How to combat political extremism

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, one of America's leading experts on the far right, joins us this week to discuss what draws people to political extremism online and offline — and what we can do to combat it.

Miller-Idriss is the director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University and author of the book Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right. As you'll hear, PERIL takes a public health approach to preventing violent extremism and provides tools and resources to help communities create resilient democracies.

In the interview, Miller-Idriss discusses how extremism and political violence are linked to our desire for community. This dynamic means that extremist ideas can pop up in seemingly innocuous places from martial arts groups to online wellness communities. She says understanding this dynamic is key to moving people away from extremist spaces and into constructive communities.

Miller-Idriss visited Penn State as part of the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar exploring the theme, "Birthing the Nation: Gender, Sex and Reproduction in Ethnonationalist Imaginaries."

Michael Berkman
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy on the campus of Penn State University, I'm Michael Berkman.

Chris Beem
And I'm Chris Beem.

Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle and welcome to Democracy Works. Our guest this week is Cynthia Miller-Idriss professor in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Education at American University. She's also the director of the polarization and extremism Research and Innovation Lab, and the author of the book hate in the homeland the new global far right. Cynthia visited Penn State's in January to present a lecture as part of the Sawyer seminar I project that will explore the role of gender sex and reproduction in ethno nationalism. But our conversation focuses mainly on the work of her research lab, and how to both recognize and combat political extremism. Something I think we can definitely use, especially in an election year.

Chris Beem
It's a very timely, sorry to say it's a very timely topic, right? We all are aware of this, excuse me of this huge increase in domestic terrorism. anti semitism has exploded on the right and the left. There's, there's violence against Muslims, African Americans, gay and lesbian people, trans people, you know, we can go down the litany of, of events of mass shootings, where the person was motivated by hatred of the groups that they targeted.

Michael Berkman
And so what we've got with Cynthia is a really interesting project, I think, because we have really powerful scholarly work on extremism that approaches it, I think, in a somewhat different way than most of the other work that I've read anyway. But attached to that is also a lab that really tries to make a difference. And that tries to see how you can apply what she's learning through the scholarly work to actually undermine extremism. And our focus here, which is also different, I think, from a lot of work that we've seen is on younger people, mostly, I think, middle schoolers and high school, not really college campuses, I think her lab work is almost entirely with families with kids that are in middle school and high school, and she's trying to understand how young people get sort of swept into extremism, adopt extremist viewpoints, and potentially act on that. And I think what's so interesting here is that we're used to hearing about the role of social media. In radicalizing people, certainly, we hear a lot about the role of social media, in mobilizing extremists for, say, ISIS throughout Europe when they're trying to bring especially women into ISIS. But here, she really goes well beyond social media to talk more broadly about the kinds of spaces that younger people find themselves in, and she uses that word spaces quite a bit that young people find themselves in, where they develop these extremist views.

Chris Beem
Yeah, you know, you read, you read the book, and when I said it reminds me of a whack a mole game, only the whack a mole game is, you know, 1000s of holes, right? And these expressions of far right ideology, and this kind of searching for people to kind of try to find where they are, and to connect to them, at a moment of some kind of vulnerability or lack of sophistication in their lives is just really astonishing to me, I had no idea that there were cooking shows and drywall videos that were were developed as a kind of means for introducing these kind of neo Nazi ideologies.

Michael Berkman
I'm with you. I didn't know about a lot of this. And I think it contextualize this, for me this notion of growth of extremist growth in a way that's different from how we usually talk about it. Right. So, I mean, you mentioned even right at the beginning, the rise in hate groups. And so one way that we assess increasing anti semitism increasing right wing extremism, as we say there are more, we might say there are more hate groups around and other ways we look at crimes and we say the more hate crimes around and certainly in hate crimes, we've seen quite an explosion. But she wants us to think about this growth in terms of both supply and demand. And so she wants us to think about both, you know, sort of a top down approach or what she calls the supply side approach, which is how different kinds of organizations how different kinds of messaging how different kinds of structures sort of bring people As in, as well as on the bottom up, and that is or the demand side, like, what is it about young people, some young people today that makes them so vulnerable and open to extremism? I mean, what is it about their personalities? What is it about their sense of vulnerability? What is it about who they are, that makes them recruitable? And as I kind of mentioned before, I mean, I think you see this kind of work actually, in, you know, in Europe and understanding ISIS recruitment. And, you know, why is it that some young girls want to pick up and become an ISIS wife and how they're recruited, say, through different kinds of networks, and through through social media or through other sources like that, but very rarely have I seen this kind of work done on the American side, or at least in a way that's come to our attention at at democracy works. And I think that's what makes it particularly interesting to me to move beyond just the groups to move beyond the X to understanding more broadly, the spaces and spaces that she describes as virtual spaces that she describes as real, and spaces that street described, even in purely as purely symbolic that attract, you know, young people today?

Chris Beem
Well, you know, obviously, it is easier to count groups than it is to count 14 year old boys with their laptop open. Right. And so that's part of the issue here. But yeah, I think, the spotlight exactly and and so you have, you know, I think the fact that so many young people have phones, and laptops, and you know, whatever those things are called the page things anyway, so many people have phones and laptops that so many children have phones and laptops, that it's just the direct access to these, you know, let's call them boys is just significantly higher now. And it's harder for parents to know exactly what they are consuming, let alone, stop it or control it.

Jenna Spinelle
And as she says in the interview, it's important to make yourself aware of what's happening in today's media environment. It's just as easy to bury your head in the sand and ignore all of this if you want to, but we talk in the interview about how everybody kind of has an obligation to keep this stuff in their minds disturbing as it may be. So let's go now to the interview.

Jenna Spinelle
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, welcome to Democracy Works. Thanks for joining us today.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Thanks for having me.

Jenna Spinelle
So you are one of the country's leading experts on the far right, and extremism. And you've been studying these areas for a long time, I thought maybe we could start with your definition of the far right maybe how you think about it today and how that definition has evolved in the time you've been studying this field?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Yeah, well, first of all, I often consider myself an accidental expert on the far right. It wasn't what I intended to study, I spent the first 1520 years of my career in Germany, studying school based responses to resurgent anti semitism and Neo Nazism there, and was sort of tracing aesthetic changes in the far right, they're the change from the skinhead kind of racist scene to a much more mainstream, commercialized appearance. And then Charlottesville happened sort of right after I finished a book called The extreme gone mainstream. And so everything shifted. So you know, I wasn't really working on us contexts, very much at all, although there's a global dimension to this until around 2017 2018. And I use the term far right, which I often say is the best bad term available for the phenomenon, in part because that is a term that's used by global databases by scholars around the world. It's recognizable, but I don't like the term because it's often very easily sort of turned into political partisan tensions. But the way that I use the term the definition is it's loosely gathers two clusters of problematic beliefs and behaviors that are related on the one hand to supremacist to thinking which is thinking that sets up a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority between groups of people in which the other poses an existential threat that often has to be met with violence in this country and globally, that's most commonly white supremacist extremism, but we also have rising male supremacy, Christian supremacy, Western supremacy. So you have groups like the proud boys who call themselves Western chauvinists, for example, that would fall in that category. Then the other sort of part of the bucket is anti government, anti democratic movements and groups and scenes and that includes in this country, the unlawful militias groups like the Oathkeepers the three percenters but also kinds of general anti government movements and anti democratic movements that seek to reduce the rule of law or the protection of minority rights. And then there's some other kinds of clusters of things that don't fit neatly conspiratorial movements like Q Anon, which actually cut across the spectrum. And the last thing I'll say is that there are a lot of things that fall under those categories that also cut across the political spectrum. So anti semitism, misogyny, male supremacism, for example, are a part of the far right, but also appear across the political spectrum, including on the left,

Jenna Spinelle
And you write in your book hate in the homeland about needing to think about shifting our focus to the ways that people enter far right movements enter extremist spaces. I wonder if you could talk more about generally what some of those pathways are? We'll get down to more specifics later on. Sure. But and to what extent those pathways are similar, from country to country.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Yeah, so one of the things that frustrated me and when I first started working on this in the US, in part because I live in DC, and so I'm often kind of invited to meetings with policymakers who work in the national security space. And during that kind of post Charlottesville period, when we saw a series of horrific attacks, both in the US and overseas in Christchurch, and El Paso and in Pittsburgh, and you know, then eventually Buffalo and more there was a real shift in the US is interest and willingness to discuss and eventually willingness to acknowledge that as the Department of Homeland Security eventually did in October 2020, that domestic violent extremism is the most pressing and lethal threat facing the homeland. So that finally happened in 2020. So we're not even that far from that period of time. We're only about three years into acknowledgement. I say that because that meant, you know, prior to that, for 20 years since 911, the focus had been on international Islamist forms of terrorism and extremism. And so all of the questions that I was getting in those early years were about they were using frameworks that that made sense for ISIS and Islam, you know, and I'll cut it. And so they were asking questions like about the hierarchy of the groups, the chain of command? How can you infiltrate them? How you know, so all as if this is all organized top down by an ideology, and a structure and a group that can be infiltrated and broken up? And I'm there trying to explain that, you know, actually, what happens in most domestic violent extremism movements, including white supremacy and anti government extremism is the ideas come to you rather than you seeking them out? Especially in online contexts? There are groups producing propaganda. So groups matter. But groups are not where the vast majority of violence comes from, in fact, every major terrorist attack on the far right going all the way back to Oklahoma City, has been at the hands of a person who was not a formal member of a group. And so, you know, we spend a lot of time on groups, including in the media, because they're understandable. They're definable, and we think that we can just say like, that's the problem over there. But actually, I think a lot of the problem is right here on your screen in front of you and your kid's room and your brother's room and whatever, as they're on their laptops, and they're in online gaming platforms, or they're in self help forums, or they're in I mean, really, anywhere. It's the you know, the point of that book, hate in the homeland to talk about those spaces and places is to show how ordinary these early exposures are. They're ubiquitous, and they're everywhere. So hateful, conspiratorial ideas are everywhere. And it doesn't mean that everyone who encounters them is going to go down those rabbit holes, but the rabbit holes exist, meaning it's pretty easy to click on the next recommended link and get to ever more salacious content because of how algorithms themselves for social media companies prioritize salacious content, and pretty quickly get to content that's banned actually pretty, you know, afterward, but has been viewed and downloaded millions of times before it's banned. So you know, there are cooking shows, there are livestream MMA tournaments, there are online gaming chat rooms and servers that get either infiltrated by or, you know, deliberately introduced by people who are deliberately introducing extremist ideas, or they're just somebody sharing a link, they get into a chat room, it's a meme sharing site, and they're sharing evermore scientific, racist and gross content to try to kind of continue to shock each other. And somebody you know, follows a link to an encrypted chat room and then that leads them down a rabbit hole. So it's just the pathways are endless, I think at the beginning, and you know, those become more narrow and focus as you move, but there are many different points for potential offer and being early on and it's one of the things I tried to emphasize.

Jenna Spinelle
And speaking of offering I mean, I know that you communities, whether online or off, also police themselves. And so I wonder to what extent that happens. We you're right, we do hear a lot about the rabbit holes and the people who become radicalized, but maybe not as much in the media about groups that keep those forces at bay?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Well, there are, of course, there are like trust and safety groups that are official parts of social media platforms that are trying hard to remove bad content, and they get a lot of, they get a bad rap. But I think actually, you know, I've talked to a lot of those folks. First of all, a lot of those teams have been decimated by layoffs recently, so they're really stretched thin, but also they are, you know, they're trying to work within a corporate structure that prioritizes profits. And that, you know, is always trying to play catch up with the guidelines of how to remove content and how to quickly remove content and use AI in many cases to remove content that AI doesn't always right away, recognize as false or conspiratorial, or deepfake. Video, you know, the problem I have with the content moderation side of it is that even in the best case scenario, even when everything goes right, and the content gets removed, it's always been downloaded millions of times and seen, you know, millions of times and so the harm is already done. It may we may stem the flow of the harm, but it's not actually a preventative. It's like a band aid, right, you're stemming the bleeding that's happened and stopping further harm, an infection from spreading, but you're not actually like the cuts are already there and are in the in the fabric of our society, our social cohesion, etc, the harms that are done to targeted groups. And so sometimes you get stigma as a policing technique, you know, then sometimes you get individuals who just step up and say, like, that's awful. But in teenage spaces, there's not enough of that. And I think part of it is just it's so normalized. You know, the talk I gave here on campus last night, a young woman came up to me, right at the end of the talk a student and said, you know, just sort of heartbreakingly that, you know, acknowledging just how desensitized she's become to the, you know, horrific gender based violence that she observes, and you know, in online spaces every day, and just has come to accept it as kind of part of what one of the teenage girls who observed mass shooters online rage later said, quote, it's what online is, why would anyone report it? I think that that's a danger to when the kind of when we get so used to how awful it is that you just dismiss it, because there's a kind of desensitization and dehumanization that comes from that kind of toxic stew, as well. So sometimes there's policing internally, sometimes there's external constraints, but I don't think it's a match for the kind of desensitization, that's happening.

Jenna Spinelle
And so you know, people find communities and want to join groups because they want connection, they want to feel validated. They want to feel meaning, and purpose. And so I wonder how you think about that side of the equation. It's like an extension of the Robert Putnam Bowling Alone problem, right? And so how do we keep all the good stuff about communities and being part of them, but without some of these more nefarious forces that find their way and as we're discussing,

Cynthia Miller-Idriss
I mean, it's one of the, you know, one of the pieces of advice we give to parents and our parenting guides and tools and trainings is to think about fostering a healthy sense of connection and belonging and identity, like a lot of teenagers who go looking for this kind of stuff, both on the Islamist ISIS related recruitment. And on, you know, domestic, violent extremist groups here are actually looking for some way to belong, to have meaning to have purpose to contribute to something that they think is bigger and better than themselves. It's a major set of vulnerabilities. This is a generation of young people that's more isolated than any generation and previous record. And yet they are connected online. Often they don't, that doesn't make them feel less isolated. Right. They have fewer people who they count as friends, they have fewer people who they think they can ask for a favor, or rely on for help. And so those are all things that create vulnerabilities. And it's one of the reasons why we saw such a surge in both the circulation of online propaganda and in weird kinds of radicalization during the pandemic like QAnon.

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah. And one of the guides that your team put out, you talk about the principle of civic courage, I believe that was in the one for for just general community members, bystanders who might witness forms of extremism. Can you talk about what that is and how it plays out?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Yeah, I mean, so one of the things we find is that there's really interesting data on this is that people's willingness to intervene with a person who they know has expressed radicalizing ideas harmful content conspiratorial content is dependent on their knowledge of that, right. So they because they may doubt themselves right to do I really know is that definitely, what did he mean by that? Right? And so we find this with parents, for example, their knowledge of harmful online content, predicts their willingness to engage and their confidence to do so those two things really interesting. We're doing longitudinal study. These are the parents, we find that they start to forget what they learned about six months after the intervention, but their confidence and willingness to engage stays high for another three months. So you know, what we've been talking to funders about is like, that tells us people and then it drops, right. So it trails after they realize they forgotten, then about three months later, they stop being willing to intervene or being confident that they can do so effectively. So we've said, you know, look, I think people need a booster, basically, about six months after we've had an initial intervention. Can we send people a short video? Can we do a short primer to remind them what they learned and keep their knowledge high, in order to keep the confidence high. And so I think this notion of civil courage is, is about, you know, you know, willingness to step up willingness to speak up to intervene, but I'm also cautious about it, knowing what we know, from the data that that's also connected empirically, to people's awareness of the problem. And their, their confidence and willingness to intervene depends on how much they know, right?

Jenna Spinelle
And then I mean, in our media world, it is, as we've discussed, you can create a world in which this extremist content is the only content you're exposed to. But you can also create a world where you never ever have to encounter it, if you don't want to. And so how much, how much duty do do we all have? I'm just gonna go out on a limb and say people listening to this podcast are probably not mostly consumers of our right or extremist content. But how much duty do we all have to know what's out there and to and to stay apprised of what's happening?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss
I think, I mean, you know, I'm a compassionate person about how busy people are and how you know, so I'm not going to wag my finger and say, you know, everybody should be doing better. But I think there's this principle that says, like, we're all doing the best we can, and we could all be doing better, right, like, and so I think if you acknowledge and recognize that, that we're doing the best we can with constrained times, and schedules and balances, and overwork, and under, you know, a lack of time for ourselves. And I think staying informed in this moment of real democratic crisis is critical. And I think, you know, one of the things we found with our parents guide is that it only takes parents an average of seven minutes to read that guide. And so we then wrote an op ed for USA Today that said, it only takes seven minutes to keep your kids safer from online harms. And we found that by studying those parents, after even just seven minutes of reading, on average, three months afterward, we had 6% of the 1500. Parents we studied, say that they use what they learned in the Guide to directly intervene with a child who they now understood, was exposed to or expressing radicalizing content. 11% said they, after reading that guide, in just seven minutes, they joined or created a group of other parents to talk about the online harms that their kids were exposed to. And that really, to us says that you can have that's about 75 people who said, they use what they learned in just seven minutes of reading to intervene. So you know, I think it's really important to know, you don't have to go to a whole weekend workshop, you don't have to take a semester long class, you don't have to write a book on this. But you can pick something up parents told us they wanted it in a PDF downloadable. So we made it as a PDF downloadable, but it's also available online, on our it's all free on our websites, and doesn't have to be our tools, I think there's a lot of things that can inform you while you're drinking a cup of coffee, that actually just helps you. The last thing I'll say is this data isn't published yet, but I just heard yesterday, so kind of hot off the press that our 12 month data where we also talked to parents about parenting styles indicates that actually parenting style is a huge predictor of their willingness to engage in their effectiveness at doing so. And so that's, you know, parents who are so you know, I won't go into more detail on that. But I think stay tuned for that publication and for what we're learning about the difference between say being an authoritative parent versus authoritarian versus permissive in terms of how willing and how confident parents are that they can engage effectively with a child turns out to have a lot of impact on whether they can do it. Yeah.

Jenna Spinelle
And and we'll certainly link to all of those resources in our show notes. But for, for listeners who, who have kids, or maybe who are teachers themselves, what are some of the warning signs to look for?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Well, you know, some of it is like, you know, if teenagers start to say something like, you know, just out of the blue usually like one of the ones we used to say is it probably a little less common now but but teenagers will say something like a joke that is, you know, sometimes quite obvious like we've heard parents tell us, a kid says some joke about the Holocaust, right? That's a con and then when you speak up and say something to that to them about that. They say or something anti immigrant or mentioning the great replacement or something. Then they say, Oh, don't be such a triggered snowflake. Right? So to me if you if a kid uses the phrase triggered snowflake, doesn't mean they're radicalized at all, but it means that they're definitely exposed to something online. That is a narrative that positions this narrative about like kind of hateful and far right content as being you know, just a joke, and everybody else just can't get the joke right? is just too serious. Like we're the edgy ones using satire and humor and you just don't edit. And so, you know, what we find is that parents actually, you know, usually know something is going on, they just don't know what it is, right. So we've had parents come to us and say, I can tell something's going on, I don't know, if they're doing drugs, if there's like, if they're involved in some new relationship, if they're exposed to something online, but they're changing, right, the personality is changing. And a lot of the warning signs about being withdrawn, changing relationships, pulling out from other friendships are actually the same across a whole range of problematic things that kids could be doing, or things that could have happened to them. And so talking to them, is really important. And that's, you know, one of the things we really urge parents and teachers to do is approach the subject with curiosity, rather than judgment, because kids shut down right away, if you have judgment or shame. But if you can, sort of one of the best things is just ask them to explain how a meme works, how they, you know, how do you encounter means how do they work? How do you modify one, can you show me how it works? And then that can get a great conversation going about how awful a lot of these memes are, because a lot of this content comes to kids in the form of jokes.

Jenna Spinelle
So you mentioned immigration earlier. And that was something I thought about as I was reading hate in the homeland, I think it definitely fits into this, you know, Western supremacy ideology you were describing before, but the same time in the US, I mean, there are problems and you know, things that need to be addressed. So how do you kind of focus on those things without, you know, completely giving into that supremacist line of thinking? Yeah,

Cynthia Miller-Idriss
I mean, our you know, in the lab, and my interest is in trying to challenge you know, five things really is what we work on countering and preventing in the lab. One is supremacist thinking, as I said, that sort of sets up this hierarchy of superiority, inferiority, that ultimately, and in many cases, leads to the idea that there's an existential threat against your group. The second is propaganda, conspiracy theories, all kinds of information problems, so Miss dis mal information. And then the last is misogyny. So those are the kinds of five categories of harm that we work on about online and offline harms. With it, you know, beyond that, you know, we expect there we want a democracy to have a range of political opinions, a range of political solutions, there's an Overton Window, of course, for any set of public policy decisions, including on immigration, that is always going to move back and forth. And that should move back and forth. And so my or anyone else's in the labs, own political opinions should be kind of irrelevant to that as they are in my teaching. And we try to, you know, really keep that separate from combating these five things that we think are really undermining and problematic to inclusive democracy. And so the prevention of those five things should be able to be held separate from opinions about policy solutions. And we haven't had problems with that, per se, I think everybody gets that. And it's a pretty straightforward thing to try to be preventing violence. And so we haven't had, I think, as many problems as some other research labs have had, in terms of political attacks on them, or threats against them. And I also think, because a lot of our work with parents and grandparents in particular, has really good evidence that it's effective for Republicans and for Democrats. And everybody's worried about what kids are seeing online.

Jenna Spinelle
So the last thing I'm going to ask you about speaking of public policy, you're often called to testify before Congress. And the popular perception of the way these hearings go is that the members are just looking to ask their gotcha question that they can post on social media or go on cable news later to talk about, I guess, I wonder, do you do you feel like you're being heard, and that, you know, Congress is actually interested in trying to do their part to solve some of these problems?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Yeah, I think it's changed a little bit over time. So I will say when I first the first time, I testified before Congress, I couldn't always tell who represented what party and the kinds of questions that I was being asked. And it felt like a pretty civil discussion and dialogue, that's really changed. And there definitely is a more performative aspect to it. Maybe there always was, and I just didn't see it. But it felt more serious several years ago than it does right now. And so we have serious discussions, and I've declined, you know, times to do it. When it felt really like a circus, like the name of the hearing, you can tell right away, it's disingenuous, or you just realize it's just not going to be a good opportunity to share evidence. But even in cases where it looks like it's going to be difficult, we will often agree to do it. But like, for example, the one we did just recently in May, which was a difficult hearing, we just focused on our parents evidence and just kept coming back to that anytime, you know, it steered away, which said, you know, we're here to share I'm here to share our evidence about what parents and caregivers need and what communities deserve. And if it's an opportunity to read that evidence and get academic evidence into the record and share and just keep trying to be civil ourselves, is worth it. And so we've been you know, I'm still doing it, not always I will say behind the Scenes, there are much more productive things that happen in the hearings, sometimes open up conversations, and can be opportunities to have further conversations with staff or with congressmen and women behind the scenes later, that can be really useful. And so that's happened as well.

Jenna Spinelle
Thank you for all the work that you're doing. And thank you for joining us today to talk about it. Thanks for having me.

Michael Berkman
Yeah, so that was a terrifically interesting interview focused a bit more on the lab and the work that they're doing then the scholarly work in the book, which was made for a nice combination, I thought I wanted to, I wanted to comment on on something she said there, which talks about her efforts to sort of define the work that they're doing, and that they think of their work, the work that they're doing, in terms of evidence based tools using a public health approach. In other words they want to redefine through their lab and the work that they're doing. They want to redefine this extremism among young people in particular as a public health problem. And good luck with that, because it reminds me of the many efforts that had been made to redefine gun violence as a public health issue. And the incredible pushback that Democrats have gotten from Republicans in Congress, indeed, just an out and out refusal to devote research funds into looking at gun violence as a public health issue, they always comes out well, it's a mental health issue, which also would be a public health issue, but somehow that connections rarely made. And so I thought I thought that was a really fascinating part of of her discussion.

Chris Beem
And, you know, just important ladles on the depressing bastion of all this, right? Because it just speaks to the fact that you have to stipulate that, you know, far right extremist language and expression is bad in order to do something about it. And, and if you are in Congress, saying things like, you know, alluding to, if not absolutely, Foursquare, appealing to this kind of great replacement theory, you're not going to do that. And when you have, you know, the leader of your party saying, you know, good people on both sides. And, you know, and when you're talking about a group of Neo Nazis, that's very difficult to do. And so I do think it's it's just bespeaks kind of the condition in which we find ourselves right now.

Michael Berkman
And she talks, in fact about her experience is trying to talk about this before Congress, where she says that there's really been a change that when she first started talking to Congress, you couldn't tell who was asking the questions. And now what's coming out of Democratic and Republican members towards her is distinctly different than other words, she can tell you what party they're from based on the question.

Chris Beem
Well, you know, I mean, we could have a long argument about whether congressional hearings were ever useful. They were used. Yeah, in turn, they still are used. Yeah. Well, but But the objective of your average, a US representative, or at least a Yeah, that's not fair. The objective of a number of important congressional representatives in a hearing is to get themselves viral, is to say something that gets picked up, and that gets put on, you know, cable news and then gets picked up in Twitter. And I think, given that it's not a surprise that that's where we are,

Michael Berkman
I mean, reading the book, and listen to the interview. I was really brought back to a book I mentioned in our year rent show, not that I expect anybody remember to mention again, because I think it really is interesting pair these two books, and that's just Charlotte's book, the undertow where Charlotte sort of takes a tour through some of these far right spaces, as she would call them, not necessarily as he calls them, but you know, he attends and Ashley Babbitt Memorial, he goes to different festivals, he goes to Trump rallies and, and you know, when, especially when he goes to the Trump rally, you know, he talks about how it reminded him of, I believe I read this in his book that it reminded him of going to Grateful Dead concerts that it had that kind of festival feel to it, in fact that it had people that he'd seen it multiple ones around the country, they follow it around. So there really are these spaces of this kind of extremism that are developing. I mean, the Ashley Babbitt memorials that he talks about are downright frightening, that kind of delusional thinking that's going on at them the effort to turn her into some sort of a hero. So, uh, you know, I take the two together to give me a much richer understanding of what's meant by the kind of extremist spaces that are happening around the country, that it's more than just an algorithm on social media.

Chris Beem
Yeah, the soil is already ready to receive this. And that is a sign of mental illness in our culture, a well adjusted boy doesn't go looking for neo Nazi propaganda. He's not looking for groups to hate. And the fact that that is where we are the fact that that is happening so frequently. I think that's why she's right to say this is an everybody problem. Yeah. You know, I actually think that might be a good note to end on. You know, I mean, on this podcast, usually we are looking to politicians to solve this. The problem we're looking at and, and in this case, you know, it looks like her point is Cynthia's point is that we all have a role to play here. And I think we should be grateful to her for bringing that up making that clear to us. So, for Democracy Works, I'm Chris Beem.

Michael Berkman
I'm Michael Berkman.

Chris Beem
Thanks for listening.

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