The 24 Seven: The Truth of January 6th

Four years after the historic insurrection, America has changed inexorably in ways tragic and entirely normal in our nation's long history

Programming: Tune in at 430p ET today for a 24sight Livestream on the Substack App discussing this piece. Catch me at 3:45p ET on The Julie Mason Show on SiriusXM 124, talking about this fourth anniversary of the historic January 6th attack.

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1. Caged In

That photo leading off today’s 24 Seven is the fencing around the Capitol, something which seems likely to be a new permanent part of America’s historic and revolutionary democratic republic, as we close in on 250 years since our founding.

That’s unlikely to register for most Americans, because most Americans don’t make it to Washington to tour the Capitol, much less work there every day. That’s just the reality of it, the same as how most “coastals” don’t understand industrial farming and crop rotations. Lived experience and traveling really helps your understanding of the world, I know it’s opened my eyes many times over — a benefit of choosing a career as a professional reporter over more stable and lucrative options.

I thought of this when I launched 24sight News one year ago, after being laid off from The Messenger. (It’s ok if you don’t remember that site, I’ve now outlived it by about four months with my own scrappy news startup here. We had a lot of great reporters there and plenty of money, a whopping $50 million investment, but the media landscape changed in ways that it seems a web-traffic driven startup was unlikely to ever work.)

After getting tossed overboard in the first round of layoffs before the whole news site imploded, I drove to New Hampshire to cover the 2024 Republican primary. I was interviewing voters in suburban Manchester — which had a heavy amount of support for former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley — and a gentleman who was a retired electrician told me that January 6th was a false flag operation, the windows of the Capitol had been replaced so that they could easily be exploded and the whole thing was a put-on so the Justice Department could attack Trump voters.

I pulled out my Congressional press badge, showed it to him, and said he didn’t know what he was talking about and suggested we talk about something else.

As a professional reporter, I’ve been trained to be detached and professionally objective — removed enough from a situation to take a measured assessment of what’s really happening. But I’ve also been trained, and believe deeply in, accuracy and presenting a correct and true account of events to the public.

The windows of the Capitol that were smashed in have long been old and outdated. I know because over the years I’ve taken source calls in secluded spots around the building, peering out those windows through the drooping glass of panes which have been there a very long time and wondering why the seat of the free world didn’t have a little more scratch to invest in an upgrade, if only for the savings on the heating bills.

Normally if someone told me something demonstrably inaccurate or out to lunch, I would move on to another voter after thanking them for their time.

But I understand why he didn’t know all this.

The person who will be the next president repeatedly told his supporters lies about how he lost the 2020 election. So much so that thousands of them attacked Capitol police, ransacked the building, chanted they wanted to murder the sitting vice president and for hundreds of them ultimately wound up in jail for everything from assaulting police to breaking and entering.

That’s incredibly powerful, historically so, and will take a very long time to sort out, especially if history is a guide.

2. America’s tough history

Telling the story of our nation’s history has always been a pickle, especially when it comes to trying to assess a benchmark moment in realtime. The September 11 terrorist attack took years to fully understand, even as it was benefitted by the fact it was a foreign adversary which helped unify the country around at least understanding what happened. (The national divisions erupted in the responses to the 9/11 attack.)

Internal divides have always been harder. (See the removal of statues and monuments and renaming of buildings which had been dedicated to Confederate generals — even in Union states — which is still being hit with a backlash.)

Many years ago, when I was in high school in the suburbs of Baltimore, I used to listen to Bob Lopez, religiously. He was the news guy on the morning show on 98 Rock and had a Sunday news show which was freewheeling indeed. (He had a lot of content on back then which sounds a lot like what I hear from the TikTok and Instagram wing of things, which never made its way on to what were then mainstream media outlets. He was a badass.)

Lopez had on an academic who had written a critical history of America’s textbooks — the literal history books we learned from in school. “Lies My Teacher Told Me” by James Loewen showed how the need to sell books nationwide which could pass “muster” in both conservative and liberal states typically resulted in textbooks either glossing over the hard parts of our nation’s past, leaving it out altogether or in some cases flatly misstating what happened.

3. Important, in ways not anticipated

January 6th was decisive and foundational for millions of American voters, so much so it spurred a sharp realignment of many Reagan-era conservatives with Democrats and progressives they otherwise would have had nothing to do with. For many others it was seen as overblown and not as important as other pressing issues. (And for a distinct minority it was seen as animating in another way, as proof of conspiracy theories and disproven election lies.)

And it clearly shaped the election results two months ago, but Trump’s team of nationalist conservatives did a better job of talking about transgender issues and the price of groceries and meeting their voters where they live, in the world of TikTok, YouTube, podcasts and the new online media giants.

That was enough to squeak him back to the White House, in spite of the historic January 6th attack. His promises to pardon the people who attacked the police got little airing in that other world of now-dominant media, and for comments and threats that did get through, were drowned out by a campaign promise of better living and cheaper goods.

Along the way, special counsel Jack Smith investigated, developed and ultimately filed historic criminal charges against Trump and his aides and allies for their roles in January 6th — but dropped the case in the wake of Trump’s election win. Trump’s legal strategy of delay and appeal worked handsomely in his favor, resulting in a landmark Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. United States which outlined broad new powers of “presidential immunity” from criminal prosecution for anything deemed an “official act” while in office.

Congress rewrote the law overseeing something which used to be a rote peaceful transfer of power to make it clear that a sitting vice president cannot unilaterally override the votes of Americans and set a higher bar for registering complaints — something which, ironically, will benefit Trump today.

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4. The wounds

Take time to heal.

The police who bore the brunt of the onslaught still walk the halls of the Capitol, guarding the doors and doing their job. Lawmakers who barricaded doors, dove on top of others to shield them and even, in one case, hid in a supply closet continue working daily inside the Capitol. (The Capitol has its own distinct culture, even inside D.C., which keeps the country running even amid historic calamities.)

It took Black Americans a century to truly win citizenship despite a trio of Constitutional amendments ratified after the Civil War, sharecropping, the rise of Jim Crow and decades of violence gave birth to the Civil Rights movement before passage of the Civil Rights Act — a saga which lasted half the young nation’s time on this earth. (The revisionist label for the Civil War, the “War of Northern Aggression”, did not emerge until the 1950s racial backlash against the outlawings of separate bathrooms, water fountains, schools and more for “coloreds” and for “whites”.)

Even in the aftermath of Sept. 11 with as close as America may seen to unanimous support for a group (the victims and families of the victims of the attack), it still took many years and extensive lobbying by comedy star Jon Stewart to secure permanent government funding for them in exchange for them not suing the nation’s major airlines.

In that context, a domestic attack by political activists, driven to storm the Capitol on false pretenses (many of whom later testified they had been victimized by election lies and wild conspiracy theories) seems destined to take some more time and feral battling before any type of settling is achieved.

And like most deep divisions in American history, it continues to be a live political issue. Even if the reality of it is well-documented and well-known. America’s history is wrought with tragedy.

President Joe Biden awarded the co-chairs of the House January 6th Committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson and former Rep. Liz Cheney, the Presidential Citizens Medal at the White House last week. The incoming president has said he wants them placed in jail.

5. The Truth

Is messy. It is rarely clean and simply understood, especially on massively complex and consequential matters like who will be the president of the most powerful nation on earth.

But we have ways at getting at, as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein would say, “the best obtainable version of the truth’ — an acknowledgment that it almost impossible to know a complete truth.

Testimony before a court or Congress is a good way of getting at what happened. People of all stripes tend to be more accurate and recount things better when the threat of jail or big court fines is hanging over their head.

Lengthy investigations also help. The House January 6th Committee did strong work in gaining as much information as a team of Congressional investigators could and presenting it to the public over a series of blockbuster hearings in the summer of 2022. And with the seeming collapse of the federal January 6th investigation, it could stand as the fullest recounting of what happened.

(House Speaker Mike Johnson has promised to conduct a second House investigation into the January 6th attack, but it seems unlikely it will come close to the depth or breadth of findings from the original investigation.)

The Civil War was fought over slavery, Sept. 11 was a terrorist attack by launched by a Qaeda and January 6th was an insurrection spurred by then-President Trump and his repeated lies about the election four years ago.

In each case, the vast majority of Americans understood exactly what happened. And daily life went on, changed forever.

At 1 p.m. ET, Vice President Kamala Harris is set to preside over the counting of the votes showing that she lost the 2024 election and Trump won.

6. Writing Music

It’s quiet here, in suburban Washington, on a very snowy (and frigid) January day. No music for today’s newsletter, just the clean reflective light of the snow and the perpetual hum of the HVAC unit.

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