Modern Wisdom - Democrats vs Republicans: Who Is Actually More Violent? - Robert Pape #1154

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

Robert Pape is a political scientist, professor at the University of Chicago, and author. Why is political violence on the rise in America? With the midterm elections approaching, could this be one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime? What’s driving the hostility, what’s actually at stake, and how could the outcome shape America for years to come? Expect to learn why we’ve entered into a new era of violent populism, why January 6, 2027, will be a major breaking point for both political parties, why the upcoming midterms might be the most dangerous election of our lifetimes, how normal people become radicalised on both sides of the spectrum, why Trump is at the center of political violence for both the left and right, and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Sign up for a free trial from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com Extra Stuff: See me live in the UK & Ireland this October: ⁠https://chriswilliamson.live Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

People of the UK and Ireland, if you want to come and see me live tickets are very limited for my live tour this October, but they are still available. Dublin is already sold out. However, if you're a fan of modern wisdom, if you love psychology, philosophy, human nature, personal development, and you want to hear stories that I definitely can't tell on the internet, then come and see me live this October. Chris Williamson.Live has got all of the tickets. Dublin is completely gone, but there are limited tickets everywhere else. I'll see you soon. Chris Williamson.com. We discussed this recently on a debate, but I wanted to give it a full treatment because I think this, topical feels very critical to the current conversation. What is the number one threat to America, in your opinion? The number one threat to America is not from a foreign government, even Iran.

It's not from a fringe militia group. It's from tens of millions of Americans who support political violence. Once you have support for political violence lodged in the mainstream of society, this changes everything. Is this a new era of political violence? It's a new era. It's an era I call violent populism because I want to explain that we have had almost every year since the founding of our country, 250 years, some type of, you. of political violence, some type of militia group, an assassination attempt here or there. That's not what we are living through now. This is a new paradigm.

This is a different world. Now, it has happened a few times before. I'm sure we'll talk about this in the 1920s, the 1960s, but as for almost everybody listening to this show, we are in an era of historically high political violence and historically high support for political violence that will change the election that we are about to go through in ways we may not really be prepared for. How unprecedented is this? Because I don't know, I think back to the Vietnam War and there were protests around that. That felt like civil unrest domestically. And prior to that, there's been all manner of, I mean, there was a civil war, not even that long ago, right?

Well, the Civil War, 1860, let's just remind ourselves that that is a long time ago. Talking to someone with a country that's a thousand years old, you know what I mean? Well, okay. So maybe from your perspective, it's just the other day. But for Americans, that is a long time ago. And the 1960s, we need to recall that that was over 65 years ago. So that's a long time ago. And that means that although there will be a few of us, baby boomers who are born,

I'm right at the tail end of the baby boom generation. So there will be a few of us who were born. But even I can't really recall personally the 1960s because I was just way too young. So the fact is, yes, there have been. precursors and other eras of violent populism where you have a whole spate, waves of assassination attempts, waves of violent protests. And side by side with that, large millions and tens of millions of Americans supporting political violence, but it is actually a historical anomaly in our country. It is not simply the same as it was 10 years ago or the same as it was 15 years before that.

But the big picture here is that we are in an era where we have experienced not one, not two, but three assassination attempts against Donald Trump, two, when he was running for president, one, when he was president. these three are just a small number of the many assassination attempts and assassinations that we have seen over the last five years. You have to recall the assassination attempt against Nancy Pelosi missed her but almost killed her husband. Brett Kavanaugh, that's a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Josh Shapiro, the arsonist burned down large parts of his house while his family was. was sleeping in the house, including him. He was governor. He's governor of Pennsylvania.

Just literally a year ago and two days. So we're speaking on September 12th. But on September 10th, 2025, Charlie Kirk, a major political activist, a podcast host beloved by tens of millions of Americans, was assassinated. while he was having one of his quite frequent debates debating people on a college campus. So this only touches the assassination attempts, Chris. We haven't even talked about the violent protests as part of the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020, where, yes, most of the George Floyd protests were peaceful, but five to seven percent of them were not. you have 28 million Americans engaged in the summer of George Floyd protesting, five to seven percent

is a terrifically large number. And we could go on and on January 6th, etc. What is, how is violent populism different from ordinary populism? Ordinary populism. You can think of as political polarization. You can think of as peaceful protests. violent populism is where you have mass support for political violence in the body politic. So the difference between populism where you have many millions of people, tens of millions of people who are upset about the establishment, they believe the establishment has largely locked them out of many benefits that are there just due. that's the ordinary understanding of populism. Well, that's an understanding that can be completely peaceful. It can generate wholesale changes of political parties.

It can bring new people into politics. Violent populism is a different animal. Violent populism is taking a lot of that anger in the mainstream, and it is transforming into political violent anger, where there's support for political violence, which is going to then encourage actual political violence. What are the numbers around how supportive Americans are of political violence? So for the last five and a half years, at my center of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, we have conducted 20 national surveys of support for public.

political violence in the United States. The book goes through all of them. The book, though, doesn't cover the most recent survey, which we literally just completed in the field 10 days ago, which means we just got the data six days ago, which means I'm revealing it here on your show for the first time in front of anybody. Nobody else knows what this data is on support for political violence. What we are seeing in the data is a not a normal election coming. What we're seeing is a cycle that I call America's domestic escalation trap where whoever loses in the midterms, we are likely to see not just simply passive acceptance, or even peaceful protests, we are likely to see violent protests, whoever loses, that may be larger than January 6th.

And I say that, Chris, not just to be alarmist, but it's because of the data. And that data is literally screaming at us. So we fielded a nationally representative survey of support for political violence in the United States, as we have done. This is our 21st, so we've been doing this every three or four months for the last five years. And the numbers jumped off the charts compared to what we have seen before. So what do I mean by that? We ask questions such as, do you support political violence to remove President Trump from the presidency or to prevent President Trump from being president? that is the anti-Trump or anti-Maga political violence. Normally, we would see several years ago 6% of the American public support anti-Trump political

violence, maybe 9%. In September 2025, just before Charlie Kirk was assassinated, it was 14%. already fantastically hired. That's over 30 million Americans, just to put that in numbers. What did we find this year, the next year, that we just really, the numbers just literally came in off the presses? 25% of American adults support the use of force to prevent President Trump from being president. that equates to 65 million American adults. That's 44% of all Democrats, self-identified as Democrats, in our survey.

This is a stunning number, Chris. This is not just another turn of the data. And the data doesn't bounce all over the place in case people think, oh, it's just randomness in the data. also we know what those numbers mean more than just with check boxes so chris we have conducted over the years focus groups we have and i mean hours long focus groups think of them as like a podcast like what we're doing here except with 70 people done with a european moderator um so it's helpful to have a european moderator so produces a little bit less bias on the part of the people involved in the focus groups. But more than more than that, we've also done further what are called survey experiments to

understand what people really mean when they say the use of forces justified to prevent Trump from being president. And what we found is 55% of the time, they mean assassinating President Trump with rifles as the attempt that failed at Butler. So they say this in so many words when you push them. Now, not everybody. but 55%. So just keep in mind, that's a, that's a very healthy number. So when I say 25% support the use of violence, this is not, oh, they just mean yelling at President Trump. There's others beyond that 55% that mean having a January 6-style democratic riot like January 6th, but it's among Democrats. So there's a, that use of,

force phrase that we have, Chris. Now, we also have, before we just only focus on the support for political violence on the left, at exactly the same time. I was going to say, like, what is the split between Democrat support for political violence and Republican support? Yeah, so let's still stick with pro-Trump, anti-Trump, because this is the best way. We have lots and lots of questions, but this is a good way to capture this. So we also ask questions about the pro-Trump support for political violence. And in particular, since Trump has become president and notice there has been democratic protesters, we like the question, do you support President Trump using the U.S. military to suppress Democratic protesters?

Now, he has not done that yet, but using the military. military to suppress democratic protesters is a very violent way to suppress democratic protesters. 16% of Americans, almost all of them of course Republican, 16% of Americans support President Trump's use of the military to suppress democratic protesters. That is approximately 40 million Americans. So, you put these two numbers together, the anti-Trump support for anti-Trump political violence and support for pro-Trump political violence. And what do you end up with? A hundred million Americans supporting political violence as we are running into the midterms. This portends that the

midterms will be the most dangerous elections in our lifetimes. I don't mean just literally on the day of the midterms. I don't mean at the ballot box. There may well be issues. Exactly. It will be first and foremost about the counting of the vote and then seating the winner in January. Just as it was in 2021 on January 6th, that the actual violence related to the November 2020 election was not on the election day, November 2020. It wasn't even in December. It was literally on the day that Congress was going to certify the winner. And that happens in Congress again on this year. Most likely the day will again be, Chris, January 6, 2007. Again, a Wednesday. It seems to me like the political violence, at least, that you focused on so far, is anti-Trump and then anti-anty-Trump.

Very much so. Very much. A lot of the time when I've heard some of this data that's being put out recently, the FBI or the CIA say that the single greatest domestic threat to America comes from the right, not from the left. What about right-leaning threats that are like initiatory rather than reactive? So those studies, which I go through in detail, those studies that you just quoted were right until 10 years ago. So it's very important to understand, Chris, that it's, we need to lift the hood on some of the headlines that are often used as clickbait to, get a lot of attention on the studies. Yeah.

Once you lift the, once you lift the hood, you will see that the studies that say most of the political violence is coming from the right. And then the other counter studies that say, oh, no, no, it's coming from the left. Once you lift the hood and actually go through the annual data point by point, you will see that they come to almost exactly the same conclusions. And where they disagree is where's their starting point. Do they start in 1990 or 1980, in which case, absolutely true. If you start in, let me just pick 1990, if you go for 35 years from 1990 to 2025,

and you say in that 35 year period of time, of the lone wolves, and that's what we're talking about, because they don't usually include at all January 6 or George Floyd. They're not counting the violent crowds at all in these studies. They're just focusing on lone wolf violence. The truth is, yes, it would be over that 35-year period a majority from the right. If you started in 2015, absolutely, it's going to be maybe not a majority from the left, but very heavily balanced left and right.

And so the truth is that it's a matter. of the time frame, and what does that mean? That means the nature of political violence in our country has changed over the last 10 years. We're not in the same era we were in in the 1990s. We're not in the same era we were in after 9-11 from 2001 to 2005. We are in a new era. That is why I gave it a name, violent populism, and that new era dates pretty much to the beginning of President Trump's first term. And much of the violence since then, not 100% of course, but much of the violence, as you correctly said, is either pro-Trump or it's sort of anti-anti. So you had a nice way to really see that as President Trump came into office, he represented.

a tremendous angst about a certain set of social changes that I'd like to explain. But just as he was representing angst about those social changes, there were others who felt increasing angst that Trump was going to reverse those changes and send them back. That is what you're describing as there is the anti-Trump and anti-anty Trump. There's the anti-Trump and the anti-ante. Yeah, it feels like reactionary and re-reactionary. That's right, because at the root of it is not just a personality.

There are issues related to political rhetoric. Absolutely. I've spent years studying that. So there's, but that is the second level. The first level, Chris, what's determining why we're in the era of violent populism now, as opposed to 20 years ago or 20 years from now is that we're in the tipping point of certain social changes

that are happening to our country. Trump is a symptom of those changes as much as he is a cause of those changes. And so once you understand the deeper social changes that are occurring, that are leading to this tipping point generation, now we can see why we're in the era of violent populism and why it's likely to possibly get quite worse over the next five to 10 years.

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And so I spend lots of time doing that because before I did this book, Chris, for 20 years, I studied terrorism. I compiled all the suicide terrorist attacks around the world after 9-11. That's over 8,000 individual cases of suicide. attacks. So I'm very familiar with studying the individual perpetrators of terrorist attacks, including the most deadly in the world, and also tracking their manifestos, what they say, how much the manifestos reflect personal grievances versus social grievances. And so what you see, and I don't mean to paint a moral equivalence on the right and the left, but in terms of basic operations, how they relate to the mass support of political violence in the country, there's a lot of symmetry.

There's a lot of symmetry between the right and the left. The key thing that most people don't know about political violence is that mass support fundamentally changes the scale of political violence. you can expect in a country. And this is happening in the United States, but it's not unique to the United States. It's true in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 80s. It's true in Lebanon in other periods of time. So what we're experiencing in the United States, we have specific social changes that are unique to what's occurring in the United States. But the basic pattern here that I'm trying to explain of once you have mass support for political violence, this matters because it nudges volatile individuals

who are volatile for their own psychosocial reasons. Yes, many of them have personal pain. Many of them have personal issues. But what it does is when there is mass support for political violence, it nudges those volatile individuals over the edge because they have an additional. motive for carrying out the political violence, which is social approval. They can expect that when they carry out their violence, there will be approval by many, many, many people. You definitely saw this with Luigi Mangio. I think, like, canonical example. Canonical example. And it's also in the age of people ask, well, is this all a product of social media? Social media matters, but it's like pouring gasoline on an underlying fire. And what's the gasoline? You can see the social

approval almost instantly. I'm interested in what happens if you spread out from individual actors. I understand that if you're an assassin, one person trying to kill another person or successfully killing another person, that's a big deal. It tends to be kind of great men of history inflection points. It might get a lot of headlines. But when we're talking about mass support for mass political violence, if you're using numbers in the tens of millions or hundreds of millions, this is not going to be a hundred million individual assassins. But as of yet, I haven't heard you really talk about folding in the rioters. What does it look like? January 6th was a lot of fucking people. George Floyd was a lot of people. So we have seen over the last, since the summer of 2020,

we have seen three main instances of collective political violence in the United States. Some went on for a period of time, some were just one day. So the first was, the summer of 2020 with George Floyd. And the starting with at the end of May when George Floyd was killed and the video of his death went viral, there were in the top over 100 cities in the United States almost daily protests. And those went on for months, Chris. At my research center, the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, we tracked on a day. basis, all of the protests, both peaceful and violent, in the top 50 cities, every single day

during that summer. And what you saw was that most were peaceful. That's absolutely true. But there was a very clear pattern, which was the peaceful protests would start usually in the afternoon, often at about 1 o'clock, and usually at a downtown area or a downtown square. And then it would go on. it would usually go on through the early evening, at which point, a lot of times the protest conveners, the people who started the protest, they just wanted everybody to just go home. But that's not what happened. Most people went home, but a lot of people stayed. And that's when the violence happened when the sun went down.

So you could see a very, very, very, very clear pattern here. And this is maybe not absolutely 100%, but oh, my goodness, it's stunning when you see this on a daily basis. in 50 cities in America, how what starts as a peaceful protest effectively has Chris Splinter groups, which splinter off. They're the ones who are burning down police stations. They're the ones who are destroying the businesses and so forth. And so you have for that summer of 2020, you have 10s, you probably have 20 million, 25 million Americans who legitimately think that they were there and it was truly a peaceful protest because they went home. They just went to bed.

They just went home. But that didn't end when they went home. It's going to be highly frustrating if you are a genuinely peaceful protester that wants to go out and hold the sign and do the thing during the day. And then the headline that's used by the side you're trying to protest against is not peaceful protest. It's the small number of people that then continued it on into the night. That's right.

It'll be highly irritating. So I guess. But let me go on with January 6th to show you said the parallels. Okay. So again, we're saying five to seven percent of the people involved in the George Floyd protests also engaged in violent protests. Majority of that was at night. Majority of that was at night.

Interestingly, January 6th very much in the daytime. But also the five to seven percent rules is active here. So on January 6th, President Trump, hauled the crowd weeks before. It was December 19th. He sent out this famous tweet on Twitter about come January 6th, it will be wild. And then people came to the ellipse in Washington, which is near the Washington monument. If people who have been there know. And that mall can hold many, many people. And about 120,000 people came that day to listen to President Trump, others speak that day.

Giuliani spoke that day. President Trump was the last speaker, as he typically is at his rallies. And what happened during that period is President Trump really pushed up the energy and passions of the crowd. He made it absolutely crystal clear. He went state by state reciting his litany of exactly where the election was stolen from him. state by state, number by number. And then he focused the crowd.

He focused them on the weak Republicans in the Congress. And he named them Mitch McConnell. And then he also said, and the one he was worried the most about was Mike Pence. Would Mike Pence, who's his vice president, do the right thing? And by that, he explained, stop the. the certification of the election because Pence could have literally stopped that. And so he had the crowd focused on this. And then he said, and we will march.

And I will be at the head of the march right down now to the capital. And we will demand the right result. This is the language he used. And so what happened during this hour speech, is actually starting within about 10 minutes into the speech because he says the same thing multiple times. And if you watch his rallies, he often returns to the same themes over and over. So he did that here, too. So people right away got the message that Trump wanted them to go march down and pressure the Capitol in Congress. And so that started to happen within 15 minutes of his speech. We actually have this all record. We have tape of this. We have so much cell phone and so forth.

And what you see unfold is that the crowd, as it gets there, they start to be, they're bursting. There's 10,000 suddenly from the ellipse who now move all the way down to surround the capital. They're so big, they burst right through the bike. What is the defense of the capital? It's three perimeters of bike fences and 200 cops. And suddenly there's 10,000 people, 10,000 people. 10,000 people. Well, no surprise, they burst through the bike fences,

which are these outer, what they called outer perimeter defenses. And right at around 2.15, when Mike Pence formally certifies the election, is when Trump puts out a post. And he hadn't been posting a whole lot here. He put out a post saying, Mike Pence, let us down. that is when the crowd bursts through into the Capitol itself, burst through the doors, burst through the windows. That's when the hang mic pens. That's when the scaffolding. All of that is happening during this period of time. And it is, it's really, now that we have the detailed videos that we

can analyze, and keep in mind, I study political violence. This is what I've been doing for 35 years. quite a bit about military operations. The last time we're on, you have to recall I taught for the U.S. Air Force, so I'm not just somebody who's a general consumer of this. It was really stunning to see how the crowd essentially like a wildfire spreads. And once that wildfire spreads, Chris, there's just with 200 cops, there was no way they could contain that wildfire, but how many actually burst into the Capitol? 1600.

1600. So just keep in mind, we started 120,000, then we had 10,000 surround the capital. How many literally burst through, did the actual violent part of January 6th? And this was not the, you know, as Tucker Carlson has tried to describe this, the grandmas. there were 400 others who kind of wandered in as the grandmas, who I'm not putting in the 1600. They were not actually prosecuted, those other 400. So there were 400 others who after this was over,

they're walking through looking at things. That's not the 1600. No, the 1600 are the ones bursting through the windows, bursting through the doors, taking poles like literally, I don't know if I could take this, but literally a pole like this. And they didn't have weapons. with them. So they literally took flagpoles or they took the bike racks and they beat the police with

them. And we have pictures of the 600 of 600 of the 1600 doing that one by one by one. So when I say that this was a violent protest, this is a wildfire which is spreading. And, and, And what was the important thing during this roughly three-hour period of time is President Trump did nothing to call them off until the very end at 415. So it went on for about three hours until President Trump finally made a video and said they should go home and he loved them for what they did. And ever since President Trump has been glorifying the January Sixers. He has pardoned them all, every single one, regardless of how violent they were, all 1600, it's about 1575 to be exactly. And our center studied every single person who was prosecuted for January 6th, all 1,5 case by case by case. And so that's over 10,000 court documents we've been through.

We've had research teams. So we know an enormous about what happened on January 6th. And it didn't just end on that day because January 6th was such a convulsing event that it largely radicalized much of MAGA. Not all of MAGA, but it largely radicalized MAGA and changed MAGA from what it was before January 6th to what it's becoming now. And President Trump is quite content with that. he's to this day on truth social, his video speaking at January 6th to remind everybody that it was such a good thing. A quick aside, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I've started every single morning the same way for the last five years now,

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Right now, you can get a free sample pack of elements most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to link in the description below. heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. What's the percentage that you equate from January 6th? You said five to seven from some of the more left-leaning protests. What's the percentage? Well, I would say, well, once we had 120,000,

and then we have 10,000 that we're actually surrounding the capital. And that's the real number I would put at, say, about 10% or 8%. And then the others who actually burst in the roughly 1600, it is just a fraction of the of the others. But what I would say is that there really is when you watch the videos of how this unfolds,

it becomes pretty clear, to me, anyway, as somebody who has studied operations, it had the police not simply let them in, had the police really decided to, stand there in fight. I mean, they already got beat up. Almost 200 of them went to the, to the hospital. Five committed suicide afterwards, but almost 200 went to the hospital. So had they decided to literally stand and fight to death to prevent them from coming in, I think there's a good chance you would have had many more than a 1600 come in. Because I think what happened is that once you

had that burst through breaking the doors, breaking the windows, actually burst their way in, I think a lot of folks were just happy to content, and whether they decided they might have gone in later or not, they were just happy to let that first phalanx go through. But had there been actual resistance to that more than there was, I think this could have actually been a lot worse than what we saw in January 6th. The third are the protests that happened on college campuses after October 7. So we need to remember that we have just come through, not just a few days or a few weeks, but almost an entire year from October 7, 2023 through the end of spring 2024, of a variety on waves of violent protests on college campuses. where college protests, this is on the left. So I also conducted large-scale surveys of over 5,000 college undergraduates,

5,000 ordinary adults right in the middle of this period to really understand the nature of those protests, who was protesting, what their identity was to the extent they would tell you on a survey and so forth. And so, again, to get deep dives into this, And what you saw was a similar wildfire on the left that you saw with George Floyd, except not as violent. So just to be very, very clear, the George Floyd protests were extremely violent when it came to property damage,

literally burning down police stations, burning police cars, destroying businesses. with the campus protests, the fact is the ones who stormed into the classrooms, who went into the libraries, it was pretty scary. If you were a student there, and we have this in the surveys and also text boxes where people wrote in what their feelings were, the students were pretty scared of what happened because they didn't know how violent it was going to get. But as a matter, it wasn't as violent. as the George Floyd protest, but nonetheless,

it's another instance of violent populism. When I say the era violent populism, and I'm not only describing lone wolf assassinations and assassination attempts, I'm also describing the large instances of collective political violence. And what's special about this era, our era of American violence,

violent populism is it's occurring on both the right and the left. When we look at the 1960s, it's almost all violent populism on the left. When we look in the 1920s, it's almost all on the right. So in this era today, what's special is not just we're living through it. That's, of course, what's really impactful for us here, is, but also that it's happening on both the right and the left. And the truth is the right and the left don't like to admit how much violence is happening on their side. And I know because I've been in the media on all those sides over the last five years talking about this. And I can tell you that everyone wants to finger point at the opposite side as opposed to their own. And I want to say that you said everyone does.

There's a temptation to do that. many do like to fingerpoint only at the other side. There have been instances and growing number of instances I want to point out where you might not expect you would get more balance. And it's just very important to see that it is heavily divided just as you would expect in this era of violent populism. Because if tens of millions of Americans are supporting violence for the political goals they support, they're also going to tend to excuse it because they support that violence. So they're going to tend to excuse it. They're not going to want to admit it or they're going to want to, and it's really, you can almost see the stories that are written. So if there's a lone wolf,

let's just focus on lone wolf. If there's a lone wolf attacker who is attacking a Democratic target, right away, people will assume, well, that must be someone who's leaning pro-Maga or pro-Republic. and then also the reverse. Well, what are the news stories? Usually the news stories are literally the same structure, which is the more left-wining media. If the attacker is coming from the left, we'll talk about mental illness.

We'll talk about things other than the political motive. What about the right-wing media when the attacker, the other way? Almost exactly the same. So you can almost change. take the same formula story, and now I think with chatGBT, it's literally easy to do. It's pretty formula. It's pretty formulaic and just put in the different names. But it's not 100%.

I just want to be clear that in this show we're on now, we're talking about both sides. Over the last year and a half, I have seen real effort here by certain organizations have tried to do more to talk about both sides. I've seen an effort by certain political leaders to try to talk about both sides. They don't get as rewarded as much for it. They don't get as rewarded and nonetheless, many of them are still going down that road, Chris. That's something that we should look at and just notice. What do we get wrong when we imagine the archetype of someone who supports political violence?

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. There's a standard stereotype that our data talks. totally shatters, just completely. And it basically hasn't been true for the last five or six years as this stereotype has come out. But the standard stereotype is that the person is unemployed. The person is rural. The person is part of a militia group. And they're usually male. And they're usually between, say, 18 and 24, 25 years old. And that stereotype, by the way, was true from 1990 to about 2014 or so, 2015. But that stereotype started to change under when President Trump came into office, but oh my goodness, did it change with the Jan 6th, the collective political violence that we have, that we have just been talking about. So the new stereotype, type, Chris, before I go into examples, are essentially well-educated, middle-class Americans,

nice homes, and a 401k, and they wear a suit and tie. That is your standard insurrectionist. That's whether you're or social justice warrior. If we pick Luigi Mangione, just to put some concrete examples on this, this is someone who's coming from generational wealth. This is not an unemployed. This is not unemployed. This is somebody who went to prep high schools.

This is somebody who went to Ivy League Penn, University of Pennsylvania. This is somebody who got to live a very nice lifestyle in Hawaii. If we look at the most recent, we can look at all three Trump would be assassin. But let's just look at the most recent one, which is in April. His name is Cole Allen, 31 years old. highly educated, engineer. This is somebody who,

in his manifesto, he is explaining that he feels called to the duty to respond to all the social injustices that are happening on the part of the Trump administration. And the Gen 6 profile is especially telling here. So it went through all 1,5 of the individuals who, and what was stunning, And we have pictures of their actual professional jobs, not just what the violence they were doing in the Capitol. What was stunning are the 45% who are business owners, who are doctors, who are gynecologists, who are nurse practitioners.

A lot of gynecologists at January 6th? Well, several. They were definitely investigating a small hole. Well, okay, I'm not going to make that. I'm going to leave the year the podcast, guys, so I'm going to let you do that. that one. But what I'm pointing out is that, is that we, on January 6th, the media right away ran to a narrative of these are silly people wearing silly hats. They are militia group members. Only 10% were members of militia groups. And this isn't just hand-wavy understanding. You see, when you go

through the court process, you are indicted, and then nearly all of those 1575 were actually sentenced. What people may not know who don't do this professionally for a living is when you go all the way through the court system and you get to sentencing, your whole background, whether you're a militia group, all of that comes in at sentencing. It's a very sophisticated profile. Oh, for sure, because how do you know how recidiv—the risk of recidivism, for an individual when you're going to sentence them unless you don't have all of that background. And with the January 6ers, since they were being, most of the investigations were being done by the FBI, there was plenty of manpower to go and actually collect their detailed profiles.

So when I give you these backgrounds, we have high, high confidence of their backgrounds. And the point is, these are people, notice all of these different individuals that I'm talking about, these are people with something to lose. We're used to thinking that this profile of someone who does political violence are the losers, the marginal. If their life gets thrown away, well, it wasn't a good life anyway. Not when you live in Elmhurst, Illinois. Not when you look at where they're from.

They're from, in the states they're from, they are from the nice suburbs. Sorry to say they're going to be from the nice suburbs in Austin here. They're not from the panhandle of Texas. So we could take the, all the number, we could literally give you a map and show you where all of the Jan Sixers who came from Texas came from, by their actual residence, because you have to have that information. And you would see they're in the nice suburbs around Dallas. They're in the nice suburbs around Austin.

They are not in, well, very few anyway, are around the panhandle of Texas. Why would someone with a career or a family, or a house or an education, a lot to lose, risk everything for politics. If these people are from such nice backgrounds, previously, if you've got nothing to lose, it seems like an easier trade to go and invade the Capitol or set a police station on fire or trying to assassinate the president. Why would somebody that's got something to lose go so far and risk a lot in the sake of politics? Because they think they're about to lose it all in the next couple of years.

What is happening, Chris, is that we are going through a set of social changes in the country that are putting large swaths of the public on pins and needles about what's going to happen to them and people like them when the other party wins. Because when the other party wins, the other party has been zeroing out benefits for their side. So we have this unbelievable pollution disaster in East Palestine, Ohio. This is MAGA country. This is a country. This is, I'm born in Erie Pennsylvania that's just on the other side of where this area of Ohio is. So I'm from Western Pennsylvania. I went to, and what did you see?

You saw virtually no Democratic leader, certainly not President Biden, show up to actually show sympathy. And there were months of story after story after story of all of the problems there. And then if you look at what people on the Democratic side of the aisle think when Republicans come in, they think Republicans are going to take away their vote because Republicans are constantly looking for ways to zero out birthright citizenship. And maybe they couldn't get it through this time, but maybe they'll get it through the next time. So if you look at both sides, and you see this in our data, both sides of very well-off people are petrified. that when the other side wins, the other side is going to take away their nice life or their future or the future of their kids. How does a normal person become radicalized then? It's a matter of, think of it as a group.

You're not being, the individual person is going to be radicalized to take violence as an individual or as part of a mob where the mob is like a wild, I was just explaining. It's kind of starting peaceful and then over the period of hours escalates into something that's violent. But when you talk about the support for political violence, that's a different story. When you talk about that that is the normalization of political violence is a cascading phenomenon unless there's actual pushback by political leaders. Okay, so to try and use my bro signs summary, both sides are increasingly worried about what the opposition is going to do to the future of the country and their ability to reverse the changes to the future of the country. Exactly. To get into power, to get back into power. Exactly. Because you've got this smouldering furnace, there is immediate communication 24 hours a day, which allows the most inflammatory comments to be self-suffer. selected using social media and push to the top. And then this increases the preparedness for both

sides to say, we are okay with increasingly extreme measures in support of our political goals and in defense against the opposite side's political goals. Is that like a fair summary of where we're at? That's a fair summary. And Chris, the only thing to point out is there's little pushing back on that. So notice. Even if people don't endorse political violence, people, oh, that's an interesting stat. So how many people that don't endorse their own side's political violence are in the silent few that don't object to their own sides political violence?

So we have, in our surveys, we have routinely 65%, 70% of Americans who abhor political violence. They are the silent majority, Chris. but they don't have a good vehicle to express that. We have been tracking this for years. And so you might think that, oh, there's a political leader who would run for president, and what's their number one thing they're going to run on ending political violence in America?

Where's that leader? On either side? That that's her number one issue? Okay. So what I'm pointing out is that when I say, you asked me, how was it occurring? And I'm explaining that cascade and the social media. But there's something that's left out of that picture, which is where's the pushback? Where is the, and it's not because the public isn't there.

In fact, as I'm explaining to you, two thirds to 70% of the public routinely, survey after survey abhors political violence. And that is that missing factor that can actually, maybe not fully solve our problem, but can help us to get through these social changes that we're experiencing it without breaking the country apart. Because now the country is, as I'm explaining to, becoming more radicalized over time. That's what those numbers in our survey show, but there's still a large, the majority of the country. Today. Today abhors political violence, but they don't have a good spokes, they don't have the leaders.

They don't have the vehicle to express it. Where does it tend to be expressed the most, I would point out, is on podcasts. So I don't necessarily want to give one side benefit, because I've been on so many. I don't want to, you know, sort of, but if you push me, I can name some. But I'm just telling you that there are literally folks in the media who have, over the last several years, taken it on as if not their number one mission, number two or three, to really try to give voice to this silent majority that abhors political violence. And that on social media is something that could grow. And I'm just pointing out that it's not because they're the minority. It's they're a silent majority meaning that there hasn't been created the natural vehicles,

the natural leaders in order to vocalize that. But this is truly the missing weapon against the rise of violent populism that we're experiencing in our country. I understand there's two things that I'm trying to separate out here. One is sentiment and the other is action. So it seems to me that a lot of what we've been talking about so far is the support for people using political violence, either in support of their own political desires or against the other side's political desires. How much does the normalization and support in what is still a minority, right, around about overall 25%, 30% or so of people support that,

is what are the indications that the normalization of the support of political violence actually leads to political violence? Because that's not necessarily true. That doesn't necessarily track. What you need is a focal point to bring that normalization of political violence into concrete action. this is what I mean by a wildfire analogy. This is what I said earlier when I was explaining what we're heading toward with the American domestic escalation trap, this cycle I'm about to explain. But let me start by explaining it with a wildfire before we get to the political violence.

How does a wildfire happen? You have masses of drywood combustible material, and then you have. have a spark. Some baths and with a cigarette. A cigarette, a cigar butt. They walk away. Think of that as the focal point. So that is how you get a wildfire. You can have that mass of material, that dry wood. It can sit there for months and months and months. You might even go through a whole year and not have actual wildfire. But once you have a lightning strike, once you have that cigar butt thrown out, the fact you had months and months of nothing, that doesn't stop it because it goes up like that. That's the issue with normalization of political violence. And that's what you saw,

that's what you saw in January 6th. So you had a buildup of mass support thinking that the election was stolen, a lot of anger. And what happened on literally January 6th and at the ellipse during President Trump's speech, the focal point, which was the trigger and the spark that turned that massive of combustible material into action. So is there in your research a suggestion that people who are in support of political violence are also more likely to enact political violence themselves? To the extent we can track that, yes. But I want to just point out.

To me, that's what's important, right? It's, yes, the support of political violence is crucial because it's a temperature check for what's happening in society at large. But you could have 100% of support and you could still have zero actions, right? Just being in support of something doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to go out and do it. That's right. But keep in mind, I'm going to give you an answer that's an actual social scientist giving you an answer. And when I said yes to the extent, you might say, well, but Bob, that's exactly what I meant. But let me just give you an example of what I mean. See, normally can't put on the couch the perpetrator of political violence, but sometimes they

do things that's just as good. The individual who attacked the Pelosi, Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi's with the hammer, he was arrested and put in jail in San Francisco. And 10 days later on a Friday, a local radio station wanted to interview him and is still on the web. And they, for some reason, people to jail said okay, which is a little odd, but nonetheless they did. So he got on, and the first thing out of his mouth was he wanted to apologize to all the many people in the country for failing to kill Nancy Pelosi. He knows they wanted her dead. He knows that he had the opportunity, and he wanted to apologize for failing in this mission. Talking as part of a cause, part of a community. So when you ask for the hard,

evidence. So this is my job as a social scientist. I'm not just a journalist, not just connecting dots loosely. I have to find that kind of a case when you say, show me the overlap. And we have them, but this is what it looks like, because what you can see in that behavior is somebody who's a true believer, not just in the cause, but in the publicity for the cause. Let me give you another set of examples, Alan, Cole Allen, who was the third attacker for Trump. Just before his assaults at the dinner, he sent out a manifesto to a bunch of friends and family members. And he makes it quite clear that he believes he's essentially a social justice warrior.

He's effectively a Robin Hood who is going to make personal sacrifices to do what others wouldn't do, even though they want the same outcome. He says this in his manifesto. So when individuals make manifestos, not always, but often the purpose of the manifesto is to connect with that community they believe is going to support their actions. They want to tell that community why they're doing it. They want to embrace the affinity between their violence and what the community, values. And that's what the manifestos are physically doing. The writing is meant to do that. They also, by the way, apologize to usually their loved ones for they're not going to be around anymore. So they're going to say things that will be personal. So when you hear there's

personal things, it's usually because it's a son apologizing to his mother that he won't be there to help her in her old age, stuff like that. But this is, these are the pieces of evidence, Chris, where when you look in detail, you can see that strong overlap of the support for political violence and the violence itself. In other news, if you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole, the RP Strength app is the best place to start. I've been in the gym for 20 years, and it wasn't until the past few years that I had the best training sessions in my life, and RP was a massive part of that. Actual scientists built this thing around one obsession to beat up that.

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description below, heading to rpstrength.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's rpstrength.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Do you think the main problem is violent extremists or the people that sympathize with them? Oh, the people sympathize with them by far, by far. I think that would be surprising to most people to hear. Well, it may be and it might make them feel uncomfortable because when they, you know, joke at the coffee, when they're at the coffee maker at the office and they're saying, yeah, we've got to get those Trump assassins better shooter training. This is effectively support for political violence, Chris.

They may not like to accept that. They probably will feel uncomfortable hearing this. But the fact of the matter is that when there is mass support for political violence, this translates into actual political violence. This is true domestically. So if we break out of the American context, we look at Northern Ireland, the Irish Republican Army that conducted decades of terrorism in Northern Ireland, you can see immediately as public support for political violence among Catholics in the fall of 1960. We actually have the opinion poll data here. As it actually grows, that's what gives birth to the IRA. It's not the other way around.

It's the IRA is responding to the public support for political bonds. Coming back to the American case in the 1960s, we have the Weather Underground, which is a group of anti-war protesters from the 1960s who break off. And then they form literally a terrorist group, an American terrorist group, and conduct over 20 bombings to protest with the bombings. They thought of it as protest, the Vietnam War. Well, they too are responding to the perceived, what they perceive is this huge amount of community support. And how do we know that?

They wrote books about it. They detail up. They explain this. They explain how, in fact, one of the things that they, as the weather underground evolves over time, is after they do about 20 or so of the bombings, they start to write that they're just surprised. there's not more falling in their wake. They thought there was going to be much more support for their actual violence, and then they're disappointed that there's not as much coming as they were expecting.

So you can see in their calculations, their thinking, that support for political violence animating them, and one of the reasons they just go out of business on their own is, of course, the Vietnam War ends, but also they just come to see that there just weren't many takers for that violence. That didn't stop, though, 20 instances of bombing. Right now, is this violent populism something that's exclusively happening in America, or is this trend that we're seeing that's sweeping across the world? So it's starting in other mature democracies. So it hasn't gotten as much traction in other democracies.

And I don't mean other immature democracies. So when we study political violence around the world, we're used to studying political violence and say authoritarian countries or countries that were a democracy for a few years. They kind of transitioned from authoritarianism to democracy and then they slid back. That's the usual group of countries that we used to think about political violence. That's not what I'm when I'm answering your question. I'm talking about Canada. I'm talking about Germany. I'm talking about Britain.

I'm talking about France. just to be very, very clear. And what we saw are the beginnings of this in other countries. In Germany, for example, we saw around the time just before we had January 6th in our country, there was a similar storming of the Reichstag in Berlin. Many Americans don't even know about that because they just weren't focused on Germany. Well, the Germans were. and when I was conducting this research, the Chancellor of Germany in September 22 flew me to Berlin for an entire week in the Chancellor meeting with every single top leader of the CDU, his party.

And also that's like the defenseman. I mean, every single top person, multiple times, by the way. And then also leaders of other parties as well. For example, I went to the Parliament to meet with the Green Party for long sessions as well. Well, to go through all of the detailed analysis here. And that, I am told, because I didn't go back six weeks later, but I'm told that played a powerful role in rolling up the plot to assassinate the chancellor six weeks later. So that they headed off a big assassination plot that was underway.

I've also worked with the Canadian government. I've worked with the British government because the social changes that are underneath what's occurring in violent populism in the United States are occurring in other mature Western democracies. They're occurring a little bit of a lag, a little bit later. And so maybe now is a good time. We haven't had a chance to really talk about the key social drivers of this. So there are really two social drivers, Chris, of violent populism in the United States. And then the Iran War is making it worse.

So the biggest driver of violent populism is in the United States is a demographic shift. For the first time in our country's 250-year history, the United States is transitioning from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy. In 1990, we were 76 percent non-Hispanic white as a population. Today we're 57% non-Hispanic white in about 15, could be 20 years depending on deportations. And now you can see why deportations matter so much is when we'll be 49% non-Hispanic white as a people. Now that demographic shift, just to be clear, this is all happening now in this tipping point generation. It's not the case. if you look back all the way to 1776, we have been essentially between 80 and 85 percent

white as a people going all the way back in that period of time. So it's not like this is ebden and float. Well, this demographic shift is of tremendous political importance, Chris, because it dramatically impacts which of the political parties are going to win. The Republican political parties much more heavily, white than the Democratic Party. It dramatically influences the composition of those parties. It explains the meteoric rise of President Trump on his issue of immigration and why when President Trump came down the escalator in 2015 talked about immigration, he almost instantly rose to the top. And then

within six or nine months, he had knocked out just about every one of the other Republican leaders who, were on the other side of his immigration issue. Jeb Bush, number one. And this has been his signature issue. And now it's morphed into deportations. Because what this represents, not for every Trump voter, but for a large fraction of Trump voters, what Trump represents first and foremost, is stopping, if not reversing this demographic shift.

Now, at the same time, there are. are many people on the left who see the rise of President Trump, Donald Trump, and the MAGA movement and the rise of immigration and what that means for the demographic shift. They want to keep the shift going, Chris. They want to accelerate the shift. How many of these people do you think know the implication of more non-white people in my country means more voting people either against my cause or for it? What we have in our data is the ability to correlate stuff like that. So with our opinion survey, the key key thing that matters more than anything else, Chris, is that if you are worried, whites in America are being deliberately replaced by the Democratic Party,

if you worry about that, you're not just more likely to vote for Trump. you're four times more likely to support political violence for Trump, four times more likely. If you believe America is a racist country and always has been, which is kind of the mirror image on that question, you were two and a half times more likely, not just to vote Democrat, but to support political violence against Trump. So this issue of the demographic shift, it's not just loosely connected. with violent populism, it goes right to the core of what's occurring in our country. And it explains the period of violent populism, why it's occurring now and not 30 years before or 30 years from now.

Because it could have just been people not wanting to see their culture change. It could be people not wanting house prizes. In the 90s, culture wars. we're sort of not wanting to see culture change. Now you're at the tipping point generation. But there's a second social change, Chris. And this gets to your point on housing economics. Side by side with this demographic shift has been a mass wealth shift to the top 1%.

This starts in the late 1980s. In the late 1980s about the top 1% control. about 17% of America's wealth. That's a lot, but still 17%. Today, at least it's as of two years ago, that's the most recent data. It's 26%. What does that mean? That means the bottom has lost all that money. So when you are going to buy a house, when you're going to pay rent for an apartment, you suddenly have a negative pie over the last 30 years. You're not gaining ground from where your parents were. You're losing ground from where your parents are.

I call this wealth shift to the top 1%, putting the rest of us in a negative sum society, where we're suddenly worse off economically with each passing year. Now, what does that mean? That means the people who have are worried they're going to have less and less and less. And that also means that that combines with the demographic shift. So you have a situation where with the demographic shift, you're worried the other party is going to get in power. And what are they going to do?

They're going to help their own. And they're going to take even more from you. And both sides think that. So it's almost a mere image, Chris. So they are, we live in a world where in the mainstream, those that have are increasingly worried they're going to lose over time. And the key focal point for that is an election. It's an election. So remember you ask, how does it go?

How do you get from this mass sentiment to actual, action. Well, the elections matter, Chris. And we saw that in November 2020. And unfortunately, we're coming up to another focal point election with these midterms. Because we're already seeing the mass sentiments that I've just laid out for you that are incredibly worried. We already know we have a focal point coming. And it could be literally the day January 6th, 2020. when whoever is supposed to win, whoever thinks they're winning, is going to get seated or not. And what we face, Chris, are the following three stages. And if I could lay this out in three stages. Stage one, you have the actual vote, the actual election. And the outcome is a legitimacy shock, meaning it's a razor-thin margin.

The losers in a razor-thin margin election don't think they legitimately, lost. Whoever the loser is going to be, they're not going to be happy. And I think the other side cheated them out. And you're already starting to see this on both sides. Then we have stage two, which is the focal point of literally seating the Congress on January 6th. And what happens? Either whichever side loses, if it's the Republicans that lose, you have President Trump and is President Trump going to stop the Republicans from putting pressure on the Congress? Really? What if it's the other way around? What if it's the Democrats who are the losers and they show up to the mall and they start to protest? You have President Trump. And President Trump

has already been talking about Insurrection Act. He's already been talking about what? Bringing out the military to suppress democratic protesters. So what I'm trying to explain is that as we go through this election cycle, this process, we're going to see stage one, which is the legitimacy shock to discover that we're not really sure who exactly won that election. Number two is the focal point where somebody's supposed to be seated. Those winners are supposed to be seated. But will the losers just accept that that will happen when they don't think they lost? And then number three, if you do have that stage two, where there's another January 6th, sixth style of that. You don't just have this over. You get stage three, which is prolonged,

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when this happened a year ago, so in June 2025, we had the Hortman assassination, and I published a big piece in the New York Times, that we're on the brink of a period of major political violence. It's about to occur. And I warrant that if, based on the sentiment data that we had then, which is not as bad as now, but we had then was already very worrisome, that we had to worry that we would have

assassination attempts against people on the right and that we would have President Trump use military-style immigration enforcement in cities like Chicago, and then it later became Minneapolis. And then what happened just three months later, Chris, we had the Charlie Kirk assassination, we had Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, and we had Metro Blitz in Minneapolis. Basically, all those concerns that I laid out in that January, June, middle of June, 2025 op-ed literally happened just a few months later. And what you're here today is the sentiments here for political violence are much higher. And you're hearing a similar set of warnings by me here today, which is we are really on the brink of the most dangerous elections in our lifetimes. And there's

no signs of any pushback of this by our political leaders. You hear almost no political leaders being concerned about political violence occurring, certainly not by their own constituents. To the extent you hear about political violence, the leaders are perfectly happy to call out the other side. But unless the leaders will restrain their own constituents, you get the cycle that I'm describing. Do you think this situation of political violence would be worse or better if the Democrats had won in 2024?

I'm not sure how much it would have changed, Chris, because it's a function of the social changes. I know people want to believe that if only their side won, everything would be fine. That's not what this book is telling you. And maybe that's a frustration because people just want to hear, oh, yes, the Democrats just win, then we're all hunky-dory. Or if the Republicans win, we're all hunky-dory. That's not what's occurring. What's occurring is the two social changes I just laid out for you. We are continuing to go through a demographic shift in our country from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy, which is going to have profound effects on our two political parties and who will win future elections.

We also are continuing to have wealth shifts go to the top 1%. It's not true that we are restraining our billionaires. Essentially, both parties are perfectly happy restraining the other side's billionaires, but we don't have demonstrated evidence that each party will actually reverse course and start to truly change the wealth shift to their own billionaire. The support of economic violence as opposed to sort of physical violence. I guess in your predictions, why was there not a concern about the prediction of a right-wing assassination of a democratic politician? Your concern was. Oh, well, no, there was in the fall of 2022.

This was exactly, so there's just more to tell you about this. So literally in the fall of 2022, I am warning key authorities about the rise. of possible assassination attempts against democratic leaders. And then the Pelosi attack happened just a few weeks later. So literally, this pattern that I keep pointing out to you where we're doing these surveys, Chris. And the surveys are tracking the sentiment and support for political violence in the United States. And I'm taking seriously because of my knowledge studying political violence all around the world

that this is a pivotal factor in whether that violence will occur. It's not just a trivial factor. It's a pivotal factor. And there are chapter and verse instances where I've warned, and I've warned about it when the sentiments go up on one side. And that is with National Sheriff's Associations, political leaders in Washington, D.C. So this isn't just a matter of what you're seeing now is me talk about this in the public.

And normally, so the last time I was on, I told you I advised every White House since 2001. So that's multiple Democratic white houses, multiple Republican white houses. What you're seeing with Professor Pape over the last year or so, six months for sure, is now talking to the public in general through social media. basically laying out as much detail as I would normally be presenting in those private meetings. The only difference is in the private meetings, you really need a 30, 40 page detailed slide presentation where you're going to answer every single one. You have brilliant questions, Chris. Believe me, when you get inside those closed door rooms here, it's like a bunch of bees stinging you from all different directions,

and you better have every single answer nailed down. Yeah. How much of the domestic civil discord do you think is self-generated and how much could be encouraged or manufactured by America's enemies? It's hard to know for sure. We had the best studies of this were actually done at the University of Cambridge in the aftermath of Trump's victory in 2016 and 17. because this was when the real, there was a huge concern was Russia manipulating the election for Trump, if so, how. And Russia did have an internet research agency, it was called. And this is out of St. Petersburg, another, we know like the location of it, which was dedicated to actually influencing and polarizing American attitudes on social media.

So there's a certain set of scholars at the University of Cambridge. Your listeners can go and they can go find this with this information. And they will discover that it appears to have been modest. That is not trivial, but not overwhelming. So what appears to have happened and what you can do as a foreign government is it appears as if you can take issues of this violent populism, the social, change issues, and you can magnify them, say, 10 or 20 percent. But it doesn't look possible to make them up out of whole cloth. At least that's what we have, that's, that's what the science of

this has shown so far. Maybe we'll see in the future, this may change. I understand AI is coming, but what I'm telling you is up until now, the reason I say, we are our own worst enemies and not it's China manipulation or Russia manipulation is not because of it. I haven't looked for China and Russian manipulation, it's that to the extent we can actually test it in a social scientific way to see how much it has actually moved the needle. It appears to be relatively modest. You know there's that line about whether there's aliens in the universe and they say there's one of two explanations and both are equally terrifying. One is that we're alone in the universe and the other is that we aren't. I think about that when it comes to civil unrest domestically that there's two explanations. One is that this is, curated, germinated, seeded, manufactured, catalyzed by some foreign power. And the other is that the home nation is just turning around and kicking the ball into its own doll over and over and over again. Let me give you a real test of this, because your listeners will all have been on social media in the

last four or five months. And they will know the Lagos videos that Iran has made. So I assume you know what I'm referring to. I have no idea what you're talking about. Oh my gosh. Okay. Do we pull this up, J.B? Yeah. Can we just get some of the latest? Legos videos here. Iran. Iran on social media. Lego videos. They're called the Lego videos by the cluster by. And what you'll see is that especially in March and April, Iran made many, many, many videos that were embarrassing for President Trump showing he was he was like falling down on his butt all the time or constantly.

slipping on a banana peel or he couldn't he would he would try to get into meetings and he would keep getting thrown out because the allies didn't want him things like that so so what they were trying to do what iran was clearly trying to do this was almost i mean surely state sponsored by iran was trying to manipulate american opinion about the iran war okay so that's what i'm trying to tell you so yes let's call up some of these legos videos so that we can see some What's the price of oil? Dad, please be patient a little longer. Can you open the strait of Hormuz?

Who are you even? I have the biggest military on earth. Whatever you say, Mr. Trump, the strait is all yours. Beat it because I've already talked to Iran and the strait will be open shortly. Thanks, everyone. We are the best. Everybody knows this. There are hundreds of these, Chris.

Okay. Okay. And these are an effort to embarrass President Trump, to make the public move away from the war. Now, in the survey that I have been talking to you about that we conducted just less than two weeks ago, we also asked questions about the Iran war. Do your support for the Iran war? Because we wanted to know, how does that interact with violent populism, which we haven't talked about yet. But on this issue, what you see with support for the Iran war, Chris, is dominated by the cleavages that already existed in America before the Iran War. And those are the cleavages of violent populism that exist in our country.

And what you are seeing in our surveys, other surveys, is support for the Iran War is falling out heavily. along pre-existing divisions in our country. Is that surprising? You're not getting, yes, because in every war since World War II, every single war, we have seen a rally around the flag effect when the president of the United States from whichever party, and it's been both parties, and we have data going all the way back to the 1950s, when the president of the United States says it's important enough that we're going to use for us, you get at least a short-term,

couple months bump of a rally around the flag effect, even from the other party. People just defer to the president on foreign policy. Maybe they won't stay with them long. So I'm not telling you they're just going to ride and die with that president and so forth. But what I'm telling you is this has been a phenomenon that has been going on for, what, seven decades now? So a long period of time, many, many wars. This is the first war where that's not true. The first war where it's not true. And if the Iran propaganda was going to matter, you might think they would move Republicans. They're not moving. The Republicans are mostly, not 100 percent, of course, behind this war.

Many are upset at Israel about the war. But that's what they're upset about. They're not. The Iran propaganda to the extent that foreign powers can truly just make up out of whole cloth and move the American public 180 degrees from where it wants to go. there's no evidence of that, Chris. Not just little, there's no evidence. And even medium movement of the public by foreign powers,

much, much, much less than you would think. And the Iran War Lagos videos is a perfect example of that because they're literally not moving, the key constituency you would have to move to move the war. It's the MAGA constituency that Trump cares about. So if you don't move MAGA, you're not really moving. Trump. Which foreign powers do you think benefit the most from America's civil unrest? Oh, without a doubt, it's going to be Russia and China for sure. And it's because the more that we are

internally conflicted, the more that we're a house divided to pick one of Abraham Lincoln's phrases, the more that we will just not be paying hardly any attention or bad attention or make bad mistakes about international affairs. Because our attention span will just be so consumed by what's happening domestically. And I do believe this is one of the issues that the White House has with the Iran War, which is as much as the Iran War is probably the, in our opinion surveys, it's certainly one of the, the top issues with the economy, I think that for the White House, they have just been very, very focused on politics, which have been very intense in our country, but that's what's consuming a lot of President Trump's behavior. That's why he's talking about things like the ballroom and what he, this is, these are issues not that may not, they may seem on one sense

trivial, but they mattered to ordinary people. Ordinary people can understand them. And President Trump understands ordinary people pretty well. That's how we got elected twice. So he may well be the most brilliant politician we've had since Ronald Reagan. And so when he is focusing on issues that on CNN, you'll hear being dismissed, you know, why is he wasting his time on these trivial matters when the price of gas is going up? It's, I think, because he's focusing on domestic politics. and those are issues that we call these the low propensity voters sometime, which is a kind of a,

kind of, I think, a dismissive way to talk about people. I think President Trump sees them as key voters. And he is thinking, well, they care about this. So he's going to care about this. And that is what I mean when I say the White House has been very focused on domestic politics. And I'm not trying to tell you I agree. that should be the priority of the ballroom over the price of gas. What I am trying to tell you, though, is that that's one of the issues I see with President Trump is that I think he,

he certainly believes himself that he knows his base better than anybody else. And what other the things that means is what they care about. And I think you see they care about whether they call something the Lake of America, whether they call it the Gulf of America. And he has, really been an incredible politician. I mean, I would not just, I mean, literally to get votes, I think President Trump is maybe the best we've seen since Ronald Reagan. How much of the civil arrests and the changes that you're looking at here are downstream from the Trump era? Because it seems to me that the inflection point starts around about the time that he was introduced to politics. I know that you've got your underlying changing demographics,

and wealth inequality that maybe he contributed, maybe he didn't, that would have probably been largely outside of what was going on with regards to Trump. But maybe to do with the rhetoric, to do with the fear of, am I going to be able to get access, to be able to reverse decisions that the other side, it's no longer a game of tennis. It's a game of tennis where one other side might take the ball and run away with it, which means that I can't play anymore. How much of what you're talking about with civil unrest could just be an effective Trump?

And given that, how much could potentially, chill out come 2028. So if I had to put numbers on it, I would say 50% of this is due to the social changes I laid out. 25% is due to President Trump. And 25% is due to social media and other factors that I would just lump in another group of things. So, which is probably the exact reverse of what most people want to hear. Because if you are, anti-Trump or pro-Trump, you'd like to focus on Trump. You see what I mean? So it doesn't really matter whether you're anti- or pro. We see this in our focus groups. People love to either love Trump or hate Trump. And so they like to exaggerate, I believe, Trump's influence. Other people,

though, focus on things like social media, a lot of times because they have kids, and we saw this in our focus groups as well, they have kids and they're worried about it's not so much they think about their own consumption of social media, they worry about their kids. So they, I think, put a little bit too much weight on that. What I think is missing here for most people is the powerful influence of social changes in driving political violence. And why is that so important to me? It's because if you want to know, why has Lebanon had civil wars for decades and decades, this is rooted in changes. This isn't because of a certain leader of Hezbollah or not, because they've been killed so often. They don't have that much stability of the leaders of Hezbo. It's not because of the,

it's because of the deep demographic problems. What are some of the big issues going on inside of Israel? Deep demographic problems, even among Israelis, religious and secular Israeli. So when you look at the tensions in societies, Chris. And I study those for decades, because keep in mind, I've only been focusing on American political violence for five years, but for 30 years focusing on political violence around the world, social changes are crucial to understand political violence. And so this is what I think is missing in our discussion of this in our country. We're focusing on a lot of what I would say is the symptoms or the secondary factors. I had big debates with certain media editorial boards in 2022. I don't want to again name names because I don't want to

embarrass people. But they were trying to come to grips with this work. Because remember, I'm saying the media, and this includes the most famous media, are getting the profile wrong of the Jan Sixers. For example. And I'm showing them 40-page slide decks. This is all. wrong. They're missing it by maybe not 180 degrees, but by 150 degrees anyway. And so I'm getting in these big discussions on exactly this issue, Chris. And these are people that were not very pro-Trump. So they would say, well, Professor Pape, these social changes you're talking about, they're not going to matter because we're going to de-platform Trump. We're deplatforming Tucker Carlson. And you're going to see, Professor Pape, that you're wrong about the priorities. Well, those very same

media organizations came back and they've been publishing a lot of my work. And it's because we did de-platform Trump. We did de-platform Tucker Carlson. And guess what happened, Chris? We did not actually diminish any of those fires or any of those impacts. And I believe a lot is because they are reflecting these social changes and the anger on their side with the social changes. And when I watch Democratic politicians, Mamdami, for example, he's reflecting the other side. So I am seeing as new politicians come up. So who has had the meteoric rise on the left where before he won re-election to a major office, we had never heard of his name before, Mamdami.

It's almost the Democratic Trump, right? Trump comes down the golden escalator. Yes, we had vague, knew he was on the apprentice. really paid attention. Suddenly he comes down and he doesn't, Trump doesn't just come down and get in the mix. He becomes within a short period of time the leader, Mandami, almost exactly the same. What are the key issues they're running on? The key social change issues I'm talking about right here. These are their core issues, Chris. And these are the core issues that are not just like polarization and we disagree a little bit on tax rates.

my goodness, this is existential politics, much bigger than that. And that is what's happening to our country. It's what's breaking our country apart. It's what's driving the social changes or what's driving the era of violent populism. And we literally see it happening right in front of our eyes with the newcomers who are suddenly meteoric household names when nine months before they run for office, we had no idea. We couldn't have picked them out of a whole bushel full of apples. We just never could have done it. Bob, I appreciate you very much. This is awesome. Congratulations on the book. Where should people go to check out everything you got going on? Come to my new YouTube channel, Pape on the Politics of Force that I started since the last time I was here, literally two weeks ago,

and my substacks, especially the escalation trap, because I'm going to be talking about the domestic escalation trap. And I do hope people will go to Amazon and get a copy of this book because there's so much in here we haven't had a chance to talk about, Chris. And I just so appreciate you spending the time with me. Thank you so much. I appreciate you too. All right, until next time. Goodbye, my beauties. See you. Dude. Calculating route to avoid seeing poverty. Turn left to bypass the unhoused youth sleeping on the street. Then keep right to skip by the lines of people waiting for food. steer clear of the crowded shelter turning people away, then take the next exit. Let's stop looking away and get in the way of rising poverty.

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