The Bulwark Podcast - Adrienne LaFrance: The New Anarchy

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

The largest threat of extremist violence right now is coming from the rightwing. But 100 years ago, it came from the left. History can teach us about how America can survive this new phase of domestic terror. The Atlantic's Adrienne LaFrance joins Charlie Sykes today. show notes: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/04/us-extremism-portland-george-floyd-protests-january-6/673088/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This message comes from BetterHelp. Can you think of a time when you didn't feel like you could be yourself? Like you were hiding behind a mask, at work, in social settings, around your family? BetterHelp Online Therapy is convenient, flexible, and can help you learn to be your authentic self. So you can stop hiding. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10%

off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P, dot com. This message comes from BetterHelp. Can you think of a time when you didn't feel like you could be yourself? Like you were hiding behind a mask? BetterHelp online therapy is convenient, flexible, and can help you learn to be your authentic self so you can stop hiding. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Good morning and welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is March 9th, 2023. And I won't kid you about this. Today's podcast is alarming. I am alarmed. This is one of those moments where if you're concerned that you might be hearing or reading something that is going to make you worried about the future of the country, who wrote the story about the growing climate of

violence in American society. And she joins me on the podcast today. Good morning. How are you? I am fine. Thanks so much for having me. Well, I want to talk about the extremist violence and the history of the extremist violence and what it's going to take to move past this. But can I just share with you a bit of audio that I'm somewhat obsessed with? Would you mind? I would love that. I know that we've had the fire hose of scandals and information about Tucker Carlson, and I was not intending to talk with you about Tucker Carlson, but they have dredged up this delicious old video of Tucker Carlson on C-SPAN talking about a book that he wrote 20 years ago. This is a book that he wrote in 2003 called Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites,

My Adventures in Cable News. And he's writing about and talking about Bill O'Reilly, who was the big enchilada back then, he was the Tucker Carlson of 2003. And he's talking about Bill O'Reilly's populist everyman shtick. And he writes in the book, you know, about how, you know, O'Reilly plays this, you know, everyman guy who is just going to tell it as he sees it. But then he goes on to say that it's really kind of phony. And if he ever gets caught out of character, it's over. So after he wrote the book, he goes on to say that it's really kind of phony. And if he ever gets caught out of character, it's over. So after he wrote the book, he goes on C-SPAN and talks about it. And this is the audio that everybody is talking about today.

And so this is Tucker Carlson in 2003, 20 years ago, talking about cable TV's biggest phony back then. Let's play that. Another quote from your book, Bill O'Reilly's success is built on the perception that he really is who he claims to be. If he ever gets caught out of character, it's over. That's right. I say before that, that, Bill O'Reilly's really talented. He's more talented than I am. He's got a lot more viewers than I do. He's a better communicator than I am. But I think there's kind of a deep phoniness at the center of his shtick. And again, as I say, the shtick is sort of built on this perception that he is the character he plays.

He is every man. He's not right-wing. He's a populist. This kind of Irish Catholic populist fighting for you against the powers that be. And that's great as a shtick, but I'm just saying the moment that it's revealed not to be true, it's over. The moment he gets caught, you know, slapping a flight attendant on the Concorde for not bringing his champagne fast enough or barking at, you know, one of his subordinates to take the, you know, brown M&Ms out of my bowl and get me a bottle of Evian or something like that. The second that makes page six, it's over, right? Because the whole thing is predicated on the fact that he is who he says he is. And just nobody is that person, especially not someone who makes a million dollars, you know,

many millions a year. Hmm. So Adrian, when I'm listening to that, I'm going, okay, so in other words, Tucker knows that what he's doing is shtick now. And really what he's become is he's become what he described back in 2003. Yeah, there's a real pot kettle of quality to that clip. But also this whole notion that if he's ever caught out of character, if people ever see the difference between the private and the public, you know, man of the people, it's all over. And of course, we know that Tucker Carlson took off the bow tie

and he's a really, really, really rich guy. He makes probably more than $1 million. And he says it's over. It's over back then. But these new revelations about the gap between his public and private persona, I hate Donald Trump passionately, and the text message. Now, that would seem to be a case of getting caught out of character, wouldn't it? And so he's saying in the before times, that would mean it would be over, but that was then. I don't know about you, but I just get the sense that the Tucker Carlson of 2023 is acting like a man who thinks he'll never be held accountable.

The audience is never going to abandon him after he's been exposed, which is another indication about how the rules have changed. He may be right about that. I mean, what it actually makes me think about too is Donald Trump, you know, a wealthy real estate developer from Manhattan, successfully convincing people that he's a man of the people. And that worked, right? And so Tucker may be right about being able to get away with it. Yes, because people just don't really care about hypocrisy.

I thought David Frum had a great tweet about this. And I've thought about this, the famous movie, A Face in the Crowd. In that movie, the TV demagogue's audience turns on him after he's exposed in his own voice as a liar and a hypocrite, and that he really despises his audience as suckers and fools. And there's that moment where the audience is, well, we're done with you. And as David says, actually, there was something sweetly naive about that idea that the audience would, in fact, turn on the person. Because in real life now, what's happening? We kind of have a face-in-the-crowd moment happening in real time.

And it's not playing out the way it did in the movie, is it? Right, right. Well, and it's an era of such profound cynicism, which I think is a big part of the problem. So I want to talk about your piece, your deeply disturbing piece about the new anarchy, which is really a masterful tour of what is happening to our society, also the history of it and the international implications. Tell me why you wrote this story. You're the executive editor of The Atlantic. You didn't have to write the story yourself, but this is something that, and you say this in the article, you've been thinking about this for years now. Why'd you do it?

Thank you for your kind words, first of all. So three years ago, I wrote a piece about QAnon to try to understand that phenomenon. And after that, I sort of was left thinking, well, how do we fix this, right? How do we break the fever? And very early in my reporting, I came to the conclusion that this isn't a moment where there's a fever to break, that in fact, when you have conditions that make a society sort of ripe for violence and political violence, it tends to be something that you're in for a while. And so that sort of changed my approach and sort of sharpened the questions of something that's more like, okay, we're in it, whatever this thing is, we're in this deep division, this conditions that make us vulnerable to violence. How do we then get

through it without further bloodshed? And so that was a question I wanted to answer. And in particular, I wanted to learn from other eras and other countries to see how people have gotten through moments like these with democracy still intact. So that was the mission. And it was really hard to report. I mean, obviously, it's a complicated topic and fraught in a million ways, but a lot of the lessons are uncomfortable and unpleasant. And there isn't, but a lot of the lessons are uncomfortable and unpleasant, and there isn't sort of a clean blueprint for what we can do and how we can get this right. And it's also happening in real time, and it's moving very quickly, and it is changing. I mean, you write that we're experiencing a new phase of domestic terror,

and it is one characterized by radicalized individuals with shape-shifting ideologies willing to kill their political enemies. Describe what you mean by the shape-shifting ideologies, because I do think that that's one of the markers of our time. So the other thing that I was thinking is, we've had for the past several years, certainly over the course of the Trump presidency, this discourse where people have wondered, are we cruising toward the next civil war? And the civil war, of course, looms so large in the national memory, but it became clear to me that yes, we should worry about that outcome, of course, but the next civil war is unlikely to look like the last one. It's not likely to be geographically split the way it did. And when

you look at the tensions in American society, in American politics, they're simply not divided in the way they once were. And so this gets to the shape-shifting ideology part. When you look at those who are willing to commit acts of violence, political violence, it's not always clear. I mean, maybe a lot of them have supporting Donald Trump in common. Certainly the scholars who study this are much more concerned about right-wing violence or right-wing extremism than the left wing. But you find people who are drawn to movements that spread quickly across the social web that are sort of slippery in their ideology. Maybe they have overlapping qualities. Maybe it's misogyny or pro-Trumpism or QAnon, but the ideologies themselves are not classical in

the way we think of them politically. So you start this article with what was happening in Portland back in 2020. You remind us what we were seeing on television at the time. You write, night after night, hundreds of people clashed in the streets. They attacked one another with baseball bats, tasers, bear spray, fireworks. They filled balloons with urine and marbles and fired them at police officers with slingshots. The police lobbed flashbang grenades. The FBI notified the public of a bomb threat against federal buildings in the city. Extremists on the left and on the right had come to own a portion of downtown Portland. I'm just reminded of the last time that I was in Portland that I was thinking, what a beautiful, classy city it was. One of the coolest cities in

America. What happened in Portland? Talk to me about how Portland became this kind of, it feels like almost like a dry run of a civil war. Do you see it that way? Yeah, I mean, I can totally see why you put it that way. And I was drawn to it for the same reason, just like what on earth happened there. It seemed to be a place that in recent memories, the closest our country has come to sort of being on the brink, like the social contract broke. And I wanted to understand particularly because I had the summer of 2020 only seen it from afar through really excellent reporting. People were out there reporting about what was going on, but it also became really the conversation

around what happened in Portland was so tinged with sort of reactive tribal fights about who's to blame and is Antifa even real? Like it just got so partisan that I really felt like I wanted to go for myself and talk to people who were there and understand it. And so through my reporting, I would say what I learned is that what many people think of as the maybe most chaotic of the protests and riots in a summer of reaction to the murder of George Floyd actually was not just about George Floyd there. Certainly protesters came out in Portland to protest police violence, but the ultimate violence that took place there, the scene you described from my article, that was sort of the eruption of latent tensions that really began in 2016. And that happened because Portland is this, you know, has a reputation for being extremely left-leaning, almost comically left-leaning.

And provocateurs on the right correctly identified it as a place they could go and get a reaction. And so that started years before 2020. And then when there was sort of already people out on the streets in the summer of 2020, this dynamic returned. And that fight between right-wing pro-Trump extremists and reactive left-wing extremists sort of hijacked what was previously, you know, an outpouring of protests over George Floyd. So this didn't just happen by accident. This did not happen organically. Portland was targeted. That's right. And it's interesting because when I was

there, one of the questions I asked every person there was, do you worry about this happening in other cities? Should other cities worry that what happened in Portland can happen to them? Great question. Well, some people said yes, absolutely. A lot of people said that. But several people also said this is unique to Portland and Portland's culture because there aren't cities, maybe like Berkeley, maybe Austin. There's a few other cities that really have a reputation for being blue bubbles. And some people did say that they think that it was really unique to Portland's political makeup and sort of reputation. Before we get into the real details here. So you had the clash between these right wing groups and Antifa. Antifa is a real

thing, isn't it? I mean, it may be exaggerated, there may be demagoguery about it, but Antifa is a real thing in Portland, and you really can't tell the story of what happened in Portland without saying, yes, there are some really violent left-wing protesters there. Oh, absolutely. It's a real thing. I mean, it's not an organization. It's by design. It's, you know, loosely organized, but no, it's definitely real. And it's such a distraction that people have focused more on exaggerations about Antifa than what's actually happening on the ground. And as you point out, in 2020, what happened was you had these left-wing extremists, you know, loosely affiliated with Antifa who hijacked the largely peaceful anti-police protests with their own extremely violent tactics. But let's just go

back to what you just described, how this was also targeted by the right. In 2016, Trump supporters identified Portland as a place to provoke the left. They expected that Portland's reaction to the trolling would be swift. And so after Trump won, it became a place went to brawl in the streets. So who were these people that showed up from the right to confront the radical left? So this is like the Proud Boys, you had a local group called Patriot Prayer that is sort of Proud Boys adjacent, and other sort of more marginal right-wing groups that, you know, Western chauvinists, like just these extremist right-wing groups that, you know, one would come out and then the others would come out and march alongside them. And they felt emboldened by Trump's presidency.

And, you know, of course, you remember the moment in one of the 2020 presidential debates where Trump told the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by. And a lot of people who I spoke with for this story really see Portland as having been a training ground for the people who ultimately carried out the January 6th attack. And over the summer of 2020, Trump went out of his way to focus on what was happening in Portland. He deployed federal law enforcement agents and tactical gear to the city over the objections of local officials, over the objection of the mayor, of the governor. How did that work out? Because, of course, that seemed to escalate everything, not just the profile of the violence, but the actual violence that was taking place in Portland.

What happened after Trump sent the feds into Portland? So, I mean, I think the local law enforcement response was already, I mean, you could criticize a lot about it. And I spoke to the mayor of Portland about this. And the point he made was it's really hard when, as the police, when you're dealing with a protest, even a violent one, where the cause of the protest is anti-police, the sort of the calibration for the police is really challenging because, you know, you're playing into the thing that they're already mad about. And so it's not as though the local officials had the situation under control. At the same time, you know, like you pointed out, then President Trump didn't consult with the mayor or the governor. They actively didn't want federal forces to come in. And it certainly escalated things. I mean, I think at its core, it's an

example of this gift that Trump has for knowing exactly what buttons to press, right? So he saw this extremely left city. He knew that his base would react to his sort of like, I am the rule of law guy. I'm going to fix this. And then it was an opportunity to just get, you know, a national focus on how bad things were and sort of make the point that the left is just totally out of control. And so I think he identified a political opportunity and took it. As he did in Kenosha, Wisconsin, just to the south of where I am right now. And, you know, it came very close to winning Wisconsin in 2020. And I think that might have been a factor. So you write

that what happened in Portland was really a concentrated manifestation of the political violence all around us, that we're seeing this across the country, maybe not quite as dramatically as important. But let's talk about this, because you go through what's happening around the country in terms of this sort of rising temperature of political violence? What are you seeing? So a number of things. I mean, there are actual violent attacks, attacks on elected officials.

And so we'd see actual violence. We also see Americans' tolerance for violence changing. So more people are tolerant of political violence as a acceptable, you know, action to take, which is quite disturbing. You see more armed protests. So people bringing firearms to protest, which maybe, you know, you might argue like, well, that could be their right. But in cases where the political tensions are very inflamed, and so that's connected with an uptick in violence. So you have all these conditions where we see the violence is increasing, we see that people are more tolerant of it. Of course, the sort of national political leadership, the rhetoric is just really coarse. And, you know, we see incitements for violence all the time.

And then the other thing I think to point out is that, you know, you see acts of violence, like for example, like a shooting, the shooting at the gay nightclub in Colorado, which someone might not characterize as an act of political violence, but really is. I mean, it's so you have to take into consideration sort of the sweep of violent events that are tied to this culture of political division. So that's the other piece of it that is sort of can be hiding in plain sight. But it's very important to talk about. You mentioned this 2022 UC Davis poll that found that 20 percent, one out of five Americans, believe the political violence would at least sometimes be justified. It would be alarming if 2 percent of Americans thought the political violence because that's millions of people. But 20 percent of Americans are at least open to the idea. I think there are things that are worth debating

over when violence is justified. But the other part of that study finds that some large portion of Americans also believe that violence would be justified if it means reinstating Trump as the president. So it's really disturbing stuff, genuinely disturbing. Also, and I think you document this, this is not just theoretical.

I mean, we, of course, already experienced what happened on January 6th. You had a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Obviously, you had to hang Mike Pence, where's Nancy stuff. You had a man with a gun and a knife outside Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's house. You have a man with a loaded pistol outside Representative Jayapal's house. You have a man wearing body armor who tried to breach the FBI office in Cincinnati. You have the break in Nancy Pelosi's house and the assault on her husband. And we can just go through all of the incidents here. So you talk to experts. They were really worried about political violence in the Great Lakes, the rural West, the Pacific Northwest, and the South. Why those areas? Why Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia? What's going on there? I mean, these are swing states, right? And so the way that people talked about it to me is that places where the right and the left are most likely to collide. So to use, Portland as an example, you have a very blue city surrounded by very red rest of the

state in Washington state as well. So those are places where, you know, there's often culture that's sort of pro-militia, you know, a lot of gun enthusiasts, which in and of themselves, of course, not a problem. But if you add firearms to already inflamed, you know, political tensions, you're not going to have a good outcome. And so these are sort of the tinderboxes, I would say. And also, I mean, the other thing here is that it's a very large portion of the country. I mean, it's most of the country. The part of your article that I personally found really fascinating was your discussion of American anarchy in the early 20th century. I mean, your piece is the new anarchy. But, you know, quick reminder that we actually went through a period of fighting real anarchists, and it was deadly. You're talking

about the assassination of, you know, President McKinley in 1901. You had anarchists who shot a priest in Denver in 1908, 1910. Dynamite attack in Los Angeles, killed 21 people. I mean, this goes on and on. He had a suitcase bomb, killed 10 people at a parade in San Francisco in 1916 here in my hometown of Milwaukee. Bomb exploded in the police department in 1917, killing nine officers, two civilians, and it goes on and on. So we had a real sort of spasm of anarchist violence in this country at one time. But as you point out, the kind of the anarchist terrorists are barely remembered today, even though this was really a reign of terror. Yeah. And this is part of why I was drawn to that time. I mean, the other thing that I was interested in was, and I asked whenever I was, you know, talking to the experts

about this is right now, the threat of political violence emanates primarily from right-wing extremists. At that time in the, in the sort of anarchy of the early 20th century, they were left-wing terrorists. And one of the questions I had was, is the nature of political violence different depending on which sort of ideology is driving it? And every single person I talked to said, no, the ideology doesn't matter. It certainly matters for our purposes of understanding the threat today, but it operates the same way.

And so I was really drawn to trying to find examples that cut against what we're seeing ideologically today. And also just the other similarities being that these are loosely organized. Even the ideologies were messy in some of the same ways. These were just anti-government. Luigi Gagliani is one of the figures I focus on, and he's someone who advanced this idea of propaganda of the deed, which basically was saying that violence is not just justified, but to be celebrated in terms of destroying the state and institutions. And so

I wanted to understand sort of how we got out of that period. And this is one of the examples that is not satisfying because a big part of it was, you know, World War I provided a temporary sort of distraction. Obviously, that's not something we'd want to replicate. And then it was really the Pomerades and this really deeply unconstitutional reaction that ended up deporting a lot of the terrorists, but also many others who were totally innocent. And so, you know, that quote unquote worked, but that's certainly not something we would want to ever replicate. I want to come back to that because that raises some really tough questions here. So the anarchist you focus on, Luigi Gagliani, as you point out,

barely remembered today. He was one of the world's most influential terrorists implicated in a lot of these deadly attacks. He was an Italian immigrant who had a newspaper, you know, very, very high profile. You write that he arrived in America when America was in a terrible mood. And one that would feel familiar to the mood today. Now, of course, I don't think a lot of people are remembering, okay, why would America have been in a terrible mood, you know, back in the 19 aughts? What was going on in America back then that put us in that state of mind? Well, I mean, some of the similarities I see, you had this technological revolution that totally changed the way people work. As a result of this, you had highly visible

wealth disparity, which of course we have again today, deep political division, also familiar. So a lot of those just sort of underlying conditions, and these are the same conditions that end up being correlated with bursts of political violence, were things that America was experiencing then. And again, we are today. Going back to the Palmer raids, though, you know, we had this spasm of violence, and it was major. I mean, I was actually startled to read, you know, that, you know, in 1920, you had a horse-drawn carriage stopped across the headquarters from the J.P. Morgan building on Wall Street in New York, exploded, killing more than 30 people. You can imagine what that would be like right now. I mean, you had targeting of Supreme Court justices, of the attorney

general, obviously the assassination of the president. So you write that the sweeping action by law enforcement helped put an end to a generation of these deadly anarchist terrorist attacks. But the sweeping action were these deeply unconstitutional Palmer raids. So I guess that raises the question that work. What's the answer? What's the lesson? Because we're not going to go back to Palmer raids and yet we might have to take some aggressive steps to push back on this, on our new anarchy, the new spasm of violence. Well, I think we do need to hold perpetrators of violence accountable. So I think law enforcement deployed properly is an essential tool here, right? And looking at sort of the January 6th indictments,

maybe that offers sort of some hope that it can be done in a way that is constitutional, but also effective and is a deterrent. But this is part of why I was drawn to that era is because the truth is we do see in moments where increased law enforcement or accountability through law enforcement is necessary. We always see encroachments on people's civil rights. I mean, think about the post 9-11 era. And so there is this very real trade-off. And I think it doesn't mean you don't want to hold perpetrators of violence accountable, but I think Americans need to have their eyes wide open about what the trade-offs may be and be wary of that as well. Well, and that's the reality check in your piece, that countering extremism through

just ordinary debate or persuasion or reaching across the divide is a fool's errand, right? That's not going to work. We're going to have to crack down. There has to be consequences. It will require law enforcement and the use of force, correct? Right. And I've talked to people who've handled sort of like peace negotiations and post civil war zones. And, and they'll say things like, you know, you have to get people who disagree with each other to, you know, have dinner together and talk. And of course that's true. And there are organizations who try to do this at the same time. How do you scale that for an entire nation, knowing what our challenges we face and what our informational environment is and what the political sort of

tenor is. And so, yeah, it gets very daunting very quickly. You also write about the experience of Italy in the 1970s and the 1980s. I mean, the Italians went through about 20 years of really intense political violence, open warfare in the streets, bombings of trains, deadly shooting, the assassination, the kidnapping and the killing of the former prime minister, Aldo Moro. So what's the lesson about Italy? How did Italy put an end to all of that? Because I think a lot of people have forgotten how terrible that was. And it seemed unstoppable for years. A couple lessons from that era. And I was drawn to it in particular, because I think when Americans think about political violence,

we tend to think of, of course, the Civil War period and Reconstruction and also the 1960s. And so I really wanted to find a time that people maybe wouldn't naturally think of themselves. And so with Italy, a few things happened. So one major one was that economic conditions improved. And so previously, you had really bad economic situation. And a lot of people because of that felt like turning to violence or being recruited by these extremist groups that would resort to violence was the only path. And so when the economic condition improved, other paths opened up to people. And so I think we have to be wary of being sort of economic reductionist in this way, but there's no question that a better

economy is one factor in curbing violence. So that was a big one. And then you mentioned the assassination of Aldo Moro. I mean, I think that was a moment that really, you know, made people sort of previously they'd been kind of compartmentalizing these acts of violence and maybe they were thinking, you know, this is happening, but only for people in the political arena or only, you know, in the context of a protest and I can avoid it and sort of life felt normal to them as a result. And then the assassination of Moro was, was so, you know, high profile and spectacular that more people sort of were, I guess, sort of shaken into awareness of what was really happening. And, you know, there was a law enforcement crackdown that followed, and it made it harder for groups to carry on and also harder for them to recruit people who were just really disgusted by what

was happening. This brings me to the toughest question that came to mind as I was reading your piece. You talked to a neurologist named William Bernstein who told you that he thinks the era of political violence we're living in won't end without some sort of cathartic cataclysm. So you suggest that if Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi had been hanged on January 6th, that would have ended it. Are you sure? I mean, no, I'm not sure. And it's horrible to contemplate. I think this is a huge question is whether or not all of the old rules about what will shock us into action have changed. I mean, would it really have ended it even if Mike Pence, or would we then have gone

into a period of 18 months of rationalization or minimization or retconning? I think it's the right question. Again, it's horrible to contemplate, but one sort of example I think of is, and I write about this in the piece too, is I had been thinking about the era of sort of like pro-militia, post-Waco, post-Ruby Ridge, there was this sort of burst of militia activity in the United States. But that seemed to then go with this extremism aspect of it seemed to go away. And I was trying to figure out why that happened and what we did right. And I talked to a scholar about this and her point to me, which was disturbing, was like, oh no, we didn't actually do anything right. It's just that Oklahoma City happened, the Oklahoma

City bombing. And that because of the law enforcement that followed that, these movements didn't go away, but went underground. And so two things, I think one, if something cataclysmic were to happen, which is certainly what people in the highest levels of government and military worry will happen, I think you might have a moment that sort of presses some of this movement or extremism underground, maybe. But I also really do wonder because we thought, I thought, post January 6th, that maybe that was the shock to the system. And the decent Republicans would decide, I can't play along anymore. I have to do the right thing. And that lasted, what, 24 hours, 48 hours before Trump remained at the center of the party. And so, first of all, we would never wish for a cataclysm,

but I'm also not sure that that alone is what would shake us to our senses. I do think that this is the most troubling question. And you talked to Senator Klobuchar, Amy Klobuchar about this. She agreed. I mean, she thinks of herself now as naive. She thought Republicans would break with Trump

after January 6th. Well, as you point out, a lot of us did. And instead, we have Donald Trump, his shadow looming over everything, which again, what will it take? I think we've gone through this process of thinking, you know, if we had another 9-11, would the country come together? Would we have a sense of unity? And I just, I personally am skeptical about all of them. We had a pandemic with a million people that died and that left us more divided than ever. Right. So let's circle back. Portland now, in your article, you were there, you know, in Labor Day 2020 when it was warfare.

You went back and I just thought this really depressing image where you found a city, you know, this wounded condition. You said you counted more birds than people downtown. So I did count more birds than people. I feel like I should point out that there were actually quite a lot of birds. There's like a winter crow roost that comes in that's actually spectacular. But to be serious though, it really was quite depressing. I mean, the city felt abandoned in a lot of ways. And when I say the city, I mean, just downtown, there are certainly thriving neighborhoods and lots of people committed to, you know, rebuilding, but what happened there caused real damage. And everyone I talked to

people who live there and love Portland say that they think it will be, you know, not five years, but maybe 10 before it gets back to normal. So it was really quite sad. Are the Patriot prayer guys still around there? I mean, this is the group that you described as choosing these, you know, ultra liberal cities to protest in Berkeley, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland. Are they still there? I mean, are the factions still in place? So that group has sort of imploded. I mean, there've been some like internal strife, one person left town, there were riot charges against some of them, one dismissed one conviction. And so it's sort of imploded in some

ways, but because for Patriot Prayer in particular, it was never really what they believed in other than Trump and sort of sowing chaos was never really clear. So you can very easily see how that sort of movement could coalesce again. So even though the individuals may change, the ideas are certainly still out there and are very much the kind of borrowing again from QAnon, just sort of the like knee-jerk culture war stuff that you very easily imagine. And this is what people who I talked to in Portland said too, that especially if Trump were returned to the presidency, you would expect these groups to coalesce under the name Patriot Prayer or something else. Yeah, the name is so interesting. Patriot Prayer, these are people who come in and beat the shit out of hippies and then

say, and let us pray. You actually talked to a scholar of extremist groups who told you that one of the things that's happening now in our political cultures is the wall between patriot groups and formal politics has melted away. That in fact, a lot of these things that used to be in the far reaches of extreme politics are now kind of blended in. So talk to me about that. What does it mean when these militia-like patriot groups and formal politics have kind of blended in. So talk to me about that. What does it mean when these militia-like patriot groups and formal politics have kind of blended together?

Right. So this goes back to the 90s. I mean, when you had the sort of extremist militia groups, it was in a different political culture where at that time, national political leaders of either party would say unequivocally, we are not for violence. And these groups were certainly getting attention politically, but not endorsement from a major party. Whereas today you have, I mean, you have members of Congress who could easily be in these groups. And not only that, but you don't have uniform Republican leadership willing to say, this is not who we are. Violence is not OK. We disagree with one another in this country, but we do so verbally, not with violence.

And so that to me, I mean, it sounds like such a basic thing. But until we can reestablish real, decent leadership, the problem is not going to go away. I think that's a tremendously important point. So despite all of this, most Americans really underestimate political violence, right? Is it because anything short of an actual civil war isn't registering with them? I mean, you have the Department of Homeland Security, as you mentioned, you know, issuing a statement, the country remains in a heightened threat environment. So what is that heightened threat environment? What are the realities that we should be paying attention to? So this is where it's the individual attacks that may not immediately register as political

violence, but really are. And so, again, I think you're right exactly that some people maybe just see this as random acts of violence rather than a slow boiling political violence problem. And maybe those people are waiting for a civil war to arrive in the form that is more recognizable from the past. But the things that Homeland Security and others warn about are, you know, random attacks on, the list is disturbingly expansive, but it's on schools, on people who are perceived of as ideologically different than, you know, the person carrying out the attack, on journalists, on certainly LGBTQ community. Really, like if you look at the culture wars and sort of the various flashpoints in political debate, I think you also see sort of a map to where threats of violence are most acute. This is the part where I really became alarmed where you're talking about this new environment where you have almost universal access to weaponry.

You have an information environment where you don't need to be part of an organization to become a terrorist. And then, of course, we have the refusal to accept election outcomes with national leaders fueling the skepticism. And if you genuinely believe that your democracy has been hijacked, you are going to act out in some sort of a way. So let's just double back to this question of leadership, because I think this is so crucial. I mean, you close your article by saying the violence has to be confronted. Leaders have to,

you know, identify what is happening and face down people who use the language of democracy to weaken democratic systems. You're right. It means rebuking the conspiracy theorist who uses the rhetoric of truth seeking to obscure what's real, the billionaire who describes his privately owned social platform as a democratic town square, the seditionist who proclaims himself a patriot, the authoritarian who claims to love freedom. But Adrian, the problem is, is that that denunciation, it needs to come from within that world. It's not going to be editorial writers, op-ed writers in the New York Times or NPR or the Bulwark podcast or the Atlantic magazine. At some point, you have to have these responsible voices.

And I'm sitting here looking at a picture right now of Marjorie Taylor Greene sitting in the Speaker's chair of the House of Representatives. I mean, there was once a time when the Speakers would have acted like guardrails, would have stuffed her in the back bench, would have done everything possible to distance the party from somebody like that. But not only are we not seeing the thought leaders of the Republican Party doing what you are suggesting, in fact, they continue to either ignore or actively promote the kinds of things you're talking about. How do we get around that? Well, I mean, I think it has to come from the people,

like it has to come through electing the right people. And that's not tremendously reassuring either, because we know that there is a large and active base that is happy to have the Marjorie Taylor Greene's of the world in positions of power. So that's one big part of it. I mean, it's also sort of the classic, like boring work of democracy, crucial, but might be perceived as boring, like protecting free and fair access to election, to voting and, and sort of, you know, encouraging people to run for office who might feel quite frankly afraid to right now because of the political climate we're in.

But I think you're absolutely right that we can't expect to change the culture without some sort of reckoning from within. I think that's right. The article is The New Anarchy. It is the cover story for the April issue of The Atlantic. Adrienne LaFrance is the executive editor of The Atlantic. Adrienne, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. I appreciate it. Immensely, immensely important story. Thank you so much for having me. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We'll be back tomorrow. We'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.