Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue our special edition January 6th, 2021, meets January 6th, 2023. A new comic book imagines an America in which the January 6th Insurrection had been successful. 1/6: The Graphic Novel presents an alternate reality in which today might be known as Independence Day, commemorating the brave sacrifice of those insurrectionists who stopped the steal. Chilling, right? We'll talk to one of the book's authors now about why this alternate version of events was important to tell and how close we might have come to that reality.

Joining me now, Alan Jenkins, professor at the Harvard Law School where he teaches courses on race and the law, Supreme Court jurisprudence and more, and among other things he is co-founder of the group The Opportunity Agenda, a social justice communications nonprofit. He's also a regular commentator on CBS and MSNBC and a frequent columnist for of all things a Harvard law professor might do The Hollywood Reporter. Again, he is now co-author of 1/6: The Graphic Novel along with Gan Golan and comic book artists Will Rosado. Professor Jenkins, welcome to WNYC. Glad to have you.

Alan Jenkins: Thanks so much for having me on, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: What made you want to tell the story of January 6th or an alternate history of post-January 6th in this way? Were you always a comic book fan?

Alan Jenkins: Yes, I've been a comic book geek from way back, so I didn't really need any encouragement to do this in graphic novel form. Brian, for weeks after January 6th, 2021, I was waking up at 3 AM in a cold sweat, worrying about our democracy, worrying about the threats that remain, and with this feeling that we as a nation, we're not taking this event seriously enough and particularly the remaining threats. I wanted to do something that would reach a broad audience that did not require higher education to consume.

That would reach people who aren't going to read the 845-page January 6th House Committee report, and so a graphic novel seemed like exactly the right vehicle for that.

Brian Lehrer: There's a long history of creators taking a pro-democracy stance, patriotic in that way, through comic books and graphic novels, isn't there?

Alan Jenkins: Absolutely. Captain America in his first issue on the cover, he's socking Adolf Hitler in the jaw. This was nine months before the US entered World War II. Superman fought the Klan in the 1940s, and then fought them again just a few years ago. The Black Panther fought the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. There's a long history, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Brian Lehrer: Again, and maybe for listeners just joining us, this book asks as its premise, what if the insurrection had been successful? Let's get in to what you take successful to mean. I mentioned January 6th becomes Independence Day. In the alternative version of events, what happened that day?

Alan Jenkins: I'll try to give you the spoiler-free version of our four-issue arc. It essentially follows real events up to the point at which Capitol Hill police officer Eugene Goodman successfully led the mob away from the Senate chamber. In our universe, the mob turns right instead of left. They do everything they said they were going to do. President Trump does many of the things that he had threatened to do or said he was going to do, and democracy is extinguished.

Then the remaining two issues of the book are about everyday people coming together, grappling with this new dystopic authoritarian regime and trying to restore democracy. I won't tell your listeners how it turns out, but there are hopeful notes as well as very chilling notes.

Brian Lehrer: Well, I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to give a little bit of color here because just from the first issue, which sets things up-- maybe we should take a second here and say how you're rolling this out. This isn't one discrete book like we might think of many graphic novels as. This is a four-comic book series that you're releasing periodically.

Alan Jenkins: That's right. It will eventually be a full book, but we wanted to release it as four standalone issues. It's available today for pre-order on Amazon and for reading immediately on Issue, which is a digital platform. Part of the rationale, Brian, was that we wanted it to be timely. We were writing and rewriting issue number two as the January 6th Committee was issuing new revelations. We wanted to begin telling our story right away on January 6th, 2023. That chapter is actually set nine months after the successful insurrection.

Brian Lehrer: One of the fictional alt-reality events and, again, I don't think this is too much of a spoiler, but maybe you'll judge me for it. A character seems to be recalling that militias cleaned out the state house using their God-given Second Amendment rights in Georgia and Arizona. That's a quote from the character, cleaned out the state house using their God-given Second Amendment rights referring to Georgia and Arizona, and the same character, a right-wing ultra-nationalist, obviously, addressing supporter says that Antifa and Black Lives Matter hung Mike Pence.

Why do you go to that dark and violent a place?

Alan Jenkins: Well, part of the point here is to really remind Americans of what many of these folks had planned, and what kind of America we would be living in if they had succeeded, and also the lies that are always woven into that narrative. Poll taken about a year after the insurrection showed that 25% of Republicans believed that the insurrectionists were patriots, 26% believed they were Antifa. These things are-- they're fictional in our graphic novel, but they really relied very much on the public discourse and the threats and untruths that are out there.

Also the political violence. We know that people were just recently convicted of attempting to kidnap Michigan Governor Whitmer. We know that there were attacks on state houses in Michigan and Oregon and other places by right-wing militias. Unfortunately, although this is fiction, it's not very far off from reality.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, I wonder if anybody out there right now has had your own visions. Maybe you woke up in the middle of the night with a nightmare or however you've had these visions of what if the January 6th Insurrection had succeeded. What if it had seen succeeded through the actual violent stoppage of certifying the election? Or what if it had succeeded through some of the more legal and parliamentary kinds of moves like seating the fake electors or getting the state legislators to overturn the votes in their states?

Or if Mike Pence, had in fact, refused to certify the election, what kind of country would be would we be living in? What else would have happened? Again, when Ari Melber comes on, he's going to talk about one of the lesser discussed things that the Trump people considered, which was literally using the military, a combination of the military and the Justice Department, to seize voting machines and do other things like that. That could have been a coup in the way. In the more traditional way, you may think of a coup in some other countries actually seizing the government by force.

Mostly it was other means, in this case, that they were attempting. Have you imagined a post-January 6th America if things had gone another way or any question you want to ask Harvard law professor Alan Jenkins, co-author of 1/6: The Graphic Novel? 212-433-WNYC. Wow, we have a lot of dystopian dreamers out there, Professor Jenkins, because our lines just filled up like boom.

Alan Jenkins: Wow, awesome.

Brian Lehrer: We'll take some of those callers as soon as our screeners can set them up for me. Let me say we're obviously not a visual medium here on the radio, so we can't show our listeners the pages of your book. It's in color, but I'd say there's a gloominess in the way the events of January 6th are presented in the comic book illustration, as if through a filter, maybe we could say. In one panel, you can also really see the rapturous anger in the eyes of demonstrators paying tribute to their "brothers and sisters" lost on that day that they stopped the steal.

How did you or your co-author Gan Golan and comic book artist Will Rosado want to present those rank-and-file rioters and their supporters visually?

Alan Jenkins: We brought a couple of principles there. I am not a visual artist, so Will Rosato, our anchor and penciller really brought most of these images to life, and my co-writer, Gan Golan, who is an illustrator, I think, brought a huge amount of insight into how to tell that story. One of the important values that we brought to this was empathy.

Really, one of our main characters is a MAGA Voter who has his own kind of crisis of conscience and his own arc. We thought, and this is something I teach my students, that empathy is one of our greatest superpowers. We can't hope to persuade people unless we can understand them and put ourselves in their shoes. We might actually learn something from them even when we disagree with them on the most fundamental principles. We tried to bring that value, the cast of characters, it's a very human-driven, character-driven story, are diverse.

They come from different walks of life. The insurrectionists, some of them are very intentional conspirators in the overthrow of our government, and some of them got dragged along for the ride, and we try to be nuanced about that.

Brian Lehrer: Esteban in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Esteban.

Esteban: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call, and thanks for doing today's show. I just wanted to compare a little bit the insurrection to something that we are already very familiar with. There was a young lawyer who was just a citizen who stormed the Capitol, and they tried to lock them up for a year or two. Two years later, he's out, and then Castro succeeded. He became one of the longest-standing dictators in Latin America. I think that although this book is humorous, and I think it's wonderful to do an artistic and historical gesture, it's almost too soon because it insinuates that what if it had succeeded, it still could.

Meaning, obviously when you return, and some of the criticism was I think, Batista pardoned him out of political pressure when he was running again, and in fact, maybe should not have, because he was sentenced to 15 years for storming the barracks with several friends. Without going through the history of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, I just want to say, he was seen as just an insurgency, and then insurrection was just common or so speak, not the Castro we know today, which could have been one of the participants of January 6th.

Brian Lehrer: Esteban, thank you. Professor Jenkins, what do you think about that dystopic take? It's too soon to say it failed.

Alan Jenkins: Thank you so much for that perspective, Esteban. I would say it's not too soon. I agree with you that it could happen again, that January 6th, 2021 might turn out to have been just a dress rehearsal. That's one of the reasons why we wrote this graphic novel. It's an alarm bell. It is really trying to focus people who may not have focus, who love our democracy but may not have focused on the seriousness of this event on what is at stake and what's at risk. We're trying to do so in the best tradition of speculative fiction.

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, or Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, or Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, or Rod Serling's or Jordan Peel's Twilight Zone. I think it's not too soon, it can't be too soon, because just as you noted, Esteban, it could happen again, and we really have to be more vigilant than I think our nation is right now.

Brian Lehrer: Susan on Staten Island, you're on WNYC. Hi, Susan.

Susan: Good morning, Brian. Thank you for having this guest. This is a problem that I've been thinking about since the insurrection. This is my question. If the insurrection, as you have in your graphic novel, had succeeded, and then joint chiefs of staff had taken a decision to intervene and restore constitutional order. Would that have been considered a military coup?

Alan Jenkins: Thank you, Susan, for that question. I think it depends on considered by whom. Certainly, then President Trump would have considered that a military coup. I think others might have viewed it as an intervention to restore democracy, but as we've seen in other countries, sometimes the military intervenes, and then they never leave. I think it really depends on perspective and the aftermath. The fact that we even have to ask that question, and I think you're right to ask it, is incredibly chilling.

Part of our call to action is to make sure that we never get to that point where we have to rely on the unelected military to restore our elected democracy.

Brian Lehrer: Our board is full of people with their own dystopian alternative histories, along the lines of the premise of the Graphic Novel, which is what if the insurrection had succeeded? Rudy in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Rudy. You're not that Rudy, right?

Rudy: Hi, Brian. Thank you so much, Brian. I've enjoyed the view from the 80-year-olds and the 90-year-olds, and I'm right on the cusp.

Brian Lehrer: In the series, we did earlier in the week, yes. Go ahead, sorry.

Rudy: Exactly. I had a dream about the January 6th insurrection, where I was a death row inmate who was being moved to a room with a better view, which I thought odd, but when I got to that room, it was of oversight into the courtyard. In that courtyard were the sounds of scaffolding being constructed. It was hammering and saws and nail guns, and it was clear to me that they wanted me to have a view of my impending execution. I was so terrified in the dream that I couldn't stop thinking about it.

My mental health colleagues in my profession tried to talk this Black man down from my position of wanting to go out and buy legally a shotgun to keep as a defensive weapon in my home behind the door so that the pomp action sound might discourage an aggressor. No interest in caring, no interest in stealing anything, but I was denied because of a complicated legal history 51 years earlier. I couldn't stop thinking about it, and when I couldn't get a shotgun, I was reminded that in the Vietnam era, I had considered becoming an ex-pat moving to Canada or Europe.

I hadn't thought about that since the Vietnam War, and I thought about it again. I noticed that African-Americans like myself were sliding those websites for West Africa, the Caribbean, places where the brown and Black people could perhaps live a little differently out from under a white gaze.

Brian Lehrer: I even have a Jewish friend who has some German ancestry, German of all things, of all places, Germany, who has talked in the last few years about invoking her right to be a joint citizen of the United States in Germany. A Jewish person, considering the history there, who might at some point consider it safer to go to Germany. Rudy, thank you for that. Our last guest, Professor Jenkins, we're also framing this. We were discussing with our last guests, for example, the testimony of Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn, Black man, who was called the N-word, repeatedly by the protesters that day, some of whom carried Confederate flags.

Rudy's nightmare is something that I'm sure a lot of Black Americans have had, or something like it, January 6th related.

Alan Jenkins: Absolutely. Thank you, Rudy. I'm African-American as well and have family members back in the day who had to dissuade the clan with the shotgun, from attacking them and taking them away. This is my granddad. It's important to remember that this insurrection was a white supremacist insurrection of Confederate flag-wielding rioters. That this insurrection was a Christian nationalist and anti-Semitic insurrection of Holocaust deniers and Auschwitz T-shirts, highly offensive.

That the movements that brought this about and that I would argue President Trump corded, were very much not only anti-Joe Biden or anti-election, but counter to the multicultural democracy that we aspired to be. Remembering that is crucial. It's one of the reasons why I was waking up, perhaps like Rudy, at 3:00 AM, in a cold sweat, worrying about the aftermath of the attempted insurrection.

Brian Lehrer: Let's do one more. Pat in Somerset, New Jersey, I think has had visions of an alternative history if the insurrection had succeeded on January 6th. Pat, you're on WNYC. We've got about 30 seconds for you as we near the end of the segment. Hi there.

Pat: Hi, Brian. Thank you for everything you do for us for the entire community and the world. My nightmare was that after they had dealt with the Capitol and all the politicians and everything, they would turn their attention to any group gathering, social organization, church, or religious organization of any kind, where there were gatherings for any purpose that they would attack those.

Brian Lehrer: Pat, thank you very much. Professor Jenkins, we are just about out of time, I'm going to let you respond to Pat, and say anything you want to say to wrap it up and do one more plug if you want for the graphic novel that you have now co-authored 1/6: The Graphic Novel.

Alan Jenkins: Great. Thank you, Pat. I think some of those visions were realistic, or at least not far off from what we might have seen, and from what we might see. That's actually the last point I wanted to make is that this is a call to action and also a path to action. Your listeners can go to onesixcomics.com, that's onesixcomics.com, and add your names.

We are creating with the Western State Center, an education and action guide for people who want to go deeper on the true facts that inspired this fictional work.

Also to take action, to be connected to groups and things they can do to help preserve our democracy and uphold equal justice over white supremacy and bigotry. Please do check that out. The book is on digital form on Amazon and on the platform issue, and you can order it today. I hope many of you will and I hope we'll hear from you. You can post comments as well.

Brian Lehrer: Harvard law professor Alan Jenkins, thank you so much for joining us today.

Alan Jenkins: Thank you, Brian.

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