Editor's Notes: The Fever Dream Projections of the Right

This is the fourth issue of Editor's Notes, a newsletter that will provide occasional thoughts and updates for paid subscribers. Readers of our free articles can sign up below to gain access.

In an essay I wrote about our information environment, I referenced a 2024 conversation about January 6 that has really stuck with me:

Saying that he had simply been misled by the media initially, that with information we’ve learned since he’d come to change his view, he completely dismissed the significance of the events of January 6 as anything but a propaganda coup for Trump’s opposition due to the optics of it. The “only person who was killed” was “on the protesters’ side,” and therefore any supposed danger the “protesters” posed, or the laws they broke, could be dismissed. The relentless physical assaults on law enforcement at the scene went unmentioned (never mind the circumstances under which the “person who was killed” was shot). And “it isn’t as though Trump said to do an insurrection.”

Many of us have been there, I'm sure: suddenly encountering the mirror universe of the right, where up is down and bad is good.

Yesterday I received some mail. It came in a beat up envelope with no return address:

In it were a bundle of printed out articles with no note or other sort of direct communication from whomever sent it.

Each of these articles offered a view into the mirror universe.