Thread by @peterwsinger

This message is 100% worth your watch and share, not just on Twitter, but Facebook etc


A message from a Republican leader and an iconic figure in our culture, who gets it, and maybe might pierce thru the fever dream too many fell into.

That is, please also share it with those co-workers, friends and family who don't realize the stakes of what is going on, and the near-miss to our democracy of what just played out.

In sifting thru video, I have seen not just the stupid things we all saw like the selfies and literally crapping on the floor. But people need to understand that there was also a harder, darker part...

The crowd chanting "Hang Mike Pence, Hang Mike Pence" as they stormed the police line looking for him (Note: his wife and daughter was also there with him),

officers literally crying in physical pain as the mass of the crowd did a coordinated "heave-ho" to physically crush them with their combined body mass, officers beaten and one killed with a fire extinguisher blow to the head...

and, once on the inside, men in tactical gear, body armor, glocks+ flex cuffs roaming the halls (the understanding was that they likely planned to "arrest" VP+ Congress, bar the doors and then do a live broadcast showtrial from within, akin to the Michigan governor kidnap plot)

One single weak, glass-windowed inside door being held by outnumbered police for mere minutes is all that prevented the mob (and the hardcore element within it) from potentially seizing scores of Congress and the 3 lines of succession below the president.

Additionally, in all the news, it has been missed that armed mobs also successfully invaded legislatures/governors mansions in multiple states (WA, UT, etc)

So please do not think this is somehow over nor talk to me of "healing" as a way to avoid accountability by those who both participated and motivated these events and this larger movement.

Emboldened by their success, new events are being planned online in multiple states and in DC. The chatter also again has a violent edge to it, including vowing to take "revenge" on police for the "martyred" woman killed there.

For those that know my work on social media weaponization, that continued threat is also why Trump was finally banned from Twitter et al. He went back on his pledge of a peaceful transition in that stilted, edited video that his staff posted almost a half day after the attacks.

The very next day, once he was again directly tweeting, he went back to spreading not just the same lies that fueled it all, but announced he was not going to participate in the peaceful transition at the inaugural events, as is the practice in our history.

Even more so, he posted that he would not be in DC the date of the new discussed attacks. So it wasn't just going back on his word and returning to the messaging that drove it all. It was taken as yet another dog whistle

by both the extremists he had praised as "loved," even as he watched them literally hunt down his own VP, and by the firms who finally decided they couldn't let him use the platforms that way. Did he mean it? I don't know, but after everything, he'd lost the benefit of the doubt.

So please do share the video with those that still don't get how serious this all is, and maybe even their own involvement in enabling this man, his movement, and one of the greatest threats to our democracy in its history.