Do you ever feel like American society is caught in limbo? The bardo-realm between two election cycles. The dial-up static between invasive social media and quarantine isolation. Stacking sandbags against the deluge of conspiracies and disinformation as we await the slow-motion countermeasures of science and the justice system.
The disruptions of Trump, COVID, QAnon, conspirituality, and January 6 all still frame our everyday lives, even as we attempt a return to a normalcy that was always tenuous at best. Whatever happens over the next few months, the oven of 2024 looks preheated for chaos—yet, one by one, the treasonous conspiracy-mongering liars who peaked in 2020 are being forced to deal with cold legal consequences.
Our guest today is award-winning journalist and author David Neiwert, whose book The Age of Insurrection explains how we got here—and points a way forward.
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Julian Walker.
We are on social media, mostly Instagram at ConspiratualityPod, and you can also access our Monday bonus episodes and get ad-free episodes at Patreon, or you can just listen to our Monday episodes on Apple Subscriptions.
Do you ever feel like American society is caught in limbo?
You know, like the Bardo realm between two election cycles, the dial-up static between invasive social media and quarantine isolation.
We're stacking sandbags against the deluge of conspiracies and disinformation as we await the slow-motion countermeasures of science and the justice system.
The disruptions of Trump, COVID, QAnon, conspirituality, and January 6th all still frame our everyday lives, even as we attempt to return to normalcy that was always tenuous at best.
Whatever happens over the next few months, the oven of 2024 looks preheated for chaos.
Yet, one by one, the treasonous, conspiracy-mongering liars who peaked in 2020 are being forced to deal with cold legal consequences.
Our guest today is award-winning journalist and author David Naywardt, whose book The Age of Insurrection explains
how we got here and points a way forward.
When I first heard about a group called the Proud Boys, they seemed like a bit of a joke.
I saw a news report that showed young white guys in polo shirts half-heartedly punching a new recruit while he called out names of breakfast cereals as part of a hazing ritual.
Prohibitions on masturbation, frat boy critiques of feminism, and that whole 4chan era trolling vibe, you know, like taking their name from a song written for a Disney movie, Aladdin.
It all kind of rolled together in my mind at that time with the weird inside humor of a group of online right-wingers calling for Civil War II, Electric Boogaloo.
This is an obscure reference to a 1980s breakdance sequel.
And so then calling themselves Boogaloo Boys, but then coding Boogaloo as Big Igloo, and then Big Luau, And so wearing Hawaiian shirts.
Now you know the reference.
But of course, when those shirts are covered by tactical vests on dudes carrying AR-15s, the jokiness goes sour fast.
Let me just say that Electric Boogaloo, break into Electric Boogaloo, is a fantastic movie that defines part of my youth.
I remember it and then trying with my friends to do those moves.
So the fact that they co-opted it is bullshit.
That really bothers me.
But also this masturbation thing, it's not just a prohibition on masturbation.
I remember when I first found out about them, you're allowed to masturbate once a month
if you're in the company of your female partner.
So it's an even more cognitive mindfuck that everything you just referenced in that opening
little segment, the lengths they go to, to almost like seem contrarian and pop culture
and yet it's all just racist all the way down.
It's really, I don't understand why you would need that much effort to be in a group.
There are many other groups you can join that don't require this much effort.
Yeah, it definitely appeals to a particular demographic.
And that's, I think, part of why it was hard to figure out how seriously to take them.
Yeah.
Initially.
And even even though I would come to learn that far right street brawlers are never funny, turns out the joke is on the Proud Boys now, as just this past week, four of their leaders were sentenced to between 10 and 18 years in prison for their roles in the Capitol riots.
This news is particularly relevant for us today because we're running my interview with David Naywardt about his truly masterful new book, The Age of Insurrection.
Naywardt is a freelance journalist and prolific author who's been studying and writing about far-right extremism since the 90s.
Now look, I know we all have Trump fatigue, and all this legal stuff around the 2020 election is constantly in the news, along with the ticking time bomb anxiety about next year's election.
But stay tuned, listeners.
Ultimately, David Naywardt wants us to understand two things.
First, knowledge is power.
We have to know what we're dealing with in order to defeat it.
Second, the more we grasp what we're actually facing, the more we realize we have to get more organized and be proactive.
By the end of our interview, you'll have a better understanding of how we got here and some strong motivation and inspiration to take action.
Now wouldn't you know it, the reality distortions of conspiracy theories and cultish group identities are key to understanding how we got here.
In the book, Neiwert manages to situate the histories of each of the major far-right groups and their leaders, running from Trump's victory in 2016 all the way up to and beyond the events of January 6th, 2021.
This time period, of course, includes Charlottesville, the George Floyd protests, QAnon, COVID, and the Capitol riots.
As we all know, a lot happened.
He combined skillful storytelling with journalistic rigor to show how not only the Proud Boys and various patriot and white supremacist groups and militias like the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers were steadily escalating violent rhetoric and actions over those years, but also how QAnon influencers and other conspiracy mongers like Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn, Roger Stone, and of course, Donald Trump stoked the flames of sedition.
By creating an alternate reality for a big chunk of the electorate.
It's been a dizzying time for the news of how the justice system is slowly but surely holding these people to account.
And in amongst all the legal drama of our former president's 91 indictments and motley crew of co-conspirators all begging for some kind of support in paying their legal fees, you may have missed that Rudy Giuliani was now found guilty this past week, and potentially liable for millions in damages that have yet to be set, of defaming Georgia election workers, Shamos, And Ruby Freeman by falsely accusing them of ballot stuffing in the discredited Trump stolen election conspiracy theory.
I hope they become millionaires.
I really do.
They deserve it for what these people have put them through.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Totally innocent and I'm sure a lot of people heard their testimony to the committee and just their lives have been devastated.
Now this defamation decision echoes rulings totaling, I just checked, $1.4 billion against Alex Jones for the consequences of his conspiracy disinformation on the lives of Sandy Hook parents.
One line from the book I asked David Nyreth about at the top of our interview is, conspiracists comprised the largest portion of the January 6th mob.
So whatever the differences in style, belief system, agenda, whatever the level, the varying levels of violent extremism may have existed between the various participants in the insurrection from the QAnon shaman to Mickey Willis to Alex Jones to the random guy in the Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt to Joe Biggs of the Proud Boys who was just sentenced this week to 17 years in prison alongside Stuart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers who got 18 years.
What they all had in common was being motivated to take action by some set of false conspiracy narratives.
They also propagated those narratives to their followers.
There's a famous but contested quote from Voltaire that says, those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
That's in line with my frequent position here that what we believe to be true at the deepest level about reality, about the world we live in, colors our politics and it drives our actions in reality, in the real world.
That has consequences.
What we see with extremist groups is a cult-like commitment to a vision of reality with existential and at times transcendent metaphysical stakes.
QAnon, militia groups, and highly organized white supremacist street gangs all share not only in conspiratorial delusions, excuse me, but also in accelerationist zeal, which borrows heavily from religious apocalypticism.
To a man, whether it's Jake Chansley or Joe Biggs, Stuart Rhodes, or the as-yet-unsentenced Enrique Tarrio, part of the psychological shock has been realizing that the almost divine mandate they believed would protect them from severe punishment was always just a lie.
Well, I really enjoyed David's book, as well as your excellent interview with him.
In the beginning of the book, I'm reading about events that I perfectly remember, like local instances of violent white nationalism and Christian nationalism, all the fun stuff we get to see every day here in America.
But then about 50 pages in, it really hits me.
I'm going through how so many Americans relate to school shootings.
It hits me hard at the moment, but then you move on, and then another one happens.
It hits you, you move on, and the cycle repeats.
It's our horrible memory that is part of the problem here.
But when it's all laid out in front of you like it is in this book, You realize how pervasive and persistent this threat of nationalism writ large really is, and how entangled many of the players are.
But there's something else, which I started noticing after reading a Harper's Bazaar article about Christian nationalism something like 20 years ago.
Groups like anti-abortionists, white nationalists, and Christian nationalists understand the long game.
Now, this article I'm referencing specifically talked about how fundamentalist Christian colleges train young people to enter politics and push their religious agendas.
And even back then, the number of college students enrolled in these courses who were working on the Hill were astounding.
So while they were in school, they were interning for Supreme Court justices and different Congress people.
And now a generation later, we're seeing the results of these colleges and their actions.
And this is what constantly irks me about many progressive-minded people in America.
They're well-intentioned, but they don't see the long game.
And then I think about our own beat in the wellness space.
And what's the continual message that pervades so many of these spaces?
You're the project.
It's you.
You need healing.
You've been through something and need to come out the other side.
And when you do, you'll be self-fulfilled.
Now, there's nothing wrong with taking time to focus on yourself.
I think it's really important.
But if that's the only project that you're involved with, you're going to be extremely ill-equipped to handle the type of challenges that we're experiencing now and, more frighteningly, what comes next.
I just heard this morning that the number of people who either don't care on the Republican side about Trump's charges or are motivated by the more charges he gets to vote for him is over 50%.
The number of Republicans who care is under a quarter.
So, in some ways, looking back and pulling back at the larger picture, white nationalists focus on themselves as well.
It's extremely selfish to think that you're part of a special group that deserves something more than other people.
Now, they think their group is divinely mandated.
This is white nationalists, Christian nationalists, all these nationalists.
They might just think they're socially mandated to own something, right?
Land, government, ethics, whatever it is, it's their domain.
So on one level it is fundamentally self-ish, but on the other hand it's about the group, the tribe, and David Neiwert draws this out in his book when he talks about how many of them say they're willing to die for the cause, and I don't think it's hyperbolic.
Sure, some of the insurrectionists broke down on the stand claiming to have been serving Trump's message, and that they should not be held accountable.
But others are proud of what they did and have no issue sacrificing themselves for this larger goal.
And I rarely, if ever, hear that type of sacrificial language when progressives talk about their causes.
Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that we necessarily should.
From my point of view, it's about getting along and working with others and building a coalition with other people.
So it's not like I'm advocating for liberals to become sacrificial lambs.
I don't want any of us to die.
But when on the other side of this equation you have people who are willing to sacrifice themselves in the name of their god or skin color, how do you fight it if the only project you've been focused on is yourself?
I understand this isn't a binary.
Many people in our communities do good, charitable work.
But as an industry, the broader idea of wellness relies on this self-as-project form of navel-gazing as a marketing strategy because all the products and services are geared toward the individual, not the group.
And that's an entirely different mindset from what we're up against.
Even Gandhi said that nonviolence is the way until you have to stand your ground and fight.
And I see many more battles ahead that are going to take a lot more than posting a few memes on social media.
Yeah, absolutely.
And to echo that long game point, you know, there's been a lot of discussion since the Roe decision of the multi-decade efforts that the religious right has put into stacking the Supreme Court the way they currently have it stacked, and that that's part of why they held their nose.
Or why they fabricated religious rationalizations for why Trump was the perfect, imperfect leader to get them to the promised land, even though he had all of the moral problems that he had.
I just came across something in researching more deeply into Roger Stone, because I'm talking about him for this Monday's bonus.
Roger Stone was involved in the 2000 election and in stopping the recount that was happening in Miami-Dade, Florida.
The thing I found out that I didn't know is that three of the lawyers who were involved in essentially installing Bush Jr.
as president are now sitting on our Supreme Court.
Like, talk about a long game.
Talk about an inside track where all of these moves are being very carefully and very cynically orchestrated.
And these are the people who are constantly coming up with conspiracy theories about how dangerous the left is.
And it's, you know, recognizing that that's all part of their disinformation campaign while they have their eye on the prize all the time.
Right, and I don't want to make it seem that there aren't good progressive organizations that do see the long game.
I just think at the moment, we're extremely outmatched in the communications environment that we're working in, which is social media.
And therefore, that spills over into what the media covers.
And that really sucks for organizations doing good work, but I do still stand by the fact that the wellness industry As an industry focuses so much on hyper individualism as a as a sales point that that is part of the issue as well.
One thing I took away from the book was a deeper context for how far-right extremism had been so actively trying to push the country into chaos deliberately.
Neiwert and I talked about the incessant and completely fabricated story from their media about the supposed danger of Antifa and Black Lives Matter as the sharp end of the authoritarian Marxist spear.
This goes all the way back to like 2016.
And there's evidence gathered from the private chats of the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer, how they planned and enacted violence in disguise or, you know, without the insignia and the uniforms they would usually wear, so as to blame that violence and chaos on the left as part of fomenting fear and urgency and justifying their own militancy as if it was a response to the big bad bogeyman of Antifa.
The real threat of actual strategic and well-armed open white supremacists gathering at the gate of democracy creates a stunning contrast for me, and I know some people won't like that I'm gonna say this, with what so many of us on the left got caught up in during the racial reckoning of 2020.
I think it was really well-meaning and really sincere, but I think a lot of times we totally misdiagnosed the sickness in a way by spiritualizing it.
And mistakenly locating the enemy within our own souls.
Many became convinced that the way to acknowledge, to understand, to make progress on the issue of racism in America, especially as exemplified by police killings, was somehow for already liberal people to go into this deep personal reflection.
But this just made Robin DiAngelo richer.
I don't think it had any magical impact on the legislative effects of structural racism, let alone on the progress of actual white supremacist groups.
Meanwhile, hacked data, speaking of police shootings from 2022 on Oath Keepers memberships, showed hundreds of names from law enforcement and the military, as well as government officials and candidates.
There's the problem.
There's a part near the end of the book where Neiwert Quote Stanford Cybersecurity Professor Herbert Lin, and this is the quote.
We now live in an environment in which no conceivable evidence can persuade true believers to change their minds, and the resulting epistemic fractures translate into a once unified nation sharply divided against itself.
A worse national posture to meet the challenges of coming great power competition could not be imagined.
Now, Neiwert provides a holistic understanding of the battle in front of us.
It's a long book, as you hint at at the very beginning of your talk, but it's worth it.
He gives a context in history to what I believe to be humanity's worst impulses, right?
What I mentioned, tribalism, bigotry, violence.
And I'm pretty confident that very few of the people who actually need to read this
book as a warning of the dangers will do so because they're the people who he's warning
us against.
But it's obviously, again, not a binary and I'm critical of what I consider the most damaging
mindsets of the broader wellness community because that's a community I've been immersed
in for decades.
I completely understand the impulse to see humans as interconnected like the net of Indra,
It's a beautiful mythology.
I strive for all of us getting along.
This is what I worked in as a world music journalist, traveling around, writing about these intercultural collaborations for so long.
I think they're beautiful, they're noble goals, but they don't reflect the various serious threats that we face.
And if more well-intentioned people don't wake up to that fact, our collective rights are going to be trampled as we're seeing over and over.
So knowledge is important.
I know Neywert is a writer and he says that that is first and foremost what he's trying to present, but putting that knowledge into action, and he knows this too, is more important.
Personally speaking, I'm attending my first Neighborhood Council meeting tomorrow, the day after recording, and I'll be going every month moving forward.
Neighborhood meetings, zoning board meetings, library meetings, school board meetings, they're Very boring in general.
My first job as a full-time reporter was in Monroe, New Jersey, and it required me going to these meetings multiple nights a week and trying to pull up, like, my garbage bins were toppled over.
I need the garbage men to stand them upright.
That's what I had to report on because I had to find these stories.
But local news is really important because it's literally where you live.
So I look forward to getting more involved in my immediate surroundings, and as David says in the interview, the agenda by the right is to pick apart democracy at the local level so we have to show up.
Now one thing some of the more aspirational messaging from the yoga world does to our brains is to think that we can change the world and anything less is not worthwhile.
I think this is bullshit.
Because if you start locally by trying to make small changes, you can actually start to make an impact from there.
It really is the best we can all do and it does result in real-world change.
Now, you're not going to get Michael Jackson-sized sponsorship where you literally do change the world through your music.
Most of us aren't capable of that, but all of us are capable of these very small steps because they add up collectively.
Because this is really not a both-sides issue.
Neywork goes to great lengths to show how MAGA World positioned this as if it were them against Antifa.
In fact, this part really got me in the book.
He talks about how the Proud Boys were marching on the Capitol on January 6th.
And they were some of the very first people to breach the fences, and they were chanting, fuck Antifa, but there was no Antifa there!
So it's a manufactured lie to make it seem like it's both sides.
But the fact that they were chanting it without any of them in sight just shows you how it's all in their heads, and it's all projection to begin with.
A final message before we get to this excellent interview.
Support organizations that fight hate groups.
One I like is Southern Poverty Law Center, and they've done important work since the early 70s.
And the thing is, every week I see a Heritage Foundation write some fucking thought piece that's a hit piece on their work.
And I know some people were frustrated at their stance on Islam at the time, and that's all debatable.
No organization is perfect.
But I'd rather focus on groups doing on-the-ground work that I don't agree with on everything than reading biased op-eds and think that I'm learning something.
That's you, Heritage Foundation.
Now, we haven't been here where we are right now as a nation before.
And as David says at the end, democracy is something that you have to continually fight for.
It's not a given.
And we need to understand that and put that into action on a regular basis.
This He won the 2000 National Press Club Award for a series on domestic terrorism he produced for MSNBC.
He's the prolific author of nine books, the latest of which is titled The Age of Insurrection.
He describes it as a kind of toolbox, so I ask him at the end what we can actually do.
Here's my interview with him.
David Niewert, it is a pleasure to have you on Conspiratuality.
Welcome.
Pleasure to be here, Julian.
I just finished all 500 plus pages of your epic book yesterday.
It's really an accomplishment.
The combination of research and storytelling is really masterful.
What you've done is track groups like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, Patriot Front, and their most significant members from around the time of Trump coming to power, all the way through to January 6th, 2021, and then after the Capitol siege as well.
As you may know, we focus on this podcast a lot on the impact of conspiracy theories.
You have a line in your book that goes as follows, conspiracists comprised the largest portion of the January 6th mob.
So, can you tell us about the role that conspiracy theories play?
In creating what you call the age of insurrection.
The reason I said that is that really every one of the five groups that I identify as being part of the January 6th insurrection are all conspiracists to varying degrees.
The white nationalists and patriots, I mean, patriots are built around conspiracy theories.
And as are white nationalists and groups like the Proud Boys, these street brawlers, it's their mother's milk.
It's something that runs through all of them.
But there are some people for whom, whereas, you know, Boat Keepers and Proud Boys all have a very specific set of motivations.
There's a group of people for whom the conspiracy theories themselves are the motivation.
And here I'm thinking of The Alex Jones Infowars contingent, as well as, of course, the QAnon conspiracy cult.
They all operate in this alternative universe of conspiracism that they've built up from Really, they've built up over the last 20 years this world in which, you know, the world is actually secretly run by a cabal of wealthy elites who are trying to manipulate the rest of mankind into slavery.
That's the abiding narrative that they all buy into.
And for some of them, yes, specifically those beliefs are really what they focus on.
Conspiracy theories also play a role in how political theorists talk about the emergence of fascism in democratic societies.
And you reference in the book the nine mobilizing passions that drive this cultural process toward the far right.
Can you tell us about that?
Yeah, fascism is definitely an element of what we're dealing with here.
It's not classical European fascism.
It's more like modern American fascism.
But it has underlined these same drives and these same elements that constitute fascism as we've known it through history.
And this includes this ultra-nationalism, very selective ultra-nationalism that Somehow manages to find alliances with other nationalists from other countries, as well as this abiding belief in what Roger Griffin calls palingenesis, which is this belief in a sort of phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes for the national identity.
These all revolve around a mythology of a bygone golden era to which they hope to return the nation.
There are a lot of other elements that are distinctly fascist that we can identify with these movements, including, you know, the contempt for weakness, the absolute insistence on their own heroism.
Umberto Eco wrote that, you know, in a fascist society, everyone is educated to be a hero.
Mythos of heroism really plays a central role in all this because this is how they generate, first of all, their justification for their beliefs, but it also becomes the fuel for whom they target and how they target them, specifically with violence.
So these are all elements that have been historically part of fascism since the early 20th century, and they've actually always been latent in American politics.
We just haven't had the political space for it to grow until the last six, seven years.
The heroic victim is the phrase that comes to mind for me.
Yeah, that's, you know, it's been observed by more than a few sociologists that right-wing extremism really builds on this idea that ordinary people are being squeezed between nefarious elites at the top and a parasitic underclass underneath and that they're being sandwiched in between them.
This is called a producerist narrative.
It's really central to right-wing extremism as well.
And it's one of the reasons, one of the main things that they devote so much energy to is concocting these enemies.
Of course, back when I was a kid growing up, it was communists that the John Birch Society was waxing paranoid about for Seemingly decades.
You know, by the early 2000s, it started focusing on immigration.
Immigrants became the focus of the idea of a parasitic class attempting to destroy America from underneath.
After Trump was elected, then we started hearing a narrative about anti-fascists.
So Antifa became the demonized, nefarious entity of that period, at least for a while.
Now we've had more recent iterations like attacking critical race theory, as well as the supposed groomer epidemic in schools that's actually a means of victimizing the LGBTQ community.
You know, your book really focuses on the U.S.
for the most part, but at the start, you do establish a context of surging right-wing movements around the world.
And as you just pointed to, the paradox that immediately comes to mind for me is that of this hyper-nationalist focus on sovereignty.
that rejects all of the post-World War II and climate crisis international alliances,
but still very actively builds these bridges of support and sometimes covert influence
with political groups, even with ruling parties in other countries that are advancing a far-right
agenda. Steve Bannon is of course a major player in this endeavor. And the most public examples of
this might be Tucker Carlson broadcasting his show from Viktor Orban's proto-fascist Hungary while he
he kind of gives them a massage.
And then, you know, the following year, CPAC happening, the American Conservative Convention happening in Hungary, and it happened again this year.
This is incredible to me how international this group of nationalists actually are.
I want to quote something to you from the book again.
Early on, you say that since 2014, Russia has spent over $300 million on a covert campaign to influence American politics.
So tell us more about that, about how disinformation, conspiracy theories and political turmoil in the U.S.
benefits other authoritarian leaders.
And of course, top of the list is Putin.
Sure.
Well, of course, actually, the 300 million is what they've been spending, not just on the U.S., but spreading disinformation all throughout Europe, as well as, you know, Australia and other nations.
The Russian regime has been financing organizations and political movements and parties, particularly
in Europe, that are designed to undermine democratic regimes.
This includes the Alternative for Deutschland party, the far-right party in Germany, Sweden
Democrats in Sweden, Maloney's Italy First Party in Italy, Marine Le Pen's Nationalist
Party in France.
All actively funded by Putin.
Yeah.
This money is funded through giving people loans, as well as, of course, free propaganda efforts.
And a number of other means.
Yeah, they get a lot of support from, if not Putin's regime itself, it's through his oil oligarch toadies with whom he's aligned.
And then it also includes, you know, there are Russian ties between extreme far-right terrorist groups, neo-Nazi groups like Atomwaffen-SS.
whose founder actually lives in Russia now.
The tendrils are multifaceted and run in a lot of different directions, but there's a lot of money flowing.
The thing that's really tricky these days about having this conversation is that it's a mirror image of the conversation that Alex Jones is having.
Except his is based entirely on fabrications and boogeymen, and you're talking about something that's based in research and facts.
But on the surface, it sounds very similar, right?
Substitute Putin for George Soros, and you could have said that same paragraph.
Yeah, of course.
And been, you know, a more mild-mannered Alex Jones.
So it's really tricky.
So again, what's your take on how Propaganda, conspiracy theories, the disinformation, the deliberate disinformation component of this functions.
Do you have a sort of working theory of that or observations about that?
I think the underlying phenomenon that we're dealing with here is authoritarianism.
In order to recruit people into the sort of authoritarian worldviews that they're promoting, it requires a disengagement from reality.
Because most authoritarians are promoting this sort of alternative universe where, no, no, we are telling you what's true, don't believe the media.
That's a big part of how authoritarianism works, is that they separate their followers from the rest of the society by getting them to completely succumb to these conspiracist narratives.
It serves as a sort of wedge between the authoritarian followers and the rest of society.
Yeah, and it almost, it always sounds inflammatory to say so or pejorative,
but I think there's a way that the idea of cult indoctrination actually is a pretty good fit here
in terms of that sense of trust only the leader and the others who think like us.
Everyone else is lying to you.
Yeah, exactly.
That's precisely what's going on.
Cultic authoritarianism is really what we're looking at, and it's not hard to see who the primary figure of this cult is.
Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, your book really artfully shows a timeline which gradually fills in as you weave back and forth between these various groups and figures rising to far-right prominence and influence during the Trump presidency.
These anti-democratic street brawlers, militia members, and in some cases openly fascist groups, all come together quite deliberately to try to overthrow the election on January 6th, which of course is the climax of your narrative.
But you also point out, you talk about it as the outside game and the inside game, that this was happening not only from the outside of the Capitol, but from within as well.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, sometimes in our news cycle we end up We end up looking at the GOP as being filled with these spineless career politicians who are just too afraid to anger the MAGA base by standing up against Trump.
But there's more to it than that, as you as you show.
Tell us about that.
It's sort of hard to say that all Republicans are authoritarianism, but I think authoritarianism has become the major element of the Republican Party in part because the conservative movement and conservatives in general came to the realization that They not only lack the ability to gain majority support, but that their prospects of ever becoming a majority again, going into the future, are increasingly thin and dim.
Their entire hope revolves around keeping white male Christians in power and disenfranchising the rest, which requires fundamentally a sort of anti-democratic approach, basically a minoritarian approach.
That has a lot to do with why Republicans have been so dedicated to limiting voting rights, powers, as well as cutting out, you know, stopping people from voting in various districts, preventing get out the vote.
initiatives within states. In the end, it's less about Trump and more about asserting this
authoritarian, minoritarian rule, their intent on hanging on to power.
You end up with this situation on the day of the Capitol insurrection,
where the insurrectionists are storming in from the outside.
But on the inside, there are figures who are not only sympathetic to them, but
who, it sounds to me like, are involved behind the scenes in terms of trying to
accomplish some of those aims.
Can you tell us about that?
There are actors, including, you know, Former Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump's longtime trusted advisor, Roger Stone.
They work, they work in collusion.
You know, they all get, they all have these powwows where they get together and talk about what their strategies are going to be.
And, you know, it's been increasingly clear that their strategy going forward from January 6th is to attack on the local level, to organize on the local level and bring these organizations to play in local politics in a way that hollows out democracy from the bottom up.
So that you have school boards and library boards and city councils and county councils first being taken over by some of these far-right activists who surreptitiously run for these seats and then actually take over the boards.
We've certainly seen that in Idaho in the last few years, as well as in Florida and elsewhere.
Then they also bring into play groups like the Proud Boys and these local militiamen and other so-called patriots who turn out to threaten and intimidate boards that fail to pay any attention to or acknowledge their agendas.
Particularly, we've seen this in relation to school boards being attacked for LGBTQ content in their libraries.
Yeah, I think the chapter title in your book is a hundred small insurrections that post the kind of Failure, although they got the ball pretty far down the field, of the capital insurrection.
You then have this regrouping around, let's do a sort of grassroots organizing where we can be aggressive and hostile and intimidating and come bearing arms to all of these school boards or city council meetings or LGBTQ, you know, pride gatherings.
I mean, they know that democracy has always functioned by having, you know, ordinary little old ladies turning up for the school boards, right?
And these little old ladies are not prepared in any shape, form or fashion to deal with, or nor do they have any desire to deal with, these thugs bearing AR-15s who get up and yell at them and scream.
Most people are going to try to, will have to feel like they have to walk away from that because They're utterly unprepared for it.
Unfortunately, what it does mean going forward is that people running for local office need to take this threat seriously because, inevitably, they're all going to be confronted with these factors, with these groups that do this kind of thing.
Truth is, democracy isn't easy.
We've kind of taken it for granted for so many years that it will just run naturally and easily.
But when it's being attacked and threatened, the people who are going to be holding democratic office need to have the tools to be able to stand up to the threats of people that are actually trying to destroy democracy.
What might some of those tools be?
Well, knowledge.
This is the first.
I mean, that's why I wrote the book, was for people to have the informational tools that they need to understand what it is that they're looking at and dealing with.
When proud boys come out to their school boards, they really should know what they're dealing with.
Not only that, they also need to understand that there is a very real threat of violence that underlies all of this and that they need to act accordingly.
They need to be prepared accordingly.
You know, I mean, we weren't prepared on January 6th because ultimately the people in charge didn't take it seriously enough.
Certainly what's been happening as well on the local level, you know, I think some of the most recent incidents that we've seen were in Glendale, California.
And most of these guys that were showing up to threaten them with guns were not even from the districts that they were protesting.
They were just there to cause trouble.
encouraging in their schools.
And most of these guys that were showing up to threaten them with guns were not even from
the districts that they were protesting.
They were just there to cause trouble.
And because that's their strategy, that's what they're going to do.
And initially, the school board was really taken back.
They'd never seen this kind of thing.
Certainly the people who ran for school boards when they ran for them had no clue that this was going to be something that they would be dealing with when they did.
You know, they thought they were going to be looking at curriculum and funding and budgets, which, you know, they still have to do.
But now there's this sad reality that the Democratic offices that they represent, or that they hold, are being challenged by this movement.
Yeah, they're under siege.
Yeah.
You said that democracy is not easy, and I want to come around to this sort of historical
fetish for 1776 that these insurrectionists have.
They love to invoke it, they love to chant it while they're storming the barricades.
People like Steve Bannon and Alex Jones, who love to style themselves and their followers as noble revolutionaries continuing that tradition.
You say they've got this upside down.
What did they get wrong?
I think I was quoted in the New York Times once saying that, yeah, patriots love to call and hold themselves up and epitome of patriotism itself, but you've never actually met a more seditionist bunch in your life.
That's something that I observed going back to the 90s, that when I was first writing about the militia movement and the patriot movement, which is functionally identical, they're the same thing.
that they're actually travesties of what they claim to be.
They claim they wrap themselves in red, white, and blue, claim to be all about defending America.
What they're actually doing is creating a view of America that is fundamentally anti-democratic.
And that's what, you know, one of their bywords is that they'll say,
this isn't a democracy, it's a republic, right?
Which is a pretty clear expression of their hostility to democratic values and democratic institutions and democracy itself.
It's also a really dangerous belief.
It's a Utterly false.
It's a little toss-off line that was created by Robert Welch of the John Birch Society back in the early 60s.
And it has no basis in historical reality or anything else that, you know, the Founding Fathers were very much concerned with democracy.
They just didn't want direct democracy.
They wanted a representative democracy.
And that's what we've got.
The idea was that it represented a democracy that would ameliorate the possible abuses of the popular will, which I think it generally does.
That's part of the myth that they tell us because when they say, well, it's not a democracy, it's a constitutional republic, right?
That's a non sequitur.
Every known republic has a constitution.
And if you're talking about, well, or they just say we're a republic, then you say, well, what kind?
Are we a Soviet republic or a socialist republic?
Or what's the content of our republic?
Of course, the answer is we're a democratic republic.
That's what we have always been.
Nonetheless, that's part of what they do.
Patriot militia folks, and I think the real symbol of this was the Gazdan flag, the yellow Gazdan flag that we all I'm familiar with during the Tea Party years, but let me tell you, back in the 90s when I was going to militia meetings, that was where we started seeing it.
Because the militia patriots were the first ones to adopt this sort of hyper patriotism as a way of disguising their fundamentally anti-democratic impulses.
Yeah, so the militia patriots were very much, I mean, their whole thing was embracing the founding fathers and read the Constitution, although none of them have actually read the Constitution.
It's pretty obvious when you talk to them.
And, you know, they've read selected parts of it.
The Second Amendment, they all know, you know.
But the rest of the, you know, the 14th Amendment, they're not so keen on.
When I saw the Gadsden flag come out as part of the Tea Party, that was the real signal to me that we were seeing all of this Patriot Movement stuff moving into the mainstream through the Tea Party.
And the Tea Party did, in fact, become this major conduit for far-right Patriot Movement beliefs.
The sort of apotheosis of this was the Oath Keepers who were really closely associated, their whole origin story was really closely associated with the Tea Party.
By 2010 and 11, they were sponsoring Tea Party gatherings, they were a major presence in the Tea Party, and they were also spreading this supposed form of constitutionalism within the Republican Party that We now see everywhere, particularly on the local level, these crazy ideas like that the federal government shouldn't be allowed to own public land and that it shouldn't be involved in education, has no power to enforce environmental law, and that it has no power to enforce civil rights law, which, frankly, was the nexus of all this.
The origins of this go back to the 1960s and 70s and the Posse Comitatus movement to that era, which was an openly racist and anti-Semitic movement that was devised by people who had I've previously been involved with white supremacists from the South.
So a lot of them moved to the Northwest, as it turned out.
Yeah.
So what the Posse Comitatus was really focused on and what really inspired them was the 1960s and 70s enforcements of civil rights laws.
And that was ultimately what they were focused on, was defaming the federal government Preventing it from actually being able to enforce civil rights laws on a local or national level.
Yeah, with that kind of sovereign citizen style obsession with specific interpretation of like this sentence that I've excised from the legal kind of Right, which they then combine with citations from Black's law book.
They'll even cite the Magna Carta and various other bizarre texts, and then they mix it in with the Constitution, and it becomes part of their conspiracist worldview.
Yeah, it's an interesting overlap with religiosity because I think there are several videos I've seen of sovereign citizen type people in multiple countries where when they'll break in to a government office, they'll sort of chant or intone The specific verse from the Magna Carta or from the Constitution or from whatever source that they're citing as sort of almost giving them a divine mandate to do the thing that they're doing.
They believe that divine mandate is theirs because, look, nobody ever sees themselves as a bad guy.
These people all see themselves as heroic, godly, you know, God-fearing, good American Christian people.
Especially from an authoritarian point of view, it's absolutely essential to have gods and premature on their actions.
That I see as having happened in our political discourse over at least the last 10 years is this kind of carnival mirror effect.
I would say fun house, but it's not fun.
And you know, you see things like racist reactionaries will accuse progressive activists of being the racists and people in favor of book burnings or book bannings will point the finger at disinformation researchers as censoring free speech.
And then, of course, those attempting to steal an election and upend democracy will claim they're only trying to stop the stealing of an election and they're trying to fight the authoritarian woke Marxists.
And so I often lament that the culture war aspect of this.
Makes it seem like the right has brought a bazooka to a knife fight.
Yeah.
Especially because for all of their moral posturing as good Christians, they have no problem lying and distorting the truth aggressively so as to win these daily skirmishes and just own the libs.
But you have a thread running through your book that I see as being about a more visceral and violent manifestation of this dynamic that I was just describing.
And it's this way in which Antifa and BLM, and you've already touched on how, you know, then CRT and trans people are used to mobilize paranoia and outrage in ways that to the people on the right seem to justify The violence, right?
But within the culture, more broadly, it can create this false perception that there's a both sides phenomenon.
Antifa is really, really bad.
Like Antifa is as bad as the Proud Boys kind of thing.
You touch on this multiple times through the book, and I think you do a really good job of unpacking the timeline of how all of that unfolded.
Can you say a little bit about that?
Sure.
Well, I mean, I've often remarked that 90% of what you hear from conservatives on the right is just straight up rejection.
You know, if you want to know what they're planning to do, look at what they're accusing liberals of doing, and that's what they're planning to do.
I mean, I think back on, you know, Jonah Goldberg's book in 2008, I think it was, Liberal Fascism.
Which was pretty much a warning sign, I thought, considering that it just was one of these things that came out of nowhere to accuse liberals of being fascists.
And in fact, it was at a time that I was seeing really a rise in really ugly authoritarianism on the right at the same period.
The real feature of so much right-wing rhetoric, even in that period, was what I call eliminationism.
It's not a term I had coined.
It came from Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.
It's basically what the essence of scapegoating is.
When we create scapegoats, we're doing so for the purpose of eliminating them from our society.
And eliminationism is basically a politics where you vilify and demonize your opponents to create this view of them as being less than human.
Early 2000s, it was very much directed at immigrants.
And Latinos in particular.
In more recent years, one of the t-shirts I used to see showing up at Proud Boys events was a Pinochet did nothing wrong t-shirts that showed people being thrown out of helicopters, which is a reference to how the Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, would take his enemies or, you know, his leftist critics up in helicopters and drop them out.
It's been very common.
for pro-boys and oath keepers and folks like that to throw all of them into one basket.
They call Antifa, BLM, Black Lives Matter, and even liberal Democrats, they call them
communists.
And this is part of this desire to, apparently in their view, communists even, which I'm
not, I'm not a communist, but I'm an American and I think everybody should have the same
civil rights as anybody else.
They're not allowing others to be, even to exist, which, you know, becomes the same thing now that we're seeing with the anti-groomer or the, you know, the supposed anti-groomer rhetoric being directed at the LGBTQ community.
They don't even want transgender people to exist.
They don't think they should be allowed to exist.
And certainly they don't think gay marriages should exist or, you know, any of these other aspects of the LGBTQ community.
About this is that the reason I wanted to ask you about Antifa is you do a really good job of tracking, you know, all the way back to right before Trump came into office, the conspiracy echo chamber has is constantly ginning up these fabricated ideas.
Like at that time, it was that Antifa was going to storm, you know, the streets and wreak havoc and stop Trump from taking office.
There's this constant sense that Antifa is this big Well-organized, funded by George Soros.
They're the ones doing all the violence.
And that runs all the way through.
There are instances that you track again and again and again, all the way through to Tucker Carlson's disinformation documentary about the January 6th insurrection.
And I think that the George Floyd protests were, in a way, this golden opportunity for these propagandists to take to the streets.
And you track this, Proud Boys, Patriot Front, others like them, and they are actually
instigating violence, coming to fight, being incredibly aggressive.
And in some cases, you have the back-channel evidence to show that they're saying, let's go undercover today and wreak havoc, and then say that it was Antifa so that we can continue creating this public perception that we are the only ones who can save America from this terrible, scary force.
Right.
Well, that is exactly what happened.
You know, the post-2020 conventional wisdom, especially on the right, is that Antifa and BLM burned down cities and killed dozens of people and so on and so forth.
Well, being from Seattle and having visited Portland recently, I can tell you that neither of those cities were burned down.
We had a couple arsons and that was it.
More importantly, the idea that there were dozens of people killed is also a fabrication.
The only part, there was one fatality in all of the summer 2020 riots that was directly related to the protests.
And that was in the Bay Area in late May, when a guy named, a Boogaloo boy named Stephen Carrillo, who is a Reserve U.S.
Air Force Sergeant, He was involved in this militia group that went out and did armed practices in the California hills.
He and another cohort drove to the George Floyd protests in Oakland using a sniper rifle, shot two federal guards, federal officers who were working in a guard booth and killed one of them.
He was tracked down a couple of weeks later.
Sheriff came to question him about the Oakland shooting at his home in rural, in the rural areas.
He got into a gunfight with the sheriff's deputies, killed a sheriff's deputy, and then was tackled by a neighbor.
And Carrillo is now, I believe, serving a life term in prison for that crime.
And he was unquestionably, you know, one of these right wing extremists.
And his plan was to try to pin the blame on Antifa for his violence.
And you know what?
It worked.
Both, you know, Ted Cruz cited that shooting as proof that Antifa was killing people.
As did Mike Pence in his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention that summer.
The truth frequently has a very hard time competing with the concocted realities that these propagandists and these disinformation artists concoct, and especially when it has to do with a pre-established narrative like the one about Antifa and BLM in the summer of 2020.
Now, there was one guy who said, I'm 100% Antifa, who was involved in a skirmish where he shot someone.
Yeah, there was a man named Michael Renal who was out on one of those nights when Proud
Boys invaded downtown Portland with their pickup trucks.
And they were shooting people with their paint guns and hitting, threatening them with their
AR-15s and walking around town and looking for people to beat up.
And Renal was with some friends that he apparently believed were going to be attacked by these
guys.
He confronted one of them in the streets.
The guy pulled out a can of bear spray and started spraying him.
And you can see all this on the video.
And the very moment that he pulled that and started shooting the bear spray, Reno pulled his own gun and shot him and killed him.
The one shot in the chest.
And actually shot him twice.
And then he fled the scene.
He became immediately demonized by the national press as, you know, rogue, violent Antifa guy.
And he did, you know, did an interview with Vice where he explained that he believed he was firing in self-defense.
But later that same day that he did that interview, federal marshals caught up to him in Western Washington at a In an ex-urban area where he was hiding out, confronted him and got into, they shot him down.
They claimed that he had pulled a gun, but his gun was actually found fully loaded in his pocket.
So the idea that, well, Let's just put it this way, they were very much conflicting stories.
But Donald Trump was very big on having federal marshals hunt this guy down and kill him.
And in fact, he told one of his rallies that they didn't want to arrest him, they were just going to get him down.
And that was pretty much the attitude, that this guy doesn't deserve a day in court, let's just kill him.
Summary, extrajudicial execution.
Yeah, and you're right that witnesses or people who were within earshot of the scene said that they didn't hear any of the kinds of law enforcement warnings and any of the steps that would proceed using lethal force in a justifiable way.
Yeah, but of course these police forces investigated themselves and gee, golly surprise, they actually found themselves innocent.
Well, you know, speaking of investigations and innocence, you know, I know we all have Trump fatigue right now, but our interest, of course, is piqued by this rash of indictments and arraignments and trying to find court dates in a race against the election clock.
I think I can speak for for most of us liberals that the Mueller report was was such a big disappointment in terms of feeling like Trump and his his Kokenspergers would ever be held accountable.
But now things are things are really moving.
There's there's this incredibly tepid response from MAGA when Trump calls for mass protests outside of the courthouses where he's where he's being indicted, which which of course can It can lull us into a sense of like, oh, maybe it's dispersed.
Maybe all of the major extremists and leaders and foot soldiers have been imprisoned after the insurrection and the rest of them are too scared to do anything.
What's your sense based on having followed these groups for as long as you have?
About what could unfold between now and the election next year, because I have a sense we're headed into a very incendiary time.
Well, I think actually that a lot of Trump supporters are fully aware of what a con artist the guy is, and they certainly are aware that he will throw them under the bus if he needs to.
Which is why a lot of people weren't turning out to do these protests.
Will they vote for him?
I think that that's entirely possible.
Would they turn out for another insurrection?
Well, I think if they felt there were going to be another 100,000 people out there on the Capitol Mall, yeah, they probably would.
And I think that was a lot of what had to do with it.
That, you know, we'd had two previous protests in D.C., one in November and one in December, and each one was larger than the previous one.
But they didn't have Trump's endorsement when he came out with that tweet on December 18th, the Be There, Will Be Wild tweet.
That I think is very much correctly credited with the mass response that he got.
I think that if he has similar circumstances and is able to manipulate them again, I think it's entirely possible they could do something like that again.
Yeah, and we also did have the heartening kind of results in the midterms.
Yeah.
You know, in terms of so many of those election-denying candidates not getting in, there were still plenty who did get in, most notably the Secretary of State positions not getting filled by people who would then use that.
Yeah, yeah.
And they worked really hard, especially Michael Flynn and those folks out there worked really hard to try to get these election-denialists elected.
And to hear Kerry Lake tell it, yeah, they actually did!
Yeah, she got it anyway.
In her own alternative universe, she's actually in the shadow government.
Okay, there's so much, obviously, that we can't get to today.
I really want to highly recommend The Age of Insurrection to everyone listening.
You say in the introduction that you hope the book will be a kind of toolbox, and you mentioned that a little bit earlier as well, for readers to use in recognizing our predicament, fighting back against the clear and present danger of far-right extremism having gained so much ground.
What are your closing thoughts on why reading your book might serve this role and then what else we can do?
The book, I tried to make it a fairly complete and thorough summary of what I would call the insurrectionist army or the anti-democratic movement in America.
Understanding what we're dealing with is going to be essential to fighting it.
But then we have to actually fight it.
I'm not talking about, you know, Going out and buying our own AR-15s.
I'm talking about organizing our democracy.
I think the best tool to fight forces arrayed against democracy is democracy itself.
It's not something we can take for granted anymore.
It's something that we have to fight for and work for.
And then once we've fought for it and worked for it, we actually have to put it to work to achieve better democratic outcomes across the country so that more people are empowered More people have the right to vote.
More people have economic opportunities that a lot of these anti-democratic efforts and initiatives actually curtail seriously.
Emphasizing communitarian values, old-fashioned communitarian values, where we're all looking out for each other.
You know, I live on an island where during the pandemic, unlike much of the rest of the country, The community here really got behind the efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
People masked and you got the stink face, stink eye, if you walked around town without a mask, you know, and everybody got their vaccines quite promptly.
Now, we did have a few cranks showing up on street corners with signs saying that COVID was a hoax and whatever, but it was such a tiny minority on the island and people were really looking out for each other.
Maybe that's because we were on an island, and that's part of the mentality of living in a place like that, is that we tend to look out for each other.
But the end result was, over the whole pandemic, we had one death.
We had the lowest infection rate on the entire West Coast, and one of the lowest in the country.
We were kind of represented what America could and should have been.
I grew up in a time in southern Idaho when those communitarian values were really powerful and they kept communities together.
And I think right-wing extremism and its seep into American politics has really frayed that ethos and frayed that mindset.
You know, a lot of the hard work we need to do is to restore that sense of community among ourselves.
And a lot of it actually does.
Thank you everyone for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
We'll see you here next week with our guest Naomi Klein talking about her exceptional new book, Doppelganger, which everyone should pre-order if you have not.
