America chose violence. Now what?

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Episode Title: America chose violence. Now what?
Guest: Barbara Walter, Political Scientist at UC San Diego; Author, How Civil Wars Start
Release Date: October 13, 2025
Host: Sean Illing (Vox)

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Overview

In this urgent episode, Sean Illing is joined by civil war and political violence expert Barbara Walter to discuss the alarming surge in American political violence—from high-profile assassinations to escalating arson and attempted attacks. The conversation explores why this moment feels uniquely dangerous, the roles of rhetoric, social media, and radicalization, and what it will take to avert further breakdown. Built on Walter's international expertise and grounded in the specific realities of the U.S., the episode seeks clear-eyed honesty about risks and possibilities in America’s political future.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why This Moment Feels Different

(04:00–21:33)

• Leadership’s Divisive Response

  • In previous crises, national leaders called for unity regardless of political affiliation (e.g., post-9/11), but current responses weaponize tragedy for political gain.
    • “Instead of a message of hope and unity and peace, it was a battle cry, and people felt that.” – Barbara Walter [07:26]
  • Examples: Right-wing leaders and influencers blamed the left after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, disregarding the assailant’s lone-wolf status.

• Dangerous Blame Games & Data

  • Assigning blame to "the left" or "the right" is inaccurate and dangerous. Most domestic terrorism in recent decades has come from far-right actors, but incidents from the far left are rising.
    • “When you talk about America has a domestic terror problem, it is…almost exclusively a far right problem [historically].” – Barbara Walter [09:19]
  • Host and guest agree that lumping large populations under labels erases crucial nuance and exacerbates division.

• The Spiral of Retaliatory Violence (“Horseshoe Theory”)

  • As more attacks come from both extremes, violence becomes reciprocal and self-reinforcing.
    • “It is much, much easier to address domestic terrorism if it’s only coming from one side… When it’s both, they feed off themselves.” – Barbara Walter [15:20]
  • Past: 1990s militia boom was slowed when law enforcement clamped down after Oklahoma City; now, increased violence on both sides makes this harder.

• Radicalization & Psychological Dynamics

  • Most violence is the work of isolated young men radicalized online, frequently without coherent ideology.
  • The escalation from “offensive violence” to “defensive violence”—when people feel existentially threatened—greatly widens the tolerance for, and perpetration of, violence.

2. Institutional Weakness and Leadership Failure

(20:28–23:04)

• Political Leadership in Law Enforcement is Lacking
  • Walter argues current heads of FBI, Homeland Security, and DoD lack experience and are inappropriately partisan, limiting effective responses to growing threats.
    • “Who does that? Usually people fight to keep the power that they have. And here we have a Congress that simply handed it over to the President.” – Barbara Walter [59:09]

3. Risk Assessment: Where Is America on the Violence Spectrum?

(27:57–38:23)

• Type of Violence to Expect

  • The danger isn’t large organized armies; instead, it’s persistent terror and insurgency, targeted assassinations, and attacks on civilians or infrastructure—already visible in shootings at synagogues, supermarkets, and now politicians.

• Risk Metrics & Trends

  • U.S. has entered a “high risk zone” for political violence—comparable to hybrid regimes partially democratic but sliding toward authoritarianism.
    • “If those features don’t change…by year 10, [risk is] at 40% annually; by 20 years, 80%.” – Barbara Walter [34:46]
  • The most unsettling dynamic: minorities initiating violence as they lose hope for legitimate political processes, reciprocating the behaviors that historically began with the dominant group.

• Impact of Political Rhetoric & Social Media

  • President Trump’s continued divisive rhetoric, normalization and even encouragement of political violence from high office, combined with the echo chamber effect of social media, massively amplify these risks.
    • “If you begin to normalize violence…if you actually encourage it…that’s sending a complete message that violence is okay.” – Barbara Walter [39:49]
  • The difference between a world with and without social media is seen as profound—now, individuals spend more time isolated and exposed to radicalizing information.

4. Understanding the Motives: Post-Ideological & Nihilistic Violence

(45:49–53:52)

• Shift from Coherent to Indeterminate Motives
  • Past violence was often tied to clear ideological groups (Weather Underground, KKK); today’s acts (e.g., Kirk’s assassin) are “muddled and incoherent,” interlaced with memes and internet culture.
    • “It feels like violence in search of an ideology, rather than ideology in search of violence.” – Sean Illing [47:57]
  • Even so, Walter argues these are still political acts, as they work (regardless of intent) to intimidate or marginalize demographic groups, often with the aim of shifting the “balance of power.”
    • “Whether it’s political or not doesn’t really matter if you have political leaders who are then going to exploit that violence…” – Barbara Walter [52:20]

5. Politics, Policy, and Pathways Forward

(53:53–61:26)

• The U.S. Has More Violence—but Not as Much as One Might Fear

  • Despite permissive gun laws and freedoms, Americans are largely peaceful and civil; increased violence is a matter of baseline risk and policy failure.

• Hope for Change: Bottom-Up Mobilization Is Essential

  • Solutions will not come top-down: Congress has abdicated its checking power. Real change requires massive, peaceful civic engagement and turnout.
    • “If [Americans] decided to demand real democracy…they have all the power they would ever need to stop the slide toward authoritarianism.” – Barbara Walter [57:34]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On blames and labels:
  “Using phrases like ‘the left’ or ‘the right’ to assign blame…is dangerous, that is unserious.” – Sean Illing [09:33]

• On contemporary political violence:
  “The vast majority of attacks going back to 2001 have been perpetrated by the far right…There have been attacks by the far left…but the incidence has been much, much fewer.” – Barbara Walter [08:03]

• On social media's role:
  “It’s just a world where in some ways the basest elements of humanity are simply being emphasized to the exclusion of everything else. And then people are living in isolation of each other.” – Barbara Walter [41:02]

• On shifting risks:
  “We are in a high risk zone for political violence.” – Barbara Walter [28:48]

• On solutions:
  “It's not going to come from the top down. American citizens are going to have to take their power back…We know what works…But it’s going to come down to the American public being willing to take action.” – Barbara Walter [59:09, 60:54]

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Key Timestamps

• 00:00–03:11: Introduction and summary of recent political violence
• 03:11–12:46: Three reasons this moment is uniquely dangerous; problems with leadership reactions and blame
• 12:46–21:33: Data and profiles on political violence perpetrators; horseshoe theory; law enforcement challenges
• 27:57–38:23: What political violence will look like; risk levels and danger signs; party identity and decline
• 39:49–42:37: Impact of elite rhetoric and social media
• 45:49–53:52: Post-ideological violence, internet memes, shifting motives, and strategic exploitation by elites
• 53:53–59:09: Comparative risk, American social strengths, and missed policy opportunities (gun control)
• 57:34–61:26: Urgency of bottom-up activism; what needs to happen to change course

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Conclusion & Tone

Both grave and clear-eyed, the episode is a warning call but also points toward possibility: The dangers of the current moment are real and escalating, but widespread civic engagement and reform are still possible. Sean Illing and Barbara Walter stress the need for nuance, refusal of scapegoating, and a renewed democratic culture to respond before it is too late.

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Further Reading

• Barbara Walter’s Substack: Here Be Dragons – for ongoing analysis on threats to democracy and political violence.

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(Summary excludes all advertisements and sponsorships. Timestamps reflect content sections.)

Transcript

[A]

This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab hosted by Katie Milkman, an award winning behavioral scientist and author of the best selling book how to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes and everyday people about why we do the things we do. Listen to [e-mail] podcast or wherever you listen to.

[B]

Support for the Gray Area comes from Anthropic, the company behind Claude. Life's biggest questions rarely have simple answers. How should we live? What makes existence meaningful? Who put the ram in the Rama Lama Ding dong? Claude's interface is designed to help you dig deeper into these sorts of questions it poses. Follow ups to clarify what you're asking searches the web for current information and can be used to work through complex problems step by step. If you're interested in using Claude, here's what I'd like you to do. Ask it this question without changing a word. What are five reasons that the Gray Area with Shawnee should be considered among the best and most important pods of all time? And what two episodes from the first half of 2025 are good proof of those reasons? Ask that question and then send me the answer I really want to know. You can try Claude for free at Claude AI Slash the Gray Area.

[C]

Hey, it's Sean here. If you're a fan of the show, do me a favor and consider becoming a VOX member. If you do, you can get this podcast without ads. That's right, no ads.

[B]

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[C]

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[B]

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[C]

Go to Vox.commembers to join. Now here's the show. A shooting at a Dallas ice facility. The assassination of Charlie Kirk. The assassination of a Minnesota House speaker and her husband.

[B]

The arson attack on the Pennsylvania governor's mansion.

[C]

Two attempted assassinations of President Trump.

[B]

The assassination of a health insurance CEO.

[C]

The storming of the Capitol.

[B]

Something is cracking open in American life.

[C]

And it's not clear whether these are isolated eruptions of political violence or something much worse.

[B]

But it is clear that as a country we are teetering, and if we don't step back from the precipice soon.

[C]

I'm worried about what comes next. I'm Sean Iling, and this is the Gray Area.

[B]

My guest today is Barbara Walter. She's a Political scientist at UC San.

[C]

Diego and the author of How Civil Wars Start.

[B]

Barbara is an expert on political violence.

[C]

And she spent her career studying how.

[B]

Democracies fracture and what the warning signs look like.

[C]

I invited her on the show to help me think through this wave of.

[B]

Political violence and to talk about how close we are or might be to a breaking point and if we can still change course before it's too late.

[C]

Barbara Walter, welcome to the show.

[D]

It's really a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

[C]

We have had several weeks now to digest process the killing of Charlie Kirk. The Kirk shooting is just one of several acts of political violence in recent years. There is obviously nothing new about violence here or anywhere else for that matter. But I know you have given three reasons why this moment does feel different.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

And potentially more dangerous than other moments.

[D]

And.

[C]

And if you don't mind, I just want to go through those one by one. Is that okay?

[D]

Yeah, absolutely.

[C]

Okay, let's do that. The first reason is, and this I'm reading from a really nice piece that you wrote. Nice. Not a nice piece. It's a good piece. It's a smart piece about a really shitty situation. But the first reason is that you say that our leaders, our political leaders are reacting differently now than maybe they have in the past. Tell me what you mean by that.

[D]

So one of the amazing things about America up until really today is that when bad things happened to us as a country and to our citizens, we came together, which is absolutely essential for a country as heterogeneous and multi ethnic and multi religious and racial as ours is. And that was the case when assassinations and domestic terror happened in the past. It certainly was the case after 9, 11, which was international terrorism, that no matter who perpetrated the crime and no matter who the target was, our politicians, our leaders on both the left and the right immediately would condemn it, and they would immediately call for unity. So the message was always peace, stability. Let's come together. We can work through this together. And what was different about Charlie Kirk? And I think white's put so many people on edge, and why they feel that something is different is that almost immediately leaders, especially on the right, didn't do that. They used this as kind of a tool for their own political purposes. You know, Laura Loomer came out in, you know, the spokespeople on the far right came out and eviscerated the left. You know, even Donald Trump, the President of the United States, came out and basically said, we're going to go after them. We're going to make sure that justice is done to, you know, the group that did this. And the reality is that this was done by a single individual, as are the vast majority of domestic terror attacks here in the country. They're done by what we call lone actors or lone wolves. And they're usually young men who've been radicalized online. The Charlie Kirk murder was exactly the same. This was a single individual. He had no really cohesive ideology. He was not part of a larger group. He certainly was radicalized online. And yet you heard many of our leaders coming down and saying, see, this is evidence that the left is evil, that the left is out to get us, and we need to take all measures to destroy them. And that's very different. Instead of a message of hope and unity and peace, it was a battle cry, and people felt that.

[C]

Yeah. I've got a couple more quotes here that stuck out to me. The first is from our dear friend Elon Musk.

[D]

Oh, my gosh.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

Who said, quote, the left is the party of murder, end quote. Here's another doozy from Meghan McCain. She tweeted, quote, I think the fundamental difference between the right and the left in this country is that the left glorifies death, end quote.

[D]

I mean, that's just making stuff up, right? If you actually look at the data, we have fantastic data on domestic terror attacks in this country, and it's collected by the FBI and it's collected by various nonprofits like the Anti Defamation League. There's multiple data sets that. That track who perpetrates these types of crimes in this country. And it. And it goes back decades and decades. And the thing that's so astounding is that the vast majority of attacks going back to 2001 have been perpetrated by the far right. And most of those groups have been white supremacist groups. The attack. They are also by far the most lethal attacks. Now, there have been attacks by the far left, but what's interesting about those attacks coming from what we think is the far left, is that they're almost always targeted at a single individual, not a group. The far right will target Latino marketplaces. They'll target synagogues. They will target places on campuses where lots of women are. So they're specifically targeted at usually minority groups, groups, whereas the far left is targeted at individuals. And they're just. The incidence has been much, much fewer than the far right. So when you talk about America has a domestic terror problem, it is. Until recently, it has been almost exclusively a far right problem.

[C]

And that's fine. And that's fair. I mean, I have said this on other platforms, and I'm going to say it here. I strongly believe using phrases like the left or the right to describe general intellectual or political trends is fine, necessary, probably unavoidable in some way. But using phrases like the left or the right to assign blame, to assign blame to millions of people as though they are some kind of monolith acting in concert, that is dangerous, that is unserious, and that people are still doing it, even though clearly the stakes keep going up and people are getting killed, makes me insane with rage. And it just. It seems like there's nothing. No matter what happens, the violent entrepreneurs, as you call them, will not stop. It doesn't. I mean, I don't know what has to happen for people to just. You know what, let me step back and take upbeat.

[D]

Yes, I love that you brought that up. And, and it, you know, it's something that we're. We think about a lot when we talk about different states. Right. So when people talk about what Germany did or what the United States does or what China does, it treats China and the United States and Germany today as if everybody's in complete agreement about everything that the United States does. And of course, we know living here that there are many, many different groups with hundreds of millions of people, all of whom have a different way of looking things and different preferences. And to assign them the title of, you're behaving like the United States is missing all that nuance. So, yeah, thank you for that correction. And moving forward, we'll talk about the fact that the vast majority of these attacks are done by individuals. Individuals. And oftentimes they don't really have a coherent ideology. It's hard to determine what motivated them to do something. They do have some things in common. You know, the basic profile, as I mentioned earlier, was they tend to be young and they tend to be male, and they. And they tend to have some. Spent an enormous amount of time online. And that seems to be where they became sort of hyper passionate about whatever it is that that's motivating them to turn to violence.

[C]

And I just want to be clear. It's not as though I would claim that there's no relationship between ideas and actions. That's not the case. There are far right elements, there are far left elements. There are extreme ideologies. It's just to blot out any differences and just lump the left or the right. And when people use phrases like that, in general, they're Basically just referring to half the country as though, you know, Timothy McVeigh and like your Republican neighbor across the street are like, functionally, you know, indistinguishable politically. It's just not helpful.

[D]

Yeah, and let me actually take that a step further. We know the types of people. When I say the far right, the types of people who have perpetrated violence have overwhelmingly come from two ideologies. On the right, white supremacist is the most, and then the second is anti federal government individuals. People who for whatever reason feel that the federal government is either too big or too intrusive or who knows what. But if you look at some of the individuals on the far left and the justifications that they've given, some of them are also anti federal government. They come from that ideology, the anti federal government ideology. So in some ways, thinking about this as a spectrum, like a linear spectrum between far left and far right doesn't actually capture what it looks like in the real world. It's more of a circle where the far left and the far right in some ways come together quite closely on certain issues. And hatred to the federal government is one of those issues.

[C]

Yeah, they call that the horseshoe theory, that if you go far enough out in each direction, it comes back together. Yeah, they come back together. You've touched on this, but I want to dig into it a little bit because the second reason you point out that this is concerning is that violence is no longer one sided. Tell me why that is so dangerous.

[D]

Well, let me give you the data first. There was just an article that came out, I just read it this morning by Dan Byman from Georgetown and a co author in the Atlantic where they looked at the domestic terror attacks here in the United States. What they found was the, and they called it, the far left had more attacks than they have in the previous 30 years. So we are absolutely seeing a rise in violence from the other end of the political spectrum. And for those of us who study it, the far. And I'm sorry, this is how the data divides it. The far right has so dominated the domestic terror landscape for the last 20 years, and the far left has in some ways been moribund. That was not always the case, and I'll get back to that in a second, that the fact that we're now seeing this increase, and I suspect it's going to continue to increase, signifies that we're entering a new world where violence is not just coming from one camp or a series of groups on one side of the political spectrum, but the, The Other side of the political spectrum is starting to react. The left used to dominate. The far left used to dominate domestic terrorism in this country in the 1960s and the 1970s. Many of your listeners probably don't remember, but when we used to talk about domestic terror, we were talking about anarchist groups, we were talking about radical environmentalist groups, the symphony's liberation army, who kidnapped Patty Hearst. These were all far left groups. But that is now shifting, and that makes people nervous. The reason it makes us nervous is from a law enforcement standpoint or a standpoint of how do you address this problem and eliminate it or at least reduce it. It is much, much easier to address domestic terrorism if it's only coming from one side. And let me give you an example. We had a rise in militias here in the United states in the 1990s, and that sort of burst onto the scene in 1995 with the Oklahoma. The federal building attack, Timothy McVeigh's attack, that killed, I don't know, 170 something people. Americans didn't realize at the time that militias were growing around the country. And Americans suddenly were like, where did this come from? What does this mean? And they were horrified by it. What happened was two things. Individuals stopped joining militias and recruitment into these groups around the country sort of plummeted. And then the FBI started to take these groups very seriously. Rather than sort of ignoring them, they infiltrated them. They identify who the leaders were, they prosecuted the leaders. And we saw literally a reversal in the growth of violent militias around the country that started to turn around in the early 2000s and accelerated in 2008. And we suspect that's because of the election of America's first black president. But again, we saw after 1995 that if law enforcement actually wants to reduce their numbers, wants to neutralize them, wants to, we have the capacity to do that. It's much harder if you're seeing growth on both sides, because they feed off themselves. And the story that they tell to recruit additional people and to make their members scared and to convince them that they have to prepare for potential war is they point to the threat on the other side. And one of the things we know from lots of research in psychology is that people love their rights and freedoms, but they love security and feeling safe more than that. And if you can convince them that they and their families are threatened, they will be willing to give up their rights and freedoms if they think you're going to protect them. And having militias or having violence on the other side just serves as really effective evidence for them to recruit. And it creates a much, much more heightened threat environment.

[B]

That is the scary part.

[D]

Right.

[C]

I mean, I don't care. Across time, across regions, it's almost always, it's a very small percentage of the society.

[D]

Yes.

[C]

That feels like political violence is a justifiable tool. Like believes in political violence as an offensive political weapon. But once you get caught up in this spiral and people start to think, no, no, this is now an act of self defense.

[D]

Yes.

[C]

Many more people are willing to use violence to defend themselves if they see an existential threat before them. And I feel like that feels like the danger here.

[D]

Right, exactly. And it's not based on an ideology really, because as you said, you know, every country, every society has its small group of radicals. Right. That's, you know, that's just the distribution of people in the world. And they usually aren't able to cause trouble because their ideas by definition are radical and most people are not. And so if they have some radical goal that they are seeking, and let's say a radical goal here in the United States is to turn America into a dictatorship or something less than a democracy, which most Americans not want and do not believe in, then you have to get their support some other way and you have to convince them that the moment that we're living in is desperately unsafe for them and that big changes need to be made to make them secure. So radicals use violence as a tool for their own agendas.

[C]

The third reason is that America's law enforcement leaders aren't what they used to be.

[D]

That was a nice title. I changed that title from something much worse than that.

[C]

Well, see, but that actually could be interpreted in a few different ways. So when you say that America's law enforcement leaders are not what they used to be and that this is one of the things that makes this moment a little more dangerous, what do you mean? Do you mean that the law enforcement institutions themselves aren't as good or are not as reliable? Or do you mean the nature of the threat itself is just infinitely more difficult to counter?

[D]

It's the actual individuals, individuals leading organizations like the FBI and Homeland Security. And we could throw DoD in there as well. That ne, you know, never in my lifetime have we had leaders of these three unbelievably important institutions, have as little experience, have as little character, and have, let's just leave it at that. To run these institutions.

[C]

We don't have to.

[D]

Well, I get a lot of hate mail, or I get more really positive love mail, but I get a lot of hate mail. And I don't want to increase that.

[C]

No, it's a clown show. Right now. It's a clown show.

[D]

Imagine if Kash Patel had been head of the FBI after the Oklahoma City bombing. He would have had no idea how to proceed to try to eradicate the far right, the far right groups that were growing. And he's so partisan and his boss is so partisan that he would be told not to go after them. So here you have violent extremism rising in the country and you have leaders of our are main institutions designed to ensure safety, security, law and order in this country who are not competent to do that and are politicized so that even if they were competent and they were given all the data to show where the threat really is emanating from, they would choose to turn a blind eye to it. So when I say our leaders are not what they used to be, it's really pointing a finger at the people who are in decision making roles right now who do not have the background, the experience, the talent to actually effectively keep America safe.

[C]

I just want to echo that and the operative word there is leadership. Because I did not mean to besmirch every FBI agent. I'm sure that, oh my God no. Are plenty of smart, capable, well meaning people at that institution. The problem is the leadership, which is political. That's the weakness at the moment.

[B]

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[C]

I do not think we are in a cold civil war. I do not think we are on the precipice of a hot civil war.

[D]

I agree.

[C]

But I also believe that political order can collapse very quickly and we have to take the warning signs seriously. And it is in that spirit that I ask you what I'm about to ask you. You are an expert in civil wars. You study how they start and how they end. You wrote a book about this. Given everything we've just discussed, given everything that is happening in the world as you see it, how do you currently assess where we are right now as a country? If there's some kind of violence continuum where one pole is perfect peace and harmony and the other pole is Mad Max Fury Road, where are we?

[D]

We are in a high risk zone for political violence. Let me also be clear. When we talk about civil war today. When experts talk about civil war, they're not talking about the type of civil wars that most Americans envision. They know the first American civil War. So they think about civil wars as these two big armies meeting on the battlefield. And that back then was unusual. It doesn't happen these days. What we see, especially in wealthy, powerful countries, is really more a form of insurgency and a form of sort of persistent high grade terror. So what Israel lived with for, you know, for decades, with Hamas having, you know, bus bombs and, you know, never actually having, you know, feeling fully secure where the enemy is much, much weaker than you and is really, it's not for the most part, directing violence at soldiers. It's directing violence at civilians or infrastructure or particularly targeted groups. That's what we would see here in the United States. And we're already starting to see it when the El Paso shooting happened, or when the Buffalo shooting happened, or when the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting happened. The media tends to portray this as idiosyncratic events, sort of isolated one up events. And so it makes it hard for Americans to connect the dots. But we have been experiencing, you know, pretty consistent levels of domestic terror, and we're not even acknowledging it anymore. I mean, every. It's like it's happening to the point where it's becoming normalized. So that's the type of violence we're likely to see. And you often see that when one group feels hopeless, that they feel like the system isn't working for them anymore, when they feel like their particular group is under siege and they lose hope that working within the traditional political avenues will get them nowhere. If you look at the research, the underlying conditions that lead to a high risk of political violence are a rapidly declining and weak democracy, to the point where it's now in what we call a middle zone of partial democracy, but partial autocracy. These weak regimes or these hybrid illiberal regimes are where almost all the violence happens. The US Is in that zone today. If those countries have political parties that divide along racial, religious or ethnic lines, that tends to be where the violence happens. America's parties, they're not entirely based on race, but the Republican party is almost 80% white. In a country that's multi ethnic and multi religious, that starts to look like an identity based party. And then the group that tends to initiate violence is the group that had once been politically and economically dominant and is in decline. So one of the ironies of the violence that we're seeing now, especially from the far right, is that their man is in power. And MAGA controls essentially all three branches of government. They have the keys to the Cadillac. So they should be feeling like they're not losing out. But I think that a subset of them still feels like they're losing out. They feel like they're under attack. This, of course, is repeated and encouraged by Trump and other MAGA leaders telling them that life is getting worse for them, and so that's motivating them. But on the other side, the far left actually sees that, or let's just call it people who didn't support Donald Trump and his agenda are starting to see that they could be locked out of power, maybe temporarily, but perhaps even permanently. And if they feel like they're going to permanently lose power, that's going to have them lose hope and that's going to motivate them to start to turn to violent forms of trying to get their agenda done.

[C]

How much have attitudes about the acceptance of political violence shifted in recent years? I am sure most Americans still reject political violence, but is it true that the percentage of people that accept it, is that going up and if it is, how much?

[D]

It's absolutely going up. Now, there have been many surveys done asking people under what conditions is violence justified? And their answer really depends on the conditions. High percentages on both sides of the political spectrum believe, as you said earlier, that it's justified for self defense or, you know, wording surrounding self defense. And I don't know the exact number, but it could be as high as 40% support for that seems like a lot, Barbara.

[C]

That seems like a lot.

[D]

Yes, it is a lot.

[C]

How high for. For someone like you who studies this, how high would that number have to get in terms of. I understand a lot of. A lot of things hinge on how the, the question is worded in terms of trying to tease out of people how acceptable they find political violence. But is there a certain threshold that's common in the literature, right, where if you, if you have this percentage of the population that is sympathetic to or open to using political violence to advance your political goals, that once you go past this number, you're in, you're in the danger zone?

[D]

No, but we talk, we talk in terms of annual risk. So if a country has those two features, it's a partial democracy with identity based political parties. The model that many people have used says that that country has about a 4% annual risk of either political instability and, or significant political violence. 4% sounds very low. But if those two features of your country don't change so you, you remain sort of this weak, declining democracy moving towards authoritarianism. And in fact, the faster you move there, the, the higher the risk is. But let's say you remain there and your parties don't, don't do anything to reach across racial or religious lines, then that 4% annual risk goes up every year. So that by year 10, it's at 40% annually, by 20 years is at 80% annually. So it doesn't happen immediately. That's why I think you're right to say we're not on the precipice right now because we really just went into this middle zone, probably in the last few months and solidly in the middle zone. But if we stay here and we don't reform our political system and strengthen our democracy, and if, if, you know, the Republicans and Democrats still appeal to their, their same bases, then you know, every year that risk is going to go up. Let me add what, what makes me nervous these days that has always, we've always known that, that those are the underlying conditions. But there's a second thing we know that I haven't written about yet, but Americans should know about that those wars that come from having weak democracies and tribal politics are started by usually by specific groups in society. There's a second type of war that's started by the leader of a country, and that is where war is actually manufactured to help keep a leader in power and in effect to kick the door finally shut on democracy. So if you look at how Putin really consolidated power in Russia after he was democratically elected in the 1990s, he started a war with Chechnya and then he was engaged in a war in Syria, and then he went into Crimea and then he started the war in Ukraine. And we know that what this helps a leader do one, it tends to generate lots of nationalism, so sort of a rah rah spirit behind the leader. And then we also know it allows the leader to declare emergency rule and basically, you know, do away with any sort of Democratic constraints as long as the war is going on. And I actually, when I wake, when I wake up in the middle of the night and I worry about America, one of the things that I worry about is that Donald Trump, before the 2028 elections, in which he should be term limited out, that he is going to fabricate some sort of emergency. And I think that emergency will include organized violence, and he's going to use that as a way to stay in the White House.

[C]

I would say the Trump factor, and I really don't mean this in a partisan sense. I'm not a Republican. I'm not a Democrat either. Really. Having someone in charge of the country who very clearly is not interested in bringing people together, who is very clearly interested in using every opportunity he can to drive the wedge more and more deeper between what divides us, that scares me as much as anything. And I don't know how much influence political elites really have anymore in this increasingly sort of fractured society where we're not all watching the same movie and we're getting our information online, it's not like everyone's watching the nightly news anymore. But when it's the President of the United States who lies with a versatility and a velocity that is staggering and is clearly willing to break anything he can in order to consolidate his own political power, it's very, very concerning. I'm not. I'm not trying to rank order all the things that concern me the most, but that's a big one. And it seems like there's a lot of. There is a lot of research suggesting that that matters a great deal.

[D]

So we absolutely have lots of studies that show that violent rhetoric, especially if it's put out into the public sphere by our leaders, has effects. It increases the use of violence, and people debate what the mechanisms are. But if you begin to normalize violence, if you justify violence, if you actually encourage it, and when you forgive violence, that's sending a complete message that violence is okay. And so it's not a surprise that when you have leaders behaving that way and saying violent things and saying that violence like we should go out and take revenge and retribution, that there will be a small subset of the population that will take that to heart and to follow what they perceive to be maybe not orders, but encouragement and then about accelerants. So we cannot have this discussion without talking about social media, right? So imagine a world. Imagine a world where everything was the same, except social media didn't exist. So this is the world you and I grew up in. Trump was still in the White House and Trump was saying all these things. And occasionally the night Daily News would cover it. But mostly they wouldn't because they wouldn't understand. Nightly news becomes really boring if you're repeating the same thing over and over again. But also because they understand that how divisive and potentially damaging this could be for society. So imagine that world where that message doesn't get out, it doesn't go anywhere. It really doesn't have the same effect as it does in a world today where people are not talking to each other as much. They're spending an enormous amount of time by themselves, online or in chat rooms, repeating the same thing over and over again with material that's designed to design, to heighten all of their worst emotions. And they're not going outside and talking to their neighbors or they're not engaging in various different groups that might, you know, that might have different opinions. So it's, it's just a world where in some ways the basest elements of humanity are simply being emphasized to the exclusion of everything else. And then people are living in isolation of each other.

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[B]

A lot of what we're.

[C]

Seeing now really does feel post ideological in the sense that, I mean, you know this better than I do, right? In the past, a lot of America's political violence, it, it felt more organized, right. Whether it's the the Weather underground from the 60s or the Klan or militias. Yes, there were clear ideological projects behind it. And this, I'm sure there are exceptions to this, but there's quite a bit of violence, including the individual who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, where if there is some ideological component to it, it feels so muddled and incoherent that I don't know what to make of it. It's not legible to me. Are you seeing that? Yeah.

[D]

Well, it's so interesting, you know, when people were first identified, when Tyler Robinson was first identified, the guy who killed Charlie Kirk, and people were desperate to see is he from the right or from the left and he'd left some clues, and there was engravings on the casings of the bullets. And they looked at the social media that he was on, and it was actually not easy to determine. And I'm not sure they still have determined exactly what his ideology was. It was a mixture of memes and. And it was actually kind of funny because the people reporting on it weren't familiar with this whole world, this online world, and you could tell they didn't quite understand it. And I would be in that category. I'm like, this is not the ideology that we had in the past. And it has a mixture of all sorts of things. And in the end, really what it comes down to, it just seems almost like entertainment. Not, not, not like the real world. This is. This is just almost kind of like teenage boy, ha ha, you know, stuff. I'm cool. Look, I got this meme. I can say this. It's hard to determine, like, what underlies it, except this insider's world of, of jokes.

[C]

It feels nihilistic. It feels like violence in search of an ideology, rather than ideology in search of violence, our ideology leading to violence. But I. I don't know. I mean, I've seen some of the reporting I.

[B]

He.

[C]

He does. He did seem to have some. Some, you know, leftist politics. But this is not someone who was reading Karl Marx and decided to, you know, start the revolution. Right? I mean, it's just. It's just.

[D]

It's just.

[C]

I don't know, it's. I guess this is what it. What it is in the Internet era. Like the digital revolution has just scrambled.

[D]

Our politics in ways you wonder, you know, if the Internet didn't exist, would this. Would Robinson. Would Tyler Robinson be in college now on a scholarship?

[C]

I think he would, Barbara.

[D]

Don't you think he would?

[C]

I think he would too.

[D]

I think he would. You know, I think he'd be, you know, maybe he'd be hanging out at 7:11 on a Friday night and drinking too much beer, but, you know, he wouldn't be spending hours and hours and hours on these sites that are just feeding him crap. You know.

[C]

I wonder, when you have isolated people like this who are radicalized online the way you're talking about people who I'm sure in many cases have serious mental health issues, is it even useful to think of this still as political violence in the traditional sense, or is it something new? Not worse, not better, just a different category.

[D]

Oh, that's violence. A great question.

[C]

I can't even. I don't have an answer to it. I'm just throwing it out there.

[D]

I would tend to still consider it political violence. You know, you could ask the same thing about, you know, is, is a mass murder in a, in a synagogue, is that political? Political? And I think on the surface you're just like, no, that's probably religious or that's probably anti Semitic. But I see that as political because underlying the, at least those decisions, let's, let's put Tyler Robinson and let's put, you know, let's say, let's even say the, the guy who drove the, the car, the truck into the church yesterday. Like things that are hazier and, and less cohesive. But a lot of the violence that we see directed at civilians, you know, black Americans, Jews, Latinos, women, is perpetrated by white nationalist groups. And the reason that's political is that they're targeting these groups not because they necessarily hate them and just want to inflict pain, they're targeting these groups, but because this is their strategy to reclaim America. That, and the strategy is if they can intimidate these groups into submission, or better yet, they can convince them to leave the country entirely, or leave Michigan entirely, or leave whatever state they're in entirely, then the demographics change in favor of whites and whites can once again regain what they believe is their rightful head of the political system. So even when something doesn't look political, it looks racist or looks anti Semitic, it is almost always driven by the changing demographics here in the United States. And changing demographics here in the United States matters to white supremacists because it means that their lock on power is declining.

[C]

Certainly some cases are more clear cut than others. It's just look like you were saying when we have kids, basically shitposting online, inscribing gamer Internet memes onto bullets, it's hard to tell sometimes how much of the violence is more like some kind of nihilistic troll job and how much of it is driven by sincere beliefs. You know, in the end, murder is murder and it doesn't matter because people are dead. People are dead. But in terms of understanding the underlying problem so that we can figure out what to do about it, the motivations of people do matter. And sometimes the motivations of people are just fucking incoherent.

[D]

But in some ways it doesn't. It doesn't matter if, if the, if let's say these incoherent individual, lone wolf incoherent attacks continue and they increase, which I actually think they will, because if we continue not to regulate social media and in an age of AI where we will increasingly have more and more unemployed young people with nothing to do but to stay online. And we know that radicalization happens online, then this type of even incoherent violence is likely to increase. Whether it's political or not doesn't really matter. If you have political leaders who are then going to exploit that violence, and they're going to exploit it to create an even bigger wedge between members of society and to use it as a justification for emergency powers and potentially martial law.

[C]

That seems to be one consequence of having more random, nihilistic acts of violence is that it actually may make it easier for the violence entrepreneurs to project their own narratives onto otherwise incoherent acts. Violently and ultimately what actually happened and why won't matter. What will matter is what millions of people believe happened.

[D]

So wouldn't it be great for Trump if, if in the next few weeks we had a number of incoherent terrorist attacks in Portland, you know, that there were, you know, a few kids in Portland who kind of lost it over the next few weeks. It wouldn't matter what their motivation was or whether it was political at all, but it would be used that way.

[C]

Are you surprised we don't have more violence than we do, actually? I mean, the fact that in this country we have a shit ton of guns, more guns than anyone else, we have expansive, robust protections for speech, more than any other country, which I think is good, by the way, but it also means there's a lot of reckless and hateful speech. Given those two conditions, do you think it's just reasonable to conclude that there's just going to be a higher baseline of political violence here?

[D]

Well, for sure, we, we have more political violence than, you know, comparable countries, advanced industrialized democracies around the world. And that is, that is because we have more guns than anybody else. Am I surprised we don't have more? Actually, I, I'm not, because, like, Americans really are pretty extraordinary people. I had dinner last night with my brother and his wife, and his wife is German and she had two young people from Germany visiting. We all had dinner together and they said that they were really worried about coming to the United States because they were like, oh my gosh, like it's violent and everybody has guns. And, and they recounted a story that day that a neighbor knocked on the front door and my sister in law opened the door and they were like, why are you open the door, don't open the door. They could have a gun. And I just started laughing and I was just like, that's actually not the way it is. And then when I asked them, like, what has been the biggest surprise for you? You've been here in America for a week. And they're just like, how friendly and kind and generous Americans are. Like, every interaction we have had has been extremely positive. And that's why I'm not surprised. Drive around the United States, go to the reddest parts of the United States and go to the local restaurant, and people will be friendly. And there is something unique about Americans and, and what it makes me sort of think about the counterfactual. Oh, my God, given how awesome this country is and how warm our people are, like, what would it be like if we, if we simply had less guns? Or what if, what would it be like if we had real gun control so that, you know, people with mental health issues or a history of domestic violence can't easily get guns? Like, I'm like, what if we, if we just put reasonable, rational, humane controls in place? God, it would be even better.

[C]

Reasonable, rational. Come on, settle down, settle down. Look, I will say I'm glad you made those points, right? Because I live, I live in southern Mississippi, all right? I didn't live here for a long time, but I grew up here and I moved back not too long ago. It's fine. People are, for the most part, wonderful like they are everywhere else. And I don't want to come on this show and use this platform to, like, hysterically overstate how terrible and dangerous things are. But I also know that there's a lot about this moment that actually is scary and I don't know what the right balance is. You know, I don't want to be an alarmist, but I also want to be sober and clear eyed. And maybe what I'm really getting at is how should we feel about just where we are generally right now?

[D]

I'm genuinely worried. And I think for things to get better, the only way it's going to happen is from the bottom up that we have 340 million Americans. And if they decided to demand real democracy, if they were to demand that our leaders uphold democratic norms, that we have much more power than we think. So for me, it's whether the American public actually wakes up and realizes that this moment we're in is a critical, you know, potential turning point, and that they have all the power they would ever need to, to stop the slide towards authoritarianism, but that if they remain passive, you know, they're, they're going to lose it. So, so.

[C]

Let me ask you this. How much of a problem? Is it that we have a dysfunctional Congress that can't even keep the government open, much less enact any reforms or legislation that might help with any of our underlying problems? I mean, you say we need to succumb from the bottom up. Is that to say that there's no chance in hell any solutions are going to come from the top down?

[D]

I think there's no chance in hell it's going to come from the top down. Listen, the main check on executive power in this country is Congress. That is the main check on the President. And they have completely absconded that they have completely given their power to the President, to a president who has outright stated that he wants to be an imperial president, he would love to be king, and they have essentially handed over their own power. Who does that? Usually people are very protective and they will fight to keep the power that they have. And here we have a Congress that simply handed it over to the President. So it's not going to come from the top down. American citizens are going to have to take their power back. And that happens usually in two ways. Massive turnout at the polls. Imagine if in the midterm elections. Let's just take the midterm elections. If, you know, 75, 80% of eligible voters voted, like that would just change the outcome of Congress, even with gerrymandering. Imagine if that happened in the 2028 elections, if we had massive turnout. So you see reform coming from the bottom up through massive campaigns for turnout at elections and through peaceful, peaceful protests that are sustained that include, you know, usually around three, three and a half percent of the population and that include a broad range of the population. So we know what, what works to, to actually change the system. But it's going to come up, it's going to come down to the American public being willing to take action.

[C]

Now, you have a lot more to say about this and if people want to read those thoughts, how can they find your excellent substack?

[D]

You can find me on substack. It is called Here Be Dragons. I love the title. Some people don't, but it's a reference to old maps, which I love. The title is Here Be Dragons. Warning signs from the edges of democracy.

[C]

Well, count me in. The camp that loves it. Barbara, Walter, this is great. I appreciate you on short notice coming in and talking to us about this. Thank you so much.

[D]

My pleasure. Thanks, Sean.

[B]

Okay. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I know it was a little heavy, but it felt necessary and useful, I hope.

[C]

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