Clerical Newsletter Warns Against Heresy on High Holy Insurrection Day

A journalist and an academic disinformation expert take to the pages of the church newsletter The Atlantic today to warn that MAGA America is distorting the meaning of January 6, Insurrection Day, the highest holy day in the secular religion of the political class. There’s too much stuff on the Internet, they argue, and it hasn’t been sorted by experts, so people can just grab whatever factish thing they want and then use it to believe whatever they choose. You can load up your cart with just your evidence, and leave the rest on the shelf.

This, they conclude, is a change from How Things Used to Be™: “Evidence foraging might historically have meant digging into a subject, testing arguments, or relying on genuine expertise. That was the foundation on which most of our politics, culture, and arguing was built.” You used to know what was true because experts told you it was, and now you can just…read stuff. This is very bad! It’s worse than brainwashing:

Arguing for calm, rational, fact-based, expert-centered analysis, Warzel and Caulfield launch their essay with this absolutely remarkable opening paragraph, annihilating their point before they attempt to make it. Please remember their argument about rational discussion as you read the sociopathically shameless first sentence:

Try to remember for a moment how you felt on January 6, 2021. Recall the makeshift gallows erected on the Capitol grounds, the tear gas, and the sound of the riot shields colliding with hurled flagpoles. If you rewatch the video footage, you might remember the man in the Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt idling among the intruders, or the image of the Confederate flag flying in the Capitol Rotunda. The events of that day are so documented, so memed, so firmly enmeshed in our recent political history that accessing the shock and rage so many felt while the footage streamed in can be difficult. But all of it happened: men and women smashing windows, charging Capitol police, climbing the marbled edifice of one of America’s most recognizable national monuments in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

1. We need to get back to rational, fact-centered discourse;

2. For example, REMEMBER HOW TERRIFIED YOU FELT FOCUS ON YOUR FEELINGS FEAR FEAR FEAR

And then, after opening with an amygdala-punching maneuver to put readers into feargasm before they start reading the part about calm, rational, fact-focused thought, they engage in, guess what, a selective invocation of catastrophic images: Ohhhh, the day when the MARBLED EDIFICE was marked with the darkness of MAKESHIFT GALLOWS.

It’s an essay about balanced, rational analysis that opens with hyper-emotional manipulation, but — much more amazingly — it’s an essay that warns against choosing only facts that support your own view, from authors who choose only facts that support their own view. Yes, there was a dude in a Camp Auschwitz t-shirt that day, and some of the people who were there broke windows and fought with police. But this is also an image of the terrifying insurrection that you should remember with feelings of deep-seated fear, and all of these images reveal divergent realities about a complex event:

The day of unparalleled slaughter, the new 9/11, the 21st-century Pearl Harbor, the day of horror and bloodshed when many of the terrifying insurrectionists…stayed between the velvet ropes. Further, drawing a contrast with the old days when we could still think rationally:

The current internet—a mature ecosystem with widespread access and ease of self-publishing—undoes that. As the mob stormed the Capitol on January 6, the justification machine spun up, providing denial-as-a-service to whoever was in need of it, in real time. Jake Angeli, the “QAnon Shaman,” was an early focus. Right-wing accounts posting about the insurrection as it unfolded argued that these were not genuine “Stop the Steal”–ers, because Angeli didn’t look the part.

Note the absence of an argument: Angeli was going to commit insurrection and overthrow the government by ___________? Denying that Angeli was an insurrectionist is a right-wing conspiracy theory; asserting that he was an insurrectionist is an untested assumption. He tried to seize power by…wandering around? By what mechanism did he intend to seize power? What did he do? Did the Department of Commerce tremble at the very edge of obeying his orders and treating him as the new king? Was he almost the commander-in-chief? “STRATCOM, this is Angeli. I have the football!”

Down toward the bottom, the increasingly ludicrous essay describes the January 6 Commission like this:

The commission’s work was the sort of precise and methodical case-building that is the opposite of the frenetic and immediate justification engine. In an anti-institutional moment, the congressional truth-gathering process read to some as academic, slow, even elitist.

This is nakedly, shamelessly dishonest framing — in, again, an essay about getting the facts right and thinking rationally. As I’ve written before, a reverential two-hour PBS Frontline documentary proudly reported that the bold truthtellers of the commission hired a television producer to shape the narrative of the hearings and really make the storyline pop:

To pretend that this was a methodical, slow, even academic fact-finding effort is uniquely shameless bullshit from a gaggle of dimwitted whores. It was calculated political theater, produced for television, nakedly focusing on dirtying up Trump to the quite deliberate exclusion of other topics:

Here’s the link again. Read the whole thing yourself and see if you come to a different conclusion, but I read this essay as yet another in an endless series of sleazy and bone-dumb efforts to make January 6 simple and terrifying, excluding context and shading, for the purposes of a form of partisan manipulation that never works because everybody can see the trick.

Our regime propagandists are stupid, lazy, and unimpressive, and they wish you didn’t see them so clearly.