"They Sought to Convert Us": Officers' January 6 Testimony Reveals the Riot's Dark Righteousness

[Nevilledog]

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ProfB
@AntheaButler
⁦@JeffSharlet⁩ with the important religion aspect of the 1/6 insurrection and the violent anxious bench of White Christian Nationalism
"They Sought to Convert Us”: Officers’ January 6 Testimony Reveals the Riot’s Dark Righteousness | Vanity Fair

“They Sought to Convert Us”: Officers’ January 6 Testimony Reveals the Riot’s Dark Righteousness
With their evidence, Capitol police officers linked the Trumpist mob to the Christian symbolism it used—and will continue to use—as a “psychological safety net.”
vanityfair.com
2:48 PM · Jul 28, 2021

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/07/officers-january-6-testimony-reveals-the-riots-dark-righteousness

To the Republicans who insisted that there was little left to learn about January 6—least of all from frontline cops who could testify to the record that day left on their minds and bodies—the four officers who opened the January 6 hearings responded with horror, eloquence, and some of the simple but essential facts that have escaped not only most of the GOP, but much of the media as well.

The insurrection, they insisted, was armed. Not just with the flagpoles many used to beat “the Blue” they so often claim to “back,” but also with “hammers, rebar, knives, batons, and police shields,” said Sergeant Aquilino Gonell. “Bear spray and pepper spray.” (Also: bats, Tasers, a cattle prod, and, according to affidavits, at least one gun, likely more.)

The insurrection, they insisted, was murderous, in plain fact, borne out by a walk-through of video from Officer Michael Fanone’s body cam. “I remember one of them distinctly lunging at me time and again, trying to grab my gun,” he testified. “Kill him with his own gun,” they chanted. By then his heart attack had likely begun. He wasn’t, he explained, “an impediment” to those who would surge forward. And yet they remained; “they tortured me.” They beat him and hit his skull with a Taser “again, and again, and again.” Not because he was in their way, not because he was “deep state,” not because he was an election thief; because they liked the way it felt.

Maybe the bitterest, truest line of the day was uttered by Officer Harry Dunn: “Everything is different, but nothing has changed.” The violence is visible for all to see, but still we are blind. It’s no accident that such language echoes faith. The insurrection, insisted Officer Daniel Hodges, was religious.

*snip*

[crickets]

1. Yikes.

Andrew Seidel, author of The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American, has been working with a group of scholars and journalists (I’m a contributor) to build a collection along the same line as Manseau’s. He notes the “Jericho Marchers” who blew shofars (a ram’s horn of symbolic meaning in Judaism, appropriated by Christian nationalists) around the Capitol on January 5 in a reenactment of the holy conquest depicted in the Book of Joshua; the “openly militant prayer” by evangelist and Trump official Paula White that preceded Trump’s speech the next morning, in which she called for “holy boldness” in “overturning” the enemies of Trump; the writings on that gallows erected outside the Capitol: “In God We Trust,” “God Bless the USA,” and “amen”; Michael Sparks, the first man to breach the Capitol, who did so “in JESUS NAME,” by his own account; the dozens of insurrectionists, several of them armed, who sought to sanctify the Senate chamber with a prayer to Jesus that included thanks “for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government.”

I knew about the gallows but completely missed any mention of “Jericho Marchers” and such until now. Horrifying.

[czarjak]

2. We were told we'd be brought over "kicking and screaming"?