"There's nothing scarier than a white mob. Especially in the United States."
These are the words of Democrat Congressman Ruben Gallego, who was evacuated from the US Capitol as a violent, angry mob closed in on January 6.
A former US Marine, Mr Gallego was ready to fight his way out of the chamber.
He says if the mob had got hold of members of Congress that day, they likely would have tried to kill them.
Democrat Congressman Ruben Gallego instructed people how to put on their gas masks when the Capitol building was under siege. ( Getty Images )
Watching the coverage of the Capitol Hill insurrection from Australia, you could be forgiven for seeing an element of pantomime in the events: costumes and crude levity among the rioters, a file of protestors walking almost dazed between velvet ropes in the Capitol rotunda.
But that ignores the real threat the mob posed.
Mr Gallego sees race as one of the key motivators.
"There is a population of this country that has gotten used to always being on top and not having to share power," he said.
"And now they have to do that, and they have to compete. And psychologically, it's breaking them."
Democrat Congressman Ruben Gallego says the violent mob likely would have killed politicians if they reached them. ( Four Corners )
Former director of national intelligence Jim Clapper told Four Corners there's a fear among white Americans that they are losing control.
"What we saw was a manifestation of something that has been building up in this country for a long time, preceding Trump. Trump exacerbated it, exploited it, amplified it, and in this specific case incited it." Mr Clapper said.
Yes, there were African Americans and Hispanic and Latino Americans among the tens of thousands who converged on Washington DC in January for a last-ditch protest to prevent Joe Biden being confirmed as the winner of the Presidential election.
But at the forefront of the violence were members of far-right extremist groups like The Proud Boys and organised militias The Three Percenters and Oath Keepers, all with ties to white supremacist ideologies.
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Former senior Trump appointee in the Department of Homeland security Elizabeth Neumann holds Donald Trump responsible for galvanising right-wing extremist views that fuelled the riot.
"The whole experience of this last six years, not only did his rhetoric allow and encourage white supremacists to feel like it's okay for them to be out in the open and talking about their ideology again … but it also increased recruitment and empowered some of these groups to take the actions that eventually led to January 6."
There is a large disenfranchised segment of the American population whose motivations are varied but who express a common fear of being eclipsed by an urban, racially mixed elite.
On January 6, Donald Trump successfully persuaded tens of thousands of them not only that the election had been stolen from him as their representative but that they must use "strength" to take it back.
Pro-Trump rioters outside the Capitol building on January 6. ( Steven Voss: Politico )
'We're in a form of civil war right now': Clapper
According to Mr Clapper, America is now in an incipient civil war.
"I think we have an ambient or latent form of civil war right now, just because of the two contrasting camps that people are in," he said.
"So we're in a form of civil war right now."
Returning to live in Washington after a long gap, the divisions in the country are painfully evident.
The late 1990s, when I lived here before, were marked by a big shift to the right with Newt Gingrich's "Republican Revolution".
That morphed into the Tea Party taking the GOP further to the right and laying the groundwork for more extreme people to enter Congress, including at least one avowed QAnon fantasist, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has demanded the right to bring a handgun into the House chamber.
I chose to spend inauguration day in Washington's poorest neighbourhood, Anacostia, where activist Arianna Evans was handing out clothes and food to the capital's most needy residents. Evans had turned her back on the ceremony across town.
"I'm not watching because Joe Biden doesn't really represent me or my generation, or any of the values that I hold as a human being," she said.
Activist Arianna Evans pictured in Washington’s poorest neighbourhood, Anacostia. ( Four Corners )
Ms Evans has started a splinter group of the Black Lives Matter movement called the DC Freedom Fighters; she says she wasn't shocked by the threats made by the rioters on Capitol Hill or the photos they posted of themselves.
She viewed the insurrection as "a bunch of entitled white people getting what they want in this country, as they always have".
"They can threaten to hang their vice-president because this is their country, and all I saw when I saw that smug white man sitting in that chair with his feet kicked up on the speaker's desk was like, this is what white privilege looks like."
Ms Evans believes the rioters were able to rampage through the literal corridors of power because they were white.
"We would have been dead on the grass. We wouldn't even make it to the stairs. We wouldn't have made it to the white marble, because they wouldn't want to spray our blood off of that."
Threats of further violence
The FBI has arrested and charged 164 rioters so far, including members of organised right-wing militias. Indictments allege that militia members used military-grade equipment and real-time communication technology, including apps like Zello, as they stormed into the capitol.
As members of Congress were evacuated through a network of tunnels under the complex, the FBI claims a militia member received Facebook messages giving detailed instructions on how to find the senators and members of Congress sheltering in secret basement rooms.
One message read:
"All members are in tunnels under the capital (sic) seal them in. Turn on gas."
Last week in Washington, the Acting Director of Homeland Security issued a formal warning that violent extremists could "continue to mobilise to incite or commit violence in the months ahead."
Polls show that a large majority of Republican voters still believe that the 2020 election was stolen by the Democrats.
As assistant secretary for counter-terrorism and threat prevention, Elizabeth Neumann's job was to assess domestic terror threats in America.
She said: "When you have 50 million people in this country that believe in this big lie … then some small percentage, maybe it's only 1 per cent, but 1 per cent is 500,000 people — 500,000 people willing to commit acts of violence."
There will be painstaking investigations into the causes of the riot but in the meantime, the most shocking sight in Washington is not the armed soldiers on the street who will remain through the impeachment but the quick retreat from principle of Republicans in Congress.
In the immediate aftermath, there were calls from Republican leadership to condemn Trump for his role in encouraging the insurrection.
Within days, as the reality emerged of Trump's continued hold over the party and its voting base, the appetite for condemning the former president evaporated.
Trump looks likely to avoid a reckoning for his role in stoking American divisions and appears set to claim an acquittal in the upcoming Senate trial as the final victory in his presidency.
Watch the full investigation on Four Corners tonight at 8:30pm on ABC TV or livestream on the Four Corners Facebook page.
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