The mob violence that descended on the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday was the culmination of weeks of incendiary rhetoric and increasingly feverish planning – much of which took place openly on websites popular with far-right conspiracy theorists.
Jared Holt spends a lot of time on those websites. He’s a visiting research fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, where he has been focused on extremist online activity.
Since November’s election, Holt has seen websites like Parler, Gab, TheDonald, and MeWe fill with torrents of “conspiracy theories, disinformation and outright lies about the results of the election,” he says. “And those lies often came from the top arbiters of power in the Republican Party, notably President Donald Trump himself.”
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