Late Friday afternoon, House speaker Mike Johnson released a ton of boring surveillance footage of the Capitol complex taken on January 6, 2021. Indeed, to hear some Republican lawmakers tell it, the fact that so much of roughly 40,000 hours of video is boring serves as an indictment of the congressional committee that investigated the events of January 6. By dwelling so extensively on the violence and vandalism, they say, this congressional inquiry somehow failed the American people, whose attention should have been directed to the inconsequential banalities that also occurred on that day.
On its face, that might sound like a profoundly foolish argument. The fact that millions of Americans brushed their teeth and walked their dogs on December 7, 1941, doesn’t undermine the horror of Pearl Harbor. Footage of the 9/11 hijackers uneventfully navigating though airport security doesn’t dilute the terrorism they would later commit. A “mostly peaceful” riot is a riot, nonetheless.
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