Today is, of course, the third anniversary of the Trump-inspired attempted insurrection of January 6th, 2021. A lot has happened since then.

First of all, according to an Associated Press database, with respect to the number of January 6th defendants:

• About 1,230 people have been charged with federal crimes, ranging from misdemeanor offenses like trespassing to felonies like assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy; 
• About 730 people have pleaded guilty to charges, 
• About 170 have been convicted of at least one charge at trial; 
• Exactly two defendants have been acquitted of all charges. 

In addition, about 750 people have been sentenced, and some are already out of prison after completing their sentences. However, in the meantime there is a case heading up to the Supreme Court involving a challenge to prosecutors’ use of the charge of “obstruction of an official proceeding” as one of the charges used against the January 6th rioters. More than 300 of these defendants have been charged with the obstruction offense, and so has Trump in the federal case brought by special counsel Jack Smith. The justices will hear arguments in March or April, with a decision expected by early summer. 

But the more interesting development is how a large swath of the American public has come to believe that the FBI and other law enforcement personnel instigated the riot to suppress  political dissent.

Say what?

Yup, according to a Washington Post article, about a quarter of Americans think the FBI and law enforcement are guilty of having instigated the insurrection, and over a third of Americans still believe Biden’s election was illegitimate.

So, the Republican’s new brand is just to be divorced from reality.

This is a lot like the Jade Helm conspiracy theory of 2015, in which conspiracy theorists believed that the United States government was planning to take over a portion of Texas in order to come and take away the guns of Americans. In reality, Jade Helm was a joint exercise in realistic military training involving units from multiple branches in multiple states, under which approximately 1,200 troops were engaged in exercises, mostly in sparsely populated arid regions, designed to train soldiers in skills needed to operate in overseas combat environments.

That’s it.

But according to conspiracy theorists, this was an international operation aimed to seize people’s guns; to use recently closed Walmarts to “stockpile supplies for Chinese troops who will be arriving to disarm Americans”; and involved a military plan to “round up political dissidents” and “remove key political figures” who may be against the imposition of martial law.

Did any of these conspiracists ever apologize for being wrong, completely wrong, absolutely wrong, as wrong as wrong can be, about their absurd assertions?

Of course not.

Just like all the “Revelations”-inspired doomsday soothsayers predicting the second coming of Jesus and the Rapture, when Jesus doesn’t show up — like all the other times he didn’t show up — and good Christians aren’t snatched away into heaven, does anyone apologize? No, they just pick a new date for when these things will happen. Just as the conspiracy theorists for Jade Helm offered excuses for why their theories did not come true, and then just moved on to the next conspiracy.

This is the new Republican party that Donald Trump has inspired (and even Mitt Romney has conceded this much): they’re now just the Party that is divorced from reality.

So when people say that Donald Trump — known to be the greatest and most voluminous prevaricator in the public sphere — “speaks the truth,” what they really mean is that he articulates their fantasies about how they wish the world would be compared to how it actually is.

This is one of the reasons that some of us are arguing that democracy really is “at stake” in this election.

If fantasy can substitute for facts, then we no longer have a functioning democracy. We will just have the collective wet dream of a large swath of unhinged racists and “Christian” authoritarians, and we will no longer be the beacon of democracy for anybody, especially ourselves.