After the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, police and military institutions are “taking seriously the threat posed not just by a handful of crazy-sounding individuals out there, but organized groups like the Proud Boys and the boogaloo bois and the Oath Keepers,” Malinowski said in an interview on “The Long Game,” a Yahoo News podcast.
“The law enforcement piece of this is going after those people and those groups, not waiting for them, not just putting up fences in case they attack … but actually going out, conducting arrests, disrupting their organizations, conducting surveillance where that's lawful,” he said. “It's completely changed the posture of these groups. They are now more in hiding than what they were before the 6th.”
More than 225 people have been charged with crimes related to the Jan. 6 insurrection, the Washington Post reported Sunday.
Malinowski is also unhappy about the proliferation of razor-wire-topped fencing that now surrounds the U.S. Capitol in the wake of Jan. 6. “I hate these fences,” he said.
Malinowski was already working on the issue of conspiracy theories when he became the target of death threats last year, after the National Republican Congressional Committee ran misleading ads that seemingly tapped into the growing popularity of the bizarre QAnon cult. QAnon is an alternative-reality belief system that falsely says Democrats are part of a sex trafficking ring. Congress approved a resolution condemning QAnon that was co-sponsored by Malinowski and a Republican congressman last year, although 17 Republicans voted against it.
Malinowski said conspiracy theories like QAnon are a “precursor drug” that radicalizes people into violent action. “[It] gets your mind in the place where you're then susceptible, vulnerable, to being recruited by even more extreme and better-organized groups that actually conduct actions, operations,” he said.
Many QAnon adherents took part in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, which Malinowski said was unsurprising if you think about the fake world that its followers have entered.
“Imagine if you really believed that there were thousands of children being held, kidnapped and sexually abused in your community. Would you write a letter to the editor? Would you go to a peaceful protest? I think a lot of people, if you really believed that, might think that that actually does justify smashing things, breaking things and hurting people,” Malinowski said. “The disinformation, the lies themselves, are an incredibly important part of this.”