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Truth in the Barrel
Devil's Cut | Domestic Terrorism
00:48:36
Devil’s Cut | Domestic Terrorism From the Oklahoma bombing to January 6th, America has had no shortage of political violence. This week Amy speaks to Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware authors of the book, God Guns and Sedition about the history of...
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Host (Colonel McGrath)
We have been more fortunate than many other places in the world, the United States is not free from domestic terrorism. In our history, groups with familiar names like the KKK and Aryan Nation come and go. Lone wolves like the Unabomber become household names for people came of age in the mid-90s. Just saying Oklahoma City is enough to trigger horrific memories of a bombed out building where 168 innocent lives were lost. And it needs to be made perfectly clear. Domestic terrorism can be and has been perpetrated to advance causes across the political spectrum, from the far left to the far right. But what is undeniable, and the data backs us up, is that the far right is home to the most pervasive domestic terrorist threat in American history and in American society today. Joining me to talk about this are two scholars who literally wrote the book on the subject. The book is called God, Guns and Far Right Terrorism in America. Bruce Hoffman is a fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, professor at Georgetown University, and fellow at the United States Military Academy's Combating Terrorism Center. His co author, Jacob Ware, is also a fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations professor at Georgetown, and also serves on the editorial board at the Modern War Institute at West Point. Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware, welcome to Truth in the Barrel.
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Bruce Hoffman
Thank you for having us.
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Host (Colonel McGrath)
I think it's important for listeners to have kind of a basic baseline of some definitions. You all are experts in domestic terrorism. You've written a book on it. What, what actually is domestic terrorism? Let's just start there.
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Bruce Hoffman
Do you want to take a Jake or you want me to?
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Jacob Ware
You're the expert on this question, Bruce, so fire away.
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Bruce Hoffman
Well, I don't think there's any definitional distinction between domestic and international terrorism. Terrorism is violence or the threat of violence calculated to achieve far reaching political change. I mean, it's a strategy of intimidation and coercion directed against the government broader society as well. Yeah, you Know, it becomes much more controversial when we talk about domestic versus international terrorism just because of the old adage that, you know, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter and that terrorism has become such an emotional and subjective term. So a terrorist basically is someone you disagree with or you cast dispersions or opprobrium on. But there is of course, U.S. statutes, I think 2331, that in essence conforms to the definition that I just provided, which is more of the scholarly one than the legal one. But I don't think there's much daylight between them.
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Host (Colonel McGrath)
Well, so as I've done research into this, just sort of wave tops level just for the show, it appears like we categorize domestic terrorists in sort of four different ways. There's religious, religiously motivated, right wing, left wing, and then there's this term ethno nationalism. And so I wanted to ask you because I think a lot of people, maybe people that don't, you know, don't, haven't read your book or don't really fully grasp all of this stuff kind of, you know, just people walking down the street don't really know the difference between right wing and left wing terrorism. I mean, a lot of people are like, well, they're all extremists. So what is the difference? Like, how do you distinguish between the two?
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Jacob Ware
That's a tricky question. Colonel McGrath, let me give you our the way that we defined it in the book was far right terrorism, which is the word that we use as opposed to right wing, is really defined by hierarchies. That's the word that we use in the book. What I mean by that is people on the far right seek to protect or defend real or perceived hierarchies in society. Whether those are racial hierarchies, whether they are gender hierarchies, religious hierarchies, kind of native versus immigrant hierarchies. And so you would say, for example, well, I'm a white Christian man, American born, and I seek to protect my position atop that hierarchy against challenges. And that would lead you to white supremacy. A far left extremist would say, actually those hierarchies that exist in society, they are invented, they are created by society. They don't exist, racial hierarchies don't exist. And our violence, our activism, is going to try to strike those down. And so you would say, well, there's a hierarchy between government and civilians through things like law enforcement. And so we're going to try to strike down the hierarchical role that law enforcement takes you would say there's hierarchies between people and animals, and so we're going to try to strike down structures that have protected humans over animals. That's, I think, the best way that we think about it. But of course, these are extremely politicized terms, and so people will take them in directions that they wish.
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Bruce Hoffman
Well, let me add to the confusion by saying that many scholars now talk about or invoke the horseshoe theory, in other words, where the extremes of both far left and far right have gotten so extreme that they're actually coming together. And this is what Jacob and I write about in the book the Strategy of Accelerationism. In other words, I would argue in the highly divisive and polarized environment that we currently exist in in the United States, that both extremes are convinced that the system is fundamentally corrupt and rotted, that legislatures have been reduced to sclerotic bodies, that executives may have overstepped their authorities, and that therefore they both share a common aim of pulling down the system, believing that the exist system, including capitalism, has fundamentally failed, and that therefore there has to be something new. And the idea of accelerationism is that a series of wildfires could be set across the United States that would eventually come together in one gigantic conflagration, overthrow the government, and remake the United States in a different vision.
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Host (Colonel McGrath)
Yeah. So this idea of accelerationism, I mean, just last year, and I'm sure there's lots of plots that are uncovered, but there was one just south of where I live in Kentucky, in Tennessee, where somebody wanted to go after a power plant. And the idea was, if you go after a power plant and you create terror or you have mass amounts of people without power, that somehow the government then is going to fall, I guess, and they're going to, I don't know. Achieve what? Achieve? Well, you tell me.
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Bruce Hoffman
Well, you only have to go back 30 years to until 9 11, the worst terrorist incident or the most lethal terrorist incident in the United States. The bombing of the Alfred P. Murray Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City. And this was precisely Timothy McVeigh's motivation. Now, McVeigh, much like I would argue, the landscape we see today in the United States with political, violent political extremism, did not belong to a specific organization, was not following anyone's orders. But like the incident you just described in Kentucky, he had this fundamental faith in this belief that, you know, you blow up a federal office building and you kill lots of people. 168 persons tragically perish that day, and that this would set in motion a chain reaction where other people would imitate him. I mean, violence today is all about copycat, inspiring copycats. I think this is why we talk so much about the lone offender. That was exactly McVeigh's motivation 30 years ago. Now, it fizzled out, fortunately. But let's say his inheritors today embrace the same sort of strategy and believe they can set the fuse that will result in a series of. For want of a better term, sympathetic explosions that eventually will be this gigantic conflagration. This was all laid out in The Turner Diaries, 1970s era, very dystopian novel that talks about the overthrow of the United States. And actually, you know, it's not true, as the. As has often been argued, that the FBI ever said this was the bible of the far right, that actually the author of it appropriated that saying to sell more books. But it's indisputable that the Turner Diaries, even in the case of McVeigh, but since is repeatedly surfaced as a kind of blueprint for this accelerationist strategy.
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Host (Colonel McGrath)
Yeah, and what struck me, I have your book right here. For those listening. It's called God's guns and sedition, far right, Terrorism in America. It's. It's really good. And one of the things that struck me when I read it was the. The fact that, like, it seemed like this stuff really got going in the 1980s. Is that. Is that a fair assessment? I mean, you talked about the 1970s, but I feel like it's. It really kind of got going in the 1980s and then has just gotten worse and worse. Is that. Is that fair to say?
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Bruce Hoffman
Yeah. I don't want to hog the microphone, but I would jump in here only because I started studying terrorism generally in the mid-1970s, and by the mid-1980s, had started focusing on domestic terrorism of all kinds. And that was part of the genesis of.
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Host (Colonel McGrath)
So you're the one responsible.
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Bruce Hoffman
Well, you know, it was Jacob and I. We started the book in April 2020 in kind of the depths of. Or the beginning of the depths of COVID And we detected a lot of parallels, and that's why we really zero in the 1980, as you've just done, Amy, is the beginning of this trajectory that we see, I would argue, having been realized today in the 1980s. It began with xenophobia, with profound opposition to immigration. It then spread to and adopted something of a religious element as well that we see prevalent today in the form of, let's say, Christian nationalism. And this trajectory really began as we. And the book's title says it all. I mean, God was really the 1980s, when it had a really strong, much more salient religious dimension than it has today. You actually had clergy who were leaders of some of these groups. Then you have the transition to the 1990s, to the guns part, where this movement, like all extremist movements, realized that it had to expand in order to survive and embraced or brought into its fold the militias, which were then becoming quite popular and also seized on Second Amendment rights issues, which of course, during the Clinton administration. The Clinton administration had been the most advanced, at least in gun control. And this was part of Timothy McVeigh's motivation. And then we talk about the seditious element that was prevalent or first surfaced then, but became more prevalent in this century and culminated in the events of January 6, 2021.
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Host (Colonel McGrath)
I used to teach at the U.S. naval Academy and I remember talking about terrorism in one of my courses and I brought in a guest speaker from the University of Maryland. And they have this start. It's like tracking domestic terrorism data. And it was relatively new, I think, at the time that I taught at the Naval Academy and had somebody who came in as an expert to show us the data. And what struck me, and I had no idea as an instructor of this until they came because it was fairly new to kind of look at domestic terrorism at that time, was that right wing terrorism is as a percentage pretty high when you compare it to left wing terrorism or religious based Islamic, at least in the United States, Islamist terrorism. And then some other data points that I thought were interesting at least since 19, the 1940s on immigrants were only 8% of the plots and terrorists that we, you know, non immigrants were 92%. You would expect it to be mostly men. That was true. Men were 90%, 76% were white. And this was from the National Academy of Sciences. And then the csis, the center for Strategic and International Studies has done a couple of studies on this. And in 2022 they came out with a report that said that these right wing attacks were increasing, especially in the past decades. Their sharpest rise has been in the past decade. So my question to you is, do you agree with that? And why do you think that is? Why do you think we have such a, such a big increase in right wing terror incidents?
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Jacob Ware
Yes, I would say Bruce and I would agree with that. I think that is why we felt compelled to write this work. In my view, one of the strengths of our book is actually we thread a needle through a number of mass shooting incidents, really that I think people in America will remember. But perhaps have never quite put into this trajectory. So you can go back, of course, 10 years ago, 10 years and one month ago to Charleston, South Carolina. We go through Charlottesville, the Pittsburgh shooting, the deadliest anti Semitic terrorist attack in US History, El Paso, Buffalo. These are all mass casualty incidents driven by white supremacy. And we know they're driven by white supremacy because the individuals themselves said so in manifestos and other statements. The reality is those kinds of incidents don't really exist at present from the far left this century, with the notable exception, of course, of the, I believe it was 2017 Alexandria baseball shooting, which was almost a catastrophic incident. Was a catastrophic incident, but fortunately with no death toll among the targets. And the data supports that as well. The organization that I, you mentioned, a couple of great organizations there that collect data on this. I'll throw out another one, which is the Anti Defamation League, which is kind of the main Jewish watchdog in this country. Every February, I think they release a report that looks at the murder and extremism over the past year. And they found that, I think something like 75% of fatalities over the past 10 years, 15 years, extremism related fatalities have been perpetrated by the far right. And in fact they found in 2021, 2020, 2022, sorry, 2023 and 2024. So the last three years, every extremism related fatality United States has been perpetrated by the far right. Now that's not going to be true in 2025. Of course, that stopped being true within hours, actually, given what happened in New Orleans. But yes, the data, I think, in our view, supports that today the violent far right still poses the predominant terrorism threat to the United States.
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Host (Colonel McGrath)
So Jacob, though, or Bruce, if I walk down the street and I'm talking to people and the subject comes up, maybe it's right after an incident or something like that of domestic terrorism or a shooting or something. If you talk to people a lot of times you'll hear this. Well, the far right and the far left, they all do the same thing. And there's just as many far left terrorists out there as there are far right. I hear that a lot, but the data actually doesn't show that. I mean, I guess my question to you is why do you think there is such a difference in perception versus reality?
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Bruce Hoffman
Well, I think it's changing. I mean, I think as Jacob described, that has been the pattern for more than a decade. I think it's been interesting that since the 2024 presidential election, a lot of the more extremist proclivities that, that we saw from the far right are just being folded into, I think just a general divisiveness and disillusionment in the United States. I don't know how this is parsed because the US Capitol Police doesn't issue who the threats are. Coming from 2024, there were more than double the number of threats and attacks on members of Congress compared to 2017. I mean, nearly 10,000 in the U.S. capitol Police testified on the Hill just a few months ago that 2025 was running even higher. I mean, and that's coming from the left as well as the right. I mean, just in the past week, for example, there have been threats against Marjorie Taylor Greene. Someone was convicted of that. But also Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's campaign offices in the Bronx were attacked. Again, the left wing attack. But I think the point is that what we've seen historically is that the far right is far better organized and mobilized and equipped to engage in violence than the far left has been. I mean, the New York Times a couple of years ago reported that there were at least 120 far right militias in the United States, including, like the Boogaloo Boys. You know, there's nothing like that. There are militias and they are increasing, I would argue, at a, probably at a less, you know, not as quite of a higher rate. I mean, there are far left militias, but the number is completely eclipsed by the number of far right. So in terms of people with the training, the wherewithal, and the organizational skills to commit violence, that has historically resided more on the right than the left. The right has also had more of a proclivity to engage in lethality. For example, There were over 1,000 bombings in the United States during an 18 month period in 1970 and 1971. This according to the FBI. We don't remember that at all or even acknowledge it. I mean, that's a lot of terrorism. The reason we don't remember it and it goes unacknowledged is because only a handful of people tragically died. I mean, it never, that accumulation never even got close by any stretch of the imagination to what occurred one day in Oklahoma City. So that's often this differentiation. But I think what worries me the most finishing the book is, as I said, it's not just threats to members of Congress that are increasing. In a 2024 poll over, sorry, over one third of journalists reported receiving physical or digital threats. I mean, the use of violence, at least, even if it's not actual violence. It's the intimidation or the threat factor is certainly rising in the United States and that I think should worry everyone.
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Host (Colonel McGrath)
Yeah, and something you said about the plots back then in the 1970s, many of them didn't come to fruition and now more are. And I kind of tend to think that that has to do with access to information. People are getting better at pulling these things off because they're getting maybe more training or they just have access to the Internet, which kind of, it shows them how other people have done it, whereas they didn't really have that in the 1970s. That's just a, that's just a speculation or a theory on my part. But your, your book is, is titled God's Guns and Sedition. So the guns part, let's talk about that. How much of a role does the sort of, I call it far rights fetishness. But you know, you can correct me, but there's this fetishness in, in, in our country with guns. And how much does it play into what's happening?
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Jacob Ware
It plays a huge role. Before I answer this question, let me point out that I am a gun violence survivor myself. I serve as a survivor fellow at every town for gun safety. So everything I say about guns should be taken with that bias in mind. However, we do trace a shift in tactics and a shift in targeting throughout the course of our book. In the 70s, 80s and 90s, you often saw very complex terrorist attacks that targeted what we call hard targets, well defended locations that are particularly symbolic, whether they're because of their government or what have you. Timothy McVeigh is a great example of that. As we moved into the 21st century, far right terrorism changed and it became defined basically by the same kind of mass shooting incidents you see in schools and other community locations. As you go through prominent far right terrorist incidents over the past 15 years, overwhelmingly they are mass shootings that are occurring at soft targets, predominantly places of worship. You mentioned the information element. Social media without question, has hypersonically mobilized this movement, hypersonically empowered the movement. It has lowered barriers to entry for individuals. But I think firearms have too. And frequently now you're seeing individuals who do not have a lot of training. They are not experts in terrorist tactics, let alone military operations. They're people who radicalize very quickly on social media, often very young people. And they are able to conduct an act of violence because of access to weapons. And we make that recommendation in our final chapter. In Europe, in Canada, in my view, the number one counterterrorism policy that they have is arms Control. There's an understanding that we're not realistically going to be able to prevent every single person from radicalizing and mobilizing to violence. It's not realistic. So we have to consider the capability element, too. And in the United States, we're always frankly going to be behind the eight ball on that. The flip side of this that's really important to mention is that firearms, of course, hold a mythical place in far right ideology. And you see that in the Turner Diaries that Bruce mentioned. You saw that very prominently in Timothy McVeigh's radicalization. There is a prominent feeling among the violent far right that when the government talks about gun control, that is the first salvo in their tyrannical clamp down on American freedoms. And so it's a capability element, but it's also a very strong ideological question as well. And that is a big challenge.
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Host (Colonel McGrath)
Yeah, we'll definitely get to the prescriptions to try to tackle some of these things, because that is. Your last chapter is almost like the most important part as to how do we counter domestic terrorism? What do we. What do we need to do to mitigate some of this? But I also want to ask you, though, because it's in your title about the God part. Right. How connected are these terror groups or persons with far right? Maybe Christian evangelicals? I don't know. I mean, why is God in the title here?
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Bruce Hoffman
Well, that's a reflection of, as I said earlier, that the title, just serendipitously, not by Design, ended up framing the errors of political extremism on the far right that we describe in the United States. And in the 1980s, there was a very pronounced religious element to this. The Aryan nations, for example, which was based in Hayden Lake, Idaho, was led by the Reverend Richard Gerd Butler. And it aspired to be an umbrella organization that would unite the entire universe of violent far right extremism in the United States. Many of the leaders of groups other back then, other than Butler, Reverend Robert Miles from Michigan, for example, Reverend Pete Peters from Colorado. There was much of a religious element injected into the movement, and it went beyond Christian evangelicalism. It was really a form of what eventually evolved into what was called Christian patriotism, which was using scripture to justify various political positions, anti Semitism and racism, for example, propagating an argument that Jews were not the chosen people, white Anglo Saxon Protestants were in fact the chosen people, and both Jewish people and any persons of color were the spawn of Satan, placed on the earth to do Satan's work. And that was a really big theme of the movement, but it actually had limited resonance. And that was why I said earlier that like all extremist movements, they have to grow. It's like the shark in the water. They have to move forward or they die. And that's why you had the shift in the movement. Firstly, after a trial in 1988 in Fort Smith, Arkansas, where 14 white supremacists, including some of these religious figures, were indicted on charges of seditious conspiracy. Conspiracy, but they were acquitted. There was a realization in the movement that it could have been decapitated, and it decided to spread outwards. And I would argue it became less religious and more geared towards single issues. For example, hoping to draw people in because of their. Their commitment to the second amendment rights under the Constitution. And then what was described at the time as a conveyor belt that would hook them on one particular issue. Perhaps it was the perennial crises in America's farmlands where people were losing their farms. And rather than understanding the complexity of economic factors and even global politics, for example, it was much easier to blame a global conspiracy, for example. And the movement attempted and was successful in hooking people on one particular issue and then pulling them on the conveyor belt and convincing them that really, sedition was the only answer. And that gets to the third part of the title. The religious dimension is still present. I mean, that's certainly the case, But I would say that it's less pervasive and that the leaders of the extremist groups on the far right, at least in recent years, have not, as in the 1980s, cloaked themselves with the mantle of some clerical authority or particular theological knowledge. They've been secularists, basically, but that's still an element in the movement. I mean, this movement has always aspired to be a big tent, to gain momentum and continue to build on its constituency. So even if the religious element is less pronounced nowadays, it's not completely absent.
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Host (Colonel McGrath)
When you all did your research into this, did you interview people who may maybe in jail, are in jail right now because they were part of a conspiracy theory plot to do some sort of terrorist thing? I mean, how did you go about the research?
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Jacob Ware
We did not conduct interviews. We conducted archival research of other forms. So, for example, trawling online chat rooms for.
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Host (Colonel McGrath)
But that was fun.
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Jacob Ware
Always a perk of the job. Colonel McGrath. For trends and ideological markers and conversations about violent plotting. The manifestos that have been written in the past 15 years are, unfortunately, a tremendous primary source. And one of the advantages for me, with writing a book with somebody who, frankly, has been Studying terrorism since before I was born by decades is. He had a lot of. Bruce has a lot of primary source material from the 70s and 80s, which I think is a real advantage for us. So, you know, as the readers go through the bibliography, the footnotes, they'll find a tremendous, I think, a tremendous amount of primary source documents, FBI documents from the early generations of this movement. And through that kind of primary source research, we were able to trace, I think, ideological developments and tactical trends and reach the point where I think we were able to connect things that are happening today with moments from the movement decades ago.
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Bruce Hoffman
I could just add, also, trial transcripts played a huge part, and there's a wealth of those. But don't forget, we started writing this book in 2020 and finished it in 2022. So it was the height of COVID We couldn't get out, really. And it would have been very difficult to interview through the Bureau of Prisons remotely. So we had to really depend on archival and other sources, as Jacob described. I'll add one thing. Parenthetically, it was fascinating to write a book with someone who's 40 years younger than you. I mean, Jacob was very good, exactly as you described. You know, in mining the social media is far more in depth than I was in that respect. And as Jacob said, historically, I had this wealth of material that I'd collected when I started studying this in the 1980s and had always collected and then knew where to look in terms of trial transcripts and other materials.
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Host (Colonel McGrath)
Yeah, it sounds like it's a great balance because you are able to see different things. I mean, you, Bruce, come from sort of a more historical background. With understanding that, and then Jacob bringing in, you know, the social media stuff that's happening today that you, I'm guessing here, Bruce, may not have even known some of these. These tunnels into this social media area existed. I mean, my own kids are showing me stuff that I'm like, what? You know. So that's really interesting. But we just unfortunately had another horrific attack recently, this time on state elected officials, as you know, and the Minnesota speaker of the House, Melissa Hortman, her family, other lawmakers, State Senator John Hoffman, his family was targeted. When something like this happens, what do you look for when, I mean, you try to get primary sources to figure out who did this, why they did this. Is there anything right now that you can talk to us about that incident that you might know a little bit more than the average Joe on why this happened?
- [33:22]
Jacob Ware
A couple of thoughts. One is, I mean, the first question that you always ask in an aftermath of a suspected extremist violent incident, is who's the target? In part because that helps you inform the most important question, which is, who's the next target? Of course. And in fact, my understanding is the police officers in Minnesota were doing that in lifetime and may have prevented more carnage by asking those kind of questions. The target here is, of course, Democratic lawmakers, and that gives you a certain, I think, idea of what the ideology is here. However, I'm not sure we've seen that yet in his statements, and to be honest with you, that's not really surprising to me. One of the elements that Bruce and I begin to tease out a little bit in the book, although it's developing still, is what we call ideological convergence. In other words, mixing and matching in ideologies, sometimes ideologies becoming less coherent, less important to an extremist story. In fact, under the Trump administration, the FBI has added a new term of art in its counterterrorism work, which is nihilistic violent extremism, which denotes people who do not have kind of far right, far left, anti government religious ideology, but actually have an absence of those ideologies and are driven more by hatred of society and the violence in itself. I don't know if he was one of those individuals, but this is a broader trend that we're seeing where violence, including extremist violence, seem to be perpetrated by individuals with a lot more chaos in their ideologies and a lot less coherence, a lot less predictability. And that is an enormous challenge because from a counterterrorism standpoint, you want predictability, you want to be able to say, this is the community that's going to be targeted. If people can't even reliably say that in their own heads when they're planning attacks, how can we expect to be able to do that? So, long story short, I think it's too soon to tell, but also, we may never get an answer, and we need to get used to that. We never got an answer after the Trump shooting either. It's getting more normal that we don't get answers after these kind of incidents.
- [35:44]
Host (Colonel McGrath)
Super interesting. So at the end of your, your book, you have a chapter on ways we can counter far right terrorism or just, you know, domestic terrorism in general, because as it sounds like, it's sort of becoming that we can't tell even if it's far right or far left or whatever, if we wanted to. So what are some of the things that we can do? I mean, we can't just say, well, we'll put up our, put up our hands and quit here. I don't want to live in a society where we continue to have these incidents. So what do we do about it?
- [36:23]
Bruce Hoffman
That was the longest chapter actually in the book and the one that we were, I think, proudest of because we didn't only do this historical accounting of a trajectory, but we actually broke out our recommendations into three categories of what could be done in the short term which would strengthen the regulatory framework. In other words, legislation, laws that could be enacted, such as domestic terrorism legislation. That was sensible reform of section 230 of the Communications Decency act that identified social media from the same sorts of, of responsibilities that the traditional media had. Our argument was that in 1995 when everyone got their news from the 6:30 or 7:00 clock evening newscasts and read newspapers, that may have been appropriate. But now in an era where more people get their news from YouTube or TikTok or Facebook, that it outlived its relevance. We argued that there needed to be medium term measures to rebuild civil society, such as as digital and media literacy. And then we advocated that these things would lead to a generational change in the long term that would promote national unity. So as I said earlier, we finished the book in 2022. It was published in January 2024. And what worries me profoundly is that the potential of realizing any of those recommendations in this highly divided, highly polarized Congress and society has just diminished, at least for the time being. I mean, Jacob and I, especially given the gravitas of the Council on Foreign Relations. Jacob and I went up on the Hill because this is a Council on Foreign Relations book and spoke to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. But predominantly minority generally is more responsive to ideas. There's more Democrats than Republicans. I mean, the one thing everybody agreed on was reform of section 230. Jacob and I were fascinated that they then turned to us and said, well, how do we do it? Whatever our other skills or qualifications to write this book are, neither of us are parliamentarians. And so that was a bit worrisome. But we can see that even on something where there was broad bipartisan agreement, at least that we found, there hasn't been any progress, at least to my knowledge. So it's left me wondering whether these ideas are now just going to molder until there's a change in government. And then hopefully they could provide something of a roadmap or guidepost on how we can get back on track and promote national unity again and repair the damage that's been done to civil society, which I described, you know, the rise in threats to members of Congress and local legislators has to be something that concerns all of us. The rising threats to journalists, for example, I would argue, I would add in that, and what is, what has really surprised me in the research I've done since the book is the really the unaccountable rise in attacks on houses of worship and people because of their religion. Now, we know, as Jacob pointed out earlier, the Anti Defamation League, which has monitored these things since 1979 very closely. You know, there was a 900% increase in nearly 900% increase in anti Semitic incidents over the past 10 years, nearly a 350% over the past five years. But CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations, reported that 2024 was the highest number of incidents of attacks on mosques and threats and incidents involving Islamophobia. I was astonished to read that there's been an 800% increase on attacks on churches since 2018. I mean, an average of, you know, 30 a year. There's been 500 attacks just on Catholic churches alone since 2020. And in fact, in terms of protecting houses of worship from attacks, it's our Hindu brothers and sisters that the Hindu community has produced this really excellent sort of template or guidebook on how to secure a place of worship from attack. So we can see on all dimensions, civil society is eroding, whether it's political journalism or, you know, religion. And, you know, that's, I think so. I think our recommendations are still enormously pertinent. The practicality of them being implemented right now, I think, is fairly dim.
- [40:53]
Host (Colonel McGrath)
Well, you know, you say in your book that one of the big challenges is the inability to admit that there's a problem at all. And I think until we get to the point where members of Congress, you know, agree that there's a problem or actually larger society agrees that there's a problem, it's hard to implement some of of the things to counter it. And part of what we're trying to do, you know, on this show is talk about these things because I think part of how you get to that point is for people to have knowledge. Just that those facts that you just brought up, Bruce, I mean, you were surprised by them. We should all be surprised by them. We're not talking about it enough. And that's part of what this show is intended to do. But I agree with you in the sense that I'm not sure we're going to be able to tackle anything under the current leadership that we have, I hope that, that that's not the case. But I worry that some of these prescriptions for this just aren't, aren't going to go anywhere. So I am worried. Do you agree with that, Jacob?
- [42:13]
Jacob Ware
I mean, it's been kind of lost in the noise of the past six months. But the January 6th pardons, I think they're catastrophic for counterterrorism. Not just because you have battle hardened leaders returning to their groups, having now actually faced up against the government, paid a price and emerged triumphant, but more so just an erosion of a deterrence against violence in our society. And, you know, it would be very hard to prove statistically, but it wouldn't surprise me if the sporadic violence that we've seen this year in Washington, D.C. in Boulder, Colorado, Palm Springs, California, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Minnesota is inspired or at least lubricated by a broader understanding that political violence is not necessarily taboo anymore. You can commit acts of political violence. You can threaten to assassinate the vice president, you can break into the citadel of democracy, and not only will you be forgiven, pardoned, but you'll be celebrated, lionized. Yeah, that is a seismic shift in American democracy. And you know, there's this famous expression that we all know history is written by the victors. I reflect on that often in the context of January 6th and about, you know, wondering what history books are going to write about that day, given that the movement emerged triumphant from that attack. That is something that those of us who stand against that kind of activism, against that kind of violence really have to think about very deeply because that narrative shift is a tremendous headwind that we're fighting against now. And you see that. By the way, Colonel McGrath, just really quickly in the data, Bruce and I have a couple of data points in our book that says during the Biden administration, something like 40% of Republicans who were polled would say that they believed violence was justified in defensive of the party or defense of the country. You're now seeing that among Democrats talking about Trump, similar numbers. That is stunning. When 40% of Americans believe that violence against the other is justified. I mean, that is anti Democratic, opposed to democracy. And that is the reality of the challenge that we have to try to surmount.
- [44:49]
Host (Colonel McGrath)
Yeah, well, I don't want to end on that note. I want you to think hard and maybe you have to think hard. Is there anything, though, that gives you hope right now?
- [45:05]
Bruce Hoffman
Well, I was an historian and I'll tell you what gives me hope by citing something dismal. I mean, a lot of this Looks very similar to the 1910s and the 1920s, especially the 1920s. I mean, people forget that there were 4 to 5 million members of the Ku Klux Klan in that time period. There were more members north of the Mason Dixon line than in the South. Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania were the leading places. It was a time of deep xenophobia and political divisions. I mean, the xenophobia resulted in the Klan's power to influence the 1924 Immigration act, which remained in force until 1965, that limited, especially Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Catholic immigrants from Southern Europe, and Asian immigrants to the United States. There was this profound. In researching the book, Jacob and I found this profound skepticism of Washington. I mean, they didn't use terms like the swamp, but very similar, an aversion to what people saw as pinstriped east coast intellectuals and elitism. There was a deep skepticism of science, of vaccinations, of medical advancements. I mean, what I'm describing sounds like today, but the United States got past that, and it took a catastrophe, which was the Great Depression, to get us out of that mindset. So I'd like to think that as well, that this is just another phase in American history that is not without precedent, that we have surmounted in the past. And you know what I think of what sort of animates me and inspires me. But of course, it took another tragedy to produce it was what happened on the evening of September 11, 2001, when members of both parties in Congress locked arms on the steps of the U.S. capitol and in unison sang God Bless America. And that was, like, so enormously inspirational because it sent the message that when we're unified, when we're together, there's nothing that we can't accomplish. And I'm hoping and praying we get back to that moment on September 11th when we can see that kind of bipartisan commitment and unity in the United States to build the country.
- [47:31]
Jacob Ware
Build the country.
- [47:33]
Bruce Hoffman
From as I've described, when you have attacks on members of Congress, on local legislators, on journalists, on houses of worship, all increasing, there's a problem.
- [47:47]
Host (Colonel McGrath)
Yeah, well, and I agree with you. I feel like I would wish that we didn't have to have an external attack in order to come together. I wish that we wouldn't have to be a tragedy for us to come together to be able to move on. But, yeah, you look throughout history and you wonder how we're going to get through this time. But it's good to think back and at least know that we have gotten through similar parts of American history in the past and I believe in our country. And that's one of the reasons I'm not giving up. And I think a lot of our listeners aren't going to give up either. But I really encourage everyone to go out and read this amazing book, God's Guns and Far Right Terrorism in America. And I am super happy that you came on the show today. I really appreciate your time. Bruce Hoffman, Jacob Ware, thank you for being a part of Truth in the Barrel, Devil's Cut edition. This was a really important topic and certainly appreciate your expertise.
- [48:57]
Bruce Hoffman
Well, you're very welcome. Thank you for having us.
- [48:59]
Host (Colonel McGrath)
All right.
- [49:05]
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