The shooter who took ten lives at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket on May 14 cited “the great replacement theory” as his rationale for randomly gunning down Black people. This paranoid fantasy shared by millions of Americans says that Democrats have hatched a diabolical plot to replace white Americans with people of color (imported or domestic).

Where did this concept come from? A recent New York Times analysis of more than 400 episodes of Tucker Carlson’s nightly ranting on Fox News showed that the onetime news host at CNN, PBS, and MSNBC was openly promoting this racist propaganda. On one show, he directly warned a category of viewers he respectfully called “legacy Americans” that they were in danger of being replaced by voters from “the Third World.” Given that Carlson has also alleged that those protesting the murder of George Floyd were not objecting to police brutality but looking to inflict “ideological domination” on the country, his racist antagonism is not surprising. But the amplification of a lie into a “theory” is both absurd and very dangerous.

For the super-rich, 2021 has been casting lots of shade—from the Sackler family’s weaseling out of any accountability for opioid deaths to the Pandora Papers’ exposure of billionaires’ offshore and domestic tax havens. We had reminders of how America’s richest families keep that “super” before the “rich”—like with tax loopholes allowing them to pass vast sums of wealth down to their heirs by avoiding capital gains taxes. We also learned from the New York Times that in the homes of the wealthy, many basic kitchen appliances are now being hidden within bespoke cabinets, and only the initiated know where. (For instance, a regular person could not find the fridge chez Cher.)

And yet after Democrats failed to get the votes for a corporate income tax hike to pay for President Biden’s infrastructure and social spending bill, they are also unlikely to pass a proposed billionaires’ tax that would make the super-rich pay annual capital gains taxes on the value appreciation of their humungous assets. That’s a shame since there are more billionaires than ever in the United States: 719 in 2021, an increase of almost 17% over 2020.

Perhaps the ultimate irony of the Trump era arrived during the voted-out President’s most recent impeachment trial, with a video montage of prominent Democrats using the word fight. After four years of the defendant’s “I know you are but what am I?” playground logic, Americans heard his lawyers do the exact same thing in attempting to show that there was no difference between someone trying to steal an election and those trying to stop him from doing that. Somehow, telling a mob to go down to the Capitol and “fight like hell” on the day Congress was certifying electoral votes is the equivalent of using the word fight on MSNBC.

I doubt it mattered what kind of argument Trump’s legal team made. On February 13, 43 know-nothings in the Senate Chamber affirmed their knowing nothing of Constitutional law (Brandenburg v. Ohio, for instance, which holds that protected First Amendment rights do not include “inciting or producing imminent lawless action”) by acquitting the election’s loser of incitement of insurrection, the article of impeachment against him.

The two weeks between the Capitol assault on our democracy and the inauguration of our 46th President roughly coincided with Sotheby’s “Americana Week.” Leaving aside the strange fact that Americana Week went on for 14 days, what drew me to the Sotheby’s ad for furniture and folk art up for virtual bid was View of Hallowell, Maine, an American School painting described in the catalog as “a mother and her son gazing upon the bustling waterfront and business district . . . from Butternut Park on the Chelsea side of the Kennebec River.”

The anonymous painting strikes all the right notes of historical nostalgia—one that, for me at least, was implanted by the historical-society reproductions in my grade school textbooks. These kinds of documents of our national past are among the few you could today deem kid-safe—the primitive full-body portraits of children as miniature adults, usually holding a flower, a butterfly, a piece of fruit, or an unfortunate kitten by the neck; landscapes with giant rectangular cows and sheep anchoring patchwork farmsteads, with rolling hills and towns across rivers like the Kennebec, enlivened by the occasional sailboat or tugboat.