"A stolen traffic sign that someone had painted over with the slogan 'Stop the Steal 2020' and the image of a grinning skull with Donald Trump’s hair, smoking a cigarette..."

"... had an undeniable flair, even if its iconography was hard to parse. More poignant was a strip of blue fabric with the word 'pence' in white letters that had seemingly been torn—in anger? sorrow?—from a 'trump pence' flag. A white poster board was stencilled with... 'time to cross the rubicon.'... [Photographs of] graffiti... such as 'power to the people!' and 'where are you thomas jefferson?!,' along with—easy to parse—an S.S. symbol.... [A] photojournalist, Madeleine Kelly, donated the protective vest she was wearing when she was kidney-punched by a female protester who shouted, 'That bitch is photographing us!' When Kelly returned home, she found a slit in the vest; she’d been the victim of an attempted stabbing. For the record, no one at the museum seems much interested in acquiring the furry Viking-style headpiece famously worn by Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon Shaman (not that he’s offering it)...."

From "Insurrectionabilia at the Smithsonian/In 2026, we will celebrate the nation’s semiquincentennial, and also the fifth anniversary of the January 6th uprising. Curators diligently preserved detritus from the Capitol attack, including photos of a wooden gallows" (The New Yorker).