Bruce Hoffman & Jacob Ware: The Rise of Extremism

Ken Harbaugh:

If you're a fan of Burn the Boats, hit the follow button to stay up to date with all our newest releases. Thanks and enjoy the show.

Jacob Ware:

We have this idea that far right terrorism in the United States today, is primarily an issue of right versus left.

The front cover of our book shows gallows and a noose that was wrecked outside the US Capitol on January 6th. That was intended for a conservative, evangelical Republican vice president.

Individuals who do not tow the line, who do not stay in line. They will find themselves liable to be targeted as well by the movement one day.

Ken Harbaugh:

I'm Ken Harbaugh, and this is Burn the Boats, a podcast about big decisions.

My guests today are Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware. They are fellows at the Council on Foreign Relations and co-authored God, Guns, and Sedition in which they map the rise far right terrorism in the US and offer ways to counter it.

Bruce, Jacob, welcome to the show.

Bruce Hoffman:

Thanks so much for having us.

Jacob Ware:

Thank you.

Ken Harbaugh:

I love the title. I'm terrified by it, but it does capture the whole thesis. And I want to get into that but I would like to start by asking what is different about the far right terrorist threat we face today?

Because America has experienced domestic violent extremism before. We have long been a country awash in guns and religious fervor and seditious movements.

But the current threat is something for which we seem woefully unprepared as a society. I'm wondering what makes this moment especially dangerous. If it's not new, it is dangerous.

Bruce Hoffman:

It isn't new. And in fact, the book traces a trajectory that we track to the 1980s, when movements that hither to had been pretty much oriented towards hate and intolerance, adopted or grafted onto itself, as you just pointed out, this very salient and prominent anti-government extremist position leading to sedition.

So, what's different now, compared to then, two words, social media. Back in the 1980s and the 1990s, this was a real movement, but it was geographically dispersed and disparate.

It was isolated individuals who may be serendipitously or fortuitously had come together. But making these connections and networking was enormously difficult.

In the 21st century, and particularly in the past decade, the movement has been able to connect with like-minded people to inspire, to motivate, and ultimately even animate them to acts of violence through this connectivity and through this networking.

And that's only possible because of the revolution in digital media and the advent of social media.

Ken Harbaugh:

Jacob, I'd like to put this question to you. I would submit that there is another significant difference between threats we faced in the past and the threat we face today, from far right extremism, and it's the political cover being offered by a major American political party.

I think you have to go all the way back to maybe the second KKK and the political cover provided by the Democratic Party in the South which ushered in decades of a terrorist regime.

And you have something similar developing today, I would argue, in which a far right extremist movement, a violent movement is increasingly being given cover, being provided with political cover by the Republican party. Is that fair or is that going too far?

Jacob Ware:

In August, 2017, a rally occurred at a place called Charlottesville, Virginia, home of the University of Virginia. Where a group of explicit and outspoken white supremacists and neo-Nazis gathered for an explicitly white supremacist cause of maintaining confederate symbology. And a terrorist attack occurred that place and a young woman was killed.

After that moment, we had this very painful, drawn out back and forth in the media where President Trump basically refused to condemn the perpetrators. And he said those famous, I think six words there were very fine people on both sides.

In our book, we trace a number of attacks and extremists that trace a big portion of their kind of emboldening to that moment. That feeling that we can gather on behalf of these ideologies, we can gather and cause acts of violence and actually the White House will protect us.

And I think that helped inspire further organizing, further activism leading up to the famous presidential debate where President Trump told the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by. And of course they did stand by, wait for his orders, which emerged on January 6th when he declared, “Let's walk to Pennsylvania Avenue.”

One correction to the narrative that I think is important is we have this mentality, we have this idea that far right terrorism in the United States today, is primarily an issue of right versus left, Republicans versus Democrats or white people versus everybody else.

So, white people versus minorities, white people versus Jews, conservatives versus liberals, however you want to frame it. And that's not entirely true and that's one point that Bruce and I have been really keen to try to correct.

The front cover of our book shows gallows and a noose that was wrecked outside the US Capitol on January 6th. That was intended for a conservative evangelical Republican vice president.

We've seen numerous cases since then of republicans who don't tow the kind of MAGA orthodoxy being threatened. We've had individuals saying that you can sign up for rhino hunting licenses and there's no limit to how many rhinos you could hunt.

Nikki Haley, who recently dropped out of the presidential race, had requested secret service protection because the volume of threats against her.

So, yes, I think top cover matters, and I think certainly there are individuals on the political right, right now, who are not being outspoken enough against political violence.

But at the same time, they are actually threatening themselves by doing so because we've seen time and time again over the past kind of seven, eight years, that individuals who do not tow the line, who do not stay in line, they will find themselves liable to be targeted as well by the movement one day.

Ken Harbaugh:

But the targeting of those individuals, those traitors to the movement from within, that is merely the first step in taking on the larger threat which they perceive as the left and the moral rot that the decadent West is experiencing.

I mean, Bruce, this plays out in just about every historical example of far right extremist movements. They always purify their own first.

You look at the brown shirts in Germany, you look at Mussolini's fascists in Italy. Before they took on what they perceived as the main threat, they purified their own movement. Is that a fair historical reading?

Bruce Hoffman:

Well, I would just adjust it slightly and say all revolutionary movements first deal with their external enemies and then turn on the internal ones to ensure their longevity into consolidate power.

Ken Harbaugh:

They first deal with the internal and then turn on the external. Right?

Bruce Hoffman:

No, I would say they first deal with the external. So, your point, and as Jacob was just describing, that we see this as a movement directed against Democrats or against the left, but it's as much directed against the right.

But I think first, you need the rallying power of focusing on an external enemy. And once you've vanquished that external enemy or in the process of doing so, then you turn on the internal ones to consolidate power and make sure that there's no dissonance.

What you're getting at, though, I think is enormously consequential and important is that this is a movement that brooks no dissent from any quarter. We just have to think back to the morning of January 6th, 2021, when pipe bombs were found outside both the RNC and the DNC.

So, this movement threatens democracy and freedom, not even both externally and internally, but not necessarily even sequentially.

Ken Harbaugh:

Is there an ideological coherence though? When I try to parse what Trumpism means, it's more a cult of personality than an ideological movement. And maybe we have to separate the two.

I mean, the right wing extremism that you write about far predates the rise of Trumpism, but they see fully married right now. Jacob?

Jacob Ware:

Well, I think that's one of the elements that led to January 6th is we had a kind of a failure of imagination because the people that gather there, the groups and ideologies that gather there are actually quite diverse.

You have anti-government militias who are driven by gun rights and libertarian issues. You have QAnon supporters who believe that the Democratic party and other kind of prominent institutions are being led by Satan worshiping pedophiles who are going to be gathered up. You have kind of non-ideological people who feel overlooked.

And what President Trump managed to do is he managed to get all those people together under a bigger tent and then drive them towards a certain location on behalf of a certain grievance.

So, there was almost a failure of imagination to really understand how unifying he has become, how powerful he is, how much he can drive momentum and drive energy, drive opportunity in a way that is very, I think, powerful, very intoxicating to the people who are in that movement.

Ken Harbaugh:

If there is a cohesive force then, it seems to be grievance itself. It's not an aspirational movement. It's not seeking to build anything, it's seeking to destroy and punish.

And you look at Donald Trump's pledge from his campaign to be a retributive president in a second term. It really is grievance driven more than anything, which I guess makes for a big tent, but it doesn't really build anything. Is that right, Bruce?

Bruce Hoffman:

Well, it's certainly grievance driven, but it's also, I think about harnessing what is just a collapse of trust in elected officials.

I mean, President Trump and those who are running in tandem in essence, or aligning themselves with him, are talking about government that has broken, that has ceased to serve the people, and therefore they're advocating very extreme solutions.

I mean, we have the first presidential campaign, I believe in history (I'd be very surprised if this is not the case) where a presidential candidate admits that they're going to be dictator for a day and that does not dissuade or deflect any support.

So, yes, it's grievance, but it goes even beyond that to just as all revolutionaries promise a remaking of society, a remaking of governance, a completely new and different order.

Ken Harbaugh:

Do you have a clear picture of what the new order is though? It seems like the only imperative is to destroy what exists and to exact retribution. But other than removing democratic safeguards and regulatory safeguards, it's not clear to me that the new order proposed is very well thought out.

Bruce Hoffman:

Well, it's also, purging the civil service of anyone who has any kind of professionalism or independence. I mean, we're talking about a subservient state. That's the new order in essence.

And you pointed out a minute ago, and I think you're absolutely right, is that this is more a cult of the personality than any kind of cohesive ideology.

We're not talking about a unified or a monolithic movement, but we are talking about a person who's every word resonates with it and doesn't really brook any kind of skepticism or doubt, which is also, quite extraordinary.

Ken Harbaugh:

Jacob, can you talk about the international components of this movement and how for the first time certainly, in my memory, maybe ever, our allies across the world are looking at the US as an exporter of terrorism.

Jacob Ware:

The US is part of the five-country intelligence alliance called The Five Eyes. Those are five English speaking countries, the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

Three of those four other countries, that being Australia, Canada, and the UK have designated US based groups as terrorist organizations in the same way that the US has designated foreign terrorist organizations on their own list.

That is quite a stunning development, I think. So, clearly other countries now, feel that organizations based in the United States pose a national security threat to them.

That's complicated further by the fact that the United States does not have any kind of domestic terrorists list, nor should it because of the First Amendment.

But that means that other countries are basically determining that, “Listen, we have to take this issue into our own hands because we don't think the Americans are going to do it for us.” And that is quite, quite alarming.

We're seeing tactical and ideological links too. So, I think one of the areas where you saw that very strongly was in Brazil on January 8th, 2023, where we saw an election that happened in that country's capital city Brasilia perpetrated by a very similar mob, driven by very similar grievances, tactically and ideologically supported by individuals on the American far right.

And all while the leader of that movement was in self-proclaimed exile in Florida.

We've also, seen terrorists attacks that occur with manifestos in Slovakia, for example, in New Zealand, where individuals mentioned political developments in the United States as being important in their radicalization and mobilization.

So, yes, the United States has emerged as an exporter of far right terrorism as Bruce and I wrote in Foreign Affairs Magazine last September, and that is a very serious development.

Bruce Hoffman:

Can I add one thing, Ken?

Ken Harbaugh:

Sure.

Bruce Hoffman:

I mean, especially as a veteran, you will know this, that basically two decades ago we called out other countries for exporting what we saw was a poisonous ideology that was being adopted elsewhere. That was fomenting violence, terrorism, insurrection even.

And it's astonishing to me, having studied terrorism now, for nearly 50 years, that the United States is thought of by some of our closest allies in the same way that we're responsible for exporting this poisonous ideology that we chart in the book for instance, has inspired and motivated terrorist attacks whether it's New Zealand, Germany, Slovakia, other countries.

So, this is very alarming that the United States finds itself in a position where US groups are designated, and the US is called out by its closest allies for exporting this insidious ideology.

Ken Harbaugh:

Can you talk about the Christchurch attack and how inspired by the American far right the perpetrator was? I mean he even chose to use firearms instead of explosives because of the impact it would have on a Second Amendment debate in this country.

What we do here reverberates around the world and affects every far right extremist movement there is.

Jacob Ware:

On March 15th, 2019. So, it's actually, we're just around the fifth anniversary of that attack now, a lone gunman called Brenton Tarrant entered two mosques in Christchurch New Zealand and murdered 51 worshipers in those two mosques.

Now, he had a lot of inspirations partly inspired by a terrorist attack that happened eight years earlier in Oslo. Again, a individual driven by this great replacement theory.

But Brenton Tarrant advocated for something called accelerationism, which is a strategy of revolution calling for acts of violence that are going to accelerate some kind of catastrophic cataclysmic collapse or apocalypse so that the desired world, the desired new order can be rebuilt in the aftermath, whatever that means.

He felt that one of the best ways to advance that race war, that chaotic collapse was a civil war in the United States. And that is why he conducted an attack using firearms rather than explosives, as he said, or a flame thrower.

He felt that his attack would split the United States into two sides on the gun issue, on the second Amendment issue. The left would overreach, the right would react, and you would have a civil war situation.

Ironically enough, his attack would lead to a serious crackdown on firearms in New Zealand. Actually, they had a buyback and ban certain types of firearms.

And so, he did not succeed, of course, in accelerating a civil war in the United States, but he did succeed in cracking down on guns in his own country.

Ken Harbaugh:

Well, that is such an instructive postscript because in New Zealand, the whole of society response was to address the issue and to make it harder for people like that perpetrator to get firearms in the future.

The postscript for the anti-government riot insurrection in Brazil that you left out was that society rallied around the legitimate government and held the perpetrators accountable.

If you compare those reactions to how the US, especially one political party in particular reacted to an attack on the government and has reacted to every mass shooting that we now, experience on a seemingly weekly basis, it is a damning indictment of our society's ability to adapt to threats.

Jacob Ware:

So, the gun issue does is instructive there, but I would actually point to another thing that happened in New Zealand.

So, a couple of years, I think after the attack, the government, actually the Supreme Court released a report that was summarizing their findings into his life and into the response, into preparedness for the next attack.

That report was titled in the Maori language, so the indigenous language there in New Zealand, This is Our Home. That was the name of that report.

I always felt that was so powerful. The concept of a minority community, a minority religious and racial really community in our country is targeted by a white supremacist claiming to act on behalf of the true New Zealanders, even though he was Australian.

And the government responds, the pro predominantly white, at least leadership labor, government responds by saying, this is our home. That was such a strong message of unity across race, religion, party, language.

We have lacked that kind of response in the United States, that kind of united aggressive response against political violence and in defense of people who come here and are minoritized.

And I think that does open the door to further violence. The fact that we don't have that ironclad united response across party even, that makes counter-terrorism very difficult.

Ken Harbaugh:

It's not just that we lack that response. We have influential leaders emboldening the insurrectionists, emboldening people who would undermine our democracy.

You referenced, of course, the former president telling the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by. We have a chorus of people in the Republican Party calling the January 6th Insurrectionists hostages and martyrs.

You had Tommy Tuberville saying that he doesn't see white supremacists in the US military, he sees American patriots. I think it's going too easy on the Republican influencers in this country to say that they're not unifying in response to these threats. They're actually provoking and emboldening them.

Bruce Hoffman:

Well, and also, think of it this way, terrorism is always a strategy of provocation in any event, and it's eliciting a response on the other side.

For the past three years at least, polls annually conducted by the Washington Post in The University of Maryland, the percent stays roughly the same. About a third of Americans believe that in certain circumstances it is justified to use violence against the federal government.

Now, you are right, it's a higher percentage of Republicans, but it's not 0% of people who identify themselves as Democrats.

You can see that as Jacob described, what is going on here in this strategy or ideology of accelerationism is the hope to lock the United States in this upward spiral of violence from both sides.

Where both sides lose faith in governance, hopefully encourage this violence and disorder to break out. That leads to the solution of an authoritarian regime.

And that's what I think makes this moment in time so dangerous, is this idea of provocation that could lock us into a spiral of violence that really is without precedent. I mean, it's something that we really haven't had to grapple with except in the 20 years that led up to the Civil War.

Ken Harbaugh:

We've referenced accelerationism a few times. Jacob, can you explain what that is? The connection to The Turner Diaries, this idea that you don't need a massive army to take down the US government. You can provoke in certain ways and accelerate the apocalyptic end of the status quo.

Jacob Ware:

I will let Bruce really weigh in on The Turner Diaries because I think he can be more eloquent than I can on the origins of that book and what they meant.

But the accelerationism, sorry, in concert with a range of other very clever strategies and operational models has led to a place where terrorism is quite straightforward and counter-terrorism is very difficult.

One of those strategies is something called leaderless resistance, which was designed by the violent far right in the 1980s and 1990s.

Basically, the concept is rather than operate in groups where you leave yourself vulnerable to infiltration and decapitation of the group, it's smarter to operate in decentralized networks as cells or individuals where one arrest, for example, might not lead to the take down of an entire network.

This leads to what you might call lone actor or lone wolf violence. And most of the far right terrorism we've seen over the past 15 years, let's say, whether it's Oslo or Charleston, South Carolina, or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Christchurch, New Zealand, Poway, California, El Paso, Texas, Buffalo, New York, Jacksonville, Florida, has operated under these leadless resistance guidelines.

Often then incorporating that accelerationist bent, which basically says that these acts of violence are not just isolated. They're not meaningless, they're not just intended to cause ripple effects within a community. They're not just intended to send a message to an outgroup that they are not welcome.

There's also some kind of end goal. There's also an intent to spark something further.

Dylann Roof, the Charleston shooter, for example, his goal was to start a race war. He felt that with a smartly or cleverly targeted act of violence at a historically black church, killing black people in a very public way, that he could inspire some kind of counterstrike that would accelerate that race war, that civil war.

That his brethren would emerge victorious from and be able to reassert their worldview in the aftermath.

It's a very effective strategy when it comes to radicalizing new people towards violence because you can almost trace out in their minds how it would be successful.

Bruce, do you want to weigh in on The Turner Diaries?

Bruce Hoffman:

Sure. The Turner Diaries is without any doubt the preeminent pre-social media exemplar of violent far-right propaganda. It was written or first published, I should say in 1978 by someone named William Luther Pierce, using the pseudonym, Andrew Macdonald.

Pierce was extremely intelligent individual. He had a PhD in physics, for example. He had attended Rice University and Caltech, two of the finest universities in the United States.

But interestingly, he was also, in an invalid Nazi and he led something called the National Alliance, which was a manifestation of the American Nazi Party.

Pierce was smart enough to understand back in the 1970s that there was only a limited audience for his like endless regurgitations of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. And he said, “I've got to reach people in a different way.”

And he hit upon the idea of writing this dystopian novel that would lay down a scenario where a group of quote unquote “patriots” or the only true patriots …

And of course, this is a movement as you well know, Ken, that cloaks itself in the mantle of patriotism also as top cover, that basically stage a revolution in the United States and launched a race war.

And as life imitates art often. There was a real-life terrorist group in the 1980s calling itself The Order. And The Order is the main terrorist group in this novel. There was a successor group, The Order II or The Silent Brotherhood II.

And then of course, this novel inspired Timothy McVeigh to carry out the most consequential terrorist attack, or certainly the most lethal terrorist attack in the history of the United States until September 11th, 2001.

And that was the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 persons.

And just like Jacob described, the message of The Turner Diaries is accelerationism, and it's this idea of leaderless resistance of quote unquote “true patriots” like Timothy McVeigh setting brush fires throughout the US that eventually comes together as The Turner Diaries depicts into this gigantic conflagration.

Now, many other scholars, and many journalists have wrongly said that the FBI terms The Turner Diaries, the Bible of the far right. That's not true. At least we found in our research, there's no evidence for that.

Rather, what we strongly suspect is that Pierce himself gave The Turner Diaries that moniker in order to sell more copies of it. And he wasn't too far wrong because the Turner Diaries is sold an estimated 250,000 to half a million copies.

And to your point of emphasizing January 6th, 2021, as such a watershed in the United States, up until about a week after January 6th, 2021, you could buy The Turner Diaries on amazon.com. It was readily available.

Now, the FBI has said that it was an enormously important foundational document, and I think that's exactly right.

But we see how it was a blueprint for Timothy McVeigh because one of the climactic scenes in The Turner Diaries is when The Order penetrates the FBI headquarters in downtown Washington, DC with a truck bomb in the basement that blows it up.

Well, the Murrah building did not have a basement but McVeigh basically used that as his blueprint.

And in fact, when Timothy McVay was arrested about an hour after the bombing by a very alert Oklahoma State trooper, in a folder on the passenger seat next to him were a bunch of clippings, but also pages excised from The Turner Diaries that McVeigh had highlighted and annotated.

And of course, when McVeigh was a soldier station in Fort Riley, Kansas, he earned beer money by selling The Turner Diaries at gun shows across the state and surrounding areas. So, this may have been McVeigh's Bible, but the FBI actually never used that phrase.

Ken Harbaugh:

How worried should we be about the infiltration of the military and law enforcement by extremist groups? You mentioned McVeigh was an army vet. Stewart Rhodes, army paratrooper. Louis Beam, who pioneered Leaderless Resistance army vet from Vietnam. How worried should we be?

Jacob Ware:

This has been a controversial conversation when Bruce and I have been out on our book tours. People don't particularly like having this conversation. We try to have it in quite a nuanced way.

I think the first thing to remember is the numbers of extremists in the military are quite small. The number of veterans who are extremists is also, quite small.

But as we quote a army investigator in the book, “Extremists in the military is like cyanide.” The numbers are small, but they can do a lot of damage. And that's the challenge.

We find that primarily, there are issues with white supremacists and neo-Nazis who seek to enter the military for training, recruitment, radicalization, expertise in communications, and expertise in insurgency and counterinsurgency.

And then we see high levels of veterans as well who radicalize sometimes decades after their service and then conduct a tax or engage in extremists paramilitary activity.

Less so we don't see as much of individuals inside active duty who are radicalizing as part of military culture, let's say.

Veterans I think are not necessarily more likely than any other extremists, or I should say the veterans within extremism are not more likely than any of the others to conduct attacks.

But as we saw at Oklahoma City, as we saw at Oak Creek, Wisconsin, as we saw with that tactical column entering the US Capital on January 6th, veterans in these extremist groups do have capability to conduct quite damaging attacks. And that is a concern.

Ken Harbaugh:

What makes veterans susceptible to that kind of radicalization? We know they are targeted specifically by these groups. They act as force multipliers when they join these groups. What's the appeal?

Jacob Ware:

Well, listen, the military is very concerned right now, for good reason, about suicides in the veteran community. Obviously, those numbers are too high.

I would hypothesize that the reasons why individuals who are veterans are turning to extremism are probably the same reasons why they are turning to suicide in unfortunate cases.

Those things being mental health issues, including post-traumatic stress disorder, especially in combat, veterans inability to integrate back into civilian life, a feeling that your service is undervalued or underappreciated or wasted. Each of those things, I think increase an individual's vulnerability to being pulled into an extremist group.

And as you said, extremist groups are looking specifically for veterans for the credibility that they have, but also, the training, of course, the expertise in weapons, the expertise in insurgency and counterinsurgency.

So, I would frame this as like we need to be protecting veterans who are coming out, individuals who have served the country heroically. We need to be finding ways to protect them from these ideologies and from the extremist groups that are doing a particularly effective job at recruiting them because of the skills that they have.

We need to be making sure that these veterans, especially those coming around from combat tours, are being really well taken care of by the government, by the VA, to ensure that they can live productive, healthy, happy lives on the outside and not turn towards these extremist groups that do not wish them well.

Ken Harbaugh:

Bruce, I am fascinated by the appearance guns make in the book and how the appeal to gun culture or as an explicit strategy to expand the movement. I mean, there's a reason I think you order the title the way you do, God, Guns, and Sedition.

Talk about the historical appeal to the gun rights movement as a membership play.

Bruce Hoffman:

Sure. Well, I mean, interestingly, the reason we chose that order is that it sort of maps with the trajectory of the book.

The God part really describes a movement in the 1980s that did have a much more prominent religious dimension to it in that many of the leaders of the groups that were active at that time intent on violence preface their names with titles like reverend and pastor, preached in the Christian Identity Church.

I mean, look in an era before social media, the church was one of the best ways to gather large numbers of people in one place.

But a seminal event that occurred in 1988 set the movement off in a different direction. And this was the trial of 14 white supremacists in Fort Smith, Arkansas on charges of seditious conspiracy.

The same charges that 22 members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers were convicted of rising from January 6th, 2021.

However, in 1988, they all were acquitted. And when they were acquitted, this prompted two changes in the movement.

Firstly, they recoiled at the fact that had there been convictions, the movement could have been decapitated. And we've already discussed the advent of leaderless resistance. Louis Beam had articulated that already in 1983 and 1984, but by 1992 was doubling down on it.

But the other big development was that like any terrorist movement, there's this perennial search for new constituencies or a new demographic to appeal to. And this was right around the time that the militia movement was coalescing and emerging.

And therefore, violent far right extremists seized upon the Second Amendment issue as a culminate, as a way to draw people into the movement.

Of course, we have to think back to the early 1990s when President Bill Clinton had just been elected president, actually did embark on a very ambitious effort to institute gun control in the United States.

And for a decade, in fact was successful in implementing a ban on assault weapons that expired in the mid-2000s. And we can see some of the results of that and the litany of mass shootings we've experienced.

But this whole notion that the federal government was coming to take your guns really gained traction. In fact, once again, that great huckster and impresario, William Luther Pierce changed the back cover of The Turner Diaries with big, bold letters it said in the 1990s, “What will you do when they come to take your guns?”

In other words, to draw people into this movement. And in fact, that was one of McVeigh's motivations amongst many.

But one of them was certainly avenging Ruby Ridge and Waco, but also, it was this fear that the United States government was going to seize weapons.

So, that became really a launching pad that sustained this movement and actually enabled it to grow and laid the foundation of it to be this big tent that we see today.

Ken Harbaugh:

You've referred to the fact that 30% of Americans now, feel, at least according to some polls, that violence against the government may be necessary under some circumstances.

When people talk about Civil War, what goes through your head? Surely, it's not mass armies, but what could it look like if we have a dramatic rendering of our social fabric in a nation awash in guns and riven by divisions in polarization?

Jacob Ware:

Well, this is the opening framing of our book. It's this notion that a lot of scholars actually have written about what civil war in the United States would look like basically from the foundational premise that civil war in the United States is now, inevitable.

We don't see that largely for geographic reasons. As you've pointed out, you don't really have the land divisions that you had during the First American Civil War, if you want to put it that way. So, you don't have this division that runs north south or east west that would facilitate mass armies.

What you have is urban rural divides and divisions within cities that might spark violence.

We see a more likely scenario as actually what happened in Northern Ireland during the troubles of sustained widespread violence from multiple factions targeting both governments and the public in ways that are very corrosive to democracy, to the social fabric, to unity as a country.

I find it kind of discouraging that there is so much discussion of Civil War because it almost leads you to think, “Well, okay, so if we avoid civil war, that's a victory.”

When in reality, there is a whole range of catastrophic violence that we could see in this country, well short of civil war, that would very effectively cripple our country at a time when we're embarking on this new era in national security and foreign policy. And that is very, very dangerous, I think.

So, our analysis is that civil war is unlikely and not inevitable, but that does not mean that everything is okay, and that we should not be playing a very active role in trying to stop violence that's coming down the road.

Ken Harbaugh:

Bruce, any final thoughts?

Bruce Hoffman:

I would agree with Jacob. And I think the scariest aspect is that the means and methods of implementing violence in the United States are readily accessible.

And we've seen how, at least in terms of terrorist threats in this country, unlike in the 20th century where big bombings, much like Oklahoma City or even smaller bombings, there were 3,600 bombings, for instance, in the United States between 1970 and 1971.

The reason we don't remember them is the vast majority were non-lethal. What we see now, is terrorism is undeniably becoming more lethal everywhere.

But also, in the United States at least, I think the means and methods of engaging in violence are just so readily obtainable that anyone who does want to embark hubristically or as unrealistically as one could think on at least trying to implement a civil war, can at least believe and have the conceit that their act of violence could trigger this wider conflagration.

Which of course is exactly at the heart of the message of The Turner Diaries.

Ken Harbaugh:

Do you perceive a weird fetishization around this idea of civil war within some quarters of the right?

When I look at the military cosplay culture, when I read some of the traffic that gets forwarded to me about preparations for civil war, well, I guess this is part of the accelerationist mindset, they want it to happen.

Bruce Hoffman:

Well, on January 6th, 2021, there were stockpiles of weapons in motels, and Rosalyn, and in Northern Virginia communities that were waiting to be tapped into and for rapid response.

And I think that's about as good as illustration you're going to find of how readily accessible or how appealing this type of violence can be for certain people and why the threat is taken so seriously.

Jacob Ware:

I'll give another illustration, Bruce, that I think of, Ken, when you use the word fetishization, and that's the boogaloo movement.

So, the boogaloo for those who aren't aware, is a kind of pro-gun, anti-government movement that takes its name from a movie that's kind of a cult classic, I think from the ‘80s break into electric boogaloo, I think.

And because that movie was a sequel, they took that name to indicate that the boogaloo is the sequel to the First American Civil War.

Now, this group incorporates humor and irony heavily into its messaging and symbology. One thing they do, for example, is they frequently wear Hawaiian aloha shirts with igloos on them because big igloo and big luau were some of the terms they would use to try to evade social media content moderation algorithms.

So, this is a group that very seriously in some of its rhetoric, talks about like legitimate civil war against the government, but at the same time is doing so in a very kind of crass, humorous, unserious way.

And I think that is that fetishizing of widespread violence without any real understanding, A, of the capability that would be required for that to happen.

And B, just how profoundly horrendous and bloody such a scenario would be and how frankly nobody at all of course would benefit from that situation.

Ken Harbaugh:

Well, that's just it. The fetishization is in complete ignorance of what the actual outcomes would be. I was in Afghanistan in 2006, I've had military vets on this show who have been in the middle of civil wars.

And the military people who are involved in these movements in the US, many of them are playing out fantasies that they didn't actually get to participate in overseas. I think very few people who've actually seen combat closeup much less a civil war, think there's anything romantic or glamorous about it at all.

Bruce, I'll punt to you for closing remarks.

Bruce Hoffman:

The United States is really in a remarkable situation now, that one can say that no matter what the outcome of November's presidential election is, we could be faced with equally compelling and worrisome scenarios of violence.

And it really speaks to, I think, the erosion of what America is. I mean, I constantly think back to the evening of September 11th, 2001, when Republican and Democratic congressmen locked arms on the steps of the US Capitol and sang God Bless America.

And how enormously reassuring that was on a day that we've suffered one of our greatest traumas in our nation's history, to see that kind of spirit. I found enormously as I said, reassuring but also, inspiring.

And we need to somehow return to that moment where we're not at each other's throats, and I don't know how we get there, but it doesn't seem that it's something that will necessarily happen anytime soon.

Ken Harbaugh:

Well, I'm with you. I long for that sense of unity and shared purpose again. But I think ultimately, it's going to come down to voters holding the bad actors accountable.

Jacob, Bruce, thank you so much for joining us.

Bruce Hoffman:

You're very welcome. Thanks for having us.

Jacob Ware:

Thank you.

Ken Harbaugh:

Thanks again to Bruce and Jacob for joining me. Make sure to check out their book, God, Guns, and Sedition. The link is in the show description.

Thanks for listening to Burn the Boats. If you have any feedback, please email the team at [email protected]. We're always looking to improve the show.

For updates and more, follow us on Twitter @Team_Harbaugh. And if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to rate and review.

Burn the Boats is a production of Evergreen Podcasts. Our producer is Declan Rohrs, and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our audio engineer. Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers, Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss.

I'm Ken Harbaugh, and this is Burn the Boats, a podcast about big decisions.