January 6 was no ‘deadly insurrection,’ just a cynically exploited riot

Three years ago today, I was quarantined in a Las Vegas hotel. Our rigging team would soon fly to Abu Dhabi to hang a UFC show for Arab sheiks and their head-covered harems.

With nothing to do, I fell asleep watching Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” speech on TV. I woke to my phone blowing up with text messages — but there were no names, only phone numbers. (New phone. Who dis?)

Brace yourself for the worst. The storm isn’t coming. It’s already here.

“They're going for it! Holy s**t!” one read.

“Yes! Yes!! Let’s f***ing GOOO!!!” said another.

“Baboons. A pack of baboons. These are your people?” asked another.

No names. Only numeric anons. I had to guess who was who.

I looked up at the TV and turned the volume up. My phone buzzed again.

“This is frickin AWESOME!!”

On the TV screen, I saw American flags waving above a chaotic riot. Puffs of tear gas rose here and there. Talking heads on Fox News were already yapping about “attacks on our democracy” and all that. Same with CNN and MSNBC. Typical.

The 9/11 attacks had given the older pundits plenty of practice. The COVID-19 panic had them in full parrot mode.

All I could think about was the past year of race riots, burning cities, white-boy beatdowns, and the media’s firehose of lame excuses for urban barbarism. The hypocrisy was infuriating but hardly new.

My phone kept buzzing.

“I thought you said Trump supporters weren’t violent. Lol.”

“Go! Go!! Gooo!!!”

“Where is Trump?”

The next day, January 7, that question was still hanging in the air. Was the president imprisoned by the regime? Had he escaped overseas?

“Where is Trump?”

That evening, Trump finally delivered his statement on the riots. Afterward, a friend sent me a post from a widely read, plan-trusting, "Christ is King" type blogger. This guy seemed sure the Trump broadcast was a deepfake. He pointed out the president's neck flab as evidence — as if they’d just popped a phony Trump head onto a suit collar and started typing out his lines.

Neoreactionary plan-trusters were flipping out. Maybe the real president was imprisoned. Maybe he was already dead. Maybe we would all be dead soon.

I told my friend this was preposterous. Eventually, he agreed. “But give it a few more years…”

For the next two weeks, I watched my country descend into madness through an Abu Dhabi television. Pundits and politicians repeated “deadly insurrection” over and over — never once mentioning that the five people who died were all Trump supporters.

Meanwhile, a buddy of mine, whose mental health had suffered massively under the mask ‘n’ vax regime, sent me increasingly deranged videos of pathological liars talking about “white hats” and “America is actually a corporation” and fuzzy footage of an alleged liberation army off the coast of California, poised to free us from our satanic communist neo-Babylonian overlords.

The reality is there was no “deadly insurrection” — just a cynically exploited riot. Nor was there a “plan” — just a lot of cynically exploited patriots mourning the loss of their country.

The situation has only deteriorated. As we enter a new election cycle plagued by tribal fury, open borders, wars overseas, an untrustworthy voting system, articulate AI agents, sophisticated deepfake software, and more digital delusions than an Asian internet cafe in hell, something tells me we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Insist on the best for America. This is our home. End of story.

But brace yourself for the worst. The storm isn’t coming. It’s already here.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally as a post on X (formerly Twitter).

Joe Allen has written for Chronicles, The Federalist, Human Events, The National Pulse, Parabola, Salvo, and Protocol: The Journal of the Entertainment Technology Industry. His book Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity is out now.