White nationalists in action
The violent invasion of the U.S. Capitol is anything but a surprise. As our podcast this week discusses, this is the culmination of both four years of President Donald Trump’s rhetoric and 400 years of American history.
During the presidential debates last year, Trump refused to condemn the all-male neo-fascist group Proud Boys, instead telling them to “stand back and stand by.” Last week, they were no longer standing by. As host Al Letson says on this week’s show, “White nationalists, Proud Boys, QAnon and other extremist Trump supporters, they took action.” On the show, Al talks with two journalists who were at the Capitol on Jan. 6: independent reporter Brendan Gutenschwager and Washington Post reporter Marissa J. Lang. This is an excerpt from their conversation.
Al Letson: What was it like being inside the Capitol while all this is going down?
Brendan Gutenschwager: It was very overwhelming. It was something that really has no other parallel, other than maybe the early 1800s. It just defies logic to see this in the modern era. Just the whole time, it was just this shock that any of this was truly happening. I also was really in shock that the police – who were known for getting aggressive if necessary with certain protests if things got out of hand – I was very shocked to see them overwhelmed so quickly and ultimately having to stand down in many instances as people just ran through.
Marissa J. Lang: It was night and day from what I was expecting and what I have seen at other protests. In those instances, as you mentioned, we saw mass arrests, but we also saw a lot more aggressive riot control police response. We saw police officers who were firing flashbangs and Stinger balls and rubber bullets and tear gas – tear gas that blanketed entire city blocks in those cases – pepper spray, using batons and shields and kettling folks. It was just a very different scene.
Marissa, for two weeks, you've been reporting on the possibility of violence on the day Congress was certifying the presidential election results. Did you come prepared to see what actually ended up happening?
Lang: I came prepared for violence. I had been paying attention to these message boards where some of these right-wing extremists have been enumerating their plans for weeks. They have been saying: "We're going to bring our guns to the District. We're going to bring weapons to the District. We need to move in groups so that the police are not able to detain us. We're going to storm the Capitol. We're going to string up these Democrat lawmakers that we don't like." These threats were real, and they were repeated over and over. When they did break the line, push past the officers and climb the steps of the Capitol, I was still, I would say, not surprised. I was still sort of in the mindset of, "OK, we knew this would happen. We knew this would happen." I sort of figured that if I knew that it would happen, then so did law enforcement.
What do you think the future is going to be for America when we talk about these political fights and political arguments that are breaking out all across the country? This isn't a new thing at this point. We've seen this over and over and over in different cities for different reasons.
Gutenschwager: Unfortunately, I think for the near future, there still will be a lot of this division, but I really just see so much anger still there and so much hostility between sides. It's going to be a big healing process. People are going to have to do a lot of deep thinking about what has happened, not just with this incident, but everything over the last few years and just how the political discourse has changed.
Lang: I would say that I think the split and the division that we're seeing is only going to get worse. I was talking to some of the Trump supporters out there yesterday who were hanging back and were not storming the Capitol and seemed kind of stunned by what they were seeing as well. When I asked them where do they think this is going and what happens when they wake up tomorrow and Joe Biden is officially the president-elect, they said they think that certain states are going to decide if they want Joe Biden to be their president, certain states are going to decide if they want President Trump to continue to be their president, and very unironically were talking about secession, were talking about things like civil war. I think a lot of folks really do believe that's where we're headed.
Yeah. I don't think what we have coming is a second civil war. I believe that we never stopped fighting the first one. This is just the next iteration of those battles.
Lang: Yeah. There were people walking around the United States Capitol building with the Confederate flag.
Listen to Al’s whole conversation with the reporters in the episode Democracy under siege.
By the Numbers
Many observers pointed out the difference in the way law enforcement treated the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol last week compared with peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters over the summer. Our reporting on the coordinated federal crackdown on racial justice protesters is worth revisiting.
-
At least 340 people faced federal charges coming out of the historic wave of Black Lives Matter protests over the summer.
-
More than 60 people arrested at Black Lives Matter protests since May 30 were ordered to be held in prison awaiting trial – some were imprisoned for months.
-
There were no injuries at 97.7% of over 7,500 racial justice protests over the summer.
-
So far, there have been at least 82 arrests stemming from last week’s violence at the Capitol.
Read the story: ‘Go after the troublemakers’
|
Esmy Jimenez is a Reveal investigative fellow who also works as an immigration reporter at Seattle public radio station KUOW. Before working as a reporter, Esmy had gigs as an Alaskan farmhand and a state park employee in the California redwoods. 
