An Insurrectionist Slush Fund And A Win For The Unreality of January 6

The American right’s version of the American right’s January 6 insurrection cannot be made real in the end, or there will be other insurrections, maybe bloodier, deadlier ones, until there is no more reason to stage an insurrection, with power safely secured, cordoned off from those the American right sees as illegitimate leaders of the American government – namely, anyone who is not them. 

The president on Monday dropped his fake (bad-faith) lawsuit against the IRS and had his personal employees at the Justice Department "settle" the suit for $1.776 billion, an amount designed to troll those who oppose the most corrupt act in American history and a winking nod to those who support the creation of a veritable slush fund for January 6 insurrectionists (media outlets rounding up to $1.8 billion are missing the point entirely). The small business owners who stormed the Capitol, you see, were mere victims of the "weaponization" of the DOJ, every right-wing accusation being a confession.

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Now they'll be rewarded monetarily for their loyalty to Trump. Many of the insurrections are going to need that cash to pay defense attorneys representing them in sex crime trials. At least one of the insurrectionists accused of sex crimes promised his victims to pay them with Trump money if they would keep quiet (data collected on the insurrectionists showed 82 percent were men, 91 percent were white, and the most common job among insurrectionists was business owner).

None of this, as I wrote last year, would have been possible if right-wing media had not immediately shoehorned an alternative narrative into mainstream coverage of the violent 2021 attempt to overturn a free and fair election and end representative democracy in the United States. The January 6 unreality creation machine was churning furiously within days of the attack on the Capitol, which originally drew across-the-board condemnation before an alternative sequence of events was created as a means for excusing and even validating the insurrectionists' murderous siege of the Capitol.

Insurrection Or Non-Event? It’s Up To You.

The history of January 6 cannot be muddled. We saw what happened and we won’t be gaslighted.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

The insurrection we saw with our own eyes was slowly turned into One Big Misunderstanding. The American consumer of news could choose their own adventure: The people who tried to overthrow the 2020 election were bad apples who had ignored the desperate pleas of peace from their god-king; they were simply on an ordinary walking tour of the Capitol; rogue FBI agents with left-wing politics staged the whole bloody thing; or maybe none of the shocking violence on your TV screen was real. Who's to say? Not everyone at the scene was smashing cops in the head with flagpoles and fire extinguishers, after all.

Bothsidesism is so easily weaponized in this way. Within a couple weeks of January 6, there was a Democratic version of the insurrection (real) and a Republican version (unreal). Jammed into the social media algorithms controlled by Trump allies, these versions of January 6 were treated by most big media outlets as equal and opposite, the way Democratic Party and GOP tax policies might be treated. For a while the Democratic (real) version was the nation's reality, and the small business owners who tried and failed to overthrow the government were prosecuted and thrown into prison. Their lives were rightfully ruined. Justice was delivered in a piecemeal way until, of course, the right's version of the insurrection (unreal) pushed its way into the country's consciousness.

Without that relentless propaganda campaign in the months after January 6, Donald Trump would not be president today. Trump and his entire inner circle would have been arrested within hours of Biden's swearing in if the Biden administration had done the right thing, if they had been guided by something besides fear of Republican anger. Punishing the coup doers had to be Priority One. None of them should have ever enjoyed another day of freedom. I would think this would go without saying, but tragically, it did not. Pro-democracy leaders in South Korea and Brazil, which has had democracy for about fifteen minutes, seem to understand what to do with coup doers.

I knew back in June 2022 that elected Democrats – especially the olds – could not grasp the power of the right wing's unreality creation, and how it had so easily turned an attack on American democracy into a two-sided issue. Democrats moved too slowly in their response to the insurrection. They operated as if it were the 90s, or even the early 2000s, before social media fragmented reality into a million pieces, each curated to fit our personal worldview, however warped.

Because it's always normal and not at all off-putting when a blogger quotes himself, here's what I wrote about the January 6 commission in 2022:

Bad-faith arguments were the centerpiece of the effort to subvert the 2020 election and install Trump for a second term, similarly to how Supreme Court conservatives installed George W. Bush as president in 2000. Republicans argued Vice President Mike Pence had to ignore the 2020 election results and instead certify a fake slate of electors because the election had been stolen. They created a reason to steal the election so they could steal the election. It's as simple as it is politically genius. And after all that bad faith, all those cascading lies piling on top of each other one at a time, we have a good-faith group of lawmakers trying to make it right and drain the fascism out of the Republican Party. It's a doomed mission – one that's already been lost. ... The Democrats' frail, failed, foolhardy leadership cannot comprehend our political moment. They either do not believe or do not understand that we have fallen into the abyss of authoritarianism, and largely got lucky in defeating it during what was likely a coup practice run in late 2020 and early 2021. 

And so it was a doomed mission. The made-for-TV case against the insurrectionists fell flat because it depended on two nonexistent things: Good faith from all sides and one agreed-upon reality of what happened on January 6, 2021. This week's creation of an insurrectionist slush fund is a win – a big win – for the nightmare unreality that has become so widely accepted as the Actual Events of that shameful fucking day.

It makes sense in the most perverse way that Trump would sue his own IRS to steal nearly $2 billion to hand out to those who tried to maim and kill members of Congress for him. For Trump – a loveless man like his father who has never received love and therefore cannot love – loyalty is the only true expression of love. A willingness to die, for him, is the ultimate display of love. It's why Trump called January 6, 2021 a "day of love."

Because for him, it was. Never before had so many people expressed their undying love for Fred Trump's self-hating failson the way the insurrectionists did on that grey winter day. Some of them died because their hearts couldn't take the stress of walking up the Capitol's steps. Many of them sustained major injuries. And most of them went broke trying to defend their actions against a DOJ operating in actual reality and going after enemies of the republic.

As molar-grindingly mad as this makes me (and you), this is not the Final Victory for the right's January 6 unreality. It can't be, because if it is, American democracy is fucked in ways that can hardly be imagined today. In whatever comes after this regime, the reality of January 6 has to be restored and the U.S. government has to act on that reality the way it did before Trump was installed for a second term.

First thing's first: Every single person involved in this corrupt $1.776 billion settlement needs to go to prison. They participated in a criminal scheme and they need to be punished. That's just the way it is. I am a prison abolitionist with exceptions. Every penny distributed from this slush fund must (one day) be taken back by the federal government, and anyone who can't pay back the funds should join the IRS and DOJ officials – you guessed it – behind bars. There has to be severe consequences for everyone involved in this whole sordid affair.

I have to believe that the right's January 6 unreality is not permanent. Let me cope.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.