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You know, following NATSAC news right now is like drinking from a fire hose. We try to help you track what matters and why. And if you want to do that in less time and support our work, sign up for npr. You'll hear every episode without sponsor messages. And your support helps keep NPR journalists around the world safe and doing their jobs. Learn more at the link in our episode notes plus.NPR.org.
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He'S a misogynist. He's a racist. He regularly channels anti Semitic tropes, but he is also the face of a growing young generation of Republican males.
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Tucker Carlson interviewed a man who has praised Hitler, defended Jim Crow and called for a holy war against Jews. A think tank closely aligned with the Trump administration initially defended that interview. Extreme views on the far right of American politics are dividing Republicans. Do they also pose a national security threat? This is Sources and Methods from npr. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. Every Thursday on this podcast, I dive deep on some of the week's biggest national security stories with NPR reporters who are out covering those stories this week, Odette Youssef, who reports on extremism for NPR from her home base in Chicago. Welcome back, Odette.
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Thank you.
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And also, Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman is back. And we're going to talk through a bunch of things, including another big national security story this week, the death and the legacy of former defense secretary and former Vice President Dick Cheney. Hello, Tom.
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Hey, Mary Louise.
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All right. We're gonna start with the divide that seems to be opening up on the American political right in the aftermath of that interview we just mentioned. And Odette, I'm gonna let you own this part of the conversation because you're doing some really interesting reporting and you've been looking at the details of Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes and why this has all blown up into a big political story. But I have just a basic question before we get into all of that, which is why is it why is it a national security story that we're here talking about on sources and methods?
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B
Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question, too, because sometimes I ask myself why I, the domestic extremism correspondent, am situated with the national security team at npr. You know, I think this is really a result of 9 11. You know, 911 was a physical assault on US soil by a foreign enemy. And I think that that is sort of traditionally how we've thought about the question of national security. And so now Fast forward to January 6th, when we look at what happened that day, sort of the attempt to forcefully prevent the results of a Democratic election from going forward, that was a threat from within. So national security does include sort of this concern about domestic extremism. The way that I think about it is that these strands of an authoritarian movement that we're seeing on the right are about taking apart the very principles of inclusive democracy that distinguished America from its enemies. On 9 11, you're reminding me of.
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A question I think many of us have been asking and trying to answer in our reporting, which is what if the greatest threat to American national security is us? I want to back up, I want to let you walk us quickly through the facts, starting with Nick Fuentes. For those who aren't familiar, who is he?
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Nick Fuentes is a 27 year old live streamer who for much of the past decade has been considered sort of on the outermost fringe of the political right. He regularly channels anti Semitic tropes. He's a misogynist, he's a racist, he's a Christian nationalist. But he is also the face of a growing young generation of Republican males that he calls his griper army. And a little context on that, if you don't know a groiper is a cartoon frog which has become sort of the avatar of this young generation of racist, homophobic, misogynistic Republican men online.
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So that's who Nick Fuentes is, which walks us up to Tucker Carlson, invites him. Come on the show, let's do an interview. That has created an uproar. But part of that is because of the tone of the interview. This was not a hard hitting. Let me really press you on why you think what you think and what evidence you can marshal to support your position. This was a pretty friendly chat.
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B
It was. I mean, you can find many of Nick Fuentes statements online. I mean, he's online all the time. And he said things about loving Hitler. There was no questioning of that.
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You're one of those people.
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One of the reasons I wanted to.
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Meet you is you're one of those people who is defined by clips.
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Yes.
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C
And I'm one of those people also.
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Yes, yes. So I get it.
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So I'm gonna just shut up and you tell me what you actually believe.
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Yeah.
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B
You know, at one point in the interview, he talks about his love for Stalin.
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I'm a fan. You're a fan of Stalin's. Always an admirer. But we don't need to go into that. I don't like.
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C
Let's. Okay, let's get back to this. We'll circle back to that.
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B
It was weird because there was no probing, really of that either.
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So there were Stalin, who, just for the record, the Soviet leader who killed millions of his own people. Go on.
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B
That's right. Yeah. So, yeah, it was sort of an odd sort of treatment of the opportunity to really query Nick Fuentes, I would say.
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Although, why did this interview in particular trigger such a big fight within the GOP that we're sitting here talking about it as a national security story? Because Tucker Carlson has had, I'm trying to remember, a Holocaust conspiracist on his show before he has promoted the racist theory, the great replacement conspiracy theory. What was about this Fuentes interview, do you think?
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B
So the Fuhrer seems really to be centering on the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. that played a large role in creating Project 2025. So, you know, Carlson is a close friend to the Heritage foundation. And there were calls for the Heritage foundation basically to chastise Tucker Carlson for having platformed Nick Fuentes.
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And they did the opposite, at least initially.
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Yes. So the head of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, last Thursday declined to do that. He posted a video on X.
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The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail. Most importantly, the American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right. I disagree with and even abhor things that Nick Fuentes says, but canceling him is not the answer either.
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B
So his refusal to sort of like, distance the Heritage foundation from this created wider controversy just within the Republican Party, where current and former senators basically were like, you know, it's time to draw the line and disavow the quote. Hitler is cool.
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Yeah, I'll just name drop a few of them. Senator Ted CRUZ, Senator Mitch McConnell. We also heard from conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro. There have been others. There are plenty of conservatives out there.
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Senator Lindsey Graham.
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Right. Condemning the Fuentes appearance. But there's a bigger context. This interview did not happen in isolation. And I'm thinking of some other racist rhetoric coming from parts of the political right. Just a couple of weeks ago, as you can tell, I saw that Politico published this. Excerpts from a group chat. This was leaders of young Republican groups.
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B
Yeah, that's right. So private chats that were happening among leaders of young Republicans in four states where they were saying things like, I love Hitler. And I mean, it was just sort of like a. A stew of, you know, anti Semitic, misogynist, racist material, joking about sending political.
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Opponents to the gas chamber and so on. I do need to note NPR has not independently verified those texts. We're citing Politico reporting here, which did not stop Vice President JD Vance from leaping into the fray. This is him talking about pearl clutching in an episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
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C
The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. Like that's what kids do. And I really don't want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke, telling a very offensive, stupid joke is caused to ruin their lives.
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I don't want to grow up in that kind of country either. But I will note that the people in this alleged chat were all adults, right, Odette?
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B
Yeah. I mean, young Republicans goes up to the age of 40 and some of them held elected positions. There was a state senator from Vermont that was in there. There were people that working as staff to elected officials. These weren't, you know, people that were still in college necessarily.
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So land us back kind of where we began at the national security threat aspect of this that you're tracking and what all of this rhetoric in this moment may tell us about what the Republican Party is prepared to tolerate.
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B
Yeah. I mean, so I think what's what really struck me after watching the Carlson Fuentes interview is that so much of the anger about this really focused on the antisemitism. But there were parts of this interview also that were so deeply misogynistic, really deeply dehumanizing. And so it's interesting to see that we're not, we're not hearing the disavowal of things like talking about the quote, hoe ification of women in America, for example. It's that question of like, you know, after 9, 11, you know, President, former President Bush at the time was saying that it was an assault on America's freedoms. You know, freedom was kind of an undefined term. I think that what we're seeing now is an assault on inclusive democracy and civil rights under an inclusive democracy. And it's not just against Jewish people, but it's against women, it's against trans people, it's against people who are not white. And we're not seeing equal sort of outrage about all of that.
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We're going to take a short break when we get back. Tom Bowman, you are in the hot seat because we're going to talk through Dick Cheney's lasting imprint on U.S. national security. That's ahead on sources and methods from NPR.
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Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of FRESH AIR.
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Hey, take a break from the 24 hour news cycle with us and listen.
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To long form interviews with your favorite authors, actors, filmmakers, comedians and musicians, the.
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People making the art that nourishes us and speaks to our times. So listen to the Fresh AIR podcast from NPR and whyy.
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I'm Rachel Martin. If you're tired of small talk, check out the Wildcard podcast. I invite influential thinkers to open up about the big topics we all think about, but rarely talk about. Tune in this fall to hear Mel Robbins, Malala Yousafzai and Brene Brown talk about everything from grief and God to ambition and forgiveness. Watch or listen on the NPR app, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. There is so much happening in politics in any given week, you might need help putting it all in perspective as your week draws to a close. Join the NPR Politics podcast team for our weekly roundup. Here, our best political reporters zoom into the biggest stories of the week, not just what they mean, but what they mean for you all in under 30 minutes. Listen to the weekly roundup every Friday on the NPR Politics podcast.
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On this week's books we've loved. We're headed to the open range with Morning Edition's Michelle Martin to break down Charles Portis classic True Grit. Find books we've loved in NPR's Book of the Day podcast feed on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. You'd be hard pressed to name many people who had a bigger impact on American national security this century than Dick Cheney. The former vice president, the chief architect of the Iraq war, died this week at age 84. Tom, you spent a whole lot of time covering the wars that Cheney advocated for in the aftermath of 9 11. First thing that comes to mind when you think of his legacy, I think.
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He'Ll be not treated well by history. And you're right, he was the chief architect of the war. And he said to the American people, I'm convinced that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, particularly a nuclear program. The intelligence was faulty. Saddam gave up his program in the early 90s. The CIA assumed he had another program. And he also said we'll be greeted as liberators when we go into Iraq. Do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly and bloody battle?
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He was on Meet the Press. This is him talking to moderator Tim Russert.
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I don't think it's likely to unfold.
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That way, Tim, because I really do.
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Believe we will be greeted as liberators. No, it created this hornet's nest of insurgency and death. Thousands of Americans died. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died And it also spawned the Islamic State that came out of this, which also took over parts of Iraq. The United States had to send troops back in to help the Iraqis fight the Islamic State. There was a colonel in the Pentagon, Mary Louise, he said to me several years ago, tom, this was the single biggest strategic blunder this country's made in its history. And also, Mary Louise, I spent a lot of time in Iraq in 2006, 07 and 8. And, you know, it was a Sunni, Shia split. Of course, Saddam was a Sunni Muslim, but the majority of people there were Shia, really oppressed by Saddam. And a couple of Shia guys said to me, you know, I wish Saddam was back in power.
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Why?
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Because, you know, if you behave yourself, nothing's gonna happen to you. But he said, you know, with all these attacks, these car bombs, these IEDs, you know, these militias fighting each other in my neighborhood, people dying, it's worse now than it was under Saddam. I think that's an incredible indictment.
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I want to play a little bit of Cheney because y' all are saying things that feel applicable to U.S. foreign policy and decisions that are being made today. This is. This is. A few lines were in the obituary that our own Don Gagne prepared of Dick Cheney. This is from 1991. Cheney was talking to us, talking to NPR. He opposed, @ that point, an outright invasion of Iraq. This was during the Persian Gulf War. And the reason was what came to be known as the Pottery Barn rule. You break it, you own it. You'd probably have to put some new government in place. It's not clear what kind of government that would be, how long you'd have to stay for the US to get involved militarily in determining the outcome of the struggle over who's going to govern in Iraq strikes me as a classic.
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Definition of a quagmire.
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A quagmire. So listening to Dick Cheney in 91, knowing all that came to pass, Tom, I'm thinking about where we find ourselves today. Very different world, decades later. But as the US Amasses military force off the coast of Venezuela, have we heeded this morning that if we break a country, we're going to own it?
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C
I don't think we've heeded that warning. And I think some people, if not with Venezuela down the road, maybe decades from now, will say, hey, I have an idea. We can easily take over this country and install a government. We never learned our lesson. We didn't learn it in Vietnam. We didn't learn it in Iraq or Afghanistan. And it's possible Possible, as President Trump has said, that he's sending the CIA into Venezuela, which is, he said it's a covert operation. Well, not anymore. It's called an overt operation.
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When you announce it, it becomes pretty overt.
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And the other thing is, he said we may strike land targets in Venezuela. To what end is this to overthrow the Maduro government? Is it going after the cartels? I say stay tuned, but it looks like when the USS Ford arrives, probably as early as next week, you could see some targets hit in Venezuela, and then we're heading down that road again.
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A
A couple of points that come to mind for me. One is, as I think about Dick Cheney's legacy, he certainly came from a very different wing of the Republican Party than Donald Trump. Donald Trump, but also advocated a very expansionist view of presidential White House powers. So that's one thing. The other thing, and this is a jump ball for either of you that may have thoughts, but just Dick Cheney in his prime when he was vice president, was the ultimate Washington insider, the ultimate power broker. He could get things done, and yet he ended up a stranger to today's Republican Party. And of course, we think about his daughter, Liz Cheney, the former congresswoman, now one of the very few Republicans who will vocally stand up and oppose Donald Trump. I mean, this loops us back, obviously, Odette, to divides within the GOP and how that party is changing. Does it also tell us something about our country's national security priorities, how they may have changed?
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B
Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting to trace the through line between Cheney's time as vice president and now, because the national security threat during that time was very clearly defined as the global war on terror. And while, you know, it's helpful to have corralled the resources against that at the time, it also sort of meant that we weren't paying attention to other threats that were growing from within the US of organized far right militias, for example. And that sort of paved the road to what happened on January 6th. And so that was part of this trajectory. But then now the, the national security threat as defined by the Trump administration is, I think, increasingly unclear to people. We're no longer necessarily only doing the global war on terror, but there's also this threat from within that the Trump administration has talked about regarding antifa. They've also been designating drug cartels as narco terrorists. And so the national security threat right now seems to be spread over a much wider array of actors.
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Okay, quick break. And when we come back, your favorite and mine, open source intelligence. Oh, son. We're going to crack open each other's reporters notebooks. That's ahead on Sources and methods from NPR.
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Keeping up with the news can feel like a 24 hour job. Luckily, it is our job. Every hour on the NPR News now podcast, we take the latest, most important, important stories happening and we package them into five minute episodes so you can easily squeeze them in between meetings and on your way to that thing. Listen to the NPR News now podcast now.
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Fall in love with new music every.
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Friday at All songs considered. That's NPR's music recommendation. Podcast Fridays are where we spend our whole show sharing all the greatest new releases of the week.
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Make the hunt for the new music.
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A part of your life again. Tap into new Music Friday from All Songs Considered available wherever you get your podcasts. Making time for the news is important.
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But when you need a break, we've got you covered on All Songs Considered.
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NPR's music podcast. Think of it like a music discovery show, a well deserved escape with friends and yeah, some serious music insight.
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I'm going to keep it real.
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I have no idea what this story is about. Hear new episodes of All Songs Considered every Tuesday. Wherever you get podcasts, you care about what's happening in the world. Stay informed with NPR's State of the World podcast. In just a few minutes, we take you to stories around the globe. You might hear the latest developments in world conflicts or about what global events mean for the price of your coffee. Listen to the State of the World podcast from npr. A couple more developments to touch on this week. The first is in Gaza. Now, we've talked on this show before about how ISRA has shut out international journalists for the duration of the war there, except for rare military escorted visits. NPR's firsthand coverage has come from our producer who lives in Gaza, Anas Bhabha, and his excellent work. Well, this week our bureau chief, Daniel Estrin was able to get into Gaza. This is the first time he has been in since the war broke out more than two years ago. This was again a tightly controlled trip with the Israeli army, the idf. Daniel was taken to the line that divides Gaza. This is the line between the Israeli occupied part and that area is still under Hamas control. There were conditions to that visit. Israel's military censor reviewed NPR's raw audio and video. None of the content was altered. But I want you just to hear a taste of Daniel on the ground in Gaza. It's quiet except for the chatter of Israeli soldiers behind me. I barely see any shrubbery or any trees, just vast expanses of crumpled cement homes and cement beams sticking out of.
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The dirt like tall tombstones.
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Such a picture he is painting there. I will note that NPR and other news organizations are continuing to push to be able to go independently and verify and tell you what we see and what we hear and we'll continue that push. Tom, one other thing. I just want a quick update from you on Venezuela. We nodded to it, but it seems like every day there's another boat strike. There are more US Vessels still heading to the area. What's the latest?
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C
Right. You probably have a dozen or more warships down there now and more ships are heading there, particularly the USS Ford aircraft carrier. I'm told it'll likely arrive sometime next week. It has 80 to 90 aircraft on it, mostly F18s, and it brings with it a strike group of another half dozen or so ships. So it's a huge military buildup off Venezuela in the Caribbe, but to what end, we don't know. Again, is this going after the cartels or is it going after the Maduro government? We just don't know.
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We're going to end with Osint, as we always do. Osint, open source intelligence, the not so secret yet telling details that we stumble across in our daily reporting. Tom, I will let you start.
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Well, more and more senior officers are leaving the Pentagon. Some are getting pushed. Some are leaving on their own. This is one general I know who's a three star. He was supposed to get a fourth star and get a pretty plum job. He had an interview with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. He was asked about troops on American streets. He did not give the right answer. He did not think it was a good idea. So therefore he did not get that plum assignment. And I had a couple of beers. Since I can't go into the Pentagon, I had a couple of beers with.
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A
This frequenting nearby bars even more often than you were previously.
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C
My expense account is going to go up and up and up.
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A
You heard it here first editors.
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C
I was talking to this colonel who said they went through my social media and they found something they didn't like. So I was moved to a different job. He said, I'm just going to retire. And he said, you know, Tom, we have this transition office we all have to go through before we leave. And they talk about how do you build a resume, job opportunities, where do you want to go, blah, blah, blah. And he said, the transition office told me we've never been this busy with all these colonels leaving. And these are you know, obviously, very experienced people. They could be generals someday. So you continue to see, yeah, it.
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Has all kind of implications for the pipeline of who's going to lead the military in the years to come.
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C
So you're continuing to see a brain drain of really good officers leaving because they don't agree with the policies of the Trump administration. They don't agree with Hegseth, and it's. They're getting. They're leaving on their own or they're getting thrown over the side.
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A
Odette, what do you have?
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B
So, Mary Louise, as you mentioned, I'm here in Chicago, where we've been experiencing a really heightened level of federal immigration enforcement. And this, as you may have heard, has really brought out a broad sort of grassroots level of activity to counter what immigration enforcement officials are doing here. So we've got, you know, neighborhoods where people are on encrypted, you know, text groups, and they are closely tracking the physical movement of these federal agents through the city and reporting them when they see them. So earlier this week, I was doing some reporting about all this, and it was interesting because, you know, I was out all day sort of, you know, doing the reporting. And so finally, near the end of the day, I was able to sort of sit back down again and regroup. And I actually found out that the vehicle that I had been using that day with, you know, our photographer who was moving around with me, our vehicle had actually been tagged in one of the channels as an unusual or suspicious vehicle.
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A
Ah, so you were spotted. And what the question was like, who are these guys?
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B
Or they thought that maybe we were immigration enforcement. Yeah.
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A
So interesting is, you know, you show up on the scene, and in some ways you become part of the story.
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B
Yep.
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A
Okay. Mine is I was traveling this week. I was in Oklahoma City for a bunch of events with our stellar team at our member station there, kosu. One of them, by the way, Tom, was with a bunch of college students from all over Oklahoma, several of whom told me they listened to sources and methods and they loved your story about the Romanian armed forces.
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C
Oh, that's great. Of course, they KNEW it was October 25th.
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A
Right? They do now. And you may need to score a few more, a few more invitations for next year. But yesterday was my last morning in Oklahoma City, and I went for a run before I went to catch my flight and ended up at the memorial of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, which, of course, was the site of the Oklahoma city bombing on April 19, 1995. And, Odette, correct me if I'm wrong. I think it remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in US history.
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B
That's right, 168 deaths.
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A
168. Well, the memorial that they have built to honor those people and the survivors is extraordinary. You enter through these massive bronze gates with time stamps on them. The bomb went off at 9:02am and the first arch you walk through is marked 9:01am because they want you to enter. This was the last moment of peace, the last moment of before everything went wrong. And you eventually exit through a gate marked 9:03am which the first moment of healing, the first moment where they start to rebuild. Inside is this incredibly powerful field of empty chairs, one for each of the people killed. Normal sized chairs for the adults and really small ones for the kids who were killed. I found it profoundly moving in a moment where, as we've just been discussing, we are witnessing rising political violence in the US and threats against Americans by Americans. But the piece I will leave you with that gave me hope was the Survivor Tree. Have y' all heard about this or seen it?
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B
No.
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A
It's this old elm tree that was there when the bomb went off. Its branches were all ripped off. The trunk was blackened. There was glass embedded in the bark. They thought it would die. And lo and behold, it did not die. It survived. It stands there today. It's beautiful. The leaves are turning fall colors right now. And the inscription around the inside of the wall around the Survivor Tree reads, the spirit of this city and this nation will not be defeated. And they've taken hundreds of seeds from the Survivor tree. They grow them into saplings. And those saplings are now growing all across the United States.
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B
Wow.
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A
How beautiful.
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C
That is a remarkable story. That's a great story.
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A
And it's beautiful that it's given rise to more life and more hope all over the country. With that, I want to say thank you to both of you. NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman here in the studio with me. Thank you, Tom.
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C
You're welcome.
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A
And national security correspondent Odette Youssef, who covers extremism from her base in Chicago. Thank you, Odette.
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B
Thanks for having me.
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A
And a reminder, you can email us with your feedback with your questions at sources and methods. All one word sources and methods. Methodsnpr.org and if you are enjoying this show, let us know. Support us by leaving a rating or a review on the platform where you listen in a world of algorithms that actually really goes a long way toward helping new listeners find us. I'm Mary Louise Kelley, and we are back next week with another episode of Sources and Methods from npr.
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