Of all the GOP’s lies enveloping the 2020 election, one of the most enduring is that the Capitol insurrection was a gun-free political protest. It was neither.
It wasn’t a protest. The rioters’ own videos, reinforced by their social media posts and internal messaging, irrefutably depict “mobs of Trump supporters ransacking Congress, threatening to kill Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and viciously attacking scores of police officers with chemical spray, fire extinguishers, hockey sticks, and flagpoles,” as Mother Jones describes the uprising here.
These weren’t aggrieved citizens petitioning their government for redress of grievances (legitimate or otherwise). The mob included organized armed violent groups who had preplanned an operation to prevent the constitutional process of certifying Biden’s election victory.
And they took their arms there. The rioters’ guns weren’t, for the most part, visible during the rioting, although a handful were. The visible weaponry largely consisted of mace and thrown objects, such as flagpoles used as spears and hurled at police officers like javelins. But guns were there.
Denying that irrefutable fact, which will be discussed more publicly when the felony trials of Capitol insurrections begin, is part of what is a deliberate effort by Republican members of Congress and other elected officials to “whitewash” and “cover up” their party’s organized attempt to overthrow our government. Those are Mother Jones’ words. (Unlike many MJ articles, this one is by a team of writers, not a solo author.)
Key to the false claims by such GOP politicians as Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) that the insurrection was a “peaceful protest” is that the “protesters” were unarmed, and posited, of course, on a very narrow definition of “armed” as meaning guns. Trump himself said, “There were no guns whatsoever.” But that claim, too, is false.
“A Mother Jones investigation drawing on public video footage, congressional testimony, and documents from more than a dozen federal criminal cases reveals that various Trump supporters descended on DC that day armed … with guns,” the magazine’s journalists say, adding, “At least three people arrested in connection with the insurrection are facing charges for carrying firearms on Capitol grounds.”
If that doesn’t seem like a lot, remember, this counts only those who were caught and charged.
There were more guns nearby, including a stash of rifles that Oath Keepers snuck in a motel room (surveillance video, left).
“Multiple others arrested downtown and in the vicinity of the Capitol had rifles, pistols, explosive materials, and large supplies of ammunition,” Mother Jones said, after poring over court documents. Listen to the police themselves:
“’Over the radio I heard our gun recovery unit working constantly,’ testified DC Metropolitan police officer Daniel Hodges during late July hearings held by the House Select Committee investigating January 6. ‘Multiple gun arrests were made from January 5th through the 7th against those attending, likely had attended, or planned to attend Donald Trump’s gathering.’”
There’s also indirect evidence of yet more guns; for example “communications among numerous January 6 suspects detailed in court documents indicate that many of their fellow insurrectionists were armed with guns.” Defendant Christopher Alberts, “who is accused of multiple federal crimes,” was arrested with a 9mm pistol; and defendant Guy Reffit is said by federal prosecutors to have boasted in wiretapped conversations about being armed during the riot and saying others were, too. An as-yet-unidentified rioter was photographed at the Capitol with a handgun in his waistband.
There is footage of a man yelling through a bullhorn, “If you have a weapon, you need to get your weapon,” and of a rioter confronting a police officer guarding a Capitol entrance shouting, “Shoot that motherfucker! Shoot him!”
Protest? That’s not what Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes called it during his group’s pre-insurrection planning; the words he used were “a bloody, bloody civil war.” The delusional Rhodes wanted Trump “to declare an insurrection, and to call us up as the militia.” Trump himself never did anything to discourage such thinking among his most fervid — and violent — supporters.
The Oath Keepers weren’t “protesters” by any stretch of imagination. They’re a militia group. They train with weapons. They view themselves as a private army, on call for carrying out acts of political violence, or war in the streets. Mother Jones says, “Court filings show that in a series of communications through video chats and encrypted messaging platforms multiple Oath Keepers discussed coordination of weapons for their January 6 ‘ops’ in DC.” Just listen to the Oath Keepers themselves:
“'[W]e have a shitload of [quick reaction force] on standby with an arsenal,’ messaged Oath Keeper Joshua James, a 33-year-old Alabama resident, responding to an offer from an unidentified individual to ‘coordinate help’ from ‘friends not far from DC with a lot of weapons and ammo.’
“Kellye SoRelle, a lawyer who represents the Oath Keepers organization and is close with Rhodes, told Mother Jones in an interview that an Oath Keeper member transported a cache of firearms by truck from North Carolina to the Comfort Inn Ballston shortly before the assault on the Capitol.”
The Mother Jones article details how some of the insurrections, in violation of their pre-trial release, still have weapons in their possession. And quotes Reffit: “This has only just begun and will not end until we The People of The Republic have won our country back. We had thousands of weapons and fired no rounds yet showed numbers. The next time we will not be so cordial.” If you’re wondering why judges are still keeping some Capitol riot defendants in jail, that’s why.
More than 81 million Americans voted for Biden, or against Trump, take your choice. He won. On January 6, 2021, a mob of 15,000-plus Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to take that away from us. Keep in mind there are more than 5,000 of us, for every 1 of them. This was a tiny minority trying to violently impose their will on the majority. It’s our political rights that were violated, not theirs. We exercised our rights peacefully; they objected violently. We voted on paper; the mob had mace, spears, tasers, and guns. The guns of January.
If it was only the mob, that would be one thing. Police, National Guardsmen, and the U.S. Army and Marines, if necessary, can defeat an insurrection. But the Republican Party has stood behind the insurrectionists, defended their efforts to overthrow our government, whitewashed their violence, and lied about it. Not a few members of Congress and other Republican leaders elsewhere, acting alone or as an isolated faction, but nearly all of them. That’s not a party you can vote for. Not if you love America, believe in its system of government, and want to preserve it.
This isn’t about differences of ideology or policy anymore. It’s about what system of government we’ll have, and whether our leaders will be chosen by ballots or guns.
I’m not against the Republican Party per se. We need two political parties if we want healthy political competition. What I want is for the GOP cast off Trumpism, disavow extremism, play by the rules, respect facts and truth, and compete with ideas and proposals again. But responsible American citizens can’t vote for this Republican Party, or the violent, nihilistic, insurrectionist, authoritarian movement it now represents. That’s madness.