NYT’s Brooks: January 6 Committee ‘Fundamentally Ill-Pointed,’ ‘A Little Too Parochial’

During Friday’s broadcast of PBS’s “NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks elaborated on his criticisms of the House of Representatives January 6 Committee, which he had suggested in a recent Times column as being too political.

Brooks criticized the intent of the committee’s inquires and did not consider the broader reasons that led to the January 6, 2021 event.

“My problem is with their intent,” he said. “I think the committee is fundamentally ill-pointed. And I say that — I care most about now — I care a lot about what happened on January 6, 2021, but I care more about what happened on January 26, 2025, and 2029. And the committee to me seems to me, as protectors of our democracies, elected officials, they should be paying attention to that. Right now, there are tens of millions of people who think the election is stolen, who think violence is justified. And a lot of them are running for office in local levels. How big are they? How much of a threat are they? What offices are they running for? And how should we understand the threat to the next January 6?”

“Second, I thought they were a little too parochial in just the way they conceived it all. This is not just happening here. This is happening in countries all around the world. The Republican Party looks a lot like parties in Poland, in Turkey, in Hungary. This is not a conspiracy. It’s a movement caused by social conditions. How serious is the threat to our democracy in 2024 and 2025? What — how close are we to violence? If you look at the conditions in other countries that have led to violence, how close are we to that? What is violence supposed to look like? And so I would have liked to see a committee that focuses on the future and preventing a disaster and not a committee that was focusing on who was texting Mark Meadows when.”

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