US Politics

The US health secretary, Alex Azar, warned Donald Trump in a letter that last week’s attack on the Capitol threatened the administration’s legacy, and he urged the president to support a peaceful transfer of power.
In the two-page, formal resignation letter, dated 12 January, Azar recited what he saw as the administration’s key accomplishments but voiced concern that last week’s siege in Washington and Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud “threaten to tarnish these and other historic legacies of this administration”.
“The attacks on the Capitol were an assault on our democracy and on the tradition of peaceful transitions of power,” Azar wrote.
“I implore you to continue to condemn unequivocally any form of violence, to demand that no one attempt to disrupt the inaugural activities in Washington or elsewhere, and to continue to support unreservedly the peaceful and orderly transition of power on January 20, 2021,” he added.
Azar says he will resign at noon on 20 January, when Joe Biden is sworn in.
Azar is not the first member of Trump’s cabinet to issue strong words in the wake of the attack, in which five people died and which led to the president’s second impeachment.
Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary, resigned after of the attack, saying in a letter to the president that she blamed his “rhetoric” for “the mess caused by violent protestors overrunning the US Capitol in an attempt to undermine the people’s business”.
Elaine Chao, Trump’s transportation secretary, also resigned, calling the attacks “traumatic and entirely avoidable”.
Azar took up the role of health secretary in 2018, overseeing the department during the unprecedented coronavirus crisis, which has so far claimed the lives of nearly 400,000 Americans. Some experts are estimating half a million deaths could be possible by the end of February.
Earlier on Friday, Azar told NBC News the US did not have a reserve stockpile of Covid-19 vaccines, but it was confident that there would be enough produced for second doses.
“We now have enough confidence that our ongoing production will be quality and available to provide the second dose for people. So we’re not sitting on a reserve any more. We’ve made that available to the states to order,” Azar said.
The news on Friday came as Joe Biden called for a vast expansion of federal aid in order to vaccinate 100 million Americans in his first 100 days in office. Biden has tapped Xavier Becerra, the attorney general of California, to lead the health department. More

House speaker Nancy Pelosi has said it is possible that members of Congress could face prosecution if found to have “aided and abetted” the violent attack on the Capitol earlier this month that left five people dead.“Justice is called for as we address insurrection perpetrated against the Capitol last week,” the Democratic speaker told reporters on Friday.“If, in fact, it is found that members of Congress were accomplices to this insurrection,” the Democratic speaker said on Friday. “If they aided and abetted the crime, there may have to be actions taken beyond the Congress in terms of prosecution for that.”Pelosi’s comments came after Mikie Sherrill, a Democratic congresswoman of New Jersey, said she saw colleagues leading groups on “reconnaissance” tours of the Capitol a day before the riot.More than 30 Democrats have signed on to a letter, spearheaded by Sherrill, seeking more information about the tours that took place at the Capitol on 5 January.At the press conference – her first since the House impeached Donald Trump for a second time over his role in encouraging the pro-Trump mob – Pelosi announced there would be a review of Capitol security.She said retired Lt Gen Russel Honoré was being tapped to lead a security review of the US Capitol in the wake of last week’s deadly insurrection.Honoré is perhaps best known for overseeing humanitarian aid efforts in Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina. Pelosi says Honoré will conduct an immediate review of security and inter-agency interaction and Capitol “command and control”.Pelosi would not provide specific details on when she would transmit the article of impeachment to the Senate.“They’re now working on taking this to trial,” the speaker said of the impeachment managers. “You’ll be the first to know when we announce that we’re going over there.”Once the Senate receives the article, the chamber must begin a trial to determine whether the president should be convicted and removed from office.Though the trial will probably conclude after president-elect Joe Biden has taken the oath of office on 20 January, a conviction would prevent Trump from running for president again. A handful of Republican senators have already criticized Trump and signaled that they have not decided whether to support conviction, but at least 17 would need to break ranks to convict.Meanwhile, the justice department inspector general announced on Friday that it was launching a review of the department’s role in the riot. The inspector general, Michael Horowitz, said his office would “assess whether there are any weaknesses in DoJ protocols, policies, or procedures that adversely affected the ability of DoJ or its components to prepare effectively for and respond to the events at the US Capitol on January 6”.The justice department has already opened 175 criminal investigations in connection to the Capitol riot, and that number is expected to surpass 300 by the end of Friday, a federal prosecutor said.Speaking at a press conference, Michael Sherwin, the acting US attorney for the District of Columbia, said his office is exploring “more significant felony charges” against those involved in the riot.Sherwin said there are also growing indications that law enforcement officers, both current and former, participated in the riot.“We don’t care what your profession is,” Sherwin said. “We will charge you, and you will be arrested.”Steven D’Antuono, the FBI assistant director who leads the Washington field office, said even friends and family of the rioters are providing tips to the bureau.D’Antuono said, “You might want to turn yourselves in instead of wondering when we’re going to knock on your door – because we will.” More

Sign up for the Guardian Today US newsletterA far-right website that was among the platforms used to organize the deadly violence at the US Capitol has again been forced to find new internet service protection after a shell company owned by two Russians and registered in Scotland cut ties with the platform’s internet host.The website 8kun, which was previously known as 8chan, has long been one of the preferred platforms of the far right and followers of the baseless conspiracy theory QAnon. It was used by rioters ahead of the 6 January attack to mobilize other “patriots” to “help storm the Capitol”, with some on the message board debating which politicians to kill once they got inside.In the aftermath of the riot, users continued to post content fomenting violence, including maps of government buildings to target and combat techniques for a proposed civil war.It wasn’t the first time the platform was linked to acts of violence. Its predecessor site 8chan was linked to a series of white nationalist terrorist attacks, including the massacres in Christchurch, New Zealand and El Paso, Texas.8kun has faced significant hurdles to remain online since at least 2019, when the El Paso attack occurred. All websites on the internet are kept online by a network of services including web hosts and domain name registrars. 8kun has had a loyal internet provider in Washington state-based VanwaTech, whose CEO has repeatedly defended its connections to the hate site in the name of freedom of speech.But the site also cannot function without platform protection services that prevent DDoS attacks, or distributed denial of service attacks, and few providers have been willing to work with it.Following its removal from Cloudflare, 8kun, throughVanwaTech, worked with Oregon-based CNServers LLC for DDoS protection. That company, too, cut ties with 8kun when it was alerted to the site’s violent history.Since October 2020, 8kun received DDoS protection from DDoS-Guard, a company that provides protection to a number of controversial websites, including neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer. 8kun’s ties to DDoS-Guard were first reported by the security researcher and journalist Brian Krebs.This week, DDoS became the latest company to cut ties with 8kun’s hosting company VanwaTech, following inquiries from the Guardian.8kun is now being hosted by the US-based firm FiberHub, which is based in Las Vegas, Nevada, according to analysis from independent web researcher Ron Guilmette viewed by the Guardian.FiberHub does not provide infrastructure directly to 8chan but does support VanwaTech as a client, the co-founder and chief technology officer Rob Tyree confirmed to the Guardian by email.“We have received no reports that content hosted by VanwaTech supported by our infrastructure is in violation of our terms of service or acceptable use policy, which includes a requirement to abide by all US federal and state laws and regulations,” Tyree said. “Should we receive any such reports, we would follow our internal policies and observe any legal requirements to resolve those matters as swiftly as possible.”DDoS-Guard, the company that provided services to VanwaTech until earlier this week, was registered under a limited partnership, a financial structure in Scotland that allows non-residents to create companies with little scrutiny, on 24 November 2017 by Aleksei Likhachev and Evgeniy Marchenko – two Russian businessmen who remain owners of the company today. The partnership under which DDoS-Guard is registered is called Cognitive Cloud, and is listed at an address in Edinburgh’s Forth Street.Speaking from the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don earlier this week, Marchenko told the Guardian that 8kun was not a direct client of DDoS-Guard, but that his company provided services to VanwaTech. He described DDoS-Guard as a global information security service. It hosted “thousands of websites”, he said, adding that it merely provided VanwaTech with “transit protection services” to stop it from falling victim to DDoS or other “brute force” attacks.“It looks like they host some dubious sites like Qanon/8chan/8kun. I still don’t understand what are they about and have no information about their content or activity,” he added.“We are not related to any politic issues and don’t want to be associated inany sense with customer hosting such toxic sites like QAnon/8chan,” Machenko said after the company severed ties with VanwaTech.Asked why he used a company based in Scotland, Marchenko said: “Why not? The UK is very comfortable for business. I visited London one time, 14 years ago.” He said: “We don’t support any illegal activity. We know nothing about what happened in Washington or support one side or another. This company [VanwaTech] is just one of our many customers.”DDoS-Guard’s other clients include the Russian ministry of defence, as well as media organisations in Moscow. The firm’s webpage links to an official ministry history, which sets out recent steps the Kremlin has taken to ban the use of smartphones by Russian soldiers, after a series of leaks.“It’s OK to earn money from the Russian government or from any other government. It’s just business,” Marchenko said.DDoS-Guard’s Edinburgh office is at 18 Forth Street, a terrace of small Georgian townhouses in the eastern part of Edinburgh’s new town, There was no evidence of any office belonging to Cognitive Cloud at that address or any of the five other neighbouring townhouses. An employee at a neighbouring business said in his 7 years working there he had never met anyone from Cognitive Cloud but had frequently fielded requests to take mail and parcels for the firm. A manager at Edinburgh Office said Cognitive Cloud was not a tenant at the address but referred the Guardian to another company of a different name based in London, to which she said mail addressed to Cognitive Cloud is meant to be forwarded.The Scottish number listed on the site for DDoS-guard is disconnected. A tech support representative contacted through the Russian phone number on the site said the majority of its clients are based in Russia and declined to answer any other questions.Marchenko said its Edinburgh office was an “EU subdivision” staffed by a “representative”.VanwaTech did not respond to request for comment. More

Washington DC and capitols across the US are bracing for violence this weekend after law enforcement officials warned that armed pro-Trump insurrectionists are planning to swarm the cities in the days before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration
Security measures have been dramatically strengthened following the 6 January attack on the Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump and members of far-right groups that left five people dead, including a police officer.
The planned demonstrations and threat of violence, which come as the country still battles the coronavirus pandemic, have had a chilling effect on plans for Biden and Kamala Harris’s inauguration on 20 January. Trump is expected to leave the White House for the final time that morning.
An inauguration rehearsal ceremony that was set for Sunday was postponed until Monday over security concerns, Politico reported. The National Mall is expected to be closed to the public on inauguration day.
Following a briefing from Secret Service and FBI authorities, Biden also canceled his plans to ride the Amtrak train from his home town of Wilmington, Delaware, to Washington for the inauguration.
The House oversight committee sent letters to 27 prominent travel companies on Friday, urging them to use “screening measures” to prevent their services from being used to facilitate plots ahead of Biden’s inauguration. The companies included car rental giants Avis and Hertz and hotel chains Marriott and Hyatt.
In an internal FBI memo first reported by ABC earlier this week, officials warned: “Armed protests are being planned at all 50 state capitols.”
“The FBI received information about an identified armed group intending to travel to Washington, DC on [Saturday] 16 January … They have warned that if Congress attempts to remove Potus via the 25th amendment, a huge uprising will occur,” the document noted.
The memo also said the group planned “to ‘storm’ government offices including in the District of Columbia and in every state” on 20 January.
Efforts to remove the president from office faltered, but on Wednesday, Trump became the first US president to be impeached twice, after the House of Representatives condemned him for inciting a violent insurrection and encouraging a mob of his supporters to storm the US Capitol.
Organizers of the planned unrest are believe to have moved their activities from mainstream social media websites to more secretive online forums to avoid detection, but some details about plans have emerged. In an online advert for a “Million Militia March” scheduled for inauguration day in Washington, a caption read: “The Trumpists will be keeping DC and the military busy on the 20th as you can see.”
The FBI is also reported to be monitoring “various threats to harm President-Elect Biden ahead of the presidential inauguration” and “additional reports indicate threats against VP-Elect Harris and Speaker Pelosi”.
Security measures to stave off violence in Washington and across the country have been extensive. Federal and local authorities have already set up a security zone downtown and 20,000 national guard members will deploy to Washington. Federal security authorities have also asked officials in Virginia to close all crossings into downtown Washington between 6am Saturday and 6am on 21 January, the Washington Post reported.
State capitols, some of which have already seen the resumption of legislative sessions, started ramping up security this week. The New York police department is sending 200 officers to the state Capitol to assist with security, a top NYPD official said on Thursday. And national guard members were sent to Olympia, Washington, to support security efforts this week — arresting two protesters who tried to enter the capitol building without authorization, NPR reported.
Safety concerns have spurred Michigan officials to erect a 6ft fence around the state’s capitol building. The last time authorities used fencing at the capital was in 1994 – when the Klu Klux Klan held a demonstration there, Mlive.com reported.
Michigan capitol authorities have also banned the open carry of guns inside the building following an armed anti-lockdown protest this spring. Several participants in that demonstration were later accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer.
In Austin, Texas, national guard members and state troopers secured the capitol building when the legislature met on Tuesday. One man, a member of a group named Patriots for America, was removed from Capitol grounds for toting an AR-15 rifle.
New details about the Capitol riot emerged on Friday, demonstrating just how close the violent mob got to the vice-president, who was overseeing the electoral vote certification of Biden’s victory when the building was breached.
Pence was not evacuated from the Senate chamber for about 14 minutes after rioters entered the Capitol. Many shouted that Pence was a “traitor” as they made their way towards his location, according to the Washington Post. Pence was moved to a room off the chamber just moments before rioters entered the chamber.
Federal prosecutors in Arizona this week described how the rioters involved in the 6 January attack on the Capitol had intended “to capture and assassinate elected officials”.
The disclosure in a court filing came as prosecutors pushed for the detention of Jacob Chansley, the QAnon conspiracy theorist who was photographed wearing horns in the US Senate chamber and standing at Pence’s desk.
“Strong evidence, including Chansley’s own words and actions at the Capitol, supports that the intent of the Capitol rioters was to capture and assassinate elected officials in the United States government,” prosecutors alleged.
The charges against Chansley “involve active participation in an insurrection attempting to violently overthrow the United States government”; prosecutors also warned in their detention memo that “the insurrection is still in progress”. More

Donald Trump’s incitement of a mob attack on the US Capitol was a watershed moment for free speech and the internet. Bans against both the US president and his prominent supporters have spread across social media as well as email and e-commerce services. Parler, a social network popular with neo-Nazis, was ditched from mobile phone app stores and then forced offline entirely. These events suggest that the most momentous year of modern democracy was not 1989 – when the Berlin wall fell – but 1991, when web servers first became publicly available.There are two related issues at stake here: the chilling power afforded to huge US corporations to limit free speech; and the vast sums they make from algorithmically privileging and amplifying deliberate disinformation. The doctrines, regulations and laws that govern the web were constructed to foster growth in an immature sector. But the industry has grown into a monster – one which threatens democracy by commercialising the swift spread of controversy and lies for political advantage.What is required is a complete rethink of the ideological biases that have created conditions for tech giants to have such authority – and which has laid their users open to manipulation for profit. Social media companies currently do not have legal liability for the consequences of the activities that their platforms enable. Big tech can no longer go unpunished. Companies have had to make judgments about what their customers can expect to see when they visit their sites. It is only right that they are held accountable for the “terms and conditions” that embed consumer safeguards. It would be a good start if measures within the UK online harms bill, that go some way to protecting users from being exposed to violent extremism and hate, were to be enacted.In a society people also desire, and need, the ability to express themselves to become fully functioning individuals. Freedom of expression is important in a democracy, where voters need to weigh up competing arguments and appreciate for themselves different ideas. John Milton optimistically wrote in Areopagitica: “Let Truth and Falsehood grapple; whoever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” But 17th-century England did not know 21st-century Silicon Valley. Today, speech takes place online much more so than in public streets. Politics is so polarised that Mr Trump and his Republican allies claimed without any factual basis that electoral fraud was rampant.Facebook and Twitter can limit, control and censor speech as much as or more than the government. Until now, such firms exempted politicians from their own hate speech policies, arguing that what they said was worthy of public debate. This rests in part on the US supreme court. Legal academic Miguel Schor argued that the bench stood Orwell on his head in 2012 by concluding “false statements of fact enjoyed the same protection as core political speech”. He said judges feared creating an Orwellian ministry of truth, but said they miscalculated because the US “does have an official ministry of truth in the form of the president’s bully pulpit which Trump used to normalise lying”.Silicon Valley bosses did not silence Mr Trump in a fit of conscience, but because they think they can stave off anti-trust actions by a Democrat-controlled Congress. Elizabeth Warren threatened to break up big tech and blasted Facebook for “spreading Trump’s lies and disinformation.” Her plan to turn social media into “platform utilities” offers a way to advantage social values such as truth telling over the bottom line.Impunity for corporations, technology and politicians has grown so much that it is incompatible with a functioning democracy. Populists the world over have distorted speech to maintain power by dividing the electorate into separate camps, each convinced that the other is the victim of their opponent’s ideology. To achieve this, demagogues did not need an authoritarian state. As Mr Trump has demonstrated, an unregulated marketplace of ideas, where companies thrive by debasing politics, was enough. More

Donald Trump is expected to leave the White House as president on Wednesday morning, just hours before Joe Biden’s inauguration, flying off on Air Force One to his beachside home in Florida.Trump’s post-presidential plans have been clouded in uncertainty. But several US news organisations reported on Friday that Trump intends to live at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach resort. His daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner are expected to join him there, at least for some of the time.Trump has said he will not attend Biden’s inauguration, following last week’s deadly invasion of the US Capitol and Trump’s second impeachment on Wednesday. He is expected to leave Washington on the morning of 20 January, Bloomberg reported, citing two people familiar with the matter.The Associated Press, citing a person familiar with the planning, said there would be a departure ceremony at Andrews air force base, with a military band, red carpet and 21-gun salute under discussion.Several White House staff are likely to work for Trump and his family from their new Florida base. According to the Palm Beach Post, Melania Trump recently visited a private school in Boca Raton that the couple’s teenage son Barron is due to attend.Adjusting to life outside the White House may be tough. When the president arrives at Palm Beach on Wednesday roads will be shut as his motorcade threads its way to Mar-a-Lago. Once Biden is sworn in, however, they will reopen. Commercial flights from the nearby international airport that pass directly over his estate will resume.It is unclear what exactly Trump intends to do next. It seems inevitable he will spend some of the weeks and months ahead closeted with his lawyers – and, as per his presidency, on the golf course. He faces a second impeachment trial in the Senate and a slew of other legal cases, federal and civil. As an ex-president he loses his immunity from prosecution.In Washington Trump’s staff are busy packing up. On Wednesday, a photographer for Reuters snapped the president’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, carrying a large, framed photograph of one of Trump’s meetings with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. Other items on their way out of the building included a stuffed pheasant and an Abraham Lincoln bust.The removals and piles of boxes have prompted a rash of puns on Twitter, with several calling on the president to “stop the steal”.In September 2019 the Trumps filed court papers declaring Mar-a-Lago their permanent residence. Renovations are reportedly going on inside the family’s private quarters. Melania Trump has been shipping items for almost two months, ahead of her return next week, with one source telling CNN: “She just wants to go home.”Not everyone is thrilled by the prospect of having the former first family move in. Late last year neighbours sent a letter to the town of Palm Beach saying Trump would violate an agreement made in 1993 that allowed him to convert Mar-a-Lago into a private club. It stipulated that no one could reside at the property, the DeMoss family who live next door complained. More

The truth hurts, but lies kill. The past 12 months have demonstrated that with a terrifying clarity. Lies about Covid, insisting that it was a hoax cooked up by the deep state, led millions of people to drop their guard and get infected. And one big lie about the US election – claiming that Donald Trump had won, when he’d lost – led to the storming of the US Capitol and an eruption of violence that left five dead.The impact has been so swift, events rushing by in a blur, that it’s easy to miss the significance. On Wednesday, Donald Trump – already only the third US president in history to be impeached – was impeached again. In the first 222 years of the country’s existence, impeachment happened only once. Now that most severe, vanishingly rare of sanctions has struck twice in a single year.In the past, the impeachment process unfolded at a slow crawl: 11 months separated the day Bill Clinton vowed he’d never had “sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky and the vote in the House of Representatives to try him for high crimes and misdemeanours. This time it happened in a week, the speed a function of two unusual circumstances: first, the accused has only days left in office; second, those House members were witnesses, Congress the scene of the crime.Unusual too is that this decision was not taken on wholly partisan lines. Ten Republicans broke ranks to put Trump in the dock. Though that only emphasises that 197 Republicans did not: they apparently find it acceptable for a president to incite a violent insurrection against the nation’s democratically elected assembly. Next comes a trial in the Senate. The conventional wisdom says that it will fail – that most Republican senators, terrified of their party’s Trump-worshipping base, will follow the lead of the 197 rather than the 10 – especially once Joe Biden is sworn in at noon on Wednesday and the urgent need to remove Trump from power has faded.Still, it’s possible that the cannier Senate Republicans will adopt the icy cynicism of Mitch McConnell – who briefed that he is open to convicting the president – and seize the chance to be rid of the Trump incubus once and for all. If enough of them vote guilty, then in a second vote the Senate can bar him from holding public office ever again. Ambitious Republicans, eyeing the 2024 contest, are already gaming out that scenario – some of them perhaps within Trump’s own family. Has Ivanka pulled out of attending Biden’s inauguration because she wants to remain viable with the base? If so, she’ll first have to contend with her brother, Donald Jr.And yet, even if Republican leaders manage both to banish Trump and prevent a dynastic succession, they will not be rid of him. It’s become a truism to say that Trumpism will linger, but there is an even more direct legacy that will hang around like a foul stench. That is the fiction that propelled those crowds to break into the halls of Congress: the big lie of the stolen election.“The lie outlasts the liar,” wrote the eminent historian of Nazism Timothy Snyder. If Trump’s supporters continue to believe that their man won big last November – and even now only 22% of Republicans consider the election free and fair – there is no reason why their anger at that theft should abate over the next four years. On the contrary, it will grow and fester, demanding payback in 2024, by force if necessary. Snyder notes darkly that 15 years separated the invention of the big lie that Germany lost the first world war thanks to a Jewish “stab in the back” and Adolf Hitler’s ascendancy to power. Myths endure.All of which raises a much bigger question than what to do with Donald Trump: what to do about the big lie and, more deeply, about the climate in which millions have come to believe it’s true. There has been much diagnosis of the post-truth phenomenon that Trump came to embody, but what about a remedy?A first requirement is to tailor the treatment. The philosopher Prof Quassim Cassam, author of a study of conspiracy theories and their appeal, distinguishes between the producers and consumers of such fictions. The pedlars of lies may have a casual, smirking insouciance towards the truth, but that’s not true of their audience. Those who stormed Congress were not dismissive of truth’s importance; on the contrary, they were prompted to act because of what they believed to have been a vital, hidden truth.The task, then, is not to restore public regard for veracity so much as to equip citizens to distinguish between what’s factually true and what is false. To that end, the philosopher has an unexpected suggestion. Get those who swallow conspiracy theories to ask of those supplying them the very questions they usually direct at the supposedly lying establishment: cui bono? Who benefits from this version of events? What’s their agenda? Except now they won’t be interrogating the BBC or the New York Times but the likes of Alex Jones and the disseminators of the QAnon fantasy. What exactly are they getting out of spinning these tales? A tidy profit, for one thing.Similarly, one might also ask the believers, what’s in it for you? How does believing the QAnon story that a Satan-worshipping ring of paedophiles controls the US government help you? How does it address any of the underlying problems in your life? If you feel life and opportunity have passed you by, how does subscribing to QAnon help? Perhaps it provides a spurious kind of explanation, but it doesn’t make your lot any better. Admittedly, a university professor is not perhaps the ideal carrier of that message. Better, says Cassam, might be a former conspiracy theorist, someone who has broken free.The most obvious corrective to lies are the facts that people can see with their own eyes. Few people still insist Covid is a hoax when they or a loved one are in intensive care. But the next best thing is verifiable information about your immediate community. It’s no accident that the rise of conspiracy thinking and post-truth has coincided with the decline of local news: 265 local titles have closed in the UK since 2005. Into that vacuum have rushed unverifiable, often abstract assertions about the state of the country or the world, spread by social media. With no full account of the reality around you to check against, those assertions can take root.The media is clearly central in all this. In the US, two separate epistemic universes now exist side by side – an MSNBC realm, in which Biden won fair and square; and a Fox News (and now Newsmax and One America News Network) one, in which Trump was robbed. In the US, it’s easy to succumb to nostalgia for the old “fairness doctrine” that demanded balance from the broadcast networks until it was scrapped under Ronald Reagan in 1987. If that were revived, and extended to cable, it might break down the divide, restoring at least a shared basis of agreed facts. Dream on, say the experts: that genie will not return to its bottle. Others suggest a more immediate fix: lobby advertisers to boycott fact-deniers such as Fox, starving them of funds.Still, cable news is only part of the story. Separate silos of knowledge exist and are entrenched just as much on Facebook and Twitter. A more realistic demand might be for external audits of those platforms, opening their algorithms in particular to public view, says the specialist in digital journalism Prof Emily Bell. Why not make transparent the process that ensures falsehoods spread six times faster than the truth on Twitter? While we’re at it, Bell suggests serious investment in the “civic infrastructure of knowledge”, from libraries to new forms of local reporting that might hold power to account.None of these ideas represents a perfect answer. The point is, the twin crises of Covid and Trump have exposed the mortal threat posed by lies and the long war on truth. Now the truth must defend itself – and fight back. More