Let Them Eat Death
“Have the courage to do the right thing: fight!” said Kimberley Guilfoyle from her VIP, backstage tent with the Trump inner circle a few hours before the American extreme right stormed the Capitol, crashing through the few untrained, understaffed, mostly unarmed and completely unprepared police that were present. The videos of the Capitol Building police being attacked is obviously disturbing, though perhaps it’s less obvious why exactly it’s as disturbing as it is. There’s the immediate, superficial layer of violence that’s always difficult to watch. Peeling the layers back, however, we may first notice an unusual inversion in which the unarmed victims in these scenes are the police. That inversion raises a series of questions that reveal other layers that add to the distress of watching.
The Capitol Building is an American landmark, a global landmark. According to its website:
“The United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., is a symbol of the American people and their government, the meeting place of the nation’s legislature. The Capitol also houses an important collection of American art, and it is an architectural achievement in its own right. It is a working office building as well as a tourist attraction visited by millions every year.”
Just like with the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the choice of the target cannot be attributed to chance. The targeted building itself is a message. Importantly, especially since 9/11, you would expect it to be a highly secure location generally but definitely while in session, with the complete House of Representatives and Senate present to certify a Presidential election, including the Vice President and the Speaker of the House, the second and third people in line for the presidency. Somehow, however, on January 6, 2021, no additional security was present, nor was there any plan or preparation for an attack that had been largely commented online, in the open, for months. The obvious comparisons to the massive security deployed for the racial justice protests on June 2, 2020 only underscore that this lack of preparation can be nothing other than deliberate.
In other words, not preparing for security and safety was part of a plan, the second layer that makes the videos horrific. Presumably, considering the stakes and scale involved, this means multiple actors were convinced, pressured, bought, blackmailed, and God knows what else. But there was another part to this plan, involving the other protagonists in the video, the instigators, the leaders of the mob. As it will no doubt continue to come out, the most forceful among the rioters, the ones at the very front of the mob, face to face with unarmed police while encouraging everyone else to get more violent, were known neonazi and right wing extremist leaders. Their antics in no way demonstrates that these people are particularly brave. Watch the videos closely: they are at the front, face to face with the police, taunting them, threatening them, attacking them but the police are unarmed and the few that do have firearms have clearly been ordered to stand down. The nazis at the front of the mob are not brave, they were in on the plan. And the police officers they are attacking, despite the Republican Party’s public claims of support for Blue Lives, are disposable. Respect for the police is just one more false Trump Family and Republican Party talking point, further evidence that everything that the Trump Family claims to stand for is bullsh*t. We are now in the third layer that we can intuit but perhaps not fully articulate as we watch the mob in the videos: the hypocrisy and lies behind the plan.
American Nazis and extreme right-wing groups are not new and have been openly organizing well before the Trump presidency. But in the past four years, they have been emboldened. Nothing like a President in the White House to make neonazis feel comfortable tweeting, connecting through Facebook and selling their merchandise through Amazon, Ebay and Shopify. The heads of these companies, fully aware of what was happening, and in the case of Zuckerberg who has already faced criticism explicitly for allowing this sort of political violence to be organized on his platform elsewhere, did nothing to reign in the confederate nazis because it was simply too profitable to let them continue. Social Media companies deliberately use algorithms that encourage extremism. They have played a direct role in the general decadence of social discourse and have profited from facilitating the erosion of the social fabric. The fact that Trump’s personal accounts were shut down only after the insurrection speaks volumes. So as you read about that police officer beaten to death with a fire extinguisher, just think of all the false rumors, hatred and misinformation that had been pushed to the top of the attackers’ news feeds, the fourth layer.
But the fifth layer, the core, isn’t a strategy or an algorithm, it isn’t a group of people or a weapon, it’s a mindset. “Have the courage to do the right thing: fight!” says Guilfoyle in the now infamous video, shot by Don Jr. and posted to his Facebook page. If she had an open bottle of Krug in her hand while an orgy raged in the background I doubt the video would feel much more decadent than it does already, though Trump putting on a red boxing glove to get in the mood certainly adds a similar effect (yes, watch the video closely). But who is she talking to? Who is she encouraging to be courageous and fight? Surely not the police, since they are the cannon fodder. Not the neonazis who are in on the plan; they don’t need courage or encouragement, they’ve already been hired. No, the audience, the recipients of Guilfoyle’s generous encouragement are the people watching on Facebook and the people in the mob, following the neonazis. They would never be invited to the VIP tent, they are simply actors on a screen, the kind that Trump is fascinated by the most, the kind that move as instructed as he watches them from a safe distance, on a screen, in the VIP tent.
This layer is at the heart of what is so difficult to articulate but is so gut wrenchingly disturbing about watching those unarmed police officers being attacked. Guilfoyle dances and Don Jr. smiles knowing that in a short while things will get “wild”, just as his father had promised in his tweet. They all know that their plan, Trump’s Beer Hall Putsch is in motion and in just a few minutes, those unarmed police officers would be the victims of the hired nazi mercenaries whose job it is to disrupt the formal certification of the presidential election, creating a deadly and dramatic set up for the legislative part of the plan to deliver the Coup de grâce by the Republicans inside the Capitol. They know.
The videos of those police officers being attacked are so disturbing because we know, in a strange sort of beforehand hindsight, that they are expendable. That if they died, the planners wouldn’t care and that the tech billionaires that have profited from Trump being in the White House don’t care, just like the Republican legislators and senators don’t care. Because in the end, while they fill their red boxing gloves with champagne and make fools of themselves dancing on social media, while ripping society apart, they are winners, while the victims of Covid, police brutality, poverty, and their own manipulations and lies, are losers. The more the Ancien Régime changes, the more it stays the same.
