We begin today’s roundup with an incredibly important article by David Rothkopf at The Daily Beast on the Big Lie and why so many Americans have lost touch with reality:

Six months after the attack on the Capitol triggered by that lie, commentators, political scientists, and families around the dinner table still struggle to come to grips with perverse reality. It is natural to want to understand how we got here. The fate of our democracy turns on not just what our electorate believes but why they believe it. Why are a third of us such gullible rubes?

Speaking of extremism, Peter Weber at The Week shines a spotlight on one of the most extremist members of Congress, Rep. Paul Grosar:

Meanwhile, Rebecca Traister at New York magazine analyzes President Biden’s progressive policies:

Now, the question is whether he can execute theirs. Few expected Biden would be at the helm of the Democratic Party’s biggest left turn since LBJ. (“A lot of us are like, Huh?” said one advocate who works closely with the administration. “I’m closer to it than some people, and I’m still like … Huh.”) But here we are, with a federal-budget proposal representing the highest sustained government spending since World War II being negotiated in the Senate and historic investments in a care economy and climate policy on the table via an imperiled reconciliation bill. It’s stuff that — if any of it works — would be the result of decades of organizing: on the streets, in electoral politics, and in the field of economic policy. If it doesn’t, human beings and the planet will be that much further from getting anything close to what they so desperately need. But success or failure now is also about whether this president will truly take advantage of that once-in-a-lifetime shift in economic thinking to produce lasting change, or just a marginally better version of an old Democratic model.

Paul Krugman looks at the Biden economic boom:

We’ve gained three million jobs since Biden took office, or 600,000 jobs a month. This compares with gains of 340,000 a month in the year leading up to the 1984 election.

To be fair, Reagan-era job gains took place from a lower base, so it may be more appropriate to compare growth rates. But this still gives Biden the advantage: 5 percent at an annual rate, versus 4.4 percent in 1983-84. And the disparity grows if you compare jobs with the working-age population, which was growing around 1 percent a year in the 1980s but has stagnated in recent years.

At The New York Times, Kmele Foster, David French, Jason Stanley and Thomas Chatterton Williams write about the authoritarian streak in the right’s attempt to use critical race theory as a boogeyman at all levels of education:

It is because of these differences that we here join together, as we are united in one overarching concern: the danger posed by these laws to liberal education.

On a final note, Jelani Cobb at The New Yorker takes a deep dive analysis into the history and dynamics in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the aftermath of the Derek Chauvin sentencing: