Introduction

Eleven days after the January 6 riot, as America was still sifting through the aftermath, NPR aired an interview with Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling in which he described what an insurrection is. “If you take the definition out of the military’s doctrinal manual, it says something like it’s an ongoing uprising and an organized uprising that uses both violent and nonviolent means to overthrow an existing government or to wrest away aspects of government control.” The manual, he added soberly, “continues by saying that it often counts on government security forces—meaning the police, the military—to overreact, which then brings more proponents of the insurgency because they believe the government institutions are faltering. All of those contribute to an insurgency.”

NPR’s interviewer, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, pressed Lieutenant General Hertling on whether he thought January 6 constituted an insurgency, and he answered, “I do, Lulu. . . . We’re seeing some of the same in U.S. society right now, and they all go by names. I mean, you could recite the Proud Boys, QAnon, the Three Percenters. You can go down the list. Each one of them have different desires and different objectives, and they are sucking the population, because of other factors like disinformation and misinformation from the government, into their aggrievement. And that’s what’s troubling.”

Except that, if you truly follow what the manual says, the sad assault on our Capitol—more operetta than high drama—hardly fills the bill. It was stomach-churning to see a grown man with bison headgear and tattoos parade around the Capitol, or another with his feet on the desk of the Speaker of the House. But the riot was neither “an ongoing uprising” nor “organized” in the true sense of the word. It is even debatable that it sought to overthrow an existing government. The left and the press have eagerly exaggerated all these traits, overemphasizing the “command and control” aspects, which journalists repeated as if they were military experts, in the belief that it would hand them the moral upper hand. They could then expect to use such a vantage point to ram through their preferred policies. If they were honest with themselves and others, however, they would have admitted all those things about the events that took place in the long turbulent year that had just concluded.

America in 2020 had its Year of Living Dangerously. It faced an all-out assault on all its institutions, structures, and systems, with scenes worthy of Peter Weir’s haunting 1982 film by that name. The May 25 death of George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old black man, at the hands of white Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin, touched off months of protests, riots, and looting. Whatever drugs may have been coursing through his veins, George Floyd was murdered; there was no justification for what Chauvin did.

There was also no justification for BLM’s use of this tragedy, however. Within days of Floyd’s death, portions of many American cities from coast to coast and border to border became scenes of marches and street shutdowns during the day and destruction and intimidation after sundown. The protests, which could degenerate into violent intimidation of city dwellers and, in almost seven hundred cases, into outright riots, were organized by Black Lives Matter organizations that promise racial equality but preach Marxism, transgender ideology, “queer affirmation,” and so on. The ensuing mobs brought down statues, broke into stores—both large retailers and small mom-and-pops—and looted merchandise. Diners in outdoor restaurants were intimidated by marauding BLM activists into chanting slogans or facing public harassment. And it all happened in the middle of a pandemic. Within days of the start of the violence, vandals had caused the loss of at least nineteen lives and somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion in damage, “marking it as the costliest civil disorder in U.S. history,” according to the Insurance Information Institute.

By late June, things had gotten so serious that the Australian academic David Kilcullen, a leading expert in the British counterinsurgency in Malaya in the 1950s and the man who conceptualized and monitored George W. Bush’s successful surge in Iraq in 2008, wrote that the United States was in a state of what the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Guide to the Analysis of Insurgency calls “incipient insurgency.” Kilcullen wrote that, although the moment did not meet all the conditions of insurrection, the CIA’s definition of incipient insurgency “encompasses pre-insurgency and organizational stages.” The CIA manual itself further describes how a sense of injustice is manipulated at this stage.

During the preinsurgency stage, insurgents identify and publicize a grievance around which they can rally supporters. Insurgents seek to create a compelling narrative—the story a party to an armed struggle uses to justify its actions in order to attain legitimacy and favor among relevant populations. Specific indicators that insurgents are seeking to mobilize the population around a grievance might include:

• Emergence of websites or the circulation of flyers, pamphlets, DVDs, or other promotional materials that generate popular discussion of the grievance.

• Media articles or opinion pieces on the issue.

• Espousal of the grievance by legitimate political or social organizations.

• Demonstrations or protests in which the issue plays a prominent rallying role.

The BLM-induced violence of 2020 included all of these characteristics. Through the use of repeated exaggerations, the BLM leaders and organizations manipulated a sense of injustice and, just as important, a sense of white guilt that has been building since the 1960s. The violence was meant, moreover, to overthrow an existing constitutional order, to dismantle “the organizing principle of this society,” in the words of the top leader of the Black Lives Matter organizations that directed and coordinated the insurgency. It resulted in the reprehensible loss of lives and property, and the leaders achieved the change in everyday life in America that they sought. When Major League Baseball came back to a restless nation in August, it became clear to what degree things were not back to normal. Opening Day, delayed by months because of the COVID-19 pandemic, was a pageant to racial self-flagellation. Teammates locked arms while announcers repeated platitudinal incantations about “systemic racism” in America. That this was happening to the pleasant National Pastime, one of the most integrated areas of American life after the valiant Jackie Robinson broke the color line, a sport that hitherto had escaped the self-inflicted racial wounds of the NFL and NBA, was ominous. Our schools, our offices, our legislatures, everything from the sublime and sacred, such as our churches, to the mundane, such as our fraternities and sororities, succumbed to an obsession with all things race following the protests and riots.

The ghoulish tragicomedy of the Capitol Riot will in no way affect our lives in the same manner, except by accelerating the changes that the BLM mayhem occasioned. Heather Mac Donald got it right, as usual, when she wrote two days later that the Wednesday, January 6 attack “will give even more fuel to the ongoing desecration of our heritage by the Left, a desecration that will prove more momentous than what occurred on Wednesday.”