Scott Rhee's Reviews > Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop's Battle for America's Soul

As more and more information comes out about what led up to the horrific events of January 6, 2021—-that Trump not only incited the conflagration but purposefully did absolutely nothing to mitigate or stop his followers for several hours; that some Republican members of the House and Senate aided and abetted the terrorists as they broke through the police lines; that the attack on the Capitol was a far more coordinated effort than originally thought—-it is disheartening that so many people don’t seem to be appropriately outraged or passionate about it.

Is it a case of news burn-out? People just get tired of hearing about it, so they stop caring? Or is it a case of helplessness and apathy? The average person just feeling like he or she can’t do anything to change the corruption in Washington, DC, so why bother? It seems to me that both cases are exactly what Trump and his lackeys want, because they want us to forget and move on, disingenuously claiming that letting bygones be bygones will somehow bring a sense of unity back to partisan politics when, in fact, it is nothing more than an attempt to dodge true accountability.

January 6 still angers me. I am still horrified and bewildered by the events of that day, and I refuse to let it go. Like Michael Fanone—-the DC vice cop that answered the call to help his fellow Capitol police officers under siege by a violent mob (each officer there was outnumbered 58 to 1) and suffered a beating that resulted in a heart attack, major concussion, and PTSD—-I find it a disgrace the way some Republicans have either downplayed or completely denied the events of that day. The implication is clear: they see their own culpability—-four years of sycophantic ring-kissing and either turning a blind eye or blatantly green lighting Trump’s anti-democratic (and, yes, criminal) policy-making—-so they need to downplay or ignore it for posterity’s sake. They believe that the average American is stupid and will forget about all this in a few years. They also believe that history will forget about it, too, if we all just shut up about it.

Well, Fanone isn’t shutting up about it. In his book “Hold the Line”, Fanone tells his first-hand account of being knee-deep in the shit of that day: being dragged into the middle of the insurrectionists and beaten with a flagpole that ironically waved a “Blue Lives Matter” flag; tazed repeatedly at the base of his neck resulting in being knocked unconscious for four minutes and subsequently suffering minor brain damage; hearing someone scream “Shoot him with his own gun!”; being terrified that he was going to die and screaming, “I have kids! I have kids!”, which may have actually saved his life; having some insurrectionists actually pull him back to safety. Famously, on a live TV interview, Fanone, in regards to those in the crowd who helped him, responded, “Thank you, but fuck you for being there in the first place.”

I personally love him for that. That one line, strangely enough, riled up a hornet’s nest of anger from many people, all for the wrong reasons, in my opinion. No, Fanone isn’t saying that he’s against protesting. He’s also not saying that everyone at that protest necessarily went there with the intention of doing harm and attempting to overturn the election. What he is saying is that everybody involved in that attempted coup (and let’s not sugar-coat it: it was a coup attempt, and an insurrection) was there because they were either gullible and actually believed Trump’s Big Lie or knew the truth but didn’t care because they wanted to make history.

Fanone has pissed off a lot of people. Foremost among the pissed are, of course, the Trump supporters and supporters of the insurrectionists. He still gets death threats. He’s also pissed off a lot of the Republicans who are trying to push a false narrative that January 6 was just a peaceful protest and a day of “hugs and kisses”. Sadly, though, he’s also pissed off a lot of his fellow brothers-in-blue. Many of them, if not all, he notes, are white, because Fanone is smart enough to see the role racism and white supremacy played in the events of January 6, and he’s not afraid to say it.

“Hold the Line” is an important book to read for anyone who believes in things like Truth and Integrity. Fanone is a true American hero.