THE SHORT-FINGERED CONVICTED FELON'S JOKE OF A CEREMONY

 

Dems picked the wrong senator for Senate Judiciary leadership

 

Dems picked the wrong senator for Senate Judiciary leadership

They need a fighter on the committee, not a go-alonger.

January 7, 2025 at 7:45 a.m. ESTToday at 7:45 a.m. EST

5 min

 

At a White House ceremony last week, then-Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) and then-Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) couldn’t stop congratulating themselves on the Senate’s confirmation of 235 federal judges during Joe Biden’s presidency. Durbin declared, “We are proud of the fact that these nominees have bipartisan support. More than 80 percent of them received bipartisan support.” (It was not clear why it should matter that Republicans supported some of them.) Schumer praised Durbin for “nudging him” to get judges confirmed.

 

Given their self-regard, it is hardly a surprise that Durbin was selected as the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee now that his party has moved into the minority. This was a mistake, and their celebration was excessive.

 

Democrats were in the majority (albeit just with Vice President Kamala Harris’s vote for the past two years) throughout Biden’s tenure. Of course they should have confirmed the president’s nominees. They should also have confirmed a batch of others whom they instead abandoned: 3rd Circuit nominee Adeel Mangi, 4th Circuit nominee Ryan Park, 6th Circuit nominee Karla Campbell and 1st Circuit nominee Julia Lipez.

 

Republicans waged a reprehensible Islamophobic smear campaign against Mangi and got away with it. As for Park, Republican senators “blue-slipped” him, allowing home-state senators to exercise a veto on the nominee (although Republicans didn’t honor home-state blue slips when they were in the majority), leaving some legal experts exasperated:

 

“It just doesn’t make any sense to me,” said Carl Tobias, chair of the University of Richmond School of Law. “Why are they falling on their sword?”

He is not alone. (In 2023, I vigorously denounced Durbin’s timidity on blue slips.)

 

This was part of a familiar pattern. Durbin time and time again refused to use the full powers of his position to defend the rule of law and rein in the rogue Supreme Court. In 2023, he politely sent a letter asking Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to appear before the committee to answer questions about an ethics mandate. Roberts declined to come; Durbin did not press the issue. The next year Durbin asked Roberts for a meeting regarding Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s egregious ethics missteps (a meeting that Roberts also declined) — and then, again, let it drop. To no avail, Durbin pleaded with Alito to recuse himself from cases concerning the failed Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Subpoenas and hearings — the normal tools wielded by committee chairmen — were not deployed.

As I wrote last May, “The long-term imperative must be to educate the public about the extent to which the court has been compromised. Only then can democracy defenders build consensus for serious reform such as term limits or the appointment of additional judges to rebalance the court and restore its stature.” Durbin failed in this regard.

 

The notion that Durbin could either get lots of judges confirmed or use the bully pulpit is misguided. A competent and aggressive chairman can do both. After all, the majority gives you the full array of powers to render advice and consent and conduct oversight.

“Senator Durbin was a distinct disappointment as Chair of Senate Judiciary when Democrats were in the majority and is a far weaker choice than Senator Whitehouse would have been as ranking member of that key Senate Committee now that the Republicans are in the driver’s seat,” constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe told me in an email. “Damage control will be essential with Trump and Musk driving the agenda on judicial appointments and Justice Department issues. There’s every reason to worry that Durbin will be a lackluster leader of the opposition to the MAGA wrecking ball as it smashes against our fragile system of checks and balances.”

 

When it came to investigating Justice Clarence Thomas’s financial impropriety, it was Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Georgia) who “sent a letter calling on the Judicial Conference to refer Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Attorney General for potential violations of the Ethics in Government Act 1978.” When the Judicial Conference refused to do so, Whitehouse was the one to write a blistering response:

 

The Judicial Conference response contains a number of inconsistencies and strange claims, and ultimately doesn’t address the only real question the Judicial Conference should’ve been focused on for the nearly two years it spent on this matter: Is there reasonable cause to believe that Justice Thomas willfully broke the disclosure law? By all appearances, the judicial branch is evading a clear statutory duty to hold a Supreme Court justice accountable for ethics violations.

Whitehouse has consistently demonstrated leadership and the determination to expose the financial and ethical corruption of a rogue and hyper-partisan Supreme Court. In floor speeches, Whitehouse has been the key player in exposing the right-wing scheme to capture the federal courts. He also has been at the forefront of efforts to pass a mandatory Supreme Court ethics code and impose term limits.

 

In short, if Democrats wanted to wage an unabashed defense of the rule of law, hold Republicans’ feet to the fire, lead aggressive confirmation hearings on absurd executive branch nominees (e.g., Kash Patel for FBI director) and use every tool to slow or stop unfit executive and judicial branch nominees, then Whitehouse, not Durbin, should have been put in the ranking Democrat’s chair.

 

“But seniority!” you may cry. Seniority is not the sole consideration in awarding committee chairmanships. (The practice has been to give “due consideration” to seniority of service in the Senate as well as “the preferences of Democratic Senators, and uninterrupted service on the committee(s) in question”). In any event, party leaders have worked their will to move aside chairmen (e.g., Dianne Feinstein) who were not up to the job.

 

In the case of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Democrats chose the path of least resistance (i.e., stick with seniority) to reinstall Durbin — who all too often took the path of least resistance against Republicans and Supreme Court malfeasance.

 

We are entering a fraught time for the rule of law. Having invested Durbin with such a prominent role in defense of democracy, “it’s now up to him to disprove those of us who doubt his resolve and fear his fecklessness,” Tribe said. The confirmation hearings for Patel and attorney general nominee Pam Bondi will give us a hint as to whether Durbin is up to the job.

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Marketing

How Automakers and Car Dealers Can Survive the Chinese EV Onslaught 

We’ve seen this movie before. And it’s a lesson for all entrepreneurs about how to position your product for a changing market. 

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1

JAN 7, 2025

Several decades ago, I was directly involved in one of the greatest efforts ever to position and brand entire new lines of luxury vehicles, whose Japanese manufacturers were planning to enter into the U.S. market. I was the CEO of a company that made millions of calls each year to measure the relative satisfaction of car customers with their sales and service experiences.

In the mid-1980s, the overwhelming perception by U.S. vehicle owners was that cars made in Japan were cheap-looking and unstylish, despite their reliability. We advised management at both Nissan and Toyota (and eventually Honda) that to succeed in the luxury space, they needed to establish new brands and new dealership facilities, and to enforce exceptionally high standards of dealer sales and service behavior. An elite group of existing dealers were awarded the opportunity to sell these new brands based on exceptional customer satisfaction levels as measured by our surveys and technology.

It was a given, of course, that the actual quality of the new cars needed to be high, but that was less of a concern than the need to overcome the negative consumer impressions of vehicles made in Asia. Luxury German, Italian, and English cars screamed elegance – but Japan conveyed a different image. 

Remaking that image is the origin story of Infiniti (Nissan), Lexus (Toyota), and Acura (Honda). These brands – at least in the cases of Lexus and Acura – have triumphed in America and come to be regarded as high-end, high-quality luxury lines with most car buyers not making the slightest connection to the parent companies, or to any remnants of their former prejudices and perceptions.  

Can Hyundai’s Genesis Pull Off the Same Branding Trick?

The latest entrant into the luxury branding sweepstakes is Hyundai, and the exceptional job it has done since launching the Genesis luxury brand in 2008 – again without the slightest look backward at its origin as a low-end Korean manufacturer. While most consumers still don’t even recognize the brand or badge, Genesis sales have continued to accelerate. New models have been added to the lineup and massive, flashy TV advertising has driven increased awareness. The cars themselves look largely indistinguishable from the major European luxury players (which the latest Genesis ads insist isn’t the case) while the built-in gimmicks, gadgets, and electronics are actually leading edge.  

Interestingly enough, and a lesson for entrepreneurs and startups, is that much of the new tech in these cars is relatively untested and somewhat unstable, but the advertising and promotion value of being leaders in the space has seemingly overcome the desire to make sure that all the stuff actually worked as promised. The major players are far more concerned, constrained, and even regulated in these areas and – as a result – are far behind. This is very much reminiscent of the Tesla self-driving fiascos, which are instances of the same old “forgiveness rather than permission” philosophy, but sadly, much like Theranos, represent serious ongoing risk to life and limb.  

BYD Is Yet Another Asian Competitor Ready to Crack the U.S. Market

The next vehicle invasion is already underway. This time it’s coming from China with brands and players, like BYD, that most car owners have not yet even heard of. They will soon. While the Musk-hyped media continues to drool over Tesla and bolsters its market cap, Tesla made about 1.8 million vehicles globally in fiscal 2023 while BYD produced more than three million EVs and ranked as the world leader. “Made in China” used to have negative connotations – similar to the earlier Japan issues – before the world learned that everything that Trump sells to the MAGAt suckers is manufactured in China and that’s made things apparently hunky-dory with the cult. 

We’re now watching Tesla sales decline for the first time in a decade, with the often-ridiculed Cybertruck leading the downward spiral. This is partly political, tied to CEO Elon Musk’s hard right turn and his boorish and infantile behavior.  Driving one of those monstrosities may soon be perceived as the vehicular equivalent of a MAGA hat on wheels.  

In fact, especially where certain energy technologies like batteries are concerned, there’s an understanding and even acceptance that China is now leading the pack. So, no one’s worried about hiding the backstory and both Elon and Trump can’t get seem to get enough of Xi Jinping. Tesla has its own very substantial facilities in China and is highly dependent on materials supplied from there as well as the revenue from the many Tesla vehicles sold there.

Trump has been talking big about tariffs on Chinese imports and also eliminating the EV tax credits, but most of that conversation was before he and Elon made their unholy and wholly confusing partnership. I’m not betting that anything adverse to Tesla (or Tik-Tok for that matter) is likely to happen any time soon, since nothing talks louder or more persuasively with the Orange Monster than the money that people put in his pocket. It’s also possible that Chinese firms have already begun planning to create assembly (and possibly manufacturing) facilities in the U.S., which would be expressly designed to get around any Trump tariffs.  

In fact, to give Musk his due, if it weren’t for Tesla’s cumulative edge in data capture, which will be critically important to the next autonomous generations of EVs, the Chinese would probably roll over the entire U.S. vehicle industry. There’s a precedent. Various Asian players have already done so in the steel industry, even as President Biden blocked their latest acquisition actions – Nippon Steel’s attempt to buy U.S. Steel.  

Car Dealers Will Need to Stay Aggressive

The Japanese vehicle invasion of the 1960s and ’70s caught U.S. manufacturers largely flat-footed. On the other hand, the biggest and smartest dealers that had available capital jumped on the new bandwagon, built new dealerships, and largely shut out any new entrants into their respective marketplaces. The captive dealers that were still playing the Detroit game and thus largely dependent on the old-line manufacturers lost several competitive steps and still haven’t really recovered. Today the mega-dealer chains like the Penske Automotive Group (with more than 200 locations in 28 states) have continued to expand and are probably already positioning themselves to add Chinese lines to their domestic offerings.

While some of the best and biggest of these dealer chains may finesse parts of the risk, most dealers won’t be able to resist the invasion by themselves. The prior Japanese history should be more than a fair warning that, if the domestic manufacturers don’t aggressively step up their EV game, they may lose this battle as well. That means millions of Americans will be driving BYD vehicles by 2030, if not sooner.  

Don’t Mention the Coup!

 

Don’t Mention the Coup!

The memory of January 6 vanishes from Trump’s new Washington.

By David Frum

January 6, 2025, 7 AM ET

 

The president of the United States is the country’s chief law-enforcement officer and the symbol of national authority and unity.

This incoming president faces a battery of criminal charges relating to his abuse of office and to personal frauds. He’s been convicted of some already; more are pending. He is also the author of a conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 election and seize power by violence. More than 1,000 of his followers have been convicted and sentenced for their roles in his attempted coup d’état.

These two sets of facts are obviously in considerable tension. How will they be resolved?

A strong desire exists—not only among pro–Donald Trump partisans—to wish away the contradiction. Trump will be president again. Every domestic interest group, every faction in Congress, every foreign government will need to do business with him. It’s unavoidable; the system cannot operate around him as if he were not there.

What cannot be avoided will not be avoided. And because most of us need to believe in what we are doing, almost every institution in American society and the great majority of its wealthiest and most influential citizens will find some way to make peace with Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021. Nobody wants to say aloud, “The Constitution is all very well up to a point, but the needs of the National Association of Birdhouse Manufacturers must come first.” Inevitably, though, our words come into alignment with our interests, and our thoughts then come into alignment with our words.

On the ever rarer occasions when the January 6 insurrection is discussed, the excuses will flow more and more readily. Trump didn’t conspire. It was just a protest that got out of hand. Only a tiny minority broke any important laws. Surely, they have already been punished enough. Anyway, the George Floyd protests were worse.

Even Trump’s opponents will fall more or less in line. As Democrats try to make sense of their 2024 defeat, some are already arguing that the party paid too much attention to procedural issues: too much talk about democracy, not enough about the price of eggs. Many will argue that the best way to win in 2028 is to attack Trump and his administration as servants of the ultrarich—in other words, by dusting off the playbook that Democrats have traditionally run against Republicans. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris all campaigned against Trump as a kind of aberration; all welcomed the support of non-Trump Republicans. Next time, things are likely to be different. Trump will be lumped together with all of his Republican predecessors, and the way to succeed in the lumping together is by jettisoning the topics on which Trump is unique (violent coups d’état) and focusing on the topics where he is not unique (tax cuts for the rich and regulatory favors to corporations). The attempted coup of 2021 will be unhelpful old news in a 2028 cycle defined by performative populism.

These imperatives will apply even to that supposed incubator of anti-Trump feeling, the sad dying remnants of what used to be called the mainstream media. (Today, of course, anti-Semitic and anti-vax cranks on YouTube draw much bigger audiences than any program on CNN or MSNBC, so what counts as “mainstream” or “fringe” is a very open question.) If you’re a normal journalist trying to report on inauguration plans or the staffing of the Cabinet or the administration’s first budget, your job depends on access, and access depends on playing ball to a greater or lesser degree. If you keep banging on about an attempted coup that happened four years ago, you are just making yourself irrelevant. And when you encounter somebody else who bangs on about it, you will be tempted to dismiss them as irrelevant, too.

The coup makers won. The coup resisters lost. Washington is not a city that spares much sympathy for losers.

“This never happened,” advises Don Draper on the television series Mad Men. “It will shock you how much it never happened.” So it will be with the first attempt by a serving president to overthrow the government he was sworn to protect.

Not all of us, however, have to live in the world of Washington transactions. Some of us need to volunteer to keep talking about the inconvenient things.

Trump really did try by violence to violate the first rule of constitutional democracy: Respect elections. Constitutional democracy matters, whether or not the theme helps Democratic candidates for federal office, whether or not it energizes media consumers, whether or not it advances the lobbying agenda of the National Association of Birdhouse Manufacturers. Those volunteers don’t need to blame those other Washington players for doing what they feel they need to do. The volunteers have only to remain faithful to their purpose: to push back against the Draper doctrine that the unwanted past can be made to disappear. It did happen. It should still shock us how much it did happen.

 

The Internet Is Worse Than a Brainwashing Machine

 

The Internet Is Worse Than a Brainwashing Machine

A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away.

By Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield

 

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Samuel Corum / Getty.

January 6, 2025, 6 AM ET

 

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.

It is also hard to remember that—for at least a moment—it seemed that reason might prevail, that those in power would reach a consensus against Donald Trump, whose baseless claims of voter fraud incited the attack. Senator Lindsey Graham, a longtime Trump ally, was unequivocal as he voted to certify President Joe Biden’s victory that night: “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.” The New York Post, usually a pro-Trump paper, described the mob as “rightists who went berserk in Washington.” Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which had generally allowed Trump to post whatever he wanted throughout his presidency, temporarily suspended his accounts from their service. “We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote then.

Yet the alignment would not last. On January 7, The Atlantic’s David A. Graham offered a warning that proved prescient: “Remember what yesterday’s attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol was like,” he wrote. “Very soon, someone might try to convince you that it was different.” Because even before the rioters were out of the building, a fringe movement was building a world of purported evidence online—a network of lies and dense theories to justify the attack and rewrite what really happened that day. By spring, the narrative among lawmakers began to change. The violent insurrection became, in the words of Republican Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia, a “normal tourist visit.”

David A. Graham: Don’t let them pretend this didn’t happen

The revision of January 6 among many Republicans is alarming. It is also a powerful example of how the internet has warped our political reality. In recent years, this phenomenon has been attributed to the crisis of “misinformation.” But that term doesn’t begin to describe what’s really happening.

Think back to the original “fake news” panic, surrounding the 2016 election and its aftermath, when a mixture of partisans and enterprising Macedonian teenagers served up classics such as “FBI Agent, Who Exposed Hillary Clinton’s Cover-up, Found Dead.” Academics and pundits endlessly debated the effect of these articles and whether they might cause “belief change.” Was anyone actually persuaded by these stories such that their worldviews or voting behavior might transform? Or were they really just junk for mindless partisans? Depending on one’s perspective, either misinformation posed an existential threat for its potential to brainwash masses of people, or it was effectively harmless.

But there is another, more disturbing possibility, one that we have come to understand through our respective professional work over the past decade. One of us, Mike, has been studying the effects of our broken information environment as a research scientist and information literacy expert, while the other, Charlie, is a journalist who has extensively written and reported on the social web. Lately, our independent work has coalesced around a particular shared idea: that misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine. A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away, and the incentives of the modern attention economy—people are rewarded with engagement and greater influence the more their audience responds to what they’re saying—means that there will always be a rush to provide one. This dynamic plays into a natural tendency that humans have to be evidence foragers, to seek information that supports one’s beliefs or undermines the arguments against them. Finding such information (or large groups of people who eagerly propagate it) has not always been so easy. 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.

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. “This is NOT a Trump supporter…This is a staged #Antifa attack,” the pastor Mark Burns wrote in a tweet that showed Angeli in the Senate chamber—which was then liked by Eric Trump. Other “evidence” followed. People shared a picture of Angeli at a Black Lives Matter protest that conveniently cropped out the QAnon sign he had been holding. People speculated that he was an actor; others interpreted his tattoos as a sign that he was part of an elite pedophile ring and therefore, in their logic, a Democrat.

The use of Angeli as proof that these people were not MAGA was just one of many such scrambles. Within a few hours, MAGA influencers speculated that one protester’s tattoo was a hammer and sickle—proof of leftist agitation. On TV, a Fox News host argued that Trump supporters don’t wear dark helmets, or use black backpacks, so the mob couldn’t be Trumpist. Fairly quickly, the narrative emerged that the attack was a false flag, and the media were in on it. Conspiracists pointed to the time stamp of an NPR live blog that seemed to announce the riot before it happened as evidence it was all preplanned by the “deep state” (and neglected to note that the story, like many, had been updated and re-headlined throughout the day, while retaining the time stamp of the original post). The famous footage of a Capitol Police officer heroically leading the mob away from the door to the Senate was “proof” in MAGA world that Trump supporters were being coaxed into the Capitol by the cops. Similarly, images of officers overwhelmed by rioters and allowing them past the barricades were further proof that the insurrection had been staged. The real organizer, they argued, was the deep state, abetted by far-left groups.

For a while, the rush to gather evidence produced a confusing double narrative from the right. In one telling, the riot was peaceful—the Trump supporters in the Capitol were practically tourists. The other highlighted the violence, suggesting that anti-fascists were causing destruction. Eventually, the dueling stories coalesced into a more complete one: Peaceful Trump supporters had been lured into the Capitol by violent antifa members abetted by law-enforcement instigators working for the deep state.

The function of this bad information was not to persuade non-Trump supporters to feel differently about the insurrection. Instead, it was to dispel any cognitive dissonance that viewers of this attempted coup may have experienced, and to reinforce the beliefs that the MAGA faithful already held. And that is the staggering legacy of January 6. With the justification machine whirring, the riot became just more proof of the radical left’s shocking violence or the deep state’s never-ending crusade against Trump. By January 7, Google searches for antifa and BLM (which had not played a role in the event) surpassed those for Proud Boys (which had). In the months and years after the attempted coup, the justification machine worked to keep millions of Americans from having to reckon with the reality of the day. December 2023 polling by The Washington Post found that 25 percent of respondents believed that it was “definitely” or “probably” true that FBI operatives had organized and encouraged the attack on the Capitol. Twenty-six percent were not sure.

Conspiracy theorizing is a deeply ingrained human phenomenon, and January 6 is just one of many crucial moments in American history to get swept up in the paranoid style. But there is a marked difference between this insurrection (where people were presented with mountains of evidence about an event that played out on social media in real time) and, say, the assassination of John F. Kennedy (where the internet did not yet exist and people speculated about the event with relatively little information to go on). Or consider the 9/11 attacks: Some did embrace conspiracy theories similar to those that animated false-flag narratives of January 6. But the adoption of these conspiracy theories was aided not by the hyperspeed of social media but by the slower distribution of early online streaming sites, message boards, email, and torrenting; there were no centralized feeds for people to create and pull narratives from.

Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is

The justification machine, in other words, didn’t create this instinct, but it has made the process of erasing cognitive dissonance far more efficient. Our current, fractured media ecosystem works far faster and with less friction than past iterations, providing on-demand evidence for consumers that is more tailored than even the most frenzied cable news broadcasts can offer. And its effects extend beyond conspiracists. During this past election season, for example, anti-Trump influencers and liberal-leaning cable news stations frequently highlighted the stream of Trump supporters leaving his rallies early—implying that support for Trump was waning. This wasn’t true, but such videos helped Democratic audiences stay cocooned in a world where Trump was unpopular and destined to lose.

Spend time on social media and it’s easy to see the demand for this type of content. The early hours of a catastrophic news event were once for sense-making: What happened, exactly? Who was behind it? What was the scale? Now every event is immediately grist for the machine. After a mass shooting, partisans scramble for evidence to suggest that the killer is MAGA, or a radical leftist, or a disaffected trans youth. Last week, in the hours after a mass murderer ran a car into civilians on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Trump began tossing out lies and speculation about the suspect, suggesting that he was a migrant (information later arrived indicating that the driver was a U.S. citizen and Army veteran). The tragedy and the chaos of its immediate aftermath became an opportunity to attack Democrats about the border.

This reflex contributes to a cultural and political rot. A culture where every event—every human success or tragedy—becomes little more than evidence to score political points is a nihilistic one. It is a culture where you never have to change your mind or even confront uncomfortable information. News cycles are shorter, and the biggest stories in the world—such as the near assassination of Trump last summer in Pennsylvania—burn bright in the public consciousness and then disappear. The justification machine thrives on the breakneck pace of our information environment; the machine is powered by the constant arrival of more news, more evidence. There’s no need to reorganize, reassess. The result is a stuckness, a feeling of being trapped in an eternal present tense.

This stagnation now defines the legacy of January 6. Once Republicans rewrote their side’s understanding of the insurrection (as a nonevent at best and an example of deep-state interference at worst), they dismissed all attempts for accountability as “Trump derangement syndrome.” Senate Republicans blocked initial attempts at a bipartisan January 6 commission; then–Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called it a “purely political exercise” that would not “uncover crucial new facts or promote healing.” During the congressional hearings on the attempted coup, Fox News largely ignored the proceedings. Trump, now president-elect, is pushing for an FBI probe of former Representative Liz Cheney for her involvement in the commission. Its findings, released in a detailed report, were immediately discredited by Republicans, who called it dishonest, politically motivated, and part of a witch hunt. By Republicans’ cynical logic, the events of January 6 were overblown, but are also ancient history. Only hysterical Democrats, obsessed with taking down Trump, could not move on.

Democrats—and the two Republicans on the committee—were right to seek accountability for January 6, but it proved exceedingly difficult to do so in an information environment that is constantly stuck in the now and the new. Trump and the MAGA media complex used the insurrection to portray Democrats as a party of scolds, obsessed with the past, droning on about democracy. 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. Many simply didn’t pay attention to the process. Meanwhile, the right-wing ecosystem’s work to refute the commission likely felt more improvised, authentic, and ultimately convincing to its followers.

When the Democratic Party chose to make the 2024 election about Trump, his threat to the rule of law, and the “battle for the soul of this nation,” as President Biden once put it, it was under the assumption that the indelible images of January 6 would be able to maintain their resonance nearly four years later. That assumption, broadly speaking, was wrong. Confronted with information that could shake their worldviews, people can now search for confirming evidence and mainline conspiracist feeds or decontextualized videos. They can ask AI and their favorite influencers to tell them why they are right. They can build tailored feeds and watch as algorithms deliver what they’re looking for. And they will be overwhelmed with data.

The hum of the justification machine is comforting. It makes the world seem less unpredictable, more knowable. Underneath the noise, you can make out the words “You’ve been right all along.”