Points out Antifa claims have been discredited
Lee Roy Lollar rightly condemned violence in his January 11 letter to The Dispatch. I also agree with his assertion two sentences later that President Trump’s comments at the rally did not help the situation — in fact, without them, and without the President’s many calls for backers to come to DC that day in the first place, no violence would have occurred at all.
But I vehemently disagree with Lollar’s attempt to shift the blame for the violence onto Antifa who, he infers, had infiltrated this largely MAGA crowd. I suspect this claim is based on a swiftly discredited story pushed out the very afternoon of the riot by the Washington Times — a claim they retracted just hours later and days earlier than Lollar’s letter. Lollar must not have bothered to spend the two minutes it would have taken to do the Google search that would have shown lack of evidence for Antifa involvement with stunning clarity. Or to peruse the Twitter posts from self-identified MAGA folks planning violence prior to the mayhem on the 6th. He should have.
Of course, he’d probably just claim those were Antifa members masquerading as MAGA types, anyway. One conspiracy theory stacked onto another, and another, and another adds up to essentially impossible. It appears that Mitch McConnell and Liz Cheney agree with my view.
Trump said two years ago that “what you’re seeing is not what’s happening.” As absurd as that seemed to many back then, there remain a surprising number of people who are still able to contort themselves into believing it.
For our democracy to survive we need a lot more people to stop buying into Trump’s never-ending assault on truth.
Paul Mack
Columbus
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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