The Jordan Harbinger Show - 718: Barbara F. Walter | How Civil Wars Start (And How to Stop Them)

Episode Date: August 30, 2022

Barbara F. Walter (@bfwalter) is the Rohr Professor of International Affairs at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of the NYT bestseller How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them. What We Discuss with Barbara F. Walter: What does Barbara's research into causes and warning signs of civil wars around the world portend for the chances of such a conflict in the United States? What is an anocracy, and have you ever lived under one? Why societies transitioning toward or away from democracy are especially vulnerable to the threat of civil war. What makes some countries survive political instability without the violence of civil war while others rapidly succumb to it? Who is most actively pushing for civil war in the United States, and what are their grievances? And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/718 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Miss our conversation about national security, strategic empathy, and the societal benefits of immigration with former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster? Catch up with episode 410: H.R. McMaster | The Fight to Defend the Free World here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

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Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. White working class men have declined on most social and economic measures in terms of divorce rates, in terms of suicide rates, in terms of their average wage, in terms of their life expectancy, in a way that hasn't happened with any other demographic group. And so they were a ready population that was, you know, felt ignoring.

by the establishment, and suddenly they had this candidate in Trump who seemed to understand them. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional Russian chess grandmaster, mafia, undercover agent, tech mogul or economic hitman. And each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker. If you're new to the show, welcome. If you want to tell your friends about it, please do that. Our episode's starter packs are the best way to do so. These are collections

of our favorite episodes organized by topics that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Topics like persuasion, influence, disinformation, cyber warfare, negotiation and communication, crime and cults, and more. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, how does civil wars start? And are we headed for one here in the United States? Now before I read this book, I did think all the talk of civil war was hyperbolic, designed to get clicks, a little bit annoying, frankly. Now, I'm not so sure. We're seeing a lot of the signs, the growth of militias in the United States, the failure of peaceful protest. Civil wars are often preceded by years of failed nonviolent

protests. And protests are a warning sign. They show that people believe the system will still respond to them, but if the system doesn't work and does not respond to them, they will resort to violence because there's nothing left. And groups that lose an election often resort to violence or civil war. We've seen it in other countries, and we've seen some of the most contentious elections in our country's history just in recent years. There are plenty of other signs, and we're going to explore a lot of this on the show today with our guest, Barbara F. Walter, who's been studying civil wars in other nations and has now applying what she's learned and her expertise to what we're seeing right here at home.

Disturbing stuff, but not hopeless. Here we go with Barbara F. Walter. I'm not going to lie. The book scared me a little bit. It's one of those books that says what a lot of people are probably thinking, but maybe too afraid to say, either because they don't want to think about how horrible it's going to be, or because they don't want to sound like a kook, because a lot of my kook friends were the first people that go, we're going to be in a civil war. And I'm like, calm down. You also think there's going to be a famine every year in California. Yeah. So what's going on here? There's a lot of civil wars in countries throughout the world, sure. And I think the problem is everyone thinks their civil war is unique, but it's not. And that was what really kind of freaked me out because I was like,

well, it's America. We don't do that. We did it once. But that was a long time ago. But there's factors that you can spot leading up to it. And then when you lay those out, it's like, oh, we have that. I have that. You know, when I started writing this book, I did not think it was going to be a terrifying book. And it wasn't terrifying initially because when I started writing the book, I was writing about all the other civil wars that I've studied around the world. I don't really talk about the United States until chapter six. So it was only when I started to do the hard work of applying all of this research that we knew about other civil wars outside of the United States to my own country, that I myself started to get terrified. And there were times when I was writing chapter six and

chapter seven where I have a standing desk, I'm standing, I'm typing, and I would have to step back and I would have to walk away and I would walk around the block and I would, I talk to myself and I say, you know, is this right? Am I getting this right? Because what I'm saying is a big deal. What I'm saying is really powerful. What I'm saying is going to hit people hard and it better be right. You can't compare Michigan to Iraq and be like, there you have it, folks, and then light your cigarette and lean back in your chair. You better have some ish to back it up. I'm an academic. Nobody's ever heard of me.

This is a really tough, hard, dark subject. My expectation was that nobody was going to read this book. Academics weren't going to read it because it's not an academic book. And normal people weren't going to read it because it was what it was. And I think one of the reasons why it took off and resonated so much and kind of became the national debate for a while is because I didn't say, oh, America is going to hell. You know, terrible things are happening in America. I started by saying, I've studied this for 30 years. I've been on a task force that our own government actually runs that has a predictive model about where around the world.

Civil wars are likely to break out. We know what the factors are. Our government knows what the factors are. And now let's just take all of that information that people don't have, that our politicians don't have, because it's on the shelves in universities or it's very, very technical, or it's so dense that nobody wants to plod through it. Let me take all of that and apply it to what's happened here in the United States and let's see what we see. And I think that's when it becomes terrifying because as you're reading stories about, you know, Bosnia and Sarajevo, as you're reading stories about Ukraine, as you're reading stories about Northern Ireland, as you're reading stories about Israel and the Palestinians, I'm not talking about the United States at all. I'm just saying

this is what happened. And as people are reading that, they're realizing, they're seeing the patterns themselves. And they're realizing, oh, my gosh, this is what's happening here. This is what we're seeing here. And oh, my gosh. That was me, right? I understand this. People like me think events like January 6 where it's like, okay, this happened. And it was definitely wild and crazy. But also the media is playing it up. But also that really wasn't necessarily exaggerated because I saw the footage of somebody getting shot in the Capitol building because she tried to climb through the widow. And the plot by, was it, anarchist, cooks, tried to kidnap the governor of Michigan, my home state, and then put her on a show trial and execute her. That is something you hear about in a novel by, what's that,

the man in the high castle, is it Philip K. Dick or something like that. I mean, it's like a sci-fi, dystopian. It sounds dystopic. Yeah. And I'm like, we don't do that in the West, let alone in Michigan. And when we hear that stuff, we go, look, that's going to be put down by a powerful government. We don't stand for that crap. But then you see stuff online or you hear people you know go, yeah, they should have got her. And it's like, what are you talking about? Are you insane? The answer is kind of yeah. You've said that democracies increase in number alongside the rise in civil wars. What does that mean? What's going on here? Yeah. So if you look back to the 1800s, the vast majority of countries were not democracies. There were very, very few democracies. The United States was this exception in that we

We were the first modern democracy. We were the big, grand experiment in whether democracy can actually work. What was Switzerland? Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt you. What was Switzerland at that time? Were they like a monarchy back then? I don't even know. So Switzerland is this interesting case of a federal republic with fairly autonomous cantons.

Like the Italian part, the German part, the Flemish part. Is that one of them? The Romache kind of, it's called Romache. But there's multiple cantons in the German and the French part. Okay. So some of them are quite tiny. Okay. So you're saying the United States is this democracy.

It's kind of, well, it's very much an experiment. It's this outlier. But civil wars start increasing as democracies start increasing. So does that mean democracies cause civil war? I assume that's not necessarily what you're saying. It's got to be the transition or something, right? I mean, social scientists will say, you know, correlations don't mean causation. So the fact that you always have clouds when it rains doesn't mean that clouds cause rain.

it means that clouds are perhaps an indicator of rain. So what started happening in the 20th century is that country started to democratize. That occurred especially, you know, after World War I, World War II, and then at the end of colonialism. And what happened was we also started to see a rise of civil wars. Who knows why that's the case? We do know that one of the predictors of civil war is whether a country is a partial democracy. It's neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic.

We call it an anocracy. Is that what we are? Because that sounds like what we are, kind of. So we became an in inocracy for a very short period of time in December of 2020. We can talk about why that's the case. We have moved out of the anocracy zone since then. That's good, right? Yes, that is very good.

But because we haven't had any significant reforms to our political institutions, because our democracy really hasn't been strengthened since then, we could easily slip back into the unocracy zone. So I think part of what was happening in the 20th century is you have these countries that were attempting to democratize. Some of them are trying to democratize quite rapidly. This tends to create not only instability. Things are changing. Leaders are changing. But it also creates opportunity. You suddenly had once autocratic governments that were very strong. They knew how to suppress. any sort of uprisings. If you have governments that are changing rapidly and you want to challenge them, that would be the time to challenge them. So you had groups that perhaps had been shut out of power,

they want a piece of the action, they see this opening and they go for it. But we also know that civil wars are more likely when governments are transitioning away from democracy. So you had a once strong democracy that's becoming more autocratic or that's gaining more autocratic features. Ukraine is an example of that. Its civil war broke out in 2014. And that was at a time when Yanukovych was concentrating power in the hands of the president. You have a higher risk of civil war in those situations, not because the government is less able to repress dissent like you have with democratizing countries, but because, you know, you have more grievances. Suddenly, citizens are realizing that they're losing rights, freedoms,

they're losing power, and they're seeing that the window for them to do something is closing. And so those are also the times when you see groups that are losing in that situation or that are particularly worried about, you know, the move towards autocracy when they begin to organize and they make a move. And that's when the government says the CIA is fomenting a coup when it's a bunch of students that out on the Euro-Mydon or whatever. Yes, exactly. Trying to make sure that their future actually looks like something that's not just what their parents had to live through in the Soviet Union.

All right. Why do some countries move fast through this shaky middle transition zone? I'm thinking Eastern Europe. I was in the former East Germany in the 90s. There weren't civil wars. There was Bosnia and Yugoslavia. Don't get me wrong. But Czech Republic, totally fine.

Romania. Fine. I mean, all these countries sort of slid out of very repressive communism under the USSR, the Soviet Union, and then just kind of were like, hey, we're going to join NATO in a decade or whatever. It was really, it was like the sun came up over the horizon and the gray landscape turned into color. But then we have Venezuela that's like, oh, just kidding, we're going to bungle this and turn into a banana republic that's just a commodity-based kleptocracy or Iraq or other places that have just absolutely gone. I don't even know if you can say backwards, but certainly sideways.

So, you know, I mentioned that I was on this task force with the U.S. government. It was called the Political Instability Task Force. And it's been around since 1994. And one of their goals is to have this predictive model. Two types of people sat in the room to help create this model. Half the people were social scientists, experts on civil war, people like me. And half the people were data analysts who were taking all the information that we were giving them. And they were trying to come up with the best possible model. And when this model was created, created, the experts gave the data analysts over 30 different types of factors that we thought would put countries at high risk of civil war. And it was things like poverty, income inequality,

how ethnically and religiously diverse a country was. So these things seemed, you know, seemed pretty obvious. And the data analysts left and they worked on their model, they worked on the model, and they came back. And they basically said only two factors were highly predictive. And we were shocked. We didn't expect that. And we didn't expect the two factors that they found. That was a surprise to the experts. And the first factor was what I just talked about, this partial democracy. You know, it was the countries that were in this middle zone that were the most unstable and the most prone to violence. And the second factor answers the question you just asked. So, you know, why was it that Eastern Europe transitioned rapidly with, you know, relatively no violence except for the form of. Yugoslavia. Central Asia, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan had violence, but these other countries didn't. So why was that the case? Because the second factor was whether in these partial democracies, citizens organize themselves around politically around ethnic, religious, or racial lines. So it was the combination

of having these weak partial democracies together with political parties that were identity-based and not based on any sort of ideas. And identity-based political parties tend to emerge in multi-ethnic, multi-religious countries. And so why did it happen in Eastern Europe? Because these are some of the most ethnically homogeneous countries in the world. Except for Yugoslavia, right? Except for Yugoslavia. And, you know, Czechoslovakia, for example, you know, and there are going to be people in your audience who say, no, none of these countries are entirely ethnically. homogenous, and that's absolutely true. There is no such thing as a pure ethnic or racial state, but if the vast majority of the population is from one ethnic and religious group, you don't

tend to have powerful competing ethnic parties like you do in Yugoslavia or like you did in Iraq. Czechoslovakia had the Czechs and the Slovaks, and what did they do? They split. You know, they chose not to live together. And so they created homogeneous ethnic states and didn't have to deal with these competing ethnic parties. You wrote a lot about factionalism. Is that the tribalism that we're hearing about in the news and seeing online, ethnic religious groups, political parties split by identity? Is that what factionalism is? So it is very similar. Think about it as tribalism, you know, ugly tribalism or predatory tribalism. So it's not just where the population breaks down into whatever their separate identities are, but that they organize politically around that. And then

one or more of those parties, they seek to gain political power, not only to gain political power, but in order to shut out all the other parties. It's tribalism on steroids. So how did these factions develop? You know, I was jokingly going to say, oh, it's Fox News versus MSNBC, but maybe that's not actually a joke now that I say it out loud. I mean, those aren't ethnicities, thankfully. But there certainly seems to be tribalism, especially online, of people that say, like, oh, if you're going to try and do this, you're going to take it out of my dead hands, or you're You're not going to make me stop going to my church, even though no one's actually trying to make you do that. So the rise of tribalism or, you know, when I call it factionalism, political, ethnic factionalism, it tends to require two things, at least two things.

It tends to emerge in times of change and usually demographic, social change. And it requires what I call ethnic entrepreneurs. So ethnic entrepreneurs are, they tend to be politicians. but they can be media personalities, they can be ministers of a church. It refers to individuals who play on people's fears about the other and that use ethnicity or religion or race as a way to galvanize support for their campaign, for their church, for their radio station. And they do it quite consciously, and it tends to be very, very effective. So ISIS did this, right? ISIS did this. Like how to start the caliphate? Rwandan genocide, didn't they use an FM radio kind of spokes guy? They had radio towers all around Rwanda. And for 18 months, what extremists within the Hutu party did was they

broadcast messages of fear. The Tutsis are organizing. The Tutsis are, you know, if they come to power, which they will in 18 months, they're going to launch a genocide against the Hutus. And so you need to arm yourself and you need to take action before this happens to us. It is a form of conscious, organized fearmongering with the purpose of for politicians catapulting themselves into power, for the purposes of people who do this, you know, in industry, it's to enhance their profits or their bottom line. Slobodan Milosevic was sort of the classic example of this. And I could tell the story if you're interested in hearing this story. Right, Serbian dictator. Yeah, I don't want to get too far off track, but I read his biography a long time ago. And it was very much like, hey, I know we

control the army and kind of the economy and everything else. But look at these, look at these minorities, Albanians that are coming in and polluting our whole country and they're taking from us. But also the Croats, you know, they're kind of, and it's almost like Tuzman, who was also like the Croatian version of Milosevic, I don't know if they were in contact with one another, but it was almost like, when you think about it and you look at it, it's almost like, I'm looking at you and I'm going, all right, you do your thing over there, I'm going to do my thing over here, and we're just going to cause hell. And then we'll probably go to war with each other, but whatever. It was almost like they just knew that it was going to happen that

way and they just didn't care because they were busy building a bunch of wealth for themselves and thinking that, I mean, it's a sociopath. Shit. Ethnic entrepreneurs generally don't pay the cost of war, right? They're smart. Well, look at like Putin's doing it. Right. Right. Hey, a bunch of poor people that can't read. You guys go to war.

I'll pay you in vodka. But I'll be here in my palace. So the ethnic entrepreneurs are going to gain all the benefits of war. War is going to put them in power and keep them there. And they're not going to pay any of the costs. It's the poor average citizens who are fighting the war for them who are going to pay the cost. But I wanted to get back to, you know, the second issue. So you need ethnic entrepreneurs.

But the fear-mongering message that ethnic people, entrepreneurs bring to, if you're Milosevic to the Serbs, or if you're Tuchman to the Croats, or if you're the leader of the Taliban that you bring to average Afghans. The reason it resonates is because it happens during a period of rapid change, a period of time when average citizens are nervous, when they are looking out in the world and they're seeing changes and they're already a bit afraid. And it's that fear and that sense of that there's potentially a looming threat to their livelihood or to their political power or to their status in society that resonates with the average citizen and that allows the ethnic entrepreneur and his or her message to be

successful. If an ethnic entrepreneur emerged at a time of absolute stability, you know, think about, I don't know, maybe the 1950s here in the United States when everybody's kind of feeling good. Everybody's boat is rising with the tide. I mean, we say everybody, but we're also talking, we mean like, except for you, African-American people who are totally not doing that. Yes. And that's a really, really great point because, you know, there have been hundreds of studies of civil wars. And we actually know who tends to start them, especially the ethnically based civil wars. And it's not who people think. People think it's going to be the poorest groups in society, or it's going to be the groups that are most discriminated against. It's going to be the African-Americans or, you know, the illegal Mexican immigrants because they're the most downtrodden of the groups. And they, you know, seemingly have the greatest motivation to rebel. Those groups do not rebel. And they don't rebel for a good reason. Partly they don't have the energy to rebel. They're so busy trying to survive.

They're working. That organizing is a luxury that they don't have. And the second reason is they don't have the capacity. If they even try to organize, the state tends to jump on them immediately because that's who they're watching. The group that tends to start these wars are the once dominant groups that are in decline. This is a really long way of saying white people, Barbara. This is a really, really long version of that, isn't it? It is. And here in the United States, the group that has been politically, socially, economically, dominant since the very beginning of this country have been not just white people, but white Christians, and we could go a step further, and it's been white Christian males for the most part.

America is changing, and it's changing rapidly, and it's been the most rapid demographic changes have happened in the last 20 plus years. So it's relatively recent. And what most people don't realize is that America is going through this radical demographic transition. From a white majority country to a white minority country. And this is deeply, deeply threatening to a subset of the white population who sees the loss of power. They see that politically, they no longer are guaranteed the presidency. They see economically that they're no longer necessarily guaranteed the best jobs. They see that they're no longer guaranteed access to the most elite universities. and you can go on and on and on.

And there's a subset of this population that's deeply resentful of that, that's deeply threatened by that, and truly, truly believe that it's their patriotic duty to do something about this because they truly believe that America's identity

is a white Christian nation and it's their obligation to retain that. And, you know, when you have extremists within a particular population, they very early on begin to preach, you know, if the system no longer works for us and we feel like the system is going in the wrong direction, any means is justified. And again, what we're seeing is that

those extremists have existed for decades, but their message is increasingly resonating with a larger portion of the white population. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Barbara F. Walter. We'll be right back. By the way, y'all know me. Got to plug the free networking course over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. It's free. There's a no upsells, I don't need your credit card. It's about improving your networking and connection skills, creating personal and professional relationships. Yes, it'll make you a better networker in a very non-sumousy, non-gross way. It'll also make you a better thinker. That's Jordan Harbinger.com slash course, and most of the guests you hear on this show

already subscribe and contribute to that course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, back to Barbara F. Walter. I want to clarify something because you mentioned white Christian males. I think a lot of people, when they hear that, are going to go, what the hell? I'm a white Christian male. How dare you? This isn't really something that replies to all white Christian middle-aged dudes like me, right? This is just like there's a certain subset of them typically that are disaffected that are seeing things not go their way. Yeah. Because I think people are going, well, you're just making, you're just othering me, you know, you're creating the faction by saying it's us doing it. But it's really not all of those people doing it. No, no. And thank you

that clarification, the way to think about this, in any population, there's moderates and there's extremists. And the vast majority of the population, they're going to be moderates. Most people aren't radicals, but every population does have radicals. Sure. And so that's the same here in the white population. The vast majority of whites are moderates. They want peace. They want democracy. They want our country to thrive. But there is a small subset that feels like our our country is being taken away from them and that they are justified to use violence to retain what they believe is the original identity of the country. The challenge for extremists is always can they convince at least some of the moderates

to shift in their direction because unless they're able to do that, they will never succeed, right? They don't have the numbers to succeed. And so what you see those extremists doing, they're used. propaganda. They attempt to use information and in a world of social media, disinformation, and misinformation to radicalize at least some percentage of those moderates because they need numbers. The thing that seems extra dangerous here is that the factions don't happen overnight. Most people don't realize that they're turning into the faction. They don't realize they're

grouping together by identity. And even if they kind of do, it's because they're protecting their country. They're protecting their people. I lived in the former Yugoslavia in in the early 2001, basically, in 2004, 2003, something like that. I got to look it up. It's been a while. But it was right after the Civil War, for the most part. Everyone thought I was nuts, but it was fascinating. Also, I think I was nuts, more so than now.

Having kids will do that to you. But I saw a lot of, like, the rural urban divide was a thing. Having people be like, well, we didn't think that much about how I was Serbian and my neighbor was Croatian, and the Croats over there started doing this, and the Albanians started doing that and then our neighbors started to disagree with this on this. And then I realized that guy's got guns because he was in the army. So we got got, and it was like a whole slow boil. And that got really scary. And then of course, dot, dot, dot, genocide of all parties on all sides, essentially. I mean, it was just a massive thing over there, as we all know. And of course,

it's been happening slowly here in the United States simply because of migration. Kids have been migrating from the rural states to the coast and to the cities for generations. And it's a particular type of person that tends to be migrating. It's the more educated person. It's people who tend to be less conservative. And so you're getting this selection effect that, you know, 100 years ago didn't exist. And of course, once you geographically live in different places, you're not interacting with each other. And if you're not interacting with each other, you start to lose the sense that you're all human beings, that you start to not see the similarities. It becomes easier to think of the, you know, somebody who's different from you in some ways as the other and to dehumanize them. So that's the slow process that's

been happening. And I suspect that selection effect is going to continue. One of the things that I really worry about now that we have state governments that are imposing increasingly conservative social policy. And the end of Roe v. Wade is a precursor to that, is that you're going to see, I think, more migration and more selection out of where conservatives want to live in conservative states and liberals want to live in liberal states. And there's going to be even less interaction. What's been happening more quickly in terms of, you know, creating this tribalism here in the United States, I think has to do with social media. I truly believe it's been an accelerant. And it's been an accelerant not because of the material that people are putting online.

It's become an accelerant because the algorithms that have been designed. to keep people engage as long as possible on various social media platforms. The social media companies have figured out that the material that keeps people online the most is the most emotionally charged, the most incendiary, the material that taps into people's deep-seated sense of fear and threat and anger, those sort of old core emotions. So Facebook and YouTube are agnostic about the social implications. of their algorithms, all they care about is keeping people online. But the result of that has been that they're spreading the most divisive material and the most extreme material, and they're

putting in the hands of Americans, and that's dividing us even further. Well, I've done a lot of shows on this. I actually created a whole playlist of episodes about this. If people want to check it out, it's our disinformation starter pack at jordanharbinger.com slash start. It has things with episodes with Renee DeResta, episode 420, which explains all of that, how it works. how she discovered it and sort of monitors that she writes about all this. But also Facebook and Burma comes to mind for people who don't know what I'm talking about. There's a minority group there called the Rohingya. And essentially these, I guess, government sanctions or local government sanctioned people are just like, hey, these people are trying to take your land and they're

trying to do that. And so they whipped up a froth among some of the locals and they just went and burned down all of the areas and houses where these people lived and pushed them over, I think, into Bangladesh or something like that. Yeah. And they're just all gone now. They're just moved into these refugee camps. And it was because everybody got whipped up into a froth on Facebook about how the Rohingya were going to come after them. So they went after the Rohingya. And is that considered a genocide or was that just considered a like a civil war precursor?

I don't know. It was not a civil war because the Rohingyan had absolutely no ability to organ. They didn't organize and didn't fight back. It was a, to be more specific, a military-sponsored genocide on a minority group there. And, you know, what's really interesting about that case is the timing. of it. So why did it happen when it happened? And it was a variety of things. One, Burma was in the process of democratizing. It was in this middle zone. And the losers of that democratization attempt was the military. So the previous regime had been run by a military junta. They had all

the political power. They had all the economic power. If the country's going to democratize, they're going to lose. And this was threatening to them. But how, you know, they had to figure out how do they actually retain power? And one of the things that they did was they used Facebook as a way to convince ethnic Burmese who are Buddhist, that the Muslims who were in Burma were deeply threatening to them and that they needed to organize and that the military, the military was going to protect them and therefore average Burmese citizens needed the military. And so it served a number of purposes for them. It enhanced their stature and their power. It galvanized the support of citizens behind the military at a time when they were losing power. And eventually, you know,

they were able to bring themselves into power and democracy reversed. This is something that can absolutely happen when you have, I see the wealth gap growing in the United States. Social media allows extremists that were maybe normally just in small groups or small cells or had to be in large groups in order to do anything. The KKK, people go, well, they're basically gone now. Okay, fine, but now you can have a group of one in a basement somewhere interacting with all the other groups of one all over the place. My friend Scott Galloway said, it's never been an easier time to become a billionaire, and it's never been a harder time to become a millionaire. There's way more insanely wealthy folks with power and control over huge amounts of resources, and there's much fewer

upper middle class folks who just kind of made it. And that's a dangerous inflammatory combination. And I kind of worry the pitchforks could come out just because of that, politics and tribalism aside. The billionaires, it brings up an interesting point. We know that our politics are becoming increasingly polarized, meaning that both sides are moving more and more to the extreme. So the question is, okay, where is this extremism being injected? How is that happening? And it's happening through gerrymandering, through the primary system, through billionaires, and I'll explain that in a second, and through social media. So, you know, the fact that we have increasingly gerrymandered districts means that we have districts that are increasingly, you know,

one party. You might think, okay, well, how does that make it more extreme? But that's That means that in the primaries, if let's say you have a gerrymandered district that's almost entirely Democratic, right? The voters who tend to show up for the primaries on both the left and the right are the more passionate, the more extreme voters. They have the more radical preferences. And we know that turnout in primaries is really, really low. So the last primary in Kentucky, I think about 20 percent of the eligible voters showed up. And those 20 percent, are not representative of the average voter in Kentucky. So they tend to pick the more extreme candidates. Then when you think about billionaires, one of the things most people probably don't know is that

Citizens United, the decision by the Supreme Court to basically allow individuals to donate as much money as they want to political candidates was a huge boon to billionaires. That meant that billionaires could target an individual who otherwise would not have had any chance of getting elected and propel him or her into power. I firmly believe that pre-citizens United Trump would never, ever have been a candidate. But we also know from really good social science studies that billionaires, on average, their political views are much more extreme than the average individual. You know, think about Elon Musk. I mean, he's sort of a perfect example of this. They're not representative of the average American, and yet they have disproportionate influence. That's injecting more extreme

candidates and more extreme ideas into our politics. And then social media again, because the algorithms, you know, disproportionately favor more extreme material because that shocks people and it keeps them on their phones longer. People are getting more extreme information than they used to in the past. So you have extremism coming in from these various directions in a way that wasn't the case 30 years ago. I am not the expert here at all. So I'm going to defer to you, But man, it sure seems like Trump would have had a chance without what you mentioned, the billionaire thing. Because I feel like what he says does actually represent what a ton of people feel and want. I don't know if it's just, well, there was a lot of money put behind him by these big money interests.

I think a lot of people, they were just waiting for somebody to call bullshit on the establishment. And I get it. I mean, I look at stuff in the establishment. I'm not a firmly on the right or the left, but I look at the stuff in these sort of like establishment folks. and I'm like, God, come on, more of the same. And if I'm doing well in life, right? The show's doing good. I feel like I'm in a good place.

I live in California. You know, get my tan, whatever. If I lived in Michigan and I was like, crap, I'm still not able to get a job because of this bullshit, I would be so angry and I sure as hell would not vote for the person who's like, let's continue onward doing what we've never done to help you. Of course I would vote for the guy who's like, you know what? Everybody's lying to you.

I'm the one who's not going to do that. Yeah. And that's absolutely true, right? The message that, let's call them, ethnic entrepreneurs are putting out there will not resonate unless there's a bit of truth to them. And so Trump's brilliance, or maybe he was just lucky, was that he put out this very powerful anti-immigrant message early in the campaign. You know, when there's something like 36 Republican candidates, he's, nobody's paying attention to him. He starts talking about, you know, Mexicans coming across the border.

it's resonating with especially the white working class. They start coming out for him. And he's, you know, again, he rises in the ranks to become the Republican candidate. His message 30 years ago would have gone nowhere. But it went somewhere today because the white working class has suffered. They were the losers of NAFTA. You know, there were lots of winners of NAFTA here in the United States, but there was also losers and the white working class that used to have secure, well-paying manufacturing jobs, they lost those jobs and nothing replaced it. So if you look at the data, white working class men have declined on most social and economic measures in terms of divorce rates, in terms of suicide rates, in terms of their average wage, in terms of their life

expectancy in a way that hasn't happened with any other demographic group. African Americans, Latinos, at worst, their quality of life has remained stable. It has not declined, whereas for the white working class it has. And so they were a ready population that, you know, felt ignored by the establishment. And suddenly they had this candidate in Trump who seemed to understand them. And of course, You know, now that other Republican leaders have observed the success of Trump's message, and they've seen that it resonates with this important voting block, you know, they're going to double down on it. Do Democratic systems that have civil wars all share any kind of common traits?

I'm looking for like, okay, what do we have in America that is a common trait with another democracy that's had a civil war? So, first of all, full, healthy democracies don't experience civil war. It does happen in countries that people think of as very comparable to the United States. The U.K., you know, for decades had, they called it the troubles. I don't know how they got away with calling it the troubles. This was a civil war. That's a very British way to say.

Well, they're very understood. There's some issues over there. There are literally bodies in the streets. But yes, it's troublesome. But that's a really nice case in part because people think, you know, well, the United Kingdom was this very, very healthy democracy at that time. Yes and no. It was in most of the United Kingdom. It was not in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland, London basically seated Northern Ireland to the Protestants and said, you know, you can run this place pretty much any way you want as long as you keep law and order. And they were brutal towards

the Catholics. And it was not in no means of full democracy in that particular region. And so the Catholics eventually organized to try to convince, you know, West, to reform. But it's also really indicative in the type of civil war you see. Like, I think one of the reasons many people have a hard time thinking that the U.S. could have a second civil war is that they're thinking of the 1860s version of a civil war. And people's responses, you know, we're not going to have two big armies with people in uniform, you know, meeting each other on a large battlefield. That's just not going to happen. And they're right. Because the 21st century civil wars that we see, especially against powerful governments with the United States,

powerful militaries like you had in the UK or like you would have here in the United States, doesn't look like that at all. It looks like a form of insurgency where you have kind of small cells or small bands of individuals. It could be militias. It could be paramilitary groups. And they generally use unconventional tactics, guerrilla warfare or terrorism. And they don't try to engage the military. They try desperately to avoid engaging the military because that's a losing proposition. Instead, they target civilians. And that's exactly what the IRA did. The Irish Republican Army. Yeah, they put a lot of, I mean, among other things, bombs in garbage cans in London, which is why London has no garbage cans. Have you ever noticed that? No, I have it. No garbage cans. Yeah, when I was there, I was like, I want to throw this away. No garbage cans anywhere. And you had to go into a place to do it. Like outside, they just don't have garbage cans like you would see in New York City. And someone finally told me, yeah, well, they used to get blown up all the time. So we just removed all of them. Yeah. You know, the IRA or splinter groups from the IRA still exist. This is not entirely in the past.

And if you look at Hamas and Israel, Israel has one of the most powerful militaries in the world. If you're a rebel group, you want to push for change in a country like that. You don't want to engage the Israeli military. You're going to turn to terrorism. And that's exactly what Hamas has done over the years. So that's the type of violence we would see here in the United States if it were to happen. I've heard you say that Americans across the political spectrum are becoming more accepting of violence to achieve political goals. How do we know that? That's kind of, I mean,

that's a scary statement. Yeah. Well, I only said that because I've been reading the polls. Okay. There have been recent polls. I'm trying to think who did the last one, which was just a couple of weeks ago. But the Pew Research Institute is polling this. Researchers at the University of California Davis have a working paper on it. And I think actually Science Magazine did a quick brief on it two or three weeks ago, their polls are showing consistently what you just said, which is that Americans on both sides of the political aisle are more accepting of using violence under certain circumstances. And that is part of a longer trend that we have seen, certainly over the last 10 years and possibly even further back.

This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Barbara F. Walter. We'll be right back. back. Thank you so much for supporting the show. And if you want to grab something from a sponsor, so I, you know, look, I got to chill a mattress to keep the lights on around here. What can I say? I know the codes are different. The URLs are different. Don't bother writing it down. Just go to Jordan Harbinger.com. You can search for any sponsor on that page or use the search box right there on the home page of the website. Jordan Harbinger.com. You can search for a sponsor right there and the code will pop right up. Please consider supporting those who support this show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Barbara F. Walter.

What about a place like South Africa? That place had every chance to devolve into Civil War, but it didn't. Is there a model there in some way, or are we just waiting for their turn at this point? So I love that case, and I do think it's really informative. I actually have been thinking about Civil War since the late 1980s, and I remember I was in a class in college, and actually it was probably in the mid-80s, class in college, and we're talking about about where's the next civil war going to happen? It was so clear to us, and the answer very quickly was, it's going to be in South Africa. There's no question about it. And that's because

South Africa, not only did it have an apartheid regime, but it had, which was run by a minority of whites in this vast majority black country, but the apartheid regime in the face of what was essentially South Africa's version of civil rights protests. You had peace. protests by the majority black population. In the face of those protests, they started cracking down even more aggressively. And many of your listeners will remember the Soweto riots. They'll probably remember that famous photograph of a young black boy holding the dead body of a, I think it was a young boy or girl. And so it had come to the point that when school children went out to the streets just peacefully demanding reform of the political system,

the government sent the military in and mowed them down. That was where South Africa was. And then it changed. Wow, why did that happen? So the business community in South Africa was also white. And they were suffering under years of economic sanctions. The United States, Japan and the European community, which were the three biggest trading partners of South Africa, had placed very harsh economic sanctions on the country, and it was economically strangling businesses there. And it came to the point where the white business community had to decide we can either have profits or we can continue apartheid, but we cannot have both. And they chose profits. And so they very quickly went to the apartheid regime, and they said, we're not going to support this anymore.

you must agree to majority rule, transfer power to the majority blacks. And of course, once the government lost the support of the business community, they understood that the game was over. And then you suddenly had this situation where Nelson Mandela was released from prison and very quickly DeClirk transferred power to the ANC. And civil war was avoided. You know, people, when they think about South Africa, they think about Nelson Mandela and what just had an extraordinary man and humanitarian he was. And that is absolutely true. But what's so interesting about South Africa is the role that the business community played. And most people don't know about that. They're the ones who ultimately decided they were no longer going to support apartheid. And of course,

it wasn't because they had a change of conscience or because there's no altruistic motive. But they were incentivized to do that because they were losing economically in an apartheid system. And that made it no longer tolerable. The problem with the slow boil, the factionalism, most people just don't believe in the possibility of civil war until violence is a part or a reality of their everyday life. I think there's a quote from, I don't know if this is a German after World War II or what, but he says, you can know more, you know where I'm going with this, you can no more see it happening from day to day than a farmer sees the corn in his field growing. One day it's just over your head. And that's me. And I think it's a lot of other people because I'm like, oh, civil war, come on. But you're right.

I was thinking of somebody playing the, is the piccolo or the flute and marching with a drummer boy out in Manhattan and being like fire the cannons. And like that is just not going to happen, but you're right. It's going to be more like, why did this grain silo blow up or why did this train get derailed? And it's going to be, we're going to see something like partisans for free trade or something or partisans for the border wall or partisans for whatever, you know, the crazy thing on the left or the right, this extremist kind of ideology. don't even know what it'll come from, but we're all going to have shocked Pikachu face and everyone else like you is going to go, duh, we've been saying this for 10 years. Of course, this is going to happen. It makes sense. It's human nature, right? We all are living our lives. We all have jobs to go to. We have kids to raise. Weddings to attend. You know, life is busy. And then on top of that,

we don't want to think about terrible outcomes, right? You know, human beings are inherently hopeful. Like, tomorrow is going to be better than today. And then on top of that, You have individuals who actually want to create smoke screens. They want to distract us. They don't want us to be paying attention. For years, things like Timothy McVeigh's attack in Oklahoma City was portrayed as a lone wolf attack, that this is just the result of a crazy individual. No, no, Timit, this is part of a larger far-right, white supremacist, anti-federal government movement here in the United States. He had, you know, pages from the Turner Diaries, which is the Bible of the far right in his pickup truck. He probably was a member of one of the Michigan militias that was also

involved in the attempted kidnapping of Governor Whitmer. So there is, but the problem is if you don't connect the dots, if you continuously portray this as these are just crazy individuals, then you remain blind to what's actually the cancer that's growing slowly from within. On January 6th, my email blew up and people were asking me, what, you know, oh my gosh, like, what do you think? Are you surprised? what are you feeling? And my response was, I'm feeling relief. And it's because people like me who've been studying extremism around the world and here in this country, people who've been studying the rise of political violence, the increase in terrorist attacks, directed at synagogues and directed at African Americans and directed at very particular individuals. You know, we've been talking about

this for years and people have not been receptive to the message because they haven't seen its existence. They found it hard to believe. But January 6th was so public. It was so obvious. It was impossible not to see that this was something that we've never seen before. And it finally allowed this cancer, the growth of this cancer, to enter the conscience of average Americans. And again, like, you don't want to be surprised by Civil War.

You want to recognize the warning signs so that you have. time to do something about it. These, I guess you would call them sons of the soil parties are becoming more and more popular globally. In America, it tends to be rural and maybe, I would, look, I'm not saying people who live in rural areas of America are undereducated, so I want to clarify that before I even say this, but rural and undereducated people who are undoubtedly getting the shaft on jobs because of NAFTA, benefits, health care. Like, their situation is bad. I'm not saying it's their fault. I want to be very clear on this. Their situation is very bad. And I see this is a huge problem. Well, the other problem is it's not like there's no choice. There's no other option. We've been so

misinformed in this country. We often vote against our own interests. And I feel like a lot of these groups are the ones who vote against their own interests over and over and over again and then go, well, our situation's still getting worse. Arm yourselves. And that's really dangerous. Because it's not like there's no outlet for change. They just chose something else. And I don't understand why. I don't understand how I guess it is misinformation or disinformation. Why would you choose a worse lot in life and then go, you know what, this just keeps getting worse? Of course it does. It's the meme where the guy's riding the bike takes the stick and shoves it in his front wheel and falls over and says, this is their fault. Yeah. Again, the way I think about what's happening within the Republican

Party today is I think about it that there's really two players. There's Republican leadership and there's Republican voters. And I would even break Republican voters down into moderate Republicans and those on the far right. Sure. You have to do that because lots of people that I know vote Republican and they are not this at all. Yes, exactly. So Republican leadership deserves an enormous amount of blame for what's happening. It's Republican leadership. They have a challenge. Their challenge is that starting in the 1970s, they decided that they were going to pursue a strategy where they appealed to Southern whites. So they have created a party that is predominantly white Americans, and some portion of that are very, very conservative and

intolerant. But they also vote, and they also have put Republicans in positions of power for the last few decades. So their problem is that whites are a declining group in society. They're going to be a minority by 2045. And that means that in a system, a democratic system of one, one person, one vote, you cannot continue to win elections if that's the profile of that's the makeup of your party. And so I think what Republican leadership has realized is that they need to kind of do what Victor Orban did in Hungary, which is there are these legal loopholes in our system that will allow you to make voting harder, that will allow you to basically stymie any sort of legislation so that you begin to convince your citizens that democracy is inefficient, that democracy

isn't working, that democracy is shutting you out of power. And then if you add to that, what people are calling the big lie, if you add to that, that our electoral system is broken, that there's enormous fraud there, that the results of elections aren't legitimate, then you can actually convince citizens, your supporters, that democracy isn't the best system for them. And they will actually begin to support your strategy of unraveling democracy to ensure that you can cement in your rule even after you're no longer the majority. You know, I do think that there are many Republicans out there who truly believe that the 2020 election was stolen, that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.

that the Democrats will do everything to hold on to power because that's what they're being told. They're being told that by their politicians. They're being told that by, you know, Fox News. They're being told that in the social media sites that they go to. And so they truly believe that. And then suddenly you have a situation where they agree with the politicians. Let's get rid of democracy or let's weaken democracy because it's not a system that's working anymore. Is the other side blameless on this? Because whenever we have, have something polarizing like this, you know, you mentioned Republican leadership. Polarizing means there's what, two polls. But I'm just, I'm a little uncomfortable with blaming one side for polarization. Yeah. I guess. And again, you know, the Democrats have moved further to the left. They haven't moved

as far to the extreme as the right have, but they have certainly moved to the left. You know, you could also consider the Democratic Party an ethnic faction in the same way you consider the Republican party and ethnic faction. You know, the vast majority of African Americans are Democrats. The majority of Latinos and Asians and atheists and Jews and, you know, non-Christians are Democrats. You know, in a country that's multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, the fact that you have different races and ethnicities and religions are not really overlapping significantly across the parties. It's a problem for the Democrats that they're losing white voters because, you know, whites still are a majority of the country. And they've been gravitating towards one party since the 1970s. Speaking of the far right, we've seen what seems like extremist infiltration of government and law enforcement. How much of that is kind of kooky conspiracy stuff and how much of that is real? I know friends in the military that say, actually, far right extremism. And I'm talking about far right. I'm not talking about Republicans in the military.

officer corps. I'm talking about like white supremacists in the army, Navy, Air Force, whatever. These folks are saying it's a real issue. Again, not conservatives, but like Nazis. Is this a thing that you're tracking at all? I read about it, but I don't actually, I'm not doing the data collection on it. Okay. Other good people are. But, you know, the CIA has this manual. It's called the manual for insurgency. It's actually open source. You can find it on, on the web. It's there portions of it that are redacted. But it's really, really interesting. And it talks about the stages that a country will go through on the road to insurgency. And one of the things that they talk about is that you begin to see the nascent rebel groups sending individuals into the

military for training. That's part of their strategy, not only to gain experience with combat, but also to have access to intelligence. So again, the CIA's manual is outweigh, is outwe. looking. It's all about what should we be observing in other countries. The CIA is not allowed to study the United States, so it has nothing to do with the United States. But again, if you take that and you think, okay, is that happening here in the United States? It absolutely is. You know, some of the far right militias, and the three big ones currently, all this is likely to change are the oathkeepers, the proud boys, and the three percenters. We know that they have actively encouraged members to join the military, to join law enforcement for these two reasons, to gain experience, also to gain

access to firearms and to understand where firearms are being stored and then also for information and reconnaissance. So that is absolutely happening here in the United States. For people who are interested in this, the person who's doing, I think, some of the best work is a woman named J.J. McNabb. And if you Google her, you'll find her pretty quickly. We'll find out some more on that because I am interested in this, because a lot of my friends who are in law enforcement in the military, they are, many of them are conservative Republicans, and they'll tell me things like, yeah, I'm a little worried because there's like these kooky guys in here. Yeah. Look, I got a lot of left-leaning listeners and a lot on the right, and we disagree on stuff, the left and the right all the time. What I don't want people

to do is tune out and go, oh, he's just blaming Republicans for everything. Yeah. The majority of people that I know who vote Republican are very concerned about this because it's people they associate with a lot are often the people that tend to put one foot into this camp, whether they're in law enforcement or the military or they're just voting for more extreme things. I have a lot of people write in that say, hey, I'm a Republican. I'm a Christian gal or guy, but my parents are just telling me stuff that is bat shit crazy. They live in Albuquerque, and they go back and they visit their town in New Mexico or wherever they, and they just go, what happened here? Everyone's being a psycho. The things we talk about make no sense. Those of us that are more.

conservative are on the front lines of this and seeing it much more closely than somebody like me who's kind of in the center and is like, is this a real thing? You know, and then you talk to people on the extreme other side and they're like, oh, it's all the rights fault. And it's like, well, you don't want, I don't really trust what they say because of course everything is always the fault if they're like hardcore on the left. And so it's been confusing for people like me because we don't always see it. And we are the people who are slowly boiling in the pot. Yeah. And both of my parents were lifelong Republicans until recently. You know, I grew up in a house. household where we had first, you know, the Reagan calendar every year in our kitchen and then we had

the Bush calendar. And, you know, and I worked for the CIA for a number of years. So, but I also think it's incorrect to say that both sides are equally dangerous at this point. One side is pursuing anti-democratic measures. They really are trying to weaken our democracy. And when elements of that side are also actively organizing. And two days ago when Mara Lago was raided, if you looked on the chat rooms, the references to Civil War just, you know, went through the roof. You know, that's not coming from all sides of society. That's coming from a very particular part of society. And again, as somebody who studies Civil War, it's coming from the part of society that we would expect it to. It's, it is the group that is in decline and that is most threatened by.

the changes that are occurring demographically here in the United States. Wow, another feel-good episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show, everybody. Barbara, can you leave us with some advice here? Is there a positive note in this? There is a positive note. You know, again, you know, countries that have these two factors, you know, that are both a partial democracy and have these ethnic parties, these, you know, tribal parties, we know that they have about a 4% annual risk of civil war.

That seems like it's low, but it's not. It means that every year that those two features continue in a country, the risks increases. But it also means that we have time, right? We actually know the risk factors. We know that the United States is kind of in dangerous territory. It gives us time to strengthen our democracy. And I think the fact that this book resonated so much, the fact that we're even having this discussion, the fact that people are paying such close attention to the January 6th hearings means that American citizens. are now paying attention and are now beginning to ask like, what can we do? And again, let me just say probably the most important thing people can do is to vote. You know, we know, for example, people think Kentucky is a deep red state. All we know is that Kentucky is a non-voting state. And you could say that about almost every state in this country. There's a huge portion of the American population that's standing on the sidelines and not voting. And if they were to go out and vote, we would have a very different outcome. Barbara, thank you so much for taking the time and doing the show.

I know I've given you a little bit of a hard time, and I appreciate you being a good sport as well. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for having me. I've got some thoughts on this one, as usual. But before I get into that, here's a preview with the 26th National Security Advisor, General H.R. McMaster,

on the greatest threats to the United States. Here's a preview. War is this continuous interaction of opposites, right? you and maybe multiple enemies and adversaries inside of a complex environment. You have to understand strategic empathy to try to view these complex competitions from the perspective of the other. Do you think our divisions domestically right now are one of the greatest threats to our national security? Absolutely, George. They are. And our adversaries are doing everything they can to exploit them. I mean, Russia is masterful at this. When we were attacked on 9-11, you know, Al-Qaeda didn't target

Democrats or Republicans, right? They targeted Americans. I think it's time to really demand real reforms, you know, and if teachers' unions are an obstacle, we've got to tell them, hey, you can't strike reform anymore. And we need to demand it. The fact that we're driven apart from each other based on these divisions in our society, what social media is doing to us by driving us apart with these algorithms to show you just more and more extreme information based on your predilections, the fact that, you know,

if you're of one political persuasion, you watch one TV network, and so many of the but different political persuasion watches a different one. You're creating two different realities. We're doing this to ourselves, Jordan. We've got to stop. We've got to stop it. So let's think about it. Let's work together to make our republic better every day.

And there are some who don't want to do that. They think that, hey, you can't even empathize. You're not even allowed to empathize. It's a real tragedy. For more, including General H.R. McMaster's thoughts on immigration and climate change, check out episode 410 on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Like I said, disturbing, but also not totally hopeless. It makes sense that when people lose elections,

sometimes they think they might win next year. But if they think they will never win again, they will never regain power, then they start to lose hope, and that can spark violence. Kind of scary, given the rhetoric on both sides of the aisle these days. The United States now has as much factionalism as Ukraine and Iraq. When you hear that, do you think,

well, two countries doing great right now, nothing to worry about here. The comparison here, really, this is not an exaggeration. Does this mean the left and the right in the United States are supposedly about as factionalized as the Russians and the Ukrainians are in Ukraine? That is a question that some academics are debating, but either way you look at it, not a good sign. Scary stuff right there.

But how does all of this lead to armed conflict? Well, in the early stages, groups will buy arms and link up with one another to make other groups feel insecure, to gain power, which then causes those groups to buy arms and link up to feel more secure, causing the other groups to then ratchet things up, and often you have foreign interference in the mix here, and then at the end of it all, you have large armed groups that are afraid of one another, and that is not good. The book is really interesting. It gives a lot of examples of different countries and different regions throughout modern history that have experienced civil wars and analyzes the contributing factors. I thought it was a good read.

It sounds like what we need to do here in the United States is make sure that the grievances of people who are attracted to extremism are addressed. So if we are worried about people in the inner city gravitating towards, let's say, left-wing extremism, then we need to address those concerns. If we're worried about rural folks being drawn into extremist ideology, then we need to address their concerns as well. Basically, we need to reduce the draw of extremist groups by addressing the concerns of those who would become radicalized. It seems like doing a lot to increase education, health care, addiction, stagnating wages, unemployment in certain groups, and things along those lines would do a lot to stabilize our country. But according to some, that's crazy

talk as well. If you're interested in factionalism and social media and misinformation, check out our episode with Renee DeResta. That's episode 420. Also, we've got a whole playlist on disinformation over at jordanharbinger.com slash start. It's worth studying and looking into. Big thank you to Barbara F. Walter. All links to all of her books and work will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Books always linked up at Jordan Harbinger.com slash books. Please use our website links if you buy books from any guest on the show. It does help support what we do here. Transcripts in the show notes, videos on YouTube, advertisers, deals, and discount codes, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider

supporting those who support this show and make it possible. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and managed relationships, maybe even across the aisle. Speaking of reaching across the aisle, I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using the same software systems and tiny habits that I use every single day. That's our six-minute networking course. The course is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course.

Dig the well before you get thirsty. Who knows? Hopefully we can avoid Civil War by bringing the world a little bit closer. Most of the guests on the show actually subscribe to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Hey, and at worst case, maybe you'll find somebody who has an underground bunker. You can put your family in during the next conflagration.

I hope I'm kidding about that. This show is created an association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when he finds something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's been thinking about this, talking about this, or is in denial about this, definitely share this episode with them.

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So if you want to hear some wild and inspiring firsthand stories, I invite you to check out what was that like. Every story is verified. Their site even has photos so you know even the most bizarre stuff you're hearing is somebody's real life. Listen to what was that like on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whatever app you're using right now. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way.

Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not. The through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something You Should Know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands

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