Release Every Frame of January 6

A man who lived through January 6 the same way I did just said something out loud, and it is worth two minutes of your time.

Watch it. Then let me be careful and clear about what I am telling you and what I am not.

I am not telling you I can prove every word of that clip. I cannot stand here and swear to you, frame by frame, who every person on those Capitol steps was that day or who they answered to. That is the whole point. Neither can you. And neither can the people who spent four years telling this country they knew exactly what happened on January 6 and exactly who deserved to rot in a cell for it.

So let me set down the part people love to argue about and pick up the part that is not in dispute.

The government has the footage. You don't.

There are tens of thousands of hours of Capitol surveillance video from January 6. For years, almost none of it was public. Defendants like me had to fight through our own cases just to see slices of it. Reporters had to sue for it. The cameras belonged to the government, the tapes belonged to the government, and the government decided — case by case, clip by clip — what you were allowed to see and what stayed locked in a vault.

Sit with that for a second. The single largest archive of evidence about the most-prosecuted day in modern American history has been controlled, the entire time, by the same institution that built the prosecutions off of it.

"Release it all" is the only honest position

Here is the test I apply to every one of these fights, and it has never once failed me.

If the footage shows exactly what they said it showed, then full, unedited release ends every rumor on the internet overnight. It vindicates them. It makes people like me look like we were wrong. So if I am wrong — prove it. Roll the tape. All of it.

But if there are things in those tens of thousands of hours that complicate the official story — people at the very front who were not who the crowd assumed, moments that do not match the version we were sold, faces that were quietly never charged — then withholding the video is not "security." It is editing. It is a stranger deciding for you what is real.

The only reason a question like the one in that clip survives for years is that the people who could answer it with one hard drive keep choosing not to.

I am not asking you to believe a meme. I am asking you to demand a file.

I do not build my case on viral posts, and I am not asking you to build yours on one either. I am asking you to notice the pattern, because I have lived inside it.

In my own case, under my own name, I have said I was arrested when I should not have been, and that I have video I believe proves it. I know what it is to have the footage be the entire ballgame. I know what it is to wait on records that someone else gets to keep in a drawer. I learned the hard way that in these fights the document is everything and the narrative is nothing.

So when another defendant points at the crowd and asks a simple question about who was really in it, I do not laugh and I do not flinch. I ask the same thing I always ask.

Release the records. Release the video. Not the clips that flatter the case — all of it.

What you can do right now

First, share this. Not because I wrote it — because the demand is clean, and anyone, anywhere on the political map, should be able to say it out loud: the public has a right to see the public's own footage of a public building.

Second, take it to your representatives. Ask them, on the record, whether they support the full, unedited release of all January 6 Capitol surveillance video. Then watch who says yes, who says no, and who suddenly needs to change the subject.

Third, read the rest of the record I am building. I already documented how the government admitted, in a legal settlement, that it pressured platforms over what you were allowed to say online — the DOJ social-media censorship settlement. The footage fight and the speech fight are the same fight: who gets to decide what you are allowed to see, and what you are allowed to say about it.

I deal in records. This one — all of it — belongs to you.

Your turn — cast your vote

Reply to me on X @RealRyanNichols and vote:

🅐 RELEASE IT ALL — Every frame of January 6 Capitol video, unedited, public.

🅑 KEEP IT SEALED — The government is right to decide what gets shown.

🅒 SHOW ME MORE FIRST — I won't make up my mind until the full tape is out.

Tell me where you land. And if you believe the public has a right to its own footage, say it loud enough that the people holding the drive can hear you.

— Ryan