Why Did the Oath Keepers Do It?

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What did the Oath Keepers and other militia groups really think they would achieve by attacking American democracy and losing everything? I suspect they wanted only one thing: to escape the boredom of their own lives.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

• The people cheering for humanity’s end
• Expiration dates are meaningless.
• The bottom-up election-denial strategy

For What?

Even before January 6, 2021, I wondered about the kind of people who live the classic American paranoid life, the citizens whose politics, as Richard Hofstader them almost 60 years ago, are a stew of “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” I first encountered this mindset when I worked in the U.S. Senate as personal staff for the late John Heinz of Pennsylvania: I would field calls from constituents who demanded