Bennie Thompson - The January 6th Report: The Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol

Foreword copyright 2023 by Darren Beattie

The documents in this book have been released by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol and no copyright is claimed.

The text in this edition corresponds to the original report released by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol at approximately 9:56 p.m. on Thursday, December 22, 2022. Any subsequent updates to the publicly available report made by the Committee are not reflected in this edition.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Brian Peterson

ISBN: 978-1-5107-7508-4

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-7517-6

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

FOREWORD TO THE JANUARY 6TH REPORT

BY DR. DARREN J. BEATTIE

January 6 is a date that will live in controversy. To many top Democrats, much of the legacy media, and even some establishment Republicans that darkest of days warrants a spot in the pantheon of great American tragediesright alongside Pearl Harbor and September 11. Vice President Kamala Harris likened the so-called assault on democracy on January 6 to both of those attacks. Not to be outdone, President Biden described the January 6 insurrection as the worst attack on Democracy since the Civil War. Former president George W. Bush commemorated the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 with a subtle comparison to January 6a striking comparison also entertained by fellow Republican war hawks Liz Cheney and Lindsey Graham.

Much of Trumps base, meanwhile, embraces a radically different interpretation of the events of January 6. Though Congressman Andrew Clyde indelicately downplayed the January 6 rioters intrusion into the Capitol as a normal tourist visit, he nonetheless reflected the thinking of many Trump supporters in his view that there were some rioters, and some who committed acts of vandalism... but to call it an insurrection is a bold-faced lie. Many share the view that among the modest percentage of rally-goers who committed violence or vandalism, many were not Trump supporters at all, and indeed may have been Antifa sympathizers. Still others, including the author of this foreword, advance the highly disturbing thesis that the federal government may have had a hand in allowing the riot to happen, and even in some cases may have actively instigated it.

These radically different interpretations of the events of January 6 reflect the extreme political polarization that helped to condition those events in the first place. And while there is surely hyperbole on both sides, the notion that the events of January 6 amount to terrorism, much less terrorism of a variety comparable to September 11, is not only untenable, but also absurd and dangerous.

September 11 was the deadliest terrorist attack in history, claiming the lives of nearly three thousand victims and resulting in insurance losses of approximately $40 billion. This, of course, does not include the impact on the stock market, airline industry, or the immeasurable blood and treasure spent on the ensuing Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. The alleged insurrection of January 6, by contrast, directly resulted in four deaths, all of whom were Trump supporters, including the unarmed Ashli Babbitt, who was fatally shot in the neck by a Capitol Police officer. According to a March 2021 estimate, the rioters who stormed the Capitol inflicted a grand total of $1.5 million in property damagea fraction of the $1 billion damage caused by politically charged riots in the aftermath of George Floyds death, much less September 11.

There is one crucial sense, however, in which the otherwise offensively stupid comparison between September 11 and January 6 is devastatingly appropriate. The War on Terror that President George W. Bush launched in response to the 9/11 attacks didnt simply involve wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it involved an unprecedented enlargement and reconfiguration of Americas national security apparatus. The Patriot Act, the NSAs domestic surveillance campaign, and the creation of the mammoth Department of Homeland Security mark just a few highlights of the muscular post-9/11 national security state. Just as we associate 9/11 with the War on Terror, and specifically the war on Radical Islamic Terror, so might we associate January 6 with the Domestic War on Terrorthat is, the governments repurposing of the national security state domestically in order to silence, suppress, and crush the alleged national security threats emerging from the political right. This Domestic War on Terror kicked into high gear in the aftermath of Donald Trumps presidential victory in 2016. For better or worse, the national security state perceived not only Donald Trump, but the Trump phenomenon (the energies surrounding the emergence of Trump as a political force) as an existential threat and acted accordingly.

In early September 2021, Politico reported on a Department of Homeland Security memo identifying white supremacy as the number one terror threat America facesahead of not only the left-wing groups responsible for an extended summer of fire and violence while protesting the death of George Floyd (DHS did not even name Antifa as a threat), but also ahead of foreign terrorist groups. President Bidens attorney general Merrick Garland echoed FBI Director Christopher Wray in his assessment that racially motivated extremism of the especially white variety presents the premier threat to democracy. President Biden himself took the occasion of his State of the Union speech to echo the alleged consensus of intelligence agencies that the most lethal threat to the homeland today is white supremacist terrorism.

In another speech, Biden was quick to assert that the January 6 deadly insurrection was about white supremacy. One or two out of the tens of thousands of people who attended the January 6 rally carried a Confederate flag. A Capitol Police officer alleged that rioters repeatedly called him the n-word after he revealed that he voted for Biden. In the mountains of video of January 6, no evidence has emerged that would support that officers claims, and we can be pretty sure if there were such evidence the media would be happy to play it nonstop to add additional scandal to the so-called insurrection. Even the Proud Boys militia group, described in countless media headlines as white supremacist, was run by an Afro-Cuban during January 6.

Ultimately, the lack of evidence of genuine white supremacy in relation to January 6 is immaterial. When Biden suggests that January 6 was motivated by white supremacy, he means white supremacy in the broad sense, in which partisan detractors and much of the media refer to anything adjacent to Donald Trump as white supremacist. This is the same sense in which Hillary Clinton described January 6 as a tragically predictable result of white supremacist grievances aired by Donald Trump, and referred to the phrase Make America Great Again as a slogan favored by white nationalists. It is in the context of this broader, politically weaponized conception of white supremacy that we can see how ominous it really is that major national security bureaucracies now target white supremacy as the number one security threat. The Domestic War on Terror then starts to look dangerously distant from a situation in which the nations national security apparatus exists to protect Americans from foreign threats, and more like a situation in which the national security apparatus exists to suppress, demonize, and destroy one political faction of the nation on behalf of its rival.