I wouldn’t let Trump or his followers off nearly so easy. Don’t forget Trump’s deliberate seeding of the lies about mail ballots before the election and his speech claiming victory at 2a after election night, when we all knew the ballots weren’t fully counted.
https://twitter.com/joshgerstein/status/1479130548002033666
And the people he deluded were the recipients of one of the broadest, loudest, and most determined efforts to convey the truth in memory. Their fellow citizens marshaled evidence and banged pots and pans for five years to let them know they were being lied to. They didn’t care.
The reason they didn’t care is what, imo, makes arguments like Bari Weiss’s sophistry. The Capitol insurrectionists were there for Trump, their attachment to him was direct and personal. They were there because he wanted them to be. It had nothing to do with truth or democracy.
The insurrectionists couldnt be dissuaded by democratic values, evidence, or the judgment of federal courts bc their own rationale didn’t depend on those things. And they repeated Trump’s lies not bc they were convincing but bc they were *his* and they wanted to be on his team.
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