Arrests of Capitol attackers prove Trump’s ‘white working class’ narrative was all a lie: columnist

Arrests are continuing after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by President Donald Trump's supporters. Republicans like Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) attempted to claim, falsely, that Antifa was behind the riot against the Capitol. President Donald Trump attempted to paint the Capitol insurrectionists as "patriots" and everyday Americans angry about the election being stolen from them.

Evidence proves that the attackers weren't merely normal, working-classes families bringing their kids to a political rally and then to casually knock on the Speaker's door to complain about the election. Writing for the Washington Post Eugene Scott revealed that data for those 377 arrested so far doesn't match what any of the Republicans have claimed.

Robert A. Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats sorted through the arrests to analyze their demographics.

"What we know 90 days later is that the insurrection was the result of a large, diffuse and new kind of protest movement congealing in the United States," Pape wrote in The Post. "Those involved are, by and large, older and more professional than right-wing protesters we have surveyed in the past. They typically have no ties to existing right-wing groups. But like earlier protesters, they are 95 percent White and 85 percent male, and many live near and among Biden supporters in blue and purple counties."

A 2017 survey indicated that white working-class voters felt their world was changing around them, but as the report explained, that isn't the whole picture.

"The most recent attempt by Trump supporters to keep the former president in office largely included White culturally anxious professionals from urban areas, according to the study," said the Post. That's the same kind of pattern seen during the Civil Rights movement, the Klan and among other white supremacist groups.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that Trump supporters were easily moved by his message to return the U.S. to a more idealized time when whites were more in control.

"When compared with almost 2,900 other counties in the United States, our analysis of the 250 counties where those charged or arrested live reveals that the counties that had the greatest decline in White population had an 18 percent chance of sending an insurrectionist to D.C., while the counties that saw the least decline in the White population had only a 3 percent chance," Pape wrote in his analysis of the data. "This finding holds even when controlling for population size, distance to D.C., unemployment rate and urban/rural location. It also would occur by chance less than once in 1,000 times. Put another way, the people alleged by authorities to have taken the law into their hands on Jan. 6 typically hail from places where non-White populations are growing fastest."

Scott closed by saying that the backers of Trump help to paint a picture of the direction the GOP is turning as their voters try to navigate a new world with a changing makeup.

Read the full column at the Washington Post.