Revolting: The January 6th committee’s public hearings

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist in New York. I'm John Fassman. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. For millennia, humans have lived in fear of wolves and have tried to eradicate them. But since wolves were placed on endangered list in the 1960s, their population in Europe and America has grow as have efforts to learn to live with them. And we all grab lunch or coffee with a colleague from time to time. You may even have been to their houses or gone out drinking with them. But would you want to spend an entire weekend dropping acid with them? First up though.

The Select Committee to investigate the January 6th attack on a United States Capitol will be in order.

What happened on January 6, 2021, is not a mystery. The attack was broadcast and live streamed onto the world screens.

Donald Trump was at the center of this conspiracy and ultimately Donald Trump, the President of the United States, spurred a mocke of domestic enemies of the Constitution to march down the Capitol and subvert American democracy.

Last night, the committee investigating that attack held its first public hearing.

January 6th was the culmination of an attempted coup.

Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, chaired the hearing with the Republican congressman from Wyoming, Liz Cheney, as vice chair. Neither minced their words.

President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack. On the morning of January 6, President.

Donald Trump's intention was to remain President.

Of the United States despite the lawful outcome of the 2020 election.

The committee played well over 10 minutes of footage showing rioters attacking the police and storming the Capitol.

We back up.

The capit.

A documentary filmmaker, Nick Quested, who had been embedded with the proud boys, testified to what he saw that day.

For anyone who didn't understand how violent that event was, I saw it, I documented it, and I experienced it.

So did a Capitol police officer.

Never in my wildest dreams did I think that as a police officer, as a law enforcement officer, I would find myself in the middle of a battle.

America will hear testimony like this in the coming weeks.

So last night we had the first of half a dozen public hearings, and it's the denouement of 11 months of investigation by the House January 6th Committee.

James Astil is our Washington bureau chief.

This opening public hearing was them really laying out the case against Donald Trump, reminding America of the horror of the insurrection on Capitol Hill and connecting it absolutely to Trump's at that point, month long campaign to steal an election which he'd lost.

Did we learn anything new from last night's presentation?

We learned interesting details. For example, Trump was getting a lot of clear advice from within the White House. You lost this election. There's no evidence to the contrary. Bill Barr, the then Attorney General, was the first witness to the committee. He said that he told Trump that Trump's claims that there was great electoral fraud, that in fact he'd won the election, was nonsense.

I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the President was bullshit. And, you know, I didn't want to be a part of it. And that's one of the reasons that went into me deciding to leave when I did so.

That was powerful. We then cut shortly after that to Ivanka Trump, his daughter, senior adviser at the time, who said there was nothing in the President's claim that the election was fraudulent and therefore, of course, she believed the Attorney General. There were interesting bits of detail around the instrumental role of far right militia groups in organizing the insurrection. But so much was reported and graphically broadcast live to Americans at the time that nothing that we heard challenged that story, which I think we knew on January 6, 2021.

I wonder if you could just fill in the blanks a bit for listeners who have not followed this as closely as you have. What is the committee itself, how is it created, and what are its powers?

Originally, in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection, there was almost a consensus that there needed to be a very powerful, bipartisan, independent investigation of, of what had happened. That sort of an inquiry would have been staffed by experts, not run by politicians. The Republican Senate conference nixed that idea as the mood changed in the Republican Party. And so it became a Democratic exercise, a partisan committee of inquiry, which subsequently managed to get two principled Republicans to sign on, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. You ask about the powers of the committee? Well, they have a team of some 40 investigators who've been plowing through tens of thousands of documents, interviewing hundreds and hundreds of witnesses over the past 11 months. They have subpoena power, albeit most of Trump's coterie refused their summonses. So they have powers, they have resources, just less of both than they would like.

And, James, what's the scope of their inquiry?

So it is, of course, the insurrection on Capitol Hill, but it's the whole lead up to that and the broader array of circumstances that the committee is now arguing led to the insurrection. And that includes the campaign by Trump and his acolytes to persuade politicians and officials at state, federal and local levels to change the results of the 2020 election. It includes the role of far right militias, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, in trying to reinforce that corrupt campaign. It includes also the financing of all of the above. So it's very wide, but it's trying to connect the dots between those apparently disparate actors in the run up to the insurrection.

So the committee does have tremendous power of inquiry, but it doesn't have the power to make arrests. Do you expect to see more charges as a result of these hearings? And more broadly, how would you rate the performance of Merrick Garland, the attorney General who oversees the Justice Department, which does have powers of arrest and prosecution?

The DOJ has been charging large numbers of participants in the insurrection, essentially foot soldiers, small fry. Between 800, 900 people have been charged with crimes around, essentially, breaking and entering into the Capitol Building. What we would expect is that the DOJ will leverage some of those that it's charged to get more evidence against bigger fish. It's clear that the House committee thinks that there's a legal case to be made against Trump himself and those working for him to invalidate the election. The DOJ has said that it takes note of all the evidence that the committee has turned up. We just don't know whether Garland is aggressively investigating the same targets. So we don't know what the prospect is of charges against some of the top dogs in Trump's orbit.

Who do you think the audience for this presentation was? Is it wavering Republicans? Are they trying to convince Trump, friendly Republicans, that they're wrong? Or is the audience history or something grander than that?

It can be all of the above. Certainly, the committee is motivated by a sense of laying down a record for history. It wants to reach beyond the political moment and let it be known that the House Congress did its duty in investigating this most appalling crime against American democracy. But if you ask me, as a watcher of American politics. Who is the audience that would be most powerfully moved by this? It's the sort of middle ground in American politics, independence, a few moderate Republicans, complacent Democrats. All of those voters seem to be remarkably complacent about this threat to American democracy. The brief moment of revulsion in the center of the electorate after January the sixth is very much dissipated. People are concerned about inflation, pressing economic issues. Democracy has not proved to be anything like a sort of rallying point for Democrats and for those few Republicans who've made a stand on this issue, notwithstanding the the movement of their own party against it.

Let me turn to the politics. Around 60% of Republicans believe the lie that the election was stolen. Do you think any of this is likely to change the minds of people who believe that? And if not, does that make this whole thing sort of an empty exercise?

I don't think anybody who thinks the election was stolen is willing to acknowledge the reality that's been around them for all these months. And certainly the conservative media echo chamber which those people inhabit is doing its best to keep the blinkers on. Fox News, just, for example, is not showing this hearing live, as most other cable networks are. You ask whether the hearing has purpose, then? Well, I think it absolutely does, partly because the record does need to be laid down, partly because it's incredibly important that democratic institutions do their jobs when institutions are being challenged, and the job of Congress is to investigate this attack on itself. But also I do think that there is political purpose in reminding Democratic voters, especially perhaps those who are demoralized minded perhaps, to sit out the midterms what is at stake in this contest between the Trump right and reasonable people of all other political persuasions. And I think that there was a lot of power in the hearing last night addressing those voters. Don't be complacent. This was real. It was extraordinarily violent and incredible abuse of the freedoms that all Americans enjoy. That's a rallying call to Democratic voters and perhaps to moderate Republican voters, too. Not that there are many of those left.

James, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you.

Angela Dassau stands still, eyes closed, head bowed, arms at her sides in the cold Wisconsin night. She raises her face, cups her hands around her mouth and howls.

Hal Hodson writes about science for the Economist.

She stands stock still, head cocked to one side, listening for a response. But if the wolves are out there, they're not talkative tonight. Angela is a biologist at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Her work focuses on the Acoustic calls that animals make. And at the moment, she and her group are particularly focused on wolves. They drive around the countryside in deep rural Wisconsin, getting in and out of their jeeps at regular intervals and howling, listening for the wolves responses, and making maps of where the wolves are and how they're moving around their territory.

If you start a howl survey at.

This time of night and do the.

Full survey, you usually be done by about midnight.

Okay.

And so that's pretty much appropriate.

I must be exhausted.

Oh, it's exhausted, yeah.

Like, no joke. This is not something that's easy fieldwork.

But the wolves that Angela's howling to may be dead. 216 of Wisconsin's roughly 1,000 wolves were killed in just 60 hours of hunting in February 2021, a killing spree that was made legal by Donald Trump's removal of wolves from America's endangered species list. This kind of wolf hunting has not happened on this scale in Wisconsin in recent decades, but it is part of a broader trend. Wolves have been expanding back into human occupied territories after centuries of eradication at our hands.

The wolf by horn.

From Peter and the wolf to the Big Bad Wolf. It's hard to find a human account where the wolf isn't painted as the villain. And that sentiment dates back over 5,000 years, to around the time when humans began to herd animals, and at the same time, when humans and wolves existed in roughly equal numbers on the planet. This balance of bodies, if you like, is the reason why confrontation was so fierce between the two sets of creatures. And human wolf confrontation became the stuff of legend and myth. Some of the earliest references appear in Gilgamesh, the Babylonian epic written sometime between 2000 and 1200 BC. Norse mythology tells of three different wolves, all malevolent, consuming people, the sun and the moon struggling against the gods themselves. But the fiercest ideological opponent of the wolf would arrive much later in the form of Christianity, which painted the creature as a devil incarnate for its interference with the flock. Edward I ordered the extermination of all wolves in England in 1281, and Britain had become a country with no wolves at all by about the 1600s. Eradication became the de facto stance of most governments through to the end of the last millennium. Today, wolves have mostly disappeared from America. One of their last real strongholds is in the Boreal north of Canada. But the 1960s saw a turning point for wolves. They were added to the endangered species lists of many countries. And in both Europe and America, their populations began to climb. Wolves padded out of the Italian apennines into the rest of Europe via the Alps. And Canadian wolves started crossing the border going south. Today, there are between 250 and 300,000 wolves on the planet. The majority, some 50 or 60,000, are still in Canada. And the number of wolves is growing fastest in places where they are protected. Italian wolves have been expanding back into territories they used to occupy all over Europe. But when the wolves do come back, farmers no longer have any protection. And they face a choice between relearning the traditional tools of shepherding, with all the labor that that entails, and petitioning their government to remove the wolves. No place on the planet has managed the coexistence of humans and wolves as consistently as Abruzzo national park in central Italy. This is because wolves were never driven out of the Italian Apennines at all. The shepherds who live there have always had to find ways to protect their flock from wolves. One of those shepherds is Alessandro Tamburro, a shepherd working high above Lake Berea at the center of the national park. One of the forgotten tricks in dealing with wolves is an entirely specific breed of dog called livestock. Guardian dogs. They've been bred for thousands of years to integrate with sheep and to treat them like their family and to protect them from wolves when wolves attack. Another key pillar of protecting wolves is to compensate shepherds when they do inevitably lose sheep. Mr. Tambouro says he's lost a lot of sheep to wolves, but at least receives government payout in compensation. Doing this helps keep a lid on anger that might otherwise boil over into retribution. And despite the threat they pose to his flock and his livelihood, Mr. Tanburo says he does not hate wolves. Given the choice, he says, he would not have them eradicated. Instead, he talks about them like the weather, a phenomenon which exists, one with which he has to cope, but to which he is ultimately indifferent.

Yeah, it is a pretty glorious day, isn't it?

It is.

Back in Wisconsin, where wolves and humans live in far greater conflict, Ms. Dassau wants to nudge farmers and residents into thinking about them in the same way. Like the weather, they certainly do howl.

More frequently on nicer days like this than when it's a little, like, overcast, rainy.

To this end, she and her group are developing a network of microphones, which can be installed in the wilderness to listen for howls. When three or more microphones pick up a howl, they can triangulate its location based on the volume at different locations. And when those microphones pick up multiple howls from the same wolf, that data can be used to calculate the direction in which the whole pack is moving. The idea is that by tracking the wolves in this way and offering the people that have to live with them some degree of information about where they're going and what they're doing, the researchers can prevent any conflict from actually taking place between humans and wolves. But from Wisconsin to European farmland, as wolves return to regions from which they've been long absent, is it reasonable to ask why the human beings that live there ought to put up with them at all? There are moral arguments for allowing wolves to return to the human environment. They used to live there, after all. There are also utilitarian and environmental reasons for bringing them back. They prey on herbivores, which allows the plants that the herbivores themselves eat to grow more strongly and sink more carbon from the atmosphere. The idea that humans could control the entire planet, with all the complexity and its variety of ecosystems, is a pipe dream. And perhaps learning to live with wolves can help humans appreciate their true position. The most powerful creature on the planet, but not almighty.

Once the domain of hippies and adventurer travelers, psychedelics such as LSD and ayahuasca have spent the last decade working their way toward the mainstream. Tech gurus have been known to tout microdosing, while the benefits of psychedelic therapy are also making headlines. Drug laws are loosening, too. Oregon has legalized psilocybin therapy, while regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are considering the virtues of mdma. And now corporate bosses are getting in on the act, looking into how psychedelics can help their employees and approve office camaraderie.

Interest in psychedelics is starting to grow in corporate America and Europe as attitudes towards these substances are slowly becoming much more open.

Natasha Loder is the Economist Health Policy Editor.

What we're seeing is the business community is starting to look at how these types of psychedelics can be made available to staff either for mental health conditions or even for the ultimate corporate retreat.

I shudder to ask, what is the purpose? What is the goal of a corporate retreat that includes psychedelics?

Companies are looking at this for a variety of reasons. One of them might be for some sort of bonding experience among leadership or a certain team. There's an idea that having these psychedelic experiences can sort of open up businessmen to a sort of different way of thinking about themselves and about the world. I wanted to find out more about this idea, so I spoke to Anne Felipe, the boss of the new Health club, which has recently started and is offering psychedelic services directly to businesses.

The company could actually buy services from us to either help their C level Become a better leader, a better boss, also with the support of psychedelic assisted therapy or coaching. But also we offer services that a company could actually give psychedelic therapy to their employees as a benefit, for example.

So this all seems very positive. Are there any risks associated with using.

Psychedelics in terms of medicines? They're certainly considered safe, but you know, there are a variety of issues and risks. And of course there are the risks of having something like a bad trip. I mean, we talk about these experiences as being good ones, generally ones that can be helpful, but you can also have bad trips. And so that's why what's really critical about these drugs used in mental health or perhaps just in a sort of corporate setting, is that they're really kind of in a tightly controlled environment and very closely supervised. And they're also not suitable for people with certain kinds of mental health conditions. And I'm thinking, you know, bipolar or schizophrenia. And Anne also mentioned issues that could arise around drawing a distinction between people who are essentially self medicating with these substances.

There are people who end up doing this like almost every weekend, especially with Ayahuasca, it has turned into a very specific, you could say like a weekend culture to do psychedelic trips. And the interesting thing is that it's not about addiction because a lot of people say, well, can you get addicted from LSD or from psilocybin? But you actually can't because the more often you do it, the less it works. Which goes for, I think, all tryptamins in the psychedelic family. But with Ayahuasca it's similar in terms of addiction, but for some reason it gives a lot of people this sometimes feeling of that they heal themselves.

What about mental health issues more broadly? How are corporations encouraging the use of psychedelics in that area?

Well, so this year the soap maker Dr. Bronner's in America started to offer ketamine assisted therapy via their employee mental health care benefits. And staff are going to have access to infusions of ketamine given alongside counselling, which is really the sort of gold standard for offering this sort of therapy. And Dr. Bronner is providing this benefit through a plan administrator called Enthea. And I think it's very likely that other companies will start to make ketamine therapy available in the future in America at least. You know, the question is what sort of oversight is going to happen for patients who are on these therapies in the long term? If they're on them for years, you know, how much do we really know about what the risks are of Being treated like that.

Benefits of psychedelics seem deeply personal, sort of emotional. It expands empathy, those sorts of things. Do people really want to go on psychedelic retreats with their coworkers? Do they want to rely on the office for this sort of mental health care?

I think people vary. I suppose it depends what your co workers are like. I guess if you're in the music business, it might be very different from whether you work in a bank. I think what you ideally want is good and effective mental health treatments to be available to everyone, anywhere. And what you will see in some circumstances is that companies will decide to support these treatments because it's causing a business problem for them.

So, Natasha, if the Economist starts offering psychedelic retreats, would you want to go on them?

I don't know if you've spoken to many people who've done psychedelic retreats, but, you know, listening to someone's psychedelic experiences, like watching paint dry or listening to their dreams, you know, you think it might be interesting, but it really isn't. Psychedelic experiences really do expose you. I think a lot of people, myself included, like to have a professional face at work. Even though, you know, I'm a bit quirky, I don't necessarily want to reveal the true depths of my quirkiness.

Yeah, I'm with you on that. I think whatever weekend the Economist is taking everyone out for ayahuasca, I'm busy. Tasha, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you so much, John.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors this week are Marguerite Howell and Chris Impey. Our sound engineer is Will Rowe. Our senior producers are Sam Westrin, Jack Gill and John Jo Devlin. Our US Audio correspondent is Stevie Hertz. Our creative producer is William Warren. And our producers are Rory Galloway and Alize Jean Baptiste. And assistant producer Avesoyo Sundairo. With extra production help this week from Saul Rivers. We'll all see you back here on Monday.

Sam.