Earnest question: is there any evidence that the people who stormed the Capitol were white supremacists, as they’re so often described?

They were many things - unpatriotic jackasses most of all - but I haven’t seen anything to indicate white supremacy motivated this thing.
That “white supremacist” has become just an amorphous descriptor of people the left doesn’t like is a really, really bad thing. Especially when censorship and cancel culture are en vogue.
Also - to be clear - I’m confident there were white supremacists who were involved. But we can’t define groups by a particular subset of their actors just because it’s convenient.
It is an enormous logical jump to go from “a few people had confederate flags among thousands of people” to “this was a white supremacist rally”
Words still have meaning even when you’re describing bad people. I would argue that they should actually be a lot more judicious when those are your subjects.
I guess my contention here is that we should stop saying things that aren’t true simply because they’re about bad - even evil - people and may make us feel good to say.

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More from @DrewHolden360

15 Jan
🧵Thread🧵

Today Jacob Blake conceded he was armed with a knife when he was shot by police.

A lot of people insisted this wasn’t the case in order to fit their narrative. That’s bad. And we’ve gotta talk about these things - I try to explain why below.
nationalreview.com/news/jacob-bla…
First and foremost, this situation is awful. A man was paralyzed. His children surely traumatized.

But as I’ll go into more depth on later, it’s also important that media and others report these sorts of situations accurately.

It’s clear that @cnnbrk didn’t. Image
The actual reporting on this was actually better than I think a lot of conservatives realize - lots of outlets couched their coverage by saying that it had been reported that Blake was unarmed.

@Reuters didn’t. ImageImage
Read 23 tweets
11 Jan
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
There are maybe 30 separate reasons this is funny
“The architect of the fraudulent Iraq War, who has supported Democratic candidates for years, has formally broken with the GOP. Take that, Republicans!!”
Read 5 tweets
10 Jan
I’m worried the hyperbole is getting a bit out of control with all this.
Twitter as a medium is also very, very shitty at conveying nuance (obviously) but the real problem here strikes me as about our collective inability to talk about bad things without comparing them to much, much worse things.
While I certainly think the storming of the Capitol is awful - as I’ve said repeatedly - on the scale of worst things to ever happen to America it seems a little bit less bad than 9/11 to my simplistic worldview.
Read 6 tweets
7 Jan
I’m open I let my emotions get the better of me yesterday. I don’t have a column or anything like that, so I figured I would lay out my thinking about what happened at the Capitol where I lay out most things - a not-so-quick 🧵.
First, what we saw yesterday with the storming of the US Capitol was vile, barbaric, and unamerican. There is no excuse that exists for a mob to break into a federal building, particularly one that was housing the entire US government. It was despicable.
It’s important we start here because every other piece of commentary - esp on media hypocrisy - is secondary.

Sure, we need to be able to walk & chew gum and talk about issues in parallel. But that requires defining what issues must take priority over others. This one is tops.
Read 17 tweets
6 Jan
I don’t care how much you don’t like the press.

It is absolutely, patently absurd to pretend that the riots that shook DC and other cities by BLM and antifa could hold a candle to the threatening insurrectionist activity we saw today. (1/6)
Today’s riot and assault on the US Capitol isn’t some symbolic issue.

The national guard is actively being deployed to the US Capitol in response to seditious threats against the US Congress, cheered on by a president who had rallied these rioters to DC beforehand. (2/6)
I’ve seen a lot of you on here spend your time today criticizing the media and the left for being concerned about today’s events but not the riots we saw here, in Minneapolis, in NYC and beyond last summer.

You are wrong to do so. (3/6)
Read 6 tweets
6 Jan
“Surely the problem was that the GOP moved away from its embrace of free market principles, limited government, and politeness” someone with an outsized influence on The Dialogue is thinking right now.
“If only we could go back to exactly where the GOP was in 2007!” they muse.
“If we could just have used our political capital to lower capital gains taxes a little bit more, it would’ve been smooth sailing.”
Read 4 tweets

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