- Articles about the anniversary of January 6th.
- MAGA cognitive dissonance.
- Loyalty over expertise — CBS Evening News.
- Headlines about whether narrative defeats reason, conservative hysteria over Chick-fil-A and a gay couple, and the Pentagon’s petty attack on Sen. Mark Kelly.
- Umberto Eco’s list of traits of fascism.
- And Springsteen’s “Soul Driver.”
Once again, the MAGA crowd, and their glorious leader Trump, don’t care about law and order or principles, only tribal loyalty.
Slate, Russel Payne, 6 Jan 2026: We learned nothing from Jan. 6, subtitled “Evidence Trump tried to overturn the election 5 years ago is ‘overwhelming.’ There haven’t been any consequences”
After a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, it appeared the attack would result in a rare moment of reckoning in American politics — at least for a moment. Even hardline GOP politicians had distanced themselves from Trump, then President Joe Biden was in charge and Congress and the Department of Justice were investigating both the attack and the plot to overturn the 2020 election behind it.
Five years later, any accountability, political or legal, that Trump and his allies faced has been erased.
With a recounting of events since then. Pardoning the rioters, and so on. Conspiracy theories. How partisan alignment doesn’t change despite that one event.
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NY Times, Editorial Board, 31 Dec 2025: Disgust Over Jan. 6 Is No Longer Bipartisan
It was a day that should live in infamy. Instead, it was the day President Trump’s second term began to take shape.
Five years ago, on Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, hoping to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. After the sun set that day, Congress reconvened to certify Joe Biden’s victory. The rioters lost, and so did Mr. Trump, who had summoned them to Washington and urged them to march to the Capitol. The Trump era seemed to have ended in one of the most disgracefully anti-American acts in the nation’s history.
And now he’s worse.
That day was indeed a turning point, but not the one it first seemed to be. It was a turning point toward a version of Mr. Trump who is even more lawless than the one who governed the country in his first term. It heralded a culture of political unaccountability, in which people who violently attacked Congress and beat police officers escaped without lasting consequence. The politicians and pundits who had egged on the attack with their lies escaped, as well. The aftermath of Jan. 6 made the Republican Party even more feckless, beholden to one man and willing to pervert reality to serve his interests. Once Mr. Trump won election again in 2024, despite his role in encouraging the riot and his many distortions about it, it emboldened him to govern in defiance of the Constitution, without regard for the truth and with malice toward those who stand up to his abuses.
Tragically, America is still living in a political era that began on Jan. 6, 2021. Recognizing as much is necessary to bring this era to an end before it has many more anniversaries.
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And so MAGA keeps making excuses for glorious leader, no matter how extreme his behavior.
Slate, Jill Filipovic, 5 Jan 2026: Trump Is Going Full Dick Cheney on Foreign Policy. MAGA Is Twisting Itself Into Knots to Defend It., subtitled “It’s not easy to defend the president’s promise to ‘run’ Venezuela after years of criticizing foreign wars. But his lackeys are sure going to try.”
Donald Trump’s moves to invade Venezuela, abduct its president and first lady, invite global corporations to exploit its resources, and leave the nation’s feckless authoritarian regime largely intact range from blatantly illegal to facially insane. And the MAGA response to them is the most illustrative yet of the movement’s utter ideological and moral bankruptcy.
— Pause here. “Utter ideological and moral bankruptcy.” Resuming —
This is a president who promised to put America first: He ran on isolationism, as well as an end to the era of wars of choice, foreign quagmires, and the U.S. as the world’s police officer. What Trump has offered instead: wars of choice, with America as the world’s plunderer—and his followers not only cheer but invent ridiculous pretexts to defend this utterly unjustifiable move.
Once again, my interest in following stories like this isn’t about politics so much as human nature. How despite our pretenses at constructing idealistic standards of fair behavior, e.g. the US Constitution, most people, even when they claim allegiance to such standards, don’t follow them for a moment. They’re much more motivate by tribal loyalty and leadership by an authoritarian would-be dictator. They don’t want to think, they want to be told what to do. This is just how most people work. The article proceeds with things Trump promised, and instead did the opposite. But that’s OK with MAGA!
The usual MAGA defectors—Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene—offered their usual criticisms that this isn’t what MAGA stands for. But the protests are starting to ring a little hollow after the 456th time the president said he would do something, then did the opposite. What is now apparent to anyone willing to see it is that there is no MAGA ideology. There is no moral core. There is no organizing philosophy. There is simply a reckless and self-interested president who desperately wants to be admired, who is a master of distraction, and who sees the White House as a very fine way to enrich him and his family.
There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance going on here. The piece concludes:
“Start a war for oil to distract from problems at home” is the dumbest plot, but it seems to be our current storyline. And most of MAGA, a hollowed-out movement of unprincipled and morally vacant shills and sycophants, seems keen to play along.
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And this. MAGA-friendly Bari Weiss has taken over CBS News, despite inexperience in broadcasting, with promises to promote the perspectives of average Americans over those of academics or experts. (See yesterday’s post.) Last night’s CBS Evening News, with a new host, did not go well. Again, it’s easy to see this as the promotion of loyalty over expertise.
Slate, Luke Winkie, 6 Jan 2026: The Disastrous CBS Evening News Debut Was at Least an Apt Metaphor for America Right Now
Generally speaking, when presenting oneself as the vanguard for a radical new editorial direction—one that supposedly cuts through the ossified liberal bromides that have long dominated the nightly news—you do not want your debut broadcast to be reminiscent of an infamously botched campus newscast. Unfortunately, Tony Dokoupil, the newly installed anchor of CBS Evening News and the face of the company’s nouveau regime-friendly rebrand, was not so lucky. Monday was Dokoupil’s inaugural shift at the desk. How did it go? Well, to quote the man himself, “first day, big problems here.”
With a video and description.
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Let’s catch up on some “just headlines.”
- Skeptical Inquirer, Stuart Vyse, 2 Jan 2026: Will Narrative Defeat Reason? It does most of the time.
- Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 5 Jan 2026: A single Chick-fil-A store congratulated a gay couple, and conservatives lost their damn minds, subtitled “A harmless Facebook post exposed the emptiness of the conservative culture war”. Snowflakes.
- CNN, Zachary Cohen, 5 Jan 2026: Pentagon moves to cut Sen. Mark Kelly’s military retirement pay as punishment over ‘illegal orders’ video. Such pettiness.
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One more, beyond the headline.
And let’s end with this. Umberto Eco, the great Italian novelist, once wrote an essay about fascism. Its points are captured in this Wikipedia post. (I saw this via a Facebook post.) I’ll summarize. It would be interesting to compare these points to those in Timothy Snyder’s ON TYRANNY (review here).
- The cult of tradition
- The rejection of modernism
- The cult of action for action’s sake
- Disagreement is treason
- Fear of difference
- Appeals to a frustrated middle class
- Obsession with plot [i.e. conspiracy theories]
- Casting enemies at both too strong and too weak
- Life is permanent warfare
- Contempt for the weak
- Everybody is educated to become a hero
- Machismo
- Selective populism
- Newspeak
How many of these are obvious qualities of the current Trump administration?
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And what I happen to be listening to this afternoon. One of my favorite Springsteen songs.
Well then here’s to our destruction…
