First up, how bad was January 6th compared to other protests? RealClear Investigations does a deep dive and it is very illuminating:
Next, who were the January 6th protesters in terms of their backgrounds, and how do they compare to the average American and known right-wing extremists? Here’s a hint:
A main finding of this report is that the individuals charged for participating in the January 6, 2021 breach of the US Capitol to stop the certification of Joseph Biden as the president of the United States are a cross section of America.
The verbiage in the report is a little confusing. The “insurrectionists” are just the January 6th protesters, while the “right-wing extremists” are a group of 108 individuals in a database who committed an act where “the case must (1) demonstrate clear ideology and (2) violent intent linked to REMV [Racially/Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists] ideology” (p. 33).
1. It seems the protesters were mostly young and middle-aged:
2. They are also similar to the electorate in terms of socioeconomic status:
3. And contrary to the what the media would have you think, they were not a bunch of militia types:
4. Here is some food for thought:
Since Trump’s voters are famously rural, one might expect that the insurrectionists would overwhelming reside in the most rural counties in America. However, only 23% of insurrectionists came from counties that are more rural than urban, the national average of the 23% of the US population who live in this same classification. This means that the insurrectionists are an overwhelmingly urban phenomenon.
As usual, Glen Greenwald nails it:
The number of people killed by pro-Trump supporters at the January 6 Capitol riot is equal to the number of pro-Trump supporters who brandished guns or knives inside the Capitol. That is the same number as the total of Americans who — after a full year of a Democrat-led DOJ conducting what is heralded as “the most expansive federal law enforcement investigation in US history” — have been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government as a result of that riot one year ago. Coincidentally, it is the same number as Americans who ended up being criminally charged by the Mueller probe of conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, and the number of wounds — grave or light — which AOC, who finally emerged at night to assure an on-edge nation that she was “okay" while waiting in an office building away from the riot at the rotunda, sustained on that solemn day.
That number is zero. But just as these rather crucial facts do not prevent the dominant wing of the U.S. corporate media and Democratic Party leaders from continuing to insist that Donald Trump's 2016 election victory was illegitimate due to his collusion with the Kremlin, it also does not prevent January 6 from being widely described in those same circles as an Insurrection, an attempted coup, an event as traumatizing as Pearl Harbor (2,403 dead) or the 9/11 attack (2,977 dead), and as the gravest attack on American democracy since the mid-19th Century Civil War (750,000 dead). The Huffington Post's White House reporter S.V. Date said that it was wrong to compare 1/6 to 9/11, because the former — the three-hour riot at the Capitol — was “1,000 percent worse.”
That the January 6 riot was some sort of serious attempted insurrection or "coup” was laughable from the start, and has become even more preposterous with the passage of time and the emergence of more facts. The United States is the most armed, militarized and powerful regime in the history of humanity. The idea that a thousand or so Trump supporters, largely composed of Gen X and Boomers, who had been locked in their homes during a pandemic — three of whom were so physically infirm that they dropped dead from the stress — posed anything approaching a serious threat to “overthrow” the federal government of the United States of America is such a self-evidently ludicrous assertion that any healthy political culture would instantly expel someone suggesting it with a straight face.
Finally, memes provide some needed perspective:
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