Offline with Jon Favreau - Why Kamala Fandom is Rocking the Internet – and the Trump Assassination Isn't

Episode Date: July 21, 2024

We still don’t know why a 20-year-old from Pennsylvania opened fire on Trump last weekend. Lone shooters whose paths from normalcy to vigilantism seem esoteric, obscure, or perverse have become a familiar pattern—but there’s actually a lot we do understand about the origins of political violence. Max sits down with terrorism scholar J.M. Berger to understand the psychology of violent extremists and what role the internet plays in their decision to act. But first! Max is joined by the New Yorker’s Jessica Winter to talk about the online fandom around Vice President Kamala Harris and the true meaning of the coconut emoji. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Hey everyone, Max here. So when we recorded this episode, Joe Biden was still insisting he would stay in the 2024 race, and that is no longer the case. Something fundamental about how our politics work is changing before our eyes, and it's changing very quickly, which is why you will hear us in this episode refer to Biden as if he were still the nominee. But both conversations in this show, and especially the first one about Kamala Harris, are, I think, even more relevant. Okay, here's the show. You would think, and I would think, that this event would have been much more stabilizing than it has been so far. And I mean, you know, obviously, things could change very quickly. And

there's a lot of reason to be cautious and to be attentive to what's going on. But I think the more extreme partisans of Donald Trump and the extremists who orbit that part of the Republican Party really kind of baked in the idea that the bad guys are out to kill Trump. And so this is almost kind of like just confirmation of something that they already believe to be true. Welcome to Offline. I'm Max Fisher. John is at the RNC. So we've got two conversations this week I think you all will find really fascinating. So we still don't know, and may never know, precisely why 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crokes opened fire on Trump last week. And that's become a familiar pattern.

Lone shooters whose paths from normalcy to vigilantism seem esoteric, obscure, or plain mysterious. But we are not as in the dark as you might think. There's actually a lot we now understand about the origins of political violence, the psychology of it, and especially what role the internet plays in it, as it often does. Later, I will talk with the terrorism scholar J.M. Berger. That was his voice you heard earlier. J.M. has a specific theory on how people come to embrace political violence that, for me, has shed more light on the topic than anything I've read or heard. But before we get to that, we are starting this week with an optimistic story about the internet's influence on politics. How's that for a change of pace? It's a story about looking to the future while remaining unburdened by the past,

about what can be, and about why the beating heart of progressive politics just might be a coconut. If you know what I'm talking about, you may already be a member of the New K-Hive, a shockingly sudden but I think very, very enthusiastic online fandom around Vice President Kamala Harris. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, the New Yorker's Jessica Winter, who wrote on the phenomenon, is here to explain why Kamala has got much of the progressive social web cheering her name, quoting her speeches, and yes, putting coconut emoji in their display names. Jessica, welcome to Offline. Thank you so much for having me.

So describe for us, please, the rise of this online Kamala fandom in the last few weeks. What set it off? Why it's happening? When the kind of shape that it's taking? So I can describe my own experience of this. So immediately after that disastrous debate, when there were the first calls for Biden to step out of the race and conversations about what happens next, which now seems so long ago, so much has happened in the last few weeks. It's like a trip down memory lane. But when that was happening, it was just pandemonium on all my feeds. And after a couple of days of that, I kind of stepped away from it because it was kind of overwhelming and I had other work to do. And when I opened Twitter again, I want to say it was the Tuesday after the debate. It was one of those classic

social media Rip Van Winkle moments. Everyone is speaking a subtly different language. There's all these references, but you don't know what they're referring to. And there's these nesting dolls of inside jokes and you can't grasp the tone, and you have no idea what's going on. But it was something about Kamala Harris. Her face was all over my feeds. People kept saying the word context, unburdened, as you mentioned, was a word that kept coming up. I was seeing Kamala describing how to season a turkey and talking about her love of Venn diagrams. And as you mentioned, there were coconuts everywhere. And what had happened was this more or less spontaneous coalition, for lack of a better word,

had decided en masse that they wanted to promote the idea that Joe Biden should step aside in favor of his vice president. And that this idea was being germinated through all of these memes and it had taken on a life of its own and it was giddy and contagious and fun and people wanted to be a part of it. So I want to circle back on this idea of a spontaneous coalition, which I think is like, this story feels silly, but actually really important. But first, we should, for folks who don't know the coconut tree clip, I think we have that and we should play that because it is truly delightful and also one of the important political texts of our time. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you. Every time I hear it, it's funny. There's a new detail. I noticed the like weird pause halfway through the way she laughs at her own jokes. There's truly nobody like her.

Yeah. Yeah. So something that I think is kind of fascinating about this is that it seems to be led by younger, kind of more left-wing Democrats, like generally the like Bernie coalition. And that is surprising, right? I mean, Kamala Harris is a former prosecutor to the extent that the left wing of the party acknowledged her at all. It was to kind of denounce her as a cop. And yet now they seem to be really embracing her. What do you make of that? Yeah, I mean, you're right that it was

most pronounced on the left. I think that most voters are pragmatic. I think most voters see voting as a practical act. I think progressives and leftists, I think that's true of them as well. And so I think the same group of people who might be put off by Harris's background as a prosecutor, as a DA, how she pursued low-level drug offenses and truancy and other examples. I mean, these are the same voters who really have no love lost for President Biden either. And I think they're looking at this situation pragmatically, and it doesn't look like a pragmatic situation. It looks like people goofing off on Twitter. But however goofy and opaque and thickly layered and irony the presentation is, you know, the essential position that Kamala Harris provides, however imperfect, an escape hatch, an escape hatch nonetheless.

That message is really easy to understand and to communicate, I think. So I had the same reaction initially that this felt like a pragmatic choice, that this is people who think that they don't want Donald Trump to be president and that elevating Kamala Harris is kind of the best way to do that. I'm not, at this point, I feel like I have a much harder time saying for sure whether this is purely pragmatic and instrumental or the degree to which it is ironic. Like in your piece, you reference that like Chapo Tophouse is like embracing Kamala thought these days and like i'm not sure how much they actually care about what's on the democratic ticket um the degree to which it's ironic the degree to which it has actually maybe become sincere like the number of

people who i talk to who are like you know i listen to those speeches again and i actually think that she's got a point about existing unburdened by the past. And like, kind of where do you stand on which of these things is it? Or is it all of the above? Is it like a weird mix of ironic and sincere? I think it's all of the above. I think it's ironic and sincere. And I think it's kind of mordant. I think there's a kind of gallows humor to it.

And certainly Democrats and liberals and progressives have been given a lot of reason for despair in recent years. Yeah. You know, I think that if we're talking about existing in the context and being unburdened by everything that came before, if we want to do both of those things at once, you can kind of think about the before and after of the debate. So when you juxtapose Kamala Harris with the President Biden that we were thinking of before the debate, you know, he's old. He's too old. People have a lot of misgivings about how old he is. But he is an elder statesman with a great wealth of experience and his administration has accomplished a lot of good things. And let's stick with this.

And when you look at all those memes and speeches and clips juxtaposed with that President Biden, yeah, it seems like an unserious person and just a person who kind of exists to be a meme. And this was Joe Biden at one point, too. We kind of forget how memeable Joe Biden was when he was vice president. I mean, there was an entire rubric of The Onion devoted to, you know, Diamond Joe with his Trans Am shirtless in the driveway. But when you get to the after of the debate and everything that we saw and can't unsee of the debate and a lot of what's come after it, I mean, he really hasn't done a good interview since the debate either. And you juxtapose that, President Biden, with Kamala Harris. I mean, the subjectivity is just completely different.

I mean, suddenly she's not goofy and unserious anymore. Suddenly she's relatable. She's charming. You want to have a glass of wine with her. You do too. I do too. I mean, I want to season a Thanksgiving turkey with Kamala Harris. You know, I think genuinely, I mean, maybe it was people trying to talk themselves into something, but I think there was a genuine element of it.

And I feel it too, that people went back to those videos and they saw something different because things had changed so drastically, literally overnight. I think that's a great point. And I wonder if part of what also happened there is that we had this both a very sudden context shift in the debate, like really changed what we all thought was possible. And we started to look at Kamala as a contrast to Biden very differently. I wonder if there was also, I felt like I had this almost kind of frog boil effect where Biden has been, you know, he didn't become the age that he is overnight at the debate, right? He'd been gradually kind of, you've been seeing

it in his speech, you've been seeing the way that he talks and the media appearances that he makes and doesn't make, that maybe I had been kind of gradually getting used to that. And that I realized that at the moment of the debate, but I also realized that when I look at a clip of Kamala Harris, and I think, oh, it's actually possible to have a Democratic nominee who seems young and energetic and like maybe a little zanied out, but like part of the meme-ability and ironicness of this, might actually also be part of what makes her genuinely appealing to people. Like, let's play the Venn diagram clip, which you have referenced. I love Venn diagrams. I really do. I love Venn diagrams. It's just something about those three circles and

the analysis about where there is the intersection, right? Yeah, I see people that you agree with me, right? So, okay. So I asked my team. I brought props. So she can be so irreverent and weird and surreal in a way that, like, I don't know how deliberate it is or is not. But it's also, like, it's not that dissimilar from what kind of like online humor has become. Like when you think about super online sites like ClickHole or like quote unquote weird Twitter, if people are familiar, like Drill is a weird Twitter account.

It kind of feels like that. So I wonder if her sense of humor and like tell me if you think I'm just being crazy here. If there is like, has become kind of a way in for people where you can appreciate her weirdness, ironically, because if you're very online, it feels very familiar. While at the same time, she is very genuinely upbeat and hopeful in a way that I think a lot of people are craving right now. But maybe the irony gives you permission to say, okay, this is new. I haven't been feeling this all along. I might be feeling this because of this very specific set of humor who seems to do well with voters like one-on-one as opposed to, you know, giving grand stirring speeches. I don't think she's, you know, I don't think that's part of her skill set. You weren't stirred by the Venn diagram clip we heard just now. Like, yeah, she's the Venn diagram of irony and sincerity. You know, she sort of puts herself in the middle of it, or her persona does. I think that's right. And so, I think that people are seeing her as an instrument, right?

They're having a lot of fun revisiting all of her speeches and putting them into this new context and kind of acclimating themselves to a new view of Kamala Harris. Or frankly, they just weren't paying attention. I mean, I can't really say I've given much thought to Kamala Harris in the last four years. And that's not exclusive to her. The vice presidency is often a thankless, largely invisible job. It's hard to distinguish yourself as the vice president. But I also think that she is an instrument in that people are enthusiastic about her in large part because of where she is in the structure of the government, right? They're not necessarily enthusiastic about her because of her specific qualities as a candidate. And so it would make a lot of sense that there is this overlay of rueful irony to the support of her as opposed to people having to perform this deep passion and belief in her as some kind of generational political talent.

Right. We're probably not all getting coconut pilled if she's HUD secretary. Exactly. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And if Pete Buttigieg were vice president, or if any number of other people were vice president, I think we would be pilled with other tropical fruits of their choosing. You know, I mean, a lot of it is just where she is. But I think once people landed where she was, they started looking around and they were really kind of delighted by what they saw. Well, what do you think it tells us about the way that politics work online or maybe can work online? Because you referenced earlier, and I think it's a really important idea, that it is this kind of spontaneous overnight coalition. And of course, it was leaderless

because Kamala Harris and her team cannot be seen as encouraging this because they outwardly have to show loyalty to Biden. Yeah, absolutely. It was, yeah, it was Occupy Kamala. There were no leaders. Yeah, I mean, she was in a spot where she couldn't, you know, tweet out the perfect kind of reply or engage with the jokes at all. You know, I can't imagine she hasn't been observing it from afar. far. And it's also, it's difficult to, it's really difficult for me to differentiate between

how much of this is just niche stuff on Twitter, and it doesn't really have any larger impact on anything. And how much of it is, no, Twitter is real life sometimes, because things that happen in certain niches on Twitter, you know, filter up into, you know, the larger voting population. I mean, it makes me think actually, right as the Kamala mania was kind of peaking, I went to a children's birthday party and I was chatting with a woman in her 70s, baby boomer, swing voter. I think she was a Trump, then Biden voter. She watched the debate. She was horrified. She doesn't know what to do now. She's a registered independent. And this is a normal person. She doesn't watch Fox. She doesn't watch MSNBC.

She's running around with her grandkids and gardening. She's not making dank memes. She's a normal person. And she was aware. She was ambiently aware that there was something going on with Kamala Harris online. And there were coconuts and something. And I really enjoyed trying and almost certainly failing to explain this to her. And I don't want to extrapolate more than I should from one conversation, any more than I want to extrapolate more than we should from, you know, this crazy thing that happened online two weeks ago and may be completely over now. But it did show me how these seemingly insular conversations, you know, can travel to unexpected

places. And I also think it's more than reasonable to think that there are a lot more of her out there of people who do not like Trump, who were never that enamored of Biden in the first place, and now they're looking for other possibilities. Yeah. And I think you're right that this is one of those rare, maybe Twitter is real life moments because of the whole Biden reckoning was something that kind of started in a few places, but started in large part on Twitter. And then it kind of filters out to elite circles. And then that ends up mattering. So we are recording this on Tuesday and the show will air on Sunday. So in terms of this election cycle, 18 political

lifetimes from now, do you think the Coconut Coalition will still be holding strong on Sunday? I think the Coconut Coalition has gone very quiet. And whether that is because everyone is wrapped up in the assassination attempts, the Republican Convention, the J.D. Vance news, and yes, the 1800 things that will happen between now and airing. Whether that's why or whether it's because there's this perhaps acceptance that Biden is just running out the clock and nothing's going to happen. I mean, who knows? I don't know. But I think it's inevitable that the momentum behind any kind of phenomenon like this becomes attenuated. And the Twitter of it all, there are always new memes to make, right? You know, people get the joke and they move on. I did feel some resurgence of Team Coconut after the J.D. Vance in a vice presidential debate, prosecutor Kamala coming out in full force, and she does do really well in that mode. But again, that enthusiasm was specifically about her in the VP slot.

It was about her taking on Vance. It wasn't about her taking on Trump, which may or may not be indicative of something. Right. Well, I will be, for whatever it's worth, existing in the context. And Jessica, I'm so grateful to you for coming on and existing in that context with me. Thank you so much. This was really fun.

Hey, everyone. My next guest is J.M. Berger. Thank you. Matthew Crooks to try to assassinate Donald Trump. But there's a larger question here. It's one we've faced over and over in the wake of extremist violence, whether it's been jihadist, white nationalist, insurrectionist, or seemingly of no ideology at all. And that question is, what makes someone come to a point of choosing, often seemingly on their own, political violence that most of us would never consider? To me, maybe no one has smarter and more thought-provoking answers to this question than J.M. His theories on this and his 2018 book, which is titled Extremism, have changed how I think about not just violent extremism, but how politics and identity work more broadly, and especially the internet's role in our world.

J.M., welcome to Offline. Thanks. Thanks for having me. So, J.M., you have a theory of extremism that is rooted in something called social identity. And I think this is really important because it's a very different starting point than how we might typically think of violent extremism. So, can you explain what social identity is? Sure. So, social identity seeks to explain intergroup conflict, basically. And it proceeds from the idea that everybody has a group that they feel they belong to. That's called the in-group. In doesn't mean like they're popular or dominant. It's just the in-group is whatever group you happen to be part

of. And when you have an in-group, when you're part of an in-group, invariably you discover that there are people who are not in your group and those are out-groups. And so extremism is the belief that your in-group can't be healthy or successful unless it's engaged in conflict with an out-group. Right. Yeah. I wanted to ask you about this definition you have of extremism, which I refer back to all the time. You say extremism, quote, refers to the belief that an in-group success or survival can never be separated from the need for hostile action against an out-group. And again, that feels surprising to me. That feels like not how I usually think of violent extremism because it's not tied to a political cause. It's just about this sense of identity. So can you explain why is that the thing that draws out this violent extremism in people? Yeah. So, one of the things I really was trying to do with this definition is to get away from a lot

of previous thinking about extremism. So... What was the previous thinking? Really, the sort of dominant kind of definition. There's no one definition that everybody agrees on. The dominant kind of strain of definitions, the genre of definitions, is that extremism is just people on the fringes of society. Oh, I see.

So, you know, the problem with that theory is that it doesn't allow you to follow a movement as it goes from the fringes to the mainstream, which is a problem that certainly we've seen a lot in history and is a problem that we're dealing with right now. picked a few of the groups that I previously studied, like ISIS and neo-Nazis and Nazi-Nazis, and looked for the commonalities that we see when we're sort of, you know, you dive into what they say about themselves and what they believe. And what I found was, you know, a definition that is not perfect, but is, I think, better than a lot of the alternatives because it sort of reduces the number of gray areas that you're dealing with when you're thinking about this problem. You know, we want to have a category to study

and to understand that we can sort of say this category, people, you know, who are in this category behave in certain ways that we can then proceed to study and get a better insight on. So, really, you know, I went through a lot of the literature in the course of working on my dissertation, which was written after the book you mentioned. And, you know, I really picked apart each of the definitions. And ultimately, what I found is that a lot of the ways we think about extremism is that we think about extremists as being, by definition, being powerless. And that none of the real theories of extremism accounted for what happened when extremism becomes powerful, when they take control of a society.

And so, you know, to me, this piece, this conflict piece is really what unifies the movements that we think about. When we think about ISIS and we think about Nazis, they, you know, have a lot of beliefs that are exact opposite of each other. And they would kill each other happily because each other fit their definition of enemies. But what they have in common is that belief that they can't protect the group they belong to without constantly being engaged in hostile action against an outgroup, against some perceived enemy. extremism, but politics more broadly, that we think of social identity as something that kind of follows as an after effect of politics that we, you know, prefer one party over another because we like their policies on X issue. And then maybe that starts to inform our identity. And I think we're starting to understand that, for example, our politics are driven much more by a sense of I identify as a conservative, I identify as a liberal, and that leads me to see the other side as a threat to me. And that is the thing that is driving my politics

and that leads me to then say, okay, well, that means that I like this candidate or this party or this policy because it fits into that sense of an in-group that I belong to and an out-group that I am fighting against. But why is it that you think that this is so powerful, this sense of identity conflict of like my group is in conflict with another group because we all feel that to some extent why is

that the thing that can lead us to this moment of you know like the guy who in 2010 parked a car bomb in the middle of time square or you know the guy who brought an assault rifle into a predominantly black church in Charleston in 2015. So, this is going to take a little bit of walking down the garden path here. No, please. Yeah, give us the long answer. Okay. So, when we started this conversation, you asked about social identity theory and social identity theory basically holds that once you start categorizing people into groups, people automatically develop some bias against the out group. So if you tell people, you know, just take a group of random people, put them in a room, say you're team red, you're team blue,

people will automatically start to think that team red is better than team blue. And so different kinds of factors can cause that feeling of superiority to escalate. And what we really see is, you know, there's a big body of work that I talk about in my book, Extremism, that talks about something called uncertainty identity theory. And that's when people are experiencing uncertainty. They are attracted to extremist groups that seem to offer certainty about the world, about your place in the world and what you should do. And so the next big piece that I'll be publishing on this, hopefully in the next year or two, really goes bigger.

So we have all these theories that say that these things happen. We don't have real good explanations of why they happen. And so i've been looking at is a is something called the social construction of reality which is uh best written about by a man named peter berger from not a relation and thomas luttman and the 1990s and social construction of reality basically puts forward a description of how we interact with the world that I think is very accurate, is that we don't know for sure what's real unless we can check it against somebody else's impressions. Trivial things, right? The sky's blue, it's hot outside. Those kinds of things we understand pretty quickly. But when there's a problem and a challenge, your instinct is that you ask other people what they think.

You get a gut check from other people. And you're more inclined to get that gut check from people who you perceive to be like yourself. So, it's your in-group. So, the in-group consensus is basically what determines what's real. The group that you feel most identified with, you're going to take a lot of your cues about the world from them, whether it's religion, you know, I believe in God, I believe this is right and this is wrong, or whether it's political, I'm a conservative, I'm a liberal. And all of that is fine. It doesn't necessarily involve conflict. In certain kinds of situations, when your in-group consensus is being destabilized by an out-group consensus, you're going to take steps. The in-group will take steps to try and stabilize the in-group consensus.

And there are basically two approaches to doing that. One is called therapy, and that basically means you try and convince other people to see the world the way you do. And then the second one, which comes out when therapy doesn't work or when you're not inclined toward therapy, is called annihilation. And in annihilation, you strengthen the in-group consensus by diminishing members of the out-group. So, people in the out-group, their opinion about the world can be ignored because they are inferior to me because they're stupid because they are less than human and if that doesn't make them go away then the next thing what happens is annihilation will escalate into extremism and so all the things that we associate with extremism in terms of

killing people in terms of genocide hate crimes all those things are really about removing the outgroup from your sphere of operations about removing the out-group from your sphere of operations so that the in-group consensus can continue untroubled. You know, so genocide being the ultimate, you know, kind of manifestation of extremist violence is an effort to completely erase the out-group so that their view of the world will no longer trouble you very well. So that's a big picture. It doesn't necessarily explain why one person does it. this sense of we feel uncertainty, we feel destabilized, that what pulls us then into seeing it as a matter of my in-group is threatened by an out-group where it's, you know, I'm having

trouble getting a job or I don't feel that my economic situation in future is what I hoped it was going to be. What is the cause of that? It's because of immigrants. And that is what my immediate in-group is telling me. And it is putting me into this framework of the problem that I'm facing is because of this out-group that is an existential threat to my in-group or you know why do I feel like society is changing in ways that maybe feel destabilizing to me or that feel like I'm not prepared for it's because of minorities who have too much of a voice and that's the out-group and that this in-group out-group formulation can be comforting because then it tells me that the thing that I'm feeling destabilized by or threatened by, it's because of this identifiable threat and

great news I have this in-group that I'm going to rally with me against that out-group. But there's an important question here, which is how we go from just a kind of state of seeing the world, of explaining the individual problems or challenges we might face into this context of my in-group versus an out-group, to, as you mentioned in your definition of extremism, that our group's survival or success can never be separated for the need from hostile action against the out-group. And you have a theory about what leads this line to be crossed that I find so compelling. I cite this all the time to people.

This is so revelatory to me, the crisis solution construct. Can you explain what this means, what you mean by crisis and by solution? Sure. These are concepts that were developed by my colleague, Haroro Ingram, who was developing a lot of great tools to look at extremist movements around the same time that I was coming up with this definitional stuff. So his work and mine, his work is particularly informed mine is what I would say. So the crisis solution construct holds that the in-group is being threatened by a crisis that some kind of problem that is being caused by the out-group. And the solution to that crisis is to take hostile is being caused by the out group and the solution

to that crisis is to take hostile action against the out group so the crisis narrative is what you see in the extremist movement it'll be you know immigrants are invading for a sense being one that i've written quite a bit about recently um you know you describe that as a crisis and then the only way to protect the in-group is to is to stop that envision with whatever tools are available up to and including violence and the things that i think you know when we think about why where do we go from you know having just restrictions on immigration to killing immigrants to killing them and expelling them. I think that instability is something that really affects that. So you kind of alluded to this briefly before.

When somebody has anxiety about a job, their job, it's not necessarily that they're poor. It's not because, like, we went through a lot of this stuff in the early stages of studying extremism. Like, people are extremists because they're poor. No. People are extremists because they don't have a good education. No.

So what leads people to move toward extremism is change, sudden dramatic change. change you know when suddenly you know inequality surges when you know the top one or two percent are suddenly getting much much richer and the bottom percentages are getting poorer it even if it's uh not even like inequality necessarily it doesn't have to necessarily be anything actually bad happening to you if you know your economy your local economy went from coal mining to websites. You know, it's like a big dramatic change that is destabilizing to your sense of who you are and how you're supposed to act in the world. And so, those moments of dramatic change are really dangerous moments. And we've been going through an extended period of very dramatic change and uncertainty over the last 10 to 20 years. And so I think, you know, the concerns that we're all discovering about extremism right now are a product of that.

And all of this, the kind of sense of instability and then answering that with my in-group is fighting their group, that's kind of the terrain in which this can happen. But of course, most people who experience, you know, feeling destabilized by social change or economic inequality don't pick up a gun. So can you talk about what are the kind of further steps down that crisis solution construct that lead people to, that very small number of people, to this answer of, I have to do, you know, something really extreme and violent about it. We can talk about patterns, but not predictors, you know. Of course. It's the sort of the situation is we sort of see what the process is, but we don't necessarily know what makes one person more vulnerable to it than another. But the process for extremist violence specifically is that a person who identifies with an extremist movement will look at the crisis narrative that they're being given, and they will ask themselves, am I doing enough?

There's a self-critique. The extremist ideologues and extremist recruiters will constantly beat this drum as you have to do more, you're not doing enough. And so when a person looks at themselves and does that self-critique and says, am I doing enough? And if the answer to that is no, then they're going to try and do something more. And that thing that they do more may not be violent. It may be pamphlets, it may be recruitment, it may be harassing people on social media. Or if somebody keeps asking that question and keeps feeling like they're not doing enough, they can escalate that to a period of violence. And that cycle can happen very quickly for some people. For a lot of people,

moving toward an extreme kind of act like killing someone is a slow process and there's a lot of cognitive barriers to it. And in fact, all of this, all of this extremism is really, none of it is really inherent or instinctive to human beings. These are things that come out of situations. So you're fighting all your instincts as a human being to do this. And so only a few people will will get caught in that cycle so irretrievably that they end up picking up a gun and shooting

someone or building a bomb this idea of a narrative that kind of gets shaped for people or fed to people feels really important to me can you talk about what that typically what that kind of narrative looks like when we're very far down that path when we what we see is for many people it's a very diverse group and especially even more so now with the sort of rise of the participatory social media has really upended a lot of the old processes there are some people who have something some dysfunction within them that is going to lead them into violence and they are just looking for the type of violence right they're looking for an excuse right and a cause for the thing they wanted to do anyway yeah and then there are other people who who get caught up in the ideological piece and you know, the ideological piece has a lot to do with the choice of action you're going to take has a lot to do with power.

So if you're a part of a fringe extremist group and your group is so far out on the fringes that you don't think you're ever really going to be able to take over society, then you're much more likely to do violence. So an ISIS supporter living in the United States, for instance, there's no political route for that person to create what they want in the world here. So they're more likely to go to violence in that kind of instance. Neo-Nazis have, up until very recently, been in that category

where their beliefs are so far out on the fringe. There's a whole subset that we study at Middlebury called accelerationism. And the accelerationists believe that there's no chance to fix what's wrong with society. Society is just broken from head to toe, that white people are part of the problem. They're complacent, they're corrupt, they're mixing with other races. And so their solution is to destroy everything and tear everything down. And a lot of the recent extremist violence that we've seen has come from acceleration circles, because that's the premise that they're working from, is that there is nothing else they can do except try and tear society down one piece

at a time. Oh, that's right. Yeah, now that I'm thinking about a lot of the groups that sprang up in 2020, especially like the, you know, Boogaloos or these kind of like white militia groups that were really big on Facebook. Yes, there was, I'm now realizing, a kind of common narrative that like the violence in itself

was not going to bring about what they wanted, but was meant to bring about this total social collapse, which does seem like it kind of dovetails with this idea that if you see the stakes as really severe for your in-group, it can lead you to think that provoking violence is not just acceptable, but is actually desirable and necessary. But you said that until recently, neo-Nazis have only seen violence as their path to change. Are you saying that they see politics as more viable for them now? nazi groups not all neo-nazis are accelerationists first you know i should specify that up front and

the people who are attracted to accelerationism may not be convinced by anything that's happening right now but for a lot of white supremacists a lot of neo-nazis you know the anti-immigrant positions that are being espoused increasingly extreme anti-immigrant positions that are being espoused by the republican party are more and more in line with their desired outcomes. So they are, to some extent, you know, we're seeing them at, there was a, you know, been a series of marches and protests by neo-Nazis in Nashville recently, you know, they're showing up at town council meetings to sort of speak their minds, and they're feeling emboldened in ways that they haven't before. And we're seeing that in a lot of places around the country. So, you know, I think there's an alarming convergence between what they want and what the Trump platform is offering them.

I feel like this crisis solution, identity conflict framework for understanding violent extremism also does a lot for me to help me understand other forms of maybe less necessarily overtly violent forms of extremism that are rising, like, you know, white nationalism, QAnon. And often it seems that conspiracies are to some extent at the center of this, or maybe really important for this narrative building. And you write in your book that conspiracies can be a really important part of creating an extremist identity can you talk about why that is why conspiracies play this big role sure and i mean i'll just say also at this just uh briefly address something you mentioned that question but violence is not only one way that extremists act out. The definition of extremism I use calls for hostile action. So there's many different things that extremists can do, including writing laws that marginalize people who are in an out-group.

Racial slavery in the United States was an example. So there's a lot of that. Conspiracy theories are a mechanism that essentially says that the out-group has very high agency but very low merit. So, they have all the power and none of the merit. And the in-group has very high merit but very low agency. So, they're people who are good people who are being affected by a secret conspiracy that is being done by these people who are terrible, but they hold all the power. So you see that most clearly in sort of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, but you really see it throughout the whole rich tapestry of conspiracy theories. It's so funny you mentioned that. I have another show called How We Got Here and our episode this week is about other failed assassinations of political leaders. And something that has come up in one after another, one country after another, is that the would-be assassin almost always has this belief that there is some group out there that is exactly what you said, that is very, very powerful, but also has like, they're inhuman, they're not, you know,

they have no merit, they're just evil, and that that leads them to feel a sense of both necessitating and justifying extreme action against this group that they see as whether it's, you know, George Soros, whatever, as so powerful and so nefarious. So, it's funny to see that common thread in all those conspiracies. I think, you I think that's something that we see in a lot of extremist violence, but not all extremist violence. And not all assassination attempts are extremist. We still really don't know, in this case, what happened. We're learning a little bit about this guy. We may never get clear answers about why he did what he did. There have been a couple of cases of, you know, mass violence, shooter violence over

the last several years where, you know, we just, we still don't know. Even years later, Las Vegas mass shooting is the one I'm thinking of where, you know, there were a lot of, there were a lot of, a lot of smoke, but no fire, right? You know, there's like a lot of stuff that the guy was into that maybe affected his thinking, but nothing he left that really made it clear what he was trying to accomplish or why he was doing what he's doing. That is something I feel like I have come back to a lot too in writing about extremist violence, you know, writing a lot about jihadism, you know, when that was something that we thought a lot more about in the kind of early 2010s, where you would so often there would be some horrible incident and you would be scrutinizing this person's social media history, things they had said to classmates years earlier, trying to thread together a narrative.

And sometimes you could do it, but sometimes, you know, what goes on between somebody's two ears ears it can be so complicated and so hard to know that while i do find these theories incredibly illuminating you are right that to some degree when we're talking about one person's path to a decision you know there's there's some mystery that's always going to remain so something else i wanted to ask you about this is obviously a show about the internet and its effects in our world and you have called social media a game changer for how extremism works. And hearing you describe all of this, it does feel like it's clicking into place for me like, okay, how the social web could potentially supercharge for some people on a really big scale this process of pulling them down this path of identity conflict and identity crisis to then solution a collective effort to do whatever they have to do. How do you see social media as changing or accelerating or changing and accelerating this process?

So, if extremism comes about when your in-group consensus comes into conflict with the out-group consensus. What social media does is it's a gigantic consensus calculator, essentially. Likes, shares, comments are all ways to reinforce one consensus, the strength of one consensus over another. And what social media has done is sort of destabilized what was already a pretty unstable process. Because what we can see, there's a little bit of research on this, and I would like to see more. It doesn't take much to convince you that your in-group consensus is good. So the way I used to talk about this for some years now is that, you know, if you were a radical jihadist living in Peoria in 1950,

you would very possibly go your whole life without meeting anybody who shared your views. And now you hop on social media and it doesn't matter what it is you believe, you can find people who share your views. So the question is, how many people does it take to make an in-group consensus that feels like it defines reality for you? And the answer is maybe 50, maybe 100. I mean, we're not talking about gigantic numbers. And you get a movement like QAnon where there's hundreds of thousands and millions of people participating.

It's very difficult to convince those people that their view of reality should be changed because they can point to the fact that there's a million other people who believe the same thing they do. Right. And that idea of a consensus calculator, that's so fascinating and that really clicks for me. And it especially makes me think that I feel like I could understand how social media algorithms, which of course, we know can pull in a lot of directions, but generally tend to pull people towards whatever version of their pre-existing worldview is more engaging, a little bit more extreme, a little bit more heightened to that sense of us versus them. That if you're already at a three out of 10 of believing my in-group is virtuous, the out-group is evil, and they are a threat to us, it could really

easily push you to a five out of 10. I'm thinking about, again, 2020, how many people started spending a ton of time on social media and maybe already had a belief that I feel really scared by what's happening in society. I really need a sense of safety. And also I have this sense that there's someone out there who's behind the virus or who's a threat to my community. And I'm scared about that that it could create this sense of reality around oh it's the out group and it's the out group that is such an affairs threat to you that you have to do whatever it's going to take to defeat them yeah i mean algorithmic stuff i wrote a novel about this actually it was 20 uh really 20 yes it's

called optimal and it has a lot of discussion discussion of the effects of algorithms on society. And one piece of it is just that. So algorithms, what they do is by shaping the content that you see, they create an impression of what the in-group consensus is. So depending on how skeptical you are when you approach that stuff or how extremely online you are you can really be shaped by that now there are a lot of other factors i don't want it to be like you know it's just algorithms are driving us over this cliff because there's a real people behind a lot of this stuff and you know the algorithms might make it easier to find your in-group uh you know but it doesn't necessarily uh insist that that

in-group be negative you know i mean you can all be fans of a television show uh you can all enjoy shogun together you know that's that's an in-group it doesn't have to be a bad in-group uh but you know other stuff like covid which was a huge generator of uncertainty, pushed people to more kind of feeling more impulse to seek the reassurances that they get from extremism. To bring it back to the Trump assassination attempt, this is making me curious if you have a sense for how this event is being portrayed or discussed in the corners of the social web that might be, let's say, eager to contextualize it within a certain crisis solution framework. Boy, this is where no plan, no theory survives contact with reality, I guess. Of course, right. So you would think, and I would think, that this event would have been much more stabilizing

than it has been so far. And I mean, you know, the bad guys are out to kill Trump. And so this is almost kind of like just confirmation of something that they already believe to be true. So there was a burst in the stuff that I monitor and the stuff that we monitor at Seat Tech. There was certainly a burst of like, okay, this is it, this is war, this is civil war.

But it's calmed down surprisingly quickly, in part because he wasn't seriously injured. So far, he has not used this as a call to violence, to reciprocal violence. So far, knock wood, it's not as bad as I would have, if you told me this happened two weeks ago, I would have expected a worse outcome by now. I had the exact same reaction. I thought, you know, oh God, the far right telegraph channels are really going to go off. And I checked in with some friends who, you know, professionally monitor those. And they were sending me some memes that were pretty scary about, you know, the Democrats have opened fire and they're coming for us. But the point the friends who monitor these groups made is that like, look, this is nothing. The actual reality of what happened is absolutely nothing to the prevailing QAnon narratives of what's been happening to the right and Donald Trump in the last four or five years. So they, this is kind of, as you were saying, for people who are already there and who are bought into these conspiracy frameworks, this is kind of a drop in the bucket. And I guess also if part of the narrative on the

far right is this showed that Donald Trump is invincible, then there's nothing destabilizing about that because he came out fine. Yeah. So, I mean, I would definitely say like you know everybody should keep the powder dry in a very non-violent concept of what that means uh i mean i think we should i think there's a lot of instability there's a lot more things that could happen and also there may be some people having a slow burn reaction to this that we're not they're not doing it as visibly and we're not seeing it so and the democratic convention is probably uh going to be a flash point for for some of that i would guess so i i've definitely not i'm not ready to sort of relax with this um but i would say that yes so far i cautiously, uh, relieved at what I'm seeing.

Yeah, I am too. And I have to say, talking with you about this stuff always does make me feel in a weird way comforted because I feel like I understand it so much better. So, JM, I really appreciate you coming on and I had a great time chatting with you. Thanks. I'm glad I was able to talk to you about this. This election has always been about so much more than Biden versus Trump. And now more than ever, down-ballot candidates and grassroots groups are getting lost in the national conversation and need our support. If you're looking for ways to help, join Vote Save America's 2024

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