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Pundits desperately searching for a historical analogy for the storming of the U.S. Capitol have seized on August 1814, when the British army burned the Capitol in retaliation for the U.S. assault on the Canadian capital a year earlier. But there’s a more apt comparison. Fifty years later, in July 1864, with the Civil War still raging, a Confederate army came within shooting distance of capturing Washington. Confederate Gen. Jubal Early could see the shining dome of the Capitol “feebly manned,” he later wrote, a mere six miles away. Though troop fatigue, summer heat, and the late arrival of...

“No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently from the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol. We all know that’s true. And it’s unacceptable. Totally unacceptable.” – President-Elect Joe Biden The contrast between the law enforcement reaction to the storming of the Capitol on January 6 and the suppression of peaceful protests in the summer is not just stark – it is black and white. The Black Lives Matter demonstrators crowd outside the White House on June 2, 2020 was...

By Alex Newhouse, Research Lead, Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, Middlebury Institute of International Studies The attack on the U.S. Capitol building on January 6 was shocking, but no one following right-wing activity on social media should have been surprised. The attempt by President Donald Trump’s far-right supporters to violently stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College vote and formalizing Joe Biden’s election victory was consistent with their openly expressed hopes and plans. As a researcher of far-right extremism, I monitor right-wing social media communities. For weeks in advance, I watched as groups across the right-wing spectrum declared...