Radicalization and Extremism

Farah Pandith, adjunct senior fellow at CFR, and Cynthia Miller-Idriss, professor at American University’s School of Public Affairs and School of Education and director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, discuss the post-9/11 resurgence of far-right violence, and lessons learned in the aftermath of the tragedy that can be applied in the fight against domestic terrorism. Learn more about CFR's Religion and Foreign Policy Program. FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Social Justice and Foreign Policy webinar series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. As a reminder, today’s webinar is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org, and on our iTunes podcast channel, Religion and Foreign Policy. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Farah Pandith and Cynthia Miller-Idriss with us today to talk about the changing landscape of terrorism in the United States. We shared their bios, so I will just go through and give a few highlights. Farah Pandith is an adjunct senior fellow at CFR, a foreign policy strategist, and a former diplomat. She is a pioneer in the field of countering violent extremism, or CVE, and served as a political appointee in both Bush administrations, and the Obama administration. She served on the secretary of homeland security’s Homeland Security Advisory Council, where she chaired the Subcommittee on Countering Violent Extremism. And she was the first special representative to Muslim communities, appointed in June 2009 by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. She’s the author of the book How We Win: How Cutting-Edge Entrepreneurs, Political Visionaries, Enlightened Business Leaders, and Social Media Mavens Can Defeat the Extremist Threat. Cynthia Miller-Idriss is a professor at American University’s School of Public Affairs and School of Education, and runs a polarization and extremism research and innovation lab in the Center for University Excellence. She has testified before Congress and regularly briefs different agencies in the U.S., the United Nations, and other countries on trends in domestic violent extremism, and strategies for prevention and disengagement. She serves on the International Advisory Board of the Center for Research on Extremism in Oslo, Norway. She’s also a member of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Tracking Hate and Extremism Advisory Committee. She is the author of several books, including Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right. She has also authored a recent piece in Foreign Affairs entitled “From 9/11 to 1/6: The War on Terror Supercharged the Far Right.” So thank you both for being with us today. This is a huge topic to cover. A lot of years to understand the history and where we are now. Cynthia, let’s start with you to talk about the ways in which the face of terrorism in America has changed over the past twenty years. MILLER-IDRISS: Thanks, Irina, thank you for the invitation. It’s such an honor to be here and I’m excited to hear the questions from the audience as well. And it’s a great first question. Of course, I could go on for hours to respond to that, so I’ll try to give you the Cliff Notes version of this. Which is to say that it comes as no surprise to anyone in the audience, or really anyone who’s followed the news at all, to know that after 9/11 there was a complete laser focus, I would say, pivoting of global, and national security, and intelligence attention to the threat from international or Islamist forms of extremism. And, we had, of course, many prior waves in this country and elsewhere of what is called often—and I should say the classification terms are difficult here—but I use the term “far-right” to capture white supremacist extremism, but also some anti-government forms of extremism. And we’d had prior waves of that culminating, for example, in the Oklahoma City bombing in the U.S. in 1995, which took the lives of 168 people. But 9/11 really pivoted the attention completely—almost completely, in terms of how resources were distributed. And I should say, not that people weren’t necessarily paying attention, but the political will and the funding wasn’t always there, as I know Farah will agree on that, and we’ve just been chatting about that. But the official attention, the resources, the political will was really dedicated here and abroad to the threat from Islamist extremism. Even around 2008/2009, just after President Obama was elected, we began to see a serious spike both in hate group membership, in the numbers of hate groups, and in the growth of new unlawful militia and anti-government extremist movements like the Oath Keepers or the Three Percenters. These are kind of revolution-oriented or even civil war-oriented unlawful militia or patriot militia movements that seek to thwart what they believe are tyrannical government actions, ultimately culminating in something like 1/6 in the long-run. So there was a steady growth going on for well over a decade. We saw that in episodic terrorist violence, in Oslo in 2011, in places like Charleston in a church, and then at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. A lot of houses of worship, of course. And then Christchurch, New Zealand, followed rapidly by, of course, there was Pittsburgh first, then Christchurch, followed rapidly by El Paso and other places—synagogues and other attacks here and abroad on religious institutions largely, in addition to targeting ethnic groups, like in that Walmart in El Paso. So we’ve been seeing rising terrorist violence, rising extremist violence, mainstreaming and normalization of extremist ideas, which we saw in things like the Unite the Right rally in 2017 in Charlottesville, where you had scores of young men marching across the college campus unmasked, with their faces uncovered, chanting “Jews will not replace us”—I mean, real propaganda. And then a steady growth in attitudes and plots even that were foiled, and then the spread of propaganda really well documented on any number of measures. That eventually did lead in the fall of 2020 to the Department of Homeland Security in its annual threat assessment declaring that domestic violent extremism in general, and white supremacist extremist in particular, is the most persistent and lethal threat facing the nation, facing the homeland. Most threat assessments in Europe continue to track Islamist forms of extremism as representing the greatest threat, but are increasingly describing far-right extremism as the fastest-growing threat. So there’s some slight differences in how the threat assessments are described, which I can get into in Q&A, but there’s no question, I think, that in terms of lethality, in terms of global percentage of deaths, for example, far-right extremism represented 82 percent of terrorist deaths in 2019 globally across the West. So we have a number of measures that pose to its serious nature, and the pivoting of the threat, and really a pretty delayed reaction to it in terms of the resources, the attention, and the willingness to address it. I think a lot of that changed on January 6. And we saw shortly after that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence sort of slightly revise the threat assessment to note that it’s not just white supremacist extremism but also anti-government extremism, as a form of anti-government extremism that poses the most persistent threat. And I think that that’s true. But we now have quite serious attention, Pentagon issuing its first ever stand down order. We have serious attention in the form of hearings and a number of other committees going on. Sort of the springing into action around the globe, I think, to start to think about solutions. But my negative assessment, and I’ll get into that finally. I’ll just conclude to say it’s still very little very late in terms of the kind of resources that are being devoted in the U.S. I would say much better resources are being devoted overseas in terms of prevention, particularly in Germany and in New Zealand in its response to Christchurch. And I’m happy to get into that in the Q&A. But I’ll stop there. That’s an attempt to kind of do a Cliff Notes thumbnail sketch of the past two decades in a pretty short period of time. FASKIANOS: That was great. Farah, let’s go to you to talk about counterterrorism strategies and practices, and how they’ve changed, and what you see that we need to be doing. PANDITH: Well, first of all, I just wanted to say good afternoon to everybody. And I wanted to highlight the fact that there are three women taking part of this panel. And that’s a terrific thing, because usually you do not see that. So that’s one thing I just want to say. Cynthia’s excellent synopsis of where we’ve been and where we’re going is sobering. And I agree with everything that she had to say. I want to take a step back, though, and talk about the ideology that moves people to think about the “us versus them,” which is really at the heart and the core of all of these different kinds of terrorist organizations. You may believe different things, but ultimately it is an “us versus them” scenario. And it is rooted in how you think about yourself, and identity, and belonging. And that’s essential to say, because I think that the U.S. government—and we can talk about how international actors have responded to this differently—but our assessment of the forces that move the human emotions have been off. We have not been ahead of the game. We have been playing catch up. We have been thinking about what we think we see in front of us, and analyzing, and articulating a response that is for the very second that we’re dealing with it. There has been very little long-term forecasting of where this is going to be, which has resulted in too little, too late. And it is dramatically shocking to me that here we are in 2021, where in the homeland we are dealing with the kinds of threats that we’re dealing with from the ideology of “us versus them,” when societal sinkholes have been exposed in our country around political lines, around other lines. The audience is American, so you all have been living it with us. These things have pulled apart societies. Communities haven’t come together. You add to that what’s been happening with the technology revolution over the last twenty years, and you see a very sobering sight. And you see an activation of hate and extremism that no one could have imagined. And what that means is that the solutions that we were looking at, right, when we were shocked and appalled at 9/11, and we didn’t know how to handle it, and how do we prevent something like this from happening? We were looking obviously at the kinetic response. How do we make sure al Qaeda doesn’t come back to our country? But soon after that we began to think about, well, how do you build the prevention models within communities so that the people that they’re trying to recruit are not finding this ideology appealing? And, everybody knows twenty years later that it’s a whole of society thing. We’ve been talking about this for fifteen or twenty years. Obviously, it is not just government. It is nonprofits. It is philanthropy. It is business. We know all of that. We know that solutions are local. We know that faith leaders matter. We know that community leaders—and we know all of this stuff. What’s the problem now? The problem has been that while we have piloted some exceptional programs—early days after 9/11, for example, using faith leaders to help us get into communities, for example. Using former extremists to tell their story, whether you’re former FARC, or former al Qaeda, or former Neo-Nazi. I want to tell you how I was recruited, why it was appealing to me, how I left. Those are really important stories to be able to tell. Whether it is education programs in schools—I mean, we piloted many different kinds of things in our country. Meaning, we supported those kinds of things. But we were not looking at the homeland. Our assumption was we got it here. We don’t have the problems that other countries have. We’ll be OK. And how foolhardy is that, to look at that right now, because ideology has no borders. So something that is happening in Oslo affects the guy in New Zealand, right? We learned that the hard way. So when I look at the response, Irina, what I see is good intentions. I see some creative thinking. But I see a very slow and unsteady response in both the scale and the understanding of the global nature of this ideology, and how it pings across the world. We aren’t talking about recruits coming from generations that are much older. We are looking at Millennials. We are looking at Gen Z. And we’re looking at Gen Alpha. We, as the United States, ought to be thinking about how to protect our communities—a fifty-state plan—that allows us to go deep on cultural intelligence so that we understand how the emotions, psychologically, and spiritually, and community-wise are shaping the way people think about their identity, because that absolutely impacts the ability for somebody who’s recruiting that person to do something. So all of this to tell you in the good news category, it’s not like we haven’t tried anything and we don’t know what’s going to work. In the bad news category, it’s, well, what are we doing about scale? While I absolutely am delighted to see a change in the numbers of the amount of money that’s going out in terms of grants to local communities to do work, I’m distressed because I look at the landscape in the years ahead. We cannot expect to get a handle on the ability to build inoculation, and resilience, and prevention on $20 million a year. I mean, that is outrageous. So how do we think differently about this? And then the final thing I just want to say is on the way in which we approached handling preventative strategies in the ideological space, we did it like this: This is the kind of extremism we’re talking about, so here are the kinds of programs we think are going to work for AQ or ISIS. This might work for Neo-Nazis. We have done very little analysis in terms of the nuance within those groups. I don’t see specific programs for how women are getting radicalized. I don’t see specific programs for how you look at young people who are in the Gen Alpha category, for example. So we can do better to say how do we think about the child and adolescent mind? What do we learn from the social scientists that can apply to how we build these programs? What are community leaders saying that they need? For example, the resources on the mental health side, which we are not actually doing properly. All of these things can dramatically shift the safety structure and the safety landscape for our country if we do this right. FASKIANOS: Thank you, both of you. Very powerful. Let’s go to all of you now for your questions and comments. And I can’t believe we have no questions. We do. All right. Syed Sayeed. Be sure to unmute yourself. SAYEED: OK. Good afternoon and thank you to you, first, the Council on Foreign Relations, to organize this forum. And thanks to both the speakers. They have very powerfully stated their introductory framework for all of us to think. My point is that the religious—what shall I say—authorities from Muslims, Christians, Jews are not playing the kind of role that they need to play. Because it doesn’t matter what religion you are talking about, the philosophy of all religions is looking after the humans, and have a framework in which the human individual and human groups can grow and develop in a way that they are going to be stronger in individual roles and group roles, to contribute to the betterment of their own groups and other human groups. I mean, that’s the bottom line of Christianity, of Judaism, of Islam. The wellbeing of humanity is uppermost in all religious thinking. So if the religious leaders around the world can spell this out very clearly for their followers, and for others, it might become a very important factor in the future. They are not playing that kind of role. And I hope and pray that they realize that they have a responsibility, not just a choice but a religious responsibility, to spell out the nature of wellbeing they’re trying to cultivate individuals and groups. And I hope and pray—and I pray that the speakers and the Council on Foreign Relations do play a role to bring about this kind of focus of the international religious authorities. Thank you for the opportunity to make my point. FASKIANOS: Thank you, Syed. Farah and Cynthia, do you see that the faith community and faith leaders have—that there has been enough done by faith leaders? Or what more could they do? I mean, practical advice on what can be done in their communities, in their synagogues, and churches, et cetera? MILLER-IDRISS: Well, I think that there has been—first of all, thank you to the participant for the helpful comment. And I think that we agree. I think when you have people who are adhering to the tenants of their faith communities, you typically see people who are resisting extremism and working toward a common humanity. What we often see, though, is some manipulation within communities of disinformation, or propaganda, or scapegoating that can exploit, in some cases, across any faith community, some of the tenets of those beliefs. And so I think what we have been seeing over the last few years has been what we call kind of secondary prevention resources being devoted to faith communities to better reinforce prevention of violence by equipping people—what I call equipping the people at the synagogue doors to make sure they can thwart a violent attacker effectively. I mean, it’s important, but it’s not the kind of prevention that I really feel like we need, which is more primary prevention in terms of helping truly inoculate populations against the spread of disinformation, and propaganda, and conspiracy theories in ways that help them recognize and resist from within the mainstream the outreach that comes to them from the fringes. And so I should say, in full disclosure, my research lab is one of the teams that got DHS money that was announced just last week in partnership with the Multi-Faith Neighbors Network in Tarrant County, Texas, and Search for Common Ground, to build a toolkit for faith communities by working with and partnering with faith communities in Texas. And then hopefully we will be empirically testing it to ensure that it is effective as a primary prevention to helping people be inoculated against, recognize, and be more resilient to propaganda and disinformation and extremist ideas. And then hopefully we’ll be able to scale up. There is a plan for scaling up as well if it’s effective. But so there is—so, I’m intimately familiar with one effort, because we’re a part of it and we launch tomorrow, October 1, that work, with our first kick-off meeting. And so we’re about to begin that. And I hope that it’s the start of—and that began because a faith community member reached out to us. So we do—asking for help and assistance. And then we went after—we decided to do it and went after funding to support it. But I absolutely agree that part of the trouble here is a tremendous lack of resources compared to what other countries have to really engage in both the kind of pilot testing we need and the scaling up, along with the evidence and the transparency about what works. We just don’t have anywhere near the kinds of resources that we need to do it. I mean, we’re just scratching the surface. So it’s—I think if we don’t really see either private sector donors step up or the federal government step up, we’ll just be scrambling along to sort of pick up the trails of what’s—little crumbs of things, rather than really trying to build something that’s more comprehensive. That’s my disclaimer about the negative, my pessimistic side. It’s that we just don’t have enough resources. But the optimistic side is that the will is there, I think. The understanding of the need is there. And the creative energy is there. And we’re certainly seeing that from within the faith community as well. FASKIANOS: Great. And Syed, now everybody has raised their hands, which is fantastic, with written questions. So thank you for getting us started. So let’s go next to Tereska Lynam. And you need to unmute yourself. LYNAM: Sorry. FASKIANOS: There you go. LYNAM: So mine is actually a comment that I’d like your reaction from. FASKIANOS: Can you identify yourself, Tereska? LYNAM: Sorry. Tereska Lynam, University of Oxford. And I have been traveling a lot recently, both within the U.S. and internationally. And I’ve never in my life had so many—heard so many political moderates, both inside and outside of the U.S., mention, kind of apropos of nothing, that they believe that the U.S. is headed for a civil war. And I would like to hear your—if you have any reaction to that, what your—if you’ve seen maybe the same thing, or—I don’t know. Thank you. (Laughs.) PANDITH: Tereska, it’s interesting that you’re saying that. I used the term “social sinkholes” when I was giving my overview. And I think that there is deep despair in the United States that is being felt in new ways because we’re able to access things with a swish of our finger on our phones. And so you’re getting a consistent feedback loop on a whole host of different things—both feeling optimistic, and negative, and confused, and whatever you—and fearful. And I think it’s the fear of some of these things that are driving some of those conversations, because we haven’t seen it at this level in this way. No one has a crystal ball to be able to say we’re heading this way or that way, but we certainly know one thing. And that is if we do not talk about the changes that have happened, and why we think they are happening, and address them, we’re in a completely—to use the term “unprecedented” is ridiculous, because post-COVID no one has seen this. But there’s a movement that I concur with you that I have also seen, policymakers as well as political commentators, thought leaders, and others, who are filled with confusion and despair because they don’t know the way out, because they haven’t seen a model that looks familiar to them that they can figure out what’s the strategy to go forward. That’s my response to it. I also just wanted to say a word about the faith leader thing, just to—I agree with what Cynthia said. And I think there is activation in a new way. There has always been, in my opinion, great desire from faith leaders of all kinds to be helpful in the fight against hate and extremism. That’s been my experience since 9/11. But I also agree with the point that there are also negative influences in the faith community that want to stoke a fire in a particular way. And I certainly have seen that, we can see that in our own country with, I mean, somebody like Terry Jones, who most people forget, but he made a huge difference to the way in which Muslims understood themselves in America, in terms from a safety point of view. But also the way Muslims around the world understood what they believed America to be, because he was going to burn the Quran. So there are aspects to this that are really important. And one last point, when we talk about faith leaders. I just want to make the point, with the change in the kind of fear that we’re looking at right now around ideology—from the violent far-right and particularly the white supremacist movements—you haven’t seen a reaction in America that is asking Christian leaders to talk about what Christianity stands for in the way in which after 9/11 they demanded that everybody that, quote, “looked Muslim” said something about the fact that AQ did not represent Islam. And I’m not—I’m simply saying this for one reason: The universe and the expectations have shifted over twenty years. And what we see as necessary has shifted over twenty years. And I think that there is great need to reassess what we ask for from our own neighbors and from our faith leaders and our community leaders in this moment in time. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go to a written question from Abbas Barzegar. And, Abbas, do you want to just ask it yourself? OK. BARZEGAR: Yeah, I’m happy to do so. FASKIANOS: Oh, great. Wonderful. And identify yourself. It’s great to hear from you. BARZEGAR: I’m Abbas Barzegar here, now with a group called Horizon Forum. And we work on informing philanthropy and grant-making institutions about domestic hate groups and extremist groups. So the question was around cultural intelligence. Farah, you mentioned this. And I just—it’s a friendly question, asked in good faith. But one of the direct grievances that is often mentioned by domestic extremist groups and hate groups is government surveillance, government intrusion into the community, et cetera. And so I worry about—I’d like to hear more about what you think is an effective strategy there? Because I would hate for government to play an increasing polarizing role in the field, to become a participant in the polarization rather than some—an actor that can deescalate the tension. PANDITH: Abbas, I’m so glad you asked that question. And I take with the spirit that you intend it. And I too agree with you, we don’t want a security state upon us. However, that’s not what I meant. (Laughs.) So culture—I have a piece coming out with sparks & honey that—which is a cultural intelligence firm in New York—that will go into great detail here. But as I looked at the experimentation over the last twenty years on how we can be predictive and forecast better, the only tools in our toolbox around that was human intelligence. It was really trying to—trying to gather—the old forms of information. And I thought to myself: If we’re able to predict years in advance that veganism is going to be on the rise, or cannabis is going to be the thing that everybody’s talking about, or that this product is what everybody’s going to be using in their households, why is it that we cannot understand through our daily lives—this is not surveillance. This is information that marketing firms have. This is not going to mosques and churches and spying behind a pew or a thing. That is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the touchpoints that put together signals that are able to tell you: Something really interesting is happening with Generation Z. They’re moving in this direction just the same way we can tell they’re becoming more directive around what products they buy because of what the companies stand for. Just the same way we can tell that Gen Alpha, even though they’re super young, are going to be moving in a direction that’s very different from their parents, who are Millennials. And this is why, because these are the things that have been around them. This is what they’ve been exposed to. But that requires us to be alert and on it with the signals that we see, not signals that we’re gathering in super secret, horrifying ways. And I feel very strongly that one of the missing pieces in understanding society is that we’re not looking at society. We’re not seeing things. We’re compartmentalizing  what brands people are going to buy, or what products might be interesting. And that may be fine for the bottom line of a company, but I want to understand from an emotional and psychological thing, could we have understood twenty-five years ago, because of the signals that we were seeing within society, the way people were acting, talking, buying things, doing things—could we have built a map that said: Something really odd is happening around identity and belonging? And this fear around America not being white—a predominantly White nation is going to have an effect in a way that is really X, Y, or Z. Could we have done that? That is the question I’m asking myself. And I look at the trajectory of the hybrid extremisms, the surge in money and organization and all of the things that we know are happening in the terrorist front, and I am really worried about the future. And so what I am asking myself is: How do we forecast better? What can we think about and do differently? So that is what I mean by cultural intelligence. I am not talking about a police state that is—we already know that Apple and Google and whatever are taking our data, and all that. That’s not—it is understanding how to put those pieces together with social scientists and others who can say: These are indicators for societal change in this particular way. I hope that I explained that. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Simran Jeet Singh, with The Aspen Institute’s Inclusive America Project. Simran, do you want to ask your question? All right, so I’m going to ask it. So thanks to you both for your presentation. And his question is regarding the role of race and religion in relation to how we perceive threats. To what extent do you see Christianity animating the surge of far-right white nationalism in the U.S.? And what effective responses, if any, have you seen that might serve as good models for us? MILLER-IDRISS: Well, I can start by saying I think,  the way that I typically describe this is what—there are two major sides to the far-right extremist spectrum. One is—and they intersect and overlap with each other. But one is sort of anti-government, anti-democratic, authoritarian, refusal to protect minority rights, et cetera, et cetera. The other is based on a range of supremacisms. And the idea of supremacism, the most common expression in the United States historically, and the one that has posed and still poses the most lethal threat in terms of terrorism, is white supremacy—white supremacist extremism. But we also have Western supremacy. We have Christian supremacy. We have male supremacy. In ways—I mean, we’ve seen rising incel—involuntary celibate—violence and terrorist actions against women. We have seen the self-described Western chauvinist Proud Boys, who are, very, and increasingly, across Europe in particular, a very strong anti-Islam and Islamophobic ideologies couched as pro-Western, right? So what you have are far-right groups, and political parties even position themselves as protecting women’s and LGBTQ rights because they argue that those are Western values that have to be protected from a threat—that supposed threat of Sharia law. And of course, we saw that here with forty-three states putting forward over the past twenty years actual legislation to anti-Sharia legislation. So we have this real deep Christian supremacy, even—or couched sometimes as Western supremacy—that is really baked in many ways to this Islamophobic and anti-Islam thinking that also often bleeds into anti-immigrant scapegoating in general. And it’s policies even that either are explicitly kind of Muslim bans or that are using fearmongering and scapegoating against immigrants to kind of stoke that same type of fear and protectionist idea of an existential threat that’s coming. So that’s a kind of rambling way of saying: Yes, there absolutely is. Even when it’s not explicit. I think even when we don’t hear explicit pro-Christian or sort of Christian extremist thinking—although there is, of course, Christian nationalism and Christian white nationalism going on. When we don’t hear it, it’s often coded as Western or even as anti-immigrant, where Western is framed as superior, right? And a lot of even language we’re hearing right now around immigrants at the border supposedly carrying COVID, right, that that is—that the source of—I mean, very anti-science, right? Anti—not—explaining disease in ways that are very typical for the scapegoating of immigrants historically over time, and not rooted in the science of how this disease is spreading, and why, and where. So that’s a longwinded explanation and way of saying that I think we have to be looking at these intersections around the way that supremacism works. And that even when white supremacy isn’t explicit ideology that’s stated, or sometimes denied, right? We have groups that are denying that they’re white supremacists but positioning themselves as Western supremacists. There’s often a civilizational kind of rhetoric or language behind it that is still—and I think very much traces back also to the post-9/11 climate. I mean, we have to understand that, of the real Islamophobia industry and its efforts to stoke Islamophobia in the population, and the way that that fostered an anti-immigrant and pro-Western kind of ideology. So and then the only thing I will say about the solutions here is that we need to involve faith communities, but we also need to help understand at a very basic level, within the education system, what does it mean to have supremacist kind of thinking across the board? How does that intersect with male supremacisms, Western supremacisms? Because it’s everywhere. It’s baked into the history of this country and it’s baked into  everything from gender pay gaps to all kinds of things, right? I mean, the fact that Farah mentioned right at the beginning that there are three women here, that is also—I am often the only woman in the room in these kinds of conversations. And I’m sure you are too, Farah. So that is really, really notable. And just the history of how these types of assumptions get made about who has a voice and who speaks is also part of this story. So I think we need to engage faith communities. But it has to be part of a much bigger set of engagements about how to combat supremacism as a rule, even as we combat the most lethal threat from that, which is white supremacist extremism. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m now going to next to Ani Zonneveld. ZONNEVELD: Hi. Good morning, good afternoon. Ani Zonneveld, Muslims for Progressive Values. Thank you for pointing out the importance of culture. And there’s clearly a lot of good ideas out there. But culture is so poorly funded. And as you look at the plethora of problems that we have, the religious influence on culture, that connection is really underestimated by our policymakers. The costs of changing hearts and minds, from my experience with working with religious leaders who are human rights affirming, it just took five years to do that. And it took less than $270,000 to do that in one country, which is the cost of one bomb. Our foreign policy of bomb and rebuild, bomb and rebuild does not work. At what point are we going to wake up to a more enlightened foreign policy and the funding that goes into it? Number one. Number two, the success of the Taliban and the response from the Muftis of the world congratulating the Taliban was shocking and appalling. And these are Muftis representing governments, right? These are—as you know, probably Farah—the Muftis are not just some ad hoc committees. They are set up by governments. What do we have and what powers do we have in our funding policies with these governments in reigning in this radical influence? Thank you. PANDITH: Ani, it’s great to see you on this screen. I hope that you’ve been well through this pandemic. Well, there are two things I want to say—(laughs)—about your excellent points. The first is, I look to the American public to ask their elected leaders why they are spending so little on soft power. I mean, that is fundamentally the bottom line. If we, as members of our country, don’t demand a more realistic assessment of the power of soft power, we’re going to get what we got. And we have—I did an assessment with folks around soft power. And when I asked, do you know how much money we spent on trying to stop ISIS using the ideology of ISIS compared to how much we used in the kinetic war, people would imagine it was 15 percent, 20 percent, 25 percent. And I said it was 0.0138 percent. That is how much money—because we don’t value it. We say we do, but we don’t. So the only way to change that on the foreign policy side is to demand that Congress give more money to our instruments of soft power across government, but also demand that—and this is a really important point—I think we are one of the most generous nations in the world on the philanthropic side. And there is a lot of money that goes to incredible causes in our nation. And I’m really proud of that as an American. But I have firsthand experience over twenty years of asking foundations, family foundations, large foundations, private philanthropists, begging and pleading with them to give money towards fighting the ideology of “us versus them.” Eyes glaze over first. Secondly, there is this problem of—and the Congress had the same problem—can you prove to us that if we give you this dollar that that person will never be radicalized? Well, no. I can’t. I mean, how can I prove? How can I promise you that? That is the metric they are expecting. And so you got very little money from NGOs going into helping—sorry, very little money from philanthropists given to NGOs which are doing the bulk of the work, and should be. And one of the big things that I have a problem with is you’re asking NGOs to fight for money to do this really important work, which often means that they have to review really horrible videos and information that they’re getting. Beheading videos or horrible things that they’re seeing on TikTok or, pick your social media platform. And there’s no support on the mental health side or anything for these NGOs, because they’re so small. They’re not Facebook. (Laughs.) They’re not—they don’t have quiet rooms and free food, OK? These are NGOs that are fighting for every dollar. Why am I saying all this? I 100 percent agree with what you’re saying about why our value system is shifted. But it is not just government. It is also where philanthropy must put their money as well. Then your second question on—or, comment, rather, on the Taliban and other organizations—other nation-states that have religious instruments that support what the Taliban is doing. It is outrageous that we aren’t doing more to call them out. I mean, Ani, you and I have had the conversation about Saudi Arabia. You and I have had the conversation about what I saw around the world with the billions of dollars they spent over decades to transform the way people think about what it means to be Muslim, so there’s a monolithic way that you must be. But America and other nations—it’s not just the United States—have to be clear about what they stand for in this way. You are 100 percent right when you say we have nations like Pakistan who are openly talking about how great it is that they are—that they’re going forward doing the work of—that no one else could do. The Taliban is doing really, really well. You don’t see America following up in the way in which we would expect them to. So all of the points that you are saying are correct. But it comes down, from my perspective, to what the American citizen demands of our elected leaders, and how we articulate that. FASKIANOS: Great. I’m going to go next to Sharon Welch who has written, I think, two questions and raised her hand. So why don’t you just ask the one that you want. WELCH: One of the things that I’m interested in is if you’ve found anything that’s successful in countering the spread of disinformation. I’m now working for League of Women Voters. When we talk about free and fair elections, and the difficulty of misinformation, I know there was a recent study from MIT that showed that even with amplification false information spread more quickly than true information. So what projects are you seeing that’s helping counter that? MILLER-IDRISS: I’m so glad you asked. (Laughs.) Because I run a research lab that has spent the past year pilot testing a number of things to see what works. And we’re now in the scale-up phase and expansion phase. And to our great delight, everything we tested—from an animated video about the Boogaloo, to acted videos on—inoculation videos on white supremacy, scientific racism, and male supremacist content, and anti-vax content. And then a parent’s—a series of resources for parents and caregivers—everything was effective in all of our pre and post testing and assessment of what worked. In different ways, though. So we have some of those findings up on our website, others out in preprint. I’m happy to try to share them. We’re trying to—one of the struggles of this work is that there’s never enough public communication about what we know. Now we know a lot of things, and we’re trying to figure out what’s the best way to get it to the public. But, for example, we built every source for parents and caregivers, and a whole series of resources for teachers, coaches, mental health practitioners, others who work with youth, in partnership with the Southern Poverty Law Center. We have built out a dedicated website, which I’ll drop in the chat. But one of the things we did was test that resource with 755 parents and caregivers to see what they learned. Did they improve their ability to recognize warning signs of extremist radicalization? And did they feel more empowered to intervene if they did see those signs in a child that they knew? And one—it was really fascinating. It moved the needle in the right direction on every single measure, except for one group with one measure. Which is that the most educated group of parents did not improve their ability to recognize disinformation as a result of our intervention. And the reason why is because they came in so confident—so much more confident than everybody else that they already knew how to do that. And then they engage in our intervention, read our resource. And they got less confident, because they realized then how coded this stuff is, how complicated it is when kids encounter it through means and online gaming sites, in emojis, in anime, all kinds of places online that they weren’t anticipating, through coded speech, in really difficult youth cultural ways. And they got less confident. So we saw that as a win, because we corrected what we see as overconfidence, essentially. But it also taught us that that group of parents was never going to reach out to that resource on their own, because they didn’t think they need it. And so one of the things we’re trying to do, every partnership we engage in, every research project we do, every intervention we do have evidence associated with it. So we do agree to engage with the city, for example, and mayor’s office right now, but only if we’re allowed to pilot test and do pre and post testing and evidence. Because we really want commitment to transparency on all the measures. So we have our full reports, all of the instruments up and available, for example, on that whole SPLC study. So we have found our video-based inoculations moved the needle, helped people be less persuaded by extremist propaganda. So I’m happy to share that. You can visit our website. I’ll drop it in the site. But there is some good evidence, including from our lab, about what works. But it doesn’t always work the same way for every person, I guess is what I would sum up. FASKIANOS: That’s fantastic. And after this webinar we’ll send out the link to this video as well as links to Cynthia’s resources. So everybody, if you don’t get it in the chat we will circulate it, and anything that Farah wants to send out as well, because we want to disseminate good information and have you share it with your networks and in your communities. So I’m going to go next to Thomas Uthup, who has raised his hand and also written his question. Tom, over to you. UTHUP: Hi. Thank you very much for this discussion, which has been fascinating. Yes, my—it’s actually a two-part question. But before I say that I wanted to thank CFR, and Irina, and Professor Miller-Idriss, and Farah Pandith for this fascinating discussion. Professor Idriss, please say hi to Shamil for me. Both of you have touched on the global element of this far-right extremism, but I wonder if you could elaborate a bit on the ideological, beyond the inspirational, direct inspiring Christchurch, and online connections between far-right groups across the world. I remember twenty years ago doing some research on one of the extremist groups in India, which actually duplicated the language used by Hitler in Mein Kampf, but sort of Hitler’s language about the Jews, these people just substituted Muslims. But everything else was exactly the same. Also, one thing that has puzzled me is how the far-right groups in the U.S. seem to attract minorities. For example, Enrique Tarrio, at least to me, seems like a Hispanic leader of the Proud Boys. And you would think that that they would not find these kinds of groups attractive. And the same thing, I think Ali Alexander is African-American but born a Muslim. Thank you. MILLER-IDRISS: Well, thank you, Mr. Uthup. I’ll try to answer these quickly. I’d love to hear Farah’s answer to these as well. But on the second question, that gets to that issue of supremacisms and the intersecting supremacisms that I talked about, because one of the things we see is that we do have members of ethnic minorities joining groups across the far-right spectrum that are, in this case, ostensibly and officially not white supremacists, but are Western supremacists and misogynistic. And so you have groups that are attracting people based on the idea of anti-immigrant, or anti-Islam, or a Western civilizational rhetoric that  obviously is linked to white supremacy and white supremacist thinking, but is not officially—is a related form of extremism. And I think when you see that people are attracted to this supremacist kind of thinking in different expressions—and the far-right is a—includes a spectrum of those expressions that intersect and mutually reinforce each other, but don’t always come out in the same exact way—then I think it makes a bit more sense. On the global question, I’ll just say that  there are a lot of things to say about that, about the global interconnectedness. But one of the things that’s happened over the last ten years or so that is really important at mobilizing white supremacist extremisms, is the emergence of a consolidated conspiracy theory called the great replacement, which united what had been an American-based conspiracy theory called white genocide with a European conspiracy theory called Arabia. This idea that different groups were responsible for it but that through demographic change and immigration there was the eradication of white civilizations or of European ones. That came together for complicated reasons that I’ve written about and can explain in depth another time, in something called the great replacement. And that now has mobilized. And it enables basically—we’ve seen Jews be attacked for it, we’ve seen Muslims be attacked for it, we’ve seen Latinos be attacked for it. It enables the target groups to be diverse. Anyone who threatens white or Western civilizations is a target because through demographic change and immigration they’re seen as an existential threat. And then people are called upon to act heroically to thwart it. And I think that that’s really important, this idea that people are drawn for kind of positive reasons. And it sounds twisted. They believe they are engaged in a quest to make a real difference that is, even if they see themselves as martyrs, to inspire others. And so that’s global, because it’s seen as a threat—at least, it’s global across Western civilizations—seen as a threat from immigration demographic change, this idea of a genocide or a replacement. They even will compare that, and have compared the experience of white civilizations, to Native Americans. That’s a frequent trope. I’ve heard it for twenty-five years, this idea that white civilizations are going to be forced onto reservations because immigrants will eradicate them, just as they did the Native American tribes. So we saw that in a recent manifesto of the terrorist in El Paso, for example. So those kinds of—that level of existential threat and fear is what’s at the root. But it’s global now, and in ways that have made it much more powerfully shared across online spaces. I could go on, but I have to stop, I think, to—I really want to hear what Farah has to say about this as well. PANDITH: I just want to add one small thread to the question about sort of—you’ve talked about your experience in India and taking Hitler and making it fit for what they want to do. And obviously—I just want to remind people that what we’re seeing right now in terms of the sophistication, if we can use that word, and savviness from these groups is really quite dramatic. It’s almost like a uniform that people use to sort of build that spirit. There is a—they share memes, they adopt memes. They’re looking at successful models to see what worked. As evil and horrible as ISIS was, they were really successful. (Laughs.) I mean, they were very successful. They got people from all over the world to come to the so-called caliphate. There was a look, there was a feel, there was an image, there was a whole thing all set up. So even though you may not buy into the ISIS ideology, boy, you want to do what they did so that you can get their money, their organization, their look, their power. So you do see other kinds of groups going, OK, if they were doing it this way, or this was the way they recruited, this is the way they raised money. We’re going to do it too. So I think we—this goes back to my theme of understanding the complexity of the moment we are in today, alongside the most obvious things which are obviously the technology landscape has completely shifted everything. But there’s a financial piece also that I just want to highlight, because that is making it possible for this global movement—whatever it is—to be activated. They are not going to be able to do the work that they’re doing if they weren’t funded, and they were not organized in this way. So I think that there are aspects to this that when people are looking at what the threat is and what’s coming, there are places to plug. And we could cut things off, if we were only to do it in a more strategic way, as opposed to sort of just analyzing it. FASKIANOS: Thank you. We are at the end of our time. And I would ask each of you just to leave us with—and somebody put this in the chat, Zarrir Bhandara, that obviously religious leaders and clergy have a great responsibility. So what would you leave this group with as the top two things that they should be doing, or could be doing in their communities to help? MILLER-IDRISS: Oh, hard question in thirty seconds or so. But I would say helping people to understand how they’re being manipulated by the persuasive extremist tactics, propaganda, and rhetoric—whether that’s the weaponization of youth culture, the positioning of the far-right as the counterculture to a triggered mainstream that can’t take a joke—as we often see happening online—or the scapegoating of immigrants, or the ways in which in every—we’re seeing the mainstreaming of extremist ideas and the normalization of some of those ideas come across in many more spheres of life. So there’s no longer just a destination. And I think it’s on the obligation—it’s the obligation of everyone in the mainstream to build resilience to it. And that’s part of what it means to recognize that democracies are fragile, and that for a country that likes to think of itself as a beacon of democracy, it maybe is more of a shock to realize how fragile it is. But it’s all the more incumbent on all of us, I think, to understand that you can’t just defend democracy with force, but you have to do it with education. And that education starts in every community, including faith communities. So I think it’s on all of us to take this up in whatever small way we can. And it can feel overwhelming, and that you can’t do anything about it. But that’s the beauty of community-based resilience, is that every community can. So I think it’s actually an empowering moment for local communities to step up and really engage. FASKIANOS: Farah. PANDITH: So I would just say that—yeah—there are three things I would say. The first is solutions are available and affordable right now. And you cannot feel like putting your hands up in the air, like what are we doing to do? I realize you can’t boil the ocean, but to Cynthia’s point you need to start small in your local community, this is how it matters. Two, you must—must, must, must—put the pressure on elected leaders to put this into their framework as a priority. We have an obligation as members of a society to be able to build the kind of societies that we want. There are more of us than there are of the extremists. So let’s use that power and do more. And the third is, coalitions are our friend. And I think America has a great legacy of building coalitions to move things. And I think we are late to the game on hate and extremism. Everybody is fearful. We are a country that is a gun culture, so that—there’s an aspect of that as well, that if I go too far, I’ll be killed. There are requirements in terms of our own individual response to being an active actor in our community not to look away, and to do what we can do. So what Cynthia says about it takes all of us, that is my mantra. And I completely agree. Let us ask all of the members of community to put the red lines down on hate and extremism and build the communities that we want. FASKIANOS: Well, thank you both. We could go on for hours but, unfortunately, we can’t because of time. And we appreciate the time that you’ve given us today and the work that you’re doing in this space, and to all of you for your questions and comments. As I said, we will send out a link to the video, to the resources that Cynthia and Farah have mentioned. You can follow Farah on Twitter at @farah_pandith and Cynthia at @milleridriss. So I encourage you to sign up for their tweets. And I also hope you will follow us at Twitter at @CFR_Religion. And please reach out to us at outreach@CFR.org with any suggestions of topics that you would like us to cover going forward. We appreciate you both and all of you. So thank you very much. PANDITH: Thank you. MILLER-IDRISS: Thank you.

Dana Coester, editor-in-chief at 100 Days in Appalachia, shares best practices for reporting on extremist activity at the local level. Bruce Hoffman, Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis senior fellow on counterterrorism and homeland security at CFR, provides context and background on domestic terrorism and extremist groups. Carla Anne Robbins, adjunct senior fellow at CFR and former deputy editorial page editor at the New York Times, hosts the webinar.   FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Local Journalists webinar. Today we will discuss best practices for reporting on extremist activity with Dana Coester, Bruce Hoffman, and our host, Carla Anne Robbins. I'm Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach at the Council on Foreign Relations. As you may know, CFR is an independent, nonpartisan organization and think tank focusing on U.S. foreign policy. This webinar is part of CFR's Local Journalists initiative created to help you connect the local issues you cover in your communities to national and international dynamics. Our programming puts you in touch with CFR resources and expertise on issues of global interests and provides a forum for sharing best practices. So, thank you all for taking the time to join us. This webinar is on the record. The video and transcript will be posted on our website after the fact at CFR.org/localjournalists.   So now to introduce our speakers. Dana Coester is the editor in chief of 100 Days in Appalachia. She's also the creative director of West Virginia University's Media Innovation Center and leads the center's Innovators-in-Residence program. She is presently directing a documentary film, Raised by Wolves, about youth and online hate in Appalachia. Bruce Hoffman is a senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at CFR and a professor at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He was previously the corporate chair in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency at the RAND Corporation, and he was appointed by Congress to serve as a commissioner on the FBI's 9/11 Review Commission and was lead author of the final report. And last but not least, Carla Anne Robbins. She's an adjunct senior fellow at CFR. She is faculty director of the master of international affairs program and clinical professor of national security studies at Baruch College's Marxe School of Public and International Affairs. Previously, she was deputy editorial page editor at the New York Times and chief diplomatic correspondent at the Wall Street Journal. So welcome to you all. I'm going to turn it over to Carla to have this conversation, and then we'll come back to all of you for your questions and comments. So Carla, over to you.   ROBBINS: Thank you, Irina, so much. Thank you, Dana and Bruce, for joining us. And thank you to everybody for joining us today. We know you have many choices of Zoom conversations as well as deadlines to deal with. This is a very important topic obviously for the survival of our democracy as well as the challenges of reporting. So I very much appreciate everybody being here and very much appreciate what my colleagues are doing out there in coverage every day under very challenging circumstances. So we watched Charlottesville and the January 6 attack on the Capitol unfold with horror, and I am eager to hear from Dana and all of our colleagues because this is going to be a conversation among all of us today about what's going on in our communities. But I'd like to start today's discussion with some sense of the national scale and the nature of the problem of domestic extremism—what we know and what we don't and why we don't know more.   So in March, FBI Director Chris Wray told the Senate committee that domestic terrorism was quote “metastasizing across the country,” and he said the number of domestic terrorism investigations at the FBI had risen to two thousand since 2017 when he took over the Bureau. But he didn't provide any more precision about it. The New York Times has reported that the Bureau opened more than four hundred domestic terrorism investigations in 2020 and forty cases into possible adherence of far-left groups that are known collectively as antifa. I can never say it without thinking about Trump going “an-ti-fa.” And another forty into the Boogaloo, a far-right movement seeking to incite a civil war. Meanwhile, in mid-May, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told the Senate that the greatest domestic threat facing the United States came from what they called quote “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocate for the superiority of the white race.” So with that context, which I think is very important interpretively but sort of weak on data, Bruce, if I may begin with you, do we have any more granularity on the scale, location, strength, and threat posed by domestic extremist groups? And why isn't Wray telling us more?   HOFFMAN: The short answer is no. And I think one reason that Director Wray [inaudible] and one reason [inaudible] no more is that the federal government really doesn't collect statistics on what we naturally call domestic terrorism but also all sorts of other phrases and terms. We rely basically, or at least in my research, I rely on the Anti-Defamation League that has followed this for decades. I think it has very solid collection figures—Southern Poverty Law Center. There's any number of other research institutions in the Pacific Northwest, for example, that monitor this. And they all have different means of collection. They all have different definitions, so we have no clear picture. And that's, I find, very frustrating and, of course, very different compared to international terrorism where we often do have that precision.   ROBBINS: And scale? I mean, those two numbers that Wray used, I mean, and does scale perhaps not matter? I mean, you know, all those years of the Journal, I like numbers.   HOFFMAN: Well, the New York Times last September, I think authoritatively, put the figure of members of militias, which is only one dimension of this. And that's the other problem. Let me answer your first question. We're not talking about something that's either homogeneous or that's monolithic. We're talking about something that's very disparate and very diffused and often quite amorphous. And in an era of social media, it creeps behind the scenes. But the New York Times put the number of armed militiamen at twenty-five thousand. My colleague at American University who I think is one of the best researchers in this field, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, in a recent book, Hate in the Homeland, put the figure of white supremacists, militia members, anti-government extremists willing or at least expressing interest in committing violence at upwards of seventy-five thousand. We don't know. I'll throw one thing out that worries me, which is more anecdotal, and you've asked for hard evidence. But I have found in multiple states now, you know, in gun stores and sporting goods stores, they're cleaned out of assault rifles, semi-automatic pistols, and especially of factory-manufactured ammunition. This has been the case since March. But when I throw out numbers of militiamen or members of violent extremists, one has to assume that there's plenty of, unfortunately, weaponry and ammunition available that I think exceeds what might normally be associated with either hunting or sportsmen or home defense.   ROBBINS: So, that's scary. So, we'll come back to more about that. But why does the FBI not track the numbers?   HOFFMAN: Well, there's no domestic terrorism statute, and this is a source of controversy. You could have multiple terrorism experts and civil liberties advocates who's going to disagree profoundly about this and fear that a domestic terrorism statute might be used as past excesses of surveillance and monitoring of the civil rights movement of the anti-war protesters in the 1960s and '70s. It could be used to demonize and to target legitimate expressions of discontent or of opposition. It's a real problem. It's not to say that the FBI doesn't follow domestic terrorism. Certainly when I was a commissioner and we worked for fifteen months in the Hoover Building and back then everything was ISIS or al-Qaeda, but really ISIS all the time, every minute, I never once in any of my interactions saw anybody in the FBI in the counterterrorism division dismiss, denigrate, or ignore domestic terrorism whether right or left. It was a lower priority; they were focused on it. They probably have their own internal figures, but of course, you know, as Jill Sanborn, who was the former assistant director for counterterrorism, she's now an executive assistant for national security at the FBI, when she testified on the Hill back in January, she said quite rightly the FBI doesn't monitor social media—the First Amendment rights. So, you know, even if the FBI has figures on what they're investigating, that's when there's been a clear predicate and when the line has been crossed in terms of either the incitement to violence leading to conspiratorial planning for an actual act of violence or violence is being committed. So even they did provide the statistics it would only be, you know, one slice of what we see is a much larger movement with sometimes uncertain intentions. I mean, how much of it is boasting or hot-air rhetoric over social media? But we know and everybody who's listening to this or tuning into this webinar knows words matter, and words can be weaponized as we've seen in the wrong hands for nefarious purposes.   ROBBINS: Thanks. So Dana, you play a dual role as a researcher and reporter and editor and have a lot of experience on this topic for quite a while. But can you talk to us, you know, first about what you're seeing in your own community and how it has been evolving over the last year or so and, with that I suppose, what definition are you using? I mean, Bruce talked about a variety of different definitions and, you know, what's your baseline?   COESTER: Well, that one is a tough one to answer for all the reasons that he also said. But we actually from a scholarly perspective, as a media scholar and tech scholar, we were already starting to document, you know, back in the 2012-2014 era things that were happening in digital spaces and gaming spaces and really starting to think about the platform role in that. So that was a sort of digital landscape that we were looking at. But at the same time, we were aware of, as journalists and members of a community in Appalachia, how there was increasing populist rhetoric and groups beginning to be more vocal and organized in real-world spaces. Well, I actually don't want to say real world because obviously what's happening online is quite real as well. So really, it was looking at those spaces separately and then seeing how they started to increasingly overlap and collide. And I think we saw, you know, a sort of six- or seven-year collision in the making happen last summer when you started to really see the QAnon, Boogaloo militia groups organized globally, frankly, but that also have regional roots, organized white supremacist groups, really began to coalesce into a much more cohesive threat that we've been seeing the results of that since.   ROBBINS: So, in your own can you talk a little bit about your own community? You wrote a piece for Nieman Reports, I think, three or four years ago, which I recommend. We're going to push out to everybody a variety of different readings that we very much recommend. Dana has been educating me in the last thirty-six hours, which I very much appreciate. But can you talk a little bit more recently about what you're seeing and your reporting on that?   COESTER: Sure. And we've got several, sort of, active investigation so I'm a little bit careful. But historically, this area has actually been targeted by external groups such as Patriot Front, Patriots of Appalachia. There's a number of other groups that pretty early on were doing the, you know, sort of the papering of flyers in the region. And that's been, sort of, an intermittent thing that has happened, honestly, generationally. But what we saw was a more coordinated relationship between language that was being used and global networks and now language that was being used in local networks, which spoke to us of a more coordinated organization at scale for these groups. For example, in 2015, very early on in the Proud Boys movement, there was local Proud Boys activity here that was prevalent in some of the gym culture here. And then we also see a lot of things filter through local Facebook groups where it's, you know, trad-mom kinds of activities that, at first glance, don't seem to be of concern but you start to see the infiltration and manipulation of those groups by external actors—   ROBBINS: Trad mom? Can you explain trad mom?   COESTER: Oh, sorry. All right. Yes, so traditional mom, so trad mom is what that stands for. There's other—trad cap. There's some other sort of communities that are not, you know, I don't want to suggest that any individuals that are in or adjacent to those communities are on the cusp of becoming a violent extremist, but we do have enough data and longevity looking at sort of the evolution of these groups and the manipulation of these groups that the risk for extremist violence by even a few gets increasingly higher, which is why we have to pay attention to those.   ROBBINS: And I want to come back a little bit more about not just the [inaudible]—   COESTER: I'm sorry, because you're asking about the region that there's manipulation of values and concerns in the region that are also not on surface organized white supremacist activity but are rooted in that. And that's why it can very much be a hiding-in-plain-sight kind of manipulation. For example, one of the groups released a PDF about, you know, back to nature, healthy living that if you're not really aware of the coded language and sort of what's underneath that, you know, looks like pretty damn good advice for, you know, for healthy lifestyle, or it'll be something that's rooted in concern for the environment or to the working poor. And so there are values that are inherent to a region that are, especially a distressed region, that are quite ripe for manipulation but on surface may not seem to be what it is.   ROBBINS: So now you've completely intrigued me. Tell me about how healthy living is manipulated or is used as a cover for either recruitment or for promulgation of extremist or white supremacist views?   COESTER: Well, it may—   ROBBINS: I'm never eating granola again. I just wanted to [laughs]—   COESTER: Well, it's about self-reliance and resilience and growing your own food and organic food. I mean, now that all of these things get coalesced, now you'll have also anti-vax stuff that will come into there. It'll be things that are rooted in racial superiority, but that's like after you get ten layers deep. And at first, you're just reading recipes for canning, you know, your homegrown tomatoes. And so it's subtle in that kind of manipulation. And by the time you're sort of part of that community, if you're naive to that, which I think a lot of people are, then I mean, that's how the grooming works. That's how radicalization works. It starts to make sense to you. And that happens over a long period of time. It's not something that happens, you know, in one social media post or in one, you know, engagement.   ROBBINS: So, Bruce, can you assess—be a media critic for a minute. I mean, you pay your money for your subscriptions, so you get the right to be a media critic. Can you assess the quality of the coverage of domestic extremism that you're reading and the good and the bad? You know, are you getting the right information? Is it being shaped in the right way? You know, give us a read right now.   HOFFMAN: Well, it depends what media sources one consults. There are some media forces that—   ROBBINS: I can take it if you criticize my former employers.   HOFFMAN: Well, look, I mean, I'm a dinosaur. I get three hardcopy newspapers delivered every day: the New York Times, the Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and then whatever else I get from the internet. You know, I'll make a broader criticism about terrorism. I mean, generally, I find the coverage is incredibly important—and then I get to the criticism—and often very illuminating. Actually now more than ever, we depend on the media for this kind of information, especially depending which administration might be in office and maybe hearing the message or putting their thumb on the scale. So I find most of it has been illuminating and useful. I'd make a more general criticism about coverage of terrorism. There's a discomforting, I mean, for me, at least as a specialist, sensational element to it is that it seems where the media reporting I don't think is helpful, but I understand completely why it's done. It's more in the feature route, it's why persons have become extremists and then dissecting their background. I mean, firstly, I think there's a moral issue about giving attention to these people. And sometimes that information is posed to the victims, let's say, and sometimes that information, these people become heroes inadvertently. The media isn't setting them up as heroes, but just the attention on them.   In my view—I've studied terrorism now literally for forty-six years since I first went to graduate school. What we fail to realize is that terrorism doesn't occur in a vacuum. And it reflects the divisions and the polarizations and the political currents in society. And that is to say that the people who commit—this will sound very odd and I'm not lionizing or defending them, but it's easier for us and it's easier for them to be portrayed as monsters. And they're not. I mean, they've come out of society. They are a reflection, as I said, of the divisions. And I sometimes feel that some of the reporting is trying to find the holy grail of what was the trigger that led to this person committing these acts, which had inadvertently give so much attention to exactly what Dana was talking about the, sort of, you know, the progression of radicalization from very anodyne messages. I mean, this is something that has been prevalent especially in the white supremacist movement or far-right wing extremism for forty years now. It's what Leonard Zeskind many years ago called the “conveyor belt philosophy,” is you hook people on something that seems completely innocent and then pull them down that conveyor belt of progressive radicalization, which may be on one end religious dicta. And we've seen that in the “Identity Church” movement, for example, where Christianity and the New Testament becomes a justification. But we've also seen that as something, you know, both you and Dana have been talking about, this whole conceptualization, which is fascinating to me, that the New World Order is back. And the idea is that everything is glocal, that even local problems are now refracted through this global lens and it's the New World Order whether it's UN domination or control of the United States by elites. And by the way, these are the exact same elites that were invade against in the late 1970s, early 1980s. You could even, in fact, go back to the 1920s in the Ku Klux Klan. It was more of a Northern than a Southern phenomenon, although a few people know that. And there was this tremendous disdain for science, which, of course, we've seen in the past fifteen months, and also of any kind of East Coast elitism or expertise, which, of course, this is what people are campaigning on now.   ROBBINS: Yes, and that is a—although you go in, and I want to pair that thought with what Dana has shared with me a set of tips that underplays the seriousness of the recommendations about how you report on these people and report on this phenomenon. I want to throw this open to the group, so I'm going to ask Dana to go through questions about a few of these. But I also want you to listen to this and as a consumer, you know, please do not hesitate to jump in and ask questions as well of this. So we're going to share these, Dana, and I wanted to throw this open. So, everybody who's with us as well, please get your questions ready and your comments ready because it's enough of me asking questions. But you have sent a group of very interesting suggestions. I'm going to curate them, the ones that intrigued me the most, and we'll come back to other ones. Of course, you can answer any question you want with any way you want.   You talked about, you know, understanding the media manipulation lifecycle and particularly this question of amplification. You know, it seems to be of particular concern. You know, not reporting on the mindset of extremists, you know, if we don't report on the mindset of extremists, don't we run the danger of underestimating the political sources and of a potency of the threat? How do you balance that? One of your colleagues wrote that we have to understand that news outlets provide a vital bridge between fringe ideologies and the public that can intentionally or not normalize these views and allow them to influence public discourse and define the narrative surrounding political events. I understand that. That's the, you know, that's the amplification. But, you know, if we don't report on the mindset of extremists, there is this danger that we can both underestimate the potency of the threat but also not understand the society that created this, you know, and there are some problems that have to be fixed if this is so appealing. So how do you deal with this, you know, the manipulation lifecycle without, you know, underreporting the problem?   COESTER: Well, I don't think we need to report on the mindset at the point at which the extremists have taken action and tragic action over the last years. What we can report on and what we need to report on is the systems that gave rise to that, the messaging that gave rise to that, the actors in that space that gave rise to that. That's the sort of the unpacking and the education that we can do at the community level. Although I will say, I mean, so we have an internal policy, you know, we don't do lone-wolf reporting. We don't do feature pieces. We really are trying to focus on systems, watchdog roles, accountability roles, and I would say that we have to look at who are influential people in the network. So, for instance, you know, there is an elected official from West Virginia who participated in the January 6 insurrection. And so, locally, we need to understand that an elected official participated in this, but we also need to look at what are the formal and informal networks of this individual. So now I'm less focused on the individual, and I'm more focused on what are those networks of influence that gave rise to that because those are still threats. Those are still threats that are in the region. And so I don't struggle with that anymore. We don't do it, but we feel confident that the work that we are publishing is getting people information they need.   I will say broadcast news is really a sort of, local broadcast news, I will say—not national, I have my critics about that—but I think local broadcast news really has an important role to play in this as well. I don't want to just focus on local, digital, and news outlets. And there was an example of—and this is a simple thing. This was an example of something that was beneficial that never would have been meaningful at a national level but was meaningful at a local level where an individual had come into an apartment complex wearing, you know, the red, you know, MAGA hat, and was asking where local synagogues and mosques were. The person at the desk immediately started sharing that on social media, and broadcast did a very balanced, credible, non-inflammatory, just information to the community that helped put community members and targeted community members on alert. And that wasn't dramatic, and it also helps set some context for why in the, sort of, post-January 6, post-Tree of Life, post-Christ Church environment, that that was important local information. And it was just a simple piece, but I thought it was really well done and quite balanced. And that was just a local broadcast station. And another one was some flyers had been posted, I don't recommend doing anything about flyers or when people, you know, drop things in parking lots or people's driveways, but West Virginia Public Broadcasting, Dave Mistich, a reporter, who has also worked with us at 100 Days in Appalachia, did a sort of an explainer piece for the community about the rhetoric that the flyers were using. So it wasn't, you know, “far-right groups post flyers,” you know, which is just amplifying their message, and also you never sort of show websites or phone numbers or any of that, but it's saying, “Community members, they are targeting you. Here's the language they're using and why.” And that's useful, that's valuable.   ROBBINS: This, you know, the First Draft News you shared, the [inaudible] says that reporters should ask whether or not a story has extended beyond the community being discussed, and that that's a tipping point that, you know, that once it has extended further than it becomes newsworthy. But you don't want to amplify something that's just within the echo chamber itself. Now knowing that, how you know that is an interesting question. And then, I think, your examples are really good. You don't just write a straight news story that says, “The flyer said this.” You want to assess what the, you know, the language, you want to deconstruct it, you want to explain it. But you also open yourself up to the charge that you're censoring the views, don't you? You've made your peace with that.   COESTER: Well, I will also say, and I've said this in other conversations like this, reporting and publishing, I think, are two different acts. And we report information. I think that journalists get caught up in the idea that it has to be at an above-the-fold thing, and you're going to win an award or any of that kind of nonsense. Whereas journalists doing good investigative work and then reporting that information to communities that are targeted is a form of reporting without amplifying. For example, we've done briefings for teachers who are in positions where they're, you know, so that they can take actions when they see youth who are susceptible or who are participating in rhetoric or actual, you know, more dangerous activities. And we've talked to mental health, you know, professionals about, you know, cues and things that we're seeing like when we're seeing a sort of a trend happen in an online space. So, that's reporting. We're reporting data to community members that can take action. And other times it's publishing, but yes, I've made my peace with that.   ROBBINS: So I want to, Irina, I'm going to take the prerogative here just to read a question from the Q&A because I want to pair it because I want Bruce to respond on the amplification question. But there's a question here in the Q&A that's also, I think, quite relevant to both of you, but I'll start with Bruce because your specific experience with the commission. On the amplification question, how do we make a decision like that? How much do you worry about, you know, reporting amplifying this? And then the specific question in the Q&A, “How do we cover law enforcement agencies' role in shaping extremism? And how do you analyze the motives of the FBI?” And that is from Ashley Nerbovig who hasn't identified where she’s from? So—   FASKIANOS: Ashley is a freelance journalist reporting on extremism in Montana and Michigan.   ROBBINS: Okay, thank you, Ashley. You have a lot of work, I suspect, to do. So Bruce, over to you with both questions.   HOFFMAN: An answer to the first question, I think, [inaudible] I'm not a journalist. So maybe this is just a little simplistic but you report the news [inaudible]. And you always make sure that whatever you're reporting is not communicating—I mean, terrorism is an act of violent communication. And that's also something we forget. Terrorism always has a purpose, and the purpose is to attract attention to the perpetrators into their cause. So it's reporting on something but not giving them that platform, and that's what they're seeking from that violence. I mean, this may be, again, my naivete about how newsrooms work, but is why the editing function, I think, is so important. I mean, this is the great thing about journalists is that, as opposed to, let's say, social media is there is a screening process to make sure that it's objective or hopefully, at least my naivete, I assume this is what editors do—   ROBBINS: We try.   HOFFMAN: —so that it's not serving the purposes of the terrorists. I mean, this was something internationally that was very common in the '60s and '70s, and then, fortunately, is much, much better. Also, if I could just leverage off of something that Dana was saying that's so important, the one thing that I haven't seen a lot of coverage about, which I think is so important, and she was explicit about it but I just want to second it, is that these extremist movements are actively recruiting youth. And I haven't seen very much reported about that. There is a lot of reporting about the former [inaudible] people indicted on January 6, about the leaders of these groups that we recognize, but I don't see that much being done in these communities that, as Dana described, that have had faced severe economic issues that sometimes have been caught up in the opioid mess that we see now, you know, sort of litigated in courts in the national news but, in fact, has had such a profoundly corrosive impact on rural communities where, especially, youth become very targeted, become very susceptible. And there, it's not just flyers, but again, something I haven't seen a lot of report about. Stickers, I mean, this is a big thing with youth, sometimes t-shirts and clothing, too, but stickers that are put on the back of stop signs, that are put outside of synagogues, churches, and mosques, for example. I mean, that indicates, and it goes exactly to Dana's point about global things becoming local, I mean, that indicates that somehow a global dialectic has seeped into the local milieu and that it's usually kids that are manufacturing or ordering these stickers and putting them up and serving a group that they may have absolutely no contact with.   But one reason that this is important is that last year the leader of one of the SIEGE groups, and the SIEGE is one of the worst manifestations, at least in my view, of extremism. I mean, it's pretty horrific violence. They venerate Hitler and Charles Manson. But it turned out that the leader of a cell that was egging on—and this was in Lithuania and in Europe, basically, not the United States—but was egging on and sort of directing cells of people throughout Europe. Firstly, it was these very mundane things but then escalating to violence. It was a 13-year-old. And it's kind of like that famous New Yorker cartoon from the 1990s, you know, with a dog sitting in front of a computer and says, “On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.” Well, no one knew that they're taking orders from a 13-year-old that was, you know, this was the worst kind of video gaming, in a sense, that had real-life consequences.   But the question, you know, this is, you know, the question about the FBI, I mean, this, I think, is a huge problem, law enforcement writ large because law enforcement is both far and away, year in, year out, government officials and law enforcement, not persons of color, not Jewish persons, not necessarily Muslims, not Asian Americans, when you look, at least at the ADL statistic going back a decade, it's often law enforcement and government officials that are targeted most by these extremists. At the same time, as we know from the January 6 events, members of law enforcement in the military, some active, some retired, have been involved in these kinds of activities. And I think it's very important, I mean, in theory, the FBI, because persons have security clearances and have security clearances at the highest levels. I mean, they've gone through lie detectors. They have to be completely forthcoming on their SF-86s, which is what you put down all your material to get access to classified material every five years. I mean, that should pick up a lot of it. But, of course, there aren't security clearances in many cases for local and state law enforcement, and it may be harder to identify people that may not only be sympathizers, but may indeed and there's, of course, an historical legacy, especially during the civil rights movement, of local law enforcement being in league with whether it's the Ku Klux Klan or other extremist groups. This is a very important question to ask.   In my experience, I also in previous years had spent two years at the CIA as a scholar in residence and that to me a completely different experience from the FBI because it was international orientation and basically you look for intelligence wherever you could get it. What impressed me the most at the FBI and it was something I was never aware of, it's just the role that lawyers for the Department of Justice play in almost everything that they do that there has to be a predicate, that there's oversight that, I suspect, again, I'm not a specialist in law enforcement, but there's more oversight, one would hope, at the federal level than there tends to be at the local or state just because of the different orientations, different levels of clearance. Although, I have to say one big change that is happening in the past year plus, more and more, of course, local and state law enforcement officers are wearing body cameras. And the attorney general has now released guidance that federal law enforcement agencies when they're arresting fugitives or any kind of operation have to wear those cameras, too, which hadn't been the case in the past.   ROBBINS: So, Irina, over to you.   FASKIANOS: I'm going to Phillip Martin, who wrote his question but also raised its hand. And, Phillip, if you want to just ask it, he's a senior investigative reporter at WGBH in Boston.   Q: Yes, thank you, both of you. Thank you for this illuminating panel discussion, Carla, Dana, and Bruce. I'm wondering if you can comment on the funding sources for right-wing extremists that include the Proud Boys, Boogaloo Boys, and Three Percenters, among others. And oftentimes, I found the concomitant funding source from certain Republican politicians. Marjorie, I know her name is used all the time. I can't remember right now—   COESTER: Taylor Greene.   Q: That's right. So I'm wondering if you could comment on those funding sources, which seem to be an extraordinary issue in the context of the proliferation of extremist groups in the United States? Thank you,   COESTER: Well, that's a great question because that's actually one of things I advocate for. That is the thing local journalism can and should do. I mean, old-fashioned, follow-the-money among these networks and really understanding how they're operating because I just wanted to add, you know, when we were talking about maybe complicity among law enforcement, that the thing that local news has to recognize is that there are individuals who are affiliated with or sympathetic to extremist ideology who are on college campuses, who are IT workers in major businesses, who are board members of influential institutions, who are, as we see, elected officials. That is a local problem that has to be—first responders. I mean, so that's where that sort of interception and understanding of those networks has to happen. I will say on the funding sources, we're actually working on something right now that's looking at some of that happening in—it's happening in cryptocurrency. It's harder actually to follow the funding sources unless you managed to become very close to or part of or have access to one of these groups. And so that's just to say, yes, that's a problem. It's even harder to follow but connecting all of those dots is exactly what local investigative and regional investigative reporting can and should do. Although, of course, we're all underresourced.   FASKIANOS: All right. Let's go next to Elise Schmelzer in Denver, “What are the best practices for covering extremism on a local level as a continuous problem as opposed to episodic coverage when there are highly public uprisings? What should local journalists be tracking and writing about between those movements?”   COESTER: So, the first thing that I would do is make—I mean, oftentimes, just the reality in our society and why we're having this problem is most local newsrooms are majority white newsrooms. Reporters and editors in those newsrooms are likely unaware of what local threats even are that have probably been generational because they're not engaging with targeted community members. So that's the first place to start is to build those relationships, to understand. You know, we know from our research on youth, youth aren't even reporting half the hate instances, most of the hate instances that they're experiencing. Muslim community members are not reporting. It's just sort of part of the backdrop of their life. And so, you know, if you're a reporter coming into that, you sort of have to make room for understanding what that generational activity is before you can really engage with it. And then I would say we don't want to do, I mean, we don't want to focus on the episodic incidences, we want to be in a position to see before there's a threat because we're already monitoring, following, and connecting the dots on those networks. I mean, last year, last summer, when we sort of saw the coalescing of a lot of these groups, we were immediately, you know, raising the alarm. And we were, as Bruce mentioned, you know, we were doing local reporting on what the, you know, sales of guns and ammunition. And so when you're already doing that work you see, and if you're already in, you know, you already have access to the Telegram group or now the group's left Telegram and they're, you know, meeting in, you know, the local Denny's and you have access to that, then you know before it's episodic, and that's where there's an opportunity for disruption, especially with our work on youth, you know, trying to disrupt that before, you know, we have another Dylann Roof or a horrible situation.   ROBBINS: Irina, can I ask Bruce to address that because some of this is, you know, you talked about one measurement, which was purchases of guns, but this sort of, as law enforcement, you know, academics and journalists are all looking for different ways to look into what appears to be a classic community before something explodes. What are the indicators you think we should be following in local communities?   HOFFMAN: Well, all terrorism, not least with these groups, it's a constant search for new constituencies. They're trying to broaden their base and appeal to new recruits. I mean, they're kind of like the archetypal shark in the water that has to move forward to survive. So, I think it's all the sides. I mean, the stickering, for instance, is something that I don't think a lot of attention has necessarily been paid to. We drive by these things and don't notice them. But at least for young people, they become kind of a code that you look for them, and it gives a disproportionate impression that there may be more, let's say, a white supremacist in a community. There might be, but that's part of the ideas is to mainstream these kinds of beliefs and also constantly pull new people in. I think it's also monitoring of, you know, currents across the country that nongovernmental organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, for instance, which isn't only about anti-Semitism, but it's about all kinds of racism and hate crimes, which gives a window to what might be happening in one community because they're ADL regional reports. But usually, that's not confined to one community. These groups to survive have to learn from one another. And that's, in fact, they learn if there are going to survive, they learn faster, unfortunately, than often the government and law enforcement does. So I think it's monitoring the overall trends. And again, going back to my earlier point, I think at the risk of a truism is that all of this doesn't occur in a vacuum. I mean, it needs a context. We've seen the context, arguably, in the past year much more sharply. But, of course, that context you can go back further than Charlottesville in 2017. But that was a clear indication of where we were headed at. But how many people looked at that as just an aberration or a one-off?   ROBBINS: Irina, sorry. Thanks.   FASKIANOS: That's okay. I was just going to say Elise is with the Denver Post, just to give context to that question. So Maria Alvarez has raised her hand. So, please unmute yourself and say your affiliation, please.   Q: Thank you very much for this webinar. It's really informative and important. I teach journalism here at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York City and also a veteran New York City reporter for several decades. I covered 9/11, and I'm just interested in knowing has there been any research or data gathering about local police departments' protocol or policies in trying to ferret out or have applicants out themselves if they've been involved in any type of white supremacy group or have been involved in any type of racial conflict or been arrested for something like that in the past? Has anybody been researching that because it's very difficult to get a police department to talk about those policy or discussion of those policy changes because they're very secretive? And, of course, there was at least half a dozen police officers from the NYPD that were outed when they attended the January 6 insurrection. Thank you.   ROBBINS: It's a great question, and we can tag team that, Irina, with the Steve Walsh question from KPBS in San Diego. Steve Walsh writes, “I also covered military and veteran issues in collaboration with NPR. We've reported on the Department of Defense stand down on extremism. Now that they've highlighted the issue, the question we're trying to get at now is what does the DOD need to do to actually track and target extremism? They still seem quite reluctant to take concrete action.” So I think these are similar questions, which is how do you know when somebody is being recruited or applying and have in addition to having you root out people in your ranks? Is there any serious conversation about how to do that?   HOFFMAN: Well, certainly since January 6 there has been. [Inaudible] a long time before that but certainly both in terms of the U.S. military and also with police departments that has become much more of an issue. You know, this is the problem with terrorism generally is when terrorism is in the news there's a lot of interest and a lot of attention, and then there's a lot of governmental response to pressure from citizens and also the investigative reporting and illuminations that the news media does. But then when it's a period of quiescence, it completely dies down. I mean, in the 1980s and 1990s, law enforcement but even more so the military had to deal with this on a very serious basis. One was finding all sorts of military ordnance, things that you could not have gotten unless they were stolen from military stockpiles—anti-tank missiles, C-4 plastic explosives, bazookas, rocket-propelled grenades. All kinds of things like that were turning up in white supremacist survivalists' compounds and elsewhere during that period.   And the military crackdown very intently, in fact, Secretary Austin, the secretary of defense, has talked about when he was lieutenant colonel at Fort Bragg in 1995 and had to weed out the same types of elements. But yet in the reporting after Charlottesville in 2017, there were accounts of Marines from Camp Lejeune or from Parris Island coming up to Charlottesville. I think there were also people from Fort Bragg as well. So we're back to reinventing the wheel. From my observation, I know much less about the police than the Defense Department. I think the Defense Department is taking it very seriously. The change in administration has clearly helped. The new secretary of defense from the time he was confirmed has zeroed in on this issue, and it is one that he's familiar with. I think that, you know, Walsh's frustration is that DOD is, you know, moving very quickly to do things but is not really publicizing it, and I'm not sure has actually settled on—they know this is a problem. Let me point out, this is a problem for U.S. national security and defense because our enemies point to this and believe the United States, the military is being hollowed out by these searches for miscreants. I mean, I don't think that's true, but it's in the sense that they are that prevalent. But the point is I think that's another reason why the DOD is quiet on what they are doing. I think on the one hand it's relatively new that they're focusing on this since the change in administration. They're not quite entirely set on what practical measures they will take apart from the ones we've read about. But I know for a fact there's lots of discussion about this. I'm less clear about law enforcement. Certainly the chief of police in Houston has been the most outspoken, at least what I've read from media reports on this issue. I've heard similar things from NYPD, but as Maria Alvarez's question notes, I mean, this is a systemic problem that is not new. And it's not just recruits and people in the academy but what law enforcement agencies will do to, you know, basically monitor their own ranks. And this is why I think federal law enforcement will be immensely useful in helping them, but I don't know of any programs or implementation, you know, that sort of synergy yet.   ROBBINS: Thanks, Bruce. That's really helpful, and I want to talk to you about the DOD offline after this. Dana, what are you seeing where you are? I mean, is there anything of a conversation among local law enforcement of, you know, of goodwill to how they're grappling with this problem? Or are they just in denial?   COESTER: No, I mean, it's inconsistent. There have been some gestures, I will say, very locally here in Morgantown. There's been some vocal efforts. But again, I think sort of January 6 kind of drove people into, you know, either doubling down on ideology or saying, “Oh, shit, that's not what I thought I was getting into.” And especially we see this with some young people who are, which is the point where you can pull them back when they're starting to realize and get fully educated about what's happening. But I think, to Bruce's point, it's less being aware of what law enforcement or other people who have power and local communities are saying and more about what they're doing, what are their networks, and there's good digital forensic investigation that local journalists are doing that is helping uncover—and also veterans' groups and military. There are also some actually, right now I'm seeing a lot of really active and I'll send the link afterwards of veterans' groups and military groups who are sort of doing this work independently and trying to identify and disrupt that in their own ranks, too.   FASKIANOS: Okay, so we'll take the next question, it's a written question from Chris Joyner, who's with the Atlanta Journal Constitution, “Prior to January 6, there was a lot of in-network communication that showed an intent toward violence, including plans to assault the Capitol. Knowing that, at what point is there a journalistic responsibility to report on the rhetoric of extremism, rather than worrying about amplifying that message. The same might be asked about reporting on smaller accelerationist groups, which have a smaller reach by the nature of their organization?”   HOFFMAN: Well, as a nonjournalist, I mean, I think the element or the need to provide warning is not amplification. And I think that's where the media can play an immensely useful role. Everything we're reading about January 6, including an article that'll be in the hardcopy of the Washington Post tomorrow where, you know, the Senate investigation has concluded that this was being, this was a quote from one of the senators being planned in plain sight. I mean, that's very different from the impression we had on January 6, 7, 8, and so on. And that's why I think the warning is absolutely essential. I think the public good that that does outweighs the risk. And again, it has to be balanced and not alarmist, but this is why, at least, unlike social media, in traditional media, editors, you know, play a very important function.   COESTER: Yes, I mean, 100 percent agree with that. I mean, it's a clear distinction, and when you're in it, you know it. And we were in it last spring and last summer, and I actually had, I would preface, before we wrote something or oftentimes we were doing sort of closed-door briefings with different groups, you know, “I don't mean to be alarmist, but this is what we're seeing. And this is what we think may happen if there's not an intervention.” And so, yes, I think that that, and that is quite different from just sort of repeating what a particular group says. But if you're in a position and you have your hands around network and you're really understanding coded language and the rhetoric, then you see when something flares. That's reporting. That's intelligence that you bring to what's happening, and I don't see that as amplification at all.   ROBBINS: So I am going to, actually we've got a minute left, so we're going to do thirty-second responses—this is Final Jeopardy. Dana, I'm going to ask you very quickly, one of the tips from your people is prepare for harassment after reporting critically on far right and white nationalist extremism in your community. How do you prepare for harassment? How do you protect your people?   COESTER: Well, there are really, really good programs out there that help newsrooms do that, and I'll provide some links for that, too. I would say that's something that you have to take profoundly seriously. It's the job of an editor to protect not just the reporter, but their entire staff. When you're local, those risks are quite amplified because you're literally there and accessible. And also, you have to protect sources because they can be targeted as well. And I will say that in other conversations with folks when I let them know how serious and sharing, you know, some personal experiences, how serious those risks can be, they kind of back away like I'm exaggerating. I'm not exaggerating. So you have to just know that going into it.   ROBBINS: So we will share this TrollBusters training program about digital harassment, the Columbia Journalism School's Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. So we're going to share this because we want you guys to be safe and to be aware of the need to be safe. So we'll push that out to you. Dana, thanks for sharing that. And Bruce, last question to you. So I was on a panel last week. This is what we all do, we do panels, and asking this question, why scientists blew it and journalists blew it in the reporting on the sources of the COVID pandemic. We all rushed to judgment saying hands down we absolutely knew that it was an animal-to-human transmission. There was no chance at all of a lab leak, and now we are reexamining this. We don't know what it was, but we did call the balls and strikes on that very quickly. And this raises a very interesting question, which is if you were reporting on and you have to get the message out at some point about the message of extremists, we're going to be calling balls and strikes. We're going to say, we know the election wasn't stolen. That's absolutely not true. We made the mistake in 2016 of not calling out disinformation. How do we find this balance out here or when it comes to extremism not even a problem?   HOFFMAN: No, I think it's a huge problem. There's a lot of parallels to COVID. I think, I've always believed this, and I've worked in government but you can't rely on just your government sources. And I think that's absolutely key is reaching out to people whether they're scholars or people in non-governmental organizations but who track things differently, who think about them differently, and have a different agenda. That's absolutely essential, and that can avoid the kind of, you know, the group thing because in the domestic terrorism realm, as with that Clint Eastwood film about Richard Jewell, and I remember very clearly that FBI was saying it's the quote unquote [inaudible], which sounded great. And many journalists who I knew were top journalists covering terrorism. I mean, the FBI was saying this. They went with it. And as we've seen with the film, it ruined someone's life. So I think it's going beyond the official sources. I mean, just an ordinary story and trying to get the much broader context and the depth.   And I'm going to say one other thing just to follow on what Dana said. I mean, this is a huge issue in covering especially for-right extremism but to an extent far-left extremism as well because they're the ones who invented doxxing. But this is, well, actually it's even worse. The far right was doing the doxxing first, but journalists and scholars, I mean, this is what's changed completely. In the past terrorists or extremists liked the media because we did tend to amplify their message or even if it was unintentional, it was giving them attention. We're in a very different era where last year, Atomwaffen, which is not a domestic extremist group, it's an international terrorist group, targeted six journalists. I mean for harassment but having been subject to that kind of harassment from the same types of people, it upends your life. So journalists really covering the story have to scrub their presence on the internet and all their personal details. And be very careful, especially if you're a woman because they will come after you.   ROBBINS: I will turn this back to Irina, but I just wanted to say thank you to Dana and thank you to Bruce for an extraordinary conversation. And thank you to all for the extraordinary questions. We're sorry we didn't get to all of them. But this has really been—and we're going to share more information. And we're going to push the questions that remain to Dana and Bruce, so we can share some of the answers as well. Back to Irina.   FASKIANOS: Thank you very much. And I just want to encourage you all to follow on Twitter, Carla's at @robbinscarla, Dana Coester's at @poetabook, and Bruce's is at @hoffman_bruce. So you can follow them there. Please visit CFR.org, ThinkGlobalHealth.org, and ForeignAffairs.com for the latest developments and analysis on international trends and events and how they're affecting the United States. And please do reach out to us to share suggestions for future webinars. You can email us at localjournalists@cfr.org. So thank you all again. And thanks to all of you for being with us today.   (END)

Bruce Hoffman discusses domestic terrorism in the United States. The CFR Master Class Series is a weekly 45-minute session hosted by Vice President and Deputy Director for Studies Shannon O’Neil in which a CFR fellow will take a step back from the news and discuss the fundamentals essential to understanding a given country, region of the world, or issue pertaining to U.S. foreign policy or international relations.