Photographer Wolfgang Schwan intentionally left his helmet and gas mask in his car on Jan. 6, planning to return for them in the evening when things were likely to heat up near the Capitol.
That was the word that was out there.
But by early afternoon the scene was a historic failure as the country watched a pro-Trump insurrection breach the Capitol while lawmakers scurried for their lives and the vastly outnumbered Capitol police were overrun and beaten. Five people died, including one police officer.
The details dribbled out: Certain politicians were on lists. Elected officials were among the group outside. The right doubled down with claims of Antifa driving the day’s events. The bare-chested and horned insurrectionist, a regular on the protest scene and the 15-minute darling of almost any portrayal of Jan. 6, was arrested and jailed in Arizona while others were rounded up around the country on an array of sobering charges.
A Woodland Park, Colorado man was recently identified as an active player inside the Capitol and has been charged with assaulting/impeding a federal officer and entering a restricted building with the intent to impede official functions, among other charges. A photo of him and cohorts – likely affiliated with the Three Percenter militia group – is making the rounds; the group posed outside of Rep. Lauren Boebert’s Shooters Grill in Rifle.
“The violence that was shown here was appalling,” said Schwan, who was able to get up close outside the Capitol building, where he saw a stream of people breaching the building through windows, and looters emerging with all manner of souvenirs.
He saw cops pushed to the ground and kicked. “There was a massive failure as far as preparation,” he said. “They were left out to dry.”
As Joe Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration nears, the space surrounding the Capitol is now walled in with seven-foot fencing that supposedly nobody can climb, and unlike Jan. 6, there is little ambiguity about the presence of the National Guard. Their numbers are expected to hit 25,000 on Wednesday. That compares to the 340 who were originally deployed for the Jan. 6 rally, mostly for traffic and Metro crowd control.
“It looks like a military base now,” Schwan said. “They’re not messing around since the sixth.”
Based in Philadelphia, Schwan travels to cover civil unrest. He’s versed in street conflicts in places like Portland and appears to have a sense of ease with those on the edges of either side. On Jan. 6 he walked from the White House to the Capitol after Donald Trump’s Save America Rally at the Ellipse started to get repetitive. Trump was still talking when the crowd started to move.
But before the crowd dispersed, Trump said, among many prior things that would prompt a rapid-fire second impeachment, “Our country has had enough… We will not take it anymore and that’s what this is all about.”
Schwan, whose work tends toward the gut-level and personal, walked alongside a group of Proud Boys. Like the people who had executed the security strategy for the afternoon, he had no idea how fast things would reel out of control once the crowds started to trigger at the Capitol grounds. Nor did he have any idea how far they would go as they carried out the Capitol’s first siege by American citizens.
“It was a sea of people losing their minds,” he said, likening the scene to the recent election revolt in Belarus. He said he seriously wondered at one point if the rioters might succeed in staging a coup.
“I thought, f**k, we might just have a lot more years of Trump,” he said.
He said the energy that mounted in the crowd was different this time around. Things started to get hot after 1:00 p.m., when the joint session convened to certify the Electoral College votes.
Typically crowds at protests heat up in waves, he noted. But that afternoon, the group was on a trajectory as a mob formed and headed to the Capitol steps. The crowd would get agitated and stay at that level, then it would get more worked up without backing down.
“There was a mob excitement and chaos that just kept going,” he said.
The rioters broke into the building at 2:11 p.m., just after the Capitol Police’s call to the D.C. National Guard for immediate help.
Trump would finally issue a message to the crowd that it was time to “go home, we love you, you’re very special,” but Schwan says phone reception in huge crowds doesn’t always work. When word of the message spread through the crowd, there were choruses decrying fake news.
Schwan returned to the scene the following day to see if there was anything going on, but it was quiet – and has been since security was completely overhauled.
He’s certainly heard other people’s accounts of what happened on Jan. 6, including accusations that Antifa had a major hand in the violence. Having had considerable exposure to Antifa’s tactics, he says “chances are slim that was the case.” Schwan believes the rioters were proud of what they were able to do and not likely to want to be confused as Antifa plants.
He said the area surrounding the Capitol feels walled off and eerie, yet “reasonable” as Joe Biden prepares to step into the presidency Wednesday. National Guardsmen walk the streets and ask for ID’s at checkpoints. Schwan says people are dealt with swiftly when they happen to be in the wrong place.
Looking back, he says, he didn’t think “anyone in their right mind” would try to breach the security for this Wednesday’s events.
That said, based on reports of possible insider threats, the FBI vetted each of the Guard troops assigned to Washington and on Tuesday, sent 12 of them home due to connections to right-wing extremists discovered in their backgrounds.
As of this past weekend, Schwan wasn’t sure how close he’d be able to get to the inauguration itself. And like everyone else, he couldn’t say with certainty that violence wouldn’t erupt at some point at some place.
Featured image: by photographer Wolfgang Schwan.
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