1/10 January 6 was practice for Trump’s next coup attempt, @bartongellman reports. In our cover story, Gellman examines the convictions of Trump’s most fervent supporters, including some who stormed the Capitol. Here’s what he learned from researchers: bit.ly/3EuhxbR
@bartongellman 2/10 The first fact about insurgents that surprised Robert A. Pape, a political-science professor at the University of Chicago, was their age: Violent political extremists tend to be in their 20s and early 30s, but the median age of people at the Capitol that day was 41.8.
3/10 Then there were the economic anomalies: Only 7% of insurgents were jobless; more than half had a white-collar job or owned a business. “The last time America saw middle-class whites involved in violence was the expansion of the second KKK in the 1920s,” Pape told Gellman.
4/10 Six out of every seven insurgents charged with crimes had no affiliation with extremist groups like the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers. “January 6 wasn’t designed as a mass-casualty attack, but rather as a recruitment action,” another source told Gellman. bit.ly/3EuhxbR
5/10 Researchers also mapped the insurgents by home county. Counties won by Trump in the 2020 election were less likely than counties won by Biden to send an insurrectionist to the Capitol. Likewise, the more rural the county, the fewer the insurgents.
6/10 “Only one meaningful correlation emerged,” Gellman writes: “Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline”—a link that held up in every state. bit.ly/3EuhxbR
7/10 A post-insurrection survey targeted toward people who don’t trust the election results found that 8%—or 21 million American adults—agreed that violence was justified to restore Trump to the White House.
8/10 The same survey also found that almost two-thirds of “committed insurrectionists” agreed that “African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites”—an ideology that aligns with the Great Replacement theory. 
9/10 What researchers found doesn’t fit with the government’s characterization of attacks from lone wolves or small groups of extremists. “This really is a new, politically violent mass movement,” Pape told Gellman. “This is collective political violence.”
10/10 The DOJ and FBI “are chasing down the foot soldiers of January 6, but there is no public sign that they are building cases against the men and women who sent them,” Gellman writes. “Absent consequences, they will certainly try again.” Read more: bit.ly/3EuhxbR
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