Why they fight: It's not just about Trump -- the insurrectionists believe 'their version of America is under threat'
The Jan. 6 rioters’ composite profile reveals an insurrectionary base willing to resort to political violence to resist challenges to the dominant position of white Christendom and patriarchy in the United States.
At about 8 a.m. on a Thursday morning in late June, FBI agents in tactical vests appeared at the front door of Casey Cusick, a 36-year-old Christian evangelical pastor, in Palm Bay, Fla.
Dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, Cusick met the agents in his front yard, and they placed him in handcuffs. His 4-year-old child asked Cusick’s wife: “Mommy, why are they locking Daddy’s hands?”
Cusick, vice president of Global Outreach Ministries church, was charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds and other violations in connection with the Jan. 6 assault on the US Capitol. His father, Jim, the founder of the church, along with David Lesperance, a member of the church, have also been charged.
Months later, recording a podcast while awaiting trial, Casey Cusick reflected on how his father had noted before Donald Trump was elected that 1 Corinthians 15:52 says, “In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: the trumpet shall sound.”
To Casey Cusick and his father, the word “trump” couldn’t be a fluke of translation.
“Now, you can’t tell me that it’s coincidence that the last president was Donald Trump,” Cusick insisted. “And here we go reading the scripture right here where it says, ‘The last trump for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.’”
The Cusicks had traveled with Lesperance to Washington DC on Jan. 6 to support Trump.
“We went up to DC to attend the rally because we believed what Trump said, and we believed that he won the election,” Casey Cusick told the far-right news outlet Newsmax. There, Trump told his supporters: “Our country has been under siege for a long time, far longer than this four-year period. You’re the real people that built this nation.” He added, “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Now, 10 months later, Casey Cusick was telling his podcast listeners: “We’re in a situation right now of combating this stuff in our country. We need to throw away all these love messages and faith messages, and start teaching our people and letting ’em know what is going on in our country. And if you don’t fight — fight back against this tyranny that’s happening — they’ll shut our churches down. We already saw what happened with COVID-19. We saw them literally shut our churches down.”
READ: Trump has raised an army of 21 million ‘committed insurrectionists’ — and they crave bloodshed
Since Jan. 6, the FBI has arrested more than 675 people in connection with the assault on the US Capitol; they are spread across 340 counties. Almost a third of them face charges of assaulting or impeding law enforcement, according to Department of Justice. The rioters came to hear President Trump proclaim his false assertion that the election was stolen, and some, outfitted in tactical gear and weaponry, surged towards the Capitol before he had finished speaking, intent on preventing Congress from certifying Joe Biden as the winner. They condemned the US government as “tyranny,” called members of Congress “traitors” and chanted, “Hang Mike Pence,” while casting themselves as the spiritual successors of the patriots of 1776. They falsely asserted that the incoming Biden administration was captured by the Communist Party of China.
“We won’t let you steal this country,” Oliver Sarko of Columbus, Ohio said on his Snapchat as he roamed the halls of the Capitol on Jan. 6. “Fight for Trump!” he yelled. And then, “Beijing Biden will never be president, we reject communism.”
Underneath the professions of patriotism and conspiracy-minded beliefs that the Biden administration and the Democratic Party are under the control of a sinister global cabal, the rioters’ composite profile reveals an insurrectionary base willing to resort to political violence to resist challenges to the dominant position of white Christendom and patriarchy in the United States.
“It’s not just being a Trump loyalist,” Amy Cooter, a sociologist at Vanderbilt University, told Raw Story. “A good majority of them feel like their version of America is under threat in a variety of ways. They’ve had those fears exacerbated by the pandemic. They were genuinely afraid of the protests after George Floyd’s killing. Whereas people of color, especially Black people, grow in size population-wise and grow in terms of political power, white people lash out through a variety of means, including gerrymandering. Some white people, to use a technical term, are freaked out. Trump becomes a symbol of resistance to all of these problems they perceive.”
Read: Katrina Pierson served as liaison between Jan. 6 insurrectionists and the White House: report
The counties that sent insurrectionists to Washington DC on Jan. 6 defy easy categorization, from Los Angeles County, with 13 (roughly one defendant for every 1 million residents) to a handful or rural Kentucky counties with populations ranging from 15,000 to 45,000 that host one defendant apiece. Among the counties with the highest levels of participation, where at least one person for every 100,000 is facing charges related to the assault on the Capitol, some like Brevard and Marion in central Florida are booming, while others, like Putnam and Dutchess in New York’s Hudson Valley, lost population over the last decade. They include Democratic strongholds like Nashville, Tenn. and Columbus, Ohio and counties that Trump carried in the 2020 election like Macomb, in Michigan, and Brevard, in Florida.
Research by the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, or CPOST, has pinpointed one correlation between the insurrectionists and the demographic trends of the counties where they live. As reported by Barton Gellman in the Atlantic: “Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline. For every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a strong link, and it held up in every state.”
CPOST surveyed 1,070 Americans and found that 9 percent believed that use of force was justified to restore Trump to the presidency, and that a fourth of adults agreed, in varying degrees, that “the 2020 election was stolen, and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.” The survey found that 8 percent of Americans, equivalent to 21 million adults, held both of those radical beliefs.
“Today’s 21 million adamant supporters of insurrection also have the dangerous potential for violent mobilization,” wrote Robert Pape, CPOST’s director.
CPOST’s research also found that 63 percent of “adamant insurrectionists” believe in the Great Replacement theory based on their agreement with the statement: “African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites.”
Rooted in white-power extremist thinking, Great Replacement is typically expressed in more apocalyptic terms as a false belief that white people are facing imminent genocide due to a combination of immigration and declining white birth rates. White power extremists like Brenton Tarrant and Patrick Crusius, respectively responsible for massacres of Muslim worshipers at two mosques in New Zealand and of Latinx shoppers at Walmart in El Paso, Texas, both in 2019, used Great Replacement theory as justification for their mass murders. White nationalists chanted, “Jews will not replace us” during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. in 2017, and Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson has recently embraced Great Replacement theory.
Amy Cooter, the sociologist at Vanderbilt University, told Raw Story she thinks the Great Replacement theory is not exactly the right framework for understanding the motivations of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
“I think Replacement theory is an overt neo-Nazi perspective where they are consciously concerned about being outnumbered by Black people,” Cooter said. “From folks I have observed for a long time, they don’t have that conscious belief. Many of them are genuinely oblivious to racism and oblivious to how much harder it is to obtain the American Dream if you’re a person of color."
Cooter conducted ethnographic research with Michigan militia activists about 10 years ago, and sees a strong crossover with the insurrectionists who mobilized on Jan. 6.
“Their ideology is shared across a broad swath of conservatism,” Cooter said of the militia activists. “The real power is trying to get at the cause of the insurrection. If you just think the insurrectionists are white supremacists, then we’ll miss some important insights about how to stop the next insurrection.”
Analysis by Raw Story suggests that racial anxiety over declining white population tells some but not all the story about the underlying motivation for the Jan. 6 insurrection. Raw Story identified a dozen “hotspot” counties where at least four people are facing federal charges related to the assault on the Capitol, excluding counties where all defendants were part of the same family or traveled to DC together. The counties were also selected based on a criterion that at least one of every 200,000 residents face charges in connection with the Jan. 6 assault.
All 12 counties saw some decline in their white non-Hispanic populations between 2015 and 2019. By far, the sharpest decline was seen in Collin County, in the suburbs north of Dallas (4.2 percent). Other counties that experienced a significant drop in the non-Hispanic white population were Franklin County (Columbus), Ohio (2.7 percent); Marion County, Fla. (2.3 percent); Macomb County, Mich. (2.1 percent); Camden County, NJ (1.8 percent); and Brevard County, Fla. (1.7 percent).
The remaining six counties saw their non-Hispanic white populations decline at rates equivalent or less than the national average of 1.5 percent: Bucks County, in the suburbs north of Philadelphia (1.5 percent); Dutchess County, NY (1.3 percent); Jefferson County (Birmingham), Ala. (1.0 percent); Allegheny (Pittsburgh), Pa. (1.0 percent); Erie (Buffalo), NY (0.8 percent); and Davidson (Nashville), Tenn. (0.5 percent).
Beyond the decline in white population across the United States, there’s a much more dramatic shift afoot. A 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center found that the share of Americans who describe themselves as Christians dropped by 12 percentage points over the past decade. And a Gallup poll released in March 2021 found that the share of Americans who attend a church, synagogue or mosque dropped below 50 percent in 2020, down from 70 percent around the turn of the 21st century. The share of Americans of Americans who call themselves Christian has declined among all racial and ethnic groups, but none more so than white non-Hispanics.
READ: Trump's midterm threats reveal he’s learned an alarming lesson about GOP voters: columnist
While the religious right is celebrating dramatic victories in its march to outlaw abortion, the declining demographic clout of churchgoing Christians signals a potential loss of political power.
“I love this country; I love America,” said Casey Cusick, the pastor in Palm Bay — part of Brevard County — who has a pending charge of felony violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds. “And I’m saddened to see where things have gone with our nation.” Cusick, explained in another part of his October podcast that he believes the United States “was founded on Judeo-Christian principles.”
Cusick lamented that a lot of Christians “say politics doesn’t belong in church, and the reason is no one wants to believe the truth — no one wants to understand what’s going on in our nation. They just want to fly by the seat of their pants, not get involved politically because, you know, you can’t do that. To be honest, that’s the reason our country’s in the situation that it’s in right now.”
Joshua Black, a rioter from Leeds, a suburb of Birmingham, Ala., explained in more vivid terms how his feeling that the Christian nation was being ripped away from him motivated him to invade the citadel of American democracy.
In a YouTube video, Black explained that he decided to go inside the Capitol after being shot in the face with a projectile because he “wanted to get inside the building so I could plead the blood of Jesus over it.” Once inside, he found a door marked “US Senate” and went into the chamber.
“I just felt like the spirit of God wanted me to go in the Senate room, you know,” Black said. “So, I was about to break the glass and I thought, no, this is our house, we don’t act like that. I was tempted to, I’m not gonna lie. Cause I’m pretty upset. You know? They stole my country.”
Eventually, he concluded that he had achieved his purpose, and left the Capitol building.
“I pled the blood of Jesus on the Senate floor,” Black said. “You know. I praised the name of Jesus on the Senate floor. That was my goal. I think that was God’s goal.”
Kevin Tuck, a pastor at the Lighthouse Church of Central Florida who stormed the Capitol while employed by the Windermere Police Department, posted a defiant YouTube video a month after being charged with obstruction of an official proceeding and disorderly conduct in a Capitol building. In his comments explaining the motivation behind the assault on the Capitol, Tuck decried both the rising acceptance of homosexuality and what he perceives as a loss of nationhood.
“You look at Jan. 6, that was a day that patriots were fed up — fed up,” Tuck reportedly said. “Patriots are being arrested left and right for trespassing. You’ve got to be kidding me.
“We need to rise up and be conservative again,” he continued. “Do you remember what conservative means, Republicans? Hear me out: We are embracing the homosexual lifestyle as if this is normal.
“We need to go back to becoming a conservative nation again,” Tuck concluded. “Back to nationalism. Being proud of this country.”
Pat Stedman, a 32-year-old self-described “dating and relationship strategist” from Haddonfield, in Camden County, NJ, posted on Twitter to his 29,000-some followers on Dec. 30, 2020: “Highly, HIGHLY recommend all patriots come to DC on the 6th. This will be a turning point in our nation.” He added, “If you are coming DM me. Assembling a TEAM.”
In a video posted on his Twitter account at 3:52 p.m. on Jan. 6, Stedman reported: “I was pretty much in the first wave, and we broke down the doors and climbed up the back part of the Capitol building and got all the way into the chambers.”
While Cusick’s podcast commentary expresses frustration that fewer Christians are declaring dominion over political governance, Stedman is preaching to young men who have difficulty maintain relationships with women that their problems are rooted in the decline of patriarchy.
“In the modern era, a husband does not have a ‘right’ to his wife’s body; he has no authority over her whatsoever,” Stedman complained in a blog post earlier this month. “Divorce is easy — you don’t even need an explanation — and in the aftermath, it’s usually the woman who ends up with the house and kids.”
Deriding gender progress in gender equality, Stedman lamented that traditional male authority has been supplanted by “an amorphous corporate state syndicate.”
Among defendants who hail from the regions with the highest levels of participation in the insurrection — central Florida, New York’s Hudson Valley, and the northern Philadelphia suburbs — some hold criminal records that reflect involvement in hate activity, or domestic violence.
Michael Curzio, a Marion County resident who was cited by US Capitol Police on Jan. 6 after refusing to leave the upper level of the Capitol Visitors Center, had previously joined a white supremacist gang known as the Unforgiven while serving a prison sentence for attempted murder.
Anthony Vuksanaj of Putnam County, NY — where three out of every 100,000 residents faces charges related to the assault on the Capitol — was charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds. Vuksanaj was previously charged in 2019, along with his wife, with second-degree criminal mischief as a hate crime, unlawful imprisonment and other offenses, according to a local news report. The news outlet reported that New York State Police were called to a Chili’s parking lot on a report of a domestic dispute and that the Vuksanajes violated a protection order by preventing the victim from leaving the parking lot, according to the report, which also said the Vuksanajes attempted to pull the victim from a vehicle and damaged the vehicle with a tire iron, and that the crimes appeared to be biased due to the victim’s sexual orientation.
Ryan Samsel of Bucks County, in Pennsylvania, was the first rioter to approach the police line at the entrance to the Pennsylvania Avenue Walkway, as a mob that included a large number of Proud Boys approached the Capitol. According to his charging document, Samsel pushed and pulled the barricade until the crowd pushed the barricade down on top of the officers, causing one officer to hit her head on the stairs and lose consciousness. Federal prosecutors told the court that prior to Jan. 6 Samsel had a long history of assaulting women. In one incident, in 2008, Samsel reportedly poured beer on his pregnant girlfriend, shoved her into a canal and repeatedly held her underwater.
Casey Cusick also has a reported history of domestic violence. Cusick was arrested at his home in 2018 for disorderly conduct, according to Florida Today. The newspaper cited an arrest report that indicated that Cusick struck his wife on the nose with his right elbow, causing her to bleed, although the charge was not adjudicated.
Central Florida and the New York’s Hudson Valley, as two regions of the country with a disproportionate share of the Jan. 6 defendants, are also well represented among the two extremist groups — the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys — that played an outsized role in the insurrection.
Members of the Oath Keepers who face charges related to the assault on the Capitol are prominently represented among the defendants from Brevard and Marion counties. Kenneth Harrelson, who was assigned to serve as the “ground team lead in Florida,” hails from Titusville, in Brevard County. Kelly Meggs, named the “state lead of Florida,” and his wife, Connie, live in Marion County. The three Oath Keepers members conducted paramilitary training together at a firing range in Florida prior to Jan. 6, according to federal prosecutors.
Jeremy Brown, an Oath Keeper who told an InfoWars interviewer that he started reaching out to other US Army Special Operations veterans in April 2020 “when we started having the lockdowns,” lives in Tampa, Fla., as does fellow Oath Keeper Caleb Berry. Another Oath Keeper, James Delisco Beeks, lives in Orlando.
Roberto Minuta, an Oath Keeper who was assigned to Roger Stone’s personal security detail before he took part in the assault on the Capitol, operated a tattoo parlor in Newburgh, NY, although he reportedly moved to Prosper, Texas, north of Dallas, in 2020.
William Pepe, a former New York Metropolitan Transit Authority employee who lived in Beacon, NY at the time of the Jan. 6 attack, is charged with conspiracy to stop, delay or hinder Congress’ certification of the electoral vote by force, along with fellow Proud Boys Dominic Pezzola and Matthew Greene. The three men are accused of charging towards the Capitol behind Samsel, and Pepe is specifically accused of removing a police barrier at the entrance of the west plaza so that other rioters could infiltrate the plaza and prevent officers from controlling access to the Capitol.
Joe Biggs, who led the Proud Boys mob alongside Ethan Nordean that marched on the Capitol, is from Ormond Beach, on Florida’s east-central coast. Arthur Jackman, who is married to an Orange County sheriff’s deputy, is from Orlando. Jackman was indicted alongside Kevin Tuck, the former Windermere police officer, and his son, Nathaniel Tuck, who had previously been employed as an officer with the Apopka Police Department. The three men posed together, along with Proud Boys Biggs, Nordean, Edward George and Paul Rae, on the Capitol lawn after storming the building.
The rhetoric of the Hudson Valley and central Florida insurrectionists, like their counterparts from across the country, included an unmistakable call to war.
After fulfilling his obligation to provide security for Stone, the indictment says Roberto Minuta “donned battle apparel and gear, including hard-knuckle tactical gloves, ballistic goggles, a tactical vest, a radio with an earpiece and bear spray. Minuta and give other Oath Keepers reportedly sped towards the Capitol, swerving around law enforcement.
“Patriots are storming the Capitol building; there’s violence against patriots by the DC police; so, we’re en route in a grand theft auto golf cart to the Capitol building right now,” Minuta reportedly said. “It’s going down, guys; it’s literally going down right now. Patriots storming the Capitol building… f*cking war in the streets right now… word is they got the building… let’s go.”
Minuta, like his fellow Oath Keeper Jeremy Brown in Florida, had been radicalized by the government response to the pandemic.
Minuta had refused to shut down his tattoo shop in Newburgh in defiance of executive orders by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in May 2020. At the direction of founder Stewart Rhodes, Oath Keepers turned out for a rally to support Minuta that month.
“I’m going to designate him as a lifetime Oath Keeper,” Rhodes reportedly said. “And I’m not going to say we’re going to comp him a lifetime membership, because he’s earned it. He’s earning it right now. So, we’re honored to have him as a member of the Oath Keepers.”
Casey Cusick, the pastor from Florida, and Pat Stedman, the “dating and relationship strategist” from southern New Jersey, share some things in common. Both are men in their thirties who are facing charges related to the Jan. 6 assault on the US Capitol. They live in different regions of the country, and seemingly speak to different audiences, but in many ways they represent the religious and secular sides of the same coin.
“I believe we’re in a time of restoration,” Cusick said in the Nov. 21 episode of his podcast “The Watchmen,” which is billed as “a Biblical outlook at what’s going on politically in the world today.”
Stedman told his listeners in a Sept. 25 episode of his “COVID/Cabal” podcast: “The planet is transitioning to a different age. It’s transitioning to a different age, and it’s transitioning to a different consciousness. And you either get on board with the consciousness — there’s not a lot of time left for that — you literally get on board with that, or you literally are not gonna make it.”
Both men share a fixation on elites, echoing Trump’s demonization of a global elite during the 2016 election and his efforts to undermine scientific expertise through antagonism towards Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Cusick said in one of his podcasts that through researching COVID-19 on the internet he learned about “Satanic ritual abuse and things like that.”
“We’re worried about a virus when in reality, there’s stuff in our food that would blow your mind,” Cusick said, building to a crescendo of alarm. “There’s stuff in movies that they put in there for our children. There’s stuff they’re doing to children; it’s just terrible. And I’m telling you right now, this whole thing that is going on is a thousand percent about the kids. It’s about sex trafficking that’s been going on worldwide…. And it’s at the highest level. Elites. At the highest level.”
Both Cusick and Stedman also insist in remarkably similar language that the results of the 2020 election must be reversed.
Sipping a glass of Riesling on his deck this past fall with the air of a successful man living the good life, Stedman gazed into the camera and said, “All this talk about, ‘Just wait for 2022, just wait for 2024’ — which is ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. You fix 2020, or it’s done. Or the United States is done.” He added, “They’re just going to steal it. And the only way out is noncompliance. You can’t look to the voting booth.” (He qualified his statement by saying he’s not calling for violence: “It’s just noncompliance. You accept the system is not legitimate, doesn’t work, it’s corrupt, it’s captured, and you let what else happens, happen.”)
Cusick made the same point in the Nov. 21 episode of “The Watchmen,” with its televised wrestling-style show intro (“It’s time. So, get your popcorn ready. It will be… political. It will be… Biblical.”): “We have to do something about 2020. If we don’t deal with 2020 — I’ve said this a thousand times — how do we have a 2022?”
Both men overtly invoke the apocalypse, and self-consciously make QAnon references in their respective podcasts.
“What is going on here in America?” Cusick said in the Oct. 19 episode of his podcast. “They have us — we’re enslaved…. When the pilgrims came to America in 1620 — four hundred years from then goes to 2020 — when did this awakening start in the United States? Everyone started realizing what was going on with our elections, with Hollywood, with all these elites. It started in 2020, thanks to our president, Donald Trump.”
Cusick offered an allegory, comparing Americans from the settling of the colonies in the 1600s to the Israelites who, according to the Old Testament, were enslaved in Egypt under the pharaoh. By way of explaining how the United States, which after all, was supposedly “founded on Judeo-Christian principles,” had been “enslaved” since before its founding, Cusick claimed that “it was infiltrated and it became Satanic.”
For Cusick, Trump is to be credited for awakening a sense of nationalism in Americans and helping them define an enemy, which happens to be their fellow citizens.
“Trump’s the one who made people all of a sudden realize we have a country, and we have an opposition, whether you were on the left side or the right side,” Cusick said.
While concerned with something entirely different — helping men have more sex, as opposed to saving souls for Jesus — Stedman offered a similar chronology in his Dec. 9 blog post entitled “Why Your Woman Stops Wanting Sex.”
“We have been experiencing a gradual dark night of soul these past 100 years; as I write this in December 2021 we are near the culmination of it,” he wrote. Then, he went straight to the apocalypse: “In this collapse all that has been hidden is becoming seen. We are living through the apocalypse — the great revealing. The great awakening.”
After invoking apocalypse as a force for a transformation in gender relations, Stedman advised young men that they should strive for “consensual polarity” while making it clear that he was not advocating for equality: In his view, the men are protagonists; women are material to be “forged.”
“Such a relationship is well within your grasp,” Stedman advised. “In spite of all the programming, suitable women are all around; though many do need guidance — you will need to help forge them. But the limiting factor is you. Because you can only take a woman as far as you yourself have gone.”
Both Cusick and Stedman appeal to an authoritarian impulse by setting up a struggle between a populist base and an elite, with Trump still embodying the avenging strongman. For, Cusick, who views Trump is “a type and shadow of the Messiah” just “as Obama was a type and shadow of the Antichrist,” the former president will returned to power through God’s will. For Stedman, it will be with the assistance of a shadowy cadre he described as “an upper strata of the military… good people who are in this deep, deep apparatus… it’s beyond top secret.”
Cusick said he believes the reason Americans are experiencing tribulations is that “God’s allowing us to see Satan’s plan so that we can wake up.”
Stedman asked his listeners: “Why is Trump so confident? Why is Trump safe? Why is he protected? Why did he pull back before?” And he similarly concluded: “Well, he pulled back because he’s allowing the consciousness of the public to grow.”
In contrast, the elites and other enemies of Trump’s base, recognize that their days are numbered, Stedman claimed. It will be only a matter of time before Trump’s ultra-secret military backers would come to the aid of the yearning masses to vanquish the elites, he predicted.
“They will not be able to walk down the street,” Stedman claimed. “Do you think for a second that these people are confident in their position? Why don’t you think they’re confident? Well, they’re not confident because there’s a group above them that’s sandwiching them. You’re here at the bottom — the masses that are waking up, putting pressure on the bottom. And they’re on the top and they’re putting pressure on the top. And these people are getting squeezed. They’re like a nice little fruit. They’re getting squeezed of all their juice.”
Cusick, meanwhile, confidently predicted that Trump will return to power in a manner similar to the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
“I will say he’s stepped out of his wealth, just like Jesus stepped down out of heaven into this dark world to help us, to redeem us,” Cusick said. “Donald Trump did something very similar. He’s gone. Jesus was gone for three days and three nights, but he came back.
“I believe it’s going to be the same,” he predicted. “He’s a conquering king.”
10 states with largest number of arrests on federal charges in connection with Jan. 6 insurrection
1. Florida — 78
2. Texas — 61
3. Pennsylvania — 60
4. New York — 55
5. California — 43
6. Ohio — 33
7. Virginia — 3
8. New Jersey — 22
9. Missouri — 18
10. North Carolina — 18
12 counties with largest number of arrests on federal charges in connection with Jan. 6 insurrection
1. Los Angeles, Calif. — 13 (0.13 per 100,000 population)
2. Orange, Calif. — 10 (0.31 per 100,000 population)
3. Kings (Brooklyn), NY — 8 (0.29 per 100,000 population)
4. Brevard, Fla. — 7 (1.15 per 100,000 population)
5. Allegheny (Pittsburgh), Pa. — 7 (0.56 per 100,000 population)
6. Franklin (Columbus), Ohio — 7 (0.53 per 100,000 population)
7. Hillsborough (Tampa), Fla. — 7 (0.47 per 100,000 population)
8. Dutchess, NY — 6 (2.03 per 100,000 population)
9. Marion, Fla. — 6 (1.60 per 100,000 population)
10. Orange (Orlando), Fla. — 6 (0.42 per 100,000 population)
11. Broward, Fla. — 6 (0.31 per 100,000 population)
12. Riverside, Calif. — 6 (0.25 per 100,000 population)
