Jan 6 Hearing Tied Trump to The White Power Movement

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, HOST: To explore the evolution of right-wing extremist groups in America and their connection to Trump, author and historian Kathleen Belew joins WalterIsaacson.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Bianna. And Professor Kathleen Belew, welcome back to the show.

KATHLEEN BELEW, AUTHOR, “BRING THE WAR HOME” AND ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY: Thank you for having me.

ISAACSON: So, we heard yesterday’s hearings a whole about the white power movement. You wrote a book about it called “Bring the War Home.” One of the things that struck me is how the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, two separate organizations, get united by Trump in this January 6th insurrection. What did — what struck you about that?

BELEW: It’s interesting to note the way that this argument was put forth in the Committee hearings this week, because their purpose here is to establish that Trump was the unifying figure that brought these groups into sort of common purpose on January 6th. And that his go order was sort of the thing that tipped off the violence. And that fits, of course, the idea that the first job of the Committee is some kind of accountability for the very near brush we had with a coup. But the other thing to think about here is that these groups have worked together over quite a long time. So, the white power movement is a loose social movement that has brought together a whole bunch of different ideological viewpoints on the right, from the Klan, two Skinheads, to neo- Nazis, to parts of the militia movement, and now, to groups like Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and others that were at play on the 6th. So, we have spent a lot of time talking about these groups as disparate, when, in fact, we should be thinking of them as a groundswell. So, this was a very helpful thing to see during the hearings.

ISAACSON: You referred to it as a white power movement. Tell me about that terminology.

BELEW: So, white power is, first of all, what these activists called themselves during the earlier part of their history, which is what I write about, from the late 1970s to the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1985. And the reason they use that term and the reason that I think it’s a helpful term is that it really lays bare the violent and revolutionary capacity of this movement. I think sometimes when people hear the word nationalism, as in white nationalism, they think of sort of patriotism run amok, or the idea that there’s something white about the American nation, culturally or linguistically or historically, that should be preserved. That’s not what these folks tend to be about. The white power movement is interested in, you know, the eradication of people of color, white homeland, and possibly even a white ethnostate or even an all-white planet achieved through profound violence and asymmetric warfare.

ISAACSON: One of the things that struck me about your book, which we heard about in yesterday’s hearings too, is to what extent — to a large extent, the white power movement is not super nationalist, but is anti-state. They felt that the state was the enemy.

BELEW: That’s right. This is one of the big unresolved conflicts in the way our founding documents are arranged. And I think I heard someone on the radio talking about Alexander Hamilton — or maybe this was in one of the closing statements in the hearing, talking about Alexander Hamilton and thinking about, you know, the capacity of the government to limit the Mob, the capital M, Mob, of the people, from committing violence that might hurt the democratic process, which is one impulse. The other impulse that runs in our society is the capacity of the People, capital P, to limit the state. And whether the Mob is a sort of violent body that needs to be constrained by the state, or whether the state is a tyrannical force that needs to be constrained by the people, it’s one of these contradictions that we have never fully sorted out. And you see it come up over and over again in the history of vigilante movements in the United States as sort of an alibi for all kinds of violence and all kinds of anti-democratic activity. And certainly, the testimony of the gentleman who was — who had worked with the Oath Keepers, was very clearly in line with this, talking about how the group imagined an armed revolution — — how they thought about creating a deck of playing cards with targets. How they thought about training and armament. The new information we’re hearing about, not only weapons but explosives and, you know, tactical gear. All of this is in line with the paramilitary movement that has been waging war on the United States since, at least, the early 1980s, and has done so largely unabated over time. And it’s a threat that has become a clear and present danger not only to American citizens but also to our country as a whole.

ISAACSON: Well, one of the things that I confused about this whole thing was in waging war, insurrectionists against a bad State, and then Donald Trump, who is actually president, tells them to come and do it. Was Trump somebody who helped, sort of, alter what the ideology was of the Proud Boys?

BELEW: So, this is a tricky question. Because I think the committee has two different goals here, or at least, should have two different goals here. One of them is accountability for the — for Former President Trump and his administration for the events of January 6th. And the attempts to stop the peaceful transfer of power. I think that’s the first order of business, and just that is a huge Herculean effort. And has, I think, commanded most of the attention. But the other goal should be for us all to come away from this with a clearer view of this groundswell of white power and militant right activity that, you know, may have for a while, united behind President Trump. But certainly, was never fully in anyone’s command, and certainly did not stand down after January 6th, but remains with us as a live and militarized presence in our society that is, even now, continuing a campaign of intimidating school boards, trying to wage attacks on State houses, infringe into local political processes, do intimidation campaigns. We should be thinking about the folks arrested in the U-Haul, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho and the marches against pride parades, the march in Boston. This is all rolling along at a very frenetic pace as the committee is trying to tell the story. So, the groundswell is what we have to keep in view.

ISAACSON: This groundswell of white nationalist armed insurrectionists in your book, it surprised me. I hadn’t really known this began after Vietnam, or should I say, America’s failure in Vietnam. Why does that happen and how does that resonate today?

BELEW: You know, one of the interesting correlations in rises and falls in clan membership, which is one of the longer, sort of, histories of this kind of an activity that we have going back to the 1860s, is that they correlate more closely with the aftermath of warfare than they do with most other contextual factors. So, the aftermath of warfare is a better indication that there is going to be a surge in Far-right activity and violence than poverty, or immigration, or civil rights gains, or various kinds of social unrest. Many other measures people have looked at to determine what’s going on here. And it turns out this is not just about veterans, although veterans do bring high levels of tactical weapons expertise that really escalate the capacity of these groups to do harm. It turns out that all of us are more available for violence in the aftermath of war. One sociologist found that that measure cuts across gender, across age, across who did and didn’t serve in combat. It’s all Americans who find themselves more available for violent reaction after warfare. And although the global war on terror was fought by a small number of people over a very long stretch in ways that were often not visible to most of American society, we’re talking about our longest war ever. When the — my undergraduates don’t even remember a time before 9/11. They don’t remember 9/11. So, the legacies about long engagement, I think, are with us. And there certainly powerful motivators for groups like the Oath Keepers which is focused on the recruitment of veterans.

ISAACSON: How great is the magnitude? How worried should we be about this movement?

BELEW: I think that it is difficult to be too worried about this at present. This is — in my view, there are two major dangers posed to everyone in the United States right now from this movement. One of them is that groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys become a sort of paramilitary shock force of the most extreme parts of the GOP, and lead us towards a, sort of, authoritarian politics that is enforced by violent action, intimidation, and all of the things we would expect from reading the history of those movements. The other is that there will be a contingent of people in those groups, like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, who are not at all interested in the United States or gaining power as part of the GOP, but who are actually interested in overthrowing the United States and creating their own ethnostate which is, not at all, interested in democracy or voting or freedom or any of the things I think of as patriotic. Both of these are dangerous to our society. And I think one thing that the Committee is showing us is that the time to respond is running short.

ISAACSON: How important was Trump in all of this? One of the witnesses said, Ben is lucky. We haven’t seen this before. It could’ve happened before, after any one of these insurrections. And, yet it seems Trump is the person who makes it happen on January 6.

BELEW: I’m convinced that that is true from a tactical standpoint and that the go signal was Trump calling people to the Hill. I think that testimony has shown that. I’m not sure how much he was in command of the movement and I’m not sure that we didn’t already see other attempts at this. So, I mean, most viewers might not realize that the Oklahoma City bombing was not just the work of a few disaffected madmen or a lone wolf, but part of this very carefully organized domestic terrorist attempt to destabilize the government and bring people into the white power movement. And it worked, by the way. The militia movement numbers rose after Oklahoma City’s bombing. And, I think, future historians will find that that sort of bump in inactivity fueled us into the way that takes us to unite the right in Charlottesville. All of this has deep history going back decades, if not generations. We have a lot of examples of how it has worked. The other problem here is that this is the movement that operates simultaneously above ground, where we can see it, which is the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. And also underground, where it is much more difficult to have an in-the-moment sense of what’s happening. We get little bits of it when we read about groups like Adam Wathan (ph) or other, kind of, paramilitary strength force units. But the underground is largely out of view. The historical archives show us that we won’t have the full story about that part of it for a good long time, 10 or 20 years, right? With the exception of moments like this committee, where we get all this information. We get people leaving the groups and talking about what they were doing. We get lists of weapons. We get asset seizures. We get plea bargains. So, this is our opportunity to see behind the curtain. And so far, what we’re seeing is very alarming and should escalate everybody’s sense of urgency about this problem.

ISAACSON: One of the people who testified yesterday was a spokesperson for the Oath Keepers, who then quit the organization. He said he quit the organization when he found them all standing around a store talking about how the holocaust was made up and was fake. To what extent is it more than just white power, and to what extent is it antisemitism and other things rolled in?

BELEW: So, one of the interesting things about the white power movement is that it is an incredibly flexible, ideological group of people. So, if you think about what has to happen in the 1980s, for instance, to put a, sort of, traditional Christian white separatist in the room with a hard-drinking tattooed, topless skinhead. We’re talking about huge, sort of, contortions to make that OK with everybody. And the thing that motivates that ability to be flexible and bring everyone together is an intense sense of emergency that the white race is under attack and will be eradicated without swift action. So, that sense of urgency is able to pull in all kinds of different social issues into one, sort of, conspiratorial, apocalyptic belief system. So, antisemitism, in this ideology, undergirds all kinds of other issues. Whether they’re interested in opposing the federal government, opposing abortion, opposing gay rights, avoiding contact with people of color or doing violence to those communities, opposing a non-Christian people of various kinds. The other interesting thing that that witness said during the hearing was that the Oath Keepers were deliberately misrepresenting the fact that they are a militia group. Saying that they were a veterans advocacy group. And this is all directly out of the playbook of the white power movement. I — the one that springs to mind was David Duke saying, you know — or folks like that saying, I’m not racist, I’m racialist. I’m not segregationist, I’m separatist, right? Because they’re always figuring out where they can land within the realm of, sort of, public acceptability so that they can recruit and radicalize more people.

ISAACSON: One of the odd things about the whole Oath Keeper movement is how people like General Michael Flynn suddenly got sucked into this deranged vortex. To what extent is it affecting military people, and how do the — how does somebody like Michael Flynn get so sucked into this?

BELEW: The short answer is that there are as many ways into this movement as there are people in the movement. There are — people find this kind of ideology for all kinds of reasons. Some of them are about deeply held beliefs. Some of them are about social connections and ulterior motives. And, you know, there’s all kinds of things going on. And I’m not someone who believes there’s, sort of, like, a clear psychological profile. I think it’s sort of a — like any social movement, there’s a variety of things happening. But what I will say is that it’s very typical for the white power movement to target active-duty service members and veterans for recruitment, because they want those skills that those people bring. And I will say that the Department of Defense has only, in the last two years or so, begun the process of taking a tally of how many people have this kind of a belief system within the armed forces. But plain and simple, we don’t know how big the problem it is because nobody has been keeping an accurate count. And it’s even worse than police officer record keeping because there’s no centralized record keeping there at all.

ISAACSON: President Biden announced a national response to domestic terrorism that touched on a lot of this. What’s your thought about his plan and what more do we need to be doing?

BELEW: That plan is a huge step in the right direction. As are the — sort of, string of reports that have come from the Department of Homeland Security and FBI, saying that this white power domestic terrorism is the biggest terrorist threat to the United States at present. This is it. This is the big one that we need to be organizing around, and allocating resources to, and figuring out how to surveil and doing all of these things. But the thing is that this movement has been on the march since the ’70s. It declared war formally on the United States in 1983, and we have a few years of will and resources, and expertise devoted to the problem. So, the question is going to be, how quickly we can catch up? How much will there is to solve the problem? And whether it will be enough?

ISAACSON: Professor Kathleen Belew, thank you so much for joining us again.

BELEW: Thank you very much for having me.