Angry Planet - The Second American Civil War Is (Not) Coming

Episode Date: October 20, 2022

Alt Weeklies are an important part of America’s media landscape. It’s local reporting from people with a different point of view and different goals. If you’re mad at mainstream narratives you could do worse than picking up, say, the Inlander out of the Pacific Northwest. If you want to know what’s really going on there, how worried you should be about budding extremist movements, and what role politicians are playing in our current various crises, it’s a good place to start.With us today is Daniel Walters. Walters is an award-winning investigative journalist at the Inlander where he covers right-wing extremism, politics, and maybe just a little bit of pop culture.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet.

I'm Matthew Galtz. And I'm Jason Fields. Alt Weeklys are an important part of America's media landscape. It's local reporting for, people with a different point of view and different goals. If you're mad at mainstream narratives, you could do worse than picking up, say, the Inlander out of the Pacific Northwest. If you want to know what's really going on there, how worried you should be about budding extremist movements and what role politicians are playing in our current various crises, it's a good place to start.

So with us today is Daniel Walters. Walters is an award-winning investigative journalist at the Inlander, where he covers right-wing extremism, politics, maybe just a little bit of pop culture. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, I appreciate it. All right, so I'll be a little honest with you up here at the top. I must admit that the reason we're having you on the show is that our mysterious producer, Kevin Nodell, brought your work to my attention after you got into a Twitter spat with Seth Abramsome. Can you tell us, I don't want to focus too much on the beef itself, but I think the story that's at the center of the beef that he was commenting on is actually interesting and instructive. Can you kind of walk us through what he was looking at and what he was getting wrong there?

Yeah, I guess the first thing is that, you know, it's kind of like, it's like I made a wish that, oh, I wish that I kind of my name, you know, I get invited on a national podcast and then you can like cure the monkeys pot. Because it's like, you know, you never want to like have some argument you have on Twitter as that's kind of, you know, my editors certainly wouldn't want that either. So that's not ideal, but it kind of does show the perverse incentives that a lot of people have on Twitter and actually kind of, it actually shows, I think, why a certain type of commenter like Seth Abramson has been kind of rewarded. for a lot of the things that he said. And, you know, if you're like him and you continue to, like, tell people, A, either what they want to hear, as he did with Bernie Sanders, kind of pretending like Bernie Sanders was winning when he actually wasn't when he wrote for the opening post, or you're telling people what they're really afraid to hear, but kind of the worst case fears, which is the idea that, like, we're on the precipice of civil war, and it's going to start in this,

kind of this dark and dusty corner of Idaho, then that's going to be something that. that a lot of people are going to be paying attention to as well. So he kind of, yeah, he had tweeted, and I kind of saw this, he had tweeted basically, says if a civil war starts in the U.S. in the next five years, it'll start in Idaho and be started by the American redouters, armed fascists who leaders have close ties to Trump and her already openly threatening government officials. I advise Googling American readout ASAP. And then he has this kind of this long thread where he kind of talks about this idea that kind of predicts that if Trump is indicted or runs against Biden and loses in 2024. The odds, the readouters seek war appear to me to be

one and three. So it's a pretty, you know, pretty specific number in terms of his chances there. And then he talks about, you know, some of these other things about about all this kind of prediction of collapse, this nightmare scenario, Don Jr. and Trump setting up maybe a second home base in Montana. A lot of his wild speculation. Then he ends it with kind of saying, like, no need to take what I've written here. Look up reliable sources yourself. If you have friends in Idaho, talk to them. I'm very confident they will tell you exactly what I said here, as will others who live in or near the American readout region. And he also mentions that like, you know, if you're saying in Idaho, I would get out now, basically. And then what happened despite his plea for people to

listen to the people that are there, like a bunch of people, including, you know, reporters that are in Idaho or people like me, or I'm in Spokane, but I cover North Idaho because we're right next door. Kind of like, we're basically like, hey, you know, this is, this is kind of wildly inaccurate. it kind of wildly just proportionate for kind of the situation. And it's also kind of like, you know, irresponsible to like tell people to like leave the place that there's home and their places that they love instead of pushing back against it. And so it got everyone from, you know, reporters like me, the reporters, you know, at places like Idaho Caposan, which is kind of an enterprisey, journalistic startup. That's a lot of really great reporters

pushing back on it to people like, you know, the readout anti-fascist account, which is kind of like a kind of a conglomerate of anti-fascist research. They're not like people that are getting into fights in Portland or anything, but they're, you know, kind of trying to expose people. Like, they're kind of saying this is bogus too. Then he kind of like was, you know, blocked me and kind of like push back and that kind of thing, which is, you know, I, we were, I was insulting towards him. So I'm not going to blame him for that. But the larger question of kind of what is, what is Idaho? And what is the redoubt, I think is, is an interesting one.

Well, let's get into that. What is American readout and what's going on in Idaho? Yeah. And so I would have pain. And this is all kind of, you know, this is. it's kind of impressionistic. There are probably people that would disagree with me, but I would kind of see the kind of the height of American readout movement is probably roughly from maybe 2014, 2015 to probably 2019. And so there is this, it actually came out of this post-apocalyptic

fiction writers, this whole genre of survivalist prepper fiction, which is kind of like the secular prepper version of Left Behind series, you know, kind of this idea that there's going to be this government collapse. And when this happens, we're going to have to rebuild society and there's going to be like, we're going to be the ones to do what we can kind of rebuild it in our image, that kind of thing. I ended up actually writing a story

about some guy that was the former open government embudsman for the AG's office that ended up writing a ton of this set in Washington State. So it's a really big genre within a certain community. And so he basically kind of wrote about this. It had this blog, had this kind of this fan fiction blog.

In the kind of early, sorry, early 2020s, he ended up having a not early 2020, so early 2015, he ended up having a piece that was about like, he ended up kind of telling people, hey, let's all get together. We're going to draw, try to draw a bunch of Christians, maybe, maybe kind of Jews that are kind of aligned with us, conservative Christians, conservative Jews. We're going to all draw them to this five-state area and focus on that. And to what end to trying to change the, like just kind of build a survivalist paradise? Like what's the deal here?

Yeah, they're going to try basically to, I would say it's both as a kind of a bulwark to defend against what they would consider to be liberal tyranny from the federal government. This is really, really popular on the Obama era, or possibly if there's a government collapse as this kind of this home base that people could retreat to and rebuild society from. So I would say it kind of ranges from we're just going to be this force of opposition against liberal tyranny to we're going to basically be really, you know, focusing on on actually fighting, rebuilding society or fighting, you know, if there is subdis collapse eventually. That's such an American tradition to bomb shelters in the backyard, people keeping tens of thousands of days worth of food, the walking dead, both. and the TV show. So it's kind of interesting to have it specifically localized. Now we all know where to go. Yeah.

And in fact, in this story, there was like a, you know, there was this guy in like Olympic Peninsula of Washington State that was selling guns that had coordinates on them for his like base. If there's a collapse, you could all come to the coordinates. Then he sold his property. And so he had to like put, there's a lawsuit. He had to put out this announcement, like, please if there's a government collapse, do not come here.

I don't own the property anymore. So I had kind of written about that. He was tied in with the fan fiction in Washington State. So that was kind of this idea. And it was, there's an older version of that in Idaho, which is called the Northwest imperative, which is from white supremacists, which is, you know, kind of a very similar concept except instead of being just like, you know, kind of religious and conservative, we're going to try to specifically attract white people here.

And that was a big part of the Aryan Nations, which was a group that North Idaho in particular, particular really, really fought in the early 19, kind of the 1990s and early 2000s. That was kind of a real, like, when I was growing up reading the spokesman review newspaper, that was a big story, was this, this fight with this, this area nations, this, you know, yeah. So it's, you know, it's the Turner Diaries, right, with when you throw in the white nationalism. How, like, specifically with the white nationalist stuff, I know it's complicated and there's, like a long history of that in the Pacific Northwest. How integrated is it into all of these various groups? Yeah, it's sort of interesting because the, I wouldn't, I wouldn't consider the,

in fact, I got an email. One time when I wrote a piece, I got an email from James Wesley Rawls, the person who kind of started the readout saying like, hey, we're not a white supremacist movement. We really decry racism. And there's a big part of that. I would not say that the readout movement specifically is primarily a white supremacist movement, but you do have, you know, kind of some white supremacist style pastors that have been associated with it. So you kind of have the read, and this is the case too with, you know, you could look back at Ruby Ridge. You have kind of, within this militia movement, you have this kind of segment that's kind of white supremacististee, but it's not the primary focus of the movement, which is more of like kind of anti-government, kind of anti-government, anti-preparation.

We're going to like rebuild society eventually. It's not primarily focused on on spreading fears about a particular race. In fact, a lot of them are proud about this is my black friend, that kind of thing. You know, more like Amin Bundy, right? I mean, the Amin Bundy stuff was like they allegedly had people who were not white involved. Yeah, no, the Ammon Bundy is a real, like, that was a real, I mean, when he was in the, or during the Oregon Wildlife Refuge standoff, that was a big like kind of a moment of real excitement and energy within the readout in Idaho. Some of the people from North Idaho went over there. To kind of go over there, there's, you know, legislator that was from our area that went over there, legislators from Idaho. So that was, yeah, that was a really, really major

kind of movement in that kind of movement of terms of like government opposition. Are these movements connected in any way to state officials, to state politicians? I would say within, I would say pretty heavily within, especially within that time period, within that kind of like toward 2019 before the coronavirus pandemic. And so a lot of it, like I did a huge feature on Heather Scott, who's one of these North Idaho legislators, who's really, really immersed with the movement. The new head of the Idaho State GOP, Dorothy Moon, is another person who's been kind of very involved with this kind of right-wing. It's a very conspiracy-oriented movement. Probably the biggest conspiracy that they're probably into as opposed to others are. Like, they're not a

lot of Q stuff, more like agenda 21 has been the big one that's been really powerful there, this idea that basically the federal government and the UN are basically trying to force rural people into the cities by doing a variety of things. And it can range from Kim trails being sprayed to introducing wolves to try to push people into the cities. Kind of this real idea they want to remake the union wants to remake society. And so they they want. And so that's a big, part of, I would say, North Idaho politics in particular. So that that has been a pretty big factor in, especially if you go up to boundary counting, which is the very tippy top of the state Idaho's panhandle, that is where you see a lot of that pretty influential in politics.

It's really cool that Q&ON has such brilliant competition. I mean, that's that's that's Q-level stuff. Great. And this is before, this is kind of before Q&ON. And one of the things that, of course, as you guys have covered, like, you know, Q&O has done is it's sort of like, it became kind of the Avengers initiative for conspiracy theories, bringing everyone together to kind of like this one, like, hey, we're going to like have every conspiracy theory under the same umbrella. And so, but I would say, I have not. I have to report a little bit on some of the stuff, local officials, think of that, but I would say that the kind of the more the libertarian-ish read out

those kind of conspiracies, you know, FEMA camps, that was kind of more of the real prime factor than some of these others in the region. Can you, there's a story that I think is really illustrative of what is possible here and what things actually look like on the ground. Can you tell us the story of the standoff that wasn't? Oh, yeah. So this is a, yeah, this is a really like major, it's actually become a major part of North Idaho conservative lore. So basically you had, you know, so you have the George Floyd protests and there's a bunch of rioting, including in Spokane. There's some rioting in Spokane. It's not major, major, but it's like the first time Spokane has actually had rioting in like 30 years. The police have called a riot. Windows are broken downtown. The sheriff comes up, the sheriff of Spokane comes up and says, hey, we have Intel, these Tifa socialists that are doing this. This is sort of like we've heard, you know, talk about, you know, vehicles and that kind of thing. So there had been this rumor that Antifa and these suffering radicals were actually sending kind of operatives into North Idaho.

And this is kind of the thing that kind of there's the business type idea that it kind of, there's to paraphrase Tom Wolfe, the dark night of anti-fascism is always said to be landing. Always said to be descending upon North Idaho, but always lands in Portland, right? So like, there's this role, you're seeing what's happening in Portland, these kind of insane images of fire and theory. And there's also seeing what's happening in Spokane, which is, you know, people writing for the first time. And they don't really understand that it's like kind of more of a viral movement and viral kind of ideas rather than necessarily like actual operations. So I think this is going to happen in Idaho. And so like a bunch of people in Idaho says, like, this is not going to happen in our community. So they get guns.

They go, they kind of parade around in downtown Port-a-Lane. They end in Sandpoint and kind of these Idaho, North Idaho cities. And then there's no like violence or. chaos, you know, Antifa doesn't really show up. There's one guy in an Antifa mask I wrote about that was kind of this, you know, kind of this, you know, 20-something person from Portland that was concerned about seeing people with guns. So as you, you know, it kind of can feed on each other. But there wasn't anything that happened.

And so they believed that it's them, their ability to stand up against Antifa that kind of stopped. So it becomes this sort of this legend, this Alamo movement about like how, you know, this is the end of three amigos where all the townspeople are coming together to stop Alco from invading and just, you know, hurting the people, the townspeople. And so that's kind of become part of the legend of Idaho. And so, yeah, I would say that that kind of movement in terms of like, let's parade around with guns and we're not going to, like, hurt anyone.

But if something goes down, we're going to like, we're going to, you know, we're not going to start anything. We're going to finish it kind of thing, you know. And they have the legal right to do so because, you know, the Idaho laws aren't prohibiting open carry. So you can do that. And Shay, who's, okay, who's this guy, Matt Shea and like we've talked about Heather Scott a little bit.

Yeah. How do they take advantage of this moment politically? Well, I mean, they'd always kind of been, I'd say like Heather Scott and Matt Shea at a really sort of, this has always sort of been the moment that they'd been predicting. So you can watch, you can read on, you know, websites like read out the readout news, which is kind of this, you know, far right website in North Idaho. You can kind of track these different moments of all of these things about like there's always going to be this apocalyptic moment, right? You know, Matt Shea was one of those people

saying that he was a, he was a, he was a Spokane Valley legislators. He was a legislator from my area who was always sort of predicting that like, hey, you're going to need to have this bunker with all of this ammunition, all this food, because society is going to collapse, continually kind of predicting this. And so by doing that, he was kind of going to be, you know, he was, and he was also predicting that like, you know, and as, you know, as Obama, you know, Obama was kind of, when Obama was, you know, kind of going out, you know, eventually kind of transitioned to other parts of fear. You know, we're afraid of Muslim refugees that are coming in and are going to like impose Sharia law onto Idaho or we're afraid of these anti-fascist communists that are going to be coming in

exacting a vengeance upon Idaho. So this has been a really like common thing. So this just sort of plays sort of into their narrative. I say that they've been kind of speaking about for a while. But I would also say, though, by 2020, though, it's really not the readout move. The readout movement, as I see it, really kind of dissipates a little bit and kind of become subsumed by Ammon Bundy's People's Rights movements. And so this is kind of something where he brings together these anti-vaxxers, these anti-government types, and these kind of militia types to all sort of together to really oppose a lot of restrictions around COVID-19. And this is the kind of thing that some of these people have been afraid of for a long time. And so this kind of became this

movement where he really sort of pulled together. I would say all of these different groups to, you know, kind of led these different groups together and kind of really led this real, real sort of intense opposition. So we saw people like state the state houses. They would be like really, really protesting, breaking windows. And this is before January 6th. You kind of had these mini January 6th type moments in Boise or in Cordo Lane. places like that. And so I'd say that was kind of more of an Ammon Bunny People's Rights Movement. And I'd say now we're kind of seeing that, I think, fade out a little bit. And I'm really concerned about seeing the rise of, you know, actual kind of more white supremacist alt-right types in North Idaho.

And so I see that as kind of the bigger concern now than the readout. And so that's one of the objections I kind of had to Seth Abramson's post, along with predicting civil war, is that like he was kind of saying that this is predominantly the readout. I just don't think that's the kind of the real way that things are really operating. It's a little bit out of date, I think. Angry Planet listeners, thank you for tuning in. We're going to take a little bit of a break here for some ads. If you're listening on the substack, you don't have to listen to the ads.

We'll be right back. All right, Angry Planet listeners, you're on with Matthew and Jason. We're talking to Daniel Walters from the Inlander about reporting on extremism in the Pacific Northwest. So something that you kind of lit on that I think is very interesting that people don't seem to understand. And this is also something that I think applies to anti-fascist movements in Antifa. We tend to see the political extremists on the other side as this block.

When in actuality, you have all these different various movements that don't always align that are often fighting each other. Right. There's a phrase I like to use that basically is the further fringe you go, the more afraid the fringe becomes. So kind of the more, the more fringing, because you have these people that are really like egotistical or really like think that if they don't follow their path, the government, you know, the whole world is going to collapse. So, of course, you have this real, real, like, intense infighting. And so that's the kind of thing that, and to a certain extent, it's a good, I mean, it's, you know, having that kind of conflict, you know, is not necessarily a bad thing if you don't want, you know, United Front to me would be a more, more concerning with some of these extremists than having some of this conflict. As long as the conflict doesn't become, you know, actually physically violent.

But, but, yeah, I think you really have people that are really disagreeing about who's going to lead the movement. What is it going to look like? And I think that's a pretty good insight that's really important to think about for both left wing and right wing radical movements. Very quick question. How many people are we talking about? Like, what are the numbers? That's, I mean, those are really, that's a really hard question to answer. I would say, like, Devin Burkhart with the institution for, the institution for, I have to look it up.

But there's got, Devin Burkhart is an extremist researcher in the area, has done some good work on looking at Facebook. book, things like that. But there's, I'd probably say for the Ammon Bundy movement, there's probably, probably, probably thousands throughout Idaho, probably, thousands of people kind of associated with that. I would see the readout, it's probably a lot, I would say probably smaller, probably like, you know, maybe, I don't know, 400 people total in Idaho. I don't know. This is just like back of the envelope estimates, but there's, I mean, North Idaho is very, very, very right-wing and conservative, but not everyone is training at militia camps or anything like that, you know, so you have a lot of people that just like, don't like, you know, don't like Biden or don't like Obama or they kind of don't like Democrats and they really think that, you know, they want to be left alone. They're kind of libertarian. A lot of people like that that are just, I would say, kind of more. far right, but more kind of mainstream far right. Yeah, most people just want to be left alone and want the economy to be turning along and don't want to pay high taxes, right? Which is kind of an interesting turn that kind of some of the far right has taken in Idaho, which is kind of a surprising thing. It's gone from being very libertarian focus to very, very culture war. In fact, there's a group called Idaho Freedom Foundation, which is one of the most prominent, powerful groups in Idaho in terms of, like, politics.

and they've gone from being like, you know, I was wondering, are they going to like join the Black Lives Matter movement, honestly, like, are they going to be, because they've like come out against civil forfeiture. Like they've really, really opposed that kind of stuff. They've kind of really had a libertarian to going like kind of the opposite way in terms of like really, really, really worried about race, racial curriculum and, you know, trans stuff and curriculums for schools and that kind of thing. So really, really worried about drag shows and kind of like, we need to crack down on this kind of stuff as opposed to we need to just be. left alone, which is kind of interesting. Like, I didn't necessarily expect the movement to go in that direction. I think I have a pet theory about this and why this is happening. So I think people pull the levers of power that are available to them.

I think that quite like nobody likes, I think most people when they've learned about like what civil forfeiture is, don't like it. There's a lot of issues like that, but they've, in like criminal justice reform, ending the drug war, the stuff that most Americans are largely on board with. But all of those problems feel real big and like they can't be tackled. And it seems like all the efforts in that direction, seems like maybe not actually true. But seems like all those efforts in that direction over the past 10 years have kind of come to not. But what you can do is you can get some books banned from the high school. And damn it, you can get on the school board and raise a ruckus and make sure your kids aren't wearing masks or whatever. You know, X, Y, or Z, these kind of hyper-local issues that you feel like you can have more control over.

And let's, and, and let's remember like what COVID did. And I, and I kind of think is, yeah, COVID sort of pulled together everyone. It was this sort of this, it was like the, you know, the mothership and independence day for a lot of conservatives, like all of this, this thing for everyone to unite against, right? For like everyone to like, against this. So suddenly like your, the government is intruding in your everyday life and even more profoundly is intruding in how your kid is being raised. and your ability, like, what's happening with my kid, my kid's education.

So suddenly a lot of people that were, it was this incredibly radicalizing movement across the spectrum. On the left, I think we saw that a little bit, but I'm not an expert in the left, but I think particularly on the right, as that what we saw is we think we saw a profound amount of, I think people just becoming radicalized. And I knew a lot of people that were, I've known people that were former Matt Shea guys that had kind of turned in them, kind of moderated, that seemed to be coming a lot more. re-radicalized to a certain extent by what was happening.

But I'm sympathetic to like a lot of the stuff about, you know, just like thinking about the situation where suddenly like, you know, you're being forced to wear something different when you're going into, you know, going into places. You're being, your business is shut down. Like, how radicalizing is that? Like literally the government telling you you can't run your business that you worked and kind of built up. Like, you know, and there's, you know, obviously there's good reasons for a lot of those

things. But no, it's a really kind of profound moment. I think. And I think what it did, too, is it exposed a lot of people to the school system. A, a lot of people, too, were really sort of like upset at the school system, A, because of how they'd handled COVID, but also B, they were kind of more involved with their students' curriculums. So they were like maybe sometimes in the room when the person is being taught about, okay, here's what systemic racism is. Here's how we understand systemic racism for certain high schools, right? And so they're really going to be, I think, more incensed by that. And you're getting more

examples of anecdotes and that kind of thing. But in other case, it was just like Trump, it was really fascinating because Trump was such a, he was such a demagogue when it came to racial minorities and in particular, you know, immigrants and refugees. But he didn't like, he didn't have a problem with gay people at all. Like, you know, trans people, you thought, you had kind of an issue with that. Like, there wasn't, like, it, like, I was, like, the gay rights was not, anti-gay was not a profound part of even the extreme. extremism. Like when I'm listening to these guys, I'm not hearing a ton of anti-gay stuff, except for some of these white supremacist pastors. I'm not hearing a ton of that back then. Now you're

hearing it. But it's kind of amazing to me that that's kind of changed. Yeah, and this is something you covered obviously with the Pride in the Park stuff. Like, why do you think that shift has happened? Because it feels recent, right? It feels like past year that has really ramped up, especially like anti-trans stuff. But there's also some anti-LG, like, just anti-gay in general stuff going on too, right? And so, like, I would say there's two things. One of the, and I wanted to note that I, one of the stories that I kind of talked about is kind of this really fascinating moment, and I kind of realized, hey, there's something big

here is like, I attended this kind of forum that had been put on with this group called the Panhellow Patriots. It was like this right-wing motorcycle club. And this motorcycle club was passing around children's books and being offended by these children's books. And so kind of the economy, and they were kind of, when they said, they talked about it, They were kind of like trying to work out this dissonance in their head. It'll kind of live as they're kind of discussing it of like being this cool, you know, motorcycle guys.

Don't, you know, biker guys don't care about like what you do with your life to actually being like really upset about this, right? Because these aren't these aren't like school marbs that were like tutting, right? So in North Idaho in particular, I think that, I mean, I think it was two things. One is the national, the national movement. So you had guys like Chris Rufo who are specific. specifically seeing this moment in education, as this moment to really kind of like drive in this wedge. In some ways,

he's kind of open about being kind of cynical about it, about trying to kind of conflate, I would say some really kind of crazy wet left wing stuff with the kind of more generic normal liberal stuff and trying to kind of say it's all part of one umbrella and trying to confuse that. And so he really was pushing a lot of like his opposition to critical race theory and saying, oh, you're supposed to be guilty for being white.

And then you had the trans, then you had a lot of the kind of the stuff about sex ed being pushed by the potential next president, Governor DeSantis of Florida, who's a person that people are looking to Idaho from Idaho, jealousy. They're like, we've got to like imitate this guy, you know. People are trying to compete to see how they can like imitate DeSantis and imitate Abbott in Idaho. So it kind of becomes this competition. And then the third thing, and this is something I think is particular in North Idaho, is you have this immigration of these right figures, kind of these. was part of the Gryper kind of movement. So these kind of these 4chan, adult, cynical, like cynical kind of, like, kind of prankish, white supremacist type people that are migrating to Idaho,

specifically because it's extremely white, to kind of create this new kind of movement. And they're behind the scenes really, really, really stoking these fires, like really, really, not just with their, with their many, many followers, but within, like, this whole network of telegram people and these, like, local blogs. and local print publications that are all this like incredible like society of far right, you know, I think about it like you open up a shed and see like the spiders have built like this incredible like spider land and it's kind of like like that with a far end.

It's like it's community organizing is what it is in a way that's really, really profound. And like if you were, you know, the left really really would love to create in a lot of parts of the community. But it's like happened to right in North Idaho in a way that's it's kind of astonishing. but also just genuinely pretty powerful in terms of driving discourse and driving it to the right. And so it's the national and it's also just the fact that, yeah, we're, you're, it's not just the fact that Idaho is not necessarily reacting to the curriculum in Idaho. Idaho is reacting to the curriculum in Berkeley.

Idaho isn't reacting to the protesters. The, Idaho's not reacting to drag queens in Idaho. They're reacting to the drag queens in San Francisco. they're not reacting to protesters in Idaho. They're reacting to protesters in Portland. And so, like, that's the challenge that we're having. I think it goes the other way as round is that we're sort of like, and this is kind of one of the kind of epiphanies they had is that we're being, like,

driven apart and polarized by social media. But, like, some, it's also brought us together. So we're, like, divided by glass, but we're pressed up against the glass, like just with this absolute theory on our faces that can't believe, like, get a load of what this guy just did. It's kind of funny. The theory is always. you know, if you get to know your enemy, you'll come together.

But actually, I think familiarity breeding contempt is a lot more close to it. I think it depends on like, I think it depends on how you know your enemy. If you know your enemy through their worst tweets. So like if you don't like if you don't get like, like there's one of the things I tell like, so if you're like a liberal person who wants to be like listen and wants to be like, okay, I want to see what the Republican point of view is. I told me, don't follow like Ben Shapiro, right? because he'll drive you crazy because he's trying to go into he's trying to like kind of

like follow people like you know David French or people that are like to the right of you but like still agree with some core principles on you with you and so I think that's part of the problem is that we're like is what social media does is we're seeing the most horrifying parts of other people as opposed to you know I go to when I go to I go to church and when I go to church I go to church with people on different ends of the socioeconomic spectrum people of different races although not a ton because it's Spokane, but also people of different, like, ideological positions kind of across the board. But that's the kind of thing that's really, really like falling apart. And so in the sense of like knowing people that have different politics of you, but you don't know them

primarily because of that political opposition, I think that's like, that's part of the problem. And so like there are people that I can have a really good conversation with a relationship with that, you know, disagree with me profoundly. But it really helps to have, you know, something else in common rather than just like your difference. I want to switch gears just a little bit here. Another phenomenon I think that you've written about, I think this is one of your award-winning pieces. Triggered? Is that one of your award-winners?

Yeah. It was really great. I encourage everyone to read it. It's on the inlander. It's titled scrolling up. Triggered how America's social unrest and weakened institutions have incited vigilantes. You've got some horrifying stories in here. It's like kind of a byproduct of everything we've been talking about

is this erosion of trust in institutions, specifically the police. I'm not saying the police haven't given us reason. reason to distrust them, but things step in to fill those spaces and the results are not always great. Can you tell us a little bit about vigilantes in the Pacific Northwest? Yeah, I mean, like a lot of it was sort of like based on some of the stuff with, you know, kind of reacting to Antifa, that kind of thing. And then also watching what was happening with, you know, from, you know, across the state, what was happening with the chas and shop, the kind of the breakaway kind of police free zone for a little bit in Seattle. I'm like, this is kind of insane. This is crazy.

But seeing kind of that, yeah, that that distrust coming out in terms of people not believing that the system works for them anymore. So we've seen this situation with like, you know, somebody pulls a shoplifter and somebody pulls a gun on the shoplifter. And then, you know, another situation where, and my favorite kind of, I think my favorite part of that story is I kind of have this cascade of vigilanteism that I've sort of written about. So I started talking about this person who's. stinks someone who stole their car.

So this kind of outlawed biker guy. A car that's been missing for four years, by the way, right? Yeah, but like he stinks, yeah. But she thinks, but like he doesn't know. So he hears about this car has been stolen. He sees this car been stolen. So he goes after this car with his bike. He's pounding on the, you know, pounding on it.

But then we, in social media, we get this like this, we see this black family inside there, horrified. This kid there has horrified. This person trying to run away. multiple people trying to like get into the car and so you know from the biker's perspective he's seeing this this thing happen he wants to stop this car theft from the family's perspective there's like these crazy people possibly racist that are are coming after him trying to kill him and you know it's this really really a horrifying moment that's where I start out but then kind of in with like this becomes this

viral phenomenon on Twitter and everyone is unsurprisingly is super horrified with his thing track the guy down, they find him, they find a number that is associated with with him on Facebook. They start sending a bunch of really like angry, angry messages toward this number, you know, toward this, this number that appears to be associated with them, including like interracial pornography and all this kind of stuff, death threats. But like it's not actually his number because it doesn't have this number anymore. It's like this like this young, this young girl and her, she's absolutely horrified. And so it's just this great sort of like this whole like all these different shades of vigilanteism from kind of Twitter mobs to, you know, kind of people like sending like death threats, which is just incredibly common these days.

And then also like people trying to stop crime. And yeah, it's becoming a real big, I think it's just a real big concern. And I think like we had this moment where in Spokane where the police said that we're getting rid of the property crimes unit. And it wasn't totally, from what I can tell it wasn't totally true. We learned later like it was something there. kind of doing a sort of like a negotiation kind of ploy. It was kind of seemed to be kind of some political ploy like, hey, we're just, you know, they weren't stopping investigating property crime. But the property crime rate absolutely soared in like the month after, even though there hadn't necessarily been this profound change. And so when I'm looking at like crime rates right now, it's like, I wonder like how much of it is that we are trusting each other, how much of it is

that we're not trusting the police. How much is the police are saying we're handcuffs, we can't investigate crimes anymore. How much is that actually like causing crime to increase because people are like, I have to take matters into my own hands because the police aren't going to investigate it. Or like, I'm not going to get caught, right? So there's all these sorts of things that can kind of feed on each other. And one thing I was trying to figure out is like how does, and I asked several experts this, how does vigilanteism decrease? Like how does, you know, and it's, it's like, I don't necessarily like know entirely. Sometimes it's because like, some of that, some of that becomes sort of like that anti-vigilante fever becomes sort of subsumed into the justice system for good or bad and oftentimes bad.

But I don't know necessarily how to fix it. But I'm genuinely kind of worried about this in our, not just in our area, but, you know, across the country for sure. So they were right. The people who were preparing for the end of society were right. That's what was so fascinating is that these people like were like COVID was that moment of like, I'm almost. wondering, this is your moment. Like, this is your moment you've been predicting. This is like almost like the collapse. Then a lot of them were the people that were really like the most upset that society was being shut down. And so they weren't necessarily, they didn't really like,

you know, kind of, but yeah, but there's there's there are some people that are sort of, I think, craving conflict, right? And so I do think there are people that if there is, you know, so if there is big conflict, there are people that will, I think it's far more likely you have, you know, big, you know, you might have something goes wrong. You might have street violence in bigger cities, right? You might have people from Idaho that drive to place, Idaho and Spokane, that drive to places like Portland, places like Seattle to take a part in that, right, on whether on, you know, one side or the other, because they kind of think this is, you know, once people start to think, and this is kind of what I actually do worry about when it comes to like, once people

believe that there's no political option for making change, that there's no option, then I think they become really, then that's when they become like, they start getting violent, destructive. And that's, that's kind of scary to me. That's not a good, that's not a good thing because it feeds off of each other. And then we think like, hey, maybe the only way to stop this is to become violence destructive ourselves. And, you know, I don't like that. So are you worried about civil war then? Not, not in, yeah, not in the, I would say not, not particularly. I'm worried about, I worried about incidents of violence.

of extrajudicial violence and political violence that crops up. You know, I'm worried about things like assassinations. I'm worried about, like, bombings. I'm worried about, I'm worried when I see, you know, just as I worry, you're worried when you see abortion clinics set on fire. You're worried when you see, like, anti-abortion clinics set on a fire, right? You know, kind of some of these pregnancy clinics. I'm worried about, yeah, so I'm worried about, like, those moments of violence,

but it's the idea that this is going to become some massive breakaway civil war. I just don't, I just think that's that sort of like, the people I talk to that I respect, the stream of researchers that I talk to that respect, like people at the EDL. And that's not primarily what they're seeing. They're seeing more of these, what they call like, I think it's a stochastic or stochastic. I don't know what to pronounce it. But kind of these moments of like social media, something goes viral, they see something, lone wolves that are kind of inspired by, you know, you have more instances of people,

you know, left wing people trying to firebomb, ice, like happened in Tacoma. Or do you have more instances? of, you know, right-wing people that are like breaking glass of, you know, libraries or things like that. I mean, you don't even, I mean, there's a case in Boundary County that didn't even have the books that they're, like, there's protest, like, armed protests of Boundary County. But I don't know if it's armed, but like these really intense protests of Boundary County Library. They didn't even have the books that they're protesting at the library. It was just, you know, people are trying to like, all politics is national. So now.

that's a really nice way of putting it. I like the way you flip that over. Yeah, all politics is national. That's good. Yeah. And it's true. It feels very true now. Yeah.

You know, just like you said, we're very good, like a lot of people in the Pacific Northwest, and I know down here where I live, I live in South Carolina, are very concerned about San Francisco. People in Texas are very, where my family's from are very concerned about California values, even though they came from California a generation ago. And the Seth Abram's situation is a great example because he's like from, he's like from kind of New England area, right? And like he's seeing this sort of thing happen. You know, he reads read some like some pretty good reporting about what's happening in Idaho and is kind of like, oh, this is like, and he's using that to rally his own followers for their political, you know, purposes and that kind of thing.

So it's kind of like there's some stories actually right that like I don't want this, I don't think this story should go viral. Like this is this really kind of incendiary local story, but it's like kind of like, you know, if it does go viral, sometimes I'm like, well, you know, maybe it shouldn't have half, you know, it's like you want as a, you want it all your writing to be seen, but it's like this is not, this is the story that's like impacts this real community. This isn't supposed to be this national firestorm because it can really distort. I think it can really distort things when it becomes like that. Wow. I'm real journalist. Not good. Also, real quick, dad, I'm not talking about you. I know you listen. Remind me to tell you. the goat story when I see you. Okay. You're playing of God stories. Yeah. Perfect, perfect personal message to my father planted in the middle of the, at the end of the podcast.

I think that's a good place for us to end, right? This idea that all politics now is national and the only war left to us is the culture war. And it's getting... Yeah, and I think that's one of the reasons why I actually think that, like, because you mentioned kind of, there's some discussion within the Seth Abramson piece about about just sort of connecting with, you know, about like these, you know, journalists parachuting in and that kind of thing. It was national journalists and local journalists and that kind of thing. That's an always this interesting economy of local journalists are facing.

But like, I kind of think there needs to be more sort of interplay between the two in this healthy environment because like a lot of times like, I'm like Patriot Front things happen. New York Times actually asked me to like write about it briefly. And because, you know, they didn't have anyone on the ground. They went something on the ground. And so I went over there and wrote about it. I'm not an expert in Patriot Front, so I don't rely on these other extremist experts, but a lot of these other people that are experts on like Patriot Fund aren't experts on what's happening in my community that might be really precipitating them.

And so you kind of really need the ground-level troops and you need kind of the national artillery basically and trying to like trying to make the understanding happening. Some of the really, really great writers to like dive in and dig deep with a fresh perspective who aren't living in the water. And you need people that are like kind of know what's been happening and been covering the community for years to, you need kind of both those perspectives. And I think that's a real key, I think, to putting these moments in perspective. And also just trying to navigate this tension between like there's nothing to worry about

and the sky is falling. And like, as a journalist, it's really, really hard to say, like, you should be pretty concerned about this. And that's always like, how do I write that in this sense? Like, how do you write a headline like, oh, you should be pretty concerned about this problem without like saying, you know, you should be taking up arms or saying like there's nothing to see here. Daniel Walters, your work is on the inlander. Thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this.

Yeah, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it. That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. Just created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like us, if you really like us, please go to that substack. It's at AngryPlanetpod.com or AngryPlanet.substack.com. where for mere $9 a month, you get early versions of the mainline episodes that are commercial-free and bonus episodes.

We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.