The Insurrectionists Weren’t Who We Thought. That’s Key To Stopping Them in the Future.

There’s an awkward truth being unearthed about the most extreme participants in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6. They aren’t the down-and-out, unemployed, rural, and “forgotten” sector of our society many often assume. In a report authored by Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, with the help of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), which examined the court records of 377 participants who were arrested, the rioters were by and large found to be white (95%) and male (85%)—and that’s no surprise. More surprising is the fact that they came not from deeply red, Trump-heavy counties but rather from relatively affluent, middle-class ones, the majority of which Biden actually comfortably won.

Photo by Jacquelyn Martin/AP

The last finding startled Pape and the CPOST researchers, who had expected economic dislocation lingering from the 2008 recession to be a driving factor for the rage exhibited by the rioters. What they found instead was a strong correlation between participation in the riot and a changing demographic in the insurrectionists’ home counties. Specifically, counties that had shown the steepest declines in white population were the most likely to produce insurrectionists. This held true, Pape determined, even after controlling for population size, distance to Washington, unemployment rate and urban or rural location.

As Pape writes in a Washington Post OpEd:

“Texas is the home of 36 of the 377 charged or arrested nationwide. The majority of the state’s alleged insurrectionists — 20 of 36 — live in six quickly diversifying blue counties such as Dallas and Harris (Houston). In fact, all 36 of Texas’s rioters come from just 17 counties, each of which lost White population over the past five years. Three of those arrested or charged hail from Collin County north of Dallas, which has lost White population at the very brisk rate of 4.3 percent since 2015.”

In fact, according to the report, counties that had lost a significant proportion of their white population were six times more likely to send an insurrectionist to Washington than those that had not, even adjusting for all variables like size and distance from the riot.

Could lurking racism and nativism lie at the core of the violence seen that day? Historians wouldn’t be surprised. Large-scale, national racist movements in the United States often arise in response to seismic shifts in demographics. One curious analogy to the present-day cults of MAGA and Q was the ironically-titled “Native American Party” in the mid-1850s, which actually had nothing to do with indigenous people. This Protestant group was apoplectic over the arrival of waves of Catholic immigrants from Ireland. They falsely believed in a papal “Romanist” conspiracy that would subvert their religious freedoms and liberties here in America. (They were somewhat humorously known as the “Know Nothing” party because, when asked about their affiliation with the secretive society, the adherents were advised to answer, “I know nothing.”)

Similarly, the KKK, which had more or less disbanded in the waning years of Reconstruction, rematerialized in 1915 and experienced a resurgence following World War I in response to black migration to the North. In addition to its terrorizing of African Americans, the KKK began targeting immigrants, Jews and Catholics while promoting patriotism and white supremacy. With echoes of today’s culture wars, it also attacked “urban” elites and intellectuals. Memberships swelled to as high as eight million in the 1920s by some estimates, with many mainstream and middle-class Americans joining.

This phenomenon of fearing immigrants and minorities is sometimes referred to as the “Great Replacement,” which falsely warns, as it has for more than 150 years, that brown-skinned people and their non-Christian allies are going to take over the country. Echoes of this fear reverberated during the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, when white nationalists chanted, “Jews will not replace us!” 

To explore whether this same sentiment underlay the January 6 riot, the CPOST conducted opinion surveys in February and March of this year and found that the “Great Replacement” was a clear stand-out as a fear driver, propelled in large measure by social media exposure. Nativist and racist followers of the former president are likely to see the Biden administration as the embodiment of these fears, with an African- and Asian-American Vice President, the most diverse cabinet in history, and multiple minority appointments to the federal judiciary.

But couldn’t the correlation between white population loss in a county and insurrection participation be mere coincidence? According to the report, there’s less than a one in 1,000 chance of that happening randomly. That’s why Professor Pape believes it is crucial to understand the political and racist roots of the attack, because otherwise policy might be wrongly directed. If law enforcement is to become more predictive in its approach, it must understand where the insurrectionists are actually coming from, both geographically and ideologically.

Pape’s earlier work demonstrates this well. He is known primarily for his research on international terrorism, most notably for his research on suicide bombers showing that they are not actually religious zealots, as most assume them to be, but rather secular ideologues responding to Western military occupation. This is key to understanding not only how to respond to their threat but how to infiltrate their networks and stop the violence before it begins. With the insurrectionists in America, this would mean a serious rethink of who these “radicals” really are, especially if we are to understand how mainstream, “ordinary” middle-class Americans—the same that once joined the Know Nothings and the KKK in the past two centuries—were incited to fly to Washington and attack the Capitol.