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From a smattering of ominous right-wing compounds in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s, to the shocking January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, America has seen the culmination of a long-building war on democracy being waged by a fundamentally violent and antidemocratic far-right movement that unironically calls itself the “Patriot” movement.
So how did we get here? Award-winning journalist David Neiwert — who been following the rise of these extremist groups since the late 1970s, when he was a young reporter in Idaho — explores how the movement was built over decades, how it was set aflame by Donald Trump and his cohorts, and how it will continue to attack American democracy for the foreseeable future.
Buy the Age of Insurrection on the SWAJ Bookshop List: https://bookshop.org/lists/swaj-books-for-2024/edit
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163
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Today, I have an interview with the great veteran journalist, David Nyward.
David's been covering extremism and the far right in the Pacific Northwest for a long time.
You might be hearing my baby, Kasia, in the background.
She's here co-hosting this morning.
David's just somebody who's been at this for about 35 years.
He's written a bunch of great works on extremism and the far right in the United States, and that includes In God's Country, The Patriot Movement, and The Pacific Northwest, Death on the Fourth of July, The Story of a Killing, a Trial and Hate Crime in America, The Eliminationists, How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right.
And what we're going to talk about today is The Age of Insurrection, which came out last year.
It's a long book, 450 pages, all about the militias, the white nationalists, the alt-right groups who not only helped to make J6 happen, But who continue to organize and continue to activate in the wake of J6 three years later.
This interview really dovetails really well on what I talked about with Bryn Tannehill last week.
I think Bryn was forecasting the future in many ways.
What David shows us is a history of how we got here.
And this show, we focus on Christian nationalism and the religious right, and Dan and I are trained as scholars of religion.
Well, we veer into the far-right and misogynist and militionist groups at times, but David Nyward's really just somebody who's been embedded in that world for over three decades and provides some insight on how the Christian nationalists we talk about cross over with, again, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Aryan Nations, and so on and so forth.
I learned a lot talking to him about the ways that these groups are hyper-local and they've recruited and organized with Moms for Liberty, with attempts to take over school boards, with COVID denial, conspiracy theories surrounding QAnon and other things.
It's just a really helpful discussion for understanding how these groups fit into that whole cosmos.
I know some of you are feeling a little hopeless as if violence is inevitable and we're going to have a rough year ahead.
I think this interview along with the one I did with Brent Tannehill is unflinchingly honest about where we are.
The goal for me is not to be so ominous about what's coming that everyone feels paralyzed.
The goal is to say we have to have an honest assessment of where we are and we need to move forward.
We need to realize the choices that are ahead of us, the possibilities that are ahead of us, and not only brace for those but work for the best possible outcome.
This is not an easy moment to live in, but it's one that we can direct and it's one we can cultivate.
History is not destiny.
And I guess for me, I just don't want to be a harbinger of doom who is leading folks to do nothing.
I want to say, this is what we're up against.
And I think we're up for the challenge.
I think we have a chance to protect democracy, to protect a sense of America as some kind of free society, but it's going to take a lot of work.
With all that said, if you're a subscriber, stick around.
We've got 15 minutes of extra conversation with David Nywert.
If not, subscribe now so you can get the full conversation and hear everything I talked about with him.
You can get all that in the show notes, of course.
Becoming a premium subscriber comes with a lot of benefits.
Appreciate y'all.
Thanks for being here.
Here's my interview with David.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
As I just said in my introduction, I'm joined today by just an amazing writer and somebody who's just been at this for a long time and has done incredible work, and that's David Niewert.
So, David, I've introduced you to the audience, told them all about all your writing, including All these books about terrible right-wing movements and a book about whales, which is like my favorite thing in the whole world.
It's like giving me hope someday I'll be writing a book about something beautiful like whales.
So, thank you for joining me and thanks for writing just a magisterial book in the age of insurrection.
Thanks.
Let me start here.
I read the book, and 450 pages or so, you take us through Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, White Nationalists, people like Nick Fuentes, militias, right-wing groups.
And when I was done, I went back.
When I was done, I went right to the beginning.
And the first pages are about fascism.
You give us a pretty succinct definition of fascism.
Fascists are nostalgic.
They play the victim.
They're prone to violence.
They blame others for their pain.
They believe they have a right to dominate other people.
I'm wondering if fascism is your way of understanding the connections among all these bad actors in the book, phenomena like Great Replacement Theory, QAnon, white nationalism.
Well, partly because I think my concerns about fascism as a latent force in American politics Has been a lot of what's driven me over the 34 years that I've been doing this.
And a lot of that has to do with, you know, my origin story starting out in the Idaho Panhandle just a few miles north of the Aryan Nations.
And coming to understand how fascism works, even back then, and how it is attractive to ordinary Americans in ways that I think most people would find surprising.
And so, it's not It's not that all of these far-right extremists are innately fascist or fascist by definition.
I try to stick to a pretty strict definition of what fascism is using Scholarly words, as well as what I've seen and experienced.
I think that the concern is that it's the destination for all these groups, especially as they coalesce and form Alliances, and sort of create new creatures that take on a life of their own.
I mean, we're seeing this melding of white nationalists and street brawlers, Proud Boy types, with Christian nationalists.
We're seeing them turn out that way.
And like I say, these things take on a life of their own, and eventually I think that the destination that they're all headed towards is fascism as at least an American form of it.
And that's the important thing to understand is that fascism is a force that appears throughout, I think, around the world in a lot of ways, particularly as a form of Violent right-wing populism, essentially.
Eliminationist right-wing populism.
Roger Griffin calls it hell and genetic.
In a lot of ways, he predicted.
Roger Griffin is this Oxford Brooks scholar on fascism, who has been writing since the 90s.
And his definition of it was, yeah, pelagenetic, ultranationalist populism.
What he means by colonogenesis is the myth of the phoenix-like rebirth.
The idea of, you know, society is going to have this phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes of the terrible things that the left has inflicted on the world.
And, I mean, that's their narrative.
When I was writing about militias, I really was detecting these really powerful undercurrents of fascism within that movement, the whole Patriot militia movement.
Uh, was undergirded by this really powerful undercurrent of fascism.
And, and so I called him back in 99.
I, in the book that I published, my first book that I published about the Northwest militias, identified them as proto-fascist.
And then I started seeing a lot of these currents moving into the mainstream during the first two decades of this century.
One particular was the way we saw the Patriot movement move from organizing just generic militias to organizing border militias down on the Arizona and Texas border.
And then of course they really moved into the mainstream with the Tea Party.
Yeah, and that was extremely concerning because, you know, I would go to somebody's tea party, the other reason why I went to Montana, I was selling a copy of Mein Kampf on the tables, you know.
That's a pretty good indication of fascist impulses, I think, as, you know, as things you might pick up at the old political rally, just come home with a copy of Mein Kampf.
One of the things, just before we move on from this, one of the things that I really, really, really appreciated about the book is the ways that you show us that everyone in the book, from Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, doesn't matter.
The destination might be fascism, which seems extreme and is, of course, alarming.
The presentation is of normalcy.
And I think you hit on that when you talked about the beginning of your career in the Idaho Panhandle.
The goal of the alt-right and white nationalists has always been to sell themselves as good, hardworking Americans.
They're the opposite of how they want you to think of the Black Panthers, right?
Or as of some other group that they're going to tell you is way beyond the pale, the Communist Party of America.
We're just good, hardworking Americans who happen to be Selling Mein Kampf at a table at a rally or part of a militia.
I think that has a lot to do with why they call themselves the Patriot Move.
Why they cloak themselves and all this sort of, I mean, really jingoistic Patriotic guard.
Red, white, and blue everything.
Screaming bald eagles everywhere.
They really wrapped themselves in red, white, and blue buntings, and they call themselves constitutionalists while touting a version of the Constitution that is not recognized by any court in the land.
But when you call them out as being extremists, they say, well, I'm just talking about the Constitution.
It's like, yeah, your version of the Constitution is not ours.
They read whatever they want to into it.
And, you know, do a lot of cherry picking.
And a lot of the constitutionalists, especially like the ones that I first had experience with in the 90s, Montana Freeman, they call themselves constitutionalists.
Pulled up in a Montana ranch out in Jordan to teach this version of constitutionalism, which the Constitution actually doesn't pertain to them if they do the sovereign citizen thing and file all these documents down to the county clerk, and then they're freed from paying taxes, and they're freed from having to
Uh, file court, you know, uh, documents, proper documents to the bank and that sort of thing.
These guys were harassing their neighbors and doing all kinds of really, uh, strange stuff.
Illegal stuff.
Extremely illegal stuff.
Really very little has changed in the constitutionalist ideology and philosophy in the 30 years that I've been covering them.
And, you know, We're still seeing, we're very much seeing the effects today with especially the constitutional sheriffs who are getting elected in these rural counties who claim to be following the constitution, but their version of the constitution is that the sheriff is the supreme law of the land out in these counties and he can negate federal laws if he wants to.
Well, it's amazing.
Their first impulse is to claim the American flag, and then they claim the Constitution.
And it's almost like by claiming those symbols, they then can do whatever they want because they've claimed the mantra or the shell of the real American, and then they can tell you what an American is.
And they're like, well, I have the flag.
I have the Constitution.
Who are you to tell me about anything?
It's an interesting kind of attempt at a sleight of hand.
One of the things that I took away from some of the early parts of the book is the use of Civil War language.
I think a lot of people listening have become accustomed to hearing folks, whether people who are at J6 or militia types, talk about Civil War.
I think we see that on social media now quite often.
But I'm wondering what the folks you cover in this book mean when they say civil war is here or that it's coming or that it's inevitable.
Innate to the sort of far-right ethos is this undercurrent of eliminationism.
You don't deal with your enemies through democratic means or democratic processes and overpower them with the ballot box and that sort of thing.
You defeat your enemy by eliminating them.
This has been really a constant.
In the radical right, at least since the 80s, believe me, there were Certainly undercurrents of eliminationism all through the Aryan nations, but also a lot of it through the early militias.
And then it became really acute when they adopted immigration as their primary focus.
And so in the first decade or two of this century, they've been spouting a lot of talk about eliminating immigrants and people who shouldn't be here.
And of course, this is very familiar to me.
One of my earliest journalistic projects back when I was still in newspapers was doing a project about Japanese Americans and how they wound up in internment camps and well, turned into a book as well.
And the striking thing about a lot of the research I did back from, you know, archival research and that sort of thing from between 1900 and 1924, there was this incredible burst of eliminationist rhetoric directed towards Japanese immigrants.
And interestingly enough, you know, they had this, it was the same sort of conspiracy theory that we hear now.
It was essentially replacement theory.
That the Japanese emperor was sending all these immigrants over to the West Coast not to be farmers, which they were just posing as farmers, and that they were secretly soldiers of the emperor who would, upon giving us the correct signal, engage in acts of sabotage to aid the invasion of the West Coast that the emperor planned.
There are whole books written about this.
And they were wildly popular.
And, you know, it was really widely believed.
So that when Pearl Harbor happened, all of the people who had done the warnings about the Japanese invasion were seen as prophets.
Oh, they predicted that this would happen.
It was like, oh no.
And that was why they rounded people up and sent them off to concentration camps.
Yeah, I had kind of a long experience with this, and I could see where it was going.
The first two decades of this century, they've been doing nothing but that, and now it's kind of reaching its pathiosis with Trump and Stephen Miller and his guys all talking about doing a mass deportation program on day one of the next Trump presidency.
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You know, as a Japanese-American, I know those histories really well, and I appreciate your work on that whole history.
And for me, when I hear Stephen Miller talking about these camps, I'm thinking you're priming the population to think of that as acceptable.
Like, as you said, you have these books in the 20s that are outlining why we should eliminate the Asian horde or the yellow peril.
And therefore, when Pearl Harbor happens, everybody's ready to go along with FDR and everyone else saying, yeah, put them in camp.
And we're there.
We're there.
Again, whether it's immigrants, whether it's trans people, whether it's members of the queer community, we're at a place where they're priming their constituencies for camps as something that is an acceptable outcome.
With all of that in mind, you know, you point out in the book the right-wing proclivity for concocting enemies.
We can think of, after the Civil War, the birth of a nation and the idea of the black rapists attacking white women.
We can think of the histories involved with someone like Emmett Till.
They're going back to the 20s and in addition to the xenophobia there was this fear of anarchists and communists and in addition to anti-semitism.
The KKK was vehemently anti-catholic.
Right.
We can talk about the 60s and the hippies.
We could talk about the 80s and welfare mothers.
We can talk about all of that.
Why do I bring all this up?
Well, the book for me was the best treatment I've seen of the genesis of Antifa as one of the next in line of this long lineage of right-wing bogeymen.
Can you give us just a little bit on how Antifa became the Fox News favorite as those trying to destroy America and everything that's left of it?
Well, sometimes I ask people to just stop and think for a minute.
When did you first hear of Antifa?
I mean, there's this great evil, ominous, existential threat to America.
When did you first hear of it?
Probably in late 2017.
You suddenly boom, and we've got this scene going on that's, ooh, it's these menacing guys in black clothes who are conspiring to destroy America.
They're left-wing anarchists and that sort of thing.
And the reality is that the whole boogeyman was originally a conspiracy theory surrounding Donald Trump's inauguration in January 2017.
There was a conspiracy theory being trundled around by Alex Jones and some of his cohorts.
And those folks were, you know, what they were saying was that they were going to try to stop, that the plan was to try to stop Trump from being able to take the oath of office.
This is why we saw the streets of D.C.
filled with bikers for Trump and all these guys from the far right walking around.
They built this whole massive conspiracy theory around it.
And then, of course, nothing happened, but that didn't matter.
What mattered was that they had gotten all these people activated and ready to bring their AR-15s out for Trump.
And as it happened, that November, they repeated the conspiracy theory of there was going to be this, I don't know if you remember, but there was this brief panic in the conspiracy theory world that, and it even got reported on Fox News, that there was going to be this attempt by Antifa to try to take over the White House.
And that they were also going to be spreading out to all these American cities and gunning down white people and beheading them, even.
So, they had these talk of maybe conspiracy theories, but by that November, also, the other thing that had happened, of course, was Charlottesville had happened by then.
And after Charlottesville, we really started seeing Fox News do a lot of reporting, picking Antifa as the real threat.
Interestingly, the stories never said, in comparison, white nationalists are not a threat at all.
No, but that was the implication, because they never The Fox News never did, actually, any stories about the growth of these white nationalist thugs on the far right, and these street gangs, these Proud Boys, and the violence that they were bringing to the street.
They created this whole mythology.
I mean, Fox News was really primarily responsible for it becoming something sort of an entrenched myth.
So by summer of 2020, when we started having all the George Floyd protests, suddenly it became a byword.
I mean, we had a lot of violence in the streets of Portland and elsewhere in San Francisco, and I covered a fair amount of this.
And the sort of reportage that we were getting from a lot of the mainstream outlets, particularly from Fox News and CNN and folks like that, Once again, depict Antifa as the progenitors of all this violence, but what I was seeing was these busloads of heavily—I mean, they weren't bringing guns, as far as I know.
But heavily armed, you know, guys carrying baseball bats and all doodered up with pads and helmets and that sort of thing, ready for combat, ready for street combat, busing them into Portland.
All these guys were just very eager for violence.
And so soon they'd hold a brief rally, you know, for about an hour and then go marching through the streets of Portland and inflict violence on the locals.
And, you know, the locals were like, yeah, screw you, buddy.
We're not going to put up with this.
And they fought back.
But the thing about it is that Antifa was always an entirely reactive force.
I mean, my experience with them, even before 2017, was always in the context of they were turning out to try to prevent activities by actual neo-Nazis.
That was my main experience with Antifa prior to Trump's inauguration.
And one of the things that I think you make evident in the book is there is very...
Very, very intentional recruiting and organization by the Proud Boys or by the Oath Keepers.
There's a sense of, come join our club, come join our movement, come join our masculinity brigade or whatever.
What you also make clear and you show through just endless amounts of receipts are Antifa really is a reactionary thing.
It's a, hey, there's Nazis in our city.
We should probably go down there and not let them just tear up our city.
We can talk about all the details of Antifa and their tactics, etc.
But I guess for me the takeaway is The real victory in those years, 2017, 1920, was really Fox News being able to say, hey, there's two sides in Portland.
One is, yeah, these hardworking American patriots who happen to be alt-right white nationalists, but also the really looming, menacing threat that will probably behead people, including your neighbor and take over the White House next week, and that's Antifa.
And that was the real victory of the media, was to make it as if this was just both sides equal.
And I think Portland became the epicenter of this.
I think the book for me was really helpful for re-assembling the timeline of what happened in Portland Because again, if Antifa is a bogeyman, I think West Coast cities are another bogeyman.
One of the concerted efforts has been to say, San Francisco, what a hell hole.
Portland, on fire all the time.
Seattle, can't even walk there.
And don't get me wrong, all those cities have issues.
But the goal has been to make them out to be these unlivable places that are just overrun by chaos and anarchy.
And I think the book really helps us see why they did that.
I want to focus in on the Proud Boys, because I think we've hit a stage where a lot of folks are coming to realize the election's around the corner, and we're kind of in for it.
You just do a wonderful job of showing us how after J6, The insurrectionists did not stop.
They might have taken a break.
They might have not been in full public view for a couple of months.
But here's the phrase you use that I just want to ask you about.
You say, after J6, the Proud Boys turned their focus hyper-local.
Right.
And that revealed the explicit alliances with Christian nationalists.
Sure.
I first noticed it or first became aware of it when I was looking at the messages, the text messages that Ethan Nordean was sending to his fellow Proud Boys, which came out shortly after he was arrested in February.
In the month after J6, he had been strategizing with all of his fellow Proud Boys.
He talked pretty explicitly about how let's pull our, you know, pull basically our claws back and go to the local and work with people locally because we're going to do better building ourselves from the ground up, getting more recruits, getting more sympathy, getting more, you know, network.
He would talk about networking with local causes.
And so really within those first few months, we started seeing Proud Boys turn out again.
You know, the Oath Keepers pretty much have vanished.
I think they're a dead letter with Stuart Rhodes being in prison.
But Proud Boys are still very much an ongoing party, even after J6, and it was because they did the strategy of spreading out, fanning out, and we started seeing them turn up at rallies for—we'd have these right-wing Christian nationalist preachers show up in Portland to do anti-abortion protests.
And in both Portland and Salem.
And they then, and Chernoff probably turned out to defend them, which meant inevitably there was going to be violence, and there was.
Because that's what they're about.
You know, these guys are about bringing violence, and that's their appeal.
People don't understand that their appeal is, hey, you get to do violence against leftists.
If you hang with us, you can go beat up some hippies with this.
And that was why these guys were all eager for violence when I'd see them get off the buses coming into Portland.
And of course, that was the function of the brown shirts and the black shirts in Germany and Italy back in the 20s and 30s, was to bring violence to the streets and to punch a bunch of leftists.
And that was very much the function these guys were serving.
So I was definitely seeing a lot of neo-fascism going on there.
Well, and they caught people off guard.
So, the street brawling was one, but I think they caught people off guard with their focus on schools.
Like, I don't think they expected to see those guys you just talked about at the school board meeting.
Right.
Standing next to Moms for Liberty.
And so, that was what they did after J-6, is that they started going to, you know, library Drag queen ratings, any kind of drag queen performances in small towns.
Anything that, well, basically anything that attracted the ire or activity of, you know, Christian nationalists seem to be attracting the likes of the Proud Boys.
They're collaborating in tandem with them.
And in Udessa, you know, if the Christian Nationalist preachers who organized these events was questioned about it, they'd say, oh, they're a friend.
Moms for Liberty, in particular, was noted for holding a lot of events with the Proud Boys, sort of in conjunction with them.
And yeah, that's where we started seeing these alliances form.
They also became very much aligned with the anti-vax movement.
But that's also, we saw the anti-vaxxers forming alliances with Christian nationalists as well.
They all spout really pretty much the same universe of conspiracy theories.
And I think that this conspiracist narrative is definitely going somewhere, and that destination is fascism.
I really just appreciated this kind of timeline and map you gave us, because I think after J6, A lot of people kept asking me, hey, are we going to have another J6?
And I think what they were expecting was, hey, are we going to have another big riot?
Or is it going to be North versus South, a la the Civil War?
And I think what we should have been looking for, or what folks should have been registering, is that every time you go to a school board meeting, and instead of it being a boring affair about policy and procedure, it's 88 people yelling the worst obscenities possible and telling school board members to go die in a ditch.
You know, half the people doing the yelling are guys in vests who look like they're bikers from out of town.
As you say in the book, that's little insurrections everywhere.
That's little fires everywhere.
That is little tears in the fabric of American society everywhere.
Sure.
And that was happening at hospitals, right?
Doctors getting intimidated.
Teachers getting intimidated.
Librarians getting intimidated.
And I just think, yeah.
And of course, none of these people are prepared for this.
I mean, think about it, Bradley.
All my life, the people who...
Ran for school board and occupied school board positions and library board positions and health board positions and stuff like this.
We're fairly quiet, timid, slightly wonky people who, you know, like things to just, everybody to just get along, you know, sort of thing.
None of the bellicose stridency at all.
That's like, that's like kryptonite too, right?
So the effect of all out of this is that it's actually driving people out of public service, public office.
public-facing organizations where they normally would be contributing to the larger welfare of society, but instead they're being driven away.
And that's really one of the sort of very corrosive effects of this brand of extremist politics.
It's a slow drip.
And I think January 6th is this explosion.
But the word corrosive is perfect because government is boring.
School board work is often very tedious.
To be somebody who is a librarian is not to think I'm going into a career full of conflict and rage.
Public square offs.
I'm a librarian who cares about people having access to knowledge and books and a quiet place to reflect on those things.
And all of a sudden, you have to make a choice.
Do I want to do that profession?
Do I want to take on that role?
And face down, people emailing me every day and telling me and my kids to go die somewhere?
Yeah, no, it's also affecting school teacher workers, just a whole broad bandwidth of people who are being targeted by these guys.
So yeah, it's clearly the strategy is to hollow out democracy from the bottom up so that when they do have another sort of authoritarian push at the top, they'll be able to shove the whole interface over.
I think that's the larger strategy.
Reading your book brought me back to a bunch of summers that I think, when we are down the road somewhere, we'll reflect on, in the ways that people reflected on the summers of, say, like 1968, 1969, 1972.
Right.
The summers of 2017, the summer of 2020, they're all kind of a blur in my mind.
Here's my question.
What does the summer of 2024 hold for us?
Well, I think, actually, being in election year and everybody's conscious of, you know, You know, the public PR effects of violence, the negative PR effects of violence.
That tends to suppress a lot of right-wing extremists, especially if they see a chance to take power, which, so they're going to be very determined not to try to trip Trump up by setting off a bomb in Oklahoma City or something.
But I think 2024 to 2025 is going to be very worrisome to me.
And really post-election, after the election, this year as well.
I think no matter what the outcome, I think there's X level of violence sort of wired into the scenario.
Mainly because we've got all these guys, you know, they've been talking, I remember the guy back in In 2021, showing up at a Charlie Kirk event in Nampa, Idaho, saying, when do we get to use the guns?
When do we get to start shooting these people?
And I got to tell you that that's not an uncommon sentiment among the people on the radical right.
If you hang out, I mean you go hang out in their telegram rooms and things like that.
You know how they talk among themselves.
They can't hardly freaking wait to start shooting liberals and black people and Mexicans and anybody who doesn't fit their agenda.
Obviously people of color are going to be the earliest targets and And especially Latino immigrants.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot directed at them, as well as Muslim immigrants.
I think if Trump wins, they're going to feel empowered.
And they're going to be, I mean, Trump himself will be unleashing a fair amount of violence against people, especially if he does go through with this mass deportation program, because that always entails violence, no matter what you do.
But I think he's also gonna have hold of citizen militia support as it were for these.
They're gonna be engaged in rounding people up, which once again means more violence as well.
So I think that if he wins, that there's going to be significant level of violence, not to mention probably the destruction of democracy itself in the United States, at least for the short term.
If he loses, if he loses, they're just going to go freaking nuts.
If he loses, they are going to go insane.
I mean, they're already so certain he's going to win, for one thing, that they won't ever accept.
I mean, no matter how, even if there's this massive blue tide and people turn out in huge numbers to stand up for democracy, which is what I'm hoping for, frankly.
I think that they will want to accept that outcome.
And so then we'll start seeing various kinds of domestic terrorism.
We'll see bombs going off.
We'll see mass shootings.
We'll see possibly, you know, militias bringing into action, attempting more insurrections, possibly on state level or local levels.
My focus is, of course, on Christian nationalism, and I think we overlap in terms of our foci, but your focus has been for so many decades on the alt-right, on the white nationalists, on the white supremacists.
And I think reading your book, it brought me back, honestly, to summers that I had Consciously not been thinking of, because they were just so turbulent and difficult.
But it also gave me a vision for the first time, I think, clearly in my own mind, where I admitted, if he loses, we're going to see people just say, I've had enough.
This is the country I'm destined for, and I'm going to do what you just said.
I'm going to take matters into my own hands, whether that's domestic terrorism, whether that's trying to take over the streets of Portland or whatever.
But if he wins the mandate for fascist policing in our streets by citizens, the mandate to accost and attack and verbally abuse and menace people, As they try to just do their jobs or walk down the street or go to school is going to be even worse exponentially, I think, than it was when he won the first time.
That the climate of the country is going to change dramatically.
Is that a fair kind of idea?
Yeah.
I think that people underestimate the extent to which their There are literally millions of people out there with AR-15s and huge caches of ammunition in their basement.
But what I do know is that one of the realities about guns is that they're so empowering.
And they're so inviting, they invite their use.
And people who own an AR-15, you can't actually use it for much.
You can't go hunting with it, because the rounds, these high-velocity rounds that they have in them destroy the meat, right?
So it renders whatever you've hunted just utterly useless.
What I'm saying, I mean, the only reason to have an AR-15 is to shoot people.
And in large numbers.
They're very good at that.
That's what they're designed for.
So I think that there's going to be a lot of people who have these guns.
And they're going to hear them call their names.
And especially because so much of the appeal of radical extremism is that they appeal to people's desire to be heroic.
I mean, I've never met a right-wing extremist who didn't see themselves as basically heroic.
Certainly no right-wing domestic terrorists I've written about.
I mean, that's part of the profile of a right-wing domestic terrorist, is they see themselves as saving the country.
Thanks for listening today, y'all.
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