At the risk of sounding like an elitist I do think that one of the main problems facing the conservative cause these days is all the stupid people in positions of consequence.
Also obviously some of this is flip but I think it’s something conservatives don’t actually talk enough about. I’m not saying elect egghead experts out of touch with real people. But we’ve got some real intellectual lightweights in our midst.
Yeah something tells me I’m gonna mute this one sooner rather than later.
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.
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.
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.
“The architect of the fraudulent Iraq War, who has supported Democratic candidates for years, has formally broken with the GOP. Take that, Republicans!!”
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.
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.