The true of story of the events that played out on January 6, 2021 has never been fully told. Bits and pieces of it have shaken loose, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that fell on the floor. But never before have they been stitched together into a complete and accurate picture of that day’s events, so that people can understand what actually happened — as opposed to being told what didn’t.
A new film, War on Truth, directed by Chris Burgard and produced by Nick Searcy, tells the full story — not just the parts of it that the political opponents of Donald Trump and the media, who are as tight as peas in a pod, want people to know about.
The narrative that was created by the opponents of Donald Trump — who came to control the government as well as the media after January 6 — was that an “insurrection” had taken place, with all the implications of a violent attempt to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s putative victory over Donald Trump in the presidential election a few months prior. Trump had summoned his troops to the capital — and that they had “stormed’ the Capitol building, determined to turn “our democracy” into something dark and sinister, controlled by a an authoritarian cartoon caudillo cut from the same cloth as Juan Perón or Augusto Pinochet, the onetime dictators of Argentina and Chile, respectively.
It is a narrative as soaked in hysteria and misdirection as that which triggered the transformation of most of America into a prison during the final year of Trump’s presidency, which — via unprecedented and unvetted absentee voting that went on for months prior to the election — cast a shadow of legitimate doubt over the integrity of the election. That doubt led, in turn, to the decision of tens of thousands of ordinary Americans to make their way to the capital to petition their government for a redress of their grievances. To be heard. To try to find out what happened.
And that is what the political opponents of Trump who took control of the government — with the eager amen-cornering of a “mainstream” media that no longer even pretends to be interested in the truth about anything — framed into a narrative about an “insurrection.”
They are using that narrative, to this day, to frame any questioning of anything the left does as implicitly insurrectionary by dint of being a “threat to our democracy” — by which is meant a threat to the one-party rule of the left, which must never be questioned.
Or else.
One of the truths you will learn about if you watch this movie is that this was an “insurrection” of unarmed people, which would be the only such “insurrection” ever attempted in history. Another is that the “insurrectionists” were directed into the Capitol Building by the Capitol Police, who were not attacked by the “insurrectionists,” who for the most part walked into the building like curious tourists. There was flag-waving and some bullhorn-talking but next to no violence perpetrated by the “insurrectionists.” On the other hand, unarmed veteran Ashli Babbitt was killed — shot while trying to crawl through a broken door by a Capitol Police officer who was never charged with any crime.
Contrast this with Derek Chauvin, the former police officer who is doing hard time because he was found guilty of killing deified thug George Floyd, who more than likely died of heart disease and complications from a drug overdose. None of the “mostly peaceful” protests that ensued, resulting in the torching of several American cities, was ever styled an insurrection, either — probably because the left did not consider any of them a “threat to our democracy.”
War on Truth explores a much more serious threat — to the previously taken-for-granted right to peacefully assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances. The left has criminalized this when it involves grievances the left dislikes. More than 1,265 Americans have been criminally charged — and more than 460 people sentenced to prison.
One of them is Easton Cantwell, a former Army paratrooper who was kept in limbo for two years by federal Inspector Javerts before finally being sentenced to five months’ imprisonment for “obstructing Congress.” Cantwell took a plea deal to avoid being incarcerated for years rather than “only” five months. “The Justice Department wants validation” of the narrative, Cantwell says. “Because without that validation that we got convicted of something, then it didn’t really happen like they said.”
Joseph Stalin’s favorite secret policeman, Lavrentiy Beria, is credited with saying, “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”
But perhaps the film’s most important truth is that the people who came to air their grievances were suckered into a well laid trap — one set up to provide a narrative about an “insurrection” that could be used to sucker the American people into believing there was — and is — a “threat to our democracy.”
To find out more about that, you’ll have to catch the film, which makes its public debut on May 17.
Mark Anthony is a former Silicon Valley executive, columnist, political analyst, and host of the nationally syndicated radio show called The Patriot and The Preacher.
Image: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center via Flickr, CC BY 2.0 (cropped).