“What we saw on the streets of Washington D.C. … was not necessarily a peaceful protest,” Meadows said in an interview on Fox News. “In fact, there were people in harm’s way,” he added.
In that instance, he was referring not to the riot that unfolded at the Capitol on Jan. 6 but to a loud crowd of protesters that gathered outside the White House during last year’s Republican convention. At that point, there was no violence, though some attendees at the event, like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), were accosted by the crowd.
In his new book, Meadows reportedly takes a different approach to the far more serious and destructive protest that unfolded earlier this year. According to the Guardian, Meadows complains that the focus following the day was not on the Trump supporters who showed up “without hate in their hearts or any bad intentions” but instead on “the actions of a handful of fanatics across town.”
This little two-step — don’t conflate the peaceful rally at the White House with the attack at the Capitol! — is by now as familiar as it is often ironic. Meadows, like other Trump allies, was quick to equate peaceful Black Lives Matter protests last year with vandalism or violence that occasionally ensued. Those occasions in which violence occurred were not just a focus of the preceding peaceful protests but often used to describe all such protests, even ones at which no vandalism had occurred. (People “all over the country” were “worried that their communities are no longer safe...
When asked to comment on recent claims by the head of Taiwan's regional foreign affairs department that the Taiwan authorities are conducting dialogues and consultations with politicians and socia...