ON JANUARY 11, 2021, five days after Donald Trump's supporters stormed the Capitol, CNN published an article titled "Experts Warn That Trump's 'Big Lie' Will Outlast His Presidency." It quoted Timothy Snyder, a historian who wrote the 2017 bestseller On Tyranny.
"The idea that Mr. Biden didn't win the election is a big lie," Snyder said. "It's a big lie because you have to disbelieve all kinds of evidence to believe in it. It's a big lie because you have to believe in a huge conspiracy in order to believe it.
And it's a big lie because, if you believe it, it demands you take radical action." In the two years since, the phrase "Big Lie" has become central to the story of how Trump incited violence at the Capitol. Opening the sixth House Select Committee hearing on the coup attempt, Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said that Trump's "multipart pressure campaign...to block the transfer of power" was an "effort based on a lie, a lie that the election was stolen, tainted by widespread fraud-Donald Trump's Big Lie." Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.) echoed the mantra at the next hearing, saying that "millions of Americans were deceived" by Trump's Big Lie of voter fraud.
And of course Trump did lie about widespread voter fraud for months before any votes were cast and right up through the rally where his supporters gathered and then breached the Capitol, unleashing carnage. But it is insufficient to claim that the Big Lie is merely that the 2020 presidential election was stolen or that Trump's election-fraud conspiracy was the root cause of the riots. As we confront the insurrection on its two-year anniversary, it's important to remind ourselves of what motivated the rioters that day: the idea that the United States is for white people, whose power must be protected at all costs.
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