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Musings on Maps
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Mobs and Jobs
We had been waiting for the barbarians for some time. We had been told to. The President had been, over four years, mapping the threat of the barbarians advancing from across borders. But we imagined that they would arrive from the edges of empire, breaching the ramparts of defense that had been increasing for our national security, rather than assembled on the Washington Mall, ready to sack the Capitol building, invading the offices of congressional representatives to interrupt the transition of Presidential power.
But when they did arrive, it was at the beckoning of the man who ran for U.S. President with the mantra "Jobs not mobs," and ensured us that the very border wall that would keep out "illegals" who had undercut the American worker was far better for America than raising the minimum wage.
In the very final Presidential debate, Trump had taken pains to evoke the marauding crowds that would fill the streets after the election of his opponent, to illustrate that Biden should be trusted. The barbarians had arrived at the Capital, not at a frontier settlement, but at its center; rather than arriving as migrants from across the border, they came on busloads, airplanes, and cars, in busses paid for by Trump evangelist, the Republican donor who believes the President chosen by God–or by itineraries to Washington, DC, that PeacefulRedStateSecession had mapped.
This invasion did not cross national divides, or defend anything other than endangered liberties. It was not on foot, but they were dressed for cold weather. But it was an actual seizure of the U.S. Capitol, by an inside job, utterly unlike the visions of invasions threatened during a series of National Emergencies in recent years–from the Migrant Caravans, enabled by the "humanitarian visas" given out by the Mexican government, that had made it so urgent to "fix" America's immigration laws–a pedestrian pilgrimage on a sacred calendar that had necessitated the first $1 Billion to be transferred from the Department of Defense to remedy "critical readiness issues facing our military" as the caravans "thumbed their noses at our drug and immigration laws" as they advanced in four massive caravans "in an effort to enter the US" and threatened to breach borders.
Migrant "Caravan" Approaching American Border (March, 2019)
Their routes were longer, and were not conducted on foot–but these barbarians were truly at the gate, if they didn't come as vectors that wold pierce our borders. They were, rather, crowds that were sourced on social media, in reaction to the threats of regime change that would come by elections, by the creation of consensus. And they could not be traced to transnational cartels or the "historical routes" of migrant caravans; these threats at the perimeter of the U.S. Capitol were crowd sourced, promoted in multiple Facebook groups, where, in hours after the refusal to accept the results of the U.S. Presidential election had been called in several states, verb tenses became unhinged from reality in the waning hours of election night, as what would be the largest-growing Facebook groups ever in the history of the platform grew online, a virtual crowd, not able to be tracked by GPS or viewed as puncturing our borders, but rather aimed at puncturing sovereignty from within: the boundaries of states were less important know, despite threats of migrants overwhelming those fortified border check-points by rushing them en masse, but the crowd that was assembling on January 7 before the sun rose was threatening to pierce the perimeter of the Capitol, to finally stream down the Mall, down Constitution Avenue, down Pennsylvania Avenue, energized by having been urged "we're going to have to fight much harder" and reverse the betrayal by "traitors" in the U.S. Senate of the electoral maps that they were all convinced were rigged. They advanced not on the edges of empire, for over two thousand miles–
–but by moving several thousand feet to cross scaffolding set up for inauguration day, tearing down fencing that separated them from the Capitol, pushing past barricades into a citadel of governance.
The barbarians were not of migrants, this time, approaching the border, that animated their sense of urgency, but of a certification of the deep danger of an end to the Trump Presidency–even though President Trump had, equipped with with U.S. Border patrol statistics, traced national threats and states of emergency throughout four years of his Presidency, in the specter of invasion evoked by transnational threats.
But if all maps depend on consensus–few migrants saw themselves as crossing a border that was a crime to cross–the Despite images of the Caravans we had watched as they arrived from Central America, determined to cross our national boundaries, these barbarians looked as if they were all white–a crowd celebrating, signing, and dancing as they wore red MAGA hats, scarves, and carried TRUMP 2020 signs and other campaign paraphernalia, and had arrived to conclude a campaign that had not gone as they had expected, while the collective mug shots of those guilty of "immigration crime suspects" that had popped up on billboards throughout the nation had effectively under-written the need for racial profiling.
Mug Shots of Immigration Crime Suspects
Rather than crossing the fortified border at the edges of empire, this threat grew before and as if in opposition to the chambers of representative government occurred from a stage erected in previous days, but an event that was promoted since the electors had met in individual states to confirm popular votes for U.S. President. This crowd was crowd-sourced on social media, by hashtags like #StoptheSteal, Large crowds had begun to arrive before sunrise, occupying the rows of seats on the Mall. They seemed benign, but would set up a conflict between the power manifest in crowds and the allocation of representational government by states' electors. The confrontation before the primary seat of representational government was arrived at by varied routes–busses organized to Washington DC, often by the same groups who had sponsored Rallies for Trump but the underlying map was a call for a new form of governance, interrupting smooth progress of transition of power that had been mapped out from Election Day in November to the meeting of electors in respective states on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December to the certification of electors by a joint session of the U.S. Congress. This timed progression of an assembly of representative structures dedicated to mediate the popular vote was interrupted by a crowd that claimed the American flag, lest it be desecrated, as certification was interrupted by an alternative manner of government of acclamation by a crowd, eager to oppose the immediacy of its collective unruliness and deep conviction to the stately dome.
East Side of Capitol before Crowd-Sourced insurrectionist Crowd
These were not the barbarians we were long told to be expecting from across the southwestern border, but they posed a far deeper national security threat. But they dressed the for part. Some were in revolutionary or paramilitary garb; others who had attended of past Trump rallies wore election garb of the concluded 2020 campaign. They channeled a mythological past of the defense of the constitution, more than crossing from "barbarian" lands, to destroy a vision of empire that had promised civilization to the world.
Emmanuel-Auguste-Dieudonne Las Cases, A map, exhibiting the . . . . destruction of the Barbarians, that invaded the Roman world (1800)
This consensus assembled from all America would not be an invasion, but would invade Washington, DC, to ensure not its destruction, but an alternative universe of electoral victory: the results would change the course of global history as consequentially as that ur-map of invasions, mapped in detail in a masterpiece of historical geography, that condensed barbarian invasions at the fall of the Roman Empire, collapsing many years in a moment of destruction. Rather than arriving from outside our frontiers, as we had been warned, this invasion came from within, by those who ostensibly sought to set the Empire right, rather as an invasion in the sort of ur-maps of invasion and historical decline that were framed in the elegant color-coded historical maps of the post-Napoleonic July Monarchy, that looked back on the invasions that eroded political stability. It was hard to map them with any analytic distance, as they seemed to seek to awe us with their spontaneous presence, as they were seeking to impose a judgement on the process of the election, to take back the clock not to just the early hours of election night, when Donald J. Trump appeared from initial results to be in the lead, but to the height of his President, if not to the first inauguration, and to acclaim Trump the President for Life that he had jokingly entertained the possibiity of accepting as an honorific first half way through his term, in 2018, joking in a private speech at Mar-a-Lago to Republican donors that he would "maybe . . . have to give that a shot someday" at the position, as if it were on offer, and by April 2019 suggesting that his base may well just "demand that I stay longer" as President or extend his term "at least for ten to fourteen years."
The detail of the routes by which those barbarians had arrived from all Europe and Asia were detailed with elegance in post-Napoleonic Paris, where they must have been prepared with reassurance of a sense of some stability after the restoration of the July Monarchy, from a place of security before 1848 revolutions.
"Invasion of the Barbarians," E. Soulier Paris, 183
This was a crowd of believers, and was not a spontaneous crowd: it was truly crowd-sourced, summoned by sirens of social media. The culmination of Trump rallies and crowd management techniques that had developed since the summer of 2015: this time, the crowd was reliably sourced. The assembly of the crowd improvised a new form of government, a new form of staging a putsch of the sort never seen in America, whose members would themselves rectify Donald Trump's own disappointment and inability to process an election he argued "we were getting to win," until the tallies changed as absentee votes were tallied, in ways that didn't fit his narrative: convinced he in fact had won and did win the 2020 election, in keeping with models of fringe news media sources that had predicted his victory, early tweets that warned "They are trying to steal this election" had set up an alternative reality over two months–"Frankly, we did win this election" and then "We are up BIG but they are trying to STEAL this Election. We will never let them do it!" —that set in motion the logic of an alternate reality by an alternative structure of governing, in the arrival of a huge crowd eager to preserve the vision of an electoral victory that did not occur. As the crowd's momentous size was described to its members repeatedly, that had its own entity able to overpower representative structures, they gained momentum to overpower the representative structures that had badly served the President's plans. This was the map to project the vision of Donald J. Trump's second term by a crowd in the Mall bigger than on Trump's inauguration, a crowd joined to their President, more than the faithless Vice-President or Secretaries of State who had confirmed what Trump appeared convinced were faulty tallies of votes.
The invasion by these barbarians was animated by a different mythical vision of the historical past. They attacked possessed by starting an imagined revolutionary uprising to appeal to a revolutionary fervor of asserting belonging and agency. Those assembled had processed and were inspired by claims that the vote had been stolen on a scale of "widespread, nationwide, massive voter fraud" since mid-November, even if his lawyers were hard-pressed to say where the fraud lay, even as allegations shifted to charges of "good-faith errors in operating machines," or to corrupt tallies in machines themselves that were operated by companies lying outside the United States, or just glitches in electronic voting machines–if not the fraud of mail-in ballots that Trump had warned since the spring of 2020 might have been fabricated en masse in foreign countries. The evanescence of any sense of agency as to who was manipulating fraud on such a scale had driven them to desperation.
The crowd came to impose an alternative reality he demanded, to interrupt the due process of the electors' certificaiton. Busses paid for by one of the last remaining Republican donors, the MyPillow Guy, Mike Lindell, ferry millions of patriots to Washington, DC, a Trump Base meant to replace institutional distortions that had allegedly obstructed the election's transparency. The Patriots who arrived on The Ellipse where they had been invited by Donald Trump, immediately sensing belonging, removed from the social isolation of being sutured to screens since the election, from fears of the disruption of a stolen election in the confidence of the crowd, listening to music as they warmed up from before seven in the morning. If the crowd met a moment of what crowd theorist Elias Canetti termed "release"–the moment of cohesion–as they were harangued for an hour by a President who described the failure of all the structures in place he had expected would lead to a second term. Upon hearing Vice President Pence, acting as President of the Senate, would not disrupt the certification of electoral votes at 10:02, reminded again by Trump how "they rigged it like they've never rigged it before," they took matters into their own hands, with the agency they felt the U.S. Constitution promised. The invitations offered a time to meet with President Trump, and make their voices heard to representatives in unison with his complaint about the certification of the electoral vote.
The FB Group PeacefulRedStateSecession.com, which long nourished the secessionist fantasies, set the stage for an overturning of the very structures of government–assembled at a red star on Constitution Avenue, to Save America. The project of national salvation reveal the deeply corrosive of an increasingly oppositional mapping of the nation into "red" and "blue" states that has increasingly been mis-mapped around the defense of constitutional freedoms, before Trump promoted the constitutional crisis by inciting crowds to storm the Capitol to interrupt a joint session of Congress. The crowd that had been released as Trump finished his speech, stormed the capitol with anger and entitlement, indignantly yelling at Capitol Police, "We were invited here. We were invited by the president of the United States" as if entitled to bring down the state in an "exercise in patriotism," an undefined "call to action" that promised to change the election's outcome–an invitation extended widely on social media surviving only as screenshots apprehended from a social media sea. And once they arrived, these messages were reinforced, urged by the Tea Party activist who founded Women for America First to protest the first impeachment of Donald Trump in 2019. This time, Trump urged the assembled crowd-sourced crowd that it was imperative to show strength, in this final effort that awaited them: "It is up to you and I to save this Republic! We are not going to back down, are we? Keep up the fight!"
Rushing the chambers of the U.S. Congress would forestall not only the tally of electoral votes and their certification responded to the need to overturn the illegitimacy of the "hoax," widespread corruption, and sullying of American democracy and the civic ritual of the in-person ballot. Those storming of the Capitol as not exactly a siege, but would trigger the sudden pressure of an energized mob to shatter the bureaucratic process of Congress, meeting in their chambers without cell phones, by needed pressure, to overturn the election Trump had assured them was indeed a landslide that audits had not yet fully revealed, but the demand for full transparency would immanently reveal, and create consensus only waiting to be mapped.
1. Crowd theorist Cannetti argued the most important moment of the transformation of the crowd from within is "discharge," the moment of unification behind a sense of purpose that mobilizes and realizes a crowd which has never existed before. Before that moment, the crowd does not actually exist in the same way, but it suddenly erases any sense of distance in a shared purpose, and shared identity, a feeling of equality and relief where they are collectively oriented in a moment of release in a blessed moment of orientation. When did the moment of discharge arrive? The process of assembling this crowd had begun of the sixty five days since the election, as snowballing #StoptheSteal groups took Trump's tweets to nourish faux stoic solidarity. When Trump urged,"You have to show strength," the words percolated with desires to defend Constitutional liberties in ways that masked the contradiction that they were disobeying the law.
Discharge arrived at the crowd over several stages in the rally, boosted by the simultaneity of being addressed by the President and being tweeted to by him, that "Mike Pence doesn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country," as he refused that he would ever concede, live, and growing in their minds while hearing him wield truthful hyperbole as magnified it to beyond a million, bending time and space, while investing the crowd that had been assembling since 3 AM with a directionality and purpose that became clearer over time. The goal of changing the election that brewed behind all those optimized electoral maps crystallized around the goal of forestalling of the goal of Pence changing the certified electoral, as if he was empowered to do so, their goal strengthening their common identity, energizing the crowd with a renewed sense of immediate purpose. How much did it help that a Black and a Jew had been elected to enter the Capitol building the previous night, electrifying the Base by alerting them this was not business as usual, and demanded interruption? This crowd arrived filled with the sense of indignity as if entitled to overthrow their government when it took their rights away–the promise was embedded in the Gadsden flags that they waved, as much as the MAGA ones, and the banners that they took pains to bedeck the Capitol in a major media event, as they arrived with cell phones and Trump 2016 hats and Trump 2020 banners in a four-hour Siege of the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, long after the election was lost.
Their sense of urgency was apparently echoed in their use of survivalist rock-climbing skills, knee-pads and gloves, some in paramilitary outfits and some in fantasy garb, they scaled the neoclassical facade, wrapped in American flags and bearing Gadsden Flags to forestall regime change and equipped with cell phones. They also brought, in those backpacks, unregistered ammunition, unregistered firearms, tasers, ropes, Molotov cocktails, and fireworks, and megaphones, to fulfill a patriotic duty to the nation, filmed on iPhones to make sure it would be covered in global media markets and across the nation. Enraged at the identification of the Vice-President presiding over the certification of electoral votes, who they called a "traitor" the crowd seem to have stormed the Capitol for their own duly elected representatives, as Secret Service members tried to secure the Senators, representatives, and VP who had become targets of wrath by an almost entirely white mob bearing weapons, storming the chambers of Congress like a lynching mob. The image of Pence as a traitor and turncoat, betraying a President who refuses to accept electoral results. Had the evangelical Catholic Pence been replaced by those who believe Trump was "chosen by God"?
Scaling the Perimeter Wall at the NE Corner/Michael Robinson Chavez/Washington Post
They cheered as they planted American flags atop the Capitol building, hanging banners reading "Trump 2020/STOP THE BULLSHIT," equipped with signage to keep hope alive after the election was lost. They weren't the barbarians we had expected and were long announced as at the gate. But they came with a sense of vengeance, gripping the walls they had prepared to scale the stone facade on a mission with tenacity and a sense of duty after having received a Presidential benediction. They had just been chanting "Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump!" as the black-gloved President told them he would never concede, and "We will not take it any more, . . . and to use a favorite term that you people will came up with, we will stop the steal." Trump bemoaned the state of corruption in the nation, alerting the crowd of the dangers posed by fake news media and big tech as surrogates for a global war. He placed the certification of votes as the final chance for populist groups to defend freedoms as if it were the eve of a monumental battle of civilizations, not at the border between the United States and Mexico, but to rush the Capitol building, where the senators and congressmen were cloistered, without cell phones, voting to confirm Trump's removal as President as the end of an era.
2. If Trump did not directly communicate plans for staking siege to the Capitol, on that day, but communicated indirectly to the assembled crowd who seem to have understood the plans for an insurrection or seizure of power. Just after Christmas, images predicted the arrival of a storm as if by an act of divine vengeance to break the delivery of the electors' vote. The size of the crowd was difficult to estimate, but seems to have been difficult to estimate, but the number was far fewer than seems to have been widely expected by each of the groups who predicted "low number a few hundred thousand, in high numbers 2-3 million, imagine the scene" drawn from all fifty states, in a scene of mass consensus achieved by massive-crowd sourcing from vigorous online promotion to the announcement at rallies of "Stop the Steal" held as electors met on December 12.
We know Trump's words, whose intention was transparently clear, but can only imagine their effect. Amidst a befuddling tally of votes he insisted were misreported by a Fake Media, he had bemoaned again the scale of the "egregious assault on our democracy" in the theft of a landslide that was itself a a threat "our country be destroyed" and a threat to "America First," with urgency. The invitation to advance–where was there left to go?–got only crisper as the speech advanced. Truthful hyperbole allowed him to exaggerate the crowd that he imagined stretching to the Washington Memorial, as if it were a new inauguration audience. The date had been grimly pre-announced, and the urgency to "Save America" hardly needed to be spelled out.
The urgency grew, as the crowd had entered an alternate reality, as the hour continued. Trump bemoaned that "our media is not free" asked them all to turn on your cameras, as "we're going to walk down to the Capitol," "that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard," ramping up the energy of the crowd that had been listening to music for hours, thanking his "incredible supporters" as he asked them to refuse all hoaxes, to remember why they had come to the event, how they were all waiting for the Vice President to act as President of the Senate, and join him in demanding "sweeping electoral reforms" and asking them, his soldiers, finally and conclusively to drain the swamp, to restore vital civic traditions of in-person voting, as the representatives and senators who owed their election to him alone would not. Without such a renewal of the Tree of Liberty, the worst would happen, beyond a feared end of liberties: "they want to take down the wall" and "let everyone flow in," Trump concluded with urgency, imagining the destruction of his long-vaunted project to raise the stakes. Instead, the MAGA minions would "be pouring in to Washington, DC" to restore order and affirm the intensity of their personal relation to the state in a transparent manner that the corrupt tally of the vote obscured.
"We are going to–we are going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we are going to the Capitol," he wrapped up his remarks to the audience he cherished. ". . . So let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue," he urged his minions, asking them to retake the very halls of government that obstructed his second term, making the transactional nature of the march clear. Even the President did not incite the crowd to violent entrance of the Capitol Building, the publicity that announced the "march" showed its target–and the site to demand election integrity–clear. The rapt audience was ready to assault the building and strike down the police guards they encountered with flagpoles to answer the President's personal "call to action to us to come back to Washington on January 6 for a big protest" by "taking back the country from corrupt politicians," and wrest the nation from the political class, intensifying its sense of urgency.
They all knew the endpoint of the Save America March and had iPhones in their hands, but weren't using their mapping functions, as they recorded the scene that the news media would not report. They were being invited to reveal their patriotism, and stand up for the U.S. Constitution and the country by the Commander-in-Chief in the face of "pure theft" of what was a landslide, and came dressed for re-enacting a drama of insurrection and revolution, in a rally that would consume the halls of government, uniting the size of the momentous rallies of the five-year Presidential campaign that Trump had been boosted to the empyrean, beyond Reality TV, to a new level of transcendence. But few have spent much attention to map from where they came. Few members of the mob needed to use their devices' mapping functions or GPS, as the mission of retaking the government could be seen behind the bullet-proof glass from which Trump had addressed them.
Trump had magnified the size of the crowd considerably, describing the "tens of thousands" he saw before him, inviting those in attendance to turn their cell phones back to cover the size of a crowd he said the media would underestimate, and magnifying what was estimated as a crowd of 10,000 by trademark "truthful exaggeration" by magnifying it to "hundreds of thousands of people here" and describing the "hundreds of thousands of American patriots [who] are committed to the honesty of our elections" across the nation. The number was guesstimated at "several thousand people . . . even 10,000, maybe." After Trump's moment of truthful hyperbole, social media photographs and claims magnified the crowd and multiplied its loyalty on social media. The filming of the breaching of the Capitol's perimeter spread on social media, as members of Congress without cell phones remained in the dark, and protestors counted on the element of surprise: even as Trump insisted that "the media will not show the magnitude of this crowd," recalling the disputes he had had with the crowd on Inauguration Day, describing "hundreds of thousands" to rival even an inauguration crowed, famously falsified as the largest ever, estimated at 300,000-600,000, to keep the Trump flame alive. Trump insisted that the marchers themselves film the event for history and the nation, from the start of his hour-long harangue to turn their cameras on, and to "Turn your cameras please and show what's really happening out here because these people are not going to take it any longer." "Go ahead," he urged, making the audience part of the spectacle, "Turn your cameras, please. Would you show?" In his subsequent public address, at the United States southwestern border, the President fondly remembered how "Millions of our citizens watched on Wednesday as a mob stormed the Capitol and trashed the halls of government," before pivoting to affirm his respect for America's "history and traditions" and "the rule of law."
Live-streaming the assault was a way to trigger a national movement, if not to create a testimony of the great attempt to keep an outgoing administration alive, and with it an alternate reality. Amidst cries of disbelief from "They're going up—go, go, go, go!" and "Oh! They're climbing up the wall!" to ecstatic rejoinders of "Let's go, let's fucking go!" to "There's so many people! I can't believe this is reality! We accomplished this shit! Together! . . . We're all part of this fucking history!," to "Holy shit, there's so many people!" the ragtag group wrapped "TRUMP NATION" banners and "Trump 45" jerseys, the oddly dressed one said "Wait a second, I'm filming this!" a mob advanced past guards they saluted as "bro" as they sought to seize the House chambers, blowing vuvuzelahs chanting "U.S.A., U.S.A.," saying You guys gotta follow the Constitution!" and, more festively, "Fuck, that was awesome! Let's burn this shit down!"
As this potential orgy of destruction was unfolding, President Trump had assured his overeager audience that he would be marching with them to the Capitol–"after this, we're going to be walking tot he Capitol, and I'll be there with you."–but retired from the lectern of the Save America March to enter a waiting motorcade, to watch the fate of the joint session of the U.S. Congress on cable news in the White House. But their ears were already electrified by the itinerary he described, allowing them to envision this pathway to the future, and the they vital fight they would wage, affirming that he would never concede, and with the gestures of a television preacher he evoked how "we're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we're going to the Capitol and we're going to try and give —" before breaking off his thoughts in midstream, and entering a limousine, having planted plans for an insurrection to his best ability. The routes to the Capitol building itself would be less direct, but would flow about the building that the Capitol police tried to secure, and to overwhelm them in the immense discharge of their collective energy, overwhelming the limited number of Capitol Police they had already judged insufficient to protect the legislators, or obstruct a crowd of their size: Trump had given a benediction to move forward as Christian soldiers, and to surge beyond the Ellipse in an ilustration of their own agency and apparent liberty.
Save America March/Pete Marovich, New York Times
Reports are that Trump watched the insurrection as it unfolded with excitement, pleased at what he saw on television. On the ground, cheers drowned out reality, elevating to a vertiginous ecstasy the idea of a seizure of power of which the participants ensured a live stream continued, as they breached the upper chambers. "We did this shit! This is surreal scene! What reality is this? Fucking did this shit!" "Hell, yeah!" "About time!" "Oh, my bad–I didn't know I hit it that hard." The mob paused in the Rotunda for selfies while chatting up guards, reminding them of the futility of resistance and admiring the cupola, amazed at the scale of their accomplishment, pinching themselves that this "was real life," urging one another to "treasure this moment," and bursting, without anything else left to say, into chant–"We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump!" to make their voices heard. They were confident there were too many people to for bullets to be used against a crowd whose size they seemed to magnify, until the arrival of the police. Then, they were shocked a gun was actually fired and someone entering the chambers–amazed a moment of violence had in fact occurred, but also glad and still excited to have gotten it on film, not noticing Donald had left them alone.
Roberto Schmidt, AFP/Getty/Quartz
Born on a sea of insurrectionist flags of all stripes–Gadsden flags, American flags, Trump flags, Confederate flags, and sporting a range of Trump gear, they were ready to confront forces of Darkness. It may not have mattered that Trump was no longer with them, as he was presiding over the entire event, and they had internalized his litany of baseless complaints and groundless assertions. Waving triumphal flags overhead as they approached the Capitol, they entered the House of Representatives' and Senate chambers, chanting "Our house! Our house!" and "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" they told guards not to put their hands on them, telling them they were impotent before events that were unfolding as they clung to their freedoms. Among these America Firsters, the right of "the people to alter or abolish any government that does not secure inalienable rights" seemed, on the morning of January 6, 2021, the only agency that remained in their power to stop the transmission of power that they felt a rigged system of elections about which they had ben warned for years was about to take place in the pro forma certification of electoral votes underway in the Congressional chambers as the Save America March had assembled to hear purported heroes of an outgoing administration. Did America First entail subverting the electoral process, or was it about defending liberties?
3. If President Trump did not directly encourage the crowed to enter the joint session of the U.S. Congress, he knew that the crowd had its own logic. Students of revolution have long studied the crowd as an actor of revolutions, and tried to study the logic of crowd behavior: fear is a major motivator of crowd behavior, and the fear of a loss of rights, an impending restriction of rights, from the panic of the Great Fear of 1789, as rumors spread of an "aristocratic conspiracy" to overthrow the king created a massive rural panic that triggered a convulsion of possibly anarchic character at fears of a restriction of grain supplies in the near future: the logic of the fear of a loss of liberties was fed by the growth of rumors across the countryside of the impending absence of a great protector, which historians have tried to map across rural regions as transmitted by their own rural circuits of considerable historical consequence, most powerfully in the work of Georges Lefebvre:
Lefebvre, Rural Panic in Revolutionary France (1932): The Currents of the Great Fear
If Lefebvre worked hard to map the overlooked spatial and temporal progression and identity of the fear that spread through France, the twitterverse registered similar waves of panic transmitted among online groups. For if we are still unsure of labeling the even an insurrection or act of sedition or uprising, looking only at the movement on the ground near the capitol reminds us of the need to examine the charges and accusations that were long coursing on social media, increasing expectations for a day of wrath, imagined to attract up to three million, if permissions only expected 5,000, the rumors of millions of marchers suggested easy overwhelming of the Capitol police.
Their size increasingly magnified to punctuate the lists of grievances Trump listed for just over an hour, the magnification of the crowds who had felt isolated with the mandate for social distancing many so deeply opposed were released as they gained a new density on the Ellipse, no matter where they had come from. They were encouraged to tap into a sense of being wronged, and the hectoring of the audinece must have heightened their already long-nourished fight-or-flight response, as the representative structure of the capitol was in sight. The speech didn't need to list the other grievances that Trump might not have mentioned theis time, but were implicit–a curtailing of freedom of gun ownership, a silencing of speech, a turning back of religious freedoms–which were fought over in the election. Those fears of a loss of liberties and change in administration had already been amplified through social media across the nation, far more electrically than Lefebvre's spatial map of primary currents of the Great Fear through rural France that demanded historians recast their research of what was long seen and studied as an urban revolution: this revolution was born on social media, if it arrived in busloads or by plane, to witness an event they could only dream, but seemed to call for their own participation in nothing less than a new model of government.
The intensity of currents of fear that had run through chat rooms, TheDonald, and various citizen militias and Trump supporters came to a head at the condensation of these groups as a false populist force outside the Capitol building as the certification of the 2020 Presidential election was tried to be obstructed. Rather than fear spreading on the ground, however, or through popular movements, the mass-based nature of rally based on Facebook groups assembled a sense of purpose and direction that might be embodied in the busses that stopped in twenty-five American cities to collect Patriots, often in parking lots or airplane hangars from Arizona, Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana, Kentucky, and Florida seemed to summon a virtual confederacy to Washington. Riders foud collective experiences on the bus, having had their vagal nerves electrified by barrages of claims that the electoral vote had been distorted on NewsMax, FOX, OANN, that Trump had promoted–seeming to bestow his favorites to escalate temperatures across the nation that seemed evidence that the election raged, as "news bubbles" of 2016 bore fruit in adherence to different sets of electoral maps.
We had all watched how the margins of votes broke in different states, parsing them by voting groups, but as we watched them, the nation that had hived into groups broke into different alternate realities that called into question the election's validity before it was even held, and drew out debates about its validity. And as they did so, the very institutions of representative government had been eroded. In polls that promised to refresh "the most up-to-date and accurate tallies in the Presidential race" from OANN, the contest had become a horse-race, undercutting the validity of the results that would be announced on Election Night, and creating a fake drama that ran against the predictions of most major news networks, hiving off America into two separate media silos which doubted the validity of the mainstream media. In what was seen as only an attempt to out-Fox News, the electoral maps that were projected on news sites predicted clear signs of victory that undercut the representational value of the electoral map, before and after the election-, that dislodged the ontological status of the electoral map, long before protest of certifying electoral votes–to turn back the clock, perhaps, to the very first tallies of votes, made before Democratic and internationalist tampering, when Trump led in Georgia and Pennsylvania by credible margins of victory–the provisional and unstable nature of all electoral tallies were made apparent, even after states had certified results. If FOX projection models long predicted a certain victory for Trump, the aftermath of the election and the contestation of votes eroded the ontic stability of the electoral map in a strategic way, as if playing a long game for overturning the vote.
Electoral Prediction
OANN November 16, 2020
These maps erased contingency, increased conviction, and unmoored a map once the bedrock of democratic representation, validating assertions "Trumpland doesn't believe the election results" and would contest them, and denying any consensus of a map that had no role but to create consensus.
The squabbles between the size of crowds nominally assembled by joint crowds brought to Washington by Women for America First who organized the March to Save America and the Stop the Steal and MAGA crowds came to bolster the claims that this was a "real Million Man March. Unlike the Women's March, that once embodied the Trump Resistance, or the Million Man March, these foot soldiers embodied the true electoral map that the size of crowds at this rally confirmed: as Trump had argued that he knew he won the election in Georgia by the greater size of his crowds compared to those reported for the Democratic ticket, the size of crowds provided a true direct illustration of democracy that the electoral maps based on fault tallies only disguised. The logic of the crowd's behavior was promoted as evidence of fears of the loss of liberties a Biden administration would bring, planted long before their arrival in Washington DC. The fears were magnified in the increased urgency that Donald Trump gave to the erosions of liberties as a direct result of an illegitimate transition of power to convulse his audience. The fears rendered evident the need to stop the joint session of Congress. lest they validate the false electoral map Fake News had promoted. Until Trump agreed to concede, they would provide the defense of rights and liberties a Biden presidency would erode, and the declaration of a victory for two Democratic senators in Georgia the night previous only augmented the intensity of pressure on embodying a physical presence that would overturn the tally of electoral votes by a sea of supporters in bright red MAGA gear that embodied a real, authentic electoral map before the Capitol itself.
Trumpland did not believe in counting, so habituated had they been to rallies, rather than just tallies. With such systematic ontological destabilization of the electoral map, evident in the sea of distinctive bright red hats, could the end of the protracted drama of the election be announced? The sense of being on the side of righteousness was affirmed in the Invocation that proceeded the Capitol Siege, as Donald Trump was prayed for as the divinely sanctioned leader of the nation, chosen by God to lead America, in ways that invalidated the need for electoral approval of the President God had selected for the nation.
The fear and the logic of a loss of liberties promoted online was very old regime and premodern, if they were cast in an imaginary of defending early modern nationalism. For while the Capitol Siege has been argued by Jill Lepore to be considered a race riot, the conflict cannot be captured save as a deeply anti-parliamentary tactic, a coup, as Fiona Hill insisted, a "self-coup" of the sort strongmen like Recep Erdoğan staged in 2016, before Trump came to power, to seize power outside established parliamentary process by an autgolpe that renders impotent the parliamentary system. The confusion of a sense of lawlessness and the demands of restoring a legal order that was in danger of being eroded was considerable, as the crowd was augmented by the possible and alleged presence of off duty police officers from Seattle, Rocky Mount, Virginia, and Fire Departments in New York City, Florida, ready and willing to help strategize as they entered the building, unlike a disorderly mob. It might be that the two-color division of map might reveal, but the range of those light blue states, that weren't such strong blue, belied the far, far greater intensity of a MAGA crowd.
5. The right to declare a separate region of like-minded liberties was promoted in the maps in online Facebook forums that promoted "peaceful secession." Maps provided for online Facebook forums redrew the nation with the promise that red states might secede from the nation that had been gaining steam on Twitter and elsewhere, while we all socially distanced, the need for DIY nation-making emerged, as local Republican Party Chairs sanctioned, endorsing Rush Limbaugh in suggesting the not so secret conspiracy that Republican-governed states exercise their "rights" and freedoms in what was a compact of states. The need to "keep the American parts of America American," as the Facebook group had it, would become clear as Limbaugh urged they "band together" as Texas, Wyoming, Nebraska, Utah, Montana, Alabama, and Mississippi join others–and break from the nation that the electors were about to saddle with a new President they had not chosen and did not want, and in America liberty was, in the end, that everyone should get what they want.
The moment of violence from which this birth of a new nation would begin might be commemorated in the future as January 6, 2021, bundling national security, sacred identity, and second amendment rights that defined an ecoystem of identity-based authoritarian systems, but ensured a good sleep at night. Yet as Lindell continued to tweet proof of broad hacking of the election–and eagerly contested Democratic margins of victory in a full six states–he undermined any sense stable resolution might be expected in electoral maps.
The potentiality of secession was sketched as a redemption of rights began atop the Manichean antagonism of battle lines, as they were encouraged by chromatic oppositions of red v. blue state maps to nourish secessionist fantasies as overlays atop the two-color dichotomy of electoral maps: by pooling the resources of all those smaller red dots, and overpowering or just excluding those blue dots–and sacrificing some, as in the Central Valley of California or upstate New York, in hopes they might migrate to North Dakota or Montana, and getting creative in Arizona and Colorado, but focussing on the parts of Wisconsin and Minnesota that in "a county formed from red states–or individual counties–"would follow the constitution." Gerrymandering the nation, rather than only a few states, might more fully proceed to actual secession, confounding the map with the territory, and obscuring that the excision of backed-out counties would offload actual sites of wealth-production, major centers of population, and impose consensus in falsified ways in an eroded union.
PeacefulRedStateSecession
This vision of secession would be nominally "peaceful," but any sense of tranquility would be for observers of an online map. The cartographic fantasy adapted newsmaps everyone had seen on election night, and used to draw a new sense of sovereignty, which might be imagined as meriting an even more insurmountable wall:
Red-State Secession: "Potential Borders if Trump States and Hillary States Split into Two or More Countries, and States Allow Certain Counties to Join another Country"
Secession need not be a bad thing, those who held high Gadsden Flags realized. This was about defending the imaginary of a new nation, forever resilient, and might create either the basis to restore the rightful ruler or if not trigger the secessionist movement that might follow in the country, as a number of simultaneous protests were planned across state capitols–demonstrations that might be pushed to create a unifying protest that awoke a sleeping red giant, and many of the overlapping groups of Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, secessionist movements in varied states and alt right groups.
Demonstrations at State Capitols on January 6, 2021
Severed from national laws that were no longer representing their interests, the members of Red State Secession (when exactly was the modifier added?) had been cut off from the laws that DC sought to impose on them, and had, they convinced themselves, the longer that they looked at the Gadsden Flag, perhaps, and the map that it created as a call to arms and indeed military recruitment to defend the denial of liberties: the image that Benjamin Franklin had devised as a rallying cry to join an army against Great Britain and throw off the yoke of British Sovereignty: only by being divided into segments would the power of the nation be denied, but the "duty, to throw off such government" after a long series of abuses and usurpations described in the Declaration of Independence would merit the altering or abolition of "any government that does not secure our inalienable rights," from second amendment rights to gun ownership to religious freedoms. The disparate segments of vigilant MAGA groups, from the Proud Boys and militant Oath Keepers and 3%ers, offspring of Patriot movements formed lest the Obama Presidency diminishing freedoms, would storm the Capitol united for "We the People," with aims far beyond rights of assembly or freedom of expression.
III%ers Tweet Promoting January 6, 2020
The rally that had long been planned was, after all. Those who attended anticipated an orgy of open carry, and an affirmation of religious identitarianism, where rioters, as the original American revolutionaries who fought for their inalienable freedoms, might assemble beneath the Washington Monument with thousands of AR-15s in an unstoppable show of force, equipped with high-capacity feeding devices, even if carrying handguns without a permit is an offense in Washington, DC.
The event was, after all, planned in mid-December as a major event of Free Speech, shortly after the electoral college had met, and Pennsylvania electors had cast their ballots for Biden, as a conclusion already envisaged if the attempts to audit the vote and suits to dismiss votes as invalid would fail; it would celebration of Second Amendment rights by fiat; and if one wonders at reports that the rioters had come to Washington, DC, having widely shared maps of tunnels under the Capitol Building to concretize their plans for surrounding and taking the Capitol building. While described as insider knowledge, and perhaps facilitated by taking tours of the site in advance, they probably had only cobbled together tourist maps of the tunnels under the Capitol building that seemed routes to prevent Congress members they sought to make their views known to from not hearing the demands that they, the crowd We The People, felt it was their right to make: the protection of rights to assemble, freedom of speech, and rights to bear guns had all been obscured by how fake news had stolen the election. The recent escalation of #StoptheSteal tweets confirming the stolen nature of the election in 1.3 million tweets since election day suggested something like a seismic register for the Base that had jumped on the eve of the rally.
While the President did not directly invite the marchers who had assembled in the Ellipse to breach the Capitol, the incessant reminders of the stolen nature of the election had baited them since state electors had delivered the Presidency to Joe Biden. Trump tweeted out falsehoods with vigor, questioning the legitimacy of the transfer of power, as many flagged as false grew from Election Day throw the day of protest.
6. The indignation that tweets channeled was mapped onto real space on January 6, in ways that drove momentum to real moment of release. While announced as a First Amendment Activity, this was a second amendment rally, a rally asserting religious freedoms and religions nationalism, with fervent conviction, with many other fellow travelers convinced of the infringement of their rights and the need to Save America and their duty to do so. As their Commander in Chief animated the crowd assembled by affirming "we will never concede" and that at this moment, "we will stop the steal," the heady disorientation clarified a map of affirming what was just 'right.'
The claims of purifying the Capitol and the center of power was not a cry of a Presidency in its death throes, but a concerted effort that might prompt the restoration of a form of government transparency in asserting and protecting rights by reclaiming the chambers of government in misguided hopes to start a revolution. Many might have procured the maps of these tunnels in anticipation of storming the Capitol to defend the "true" results of the election by downloading them off an ESRI story map; a map of entrances to tunnels would also be confirmation of the plans of action that readied their disparate forces to enter the grounds to force the election. Online chat groups had already reasoned and spread the news in anticipation: "He wouldn't be calling us to Washington unless there was a purpose that would ultimately end in him winning the election." The maps could be easily gotten; the marchers would retake the Capitol building from entrances off of the ellipse that must have illustrated not only the vulnerability of the Capitol to attack but direct access to government.
Washington Tunnels on Capitol Hill/ESRI
Maps of tunnels available from visitors map circulated as "the most important maps of the day," the basis to look for anyone fleeing the Capitol, rather than as a point of entry; it was disseminated in color-coded urgency with instructions to form "a TRUE LINE around the Capitol and the tunnels" in conspiratorial tones:
TheDonald.win/Distributed Map of Underground Exits from Congressional Chambers to be Blocked as Congress Certified Electors
The hopes for surrounding the Capitol, in hopes not to allow any legislators to leave the premises, and indeed to paralyze the government's regular function, as it prepared to, in the words of the planners of the event, "certify the steal," led rioters to enter the building from numbers of sights, to overwhelm security by multiple breaches of the building, first from the east, approaching the west front by breaking open doors (5), having scaled rim of the portico (3) as others scaled the walls on the northeast portico (6)–all areas marked "very important" to man–to enter the Senate wing (7). Security was at the same time clustered at the west front (2), as reinforcements were unable to be called. Only after crowds broke into the House chamber and the Speaker's Gallery did law enforcement officers draw guns, hoping to disperse the rushing rioters at the buildings entrance (4).
But is the on-the-ground assessment of the movement of rioters only able to scratch the surface of the ways fears were incited and communicated across the masses of marchers who moved on, like Christian soldiers, animated by a sense of duty that had cascaded into different causes and chatgroups, constituencies of the movement Trump had triggered that were swirling under all those different flags–flags of Confederates, Gadsden flags of insurrectionists of 3%'ers and Oath Keepers or Second Amendment groups, and Trump 2020 banners that created a sense of a sea of red, American flags and the Thin Blue Line flags, popular among pro-police groups that won broader currency among White Supremacists after Black Lives Matter, emblems that placed those who flew them in the space Trump extolled the police as occupying "between civilization and total chaos. The uniting of these groups, in an echo of the "Unite the Right" rally at Charlottesville, assembled to fight forces of darkness.
"Visualizing a Riot," Curbed
While these graphics of mapping the on-the-ground situation suggest the coordination of forcing entrance and taking the building, the hope was perhaps that the logic would unfold as a mob scene, able to be deflected from responsibility, but generalized an image of crowd violence that would "build momentum and pressure and the on the day change the hearts and minds of Congress, peoples who weren't yet decided, or who saw everyone outside and said 'I can't be on the other side of that mob,'" as a right-wing activist who helped organize Stop the Steal claimed he planned with U.S. Representatives since late December, or since the electoral college met, when plans to interrupt congressional certification of the electoral votes began. As those who saw the seeds of dangerous crowd behavior, in mid-nineteenth century Paris, in prisons, brothels, and asylums as grounds for breeding criminal behavior, the proliferation of falsified revolutionary fantasies of seizing the state and interrupting processes of government to prevent loss of liberties proliferated online.
As much as map the routes of the entrance of what has been called a mob, we might pay more attentio to mapping how it was crowd-sourced. How did social media channel the Stop the Steal votes in multiple states by magnifying calls in chamber of accusations of illegitimacy to prepare for a populist putsch on January 6? To be sure, the manufacture of crowds asserting false populist claims began not only online, but in Stop the Steal rallies in individual states, as individual rallies for "stopping the steal" in Arizona, Philadelphia, and Virginia grew in November and December, as "President Trump's path to victory appears to shrink," according to national media group Nexstar.tv, leading Trump allies in Congress, as Arizona Representative Dr. Paul Gosar, to tweet a demand tha President-Elect Biden "should concede" on the eve of the certification of electoral votes in Congress, tagging the Stop the Steal movement. With Alabama Representative Mo Brooks, Arizona's Andy Biggs he had planned since mid-December the massive rally on January 6 in DC.
As much as focus on the routes of an angry mob, filled with whites dressed in gang-like colors of passionate intensity, was there a possibility that tours of the Senate Chambers were given to members of such populist groups agitating for Second Amendment rights or Christian Nationalism the day before crowds assembled?
The anticipation was fanned on chatrooms and TheDonald amplified as they intersected with the script of historical re-enactment that Second Amendment defenders defended, far more than a mere First Amendment activity: the images of a threatened end of times asked viewers to envision the capitol in apocalyptic terms. Gun ammunition websites had explained that "a failed state is to post-modernity what the nation-state was to modernity," and the incapability of our current states from "exercising authority over all of its nominal territory" was in fact a "hallmark of our age," but the rights to overthrown government that denied rights, as was not doubted for gun owners, sanctioned the state of emergency to Save America. The "map" attributed to founding father Benjamin Franklin survives in the Gadsden Flags many held at the insurrection that they imagined would be the start of a new revolutionary war to defend local liberties, to defend the "sacred landslide election victory" Donald Trump had affirmed that morning by the "trial by combat" Rudy Giuliani had ominously foretold. The compact was able to be secured by "We the People," and invited contingents to identify themselves by Gadsden flags that illustrated their commitment to the cause, diffused by the "3%ers," a militia group of Patriots who since 2008 have vowed anti-government extremism, often based in Canada.
Engraved Map of Thirteen Colonies, Philadelphia Gazette, ed. Benjamin Franklin (1754)
There was something more than deep theater here: Trump, who had lost the election, was desperate, with a group of lawgivers who had decided to stall the confirmation of electoral votes that day for as long as necessary, saw the "Stop the Steal" rally as a final attempt to give those who remained in his base a sense of their agency as true patriots, attracting disparate groups from Oath Keepers to Q Anon to deep loyalists, to claim their new identity as domestic terrorists, convincing them that they might stage a new revolution, and be part of a truly historical "experience" that transcended them all, using the Capitol building as a prop in a final Reality TV show that exposed the falsity of the official popular vote by the sheer force of passionate intensity, in a last-minute attempt by which true patriots could move collectively to Stop the Steal definitively.
There was a sense of collective brainwashing at that Rally as they readied for combat, ready to have their adrenaline and fight or flight impulses energized as they had at other rallies in the past. But this time was different, and they had packed nooses, axe handles, hockey sticks, heavy duty zip ties and flexi cuffs, repurposed cattle prods disguised as flagpoles, molotov cocktails and other handmade armaments, and backpacks concealing ammunition: as improvised police, they arrived to take control of the congressional chambers. Despite the DIY nature of many improvised weapons at the riot at the Capitol, many counter-terrorism experts believe encouraged or animated as an inside job, if one that betrays the Commander in Chief's fragile state of mind–an inside job that was allowed by the absence of any security cordon, the long-term denial of an electoral loss, and the false urgency of preventing a ratification of an electoral tally Trump willfully wrongly argued might be stopped. When the crowd entered, Nancy Pelosi had to place a personal phone call to Virginia's Governor, Ralph Northam, to secure the arrival of the National Guard, as other representatives turned to their offices to ask why more security forces were not on the way.
As for the fear of invasions, it was not that we had long mapped it wrong–it is just that the Deep State was within, and a lynching mob that went straight into the Capitol, without pausing for nicety, might fulfill the needs of the moment that allowed the disbanding of laws, and defense of liberty, fueled by escalating claims of voter fraud, and summoned to defend the system of elections that were sacred to the nation, in the "Second American Revolution" that the secessionist group announced was scheduled to start "on Jan 6," to be noted on one's calendar. The night before the rally assembled, Trump again promoted it on social media, reminding his base on Tuesday evening that "thousands would be pouring into Washington DC" to shake things up, if not shut down government for the specific aim of preventing the certification of electoral votes, the final "line in the sand" that the Trump administration seemed to see fit to draw.
7. We had told the barbarians were coming from the start of the Trump Administration, and it was reliably mapped from the southern border. This invasion of Washington, DC was not an overthrowing of empire, but rather the final chance to punish the Deep State, and change world history by securing and defending the liberties of the Gadsden Flag. It aimed at a major historical change, reversing the election by a false populist putsch for broadcast on global media. After all the attempts at audits, lawsuits, and recounts, the confrontational Schmittian Moment of a "state of exception" with the enemy began–to quote the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, who adopted a vision of politics structured by the dichotomy between "enemy" and "friend" that gained new traction for Trumpers as those who were ready to allow the certification of electors to proceed became clear, and the image of Mike Pence certifying the election grew–even if Joe Biden's victory had been almost uniformly projected by news outlets in mid-November and had been officially confirmed by Electoral College votes in mid-December. At the heady moment when electors were certified at the Capitol building, the formal decorum of the roll call could be punctured in a final revelation of agency and anger, as the Vice President made it clear he would not reject the electoral college in the manner the President wanted, overturning the law in the way that Schmitt argued followed a "higher law" than parliamentary procedures.
Brendan Smialowski / AFP/Getty Images
This depended on the continued loyalty of the crowd who attended the march to their leader. From his arrival, Trump readied himself behind the bullet-proof glass, steeling himself for the appropriate moment for stepping out of the law, into a State of Exception, adopting parliamentary decorum and shattering the reverence for the norm that was manifest in the largely ceremonial joint session of Congress, whose procedural function was going to be shattered, after the final objections for discarding Biden electors had been launched, but failed to delay the procedural vote whose outcome was now clear, and the time to create a crisis at the Capitol had arrived. "I hope Vice President Pence has courage today," prayed a marcher on the Ellipse, echoing the words Trump had just spoken and proceeding to Pennsylvania Avenue with the President, "and I hope any politician who thinks he has a future shows courage to stand up and do what's right." "I hope," President Trump had just told the rally, "Mike Pence does the right thing, because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election . . . "
Was he readying himself for the advance of rioters on the parliamentary chambers? They had betrayed him. Unlike the representatives, these groups would advance in an incarnation of will of "We the People" groups would affirm the direct tie of people to sovereign, a principle of fascism, embodying Carl Schmitt's notion of "present government" and the invoking of a higher law, in a negation of democracy, and a determining moment of rejecting norms akin to other revolutionary moments in world history: the impending certification of the vote constituted a need to reject norms, in the "decisionist" school of thought Schmitt nourished, and promised the rioters a sense of agency. For the moment of rushing the Capitol would incarnate a will able to substitute for elected representatives needing to be stopped, physically in the process of betraying the people's will; at the very moment of the ceremony that would start the formal transition of executive power, the walls could be breached, one of the lucky groups of rioters could seize Pence and his family, Pelosi, Schumer, and Clyburn, and place their heads on pikes outside the Chambers, as Steve Bannon had boasted the heads of FBI Director Christopher Wray and public health officer Anthony Fauci be placed on picket as a public warning on both sides of the White House in Trump's second term, following the precedent of Tudor England or medieval Italy, but that Bannon argued gained precedent as "how you won the Revolution" in November, 2020. The rumor that Trump had peevishly demanded to place the heads of any Republicans who supported his first impeachment on pikes suddenly seemed more credible than ever. If we had been sloppy in using the political term of fascism as a label for disparaging the anti-democratic, the political enthusiasm of broad-based mass organizations that were manifest at the Ellipse for what was announced as a rally and a protest march as senators and congressmen were meeting.
The rally assembled a convergence of mass movements to contest the certification of the democratic election. In contesting electoral certification fascism in America seemed to have arrived, as pro forma certification of electoral votes they refused to accept compelled the overthrow of the government that had now been complicit in falsifying the election. The need for accountability had led the crowd to assemble in defiance of the very dangers of a new international order that Schmitt had feared, promoting globalist agendas threatening the national legal order, calling for defiance.
The President enjoined the audinece to fight "big tech and the fake news" who stood for the internationalists who demoralize and control Americans by rigging the election. Mike Lindell was all too ready to blame China and Iran for the Democratic victory, although Trump seemed to have refrained from going there. Trump insisted on allegedly falsified election results on a variety of fronts, leaving it vaguely situated between miscounted the ballots counted by machines in other nations, resolving to "finally hold big tech accountable" for concealing his victory now that no other means than direct action remained. If the rioters have effectively suspended the speed of such transition to occur, or forestalled the formation of a new administration, they did so not only through the rehabilitation of an image of a confederate past or "Lost Cause," but the precipitation of the very "State of Emergency" Trump clearly felt, and that some believed would precipitate a break from the political order and a leap into the state of exception that Lawfare's Quinta Jurecic feared in 2016, before the election and even start of his Presidency, suspending a constitutional transition of power, inaugurated, as it were, from the sovereign's own articulation of the state of exception by virtue of the "extreme peril" that the transition of power poses to the state. As the rioters were encouraged to fight for Donald Trump's second term and his survival, as if trapped in his narcissistic fantasies that blinded them to actual events.
They were not really invading the Capitol, but provoking the transition to a new stage of history that, despite earlier marches, needed to finally clear the bureaucratic obstructionism of the liberal state that might be poised, in future weeks, to dismantle the very Border Wall that had given America its sovereign integrity. The moment of breaching the citadel instead occasioned a release of vertiginous empowerment for those who we were waiting to preserve democracy and ensure the safety and security of the accuracy of the Presidential vote. Their arrival had been something we were long envisioning, and many indeed also knew was coming. They had, indeed, been planning to dash hopes for a peaceful transition and to save America, more than overthrow it, but the crisis of destabilization of national security was far greater and far more immediate: in order to fulfill plans for Making America Great, they had downloaded travel routes to DC and memes to promote the march from the Washington Monument, across the Ellipse, envisioning scenarios by which "we'll storm offices and physically remove and even kill all the D.C. traitors and reclaim the country." The forum called "The Donald," which had addressed "patriots" from 2015, if it migrated from Reddit until the excited agitation of the subreddit expressing solidarity with the President who had lost the election was removed, in June, 2020, after it began bubbling over with Donald Trump memes for the election, now migrated to alternative media, moved to TheDonald.win, had promised a virtual apocalypse of a shitstorm. Proud Boy Joey Biggs, well schooled to "stand down and stand by" by his leader, boasted on a video uploaded to Parler, "Watch out, January 6 — you ain't gonna know who the fuck it is standing beside you!" with glee.
Envisioning the storming of the U.S. Congress and routes of breaking into all federal buildings on the day electoral votes were due to be tabulated, readers of the online forum known as "The Donald" ruminated about the prospect of bringing their own guns to D.C., even if doing so would be a crime in Washington DC, due to the capitol's stricter and perhaps more reasonable gun laws. Rather than carrying guns on routes across borders, they would illustrate Second Amendment freedoms on the President's Park, while it still "belonged" to President Trump. After all, many of the communities where they had found most meaning were disrupted, and this was their historical legacy: they had been invited to take back a seat of power for the final chapter of a long-promised draining of the swamp to prevent the stealing the vote–surrounding the Capitol in a burst of glory. Marchers who rebuffed police as they had been "invited by the President" reflected the crisis of authority that would be a culmination of the Trump Era, offering the last time to Make America Great Again, even by subverting gun control laws and destruction of federal property, as part of a new revolutionary tide.
They were, after all, invited in, even if they did a bit of breaking and entering, and invited to partake in a redemptive act–and could not be able to believe their good fortune as what seemed to be starting as they entered the Peoples' Chambers, and the chant turned to another Trump Rally cry, "Stop the Steal!, Stop the Steal!" as they wondered what the officers were doing to contain their movement, and tried to film as much as possible of what was an almost orgiastic experience of iPhones, elevated banners, and a huge effort to enter the locked doors of the chambers, incredulous that they had gained access to the building and could break down the chambers' doors, or jimmy them with a knife, pausing reflectively amidst everything to wish that they had only thought to bring boom boxes to play music that might match the drama of the occasion.
They had all, in the end, been invited to an event to which Donald was himself the master of ceremonies and host of a final melding of his career in public politics and DIY Reality TV.
Donald had, after all, started the machinery of the MAGA crowd on December 19, several days after the electoral college voted, as he begun to plan the massive rally that he might bring to Washington as a direct manifestation of democracy and patriotism that was a last attempt to "Save America" from Joe Biden. Trump let let his base know, as Rudy Giuliani was running a smokescreen by distracting the nation with claims of widespread fraud, to plan a "Big protest in D.C. on January 6th." The President hectored the crowd about what really matters on social media, and Jack Dorsey must rue that tweet which had seemed so harmless when it was sent on Dec. 19, cryptically addressing his base, "Be there, will be wild!" as he sanctioned abandon at the biggest Stop the Steal rally ever at the Capitol, the one they'd all been waiting for. And he continued to hector the crowd angrily, mentioning the upstanding nature of Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who had recently lost their elections, reminding them of the danger of granting a Democratic majority to the US Senate, reminding them of the need for only 11,779 votes–just 11,000 votes and 779–and the scale of the fraud that must have occurred, in a tormented world salad of obsessions that had so filled his mind in previous weeks.
Members of the Facebook group whose members were already visualizing secession read remarks urging them to put aside other business for this truly Manichaean battle, not waged at the polls: "If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism!" Is it enough that Facebook has barred Trump, now that the base has had time to migrate to Parler and Gab? Was it surprising that cellphones were the weapon of choice, as if they might unleash the revolution online that would cascade across the country in the same way that they were alerted and summoned to Washington, DC? In case any one had missed it, and was not planning to arrive, Republican Attorneys General both helped fund the "Stop the Steal" rally, and promoted it by robocalls that rallied the troops with the heady news "At 1 p.m., we will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal," in a rally at the Ellipse in President's Park, with doors opening at 7 AM, . . . we will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal!" After disclosing the plans of action, the robocall concluded with the reassurance "We are hoping Patriots like you will join us to continue the fight to protect the integrity of our elections," nothing its sponsorship by the "Rule of Law Defense Fund," a group to which anyone reasonable Republican would want to belong.
Rule of Law Defence Fund and other Groups sponsoring March to Save America
The battle seemed truly world changing, and a moment of history where the opportunities for martyrdom might abound, as well as true heroism, a new historical age beginning, or a sun kept from setting, seen with the sudden clarity of newfound depth of field as a contest of civilizations in which they could partake.
Albrecht Altdorfer, Battle of Alexander at Issus [Alexanderschlacht] (1529)
The gap in understanding in the nation was captured by the Newspaper of Record. To capture the Capitol Siege underground journalist Elijah Schaffer captured by following the crowd into the chamber offices, the riots were described for all who were not there to witness as anti-climactic in the absence of violence, even after the huge rush of adrenaline breaching the walls of the Capitol building met. The riots were not an invasion or desecration of a house of government, but oddly unplanned as those who waited to incapacitate the officers of the Deep State in their tracks may have realized they had no plans–or been so overcome with the ease of entering the Capitol building where they found such limited resistance until the arrival of Police from Washington, D.C., that they abandoned all plans for using subterranean corridors to plant explosives and aimed to rush the chambers of Congress directly.
6. The New York Times did the nation a disservice in describing a tragedy as low-level comedy. The Times characterized the arrival of rioters at the Capitol who had rushed suspiciously few number of capitol building police to enter the inner sanctum of power as a moment as awe-struck protestors. After breaching the walls, they paused in disbelief, at a moment where they were utterly at a loss that seemed more giddy than violent, filled with awe rather than breaking all sense of order and respect for lawfulness: "inside, there was a strange mix of confusion and excitement, and the almost lack of police presence in the beginning amplified the feeling of lawlessness" as an extreme game which they had only tried to visualize in the past unfolded. Struck by the grandeur that comes from not having visited museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was time for selfies. "They gawked at the place of wealth and beauty, adorned with art and marble, a domain of the powerful," as if it was all wrongfully procured by their tax dollars, feeling for a moment, in those four hours of insurrection that left five dead, "for a short while on Wednesday afternoon, [they] were in control . . . [and] could not be ignored." The odd assortment of DIY equipment, zip ties to take prisoners, and even the occasional noose suggests something much more terrifying was at hand as the chambers were vandalized.
But if this was a tragedy of national proportions, it was also a farce, a battle that was enacted in costume, and with imaginary weapons. The Washington police who arrived rightly treated them as folks who were possibly dangerous, but could be most sensibly escorted out of the building after ensuring that they were not laying the sort of pipe bombs that had arrived, that very day, at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee alike, by domestic terrorists who the administration may well have facilitated, in a marriage of convenience that demands broad investigation.
Was this only for four hours, or was this a declension of how the government was to be understood in post-Trump America, where the promise of democracy was only about breaking walls? After all, this would be the last time in a while that they would be invited in. There was a sense of the declension of history in the member of the mob that entered the Capitol posing with loot from the Speaker of the House, before a picture of the surrender of General Burgoyne who attempts to present his sword to General Horatio Lloyd Gates, Adjutant General to the Continental Army,–
Win McNamee/AFP/Getty
–and the landscape scene of the honor of U.S. Military was a sharp contrast to the looter who mugged for the photographer Win McNamee: a story of the declension of patriotism, perhaps. The young Floridian father who was leaving the Rotunda with the Speakeer's podium had devoted hours to social media alternately mocking Black Lives Matter and defending pro-Life groups. He church-going Baptist who was also animated about attacking abortion rights shared his mounting anticipation at being part of the March, filling his Facebook feed with images chronicling his itinerary to Washington, DC, to stall confirmation of electoral votes, and taking the speaker's podium was sort of doing his part.
Back at the real American Revolution, after General Gates had defeated the British forces at Saratoga, he graciously showed his honor to posterity by offering Burgoyne hospitality and refreshment in his battle tent, as a motley band of American soldiers of disparate rank looked on to witness the former British soldier's decorum, in which he seemed to show himself forever the gentleman, burnishing his reputation despite rumors of his participation in a conspiracy to take General Washington's place at the charge of the revolutionary army. The historical painting of the former British soldiers was planned by John Trumbull for a series of historical canvasses that would serve to "meditate seriously the subjects of national history, of events of the Revolution," including Bunker's Hill, Trenton, Saratoga, and Yorktown, based on local landscape studies.
John Trumbull, Surrender of General Burgoyne (1826)
The 1777 Battle of Saratoga that was fought by the white men who joined the Revolutionary Army were being led by a man accused of having sought to replace Washington, and it was fitting that this picture was the background of a misguided attempt to disrupt the completion of electoral process if not stage a coup as an inside job. The scene was a model of America First.
Blurred in the background of the widely shared news photo of the man participating in the mob that rushed the Capitol building to obstruct the lawful transmission of power, an iconic image of the Siege of the Capitol, is perhaps a reminder of the plaintive nature of the frayed bonds of government to people that led some to enter the chambers of members of the U.S. Congress. This time, they arrived to pry open locked doors that had failed to represent the common will, and would break into congressional offices to liberate information, seeking to steal unlocked "open" laptops, private property they eagerly removed from the capitol building to scour for evidence of corruption which they had hoped to cleanse the nation.
One rioter boasted on social media he had found a mine of needed information on Pelosi's laptop as if its seizure provided a moment of clarity: it revealed in transparent ways "all facets of this complex Election Theft using Vatican Bank to give Obama CIA 14 pallets of $400 million cash to Leonardo!!" at military bases in Texas. Luckily, Trump was on his way to arrive in Texas, that bastion of liberty, to decode the conspiracy that the man who stole the laptop would present to him, on his final lap of victory of a long campaign. Another stormer of the Capitol, citizen journalist Elijah Schaffer of BlazeTV, channeled the coursing adrenaline flowing through everyone's veins who illegally entered the government building, shocked at the vertigo of having penetrated the Capitol building, and detailed the pleasure of collective cosplay before he was banned from Facebook and Instagram: "I am inside Nancy Pelosi's office with thousands of revolutionaries who have stormed the building. To put into perspective how quickly staff evacuated, emails are still on the screen along side a federal alert warning members of the current revolution."
Filed under Capitol Riots, crowds, Donald Trump, Red States vs. Blue States, social media
Tagged as alt Right, America First, Carl Schmitt, domestic terrorism, electoral maps, MAGA, national security, news bubble, news maps, red states, secessionism, secessionist movements, Second Amendment, Southern Secession, sovereignty, TrumpLand, voter fraud
Get Me Out of Here, Fast: Escape from D.C.?
The forced monotone of Donald Trump's public address to the nation on March 12 was a striking contrast from his most recent State of the Union address. He sought to calm the nation as it faced the pandemic of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 in what was perhaps his most important public address. On the verge of breaking beneath the gravity of circumstances that spun far out of his control, however, rather than show his customary confidence, Trump seemed a President scrambling and in panic mode trying to rehearse stale tropes, but immobilized by events.
President Trump tried to look as presidential as possible, re-inhabiting a role of authority that he had long disdained, as he was forced to address a nation whose well-being he was not in control. The national narrative, as it was begun by WHO's declaration of a pandemic, was perhaps seen as a narrative which seemed to spin out of his control, below his eyes, as he tried to calm markets by addressing the nation in what he must have imagined to have been as reassuring tones as he could summon. With his hands grasped but thumbs flickering, as if they were a fire under which he sat, as if he were wriggling like a kid strapped in the back seat of a car where he was a passenger to God-knows-where, wrestling with the increasing urgency that his aides demanded he address the outbreak of the virus in the United States that he had long tried to deny. Serial flag-waving continued to fuel President Trump's attacks on China and the World Health Organization, as if trying to toe the line of adherence to America First policies of nationalism before a global catastrophe, that did not compute. If America First as a doctrine allows little room for empathy, affirming national greatness and the importance of a logic of border closures was all he could offer, and would be predictably lacking reassurance or empathy as he attempted to create a connection at a defining moment of his Presidency, but looked particularly pained.
If Trump rarely trusted himself to make hand gestures as he plighted through the speech, thumbs flickering, hands clasped, he every so often seemed distinctly out of synch with his austere surroundings, gold curtains drawn to reveal two flags, barely aware, perhaps, that the eyes of the world were very much on his performance in this new sound studio to which he was not fully accustomed, trying to explain that he had undertaken measures that had made us safe, even if he must have been worrying that the lack of worry he had been projecting and urging in previous weeks had risen across the nation, and his performance was not calming them at all. He was tasked with describing the vulnerability of the nation to the novel coronavirus whose effects he had downplayed repeatedly, but was no longer able to dismiss, and no longer able to concede posed a far greater threat to the American economy than the danger of "illegal" migrants he had so often pointed to as a cause of national decline: the virus that had already crossed our borders repeatedly, since the first cases of COVID-19 were diagnosed in San Jose and Seattle, would potentially bring down his presidency, and he lacked any ability to explain the scale of the effects of the virus that he had effectively helped release by ignoring warning signs.
Oval Office address of Wednesday, March, 11, 2020. Doug Mills / The New York Times)
The link of America to the world defined in his America First candidacy–even made the very identification of a pandemic difficult to process. And he did so in the starkest national backdrop possible, vaunting his closing of borders, suspension of "flights" from China, and ties to Europe–even as he encouraged Americans to return from abroad, and had allowed unmonitored entrance of Europeans and world travelers into New York that would make it the site of the entrance of the disease to the majority of American cities where the viral load arrived, with over 900 people entering America through New York daily for months after China suspended travel from Wuhan on January 23–after China called the outbreak "controllable" on New Year's Eve. The declaration that echoed the concerns of the World Health Organization may have been buried in global celebrations, even as Trump blamed it for starting a sense of false complacence before undeniably "real" news that he feared would come to define his Presidency.
Trump was unable to accept declarations of the World Health Organization had just called the coronavirus outbreak–an outbreak which, we now know, he had in fact been hearing alerts from American intelligence as early as November 17, about the outbreak of cases of the novel coronavirus in Hubei province, rather than January, when initial infections in the United States were reported. As much as Trump found it difficult to admit the vulnerability of the United States to a global pandemic–or to the recommendations issued by WHO–who set the caduceus that symbolized medical ethics authority over the North American continent–at which he bristled at the notion of a global scope of edicts across boundaries, as if a map where national divides were erased as if it compromised national authority for a disease the President has been uncannily persistent in localizing in China, even before an increasing preponderance of evidence of its global circulation and transmission over a series of months.
Fabric Coffrini, AFP
As cascading fears grew in markets across the world, Trump was perhaps forced to realize his new relation to the world, even as the German stock exchanges plummeted as the measures he announced seem either difficult to process, or failing to address the importance of maintaining trade ties–or of taking adequately prudent steps of public health.
Slumping in his seat at the Resolute Desk, perhaps contemplating how no predecessor had ever delivered on air unprepared remarks from the desk, and visibly discomfited in doing so. He must have hoped to make up for his televised performance by sending surrogates scrambling to social media, issuing clarifications for misstatements–as the exemption offered U.S. citizens to return from China, or the exemption of Ireland, as well as England, and an assurance that trade would "in no way be affected" by the ban, as markets had reacted poorly to his performance. While it seemed that Trump was cognitively unable to process the possibility of a crumbling American economy–and a decline of America's place in a global economy–under his watch, a prospect faced since he had met with airline executives with whom he discussed the effects of stopping flights of foreign nationals from China in a March 4 meeting, offering them a bailout that limited the impact economic effects of heightened travel advisories, is it possible he had no sense of the massive fallout on the national economy?
March 11 Address/Ralph Orlowski/Reuters
As Trump spoke, global markets not only failed to register confidence–but plummeted, as he revealed no clear plans to to call for social distancing to contain the spread of the virus, and revealed that lack of national preparation for confronting an infectious disease that had no vaccine. He may have remembered that he had outright fired a former cabinet member, barely remembered in the rogue's gallery of administration, Tom Bossert, who had demanded preparedness "against pandemics" and a "comprehensive biodefence strategy" of the sort the previous administration of Pres. Barack Obama had tried to institute, or that a simulation of a pandemic that could devastate the American economy and kill up to half a million revealed in October 2019 "just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed."
It seems likely he was rather trying to conceal the massive scale of lying to the nation about the effects of an economic downturn unprecedented in scale, but which the increased lines at Wuhan's Tianyou Hospital the previous November had already indicated had a problem of infectious diseases on their hands that would have a potentially global consequence. Trump tried to spin the consequences as purely local, in an unprecedented wishful thinking whose scale of deception far exceeded the pathological deceits he had long taken to perpetrate on investors, business partners, and even on family members–from hiding his older brother's treasured trucks that were a Christmas gift and then admonishing him not to cry, or he would destroy them before his eyes. Even as satellite imagery showed a clear rush to hospital emergency rooms in Wuhan in November, as clusters of cars marked in red crowded the emergency rooms that revealed "a steep increase in volume starting in August 2019 and culminating in a peak in December 2019," when China began epidemiological investigations that led to identifying and sequence of the novel coronavirus by January 12, ten days before the city went on lockdown to contain its spread.
Annotated Satellite Photographs of Wuhan's Tianyou Hospital in September 2019
While Trump registered no alarm at the arrival of the very pandemic whose global impact American simulations feared would cripple the national economy, he tried to offer spin on having closed borders to the virus, as if it were not already diffused within the country, in a mind over matter sort of exercise that suggested limits purchase on reality, as if he was able to recognize the risk earlier administrations had identified as a national priority.
Filed under borders, Coronavirus, COVID-19, data visualization, national borders
Tagged as airline routes, alt Right, CDC, COVID testing, disease maps, Donald Trump, health care, infectious diseases, isolationism, pandemic, public health, shelter-in-place, social distancing, sovereign bounds, sovereignty
Mapping the New Authoritarianism: Trumpism, Tampons, Misogyny and the Volatile American Electorate
It seems, goes the popular wisdom, Donald Trump stunned the country by being able to make up for the lack of a party organization by followers he developed on Twitter. But Trump was able to tilt against a candidate he was able to identify with an establishment, and an establishment that he convinced voters had not served a plurality of states, as a salesman of something different than the status quo, adopting a highly mediated populism that was rooted din claims to reorganize the state and its effectiveness. The bizarre combination of an outsider who promised a range of constituencies that the state would be remade in their own interests–defending American sovereignty; returning jobs to depressed regions; defending anti-immigrant interests–may not be able to be aligned directly with the appeal of a fascist state, but provided a collective identity for many that gave meaning their votes, at the same time as dropping voter turnout across the midwest and new restrictive voting laws, including in Wisconsin and Ohio.
Trump gave a greater sense of urgency to the crucial number of undecided in his favor–before a broadly declining turnout nationwide, but also decreased turnout in many states where differences in the popular votes were small, as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa, and pronouncedly higher in the "deep south," based on estimates of the U.S. Elections Project.
U.S. Elections Project
The extraordinary effectiveness of Donald Trump's affective appeal to voters in the 2016 Presidential remains particularly difficult to stomach for many, moving outside of a party or any civic institutions, but rooted in the adroitness by which he branded himself as a political alternative. Trump's uncensored comportment was central to the success of that campaign, many have noted, as it lent cathartic license for exposing emotions of fear, hatred, and anger rarely seen in political discourse–and seemed to run against reasoned discourse. The performative orchestration of a wide range of emotions–tilted toward the red end of the spectrum market by fear; resentment; indignation; anger; disorientation–which drew lopsidedly from an atlas of emotions. If the range of emotional responses were triggered in a sense by the prominence of social media, which allowed a quite careful orchestration of retweeting and public statements designed to trigger emotions to make political decisions, it was orchestrated carefully more from Reality TV than Reality,–orchestrating its audience's attention by means of quite skillful editorial manipulations of footage, fast cuts, and clever stagecraft to create the needed coherent story from declarations, angry accusations, and assertions. Trump's campaign touched on issues of fear and anger, hopping between nearby sectors of the below map, but focussing attention on a fear of women and scapegoating of others to manufacture an actually illusory model of strength.
The emotional integrity was more important than the language–leading to bizarre debates as to whether his supporters took him literally, or if his references were serious in content even if the actual utterances he made were not in fact as central his appeal as the feelings of antagonism and alienation that he so successfully seemed to tap.
As a creature of the airwaves, Trump used emotions as a way to orient voters to the changing world of globalization by emotional venting that appeared to defend a past order: despite his lack of qualifications to serve as President of the United States, the defensiveness created a source of validation for his candidacy that few expected, but are so familiar to be available to install as browser extensions via Reaction Packs. The recognition of Trump's display of emotions are so familiar that they convert easily to downloadable Reactions as emoji, so iconic has been Trump's animated orchestration of anger, fear, and resentment across the body politic, in ways that remain difficult to map.
The popularity of such "rage faces" recouped the repeated registering of emotions in Trump's campaign. Indeed, Trump's–or the Trump campaign's–active retweeting of 140-character declarations defaming individuals or amping up socio-economic antagonisms prepared the way for the recognition of these emoticons which, although not released or sanctioned by Facebook, had first become recognizable in American political discourse that summer in much of the American subconscious.
The animated reactions engaged many online not politically active or voted in previous elections, redefining the political landscape outside of red versus blue states, and mirroring tools of psychometric profiling–first successfully used in political settings to mobilize support online for "Leave E.U." in the Brexit campaign–first framed by researchers at Cambridge Analytica, developed by an psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, before changed his name to Dr. Spectre, sold to the MyPersonality tools of Cambridge University's Psychometrics Centre to the shady Strategic Communications Laboratories, who in 2013 established Cambridge Analytica in the United States. The tools had indeed boasted the ability to measure voters' personality from their digital footprints, decrypting psychological criteria for emotional stability, extraversion, political sympathies, able to predict sexual orientation, skin-color, and political affiliations by using FB likes as an open-source psychological questionnaire based on an OCEAN scaling of personality traits that rank the positive-sounding values of Openness, Conscientiousness, Aggreeableness, and Neuroticism, all the better "to understand [their] unique personality type" in order better to define their decision-making process–each letter can be clicked to reveal a face registering individual emotions on their website, in ways that creepily echo emoticons as tools to achieve "better audience targeting" by "better audience modeling" through 5,000 data points per individual.
Through such data profiles and the pseudo-scientific claims of "audience insight" or "targeting", Trump was helped to orchestrate emotions to construct a sense of belonging.
For despite his lack of political qualifications, if in part because of it, Trump represents the victory of the unqualified–"the people"–and an illustration that someone outside of a political system can assert their importance in government, and to discredit the political system itself. While Trump's campaign had not been data-heavy, the use by Democratic strategists of big data analysts from BlueLabs had perhaps encouraged the Trump campaign to turn to Cambridge Analytica, whose boasts of a huge ROI for political campaigns would be wildly boosted by the June success of "Leave" in the Brexit vote. The orchestration of emotions most familiar from the production values of Reality TV have little precedent in politics, but was honed against those assumed to be part of a political class and designed to refute any notion of scientific expertise.
The particular targeting of emotions of dislike, fear, and resentment increased in the Trump campaign from mid-August 2016, about a month after the marquee event of the Democratic convention celebrated diversity, with the entrance of Stephen K. Bannon, serial wife-abuser of Breitbart fame, and he who invoked the "church militant" to explain the need to bind together church and state in fighting for the beliefs of the West as campaign chief of the Trump campaign, united a deep fear of refugees, terrorism, and "Radical Islam." The accentuation of such a call to militancy was tied to an accentuation of misogyny in the Trump campaign, as Bannon joined Trump's new campaign manager pollster Kellyanne Conway,to play to the lowest common denominator of voters through their economic and social fears, in ways that particularly distorted the campaign that benefited Trump and tilted to the unique brand of misogyny. In ways that shifted the logic of the campaign for U.S. President after both conventions had concluded, the expansion of Team Trump helped direct a model of behavioral sciences–already used by NATO in Eastern and Central Europe as propaganda against the dis-information released by the Russian government–as a rallying cry uniting many ranges of hatred–the "deplorables" Hillary Clinton famously and perhaps fatally invoked–within the highly charged emotional language of Trump's campaign.
Many refused to label Trump as recognizably fascist in his political thought, despite his outright xenophobia, manipulation of fear, and cultivation of a rhetoric of crisis, refusing to recognize the roots of his strong authoritarian characteristics by a name that has long been identified with utmost evil, in an attempt to explain Trump as something else. Most notably, historian Robert O. Paxton allowed that Trump only openly took a selective rehabilitation of the anti-modern fascist movements, whose strongly authoritarian character offered "echoes of fascism," rehabilitating the sanctioning of social violence, suspension of rights, and dehumanization from fascist movements in his assertion of openly extra-judicial rights he asserts as a leader. Yet in its open aggression motivated by a the violence of urgency–and in its turning in from the increasingly complex world that Obama attempted to navigate, and rejection of globalism, as in its rejection of civility and disdain for women, Trumpism closely rehabilitates fascism in its doctrine of prerogatives of the protection of the state that transcend constitutional law, or the subordination of constitutional law to Staatsrecht. Whereas fascism arose in response to international communism, Trumpism seems an open response to globalism of the twenty-first century.
While not a direct descendent of fascism, Trump has defined himself as a man of action–together with Bannon–in his proliferation of executive orders as a form of decisions, creating the relation of individual to state in his own oratory and the security of America that he claimed to guarantee. The championing over urgency and privileging of emotions and accusations over issues–a hallmark of fascist politics–serves to fabricate public consensus, cast in Trump's tacitly gendered assertion "America needs a CEO," as if to call into question the existence of a historical authority in the state. While Paxton rightly lamented increased usage of "fascist" as an accusatory epithet, able to be applied interchangeably to the intolerant authority of the Tea Party, the intolerance of the Islamic State, or Donald Trump, but failing to discriminate its actual target, Trump's near-consent courting of the limits of Freedom Speech led him to launch attacks that test the limits of Free Speech and First Amendment, shocking many neighboring countries,– "I'm so tired of this politically correct crap"–labelling political correctness as "the big problem in this country" to which he claims his own authority will create a long-awaited corrective.
His campaign, notwithstanding serial unrepentant falsehoods, his campaign promised to rectify confusion by the ability to Make America Great Again, invoking an idealized notion of country to which he invited all to rally behind and stigmatizing the most vulnerable scapegoats–the undocumented; the refugee; the poor–as targets of collective anger, albeit without racialized theorization of a subordinate status or staking openly ethnic claims. Trump sewed a steep set of divisions in the nation that were concentrated in non-urban areas in "swing states," but which corresponded to the emotional aesthetics of and a deep feeling of abandonment–a deeply declining distrust of government across the nation not adequately mapped a full year before the election, far deeper among Republicans than Democrats but at record low–but supported by a broadly declining belief in government fairness, across "red" and "blue" states.
In many ways, the vote was the victory of a performative model and the emotional satisfaction that that model of performance offered. Trump's victory made sense to those who bought the promise of those who believed that America Needed To Be Made Great Again–and who entertained the importance of time-travel to do so, and entertained a delusion of going backwards in time. For Trump appealed precisely to those areas and regions that entertained return to a past, conceived of often as a rebirth of a lost economy, peacefulness, and prosperity, but concealing an era of small government, and proposing the myth that there was indeed a chance of returning to a bygone of the imagination: many saw a rejection of globalism and of multiculturalism or of a disturbance of a past gender politics, and they saw it as best embodied in someone himself moored in an earlier, whiter era,–and a civil society in which charges of Trump's gender could not be made to stick. Trump's performative model seemingly surpassed logical contradictions inherent in his words or person, making it all the more difficult to comprehend, even as we have repeatedly turned to maps to do so–even as we were frustrated by them: Trump's wealth papered over the huge contradictions of someone whose wealth was apparent, as he performed the role os a man of the people; his age was apparent, even if his improbably marriage to a younger woman could conjure an image of apparent potency; his lack of political convictions was concealed in a patriotism that few saw the need to question; his lack of political expertise affirmed the lack of relevance of expertise to getting the job done, as it only confirmed a belief in the failures failures of a political class and distrust of government already at historic lows across the country.
Filed under 2016 Presidential election, 2016 US Presidential Election, data visualization, Donald Trump, Reality TV
Tagged as alt Right, America First, Authoritarianism, fascism, misogyny, neoliberalism, politics, Reality TV, Red States vs. Blue States, Reform Party, Republican party, scapegoating, sexism, social meida, TrumpLand
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We read more maps than ever before, and rely on maps to process and embody information that seems increasingly intangible by nature. But we define coherence in maps all too readily, without the skepticism that might be offered by an ethics of reading maps that we all to readily consult and devour. Paradoxically, the map, which long established a centering means to understand geographical information, has become regarded uncritically. As we rely on maps to organize our changing relation to space, do we need to be more conscious of how they preset information? While it is meant to be entertaining, this blog examines the construction of map as an argument, and proposition, to explore what the ethics of mapping might be. It's a labor of love; any support readers can offer is appreciated!
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Misfit Mommy Memoir
Join my offbeat journey as I find my voice, which is often political and occasionally unique.
aNtiDoTe Zine
A tale of blind doctors and good illnesses
Disability Remix Blog
Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability
lovebooky
Books and Love