The extremists behind the Capitol riot

Stephanie is joined by journalist and author of 'Fascism Today,' Shane Burley, for an in-depth look at right-wing extremism in the U.S. and the motives of far-right hate groups, like those behind the Capitol riot, which left five people dead.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The amount of people who were willing to come to
d C, to fly into DC, to come out to
engage in violent action. That was a small number when
we look at the entire country, but it's a mass
number of people, and we've got tens of thousands of
people around the country doing it. When you go on
these chat rooms and stuff, you're seeing people say things
like I'm willing to die for this. I'm willing to
kill for this. They're talking about bringing weapons places, they're

(00:21):
talking about modifying weapons. That's something about Donald Trump's just
whipping them up into a frenzy that's been able to
really be an organizing agent. That's what's so scary about
him personally. We're talking about a level of violence that's
being committed to here that we haven't seen from a
mass public like this before. With just days left in

(00:43):
a presidential term that has been defined by chaos, bluster,
and disregard to the American people. I watched in horror,
as did the rest of the country, as enraged Trump
supporters reached the US capital in an attempt to demonstrate
their capacity for violence. Rioters broke windows, they ransacked offices,

(01:04):
Confederate and pro Trump flags were carried throughout the building.
There was an armed standoff in the house chamber, and
when all was said and done, a woman was fatally shot.
Four others died, multiple injured. And just think about the
fact that a US Capitol Police officer died due to
injuries he was beaten over the head with a fire

(01:25):
extinguisher is not something any of us imagined we would
ever see in our lifetime. If we need any sort
of confirmation that right wing radicalization is threatening our democracy,
we got that confirmation on that day. I'm Stephanie Rule,
MSNBC Anchor, NBC News Senior correspondent, and this is Modern Rules,

(01:47):
a podcast from NBC Think and I Heart Radio. On
this podcast, our goal is to get straight to the
point because in he's really complicated times, there's a lot
we need to understand and the only way we can
move forward is to get smarter on these things. On

(02:08):
this episode of Modern Rules, we're asking a pretty simple question,
how did this mob form? And should we have seen
it coming? My guest today says absolutely yes. Shane Burley
is a journalist and a filmmaker. He's reported on and
studied extremism in the United States for several years. He's
also the author of Fascism Today, What is it and

(02:29):
how to end it? Shane, I am so lucky you
are here today. So let's please start with this rally.
Where do these people come from? Who are they? These
are not just formal organizations. This is not just the
organs of the GOP, for example. It's not just like
far right organizations of the past. It's a diverse social
movement that's coming across all around the country based on

(02:52):
this weird allegiance. They have to Trump as an individual,
but what they're doing is coalescing around this almost messianic
figure of Donald from someone who promises so much, is
expecting to deliver things far beyond what a politician delivered.
He's promising to change their lives as individuals, and so
the promise that Donald Trump has built with these people
goes far beyond what he can do in the government,

(03:14):
which is why there's no reason to believe that they're
disappearing when Trump leaves office. That rally turned into this
mob of people storming the US capital, one of the
most sacred and important and theoretically secure buildings in our country.
This mob of people wearing Nazi t shirts and horns
and homemade for pelts. They basically shoved themselves into the building,

(03:38):
sent all of Congress and our Vice President into hiding,
and they vandalized the building. Who is this mob made
up of young old? Obviously movement in general exkews older,
but there is a large number of young people that
are sort of of a few intersecting constituencies. On the
one hand, you have a lot of rural folks who

(03:59):
are facing the kind of economic effects of what Rule
America is going through right now. Um, you're seeing a
lot of organizations that have sprouted up in the Trump years,
Proud Boys, militia organizations, and quote unquote patriot organizations that
have gotten much much bigger. The reality is that that
they're far right. Coalition is broad enough that it includes
a strong new age culture. This is not what we

(04:21):
normally associate with Republican Party. But there is a sort
of crossover in the world of alternative medicine, crystal healing,
things like that with Q and on, because there's a
common kind of conspiracy worldview. So it's not actually uncommon
to go on these far right websites and see kins
of alternative healing stuff. Acupuncture, chiropractic, all kinds of stuff.
It's a large collection of people whose real only association

(04:44):
is a belief in Donald Trump and a belief that
some kind of revolutionary answer needs to happen. And they're
also bound together by deep nativists for beliefs. There's a
profound sense of mythology that drives them together, a sense
of heroism, a sense that they are the main character
of this story, right um. And I think that is
also part of the mentality that gets people to break
through those barricades, to attack one of the most heavily

(05:07):
fortified buildings in the country, and to try and disrupt
an electric certification. But when you look at the images
of the capital, it is very upsetting to see people
defacing that property. I have now looked at these photos,
these videos for hours and hours. Can you please explain
the aesthetic to me? The fur pelts, the horns. I

(05:30):
think somebody referred to it as hill billy burning man
meets Jamiroquois, Like I don't even understand, Like, how do
you think I'm gonna put this get up on with
no shirt and paint my face and put horns on
to go to a rally. I mean in the same
way that you think that storm in the capitol somehow
stops an election. I mean, this isn't people that are
based on like real political conscious which I think people
have been calling him the que shaman, the q and

(05:53):
he's covered in Nordic pagan tattoos. They are generally commonly
associated with far right movements that have take and up
Nordic pagan imagery and that's sort of a call back
to some kind of Northern European racial nationalisms. The rhetoric
has increased so dramatically in the last year and most
specifically in the last two months, all motivated by the
belief that something profound is taking place in the country,

(06:15):
like all of people are taking democracy away from them um,
that their kind of action has become openly revolutionary. They
see the utility and speaking a common nativist grievance based
anger um, and so that is useful to them. That
gets people out into the streets, and when it comes
to where they go now it's going to shift from
the electoral realm to the street um. And we're starting

(06:37):
to see that in the post election period. For the
primary function of these groups and these rallies is essentially
to show violent force. So, as someone who tracks this
closely and follows the chat rooms and their pages and
their extreme groups, when this happened on Wednesday, were you surprised? Oh? No,
absolutely not. There is no reason to be surprised. I

(06:59):
have been to since and dozens of these rallies over
the years. UM, I've seen reporters and activists attacked with
real serious immunity, like seeing Trump called them out, seeing
the mass response, seeing the chatter on places like telegram
and parlor and other social media platforms. We should have
known this was going to happen. Those people who participated

(07:20):
on Wednesday, they shut down the Capitol Building, They messed
up Nancy Pelosi's office. Her office has been cleaned up
since then. And on that very same day, Joe Biden
was certified. Do they consider Wednesday a win? Some do,
because their goal was never getting something done. Their goal
was showing power. Their goal was their ability to actually
affect space. They can take over a government building, they

(07:43):
can actually push things back, they can disrupt the entire
organs of the federal government. They were able to shut
down the Capitol Building. I can't say a lot of
movements have done that in any recent years. That's a
big deal. Is the common thread in all these groups.
Trump I interviewed an expert on Colts, Sarah high Power,
and explain that people are basically traumatizing themselves with untruth

(08:03):
They're basically pumping themselves full of these stories that are
incredibly traumatic if they were true, Believing them and having
it moved them emotionally along this ladder. And so what's
happening is all these kind of untruths are compounding on
people and creating this deep sense of motivation. How do
they organize Wednesday, for example, or any one of these events?
How does it work? I mean it might not be

(08:25):
super sophisticated, but they all showed up, you know, in
a way it is sophisticated a way. It actually speaks
to how people organize themselves in the twenty one century
through a kind of horizontal social movement with older folks.
It's oftentimes the Facebook groups with the more militant folks.
It's some of these new social media sites like or Telegram.
But basically there there would be a few people who
are a little bit more organized calling together a rally.

(08:46):
Everyone in these these groups that are very active that
they are able to see it, and then they kind
of do it through the horizontal networks of calling people,
setting up car pools, and doing researchers. This will sit
on a lot of these Facebook groups and see how
they come together, and sometimes very large rallies will come
together in a matter of days simply by someone saying, Hey,
we should go out there and quote unquote stop Antifa
or we're going to go stop these Black Lives Matter people,

(09:09):
and then they will come out really quickly. And there's
also these kind of militia or patriot focus forums where
people are very explicive about what their intentions are with
their plan violence, and they do it very very quickly
in the way that's kind of impressive. It speaks to
the way that social media can create spontaneous groupings of
people very quickly. How reliant are they and how empowering
are these social media platforms. Yeah, I mean they're absolutely central.

(09:32):
You can't do it without it. Facebook and Twitter have
been especially hesitant to act for years um and now
I don't think they can put the genie back in
the bottle. The autonomous nature of social media, it's very
very hard to identify ones that are problematic, particularly Facebook groups,
which is really important for older demographics. People like my

(09:53):
mother or my sister. I have experienced them falling for
conspiracy theories that end up in their feed sort of
masked as you know, what starts as information for moms
ends up something way more twisted and dark. And if
those things were not allowed on Facebook, they actually would
never ever see them. The reality is that propagating profound

(10:17):
falsehoods that victimize certain populations, that's dangerous no matter who's
doing it. The willingness to allow Donald Trump to say
what he wants because he's the president, those sorts of
things need to end, and they need to be able
to make those tade those standards across the platforms period.
The reason people use Facebook and Twitter is because other
people use Facebook and Twitter, and so I actually think
that if Facebook and Twitter, Instagram and the other major

(10:38):
social media channels maintain a certain level of standards about
these things, they actually will have an effect for the
masterminds behind these untruths who then create this. It would
be a lot easier if you could say someone is
actually lying to these people. They're making up a conspiracy
theory and telling it. But It's unfortunately more complicated that
because the reality is that people believe these The reality

(11:01):
is that that one person learns that from another person
escalates it through a game of telephone. That's happening across
millions of people. There is no central place here. Conspiracy
thinking has become so out of control that there is
no way to kind of rein it in on the
right anymore. I can tell you. After Wednesday went down,
you saw all sorts of Republican voters like my parents,

(11:23):
humiliated by it. When my parents saw that was the
first time they finally said enough is enough. Yeah, there's
a lot of people that are kind of turning on Trump.
Enough enough, but also over Republicans think that there was
some kind of funny business in election with zero evidence,
which is the entire core of this narrative. So that's
a mass. We're talking about tens of millions of people
that are in agreement about a conspiracy narrative propagated by

(11:44):
Donald Trump. We'll be back after the break. Let's think
of other protests that we see. I usually have a
better idea of what they're protesting for. I know what

(12:06):
women's marches are for. I know what marches for science
are for. I know what pro life marches are for.
I looked at a crowd of people, many of whom
were wearing Camp Auschwitz T shirts and Nazi garb, cheering
on Ivanka Trump, who is Jewish. So what exactly is

(12:27):
binding these people together and following trumpic That's what I
don't understand. They're they're protesting for, Yeah, to set things
on fire, that's what they're protesting for. This is something
that I think the GOP hasn't had a real connection
to in the last several years, which is what does
a militant revolutionary movement look like? Well, it's not going

(12:47):
to look like policy reform, and within that to have
a movement that large with being revolutionary, they're not all
actually going to agree on what that new future world
looks like. And so instead, what there is in Trump
is a tacit coalition of people who want to set
fire to things, who want to burn it all down,
and who want to attack the status quo. What this
does is actually create a pressure valve. And so the

(13:08):
power that Trump has now, the power of these people
have now is in physical space. They can take things over,
They can foll violent pressure if they want they can
create large mobs as they did in DC. So I
think it's debatable whether or not that's going to have
an effect on policy in the next few years. But
he is going to basically have the ability to hold
down people in communities with a real threat of violence

(13:28):
by mobilizing this huge army, And in a lot of ways,
that actually is what what it has in common with
revolutionary movements historically does the number of right wing extremists?
Is the real number smaller than the perceived number? Because
of social media, because of the president, it sort of
gets amplified and amplified, especially because the beliefs are so crazy,

(13:50):
they're very, very popular to talk about. But when you
get down to it, Republicans lost in the mid terms
in two thousand eighteen, the president lost the election. In
two thousand twenty, Republicans lost control of the Senate. So
is this Trump faction actually that big? You know? Historically,
if we're talking about neo Nazis and they all right,
it actually is pretty small. It's bigger than it has

(14:11):
been in decades, but it's still pretty small. But what
we've seen happen is where certain ways of thinking that
would have been only on the extreme right have now
moved their way into GOP mainstays, and so we're having
a mass radicalization event because the ideas that are motivating
the Trump base right now are so out there that

(14:32):
they would have been on the fringes of the internet before.
And so I think in that way, extremism has become
a mass phenomenon and the conservative movement, and it's going
to drive an even bigger swath of the public as
they confront social issues from a conspiracy mindset rather than
a fact based one. Talk to us about Portland. What
have you seen, especially over the last few months as

(14:55):
you've watched tensions there rise. Is that city sort of
the canary in the coal mine for the rest of
us for what's to come. I think that's a good
way of phrasing it. So the dynamic of Portland's is
important because it's considered a deep liberal city that has
a long history of racist violence around the center of
the k K and the twenties, a really serious problem

(15:15):
with neo Nazi skin hits in the eighties and nineties.
Organ itself has a racist history of being sort of
an intended white ethno state um having a divide between
the rural areas and the urban areas and has a
deep problem with things like gentrification and racial politics in
the city. Any time you're having this sort of blue
oasis inside of a red kind of container, like we

(15:38):
have an organ you're seeing people kind of surround from
the outside communities and so this seeing far right groups
in that area is not uncommon, but the clashes have
only escalated over the several years. So groups like Patriot Prayer,
which is another far right organization based generally out here,
and the probably have been coming to Portland once a month,
once over two months for these violent classes for last

(16:00):
several years. And so we're seeing literally blood flowing in
the streets, people being very seriously hurt, hospitalized, some people
end up killed. And this is being going on for
quite a long time. The entire function of which these
groups coming out is to sort of declare their autonomy.
So they're bound together by grievance and a leader who's
amplifying their grievances. But where do they go from here?

(16:23):
These people just basically shoved their way in. In general,
is law enforcement underestimating the will or the capabilities? Absolutely,
this is true in Portland, but it's really true in
places around the country. Leftinly counter downstairs are always more numerous,
usually because we're talking about nonprofits and unions and other groups.
The part of them. The police take an incredibly light

(16:46):
hand with the far right protesters and an incredibly heavy
hand with the left wing protesters. Um. And this is
a pattern that has repeated itself. There's a number things
that that the lie that that the police generally see
the far right protesters as less radical, that there's a
historic connection between police and far right movements, both locally
and around the country. Then let's talk about that willful ignorance.

(17:06):
Because there were lots of videos from people from the
riots who said, oh, the police were cool to me,
and you know, they directed me to Chuck Schumer's office,
or they walked me out. I mean they walked out
like they were, you know, going on a tour of
the Capitol. When you actually looked at those police officers,
they were not equipped to handle this mob. There's tons

(17:28):
we could have done, and we chose not to. Why
is that there has been generally this belief that these
right wing groups are just normal Americans trying to I
don't protect the country. Um And, so I think what
we see in DC is just the belief that these
are Trump supporters. They're just conservatives. They're here sharing their
voice like anyone does, and doesn't see the potential for violence.

(17:50):
And because of that, they have been given allowances that
left wing groups never would or groups led by community
of color never would. Part of it, I think it's
the structural racism and law enforcement where community of color
are seen as more threatening when they're in mass groups
protesting than largely white movements are. And to not say
the potential for violence when we're able to see armed

(18:11):
rallies happening around the country is willful ignorance. The fact
the law enforcement hasn't taken these groups seriously is leading
us to a situation when they were able to grow
without any pushback and now are at a position when
it would be actually hard to reverse time on this.
There are now Q and On members or sympathizers actually

(18:31):
in Congress. Based on your reporting and what you study,
do you see this as something that's going to be growing.
Q and On believes that they are freedom fighters, that
the entire model of Q and ON is to take
a bizarre story and put you right at the center
of it. This world would fall apart if it wasn't
for you intervening on it. There is a narrative history

(18:53):
that requires messiahs to come in and change things as
a day a sex machina, and that's the entire function
of Q and on. So, of course they're not streamists.
The extremists or the pedophile cabal that are taking over
the comment those are the real extremists. You're just a
regular American. But what happens right when they say, you know,
the day is coming on April one? What happens when

(19:14):
these days, these times passed and none of the things
they predict come to fruition? The same thing when the
apocalypse never came after the preacher predicted it, you know
it's you. You look back and say, oh, you know,
it's because of this reason. It was because actually he's
doing a longer game. There's all kinds of ways to
explaining it. The failure of a prophecy has never stopped
the most pious from continuing their work. Other countries watched

(19:37):
what happened at the Capitol in horror. But extremism is
not unique to the United States. What is it like
around the world. Yeah, this is not just happening in
the US, This is happening with the a f D
in Germany, this is happening with you, Kip. This is
a serious ideological change or response to the crisis that
we're entering in the twenty one century. And so there
is a lot of ideology that's driving this, and then

(20:00):
there's also a lot of grifters that will help to
take the ideology and shoot it through the stratosy. So
what happens when they don't have a sponsor in the
White House. Anytime you see these far right movements escalate,
they have a point when they start to contract, either
from their own failures, and at that point, when they
see that their movement has been unsuccessful in meeting at goals,
that's when you start to see seemingly impulsive active violence.

(20:22):
And it's a positive thing when their movements shrink. But
there's also a flip side to that, which is that
these are the point in which you start to see
desperate acts. And that's what actually worries me about. We
have every reason to be hopeful, though, I mean, we
saw much larger protests against police finance, we saw larger
social movements of young people coming out. We have all

(20:43):
the tools, they are all here, we just have to
do them. And so knowing that as that's what keeps
me hopeful through dark times like watching the Capital be
overrun by the far right. I have to admit I

(21:04):
was surprised that Shane ended on a hopeful note. The
demonstration of violence that we saw at the Capitol is
a reminder that the disastrous elements of Trump's presidency will
likely have very destructive consequences. On this podcast, we want
to leave you with some time to think. Something Shane
left me thinking about is this, Maybe we do have

(21:24):
a reason to be hopeful. No doubt the president has
pushed the boundaries of many of our most precious institutions
to the brink, but maybe they've held Wednesday was a
terrible day, but you know what happened that night. Joe
Biden was certified as the next president of the United States.
And while right wing extremism is on the rise, maybe

(21:48):
it's in response to another growing movement, one that gets
less attention, but one that's built around equality, compassion, and progress.
I'm Stephanie Rule, and you're listening to Modern Rules upon
cast from NBC THINK, MSNBC and I Heart Radio. This
podcast is hosted by me Stephanie Rule. Mike Batt and

(22:08):
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(22:30):
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