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Now major platforms have to sift through the mess and make decisions about what they’re willing to tolerate and enable

“Twitter employees have coordinated with the Democrats and the Radical Left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me — and YOU, the 75,000,000 great patriots who voted for me,” the posts said. They added: “We have been negotiating with various other sites, and will have a big announcement soon, while we also look at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future. We will not be SILENCED!”

Twitter removed those new tweets from the @POTUS account soon after they were posted, saying the move was consistent with its policy against using other accounts to try to evade a suspension. “For government accounts, such as @POTUS and @WhiteHouse, we will not suspend those accounts permanently but will take action to limit their use,” a Twitter representative said.

Twitter and Facebook’s actions to shut off two of the largest megaphones Mr. Trump has relied on for years to communicate with the public highlights the difficult position social-media platforms face in regulating controversial content on their platforms.

Mr. Trump had more than 88 million followers on Twitter and more than 35 million on Facebook.

“These two Tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behavior from this account in recent weeks.”

“In light of this ongoing and urgent public safety threat, we are suspending the app’s listings from the Play Store until it addresses these issues,” a Google representative said.

Mr. Trump had tweeted three times since regaining account access Thursday. In his first post, he tweeted a video condemning the violence at the Capitol and acknowledging that a new administration would be inaugurated Jan. 20, without specifically naming Mr. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.

They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

Mr. Trump won more than 74 million votes, seven million less than Joe Biden received.

Google said it acted because of “continued posting in the Parler app that seeks to incite ongoing violence in the U.S.,” which violated its requirements for sufficient moderation of egregious content for apps it distributes.

Twitter earlier Friday shut off the accounts of Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, and Sidney Powell, a lawyer who worked alongside Mr. Trump’s legal team. The company also said Friday that it suspended several accounts associated with the far-right conspiracy group QAnon for violating its policy on coordinated harmful activity.

“the world’s largest social media companies finally do the right thing and deplatform the inciter-in-chief before another person is killed or another cherished piece of our democracy is violated.”

American protesters wanted to overturn an election; Germany’s wanted to overturn a set of policies. And most importantly, while some far-right populist politicians backed the Berlin demonstrations, they did not have the support of the country’s leader.

What connects the protesters on both sides of the Atlantic is a deep distrust in officials and a belief in conspiracy theories. In fact, many in both countries believe in the same conspiracy theories. The QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that President Trump will defend the world from a vast network of Satanists and pedophiles, is shockingly popular with many in Germany’s anti-lockdown movement, as it is with the president’s fiercest partisans at home.

The similarity that struck me most, however, was how aimless and lost some of the rioters both in Berlin and Washington appeared to be once they had reached their target

Is this their revolution? A bunch of selfies?

It seems like protesters on both sides of the Atlantic long for some sort of control, and want to assert their power over legislative headquarters that they see as representative of their oppression. But all they get in the end is a cheap social media surrogate

Political compromise, and ultimately, reconciliation, starts with recognition. But real-world politics cannot follow those who become believers in their alternate realities. A different strategy is needed.

Instead, to protect our democracies, we must watch them, contain them, and take away their guns.

he made this association: “Censorship does not make us wiser. It does not make us better informed. If it did, we’d be speaking Russian right now. The Soviet Union would run the world; it would have worked. But, instead, the Soviet Union is extinct. It collapsed under the weight of its own absurdities, absurdities abetted by censorship,” he said, working up to this point: “And that’s the most basic lesson of dictatorships, all of them. Anything built on lies falls apart over time.”

Except that’s not true anymore. Lies are working well these days, thanks to all the soft places they have to lay their eggs. As proof, we have Donald Trump, whose lies during the 2016 presidential campaign secured an electoral college victory. We have QAnon, the vile conspiracy-theory community knocking on the door of Congress. And we have “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” a program so stocked with deception and misdirection that it racked up the biggest ratings numbers in cable-news history earlier this year.

independents — especially recently arrived Spanish-speakers — are seen as more up for grabs because they’re less tied to U.S. political parties and are more likely than longtime voters to be influenced by mainstream news outlets and social media.

The GOP under Trump mastered social media, especially Facebook use, in 2016 and even Democrats acknowledge that Republicans have made inroads in the aggressive use of WhatsApp encrypted messaging.

Valencia bills her Spanish-language YouTube page, which has more than 378,000 followers, as a channel for geopolitical analysis. But it often resembles English-language right-wing news sources, such as Infowars, sharing conspiracy theories and strong anti-globalization messages.

In South Florida, veteran Latino Democratic strategist Evelyn Pérez-Verdia noticed this summer that the WhatsApp groups dedicated to updates on the pandemic and news for the Colombian and Venezuelan communities became intermittently interspersed with conspiracy theories from videos of far-right commentators or news clips from new Spanish-language sites, like Noticias 24 and PanAm Post, and the YouTube-based Informativo G24 website.

“I’ve never seen this level of disinformation, conspiracy theories and lies,” Pérez-Verdia, who is of Colombian descent, said. “It looks as if it has to be coordinated.”

Some of the information shared in chat groups and pulled from YouTube and Facebook goes beyond hyperbolic and caustic rhetoric.

Political campaigns, social justice movements and support groups have followed along, making WhatsApp a top tool for reaching voters in Latin America and from Latin America.

unlike the conspiracy theories that circulate in English-language news media and social media, there’s relatively little to no Spanish-language media coverage of the phenomenon nor a political counterpunch from the left.

Bula-Escobar, who’s also a frequent guest on Miami-based Radio Caracol — which is one of Colombia’s main radio networks and widely respected throughout Latin America — has gained an increasing amount of notoriety for pushing the claim, often seen as anti-Semitic, that billionaire George Soros is “the world’s biggest puppet master” and is the face of the American Democratic Party.

“Who’s going to celebrate the day, God forbid, Trump loses? Cuba; ISIS, which Trump ended; Hezbollah, which Obama gave the greenlight to enter Latin America; Iran; China … All the filth of the planet is against Donald Trump. So, if you want to be part of the filth, then go with the filth,” Bula-Escobar said in a recent episode of Informativo G24.

On Facebook, a Puerto Rican-born pastor Melvin Moya has circulated a video titled “Signs of pedophilia” with doctored videos of Biden inappropriately touching girls at various public ceremonies to a song in the background that says, “I sniffed a girl and I liked it.” The fake video posted on Sept. 1 has received more than 33,000 likes and 2,400 comments.

various fake stories across WhatsApp and Facebook claim that Nicolás Maduro’s socialist party in Venezuela and U.S. communist leaders are backing Biden.

“It’s really just a free-for-all now,” said Raúl Martínez, a Democrat who served as mayor of the largely conservative, heavily Cuban-American city of Hialeah for 24 years and is now host of a daily radio show on Radio Caracol. “It’s mind boggling. I started in politics when I was 20. I’ve never seen it like this.”

“When I hear from other stations, they haven’t just sipped the Kool-Aid. They drank the whole thing,” Martínez said.

Radio Caracol, for its part, received unwelcome attention Aug. 22 when it aired 16 minutes of paid programming from a local businesssman who launched into an anti-Black and anti-Semitic rant that claimed a Biden victory would mean that the U.S. would fall into a dictatorship led by “Jews and Blacks.” The commentator claimed that Biden is leading a political revolution “directed by racial minorities, atheists and anti-Christians” and supports killing newborn babies

on Friday, the editor of the Spanish-language sister paper of The Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, publicly apologized for its own paid-media scandal after running a publication called “Libre” as a newspaper insert that attacked Black Lives Matter and trafficked in anti-Semitic views.

"What kind of people are these Jews? They're always talking about the Holocaust, but have they already forgotten Kristallnacht, when Nazi thugs rampaged through Jewish shops all over Germany? So do the BLM and Antifa, only the Nazis didn't steal; they only destroyed,” the ad insert said.

“It’s not right wing. I don’t have a problem with right-wing stuff. It’s QAnon stuff. This is conspiracy theory. This goes beyond. This is new. This is a new phenomenon in Spanish speaking radio. We Cubans are not normal,” Tejera laughed, “but this is new. This is crazy. This is f---ing crazy.”

But the cases of Crews, Caputo, and Paul Alexander suggest an additional conclusion: that people whose jobs require them to provide “alternative facts” on a regular basis might eventually break under the strain.

Caputo may well represent the face of a second-term Trump administration. Instead of people with expertise and competence, the White House and Cabinet agencies will contain ideologues with no experience—or, worse, ideologues with a long record of bad judgment and terrible errors

another HHS political appointee, Paul Alexander, regularly sent emails harassing employees of the CDC. He described its deputy director, the physician Anne Schuchat, as “duplicitous” for saying she hoped the country could “take [the pandemic] seriously and slow the transmission … we have way too much virus across the country.” Alexander also regularly sought to censor weekly scientific and statistical reports—the “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report,” to be precise—written by the nation’s most important public-health institution, describing them as “hit pieces” targeting the Trump administration.

in this election year we are grappling with something entirely new. The president, the Republican Party, and its campaign machine are collectively seeking to create a completely false picture of the world

This isn’t just a matter of wishful thinking or a few white lies. The president’s campaign staff needs voters to believe that the pandemic is over, or else that it never mattered; that 200,000 people did not really die; that schools aren’t closed; that shops aren’t boarded up; that nothing much happened to the economy;

that America is ever more respected around the world; that climate change isn’t real; that the U.S. has no legitimate protesters, only violent thugs who have been paid by secretive groups.

It is easy to see why Trump appointees who work in institutions that deal with science and public health might be the first to break: Their jobs require them to grapple every day with data that they have to deny.

The adherents of the QAnon cult may have literally been driven past the point of reason. In order to make sense of the world they can see all around them, they have created an elaborate and obviously false explanation—that an omniscient Trump is fighting a cabal of deep-state satanists and pedophiles.

No wonder Republicans, instead of shunning QAnon believers, are working to elect some of them to Congress in November. They genuinely serve a function, helping Trump supporters navigate the gap between the reality they live in and the fiction they see on Fox and Facebook.

he only historical parallels come, inappropriately, from Stalin’s Soviet Union, Maoist China, and other regimes that created elaborate propaganda versions of the world and then forced people to pretend they were true.

But those alternative realities were backed up by violence. America does not have that kind of police state.

On ABC, the mood was different. Mr. Biden and Mr. Stephanopoulos engaged in a sober policy conversation more suited to a Sunday morning public-affairs broadcast.

The tone tensed up when Mr. Biden declined, as he has several times, to fully explain his view on expanding the Supreme Court. “Don’t voters have a right to know where you stand?” Mr. Stephanopoulos asked.

in the health crisis and urged people to “use the word ‘cure’” in reference to emerging therapies to treat the virus, even though no treatment has emerged that meets that description.

“On the masks, you have two stories,” Mr. Trump said, claiming falsely that most people who wear masks contract the virus.

Perhaps notably, Mr. Trump said he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power after the election — a promise he declined to make in the first debate — though he quickly added the qualification that he would insist on an “honest election” and raised unsubstantiated theories about voter fraud

Biden suggested making masks and vaccines mandatory.

Mr. Trump minimized the danger of the virus, despite having been hospitalized after falling ill with it. He has poked fun at Mr. Biden for wearing a mask and has resisted the idea of making masks mandatory. Mr. Trump has theatrically removed his mask at his campaign rallies; Mr. Biden disclosed that before walking onstage, he had been wearing two masks, a preventive measure that some doctors say is effective.

Trump clung to an unpopular posture on masks and the pandemic.

He tried to twist the position of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s foremost infectious disease expert, on masks. And he dismissed the scientific consensus.

refusal to condemn white supremacy during the first presidential debate

Election Day whether he supports expanding the number of seats on the Supreme Court. But he said he wanted to wait until after the Senate had acted on the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Mr. Biden has made it clear in the past that he did not support the idea. He has avoided the question during the campaign by saying he didn’t want to play into Mr. Trump’s hands and turn attention away from what Republicans were doing with the Ginsburg vacancy. But he agreed with the moderator, George Stephanopoulos, that voters had a right to know his views, and he set out a schedule for disclosing them.

“So, he says that the voters should know his position on this issue, but not until the confirmation process has concluded. By that time, a majority of voters will have already voted, including this voter.”

Still M.I.A.: a second-term Trump agenda.

But the lack of a vision for the next four years — and for navigating the remaining months and years of the pandemic — is a glaring and unaddressed weakness for Mr. Trump. When Ms. Guthrie gave him a chance to make his closing pitch for another four years, he began, “Because I’ve done a great job.” There were few other specifics beyond the classic Trumpian boast. “Next year,” he promised, “is going to be better than ever before.”

What if Biden loses?

But they made an even more devastating case by chronicling his inaction as commander-in-chief during the most frightening moments of the siege with clips from Twitter, Parler and YouTube; cell phone footage from reporters and members of Congress; desperate police radio dispatches calling for backup; officer body camera footage that was marked as being obtained by the US attorney's office; and an array of surveillance camera footage from across the Capitol that captured a bird's-eye view of key moments.

Wielding the element of surprise by unearthing many previously unreleased videos, they showed the harrowing moments where then-Vice President Mike Pence, his wife and daughter, were rushed to safety down a narrow stairway on the Senate side of the Capitol. They juxtaposed that surveillance video from an overhead Capitol camera with a video shot from within the angry mob outside chanting "Hang Mike Pence!" -- then crystallized the danger with a chilling photograph of a noose and a gallows that was erected that day outside the Capitol.

The managers tried to give it all context by showing Trump's tweet attacking Pence two minutes before the vice president was evacuated down those steps

To rebut Trump's defenders' claims that he did not incite violence and had no bearing on the events that unfolded that afternoon, the managers then showed video of a Trump loyalist outside the Capitol reading the former President's tweet accusing Pence of disloyalty in real time over a bullhorn as anger mounted.

Never before in history have Americans seen one attack on their nation from so many different perspectives. For hours, the managers outlined in painstaking detail what unfolded in each critical minute of the siege with timestamps — later played back against the President's actions or inaction. Sometimes, they showed the same few minutes or seconds from the vantage point of two or three different videos to punctuate their arguments. The montages were brutal, searing and unforgettable.JUST WATCHED'Storm the Capitol!': Rioters react to Trump speechReplayMore Videos ...MUST WATCH PlayM19.15 55.34l30.07-20a4 4 0 0 0 0-6.66l-30.07-20A4 4 0 0 0

At another point, impeachment managers tried to portray the danger that staff members felt as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was being hunted down by rioters who pounded on doors demanding to know where she was.

"They're pounding the doors trying to find her," the aide whispers into the phone. The bookend to the call was a video from minutes later, showing a rioter jamming his shoulder into an outer door and then breaking through near where they were hiding, before turning away.

In another near miss, new surveillance video showed Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman sprinting down a Senate hallway to respond to the breach, encountering Sen. Mitt Romney and gesturing for the Utah Republican, who had been critical of Trump's baseless election rhetoric, to turn and run in another direction to avoid encountering the mob.

The Democratic managers also used shaky, disjointed video to try to capture the confusion and fear that ensued when a Capitol Police officer shot pro-Trump rioter Ashli Babbitt

The gunshot is heard, then a gasp of profanity capturing the fear in that moment: "Take your pins off," members are heard telling one another. Swalwell noted that the buzzing sound in the background of the video emanated from the gas masks members were holding.

At 4:17 p.m. Trump finally tweeted an on-camera message telling rioters to disperse. A video displayed during the trial Wednesday showed the "QAnon Shaman" Jacob Chansley, who was seen inside the Capitol dressed in horns, a fur headdress and red, white and blue face paint, back outside on Capitol grounds telling others a short while later that Trump had released a video message conveying that they should all now go home.

Since its founding in 2003, 4chan has attracted a unique population of deeply cynical men, once all young, but now aged from their 40s down to their teens, who generally use the board to express their angst through dark humor. People who are unhappy with the circumstances of their life tend to retreat there. The unhappier they are, the longer they stay and the more they post.

The memes about a new civil war spread from /k/ to various groups on Facebook and Reddit, all with names that evoked the terms boogaloo, igloo, or luau. Enthusiasts also congregated in group chats using services such as Discord.

The message board /k/’s culture overlapped heavily with 4chan’s virulently racist politics discussion board /pol/. However, by 2017, the movement that had developed there—the alt-right—had largely imploded, after the disastrous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

By 2018, as talk of fascism declined on /pol/, the more libertarian and less overtly racist culture of 4chan’s /k/ and the boogaloo movement began to fill the empty niche.

The co-option of Hawaiian imagery and igloos was inherently cynical and meaningless. There was no connection to the group’s ideology outside of the linguistic resemblance of the word boogaloo to igloo and luau. But this co-option fit the ethos of online spaces perfectly, with a niche group celebrating its anti-government, libertarian views by draping them in colorful jokes and nonsense that could be remixed and reinterpreted endlessly.

The politics of the boogaloo boys are deeply contradictory and varied but can be roughly summed up by a few agreed-upon ideas. They are libertarian, in favor of gun rights, and opposed to government police forces. Many users say they are active-duty service members or military veterans.

As with the alt-right, many boogaloo posts are about men in crisis, humiliated or debased. Intermingled with memes about revolution are nostalgic images and video clips, glitched out to look like old VHS tapes, of what they imagine was the ideal existence: being the patriarch of a middle-class American nuclear family sometime between the 1950s and the 1990s.

The catalyst was similar to what mobilized so many young people on the left: the notion that the government enriched a privileged few at the expense of the people. In this, the boogaloo boys shared the anti-corporatist left’s belief that the government had betrayed public trust by maintaining a growing police force to perpetuate an unjust status quo.

I’m not surprised by the odd mixture of ideologies that the boogaloo movement encompasses. One of my first sources was a chan-going Black man in his 30s, an accelerationist Communist who was friends with a variety of radicals, including many in the alt-right. What these men shared was years of marginalization and a hatred of the present state of society.

As decades of rising inequality produced successive generations who felt they were consigned to the fringes, 4chan became an outlet to express rolling waves of escapist memes and radical anger. Among the left, this uptick in radicals and the corresponding increase in funding for law-enforcement agencies have generated further support for protests aimed at defunding the police and diverting the funds to social programs

But 4chan occupies a unique place on the social web, distinct from more mainstream sites. If 4chan’s history is any indication, it’s extremely likely that some portion of these social-media users and posters on /k/ are federal agents. Having interviewed many young men who ran chan-style sites, I know that state security agencies knock on their doors early and often and ask for comprehensive records.

before most people, including myself, got wind of the boogaloo movement, Rutgers University had generated a “contagion and ideology report” for law-enforcement agencies in February that detailed the group’s online network. Its conclusion: The boogaloo boys are terrorists. Its recommendations: more law enforcement, more surveillance.

It’s sad that voters feel like they only have a choice between democratic socialism and white supremacy.

Ms. Witzke’s ascent in Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s home state may be the nadir of the Delaware Republican Party’s rapid swerve from patrician moderation to the far-right fringe

Republicans running statewide are facing a choice: Appeal to the vocal extreme or find some way to assemble a more centrist coalition that could actually elect them.

That was an easy case to make not long ago in tiny Delaware, population 974,000, where “the Delaware way” was a model of centrist political accommodation.

The F.B.I. has warned that QAnon poses a potential domestic terrorism threat.

“People are so tired of George Bush-era politics. Nationalist populism is the future,” Ms. Witzke said. “America First is the future. And that is what I am.”

The Republican Party has to be open-minded about the people who live in this country and get back on some sort of track that makes sense to the average voter,

You can’t just have ideological beliefs that don’t appeal to a majority of people in a state — or the country.

Ms. Witzke’s message to moderates, she said: “It’s me or Antifa.”

On Wednesday, a day after Mr. Trump’s Proud Boys remarks during the first presidential debate, Ms. Witzke took to Twitter to create more headaches for her party. “The Proud Boys showed up to one of my rallies to provide free security for me when #BLM and ANTIFA were protesting my candidacy,” she wrote, neglecting to mention that the Proud Boys outnumbered the McDole family protesters at the event.

“We are sick and tired of pandering and people electing government officials who will cave to the mob,”

Gathered with her in the parking lot of the Republican Party headquarters here was a self-appointed security guard with a gun on his hip, a political adviser whose losing clients include candidates accused of racism and anti-Semitism, and a smattering of Proud Boys, the far-right brawlers whom President Trump told to “stand back and stand by.”

Thus began the coddling of the populist mind

Disagreement on the right quickly came to be seen as synonymous with disrespect. If “we the people” (the term Trump partisans apply to what they call the “real America”) believe something, then the people deserve to have that view reflected right back to them by their politicians and pundits.

Repeatedly, Fox leaders and personalities who did not seem to believe the 2020 election was stolen referred to the need to “respect” their audience by telling them otherwise. For these Fox staffers, respecting the audience didn’t mean relaying the truth (a true act of respect). Instead, it meant feeding viewers’ insatiable hunger for confirmation of their conspiracy theories.

Politicians are always tempted to pander, but rarely do you see such a complete abdication of anything approaching true moral or political leadership as what transpired at the Waco rally

It’s common to critique the Trumpist movement as a Donald Trump cult, but that’s not quite right anymore. He’s still immensely influential, but do true cultists boo their leader when he deviates from the approved script? Yet that’s what happened in December 2021, when parts of a Dallas rally crowd booed Trump when he said he’d received a Covid vaccine booster. And does anyone think that Trump is a QAnon aficionado? Yet in 2022 he boosted explicit Q content on Truth Social, his social media platform of choice.

There may have been a time when Trump truly commanded his movement. That time is past. His movement now commands him. Fed by conspiracies, it is hungry for confrontation, and rallies like Waco demonstrate its dominance

he started receiving death threats. People said they wished he and his family had been killed by drug lords, told him that “sooner or later your punishment will arrive” and proposed that he be nailed into a coffin or run over by a cement roller.

Mr. Moreno, who grew up in Colombia, began working as a researcher in a computer science and robotics lab in Paris in 1983; the career that followed involved creating a start-up, meeting the Dalai Lama and being named a knight of the Légion d’Honneur. His work has won several awards and spanned many fields — automotive, medical, nuclear, military, even home goods.

Many of the recent threats have been directed at scientists studying Covid-19. In a survey of 321 such scientists who had given media interviews, the journal Nature found that 22 percent had received threats of physical or sexual violence and 15 percent had received death threats

Last year, an Austrian doctor who was a vocal supporter of vaccines and a repeated target of threats died by suicide.

increasingly, even professors and researchers without much of a public persona have faced intimidation from extremists and conspiracy theorists.

Around 2010, he started thinking about how technology could help create sustainable cities. Eventually, he refined his ideas about “human smart cities” and “living cities” into his 2016 proposal for 15-minute cities.

The idea owes much to its many predecessors: “neighborhood units” and “garden cities” in the early 1900s, the community-focused urban planning pioneered by the activist Jane Jacobs in the 1960s, even support for “new urbanism” and walkable cities in the 1990s. So-called low-traffic neighborhoods, or LTNs, have been set up in several British cities over the past few decades.

Critics of 15-minute cities have been outspoken, arguing that a concept developed in Europe may not translate well to highly segregated American cities. A Harvard economist wrote in a blog post for the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2021 that the concept was a “dead end” that would exacerbate “enormous inequalities in cities” by subdividing without connecting them.

Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist with four million Twitter followers, suggested that 15-minute cities were “perhaps the worst imaginable perversion” of the idea of walkable neighborhoods. He linked to a post about the “Great Reset,” an economic recovery plan proposed by the World Economic Forum that has spawned hordes of rumors about a pandemic-fueled plot to destroy capitalism.

A member of Britain’s Parliament said that 15-minute cities were “an international socialist concept” that would “cost us our personal freedoms.” QAnon supporters said the derailment of a train carrying hazardous chemicals in Ohio was an intentional move meant to push rural residents into 15-minute cities.

“Conspiracy-mongers have built a complete story: climate denialism, Covid-19, anti-vax, 5G controlling the brains of citizens, and the 15-minute city for introducing a perimeter for day-to-day life,” Mr. Moreno said. “This storytelling is totally insane, totally irrational for us, but it makes sense for them.”

The multipronged conspiracy theory quickly became “turbocharged” after the Oxford protest, said Jennie King, head of climate research and policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that studies online platforms.

“You have this snowball effect of a policy, which in principle was only going to affect a small urban population, getting extrapolated and becoming this crucible where far-right groups, industry-sponsored lobbying groups, conspiracist movements, anti-lockdown groups and more saw an opportunity to insert their worldview into the mainstream and to piggyback on the news cycle,”

The vitriol currently directed at Mr. Moreno and researchers like him mirrors “the broader erosion of trust in experts and institutions,”

Modern conspiracy theorists and extremists turn the people they disagree with into scapegoats for a vast array of societal ills, blaming them personally for causing the high cost of living or various health crises and creating an “us-versus-them” environment, she said.

“I am not a politician, I am not a candidate for anything — as a researcher, my duty is to explore and deepen my ideas with scientific methodology,” he said. “It is totally unbelievable that we could receive a death threat just for working as scientists.”

The FBI, for the first time, has also identified fringe conspiracy theories as a risk factor for domestic terrorism, citing QAnon, which says that an active deep-state conspiracy is trying to take down Trump.

As a Muslim American, I have been asked for 18 years to denounce violent Muslim extremism done by terrorists I’ve never met. My loyalty and patriotism are interrogated, questioned, and treated as suspect. So what do we say to those who enable and promote a white-nationalist ideology?

Finally, people of color can no longer shoulder this burden alone. We need all Americans to step up, to stand with those targeted for violence, because hashtags and tweets won’t cut it any longer

The fact that, for some reason, it took President Trump’s Department of Defense more than three hours to deploy the National Guard to the Capitol on January 6 doesn’t concern former Vice President Mike Pence, who was targeted by the mob. He finally broke his silence on Wednesday—only to push an op-ed based on the big election lie and blasting “leftists” who “want you powerless at the ballot box.”

the threat to our democracy is coming from conspiracy theorists in the Republican party

Per the 20th Amendment, the only way someone else could serve as acting president is if Congress determined that neither the president-elect nor vice president-elect has qualified by Inauguration Day. However, seeing as the results of the election declaring Biden victorious were certified, the window for such a possibility has closed.