A cousin forwarded this link to an interview conducted by Amanpour and Company with Professor Robert Pape. Pape heads up the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism at the University of Chicago, and he and his colleagues have been studying the profiles of the insurrectionists who stormed the United States Capitol on January 6th.
What they have found is–in a word–terrifying.
The demographics of that mob are strikingly different from what we might expect. Among other things, they came disproportionately from “blue” counties, where demographic change is most visible, and what they have in common is belief in the Big Lie and– even more troubling– “the Great Replacement,” the conviction that minorities will soon “replace” and have more rights than White Americans unless they are (violently) resisted.
While the number of Americans currently willing to resist violently is relatively small, the number who believe in the Lie and Great Replacement–and who may eventually be persuaded that violence is warranted– is significant.
I can’t paraphrase or summarize what Dr. Pape and his researchers found–you absolutely need to click through and watch the segment.
H/T to Yvonne, who forwarded this interview.
Sad that this study has received so little coverage by the main stream media. Could it be that so much of the media, both local and national, is made up of whites who have achieved the status of privilege and now identify as a class that is in danger of being replaced?
A great quote from one response to the video says “When you are used to privilege, equality feels like oppression”.
i was at a funeral monday,for a close,few, friend.. i went back to his hometown to renew aquIntances long past,decades. some passed,some still working,some retired. the local water hole was once a social place for former vets,and a yearly smelt fry.. small town minnisota..the bar is now owned privatly,we all went there after the funeral. whereas back in the 80s this was a pro democracy,anti communist,horray for the red white and blue..yesterday was a dismal view into how this once civilized town became a trump/bigot plaque. there was a cardboard cut out of thump, thumbs up, wearing a fuck biden hat..and along with other bought and paid for slogans scattered about. i didnt mind it, i took my resposable approach to bend around the cheap talk and focus on who.
it didnt matter,it was like being in a cave with the lights out and the drinking animals mulling for something to eat. sure was diffrent than listening to the past patons talk about vietnam and the PIC or CRP program.
i asked a few, who gave me a dialog on whatever ongoing meme was present, where did ya read about that?, not one could say,they read about anything, it was instead cake shoved in someones ear for pleasures by someone they trusted,knew,eh! whatever… convienece was the word that spread the issue, not someone actully reading and or,researching the issue.yep, Mr Pape is correct, assessing the whos who,and when and where. except im sitting in this group, looking at a full tilt what has happpened,and who its dragged it down with(age group correct). many of these people there were once aquiatences in everyday affairs, long ago. i made conversation on the facts, of one issue, and was denied any recognition for my,well, taking time to read it, better yet, i grew up in a big city minority world, they grew up in small town farms and what the previous gererations decided what was right. i debunked it,as experience,and they just stared.except its grown into what mainstream media, networks have deciced for them to live like. theres a brew of skilled people who have been paid nicely to air a few words that get blown into a hurricane. i would like to make a assesment that its all the territory,but its not. the radical thinking of these people didnt come from just fear of losing its grasp as majority. it came from media and networking to change those minds. i see whereas, they dont read beyond the ag reports or their tax bill. feeding this is a lazy mans? persons media,called social media,silos of one way news.unfortunatly, it has manifest itself into a movement to distroy what gave them the right to distroy it. what is the end game Mr Pape. are we allowing it to fester into the doom we here are waiting to happen? as i ask questions,beyond the conversation, it only leads to who? obviously,capitalisim is power,money is the fuel, and well i guess i can draw that conclusion, with one party in DC fully in control of the switches,all financed with lies and deciet.
whats the end game? and whos the next,king?
Is it fear of replacement or just bigotry? Perhaps they’re the same thing.
Are the rioters who were arrested predominantly from “blue” counties because that represents the group as a whole, or because law enforcement in those areas is making more of an effort to locate and arrest them than law enforcement in pro-Trump areas?
When in history has it “Never” been that way?
Athletics is a prime example in more recent history, many of the Negro league players were superior to the white professional players! The anger that existed because black players play the game with much more pizzazz skill on the whole, enraged not only the white players but those who followed baseball.
The NBA, well, they initially had an issue with Jewish players, before Black players, the best players in the NBA were Jewish. On the whole, the average white player is probably relegated to third tier.
The history of the NFL and college football was exactly the same. And, the skill and prowess players of color showed concerning these” Games” definitely disturbed the white ruling class! I mean, really? Players of color weren’t smart enough to play quarterback in the the college ranks let alone the NFL? Now, the realization, quarterbacks of color might be the best quarterbacks in the game eventually.
But hey, concerning all sports, all these white players could be replaced and leave all these white fans to? Root for players who are not white? Or even players of color who don’t speak English as their first language? Oh my God, save us all!
Look at how the Irish went after the Italians, LOL! The Irish were at the bottom rung of society. So when the Italians came in, they didn’t so much have to worry about workers of African descent, because they were still stuck in the South! So the Irish went after the Italians! Their darker complexion, and, the intermingling of the Romans with North Africans and their wars with Carthage, and the Moors settling in Sicily and Southern Italy, they were deemed black by the Irish. Afterwords, the Irish and the Italians went after African-Americans when they started to move north. They all feared replacement. It didn’t matter that those workers that came from the South were undoubtedly here much longer than any of them or their ancestors! There always has to be a bottom rung!
I mean you can look back at the Romans, and their relationship with the Huns. The Romans used them and became fearful when the Huns became more numerous. They feared replacement and started to renege on promises made and contracts signed! Eventually, at was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Huns decided to take what they had been promised, much to the devastation of Rome.
For the most part, you can look back at Jewish history and see how the Jews were treated and relegated to ghettos because of their intellectual prowess and business and finance, they were deemed a threat! Precious metal working, jewelry, money changing (banking), a lot of this was deemed forbidden by white Christians and therefore given to the Jews! And then, the Jews were demonized for their expertise. The white Christians feared the Jews would rollover them because of their control over the money and finances of many of the wealthy.
So, you can see, on the whole, the white race is an extremely fearful ethnicity prone to violent lashing out when they feel they are about to be replaced. When, laid bare, whites are no more, and probably less intellectual in some areas. Less athletic, inferior fighters, and, the list can go on and on. Part of it is a hunger, those who are minorities, those people of color, strive be better because, that’s the only way they can get out of their anointed social status below those of the white race!
When you’re white, you are self deluded and self entitled, also, willfully ignorant on how to conduct yourself with your fellow man. Even throughout Scripture it was talked about, how to respect the foreign resident treat the foreign resident the same as yourself. Love your neighbor! Even love your enemy! These were not White Tenants of Scripture, the Bible is not a book written by white people! It is a book written by those who formed the Jewish race, and, much of what happened in the Bible actually took place in Asian parts of the old world!
But white folks would have you believe that somehow, Christianity is a white religion! Really, the white race is the world’s largest chameleon, they take from everyone else and claim it as their own, and never really fess up to inferiority where it exists. Therefore, there never really is the drive to be better, only receive what they perceive to be owed by humanity relating to their self perceived self deluded reality! In the age of weapons proliferation, the white race really feels that they can wipe out everyone else when it comes time! Because, that’s the only thing they’re good at, hatred and killing!
One hilarious claim is that Blacks or people of color were directly descended from Canaan, that people were of dark complexion because they were cursed because of Canaan, when actually, the darker races were not from Canaan but from Kush, and Put Canaan’s brothers who settled in Africa, the lighter skinned races were descendent from Canaan. And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto HIM. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.” (Genesis 9:21-27)
It is Canaan, not his father Ham, who was cursed. Canaan was not black skinned, nor were his descendants who settled in the land that became known as Palestine. (Genesis 10:15-19)
The Canaanites were, in time, subjugated by the Israelites, descendants of Shem, and later by Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome, descendants of Japheth. This subjugation of the Canaanites fulfilled the prophetic curse on their ancestor Canaan. The curse notably had nothing to do with the black race.
The Bible is not a white book but it shows the truth about the beginnings of the white race! I suppose that would make a lot of white folks fearful, and, of course try to create an alternate history, alternate facts and out and out fabrications and lies!
Prof. Robert Pape said a subset of the Capitol violent insurrectionists to be particularly concerned about was the highly-trained ex military.
That was the same subset sought by the leaders of the 1933 Business Coup. In that case, ex-military members of the American Legion were to be recruited for the overthrow of the FDR Admin.
Once again, we talk on this blog about misinformation and disinformation, yet here we are discussing an NPR interview about the dudes who showed up on the day of the insurrection.
Why aren’t they talking about the funders, the organizers, the planners, etc.?
I heard a Democratic politician rattling about the insurrection on NPR and how they needed more funding for the Capitol police to hire different levels of expertise within the department.
Really?
And how she was so upset with her fellow Republicans for not wanting to form a commission.
Really?
Look up the definition of insurrectionist under the United States Code of Laws. Until we hold ALL those people responsible, this is all yellow journalism. We’ve got weeks of planning on Facebook Groups and billionaires who funded it and GOP members who assisted and even ignited it.
Yet, none of those people have received indictments. Why?
Well, after once again seeing the videos of the violence and the screaming mob of the “CEOs” and “accountants”, it struck me that there must also be some connection to the disease of overt capitalism. Yes, the “replacement” mindset added to the fear of equality by those harboring the desire to “take what is mine and screw everybody else” is stronger than we thought in our “civilized” population.
What those screaming and raging, middle-aged “family people” were actually doing was recapitulating the behavior of the tribes of yore that ransacked those who they felt were usurping their command of resources. At its core, capitalism is simply the modern expression of those primal instincts for survival. Clearly, all it takes is the sowing of the seeds of fear that the assumed position of power will be replaced snapped these non-thinkers back 200,000 years. That so-called shaman dressed appropriately for the mass idiocy. Those men and women were truly re-living the tribal imperative.
Unless we missed the point, the riot on 1/6 showed how thin the vernier of civilized behavior really is.
Prof. Pape’s perspective does hold some scariness, but I wonder whether, or not the focus of the interviews on the rights issue (@minute 8:31) biased the findings. The questions in a survey of this sort can nudge the responses towards the interviewer’s bias. So the focus on “rights” might have covered the more general issue of the numbers of non-whites moving into these increasingly “Blue” counties.
Maybe because I am not feeling threatened by the increasing plurality of the population of the country, I can’t, or don’t, see the non-whites gaining more rights than me, but to me, the issue seems to be one of hoping the non-whites will FINALLY get equal rights.
The xenophobia that Trump had spent so much time and focus on pumping up, as in the typical demagogue’s MO, was about numbers of “Them,” not on the rights they might, someday, be granted. So, I remain a bit skeptical of Prof. Pape’s conclusion.
Felix- thoughtful point!
1/6 was an attempted Coup. When the clock ran out on all the counts, re-counts, frivolous law suits, the next step was fact-free accusations of grand theft and fraud. The goal was the violent over throw of our system and the installation of The Trumpet as president.
Carl Sandburg said it very well: “If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell”
The attackers demographics mentioned in the interview consisted of the middle class. They were not people on the lower economic class in America. The attackers were no Bonus Army of the 1930’s who were out of work and out of hope. The 1/6 attackers were not rallying for Civil Rights or Equal Rights, they gathered because they wanted to dominate the political system.
The attackers role model was The Trumpet who exemplified their bullying tactics.
We as an electorate over the last five or six decades have decided that to achieve the aspirations of the Constitution about equality we had some ground to make up from the past. In order to achieve a fair and stable society people with darker skin, regardless of their family migration history, who had been held back in the past, deserved somewhat of a head start economically in order to catch up to those of European descent. Several programs have been instituted to achieve that.
I don’t have data to support opinions of the effectiveness of those programs in meeting their goals, but some of their unintended consequences are anecdotally apparent now. Part of the Trump story are supporters who liked the old days better when the place in society that various demographic groups, like race and gender, held was culturally assigned. In other words, these people who are now resentful assumed that there was something not right about what the Constitution had always aspired to.
Carrying loads of resentment over lifetimes eats away at the soul and grows over time as the biases it creates find way more evidence to be angry about than is actually there.
This, like anthropogenic climate change, is another example of anger created by the refusal to adapt to new cultures that are based on rapidly increasing human knowledge demanding progress.
It leads to resentment and anger at those who influence and lead the cultural adaptation to the changed reality.
REALLY, Todd?!?!?!? Going after the NPR journalist instead of holding the GOP responsible??
Come on!!!!
Sheila — great interview and as you said terrifying and disturbing. I hope Democrats begin to realize this is not your momma’s congressional spat!!!!
“The majority of the evidence that we have on hand says that people who like Trump don’t care what he does – it just doesn’t matter if he breaks the law,” said Francisco I Pedraza, a political scientist at University of California Riverside. For those voters, “he can do no wrong”.
“We know from a lot of social science research that people who back Trump also register very high on validated and reliable indexes of racial resentment, for example, he serves that and offers a kind of politics that responds to that flavor of politics,” Pedraza said. “Anything else doesn’t matter as long as he continues to be a champion for racist [sentiments].”
The Trumpet followers also do not care if he lies, the means justifies the ends.
If you want to read the actual report of what happened which has already been reduced to “rioters” at the Capitol, here’s the report. The problem is it excludes all the Intel collected about who funded it, who organized it, etc. They had t-shirts made and rented buses for the event. Ginni Thomas, wife of SCOTUS apparently paid for one of the buses.
Now, I didn’t waste my time going through all 128 pages, so be my guest. I read the Exec Summary which lays the blame on the US Capitol Police which is the same group that just received a taxpayer-funded increase in funding where even the “progressive candidates” whiffed.
Protect the oligarchy at all costs. 🙂
https://www.rules.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Jan%206%20HSGAC%20Rules%20Report.pdf?utm_campaign=wp_the_daily_202&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_daily202
The 1/6 insurrection took place in a part of the country that was very urban and very blue. The fact that people who attended that event are mostly from blue counties is not terribly surprising. People tend to go to events that are close to them. So I’m not sure this finding is not being overblown.
Plus, you have the 15% rule. In a community, people in the majority (almost always white) do not get combative when the minority population (usually non-white) is less than 15% of the total population. In other words, people react when they’re “threatened.” In more rural communities, where there might only be a family or two that is black or some other minority, people are more accepting, i.e. they aren’t “threatened.” It’s the more urban areas (which are also more blue) where minority population reaches 15% that’s when you have a backlash.
On an unrelated note, historian and conservative commentator Tom Nichols said he is much more worried about American democracy today than he was a year ago. I 100% agree. The things people are saying at Republican/conservative events are alarming. There is no respect for American democracy.
On another unrelated note, Democrats need to stop spending so much effort opposing marginal changes in voting procedures that at the end won’t make more than a slight difference in turnout and worry a lot more about the people who will be counting those votes and the procedures they will be using.. In the past, we’ve always relied on people being honest and carrying out their ministerial responsibilities when it comes to the vote count. Those honest Republican vote counters who did their jobs even though it resulted in Biden winning the election are either being replaced or quitting.
I checked stats on the racial distribution of the global poplulation. Only 4% are Native American. Seems to me that they are an endangered species. From looking at the graph it looks like 1//5 of the global population is white. Asians are the majority.
In Charlottesville they chanted, “You will not replace us!” They are afraid of minorities and are most likely white Christian nationalists. I would not be surprised to find they are sexist as well.
I knew already that the insurrectionists were middle-aged, college educated white people. This just goes to show that fear can easily undermine rational thought and that con artists like the former president can easily inflame those fears and consequently con and manipulate people.
Martin Luther King stated that people in power are unwilling to share it. That’s so very true. My fear is that our country will become like South Africa, a country where white supremacists oppressed people of color with apartheid.( or would it be just a return to Jim
Crow?) If the military or even ex-military becomes a significant portion of people who support violent resistance, America will be in danger of a civil war.
Racism is not just our problem; it’s a global problem. Just look at the global distribution of the vaccine if you want verification. America is just a glaring example of racism.
Obviously those from blue counties are experiencing greater racial and religous diversity in their counties. So, it makes sense to me that a significant # were from “blue counties.”
It’s time to start singing my songs that are a cry for justice again. Mind you, I don’t sing them just for the LGBTQIA community. I sing them for all of us.
Todd, the Capitol Police played no role at all in launching the Jan 6 insurrection.
They may be faulted in not preventing the mob from entering the Capitol but they were successful at their greater responsibility of protecting Congress members and staff.
Paul – not sure you watched the video. There were folks from SF, Seattle, Chicago…no close to DC.
Good point Felix!
Other than my objections to the very bad social science, I detected the same old “maybe our data are bad, so you should give us LOTS more money to study this” attitude.
Americans are spoiled rotten, entitled whiners.
I still think the holy book of folk tales has no bearing on morality.
I much prefer the modern Confucius, Jordan Peterson.
Much more pertinent advice. If you can’t understand him,
try “The Moral Landscape” by Sam Harris…
Yes Vernon, we may use buttons, zippers, and velcro, but that doesn’t mean we’re more civilized than primitive men. Each man guarding his heap and confederating with men of equal greed really isn’t civilized. Doing away with private property and sharing wherever you see need is civilized.
Very interesting – shoots down my theories of potential counter-measures – leaves much to ponder
Thanks for the link, Sheila.