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Beverly Hills saw more residents arrested for participating in the United States Capitol uprising than any other city in California.
Three of the 14 California residents accused of connection to the pro-Trump riot in Washington on Jan. 6 so far are from the wealthy Los Angeles County enclave: Gina Bisignano, a beauty salon owner, and Simone Gold and John Strand, two right-wing activists who spread incorrect information about the coronavirus through their roles at America’s Frontline Doctors, an organization founded by Gold, an emergency room physician.
The other 11 Californians accused of the riot are spread across the state, from San Diego to San Francisco, with three grouped in cities around Sacramento, the state capital, and two in cities in the notoriously conservative Orange County, to the south from Los Angeles.
The prominence of Beverly Hills and the profile of the three residents who have been charged reflect what the experts say are broader trends in the origins of the more than 250 people charged so far in connection with the Capitol riot.
More than 90% of the people accused in the disturbances so far are white, researchers from the Chicago Project on Security and Threats have found. About 40% own business or have white-collar jobs, the researchers found, and compared to previous right-wing extremists, relatively few of them were unemployed.
“There is this assumption that the most reactionary people on the front line would be what is often called the white working class, but of course that’s not what we saw,” said Vanessa Wills, a political philosopher who studies the intersections of race and class. “The people who attended are disproportionately small business owners.”
People have accused the attack so far too it did not come exclusively from republican states or conservative enclaves. In fact, most lived in counties conquered by Biden, such as Beverly Hills, located near Hollywood, in the liberal county of Los Angeles.
Only 10% of the people accused so far had identifiable ties to right-wing militias or other organized violent groups, the Chicago researchers found. Many more were people who identified themselves as traditional Trump supporters.
From blockade protests to the US Capitol
The salon’s owner, Bisignano, was indicted on seven counts, including destruction of government property and civil unrest.
Gold and Strand, right-wing activists were indicted on five counts, including disorderly conduct in a Capitol building. Gold’s lawyer declined to comment on the charges against her, and Strand and Bisignano’s lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.
All three Beverly Hills defendants were already prominent right-wing protest figures before the events on Capitol Hill.
Bisignano went viral in December for shouting homophobic slanders in an anti-lockdown protest outside the home of the Los Angeles public health director, according to TMZ, who called her “coronavirus lockdown”.
“You are a Satanist of the new world order,” said Bisignano to a person who filmed her in the protest, according to the TMZ video. “You are a Nazi and have been brainwashed.”
“Is there anything wrong with not wanting a block?” she asked. “Is there anything wrong with wanting freedom?”
Gold, who has been labeled a “toxic supplier of disinformation” for her public positions questioning the safety of the coronavirus vaccine and publicizing hydroxychloroquine as a cure for the virus, was part of an anti-blocking demonstration with other doctors in the Supreme stages Cut in July. The video of doctors spreading misinformation about Covid-19 was repeatedly shared by Trump and Donald Trump Jr and, finally, seen more than 14 million times, despite being taken down by various social media platforms, the Washington Post reported.
Strand, the communications director for doctors at the Frontline of America, was also a key organizer of the frequent pro-Trump rallies in Beverly Hills before and after the election, the Los Angeles Times reported.
“The election is not over,” said Strand in a protest in mid-November, after Trump lost the election, according to images posted on YouTube. “Yes, we have a chance to win the election.”
All three Beverly Hills defendants spoke publicly about their participation in the Capitol riot before being arrested, including interviews in newspapers and social media.
“I’m like, I didn’t know that we were attacking the Capitol. I should have dressed differently, ”Bisignano told the Beverly Hills Courier before her arrest, noting that she had worn Chanel boots and a Louis Vuitton sweater for the riot.
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It is unclear how wealthy or financially stable Bisignano or the other Beverly Hills defendants are. While many of the Americans accused of the Capitol riots were educated, employed and financially stable enough to pay for a trip around the country to participate in a pro-Trump protest, a Washington Post analysis also found that many people accused in the attack they had some history of financial problems and, as a group, were twice as likely as Americans in general to have a history of bankruptcy.
Understanding the origin and social status of alleged domestic terrorists is important to understand what can be done to contain this type of radicalization and prevent future attacks. The profiles of Capitol rioters already pose a challenge for these types of efforts, say the researchers.
“What we are dealing with here is not just a mixture of right-wing organizations, but a broader mass movement with violence at its core,” wrote the Chicago Project researchers on Security and Threats in a public presentation of their initial findings. Normal strategies to combat violent extremism, such as social programs for the poor, or prisons targeting organized extremist groups, would not work, the researchers concluded: what was needed was “approaches to reducing the escalation of anger among large sectors of mainstream society”.
Many Americans had reason to be angry at the failures of politicians and the federal government during the pandemic, which generated widespread unemployment, disproportionate burdens for people of color and half a million deaths, but Capitol attackers were not largely representative of the US population. USA.
Experts emphasized the importance of recognizing coded attacks on the legitimacy of black voters’ ballots within Trump’s rhetoric about “electoral fraud” and the value of understanding the Capitol insurrection as an act of racial violence motivated by ideas of white supremacy.
But the economic and class background of the alleged Capitol rioters can also be revealing, particularly as many Americans struggle to understand why so many of their fellow citizens were vulnerable to Trump’s lies about electoral fraud and sinister conspiracy theories like QAnon.
White Americans who appeared on Capitol Hill did not appear to represent the country’s big companies or financial elite, said Wills, the political philosopher. Instead, they seemed to largely represent people who were under pressure from larger companies, resentful of the government, who had provided a small business pandemic relief program that did not help many small businesses, and also resentful of “the demands of working class that they consider hostile to their interests as small business owners ”.
It was no accident that chaotic protests against the blockade in state capitals during the first months of the pandemic were precursors to the Washington Capitol attack, Wills argued: public health blocking measures specifically threatened small businesses and their ability to ensure that their employees would go back to work.
Although susceptibility to conspiracy theories involves many factors, she argued, people would probably be more open to embracing wild theories if the theories justified them to act on what was already in their economic interest.
“Most people would find it difficult to think well of themselves if they confronted the fact that they woke up that morning and decided that they will thwart society’s attempts to contain a pandemic for their own private financial benefit,” said Wills.