Making Sense with Sam Harris - #169 — Omens of a Race War

Episode Date: September 20, 2019

Sam Harris speaks with Kathleen Belew about the white power movement in the United States. They discuss white supremacy, white nationalism, white separatism, the militia movement, “The Turner Diaries,” the connection between the white power movement and war, the significance of Ruby Ridge and Waco, the Christian Identity movement, the significance of “leaderless resistance,” the failures of the justice system in prosecuting white power crimes, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, let's see here. Brief housekeeping.

I've added a conversation track to the Waking Up course. And so I've started to interview teachers there and other experts on topics related to meditation and the nature of mind and living an examined life. And that's just starting. Generally speaking, these will be teachers and experts I admire and agree with, but also people who have genuine insights but may also believe a lot of cockamamie ideas that I'll want to push back on. And there will also be some cautionary tales, and I've just added one of those, the former cult leader Andrew Cohen, who, as I made clear, I don't think is merely a fraud, though he clearly created a lot of harm. I think he's a person who had some real insights and created a lot of harm. Anyway, I found that a very interesting conversation.

I think there's a lot to learn from his experience, both as a student and as a teacher, to learn from his experience, both as a student and as a teacher, and that kind of thing that's more narrowly focused on the contemplative life and ethics. And certainly meditation will be on the app rather than the podcast these days. Also, there's a new Android build coming, and it will be entirely new. I've been hearing about all the technical pain Android users have been experiencing. Anyway, a comprehensive fix is in the works, and I will let you know when that launches. What else here? My friend Douglas Murray has a new book out called The Madness of Crowds, and this is a book I am really happy he wrote. I was thinking at one point that I should write a book along these lines. He has done a much better job than I would have.

This is really the rejoinder to the wokeness that we've all been waiting for, and it is quite a measured book. Douglas, as you know, has a lacerating wit, so there are many laughs to be had at the expense of the far left, but this is not a shrill or tendentious book at all. This really is just a sanity check, and I found it a joy to read. I'll read you my blurb, just to give you a sense of how much I like this book.

We live at a time when many of the luckiest people on earth declare themselves among the most oppressed, while seeking to oppress others in the service of a paradoxical new faith. And no one is so beloved or immaculate that he or she can't be dragged before the altars of this cult and offered up as a fresh sacrifice. In The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray shows how the apparent virtues of social justice, intersectionality, and identity politics have begun to stifle honest thinking on nearly every topic. In the process, he displays more courage and wit and basic decency than can be found anywhere among the woke. The book is simply brilliant. Reading it to the end, I felt

as though I'd just drawn my first full breath in years. At a moment of collective madness, So I love the book, and I recommend you buy it. It would be great to see this book really succeed. This was a necessary book, and Douglas was certainly the right man for the job. Okay, final announcement here. If you're supporting the podcast, please make sure you are listening on the private feed, not on the public one. And that means you should go to my website, you should go to my website, log in, go to the subscriber content page, and subscribe to the private RSS feed. If you're on mobile, you can generally do that with one click, which will connect to your favorite podcast app. But we're making some changes here on the podcast,

and I don't want subscribers to lose access to any content. So please make sure you are subscribed if you're a supporter, and you'll know the difference in your podcast player by seeing a red icon for the Making Sense podcast as opposed to a black one. That is the telltale sign. Anyway, if you have problems, you can contact support at samharris.org, and they will help you. And one change that's coming, and it's coming now, is I will start adding an afterword to each podcast interview, where I talk a little bit about the conversation you just heard. I won't always do this, perhaps. Sometimes I will have left everything on the field,

but if I have any further thoughts, I will put them after the conversation and not up front in the housekeeping. And now for today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with Kathleen Ballou. Kathleen is a historian and the author of the book Bring the War Home, the White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. And she spent 10 years researching and writing this book. She's currently an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago. and you may have heard her on Fresh Air, as I did, and she's appeared on CBS News and elsewhere, and there was a PBS Frontline documentary based on her work titled Documenting Hate, New American Nazis. Anyway, we cover a lot of ground in this episode. We talk about the white power movement in the United States, the difference between

white power and white supremacy and white nationalism and white separatism and the militia movement. We talk about the Turner Diaries, the significance of events like Ruby Ridge and Waco, the Christian identity movement, the significance of so-called leaderless resistance, the failures of the justice system in prosecuting white power crimes, and other topics. And now, without further delay, I bring you Kathleen Ballou. I'm here with Kathleen Ballou. Kathleen, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Thank you for having me. So our job today is to talk about white power and white supremacy and white nationalism and white separatism and other joyful topics. And you've written a book titled Bring the War Home, the White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. And so obviously these topics are more and more in the news as we live yet another year in Trumpistan. Just to get our bearings here, how do you come to know anything about this stuff? And maybe to start, how would you differentiate the terms I just listed? That's a great place to begin. These terms are distinct, and it's important to understand that they describe a whole range

of beliefs, ideologies, and ways that people move through the world. So the big category is white supremacy. Now, that covers everything from individual belief systems to the different kinds of systems and opportunities that structure daily life in our country. Many scholars have established that America is what we might think of as a white supremacist nation. And by that, I mean simply that there is an unequal distribution of resources, opportunities, and other elements of American life. opportunities, and other elements of American life. And we could look at incarceration, education, health, all kinds of different metrics we can use to understand that. Now, that is historical in that it's something that was established over time, and we see vestiges of white supremacy in law and policy. And it's also individual in terms of belief system from person to person.

also individual in terms of belief system from person to person. Now, all of that big white supremacy is much more amorphous and distinct from what I write about, which is the white power movement. That is a group of activists. And I suppose I should just say, I use activists not in any kind of positive terminology, but simply to describe someone who is taking action to bring about a social and political change. And the people that I write about are members of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi groups, skinheads, militia groups. Some are radical tax protesters, and some are other kind of stripes of anti-state belief. These groups came together in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and set out to wage war on the federal government. So what I write about is the

period from the end of the Vietnam War to the Oklahoma City bombing that really set the stage for the politics we find ourselves confronting in the present. Yeah, yeah. So I want to talk about the origins of all this, but hopefully we will I want to talk about the origins of all this, but, you know, hopefully we will have something to say about the nature of what's happening in the present. So let's talk about, well, first, you just made a few distinctions that we should clarify. So you mentioned a bunch of these groups, neo-Nazis, the KKK, the groups that people have heard about, like the Aryan Nations and the Order. You alluded to tax evaders. I guess those are sovereign citizens. These groups are not all identical ideologically. How do you parse this landscape, and is there now a formal connection between all of these miscreants? And

do they help one another even if they don't totally agree? So this is something that the scholarship missed for quite a long time, partly through using an overly rigid idea of what a social movement should be and should look like. Many social movements in the late 20th century are fragmented in the way I'm about to describe to you. The other thing that people do, and I think this is a very natural sort of human approach to a belief system that you find foreign or objectionable, is to try to sort it into categories. So there's a lot of early scholarship that's sort of trying to figure out, okay, how many of these people are Nazis? How many are skinheads? How many are Klansmen? And which symbols exactly should be used by which group and exactly what variety of ideology do you find in each place? And that's

all valuable to know. And certainly there are differences between some of these groups. But what I do as a historian is try to understand how this movement worked for people who were members of it. And what you see on the ground is not strict divisions between these groups. What you see actually is a very vibrant circulation of people from group to group and between ideologies. And the way people in this movement describe their own activism is very similar. So one person said something along the lines of, suppose we're all Christian. It's like I'm Church of Christ and that guy over there is Baptist, right? But we're all Christian. Others describe it as they're all in the armed forces, but they're simply in the army and the navy and things like this. So it's important to have a

mode of understanding that allows us to see not only the distinctions, but also the commonality and the fact that people moved at great frequency between these different groups and belief systems. But are they all white supremacists? And are they all white separatists? Are they all white nationalists? Do they all... I mean, I guess the one that stands out immediately to me, I know very little about them, but like the sovereign citizens, are they even racists? Aren't they just tax evading nutcases? Well, the first thing I would say is we probably want to get away from thinking about nutcase and miscreant and words like that as early as possible. Because even though the people who

are in this movement have ideas that you or I might not agree with, they're acting with a pretty coherent worldview and set of beliefs that makes what they're doing legible. The thing with the militia groups- I guess I've seen too many of them on daytime television throwing chairs at Geraldo Rivera or screaming at Sally, Jesse, Raphael. Oh, yes, you've looked at those ones. Yes, they were definitely-

I'm dating myself. Yeah, for a little while in the moment I studied, they were really doing a lot of those talk show appearances. And certainly there are people within this movement who I think we could all agree are motivated by various kinds of mental disturbances, as well as political ideology. There's one man I write about testified in front of court that he could levitate and speak to God and things like this, but he was a leader in the movement. Anyhow, the militia movement is a little bit more difficult to grapple with than the earlier period that is really at the heart

of my study. And what I'm talking about is at the end of the 1980s, there's this big movement of white power activity into militias, but the militia movement is bigger than white power. And not all of the militia movement should be classified as white power. It's not kind of a one-to-one transition. What it is, is that the white power momentum, which is substantial at the end of the 1980s and includes a major sort of upsurge of network organizing groups, weapons, and money, all ends up in the militias. So what I'm kind of writing against is the idea that the white power movement simply disappears at the end of the 1980s, which many people had thought. Instead, it ends up within the militia movement. So what does that

mean? First of all, there are groups of militia men and individuals in the movement that are not acting out of the same kind of overt racial animus that is what we're dealing with in the white power movement. And some of the sovereign citizens activity might be classified in that way. However, there are also a lot of cases where that kind of race racial, what would we call it, race neutrality is actually simply a veneer to make white power activism more acceptable. And that's an old strategy that goes, you know, way back, at least to the Vietnam War, if not into the early 20th century. So I think we have to be very cautious with the militia movement. But certainly it is an area that deserves more study. Right. And if I recall, this is what made

understanding Timothy McVeigh and Ruby Ridge and those incidents that we'll talk about a little confusing because it was entangled with this larger militia movement. I think Timothy McVeigh was associated with the Michigan militia at one point, and it just wasn't clear what was what and what the ideology actually was. Exactly. And McVeigh, as we can talk about, is a pretty clear case of white power activism. But many cases are less clear than that, especially in the militia years. Let me go back before we move on to another part of your question that I think is a really good one, which is how we think about those other terms, white nationalism and white separatism. So white, these are often muddled terms. And I'll just start by saying that white nationalism is the idea that there is something inherently

racially known and held in the category of the nation. So the idea that whiteness is an inherent part of what makes the United States what it is, and that the admission of other cultures will inherently disturb or weaken the nation over time. And in terms of the study of extremist groups, the best example of white nationalism, I would argue, the one I use for teaching, is the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Now, that's a very familiar example, probably, to a lot of your listeners. That's the one most people study in high school. It's also huge. It was 4 million people. It was 10% of the state of Indiana. And very famously, this is where you get the pictures of the Klansmen wearing white robes and hoods and marching on the

National Mall in Washington, D.C., but with their faces uncovered because it was socially acceptable. Now, what that Klan was about was state participation. And we know this because a ton of them got elected to office. They were about state participation. Their slogans were things like 100% American, America for Americans, things like this. They were profoundly anti-Black and anti-Semitic, but they were also anti-immigrant and had a lot of other interests. Okay, so that is white nationalism. That's not what we're talking about from 1983 forward for people on the fringe,

because from 1983 forward, there's a huge pivot in this movement, partly fueled by the sense of betrayal felt in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, in which the white power movement is instead setting out to overthrow the federal government, to create race war, and eventually to found a white nation. So white separatism is better for what we're talking about. But even separatism is sort of a few steps short of the ideology that's really the most popular and biggest animating push in this movement, which is is not separatism. The end game is overthrow of the United States and the creation of an all-white polity that eventually they envision might take over the world. Right. So they do go that far. They have a kind of Fourth Reich, let's complete Hitler's project kind of ideology. They do. And the best place to sort of see and understand it is in a dystopian novel that becomes a sort of lodestar for the movement called Turner Diaries, which really lays this out as an imaginative path forward.

I mean, one thing that's really interesting about this movement from a scholarly perspective is how they think they can possibly do it because it's a tiny group of people, right? It's a fringe movement. And they are setting out to do what they say in this novel is something like a gnat assassinating an elephant. They want to overthrow the most militarized super state in the history of the world. So the Turner Diaries is so important, not because of its writerly qualities, but because it really lays out how they could hope to achieve something that radical. Right. Yeah. So, and as you point out in your book, not only does this movement get naturally seeded by disaffected soldiers coming back from wars, not just the most relevant one here or the most proximate one is the Vietnam War, but you point out that in the aftermath of basically every war we've fought, this has been a phenomenon where some number of soldiers, albeit a tiny percentage, take their

grievances against the state, the U.S. government, and direct them back home. And I mean, hence the title of your book, Bring the War Home. Can you say something about that? And then we can just talk about how the origins here and just how many people are involved. Absolutely. So this is actually how I got into this project. I wanted to do, when I was set up to write a dissertation, I wanted to study the long legacies of racial violence in the United States. We are uniquely without a sort of shared public process around

reckoning with the long violence that has characterized the nation. And at that time, the only sort of thing like that that had happened was a totally non-governmental Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Greensboro, North Carolina. This happened in 2005 around an event that had happened in 1979, in which a united caravan of Klansmen and neo-Nazis opened fire on a leftist anti-Klan march and killed five people, wounded several more. And the thing that the perpetrators and the people aligned with these ideologies said in the TRC proceedings was, I killed communists in Vietnam, so why wouldn't I kill them here? Now, I couldn't stop thinking about this. This is a profound collapse of time and space and people. It mixes up home and battlefront. It mixes up wartime and peacetime. It collapses

everybody communist into the same kind of racial and subjugated category of death. This is enormously meaningful. And what I wondered is if this is going to be a story about sort of, you know, a Rambo story of veterans returning home and creating violence at home. It turns out that it's really not that simple at all and that this isn't a problem of veterans. What we see indeed is that there is a surge in this kind of vigilante violence after every major return from combat. But it turns out that that effect actually goes across age groups, across gender, across categories of people who do and don't serve in warfare. All of us become more violent in the aftermath of war. Now, that raises a whole lot of questions. of violence and whether the state's role in creating warfare creates this aftermath. We can go to individuals bringing the war back with them. I tend to think it's a combination of a whole lot of different complex factors. But what we know for sure is that we see this reverberation effect

in the aftermath of violence and that this tiny, tiny percentage of returning veterans brings back with them things like munitions expertise that are then used to escalate the body count of white power violence. The war also creates a paramilitary culture in the 1980s in the United States. You know, people that I write about with these fringe beliefs are hardly the only people who think that that war is the major cultural event of their lifetime. You can just look at the outsurge of movies and camo fatigue, you know, clothes and paintball ranges and all kinds of other things like that. So they're also capitalizing on this big cultural moment of the 1980s. Yeah. And also you get the increased militarization of police forces.

And then the response to that, I mean, the right-wing outrage over the apparent misapplication of state force. So the two events that you write about that were so galvanizing to this movement were Ruby Ridge and Waco, where you have, you know, essentially military snipers. and Waco, where you have, you know, essentially military snipers and, in the case of Waco, a ton of military hardware intruding upon the lives of somewhat deranged but as yet non-violent people and essentially escalating these situations into kind of mass murders, if you view it from the side of those who view the Branch Davidians and the people at Ruby Ridge as pure victims. Maybe that's a good place to start. I mean, what happened with Ruby Ridge and Waco, and what did that do to the white power movement?

Sure. And we should think of Ruby Ridge and Waco as related, but sort of different kinds of events. And the other thing I want to just interject before we start on that story is that the kinds of paramilitary policing that came into public view and public sort of became objects of public discussion because of Ruby Ridge and Waco. had already been used on a lot of civilians in the United States because counterinsurgency warfare was also developed sort of through experimental methods in communities of color and then in Vietnam before it was used in this way. So what's new about Waco and Ruby Ridge is mostly that it's televised and that people are focusing on it in the way that they do. And that's partly because the people at the receiving end of this violence are white. So what happens in Ruby Ridge is that there's a, well, so Ruby Ridge is a case of a white power activist, Randy Weaver, and his family had moved to the area to become survivalists. They built a rough cabin. They followed Christian identity

practice, which is a white power theology. Randy Weaver ran for sheriff on a white power platform, and they had visited Aryan Nation several times, or at least twice or something of that kind. At one of these Aryan Nation's meetings, a government informant tried to get Randy Weaver to also become a government informant by selling him a illegal weapon that had been modified to be, I think, a quarter of an inch short. It's hard not to sympathize with the idea that Randy Weaver and people who, people of all political stripes actually, can look at this case and sort of think this was dirty dealing on the part of the government. It's kind of entrapment. I mean, yes, I'm not a legal scholar, but entrapment is certainly the word that came to mind the first time I read this case.

A lot of other things happened by way of miscommunication, including giving him the wrong court date and then responding when he didn't show up to the court date, although he had also decided not to go. So there's a whole bunch of sort of bad faith effort around this. And then government snipers encircle his cabin to try to demand that he come to court. But the Weaver family, all of them, including the children, are highly armed. And this turns into a multi-day standoff with several people killed in the course of events, including Vicki Weaver killed as she's holding her infant daughter in her arms inside of the cabin. And for reasons we can talk about,

her death is among the people lost. Her death is sort of singularly important to this movement for a number of symbolic reasons. The thing that I find most interesting about this is that Ruby Ridge is kind of the moment where we can see that the white power movement's paramilitarization. And by that, I just mean the way that it's becoming more and more like an army. It's using military grade weapons and uniforms. At this point, Klansmen have largely abandoned the white robes and hoods and started using camo fatigues instead. They're using things of this kind. We see that paramilitarization colliding with a concurrent paramilitarization of policing. So there's a picture that I found in the archive where a group of five skinheads was on their way up to the mountaintop during the siege with the

intention of resupplying the Weaver family with more guns and ammo. And they're caught, they're detained and arrested by the ATF, which is Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. And there's a photograph of a ATF officer arresting one of the skinheads down on the floor with his knee on the back. And in the photograph, they're wearing the same uniforms. They're indistinguishable from each other, except that one of them has an ATF jacket. And it's really something that two completely different elements of society, one being supposedly a neutral arbiter of kind of state law and the other being an anti-state movement could come to be outfitted in such a similar way. So all of that gets really cooked into a frenzy by Waco, which is not a white power event per se. The Branch Davidians who are surrounded and

put under siege at Waco are actually a multiracial compound, but they are kind of an apocalyptic group of, I guess we could say, fellow travelers with the white power movement. And certainly the white power movement understands it as a white power event. And in fact, in some of the magazines within the white power movement, they show only the photographs of Waco victims who are white victims. They omit the other people. So it's sort of put forward in that way. And Timothy McVeigh was actually standing there. I mean, this was like a month-long FBI, ATF siege. And many people traveled, among them Timothy McVeigh, to just kind of bear witness to this atrocity in the making,

the kind of misapplication of state power, whether or not David Koresh himself was a white supremacist. Yes. And unlike Ruby Ridge, which is very remote and on the top of a mountain, and most of the images coming out were satellite images, Waco was on the Texas prairie. So the cameras could watch everything that happened, including when federal armored vehicles rolled in and set fire to the compound, or the compound somehow caught fire. This is still a matter of some argument. But the siege, the Waco siege, became a sort of meeting point for people in the white power movement. Louis Beam, who is one of the key leaders of this movement, came out to the siege and asked questions of many of the law enforcement officers,

tried to get press credentials. Timothy McVeigh made the trip. McVeigh was not there when the fire happened at the end, although there are reports of him watching it on television with tears running down his face. And significantly, when we're thinking about these long aftermaths of warfare, the armored vehicles used to end the Waco siege were very, very similar to the one that he manned, that McVeigh manned in the Gulf War in the Big Red One

Infantry Division. Just to close the loop on Christianity here, So the Branch Davidians weren't Christian identitarians in quite the same way as some of these other groups are, but there is a kind of apocalyptic Christianity organizing some of this movement, right? And if I recall from your book, the end of the Cold War seemed to signal to the people who have this cast of thinking that we were kind of entering the end times, and this was the moment where, you know, the white supremacist Christian ethnostate needed to be built. So Christian identity, for listeners who might not have heard about this before, is a political theology that holds that white people are the true lost tribe of Israel and that everyone else are racial enemies. Everyone else, people of color, Jewish people, anyone who is not white

and part of this tribe, this faith holds have descended from either beasts or Satan, depending on where you are in which strand of the theology. And I'm simplifying a little bit for expediency, but I think this is a fair depiction. The interesting thing about Christian identity in terms of how it operationalizes this movement is that unlike evangelical churches, which are also gaining huge memberships in the 1980s, which are also becoming very politicized and very focused on the apocalypse. Unlike the evangelicals, Christian identity has no rapture. There is no promise that the faithful will be spared this hideous battle at the end of the world. Instead, the faithful are supposed to survive the battle, so they become survivalists. And they are tasked with clearing the world of enemies, which again is all non-white people and Jews. And so clearing the world of enemies so that Christ can return.

So what Christian identity does for the people in this movement who believe in it is to transfigure this whole thing into a holy war. Now, this thing about the apocalypse, though, is way bigger than the white power movement. And I think that the end of the Cold War is significant. This is kind of the direction that my next book might be going. The end of the Cold War is significant in this way, not only for people on the fringe or for evangelicals, but for a whole lot of people in the United States. Because if you think about Cold War America, people had really come to live with the idea of the imminent end of the world or the imminent threat of life presented by nuclear warfare. We can think about those duck and tuck cover drills and videos and all of the different ways that people were sort of primed in civil society to think about how that could kind of happen at any time. And then that layered on top of this religious belief, which again, ranges from evangelical churches all the way to the Christian identity fringe. So what happens in 1989 is super interesting because the enemy disappears, the Soviet enemy disappears at the end of the Cold War, but the belief doesn't disappear. So there's this whole

group of people who suddenly have this intense belief in the imminent apocalypse, but it's a hole in the story. So for people in the white power movement, a lot of people simply replace the state into that kind of missing enemy slot. My sense is that in the 90s, this is kind of a crisis of narrative for a lot of people beyond this movement. So in the aftermath of Waco, we have Timothy McVeigh, you know, highly motivated, it would seem, to take the war home. And at that point, just prior to the Oklahoma City bombing, Just prior to the Oklahoma City bombing, do you have a sense of how many people were part of this movement? Yes. So this is a tricky thing to count. And I'm going to explain my best estimate and then I'm going to tell you some of the problems with it. Historians and sociologists have kind of thought about this in concentric circles, which is to say that, as I was saying earlier, social movements have kind of varying levels of degree of participation, if you will. So you can think about concentric circles like a bullseye, and in the middle are only about 25,000

people. Now, those are the people who live and breathe the movement. They marry other people in the movement. They get rides to the airport from other people in's around 150,000 to 175,000 people. Those people do public-facing stuff, like attend rallies, subscribe to literature, regularly read the newspapers. Outside of that is another 450,000 people. And those people don't themselves contribute money or time, but they do regularly read the literature. So what we can imagine is that there's another more diffused group of people outside of that who would not read something that says, you know, official newspaper of the Knights of KKK, but who might agree with many of the ideas that are presented in it. So what we have to think about is the way that this kind of model of organizing both moves ideas from that hardcore center out into the mainstream and pulls in recruitable

people towards the middle. Okay. Now that I've said that, that's our best estimate. One other thing is at play, which some sociologists discovered, which is that after 1983, this movement is using a strategy called leaderless resistance. Now, this is actually very, very similar to how we now understand cell-style terror. And I think a lot of people will think it's familiar because of all the things we've learned after 9-11. Leaderless resistance simply holds that people can agree on a common set of targets and objectives and then work together to achieve them through violence, but without communication with other cells or with central leadership. And leaderless resistance in the white power movement came about

mostly because they were so frustrated with FBI infiltration in the civil rights era, and because they thought it would make it more difficult to prosecute them in court. And it did make both of those operations more difficult. But the bigger legacy of leaderless resistance has been that we lost our entire conception of this as a social movement. And I can talk more about that in a minute. But what this means for numbers is that after 1983, this movement is no longer interested in trying to get 10,000 people to march down Main Street. This movement is interested in trying to get, you know, 10,000 people to march down Main Street. This movement is interested in trying to get 12 people who are willing to rob a bank or set off a bomb. So what we have to remember is that after 1983, decreasing numbers actually doesn't mean decreasing violence or activity. So you've sketched a picture of something like 700,000 people who are in these central rings of the movement,

and 25,000 of whom are actually soldiers or consider themselves soldiers. Do you have a sense of that outer ring of sympathizers? Maybe there's a ring beyond that. I'm just trying to imagine how many people in the US when they saw Oklahoma City thought, yeah, that was probably a good idea. That had to happen. I understand what McVeigh was up to there. How many people would you think were untroubled by the preschool kids who were killed there? I mean, I just because there's a picture. I just want to know what we're talking about when we're talking about, you know, murderous white supremacy and its sympathizers. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a really interesting question, especially because, you know, none of these answers are ever simple, even for people in

the movement. There's a lot of argument in the movement about the efficacy of Oklahoma City because of the children. That's a really hard pill for people in the movement to swallow because white children are so central to what they think they're doing. Maybe that's a confounding variable. Maybe it's just we need a different example. So let's just focus on Oklahoma City for a moment. We can summarize what Oklahoma City was briefly. I mean, people will be fairly familiar with it, but I guess a few things to point out. One is that it was not totally clear that McVeigh was a white supremacist, or at least it was not as clear as it might have been. He's not, he doesn't have, he doesn't have a swastika tattooed on his arms that I recall. And he didn't

claim to be part of a white power movement, right? I think he even claimed to have just acted on his own. And you are now saying that this is part of the plan to actually hide the fact that you had Confederates. And I think many people think he had several Confederates who went unprosecuted and undiscovered, and there was very little will to go digging further there. amount of conspiracy thinking around that. I remember Gore Vidal wrote at least one piece in Vanity Fair. And so just, I guess, give me your take on Oklahoma City and what it meant and what it did to the movement. Sure. So before we do Oklahoma City, I want to give you one more piece of information about kind of the relative size and importance of the movement. And that is simply a comparative example when we think about fringe movements in the United States and what is and isn't important to study. So the John Birch Society is much more studied and much more understood than the movement that we're talking about today. The John Birch Society, as some of you may know, is a anti-communist

kind of Cold War era extremist group that sometimes borders on violence and that had a lot of political attention paid to it for a minute there. John Birch is usually covered in textbooks as an example of extremism. The John Birch Society had about 100,000 people at its peak. So we're talking about a movement that's larger and has inarguably more weaponry and military training than John Birch. So for me, the question becomes, why didn't we know about it? Why didn't we understand? And how did we forget? Because all of the things that I write about in my book are examples that were documented at the time, like the McVeigh case, right? The events that I talk about in the book were all covered in the press. There was footage of Klan paramilitary training camps on

Good Morning America, the Today Show, and things like that. The Greensboro Massacre was the subject of a Saturday Night Live sketch. This was in the zeitgeist. People understood that things like this were happening. What we lacked was some kind of apparatus for putting them together into the same story. So that's the thing that I think is really interesting, especially because when we think about this phrase, the lone wolf, it was popularized by these activists. They deliberately wanted to disappear. these activists. They deliberately wanted to disappear. Now, one example of this is the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people. What we're talking about is, of course, Tammy McVeigh's fertilizer bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Now, that is the largest deliberate mass casualty on U.S. soil between the bombing of Pearl Harbor and 9-11. But it is not understood. We don't have a durable public understanding of this as being a work of ideology and politics rather than kind of one person's madness. We don't learn about it in school. We don't think of it as a milestone moment for the United States, like when we teach a history survey. And I think it's really interesting that we've missed it. Now, I think that, you know, of course, there's a lot of conspiracy theory around it and multiple bomb theories and John Doe theories, all kinds of things. To me, I think the persuasive thing is actually in the historical archive and to understand what happened here.

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