Chris Jennings

The most overt example is the extreme popularity of the QAnon conspiracy, which was basically an updated version of the story that the Weavers told.

You had a larger and larger share of American citizens, including people in genuine roles of authority who believed or at least claimed to believe

And so, you know, when I say crack up of American reality, I'm saying that you have citizens living in two different worlds, perceiving the same events through very different lenses.

And obviously that has been accelerated by a media landscape that has gotten more heterogeneous.

And so, yeah, I would say that's what I mean by crack up.

Yeah, the sort of official postmortem went on for a very long time and was extremely thorough.

The Department of Justice issued huge reports, blockbuster Senate hearings from the Judiciary Committee in which literally every – even minor character from the whole story was deposed and spoke before Congress.

Randy and his daughters went to Washington and addressed the Judiciary Committee.

To use a term that has in the last couple of weeks come back into the news, there was a matter of qualified immunity.

Can a federal agent in performance of his duties be held legally liable?

And obviously, that's something we've seen in the news lately with federal officials saying that –

CPP agents have full immunity and can't be held liable for what happens while they're performing their duties.

Most people on the right would say that not enough heads rolled.

There was a few demotions at the FBI.

There was one FBI functionary did serve a little bit of prison time, but it was not for anything he did during the siege.

It was for destroying sort of an after-action report that reflected poorly on the FBI.

It was a classic case of the cover-up

was where most of the crime happened.

Yeah, I would say so.

And I don't even think you need to resolve to sort of cynical financial calculus to explain why these ideas became popular with a certain type of interest.