By
Matthew Rosenberg,
Jim Rutenberg and
Michael M. Grynbaum
Jan. 6, 2022
It was mere hours after a mob spurred on by the “stop the steal” lies of President Donald J. Trump had attacked the United States Capitol, and already new lies were taking hold in the nearby streets.
The police had pushed the few dozen remaining protesters off the Capitol grounds, but some continued to
hurl threats and obscenities at a line of officers in riot gear. “Traitors get the rope,” a man shouted. “Wait until we come back with rifles.”
Only yards away, though, others were spinning fictions about what they had just witnessed, even joined.
“They’re calling us violent Trump mobs,” bemoaned a woman shortly before 8 p.m.
“That’s because antifa came here dressed as Trump supporters and started all this,” added one of the men she was speaking with.
Another man chimed in to say that he had been inside the Capitol, and that it had been peaceful. “We didn’t do a thing,” he said. “We were there for the Constitution — to make sure democracy was followed.”
Soon, that instant rewriting of history coursed from the street to online chat rooms to social media and, in the case of the antifa conspiracy theory, to
Laura Ingraham’s prime-time program on Fox News.
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Over the last year, that same self-nourishing loop — connecting the extremely online Trumpian grass roots to close Trump allies with national soapboxes and finally to the former president himself, plotting his comeback from Palm Beach exile — has circulated a furious array of rumor, innuendo, partial facts and
outright lies to fill the right-wing media with alternative narratives of the first interruption in the peaceful transfer of power in American history.
By Thursday’s anniversary of the violence that has been connected to
at least seven deaths and left some 150 police officers injured, it was an article of faith among vast swaths of conservative Americans that the riot was just “one day in January,” in the words of former Vice President Mike Pence, whose life was directly threatened. For the half of Republicans who now believe the rioters were at the Capitol to “protect democracy,” according to the latest
ABC News/Ipsos poll, any talk of Jan. 6 as a singularly violent episode in American democracy would likely be taken as liberal, mainstream-media claptrap.
“Jan. 6 barely rates as a footnote,” Tucker Carlson told his Fox News viewers Thursday night. “Really not a lot happened that day if you think about it.” He called the event “just a riot — maybe just barely.”
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Credit...Christopher Lee
The reimagining of Jan. 6 has not so much evolved as it has splintered into rival, but often complementary, false narratives with a common goal — to shift blame away from Mr. Trump, his supporters and a Republican Party maneuvering to win back control of government. The riot was a “false flag” operation by antifa, the loose left-wing collective; the F.B.I. planted agents to stir up the crowd; the protesters were mere “tourists” wrongfully accused by a Democratic-led Justice Department and vilified by a biased mainstream media; police officers recounting their injuries and trauma were “crisis actors.’”
Mr. Carlson has emerged as a leading proponent of Jan. 6 revisionism, most prominently with his three-part “Patriot Purge” series. Carried on the Fox Nation streaming service, it amplified a debunked “false flag” conspiracy theory that the F.B.I. had instigated the violence as a pretext to lock away peaceful but concerned Americans because of their political views, creating a class of patriot martyrs. On Thursday night, he aired excerpts from “Patriot Purge” on his prime-time show, spreading those conspiracy theories to one of the largest audiences on cable television.
Mr. Carlson’s relentless promotion of the series — and the ensuing silence from Fox News management — recently prompted two longtime conservative contributors at the network to quit in protest and contributed to the exit of Chris Wallace, the longtime news anchor. In fact, “Patriot Purge” was the apotheosis of a yearlong shift in the way Fox News stars refer to the Capitol attack. Though the network’s commentators allow that mob violence is wrong, they often pivot to asking why Black Lives Matter protests did not prompt similarly sharp criticism from Democrats.
Then there are
podcasts like that of Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser who faces contempt charges for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House committee investigating the riot. (In seeking his testimony, congressional investigators
cited Mr. Bannon’s interactions with Mr. Trump and other key players in the effort to dispute the election results as his podcast
generously featured false voter-fraud theories; Mr. Trump
pardoned Mr. Bannon, hours before leaving office, for unrelated fraud charges.) Even as Mr. Bannon acknowledges “things happened” on Jan. 6 that “did cross the line,” his
“War Room” podcast provides a popular stage for people promoting Jan. 6 conspiracy theories or portraying those arrested as political prisoners.
On Thursday, Mr. Bannon used his podcast to showcase what
he called “counterprogramming” to the somber ceremonies commemorating the day in Washington. His featured guests were the Republican Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida, who portrayed the events of Jan. 6 as “a fedsurrection not an insurrection,” now being used “against a patriotic, pro-America, God-fearing America First movement all over this great land.”
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Credit...Christopher Lee
The Case of Ray Epps
In a hallmark of the times, what many Americans are willing to believe about Jan. 6 — a day thoroughly documented in real-time by journalists, participants and cable TV, and reconstructed in the hundreds of cases being assembled by federal prosecutors — is determined by their politics, not by the facts. And amid a seemingly never-ending pandemic marked by confusing public-health messaging and government mandates, these fictional and conspiratorial accounts of the riot carry an obvious appeal, especially for Trump supporters alienated from mainstream institutions after his tumultuous presidency and election loss.
“When I talk to folks on my side of the aisle, they’ll have a litany saying, ‘They lied to us here and flip-flopped on this,’” said Sean Spicer, Mr. Trump’s former press secretary who now hosts a show on Newsmax. “There’s such a belief that the mainstream media and most of our major institutions are not looking out for people anymore.” He added, “So when someone throws out a conspiracy it’s, ‘Why not? That’s equally plausible.’”
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Adherents have built up characters to support their claims that antifa infiltrators or federal agents were the ones who whipped up the mob, in some instances doing so as events were unfolding in Washington. One is a man named Ray Epps, a Trump supporter who was captured on video the night of Jan. 5 urging his compatriots to “go into the Capitol” the next day.
Some in the crowd responded approvingly: “Let’s go!” rings out one reply.
“Peacefully,” Mr. Epps said, just before others began chanting “Fed, Fed, Fed!” at the man, who at age 60 stood out in the far-younger crowd.
Mr. Epps, who lives in Queen Creek, Ariz., where he owns Rocking R Farms and the Knotty Barn, a wedding and event venue, according to PolitiFact, appears in another video taken the next day. He is seen yelling to a crowd: “OK, folks, spread the word! As soon as the president is done speaking, we go to the Capitol. The Capitol is this direction.”
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Credit...Christopher Lee
Both moments went largely unnoticed until June 17, when a poster on the online message board 4chan
put up the video of Mr. Epps from Jan. 5, writing, “This Fed was caught on camera encouraging the crowd to raid the Capitol on the next day.”
The anonymous poster added, “Who is this man?”
Another person then identified him as Mr. Epps. Soon after, the video and Mr. Epps’s name were
posted in a Twitter thread, and a new conspiracy theory began its journey into the Republican mainstream.
Four months later, on Oct. 21, the video was being shown during a congressional hearing. There, Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, used it to question Attorney General Merrick B. Garland about whether federal agents had acted as agitators on Jan. 6.
Within days, stories about Mr. Epps began appearing on websites like Revolver News, which ran an article, “Meet Ray Epps: The Fed-Protected Provocateur Who Appears to Have Led the Very First 1/6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.” The Epps story gained further promotion on the far-right cable network One America News — portrayed by the correspondent Chanel Rion as evidence of “the F.B.I.’s possible involvement inciting an invasion of the Capitol” — and, far more widely, in Mr. Carlson’s “Patriot Purge.”
To date, no evidence has emerged linking Mr. Epps to the F.B.I. or any other government agency. In fact, his known connections are decidedly anti-government: In 2011,
Mr. Epps served as the president of the Arizona Oath Keepers, the largest chapter of the militia group whose members were among the mob that attacked the Capitol, though it is not clear if he remains a member of the group. Yet in the days leading up to Thursday’s anniversary, and on the anniversary itself, the speculation around Mr. Epps only seemed to snowball, amplified on countless social media posts, on Mr. Bannon’s podcast — part of a possibly “massive false flag operation,” as his website put it — and on Mr. Carlson’s prime-time show on Fox News on Wednesday and again on Thursday. “Is this guy going to be charged? Where is he?” Mr. Carlson asked. “It’s a legitimate question, why won’t they answer it?”
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Credit...Christopher Lee
How revisionist histories of Jan. 6 picked up where the “stop the steal” campaign left off, warping beliefs about what transpired at the Capitol.
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