Paramilitary expert reveals why Jan. 6 was ‘very successful’ for the militant right

An expert on the White Power movement provided harrowing analysis on CNN following Tuesday's televised hearing of the House Select Committee Investigating the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

CNN's Jake Tapper interviewed historian Kathleen Belew, who has testified before Congress as an expert witness on white nationalism. She is the author of the 2019 book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America and co-editor of the 2021 book, A Field Guide to White Supremacy.

Belew said she thinks it is important to look at what Jan. 6 meant to the people in Trump's MAGA movement.

"One of the comments that was read in testimony today, to the tweet about it will be wild, that the former president wrote, was a direct reference to a white power novel called The Turner Diaries which describes a sort of -- it's a handbook for how white separatists can take over the United States and then through a campaign of violence and genocide create an all-white planet," Belew said.

"And this is important because that book has in it an attack on the Capitol very much like the one we saw on the sixth and the point of that attack within that book and within the ideology of this movement is not a mass casualty event," Belew continued. "It was not imagined as a mass casualty action, like the one they very successfully undertook in Oklahoma City. It was imagined as a strike at the heart of power that was meant to recruit and it was stunningly successful."

"So we shouldn't let the idea of ineptitude distract us from what was for the militant right a very successful recruitment action," Belew concluded.

Watch Kathleen Belew on CNN:

Kathleen Belewwww.youtube.com