“Unlike other recent spasms of American violence, this was not the work of a lone wolf nor of a small cell of radicals. The pathway to an attempted government overthrow unfolded in public, out loud on the internet, in a process that experts call mass radicalization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The protest was likely just the tip of an iceberg; nobody knows how many Americans\u2014tens of thousands? more?\u2014would willingly have joined them if they\u2019d been in Washington that day. It\u2019s a new challenge for America, and a serious one: At times and places when large groups of people have been inspired to embrace violence, it often leads to long-term unrest, if not outright civil war. And right now, experts think, it\u2019s happening faster than ever.”
…
“over the past roughly 15 years, the average time span of radicalization in the U.S. has shrunk from 18 months to 7 months, largely because of how much of our lives have shifted online.”
…
“Typically, when we talk about radicalization, we\u2019re talking about it at an individual or small-group level. We talk about how Person X came to adopt an extremist viewpoint and act on it. We highlight things like personal grievances, their identity ambitions\u2014perhaps they were seeking some thrill or meaning in their life, and got excited about the promises being made by an extremist ideology, and that if they participated, they would be revered as a hero. With small groups, we tend to talk about group cohesion. Individuals tend to isolate themselves among like-minded people\u2014it\u2019s just a natural human instinct. That tends to form echo chambers, where you hear the same ideas over and over, and they\u2019re never challenged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mass<\/em> radicalization is a much larger phenomenon in which you have tens of thousands\u2014if not millions\u2014of individuals who are vulnerable to [extremist] messages they receive from really influential people. And then, there might be movement towards mobilizing those individuals. They still talk about personal grievances, but there\u2019s a broader national political message there, [where] this is a battle between good and evil, where the other side is looking to undermine us and our way of life, and we all have a responsibility to challenge and confront the other side.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “over the past 4\u00bd years, we have had a very influential political leader [President Donald Trump] pushing a narrative that is not only polarizing\u2014not only highlighting that the right and left are far apart on policy issues and disagree on discretionary spending\u2014it\u2019s a narrative of \u201cothering.\u201d It\u2019s a narrative that casts the other side as evil, as \u201cenemies,\u201d as individuals you have to fight at all costs in order to preserve your way of life. We saw this, whether [Trump\u2019s \u201cothers\u201d] were Democrats, the news media or the scientific community.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Our reality now is one in which a radicalizing message can be broadcast to hundreds of millions of people in a matter of seconds. And if it catches on, you\u2019re virtually guaranteed that millions<\/em> of people will [believe] that narrative. We\u2019ve seen this in the more traditional forms of media, with outlets like Fox News pushing some of these conspiratorial views, but we\u2019ve also seen it with social media companies not cracking down on this rhetoric early, and instead letting it fester.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Think about somebody in the 1980s or 1990s radicalizing into the \u201cwhite power\u201d movement. You had to know somebody in your real-world life who was involved in it. They had to recruit you in or introduce you to the ideas. That tended to be a pretty slow process\u2014a process that, for a lot of individuals, didn\u2019t happen. Now, it\u2019s a click away.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “there\u2019s not an equal [threat] level across those ideologies. Our data suggest that far-right extremist views are the most prevalent of the extremist views in this country.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The \u201cUnite the Right\u201d rally [in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017] was all about bringing these different groups together against a common cause and common enemy. To date, we\u2019ve really only seen that manifest in online rhetorical collaboration, and then that\u2019s spilling offline in terms of marches and demonstrations. To some extent, January 6 was these groups coming together. You saw everyone from neo-Nazis to QAnon supporters to Proud Boys marching on the Capitol that day.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Look, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s good for the social fabric of our country for individuals to believe conspiracy theories and extremist views. But it\u2019s not illegal. Individuals can hold those beliefs if they want to. What is<\/em> illegal is when they mobilize on behalf of them and hurt someone else, or commit some other crime on behalf of those views. That\u2019s really what we have the legal authority to do something about. When we\u2019re talking about policies<\/em> that we can reasonably enact in this country, then we\u2019re talking about stopping people from engaging in illegal behaviors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the social good of our country, I hope that we promote more mainstream rhetoric over the next few years. I hope that we elevate science and evidence and fact to the position that it used to have, and that these narratives are not as prevalent, because it is bad for our democracy and our communities.”\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n