Lots of discussion On Here about CT policies and their relevance/appropriateness to the attack on the Capitol. One thing that's going to start looming larger if things get worse before they get better is material support. Material support in foreign CT policy is currently constructed very broadly, in ways that are not going to sit well when turned to domestic groups and persons.

I think this is debatable, and we won't know the answer for a while. There are two possible trajectories here. 1/x

https://twitter.com/ThePlumLineGS/status/1347582400008749056

Trajectory 1: The attack becomes a signal event like Ruby Ridge or Waco, and extremists use it as a rallying point going forward. They will certainly try to do this, but there are some key differences.

This was first seen with ISIS, but in that case, the target audience of people susceptible to radicalization was much smaller, and the net benefit of deplatforming clearer. Doesn't mean we shouldn't enforce platform standards, but we need to be clear-eyed about trade-offs.

https://twitter.com/BUexperts/status/1347587140868329480

This piece by @lizzypearson for @VOX_Pol was one of the first I recall to address these dynamics voxpol.eu/wilayat-twitte…

Sigh. I'd been hoping to stay out of this, but OK.

The answer is "it's complicated."

Buckle up for a (hopefully) short thread.

https://twitter.com/tweetsintheME/status/1314935927899385858

Three things are true:

1) McVeigh was fixated on a notorious piece of WS propaganda

2) McVeigh associated with/admired a number of white supremacists

3) McVeigh isn't documented to have talked to his friends about WS as a driving factor in his life or the OKC bombing

In my latest for @TheAtlantic, I write about how the perfect storm of uncertainty created by the deadly combination of COVID-19, social media and Donald Trump fuels extremism and warps reality itself theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… A short thread:

Social psychology research has shown for some time that feelings of uncertainty -- whether personal, social, political or economic -- make people more susceptible to extremism amazon.com/Extremism-Psyc…

Is dystopian fiction good for society? Time for a THREAD! The proximate cause of this thread is the following article by @peterwsinger @august_cole whose #burninbook you should check out, if you haven't already. slate.com/technology/202…

I was asked recently if I wanted to write something about extremist activity around the nationwide protests. I found this uncharacteristically difficult, and this is a short thread about why. If you follow me, you probably also follow some of my colleagues who have been tracking this activity, so you know it's real and you know it's dangerous. Some of us should be tracking it and talking about it.

Hard to even imagine what effect it will have on national security when the president's Cabinet and personal envoys are wandering the globe literally demanding that foreign countries penetrate our intelligence services. But her emails.

A short thread: Back in 2011, after Anders Breivik's terror attacks in Norway, it was clear immediately that things were going to be different.

https://twitter.com/intelwire/status/1100399634378354689

The ambitious nature of the attack really redefined what lone actor terrorists could aspire to accomplish. Additionally, he left a 1500-page explanation of what he had done and why, which everyone devoured searching for answers.

This seems like a perfect time to watch Nic Cage in what immediately looks to be another in the long line of laughably bad Netflix dystopias. Well, this definitely ain't subtle.

The dreaded YEAR-IN-REVIEW thread commences. Much of my focus in 2018, and going forward, has been on extremist ideologies. In January, I contributed an essay to the @AspenJSP publication, Pluralism in Peril. assets.aspeninstitute.org/content/upload…

This is ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

https://twitter.com/webradius/status/1075424358724763648

The paper is particularly interesting when read with Hogg's Uncertainty Identity Theory -- which I discuss in 'Extremism' amzn.to/2MhXwgQ -- and Kruglanski's cognitive closure thesis. Extremist beliefs tend to help people resolve uncertainty.

For those of you who were following the discussion of this earlier in the week, a robust defense of the inclusions of the Las Vegas mass shooting in the GTD, from @START_UMD @eem1101

https://twitter.com/START_UMD/status/1071154138468282369

The explanation for why the attack was included in the database makes sense based on consistency of practice for the database. Whether that means the attack was, in fact, terrorism, is still debatable.

This is interesting, but the document says "categorize" not "classify" or "designate." There is not, to my knowledge, any sort of formal government domestic extremist designation. It is probably more accurate to say the FBI "describes" them as an extremist group.

https://twitter.com/jason_a_w/status/1064564764511064064

Also worth noting this is not an FBI document; it's a sheriff's office description of something they were told by the FBI.

How did I not know about Futuresport, the made-for-TV knockoff of Rollerball, until now, and wtf kind of accent is Wesley Snipes trying to pull off here? THEY PLAY THE GAME ON HOVERBOARDS

A lot of interesting material in this post from @ajaltamimi, which is an internal discussion of (relative) "extremism" in IS. One interesting point that I've talked about in passing but increasingly think is worth a closer look:

aymennjawad.org/21757/an-inter… One question I've been asked in terms of my definition of extremism is what happens to the definition if the out-group is eliminated. The answer is that the extremist movement starts carving new out-groups from the available in-groups.

New from me for @TheAtlantic, Donald Trump is the glue that holds together a fractured American far right, with disastrous consequences as we saw last week. And it's far from over. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… Today's article includes the results of cluster analysis of data from the Alt-Right Twitter Census, which identified factions within the movement voxpol.eu/download/vox-p… @VOX_Pol

OK, we're fully into a news cycle, so time to re-up the @onthemedia guidelines, which I myself have been guilty of not following. We've got five reported IEDs so far, some awaiting confirmation, all awaiting more information. Reported suspicious or confirmed IED packages so far:

1. Soros
2. Clinton home
3. Obama
4. White House
5. CNN

4. only being reported by CNN, as far as I can tell and not confirmed in WH statement just issued.

5. May be an abundance of caution screening, not clear.

As I mentioned last week, I wanted to put some new/old material out as a way to say thanks to everyone who has supported 'Extremism' so far. The following thread is a major document dump. amzn.to/2MhXwgQ Some background: As many of you know, I got started working on terrorism and related fields by doing OSINT from FOIA documents and court records. Over the years. I have acquired thousands of documents, even as my list of to-do projects has been growing like kudzu.

For @VOX_Pol, my latest research is out today, examining at the online networks of the alt-right. A quick thread about the top-line findings ensues.

voxpol.eu/new-research-r… For me, the most important conclusion found from examining the content of nearly 30,000 alt-right Twitter accounts is that the alt-right is better understood as an extremist political bloc than as an ideological movement.