 Hi, I'm Candice Rondo. I'm director of the Future Frontlines program at New America. And I'm at the State University Center on the Future of War. I am so glad that you are all able to join us today. And I really want to thank you. We're really looking forward to diving into this conversation on the anniversary of the January 6th attack on the Capitol. We have a lot of great panelists, great speakers, some very experienced researchers and policy experts with us today. But before we get into the conversation, I want to just do a little bit of housekeeping. First of all, I want to encourage you all to join us in the conversation during the Q&A. We have a two-hour conversation here. And we really want to be in dialogue with you. And if you look at the bottom of your screen, you're going to see there's a slight little button there for you to join in and put your questions in the Q&A chat. Also, if you're interested in the reports, they are online, and you can also access those again at the bottom of the screen on the right-hand side. We have a fantastic event and obviously a lot of research to share with you. But before, again, getting deep into all of this, I want to set the context a little bit. A year ago today, just about a mile from where I live here in Washington, DC, and actually almost exactly to the hour, Democracy in America really took a very dark and unprecedented turn in its history on January 6. Thousands of Americans who traveled to Washington from all over the country stormed the Capitol as members of Congress were seeking to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. A lot of the folks who showed up that day were spurred on by President Donald Trump at the time. And they were inspired by the Stop the Steel Movement, which we all now know it was a massive campaign to spread disinformation about the election and the election's integrity. And they were also inspired by other sentiments, including white supremacy, anti-government sentiment, and an idea that sovereign citizens should be more responsible than the federal government for the rule of law in this country. Many were average citizens, but many also came prepared for battle and fully armed, as we saw. Five police officers died that day as a result of the violence. And two women, supporters of Donald Trump, also died that day. Hundreds were injured, including many police officers who are local here to our community in Washington, DC. And many also were challenged later by the results of post-traumatic stress and are still sorting through that today. Really important to note that this event was a thunderclap for so many people and has changed so many lives in this country, but has also really destabilized our democracy in a very profound way. It's no surprise, though, for a lot of the folks who are in this event today. Many of us were watching. We saw the rising tide of hate and disinformation online in the year leading up to January 6. Researchers, journalists, concerned citizens were all ringing the alarm bells, saying, we've got a problem. The red lights are flashing. We saw this on Facebook. We saw it on Twitter. We saw it on YouTube. And we also saw it on this growing ecosystem of the alternative tech movement that tends to target far-right audiences on platforms like Parler, Gab, and Rumble. And much of what we know actually happened on those platforms. All of the many of the tips that the FBI has received over the last year, 300,000 we heard from Mary Garland yesterday, the Attorney General of the United States, actually came from online digital evidence. Some of it was on Parler. Some of it was on Facebook. We know this story. And it's not just Americans who are watching that day. Billions of people around the world who have access to social media also were watching this debacle unfold in real time online. And it has reshaped the way the world looks at America and understands our promotion of democracy and our defense of democracy in this country. The folks who are with us today are all part of this story. And there really have been champions of trying to understand what happened that day. It's worth noting, in fact, I must note, that our partners on this event include the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab, Arizona State University, the Bridging Devides Initiative at Princeton University, as well as Just Security and Tech Policy Press, all of whom are represented here in some way or another today. And so this is really a truly a team effort, but it's also really indicative of just how urgent and critical it is for us to understand what happened on January 6th, what it means for the future of democracy in this country and the potential for more political violence to erupt as we creep into the midterm election season and then move toward the 2024 elections. Our first panel today will be moderated by Mary McCord. Mary is just a profoundly influential figure when it comes to thinking about national security, not just in Washington, but across the country. She is well-known for her 20 plus years of work as a federal prosecutor, as a defender of democracy and she's worn many different hats over time. Most recently, she was before joining ICAP as the executive director. She was the acting assistant attorney general for national security from 2016 to 2017. And before that, she was the assistant attorney general for national security from 2014 to 2016. So many more things to say about Mary, but perhaps that will be revealed as we chat today about our research on the all tech world and the future of political violence in this country. Over to you, Mary. Thank you, Candice, and thanks to New America and ASU and tech policy press and just security and bridging divides and DFR labs, Atlanta council also is my good friends for being part of this and really looking forward to this discussion. I wanna jump right in because I think there's a lot of interest, obviously, in this topic and I wanna make sure we have time for questions from the audience. So be thinking about those as we go along. And Candice, I just wanna start with you as the project lead for this. And before I do that, I should also indicate in addition to Candice here, who's already introduced yourself, we have Ben Dalton, who is a fellow at the Future Frontlines project and also Professor Sean Walker, who also is a researcher and a professor who worked on this project. And I wanna really dive into this research, but before we do, I mean, I think many of us who have been tracking extremist movements, whether they are domestic extremist movements or foreign extremist movements over the years have seen that social media has played a role in recruitment, in propagandizing, in planning. I saw this at the National Security Division. I saw foreign terrorist organizations do this. I saw this at the National Security Division and is in my current role at Georgetown University's Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. I've seen it with respect to domestic extremist movements including many that you mentioned, the Unlawful Private Militia movements, conspiracy theorists, accelerationists, white supremacist movements, et cetera. So in setting out on this project, I know you focused on Parler. What was it that you, what questions were you really trying to answer? What was the goal of this particular research, this particular project? Well, I mean, I'll speak for myself and I know that each of us had, I think, different motivations and different questions in mind. And we all come from different backgrounds. For instance, I'm a journalist. Sean is an information science researcher. Ben is also a journalist. We have other colleagues who are mathematicians on this project, data scientists and so forth. For me, I will say, a big question was, there were all these claims about the role of Parler in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Cheryl Sandberg, the CEO of Facebook at the time, blamed Parler and Rumble and all these other sort of alt-tech sort of fringe platforms for being more responsible for the spread of disinformation and violent and hateful speech online ahead of the elections and also of course leading up to the attack. And the question is, first of all, Facebook of course has had challenges with its credibility when it makes these types of claims. But my question was, well, how would you know? How would you know whether Parler was more responsible than Facebook or Twitter? I mean, it seemed like a very unfair comparison Parler had about 15 million users at the time while Facebook had almost 3 billion, right? And Twitter probably had close to 2 billion itself. So it seemed a little bit like an apples and oranges comparison. And yet, there was something to it, right? What we know from looking at the data and from what happened, that team went up and folded. In fact, quite a few people were indicted because they were filmed and then they posted their stuff online to Parler. What we know is that it was an important part of the story and it was so important that after the fact, only three days later, Amazon decided to shut it down. And so did Apple and Google, right? So it was taken offline and that was really a thunderclap. So for me, one of the questions is, how do you measure the effect of one platform versus another? Like what are the tools that you use to do that? And can you really say with any kind of definitive sense that, okay, this platform was more responsible than the other? It turns out you can't, but we'll talk a little bit more about that. I also, I mean, I think everybody was really curious to understand how many of the folks who have since been arrested actually were active online if on these fringe platforms like Parler and like Rumble. And we certainly found that they were active and that it was a factor for a lot of these folks, but there's still more work to do on that. And it's so important to try to trace this for purposes of, are there legislative initiatives that ought to be considered by Congress? Are there just good corporate governance policies that ought to come out of this, among other things? Accountability, it was a big theme of, of course, Attorney General Merrick Garland's speech yesterday. We're not necessarily here talking about accountability in a criminal sense, although maybe we should be via the platforms, but certainly accountability in terms of what was their role in this first significant attack on the Capitol in over 200 years. I wanna hear from Ben and Sean, both on this question, because I know you each approached it from a slightly different perspective. So Ben. Yeah, so we sort of structured our research in a trio of influencers, people who were in the Trump orbit, celebrities who were sort of the top line of discourse, objectors who were the members of Congress who objected to the certification of the electoral results and a group that we're calling the Contestors who are the individuals who were arrested and charged with crimes related to their alleged activities on January 6th. And I spent the most time focusing on that third group. And what really drove me was just, who were these people? Were they everyday Americans? Were they militia groups? We saw such a diversity of actors on that day. And I was interested in where they came from, what had activated them. And yeah, particularly the sort of online offline crossover where their online networks would crossover into offline activism and vice versa, where they would draw from protests and events to fuel the online conversation. So that's really kind of what informed my part of this project and what struck my interest the most. And I wanna come back in detail to that too, because that's one of the things, I did a ton of speaking through 2020 and through 2021 about this sort of online offline relationship. And so, but of course, I speak not as a researcher, I speak as a lawyer and an observer and a consumer of the research of you and others. And just based on what I see and what people report to me who've been impacted in communities. And I deeply felt that there was that connection but to have the empirical data is so important. Sean, can you just give us a little bit of what you went into this project hoping to learn? Sure, for me, I was really interested in the role, the connectivity between Parler and other platforms and also the sort of texture of Parler. Was Parler similar type of communication that's happening? Was that similar to what's happening on say Facebook or Twitter platforms that many people know? Or is it something completely different? And the answer to that is actually it's really completely different. The types of language that we see from sort of the general members as well as has been mentioned these objectors, right? These 147 members of Congress, they're using different language. It's much more caustic I would say than what we see on their public presences on mainstream platforms like Twitter and Facebook. So we did some analysis where we looked at their public official Twitter accounts. And then we also looked at what they deleted from those accounts. And then we looked at the objectors. We found 46 of those that had Parler accounts and 13 of those were highly active. And the language is very striking and different. They're not talking about stop the steal in their public Twitter accounts. They're talking about that in Parler in this space in a very caustic, accusatory way. Also the platform kind of changes over time. It's what we've seen is that in 2018 to 2019 it's not really that active and not really a lot of folks are using it. But then there's this exodus as mainstream platforms like Facebook and Twitter kick up their content moderation folks migrate from those platforms to Parler. And then activity starts to change. And then around the election, the types of content that's posted becomes more conspiracy theory, much more extreme over time. And so that was one of the things that I was really interested in and kind of surprising of that fact about how eventually disconnected Parler became and this sort of greenhouse that helped to grow conspiracy theories and extremist content. Well, let's start right there because that actually is one of the things I wanted to get us into before we get into sort of some of the other like correlations that you found which is exactly how does that content differ and how do the users differ? Because as Candice pointed out, we're talking about, I mean, the numbers are still big 15 million but in comparison to Facebook and Twitter, it's minuscule. So who's using this, who's drawn to it and how is that content different and how much is posting and reposting from other platforms? Sure, I'll start if that's okay with everyone. Yeah. So what we see user-wise, there's a lower number of users but I think what's important to note is that around the summer of 2020, we start to see politicians and other folks, celebrity figures start to migrate to Parler. A lot of this is because there's conversations, myths about content moderation saying that mainstream platforms are suppressing conservative content which I think there's a confusion about conservative content versus misinformation. A lot of studies have shown that conservative content is not actually being suppressed but there was this belief, this myth and so that caused folks to shift and as mainstream figures shifted then Parler became more legitimate. So pre this shift, Parler wasn't, was really this fringe platform but as mainstream folks move like Paul Gosard, Nunez, Andy Biggs and such, move to the platform, then they provide this legitimacy. In the content shift, one of the analyses we did was look at sort of the links that people posted, especially these objectors and these influential users in Trump's orbit. We see when they first come onto the platform around the summer of 2020, we see that they're still linking to other social media platforms, they're linking to some mainstream news sources, Fox News, some BBC, some New York Times but then we see as closer to the election and beyond we start to see that shift to sites that basically broker and misinformation. So sites like the Gateway Pundit and such, we see that shift into that connections to that misinformation ecosphere information space versus mainstream media and news. So we see that shift over time of that type of content. And what about the users and maybe this is a good question for you, Ben, the users who are not the, you told us about your three categories and that you focused on the, what did you call them, that last category? Yeah, Contestors. Contestors, yes, thank you. So we're talking about ordinary people who just believe the election was stolen, right? Or users of Parler. Who are we talking about when we talk about the contestors? Well, not necessarily. So one thing that's really striking about them is their diversity, not necessarily in terms of demographics because they were overwhelmingly male, lots of military background, lots of law enforcement background, but they came from practically every state in the country. And they really varied between people who seemingly were activated on an individual or even like a family level. We had actually a couple of entire families who ended up getting arrested and indicted all the way through to these organized groups that have attracted quite a bit of attention, such as the Oath Keepers, the three percenters and the Proud Boys. And it's the latter group who are facing some of the most serious charges related to that day, conspiracy charges related to obstructing a formal congressional proceeding, which was obviously the certification of the electoral vote. So I hesitate to call them everyday Americans, but certainly there were some people who seemingly sort of got swept along for the ride. Parlor's influence, I'm interested to know, we just learned since Francis Hogan, the Facebook whistleblower has provided a tranche of papers and other documents and information that she brought with her from Facebook. We've learned that Facebook made some pretty significant changes in how it was approaching taking down content both before the election and after the election. And the Washington Post ProPublica just yesterday published results of their own research into the impact of Facebook's decision just post January, or just post the election day to dismantle its civic integrity task force. It had, to its credit, before the election, it had recognized its platform was being used for disinformation and to foment violence. It had implemented its dangerous individuals and organizations policy and other policies to take down violent content and some disinformation content. And that's not only I think about the election, but also about COVID and other things like that, which were all at issue in 2020 leading up to the election. But what we've learned is that right after the election, they basically dismantled that task force and in the period between election day and January 6th, I believe the data I saw yesterday is that Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of the election. So I can't necessarily, you started us off talking a little bit about the finger pointing by Facebook at platforms like Parler and Gab and Rumble, but what does this show us about Facebook's role in undermining governmental institutions and fomenting the violence on January 6th? And is there a way coming back again to your initial question that you wanted to answer to kind of compare that to Parler's role? Yeah, I mean, so one of the things that I think is also kind of worth noting here, just kind of tailing off some of the things that we observed in our research, and Ben and Sean were just kind of referencing who are these users and kind of what was driving the conversation online on Parler and elsewhere. I mean, there was a real notable convergence between a reaction to COVID restrictions, that was a big theme. And really important, the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted right after George Floyd's killing in May of 2020, there's a real close alignment with these, it's almost like a signway where you see more people joining either because they're starting to identify with this idea of being part of the free speech movement as advertised by Parler and other old tech platforms. And so there's kind of like the synergistic effect of these offline events happening, right? Real world COVID restrictions, responses to that, and then the Black Lives Matter movement and counter protests, escalating violence on the streets from all different angles. And that conversation is getting more and more heated on all of these platforms. And we can talk about, I think, there's a temptation to think that Facebook did a lot and it did. There was definitely, the integrity efforts were certainly significant and they clearly did drive some from Facebook onto platforms like Parler, as we said. However, 650,000, that's just what the Washington Post and ProPublica were able to find in the time given and with the resources at hand. We know that there's more out there. And there's a real parallel, right? I'm not at all surprised to hear that there was, after November, there was this escalation of activity on Facebook in groups because we saw the same thing in Parler. And I'm certain that if we went to every single platform and we sort of took a look, we would see that escalation, especially if we're using certain types of hashtags and certain types of terms, and we would see that alignment basically. So I think the thing, the question I have is sort of, why, what logic informed Facebook's executives and decision makers as they were thinking through what would happen after the fact? Because it was pretty clear right from the start that Donald Trump intended to contest the results. He said so. He said it repeated. No surprise. Right, I mean, he said it in public debates. He said it on Twitter. I mean, he had surrogates saying it for him. And so I'm at a loss to understand, what part of that message Facebook executives and others at Twitter and elsewhere, that they weren't understanding, that they weren't hearing for some reason and why stand down a team that was meant to really protect our institutions right at this crucial, very sensitive period. I hope that now we know that one of the lessons learned is unfortunately you've got to, it's gotta be kind of around the clock now, vigilance. It's not literally just about the election cycle. And I don't know, we're almost rarely not in an election cycle. This is a rare year, right? So every two years we've got something going on, which really means every other year we've got something going on. So for tech companies, large or small, Parler, Facebook, Rumble, you name it, they really have to be thinking through, what is the logic here? And the logic has to be around, look, it's the biggest show, not just in the United States, in the world, when the presidents of the United States is elected in this country, everybody in the world is watching for the results and everybody in the world has a view and they know that it matters. So, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. So the real question here is like, how do we establish measures that are informed by the evidence, right? Inform by what we know also about like how these technologies work. Right. Yeah, well, so let's get to that. We talked a little bit about the online offline. We talked about this call and response. I mean, one of the things that I observed through 2020, well actually before that even, ever since Trump came into office was, but certainly amping up in 2020 with the COVID pandemic hitting stay-at-home orders, governor shut down orders. I would, then the killing of George Floyd and racial justice demonstrations and then the seeding of the stop the steal movement even before the election. What I was seeing was President Trump wouldn't come out and make forceful statements, against governor's public health orders such as stay-at-home orders and correlative with that. At the same time as that, his online statements through Twitter, his public appearances and statements, you would then see offline, armed storming of state houses in places like Michigan and in Idaho and many other places in opposition to governor's ordered public health measures. Same thing with the racial justice demonstrations. When Trump would say, these are not peaceful, these are violent anarchists who are rioting and looting, then you start seeing armed private militias heeding that call, coming out, deploying on the streets, heavily armed, intimidating people, trying to exercise their first amendment rights and obviously putting people in grave danger. We've had multiple people shot and killed and now of course we have the unfortunate situation of Kyle Rittenhouse now being held as a hero, a vigilante hero. And then the same thing I saw with the election, Trump starts talking in April of 2020 about mail-in balloting is highly susceptible to fraud and just building up this narrative that then you started seeing people starting to come out on the streets. We have to oppose mail-in balloting, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, but I don't think Trump had a parlor account. So how, and I don't know which one of you's best position to answer it or maybe all three of you. So how, I think of so much of his activity being on Twitter, being on Facebook, how did that translate into the parlor discourse on these subjects and the then offline activity related to it? So first of all, Trump did actually, team Trump did have a parlor account. Ivanka Trump had a parlor account, Don Jr. had a parlor account. So it was a family affair on both. And they joined, I think, I'm not sure actually about the joint dates, I'll have to ask Sean a little bit about that. But it certainly wasn't in 2018 right away, which is when of course parlor was launched. They had a presence and that presence was outside. But interestingly, they weren't as active, right? But their surrogates were extremely active. So Lin Wood is one of the top posters on parlor. We found that Joe Paggs, who's a Fox News commentator and a close Trump supporter and surrogate, he was, I think, number two after Ron Paul in terms of numbers of posts throughout his entire use on parlor 1.0. So the surrogates actually were extremely important. And in fact, that for us, I think was one of the more shocking findings just to see just how outsize their influence was. So in theory, if you're opening parlor as a normal user, average Joe, you open it up, you're gonna probably see some content there from a Trump surrogate right away because of the way the platform is designed, right? It's not just because of what the content is, which is really, really important distinction. There's a lot of, I think, over focus on content and its moderation. This is more about decisions around who gets pushed up, the ranks, right? And so those are algorithmic decisions, right? Those are design feature decisions and who gets privileged as a result. And then also, one of the things that's still in mystery to us, I think we're gonna try and research this a little bit is who actually profits from it, right? Because there was this very strange business model where parlor said, we don't sell your data to third parties. And it's probably because they didn't have to because most of that stuff was publicly available on parlor 1.0, which is why we know so much, right? Because it was all just sort of out there. And there weren't a lot of privacy protections for parlor users. But back to your point about kind of the special treatments of VIPs, right? And Trump in particular, on these others mainstream platforms and Facebook and Twitter and so forth. Yeah, I mean, I think it's sort of unconscionable to think that VIPs, who are spreading disinformation at the level that Trump was in literally inciting violence for years were not in some way restrained. I think Twitter has done a great job comparatively speaking of actually adopting some logic. You've got the now you've got the five strikes, right? We just saw that happen with Marjorie Taylor Greene who's been permanently banned from the platform. I mean, at least there's a logic there and it's right up there up front. The problem with Facebook is the logic always seems to come after the fact. And then it doesn't seem to apply across the board. They seem to have a real problem with definition of terms. And for an organization that was worth, I don't know, I mean, it's like a trillion plus, right? And that has so many smart people working for it from around the world. And in the United States, many of them actually lawyers who love definition of terms, it's a mysterious to me that these mainstream platforms don't wanna take that on and don't wanna be more transparent about that. And I guess that's where the congressional piece comes in, right, is lawmakers have to really press them to either take on, build consensus around definitions of terms, right? I'm like, what does it mean to have inauthentic behavior on a platform? What does it mean to have disinformation or misinformation? And also obviously the research community needs to do this work, but honestly, it's gonna be up to policymakers. I think Sean probably has some ideas about this too though. Yeah, I'm sure. And just to answer your question, Team Trump joined Parler in late, so December of 2018, Ivanka Trump joined Parler in December of 2020. I looked that up, okay. Interesting. So after the election. Yes. And so one of the things I would add too is that with the theme of Parler being really different, right? If you weren't on Parler, I think it's difficult to really understand how different this platform is. You just, a lot of folks might overlay their experiences with Facebook or Twitter or Reddit or Instagram, but we see that Parler really didn't have a content moderation team. That's one of the reasons why Apple and Google removed the app from their app stores because their lack of content moderation. There was a very small content moderation team and there was very little content that was moderated in that content. You do not want to view that content was just really explicit and inappropriate in an extreme, right? Versus what we see in platforms like Facebook and Twitter, they have a larger content moderation team. And to be fair, this idea of content moderation is very difficult. We don't have good solutions. It's kind of like taking out your appendix with a chainsaw in many ways. It doesn't really help, but we also know some of our conceptions about misinformation are really problematic right now. We think if we delete content, then it will stop spreading. In some cases, deleting content makes it sort of more juicy and more valuable. So we saw that with the pandemic video early in COVID times and then we saw that with sort of Parler became more juicy because a result of content being deleted on mainstream platforms. And we often think about if we just delete content then we stop it spread, but we have to kind of think about misinformation. People don't adopt and spread misinformation because they're dumb, right? Like do your own research is my least favorite phrase that I can just like ever hear on the news like ever, right? And so I think we also need to think about the relationships that a lot of folks that were on Parler and we're supporting Stop the Steel and the Trump network and all these COVID protests and such, we wanna think about their sort of relationships with that information. There are reasons why, right? We adopt and spread misinformation because it has some value to us. And that might be our relationship to government officials. It might be our relationship and feelings about President Trump. It might be cause we wanna protect our children. So that's why we're believing COVID misinformation about vaccines cause we want some way to keep our children safe and science sometimes takes a little while to develop. So I think we need to think about the role of fact-checking, the role of content removal, the role of account suppression and then how does that cascade over time, right? Like that's one set of solutions in our toolbox but that's a very blunt solution to the problem. And so thinking about these relationships, thinking about some of these historical reasons why folks believe some of this content and this misinformation is really important. And the platforms are not equipped to do some of this but also some of their methods are just really poor. Like if I post something and Facebook pops up and says, well, we think this is misinformation, right? Like what's the psychological effect of someone whenever the platform themselves labels something that they believe to be true as misinformation and oftentimes it's not about truth or false, right? That's not the problem. It's normally about a whole set of values that folks are adopting. And we can see that as folks moved to Parler and the content on Parler, right? And especially as Parler starts to disconnect from the rest of the world, it becomes more extreme over time because it becomes this isolated platform that we don't have contesting voices. Instead, we have voices that are kind of continuing to add fuel to the conspiracy theory and to these misinformation narratives. They just become more extreme because they're not running into anything that's a counter to that. Just to add on to a few things that Sean said there. When he says that like the most sort of extreme stuff, like the worst of the worst might get moderated, sure. But like, some of the contestors that I looked at, they're posting history, there were occasionally explicit calls to violence that just seemingly went unmoderated. And we've used the metaphor sort of as like a hot house that Parler served as a hot house as it disconnected from the rest of the conversation where discourse would sort of come in to the platform, intensify, and then gradually leak out elsewhere on the internet. And I saw this in particular with users that had multiple accounts on many different platforms and were posting to all of them at the same time. They would save their sort of most pointed of a interpretive commentary for Parler and then tone it down or couch it a little bit on places like Twitter or Facebook, but the messaging remained consistent across all of them. Right, I think one other, sorry, just to jump in here. One thing that we haven't really talked about or mentioned in a great deal is, so you have that kind of intensity or intensification of this increasingly extreme content and sentiment online, but also one of the features of Parler that is really important to understand is because there were few safeguards, in fact, like the moderation of 1.0 was driven by users, 800 users roughly to 15 million, okay? That's just crazy. It doesn't make any sense. And it's also user driven, so their standards are who knows, right? Nobody knows what those standards are, but because you don't have those safeguards, that also means that inauthentic behavior can happen. What do we mean by inauthentic behavior? We mean literally the deployment of bots to elevate, retweet, or sorry, repost or reparler, information online. It means coordinated action by different users who may be sharing a singular account. I mean, we saw this at scale and in a way that I'm not certain, I mean, perhaps it does happen on Facebook, we don't know. Again, we have so many sort of black box situations in all of these platforms, but Parler was remarkable in that it was really vulnerable to a lot of coordinated inauthentic behavior. We wouldn't see that sort of activity. So it's some of the posting rates we saw are just not humanly possible and other platforms would have shut that down due to some rate-leading. But I think this is an important point to note that as a platform, Parler, the infrastructure was really poorly designed. It was, I believe, amateur hour is an understatement. And so the platform wasn't secure. There were sort of no safeguards again on automated posting. And then after the election around January 6th, as people started companies that supported Parler and provided services to Parler started to abandon it, then their security infrastructure, what was there just fell apart. And so that's one of the reasons why hackers in different groups were able to access data. I mean, even driver's licenses from those that had verified their profiles, all that information was accessible because it was just so poorly designed until Amazon flipped the switch to turn off the lights. And as part of our work, trying to collect some of that data as it was just disappearing really quickly, that was part of our struggle. To what extent did you find foreign actors, foreign influences taking advantage of these vulnerabilities, Sean? I think that's a good Candace question, but yeah, so I'm gonna pass off the Candace first and then I'll, I'm most wound up for Candace. So Stanford did a great study almost immediately after the attack. They really had to be committed to the work that they did. One of the things, of course, that they noted was that there were a lot of users from Brazil in Saudi Arabia that joined around 2019 and there was a huge presence. And in fact, I guess that was in response to stuff going on in those countries, but also clearly kind of an identification with this authoritarian strongman model of governance, right? And then that's why the conversation was driven to parlor. Most certainly there was some inauthentic behavior there. We do know that, that has been established. We also know from a study that Graphica did, which is a New York based organization that looks at disinformation, that, you know, offshoots of the internet research agency, you know, the Russian troll farm and sort of factory for disinformation also were really active on parlor as well. So there's definitely, you know, those prior studies are already there. It's established it was happening. We believe, you know, that there are, there's probably strong evidence, particularly I think among some of those folks who are user accounts that were linked to QAnon, that was probably a pretty big vector for a lot of automated content uploading and transfer and that probably foreign actors were involved there. But I think that bears greater study. Right, thanks. I know I should be switching now to audience questions, but I'm going to take moderate as prerogative because there's a topic we haven't really touched on much at all that I think it's important to hear from you on. One of the things I found really interesting reading through your report is you really did do kind of a deep dive into some of the people that had been indicted based on their role in the attack on the Capitol on January 6th. And so I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit about what you saw in terms of patterns or trends with respect to those who were indicted, their use of parlor, how they used it. I know you did a super deep dive into two individuals in particular. And I'm also interested if you can. The other thing I found very interesting about this data analysis was that correlation geographically between the residences of the indicted individuals and areas that had seen large numbers of protests and demonstrations, not all about the elections, but about COVID, about racial justice, et cetera. And some of these were demonstrations where you had antagonistical protest or counter-protest or sometimes episodes of violence, sometimes armed intimidation, those kind of things. So I'd love to hear each of you speak a little bit to this, what your research showed with respect to those who participated in and have now been indicted and start wherever you want to start. I can take the first part of that, talking about some of the folks that we took a bit of a deep dive on. We profiled two people. And I mentioned earlier that the organized groups, Oath Keepers, Pride Boys, 3% are the ones who are facing the most serious charges. The first person that we looked at was a woman named Jessica Watkins who ran an Ohio militia called the Ohio State Regular Militia that was affiliated with the Oath Keepers. And she has attracted quite a bit of media attention in large part just because she thoroughly documented her role in the attack on Parler as it was happening, everything from like taking selfies inside the building to, I'm paraphrasing, but essentially saying after the fact, yeah, we absolutely stormed the Capitol. And those posts on Parler became a big part of the Justice Department's case against her. And in terms of her activity on Parler, so you earlier maybe a little bit surprised that Ivanka Trump had joined only in December, 2020. Actually, the peak of activity, both in terms of posts and signups on Parler took place the week after Joe Biden was projected to win, which I believe was November 7th. And she joined on in December as well. So she was part of this wave of people who were just flocking to the platform in the wake of the election. And one stop this deal was kind of at its peak. And then the second person we looked at was this man named Mckayja Jackson, who's based in Arizona. He was seen on the day of the attack, affiliating with a group of Arizona Proud Boys, although he maintains he has had no contact with the organization prior to that, he's not a member. And we looked at him because I would describe him as sort of a bit of a citizen journalist slash right wing provocateur. And is really embedded in this pretty like close knit network of activists and posters. And part of what made him appealing is that he's just so prolific. And you could see what he was doing on Parler versus what he was doing on other more mainstream platforms. And you could kind of compare that distinction which I mentioned earlier where he was saving his most sort of pointed remarks for Parler. And I'll address some of the geographic questions you asked about protests. So we analyzed the residents. So we looked at the place of residence for those that were indicted. At the time we were degraded in analysis about 650 in change. And what we found was that there's a statistically significant clustering of protests. So that means around each of these residences. So that means that every person that was charged there's a clustering of protests related to ranging from COVID to BLM to stop the steal. So they're impacted by their local environment but then we looked also at the state level and this work was in collaboration with our colleagues at the Bridging Divide Initiative at Princeton. And we looked at, they looked at the state level do we expect, how many protests do we expect to see due to population? And what we see is this actually pretty complex picture where folks are probably more influenced by their local level. So the protests that are happening around them and then they're influenced at the national level. So what we saw in Texas for example was that there were a lower number of protests but we see higher number of folks that were indicted. So they're protesting against COVID lockdowns other kinds of like quote unquote COVID lockdowns, right? So COVID protection measures, I'd call them they're protesting against those but those aren't happening in their state. They're protesting against these activities in other states. So there's this, these really kind of complex decision matrix where people are impacted by both what's happening at their local level but then they see what's happening nationally and then react to that as if it's also happening where they live. Super interesting. Jesus, do you wanna jump in on this before we take a couple audience questions? I mean, I just, I think what was remarkable too when we looked at the video data. So one of the things, you know there's been some controversies even within our own team about like what does the video data mean, you know that we captured, right? There's like 69,000 posts that had videos that resolved an actual set of geo-coordinates. And for me, I mean, just because it's just so visual, it's very striking just how much of that video content got posted at a greater rate but all across the country. But there were these little pockets of high concentration, right? No surprise Washington, right? Because January 6th happened in Washington that that ranked as like the number one city where there was this pattern of high clusters. But it was really interesting to see that like St. Louis was the second highest city. And that made me wonder, what's behind that exactly? Is it because that is kind of the historical home of the origins of the Black Lives Matter movement? And there's so much tension around sort of policing and race and how much of this when we think about like localized patterns of political violence, I think that's kind of how we have to now approach this issue, right? Which is that literally, it's kind of like almost a city by city and county by county battle for the soul of Americans, right? And to kind of get them to pull back from political violence because they're reacting to what's going on really just so close to home. Yeah, I mean, they say all politics is local and all extremism is local. I don't know, it's both local and national, right? So I've been trying to skim through these questions while also listening, which is very difficult to do, I will say. But this one really intrigues me here. This question is looking at the data and how the echo chamber built up the fan fiction which then became their reality. How do we inject complete truths and complete facts? And I don't know if any of you have any answers or suggestions, but this is something I think about often too, like how do you counter this? Outside of just legislation, things like that which has its own unique challenges, what to do? I mean, I wanna go back to something that Sean has said earlier about the value of disinformation and misinformation in communities, right? The value of sharing information just generally, right? Look, who isn't a gossip in their own family, right? And there's like, there's kind of a, you can trade on that value amongst your family and friends in a very natural way, very human, right? On these network platforms, right? We have to understand that it's really less about truth and more about performance. It's an extremely performative medium. And so in political violence is based on the idea of creating a spectacle, right? In the response to a perceived slight or hurt or wrong or oppression, you name it. You cannot have political violence without the spectacle. What would be the purpose really? If people are not registering that this is happening and it's just happening in a closet somewhere, it's not effective, right? It's not an effective method of influencing people. And so this is really important to understand that it's a little bit less about truth and injecting facts, although that's important. And of course we wanna find ways to counter that. And it's more about understanding that platforms by design, unfortunately, tend to amplify this value creation, this social capital pyramid that rewards misinformation when it's shared in groups. It's just the way it works. And so the way to counter this is to regulate technology, right? So to counter this is to make platforms responsible for being more transparent around, not just content moderation choices, but literally about like what's in their algorithms, right? And then how many times are they actually seeing violations of their terms of service online? And it needs to be done with regularity. These are the kinds of things that, when radio started, when TV started, eventually Congress came around to the idea that in fact, there have to be some rules and standards. And now we've reached that point. It's really much more about regulating the technologies in a way that prohibits people from, I think, oversharing, right? Misinformation and disinformation, but others probably have some other thoughts on that. I mean, I'll add two points. I think one is potentially putting truth aside for a moment, not saying that truth is not important, but oftentimes what we find about is the truth, like Candice was kind of mentioning here, is that beating someone over the head with fact checking whenever, you know, it agreed that the fact checkers are valid, all that happens is we're angry and we dislike each other even more than we did before the process starts. So another way to think about this is how, how do we reconfigure these relationships? Who are the brokers in different communities that people trust? And also think about the kind of stickiness of once you believe something, right? Every time you encounter information, whether it's misinformation or disinformation, that can reconfigure how you make a value determination. So we can say, look at some of the early pronouncements Trump had about COVID, not being serious. So that was stickiness to folks that really believed him that didn't stick to those in their value network for those that didn't believe him. And so we can see those different configurations. So who are those brokers that potentially can have those conversations? But there's not really a quick process. And finally, one of the other problems is access to data is a huge issue from these platforms. So once they remove content, the content's not available to the public nor is it available to journalists, governments, researchers, academics. So we can't really look at, we just kind of see the fallout. And if we were lucky enough to collect some of that data before it happened, so if I'm clairvoyant, which sadly most days I'm not, then I can't collect that data because I didn't know this was about to happen. And so we don't have access to really understand what happens so we can research it, journalists can report on it. Members of government can understand and analyze policies. So having access to that data is also important. But this is gonna be a really long-term, a fairly slow process, and there's sadly no quick fix. That segues in, and this will be the last question to another one related to this, which is looking forward to 2024. We're approaching a critical point where de-platforming and third-party moderation of extremism slash misinformation, bad actors may fail given the adoption of alternate platforms with vertical integration and lack of care of reputational risks to their platform brand. What can be done to mitigate this? Such a great question. I think we're all gonna be scratching our heads and trying to figure out an answer to that for the next two, three years. One thing I wanna know is that, the Parler lawsuit against Amazon, which was lodged against Amazon immediately after Parler was taken offline first in federal court and then eventually kind of skittered over to state court where it is now in Washington state. That's still going on. And so I'm really curious to see how that will be resolved. There's obviously been a request for a summary judgment, throw it out, don't keep it, whatever. But it looks like it's gonna go to trial now sometime in February. And so that, if Amazon succeeds in convincing the court that it did not violate, it did not, there was no breach of contract with Parler. And then in fact, it was Parler that violated its terms of service and the contract and did not mind the store essentially. That has some interesting ramifications, I think going forward. It's in state court, right? And Parler, it's not totally clear to me that the lawyers for acting on behalf of Parler would pursue it in some other venue or how they could if they were reversed. But in any case, it's gonna be significant. And I think we're gonna see, I suspect actually we might have a repeat. It might not be Parler, could be truth social, which Trump ever actually does get online with his new social media platform. We'll see if the SEC allows that to go forward. It could be truth social, it could be getter, it could be rumble, it's curious to me that, I mean, there's a lot of stuff on rumble. I mean, a ton of stuff. In fact, you even have some of the indictees, right? One of whom I think actually is defending himself in the federal court here in DC, who was just airing all kinds of crazy stuff online on rumble still. And so it's curious to me that Amazon has not for whatever reasons, I'm not sure who their provider is, rumble, but it's just sort of interesting to me that large scale hosting services, like Amazon and others, haven't taken a harder look at some of these fringe platforms already. And maybe that's a conversation that needs to be had. And maybe that's something that Congress needs to really start debating now. Maybe we won't catch the 2024 wave, but it's possible. Yeah. Well, I've got so many more questions. I'd love to talk about other platforms. This is something I know, Ryan Goodman here, we're gonna hear from next has written about and done some research into places like thedonald.win, which we haven't even talked about, which had, to my mind, an enormous impact on the Stop the Steel Movement in January 6th, but I will get in trouble if I don't pass the baton here because we do have so many more great speakers. So, and for those, I know there are lots of questions that have been proposed and there will be more time later in the rest of this event for those questions. But right now, we are going to hand things over to Ryan Goodman, the editor-in-chief of Just Security, which is an online forum for rigorous analysis of national security issues, foreign policy, civil rights issues. I know Ryan very well, we've worked together before, opposed to there, it's an excellent resource. And also Justin Hendricks, who's the CEO and editor of Tech Policy Press, a nonprofit media venture focused on ideas and debate about the intersection of technology and democracy and nothing could be more critical right now. You're going to talk to us in particular, I think about the status of the two ongoing investigations. So we're talking about the congressional investigation by the House Select Committee, as well as the Department of Justice investigation. And just to kick that off, these are very different things and this is so important. The congressional investigation is in service of Congress's legislative authority and are there legislative gaps that need to be filled, the things they need to do to address and prevent this from happening again from a legislative and oversight perspective, the DOJ investigation is a criminal investigation. So off to you, Ryan and Justin. Thank you, Mary, and thanks to Candice and everyone at New America and all the other partners in this event today. Very pleased to be joining you on this anniversary of the dark day. And I appreciate Candice's opening at the event, just sort of centering us and grounding us in the atrocity of January 6th, first and foremost. So on to the next slide, I'll just quickly introduce myself. As Mary said, I'm Justin Hendricks, editor and CEO of a relatively new independent media site called Tech Policy Press and also an associate research scientist and adjunct professor at NYU School of Engineering and Ryan. Hi everyone. So I'm Ryan Gemma and I'm a professor of law at NYU School of Law and then co-editor and chief of just security. And like Justin, it's really an honor to be here with such an incredible group of experts and I'm learning so much and look forward to the rest of the conversation as well. And I think we'll go to the next slide where Ryan will describe the clearinghouse at just security. So very quickly, the clearinghouse at just security is something that Justin and I created and then curate, which we hope is just an open access public resource to anybody who wants to look at it, the general public researchers, staffers on the Hill and others. And it tries to be as comprehensive as possible in terms of collecting all the government documents, all of the documents that are being produced by the select committee. And then it's a reference point out to others research. So different organizations and academic institutions that have collected and curated and analyzed the criminal cases, for example, is a huge part of what we're trying to do there. So if also people who are in the audience think that some of their research is not in the clearinghouse, just send us a link and we're happy to add more because we want it to just be generally accessible to everyone. On to the next slide. I think one of the things that you have already got a sense from the earlier presentation here is just the scale of January 6th as a phenomenon. And I quite like this visualization which comes via Kate Starbird, a researcher at the University of Washington and it's a center for an informed public that tries to depict, and this was early work from her, it tries to depict just the kind of massive mechanism behind the big lie and how that showed the interaction between a variety of different entities and groups and groupings of people, whether political elites, media elites, supporters of the former president, and then of course extremists who ultimately were willing to do violence on January 6th and the attack on the Capitol. And we're gonna give a little update today on the investigations, chiefly the DOJ and the select committee investigations, but also a handful of others and try to relate those back to the topic of tech and social media on some level. But if you think about this general phenomenon of January 6th, there are investigations essentially looking into all aspects of what you see here in this diagram. So we'll go on to the next slide where I think Ryan will pick up. So with Mary McCord's comments as well, I think it depth tells very nicely with that, which is to think about the major or primary investigations and then the secondary ones and the major investigation on the congressional side is of course the House Select Committee, which is conducting oversight and is building in a certain sense a historical record that can go into some of the underlying causes of January 6th and on the other hand, the other primary kind of investigation is on the Department of Justice side in the criminal arena. And that's very narrowly focused on individuals and organizations that have criminal liability that can be proven in court beyond a reasonable doubt. So that's a very broad lens and a very narrow and specific lens. And then we just thought out of an effort to be a little bit more comprehensive to list a few other secondary investigations. There is an ongoing investigation in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is looking more into how the Trump White House interfered with the Justice Department to try to overturn the election, a criminal investigation in the state of Georgia in which the prosecutor is looking specifically at Trump and Giuliani and how they try to potentially interfere in the Georgia election. Civil cases that are being brought by certain members of Congress, some Capitol Police force members against multiple defendants, but definitely including President Trump, that might produce a wealth of information through civil litigation. And then the other civil case that's a very recent one is by the Attorney General of the District of Columbia, which he has taken a suit against the Oathkeepers and Pride Boys as organizations and as their members. And then the next slide just gives a little bit of a capsule summary of the Department of Justice's current body of arrests and indictments. And I just thought it'd be notable to say one thing in terms of empirical research that draws from this database. The Department of Justice states that about 2,000 to 2,500 people entered the Capitol, all of whom could be indicted, but only in a certain sense, 725 have been charged. So you have to think about if you're gonna just take the database of charges or those who have been charged open question in a certain sense, how representative they might be of the entire group of people who entered the Capitol. Just to say a few other words besides the ones that are there, but the top line one might be important to spotlight, 275 people charged with corruptly obstructing an official proceeding. And then when I get to the next slide I'm not gonna get to it yet about whether or not this will reach to the upper echelons of power. For example, maybe President Trump himself, that is one of the most talked about charges that he has some exposure for that particular charge. It did he aid in a bet the 275 or some of the 275 people that engage in the activity. Just a couple of other additional statistics that I think are useful to think about the people that have been charged and the topic of our conversation today, the majority of them, according to the George Washington University program on extremism, the majority over 77%, their charging documents are based on evidence from their own personal social media accounts or others accounts. That also might suggest something about how representative those are. More than 80 of the defendants, more than 80 have ties to the military, the vast majority of those being veterans and about 78 militia members have been charged. So that's like proud boys, Oathkeepers, three percenters. There are about 40 people who've been charged for conspiracy and the vast majority of people charged for conspiracy are proud boys, Oathkeepers and three percenters. Next slide is just up to the minute kind of information about the Attorney General's statement yesterday that he made to Mary Garland in a certain sense was addressing in part some of the criticism that there's no sign inside the Justice Department that they are in fact investigating not just the foot soldiers of people who are there, but people who might be higher up all the way to the former president of the United States. I highlighted here the key words that he uttered that suggests that the Department of Justice will in fact, follow the evidence and follow the law. And if the investigation leads to Trump then that's where they'll go. And then the last one he also says we follow the money, which indicates a wider conspiracy or organized criminal activity that might be something that would come within the lens of their investigation. One caveat to that is some people also have a nagging concern that there is no evidence to suggest or public evidence to suggest that the investigation is really that large. And we would by now probably have signs through the media that Trump associate, for example, would be subpoenaed or being called in for interviews or things like that. It's very hard for the Justice Department to keep such a massive investigation if it were ongoing under wraps. So I think the next slide is over to Justin. Okay, just to go to go quickly now through where we're at with the House Select Committee which has got spun up now up to 40 staff according to a recent report. And it's in the process of hiring additional investigators including I believe some individuals who are meant to have expertise in social media has interviewed over 300 witnesses, look at 35,000 documents. We've seen two resolutions citing contempt of Congress for Steve Bannon and for former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and 52 subpoenas including to multiple members of militia including Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and First Amendment Praetorian. So onto that next slide. And just a quick recap, I'm not gonna read all of this to give you some sense of how those subpoenas break out across individuals tied to the former president, people involved in organizing the events and rallies that led to the January 6th insurrection or led up to it. Individuals part of stop the steal effort and then former Trump officials, DOJ officials and a number of others. And I think importantly, here you're seeing the committee move reasonably quickly to lodge these subpoenas and to pursue them. And a number of observers have remarked on the pace at which they're working. So we'll go on to the next slide. I just wanted to kind of pause for a moment and remind folks of the legal remit. Of course, the select committee is looking at the facts, circumstances and causes trying to get to the bottom of what actually happened on January 6th, who's responsible and who should be held accountable. But it's also looking at a range of other things is including the activities of intelligence agencies, law enforcement, the armed forces, trying to understand what information the government had in advance of January 6th. And crucially, how the government, a big part of that question is the extent to which the government looked at evidence that was very apparent on social media sites like Parler, like the Donald, that indicated that violence may indeed occur at the Capitol. And so there is language inside the select committee legislation that talks about influencing factors and getting to the bottom of influencing factors, looking at technology, including online platforms and other factors like financing and a topic Mary brought up in my line for an influence potentially around January 6th. So a lot of the language is really looking at also then what should the government do to better repair for the future? And so what are those types of policies, protocols, processes, procedures that would permit the government to avoid a similar event attack in the future? So we'll go on to the next slide. And this is just based on a recent New York Times report. But just to give you some sense of how the committee works on the inside, they've got these color-coded teams working across different aspects of what's happening, including looking at violent extremist groups and big lie, stop the steal organization. So trying to look specifically at those elements of what happened prior to McGowan to the next slide. And I believe here I'll turn it over to Ryan. Yeah, so just wanted to pause for a moment on something that has not done much attention, which is the Senate Judiciary Committee's independent investigation. And they issued an interim report in October of 2021. And what I'd mentioned earlier, which is an investigation about how the White House interfered potentially with the Justice Department and pushed the Justice Department to open up investigations of supposed election fraud. And I do think it's an important lesson of the power of disinformation campaigns because of the kind of hydraulic pressure that was created inside the Justice Department and FBI to respond to ways in which they've been public misinformation. And just by way of political context, it's not as powerful right now in the sense of versus the Select Committee because of a 50-50 Senate that hampers their subpoena power. But it actually has a potential for life after the 22 midterm. So everybody expects that the House Select Committee will wrap up before the end of this year. But the Senate side might be able to continue. And then the last slide, I just thought we'd mention a different legal dimension of this. There is ongoing litigation around the Select Committee's work. The primary one is Trump, the former president has tried to block the White House records from being turned over to Congress. But in all likelihood, that'll be resolved fairly soon at the U.S. Supreme Court. And he has in many senses of the word a losing hand. So I do think that the Supreme Court will vindicate Congress. And then the last is just to note for folks who came to this event, there are multiple lawsuits now by some of the witnesses to try to block subpoenas, especially of their phone records. I highlighted one out of the others that that one is not like the others. Amy Harris is actually a photojournalist who was documenting the Proud Boys. And she has sued the Select Committee trying to block them from getting her phone records and the like, saying that it's her sources. And she's backed up by one of the top First Amendment lawyers in the country. And multiple journalist organizations have made statements in her favor. So she's very much unlike the others. And then I think the last slide we have is just, Justin and I thought to throw up a few ideas as to the final thoughts about what is the objective of these investigations? So one is just a shorthand here, possibility of accountability, which might occur without any shift in public opinion, but that might result in criminal referrals or other forms of accountability, truth seeking for the historical record. And that's in a large part, what the House Select Committee is trying to do and findings and frameworks that may be valuable for the future. So ways in which they certainly, at least of the Select Committee, can maybe get to some of the root causes and the ways in which social media and the like led to both the big lie and then also the radicalization and violence that we saw a year ago from today. And I think we have a slide with our contact information. And once again, we thank you for having us here today. And I look forward to hearing from anyone that has additional information that they think should be included in the Clearing House. Candice, over to you. There's so much that I realized, wow, I thought I was tracking what was happening in Congress and with the DOJ and all these different lawsuits, but I realized that it's just massive what's going on. And then it's great segue actually for our next panel because I think it really kind of sets the tone. We've talked a lot about sort of the online realities and sort of how that relates to the offline. But there is an after January 6th as well. And so for our final panel today, we're gonna be talking with Jared Holt, who in addition to being a leading expert on far-right extremism in the States is a resident fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council, a great friend and colleague and a very important thought partner for us in terms of the research that he does. Jared has just published a report on the aftermath and the impact of the insurrection on domestic extremist movements called After the Insurrection, how domestic extremists adapted and evolved after the January 6th Capitol attack. And we're gonna hear more about that from Jared and also our other guests on this panel, Shannon Hiller and Eric Ward. All of these folks are partners of ours. Shannon is also a neighbor and friend and is the executive director of the Bridging Divides Initiative, which is a nonpartisan research initiative based at Princeton University that traps and mitigates political violence in the U.S. And they've done a lot of great work over the last year trying to understand and track different events across the country without which we could not have done our research nearly as well. I also wanna welcome Eric Ward who really doesn't need a ton of introduction in the same way that Mary and all you guys don't need much introduction. But in any case, he is the executive director of the Western State Center and he's based in the great state of Washington. I hope I'm correct about that. And where he works on the challenge with the rising authoritarianism, hate and violence and with the Western State Center helps to empower marginalized communities to work at the grassroots level on trying to counter authoritarianism and attacks on democracy. Eric is a nationally recognized expert on authoritarianism and he has most recently and quite famously was awarded the Civil Courage Prize and was the first American in the 30 year history of that prize to receive that award today. So really thrilled to have all of you on this panel and in this conversation with us. I wanna start with Jared, because Jared you really did dig down to try and track what happened after the fact and what changed for some of these militia movements, white supremacist movements that we saw that were very active on the day. And we know that also the response from the tech community and the tech companies in some ways did impact that. Just the kind of the platforming and then on the individual basis but also in terms of the platforms themselves. And I just wonder if you could tell us like what changed? Quite a bit changed. Part of the reason that I wrote the report that I did and published it when I did is because extremism should be understood as a fluid really. As we do the important and incredibly necessary work of going back and making sure that we have documentation data as much information as we can about what happened so that hopefully we can learn and grow and craft policy and civil action and et cetera to combat it. It's also important to make sure that we understand how things are moving. So after the Capitol attack, a lot of the groups extremist groups and die hard Trump supporters alike went home thinking they did something really great. They were very proud of themselves. They were talking about this being the next, the first shot and the next American revolution. There was chatter of follow-up events in DC and elsewhere around the country. But then as a rest started happening and as tech platforms started cracking down on some of the most visible components of what went into January 6th, a lot of that turned into paranoia. And that paranoia effectively did lead for the most part to a on the ground organizing freeze for a couple of months. You had leaders of extremist movements like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers actively discouraging attendance at protest events. In a lot of cases, they were afraid that these events were honeypots set up by the federal government to entrap them and build out draconian anti-terrorism watch lists fulfilling their wildest fantasies of government persecution against themselves. So a lot of things have happened in the last year. Most notably, I think is sort of the decentralization of at least the organized component of extremist organizing. So instead of coming to DC for these high-profile national events like they did especially in November and December and then again in January, producing January 6th during the Stop the Steel Movement, a lot of what ended up reemerging was kind of a push down into local, regional and state level actions. And this was talked about by leaders in these movements as a way of potentially avoiding scrutiny and also of kind of leveraging as much efficacy as they could in effecting change. Often at these local levels and these regional and state levels, the knowledge and the resources to push back against these movements isn't the same as it exists on the national level where even just in the time that I've been doing this the last six or seven years has improved tremendously. Our research, our knowledge, our competence on these issues has gotten leaps and bounds better than it was when I started. But then at the same time, the ideological components of these movements have continued to crawl further into the mainstream. You have hosts on networks like Fox News, you have elected politicians like Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene. You're kind of extending their hands out to these more fringe extreme ideologies and sentiments and pulling them into the national stage. And that's concerning because when we look at who participated in the Capitol attack, there were extremist groups that were militias, definitely people who showed up with the intention to unleash violence. And then there were a whole lot of just diehard Trump supporters whose beliefs in conspiracy theories and election lies and misinformation propelled them through the doors side by side with those groups. So the ideological components are going further into the spotlight and the mainstream in conservative circles from what we found. Meanwhile, the organizing components are sort of decentralizing across the country, which I think provides kind of a unique landscape that is going to require some shifts in the way that we think about solutions to this and countering the most violent outcomes of these ideologies spreading. So I wanna get to Eric and Shannon but I wanna drill down a little bit further, Jared, on like, well, what are those shifts and also a related question, we saw also, and we're continuing to see, the doxing of individuals who are present at the Capitol, all of their information out there, we've seen also, of course, there was a leak of the oath keepers, forums and emails. What should we make of that in terms of, again, just shifts at the movement level but also shifts for the public and lawmakers, how does that relate? I think the effect it's had on the groups, especially data breaches and the increased collection of data from platforms like Parler and GAB, the hacking of data that's been provided to researchers and journalists, et cetera. It's revealing details on these groups that weren't previously known and that I think kind of puts them into a more defensive position and motivates them more to try to decentralize in that sort of way or to seek out alternative tax solutions to prevent that kind of thing from happening, whether it's encrypted chat, whether it is even, in some cases, building their own online infrastructure to try to guard against that kind of thing because for better, I mean, I guess it's the silver lining here is that although way too many people in this country, according to polling, are at least supportive or indifferent towards this, the majority, at least this point, is still not supportive of it. So there are consequences that come from it but we have learned a lot of alarming things from, for example, the oath keepers hack, some of which were sort of things that many had suspected already, like the high presence of law enforcement and military and groups like the oath keepers. But to get that confirmed and to get that on record is no small thing and to be able to quantify it and really look at it that way, I think enables research communities, journalists and even the general public to further understanding of what exactly the threat is here and it's the old rage against the machine song, right? Gotta know your enemy. So, I mean, it's interesting actually, this is from a policy perspective because we know the US military, Pentagon has been undergoing this review, they had the stand down immediately after the January 6th attack, we're looking at extremism within their ranks, little harder to do that with so many different police forces out there, no clear indication that there has been some national movement by leading policing organizations in that direction, although that's a conversation that maybe should happen. Eric, I wanna turn to you because I know this is something that you track that you understand the impact on marginalized communities in particular when police and law enforcement and members of the military show up and show out in these kind of formations, what is the psychological impact? And then how should we think about some of what Jared said in terms of the adaptation and the kind of paranoia now that may be pushing people into darker places? Certainly, I think it's an important question in terms of, there's almost a symbiotic relationship right now between the digital sphere, what happens in terms of the issue of governance or government and what's happening in the ground in communities and neither of them are the originating source. I think we have to understand that there is a connection, a dynamic that is occurring between those three spheres that are threatening democracy and opening up the space for political violence. When we think about January 6th a year ago, I first start thinking about in 2020 when FBI Director Christopher Ray told Congress that racially motivated violent extremism led by people subscribing to some kind of white supremacist type of ideology was the nation's leading domestic terrorist threat. And that was three weeks to the day before the attempted kidnapping which was initially planned as an execution of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmore. I shared those stories because I think it's important for us to understand that the real horror on January 6th was not just the white nationalist alt-right stop the steal breach of the US Capitol. It was a willingness of our institutions, right? Our systems of governance to turn a blind eye to the white nationalist violence that had been building in the country over the last four years. And also as you pointed out, the racial and political violence that resides within law enforcement and within the military that provided permission for that violence to proliferate. I think we are in a moment where these dynamics are still very much in evidence. We can talk about Portland, Oregon and what has occurred over here over the last four years. But I think it's important to talk about things that have transpired since January 6th that tell us the second important piece here which is the insurrection that began at the US Capitol on January 6th has not ended. It has spread to communities and towns around the country and who are the new targets are not elected officials sitting in Congress. They are health workers, they are educators, they are civil rights activists who are looking to address inequality and they are local government itself. The police play a significant role in this moment that I think is worth unpacking. What the role that they play is that they signal to a community whether law and order will be upheld or whether communities in their division, in their political divides will then begin to rely on their own rules of engagement in these moments. The invisibility of law enforcement should also be noted as of at least the beginning of this panel today. None of the major law enforcement associations in the country have put out messages in support of the 140 law enforcement officers who were injured at the Capitol last year. This moment in terms of law enforcement is critically important. It is being driven by its own influences of digital narratives, right? That paint law enforcement has under fire. That is not the case. Most communities, most data shows that communities are supportive law enforcement but what they want is unbiased law enforcement, law enforcement that focuses on its mission, right? Not playing into the political ideological divides that are occurring. It is a sad and frightening state of affair and I'm happy to dive more into that but I wanna say one other thing. As we talk about the dangers of law enforcement, right? The proliferation of extremism in the military, the impact that that has on local communities, right? Understanding this insurrection is still ongoing around the country. I think it's important for us to remember a few things, right? Which is that this insurrection has not gone uncontested neither before January 6th and certainly not after January 6th. We are watching elected officials, business leaders, community activists, right? Those in government begin to coalesce to respond. Here in Oregon and I'll stop here that coalescing resulted in the expulsion of a sitting state representative by the name of Mike Neerman here in Oregon who had planned his own state level insurrection weeks before January 6th. And I think it's important to note that he was removed from office by a unanimous vote. The only person who didn't vote for his expulsion was himself. That meant every Republican, every Democrat here in the state of Oregon voted to expel this elected official who had dabbled into extremism. I think we can do the same thing both national and the state level around the country. We are not powerless in this one. We're not powerless. I mean, I think that's a really good point. And I just want to note that it's a story that that particular story that you just mentioned about Mike Neerman, it hasn't really gotten a lot of coverage. And yet this would be the day to do it, right? If you're going to have a story about sort of the impact of January 6th, one year on, there's a perfect example. And it's surprising, you know, I love my former colleagues in the news business and I really respect and revere them. And of course, the institution generally, but it has been surprising the kind of lack of real dedication of resources to covering beyond Washington, beyond New York. Really, what was the impact of the local, because this is very local, very local movement. And I just want to say, you know, I was raised in a family where, you know, my father figured my uncle, he was a crime seaman investigator, right? He was a cop for 20 years. I have deep respect for the professional policing. I covered the military for a long time. Deep respect for the military. But the profound lack of leadership has been striking from, you know, large-scale organizations like the Brotherly Police and Protection Association, right? PVA, extremely shocking that we haven't heard from them. We haven't seen that kind of leadership from some of the more prominent members of the law enforcement community. While we have seen some, I think, from the Pentagon, we certainly need to see more. But you also raised, Eric, some interesting questions about the kind of the locality and the potential for both accountability and potentially reconciliation. And I know, Shannon, this is something that you think about a lot and you have been tracking at the local level as you kind of look at the unfolding of political violence over the last year. What are your takeaways from the current response to January 6th and the evolution of that response? I think we have both from domestic extremist movements but also from lawmakers and other leaders around the country. Sure. Thanks, Candice. And thanks to Jared and Eric for their critical work in this area. Candice, you said we're friends, but you're making me go right after Eric, which is we're gonna, we might have to reconsider that one. I would say too, you know, though, building off of Jared's work, we also did a little bit of an internal review of some of the weekly monitoring we do that often links to Jared and Eric's great investigations and looks at offline trends. And, you know, how do we translate those to communities so they can actually take action before they start getting momentum? And, you know, the sense I got looking back on those weeks of monitoring and reports for communities was a real profound sense of backlash, of sort of backlash too, that we, as Eric mentioned, we did have a moment of bipartisan rejection of the violence on January 6th, but it was so fleeting. We saw even as early as February more stuff, the steel demonstrations in communities, localized demonstrations around these partisan audits of established election results. And so we saw that around election trends too. You know, we also saw it around the topics you all were just digging into now. It's this constant drumbeat of racial justice issues. We were reporting on the shooting of Dante Wright, you know, mid-year, but also the many, many cases in Georgia, in Kenosha, in Charlottesville, that kind of felt like an onslaught. And so some of the progress we might have felt in what some have called racial reckoning last year and really the backlash of which led us into January 6th. We saw more of that this year. And I think there's been some really incredible writing from folks like Hikim Jefferson on how that relates to January 6th. But then, you know, it's hard to forget that we, communities were also getting ready for hot vacs summer. And then we see how quickly come July and August with the introduction of Delta, this resurgence in COVID related demonstrations. And that gets, I think, to so many of the threats and harassment we've also seen since 2020 and the uptick in the end of this year. You know, early on in the pandemic, we actually saw a mix of local demonstrations, people calling for all types of solutions to COVID and to the pandemic, people also against mandates. I mean, these are important issues that we have to find space locally to discuss. This last round of demonstrations, though, were almost exclusively anti-mandate, anti-mask. And as we've seen so prominently, often involved groups like the Proud Boys, even being applauded for intimidating local officials. So, you know, I think unfortunately, I know we're hopefully going to get into some of the positive ways we can work on this at a community level. But certainly looking back on the last year, I'm not feeling that we're in a better place than we were before January 6th of 2021. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that you mentioned the kind of the vigilantism. And I think, Eric, you were kind of alluding to this, essentially, that there's this sort of this uncapping, almost like an uncorking of vigilantism that has occurred. And we've seen that, you know, before January 6th and after January 6th, we're all tired of COVID. I don't think anybody in this country or in the world is just tired, right? And there's a lot of agonization, a lot of frustration. The ability to contain it is difficult. But I'm going to say some things that are going to potentially be controversial here. There are a lot of business owners, small, medium business owners who have been deeply impacted by what has happened with the COVID restrictions and protections and so forth. And, you know, a lot of those folks belong to a certain demographic, a certain class, and they've been really impacted, right? And so the story that they are telling themselves, which is not a wrong story, but it is a story that they have been telling themselves, is that all of this is about sort of, all of it, there's a convergence, right? You know, where the federal government is out of control and then people of color who are raising questions about the way business is done in this country when it comes to race politics and the protection of our civil rights. You know, that's also out of control. And everything's out of control. We're out of control. And I think, you know, at the local level that manifests in all kinds of different ways. We documented, Ben, in particular, the two folks that we followed and looked at, the two folks who were arrested, you know, one of them was out there with, you know, a group of proud boys in Arizona, you know, and the whole thing was to prank by ripping people's masks off their faces, right? And getting really confrontational about this stuff. So I wanna come to you, Eric, and then you, Jared, and just, you know, looking forward here, you know, what can we expect? How do we respond? What are the measures at the local level, the national level? Because I think that now that everything's decentralized, as you say, Jared, right? Like now that we see this paranoia leading to decentralization in these movements on the far right, there's a real concern that, okay, it's atomized, right? It's just out there now in the atmosphere. So what should the response be? Maybe Eric, you wanna go first? Yeah, it will be 31 years ago this spring that I physically attended. My first White Nationalist meeting. And folks can follow up to hear that story. But we've learned some things over this 31 years. And if we wanna know how an African-American can spend the day with White Nationalists, right? The key is understanding that there are three things that are driving this current moment. The first is we have to understand that this is a movement that is drawn towards a conspiratorial worldview. So they see this moment as a existential fight. And that's critical to know in formulating responses. They are seeing this moment as a fight between good or evil. The second is that Jared's report really underlined some critical pieces. While it's about the digital sphere, right? And how that manifests in the real world. We should understand that Jared is also pointing out that what we are seeing is a fully fledged social movement, right? Now it's not a social movement grounded in inclusion. It is one grounded in exclusion, but all of the variations of post January 6th that shifts the movement point to a social movement. That is what a social movement does when it finds itself in a violent moment. Whether that violent moment is January 6th, whether it is Charlottesville or whether it is Oklahoma City, this is how it responds. That tells us that what happened on January 6th was not a political discipline, but it was an attack on democracy. So the second piece is we have to remember that this was an attack, both physical and politically on democracy. The third piece that I would just say is again, we have to recognize that there are communities around the country, right? Who are trying to contest for democracy, for American democracy. And what they see signal from national organizations, from elected leaders, from government agencies tells them very much each and every day whether that fight is in vain or whether it should be continued. The real danger in this moment is actually not the insurrections, right? The January 6th investigation critically important. There are still threats that we must face, but the real threat is the inability of the federal government, right? To unify communities, to support communities in this fight for American democracy, paramilitaries that get very specific, paramilitary groups will continue to face to be a significant threat, right? We watched them here a year ago in Portland, Oregon, driving around in protest in the field in the back of pickup trucks, using paint guns to target both counter protesters and just pedestrians walking down the streets. We watched the government laugh that off as a prank or trying to get at liberals. But those of us who understand what is happening in this country understood that that was just a dry run. These are folks practicing, right? How to point live weapons at individuals on the streets and pull the trigger. We can't wait, has this evolved? So I would just say three things very quickly. The first is, is for those of us who are collecting data, right? We have to not just release our data to the media, right? We have to begin to share that data in advance with community leaders and elected officials. They shouldn't be finding out this information the same day that journalists and the rest of the public finds it out. They should have access to this data and universities and our national organization should figure out ways to facilitate that. The second is that media and journalists, this is a message and it's a hard message to deliver because journalists are under fire right now across the political spectrum, facing increased physical attacks as well. But it's important that journalists begin to cover the full story, not just militant counter protesters kicking in windows, not just white nationalists, but the law enforcement response, the business response, the response by community leaders and the impact that January 6th has had on communities. The third is simply this, we need federal agencies to step up, right? A Portland, Oregon on its best day at its most high functioning moment could not garner the resources to respond to these intrusions by authoritarians into our community. But guess what? Neither can DC, neither can Los Angeles, neither can Des Moines. We have to have federal agencies partnering with local communities if we are to push back against this authoritarian movement. And finally, a tip of the hat to the January 6th investigative community who is very much taking this seriously and understanding this will not get cleaned up in six months. This is a long arc for the struggle for American democracy. We can do it, but it has to be both a federal and a local engagement that is unified. Candice, can I just double down on something that Eric said about data with an example, even just from this past week. I think many of us watched last September as this Justice for January 6th political prisoners event in the community of folks who were watching it. Folks did not expect a big turnout, but the coverage and the ways we talked about it leading into it ended up sort of, I think there is more law enforcement and media attending last September than folks actually down the road at the Capitol. This week, we also have more of these January 6th political prisoners events that we're not expecting to be widely attended. We have seen them, they exist, but to a point in Jared's report, one of the more concerning trends there is local officials and elected leaders, at least four sitting members of Congress attending events like this and then putting that narrative back out into the public sphere. And so I think, we did a quick brief on what's the past history, where have these happened before, where are they scheduled? So that's the focus on the threat side, but to the greater point, the whole story is there's also a lot of vigils happening all around the country today, seeking to unify the country and tell a story about how we could move forward together and actually commemorate this day together. So I think just an example from this week on how do we actually action on this information as it's happening? How do we put these events and these negative narratives in context of all the other positive work that is going on? I bet that our reporting by the end of the week is gonna show there's been much greater turnout at these vigils looking to advance a unified narrative than a relatively minor turnout at these more problematic events. Yeah, great point about the Justice for J6 movement. And Jared, you do talk about this in your report. And I wonder if you could touch on that in your response and just thinking about Donald Trump today was supposed to hold one of these Justice for J6 rallies. And he, I guess, decided he wanted to shift the eye of the public elsewhere today, but we know that on January 15th will be in Arizona, which is a hotbed of this Justice for J6 movement as well as a lot of the militia members, right? And a lot of the arrestees as we've documented. Jared, talk about that a little bit. Yeah, it's, you know, even though Trump kind of bailed out of his press conference today, I can imagine it was probably even a bridge too far, all things considered for Republican allies. The fact is that, you know, at these movements, even though, I mean, to Shannon's point, even though these events aren't, you know, drawing large amounts of people, like I saw some video of people down at the Capitol this morning, you know, saying how terrible it was that, you know, the media and the Democrats or whatever are villainizing January 6th. And it was maybe like six people, Max. But then, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz show up. And like they're part of acknowledging this problem and coming up with solutions to these problems is also identifying sort of these high profile individuals who are essentially extending their handout to these causes that aren't vastly popular. There aren't 10,000 people down on the National Mall today rallying about this and using the resources and the positions they have to inject this into society. And even, you know, even if this doesn't produce 10,000 new Proud Boys recruits, it spreads this sentiment and spreads this ideology further and further. And in terms of sort of the earlier discussion of, you know, going forward with this, it's hard to come up with a whole lot else to say that Eric didn't say, just abducting the words from my brain in real time. But the, I think collaboration is a huge part of going forward because, you know, and I'm so glad you picked up on this, Eric, like as this report kind of shows like this is a social movement. This is not, you know, this weird little cluster of groups and certainly they're there and they have their own threat profiles and like reasons to keep an eye on them. But there's a broader social movement happening in this country going towards a really dangerous direction. And, you know, to combat it, you almost kind of need a counter movement. And, you know, hopefully that is one that is based in the pursuit of fact and in the, you know, preservation of multiracial democracy and equality and inclusion in this country. But, you know, I think it's imperative that the research community press concerned members of the public, activists, et cetera, like are all in communication, sharing data because, you know, getting a bunch of clicks on an article is cool, but it's not gonna save face in democracy. And then, you know, kind of zooming out to like the bird's eye view, you know, a lot of these movements capitalize on social disorder. And I think it's also important in discussions to acknowledge that fact, that, you know, social disorder is a, you know, ripe ground for people to build conspiracy theories out of for people to spread lies and foment hate out of and being able to address that social disorder and take actions to promote productive conversations and unity and sort of a collective push towards righting some of the wrongs society towards empowering disenfranchised people in society. I think it's crucial part of the equation even if it's not, you know, immediately concerned with extremist groups, it's gonna be part of the solution in getting us to the other side of this problem. So, such amazing points and like, I realize that we've just been talking to ourselves here. There's great audience Q and A, I wanna get to that because we only have a few minutes left here. At least one of the questions that I wanna raise that's been brought up here by Eddie and I'll just tail on to what Eddie has asked here. So a lot of politicians, Eddie points out, use fear to appeal to voters, right? And we've been talking about this social disorder, you know, the kind of this challenge with your identity and like, are you in or are you out? And financing those politicians and groups, you know, is a part of that appeal to fear, right? And we know also that there's kind of a convergence with online advertising and with, you know, tech platform governance and that politicians, you know, who are running for elected office who are actually even sitting in office today are doing an in run around what we would call sort of normative rules of the game. Eric, can you speak to that a little bit? Look, we know fear cells, we know that we are living in a populist moment, not just here in the United States, but globally and a populism has become the narrative regardless of the consequences. And the truth is, it gets facilitated though by things we do have control over, right? For instance, right? But the federal government could provide direct support, right, to local communities who are seeking, right, to hold accountable tech companies that are helping to facilitate habit, right? In communities, I think about six months after January 6th, and I think of the Wee salon, right? A Korean owned salon where there was a rumor that there was an individual who sexually targeted a child, right? It kicked off, it used transphobia to allow the alt-right to organize. Weekends of violence, right, that led the restabbings, right? There were beatings, there were weapons being brandished on the streets of LA with very little law enforcement intervention, by the way. But the key piece is even the best social media platforms, right, Twitter, who does take this very seriously was allowing this law to proliferate for months across social media with no response. Business owners lost days of business in the midst of a pandemic. There is no avenue for them to seek redress for data companies who are allowing this to happen. Look, elected officials will always be elected officials who peddle hate, who peddle bigotry and division rather than speaking to the actual needs of communities. But it is really digital platforms that are allowing this to proliferate and states and local communities have no recourse to hold this account. I'm pretty sure that if I set up a company that specifically by bi-prime led to the economic depression of a community, increased tension of that community would try to hold me accountable. We're just asking the federal government to open up avenues for local communities to do the same. Great point. So we have one probably just in a time for like one more question here. And it actually picks up on what you just said here, which is giving local communities avenues to respond to the proliferation of this hate online, the stoking of that violence by politicians and elected officials and even apparently members of the law enforcement, potentially members of the military. And Shannon, you and I, Jared, all of us kind of research geeks, we've talked a little bit about the challenge around data and data sharing. And one of our audience members asked, what can we do to encourage data sharing in all kinds of ways, not just tech platforms, but Shannon, you're not reporting on tech platforms, you're reporting on protests, right? But if we didn't have that information, we would never be able to kind of divine kind of these trends, right? So Shannon, to you and then maybe just 30 seconds for each of you to comment on that last before we close out. Sure, thanks, Candace. I mean, I think it gets again, it part of what Eric was highlighting as part of the purpose of the research we're doing, especially at this moment for our nation, for our democracy. I mean, I think when we reach out to folks about partnering or what we're trying to do with data and information, it's about getting it in the hands of decision makers who can help keep people safe, can find opportunities to open up dialogue, can bring critical information into their communities that will help them advocate to tackle some of these tough issues we've been discussing here today. So, I mean, I think there is some opportunity there to talk about ways we can be creative, whether it's at a federal level legislation opening up avenues for information from platforms or just between each other as researchers and organizers and anyone who, as I think Jared and Eric both eloquently put it, is trying to fight for an inclusive democracy today. So, that's part of my pitch when we're trying to break down these barriers is now is the time. And I think we've found some success in that. And I think we've also heard a lot of gratitude from communities who have been able to action on that information. And of course investment, Jared, what do you think? I think all of that is right. I think the research consortium that just security that like Justin Ryan we're talking about is like a great model of this. It's still on a national scale. So, it would probably need to look a little different on state and locales. But ultimately, I think the point is that, sharing data or sharing findings or counts or whatever you have to offer isn't just gonna happen. It takes concerted effort. It takes, sitting with what you have and thinking about who needs to see it and doing whatever you can in your power to get it there. And I don't know if the research community could just stand to, I don't know if it's just like dropping the ego a little bit or like having to come to Jesus moment, but hopefully as this next year goes on we'll see more of that. Agreed, Eric, you get the last word here. Look, and very quick, I wanna thank both Shannon and Jared and everyone on this call who have worked over the last year, over the last year to preserve American democracy. Yes, American democracy was attacked on January 6th, but it was also defended and preserved 140 law enforcement officers and many others stood their ground on that day in defense of American democracy. So did congressional members and so did leaders around the country and we should celebrate that on January 6th as well. We have work to do and data is essential to that work, right? In ensuring that that data is used at all areas of society, not just media, but at the grassroots at the government policy piece is essential. And the last thing I will say is also the sustainability of those who do that research. They are looking at some of the ugliest aspects of American society that can't but help to be absorbed right? And so as we are building these amazing set of researchers and data analysts, let us also take care of them so that this work can be sustained over the long haul. It's a pleasure to be with you all today. Thank you so much. We're gonna keep defending democracy here at New America and with all of our partners and in our lives on a daily basis. And I hope we go out and remember that today and the days going forward. I wanna thank all of our partners and especially Atlantic Council of Justice Security Bridging Divides Initiative. Thank you so much for your contributions and thank you to the panelists. We'll see you again soon.