With the anniversary of last year's January 6 Capitol incursion this week, the agitprop media are doing their best to instill fear of a bogeyman caricature of conservatives.  Yesterday's edition of Face the Nation added a patina of academic respectability in an interview with Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, who has studied "insurgencies in war zones" and applies that model to the January 6 events of last year, which were, as the media like to say about far more violent riots, "mostly peaceful."  You would never know from the professor's words that the only deaths were at the hands of police, not the "insurrectionists," and that most of those who entered the Capitol were beckoned in by police.

The good professor seems to really, really want to find danger in mainstream conservatism and, egged on by host Margaret Brennan, made some points that struck me as odd.  For instance:

We find that only 21 million people believe two radical beliefs in America today. One, that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president, and, two, that the use of force to restore Donald Trump to the presidency is justified. And their media sources of those 21 million, they come from — 42 percent of the 21 million, their main media source is Fox News, Newsmax, and One America. That is mainstream, conservative news. Their second most prominent news source is actually liberal and centrist media, like CNN, NPR, CBS. And you might say, well, how could that be? It's because often when people watch ideas they disagree with, that makes them angry. Only 10 percent of the 21 million are getting their news mainly from right-wing social media, like Gab or Telegraph.

So, apparently, it is a bad thing that conservatives read both liberal and conservative media because they will get angry when they read the liberal media.  Does the good professor find virtue in reading only one side of the political divide, as so many progressives seem to do, shunning Fox News and the conservative blogosphere?

And these 21 million are very scary:

[W]hat we're seeing in our surveys, our national surveys, of the 21 million in the insurrectionist movement is a mass of combustible material. Think of it as like dry wood that could be set off like — from a lightning strike or a spark, as in wildfires. Well, we're moving into a highly volatile 2022 election season, where there could be many sparks at the local levels. And a lot of our election laws, say Georgia or Texas, the counting of the vote has been more politicized than ever before.

What that does is it creates a very dangerous season. Which means, as we go through the 2022 elections season, it's crucial to have dialogue with our political leaders, our community leaders, especially the White House, over this new empirical reality.

What does he think the White House should do?  He offers no clue.  Spying?  Repression?

Certainly not transparency in examining the election of 2020, where audits keep discovering problems.  No, that would be dangerous.

Watch and  see for yourself.

Hat tip: David Zukerman.

Photo credit: YouTube screen grab.