Thread by @MikeAJensen

A while ago, I started what I thought would be a quick exercise to confirm the narrative of J6 defendants as “ordinary” people with few links to extremists, extremist groups/movements. I began work on a network visualization and now I no longer find this narrative convincing. 1/

Several thousand pages of court documents and countless social media posts later, I have added 244 defendants to this visualization, which maps the extremist connections of and between the rioters. 2/

That’s approximately 30% of all defendants. While that’s not a majority, a 30% rate of affiliation with extremism/extremist beliefs among a collective of apparently “ordinary” individuals is an astounding number. 3/

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. 4/

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. 5/

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. 6/

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? 7/

As @MillerIdris has masterfully pointed out, extremism has become far too mainstream, and I fear that the “ordinary people” narrative surrounding J6 only makes this problem worse. foreignaffairs.com/articles/unite… 8/

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. It’s not. 9/

Given that we are really just beginning to learn about the extent of co-conspiring between the rioters ahead of J6 (not to mention that there will likely be hundreds more arrests), I expect this visualization to get even more complex and dense in the weeks ahead. 10/

This is a work in progress, but we are working on turning it into an interactive visualization for the @START_UMD @RaD_UMD website. Stay tuned. END/