Making sense of history as it unfolds can be a fraught exercise, an attempt to find order in events taking place across space and time, when it can be difficult to find critical distance. However, occasionally a flashpoint occurs with such intensity that it seems briefly to arrest time. The sense of suspended time lasts long enough to allow for a synchronic snapshot to emerge, peeling back the layers of social and psychological immersion that make up the familiar to lay bare the complex forces of an epoch. The Capitol riots in Washington, DC, on January 6th, 2021, are just such a flashpoint. In years to come, we may see this as a day to be remembered, yet it may also be too easily forgotten, discarded on the junk heap of history like so many social media memes.
At that flashpoint moment, the social, political and economic crises accumulating over decades of American and global history exploded in the chaotic occupation of the US Capitol building by populist groups, organized militias, white supremacist groups, conspiracy theorists, historical re-enactors, and so-called âinspired believersâ (Program on Extremism, 2021). They were in Washington to express fealty to Donald Trump, the outgoing 45th President of the United States (POTUS), a man who ran America like a business, purportedly rejecting the entrenched political elite (while inhabiting this very position) and their social-political norms, to give power back to the ordinary citizen. Leading up to the riots, Trump tweeted incessantly, making use of well-worn rhetorical strategies used by far-right elites in mobilizing the disenfranchised to support white supremacy (Mondon and Winter, 2020). Unsurprisingly, the rioters depicted in the media that day were predominantly white, staking claims for the continued domination of whiteness in America.
The US Political, Economic, and Social Context
The Capitol riots can be understood as the culmination of a fevered period in the US, built up through the Trump presidency and accelerating dramatically through a series of four ongoing events in 2020. First, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, with ramifications in terms of state (mis)management that included downplaying the seriousness of the pandemic, in parallel with citizen mobilizations providing mutual aid and âcare-mongeringâ tempered by reactionary threads against masking, lockdowns, and vaccinations. Second, these reactionary threads were driven by the denial of health science and a concomitant escalation of disinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theories. Third, the reactionary context includes an escalation of white supremacy, racism, populism, and the alt-right (opaquely supported by Trump), not just in the US but also globally, with a simultaneous rise in anti-racist movements exemplified by Black Lives Matter. And, finally, the defeat of Donald Trump by Joe Biden in the Presidential election of November 2020 and the subsequent disinformation campaign falsely claiming Biden had stolen the election, organized under the hashtag #StopTheSteal, can be seen as the inciting incident in the ensuing actions.
In the context of these four trends, discussed below, the âMarch to Save America,â also called #MarchForTrump, was organized by a group called Women for America First (Schwartz, 2021) to take place in Washington on January 6, 2021. And take place it did. But how did we get here?
The COVID Conjuncture
The year 2020 opened with the arrival of a COVID-19 epidemic, eventually labeled a pandemic by the WHO on March 11th. In the United States, this health crisis was politicized by a president who engaged in casual COVID denialism, refused to follow public health guidelines such as wearing a mask or social distancing, and rolled out a fragmented, incoherent, and self-absorbed pandemic strategy, including a withdrawal of the US from the WHO, and hijacking high-level COVID strategy meetings to discuss his personal online image. His primary crisis communication strategy centered on the use of Twitter as a digital pulpit for the dissemination of spontaneous exhortations, often very personal, occurring late at night, and unbecoming of the position of POTUS. This lack of science-based leadership created an information gap followed closely on its heels by an infodemic (Cinelli et al., 2020), a dangerous viral misinformation epidemic run rampant on social media. The infodemic included not just misinformation but also the outgrowth of conspiracy theories around COVID and beyond, as people attempted to come to terms with emerging health, economic, social, and political realities within an atmosphere of unknowns mixed with outright fabrications or disinformation. Alt-right politics defending anti-masking, anti-vaxxing, and anti-lockdowns further confused the issue, as highly divisive political agendas emerged, taking advantage of the heightened state of confusion and anxiety to mobilize support for Republicans and the alt-right. Moreover, the politicization of public health care through the dismantling of Obamacare and the capitalist-friendly political denial of climate science have both directly promoted distrust of scientists, medical professionals, and public health officials now tasked with managing COVID-19.
This context, which Toby Miller and Pal Ahluwalia (2020) call âThe Covid conjunctureâ brought with it not just grievances against governmental overreachâcontesting the legislation of mandatory masking, lockdowns, border closures, and business shutdownsâbut also fears of mandated vaccinations, quarantine jails, internment camps, and microchipped vaccines, and the limits to freedom and autonomy these seem to imply. The US public has a healthy distrust of state officials at the best of times and is well aware of what happens to societyâs rebels and outcasts. However far-fetched some of these fears may seem, there is a history of government persecution, where outspoken radicals may be silenced, criminalized, jailed, subjected to state violence, or even killed. Moreover, there is a history of unethical psycho-medical experiments in Canada and the US that have received media play in recent years, including the MK Ultra experiments with LSD on unknowing subjects (Bhambra, 2019); the Milgram experiments on the (ir)responsibilization of violence (Blass, 2009); the Tuskegee Study in which Black men with syphilis were given placebos such as aspirin and denied antibiotics, without consent, to better understand serious complications of the disease (Jones, 2008); and the historical and on-going non-consensual sterilization of racialized and Indigenous women (Black, Rich, and Felske-Durksen, 2021)âall with long-term negative consequences for participants, up to and including death. In this context, distrust of medical officials and the medical establishment might be understandable, and the fragmented, misinformed, anti-science, and often contradictory crisis communication strategies of the Trump Administration only served to exacerbate this unease.
While populist groups were contesting public health guidelines aimed to keep people safe from COVID, as fragmented as these guidelines were in the US, the facts started to emerge that COVID had served to make visible and amplify vast inequalities across race and gender. Racialized groups in the US, Canada, and other countries have counted disproportionate numbers of cases and deaths (Millet et al., 2020; Lewis et al., 2020). Women, and in particular women of color, are doing the heavy lifting in terms of over-representation as front-line workers such as nurses, grocery store and retail clerks, teachers, daycare staff, long-term-care workers, cleaners, and moreâpositions that have higher exposure and therefore higher rates of infection and death. In addition, under lockdowns, stark increases for women in job losses, childcare responsibilities, homeschooling supervision, and gender-based domestic violence have led the pandemic to be called âa disaster for feminismâ (Lewis, 2020, n.p.). These unequal impacts have led some to call COVID-19 a syndemic, in which social, environmental, and economic conditions have synergistically combined with the pandemic to exacerbate negative health impacts on particular groups and communities (Miller, 2021).
The Crossroads of the Information and Health Crises
The rise of fake news and disinformation during the tenure of President Trump is also of note, as is his dismissal of mainstream news itself as âfake news,â leading to a confusing meta-mediascape of truths, half-truths, and lies. Trump was found, by a team of fact-checkers at the Washington Post, to have lied or made misleading claims a total of 30,573 times during his four-year tenure as Presidentâa rate of 20.9 lies per day (Kessler et al., 2021). A mixed bag of conspiracy theories arose in this wake, with claims as wide-ranging and imaginative as the following: the horrific wildfires in California were started by Antifa or Jewish Space Lasers (Chait, 2021); Hollywood and political elites are harvesting the blood of children through a Satanist pedophile ring, a theory promoted by QAnon (Friedberg, 2020); and âThe Great Replacement,â a populist fear held by white people of being demographically âreplacedâ by racialized groups, propagated by such right-wing media pundits as Fox Newsâ Tucker Carlson (Giroux, 2021). These and other conspiracy theories have grown legs in a context where journalists, educators, and other cultural and knowledge producers, in particular those articulating ideas related to social justice, critical race theory, feminism, Marxism, and so on, are increasingly demonized (see Chapter 2). Viral disinformation tidbitsâas fascinating as they are falseâserve as surplus narratives, underlining the fragility of collective truth, and with it, propelling the growing incoherence of the American consciousness forward (see Chapter 3). These conspiracies and incoherencies both motivate and are reflected in the riotous discourses and material actions of January 6th.
While Trump positions himself as a lone hero, standing up to the very political and economic forces from which he has so richly benefited throughout his lifetime, he continues to blame liberal elites for the pain faced by Americaâs dispossessed, serving to erase the fact that he is part of this same oppressive and extremely wealthy elite class. Thus, despite being deeply embedded in the conduits of power, he is seen by populist publics as an ordinary working man, having pulled himself up by the bootstraps. This claim is patently false. Donald Trump inherited over 413 million dollars from his fatherâs real estate empire (Barstow, Craig, and Buettner, 2018). This (mis)alignment of Trump with the economic concerns of his base is just one more piece in the disinformation puzzle. Disinformation, we may recall, is false information put forth by someone who knows it to be false, and it is a hallmark of Trumpâs communications.
Any analysis of the riots must therefore reckon with the power of social media not just to organize and document the events of the day but also to shape the way those events are influenced a priori by misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news.
The Rise of Populism, White Supremacy, and the Alt-Right
This disinformation mediascape might help to explain the recent rise of QAnon, the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and other white supremacist, alt-right, or populist ideologies and groupsâall of which were present at the riots. However, alt-right ideologies in the US and Europe are nothing new. Trumpâs famous âMake America Great Again,â slogan is hardly original. Rather, it replicates Margaret Thatcherâs attempts to put the âGreatâ back into Great Britain while infamously declaring, âThereâs no such thing as societyâ (Thatcher, 1987, cited in McLachlan, 2020). A complex set of overlapping factors and events can indeed be traced back to the spectacle under the Thatcher government of what Stuart Hall (1979, p. 14) called âthe moving right show,â which signaled a political and economic shift toward neoliberal capitalism and white supremacy that has continued unabated through to the present moment (Sim, 2000; Danewid, 2021). Thatcher used a defense of whiteness combined with appeals to economic and social class worries to deflect attention away from a massive restructuring of the British state consisting predominantly of a reduction in the social safety net. This is all echoed in Trumpâs neoliberal capitalist strategies, which include deregulation, privatization, and the responsibilization of the sovereign individual, which together contribute to the erosion of a sense of the common good and the requisite practices of collective solidarity that might support the creation of collective goals, hopes, actions, and social justice movements. Instead, we see the rise of an individualist populism that, followin...
