(+++) HERE WE GO AGAIN

Domestic Darkness: An Insider’s Account of the January 6 Insurrection, and the Future of Right-Wing Extremism. By Julie Farnam. IG Publishing. $27.95.

     When is enough enough already? In the case of rehashings, retellings and re-evaluations of the events of January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C., the answer is “not yet and at this rate maybe not ever.” The latest expert/insider/analyst/observer/commentator to wade into this particular morass is Julie Farnam, who was Acting Director of Intelligence for the United States Capitol Police on “that fateful day” (as it tends to be called ad nauseam). To the surprise of absolutely no one who has followed even a smidgen of the coverage of the protest/riot/insurrection (one’s choice of terminology influenced, like everything else on this topic, by one’s politics), Farnam wants to reveal which of the inner workings of government rose to the occasion and which fell short, and why. From her perspective.

     Not surprisingly, Farnam discusses all the ways she was out in front of the events of the day and all the ways her efforts to head off something awful were sidetracked or undermined by others: self-justification and self-praise are de rigueur in books like hers. She became Assistant Director (not yet Acting Director) of the intelligence apparatus of the Capitol Police just before the 2020 presidential election and, as she tells it, promptly set about trying to correct a longstanding circle-the-wagons mentality and culture of silence and non-sharing of information – issues that, of course, she holds responsible for the events of January 6. Farnam’s attention to the inner workings of bureaucracy befits someone who is herself of a strongly bureaucratic mindset – she spent 13 years with U.S. Customs and Immigration Services. But the abstruse details of the perpetual turf wars of the overly complex machinery that is the federal government may be a bit much for non-bureaucrats to follow.

     Ordinary readers will likely pay more attention to the unsurprising (even if true) reasons Farnam cites for being unable to get her proposed procedural reforms to take hold: she was a woman in a largely male environment and did not have a police background. That is about all that readers looking for a good-vs-evil axis beyond Farnam’s police-vs.-extremists formulation will find here, although there are certainly hints of mistakenness (bordering on venality) here and there – for instance, Farnam says the chief of the Capitol Police, Steven Sund, left the force understaffed through missteps that Farnam says could have been avoided. Sund, however, has written his own book about the January 6 events, and to say that his version of what happened differs from Farnam’s is an understatement.

     To Farnam’s credit, unlike many authors of “they messed up by not listening to me” self-excusing books about January 6, 2021, she does own up to mistakes she herself made, notably by becoming romantically involved with another law-enforcement person – who, it turned out, was leaking information to some of the January 6 protesters/rioters/insurrectionists and eventually faced federal charges for doing so.

     Actually, leaks like that one are the most interesting elements of Domestic Darkness: the fact that some in law enforcement funneled information to leaders of the January 6 events is troubling and would certainly argue for much harsher discipline against law-enforcement personnel who abuse their positions and betray their oaths. That is not, however, where the prescriptive portion of Farnam’s book goes. Although she does call for harsher penalties for those who abuse power, she mainly trots out the usual notions of tracking the bad guys (and gals) more closely, designating more groups as terrorists, cracking down on violence, and so forth. And her book’s subtitle aside, there is really nothing of note in it about “the future of right-wing extremism.” There is, however, a little bit about her own future after January 6, 2021. Did she move into the position of Director (not Acting Director) of Intelligence when the Capitol Police realized the quality of her analyses and recommendations? Not at all: in a March 10, 2022, press release, “United States Capitol Police (USCP) Chief Tom Manger announced the selection of Ravi Satkalmi as the USCP’s new Director of Intelligence” and said that “Ms. Farnam will continue to serve as the Assistant Director of the Division.”

     Farnam resigned from the USCP in May 2023. It is a safe bet that the bureaucratic infighting, the perpetual internecine warfare that is a primary characteristic of the huge and sprawling federal government and all agencies within and related to it, the cliques and agendas and mismanagement, did not depart with her, and will still be very much in evidence when the next major challenge arises – by which time even more books will surely have been written about this previous event, since it seems that enough is never really enough.