One of my high school friends seems to have got into this stuff.

The stuff he is saying most of the year was so crazy that to me it was almost like a parody of a conspiracy theory. Like at first I thought he was making fun of the hyper-partisanship around us by taking on a character or something for laughs, but then I realised he was dead serious.

I tried to mildly engage to debate the likelihood of some of it early on but he pretty much said if I continue we can't be friends.

Due to lockdowns haven't seen him in person anyway, so I just try and direct online conversations away from it. But it does worry me.

It's relevant that both sides do it though when assessing how we might change society as a result of this incident.

If you're going to ban one side from social media, it's relevant if the other side say the same type of stuff. If you're going to say that crimes committed by extremists were inspired indirectly, then you have to look at what else indirectly inspires trouble.

If we're going to have unity among the people - we need the same fair standards applied to everyone.

Well that part I agree with. Although I would apply it to the congress as well.

I think part of why we are in this mess in the first place is there's been too many people acting with dishonour for too long.

It's part of why a section of society turned to trump originally - because they had no faith in the existing institutions to address their concerns.

Well it comes down to how one defines incitement I guess.

He called for a peaceful march. There's nowhere where he says to use violence.

If you define it as instigating a political movement overall then he is the architect of that....but then we're back to a place where anyone who speaks on any philosophy or political view might be banned if some extremist justifies a crime using it.

That's the aspect I find concerning about this - the majority consensus that he incited it even when there doesn't seem to be a part of the speech anyone can point to that actually does.

And that's why I mention the other side too - because if it's a crime to cause division that can lead to violence and death well then a lot of people in politics need to step down. The entire past few years I would argue there's been a lot of purposeful division forming on both sides.

For much of his life he seemed to identify as a democrat - so I would consider him to be a left-leaning right wing guy. My understanding is he's generally considered to be left of pence and the evangelical type right wingers as well.

What i'm saying is - it's not reasonable to deplatform people towards the centre of their side just because extremists like them. We wouldn't deplatform Sanders or Biden if someone further left got criminal, so it's not really reasonable to de-platform conservative leaders because far right extremists overtook their causes.

Here's my current thinking:

1. Trump is a person with some character flaws and I do not agree with a number of his policies.

2. Despite his flaws, for the duration of his term I do not think he has been treated fairly by the media. That said I also think Obama was treated badly by the right wing sections of the media - however the general hysteria around not accepting Trump as president and the daily attacks some reasonable and some not from all sides were beyond anything I've seen in my lifetime.

3. Trump responded to this by acting in a way that made it worse. So we have a feedback loop - where the media got more and more aggressively anti trump and trump got more anti media.

4. Then online,  Social media itself creates "yes/no" thinking, simple rather than detailed conversations, and the algorithms to maximise your engagement send you more of stuff you approve of - sending people into rabbit holes of idea reinforcement.

5. I believe the combinations of these things together have brought us to the strange state of affairs we have now where everyone is divided into two camps. Both sides think they are the true patriots. The left thinks the right are deplorable and the right thinks the left is crazy.

Here's my problem with the impeachment:

1. The attack of the capitol is totally unacceptable.

2. Trump's speech did not call for any violence and in-fact used several phrases that directly suggest the opposite.

3. Before being de-platformed Trump tweeted twice saying while he understood the anger and the frustration and while he also does't accept the election result there can not be violence and that his party stands for law and order and respecting authority etc.

4. It may be that the far right groups who staged the assault were motivated by Trumps claims of a phoney election despite his calls for peace.  However, if this is the case, it should be noted that senior figures from the left claimed the previous election 2016 was hijacked for several years.

5. Likewise radicals from the left staged violent incidents in the preceding years - including things like violently capturing a city block, driving out police, and declaring it a seperate society. While some of the triggering incidents (floyd) are understandable, no political figures from the left have been held responsible for their ideology creating radicals when there have been crimes to the extent that we now seem to be suggesting figures on the right are responsible for the existence of right extremists. Additionally some on the left made statements that are questionable - such as the suggestion to confront trump cabinet members when they are seen in shops etc.

Looking at that wider context - and while I think there's a lot of regrettable things about Trump - I just don't get the logic of he can be fairly blamed for what happened at the capitol.

He's really only done the same tactics that the other side has been using, and there's no doubt to me that in another scenario we could easily see a similar incident based around the left.

What's really disturbing to me - is that despite the above - and despite actively calling for no violence - he's going to be impeached for inciting violence.

It's almost like we're all so outraged about this that what actually happened doesn't seem to matter anymore. I find it really disconcerting. I'm not even a Trump fan but the way this has all played out simply doesn't make sense.

I tend to go with whichever idea seems the least far fetched.

It's not impossible that there's paid actors and professional agitators and so on, but it doesn't seem as likely to me as the idea that out of the trump supporters - a small proportion are a violent psychos.

Likewise with the left...you have a handful of people who will gladly light a fire when they get a chance to.

So I have no issue with it being trumps people that did it - the problem becomes that the trump speech did not actually say to do it.

So if we're going to ban speeches that don't tell people to do stuff, but that violent extremists can use as justification for their actions - then you're going to have to start banning all kinds of genuine political discourse.

Before you do it I would have a read of this type of data:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2759797/

I understand the desire to protect your family but in many cases the best way to do this is to stay away from guns.