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Notes -
Huh, I pulled up short on the very first line:
No, there were a lot of already-Trump-skeptical (not to mention all-out NeverTrumper) American conservatives who agreed with that. A rather larger group that weren't happy with rioting, but this specific claim isn't about the rioting: it's about Donald Trump's behavior. Which was barely even well-characterized on January 7; we still had wild stories of Trump trying to physically take control of his official car. And of the three examples he himself gives, one clearly does not condemn Trump's behavior at all, Steve Schwarzman's statement.
The only mention of the Trump is that his remarks preceded the "insurrection", as Schwarzman terms it.
As for the core of the claim:
This is just Yglesias's headcanon. It has no real probative value; you shouldn't update on it unless you blindly trust Yglesias.
Indeed. The whole argument is based on MattY's and his fellow DC residents' anxiety about Trumpists and Jan 6 being an objective evaluation about society. No one else thinks so. Some Republicans at the time were swept up in the anxiety and have subsequently came back to reality. Others like Liz Cheney have not.
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