| HN Mirror

I don't. I haven't really found any, and this is the conclusion of my own observations over the last year.

Prior to lockdowns and work from home, I didn't pay much attention. Once I was forced to stay inside, I tuned in a lot more. As I noted the polarized views expressed, I intentionally sought countering expressions.

Over the year, I ended up following a wide spectrum of people on social media and consumed articles by a variety of publications.

From there many patterns emerged. Larger entities—unsurprisingly—influenced the topics du jour. Sometimes they were unique to that segment; sometimes retorts to another group's topic.

I noted the frequency of real, substantiated information went down over time, by all sources. From "sources close to the matter" to right-wing influencers making grandiose claims, practically every group fell into this pattern.

Ironically, the most extreme groups (relegated exclusively to social media) were among those that made the least exaggerated statements or observations. (From Antifa to Proud Boys.) They seemed to stick most to their prescribed beliefs and didn't really utilize the inflammatory stories and rhetoric from traditionally more moderate sources, such as mainstream media and influencers.

By that same token, it was the more middle-aligned groups that became more polarized and extreme, but even that was skewed more heavily to the left of center.

If I had to characterize it, I'd say the most extreme political sources maintained their extreme views and spoke softly. The middle-most sources often far exceeded inflammatory rhetoric of the extreme edges.

I'm not sure if this is because extreme viewpoints were simply unspoken among the extreme groups, but the intensity with which they spoke was much more moderate the further out from center they got; not exactly an inversion, but darn near close.

While Antifa accounts would do deep dives on police tactics or communist groups would discuss building fund pools for other communists out of work, left-leaning mainstream media—like the Guardian—would run story after story about the existential threat of white supremacy, for example.

For most of the year, left-sided groups were on the offensive, while right-sided on the defensive. When the election insanity took place, the offensive/defensive roles briefly switched, but then both ended up taking an offensive position up until the 6th. After that, both sides slowly ramped down.

In broad strokes, it became apparent to me that mainstream left-sided media was the most expressively extreme, both in rhetoric and reach. Right-sided social media reached a similar extreme following the election.

While the narratives emboldened by Trump following the election were by far the most extreme, the impression that I got from the right-side was "talk big", not "act big". On the flip side, left-sided extremists were "talk soft" and "act carefully": they would devise plans and act on them.

Of course it's impossible to suss out the intention of any given individual. There were, no doubt, individuals on the right that wanted to overthrow the government that they perceived to be insurgents of democracy, just as there were individuals on the left that wanted to create lists of Trump supporters in order to punish them for their crime of supporting the brash president.

The president's behavior—especially amplifying absurd claims of election fraud espoused by Sydney Powell—was unquestionably dangerous. By the same token, the persistent vilification of the right-wing—to such extremes as to characterize them as white supremacists or Nazis—by the left-sided mainstream media is also unquestionably dangerous.

As someone who holds values reflected across the political spectrum—though admittedly subject to bias—I am far more concerned about the utter cultural monopoly held by a single party than I am about a handful of undereducated "patriots" that felt their election was stolen from them.

If I could counter the concerns raised about the threat the "insurgents", some n-hundred people breached the threshold of the capitol and were met by practically no resistance inside... and what occurred? Not a single shot was fired by the "insurgents", nothing was burned down, nobody was taken hostage or overcome.

On the flip side, the "damage" done was reported by the cultural monopoly to be some tens of millions of dollars. However, sussing out the actual figures, there was about $30,000 damage to historic artifacts, and some $10,000-20,000 miscellaneous damage. The remainder of the tens of millions in damage is the cost of the existing + additional security services, including a fence that costs hundreds of thousands a month. (I'll leave it an exercise to the reader to figure out how much their normal security detail costs, already.)

This utter violation of truth by the most powerful institutions in the world strikes me as a more flagrant threat than the "insurgents" who accomplished exactly nothing of substance.

I bring this up because both sides are filled with ignorance and dishonesty. But certain groups with a certain threshold of power engage in expressions of extreme views that are hard to unpack from truth.

It's easy to take a member of Antifa with a grain of salt, just as it is a legitimate white supremacist. It's much more difficult for people to distinguish truth from false narrative by groups who proclaim to be the arbiters of truth.

After seeing characterizations from these groups over the last year and how they characterize what occurred on January 6th, along with the rhetoric among the people engaged in the "insurrection" and extensive footage captured during the event[1], I find the extreme characterization of the events on that day to be exaggerated. In short: I believe at no point was the apparatus or continuity of the US government under any threat. At all.

Of course, this is subjective. And I am under no illusion that I'll change anyone's mind. But I will assert that a thorough review of each of these groups will yield a vastly different reality than what each present. And, within this reality, it will be shown that the only extreme behavior exists among the institutions and individuals that espouse extreme distortions of truth to the determent of everyone.

I know this doesn't really answer your request, but I hope it characterizes how I came to these conclusions. I think this is one of those cases where one truly has to look through what's passed around to find the truth. Not to confirm an implicit bias, as is usually done, but to really try to understand what's going on.

At this point, I treat every source and group as suspect. For all major claims, I now try to find counterpoints from the other side, and then further try to find as much real data as I can. Only then do I feel that I understand what's actually happening.

I treat every source as hostile to truth, because after a year of fact checking, they pretty much all are.

I strongly suggest you do, too. Fact check the fact checkers, as it were. The very presence of such extreme views should warrant skepticism.

1: There was, at one point, an excellent compilation of some 2 hours of footage arranged sequentially of the events on January 6th. It was available on YouTube and put together by a left-leaning individual (so not concerned with making things "look good"), but has since been taken down. It shows a much more tame (but not free of violence) series of events that run very contrary to the extreme characterizations among some major media outlets.