| Here's a peek behind the curtain: My initial thought for the start of this newsletter was to frame it as though I was a Civil War soldier, writing to my betrothed on the occasion of my third day away from home. I started to write it, too, until about two sentences in when I realized I had no idea what the joke was supposed to be. It's certainly joke-like, I guess, in the way that starting a newsletter with "why'd the chicken cross the road" would set up a joke. But then what? And for Heaven's sake why? The point is that I've already succumbed to madness. And in only three days! Impressive. Tip: Rewriting history is surprisingly easy Perhaps the prompt for my original introduction to this newsletter was that I had insurrection on the mind, as one occasionally does these days. A CBS News-YouGov poll released this week found that the most recent attempt to subvert American democracy, the one that played out on Jan. 6 at the Capitol, is viewed with strong disapproval by most Americans. A quarter of Republicans, however, say they at least somewhat approve of the rioters who stormed the Capitol. The percentage of Republicans who say they strongly disapprove of that attempt to derail the results of the election dropped by more than 10 percentage points since January. One reason for this, clearly, is the concerted effort by allies of former president Donald Trump to reshape the public's understanding of what happened that day. And no one has as robust a combination of platform and interest in rewriting history as Fox News's Tucker Carlson. Since he emerged as the network's dominant star in recent months, Carlson has repeatedly alleged conspiracies against him and his viewers from the NSA to UPS. (Yes, as in the package delivery people.) The pattern is consistent: make a claim, speculate about how far the conspiracy goes — and then later seize on incidental or unrelated evidence as proof that his speculation was right all along. On Thursday night, Carlson declared that he had proof of one of his more egregious claims: that the Jan. 6 riot was to some extent a function of goading by undercover FBI informants. His original claim to this end was largely predicated on a report from a right-wing news site implying that "unindicted co-conspirators" identified in charging documents were necessarily anonymous federal agents. That one of the co-conspirators in that report was actually the wife of the charged rioter either undercuts this theory pretty dramatically or, I guess, shows the extent of the long game the FBI is willing to play. His guest on Thursday night was a DEA agent, Mark Ibrahim, charged this week in connection with being at the Capitol that day. Carlson described Ibrahim as having been invited to the protest that day by an FBI informant who then encouraged him to riot (though Ibrahim didn't) proving, Carlson argued, his claims about FBI incitement. But Ibrahim didn't actually bolster this point. "I don't think that the informant I brought to the rally that day was malicious or trying to entrap me in any way, shape or form," he told Carlson. Carlson asked Ibrahim if he thought there were other people in the crowd who had been in contact with the FBI; Ibrahim said, "Not that I've seen." Ibrahim also mentioned being there with his brother, who is an active-duty FBI agent (as Carlson should know, since he's interviewed Ibrahim about that in the past). I'm just a dope who writes a newsletter, but it does seem odd for the FBI to try to incite violence by using an informant to compel a federal agent to riot while he's hanging out with his brother who is an FBI agent. By the way, the purported informant is mentioned in the charging document. That file notes that Ibrahim claimed to have been lured to the rally by the man. When interviewed by federal investigators, the informant said "that he was not there in any formal capacity for the FBI and that the FBI was not giving him directions or marching orders." Making a false claim to the FBI is a felony. Making a false claim on Fox News clearly is not. How to read this chart One thing I've been trying to do with this section is to pull out visually interesting (if complicated) graphics I've made in the past. So, here's one that meets both of those descriptors. I sincerely love this chart because I am a nerd. It shows five different pieces of data: - The density of non-Hispanic Whites in a county according to 2019 Census Bureau data. That's arrayed from left (fewer) to right (more),
- The density of White Christians in the county, according to a PRRI survey. That's from top (most) to bottom (fewest),
- How the county voted in 2020: red for Trump and blue for Biden,
- How big the county is, as indicated by the size of the circle, and
- The range of values for Trump- and Biden-voting counties at every density of White residents.
That last metric is the point. See how the red-shaded area is consistently above the blue-shaded area? It shows that places that were more supportive of Trump scored higher on the vertical metric — density of White Christians — even when the density of Whites was otherwise the same. For those of you who have been with me the past few days, I hope you appreciate how far we've come together on our chart-regarding. Day one was a simple line chart. Day two, a grid of shaded boxes. Today, a complicated multi-dimensional scatter plot. By day eight, you're going to need virtual-reality goggles. Anyway, dearest Liza, that's the news from the front. Always yours, truly, Jebediah Herkimer IX | 
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