The mob violence that descended on the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday was the culmination of weeks of incendiary rhetoric and increasingly feverish planning – much of which took place openly on websites popular with far-right conspiracy theorists.
Since November's election, Holt has seen websites like Parler, Gab, TheDonald, and MeWe fill with torrents of "conspiracy theories, disinformation and outright lies about the results of the election," he says. "And those lies often came from the top arbiters of power in the Republican Party, notably President Donald Trump himself."
And it wasn't just fringe websites. On
Twitter, Advance Democracy found more than 1,480 posts from QAnon-related accounts about Jan. 6 that contained terms of violence since Jan. 1. On TikTok, videos promoting violence garnered hundreds of thousands of views.
Trump's claims have fueled increasingly heated rhetoric since the election, Holt says – spiking in the last couple of weeks as Trump doubled down on conspiracy theories like
the false and unfounded notion that a company that makes electronic voting systems had deleted votes for Trump. "Then it really, really went nuts," Holt says. After Trump
promoted a Jan. 6 protest in D.C., "a lot of his extremist supporters interpreted this as a call to action for them."
On forum boards like TheDonald and antigovernment and militia movement group chats, those conversations included plans to surround the Capitol on all sides, alongside maps of the U.S. Capitol complex marked with locations of tunnels and entry points. "And there was discussion specifically of overwhelming police with large crowds and doing that in order to violate laws against carrying weapons and against entering federal buildings," Holt says.
There was also much discussion on such forums about ways to find and attack Black Lives Matter and antifascist protesters, Holt says. But on Wednesday, those groups largely stayed home. That may have shifted Trump supporters' focus to its eventual target, Holt suggests: "Perhaps the lack of a counterprotest to receive the violence that all these supporters were so ready to unleash meant that that energy instead was directed at the federal government."
When Trump
told his supporters to head to the Capitol, Holt says, "I think the levee just broke."
"If Trump had not told people to go to the Capitol, I don't know that it would have happened. Because people on the ground were engaged in some pretty extreme rhetoric about coming back with guns if things don't go their way, and stuff like that. But there wasn't any real sort of significant action happening on the ground until Trump finished his speech."
In the march toward the 2020 election, "at every turn Trump and his enablers in Congress and in the media ecosystem were parroting some version of the 'deep state' narrative," she says.
"So what happened in the Capitol is really the culmination of months and in some cases years of belief in the sort of paradigmatic world in which you have a very clear set of bad guys who are out to get Trump, and you have a very clear set of good guys who are fighting that battle."
But with my old teeth, I can't actually have the gum 'cause it tends to pull out my old fillings that I would rather not replace.
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