Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Jan. 6 hearing was compelling, but not convincing to everyone

Jan. 6 committee hearing with Rep. Bennie Thompson and Rep. Liz Cheney

Rep. Bennie Thompson and Rep. Rep. Liz Cheney lead the first in a series of hearings in which their committee will present evidence related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

The committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol conducted a riveting public hearing in prime time Thursday. Carried by most of the major broadcast and cable news networks, the two-hour proceeding featured video of the riot, recorded statements from advisers to Donald Trump and powerful testimony from a police officer injured during the attack.

Observers on the left and right found the hearing compelling, the testimony heartfelt – but not always convincing.

What follows is a selection of responses from across the political spectrum.


Peter Baker in The New York Times:

Still, there was another audience for the hearings as they got underway, and that was Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. If the committee was laying out what it considered an indictment against the former president, it seemed to be inviting the Justice Department to pursue the real kind in a grand jury and court of law.

As she previewed the story that will be told in the weeks to come, Ms. Cheney all but wrote the script for Mr. Garland. “You will hear about plots to commit seditious conspiracy on Jan. 6,” she said, “a crime defined in our laws as conspiring to overthrow, put down or destroy by force the government of the United States or to oppose by force the authority thereof.”

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Bill Kristol in The Bulwark:

Liz Cheney did her job tonight. Her remarks, and the hearing as a whole, gave me confidence the Jan. 6th Committee will do its job well over the next two weeks. We all complain, often justifiably, about the failures of our leaders, the failures in particular of members of Congress. But the Jan. 6th Committee, I will venture to say, will do its job. The question is whether we the people will do our duty in drawing the conclusions we need to draw. Will we make these hearings an inflection point in strengthening our democracy, not just a blip in politics as usual?

Susan Glasser in The New Yorker:

The hearing began and ended, as it should have, with Trump himself. “President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” Cheney said, consciously echoing an interview that she gave to Fox News on the afternoon of January 6th, while she and her colleagues were still in hiding from the pro-Trump mob. It said everything about where American politics are today that on Thursday night, a year and a half after the events in question, Fox News did not dare to broadcast Liz Cheney’s remarks—or to air the full hearing live, as the other networks did. Instead, it chose to run its regular evening programming of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and the rest of the Trump propaganda machine.

Brain Walsh, former communications aide for House and Senate Republicans:

Gary Abernathy in The Washington Post:

There was much focus on the actions of the militant Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. If the committee’s purpose was to convict those groups of planning and carrying out the Capitol incursion, they may have succeeded. If the goal was to prove that they were acting at Trump’s direction — even if they convinced themselves that they were through inferences and assumptions based on Trump’s random tweets — the committee failed. The sometimes convoluted efforts by Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), the committee’s chairman, to connect the dots, and video editing that synced Trump’s comments with various insurrectionist acts, were ineffective.

Walter Shapiro in The New Republic:

The committee is still bipartisan, with Cheney and Representative Adam Kinzinger onboard. But these two Republicans remain the antithesis of the cult of Trump. The result: the first congressional committee in memory on which all nine members are united in the same cause—getting at the truth of the attempted coup of January 6. That meant the narrative was not interrupted by Benghazi-style grandstanding and conspiracy-mongering by scorched-earth Republicans.

Kimberly Strassel in the Wall Street Journal:

What’s actually missing in this special sauce of prime TV hours, slick videos and positive press is the one ingredient truly vital for public interest: credibility. If huge swathes of America ignore the committee’s work, it will be because the committee itself—through its construction and through its actions—made it easy.

Philip Bump in The Washington Post:

Yes, God forbid that Fox News should air an hour of propaganda or dishonesty. Carlson didn’t articulate the purported lies, which he couldn’t have, because the hearing hadn’t actually begun by that point. But it didn’t matter, because his audience wasn’t hearing the evidence from the hearing anyway. Was it a lie when the hearing showed William P. Barr, Trump’s ever-loyal attorney general, describing Trump’s voter-fraud claims as nonsense? Doesn’t matter, just wave it all away as untrustworthy without actually explaining what was said and why it couldn’t be trusted.

Debilyn Molineaux:

James Fallows:

Heather Cox Richardson:

Veteran reporter Bob Woodward called the evening “historic.” Looking back at the 1954 hearings that destroyed the career of Senator Joe McCarthy by revealing that he was lying to the American public, Woodward said that tonight’s event “was the equivalent of the Army-McCarthy hearings." (found in Heather Cox Richardson’s daily email)

Stephen Colbert:

Stephen's LIVE MONOLOGUE After The January 6th Committee Primetime Hearingwww.youtube.com

Read More

Should States Regulate AI?

Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-CA, speaks at an AI conference on Capitol Hill with experts

Provided

Should States Regulate AI?

WASHINGTON —- As House Republicans voted Thursday to pass a 10-year moratorium on AI regulation by states, Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-CA, and AI experts said the measure would be necessary to ensure US dominance in the industry.

“We want to make sure that AI continues to be led by the United States of America, and we want to make sure that our economy and our society realizes the potential benefits of AI deployment,” Obernolte said.

Keep ReadingShow less
The AI Race We Need: For a Better Future, Not Against Another Nation

The concept of AI hovering among the public.

Getty Images, J Studios

The AI Race We Need: For a Better Future, Not Against Another Nation

The AI race that warrants the lion’s share of our attention and resources is not the one with China. Both superpowers should stop hurriedly pursuing AI advances for the sake of “beating” the other. We’ve seen such a race before. Both participants lose. The real race is against an unacceptable status quo: declining lifespans, increasing income inequality, intensifying climate chaos, and destabilizing politics. That status quo will drag on, absent the sorts of drastic improvements AI can bring about. AI may not solve those problems but it may accelerate our ability to improve collective well-being. That’s a race worth winning.

Geopolitical races have long sapped the U.S. of realizing a better future sooner. The U.S. squandered scarce resources and diverted talented staff to close the alleged missile gap with the USSR. President Dwight D. Eisenhower rightfully noted, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” He realized that every race comes at an immense cost. In this case, the country was “spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Closeup of Software engineering team engaged in problem-solving and code analysis

Closeup of Software engineering team engaged in problem-solving and code analysis.

Getty Images, MTStock Studio

AI Is Here. Our Laws Are Stuck in the Past.

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises a future once confined to science fiction: personalized medicine accounting for your specific condition, accelerated scientific discovery addressing the most difficult challenges, and reimagined public education designed around AI tutors suited to each student's learning style. We see glimpses of this potential on a daily basis. Yet, as AI capabilities surge forward at exponential speed, the laws and regulations meant to guide them remain anchored in the twentieth century (if not the nineteenth or eighteenth!). This isn't just inefficient; it's dangerously reckless.

For too long, our approach to governing new technologies, including AI, has been one of cautious incrementalism—trying to fit revolutionary tools into outdated frameworks. We debate how century-old privacy torts apply to vast AI training datasets, how liability rules designed for factory machines might cover autonomous systems, or how copyright law conceived for human authors handles AI-generated creations. We tinker around the edges, applying digital patches to analog laws.

Keep ReadingShow less
Nurturing the Next Generation of Journalists
man using MacBook Air

Nurturing the Next Generation of Journalists

“Student journalists are uniquely positioned to take on the challenges of complicating the narrative about how we see each other, putting forward new solutions to how we can work together and have dialogue across difference,” said Maxine Rich, the Program Manager with Common Ground USA. I had the chance to interview her earlier this year about Common Ground Journalism, a new initiative to support students reporting in contentious times.

A partnership with The Fulcrum and the Latino News Network (LNN), I joined Maxine and Nicole Donelan, Program Assistant with Common Ground USA, as co-instructor of the first Common Ground Journalism cohort, which ran for six weeks between January and March 2025.

Keep ReadingShow less