Director of Terrorism Research Center Discusses Capitol Attack
Gruenewald has published more than 40 peer reviewed articles on topics related to terrorism and other forms of extremist, ideologically motivated violence. As center director, Gruenewald leads a team of students and faculty who conduct and facilitate research on terrorism, extremist violence and the effectiveness of anti-terrorism policies and programs. Research at the center informs the work of those who seek to counter terrorism and other forms of extreme violence.
To do their work, Gruenewald and other researchers at the center rely on several public, open-source databases. Gruenewald is co-PI on one of these, the U.S. extremist crime database, a collaboration between many universities. The extremist crime database contains comprehensive information on multiple forms of violent extremism in the United States since 1990. Today, Jeff and I will be talking about what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, a complicated event that he has called a flashpoint in the development of far-right extremism in the United States.
So many people who watch the news have seen images and video of the attack at the U.S. Capitol. Some of these people, I’m sure, came as individuals, not necessarily affiliated with a group or organization. But I know that many people who showed up that day were affiliated with an organization. You’ve talked about this a little bit and actually made a presentation on it, but tell us briefly who some of the main groups were.
Jeff Gruenewald: Yeah, the videos seem to be getting now more and more disturbing as time goes on and even more being released. You know, with the second impeachment trial. ones that we had not been seen before. So the spotlight right now is on a couple different groups. But you know, we’ve been studying groups like this for a long time, and people, sociologists, political scientists before me as well, so we know quite a bit about the ideologies, although they’re always nuanced. But the ideologies and some of the factors that drive them. Some of the members to commit violence. And of course we like to remind people that not all of them are committing violence. And you know, even the so-called violent groups, it’s usually a handful who are resorting to violence. But I think the Proud Boys is becoming the most prominent extreme, far-right group. They’re the one that’s catching the headlines after the January 6 attacks, and these guys are ultranationalist, they’re xenophobic, they’re authoritarianists, if that’s a word. They’re white supremacists.
MM: Do you think most Americans were surprised by what happened on January 6th?
JG: It’s hard, you know, I don’t want to speak for most Americans, but I will say maybe I wasn’t surprised, you know, it makes sense, even in the moment, but I was still shocked to see it play out live on TV. But I think you know something to that scale at the Capitol was again still shocking, and I think others were shocked. And then as we just sat there watching, you know the next thought was where’s the law enforcement, where’s the backup? Why is it taking so long for the National Guard to be called in. I’d say I was surprised that… uh, I wouldn’t have called that one. Similar to after 911, analysts and experts have looked back and said that was that was a failure of imagination.
MM: You’ve talk about that before, failure of imagination. What does that mean?
JG: We had the threats, we had the intelligence, they were pretty clear. If we look at the 9/11 Commission report, you have page after page of the intelligence from all around the country, where we had all these dots that we failed to connect them. We failed to imagine how that they could all be connected into this violent, dangerous move on January 6.
MM: And so there was a lot of intelligence chatter about these groups. Is that correct?
JG: Yeah. It was known, and I talked about this before, but discerning between insightful chatter is also not new. We’ve saw for the last several years that these groups are using the Internet more effectively to organize and show up at the same place and same time. But even despite all of that knowledge, those in those in charge didn’t think it would actually come to fruition.
MM: I want to talk a little bit about conspiracy or misinformation, especially in the context of social media and sort of the relationship of all of that to far-right extremism. What do you think is the relationship between misinformation and goals of some of these groups?
JG: It’s one of the most interesting parts of studying the far right, but also one of the most dangerous parts of these groups. And maybe what separates them… This is why we call them extreme. Most people aren’t aware of these types of conspiracies. You know when I talk about them… if I’m teaching a terrorism course or homeland security course or speaking in public, I can just tell by people’s faces. This is this is new to them. Well, maybe that’s a good thing. That it is new to them, but we have old conspiracies with the far right that… We’ve got the Zionist occupied government, this new world order that claims that the government is being run by global elites and specifically Jewish bankers. There’s a lot of anti-Semitism as you go back and certainly still case in the extremist movement. But more recently, of course, we’ve got Q Anon that’s catching the headlines. This one I think a lot more members of the public are aware of, but it is pretty extreme that… They think that there’s a cabal of cannibalistic, satanic child traffickers made up of Hollywood elites, Democratic elites, and they believe some government insider named Q is communicating with them over the Internet. And so we’re just starting to grasp the toll it’s taking on… Well, I’ve said in the U.S., but it’s also outside of the U.S. But just families in particular… I’ve been watching videos of kids kind of losing their parents to the these conspiracies and just ripping families apart. But they’re dangerous, in addition to harming families and relationships. But they also maintain that these conspiracies that people need to define government authorities, law enforcement, particular that that there’s this imminent threat, and there’s a need to take up arms to protect… whether it’s their race, their way of life. And that it’s up to them to root out and to overthrow this corrupted tyrannical government. And I think… We’ve got freedom to think in this country, think about how we want to think, freedom of speech, but one way I really think that these are dangerous is how they demonize others. And they dehumanize, whether it’s through anti-Semitic beliefs, racism, xenophobia. But it puts a target. They kind of help narrow the target on certain social groups who are dehumanized, and that’s a dangerous thing when you have people who become radicalized to the point of violence. I think you mentioned social media, how that plays into it, and I think it’s just, uh, obviously that social media helps to spread these conspiracy theories. I think social media allows for these conspiracy theories that seem a little more palpable, because you see all these other people who also believed them. You see, a post has 2,000,000 likes and it seems like, well, how can all of these people be wrong? And when you got people in power, you know political figures seemingly accepting them as true, or not rejecting them out hand, that these conspiracy theories seem a little more legitimate.
MM: How could we prevent something like this from happening again? Are there policies or programs that might be implemented to reduce the risk of this type of violence, this type of event?
JG: I’m a criminologist, so of course I’m going to think about what we can do from a criminal justice perspective, but at the same time obviously we need to think about how to prevent people from entering it… hopping on these pathways towards radicalization. I think we should educate ourselves and our children about the threats of extremism, the threats of misinformation, disinformation, conspiracies that are, like we mentioned, ever more present online. And this has to start in our schools. Here in the local high school we have great classes. We’ve got students taking criminology classes, sociology classes. I think these are great opportunities to talk about extremism and the dangers of it. I think we also have to be willing to as a society – and I think we’re getting closer to this – but call politically motivated violence terrorism, despite the color or the nationality of who’s committing it and recognize it as a serious and enduring threat, it’s not something that used to happen. It did used to happen, but it’s still an ever-present threat. The Department of Homeland Security is recognizing this officially too.
MM: Jeff Gruenewald, thank you for being here with us today on Short Talks From the Hill.
JG: Thanks for having me, Matt.
MM: Music for Short Talks From the Hill was written and performed by local musician Ben Harris. For more information and additional podcasts, visit Arkansas Research. That’s arkansasresearch.uark.edu, the home of science and research news at the University of Arkansas.
