by David Kordahl
While grading papers last week, I turned on Max (the streamer formerly known as HBO) and watched The Insurrectionist Next Door. This documentary was made by Alexandra Pelosi, the daughter of Rep. Nancy Pelosi. I’d read a little about the film beforehand, and I was curious how the younger Pelosi would find a way to profile her subjects—characters in various amounts of trouble with the law due to their actions at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021—without her kinship with the elder Pelosi getting in the way. But this connection turns out to be the central gimmick, and Pelosi makes no secret of it, casting herself as a shocked diplomat to Trump’s deplorables.
“What do you think of your dad’s song, ‘Fuck Joe Biden’?” she asks an older daughter in one scene as Dad, a White rapper with the words PROUD BOY tattooed across his forehead, sits with a younger child on his lap. Pelosi presents herself as frankly confused by the Trumpists. The White rapper, Billy Knutson, is thought by his family to be a good dad and good husband, and we watch his wife and children cry as they leave him at the prison for a six-month stint.
All leads of The Insurrectionist Next Door face, or have already served, time in prison. Another interviewee, the ex-pornographer Felipe Marquez, is shown baking a cake for Pelosi at his home in Fort Lauderdale, FL, where he is under house arrest. As Marquez tells his story, Pelosi refuses to believe it. “So a hooker broke up with you and that turned you into a Christian conservative?” she asks.
“I thought she was just a regular woman who would have a family with me, and we would watch conservative news together,” says Marquez.
Pelosi presses him on this, exasperated. “You’re telling me that the left is responsible for your prostitute girlfriend leaving you, and therefore you took it out on the left by storming the capitol and participating in an insurrection?”
“Men are weird,” he says, frowning while stirring in the eggs.
Presumably, Alexandra Pelosi accepts the usual framing of the events of January 6, 2021, whereby the Proud Boys and other extremist groups converged on Washington, D.C., with the explicit purpose of stopping Congress from certifying the results of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. Many details now shade this basic story (the incident’s Wiki article runs over 40,000 words), from pipe bombs that were intercepted in a nearby neighborhood, to the allegation that Trump himself wanted to “storm the capitol” and was only stopped by a secret service driver who refused to drive him there. Yet the interviews in The Insurrectionist Next Door undercut the notion of much forethought.
“Emily, did you go to the capitol to assassinate my mother?” Pelosi asks Emily Hernandez, a girl in her early twenties, who seems surprised at the idea. Hernandez now has worse problems than January 6 to worry about, as she is now responsible for killing someone while drunk driving. But initially, she says she went to the capitol with her uncle just to leave Missouri for a bit.
The Insurrectionist Next Door is filled from start to finish by dim bulbs who hardly seem up to the task of engineering a revolution. So what are we to make of this? Pelosi is wise not to give us a potted thesis statement in the documentary (though her interviews have been less coy); still, a message can be inferred. The main action on January 6, we are led to suppose, was organized by a hard core of organized revolutionaries, eager to help Trump carry out his anti-democratic coup, and these “next door” insurrectionists were cynically used as cannon fodder, never really understanding their role until the law came knocking on their doors.
I should state outright that I enjoyed The Insurrectionist Next Door, and found something parsimonious about Pelosi’s interpretation. It allows these disgraced normies to be reintegrated into the American fold, even the ones who remain convinced they did nothing wrong. Unfortunately, I think that the interpretive rupture that took place at the beginning of 2021 is more severe than she lets on.
Let’s review the numbers. A recent poll has 61% of Republicans reporting that they think that Biden benefited from voter fraud in 2020. Are these people divorced from reality? Just over a year ago, in the 3QuarksDaily article, “Thomas Kuhn and the January 6 hearings: Which reality is ‘true reality’?,” Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan made that case, arguing that Republicans had simply exited the reality-based community. This seems wrong to me, though I concede Gimble and Suilebhan may have been prescient in calling on Kuhn, since the anti-Trump and pro-Trump narratives of 2020 seem incommensurable, with emphases that make it hard to hear both stories at once.
In the anti-Trump narrative, Trump limped into 2020 as a disgrace. He had already been impeached in 2019, and with the outbreak of COVID-19, his administration’s bumbling response cost many lives. The George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020 showed that Americans were ready for decisive change, which they demonstrated in November 2020 by voting for Joe Biden.
The best version I’ve read of the pro-Trump narrative was from a right-wing history podcaster, Darryl Cooper, who wrote a guest column for Glenn Greenwald’s old Substack. In this narrative, Trump entered 2020 with his head bloodied yet unbowed. The one-two punch of COVID-19 and George Floyd allowed the American media to unscrupulously smear Trump—by blaming him for a virus he couldn’t control, and by covering up a summer’s worth of leftist political violence—and allowed them to valorize Biden, not least by omitting any stories that would embarrass him (as in the blackout re: Hunter Biden’s laptop).
Alexandra Pelosi seems perplexed that her interviewees refuse to blame Trump for their problems, but this points toward a basic misunderstanding. In the pro-Trump narrative, the problem is not Trump, but rather people like Pelosi—i.e., members of the mainstream media, who willfully misrepresent reality. When Pelosi’s insurrectionists refuse to turn tail on Trump, it’s because they see themselves, like Trump, as targets of an unjust campaign against people with their views.
As I’ve discussed before in this column, I was a reluctant Biden voter, but I’ve also been reluctant to condemn Trump supporters. One persistent difficulty in American politics is that most of us inhabit different offshoots in the labyrinth of political narrative, with different interpretations of where it all went wrong. Of course, many of these questions are never settled, and we eventually learn not to assume that the people around us have the same political certainties as our own.
What bothers me about The Insurrectionist Next Door is that even as it humanizes its subjects, they are invariably portrayed as too feckless and ignorant to ever be taken seriously. Yet the events of January 6, 2021, like most subjects of conspiracy theorizing, are contested because the events that happened were strange. But Pelosi never admits this. Near the documentary’s end, she hears the case from Johnny Harris, a protester who could be a stunt double for the My Pillow Guy, that all was not as it seemed. In the footage he presents, Harris finds hints of stage management in nearly every frame, but Pelosi responds in a way that typifies her project’s contradictions. “Just stop talking,” she demands. “I don’t want to hate you. Every time you start going too far, I start to hate you, and I don’t want to hate you!”