Appears to contradict? The words stung through the sickened flatness of that first morning after. I’d been up late into the night watching and rewatching the videos, merely watching as best I could from across the ocean as thousands endured the blistering cold to bear witness. The problem for a month had been words. The instrumentalization of language that did not reflect reality—and here it was again.
The first screenshot was taken on Sunday, January 25th around 9:30am. The second screenshot was taken on Monday, January 26th around 7:00am.
Contradicts. The videos contradicted the official account. Fight fire with fire, and in any case it’s the truth. A video is not necessarily reality. It is not necessarily truth. But it is evidence. You can make evidential claims about what it shows without making ontological claims about what happened. A single video offers one vantage point; multiple videos begin to triangulate. Reality was still not necessarily fully available to us on Saturday morning, but whatever reality was, the videos available contradicted the federal account.
By Monday morning, the headlines had changed. A small thing. And yet almost six years into trying to understand what has changed for us about language, something important felt restored.