Robert Pape

So I don't want to over read this as if it's everything is just about the Internet.

We tend to dodge everything.

the actual core issues of the social change, and then we tend to focus on things that we are just a little more comfortable, I guess I would say, to focus on, as if if we simply solve that one problem, everything would be okay.

No, you're pointing to the accelerants, but they are not the absolute fire itself.

I do believe that's true.

It's a little more difficult to document with great precision, but I do believe that we see that as the pool of supporters for political violence grows, the individuals who are the volatile individuals are coming from that pool as well.

And what you are seeing is a wider range of biographical backgrounds, and that matches then the wider range of supporters of political violence in general in the body politic.

Where we really drilled into this was we analyzed the early profile of the January 6th attackers, those who broke into the Capitol, compared to who committed political violence on the right from FBI data going back the previous several decades.

And what we found is a markedly different profile.

Huh.

What we found is that the old profile of those who would commit lethal right-wing violence was people who were unemployed, members of militia groups.

They were basically the fringe.

And what we found was in the first hundreds of people who were arrested after January 6th, that profile looked nothing like that.

The profile was very different.

They were unemployed only to the average of the country as a whole, 7%.

They were business owners, doctors, lawyers, CEOs.

That's the profile.

Think of it as insurrectionists in a business suit living in a nice suburb right next to you.

And only about 10% were members of militia groups, not 50%, as we had found before.

So what we saw was a completely different profile.