What I Learned Retracing the Footsteps of the Capitol Rioters
How should we memorialize January 6? Consider the walking tour. Standing on the Ellipse, between the White House and the Washington Monument, I heard President Donald Trump deliver his fiery address. Youre never going to take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong, he said to the crowd, claiming that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him. I could see men climbing the trees around the park, dressed in fatigues with Glocks at their side, as I heard security announcements prohibiting backpacks, chairs, and flagpoles play over the loudspeakers. When Rudy Giuliani took the podium, I heard him say, Lets have trial by combat, and the crowd roared. I heard people chant USA! USA! as I marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the Department of Justice. I even heard Jacob Chansley, now infamously known as the QAnon Shaman, roar, FREEDOM! as we approached the steps of the Capitol. I wasnt at the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. I was at the January Sixth Experience, a $40, three-hour Airbnb experience that promised to deliver the definitive walking tour of the conspiracy and national security event of our lifetimes. See the sights of Pennsylvania Avenue, from the White House to the Capitol, the hosts advertised, as you trace the steps of the mob that attacked Congress. Peter Wehner: The GOP is a battering ram against truth Thats how I found myself, along with four fellow tour-goers sporting sensible walking shoes with water bottles in hand, following in the footsteps of the insurrectionists on a cloudy day last month. As our guide, Kevin W. Smith, recounted the lead-up to and events of January 6, he played the speeches and chants from a small Bluetooth speaker strapped to the side of his backpack, and showed us photos of those armed men in the trees and other insurrectionists from a binder packed with screenshots of tweets, maps, and more images from the day. As we avoided sidelong glances from other tourists, equal parts intrigued and disturbed by this small group broadcasting Trump-rally speeches on its walk to the Capitol, I thought: Perhaps history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as walking tour. Depending on whom you ask, January 6 was any number of things: an existential threat to our democracy. A slapstick fascist comedy worthy of mockery, not remembrance. Trump called it a beautiful day. In March, when Tucker Carlson still had his Fox News show, he aired selective footage of the riot, which he had exclusively received from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, aiming to warp perceptions of the event. These were not insurrectionists. They were sightseers, Carlson said . To some conspiracy theorists, the insurrection didnt happen at all. The January 6 participants have also attempted to revise history. I am a political prisoner, Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, said at his sentencing hearing in May, where he received 18 years in prison for seditious-conspiracy charges related to his role in the insurrection. Pointing out that Rhodes had prepared to take up arms and foment revolution, Judge Amit P. Mehta replied: Youre not a political prisoner, Mr. Rhodes. Youre here because of your actions. John Strand, who was caught on video pushing past a fallen police officer to enter the Capitol building on January 6 and later convicted on five criminal counts, declared , I did nothing wrong. The appropriation and misappropriation of January 6 get at a deeper question: How should we remember and memorialize that day? Despite extensive media coverage, prime-time congressional hearings and an accompanying 800-page report, and more than 1,000 people criminally charged , nearly two and a half years later, we have no consensus about how to tell the story of January 6 and its aftermath. As Robert Costa, CBS Newss lead election correspondent, said recently, January 6 hasnt settled into the national consciousness as a significant event. Smith, a 40-year-old Republican until I couldnt be anymore, believes that the January Sixth Experience is part of the answer. Smiths background as a former U.S. intelligence analyst informs the tours treatment of the insurrection as a national-security event, which he likens to the British burning of the Capitol in 1814. Though he left government for the private sector in 2019, Smith watched the events of January 6 unfold from a sensitive compartmented information facility basically Pentagon jargon for a secure roomin Northern Virginia surrounded by intelligence-community colleagues. Though it wasnt as much a surprise to me because I had seen it bubbling up for weeks, none of us could really believe what we were witnessing, Smith told me. Adam Serwer: The January 6 deniers are going to lose Smith delivers the tour with the quiet authority of a national-park ranger. Hes distilled the immense amount of information, social-media posts, and other noise from that day into digestible chunks and entertaining anecdotes. Since he began the tours on January 7 of this year, just after the insurrections two-year anniversary, Smith has conducted five of them. He says the cost of admission will go toward technological improvements (large-screen tablets to play videos, a louder speaker) and eventually toward hiring an additional guide or two. On official tours of the Capitol, guides can mention January 6 only if asked , a policy that in many ways reflects a country at odds with itself, unable to agree on fact and truth and reluctant to engage on the history of a day that threatened democracy, Joe Heim wrote in The Washington Post earlier this year. This frustrated Smith. How are you just gonna not talk about this thing? Smith asked me. It is part of our history; it is part of this building. We should talk about it, instead of just pretending it didnt happen or bickering over it. Similar frustrations led the producers and writers of The Daily Show With Trevor Noah to develop a tour of their own. It feels like theres an active effort made by each party to either forget it, bury it, or downplay it, Jocelyn Conn, a producer of the show, told me. The government cant even agree on whether we should memorialize it, because they cant agree on the facts right now. So last summer, they launched In the Footsteps of the Freedomsurrection, a self-guided audio tour that offers a brand-new way to relive the magic of the insurrection. The Daily Show team hopes that these installations and stunts, much like its Trump Twitter presidential library and mock January 6 monuments , will keep the true story of the riot from getting lost. The humorous treatment draws out the absurdity of the day. Hearing along The Daily Show tour that Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri sold mugs with an image of himself cheering on the rioters literally stopped me in my tracks, prompting me to ask myself, Did that really happen? ( It did .) Were just like, Heres what happened, and this is why its funny. And if you cant laugh at things, youre gonna cry or feel outraged, Jen Flanz, the programs showrunner, told me. Walking tours seem especially well suited to offer clarity. Michael Epstein, an expert in place-based storytelling and the founder of Walking Cinema , says that certain issues, such as climate change and gentrification, are difficult to continually engage with because they can seem hopeless. But presenting the story in an entertaining and dynamic way can unlock something. Walking tours can put your mind in a world like a good novel, Epstein told me. According to Conn, To see it for yourself is a whole different way of experiencing it, than to see the coverage on television. Ive written about January 6 for the website Lawfare, so I wasnt sure how much Id get out of a tour, but I was engaged in a new way by hearing the ambient sounds of the crowd, and seeing the sturdy wrought-iron light pole at the Capitol that rioters had felled. Listening to a Kimberly Guilfoyle speech in public felt like a small price to pay for authenticity. Yet walking tours have their obvious limits in the culture wars. When I first reached out to Smith after stumbling on the January Sixth Experience, its name made me think the tour was more of an insurrection reenactment for the MAGA set than a deeply researched anti-disinformation project. Maybe there are people seeking the MAGA experience, but they havent ended up on Smiths tour just yet. Everybody there was on the same page, he said. It sometimes seemed like Smith was preaching to the choir; many of his more unsavory anecdotes from January 6 elicited disapproving head shakes and tsk-tsk s. Amelia, an active-duty Air Force service member who first heard about January 6 from her mother while stationed in South Korea, told me that she was attending the tour for a second time after troubling conversations with her more right-wing colleagues. All of us here are obviously of the same mind, she said, and no one on the tour disagreed. (She asked that her last name not be used.) Conor Friedersdorf: The contested significance of January 6 Another woman, Scarlett Bunting, who was previewing the tour for her womens social club, the Belles, worried that some of the members who support Trump would find the tour offensive. She wondered aloud if Smith could tailor the content. Smith welcomes doubters, but his aim isnt necessarily to change anyones mind. I dont approach this as a Democrat trying to tear apart a narrative, he told us on the tour, describing his forensic approach. I barely even said the word Republican today, right? It doesnt matter to me. There was a perpetrator, and this is a crime scene. The Daily Show had a similar sense of mission. Were not out there trying to convert anyone to think anything, Flanz said. Her colleague, a coexecutive producer named Ramin Hedayati, agreed: We just wanted to remind people that this was a bad thing that happened. And we should not forget that. Smith told me he sees a promise of transformation in presenting people with these facts. He imagines people going on his tour and then returning to their living rooms and front porches and Facebook groups. Its about making January 6 feel more real to you as a person who cares about the country, he said. Giving you an emotional (and also factual) base for engaging with people who trust you and could be influenced by your sincere views. Along the tour, we walked past the National Archives, just as the insurrectionists did. Two 65-ton statues flank the entrance: A wizened old man sits with a closed book on his lap, Study the Past etched into the plinth beneath him; across from him, a young woman sits with an open book, most of its pages still blank, and under her the Shakespeare quote What is Past is Prologue. Smith likes this stop of the tour best. My personal mission, if there is one, is embodied by those two statues, he told me. We have to be mindful of what happened on January 6, 2021; what that tells us about where we are as a society; and what it could mean for our future.