January 6 and the Triumph of the Justification Machine - The Atlantic

"misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet ... as a justification machine".

Humans are "evidence foragers ... historically [that's] meant digging into a subject, testing arguments... That was the foundation on which most of our politics, culture, and arguing was built. The current internet... undoes that. As the mob stormed the Capitol on January 6, the justification machine spun up, providing denial-as-a-service to whoever was in need of it, in real time." The post gives a lot of examples.

The goal: "not to persuade non-Trump supporters to feel differently about the insurrection. Instead, it was to dispel any cognitive dissonance that viewers of this attempted coup may have experienced... reinforce the beliefs that the MAGA faithful already held ... [provide] more proof of the radical left’s shocking violence or the deep state’s never-ending crusade against Trump... [by] December 2023 ... 25 percent of respondents believed that it was “definitely” or “probably” true that FBI operatives had organized and encouraged the attack on the Capitol. Twenty-six percent were not sure."

Compared with the Kennedy assassination or even 9/11, today's "justification machine... has made the process of erasing cognitive dissonance far more efficient... on-demand evidence ... more tailored than even the most frenzied cable news broadcasts... A culture where every ... human success or tragedy becomes little more than evidence to score political points is a nihilistic one... you never have to change your mind...

the breakneck pace of our information environment... the constant arrival of more news, more evidence... [results in]... a feeling of being trapped in an eternal present tense."

Biden was therefore mistaken "to make the 2024 election about Trump, his threat to the rule of law, and the “battle for the soul of this nation"" - by then, January 6 had been rewritten by MAGA, for their followers, as "overblown... ancient history. Only hysterical Democrats, obsessed with taking down Trump, could not move on."