Black Lives Matter and the Racialized Support for the January 6th Insurrection

Abstract

Does support for the January 6th insurrection come mostly from concerned citizens worried over illegal voting, or from racists spurred to action by the highly visible Black Lives Matter protests and Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat? We field a survey experiment aimed at disentangling links between old and new racial grievances, anti-immigrant beliefs, Black activism, and support for the January 6th insurrection. We find that the people most likely to be supportive of the insurrection are whites who hold negative attitudes toward immigrants and subscribe to white replacement theory. Beliefs about the George Floyd protests also explain January 6th support, above and beyond demographics and other racial and political views. These results are validated by the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey. We also conduct a survey vignette experiment and find that anti-BLM rhetoric spread by Trump and right-wing news sources likely soured opinions on the movement and set the stage for widespread insurrection support.