Opinion | The Chaos at the Capitol Shows America Is in a Reality Crisis

On Wednesday, thousands of Trump supporters flocked to Washington, D.C., to protest and overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. They listened to their president say he would never concede, that American elections were no longer free or fair. Then he implored his audience to march on the Capitol building. Moments later, Trump supporters chanting, “This is our house” broke past police lines at the Capitol.

For close observers of the pro-Trump and far-right extremist movements, this dark moment has felt almost inevitable. You can draw a straight line from the message-board fever swamps to Mr. Trump’s rallies to Charlottesville to “Stand back and stand by” to this. It is a desperate attempt to overthrow the democratic process. It is also the crash of a universe of toxic conspiracies against the rocks of human reality.

“The way I am seeing it is as a crescendo,” Marc-André Argentino, a researcher who studies the QAnon movement, told me earlier this week referring to the planned protest. Recent weeks have felt like the confluence of contentious events and dark news, including an enormous coronavirus case surge, the end of the Trump presidency and the election certification process, and a vaccine rollout. “There is the sense that in some circles all hope for a Trump win will be lost,” Mr. Argentino said. “For others it’s the end of a Trump era, when they had free rein. For some it’s frustration at upcoming liberal governance and lockdown measures.”

As Wednesday’s siege of the Capitol demonstrates, we’re entering a volatile moment. Those who’ve been cocooned in Facebook groups and fed a steady diet of lies from election-denial outlets like Newsmax and One America News are coming to a realization that there is no grand plan for Mr. Trump to magically retain office. In forums like The_Donald, die-hard supporters are furious, not only at congressional Republicans who’ve refused to deny the election results, but also at Mr. Trump himself. “Trump better do something about all of this tomorrow, or he is the biggest traitor of them all,” a supporter wrote online. He said that he was attending Mr. Trump’s speech on Wednesday and that “it better not be for a rally, it better be for some real-deal information.”

The desired information never came. It doesn’t exist. For Trump supporters and QAnon believers, the cognitive dissonance in this moment is frightening to behold. In one video circulating from Washington, a group of Trump supporters confronted Senator Todd Young of Indiana, a Republican, outside the Capitol, asking why he refused to object to the election results. Mr. Young, clearly exasperated, argued that he must uphold the law. “I took an oath under God. … Do we still take that seriously in this country?” he asked. The supporters weren’t moved. “The law matters with us!” one shouted. “It doesn’t matter with the Democrats.”

That is just one example of the long-term effects of an endless stream of propaganda, conspiracy and lies. But there are so many. Here’s a short list from just the past few weeks:

• A group of at least 13 Republican senators and more than 100 Republican House members said they would refuse to accept President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.

• The president of the United States was caught on tape for over an hour angrily spouting QAnon conspiracy theories about voter fraud in an attempt to pressure Georgia state officials to overturn the election results.

• In Nashville, federal investigators announced they are looking into evidence that suggests the Christmas bombing suspect believed in lizard people and other far-fetched conspiracy theories.

• A Wisconsin pharmacist who believed the coronavirus vaccine to be harmful intentionally sabotaged more than 500 Moderna vaccine doses. In Georgia, state officials announced recently they are expanding vaccine access because many rural health care workers refuse to get the shot.

• On Monday, a man with an online history of extremist right-wing views was detained in Queens after a hoax 9-1-1 bomb call that shut down a mall parking garage.

Each example is concerning on its own. Taken together, these events show a country in crisis. As a reluctant chronicler of our poisoned information ecosystem, to me none of this is very surprising. It is the culmination of more than five years of hatred, trolling, violent harassment and conspiracy theorizing that has moved from the internet’s underbelly to the White House and back again. While that hate and violence has on occasion spilled into the streets, it appears we’re only beginning to understand its true impact. For years now, professional grifters, trolls, true believers and political opportunists have sowed conspiratorial lies, creating intricate and dangerous alternate realities. We are now witnessing the reaping. It is likely to get worse.

There’s no easy solution to our current crisis, in part because there’s no one culprit. Donald Trump’s half-decade assault on the truth has played an outsize role. So have social media platforms and pro-Trump outlets like Fox News. The mainstream press has also struggled, especially earlier in the Trump era, to counter disinformation and not amplify lies and conspiracies.

But that’s just the supply side of our reality crisis. Equally important is the demand side, in which millions of Americans are actively courting conspiracies and violent, radical ideologies in order to make sense of a world they don’t trust.

Such explanations don’t begin to excuse the selfish lies or their dangerous effects. But they do illustrate that our reality crisis is born of selfishness, shamelessness and suffering. It is bone deep. And it will only continue to escalate.

But what is perhaps most frightening is that the alternate reality that many Trump supporters and anti-vaxxers and QAnon believers cling to doesn’t exist — a fact that sooner or later will avail itself to many true believers. And it is at that moment of cognitive dissonance — the moment the bubble begins to burst — that the plausible danger that experts have been warning about for years becomes real.