Zachary Green:
Even the failed January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was fomented by online misinformation about the 2020 election. Some of the insurrectionists even used the fringe social media sites Gab and Parler to trade information on what streets to take to avoid the police and what tools to bring to break into the Capitol.
In response to the attack, this March, the Department of Homeland Security made $20 million in funding available for local communities to develop programs to prevent domestic violent extremism.
But that’s still only 11 percent of what Germany spends annually on countering radicalization amongst its own population–which is just a quarter of the size of the U.S.
In fact, just last year, in the face of the worst rise in far-right crime since 2001, the German government approved more than $1.2 billion in anti-racism programming over the next three years.
