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Sunday, October 02, 2022 12:12:44 PM
Michael Fanone Is Not Your Fucking Hero
He almost lost his life defending the Capitol on Jan. 6. Now, he’s a #resistance star — and he hates it
LET IT BE known that Michael Fanone does not in any way, shape, or form want to visit the U.S. Capitol. “It’s so fucking lame,” he tells me on the phone one August night as we’re discussing what we should do over the next few days together.
What he absolutely does not want to do is this: He does not want to roam the so-called hallowed halls of democracy or gaze pensively upon the portraits of dead white men or retrace the steps he took on Jan. 6, 2021, when he responded to a distress call from the Capitol Police and joined the scrum of cops pushing back violent insurrectionists inside a tunnel on the Capitol’s west end. He does not want to stare into the middle distance, stony-faced and solemn, as he explains how he was pulled into the crowd, beaten with pipes and the pole of a Blue Lives Matter flag, tazed at the base of his skull, suffered a heart attack and a traumatic brain injury, and fended off attackers with pleas of “I got kids” before losing consciousness for more than four minutes.
He does not want to parade around like some goddamn American hero, even if he is a goddamn American hero, because Michael Fanone knows what can happen to American heroes, and it isn’t fucking good. “So little of my life has been spent in that building, and — fuck that place,” he tells me later, after we have spent two days together very much not visiting the U.S. Capitol. “And fuck the people inside it too.”
Like, fuck, for instance, the 21 House Republicans who voted against awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6. Well, when Fanone got a load of that shit, he called up his friend Harry Dunn — a Capitol Police officer who had testified with Fanone during the congressional hearings in July 2021 — and the two decided to pay a little visit to every one of those House Republicans (“I was like, ‘I’ve got nothing better to do today. I’m going to go annoy some people on Capitol Hill’”).
Speaking of those visits, fuck the “fucking fat fuck” chief of staff who had the gall to ask to see Dunn’s badge that day (“I was like, ‘Here’s my badge number: One,’” says Fanone, holding up his middle finger. “I eat that shit for breakfast”). Fuck Marjorie Taylor Greene (“Put her in the tinfoil-hat brigade”) and Andrew Clyde (“When confronted in person, he fucking folded like a fucking deck of cards”) and Matt Gaetz (“I mean, dude, there’s a constituency out there somewhere in America that elected Matt Gaetz and decided that guy somehow embodied what it is to be a real red-blooded American. A fucking pedo. I don’t get it”).
Fuck Josh Hawley. “He comes down there, flashes the sign of solidarity, riles up this fucking crowd,” Fanone says of Hawley’s actions during the insurrection. “I would’ve had more respect for him if he said, ‘Charge,’ and fucking rushed the first fucking group of police officers that he could possibly fucking find. But he didn’t. He ran like a bitch as fast as he fucking could to the closest safe room in the fucking Capitol building.”
And definitely, definitely fuck Kevin McCarthy, who, as Fanone describes in the first chapter of his memoir, Hold the Line (out Oct. 11), lied and deflected his way through a meeting with Fanone and Jan. 6 casualty Brian Sicknick’s mother — the dead man’s mother, for fuck’s sake! — as he nixed any chance of a bipartisan Jan. 6 commission because of so-called political factors.
“I think at night, when the lights are turned off, Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan have some pretty choice words to say about the fact that they have to hang on Kevin McCarthy’s wall,” Fanone states. “They did some fucking above-average things. And they’ve got to adorn the wall of this fucking weasel bitch named Kevin McCarthy, with his fake fucking spray-on tan, whose fucking claim to fame, at least in my eyes, is the fact that he amassed a collection of Donald Trump’s favorite-flavored Starburst, put them in a Mason jar, and presented them to fucking Donald Trump. What the fuck, dude?”
This level of pugnacity is not necessarily how Fanone might have envisioned his legacy back in that shining moment when America seemed (mostly) united in its acceptance of the fact that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a shitshow of the highest order and that those who participated in or fomented it should be held accountable.
When that moment passed, there was a moment when Fanone thought his eyewitness account and the violence captured in his body-worn camera footage could shame it back into existence and convince people of “the sickness that’s taken over this country and that we’re Americans and kumbaya and all that shit.”
Then there was the moment when it became clear that reality didn’t actually fucking matter to Trump’s apologists and acolytes, and that “waging a one-man war against Donald Trump and the fucking people that refuse to accept reality” would have to be what Fanone did to face himself in the mirror, even if it meant alienating his colleagues, giving up his career and his pension, becoming a pariah and a punching bag on the right and a CNN talking head and an unwitting celebrity on the left, and managing his complex feelings about all of this by also becoming the type of guy who sets up secret Twitter accounts to troll certain highly trollable members of the United States Congress.
If he’s putting out a memoir now, it’s to continue scratching the itch to draw attention to Jan. 6, sure, but it’s also because, as he tells me, “Mike Fanone is broke. I’m pretty sure that’s why people do things like this. I said the things that I said for free and fucking destroyed my career, made my job untenable, and then tried to make hard lemonade out of lemons.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/michael-fanone-jan-6-book-congress-hawley-gaetz-trump-1234589772/
He almost lost his life defending the Capitol on Jan. 6. Now, he’s a #resistance star — and he hates it
LET IT BE known that Michael Fanone does not in any way, shape, or form want to visit the U.S. Capitol. “It’s so fucking lame,” he tells me on the phone one August night as we’re discussing what we should do over the next few days together.
What he absolutely does not want to do is this: He does not want to roam the so-called hallowed halls of democracy or gaze pensively upon the portraits of dead white men or retrace the steps he took on Jan. 6, 2021, when he responded to a distress call from the Capitol Police and joined the scrum of cops pushing back violent insurrectionists inside a tunnel on the Capitol’s west end. He does not want to stare into the middle distance, stony-faced and solemn, as he explains how he was pulled into the crowd, beaten with pipes and the pole of a Blue Lives Matter flag, tazed at the base of his skull, suffered a heart attack and a traumatic brain injury, and fended off attackers with pleas of “I got kids” before losing consciousness for more than four minutes.
He does not want to parade around like some goddamn American hero, even if he is a goddamn American hero, because Michael Fanone knows what can happen to American heroes, and it isn’t fucking good. “So little of my life has been spent in that building, and — fuck that place,” he tells me later, after we have spent two days together very much not visiting the U.S. Capitol. “And fuck the people inside it too.”
Like, fuck, for instance, the 21 House Republicans who voted against awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6. Well, when Fanone got a load of that shit, he called up his friend Harry Dunn — a Capitol Police officer who had testified with Fanone during the congressional hearings in July 2021 — and the two decided to pay a little visit to every one of those House Republicans (“I was like, ‘I’ve got nothing better to do today. I’m going to go annoy some people on Capitol Hill’”).
Speaking of those visits, fuck the “fucking fat fuck” chief of staff who had the gall to ask to see Dunn’s badge that day (“I was like, ‘Here’s my badge number: One,’” says Fanone, holding up his middle finger. “I eat that shit for breakfast”). Fuck Marjorie Taylor Greene (“Put her in the tinfoil-hat brigade”) and Andrew Clyde (“When confronted in person, he fucking folded like a fucking deck of cards”) and Matt Gaetz (“I mean, dude, there’s a constituency out there somewhere in America that elected Matt Gaetz and decided that guy somehow embodied what it is to be a real red-blooded American. A fucking pedo. I don’t get it”).
Fuck Josh Hawley. “He comes down there, flashes the sign of solidarity, riles up this fucking crowd,” Fanone says of Hawley’s actions during the insurrection. “I would’ve had more respect for him if he said, ‘Charge,’ and fucking rushed the first fucking group of police officers that he could possibly fucking find. But he didn’t. He ran like a bitch as fast as he fucking could to the closest safe room in the fucking Capitol building.”
And definitely, definitely fuck Kevin McCarthy, who, as Fanone describes in the first chapter of his memoir, Hold the Line (out Oct. 11), lied and deflected his way through a meeting with Fanone and Jan. 6 casualty Brian Sicknick’s mother — the dead man’s mother, for fuck’s sake! — as he nixed any chance of a bipartisan Jan. 6 commission because of so-called political factors.
“I think at night, when the lights are turned off, Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan have some pretty choice words to say about the fact that they have to hang on Kevin McCarthy’s wall,” Fanone states. “They did some fucking above-average things. And they’ve got to adorn the wall of this fucking weasel bitch named Kevin McCarthy, with his fake fucking spray-on tan, whose fucking claim to fame, at least in my eyes, is the fact that he amassed a collection of Donald Trump’s favorite-flavored Starburst, put them in a Mason jar, and presented them to fucking Donald Trump. What the fuck, dude?”
This level of pugnacity is not necessarily how Fanone might have envisioned his legacy back in that shining moment when America seemed (mostly) united in its acceptance of the fact that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a shitshow of the highest order and that those who participated in or fomented it should be held accountable.
When that moment passed, there was a moment when Fanone thought his eyewitness account and the violence captured in his body-worn camera footage could shame it back into existence and convince people of “the sickness that’s taken over this country and that we’re Americans and kumbaya and all that shit.”
Then there was the moment when it became clear that reality didn’t actually fucking matter to Trump’s apologists and acolytes, and that “waging a one-man war against Donald Trump and the fucking people that refuse to accept reality” would have to be what Fanone did to face himself in the mirror, even if it meant alienating his colleagues, giving up his career and his pension, becoming a pariah and a punching bag on the right and a CNN talking head and an unwitting celebrity on the left, and managing his complex feelings about all of this by also becoming the type of guy who sets up secret Twitter accounts to troll certain highly trollable members of the United States Congress.
If he’s putting out a memoir now, it’s to continue scratching the itch to draw attention to Jan. 6, sure, but it’s also because, as he tells me, “Mike Fanone is broke. I’m pretty sure that’s why people do things like this. I said the things that I said for free and fucking destroyed my career, made my job untenable, and then tried to make hard lemonade out of lemons.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/michael-fanone-jan-6-book-congress-hawley-gaetz-trump-1234589772/
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