James Carville, Kevin Kruse, Julian Zelizer & Kathleen Belew

new book, myth America. We talked to Kathleen Blue, author of Bring the War Home, the White Power Movement, and Paramilitary America. But first we have the legendary democratic strategist and Pod favorite James carve All. Welcome to Fast Politics. James Carvall, Well you'd like to be here, Well, thank you. I had to talk to you because it just was like too insane. I mean, is this disarray? James Carville. First thing was all the speculation of what the post

Trump Republican Party would look like. We now see it. Welcome to the post Trump Republican body, which, if you think about it, Trump made the adult in the rock unbelievable. These clowns start like Brent Scrollcroff but you know Jim Baker, who had come back in through the door again, Well, guess what you know? And it's really funny, is you see what the Democrats had a four vote majority and what Nancy Pelosi did with it. Watched these people with

the majority. Didn't tell me which party is more discippline at, which party is more organized? So McCarthy didn't have the votes. This morning, everyone went down to a basement together to try to bully each other into getting the votes to Republicans. They came up, they were even more piste at McCarthy. They gave speeches. MATD. Gates is like, no way, Lauren Boberts. She says, I will only do this if there's a one person motion to vacate. Is there any historical precedent

for having a speakership that hinges on? One member of your insane caucus came from fire in ninety three, and even I wasn't around at nineteen, the three may Not party historian of the House. It's really amazing the disintegration of the entire party. You know, we thought, I thought it just become like a personality code. But now Trump has gone in. I mean, he's done. I mean, it's I'm very comfortable talking about him in the past tense. But there's no undepending of the Republican Party. And I

grew up in politics. They were for low attacks, is, less regulation and strong national defense, and then it was just always the default position. Doesn't even pretend that anymore. A lot of a pro Russia in a sense that a political adherents, of leaders of a political party and its followers ascribed to some philosophical undepending other than just rage and resentment. It's just where they are just a back mean not I'm not giving you democratic talking points.

It's just everybody kind of knows it, even the Republicans know it, but there's no way out of it. It seems like the House is in it much worse than the Senate, like the House has. You know, they are a cult of personality without the personality to some extent, that's correct. And you know McConnell's has some lemporage from just look at the fight with him and Rick Scott. Generally, this has been a pretty well disciplined political party. I mean, it was an old line that deals you heard it

when you were young. There's Democrats fall in love Republicans fall in line. Well, I mean it's I think what's happened is the party has just disintegrated at warp speed. I just thought history had a kind of an arc. You had these things that happened and in over a period time, and it went like an eighty degrees down. Didn't take much. But it does seem to me like McCarthy had decided to do the vote without knowing they had the votes. I mean that seems like an unforced error.

How could you not do the vote? You can't conduct business without a speaker, right, you could wait until you had the votes. I mean, if you don't have the votes, right, do you know how long can you wait? Do you think that these people are Andy Biggs are born both but martually interested in policy. You know they're loving this. I mean all they care about is somebody social media follows that have much money there. Their fundraising is probably spiked.

It doesn't even cross their mind. I mean, you definitely are seeing Democrats look pretty good in this whole thing, right, even if you have well, yeah, compared to that, right, I mean, but no, you have fractions. It's a big tent party. You have people in the Democratic Party who are more left and more right. Yeah, the Democrats are coalition, and you know coalitions can be uncomfortable, but they're not

a coalition. It used to be had, you know, main street Republicans, and you had national security Republicans, and you had limited government Republicans, and you had low regulations. It's none of that. It's all gone, that's all of the past tests. You just have a party of just seating resentment and that you've seen the result of it. Do you think that this is because Republicans have been too interested in their base. It's a base obsession. You understand

what happened in the last election. Models would cause the Republicans not to have the year that that everybody was on fire saying they were going to have is Republicans. I think that that like seven percent of self identified Republicans voting Democratic with two of self identified Democrats voted Republicans. And also, contrary to every historical president, there was independence broke for Democrats. That they're in a hamlet because they base, they have to be fed a constant diet of stunts

and resentments. If you think about little republic policies become it's just stunts they're sending migrants to Washington or Cape Cod or whatever they sent them, and the slavery not teaching. Yeah, I mean, it's just one stunt after another. And the problem with being a party of stunts, you have to keep pulling off stunts. People need more. Then you run out of ideas, so you just keep doing crazy shit. It's just it's what it is. There's nothing at the

bottom of the whole thing that that's my point. Yeah, no, I mean I think that's right. And like in Republicans decided not to have a policy platform, and that the policy platform was Trump, I mean, right, and from there they went from once, you know, denying the election of January six. You know, this is the January the Third insurrection that we're watching right now. It's true it's non violent,

but it's still violent. Really, right, there's no place they can go that they all kind of have some ideological commonality. There's just none of that anymore. I don't even know. I'm party of scholar Republican Party, but you know, you would have all this Ross Dohart and Brett Stevens and you know, the post Republican Party, Well you got it. But so here's a question. I mean, they can just

keep voting forever. I mean, they can just keep voting until enough people fall out so that theoretically someone gets a speaker. I mean there's another scenario where McCarthy doesn't get it. I mean it seems like right now, McCarthy and you had Marjorie Taylor Green. Yeah, she's the moderate, right, she's whipping the vote the Jewish space lasers woman. That's right. We choose a very powerful and Jim Jordan's also is

whipping votes for McCarthy. Here's a man who think eight Ohio state wrestlers said he knew exactly what was going on there would being molested. I mean really, I mean Lauren Bobert Google Lauren met Jason right, well, no, and Lauren Bobert, who barely won her re election she won by seven hundred points. I mean, when she's just enraged at McCarthy. But here's a question for you. Here's this House. It's a very slim majority they won by winning these

kind of purple e districts. If Republicans were focused, which I don't think they are, on re election, on keeping the House, they would need to do popular legislation. But they don't have any popular legislation. Think of George Santos. All right, you're Jewish, I'm Catholic. We don't we're not very much into God having kind of coded messengers. But the evangelical say, you know, James, God works in mysterious ways, and he sends messengers periodically to express his displeasure. And

I think that God, you gotta be understand. Maybe they're right, and maybe God wanted to just demonstrate the other rot that's a modern Republican party has become, and his messager was George Santos. Who a human could not think of a more perfect reflection of what that party has become than George Santos. Maybe they're right. You got to admit he's a messenger from some kind of divine origin because a human couldn't make him up. I think that's right. I mean, we don't even know if his real name

is George Santos. I've seen it reporting that says he doesn't want to be called by that name. I don't know. I don't even know if he knows. I don't think that's his purpose. I think his purpose is to just demonstrate what this whole thing has become. He is. He is the perfect modern Republican. Yeah, there really is no I think so too. So now we are in this Republican party, what should Democrats be doing right now? Well, the House semocrosses, but exactly they should be joined to

vote for hockey. They have a four vote majority. I don't think there's much legislatively that we're gonna be able to get done. I would continue to support Ukraine with everything that we got. I think that's utterly essential. And there's one great form as opportunity we've had and got news lin And how are you going to get into the headlines if they have to give up? You have a motion to vacate the speakership. But understand what that means.

At any time five Republicans can get rid of the speak of on a on a limb because all the Democrats will go on with it. This is just keep poor and keressing because they keep playing with matches. I mean, do you think there's a world in which these few moderates who want to get re elected go and you know eventually put themselves together with the McCarthy is not going to win the second vote. There's already seventy eight mccauthy, certified,

Jeffers ten others. So un thus they change. Now what they can do as you watching this is they can't abstain because you need a majority of those voting. You don't need to a team. So I'm just watching. Actually I'm watching box because I figure if there's any breaking news and get it first, it's true. So we're gonna watch this. This is going to come out tomorrow. We're gonna have either a McCarthy speakership or a more likely protracted speakership. Battle that goes on. But nobody can do

anything until there is a House speaker. But they can do anything anyway. It's gonna pass anything that's gonna pask this in it. So at least we get some entertainment out of doing nothing. It gives us something to do and I can keep the screen. Note I don't even need sound. So you think ultimately this is a popcorn situation for all parties involved. I think popcorn connotes that that you enjoying it. I'm not sure that professional Republicans

are terribly enjoying this. Now they're not. We are in this one eight in the Congress. They will eventually have to deal with I guess they won't have to deal with the debt ceiling for a year, right, I think it's September, but I'm not sure. Yeah, So, I mean, ultimately, for now they can just fight with each other. They're not compasses anything that will pass the Senate. They're not compass to anything that's going to get the president signature.

I mean, you know, of course they can negotiate continuing resolutions and things like that, because you know, and you've got I think it's eighteen and don't hold me to the exact thing Republicans who represented districts at Biden carried.

My guess is, and I'm not a very good seer or prognosticative future polls, but I think the image of the party is going to have to take a hit here after whatever happens after this, and some of these people start addictioning them, and they'll start alignment in, pointing fingers and saying it's not my father's fo that's gonna happen. You were a big part of Clinton world. Are you surprised that there's been so much bipartisan legislatation over the

last two years. I'm surprised that people don't realize how much it is. But yeah, there has been and let me say this present Clinton Obama. They came in with huge majorities, right, I think they did some some remarkable things that. Don't get me wrong. What's happened here in the Biden would hardly be any majority to speak of, is pretty remarkable. And there is a certain segment of the Republicans that kind of like doing things, but they're

not many of them in the House. I think that bipartisanship is pretty interesting and almost surprising, you know that. You know, we've seen an infrastructure bell, We've seen all of this, even like the Chips legislation, good claim funding, right, defensive marriage. I mean yes, but that remember Democrats had a four boat majority and you could you know, some Republican sences wanted to go along with that. That's not the way the world exists now, right, It'll be interesting

to see. So last here we are, we'll see how it plays out. I'm not going to ask you to predict something in knocus. When's the last time you remember a knockdown, drag out fight for a party chair even the last time you even remember an election for a party chair? All Right, they're like killing each other over that, right, Well, the RNC chair. I mean you've got RONA. McDaniel and and then my pillow guy is running and as somebody else. Yeah, no, I mean it's interesting to me that they've lost three

elections with Trump and they're blaming everyone but Trump. They're just as stupid as they ever been. I've said it before, you know, I would say it again. Maybe their problem is they have low quality voters, and low quality voters are going to produce low quality people that are going to produce low quality events. Maybe that's the problem. I'm serious. They are not quality people that are deciding who the candidates are. I'm sorry. So you think that ultimately Republicans

have a low quality voter problem. I think Darian is the bug and in the process take stoopid people that voted their primary James carve Al, thank you so much for joining us. All right, okay, come back soon. Julian Zelazer and Kevin Cruz are the authors of myth America. Historians take on the biggest legends and lies about our past. Welcome too Fast Politics, Julianne and soon to be Kevin. It's great to be with you. Nice to speak, so

talk to us about this book. You know, Kevin and I both have been following all the changes that take place in politics and the media, and both of us were struck by how many things you hear about the past that just don't really fit with what historians have to say. So we just wanted to bring together a group of really good academic historians right well to write punchy short essays, tacklely and some of the myths that are so pervasive in our debates that influence how we

deal with politics today. I want to know how you guys decided that you needed to write this book because there's so much misinformation disinformation. Give me the story of what happened, because I feel like there's a great story of like a Ben Shapiro tweet or something, well, probably a million of them actually. I mean we had written another book together, you know, more of a full book that that's become a textbook about the US since nine four, so called fault Lines, and we had worked on that,

and then it was the year before the pandemic. I don't think there was a single tweet. I just thought there was a lot going on already in terms of what's happened in in the classroom and how you teach about race. There are so many arguments about government not working that we heard all the time, or that you'd see social media commentary on that. Both of us said, this is just ridiculous. Why not actually bring people who study this stuff and know about this stuff and have

them chime in. We're gonna have a big conference, but we couldn't because it all happened right when COVID hit. So we just we did it virtually. Hike Kevin, Hey, how you doing good? So we're talking about the book. It's called myth America Historians take on the biggest legends and lies about our past. What were the things where you like, we're going to have to put this in the book. This kind of started out of Twitter, right, Yeah.

For me, it was the Southern strategy. So for years on Twitter, I've been pushing back against people, first Kanye West and then teness Ta SUSA and the whole host of others who somehow leaning into this idea that the South and strategy, which has been kind of a mainstay of American political history for decades now, was an invention of liberals and a recent invention of liberals and something they just made up hull cloth. So it was a

bizarre claim they made. And I started to push back on this on Twitter with threats, and as I did, I kept thinking, why, I know some giant books on this. There's a book by Merle Black and Earl Black called The Rise of Southern Republicans, which is great, but it's you know, it's it's a brick. It's it's not a book you I would you know, casually recommend anyone. And I thought, well, somebody needs to write kind of a

short version of this that that I can assign. And and like any professor who wishes someone had written the reading we want to assign, I just wound up right now. So that was the starting point for me. And Julian had done stuff on the Reagan Revolution, so that was a natural one for him. And then we looked around and thought, okay, we're doing this stuff on social media and OpEd and places like that. Who else is doing

this right? And so some of the other contemporary debates about white backlash, about the insurrection, about voting right, about Confederate the more reels, you know, there were a bunch that came us came to us pretty quickly. Uh, and and it seemed a run off the bat that we had a pretty good core group here. The hardest part for us, i'd say, was limiting this. You know, we

could have gotten fifty sixty historians to do essays here. Um, we had to kind of pick and choose of what we wanted to do and the other if I could just jump in Molly. The other thing was that there were all these really interesting historians who were, you know, trying their hand in the public realm through either Twitter or other forms of social media. And obviously at some level that's limited in terms of how much you can say.

Part of what Kevin and I wanted to do was turned back to the traditional way we tell our stories and make our arguments. Give these authors a little more room to expand on things that had really you know, popped on social media. Uh, and to put it all together in in this book. What is the stupidest thing you've had to debunk? Well? For me, I mean, look,

I have a pet peeve. I I don't mind debates about it if it's good to have government intervention or not, and people have different perspectives, but I can't take when you hear over and over again how government is just a constant failure. And you always hear this about the Great Society, how it was catastrophic, it had unintended effects, didn't really do what it was supposed to do. Same with the New Deal, and that just doesn't square with

everything we know from our best historians. And so I was very excited when we were able to include two essays that by um Eric Rauchway and Josh Zites that really just show this is it's not true. And if you're going to have the debate, have the debate on real terms, uh, not on this false notion that these programs have no impact. Kevin, what about you? Yeah, those

are the two big ones. Uh. I think I always laugh at people who argue with the New Deal was a colossal failure, which explains why FDR was elected four times. I mean, for me personally, the stupidest one. And this is why I feel like my essay is the least imaginative one in the entire collection. I think because I am simply responding to people who are saying, Nah, this thing didn't happen, and I have to kind of patiently

go through and say, look, it really did. So it's just mine is really just a matter of correcting the record. So that's about as stupid as it gets that people are denying that these basic facts actually happened. Yeah, that is a pretty interesting and also quite stupid. Is this the book you want to read so that you can go to Christmas with your conservative relatives? Yeah, I mean, I mean, I think that's that's why we designed it.

You know, these are common myths that are out there in the public sphere, and a lot of people have spent a lot of time spreading these falsehoods, whether they know their falseness or not. There's a big push to get these ideas out there and and books and movies and and and certainly on social media in the web, and so people are gonna encounter these things. And just like all of us involved in in the you have done Twitter threads to help people. You know, we're not

trying to convince the people were arguing against. They're investing in guests. But there are people on the sidelines they don't know any better, who hear someone say, oh, you know, the Great Society was a total failure, or or oh feminism was anti family, and and and whether they haven't heard anything pushed back, and these are gonna be convenient, small chapters that are gonna be designed to be read easily by anyone who's not an expert, but who just

wants to know the facts. And this is important stuff. I mean, we have one by Carol Anderson on voting fraud who really shows that a lot of this argument which has big impact. I mean, it's been the basis of this idea. This idea there's massive voting fraud been the basis of of the election denialism and the effort to overthrow the election. And she just writes a really good piece both debunking that but also showing where the idea came from and how it's been deployed for decades,

really going back through century to undercut voting rights. It's not simply con servative relatives. I think it's liberal, moderate relatives. Our goal is to push back against the disinformation era and simply be at these parties or be at dinners or wherever you are, and just have uh debates that are based on what we know about history rather than what we're just fabricating about the past. Do you think that you know some of these misconceptions are rooted in

ignorance or dishonesty. I think both. They're clearly people out there who know what they are saying has been either disputed or they didn't even believe it to begin with. And I think there are bad actors out there who really don't care if it's true or not. And when they know something's not true, they're still putting it out there because it serves political purposes and it's not really history, that's just pure propaganda. But I do think there are

many other people I don't know. I meet them all the time at these parties we're talking about or dinner, have heard stuff, and and they've heard these arguments about history. And there's so much out there right now that it's easy for people who are well intentioned to start saying things that are really at odds with what historians have worked on. I think you see this all the time in the debates about critical race theory and how to study,

um the role of race in American history. A lot of what's being argued is it's actually kind of conventional at this point. You've had three or four decades where historians have been uncovering the different ways in which race has impacted so many elements of American society from Slavery forward. But sometimes if you if you look or hear from people, they're acting that this is some novel, radical idea that's just being thrown out into the public sphere with no basis.

But that's just not the case. And so I think it's a mix. It's it's dishonest players, but also people who have law some sense of where the historical research actually is. Yeah, and that's I think that's a key point, because it ultimately doesn't matter, right whether or not these lies are being intentionally spread or whether they're being spread by people who don't know any better. There's something spread, right, They're still out there, and so we've got a duty

to push back on them. That's really quite interesting and I think important. Is there anything that's surprising in this book? Well, I mean it depends. I mean, because we wouldn't find it surprising. I think historians probably wun't find it surprising. There are a couple of things. I think We've got a couple of pieces that are I think are going to be important and maybe push the envelope even for historian.

So Larry Glickman has a great piece on the white backlash and this is a phrase that a lot of us, myself included, have used unquestionably, and what Larry shows is that concept fundamentally gets it wrong. Right. It presents the actions of the supposed backlash community. It's reactive. They didn't start anything, They're simply responding. They don't have agency. It just sort of happens, right. And so what Larry's esse he does is I think in a force not just

lay readers, but historians too, to rethink that. That said, a lot of the other stuff in here is very conventional for historians. Again, the stuff I have on the Southern Strategy, the stuff on the New Deal, the Great Society, the Reagan Revolution, these are all very conventional things for historians, but it seems like it's become a little more muddied in the public. So I think what surprises people will largely depend on what they're bringing to the book to

begin with. So some things may surprise you, some things may may shock you. When I did the Southern Strategy piece, I found details of the story I hadn't even known before, so so I I guess I learned some stuff even writing it. So maybe everyone will find something in here to to be surprised about. And a couple of others I just throw out there. I think Kevin is a h pcent right, but a couple of others that I

think come out in nice ways, in surprising ways. So we have one essay called the Border by Jerry Katava, and he argues that the border which we all think of is now it's become the image of a dangerous area, of a fraud area. These areas of the country also are often quite vibrant. There's all kinds of interesting elements of community of commerce in these border towns, and I think the essay really challenges a fundamental myth that is at the basis of a lot of anti immigration rhetoric.

But the essay won't be the border that most people are thinking of. And Michael Kaysen, another great historian, has a provocative piece about the ways in which socialism hasn't actually been absent from American political life, but it's it's been here for a long time, and it's impacted ideas that have been absorbed sometimes by the mainstream party. So I think there's some surprises there that will at least force people to rethink a little of how how they

look backwards in time. So interesting. Thanks to you guys for coming on our pleasure, Thanks for having us, Thanks for having us. I know you, our dear listeners, are very busy and you don't have time to sort through the hundreds of pieces of pundentry each week. This is why every week I put together a newsletter of my five favorite articles on politics. If you enjoy the podcast, you will love having this in your inbox every Friday. So sign up at Fast Politics pod dot com and

click the tab to join our mailing list. That's Fast politics pod dot com. Is the author of Bring the War Home, the White Power Movement, and Paramilitary America. Welcome to Fast Politics, Kathleen, Thank you very much for having me. Let's first talk about this and the title I think is amazing to this crunchy to all to right pipeline. The Popolos suspect may fall on that continuum, right, I

think that's right. I think there's also a good chance that some of that is going on in the club queue shooting and Colorado springs, although it's still early days and getting details on either of those cases. But what we're talking about in this piece, and let me preface this by saying that all right should always go in quotation marks. It's a term that's somewhat outdated, but it is how it has entered our cultural conversation. So here we are with all right, and we can talk more

about that. But the question is sort of about whether instead of existing on a political continuum that is a straight line that goes left, right, center or excuse me, left, center, right, where the left is say stalinist Russia, the middle is the United States, and the right is Germany in World War Two, what if we think of it more as a circle where the left and the right extremes actually often have much more in common with each other than

they do with the center right. Yeah, sort of, I have some you know, I'm a historian, so I have um some itchiness about horseshoe theory because I think horse shoe theory does a good job of showing how close the ends of the spectrum are to each other, but doesn't account for overlap. And what I see in the archive is actually quite a bit of overlap. So I'm

a historian of the white power movement. My focus in my first book was about the eighties, seventies, eighties, and nineties and what you see in publications by skinhead groups, clan groups, militia groups, and particularly in women's publications are a whole bunch of social issues that we usually think of as leftist, like macrobiotic diet and organic gardening. Um, you know, in the seventies organic gardening mid with free paganism back to the Land. So it's it's an interesting

thing to see this sort of crossover space. Oh, that is interesting, and it makes sense because like people like Alex Jones, you know, he's a survivalist too exactly, And there are some, you know, real time examples of people who used to be in the occupy movement and have now taken root in the militant right. I think the directional movement is less often the other direction, but it

does also happen. And although these social issues means something very different in each space, they are an area of possible recruitment. Now I should also just clear the air a little bit. There was some concern by a few people who wrote to me after the Atlantic piece about this that I did, who were worried about like, are you calling all of the survivalist or back to the land left Nazis And no, I'm certainly not. What we are doing, though, is paying attention because this is an

opportunistic white power and militant right movement. It is interested in any open window that it can exploit for its own purposes, and this is one of the ones that we should be paying attention to. I want to get back to this idea that there's sort of a connection between this sort of like left and right. Just can you go back historically and just sort of talk me through like where this started. I mean, because you were starting that and I sort of interrupted to, oh, no worries, Yes, sure.

In my work, I'm looking at just the white power movement forward. So really we're talking about a movement that brought together previously dispersed far right groups in the late nineteen seventies into one movement, oriented them against the federal government and other parts of the state, and has been sort of engaged in the militant asymmetrical war on the United States since then. So that's what I refer to

as the white power movement. It has included clan groups, neo Nazi groups, militias, some militia's not all militias, um skinheads and tax resistor groups, and several others. But if we're thinking about the interface with sort of crunchy left and survivalist right, I think we can trace it back

a great deal further than that. I mean, the Nazi Party was very the land classically and right, and several environmental groups in the United States, like the Sierra Club have long histories of being being involved with eugenics and projects centered on whiteness in the United States. So interesting anti vactors are a new group or are they? Were they always a group, because there have been you know,

viruses and plagues and things like that throughout history. But it strikes me that the most recent sort of left to right conversion is the COVID vaccine. I think so. And I think that that, um, it's something that I noticed just casually in Facebook groups even before that, around childhood vaccinations more broadly, and you get a sort of leftist crunchy discourse about spacing out childhood vaccinations or researching particular kinds of additives to childhood vaccinations and doing so

often in in very little relation to scientific evidence. On the left that has to you with like fear of chemicals and fear of toxicity, I think. And then on the right, we see that mobilized more as fear of the state, fear of conspiracy, fear of nefarious plots to

control people. That one feels to me very much like how people talked about fluoride, the chemical added to water to reduce dental decay in children, and the right has been very worried about fluoride for conspiracy reasons since at least the John Birch Society and the left has been worried about it, mostly because of toxicity. Yeah, both parties are united by moronics. I mean, I feel like there's a temptation to always say that it's worse now, that

things are worse now. Are things worse now or do you think this is just sort of cyclical? Well, worse is an interesting question because I think when we're talking about sort of cultural overlap, some of it is perfectly harmless. Some of it is simply, you know, people who have very different political ideas but do share something else in common, which I don't know in most contact, I think is

very good for our society. The problem is when, first of all, when the white power mobilization of these issues is attached to other recruitment actions, which it is very heavily right now, and when we're in the middle of sort of an upsurge in activity, So this seems quite innocuous, you know. I mean, vaccination is when we can see

the obvious harm. But things like you know, choosing a midwife instead of a doctor, that is perfectly valid decision that a whole lot of people make for totally benign reasons and often in in a perfectly reasonable critique of our health care system, and it can be a gateway to exposure to some of these activists. So the problem

isn't choosing a midwife. The problem is coordinated efforts by white power groups to use interest in midwif free to recruit people into a movement that is in fact interested in extremely violent outcomes um including attacks on democracy, a tax on targeted communities, and attacks on several other sorts

of infrastructure targets. So we have to read this whole sort of I mean, this came up in the new cycle this time because of a TikTok debate, you know, which is I mean, it's hard to think of something that feels less consequential than a TikTok feud, right right, But we have to read it connected to all of the other benchmarks of mobilization like January six, Proud Boys showing up at local school board races, like the attacks on lgbt s Q story our possibly the North Carolina

infrastructure attack, although I think we're still early days there and finding out exactly what happened. But there's a lot of other activity right now right now, the speculation on North Carolina. Can you just explain to our listeners what what this is all speculative right now, but just explain

what it is. Yes, I'll tell you why. I have my eyebrow raised proverbally as a historian, which is, the White Power movement has been interested in infrastructure attacks since the nineteen ease and has mobilized successfully to carry out cell style terrorist attacks on infrastructure targets, both attempted attacks and real ones for decades. So this is something they've talked about a lot um. That's piece of information a

um piece of information. B is that it's also something that comes up in books like the Turner Diaries, which is a novel that is also the manual of operations for the movement. So we have a record of them hitting or attempting to hit targets like gas lines, dams and water installations, water storage, power plants, nuclear plants. The list goes on. Most of these things didn't happen, but we have an archive of attempts that we have to

look at next to the archive of successes. And then piece of information see is the nature of this particular outage. So the fact that it was power stations hit by gunfire they found I think I read something about, you know, many rounds of ammunition from a high powered rifle, assault rifle. I think I read at each of the sites, and the fact that they haven't come out and said like, oh, vandalism or you know, something of that nature, but have instead called in the FBI and a t F. All

of that together means that something is going on. So I don't know what the something is. There are certainly other people who might have an interest in damaging the power grid, but I know that this is a strategy that is part of sort of the playbook of the white power movement. So interesting, do you want to talk to me about this hearing in two thousand nineteen because Candace Owens is such an interesting Oh yeah, I sort

of don't even know what to make of her. Yeah, I mean, I know what she is, but I mean I'm just curious, like what historical Is there a place for her and his? Is there a sort of historical yeah reference for this? Oh sure? I mean, you know, I think she's a professional political operative who has her own very specific agenda instead of talking points that often is very little to do with what I would classify

as factually based or the problem at hand. So I think in that hearing, it's one of several examples of not having the conversation we need to have desperately about a real problem that has a real body count attached. So you know, not everyone wants to have that conversation.

She's hardly alone there. The GOP has also diverted attention from this in all kinds of different ways, ranging from the early days, you know, sending around talking points memos about how the El Paso shooter we should talk about it as mental health rather than my power, yeah, all the way up to much more open embrace of these tactics, and especially in the late Trump administration. So you know, again we're talking about a continuum of not confronting the problem.

I mean, far be it from me to talk about intentionality. Maybe if we were to take her at her word, she was simply saying that there are other problems that impact the black community more. I mean, I think there are ways that that's correct. There are big systemic problems that we have to deal with in this country. But what she's frankly, just very very wrong about is that this is also one of them, and it's impacting the

Black community. It's impacting the Jewish community, is impacting the Latino community, immigrant communities, and it's now impacting our ability to hold free elections and have a democratic process. So I think it is a huge problem. I want to talk to you about the Buffalo shooter. I mean that was a white nationalist, yes, shooting, right? Can you talk

to us about that? Sure. So one of the things to understand about the white power movement is that it has since used a strategy called leaderless resistance, which is simply cell style terrorism. The idea is that one or a few people can act in coordination and with impact from leadership, but without demonstrable ties to leaders or to other cells. So this is a strategy imagined to sort of foil the ability of FBI agents to infiltrate groups, which had been a big problem in the civil rights

era and to make it harder to prosecute right. But the bigger impact is that we have as a society have sort of bought this up as the way we understand this kind of violence. So we get over and over again stories about lone wolves, right, the lone wolf shooter, the loan shooter, the loan terrorist. There are individual acts

of violence in our country. There are all kinds of mass shootings, and this is only one subset, right, But when it is a white nationalist action, it should never be treated as a lone wolf act because it is networked, it is ideological, and it's connected to other acts of violence. So this lone wolf thing is how we get stories about Buffalo as an anti black shooting, the Tree of Life as an anti Jewish shooting, El Paso as an anti Latino shooting, christ churches, and anti Islamic shooting. We

can go on and on. There's a lot of these, and they are are all of those things. And of course there are specific histories of anti Semitism and anti black violence, and we can go on, right, but they're all also carried out by white power gunmen using the ideology of this movement. So, for instance, in Buffalo, there was a manifesto, which I don't recommend people go and try to read and parse because we can leave that

to people who study those kinds of documents. But if you take that manifesto and run it through a plagiarism software, which I have as a professor, it's largely just cut and pasted from the christ Church manifesto. So these are actions that share not only sort of like target selection, but they share tactical information, they share ideological information, and often they have social network ties with other people in

the movement. So interesting, if you're talking to a legislator, what would you tell them is sort of the first thing they need to get going on to to slow this down? Yeah, I mean this is now well, So the first thing I would say is there is some good news about that part. I think that our surveillance agencies have really changed their posture around the problem of white power and militant right violence. They have now said that this is the biggest domestic terror threat to the country.

That means that all of the resources that come with that designation are pointed in the appropriate direction right until there's a Republican president, right exactly. That's until there's a Republican president. But the thing is that we are incredibly late in doing that. As I said, this has been a massing momentum since the late nineteen seventies with very little stop. This is the movement that bombed the Oklahoma City Federal building. And we should all pause and remember

that after that militia activity increased, it didn't decrease. Just like Elon owning, Twitter brought out more hate speech. I mean, they take every victory as a larger victory. Yeah, exactly. It's been gaining moment them. So the time is really

short for dealing with this. So the thing that I think we need to do, and you know, I'm a historian, so every you know, everything looks like a nail when you have a hammer, right, But I think that what we really need is a conversation about our national history of racism and racist violence. The United States is hardly alone in its history of racial injustice. There are many other countries that have similar stories, but we are very very peculiar in how little we have done to actually

face down that story. You know, if you think about it, even something like make America Great Again, that is a historical argument, right, that's making an argument about time, about what is America, about what's included, about who's included, about whether it was great. Those arguments depend on people having a degree of blankness about what the story is that we all share, that we all come from here. So I think that's a huge part. The other place I

think we really need action is de radicalization. It's incredibly difficult to scale it, really, I think is working mostly on a one to one sort of model, And for that reason, I think that it would be much more helpful if I were a legislator, if I had a magic one want and a lot of money upstream efforts like teaching kids civics, teaching kids what to do when they encounter white power content, online resources for school librarians and parents and teachers who are you know, trying with

both their hands to keep their kids from going to these websites. I think turning off the pipeline would really be helpful. And the research also shows that deep platforming, you know, I don't think the goal is to remove these actors from the Internet. The Internet is a wide, vast place. There will always be hate speech, but removing the forum slows down the momentum and that has a real results and how many people are hurt. Yeah, that's really a good point. Thank you so much for joining us.

Oh it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to your the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.