THE ROOTS OF DOMESTIC RADICALIZATION
This** is a very worthwhile interview of Dr. Michael Jensen, a Senior Researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, where he leads the center’s team on domestic radicalization and manages data collection for the Global Terrorism Database.
When the House Impeachment Managers warn about the need to stop Trumpism now, this article makes clear that the threat really is dire, and that January 6 was not an aberration at all. Of particular importance is the data Jensen and his colleagues have collected concerning the speed of radicalization of terrorists, domestic and foreign, through the use of social media. Twitter’s acquiescence to Trump’s years of incitement is inexcusable. The long-last shut down of his account is welcome, but other channels are feeding the beast.
In the interview, Jensen is asked about the factors leading to the kind of mass radicalization seen at the storming of the Capitol (emphasis added here):
First, you have to have a vulnerable audience receptive to the extremist narrative — individuals who are scared, angry, isolated and looking for answers that satisfy their own personal biases, looking to cast blame for their problems on someone else. They find narratives that tell them their problems are not their fault; it’s the product of a conspiracy trying to undermine your way of life and well-being. Those messages are deeply appealing, because it’s harder to look inside and question your own decision-making and behaviors. Over the past year in particular, we’ve had an unprecedented situation that has left a very large audience receptive to those narratives. The pandemic has left people scared, without jobs and looking for answers to what happens next.
The second thing you need is an influential voice pushing the extremist narrative. And over the past 4½ years, we have had a very influential political leader [President Donald Trump] pushing a narrative that is not only polarizing — not only highlighting that the right and left are far apart on policy issues and disagree on discretionary spending — it’s a narrative of “othering.” It’s a narrative that casts the other side as evil, as “enemies,” as individuals you have to fight at all costs in order to preserve your way of life. We saw this, whether [Trump’s “others”] were Democrats, the news media or the scientific community.
The final thing you need is a mechanism to spread that narrative to the masses. Historically, mass radicalization took time. If an influential leader wanted to spread a message, they’d do it through newspapers or political speeches in towns and cities throughout their country, and it could take a while for that message to spread. But that’s not our reality anymore.
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’re virtually guaranteed that millions of people will [believe] that narrative. We’ve seen this in the more traditional forms of media, with outlets like Fox News pushing some of these conspiratorial views, but we’ve also seen it with social media companies not cracking down on this rhetoric early, and instead letting it fester.
Those three conditions [make people] ripe for mass radicalization. And once that narrative changes into a call for action — when it’s not just about changing someone’s beliefs, it’s about inspiring them to act on those beliefs — you get January 6. You get mass mobilization. That’s what we saw.
I’ve seen several comments comparing the January 6 “failed coup” to Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, noting that a mere 10 years later, Hitler was Chancellor. The analogy is incomplete in many respects, including the fact that Trump was already [a rejected] President. But Jensen’s message is that the world is no longer operating on ten-year timelines.
He offers some hope, too: Our eyes have been opened, and we will no longer passively accept social media’s promulgation of terrorism. As the pandemic eases and people’s lives improve, the vulnerability factors should diminish, leaving some people less vulnerable to resentment messaging.
If, as expected, the Senate fails to hold Trump responsible, that is a pretty bad message. Many of us look to prosecution of Trump and his cronies afterwards as a cure. Jensen warns against that:
This is not a problem that we can or should try to arrest our way out of. There are individuals who constitute real threats and should be criminally prosecuted. But if the only tool in our arsenal are arrests and incarceration, then we stand a chance of creating a lot more harm than good. If we think that January 6 is a sign of things to come and requires a massive crackdown, we can foster ill will and distrust and play right into extremist propaganda that is used to radicalize more people. January 6 could be a bit of a “black swan” event, and we shouldn’t overreact to it. We should have a measured response.
Your thoughts?
** The Problem Isn’t Just One Insurrection. It’s Mass Radicalization. — POLITICO