USA 2020 Elections: Thread

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Wed Mar 17 03:39:45 PDT 2021


https://pjmedia.com/uncategorized/victoria-taft/2021/03/15/a-study-shows-very-few-capitol-hill-rioters-were-qanon-red-staters-with-ties-to-right-wing-groups-n1430314

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/03/04/9-huge-reasons-why-hr-1-for-the-people-act-is-disastrous-for-american-election-integrity-n1429917

https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/BFI_WP_2021-13.pdf
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/profiling-insurrection-characterizing-collective-action-using-mobile-device-data/
https://news.wttw.com/2021/02/15/study-few-us-capitol-rioters-had-ties-right-wing-groups
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-adult-in-the-room/id1535902952

Study Shows Very Few Capitol Hill Rioters Were QAnon Red-Staters With
Ties To 'Right-Wing' Groups

Authored by Victoria Taft via PJ Media (emphasis ours),

A survey by the University of Chicago finds that most Capitol Hill
rioters had no ties to any fringe right-wing groups and were merely
engaged people outraged by what they believed was a rigged election.
AP Photo/John Minchillo

While colorful weirdos with names such as QAnon Shaman and Baked
Alaska stole the headlines, people who were arrested by federal
officials during and after the riot were a “broader core of people”
with a healthy skepticism about the veracity of the November 2020
election, according to the study.

    QAnon Shaman: 'I regret entering that building with every fibre of
my body' https://t.co/YpLx4dhw57
    — BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) March 5, 2021

There was plenty of reason for the skepticism, considering the
collusion between Big Tech, unions, lawfare, and Democrats’ combined
efforts to sway the election. Those efforts were at the very least
unethical.

As Time Magazine enthused in an article entitled, “The Secret History
of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,” “there was a
conspiracy unfolding behind the [election] scenes” of an “informal
alliance between left-wing activists and business titans” to “save”
the election from Donald Trump.

    The handshake between business and labor was just one component of
a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an
extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to
ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more
than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to
shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack
from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President.

    […]Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got
states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of
millions in public and private funding. They fended off
voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got
millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They
successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line
against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral
smears.

Rather than being ill-informed, it appears that the Capitol Building
rioters may have been better informed than most on these moves to sway
the election.

In a “working paper” that is considered to be a “novel approach” to
“estimating community-level participation in mass protest events,”
Asst. Prof. Austin Wright of the Harris School of Public Policy and
David Van Dijcke of the University of Michigan found a surprising
number of the people arrested at the Capitol Hill riot who were
business owners and other professionals obviously upset over election
fraud.

The paper found that those arrested were “more likely to have traveled
to the Capitol from Trump-voting “islands,” where residents are
surrounded by neighborhoods with higher numbers of Biden supporters.”
More than half came from counties that Joe Biden carried.

Though the researchers include the fact that the overwhelming number
of people live in Democrat areas, they also highlighted the fact “that
proximity to Proud Boy chapters and local levels of engagement with
misinformation posted on Parler, the exiled social media platform
popular with the far right, are robustly linked to participation in
the Capitol rally.”

However, researcher Austin Wright said living in those leftist areas
“played a significant role.”

    Social isolation and the perception of being threatened by
neighboring areas that largely hold opposing political views also
played a significant role in who was there.

The researchers also looked at cell phone data such as where in the
country Capitol rioters called. Most were in the eastern, central, and
southern parts of the country.
Screenshot of study’s findings.

Could the cancel culture and being surrounded by people with Trump
Derangement Syndrome and other anti-conservatives have helped trigger
the attack?

They claimed some of the rioters were on the social media app Parler,
though efforts to discover other social media apps used by the people
arrested were not noted.

The survey found that approximately 10% percent of the Capitol rioters
had a connection with Proud Boys, which they describe as a “hate
group,” and Oath Keepers.

Nearly 90% had no ties or right-wing affiliations whatsoever.

And they found out that 85% of the people arrested were business
owners or held down white-collar jobs.

WTTW TV reported that researchers hadn’t even needed a “business
owner” category before when looking into protest groups. Robert Pape,
a political science professor at the University of Chicago, oversaw
the study and said the caliber of people at the riot was surprising.

    “Normally, we don’t even have a category for ‘business owner’ when
we study political violence, so this is a very big sign that we’re
dealing with a new political movement with violence at its core that
can’t be reduced to the usual suspects.”

Jobs held by Capitol rioters.

Perhaps they should consider that the 2020 election was seen by half
the country as rigged. Election integrity efforts, not name-calling,
lawfare, and canceling others who hold politically opposing views,
will be key in winning back confidence in the elections process. If
Democrats pass HR 1, all bets will be off.

Victoria Taft is the host of “The Adult in the Room Podcast With
Victoria Taft” where you can hear her series on “Antifa Versus Mike
Strickland.” Find it here.Follow her on Facebook,  Twitter, Parler,
MeWe, Minds @VictoriaTaft


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