Sinai vs. the Capitol Riots

Three days before furious throngs mobbed the U.S. Capitol over suspicions of rigged voting stations, Yale historian and fascism expert Timothy Snyder thought aloud about local news. "If local news were stronger," he told CNN on Jan. 3, "we'd all have a stronger sense about how the elections actually happened." Three days after the Capitol riots, on Jan. 9, Snyder elaborated in The New York Times Magazine: "If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions." The end result of those abstractions and fictions, he wrote, is "losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true."