House Speaker Mike Johnson has promised to release more than 44,000 hours of surveillance footage from Jan. 6 to the public, with one major caveat: The faces of some individuals who participated in the storming of the Capitol, a violent attempt to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s election, will be blurred out.
In a press conference on Tuesday, Johnson said that “the release of the January 6 tapes is a critical and important exercise, we want transparency … we trust — House Republicans trust — the American people to draw their own conclusions.”
Johnson added that the party is going “through a methodical process of releasing them as quickly as we can” and that they “have to blur some of the faces of the persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against, and to be charged by the DOJ and to have other, you know, concerns and problems.”
I may be confused about your point. It seems like you’re acknowledging that it’s a bad argument, but supporting using it against those whom you despise, no?
It’s not a good argument (nothing to hide), and I think it gets deployed by whomever is trying to lean on someone else. It’s not great to be a hypocrite, but hypocracy doesn’t invalidate an argument.
This is all aside from what I meant to be my main point though, which is that this original post is, in my view, meant to gin up more outrage by misstating what the speaker said. Turning discourse into an exchange of inflammatory bumper stickers is social media’s most toxic influence.
Talking through “nothing to hide” and its ramifications is worthwhile and on point though. Kudos!
Yeah I see the confusion, that was all just hyperbole meant to poke fun at them for being hypocrits. My main point was the word “deterrence”.
If the faces were shown unblurred, it would be a deterrent to others who might think about engaging in insurrection in the future as they wouldn’t be able to hide behind privacy measures … [And back to the poking fun] the very same measures that they disavow when others are subject to them because “if they have nothing to hide …”
They are related, which is why I said both rather than one or the other