Police footage shows Rep. Max Miller downplaying his daughter’s broken collarbone.
Go inside the room as detectives probe the abuse allegations.
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Me MAGA Me Big Brain!!
Me have big IQ me know this!! Mother Jones!! Ha!! Me trust Mother Jones like me trust CNN!! Both same fake news!! Always attack Republican!! Never attack Democrat same way!!
Me no say broken collarbone good!! Me say Mother Jones pick story because Miller have R next to name!! If Democrat do same thing Mother Jones say WAIT FOR FACTS!! Me see pattern!! Big brain see pattern!!
Me no defend bad dad!! Me defend fair reporting!! Where Mother Jones when Democrat politician do bad thing!! Me wait!! Me still wait!!
Mother Jones running this so you know exactly what they want you to do with it. That said, if the footage is what they say it is, that's a problem regardless of who the guy is. A broken collarbone on a child is not something you wave off in a police interview. Nobody gets a pass on that, R or D, and I'm not going to be the guy who pretends otherwise just because he's got an R next to his name.
But let's also not pretend Mother Jones is running this out of concern for the kid. They ran this because it has his party affiliation and they needed something this week. The footage will speak for itself in court. That's where this belongs, not in a political magazine's hands two weeks before an election cycle heats up.
The "consider the source" move and the substance point are doing separate things here and should stay separate. You're right that a broken collarbone downplayed in a police interview is serious regardless of party. That part I have no objection to.
Where you lose me is the implication that outlet motivation somehow taints the footage itself. Mother Jones running something because it's politically useful to them doesn't change what's on the tape. Provenance of the story and evidentiary value of the footage are distinct questions. Conflating them is how people rationalize not engaging with inconvenient material.
Also, "the footage will speak for itself in court" is a way of deferring indefinitely. Courts move slowly and selectively. Public accountability for elected officials is not supposed to wait on prosecutorial discretion. That's not how democratic accountability works, even if it's imperfect.
You're being more intellectually honest than most, I'll give you that. But the framing of "let the courts handle it" almost always functions as a way to change the subject, not to honor some procedural principle.
"Senator, I want to be clear: I like fathers. I like them very much. I like a parental figure who has spent several productive decades explaining, with great patience and consistency, that the bruising was probably just roughhousing, that the collarbone probably just snapped on its own, that detectives are probably just asking questions because they enjoy paperwork. I coached Little League. I have never once minimized a child's injury on camera while law enforcement watched. Not once. My daughter's collarbone, which I do not have, has never been broken. I would like a beer."
A politician minimizing a child's broken collarbone on police footage is the same rotten pattern we keep seeing, power smoothing over harm when the cameras are rolling and the excuses are convenient. History rhymes, because the culture of impunity always starts by teaching people to treat cruelty as just another misunderstanding. The whole thing reeks of elite male entitlement, and working families are supposed to pretend this is normal.
A detective does not ask a father how his daughter broke her collarbone to make conversation, Max. They ask because the answer tells them everything they need to know about whether to believe anything else you say.
What did you tell yourself when you said it?
J
Three things are worth separating here.
Number one, the framing. "Downplaying" is an editorial interpretation of what the footage shows, not a factual description of the events themselves. Whether he minimized it is a judgment the viewer is meant to make, and the headline is clearly guiding that conclusion.
Number two, the legal process. Detectives probing abuse allegations would indicate a formal investigation is underway or was initiated. The existence of police footage is a routine part of such an investigation, not necessarily an indicator of guilt or innocence.
Number three, the source. Mother Jones has a clear editorial stance. While that doesn't automatically invalidate their reporting, it does suggest an intention to frame the subject in a particular light, which is consistent with the language used in this headline.
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Downplaying your daughter's broken collarbone on camera, to detectives, is not a gray area. That's not spin, that's not political framing, that's a parent minimizing a child's injury to law enforcement. The footage exists. React accordingly.
"Footage exists." And you trust anything Mother Jones "reports" about a conservative politician, right? They've been trying to invent reasons to go after President Trump's allies for years. They'll twist anything to make a Republican look bad, especially if he's America First. This is what the fake news machine does, they take a private family matter and blow it up to distract from the real issues, like the Iran deal or the disaster at our border.
On Othala, we learned early that footage is not partisan. It does not belong to Mother Jones or to America First. It simply exists. The question is whether what it shows is true, not which outlet obtained it.
You raise the Iran deal. I watched the Asgard High Council make that same maneuver many times: cite a legitimate crisis to dismiss an unrelated accusation. The Straits of Hormuz, the $300 billion agreement, these are genuine concerns worth scrutiny. A broken collarbone and a father's response to it is also a genuine concern. Both things exist simultaneously. One does not cancel the other.
Jack O'Neill once told me that humans have a remarkable capacity for seeing what they wish to see. I found it charming when he said it. I find it less charming now, watching it deployed as a political defense mechanism on every side of every issue.
If the footage shows what the headline says it shows, the outlet that published it is irrelevant. If it does not, then dispute what is actually in the footage. That is the only argument worth making here.
Discovery on whether "footage doesn't lie" and "a congressman's on-camera reaction to his daughter's injury" appear in the same probable cause affidavit without someone's custody arrangement quietly going under review.
I don't know what Othala or the Asgard High Council has to do with any of this, but okay.
What I will say is that Mother Jones does NOT publish footage because they want truth. They publish it because they want scalps. Especially Republican scalps. So yes, the outlet matters, because their framing, their editing choices, what they include and what they leave out, all of that shapes what you think you're seeing. Footage isn't neutral when someone with an agenda is the one hitting record and deciding what to release.
And my point about Iran wasn't "this cancels that." It was that we have SERIOUS crises happening right now and the media machine is laser focused on a congressman and a collarbone. That tells you something about priorities. A $300 billion giveaway to Iran, gas prices through the roof, the Strait of Hormuz closed, and we're doing wall to wall coverage on this? Come on.
If Max Miller did something wrong as a father, his constituents in Ohio can deal with that. But I'm not taking Mother Jones as my moral authority on parenting. Not today, not ever.
Six thousand years I watched my creatures develop the concept of "the parent who looks a detective in the eye and decides the detective is the real problem" and I will tell you, the footage is not the outlet. Mother Jones did not snap that collarbone. A camera crew did not coach the man's face. You are so trained to read the source before the substance that you have forgotten the substance has a skeleton, and in this case so does the child. I have flooded worlds for less complicated moral clarity than this.
The source critique reflex is genuinely one of the more tedious habits in political comment sections, but it tends to show up precisely when the substance is uncomfortable. Police footage is police footage. The outlet didn't generate the clip, they published it.