The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority. Absolutely free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.

Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, life and culture.

My name is Freddie Gray. I'm the deputy editor of The Spectator.

I'm joined today by John Daniel Davidson, who is a senior editor at the Federalist. And we're

going to be talking about the first anniversary of January 6th and the famous storming of the capital, which occurred in the run-up

to the transition of power between President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden.

John, it's been a year exactly today since that very dramatic news day, very dramatic day in Washington.

And I thought I'd start by ask you a slightly opaque question, which is,

has your feeling about what happened changed much?

Or has your perception of what happened changed much since, let's say, January 7th to today?

It has quite a bit.

And it has because of all that has happened since January 6th of last year. There was an opportunity after January 6th to take stock of the way that we tolerated political violence

for months and months leading up to the Capitol riot

and the danger that that posed to civil society,

to our constitutional republic,

and to change course.

And we did the opposite.

And by we, I mean, for the most part, Democrats, Democratic leadership and corporate media

decided to use January 6 as a cudgel and hammer away at all Republicans, at all conservatives, and smear them all as essentially

capital rioters and conflate, you know, they would go on, as we saw this last weekend,

the New York Times did, conflate rather mundane efforts by Republican lawmakers at the state level to pass

election reforms, conflate that with insurrectionists and to label vast swathes of their

...