Taken together primarily, along with numerous other tweets in secondary. It wasn't just those two.
1. The president did not incite violent insurrection.
2. None of the presidents actions meet the legal standard for incitement. Full Stop.
3. None of the presidents actions meet the commonly understood definition of incitement. Full Stop.
I think an argument could be made for 1. I’d struggle with 2 or 3. IANAL but let’s consider:
> So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give… The Democrats are hopeless. They’re never voting for anything, not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.
> So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I want to thank you all. God bless you and God bless America. Thank you all for being here, this is incredible. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Enough with the gaslighting - this was entirely justified.
In fact I don’t like the tone of your comment and I feel it might be setting some people off.
How about we keep the responsibility with the people actually physically doing the crime. People make their own decisions.
Your logic would dictate the person doing the crime takes no responsibility since they were incited into doing it.
That's false. The standards for incitement according to the SCOTUS are defined in the Brandenburg Test and are _famously_ narrow. They include a subjective test of the speaker's intent, and an objective test.
- Subjective: Speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action" (this means, was the speaker intending to produce imminent lawless action).
- Objective: Speech is "likely to incite or produce such action"
In an incitement case here, the objective test is absolutely easy. The crowd broken into the halls of the Capitol, violently disrupted a session of Congress, and killed a police officer. Any lawyer would have no problem arguing in court that the speech that morning was "likely" to incite imminent lawless action.
The harder test is the subjective test of the speaker's intent. Here, we need to show that Donald Trump intended to incite imminent lawless action. That's typically a very hard test, because we can't read minds. But we can use circumstantial† evidence to piece together enough of a picture to allow a jury to convict.
† circumstantial evidence is used all the time to determine intent for crimes in courtrooms all over the United States, and is completely valid evidence. Don't raise "but that's circumstantial!" as a defense, because circumstantial evidence is completely valid.
By your logic a mafia don who says "it'd be a lot better if [enemy boss] wasn't alive" resulting in an assassination didn't incite violence, and the responsibility should lie with the "people who did the crime" because people make their own decisions. This is a colossally stupid take.
Your post is full of straw man arguments and I'm not sure if you're being intentionally disingenuous, or just have a very poor understanding of political events in general and Twitter's ability to moderate their own platform. Come back if you want to have a real discussion.
Twitter is being prodded by government officials and working in monopolistic collusion your silly claim about it being a private entity is completely moot. If this is the road you want the US to do down you reap what you sow.
Consider this example.
John fired Andrew from the job. And told him, please do whatever you want to get your job back. Andrew took his shotgun and killed ten top managers.
Deaths of ten people is a direct consequence of John actions. John actions might be irresponsible, but was not inciting violence.
Same way Capitol hill events were a direct consequence of Trump actions, but Trump did not incite violence.
In a way, all political advocacy consists of incitement of violence. Any law not ultimately backed up by the credible threat of violence is just a suggestion. If you don't pay your taxes for long enough, eventually federal agents with guns will come to take you to jail, and if you resist, they'll kill you.
Well, no, they didn't claim that. They claimed the two tweets, taken together, were the straw that broke the camel's back.
And, yes, I think you could reasonably make the claim that the tweets were innocuous if you throw out the context of the President inciting a violent insurrection on Congress. But, we don't have to blind ourselves to that prior context. Given it, and given the way a number of people received those comments and have been actively organizing for violence around the inauguration since then, it doesn't seem to be to be a close call.