Thread by @kurteichenwald

1. In 2012, I wrote a book about terrorism/nat security in the 500 days after 9/11. It took 6 years of reporting in many countries.

The attacks, from left and right, came before people even had the chance to read the book....

2...the problem is, in the real world, no one is always 100% right - not the GOP or the Dems - and the book reflected that, based on reporting. Depending on what page people flipped to, i was called a 9/11 Truther, anti-American, a water carrier for the Bush Administration....

3...someone who wanted to destroy the NSA, pro-torture, anti-torture, etc. (Shortly after the book came out, other articles I wrote led to me being called an NSA water carrier, when before I wanted to destroy it.)....

4...GOP Gov George Pataki even attacked the book based on what he read on the back of the jacket - not the book, he was literally judging the book by its cover.

The only people who didn't attack it: The ones who were there, on both sides, the Administration and their opponents..

5...I was told several times by people in multiple governments and the people who fought them that this was the only book that captured the full truth of what happened.

Yet...people who did NOT report for 6 years, on left & right, yelled that I was wrong. For opposite reasons...

6...I have long known that information and facts have taken second chair to belief. I have long known that it is easy to string a lot of facts together in a way that creates a lie. (That was what my second book was about.) People start with belief, find what backs them up, and...

7...attack the motive of anyone who presents information that should make them reconsider their beliefs. Not change them, just reconsider them. But now, all there is is people who do not do the work attacking the motives of those who do. No one is honest, in their world, except..

8...them. I have had a person literally tell me he only got his information about a certain topic based on the headlines in the NY Times about it. I wrote those stories.....

9...Not two minutes later, when explaining something to him about what I had written, he proclaimed "You don't know what you're talking about!" From a guy who only had information from the headlines on the stories I wrote.

I am talking about this in hopes dems will hear me....

10...I have criticized people who attack democratic candidates. Almost every time, when I look up the basis of their attack, it is wrong. I read original documents, actual statements, research papers. Wrong wrong wrong.

But rather than wanting to know, people attack. I have....

11...been accused of "being in the bag" as one person put it, for Biden, Sanders, Warren, Beto, Buttigieg, because obviously that is only reason I would ask people to stop attacking, to stop using Facebook crap or interpretive garbage as basis of attacks, to say....

12...why you SUPPORT someone, not why the other person is garbage. And if you DO criticize someone's policies, if you are doing it in a tweet, you are wrong. The nuance of policy is too complex to be reduced to a single tweet.

So, why am I writing this? It is a primal scream...

13...begging people to recognize that I, you, all of us should fear for the future of our children, that this not a normal time, and that there are serious consequences at stake. When you, as a dem, attack another dem as untrustworthy etc based on flotsam, you have put it....

14...out there. It is used by the GOP and Russians and trolls to gin up the people who want perfection or don't vote. Remember, Trump lost the popular vote and won based on a few hundred thousand votes spread across many states. When you put out unresearched, uninformed garbage..

15...you are feeding into a cycle, a system that bounces allegations from place to place until fantasy becomes reality. Gore never said "I invented the internet." What he did say was true. But the repetition of that lie lost him votes. The GOP has convinced many that there is...

16...massive voter fraud, when there is not. They are using that to take the power of the vote away. When Trump says millions of people voted illegally, it is repeated again and again and then it is believed by a huge swath of Americans.

You believe fictions. I do too. We...

17...have a constant obligation, if we care about our children and grandchildren, to research what we say. And the serious way to avoid error is by speaking UP for your candidate, not tear the other down. None of the critics of my 2012 book who attacked me as this or that ever...

18...cited anything in the book other than the particular page they objected to. One person declared I was biased because I described what Bush was wearing...on the first page of the book...and he declared because of my bias, he would not read it.

Attacking motives is easy.....

19...not challenging your own beliefs is easy. Hunting down stuff that reinforces what you want to believe is easy.

It is also all irresponsible.

Learn why you SHOULD support a candidate, and dont throw flip arguments out about why another is terrible...

20...the more simplistic the argument, the more I can guarantee: It's wrong.

Ending this with a history lesson:

21...
1968: Libs and southern dems protest voted against Humphrey. Nixon won.
1980: Libs and moderates PV'd against Carter. Reagan won.
1992: Conservs PV'd against HW Bush. Clinton won.
2000: Libs PV'd against Gore. W. Bush won.
2016: Libs PV'd against HRC. Trump won.

.....

22...protest voting has an ugly history. It never accomplished anything. It cost so much.

So, educate yourself. Read things that challenge your beliefs. Don't engage in flip attacks. Tell us why you support who you do. That's harder - and more educational - than name calling.