Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome back to The Takeaway, I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. I want to take a listen to part of the first episode of a new podcast called American Terror. It exposes domestic terror groups in the US.

Speaker 2: That was energized as many of our people were by Donald Trump's campaign.

?Ben Makuch: The phone's on speaker, so I'm trying to be as quiet as I can. If any of these neo-Nazis find out that I'm listening, it would blow the infiltrators cover and my access.

Speaker 2: Would you also feel comfortable in the training and firearms?

Speaker 4: What is your religious?

Melissa Harris-Perry: What you heard there is from the first episode and it's a harrowing account of the infiltrator, an informant who's gotten inside the neo-Nazi group known as The Base. The Base intends to start a race war and overthrow the government and this conversation took place during a conference call with the group.

I sat down with Ben Makuch host of American Terror and an extremism reporter for Vice News, I wanted to know how Ben thinks about extremism.

Ben Makuch: I actually was a reporter that focused more closely on groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda and I covered the rise of ISIS, all the way into the 2016, 2017 years. Around that time, I started to notice that in much the same ways that these types of jihadist organizations were creating ideologies and having martyrs and whole histories that they would refer to, and had the chat rooms and the social media infrastructure to radicalize themselves and to organize, I saw that coming from the white nationalist, white supremacist space, but it was all emanating from the US. For me and other people that I've worked with Vice, we noticed this rise a lot earlier than a lot of other organizations had. It was very much downplayed as something that was not particularly violent, but of course, as the election of Donald Trump came to the equation, you started seeing this rise of the far right.

I would say not so much that it wasn't there before he was there, but I think that there was certainly a popularizing of it and I think that there was a weaponizing. It takes us all the way to now we're staring at the midterm elections that are coming and I think there's a lot of extremism that's happened in the last couple years. Without even having to mention it, Jan. 6 is very much in the minds of a lot of Americans.

Melissa Harris-Perry: On the one hand, you're telling a story that is rooted very much in this contemporary moment, but the work that you're doing in American Terror is grounding this historically. Walk me through a bit of the historical narrative that you're telling us.

Ben Makuch: Whenever America goes through these extreme moments of war, we often see the rise of white nationalism and white supremacism. If you look at something like right after the Civil War, we had the formation of the Ku Klux Klan and this was done predominantly through Confederate Veterans who came back and founded these organizations, but also, World War I fueled the membership of the Klan and it happens again after World War II. Then most specifically where we really pick up on, is right after the Vietnam War and how that experience very much changes the far right terrorist movement and makes it look a lot more like what we see today.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What is it that was either innovated or became different around white supremacist extremism after the war in Vietnam?

Ben Makuch: The big thing is that the Vietnam War was this not only a massive amount of people were involved in fighting it, but the sheer horror of the violence and the technological level of the violence, made this probably the first real modern war that we know of today when we refer to war.

Also, they were fighting this insurgent force in the Viet Cong. These were people that were not dressed in soldiers uniforms, these were local population. It was a racialized war in the ideas of many Americans, they saw Vietnam as this war against other people, so that changed the way the perception of it was.

I think most of all when they came back, the idea of something like the KKK and its ideas of wearing hoods and burning crosses, it's a lot of showmanship. There's something to it that's not very militaristic, that's not very modern, and it's very obvious what you're doing. They traded in those robes for the military fatigues and to look more like an insurgency here in America. Then from all those points I mentioned, we see a real rise in anti-government far right rhetoric, so seeing the government as the enemy.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I guess the part of what I find surprising about that is twofold, one especially in Vietnam, but even in wars prior Black service members, Latino service members, for these veterans, the return from war is often an initiation point of social movement activity towards equity. I also just want to be sure, that the vast majority of US service people and veterans are never engaged in extremism, but the extremism is always precisely that, extreme and relatively narrow group?

Ben Makuch: Absolutely, the vast majority of veterans and service people are not extremists, and do not engage in extremist activities. This is something we make very clear in the podcast, but when they do, they play outsized roles in these extremist movements.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Let's come to January 6th, and part of what you say as a distinction this moment is the ways that extremist language has now become part of mainstream media discourse. Can can you say more here?

Ben Makuch: As someone who's reported on this for so many years, there were things that I saw in the doldrums of neo-Nazi chats. Now, this is something that I see Tucker Carlson regurgitating on nightly news in the most popular broadcast television show in the US. I think it is a fact that the GOP has outright adopted some of the language, so seeing that has been possibly the most troubling thing that I've experienced because it says that certain strands of broad-based American society are okay with that, and I think that that's really dangerous.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Help us to understand how as a journalist, you can reasonably and responsibly report on these issues without simply providing a platform to the most hateful and a potentially violent and dangerous aspects?

Ben Makuch: When you're reporting on these groups you have to have a conversation about how much you're going to be doing their work of advertising them. This is something that is inevitable with extremism reporting, but you have to understand why and what is the public value in you talking about these groups.

Now, for me, I focused very sharply on neo-Nazi accelerationist terrorist groups. These were groups who stated goal was to create all-white states through acts of violence to hasten the collapse of the US government and create a white ethnostate in its ashes. These groups were a public national security threat and to me, it was important to report on them.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Ben Makuch is host of the podcast American Terror from Gimlet and Vice News.

[music]

[00:07:37] [END OF AUDIO]

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.