TERRY GROSS: She sees a connection between many people on the far right and Christian nationalism, which teaches that America is not only a Christian nation, it’s God’s chosen nation. As a Christian, she finds this very disturbing. Elizabeth Neumann has more than 20 years’ experience in homeland security, dating back to when she served on George W. Bush’s Homeland Security Council. She initially joined Trump’s Department of Homeland Security in 2017 as then Secretary John Kelly’s deputy chief of staff. She’s now co-director of the Republican Accountability Project, which was founded to push back against the lies and conspiracy theories about voter fraud and claims that the 2020 election was rigged, and to hold accountable elected leaders who have supported those claims and tried to overturn a legitimate election.
Elizabeth Neumann, welcome to FRESH AIR. I want to start with the January 6 insurrection. In a lot of ways, it did not succeed. It didn’t succeed in overturning the election. It didn’t return Donald Trump to the presidency. Over 300 people have been charged by the Justice Department. Some of the Q followers were disillusioned that the prophecy about Trump remaining president didn’t come true. So in that sense, the insurrection was a failure. Are there ways in which it was a success for the far right?
ELIZABETH NEUMANN: Thanks for having me, Terry. And unfortunately, yes, it was viewed as a success for white supremacists, for anti-government extremists and, quite frankly, probably, many of our enemies overseas. They saw it as a success in that we have such societal discord that we can’t seem to find, even post-January 6, the ability to come together on a basic thing like a commission to study domestic terrorism in our country and what happened on January 6. So we are very fractured as a nation at this point, very polarized. And that plays into our enemies’ hands.
So while the guard rails held up and the presidential transition happened on January 20, there is damage to our democracy that persists today, including the fact that you see so many Republicans at the state level and at the national level spending so much time and energy on voter suppression, because a sizable portion of the Republican Party, the Republican voters, believe that the election was stolen from them. That is not healthy. We are in a very precarious place in our country.
GROSS: Are there ways that January 6 empowered the right-wing groups, the hate groups, the white supremacist groups, the militias?
NEUMANN: Yes. In particular, if you look at white supremacists, they have this ideology behind them. And not every white supremacist holds to this. But going back 40, 50 years to the ’80s when the white supremacist movement kind of consolidated and came to the conclusion that they were no longer going to be able to establish or achieve their aims through the government, they realized that they needed to make the government their enemy. And they basically declared war on the government and stated that their aim was to overthrow the U.S. government, to establish a white nation. So when you see the Capitol being attacked, which is this symbol of our seat of government, it has this rallying effect for a white supremacist who holds to this ideology that, eventually, there’s going to be this massive war. And the U.S. government’s going to be overthrown. And they’re going to be able to establish this white nation.
So it’s not like they destroyed the Capitol. It’s not like they disrupted the transition of power. But it was seen as kind of almost the starting point, perhaps, of the civil war that they have believed in their mythology was going to come at some point, a race war. And so you see on online chat rooms that you have groups using this as a recruitment tactic, that it’s finally happening, if – you know, there’s going to be this race war, that we’re finally going to be able to achieve our aim of ridding the country of all of these people we don’t think should be here, establishing our own country. And any time you have, for an extremist group or a terrorist group, something that symbolic, it affects and helps them with their recruitment, with their morale. So these – certainly, on the white supremacist side, we see an emboldening effect for those groups.
GROSS: Which of the groups want to see a race war and want to see, like, a civil war that leads to a white nation?
NEUMANN: So that particular strain is going to be in your white supremacist group, so neo-Nazis and other groups that borrow their mythology largely from Germany and Nordic countries. What you also see, though, is there’s this other movement called the boogaloo boys. You may have heard of them as well. They also believe in a coming civil war. They also subscribe to an ideology of accelerationism, which a white supremacist might also ascribe to. That concept is that we are going to commit certain acts to accelerate societal collapse, to encourage the oncoming of a civil war. So it’s not just a belief that someday there will be a civil war, as if you’re being prophetic and you have awareness of something happening in the future. The accelerationism is it is my job to help bring it about.
So boogaloo boy believes in civil war. And it may also have a white supremacist viewpoint, might believe it’s a race war, but not necessarily. There are a lot of boogaloo boys who just believe that there’s a coming civil war and it has nothing to do, at least at a witting level, with race. So the – (laughter) one of the hard things in studying extremism, especially today, is that increasingly, we have these groups kind of morphing. An individual may have multiple ideologies that they have cobbled together to form almost their own version of an ideology. And so you might easily have a white supremacist who is also a boogaloo boy. You also see that the melding between the white supremacist groups and the anti-government extremist groups, there tends to be a lot of overlap there.
But you could find somebody easily – you could find a militia or a member of a militia who hates racism, who hates white supremacy. They are just about the right to bear arms and be able to exercise protection for their neighborhood through a militia. So it’s really hard to categorize with broad brush strokes. And part of the reason that, perhaps, we haven’t been able to take domestic terrorism as seriously as we should have is because of that decentralized lack of organization to many of these groups. I mean, you often see infighting between supposed leaders of these groups. And it can give this false sense that they don’t have their act together, they’re not actually that dangerous because they’re always fighting with one another. And they can’t even agree on the issues that they stand for.
GROSS: Well, did January 6 and the insurrection have the effect of bringing these groups together and creating a previously un-existing alliance?
NEUMANN: Definitely did. In fact, that’s one of the biggest concerns that we had is (laughter) you had groups that maybe wouldn’t have interconnected before, have an in-person, in-real-life experience, which during a pandemic is kind of rare to begin with, where they’re meeting people. So that networking effect can be very powerful. Not only did they meet in person, they’re having an experience that for them it had a lot of adrenaline, a lot of euphoria. It bonds you. It’s like being in the foxhole together in war. It bonds you in a way that just meeting on the street would not bond you.
So there is a concern then on the other side of January 6, you have groups interconnected in a way that they weren’t before. We heard in the news on Wednesday that prosecutors have found interconnection between Oath Keepers and Proud Boys and Three Percenters. I think we’re going to see more of this to come as the investigation unfurls. But the knowledge that they had been coordinating in the weeks up to January 6 is rather significant. These are not groups that necessarily share the same ideology. They shared a common purpose clearly and showing up on January six. And what has been revealed so far is basically coordination to be able to attack what they expected to be antifa showing up on January six. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s any more coordination specific to the capital, though, in the messaging traffic that was released, they were talking about an insurrection.
So there clearly was this understanding in the weeks prior to January 6 that something that they labeled an insurrection was going to happen on January 6 and that they needed to coordinate to be able – to achieve that common purpose. That is rather concerning in that heretofore most of these groups kind of kept to themselves. And so, again, it’s – something about January 6 definitely shifted the makeup and the threat that we were facing. It used to be small groups. And we were predominantly worried about the white supremacist groups because historically they have been the most lethal in their violence.
But the other major problem with January 6 is so far of those indicted about, 85 to 90% – the numbers will change depending on, you know, who gets indicted next – but it’s somewhere in that 85 to 90% of the individuals indicted are unaffiliated. That means they’re not Proud Boys. They’re not neo-Nazis. They’re not Oath Keepers. They are just people that are passionate about Donald Trump. They are MAGA. To have that many unaffiliated people doing what happened on January 6 – and clearly, they were led by people that were more coordinated, more organized – they crossed into acts of terrorism by what they did to the Capitol on January 6.
That’s really concerning to most extremist researchers because it demonstrates we’re kind of in a very different threat environment. It’s not just these organized groups. It’s that we have mass violence justified for political purposes. It’s rather stunning, actually, the more the data comes out about who actually crossed the threshold into the Capitol.
GROSS: Are you saying that when Trump was president, he was able to accomplish the kinds of things that these disparate groups, the Proud Boys, the white supremacist groups, the Three Percenters, all the accelerationists (ph), what they were not able to accomplish?
NEUMANN: That’s a great way to frame it. Yes.
There’s a lot more and it’s well worth listening to the whole thing. Perhaps this is just one of the regular paroxysms of racist, right wing activity that doesn’t necessarily lead to major outbreaks of organized violence. But something feels different about this. I hope I’m wrong.
