We Need to Understand How We Got to January 6 Before We Can Move Forward

The Mother Jones Podcast explores how the Capitol attack was a recruitment event.

Julio Cortez/AP

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The deadly insurrection at the US Capitol wasn’t the start of something, nor was it the end. What happened on January 6 had been planned for weeks, and the ideology behind it had been brewing for years. That day’s chaos was the moment in which a dangerous mix of far-right factions came together in a way that won’t be disentangled anytime soon. 

Even now, some five months later, there’s still so much to process and still so many questions to answer (especially as Republicans work to forget the deadly attack ever happened). So at Mother Jones, we’re continuing to unpack what led to that day and what has followed.

In last week’s episode of the Mother Jones Podcast, we brought you the story of an unlikely insurrectionist: Dr. Simone Gold, a Stanford-educated lawyer and emergency room physician who ended up on an FBI most wanted poster. And this week, with the help of Mother Jones disinformation reporter Ali Breland, we explore the historical foundations of modern political fringe movements, like QAnon, and consider how they are the outgrowth of paranoid conspiracy-mongering politics that have taken root across the US over the last century.

We hear from a former Oath Keeper about why he joined and later left the extremist militia. We meet one of the overlooked characters who poured gasoline onto the fire leading up to the insurrection, someone whose online popularity with Gen Z extremists reveals why it is not necessarily the generation that will save us. Plus, we talk to experts about what’s ahead and how we may not know how widespread extremist groups actually are.

Take a listen:

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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