There is a right-wing conspiracy theory called the great replacement, which says that white people are being overtaken by minorities and that this is going to cause a loss of rights for white people. slate
It used to be on the fringe. 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. 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.
We’ve now studied nearly 700 who have been arrested, and we’ve brought the study up to date as of early December. What we see is, over half of those who have been arrested are business owners, CEOs from white-collar occupations, doctors, lawyers, and architects.
They are a political minority in the places that they live. This is really quite striking. The more the county votes for Trump, the less likely was the county to send an insurrectionist. The more rural, the less likely to send an insurrectionist.
For the past decade and a half, our research team at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats has conducted demographic studies of international and domestic terrorists. Four years ago, our study of 112 people who U.S. authorities suspected were involved with the Islamic State undercut the assumption that supporters of the group were uneducated, isolated, and unemployed. atlantic