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Crowd: Lock her up. That's right.

Kai Wright: Is this where it began? The threats to school board members? The kidnapping plots on elected officials? Did it all start with the lock her up meme of 2016? Coming up on The United States of Anxiety, conservative columnist, Mona Charen talks about what she calls, "Perverted patriotism" and about the future of conservative politics. Are you a conservative who just can't get down with the authoritarian streak running through the Republican party today? We'd like to hear from you. Also, we got an interesting observation from one of you who was at the Capitol on January 6th. We'll share what you noticed about the crowd and ask a researcher who's been tracking prosecutions what it means.

Seamus Hughes: The vast majority were for lack of a word pedestrian in nature. They're realtors in Texas, they're construction workers in Pennsylvania, they're soccer dads in Missouri.

Kai Wright: That's coming up on The United States of Anxiety.

Regina de Heer: What would you consider a patriotic act?

Natalie: I have no idea.

Bea: Me neither.

Mo: Representing where you come from.

Anonymous: It depends on what patriotism is perceived as, right? It's nice when people are proud of their country, but I think when patriotism is seen as exclusive, then I think it's not really patriotism anymore.

Regina: Would you consider patriotism a good or a bad thing today?

Natalie: I guess the more negative side.

Mo: Patriotism is never a bad thing.

Alexis: I don't feel it is a good thing at all. I would like to distance from that term completely.

Anonymous: It seems people who are patriotic go towards a nationalist extreme.

Danny: It's an abused term used to justify things that are running your society.

Alexis: White supremacy and white power.

Danny: It's a really good way to get people to do what you want them to do without them questioning it because it's unpatriotic.

Natalie: I wouldn't go around bragging that I'm a Patriot, sorry.

Kai Wright: Welcome to the show. I'm Kai Wright. Patriotism in the most literal sense is quite a mundane idea. Merriam-Webster says, "It's love for or devotion to one's country." In our political culture, it's been a similarly straightforward and familiar divide for a long time. A clear embrace on the right, or more distant relationship to the idea on the left, but somewhere along the way, those familiar signposts of national politics went a new direction. On the left, some have begun trying to rebrand patriotism around liberal ideas for the country's future, and as for the right, I am not yet sure what to say about where we've arrived, which is why we've invited Mona Charen to join us on this show tonight.

Mona has been in writing a syndicated column about national politics from a conservative point of view since 1987. She began her career at the National Review, which was certainly the journal of record for conservative thought at the time, at least. She was also a speechwriter for Nancy Reagan, among many other claims to fame, and today, she's policy editor of The BulWark and host of the podcast Beg to Differ. Mona, thank you for joining us tonight.

Mona Charen: I'm delighted to be with you.

Kai Wright: Okay. Mona, let's start with the latest viral video horror which has been circulating this weekend. I don't know if you saw this story, but it's a video of a woman in Page County, Virginia at a school board meeting where they're debating whether to continue mandating masks in schools. Here's the clip.

Female Speaker 1: All right, no mask mandates my children will not come to school on Monday with a mask on, all right? That's not happening. I will bring every single gun loaded and ready, I will call every--

Female Speaker 2: Okay, that's three minutes. You have gone past your time. It's a policy. Thank you.

Female Speaker 1: I'll see y'all on Monday.

Kai Wright: The woman later said she did not mean this threat literally, that she was talking figuratively about opposing a mask mandate with all her might. I should also say, that the board ultimately voted to end its mask mandate which is in compliance with the new governor Glenn Youngkin's executive order, giving parents the right to choose whether their kids wear masks at school. Also, that the local Sheriff's department has charged the woman with a crime for making this threat.

Now, Mona, I won't ask you to comment on the facts of this case as you may or may not have followed it, but I feel like the incident in general offers a lot of openings for our conversation. One thing that strikes me is that there is an actual specific policy dispute at the core here. It's not solely culture war posturing, but what if anything about what you have heard there from her and in that scene, stands out to you?

Mona Charen: Oh, we are so used to this by now, Kai. You have people, for example, there's this youth group called, Turning Point USA run by a guy named Charlie Kirk, and at their most recent meeting, somebody stood up and said-- because they were circulating the big lie about the election having been stolen and this perfectly sincere man stood up in the audience and said, "Look, when do we start using our guns? When do we start killing people?" Charlie Kirk, his response was pathetic, but he said, "No, no, we're not recommending that because that would just be playing into the other side's hands" or something along those lines, not that would be immoral and wrong. We don't call for political violence, no.

In any event, this is the mood that has been engendered by many things over the last five years primarily Trumpism, but the hysterical resort to violent imagery and violent talk and even violent actions as we have seen on January 6th, has unfortunately become part of our police political culture, and it is unclear what the future holds now that this Pandora's box has been opened.

Kai Wright: You wrote about this Pandora's box in a recent column, and you pointed to useful stats from The Washington Post that lawmakers were subjected to 3,900 threats in 2017, which already sounds a lot to me. In 2020, that number shot up to 8,600, so that's more than double, and it rose even further last year, and you said, you've heard of Republican officials, in particular, who are genuinely afraid for their safety if they go against the grain. Is that hyperbole? What are they saying?

Mona Charen: No, in the beginning, when in 2015, if you will, when Trump was running and there was this bully boy tone that his accolades adopted, particularly Roger Stone and others. At the time, it simply took political courage, the courage of one's convictions to stand up against Trump, but in the intervening time with pretty much lightning speed, it is now no longer that you have to have political courage. You have to have physical courage because the threats to people's safety are absolutely real, and they are--

Everybody who has done the right thing, for example, regarding the election of 2020, if you look at-- Frankly, things could have been much worse had it not been for a number of Republican, local officials, state officials, and others who refused to lie, refused to misrepresent the results, did their jobs, showed integrity. It's amazing how many of them have either been rebuked by their local Republican party, removed from office, or had death threats. Many of them had to leave their homes because of the threats to their safety.

Members of the US Congress were afraid to vote for impeachment in 2021, the second impeachment, because of fear for their families. They knew they would confess that they knew Trump was guilty and they knew-- They would like to, or perhaps liked to have voted for impeachment, but they were afraid. Yes, now, we've reached the point in America, which I never thought I would live to see, where we are becoming more like the countries around the world that we used to instruct about democratic process, rule of law, peaceful transition of power. Now, we're coming to resemble them. It's deeply, deeply worrying.

Kai Wright: You have some personal experience with this. Back in 2018, you were on a panel at the CPAC conference, which is the annual gathering of conservative politicals and thinkers. By that point, your opposition to Donald Trump was well known on the right, but you've also long been a critic of today's feminist politics, and as I gather, you wanted to make a point about hypocrisy that as conservatives, you have to stand up to abusers in your own ranks if you're going to have the credibility to challenge what you see as the excessive of progressive feminists. You did make that point, and what happened to you?

Mona: I did make that point and I was booed because I was saying that you cannot ignore the sexual abuser in the White House, and you can't ignore the fact that the Republican party endorsed a known or strongly suspected, let us say, child abuser who was that senate candidate from Alabama, Roy Moore. That was in 2018. I said, as you just quoted me, "You won't have credibility and you can't--"

Besides you cannot-- it's so easy to always criticize the other side, but frankly, as everyone knows, when you criticize your own side, you have more credibility than when you're criticizing the opposition. It's nothing easier than criticizing the opposition, but it's important to criticize your own side. By the way, I have to say, some of the most gratifying letters that I received at the time were from people who said, "Thank you for doing this. I've been a lifelong, progressive or liberal, and I hope if the tables were turned, I would have the integrity to do the same thing to my son." Which is very nice.

Kai: You had to be escorted out by security, right?

Mona: I was escorted out by security. Yes, I was. [chuckles] Although, maybe that was excessive caution on their part, who knows, but yes, I was escorted out by security. I was dumbfounded because they said, "How were you planning to get home?" I said, "Well, just going to call an Uber." [chuckles] They said, "We need to have you escorted out."

Kai: Wow. Let's hear from Dan in Bridgewater, New Jersey. Dan, welcome to the show.

Dan: Hi, first of all, for first approximation to conservatism, look it up in a dictionary. The first thing you notice is that any radicalism left or right, automatically does not constitute conservatism. Secondly, I've been a conservative since UC Berkeley in the 1960s. In all that time, I had no objection to opposing racism, women's rights, or any of these things. I've been very much a participant in them. The problem is that what you have now, it's not people call the right. It's not conservatism, but what it really is, is a younger generation from the democratic labor of origins in terms of their parents, for whom there were no jobs available.

They went in the military, fought all over the world and came back and there's still nothing for them because everything keeps going to China. These people do not have more than high school education, so they were hoping to have the same manufacturing jobs as their parents, union protected, perpetual, living a middle-class life. Islamabad left because of everything going to China. When you see these guys out there practicing shooting and all this, it's the only thing they've ever known. That's the only thing the country ever gave them-

Kai: Dan, I'm-

Dan: -the military service [crosstalk]--

Kai: Dan, I'm going to stop you there just for time, and Mona, I want to add to what Dan saying, Basil Rodericks, on Twitter asks a version of this too. What does conservative actually mean? How does Mona Charen use that moniker? What is being conserved? I put those two things together and what is your response?

Mona: Sure. I guess I agree with the caller that what we are seeing now on the right is not conservatism. It is a kind of radicalism. I agree about that. I might quibble or perhaps have a different interpretation of why we got here, but regarding how I think about conservatism, here's how I think about it. I think that it is-- conservatism in America has always been a bit different from conservatism in Europe.

In Europe, it's a throne and alter worldview that you like authority and you like order and you like the way things were always done and you have a sort of religious sensibility and so forth. In the US, of course, there are different kinds of conservatism, but the one that I was always attracted to was the one that was all about conserving the American founding and the American founding is based on limited government, maximum amounts of individual liberty, and rights for individuals.

Then beyond that, the conservative worldview is one that is open to reform but cautious and circumspect and wants to take everything into account and is very concerned about process. How you do things, the legitimacy of change, and not simply, having radical departures from the way things are always done. In fact, there's an old story that somebody said that a conservative sees a fence that-- he is on a long walk, and he sees there's a fence, and instead of saying, "Why is there a fence? This fence is in my way, we really need to get rid of it," would say, "There must be a reason that this fence is here."

Somebody built this fence and they must have had a reason. That's kind of a long way around saying that, "I regard conservatism as being about prudence, about doing things the right way, about protecting the rights that we all love and are part of our patrimony as Americans." Finally, let me just say, it's about respect for truth. That has been the most disorienting aspect of the last few years for me, is to see the disinformation that frankly, is an old cold warrior I associated with the KGB, [chuckles] but the right-wing media outlets have become purveyors of such lies. You cannot have a self-governing people who are so badly misinformed and disinformed if you will. That is my summation of my own conservatism and what I think it can be at its best.

Kai: I'm talking with columnist, Mona Charen about the embrace of political violence and citizen's arrest themes on the right, and about the future of conservative politics. We want to hear from you too, particularly, if you consider yourself conservative but don't feel comfortable with this trend in the Republican party, where do you fit in politically these days? Beyond your partisan affiliation, what matters to you and how are you able to engage those things if not through the Republican party? We'll take your calls after a break, stay with us.

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Kai: Welcome back. I'm Kai Wright. A programming note, I spoke with Carol Anderson about her book Tracing the History of Voter Suppression in the United States. I think it's a conversation that offers useful context for the ongoing debate over voting rights. You could find it at the top of our podcast feed right now. It's wnyc.org/anxiety or wherever you get your podcast. Right now, I am talking with conservative columnist, Mona Charen, Policy Editor for the Bulwark and a mainstay of conservative thought and debate for decades.

She wrote speeches for Nancy Reagan at one point. You can't get any more bona fide than that, I'd think, but her opposition to Donald Trump has put her well outside the Republican fold these days. Mona, can we hear some of your backstory? We heard before the break how you define conservatism, but you grew up in the tri-state area here in New Jersey. You were raised by brainy academics, as I believe. A psychologist and a chemist who were both Democrats. How'd you end up a Reaganite?

Mona: That's right. They were part of a phenomenon that I don't think is that unusual. They were mainstream middle-of-the-road Democrats who actually right around the time that McGovern was nominated, felt that the Democratic Party had gone too far left for them. Actually, though they had been Democrats, they voted for Nixon in 1972. My family was very interested in public affairs, and we talked about everything. I don't think they quite expected me to become an actual conservative.

[laughter]

Mona: They were very, very tolerant. The fact is, one of the things I worry about is that in our current environment of such heated polarization, the thing that I get the most satisfaction from, and that I think is one of the crowning glories of our civilization, that is the process of debate and argument and hashing things out in a democratic way is under threat at the moment. I bet that most of the listeners to this radio station have views that are far to the left of mine on many issues. We could have strong feelings about it and argument, but there's this attitude now, not that I want to persuade the other side that they're wrong, but I want to crush them and they want to crush me.

Therefore, we have to kill each other, we have to win. We have to just make sure that they never hold power again or the country is going down. It makes having reasonable arguments almost impossible.

Kai: I have to ask about that. I don't know about the listeners to this radio station, but certainly, I'm probably many miles left of you. People like to say, right? Conversations like this one we're having two media types with very divergent political views used to be normal and never happened. I'm not sure, does that really ring true? We had the counterpoint TV shows, but was there really substantive?-- I mean this as a question, in your experience, was there really substantive cross debate where people changed their minds even in a modern era?

Mona: Yes. Look, it's a really big subject, and I would refer people to Jonathan Haidt's book about how people-- Oh, I forgot the title right now, but anyway, he wrote a really good book about how people make up their minds. There's a lot of tribalism that goes into it. A lot of the time we think we're being motivated by a good argument but in fact, our emotions go first. There's a lot of research about that, but I would say that the tone of hatred, the feeling of hatred that is now dominating on both sides is definitely new.

There was always a certain amount of mutual distastes, let's say, but it was still possible, for example, in Congress for the two parties to come together and say, "All right, you think this and we think that, and let's come together and at least craft some kind of compromise." That is less and less possible. Although, it's not impossible still. There are moments. I think the infrastructure bill was one and possibly, God willing, we will get one of those on reforming the electoral count act. We'll see, but it's becoming more and more difficult.

Kai: Let's hear from Elizabeth on the upper east side. Elizabeth, welcome to the show.

Elizabeth: Well, I always listen to your show. I come from a very conservative background. My grandfather was chief justice, and my father used to argue cases before the Supreme Court.

Kai: Wait, your grandfather was chief justice of the Supreme Court, is that what you just said?

Elizabeth: Yes.

Kai: Who was your grandfather?

Elizabeth: Charles Evans Hughes.

Kai: Okay.

Mona: Oh, wow.

Elizabeth: All right.

Mona That's great.

Elizabeth: Well, my father argued cases against wiretapping. He was also conservative but it depended really-- we were raised to believe that it depends on the situation because my grandfather had a case where he argued for the socialist way back. He wanted to be fair. That's how we were raised to be fair and that’s what justice is. I don't like hearing the left view right now. I think that they're way too far over towards socialism and nor do I like the wackos that you see on the right. You just said, it's something has happened to this country.

Kai: Elizabeth, what does that mean for you? Where does that put you then if you feel like there's these two poles and you don't--

Elizabeth: I don't open my mouth much.

Kai: Oh, wow.

Elizabeth: I don't see anything because you never know how people are going to react. You just don't. There's a lot of wackos sleeping on the street. I could go into how the city is being run too, but that's not the point. I'm just saying that you can't state your mind if you're a Republican or a conservative anymore, people really react badly.

Kai: Well, Elizabeth, thank you for stating your mind to us on this show. We welcome your call, and I hope that you will keep calling.

Mona: Thanks, Elizabeth. Very interesting family background there, and by the way, I hope you'll explore thebulwark.com, where I'm the policy editor. We have a non-tribal approach to policy matters, and it's very lively. I hope you'll give us a try.

Kai: Let's go to Josh in Millerton, New York. Josh, welcome to the show.

Josh: Thank you very much. I just wanted to ask why you avoided in your definition of conservatism the issue of common good when the preamble of the town constitution not only talks about a more perfect union but domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, and blessings of liberty to ourselves and posterity to our kids and grandkids. The whole idea of the common good is an equal part of the founding as well as individual liberties. I think that should be core to conservatism if I understand conservatism. I'll drop off here and say, "Thank you."

Kai: Thank you, Josh.

Mona: Sure.

Kai: How do you respond to that?

Mona: Okay, so the caller mentions common good. Maybe some listeners aren't aware that there is a movement out there among national people who call themselves national conservatives, who reject the idea of limited government and do so on the grounds that they want to pass laws for the common good. There's a lot that goes under that umbrella. I am not happy about that trend because it seems to me that it has the potential to drive a truck over individual liberty.

One of the things that people fight is that there was this objection to-- what was it called? The something, happy hour-- oh, gosh, out in San Francisco, it was Drag Queen Story Hour, it was called at the local library. There we go, I found it. One of the conservatives went on a tear about this, saying that from his point of view, and he's very involved in this whole national conservatism thing, he said, "This is the thing that we really need to stamp out and it's for the common good, it's for your own good."

My view is you cannot do that in a pluralistic country, that the genius of our system is we let people to the degree possible. We let people do what they want, and as long as they're not hurting somebody, and if you stamp out somebody's right to do the story hour, then they, when they take power, will stamp out your right to have religious services or to have guns, or to have many things that you hold sacred. What I am worried about in this tendency is its fierce intolerance and its authoritarianism, its potential authoritarianism. You have to be content to live together in the same country with people who have views that are very different from your own.

Kai: Someone on Twitter, Lulu, asks a version of a question I have which is, ''Why do you think white nationalism has found such easy and comfortable home in the Republican Party?'' I guess I would associate it with what you were just talking as well. This stamping out of pluralism in general, why do you think it has found such an easy home in the party?

Mona: It's always possible to appeal to people's lowest instincts. That's one of the reasons that leadership is so important. There are reasons that we have taboos and against certain kinds of demagoguery. It used to be taboo to make an explicitly racial appeal. Now, I'm not obviously going further back. It was absolutely normal, but I'm talking about in my lifetime. Those taboos were important. When Trump transgressed one after another, after another, starting with, "I don't like John McCain, the hell with heroism. I'm not for heroism."

Then, of course, with the racial and the ethnic and the rest of it. He transgressed all of these norms and, again, to use that metaphor, he's letting this genie out of the bottle. These tendencies toward racial hostility, toward ethnic suspicion, toward all kinds of hatreds, are always out there ready to be exploited, but a country that has a healthy political culture strongly discourages that and even makes it taboo, as I was saying.

When we repealed the taboo, it's not shocking that we're getting a lot of it. It's just galloping along and frankly, one of the things that I find so dismaying is also, just the sheer vulgarity of the age we're living in. The fact that, "Let's go, Brandon" is chanted at football games in the south, at college football games in the south. That's just disgusting.

Kai: The idea that a metaphor of bringing guns to make your point at a school board meeting is so casual even if it was meant. Even if it was as a metaphor and not literal.

Mona: No, exactly. The guardrails are down and all the sewage is flowing out if you'll forgive the mixed metaphor. [laughs].

Kai: Well, I don't know that's about right. In the couple of minutes we've got left Mona, in your column, you argue that your prescription to this is what you call more uncorrupted patriotism from everybody else, what do you mean by that phrase?

Mona: Right. I lament the fact that the people who are supporting Trump and who are supporting these-- So sorry, my dog is barking in the background.

Kai: It's okay. He's welcome, and if they got something to say, we just want to hear them out.

Mona: [laughs] These people who are making citizens arrests and threatening local school boards and so forth, they think they're the patriots, and of course, they're the opposite of patriots because they're not respecting pluralism, they're not respecting rule of law, they're not respecting the fact that other people have different views. Therefore, how do you answer that? Well, we have to have a better patriotism, and it's important for people who still hold, like our earlier caller, Elizabeth, people who still hold to the old standards of what it means to be a patriot to speak up and say, "You can not hijack patriotism from me."

Kai: Do you think this is unfair to ask with a minute left, what is the prospects of a third party for people like yourself and Elizabeth?

Mona: Well, of course, I would welcome it, but it's awfully difficult to form third parties in the United States. If there are clever people out there who have looked into it and have some great ideas, I'm open to it. I'm also open to changing the way we vote with rank choice voting as you did in New York. I'm open to all kinds of reforms because I think we are sliding, we are really sliding as a country.

Kai: Is there any real conversation about another party amongst your [crosstalk]--

Mona: Oh, there's lots of conversation, but, as I say, there are just all of these institutional barriers. Then there's also the right-wing ecosystem of information that's out there makes it extremely difficult because you have this hardcore of about 30% of the Republican party that is in charge and that gets oxygen from the foxes and the bright barts and the rest. It's a difficult, difficult situation.

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Kai: Mona Charen is policy editor for the Bulwark, she's been writing a syndicated column about national politics from a conservative perspective since 1987. Thanks so much, Mona.

Mona: My pleasure, Kai. Great to be with you.

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Kai: Welcome back, I'm Kai Wright. Regular listeners know that one of my favorite parts of this show is hearing from you. I'm always asking you for emails and for voice memos and that's for a reason, a lot of times, they inform what episodes we make, and sometimes, we like to just go through the mail and tell you what we've been hearing, though, if I'm honest, the we in that is really our senior digital producer, Kousha Navidar. Hey, Kousha.

Kousha: Hey Kai. After each episode, we get emails, voicemails, video. Here are some that we thought everyone might find interesting. First one is in response to our solstice episode last month, we asked how you at home celebrate the solstice, and a listener named Ricardo, who full disclosure is actually a friend of mine, sent us a video of him outside safely burning a fire.

Kai: A fire.

Kousha: You said you wanted an icebreaker for the segment, Kai, and I took that literally. Here it is.

Ricardo: There you go old frustrations. Consumed in fire. The new year is coming.

Kai: Yes, Ricardo. Burn it all, burn it down. Kousha, that sounds just really satisfying to put your anxiety in a fire and burn it off. It felt like as I've talked to callers over the past several months, that a lot of people are actually struggling with how to react, how to show up in this moment politically, socially and every other way. It makes me think about the conversation we've just had with Mona Charen about finding new ways to think about patriotism in this country.

Kousha: Yes, it's interesting. After one show, we got a voicemail from someone saying she's been trying to keep fighting for the country she wants to live in but she's worn out.

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Gabrielle: Hi, my name is Gabrielle. I am in Texas. I was responding to the prompt about how our engagement with politics has shifted. I graduated college last May. I would work for campaigns, I was studying government and political communications. I don't want to say it's almost the complete opposite now, but it's close. Graduating and really taking a look at the world I was graduating into didn't give me a lot of hope, like what can I actually do to make change when these systems have been in place for so long?

We know what's wrong and yet, the same things keep happening with the racial justice, with the environment, with COVID. It just feels a little bit hopeless. I've been trying to engage at more of a local level, and I think that's been helpful because it's a little bit easier to identify things that you can change and your vote means a little bit more. I really appreciate the perspectives and the guests that you guys bring on. Thank you so much for what you do.

Kousha: Thank you, Gabrielle. Then one more for you, Kai, and this one was surprising. A couple months ago, you remember we did an episode called the Myth of the United States, and we talked about how division has always been a part of our country's history. After this episode, our inbox was full. We got one voicemail from someone who had an interesting observation about what happened on January 6th.

Henry: Hi there, my name is Henry. I was especially struck by one of the last comments on your segment on we fought a civil war in the 1860s to prevent the union from breaking apart, and now, we might have to break apart to prevent the civil war. For me, that actually is a really appealing concept, as someone who does worry about the prospect of political violence. There's a large portion of the country that though, I think they're wrong, it believes that this past election was stolen. If you actually believe that, then something like January 6th, it's hard to say that that's not warranted.

I'll say, I was actually there on that day. I was actually in the crowd in observational capacity not at all aligned with it but had shown up. I was there outside the Capitol but watching it unfold, and it was terrifying. There were a lot of militia, there were a lot of crazy people, there were also a lot of what we would largely consider to be normal people who got carried away in something that they actually believed was right, was the right thing to do, was to stand-- They thought that they were reliving 1776.

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Kai: Henry's observation made me think of a research project underway right now. The Program on Extremism at George Washington University has been tracking the details of every federal prosecution of people who stormed the Capitol that day. I met the deputy director of that program recently, Seamus Hughes, and he was explaining to me what they've been finding in those court documents. I got in touch with Seamus, and I played Henry's message for him. Seamus, thanks for joining us.

Seamus Hughes: Thanks for having me.

Kai: You heard our listener Henry's characterization of the crowd he saw that day, what's your reaction to what he said?

Seamus: I think he hit the nail on the head. When you look at the cases, we've got more than 1000 people that the FBI has been looking at who crossed a legal threshold onto the Capitol, of that 720 people have been charged federally for crimes that day, and the organized groups, the Oathkeepers, the proud boys, they get a lot of media coverage because they were all in uniforms and stack formation, had their radios and things like that, but if you dive into the numbers, the vast majority were, for lack of a better word, pedestrian in nature, kind of a typical profile, right? They're realtors in Texas, they're construction workers in Pennsylvania, they're soccer dads in Missouri.

They weren't part of organized groups by any means. They come from 46 different states in DC. The vast majority of them were live-streaming their own crimes in real-time. The takeaway from this is, there was obviously some organization and some pushing by politicians and others, but for the folks that were there, they largely came there because they saw a Facebook post about it or a tweet about it, and we're drawn to this idea of we've got to stop the steel.

Kai: Why does that matter? Why is it important to understand that?

Seamus: Though, in many ways, it's a little bit more frightening, and in other ways, it's not. Here's the way it's more frightening. The Oathkeepers, the proud boys, they were always gonna go January 6th, right? but if you can get the soccer dads from Missouri, you can get a mass movement towards there-- for lack of a better word, that is concerning in and of itself. In fact, if we look at the folks who have assaulted police officers, individuals have been charged with assaulting police officers, the vast majority of them were what we call spontaneous clusters. They attacked a police officer with someone they met with that day. They were wrapped up in the fervor of the crowd of that moment.

Now, that's the concerning part about it. The place that we can take a little bit of solace for is we haven't seen a huge mass movement like that since January 6 at the Capitol. January 20th, the inauguration or the just for January 6 rally in the fall, the folks that are going to those rallies now are the true believers through and through and less to be-- again, those soccer dads from Missouri.

Kai: Why is that? Why is it not those people anymore?

Seamus: There is the full weight of the federal government jumped in. This is the largest FBI investigation in its history, the largest DOJ prosecution in its history, the most cases the DC federal courts has ever taken on, and so you're not getting the merely curious, for lack of a better word. Now, the concern is, it's still not an insignificant number of people that are drawn to this. The Oathkeepers still have membership in the 1000s. The proud boys have still been active in a number of states, so things are still churning along.

The hope and I'm not sure whether my hope is misplaced, my hope is social media companies which played a role in terms of their algorithms pushing someone down a rabbit hole, may sit up and take notice a little bit more than they did in the past because if they don't, we're going to have another moment like that.

Kai: What about that? One of the stats that you point out as you go through these cases that 77% of people charged or charged based, at least in part on evidence taken from personal social media accounts. You actually warned that we shouldn't just be mocking that, that it's not just an example of like, "Oh, well, they're pretty bumbling criminals there," that's actually a worrying fact, how so?

Seamus: It's much more worrying for me because it's not that they're bad criminals, although, they are, right? but it's really more so that they didn't think they were doing anything wrong. They thought they were part of a second revolution and if you're going to be part of a new republic, you want to document your victories which makes prosecutors jobs a whole lot easier when you're facing evidence in images and videos, but it does speak to a larger question here which is no one thinks of being a traitor, no one walks in thinking I'm Benedict Arnold that day.

They all thought they were patriots. They thought if they didn't do this, they were going to lose their republic, and so that feeds into this hero narrative, this idea that if I don't go there, no one else will and I am just a man or woman to do so. In many ways, it's really almost more concerning.

Kai: You have been involved in national security and counterterrorism work in Washington for a number of years on a wide range of movements and issues. How does what you just described, how does that compare to other threats and other terrorist movements that you've studied in the past?

Seamus: In many ways, you're looking at a mini mass radicalization. I would be hard-pressed to think of an event that would garner that many people for other extremist movements in recent history. Now, you got to put in context, we're talking about a couple thousand people in DC on that day in a population size of 300 plus million people, so context matters. At the end of the day, though, they cross threshold, get to the Capitol and stop certification for a number of hours. I'm not minimizing it, but in the larger scheme of things, relatively small numbers.

Now, let's put it in a different context, which is you look at domestic terrorism or domestic extremists in the US, you have 1000 active investigation in all 50 states for ISIS or Al Qaeda cases. You have 2700 active investigations for domestic terrorism, so that's Neo Nazis, white supremacist, that type of movement. In the last year and a half, that number has gone from 852 to 2700. The FBI directors keep sounding the alarm in commercial testimony, he says, "Our agents are overworked, we're moving folks off of ISIS cases, also, off of white-collar crime cases, off of public corruption cases, and we're moving on domestic terrorism because the threat is rising to a level that we cannot handle right now."

They're asking for more resources, more prosecutors, they throw in everything that-- because they haven't seen anything before like this. One last thing I noticed, you look at the extremes of landscape in the US, it's fractured, meaning that you don't just have white supremacists, you don't just have Neo Nazis, you don't just have in cells, or sovereign citizens, or all those ideologies which are quite confusing and esoteric in nature, they mix. It's like a salad bar, as the FBI calls it, a salad bar.

People are picking and choosing their own stuff, and so that becomes a little bit harder for law enforcement to wrap their head around. You add into the fact that there are Americans with their own civil rights and civil liberties protections on top of that, rightly so and that becomes a very hard problem set to address.

Kai: I saw somewhere, it may have been you, they talked about it as a potentially massive networking event that there was all these disparate ideologies and people that got together that could potentially then make it a more coherent movement. Has that turned out to be true or has the opposite turned out to be true?

Seamus: I think the opposite right now, but we got to look at the build-up to January 6. The build-up to January 6, you look at rallies in Virginia and Washington in California for a variety of issues, whether it be quarantine, lockdowns, or gun rights or things like that, the same players that were there, Virginia showed up on January 6, and so clearly, there was some level of coordination, or at least nodding that you saw somebody at the crowd last month. That does matter a great deal.

Now, they weren't trading business cards in the middle of the attack but there is something to be said about, for lack of a better word, a rockstar status that comes with being there on January 6, and we see a number of these January 6 defendants pivot away from remorse and feeling of guilt for being there and instead, use it as a bona fides to start businesses, or podcasts or all of these things because they were the ones who when push came to shove, they showed up that day.

Kai: You are a sober guy, a careful thinker, you're a researcher, where are you on a scale of 1 to 10 of your level of concern about this extremism?

Seamus: I've been doing this type of work in national security [for the last 20 years so I professionally end up at a five at all times, and I think that's probably a safe way to go so I can sleep at night. For this, I'm probably more than six or seven.

Kai: Oh, wow.

Seamus: There are things to be hopeful for which is the fact that there weren't mass rallies after January 6 in any real way in the Capitol. The other thing is, we shall also notice post-January 6, there was not a major terrorism attack in the last year and so that is a victory, we can decide whether that's because the threat has gone down or whether law enforcement has been more active. I think the jury's still out on what the answer is for that but there's something to be hopeful for. We also needed to look back at our history.

I think in the 1970s of car bombs going off every couple of days for a variety of different extremism movements. We have ebbs and flows of extremism and terrorism in this country. Every once in a while, we can pull ourselves back, and I get a sense and this might be the forever optimist and the first-generation immigrant of me, but I think to myself, we're going to be able to figure this out. That's for the violence part. For the question of echo chambers and radicalization and generally not wanting to be in the same room as somebody who doesn't have the same politics of you, that's really more where I'm more concerned, the societal ills of this and less of the mass violence.

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Kai: Seamus Hughes is the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. Thanks for taking this time.

Seamus: Thanks for having me.

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Kai: The United States of Anxiety is a production of WNYC Studios. Our theme music was written by Hennis Brown and performed by the Outer Borough Brass Band. Mixing by Jared Paul. Milton Louise was on the boards for the live show. The team also includes Emily Botein, Regina de Heer, Karen Frillmanm, and Kousha Navidar, and I, of course, I'm Kai Wright. You can keep in touch with me on Twitter @Kai_wright, that's K-A-I_wright, and you can join us for the live version of the show next Sunday, 6 PM Eastern, stream it at wnyc.org, or tell your smart speaker to play WNYC. Until then, take care of yourselves, and thank you for listening.

 

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