Thread by @wiczipedia

I see a lot of "Putin is happy tonight" tweets and they're misleading at best. I fear that to people without all the context, they support the narrative of Russian collusion, or tacitly insinuate that Putin had a hand in today's events.

Nope. Today was uniquely American. But...

Putin is pleased to see a divided America, to see images that can fuel his whataboutist propaganda and policies, that he can use to undermine the US on the international stage for years to come. He did not engineer it, but he and other adversaries will cheer it.

Please don't @ me with your conspiracy theories. I've had enough of them for a day if not a lifetime.

My last tweet/s before bed:

For my book (in an excerpt you can read here: politico.com/news/magazine/…) I tell the story of an anti-Trump flash mob supported by the IRA, unbeknownst to the protestors.

(Thread continues...)

Why do I mention this today? The fact that these folks — whose political views might align with yours more than those of the people who stormed the Capitol today — were supported by the IRA doesn’t make their views any less legitimate or deeply held.

Yes, I am sure Russia amplified some of the rhetoric that today’s mobs espoused. But we can’t blame Russia for it, or for inciting it. The blame there rests with the President, with officials who wouldn’t distance themselves from conspiracy theories, racism, or extremism...

...with the social media platforms who provided the infrastructure for it to spread.

Russia didn’t create American racism just as it didn’t create ethnic tensions in Estonia or homophobia in Poland. It benefits from all those phenomena, though.

All I’m asking is that on an awful, tragic day in American history, we take responsibility for how we got here. Let’s think about the implications of what it means for the US on the world stage, yes, but not undermine all of the sovereign choices we’ve made to reach this moment.