America’s New Age of Political Violence — with Barbara F. Walter

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So the murder of Charlie Kirk, this feels different. It feels as if we're on the precipice of something really dark.
And I was thinking, when's the last time

the nation was in this type of dark mood? And I would argue it's been a very long time, there's something very strange going on here.

The vibe is very much that we are perhaps entering a descent into some sort of darkness. Even the January 6th

riot or insurrection, whatever the term you want to use, it was embarrassing, or I found it embarrassing and humiliating, and it made me angry. But this makes me, or

I think this makes us somewhat a little bit queasy. This feels as if something really terrible might happen, that this might be the starting gun or the ending gun for some sort of downward spiral.

And we wanted to bring in someone who has a background in civil wars and political violence. So we found Professor Barbara Walter, who is a professor at UC San Diego School of Global Policy.

Anyways, with that, let's bust right into it in this very, what feels like a very precarious, unsettling time. Here's our conversation with Professor Barbara Walter.

Professor Walters, where does this podcast find you? I'm in San Diego right now.

I was born in San Diego. My parents are living in Toronto.

My mom was seven months pregnant, and they got sick of the Toronto winter, and they read an article saying San Diego had the best weather in North America.

So they drove there, and I was born there a few weeks later. Anyways, let's bust right into this.

As someone who's studied political violence, what stands out to you most in the aftermath of the Kirk assassination?

So what worries me about the Kirk murder or any type of crisis or crisis or emergency that happens between now and 2028 is that there is always an end game to democracy.

And the end game is: how does an aspiring dictator actually finally shut the door on democracy? And it's not easy to do because citizens don't want to give up their rights and freedoms.

And so, if they think they're losing that democracy is about to disappear,

they'll fight against that. So, the strategy that you see these aspiring dictators pursue time and time again is they seek a crisis or an emergency, or they manufacture a crisis or a war.

Netanyahu is doing that right now in the Middle East to keep himself in power.

But it could also be something like the Charlie Kirk murder, where you use this and we have a name for people who use, they're violence entrepreneurs.

You use a violent episode to one, demonize your opponent, say, oh my gosh, look, they're animals or they're dangerous or they're going to kill you.

And two, to convince people that power needs to be centralized, to declare a state of emergency, to declare martial law. And people will almost always trade

freedom for security. And so

I don't think this is that Reichstag moment. And I write about it in my Substack newsletter.
This is not the Reichstag moment.

But I think there will be a moment between now and 2028 where Trump finds some crisis and he uses it to scare the bejesus out of americans and convince them that um he needs to gain more power to protect them and americans are going to give it to him

i've read that um a lot of times that these individuals think that they're in order to capture social capital believe that this is sort of a heroic act of

of violence. I've also noticed a pattern with

political violence that it tends to be young men, young white men.

And I'm curious also, have you done any studies connecting online behavior and a certain type of online behavior with either political violence or just mass shootings in general?

I haven't done that particular research.

Interestingly enough,

Facebook has.

Do you remember a few Decembers back, there was a whistleblower, a Facebook employer named Francis Haugen, who who turned over tens of thousands of pages of internal Facebook documentation to Congress and to the Wall Street Journal.

And those documents outlined the internal experiments and studies that Facebook had done with the universe of the data that only Facebook has access to.

And they looked at the effects of online time on a whole host of outcomes from depression to anxiety to violence. And, you know, not surprisingly, they found that the more time you spent

on

Facebook and

I assume other social media outlets.

And

again, you'd have to look at the content they were looking at, the more likely you were to experience a lot of these negative outcomes. So Facebook knows that.

We also found out recently that Facebook suppressed information they had about the effects of social media on children. So

we know that spending hours and hours a day alone

in your living room or in your bedroom watching violent videos or engaging in

really extremist chat rooms does increase how radical you ultimately become and how likely you are to use violence.

So, and then to get back to young men, the vast majority of this type of violence is committed by young men. And young men are spending more and more time online.

And in some ways, it's really, it's a tragedy. It's a tragedy.
Here are all these

young men

with promising futures. This was

an A student. He got a full scholarship to college.
He had his whole world ahead of him.

And yet most of his time increasingly was spent online. And we'll find out exactly

what he was looking at and what he was engaging in. But we know that that does not make for healthy, well-adjusted, peaceful people.

There's been a lot of discussion or a lot of rhetoric around, you know, kind of this is war. And then

some other people saying

that it feels, one of the reasons this just feels so awful is it feels like there's a sense in the air that we may be on the precipice of something just very bad.

And you have actually studied civil wars and around the world. And what are the kind of the you've studied them globally.
When you look at America today,

what parallels or kind of warning signs do you see?

Well, I'll start with the underlying conditions.

For five years, between 2017 and 2021, I served on a task force run by the CIA called the Political Instability Task Force.

And one of the goals of that task force was to come up with a model that would help the U.S.

government predict what types of countries were likely to experience political violence and political instability within the next two years.

And when this model was created,

You had two types of people on the task force.

You had experts on conflict like myself, and you had data analysts who worked for the agency. And the data analysts asked the experts to

tell them everything

we thought might potentially lead a country down the path towards war. And we gave them 38 different factors.
So we actually didn't know which were the most important ones.

So things like poverty, whether a country heavily discriminated against a particular group, whether a country was ethnically homogeneous or not,

all sorts of stuff. And the analysts went away.
And when they came back, they said, hmm, it turns out only two conditions were highly predictive.

And they were not the conditions that the experts expected. The first condition is something we called anocracy.
All that means is a partial democracy.

So the vast majority of political violence, the vast majority of civil wars do not happen in healthy democracies and they do not happen in full autocracies.

They happen in between, in this middle zone, where a country has some elements of democracy and they have some elements of autocracy.

And they especially happen in these anocracies if they're rapidly moving from one side to another. So if you have a democracy that's rapidly declining, that puts it at risk of political violence.

If you have an autocracy that's rapidly democratizing, think about Yugoslavia in the 1990s,

that's where you get political violence. So that's the most important feature.
Do you have a weak and rapidly changing type of democracy? The second is

whether citizens in those democracies were basically choosing political party based on race, religion, or ethnicity rather than on ideology.

So you're joining a political party, not because, not mostly because you're conservative or liberal, but you're joining because you're black or white or Muslim or Christian or Serb or Croat.

So if a country had these two features, it was a partial democracy with these identity-based political parties, the task force put that country on a watch list.

We called it the watch list, and we considered it at high risk of political violence and instability within the next two years.

So if you take those underlying conditions and you think about the United States today, the United States is now solidly in the inocracy zone based on the measure we used on the task force.

We are no longer considered by any group that studies democracy a full democracy. We are in this middle zone.
If you look at our political parties, they started breaking down into,

you know, by race and religion starting around 2018.

It got a little bit better in the last election where Latino men and African-American men gravitated from the Democratic Party towards the Republican Party.

But I suspect that's going to go back in the next election.

So by both of these measures, the United States is in this high-risk category today. Those are the underlying conditions.
So then look at the more immediate conditions.

So what tends to trigger civil war? What tends to trigger civil war often contested elections. It's elections that people don't trust, elections that are very close,

and elections that have this sort of winner-take-all, zero-sum feeling to them.

that if you lose the election, there might never be another election again, and you might permanently be shut out of power. When you have that surrounding elections,

people tend to start to give up on playing by the rules. And the more extreme elements

in the parties and their message, which is, you know, the system is broken, you know, we're never going to fix it. Violence is justified.

That message begins to resonate with the more moderate members of the party. And that's when you start to get in trouble.

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I think that's fascinating, this notion of an anocracy, and that is somewhere in between. If you're Singapore or China or Russia, quite frankly, not a lot of risk.

If you're, I don't know, Japan or Canada, a healthy democracy, but something, some hybrid in between isn't a good place to be. I think that's really fascinating.

The second thing you mentioned that I didn't get a strong feel for whether we're there or not is when things are

when there's racial divisiveness. A lot of this rhetoric is positioned as white Christian nationalists.
Obviously,

non-whites tend to gravitate, I think, towards a more progressive viewpoint. Well, I'll stop there.
Do you think we fit the conditions for that second criteria?

You know, it's really interesting.

You know, I thought by this time, Donald Trump in his second term, we would clearly fit that criteria because I, you know, Donald Trump in his first term was more upfront.

I thought about supporting the white nationalist agenda. He sort of lauded the riders or the people who are parading in Charlottesville in 2017.
He stepped back a bit with that.

And I think he's realized that, for example, the Latino community could be a potential voting block for him. You know, he hasn't really,

you know, his immigration rates have disproportionately affected non-whites. But I I think he's a little more sensitive to the fact that Latinos helped him win.

They're the fastest growing population here in the United States. They're not going away.

And he doesn't want to alienate them too much.

And because the white population is declining compared to other groups in the United States, the Republican Party needs to reach across racial and religious lines.

And so I think he's been a little more sensitive to that.

But having said that, you know, after the 2020 election, if you looked at who voted, you know, how Americans vote, the vast majority of Black Americans voted Democrat. They still do.

A majority of Latinos vote Democrat. A majority of, a large majority of Muslims and Jews, and Asians vote Democrat.
And whites overwhelmingly vote Republican. It was about 80% of whites

voted Republican. And this is in a country that's multi-ethnic and multi-religious.
So that really starts to meet this criteria of identity-based rather than ideologically based.

And also when you look at who who gravitated towards the Republican Party over the last 10, 15 years, it was working class whites. And ideologically, they would be much better served by the Democrats.

So they're choosing the Republican Party for a whole host of other reasons unrelated to

what would be

in their economic and social interest.

So what's your sense of things? Do you feel that the table is set for something, and revolutions can take on different forms, right? Or civil war can take on different forms. Do you think the...

the table has been set for some sort of civil unrest that only gets worse and worse?

Or like most things, will this begin, will the half-life of this be a few weeks and we'll move on to the next big thing?

You know, I wish I didn't have to say this. I think we're actually in a really very tough, bad spot.
And I'll tell you why. America has experienced political violence throughout our history.

And in the 60s, we saw that. But the response was almost always

uniform. If we go back even to the 1990s, in the 1990s, we started to see the rise of

violent extremist militias in the United States. And Americans didn't really get it, didn't see this until the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
And that sort of, you know, threw them into the limelight.

And the response to that by American citizens was absolute horror, absolute condemnation. It didn't matter.
what drove this person. It didn't matter what political affiliation he had.

All Americans condemned that violence. The second thing that happened was it activated the FBI to aggressively go after militia groups across the country

and figure out who the leaders were, figure out where they were organizing, and really in some respects, neutralize them. So if you look at 1995, it was the peak.

of militias in the United States until recently. And after the FBI started focusing on this problem, we saw a pretty consistent and rapid decline.
That is not happening today.

We now, we've seen the rise of militias pretty quickly since about 2008

with the election of Barack Obama. And now we're seeing a series of domestic terror attacks.

And the response isn't by the FBI,

let's look at the problem that we have and let's root it out and let's figure out what's driving this.

And the response by Americans is not, this is absolutely terrible.

You're seeing pockets saying, this is war,

this is, we need to get retribution, we need to, you know, eliminate the enemy. And this is not

a healthy dynamic. We need to treat this in a unified way, that violence in whatever guise, especially politically motivated violence, is not acceptable.
And the FBI needs to address that. And

we have an FBI

that is politically motivated and not necessarily interested in rooting out all types of violence.

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You're a full-time prof. I spend a lot of time on campus,

and

there seems to be a very disturbing trend among students where they seem more accepting to the notion of violence as a means of countering what they see as violence, and that is words.

And today, student acceptance of violence to silence speakers is at a record high. One in three students say violence is acceptable to stop a speaker, up from one in five in 2020.

What do you account for the change? What do you think is responsible for the change?

I think the single biggest factor that's driving a lot of the breakdown of societal norms and societal threads and societal decency and civility is the internet. You know, if you look at

countries, if you look at democracies, if you look at speech, it really didn't start to unravel and get

really heated and negative and uncompromising until about the

late 2000s. And that, of course, is the introduction of the smartphone and the rise of people's reliance on social media for most of their news.
And then when you started to have algorithms that were,

when the tech companies figured out that they could design algorithms that would push information into people's hands that was sort of addictive, information that they couldn't keep their eyes off of, that kept them tied to their phones.

That information was in many cases the most emotionally charged, the most incendiary. It's information that was designed to ramp up people's emotions and

sense of fight or flight. And I don't think it's a surprise that 20 years later,

we have a society that is much more distrustful of each other, distrustful of the system, isolated from each other. And

I think that's what we're seeing. So I think that's the biggest reason is that a lot of these kids

are getting their information from social media sites, and they're being fed only a very particular segment of information. And they come to believe that.

And it's delivered to them in the most impassioned way, which of course makes them particularly impassioned as well.

And then you see them come on campus and they've spent hours and hours and hours online talking to people who agree with them and tell them nothing different.

And then they hear something different. They've also been told that those people are wrong and dangerous.
And

they're ready to go to battle. So that's, I think, a big part of it.

I actually think universities have done a terrible job educating students and taking this issue head on and talking about the importance of free speech, teaching students

about debate,

teaching students to listen to arguments and to take them seriously and then

to debate the ideas in a reasonable, logical way.

I think we've basically, you know, not just not thrown our hands up, up. I think we've basically decided that maybe that was too hard or it might get us in trouble.

Universities aren't really known and professors aren't really known to be the most courageous people. And I think it's just easier to just put our heads down and

think that life is going to continue as it always has. And now we're seeing the effects of that.

Like most people, I've been thinking a lot about this. And I want to put forward a thesis

on what the root causes are. And you've already touched on a few, and have you respond to it, and then move to what some potential solutions might be.

I see the three legs of the stool here, if you will, is one, what we've been talking about, and that is a connection between algorithms that promote incendiary content and rage to profit.

We used to think sex sells. Actually, we found something that sells better, and it's rage.
And the algorithms have figured that out and pit us against

each other. And it's worked.
We now believe that it's not Russians pouring over the border in Ukraine or the CCP or income inequality or climate change that is our enemy.

It's our neighbor who has different political beliefs than us.

And then two,

young men who are really struggling in our nation, lack of economic and romantic opportunities.

Biologically, prefrontal cortex doesn't catch up to a woman's until they're 25, lack of male role models, an education system, I would argue, that is somewhat biased against them, lack of economic opportunities.

And then you pair that with number one, they begin to sequester from society.

And like any mammal, when they're not surrounded by other relationships, they start to go, quite frankly, crazy, similar to an orca in a tank alone, or leave your dog alone for a day and see what happens.

And then the kicker to all of this, we don't have a monopoly on the first two. What we do have a monopoly on is divisive content, struggling men who have access to the guns.

I found this crazy stat in the U.S.

I'm in London right now. In the U.K., there's going to be 30 gun deaths this year.

There's 120 a day in the United States. So since Charlie Cook's assassination or murder two days ago, there's already been eight times the number of gun deaths in the U.S.

that there will be all year in the U.K. Where do I have that wrong? And what color would you add to that? It is absolutely right.
And I couldn't state it better than you just stated it.

The only thing I'll add is if the gunman who killed Charlie Kirk hadn't had access to the internet,

if this was pre-2008, the world that you and I grew up in, and he didn't have access to guns, he would still be in college and he'd still have a future ahead of him.

And Charlie Kirk would still be alive. He would not have been radicalized.
All of these poor kids,

most of them are

young men, are being radicalized online. And the radicalization pipeline goes straight through the five biggest tech companies of the world, all of which are American.

What you just said is so powerful. I hadn't thought of it that way.
I mean, it's just so obvious, but I think that's what real insight is, is you say just something obvious.

It's obvious after you hear it, and that is if this kid

hadn't had access to the internet, he would be a scholarship student. and wouldn't be spending the rest of his life in prison and Charlie Kirk, a father of two, would still be alive.

I can't stop thinking as a parent of two boys,

you know, I guess some combination of family members and friends basically figured out that he had done it. And can you imagine that drive to the jail station, to the prison to turn it off?

Actually, it breaks my, it breaks my heart that

it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart for everybody involved.

I can't even imagine.

But that is just so, I think that's just so,

you know, I just hadn't thought of it that way. That if this kid hadn't had access to the internet, most likely

this just wouldn't have happened. So

let's move to solutions. You are on these task forces.
You're not only helping to identify for our intelligence apparatus what nations are vulnerable such that we can plan.

What if you were asked to serve on another task force, and my guess is you probably will be, that said, all right, what are some common sense solutions

to reduce political violence, the likelihood of civil war? I won't even go to gun violence because that's just,

let's talk about political violence and reduce the likelihood of civil war. What would you suggest are two or three programs that the government should be considering?

So, Scott, there are lots of common sense solutions. The problem is we don't have common sense politicians right now on either side.

And I'll tell you why.

We know from our from the government the u.s government's own task force that if you if you have a strong healthy democracy you don't experience this type of violence um you actually experience peace and prosperity like the united states has done for

you know certainly since since the end of end of world war ii and for black americans since the civil rights movement so That is the single most important thing we can do is to strengthen our democracy.

But if you look back,

and we know all the really undemocratic features of the American government, you know, everybody knows what needs to be changed. We need to get rid of gerrymandering.
We need to

reform the Senate. We need to get rid of the Electoral College.
We absolutely have to get big money out of politics.

When Biden came into power in 2020, The Democrats controlled all three branches of government, right?

And they knew that democracy was in trouble here in the United States. And they were not able to get a single reform passed.
So our democracy was no stronger after

Joe Biden left office than it was beforehand. So what does that tell us? It tells us that we're not going to reform our democracy anytime soon.

The Democrats either aren't able to reform it or aren't willing to reform it.

And the Republicans are not going to reform it because they benefit from, they disproportionately benefit from the current system so then go to the second um fact which is you know these identity-based politics can really create a very combustible um atmos political atmosphere well i mean maybe right maybe um trump and and the and and the republicans will will increasingly reach across religious and racial lines but then they're going to face the same problem that democrats faced in the 1960s um if they reach and across racial and religious lines, they're going to lose

a big portion of their base. And a big portion of their base are conservative whites.

And a subset of that are white nationalists. So they will fight having the Republican Party have a bigger tent.

So that's probably not going to happen anytime soon.

So then, like, what would you do?

If I was on another task force and and someone said, okay, give us a common sense solution that we can implement now that will almost certainly have a big and quick effect.

Regulate the algorithms of social media, right? Again,

like the five biggest tech companies

in the world are all American companies and they are essentially unregulated.

And we are increasingly seeing all the big negative societal effects that unregulated social media is having, not just on the American public, but on our democracy and on societies and democracies around the world.

That's what I would tell our politicians. I would say, you know, have the courage to take on the tech companies.
Give up the money that's pouring into your campaign coffers.

Do what's right for America. Do what's right for your teenage boy.
And don't allow them to basically control the minds and the limpic systems

of our kids. You know, set them up for

a life that will be more divided, more hate-filled,

less prosperous, more violent than they would have otherwise gotten.

I think we should leave it there. Barbara F.
Walters is a professor at UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy and a leading expert on civil wars, extremism, and domestic terrorism.

She's the author of the New York Times bestseller, How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them. She joins us from San Diego.
I just want to repeat again what you said, and it was just so obvious.

It really kind of was puncturing. That if this young man

had not had access to the internet, it's unlikely that he would have taken the life of a father of two and be facing a life behind bars. He could have had a much different life

and not injected what is massive instability to the American experiment and you know with one shot of a rifle. Very much appreciate your time, Professor.

Yeah, thank you very much for having me on and thanks for your work as well.

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