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Harvard researchers said they were surprised to find out that most Jan. 6 protesters were motivated by loyalty to President Trump and were not attempting to carry out an insurrection, as mainstream media have uniformly portrayed the event at the U.S. Capitol.
The study was based on court documents from 417 of the more than 800 defendants prosecuted for the riot, the Harvard Crimson said in a report spotlighted by Just the News.
“The folks with QAnon T-shirts, and signs, and flags were so prominently displayed in much of the visual imagery that came out of the Capitol attack,” said Kaylee Fagan, one of the authors of the study.
“So we expected to see more QAnon-related concepts come through in the documents.”
About 20% of the rioters said they were motivated by support for Trump and the same percentage said it was about Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Fewer than 8% said they wanted to start a civil war or armed insurrection.
“I don’t think I expected the result to be this stark,” said Fagan.
The study was released as a working paper because it has not been peer-reviewed, the Harvard paper said.
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The court documents, the authors of the study said, show “Trump and his allies convinced an unquantifiable number of Americans that representative democracy in the United States was not only in decline, but in imminent, existential danger.
“This belief translated into a widespread fear of democratic and societal breakdown, which, in turn, motivated hundreds of Americans to travel to D.C. from far corners of the country in what they were convinced was the nation’s most desperate hour.”
No evidence of conspiracy
The FBI said last year it did not find evidence of a conspiracy behind the events of Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol, according to insiders.
And in July, a Democratic senator admitted that after intensive investigation, the partisan House select committee had been unable to prove that President Trump conspired to “overturn the election” and maintain power by creating a riot.
The Jan. 6 committee is claiming the Proud Boys group was part of a grand conspiracy directed by Trump. However, the New York Times reported last September that a member of the Proud Boys who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6 was an FBI informant. And, significantly, the paper reported that the informant – who texted his bureau handler during the riot – insisted the Proud Boys had no advanced plan to enter the Capitol and disrupt the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
Trump’s interest, in fact, was in Congress carrying out the constitutional process of deciding whether or not to certify the vote. After the riot, many of the lawmakers who had pledged to object to certain state electors based on alleged election fraud backed down.
Revolver News has reported evidence that FBI informants and Antifa operatives turned a peaceful Jan. 6 rally into a riot, spotlighting the role of Arizona man Ray Epps. In a follow-up report in December, the news outlet presented evidence, backed by videos and images, that there were others who worked in tandem with Epps to orchestrate the Capitol break-in.
Epps was featured in a recent New York Times story that lamented he is “a man whose life has been ruined by a Jan. 6 conspiracy theory.”
However, Epps is the one man who has been captured on video urging people to storm the Capitol on the day before the Jan. 6 riot and then directing the breach of the guarded perimeter while Donald Trump was still speaking one mile away.
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