Up First from NPR - Does the Military Have an Extremism Problem?

Episode Date: January 5, 2025

As Congress meets tomorrow to certify the results of the 2024 election, it also marks the 4-year anniversary of the attack on the Capitol. The participants of the riot on January 6, 2021 intended to disrupt the certification process of the 2020 election results. When it was all over four people were dead, 140 law enforcement officers were wounded and there was nearly $3 million in damage.There were people from all walks of life at the Capitol that day, but one thing that many of them had in common? Military ties. That reality is something that the military is still grappling with today. On this episode of The Sunday Story from Up First, we are joined by NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman and producer Lauren Hodges, who were both at the Capitol reporting that day. Last year they released a new investigation with NPR's Embedded podcast called "A Good Guy," about an active duty Marine who participated in the Capitol riot.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Ayesha Roscoe and this is a Sunday story from Up First. Every Sunday we do something special, going beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. Tomorrow marks four years since the attack on the U.S. Capitol as Congress attempted to certify President Joe Biden's win in the 2020 election. On January 6, 2021, then-President Donald Trump, now president-elect once again, held a rally to dispute the election results. And then thousands of people charged into the Capitol.

Many were chanting, stop the steal, some broke windows and damaged property, others called for the hanging of public officials like then Vice President Mike Pence and then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. When all was said and done, four people died, 140 law enforcement officers were wounded, and there was nearly $3 million worth of damage. And the FBI soon opened what would become its biggest criminal investigation in history. And as the arrests began, something became clear. There were a lot of people with military ties in the Capitol that day.

It's a fact that continues to have a ripple effect for the Pentagon, especially now, on the eve of another transfer of presidential power, and as Trump continues to set up the cabinet for his second administration. Trump recently said that he might pardon some people who were convicted for crimes on January 6 on his first day in office. Today on the show we want to dig into the continued legacy of January 6, 2021. Does the military have a problem with political extremism in the ranks? And what does that mean with Trump returning as commander in chief?

NPR's Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman and producer Lauren Hodges have been asking themselves those questions. Late last year, they released a new investigation with NPR's embedded podcast called A Good Guy about an active duty Marine who participated in the Capitol riot. My conversation about extremism in the military with Tom and Lauren after the break.

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We don't know, but we're making some fun, bold predictions for the New Year. Listen now to the pop culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR. We recorded this conversation before the two acts of violence involving trucks on New Year's Day. A pickup truck carrying an ISIS flag intentionally driven into a crowd of pedestrians in New Orleans, which killed more than a dozen people. And a Tesla cyber truck filled with fuel canisters and fireworks that erupted in front of a Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, injuring passersby. Both suspects died as well. Since then, law enforcement has identified the two suspects as retired and active duty

service members in the Army, respectively, and are investigating the motives for both attacks. Tom and Lauren, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Hey there. So, you know, I have a lot of questions about this investigation and about the military during the new Trump administration,

the upcoming Trump administration. But you know, I wanna go back to January 6th, 2021. I think most of us watched the attack on the Capitol live on TV. I was in the dentist and started seeing reports that the barriers were being broken. And then after I got out of the dentist appointment, I realized, oh, shoot, this is of another level. But you were both there.

You were on the ground. Yeah. I was at the Capitol when that huge crowd that Trump sent over started to arrive and, you know, pressing in from all sides. It was thousands of people. I watched them eventually break through police barriers and rush up the Capitol steps. I asked one man in the crowd nearby, what do you want to see happen if you get in? The people in this house who stole this election from us,

hanging from a gallow out here in this lawn for the whole world to see, so it never happens again. That's what needs to happen. So there were clearly people committing violence or wanting to see violence, and there were hundreds encouraging it, pushing it forward. We don't want the deal! We don't want the deal! Well, hundreds more, you know, they were just kind of watching this all take place.

So there were people of all sorts of motivations. And we should say not everyone destroyed property or was physically violent, but most of them had one thing in common, Ayesha. They believed Donald Trump's lie that the election was stolen. And another thing that a couple hundred of them had in common was military ties, both veteran and active duty. Wow.

I mean, hearing that tape about hanging them from gallows, I think some of that seems to be kind of like memory white, like the violet rhetoric at that time. But then also that some of these people had military ties. Tom, you've covered the military for decades. You've been embedded with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Was it surprising to you to learn that some of these people,

like attacking the Capitol, were actually people in the military who were supposed to be protecting the US? You know, it really wasn't much of a surprise. I know that militias and far right groups like the Oath Keepers or Proud Boys, they often target veterans for recruitment, in large part because of the military training.

But again, not everyone there was part of those groups or committing violence. Earlier in the day, as I was walking through the crowds, I noticed there were a number of people with law enforcement or military ties. I saw some flags with the Marine insignia in a ball cap or a sweatshirt with the Marines Eagle Globe and anchor emblem. Yeah, I saw a lot of that too. And you know, afterwards, after this day, Tom and I started following the FBI's arrest announcements to see if there really were as many military folks out there that we remember seeing. And our colleagues at NPR started tracking it too. And NPR analysis found that of,500 arrested, some 200 had military experience.

That is roughly 13%, about double what you would see with the general population. And we wanted to know more, so we reached out to Michael Jensen. He's a researcher at the University of Maryland, and he studies domestic terrorism. And he found that nearly every branch of the military was represented at the Capitol that day. It is so shocking when somebody that's taken an oath to protect the country is doing something to harm it. So most of the people with military ties that day were veterans and one of them you may

have heard of who Republican politicians have talked about a lot and it's Ashley Babbitt. She was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer as she lunged through a shattered window near the house floor. Babbitt was an Air Force veteran. So some of these people were veterans, right? But were there any active duty military members there on January 6th? Yeah, so according to Jensen, at least 24 of them were active duty across the various branches and the reserves. And the branch with the biggest number of participants in relation to its size was the Marine Corps.

The Marines. Do we know why they were so represented or overrepresented on January 6th? You know, it's hard to say. We asked a lot of people that question. You know, some Marines told us there's a sense the Marines tend to be pretty traditional, more physically aggressive, lean more politically conservative

than maybe some of the other branches. So you mentioned you talked to that researcher. What did he think about all this? The researcher, Michael Jensen, wasn't that surprised. He's been tracking instances of political violence in the military going back 35 years to 1990. In fact, there's been more than 700 documented cases, stuff like starting physical altercations at protests,

plotting violence against public figures. And those cases have been rising year after year leading up to January 6. And as for the Marines, the Marine Corps has the second most cases of former or current members who are extremists, second only to the Army, which is the largest branch. This despite the Marines being the smallest fighting force. And Jensen told us historically the Marines don't open very many investigations into these cases so they have a disproportionately large problem with extremism but they're

doing the least amount of investigations. In your podcast series, A Good Guy, that you did with NPR's Embedded, you look at the case of one active duty Marine who was stationed at Quantico at the time, and I guess he was there on January 6th? Yep. His name is Joshua Bates, Sergeant Joshua Bates. He's a third generation Marine and really a high achieving one. And he was promoted to sergeant early. He has a Navy

Commendation Medal and he got an internship offer from the National Security Agency to do intelligence work. And on January 6th, 2021, he is 20 years old when he says a couple of other active duty Marines at Quantico base invite him to the Stop the steal rally. And they see this crowd surging toward the Capitol and decide to join it. I asked Josh why. So you thought it was okay to be in the building? Well, yeah, because we walked right in. We didn't see any signs that, you know, said don't do not enter, no trespassing. And as soon as we walked through the door of the Capitol building,

there were two police officers standing right across from the door. I figured if we weren't supposed to be there, they would have told us to get out. Of course we know from being there that the scene wasn't as calm as Josh just described. No, not at all. So we combed through some security footage of Josh and his friends in the Capitol. They're in there for about an hour altogether and they are definitely participating in some rowdy crowds You can see them taking turns holding a don't tread on me flag Josh is chanting what looks like stop the steal and most notably the three of them help someone else put a maga hat on a

Statue of Martin Luther King jr. In the Capitol Rotunda and they take a picture of it You know, I kind of don't know what to say about that. I mean, because Martin Luther King very famously died from political violence. So that was a, you know, what a scene to partake in. But Josh and his friends, they're actually active duty Marines. So they take an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. How would you characterize what they were doing at the Capitol that day? Like how does this factor into the idea of political

extremism? Is Josh and what he was doing extremist activity? You know, it's really hard question to answer. We spoke with Josh for hours on two occasions, and he cops up to the statue thing, but really downplays or even sometimes denies everything else he did that day. And we asked him that same question. How do you see yourself?

Were you a protester or an extremist? I would say the line that crosses you from just peaceful protester, kind of just looking around and walking around and extremist is insinuating violence, being associated with one of the extremist groups. Once you compromise your integrity far enough to hurt someone or hurt the history behind

the building, I think that's kind of what draws that line. So it seems like this guy is trying to carve out this neat little box for himself as a peaceful protester. It felt like that's why he wanted to talk to us that day. Maybe that's true. After all, he wasn't beating up cops or breaking off table legs, like some of the other people who were there. The main issue for Josh here is that what he told us did not match what

we saw on the cameras. And we were wondering, even if he didn't directly hit anyone or break something, did he still engage in extremist activity? After all, this whole day was an act of violence. And that question is what a lot of other people were wrestling with too. People all the way up to the highest levels of the Pentagon. We'll find out more about that after the break.

We're back with the Sunday story. So Tom and Lauren, you've been looking at political extremism in the military since January 6th. You're seeing all these announcements of arrest and there were people with military ties among the people being arrested. I would imagine that military leadership is also seeing this in the news. What is their response or what are they thinking seeing some of the people in their ranks being arrested? Well, you know, it didn't take long at all for the military to recognize a potential problem in the

ranks. President Biden's pick for defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was sworn in just a couple of weeks after January 6. Yeah, let's play you an excerpt from our two-part podcast series, A Good Guy, about what happened next. It really helps color it all in. At Austin's confirmation hearing, he didn't mention the assault on the Capitol directly, but he said he was really concerned about internal threats. The job of the Department of Defense is to keep America safe from our enemies. But we can't do that if some of those enemies

lie within our own ranks. And one of the first things he did was to remind everyone in uniform about their oath. So Austin came up with a plan. It started with something called a stand down. A stand down in military speak is, okay, we're going to stop what we're doing and we're just going to have a training day to remind service members about what they can't do while on active duty.

Dissident activities, overtly political activities, extremist activities. The reactions coming out of these training sessions and from senior officials, they were kind of mixed. What we were hearing on the ground from units was that a lot of there was just a lot of confusion. Many service members didn't understand what extremism even means. Well, you know, what is extremism? My extremism may not be your extremism. That's Bishop Garrison, a West Point grad, an Iraq Army vet, and a lawyer. Austin tapped him to answer this huge question for the military. How do you define extremism? I'd love to actually get your personal opinion or definition of extremism.

You and all the Joint Chiefs would love to have a clean definition of it. And the problem is the definition is it depends. It's one of those things where you kind of know it when you see it. Garrison quickly became the guy that the Defense Secretary was counting on to figure out just how big of a problem extremism in the ranks really is. Garrison worked a really long time to come up with a definition. And as complicated as the work was, it ultimately led him to a pretty simple two-part test.

It almost has to be like a rubric. You can't make for every instance of what may or may not be extremist activity. It really depends on the situation of the individual. One, does the person advocate for extremist ideology? It couldn't just be that you went and read a thing because you could be a historian. You're reading Mein Kauf because you want to know more about World War II and Hitler. Two, did they act upon that ideology? You have an activity that may not in and of itself be prohibited or be criminal but it leans in that direction. It gives the commander an opportunity to say,

wait, wait, wait, what is this about? So this isn't about your political views. It's all about your actions. It's inciting violence. It's taking part in violence. Unlawful stuff, discriminatory stuff. Raising money for groups that are anti-immigrant, racist, misogynist. We're not here to be thought police in any way, shape, or form. And Garrison thought, all right, we nailed this. Extremist activity, active participation, two things go together.

So we wanted to know, based on the definition he was working on, whether Josh's actions in the Capitol qualified as extremist activity. He was up in the crowd chanting, the police were pushing him back and he was refusing to move. Those last two things you mentioned would both be activities. That is something that is prohibited. I would even argue it's always been prohibited. Garrison's goal was to give Secretary Austin a report with recommendations on countering extremism in the ranks. He knew from the beginning that anything related to extremism could get politicized real quick. And the trouble actually began before he even got to put out his report. Back when Garrison was hired to do this

work, he was given a title. Senior Adviser to the Secretary of Defense for Human Capital and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Also known as DEI. And that title was typed out in a memo, a memo which the Pentagon released in the spring of 2021. It's standard stuff, three pages long, announcing that Garrison was forming this team to counter extremism in the ranks.

Then... May 6th, I'll never forget the day. His phone started lighting up. He's becoming a target of attacks by the right wing. We uncovered the ideological veteran chief for the United States military, and that's Bishop Garrison. Suddenly his name was all over Fox News, The Daily Caller, Steve Bannon's podcast. So who is the Pentagon's newly minted MAGA purge man? Just spend five minutes googling Bishop Garrison.

This is an extremist Black Lives Matter sympathizer type guy. They're calling him the Pentagon's hatchge man. Just spend five minutes googling Bishop Garrison. This is an extremist Black Lives Matter sympathizer type guy. They're calling him the Pentagon's hatchet man. A man who believes all, all Trump supporters are racists and extremists. Because his job is to purge patriots from the ranks. They're using January 6th as the ultimate justification. He's a lunatic. Pay attention to this guy. Keep your head on a swivel.

I don't think he's up to any good. In Garrison, he starts getting these messages on social media. And that included everything from threats against my career, my livelihood, to threats of personal violence. And he was really worried about his wife and baby back home. My wife truly was afraid of like someone is going to show up on our doorstep with a long gun. Garrison, you know, he started to feel pretty alone.

That's because he says the military was shrugging off these attacks against him. As one very senior official relayed to me, you know, these types of things are like quicksand. You say like, he's a good guy, next question, and that will go away because if you fight against it, fight against it, you're going to get pulled more into it. I think not pushing back harder and not fighting for it, just let it breathe more and let it breathe longer. And that's what we're even, I think to some degree today, still seeing the remnants of that.

So Bishop Garrison, he comes up with this definition of political extremism, but he starts getting attacked by the right, called a critical race theorist and all this stuff, which you know Definitely he he was at the center of this kind of firestorm What happened to the report that he was supposed to file to Secretary Austin and to his recommendations like What did the military do with that report? Well, Bishop Garrison's report had all kinds of recommendations, like conducting an insider threat study, developing trainings. Garrison also emphasized in his report

that the military really needed to track cases of political extremism. But Ayesha, those recommendations sat on a shelf for a really long time. It took a really long time for anybody to talk with us about this too. And believe me, we tried. Eventually I got to sit down with the top Marine officer, General Eric Smith. He told me he doesn't think the Corps has a problem with extremism either. This is

something I've heard over and over across the military that they don't believe there's an extremism problem in the ranks, but to this day they've never collected data to back that up. So it's really hard to say. Yeah, well the researcher Michael Jensen we talked to would disagree that they don't have a problem and when we talked to Bishop Garrison, he was really disappointed that the department didn't really take his work as seriously as he wanted them to. My biggest fear is that it's going to take some type of major or massive incident in which people get hurt, if not worse, for the department to actually stop and take action

on us. But even still, the military has taken some measures, mostly just this past year. The Army and the Navy posted new guidelines about participating in political rallies or fundraising for extremist groups, you know, even, you know, liking extremist posts on social media. So they did put out, you know, some guidelines. And the Marines outlined some new reporting instructions,

how people can tell the military that something's going on. If a Marine suspects a fellow Marine of extremist activity, they have to report it within one to three days to a senior officer, and that might trigger an investigation. And they're also beginning the process of gathering data to determine how prevalent extremism really is. Why did it take so long for the military to address political extremism?

Right. Well, to answer that question, I want to go back to Josh Abate's story for a sec, because it offers a big clue. Josh, of course, is the Marine Sergeant whose case we followed and the one who wound up in the rotunda putting that MAGA hat on the statue of MLK. So the FBI eventually arrested Josh almost two years later connecting him to some social media posts that one of his friends had made, one of the two guys that he was with in the Capitol. And in court,

Josh gets off with a slap on the wrist, just a couple hundred hours of community service. And his military record clearly helped him out. The judge was especially impressed by character letters that described Josh as an exceptional Marine. Right. And then, after his criminal sentencing, Josh faces a retention hearing in the Marine Corps, which is sort of like military HR. It's a panel of other Marines randomly drawn, and they decide whether to keep him in the Corps or to discharge him. And if they kick him out, they then have to decide if the discharge will be honorable or other than honorable. And that second one is a huge red mark. No one wants that on their record.

And you know, there's a moment in that hearing that just completely shocked us. Is your portrayal of the events of January 6th positive, negative, or are you indifferent about it? So at the beginning of the hearing, Josh, a civilian lawyer, asked all three of the Marines deciding this case, how do you feel about January 6? One panelist said he had a negative perception of what transpired, but here's what the other

two had to say. So I wasn't there. I can't say I know exactly what happened there. I'm wondering if you've been different about what happened that day. Depending on what new sources you look at, you get a different narrative. At this point, I'm, to be honest, tired of hearing that three years later. What happened that day? Depending on what new sources you look at, you get a different narrative. At this point, to be honest, I'm tired of hearing that three years later. I mean, it sounds kind of like a microcosm of the US population at this point, but you

have two of these three panelists who are deciding Sergeant Josh Bates' future in the Marine Corps. they're pretty indifferent to January 6. So, I mean, ultimately, what did the panel decide? Well, they voted to keep him in the Marine Corps. As you said, it seems like the perception of January 6 at the time of this hearing, which is almost three years later, had gotten much more lukewarm. But that's not the end for Josh. The Secretary of the Navy, who also oversees the Marine Corps, has to either endorse the panel's decision to keep Josh or he can decide to kick Josh out. But it's been more than a year since the retention hearing and as far as we know,

the Secretary still hasn't made a decision. And a new secretary will take over when Trump enters office in a couple of weeks. Trump's nominated John Phelan, a businessman with no military experience, for that job. And the decision about whether to keep Josh might just fall to him. So for now, Josh, he's kind of in Marine purgatory doing some standard office work while he awaits his fate. That internship offer from the NSA, of course that got scrapped and he's the only one of his friends left. Even though the Marine panels decided to keep those two other Marines he was in the Capitol with, a top general didn't agree. He later

kicked out one of them for his actions, the other one he just ran out as enlistment. So basically the clock ran out on his time in the military. Like, is that what you expect to happen with Josh that he'll eventually just get discharged? Well, we'll have to see. Josh declined further interviews with us. Yeah, this was after we told his lawyer that we'd found footage of Josh in the Capitol and it didn't match his story. So he was done chatting with us. Trump said throughout his campaign that he'd be open to pardoning people convicted of crimes for January 6th if they're quote unquote innocent. In fact, many of the people convicted of January 6th related crimes celebrated from the DC jail cell they call the Patriots wing

after the election results were announced. Now that Trump's been elected to a second term, it's possible that Josh's criminal sentence, as late as it already is, could be totally wiped away. As far as his military career, it's possible that he gets to stay in the Marine Corps. Trump has had complicated, often controversial, feelings about the military and veterans. From my reporting, one thing that becomes really clear is that Trump doesn't see the military service members as apolitical, and they're supposed to be apolitical. He sees them as tools to serve the president, loyalists.

Since the election, Trump has been stacking his cabinet with those loyalists, people who are highly sympathetic to him and his supporters. Some of them, you know, they're unexpected, like Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host and veteran who Trump tapped as defense secretary. You actually heard Hegseth's voice in the montage of attacks against Bishop Garrison earlier. He's the one who called Garrison the Magger Purge Man. So if Hegseth becomes the next defense secretary, he said he's gonna eliminate DEI programs like the one Bishop Garrison was part of,

and maybe get rid of these anti-extremist efforts as well. But we'll have to see if Hegseth and Trump's other nominations survive a confirmation hearing. With Republicans control in both the House and Senate, they very well might. Yeah, and if that's the case, it's really unclear how the military's efforts to root out extremism are going to fare. Like we mentioned earlier, in the years since January 6th, military officials came up with

a strong definition of extremism and what actions are prohibited. And just this year, they said, we're going gonna start collecting data on such incidents this might all go away under Trump. Hegseth has made clear in his public statements that his focus will be on undoing some of the changes the military has made in recent years. We're also left wondering if the military missed its chance to hold people accountable for what happened that day. These are things that Lauren and I will be keeping an eye on over the next months and years of the Trump administration.

So I mean, it sounds like if the military does have an extremism problem, we may not know officially, at least not in the next four years, you know, tomorrow is January 6th and Congress will once again gather to certify the votes. Like, what can we expect this time, four years after that other fateful day, what can we expect for the peaceful transfer of power? Well, from everything I'm hearing, the certification of the 2024 election happening tomorrow will be very safe. It's now considered a national security event.

The current director of Homeland Security has said it will have Super Bowl level security. But that probably won't be necessary because it was Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol during the last certification when the election didn't go their way. This time, it did. Lauren and Tom, thank you so much for sharing your reporting today, especially about an event that now there's so many different accounts and views on it, but you were there personally. And so you saw it for yourself. Right. Well, thank you for having us. Thank you. You can hear more of this story, including lots of details in the case of Marine Sergeant

Joshua Abate and interviews with military officials in Tom and Lauren's series, A Good Guy. Find it in the Emb the embedded podcast feed. Embedded is NPR's home for ambitious long form documentary series. I also wanted to recommend a special episode by our friends at NHPR's document podcast. It follows a Capitol police officer as she deals with the aftermath of January 6th, 2021, a day that still lives in her brain and in her body. Civil dispute calls, you know, just people not getting along with each other,

neighbors not getting along with each other, and just that confrontation of them fighting and yelling at each other that just brings the flashbacks of this guy yelling at me. We want those f****** traitors. And that just kind of those emotions and that confrontation of people and you know those heated arguments are what kind of bring back those images for me. From the document team at New Hampshire Public Radio, a story of survival and resilience in the wake of January 6th, the episode is called Amelia's Thing, and you can find it by searching NHPR document wherever you get your podcast. This episode was produced by Adelina Lansianese and Andrew Mamba.

It was edited by Liana Simstrom and Irene Noguchi with help from Luis Treyes and Andrew Sussman. The rest of the Sunday Story team includes Justine Yan and Jenny Schmidt. Fact-checking by Will Chase. Engineering by Kwesi Lee and Gilly Moon. I'm Ayesha Roscoe and this is the Sunday Story from Up First. We'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.