Five people died in the attack, including Officer Brian Sicknick. He was hit with a fire extinguisher and doused with pepper spray. He died from a stroke the next day. Two other officers who had defended the building committed suicide the following day. There is no doubt about the rioters’ purpose in this attack. They mounted this insurrection, shouting “Fight for Trump!” in order to try to prevent Congress from performing its constitutional duty of confirming the democratic election of Joe Biden to the presidency. They believed that somehow the election should rightly have gone to Donald Trump and was in some way stolen from him.
And the assertion that the election had been stolen was a BIG LIE.
While this chaos was taking place in the halls of the Capitol building, members of Congress were in hiding, some of them rightfully in fear for their lives.
Despite this anarchy, in May a Trump supporter, Congressman Andrew Clyde, a Republican from Georgia, stated that the insurrection had ben nothing but a “normal tourist day.” Another Big Lie.
Where do all this lies come from? A lot of places. Too many places. Of course lying, particularly about political events, is not new. In 1994 a tabloid paper, Weekly World News, published an article which stated that twelve members of the United States Senate were aliens from outer space. The named senators laughed it off, and I doubt that anyone took the article seriously.
There have been many changes since 1994. For one thing the former president of the United States is a notorious liar. According to the Washington Post, which kept track, Trump made over 30,000 false or misleading claims while he was in office. And he was not alone. People like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Alex Jones contributed to the disinformation that saturated the internet. The internet itself helped transmit wild conspiracy theories and other misinformation.
Far right news organizations helped spread the poisonous lies. When Fox News was not extreme enough for the president, he turned to even more dangerous news sites like News Max and OAN (American News Network). Forty percent of people who trust these “news” sources believe that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the US are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.” Almost half them believe that “there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.”
For many people Facebook is a better source of news than The New York Times. Yet Facebook is reluctant to eliminate lies from its postings, even though they reported a lot of misinformation posted on their site comes from Russia. For 30 percent of Republicans Trump himself, the Great Prevaricator, is the primary news source. Sixty-one percent of Trump news followers believe that major voter fraud occurred in the 2020 election.
According to a Reuters/lpsos poll 25 percent of Americans believe that Trump is still the true president. Even though there is no evidence that left-wing activists participated in the January 6 riot, 32 percent of Americans agree that it “was led by violent left-wing protestors trying to make Trump look bad.”
Writing in The Atlantic, Peter Wehner said, “political violence will become more acceptable and more prevalent on the American right” if the Republican Party “doesn’t counteract these lies rather than indulge them.”
We are living in dangerous times. The assault on the Capitol building was an assault on democracy itself. Around the country state legislatures are chipping away at democracy by limiting access to voting. All of these anti-democratic actions are motivated by lies which are believed by large numbers of Americans.
I don’t know what can be done about the lies that are sucking people in, but something must be done. Failure to act may cost us our democracy.
