The Capitol Riot and White Conservatives' Extremism
The Atlantic Republicans Confront the Consequences of Their Doomsday Rhetoric The Capitol riot showed how the ominous tenor of contemporary GOP messaging could be fueling white conservatives’ extremism. Updated on January 9, 2021 at 10:06 a.m. ET The Republican Party’s “Flight 93” revolution tragically, but almost inevitably, came full circle this week in a storm of insurrectionary violence at the U.S. Capitol. Late in the 2016 presidential campaign, an anonymous author, eventually revealed as Michael Anton, a conservative scholar who later joined the Trump White House, described the ...