Commentary: ‘It’s Time to Stand Up for Ourselves and Our Country’

The first thing Victoria White noticed after emerging from the tunnel where she was severely beaten by two D.C. Metropolitan police officers on January 6 was the floor of the U.S. Capitol. Dressed in jeans and a light red turtleneck, shoeless, White was soaked with whatever toxic chemical gas the police sprayed on protesters. 

“I noticed that this beautiful flooring was all wet, soaking wet, like a pipe burst,” she told me this week in one of three lengthy interviews about her harrowing experience at the Capitol protest. Water, however, was not the culprit; the floor probably was drenched because law enforcement had doused Americans with chemical spray for hours inside the U.S. Capitol building.

MORE