Trump’s J6 Pardons, the Militia Movement, and the Border

Speaker 2 Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is on with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher.

Speaker 2 We're less than two weeks into the new administration, and things are already feeling very, very different. In fact, it feels menacing and has a lot of momentum.

Speaker 2 With Trump using executive orders as cudgels to all kinds of groups, from LGBTQ plus people to immigrants to just about anyone who stands in his way.

Speaker 2 From the very first day, President Trump has been quick to follow through on some of his campaign promises, as I expected him to, including granting clemency to all of the January 6th insurrectionists, the nonviolent and the violent, including the ones who attacked the Capitol Police and commuted the sentences of 14 individuals charged with being seditious conspiracists.

Speaker 2 That includes the leaders of two militia groups, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. Trump also directed the Justice Department to dismiss another 300 cases that were still pending in court.

Speaker 2 There is obviously so much to talk about here, the militias currently operating all over the country, their ideologies that separate or unite them, and any potential role they might have in the new administration.

Speaker 2 My guests today are three people who've been studying and tracking the movements of these militia groups and their place in the current environment. Dr.

Speaker 2 Amy Couder is the director of research at Middlebury's Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism.

Speaker 2 She studies domestic militias and groups of armed individuals who see it as their civic duty to uphold the Constitution the way they believe it should be interpreted.

Speaker 2 Tess Owen is an investigative reporter who has covered extremism in politics and events surrounding January 6th extensively.

Speaker 2 And Paul Rosenzweig is a cybersecurity lawyer who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security under George W.

Speaker 2 Bush and now specializes in issues relating to domestic and homeland security. Our expert question comes from David Rode, National Security Editor at NBC News and the author of Where Tyranny Begins.

Speaker 2 Stick around.

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Speaker 2 Amy, Tess, Paul, welcome. Thanks for being on on.
Thank you for having us.

Speaker 2 We're speaking on January 28th, just a week after President Trump took office, launching many executive orders, including issuing pardons and commutations to all of the nearly 1,600 January 6th protesters.

Speaker 2 As people have been following January 6 insurrectionist militia groups in Trump for years, give me one or two words that sums up your reaction. Paul, you start, then Amy, then Tess.

Speaker 6 Shameful.

Speaker 2 Shameful. Okay.
Amy?

Speaker 3 Unfortunately, unsurprising.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 Tess?

Speaker 7 Surprised, but shouldn't have been.

Speaker 2 Shouldn't have been. Okay, let's start with that, Tess.

Speaker 2 Talk about these people, these nearly 1,600 people who are pardoned, and put them in groups because i think differentiating them is important for people to understand

Speaker 7 you know i think it's important to know that obviously the the oath keepers and the proud boys the two main extremist groups who are among the january sixers that um you know those rightfully get a lot of attention um because of kind of what they tell us about society and political violence but the vast majority of the violent offenders um in that group were not affiliated with uh with the extremist group um and i think that that's kind of something important to remember as we talk about this: that these are people who were radicalized into committing violence on behalf of Trump on January 6th.

Speaker 7 We know that 169, I think, is the right number, of those people assaulted or pleaded guilty to assaulting police. 600 were convicted of either assaulting police or resisting arrest.

Speaker 7 There were groups, you know, leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers who were convicted of seditious conspiracy.

Speaker 2 Okay. So, Amy, you've written about militia groups actually tend to to grow when they perceive themselves to be targeted.

Speaker 2 The reason I'm asking is, do you think the Biden DOJ made a mistake of going after writers who weren't directly tied to these militia groups or by prosecuting people who weren't there, like Proud Boys leader Enrique Tario, or people who didn't commit extremely violent stuff, which were obvious from some of the videos?

Speaker 3 You know, I'm not the legal expert on this panel, but I think it was nonetheless important for the Biden administration to send a message.

Speaker 3 And I don't know that every single person was appropriately charged given the underlying action, but let's assume that they were.

Speaker 3 And if we can assume that, I think it's really important to send a message that at its core says insurrection is bad. We need to support democracy and democratic principles.

Speaker 3 Militias had an interesting response to January 6th. We know that there were certainly some militia members involved in the insurrection.

Speaker 3 But many of them that I have followed for a long time were looking at that and thought it was terrible, thought it was terrible for the country, thought it was terrible for the militia movement.

Speaker 3 And so they didn't necessarily complain when some of the perpetrators were held accountable.

Speaker 2 Because?

Speaker 3 Because they thought they deserved it. They thought they were acting in a way that was not supported by the law, was not supported by patriotism as they understood it either.

Speaker 2 Okay, Paul, from a legal standpoint, Trump's argument has been that their sentences are ridiculous and excessive. He's called them hostages.

Speaker 2 Talk about these sentences, whether they're too heavy-handed, too broad, or just the the right thing.

Speaker 10 Well, I think the only way to answer that is really on a case-by-case basis.

Speaker 11 The reality

Speaker 15 is that the overwhelming majority of what you and I would consider the minor offenders, the people who pled guilty to misdemeanor, trespass, things,

Speaker 14 did no jail time at all.

Speaker 21 You know, there are a few exceptions, but by and large, the people who went to prison were the people who, as Tess described it, were convicted of some form of violence, some form of resisting arrest, some form of assault against police.

Speaker 15 And the people who got the most significant sentences, the ones that were in the 8, 10, 12 year range, were some of the organizers of this, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, who were convicted of seditious conspiracy, that is, of plotting to

Speaker 9 disrupt.

Speaker 22 the operations of Congress.

Speaker 26 And so, by and large,

Speaker 12 I would say that the president's characterization is inaccurate.

Speaker 25 That,

Speaker 9 you know, the sorting function is by no means perfect.

Speaker 11 No one would ever say it is. But by and large, the judges of the District of Columbia

Speaker 13 District Court did a very good job of assessing individuals on the merit and

Speaker 11 kind of grading their sentencing.

Speaker 23 based upon comparative

Speaker 9 guilt next to others.

Speaker 17 There are any number of instances, for example, of judges who issued sentences that were below that which the prosecutors recommended

Speaker 13 precisely because they perceived that the defendants who

Speaker 23 some had accepted responsibility and expressed remorse, some had

Speaker 23 admitted only to nonviolent offenses, they racked and stacked them pretty reasonably.

Speaker 14 Again, I wouldn't validate each and every sentence, but for my money,

Speaker 12 and this is me speaking personally, by and large, the judges were more lenient than I would have wanted them to be.

Speaker 2 So how did Trump's argument get such purchase?

Speaker 2 Now, I'm not talking about calling them tourists, which was insane, but the idea, why does it have such resonance, this accusation that Trump is making from your perspective, from a legal standpoint?

Speaker 9 Well, I don't think

Speaker 16 it is a legal argument.

Speaker 28 I mean, honestly, because in law it never got any purchase at all i mean none of the judges not even the ones who were trump appointees in the district of columbia ever accepted the we're just tourists and they're being uh unjustly prosecuted it gained purchase only

Speaker 19 only amongst trump's uh trump supporters sycophantic supporters and and as to their mentality why it gained purchase there um you know i I'm going to turn it back and say I'm not the sociologist or the expert in militias and Trumpism on this panel.

Speaker 26 So I'll have to turn it back to

Speaker 2 Tess first and then Amy. What do you imagine? Because there is, as it goes on, his accusations and arguments get some sort of purchase.

Speaker 7 It does. I actually spoke to some ex-DOJ officials about this idea of overreach and whether there was any merit to these arguments.

Speaker 7 And kind of what they said was sort of what Paul's saying is that overreach is a matter of perception, sure.

Speaker 7 And I think that what it was really about was about narrative.

Speaker 7 And kind of midway through 2021, we saw this narrative of the idea that these January 6ers, especially those being held in DC jail, that they were being treated disproportionately poorly compared to others, that they were victims of political persecution, that they were languishing in these cells and being treated horribly, and that they were the victims actually of a kind of corrupt Biden administration that's hell-bent on galing its political enemies.

Speaker 7 And I think this narrative is really what helped rehabilitate the January 6ths, but rehabilitate also the entire MAGA movement, which was kind of floundering at that point.

Speaker 7 And Trump, you know, we saw Trump hitch his own issues, his own legal woes to the same narrative.

Speaker 2 Right, this idea of being persecuted and everything else. Tess,

Speaker 2 you did write the article this fall for New York Magazine, what was happening inside the Patriot Wing, and your story in Wired was titled The Proud Boys Are Plotting a Comeback and They Want Revenge.

Speaker 2 I'd just like to add to that, and then Amy, I'd like you to weigh in after that, is what are you hearing from those groups and what revenge would look like from their perspective if they have this narrative in their favor?

Speaker 7 It's a very good question because I mean, as far as the Proud Boys are concerned, you know, we've definitely seen their MO or their activities shift since January 6th.

Speaker 7 We've seen them pivot pretty hard into local activism. Really, until Inauguration Day, we haven't really seen them rally in a large place in so many numbers.

Speaker 7 We've seen them kind of targeting school board meetings and drag shows and taking on this culture war stuff.

Speaker 7 So it's unclear.

Speaker 7 There's also been kind of a splintering within the group where some have kind of sought legitimacy by allying themselves with kind of political groups, whereas others have aligned with more hardcore factions like neo-Nazis.

Speaker 7 And so when Tario and others talk about revenge, it's kind of unclear whether they see revenge as political violence or whether they see revenge as, as, okay, we hope that Trump and Trump's DOJ is going to go after our enemies and go after the FBI agents and go after the prosecutors who, quote, did this to us.

Speaker 7 I think that's currently not clear.

Speaker 7 But what Tario did make clear in the interview he gave to InfoWars after he walked out prison was that he still very much sees the Proud Boys as a kind of defense force. for Trump supporters.

Speaker 2 So Amy, talk about the narrative and this idea if they feel they were unjustly, you know, there's sort of this story, the IRA, this has happened all over the world and this idea of freedom fighters versus terrorists, essentially.

Speaker 3 Right. And I think Tess is exactly right about what happened sort of following the event itself.

Speaker 3 But I think that the narrative thread started before that, that it's fundamentally the same narrative that pushed people to believe the election would be stolen, that it was being stolen, that it was, in fact, in the past stolen.

Speaker 3 And so even though some of the movement lost momentum during Biden's administration in some ways, that narrative was still in the backdrop.

Speaker 3 There was a belief among a lot of folks that Biden's administration was completely illegitimate, that Trump was going to come back and be victorious and swoop in and save them regardless of whatever injustices happened that day.

Speaker 3 And so I think that there were things that happened in the justice system and around the narrative of unjust persecution, not just prosecution, that followed and amplified that.

Speaker 3 But I think that a lot of people just maintained that thread all along. All right.

Speaker 2 Every week we get a question from outside. Let's have a listen to this one.

Speaker 30 Hi, I'm David Rode, the National Security Editor at NBC News and a former guest on the show.

Speaker 30 My big question is: will these prisoners be further radicalized now that they've been released from prison and further emboldened?

Speaker 30 Or do you think their time in prison might cause them to think twice about engaging in violence again?

Speaker 2 So, Paul, let's start with you. Do judges and prosecutors have a reason to be afraid? And what about this emboldenment when you get off like this?

Speaker 11 The entire theory of criminal punishment is one of deterrence, both general deterrence, that is the idea that the judicial system generally deters most crime, and specific deterrence, that is, that I can convince you personally.

Speaker 14 to refrain from bad conduct by imposing upon you personally adverse consequences.

Speaker 26 The pardons

Speaker 25 in this case

Speaker 11 do not serve the traditional purposes of pardons, namely correcting an injustice of some sort.

Speaker 25 Rather,

Speaker 17 they seem to me to be explicitly about eroding that deterrence function

Speaker 14 by making it clear that at least for so long as Donald Trump is president,

Speaker 13 people who engage in violence on his behalf, he will have their back

Speaker 22 and issue pardons.

Speaker 28 Now, again, each case is different.

Speaker 9 I am 100% certain that there are some guys and maybe even gals, though it was mostly men, but some people who went into prison, who had such a miserable experience that they're like, I'm not doing that ever again.

Speaker 11 I don't care

Speaker 26 what Trump says.

Speaker 9 But there are lots of others, like we just heard about Tario, right, and the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers who are inevitably going to think that I can do what I want.

Speaker 23 And especially if what I want somehow manages to cement Trump or Trumpism

Speaker 31 in the next administration, in four or eight years.

Speaker 19 So

Speaker 28 I think

Speaker 31 that

Speaker 11 much of what Trump has done is going to create a remarkably dangerous moment of violence in the next year to two in which some of his supporters think that no amount of violence in his in his behalf is

Speaker 14 is beyond the pale.

Speaker 2 So Tess, you had written about this in this Patriot Wing where they became more emboldened. These are already some violent people.
Talk a little bit about this question that David had.

Speaker 2 Will they be further radicalized from your perspective? Were they already there, essentially?

Speaker 7 So those who don't know about it, the Patriot Wing was the name that was adopted for this part of the DC jail where January 6thers pre-trial were kind of sequestered from the general population.

Speaker 7 The decision to put them all there, I couldn't quite get a sense of who made that decision. But what became clear through the reporting I did was that

Speaker 7 it was functioning as a sort of incubator for those very same beliefs that brought them all to the capital in the first place.

Speaker 7 And that there was a culture inside that wing where,

Speaker 7 people were kind of put through purity tests when they first arrived.

Speaker 7 And if they, you know, if they showed any sign that they might be a quote fed or they exhibited views that were contrary to the others in the wing, they were shunned.

Speaker 7 It kind of operated a bit like a gang.

Speaker 7 And it's not just the people who were in the wing, but there's also this massive support system outside of January 6th activists that's putting money into their commissary funds and helping their legal defense funds, which are also shoring up these same belief systems.

Speaker 7 And so I think that was, you know, troubling.

Speaker 2 They were already cooking that in that direction.

Speaker 7 Yes.

Speaker 2 Amy, talk about this, because if they were already radicalized, they got possibly got more radicalized in prison. Some of them regretted it, certainly.

Speaker 2 But a lot of the reaction when they got out was, I'm buying motherfucking guns, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 3 Well, I think Paul is exactly right, that there's going to be a bit of a split reaction.

Speaker 3 In some past instances of militia violence, where militia members have really believed they were doing what they needed to do for the good of the country.

Speaker 3 They've been arrested, they've served time in prison.

Speaker 3 One case in particular with the Hatari militia in Michigan in 2009, most of those folks were actually eventually acquitted, but they had been incarcerated while awaiting trial. Sure.

Speaker 3 And most of them, once they were released, went back home and said, I want nothing to do with this ever again. It went further than I thought.

Speaker 3 And maybe I didn't really get punished for this, but it was awful. It disrupted my life.

Speaker 3 On the the other hand, especially with figures like Terryo and Stuart Rhodes, people who already had, frankly, a degree of clout in the movement before this ever happened, they're really in a position where Trump could, if not officially, effectively deputize them.

Speaker 3 And what I'm worried about most is the impact. that that kind of perceived legitimacy from the highest office will have on border militias specifically.

Speaker 3 And thinking about just generally, as Tuss was saying, there could be a range of violence that is legitimized, that is seen as not only necessary in their worldview, but something that is being signed off on by the president.

Speaker 2 We'll be back in a minute.

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Speaker 2 Biden preemptively pardoned former chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Stack Mark Milley, and members of the bipartisan select committee that investigated January 6th, including Liz Cheney.

Speaker 2 Trump, on the other hand, revoked security protections and issued orders announcing investigations into the Justice Department.

Speaker 2 This episode is coming out on Thursday, January 30th, the day that Cash Patel's Senate confirmation hearing to become FBI director is scheduled.

Speaker 2 Paul, you said that if Patel becomes FBI director, he would be the poster child of vindictiveness. I think that's pretty clear.

Speaker 2 He would be not just a deputized person, he would be the official that would allow this to happen. Do you think the preemptive pardons actually protect any of those people?

Speaker 31 Well, he wouldn't just be the officer allowing it to happen.

Speaker 15 He would be, as director of the FBI, empowered to order it to happen.

Speaker 16 The FBI's investigative authority is limited mostly by internal guidelines called the domestic investigatory oversight guidelines or diodes, which have been around for ever since the Nixon abuses of the 1970s, which are intended to

Speaker 17 cabin.

Speaker 11 the ability of the FBI to initiate investigations for pretextual reasons, for punitive reasons, for political reasons.

Speaker 11 But they are just guidelines, and each and every one of them is subject to waiver or change by the director of the FBI and the attorney general.

Speaker 9 We can't tell for sure, but given what Trump has done in the last week, which has been the most

Speaker 11 expansive assertion of executive authority that we've ever seen in this country,

Speaker 14 in so many ways that we could spend eons talking about, it seems to me highly likely that one of the other ways that he would implement implement that authority would be to give Patel free rein to conduct investigations of anybody he wants.

Speaker 14 The pardons that President Biden issued to people squarely in Patel's crosshairs, like General Miley and Liz Cheney and Anthony Fauci, will serve as some protective benefit to them.

Speaker 14 It will mean that they can't be prosecuted in court.

Speaker 4 It's an open legal question whether it means they still have to suffer the costs and distraction of an investigation, even if that investigation can lead nowhere.

Speaker 11 That's actually never really been decisively litigated.

Speaker 14 I would hope that it would prevent that as well.

Speaker 22 But,

Speaker 15 you know, those pardons have to be cold comfort.

Speaker 15 It's shocking that we've come to this.

Speaker 2 They could investigate and harass them, in other words, is what you're saying.

Speaker 9 Well, certainly they can investigate and harass people associated with them.

Speaker 10 And they might be able to make investigative demands directly to the pardoned people under the guise of investigating somebody else.

Speaker 14 I mean, if I'm investigating you and you've got a pardon, I can harass Tess and Amy all I want

Speaker 26 as your friends who have information, air quotes, about you.

Speaker 21 And so it will be, it will, I,

Speaker 15 I will be unsurprised at the depths to which the Trump vengeance tour goes.

Speaker 2 Okay. So Cash Patel clearly aligned himself with the January 6th rioters.
The FBI is responsible for tracking, quote, domestic terrorism.

Speaker 2 Patel has vowed to turn the FBI into a museum of the deep state and basically dismantle it. Amy, in your book, you write about how Trump has aligned himself with militant accelerationists.

Speaker 2 Explain who they are and how the deconstruction of government that we're already seeing aligns with that mentality. And I will add that I have talked about this in Silicon Valley forever.

Speaker 2 They don't want to rebuild. They want to destroy.
They're more focused on businesses, but it's often those terms of destruction and disruption in a way that's destruction, really.

Speaker 3 Sure. So accelerationism at its core is this idea that the decline of society is inevitable and probably catastrophic.

Speaker 3 There are some people who think it's their personal responsibility to hasten us toward that inevitable point. through the use of violence.
And we call them militant accelerationists.

Speaker 3 Not all militias are militant accelerationist in nature because accelerationism is what we call ideologically agnostic. It can draw people from a variety of political perspectives.

Speaker 3 But anyone who has this standpoint that our system, whether it's political, social, economic, or all the above, are somehow fundamentally corrupt, not serving the interests of the people, that there's absolutely no way through the legitimate political process that we can fix this, kind of serve the interest of those accelerationists.

Speaker 3 Even if they themselves don't quite evince that hard line, many people can interpret them as saying that there's no solution here short of violence, short of what we might think of as coming just a little bit shy of revolution.

Speaker 3 Most of the time, these folks don't really have an idea of the exact future that they want.

Speaker 3 And what we've seen among Trump supporters real large is this idea that they don't like the system, but somehow they still trust Trump as part of the system to fix things.

Speaker 3 He has successfully marketed himself as a bit of an outsider to many of them in a way that they don't necessarily challenge him so much as what they perceive to be broader problems with the government or the country as a whole.

Speaker 2 One of the ways this goes around is through social media.

Speaker 2 Now, I've just noticed some recent polls that show voter sentiment is very low

Speaker 2 to what Trump has done here.

Speaker 2 Tess, talk a little bit about this because people don't seem to like these moves, right?

Speaker 2 And at the same time, these groups have returned to Facebook, they're reorganizing on there, and Meta has given them free rein, even if the average citizen thinks letting these people out was wrong.

Speaker 2 And most of these voter sentiment polls are showing this at this point. Other things are more supportive of immigration reform, et cetera.

Speaker 7 I mean, I think that the idea, even if they don't agree with the pardons, the kind of anti-government sentiment that we've seen kind of boil up and over in the mainstream in the last few years, I think that and kind of the hostilities towards perceptions of the FBI, perceptions of the DOJ as corrupt,

Speaker 7 I think those have become incredibly mainstreamed in the last few years. And,

Speaker 7 you know, those views are shared widely and freely on places like Facebook.

Speaker 7 And you don't need to be a part of militia to have those views, but we have seen also a militia resurgence on Facebook in the last few years or in the last year, especially.

Speaker 2 Aaron Ross Powell And that causes them to be able to organize there, correct? That's how reorganize there where they organized previously.

Speaker 7 Aaron Powell, yes, and it also creates a kind of a fertile environment to pull people into those. You know, I've reported a little bit about on these groups' return to Facebook.

Speaker 7 And oftentimes what we've seen is that they use these sort of larger public-facing groups that are kind of called something somewhat innocuous, but kind of centered around an anti-government ideology.

Speaker 7 And from there, people are kind of siphoned off into smaller groups that are more targeted around kind of training and actually enlisting in a specific organized group.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so it's like a Patrick Henry group or something like that. Yeah, a bigger one like that.

Speaker 2 So the big reason these accounts were deplatformed in the first place is because Meta was afraid people were inciting violence, organizing violent protests on their platforms.

Speaker 2 Paul, from a legal perspective, do the platforms need to worry about this anymore? They've certainly taken all the guardrails off, especially Mark Zuckerberg at Meta.

Speaker 26 Well,

Speaker 26 that

Speaker 23 is an interesting question. It depends, I think, upon what you think is going to happen to the tech industry in the next two years in the administration.

Speaker 15 Certainly, as a retrospective matter, the settled law is that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects against liability for what social media places post online.

Speaker 9 There's been a significant movement in Congress on a bipartisan basis to modify Section 230.

Speaker 26 There has.

Speaker 13 Most of that argument has revolved around

Speaker 9 keeping children safe online,

Speaker 9 child pornography, horrible sexual abuse materials that proliferate.

Speaker 11 But the legal principle would be the same and liability for posting would extend if the law were changed to media companies that posted exhortations to violence that became real and that failed to exercise their newly enacted obligations to monitor the content of what is on their website.

Speaker 14 I am not a smart enough political analyst to predict how a fight between

Speaker 13 the people who want to rein in social media, kind of the Bannonites of MAGA and the tech bros of the Elon Musk variety, actually plays out in Trump's head or in Trump's administration.

Speaker 15 But there's at least a possibility that two years from now we'll change that.

Speaker 2 But right now they are legally protected. Right now they didn't have to pull people off.
They didn't have to de-platform anybody, correct?

Speaker 4 At this moment,

Speaker 2 they're protected. So Amy, you write in the book about social media, especially Facebook played a huge role in giving the militia movement momentum and then de-platforming them disrupted their growth.

Speaker 2 I have warned about this for a... two decades now about how they organize and they're also in the WhatsApp.
They're all over the place in

Speaker 2 various stuff that you can't hack into necessarily or see. So how important do you see them now as organizing principals, Meta and X?

Speaker 2 And what role do you think someone like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg play

Speaker 2 and the new moderation rules impacting the group's ability to proliferate?

Speaker 3 You know, it's interesting because there are some groups that have gone back to Meta. There are some that never really left.
They were just a little bit more clever about how to stay on those spaces.

Speaker 3 But so many of them fractured and went to other places and, frankly, returned kind of to the practice of the 90s of really focusing on more direct communication with people who were already in their communities and using Zello, or which is kind of like a radio almost that you can use on your phone.

Speaker 3 And as just a way to stay more private, but also kind of again, refocusing on that community initiative as opposed to what was becoming a more national movement before January 6th happened and before Facebook deplatformed them.

Speaker 3 So So it's not entirely clear to me that we're going to see some of the more dangerous elements really coming back to those spaces because I feel like they've talked amongst themselves about how to stay more off the grid so they can get away with more things, quite frankly, in some of those more private places.

Speaker 2 Or did they consult with ISIS on how to do this?

Speaker 3 I mean, I think that

Speaker 3 they've frankly sat back and reconsidered some of their OPSEC after Facebook deplatformed them in particular, because despite the fact that militias say they're prepared for everything, the vast majority of them did not have a fallback plan for social media.

Speaker 3 Should that disappear overnight? I do think that we are seeing some very loud voices on social media right now, particularly on X,

Speaker 3 who we've started kind of calling influencers because often they keep their hands clean, but they certainly inspire other people into violence and other nasty actions.

Speaker 3 And there seems to be very little appetite to limit that or control their possible influence right this moment. Right.

Speaker 3 And I think that among the folks that I'm following, most of them are seeing

Speaker 3 Zuckerberg and Elon as proponents of free speech and like what they're doing to the platforms.

Speaker 3 They believe, even if they're very not racist themselves, or at least try to be, they believe that the marketplace of ideas will naturally shut those things down. Yeah, that's their argument.

Speaker 2 But speaking of which, speaking of people who are doing that, before before the pardons, we saw Elon Musk do what was a fascist salute on stage during Inauguration Day event, which engendered controversy, but then followed it with a bunch of explicitly Nazi jokes on X.

Speaker 2 Talk a little bit more about these moments, Tess, in terms of his role, because that's exactly what he's doing. And it's not even dog whistle.
That's even too

Speaker 2 subtle, what's happening here. It's very explicit, and he's allowing others to do the same thing on a platform.
Mark is being a little more implicit in terms of letting people do whatever they want.

Speaker 2 But talk about that. And Paul, I'd love your insight into what that, there's obviously no liability, but what does that do? Test first.

Speaker 7 I think Elon Musk is molded truly by 4chan

Speaker 7 troll culture.

Speaker 7 We've seen this with the far right or with the alt-right, where you can say one thing and you know that it's a dog whistle, but then you can also say, oh, it was just a joke or, you know, where things have layers of meaning.

Speaker 7 Whether he's trying to create these layer meaning or he just simply doesn't care, I think it's more likely the latter. But I think it's that's a kind of a key

Speaker 7 rhetorical tool that we've seen among this like 4chan troll types online. And that's definitely kind of the culture that I think has shaped him.

Speaker 2 And what impact do you think he has?

Speaker 7 Well, I mean, the far right love him. You know, the Garde Brows are completely off on X.

Speaker 7 It is a swamp of neo-Nazi content and far-right content. You don't have to be on there very long to kind of run into full-on Holocaust denialism.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I call it a Nazi porn bar. I'm going to be suing me at some point.

Speaker 2 But does it have that?

Speaker 2 Does it create a situation of these influencers that Amy was talking about?

Speaker 7 Where these influencers or where these kind of fringe voices are getting clout? Yes, definitely. I mean, also, they have blue ticks by their name.

Speaker 7 You know, they've been able to kind of buy their way to some form of legitimacy through the kind of different mechanisms that he's introduced or taken away from X.

Speaker 2 Right. And Paul, does it have any legal or can they just do this,

Speaker 2 do this without any impunity? With impunity, excuse me.

Speaker 15 It's really quite interesting.

Speaker 12 In the United States, it's almost certainly action with impunity.

Speaker 9 What is developing, which is going to be quite interesting, is that Europe has much different sensibilities about free speech issues, especially with regard to hate speech and especially with regard to pseudo-Nazi or Nazism speech, especially in Germany.

Speaker 11 There is a burgeoning

Speaker 31 sense that Europe may try and de-platform X or regulate X or fine X.

Speaker 11 I think the problem with any of that is really that

Speaker 9 Musk is too rich to care.

Speaker 21 I mean,

Speaker 27 he'll spend any amount of money. He'll pay any fine.

Speaker 14 You know it's it's not just that he's a troll it's that he's the uber troll who has absolutely no obligation um of truth or veracity of any sort to anybody anymore um and he's mutated over the last five years i i'm not enough of a psychologist to understand why but you know five ten years ago tesla was a cool idea and he was building really neat stuff and everybody liked him yeah now he's giving nazi salutes on tv um absolutely without again, with impunity.

Speaker 2 But Europe might push back. That would be the place you could see it happen.

Speaker 9 It's the only possibility is against against the Nazi, the most Nazi aspects of his speech.

Speaker 18 It may very well happen there.

Speaker 14 And maybe at some point here in the United States, people won't push back legally, but

Speaker 18 there'll be revulsion at what he does.

Speaker 9 Anybody who defends him, I ask them to do the salute in front of their children.

Speaker 2 We'll be back back in a minute.

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Speaker 2 Amy, as some of these groups support law enforcement, others see themselves as vigilantes to push back against officers who stand in their way. How do you make sense of these contradictions, Amy?

Speaker 2 What's the through line of attacking law enforcement and then at the same time supporting them?

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 3 I think that there is nuance in this movement, but the thing that helps most cleanly explain this is that from the movement as a whole, they kind of draw a line between what they perceive as good law enforcement versus bad law enforcement.

Speaker 3 And that's very subjective to them, of course.

Speaker 3 But they see good law enforcement as those they believe are upholding and following their understanding of the Constitution, their understanding of the nation.

Speaker 3 And those are the ones that they support and are willing to, in their view, protect at protests or some other kinds of events. Law enforcement officers...

Speaker 3 or agencies, especially at the federal level that they see as defying that mission are the bad guys and must be opposed with equal fervor.

Speaker 2 So, in that regard, let's talk specifically about immigration. Tess, you've written about some of the paramilitary groups.
We've been patrolling the borders for decades in some cases.

Speaker 2 Some seem like they want to work for the Trump administration, some don't. Talk about the border militias, who's patrolling there, and what potential issues you expect to see there.

Speaker 2 And then, Paul, I'm going to ask you a question about the legal issues around them in a second, but go ahead, Tess.

Speaker 7 Sure. I mean,

Speaker 7 those groups were certainly very, very excited after Trump won, and they see a place for themselves

Speaker 7 in Trump's enforcement actions.

Speaker 7 I spoke with the leader of kind of the biggest group, Arizona Recon,

Speaker 7 who claimed at least that he'd been in touch with the Trump administration and that they were actually in discussions about working together. I mean, that could be bluster.

Speaker 7 That could be, you know, I think these guys love to claim that they have ends with people in power to kind of give themselves legitimacy, but certainly that is their belief.

Speaker 7 You know, and we also saw this even with the Proud Boys recently, since it's the Pardons, where they're very excited and ramped up and talking about real-life activity um you know they're also seeing if there's there's some way that they could they could help out or contribute to to to to ice enforcement um

Speaker 7 i also think to kind of go back to your point about the police and and and um dotted you you were absolutely spot on with with that um you know we had for example cash patel on inauguration evening um getting lip surface as law enforcement saying, you know, we support you, we have your back.

Speaker 7 And within hours later, you know, Trump was signing pardons for hundreds of people who had attacked law enforcement.

Speaker 7 And so how the GOP and Trump administration is going to have to square that as a party who has historically backed law enforcement with Trump's actions, which should be really interesting.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, Jr.: Right. Well, I think he likes the blue he likes.
So Paul, you were Deputy Assistant Secretary of Policy in the Department of Homeland Security during the Bush administration.

Speaker 2 Talk about the legal issues around these militia groups. The Insurrection Act allows the President to enlist able-bodied men of a certain age.

Speaker 2 But can they be deputized to work on behalf of of the government at the border? I mean, who's calling the shots if they were doing it themselves before?

Speaker 26 Aaron Ross Powell, well, assuming that the law applies and that Trump abides by legal restrictions,

Speaker 10 there is no mechanism by which he can deputize

Speaker 14 non-employees of the federal government as having law enforcement authority. That is,

Speaker 15 to lawfully carry guns, exercise the force that police officers are sometimes authorized to exercise in support of their mission to conduct arrests.

Speaker 11 That does not mean that the militia can't find

Speaker 24 a ready way of supporting the Trump mission through surveillance, through intimidation,

Speaker 11 through coordination of activity.

Speaker 25 all of which would be

Speaker 28 well beyond what has gone before, some of which would almost certainly be lawful since there's no law against citizen patrols patrols of the desert in Arizona.

Speaker 15 You and I can go there today and walk around.

Speaker 28 And if we see people we think are illegal, we can call ICE and say, hey, you know, we think we see something and they can respond or not.

Speaker 11 What will really make the difference is two things. First, the degree to which ICE

Speaker 21 and other federal law enforcement take that assistance to heart and really implement it.

Speaker 11 And secondarily, the degree to which state and local law enforcement, who traditionally are on the sidelines of immigration issues, are

Speaker 27 willing and able

Speaker 11 to assist.

Speaker 14 We've already seen a divergence in that, for example, between the response in Texas, where the governor is going to put out the National Guard to help, and the response in Illinois, where the governor, Governor Pritzker, essentially yesterday said, we'll do what the law requires us to do, but we're not going to do a whit more.

Speaker 3 Not a thing more.

Speaker 27 Yeah, not a thing more.

Speaker 2 Okay. In 2017, President Trump defended the white nationalist protesters at the Unite the Right rally.
And Charlottesville saying there were some very fine people on both sides.

Speaker 2 Final question for all of you. Let's start with you, Paul.
We've seen what happens when some of these groups act with impunity.

Speaker 2 Where do you see this going, and what can people do to protect themselves this time around?

Speaker 14 Well, I see a diminution of legal limitations, especially at the federal level and in states that are

Speaker 11 Republican states, not necessarily in red states like New York or Illinois or California.

Speaker 4 Blue states.

Speaker 13 I mean, blue states. Sorry.
Yeah. Sorry.

Speaker 26 Red, blue.

Speaker 19 Yeah. Blue states.

Speaker 23 That to me betokens

Speaker 23 increased violence of some sort, which to my mind means two things.

Speaker 21 First,

Speaker 14 There should be, I hope, vigorous legal pushback by as many people as possible, like me, trying to prevent these things from happening and maintaining the guardrails of the rule of law.

Speaker 25 And the second thing is really, it's very sad to say, but people who are in at-risk communities, whether it's immigrants or LGBTQ

Speaker 11 or African Americans, need to think about how they will collectively protect themselves.

Speaker 32 And I'm not talking necessarily about violence and harming themselves, but about

Speaker 9 watching each other's backs.

Speaker 22 And

Speaker 15 it's incumbent upon people like me who are not at risk to step up and do what I can to have their backs on a personal level as well.

Speaker 2 Okay. Amy,

Speaker 2 and then Tess.

Speaker 3 I think that the best we can all do is try to support folks in our local community to try to send resources where we can to make sure that folks feel as supported as possible.

Speaker 3 I think that the average person's ability to challenge some of the legal precedents that are happening are very limited.

Speaker 3 But hopefully we can still try to hold our local officials accountable, especially, for example, local sheriffs in border states who have already engaged some with militias in efforts to at least drum up support for anti-immigration activities.

Speaker 3 And so just being vocal and helping people know that they're not alone is one step, but it's a very minimal first step.

Speaker 3 And making sure that we have those resources is the next most important thing, I think.

Speaker 2 Where are you in the level of studying this in terms of nervousness, I guess, or looking at what's happening?

Speaker 2 Because lots of things have come to a head in the United States and then they tend to peter out, but they haven't always, right?

Speaker 3 Right. I mean, I always say that social scientists aren't known for their optimism.

Speaker 3 And I think that folks doing what I do have to be careful in this moment. But I also think that some of us have to be willing to take some risks.
Otherwise, nobody's speaking out about this.

Speaker 3 Nobody's collecting good data and trying to do work that hopefully will outlive this administration.

Speaker 2 What are some of the most dangerous signs you see, and what are some of the more promising ones? I hate to have to equalize it, but I shall do that anyway.

Speaker 3 I think some of the most dangerous signs I see are just the rapid action, which we expected in the first week of this administration, but seeing how much is at the whim of executive order,

Speaker 3 seeing how much of history seems to be being rewritten in the context of that, especially perhaps right now around January 6th.

Speaker 3 I think the sign of optimism for me is how many people are actually talking about this and trying to say, hey, this is what really happened. And we need to keep this in mind.

Speaker 3 We need to push back against these things. We need to make people aware of how these executive orders or these rollbacks are going to impact.

Speaker 3 them and hopefully get some momentum against some of what we think will be other negative changes going forward.

Speaker 2 All right, Tess, why don't you finish up?

Speaker 7 Sure. I mean, I think that, you know, this is exhausting.
This is all exhausting. And I think that there's a real risk of people becoming numb to what's happening and also things getting normalized.

Speaker 7 I think we've already seen it to a degree since the first Trump administration. Things that shocked.
things that shocked us in 2017 don't shock us anymore.

Speaker 7 You know, I remember when Trump would say, oh, fake news, all caps, and people would kind of,

Speaker 7 you know, talk about the erosion of democratic norms. And now, you know, doesn't we don't even blink when we hear that sort of thing?

Speaker 7 So I think that there is a real risk of things becoming normalized and kind of making sure you don't play into that.

Speaker 7 And as well, you know, we know that the strategy of this administration or the past, or you know, the last time Trump was in power was, you know, Steve Bannon's flooding the zone with shit.

Speaker 7 And this is a strategy to kind of exhaust people and overwhelm people where, you know, reporters and researchers are kind of left chasing their tails in circles. So I think, yeah, kind of keeping,

Speaker 7 you know, keeping tabs on what is and isn't normal and

Speaker 7 not letting the kind of window shift.

Speaker 2 And when you look at that, what do you see? What is the most dangerous thing you've seen? And is in that idea of not letting it shift, what's the most hopeful thing you've seen?

Speaker 7 Well, I guess the most dangerous thing that I see is, I guess, the idea of like a feedback loop.

Speaker 7 When you have the fringes, the far-right fringes and the mainstream both basically singing the same song, the people in power are, you know, and they're both playing off each other.

Speaker 7 That to me is the scariest thing because, you know, everyone in the middle gets kind of caught up in it.

Speaker 2 And then something you've seen that is shifted, because most of your stories, these people are not redeemed. You know, that's the Hollywood kind of thing.
Have you seen even a sign of that yet?

Speaker 7 I mean, sure, there are people, for example, among the January 6th defendants who do seem genuinely remorseful and don't want to get involved again.

Speaker 7 There are examples of people who, since 2017, have genuinely left the movement and have gone through de-radicalization training. And

Speaker 7 there are stories like that. But I think that for me, what's alarming is the normalization and the mainstreaming of extremist ideologies.

Speaker 2 And is there one person you think is the most dangerous to be paying attention to?

Speaker 7 I'd say probably the most dangerous is Elon Musk.

Speaker 2 Because?

Speaker 7 Because I think the scale of his ambitions and the amount of power, the mouthpiece he has, how he can control the algorithms to sway public opinion, the scale of his ambitions as far as it concerns other countries beyond the US.

Speaker 7 I think that's what makes him particularly dangerous.

Speaker 3 I don't disagree with Tess. I do think that his intersection with Trump makes it even more dangerous because clearly they feed off of each other in strange ways.

Speaker 3 Trump wants to draw off of Elon's fame and sort of this tech bro status.

Speaker 3 Elon seems to be looking for a daddy figure sometimes in Trump, and it just makes the the whole environment even more toxic and the potential for and the scope frankly of the damage is is really scary

Speaker 2 all right i think we'll end on that great he hates kara swisher that's great to know good to know um anyway thank you so much i really appreciate it thank you so much thank you thank you

Speaker 2 On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Rousselle, Katera Yoakum, Jolie Myers, Megan Burney, Megan Kunane, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio.

Speaker 2 Special thanks to Claire Hyman. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics.

Speaker 2 Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us.

Speaker 2 We'll be back on Monday with more.

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