Hi, I'm Dan Pramak and welcome to Axios Recap, presented by Walmart.

Today's Thursday, January 7th.

Fences outside the Capitol are up, President Trump's Facebook posting privileges are down,

and we're focused on what drove yesterday's insurrection and what comes next.

By now you obviously know what happened at the Capitol complex yesterday, and you've

also heard the condemnations by pundits and politicians, including some who helped egg

on the rioters in the first place.

But you might not have heard how so much of yesterday was not only predictable, but explicitly

planned via online message

boards and social media sites where the MAGA movement gets the most conspiratorial.

Or how those same online communities today aren't celebrating their actions, nor apologizing

for them. Instead, they're blaming what happened on others entirely, thus creating yet another new conspiracy.

So in 15 seconds, we'll go deeper with Ben Collins, who covers online extremism for NBC News and Arusha Gordon,

an attorney for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under law. But first, this.

We're joined now by Ben Collins, who covers online extremism for NBC News.

So, Ben, in monitoring the chatter over the last couple of weeks, or at least since the

January 6th date was announced, did you sense this was going to be something more than

just people coming to listen to Trump and then, you know, waving signs and screaming a bit? Yeah, this is the most organized rally since Charlottesville,

at least, actually probably more so than Charlottesville. For the last month on forums like

the Donald, which is a big online Trump forum, 4chan, 8Kun, all the big extremist forums.

They circled January 6th on their calendar and they said that's the day that Donald Trump is going to cross the Rubicon, which is a Julius Caesar reference to basically kickstarting Civil War, declaring a dictatorship. So they thought that if they showed up there and they showed their support for him, they would provide a private army for the president.

They said this explicitly on these forums. They said meet up at these places. I'm personally going to be

...