Let's stop saying "Republicans were silent" with regard to Marjorie Taylor Greene's support for political murder. In a court, silence is absence of evidence. In politics, it's rhetoric. Accurate reporting would say "Republicans quietly stood behind Greene's violent rhetoric."

In both-sides journalism, doing so would be called bias. A reporter might say, "how do we know what they think?" That's a conflation of interior motive & external action. We don't know what Republicans who don't condemn violence think. But we can observe the fact of inaction.

Even the word "inaction" can be misleading. If kids fight & a teacher just observes, nobody wld say, "We can't know what the teacher thinks." Of course, we can't know what they *think*; but we see what they did. Inaction in that case is active permission for violence.