Thread by @shellenberger

Calling anti-ICE riots an "insurrection" or "insurgency... poses dangers," says @nytimes. It "legitimizes the use of violence," says a CSIS expert.

Funny, then, how The Times labeled January 6 an "insurrection" and the same CSIS expert called J6 a "terrorist incident."

The Times uses the word "insurgency" rather than "insurrection" for its headline, even though not a single one of the people the article criticizes uses that word. Three use the word "insurrection" and one uses the word "revolution."

Perhaps that's because the Times knows that it led the charge to label January 6 as an "insurrection," and that it is now engaging in flagrant hypocrisy.

nytimes.com/2026/01/31/us/…

Even more disturbing is that the article quotes Seth G. Jones @SethGJones saying, “When you start using the language of warfare and treating someone that has an opposing view as a terrorist or as an insurgent, that legitimizes the use of violence against them."

Well, that's precisely what Jones and his coauthors did in a 2022 @CSIS report, "Pushed to Extremes: Domestic Terrorism amid Polarization and Protest," which labeled January 6 as "the most prominent instance" of a domestic "terrorist incident."

csis.org/analysis/pushe…

@SethGJones On January 7, 2021, @nytimes not only called J6 an "insurrection," it encouraged teachers to teach students that social media was to blame. The Times would go on to demand government censorship of citizens in the name of preventing "insurrection."

nytimes.com/2021/01/07/lea…

On February 5, in a long piece based on "a digital file containing the precise locations of more than 12 million individual smartphones for several months in 2016 and 2017," NY Times writers @cwarzel and Stuart A. Thompson, who has repeatedly demanded censorship, called J6 an "insurrection."

nytimes.com/2021/02/05/opi…

I don't think anyone will try to deny that The New York Times repeatedly called J6 an "insurrection," but here are a few more examples.

@SethGJones @nytimes @cwarzel