#169 — Omens of a Race War
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Summary
In this episode of The Making Sense Podcast, host Sam Harris talks about his new podcast, Waking Up, and his new book, "The Madness of Crowds," by Douglas Murray. He also talks about a new conversation track I'm starting with teachers and experts on meditation and the nature of mind and living an examined life, and offers some cautionary tales about cults and cult leaders, including Andrew Cohen, the former cult leader who, as it turns out, was a fraud. And, of course, he talks about the new Waking up course he's running at the University of St. Thomas Aquinas, where he teaches a course on mindfulness and meditation. Sam also discusses the new app he's working on for the podcast, the new Android update, and the new book Douglas Murray has written. And, as always, he gives us his thoughts on what he's been up to, and why he should write a book about it. If you like what you hear, please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming one of our many sponsors. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, and therefore you'll know the difference in the podcast is made possible by the support we're doing here, and that you'll be making a difference in your podcast. Thanks to our sponsors, we don t run ads, and they help make the podcast possible! and they will help us keep making the podcast a better place to reach more listeners, and help us make a difference in the world better listening to the things we all need to listen to the podcast. Please consider supporting the podcast by becoming a better listening Thank you, and you'll help us improve the podcast! Sam Harris, and we'll know that you're listening to a better podcast, and it's better listening, and more people listening to us all day, not less of us listening, so we can all have a better day, and a better time listening to our podcast, more of a day, better listening and more of our podcasting experience, and less of the things that matters more of what we know better, and so much more of us will be better listening so they'll have a more of that, and better of a good time listening, we'll be better of it, thanks to you, too, you'll get a better sense of what they'll know more of it. And it's coming.
Transcript
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Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber
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feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation.
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In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at
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There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with
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We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support
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So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
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I've added a conversation track to the Waking Up course, and so I've started to interview
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teachers there and other experts on topics related to meditation and the nature of mind
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and living an examined life, and that's just starting.
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Generally speaking, these will be teachers and experts I admire and agree with, but also
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people who have genuine insights but may also believe a lot of cockamamie ideas that
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And there will also be some cautionary tales, and I've just added one of those, the former
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cult leader, Andrew Cohen, who, as I meant clear, I don't think is merely a fraud, though he clearly
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I think he's a person who had some real insights and created a lot of harm.
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Anyway, I found that a very interesting conversation.
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I think there's a lot to learn from his experience, both as a student and as a teacher, and that kind
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of thing that's more narrowly focused on the contemplative life and ethics, and certainly
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meditation will be on the app rather than the podcast these days.
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Also, there's a new Android build coming, and it will be entirely new.
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I've been hearing about all the technical pain Android users have been experiencing.
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Anyway, a comprehensive fix is in the works, and I will let you know when that launches.
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My friend Douglas Murray has a new book out called The Madness of Crowds, and this is a
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I was thinking at one point that I should write a book along these lines.
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He has done a much better job than I would have.
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This is really the rejoinder to the wokeness that we've all been waiting for, and it is quite
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Douglass, as you know, has a lacerating wit, so there are many laughs to be had at the expense
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of the far left, but this is not a shrill or tendentious book at all.
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This really is just a sanity check, and I found it a joy to read.
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I'll read you my blurb, just to give you a sense of how much I like this book.
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We live at a time when many of the luckiest people on earth declare themselves among the
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most oppressed, while seeking to oppress others in the service of a paradoxical new faith,
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and no one is so beloved or immaculate that he or she can't be dragged before the altars
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of this cult and offered up as a fresh sacrifice.
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In The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray shows how the apparent virtues of social justice,
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intersectionality, and identity politics have begun to stifle honest thinking on nearly every
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In the process, he displays more courage and wit and basic decency than can be found anywhere
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Reading it to the end, I felt as though I'd just drawn my first full breath in years.
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At a moment of collective madness, there is nothing more refreshing, or indeed provocative,
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So, I love the book, and I recommend you buy it.
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It would be great to see this book really succeed.
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This was a necessary book, and Douglas was certainly the right man for the job.
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If you're supporting the podcast, please make sure you are listening on the private
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feed, not on the public one, and that means you should go to my website, log in, go to
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the subscriber content page, and subscribe to the private RSS feed.
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If you're on mobile, you can generally do that with one click, which will connect to your favorite
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podcast app, but we're making some changes here on the podcast, and I don't want subscribers
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So, please make sure you are subscribed if you're a supporter, and you'll know the difference
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in your podcast player by seeing a red icon for the Making Sense podcast, as opposed to a black one.
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Anyway, if you have problems, you can contact support at samharris.org, and they will help
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And one change that's coming, and it's coming now, is I will start adding an afterword
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to each podcast interview, where I talk a little bit about the conversation you just heard.
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Sometimes I will have left everything on the field, but if I have any further thoughts,
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I will put them after the conversation and not up front in the housekeeping.
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Kathleen is a historian and the author of the book Bring the War Home, The White Power Movement
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and Paramilitary America, and she spent 10 years researching and writing this book.
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She's currently an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, and you
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may have heard her on Fresh Air, as I did, and she's appeared on CBS News and elsewhere,
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and there was a PBS Frontline documentary based on her work titled Documenting Hate, New American
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Anyway, we cover a lot of ground in this episode.
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We talk about the white power movement in the United States, the difference between white
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power and white supremacy and white nationalism and white separatism and the militia movement.
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We talk about the Turner Diaries, the significance of events like Ruby Ridge and Waco, the Christian
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identity movement, the significance of so-called leaderless resistance, the failures of the justice
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system in prosecuting white power crimes, and other topics.
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And now, without further delay, I bring you Kathleen Ballou.
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So, our job today is to talk about white power and white supremacy and white nationalism and white
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And you've written a book titled, Bring the War Home, the White Power Movement and Paramilitary
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And so, obviously, these topics are more and more in the news as we live yet another year
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Just to get our bearings here, how do you come to know anything about this stuff?
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And maybe to start, how would you differentiate the terms I just listed?
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These terms are distinct, and it's important to understand that they describe a whole range
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of beliefs, ideologies, and ways that people move through the world.
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Now, that covers everything from individual belief systems to the different kinds of systems
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and opportunities that structure daily life in our country.
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Many scholars have established that America is what we might think of as a white supremacist
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And by that, I mean simply that there is an unequal distribution of resources, opportunities,
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And we could look at incarceration, education, health, all kinds of different metrics we can
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Now, that is historical in that it's something that was established over time.
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And we see vestiges of white supremacy in law and policy.
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And it's also individual in terms of belief system from person to person.
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Now, all of that big white supremacy is much more amorphous and distinct from what I write
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And I suppose I should just say, I use activists not in any kind of positive terminology, but
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simply to describe someone who is taking action to bring about a social and political change.
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And the people that I write about are members of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi groups, skinheads,
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Some are radical tax protesters, and some are other kind of stripes of anti-state belief.
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These groups came together in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and set out to wage war on
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So what I write about is the period from the end of the Vietnam War to the Oklahoma City
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bombing that really set the stage for the politics we find ourselves confronting in
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So I want to talk about the origins of all this, but hopefully we will have something to
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say about the nature of what's happening in the present.
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So let's talk about, well, first, you just made a few distinctions that we should clarify.
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So you mentioned a bunch of these groups, neo-Nazis, the KKK, the groups that people have heard
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These groups are not all identical ideologically.
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Are they, I mean, how do you, how do you parse this landscape?
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And is there now a formal connection between all of these miscreants?
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And do they help one another even if they don't totally agree?
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So this is something that the scholarship missed for quite a long time, partly through using
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an overly rigid idea of what a social movement should be and should look like.
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Many social movements in the late 20th century are fragmented in the way I'm about to describe
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The other thing that people do, and I think this is a very natural sort of human approach
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to a belief system that you find foreign or objectionable, is to try to sort it into categories.
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So there's a lot of early scholarship that's sort of trying to figure out, okay, how many
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of these people are Nazis, how many are skinheads, how many are Klansmen, and which symbols exactly
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should be used by which group, and exactly what variety of ideology do you find in each
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And certainly there are differences between some of these groups.
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But what I do as a historian is try to understand how this movement worked for people who were members
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And what you see on the ground is not strict divisions between these groups.
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What you see actually is a very vibrant circulation of people from group to group and between ideologies.
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And the way people in this movement describe their own activism is very similar.
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So one person said something along the lines of, suppose we're all Christian.
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It's like I'm Church of Christ and that guy over there is Baptist, right?
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Others describe it as they're all in the armed forces, but they're simply in the Army and
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So it's important to have a mode of understanding that allows us to see not only the distinctions,
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but also the commonality and the fact that people moved at great frequency between these
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But are they all white supremacists or are they, and are they all white separatists?
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Do they all, I mean, I guess the one that stands out immediately to me, I know very little about
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them, but like the sovereign citizens, are they even racists?
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Well, the first thing I would say is we probably want to get away from thinking about nutcase
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and miscreant and words like that as early as possible, because even though the people
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who are in this movement have ideas that you or I might not agree with, they're acting with
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a pretty coherent worldview and set of beliefs that makes what they're doing legible.
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I guess I've seen too many of them on daytime television throwing chairs at Geraldo Rivera
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Yeah, for a little while in the moment I studied, they were really doing a lot of those talk
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And certainly there are people within this movement who I think we could all agree are
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motivated by various kinds of mental disturbances, as well as political ideology.
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There's one man I write about testified in front of court that he could levitate and speak
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to God and things like this, but he was a leader in the movement.
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Anyhow, the militia movement is a little bit more difficult to grapple with than the earlier
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period that is really at the heart of my study.
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And what I'm talking about is at the end of the 1980s, there's this big movement of white
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But the militia movement is bigger than white power.
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And not all of the militia movement should be classified as white power.
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What it is, is that the white power momentum, which is substantial at the end of the 1980s
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and includes a major sort of upsurge of network organizing, groups, weapons, and money, all
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So what I'm kind of writing against is the idea that the white power movement simply disappears
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at the end of the 1980s, which many people had thought.
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Instead, it ends up within the militia movement.
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First of all, there are groups of militia men and individuals in the movement that are
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not acting out of the same kind of overt racial animus that is what we're dealing with in
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And some of the sovereign citizen's activity might be classified in that way.
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However, there are also a lot of cases where that kind of race, racial, what would we call
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it, race neutrality, is actually simply a veneer to make white power activism more acceptable.
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And that's an old strategy that goes, you know, way back at least to the Vietnam War, if not
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So I think we have to be very cautious with the militia movement.
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But certainly it is an area that deserves more study.
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Right. And if I recall, this is what made understanding Timothy McVeigh and Ruby Ridge and those
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incidents that we'll talk about a little confusing because it was entangled with this larger militia
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movement. I think Timothy McVeigh was associated with the Michigan militia at one point, and
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it just wasn't clear what was what and what the ideology actually was.
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Exactly. And McVeigh, as we can talk about, is a pretty clear case of white power activism,
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but many cases are less clear than that, especially in the militia years.
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Let me circle back before we move on to another part of your question that I think is a really
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good one, which is how we think about those other terms, white nationalism and white separatism.
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So white, these are often muddled terms. And I'll just start by saying that white nationalism
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is the idea that there is something inherently racially known and held in the category of
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the nation. So the idea that whiteness is an inherent part of what makes the United States
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what it is, and that the admission of other cultures will inherently disturb or weaken the
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nation over time. And in terms of the study of extremist groups, the best example of white
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nationalism, I would, I would argue the one I use for teaching is the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.
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Now that's a very familiar example, probably to a lot of your listeners. That's the one most people
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study in high school. It's also huge. It was 4 million people. It was 10% of the state of Indiana.
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And very famously, this is where you get the pictures of the Klansmen wearing white robes and
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hoods and marching on the National Mall in Washington, DC, but with their faces uncovered because it was
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socially acceptable. Now, what that plan was about was state participation. And we know this because
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a ton of them got elected to office. They were about state participation. Their slogans were things
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like 100% American, America for Americans, things like this. They were profoundly anti-Black and
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anti-Semitic, but they were also anti-immigrant and had a lot of other interests. Okay. So that is
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white nationalism. That's not what we're talking about from 1983 forward for people on the fringe,
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because from 1983 forward, there's a huge pivot in this movement, partly fueled by the sense of
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betrayal felt in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, in which the white power movement is instead
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setting out to overthrow the federal government, to create race war, and eventually to found a
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white nation. So white separatism is better for what we're talking about. But even separatism
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is sort of a few steps short of the ideology that's really the most popular and biggest animating push
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in this movement, which is not only separatism. I mean, they do pursue separatism, meaning the
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demarcation of a white homeland within the United States. But the end game is not separatism. The end
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game is overthrow of the United States and the creation of an all white polity that eventually
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they envision might take over the world. Right. So they do go that far. They have a kind of
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fourth Reich, let's complete Hitler's project kind of ideology. They do. And the best place to sort of
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see and understand it is in a dystopian novel that becomes a sort of lodestar for the movement called
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Turner Diaries, which really lays this out as an imaginative path forward. I mean, one thing that's
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really interesting about this movement from a scholarly perspective is how they think they can
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possibly do it. Because it's a tiny group of people, right? It's a fringe movement. And they are setting
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out to do what they say in this novel is like, it's something like a gnat assassinating an elephant.
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They want to overthrow the most militarized super state in the history of the world.
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So the Turner Diaries is so important, not because of its, you know, writerly qualities,
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but because it really lays out how they could hope to achieve something that radical.
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Right. Yeah. So, and as you point out in your book, not only does this movement get naturally
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seeded by disaffected soldiers coming back from wars, not just, I mean, the most relevant one here
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is, or the most proximate one is the Vietnam War. But you point out that in the aftermath of basically
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every war we fought, this has been a phenomenon where some number of soldiers, albeit a tiny percentage,
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take their grievances against the state, the U.S. government, and direct them back home. And I mean,
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hence the title of your book, Bring the War Home. Can you say something about that? And then we can
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just talk about how the origins here and just how many people are involved?
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Absolutely. So this is actually how I got into this project. I wanted to do, when I was set up to
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write a dissertation, I wanted to study the long legacies of racial violence in the United States.
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We are uniquely without a sort of shared public process around reckoning with the long violence
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that has characterized the nation. And at that time, the only sort of thing like that, that had
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happened was a totally non-governmental truth and reconciliation commission in Greensboro, North
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Carolina. This happened in 2005 around an event that had happened in 1979, in which a united caravan
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of Klansmen and neo-Nazis opened fire on a leftist anti-Klan march and killed five people, wounded several
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more. And the thing that the perpetrators and the people aligned with these ideologies said in the
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TRC proceedings was, I killed communists in Vietnam, so why wouldn't I kill them here?
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Now, I couldn't stop thinking about this. This is a profound collapse of time and space and people.
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It mixes up home and battlefront. It mixes up wartime and peacetime. It collapses everybody
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communist into the same kind of racial and subjugated category of death. This is enormously
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meaningful. And what I wondered is if this is going to be a story about sort of, you know,
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a Rambo story of veterans returning home and creating violence at home. It turns out that it's really not
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that simple at all and that this isn't a problem of veterans. What we see indeed is that there is a
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surge in this kind of vigilante violence after every major return from combat. But it turns out that that
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effect actually goes across age groups, across gender, across categories of people who do and don't
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serve in warfare. All of us become more violent in the aftermath of war. Now, that raises a whole lot
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of questions. You could go to sort of a Max Weber kind of analysis about the monopoly of violence and
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whether the state's role in creating warfare creates this aftermath. We can go to individuals
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bringing the war back with them. I tend to think it's a combination of a whole lot of different
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complex factors. But what we know for sure is that we see this reverberation effect in the aftermath
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of violence and that this tiny, tiny percentage of returning veterans brings back with them things
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like munitions expertise that are then used to escalate the body count of white power violence.
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The war also creates a paramilitary culture in the 1980s in the United States. You know, people that I
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write about with these fringe beliefs are hardly the only people who think that that war is the major
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cultural event of their lifetime. You can just look at the outsurge of movies and camo fatigue, you know,
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clothes and paintball ranges and all kinds of other things like that. So they're also capitalizing on this
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Yeah. And also you get the increased militarization of police forces and then the response to that, I mean,
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that the right-wing outrage over the apparent misapplication of state force. So the two events
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that you write about that were so galvanizing to this movement were Ruby Ridge and Waco, where you have,
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you know, essentially military snipers and in the case of Waco, a ton of military hardware intruding
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upon the lives of somewhat deranged but as yet nonviolent people and essentially escalating these
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situations into kind of mass murders, if you view it from the side of those who view the, you know,
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the Branch Davidians and the people at Ruby Ridge as pure victims. Maybe that's a good place to start.
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I mean, how did, what happened with Ruby Ridge and Waco and what did that do to the white power
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movement? Sure. And we should think of Ruby Ridge and Waco as related, but sort of different kinds
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of events. And the other thing I want to just interject before we start on that story is that
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the kinds of paramilitary policing that came into public view and public sort of became objects of
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public discussion because of Ruby Ridge and Waco, that kind of policing had already been used on a
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lot of civilians in the United States because counterinsurgency warfare was also developed sort
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of through experimental methods in communities of color and then in Vietnam before it was used in
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this way. So what's new about Waco and Ruby Ridge is mostly that it's televised and that people are
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focusing on it in the way that they do. And that's partly because the people at the receiving end of
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this violence are white. So what happens in Ruby Ridge is that there's a, well, so Ruby Ridge is a
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case of a white power activist, Randy Weaver, and his family had moved to the area to become
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survivalists. They built a rough cabin. They followed Christian identity practice, which is a white power
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theology. Randy Weaver ran for sheriff on a white power platform and they had visited Aryan nation
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several times or at least twice or something of that kind. At one of these Aryan nations meetings,
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a government informant tried to get Randy Weaver to also become a government informant by selling him
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a illegal weapon that had been modified to be, I think, a quarter of an inch short. It's hard not to
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sympathize with the idea that Randy Weaver and people who, people of all political stripes actually,
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can look at this case and sort of think this was dirty dealing on the part of the government.
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I mean, yes, I, I'm not a legal scholar, but entrapment is certainly the word that came to
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mind the first time I read this case. A lot of other things happened by way of miscommunication,
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including giving him the wrong court date and then responding when he didn't show up to the court date,
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although he had also decided not to go. So there's a whole bunch of sort of bad faith effort
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around this. And then government snipers encircle his cabin to try to demand that he come to court.
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But the Weaver family, all of them, including the children are highly armed. And this turns into a
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multi-day standoff with several people killed in the course of events, including Vicki Weaver killed
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as she's holding her infant daughter in her arms inside of the cabin. And for reasons we can talk about
00:26:51.840
her death is among the people lost. Her death is sort of singularly important to this movement
00:26:58.100
for a number of symbolic reasons. The thing that I find most interesting about this is that Ruby Ridge
00:27:05.580
is kind of the moment where we can see that the white power movements paramilitarization. And by that,
00:27:11.580
I just mean the way that it's becoming more and more like an army. It's using military grade weapons
00:27:17.160
and uniforms. At this point, Klansmen have largely abandoned the white robes and hoods and started
00:27:23.240
using camo fatigues. Instead, they're using things of his kind. We see that paramilitarization
00:27:30.100
colliding with a concurrent paramilitarization of policing. So there's a picture that I found in the
00:27:39.360
archive where a group of five skinheads was on their way up to the mountaintop during the siege with
00:27:45.400
the intention of resupplying the lever for me with more guns and ammo. And they're caught. They're
00:27:50.880
detained and arrested by the ATF, which is alcohol, tobacco, and firearms. And there's a photograph
00:27:56.340
of an ATF officer arresting one of the skinheads down on the floor with his knee on the back.
00:28:03.420
And in the photograph, they're wearing the same uniforms. They're indistinguishable from each other,
00:28:08.420
except that one of them has an ATF jacket. And it's really something that two completely different
00:28:15.400
elements of society, one being supposedly a neutral arbiter of kind of state law and the other being
00:28:21.780
an anti-state movement, could come to be outfitted in such a similar way. So all of that gets really
00:28:29.340
cooked into a frenzy by Waco, which is not a white power event per se. The Branch Davidians who are
00:28:37.680
surrounded and put under siege at Waco are actually a multiracial compound, but they are kind of an
00:28:45.180
apocalyptic group of, I guess we could say, fellow travelers with the white power movement.
00:28:51.060
And certainly the white power movement understands it as a white power event. And in fact, in some of
00:28:56.700
the magazines within the white power movement, they show only the photographs of Waco victims who are
00:29:03.560
white victims. They omit the other people. So it's sort of put forward in that way.
00:29:09.520
And Timothy McVeigh was actually standing there. I mean, this was like a month-long FBI, ATF,
00:29:18.200
And many people traveled, among them Timothy McVeigh, to kind of bear witness to this
00:29:23.160
atrocity in the making with the kind of misapplication of state power, whether or not
00:29:31.800
Yes. And unlike Ruby Ridge, which is very remote and on the top of a mountain, and most of the
00:29:38.340
images coming out were satellite images, Waco was on the Texas prairie. So the cameras could
00:29:44.120
watch everything that happened, including when federal armored vehicles rolled in and set fire
00:29:49.860
to the compound, or the compound somehow caught fire. This is still a matter of some argument.
00:29:55.040
But the siege, the Waco siege, became a sort of meeting point for people in the white power
00:30:01.160
movement. Louis Beam, who is one of the key leaders of this movement, came out to the siege and asked
00:30:07.880
questions of many of the law enforcement officers, tried to get press credentials. Timothy McVeigh
00:30:12.500
made the trip. McVeigh was not there when the fire happened at the end, although there are reports of him
00:30:20.020
watching it on television with tears running down his face. And significantly, when we're
00:30:25.020
thinking about these long aftermaths of warfare, the armored vehicles used to end the Waco siege
00:30:30.520
were very, very similar to the one that he manned, that McVeigh manned in the Gulf War in the Big Red
00:30:39.280
Just to close the loop on Christianity here, so the Branch Davidians weren't Christian identitarians in
00:30:46.300
quite the same way as some of these other groups are, but there is a kind of apocalyptic Christianity
00:30:53.400
organizing some of this movement, right? And if I recall from your book, the end of the Cold War
00:31:00.420
seemed to signal to the people who have this cast of thinking that we were kind of entering the end
00:31:07.720
times, and this was the moment where, you know, the white supremacist Christian ethno-state needed to be built.
00:31:14.700
So Christian identity, for listeners who might not have heard about this before, is a political
00:31:20.240
theology that holds that white people are the true lost tribe of Israel, and that everyone else are
00:31:28.040
racial enemies. Everyone else, people of color, Jewish people, anyone who is not white and part of this
00:31:33.020
tribe, this faith holds have descended from either beasts or Satan, depending on where you are in which
00:31:40.700
strand of the theology. And I'm simplifying a little bit for expediency, but I think this is a fairer
00:31:46.480
depiction. The interesting thing about Christian identity, in terms of how it operationalizes this
00:31:53.060
movement, is that unlike evangelical churches, which are also gaining huge memberships in the 1980s,
00:32:00.560
which are also becoming very politicized and very focused on the apocalypse, unlike the evangelicals,
00:32:06.840
Christian identity has no rapture. There is no promise that the faithful will be spared this
00:32:15.100
hideous battle at the end of the world. Instead, the faithful are supposed to survive the battle,
00:32:20.200
so they become survivalists, and they are tasked with clearing the world of enemies, which again is
00:32:26.320
all non-white people and Jews, and so clearing the world of enemies so that Christ can return.
00:32:33.060
So what Christian identity does for the people in this movement who believe in it,
00:32:36.840
is to transfigure this whole thing into a holy war. Now, this thing about the apocalypse, though,
00:32:42.420
is way bigger than the white power movement. And I think that the end of the Cold War is significant.
00:32:49.420
This is kind of the direction that my next book might be going. The end of the Cold War is significant
00:32:53.760
in this way, not only for people on the fringe or for evangelicals, but for a whole lot of people in
00:32:58.760
the United States. Because if you think about Cold War America, people had really come to
00:33:04.120
live with the idea of the imminent end of the world or the imminent threat of life presented
00:33:10.380
by nuclear warfare. We can think about those duck and tuck cover drills and the videos and
00:33:15.180
all of the different ways that people were sort of primed in civil society to think about how that
00:33:20.380
could kind of happen at any time. And then that layered on top of this religious belief, which again
00:33:25.840
ranges from evangelical churches all the way to the Christian identity fringe.
00:33:30.700
So what happens in 1989 is super interesting because the enemy disappears, the Soviet enemy
00:33:36.480
disappears with the end of the Cold War, but the belief doesn't disappear. So there's this whole
00:33:41.640
group of people who suddenly have this intense belief in the imminent apocalypse, but it's a hole in the
00:33:51.460
story. So for people in the white power movement, a lot of people simply replace the state into that
00:33:58.040
kind of missing enemy slot. My sense is that in the 90s, this is kind of a crisis of narrative for a lot
00:34:07.540
So in the aftermath of Waco, we have Timothy McVeigh, you know, highly motivated, it would seem, to
00:34:15.820
take the war home. And at that point, just prior to the Oklahoma City bombing, do you have a sense of how
00:34:27.600
Yes. So this is a tricky thing to count. And I'm going to explain my best estimate, and then I'm
00:34:35.720
going to tell you some of the problems with it. Historians and sociologists have kind of thought
00:34:41.560
about this in concentric circles, which is to say that, as I was saying earlier, social movements have
00:34:48.340
kind of varying levels of degree of participation, if you will. So you can think about concentric circles
00:34:55.680
like a bullseye, and in the middle are only about 25,000 people. Now, those are the people who live and
00:35:02.660
breathe the movement. They marry other people in the movement, they get rides to the airport from other
00:35:07.720
people in the movement, they go to all the rallies, they organize their lives around this, they move to the
00:35:12.500
Northwest. Sometimes, for movement reasons, they have children and homeschool them in a way prescribed
00:35:18.080
by the movement. Okay. Outside of that, there's another ring of people that's around 150 to 175,000
00:35:24.560
people. Those people do public facing stuff, like attend rallies, subscribe to literature, regularly read
00:35:31.060
the newspapers. Outside of that is another 450,000 people. And those people don't themselves contribute
00:35:38.280
money or time, but they do regularly read the literature. So what we can imagine is that there
00:35:44.020
is another more diffused group of people outside of that who would not read something that says, you
00:35:48.920
know, official newspaper at the Knights of KKK, but who might agree with many of the ideas that are
00:35:54.060
presented in it. So what we have to think about is the way that this kind of model of organizing both
00:36:00.280
moves ideas from that hardcore center out into the mainstream, and pulls in recruitable people
00:36:06.620
towards the middle. Okay, now, now that I've said that, that's our best estimate. One other thing is
00:36:13.420
at play, which some sociologists discovered, which is that after 1983, this movement is using a strategy
00:36:21.120
called leaderless resistance. Now, this is actually very, very similar to how we now understand cell-style
00:36:27.620
terror. And I think a lot of people will think it's familiar because of all the things we've learned
00:36:32.520
after 9-11. Leaderless resistance simply holds that people can agree on a common set of targets
00:36:39.460
and objectives, and then work together to achieve them through violence, but without communication
00:36:44.260
with other selves or with central leadership. And leaderless resistance in the white power movement
00:36:49.820
came about mostly because they were so frustrated with FBI infiltration in the, in the civil rights era,
00:36:56.480
and because they thought it would make it more difficult to prosecute them in court. And it did
00:37:02.380
make both of those operations more difficult. But the bigger legacy of leaderless resistance has been
00:37:07.500
that we lost our entire conception of this as a social movement. And I can talk more about that in a
00:37:14.240
minute. But what this means for numbers is that after 1983, this movement is no longer interested
00:37:22.180
in trying to get, you know, 10,000 people to march down Main Street. This movement is interested in
00:37:27.680
trying to get 12 people who are willing to rob a bank or set off a bomb. So what we have to remember
00:37:33.140
is that after 1983, decreasing numbers actually doesn't mean decreasing violence or activity.
00:37:40.400
So you've sketched a picture of something like, you know, 700,000 people who are in these,
00:37:47.060
these central rings of the, of the movement and, you know, you know, 25,000 of whom are actually,
00:37:53.280
you know, soldiers or consider themselves soldiers. Do you have a sense of, you know,
00:37:58.300
that outer ring of, of sympathizers? I mean, maybe there's a ring beyond that. I'm just trying to
00:38:04.100
imagine how many people in the U.S. when they saw Oklahoma City thought, yeah, that's, that was probably
00:38:12.140
a good idea. You know, that had to happen. I understand what McVeigh was up to there. How
00:38:17.240
many people would you think were, were untroubled by the preschool kids who were killed there? I mean,
00:38:24.820
I just, because there's a picture, I just want to know what we're talking about when we're talking
00:38:28.200
about, you know, murderous white supremacy and its sympathizers. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a
00:38:34.700
really interesting question, especially because, you know, none of these answers are ever simple,
00:38:42.540
even for people in the movement. There's a lot of argument in the movement about the efficacy of
00:38:47.640
Oklahoma City because of the children. That's a really hard pill for people in the movement to
00:38:52.740
swallow because white children are so central to what they think they're doing. Maybe that's a
00:38:59.500
confounding variable. Maybe, maybe it's just, we need a different example, but, so let's just focus
00:39:05.060
on, on Oklahoma City for a moment. We can summarize what, what Oklahoma City was briefly. I mean, people
00:39:11.680
will be fairly familiar with it, but I guess a few things to point out. One is that it was not totally
00:39:18.520
clear that McVeigh was a white supremacist, or at least it was not as, as clear as it might have been.
00:39:25.660
He's not, he doesn't have, he doesn't have a swastika tattooed on his arms that I recall, and he didn't
00:39:32.920
claim to be part of a white power movement, right? I think he even claimed to have just acted on his
00:39:39.560
own, and you are now saying that this is part of the plan to actually hide the fact that you, you had
00:39:46.720
confederates, and I think many people think he had, you know, several confederates who went
00:39:51.220
unprosecuted and undiscovered, and there was very little will to, to go digging further there. And
00:39:58.320
then there was a fair amount of conspiracy thinking around that. I remember Gore Vidal wrote pieces in,
00:40:05.540
at least one piece in Vanity Fair. And so just, I guess, give, give me your, your take on Oklahoma City
00:40:12.360
and, and, and what it meant and what it did to the movement.
00:40:15.760
Sure. So before we do Oklahoma City, I want to give you one more piece of information about kind
00:40:21.960
of the relative size and importance of the movement. And that is simply a comparative example
00:40:27.660
when we think about fringe movements in the United States and what is, and isn't important to study.
00:40:33.220
So the John Birch Society is much more studied and much more understood than the movement that we're
00:40:40.240
talking about today. The John Birch Society, as some of you may know, is a anti-communist kind
00:40:46.860
of Cold War era extremist group that sometimes borders on violence and that had a lot of political
00:40:53.740
attention paid to it for a minute there. John Birch is usually covering textbooks as an example of
00:41:00.020
extremism. The John Birch Society had about a hundred thousand people at its peak.
00:41:05.140
Right. So we're talking about a movement that's larger and has inarguably more weaponry and military
00:41:13.960
training than John Birch. So for me, the question becomes, why didn't we know about it? Why didn't
00:41:19.080
we understand? And how did we forget? Because all of the things that I write about in my book are
00:41:24.240
examples that were documented at the time, like the, like the McVeigh case, right? The, the events that
00:41:30.280
I talk about in the book were all covered in the press. There was footage of Klan paramilitary
00:41:36.120
training camps on Good Morning America, the Today Show and things like that. The Greensboro Massacre
00:41:41.060
was the subject of a Saturday Night Live sketch. This was in the zeitgeist. People understood that
00:41:45.700
things like this were happening. What we lacked was some kind of apparatus for putting them together
00:41:50.780
into the same story. So that's the thing that I think is really interesting, especially because
00:41:55.560
when we think about this phrase, the lone wolf, it was popularized by these activists. They
00:42:01.420
deliberately wanted to disappear. Now, one example of this is the Oklahoma city bombing, which killed
00:42:08.740
168 people. What we're talking about is of course, Tammy McVeigh's, uh, fertilizer bombing of the Alfred
00:42:14.980
P. Murrah federal building, Oklahoma city in 1995. Now that is the largest deliberate mass casualty
00:42:22.360
on U S soil between the bombing of Pearl Harbor and nine 11, but it is not understood. We don't
00:42:28.580
have a durable public understanding of this as being a work of ideology and politics rather than
00:42:35.000
kind of one person's madness. We don't learn about it in school. We don't think of it as a milestone
00:42:40.040
moment for the United States. Like when we teach a history survey. And I think it's really interesting
00:42:45.120
that we've missed it. Now, I think that, you know, of course there's a lot of conspiracy theory
00:42:50.720
around it and multiple bomb theories and John Doe theories, all kinds of things. To me,
00:42:57.480
I think the persuasive thing is actually in the historical archive and to understand what happened
00:43:02.460
here, we have to look at the other people. If you'd like to continue listening to this
00:43:06.500
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