Nearly 90% of the people accused in the Capitol riot so far have no connection with militias or other organized extremist groups, according to a new analysis that increases understanding of what some experts have dubbed the “massive radicalization” of Trump’s supporters.
A report by the Center for Extremism at George Washington University analyzed court records of cases that were made public. He found that more than half of the people facing federal accusations because of the January 6 attack appear to have planned their participation alone, not even coordinating with family or close friends. Only 33 of the 257 alleged participants appear to have been part of the existing “militant networks”, including the anti-government militias Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.
The dominance of these “individual believers” among the alleged aggressors underscored the importance of understanding Capitol violence as part of a “diverse and fragmented domestic extremist threat” and underscored the continuing risk of terrorist attacks by a single actor, concluded the researchers from George Washington.
Other analysts argued that Capitol aggressors should be understood as “not just a mixture of right-wing organizations, but as a broader mass movement with violence at its core”.
‘Mass radicalization becomes mass mobilization’
Although individuals associated with far-right networks have been critical of escalating violence on Capitol Hill, the report found that members of organized extremist groups represent only a small minority of those accused so far.
About a third of those accused were part of “organized groups” of family members or friends who planned their participation together. These small groups reportedly include a father and son from Delaware, a mother and son from Tennessee, several couples of husband and wife, two brothers from Montana and a group of acquaintances from Texas, including Jenna Ryan, a real estate agent, who took a private plane to Washington together to invade the Capitol.
The existence of these groups of participants “demonstrates the importance of involvement in networks of friendship or kinship as a key factor in encouraging increasingly extreme beliefs and high-risk, often violent, activism,” notes the report.
But the largest category of alleged troublemakers, according to the report, was a “mix” of individuals with a variety of extremist beliefs who made plans to attend the rally, originally announced as a “Stop theft” protest on their own, and had no documented connections to existing groups, or even small groups of other Trump supporters. These “inspired believers” included adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory, as well as people who simply believed the false claims of Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers that the election had been stolen from Trump and wanted to do something about it.
Michael Jensen, a senior researcher who specializes in radicalization at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, said the results of the analysis were not surprising.
“What we witnessed on January 6 was not an isolated extremist plot,” he said. “We witness an example of mass radicalization that has turned into an example of mass mobilization.”
Trump’s “big lie” about electoral fraud, repeated for months on social networks and traditional media platforms, has managed to radicalize “potentially millions of individuals who have collectively adopted an extremist point of view” about the legitimacy of the election, said Jensen.
“We are seeing a lot of people [charged] who look like very normal people, ”he said. “They tend to be older people, married, with a family, who worked. These are not radical extremists. These are individuals who have been caught in a truly extraordinary circumstance. “
Many of the unaffiliated people accused in the attack may not even know what an Oath Keeper or Proud Boy was, said Jensen, “but they know who the president is … and the president was providing a fraud narrative.”
A different analysis of the Chicago Security and Threats Project’s court records, analyzing 290 prisons linked to the attack on the Capitol, found results very similar to the George Washington University report, including that only 12% of the alleged participants were part of militias or others. organized violent groups.
These initial data revealed, Chicago analysts wrote, that “‘normal’ pro-Trump activists have joined the far right to form a new type of violent mass movement.”
The Chicago report also warned that typical counterterrorism approaches, such as the arrest of members of dangerous extremist groups, would not be very effective in addressing this complex threat, which may require “approaches to reducing the escalation of anger among large segments of mainstream society. “.
The George Washington University report also revealed how the posts of the alleged troublemakers themselves on social media have been useful in building criminal cases against them. Approximately half of the people accused of the riot had their own alleged social media posts used against them as evidence, while about 30% of the accused people “were possibly incriminated” by friends’ social media accounts.