The White Power Movement in 2024

The White Power Movement in 2024

Refuse Fascism Episode 187

Sun, Jan 28, 2024 4:36PM • 1:01:21

Kathleen Belew 00:00

The relationship between the Trump administration, or the Trump campaign, and white power activism has just intensified so dramatically. We have to worry about attacks on likely targets: infrastructure, targeted communities. And we also have to worry about authoritarianism. Some people in this movement are not necessarily interested in race war, they are now interested in seeing if they can assert control of the entire apparatus of governance. The kind of response that would really end white power organizing has to be much more complex than just incarcerating a few leaders.

Sam Goldman 00:57

Welcome to Episode 187 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in the United States.

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In today’s episode, we’re sharing an interview focusing on the white power movement with historian Kathleen Belew. She is the author of Bring the War Home: the White Power Movement and Paramilitary America and she is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University. But first, as usual, but in this week in particular, we need to talk about some developments from this past week as they relate to the fascist threat.

And, boy, yep, this was a week! Texas’ armed standoff against the federal government has escalated since we spoke about it last week, and covered it in more depth the week prior. On Monday, even the fascist dominated Supreme Court decided 5-4, non fascists to fascists — with only Amy Coney Barrett joining the non fascists — against one component of Texas’ obstruction to Border Patrol’s authority, allowing the federal government to remove the barbed wire Texas had placed all along the border.

Immediately after the decision, a fascist shitstorm erupted, with leading fascists in Texas declaring their refusal to comply. Instead, installing even more flesh slicing concertina wire and calling forth fascists in and out of government to stand with Texas and their defiance. In response to the Supreme Court ruling and in homage to the Confederacy, Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a statement declaring that the “federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the states,” justifying the state’s usurpation of federal authority at the border.

This is the identical playbook that slave states wielded to justify secession before the Civil War. The next day, Republican governors from 25 States issued a joint statement supporting Abbott; praising him for “stepping up to protect American citizens from historic levels of illegal immigrants.” Civil rights attorney Scott Hechinger had tweeted this reflection: “All this civil war talk is really about wanting state governments to have power to extra judicially without limitation, without oversight, without consequence, brutally murder marginalized families and individuals from other countries seeking a better life/future in the U.S.”

Yes, 100%, they seek to have no restraint on their overt white supremacy, on their boundless terror and brutality against migrants and asylum seekers and non white Texans overall. And they also want a civil war. A fascist movement is gunning for it. They’re bloodthirsty to eliminate for good all the people who they think have destroyed their country. As Paul Street wrote in his latest Substack: “At the heart of this extraordinary confrontation at Eagle Pass, and more broadly on the southern Texas-U.S. border, is a brazen attempt by Abbott and his Republi-fascist party to undercut the authority of the federal government. This is no small matter. For the first time in six decades, a U.S. governor is defying the authority of the national government, not merely with words, but with the real threat of force.”

As this unfolds, the fascist base and fascist media are salivating over the possibility of civil war erupting in Texas. I find it helpful, even as it’s disturbing, to share some of what fascists at the top, in power, and fascists spokespeople in media are delivering to their rabid base. Representative Clay Higgins, Congressman from Louisiana: “The feds are staging a civil war and Texas should stand their ground.” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene: “We literally saw a ruling that’s going to put the federal government at war with the state of Texas.” Going on to say: “I think Texas needs to stand their ground and we should join Texas in their fight against the federal government to defend their state, defend their border, defend their people.”

Senator Ted Cruz from Texas has gone on every news show that will take him, every radio show that will take him, to say to the federal government come and take it. Has made a now viral graphic, posted on the site formerly known as Twitter, an image that reads “Texas come and take it,” with, like, a barbed wire twirly. House Speaker Johnson is moving to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas, issuing statements like “I stand with Governor Abbott,” and declaring that the House will do everything in its power to back him, Abbott, up.

There is, quite literally, a Christian crusade comprised of armed militia, led by apostolic preachers, gearing up from around the country. Matt Walsh, Daily Wire host said: “Red governors will need to ignore the Supreme Court and do what needs to be done to protect their citizens and the border,” adding “The Last Civil War was unimaginable until it wasn’t.” Tim Poole, YouTuber, more than a million subscribers, went on to talk about how what was happening in Texas as a “Fort Sumter-esque type scenario,” you know, the opening battle of the Civil War, saying: “It does feel like it could be escalating to this federal versus state conflict.”

Charlie Kirk, on his show, “The break-ins, the looting, the murder, the rapes, the arsons, it’s, by the way, this is just getting warmed up.” Delivering, dripping in white supremacy talking points that characterize immigrants and asylum seekers, migrants, as criminal, as subhuman, going on to say: “You got 15,000 fighting age males that are getting deployed all across the country, native born Americans. You better buy weapons, everybody, have a lot of guns at your disposal. I would never leave your home without a weapon. It’s the new country we live in. It is Mad Max. Biden is creating Mad Max. You’re on your own.”

Tucker Carlson to his 11 million followers on the site formerly known as Twitter: “It’s unanimous. Everyone in power from the White House to the hedge fund managers to the Supreme Court of the United States has decided to destroy the country by allowing it to be invaded. That leaves the population to defend itself. Where are the men of Texas? Why aren’t they protecting their state and the nation?” And yet, despite this escalating violent, frightening, dehumanizing language, people are being led to minimize and mock the fascists, to pay no attention to the stakes, to ignore the reality that anything in this armed standoff between Texas and the federal government — anything intentional or accidental — could set this powder keg off, could end up in a real civil war, with the lives of immigrants further imperiled.

I recommend reading, amongst other things that we’ll post in the show notes, reporting from Tess Owens and reporting from David Gilbert on the ‘Take Back Our Border’ Convoy, which is being organized by Pete Chambers, beginning tomorrow, Monday, from Virginia, going through Florida to Louisiana, ending in Eagle Pass, Texas where this standoff is concentrated. Those who are participating call themselves “God’s Army”, and have declared that they’re on a mission to stand up against the “globalists.” Those who they see as conspiring to keep U.S. borders open and destroy the United States.

If you’ve ever asked: What if Lincoln just gave up Fort Sumter? Or: What if Eisenhower just treated school integration as a polite suggestion? Now you have your answer, as Biden simply allows the Texas State Military to lock out Border Patrol, which will have life or death consequences for children and mothers and others crossing the Rio Grande. His concern (Biden) is not in safeguarding vulnerable people are confronting the fascist menace. Instead, he is pursuing GOP cooperation with his mass deporting border cruelty.

While border crossing numbers remain within normal parameters, both parties are utilizing a “border crisis” to seize on their own gain. Biden is using immigrants as pawns in negotiations over a border bill with the Senate. He is further accommodating and conciliating to the fascists. But let us be clear, these are negotiations that he will most likely lose anyway. Because no matter how cruel how anti-asylum such proposals are, the Republicans in the Senate will continue to see him as illegitimate and those in the house will prevent any Biden proposal from advancing.

No matter who wins in these talks, humanity will lose. But here’s the thing, we have a role to play against this white supremacist escalation. Our silence is complicity. Now is a time for all of us to stand with immigrants to shine a light on the dehumanization and cruelty migrants face and to actively defend asylum seekers right now in Eagle Pass Texas, and wherever this may escalate to.

Now, an update from the post Roe hellscape: Remember how the anti abortion, forced birthers like to wax about how there really aren’t that many related pregnancies? Well, new research published in JAMA [Journal of the American Medical Association] Internal Medicine just knocks that, once and for all, away. They published a letter of research titled Rape Related Pregnancies in the 14 U.S. States with Total Abortion Bans, where they use data from the CDC, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and FBI Uniform Crime Reports to estimate that approximately 65,000 pregnancies have been caused by rape in the 14 states where abortion is banned since the overturn of Roe.

Post Dobbs, there’s approximately 10 or fewer legal abortions monthly in each of the total abortion ban states. The number is likely higher when you account for all non reported rapes. Authors of this research letter wrote: “Thousands of girls and women in states that banned abortion experienced rape related pregnancies, but few, if any, obtained in-state abortions legally, suggesting that rape exceptions fail to provide reasonable access to abortion for survivors.” Going on to say: “Survivors of rape who become pregnant in states with abortion bans may seek a self managed abortion or try to travel, often hundreds of miles, to a state where abortion is legal, leaving many without a practical alternative to carrying the pregnancy to term.”

In Texas alone, the estimate is 26,313 rape related pregnancies during the 16 months after Texas outlawed almost all abortions. Keep in mind, there are no exemptions for rape in Texas. So just think of all those who could not get out of state or for whom the abortion pill was out of reach. We also learned this week that in Texas, there have been more than 16,000 additional babies born in 2022, after SB8, six week abortion ban, compared to 2021, which comes to a 2% increase in the state’s fertility rate. We link to more on this development in the show notes.

Now onto the Trump trials. For a thorough breakdown of cases, We’ve linked to a recent piece recommended by one of our producers of the show, Lina Thorne. It’s a piece by Michael Liroff, check it out. First off, I totally get the cheering for the more than $83 million Trump has to pay up for his defamation of E. Jean Carroll. Who doesn’t want to see this pussy grabber pay up everything and never utter the names of his victims again? So yeah, she should have won, but let’s not think this punishes him or reins in his misogyny. There is no financial punishment that will abate this Mango Mussolini menace or his movement, nor his personal boundless punishing, vengeful misogyny that, among many other things, has relegated women girls and others as incubators in, now over 14 states where abortion is banned or severely restricted.

Trumpism is more than Trump, an aggrieved base, fueled by white resentment and hatred of women seeks to put everyone back in their place, with them firmly on top. Trump and the MAGA fascist movement are immune to facts, to verdicts. He is unrestrained by shame or institutions. The biggest lesson from this trial, to me, comes from the warning of the judge overseeing this case, Judge Kaplan, who warned the jurors “My advice to you is that you never disclose that you were on this jury.” Why? Because they’d get killed. Just sit with that. What does that say?

To me, in addition to saying, what a undeniable five alarm fire this is, it implicates all the powers that be that folks hoped against hope would rein them in, would hold them accountable and failed to do so. What about Trump’s immunity case with the DC Circuit? After the case was heard earlier this month, still no word regarding a decision, thus pushing back the trial start date of March further out of sight. His ballot eligibility case regarding the Colorado ballot will be heard on February 8th, I believe, by the Supreme Court.

If you think they are going to make the call to kick him off the ballot in just a couple of weeks without a major shift in dynamics, it is time to snap out of it. This fascist dominated court may have ruled in favor of kicking him off the ballot in the direct aftermath of January 6th, but the fascist polarization quickly reconstituted around the Big Lie and has held. They may return it back to the States, but again, who has the initiative? Who is setting the terms? Much like Trump’s New Hampshire win, there is no plot twist without some major external event or our action. Trump and fascism are on the ballot. No painless progress or script rewrite.

Remember, Trump’s general legal strategy on these cases, besides immunity, is delay, delay, delay, delay the proceedings until he wins the election and then dismisses the cases, and then uses the law to prosecute Joe Biden — all of his enemies, stay in office indefinitely, terrorize and brutalize anyone they deem is unAmerican, strip non Americans of their rights, and do almost anything he wishes to remain in power. How many times have people been convinced that: Ahh, this is the moment that the whole nightmare comes to an end? and yet he keeps bouncing back. That’s not a fluke.

Trump and his fascists thrive on playing the victim and his opponents in the halls of power and in the media thrive on maintaining decent people’s passivity and submissiveness to their mis-leadership. He is embraced and backed, not only by a rabid and heavily armed fascist base, but by a legal movement that has tried and tested strategies for suppressing the vote, subverting the vote, and the law. While no gag order, legal conclusion or criminal conviction can stop someone hell bent on climbing the ladder to fascist rule, there is something that Trump and this whole movement has yet to face: a mass movement of the people, resolved and unwavering in their refusal to accept a fascist America, taking over the public discourse and public squares to make that demand real. And what might that look like?

Well, in Germany, hundreds of thousands have repeatedly taken to the streets over this past week, and plan to continue doing so, in response to the AfD, Germany’s increasingly powerful fascist party. The spark was a meeting between AfD officials and explicit Nazis, which resulted in a plan for mass deportations. In a situation that holds lessons for the U.S., the growing fascist movement, whose popularity is hovering around 20%, is not being ignored, wished away or even encouraged by liberal opportunists.

Instead, according to Reuters, “Civil society groups and alliances, together with mainstream parties, trade unions and churches, with names like Together Against the Right, Cologne Stands Up or Live Democracy, are bringing people into the streets as part of an effort to expose the AfD as what it is and erode support for fascism. Much more could be said about the dynamics of these protests, but we do have to applaud the sheer recognition that the masses play a key role in confronting or alternately, accommodating fascists.

This is one lesson that Americans must learn urgently, as we are constantly told to leave it to the ballot box or the courts or anything else but mass action. The International Court of Justice came down with preliminary finding that Israel is probably committing genocide in Gaza. The proceeding announced this preliminary verdict was a scathing indictment of Israel, showing overwhelming prima facie evidence of genocide. And while they did mandate Israel’s compliance with the most basic laws of war, which we can expect to be ignored, they did not call for a ceasefire, which is what they asked of them and what they’ve done in the past. Recent example, with Russia and Ukraine. This is reprehensible.

Taking a step back, this is a prime example of how liberal institutions are incapable of effectively confronting fascism. For the very notion of enforcement is absent from the conversation. Such courts act as moral cover for imperialist war and sanctions when their verdicts align with imperialist interests, but can and are being simply ignored by the fascists in Israel. The only change that has happened since this verdict is the rescinding of funding for the UN’s aid program in Gaza by the U.S. and its allies.

This was ostensibly for thus far unsubstantiated accusations that out of their 30,000 staff, a few individuals may have participated in the October 7 assault, but for all the world, it is clearly payback for the UN court’s verdict. As they defund some of the only aid being provided to the bombed, maimed, murdered, starved people of Gaza, due to unverified reports of individual employees’ actions, they continue to raise their funding of the IDF, members of which have individually been filmed committing war crimes, and which as a whole is engaged in a genocide so blatant, the UN has recognized it.

Palestinian journalist based in London, co-founder of We Are Not Numbers, Ahmed Alnaouq, captured it this way, in a tweet: “ICJ to Israel: -Kill the Palestinians but slowly. -You still have another month. -No ceasefire. -Feed the Palestinians before you kill them.” With that. Here’s my conversation with Kathleen.

Today, I can’t hold in my excitement and hopefully I will come off somewhat articulately in talking about today’s guest. Today I am talking with Kathleen Belew, an author, historian and Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University. She is a leading expert on the history of the white power movement and its current impact on U.S. society and politics. She is the author of the book Bring the War Home: the White Power Movement, and Paramilitary America, which examines how the aftermath of the Vietnam War led to the birth of the white power movement.

You can find her writing as the Co-editor of A Field Guide to White Supremacy. She has contributed to essays in The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment, and really recommend overall, but in particular for Kathleen’s contribution, The New York Times bestseller Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Lies and Legends about our Past. So, welcome, Kathleen, and thanks for joining us.

Kathleen Belew 22:36

Thank you for having me.

Sam Goldman 22:38

Let’s start with a really simple, tiny question. What is the White Power Movement? And I’ll add another question to it: What’s the biggest myth about this movement that you feel is impacting people’s ability, broadly, to recognize it and combat it?

Kathleen Belew 22:55

The White Power Movement is a group of activists that is profoundly diverse in every way, but race. This movement brings together a whole bunch of different people that, before this incarnation, had often been at odds with one another. This happened in the late 1970s, and it brought together Klansmen with Neo Nazis with radical tax resistors. The movement includes people who are sort of theological adherents to white power religious beliefs alongside people who are political activists. It also includes people in every region of the country. It includes men, women, and children. It includes people who are high school dropouts and felons alongside people with advanced degrees.

So, it is a broad based social movement that works much in the same way other sorts of social movements have worked across that same spate of historical time. I think the biggest myth, the biggest thing we tend to get wrong, is viewing the actions of this movement as disconnected when, in fact, they are part of the same broad social tapestry. So one example of that is the idea of the “Lone wolf terrorist.”

That idea comes from the White Power Movement itself. It is absolutely how the white power movement would like us to regard acts of domestic terrorism carried out in this way, but it’s how we end up with stories about the Tree of Life shooting as antisemitic violence and Buffalo as anti-black violence and Charleston as anti-black violence and El Paso as anti-Latinx violence, when actually all of those events are carried out by white power gunmen, who share networks and ideology and are even cut and pasting from each other’s manifestos. So, one of the jobs here is to do that connective work because when those communities are joined together, they have a much better chance of standing up to this problem.

Sam Goldman 24:51

That’s really helpful. That was one of the things that I was going to ask you about, anyway, was that lone wolf strategy. It actually originates from them, and not only serves their purpose, but they want that to be what is said.

Kathleen Belew 25:06

Exactly. The lone wolf thing starts in the 1980s, largely because they are frustrated with how many informants had gotten into their groups — usually from the FBI, but also from ATF and other surveillance agencies. They get very worried about that, particularly in the Klan during the Civil Rights era, and they come up with a strategy called leaderless resistance, which is effectively what we would now think of as cell style terrorism; the idea that one or a few activists could work either independently or in small groups, without direct orders from leadership and without communication between different cells.

There are leaders. In leaderless resistance, there just are not paper trails that connect them to the cell activities. So it did make it harder for informants to do their job, and it also made it much harder to prosecute, broadly, within this movement, especially to get charges that would go all the way up to leadership. But the bigger consequence, historically, has been that we as a public and as an opposition, have really lost sight of this as a broad based movement. Instead, we have ideas about a few bad apples or a lone madmen or disaffected radicals, kind of on the fringes of our society, when in fact, this is threaded through many other parts of our politics and culture.

Sam Goldman 26:27

That’s really clarifying. I think if we are to confront that, we have to confront that it’s much bigger than we might like, not that it’s a handful of people, but we’re talking about truly a mass movement [KB: yeah], even if not all of those individuals carry out themselves, acts of violence.

Kathleen Belew 26:46

It helps to think about it as sort of concentric circles of organizing. Let’s talk about the 80s, when we actually do have numbers. I don’t think we have numbers for what’s happening today and I can talk about why. But in the 1980s, scholars usually think about a very small circle of people in that center ring of activity, we’re only talking about maybe 10 to 25 thousand people. It’s tiny, but those are people who are fully committed to this movement; who go to a white power church, and they homeschool their kids in white power materials, and they marry other activists, and their social circle is really contained within the White Power Movement.

Then, there’s a bigger group of people up to 75,000 people, maybe, maybe as many as 125,000 people, who do things like attend marches, contribute money, subscribe to the literature, regularly consume things, and they’re in the movement, but maybe not so intent. And then outside of that, we have another several 100,000 people who do things like, perhaps they don’t subscribe to the newspaper, but they read it every month, because somebody hands it to them when they’re finished. Or maybe they don’t march themselves, but they stand across the street and cheer — so a more diffuse amount of activity.

What we have to be thinking about, especially in our current moment, is that there’s another even bigger group of people that historians really haven’t studied much, who are people who would never pick up a newspaper that says “Official newspaper of the Knights of the KKK.” but who might agree with some of the ideas presented in it, especially if those ideas come from a friend or through a social connection or from church. That’s where we see heavy recruitability into the movement, and also where we would see a lot of sort of like the MAGA groundswell; people who might say, I’m not a racist, but… and then say something that is, in fact, racist, are heavily recruitable into the middle for all kinds of different personal reasons. And that model also pushes ideas out into our mainstream.

All that said, my sense is that this is a much larger groundswell now than it was in the 80s, partly because of the ways that it’s coming into our mainstream politics and partly because of the ways that our lives are so much more organized around spaces with a high capacity for radical recruitment, like social media. There’s all kinds of ways that this has become just much more efficient for these activists to carry out.

Sam Goldman 29:16

That makes a lot of sense. I was thinking as you were talking about how mainstream elements that, before, whereas a small community might be talking about it, and it was seen as outrageous, and now, while there’s many people who still can say: Yes, that’s outrageous, and not part of our discourse, the Overton window has totally shifted. The biggest thing that screams out to me is “The Great Replacement” theory, and that that’s just now part of Fox News. It’s not any longer anything to look at.

I think a lot of people right now have, rightly so, been talking and thinking about political violence and In its normalization, the increasing support for political violence, and there’s a lot of overlap between that and white supremacy. People have been talking about and outraged [about], rightly so, Trump’s speeches that pull directly from Mein Kampf [KB: yes] “immigrants poisoning the blood of our country” type language, or: The only thing we’re not allowed to do is shoot them — talking about immigrants. And: The only reason I’m not doing that is because Biden would arrest me — or some lunacy.

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you see this escalating violent anti-immigrant and white supremacist language kind of being, not just escalating, but also it being normalized by just running on the news all the time [KB: sure], how does that connect to the actions or organization of the white power movement themselves.

Kathleen Belew 29:16

The shifting of that sphere of normal discussion towards violence is happening with such speed that scholars can’t even publish fast enough to keep up with what’s happening. That piece you mentioned that I wrote in ‘The Presidency of Donald Trump: a first historical assessment’ is sort of about: What are the relationships between the white power movement and the Trump administration? Historians especially, but scholars in general, many of us like to wait to make proclamations about the present moment.

Historians, famously, will not ever predict the future, and many of us will not even comment on what’s happening right this second, I think, to our own damage, in some cases. Applying the word ‘fascism’ is something that’s been a matter of great historical debate, and I think we are now well past that debate. I think that Trump is certainly trafficking in fascism and fascist rhetoric, fascist ideas. But more than that, I think even when I wrote that first piece, it was not clear to me what the nature of that relationship was.

There is action and then there is belief. I can see the action, I can hear the rhetoric, but does it reflect belief is really always a question for a historian because I can tell you what they say they believe, and I can tell you what I think they may have believed, but belief is such a personal and veiled part of an archive — it’s sort of the bridge that I don’t usually cross. But, at the moment I wrote that first piece, we’re dealing with pieces of information, like: Okay, so we have Stephen Miller circulating Camp of the Saints, which is definitely a white power novel. He’s telling people at Breitbart to read it, and then he goes on to be part of the Trump administration that is actualizing many pieces of white power violent rhetoric, like these sort of cruelty-is-the-point measures at the border.

Does that mean that he himself believes in white power ideology? I don’t think I know, because, first of all, it’s interesting and unsettling when people who are Jewish in heritage take on these ideas — although he certainly would not be the first one. Secondly, we have to be thinking about sort of political opportunism. Is the Trump administration interested in fanning the flames of white power ideology, out of belief? or because they think that that is a convenient demographic to use for their own purposes? That I still don’t know.

But even since that piece came out, the deepening of the, sort of, relationship between the Trump administration or the Trump campaign and white power activism has just intensified so dramatically that I think that question mark is fading and fading and fading. So this year alone, we see the dinner with Kanye and Nick Fuentes, which is sort of the end of plausible deniability, in many ways. And then for him to have a rally at Waco to kick off the campaign — a lot of people think of Waco as sort of an invocation of an anti government critique, but to white power activists, it is directly related to the Oklahoma City bombing, that is a call for violence.

From then it’s just been citation after citation of things like, but not limited to, Mein Kampf. We’re not talking about an n size of one, we’re talking about an n size of a lot, where this rhetoric is routinely used in the Trump campaigning. This is a much more openly troubling engagement than it was the first time around. Between that and calls for reprisals and sort of the embrace of groups like the Proud Boys as the strike force of the campaign, I just think it is a much more concerning picture than it was in 2016.

Sam Goldman 31:12

I really appreciate that walk through, including: How do you go about thinking about these questions? and how we process in real time such danger? I think that for those listening, there’s also the: Whether something’s their intent or not, what is the impact and what is the harm? For historians, it’s important to keep those questions in mind in a different way. For people who are deciding whether actions will be furthering complicity or solidarity, there is a question of: Okay, well, what’s the impact of all this? and what what is that doing?

One of the really significant aspects of your research for me has been learning more about the connection between what I would call U.S. Wars for Empire, notably the Vietnam War, and how that played such a role in fueling or fostering the development of the white power movement in the United States. For instance, looking at those who participated in January 6th, the over representation of veterans in that event. I was hoping that you could talk to us more about this connection — both how you see it historically, and today, what what you think the continuing effect is.

Kathleen Belew 35:51

This is something that I found so striking in the historical archive — with the Ku Klux Klan, especially — because it has been part of American history, since the late 1800s. We have a really good sort of set of data about when it is strong and weak, and we’re learning more about this all the time, as people go back and look more closely and write better and more nuanced scholarship about those moments. There’s been a huge outpouring of excellent books about this, and if people want, I’m always happy to recommend them.

But long and short, we’ve had a number of hypotheses about what’s going on because the Klan has these very clear ebbs and flows. It has sort of membership surges, and then it has moments where the membership will just precipitously decline. We do know that those are not as distinct as we used to think — there’s been some sociological work that shows that there is a great amount of continuity, such that if there’s a big surge in one period, the same place is likely to have a big surge in the next period.

So it’s not that it goes away, it’s just that it recruits more or less successfully, I think. The surges, people have explained in a lot of different ways. People have looked at: Okay, is it moments of intense immigration? Is it moments of populist heated political debate? Is it moments when people of color are making civil rights gains? Is it moments of poverty? It turns out that the best correlating factor is not any of those things, it’s actually the aftermath of war. The Klan lines up really neatly with the aftermath of the Civil War, of World War One, World War Two, Korea and Vietnam, and now the aftermath of the Global War on Terror.

The interesting thing about this is that when I started this research, I was wondering if this is sort of like a Rambo story: Veterans who experienced combat and then kind of can’t turn it off. There are some people like that in the archive. That is certainly a phenomenon that we see and can observe, and that they are talking about exactly in that way. But the sociology actually shows us that it’s more complicated than that, because it’s all of us who become more violent after warfare; that includes women and children, elderly people, people who don’t serve.

Across our population, we as a nation — and actually this is true in Great Britain and Australia, too — are just more prone to violence after warfare. This raises a bunch of questions. My undergrads want to know if this has to do with monopoly on violence ( [Max] Weber stuff), whether it has to do with, the state has created some kind of a violent process, and when it’s finished, here it is at home? I think that there’s more to find out about that, and it’s a complicated picture, but what we know is that white power groups are incredibly opportunistic, they are very adept at reading the room, and when a lot of people are available for violent action, they are able to funnel a lot of that violent action into these white power causes.

So what we see is that they’re very interested in recruiting veterans and active duty service members. There’s the arguments about it has to do with kind of a sense of in-group with a sense of being aggrieved by the state. And certainly, there’s also that. There’s also really material reasons that they want veterans and active duty troops who bring tactical expertise, and access to weapons, and training, and all kinds of things that dramatically escalate the violent capacity of these groups. We saw it on January 6th. I think we will continue to see it.

The Global War on Terror, as your listeners, I’m sure, are aware, is unlike many other wars that our country has been involved in. Before the fall of Kabul, it had been the entire lifetime of my undergraduates. We’re talking about a 20 year engagement with long, deeply violent, but very socially segmented, warrior class parts of our society who are largely tasked with that work. And we’re talking about a society that really hasn’t been paying attention to that violence at all. We don’t see coffins on the front page. We don’t much engage in anti-war protesting anymore — maybe with the exception of what’s happening in the case of Israel and Gaza now, but before that war hadn’t even really figured into our debates in the last presidential election. So it’s an interesting thing to think about, like: What will that aftermath phenomenon look like with such a different style of engagement?

Sam Goldman 40:14

I was thinking about how many have been charged in relation to January 6th. We’re now three years out from that, and I think that there was a lot of hope that given the sheer quantity of people that have been charged — not all with any association to the military, to be clear — some had association to the police and other things — that we would see a dip in those who are part of the white power movement. I know that it’s kind of a messy thing, because of those concentric circles that you spoke about [KB: right] is looking at membership of the Oathkeepers, or of the Proud Boys really the right metric? And is there a metric that could be used? I have a gut feeling that, no, it’s still growing, but is there any evidence around that?

Kathleen Belew 41:11

Yeah. You’re right. First of all, when we’re thinking about January 6th, we have to sort of differentiate between at least three different kinds of streams of belief that deliver people to that moment. We have the, sort of, Stop the Steal, MAGA faithful, and within that group, I think there’s a pretty broad spectrum of what people think they’re doing there, ranging from some speech that I believe should be protected, like showing up to a march to protest something you think is wrong, and then there are others that show up that day wanting to break some stuff or interfere with an election.

That’s not protected. That is an illegal action. That’s the biggest group of people. Some of them are radicalized that day and move from free speech action to something else. Some stay within the free speech action and are just peaceably demonstrating, or at least just milling about outside of the Capitol building. The second group is Q-Anon. I think this is newer, and therefore, as a historian, I sort of hang back a little bit about describing it. The thing that is distinct is the sort of speed of radicalization and the extent to which it is working in a conspiracy theory that is not necessarily contiguous with politics, but is gobbled up by politics in various moments.

On the one hand, it is very new, on the other hand, it is the same conspiracy theory that we have been seeing since at least the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, where there is a Jewish/elite/conspiracy/globalist group of demonic people who are purportedly threatening white children and sometimes white women. That’s the same conspiracy that we see over and over again, whether it is the Zionist occupational government or “Great Replacement” or Pizza Gate or Q-Anon; same thing with variations.

Then, we have the white power movement. That’s the smallest number of people who are there on January 6th, but they’re the ones that showed up organized, they’re the ones that have now been convicted on in many cases of seditious conspiracy. They’re the ones that you saw in tactical vests, and with walkie talkies, and with beanies, so they could find each other. They’re the ones that had plans to reach the buildings. They’re the ones that talked about how to get weapons in across the Potomac.

There’s a lot of cues about why January 6th was viewed as a white power action, like erecting a gallows outside of the Capitol building. It’s thinking about this book, The Turner Diaries that we can talk more about if people want to. But, long and short, it is a recruitment act for the white power movement. That means a couple of distinct things.

First of all: The people that are doing it are absolutely prepared to go to jail within the White Power Movement. And secondly: They were interested, not in a mass casualty event like the Oklahoma City bombing, but instead at sort of a strike at the heart of power. I do think that violence against legislators would have happened if the opportunity had presented itself, but I think they were looking for a small number of casualties. It’s a very different kind of action then something like the Oklahoma City bombing. Arresting the few white power activists that were there that day is certainly not going to make a dent in anything. It just creates a series of martyrs who can then use that sort of arrest for their own political reasons.

Trump has lately added himself to that group, and sort of the promise to free everybody if he is re-elected is of course going to further inflame things if that happens. But as you said, we are talking about a huge number of prosecutions. I think it was 1200 people charged. I think we’re at like 400 people convicted and the seditious conspiracy cases alone are up to like six or eight — a lot. That is a stunning number of seditious conspiracy convictions, when we were talking about a handful in the 20th century. That is a huge number. That means that there is overwhelming evidence of seditious conspiracy.

Just to be clear, that means a conspiracy — an organized group of people with demonstrable ties and a plan that intended to disrupt the running of the country or intended a violent overthrow. It is very hard to prove, so the fact that they got that many convictions is a huge, huge change. That said, when the first couple of these convictions came down, there was some reporting saying, like: Oh, they’ve cut the head off the snake. We should all remember that it is a hydra. For sure, every time you put somebody in prison, a couple more people become radicalized. That is the way this works.

The kind of response that would really end white power organizing has to be much more complex than just incarcerating a few leaders. Because it is a social movement. It is an internally coherent ideology. It involves a whole bunch of social networks. It involves deeply held belief. It involves a sense of emergency. It doesn’t just go away, because of any one prosecutorial moment. This is something that requires a much bigger and more nuanced kind of social response.

Sam Goldman 46:18

That’s a really helpful reminder, that way that you just put it. I think that the same goes in a certain way for how we look at Trump and these cases too, that give him and opportunity — I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be pursued, don’t get me wrong, just like all of these individuals that you talked about being charged, yes, they should be — but keep in mind that then that becomes a platform for further recruitment for the culture of martyrdom.

Even the referring to them as hostages, you know, like the: I’ve been wronged and I will fight for you, I will be your retribution — kind of ideas that are then given a bigger platform. There was, in relation to this where we are now kind of question, how do you see the white power movement in this moment? People who are concerned, what should we be paying attention to? Or what are you paying attention to?

Kathleen Belew 47:16

Here’s the tricky part. This is a movement that is contiguous. It’s the same movement that I was studying what they were doing in the 80s and 90s. It is the same people. It has been organizing much in the same way across decades. I think there’s a good argument for that earlier period can tell us a lot about what we are likely to see right now. That’s important because this is a movement that works both public facing and underground at the same time — which is just to say, an action like a Proud Boys march or January 6th is meant for public consumption. That is theatrical, that is for all of us to see and view and it’s designed to do something to people.

Meanwhile, there is an underground of the movement that we don’t see in real time for the most part. I won’t get those records as a historian for at least 20 years. Because to see that part, we need prosecutions, we need people to come out of the movement and write books about what was happening, we need the FBI to declassify a bunch of stuff, we need the Freedom of Information Act to work and return records, which takes a really, really, really long time. For a lot of reasons, we’re not going to have a full picture of the underground in real time, even though we know it’s happening.

For instance, one example is all of these attacks on power stations that have been in the news lately. Nobody has said that those were carried out by white power activists. I can’t tell you for sure that they were carried out by white power activists. I would need a whole bunch of detailed information. But I can tell you that the ATF was called out, so there is suspicion that it was via foul play, particularly related to explosives or firearms, and I can tell you that there are two circulating pamphlets within the white power movement that specifically instruct activists to go out and shoot at power stations for reasons of expediting a race war.

So we can make an educated guess that at least some of that might have something to do with this. Similarly, we see mass shootings, which are more connected than we usually like to think. We see the arrest of extremist groups like The Base and Atomwaffen, which are trying to do white power violence, much in the same way that these groups have been doing for this whole time. All that is just to say that there is an underground and there is a public facing dimension. So here’s the question: In the 1980s, the last time this movement declared war on the government and became very violent and carried out a whole bunch of actions ranging from training and military camps, to attempting to poison the water supply of a major city, to assassinations of state troopers and attempted assassinations of various kinds of enemies, not to mention rolling campaigns of violence against communities. of color — the last time that happened was in 1983, under Reagan, by the way, under a Republican president, and it happened because they thought politics was closed.

They thought that even under Reagan, he could never deliver the kind of radical stuff they wanted, and so they needed to go to war, instead of pursuing politics, that door is not shut anymore. We know that because the Proud Boys are doing all kinds of local politicking. They are trying to go up the command structure of the GOP in Florida. They are showing up as armored guards for Republican candidates in places like Colorado. They are going to school boards. They are going to library story hour. These are the things you want to do when you are assuming a power structure, not just for public theater, but they’re interested in the school board elections.

It’s not just about Trump, that’s about down ballot races. That tells us that at least some people in this movement are not necessarily interested in race war, they are now interested in seeing if they can assert control of the entire apparatus of governance. That means we have two things we have to worry about. We have to worry about attacks on likely targets; infrastructure, targeted communities, and sort of enemies. And we also have to worry about authoritarianism and the security of our institutions, intimidation of the polls, intimidation of election workers.

If Trump is reelected, we have to worry about whether he will sort of give the badge to groups like the Proud Boys in in the model of a death squad under an authoritarian ruler, who’s sort of like a strong arm that he can use in an extra legal way, quickly. We have all kinds of historical models for what comes after that, and they are very bad outcomes. So those are the things I worry about. This is a fractious movement. My guess is that there are people in the White Power movement, that one or both of those things. There are probably some in each camp. I don’t know which is bigger and we probably won’t know for a while. But I think that the opposition has to be on guard for both of those outcomes.

Sam Goldman 52:00

Going off what you just said, one of the things that I’ve been thinking about is: I’m very concerned — and I’m not the only one — about what happens ten months from now. We’ve also talked about how things, unfortunately, could come to a boil before that date, depending on on certain factors. It is not, I think anymore, outside of the realm of possibility that something could happen at the Texas border between Abbott and militia, and the federal government.

I just don’t think that that’s too hyperbolic at this point. But I do think that there definitely is this ten months from now, things will be decided. We’ve talked some about different possibilities. The possibility that you spoke that Trump re-seizes power, and with that all the horror that brings, including the unleashing of the white power movement, the Proud Boys as the arm of the state, plus whatever policies that then he would just enact that would be white supremacist violence — just not by the mob, through the state.

There’s also this possibility — perhaps now not as likely as your possibility — that Biden wins, and Trump refuses to accept the results. He’s pledged to do that and I think that there’s danger there as well. There’s also a possibility there could be no election. There’s always that possibility in this world that Trump has created. I want to just get your thoughts on, there’s people who are like: They wouldn’t do it again — a January 6th again — that wouldn’t happen again.

I know that we have no crystal ball, we can’t exactly tell. I’ve had folks who focus on political violence before say that it would look different than it looked last time. It wouldn’t be at the Capitol, let’s say. I do think that given, not just their language, but the fact that they’ve had a trial, that it’s not out of the question that they would do something again.

Kathleen Belew 53:59

I think it is very likely that, either way, we’re in for a crucible moment anyway you cut it. This is not something that goes back in the box. It is not a scattered group of radicals. It is a tidal wave of people that include sort of the MAGA people, it includes also some people who are interested in fomenting organized violence against communities of color, against our institutions, and against even the idea that we should have elections at all.

I think that if Trump is not reelected, a lot of those people will be unhappy and may pursue violent action. If he is reelected, we also have to worry about all of the things that we just detailed. When people hear that, it is really easy to shut down, and that is the thing that we absolutely cannot do. Maybe this is when we can talk about the: What should we be doing in our communities. I don’t like to leave people sort of in the ditch of that fear. When you feel overwhelmed, of course, step back, and then step back in. We’ve gotta step back up, though, because this is the time.

There are a ton of places where these conflicts will unfold and it is easy to get caught up with only thinking about the top of the ticket. Those down ballot races, if we have them — as long as we have them, we’ve got to keep voting. People really need to pay attention to what’s happening at your local school board, what’s happening in your local libraries, and especially, please check in with the people around you on your block.

I think that in the months to come, it will be incredibly important to know what to do if you see action in your area. This ranges from, in Chicago, we have leafleting all the time by white power group. So you’ve gotta know who you’re gonna report it to, who you’re going to send the picture to. What are you going to do for your neighbors to color, your Jewish neighbors, people who might be victimized by these groups more specifically? How do you know that you’re going to be ready to stand together?

Because community is exactly the most threatening thing to these groups. We know from the history, putting together the pieces, such that a synagogue can stand with a Black grocery store is exactly the thing that scares this movement, the most. Being organized and reaching out to one another is the top thing on my wish list for what’s to come. And if people want to get more specific, there are amazing resources — the Peril Institute, I think it is I’m going to forget the acronym [SG: We’ll put it in the show notes.]. Excellent.

We also have to be ready to stand with people who are targeted and harassed. After some of the things that happened where — the clerk of the court or the county commissioner — Maricopa County, one of the places where the election was challenged [SG: Oh, yeah] — they’re showing up outside of his house with nooses, or the women who were targeted as falsifying voter records have to move because of harassment. We have to be ready to stand for each other. It’s a scary thing when it involves groups like this, but if we want our democracy, if we want elections, we have to be ready to stand for each other.

Sam Goldman 57:11

It’s a lot scarier to hand them the future. It’s really really much scarier for us to hand them the lives of our immigrant siblings. It’s much scarier, the world that they want to create, even than the risk that we may have to take. I want to thank you so much for taking your time to share your expertise and perspective with us. We’re going to share a link to your website, we’re going to share a link to your book. Where else do you want to direct folks to go to connect more with you, to read more from you?

Kathleen Belew

I am still on the site formerly known as Twitter, although, I don’t know how much longer we’re all going to be there. I’m trying TikTok — right now I am mainly just talking about this in little bits and pieces, but I’m happy to answer questions. Happy to direct people to books. I have too many, and always needing additional people to direct books to. I’m always happy to answer questions, so please feel free to ask questions. I’ll try to do my best.

Sam Goldman

Just to know that the Department of Defense finally released the report last month on extremism in the military over a year and a half after it was completed. The report offers minimal new data, makes clear that their security clearance process doesn’t address domestic extremism. The report deems the threat rare, but dangerous, focusing concern on rising participation rates of veterans. We recommend our interview with Will Carless on how little the military was actually doing about this threat. Will’s reporting for USA Today on this topic was instrumental in finally getting this report released.

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