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On Monday, the four-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot, members of the self-proclaimed “J6 community” gathered at a Washington hotel ballroom to lionize those who had stormed the Capitol and to rail about the “civil rights abuses” Jan. 6 defendants faced as “political hostages.”
Pardons were not sufficient, speakers at the event argued. Those who had committed criminal acts at the Capitol deserved restitution.
At the event advertised as “The Official January 6 Pardon Press Conference,” the crowd swarmed with QAnon radio hosts, boxers, social media influencers, conspiracy theorist journalists, Overstock’s CEO Patrick Byrne, and prominent figures associated with the “Stop the Steal” movement, including MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. Actual Jan. 6 defendants spoke of the hardship they said they faced in the criminal justice system. A number of people choked up during their speeches.
The tone of the event was intensely aggrieved, and it revealed the sinister scope of the alternate narrative that the “J6 community” has pushed—and will continue to aggressively push—about that day. Trump may have won the election, but for the sake of modern politics, this cohort is not going to let the Jan. 6 defendants be remembered as the aggressors.
Instead of the rioters being the source of the violence, it was the police who were the attackers. Instead of storming the Capitol as an act of defiance, the rioters either innocently ended up there through ignorance of the law (“it’s the people’s house”) or were entrapped, ushered in by the Capitol police. Instead of trying to overturn a democratic election with force, the rioters were simply and reasonably asking lawmakers to “slow things down” and look into certain valid questions about the election. And instead of being expressions of rage, the protests were a matter of peace and love. Any violent acts the protestors committed were either done in self-defense or to rescue someone else, and any weapons they carried were either symbolic—patriotic expressions of the Second Amendment—or precautions against illegal action from Antifa.
“If they’re pushing old women down stairs and crushing people, you have a responsibility to fight back and make sure the people around you are defended,” one speaker said.
Many of the featured speakers called into the streaming event over video. (The livestream, which was co-hosted by Gateway Pundit, was, technologically, a disaster, a problem that was blamed on the snowstorm.) The biggest name among the defendants was Jake Lang, a man who had wielded a shield and baseball bat while storming the Capitol. According to federal investigators, Lang was in the heat of the conflict on Jan. 6, battling police for more than two hours, beating and punching the officers around him. But to hear the story from his mother, who also called in, Lang was a tenderhearted and selfless man who got swept up in an unjust crackdown. “He saved the lives of two men that day,” she said, describing through tears how he was “protecting other people’s lives at risk to his own.”
Lang is still awaiting trial and joined the livestream from jail, where he is busy organizing a militia through Telegram. (The delays to his trial were described as a civil rights violation at the event, and it was not acknowledged that Lang’s own attorney had requested four postponements.) Lang has produced films, published a book, hosted a podcast, and raised millions for convicted Jan. 6ers. But despite his newfound celebrity, and despite receiving the kind of support most criminal defendants could only dream of, Lang spoke of a special kind of discrimination. “We’ve all been cruel and unusually punished,” he said.
Nobody mentioned the historic violence of that day: the lawmakers and staffers hiding in rooms, or watching a mob pound at the doors, praying for safety, fleeing the building. They did not mention the shocking implications of a defeated political candidate’s supporters managing to halt a congressional act. Or how people watching from home, at the time, rightfully wondered if the rioters might actually break through and kill the legislators in the building. Or how some questioned whether lawmakers might justifiably have become too afraid to go against the mob’s demands when it came time to resume their duties.
No, the image the “J6 community” conjured was one of peaceful, harmless average Americans wandering around, laughing, taking photos—only to be treated, absurdly, as violent terrorists.
To build narrative of their plight, the Jan. 6ers used language that seemed pulled from anti-racist protests. They spoke of feeling dehumanized, as a class of people. In what seemed like an intentional inversion of an infamous line about Michael Brown, one defendant, who also described the public ostracization of Jan. 6 rioters as a “lynching,” warned against a mindset in which “you have to be an angel” to deserve sympathy. Treniss Evans, a 50-year-old Texas man who had used a megaphone to lead a group of people into the Capitol and who was the host of the event, claimed that Americans had only been treated similarly once before—during the Civil Rights Movement.
But at the same time, several speakers used coded language that seemed to imply that the whiteness of the Jan. 6ers was indicative of their blamelessness. Lang’s attorney spoke of the defendants being like “Midwestern, Christian police officers” and not like “actual criminals” of the kind he usually prosecuted. (Lang, knowingly or unknowingly, also employed an antisemitic reference when he argued that “George Soros prosecutors” were after their “pounds of flesh.”)
“They’ve been treated so differently from any other protesters in America,” one media personality said. The defendants spoke of harsh conditions in prisons, of solitary confinement, poor medical care, and issues with hygiene—the kinds of complaints long shared by criminal justice reformers about the prison system, but the defendants spoke in terms of furthering another goal.
It was not just about correcting the record, but righting wrongs. The star journalist-turned-conspiracy-theorist Lara Logan, speaking emotionally of the jailing of defendants, summed it up this way: “More than freedom, they deserve restitution.” Evans joked that Trump should take the billions he’ll save through mass deportations and parcel it out to the J6ers.
Trump has not committed to specifics when it comes to pardoning Jan. 6 defendants but has said he would make “major pardons.”
It is possible that won’t include the most violent offenders. It’s also possible that for some, Trump will offer clemency instead of a full pardon. That may seem generous enough for a group of people who unquestionably broke the law, but to the “Jan. 6 community,” any moderation at all would be a concession that they had behaved as criminals—an unacceptable admission and tacit validation of the Democrats’ bullying tactics. “All J6ers need to be free, not just the nonviolent ones,” one influencer said. One Jan. 6 defendant chastised people “in the J6 community” who didn’t want to extend help to every defendant or push for every person to be pardoned. “We need to stand firmly as a united front,” he said. “Why do we treat our own people like garbage? Why is there even a debate?”
There’s something else the talk of “restitution” does: It gives the J6ers a path forward to continued relevance even after they may be granted pardons. One rioter, James Brett, made it clear that it wasn’t just about narrative control, though. Upon receiving pardons, he and his fellow defendants would not “go quiet into the night,” he said. Instead, they would be motivated into further action, possibly into running for office and other political leadership. But there was a darker ambition he betrayed. To Brett, “restitution” seemed to mean something more akin to retribution.
“To my prosecutor: I look forward to seeing you at your trial,” he said. “Justice is a pendulum that swings both ways.”
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