Trump's Legacy: Violence in American Elections
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Still tastes the same like back in the day. Right now, get two pieces of chicken starting at only $2.99 or 10 pieces starting at only $10.99. Churches. Offer valid at participating locations. Hey folks, welcome back to the Lincoln Project Podcast. My guest today is Peter Simi, who is an expert on violent extremism in America. One of the things I wanted to talk about before we introduce this show is just yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service have declared that this year's electoral vote count

that takes place after the election results are sent in from the states at the Capitol is now a area of special national security concern. Why is that? Because Donald Trump in 2021 inspired a violent mob to attack the Capitol in an effort to overturn the election by seizing the ballots, by seizing the actual certified state results and putting this whole thing into question. The Department of Homeland Security has correctly identified that they may try to do it again.

Trump's rhetoric warming up his crowds to say over and over again, I'm going to be cheated. It's a crooked election. It's trying to set up the predicates for this. We're going to talk to Peter Simi today about the threat of violent extremism, why Donald Trump is one of its motive causes, and what we can do about it. Let's get going. Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped, and battle-hardened. There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. The United States of America...

Good night and good luck. Hey, folks, and welcome back to the Lincoln Project podcast. I'm Rick Wilson, your host. And today's guest is a really smart guy about a really scary subject. Peter Simi is a professor at Chapman University of Sociology, and he has made it his work to study one of the weird undersides of American culture. And that's the underside of extremism, the culture of white supremacy, and the

and the dangers they pose to the country and our democracy. So with that, I want to welcome you to the show, Peter. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. And I wanted to ask you a question right off the bat. In the post-Charlottesville era,

Is the white supremacist movement right now on offense or defense in this country? Oh, I think very clearly offense in a way that we haven't seen in recent history, quite frankly. And, you know, it's been building. It's not anything that's just happened overnight. Sure. You mentioned Charlottesville. That was a pivotal moment. People thought initially that was going to lead to a lot of disruption, and it did in certain ways. But, you know, because of a variety of factors, including not the least of which the

you know, then President Trump's basically endorsement in some way. Equivocal, yeah. That, you know, that was something we'd never seen before come out of the White House. So that had a profound impact. And certainly now we see, you know, the movement gaining ground in ways that are very frightening and quite frankly, a very,

significant threat to the system of democracy, as imperfect as it is. You know, it used to be back in the 70s and 80s when the FBI had run this very long running operation to help dismantle the Klan. And I grew up in the deep south and I'm

It's scattered. It went deep underground. It broke up into smaller and smaller units. It was bankrupted. It was its ability to do violence at scale was was largely not entirely, but largely broken. Right.

The difference, though, with that was that the Klan had an almost – by the end of its life at that point, it had an almost clownish image. It was the 350-pound guy in the rascal scooter and the pointy white hat. It wasn't –

It wasn't what it had been in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s. But the new model of white supremacy is a lot slicker and cleaner and more presentable. Talk to us about how that evolution has made the white supremacist movement into a much more social media driven phenomenon than it's been in the past and a much more insidious phenomenon.

Yeah, that's a great question. Several things happened in the kind of period following the time that you've just described. In the 80s and 90s, we started seeing real efforts to

among folks of various types of white supremacist groups. I think one of the problems we have in terms of thinking about this issue is we have certain stereotypes in our minds. So, you know, the Klan obviously being the oldest one. So if somebody is not wearing a white sheet, they can't be a white supremacist. And, you know, more recently in the 80s and 90s, it kind of morphed into the skinhead, the racist skinhead, the young man with the shaved head and the swastika tattoo. We saw it in the movie American History X. Right.

And that became kind of etched in people's minds. And so if the person wasn't – didn't have a shaved head and a swastika tattoo, they couldn't be a white supremacist. And those were factions within the larger movement certainly and they got a lot of publicity for various reasons including their involvement in violence. But –

There's always been a much more complex array of folks involved in a much broader constellation. And you started to see in the 80s and 90s shifts towards, for instance, anti-government militia activity and the development of those types of groups that really didn't have that older stereotype of the Klan. But we're certainly promoting much, if not all, of the same types of beliefs today.

You started seeing a shift towards the idea of suits and ties. So folks like David Duke, who did have some success with electoral politics, you know, he was promoting and others were promoting this idea of kind of blending into the mainstream. Let's let's stop using terms like neo-Nazi and hate and.

and racism and white supremacy and use other terms like nationalism, patriotism. You know, this isn't about hate. It's about love. So really trying to kind of flip things in a way, at least rhetorically. Another key factor here is in the early 80s, around the time of kind of the pre-internet days where you have electronic bulletin boards on computer systems.

A number of white supremacist leaders saw that computer technology as the wave of the future. And they were very early in starting to recognize that this is a way for us to get our propaganda distributed to a wider segment of the population. It's a way for

to promote and shift and shape narratives about politics and issues that they felt were concerning, things like immigration, that they were really promoting as an invasion and using that terminology, which now, unfortunately, has become kind of common parlance.

So, these were some of the shifts that were really happening that have just kind of continued over the course of the '80s and '90s. And then when the 2008 election of Barack Obama, our first black president, that really was a moment where you saw this kind of start to come to the surface much more visibly and erupt in certain kinds of ways. And then, of course, the election in '16 was kind of the extension of that eruption.

So immigration has become inextricably bound with the white supremacist movement in the country. There is a sense that they, I think, and I'm curious about your thoughts on this. I think a lot of the folks in that movement thought they could use that as a recruiting tool into white working class, non-college men,

at at some pretty significant scale with the argument of the mexicans took your jobs the brown people took your jobs the the the black people took your jobs and they've all been given a free ride and you are being screwed and you're seeing it i think even today when they're with these you know largely fallacious stories like oh immigrants get to stay in five-star hotels and and all that

That argument seems to me to be something that has become more about immigration and foreign dilution of the gene pool, all those things.

It seems to have gotten a second wind. I mean, it's the cousin of eugenics, obviously, but it seems to have gotten a sort of second wind in that movement. Second wind, yeah. It's a hurricane of sorts that's blowing through our country in terms of how it's impacting people.

uh, folks. And, you know, I would agree working class, but also even, I would say it expands beyond that, you know, in terms of even wealthy enclaves in various parts of the country that are predominantly white have fears about this kind of an invasion of sorts and encroachment, uh, into, you know, that what they perceive and probably in many cases, rightfully so hard earned and, and, you know, they've worked hard for the, the, um,

you know, very nice home that they've been able to buy and the nice schools that they are able to send their kids to. And they feel very defensive about those things. And so I think it's working class, but it's also even middle and affluent sectors within the country who have really embraced this

sense of kind of a resentment and anxiety and a frustration about people getting things that they don't deserve and that this is encroaching on their way of life, frankly. Now, it seems to me that the sort of forward-facing white supremacists, they did take the Richard Spencers and the Chris Caldwells and the sort of Unite the Right guys from Charlottesville, they did take a pretty hard hit after that. But

In some ways, I think they might have achieved – maybe it was a period victory for them individually, but they shoved the Overton window a little further.

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I'm curious about your thoughts on the divisions inside the White Supremacist movement, the incrementalists who want to keep pushing the window a little bit at a time, and the accelerationists who want a race war. Now, look, I think that is a much lower probability, but talk to me about how those two separate –

factions or lines of thinking or tendencies inside that movement are in the overall movement today? Yeah, this is long-standing. There's been divisions. First of all, there's a lot of different factions. And sometimes that does create problems internally for the movement, and it does create susceptibilities.

It creates defection problems, people coming and going because of leadership battles and internal interpersonal squabbles and various things of that nature can have a fragmenting effect on the movement. And we often will focus on that. And in doing that, we sometimes miss the fact that that movement.

the fact that they have these factions and these divisions doesn't keep them from sustaining themselves. And in some ways, the different divisions strengthen them in that they give them different points of focus where you have some folks who are very much oriented towards explicit violence. We want race war, not tomorrow, today, you know, and any kind of violence is good violence because it's going to help collapse the system. And then you have the incrementalists like you mentioned. And frankly, there's more, uh,

A crossover between these two sectors, and I think sometimes people recognize where you have individuals who may simultaneously be working in both directions. So it's not always an indoor environment.

And that's, again, longstanding. Duke, you know, back in the 80s, he represented the kind of incrementalist mainstreaming approach. Other folks were very much in terms of revolutionary violence. The William Pierce's of the National Line wrote the book. The Turner Diary types. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, Duke was also helping, you know,

Donald Black in his attempted invasion and takeover of the Dominica Island. And he was helping with that and so forth. So, you know, you have folks playing both sides of the coin. And that's, I think, important to recognize. I was one of the.

One of the squad of young, very – so damn young people deployed down there to go beat David Duke from the Republican Party when he ran for governor in Louisiana. So he –

Duke was always one of those guys who the suit and tie and the decent haircut could never disguise completely who he was. He tried hard. I mean, and you saw – I always thought of Richard Spencer as the sort of next iteration of Duke, the guy with a well-cut suit and a good haircut, you know, who could present a little better. But then he couldn't hide it. He had to do the Heil Trump, Heil victory thing right after the inauguration of Trump in 17. And so, I mean –

On the upside, some of these people or a lot of these people seem to me to always be somewhat self-limiting. They always seem to be somewhat incapable of playing the game they think that they're playing in the broader society because their message is so repugnant. Yeah, I think that's a fair point. Part of it, I think, has to do with, you know, some of these folks are charlatans, certainly in grifters. Some of them are just sincerely, deeply committed to pugnacious games.

very anti-social destructive values and beliefs. And they have a hard time keeping that in and putting on a more polished face when they have these deeply felt beliefs that where they want to do Nazi salutes, they want to be able to do that openly and they want to be able to say ugly, violent things openly. And it's hard to keep up that face, that front stage. And so the backstage comes first.

kind of screaming forward and poses them sometimes. And obviously that can be counterproductive for them. Although, you know, I do think some of this is getting mainstream. So that backstage ugliness, because, you know, you mentioned the Overton window and the normalization process, what appears to be some changing norms around political violence, frankly, it's now, you know, that ugliness, that backstage stuff isn't as counterproductive as it was, you know, 10 years ago.

Yeah, I think that's right. So one of the people that has been a promoter of one of the central elements of today's white supremacy movement is Tucker Carlson with the white replacement theory.

And, you know, you can see it in their rhetoric. You can see it in their materials. You can see it in their video productions. They're always on this like Americans or white Americans are only 57 percent of the population. It's crashing fast. And white Americans or white people are only 11 percent of the world. It's crashing fast.

The whole world is in a global population rundown. There's no populations that are rapidly growing anymore. But the idea of white replacement has become really central. Elon Musk is another one. They've all gotten into this frame where they're super concerned about it. And

I'm curious, like with a guy like Tucker Carlson, who was promoting that on the biggest cable network in the country, what role do you see him as having played in the last few years as a way to give a lot of the people that have a much uglier, even more ugly set of beliefs below him permission to start talking about race in the ways that enable them to build that white supremacist movement?

You know, you mentioned permission. So I think that's an important word here in terms of thinking about permission structures that people like Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump provide large numbers of folks. And it's really actually, I think, hard to quantify the influence and impact and to really wrap our minds around how much this is likely. You're talking about with Carlson, millions of viewers every night when, you know, on Fox and, you know,

And still now, you know, obviously large following, large audience for things he's been doing on X and so forth. And so it's substantial, that's for sure. But it's really because, again, at least in recent history, we haven't quite seen anything like what we've seen in the last five to ten years. Yeah, and I think that the idea of

of having a guy like a Tucker, you know, he, he's, he's, he was able to appeal to a younger audience, somewhat younger. He was able to appeal, uh, by, by couching, by couching the white nationalism in demographic arguments and, and cultural arguments. Um, and I'm curious, you know, look right now, 50% of the children born in America, they are of mixed race or of nonwhite, nonwhite or mixed race.

And as my friend Stuart Stevens says, chances are they're going to stay that way. What do you see as the future for this movement? I'm kind of hopeful that it ages out eventually. But I think that there's a big effort inside of it. And I'm curious about your insights on this to recruit younger and younger and younger people to socialize them online primarily online.

And to convince them that that, you know, their problems are because of black people, because of brown people. Where do you see that younger recruitment of these of these kids coming in from? And how do you see that developing in the next few years?

Well, the online aspect, the digital space is the gaming subculture that's largely online. These are huge pipelines and there's substantial efforts as we speak for formal recruitment, but also a lot of informal recruitment.

the informal cultural kind of aspects that are consistent with white supremacy in terms of the normalization of, for instance, the use of the N-word in a lot of gaming spaces and even online more broadly, the way in which language is just routinely of a very toxic nature. You know, that's good news for white supremacists because that kind of toxicity is their bread and butter. Sure.

Talks and stuff that's unrelated to politics per se culturally is helpful in terms of setting things up for them so that they can then inject their worldview, their framework, their political positions into that kind of universe that's already kind of set up to view things in a very kind of –

vile way. So there's a real pipeline there. There's also though, as children are raised in certain environments, in certain neighborhoods, in certain families that may be embracing this kind of fear and anxiety about demographic change, obviously that's very influential for child development and children seeing the world in particular ways.

So that's obviously very troubling. And you would like to think that schools could offset some of that, but schools are in a tough position. Schools are frankly under attack as we speak across the country. And so, you know, they're limited in terms of what they can do to offset some of those influences. And how do you develop interventions for families that

frankly, aren't necessarily interested in changing their views or having a more open dialogue about some of these issues. That's very difficult. That's a really interesting point is that in some ways, you know, and I was that my next question was going to be like, how do you how do you push back against this? How do we as a culture, as a society, as a nation, how do we push back against this?

This virus that always seems to be hovering underneath the surface in, and it's not just American culture. It's, it's, there's, it's, it's a global problem, but how do we, how do we push back against that? Especially given that the, that the uptake and the ability of them to use a lot of the tools, social media, gaming culture, all those things to persuade these young men. And they are,

vastly, you know, the vast percentage of them are young men. How do we persuade them away from this? How do we, how do we, how do we push them out of a culture that is

That they're too young to understand how pernicious the culture is. Yeah. So I think there's three things on a broad scale and then one on a little bit more individual scale. The three broad scale things I think are important. One is we need to frame this problem as a challenge, as a threat to democracy. And so we're talking about –

anti-democratic forces at play and would hope that you could get that into more of a, you know, less of a partisan dialogue by framing things in terms of democracy. Although we're seeing some real challenges with that because unfortunately the

there is a certain attractiveness of authoritarianism. And frankly, democracy is a new way of doing governance. It's not that old. And there are real reasons why people might prefer other systems of governance that don't involve democracy. So, you know, that but that's even more reason why we need to really be doubling down on

trying to figure out from a kind of civic culture perspective, how do we, you know, center this discussion about democracy? Second, I do think we have to tackle the illogic of race and racism. That's got to happen at an early age. But, you

None of this makes sense in part because race doesn't make sense from a scientific standpoint. These are social categories. They have some biological basis, but certainly not the kind of biological basis we ascribe to them, especially when you start talking about migration patterns and how much intergenerational

Marriage there is across various groups from different geographic parts of the world. I mean, all of this starts to fall apart in terms of these kind of fixed racial categories that white supremacists base their entire world on.

So that's got to be attacked, and we can do that through cultural means. I think we can do it through education. But we've got to have national leaders who embrace a different way of talking about race. And, of course, we've seen recently the exact opposite of that with Donald Trump and his –

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As an old friend of mine who's been a mentor of mine, he's in his 80s now, said to me the other day, he goes, eventually Donald Trump will start discussing phrenology and the shape of her skull at this point because that's how primitive and weird and backward his ideas about her racial heritage are. You know, this is not a country. I think he's a eugenicist, you know, and I think, you know, certainly to the extent that he's familiar with those ideas, I think he subscribes to them.

I think, I think there, I have written a couple of books about the guy. There is some evidence that he believes that there are very strictly racially defined characteristics of intelligence and, and competence and capability, which are, look, he, he inherited those from, from his dad. His dad was a overt flaming racist and Trump is, you know, the, the, the fruit has fallen not far from the tree. So let me,

Let me just mention the third one, though, that I think is really important here is we've got to do something about social media in terms of regulation.

They publish things on a routine basis. That's what they do. They're in the business of publishing, and yet we don't treat them as publishers. And until we start doing that, I just don't see a path forward. I am somewhat optimistic by some states' more aggressive action on at least trying to get some regulation in place around age restrictions, which I think makes sense. But this is the Wild West in terms of this technology.

And it's – we're frankly engaged in what I believe is the greatest experiment in human history and we have very little transparency. The evidence that we do have, which is really growing by the day, is the negative consequences in terms of things like mental health, depression, anxiety, the more time you're on these platforms. You have the people creating the platforms themselves that have publicly said they don't allow their own children to use the platforms they've created. I talked to a senior –

person at Instagram one time who has children, early teenagers, and told me absolutely no how, no way will they ever have a tablet or a phone until they're 15 or 16. I will not do it. They understand how dangerous these platforms are for younger kids. And, you know, one of the things that does concern me is, especially because it has become this

somewhat walled off garden to people over the age of 30 is I was brief recently on there's a whole Nazi tick tock. There's a whole white supremacist tick tock. There's a whole cute dance moves. And yet, you know, they throw in that, that, that the Holocaust was a lie. All these things. I worry that we are, you know, look after 2016, everyone was freaked out about Facebook and,

But I worry that the social media technology and the online communities have evolved more quickly than government, certainly, and society can respond to them. And it may end up being a vector where a lot of this racial animosity and animus and incitement

develops that we're not even clear about. I mean, Twitch, another area where, you know, if you're under 30, you're probably not super familiar with some of the subcultures that exist in some of these games. And as you said, you know, they've normalized a lot of racial hatred on those things. And I'm not saying we have to get rid of them. I'm just saying we need to be cognizant of what they are in the development of these subcultures that are so dangerous for representative democracy. Yeah.

Look, we didn't get rid of cigarettes to get a handle on smoking. What we did is we engaged in a massive national public health strategy and did involved lawsuits, was part of that strategy. And I think we need to be thinking in similar terms here. We have a public health crisis. That's right. That's right. It is a crisis that we can't wait for people to become better because I think a lot of the people that end up getting stuck in this –

get stuck in it. They find themselves in this subculture and it catches them, it captures them, it changes their life where they can't. Look, once you're a white supremacist standing up at Charlottesville, your job chances have gone down pretty significantly in the country. And people like the Matt Heimbachs of the world, they kind of regret what they did, but they're stuck in that culture now. They're in a broken culture.

culture that has embraced evil and they can't force themselves out of it, it takes a lot for them to do that. It takes a lot for them to have the courage to do that. I don't think we can just deter them is I guess what I'm trying to say. I think we have to, we have to persuade and, and, and give them a path out. If you, if you tell them that once you've done this, you can never, ever leave it.

That keeps them stuck in a racial, you know, a frame of racial hatred. Well, that was my fourth individual issue that in terms of intervention is that, yeah, we we need to invest in more efforts. We have some, you know, you know, in.

Being in various stages of development and they need a lot more, I think, resources. We need a lot more work in terms of figuring out how to structure and organize them in a professional manner. They're consistent with best practices in mental health, social work, guidelines and so forth.

It's been kind of a field where there are these programs that provide interventions to individuals that are engaged in these kind of groups that want to leave. Or maybe they've left, but their life is still, you know, really a mess, frankly, and they haven't been able to reintegrate into society like you were describing. And so these programs try and help those individuals. And those are really important programs, and we need more of it.

And we need more investment in those efforts and trying to figure out what are the best strategies to help individuals. And, you know, some of these individuals do have deep-seated, long-term mental health problems that haven't been treated. Sure. Oh, yeah. Some individuals have just no opportunities in terms of education and job training, and they need that.

Some folks have tattoos all over their bodies and even over their faces and that they need those obstacles removed. And that can be quite expensive. So there's all kinds of different sources of support that we could provide to individuals to increase the likelihood that they leave that life behind and really build a new life that's not based on hate and extremism.

Yeah, I think that is, I think that is that, that giving them a pathway out, you know, you never want to, if you're, if you're in a, if you're in a battle, you never want to leave people with no option, but to fight to the death. You want to give them a path out. And I think that's one of the things that is important as we look at this is like,

sanction, but also, you know, an ability to rehabilitate is something that I think is really important. Very important. I spend a lot of time with formers, you know, folks who aren't involved anymore.

And in some cases, they have really radically transformed themselves. They're now involved in not hate activism. They're involved in civil rights activism. They're deeply religious and involved in their church or doing volunteer work to help people, immigrants in refugee situations and helping them rebuild their lives. And so, you know, there's there's folks that really do.

Go from that kind of hate and extremism to a very different life that is quite positive and productive. And so we want more of that, obviously. Right. And I do think the story of America is this arc. When my German ancestors came here to this country in 1820, they were the scum of the earth.

They were European filth. Why are we having these people come here? And then in successive waves, the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the, the, the Vietnamese, all these waves where they're the, you know, the hated community becomes America. That's the gift of this country. The propositional gift of this country is that you, you, it's not blood and soil. It's the idea and the ideal. And, and I think that, that,

the, the, the fundamental gift this country gives people is that chance to become something better. And I'm, I'm, I want to just thank you for the work you do and looking into how we can mitigate some of these problems that are still out there and keeping us from doing that. Um, and, uh, and let me know if there's anything else you want to promote or, uh, or, or your socials and, uh, and we'll wrap up this interview.

Okay. Well, I don't have any social media handles. So smart. Good for you. God bless. We do have a new book out. Tell me. Yeah, it's called Out of Hiding. I co-authored it with Kathleen Blee and Robert Futrell. And it looks at many of the issues we've been discussing. Okay. The book, folks, is Out of Hiding. And it is available on Amazon and everywhere fine books are sold.

And it's something I think that summarizes a lot of the work that we were discussing today. And I think it's a valuable effort that you guys are pursuing because this really is one of the most corrosive factors that's harming our democracy. So, Peter Simi, thank you so much for coming on the Lincoln Project podcast today. We'll talk to you again soon. Thank you for having me. You bet. Good night and good luck.