I'm Anny, I'm Noah, this is Devin, and this is no such thing. The show where we settle our dumb arguments and yours by actually doing the research. On today's episode, we're talking about the resurgence of assassinations. We'll talk about the Luigi Mangeoni case, and we'll interview a professor from the University of Chicago who's been studying political violence for decades.
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All Right, quick note that this is what the three of us are deeming to be an emergency episode based on what's happening in the news, and for that reason, it's not going to be structured like a normal episode of no such thing. We're talking about the rise of
political violence, right. We have big newsworthy examples like January sixth, obviously, the attack on Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi's husband, the two different Trump assassination attempts, and all that kind of leads us to this case where this guy, Luigi Mangioni allegedly assassinated the CEO of United Healthcare. People suspect that this had to do with like frustrations with the healthcare industry, but what the three of us are trying to figure out is why all of this political violence seems to
be on the rise. And so, yeah, I think it's a fair question, like is political violence on the rise? And you know, why does it feel like this is happening.
It's interesting because we've gotten in many ways used to mass shooting events, these sorts of things mm hm, and this is obviously close to that, but very different, and I think that's why you do see more sympathy for the cause. Yeah, perhaps where it's not just random killing of normal citizens, it is targeted in this specific way. Yeah, which does make more of a statement. I'm curious to
hear why we are seeing arise in that. Yeah, it was interesting, like this kind of violence like when it has a motivation, and when the motivation of the violence is like something that a lot of people can agree with, like obviously not the killing itself, but when the cause, so to speak, has this sentiment that's against the way that like healthcare runs in this country. You know, we did see like a very layered, very interesting reaction to this.
Just antidotally. What I've noticed is that people feel more disconnected from the system in a way you just taught this with like low turnout during the election yea amongst young people, and I think few people I think are over going through the means of the system to see results. And now I think, you know, we don't exactly know, like you're saying, there's this suppose in manifesto, we don't
exactly know what the motive was here. Yeah, but I have seen people respond in a way that suggests that they are open to people finding creative ways around the system. This seek change, you.
Know, not to perpetuate my reputation as a Bernie bro but like I think he and Elizabeth Warren had kind of the quote unquote correct take on this thing, which is to immediately like condemn the shooting, but then try and figure out why this is happening. We you know, we don't know shit about this. So we are after the break, we are going to talk to Robert Pape, who is a professor at the University of Chicago and he's been studying political violence for decades. So let's just
talk to him. Hello, Professor Pape, thank you for doing this. Can you just start by telling us who you are.
My name is Robert Pape. I'm a professor of Political Science and director of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats. I study political violence. I've been studying political violence for thirty years. For the last four years
I have studied American political violence rather extensively. Obviously, I've got a lot of things to say, you know, I've done a bunch of things on this in the last week, and I'm going to be studying political violence here in America it looks like easily the next five years.
Let's just start there. I think like you've mentioned that there is this trend, and it's an upward trend, and you don't think it's going anywhere. Can you just walk us through what exactly that trend is, how you measure it, and where you think it's going to take us.
The way you measure political violence in the United States or in Iraq or Afghanistan anywhere around the world is really pretty much the same. What Political violences are acts of violence that are meant to send a political message or have an impact on society as a whole, or to change the behavior of an actor, whether it's a government of corporation in any particular in any particular direction.
So whether you want to defund the police, whether you want to get the university administration to stop supporting Israel, whether you're trying to stop an election that is the transfer of power. These are just some of the examples that all fit under the hood of political violence. Now, starting about five or six years ago, we started to see an unbelievably noticeable trend upwards in lone wolf political violent attacks. Obviously, the CEO murder fits a lone wolf factor.
So in twenty eighteen we saw the Tree of Life Life shooting.
A tragic day in the city of Pittsburgh, a mass shooting apparently driven by hate at a synagogue in Squirrel Hill. At this hour, eleven people are confirmed dead, six more injured, including four Pittsburgh Police officers.
What you had was you had a lone wolf attacker. And then he left a manifesto, and his manifesto was all about what's called the Great Replacement, which is this idea that whites are being deliberately replaced. Then in August twenty nineteen, we saw another mash shooting, this time at a Walmart in Al Paso, killing over twenty Hispanics. And this too, he left a manifesto about the Great replacement really the identical political theory, this time blaming the issue
of the Hispanics in this complex political conspiracy theory. And then we saw in May twenty twenty two the Buffalo shooting, where again you have an attacker. He's killing approximately ten innocent African America just standing in line at a top supermarket. Here. They've done nothing to him. He doesn't know them from Adam. And he too leaves a manifesto, this one hundred and sixty pages long. So these are clearly acts of also
about the Great Replacement. What those three attacks have in common is those shooters we're trying to advance the agenda, a political agenda against what's called the Great Replacement. This is a right wing conspiracy theory that's been around for years.
What Joe Biden is doing now will change this country forever. So again, why is he doing it? There's only one plausible answer. You're not allowed to say it out loud. In political terms, this policy is called the Great Replacement, the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far away countries.
But in these cases, these shooters are leaving manifestos articulating this political agenda and that's why when I saw the writing on the shellcasings of the CEO killing.
CBS News has confirmed from law enforcement officials that the words deny, defend, and depose we're written on shellcasings at the scene. Investigators are now looking into if those words point to a motive related to insurance companies' responses to claims.
Right away, the clear signs of a politically motivated attack, even if there was somehow an additional personal motive involved. And the more we've found out, there appears to be no beef that this guy had with the actual healthcare insurance company itself. We're finding like virtually no connection at all. It appears to be almost one hundred percent politically motivated,
and that is really a common thing. You often get, these mixed motives, you see what I mean, So people are sometimes saying, well, is that only one hundred percent politically driven. Often what you find are volatile individuals. They have their own reasons for being on the edge of violence, for their own psycho social reasons. Many of them are mentally ill. But then you have this political motive layered on top and their belief that their act will become popular.
That often nudges them over the edge.
So we've been thinking about this obviously a lot over the last couple of days, but I don't think those two examples came up for us at all during our conversations. I guess in our minds we hadn't been thinking about mass shootings as fitting into this larger conversation about political violence.
Yeah, and the fact that people who are anxious about this great replacement theory end up being the primary source of political violence.
Professor, We've been asking why there's been this general increase in political violence. Is the answer to that question as simple as the demographic shifts that have been happening around the world, or is there more to it?
I would say the big tap route is the demographic shift. We are going through a historic transition in our country from a white majority democracy to a white minority, truly balanced, multiracial democracy. This helps to explain a lot of the virulent reaction to Donald Trump.
You know, when they let I think the real numbers, fifteen sixteen million people into our country.
When they do that, we got a lot of work to do.
They're poisoning the blood of our country.
That's what they've done.
Because you have folks who are really on the let's call them on the right, who are very nervous about this transition that's about to happen, and they would like it to be more managed or more carefully done and slow down. That's where this general nervousness is from. Where are they going to come out in this transition? And then the others polarization, social media, Trump's character in his personal style of politics. I would say those are three additional factors, but they're like secondary.
So you've been walking us through the general rise in political violence over the years and how it's tied to the great replacement conspiracy theory and that there is demographic change happening all over the world. But the conspiracy part is that it's being done deliberately to wipe out white populations. And then you get these lone wolf characters who are radicalized by this and they end up being the source
of political violence. In the past few years, but we've been really interested in assassinations, specifically political violence that is targeted towards a specific person, like this healthcare CEO. Have you been tracking assassinations? Are those on the rise as well?
So in twenty twenty two, we saw not just that plot against Justice Cavanaugh.
A man who fully say planned to kill Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is charged with attempted murder this morning.
And then also in October twenty twenty two, we saw the assassination attempt against Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, which missed her but almost killed her her husband.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office says that someone broke into her home in San Francisco this morning and violently attacked her husband.
Then in the next summer of June twenty twenty three, there was an assailant trying to live stream and attack against Barack Obama's home.
A man who Polisse was armed with explosives is arrested outside the Washington, d C. Home of former President Barack Obama.
And then of course we've seen the two assassination attempts against Donald Trump, and there is a whole spate of attacks against congressional leaders that collection right there, just that number that I identified. You have to go back to nineteen sixty eight. You have to go back to that year which saw the assassination of Martin Luther King.
Some very sad news for all of you, and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Efica.
Then just a few months later you had the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, who was then the leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination when he was assassinated. If you just focus just on that issue of assassinations, you can see right away that we're at a historical high. We are on a slippery slope of normalization of violence
in our country. I call this the era of violent popular What we find in our surveys is that between five ten percent of Americans sometimes even fifteen will support political violence for grievances. Political grievances they also endorse. And that's thirty million people. That's a lot of people. So I'm not at all surprised by what happened with the
CEO here. What happened is is you guys all probably know if you go to his ex account before he was arrested at that McDonald's, he literally had only sixty seven six seven followers on his x account. Within twelve hours, it was four hundred thousand four hundred thousand. Now there are folk songs for this guy.
For now a Manngioni's locked in a cell nearly identical to this one.
His supporters are donating tens of thousands of dollars to online legal defense funds.
So why is that based on your research, why is there such strong support for this specific assecent destination.
Well, I think it's been strong because at the tap root of this political violence is anger. The one third of this healthcare company's claims are denied, approximately one third.
That is outrageous.
It's more than double the industry.
Standard political anger. And that anger is real, and you can't talk people out of their anger. So our strategy has been not to try to talk people out of their anger. What we think you can do is help them redirect their anger away from violence and toward politics. I don't think talking people out of their anger is the right strategy. What the strategy should be is to have them redirect that anger, which a lot of times is based on reality. I'm not denying that, okay, I'm
telling you that's real. So you don't try to talk people out of this anger, because if you do, you're just gonna make them more defiant. That's just the way it is. If I try to talk you out of something you're mad about, you're going to dig in. Okay, So no, that's not the idea. The idea is how can I encourage you to make it more productive so that you'll actually have a way to change the system
in a productive way. Because you see, if the anger just leads to this political violence, the system may end up getting burned down. But a lot of times what comes in, and we see this in revolutions is something dramatically draconianly what right wing. I mean, much worse than Donald Trump. You think Donald Trump's bad? Nothing like the Ayatola Halmoni in nineteen seventy nine that started out as a liberal revolution against the shaw of Iran and then
it became seized and taken over by unbelievable hardliners. That's the real trajectory these when you get real violence.
Like this, professor, you have warned us of a future that is bleaked, to say the least, But is there a way to avoid it? Like what can we do as a society that would result in a decrease in political violence.
It's important in this case to recognize even more than in the others here, that anger, that anger needs to have some place to go. And that's what I'm trying to say in different ways in my writings in the media, on the podcast, and I really think we will ultimately have a softer, a medium, soft landing here in twenty thirty five. But I think we need to realize this
isn't just gonna happen on its own. But I do I'm not really pessimistic, really, I'm realistic about the challenges we face, and I actually think we will come out of this because I really believe when I'm encouraging these the politicians to do, it's really directly in their interests here. I've been studying this for a long time, and I'm articulating a strategy many of them have never heard of before. They've all been told, well, you just want to talk
the violent person out of it. I'm not telling you that's the way to go that. I'm telling you that is a pretty much a dead end. You've got to focus on the part of the public that's already upho its political violence and move them and their anger, which many of them have, in this more productive direction. Now we can actually solve some of these problems as opposed to we're going to get violent about it and that's not going to solve anything.
Folks.
This has been completely fascinating and illuminating. Thank you so much for joining us.
I love this conversation. I just really appreciate how much you folks really are looking to have a different kind of conversation about this. It really speaks you know, this is one of the reasons we're going to have that soft landing.
So that was illuminating. I do understand a little bit better, not just the rise in political violence, but also just generally why it's been happening and response. Yeah, response to it as well. Quick note to the listener, thank you for listening to this episode. I know it's not the normal kind of episode of No Such Thing. Let us know how you feel about it, if we should be doing things like this.
More reactions to the news in our future question mark, but.
Yeah, thanks for listening. No Such Thing is produced by Manny, Noah and Devin. The theme song was by me Manny. Thank you to our guest, Robert Page, professor at the University of Chicago. For more, be sure to subscribe to No Such Dot Show and feel free to reach out to us at Manny noahdevinat gmail dot com. We're off next week for Christmas, but we'll be back in two weeks. See then,