Robert Pape

Don't think of these as iron laws.

Think of these as risk factors and the tendencies in the data.

But what you see is that there are individuals, and you can actually see them in the survey research, who are predisposed to be angry and predisposed to act out impulsively.

And then it is disproportionately that portion of those folks who are already angry, already impulsive, who are far more likely to be activated.

So social media is making things worse.

It's adding gasoline to a fire, but it's not the fire itself.

But it is important because what you see is social media is the immediate manifestation of those tens of millions of Americans who are supporting political violence, because many of them are on social media.

And you can then see in the different ways they react.

And a good example of how this works is it can interact with a top-down.

So just pick the Pelosi attack as just one to give you the example.

So with the Pelosi attack, shortly thereafter, Donald Trump Jr.

made fun of the attack.

It was near Halloween, and so he made a social media post about how he was going to have

the costume here, and it was basically the hammer and so forth that the attacker used on Paul Pelosi.

And that generated enormous social media support, lots of laughter.

And what you saw is an interaction effect here.

And so then future would-be attackers can see that, and that is how you end up with this confidence in social approval.

Now, just also to be clear, in the 1960s, we didn't have any social media and we had plenty of political violence and tens of millions of people supporting it.

In the 1920s, we didn't have social media and we barely had radio and television.

And nonetheless, we got enormous support for political violence.