The top headline of The Washington Post’s “Today’s Headlines” newsletter on the Sunday after the Epiphany riot in the Capitol read as follows: “Republicans largely silent about consequences of deadly attack and Trump’s role in inciting it.” The big news in the D.C. swamp that day, it seems, was that there were unaccountably still people thereabout who could be suspected of not agreeing with The Washington Post about these things—both the prospective “consequences” and “Trump’s role in inciting” the riot, which were treated equally as simple matters of fact. Emboldened by its own firm possession of these unquestioned truths, the Post was hinting that, if indeed there were such people, they had better get their minds right pdq, or they might face a few consequences of their own.

Of course, one is used to such subtly intimidatory language from the media nowadays, but I can well imagine its chilling effect on any remaining “moderate” Republicans who hadn’t, at that point, spoken up with the sort of ritual denunciation of the President being demanded of them in the media. They might well wonder, however, whence came the media’s authority, either for its truth claims or for making such threats against those unwilling to believe them. This was ostensibly a news story, and therefore, presumably, partook of that tentativeness once implied when the reporters of the news were said to be writing “the first draft of history.” Now they are asking us to accept without question that it is