The Week Magazine January 21, 2022

We are just past the one-year anniversary of Jan. 6, and our Last Word this week gives a view of the riot from the vantage point of the Capitol Police, and it’s a terrifying read. For hours, rioters battered officers into senselessness, slamming poles into helmets and crushing hands. But to me the behavior of the crowd is in some ways less important than that of the demagogues and enablers who were hoping to harness the power of the mob. Many of the rioters were deeply confused and wildly misled by fringe media. On the other hand, the enablers, from President Trump on down, had a very clear goal in mind: subverting the results of the election by pressuring lawmakers not to certify the vote and flipping the choice to…

What happened The nation marked the anniversary of the Jan. 6 uprising last week, a milestone Democrats observed with a day of events that highlighted a deep partisan divide over the meaning of the Capitol riot. For Democrats, it was a day of solemn reflection on an insurrection stoked by Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, which left five people dead, injured more than 140 police officers, and sent lawmakers scurrying for their lives. Members of Congress gathered on the Capitol steps for a candlelight vigil and gave speeches recounting their shock and terror fleeing from an invading mob that smashed its way into the Senate chamber, chanting “Hang Mike Pence” and hunting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “America does not yet know just how close we, the…

What happened Troubling new Covid records were set as the highly contagious Omicron variant tore across the U.S. this week, with more than 1.4 million new Covid cases being reported in a single day and hospitalization numbers hitting new highs. An average of 760,000 infections are now being detected daily, triple the number of the last peak in January 2021; former Food and Drug Administration director Scott Gottlieb estimates that 40 percent of Americans will have been infected by the time the surge ends. More than 147,000 people are currently in the hospital with Covid—some 5,000 more than last winter’s high—and disease modelers predict that total will reach 300,000 within weeks. Some of the hospitalizations come from people being admitted for other reasons and then testing positive, indicating how…

When police in Lebanon, N.H., responded to a report of a German shepherd on a snow-covered highway, they thought it was a stray. Then, the dog ran away from them and led them into Vermont, where it stopped near a broken guardrail and its owner’s wrecked pickup truck. “It quickly became apparent that Tinsley led [police] to the crash site and injured occupants,” the New Hampshire State Police wrote on Facebook. The truck’s two occupants were hypothermic and seriously injured and were transported to the hospital. Tinsley, the heroic pup, was not injured in the crash. Nadia Popovici was at a hockey game between the Vancouver Canucks and the Seattle Kraken when she spotted a small mole on the neck of Brian Hamilton, an assistant equipment manager for the Canucks.…

“Not long ago, the idea of another American Civil War seemed outlandish,” said Ron Elving in NPR.org, but now “it seems to suddenly be everywhere.” Last week marked the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, when our proud, 225-year streak of peaceful transitions between presidents came to a violent, bloody halt. In the ensuing year, that awful day seems only to have deepened the partisan divide—and the belief that further violence may be inevitable. A recent Washington Post poll found that 40 percent of Republicans and 23 percent of Democrats—in other words, tens of millions of people—now believe that violent attacks on the government are “sometimes justified.” Another recent poll found that a majority of Republicans and 41 percent of Biden voters agreed that it may be…

Good week for: Feuds, after former President Trump blasted fellow Republicans who don’t admit they’ve had vaccine booster shots, calling them “gutless.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Trump protégé widely seen as a possible rival for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, recently refused to answer whether he’d been boosted. Getting the jab, after British doctors treating men who’ve had Covid reported that the virus sometimes damages blood vessels in the penis, causes impotence and a permanent reduction in its size. Mandates, after North Korea launched a campaign to pressure citizens to produce more human and animal poop for fertilizing crops. North Koreans who fail to meet their manure quota will be fined and not allowed into public food markets, the government said. Bad week for: Military surplus, after the Norwegian military…