“A web of delusions impacted real life on Wednesday and it will still impact life,” Brian Stelter, CNN’s Chief Media Correspondent, said on “Reliable Sources” on Sunday.
A large number of Trump followers held on to misinformation received from the president, right-wing media and social media platforms. That led some to believe the most extreme creed: that Trump was “an agent of God,” he reported. Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, who spoke with Trump supporters ahead of the January 6 siege of the Capitol.
“A lot of people I spoke to were completely disconnected from observable reality,” Goldberg told Stelter on Sunday.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg of delusions that sparked a torrent of chaos in Washington last week.
Far-right Trump supporters often live in alternative information ecosystems, sharing and recycling false information from untrustworthy sources, from QAnon’s conspiracy theories to “Stop the Steal” talks – the false belief that Trump won the 2020 election. Many of those ill-informed people discuss further action based on those lies.
Trump’s false allegations of electoral fraud, perpetuated by hundreds of Republican politicians and the right-wing media machine, have filled the rioters with lies and conspiracy theories. That helped fuel the web of delusions that led to the Capitol riots last week, Stelter said. Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Maria Bartiromo and many others have enabled, encouraged and spread that misinformation, noted CNN Business’s Oliver Darcy.
Traditional media outlets are struggling to find the words to cover the chaos.
Part of the reason for that [Trump has] kept going and succeeded because the inconceivable reality is actually very hard to cover, “Susan Glasser, New Yorker staff writer told Stelter.” The novelty of this movement – domestically – really caught us off the back foot. At some point, we must be almost like foreign correspondents in our own Capitol. ‘