Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explored the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. The shooting at a synagogue outside San Diego on the last day of Passover was just the latest deadly attack where the suspect has reported links to white supremacy. This incident pushed me to think harder and deeper about the roots of white supremacy in the United States. Are we really seeing something new here or is this the same brand of white supremacy that's been around for a very long time, as long ago as the Civil War maybe before. To answer these questions and more, we're joined by Kathleen Bellou. She's an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, and her book Bring the War Home, The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America is the definitive look at the modern history of white power movement. Kathleen, Welcome to Deep Background. Thank you for having me, and thank you for the kind words about the book. Before we dive into the history and prehistory of white power and white supremacy, can I ask you just a personal question, how did you get interested in this topic? It is not the most obvious topic for a starting to work on. It isn't, and in fact, when I began the dissertation, I was told by more than one person that it technically could not count as history, because the usual rule of thumb when you're starting a dissertation is that you should be studying things twenty five years ago or further is the rule. It turns out that it took me so long to finish the book that I had cleared that mark by the time it was all said and done. But I actually think that the study of the recent past has become, as you can see with this project, urgently important to understanding our political moment and the debates and challenges that we now find ourselves embroiled in. I wanted to start by asking about the category of white power or white supreme see. Certainly in a country like the United States, which had slavery from the very beginning of the country, and of course there were slavery long before there was a United States in North America, the idea that white people are superior to the black people, that people of African descent is you know, almost baked in to the earliest history of the country and the prehistory of the country. And I wonder, how do you know where to start? You know, when you talk about white power or white supremacy. You know, how do you know that you don't have to start all the way back in the sixteen hundreds when the first African slaves were brought to the Americas, or in seventeen eighty seven with the US Constitution which enshrines slavery in certain respects. The what's your working starting place when you start thinking about white power? So when I teach this to my undergraduates, we do start with those long histories of racial inequality, the ways that white supremacy is not only a matter of ideological belief for some people in the United States, but has become imbricated in our systems of government, our distribution of resources, are policing, and all kinds of other ways. It's everywhere everywhere in this country. Race is everywhere. I think reasonable people can agree on that. I think that the definitions part is critically important, especially now. So what white power refers to is a movement that comes out of the Vietnam War, brings together a bunch of ideologically diverse activists who had not been working together before. Such as clansmen, Neo Nazis, skinheads, radical tax resistors, white separatists, and others, and kind of amalgamates them into one social movement, using the narrative of the war to bind them together, and then declares war on the federal government. So that begins in nineteen eighty three. Before that, I would characterize things like the many iterations of the KKK, the Neo Nazi Party in the United States. Those things are more like vigilante violence in that the violence is either supporting the state or supporting local status quo power. Post nineteen eighty three, we're dealing with a completely different thing. After that, it is a revolutionary movement that is attempting to overthrow the United States, either through a kind of long asymmetrical war of sabotage or through a direct revolution. So that's the white power movement. The tricky one for a lot of people is white nationalism. And actually I think it's easier to understand right now because all of these stories in the news about Hindu nationalism make this distinction really really clear. So Hindu nationalism, for listeners who might not be familiar, is a movement in India in which people who are a Hindu nationalist, and they call themselves that are organizing to make India more oriented around Hinduism in culture and in policy. Right, so they're trying to inject the nation of India with Hinduism more than a Nardias. It's complicated in India by the fact that the name for India in the language Hindi is Hindustan. So you know, the word itself, Hindu doesn't only mean the religion, it also means a culture. It also means a civilization. It's a tricky one indeed, But the category is India. In white nationalism, the category is not the United States. The nation imagined by white nationalism after nineteen eighty three is fundamentally opposed to the United States and also to New Zealand and Australia and other nations where this takes hold. White nationalism is attempting to create a transnational group of white people that will take over white homelands, and eventually many of them hope to wage war such that they can achieve an all white world. That's not the same thing as say the clan in the nineteen twenties, where people were marching on the National Mall with their robes and hoods, but their faces uncovered, which was which is, among other things, anti immigrant. It was both about suppressing African Americans, but also the clan in the nineteen its nineteen twenties iteration was very focused on immigrants, especially from Catholic countries. The White Power movement also is anti immigrant. But the thing that's different is that after nineteen eighty three, this is an anti government, anti nation movement. It's not an over exertion of patriotism. It's not just too much nationalism. You talked about opposition to the United States as opposed to vigilante violence. But in its first iteration, when the Ku Klux Klan came into existence after the Civil War in part to resist the attempts at the creation of racial equality that we're being imposed in the South by military reconstruction, that is, by an occupation of Union troops, wasn't it also in its origins the clan at that point in a sense revolutionary. It was opposed to the government of the United States and was supporting the already defeated ideals of the Confederacy. So in some sense wasn't there a revolutionary impulse implicit in the clan from the beginning. I think yes, But I think this one is highly debatable, and I think it depends on what historians would call periodization, meaning when you choose to stop that story. So, the first clan was founded in eighteen sixty six in Pulaski, Tennessee by frustrated veterans of the Confederacy. It very quickly grew, but at the beginning was mostly understood a sort of like a burlesque prankster group. And then there is this moment when it formalizes and turns violent, and that violence is directed at African Americans, school tax collectors, school teachers, and people from the North who come in to implement reconstruction and people in the South who support reconstruction. In other words, it is an attempt either to resist the federal government's effort to reconstruct the South or to form a new system of power. So right in there is the distinction between revolutionary and something else. Historians have sort of argued a lot over this, but I think it's important to remember that the Jim Crow regime in the South is not sort of just a continuation of slavery, but something that has to be built and constructed and invented after reconstruction, the clan doesn't disappear when reconstruction ends. Instead, it largely just relocates into citizen militias, into groups like the Red Shirts and the White Shirts, into rifle clubs, and into spectacle lynchings, which are these mass public participation events that carry out a lot of the same kind of violence that the clan was already doing a lot of it in public. I mean. One of the things that always amazes me about lynching is that there are postcards that were spread through the South of people white people gathered around a lynched African American with a photograph being taken as a kind of commemoration of the event, and no one's wearing a mask, no one's hiding his face. Not only that, but there are women and children in their Sunday best clothes. These events are all very often happening on the courthouse or at local sites of power. And it's also not just in the South. These are happening in Indiana, in the Pacific Northwest, in Texas, and in fact, for one stretch in South Texas, the chance of being lynched as much higher for Mexican Americans and Mexicans than it is for African American men in the South. It's it's that move into lynching that makes me reluctant to think of it as revolutionary violence, because lynching has mostly been understood as scholars as conveying a kind of popular sovereignty of the community, in other words, that in other words, that when when you lynch somebody, the whole community is getting together to do it, it's a kind of perverted version of small d democracy, where we're doing this as a collective. Yes, it's a claim to that power. It's a taking back of sovereign power from the state. Let's turn now to that revolutionary movement which, as you described in nineteen eighty three, unites itself to some degree and declares war on the United States of America. Tell us that story, because I don't think that's very well known. The nineteen eighty three turn comes after this big infrastructure build up, an organization of social movement that happens in the years proceeding. The clan builds paramilitary training camps all around the country. It trains people in paramilitary warfare. It works on amassing weapons and material, getting money, getting people organized, getting people in contact with one another, and by nineteen eighty three. I think there are two major things that happen. One is that that infrastructure is in place. Activists know each other, They're all in the same room. They're kind of coherent around this common story of the Vietnam War, which has allowed some connections possible between different groups that weren't possible before. And the other thing that happens is they get really frustrated with Reagan. Activists in the movement don't make this revolutionary turn in a moment of leftist state power, but instead under the second term of the Reagan administration. And their argument about this is that the distance between Reagan's campaign promises and what they see as his moderation proves to them once and for all that electoral change will never deliver the kind of world they want, and therefore they need to declare war. Now. This is this is really relevant to us in the present moment because it means that even at moments when the center through the left might see kind of a moment of conservative orientation and executive power, that doesn't mean that activists on the friend right will be assuaged by that, and in fact, that's had just the opposite effect. In this case. So that's extremely important, as you say, for the question of the relationship between recent rounds of white power of violence and the Trump administration. There's a tendency on the left to say, well, look at Charlottesville, which followed Donald Trump's ascending to the presidency, and then look at subsequent events the Tree of Life shooting, for example in the United States, the Christchurch, New Zealand attacks, and to see this all as very much a result of the election of Donald Trump. And if I understand you correctly, you're telling a slightly different story about the way that white power activists reacted, for example, to the election of Ronald Reagan. It's not that they were empowered or emboldened by the election of a conservative president. It's rather that they felt that it wasn't enough and that therefore they needed to take some revolutionary action. Is that in your mind? I mean, we're jumping ahead to the president, which will come to you in good time as well. But is your view that something like that is happening now among white power activists. It's not that they're emboldened so much by Trump's election, It's that it's not enough, and it gives them reason to do more. I suspect that's what we're seeing. This is when I have to give the historian caveat that the thing that lets me see the story that I write about in the book is this archive that spans newspapers, primary source materials, FBI and other surveillance documents, court testimony. We don't get that kind of source base in real time. When you talk about as a starian, talk about the archive, you mean some literal archives, in some cases cashes of documents. But it's also the word archive is also a metaphor that a Starin's used to describe all the materials that you guys use to try to make sense of his darical events exactly. You can think about it as like the receipts for the story I'm going to tell I don't have that kind of information about events from about nineteen ninety six forward, and there are some reasons for why that is in this particular cash of sources. But the earlier period does tell us a couple of things that make me concerned about the present moment in the ways that you've just described. One of them is that when there is this moment of perceived sympathetic administration, that has not assuaged these activists, and in fact that has been seen as a call to arms. The other one is that there have always been sort of two spheres of activity in this movement. One of them is the sort of mass mobilizations like Charlottesville marches, political campaigns, organizing events, recruitment, drives, campus campaigns to recruit students, speak of public speaking to ours, things like that. The other one is this massive network of paramilitary camps, cell style terror, illegal communication in many cases, and different kinds of crime ranging from assassination to the obtaining of stolen military weapons and material to mass violence attacks. In the period that I study, those two spheres of activity happened at the same time, um and often there were people who crossed the line between those two kinds of activism, and we're undertaking both of those things as a coordinated kind of kind of campaign. The fact that we can't see that underground in real time doesn't mean that that's not happening, as as we are noticing more of these above board events and in fact, this wave of violent attacks that you describe, which I might also add Dylan Roofs shooting in Charleston. Absolutely, oh no, yeah, wells Bravik in Norway. Yes, putting those all together in one story is very very important because then we can start to say, oh, wow, this is a wave we're talking about. You know, three attempted attacks in the last six months. Um. A lot of these are mass attacks, A lot of these are people who are using the same coordinated messaging. UM. That indicates to me that we do have this two spheres model of activism going again, even if I can't see the sources in real time to be able to describe it in detail. One element that I think we need to also add to your depiction of people's common narrative of the Vietnam War having been lost because of betrayal by the American government and anti communism and they're bringing together of clan members and neo Nazis and others, is the religious component. Would you say something about the apocalyptic religious elements of the combined viewpoints that are coming together around nineteen eighty three in this revolutionary movement. Sure, there are kind of two major theological innovations of this movement. One of them is Norse paganism, so Odinism and other kind of neopagan ideologies that put forward the greatness of white cultures in different ways. So the idea is to take Nordic mythology, of which Odin is a central figure, and to say, ah, Nordic mythology equals white people's mythology something like that exactly. So there's and it comes with a whole cultural apparatus of things like writing in ruins and using the Viking imagery and things like that. The other one is Christian identity, and I think this one is more impactful for a couple of different reasons. One is that it has a very clear role for women, who turn out to be enormously important to motivating this movement and holding it together. The other is for its depiction of the end of the world. So the nineteen eighties in general are a time of deep fixation on the end of the world. There's deep, deep apocalyptic belief kind of across American culture, including in evangelical churches, which are recruiting much larger congregations and much more politicized congregations in the nineteen eighties. Now in evangelical Christianity, that comes with a belief in a day all the rapture, which is a moment when all of the faithful are supposed to be peacefully transported to Heaven before this big, bloody last battle that will come right before the return of Christ. So Christian identity has no rapture, but it does have the battle. So what Christian identity does is turn its believers into either survivalists. You either have to survive this end times before Jesus returns, or you have to become a soldier of God to clear the world of non white populations before you know, before Christ can return to the world. So what it does is transfigure this whole host of social issues that are important to the white power movement into a holy war. And one way to think about this is that it comes with this intense sense of emergency about something that people talk about very casually in American culture, which is this kind of imagined moment of demographic change when the country will switch over from a majority white population to something else. And as different communities begin to make that transition in the eighties and the nineties, these activists get more and more preoccupied with this. For people in the white power movement, the issues that might be conservative or understandable to us as conservative, like opposing immigration, opposing abortion, LGBT rights, opposing feminism, being in favor of racial segregation or freedom of association. All of that stuff, for white power activists is attached to this deep preoccupation with the future of the race through the production of white babies. So it's not for white power activists just they oppose abortion because it's a conservative issue or because they have concerns about unborn life. It's that they oppose abortion because abortion is one thing that is threatening the white birthrate, along with immigration integration, which they think will result in the birth of non white children or mixed race children who they see as non human. LGBT rights they think will take white women out of the work of birthing children. They're worried about feminism because they think women should be at home raising children. This whole production of white children thing is like the glue that holds together this whole belief system. And in order for it to make sense, you really have to think about how vivid and immediate this sense of emergency is to these activists. They feel this as an apocalyptic threat, so not as kind of like a soft demographic change that's going to come at some point. Okay, so you get this attempt to unify these disparate, potentially disparate social groups around a common vision and a kind of a common ideology. It's happening in the middle of the nineteen eighties, and it then leads to some rather extraordinary consequences, most saliently in your book. And this is the kind of climactic point in your book, the nineteen ninety five bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building by Timothy McVay and a group of others, And will say more about that group. How did that spectacular bombing spectacular in the sense that it was a spectacle. It created a spectacle in which nearly one hundred and seventy people were killed grow out of this movement? How did the movement go from, as it were, a group of possibly crazy looking peripheral people to a cohesive movement that could produce an attack like this. That's a great question, and the short answer is through women during the nineteen eighties. What unfolds is not sort of a popularly understood collection of shrieking and ignorant activists in backwoods something, you know, doing their own and fighting with each other, etcetera. What we see is actually a broad ranging social movement. It includes men, women, and children. It includes people in all regions of the country, including rural, suburban, and urban spaces, and includes people of a lot of different age groups, people with education ranging from high school dropout and to homeschool to I mean rocket launch engineer kind of people. Um. Religious leaders and felons and civilians, veterans and active duty troops. So it's really a disprint group of people group the word poor everybody. Yeah, well done. No, no, not at all. It's a very diverse group of people except racially, yes, um. And it even has multiple faiths in it, as we talked about. So that UM, that structure UM, together with this turn against the state, leads them to adopt a strategy called leaderless resistance in nineteen eighty three. So talk to us about leaderless resistance because that hugely important for the present moment as well. It is leaderless resistance is easy to understand now as just cell style terrorism. The idea is that you're going to indoctrinate and shape activists and maybe small cohorts of cells, like one to six people, maybe the occasional larger cell of twelve people, maybe just one to two activists you're going to get them all aligned towards the same targets, and then they're going to act independently, without communication with leadership and without communication with each other. Now, there's actually a historical reason for why they adopt this strategy, which is that in the earlier clan, in the fifties and the sixties, the Third Era clan, which is the one that opposes the Civil rights movement, the federal government had sent in a ton of informants under the FBI's Counterintelligence Project and other initiatives, and clansmen got really really frustrated with how many of these people were getting into their meetings and messing their stuff and getting people arrested and turning over mailing lists and all kinds of things like that. So leaderless resistance is actually implemented in large part to foil surveillance, and it has the other kind of immediate benefit of foiling court prosecution. But the lasting impact of it has actually been to foil public understanding. Because what happens is leaders resistance plays right into this sort of media narrative about lone wolf violence or crazy people or a few bad apples or mad gunmen, right where we get a lot of different stories about one person committing an act of violence and don't get the apparatus to put those things together into the same history. So leaderless resistance is one of the ways that we get from the formation of the movement to Oklahoma City. The other one is the implementation of computer social networking. In nineteen eighty three eighty four, they implement a series of code word accessed message board is called liberty net UM. This is before the Internet, so technically this is not the Internet, but we can we can understand this is like the proto Internet. It's it's networked computers that can speak to one another. Um. And also, by the way, it takes the FBI like two years to crack the code and see what they're posting, kind of amazing that White Power might be might be the very first social movement to have actively exploited computer technology in that way. Yeah, not only that, but the way that they do this is very much like Facebook, long before Facebook was invented. Um. What they post to these message boards includes a lot of you know, practical content like assassination lists and um, you know, propaganda messaging and things like that, but it also includes things like personal ads, So what these these boards are meant to do is to connect activists together in a movement in order to motivate this cell style activism. M So it's in a way, if you're going to have leader list resistance, you need cells and they need to communicate with each other somehow, even if not in coordination, and then the message sports become the mechanism in your story for how that happens. Yeah, well you also need a big you need the social movement to share resources and also to connect everybody in common culture as such that they can understand what the targets are supposed to be. It's interesting that Timothy McVeigh, I think you show in your book also engage in one of these models of get some resources by robbing somebody. Right, He and a couple of the associates robbed a gun dealer to get the money to have the resources to buy to buy the material to blow up the Federal building. Yes, and that's a strategy from the order and also from a novel called The Turner Diaries, which kind of becomes a I mean, it's important as a cultural text, but it's and as a manual of operations. But it's also kind of a cultural loadstar from the movement in the sense that it does that work of explaining to everybody what they're trying to do and how they're going to do it. I was fascinated reading your book about the centrality of this novel, the Turner Diaries, which seem to include in your account actually a blueprint even for blowing up a federal building with a truck bomb. I mean, very very detailed, sort of sort of envisioning process. Yeah, tell us a little bit about that about that novel, because again, it was a novel that I had not heard of before reading your book. Oh okay, So it's a novel that's published in Cereal in the late nineteen seventies and then comes out in paperback, And it is very difficult to overstate how important this novel is to the movement. The Turner Diaries shows up everywhere, so McVay sells it for a while on the gun show circuit. The Order that I talked about a moment ago keeps a stack of them in the bunk house. Other white power groups distribute them at paramilitary training. It shows up in bookstores and other places where the movement is trying to recruit far aways South Africa, and it's it's mentioned in advertisements and all kinds of different white power publications. And I think one of the reasons it's so important is it sets out to answer a question that is sort of baffling on its face and that actually has stood in the way of prosecution more than once, which is, how could this fringe movement, right, it's a very small movement possibly hope to do what it's setting out to do, which is to overthrow the United States, the most militarized superstate in world history. This is a kind of baffling problem for these activists, and in the novel, I think he describes it as a nat trying to assassinate an elephant. So the imaginative work that the Turner Diaries does in laying out how such a thing could be possible is really important for this movement in terms of being able to have an imaginary in which this could happen. And it tells us something very very important and alarming about the kind of violence we're seeing today, which is that acts like Christchurch or the Pittsburgh shooting or the Oklahoma bombing are not imagined to be the endpoint of this activism. The endpoint is not the act of violence. These are supposed to be political acts of violence that white power activists hope will awaken other white people to what they see as the self evident state of emergency facing the white race, and they think that that will eventually lead to an armed uprising that will create an all white world. And the turnidiaries imagines this very violently and very vividly, and it includes things like like many nuclear weapon blasts, the forced march of people of color out of the United States, and the eventual genocide of all populations except for white people in the world. And so then Oklahoma City does happen and the bombing does occur. And then from the standpoint of public perception, instead of the world sitting up and taking notice and ordinary concerned Americans saying there's this powerful, dangerous social movement that's seeking revolution and is using terrorist techniques and it's just blown up a building and killed a lot of people, we get basically the opposite. We get a narrative of this was a few people. I remember a narrative that you know, Timothy fi McVeigh was so radical that even the militias wouldn't have him as a member, thereby implying that maybe these militias actually aren't so bad after all. McVeigh doesn't put up much of a defensive trial. And then he allows himself to be executed by not challenging the death sentence, and he's executed in record time, and it's as though the story disappears. Why did this happen? I mean to take a comparison. After September eleventh, whatever skepticism there might have been about the capacities of terrorists operating the name of Islam to change global affairs was eliminated, and a generation of experts or pseudo experts in some cases, but nevertheless, a generation of concerned people who cared about this was born in a moment and created an industry that hasn't gone away since. In contrast, in radical contrast and the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, things sort of don't happen in that way. Talk about why, because I think it's so important. The Oklahoma City bombing represents the largest deliberate mass casualty in the United States between Pearl Harbor and nine to eleven, and the fact that we don't have a narrative about it in the ways that you've outlined is both alarming and surprising given how thoroughly these these events that I cover in the book were talked about at the time. So if you think about something like the shooting at Greensboro, people knew about that. That was front page news. Yeah, that made the front pages of many, many, many newspapers, and eventually also became a Saturday Net Life sketch like that was in the zeitgeist. But somehow we haven't connected that event with Oklahoma City. We haven't connected either of them with a narrative about a social movement. We don't have really a durable way at all of thinking about how to narrate these events. So with Oklahoma City, one of the things that happens is that the federal government tries to do a big prosecution of these activists in nineteen eighty seven eighty eight in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and so it's a federal trial on charges including seditious conspiracy. Seditious conspiracy in this case was wholly evident. The jury heard testimony about white power activists plotting to poison the water supply of a major city with cyanide. They seized thirty gallons of cyanide. The jurors saw laundry hampers full of illegal weapons and material pushed through the courtroom, and we're talking about things like anti tank weapons and claim war minds. They saw the writings of these activists where they had said that they were involved in seditious conspiracy. It goes on and on like this. That trial got no convictions. So you get these acquittals in these cases of trying people for trying to overthrow the government. I get that that's a part of the disappearance of a story that there's a coherent movement say more about how yeah, go ahead. More than that, what emerges from it is that it is a disaster for the prosecuting agencies, the atf dog, FBI. Everyone is embarrassed by this entire thing. And afterward, there's a policy institutionalized at the FBI that says they will make no attempt to tie white power violence to a movement. They will prosecute only individual crimes. They will not attempt to prosecute as part of a movement. So you have a piece of paper written at the end of this sedition trial that when the Timothy mcveay case comes up, says they will not try to prosecute as part of a movement. And why do they say in this document that they won't do that, because because it's a no win proposition that they thought that was why they lost those prosecutions. It's a kind of tactical judgment. It's a tactical judgment and a recognition that there's not a sufficient public will to prosecute white power violence as the work of a movement. And I mean, if anything, that's only deepened by the events of the early nineteen nineties Ridge and Ridge and Waco and the sieges, where where the state very clearly oversteps in and uses militarized violence against against white power activists in one case and followers of the branch Davidian compounded the other case. So the FBI is a part of the story and the deal Department of Justice. They decline to treat white white power or white supremacy movements as a coordinated and coherent said of terrorist groups, even after Oklahoma City. Why does the rest of the world go along with that? Why does the media accept that instead of pushing against the government's failure to construct a narrative. I think that there is a very durable narrative form about the lone wolf gunmen. And when there is a mass violent event that is carried out by a white perpetrator, we almost always see the same story about it. It almost always goes to lone wolf mental health and sort of like a psychological profile, rather than going to connections and ideology and politics, even when there is clear clear evidence that these are white power gunmen. So it's a kind of denial, and it may be an individual psychological denial, or it may be a white people wide social denial. I mean, my assumption is that you know that many African Americans would not instinctively think, oh, it must be a lone wolf, but might think they are organized people who are who are out to get us. Well, not only that, but the term lone wolf comes from this movement, So we are allowing this movement to disappear every time we say that phrase. One question that I hear a lot about this story is who failed to stop this movement? Because in the entirety of my book, there's never a moment where when there's like a decisive court case that renders the movement unable to organize even for a short time. Yeah, you don't have an Elliot's in your book. You don't have a you know, it will be hard to make a movie out of it because you don't have the heroic cop or you know, an FBI agent who stands up and says enough, I'm going I'm going to change this around. There's one actually who quits and frustration after this edition. Trial policy is instituted about not tying the individual crimes of the broad movement. And there are some heroic local reporters who have like one piece of this story in real time, which is amazing. I mean, there are people who are trying right, but the failure is exists at a I have to use one historical jargon term, which is transscalar, meaning that the failure of response to this movement lives both at the level of like personal prejudice of people in various positions of power allow it to go unchecked right all the way up through failures of media reporting, failures of juror education, failures of prosecutorial policy and the law, failures of military policy to stop this kind of organizing, and active duty troops failures in all kinds of different allocation of surveillance resources all the way up right, so transcalar, meaning it goes every level of all the way up to every level of systemic power you can think of, and it's all so imbricated that I think to really change it would require a massive shift in public discourse such that people start to think about it as a movement all the way up to reforming those policies and laws that allow these things to continue. Well, one change that might potentially becoming is ironically driven by a rapidly growing number of wildly successful and heavily publicized terrorist attacks, which is what we've seen in the last few years. You know, I'm oversimplifying a bit, but I would say since Charlottesville, American public consciousness, US public consciousness has really been profoundly raised around these issues, such that even events that take place abroad like the christ Church, New Zealand attacks, are incorporated into our understanding or our wake up call, which I think was not so much true for the unders Bravick attacks, which although there was interested in the United States, and there was a movie and there was a long New York or article, there was still some tendency to see this as though it were a Northern European problem. You know, something not a problem of the US. On top of that, there was the fact that Bravick, you know, was a white guy who killed a lot of white people, I mean, and so it was it seemed possible not to construct this narrative. But the recent events don't look that way. They look like a coordinated set of events around the world. And what's more, we also now have a powerful comparison to make, which is the comparison to self radicalized terrorists who are acting in the name of Islam, who also have practiced a kind of leaderless resistance. But that's not how a lot of the most effective attacks of the Islamic state operate. They operate on a leaderless resistance principle. So we now have a salient example in our minds and lots and lots of attacks. Do you have a sense that these attacks are actually speeding up or is that an artifact of our starting to notice them more? It feels to me like a wave of attacks that we're in. And something that I have been trying to talk about since Charlottesville is that the body count is very very low still given the kind of public facing activism that we can observe. So the body count is low relative to what it could be. Well, so if we compare the earlier moment with this moment and compare something similar amounts of public sphere activity with where we are right now, the comparative body count is very low, UM, meaning that I would expect there to be more death. But does that mean, just to clarify, does that mean you expect more death is coming or that you're surprised that it hasn't come yet. No, no, no no, no, I would expect more mass attacks to becoming. Yes, and we should pause on that for a moment. You're saying, in light of the historical examples and evidence, you would predict that there are more very violent public attacks coming. Yeah, that would be my hunch. I mean, historians always are reluctant to make prognosis about the future, and understandably I am, like I said, I don't have an archive. But my hunch is that, given how much public facing activity we've seen in the last say, five years, I am staggered that the body count is not already higher. So I would be very surprised if it did not amplify. UM. And that's also true because we have this other X factor about UM. So if you look at rises in the clan throughout its life, so from eighteen sixty six to the present, we have these clearly defined ebbs and flows of the clan. Um. The the high points always align with the aftermath of warfare in American society, and they do that more consistently than they align with things like economic hardship or poverty, or even anti immigration sentiment or um segregation law changes, UM. And the fact that we are now in a prolonged aftermath of war period that is stretched out coming out of Iraq and eventually out of I mean we're in. We're in kind of like a forever aftermath right now, forever wars aftermath exactly. And I mean this is a this is a kind of aftermath that we have never seen before. If you think about kind of the cycles of combat and aftermath in that it is mostly focused on one sector of society that interacts less and less with other sectors of society. Right, we see increasing segregation of military families into communities apart from other families. We see increasing use of things like stop loss in multiple tours to put people back in combat over and over rather than drafting new people. I teach at a university which is as wonderful students, but I hardly ever have students who have themselves served, or have even have family members who've served. So there's a profound social segregation around who is doing this work of violence, and a stretching out of the combat aftermath period. I don't know what that will do in those earlier periods. It's really interesting because at one point I wondered if we might be seeing like a Rambo effect right where veterans come back and just can't stop doing the violence of warfare. But it turns out that violence increases for everybody in American society after warfare, people who definitely didn't serve, like older people and women and children, across all of those groups. There's just more violence in the aftermath of warfare in American society. So in this long aftermath period, I think we should be concerned about this effect where vigilante or excuse me, revolutionary groups in this case are able to either mobilize that violent sentiment or I don't know, contribute to infan and in some way. I want to close by asking you about a phenomenon that is obviously very significant for the post nineteen ninety five of white supremacy. The era that we're in now, and that is the Internet, not in its proto message board form, but in the contemporary form that we know, which includes not only Internet one point oh, but also social media, and in which, among other things, it's much easier to spread information to people who never have to have individual human contact with each other. They might, but they don't need to have done. It strikes me that, on the one hand, the phenomenon of self radicalization, the Dylan roof whom, as you say and the close of your book, never actually had to meet any people who shared his views to develop them. So in that sense, you could sort of imagine that the Internet is a social media are are vehicles to spread ideology and to spread violence. But on the other hand, we did have Charlottesville, which was less we forget, began with a march that was called Unite the Right, which was trying precisely to translate Internet connections to the real life sphere. Talk about, if you would, the Internet and how it's going to affect or is affecting white power in our present moment. The actual violence of even public facing events like Charlottesville that led to the death of Heather Higher and the beating of other demonstrators is important to queue up as we have that conversation. The internet is both concerning and immensely hopeful. The use of viral videos and live streaming of the attacks is new and strikes me as very much of a piece with our present moment. And I'm thinking of the christ Church shooter live streaming the attack, and also the militias on the border detaining undocumented immigrants and live streaming, you know, their agony as they were held by a non government group in order to turn them over to the border patrol. On the other hand, I do want to say that like there is, there is a way that the internet could also be an agent of change and could offer us a seed of hope. The idea that we talked about with connecting these stories together as a form of understanding the history, such that we can talk about christ Church and the Tree of Life shooting and Charlottesville and Dylan Roofs shooting and Charleston all as the act of the white power movement. One potential there is to connect the impacted communities with one another and to create a kind of coalition politics that could resist this kind of violence, and so you know, the Internet gives and takes away, I suppose, but there is a way that it might also provide an instrument for public understanding that wasn't available to us in that earlier period. Kathleen, thank you very very much, not just for talking with us, but for your extraordinarily important work to help us come to terms with by recognizing a genuine, organized, unified set of ideologies that are in fact a social movement with real violent tendencies. Unless we recognize that, we're not going to be anywhere. And when we do recognize that, and I have some confidence that we will, it will be thanks to your work and to the work of other other people like you. Thank you very very much for being with us. Well, thank you for having me. Before talking to Kathleen and reading her book. I'm afraid I was one of those people who believe the message that attacks by white supremacists are isolated, disconnected, lone wolf actions. I didn't take on board the extent to which the Oklahoma City bombing and the white supremacist attacks, including the Charlottesville events and attacks on mosques and synagogues, were actually part of an organized social movement, A lot like the international jihadi movement. What's scary about that diagnosis? You heard directly from Kathleen, She said she expects the body count to rise. Now, historical precedent isn't always a perfect predictor of what's going to happen in the future, but when it comes to terrorism or other complex phenomena, it's often the best predictor that we're going to get. So I was a little bit scared, I will admit. My takeaway, though, is more about what we can do going forward than just the feeling that, boy, is this scary. The only way to solve and address a phenomena like white power terrorism is actually to recognize it for what it is. Once we understand that people can be radicalized, we can try to track the people who are in the process of becoming radicalized. Once we know there are targets, we can harden those targets and try to prevent attacks, much in the way that we've tried with some success in some instances, although not on others, to protect ourselves against the threat of international jihadi terrorism. So, in a sense, I think there are things we can do provided we diagnose the threat for what it actually is. Deep background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia gene Coott, with engineering by Jason Gambrel and Jason Roskowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is Deep Background