J1 – The Anniversary of the BLM Insurrection at the White House
By
Daniel Greenfield
On
June 01, 2023
In
Washington D.C.
On May 29th, 2020, the nationwide insurrection by the racist hate group BLM and its leftist allies arrived in the nation’s capital in a very big way.
On Friday night, a violent racist leftist mob, falsely described as “peaceful” by its media allies, converged on the White House. The insurrectionists assaulted Secret Service and Park Police officers. They shouted obscenities and threatened President Trump even as they fought their way past law enforcement personnel to reach the White House.
“It looks like a war zone outside the White House,” Adam Parkhomenko, the former co-founder of Ready for Hillary, commented on a retweeted video of a burning building.
The Democrat insurrectionists hurled Molotov cocktails and rushed out for brief tactical forays even as a more telegenic crowd that was proportionately more female held their hands up for the cameras and chanted, “Hands up, don’t shoot”: a BLM hoax popularized during the Michael Brown riots. While these human shields faced off with law enforcement, the real attack was underway with insurrectionists targeting security barriers and Secret Service personnel.
Secret Service personnel faced everything from bricks to incendiary devices and held the line. The insurrectionist assault was aimed at breaking the line, forcing the Secret Service to retreat allowing for a siege of the White House, followed by a full assault and penetration of the grounds. But despite the violence, the Secret Service did not retreat and none of the Democrat insurrectionists were able to make it over the White House fence.
The insurrectionist tactics on display were similar to those that had terrorized cities around the country, but what especially alarmed federal personnel was that the insurrectionists were not just aiming at the White House, but also at the nearby Treasury Department building.
The Treasury Building is connected to the East Wing of the White House by a secret tunnel built after Pearl Harbor to allow the president to evacuate in case of an attack.
When the insurrectionists penetrated barricades set up at the Treasury Building, there was fear that the attackers were preparing to foil a presidential evacuation by hitting both the White House and the Treasury Building, cutting off any possible escape route for President Trump.
With the Treasury evacuation route in danger, the Secret Service brought President Trump, along with Melania and Barron, down to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. Another relic of the FDR administration, the PEOC is a secretive bunker over 1,000 feet underground with its own air supply that is nearly impossible to penetrate by missile strikes or even by an armed force that has taken control of the White House grounds.
Taking presidential family members to the PEOC is usually a response to an aerial threat like rockets or aircraft on 9/11, when there isn’t enough time to evacuate in a conventional fashion. The use of the PEOC during the BLM insurrection however was triggered by the attack on the Treasury Department. With D.C. streets overrun by rioters and no cooperation from Mayor Bowser, the Secret Service may have believed that a street evacuation was too risky. And an aerial evacuation would have been ruled out until the grounds were fully secured.
On Saturday, May 30th, the insurrectionist occupation of D.C. continued. The Lincoln Memorial and the World War II Memorial were vandalized and 11 police officers were injured. An attempt was made to burn the historic Chamber of Commerce Building. And even with Trump out of town, the insurrectionist mob continued to try to reach the White House.
The D.C. National Guard was activated in the largest deployment since the black nationalist riots after Martin Luther King’s murder. Democrat governors in charge of nearby forces however remained sympathetic to the insurrectionists and refused to deploy to protect the capital.
Virginia’s Gov. Northam, New York’s Gov. Cuomo and Pennsylvania’s Gov. Wolf, among other pro-insurrectionist governors, made it clear that a new civil war was underway.
President Trump flew out to Florida to watch Elon Musk’s SpaceX launch at the Kennedy SpaceCenter. He had originally planned to be there for much of the week, but had cut short his visit earlier that week and returned to Washington D.C. just in time for the insurrection.
Instead of celebrating another great national accomplishment, President Trump was forced to begin his remarks at the launch by paying tribute to George Floyd, whose misreported drug overdose earlier that week had been used as a pretext for the nationwide insurrection.
“The death of George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis was a grave tragedy. It should never have happened. It has filled Americans all over the country with horror, anger, and grief,” Trump said at the Kennedy Space Center. “I stand before you in firm opposition to anyone exploiting this tragedy to loot, rob, attack, and menace.”
But these remarks did nothing to damp down the violence of the leftist insurrection.
Despite the wounds suffered by her own cops, Mayor Bowser, who had refused to allow the police to help stop the violence, made a public statement of support for the insurrectionists.
“While [Trump] hides behind his fence afraid/alone, I stand w/ people peacefully exercising their First Amendment Right after the murder of #GeorgeFloyd & hundreds of years of institutional racism,” the Democrat politician sneered. “There are no vicious dogs & ominous weapons. There is just a scared man. Afraid/alone…”
On Sunday, May 31st, with President Trump back, the violence intensified. Efforts were made to set the Church of the Presidents on fire. The White House guard house used by the Secret Service was reportedly torched. The BLM insurrectionists also pulled down and burned American flags where they could find them. Six members of the National Guard were wounded by Democrat insurrectionists throwing bricks. One of the Guardsmen was struck in the head.
The Inspector General’s report for the Department of the Interior documented “bricks, rocks, caustic liquids, frozen water bottles, glass bottles, lit flares, rental scooters, and fireworks” thrown at Park Police officers resulting in 49 injuries. 16 of those occurred on May 31st.
Fearing that they might be overwhelmed by the insurrectionists, DEA and ICE agents were brought in to help the National Guard. So was the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. Non-essential White House personnel were told to stay home because it was not safe for them to come to work.
By June 1st or J1, 60 Secret Service personnel had “sustained multiple injuries from projectiles such as bricks, rocks, bottles, fireworks” and were “punched, kicked, punched, and exposed to bodily fluids.” That number would later be updated to 67 injured.
With the weekend over, White House employees returning to work were told to hide their IDs because with the insurrectionists in control of the streets, their safety could not be assured.
President Trump was urged to invoke the Insurrection Act by Attorney General Barr, who was trying to mobilize every federal law enforcement agency in D.C., but still knew that there was not enough manpower, and by Stephen Miller, but was dissuaded from doing so by Gen. Milley.
“The riots over the summer, you know, I could make a case that those riots were riots organic to an aggrieved community that perceived that they had various injustices throughout their life,” Milley would later tell the J6 Committee, expressing his sympathy for the J1 insurrectionists.
President Trump was determined to reject the siege and challenged the insurrectionists on J1 with a walk to the Church of the Presidents accompanied by Barr, Milley, and other government officials. The plan was that Trump would enter the church and pray inside, but it was boarded up due to the rioting. Instead he held up a bible in what would become a powerful symbol.
In the Rose Garden, Trump had pledged to be a “president of law and order” and “an ally of all peaceful protesters”, but pro-insurrectionist Democrats denounced his defense of law and order and falsely claimed that “non-violent” insurrectionists “peacefully protesting” had been cleared out of Lafayette Square by law enforcement to make way for Trump’s visit to the church.
The clearance operation was part of a pre-existing plan to secure the area with more fences and the peaceful insurrectionists were, according to the Chief of the Park Police, armed with “bricks, rocks, caustic liquids, water bottles, lit flares, fireworks and 2×4 sections of wood.”
Senator Ron Wyden accused Trump of giving a “fascist speech” that “verged on a declaration of war against American citizens.”
“These are not the words of a president, they are the words of a dictator,” Kamala Harris tweeted.
While the threat had been more severe on previous days, on J1, national Democrats openly began expressing their support for the insurrectionist attacks on the nation’s capital.
Sen. Tom Udall and Rep. Jim McGovern teamed up to write an op-ed falsely claiming that the National Guard had been mobilized “against American citizens peacefully protesting”. They did not explain what role bricks and rocks play in peaceful protests. Or how over 100 law enforcement personnel came to be injured by insurrectionists “peacefully protesting”.
Under the mounting pressure of pro-insurrection propaganda by Democrats and their media, military leaders quickly retreated. Unlike previous deployments to riot zones, like the L.A. riots, the Guardsmen had been deployed without being able to defend themselves. And by the end of the week they had been officially disarmed. Even helicopter pilots who had “disturbed” the insurrectionists by flying too low were investigated and later wrongly disciplined.
Some of the insurrectionists would later sue for “emotional damage”.
On Tuesday, June 6th, the arrival of more troops from conservative states, that, unlike the D.C. National Guard, were reliable, helped turn the tide. But the political battle had been lost.
D.C. government elites, from Senator Elizabeth Warren to Senator Mitt Romney, appeared at protests to express support for the insurrectionists. By Wednesday, the National Guard began to withdraw. The most overt violence had ended, but its leftist political goals had been achieved.
And yet federal law enforcement and the troops had succeeded in holding the line.
The insurrection continued across the nation, but it never hit the same level of violence in Washington D.C. J1 countered and broke the insurrection around the White House. More importantly it showed what was possible with a little courage and resolution. Had J1 become a national model, much of the destruction of the BLM insurrection could have been prevented.
Unfortunately, pro-insurrection Democrats and their media intimidated federal law enforcement and the military leadership. Congressional investigations were launched and scapegoats were punished. Gen. Milley’s racist endorsement for studying “white rage” was typical of the frantic response of careerists who cared nothing for the nation, but were worried about their jobs.
What the insurrection had failed to achieve through a tactical assault, it won politically.
While military wokeness was already a problem, Gen. Milley and other military brass accelerated it radically. Top military leaders were soon ordering racist political indoctrination sessions in support of the insurrectionists. This led to severe drops in morale and shortfalls in recruitment that continue to this day. The White House held, but the military was lost.
During the J1 insurrection, Democrats and their media denounced the use of troops in D.C. After J6, there was a massive extended deployment of the National Guard along with a nearly unprecedented militarization of the area. When Biden rode to his inauguration, instead of cheering crowds, there were troops. And the same Democrats and media who had denounced the deployment of troops on J1 as “fascist” supported it in the Biden era making it clear that they had not opposed the deployment of the military, they had supported the J1 insurrectionists.
J1 has largely been buried and forgotten. The attacks on the White House and other government buildings have been whitewashed. A partial list of the injuries includes 67 Secret Service personnel, 49 Park Police officers, 11 Metro police officers, 6 Guardsmen, and unknown numbers of federal personnel from agencies who operated without making public statements.
Those over 120 injuries along with the arson and vandalism disprove the lie that the J1 insurrection was peaceful and non-violent. But the larger unanswered question is what might have happened if federal law enforcement personnel, ranging from the Bureau of Prisons to ICE to the FBI, the Marshalls and the Secret Service had failed to hold the line in D.C.
June 1 marks the second anniversary of one of the worst attacks on our center of government.
Democrat governors had rejected aid to the White House and military leaders like Gen. Milley would prove themselves to be fundamentally untrustworthy. Had the insurrectionists entered the White House, we might have witnessed the fall of the center of the government and the murder of a president. That nothing like this happened is a debt we owe to the mostly unknown men who stood up to the insurrectionists and their supporters in Congress and the media, who held the line against bricks and incendiary devices, and all through the long nights, saved our nation.
Thank you for reading.
On Friday night, a violent racist leftist mob, falsely described as “peaceful” by its media allies, converged on the White House. The insurrectionists assaulted Secret Service and Park Police officers. They shouted obscenities and threatened President Trump even as they fought their way past law enforcement personnel to reach the White House.
“It looks like a war zone outside the White House,” Adam Parkhomenko, the former co-founder of Ready for Hillary, commented on a retweeted video of a burning building.
Secret Service personnel faced everything from bricks to incendiary devices and held the line. The insurrectionist assault was aimed at breaking the line, forcing the Secret Service to retreat allowing for a siege of the White House, followed by a full assault and penetration of the grounds. But despite the violence, the Secret Service did not retreat and none of the Democrat insurrectionists were able to make it over the White House fence.
The insurrectionist tactics on display were similar to those that had terrorized cities around the country, but what especially alarmed federal personnel was that the insurrectionists were not just aiming at the White House, but also at the nearby Treasury Department building.
The Treasury Building is connected to the East Wing of the White House by a secret tunnel built after Pearl Harbor to allow the president to evacuate in case of an attack.
When the insurrectionists penetrated barricades set up at the Treasury Building, there was fear that the attackers were preparing to foil a presidential evacuation by hitting both the White House and the Treasury Building, cutting off any possible escape route for President Trump.
With the Treasury evacuation route in danger, the Secret Service brought President Trump, along with Melania and Barron, down to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. Another relic of the FDR administration, the PEOC is a secretive bunker over 1,000 feet underground with its own air supply that is nearly impossible to penetrate by missile strikes or even by an armed force that has taken control of the White House grounds.
Taking presidential family members to the PEOC is usually a response to an aerial threat like rockets or aircraft on 9/11, when there isn’t enough time to evacuate in a conventional fashion. The use of the PEOC during the BLM insurrection however was triggered by the attack on the Treasury Department. With D.C. streets overrun by rioters and no cooperation from Mayor Bowser, the Secret Service may have believed that a street evacuation was too risky. And an aerial evacuation would have been ruled out until the grounds were fully secured.
On Saturday, May 30th, the insurrectionist occupation of D.C. continued. The Lincoln Memorial and the World War II Memorial were vandalized and 11 police officers were injured. An attempt was made to burn the historic Chamber of Commerce Building. And even with Trump out of town, the insurrectionist mob continued to try to reach the White House.
The D.C. National Guard was activated in the largest deployment since the black nationalist riots after Martin Luther King’s murder. Democrat governors in charge of nearby forces however remained sympathetic to the insurrectionists and refused to deploy to protect the capital.
Virginia’s Gov. Northam, New York’s Gov. Cuomo and Pennsylvania’s Gov. Wolf, among other pro-insurrectionist governors, made it clear that a new civil war was underway.
President Trump flew out to Florida to watch Elon Musk’s SpaceX launch at the Kennedy SpaceCenter. He had originally planned to be there for much of the week, but had cut short his visit earlier that week and returned to Washington D.C. just in time for the insurrection.
Instead of celebrating another great national accomplishment, President Trump was forced to begin his remarks at the launch by paying tribute to George Floyd, whose misreported drug overdose earlier that week had been used as a pretext for the nationwide insurrection.
“The death of George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis was a grave tragedy. It should never have happened. It has filled Americans all over the country with horror, anger, and grief,” Trump said at the Kennedy Space Center. “I stand before you in firm opposition to anyone exploiting this tragedy to loot, rob, attack, and menace.”
But these remarks did nothing to damp down the violence of the leftist insurrection.
Despite the wounds suffered by her own cops, Mayor Bowser, who had refused to allow the police to help stop the violence, made a public statement of support for the insurrectionists.
“While [Trump] hides behind his fence afraid/alone, I stand w/ people peacefully exercising their First Amendment Right after the murder of #GeorgeFloyd & hundreds of years of institutional racism,” the Democrat politician sneered. “There are no vicious dogs & ominous weapons. There is just a scared man. Afraid/alone…”
On Sunday, May 31st, with President Trump back, the violence intensified. Efforts were made to set the Church of the Presidents on fire. The White House guard house used by the Secret Service was reportedly torched. The BLM insurrectionists also pulled down and burned American flags where they could find them. Six members of the National Guard were wounded by Democrat insurrectionists throwing bricks. One of the Guardsmen was struck in the head.
The Inspector General’s report for the Department of the Interior documented “bricks, rocks, caustic liquids, frozen water bottles, glass bottles, lit flares, rental scooters, and fireworks” thrown at Park Police officers resulting in 49 injuries. 16 of those occurred on May 31st.
Fearing that they might be overwhelmed by the insurrectionists, DEA and ICE agents were brought in to help the National Guard. So was the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. Non-essential White House personnel were told to stay home because it was not safe for them to come to work.
By June 1st or J1, 60 Secret Service personnel had “sustained multiple injuries from projectiles such as bricks, rocks, bottles, fireworks” and were “punched, kicked, punched, and exposed to bodily fluids.” That number would later be updated to 67 injured.
With the weekend over, White House employees returning to work were told to hide their IDs because with the insurrectionists in control of the streets, their safety could not be assured.
President Trump was urged to invoke the Insurrection Act by Attorney General Barr, who was trying to mobilize every federal law enforcement agency in D.C., but still knew that there was not enough manpower, and by Stephen Miller, but was dissuaded from doing so by Gen. Milley.
“The riots over the summer, you know, I could make a case that those riots were riots organic to an aggrieved community that perceived that they had various injustices throughout their life,” Milley would later tell the J6 Committee, expressing his sympathy for the J1 insurrectionists.
President Trump was determined to reject the siege and challenged the insurrectionists on J1 with a walk to the Church of the Presidents accompanied by Barr, Milley, and other government officials. The plan was that Trump would enter the church and pray inside, but it was boarded up due to the rioting. Instead he held up a bible in what would become a powerful symbol.
In the Rose Garden, Trump had pledged to be a “president of law and order” and “an ally of all peaceful protesters”, but pro-insurrectionist Democrats denounced his defense of law and order and falsely claimed that “non-violent” insurrectionists “peacefully protesting” had been cleared out of Lafayette Square by law enforcement to make way for Trump’s visit to the church.
The clearance operation was part of a pre-existing plan to secure the area with more fences and the peaceful insurrectionists were, according to the Chief of the Park Police, armed with “bricks, rocks, caustic liquids, water bottles, lit flares, fireworks and 2×4 sections of wood.”
Senator Ron Wyden accused Trump of giving a “fascist speech” that “verged on a declaration of war against American citizens.”
“These are not the words of a president, they are the words of a dictator,” Kamala Harris tweeted.
While the threat had been more severe on previous days, on J1, national Democrats openly began expressing their support for the insurrectionist attacks on the nation’s capital.
Sen. Tom Udall and Rep. Jim McGovern teamed up to write an op-ed falsely claiming that the National Guard had been mobilized “against American citizens peacefully protesting”. They did not explain what role bricks and rocks play in peaceful protests. Or how over 100 law enforcement personnel came to be injured by insurrectionists “peacefully protesting”.
Under the mounting pressure of pro-insurrection propaganda by Democrats and their media, military leaders quickly retreated. Unlike previous deployments to riot zones, like the L.A. riots, the Guardsmen had been deployed without being able to defend themselves. And by the end of the week they had been officially disarmed. Even helicopter pilots who had “disturbed” the insurrectionists by flying too low were investigated and later wrongly disciplined.
Some of the insurrectionists would later sue for “emotional damage”.
On Tuesday, June 6th, the arrival of more troops from conservative states, that, unlike the D.C. National Guard, were reliable, helped turn the tide. But the political battle had been lost.
D.C. government elites, from Senator Elizabeth Warren to Senator Mitt Romney, appeared at protests to express support for the insurrectionists. By Wednesday, the National Guard began to withdraw. The most overt violence had ended, but its leftist political goals had been achieved.
And yet federal law enforcement and the troops had succeeded in holding the line.
The insurrection continued across the nation, but it never hit the same level of violence in Washington D.C. J1 countered and broke the insurrection around the White House. More importantly it showed what was possible with a little courage and resolution. Had J1 become a national model, much of the destruction of the BLM insurrection could have been prevented.
Unfortunately, pro-insurrection Democrats and their media intimidated federal law enforcement and the military leadership. Congressional investigations were launched and scapegoats were punished. Gen. Milley’s racist endorsement for studying “white rage” was typical of the frantic response of careerists who cared nothing for the nation, but were worried about their jobs.
What the insurrection had failed to achieve through a tactical assault, it won politically.
While military wokeness was already a problem, Gen. Milley and other military brass accelerated it radically. Top military leaders were soon ordering racist political indoctrination sessions in support of the insurrectionists. This led to severe drops in morale and shortfalls in recruitment that continue to this day. The White House held, but the military was lost.
During the J1 insurrection, Democrats and their media denounced the use of troops in D.C. After J6, there was a massive extended deployment of the National Guard along with a nearly unprecedented militarization of the area. When Biden rode to his inauguration, instead of cheering crowds, there were troops. And the same Democrats and media who had denounced the deployment of troops on J1 as “fascist” supported it in the Biden era making it clear that they had not opposed the deployment of the military, they had supported the J1 insurrectionists.
J1 has largely been buried and forgotten. The attacks on the White House and other government buildings have been whitewashed. A partial list of the injuries includes 67 Secret Service personnel, 49 Park Police officers, 11 Metro police officers, 6 Guardsmen, and unknown numbers of federal personnel from agencies who operated without making public statements.
Those over 120 injuries along with the arson and vandalism disprove the lie that the J1 insurrection was peaceful and non-violent. But the larger unanswered question is what might have happened if federal law enforcement personnel, ranging from the Bureau of Prisons to ICE to the FBI, the Marshalls and the Secret Service had failed to hold the line in D.C.
June 1 marks the second anniversary of one of the worst attacks on our center of government.
Democrat governors had rejected aid to the White House and military leaders like Gen. Milley would prove themselves to be fundamentally untrustworthy. Had the insurrectionists entered the White House, we might have witnessed the fall of the center of the government and the murder of a president. That nothing like this happened is a debt we owe to the mostly unknown men who stood up to the insurrectionists and their supporters in Congress and the media, who held the line against bricks and incendiary devices, and all through the long nights, saved our nation.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
Thank you for reading.
