April 19, 2021 THE WASHINGTON POST – By eerie coincidence, I began reading William J Bernstein’s The Delusions of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups in early January and was deep into it on January 6. I kept reading in the days that followed the unprecedented insurrection at the Capitol, putting the book aside occasionally to look at the scores of videos taken by participants before and during the rioting. ProPublica, the investigative news site, acquired more than 500 of these videos and assembled them into a compelling new kind of documentary. The people in these clips fit with what Bernstein describes as victims of delusions. In this instance they were victims of our deluder in chief, who concocted false tales of election fraud that he repeated again and again to convince his followers that Joe Biden had stolen the 2020 election. At a rally on January 6, President Donald Trump urged the crowd to march on the Capitol, “show strength” and “stop the steal”. At his bidding, the believers set off for the Capitol. The rioters’ explanations of their actions in the ProPublica videos put on full display Bernstein’s conclusions about the delusions of crowds. Bernstein wants us to understand that human beings are not remotely as smart or as rational as we would like them to be. Only rarely are people truly analytical about anything. We make things up constantly, then claim that our inventions are true.