Just before the election, someone at Slate started a Slack channel where folks could dump their campaign-related anxiety.

They called it spiraling.

It's the place you'd go to complain about the talking heads on CNN or admit that you smoked a cigarette to relieve some tension.

And on Saturday, after Joe Biden was declared the president-elect, an editor archived this channel

because we didn't think we needed it anymore until yesterday.

That's when it began to feel like maybe we should start worrying again about how this is going to play out.

And spiraling, it was open for business.

Today, the incumbent president, his campaign and his cadre of loyal Republicans continued their campaign of

baseless claims of voter fraud going on all over the country.

Late today, Attorney General Bill Barr did them all one better.

He wrote a letter to all U.S. attorneys on letterhead telling federal prosecutors

they are allowed to investigate allegations of voter fraud.

Sure, the race has been called.

Joe Biden's the clear winner.

But the president, he still hasn't conceded. And the administration has been making these strange defensive moves. A bunch of top officials at the Department of Defense are suddenly out of work. The government bureaucrat in charge of Joe Biden's transition is refusing to give him a call. The Secretary of State,

Mike Pompeo, had a press conference this week, where he said he was preparing for a second

Trump administration. There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.

It's hard not to feel at least a little bit of dread because it's so obvious that Joe Biden won the election.

I called up Ari Berman from over at Mother Jones to talk me through some of this.

It's not a particularly close election. This is not Florida 2000. We're not talking about 537 votes.

As we're recording this, the closest state, Georgia, Biden's up by 12,000 votes.

So it's not really close anywhere.

...