I was at the Washington, D.C. “Save America” rally

Part I

Contrary to Big Media’s Big Fat Lies, the Save America rally on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, was in my opinion an exhilarating, momentous, peaceful protest.

Spoiler alert: I did not make it inside the Capitol, but I was in the first 25% wave of people that arrived, and like 99.9% of those around me, I jubilantly participated in a peaceful “storming” of the Capitol.

A friend I’ll call “Bill” invited me to go to Washington for what was shaping up to be an historic event. We took the train down from New York the night before and stayed at the apartment of his brother “Jim.” Bill is a former lefty type who quips that the left had to work awfully hard to get him to be the Trump supporter he now is. Jim got totally fed up with the Democrats and is now an avid Trump supporter.

Cat McGuire with two patriots

On arrival to the Ellipse where Trump would speak, I can say based on many Washington marches under my belt that the Save America rally’s turn-out was spectacular.  I heard reports of a million plus present.  We will likely never get an official crowd estimate from the National Park Service.

I’ve been to marches large and small, but I don’t recall encountering such a polite, well-mannered crowd. Bill had been to a prior Trump rally and Jim had been to three (Johnstown, Trump’s hospital vigil, November 3).

They said every rally is the same: uncommonly good, nice people. I figured their love of Trump colored their characterization of the President’s base.  But I discovered at the rally that it’s an actual thing: Trump supporters are by and large decent, down-to-earth, genuine people.

I saw many women at the rally, and tons of young people.  Contrary to the drumbeat that Trump supporters are racist white supremacists, Bill and Jim told me that the rallies they attended were very diverse:  Sikhs, African Americans, Cubans, Mexican, Vietnamese.  The election numbers prove this out, with Trump gaining incredible traction with Black and Hispanic voters.  From what I saw, this Save America rally was almost all White. I never did get a good answer why Trump’s diverse base did not get to D.C. for this rally.

I have to say I was truly surprised how incredibly informed almost everyone I met was.  The conversations I had revealed big-picture thinkers as well as familiarity with granular details. Those I spoke with certainly defied the stereotypical depictions of dumb deplorables.

As expected, there were a lot of Christians in the crowd, some of whom I had great talks with. I’m not a Christian, but I respected their deep faith and the fact that Christians I’ve been meeting of late (not Zionist Christians) are intensely engaged with the pressing political issues of our age. I was expecting to see Orthodox Jews, but didn’t, although I saw the Israeli flag a couple times.

Trump finally came on at 12:00pm and in my opinion he spoke with gravitas.  I appreciated that he came right out and told the crowd to remember all the Republicans who have ended up being turncoats, and the audience appropriately booed on cue. (Check out how Mitt Romney was heckled—uncued—on his flight to D.C.)

We left the Ellipse a little early to make it to the Capitol by 1:00pm when the certification proceedings were scheduled to commence. I assumed everyone would rally outside the Capitol. Some people were saying we should go in and demand the Senate do the right thing, but I didn’t hear anyone echo that idea.

People were angry and disgusted, saying they’ve had enough and they’re not taking it anymore. The stench of the Georgia election the day before was in the air. While the demonstrably stolen national elections were the coup de grace, the Biden Crime Family, China, the lockdowns, the riots and looting, and the totalitarian threat of a Democratic win all figured prominently in people’s minds and emotions, and I saw many protest signs that expressed those concerns.

Walking to the Capitol, we learned that Pence was going to throw Trump under the bus. The feelings of injustice were palpable.  Appropriately, the crowd made a pit stop at the Department of Justice en route to the Capitol. The crowd was really wound up, roaring chants like “Do your work!,” “Shame on you!,” and “Crime scene!”

There were two officials standing in front of the DoJ, and they weren’t the slightest bit worried that this keyed-up crowd might start pelting them with rotten eggs or something. While I saw one protester employ an actual pitchfork to carry his protest sign, I did not see a single visible weapon the entire time.  So much for White men and their guns. Yes, people were angry. Yes, people were venting. But I felt very safe with this crowd.

As we were walking down Constitution Avenue, it dawned on me that there were virtually no police anywhere. They were surely around, but on the thirty-minute walk to the Capitol, we didn’t see a single police officer. I did spy an undercover man with an ear wire and then a few police cars diagonally parked at intersections, but that’s it.

I was really taken aback by the conspicuous absence of a police presence. Every major march I’ve been to, the streets are fully lined with police, sometimes on horses.  I remember being terrified once at a New York City protest when a cop on an enormous steed charged into us demonstrators.

Bill, Jim, and I got to the Capitol about 1:30pm before much of the crowd had arrived and saw protesters running up the steps. We were surprised to see so many going up the steps because we assumed there was a police barrier.

We smelled tear gas and heard flash-bang grenades going off in the distance, but very soon the disturbance fizzled and the unruffled crowd paid no more attention to the possibility of violence—especially since no reinforcements came at all until we left the event at 4:00pm. It was at that time—finally—that police cars began converging on the site as we were walking away.

For some, entering the Capitol was very easy.  I talked to a young Asian man who couldn’t believe how easy it was to enter the building. A White guy told me he went in and out several times. Apparently, there were various entrances.

Dozens of people were rushing up the stairway and congregating on the balconies.  Where we were, though, there was gridlock on the steps.  The long line prompted many to climb the walls, the scaffolding, and construction trailer roofs, which is what we did, and it gave us a panoramic bird’s eye view.

There was a tremendous sense of excitement.  Dozens of people, even hundreds, could have easily “stormed” the Capitol, but chose not to. In fact, a relatively extremely small number entered the building. In my opinion, most did not go in because there was so much camaraderie and patriotic zeal taking place outside. Crowds were singing the Star Spangled Banner, and of course chanting “USA! USA!” The energy was electric, 100% positive, and we were determined to make sure our presence was known to the lawmakers inside who we assumed were deliberating on the certification.

For a crowd this size and in light of the crimes that had been done against our country, the heightened energy flowing amongst us could have been combustible.  But we protesters had about as much malevolence as an energized Superbowl crowd.

Because the vast majority of the crowd was not engaging in violence, I suggest that there was a Charlottesville-type situation in which Antifa types violently breached the Capitol despite filmed instances of Trump supporters trying to stop them.

And just as with Charlottesville that likewise brimmed with agents provocateur, the media are now demonizing the Trump protesters with the calumny of White supremacism—and implicitly treating them as proxies for the 70 to 80 million Trump voters.

I spoke with a middle-aged White guy who was 20 feet behind the late Ashli Babbit. He told me he heard a shot, saw her fall down, and that she was hit in the neck. He said there were people on the scene who told everyone to leave so they could attend to her. He did not tarry, and had to leave through a broken glass door. He struck me as someone who was in a state of semi-shock.  His parting words to me were how fortunate he felt because he “could have been that person.”

Let’s be clear, the so-called Capitol riot was trifling compared to the violent rioting and looting in U.S. cities by Black Lives Matter and Antifa mobs. These events were shamelessly excused by the media, and many celebrities as well as Kamala Harris paid for the bail of those arrested.

Of the 24 photos USA Today posted of “Damage inside the US Capitol,” the most damning consisted of debris, litter, and dust. Compare the property damage of January 6th to last summer when “mostly peaceful protesters” reduced vast swaths of Washington, D.C. to flames.

Biden and Black Lives Matter are now calling the Capitol police racist for treating the violent “Capitol breachers” (Antifa) with kid gloves. If the powers that be actually thought Trump supporters were dangerous extreme-right radicals with guns looking for trouble, wouldn’t the State have been armed to the teeth to protect the Capitol?  I didn’t see any National Guard. I didn’t see any D.C. police.

About 3:00pm, with most everyone from the Ellipse now at the Capitol, we were on the lawn right next to a line of about 25 police officers who walked through the dense crowd in riot gear. They didn’t treat us as if we were “domestic terrorists,” and in turn we treated them respectfully.

Around 4:00pm, everyone began to get an emergency text message from D.C. Mayor Bowser saying a curfew would be in effect from 6:00pm that night until 6:00am the next day.  Everyone dutifully began to leave.

Later when I was able to read the media’s reporting, I was dumbfounded to see something I had experienced as so peaceful, positive, and inspiring be described as violent, negative, and destructive. Black is white. War is peace. The stolen narrative of the Save America rally is my personal 1984 moment.

Part II: How a Life-Long Leftist Ended Up at a Trump “Save America” Rally

I am not a fan of Donald Trump, nor am I a “Q” devotee.  I inherited a liberal Democrat tradition from my mother who is of Italian immigrant descent.  Since 1992, I’ve always voted Green. In the 80s and 90s, I was active in anti-racist and ecofeminist movements.  Around 2010, I emerged from a hiatus of political activity to discover a shocking fact: the 9/11 Official Narrative was riddled with inaccuracies, if not outright lies.

I discovered my liberal-left community offered little information of value on 9/11, largely because leftist thought leaders dismissed unorthodox views as “conspiracy theories.”  Thankfully, I went where the evidence took me, not where orthodox ideology dictated.  I found myself surfing right-wing (!) websites and dialoguing with lions, and tigers, and libertarians, oh my!

By 2016, I had begun to cull the best of liberal-left and conservative-libertarian positions.  My leftist colleagues made the binary assumption that if I wasn’t all-in for Hillary, I must be “for Trump.”  Au contraire.  By 2020, dismayed by the mind-muddle of Trump Derangement Syndrome, coupled with the weaponization of political identity, I now believe the liberal-left has completely devolved into unprincipled putrefying pus.  Their most pernicious mission is hijacking our nation onto an express train to Totalitarianville.

Today I’m neither left nor right.  Like so many other former lefty-liberals, I seek to align on common issues, not tribal loyalties. We embrace core values of a free society:

a) Common sense – the ability to think independently and rationally
b) Truth – a commitment to evidentiary facts and justice without censorship
c) Patriotism – love and respect for one’s country and its peoples
d) Faith – a belief that a higher spiritual force guides us all 

I lived the first 18 years of my life in a small Indiana town, population 900, where my father’s people came from Ireland in the early 1800s and farmed the land.  They were conservative Republicans—proto deplorables, if you will.  Having now lived more than half my life in cosmopolitan New York City, I admit that culturally there remains a significant gap between me and my new We-the-People allies.  Nonetheless, these days I feel a very strong, authentic connection to my roots, rural America, where locals deeply value liberty and our Constitutional freedoms.

So many lefty-liberals did not vote Democratic in 2020 in large part because they recognize that what are notionally called Democrats is now armored with the full array of Deep State Establishment Power, including Big Tech, Big Media-Entertainment, Big Pharma, Corporate Wall Street, the ABC agencies, the Academy, and the Nonprofit Industrial Complex. In cahoots with opportunistic Republicans, this Power intends to usher in a tyrannical Great Reset agenda and assassinate the Constitution—oh, except for the 25^th Amendment.

I spoke with so many people at the January 6^th Washington D.C. rally and learned that these folks incontrovertibly understand what Deep State Establishment Power is about. They know there is overwhelming evidence that the 2020 election was stolen.  They know that seasoned coup makers created chaotic conditions with the mail-in ballot scam, and they gaslight constituents to believe the election was fair.  More alarming, they accuse Trump of fomenting a coup that they themselves are in the midst of orchestrating as we speak.

Under the guise of audacious cunning lies and manipulative propaganda, a very criminal element cheated its way to power. That’s why the rally was called Save America.  And that is what all common sense, truth-loving, patriotic, faithful Americans must do—rise to the occasion to Save America.

Cat McGuire is an activist and writer who lives New York City. She works with Break The Spell, a public outreach group raising awareness about the Covid plandemic and the Great Reset.