During the course of its 18-month investigation, the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol solicited expert statements to help it better understand “the facts, circumstances, and causes” of the attack, in accordance with the law that established the body. The Committee received statements from experts across a variety of disciplines. Not all of these statements were utilized by the Committee in its final report, and many were never released publicly. But as part of its efforts to collect documents and other records for its January 6th Clearinghouse, Just Security solicited copies of the statements and published a first tranche of them in May 2023.
Since then, Just Security has secured twenty additional statements submitted for the record, focusing on issues ranging from conspiracy theories and extremism, to the role of news media such as Fox News and the role of social media platforms ranging from mainstream platforms like Instagram to alt-tech ones like Gab.
One of the statements explores a theme that is an undercurrent in many of the others. Professor Lee Bebout of Arizona State University submitted a statement titled, “Weaponizing Victimhood in U.S. Political Culture and the January 6, 2021, Insurrection.” In his statement, Bebout explores an explanatory variable tying together the seemingly disparate elements of the broader far right that came together on January 6: a pervasive sense of victimhood that attempts to justify any and all means necessary in the name of self-defense. He identifies the ways in which former President Trump and his allies weaponized a shared sense of victimhood to unite an “us” persecuted by a “them.”
Another of the statements, by Dr. Mary Anne Franks, now a professor of law at The George Washington University, explores “Social Media and the Weaponization of Free Speech.” Dr. Franks explains how “a dysfunctional, fundamentalist, and anti-democratic vision of the First Amendment fuels and protects the extremism that led to the Capitol attack, with particular focus on the tech industry’s role in promoting that vision.” Dr. Franks’ statement explains the organizational dynamics and financial interests that have subsequently led social media platforms to largely abandon protections they put in place after January 6, 2021, including restoring former President Donald Trump’s accounts and dropping policies related to false claims about the legitimacy of the 2020 election. In her view, tech platforms cloak their decisions in the language of “free speech” and “First Amendment fundamentalism” because it is useful to them. But, she argues, “The events of Jan. 6, 2021 dramatically repudiated the clichés of First Amendment fundamentalism: the belief that truth will prevail in the marketplace of ideas, that the answer to bad speech is always more speech, and that the best way to safeguard democracy is to remain passive in the face of lies, racist and misogynist propaganda, and calls to violence.”
In a similar vein, Wendy Via and Heidi Beirich, co-founders of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, submitted a joint statement titled, “The Road to January 6 and How Metastasizing Far-Right Extremism Leaves Democracy in Peril.” Via and Beirich see a clear connection between the volume of hateful, violent rhetoric on social media and the attack at the Capitol. “It is clear that Trump and those who attacked the Capitol on January 6, could not have been so successful in garnering a large hate, conspiracy, and violence-based movement without the complicity of social media companies,” they argue. “The major tech companies repeatedly made the affirmative decision to allow hate speech, lies, conspiracies, and calls for violence to thrive on their platforms, for the sake of their bottom lines.”
In another of the statements titled, “Assessing Fox News’s connection to the January 6th Capitol riot,” Dr. Reece Peck, an associate professor of Communication at the College of Staten Island, CUNY, considers the role of Fox News in contributing to a set of dynamics that “polarized the national news market along ideological lines and politicized public information in the process, setting conditions, at the macro level, for something like January 6 to occur.” Since Dr. Peck submitted his statement, Fox News was forced to settle in a suit brought against it by Dominion Voting Systems, the maker of voting machines that was the subject of conspiracy theories advanced by Fox News personalities in the runup to January 6. Dr. Peck sees limits in trying to address the dynamics that fuel Fox News through fact checking or via interventions on tech platforms. Rather, he says, investing in a healthier, pluralistic media environment is the way forward; he argues that an “expansive nonprofit media sector, like the ones we see in other major Western democracies, could temper the narrowcasting excesses of the commercial media sector and help re-normalize professional news practices and values across the entire US media ecosystem.”
As former January 6 Committee investigative counsel Jacob Glick put it in his introduction to the first tranche of statements published by Just Security, “these expert analyses should help us reject narrow explanations for the insurrection, especially the kind that attempts to whitewash the violent extremism we saw on that day and try to sweep over the true, violent potential of the movements that fueled it.” On the three-year anniversary of the attack, polling data suggest a range of false and dangerous beliefs about the events persist, particularly among Republicans and a significant percentage of Independents. It is worth revisiting these analyses for what insights they hold to help prevent future civil unrest driven by the false claims of elected leaders, extremists, and partisan news media personalities, all of which spread unchecked on social media platforms that appear ambivalent about their role in protecting democracy.
Editor’s note: The expert statements on this topic are listed below and also available at Just Security’s January 6th Clearinghouse. The 21 statements marked with an asterisk and red font were added in this second tranche.
- Carol Anderson (Charles Howard Candler Professor, African American Studies, Emory University)
“The Role of White Rage and Voter Suppression in the Insurrection on January 6, 2021”
Expert Statement - *Sara Aniano (Graduate Student, Department of Communication, Monmouth University)
“‘We Are at War’: QAnon Instagram Comments Before the Capitol Riots”
Expert Statement - Anti Defamation League
“Extremist Movements and the January 6, 2021 Insurrection”
Expert Statement 1 - *Oren Segal (Vice President, Center on Extremism), Marilyn Mayo (Senior Research Fellow, Center on Extremism) and Morgan Moon (Investigative Researcher, Center on Extremism)
“Nicholas Fuentes, the Groypers, and January 6, 2021”
Expert Statement 2 - *A.J. Bauer (Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism and Creative Media, The University of Alabama)
Expert Statement - *Lee Bebout (Professor of English, Arizona State University)
“Weaponizing Victimhood in U.S. Political Culture and the January 6, 2021, Insurrection”
Expert Statement - Heidi Beirich (Co-Founder and Executive Vice President, Global Project Against Hate and Extremism)
“The Role of the Proud Boys in the January 6th Capitol Attack and Beyond”
Expert Statement - *Heidi Beirich (Co-Founder and Executive Vice President, Global Project Against Hate and Extremism) and Wendy Via (Co-Founder and President, Global Project Against Hate and Extremism)
“The Road to January 6 and How Metastasizing Far-Right Extremism Leaves Democracy in Peril”
Expert Statement - Kathleen Belew (Associate Professor of History, University of Chicago)
Expert Statement - Ruth Ben-Ghiat (Professor of History, New York University)
“Strongmen Don’t Accept Defeat: The January 6th, 2021, Assault on the Capitol as an Outcome of Donald J. Trump’s Authoritarian Presidency”
Expert Statement - *Sam Bernard (PhD Student, University of Sussex)
“An overview of Reddit and r/The_Donald and their use by supporters of former President Trump”
Expert Statement - Bright Line Watch
John Carey (John Wentworth Professor in the Social Sciences, Dartmouth College), Gretchen Helmke (Thomas H. Jackson Distinguished University Professor, University of Rochester), Brendan Nyhan (James O. Freedman Presidential Professor, Dartmouth College) and Susan Stokes (Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago)
“The Destructive Effects of President Trump’s Effort to Overturn the 2020 Election”
Expert Statement - Anthea Butler (Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought, University of Pennsylvania)
“What is White Christian Nationalism?”
Expert Statement - Kellie Carter Jackson (Michael and Denise Kellen ‘68 Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Wellesley College)
“Understanding the Historical Context for White Supremacist Violence in America in Tandem with the Events of January 6, 2021”
Expert Statement - Chicago Project on Security & Threats
*Robert Pape (Director, Chicago Project on Security and Threats), Keven Ruby (Senior Research Director, Chicago Project on Security and Threats) and Kyle Larson (Senior Research Associate, Chicago Project on Security and Threats)
“American Face of Insurrection”
Expert Statement 1
*Robert Pape (Director, Chicago Project on Security and Threats), Keven Ruby (Senior Research Director, Chicago Project on Security and Threats) and Kyle Larson (Senior Research Associate, Chicago Project on Security and Threats)
“‘Patriotic Counter-Revolution’: The Political Mindset that Stormed the Capitol”
Expert Statement 2
*Robert Pape (Director, Chicago Project on Security and Threats), Keven Ruby (Senior Research Director, Chicago Project on Security and Threats) and Kyle Larson (Senior Research Associate, Chicago Project on Security and Threats)
“Remorse or Double-Down? Those Who Stormed the Capitol are Remorseful, but Do Not Repudiate Trump’s Big Lie”
Expert Statement 3
*Robert A. Pape (Director, Chicago Project on Security and Threats)
“How Sorry Are They? Not Enough to Accept Biden as President”
Expert Statement 4
*Robert A. Pape (Director, Chicago Project on Security and Threats)
“The Scope and Nature of the American Insurrection Movement: From The Fringe to the Mainstream”
Expert Statement 5 - Katherine Clayton (Ph.D. Candidate, Stanford University), Nicholas T. Davis (Assistant Professor, The University of Alabama), Brendan Nyhan (James O. Freedman Presidential Professor, Dartmouth College), Ethan Porter (Assistant Professor, George Washington University), Timothy J. Ryan (Associate Professor, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and Thomas J. Wood (Assistant Professor, The Ohio State University)
“President Trump’s Rhetoric Undermined Confidence in Elections Among His Supporters”
Expert Statement - *Amy Cooter (Advisor, Accelerationism Research Consortium) and Matthew Kriner (Senior Research Scholar, Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism, and Managing Director, Accelerationism Research Consortium)
“Topping Tyranny: Understanding the Militia Movement’s Role in the January 6th Insurrection and Beyond”
Expert Statement - *Patrick G. Eddington (Senior Fellow, Cato Institute)
“Lessons Learned and Caveats for the Future: The January 6, 2021, Attempted Insurrection”
Expert Statement - *Mary Anne Franks (Professor of Law and Michael R. Klein Distinguished Scholar Chair, University of Miami School of Law)
“Social Media and the Weaponization of Free Speech”
Expert Statement - Michael German (Fellow, Brennan Center for Justice, New York University School of Law)
“Why the FBI Failed to Anticipate Violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, and How to Prevent it From Happening Again”
Expert Statement - Philip Gorski (Frederick and Laura Goff Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies, Yale University)
“White Christian Nationalism: The What, When, How and Where.”
Expert Statement - *Leslie Hahner (Professor of Communication, Baylor University)
“An analysis of ‘the role that visual symbols and aesthetics play in digital infrastructure,’ and how such symbols contributed to the events of January 6”
Expert Statement - Jared Holt (Resident Fellow, Digital Forensic Research Lab, Atlantic Council)
Expert Statement - *Brian Hughes (Associate Director, Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, American University)
“An analysis of the ‘larger trends in the communication technologies with which Americans organize their social lives and, increasingly, their political activity’ which played a role on January 6”
Expert Statement - Aziz Huq (Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School) and Tom Ginsburg (Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School)
“Statement on the January 6, 2021 Attacks and the Threat to American Democracy”
Expert Statement - *Sam Jackson (Assistant Professor, University at Albany)
“The Oath Keepers: Background and Trajectory Towards the Insurrection”
Expert Statement - Michael Jensen (Associate Research Scientist, START), Elizabeth Yates (Assistant Research Scientist, START) and Sheehan Kane (Senior Researcher, START)
“Radicalization in the Ranks: An Assessment of the Scope and Nature of Criminal Extremism in the United States Military”
Expert Statement - *Ashton Kingdon (Teaching Fellow in Criminology, University of Southampton) and Christopher J. Fuller (Associate Professor, University of Southampton)
“The Rise of Alt-Tech and the Role of Gab in the January 6th Insurrection”
Expert Statement - Rachel Kleinfeld (Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)
“The Rise in Political Violence in the United States and Damage to Our Democracy”
Expert Statement - Samantha Kutner (Proud Boys Research Lead, Khalifa Ihler Institute) and Bjørn Ihler (Co-Founder, Khalifa Ihler Institute)
“Function Over Appearance; Examining the Role of the Proud Boys in American Politics Before and After January 6th”
Expert Statement - Liliana Mason (Associate Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University), Nathan Kalmoe (Associate Professor of Political Communication, Louisiana State University), Julie Wronski (Associate Professor of American Politics, University of Mississippi) and John Kane (Clinical Assistant Professor, Center for Global Affairs, New York University)
Expert Statement - Kate Masur (Professor of History, Northwestern University) and Gregory Downs (Professor of History, University of California, Davis)
“Our Fragile Democracy: Political Violence, White Supremacy, and Disenfranchisement in American History”
Expert Statement - Mary McCord (Executive Director and Visiting Professor of Law, Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, Georgetown University Law Center)
Expert Statement - Jennifer Merceica (Professor, Department of Communication, Texas A&M University)
Expert Statement - Suzanne Mettler (John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions, Cornell University) and Robert C. Lieberman (Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University)
“How Four Historic Threats to Democracy Fueled the January 6, 2021 Attack on the United States Capitol”
Expert Statement - Janai Nelson (President and Director-Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc.)
Expert Statement - *Reece Peck (Associate Professor of Communication, College of Staten Island, CUNY)
“Assessing Fox News’s connection to the January 6th Capitol riot”
Expert Statement - Trevor Potter (Founder and President, Campaign Legal Center)
Expert Statement - Candace Rondeaux (Director, Future Frontlines, New America), Ben Dalton (Open Source Fellow, Future Frontlines, New America), Cuong Nguyen (Social Science and Data Analytics Fellow, Future Frontlines, New America), Michael Simeone (Associate Research Professor, School for Complex Adaptive Systems, Arizona State University), Thomas Taylor (Senior Fellow, New America) and Shawn Walker (Senior Research Fellow, Future Frontlines, New America)
“Investigating Alt-Tech Ties to January 6”
Expert Statement - Mike Rothschild (Journalist and Author)
“A Growing Threat: How Disinformation Damages American Democracy”
Expert Statement - Andrew Seidel (Constitutional Attorney, Freedom From Religion Foundation)
“Events, People, and Networks Leading Up to January 6” and “Attack on the Capitol: Evidence of the Role of White Christian Nationalism”
Expert Statement - Peter Simi (Professor of Sociology, Chapman University)
“Understanding Far-Right Extremism: The Roots of the January 6th Attack and Why More is Coming”
Expert Statement - Southern Poverty Law Center
Michael Edison Hayden (Senior Investigative Reporter and Spokesperson, Intelligence Project), Megan Squire (Senior Fellow, Intelligence Project) Hannah Gais (Senior Research Analyst, Intelligence Project) and Susan Corke (Director, Intelligence Project)
Expert Statement 1
Cassie Miller (Senior Research Analyst, Intelligence Project) and Susan Corke (Director, Intelligence Project)
Expert Statement 2
Michael Edison Hayden (Senior Investigative Reporter and Spokesperson, Intelligence Project) and Megan Squire (Deputy Director for Data Analytics and OSINT, Intelligence Project)
Expert Statement 3 - Jason Stanley (Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy, Yale University) and Federico Finchelstein (Professor of History, The New School)
“The Fascist Danger to Democracy Represented by the Events of January 6, 2021”
Expert Statement - *Alexandra Stein (Visiting Research Fellow, London South Bank University)
“Political Cults and the Use of Cultic Tactics in the Recruitment and Mobilization of Participants in the January 6 Attack on the Capitol.”
Expert Statement - Amanda Tyler (Executive Director, Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, and Leader, Christians Against Christian Nationalism Initiative)
“Introduction” and “Christian Responses to Christian Nationalism After January 6”
Expert Statement - *Tech Against Terrorism
“Examining Tech Platforms’ Moderation Actions and Policies Related to the Attack on January 6 and Their Impact on Online Extremist Behaviour”
Expert Statement - *Scott Varda (Associate Professor of Communication, Baylor University)
“An analysis of the role of ‘Sovereign Citizens’ on January 6”
Expert Statement - Wendy Weiser (Vice President for Democracy, Brennan Center for Justice, New York University School of Law)
Expert Statement - *Stuart Wexler (Historian and Author)
“Themes drawn from an analysis of acts of domestic terrorism in American history”
Expert Statement - Andrew Whitehead (Associate Professor of Sociology, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis) and Samuel Perry (Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Oklahoma)
“What is Christian Nationalism?”
Expert Statement - *Andrew Whitehead (Associate Professor of Sociology, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis) and Samuel Perry (Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Oklahoma)
“The Role of Christian Nationalism on January 6 and After: What National Survey Data Tell Us”
Expert Statement - Christine Whitman (Former Governor, New Jersey), Steve Bullock (Former Governor, Montana), Jim Hood (Former Attorney General, Mississippi), Tom Rath (Former Attorney General, New Hampshire), Trey Grayson (Former Secretary of State, Kentucky) and Frankie Sue Del Papa (Former Secretary of State, Nevada)
Expert Statement
- *Heather J. Williams (Associate Director, International Security and Defense Policy Program, RAND Corporation) and Alexandra T. Evans (Policy Researcher, RAND Corporation)
“Extremist Use of Online Spaces”
Expert Statement