Here is a question for you. Which crowd has a higher percentage of people being college educated?

One picture shows the mob of January 6th storming the Capitol. The other shows a college football stadium packed to the rafters on a Saturday in Knoxville or we could use a picture from Tuscaloosa or Blacksburg VA just as easily.

Most folks would point at the stadium. But they would be wrong (not by much).

The truth is the rioters had a bigger share of folks who went to college. According to a Seton Hall report, out of the 716 people charged that first year, more than a third had a degree or some post-graduate schooling. Add in those who went to college but never finished, and the number climbs much higher, to nearly 50% had attended some college.

Now compare that with the average college football stadium. Surveys say about 37.7 percent of fans in the seats ever earned a degree. Which means the mob in Washington had a slightly larger slice of college-educated people than the sea of orange and white cheering a kickoff. Even if we want to split hairs on what statistical model we’re using, the pictures are amazingly close in educational levels.

That does not excuse what they did. But it sure wrecks the lazy claim in the book White Rural Rage. The writers, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, want readers to believe American rage is by the uneducated and uninformed. The facts tell another story.

Here is how the numbers break down from the DOJ files. Of the 322 (out of 716 charged the first year) rioters with education levels identified:

These were not backwoods bumpkins fresh off the turnip truck. They included doctors, nurses, police officers, real estate agents, and small business owners. One was even an emergency room surgeon.

If higher education is supposed to make people immune to conspiracy theories, January 6th blew that idea straight to pieces.

Here is the part White Rural Rage leaves out also. The bulk of the January 6th mob was not from the hollers or the back forty. They came from the suburbs and the cities.

The DOJ records tell the tale plain as day. The five states with the most rioters charged were Florida (82), Pennsylvania (64), Texas (63), New York (53), and California (52). Add those together and do the percentages, you’ve got nearly half the crowd. And those weren’t folks driving in from cow pastures and tobacco fields. They were coming from places like Miami, Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and New York City.

That means the mob was heavy on suburban cul-de-sacs and big-city blocks, not barns and hollers. Only a small slice came from truly rural counties.

So when Schaller and Waldman try to slap the “rage” label on rural America, they’re missing the target. What January 6th really showed is how suburban and urban folks, stewing in the same social media silos and news deserts as anyone else, can be just as easy to rile up. Facebook, X feeds and cable news bubbles don’t care about your zip code. They’ll pump misinformation into a Brooklyn apartment just as quick as they will a farmhouse in Scott County VA.

If you’re hunting for the roots of that mob, you’d better look at the subdivisions and the strip malls. Out here in the country, folks were at work the next morning, feeding cows, running the volunteer firehouse, and opening the restaurant on Main Street.

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Here is what the book never talks about. Rural America is not suffering from a lack of smarts, it is suffering from a lack of news. Whole counties and regions are “newspaper deserts.” Local papers folded up or got bought out, leaving folks to rely on Facebook and X rumors or talk podcasts for their news.

But here is the catch: social media silos trap urban and suburban folks the same way. Algorithms herd people into echo chambers whether they live in the Blue Ridge Mountains or a condo in Philadelphia. That is why so many rioters came from cities and suburbs. The poison spreads fastest where people are isolated from local, trusted news.

Pile on top of that the Democratic Party quitting on rural America. Instead of showing up at the county fair, the bean supper at the firehouse, or Friday night football, they mail out glossy flyers from Richmond or Washington and call it outreach. You cannot build trust that way. In small towns, you still have to shake a hand and look somebody in the eye.  All politics is local, local committees matter! The message is not as important as the person who is the messenger.

And it is not just about showing up. It is about listening. Rural people have been telling anyone who would listen about lack of quality healthcare, 911 EMS volunteers being cut out of state budgets, retail and blue-collar workers struggling with stagnant wages. What they are not hearing is Democrats answering back IN PERSON.

That silence is louder than any book.

Plenty of the rioters in Washington had diplomas on the wall. That did not stop them from swallowing lies whole and marching on the Capitol. Which shows education by itself does not fix judgment.

The real story of rural America is not told in that mob. It is told in the people who stayed home, got up the next morning, and went back to work. The nurse pulling a twelve-hour night shift. The farmer checking calves before daylight. The volunteer fire chief filling out FEMA grants to keep his station afloat. Most rural folks had to work on January 6th.

These folks are not raging against democracy. They are the ones holding their communities together.

So take another look at those two photos. The mob at the Capitol and the stadium crowd at a college football game. Urban Democrats love to point at the first one and say, “See, this is rural America, this is the problem. They’re uneducated, they’re uninformed.” That makes for an easy headline, but it’s not the truth.

The truth is the January 6th mob was stacked with urban and suburban folks. The DOJ’s own numbers show it. Florida sent 82, Pennsylvania 64, Texas 63, New York 53, and California 52. That’s nearly half the rioters charged right there, and they weren’t coming from cow pastures. They were driving in from Miami suburbs, Dallas subdivisions, Philadelphia row houses, and New York apartments.

Only a thin slice came from real rural counties. Which means the mob was less “hillbilly insurrection” and more “cul-de-sac coup.”

So the problem isn’t rural people not knowing better. The problem is news deserts and social media silos that leave people of every background wide open to lies. And it’s a Democratic Party problem too. The party stopped putting in the face time. You can’t build trust with a glossy mailer out of Richmond or from the DNC. You do it with local committee members (people they recognize) showing up at the bean supper, shaking hands at the firehouse breakfast, listening when folks talk about hospitals closing and schools scraping by.

Until that changes, the pictures will keep being read wrong. This isn’t a rage problem. It’s a news desert problem. It’s an informational silo problem. It’s a no-show problem. And it’s a not-listening problem.

Be curious, not judgmental.

Till next time, that’s the story from the ‘Back Forty’. — John W. Peace II

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John W. Peace II is a fifth-generation farmer from Big Stone Gap, Virginia, where he grew up on his family’s dairy, Clinch Haven Farms, and still lives today. He’s a proud father to Trey and Shelby Peace, and partner in life to Cathy Swinney. A Virginia Tech graduate with graduate studies at Penn State, he served as the youngest Chair of the Wise County Board of Supervisors (2004–2008). John co-owns urTOPIX LLC (urTopixLLC.com), a Democratic campaign training firm focused on reaching rural voters that is sponsored by www.RuralAmericaRising.com PAC. He’s also a two-time Amazon bestselling author. Learn more at www.JohnWPeace.com.