Every anniversary of January 6 arrives with the same demand: forget what you saw.

Forget the broken windows of the United States Capitol.
Forget the chants that rose like smoke inside the halls of power.
Forget the officers crushed against doors, beaten with poles, sprayed, stomped, hunted.
Forget the dead.

Instead, we are offered a bedtime story. It is said that the riot was a peaceful protest. Or a tourist visit. Or a righteous uprising sabotaged by undercover FBI agents. Pick your preferred myth. The details shift, but the purpose never does: erase accountability and shift the blame.

The undercover-FBI fantasy collapses under its own weight.

If January 6 was a Democratic plot, then it was executed by an FBI still led by appointees of Donald Trump.


If federal agents incited the attack, why did Trump praise the attackers in real time?

Why did he call them patriots? And why, once back in power, did he pardon them?

You cannot claim both conspiracy and clemency. You cannot say “they were framed” and “they were heroes” in the same breath.
And yet that contradiction is now the official posture of MAGA politics.

Because the lie is not meant to make sense. It is meant to exhaust.

The Violence Was Real

This was not theater. This was not a protest that got “a little out of hand.” It was an insurrection attempt, period.

More than 140 law enforcement officers were injured that day. Some suffered concussions, broken bones, spinal damage. One officer lost an eye. Others endured heart attacks and strokes in the aftermath. Several officers later died by suicide, their lives shattered by what they experienced defending a government that now pretends nothing happened.

Five people died in connection with the attack. Their names are rarely spoken by those who claim to care about “law and order.” Their families are rarely acknowledged. MAGA would rather pretend no serious injuries occurred at all, because acknowledging the wounded means acknowledging the wounder.

To remember the dead and injured is to make denial impossible.

Why Forgetting Is the Point

Authoritarian movements survive on selective amnesia. The first step is not to justify violence but to blur it. To say it was exaggerated. To say no one really got hurt. To say the real victims were the perpetrators, now recast as martyrs.

This is why January 6 must be commemorated, not as a ritual of partisan scolding, but as an act of civic hygiene. Democracies rot when they stop admitting assaults against themselves.

The people who stormed the Capitol did not do so in confusion. They did it because they were told the election was stolen, that the republic had already been betrayed, and that violence was therefore virtuous. They believed they were answering a call. And that call came from the highest office in the land.

Remembrance Is Resistance

We remember January 6 not because we enjoy reopening wounds, but because pretending they never existed invites deeper ones.

We remember the officers who stood the line and paid for it with their bodies and their minds.
We remember the dead, on all sides, because death does not become less real when it is politically inconvenient.
We remember because a country that cannot face its own attempted overthrow is a country rehearsing for the next one.

This was an insurrection attempt.
The violence was real.
The victims were real.
And the lie that it was anything else is destroying what credibility we have left.

January 6, 2021 — The Dead and Wounded

Law Enforcement Injuries

  • More than 140 officers were injured defending the United States Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police Department.
  • Injuries included:
    • Concussions and traumatic brain injuries
    • Broken ribs, shattered bones, and crushed vertebrae
    • Chemical burns from bear spray and mace
    • One officer lost an eye
  • Several officers suffered heart attacks and strokes in the days following the attack.
  • Four officers later died by suicide, their deaths officially linked by families and colleagues to the trauma of January 6.

Deaths Directly Associated with January 6

  • Ashli Babbitt — fatally shot while attempting to breach a secured area of the Capitol.
  • Brian Sicknick (Capitol Police Officer) — collapsed after confronting rioters; suffered multiple strokes and died the following day.
  • Rosanne Boyland — died from acute amphetamine intoxication during the riot.
  • Kevin Greeson — died of a heart attack during the attack.
  • Benjamin Phillips — died of a stroke during the attack.

These facts are not disputed by courts, hospitals, or law enforcement agencies.

They are disputed only by those who need them to be untrue.