What We Still Refuse to Accept About the Insurrectionists

[marmar]

What We Still Refuse to Accept About the Insurrectionists
A year later, we are still trying to understand what drove the individuals to the Capitol, and still ignoring what we already know about how they got there.

BY NICOLE LEWIS
JAN 06, 20225:45 AM


(Slate) It has been one year since thousands of people gathered on the steps of the Capitol building with the shared mission of interrupting the peaceful transfer of power. The anniversary of Jan. 6 has brought with it a flood of stories exploring what could have possibly driven so many people to turn against the very democracy they swear they were trying to protect. One of the deepest of these investigations came in late December from New York magazine, in the form of a reported feature by Kerry Howley, chronicling the journey of three strangers whose fates collided at the Capitol. It’s a story that attempts to explain how we got there—and it also reveals why we’re not much closer to resolving the problems the insurrection unleashed.

The rioters’ stories are framed as a portrait of loss. “Gina Bisignano would lose her salon, Guy Reffitt would lose his freedom, and Rosanne Boyland would lose her life,” Howley writes. The majority of the piece is written as a plot-based narrative that primarily explores how any of this could have happened. Bisignano, Reffitt, and Boyland are not portrayed as terrorists, traitors, or treasonists carrying out an organized coup, they are simply three Americans—Gina, Guy and Rosanne—bound by their susceptibility to believe in and then act upon conspiracy theories.

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Howley’s protagonists reflect a political sensibility that has swept through the nation. Whether we call it populism or nationalism or nativism doesn’t really matter. A subset of Americans, mostly white, vehemently believes the country is being stolen from them by liberal elites and people of color. And their convictions make them uniquely susceptible to manipulation and misdirection. The subscribers to this fabulist notion gather by the millions in chat rooms and on message boards. They share violent memes in Facebook groups. As Howley points out, they meet in living rooms and at barbecues to discuss their woes. Many, as the insurrection shows, refuse to sit idly by as their birthright is pillaged and plundered.

It is their whiteness, not their ordinariness and naïveté, that’s most predictive of their eventual assault on the Capitol. Robert Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, devoted much of the past year to compiling a profile of all 700 rioters arrested by law enforcement. His research has shown that the single most unifying factor among the insurrectionists is living in a county in which the population of white people dramatically declined between 2010 and 2020. This decline has hastened the mainstreaming of a once-fringe notion that white people are at risk of being stripped of their rights. “It’s been around a long time, but what’s special now is that that theory is embraced in full-throated fashion by major political leaders and also by major media figures,” Pape told Slate’s Aymann Ismail. “If you live in an area that’s losing white population, you can start yourself to connect the dots to the spinning that’s going around with these narratives.” ..............(more)

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/01/insurrectionists-victims-banality-of-evil.html

[ShazamIam]

1. Whites are losing the right to be the first in line for everything, bad choice to base your idendity

on the color of your skin versus the color of other skins.