This piece includes a somewhat interesting Q&A with George Packer on rising sectarianism in the US.

By Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic

Donald Trump’s battle cry of insurrection—“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”—didn’t strike me at first as a four-horsemen moment for American democracy. This was a failure of imagination on my part. To be fair, I was busy trying not to catch the coronavirus. For most of Trump’s January 6 speech I was 100 yards or so from the stage, and my best guess is that only 5 percent of his supporters were masked. In my eagerness to be near the action, I had worked myself into the densest part of the crowd, a cul-de-sac of berserk anti-maskers. They were angry at Joe Biden, exceedingly angry at Mike Pence, and also a bit peeved at me.

“You don’t have to wear it,” one man said, pointing to my mask. “It’s not a mandate.”

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