The Power of Propaganda

On this fourth anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, we cannot forget the truth of what happened that day

Jan. 6, 2021: Lies beget lies, violence begets violence. (Photo by Jon Cherry via Getty Images)

I have been dreading this day, the fourth anniversary of Jan. 6. This might be the saddest day since that heinous Wednesday four years ago because we know now that even a deadly, violent insurrection at our Capitol is not enough to discourage so many Americans from rejecting its hateful, carnage-loving, felonious ringleader.

We saw that violent attack with our own eyes, an event organized to deny the peaceful transfer of power and keep Donald Trump in office despite losing the 2020 election. It happened on the day when the Congress was responsible for certifying the election results that confirmed Joe Biden’s victory.

You could turn on your television—or watch the many replays—and witness the crushing crowds, the breaking of windows, the head blows and bone-crunching with flagpoles, baseball bats, crutches, metal pipes, skateboards and fire extinguishers, as well as the use of lasers, stun guns and toxic sprays. A day when Trump’s followers chanted to hang Mike Pence and erected a makeshift gallows. A day when over 140 police officers were injured and at least five people subsequently died, including several suicides as a result of the trauma.

This was a day that Trump—who savored the violence he was watching on TV and did nothing to stop it for over three hours—recently called “a day of love.” This mad denial of reality echoed his parting words on Jan. 6 when he finally told his violent followers to go home: “We love you. You’re very special.” And in a follow-up tweet: “Remember this day forever!”

Jan. 6 was the direct result of weeks and weeks of lying about election fraud as part of a hateful, hostile, desperate campaign to stay in office. Yet while 61 lawsuits filed in state and federal courts failed to override the truth and provide Trump a pathway through the courts to deny the will of the people and hold onto power, the repetition of the lies succeeded at convincing his cult and other high-profile enablers that they had to take matters into their own hands. “Will be wild!,” Trump promised.

In the initial aftermath, there were recriminations by some Republicans about the violence. “All I can say is ‘count me out,’” said South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham. “Enough is enough.” Some members of Trump’s cabinet and staff resigned. The harshest criticism may have come from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, but only after Trump’s second impeachment ended with the Senate acquitting him. The next day McConnell declared on the Senate floor, “There’s no question—none—that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.” He described his behavior as “a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty.” By the time Joe Biden was inaugurated, 59 percent of Americans surveyed said that the disgraced president “should not be allowed to hold office again.”

But that mindset didn’t last long, especially after then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy made a pilgrimage two weeks later to Mar-a-Lago to bow down to the Malignant One and help normalize his behavior. The flood of lies were already accumulating, beginning with the conspiracy theory that the attack was driven by leftist antifa provocateurs.

This lie was being spread by Trump sycophants like Florida’s Matt Gaetz and amplified by Fox News. Some of the rioters were “masquerading as Trump supporters and in fact were members of the violent terrorist group Antifa,” Gaetz said. This lie was repeated more than 400,000 times online in the first 24 hours, reported the MIT Technology Review. Later, Fox Nation released a three-part piece of propaganda from Tucker Carlson insisting that the Jan. 6 attack was actually a government plot to persecute Trump and his supporters.

It also didn’t take long before members of Congress began rewriting the truth of that day. Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde denied that the attack was a violent insurrection. He compared it to “a normal tourist visit,” in which people were acting “in an orderly fashion.”

Gradually, the rejection of that day’s terror began to weaken, with rising support for political violence. Within a year, 28 percent of Republicans insisted in a survey that political violence may be necessary—and by 2023, a third of Republicans said that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.” Those numbers were of course highest among those who believed Trump that the 2020 election was stolen.

Trump’s narrative that the criticism of Jan. 6 and the trials to adjudicate his role represented political persecution was further solidified when he hurriedly announced his run for president on Nov. 15, 2022. In 1984, George Orwell envisioned that an authoritarian regime would one day demand the public to “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” With the launch of Trump’s campaign and his eventual success, this “final, most essential command,” as Orwell put it, was coming true.

In two weeks, Trump will be sworn in again, falsely mouthing the oath that he will “to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." His re-election makes a mockery of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s description of Jan. 6 as “the most heinous attack on the democratic process that I’ve ever seen” and his pledge to follow all leads “wherever they take us.” Not a single member of Congress or the former White House occupant have been held accountable for their role.

Trump has pledged that, on his first day in office, he intends to pardon and release many if not most of the people who participated in the Jan. 6 attack. This includes nearly 1,600 defendants who have pleaded guilty to charges and convictions ranging from misdemeanor trespassing to seditious conspiracy.

That includes Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers militia group, who was sentenced a year ago in May to 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy. Allow me to leave you with observations from Amit Mehta, the judge who oversaw Rhodes’ trial. Judge Mehta said that Rhodes’ crime:

…is among the most serious crimes an American can commit. It is an offense against the government to use force. It is an offense against the people of our country. It is a series of acts in which you and others committed to use force, including potentially with weapons, against the government of the United States as it transitioned from one president to another. And what was the motive? You didn’t like the new guy…

What we absolutely cannot have is a group of citizens who—because they did not like the outcome of an election, who did not believe the law was followed as it should be—foment revolution.

Judge Mehta also addressed Rhodes’ remorselessness and his continued attraction to violence. While he was speaking to the former Oath Keepers’ founder, he could also have been talking to the lead insurrectionist and convicted felon who will soon be inaugurated:

It would be one thing, Mr. Rhodes, if after January 6 you had looked at what happened that day and said…that was not a good day for our democracy. But you celebrated it, you thought it was a good thing. Even as you have been incarcerated, you have continued to allude to violence as an acceptable means to address grievances.

Soon, Donald Trump and his enablers will continue to spread their lies that the participants on Jan. 6 were acting patriotically. They will demand that we forget what we saw and heard with our own eyes and ears. They will try to prosecute the prosecutors and the investigators who have sought justice for what happened on that horrible day in American history.

It will be up to each of us to not forget and to oppose their efforts to rewrite that history. The truth is the truth—and our commitment to democracy and justice demands that we refuse to tolerate or normalize the continuing lies.

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