On the 5th anniversary of the January 6 event, a reprise of our post from January 2021:

Eyewitness account of what really happened at the US Capitol on January 6 – as told to MassResistance immediately afterwards

Here’s what a veteran of many other Trump rallies saw and heard that day. It was obviously a setup.

MassResistance published one of the first detailed eyewitness reports!

Unlike at any US Capitol rally in the past, the police allowed people to stand wherever they wanted! It was very strange - and clearly a trap.

[Note: An earlier version of this article appeared in American Thinker.]

By Brian Camenker
January 8, 2026

In the five years since January 6, 2021, there’s been enormous dishonesty and propaganda about what actually happened at the U.S. Capitol that day. So it’s useful to revisit a detailed observation made immediately afterward from someone who was right there.

The afternoon before, a group of people had stopped by the MassResistance office in suburban Boston. They were getting ready for an overnight ride on chartered buses to D.C. for the rally the next day. These middle-aged patriots were cheerful and excited about supporting Trump. They definitely were not “insurrectionists.”

On the morning of January 7, I got a call from one of my friends – a great friend of MassResistance – who’d been at the rally and was still in D.C. He said that what had happened that day was unbelievable. And he’d been to numerous large political rallies in D.C. over the years.

He started by saying that this was in fact the third pro-Trump rally held at the U.S. Capitol in the weeks following the November 2020 election – and he had been to all three. At the first two, he said, the Capitol building was surrounded and heavily guarded by hundreds of police. “You couldn’t get near a blade of grass there,” he said. (Others have since confirmed this to me.)

But on January 6, there were literally no police present at all when the crowds began arriving. It got weirder from there.

It shocked me. I could see there already was a “party line” of what happened being put out by the mainstream media. So I asked if I could interview him when he got back to Boston and publish all his observations. That’s what we did.

You can read that original MassResistance article with everything he recounted HERE. The accompanying photos are from him or other friends of mine who were there.

Here are some of his major points. Many of these facts were subsequently watered down or neglected in the ensuing media frenzy:

• Trump’s speech at the Ellipse was not a fire-breather that riled people to attack the Capitol. It was just the opposite. It was so subdued that people were leaving early because they were getting bored.
• Walking to the Capitol, one could see that the White House grounds were completely blocked off, which was normal, he said. But he noticed a policeman in an SUV taking pictures of the crowd. That was the last policeman he would see for a long time.
  
  
  Crowd of Trump supporters walking down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Ellipse to the Capitol.
• When he got to the Capitol, it was surprising that there were no police there at all, and people were allowed to get as close to the building as they wanted. “The Capitol building is usually a fortress,” he said, “and the grounds are cordoned off with barriers and policemen all over the place.” He added that the last few times he was there for a rally, the police were even kicking people off the nearby Supreme Court grounds.
• Soon after the area had filled up, several tear gas canisters were shot into the crowd. People from the crowd were running back with their eyes watering and covering their faces. But then that stopped, and things calmed down.
• Just after 1:00 P.M., someone near him with a bullhorn started announcing, “Pence just certified, Pence just certified.” My friend asked him where he had gotten that information and was told “Newsmax or One America.” Then another guy with a bullhorn started shouting, “Yes, it looks like the vice president has betrayed us, it looks like he has certified.” My friend said that seemed odd, because nobody in the crowd had been thinking about that.
  
  
People were just enjoying the event. Despite what the media keeps saying, nobody was thinking about rioting at all.
• When my friend tried to phone a few of his buddies who were nearby, he couldn’t do it. It appeared that the cell phone signals were being jammed. He’d been to many similar large rallies and the phones always worked fine.
• Some people began climbing on the walls and scaffolding — and no police were stopping them. That would normally be considered a serious offense.
  
  
  People up on the scaffolding.
• Strange things continued to happen. More tear gas was shot into the crowd, causing some unruliness. Then a group of three or four policemen showed up and told people to get off the scaffolding. One of the policemen got hit in the face with a tear gas cannister that seemed to come from the scaffolding. The others simply carried him away, and no police returned.
• Someone was also shooting rubber bullets into the crowd. My friend saw several people who were hit. Their clothes were ripped, and they were bleeding.
• At one point, the doors of the Capitol began opening. It didn’t look as though anyone had broken down the doors. They just opened. There were some people in the crowd yelling to move forward and go in. And people started going in.
• There were numerous people throughout the crowd who weren’t dressed like Trump-supporters and certainly didn’t act like them. Many of them wore military-style Antifa-like helmets (see our photos), which our people would never wear. They behaved in a hostile way to the regular Trump people.
  
  
  Nobody on our side wears military-style helmuts. But it's standard with Antifa or deep-state intelligence people..
• Around 4:30, when most of the people had left the area, the Capitol police suddenly showed up in full force. Well-armed Secret Service types with their batons and shields also appeared. But during the entire rally, there were almost zero police, according to my friend.

These are the personal observations of one person who was in the thick of it. He had the presence of mind to recognize what was really going on and so didn’t go near or into the Capitol building itself.

To say that the D.C. and Capitol police handled this completely differently from any other rally or outdoor event is an understatement. As my friend concluded, it was unequivocally a setup by the rogue authorities in and out of the federal government. Since then, we’ve found out that the FBI and other federal agencies (even the CIA) had people on-site to cause trouble. The “riot and insurrection narrative” pushed everywhere is a disgusting part of the scam.

Outrageously, to this day, even most conservative-leaning media dishonestly use the term “riot” to describe what happened. (Epoch Times is a notable exception.) That’s not what happened at all — at least that was not what Trump-supporters engaged in. (We’ve all seen the videos of their unusual behavior when they went inside the Capitol. They acted like tourists — taking selfies with the guards inside.)

We still await a full account of what happened from the federal authorities and the mainstream media.