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President Donald Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani has been working to bolster conspiratorial claims that left-wing agitators played a dominant role in the last week's Capitol riot.

Giuliani claimed in a tweet on Friday that has since been removed by Twitter that the Capitol siege was carried out "by groups like ANTIFA trained to riot."

He also claimed that the riot was something "that the President had nothing to do with."

This is nonsense. Let’s unpack all of it.

“We” and “They”

The “mainstream media”—I’m going to stop putting that in quotes, but keep imagining that I’m saying it sarcastically—is probably made up of several thousand individuals and then a three-figure number of institutions. At any given moment, on any given story, some number of these people and institutions will communicate facts that are eventually understood to be misleading or incorrect. Some of these people and institutions are better at their jobs than others.

I can’t help drawing parallels between what we’re seeing in Democratic Party and the similar far-left wave of enthusiasm in Britain, where a new tide of youthful energy has flooded the British Labour Party and transformed its ambitions almost overnight from ameliorating capitalism to full-on socialism.

There was an infectiousness to the excitement in 2015, in part because full-fledged socialism seemed to be answering a genuine and massive crisis of capitalism.

It spoke to those under 40 whose futures are debt-ridden, who have little hope of property ownership, and struggle to manage with precarious, low wages. It rallied a sense of the common good against the isolation and depression of austerity. It actually took the science of climate catastrophe seriously

Sullivan first had to dismantle establishment orthodoxies within himself — the same orthodoxies he now sought to undo at Brookings: That globalization and free trade were an unalloyed good, growing economies and improving people’s lives in the process. What was good for the stock market, in effect, was great for everybody. Given enough time, swelling wallets would produce a steady middle class, one that demands its political and human rights from its government. Even the most repressive regimes, the thinking went, would eventually crumble under the weight of inflowing capital. Consistent pressure via greenbacks did the most good for the most people.

“Those were the heady days when the mainstream foreign policy consensus was that globalization was a force for good,” Sullivan recalled in a 2017 interview. There was, of course, reason to think this. Capitalism helped keep the Soviet Union at bay, China still wasn’t a major power and building the economies of enemies turned them into friends. Globalization, per its champions, had the benefit of making many people rich while making the world safer in general and U.S. foreign policy less costly.

“After the Second World War, the United States led a fragmented world to build a new international economic order. It lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. It sustained thrilling technological revolutions. And it helped the United States and many other nations around the world achieve new levels of prosperity. But the last few decades revealed cracks in those foundations,”

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To many on the right, this inequality is a non-issue, and in an abstract sense, I agree. Penalizing people for their success does not help the less successful. But at a time of real sacrifice, it does seem to me important for conservatives not to ignore the dangers of growing and vast inequality - for political, not economic, reasons. And by political, I don't mean partisan. I mean a genuine concern for the effects of an increasingly unequal society.

it increasingly seems wrong to me to exempt the very wealthy from sacrifice, in the context of their gains in the last three decades, if we are to ask it of everyone else. It's not about fairness. It isn't even really about redistribution, as we once understood that from the hard left. It's about political stability and cohesion and coherence. Without a large and strong middle class, we can easily become more divided, more bitter and more unstable. Concern about that is a legitimate conservative issue. And if someone on the right does not find a way to address it, someone on the left may well be empowered to over-reach.

It seems to me that one thing our culture has lost is a space for “existential reckoning.” Perhaps its polar opposite is being Very Online.

forcing us into such a reckoning is what religion and brutal reality once did for many: It challenged us to assess ourselves fully, to see ourselves under the eyes of eternity, to live with the knowledge of death under a cloud of unknowing. This perspective was reinforced by modes of pre-secular thought as well as by the lived experience in previous generations of existential danger, illness, hunger, and death.

In a secular world of previously unimaginable comfort and long lives, we rarely get to access the existential fear and dread that counterintuitively can lead to serenity and perspective. Maybe in modernity, psychedelics are therefore the best alternative to traditional religion, and may begin to replace or supplement its function, as our disenchantment blocks our access to the faith of the past.

he new media economy promises both to make some writers rich and to turn others into the content-creation equivalent of Uber drivers, even as journalists turn increasingly to labor unions to level out pay scales.

This new direct-to-consumer media also means that battles over the boundaries of acceptable views and the ensuing arguments about “cancel culture” — for instance, in New York Magazine’s firing of Andrew Sullivan — are no longer the kind of devastating career blows they once were.

Though Substack paid advances to a few dozen writers, most are simply making money from readers. That includes most of the top figures on the platform, who make seven-figure sums from more than 10,000 paying subscribers — among them Mr. Sullivan, the liberal historian Heather Cox Richardson, and the confrontational libertarian Glenn Greenwald.

the book did not surprise me, as such, but it still stunned, shocked, and disgusted me. You simply cannot unread it, or banish what is quite obviously true from your mind

It helps explain more deeply the rants of Pope Francis about so many of his cardinals, especially his denunciations of “Pharisees” and “hypocrites,” with their sexual amorality and their vast wealth and power. “Behind rigidity something always lies hidden; in many cases, a double life,”

The only tiny consolation of the book is the knowledge that we now have a pope — with all his flaws — who knows what he’s dealing with, and has acted, quite ruthlessly at times, to demote, defrock, or reassign the most egregious cases to places where they have close to nothing to do

In a recent poll, 80 percent of Americans say “that political correctness is a problem in this country.” Hostility to new speech codes from elites was one factor that drove support for Trump in 2016. Americans do not want to abolish all differences between men and women, do not support reparations, and view college campuses as strange, alien pockets of madness. Any Democrat in 2020 has to reach that “exhausted majority” who are sick of all that. Biden has already done it.

The reason Trump is so rattled is that Biden is seven points ahead of him in head-to-head polls right now, and, after four years of Trump’s assault on this country’s constitutional order, Democrats are likely to turn out in high numbers, and back whoever gets nominated

There is something deeply clarifying about recent events at Williams College, because they reveal the logical endpoint, to my mind, of critical race, gender, and queer theory. The push for social justice there has now led to demands for racially segregated housing

Take the biggest actual social change, hailed by liberals, of the last couple of decades: marriage equality. We did not spend our time calling out homophobia, attacking the churches, or describing our opponents as “deplorable.”

It seems to me that if your argument is better and you make it relentlessly, you’ll win

I can’t tell you how many times I debated religious fundamentalists, while never disparaging them. I produced an anthology of the best arguments on both sides.

mulling over the events tonight, there’s one obvious stand-out. I didn’t hear any specific policy proposals to tackle clearly stated public problems. It is almost as if governing, for the Republican right, is fundamentally about an attitude, rather than about experience or practicality or reasoning. The degeneracy of conservatism – its descent into literally mindless appeals to tribalism and fear and hatred – was on full display.

You might also say the same about the religious right, the members of whom have eagerly embraced a racist, a nativist, a believer in war crimes, and a lover of the tyrants that conservatism once defined itself against. Their movement long lost any claim to a serious Christian conscience. But that they would so readily embrace such an unreconstructed pagan is indeed a revelation.

If you think of the conservative movement as beginning in 1964 and climaxing in the 1990s, then the era we are now in is suffering from a cancer of the mind and the soul. That the GOP has finally found a creature that can personify these urges to purge, a man for whom the word “shameless” could have been invented, a bully and a creep, a liar and cheat, a con man and wannabe tyrant, a dedicated loather of individual liberty, and an opponent of the pricelessly important conventions of liberal democracy is perhaps a fitting end. This is the gutter, ladies and gentlemen, and it runs into a sewer. May what’s left of conservatism be carried out to sea.

I’m not blaming liberals for Miller’s grim fanaticism. I am noting merely that right-of-center students are often mocked, isolated, and anathematized on campus, and their response is often, sadly, a doubling down on whatever it is that progressives hate. Before too long, they start adopting brattish and obnoxious positions — just to tick off their SJW peers and teachers. After a while, you’re not so much arguing for conservatism as against leftism, and eventually the issues fade and only the hate remains.

Think Ingraham and Coulter and Yiannopoulos. They are reactionaries in the classic sense: Their performance-art politics are almost entirely a reaction to the suffocating leftism that they had to endure as they rose through the American education system.

As a young, lonely conservative in college, I now wince at recalling, I threw a Champagne party to welcome Reagan’s cruise missiles to Britain. Of course I knew better — and could have made a decent argument for deterrence instead of behaving like a brattish dick. But I didn’t. I wanted to annoy and disrupt the smugness around me. If you never mature, this pose can soon become your actual personality — especially when you realize that it can also be extremely lucrative in the conservative-media industrial complex.

all politicians lie. Bill Clinton could barely go a day without some shading or parsing of the truth. Richard Nixon was famously tricky. But all the traditional political fibbers nonetheless paid some deference to the truth — even as they were dodging it. They acknowledged a shared reality and bowed to it. They acknowledged the need for a common set of facts in order for a liberal democracy to function at all.

Trump’s lies are different. They are direct refutations of reality — and their propagation and repetition is about enforcing his power rather than wriggling out of a political conundrum. They are attacks on the very possibility of a reasoned discourse, the kind of bald-faced lies that authoritarians issue as a way to test loyalty and force their subjects into submission.

No error is ever admitted. Any lie is usually doubled down by another lie — along with an ad hominem attack.

by taking a position directly counter to that of Mitt Romney, who favors a constitutional amendment to ban all rights for gay couples across the entire country, Obama advanced his key strategy to winning in the fall: to make this a choice election. If it is a choice election, he wins. If it is a referendum on the last four years of economic crisis, he could lose.

it’s been confirmed: gay rights is indeed a wedge issue. But now—unlike 2004—it’s a wedge issue for the Democrats. Women, too, are more supportive of marriage equality—a further shoring up of the gender gap already widened by the spring’s chatter about contraception.

He did this the way he always does: leading from behind and playing the long game. He learned from Clinton that tackling this issue up front would only backfire, especially in a recession.

The reopening of these cases represents a shift for the government, the first acknowledgment that prosecutors are coming to terms with the limitations of how they punish bank misdeeds. Typically, when banks have repeatedly run afoul of the law, they have returned to business as usual with little or no additional penalty — a stark contrast to how prosecutors mete out justice for the average criminal.

The decision to revisit the cases also draws attention to consulting firms that helped shape the original settlements. When determining the extent of wrongdoing at a bank, the government often relies on assessments from consultants that are handpicked and paid by the same bank.

Even now that prosecutors are examining repeat offenses on Wall Street, they are likely to seek punishments more symbolic than sweeping. Top executives are not expected to land in prison, nor are any problem banks in jeopardy of shutting down.

Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized husk of a society.

By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods).

Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion. Their denial of any God is as absolute as others’ faith in God, and entails just as much a set of values to live by — including, for some, daily rituals like meditation, a form of prayer.

The Syrian occupation is not a minor thing. The Washington Post reported a week ago, long before Trump’s tweet, that “US troops will now stay in Syria indefinitely, controlling a third of the country, and facing peril on many fronts.” A third of an entire country! How many Americans knew or know this? Very, very few. I didn’t.

We should not be asking why Trump has decided to nip this in the bud, following his clear and popular mandate to get us out of the region. We should be asking how on earth did the Establishment find a way to occupy yet another Middle Eastern country without any democratic buy-in at all. At least there was a congressional debate before the Iraq War and a robust public discussion. This time, they have launched a new war, occupied a third of another country, changed the rationale so they stay for ever, and tried to hide it!

There comes a point when a president has to say no to the neo-imperial blob, to cut bait in wars that have become ends in themselves, generating the very problems they were launched to resolve. There is never a good time to do this. There wasn’t in Vietnam and there isn’t in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Sometimes, you just have to do it. I wish Obama had been able to. But he got trapped in agonizing rationalizations of the indefensible, paid too much respect to the architects of failure (not to speak of torture), and thereby failed after eight long years to fulfill his core campaign promise to disengage from these quagmires. Maybe it takes an impulsive, dangerous nutjob like Trump to finally do it, to end the wars the American people want to end. And that, I think, is less an indictment of him than of those who let this madness go on for so long.