Last night, one of my softball teammates, who occupies some mythical “well-informed middle” on the whole thing (as though anyone well-informed would form no opinion on any of this), said he was unimpressed by the first hearing because he said we didn’t learn anything new. I mentioned how we learned that the violence was all pre-planned, and how Trump pushed the fraud claim even after he knew he had lost, and my teammate said well, we already knew this, didn’t we? What’s new about that?
He had me for a minute because, yes, this had all been talked about for the last year and a half, ever since the Capitol attack happened, and it really does seem like old news—until I came to realize that the big difference now is that all this was just Twitter speculation before, whereas now, we have actual sworn testimony to all of this, which carries the imprimatur of legal truth. That’s the big difference.
Once I shared this thought with him, he had an “aha” moment about it.