“Thousands of documents are great, but millions of lines of data are better. So if you’re looking at conversation details or looking at open source intelligence research or looking at social media, things like that can tell you a lot,” Riggleman says. “And I think it can drive the way you research more than bringing in people who lie, plead the Fifth, or sometimes easily forget things.”
The real story, Riggleman argues, is not Trump. (“If you sue Trump, his polls will rise,” he says. “So good luck.”) Trumpism is now gospel to an online army of devotees, hundreds of whom are now running into state and local offices. No matter which party gains control of Congress once the dust settles on election night, the next Congress is guaranteed to bear Donald Trump’s stamp on it. The GOP candidates on the ballot next month include 291 who say they would not have certified Biden’s 2020 victory, according to the Washington Post. Of those, 171 are in safe Republican districts.
A former member of the House Freedom Caucus with deep libertarian leanings (he grows his own hemp), Riggleman is concerned about the digital takeover of a party he loved, respected, and stubbornly fought for. “You also need to find out who is spreading these radicalizing ideas through digital channels, because that’s where it happens,” says Riggleman.
Thousands of Trump supporters took his post-January 6 deplatforming as a guideline to follow their leader from Twitter and Facebook to a new world of almost-anything-goes-social-media apps, like Trump’s own struggling Truth Social, or Parler, which Kanye “Ye” West plans to buy. Those apps are sucking up the latest coverage, but other apps continue to attract new and frustrated users.
There’s Gab (where QAnon supporters feel safe discussing ever-changing conspiracy theories), GETTR (a “free speech”-focused app founded by former Trump aide Jason Miller), Rumble (think YouTube for the far right), MeWe (think Facebook for Trump Republicans) and CloutHub (if Twitter and Facebook had a baby). Even Reddit is helping Trump spread baseless conspiracies about ballot filling in Arizona.
Many on the right are also increasingly using popular messaging apps like Telegram, which allows private groups to hold as many as 200,000 members, and Signal, popular for its promised end-to-end encryption. That includes many of Trump’s most motivated followers, who we know from the dramatic spike in users they both attracted after Silicon Valley firms began their post-insurgency purges.
Then there are forums like 4chan, 8kun and Endchan. Movement-inspired memes, dangerous conspiracy theories, celebrations of violence, and violent rhetoric all abound at these hubs that connect relatives who proudly consider themselves social outcasts who are up to the “normie” society most of us inhabit. put head.
As the select committee now prepares its final report on preparation and planning ahead of the brutal attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the right has moved on. And by laying the groundwork to leave a Trump-sized stamp on this year’s midterm elections — including lifting the voting laws in numerous battlefield states and recruiting thousands of new pro-Trump poll workers to local polling stations. “Police” – the former president’s acolytes are also proving to be a few steps ahead of their opponents in their plan to take the White House by 2024.
Just as an escalator helped Trump slip into the center of American politics, Riggleman says, the real story is the online gears, lubricants, chains and stairs lurking just beneath our feet. Likewise, unless more attention is paid to these means of political production, this new political order is something we will all have to get used to.
“We’re in a post-truth era, but we’re also in a post-Trump world — where those belief systems are ingrained, and we’re going to be dealing with this for decades,” Riggleman says. “We have to look to go faster, harder and better with more technology and more resources in that arena.”
