JUST "CONCERNED PARENTS":

[Michael] Jensen, the principal investigator for the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) project at the University of Maryland's National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), compiled the network map from "several thousand pages of court documents and countless social media posts." He found a total of 244 defendants with extremist connections, and created a visualization of those ties--as well as those between rioters--with the map.

"That's approximately 30 percent of all defendants. While that's not a majority, a 30 percent rate of affiliation with extremism/extremist beliefs among a collective of apparently "ordinary" individuals is an astounding number," Jensen writes on Twitter.

Indeed, while 30 percent still is not a majority, it is not a small minority either. He continues:

Of these 244 defendants, 108 were members of at least one extremist organization. 136 self-identified as members of extremist movements or publicly praised extremist groups and their beliefs. These defendants form nearly 700 dyadic relationships to extremist groups/movements and other defendants with extremist affiliations. These aren't ordinary relationships--or, at least, they shouldn't be.

Moreover, the "ordinary people" argument misses what the visualization shows--that J6 involved a number of influential defendants who acted as bridges in a larger network, facilitating the flow harmful ideas from one movement to another. Sure, the J6 defendants are "ordinary" in the sense that most of them have families, neighbors, and jobs, but who really believes that those are the things that distinguish extremists from everyone else?Jensen points to the work of another expert at American University's Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, in coming to terms with the reality that far-right extremism has been mainstreamed, and how that has happened, primarily through online radicalization--how "people radicalize in a vast and ever-expanding online ecosystem, a process that often involves no contact with particular organizations":

Jensen points to the work of another expert at American University's Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, in coming to terms with the reality that far-right extremism has been mainstreamed, and how that has happened, primarily through online radicalization--how "people radicalize in a vast and ever-expanding online ecosystem, a process that often involves no contact with particular organizations":

As ordinary individuals encounter these ideas, whether through custom-tailored propaganda or through more grassroots efforts amplified by social media, they assemble them into their own personalized belief systems. This is a far cry from more traditional models of radicalization in which people gradually adopt an identifiable group's ideological framework--such as fascism or neo-Nazism--that calls for violent solutions against a common enemy. These more coherent processes involve initiation rites, manifestos, leaders, and a chain of command that guide beliefs and actions. Those elements are largely absent from today's patchwork, choose-your-own-adventure mode of radicalization.

Miller-Idriss's point is that "Extremism has gone mainstream; so must the interventions needed to address it." And as Jensen observes, it's likely that the "ordinary people" narrative surrounding J6 only makes this problem worse.

"It depicts aligning with extremist groups, even if indirectly, and/or adopting their beliefs and attempting to violently end democracy as something "ordinary" people do," he writes. "It's not."

Tweet   @brothersjudd