This tweet (below) is extremely weird. I thought it was parody at first. It's not. Don Winslow believes that what the participants in the focus group say is “Republican misinformation”. But it’s not.
Everything these people being interviewed say is factually true, and in some cases they correct the incorrect info of the MSNBC interviewer:
- Only one person was killed on J6 and it was a protester: true.
- No police were killed: true.
- One policeman did die, but it was of a heart attack, after the event: true.
- A person acting like a federal employee (Ray Epps) was urging the crowd to attack the Capitol: true.
- The crowd denied him: true.
- They had the right to gather and protest: true.
- Some doors were opened up for the protesters: true.
- Some protesters attacked barricades: true.
- That was not an "insurrection": true.
- Trump was elsewhere and couldn't have stopped the "insurrection": true (also true that he should have done more, earlier to defuse. And also that he was urged to do so by senior Republicans).
One young participant makes an interesting and insightful point: Democrats are making this (J6 and the hearings) their "Reichstag fire" moment of the election, as excuse to gain/hold power: true or not it's a cunning inversion of the Nazi trope normally thrown at Reps.
Nothing detracts from the stupidity, the plain inanity, of (some of) the demonstrators' actions on J6. Nothing excuses Trumpian failures of judgement. But the J6 hearings have proved very little other than stupidity, inanity and judgment failure. Nothing that rises to the level of "insurrection", as proven by the fact that no-one has been charged with insurrection.
But for Winslow, somehow these people — who he calls "voters" — are peddling misinformation. False.
Also: why does Winslow have "voters" in scare quotes? They're everyday folks, quite well read, it appears, who happen to vote Republican. That's all. And that's about half the country.
Winslow is in a deep, deep pit — a swirling vortex — if he thinks this is "misinformation". It's not. But at time of writing he had 16k likes. Oh dear 😞
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