January 6 was...

The new book that explains how the GOP lost its damn mind

Have you heard about the new dating app called The Right Stuff? Funded by Peter Thiel, the PayPal billionaire who endorsed Donald Trump, The Right Stuff is for, you guessed it, Republicans who aren’t having the best of luck on mainstream dating sites these days. Apparently no one is swiping right on right-wingers, so Thiel saw a market opportunity in creating a hookup platform with “profiles without pronouns” that caters to unf*#@able incels, trolls, and reply guys who are just asking questions. Guys who wonder why you won’t debate them now have an app where someone might date them.

I have never used a dating site, having met my wife the old-fashioned way: in a bar without the slightest intention of learning each other’s last names. But the staggering good fortune of that working out is not scalable, so now everyone meets on these apps, which to be honest seems like a higher-percentage tactic than S interrupting me and my friend in mid-conversation with this line, “So, what are we talking about?”

Dating apps replicate a similar effect with prompts. On mainstream dating apps, prompts include such chestnuts as “What is your perfect vacation?” or “Are you a dog or cat person?” But The Right Stuff is drawing different distinctions with its most talked-about prompt.

“January 6 was…”

That is essentially the prompt for Robert Draper’s new book out today, Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind. Draper, not a partisan hack by any means, was in the capitol that day and escaped before the building was breached. He calls the insurrection a “seismic travesty” that didn’t sober up a Trump-drunk party as many, including myself, expected. Instead, January 6 mutated into displays of confrontation and anger that Draper calls the “performance art of cultural vendetta.”

It all happened so fast, and with so much going on, that we can almost be excused for not seeing what has been happening right out in the open the whole time. We can almost be forgiven the liberal’s instinct to not take seriously unserious people such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, the north Georgia congresswoman who said Jewish space lasers started forest fires in California.

But Draper, through admirable introspection and doggedness, makes the opposite case, that far from an easily disregarded extremist backbencher, MTG might be the most dominant force in the Republican Party next to Trump because she excels in the performance of grievance. And she does it in a political environment in which, Draper writes, getting a single thing done “didn’t matter. Being a fighter. Being on talk radio and Fox. That’s what mattered.”

“It occurred to me that many Trump supporters were embracing their perceived sense of highly personal and unjust forfeiture almost as one would a religion. It had become a lifestyle, a way of processing the world.”

And if MTG is the pope of Trumpism, then January 6 is…?

Initially, while it was going on, we could all tell that January 6 was an insurrection to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Ryan Nichols, a rioter from Longview, Texas, hollered into a bullhorn on the West Terrace, “If you have a weapon, you need to get your weapon! . . . This is not a peaceful protest!” Even MTG knew that it was a violent uprising of Trump supporters. “This isn’t the way to solve anything,” she texted Trump’s chief of staff. This wasn’t a spasm of anger but an attempted coup. But that didn’t seem like such a bad idea to some, who think of January 6 as our generation’s 1776 moment.

But before they’d cleaned up the broken glass, MTG had changed her tune. “We think they are Antifa. Dressed like Trump supporters,” she said. “Bad apples, like ANTIFA or other crazed leftists, infiltrated today’s peaceful protest about the fraudulent vote count,” said Jason Miller.

To Adam Kinzinger, a Republican congressman, that was ridiculous. January 6 was a “frigging insurrection that killed a Capitol police officer under the name of our party, not Antifa.” But Republicans who did not lose their minds would lose their seats.

At this point January 6 became fractal alternate realities that mutually coexisted. Rush Limbaugh contained multitudes. “Republicans do not join protest mobs. They do not loot and they don’t riot.” Obviously, he said, the rioters at the capitol “undoubtedly includ[ed] some Antifa Democrat-sponsored instigators.” But — stay with me here — that doesn’t mean the violence was wrong, per se.

“There’s a lot of people calling for the end of violence. There’s a lot of conservatives, social media, who say that any violence or aggression at all is unacceptable, regardless of the circumstances. … I’m glad Sam Adams, Thomas Paine—the original Tea Party guys, the men at Lexington and Concord—didn’t feel that way.”

The next day, he added a twist: It was a trap. “We got set up again,” he said. “They knew we were coming. And they had a little surprise plan.”

None of these things made sense, individually or together, yet all coexisted as Republican dogma.

Therefore, in what Draper calls “an exquisite new formulation in the factually parallel universe of the right wing,” Ashli Babbitt (the rioter who was killed by a police officer) was “executed,” those in jail facing charges for the insurrection are political prisoners (the J6 in the parlance of the nutters), and there are a lot of questions no one in power will answer. Referring to the ongoing federal investigation of insurrectionists, congressman Paul Gosar said, “The DOJ is harassing peaceful patriots across the country.”

Numerous rioters under arrest “are being held twenty- three hours in solitary confinement, and they haven’t seen a court day yet.” And [MTG] added, “There are questions that need to be answered from that day. Who killed Ashli Babbitt? Her family deserves justice. There’s more questions that need to be answered. There was intel ahead of time that there was going to be violence on January 6. President Trump requested 10,000 National Guard to be at the Capitol on January 6. The question that needs to be answered is: Who turned that request down?”

Here’s the scary thing: People believe this. Draper cites the especially brain-rattling example of Alan Hostetter who took part in the insurrection. He went in with others determined to “take back their government” by forcing Vice President Mike Pence and others to either overturn the presidential election or get dragged outside and “tie[d] to a fucking lamppost.”

Soon, in Hostetter’s mind, the events he planned and took part in became a “fakesurrection.” That was “obviously staged and faked,” adding, “We know that legitimate Trump supporters love cops.”

In another chilling example of mass delusion, Draper recounts Emanuel Cleaver’s annual Memorial Day speech at the World War I Museum and Memorial.

At one point, the Missouri congressman deviated from his prepared text. He looked up at the audience and said, “Look, I cannot finish this day of remembering those who have sacrificed for us and not include the Capitol police who were engaged in medieval hand-tohand combat as they sought to protect our democracy.”

After finishing his speech, Cleaver prepared to leave the gathering until he saw a woman approach him. The woman unleashed a string of profanities. “You politicized this!” she hollered. “My husband’s a veteran—you made him cry!” A couple of security officers pulled Cleaver away, though not before he said to her: “Ma’am? I was there. I was there! Do you understand that?” As Cleaver retreated, he could hear her shouting: “IT DIDN’T HAPPEN!!!! ”

This shared delusion is how we end up with congressman Andrew Clyde—who “on the early afternoon of January 6 could be seen panic- stricken, hollering on the House floor as the mob tried to force their way in”—later saying that video footage of January 6 showed “people in an orderly fashion” walking through the Capitol. “You would actually think it was a normal tourist visit,” he said. They were just “ordinary political citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol,” said RNC chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel.

“a normal tourist visit” … “ordinary political citizens” … “legitimate political discourse”

And this is how state senator Doug Mastriano, who attempted to overturn Pennsylvania’s election results and had made it as far as the lawn of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, is now that state’s Republican gubernatorial nominee. “Last year was a dark year,” he said. “I could not believe my country had become such a dark, evil place, with the power being used, the FBI being used, the Department of Justice, to oppress innocent civilians.”

A year after the insurrection, MTG, who by then had become a national political force in the GOP, showed a higher tolerance for the violence that she previously said “isn’t the way to solve anything.”

“If you think about what our Declaration of Independence says, it says to overthrow tyrants,” she said.

Looking straight at a delusion like this can make a fella feel a little nuts. Or as Draper writes, “It was like staring at a thousand people who were all reading newspapers that were held upside down.”

And here I have to hand it to Draper, whom I’ve known for years and in whom I’ve frequently detected a mix of moderation and skepticism. Frankly, I’ve never asked about his politics because I wasn’t sure I’d like the answer, but in Weapons of Mass Delusion Draper does not both-sides this sucker, as if you couldn’t tell from the book’s subtitle.

The stolen election was now as central to MAGA theology as the crucifixion of Jesus was to Christianity. In affirming the presence of evil, it brought clarity—and with it, a strange frisson of revelation. The lie brought joy.

For all the scattered denunciations of the Bushes and RINO enablers of godless socialism, there was only one home in American politics for this wandering tribe of fraud purveyors. The tribe constituted a critical stratum of the GOP base. There were enough of them to choke off a Republican’s political prospects at the primary level.

There is no coming back from this, at least for the Republican Party. You can’t get a little bit pregnant with a Big Lie. “Deluding audiences en masse, was a fateful proposition, however,” writes Draper. “It was not a traffic lane one could swerve in and out of on a whim. As when Caesar and his army crossed the Rubicon to commit treason against the Roman Empire, there could be no turning back.”

After January 6, I remember talking with my mother, an avowed independent voter, about the insurrection. “How could anybody be a Republican now?” she asked. Apparently she was not the only woman to come to the same conclusion. Downloads of the dating app The Right Stuff started strong when it debuted on September 30 but soon crawled to a trickle of people. The app is getting horrible ratings. Part of that is due to liberal hacktivists who think it’s funny to post comments that the FBI visited them after using the app.

Part of that is also due to The Right Stuff’s users who have a common complaint. There are no women. This is just another way that conservatives are being persecuted, and it’s about time someone starts answering questions about this. Someone needs to look into this. Maybe there should be a forensic audit of Peter Thiel’s algorithm.

Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.

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