Capitol Hill riot: Violent extremists from the middle class
Lawyers. Doctors. Nurses. Realtors. Firefighters. Current and former members of the military. More than two dozen police officers. A woman in a Louis Vuitton sweater. A CEO of a data analytics firm, and numerous prosperous business owners. Even a state legislator. All were among the hundreds of Americans who invaded and sacked the U.S. Capitol last week in a violent insurrection that killed a Capitol Police officer and left four others dead. “It’s an uncomfortable truth for white America to acknowledge”: the mob that terrorized Congress in support of “a white supremacist agenda” was not limited to neo-Nazis and toothless rednecks. In the Trump era, people who deeply believe in conspiracy theories and would happily overturn an election
“are indistinguishable from the rest of us.” Indeed, a YouGov poll found that 45 percent of Republicans approved of the assault on the Capitol. We all saw the images of bearded, tattooed men from Dogpatch and bare-chested nuts wearing animal skins, said Jack Shafer in Politico.com. But many of the rioters, we now know after their arrests, “are solidly middle class,” and were drawn from “the Republican professional and political classes.” Dismissing them as a bunch of delusional barbarians only increases “the great difficulty we will have in nullifying their violent brand of politics.”
There were definitely some hardened extremists in the crowd, said Devlin Barrett and Spencer Hsu in The Washington Post. “Dozens of people on a terrorist watch list” came to Washington, D.C., that day, and the FBI is investigating the roles of violent right-wing groups like the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and Oath Keepers. Prosecutors charged Robert Gieswein, 24, an alleged member of the Three Percenters from Colorado, with breaching the Capitol in a military vest and goggles, brandishing a baseball bat, and fighting with police. Guy Reffitt, a Texan and alleged member of the militia group “Texas Freedom Force,” allegedly joined the riot and threatened to shoot his children if they became “traitors” and turned him in. These organized domestic terrorists may have planned and led the actual assault on the building, with hundreds of MAGA fans then joining in. The FBI has arrested dozens of accused rioters and says it’s seeking more than 200; charges may include seditious conspiracy, which carries a potential 20-year prison sentence.
Many Christians “have been shaken to the core” by what they saw that day, said David Brooks in The New York Times. Some evangelicals caught up in “Trump fanaticism” blasted Christian pop music as they took over the Capitol, kneeled in prayer after sacking the House chamber, and chanted, “Hang Mike Pence.” After the riot, a shocked conservative preacher, Jeremiah Johnson, apologized for having supported Trump. He said he was then barraged with thousands of emails from fellow Christians “saying the nastiest and most vulgar things I have ever heard.” Most evangelicals are from the South, said David French in TheDispatch.com, and what’s driving their Trumpist rage is the “Southern shame/honor culture” that dates back to the Confederacy. These people deeply believe Trump’s demagogic warning that they’re “losing” their country to secular, urban progressives. Their desperate fury and “culture of grievance” is poisoning both evangelical Christianity and the Republican Party.
Indeed, “vast majorities” of Republicans still support Trump— even after an insurrection he clearly incited, said Mike Allen and Margaret Talev in Axios.com. A poll taken after the Capitol siege found that 64 percent of Republicans support Trump’s “recent behavior” and 57 percent of Republicans think he should be his party’s presidential candidate in 2024. While 10 House Republicans voted for impeachment, 93 percent of their Republican colleagues didn’t. Many Republicans fear that convicting Trump in the Senate would only “make him a martyr” and further cement his hold on millions of people. Even after last week’s debacle, “it’s still Trump’s party.”
The GOP “faces a choice,” said Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska in TheAtlantic.com. We can “repudiate the nonsense that has set our party on fire” or we can be “a party of conspiracy theories, cable-news fantasies, and the ruin that comes with them.” Many of the insurrectionists believe the QAnon conspiracy theory that there is network of “cannibalistic pedophiles” supported by “deep state” intelligence officials and senators like me. Among QAnon’s ranks is Marjorie Taylor Greene, “a cuckoo” freshman House member from Georgia. Last fall, the GOP could have decided to “disavow her campaign and potentially lose a Republican seat,” but instead decided to bless Greene’s “ludicrous ideas.” In coming months, we must choose whether to side with reality or with deranged, violent thinking. “We cannot do both.”