Truer words were never spoken. President Biden calls out the problem.
EJ Dionne/WaPo:
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Aaron Blake/WaPo:
Robin Givhan/WaPo:
John Stoehr/Editorial Board:
Rebecca Solnit/NY Times:
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Biden: "We must be absolutely clear about what is true & what is a lie. And here's the truth. The former POTUS created & spread a web of lies about the 2020 election. He's done so because he values power over principle ... he can't accept he lost." pic.twitter.com/SSZS4OzXD8
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 6, 2022
EJ Dionne/WaPo:
Biden tells the truth in the best speech of his presidency
True, the president praised “some courageous men and women in the Republican Party … standing against” Trump’s lies. He always has been ready to work with those who hold “a shared belief in democracy.” Then he dropped the hammer on the rest of the GOP.
“Too many others are transforming that party into something else,” he said. “They seem no longer to want to be the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, Reagan, the Bushes.”
“At this moment, we must decide: What kind of nation are we going to be? Are we going to be a nation that accepts political violence as a norm? Are we going to be a nation where we allow partisan election officials to overturn the legally expressed will of the people? Are we going to be a nation that lives not by the light of the truth but in the shadow of lies?
My tweet of this hour, one year ago today, as January 6 attack on Congress and Capitol unfolded: pic.twitter.com/BUQiFbfN7l
— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) January 6, 2022
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Can Democrats make protecting democracy matter in 2022? This candidate says yes.
Some Democrats have taken to suggesting that highlighting the GOP abandonment of democracy—and vowing to use one’s position to guard against it at all costs— might be devolving into one of those dreaded “process” issues that voters don’t care much about.
Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania attorney general who is running for governor this year, is not one of those Democrats.
Shapiro is set to roll out a new blueprint for protecting democracy on Thursday, the first anniversary of Jan. 6. His campaign is a test for whether a gubernatorial candidate can make the vow to employ institutional power in defense of democracy into an issue that motivates voters.
“Democracy and voting rights are on the ballot this year,” Shapiro told me. “We need a patriotic plan to defend our democracy. And that’s why it’s the first plan we are releasing in this campaign.”
"I believe the power of the presidency and the purpose is to unite this nation, not divide it. To lift us up, not tear us apart. It is about us, about us, not about me," President Biden says as he concludes his speech assailing former Pres. Trump for refusing to accept defeat.
— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) January 6, 2022
Aaron Blake/WaPo:
Garland hints at bigger things in Jan. 6 probes, as Dems call for scrutiny of Trump
Early in his remarks, Garland reinforced the idea that the investigations are far from complete and that these efforts, by necessity, were starting small.
“We resolve more-straightforward cases first because they provide the evidentiary foundation for more-complex cases,” Garland said.
Soon after came the money quote.
“The actions we have taken thus far will not be our last,” he said. “The Justice Department remains committed to holding all January 6 perpetrators at any level accountable under law, whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy.”
Some of Biden’s most memorable (and arguably positive) speeches are when he gets angry and passionate. A good example was his Charlottesville speech. I think this one may top that.
— Adam Bass (@AdamBassOfMass) January 6, 2022
Robin Givhan/WaPo:
Memorializing anger and ignorance
On Jan. 6, one year after enraged hordes of Trump supporters tried to overthrow a just and fair presidential election by storming the U.S. Capitol, the country will remember that horror with speeches, prayers and candlelight vigils. But in what should be the clarifying aftermath of a harrowing event, the fog remains as dense as it has ever been. A day that should be one of unifying commemoration promises to be one in which the country remains at odds over precisely what happened and what it means to be American.
If the country is marking anything, it is the intractable division of our own making.
It’s hard to know what any given person will be memorializing this week. Is it the anniversary of the moment when democracy was mortally wounded? As we limp toward 2024 and another presidential election, perhaps these are just democracy’s last gasping hours. Or was that chapter of chaos and terror a testament to democracy’s resilience — evidence of its ability to survive a devastating assault from within? Has the country grown stronger in the places that cracked during the onslaught or irreparably weaker?
The president will speak to the country on Thursday morning and a significant percentage of Americans still do not believe that Joe Biden is the legitimately elected commander in chief. The House of Representatives will host a moment of dignified silence, which will belie the bellicose nature of our politics—one in which falsehoods and pettiness have evolved into campaign strategies rather than distractions. There are announced vigils in Washington, Florida, Arizona, and several other states—not for those who were injured, killed or terrorized by the storming of the Capitol but for those who have been jailed for doing the storming. One man’s Jan. 6 insurrectionist is another man’s Jan. 6 political prisoner. The truth isn’t elusive. It’s a victim of willful ignorance.
This quote has two important components: 1. DOJ is looking at leaders and organizers up to the highest levels, and 2. framing the harm as the “assault on our democracy“ suggests that they are looking beyond the events of Jan 6 alone. https://t.co/GLBVwz1lI7
— Barb McQuade (@BarbMcQuade) January 5, 2022
John Stoehr/Editorial Board:
Lies are bad. A press corps enabling liars is worse
Propaganda works when reporters fear telling the truth.
It’s conventional wisdom among newspaper reporters that we should let readers decide. Don’t come to conclusions. Just present the facts objectively. Leave the rest to the op-ed page.
But that conventional wisdom is running into trouble, namely a period in our history in which normal isn’t normal anymore. The more we cling to this conventional wisdom—to these normal reporting conventions—the more harm we do to the people we claim to serve.
That paradox is put into sharp relief by coverage of the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection. Its one-year anniversary is Thursday. The press corps had a year to soul-search, but it’s still treating the event—still treating treason—as if there are two sides. The result is elevating lies to the level of truth, making everything seem as good or bad as everything else, and giving the impression that nothing matters.
I talked about this and more with Mark Jacob. He spent 41 years in daily newspapers, mostly in Chicago. He’s the former Sunday editor at the Chicago Sun-Times and former metro editor at the Chicago Tribune. Since retiring, he’s reinvented himself as the sharpest press critic on social media. If anyone knows how journalism should be done, it’s Mark. I began by asking if the press corps has learned anything.
We are proud to announce Uncivil Religion! It's a new digital resource tracing the threads of religion throughout the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 and developed in collaboration with the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History: https://t.co/J1FJNdT7NN
— UA Dept. of REL (@StudyReligion) January 4, 2022
Rebecca Solnit/NY Times:
Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump’s Lies
While much has been said about the moral and political stance of people who support right-wing conspiracy theories, their gullibility is itself alarming. Gullibility means malleability and manipulability. We don’t know if the people who believed the prevailing 2012 conspiracy theories believed the 2016 or 2020 versions, but we do know that a swath of the conservative population is available for the next delusion and the one after that. And on Jan. 6, 2021, we saw that a lot of them were willing to act on those beliefs.
The adjective “gullible” comes from the verb “to gull,” which used to mean to cram yourself with something as well as to cheat or dupe, to cram someone else full of fictions. “Not doubting I could gull the Government,” wrote Daniel Defoe in 1701, and Hannah Arendt used the word “gullible” repeatedly in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” published in 1951. “A mixture of gullibility and cynicism is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements, and the higher the rank the more cynicism weighs down gullibility,” she wrote. That is, among those gulling the public, cynicism is a stronger force; among those being gulled, gullibility is, but the two are not so separate as they might seem.
CNN's @oliverdarcy: "I'll reiterate that it's time for actual news organizations to stop calling Fox a news network. It's not. It's a right-wing talk channel that has spent the past year misleading viewers about Jan 6 with a flood of lies & conspirac[ies]" https://t.co/rabX520KCR
— Versha Sharma (@versharma) January 5, 2022
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Surprise: Democrats dodged a gerrymandering fiasco. A top analyst explains why.
While Republicans will remain clear favorites in 2022, the national map could continue to improve for Democrats. As of now, redrawn lines account for more than two-thirds of House seats, and lines still remain to be decided in some places, but those provide more openings for Democrats.
There are several reasons for all this. In some places, Republicans opted to shore up safe seats rather than gerrymander as aggressively as possible. Meanwhile, where Democrats could, they aggressively gerrymandered themselves.
To understand the full picture, I spoke to Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, who conducted the analysis along with Amy Walter. An edited and condensed version of our conversation follows.
I'm became a 14 y,o. politics geek in 1973 during the Senate Watergate hearings. Maybe that's why I'm blown away watching the House Jan. 6 Committee tighten the vice on Team Trump, setting up prime-time hearings on a president's criminality My new column https://t.co/AgJhRt0716
— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) January 6, 2022