Walking with the insurrectionists

Excerpts from an essay in The Atlantic:

I told the woman in the cat costume that I would walk with her group. “Only if you take off your mask,” she said. The media is the only real virus, she explained, knowing that I was a part of the media. I told her I would keep my mask on. Trumpists had asked me periodically to remove it. Some were polite about it, a few others not. It seemed to me that only 5 percent or so of the thousands of people gathered for the insurrection wore masks. At one point, when I was caught in the thickest part of the crowd, near the Ellipse, a man told me, “Your glasses are fogging up.”

“Yep, masks,” I said.

“You don’t have to wear it. It’s not a mandate.”

“No, I do.”

“Why?”

“There’s a pandemic.”

“Yeah, right.”

We will find out shortly if today’s insurrection was also a super-spreader event. What I do know, after spending hours sponging up Trumpist paranoia, conspiracism, and cultishness, is that this gathering was not merely an attempted coup but also a mass-delusion event, not something that can be explained adequately through the prism of politics. Its chaos was rooted in psychological and theological phenomena, intensified by eschatological anxiety. One man I interviewed this morning, a resident of Texas who said his name was Don Johnson (I did not trust this to be his name), told me that the country was coming apart, and that this dissolution presaged the End Times. “It’s all in the Bible,” he said. “Everything is predicted. Donald Trump is in the Bible. Get yourself ready.”

More at the link (no paywall).