Miscellany Central

Wednesday, March 3, 2021

Why the GOP can’t quit Trump. Thje Monkey Cage

Here’s what we learned when we surveyed MAGA supporters

By Christopher Sebastian Parker and Rachel M. Blum

March 2, 2021 at 9:45 p.m. GMT+9

For answers, we studied the opinions of supporters of the “Make America Great Again” movement. The MAGA movement, often viewed as a divisive force in American politics, includes roughly half of Republican primary voters. Its adherents are Trump’s most committed supporters. Fear of electoral reprisal from the MAGA “base” helps explain why so few Republicans dare cross Trump, even after the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6.

Our panel study examines the characteristics of MAGA supporters, their beliefs, and what motivates them. We find that at least half of MAGA supporters tend to be White, Christian, male, over 65 years of age, retired, and earn at least $50,000 a year. Further, roughly one-third have at least a college degree. Our data suggests their commitment to Trump is unshakable, motivated by the perception of a threat to their status as the culturally dominant group.

How we did our research

Our panel study tracked the political opinions of MAGA supporters in two waves between Dec. 24 and Jan. 28. We recruited participants by running an ad for the survey on Facebook from Dec. 24 to 31 that targeted users interested in “Make America Great Again” (MAGA). The ad was shown to Facebook users in every state, proportional to population. This approach resulted in the successful recruitment of 1,431 MAGA supporters from all 50 states who completed the first wave of the survey. Out of these respondents, 702 indicated their willingness to participate in a second wave. When emailed invitations to take the second survey, conducted between Jan. 13 and Jan. 28, 295 responded.

MAGA supporters are politically vocal, racially biased, and believe conspiracy theories

Our respondents are committed to making their views known. For example, at least 50 percent of these MAGA supporters have been politically active — signing petitions, contacting their representatives, participating in boycotts or donating to campaigns. Beyond that, roughly 45 percent report they’ve attended political meetings, 35 percent attended rallies, and 30 percent volunteered for campaigns.

Further, MAGA supporters overwhelmingly believe Trump’s election misinformation, as well as other conspiracy theories. Nearly 100 percent of MAGA supporters believe Trump’s claims that the election was stolen, and 70 percent support Trump remaining in office beyond the allowed two terms. Their distrust extends to other areas as well. They overwhelmingly agree, in proportions of 80 percent or higher, with statements suggesting that unknown elites control America and with conspiracy theories about covid-19.

MAGA supporters are also biased against Blacks, immigrants and women. They fully accept Trump’s rhetoric on these groups, downplay any obstacles faced by Black Americans, view immigration as a threat to U.S. laws and culture and agree women are seeking special favors, or worse, are trying to control men.

MAGA supporters are motivated by what’s called ‘status threat’

What explains MAGA supporters’ commitment to Trump and his conspiratorial and racist views? The answer is “status threat,” or the belief that one’s way of life or status is undermined by social and cultural change. As we’ve shown elsewhere, those who are attracted to reactionary movements like MAGA are often motivated by anxiety about possible cultural dispossession — seeing their social and cultural dominance eclipsed by other groups.

That White Christian men feel under siege is nothing new. We need only look at the Know Nothing Party of the 1850s, the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, the John Birch Society of the 1960s, and the tea party of the Obama years to see how often a slice of this demographic slides into bigotry. Perhaps this explains MAGA movement’s close association with racism, sexism and nativism. What’s more, more than half are middle class by income, earning over $50,000 a year; almost a third graduated college, making them middle class by that educational standard. Moreover, MAGA’s demography reflects the profile of people who invaded the Capitol in January.

MAGA supporters see Trump as their protector, the barrier between themselves and communities of color, feminists, and immigrants from what Trump called “shithole” countries, whom they perceive as threats. Perhaps this explains why they refuse to accept the election results. This may also be the reason only 4 percent of them thought Trump should have been impeached.

MAGA nation’s loyalty to Trump and commitment to a Trump-led GOP makes it hard for the Republican Party to break away from the former president. Since the 2016 presidential election, this group’s commitment to the GOP is hard to deny. In Trump’s initial run for office in 2016, roughly 90 percent of MAGA supporters voted for him. In the 2018 midterm and since, MAGA voted for Republican candidates without exception. Although Trump lost in 2020, MAGA supporters’ political commitment suggests he had coattails, narrowing Democrats’ advantage in the House.

What this means for the Republican Party

Understanding why MAGA, also known as the Republican base, supports Trump, reveals why the GOP can’t break away from him: They are intensely loyal to Trump, motivated by status threat, and convert their anxiety and commitment into votes. If any Republican tries to do disavow Trump, they will face a primary challenge. Even those sure they would survive such a primary know that their political ambitions will need Trump’s blessing.

For now, the party will remain in the hands of Trump and his acolytes. That’s likely to increase polarization, with Trump supporters’ passion for the former president matched only by his opponents’ revulsion. And MAGA supporters’ willingness to reject facts that do not reflect well on their leader is likely to continue to destabilize U.S. democracy.

Christopher Sebastian Parker (@blackbruin) is professor of political science at the University of Washington, co-author of “Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America” (Princeton University Press, 2013) and author of “Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle Against White Supremacy in the Postwar South” (Princeton University Press, 2009).

Rachel M. Blum (@blumrm) is an assistant professor in the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center and the department of political science at the University of Oklahoma, and author of “How the Tea Party Captured the GOP: Insurgent Factions in American Politics” (University of Chicago Press, 2020).

On Jan. 6 came the white supremacists. Now comes the whitewash.

Opinion by Dana Milbank

March 3, 2021 at 9:17 a.m. GMT+9

On Jan. 6 came the white supremacists.

Now comes the whitewash.

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday to answer questions about the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, told the lawmakers what should be obvious to all: that “militia violent extremists” and “racially motivated extremists” were behind the insurrection, and that there is no evidence of “fake Trump supporters” or “antifa” having any role in the attack, as Republican officials have suggested. In general, the Trump-appointed Wray testified, white supremacists are the “biggest chunk” of the domestic terrorism threat and “the most lethal.”

But to hear the Republicans tell it, the country is besieged by left-wing anarchists.

“There has been 280 arrests as a result of the Jan. 6 attack, compared to more than 1,000 arrests as a result of riots just in Portland last year,” argued Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa), the top Republican on the panel — as if violence tied to last summer’s racial justice protests in Oregon is the same as an attack on the U.S. seat of government to overturn the election. Grassley went on at length: “holding the ‘A’ symbol for antifa” ... “an admitted antifa adherent” … “antifa rioters.”

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) wanted to make sure the FBI was “tracking extremist groups like antifa or other radicalism that are connected to violence in cities across the country.”

And Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who helped to foment the Capitol attack with his effort to overturn the electoral college results, proclaimed that “we have seen massive rioting and violence as extremists, many of them leftist extremists, took to the streets,” part of an “ongoing pattern of domestic terrorism.”

Even after Wray said the FBI had found no sign of antifa or anarchist involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) took issue with “the narrative” of who was involved on Jan. 6 — and again suggested that anarchists played a role.

The attempt to muddy the waters with the largely imaginary threat of antifa serves to shift the focus from the real and present danger of white-supremacist violence. Grassley, grudgingly acknowledging that “white supremacy movements may be considered the most dangerous at a given time,” cited ever-present “left-wing threats” and asked for the FBI to “make your left-wing anarchist extremism program as robust as your white supremacy and militia extremism program.”

Key to the effort is to derail plans for a 9/11-style commission to probe the Jan. 6 attacks. Republican leaders haven’t responded to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) request for their input on a draft proposal for such a commission two weeks ago. Instead, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) last week poured cold water on the “partisan” idea and called for an investigation into “the full scope of political violence.”

In short, Republicans want to turn the Capitol insurrection commission into an antifa commission — and to paint over the events of Jan. 6 with a coat of false equivalencies.

Yet Democrats might be smart to oblige them.

Jamie Gorelick, one of the Democratic appointees to the 9/11 commission, reminded me that it, too, was born amid fierce partisanship. President George W. Bush didn’t want a commission, and a joint House and Senate intelligence probe failed to make much headway.

But the inspired leadership of Republican Chairman Tom Kean and Democratic Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton — in a sign of their unusual partnership, they instead referred to each other as co-chairmen — made it a bipartisan triumph. There was one staff, not divided by party. No subpoenas were to be issued without bipartisan agreement. The members would only speak publicly in bipartisan pairs. Kean and Hamilton agreed that they would switch sides to prevent any vote of the commission from breaking along party lines. Whenever they couldn’t agree on the language of the 9/11 report, they agreed to limit that section of the narrative to “bare facts.”

Gorelick says the same model could work again, as long as both sides agree to appoint only former officials who have no interest in holding future elected or Senate-confirmed office. If they get that part right, it won’t matter if the commission’s mandate is Jan. 6 or broader political violence, Gorelick argued. “They’ll look at the facts,” she said, and they’ll see what is objectively true: that political violence on the left is “not as consequential” as the danger from the right.

If Republicans pack the commission with saboteurs, they could still kill the effort. But we’d be no worse off than we are now, with Republican senators meeting the FBI director’s facts with antifa fantasies.

And — who knows? — the commissioners might confound the GOP leaders who appointed them by following the facts.

Learning from the Covid economy

By Matthew Yglesias

SlowBoring.com

March 2, 2021

COVID-19 hammered the world economy in general, and the American economy suffered as part of that. Lots of stuff was shut down for public health reasons. And even when people were allowed to do things, they often didn’t. Indoor dining has been allowed in D.C. for the majority of the past year, but I haven’t dined indoors, and I’m not the only abstainer — people I’ve spoken to in the industry say even since reopening, it’s been a hellish time for their businesses since the customers just aren’t there.

The same is true for travel. You’re allowed to fly on airplanes. People do it. I went to Austin for Joe Rogan. But there are just way fewer flights than there used to be — not a lot of people traveling.

Yet in a fascinating way, when you dig into the details, things are better than you might think. Household net worth is up thanks to a booming stock market and a rise in home prices. Disposable income is up. Savings are up. Poverty is down.

Not because “the economy” isn’t damaged, but because it turns out that an assertive welfare state can work miracles. There’s a powerful lesson in that which we should learn for ordinary times.

The big picture

Let’s start with the most basic — gross domestic product. GDP measures the value of all the goods and services produced in the economy. It’s a very imperfect measure of well-being, but we do know that over the long-term, countries that enjoy GDP growth also see other good stuff happen, while those that don’t, don’t.

The GDP story is that the economy slipped in the first quarter of 2020 thanks to the pandemic’s impact on world trade, then collapsed in Q2 thanks to widespread shutdowns, then bounced back in Q3 thanks to widespread reopenings, but then the V-shaped recovery stopped in Q4 because we hadn’t actually contained the pandemic.

A more organized policy response could probably have avoided that Q2/Q3 swing, since whatever you make of the Q2 closures, we didn’t adhere to them long enough to try to suppress the virus — in which case there was really no point.

The jobs picture looks similar, but bleaker, with a less robust recovery in Q2 and Q3.

I normally don’t like to do charts with two y-axes, but in this case, I think it clarifies the point — GDP and employment exhibited a similar pattern, but GDP has come closer to full recovery.

Another way of looking at this is that median earnings soared during the pandemic, not because the typical worker got a huge raise, but because the job losses were concentrated in low-paid sectors. With a ton of foodservice and hospitality workers left jobless, the median pay of the still-employed surged.

None of this is surprising to anyone, but I think laying it out in detail is important because it illustrates that the GDP and wage effects are two sides of the same coin. If you talk about GDP you sound kind of heartless, while if you talk about low-wage work you seem like a caring and concerned person. But the nature of the thing is that low-wage workers’ contributions don’t matter all that much for “the economy.” Total income is equal to total production, so shutting down a low-income sector of the economy had a modest impact on production. What really hammered the economy was the brief period in which dentists’ and doctors’ offices were shut down. The bars and restaurants have much less economic significance.

But of course it matters a lot to people who lost their jobs.

The picture at the bottom

Absent government financial assistance, this would have been a total disaster for lower-wage families.

But in fact, the government did step in with financial assistance. Unfortunately, the way the official poverty numbers are released doesn’t give us visibility into what happened in 2020 yet. Fortunately, Jeehon Han, Bruce Meyer, and James X. Sullivan got funding from the National Science Foundation to calculate something close to a real-time look at poverty.

What they find is kind of shocking, namely that in Q2 of 2020, the poverty rate was lower than it had been before the pandemic, because the CARES Act more than compensated for the decline in employment. When CARES expired, poverty rose once more, and by Q4 of 2020 poverty rates were again higher than they had been pre-pandemic. But even by December 2020, poverty was still lower than its November 2019 level. The very strong labor market that we were finally starting to enjoy in the winter of 2019-20 was better for poverty than the December 2020 situation, but all earlier points were worse.

The good news is that by January 2021, the $600 stimulus checks that Trump signed during the lame-duck period start flowing, and poverty drops again. When the American Rescue Plan is signed, larger checks will go out along with an increase in the generosity of Unemployment Insurance, on top of a huge increase to the Child Tax Credit, plus a more modest increase to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).

In other words, those poverty numbers are going to fall again, but this time in the context of a growing economy.

Ready for a breakout?

Historically, the economy used to bounce back fast from recessions. Really deep recessions like the one that hit us in 1982 and sent unemployment soaring to 10% caused a lot of pain, but they didn’t last a long time — they led to very rapid recoveries. But the not-so-bad recession that hit in 2001 took several years to recover from, despite being shallow. And in retrospect, policymakers should have taken that experience more seriously when thinking about the deep recession of 2008-09. Some economists were confident in a rapid bounce-back, but what we instead got was a 2001-paced recovery from a 1982-sized hole, so it took 10 years (or maybe more) to get back to a healthy labor market.

That means we now have a lot of people who cut their teeth on the Not So Great Recovery from the Great Recession and are primed to assume that the comeback from our current deep hole will also be slow.

But I think that’s probably wrong. The thing about the Great Recession is that unemployment immiserated the unemployed, and even middle-class people who kept their jobs saw their net worths plummet in the form of tumbling housing prices and damaged 401(k) accounts.

This recession isn’t like that. Incomes took a hit from joblessness, but federal relief spending has filled more than 100% of the gap.

Meanwhile household spending fell despite the rise in incomes, since — as you have probably noticed — there’s less going on than usual thanks to the pandemic. And that’s not just a function of formal business closures. When people don’t commute to the office, they’re more likely to make coffee and lunch at home than to stop on the way for a cup and then grab a sad desk salad from someplace nearby. The shift to more home cooking, more nights in watching Netflix, more nature walks as a leisure activity, etc. is a fundamental shift to a more frugal lifestyle.

The upshot is people have something like $1.6 trillion in accumulated savings (with more to come in the form of $1,400 checks), over and above what we would have expected from a normal year.

A big question is: What happens with that money? It’s sometimes described as “pent-up savings,” as if it automatically flows off household balance sheets when public health conditions allow. That’s not correct. The conventional wisdom pre-pandemic was that most people weren’t saving enough for retirement, and they might just hang onto the money.

But there is a phenomenon called “pent-up demand” that’s well-attested in empirical history. If for some reason the nature of the pandemic was that it became impossible to manufacture sofas, we would expect the post-pandemic year to feature unusually high demand for sofas, because over and above whatever the usual life-cycle for sofas is, there’d be all the people who would have bought a sofa in 2020 but had to wait until 2021 instead. Back when there was more domestic manufacturing and more strikes, this kind of thing used to come up fairly frequently. But what we’re really looking at today is a lost year for the purchase of services. Jason Furman has thought a lot about the economy, and he thinks pent-up demand for services might not be real.

Twitter avatar for @jasonfurman

I kind of see this the other way from him. Unless you’re willing to commit to the ongoing expense of a bigger house, there are only so many durable goods you can accumulate. But given a temporary cash windfall, the sky’s the limit on consumption of services. Of course there are logistical limits to how often any given person is going to go eat out. But even people pretty far up the income chain have places they’d like to eat that they can’t afford, or pricier bottles of wine they can’t spring for. Parents of young kids are constrained by babysitter costs. Parents of teens will want to indulge them after a difficult year.

To me, the big thing here is going to be capacity constraints. The good news for bars and restaurants is that “normal” restaurant conditions are to be operating well-below capacity a fair amount of the time, so you can accommodate flukey demand by being full on a random Tuesday night.

The bad news for “the economy” is that obviously, a lot of restaurants have gone out of business over the past year. We’re going to have a ton of dining demand chasing a diminished supply of tables, and while I am the opposite of an overheating-worrier, I do think we’ll see some inflation here.

In the travel sector, things are worse. Leisure destination hotels are available at the times people want to travel. And in a lot of cases, off-season travel is not a good substitute for visiting at the right time of year. It also seems to me that the airline industry can’t just flip a switch and “turn on” a full-capacity national web of routes. The logistical issues around getting the planes up and running and the crews changed are exacerbated because nobody is quite sure what’s going to happen with business travel, so you probably won’t even want to exactly replicate your pre-pandemic network.

The biggest risk to the recovery, in my view, is that the Fed will face pressure to raise interest rates in the face of transient inflation focused in the dining and travel sectors and slow the recovery down. But the people running the show seem pretty determined not to do that. The best GDP growth year of my lifetime was 7.2% in 1982, and I think if anything, we’re slightly more likely to go above than below that in 2021.

But instead of just marveling at things having held up better than you might think, we should really try to learn some lessons.

Better things are possible

The key thing, to me, is that we made incomes go up even as production was going down. That “shouldn’t be possible.” Shelter the most vulnerable from the worst effects of the downturn? Sure. But actually have disposable income rise and poverty fall in the middle of a huge catastrophe for GDP? That’s kind of wild.

Of course this was made possible thanks to super-low interest rates, which made it viable to transfer trillions of dollars off the government’s balance sheet and onto those of households.

But that’s not automatic. European governments, despite myths widely circulating on leftist twitter, have been much stingier than the United States so far, and we’re poised to do another $1.9 trillion in relief while they are doing nothing.

And while we did pretty amazing stuff, we also did much worse than we could have. Bonus UI money, in particular, phased out and in and down and up in a crazy, unprincipled way which would have induced extra anxiety over and above the administrative problems. We didn’t give state and local governments money last spring when it would have been most helpful, so now they’re poised to get a huge infusion just as the crisis is passing. And most of all, we never really did enough to keep small businesses solvent — driving lots of bars and restaurants into bankruptcy over the past year, while also generating tons of political pressure to allow an unwise amount of masked indoor activity.

But it’s also worth taking a moment to dunk on what the politicians got right.

There was a common line of critique last spring that united leftists and private equity fund managers alike that the government should have let all kinds of big businesses — cruise lines, airlines, hotels, etc. — go bankrupt, and that the Fed’s low interest rates constituted a kind of mass bailout of big business that would leave the economy strangled by zombie businesses. That was completely, risibly wrong. Our biggest economic problem going forward is that we won’t have enough capacity to meet all the coming demand for services. We didn’t do enough to bail out independently owned bars and restaurants. But if we’d let huge swathes of the travel and leisure sector be liquidated, we’d be in a much worse jam.

All tomorrow’s welfare states

This has been a lot of charts.

But beyond bailouts being good, the main thing I think people should take away from this is that detaching incomes from labor market outputs works fine. The government sent people checks and it worked fine. Some low-wage workers got more money in unemployment benefits than they’d made while working. Even that worked fine! You probably wouldn’t want to make that the situation all the time. But at a minimum, it’s a clear sign that the baseline of Unemployment Insurance benefits could be much higher. If a generous child allowance leads to some reduction in hours worked as people spend more time with their kids, that’ll be fine.

It’s true that over the longer term, this stuff will need to be offset with higher taxes and not just borrowing.

But that’s fine too. The point is — people’s market incomes were hit by a shock that was so big and so obviously not their fault that the government stepped in and mobilized to ensure that some other distribution of income would be obtained than the one the pandemic wanted.

The pandemic was unique in its scale, but it’s not unusual to see people suffering through no fault of their own. It happens all the time that years of accumulated job skills are rendered obsolete by some new technology or shifting trade patterns. Certain kinds of natural aptitudes are valuable at some periods and less valuable in others. I’m good at a style of writing that traditionally appeared in magazines rather than newspapers, but I’m also good at writing very fast, which was traditionally valued by newspapers and not magazines. Thanks to the internet, that’s a valuable combination of skills. If I’d come along 10 years earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to break in. If I’d come along 10 years later, I’d have been battling in a much more competitive field with fewer first-mover advantages. That’s life — even bona fide skills and hard work are, in important respects, just another form of luck.

There’s lots of great free market stuff out there — consumer choice! innovation! — but we just don’t need to accept the labor market’s allocations of incomes to people. We rejected that choice during the pandemic, and it worked — we should learn from that.

Tuesday, March 2, 2021

Josh Van Veen: Bloomfieldian Optimism – The Tragedy of Case M

Naïve optimism has been blinding everyone from Ashley Bloomfield to Case M. Josh Van Veen argues we need to be more aware of our biases in dealing with Covid – but especially the authorities.

March 2, 2021

In the United States, naive optimism was at the heart of the Trump Administration’s failed response to Covid-19. The same kind of wishful thinking may now characterise the Ardern Government. While the Prime Minister is adept at dealing with complexity, some of her officials are not. No one has given New Zealanders more cause for unfounded optimism in the last 12 months than Dr Ashley Bloomfield. Even after the World Health Organisation officially declared a pandemic, and local epidemiologists pleaded for action, the good doctor was on television to reassure New Zealanders that there was no community transmission here.

Back then, a restrictive ‘case definition’ meant few New Zealanders met the criteria for a test, even if they had flu-like symptoms. The absence of evidence was presented as evidence of absence. Weeks later the Director-General of Health would advise the Cabinet that a narrow focus on international travellers meant it was likely some cases were missed. By then, the high risk of undetected community transmission necessitated a full nationwide lockdown. It is now clear that the experience did not fundamentally change the way New Zealanders live. Rather, we became a nation of Bloomfieldian optimists.

And so it was last week. On Monday, the serene Dr Bloomfield recommended to Cabinet that Auckland return to Level 1. By Wednesday, life was back to normal again. The Director-General himself used the phrase ‘business as usual’ in his daily press conference. Aucklanders could look forward to a weekend of revelry and sports. Many would make the short trip to Hamilton for the iconic Six60 at Claudelands. Several thousand, including the Leader of the Opposition and a Cabinet minister, packed Spark Arena to see heavyweight champions Joseph Parker and Junior Fa duke it out.

Once again, Jacinda Ardern could turn her attention to other matters of state. Social justice and environmentalism were finally back on the agenda. While Aucklanders returned to their schools and offices, the Prime Minister confirmed that the government would issue free toothbrushes to preschoolers in an effort to address the country’s oral health epidemic. Later in the week she unveiled a new plan to save the Māui dolphin. She also sat down for her first major television interview of the year with Newshub political editor Tova O’Brien.

After traversing the subjects of immigration and child poverty, the interview circled back to pandemic management. It was the anniversary of Covid-19 arriving on these shores. O’Brien quoted public health advice from 12 months ago dismissing the likelihood of a community outbreak in New Zealand. The statement had been issued after the country reported its first case on 28 February 2020. ‘We got totally blindsided and underestimated Covid, didn’t we?’ It was a remark that Ardern clearly did not appreciate.

‘I think it would be really unfair to anyone to look back on statements made a year ago with all of this hindsight and make a judgement on that,’ she objected. ‘I think all of us, at some point, would have read, very early on in the outbreak, stories abroad and would never have anticipated the scale of what we’re up against.’ The Prime Minister also felt the need to defend her officials. ‘I’ve found the Ministry of Health and the people they work with completely dedicated to their jobs.’

The Prime Minister’s faith in the Director-General and the Ministry was rock solid. Indeed, she had carefully followed their advice from the beginning. But as the interview went to air, events were moving in an unforeseen direction. Before the day was over, a 21 year old student at the Manukau Institute of Technology would be notified by the Auckland Regional Public Health Service that he had tested positive for the new B117 strain of Covid-19. Most concerningly, ‘Case M’ had gone to a gym while he awaited his result.

No one could have been more outraged by Case M’s disobedience than Ardern herself. Having flown back to Wellington for an emergency Cabinet meeting, the Prime Minister called a sensational Saturday night press conference to announce that Auckland would again return to Level 3. This time the lockdown measures were to be in place for seven days. With a scowl and sharp intake of breath, Ardern told the nation she was ‘frustrated’. The frustration soon turned to righteous anger.

‘We cannot exist in an environment where we set rules and they [are] breached consistently.’ It was a good telling off. Although Case M would bear the most criticism and scrutiny, his flouting of the rules were by no means discrete. At least two other members of the Papatoetoe High School cluster went to work while they were supposed to be isolating. Hence the emphasis on ‘consistently’. However, despite her public reprimand of Case M, there was a glaring inconsistency in the government’s message.

Case M is the sibling of a ‘casual plus’ contact who thrice tested negative for the virus. According to the Ministry website, the family of casual plus contacts are not required to do anything. While it is true that Case M should have isolated when symptoms developed, the onset of these came as Auckland returned to Level 1. The government may have urged those with any known links to the Papatoetoe High School cluster to remain isolated and vigilant but, in the same breath, it told Aucklanders to go about ‘business as usual’.

Bloomfield’s nonchalance to the possibility of hidden transmission was evident throughout last week. After all, he had allowed a return to Level 1 despite the fact that 11 close contacts were yet to be tested. He must have been confident. Even on Saturday night, Bloomfield was reassured by wastewater testing and dismissed the likelihood of ‘false-negatives’. However, the source of Case M’s infection was still unknown. Genomic sequencing confirmed that Case M was indeed part of the Papatoetoe High School cluster but an epidemiological link could not be found. It was not until Monday that the truth was revealed.

Case M’s mother, who also tested positive on Saturday, confessed to going for a walk with one of the other infected households during the previous Level 3 lockdown. At the time, this may have seemed innocent enough. We do not know what advice the families received. But it appears that they were reluctant to disclose this walk to contact tracers over the weekend. Ardern’s wrath might have compelled them to do so in the end. However, it is doubtful this information would have averted a return to Level 3.

Case M’s decision to go to the gym on Friday afternoon was almost certainly the trigger for another lockdown. We may ask what was going through the young man’s head? His earlier decision to get tested for Covid-19, in the knowledge that family members had socialised with infected individuals, must have given him a sense of foreboding. But recall that his sibling had tested negative for the virus three times already and there was no indication his mother had been infected yet. It is likely that Case M believed the risk was negligible.

What did health professionals advise him? Was communication a factor? These are questions that may further help understand his actions. But we will never know. Whatever the reason, Case M is a lesson in human psychology. It demonstrates our low capacity to understand and evaluate risk. All of us are susceptible to cognitive biases that distort our thinking. Even the most intelligent and educated person can be a victim of faulty reasoning. This is especially true in business. But it has taken a global pandemic to reveal the true extent to which human beings are irrational and self-destructive.

As the Nobel-prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman explained in his 2011 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, most of our decisions are intuitive. We rely on past experience and mental short-cuts to inform us about the future. These inevitably lead to errors of judgement. One such tendency is for individuals to overestimate their ability to control a situation and downplay risk. It is called ‘optimism bias’. The result can be catastrophic, as we have seen throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. Last year, New Zealanders had good reason to feel optimistic. But our victory was never permanent.

Bloomfieldian optimism most likely encouraged Case M to believe he and his family were free of the virus. In truth, we have all suffered from a collective delusion that life in New Zealand can be ‘business as usual’ again. The latest outbreak is a tragedy of no individual’s making. If there is one lesson we can all learn from 2020, it is to hope for the best and plan for the worst. We should not depend on the government for that.

Josh Van Veen is former member of NZ First and worked as a parliamentary researcher to Winton Peters from 2011 to 2013. He has a Masters in Politics from the University of Auckland. His thesis examined class voting in Britain and New Zealand.

This article can be republished under a Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 license. Attributions should include a link to the Democracy Project.

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Rhymes, Democracy Wobbles

Suzanne Mettler, Political Scientist, Former Fellow, and Coauthor of Four Threats, Warns of Unheeded Lessons in Brutal Past

https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/news-and-ideas/history-rhymes-democracy-wobbles

Interview By Ryan Mulcahy

Published February 25, 2021

As Suzanne Mettler followed the events at the Capitol on January 6—“one of the most shocking and horrifying days of my life,” she says—the violence, chaos, and Confederate nostalgia of one insurrection conjured the spirits of another.

“When I was looking at what was happening on January 6, I was thinking about that coup d’état in Wilmington,” Mettler, the 2019–2020 Kathryn Hampson Bessell Fellow and a Cornell political scientist, recalls.

The 19th-century North Carolina insurrection is brought to chilling life in Mettler’s 2020 book, Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy, coauthored with Robert C. Lieberman. On November 10, 1898, the Democratic elite of Wilmington, enraged by African Americans’ cultural, economic, and political progress in the years since the Civil War, conspired with white supremacist paramilitary groups to terrorize Black neighborhoods and savagely dismantle a model of biracial government. Hundreds were killed; the African American police chief and several other municipal officials, including white Republicans, were driven from the city at gunpoint; and the Daily Record, a Black-owned newspaper, was burned to the ground. Threatened into submission, the state’s Republican governor rejected calls to request federal help, and President William McKinley was not otherwise moved to intervene. The rampage promised “permanent good government by the party of the White Man,” a leading insurrectionist wrote. His message quickly spread, burying the hopes of his victims under decades of racist policies and brutality.

Wilmington is a turning point in Four Threats, a historical narrative in which Mettler and her coauthor foreground the effects of polarization, racism, economic inequality, and expansions of executive power on American democracy, building to the convergence of those threats in recent years. We talked to her about white supremacy, democratic norms, and more. The interview was edited for clarity and length.

Radcliffe: Can you describe some of the parallels between January 6 and the 19th-century insurrection in Wilmington?

Mettler: There are a couple of similarities. One is that you have white supremacy out in the open, motivating people who are determined to keep political power or take back power, and to do so by force. But then, also, you zoom out a little bit, and you ask “Why are they there?” It’s not just a bottom-up phenomenon; rather, they are there because political leaders told them to be there. President Donald Trump called his followers to come. He kept telling them for two months that the election was stolen, despite officials of both parties and at the state and local level who said that it was a fair election, and despite the courts throwing out the cases that the Trump campaign was bringing forward. Trump kept telling his supporters that in fact he’d won the election and that they should come and fight for his victory. That’s what they did. And that’s in some ways reminiscent of what was happening in the 1890s, although back then it happened in states across the South, not at the seat of national government. In North Carolina, the leaders of the Democratic Party knew that their way back to power was to stoke white supremacy and resentment, and that that would motivate their supporters to resort to violence and help them reverse the result of democratic elections.

White supremacists killed hundreds of African Americans and reduced the Black-owned Daily Record to ash during an uprising against the biracial government of Wilmington, North Carolina, in November 1898. Photo courtesy of New Hanover County Public Library, North Carolina Room

Radcliffe: I wonder about your reaction to the idea of January 6 as an aberration in US history. After reading your book, it seems like the attack was less an aberration than an extreme example, or a recurrence, of forces that have been with us since the country’s birth.

Mettler: When Joe Biden went on the air and spoke that night, he said something that he’s often said in his speeches the last couple years: “This is not who we are.” The trouble with his statement is that it’s actually wrong. I think what Biden means is, “This is not who we want to be.” But sadly, what happened on January 6 reflects much of who we have been in the American past. Writing Four Threats was very sobering to me—it was a big eye-opener. Trends that we’re seeing right now in American politics have roots that go way back in American history, including a long history of white supremacy being used politically and being the source of ardent political polarization and violence.

Polarization becomes particularly strident when it combines with what Rob and I call conflict over who belongs as a member of the political community. And in the periods that we study, conflict over race becomes crucial. Racism and white supremacy become the rallying cry of one side in that conflict particularly when the other side is seeking greater equality. That can really drive polarization. That happened in the 1850s and the 1890s, and it’s happening again today.

Radcliffe: How much trouble are we in, compared with crises of the past?

Mettler: Elections are the most fundamental act of what makes a country democratic. Elections produce both winners and losers, and what’s crucial is how the losers behave. Those competing for public office must agree in advance that win or lose, they will abide by the rules. The candidates who lose elections must be willing to face it and to step aside. If a party refuses to abide by that basic principle, democracy’s over.

We are at a very bad point right now. Arguably we are in the worst state we’ve been in since sometime in the 19th century surrounding the Civil War. Polarization keeps deepening.

Radcliffe: Newt Gingrich, the Republican speaker of the House from 1995 to 1999, emerges in Four Threats as an important figure, both for his belief in the power of conflict and the overlap of that belief with a changing media environment. The book includes a passage in which he tells a group of conservative activists about the media: “You have to give them confrontations. When you give them confrontations, you get attention; when you get attention, you can educate.” How much of a factor is Gingrich’s legacy in today’s politics?

Mettler: I don’t want to give all the credit to Gingrich and congressional leaders. There were grassroots changes that were leading to a new kind of partisan sorting; you have this long, gradual process that happens over many decades. But meanwhile, starting in the late 1970s, you have Gingrich and Dick Cheney and a few other new Republicans in Congress, the young guns of their era—and they’re brash. They say, “We’re tired of our party being the minority around here; we want to find ways to start winning elections.” Their strategy is to stop compromising, basically. And to stop focusing on trying to create public policy. Republicans had been the minority in Congress, but many of them had played very instrumental roles in creating public policies along with the Democrats; they were partners in policy making. Gingrich’s strategy was to stop doing that, and instead, to play a much more hostile politics game, using the media.

From 1980 to the present, we’ve moved into a new historical period, very different from the middle of the 20th century because elections are much more competitive. In any given year, either party stands to win the majority in the House and often in the Senate, depending on which seats are up. The way both parties have responded to that—and here I’m referring to the work of a political scientist named Frances Lee—is that, instead of devoting their resources to policy making, they’ve shifted their funds to public relations. They try to have a lot of symbolic votes that cater to their base. Even if it’s not legislation that’s going to pass—it communicates well to their base.

“I’m doubtful that democracy can endure unless our two major parties are both willing to support it.”

Radcliffe: Are there any lessons from recent events, in terms of the health of our democracy, that the country seems poised to act on?

Mettler: I wish I could say that we’ve learned, but I’m not so sure. What, really, these last few months have revealed is how divided we are as a country—the polarization is really stark, and it’s combined with this conflict over who belongs. That’s going to be with us for some time and may get in the way of big reform. But we have to at least try to do smaller reforms. I have to believe that members of Congress on both sides of the aisle recognize the needs for those smaller reforms.

Radcliffe: Was there anything about January 6—in the institutional response, for example—that you found encouraging?

Mettler: The fact that members of Congress came back into session that night and finished their work, and certified the election—that was a triumph for democracy. But the fact that 139 members of the House, and several in the Senate, voted against accepting results from key states—that was extremely disturbing. The trouble is that the Republican Party seems to have become what political scientists call an anti-system party; it’s increasingly willing to part ways with the basic rules of democracy. When you’re not willing to concede an election, for example, and you tell your supporters that the results are wrong—that’s fundamentally problematic. That means that it falls to the other party alone to try to protect democracy. The Democratic Party has been trying to do that these past four years. But I’m doubtful that democracy can endure unless our two major parties are both willing to support it. On the bright side, after the election we saw many state and local officials nationwide who really did their job, regardless of which party they were in—they played by the rules.

Radcliffe: Do you worry about wider civil conflict in the United States?

Mettler: There are scholars of political behavior who are finding that a not-insignificant portion of the American public thinks that it’s appropriate to use violence to win elections or to gain back power to preserve what they value. That’s really disturbing. Right now we are not sectionally divided, as we were in the Civil War—it’s not North vs. South. We have political divisions in every state, and there’s a gaping rural-urban divide. We have now witnessed the violence at the Capitol, and I do worry that we’re going to be seeing more violence going forward. I’m heartened that the Biden administration is trying to act quickly to take right-wing extremism, domestic terrorism, really seriously. That had been lacking for many years, and we ignore it at our peril.

The Biden administration needs to fix its message to asylum seekers

Opinion by Greg Sargent

March 2, 2021 at 6:30 a.m. GMT+9Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. (Reuters/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo)

As President Biden seeks to unwind his predecessor’s cruel and destructive immigration policies, he faces a brutal balancing act: How to plead for patience without sending a message to asylum seekers that they shouldn’t apply for protection in the near term, which is problematic, because many are in desperate straits right now.

So far, the message has leaned too hard in the direction of telling asylum seekers not to come.

Alejandro Mayorkas, the new secretary of Homeland Security, gave a press briefing on Monday that showcased this problem.

There was good news and bad news. The good news is that Mayorkas announced that parents whose children were separated from them under Trump while they sought asylum here — and still haven’t been reunited with them — will have the option of reuniting in the U.S.

To that end, Mayorkas said the administration will “explore lawful pathways” for those families to remain in the U.S. This was a big ask, though there are still uncertainties ahead.

Lee Gelernt, an ACLU lawyer who represents those children, noted that Mayorkas merely committed to exploring the possibility of allowing families to unite here. “We need to see concrete, specific progress,” Gelernt told me.

This is critical, because these families were subjected to appalling abuse at the hands of the U.S. government.

Still, Gelernt noted that he’s “grateful” that the administration has made a “commitment to helping these families,” which he called an “important first step.” So this is arguably moving in the right direction.

But the bad news is that generally speaking, the administration is still struggling to get its message to asylum seekers right.

Mayorkas declared that those who want to seek asylum in the U.S. “need to wait.” He noted that arriving families and single adults will continue to be turned away due to a covid-related health guideline adopted by Trump — under Title 42 of the Public Health Safety Act — that allows the government to temporarily block noncitizens from entering to preserve public health.

Under this policy, Trump had been expelling asylum seeking adults and children, and as Alex Nowrasteh shows, those numbers have been quite dramatic. But the Biden administration has been allowing unaccompanied children to enter (and get taken into custody) despite the restriction, while keeping it in place for adults and families.

“We are not saying, ‘Don’t come,’” Mayorkas said. “We are saying, ‘Don’t come now.’” He added that Biden is seeking to rebuild an asylum system that Trump “dismantled.”

There are two difficulties here. First, it’s not clear why Biden still has yet to lift the restriction imposed under Title 42. As Gelernt pointed out, this must only be used in the interest of public health, and not to “control migration.”

Mayorkas’ framing of the issue makes it sound as if the latter is part of the goal, i.e., to buy time to rebuild the system. And as Gelernt noted, DHS — an enormous agency with all sorts of resources — surely has the capacity to test arriving migrants for covid in a way that protects public health.

What’s more, under the current policy, asylum seekers are being expelled without even getting a hearing. And our commitments to international human rights laws and norms dictate that they must get a fair hearing and due process.

Which brings us to the second problem. There’s no way to justly telling asylum seekers that they “need to wait.”

“For a family that’s facing immediate danger, that statement is meaningless,” Gelernt told me.

To be clear, there are real complexities here. It might not be crazy for the administration to worry about the politics of lifting the public health restrictions right now (but even if that reading of the politics is right, that’s not a kosher reason for keeping them in place).

What’s more, it’s understandable that the administration might want to send a message that the new system has yet to be implemented, particularly to those who might get exploited by smugglers into believing that with Trump gone, they can now waltz in.

But there’s a better way to send this message. Officials should lead unambiguously with the idea that we are restoring the human rights commitments that Trump tried to destroy, and clarify that those with reasonable grounds to apply for asylum will get a fair hearing if they come, but also that no one should be under any illusions that the system will be dramatically transformed overnight.

“Our laws are unequivocal that we must give them the right to seek asylum,” Gelernt told me. Instead, Gelernt said, the message should be that “you’re going to be entitled to a hearing, but you will not necessarily be automatically given permanent status.”

Rewriting January 6th: Republicans push false and misleading accounts of Capitol riot

By Mike DeBonis and Jeremy Barr

March 1, 2021 at 8:00 p.m. GMT+9

Tear gas is fired at supporters of President Donald Trump who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. (Evelyn Hockstein/for The Washington Post)

Instead of an attempt to overturn the election by radicalized Donald Trump supporters, it was a choreographed attack staged by antifa provocateurs. Rather than an armed insurrection, it was a good-natured protest spoiled by a few troublemakers.

And instead of a deadly event that put the lives of hundreds of lawmakers, police officers and others at risk, the riot was no big deal at all.

A legion of conservative activists, media personalities and elected officials are seeking to rewrite the story of what happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6, hoping to undermine the clear picture of the attack that has emerged from video and photo evidence, law enforcement officials, journalistic accounts and the testimonials of the rioters themselves: that a pro-Trump mob, mobilized by the former president’s false claims of a stolen election, stormed the seat of American government to keep Trump in power through violent means.

Six weeks after the attack, some are taking advantage of fading memories and unanswered questions to portray the riot in a different, more benign light. The effort comes as federal authorities begin prosecuting scores of alleged marauders, congressional committees seek to plug obvious security failures, and lawmakers consider establishing an outside commission to examine the matter.

On his top-rated Fox News Channel program last week, commentator Tucker Carlson told his audience that the attack did not constitute an “armed insurrection” and accused Democrats of a “relentless and coordinated” campaign to misrepresent the riot.

The next day, during the first public appearance of top Capitol security officials in charge during the riot at a Tuesday hearing, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) spent much of his allotted time reading a firsthand account from Jan. 6 suggesting the violence was perpetrated by a small cadre — including left-wing extremists — who were out of character in an otherwise jovial crowd.

Later in the week, scores of Republican lawmakers criticized House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other Democrats for maintaining a razor-wire perimeter for blocks around the Capitol, saying it was more about sending a political message than security, even as the acting chief of the Capitol Police described ongoing threats to lawmakers.

“I don’t think there’s any question that Democrats never want to let an opportunity go to waste to try to attack conservatives, and so they want to try to besmirch, smear, demean all conservatives in the name of a handful of people who did the wrong thing on Jan. 6,” said Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.).

The campaign to minimize or deny the events of Jan. 6 has been weeks in the making, with the efforts to muddy the waters about what happened and who participated taking shape on pro-Trump television networks while rioters were still on the grounds of the Capitol.

Many have argued that President Donald Trump's efforts amounted to an attempted coup on Jan. 6. Was it? And why does that matter? (Monica Rodman, Sarah Hashemi/The Washington Post)

On the afternoon of Jan. 6, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who said he spent $450,000 on rallies contesting the results of the election, appeared on Newsmax and made a baseless claim that would set the tone for other early efforts by conservatives in media to deflect blame for the violence.

“There were probably some undercover antifa people that dressed as Trump people,” Lindell said, a claim that went unchallenged, if not supported, by host Chris Salcedo. Later in the day, Newsmax’s star host, Greg Kelly, offered a conspiracy theory, asking hypothetically, “Did someone want this to happen?”

By the evening of Jan. 6, the most influential voices on the Fox News Channel also seemed to latch onto the theory that outside agitators could have been responsible for the violence, with unfounded reports blaming antifa and leftist radicals exploding on social media networks.

“I have never seen Trump rally attendees wearing helmets, black helmets, brown helmets, black backpacks — the uniforms you saw in some of these crowd shots,” host Laura Ingraham said.

Those narratives — blaming leftists and excusing Trump — quickly gained traction among Republicans generally. A January poll conducted by the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life found that half of Republicans agreed with the assessment that antifa was “mostly responsible” for the Capitol attack, while only 15 percent blamed Trump for inciting the invasion. Another January survey, conducted by The Washington Post and ABC News, found that 56 percent of Republicans held Trump blameless for the riot.

In fact, only one of the roughly 300 rioters charged by federal authorities is alleged in public court documents to have ties to radical left-wing groups. Instead, many are said to have close links to right-wing extremist organizations such as the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, and many more said they believed they were following Trump’s orders when they stormed the Capitol.

Charlie Sykes, a former radio host who founded the Bulwark, an anti-Trump conservative website, said the right-wing media ecosystem is building elaborate alternative narratives around scant data points.

“They will always find a way to adapt reality to the narrative, even when it requires some pretty massive leaps of logic and fact,” he said. “The further you get away from Jan. 6, the more it gets possible to say, ‘Well, it wasn’t that bad,’ or, ‘It wasn’t an armed insurrection.’ . . . It feels like this massive gaslighting that assumes that we have really short memories, and, in some cases, that is true.”

Democrats have responded to the campaign by blasting attempts to minimize the insurrection, urging vigilance against future violence from the political right and calling for more investigations of the attacks — including Trump’s role. Negotiations continue on Capitol Hill over creating an outside commission, but a proposal from Pelosi that would stack the body with Democratic appointees has encountered strong GOP opposition.

The day after Johnson aired the account that placed “agents-provocateurs” and “fake Trump protesters” on the scene before the riot, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called the suggestion “mindless garbage” and part of a “campaign of misinformation, deception and conspiracy that helped fuel the attack on January 6th in the first place.”

Several lines of pointed questioning have emerged among Republicans who are eager to deflect attention from Trump’s central role in stoking the fundamental motive for the riot — the false claim that the November election was stolen from him.

Among the most pervasive has been an effort to question whether Pelosi was responsible for the violence by failing to properly prepare the Capitol campus. The push has been fueled in part by a claim from former Capitol Police chief Steven A. Sund that one of his bosses, House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul D. Irving, told him he had to run a request for National Guard assistance “up the chain of command” before approving it.

On Feb. 15, four senior House Republicans sent a letter pressing Pelosi for answers, and the concern was quickly echoed on conservative media channels. On Sean Hannity’s prime time show that night, Fox News contributor and former congressman Jason Chaffetz said that Pelosi “is running out of excuses.” Two days later, Fox News host Maria Bartiromo speculated that Democrats sidestepped witnesses at Trump’s second impeachment trial because “somebody was going to ask Nancy Pelosi what she knew and when.”

Efforts to pin the blame on Pelosi were “one of the very few and clear pieces of misinformation about Jan. 6 that cut across the entire right-wing media echo chamber,” said Angelo Carusone, president of the left-leaning media watchdog Media Matters for America. “They were all singing from the same page.”

At the hearing Tuesday, senators including Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who backed Trump’s challenges to state electoral vote counts, pressed Irving on whether Pelosi or her staff obstructed calls for aid in any way. Irving repeatedly denied it, but calls for more answers have persisted.

Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said in a statement that Republicans are “trying to deflect responsibility for the Capitol attack from Donald Trump” and that Pelosi is “focused on getting to the bottom of all issues facing the Capitol Complex and the events that led up to the insurrection.”

Even that terminology has been contested, with many Republicans challenging whether the mob — which, according to law enforcement officials and video evidence, included people equipped with zip-tie handcuffs, bear spray and tactical gear — truly intended to subvert democracy.

Many others have questioned whether the rioters could fairly be described as “armed,” despite court filings that describe multiple instances of dangerous weapons being wielded on the Capitol grounds. At least two people are facing federal firearms charges, and authorities reported seizing firearms and explosives from multiple arrestees.

The doubters include Johnson, who told conservative talk shows in his home state this past month that he rejected the “armed insurrection” label. The PolitiFact fact-checking operation termed that “ridiculous revisionist history,” but several other Republican lawmakers last week expressed doubts about calling it an “armed insurrection”

“If it was armed, it would have been a bloodbath,” said Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), who said the term has been embraced by Democrats to create the impression that “there’s a bunch of people running around in the woods with Army fatigues on the weekends, and they’re going to take over the country, and that’s just nonsense.”

A larger group of Republicans have grown suspicious of the ongoing fortifications of the Capitol, which include a razor-wire perimeter manned by a National Guard garrison. Nearly a dozen GOP lawmakers interviewed last week said they did not believe the precautions were warranted, and many said they believed it was part of a political effort to exaggerate the threat from right-wing extremists. Some have taken to calling the fortified Capitol campus “Fort Pelosi.”

“It’s not because anybody’s out there threatening to overthrow the country,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). “It’s because it fits their narrative.”

Another strain of rhetoric has emerged seeking to defend the motivations of the rioters — particularly from Carlson, who has spent time on several recent episodes of his show attacking the notion that the riot was motivated by racism, despite prosecutors alleging significant ties to white nationalist organizations among many of those charged.

“The rally wasn’t about race at all. And neither was the riot. It was about the election. The people at the Capitol really believed the presidential election was unfair. And they had reason to believe that,” Carlson said Thursday, before adding: “Nothing is an excuse for rioting.”

Speaking Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, T.W. Shannon, a former speaker of the Oklahoma House, told an overwhelmingly pro-Trump crowd that “the reason people stormed the Capitol is that they felt hopeless, because of a rigged election.”

But few Republicans have sought to reshape the story of Jan. 6 quite as fervently as Johnson, who is mulling whether to seek a third Senate term representing Wisconsin next year.

J. Michael Waller, a senior analyst at the right-wing Center for Security Policy who published the account Johnson read at Tuesday’s hearing, called Johnson a “contrarian” but said he accurately summarized his piece, which was first published by the Federalist.

Waller stood by his observation that the crowd was largely jovial and said he never meant to insinuate that there were no extremists in the crowd, only that they came from the left and the right. He criticized those who were “grabbing one small piece and falsely saying this is a discredited conspiracy theory.”

“If my story is debunked by the facts, that’s fine with me,” he said. “I’m just saying what I saw.”

Johnson has also questioned other facts surrounding the riot. He sent a letter to congressional colleagues that included an inquiry about the cause of death of Brian D. Sicknick, the 42-year-old Capitol Police officer who died Jan. 6 and was given a hero’s farewell, including lying in honor in the Rotunda.

Conservative activists have seized on changing accounts about Sicknick’s death to suggest that the precise circumstances have been hidden to further the Democratic political agenda. Authorities have not disclosed an official cause of death, but news emerged Friday that investigators have uncovered video appearing to show someone spraying a chemical irritant at Sicknick and other law enforcement personnel.

Johnson defended his approach to the riot, saying he viewed his role as raising questions for the various investigations to answer.

“I’m not afraid of information,” he said. “Some people seem to be afraid of the truth. I’m not. I’m just trying to get the whole truth.”

Karoun Demirjian, Scott Clement, Spencer Hsu, David Weigel and Matt Zapotosky contributed to this report.