(TheLastPatriotNews.com) – The protest rally conducted by former President Donald Trump’s supporters on January 6, 2021, at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, was never intended to be an “insurrection,” and the protesters didn’t think they were “rioting,” according to a new wide-ranging study into the event.
Research by Harvard University on the motivations of the participants in the January 6 events has found that only 8% wanted to start an “insurrection” or a “civil war.”
The conclusion in question runs counter to the allegations of the January 6 Committee, the select committee at the US House of Representatives appointed by Democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The Committee includes seven Democrats and two anti-Trump Republicans.
The research by the Shorenstein Center, a body of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, is described as the most comprehensive study of the events, Breitbart News reported citing The Harvard Crimson.
It discovered that 20.6% of the rally goers were motivated to participate in the protest solely because they supported Trump.
Another 20.6% said they attended the “Stop the Steal” rally because of Trump’s claims that the Democrats rigged the 2022 election and that Joe Biden didn’t win fairly.
Fewer than 8% of the participants in the march said they had attended out of a desire to start an armed revolution or a civil war as their primary motivation.
Even fewer said belief in QAnon theories was the main factor that led them to attend the rally.
One of the three study authors, Kaylee Fagan, said she was surprised to find out that support for Trump and serious worries over the fairness of the 2020 election was the overwhelming reasons that led the rallygoers to attend the protest at the Capitol.
The research reached the same conclusion as Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law scholar, that most protesters were there because they were convinced that they were defending American democracy, not because they were seeking to overthrow it.
The study’s authors stated that the most significant number of the 417 federally charged defendants they interviewed were motivated to go to the rally because of “lies about election fraud and enthusiasm for [Trump’s] re-election.”
“[T]he documents show that 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,” the scholars concluded.
