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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Coming up later this hour, Neil deGrasse Tyson will join us to try to decode those beautiful but mysterious images that are the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. Neil deGrasse Tyson coming up later this hour, but, first, Malcolm Nance is back with us now. For 34 years, he was in the US intelligence community combating terrorism, mostly focused on international terrorism.

These days, now out of government, he's focusing on the terrorist threat from Americans to other Americans, especially right-wing violent extremism, which has been the dominant strain as the FBI and everyone else has said. Malcolm was here and had a lot to say during the Russia investigation, some of you will remember, with his knowledge of that country's interest in destabilizing Western democracies. He had a bestselling book about that called The Plot to Hack America. Now, Malcolm Nance has a new book called They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency. Malcolm, always good to have you on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Malcolm Nance: Well, I'm glad to be here. I wish I could be in the studio.

Brian Lehrer: I wish you could too. I thought it might be useful for our listeners to spend a little time first looking at some of the different violent extremist groups whose names have been in the news and how they are different from each other and how they overlap. Is it a good place to start to ask you to distinguish between the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys? Because I think a lot of people hear those names, they go, "Oh, the Oath Keepers. Oh, the Proud Boys," but they don't really know what they are.

Malcolm Nance: Right, it is a good place to start because when I end this, you're going to be quite surprised where all of these people end up or you might not be surprised. Let's start with some of the most well-known. The biggest is the Oath Keepers. The Oath Keepers was started by an ex-US Army, individual named Stewart Rhodes. He went out and became a lawyer and set up this organization, which, originally, their mandate was to get US military and law enforcement personnel to swear that they would never take part in operations or activities in the United States against American citizens, which is going to be very ironic when we get to January 6th.

Stewart Rhodes's organization was pretty much designed to oppose Barack Obama's use of the US military and training exercises around the United States. There was a famous one that was carried out in Texas and the right-wing thought it was a grand conspiracy to use the special operations to detain militiamen. It was not. It was just a large-scale training exercise, and so he did. It took off after that activity. Now, since that time, it's transformed itself into a litmus test and right-wing conservatism.

If you were supporting right-wing conservatism and you were ex-military, they would actually try to recruit you. I received recruiting materials from them soon after one of these incidents happened. My name happened to be on a gun forum list, but the Oath Keepers are very big. Maybe not in membership, but certainly in the number of people that sign on with what they believe. The membership has fluctuated, people say, as low as a couple of thousand to as high, according to Rhodes and company, as 30,000-40,000.

The people who support what they do is easily in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands. Then comes the 3% Militia, another group that started out as supposedly supporting ex-US military and law enforcement. They've opened their membership to just about anybody. It's called the 3% Militia on this bizarre, mistaken belief that only 3% of the colonists took part in the American Revolution. That myth got carried on by them and it's not true. [laughs] A lot more than 3% fought.

Brian Lehrer: In other words, if we could amass just that small or critical mass of the American population today, 3%, we could undertake a violent overthrow of the United States government. Is that the implication?

Malcolm Nance: Well, that was the implication in the name. However, there is a lot more than 3% involved in the current anti-government operations that we're going to talk about today. When I start giving you the numbers, you're going to be terrified. Then, finally, is the Proud Boys and the Boogaloo Boys. These were younger groups, younger men. The Proud Boys started as a street gang designed to physically fight liberals on the street.

You might recall, there was a famous case in New York City where they just masked up and started punching protestors in the face. Their leader, Stewart-- Oh, not Stewart. Their leader was arrested and that's where they made their claim to fame, which was to get young, hardcore, white supremacist, neo-Nazi men to confront liberals and liberal protestors and to start street fights. They've since changed into an armed militia also.

Finally, the Boogaloo Boys. The Boogaloo Boys is a fascinating organization. Not really organized, it's more of an ideological belief that these were young gamers who were young kids that cut their teeth on computer gaming. They ramped up from computer gaming playing Call of Duty to doing airsoft BB gun battles and paintball gun battles and then stepped up to AR-15s when they reached 18 and were being taught this sexiness and masculinity of carrying an AR-15, wearing body armor, and being able to intimidate people on the street for these right supremacist beliefs.

The interesting factor is they identify themselves by wearing Hawaiian shirts, but they're what we call accelerationists, people who believe that they should accelerate the collapse of the United States through armed revolution. They're very young, 18 to 25. They're next-generation. After Charlottesville, all of these groups, along with the Ku Klux Klan, state militias, neo-Nazis, all went quiet until the summer of 2020, the George Floyd summer of 2020.

I write in my book and contend that they are what they are now, which is what I call the TITUS, T-I-T-U-S. They became the Trump insurgents in the United States. They are no longer individual groups even though they may have those individual collective confessions. They are Trump's foot soldiers and they're armed and they're organized. As far as they're concerned, it is no longer about their individual belief whether they're neo-Nazi or Ku Klux Klan or whatever. It's about supporting Donald Trump and his insurgency against America.

Brian Lehrer: I'm glad you brought that up because I was going to ask you about the book title, the subtitle, the Trump Insurgency, and what it really means because groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers predate the Trump presidency. I guess I have casually thought that he latched onto them for his purposes more than they latched onto him, but you're saying it's since changed. Do you want to go more into that?

Malcolm Nance: Sure, yes. This is what I outlined throughout the book, how this massive transformation of these individual groups, their beliefs, I like to say "their confessions" because it's almost like a religion for them and throw in, and I'm sure we'll discuss this later, the QAnon conspiracy theory. By 2020, all of these groups were individual between 2017, 2018, 2019. They just started to meld together as part of that massive Trump cult. The Trump campaigns, of course, mollycoddled them, nodded to them.

Donald Trump's "stand back and stand by" comment and the run-up to the 2020 election, it was direct reference to the Proud Boys when asked to call them out. It was, "Yes, just take it easy, boys. I'll get back to you." They viewed Trump, by 2020, they were his collective armed, unauthorized militia. All of them, every one of them, whether you're talking about right-wing local militias in Michigan or you're talking about clansmen or you're talking about all these other groups that I just went through.

Even worse, for every one of these armed people that views themselves as a combatant in an undeclared civil war or preparing to be a combatant in an undeclared civil war, they viewed themselves as Trump loyalists first. There were maybe eight to nine other people that turned out in George Floyd summer that were creating what they call armed patriot groups that would come out for protests.

I call attention to the one in Louisville, Kentucky, where there was a counter-protest, Black Lives Matter. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, 200 armed militiamen take to the streets and they're counter-protesting, wearing camouflage, carrying long rifles. The numbers staggered me. I thought this is not a small militia. This is a militia that has convinced their neighbors and friends to get into camouflage and come out and start being part of the collective Trump insurgency.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, your questions welcome for Malcolm Nance, now the author of, They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet your question for Malcolm Nance @BrianLehrer. What happens, Malcolm, if Trump is not re-elected president in 2024 and he's 76 years old? Let's say he begins to fade from the scene, what happens to the insurgency that had coalesced under the banner of Trump?

Malcolm Nance: I think their loyalty to Trump is undying and shy of him being done in by a robe cheeseburger. I don't think it matters what Donald Trump does, so long as Donald Trump-- you have to understand, this isn't-- people say, "Oh, this is cultism." To a certain extent, it is. It's more tribalist. He is their tribal leader and they don't care what he does. They don't care how he does it.

They love the way that he talks to people, insults people, gets in people's faces. This is what they wanted. They wanted the freedom to remove the word "decency" from their lives. They've always hated the phrase "political correctness," which they call liberalism, which you and I call common decency to our fellow citizens and to our fellow human beings. I keep saying that collective "they," which is the Trump voter, the Trump base, the people who vote for him are no longer conservative. They're Trumpists.

It's about him carrying the mantle of, "We are," as you call it, "a silent majority." They're not a majority by any stretch of the population. The entirety of their voting base is approximately 30% of the American public, but then, again, Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler won the election with 30% of the public and then co-opted another 30% to attempt to mass murder the final 30%.

Small numbers don't mean anything. What's more important here is the fact that so long as Donald Trump has a voice, so long as he is viewed as their icon, their avatar of hatred towards the things that they no longer view these things as an intolerant feeling. They view divine hatred towards many of their fellow American citizens. 99% of what I write in my book does not come from news media sources or Western sources.

It comes from their own mouths, their abject rejection of what they think, what we, you and I, and every other person for the last 245 years think of what the United States should become the better angels. They don't want anything to do with the better angels. They've become an autocratic body, a political body that has now unleashed the belief that they've always had that they should actually be able to confront their fellow American citizens and, through intimidation and force, push their will down on the other 65% of the country.

Brian Lehrer: Janet in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Malcolm Nance. Hi, Janet.

Janet: Good morning. I want to thank Malcolm Nance for-- I know that you were in Ukraine and you were supporting the Ukrainian struggle for their freedom. I want to thank you for that. Also, why are these white supremacist groups so angry?

Malcolm Nance: Thank you also for recognizing what I've been doing in Ukraine. I'm still in Ukraine. I'm going back Friday. I'm a member of the Ukrainian army in the international legion.

Brian Lehrer: What?

Malcolm Nance: Yes, where have you been? [chuckles] We had a big coming-out on Joy Reid's show on April 19th. It was a big secret that I had left MSNBC and joined the Ukrainian army where I fight on the eastern battlefront.

Brian Lehrer: Wait, wait, wait. I have to go one step for-- First of all, how old are you and what's your role in the Ukrainian army?

Malcolm Nance: Well, I'm 60 years old, but I have a broad base of experience. In fact, I passed their commando course at age 60. We go on a daily run and I was not the last one in. Actually, it was a 32-year-old ex-Marine. That's all I wanted to do. What do I do? I'm chief of intelligence for the legion battalion. We do hold a line against the Russians in Eastern Ukraine. I'm a combatant. I carry firearms. I help the Ukrainian army fight the Russian forces.

Brian Lehrer: That's amazing.

Malcolm Nance: It just seems amazing. That is the eastern wall in the defense of democracy. I'm back here to talk about the western wall, which appears to be crumbling.

Brian Lehrer: To Janet's question about why the white supremacists are so angry, what would you say?

Malcolm Nance: I think what you're having here is, essentially, a combined revival of all the political hatred in the United States in the 20th century and somehow found its way into a solid avatar that is Donald Trump. I'm not joking. The third revival of the Klu Klux Klan in the 1920s, you couldn't be a politician in some states unless you were a member of the Klu Klux Klan.

It was so broad that it was throughout the entire Midwest and parts of the Northeast United States. They don't call it the Klan anymore. It's just straight-up white supremacy now. It's white nationalism. What you have is these groups have erased themselves of the violent figures of the past by saying the iconography of the white hood and the burning cross. Oh no. Now, it's MultiCam camouflage and the AR-15.

The antisemitism of the 20th century is raging back now. All of these groups are fundamentally anti-Semites. You might recall the week after the Capitol insurrection, they found a Capitol Hill police officer at his desk at a magnetometer or X-ray machine was reading a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He was not taking a terrorism course. He was not taking a course in violent extremism. He was reading it out of the belief that this was true.

All of those hatreds, the extremism of the 1970s and '80s that brought about Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City trial, this bizarre belief that there would be a day of rage that white men would go into an armed rampage and mass murder, all liberals, Blacks, and Jews in America, which was in William Pierce's book, The Turner Diaries, and the reason Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah building in Oklahoma City, that has been co-opted into QAnon.

That is QAnon along with the blood libel of the medieval era where they say Hillary Clinton and Jews and liberals are drinking the blood of pure white children after kidnapping them in order to gain some chemical. This is, I'm going to use it in technical and intelligence phrase, crazy. It's crazy, but it has all come together. It is now the base of the Republican Party.

They have the energy, the belief, and, like I said, a tribal leader that they are willing to die for. Instead of the Republican leadership thinking, "Oh, I need to be the moderating force here," they look at that armed, angry base and they think, "Yes, I agree with them. I've always agreed with them. I just was held up by decency from saying it." This is where we are going. The insurrection was step one of our future.

Brian Lehrer: Monique in Tarrytown, you're on WNYC with Malcolm Nance. Hi, Monique.

Monique: Hi. Hey, Malcolm, thank you for your work in Ukraine.

Malcolm Nance: My pleasure.

Monique: I am the wife of a US Army officer. I have a daughter in Germany working in the hospitals for the US Army. I have a son who's going to be commissioned soon to be defending the Constitution. I think that people have to realize that the camouflage and there are a lot of really good, hard-working American soldiers and military and officers, first of all. The second thing is I'd like to know how many homicides have these extreme groups-- There's two parts to my question. How many homicides have Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, et cetera, been convicted of? Second part is I'm a native Chicagoan. Of these 347 homicides in Chicago, would you also attribute that to a form of tribalism?

Malcolm Nance: Well, I don't know about the shootings in Chicago. I've been around there. I just think that's attributed to the fact that there are massive quantities of legal and illegal firearms on the street that people can get. When they're angry, they just shoot people. They don't discuss, they don't talk. That's just an American fault line that we have to live with now.

I'm a gun collector by the way. I never take my guns out of the gun safe, unless I'm going to a shooting range to work on proficiency. These people, they're almost like purses and iPhones. Now, with regards to the actual numbers of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, I haven't done a study, but I'm certain the Southern Poverty Law Center has done a study of it. Go to splc.org. They track these people in real-time.

Let me throw in another factor. QAnon, which a lot of people don't understand, there have been murders of family members who would not adhere to the belief that Hillary Clinton was drinking the blood of children. For example, one guy, I believe, in Baja California took his two children out and murdered them because he didn't want them to be captured by liberals. Just insane, but they are violent. What we are seeing is they get to express their violence and practice for their violence at the shooting range and their little beer parties.

We don't do that. When I say "we," I mean the other 70% of America that is not talking about this. We go to work. We go to church. We go to synagogue. We live our lives. We are not planning rebellion, but many of these people are really thinking, "If I have to, I will take arms," because they've now romanticized this bizarre view that they are the owners of America and we are just people in their way from running it properly. When I use the phrase, "in their way," that's not a joke. That's what they think. For many of them, getting us out of the way is through violence.

Brian Lehrer: Jesse in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Malcolm Nance. Hi, Jesse.

Jesse: Hi, I was just asking. Your guest mentioned before, the Boogaloo Boys. I'm just wondering how a group that basically started as one of the oldest internet memes on the internet from 4chan turned into what they are now because Boogaloo is an old internet meme. Basically, it's a Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo based off of Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, and then that's where they got the name from.

The whole Hawaiian shirt thing is because Big Tech cottoned onto Facebook and Twitter cottoned onto Boogaloo promoting civil war. They name-changed it to "big luau" and "big igloo" and that's where the Hawaiian shirts come from. It's just all 4chan nonsense that started from their weapons board, /k/, which just turned into guys larping in the woods as they say. I don't understand how it turned from that into what you have now with people going to protests with AR-15s and that kind of thing. I know 4chan pulled their politically-incorrect board, basically infected everything. It was ironic racism and then it turned to actual racism. I'm just wondering how that all got started.

Malcolm Nance: You know what? The actual origin of this is how Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's political advisor, made his millions. He actually ran a company that weaponized the rewards that you could get from computer gamers, right? If you were doing Call of Duty and you wanted to level up, you could actually purchase a different weapon system on these boards. Lots of young, young men all around the world were doing this. Steve Bannon made his money from running a Chinese company that would play these games, win these awards, and then sell them on the market, right?

A lot of these young men were on these boards. This is one of the few places where we could actually point to gaming having something to do with this. On their Discord chats, these guys were being fed political ideology, especially during the war on terrorism when you're playing games like Call of Duty Tier 1, which is just special operations guys going around shooting Muslims all day. Their anger, angst, and beliefs were being fostered there. Bannon said he was the one who created the term "alt-right," the alternative right, from these very angry young men.

All the things that you said about 4chan, all the tongue-in-cheek phrases that they were using there where the term "Electric Boogaloo," all that came from were jokes that turned into not jokes when these guys started going to the shooting range and started bringing their Call of Duty onto the street with AR-15s, which was that live-action role play with real weapons, real magazines, and identifying with the Hawaiian shirts. Believing that they were going to be able to influence things along with the other militias, that's when it stopped being a game and it started being the place where SWAT teams loaded their own magazines.

Brian Lehrer: Jesse, thank you for your call. Really interesting question. Few minutes left with Malcolm Nance, author now of They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency, and then Neil deGrasse Tyson will join us to talk about those first images from the Webb space telescope. Malcolm, how much at risk do you think the US is with everything you've laid out of an actual civil war?

Not like the 1860s with competing national armies maybe, but maybe more like countries around the world that have armed insurgencies killing each other and attacking the government and civilians alike with your counter-terrorism expertise for all those decades in government. Also, if this is going to go on at this level of intensity as you've been describing from the right, will there be a response from the left militarily?

Malcolm Nance: Well, not from the left. They love to say that liberals don't have guns. Good. None of you should be getting guns, all right? This is not a solution to the problem. I have people confront me on the street, "Malcolm, where should I buy a pistol?" That's just a child-killing machine. Don't even talk like that. We have all the systems and vehicles in place to resolve these issues.

The problem is that if they decide, and "they" being the TITUS, the Trump Insurgency in the United States, and that they want to become an armed collective, they're going to find out what the defense of the Constitution really means because the armed forces of the United States and the National Guard, they do not work for the governors. Like one general in the National Guard who refused to follow orders from the Department of Defense, I believe it was Utah, said, "My commander-in-chief is the governor of my state."

No, it's not, but that's even under threat when the Supreme Court is making rulings about the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, essentially saying states do have rights that are high or above the country. If they decide to do anything, here's how it will manifest itself. First off, I hate the phrase "civil war," but many of them are using that term. Case in point. When I tweeted about this the other day about my book, some guy comes out and says, "That's right. We should start doing this. This is a right-wing, am I right?"

Many of them talk about it all the time. The key phrase they use when they discuss amongst themselves is, "What is our breaking point?" What act or decision in their mind is enough to justify violence? As you see, it was enough that Donald Trump lost an election with his assistance to justify attempting to overthrow the government of the United States, but the defensive barriers held even though the National Guard was late.

The cops were under siege. We had people in government trying to delay the rollout of the National Guard. That won't happen if there's an armed rebellion. An armed rebellion's going to look like this. You're going to have this incident that is precipitated in a red state, but it will likely take place in one of those blue dots in a red state. Good example, Charleston, South Carolina. Giant blue dot in the middle of a bright red state. It will be carried out by someone who wants to do something against liberals.

Then the question is this. When it goes critical, law enforcement will do their job. They will stop whatever violence it is. What if it's something a little more benign like an armed group wants to protest a decision and they take over the state assembly building or the governor's mansion and the governor approves or they take over a national armory? The governor says, "Well, we're not going to intervene to stop that."

There are several states that are poised for that right now. They gain power in the belief that they now are the arbiters of what is right and wrong within the United States. The president of the United States, if it's Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or whomever, will have to make a decision about whether to use force, right? We saw from places like Waco, Texas, where even the minimal use of force pumping in gas led to a mass murder.

These people are a lot more better armed than they were with the militias in the '70s and the '80s. Then what happens when there's a bloodbath? We're just lucky there wasn't a bloodbath on January 6th. The next time, law enforcement may be forced into that. The president may be forced into using lethal force to defend the Constitution, then we are going to see something very special indeed.

Brian Lehrer: A description of the groups arming themselves from the right in America and a possible dystopian future as just described there by long-term counterterrorism expert with the US government, Malcolm Nance, now, amazingly as he described here a few minutes ago, volunteering to fight with the Ukrainian military against Russia and also the author of the new book, They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency. Malcolm, now, I'm more afraid than I was a half-hour ago, but thank you very much for coming on anyway.

Malcolm Nance: [laughs] Well, that's my job. I do it well. I'm sorry that I even had to write this book, but it is a true warning. I warned Bill Morrow on November 6th that this was going to happen. 62 days later, we got the insurrection. I just hope and pray, people read this book and have it around as a user's manual when the worst comes.

Brian Lehrer: Thanks, Malcolm.

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