Stop this, Ms. Stefanik

Whether it’s shouted in a rant by a demagogic president at a rally or delivered in measured tones by a representative on the floor of Congress, a lie is still a lie. It has the same power to poison minds, pollute our national discourse, and, as America witnessed Wednesday, incite people to senseless violence.

Rep. Elise Stefanik, R- Schuylerville, surely knows that as well as anyone. This rising Republican star, educated at Albany Academy for Girls and Harvard College, was among the firsthand witnesses to the attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob stoked on the lies of a president who keeps insisting that he won an election that he lost. After an hour-long diatribe, President Donald Trump had called on them to march on Congress, precipitating a riot that that would leave four people dead, more than a dozen police officers injured, the Capitol trashed, and America shaken.

Inside that building just before that attack came, Congress was about to certify the results of the presidential election. Ms. Stefanik and more than 140 of her Republican colleagues were preparing to carry Mr. Trump’s torch by challenging the outcome in key states won by President-elect Joe Biden, citing arguments that courts have already dismissed among the 60 or so cases the president and his legal surrogates have lost. Just before the riot disrupted the proceedings, they had initiated their challenge of the results in Arizona.

Hours later, it was apparent to all the world what had happened: Our republic had been a victim of domestic terrorism, right in the nation’s capital, aimed at forcing the govern

ment to do Mr. Trump’s and the mob’s bidding, and declare him the winner of the election. It was an attempted coup, in the capital city of the world’s beacon of democracy.

It should have been obvious to all that this was the culmination of years of Mr. Trump’s incendiary rhetoric, echoed and amplified by right-wing media and too many of the politicians in Congress itself. But most of all, it was the predictable result of Mr. Trump’s and his allies’ big lie: that the election was stolen. And make no mistake, it is entirely a lie. Every one of the arguments Mr. Trump and his surrogates like Ms. Stefanik made has been proven either flat-out false or a gross distortion of the kinds of minor irregularities that happen in elections but have no impact on the outcome.

So what did Ms. Stefanik and more than 140 of her Republican colleagues do when confronted with the violent consequence of the falsehoods that they and the president promoted? They took to the floor of Congress to oh-so-eloquently say that the millions of people they misled deserved to have their faith in our electoral system restored — the faith that Ms. Stefanik and her cohort and the president had themselves shattered. The doubletalk boggles the mind. They are the arsonists who set the fire they now claim must be investigated.

What did they think would be the outcome of this campaign of lies? What did they expect citizens to do as their trusted sources of information and their elected leaders tell them, day after day, that their democracy has been usurped, and that the legal avenues for change — free elections, courts, the Electoral College, and Congress itself — have failed them?

And what do they expect those citizens to do now, as they continue to promote this big lie, however couched it may be in their professed fealty to the Constitution?

If they can’t see the obvious answer after Wednesday’s violence, they had best spend some time with the television broadcasts and radio talk shows and social media echo chambers of the radical right that these days pass for conservative discourse. There is more violence brewing, even as Ms. Stefanik and her colleagues still spew lies under the guise of respecting citizens’ concerns. If blood is shed in what comes next, it will be on the hands of Ms. Stefanik and her colleagues, and the president.

It is not too late for them to heed the words of one of their own, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, who had the courage in February to call Mr. Trump the corrupt leader that he is in casting a vote to convict him in his impeachment trial.

“The best way we can show respect for the voters who are upset is by telling them the truth,” Mr. Romney said Wednesday night, in calling for an end to this attempt to overturn a legitimate election.

Ms. Stefanik and all her colleagues who tried to do an end run around the American electorate are no longer fighting a vigorous political campaign; they are subverting our democracy by clinging to this insidious fiction of a stolen election. They must be prepared, in the days to come, to decide what it is they are loyal to — Mr. Trump, or America. Their condemnations of violence mean nothing if they knowingly keep fomenting it. And, make no mistake, know it they do.