The Confederate Flag Entered the Capitol Today. Four Years of Civil War Never Managed It.

At a few minutes past two this afternoon, while Congress counted the electoral votes, a mob forced its way into the United States Capitol and stopped the count. The wire services have the timeline: the joint session gaveled in at one, the barricades went down within the hour, both chambers evacuated, and the building was not declared secure until nearly six. As this edition closes, the Senate has been back at work for about three and a half hours, and the counting goes on into the night.

Tomorrow's papers will call it an assault on democracy, and it was. But this page keeps a narrower ledger, and today belongs in it. Because you can learn everything you need to know about a crowd from what it chooses to carry, and this crowd, given a free hand in the seat of American government for four hours, made its choices.

I. THE FLAG

Start with the photograph moving on the wires tonight: a man in the halls of the Capitol, between the portraits, carrying the Confederate battle flag on a pole. Nobody made him bring it. There was no election-law argument printed on it. He chose it this morning, the way you choose what to wear to an occasion, and he carried it into the building.

Here is the historical fact to sit with: the flag of the Confederacy never entered this building while the Confederacy existed. Four years of war, three quarters of a million dead, and the closest its army ever came was Jubal Early's raid in the summer of 1864, which stalled at Fort Stevens, about five miles short. The distance those armies could not cross was crossed this afternoon by a man in a sweatshirt, and he did it under police escort in the sense that nobody stopped him.

Outside, the same flag flew over the crowd at the base of the Grant Memorial (photograph above), which is the kind of detail a novelist would cut for being too on the nose. The battle flag is not ambiguous. It has one sentence to say, and it has said it at every stop from 1861 to the schoolhouse doors to today, and this site keeps the full ledger of that sentence elsewhere. The men who flew it at the Capitol today understood it. So should everyone writing about "election integrity" tomorrow.

II. THE GALLOWS

The photograph at the top of this page was made on the Capitol grounds today. It is a gallows. Lumber, crossbeam, a noose swinging in it, built by the crowd, positioned (deliberately or not, and it does not matter which) so that the dome sits inside the frame of it like a picture in a locket.

A noose is not a prop that means nothing in this country. It is the single most specific object in the American vocabulary of racial terror... the instrument of thousands of documented extrajudicial killings, the postcard image of them, the thing hung on Black families' porches for a century as a signature. You do not build one by accident, and you do not build one at the Capitol as a statement about vote tabulation software. The crowd that raised it this morning was announcing what it believed itself to be doing, and the announcement was not "audit the machines."

III. THE STAIRCASE

Inside the building, a reporter's phone camera caught the single piece of footage from today that this page will not forget. A lone officer of the Capitol Police, a Black man, stands at the bottom of a staircase between the mob and the Senate chamber. He is one man. They are dozens, and more behind. He backs up the stairs step by step, holding them at talking distance, and at the landing he glances at an unguarded corridor and then puts himself in front of the crowd and moves them the other way.

Here's the scary moment when protesters initially got into the building from the first floor and made their way outside Senate chamber.

— Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) January 6, 2021

Watch it and understand the arithmetic of the afternoon: the men who came carrying the flag of the army raised to keep his ancestors property were chased off the Senate's doorstep by him, alone. We do not know his name tonight. When we learn it, this page will print it.

IV. THE COMPARISON EVERYONE IS ALREADY MAKING

Seven months ago, on the first of June, peaceful demonstrators against police violence (a movement about Black citizens' right not to be killed) were driven out of Lafayette Square, a few minutes' walk from where tonight's edition is being written, with chemical agents and riot lines. That was the posture of the state toward that crowd, on a sidewalk, breaking nothing.

Today a crowd broke through police barricades, smashed its way into the Capitol itself, ransacked offices and stopped a constitutional proceeding, and the overwhelming majority of them walked back down the Hill into the evening unarrested, filming themselves as they went. Set the two afternoons side by side and hold them there. The difference between them is not the severity of the offense, because the offense today was incomparably greater. The difference is who the crowds were, and every Black American watching tonight already knows it without needing this paragraph.

The count will finish. The certification will hold. And there will be enormous pressure, starting tomorrow, to file today under "chaos" and "security failure" and other words that conveniently have no color in them. This page files it where the crowd itself filed it, with the flag and the rope. They told us what it was. The record should simply keep their word for it.