‘Scaffold Commander’ and the Manufacture of Delusion
Trump’s lawyers are probing the theory that progressive journalist John Nichols helped instigate the January 6th attack.
YOU THINK YOU KNOW a guy. And then, this.
In a discovery motion filed November 15, attorneys for former President Donald Trump formally asked the U.S. government to produce “all documents regarding Ray Epps, the ‘scaffold commander,’ John Nichols, or any similar persons who encouraged or participated in any illegal activities on January 6th.” The filing was made in the case brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith against Trump for conspiring with others to steal the 2020 election.
Nichols, a journalist in Madison, Wisconsin, is the associate editor of the local Capital Times newspaper, a national affairs correspondent for the Nation magazine, and a regular contributor to The Progressive, where I, for several years, was his editor. He is the author or coauthor of more than a dozen books; most recently, he worked with Senator Bernie Sanders on a book called It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism. He is someone I have known for four decades and consider a friend.
It turns out he is suspected of being one of the key figures in the assault on the U.S. Capitol that took place nearly three years ago. Online sleuths have identified Nichols as possibly being the so-called Scaffold Commander, who conspiracy theorists believe was a government plant. They also believe this about Trump supporter and January 6th participant Epps (who’s suing Fox News over this assertion, which he insists is false, simply because there is no evidence to support it) and an additional cipher known as “Fence Cutter Bulwark.”
In a video posted on social media on December 1, the Scaffold Commander can be seen atop a platform that had been erected for Joe Biden’s impending inauguration, bullhorn in hand, urging the crowd on. “Don’t just stand there. Move forward. Move forward. Help somebody over the wall,” the Commander commands. “Come on, cowboy. Let’s go, cowboy.” And then, later on the same tape, “We’re in. Come on! We’ve got to fill up the Capitol! Come on! Come now! Come now, we need help. We’re going to fill up the Capitol! They got in. Come on!”
There is also a video, posted December 1, that purports to show the Scaffold Commander earlier that day. He can be seen, back of his head only, shouting through a chain-link fence bearing an “Area Closed” sign, taunting the Capitol Police officers lined up on the other side. “You going to stop it?” he demands at one point. “We see you pacing. Are you thinking about it?”
Right away, it’s clear that there is something wrong with this picture. The man in this video has on a white facial mask, presumably to ward off COVID-19, pulled down to his chin. As one poster promptly questioned, “Why would any patriot wear that?” To reduce the risk of catching a deadly virus? That would be nuts.
At another point, the man said to be the Scaffold Commander-to-be also yells something that ends in the word “commie,” followed by this dire warning: “They’ll tell you how much you can eat and where you can live! And where you can go!”
None of this sounds to me like something my friend John would say. He’s much more articulate than that. But who knows? If he were trying to pass himself off as just an ordinary rioter, he would have to pretend to be a whole lot dumber. How smart is that?
ON JANUARY 7, 2023, ALMOST EXACTLY two years after the Capitol assault, commentator Glenn Beck aired an episode of his eponymous podcast titled, “What Are the Feds Hiding in Jan. 6 ‘Investigation’?” His guest was Darren Beattie, a conspiracy theorist who runs the right-wing website Revolver News.
In early 2022, Beattie was forced to resign from a federal commission that oversees Holocaust memorials abroad because of his assertions that FBI agents instigated the Capitol attack. He wore this rebuke, which the Anti-Defamation League had sought, as a badge of honor, posting the resignation-demand letter on social media with the gleeful message, “Better than a Pulitzer.”
Beattie’s advocacy also earned him praise from former President Trump, who credited his former speechwriter with having “exposed so much of the Fake News’[s] false narrative about January 6th.”
In the podcast, Beattie zeroed in on the mystery of the Scaffold Commander, explaining how he was “pre-positioned” to play a key role in what some on the right have come to call a “fedsurrection.”
“I would say this is the person who is more egregious than anybody else, other than perhaps Ray Epps, [and] he hasn’t even been identified,” Beattie told Beck and his audience. “He’s not on any of the most wanted lists. He’s not wanted to any degree, as far as I’m aware, by the government, by the Department of Justice. And nobody knows his name. He’s simply referred to as the Scaffold Commander.” Beattie continued:
I don’t want to get into all of my methods and tricks, but I pulled out all the stops—all the stops—to identify this guy including, you know, cutting-edge facial recognition stuff, the whole deal. [Pregnant pause] Nothing. He could have been wearing some type of prosthetic. It’s just, it’s very weird. I would love to know who this guy is. It’s one of the really key mysteries of the whole thing. I suspect, if he’s, if his identity is actually uncovered, it’s going to be one of the biggest scandals in the country. I’ve dedicated a lot of resources to doing so. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to identify him.
More recently, on September 5, 2023, Beattie appeared on Jack Posobiec’s show on a far-right news network. The episode was purportedly watched 2.8 million times. Posobiec is a former naval intelligence officer and current conspiracy theorist. Beattie said both the Fence Cutter Bulwark and Scaffold Commander “played absolutely critical roles” in the events of January 6th. He says the government presumably has better technology and that, “If they wanted to, they could find out who these two people are.” But, he adds ruefully, “for whatever reason, people with resources don’t want to find out who these people are.”
That’s frustrating, he says, because “All they need to do is to be identified, and it’s game over for the regime—the January 6th, fedsurrection hoax is proven definitively to be a lie, forevermore.”
CURIOUSLY, BEATTIE MADE THESE COMMENTS about his tireless search for the identity of the Scaffold Commander after others on the right had identified Nichols as the potential culprit. The definitive article on this ran in a publication called the Liberty Daily on November 2, 2022. Here’s a snapshot:
The author, a right-wing commentator named J.D. Rucker, says the Liberty Daily received a tip about the striking similarity between Nichols and the Scaffold Commander. At first, he was skeptical. “Why would the Deep State, Nancy Pelosi, or whoever orchestrated all of this use a well-known journalist who writes for the leftwing publication, The Nation?” he wondered. “Why not get an average Joe who nobody knew?”
Excellent question. Rucker goes on to answer it:
Then, I watched a video of Nichols juicing up a crowd at a Bernie Sanders rally and I realized the guy is very talented. He has a gift for rallying people and getting them to do what he wants. That’s when I realized he might have been the PERFECT person to man the bullhorn and coordinate the “insurrection.”
The article, which was soon posted to numerous right-wing forums and online comment boards, included a headshot comparison. John Nichols is pictured at least once, on the right, in a photo Rucker explains is ten years old. He picked it because it was at the right angle. Also aiding the comparison is the fact that someone has photoshopped Nichols’s face onto a reverse image of the Scaffold Commander headwear.
The article links to a 11-minute report by Rucker that points out the similarities between the two faces, feature by feature. He then compares their voices, going back and forth between clips of the Scaffold Commander bellowing into his bullhorn and Nichols giving a speech at a Bernie Sanders for president rally. (They sound nothing alike.) Rucker repeatedly urges his audience to make up its own mind:
I dunno, it’s up to you guys. Again, I’m just asking the questions here. I’m not accusing John Nichols of being there January 6, acting to antagonize the crowd to try and get as many people to go into the Capitol building as possible on behalf of the FBI, the Deep State, the left-wing agenda, Nancy Pelosi, Capitol Police or anybody else. I’m not making that accusation. I’m just sayin’—just sayin’—there seems to be similarities.
Indeed, there are. But these similarities do not seem to have resonated with Beattie, the Scaffold Commander hunter-in-chief, who, as noted, did not even mention Nichols in the interviews that aired January 7, 2023, and September 5, 2023. A search for the name John Nichols on the Revolver News website also yields no results.
Perhaps the envisioned scenario—that a prominent left-wing journalist traveled to Washington, D.C., on January 6th at the behest of the Deep State or Nancy Pelosi or whoever, shouted warnings about the government telling people how much they can eat, climbed a scaffold, brandished a bullhorn, and deployed the oratorical skills he honed giving speeches at rallies for Bernie Sanders, exhorting the otherwise peaceful crowd to attack the Capitol, all while half-wearing a COVID-19 mask—is seen as being just too far-fetched for a serious investigator like Beattie.
What’s for sure is that it was not too far-fetched for Trump’s lawyers to file their discovery request.
THE WASHINGTON POST, in an article that ran last week, pegged this request as an example of how Trump, through his lawyers, “has been pressing the Justice Department for information on far-right claims often elevated in his speeches, on his social media feeds and by his conservative allies in Congress—further blurring the line between his campaign and his court battles.” It noted that Trump’s legal defense team has also asked for any information the government might have on “informants, cooperators [and] undercover agents” who were “involved in the assistance, planning, or encouragement” of what happened that day.
Special Counsel Smith, in response, said the government has no documents along these lines that it has not already provided. He also argued that Trump (“the defendant”) cannot claim that the actions of others absolve him of responsibility, just as, in other January 6th cases, “the defendant’s actions did not absolve any individual rioter of responsibility for that rioter’s actions—even if the rioter took them at the defendant’s direction.”
The quest to positively identify the Scaffold Commander and Fence Cutter Bulwark might have been aided by the release of more than 40,000 hours of internal security video ordered by House Speaker Mike Johnson, fulfilling a promise he made to far-right members of his party. But Johnson has announced his plan to blur the faces of the riot participants so they don’t end up being “charged by the DOJ” just because they are committing crimes.
Nichols, for his part, told the Post he was in Madison that day watching the riot coverage on TV and live-blogging about it on the Nation’s website. He also wrote a 900-word column about it published that same day under the headline “Impeach Trump Immediately.” In a piece last week in the Nation about his star turn in the alleged role of “an agent provocateur who climbed a scaffold outside the Capitol,” Nichols said he filed his story by mid-afternoon.
Could Nichols have generated all this copy and still managed to drop by Washington, D.C., 700 miles away, for a quickie pivotal fedsurrection appearance? No one who knows what a gifted and prolific writer he is would doubt it.
But here is where this whole idea of Nichols being the Scaffold Commander starts to strain credulity. John is a lifelong proponent of peace and nonviolence. He is the kind of patriot who actually stands up for the nation’s ideals. He would never help lead an assault on American democracy because American democracy is something he knows as much about as anyone and cherishes more than most.
Given all this, perhaps it’s possible, even likely, that the Scaffold Commander to whom John Nichols bears a striking resemblance in a doctored photo is not John Nichols. Perhaps the ongoing efforts to give this speculation credence is a sign that Trump’s lawyers, like the former president himself, are completely bereft of scruples and committed to the perpetuation of madness. Perhaps the real blame for the events of January 6th rests not with imaginary government agents but with the person who summoned his followers to Washington, then directed them to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell.”
Or is that just crazy talk?
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