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Many of these were photographs taken of the mob by the mob.
We saw videos made by news crews and rioters alike.
After Trump finished his speech at his Save America rally last week, I turned off the TV.
But the danger in the air made me turn it back on.
I started scrolling through social media and right-wing sites, and the images flooded in.
No one pictured attacking the Capitol appeared to have the slightest fear of repercussions.
Some carried This Is Our 1776 signs.
Together, these images are some of the scariest and stupidest I have ever seen.
Theyre also unsurprising in the extreme.
I turned away from the TV and saw the same look on my stepmothers face.
My stepbrothers said King should be shot.
It was in the faces of the policemen and later in those of Chicago machine politicians.
The pictures from the January 6 mob are notpictures of the underdog.
As an art critic, I take a step back to reach the deeper contents of these strange images.
These pictures are what would happen if Facebook became flesh.
As primary documents, they are intimate.
On Parler and Newsmax, I watched invaders watching themselves on their own social-media platforms.
The feedback loop was astonishing and insane, the moment transformed into a sort of collective far-right group portrait.
I also notice what we dont see in them: Trump.
He watched the riot unfold the same way the rest of us did, onscreen.
What other images have ever looked this way?
Fellini gave us crazed carnivals of decadence, ugliness, barbarism, and corpulence.
Here, I see a crowd of political cannibals, feeding on one anothers obsessions.
The difference in these new pictures, however, is sadly telling.
These new pictures are unlike those older pictures in another way too: People are already shrugging them off.
The older pictures still burn.
But the images and events of January 6 are, once again, not the same.
We saw only smoke, fire, ash, a ruined skyline.
In these new pictures, that demonic force is us.
