Consider This from NPR - Young And Radicalized Online: A Familiar Pattern In Capitol Siege Suspects

Episode Date: March 15, 2021

People who stormed the Capitol were radicalized by what they consumed online and in social media. That should sound familiar: Ten years ago, ISIS used a similar strategy to lure Americans to Syria. Dina Temple-Raston reports on the pattern of radicalization. Tom Dreisbach explores familiar warning signs in the past of one Capitol siege suspect — including hateful speech and violent rhetoric. More reporting from the NPR Investigations team is here.In participating regions, you'll also hear from local journalists about what's happening in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all. On the web at theschmidt.org. In December of last year, according to court documents, Bruno Cua was feeling restless. The election had long been called for Joe Biden, but President Trump continued to claim, without evidence, that it was stolen. So Kua, an 18-year-old from Georgia, wrote on social media, quote, I don't want to sit here and watch. I want to fight. On January 6th, Kua traveled to D.C. with his parents, both Trump supporters for the president's Stop the Steal rally. After the rally, they marched to the Capitol, where a scuffle broke out on the stairs.

Bruno asked his parents if he could get a closer look. According to the government, he made it inside and ran into police outside the Senate chamber, where he shoved them out of the way. Video footage places him there. And it's just then that one of the rioters was telling a handful of others they shouldn't be sitting in Vice President Mike Pence's chair. Makua responded like a typical 18-year-old. They can steal an election when we can't sit in their chair? No! We're not putting up with that either.

If they can steal an election, he says, why can't we sit in their chairs? Other rioters argued it wasn't great optics for their cause. It's a PR war, okay? You have to understand it's an I.O. war. We can't lose the I.O. war. An older man tells Kua it's an I.O. war, a military term, information operations. Information operations. We can't do it. corporations. Now, Kua is the youngest person charged so far in connection with the Capitol riot, and a new NPR investigation has revealed how his political radicalization online echoes another kind of extremism from a decade ago. I think you're causing me to realize more parallels with these folks and some of the jihadis who understand the world in this very strict good versus evil kind of way. Consider this. The Capitol siege put a spotlight on something that usually takes place in the shadows of the Internet.

Young people in America being radicalized and in larger numbers than ever before. Our investigations team reveals how it's happening. From NPR, I'm Adi Kornish. It's Monday, March 15th. This message comes from NPR sponsor 3M, supporting communities in the fight against COVID-19. Since the outbreak, 3M has responded with cash and product donations, including surgical masks, hand sanitizer, and respirators through local and global aid partners. In addition, 3M plants are running around the clock, producing more than 95 million respirators per month in the U.S. Learn how 3M is helping the world respond to COVID-19. Go to 3M.com slash COVID.

3M science applied to life. How do we reinvent ourselves? And what's the secret to living longer? I'm Anoush Zomorodi. Each week on NPR's TED Radio Hour, we go on a journey with TED speakers to seek a deeper understanding of the world and to figure out new ways to think and create. Listen now. It's Consider This from NPR. This month, the Justice Department said its probe into the Capitol attack could be one of the largest and most complex criminal investigations in U.S. history. More than 900 search warrants have been executed in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The number of defendants could exceed 400. And the youngest of them so far is Bruno Kua,

an 18-year-old from Georgia who wound up on the floor of the U.S. Senate. His journey there followed a pattern that experts have seen before in young men inspired to violence by communities they find online. Here's NPR investigations correspondent Dina Temple-Raston.

Prosecutors say Kua is a violent true believer. They say he assaulted police and was carrying a collapsible baton as a weapon. His social media posts in the run-up to the insurrection suggest that he was angry and primed for action. Kua's defense attorneys see it a little differently. They say their client was being fed a steady diet of far-right content and conspiracy theories, and he was duped into believing things that weren't true. Which, people who have studied radicalization say, sounds a lot like what happened almost 10 years ago,

when another group of young people were radicalized in much the same way. But in that case, their focus was on ISIS. I thought they were courageous, and I thought they were standing up for what they believed in, you know. That's a young man named Abdullahi Youssef. Back in 2014, when he was 18, he began following the Syrian civil war. It eventually led him to join ISIS with a bunch of his friends in Minneapolis. I spoke to him a few years later for a podcast called What Were You Thinking? And I asked him why it happened.

I think you'd have a hard time talking me out of what I believed in at the time. We're the ones doing something noble. Yusuf and his friends watched the ISIS videos over and over again. I was mesmerized, you know, like, I didn't even know they existed. And he came to the conclusion that he couldn't just sit on the sidelines while women and children were dying in Syria. He came to believe that he was just like those fighters in those videos he kept watching.

It's just check, check, check, check. That's me, that's me, that's me, that's me. And, you know, sign me up. And he would have made it to Syria if the FBI hadn't stopped him at the airport. Radicalization happens that fast. And while Abdullahi Youssef and Bruno Kua might have been driven by very different ideologies, the process by which they became extremists was remarkably similar.

For both of them, what they consumed online warped and narrowed their vision of the world. A stolen election had to be overturned in one case, and innocent Syrians had to be saved in the other. One of the interesting things about the current misinformation landscape is it's not necessarily uninformed people, it's misinformed people. Sam Jackson is an assistant professor at University at Albany. It's people who say, I do my own research. I don't trust the elites. And their

research is nonsense. It's sophisticated nonsense. Jackson studies extremist groups and the way they use online propaganda to nibble away at a Rook Food's worldview. In Kua's case, the person who inspired him was the former president. We fight like hell. And if

you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore. For many people on January 6th, the storming of the Capitol was about standing up for something. It was about a love of country. Jackson again. This rhetoric about patriotism is causing me to realize more parallels with these folks and some of the jihadis who understand the world in this very strict good versus evil kind of way. And when the world is black and white or right versus wrong, finding facts to fit that narrative is vital. Alexandra Minna Stern, a professor of American culture and politics at University of Michigan, says people find what they need online. We in many ways are living in this post-truth era where whether it's a lie or truth doesn't matter to many people. What matters is that whatever the alternative facts are,

so-called, actually resonate and make sense to them. Abdullahi Youssef said that it took a while to understand how ISIS had duped him. It's all these sad stories, you know. It's not, you don't hear any. I guarantee you everyone who went there regrets it. Bruno Kua has spent more than a month in jail. His lawyers say he was assaulted there and he has tested positive for COVID-19.

A judge decided last week that Kua can be released to his parents pending trial. That's supposed to happen on March 16th, the day his COVID quarantine is over. NPR's Dina Temple Raston. So remember that moment on the Senate floor when rioters were arguing about whether to sit in Mike Pence's chair? Hey, let's take a seat, people! Well, one of the rioters who actually did sit down was this young guy in a red MAGA hat.

It belongs to the vice president of the United States. He's the one getting yelled at by a few other men in the room. It's not our chair. That guy with the hat was a college student who'd traveled to Washington, D.C. from California. And it turns out that people who knew him back at school could have predicted he would wind up where he did. Here's NPR investigations correspondent Tom Dreisbach. Federal prosecutors say that guy is Christian Secor, a 22-year-old student from UCLA.

His attorney declined to comment to NPR. In court, his attorney conceded that the evidence he was in the Capitol is incontrovertible, though argued he was not violent that day. Not long after this video was published by The New Yorker, a lot of his classmates recognized him, like Aiden Air Sassingham. Once we saw him, I don't think we were surprised that was him, and I think that's the problem. In fact, for about a year before the riot, students had been raising concerns about Christian Secor and his far-right anti-immigrant ideology.

That hit home for students like Arasasingham, whose parents immigrated from Sri Lanka. One of the biggest warning signs was Secor's support for an extremist named Nick Fuentes. My name is Nicholas J. Fuentes. We have a great show for you tonight. Fuentes, like Sikor, is 22 years old. He livestreams a show online called America First, and he did not respond to NPR's request for comment. On top of racist, homophobic, and misogynist rants, Fuentes has repeatedly engaged in Holocaust denial.

He also pushes white supremacist propaganda and has called for an end to all immigration to keep America white. We are standing in front of this big thing called demographic change, the racial displacement of the native people in the country, and we're saying stop! At UCLA, Christian Secor was a member of the Campus Republicans, then started his own group, America First Bruins, named after Fuentes' show and the UCLA mascot.

And on Twitter, Sikor pushed the anti-Semitic propaganda that Jewish people have too much power in the U.S. Grayson Peters is a Jewish UCLA student, and he saw Sikor's Twitter feed as a threat. I was certainly concerned, not that it would immediately lead to violence, but that it would create an unwelcome culture. So your sense, looking at the Twitter feed, was that it was racist, anti-Semitic, and fascist. That is entirely correct. So Peters wrote an essay about Sikor and his group for a campus Jewish publication. Sikor's response to that essay raised even more concerns. Here's Sikor talking to a far-right podcast last summer. These people are just liars. They lie through their teeth. They know they're lying.

These people are essentially enemy combatants, and they have to be dealt with that way. I don't mean it like that, but... In that same podcast, Sikor talked about his love of guns and said he wanted to legalize fully automatic weapons. And that scared students, because Sikor allegedly used a video streaming platform under the name Scuffed Elliot Roger, a reference to a misogynist who killed six people in Isla Vista, California, near UC Santa Barbara, back in 2014. So students said they took their concerns to the UCLA administration. UCLA told NPR it could not comment on Secor's case. Public universities like UCLA face a challenge when

dealing with students like Secor because they're legally constrained by the First Amendment. Hate speech most often is free speech. That's Alyssa Buxbaum of the Anti-Defamation League. She says a public university cannot expel a student for hate speech that does not cross the line into a violent threat. But she argues schools can and should respond by actively condemning hate on campus. So just because someone's allowed to spread messages of hate doesn't mean that it goes unnoticed or without opposition. After Sikor's arrest, the school condemned the Capitol riot.

But students said they were disappointed that UCLA did not specifically condemn Sikor's extremist ideology, too. Like Una Flood, a Japanese-American student who had been worrying about Sikor for a year. UCLA definitely could have seen this coming, and it's just such a tragedy that they didn't. Federal prosecutors now cite Grayson Peters' essay about Sikor, as well as screenshots of Sikor's tweets taken by UCLA students. So in the criminal case against Christian Sikor, a year's worth of warnings are now evidence. NPR's Tom Dreisbach. You heard Tom mention the white supremacist live streamer,

Nicholas Fuentes. We know there are a lot of young people online in white supremacist networks. They talk about their age and so on. Heidi Beirich is the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. So we have a whole new generation of extremists that we didn't have before. Experts NPR spoke to say it's not just about making a connection. It's about making a profit. One researcher found over a recent nine-month period, Nicholas Fuentes raised $113,000 from daily live streams.

The NPR investigations team has also uncovered how those videos can be posted even when major tech platforms ban the people who create them. I think Nick Fuentes with his youth and his tech savvy is emblematic of a whole new generation of white supremacists who have sprung up really from the online space. You can find more from the NPR investigations team, which has been reporting extensively on the Capitol siege suspects and what motivated them at the link in our episode notes. It's Consider This from NPR.

I'm Adi Kornish. Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. Support for NPR and the following message

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