Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Subscribe here. January 6, 2022 Jan. 6 and the Age of Extremism What exactly happened on Jan. 6, 2021? Right-wing-extremism expert Cynthia Miller-Idriss argues in a Foreign Affairs essay that it was the day extremism found a home in the mainstream of American politics.
"The majority of the rioters were hitherto ordinary Americans who had only recently embraced radical ideas," Miller-Idriss writes. "Their pathways to political violence ... were shaped by a propaganda campaign that engulfed the full spectrum of right-wing politics: from Republican elected officials, prominent conservative commentators, and conservative-leaning major news outlets to newly minted social media influencers, minor radical organizations, and a burgeoning group of far-right niche media ventures."
Not only did fringe ideas go mainstream in the lead-up to Jan. 6, they've been spreading in new and unexpected ways for some time, Miller-Idriss writes. As memes have replaced manifestos, bits of mis- or disinformation can be taken up à la carte. "Thus a self-described 'Bolshevik' white supremacist group calls for the liquidation of the capitalist class, ... QAnon spreads through yoga studios and alternative medicine communities, and antigovernment militias join forces with left-leaning antivaccine groups to protest restrictions and mandates related to the COVID-19 pandemic," Miller-Idriss writes, warning that our political-information era is plagued by "metastasizing extremism."
A year later, we're still confronting such trends. As The New York Times editorial board writes trenchantly, "every day is Jan. 6 now," as Trump's false claims continue to be believed—and to be relitigated through state-level legislative fights over election procedures. (Agreement on Jan. 6 itself can be hard to come by: The Wall Street Journal's editorial board chides others for calling it an "insurrection," while former GOP strategist Karl Rove writes on the same opinion page of Republicans' responsibility to renounce it.)
Comfortingly, The Economist suggests we may not relive Jan. 6 forever. Moving on from it requires a "Republican renewal," the magazine writes—for GOP officials, pundits, and voters to reject Trump's false election claims—offering that "[t]o presume" patriotic and well-intentioned Republicans "can be permanently treated as dupes would be a mistake." One Theory on Omicron's Mildness After the experiences of South Africa and the UK offered hope that Covid-19's Omicron variant would produce milder illness—particularly for the vaccinated and those who've already contracted Covid-19 and recovered—the US is experiencing much the same. Across the country, ICUs have filled up amid a surge of cases, but local reports suggest vast majorities of those under intensive care are unvaccinated. As The Wall Street Journal's Jimmy Vielkind and Julie Wernau report, highly vaccinated New York City's current Covid-19 surge is marked by less-severe sickness.
Science may have found a cause, Max Kozlov writes for Nature, as studies of animals show Omicron infections tend to stay in the upper respiratory tract and that the virus seems to prefer it over lung tissue, potentially explaining the lack of severe outcomes among humans with Covid-19 immunity. Why Kazakhstan's Protests Matter Violent clashes have unfolded in Kazakhstan after large demonstrations were sparked by the government's decision to lift a cap on fuel prices, which rose. As The Economist writes, the protests are about more than fuel, as long-uttered "grumblings" about Kazakhstan's ruling order—particularly, over low wages, oil wealth not being shared, and the economy remaining undiversified—"have now burst out into the open."
Kazakhstan is a significant exporter of oil and uranium, but aside from business concerns, The New York Times' Dan Bilefsky writes that the protests matter more widely because Kazakhstan "has been regarded until now as a pillar of political and economic stability in an unstable region, even as that stability has come at the price of a repressive government that stifles dissent." How Red Are Russia's Lines? In negotiating with the US over the fate of Ukraine and the nearly 100,000 Russian troops reportedly stationed near it, Moscow last month presented Washington with a list of demands some Americans may consider to be non-starters—including no more eastward expansion of NATO membership (including to welcome Ukraine into its fold) and no American nuclear weapons based abroad. Russia has always blanched at NATO's growth into its orbit and America's influence, so as Amy Mackinnon writes for Foreign Policy, "[t]he question" surrounding these new red lines "is, why now?"
At Foreign Affairs, Dmitri Trenin seeks to answer that, writing: "[Russian President Vladimir] Putin has presided over four waves of NATO enlargement and has had to accept Washington's withdrawal from treaties governing anti-ballistic missiles, intermediate-range nuclear forces, and unarmed observation aircraft. For him, Ukraine is the last stand."
Others see it differently. At the France-based newsletter Russia Desk, Françoise Thom writes that Western observers don't realize how serious the situation is. Messages from Russian officials, think tanks, and media are aligned on the notion that Russia is standing up for itself and that its demands are to be taken seriously. In Thom's view, Russia's aim is to catch the US at a moment when its President is weak domestically, expose NATO as a paper tiger, and drive the US and Western Europe out of Russia's neighborhood forever. |
