How Washington’s Elites Are Using a Plaque to Control the January 6 Historical Narrative
By Kelly John Walker
Washington is desperate to control the story of January 6. Not through transparency or debate, but through something far more enduring: government-sanctioned memory.
At the center of this battle is a seemingly simple object—a plaque Congress ordered to honor law enforcement officers who responded on January 6, 2021. Yet that plaque has become the tool by which Congress and the Senate hope to finalize their version of history and foreclose everyone else’s.
America’s Founders warned us about moments like this: “It is error alone that needs the support of government. Truth can stand on its own,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. When the government feels the need to chisel its version of events into bronze while silencing others, it is a sign of insecurity, as if to force its version of history onto the populace.
And, make no mistake, Washington is very insecure about January 6 because, at heart, they do not want the People evaluating their job performance or questioning the “official” narrative.
In March 2022, Congress passed Public Law 117-103 directing the Architect of the Capitol to obtain and install a permanent plaque on the Capitol’s West Front, listing every officer who responded on January 6. When the statutory deadline passed without compliance, Officers Harry Dunn and Daniel Hodges filed suit on June 12, 2025, alleging that the government’s failure to honor its own law caused reputational, psychological, and safety harms—signaling that their “sacrifice” was worth recognition.
But who was actually “sacrificed” on that fateful day?
The J6 community has long observed that the only deaths that occurred on January 6 were those of five American citizens—not law enforcement officers—a fact rarely acknowledged in the official narrative and still largely unexamined by Congress or the press.
Ashli Babbitt—an unarmed Air Force veteran—was shot at close range by Lieutenant Michael Byrd, while Rosanne Boyland collapsed after exposure to chemical agents and was later seen on video being struck repeatedly by Metropolitan Police Officer Lila Morris while lying unconscious. These deaths, along with others too quickly dismissed as “peripheral” or “justifed,” are cataloged and examined in StopHate’s January 6 Death Count project, which lays out the human cost the government refuses to discuss.
The System Protects Itself—Extensions for the Powerful, Waiting for the People
When the lawsuit was filed, the public got a rare glimpse into how power protects itself in Washington.
Cindy Young, one of the intervenors, noted that while her motion languished, the government marched forward toward installing its preferred narrative. In other words, the government gets all the time it wants, the people get procedural dead ends, and the “history” gets written before the courtroom ever rules.
Jefferson again anticipated this imbalance: “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive.”
The Senate Moves to Finalize the Narrative
With the case still active and serious constitutional questions unresolved, the U.S. Senate recently voted to move forward with displaying the plaque—while the House refused to hang it at the Capitol. The Senate’s maneuver serves one purpose: to give Washington’s elites the public pageantry they need to claim that “history has spoken.”
There will be no debate and no dissent. The cameras will roll and a fabrication will be bolted to the wall. Washington, D.C. is the ultimate gated community and no one wants to make the paid security unhappy.
This maneuver allows the political class to cave to pressure Dunn and Hodges to withdraw their lawsuit (“you got what you wanted”) while ensuring that voices like Young’s, who challenge the government’s selective memory, are shut out entirely.
Government Speech as Historical Foreclosure
Young’s filings make a crucial argument that the media refused to touch: a government plaque is not neutral. It is government speech that overrides free speech—taxpayer-funded and placed on public ground to shape collective memory.
Once installed, it will be shown to tourists, cited in classrooms, echoed by dignitaries, and accepted as settled truth—regardless of what the full story actually is. And what “truth” will it convey? Only the government’s truth— a version of January 6 that elevates federal institutions and erases the myriad voices of those held hostage and punished by unprecedented lawfare for protesting a botched election.
In her emergency motion, Young warns that the government’s effort is not an act of remembrance but one of “historical foreclosure,” by which finality is imposed without debate and certainty is memorialized before inquiry. It is the very tactic Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn chronicled in The Gulag Archipelago: a regime’s subtle but devastating authority to determine who shall be celebrated as hero, who shall be branded as villain, and who shall simply vanish from the ledger of history.
Elite Memory vs. People’s Memory
The battle over January 6 is ultimately a battle over memory, and memory determines legitimacy.
As FreedomTalk Magazine’s review of The American Gulag Chronicles: The Road to Freedom observed, a nation that loses its memory becomes vulnerable to abuses it once swore it would never tolerate. The regime knows this, which is why its control of language, media, and “official history” has intensified, not relaxed.
The elites need a curated January 6 for the same reason every regime needs its own mythology: because their legitimacy rests on an unchallenged narrative. And who challenges narratives? Not institutions, but the people.
That is why defendants in the January 6 prosecutions had to be labeled “terrorists.” That is why dissenters had to be censored and demonized. That is why Dunn and Hodges must be selectively honored while January 6 prisoners are selectively forgotten. Reality must be rearranged so that government is always heroic, never questioned, never accountable.
The official government narrative lines up a false dichotomy: heroes on one side, villains on the other, and Washington always on the winning team. But as Soren Kierkegaard warned, “there are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
History Is Being Written Without Evidence, Without Debate, Without Us
What makes the plaque fight so revealing is not what the government says, but how it behaves. If Washington were confident in its narrative, it would welcome debate, discovery, testimony, documents, and evidence. It would embrace historians, researchers, defense attorneys, and families. It would place every victim of an orchestrated “fedsurrection” into the sunlight.
Instead, the government has done precisely the opposite. It has stalled the case in court, pressured litigants behind the scenes, kept key footage from public view, manipulated labels and language in the press, fast-tracked ceremonies meant to confer legitimacy, and quietly sidelined interventions that might complicate the narrative. If the government’s account of January 6 were truly grounded in objective truth, it would not require the protection of closed archives, sealed video evidence, media embargoes, biased prosecutions, commemorative plaques, and staged displays of institutional unity. Truth does not depend on such scaffolding; it speaks through the people, not in spite of them.
Jefferson warned that “the issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite,” and the plaque controversy distills that struggle with unsettling clarity. On one side stand the Senate, the congressional bureaucracy, legacy media, appointed officials, and a judiciary willing to slow-walk proceedings, all working in concert through the mechanisms of government speech and the quiet machinery of historical closure. On the other side are the families searching for truth, the citizens fighting to preserve memory, the intervenors demanding inclusion, and the dissidents who insist upon debate. One camp seeks to decide history in advance; the other simply asks to discover it and allow the light of truth to prevail. The first relies on power; the second depends on the right of the people to dissent and exercise free speech.
Yet there is a ray of hope. The American Gulag Chronicles book trilogy serves as a bulwark against erasure—a living archive that insists history must include the voices of those who suffered under a weaponized justice system. Unlike the polished narratives produced by government committees and media conglomerates, these volumes preserve the raw testimony of prisoners, families, researchers, and citizen-journalists who refused to let their experiences be buried. In doing so, they perform the oldest civic function of dissident literature: to ensure that future generations are not left with propaganda in place of memory. If plaques and press conferences tell the fable as the government wishes it to be remembered, The Gulag Chronicles documents the story as it was lived—unfiltered, unapproved, and unbroken—and it is precisely this contrast that makes the trilogy indispensable for any honest accounting of January 6.
The plaque controversy is not about metal or marble, but about how nations tell stories, and who gets the final word. Jefferson told us that “the spirit of resistance to government is so valuable” because there are moments in history when silence is complicity. We are living in such a moment.
If Washington’s elites succeed, their version of January 6 will be presented as final, not because it is true, but because it has been affixed to federal property and shielded from scrutiny. The tragedy is not that elites lie—we’ve come to expect that—it is that they do so with the full machinery of the taxpayer-funded state behind them, while the people must fight just to be heard. That is hardly what the Founding Fathers envisioned.
One can hear the echoes of the Father of the American Revolution crying out from the grave, “the advice of Samuel Adams is to no longer insult the feelings of an already exasperated people.”
We cannot permit the closing chapter of this story to be drafted by the elites alone. A genuine republic demands plurality of memory, and so a second memorial—one that reflects the experience of those who suffered under an overzealous and vindictive regime—must stand alongside the government’s bronze narrative. Only then can history do what it was meant to do: allow the public to weigh competing accounts and arrive at its own conclusions. After all, is not transparency—and the freedom to form one’s own ideas—the very standard by which we are told “our democracy” is protected?
