The protesters were angry: They believed that the election they had just voted in had been unfairly conducted.
And they were right.
In retrospect, it is clear the 2020 election was a grave betrayal of American democracy. Given the facts that have since emerged about that election, no honest person can deny it.
Yet the beneficiaries of that election continue to lie about what is now obvious. The real crime, they will tell you again and again, is not what happened on Election Day 2020. The real crime is what happened two months later, on January 6th, when Donald Trump led an insurrection against the duly elected American government.
All right then. Aaron Blake at the Washington Post observes:
The flourish was characteristic of Carlson’s show: Gesturing toward a broad conspiracy without backing it up with any real facts — all while stating that anyone who disagrees must be lying. It was also amorphous and nonspecific enough to give Carlson plausible deniability that he was talking about things like mass voter fraud or voting machines (vs., say, the mail balloting processes that some on the right have cast as “unfair”).
Are Carlson's Fox News viewers sealed in a bubble so impermeable that they are unaware of his willingness to spread lies on TV even when he acknowledges in private that he knows that they are lies? Who knows? FNC hasn't informed its viewers what we've learned from the Dominion libel suite about the behind-the-scenes panic at Fox and the fraudulent 'news' coverage it presented, nor are the facts about that suit very much in evidence among FNC's competitors or others in conservative media's alternate universe.
What we know is that those viewers are still watching. But so is the mainstream media and so are the folks who are wide awake outside the Fox bubble. Kevin McCarthy, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, and others still indulging in election denialism and whitewashing the January 6 attack on the Capitol are trampling on the truth. But, while a faction of the GOP is taken in (or willingly going along for the ride), millions of other Americans can see what is going on.
The circus at Fox and in the Republican caucus in the House (and in states and localities across the country) is on full display. These MAGA Republicans are pushing lies and celebrating violent insurrectionists. What they are doing is despicable.
It is also right out in the open. And that's a good thing for democracy and for the next election cycle. Because most Americans, who have no affinity for violence, who love our country, who value truth, outnumber the people who have willfully sealed themselves in a bubble of deceit.