NEWSWEEK.COM 17
ators and mischief-makers, not only were there
criminals but also a large cadre of military-clad
commandos intent on insurrection and political
terror. Their willingness to break the law and use
force surprised officials. And the fact that this
crowd had no love for law enforcement now forc-
es many to reassess who exactly they were dealing
with on January 6th—and who we have to deal
with as a country in the future.
Years from now, America will still be debating
exactly what happened on January 6th when an
insurrectionist mob stormed the U.S. Capitol
and threatened the nation’s political being. In
the coming months, the four hours of mayhem
that took place that day will be dissected, min-
ute-by-minute, in the courts, in commissions of
inquiry and Congressional hearings, as well as in
news media investigations, all striving to answer
the questions all of us are wrestling with now:how and why the protestors did it, how the gov-
ernment was so blind and unprepared, and what
we should do next.
As this 25,000-word reconstruction of the
events shows though, the skeleton of that day is
already formed. In compiling this timeline, so-
cial media—the tweeting of a handful of report-
ers who were there on that day—emerges as the
dominant source of information.
So finally it is social media, the adrenaline-fed ar-
tery that created and sustained Donald Trump and
reaches almost everyone in our society, dominat-
ing our lives, that is one of the central protagonists
of the day. It segments and feeds countless barely
touching circles in our society, our conceptions of
what happened that day limited to our personal
“feeds,” each of us on our own voyage of discov-
ery, too absorbed in our own news sourc-
)^5 es to see the bigger picture. But here it is.
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