Michael Fanone Bravely Runs From His Past

Reality Closes in on America's Potemkin Man

I suspect that DC Metro police officer Michael Fanone would take it as a compliment that few people have been a bigger thorn in the side of January 6 protesters. Clearly, it's a role he's embraced wholeheartedly with his breathlessly covered congressional testimonies, his book deal, and his various media tours.

Perhaps the most telling thing about his public appearances has been his unequivocal language in describing his January 6 experiences.

Yet it's his extreme language that reveals a disturbing truth behind his motivations.

Obviously he's entitled to his opinion about what he experienced and how that made him feel. But I'd like to relate a bit of my own experience in order to illustrate a key difference not about the experiences themselves but rather how we processed our experiences differently.

At one point in the protest there was a lull in the action and people were more focused on leaving the Western Terrace (which was extremely hard to do given the size of the crowd and the narrowness of the points of egress), I walked up to the shield wall positioned at the now infamous "tunnel" and pushed on some shields being held by DC Metro Police.

After a few pushes, I more or less gave up and just leaned against the shields with my hands. My gaze was down. Shaken from being tear-gassed and subjected to flashbangs, I was also exhausted not having eaten anything since breakfast, and was having trouble processing all that was going on.

Presently, a random hand reached between the shields. I felt a tap on my shoulder: tap tap tap. And when I looked up, inches before my eyes was the nozzle of a handheld canister of pepper spray. Before I could react, it went off, dumping a full load directly into my face. Thankfully, my glasses and my Viking-length hair ended up taking the brunt of the blow.

As I staggered back, I lost my balance and fell on my rump. To the sound of laughter. The officers were all laughing at my pratfall.

But it wasn't just the officers. I was laughing too. Laughing while coughing and spitting and blinking the irritant away. Hey, I grew up in a family of three brothers. I know when I've fallen for the oldest trick in the book. And, unlike Michael Fanone, I have a sense of humor that keeps my pretense of self-importance in check.

I still chuckle when I think about that incident. Yes, some of those officers were responsible for the death of Rosanne Boyland and nearly killed Victoria White in acts of clear and extreme police brutality. Yet both then and today, my attitude towards those officers is much more nuanced than Fanone's attitude towards the protesters who did not cause anyone's death.

Despite the fact my prosecutors summoned an entire team of officers to testify at my trial, only one eventually showed up. That one officer's testimony did little to move the needle in terms of my judge's opinion regarding my actions.

Even then, I did not hate that officer. The man who showed up to testify against me at the behest of the prosecutors is no villain in my book. I'd have a beer with Officer Sterling if we ever met again. That's saying something -- especially after 18 months in prison where hatred of all law enforcement on a deeply personal level is beaten into your head on a daily basis.

I understand that it was the prosecutors who put him on the spot and frankly, he didn't exactly come across as a person who held a particular animus towards myself or the other protesters in general. When asked to testify to the injury I caused him, he merely said, "my wrist was sore" from holding the shield all day.

As non-committal as the statement was, it was the prosecutors who claimed this meant that my "assault" was violence with the intent to cause harm. Was Officer Sterling telling the truth? Yes. Was he on board with my prosecution? I really didn't think so.

So, why am I able to perceive this nuanced perspective towards Officer Sterling in particular and the DC Metro Police in general while Fanone has not a single nice word to say about the protesters?

From the start, Fanone has leaned into the most incendiary language, describing the protesters "violent insurrectionists" and "extremists" who have "embraced political violence." Even the title of his 2022 "memoir" refuses to pull punches: "Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop's Battle for America's Soul."

A search for any hint that Fanone held a nuanced view of us protesters turned up empty. In Fanone's mind, every last one of us, no matter what we did or did not do and regardless of our intentions, we were all worthy of the harshest punishment.

In 2024, years after the story of Brian Sicknick's death being caused by the protesters had been debunked, Fanone still blamed the protesters with a weaselly turn of phrase saying, "January 6 led to a colleague of mine dying."

How can his interpretation of the events be so one-sided? Even in tales of modern warfare, it's common for soldiers on opposing sides of the battlefield to at least offer a grudging respect for each other. Part of the tragedy of war is the realization that the people most trying to kill you are themselves people just like yourself.

What's more, Fanone actually owes the protesters respect. Yes, he was pulled out of the line and dragged down the steps and beaten but then something else happened that he does not talk about.

He was escorted from the scene by those same protesters. Protesters who also stepped in and stopped the violence.

Were these people too evil insurrectionists according to Fanone?

Here, Fanone's own rhetoric stands against him. If the mob was as bloodthirsty as he insists, then the actions of those who intervened was nothing short of heroic and life-saving. He recounts that he shouted about his children in order to appeal to their humanity. And The protesters relented. That means even by his own account, the protesters had to have some humanity to appeal to.

One would think some gratitude would be in order. Yet such sentiments have never passed the lips of Officer Michael Fanone. In fact, he's so determined to paper over the fact that he owes his life to the protesters, that he now claims he "somehow" saved his own life:

"The fighting was bad where I was. At one point, I got dragged into the crowd. Rioters beat me with their fists and hard metal objects. I was struck with a flagpole bearing either the American flag or maybe Donald Trump’s MAGA flag. Someone grabbed for my gun over and over again, while another person nearby shouted, 'kill him with his own gun!' Somehow, I was able to extricate myself from the mob and make my way back to safety among my fellow officers."

That's quite the gloss. There's no way he got off the West Terrace without the help of protesters. I was there. There's even video of me trying to leave and giving up.

Fanone's self-congratulatory and monochromatic take is unsurprisingly completely on-message with the rhetoric used by Biden, Merrick Garland, the prosecutors, and the DC federal district judges. All people who worked in chorus to feed the media narrative that there is no such thing as a redeemable J6er.

Hold on here. I was a J6 protester. As I recall events, we were the ones who died that day, not Fanone and not a single one of his fellow officers. And in return for surviving the massacre, we got four years of public defamation, put on the FBI's most wanted list, subjected to outrageous show trials, and slapped with overblown sentences. I lost my career, family members, friends, some of my sanity, and to a large extent my future. If anyone has cause to paint with a broad brush here, I think it's me.

And yet, my attitude towards the DC Metro Police is far more nuanced and understanding compared with Fanone's one-dimensional take.

Why is that?

Charitably, we can say that his role as a public advocate against J6 doesn't allow him that kind of flexibility. That he has a certain narrative goal in pushing his narrow perspective. He must exaggerate for effect. Our lives are mere props in his tall tale of harrowing survival.

Which is little more than a fancy way of saying that he's lying. He's been lying for a very long time now. Finally, it seems that even Fanone is recognizing the truth is catching up to him.

He recently penned a piece for the substack Home of the Brave called "I defended the Capitol on January 6. The rioters think they’ve won."

Here again, Fanone reveals more by what he does not say than by what he does.

Note that he's dropped the term "insurrectionist" in favor of the far less incendiary term "rioter." The reason for this dialing back of rhetoric comes from the title itself. Fanone says that we protesters think we've won. This shows he understands public opinion is swaying away from his preferred narrative and thus, his role as a sincere interlocutor in the discussion is increasingly suspect.

His rhetorical restraint in this piece paints a man who cannot abandon a narrative that is on a collision course with reality.

Notice these days that the same people who took to their fainting couches over the violence demonstrated at the Capitol have expressed no such concerns for the safety of ICE agents and local law enforcement being savaged daily by unrepentant protesters and professional agitators. Neither Sedition Hunter nor Michael Fanone can condemn that violence against law enforcement.

The silence is deliberate. Better to deflect from the ever present messy reality of Leftist political violence than to spend one minute not hyperventilating over a protest over four years ago where only protesters died.

In fact, Fanone's stated goal in writing the piece is to encourage more people to acts of resistance against what he sees as a tyrannical regime.

Kind of an odd take for someone who, one mere year ago, spoke as a self-proclaimed figurehead for all law enforcement.

But for Fanone, it's not about law enforcement per se, but law enforcement when it serves the Democratic party's whims. Ironically, in castigating the popularly elected Trump administration for destroying Democracy and our economy, Fanone outlines a key trait as indicative of the tyranny:

"For Trump, anyone who doesn’t roll over for him—cops, prosecutors, politicians, anyone—is a Deep State plant, a traitor, an anti-American coward. They’re expecting that everyone who opposes them will just shut up and take it. To accept their lies and roll over. To just go away."

So, according to Fanone you know a government is tyrannical when a regime embraces coercive tactics to push its lies in the service of power.

Does this guy even own a mirror? This is exactly what he did for over four straight years.

The Biden era anti-MAGA propaganda is legendary. Not a voter alive today can forget the old man's scowling visage as he looked down his podium on the American voter from a blood red stage.

Yet those narratives have more holes than my prison laundry, especially concerning January 6. That there were people who did use weapons also means there were people who did NOT. That there were people who did act violently means that there were people who did NOT. That there were people who did enter the Capitol means there were people who did NOT.

In contrast to many of the protesters held up as examples of the violent behavior exhibited that day, there's also ample evidence to suggest there were people who acted bravely and conscientiously. None of these people were recognized for their actions.

But I'm not here saying that there were some good protesters and some bad. I think that would be a realistic and reasonable position -- even if it is unpopular in Fanone's circles.

What I'm about to say is something I could not voice for the past four years. Had I done so, it would've immediately resulted in my sentence and possibly even the sentences of other J6ers being inflated by years. You see, when you're being tried by the Federal Government, it's a really good idea to keep your mouth shut because they can and will use it against you.

Even if what I've wanted to say is in defense of everyone who protested at the Capitol. Until Trump was sworn in, there was no way what I'm about to say could have been voiced aloud without massive repercussions. Accusations of lacking remorse, or intimations that the whole affair was somehow coordinated, or the assumption that I was endorsing more "political violence."

Now that I'm not being federally muzzled, I'm at liberty to share with you my true analysis as a person who was on the ground:

We, the protesters ("rioters," "insurrectionists," whatever you want to call us) were good. Not just some of us. All of us. Beyond a question, we were all good people. As a group, we showed enormous restraint and, yes, I am even including the violent ones here.

To this day, officer Fanone feigns ignorance over the real stakes that winter day in 2021, but we knew what was happening. Going all the way back to the Russia Collusion Hoax, not a single one of us believed it. That scandal was perpetrated by the unelected half of the government against its elected head.

We knew long before the recent reveal by Tulsi Gabbard that Barrack Obama colluded with Hillary Clinton's campaign cronies to manipulate both intelligence and law enforcement into creating an illusion in order to codify a lie. We understood what had happened since 2016: the government engaged in mass public deception as an act of treason.

We knew then what they can no longer deny.

Now I'm here to say that truth gets to count for something.

I know that in the mind of every Leftist, every lie which serves the party's purposes becomes a permanent monument in their memory. No matter how many times it's disproven, the Left never feels compelled to update their talking points -- returning again and again and again to their tired old scripts.

That doesn't mean that we on the Right have to LARP along with their twisted view of the world. Not anymore. We J6ers are free now to tell our own stories about the lies used to frame us. We are under no compunction to continue standing by while expendable thralls like Fanone bandy about the same stories he used to make our coworkers, friends, and family form a frothing lynch mob.

When we stood on the steps of the Capitol that day, decrying the phony 2020 election and the subversion of the government by its entitled bureaucrats, we were right to do so.

Right to do so and right to be angry. We believed we had truth on our side then. And it was.

Today, after years of lies and misrepresentations by the Left, that truth now counts.

Future generations will look back on the election of 2020. Had we protesters not been there, those generations would have to hold their heads in shame that Americans simply rolled over to allow a brazenly obvious coup by an anti-American Soviet commissariat. That we stood on the steps of the Capitol and yes, that we even fought and yelled curses -- all of that is to America's credit. Our actions are now part of that historical narrative attesting to the fact that Americans don't take kindly to having our elections stolen by bald-faced liars.

Add to this incredibly high stakes fight the fact that we were the ones who were being brutalized that day -- that we were the ones being shot and killed and bludgeoned.

(And still no cop died.)

According to Fanone's own testimony, protesters reached for his gun. That also means that protesters did NOT reach for his gun. Far beyond that, it also shows that those who wanted nothing to do with Fanone's firearm were in the majority and it was their sentiments that shaped the events of the day.

Fanone's own words stand against him. His tone is laughably inconsistent. We were so evil that we nearly killed him. But didn't. How evil!

I don't have to go into the video records to challenge his take. All I have to do is take Fanone's own words at face value. His portrayal of the protesters is childishly cartoonish. His depiction is an attempt to conjure a wave of hatred against his own fellow citizens for the crime of knowing the truth.

Fanone owes his life to the J6ers. He will never thank those that intervened on his behalf because he knows what I know from having been there:

Those protesters that intervened to save his life? We were the rule, not the exception.

Fanone isn't even the only cop who was pulled from the line. By some counts there may have been as many as four. It's instructive that, unlike Fanone, these other cops remain unidentified.

Why? Could it be that, because they too were not beaten to death or shot by their own service weapons, these other cops likewise developed a more nuanced perspective regarding the protesters?

Perhaps. The possibility points to the fact that other officers recognized the restraint when they saw it. When they experienced it firsthand.

Americans need to take a step back and really think about what actually happened on January 6th, 2021. Not only about the reasons for the protest, but also the scale, the visceral emotional overtones at play, and the violence that the protesters endured for hours at a time.

Truthfully, there is no reason for any cop in the tunnel on the West Terrace to be alive today. The sheer size of the crowd alone means that, if the collective will were there, not only would they have been wholly eliminated, but their remains would've been unrecoverable. Pounded into so much bloody slurry sloshing between the treads of our boots.

That did not happen.

There is no other confrontation in history where a group of 10-20 people went toe-to-toe with thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands (I have my own estimates based on personal experience but I'm willing to default to the smaller crowd sizes posed by the biased legacy media.) We're talking about ratios of maybe hundreds to thousands -- to one.

In recent news from Cincinnati, we've seen how quickly such conflicts are resolved when the odds are a much more manageable handful to one.

That's the real kicker. It's not just that we were right about what was happening. It's not just that we were being brutalized by the police. It's that, despite all that -- despite the stakes and the emotional and physical pain -- we still exercised restraint.

Officer Fanone likes to look back at those odds -- odds that make the Battle of Rorke's Drift look like a neighborhood softball match -- he looks at that situation and pats himself on the back, "We did it!" as if the cops there were somehow successful in repelling the so-called "attack on the Capitol."

But the cops didn't repel us at all. They weren't somehow victorious. We went home. By curfew!

So let's take full stock here:

• We vastly outnumbered the cops

• We the protesters were the ones fighting to save American democracy

• We the protesters had reason to be extremely emotional about what was happening to our government

• We were shot

• We were bludgeoned, some to the point of brain damage and one to the point of death

• No cops notified us that it was an unlawful gathering and we were never ordered to leave the premises until we had already started filing out OF OUR OWN WILL

• Again: BY CURFEW

• While kettled in a crowd on the West Terrace, we absorbed all the cops' punishment for hours

• We had access to the cops' own firearms, per Fanone

• Yet all that happened were broken windows, broken furniture, and muddy footprints on your nice clean marble floors

We weren't violent insurrectionists. We were saints in hunting camo.

We left peacefully. And Joe Biden even won by the end of the day. No one can dispute that outcome. The cops beat, sprayed, and murdered us for a few hours and in return we complied with those same law enforcement officers and went home to prepare for life in our new police state.

And when the arrests happened and the feds rounded us up, not one of us decided to go out in a blaze of glory. This means our restraint wasn't a fluke of the moment. We exercised it daily. For years on end.

To be an American Right Winger is to always bear blame for the crimes the Left is itself in the act of committing. At the same time, we never have our own goodness, restraint, logic, and ethics be commended. No Leftist will ever turn around and admit to being wrong.

Fanone really gives the game away by modifying his speech and suddenly defaulting to calling us "rioters." He can't paint the Trump administration as tyrannical while continuing to use the same invective that allowed him to serve the tyrannical Biden regime for four years.

He's hoping you don't notice the verbal sleight of hand. And we can be honest: no one on the Left is intellectually honest enough to notice. Their sole concern is for the messaging and what's most useful in the moment.

The rest of the world will remember Fanone for who he is. That's an inevitability that's coming crashing down on him. The receipts are out. The bureaucrats schemed and lied and abused the most powerful branches of government to crush authentic democracy. Russia Collusion, Covid, the vaccines, the 2020 election, January 6th -- these are all chapters of the same story.

That means Fanone's gamble on fame is also his albatross. He should've listened to the other officers who didn't sell out their country for clicks and coin. Michael Fanone wasn't defending democracy on January 6th nor was he defending it afterwards. He was book touring for the autocrats at the autopen. He's never been anything more than a lying cutout for a lying cutout. America's Potemkin Man.

Sure, his little essay talks tough, but the subtext reveals his real intention. He will try to do now what he did on January 6th 2021: run. Run from his responsibility. Run from American democracy. Run from the cry of the Republic. And run from his vocation as a man of integrity and law.

Officer Michael Fanone's verbal two-step wasn't merely meant to exaggerate the negative aspects of January 6, they were intended to keep people from the truth. Some might think that the truth is that we weren't all bad, but he knows better. His own take shows that. The reality is we weren't even partially bad, but a unified force for the greater national good.

We sacrificed ourselves to keep Democracy from sliding off the precipice. Our actions were part of the story how Americans banded together to rescue the soul of our society. We paid the price in our own blood and treasure while exacting none in retaliation from those who sold America out. Fanone's violence and Biden's tyranny won that day.

But so too did courage, self-sacrifice, and that kind of restraint that can only be described as valor.

To a foolish man like Fanone, the tyranny of 2021 must have felt like the safer bet. To be honest, that's also how I felt every single day before the 2024 election was finalized.Thankfully,we the protesters didn't indulge in his brand of moral calculus. We rejected the easy path of the shill for the more difficult and virtuous path. Throughout it all, it felt like a long and hopeless path. In the end, by the grace of God, America did finally prevail.

And because of that, and because of the subsequent truth that is coming out, Fanone is forced to stand among a rogues' gallery of bit players in this treasonous scheme. Fanond is now numbered among despicable Americans like Nellie Ohr, Alexander Vindman, Marc Elias, and Jeffrey Zients.

While those of us who fought for America get to stand. Vindicated. And victorious.

Matt da Silva once worked at the highest levels of government trust as a Japanese and Mandarin Navy linguist. In addition to working at the tip of the intel spear, he also has the distinction of having served 18 months in federal prison for his involvement in Jan 6. Now he's pardoned and using his intel analysis and writing skills in defense of the 21st century civil rights movement known as the MAGA movement. You can find more of his writings at his substack (which is free). You may also want to give him a follow on X and TruthSocial or watch his videos on his Rumble channel, J6 Matt Cast. Please subscribe!

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