[00:00:01] Due to the themes of this podcast, listener discretion is advised.

[00:00:07] Lock your doors, close the blinds, change your passwords. This is Secrets and Spies.

[00:00:26] Secrets and Spies is a podcast that dives into the world of espionage, terrorism, geopolitics, and intrigue.

[00:00:33] This episode is presented by Matt Fulton and produced by Chris Carr.

[00:00:38] Hello everyone and welcome back to Secrets and Spies.

[00:00:41] Today I'm joined again by Jacob Ware, a counterterrorism expert with the Council on Foreign Relations

[00:00:46] and co-author of God, Guns, and Sedition, Far-Right Terrorism in America.

[00:00:51] And we discuss the unsettling question of what far-right extremism,

[00:00:55] with his proponents feeling emboldened and legitimized by Donald Trump's election,

[00:00:59] might look like during his second term in office.

[00:01:01] Jacob helps us unpack how these movements are evolving, the risks they pose to democratic institutions,

[00:01:07] and what the next four years might hold for these groups in terms of recruitment, violence,

[00:01:12] and public visibility of their hateful worldview.

[00:01:14] It's a critical conversation that I hope you'll find steers away from hyperbole,

[00:01:19] focusing instead on historical lessons and current dynamics shaping this moment.

[00:01:24] So grab your coffee, or maybe something stronger, and join us for an in-depth look at the challenges ahead.

[00:01:29] As always, a couple of housekeeping notes first.

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[00:01:49] Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy our conversation.

[00:01:51] The opinions expressed by guests on Secrets and Spies do not necessarily represent those of the producers and sponsors of this podcast.

[00:02:15] Jacob Ware, thanks so much for coming back on Secrets and Spies.

[00:02:18] It's great to have you back.

[00:02:19] Anytime.

[00:02:20] Thank you so much, Matt.

[00:02:21] You've been on a couple times now.

[00:02:23] For anyone who maybe is new or missed those episodes,

[00:02:27] if you could just tell us a bit about yourself and the topics you study.

[00:02:31] Sure.

[00:02:32] Well, thanks so much again, Matt.

[00:02:34] I'm Jacob.

[00:02:35] I'm a research fellow at a think tank called the Council on Foreign Relations, also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

[00:02:44] And I studied terrorism and counterterrorism, both in an international and domestic sense,

[00:02:52] and really try to follow as best as I can where the data takes us.

[00:02:58] In the last few years, the number one terrorist threat to the United States, to the homeland has been a violent far right threat that has manifested in places like Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, El Paso, Buffalo, and then of course at the US Capitol on January 6th.

[00:03:16] And I'm the author of a book called God, Guns and Sedition, Far Right Terrorism in America that tries to trace a narrative between all of those attacks that I mentioned and a broader history of white supremacist and anti-government activity in our country's history.

[00:03:34] So in full disclosure for listeners, I reached out to you shortly before the election and asked you to come on shortly thereafter, sort of anticipating that we'd be, you know, talking about a renewed stop the steal craze and the domestic security environment looking forward to inauguration and beyond.

[00:03:59] However, I think, you know, with the topic that you study, there's still a lot to look at.

[00:04:05] And for folks who are, you know, I think justifiably concerned about what the next four years could bring as far as the far right feeling emboldened, legitimized, and in some cases perhaps even brought directly into like official power.

[00:04:24] I wanted to have a realistic, you know, like looking at this stuff in practice now, like, okay, like we're going to find out whether these concerns were, you know, unfounded or not one way or another.

[00:04:37] I wanted to have a realistic, non-hyperbolic look with you at, you know, what far right extremism could look like under Trump 2.0.

[00:04:49] So to get us started here, could you maybe unpack what drives the far right's enduring fascination with Trump?

[00:04:58] Is it simply his rhetoric and policies or is there something deeper about how he embodies their worldview?

[00:05:05] Tremendous question.

[00:05:06] I would say there's a few elements there.

[00:05:09] I think the most important thing to emphasize is Trump is, I think, a symptom of rising far right activity in this country, not necessarily the cause.

[00:05:23] One of the key moments in our book and one of the key moments in the history of far right terrorism in America is actually the 2008 election of President Barack Obama in the United States, the election of our first black president, which leads to a huge rise in violent rhetoric and activity, obviously organizing against him as a person in terms of his identity.

[00:05:49] That was a real, I think, watershed moment because violent white supremacy, which had kind of steadily been moved to the fringes in our society for decades really, all of a sudden broke back into the mainstream.

[00:06:07] And one of the people who really pioneered that was, of course, future President Donald Trump with his birtherism allegations.

[00:06:15] Now, the way that President Trump has empowered this movement, I think, is well captured by events that happened on August 11th and August 12th in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a group of explicit white supremacists and neo-Nazis gather at that location, a university town, for an explicitly white supremacist cause, being the removal of a statue of a prominent white supremacist, one of the deadliest white supremacists.

[00:06:44] In our country's history, Robert E. Lee.

[00:06:47] And a terrorist attack then occurs at that location on the 12th.

[00:06:50] And we had this very public, very painful back and forth in the media.

[00:06:54] We may have spoken about this already in one of the previous episodes, Matt.

[00:06:59] Very painful back and forth in the media where people repeatedly attempted to push President Trump to condemn the violence, condemn the activity.

[00:07:07] And he does, but he kind of goes back and forth.

[00:07:10] And it eventually ends days later with those very famous words, there were very fine people on both sides.

[00:07:19] Now, I know that there has been a narrative that has emerged over the past few years that there was nothing wrong with what he said and it's been debunked.

[00:07:27] Let me add some color on this from a counterterrorism standpoint because I think there's two things that happened here that are important to this story.

[00:07:35] It's the mainstreaming of extremist ideology and then it's the mainstreaming of extremist activity.

[00:07:41] Again, really important to note that the people who gather at Charlottesville are explicit Nazis.

[00:07:49] They are not trying to hide it.

[00:07:51] Of course, they call themselves the United Right, but they chant Nazi slogans.

[00:07:55] They are carrying Nazi emblems.

[00:07:58] They are gathering on behalf of an overt white supremacist cause.

[00:08:02] And so the very fine people directly refers to those kinds of individuals.

[00:08:07] And then you have this mainstreaming of violence where an attack happens and the President of the United States seemingly finds himself incapable of pushing back.

[00:08:18] One of the things I'm really proud of in our work is my co-author Bruce Hoffman and I tried our best to ignore a lot of the media narrative, the rhetoric that we saw in the public space around these kinds of events.

[00:08:31] And we went directly to the movement, to the underground to see what they were saying.

[00:08:34] And we quote Richard Spencer, a prominent white supremacist in our book, as saying,

[00:08:39] Charlottesville was impossible without President Trump.

[00:08:41] I think that's a good way of thinking of it.

[00:08:44] He's not the cause, but none of this violence, none of this overt, open organizing was possible without him.

[00:08:54] And we've seen that trajectory, of course, arrive at the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021 as well.

[00:08:59] There's been a lot of discussion about Trump's role in what's called stochastic terrorism over the last nine years.

[00:09:04] So, you know, proud boys stand back and stand by inciting violence without direct orders to do so.

[00:09:10] How has this concept played out in shaping the far right's more recent strategies and how might it evolve in a second term?

[00:09:19] I don't really think of it as stochastic terrorism.

[00:09:22] I think of it more as a permissive environment or a culture of acceptability for this kind of activity.

[00:09:32] You saw that very prominently, I think, in a manifesto written by a white supremacist terrorist who murdered 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019.

[00:09:45] He has this Q&A section of his manifesto where he's asking himself questions, answering them in a rapid fire format.

[00:09:51] And he says, he asks himself, do you support President Trump?

[00:09:56] And he says something like, as a politician, God, no, but as a symbol of renewed white identity, yes.

[00:10:05] And I think that's how people in the movement feel.

[00:10:07] There are plenty of reasons for white supremacists and neo-Nazis to really rally against President Trump.

[00:10:16] Most prominently being, he's probably the most proximate US president ever to the Jewish community.

[00:10:22] He has a Jewish daughter and Jewish grandchildren.

[00:10:27] So you see plenty of rhetoric against the former and future president online among these groups.

[00:10:34] But I think they've created a culture of permissibility, a permissive environment for violence.

[00:10:40] You mentioned, I think, stand back and stand by.

[00:10:43] That is exactly what we refer to, what we're talking about when we refer to that culture, right?

[00:10:55] Where you are perhaps stochastically issuing a call to arms that can be misinterpreted, but that is enacted upon by these groups.

[00:11:03] One of the reasons I worry a lot about violence over the next four years, one of the reasons I worried a lot about election violence around this campaign

[00:11:12] is the narrative around January 6th defendants, which in the immediate aftermath, of course, was bipartisan condemnation,

[00:11:19] but has steadily been replaced by a narrative of these people as martyrs, hostages, political prisoners, heroes, patriots.

[00:11:29] Most recently, the word I saw was warriors, right?

[00:11:33] A word that actually glorifies organized state violence.

[00:11:38] That, again, is creating this culture where your extreme ideology, if you're an election denialist, for example, is glorified and mainstreamed.

[00:11:50] But also the violence that people are committing on behalf of those ideologies are also being mainstreamed and celebrated.

[00:11:57] It creates this permissive environment for future violence, and that is going to be something that hangs over us, frankly,

[00:12:04] as long as President Trump remains on the political stage.

[00:12:06] As someone who studies these hate groups, looking at what they say in their own internal channels and stuff,

[00:12:16] can you say what you've seen from them over the last two weeks as of this recording?

[00:12:21] I'm not in those kinds of spaces very often anymore, Matt.

[00:12:25] It's very labor-intensive work, exhaustive, and can really affect your mental health.

[00:12:38] But I know those of us who still are hanging on to our Twitter accounts,

[00:12:43] despite what appears to be just a worsening landscape of extremist rhetoric and pornography,

[00:12:53] we see a sense of emboldening, right?

[00:12:57] Not just in terms of what you might call far-right extremism, the kind of people I study,

[00:13:02] but also misogynistic extremism.

[00:13:06] I mean, I thought the Your Body, My Choice narrative that emerged out of people like Nick Fuentes was really, really frightening.

[00:13:17] I think you're seeing that confidence, that renewed sense of empowerment that certainly leads to, I think,

[00:13:28] a more hostile political debate and more hostile relations between people,

[00:13:33] but could conceivably lead to violence, could conceivably lead to violence as well.

[00:13:38] What does that kind of momentum mean for their recruitment, coordination, their public visibility?

[00:13:44] I mean, would it be a stretch to think that you could potentially see a return sort of similar to the way

[00:13:54] that the Klan was publicly visible early in the 20th century?

[00:13:58] It's a tremendous question.

[00:13:59] Listen, let me – I don't have an answer for you, but let me explain why I think it's difficult to answer.

[00:14:05] There's two factors here.

[00:14:08] One is I'm not 100% sure that the terrorism literature has ever truly answered the question of whether

[00:14:18] terrorism emerges more from a feeling of powerlessness or from a feeling of power.

[00:14:23] Now, the literature would, I think, say it's powerlessness, which would suggest to me that,

[00:14:29] in fact, this period would lead to less organizing, less violence, because in theory – again,

[00:14:36] terrorism studies theory – people who believe in those kinds of ideologies have now been empowered

[00:14:44] in the political system.

[00:14:45] They'll take a step back from a violent extremist brink and then instead engage in the political process.

[00:14:53] That was not the case during the four years of the Trump administration the first time around.

[00:14:57] Let's not forget Charlottesville, all those incidents I mentioned earlier – Pittsburgh, El Paso, Poway,

[00:15:03] Christchurch, January 6th – those incidents happened during the Trump administration.

[00:15:07] So the terrorism literature saying violence is more likely in a position of powerlessness,

[00:15:13] I don't think was the case.

[00:15:15] And so that question is unanswered.

[00:15:17] The other question that is unanswered, I think, is a post-January 6th question of are individuals in this movement

[00:15:25] more likely to act alone or in groups?

[00:15:27] Now, the movement has typically operated under something called leaderless resistance theory,

[00:15:34] leaderless resistance strategy, which says if you organize in groups with hierarchies,

[00:15:39] with bureaucracy, you leave yourself vulnerable to government infiltration.

[00:15:42] You will get infiltrated and decapitated by the government.

[00:15:47] And so most violence we see is leaderless resistance violence, lone actor violence.

[00:15:52] That wasn't the case on January 6th where they were able to reach that level of violent momentum

[00:15:57] because of groups, because of networks.

[00:16:00] But those networks, those groups then paid dearly with a legal price, right?

[00:16:06] The leaders of the groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys received seditious conspiracy charges,

[00:16:11] which are a tremendous kind of message of a program from the government.

[00:16:19] I don't know, Matt, whether those groups now look at that and go,

[00:16:22] you know what, it's worth organizing in groups, it's worth leaving yourself vulnerable

[00:16:27] because look what we did, or if they go, no, we're going to go back to being leaderless,

[00:16:32] or if they go, let's wait and see because we might get pardoned,

[00:16:35] or if there's some kind of deputizing that happens from the government where the government says,

[00:16:41] you know what, we're going to ask all these people to join the National Guard.

[00:16:48] I just think there are a lot of questions right now that we don't necessarily have good answers for

[00:16:55] and we're just going to have to wait and see.

[00:17:00] So this is all contributing to what I think is quite a chaotic and confusing moment

[00:17:05] for those of us studying counterterrorism.

[00:17:08] We were all very worried about election violence.

[00:17:11] That didn't happen, I think.

[00:17:13] Well, it hasn't happened so far, I think in large part,

[00:17:14] because we didn't have the same uncertainty and confusion over the process that we did last time

[00:17:21] in terms of several days where you didn't have a candidate announced as the winner.

[00:17:27] Right now, I think we're just waiting to see how it plays out,

[00:17:31] whether people feel powerless, whether they feel powerful,

[00:17:34] how that changes things, whether they operate in groups or as individuals.

[00:17:38] All of those questions will be answered.

[00:17:39] And the perennial problem in counterterrorism is those questions will be answered by the extremists,

[00:17:46] the terrorists, before they're answered by those of us working to counter them.

[00:17:50] And that is why this challenge is so monumental.

[00:17:54] Yeah.

[00:17:54] You talked about this in your book, how starting in the 80s and then really picking up in the 90s

[00:18:04] with Ruby Ridge, Waco, leading to the Oklahoma City bombing,

[00:18:11] this mobilization of the far right, and then how in the early 2000s under the Bush administration,

[00:18:17] not to suggest that the Bush administration in any way played footsies with the far right

[00:18:22] to the extent that Trump has.

[00:18:25] But the movement waned a bit.

[00:18:27] It sort of faded into the background and then surged up again with the election of President Obama.

[00:18:34] It's like it would suggest maybe that these movements need to have some sort of foil

[00:18:42] currently in power to energize them.

[00:18:45] But I mean, yeah, that was one of the first questions that occurred to me Tuesday night

[00:18:49] going into Wednesday morning, watching the returns, you know, thinking like,

[00:18:53] OK, we're going to find out now, you know, for good or for bad, we're going to find out now.

[00:18:56] Like, do they do they then, you know, OK, like we caught the car, we got it.

[00:19:02] Do they fade into the background a bit like in the early 2000s?

[00:19:05] Or do they see this moment as as as something different?

[00:19:10] The one factor that you didn't mention that I think is important is after Oklahoma City,

[00:19:16] a lot of people who had been active in that space definitely stepped back from the brink.

[00:19:22] They saw what happens and perhaps it's a pure death toll factor, but they saw what happened

[00:19:27] in Oklahoma and they said, you know what, that does not represent me and I don't want to be

[00:19:32] part of this anymore and I'm going to step away.

[00:19:36] That has not happened after Christchurch, after El Paso, after Pittsburgh, after January 6th,

[00:19:42] after Buffalo, it hasn't happened. And the key difference, I think now from 1995 is back

[00:19:48] then you did not have politicians in prominent places in positions of power who made excuses

[00:19:53] for violent extremists. That is different now where you have people who are celebrating

[00:19:58] political violence openly who are looking at people who have committed felonies and saying,

[00:20:06] we're going to pardon you because you're patriots. It's a different ballgame completely.

[00:20:12] And I think that is a factor that changes things as well in terms of whether they would feel

[00:20:18] empowered towards violence or would go the opposite way because they feel, you know what,

[00:20:22] all their grievances, all their policy priorities are being fulfilled through the political system.

[00:20:28] And there are other factors at play here too, which is for example, President Trump does not

[00:20:34] always perfectly speak for the violent far right. Oftentimes he doesn't. So there's a lot of

[00:20:40] criticism over some of his cabinet choices, for example, given the idea that some of these people

[00:20:46] are neocons and war hawks who are going to fight on behalf of Israel or Ukraine. Well,

[00:20:54] there are actors within this movement who are pro-Russia, who are anti-Israel. So what happens if

[00:20:59] President Trump takes a hard line in favor of Ukraine or in favor of Israel? What does that do

[00:21:06] potentially fracturing his support? There are other fault lines in the movement as well? Vaccinations

[00:21:12] being one, for example. Guns perhaps being another one. President Trump is a gun violence survivor.

[00:21:19] Does that change his view? So there are still policies that I could see becoming fault lines where this

[00:21:28] movement has a life beyond him and possibly, you know, where he becomes somebody who falls into the crosshairs as well. That's another factor here that is at play. There is a certain belief in the movement that they delivered him to the White House again. And so he owes them something. That begins with pardons, of course.

[00:21:55] But it goes beyond that. But it goes beyond that too. So do you have people in the movement who feel so empowered that in fact they make demands that cannot be kept and then that spirals off another wave of violence?

[00:22:06] All of these things, Matt, honestly, they are things that we can speculate about in postmortems, but

[00:22:13] I just think they're going to play out over the next four years and people like you and me are going to watch these developments with

[00:22:21] horror, probably,

[00:22:23] and do our best to participate in an unraveling of

[00:22:27] the violent forces that have such a grip on our country.

[00:22:30] Let's take a quick break and we'll be right back with more.

[00:22:50] Yeah, you mentioned some of the schisms on the far right, you know, like how some neo-Nazi groups are, I guess, turned away by the fact that Trump has Jewish grandchildren.

[00:23:03] Just sort of speaking to that, to the overlap in those ideologies, these different strains of extremism, white nationalism, Christian supremacy, and misogyny, for instance.

[00:23:15] How do these groups align ideologically and strategically and where do they diverge? I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about that.

[00:23:23] Sure. You have lots of factions in this movement.

[00:23:27] In fact, I will say a couple of days before the 2020 presidential election, my co-author Bruce Hoffman and I wrote an article for Lawfare magazine called The Fractured Far Right, where we argued you had all these little factions in the movement that were equally energetic, equally mobilized, but separate.

[00:23:51] And they were almost waiting for a spark to set them off to come together. You had the white supremacists, you had militia and anti-government types, you had QAnon, and then you had kind of a networked group of people who are not necessarily extremists, but are nevertheless mobilized by narratives.

[00:24:11] And of course, all these people came together on behalf of the stop the steel movement, and they coalesced to January 6th. And that is, I think, one of the reasons why that attack happened with such catastrophic momentum is you had all of these different groups who were able to coalesce on one narrative.

[00:24:30] Personally, I believe that basically all far right activity is to some degree mobilized by something called great replacement theory.

[00:24:48] Personally, I believe, well, great replacement theory is a conspiracy theory that says that there is a deliberate replacement of white people in Western communities.

[00:24:59] Other things come along with that, right? Christian, straight, male communities.

[00:25:07] There's an ongoing replacement that is being deliberately orchestrated by Jews, by Marxists, by feminists, what have you, by Democrats.

[00:25:17] So it's a very big tent conspiracy theory, and people can kind of pick and choose elements of it as they go along.

[00:25:23] Personally, I believe that great replacement theory is possibly the largest national security threat to the United States, not just because of what it represents in terms of violence and polarization and division within our communities, within our cities,

[00:25:41] but also the vulnerability it poses to foreign state operations as well.

[00:25:47] So if you have that replacement mindset, or if there's a part of you that believes you're a victim of some kind of broader movement, some system that is seeking to replace you,

[00:25:57] that kind of vein of thinking, I think, appears in all the different factions that we talk about.

[00:26:03] Whether you are a true white supremacist, whether you take bits and pieces of white supremacy like you're an anti-immigrant fanatic or a misogynist,

[00:26:14] whether you support QAnon, whether you support QAnon, whether you are part of a border militia, whether you're kind of a generic January 6th,

[00:26:26] you have some kind of – I believe you have some kind of trace of replacement theory that floats through your ideology.

[00:26:36] And that's not surprising when you look at data about replacement theory, you see that this conspiracy theory is held by millions of Americans.

[00:26:46] So it's not surprising that we also see that infiltrate both the extremist space and also the mainstream.

[00:26:51] You and Bruce Hoffman in your book also had a chapter on far-right extremism in the military.

[00:26:59] And while that ideology is not even remotely reflective of the majority of the military, I think in the – I don't know if you were – I don't recall if you were quoting someone or not,

[00:27:13] but I think when you were on with Bruce talking about the book, you described it as like a drop of cyanide in your drink, that any amount of it is potentially fatal.

[00:27:25] – Trump's choice of Pete Hegseth for defense secretary has raised alarm bells not only on his experience, but his past rhetoric.

[00:27:36] He also released a book called American Crusade.

[00:27:39] He may not be confirmed. That's also another wait-and-see part of this moment.

[00:27:45] What dangers do figures like Hegseth pose when they combine a militant Christian nationalism ideology with control over the military?

[00:27:55] – Sure. Fascinating case and really interesting because I think it allows us to look at this issue, this question with a lot more nuance.

[00:28:06] Bruce and I have written widely about extremism in the military and the issues.

[00:28:11] It is a quote from our book that you point to about cyanide in a drink, basically the argument being,

[00:28:18] the numbers are small, but they do a catastrophic amount of damage and it cannot happen.

[00:28:25] Now, this topic is radioactive and we've discussed in various places, people get very upset because inevitably when you talk about extremism in the military,

[00:28:34] no matter how many times you emphasize we're talking about a small number of people,

[00:28:37] people think you're tarnishing the entire institution and basically claiming all veterans pose a threat to American civilians.

[00:28:46] I think that's partly because we often point to, for example, the McVeigh case as a worst case scenario where you have a very decorated Gulf War veteran who commits an attack that is catastrophic

[00:28:59] and people point to his military experience as being possibly something that drives it.

[00:29:06] Again, those cases are rare.

[00:29:08] They are far and few between.

[00:29:11] Although you do have to think about the tools, the skills these people have when they leave that they might be able to bring to extremist groups,

[00:29:22] that is really a veterans affairs problem, not a military problem.

[00:29:26] And so we try to place that kind of differently.

[00:29:30] However, in my work, I have tried to identify what some of the other issues with extremism in the military are aside from a threat to the homeland.

[00:29:42] And the most interesting one by far for me is the threat that extremists within the military pose to the military itself.

[00:29:51] We write in our book about a case that happened in Italy where a US Army private was deployed there.

[00:29:56] He had actually entered the military on behalf of a neo-Nazi cult in what they called an insight role to try to get training and then exit.

[00:30:05] But in his case, rather than exiting, he had actually tried to launch, tried to plan an al-Qaeda attack on his own unit.

[00:30:12] So this is a clear example of a neo-Nazi entering the military and posing a threat to his fellow service members.

[00:30:18] Another example is, if you remember, the Discord leaks from last year, I think, where a National Guardsman in Massachusetts with kind of a spectrum of very bizarre racist anti-government ideologies had leaked massive amounts of classified information on Discord that undermined our relationship with allies.

[00:30:43] Again, cannot happen. It's cyanide and another clear example of far-head extremism undermining the military itself.

[00:30:51] And I think the new Secretary of Defense Hegseth example fits into that narrative because the really interesting thing about this case is he was supposed to guard the inauguration.

[00:31:05] He was in the National Guard, yeah.

[00:31:07] On January 20th, 2021.

[00:31:10] And he was removed from service.

[00:31:11] He was stood down because fellow members of the DC National Guard had reported about these tattoos, which if I remember correctly, there are two tattoos really in question.

[00:31:23] One on his chest, one on his bicep, that both refer to old Christian doctrine,

[00:31:30] but has really only been used to refer to basically the Crusades, which is often incorporated into far-right white supremacist law today.

[00:31:44] Clearly, his fellow National Guardsmen felt that he was going to undermine the mission, felt that he might in fact be a threat to the mission,

[00:31:53] and they determined that they did not wish to serve with him.

[00:31:59] That is a really important data point in this story of why extremism is corrosive to the military.

[00:32:04] It's also really important, I think, in undermining his narrative that the problem with the military today is wokeness and DEI initiatives.

[00:32:13] Now, I saw an interview with this individual where he says that he spent the last few years with Secretary-elect,

[00:32:22] designated Secretary, I guess, Hegseth, where he reports that he's been having conversations with people about how DEI has been completely destructive to the military

[00:32:33] and how generals are undermining readiness and lethality with wokeness.

[00:32:41] Just as a data point for you, Matt, and for your listeners,

[00:32:45] I have also been having conversations with a lot of people in the military.

[00:32:48] From what I've heard, that is not the case whatsoever.

[00:32:51] So we are building up here to some kind of major culture clash over things that we kind of take for granted,

[00:32:59] like the ability of women to serve in combat, over the importance of the military,

[00:33:07] which is a very diverse institution having open conversations about things like race and gender.

[00:33:13] It is going to be a very frightening time.

[00:33:16] And I find it ironic that we have had such conversations about the politicization of the military all these years,

[00:33:25] and now we have a designated secretary who is promising to rid the military of certain political ideologies.

[00:33:35] It is completely corrosive to everything that the military stands for.

[00:33:42] And it will be interesting to see if he passes muster in the Senate confirmations,

[00:33:49] let alone manages to implement those changes.

[00:33:53] He's, you know, by all accounts, a decorated veteran.

[00:33:57] He has a bronze star.

[00:34:00] That's, you know, one thing.

[00:34:02] He also has no professional experience that would lead one to manage an organization of over 2 million people.

[00:34:10] His tattoos, the one on his chest, I believe it's an American flag,

[00:34:15] like the colonial flag with 13 stars in a circle with an AR-15 style rifle over that.

[00:34:21] And on his bicep, I believe is the one that says Deus Volt, which is Latin for God wills it.

[00:34:28] It's an old crusade battle cry.

[00:34:31] That's been widely appropriated by far-right groups.

[00:34:35] Just one additional thought that I can't quite get out of my head is,

[00:34:42] I wonder what these conversations look like behind closed doors among would-be leaders of this administration.

[00:34:49] Tulsi Gabbard, future director of national intelligence.

[00:34:54] Maybe.

[00:34:55] Possibly.

[00:34:56] She's a decorated war hero as well, from my understanding.

[00:35:02] Served with distinction in the war on terror.

[00:35:06] And now is facing a colleague, a secretary of defense candidate who is telling her that she should never have been allowed to serve her country.

[00:35:16] I'm just amazed by what I would love to be a fly in the wall on that kind of conversation about how that goes and how they reconcile that kind of fundamental difference about their views on women and their role in this society and in the military.

[00:35:33] I fully cannot understand how those two views get reconciled at all.

[00:35:38] You know what?

[00:35:39] I would love to know how Marco Rubio, who by any means is a, for a Republican president, is like a very good and normal pick for secretary of state.

[00:35:50] If I was a senator, I would easily vote to confirm him.

[00:35:53] How does he feel about the potential of having Pete Hegseth as his opposite number?

[00:35:59] Like, is that on par there?

[00:36:01] Does he feel that they're on par, that they're equals?

[00:36:03] Same with, you know, attorney general.

[00:36:06] Yeah.

[00:36:06] Yeah.

[00:36:07] Again, Marco Rubio is an old hand.

[00:36:11] He's a longstanding DC institution list, has served at a high level on our foreign relations and intelligence committees, I believe.

[00:36:21] Eminently qualified, respected and known around the world.

[00:36:25] Some of these other, and that is the case with a number of the cabinet picks.

[00:36:30] Some of the other ones, again, will be interesting to watch them try to, if they go through a Senate confirmation process, to see how that plays out.

[00:36:56] Researchers have warned for a while about a kind of mass radicalization among Trump's base.

[00:37:02] How concerned should we be about this blending of mainstream support with far-right ideology?

[00:37:08] And what are the risks of those formalizations?

[00:37:11] Like, I'm just thinking about the Overton window shifting centimeter by centimeter over the last decade.

[00:37:19] Do it gets to a point that, like, we don't widely kind of recognize that it wasn't always like this.

[00:37:26] That bothers me.

[00:37:27] Well, there are a couple of tangential questions here, which are kind of existential in my field, which is, I work on extremism and terrorism.

[00:37:36] What does extremism mean if you think the ideologies have been mainstreamed?

[00:37:42] So that's one question.

[00:37:44] One is, another question is terrorism, people often think of terrorism as kind of the big, the big specter within the space of political violence, right?

[00:37:53] It's the ultimate, it's the ultimate form of violence.

[00:37:58] But it's not, that's not true, you know, it exists on a spectrum.

[00:38:01] And what happens when ideologies that have typically led to violence, to terrorism, are not only mainstream, but actually the kind of activity that that terrorism was trying to inspire is now conducted by the government.

[00:38:18] That's a long-winded way of setting up an example that I'd like to talk about, which is the August 2019 mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, by an individual who wrote in his manifesto that the attack was a response to the, quote, Hispanic invasion of Texas.

[00:38:39] This is the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in the US since Oklahoma City, 23 fatalities.

[00:38:49] And I conducted a study a few months ago where I compared the language that was used in that manifesto with language being spread about the border in mainstream Republican spaces.

[00:39:03] And particularly I used tweets sent by Tucker Carlson as well as Elon Musk.

[00:39:09] And what I found, Matt, was actually not only had the narrative of invasion from Latin America gone from the violent far right to the mainstream in less than four years, five years, but in fact the words themselves were actually identical.

[00:39:29] So yes, they were using words like invasion, but also words like illegals, words like Democrats importing voters, words like legalize, words like one party state.

[00:39:42] All these words have now been normalized and mainstreamed on the right as part of this replacement narrative that Democrats are deliberately importing voters to steal elections and replace white Americans.

[00:39:59] Again, this was the narrative that led somebody to murder 23 people at a Walmart.

[00:40:06] And it's now going to be the driving inspiration for what is being called the largest deportation campaign in US history.

[00:40:17] Again, to go back to what I said at the start of this question, terrorism only exists on a spectrum of violence and it is not the end, it is not the height of that violence.

[00:40:25] We have other words we use for the end of that spectrum, words like genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, crimes against humanity.

[00:40:31] Those exist at the end of that spectrum.

[00:40:33] So my concern is we're going to move from a space where the problem that we face is terrorism on behalf of these ideologies into a space where the problems we face are ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity.

[00:40:47] I know that sounds, I know you warned me at the start of this conversation, Matt, not to use hyperbole, but that's what I worry about, right?

[00:40:54] I worry about millions of Americans and millions of undocumented Americans being deported.

[00:41:02] I don't think that can happen in a way that is clean and legal.

[00:41:07] I don't think it can happen in a way that people are not encouraged, paramilitaries are not encouraged to join in.

[00:41:15] I don't know how it happens without border militias feeling emboldened.

[00:41:19] I don't know how that happens without widespread violence against minority communities in this country.

[00:41:25] I was worried about this a few months ago because I was tremendously worried that people like Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson were laying the groundwork for a violent reaction against minority communities in the eventuality that Kamala Harris won the election.

[00:41:39] So Kamala wins.

[00:41:41] They've already spotlighted the community that we're supposed to, that we're allowed to blame.

[00:41:45] It's minority communities.

[00:41:47] Now you can go and launch your violence, your invectives against those communities.

[00:41:50] That's what I was worried about.

[00:41:51] Now we're in a different space where the extremism has been mainstreamed.

[00:41:57] So it's not extreme anymore.

[00:41:58] It's now normal.

[00:42:00] And the terrorism that we used to worry about is no longer the center of gravity.

[00:42:07] We might enter different spaces now that are organized, that are state-driven.

[00:42:13] And that is terrifying because we've seen that story.

[00:42:18] We've seen that story in history.

[00:42:20] We've seen it in other contexts.

[00:42:21] And it's frightening.

[00:42:23] I read a book recently.

[00:42:24] It won the Booker Prize last year, a book called Profit Sum,

[00:42:28] that tells the story of a totalitarian takeover of Ireland.

[00:42:33] And it tells the story of a family within that context, within that environment,

[00:42:37] and the heart-wrenching decision they have whether to stay or leave.

[00:42:42] And the author writes that – the author comments on his book that as horrible as it sounds

[00:42:49] that I would write a story about totalitarianism in Ireland,

[00:42:53] it's less of a warning and more of a call to sympathy for those who have already been visited by these forces.

[00:42:59] And that was a very powerful thought for me.

[00:43:02] So the idea that we might think that these kinds of issues arriving here,

[00:43:09] that these kinds of activities arriving here are new and novel and unpredictable,

[00:43:17] but they're not.

[00:43:18] We've seen this in other contexts.

[00:43:20] We've seen other predictors of how this plays out.

[00:43:24] And it is really devastating.

[00:43:27] So tremendously concerning moment for a lot of people in this country.

[00:43:32] And I'm afraid, you know, given that we are not even – well, we're two weeks out from an election,

[00:43:39] and we're not even within two months of the start of this next administration,

[00:43:44] there is nothing that I can say to – or prepare now to make that threat go away

[00:43:50] or make it seem any more – any less serious, right?

[00:43:54] It is – it's like a specter on the horizon that is approaching now,

[00:43:58] and all we can do is hope it doesn't play out as awfully as it might seem.

[00:44:03] There's any sort of cold comfort, I guess.

[00:44:08] And I mean, yeah, at the start of this I said, you know, non-hyperbolic.

[00:44:12] I don't think we are.

[00:44:13] I asked you one to talk about this because I don't – I know you're not a hyperbolic person.

[00:44:18] Yeah, if I look at, you know, how this goes and everything, I think their margins in Congress are very small.

[00:44:28] Small enough that it's essentially hard to govern effectively, especially in the House, especially with that crew.

[00:44:35] And I would think that that prevents them from doing anything in too destructive, like worst-case scenario,

[00:44:44] unless, you know, they just revert to just flat-out, you know, executive action, you know,

[00:44:49] tell the courts to enforce your orders, et cetera.

[00:44:52] Okay, you know, that's something.

[00:44:54] Another hot take I've been kicking around in my head.

[00:44:57] I don't know if I entirely believe this, but it's something I'm sort of, you know, thinking about.

[00:45:02] You know, maybe this could be the case that him serving two non-consecutive terms is less damaging overall than two consecutive terms.

[00:45:12] Again, I don't know if I fully believe that yet, but, like, it's an idea.

[00:45:17] But the other thing, you know, more personally, I've been open on this, you know, show about that I'm, you know, bisexual.

[00:45:25] And I think about a clip from Charlie Kirk on a podcast of his over the summer where he's just sort of offhandedly in this sort of blithe kind of way.

[00:45:35] He said that gay people were an error.

[00:45:37] And I think, you know, that word choice is very important.

[00:45:43] Whether it was important to him or not, it's still important.

[00:45:46] But when you encounter an error, that's something to be corrected or deleted.

[00:45:51] Is it not?

[00:45:52] And, I mean, you don't have to have a PhD in history to see where that kind of logic rationally goes if left unchecked.

[00:46:03] And so, you know, whereas I think it's not helpful for us to talk about the next four years in hyperbolic ways.

[00:46:11] Because it's worth thinking, it's worth remembering that people's concerns about it are not hyperbolic.

[00:46:19] I don't know.

[00:46:20] That's just stuff that's been kicking around in my head the last two weeks.

[00:46:23] It goes back to that phrase I mentioned earlier, which I don't know if it was said in a calculated manner or if it was offhand, but it's just perfect.

[00:46:34] This phrase that Nick Fuentes said, your body, my choice.

[00:46:38] Yep.

[00:46:39] Captures so much of the concept here, whether you're thinking of it in a misogynistic sense or in a homophobic sense, right?

[00:46:48] I have control over the decisions that you get to make yourself.

[00:46:53] And there's a really scary kind of logical ending to that loop, which is your body, my choice on things like abortion.

[00:47:04] Your body, my choice on things like gay marriage.

[00:47:10] But violent extremists who attack communities on behalf of those ideologies, they're also making that calculation.

[00:47:16] They're also saying your body, my choice.

[00:47:19] And so it's also a statement of great violence, I think.

[00:47:25] It's a statement of, I get to eradicate you and your values and what you stand for.

[00:47:33] And there's no full stop because I get to determine for myself what those errors are.

[00:47:41] And it's my choice.

[00:47:43] I get to determine what your body's error is.

[00:47:47] It's my choice what to do with it.

[00:47:48] I mean, it's exclusionary to a violent degree.

[00:47:57] And again, you – I almost think though, Matt, it's better that we do get the hyperbole out of the way quickly.

[00:48:03] We establish a baseline of worst-case scenarios that we can then protect against and work our way back from.

[00:48:08] I got to hit the liquor store before we do that.

[00:48:10] Yeah.

[00:48:12] Sounds good.

[00:48:13] But yeah, I mean, I feel for people tremendously who are feeling very personal stakes in this moment.

[00:48:21] I am too.

[00:48:23] And I think the best that you can do is lean on each other, protect each other.

[00:48:29] And then once we are settled, once we're in that next stage in three or four months and we realize that maybe things aren't as bad as we thought they were or they're worse than we thought they are,

[00:48:40] at least then we're together and we can organize and we can prepare whatever kind of resistance that we need to in our own communities.

[00:48:54] Your book ended – the last chapter ended with a lot of really great suggestions on de-radicalization and how to push back against these ideologies,

[00:49:06] bits of reform, which I really appreciated because the quote like Denethor from Return of the King,

[00:49:15] you know, go now and die in what way seems best to you is just a completely unproductive, awful piece of advice to give anyone.

[00:49:24] You know, if you want to light yourself on fire and throw yourself off the ramparts or something, like do that, but don't spread that advice to other people.

[00:49:32] And I really like that your book had this really sobering look at, you know, the history of the far right in America,

[00:49:38] but ended with like actual productive things that people can do.

[00:49:41] You know, those reforms won't come out of the executive branch of the federal government at, you know, at least for another four years.

[00:49:49] But I mean, looking at some of those recommendations that you had, are there things in there for state governments,

[00:49:57] other, you know, local communities, even just ordinary people that could be highlighted over the next four years?

[00:50:05] Yeah, I think so.

[00:50:05] I mean, I think the best counterterrorism in this space is always something that happens in a nonpartisan fashion.

[00:50:12] The challenge is going to be resourcing and the challenge is going to be momentum from a government standpoint.

[00:50:18] In June 2021, the Biden administration released the first ever national strategy for countering domestic terrorism.

[00:50:26] Quite a credible document with a huge number of proposals.

[00:50:31] I would imagine that's going to be rescinded.

[00:50:36] And in fact, a lot of the real steps that were taken on domestic terrorism prevention and counterterrorism,

[00:50:43] like the January 6th prosecutions, I would imagine a lot of those are going to be unwound.

[00:50:51] Yes, the things I would recommend are things like, you know, prevention at grassroots level.

[00:50:56] Our country is chock full of nonprofit organizations working at the local level to build resilience in their own communities against extremism.

[00:51:07] Whether that's through mental health programming, whether it's through community-based initiatives,

[00:51:16] whether it's working with former extremists to de-radicalize people,

[00:51:20] that work will continue and hopefully will remain funded.

[00:51:26] A lot of those organizations are funded through grants from the Department of Homeland Security.

[00:51:34] That might not be realistic in the next four years.

[00:51:38] That does not mean that work stops.

[00:51:39] It means that it continues in the face of those challenges

[00:51:43] and people will continue to do their very best in their own communities to stop radicalization.

[00:51:49] The other thing that I think is important is digital literacy programming.

[00:51:57] Certainly something we would have spoken about previously on this podcast.

[00:52:02] This is basically the idea that you can vaccinate or inoculate people against bad information online.

[00:52:09] Again, notice I'm not saying partisan information.

[00:52:13] I'm just saying clearly incorrect conspiracy theories or misinformation, disinformation.

[00:52:18] Giving people the tools to be able to spot that information, choose to ignore it, choose to verify it.

[00:52:24] That work is happening.

[00:52:26] That work is something that can be escalated at state levels through the education system.

[00:52:32] It can be pioneered by civil society like church groups, like sports teams and private companies.

[00:52:41] And the third thing I would talk about is what could happen on the tech side in terms of trying to reform some of the online social media platforms.

[00:52:52] Now, Twitter is a very different platform than from before this particular owner.

[00:53:02] And so I'm not sure if Twitter is an area where this would happen.

[00:53:05] But one of the recommendations we make in our book is to reform what's called Section 230,

[00:53:12] which is part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.

[00:53:16] And basically says that social media companies are not publishers.

[00:53:22] Therefore, they are not personally liable for content on their sites.

[00:53:28] When my co-author Bruce and I took our book up to Capitol Hill and were talking to members of Congress,

[00:53:35] we identified a bipartisan energy to reform this particular chapter.

[00:53:40] In other words, that would lead to a situation where individuals could sue social media companies for content that they find dangerous or damaging.

[00:53:49] Based on our conversations there, that is something that I expect could happen in the next few years.

[00:53:54] It is a relatively bipartisan or nonpartisan issue.

[00:53:57] I think that would allow us a lot more space to push social media companies to really take responsibility for their own platforms.

[00:54:03] We will see if that's something that ends up happening.

[00:54:05] But anyway, I think there's plenty of stuff that we can do at the local level in the civil society to work against foreign extremism.

[00:54:16] Of course, with the caveat that we're going to be fighting against serious headwinds,

[00:54:21] which is the fact that the arsonist is in the White House and is not going to reform his rhetoric

[00:54:29] and is not going to slow down in his relationship with violent extremist fringes in his party.

[00:54:36] Well, thank you so much for coming back on, Jacob.

[00:54:39] I'm sure there'll be a lot more to talk about in this space in the years ahead.

[00:54:44] Are you on X still?

[00:54:46] I'm on X still, but I'm establishing a bigger foothold on Blue Sky now.

[00:54:51] To be honest, the really interesting thing with X isn't necessarily the content that's coming across my platform.

[00:54:57] It's just engagement seems to be down.

[00:55:00] It seems to be much harder to reach people, to have kind of good conversations.

[00:55:06] It's just turned into generally a bad platform, I think.

[00:55:10] And I'm not thrilled about Blue Sky turning into basically just a progressive response.

[00:55:15] I don't think that's healthy for our democracy at all.

[00:55:17] Yeah.

[00:55:18] But for those of us who just are not getting value from X anymore, I think it's the best we can do for now.

[00:55:25] So I'm on both Blue Sky and X.

[00:55:27] We'll have links to both of those in the show notes, a link to God Guns and Sedition,

[00:55:34] and links where folks can find your articles and stuff elsewhere.

[00:55:38] Thanks for coming on, my friend.

[00:55:40] It's good to talk to you.

[00:55:41] Anytime, Matt.

[00:55:42] Thank you so much and keep up the great work.

[00:55:44] Thanks.

[00:56:15] Thanks for listening.

[00:56:17] This is Secrets and Spies.