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I'm Chelsea Daniels and This is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by The New Zealand Herald. The assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has shone a spotlight on political violence in the US and around the world. The thirty one year old was shot at a Utah University last week in front of thousands of people. The alleged killer is twenty two year old Tyler Robinson, who's set
to appear in court this week. While his motive remains unclear, the killing has sparked conversations about the widening gap between left and right politics. It's also highlighted the deep dark depths of the Internet and how young people can be radicalized online. Today on the Front Page, Massy University emeritus professor and sociologist Paul Spoonley is with us to dissect the inner workings of those who perpetrate political violence and
how we might be able to stop them. So, Paul, the race is on to try and figure out why this shooter targeted Charlie Kirk. And there are a lot of accusations being thrown around at the moment. At the end of the day, though, does it really matter what side he was on, left or right, It's still political violence, isn't it.
It is political violence, and unfortunately, and particularly in the US, we're seeing more of it. And the difficulty, the difficulty there and the difficulty here in New Zealand is that when we get these local actors, these homegrown local actors, very often they're invisible. They send out quite weak signals. And I think, Chelsea, we're naive. I think we're naive to think that this is something that happens in America, not here. It has happened here, and it will happen here.
But we're also a naive in terms of what we need to look for, because in the case of the Charlie Kirk killing, but also in the case of the christ Church shooter, there were people around both of those shooters who would have seen something but didn't possibly didn't know what they were looking at. So I do think we need to increase the awareness of families and peers and teachers in terms of what they might look for as people get radicalized.
And in terms of that as well, I mean, I've seen a lot of conversation around on the Internet and kind of deciphering this language used I know that bullets found after the shooting carried a range of messages and the Internet is kind of racing to decipher those, and it looks like, you know, they're referencing video games, meme culture. I mean, it seems to me like a completely different language. And that isn't foreign to these kind of people, right.
No, it's not. And I mean I would go to the christ Church shooter and the advantage, if there are any advantages there was that he published a manifesto, so he, like the killer of Charlie Kirk, had insignia or memes or sayings on the guns and the ammunition. In the case of the christ Church shooter, he did have that as well, but he also had a manifesto, so we can get a sense of why what prompted him to do what he did in christ Church in twenty nineteen.
It's a little bit more difficult with this one, particularly as the shooter is not being cooperative and so we now got to do a forensic check of what's happened online, what we can get from that, and of course what the police and other are athorities are doing, which is talking to family and friends.
I mean, regardless what these inscriptions actually mean it just it points to a person who's like deeply entrenched in those online forums and that online culture, and this is where a lot of that radicalization happens nowadays.
Hey, yes it does, and it's actually relatively recent Chelsea in terms of what we're seeing. Last year the Five Eyes of which New Zealand's part, produced a very interesting report on young people in the five countries and radicalization. And what we're seeing is that younger people, sometimes educated so well educated, perhaps students who are doing well or university students and you know that's the case with this shooter, are attracted and then they go down these rabbit holes
into conspiratorial extreme views and ideologies. I have to say that the the bulk of people who express those extreme views online do not necessarily act out those views. But we still have that possibility and what we need to understand and I don't think we do really as much as we would like to. What's the process who's vulnerable in the first instance, but what's the process whereby people get convinced that these extreme views are views that they
should hold, in which they demonize others. The difficulty at the moment is we're really paralyzed, and we've got declining trust. We've got declining trust and politicians, unfortunately Chelsea, and the media, and so we tend to revert to these echo chambers in which we get affirmation of our own views. So what starts that process? What leads you into that echo chamber? And you know, we know vulnerability, we know social isolation.
There are a number of cues that we need to be aware of, but we really do need to understand more about it. And how do we intervene much earlier in that process before they do get radicalized?
And generally we're talking about this kind of right wing conservatism, it's disenfranchised young men as well. Nine times out of ten. How do we get to that group and steer them away from these kind of forums that make them feel so included and so part of a pack, so to speak.
Yeah, And I was at the University of California at Berkeley with an author called Ali Hodgchild, and what she pointed to in the American context was the disaffection and the alienation of particularly white working class men, increasingly white middle class men in terms of the recognition of diversity. So what we've got is an inversion. In the past, we would have probably said that particular groups, let's say Afro Americans, have been the victims of institutional racism, to
use a word. What we're now seeing is the flip of that, and that the victims in modern society are very often white males who were being excluded from promotion, from jobs. And so we're getting this combination of economic circumstances. And remember a lot of us began to emerge during the global financial crisis two and eight twenty twelve, and then got accelerated during COVID, and so's there's certainly a constituency. And by the way, there is a constituency in New Zealand.
If you look at a group like right wing Resistance, they tended to be young males and very much into the manisphere, so you know, a toxic masculinity, and a number of them were a university student. So those old ideas that somehow the people who are going to be recruited were not educated, were not aware of the world around them, is no longer true.
These interpretations of the messages as well as the shooters online blueprint, it's hard to decipher what his political leaning is. So you've got these very niche references to anti fascism, but you've also got these references used by groups like neo Nazi nick for Winters as followers who didn't actually like Charlie Kirk. Does this show that the far right isn't as black and white anymore?
Yes. And indeed our own groups inside New Zealand, our security and intelligence agencies, but also the Combined Threats Assessment Group, which is the main government group that looks at the threat landscape in New Zealand, have developed some new categories. And it looks as though those new categories of people who bring together various traditions both sort of less than right, as you've pointed out, to provide new political view points,
but they're still extreme. And for me, I think one of the things that I've focused on the extreme right, but one of the things that strikes me is that when you look at the extreme left and the extreme right, very often they look quite similar. They look the way in which they demonize particular people. They might demonize different people, but the way in which they demonize people and the
way in which they justify are violence towards government. And so what we've seen, and I think the US evidence over the last two decades. They've got an excellent report on what's contributed to tourist attacks and redcalization is that seventy percent have come from the extreme right. And yes, white supremacists, so they would be classic sort of Nazi fascist groups. But the other major category is anti government.
And so I think what we've seen as a new set of as a new set of groups begin to emerge, particularly since COVID, in which attacking the government, attacking the police sovereign citizens would be a case in point. And so we had a we had an activist, Richard Silvill, who was sentenced and earlier this year, and he was sentenced because he shared objectionable material the christ Church stream of the shooting, but because he threatened to kill the
Prime Minister, just Sindra Adourn. And so I think we're getting these diverse but mixed set of messages and positions that are beginning to emerge. It's much more complex than when I first began to look at the extreme right some decades ago.
Yeah, I mean, because it's from my learnings online, it's not really right versus left anymore. And even that kind of spectrum, you can question whether that's a particularly good way of describing these groups. I learned that there are factions of the far right actually in conflict with each other, so these people called gropers who think MAGA is actually liberal. So knowing the kind of colorful array and all of the different gray bits in between will probably help us moving forward, right.
It will. It will, but we need to map that landscape. So it's changed and constantly changing. So I've talked about its diversity, but we're also seeing new positions beginning to emerge,
which is what you've highlighted. And we do need good evidence for this, And can I go to There's a private group in New Zealand called Global Risk Consulting Group, and their latest assessment, which came out a while ago, think says that there's a seventy percent chance that we will see a terrorist act in the next five years in New Zealand. And I think we've got to take
that seriously. So one of the things I would dearly love us to do is to understand both the international but also the domestic landscape here, because I do think we face the possibility that because we don't understand all of these permutations, somebody's going to come out of somewhere
that we haven't actually paid much attention to. And that was, of course the Royal Commission's concern after the christ shooting, that we paid too much attention to Islamic terrorism and not enough to write a white supremacy terrorism.
Jennie Vancier live from my office in the White House complex and filling in for somebody who cannot be filled in for. But I'm going to try to do my best my dear friend, the great Charlie Kirk. The thing is, every single person in this building we owe something to Charlie. He was a joyful warrior for our country. He loved America did voted himself tirelessly to making our country a
better place. He was a critical part of getting Donald Trump elected as president, getting me elected as vice president, and so much of our success over the last seven months is due to his efforts, his staffing, his support in his friendship.
I think it's quite interesting in the US if we go back to the Charlie Kirk shooting. Donald Trump has continued to accuse his political opponents of inciting violence and placing blame on the left. He said, the problem is on the left. It's not on the right. He then blamed left wing radicals. Then we have JD. Vance signaling a growing and powerful minority on the left as well, and the very quick to point fingers. And I read
a comment from Seawan Westwood. He's the director of the Polarization Research Lab at Dartmouth College, and he said, in the aftermath of the assassination attempt against Donald Trump, say, leaders on both side of the IOWA called the national temperature issuing unified condemnation, and in the way of Kirk's murder, the opposite is happening. He said, We're witnessing the cynical minting of a martyr and a call to fight instead.
How important is it that they're taking this route as opposed to unifying and calling for condemnation of all political violence.
Yeah, and I think that's really disappointing. And so I think there are a number of public commentators and politicians in the United States that have asked, we're toning down at the temperature around this, because if you look at the evidence of President Trump's own agencies, then the major threat comes from the far right, not from the far left. So this attempt to recategorize where the threat is coming
from is actually not supported by the evidence. So the Department Justice has done some really good works around looking at where terrorism is likely to come from. And if I can give an example, Timothy McVeigh was a sovereign citizen and he was involved in the Oklahoma bombing. So those major events of terrorism have involved the far right, and I just don't think it's helpful, I mean politically,
but also in terms of how you rebuild trust. You're really effectively cementing in some of the divisions and some of the hostility and the polarization and the demonization of particular groups. And of course we forget or have forgotten, and it's not mentioned now that a Democratic senator was shot in their own home not so long ago. So why the outrage now not the outrage?
Then?
It seems very one sided to me and very unfortunate, because how do you rebuild when you dig these sort of trenches and conduct the sort of warfare.
How do we catch up to these kind of groups, and how do we learn their language online? And how can New Zealand make sure that nothing similar happens here?
I think there's some excellent work being done internationally. So the International Strategic dialogue and one of the researchers might have come Ifort has done some really good work in New Zealand. By the way, that research shows that New Zealand is accessing far right YouTube or Facebook, I'm not sure which sites. Was double the rate of Australian, triple the rate of Canada. So why is that the case? And I think we need to access some of the
initiatives and the understanding that's available internationally. The EU has done some really good work around what to do in terms of identifying the dynamics of a particular country and internationally and then what we might do. By the way, there are some initiatives in New Zealand which I think we need to acknowledge. The New Zealand Security Intelligence Service had produced a very good little Booklet's saying No the Signs. So there is something that is happening here. There are
some things that are happening here. But I would really like us to pay more attention, fund more activity to make sure that we are on top of what's happening. And particularly I think we're going to struggle given the volume of material that's appearing online and so our agencies, our security and intelligence agencies are really swamped by this material. The amount of material and then trying to identify where the potential risks might be coming from just got to
be a much more community wide response. And I do think we need to talk about digital literacy and digital citizenship. We've really got to understand what's happening, particularly to young people but also others online at the moment and what the possibilities and the problems.
Thanks for joining us, Paul.
Thank you, Chelsea. Always a pleasure.
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzidherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is produced by Jane Ye and Richard Martin, who is also our editor. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to The Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.