A New Study Shows Us the Single Biggest Motivation for the Jan. 6 Rioters | Amanpour and Company

we dig now again into a study that's happened about the january 6 capital insurrection of the nearly 400 american rioters who arrested or charged 93 percent of white and 86 are male that's according to the chicago project on security and threats here's michelle martin speaking to the study's principal investigator professor robert pape at the university of chicago with some surprising revelations about the attackers and their motives professor robert pape thank you so much for joining us thank you for having me now you've said from the beginning it's important to understand who stormed the capital on january 6th and by that you don't just mean for the purpose of bringing criminal charges you've analyzed information about more than 400 people who've been arrested so far um and i'm i'm being sort of vague about the number because the number changes you know every day um you know some of the people have been in the news like the guy with the fur hat you know the guy putting his feet on the speaker's desk but you saw that there are patterns the first thing some things that anybody who was actually watching the thing unfold could see overwhelmingly white overwhelmingly male we could also see that they're older what was the kind of overall profile of the person who got involved what's so striking in this case is that two-thirds of the over now 420 who have been arrested are over the age of 34. we have the concentration uh in the early 40s that is people who are in their 40s and 50s they have families they have jobs they are mature adults this is a very different picture than what we've seen before further when we drill into not just what we can see on tv but with this large research team at the university of chicago project on security and threats we're able to track the occupations and what we find are 45 are ceos business owners doctors lawyers accountants mid-level managers uh we have a state department official this is a very different pattern than we're used to seeing before only seven percent are unemployed that is the national average at that point um these are not people that are two three times more unemployed these are not people that are at the desperate end of the job wrong ladder and what that means is that a lot of our usual solutions just simply won't apply so we usually think with right-wing extremists well let's get them a job well somebody's a ceo or business owner that's going to be a problem um if uh what about trying to help them to um adopt other uh significant others in their life that's a big disengagement strategy in cve well if they already have children already are married this is their and they already are in a good workplace this is a this this pro this is not going to work either so what about the militia attachment piece that was the other thing i think a lot of people would have thought that they were part of these groups that they may have heard of maybe not don't know a whole lot about but you know the proud boys the people who are you know accused of you know uh desecrating these two historically black churches in dc earlier in the year or the oath keepers or the three percenters when you you found that that's not the case it was actually a might tiny minority it is it's it's um um almost 90 of the over 420 arrested for breaking into the capital now that we have half of those who broke it in you see only 800 broke in um over uh nearly 90 percent are not affiliated with milits militias or pre-existing gangs like the proud boys the oath keepers of the three percenters this is not the usual suspects these are not uh the usual ideas of the standard lone wolf the standard militia group who's doing the standard far-right violence this is not the case and this is important because if we keep thinking it's the militia groups when it's not and we keep thinking it's a lone wolf but when it's not then of course we're going to be surprised again so what did you find in fact there's when you've you've been writing about this for the last couple of months but it just doesn't fail to shock you found that there are there's a primary driver that stands out across three separate studies all with different methodologies and what is that it's one sort of overriding driver one overriding driver across all the three studies that we've now conducted is the fear of the great replacement this is the idea the great replacement is the idea that the rights of hispanics and blacks that is the rights of minorities are outpacing the rights of whites and this is a consistent factor in several ways in our studies number one we looked at the origins of where the individuals who broke into the capital where they lived and what we discovered is that over half live in counties in the united states that biden one these are not coming from the reddest parts of america these are coming half of them from the bluest parts of america now to be clear these are pro-trump supporters so i want to be absolutely clear about that but they're coming from chicago they're coming from houston they're coming from san francisco they're coming from los angeles and beverly hills within los angeles they're coming from new york city now this is uh then we started to look more deeply and we discovered that what do the counties there are about 250 that have produced these 420 plus insurrectionists what do they have uh most in common what's their biggest risk factor the biggest risk factor is not whether they're rural the more rural the less likely a county was to send an insurrectionist it's not percent vote for trump the higher the vote for trump the less likely the county was to send an insurrectionist the number one risk factor was percent decline of the non-hispanic white population the more the decline of the his non-hispanic white population the more likely the county was to send an insurrectionist and this would happen by chance less than one in a thousand times so this is very important uh to understand second we followed this up because once we knew that we wanted to say well gee what would this what's the general risk factor here in the population at large so we conducted a nationally representative sample with the national opinion research council this is the gold standard of opinion surveys not the kind of cheap thing that people sometimes do on the side um and we asked people a thousand american adults we asked them do you believe the election was stolen and do you would you willingly participate in a violent protest and what we discovered is four percent of all american adults which equates to 10 million people both believe in the steel and would participate in a violent protest we further found that the key risk factor was belief in the great replacement that is the belief the fear that the rights of minorities were outpacing the rights of whites well is it is it is it the right is it the rights or is it the people is it is it a rights question or is it just there's too many people here who don't look like me and i don't like it in our survey we specifically focused on the word rights so we specifically focused on the rights of hispanics and blacks uh rising greater than the rights of whites it's a it's a clear core belief in the great replacement idea um and so that's why we're uh able to tie the studies together so that because it's not just the general findings that overlap they overlap very tightly what made you think about demographic change the demographic change in the county as something to to look at what made you think about that so i've been studying political violence around the world for 30 years i started doing this when i started studying political violence in the balkans in bosnia remember the bosnian civil war well this was a conflict among muslims croatians and serbs i also study iraq i also study afghanistan where these are sunnis versus shia or pashtuns versus tajik so it was natural for me to include as one of the risk factors something about demographics and in our country the natural equivalent is uh the question i just uh told you about the rights of minorities versus whites and that idea uh just comes uh basically is rooted in my 30 years of experience what you're saying here has become one of the key talking points of the right-wing media is that white people are being replaced but what what does one do about that because the fact is they do have the right to say whatever they want however inflammatory and racist it may be this also comes at a time when there is no political will among people of color to how can i say this to uh attenuate their desire for what they see as equal rights in order to not scare these people you know you've got these sort of two competing movements here so so now that we know more clearly and it's become more transparent not just to people inside the movement but to now all of us as a result of this we can focus on understanding the fear you see it's not just an objective reality that's occurring here there is fear that is occurring and some of that for sure is being manipulated by political leaders people in the media i'm no doubt about that what you're saying but understanding that is a fear allows us then to understand and break that apart not to see it as a glob or a blob fear but we can then um pull it apart after 9 11 many people thought you could never end the threat of suicide terrorism um that i was doing a lot of work on the demographics of suicide terrorists that led to a lot of policies and what's the threat of suicide terrorism today zilch or near zelch and i know because i study this in my center as well so uh this has changed this the idea that we can understand more clearly the drivers helps us to understand the vulnerable populations who are really vulnerable to these uh to these fears and then within that to understand which parts of that are the convincible part and which parts are not and this is how we make progress is it possible that these views are more widespread than it would appear based on the number of people who actually participated in the specific action as evidenced by the fact that you know the former president's continues to loom so large over say the republican party apparatus in so many places and that that that adhering to this this false notion that the election was stolen has really become kind of a core belief of the republican party apparatus around the country so is it possible that this belief is more widespread than simply contained in the people who took this particular action on a particular day uh yes so so and that's one of the advantages of the nationally representative uh study is because i can tell you numbers so we now know that there are about four percent of american adults who fit cleanly into this insurrectionist movement as of now but there are millions of others who are just right next to this group who believe in the fear of the great replacement they believe the election was stolen but they say they're not willing to participate in a violent protest and i would simply add as the analyst now you see when i study political violence around the world what we see are what we call uh and i hope this terminology is okay we have passive supporters of a violent movement and we have active supporters of a violent movement the four percent are the really potentially active supporters but there are then others that are more passive and the thing we have to be concerned about as we go forward is that some of those who are now have the same beliefs but are not acting on them in such in the same way could become more active this is what's making jay johnson the former secretary of dhs so concerned this is what's making people who deal with disengagement from right-wing groups for years this is what they do for their life they are really concerned when they see the details of what we found because it really is as jay johnson said it's it's frightening so tell me you you promised you had some hopeful direction for us i think this is time to hear it you say you think that these the ideas can be intervened upon or that this behavior can be intervened upon tell so so let's talk about that now how so think about this like covet so um when we first knew there was covet people kept saying well tell me what to do tell me what to do tell me what to do well okay political leaders told you what to do but they didn't have any science much science behind that and notice how now that we have science we can tell people here's the science that will help us going forward well that's what we're doing now with these stress testing we're doing new uh uh research stress testing the second thing that's very important um is that we're going to assess we need to assess the potential of the insider threat in the us military so even though we found only a little over 10 of the insurrectionists were members of militia groups a third of those were had former military service this is a big deal because even though it's a relatively small portion of that layer cake of the storm it's a particularly deadly portion it's a particular portion that is trained to the highest standards of the use of deadly violence in the world that's our us military so this is something that we need to take very seriously and it's kind of what we can now do is identify a particularly vulnerable population that we need to understand the scope and drivers much much more it's with compared to cove but it's like understanding preconditions driving susceptibility to the disease so as we go forward um we also need to do more consistent um uh and deeper studies all the way in the run up to the 2022 election season we shouldn't look at these as just one-off studies and now we're done because the 2022 election season is going to be on us very very quickly and we already see politically it's going to be contentious well the work i'm focusing on is how much violence should we expect we know it'll be politically contentious i'm not going to be in the politics of the issue i want to we need to focus on the violence part of the issue and we need to be doing this now routinely not just wait until after an event happens and then people say well why did that happen we need to act in advance and this is one of the great things that we can do because we have the tools we have that we know how to make advances in our knowledge and we just need to use science professor robert pig thank you so much for talking with us today and i do hope we'll talk again oh thank you so much for having me terrific discussion [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Amanpour and Company

Views: 1,467,499

Keywords: interview, CNN, PBS, Christiane Amanpour, world news, news anchor, news show, news, public affairs, late-night TV, journalist, Chief International Correspondent, University of Chicago, January 6, Michel Martin, Robert A. Pape

Id: dskVval50AE

Length: 17min 46sec (1066 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2021