"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 41

In this episode: Why America's Biggest Terror Threat Is Homegrown

February 12, 2024

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 41

Episode 41: Why America's Biggest Terror Threat Is Homegrown

The January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol was the culmination of political trends in the United States that have festered for decades. And it may be a dress rehearsal for what comes next.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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Peter Bergen: Where were you on January 6th when the Capitol was attacked by thousands of enraged Trump supporters?

Daryl Johnson: I was working at my house. One of my contacts had texted me and said, are you watching TV? I said, “No.” And he said, you better turn it on because our Capitol's under attack. and I turned it on and I never thought that the threat would literally come to the doorstep of our legislators. It was a shocker.

(blurry Capitol Riot sound)

Peter Bergen: And yet you'd predicted something along these lines. more than a decade earlier.

Daryl Johnson: Yeah.

The guy talking about the riot at the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, is named Daryl Johnson. And when he uses the word “shocker,” he's talking about the sort of shock that's not really the same thing as surprise. He's talking about the kind of shock you get from touching a kettle that you've been watching heat up on the stove for a while. You knew it was going to be hot, just maybe not that hot.

Johnson wasn't surprised by the January 6th riot because he predicted the surge in right-wing extremism when he used to work for the US Department of Homeland Security. For most of his career, his job was watching a very specific kettle. He was a senior domestic terrorism analyst for the department tracking the simmering threat of homegrown terrorism. He actually issued a pretty famous report warning about that threat back in 2009. The warning was famous because it outraged Republicans… and the Obama administration officially retracted it. This kind of thing is so rare that experts in right-wing terrorism still talk about it.

Kathleen Belew: Not only did they retract that report, but they also gutted the department that Daryl Johnson worked in.

Jacob Ware: Conservative media got a hold of this report, and it set off a firestorm.

Bruce Hoffman: it was politicized once it was released, and a very prescient intelligence analysis was completely squashed.

In a minute, you'll hear more from those researchers, and you'll hear more about what Daryl Johnson foresaw ... why his findings were suppressed ... and why his story is so emblematic of the problem the United States faces with right-wing extremism today.

Daryl Johnson: That's the frustrating part, seeing these things play out over and over and over, knowing that, there could have been some prevention here if we would have taken the threat seriously years earlier.

For many Americans, the January 6 riot at the US Capitol may have seemed to come out of the blue. In fact, it was the culmination of political trends in the United States that have festered for decades. And it comes with a warning from history about how the politics of the next several years may unfold.

At a time when as many as one in three Americans endorse the view that violence against the government is sometimes justified.... In a moment when tech companies have allowed social media to fan the flames of discord... and during a Presidential election when Donald J. Trump seems to be running once again for the role of Divider-in-Chief…

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country…

Join me in the room with some people who may know more about homegrown American extremism than some of the extremists themselves. You'll hear them explain what's been influencing the decades-long rise of right wing terrorism… How something known as “Great Replacement” theory asserts there is a plot to “replace” White people… how “lone wolves” who are radicalized online are complicating efforts by law enforcement to crack down… and why the January 6th assault on the US Capitol was both a peak of contemporary American White nationalism and, perhaps, a dress rehearsal for what could come next.

Daryl Johnson: Unfortunately, I don't believe that that is the grand finale I think it's the beginning of a new phase,

Kathleen Belew: There are people who see mainstream politics and perhaps authoritarianism or fascism as a really excellent solution. And that's on the table in a way it wasn't before.

I'm Peter Bergen, and this is In the Room.

(Theme music)

You don't meet people every day who can trace the course of their life back to the moment they made a solemn vow. But the guy you heard from at the beginning of this episode, Daryl Johnson, is one of those people. And his decisive turn came in the wake of the most lethal domestic terror attack in American history.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Shattering that building, killing children, killing federal employees, military men, and civilians.

When a racist, anti-government extremist killed 168 people with a truck bomb at the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

ARCHIVAL News Coverage:The bomb, which may have contained the explosive equivalent of 2,000 pounds of dynamite, was apparently driven in a Ryder rental van.

ARCHIVAL News Coverage / Witness: It hurts deep down as to why someone would do something of this magnitude.

Daryl Johnson: The Oklahoma City bombing happened in ‘95. I had just graduated Brigham Young University in Utah and making my way back to start my federal career. I actually stopped in Oklahoma City, a month after the bombing. And, uh, I remember still seeing the makeshift memorial that was there, and it made an impression on me, that I vowed that day that I would devote my life to combating this type of hate and extremism.

Johnson describes himself as a third-generation Republican raised in a conservative but mainstream Mormon household. But he recalls periodically encountering extremist views while growing up.

Daryl Johnson: The very first impression that I remember as a child, about 11 years old, is going into a department store to use the bathroom, and when I went into the men's room and written on the stall was the letters KKK.

Daryl Johnson: And I remember going to my elementary school library and looking it up in the encyclopedia and just being amazed that we had this relic from the Civil War that was still existent in today's society.

He says he encountered extremism more regularly while working as a Mormon missionary in Michigan.

Daryl Johnson: This was the hotbed of militia activity. And I remember coming across white supremacist, pamphlets and tracts as I was proselytizing door to door with the Book of Mormon. I felt like my religious beliefs and the Book of Mormon was competing with these white supremacist literature and militia members that I was meeting.

These encounters during Johnson's youth in the 1990s occurred during a surge of right-wing extremism in the US. Researchers point to several factors that may have provoked rage on the extreme right at the time. An economic recession.....new gun control laws…a Democrat in the White House ... and, significantly, deadly clashes between extremists and federal agents at Ruby Ridge, Idaho and in Waco, Texas.

ARCHIVAL Ruby Ridge Documentary: In both cases, government miscalculation in the arrests of a fanatic ended in gunfire and death.

The Oklahoma City bomber said he’d carried out his attack as revenge for Waco.

Archival Newscaster: The jury in the Oklahoma City bombing trial of Timothy McVeigh returned its verdict: guilty on all charges including 8 counts of first-degree murder. And Gulf War veteran McVeigh showed no emotion when he was found guilty of the act.

Bruce Hoffman: Timothy McVeigh didn't belong to any terrorist group. He was not part of a terrorist command and control apparatus where he was issued orders.

Bruce Hoffman is a professor at Georgetown University and the co-author of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, a new book that traces the roots of right-wing extremism.

Bruce Hoffman: He was a lone actor that got together one, actually, probably two other friends, to carry this out. But he certainly was well versed in the ideology of anti-government extremism, which was prevalent at the time.

This ideology was a toxic brew of racism and grievances against government overreach. But for Timothy McVeigh, a key ingredient was a work of fiction called The Turner Diaries.

Bruce Hoffman: McVeigh initially plotted the Oklahoma City attack to fulfill exactly the mission that The Turner Diaries described, which is to, you know, ignite the spark that will set off this race war and this countrywide revolution.

I actually brought a copy of the book to my interview with Bruce Hoffman and his co-author, Jacob Ware, who's a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Jacob Ware: It's a small book, orange, a few hundred pages, and it's basically a manual for Revolution. It's written in the form of a diary by the protagonist Earl Turner. And he joins this group, they declare war on the US government. It's a race war, and there's several moments in this book, several violent moments, whether it's a bombing of the FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, or a mass hanging of race traitors, which is called the Day of the Rope. And these events have remained in the far right lore in the years that have followed, as sort of being a manual for how to conduct anti-government violence.

Peter Bergen: McVeigh, he was selling this book at gun shows. The book was almost a blueprint for what happened when they blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building, killing 168 people, including a bunch of kids, because there was a daycare center in the building. So there are probably hundreds of thousands of these books out in circulation or —

Bruce Hoffman: It's estimated between 200,000 and half a million copies of it have been sold since 1978.

Peter Bergen: OK. It's been highly influential. The main point of the book is the white race is being overrun. And he actually refers to the Zionist Occupation Government, which is the government that's in charge, so controlled by the Jews. He was the head of the neo-Nazi party in the US and quite a smart guy, he had a PhD, and I met him by the way, I don't know if I ever…

Bruce Hoffman: No, I didn't know that. Oh my gosh.

Peter Bergen: We did the first network, uh, TV interview with him.

ARCHIVAL CNN Interview:

Reporter: ....interview with the author of The Turner Diaries William Pierce.

William Pierce: The Turner Diaries has sometimes been called a blueprint for some of the, uh, violence that we've seen in the past decade in this country.I think that's, that's simply nonsense.

Peter Bergen: I was relatively early in my career, but very interested in terrorism. We went up to his mountain fastness in the middle of West Virginia in the middle of nowhere.

ARCHIVAL William Pierce:I believe that we will have racial and ethnic warfare. The most important idea expressed in The Turner Diaries, uh, is that each person has to stop being a spectator and start being a participant.

Peter Bergen: He was accompanied by his, like, fourth mail order bride, who was from Hungary, who referred to him as sir and he had this sort of James Bond-like set up with a cat that he was stroking, he had two acolytes who were Nazis who were there as his muscle.

Bruce Hoffman: Well, I'm tremendously impressed. I don't know anyone who's interviewed Osama Bin Laden and also probably the leading intellectual cynosure of white supremacism and Neo-Naziism in America.

Bruce Hoffman: He said, I can just reach a limited number of people with my hateful, turgid, didactic propaganda. He said the way to reach people is by writing a novel and by fictionalizing, this clarion call to overthrow the United States democratically elected government and put in place this, this white supremacist order.

In the early days after it was first published, The Turner Diaries mostly spread by mail or by being passed hand to hand. Today, social media can spread ideas at the speed of a click. And Individuals with grievances can find instant community online.

Bruce Hoffman: Two of the biggest trends in terrorism in the 21st century was the development precisely of lone wolf or lone actor types of attacks encouraged in facilitating by an overarching ideology and also the use of computers as a means of recruitment and radicalization. And this all emerged late 1983, early 1984 from someone named Louis Beam, who was a Vietnam veteran helicopter door gunner who did two tours in Vietnam, came back to Texas and was appalled at the boat people, immigrants from Vietnam who were coming, became Grand Dragon of the Texas Ku Klux Klan and launched all sorts of protests and even attacks on immigrants, but then gravitated into being the central strategist and ideologue, proposing “leaderless resistance,” which is what he called lone wolf attacks, because the FBI was infiltrating very effectively and very successfully, these terrorist groups and undermining them.

So he said, rather than have these hierarchical, command and control apparata, let's just encourage brush fires throughout the United States. Which is exactly what Timothy McVeigh embraced, that hopefully would come together eventually into one gigantic conflagration and achieve this race war and revolution that Pierce wrote about.

Again and again when people talk about fomenting a race war… they’re usually responding to something called Great Replacement theory, which is the idea that whites are being replaced by nefarious forces.

Jacob Ware: Great Replacement Theory emerged in France in the 2000s and it's a European far-right conspiracy theory that argues that there is an ongoing replacement of white, Western, masculine Christianity, by immigration, Black political power, LGBTQ rights, feminism.

Jacob Ware: When the Turner Diaries writes about Zionist Occupation Government, and writes about requiring a race war, that is appealing to Great Replacement theory as well. So this conspiracy theory is not something that's emerged in this latest wave, it's actually fundamental to far right extremism and terrorism at its very core.

Researchers like Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware are saying that these lone actors don't just emerge from the void. There's ground that they spring from. And there are factors that can make that ground more fertile for right-wing extremism. They become agitated by federal leaders or policies that seem to lean left. They are dismayed by sudden social change that is at odds with conservative norms. And — maybe most importantly — they absorb toxic ideologies that help focus their grievances.

And here's where I want to take you back to the story of Daryl Johnson. He's the guy from the beginning of our episode who vowed to fight extremism after seeing the bombed-out Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Daryl Johnson: I was very conservative myself. I was a Mormon. I have family members in the military. And I oppose a lot of these issues that the far right also opposes. But, still I could set aside my own biases, my own personal beliefs, and call out the threat for what it is.

Johnson spent more than a decade monitoring right-wing extremists, first for the US Army and later the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. By 2004, he was the senior domestic terrorism analyst at the Department of Homeland Security. In some ways he chose a more complicated task than going after international terrorists. Because until they break the law, domestic terrorists have all the rights and protections of American citizens.

Daryl Johnson: a lot of times people are deterred from going into this line of work because you have to have these delicate things that you have to maneuver around.

Peter Bergen: It's a lot easier to put somebody in jail because they're trying to join ISIS or they're sending money to ISIS, but it's much harder, on the domestic front because supporting or being part of the Ku Klux Klan or the Three Percenters or the Proud Boys is protected by the First Amendment, is that correct?

Daryl Johnson: Yeah, and this is a delicate balance—

Peter Bergen: After 9/11, I started tracking lethal terrorist attacks. I began with jihadist terrorists and then I added right-wing terrorism at the research institution I work at. You know, there was a fair amount of pushback at the time that if you were tracking right wing terrorism, which was killing people, far right terrorism, that somehow you were underplaying the jihadist threat.

Daryl Johnson: Yeah, I mean, I got that in my federal career. I was actually the lone analyst at DHS, for the first year, looking at this topic. I kind of felt like I was the alibi. You know, the DHS leadership could say, ‘Hey, we — we’re looking at all threats,’ even though there was only one looking at non-Muslim threats.

Daryl Johnson: But I was there basically to say, ‘Hey, you know, we're not racially profiling Muslims. We got, analysts looking at, non-Muslim terrorism.’ And so it wasn't until I started, complaining that there was so much work to be done and one person couldn't handle it all, I finally got a few contractors to help me with that effort.

And it was after this team was assembled that Johnson began working on the project that landed him in so much trouble.

Daryl Johnson: So this story began in January of 2007 when I received a phone call from the U. S. Capitol Police basically asking me and my team to monitor extremist message boards and websites for any type of chatter related to Barack Obama announcing his candidacy for president. But it got me thinking, because when I heard Barack Obama speak for the first time, he sounded very presidential. And I told my team, I was like, ‘What if an African American, such as Barack Obama, actually became President of the United States? What would that do to the threat landscape?’

Johnson and his team put together a report for law enforcement agencies warning that conditions in the United States were looking like they were very conducive to the rise of right-wing extremism. The country had just gone through the worst economic recession in decades...and voters had again put a Democratic President in the White House. This time the first Black American to hold that job.

Daryl Johnson: It was a unique combination of the downturn in the economy following the housing bubble. And then couple that with the unprecedented election of the first African American president. I remember as a young teen going into bookstores and finding racially charged joke books and them talking about how, you know, if America had reached its lowest point would be when a Black person occupied the White House, in their words. It was like a fulfillment of their worst nightmare. And it would provide recruiting grounds for white supremacy to thrive.

As Obama took office, proposals for new gun restrictions were being floated – the sort of policy that could encourage gun enthusiasts to start stockpiling weapons and ammunition. And, once again, a generation of veterans was coming home from war in the Middle East. Johnson's analysts were concerned that right-wing extremists would try to recruit and radicalize returning veterans because the veterans' military skills could prove useful to groups looking to carry out violence.

Daryl Johnson: The conclusion was the threat landscape was changing and you better be prepared, devoting your resources and shifting your funding to combat this issue alongside the threat from Al Qaeda. That was a big message to send at the time. Because pretty much the entire U.S. counterterrorism efforts were focused exclusively on Al Qaeda both overseas and within the homeland here.

Peter Bergen: Before the report was widely publicized, did you get any pushback from your higher ups at the Department of Homeland Security about the content of the report?

Daryl Johnson: No, in fact, you know, we got a lot of positive feedback.

Peter Bergen: What about the Obama administration writ large?

Daryl Johnson: Myself and the FBI personally briefed Janet Napolitano face to face, about the findings…Janet Napolitano was totally pleased with it. I left that office thinking that, you know, I had done my job and I'd done it well. And that was the very first time I'd ever briefed a secretary level official. And then three days later, once the report was leaked, all hell broke loose in the office.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is facing a storm of protests over her department's view on domestic terrorism.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Critics say the Department of Homeland Security document unfairly paints military vets as right wing extremists.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Veterans who pledged their lives to defend the United States were especially stunned.

The political firestorm around the report became so intense that to douse it, the Obama administration did something quite unusual for a government report. It officially retracted it, not because the report was wrong, but because it had pissed off so many powerful people on the right.

Daryl Johnson: When I came in the office, there was a lot of chaos. The Ops Center had been bombarded with a phone blitz — congressional staff calling, wanting to know the sourcing that had gone into the report.

Then we got inundated with a bunch of FOIA requests. And so this went on for weeks and months. And management said, look, let's just temporarily shut it down. And then once this controversy blows over, we'll reconstitute the effort, put you guys back out on the road and you can get back to writing and doing your analysis.

Daryl Johnson: Well, that was just a cover story I later found out, so that they could restructure, reassign us. And totally do away with the domestic terrorism unit that I had led. And then they went even further and tried to retaliate against us on our performance appraisals.

My wife and I would talk about it and I remember breaking down and crying because I was so stressed. The whole experience was life changing for me. And it took a personal toll on me as well.

Peter Bergen: It must have. I mean, at what point did you say enough is enough?

Daryl Johnson: It didn't take long for me to see the handwriting on the wall. About a month after this leak had happened, they had actually had a, congressional hearing about the funding for DHS, and Janet Napolitano was there, and of course, about midway through that hearing, they started I guess, interrogating her about this right wing extremism report, and they were calling for my firing and stuff like that. That's when I called my analysts together and said, ‘Hey, we need to be looking for new jobs.’

Daryl Johnson wasn't the only researcher to be criticized for pointing out that right-wing extremist groups have historically targeted military veterans for recruitment.

Kathleen Belew: I remember I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times saying, the history shows us that there is this strong correlation between veterans and heavy involvement with these groups. I also received, like, intense blowback to that piece.

That's Kathleen Belew. She's a history professor at Northwestern University, who specializes in right-wing extremism. And she's the author of the book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.

Kathleen Belew: The takeaway was, oh, you're calling veterans terrorists. Which is not at all what I think Daryl Johnson or I was saying. I think we were saying that, if you want to tell a story about the group of Vietnam veterans, like as a historical class of actors, you would never say like, oh yeah, they were white power terrorists, right?

Kathleen Belew: This is a, white power terrorism is a, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of that overall story. However, if we want to tell the story of the white power movement, there is a large percentage of that that is Vietnam veterans. So we do have to account for that tie.

Kathleen Belew: More than any other factor that historians have looked at as being a motivator for a surge in racist violence, more than poverty or immigration or civil rights gains, the big predictor for when there is a huge surge in membership in the Klan and similar groups is the aftermath of combat.

Peter Bergen: Why is that, do you think?

Kathleen Belew: Well, this is the big question. At the beginning, I wondered if we were talking about a sort of a Rambo story where this is simply traumatized people coming back and continuing their violence at home. But it turns out that in the sociological literature, it's not just veterans who are more violent after warfare, it's everybody.

Kathleen Belew: Those violence numbers peak after warfare, not only among veterans, but among elderly people, among women, among children, all of our measures of violence in our societies go up after warfare.

Kathleen Belew: All of us are more available for violent activity after warfare. These groups, which are opportunistic, have figured out how to mobilize around that phenomenon.

Because right-wing extremists in the US have embraced a leaderless structure, and because there are so many flavors and factions, it can be easy to lose sight of them as representing a single problem. But Belew and others say these groups ground themselves in the common ideological bedrock of white supremacy. And, according to the FBI, racially motivated violent extremists now make up the bulk of their domestic terrorism cases.

ARCHIVE Newscaster: Horrifying news coming out of Charleston as reports are coming in of a shooting at one of the oldest AME churches in all of the South…

On June 17, 2015, for instance, Dylan Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist, gunned down nine Black parishioners attending a church bible study in Charleston South Carolina. On August 3, 2019, another 21-year-old white man shot and killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, after posting a manifesto that described his motive as the quote unquote “Hispanic invasion.”

ARCHIVE Newscaster: He allegedly showed up at the Walmart armed and with a grudge detailed in a manifesto he reportedly wrote and posted on an extremist website….

And in May 2022, a racist terrorist killed 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo in a predominantly Black neighborhood.

ARCHIVE Newscaster: The alleged shooter wearing full body armor and tactical gear, targeting people of color.

Kathleen Belew says all these attacks are best understood as being part of what she calls the white power movement.

Kathleen Belew: When we're talking about the white power movement, it is really sort of an amalgam of different ideas and groups and people into one cohesive social network. So it includes Klansmen, skinheads, militiamen, radical tax resistors, Christian identity proponents and others. They are sharing money. They're sharing weapons. People move between groups, people are often in multiple groups or ideologies at the same time.

Peter Bergen: We often hear about lone wolf, or some people talk about lone actors. And what you're saying, I think, is that, basically, that that kind of terminology isn't that helpful in a world where everybody's on the internet. You can find like-minded individuals almost immediately and be corresponding with them or being influenced by them, just as in school shootings, school shooters tend to be very influenced by Columbine or other school shootings. You also see this in right wing, far right wing terrorism, is what you're saying.

Kathleen Belew: Sort of, except I think the key difference is that this is not just about copycat crime, which is what's happening with Columbine. You know, it's a real statement about the age that we're living in that we have to distinguish between different kinds of mass shootings. But school shootings tend not to be politically and ideologically driven in the same way.

Kathleen Belew: Whereas white power shootings are targeted, they are ideological, they are socially networked, and they are connected to the other parts of white power mobilization in the present. Like January 6th, like Proud Boys showing up at Drag Story Hour, people showing up at Pride parades with weapons. And like the underground stuff that we really can't see very well in real time, but we know from this history is happening. We see snippets of things that, you know, when I see this attack on the power grid stations, these are attacks with high caliber weapons, and they've called in the FBI and ATF and then they don't tell us what happened.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: A Florida neo-Nazi leader and a Maryland woman have been arrested by federal authorities on charges that they plotted to attack energy facilities in the Baltimore area..

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: deliberate shootings last December at two substations in Moore County, North Carolina. That attack turned the lights out for days for roughly 45,000 people.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: ...with attacks reported in a number of different states prompting warnings from the FBI.

Kathleen Belew: I am very suspicious that in 20 years we will find out that that was part of a coordinated infrastructure attack. All of these pieces not being together in the story is the long legacy of leaderless resistance.

The much more catastrophic impact of leaderless resistance has been that it erased our sense of this as a movement. This is when we get the idea of the quote unquote lone wolf gunman. This is when we get the idea of the individual bad apple actor that shapes our societal response to white power in the United States. And this is still our predominant mode of understanding and talking about mass violence of this movement when it happens.

This was often exactly how Timothy Mcveigh’s attack in Oklahoma City was described — as the epitome of lone wolf violence.

Kathleen Belew: We read about the Buffalo mass shooting as anti-Black violence. The Tree of Life synagogue shooting is anti-Semitic violence, the El Paso Walmart shooting as anti-Latinx violence — I'm picking just a few examples of many of these attacks.

Kathleen Belew: Those are different kinds of violence with particular histories of their own, but they are also all white power violence. These are gunmen who are, in many cases, socially connected, if not ideologically connected; they are cutting and pasting each other's manifestos. I learned through our university's excellent plagiarism detection software — I tried one time and they are literally taking each other's stuff. What might it look like if those impacted communities realize that they're all being attacked by the same thing, right? Like these are not isolated incidents.

Belew is saying that, in the age of the internet, the so-called lone wolf, white power gunman is rarely acting alone. He's part of a rag-tag, leaderless crusade that organizes and reorganizes itself under different factions or flags. But — at the core — this crusade believes in the same ideas, reads the same scripture, and fundamentally agrees about which members of the American family ought to be driven out of public life, or even killed.

Kathleen Belew: This is not a thing where, like, you've cut the head off the snake. At the very best, this is a hydra that will reform and come out somewhere else.

Peter Bergen: Well, so what does the hydra look like in 2024, and particularly as we get closer to the election and also after the election?

Kathleen Belew: The alarming thing about our present moment from where I'm sitting is that in the 1980s, the last time this movement decided to pursue mass casualty violence and armed revolution. They did that because they believed that the door to politics was closed. In the present moment, the door to politics is wide open. We have Proud Boys, ascending the ranks of the GOP, especially at the local level in places like Florida.

Those lines are no longer stark between mainstream politics and the radical fringe. My guess is that there are also people who see mainstream politics and perhaps authoritarianism or fascism as a really excellent solution. And that's on the table in a way it wasn't before.

Peter Bergen: Where were you on January 6th, and what did you think, as it was happening?

Kathleen Belew: There's no amount of reading and studying and thinking about what an event like that might look like that prepares you for actually seeing it happen in real time. You can watch and you can pick out the white power activists they're the ones with the tactical vests and the walkie talkies. They're the ones who very likely erected the gallows outside of the Capitol so that people could take selfies. That is a direct reference to the Turner Diaries and a Day of the Rope event in that book where politicians are systematically executed.

Kathleen Belew: The Turner Diaries also has an attack on the Capitol in it that is not a mass casualty event but is a show of power attack like the January 6th insurrection was. To me, you watch and it's absolutely clear what we're looking at.

Mostly on January 6th, the organized neo Nazis and fascist groups and far right groups did not show up with their swastikas and their Confederate flags. They mostly showed up with their militia stuff, the symbols that you need to know a little bit more to understand are far right symbols.

Peter Bergen: Like what?

Kathleen Belew: So the Gadsden Purchase flag is the big one. That's the don't tread on me snake flag. Various kinds of camo fatigue and paramilitary accouterments I think is what I would say.

Peter Bergen: As you know, there've been, you know, over a thousand arrests, and there've been a number of successful seditious conspiracy cases.

Peter Bergen: Some of the sentences have been 22 years, you know, long sentences. Do you think that that had some kind of deterrent effect against what you describe as a movement, it's sort of like a big melange, but do you think that that has had a preventive effect, all these arrests?

Kathleen Belew: Because we’re in an audio medium, I just want to say that the thing that you were just doing with your hands where you're kind of gesturing at this big, messy landscape of boiling turmoil is absolutely right. And the thing that you didn't say, but that is absolutely right, too, is that also nobody's in charge, right? This is a competing mess of ideologies and people and wills and like motivations. Nobody is in charge. So convicting a few people is not going to slow it down. Especially when the narrative is about state overstep and the need to resist.You know, you can't unring the bell of the internet. You can't get hate speech off the internet. They have been on the internet since 1983. They're not going anywhere.

It's worth taking a moment to talk a little bit about the proportion and scale of this threat. I helped put together an analysis for New America, the research institution where I work. And we found that since 9/11, more than 130 Americans have been killed by far-right terrorists. About 100 were killed by jihadist terrorists. And one was killed by a far-left terrorist. The political orientation of the killers is pretty clear.

In a country of about 330 million people, the raw numbers can sound small. Yet the threat of terrorism has an impact far beyond any immediate body count. In the book God, Guns and Sedition, the co-authors Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware have a line likening the threat to a drop of cyanide in drinking water. In our interview, Jacob Ware explained it really well.

Jacob Ware: One of the important things to remember about terrorism, I think, is terrorism usually is not about the victims of the attack. It's about the audience. So when Dylan Roof walks into that church in Charleston and kills nine worshippers, it's not about them. It's about every other Black person in America that's ever going to go into a church, ever again. That's the person who the message is directed to. So it's really hard to have a functioning multiracial democracy that's going to thrive if you're having these kinds of incidents that are targeted from one group against another with the message that you are not welcome here. That's the cyanide I think that far right terrorism is in American society.

Daryl Johnson: These groups are going to continue to thrive.

Daryl Johnson left the US Department of Homeland Security, but he hasn't given up on that promise he made to keep fighting against hate groups.

Daryl Johnson: These people believe we've already crossed from a rhetorical civil war to now an actual physical violent civil war.

Peter Bergen: The FBI Director Christopher Wray has repeatedly said publicly and in congressional testimony, the primary threat is from domestic terrorism, which really is a shorthand for far right extremist terrorism. I mean, when you see these, this kind of testimony, are you vindicated? What’s your reaction?

Daryl Johnson: I don't get any satisfaction in knowing that I had accurately predicted a threat. I was just doing my job. I'm just happy that they finally came around to recognize this threat and to develop a national strategy to combat it, because it's taken, over a decade of, the body count, continuing to increase for them to finally recognize this.

There is considerable discussion in the US today about the possibility of a civil war. Certainly, political violence is very much part of the American story—a country born in a revolution and forged in a civil war. More recently, during the 1970s, left-wing terrorists—the Weather Underground and even violent Puerto Rican nationalists carried out numerous terrorist attacks in the US.

But personally, I don’t see the US headed for a civil war. There were more than a thousand arrests after the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. And that had a demonstration effect that the Department of Justice will enforce the rule of law. And we haven’t seen any large-scale civil disturbances by Trump supporters since then, while some of the organized groups that fomented the riot like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers have seen their leaders go to prison, often for lengthy terms.

That said, we are in for a year that‘s likely to be one the most contentious in American politics. And while we are unlikely to see a rerun of January 6th… the seeds of violence carried out by radicalized lone actors are already likely being sown right now. So, while history may not repeat itself exactly, it may well rhyme.

If you’re interested in some of the issues and stories that we discussed in this episode, recommend the following books: Hateland: A Long, Hard Look at America's Extremist Heart by Daryl Johnson and Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America by Kathleen Belew. Both are available on Audible.

And we also recommend, God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America by Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware.

CREDITS:

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA

This episode was produced by Erik German

With help from Holly DeMuth.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

Our staff also includes

Alexandra Salomon

Laura Tillman

Luke Cregan