Originally posted by wtg:
NYT interview.
quote:
Have you had any meaningful communication with party leadership — Kevin McCarthy, Elise Stefanik, Steve Scalise — since Liz Cheney was voted out of her position? No. I haven’t had meaningful communication since Jan. 6. Kevin gave a great speech the week after that, and then he went to Mar-a-Lago and charged the paddles and brought Trump back to life. That’s the moment when I realized, Oh, man, this is a problem. You come to understand that when the party and party leaders talk about unity, and in the same breath say that Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, what they’re talking about isn’t unity. They’re talking about capitulation. When under the guise of unity, you act like Jan. 6 was just whatever you want to make of it, that is capitulating to a false narrative and to a dangerous attack on democracy. I will certainly talk to Kevin if he wants to. But I don’t see how we’re ever going to come eye-to-eye on this until there is a recognition that we can’t be the party of insurrection.
quote:
You were in favor of establishing an independent commission to investigate the Capitol attack, which the Senate didn’t pass. One argument against it was that other investigations and subcommittees already looking into Jan. 6 made a new commission redundant. What other information were you hoping a commission might reveal? You have this [expletive] narrative that it wasn’t an armed insurrection. Well, it takes two seconds to realize that nobody was arrested for carrying weapons that day because you had no place to put them. You couldn’t read them Miranda rights, and you couldn’t cuff them — because you were fighting to survive if you were a law enforcement officer. So we don’t know how many guns were there. We do know the Oath Keepers were talking about storing guns in Virginia. We do know that of the more than 500 cases that the D.O.J. has since filed, some 50 of them involved weapons, including bear spray, tasers, etc. So that would have been definitively laid out. I also want to know what members of Congress knew and were involved prior to this happening.
quote:
Do you have ideas for how, just in people’s day-to-day lives, we could be talking to one another about politics without descending into vitriol? Or put another way: How do we avoid getting into a situation like the one you wound up in, where members of your own family are sending you a letter accusing you of doing the devil’s work? First off, it’s a big failure of the church. There are lots of great pastors, but there are a lot that have failed their flock and convinced them that prophecy said Trump would get back in office and all that kind of stuff. But here’s a start: If you’re on the right and don’t have a friend from the left, go make one. And if you’re on the left and don’t have a friend from the right, go make one. Talk about your fears. Everybody’s fear is the same: There will be no place for me in this country. If a liberal hears a conservative say, “No, we do want you here,” and a conservative hears a liberal say, “You may be a crazy conservative, but I still want you here” — that’s how you start to build trust.
https://www.nytimes.com/intera...inger-interview.html 
