Digby reviewed the report released earlier this week by the bipartisan investigation of senators on the Senate Homeland Security and Rules committees:
It is a sobering report and does add some new detail to the story that we hadn’t heard before. But it leaves many more questions than it answers. After all, these insurrectionists didn’t just cook this up out of the blue. They felt they’d been given the order to do what they did and said so openly as they stormed the building. None of that is addressed by this investigation — and that’s because the Republicans on the committee refused to do it.
Among those unanswered questions is how these insurrectionists got radicalized. Politico profiles jailed geophysicist Jeffrey Sabol of Colorado and draws no conclusions either. Just an average guy until he stormed the Capitol, assaulted federal officers, attempted to flee the country, and tried to take his own life. What turned him?
Politico (emphasis mine):
“For researchers on extremism, that’s the white whale—trying to understand what makes someone turn violent,” says Bennett Clifford, a senior research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. “A lot of it is determined by individual circumstances and vulnerabilities.”
Clifford says he worries about the ways in which January 6 itself, much like 2017’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, functioned as an accelerant for extremist views. “The Capitol brought out every single type of domestic violent extremist from throughout the far right—the racially and ethnically motivated folks, the militia/anti-government people, unaffiliated pro-Trump people. When multiple flavors of people gather in one place, stay in the same hotels together, it runs the risk that you get crossovers, the recruitment of previously unaffiliated people by larger groups. Or even if they don’t join the group formally, it can help infuse some new ideology into their worldview. That’s the scariest part of January 6 for me.”
Brian Levin, a criminal justice professor who runs the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, believes part of the solution has to include addressing extremism as a mental health issue. “I’m not saying that this is something that absolves people of criminal responsibility, but when you have broad reservoirs of grievance and unstable or emotionally vulnerable people who are undergoing stressors at the same time, it’s a recipe for radicalization,” he says.
Remember all those stories of how ISIS used social media to radicalize new recruits? Don’t hold your breath waiting for government reports on what made guys like Sabol go rogue. (Or as the Internet called them during the militant standoff at the Malheur national wildlife refuge, Vanilla Isis.) We consider Islamist terrorists unalloyed evil. White ones we think are unstable, emotionally vulnerable, misunderstood, or otherwise stressed.
And who doesn’t want to join a violent insurrection when things are going poorly at home?