Narrative Warfare and the Dangers of Rewriting January 6th

When facts don’t matter, narratives become weapons and democracy hangs in the balance

Photographer Nate Gowdy, from his book Insurrection

The most evil person I’ve ever met IRL is Radovan Karadžić. I (briefly) interned on his legal defense team to fulfill a requirement for my LLM in international criminal law at The Hague. In 2016, Karadžić was found guilty of crimes against humanity. The one thing I have always remembered about that time was the legal strategy he concocted in his defense (because he represented himself). It wasn’t necessarily aimed at disputing the legal charges themselves, it was about re-asserting his narrative of what happened.

His defense hinged on claims that he was caught in a vast conspiracy against him. And that his people were freedom fighters.

He failed. History, as they say, is written by the victors.

But what happens when the victors ARE the the people re-writing history?

While judicial systems exist for the purposes of punishments and deterrence, they are also critical for establishing the narratives we all use and the way we all talk about them going forward. I say this all the time here, stories matter, stories shape our politics. What constitutes a crime? What actions violate social norms? These are a way for us to negotiate our shared values through structures and institutions.

Over the past four years we have seen a battle by Trump and conservative influencers to change the prevailing narrative about what happened on January 6th, 2021.

Immediately after the attack on the U.S. Capitol there was widespread condemnation from both sides of the aisle.

At the time Mitch McConnell declared Trump “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”

But Trump and his supporters kept pushing a different narrative.

Soon after the attempted coup conservatives were already working spin. Republican Representative Paul Gosar, former Representative Matt Gaetz and Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham all said it looked like the attack could have been Antifa provocation. MAGA influencers repeated this idea 400,000 times in the 24 hours after the attack according to M.I.T. Technology Review.

The theories have changed over the years. Tucker Carlson has suggested it was a false-flag operation orchestrated by the FBI. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has said it was the deep state. The people who had attacked the capitol, people whom the justice system had deemed criminals, were rebranded “patriots” by influencers wearing 1776 bling. They’ve been treated like celebrities.

The ‘QAnon Shmon’ pictured with the dude who goes viral for reading tweets while he eats ‘DateRightStuff’ and the hot take influencer NonLibTake

The right pushed two concurrent messages, that the ‘bad things’ were done by democrats, and that the conservatives who were present were freedom fighters. They even went and produced a song in celebration of these “patriots.”

In March, 2023 Trump joined with 20 men charged with attacking the capitol who called themselves the “J6 Prison Choir” on a song called “Justice for All.” Kash Patel, now Trump’s nominee to lead the FBI, helped produce the song in which Trump recites the pledge of allegiance while the men sing the national anthem. Trump played this at rallies while he ran for President.

Over the past four years we have seen a stunning shift in how America remembers the January 6th attacks on our nation’s Capitol, attacks that tried to undermine the entire democratic system, an attempted coup. And this rewriting is at least partially responsible for Trump’s re-election. As the NYT said, “Myriad factors explain his stunning resurrection, but not least of them is how effectively he and his loyalists have laundered the history of Jan. 6, turning a political nightmare into a political asset.”

Trump and his allies have excused, explained and sought to transfer blame. While their narrative goes against any semblance of fact, it aligns with the victim mentality shared by MAGA followers. They love the narrative that claims the mainstream media is the enemy here and that fake news has been brainwashing Americans.

Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s spokeswoman said that “the mainstream media still refuses to report the truth about what happened that day.” All of it, in Trump’s world, can be explained as a witch hunt. The ultimate get out of jail free card.

realmarjoriegreene

A post shared by @realmarjoriegreene

Talking about jail … one of the major questions about Donald Trump’s presidency is whether he will pardon the Jan 6 rioters (he has called them “political prisoners” and “patriots”). He’s promised that he will do it within his first hour in office. More than half of the nearly 1,600 Jan 6 defendants have pleaded guilty, and 200 have been convicted after trial, with sentences ranging from a few days in jail for misdemeanor trespassing to 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy.

Democrats have, of course, sought to build their own narrative. President Biden published an op-ed in The Washington Post yeseterday, arguing “An unrelenting effort has been underway to rewrite — even erase — the history of that day.” The second impeachment trial was a fully-produced event. It wasn’t necessarily intended to have a direct impact since Trump was already ending his presidency, rather it was orchestrated to send a message to the people of America - to build the narrative of the big lie in the public conscience. Attorney General Merrick Garland and Special Counsel Jack Smith moved to slowly, running out of time in their effort to prosecute Trump.

But nothing the Justice Department could do was as sexy and shareable as how the right has rebranded that day. The Washington Post is not read by people who share memes online. The right has made Jan. 6th a flashpoint and a call to arms for their social media army. They canonized it in song!!!! They made the men and women who attacked our Capitol and our democracy into heroes instead of criminals. And it has been largely effective.

I took a stroll over to Truth Social this morning, Trump’s conservative social media platform. I don’t normally spend a lot of time there, but I do think it is important to see the kinds of propaganda that is perpetuated on the platform. Here are some of the first things I saw describing Jan. 6th this morning.

Social media has changed so much about how narratives are sown and grow. We cannot rely on the old ways of narrative building, to think that a court case can fight hundreds of thousands of memes.

Jan. 6 was an attack on Democracy, a physical attack on a government building that put our elected lawmakers in danger. As we move into the second Trump Administration, we will need to watch closely how he builds the story of his power and his politics. Because narrative is more than just the stories we tell.