Walt Pasquina watched as three guys with blue armbands carried a piece of fencing from Seventh Street down to Madison Drive, where a few others appeared to be reassembling the portable metal barriers to form a barricade. In the streets just beyond the Mall, police had erected two-meter-high smart fences, which suddenly, like a mini Maginot Line, were being hacked, disconnected, and carried away in pieces by teams of four or five. He could see them being reappropriated at certain points along Madison Drive. Kelly was pestering him, thrusting her phone under his nose: Kelly, it read. We need your help. Here’s what you can do next.
“Never forget,” cried Morris from the stage, “at any moment we can choose to be agents of change. I promise you, there is nothing more meaningful than when your life is on the line and you choose to fight back.”
Master Patrol Officer Andrea Sanchez, an undercover with the D.C. Metropolitan Police, could not decide what to do. Standing just north of the Smithsonian Castle, she watched as groups of blue-armbanded folks were basically running off with every last piece of physical infrastructure intended for crowd control. Her instinct was to start making arrests before things got out of hand, but the instructions in her earpiece were contradictory. There was something else going on in the city, and officers were being pulled from the concert to deal with it. Meanwhile, there were more portable toilets being delivered mid-event, and big trucks with pallets of food and water being off-loaded onto the Mall, and strangest of all, there were construction crews jackhammering into the pavement of Jefferson Drive. Everything was happening extremely fast.
“In this moment, in this city, in this dark hour, we will prove that all the divisions heaped on us by the powerful and wealthy are false. They don’t fear us yet—but they will. Because we are what they didn’t see coming and what they never thought possible. We are the deluge. Join us. Get to D.C. It is not too late. The future is not yet written, and all anyone will ever ask you twenty, thirty, forty years from now is where were you? What did you do when you were called?”
And instead of walking off, Kate Morris took two steps and jumped from the stage to the grass below, where she was greeted like one of the rock stars. She grabbed the first random guy from the audience, as security looked on in confusion, and together they picked up the crowd-control fencing that enclosed the VIP area and began carrying it south to the roadway. People were cheering, screaming, looking at one another like, Wait, really? When Beyoncé and Eddie Vedder peaked out from backstage, their general bewilderment mirrored that of the audience.
The remainder of the event proceeded strangely. The bands and musicians went on, played the hits, and for the most part people behaved as though they were at a concert. Yet in the midst of this, the crowd leaked, siphoning off to join roving gangs of impromptu construction workers, directed by field marshals IDed by their blue armbands. Messages arrived on phones, watches, and glasses. A wider blast reached over five million sympathizers, asking for their help in both bodies and donations. On key streets, people began to build a series of blockades out of smart fencing, portable toilets, and tire-puncturing police wire, unspooled on all roads between Constitution and Independence Avenues. The area had already been cordoned off by police with standard protocol concrete barricades and metal detectors, and the street blockades would deny the authorities access to remove the concrete. Groups of severe-looking Blue Bands stationed themselves outside the entrances to each of the buildings within their perimeter. The National Gallery of Art and the National Air and Space Museum, for instance, would be closed for the foreseeable future. Finally, groups began erecting tents in neat rows between the stage and Fourteenth Street, creating bisecting pathways around which their makeshift city could grow. Two medical tents and two cafeterias sprouted up on either end of the Mall, with twenty-five solar and ninety bicycle generators deployed as connective tissue between those hubs.
Officer Andrea Sanchez’s insistence that there was something going on at this concert—not a terrorist attack, not an active shooter, not a riot, but something far weirder—went ignored, as did the calls from other officers on the scene. For thirteen years, the Metro and Capitol Police had gone on high alert whenever a large group of people descended for any reason whatsoever. The Capitol Building and White House became veritable fortresses for so much as an AARP knitting convention, and crowd-control mechanisms were deployed throughout the district in case things got out of hand. But now their drones were flying away, vanishing across the Potomac, and many of her fellow officers complained that their radios weren’t working or that they were getting conflicting orders. It was giving her a sickness in her gut, as she wondered what a mob turned loose might feel like. When she confronted one of the men coordinating the larceny, though, he was so calm and reasonable.
“You can’t do that,” she said, flipping her badge open and stuffing it in his face. “You can’t move that there.”
“No, no it’s fine,” Quinton Marcus-McCall told her, and he showed her a forged permit. Officer Sanchez studied it while Quinton’s team continued to carry fencing from the access aisles to the points of entrance and egress along the Mall. “This is part of the performance. Call it in.”
“I did call it in, man! Y’all got to stop! Now!”
“There really must be some confusion,” said Marcus-McCall, scratching his head. “Let me call my boss quick. This all must be a misunderstanding.”
And moments later, Sanchez’s dispatcher, which was not a person these days but a soothing electronic voice hooked into the Metropolitan Police’s central computer, told her that indeed this was part of the concert, including all the mature trees being planted right into the jackhammered concrete on the north-south roads.
Once the organizers controlled those north and south borders of Independence and Constitution, they went to work on Third Street in the shadow of the Capitol and Fourteenth Street just east of the Washington Monument. Groups of twenty sat down in the street in circles and fed their hands into tubes. Inside were handcuffs that secured their wrists. This tactic of deploying multiple wheels of human beings chained together, impossible to move without ripping off someone’s arm, was sometimes called a lockbox, sometimes a sleeping dragon, and had been cribbed from long-ago WTO protests in Seattle. The police converged on Fourteenth and Third Streets, but all they could do was stand there until the proper tools arrived. On a cue delivered by the app, two hundred people in interlocking human chains broke into song: “Wild World” by Cat Stevens followed by “The Way You Smile” by Zeden, followed by a more obscure number by veteran troubadour Joe Pug. They had a list fifty tunes deep, and they’d repeat it until they went hoarse. As long as they held the road.
And yet instead of reinforcements showing up to cut open the tubes and remove the protestors, the D.C. Metro and Capitol Police were being diverted elsewhere. Intelligence agencies had asserted, through their monitoring of social media traffic, that several Black extremist groups were trying to spark riots in the city’s ghettos. The chaos in Dallas was still on everyone’s mind, so the bulk of the city’s police force was dispatched to sections of Deanwood, Anacostia, and LeDroit Park, where supposed riots were breaking out. Indeed, that morning small groups of protestors, holding signs demanding an end to police violence, had hustled from one neighborhood to the other, barricading streets at random. Numbering only in the hundreds, they nevertheless managed to sow enormous chaos. Police intelligence insisted that this was a real threat, that thousands of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and 6Degrees extremists were stoking riots on par with Dallas, but wherever the city’s generous helping of riot police showed up, the threat had already melted to another block, another section of the city. Meanwhile, twenty-seven buses pulled into major intersections in the heart of D.C., blocking traffic on every street that led to the Mall. Teams of thirty to forty people exited, faces covered (by bandanas, balaclavas, Guy Fawkes and Joker masks), and with military coordination, they rocked the buses onto their sides. Bystanders filmed as the huge vehicles toppled and crashed onto the street and then ran, thinking the buses would explode. This strategy proved most useful at the four corners of the captured territory, essentially cutting off Jefferson and Madison Drives at Fourteenth Street and Third Street from the rest of the city, allowing organizers the rest of the day and night to establish a fortified perimeter and sow confusion for any authority trying to hinder their tactics. By the time the concert wrapped up, for all intents and purposes, Kate Morris’s foot soldiers controlled the National Mall, and no one in Washington, D.C.’s chain of command, from the chief of police to the mayor to the Feds, quite knew what to do about a bunch of folks with their arms handcuffed together by the Washington Monument singing Pharrell’s “Happy.”