January 6 is providing a pretext for a politically motivated crackdown on dissent.
Since the storming of the U.S. Capitol by outraged supporters of President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021, the growth of political intolerance in the United States has reached toxic levels. Trump’s adversaries immediately branded the incident as an insurrection and accused the lame duck president of trying to stage a coup to invalidate the results of the 2020 election. Los Angeles Times columnist Doyle McManus warned, in a column headlined “Warning: Jan. 6 was not a one-time event,” that Trump and his right-wing backers might use similar tactics to overturn future elections. With rare exceptions, both the mainstream legacy media and the newer social media powerhouses fully embraced the “insurrection” narrative.
