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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. Far-right extremism is thriving in many places across this country, especially in rural areas, and that includes upstate New York. Politically, the area was purple for a time, but in recent years, it has become bright red with fringe. Militia groups, actively recruit there, both online and in person. Flyers for groups like the Patriot Front and the KKK have been seen in some counties, and a data leak from the extremist group, The Three Percenters shows that a sizable portion of its membership lives in upstate New York.

Now, a new podcast out of North Country Public Radio looks at far-right extremism in that area and how it has flourished, and what kind of threat it poses to our democracy. The podcast is called If All Else Fails, and you can get a sense of the stakes in the very first episode. Let's listen to a clip. The first voice you hear is James Bonnet, a man from Glens Falls who was recently sentenced for his role in the January 6th insurrection.

James Bonnet: There's a lot of people like me that we know the election was stolen. Being in January 6th and being in there, there's a lot of Americans there that were like, "We want answers on this."

Speaker 3: Bonnet says he's still convinced Donald Trump won the 2020 election, that there's a deep state working against the former President, and he's convinced the truth will come out.

James Bonnet: I think right now we're going through a process of deep cleaning, and I think through the other side of it's going to be awesome.

Alison Stewart: Joining me now are the reporters and co-hosts of If All Else Fails, Emily Russell. Emily, welcome to the show.

Emily Russell: Hi, thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: Zach Hirsch. Zach, nice to meet you.

Zach Hirsch: Thanks so much for having us, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Emily, how do you define North Country?

Emily Russell: The North country is a huge part of upstate New York. It spans from the Vermont border in the east, all the way west to Lake Ontario and then up to the Canadian border. It's the most rural part of New York State. There's only about 600,000 people that live here. Again, it's just a huge part of the state. As you mentioned, it's become a more conservative region. It's got the largest congressional district in New York. We're represented by the third-ranking congresswoman in the house, Elise Stefanik. Very rural, pretty conservative. There's been an outmigration of people here, so not only do we have a small population, but it's been shrinking in the last decade.

Alison Stewart: Zach, what prompted the investigation, the look at extremism?

Zach Hirsch: As you mentioned in the intro, we saw this photo from the sheriff of Lewis County, New York, who it was a year's old photo from way back in 2016 of this sheriff receiving an award from the Oath Keepers. It's possible we might not have seen that photo, or it might have surfaced many years later, but the sheriff himself posted that photo in the summer after January 6th, and it got such a positive reaction from people in the North country. Hundreds of comments, more than a thousand likes, and we just really wanted to know who are all these people out there who like that, and what are the connections between police and far-right groups?

Alison Stewart: Emily, when we're talking about Right Wing extremist group, is there a hard and fast definition?

Emily Russell: There really isn't. It's really important to note that far-right ideas and groups, they exist on a spectrum. One of the things we did for our reporting is we just went around the region and looked at the bumper stickers that people have, the flags people fly. Some people fly Confederate flags around here in this region. Those ideas and those sentiments really exist on a spectrum, and particularly far-right violent extremism is pretty rare here. We want to be very clear about that.

What we did find was that there are groups that are recruiting up here, including the infamous Ku Klux Klan, as you mentioned, lesser-known groups like the Patriot Front, Proud Boys. We know those groups have been active up here and all across upstate New York. They have tried to recruit people. They have rallied in this region. Again, different groups rely on different ideologies and are on a spectrum of extremism.

Alison Stewart: Zach, how do these groups recruit? What's the pitch?

Zach Hirsch: I think there's really this idea, at least in the Second Amendment crowd, that the government is coming to take away your guns, what are you going to do about it? That's what it boils down to. We really saw in the last decade, there was a new gun law in New York State called the Safe Act, and it was touted as one of the strictest gun laws in the country at the time, and now it's really continued to just be this catalyst, this ongoing central motivating factor in recruiting and saying, "Look, this is evidence that the government is tyrannical." That was a really key thing we found for upstate New York.

Alison Stewart: Emily, I'm going to ask you to just give us a one-word sentence for each of these groups so people can understand what their, for lack of better word, vibe is. The NY Watchmen, the Three Percenters, and the Oath Keepers.

Emily Russell: [chuckles] That's a challenging one. I got to be honest, Alison. Because we're not inside these people's heads. I think the New York watchmen, they deny they're a militia, and I don't have the language in front of me, but they do say they're out to protect certain rights. I forget the language, but it does relate to a militia mentality. The Oath Keepers as well, that's widely considered a national militia, and they became more of a militia group back in 2013. The last group you mentioned?

Alison Stewart: Three Percenters.

Zach Hirsch: The Three Percenters. I can jump in on that one. The Three Percenters are actually not a group. It's an ideology that's part of the broader anti-government militia movement, the Right Wing anti-government militia movement. It's based on this unproven claim that only 3% of American colonists fought the British during the American Revolution, and they draw a lot of parallels between the British government in the 1700s, and the US government today. They see the government as trampling over their freedoms.

Alison Stewart: Emily, you can't speak for these people, but when they say the government's coming for you, [chuckles] the government wants to control you, do they explain why they think the government wants to do this, or why?

Emily Russell: There are some people that believe in a deep state. This is a false conspiracy theory that, particularly right now that the Democrats, that there's some people behind the scenes pulling the strings. In our region, particularly as Zach mentioned, guns are a big part of the inspiration for people joining these movements and these groups. They are fearful that people will come and take their guns. There's no evidence to support that, but it has become a big rallying cry, and like Zach mentioned, that really became much more popular in mainstream when there was a new gun control measure passed in New York State back in 2013. I think that's a national trend that we've seen, when there are new gun control measures put in place that does spur people to go out and buy more guns.

Zach Hirsch: If I could just add to that.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Zach Hirsch: In Episode III, we quote one far-right figure, a Sheriff from Arizona named Mark Lamb, who sums it all up. He says, "Our borders are overrun, crime is taking over our cities and progressives want to take our guns." There's just this narrative of a liberal takeover and an overreaching government that just wants to make America less secure and less free. That's a shortened version of his quote there. That's a really common narrative in these circles.

Alison Stewart: Do they ever explain why the government would want America to be less free? I keep coming back to the why, or maybe you don't have that answer.

Zach Hirsch: I don't know if I have that answer. It's a good question, I think. I'm not sure

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the podcast If All Else Fails from North Country Public Radio. I'm speaking with reporters and co-hosts Emily Russell and Zach Hirsch. The first three episodes feature, in part, the discussion about local law enforcement's role in the conversation about Right Wing extremist. Some people spoke to you in the record, others wouldn't. Let's talk about the sheriff from Lewis County that you mentioned, Mike Carelli. He plays a big role. He is a sheriff of Lewis County. It's a rural county north of Syracuse.

Emily, just for people who don't know, what is technically the role of sheriff in New York State?

Emily Russell: I'm going to pass this question actually over to Zach.

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Emily Russell: He's our sheriff expert.

Alison Stewart: Zach, go for it.

Zach Hirsch: I love nerding out on the role of the sheriff in New York State. Sheriff's Departments, they're police, they're law enforcement. They run county jails, they do security at courthouses, county buildings and public events, traffic stops, arrests, serving warrants, things like that. What's different about sheriffs, they are the only elected law enforcement in the country. As a result, there's very little oversight outside of elections. There can be recalls, there are some rules under the state constitution if someone's kind of breaking the rules a little bit, but generally speaking, there just isn't anyone to hold sheriffs accountable during the times that they choose not to enforce a particular law.

We're talking about the head of the department, the Sheriff, not an individual Sheriff's deputy, which are the officers in that department. A handful of sheriffs around New York state have openly said, they're not going to enforce certain gun laws or COVID mandates. In New York and across the country, we've seen the rise of this thing called the Constitutional Sheriff's Movement, which maybe we can get into that.

Alison Stewart: That was my next question What is that?

Zach Hirsch: The basic thing there is constitutional sheriff's claim, they can decide what is and isn't constitutional. Even going beyond that, many constitutional, it gets into a complex in the weeds legal theory, but basically, they think at the end of the day, the sheriff on the local level has the most power in the country, that on their home turf, they're even more powerful than a federal official, even the President of the United States.

One of the subjects of our series says that almost verbatim. He's asked, "Are you more powerful than the President?" He's like, "In my county, yes." It's kind of like a fringe legal theory and it's something experts are really worried about because it's authoritarian.

Alison Stewart: Sure. Who enforces the law in law enforcement? It's interesting, Emily, we hear two very different sides of Carpinelli in the podcast. There's a chipper voice message he leaves you like, "Hi, getting back to you. I just wanted to talk to you about what you want to talk to me about." Then he refuses to talk to you and goes on sort of a much more like fire and brimstone persona, even in describing how the left-wing media reached out to him. Emily, can you share with us when he uses each of these personas?

Emily Russell: Yes. It's really unfortunate that we were never able to connect with him. Like you said, he left us that voice message, and we tried so many different ways. We called him back, we left him voice messages, we emailed him, called his office. We really tried to connect with him. That voicemail was really the only time we heard from him. We were able to connect with reporters who had talked to him in the past. I can't read his mind and I don't know what he was thinking or feeling, but we do know that he understood that we were trying to reach him, and he never did get back in touch with us, but instead, like you say, he posted about us on his professional Facebook page calling us the leftist-leaning press, and said he wouldn't talk to reporters who were, I forget the language, so I'm not going to say it.

Again, I've never had a chance to interview him, so I don't know what he would be like in person. It is worth noting that there is another sheriff in our series that we were able to interview Fulton County Sheriff Richard Giardino, because of his connection to another far-right group. He was, I'll say, very generous with his time. I think we had more than a two-hour interview with him in his office and multiple follow-up conversations. I think that really made a difference.

It's very helpful to really understand why these people believe that they have certain rights and where those beliefs come from, and more about their background. We were able to tell that story about Sheriff Richard Giardino, that we had to rely on different sources for that other story about Sheriff Mike Carpinelli.

Alison Stewart: He returned your calls. He sat with you. He even had a bit of an epiphany. We won't give that away. He does say something I thought was really interesting, and Zach, this is probably your lane, that he interprets the law, but that is his job. He gets to interpret the law. Could you give us just a small example of one way that he does his job that where he would be interpreting the law?

Zach Hirsch: There was a new gun law in New York State in 2022, the concealed carry, sorry, I'm blanking on the exact name of it, but a strict new gun law that many people have heard about about having guns in sensitive places. His interpretation, sorry, the Concealed Carry Improvement Act, it came back to me. He has said that unfairly targets law-abiding citizens. He's not only a sheriff, he's a former prosecutor, he's a former judge. He feels like he has even more authority to interpret the law.

An example is he says like, if we stopped you and you're at the supermarket and you have your gun on, and the new rule is the supermarket doesn't allow guns, we're not going to arrest you. We're going to say, "Look, the law changed. Can't bring your gun in there. It's got to be in a lockbox in your car." That's basically his quote. That's an example of him interpreting the law. He adds to that, "Hey, I have a tremendous amount of discretion," and he's basically right. The sheriffs are in this gray area where there isn't real accountability, other than elections and law enforcement uses discretion all the time. The thing where he's taking a little further is, and this is more unusual for law enforcement, is he's saying, "Oh, I've written decisions about constitutionality, so having written those kinds of decisions, I can take a position based on my opinions."

Alison Stewart: My guests are Emily Russell and Zach Hirsch. They're the reporters and co-hosts of the new podcast If All Else Fails from North Country Public Radio about far-right extremism in upstate New York. Emily, does race come into play here?

Emily Russell: It's a really good, interesting question. I think yes and no. What we found in upstate New York is that far-right groups and ideologies, anti-government movements, they're more centered publicly around gun rights and gun control and kind of pushback against gun control. As I mentioned earlier in our conversation, people around here, some of them fly confederate flags, and that's a flag that many people consider has a racist mentality behind it. We see other far-right stickers that are also connected to racist ideologies around here.

I think what we found and again, I can't get in people's minds, I don't know how widespread racism is in upstate New York, but I think there is an element to it here, but it's just maybe not as over as it is in other parts of the US.

Alison Stewart: Zach, did you hear any dog whistles?

Zach Hirsch: I think Emily's right, that it's less about overt racism most of the time. There's sort of this little more nuanced aspect to it where a lot of these groups and movements overlap, and the lines just aren't clear. When you think about the historical roots of some of these groups and movements, for example, talking again about the constitutional sheriffs, that really kicked off with a white supremacist in the '70s who really felt, county sheriffs should form parses and even lynch people, their enemies, federal officials.

Now the CEO of the main group in the movement, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association is a talk show host who, his guests all the time are white nationalists and neo confederates. I do think there's not so much overt racism most of the time, but there's a complex web of interconnection here.

Alison Stewart: Emily, who is monitoring extremism in upstate New York?

Emily Russell: The FBI is here. We spoke to one FBI agent who leads one of the joint terrorism task forces up here. The FBI is tracking online extremism, in-person extremism. We also spoke with the top security official in New York State, Jackie Bray, she's the Commissioner of the Department of Homeland Security in New York State. We know they're tracking it as well.

One of the things that we heard over and over again, specifically from experts and from our FBI source, is that a lot of extremism and the spread of these ideas is happening more online now and the internet is a massive space. It's impossible to track all of that chatter in forums and messaging, and so it's become much more, I think, difficult and complicated to track extremism now that the internet is being used to spread those ideas.

Alison Stewart: Zach, in our last moments, Elise Stefanik was mentioned earlier has represented the north country for almost 10 years. Is she involved with any extremist groups openly?

Zach Hirsch: Definitely not openly. No, she has sort of distanced herself from any sort of very big obvious associations like that, but she has in smaller ways kind of indicated sympathy, or what might feel like an apparent nod to say the QAnon Movement, she described Democrats as pedogrifters, pedo as in pedophile. She denies that connection, she's been criticized for that and she denies that. I was thinking again, about your question about the why? Why do people feel this way? Part of it is because prominent figures like Elise Stefanik, one of the top ranking lawmakers in the country, are increasingly validating some of these ideas.

While she might not say, hey, I'm a member of the Oathkeepers, she's absolutely not, there are all kinds of ways in which she has given legitimacy to some of this stuff.

Alison Stewart: The name of the podcast is If All Else Fails. Thanks to reporters and co-hosts, Emily Russell and Zach Hirsch. Thank you so much.

Zach Hirsch: Thank you, Alison.

Emily Russell: Thank you, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Awesome. All five episodes are available now, wherever you get your podcasts

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