Insurgent Movement, Government Complicity, or Both?

By Xloi and B.Sandor

This article by two Three Way Fight comrades highlights the interplay between insurgent far rightists and forces within the state itself in the Capitol takeover.

We wrote this after discussing last week’s events on January 6 and watching this video (which has since been removed) from a protester who goes by "Insurgence USA." Our sense is that he is right wing but poses as also being pro BLM. His footage captured the front of the line throughout the storming of the Capitol and a close up of the woman being shot by Capitol Police. It was gruesome, but provided an account of the events first hand.

We cannot assume that the movement that stormed the Capitol on January 6th was at large anti-state or solely an insurgent movement from below. While elements of the movement were insurgent, this movement was egged on by Trump and other key people in his administration and in Congress. What this means is that instead of just understanding this as a right-wing assault on “democracy,” it needs to be understood as both internal to our so-called democracy while simultaneously having elements that are insurgent and anti-state. A main contingency of this movement to Stop the Steal would have gone home if the announcement was made that Trump would stay in office. Therefore, the insurgent components and government complicity at play here should be understood and confronted as such.

We saw political violence last Wednesday. We saw Confederate flags and people flaunting Nazi tattoos in the Capitol. We saw armed masses (mostly men) break through lines of police, albeit with blue lives matter flags. We know storming the Capitol was an organized and thought-out action, although they were probably as surprised as we were that it actually worked. In footage from the frontlines, you can hear protesters screaming, "criticism of the government isn’t enough, we need action," while running to storm the Capitol, and another exclaiming, "this is a revolution," once they break through a couple of police lines. Regardless, there was no cohesive strategy for what they would do once they actually entered the Capitol. If there was, you would have heard in the videos at least some discourse on the different thought out plans.

A man carrying a Confederate flag through the U.S. Capitol
Image by Saul Loeb / AFP/Getty Images

The mixed responses from the protesters to the police were notable, as Jarrod Shanahan discusses in his article, “The Big Takeover.” One protester shouted to a line of police, “Over the summer, we backed you when no one else did." Another screamed, "Now, no one likes you, Black people and white people." In other moments protesters try to win over the police, saying, "We have your back. We get it. We're on your side." There will continue to be major splits within the far right over alignment with the police, with many becoming politicized against the police because of what happened that day. It is also key to address the amount of ex-military and former police within the ranks of far-right militia, paramilitary, and street fighting gangs that were clearly present at the Capitol.

The next logical question is, why were there so few Capitol Police, given that the FBI and right-wing researchers around the country knew for months that protesters were planning on storming the Capitol that day? More details are coming out about the Capitol Police and the Trump administration’s possible complicity and lack of preparation. From Ibram X. Kendi to so many others, people are commenting on how little force was used relative to BLM protests and that if the Capitol was stormed by People of Color, there would have been an entirely different plan in place.

Police in military garb protecting the Lincoln Memorial from a
Black Lives Matter demonstration in June 2020. Image by @MarthaRaddatz

While the protesters transgressed police lines, some lines were as sparse as only 5-10 officers, leaving even middle school students commenting on the relative lack of protection of a federal building. But, very quickly, many used this argument as a justification and immediate demand for more military and police, forces that will ultimately target innocent people and the Left. Lawmakers are already using the events at the Capitol to introduce legislation to increase police presence at protests and adopt measures to further criminalize all dissent. What is this political amnesia that we have? Within a moment, the momentum and political consciousness gained after years of anti-police struggles that culminated in the mass movements against the murder of George Floyd seemingly went in reverse. We must still recognize our enemies in blue.

Narratives that bill Wednesday’s insurrection as a violent protest or insurrection, while failing to acknowledge the violence from police (against Black lives, but also against the right), reinforce the argument that the Left and State need to come together to defeat the far right, rather than pose a liberatory alternative to both.

We know cops take orders. Maybe they had been given orders to be lenient and use soft policing tactics. Until a Capitol Police officer shot and killed the woman protester, the Capitol Police attitude toward protesters looked mixed. Some looked intent on holding the line, others looked mortified and some seemed to back down seamlessly. More investigations will uncover why, for example, the Pentagon initially refused to back up the Capitol Police after requests from their chief for the military to step in. Previous investigations show that far right militia look to former national security advisers to the Trump administration for intelligence. There’s still a lot we don’t know. We will soon learn more about what was and wasn’t done and why.

We do know there was clear tactical leadership on the part of the movement to enter the Capitol and stop the counting of the votes on Wednesday, but not much beyond that. Some wanted to critique the powers that be, some wanted to stop a so-called stolen election, some wanted to restore the Confederacy, some wanted Pence’s head, and some wanted to smear shit on the walls. This lack of cohesion could tear the movement apart when there is no one person for them to unite behind. They are also already facing sharp repression with arrests as far away as Arizona. Few movements can withstand the kind of repression they are about to face, not to mention the likelihood that the movement is already widely infiltrated by state forces. Many new so-called movement leaders will eventually be exposed as undercover state operatives. Either way, under the banner of “Stop the Steal,” right wing forces will be claiming victory for years.

We are grappling with what the three way fight looks like in action in this moment. We think we should be developing a political pole that opposes insurgent and government-backed far right forces, while also reinforcing movements against the police like those that took off across the country over the summer. We need an antifascism that doesn’t ultimately back up the state on the one hand or ignore the right altogether in hopes that the state will simply smash the right on the other. While we might not yet have the capacity as a movement to really do both, it is imperative to understand that one without the other is fatal.