Far-right Terrorism, With Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is far-right terrorism.

 

With me to discuss the rise of far-right terrorism in the United States and abroad are Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware. Bruce is the Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis senior fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security here at the Council. He's also a professor at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. Jacob is a research fellow here at the Council where he studies domestic international terrorism and counterterrorism. He's also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service, and at DeSales University. They are the authors of the new book, God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, which is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the rise of far-right terrorism in the United States, and everyone should, given that it constitutes the biggest source of domestic terrorist threats in the United States. Bruce and Jacob, congratulations on the publication of God, Guns, and Sedition. It is a deeply researched and engaging read, and thanks for joining me on The President's Inbox.

 

HOFFMAN:
Delighted to do so.

 

WARE:
Thank You so much, Jim.

 

LINDSAY:
Now, Bruce and Jacob, before we begin discussing terrorism in America, I want to let listeners know how they can win a free copy of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America. To do so, all they have to do is go to cfr.org/giveaway. Let me repeat that, cfr.org/giveaway. There, you can read the terms and conditions for the giveaway and register your entry. The registration for the giveaway will be open until January 16. After that, we will select ten names at random to receive a free copy of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America. And for any listeners struggling to find a pen to jot down all this information, please note that we have provided a link to the giveaway in the show notes for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. 

 

Now, with those logistics out of the way, let's talk about far-right terrorism. Bruce, I want to begin with you. You've been in the academic world for a long time. You always know, defining your terms is your first step. Tell me what far-right terrorism is and how you define it.

 

HOFFMAN:
Terrorism, of course, is violence or the threat of violence in a nutshell, designed to achieve political ends through coercion, intimidation, and indeed violence. Far-right terrorism...actually, I prefer violent far-right extremism. Extremism, of course is perfectly legal in the United States. It's part of our First Amendment guarantees and protections. It's when it crosses the line into violence that it becomes terrorism. And whether it's violent extremism, or violent far-right extremism, or whether it's far-right terrorism, what we are talking about is in essence illegitimate violence, violence that is illegal, violence that in many cases amounts to sedition, which is one of the most serious criminal charges in a democracy like our own, that uses violence to achieve ends: whether it's overturning elections; whether it's targeted hate crimes, which is a big part of it; whether it is militant anti-government resistance that crosses the line into breaking the law. Now, that can be violence. It could also be refusal to pay taxes, and that's a big part of this movement as well.

 

But your question, "How do we define it?", is an excellent question because one of the challenges we had in researching the book is we're talking about a vast movement with many different constituent parts, not a hierarchical single organization, and that's been part of the movement's strength is that it is consistently over decades, one could argue over a century and a half has sought to appeal to an increasingly diverse constituency. You have the Ku Klux Klan types, racists, anti-Semites, xenophobes, anti-LGBTQ, and so on. But this movement evolved beyond that to include militant opponents of the federal government, who believe that not just state government, which is one of the arguments that the United States Civil War was fought over state's rights. They're talking about that there's no legitimate constituted government above the county level. We're talking about people that are militantly opposed to paying federal income tax, that militant zealous adherence to the Second Amendment that believe that there is an ongoing attempt by the federal government to seize their arms. So, a diverse array of people, conspiracy theorists, militant, anti-globalists and so on that come together to comprise this movement.

 

LINDSAY:
Jacob, let me draw you into the conversation, and perhaps you could build off of what Bruce just said and run through some of the names of groups that are currently active on the far-right violent extremism spectrum.

 

WARE:
Sure. The groups that defined January 6th, let's say, include anti-government organizations like the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters. You have a group called the Proud Boys, which is more of a male chauvinist fighting club. You also have neo-Nazi organizations like the Atomwaffen Division, the Base.

 

One of the key elements here that I think is really important to note too is that this movement, this network goes beyond the groups that are involved. They follow a strategy adopted by a former KKK leader called Louis Beam in the 1980s called leaderless resistance. The idea behind this is that groups when they organize are liable to be infiltrated and taken down by the federal government and by journalists, so it's smarter and more practical to actually organize outside of groups as a network and inspire lone acts of violence. So, January 6th, I think, was a coming together of a lot of groups, networks, and individuals as a mob, but a lot of the individual acts of violence that we've seen in the United States and beyond over the past ten to fifteen years have actually involved lone actors who never really showed up on any kind of group or showed up in an organization.

 

LINDSAY:
Bruce, I take your point that if we're looking at right-wing violent extremism, it is a decentralized movement, and Jacob laid out a variety of groups whose views may not align perfectly, but as we try to understand this movement, is there a tie that brings them together?

 

HOFFMAN:
I think the tie that brings them together is that they're militantly opposed to the United States government. They-

 

LINDSAY:
So, they know what they're against?

 

HOFFMAN:
They know what they're against. What they're for, that's a great question. I'd say the best encapsulation of that may be contained in a very dystopian, disturbing 1978 novel called The Turner Diaries that was written by someone named William Luther Pierce under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. Pierce obtained a PhD in physics and studied at Caltech for a time, so this was not someone who was uneducated, and in fact, it may have been his intelligence that led him to write the novel. He was also the head of the National Alliance, which was a neo-Nazi organization, and Pierce understood that the stereotypical or even canonical neo-Nazi propaganda turned out just wasn't going to be interesting or appeal to people, so he fastened on the idea of producing a novel that has been adopted as a blueprint for revolution in the United States.

 

LINDSAY:
What is it about The Turner Diaries that has given it such longevity? Because we see it showing up time and time again among these various far-right violent extremist groups.

 

HOFFMAN:
I think it's this idea that it's not great literature, but it tells a compelling story about a quote, unquote, "true American patriot," Earl Turner, who decides to take matters into his own hands, hearkening back to the Minutemen of the American Revolution, and just as Jacob was describing the strategy of lone wolves, that he becomes part of this series of individual brush fires that in The Turner Diaries culminate in the climax is a major conflagration, which is the overthrow of the United States government. Along the way, they plant a car bomb at the Hoover building, the FBI headquarters in Washington DC. And one of The Turner Diaries most devoted readers in fact, when he wasn't doing his army duties, he sold Turner Diaries at gun shows, was Timothy McVeigh, who until September 11th, 2001 had committed the most lethal act of terrorism in the history of the United States, the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 persons.

 

McVeigh just drank deeply from the well of hate and sedition and disorder that Pierce preached, and in fact, when McVeigh was arrested on April 19th, I mean, very shortly after the explosion, he had copies of pages that he had torn out and highlighted from The Turner Diaries. So, this book has been used by other terrorist organizations, the group known as the Order, which actually takes its name from a fictional order that's in The Turner Diaries. You know the old saying that life imitates art. I mean, this is much like life imitates art. This was adopted by extremists as their battle plan, and Pierce was very effective in its marketing. It's estimated that between 200,000 and half a million copies of The Turner Diaries have been sold. Up until a few days after January 6th, 2001, you could order it from Amazon. So, it was a very powerful treatise that was widely read, imitated, and tragically in some cases emulated.

 

LINDSAY:
Jacob, I have to ask, given the history of The Turner Diaries and how it has been taken up by a wide variety of far-right extremist groups, how does far-right extremism overlap or not overlap with things like white supremacy, Christian nationalism, in other sort of trends, think of the Ku Klux Klan? How do these all fit together or do they?

 

WARE:
Yes. I would say that white supremacy is one form of violent far-right extremism, alongside some of those others you mentioned like Christian nationalism. We write a lot about Christian Identity theory, which is a-

 

LINDSAY:
What is that? Because I get, there's a lot of terms and I sometimes get confused as to how they fit.

 

HOFFMAN:
Christian Identity theory is a theology that holds that white Anglo-Saxon Christians are the true chosen people, that Jews, in fact, were put on the earth by Satan as imposters, and therefore have to be dealt with harshly. There are elements of great replacement theory in it, although Christian Identity-

 

LINDSAY:
Great replacement theory being?

 

HOFFMAN:
That in essence, a conspiratorial cabal of Jews and liberals and other elites are basically importing immigrants and other foreigners into a country basically to take it over, to tip the electoral outcomes and recreate a country from its white Christian origins to something very different. So, Christian Identity theory was basically saying the same thing a century or more before, that this was part of a plot by Jews and others to take over the country. And it's alive and well today. I was just driving across the United States in the summer of 2023, and in Missouri, I noticed at least two billboards on a major interstate for Christian Identity churches, and when I subsequently did some more research about them, I was told yes, they continue to subscribe to this particularly racist, hateful theology.

 

LINDSAY:
Do all people who subscribe to Christian Identity theory participate in far-right extremism?

 

HOFFMAN:
Not at all. I would also say too that a lot of people in Christian Identity may not even embrace some of the more extreme tenets. It grew out of actually a very pacific and peaceful movement in England in the middle of the nineteenth century called Anglo-Israelism, but then in Christian Identity, it gets perverted to see Jews as the enemies, not necessarily as Jerusalem on the hill. But no, that's I think what's unique about this movement, is it seeks to draw from this very diverse constituency, whether religious people, non-religious, whether just racist, but hopes to get them on the same page, and one of the techniques they use is by holding up their interpretation of sacred texts of the Bible as being the correct one and pulling people on a conveyor belt, whereas they may be drawn into the movement because they're zealously committed to Second Amendment rights, but then they find that that's all part of this big plot that also has been biblically foretold, and that becomes a very powerful glue in a very powerful-

 

LINDSAY:
It's a coherent worldview in a sense.

 

HOFFMAN:
Exactly, and it feeds into the wider conspiratorial views. It makes sense out of a lot of diverse and far more complex phenomena.

 

LINDSAY:
It doesn't mean it's true or correct. Just it's a coherent philosophy to some extent.

 

HOFFMAN:
Precisely. To explain the United States economy, and for instance, why farmers were going bankrupt in the 1980s, I mean, this became a very attractive explanation that was quite clear and quite concise, but to these people made a lot of sense.

 

LINDSAY:
Jacob, we have this non-hierarchical movement composed of a variety of different groups that may sometimes collaborate or exchange ideas, but often pursue their own interests, don't necessarily have agreement on the end state they're trying to reach. So, why is it that far-right violent extremism is considered to be the most significant domestic threat in the United States, and is it fair to make that characterization?

 

WARE:
It's fair to make that characterization, and the way I would answer that question is by pointing to this conspiracy theory of great replacement theory. Great replacement theory, as Bruce laid out, has these two sides to it. On the one hand, you've got these theories that demonize Jews and Marxists and feminists for orchestrating this replacement of Western whiteness. On the other hand, you have the hatred and anger that's directed towards minority communities and the LGBTQ communities and immigrant communities and religious minorities. What that effectively means, Jim, is that basically everybody can be defined under that violent umbrella and can fall into the crosshairs.

 

There's a story of a terrorist attack that happened in I believe November 2018 at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, deadliest anti-Semitic terrorist attack in modern American history, by an individual who was primarily actually inspired by migrant caravans. This was the 2018 midterms and that was in the news if you remember, and he wrote on Gab, which is this far-right social media site, that he's not going to stand by and allow his people to be replaced. "I'm going in." And his choice was to attack the Jewish community. I think this just illustrates how under this umbrella of all of these enemies that are kind of arrayed against white people in these individuals' minds, they can really target whoever they want. That means that in a multi-ethnic, diverse, vibrant democracy, a lot of people can fall into the crosshairs. And that's been what's happened, and as you look at across America over the past ten, fifteen years, basically every minority community has been a victim of one of these significant far-right terrorist attacks.

 

LINDSAY:
I'm struck by that point because it does lead to the issue that it's not just organized groups or movements. You can have the actions of so-called lone wolves who are inspired by this rhetoric to go out and ask. And I just want to ask you, Bruce, given that there's a history here of far-right extremist violence, I mean, we talked about The Turner Diaries written back in the 1970s. Why do you think it is that far-right extremist violence is surging today?

 

HOFFMAN:
I would say that a lot of the tenets, a lot of the principles, a lot of the arguments we've been hearing for at least four decades, what's different today is that four decades ago, they had a far more limited reach. It was very hard to communicate these types of sentiments and to enlist people in the cause, than it is now because of social media.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay. In the old days, it was what, newsletters that were hawked out of the back of cars at gun shows? And today, you can go on, you said, Gab. I'm sure there are other-

 

WARE:
Yeah.

 

LINDSAY:
... sort of platforms. I'm not going to go to Gab to check it out.

 

WARE:
Please don't.

 

HOFFMAN:
No, in the old days, you could sign up for mailing lists and you would have to seek them out and figure out where you write to or what post office box you solicit, but that's the interesting thing about this movement is even in the 1980s, they understood that firstly, that wasn't reaching a wide enough audience pervasively and quickly enough, and secondly, when they attempted to communicate with like-minded hatemongers, particularly in that era in Canada and West Germany, they would get arrested by the federal authorities because when you send hate mail internationally, it goes beyond being a First Amendment right and it's a federal offense.

 

LINDSAY:
Yeah. The American First Amendment doesn't apply in Germany.

 

HOFFMAN:
Precisely. So, it's interesting. These groups even four decades ago had a very much of an international orientation. They were never just about the U.S., but they found themselves that they were going to jail. It's kind of like Al Capone going to jail for tax evasion, not for other crimes. And Louis Beam, who Jacob described earlier, sat down and thought, "How can we prevent this?" So, one of his solutions was the leaderless resistance. Let's not have hierarchical pyramidal terrorist organizations where you can just basically arrest up the chain of command through infiltrators. Rather, he seized on something that was called a modem, which doesn't exist really anymore, but it was a way to take a desktop computer that in 1983, when he first thought this up, cost over $3,000. It was not cheap. It had about 48K memory, which is basically a letter on a PowerPoint slide.

 

LINDSAY:
You're taking me down memory lane here, Bruce.

 

HOFFMAN:
And he came up with the idea that you could connect them through modems, which was like the classic, "You've got mail," from America Online.

 

LINDSAY:
Jacob never had to experience modems.

 

HOFFMAN:
Right. But you had a disembodied voice that would tell you that you got email. So, he had the brilliant idea of completely obviating or bypassing, sending things through the U.S. mail, but engaging in recruitment and radicalization using digital means, and of course, radicalization and recruitment by social media is now the bread and butter of every terrorist organization in the world.

 

LINDSAY:
Yeah. Left and right.

 

HOFFMAN:
Left and right, Salafist, Jihadi, you name it, left wing, right wing, and so on. This is what has given this movement now such traction. I mean, it's why something like QAnon, that conspiracy, which seems to many of us uniquely American, has spread and gained increasing popularity in Germany and Russia and Scandinavian countries in the United Kingdom, and it's again, all through social media, amplifying the power, and it's also completely inexpensive and completely timely because it's instantaneous.

 

LINDSAY:
Well, let me ask about that then because you have written about the American export of hate. Why does that gain traction? Why would something like QAnon resonate in Germany or in France or Australia?

 

WARE:
QAnon is an interesting case because it is explicitly pro-Trump conspiracy theory. Basically, QAnon says that President Trump was divinely chosen to rid the United States of this cabal that is Satan-worshiping and killing children to drink their blood to stay young. The really interesting thing about QAnon to me is actually, although all of that seems novel, it's really an age-old conspiracy theory rooted in anti-Semitism, both the blood libel conspiracy theory which again says that Jews drink Christian children's blood, but also more importantly, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is of course this historical anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, which says that Jews control various sectors of society and are manipulating various sectors.

 

So, it's not at all surprising to me, even though it has this kind of Trumpian element to it in the theory itself, that it's getting traction because this concept of elites are manipulating society, elites control the banks, the media, Hollywood, politics of course, that route really exists in basically all the conspiracy theories. Whether it's QAnon, great replacement theory, the New World Order, Zionist occupation government, it's all the same idea and QAnon is just the modern manifestation of that, and to be honest, the mainstream manifestation of that in a way that's very alarming, I think.

 

LINDSAY:
The human mind seems prone to conspiracy theories or conspiratorial thinking. I think we can see it across all countries and all cultures. And I should note that QAnon itself isn't necessarily a right-wing extremist movement. It's just it feeds into those far-right violent extremists. I'm sort of curious, Bruce, January 6th brought home to Americans in a very dramatic way, the existence of these far-right violent extremist groups. We got introduced to terms like accelerationism and boogaloo. Maybe you want to sort of explain what those are. But have the prosecutions of people involved in January 6th done anything to derail these far-right violent extremist groups?

 

HOFFMAN:
I'll start just briefly explaining accelerationism and the boogaloo boys. Accelerationism is actually a Marxist concept, which-

 

LINDSAY:
This is a lot of strange bedfellows in this hateful movement.

 

HOFFMAN:
It is, and it's also a strategy that's adopted by the far left by anarchists and black bloc. I mean, it's also basically to use street violence and other forms of violence to foment a climate of fear and disorder, and through that fear and disorder to engineer the overthrow of the government or whatever legitimate government is in place, whether it's the United States or elsewhere. The boogaloo boys basically adopted this strange sort of slang and wore Hawaiian shirts to in essence sneak beneath the radar. And certainly in the spring before the 2020 presidential election, I mean, I was actively monitoring on Facebook, which is about as open a social media platform as you can find, numerous boogaloo boys sites with upwards of 78,000 members that were all talking about overthrowing the United States government if President Trump wasn't elected, or indeed, if as he predicted, the election was being stolen. So, it becomes very serious business. And the boogaloo boys, in addition to wearing Hawaiian shirts, wear all kinds of combat webbing and combat gear and have semi-automatic weapons and train.

 

I think the most significant prosecutions in the wake of the January 6th, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol was the two dozen or so convictions of members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers for seditious conspiracy. Seditious conspiracy firstly is the most serious charge that can be brought against an individual in the United States. It means violently overthrowing the United States government. Secondly, it's also one of the most difficult to prove. In fact, in 1988 in Fort Smith, Arkansas, fourteen white supremacists were charged with seditious conspiracy and walked, and this was enormously consequential for the movement.

 

LINDSAY:
Because the threshold for proving seditious conspiracy is very high.

 

HOFFMAN:
Very high because it's conspiracy. You're not actually done something. It was enormously consequential in two respects. One is that it breathed new life into the movement. They thought they got away with it, and that in fact, the country was more behind their way of thinking than the government's. But secondly, also, as we've discussed a couple of times previously, it impelled Louis Beam to really push this idea of leaderless conspiracy because it was the recognition, if these fourteen persons were removed from the scene, the whole movement could collapse. So, they wanted to ensure its longevity. I think in the aftermath of the January 6th seditious conspiracy convictions, we don't know what the repercussions will be. One of my guesses is that we're not going to see in the future organized groups wearing T-shirts with logos on them or combat webbing that has their patches. These people-

 

LINDSAY:
They did a lot of it in public. They got videotaped, and the whole idea of recording your crimes for everyone to see probably is not the best protocol if one is going to break the law.

 

HOFFMAN:
That's exactly right. They were walking advertisements for being indicted. What I worry about in the future, Jacob as well, is that they will burrow deeper underground. They'll be really deep beneath the radar. They will consciously avoid any outward manifestations.

 

LINDSAY:
They're not going to be posting their plans on Facebook.

 

HOFFMAN:
Precisely, or rallying people on Facebook. They would have migrated to the dark web or to highly secure encrypted channels that you can communicate on today, or using gaming platforms as well. I mean, that's another way they fly beneath the radar.

 

LINDSAY:
I know nothing about gaming, but I've heard this, that the whole gaming community can be used to recruit, but also to sustain these far-right movements. How does that work, Jacob? I'm asking you because you're younger and you probably understand games better than I do.

 

WARE:
Listen, the gaming element is one of the ways that radicalization has changed in a more online world. I mean, there are apps that exist for the gaming community like an app called Discord where gamers will talk to each other and perhaps engage in racist language, for example, that can aid radicalization.

 

One of the most upsetting things that emerges from a study of the violent far-right today though is a process that we describe as gamification, and that is less so in the radicalization side and actually in the violent acts themselves. So, we can point to a couple of terrorist attacks that have happened in recent years, Christchurch in March 2019, where fifty-one Muslim worshipers are killed in two mosques, and also the Buffalo shooting in May 2022, where ten or eleven shoppers were killed at a market in Buffalo, black shoppers. These attacks were live streamed, and those live streams look, frankly, like first-person shoot-them-up games. So, immediately, you are creating that imagery, but more importantly, I think, is that these individuals talk about what they call "high scores," and when they bounce around these online networks talking to each other, they're often talking about how the next attack has to beat a high score.

 

LINDSAY:
What we're talking about here is killing people-

 

WARE:
Death.

 

LINDSAY:
... flesh and blood in real life.

 

WARE:
And that to me is very frightening, both because it dehumanizes individuals. It demystifies the concept of killing and it turns this form of violence into a video game. And that is, in my mind, again, incredibly dangerous because another thing that we've discovered is that terrorism is starting to skew younger. Some of the individuals that we write about, their radicalization processes begin when they are teenagers. So, I'm not sure if Mein Kampf is a particularly effective radicalization manual anymore because in reality for a fifteen-year-old, they're going to be much more attracted to this concept of, "Well, I can beat the high score. I can be the winner." And what that looks like when it manifests in the real world is obviously devastating acts of terrorism in vulnerable communities, and that's hard to swallow.

 

LINDSAY:
Bruce, that leads to the big question of what's the proper policy response to deal with the movement that is in some ways transforming? It's a leaderless movement to begin with, but now it's going to take much greater care with what we would call operational security, so that it's harder to track. It has a tendency to encourage lone wolf actions, which may be the hardest to track because it's a single individual who decides one day that they're going to go out and wreak violence. What do we do?

 

HOFFMAN:
This problem or this threat I should say, has become so serious that stereotypically, we often tend to view it as directed against Democrats or Liberals, but it's directed against Republicans as well. It's directed against anyone who believes in the principles of the United States and have elected governance. For the cover of the book, we chose an image of a scaffold and a hangman's noose in front of the United States Capitol, and that's significant for two reasons.

 

LINDSAY:
For the record, I'm holding the book up right now because we have a very visual podcast.

 

HOFFMAN:
One reason is that it's taken straight out of The Turner Diaries. I mean, the Day of the Rope is one of the key themes in The Turner Diaries where people are held accountable. But secondly, to Jacob and I, it was so appalling as to many other people, that in a democracy in front of the United States Capitol, the citadel of our democracy, you had these gallows and who was it intended for?

 

LINDSAY:
Mike Pence.

 

HOFFMAN:
Was it intended for a Republican vice president? So, we shouldn't be under any illusion that this is a threat to all Americans, and that's why in thinking about it, Jacob and I came up with kind of a three tiered approach, things that should be done now that will have an immediate effect, that will strengthen the regulatory framework. Domestic terrorism legislation, for example, greater regulation of social media, reform of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which basically gives a free pass to social media, but holds mainstream media accountable and liable.

 

Then we talk about medium terms, things that will rebuild civil society because, let's face it, we are at a time of profound political divisiveness and polarization, and these are things that will pay off in the next three to five years. Digital literacy, for example, bringing broadband to rural America because this is one of the factors in the United States is that on both coasts, everybody has access to things we take for granted, but in parts of rural America or parts of the Midwest, the farming belt, they're still using modems. And I saw this during the pandemic when the lockdown, when students of mine when we went virtual, they'd have to drive forty miles to a Starbucks to get on broadband, so they could attend class. And then, we talk about long-term things that we should be doing now that will break this generational cycle that has perpetuated this for four decades or more, things that will rebuild national unity.

 

LINDSAY:
How concerned are you Jacob about the upcoming U.S. presidential elections? I ask that against the backdrop of the fact that you have these groups who feel that Donald Trump is their clarion and that they are trying to carry out his message. Whether or not Donald Trump intends that or not, it's pretty clear that many of these groups see him in that light. We also have a Republican presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, who has argued that January 6th was an inside job. How do you see this playing out over the next eleven months?

 

WARE:
I think we're entering a very fraught period in American history in a way that's very frightening, partly because I think we were fortunate in a way that January 6th occurred after the election. There was not that many dates left for this kind of moment to occur. That's not the case in 2024. We know that these seditious movements are organized. We know that they're driven by loyalty to a political candidate, and there are all kinds of moments throughout 2024 where you can see individuals taking opportunity to commit violence in defense of their ideology. Whether that's the election itself with voter intimidation, for example, whether it's conventions, whether it's primaries, whether it's President Trump's court dates, all of these moments provide opportunities I think where an individual who's really driven by this movement can lash out in a variety of ways.

 

Another X factor to kind of pull on what Bruce said before is it is possible that the former President Trump loses the primary to another candidate. This is why I think a comment like Vivek Ramaswamy saying that it's an inside job is such a miscalculation because what he fails to appreciate is that if President Trump were to lose the primary, that violence, that anger that we think based on the kind of historical mythology of January 6th that we think is directed against the left will come full force against whichever candidate it was that defeated him. So, for all kinds of reasons, 2024 is a very, very frightening kind of period coming up, and we need to be thinking ahead of time now about how we can try to put out those flames.

 

LINDSAY:
Bruce, I want to ask you the same question, but before you do that, I'd like you to talk briefly about antifa. And the reason I say that is because I can imagine at least some people listening to our conversation are going to be saying, "Yeah, but what about antifa?" I hear that from many, many Republicans and people who lean Republicans, so what about antifa?

 

HOFFMAN:
Absolutely right to ask that question because this is a threat that has migrated to both extremes of the political spectrum. I mean, think about it. Before January 6th, one could argue the most serious attack on Congress was in June 2017, when again, a lone wolf, a lone individual, professing to be a supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders attempted to murder several Republican congressmen at an early morning baseball practice before the annual Congressional Baseball Game. He seriously wounded Steve Scalise from Louisiana, the minority leader. So, the threat goes both ways. And we've seen disorders, whether it's in Minneapolis or in Portland or Seattle, things that do fall within the legal definition in U.S. criminal code 2331 and so on of terrorism, vandalism, arson, and so on.

 

I think the difference is that historically, violent far-right extremists have been more numerous, according to Cynthia Idriss-Miller, who's an outstanding scholar in this field at American University, who wrote the book Hate in the Homeland. She estimates about 75,000 trained violently inclined armed individuals on the far-right. It's very hard to put any kind of number on the far-left and the violently inclined far-left, but at least historically, it has seen to be more street brawling, vandalism, and disorders, perhaps arson. Not the same levels of, let's say, military expertise, for want of a better word, nowhere near the same levels of arms, but this is something that bears watching.

 

I mean, we often talk about violent far-right extremist militias, and there are many of them. I mean, by one count, there's 20,000 members in the United States, The New York Times reported a couple of years ago. A few years ago, there were no radical left militias. They're now at least perhaps as many as a dozen, and they are emulating the far-right. So, just as Jacob described, we have a very volatile atmosphere where perhaps some of the fears that have been encapsulated in several books, in many articles of a new Civil War, maybe a bit over-exaggerated, but they're on some solid foundation in terms of contending factions, battling it out in the streets. And the problem with accelerationist theory is that's exactly what accelerationist theory is about, to both sides battling it out in the streets. So, I think given that the unexpected happened on January 6th that the Capitol was breached and stormed, it's prudent to think unfortunately of worst-case scenarios, and of just as your question suggests, violence on both sides because both sides want to provoke and egg one another on.

 

LINDSAY:
This is an incredibly rich topic. There's lots more we could be discussing, for example, what can be done specifically with social media. But regrettably, we've come to the end of our available time, so I'm going to close up The President's Inbox and tell everyone who's listening, if you want to learn more, please do buy and read, God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America by Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware. Again, Bruce and Jacob, thank you very much for joining me for this conversation.

 

HOFFMAN:
You're very welcome. Thank you for having us.

 

WARE:
Thank you, Jim.

 

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We'd love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and the transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed in The President's Inbox is solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

 

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with the Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks brought to Michelle Kurrilla for her research assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.