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How extremism affected this small American town
00:42:07
Journalist Michael Edison Hayden spent years tracking extremism in America. In this episode of Settle in, he talks with Amna Nawaz about his new book, "Strange People on the Hill," about what happened when a far-right group moved its headquarters to ...
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everyone, it's Amna. Welcome to another episode of Settle In. My guest today is Michael Edison Hayden. He's an investigative reporter and an expert on far right extremism. He's also the author of a new book, it's out now, and it's called Strange People on the How Extremism Tore Apart a Small American Town. So we talked about that town. We talked about what happened when a far right group moved into that small town. We talked about the place that extremism now holds in American politics. Politics. And we also talked about the personal toll that this work takes on him, the threats that he's faced, the mental health challenges he's had to deal with, even the friends that he's lost along the way. And we should note, this interview was actually recorded before this past weekend's shooting that took place at the White House correspondence dinner here in Washington, D.C. that's a story we're going to continue to cover on air and online, but for now, see Settle in and listen to my conversation with Michael Edison Hayden. Michael Edison Hayden, welcome to Settle In. Thanks for being here.
- [01:08]
B
Thank you.
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A
Before we get into your new book, I want to start with you and what drew you into this work in the first place? Because you spend a lot of time in some of the darkest corners of the Internet, really deep into stuff that a lot of people don't even know exists. What was it that brought you into this in the first place?
- [01:26]
B
Well, when I first started doing this, I actually started really with ABC News, which was doing a kind of an expansion then around the 2016 election. And I ended up picking up a lot of stuff about Trump's followers because it was just like, well, give him that. There's gonna be something on that. And that turned out to be, in many ways, the major story that was happening underneath him. And so the first stories I did were really about, you know, burgeoning white supremacy and that sort of thing that was happening. And then when Trump won and it was, there was a lot of shock around everything, they asked me to, you know, please keep going, because I think that people didn't really understand how it was possible. But I think I did at that time because I had been looking at them and I saw the energy around Trump leading up to that election. Then to skip ahead a little bit during the Unite the Right event in Charlottesville where all those white supremacists came out and they were fighting over that Confederate statue that was in town, I had had because of the work I'd been doing, I had A lot of contacts in the town and broke a few stories that went viral there. And then just a series of people asking me to do this material. It just wound up becoming my beat after that.
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A
I mean, it's been 10 years now, though. So what keeps you in it? Or do you find yourself still learning new things about it or being personally fascinated by the way the move has evolved?
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B
Well, it is fascinating. I think everybody should be fascinated. I don't know if that's the right word, actually, but everything should be aware. When there is a fascist movement that is growing in the United States, which there. There is and has been, and about what it can do. I still feel, I think, a certain, you know, I'm certainly, I, I work, I make money as a journalist. So there is, you know, there is that. Right. But I think I'm drawn to it more than anything else because I worry about my children. I have two sons. I worry about the future that they will inherit. I worry about the future of my family members. I have immigrants in my family. And it's because of that. I mean, I don't want to live in a world where the type of divisions that they're pushing become even more, you know, built in. I don't want it to become so fundamental to American life that this psychological pain that I feel while having covered this for a while is something that everybody, every kid has to go through.
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A
So let's. For folks unfamiliar who don't follow it as deeply as you do, which is most people listening. Let's set some kind of foundations here in terms of definitions. When we're talking about far right extremism, Right. What does that encompass? Who are we talking about?
- [04:13]
B
Sure. I mean, this can became really blurred around the time that Trump took power, in part because they all kind of fell in line around Trump. But you're talking about anti government extremists. Right. People like the Oath Keepers who were involved in the January 6th insurrection. You're talking about also the 3 percenters and those type of things. There are the kind of, there are more shock, sort of shock troops of the white nationalist movement that you see online and things like that. And then there are also these kind of academic, pseudo intellectual white nationalists who focus on things like, for example, like race and IQ and that sort of thing. And, you know, we talked about Jared Taylor, I believe, before we went on the air. And like, you know, Jared Taylor, we
- [04:57]
A
should mention, for anyone listening, was sort of considered like a grandfather at this point of the white nationalist movement.
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B
He's one of them.
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A
One of the leading Peter Brimwell previously interviewed.
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B
I mean, yeah, I mean, really focused on this idea that there are these huge differences between races and, you know, therefore, you know, whites should be separated. They need to be in a. You know, they're not safe in this particular climate, et cetera, et cetera.
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A
And central, too, is this idea that America should be a white homeland.
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B
Exactly.
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A
Fair to say.
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B
Yes. And then there are, you know, the lines of this get kind of fuzzy sometimes. But there are also neo Nazis, people who are actually, you know, they revere Hitler to a tremendous degree, and then they want to just reanimate the Nazi movement in the United States. Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of. And then there's just some people who are just anti immigrant extremists. And then I would just say that there's just the MAGA movement in general, which is so mainstream that it's difficult to talk about as an extremist movement. But there, I think, is a sort of a widespread contagion in the United States right now. We saw it during January 6, right. Where you had the proud boys who are kind of just a neo fascist street gang, and they're mixing in with, like, actual grandmothers who are there. Right. Who are just wearing Trump gear, which is a little bit. It's a little bit complicated to talk about because you may know people who are pro Trump and they might even consider themselves maga. And then you may say, this person is not an extremist. And that might be true. But I think the core elements of the movement are, to me, fascist in nature, focused on divide and conquer, and, you know, and also focused on scapegoating other Americans.
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A
You said widespread contagion. Do we have any way of capturing how widespread these beliefs are?
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B
Well, there's one example that I like to bring up, which is at the 2024 Republican National Convention, the RNC you have. There were. There were grandmothers in wheelchairs holding up signs that say mass deportation now. Right. People were holding mass deportation now signs all over the. I remember being completely shocked. I took all of 2024 off. I didn't offline. I was focused on the book entirely. And I just tuned into that because I felt it was important. I knew it was important for the book, just things like that. And I couldn't believe it. I was shocked out of my mind. Because this was the type of material that, you know, in 2016, you would see, and you would only see it from fringe corners of the. Right. Right. It was not the type of thing where it was just a mainstream thing to say. It's like, oh, yeah, we need a mass deportation force. Right, right. You also see that they say things like remigration and stuff like that. There's all these other terms that are coming from the right that are now coming out of the mouths of prominent Republican politicians. That's what I sort of mean by a widespread contagion. It's going to take a lot of work for the United States to get to a place where we kind of dial these things back and put them back where they were previously. And maybe I leave open the possibility that we may never. And that would be like absolutely devastating for the United States.
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A
So all of these ideas come together in your book. And the lens through which you explore these ideas is not necessarily about the ideas or the groups, but it's about this town. Right. This one small town in West Virginia called Berkeley Springs. Tell us about Berkeley Springs. For someone who's never been there, who will never get a chance to visit, what's it like there?
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B
Well, it's beautiful. That's the first thing I would say about Berkeley Springs, and I would encourage people to visit. It is a tourist town with about anywhere between 700 and 1,000 people. Berkeley Springs is a kind of an anomaly in that area because you have a lot of. Everybody is familiar with the kind of tourist town vibe where you go to a place and the coffee shops have maybe they have pride flags and this sort of. You know what I'm talking about, this sort of thing. Right. Well, that exists in West Virginia and it exists at Berkeley Springs. So gay couples would be going there. You have people from Baltimore, D.C. philadelphia,
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A
striving to sort of be an inclusive destination.
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B
Yeah, just to go, to be in nature and to experience. And also they have these beautiful, beautiful, beautiful springs there, warm springs where George Washington once took a bath and stuff like that. And it comes out of the mountain at like 72 degrees or something like that. It's just gorgeous.
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A
Yeah.
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B
The thing that happened here is that there is a group called vdeer. The Southern Property Law center designates them a white nationalist group. The best way for me to describe them to your audience is that they are narrowly focused on the great replacement conspiracy, which is, yes, this is important, unfortunately, because it is driving a lot of the anxiety in this country is this idea that there are people, elites, in some cases Jews, I would say VDARE is not as focused on Jews. They're really, you know, narrowly against immigration. You know, this idea that they are importing non white immigrants into the United States in order to disrupt white countries or white majority countries and make whites a minority.
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A
And that's at the core of the kind of work, the articles, the content that Vdare pushes out. Right. And vdare, we should also mention just the origin of this. It's named after Virginia Dare.
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B
Oh, yeah.
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A
Who was the first English child born in the Americas. Is that right?
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B
Yeah, that's where it traces me. So it's like to try to like sort of, you know, we're defending her honor, defending these, these whites, these founding whites. Yeah.
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A
And so VDare is founded and run by a man named Peter Brimlow, who
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B
is himself an immigrant. Yes, he's English.
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A
He's English, yeah.
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B
He's a very, he's a very smart guy. But he was, he was a financial journalist and he, he worked for Forbes and things like that. And he kind of stumbled into an argument that he, he began to make his entire career out of, which is just against this flow of non white immigrants into the United States. He founded this nonprofit called VDARE in 1999 and from the outside of the Republican party started to push for changes in more than anything else, rhetoric to begin to focus on immigration but policy as well. Very much so. And you know, if you look at his old interviews with him during the George W. Bush years, he's really pushing for changes that we see now in the Republican Party today. Really focused on non white immigration, focused on demonizing immigrants, that sort of thing. Peter Brimlow, around the time of the Charlottesville violence, he became sort of a Persona non grata. You know, could not, could not get his conferences, his VDR conferences, going to bring everybody from the movement together. His wife, Lydia Brimlow, who's about 37 years younger than he is, she was looking at Zillow, according to her, and found a listing for this beautiful castle in Berkeley Springs. And it was $1.4 million with a lot of upkeep cost because it's a castle from the 19th century. And rather than this being a kind of a, you know, the type of thing that should be, you know, belong to the state, potentially be a national park or something like that, it was just out there to be purchased. And he purchased it, they purchased it. And you know, when they purchased it, the idea was not only would this be a big coup for vidair to say, like, hey, we have a castle. This is our office, this is our castle. But also you would have an event space where, you know, so called antifa, like, you know, antifax fascist demonstrators would not interfere with them. Nobody could cancel them. Nobody could call up the Marriott and say, like, hey, this group. Do you know what this group believes? Have you seen what they had to say about Martin Luther King, et cetera?
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A
So it gives them kind of a new operating headquarters too, Right?
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B
Not just to help people operate and also people can with safety and anonymity, which is very important to Vidair. They had a lot of writers whose names they didn't want to give up and things like that. They can go in and out of the castle and. And they can meet and organize without any interference. What they didn't count on is the first part of this, which is the town and the spirit of the town. Yes, it is. Morgan County, West Virginia is predominantly white, and the county overwhelmingly voted Republican. But the town itself, the spirit of the town, is based on the people who come to visit and hike. And that is where the conflict of strange people on the hill really develops.
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A
I mean, you write about how the town is torn apart by the presence of Peter Brimlow and Vidair in this castle. How did that happen? That also suggests that there are people who support them being there and people who don't. But what is the practical impact of this group showing up and setting up a headquarters there in this one small town? What happens to the town?
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B
It's interesting. Remember what I said. I think the primary thing you can associate with VDER more than anything else is selling this idea of the Great Replacement theory. Right. And I think that throughout this country, that idea and the way it's caught on has created a tremendous amount of anxiety that affects everybody's life and is. Well, if you think about it this way, right? I mean, if you think that you're being genocided, you're going to lose everything. I mean, what wouldn't you do to try to stop that? Right. Wouldn't you do like to avoid being, you know, being a victim of a genocide? So it really ratchets up our politics to a really unpleasant, scary place.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And I think when they first came, it wasn't so much that people liked them necessarily. It's more of like the enemy of my enemy type situation in the sense that in every town now during the Trump era, there are huge divisions that are between neighbors that are related to our absolutely poisonous political climate. Right. You have somebody who's like outspoken maga, and this person is across the street. I'm going to put my Black Lives Matter sign and stuff like that. And just the amount of tension that people experience on a day to day basis is strong, then in a small town, it's even worse. So you have people. It's not so much that necessarily everybody's like, I love the content on Vedier. I think this is the best content ever. It's more the people who are fighting against them. And then they say, like, well, actually this guy supports Trump. What's the problem? They don't like him, and I don't like them. All those divisions that we see in our own life, in our own towns, those things became exacerbated to a profound degree. And you have people turning on one another over this Vidier castle, largely playing out the kind of things that you see in every town over maga.
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A
So in the years reporting this book and all the time you spend on the ground, do you get to interact with Peter Brimlow?
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B
That's a good question. Videer's site has. Has published things about me many different times. I actually met him inside the Castle for the first time in December 2023. I bought tickets to a Christmas event there with my friend and colleague Hannah Gase. And we had about a seven minute conversation, which is detailed in the book. And I think very. I think it's interesting because we're actually quite friendly with one another until all of a sudden he says, I think this is enough. And. And basically.
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A
Well, tell us about that conversation.
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B
I mean, you know, we sort of had crawled through the castle to see it, and I thought it was just a fascinating place, which was so interesting. And I went up to the. What was then the VDR conference room and saw it, but I realized it was actually quite small and quaint. And I said to Hannah, I said, look, you know, I don't think we're gonna. I don't think we're gonna run into him. And then all of a sudden, it was freezing outside. The door opened and it was like almost like a movie. It's like the air was so cold. And then Peter and his wife came in with their kids and at first we kind of laid back. He actually looked me directly in the eye, telling me he was gonna turn the heat up in here, you know, in his way, and just looked at me without. Even though they had kind of mentioned me so many times in that thing.
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A
He was gonna be there, right? He didn't recognize you?
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B
Didn't recognize me.
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A
Okay.
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B
And then his wife did as we were coming down the stairs, and I wanted to go have a conversation with them. She knew about the book coming out. She thought that the book was Making fun of them. The title, I said, look, that's a quote from somebody who asked me about the strange people on the hill. Right. So that's where the title came from. This came from my journalistic work.
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A
So he's aware of your work?
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B
Yeah.
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A
That's what you've been doing?
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B
Oh yeah, he's been. You know, they were very. I mean. Cause when we were at Southern Poverty Law center, we were reporting on them all the time. And then there was a feedback loop between the two of us, which is actually very similar to the feedback loop you see playing out between individuals in the town. At the end of the conversation, he said, all right, that's enough, and sent us off. We were kicked out of the castle. And since then, nothing. They won't talk to me.
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A
No reaction to the book since it's been out either.
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B
He recently posted on Substack. When he saw that I was speaking at Politics and Prose in dc, he said someone should go and film it. Which was quite funny because it was being live streamed on YouTube, so you could just watch that.
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A
I mean, we should note for the record too, you've documented this in your work at the SPLC too. And there's a number of his critics who allege that VDARE is. It's an anti immigration publication that's really a hub for white nationalist groups. I think to this day the Rimlows dispute that characterization. Is that fair?
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B
Yeah, they call themselves civic nationalists. That's the term that they use. The Southern Poverty Law center calls them white nationalists. I prefer I just refer in the book to the movement because I think it's easier to people to understand that there is a politically engaged, unified movement. I would times call this a white supremacist movement, but it's certainly a white identity focused movement. The most important thing for my own personal beliefs and my most important thing I want to convey to people is their. The degree to which they have helped mainstream the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. Or the conspiracy theory might even be the right word. I think a better phrasing would be this narrative about the Great Replacement. Right.
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A
What is happening in the way of selling demographic change?
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B
That it is. That it is inherently negative, that it is some sort of. That is some sort of thing to kind of harm white people.
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A
So let me ask you about that mainstreaming because it brings us to where we are now, which is that a lot of these ideas, as you say, have made their way into the mass messaging of one of our two major political parties. Right. In terms of how this country operates. So what can you say about the alignment of all these ideas that are held by what we'd call far right extremist groups, groups as well, part of the movement, as you say, and this president and this Republican Party and this conservative identity, right now, what would you say is that alignment?
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B
Well, in terms of Trump, I don't know if he even cares about this or what he cares about, but I do know that he's very, very savvy in terms of finding things that create anxiety and fear and anger and exploiting those things to accrue power for himself, to accrue wealth for himself, to dominate. He's just. He's like a shark. He's like, not even. I mean, I don't know if we'll ever see anybody quite like Trump in the way he does that. And I think the way these folks who are activists who really believe in this narrative and it is their life's work and stuff like that, he just views these things as just kind of putting his, you know, seeing what's out there that he can exploit and hitting it. And I think that that is the real relationship between the radical right and Trump.
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A
Are there fractures today where there weren't before?
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B
Oh, my God.
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A
How has the movement changed? Tell me about that.
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B
Oh, my God. Yes. What you're seeing is huge divides, at least within the online movement or with the activist side of the movement. I know that polls still show generally most Republicans feel the same way they always did about Trump. But I don't know, it's one of those things where I don't know if we'll see the full effect of it in polling for years to come. I'm actually very scared about what could happen, you know, from here, because that anti Semitic side of things. Right. I'm worried about people who are angry, who feel frustrated legitimately with Israel, who may have, like, real criticisms, aligning themselves with people who are, you know, who themselves have very genocidal ambitions.
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A
But does that fracture? Does that weaken the movement at all? I mean, take us back to Vidya, for example, as a subject of your book. How are they doing today?
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B
Good question. I went to actually back to Berkeley Springs yesterday to sign books on the show.
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A
Oh, you just went yesterday?
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B
Yes, I did.
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A
Okay. How was that?
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B
It was amazing. I was really emotional. I cried. A bunch of people coming to me and hugging me, and, you know, they'd just been through a lot over the last five years. I think this is a chance to, like, look back on it and to realize what they'd been through while I was there. Somebody asked who was very, you know, really loved the book, but said, well, what would you say to somebody who said that all this activism in the town against VDR was unimportant? The New York Attorney General's office is what really did something to them. Letitia James, who's the New York Attorney General's office, put them under an investigation into the way they use their nonprofit. That went on for basically 2022 until 2025. And ultimately there's, you know, they're legal maneuvers and it has forced Vider to basically disband in so many words. I mean, they don't because of financial
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A
pressures essentially as a result of the investigation by the New York attorney.
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B
They can still theoretically use the castle space to host people from the movement and things like that right now. But they are battling financially. They're in a lot of trouble.
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A
Yeah. So someone asks you if that matters more than the action on the ground.
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B
Well, I mean, people from the town were lobbying Letitia James to pay attention to it. Letitia James may not have even been aware of this if it were not for the article that I first wrote going back to 2020 about this, which came from where it came from the people in the town trying to get somebody's attention to pay attention to this. And I think that really that yes, the New York Attorney General's office put the financial pressure on them, but the social pressure came from the people in the town who are predominantly white, older, the exact people that Peter Brimlow thought he was going to come into town and dazzle with his money and kind of no worries, they're going to have the same beliefs as me. Really a remarkable thing that they were able to take him on with with social pressure and do as much damage to wider as they ultimately did.
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A
We're talking a lot about right wing extremism and far right ideologies. Folks will have also heard the President, this administration, others talk about left wing extremism too. Right. About the far left, about antifa. And we know that this administration has even pushed for prosecutions of people who are associated with these kind of ideologies. You study this stuff, you research it all the time. What do we know about these groups?
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B
Yeah, well, what we know is that there aren't really groups. You know, this idea that there are groups is quite fatuous. I mean, like they're talking about Democratic Socialists of America and stuff like that. Those are like the groups that they sometimes list who they might point to,
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A
people who self identify as Antifa who have. There has been some violence associated with some far off.
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B
Of course we're going to find out what happens in the, the trial around Charlie Kirk's murder. Right. We don't know what his motivation was. We're gonna, you know, we leave open the possibility of anything. But the idea that antifa is typically a form of protest, it's a way, it's a way of response. It's a militant form of protest. It's not, not all anti fascist activism is violent. You know, a lot of it is just sort of bookkeeping. It's sort of like where were they? Where did they go? Just letting, you know, letting people in the community know what people do, what they're, where they are. You know, they call it doxxing, but like not always doxxing. Some of it is literally just reporting. Just, you know, this person, you know, is in your area, they go by this name. Here's who they really are, here's what they do. I would say the majority of antifascist activism is stuff like that.
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A
We should say. People have accused you of being part of antifa too.
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B
Oh yeah, of course.
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A
What do you say to that?
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B
No, I mean, I mean. Well, I mean, I'm an anti fascist, for sure. I mean, I'm against fascism, you know, so I mean, but I've never organized with anti. I'm a journalist. Right. They say that because in part because if you focus on fascism and you focus on defanging fascism, then you can potentially be portrayed in this way. A lot of people were that, I know, who report on this material and report on the radical right were very scared after, you know, after Charlie Kirk's assassination because we worried that like they would start some sort of insane crackdown on people who are completely innocent. You know, just reporters and things like that. Yeah, because I mean, it's not like this administration has, you know, it scruples together and is. They do all kinds of unhinged things.
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A
So Mike, you talk in the book about your split from the splc, the Southern Poverty Law center, which has long been known as sort of the preeminent organization documenting and reporting on extremism and racism. I just want to put you, because we did, as part of our journalism, reach out to them.
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B
I'm excited for.
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A
Well, we just. This is the response and this was specifically asking them for comment about some of, specifically your criticism about allegations of union busting and retaliation and backing off, in your words, of a lot of their coverage for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration. Not letting those reports go out. So they deny your allegations. And they say this, quote, splc does not tolerate discrimination or retaliation in the workplace. They say they have a longstanding relationship with the union. They're committed to working collaboratively with union leadership. And then they also add that their mission remains unchanged, to fight hate, to seek justice, to advance civil rights for all. And they say their recent organizational efforts have strengthened and not diminished their ability to deliver on that mission. They also say we don't shy away from criticizing individuals at every level of the government or any other arena. Anything you want to say in response to that?
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B
Well, what I would say to that is, has anyone seen anything from SPLC since Trump's election other than, you know, other than the commercial that runs on Ms. Now every night with that plays We Shall Overcome with footage from the civil rights movement, which was, of course, which all happened before 1971 when Deese founded the organization. I haven't seen anything from them and I have hope that they can get better than they are now. And regarding working with the union, I mean, we don't have time to also ask the union, but I would say, like somebody please ask the union how they feel, because I know the people in the union are really frustrated with the way the SPLC has behaved and they may not tolerate discrimination. Okay, and they settled. But they certainly tolerated it in 2023 when I went through it. And I would have much preferred in their statement had they said, we really screwed up with him, but we do commit the discrimination because you at least acknowledge that that happened. They should at least acknowledge that that happened. And everybody who's worked there, and I'm sure some people will be watching this who were a part of that team. They know what happened too. I mean, there's a reason why they're not addressing these specifics.
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A
Mike, you talked a little bit about some of the, the backlash to your work and your reporting. The part about people posting pictures of you and your kids really struck me because you and I chatted earlier, before we began recording, about a lot of the threats that I got after I interviewed Jared Taylor in which they mentioned my family and started posting things about them. And I will be honest in saying that was a really scary time.
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B
Yeah.
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A
You have to deal with this in a much more severe, much more intense, much more frequent way. It has to take a toll. I mean, how do you, how do you look at that?
- [30:45]
B
Well, you know, it was, I guess it was June of 2021. I had taken my then 8 year old son to the Batting cage. Right. And we were working on hitting mechanics. I remember that very specifically. And afterwards I took him to 711 to get a. To get a Slurpee. And I got a phone call from somebody from the North Carolina field office, the FBI. And it was such a surreal moment because the guy called me up and he was like. He's like, yeah, I just wanted to tell you this is just a courtesy call that somebody is talking about assassinating you on a line that we have. I just want you to let you know that we're aware of this person and we're trying to take him out of circulation. Do you have any questions? And I was like, do I have any questions? My son's in the back seat. Right. So I can't be like, oh, yeah, like, yeah, how about that? Like, how does he plan to blow my head off? Exactly. I can't ask that. You know, I can't. Right? I can't. I can't ask that with the kid in the back seat. I eventually got that worked out. It was. It was. It was. It was totally crazy. But I think it got over. I mean, the kind of threats that I got him. It's funny because, you know, I was always interacting with people from the movement and things like that, and I don't think they even knew. I mean, I think. I'm sure some of them, in a stochastic terrorism kind of way, were trying to trigger these type of threats, but I don't think they realized, like, how. Not only how many threats I got, but how badly it was starting to get to me because I was in really. I mean, there are a lot of factors you see in the book. I mean, I spent three weeks in a psychiatric facility. There were other factors involved there. But I think what created the foundation for that were just always. I at one point had this. I felt like I had a rain cloud following me everywhere I went, which is kind of like straight up like a Peanuts cartoon, like you would have. But it actually did feel that way. I mean, Charles M. Schultz probably understood depression pretty well. I had no. It felt like everywhere I went there was this really, really heavy. Just like raining on me.
- [32:54]
A
Yeah.
- [32:54]
B
And I had. I had a police report at one point in my. My family's. My parents place in Long island where I lived in. In Jackson Heights at that time, and. And then one in Lower Manhattan where my office was. So there's like three different police reports were opened around threats to my safety. I mean, I had. I would have. When I worked at Newsweek, I had somebody Say to me, like, hey, if you come, you should tell your colleagues if you come tomorrow, you know, you're gonna get. You know, you just tell them you should be careful because on your way out from the subway are gonna kill you. Right. You know, I mean, it was. It was crazy.
- [33:32]
A
I mean, Mike, if you stopped doing this work tomorrow, those people would probably stop threatening you, right?
- [33:40]
B
Yes.
- [33:41]
A
Do you ever think about that?
- [33:44]
B
Yes, I do. I do. But you know what? The threats have gone down a little bit, and they may come back again, but it doesn't.
- [33:52]
A
The threats don't alarm you to the point where you think, okay, I can no longer do this work. Yeah, I don't want the attention of these people anymore.
- [34:00]
B
Well, I think. I think, like, you know, one of the things about strange people on the Hill is to, you know, is the threats are at their most scary when you're not talking about it. You know, when you're just like, oh, I'm not. You know, I'm like, we're just gonna pretend this is not happening and whatever. I get really offended sometimes when people get, like, a little threat or whatever, and then they try to make content off it on social media. I never. I just, you know, I. First of all, it's bad, you know, hygiene, Right? You know, someone shows you where somebody is, and it also can lead to more threats, you know, but there's a different thing of never talking about it and just, you know, pretending it's going to go away. And I'm just hoping that, you know, this book is more of a dialogue not only with other people who have been through this, but also with the people who are threatening me, too, you know, because I think, like, it's important for me to see the humanity in them and them to see the humanity in me if we're ever going to get out of this moment that we're in.
- [35:04]
A
How are people in Berkeley Springs doing today?
- [35:07]
B
It was. They're okay. They're okay. A lot of the stuff I mentioned around, the mental health stuff, some of them were there for that. And I think when they read that about me and they, you know, they. They knew that stuff was happening because I told them about it, but they didn't know about the details. They don't know about, like, what. What it was actually like. And I think that some of them were really emotional. A lot of people were crying when I went to the. To the. When I went to the cafe. And, you know, and for them also, it's like, stuff. I mean, I don't think everybody I. It's not like. I don't think it's written in such a way that you would look and say, like, oh, the Brimlows are the antagonists. You know, the Brimlows didn't give me enough access to see all the pain in their life. But, I mean, by the end of the. At the end of that book, it's very apparent that they've lost a lot. Right. They've lost a lot. And they faced. They become, you know, pariahs to many. They may have supporters, but they have a lot of people who will not talk to them. I've heard stories about people in town, for instance, where it's like, Lydia Brimlow comes with her kids somewhere and everybody clears out. You know, it's like, whoa. It's like, you know, I don't experience that. I don't experience like that. That must be horrible for them, you
- [36:23]
A
know, but that's remarkable. You feel empathy for them.
- [36:25]
B
I do. I do, actually. I do. Although I want to make very clear that, you know, I disagree with the actions they've taken with their lives, and I think that they've brought a lot of pain on a lot of people.
- [36:41]
A
A lot of people are going to come to these issues for the first time in reading your book. What do you want them to take away from this particular story in the way that you tell it?
- [36:50]
B
Well, I mean, I think the first most important thing, and it's like the, you know, the part of me that said he was a writer when he was five years old, this is a work of literature, and I want it to be enjoyed as a work of. I want you to feel things, I want you to laugh when it's. When it's funny, and I want you to enjoy the prose and all that. But, I mean, this is real life, as you mentioned, and there is a story, and there's a reason why we choose it. And I think that the most important thing is, like, you know, as a. I mean, do we really. Do we really want to live like this? You know, I think it's hard for
- [37:29]
A
you to talk about.
- [37:30]
B
Yeah. Unexpected. Yeah. It's like, do you really want to live like this? I don't know. My friend. My friend growing up, he. He's a Republican and, like, he's my Mets, jets type friend and stuff like that. I spent an entire year not talking to him because he was, you know, he supported Trump in the. In the first election, and I was going through all those threats, and I was like, I can't even Talk to you, man. I don't know. I don't want to talk to you. And he said I was sorry.
- [38:09]
A
That's okay. Take a minute.
- [38:11]
B
All right. He said it was like, the toughest year of his life.
- [38:15]
A
That you weren't talking.
- [38:16]
B
Yeah, that I wouldn't talk to him. And he also said another thing to me, which I thought was really interesting, because he's really like. I mean, he's just a. You know, he got into Republican. He's a business guy. You know what I mean? He's not like. He's not thinking about this stuff like that. So I forced him to think about it in a totally different way. And he's like. When I was a kid, when we were kids, basically, we used to play Little League together. The president was just a guy on tv, you know, and that was true. You know, we didn't care. We didn't have to care. I didn't. I just. I knew there were two parties and that was it. And I just, like, sort of questions like, do we really want to live like this? Do we want to have every day, like, we wake up and there's, like, a new thing that we have to go to war over? I just feel like what has happened to our country since extremism became the dominant strain of politics has been so painful and is taking years off of people's lives. And I just can't imagine that people really want to live like this.
- [39:20]
A
What you shared about your friend, though, is I think something a lot of people can relate to. More and more Americans in particular, will have folks in their lives who they disagreed with over politics. Twenty years ago, it might have meant you just don't talk politics anymore. And now it means broken friendships, broken families in some cases. Are you and your friend reconnected again?
- [39:42]
B
Oh, yeah, we're cool. You know, we're really cool. He actually, like. He subscribes to a podcast I co host. I think he's about fed up with. With. With. With the Trump stuff. I think he's. He's done with it. And, like, you know, I mean, this is not. It's not him. You know, I mean, he, like, you know, he likes rap music. He likes stuff. He doesn't want to get involved in this kind of like, you know, this. This weird racial politics. But. But, yeah, we're reconnected. But. But I do have, you know, people in my own family where it's. Where it's difficult, where there's certain things that we can't talk about or they. They can't show the same, like, you know, if, like, if everybody in the family shares some article that I wrote and stuff like that, they can't chime in on it because they're worried that it's gonna, you know, this might go against President Trump and, you know, and that. So while I've got, you know, I'm on this team and so forth, I
- [40:37]
A
think the central question you asked there is, do we really want to live like this?
- [40:40]
B
Yes.
- [40:41]
A
Is something you address so well in the book, too. And the other part of it, in our conversation and in the book is this idea that all politics, as we all talk about it, all politics is personal.
- [40:51]
B
Yes.
- [40:52]
A
It shows up in our personal lives.
- [40:54]
B
Yes. And I think one thing that is very important to consider when you think about this great replacement narrative, some of these other things that are there, is how much of this is really about improving the material conditions of the people who support it, and how much of this is really about, you know, stigmatizing or destroying imagined enemies or, you know, maybe people think real enemies, but I would say imagined. And that's, and that's a, you know, that we've gone very far off track from what this political system is technically supposed to be. We're supposed to be trying to figure out how to improve our material conditions. How are you going to get people health care, how they're going to get fed, how the kids are going to get educated, how they're going to get jobs when they get out of school. You know, so much of it is talking about sticking it to somebody else.
- [41:51]
A
The book is Strange People on the Hill. The author is Michael Edison Hayden. Mike, thanks so much for being here.
- [41:58]
B
It was so much. I appreciate it.