I wasn’t going to write anything today.
For the last week, I’ve debated whether to add my voice to what was sure to be (and was) a cacophony of the fifth anniversary of January 6th. My hesitation wasn’t born out of apathy, but of exhaustion. It has been five years. The facts of that day have been established, re-established, litigated, and proven. At this point, I reasoned, you seemingly fall into one of two camps: you either accept the reality of what we all saw with our own eyes — the violence, the chaos, the breaking of the Capitol — or you have decided to embrace a delusional storyline where up is down and black is white.
I thought there was nothing new to say. I thought the lines were drawn.
But through my own failure of imagination, I was wrong.
What I hadn’t anticipated is that the official White House website — the digital front door of our government, funded by your tax dollars — would today launch a dedicated page that doesn’t just spin the events of that day, but fundamentally rewrites them.
If you haven’t seen it, consider yourself lucky. The new page trumpets the “heroics” of the January 6th rioters, labeling them “peaceful patriotic protesters.” It attacks former Vice President Mike Pence for “cowardice.” Perhaps most perverse of all, it explicitly blames the injuries and deaths of that day not on the mob that beat officers with flagpoles and suffocated them with bear spray, but on the Capitol Police themselves.
It is one thing for a MAGA media personality to spew this revisionism on a podcast. It is one thing for a politician to say it at a campaign rally to rile up a base. But it is quite another to see it in black and white (literally) on the .gov domain of the United States.
It is perverse. It is beneath us as a nation. And it demands a response.
We have a factual record. We cannot forget the painstaking, bipartisan work of the January 6th Committee. Regardless of your politics, that Committee did the difficult work of unveiling and distributing the facts — not opinions, not spin, but video proof, sworn testimony, and timeline evidence. They showed us the text messages, the panicked radio calls, and the urgent pleas for help.
The new White House narrative turns that truth upside down. It asks you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.
It is also a rejection of what a bipartisan chorus knew to be true in the immediate, shell-shocked aftermath of the attack. We must not forget that in the days following the riot, the condemnation was universal. Kevin McCarthy said the President bore responsibility. Charlie Kirk condemned the violence. The leadership of the Republican Party, terrified and angry, called the rioters criminals. Even President Trump, before he began the long project of revisionism, called the very people he later pardoned “heinous.”
It is tragic to see what has become of the truth.
My friend Maura Gillespie, who served alongside me as a staffer in the House of Representatives on January 6th, 2021, shared with me a video she made today. It is worth the 1 minute and 48 seconds of your time to watch. It cuts through the noise of the last five years and drops you right back into the truth.
Watching it, I realized that for those of us who were there, and for those who care about this Republic, the nightmare fails to recede like most tragedies do. It doesn’t fade; it is being kept alive, fed, and mutated into something new and dangerous by the very powers meant to protect us.
And that is why I am posting today. That is why I can’t stay silent.
Because if the official record of the United States government is going to lie, then we — the citizens, the voters, the witnesses — must be the ones to tell the truth. We have to look these lies in the face and declare them false. We have to push back against these abuses of power.
We must show up for our democracy, not just when it is easy, but when the headwinds are strongest. We must never forget the nation we really are — not the one currently reflected on a White House webpage, but the one that survived that day, and the one that can still prevail if we are willing to fight for the truth.
I watched on all of the TV Stations just to make sure I was seeing what I saw that fateful
January 6 and decided for the rest of my entire life I will never forget to remind those who deny what happened what I/ we saw. We all must continue to report and remind those who saw but deny still that witnesses were not just on the ground, they were all over the world sitting in front of computers, tvs, radios, watching real time. It was life changing for me - I will never trust a mob with a gang leader ever. Blast Trump to Hell.
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 great article!