
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
In the final days before Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in early 2023, the Democrats who controlled the January 6 committee released hundreds of transcripts, emails, and reports. Because Republicans planned to abolish the committee when they took over, the Democrats gave the documents to the U.S. Government Publishing Office, which posted them on a little-noticed website.
Scattered throughout the site were more than a dozen interviews with people who had invaded the Capitol or otherwise been involved in the insurrection. It took me some time to decipher the messy system for storing the transcripts—it was like the Democrats had tossed the transcripts in a closet as they were rushing to vacate an apartment—but I eventually identified the ones for the January 6 attackers. Individually and collectively, the interviews told a detailed story about the attackers’ backgrounds, education, occupations, sources of political information, and what motivated them to come to Washington to join Trump’s protest. The investigators were methodical and asked similar questions of each person.
As I compiled quotes of the attackers, two patterns emerged. One involved the social media that the insurrectionists used to connect with one another and get their political news. The investigators asked them if they relied on widely used platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram, and also asked about smaller apps and sites that were used by conservatives and the far right such as 4Chan, Gab, Truth Social (founded by Donald Trump), and Parler. But the transcripts revealed the smaller conservative sites were not popular with the people who stormed the Capitol. When the investigators asked about social media, they heard one answer over and over.
Facebook.
The investigators found a similar pattern when they asked about news sources. The January 6 attackers had some variety in the sites they used to keep up with politics—a few occasionally looked at the mainstream media and a couple of them said they even checked out the much-derided CNN—but there was one source that nearly every one mentioned.
Fox News.
https://webharvest.gov/congress117th/...
Eric Barber
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