January 6, 2021
The storming of the US Capitol by a pro-Trump mob attempting to stop Congressional certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 Electoral College victory; the downstream consequence of the New Right’s intellectual infrastructure; the “New Lost Cause” of the MAGA right
What Happened
On January 6, 2021, a large crowd gathered in Washington DC at Trump’s “Save America” rally at the Ellipse. Just before 11am, Rudy Giuliani spoke; John Eastman stood by his side and delivered a conspiracy-laden account of Democratic voter fraud. Trump spoke and urged the crowd to march to the Capitol.
A subset of the crowd stormed the building, overwhelming Capitol Police and entering the Senate chamber, offices, and halls. Lawmakers were evacuated. The certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory was delayed for several hours.
Five people died in connection with the events. More than 1,000 have since been charged with crimes related to the breach; as of 2025, Trump pardoned many of them on the first day of his second term.
The Intellectual Infrastructure: The Lead-Up
Summer-fall 2020 — Claremont builds the narrative:
- The Claremont Institute published pieces throughout summer and early fall 2020 anticipating electoral challenges and a potential “Biden coup.”
- October 20, 2020: The 79 Days Report — organized by Claremont and the Texas Public Policy Foundation; co-authored by Eastman, Ryan Williams, Kevin Roberts, Gladden Pappin, and others; framed as a counter to the Transition Integrity Project (TIP); Christian Vanderbrouk: “A barely concealed bloodlust runs through the report” — “not a serious wargame or a policy study so much as a bowdlerized retelling of The Turner Diaries.”
- September 2020: Michael Anton’s “The Coming Coup?” on American Mind — “Democrats Are Laying the Groundwork for Revolution Right in Front of Our Eyes.” Anton became “increasingly unhinged,” and it became clear that “for some thinkers on the right there was no world in which a Democratic win could be legitimate.”
- September 12, 2020: American Mind editorial “Stop the Coup” — declared the Biden coup “a reality” with the election nearly two months away.
Election Day through January 6 — the escalation:
- November 4, 2020: While states were still counting (three days before the press called the election for Biden), American Mind published Anton’s “Game on for the Coup?” — admitted the theft “could (but will never) be proved” but laid out the “Stop the Steal” plan. The plan was a rehash of a Darren Beattie Revolver News piece from the same day.
- November 5: Claremont leadership — Ryan Williams, Arthur Milikh, Matthew J. Peterson, James Poulos — published “The Fight Is Now”: took Biden’s coup as fait accompli; called on GOP to send “swarms of lawyers” to disputed states; declared “all weak sisters on the right must be called out” and “cast aside for those who will fight!”
- December 2020: Eastman helped concoct alternative slates of electors in Georgia and Pennsylvania; filed brief in Texas to invalidate elections in swing states (quickly tossed by the court).
- December 24: A Trump aide asked Eastman for a memo on the Electoral College certification process for January 6. He produced the two “Coup Memos.”
- January 4-5: Eastman spent two days in the Oval Office making the case to Pence.
- Patrick Deneen: quote-tweeted Jack Posobiec in December 2020, calling the US “a unique form of liberal oligarchy that was disrupted by a momentary burst of democracy. The elite made sure to roll that back—amusingly, in the name of ‘democracy.’”
- Adrian Vermeule: engaged in election denialism on Twitter to the point of being called for official rebuke by Harvard; tweeted “Lol the election isn’t over until Team Joe fixes up your ballot for you.”
The Intellectual Infrastructure: The Documents
John Eastman’s Coup Memos: Argued that Pence had constitutional authority to refuse to certify or delay certification of Biden’s electors, based on false claims of widespread fraud and illegitimate alternative electors. Greg Jacob (Pence’s top lawyer), on January 6: “The advice provided has, whether intended or not, functioned as a serpent in the ear of the President of the United States… It was gravely, gravely irresponsible for you to entice the President with an academic theory that had no legal viability, and that you well know we would lose before any judge who heard and decided the case. And if the courts declined to hear it, I suppose it could only be decided in the streets.”
The Fight is Now: Claremont’s November 5 manifesto that Field calls “a plan and manifesto for the delegitimization campaign that we saw unfold on the American right through to January 6.”
Michael Anton’s “Game-on for the Coup?”: Coined “Stop the Steal” as a political program.
Darren Beattie’s Revolver News: Provided the template for Anton’s “Game-on” piece; Beattie later, during the Capitol attack itself, sent tweets naming Black public figures (Tim Scott, Heritage Foundation president Kay Cole James, author Ibram X. Kendi) and writing they must “learn their place” and “take a knee to MAGA.”
The New Right’s Culpability
Field is explicit: January 6 represents “a massive failure of prudence and judgment on the part of the New Right. It was also a moment of jarring partisan hypocrisy. Those who had the most extreme reactions to the George Floyd protests in 2020 were the most blasé about January 6, 2021.”
The Claremont Institute was the most directly implicated institution: “The Claremont Institute was there the whole time, playing along and stoking the lies.”
Charles Kesler became the institute’s “hedger-and-apologist-in-chief,” defending Eastman in the Claremont Review of Books while quietly conceding the plan was legally fabricated.
Glenn Ellmers wrote for American Mind in March 2021: “‘Conservatism’ is No Longer Enough” — “Most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term” (i.e., Biden voters). John Ganz: “Its themes of pervading national corruption and decadence, and the need for a counter-revolution and a national rebirth put this text firmly in the radical reactionary or fascist ballpark.”
Christopher Flannery (original Claremont founder) wrote in August 2022: “John Eastman Is an American Hero: He Put His Life on the Line to Stop an Unconstitutional Election.”
Roger Kimball wrote in Imprimis (Hillsdale College, September 2021): “historians… may well count the 2016 presidential election as the last fair and open democratic election in U.S. history.”
Thomas Klingenstein (Claremont’s main donor and board chairman; also one of NatCon’s biggest funders) continued to peddle conspiratorial lies about the stolen election through 2024 — including producing glossy interview videos of Eastman in 2023 that functioned as fundraising mechanisms for his legal fees.
The New Lost Cause (post-2021)
Within nine months of the insurrection, the Republican Party and the broader Trump movement had begun reconstituting January 6 as a sacred moment of patriotic resistance. David A. Graham diagnosed the operation in The New Lost Cause (The Atlantic, October 2021) as the conscious heir of the late-19th-century Confederate Lost Cause:
- Martyr cult around Ashli Babbitt (the Air Force veteran shot at the Speaker’s Lobby door). Trump produced a 2021 birthday video for her.
- Veneration of artifacts. At a Glenn Youngkin rally hosted by Steve Bannon in October 2021, an emcee called an attendee onstage carrying “an American flag that was carried at the peaceful rally with Donald J. Trump on January 6”; the audience recited the Pledge of Allegiance to the relic flag.
- “Political prisoners” framing for J6 detainees.
- Pickett’s-Charge-style mythologization — a disastrous attack mythologized as “the high water mark” of patriotic resistance.
The operation has since institutionalized: the J6 Choir on the 2024 Trump campaign trail; the January 2025 inauguration-day pardons of more than 1,500 J6 defendants; Trump’s repeated celebration of the rioters as patriots; the New Lost Cause’s absorption of January 6 into the same mythopoeic register that previously absorbed M.E. Bradford’s Lincoln-revisionist neo-Confederate project. Graham’s warning (“lost causes have a pernicious tendency to be less lost than we might hope”) has been substantially borne out.
The wiki’s structural reading: January 6 has not been expelled from American conservatism; it has been canonized within it — the same operation by which an earlier conservative movement managed Robert Welch (kept the politics, ditched the personality), now carried out in the cultural-mythopoeic key. See Counterrevolution.
The “New Lost Cause”
David A. Graham’s phrase: The post-January 6 narrative that converted a shameful catastrophe into a loyalty test and celebration of the culprits’ valor — just as the original Lost Cause reframed Confederate defeat as heroic sacrifice.
Jonathan Chait (February 2021): “the future of conservatism is Flight 93 Elections forever.”
Long-Term Consequences
- Trump was impeached for a second time (acquitted by Senate)
- Eastman: resigned from Chapman; indicted in Fulton County Georgia (summer 2023); named as coconspirator in DC indictment (August 2023); recommended for disbarment in California (March 2024)
- January 6 became a loyalty test: New Right figures who condemned it were marginalized; those who excused it were rewarded
- Trump’s 2024 campaign made pardoning January 6 defendants a central promise — fulfilled on day one of his second term
- The Heritage Foundation and others who had briefly distanced themselves fell back into the MAGA orbit as Trump’s political strength became clear
Cross-References
- The Fight is Now — the intellectual precursor document
- The Claremonters — the intellectual movement most directly implicated
- John Eastman — author of the Coup Memos; stood at the rally
- Charles Kesler — hedger-and-apologist-in-chief
- Michael Anton — “Game-on for the Coup?” author
- Darren Beattie — Revolver News; racist tweets during the attack
- Steve Bannon — War Room organizer; “Stop the Steal” amplifier
- Patrick Deneen — engaged in postelection election denialism
- Adrian Vermeule — engaged in postelection election denialism
- Thomas Klingenstein — Claremont donor who funded Eastman’s legal defense
- Claremont Institute — institutional sponsor of Stop the Steal narrative
- MAGA New Right — the movement January 6 represents in action
- The Flight 93 Election — the 2016 essay whose emergency logic pointed here
- Charlottesville 2017 — the earlier event that demonstrated the movement’s tolerance for violence