Robert Pape

In the 1920s, after World War I, you saw the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan, which had been dormant for decades, grew from a few hundred thousand to four to six million members.

Those members paid dues.

We have records.

We know that this was not just simply in the South.

This was in many places in the North.

And what you saw was, again, millions of Americans supporting political violence.

The 1960s is another example.

And in the 1960s, you have a string of political assassinations.

You also have collective political violence.

You have political riots happening in a number of cities.

That's the Chicago Convention in 1968.

Right.

And we have opinion poll data from the 60s and similar to today, there is really a striking correspondence of support by tens of millions of Americans for that political violence itself.

So what's different about our era today is not just that this is not the first time we've had millions of Americans supporting political violence.

It is pretty much the first time it's happened on both sides at the same time.

That's another distinctive feature about what's occurring in our current period compared to the 60s, which was mostly from the left, and the early 20s, which was mostly from the right.

We have a variety of databases.

We have the FBI databases.

And then we did a study at CEPOS, the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, of threats to members of Congress over a 25-year period, from 2001 to 2024.

And this was important because these were threats that were prosecuted by the Department of Justice.