“That’s not just Twitter trolling. It’s not just posturing online anymore. It’s the logic of a movement centered around aggression divorced from virtue that indulges in apocalyptic rhetoric. It’s heading exactly where such movements head, and everyone who in 2015 or 2016 was dismissing the alt-right and Trump’s Twitter trolls says, “Oh, that’s just Twitter. That’s just Twitter.” There was an inexorable moral logic that was going to lead to action in the streets.
I’ve been a pessimist about this for some time. I’ve been warning about violence for some time. In December, I was jumping up and down on The Dispatch saying violence is a real threat. Even as a pessimist, I didn’t imagine the capital being overrun on January 6.
To argue that, “Well, that was a one-time thing. Everybody got carried away” — no. No, no, no. That was the result of rhetoric and conduct that put a specific group of people together on January 6 to provide cover for an attempted coup. Many of the architects of that exact plan are still some of the most revered figures in Republican life right now.
So when you tell people their country is at stake, when you tell people the other side hates them, wants to see you dead, hates you, puts you in camps, then some people are going to believe that, and act accordingly.”