Democracy Dies in Darkness

How Americans feel about the Jan. 6 hearings so far

Some feel hopeful, others angry. Many aren’t watching at all.

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June 16, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
People gather in a park outside of the U.S. Capitol to watch the Jan. 6 House committee investigation in Washington on June 9, 2022. (Jose Luis Magana/AP)

Their mother, they agreed, would have wanted siblings Dale Petersen and Priscilla Harris to find some way to respect each other’s views about the Jan. 6 hearings, even if Petersen is a die-hard liberal Democrat and his sister is a lifelong conservative Republican.

So, from 1,200 miles apart, as the first televised hearing played last week, Petersen was on his phone in Orlando, while Harris, in her den in Tulsa, had her cell on speaker. They ended up not doing battle, but commiserating about the future of the country and the frailty of facts. Still deeply divided by ideology and party, they found common ground in their conclusion that these hearings won’t change many minds.