Two years after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Farai interviews Dr. Barbara F. Walter, Rohr Professor of Pacific International Relations at the University of California, San Diego, and author of the New York Times bestseller, How Civil Wars Start, on the serious threat factionalism poses to American democracy. Then, Farai talks to former FBI agent, counterterrorism expert, and Associate Senior Vice President of Homeland Security, Dr. Erroll G. Southers, who details how and why homegrown violent extremism is widening the distance between Americans and a solid democratic process, and what is being done to stop it.
Farai Chideya:
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Farai Chideya:
Welcome to Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chideya. In 1790, George Washington called the Founding of America, "The last great experiment for promoting human happiness by reasonable compact in civil society." But given the insurrection of January 6th and its aftermath, could the American experiment fail entirely? These are questions raised by the work of Barbara Walter, author of the New York Times Bestseller, How Civil Wars Start, and also by counter-terrorism expert, Dr. Errol Southers. You'll hear from both of them in our Body Politics special on the impact of the January 6th insurrection.
Farai Chideya:
Two years ago, supporters of then President Trump attacked the US Capitol. They wanted to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 election and Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States. Today the fallout from the insurrection continues. At least 964 people have been charged with crimes including assault and destruction of government property. The House Select committee on January 6th led by Congresspersons Benny Thompson and Liz Cheney, who was voted out of Congress by her Republican constituents, made history by for the first time, recommending criminal charges against a former president.
Farai Chideya:
According to the Department of Justice, 49 people from the insurrection have pled guilty to assaulting law enforcement officers with hundreds more pleading guilty to other felonies and misdemeanors. We start with Barbara F. Walter. She's the Rohr professor of International Affairs at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California San Diego, and an expert on civil wars. After the FBI raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago Resort in August, Twitter references to civil war jumped 3000%. Barbara first started studying civil wars in 1990. In 2017, she joined the political Instability task force, a CIA advisory panel of experts who analyze data on conflict around the world. Her book, How Civil Wars Start, hit the New York Times Bestseller list last year. Welcome, Barbara.
Barbara F. Walter:
Oh, it's great to be here. Thank you very much.
Farai Chideya:
So I want to start off with a question that I think some of our listeners might find it hard to hear when we think of the US and of civil war. Most people think of like armies and historical dress on a battlefield with bayonets, but that's not really what you're talking about. So what are you talking about in this book?
Barbara F. Walter:
I'm talking about the 21st century type of civil war, especially the type of ethnically based civil war that you see in countries with very powerful governments and powerful militaries. So the 21st century civil war is much more like an insurgency. It's decentralized, it's fought by multiple different militias, sometimes paramilitary organizations and their primary mode of violence is gorilla warfare and targeted terrorism against civilians. They're going to do everything they possibly can to avoid engaging American soldiers because they have no chance against a military like that.
Farai Chideya:
There have been a wide variety of domestic terrorism incidents from the planned kidnapping that was thwarted of Governor Gretchen Whitmer to attacks on power facilities. Tell us what you think insurgency might look like.
Barbara F. Walter:
So an insurgency would probably start in an individual state. Michigan, for example, has a long history of malicious. If you have a white supremacist group in Michigan and there are, they truly believe that the United States is a white Christian country, should continue to be a white Christian country, and the direction it's going in is wrong. They can't take control of the federal government, at least not yet. And so they're going to have more limited aims. If they could make Michigan a white ethnostate, that would be okay for many of them. And the way they would do that is they would start to target African-American churches in Detroit or places where immigrants shop in Grand Rapids. And the goal there would be to intimidate that population into submission, to deter other non-whites from moving into Michigan and to convince those that are already there to leave the state and find more sympathetic states.
Farai Chideya:
Throughout the book, you talk about how in America, factionalization tends to really break along racial and ethnic lines. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Barbara F. Walter:
It actually also breaks along religious and this geographic line and we call those types of factions, super factions, and they're particularly dangerous. Today, the Republican party is almost 80% white and it's overwhelmingly evangelical Christian. And if you look again at those dramatic red blue maps of the United States, it's clear that the rural areas of the United States are deep red and the urban areas tend to be deep blue. That's the definition of a super faction and the definition of an ethnic faction that our own government uses when it's thinking about who are the groups who could initiate political violence.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah, and you talk about three big risk factors for a civil war, anocracy, which is a term that I had never heard until this book, which shows that I got a lot to learn, factionalism and downgrading. So what is anocracy and are we one?
Barbara F. Walter:
So anocracy is just a fancy term for a partial democracy. It's government that has some features of democracy, but it also has some features of autocracy. Governments generally get into this middle zone if they're democratizing, but you can also enter this dangerous middle anocracy zone if you are a one strong democracy that's backsliding. For much of the past century, the United States has been considered a strong healthy democracy. We were downgraded in part because international election monitors who were here to monitor our 2016 election, they deemed that election free, but not entirely fair. We were downgraded again when the White House refused to comply with requests by Congress for information and when the president refused to comply with subpoenas. That might not seem like a big deal, but it actually is because the main check on the power of the president is Congress. We were downgraded again by December of 2020 to an anocracy.
Barbara F. Walter:
For the first time since 1800, we had a sitting president who was refusing to comply with the results of an election and was actively seeking to overturn those results. So we were an anocracy at the end of 2020. We did have at least one of our political parties, which we would've considered an ethnic faction. This gave us two of the main predictors of political violence. If the CIA had been allowed to study the United States, which it absolutely is not allowed to do, the task force would've likely put the United States on what we call the watch list and we would've considered our country at risk of civil war.
Barbara F. Walter:
We have since improved our democracy rating and are now slightly higher. We're not where we were at our strongest point, and the reason we increased our rating was because we had a peaceful transfer of power. President Trump did agree to leave the White House and we now have a new president and a new administration that is adhering to the rule of law, but our institutions are no stronger today than they were in December of 2020.
Farai Chideya:
So besides our anocracy rating, there's another kind of downgrading that you talk about in the book and it's a major risk factor for civil war. So tell us what that is.
Barbara F. Walter:
So most people think that the groups that tend to start civil wars are the poorest groups in society or the groups that are most heavily discriminated or immigrants. And they think that for good reason, those groups have real grievances against the status quo. They are not benefiting from the status quo and they have a motive to try to change it. Governments tend to be watching them quite closely. The groups that tend to start these types of wars are the groups that had been politically dominant but are in decline. So it was this sense of loss of status, of political power, of cultural dominance.
Farai Chideya:
As someone who's covered politics, literally the majority of my life, and covered extremism for about half of my life. I remember one of my first key interviews with someone who was an organized white supremacist, was with a white woman who was a member of the Klan and she talked about how she had to live in a housing project with black people and of course, through my mind was running, "Lady, you don't have a race problem, you have a money problem." You can live in an all white community if you have money and it's not black people's fault that you don't have money. I did not say that while we were talking, but it's this idea that she was robbed of her whiteness in a way by being-
Barbara F. Walter:
Well, robbed of her rightful status in society.
Farai Chideya:
Yes.
Barbara F. Walter:
She believes she deserves more than that and the anger and resentment at that loss just seems to be particularly motivating. If you think back to January 6th, one of the striking visuals for me as I was watching it happen was to watch all of these white people and they were predominantly men. All of these white men marching down the mall towards the Capitol, they were taking videos of themselves, they were doing this with impunity. It didn't occur to them that they might actually be committing treason because in their minds, they were patriots. America was their country. They had the right to take it back, they had the right to take it back by whatever means necessary. And that is something that the nondominant populations do not feel. And I think that's the reason why you see groups like this eventually turning to violence because they deserve to rule and that it is their right to do this.
Farai Chideya:
You use another really interesting phrase, ethnic entrepreneur and quoting you, you say, "The biggest ethnic entrepreneur of all was former President Trump." What do you mean by an ethnic entrepreneur?
Barbara F. Walter:
So ethnic entrepreneurs are these very savvy, often power hungry individuals who can take a moment in time when people are feeling uncertain for a variety of reasons and begin to convince them that there's a real threat out there. The threat is an identity-based threat and they have to band together if they're going to have any chance to survive. People when they feel threatened tend to gravitate towards their own group, whether their religious group or their racial group or their ethnic group. They gravitate towards a place where they feel safe.
Barbara F. Walter:
And what often happens is that leaders of these radical movements or leaders in the general population who want to take advantage of these moments, they play on this fear and the sense of threat and they exaggerate it and they emphasize identity over everything else and they do this in order to get their support behind them. There's this whole narrative about white genocide. This whole replacements theory is about the fact that the white race in the United States, this has been perpetrated by ethic entrepreneurs, that the white race in the United States is under threat.
Farai Chideya:
Let me actually trouble one of the main concepts in your book, which is democracy. America to me, did not really become a full-fledged democracy until the civil rights era because there was the long era in which black Americans were forbidden by law from voting. But then there was another long era where people were prevented by the rule of the mob and exclusion, so was American democracy a democracy? You also talk about Switzerland. I happened to take a fascinating trip primarily with a group of American conservatives to Switzerland with a former ambassador, Faith Whittlesey who's recently passed. And Switzerland is a nation which you say in the book has become the longest existing democracy in the world. But until 1971, women could not vote in Switzerland and there was a rogue canton where women did not get the right to vote until 1990. So can we even call these democracies before this point?
Barbara F. Walter:
So it's so interesting you bring up that case. My mother is from that rogue canton.
Farai Chideya:
Oh interesting.
Barbara F. Walter:
She emigrated to the United States in 1958. She never wanted to go back to Switzerland. My aunt was not allowed to vote till 1991 actually, when the federal government forced that canton to move. The Confederate South prior to the Civil War was not a democracy at all. During the Jim Crow era, there was massive voter suppression. We're moving in that direction today as well. American democracy from the very inception has been highly discriminatory in a variety of ways. Democracy is measured in lots of different ways. You could use the Freedom House measure, which really talks about how much individual freedom there exists. Is there freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion? There's other measures that look very much at the franchise, whether everybody has the right to vote.
Barbara F. Walter:
The anocracy measure doesn't look at that. It looks at how strong the democratic institutions are and in particular, it looks to see how many constraints there are on executive power. So if you have a president in power, does that president really operate under a whole series of checks and balances so that he or she can't become an autocrat? So when the task force was looking at all of these different measures of democracy and it was wondering, well, does it really matter if you exclude a whole portion of the population from voting? Does it matter if you don't have freedom of religion? All of these things. What turned up being important was not those things. It was how strong are you democratic institutions? If you get a bully in the White House, will that bully be constrained? And the answer is, if you don't have strong constraints, that's when you get into trouble.
Farai Chideya:
Thinking about the civil rights era as a moment where full democracy was provided in the United States to people of all races, as close as we've ever gotten, and looking at this period of just a few decades, do you think that we were solidly in the safe zone and then slipped out of it or that we were never maybe as safe as we thought?
Barbara F. Walter:
I think we're never as safe as we'd like to be, but we were pretty safe. The Voting Rights Act was powerful, it was enforced, it was effective. African-Americans began to have a real right to vote. They started to have real representation. That reversal under the Roberts Court has been really devastating and you're starting to see the effects of that. The Republican party, which is predominantly a white evangelical party today, understands that it does not have the votes to continue to compete effectively in a one person, one vote democracy. And so they have to try to go back to a version of the Jim Crow era where non-whites are actively excluded from voting and they're doing it in a variety of really creative ways and the Supreme Court is allowing them to do this without federal intervention here. We all know that there are lots of states in the United States that would be perfectly happy, disproportionately giving political power to white Christians.
Farai Chideya:
And you have groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys who have ideologies like the Three Percenters. I actually interviewed a former member of the military who was a Three percenter during the 2016 election. These were groups that helped organize around the insurrection at the Capitol. And now you do have some prosecutions and some convictions, although far fewer than some people would like thinking. Some people think that the prosecutions have been too light. You have also the Supreme Court shift, which we were just talking about. What are the important factors in whether or not we get through this era and back into a safe harbor of democracy?
Barbara F. Walter:
Well, we actually have an example from the past. In 1995, Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City. At the time, he was portrayed as a lone wolf, this crazy guy who did a crazy thing. The reality is he wasn't a lone wolf, he was probably part of the big Michigan militia. He had pages of the Turner Diaries in the backseat of his pickup truck. The Turner Diaries, even today, is still considered the Bible of the far right. It outlines a fictitious account of a civil war in the United States. It's essentially a playbook for how terrorist groups can take on the US government and end up victorious. What happened after 1995 is the FBI aggressively went after far right militias and far right violent extremists here in the United States and were actually quite effective.
Barbara F. Walter:
In 1996 was the peak of militias in the United States until recently. They then declined pretty consistently and precipitously after that in part because the American public was so horrified by what happened in Oklahoma City. But in part because the FBI was effective at infiltrating these groups and bringing many of their leaders to justice. What many of us who study violent extremism today have been worried about until recently is the fact of the federal government and Democrats and Republicans have been turning a blind eye to this rising problem of domestic terrorism in the United States. For a very long time, those of us who study this have been watching this cancer grow and also watching the federal government really turn a blind eye to it. January 6th was actually I think, a gift to the American public because it's so clearly portrayed what was happening and it made it impossible to ignore any longer.
Barbara F. Walter:
After January 6th, it was a big wake up call. I think the FBI is doing many of the same things that it did starting in 1995 and it will have an effect. Having said that, when I study the conditions under which political violence and civil war breakout, these three conditions that you talked about at the very beginning of the show are still there. Our democracy has strengthened a bit, but our institutions are still very, very vulnerable to backsliding. We still have parties that are deeply divided by race, by religion, by geography, and we still have a once dominant group that continues to be in decline.
Farai Chideya:
And with all of these challenges, do you feel hopeful that we can grapple with all the things that are going on within our democracy?
Barbara F. Walter:
I do feel hopeful, but that's in part because I tend to be an optimistic person. But it's also because I do think Americans, we're great problem solvers. We are very proactive. Most Americans deeply love this country and love what it stands for. Our founding motto was [foreign language 00:21:14] out of many, we will become one. That is our founding motto. And I do think Americans want that ideal.
So I'm optimistic also in part because we have to be right. America is going to be the first white majority country that makes this great demographic transition to a truly multiethnic, multi-religious, multiracial democracy. If we don't get this right, the rest of the world I think is going to follow that. We need to be a model for how you make this transition. And in the past year, I've worked with so many grassroots organizations. I've worked with so many Americans on the left and on the right who are dedicating their life to trying to strengthen our democracy, to trying to bring us together. And I just think with all of the talent and all of the possibility here in the United States, I do think we're going to be successful.
Farai Chideya:
Well Professor Barbara Walter, thank you for sharing insights from your bestseller, How Civil Wars Start with us today. Thanks.
Barbara F. Walter:
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
Farai Chideya:
That was Barbara F. Walter Rohr Chair of Pacific International Affairs at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California San Diego. She's also the author of the New York Times Bestseller, How Civil Wars Start. You are listening to Our Body Politic, I'm Farai Chideya. It's been two years since the insurrection at the Capitol and we're unpacking what homegrown extremism looks like in the United States. Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers was convicted of seditious conspiracy related to the breach of the capitol on January 6th, 2021. He awaits sentencing of up to 20 years in prison, which is the maximum sentence for this crime. Other trials are still pending. My next guest is Dr. Errol Southers, former FBI agent, counter-terrorism expert and professor at the University of Southern California. Dr. Southers shares this journey to studying violent domestic extremists like Rhodes and what motivates them. Welcome Dr. Southers.
Dr. Errol Southers:
Thank you for having me.
Farai Chideya:
Can you rewind the tape for us on your life? How did you become Dr. Errol Southers, expert on domestic insurgencies, et cetera, et cetera. Where did you come from? Where did you grow up? How did you get into law enforcement and now this?
Dr. Errol Southers:
I grew up in New Jersey and interestingly enough, it was an encounter with a law enforcement agency at 13 that I decided, that's the last thing in the world I ever wanted to do. Walking while black, with some of my friends, getting stopped, having one of them kick me. And in the 85 years that my mom was alive, I heard her curse one time, it was the time she called that agency and spoke to whoever was on the desk and told them what happened and they told her it didn't happen.
Dr. Errol Southers:
So I used to complain about the police and I used to complain about how we were treated and one day my father said, "You can't change the castle from outside the mote." And so here I am. I started off at the Santa Monica Police Department and Farai, you know how Mark Twain once said, "The two most important times in your life are when you were born and when you find out why." Well, I found out why. In two years I had gone from police officer to training officer to drill instructor in the academy to crime impact team member.
Farai Chideya:
Wow.
Dr. Errol Southers:
And in my fourth year at Santa Monica PD, I have a black cadet because I'm a drill instructor at the academy. She says, "You need to meet my husband." Her husband was a Berkeley Law School educated FBI agent.
Farai Chideya:
Oh.
Dr. Errol Southers:
And I met Don Leighton and Don said, "You need to come to the bureau." And I always felt like I wanted to work for the best agencies no matter where I was and I felt like Santa Monica was the best. And who was going to argue with the federal agencies to say the FBI wasn't? I went through the written tests and all the testing processes and next thing you know I'm in Quantico, Virginia.,
Dr. Errol Southers:
And graduated from the academy and I come out of the academy, I get assigned to San Diego division, I've got all this law enforcement background and they put me on the foreign counterintelligence terrorism squad and I said, "Wait a second. Why am I not working fugitives or bank robberies or?" So I'm thinking, now, I'm going to be bored. Well, two undercover operations and a SWAT team later, I realized I had found my niche and I started working terrorism there, took an interest in it, went back to school, started going to USC, got my master's degree. I've had some mentors along the way who have just been fantastic and kept pushing me and got my doctorate degree and did my doctorate on homegrown violent extremism. And then lo and behold, I just found myself traveling around the world going to places where they had the same kind of threat.
Dr. Errol Southers:
What most people don't realize is the attacks in London, Paris, all those guys, although they were jihadists, were all born there. And so I started to think about, wait a second, why are we special? And I pivoted back to the threats we had here in the 80s when we had the compound battles with Covenant Sword, Arm of the Lord and groups like that. When Lewis Beam wrote his book on leaderless resistance, if you read closely, that book was nothing more than an Al-Qaeda training manual except it was written about here. So I found myself just immersed in it and have loved it ever since. And I guess say fortunately, unfortunately here we are, I'm in a space that I've been in for quite some time that is certainly top of day when it comes to the national security threat to this country.
Farai Chideya:
The person who I DMd with for over a year and I've archived his tweets and mine, so he had read some of my reporting for 538 and he was like, "I think you get me." And I'm like, "Sounds like I probably do." He kept getting de-platformed for violation of terms of service on Twitter and then he would create a new account and relink up with me. So it's a very fragmented but interesting conversation over a long time. When he went to Charlottesville, he became a very different communicator. I got to see his mindset change, but he was very clear that for him, being an active white supremacist meant that he wanted control of America forever regardless of who lived here, regardless. America could be 5% black, 20% black or 80% black and he wanted white people like him to control it. Is that not in some ways a land question too as well as everything else? I don't know. It's an ideology question, but it's also I think to me, not so much just land directly, but it's a resource question.
Dr. Errol Southers:
I think it's a power question. Let's just look at this. The other driving factor here that we've dealt with now for going on a decade is this notion that there would be a white minority here. I've gone to sites in the past that if you went to their homepage, they had an elapsed time clock. At one point it was 2050, then it went to 2045 where they would be in the minority. That's been a driving factor for recruitment strategies for many of these organizations. So what I think they've pivoted now, and I'm agreeing with your point in terms of land and space, but what it's about now is really, power. And the reason I say that is because I look at the election we just had
Dr. Errol Southers:
And I look at the extremists that were on some of those platforms, they understand now better than we were acknowledging before, how important it is to be in state elected positions. In federal elected positions. That wasn't a priority 10 years ago. 10 years ago it was as you state land, power, resources. Now the power is connected to the politics and from years of gerrymandering now and voter suppression and running for office and denying the election, they get it. And so that's the playbook now is, can we be in a position of political power because that's the only real power at the end of the day.
Dr. Errol Southers:
I guess what makes me pause is when I think of insurgencies, I don't necessarily think of the extremist component in terms of the ideology that's attached to it. Sometimes, they have a financial objective like the cartels. Sometimes, they have a military objective where they're trying to obtain land or resources. These extremist movements now are all about an ideology. Things like replacement theory, that's what's driving them. Can we be in a position of political power that'll keep us in real power at the end of the day.
Farai Chideya:
We have been on a journey these past few years and I think for a lot of people that journey was very surprising. Where do you think we are today?
Dr. Errol Southers:
Well, I think we are certainly in a movement which you of course recognize, but when I started a dissertation on this very subject 15 years ago, I never thought we would be here.
I think we are at a point that's unprecedented as it relates to this movement. What has made it even more challenging is the virtual capacity that they all have, which you're very well aware of, the amount of disinformation and misinformation that has gone out to the point where now, it is questioning our electoral process. I don't want to sound like an alarmist but we're at a very dangerous time. And I would have to say it's certainly unprecedented as we speak about domestic threats, probably in our nation's history. And it's something that unfortunately, and I've said this for many years, we've been in denial about. We are very comfortable with addressing the other threat, another nation, another religion, another nationality another ethnicity. We have been in denial about the homegrown threat we have here and now it's on our doorstep.
Farai Chideya:
100%. And in your interview with Into America and Trymaine Lee, you talked about the ways in which government, at various stages denied that there was a domestic terrorism threat or failed to label it. And we also spoke with a black White House correspondent who had traveled with President Bush on Air Force 1 on 9/11 and after that, she saw the threat of domestic terrorism. She'd obviously been exposed to global terrorism and she tried to get her editors to label it domestic terrorism and they wouldn't. Is that parallel to what happened with law enforcement?
Dr. Errol Southers:
Absolutely. In fact, Farai, I'm so glad you're mentioning 9/11. So, many people don't know that there was a domestic terrorism executive committee created more than 25 years ago in response to the Oklahoma City bombing. Their first meeting was going to be on 9/11 in 2001.
Farai Chideya:
Really?
Dr. Errol Southers:
Yes. They canceled the meeting that day. That committee didn't meet again for 13 more years.
Farai Chideya:
Oh my goodness.
Dr. Errol Southers:
Finally, the committee met in the last two years of the Obama Administration and then what happened is the Trump Administration dismissed this threat entirely. Fortunately for us, along comes Merrick Garland. He gets sworn in. Three months after that, he has the national strategy for countering domestic terrorism. And so he put it back on the radar. But Oklahoma City was so profound that they realized we needed to do this and then 9/11 happened, it was a pivot, and it was all forgotten.
Farai Chideya:
What do you think we lost?
Dr. Errol Southers:
I think what we lost is an opportunity to educate the real people who are going to address this. Let's face it, terrorism, whether it's domestic or international, it all is local. You've got to have local law enforcement and local authorities understanding, being educated about and recognizing the threat. We missed that opportunity. We took our eye off the ball. It was all about looking at the international threat. It has infiltrated local law enforcement, it has infiltrated our military, it has infiltrated Congress. And so here we are now, trying to catch up. We're trying to make up for 25 years of lost time.
Farai Chideya:
My family has a long military history back to the Civil War all the way up to Iraq and Afghanistan. And I learned a lot from my family who served, about extremism in the ranks. Give us a sense of law enforcement. What's happened with law enforcement both in terms of members who may be active in extremist groups. And I'm presuming there's also been people who may not be directly involved in extremist groups but who've given a pass to them.
Dr. Errol Southers:
Let me just try to frame this. You've got law enforcement people who of course, are engaged in accepting the extremist belief. Let's just say they're not operationalizing it but they certainly agree with it. This whole notion shifted even more after the death of George Floyd in my opinion, because now it was George Floyd, a defund the police movement, which made them further move to the right to suggest that what they are believing in terms of their extremism, is the correct way to go. In the meantime, you have an unchecked system in most agencies of these officers when they're "on their off-duty time," can do whatever they want. So they're in chat groups, they're online, they're doing all these things because they're off duty. A lot of that came to light when January 6th happened and people who were off duty showed up. The first responder community out there is doing nothing more different than they did a half a century ago.
Dr. Errol Southers:
When the FBI was looking at the Klan when it infiltrated sheriff's departments. Speaking of sheriff's departments, we have a whole constitutional sheriff's movement that believes we don't report to anybody because we're elected by the people. And so if you have county boards of supervisors and governors and the president, they feel like they're not in our chain of command, because we've been elected. And so that's a whole other movement that's decided that they're going to enforce the laws they want and not be beholden to anyone else. So we're in a really dangerous spot here. And I think the only way we recover from this is to have, speaking about local law enforcement, to have those chiefs, to have those cities where they have mayors because the mayor selects the chief where they have decided, we are going to select, recruit and retain the appropriate people to be in our departments so that we can have some accountability, we can have some transparency and we can start to build some trust again.
Farai Chideya:
I, at one point, and it was I think about four years ago, was at a gathering of people I've known for some time and I said, "Nobody lives forever and America might not either." I was talking about this domestic terrorism threat and I don't think people really understood what I was saying and I think they understand it now. But I also think a lot of people just think, oh this has blown over. We got through this Jan six thing, everything's coming up roses and it makes me want to bang my head against a wall. How do you try to break through to people who think, well that was a thing, it's over. We're all good.
Dr. Errol Southers:
This is such a dangerous time. And America to me, is one big dinosaur. The dinosaurs thought they would never ever have to worry about a thing because they were the biggest, baddest creature on the planet and they're gone. That's us. The parallels here to Germany in the 1930s is frightening. All the way down to those states that have decided what books you can read or if books are even necessary, what history we're going to allow you to absorb. And we are just, every time something comes up to your point, "Ah, we'll get by it." It was January 6th, couple hundred police officers got hurt, we got by it. They have no idea how dangerously close we came to losing the country that day.
Farai Chideya:
So what do we do now? And by we, let me clarify the we, because a lot of times we are fuzzy. What we who actually view this as a continuing threat do? And also what do we as a very disaggregated American body politic do together? So maybe first, do we, who sense a threat do?
Dr. Errol Southers:
I think you've tied the answer to your question. It's about the body politic. This past election was critical. Absolutely critical. The first thing we have to do is restore a belief in this country's democratic process. That is very, very important. I don't know how we get past the people who don't believe in gravity.
And I say that in all truths. I just don't know how we get past that. I used to be at a point where I felt like I could talk to people and we could have a reasonable debate and I could hear their point of view. They would hear mine and maybe we'd agree to agree or agree to disagree. I can't do that anymore. And I don't know why. I've given up trying to reason with people that won't be reasonable, with people that have decided that black is not black and white is not white. So the body politic is very important. I think what we have to do is restore ourselves as a government that people believe in. What's funny is all these people who are anti-government depend on the government when something happens.
Farai Chideya:
Absolutely.
Dr. Errol Southers:
Fires, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and tornadoes. "I need you government, but I don't want you the rest of the time." But what troubles me more is the lack of consequence to the people who did what they did on January 6th. If we don't think those groups who have essentially gone silent since January 6th are not planning for what they're going to do next, we are woefully naive, because they are.
Farai Chideya:
Let me ask you about something that someone who has been tracking this posited to me and find out what you think about it. Which is that because January 6th was partly organized online and I predicted it would happen, like a lot of people did. I went to the Stop the Steal rally and I left before the insurrection because I knew that it was going to happen and I chose not to be there. I talked to a bunch of people including a former CIA agent who was like, "Yeah, I tried to tell everyone this was a thing and nobody would return my calls." And just a sense of frustration. A lot of different people saw this coming, but let's just go local. Do you think that the nature of the planning has changed to try to avoid detection?
Dr. Errol Southers:
Absolutely. The proud boys gave themselves an order to stand down when people started getting arrested. It became real when the FBI started arresting people. You can tell by the lack of activity, overt activity that they've all decided to go off the grid to the extent possible. Look, with all due respect, many of them are sitting at home waiting for somebody to knock on the door with a search warrant. And you know what? I feel good about that. That's how they should feel. But to answer your question, they've absolutely changed their tactics and that was a lesson learned opportunity for them on January 6th. They learned what worked, they learned what didn't. They learned how we will or will not respond. They're not doing anything different than our foreign enemies did for many years when they wanted to attack the United States. Look, they found out they couldn't hijack a plane in the air. So box cutters are allowed and that's how we'll do it. And so it's a lesson learned. So January 6th wasn't an opportunity missed for them. Not at all.
Farai Chideya:
One of my good friends, she hit me to the threat of militia's very early on and she was talking about how after January 6th, people in her hometown were freaked out because they knew their cousin was probably there and they're like, "Wait a minute."
Dr. Errol Southers:
So did I talk about the Mulford Act?
Farai Chideya:
Tell me about it.
Dr. Errol Southers:
California's always so proud about how progressive it is because we have a law in a state called the Mulford Act where you can't open carry a rifle or shotgun. But let me tell you how that happened. In 1966, '67 when the Black Panther party did their homework, they were the Black Panther party for people's defense. Their whole premise was, they were going to police the police. In California, you could open carry a rifle or shotgun as long as it was publicly visible.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah.
Dr. Errol Southers:
They would show up on traffic stops when police officers were stopping African Americans and they would tell the violator, we are here to make sure nothing happens to you. That didn't go over well. Mulford was a California assemblyman. Reagan was the governor. They got together and in one afternoon, they decided to put forth the Mulford Act, which would deny people the ability and the right to carry rifles and shotguns in public. And they passed that bill. By the way, Mulford, Reagan supported by the NRA. And so that is why we don't have a militia problem in California, the Black Panther party. So I often jokingly say to people, we can have gun control depending on who has the guns.
Farai Chideya:
Exactly. Wow. That is fascinating. For people who care about this, for people who care about their lives, their family's lives, this country's life and don't know what to do with the feelings of fear, hope, hopelessness. If you met someone who didn't know you and you were sitting next to them in a train station or wherever, how would you talk to them about this?
Dr. Errol Southers:
I would tell them that they need to understand that all of us stand on the shoulders of giants, to be here today. That as difficult and as challenging and as daunting as this is, that as a country, we can get past it. We've gotten past it before. Many factions today don't realize the power of the 60s when blacks and Jews march together because they were the common enemy of others. And so I'd tell them to have hope. I also tell them that there are people like me who are dedicated to this and we're not the minority. We are not. And just remember, in the choice of places to go in the world, I would have to argue that this has got to be near the top still. There's a reason for that. So while this is a challenging time, I just say, "Look, be part of the solution. We're the solution that we're looking for. So just be part of that solution." And I would say, if I had a choice to live anywhere else in the world, this would still be it.
Farai Chideya:
I am so grateful to talk to you, Dr. Southers. I wish you the absolute best with doing the work that you do and have done tirelessly for years and I hope we get to have you on again. Thank you again.
Dr. Errol Southers:
Thank you. It was a pleasure. I'd love to be back and thank you for all the work that you do. I really appreciate it.
Farai Chideya:
That was Dr. Errol Southers, former FBI agent, counter-terrorism expert and professor at the University of Southern California.
Farai Chideya:
Thanks for listening to Our Body Politic. We're on the air each week -- and everywhere you listen to podcasts.
Farai Chideya:
Our Body Politic is produced by Diaspora Farms. I’m host and executive producer, Farai Chideya. Jonathan Blakely is our executive producer. Nina Spensley is also executive producer.Emily J. Daly is our senior producer. Bridget McAllister and Traci Caldwell are our booking producers. Steve Lack and Anoa Changa are our producers. Natyna Bean and Emily Ho are our associate producers. Kelsey Kudak is our fact checker.
Farai Chideya:
Production and editing services are by Clean Cuts at Three Seas. Today's episode was produced with the help of Lauren Schild and engineered by Archie Moore.
Farai Chideya:
This program is produced with support from the Ford Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Democracy Fund, The Harnisch Foundation, Compton Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the BMe Community, Katie McGrath & JJ Abrams Family Foundation, and from generous contributions from listeners like you