As you watch the January 6th hearing today and hear about the roles that the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Proud Boys, and QAnon played on that day, remember that for these movements, J6 wasn't an isolated event. They've been mobilizing for years. A short 🧵. 1/ For those of you who like complex network graphs, here's one. It's from a larger @RaD_UMD @START_UMD project on militia crimes, but it shows that the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters have formed dense networks that have been involved in dozens of crimes since 2009. 2/

After last night’s hearing on J6, I once again spent my day trying to connect the dots between the extremist networks that were present at the Capitol and to situate them in the broader extremist landscape. Here’s a 🧵 about a connection that hasn't received much attention. 1/ In July of 2021, Fi Duong of Northern Virginia was arrested and charged misdemeanor crimes for entering the Capitol on J6. When Duong was arrested, he reportedly had several guns, including an AK-47, and dozens of Molotov cocktails in his possession. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco… 2/

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/