00:08 Charlie Sykes Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. 00:10 I'm Charlie Sykes. 00:11 Among the stories that I am fascinated by today, the reports out of the January 6th committee. 00:18 Let me just read you the Politico report. 00:20 As Trump's team pushed its discredited voter fraud narrative, 00:24 The National Archives received forged certificates of ascertainment, declaring him the winner of both Michigan and Arizona and their electors after the 2020 election. 00:35 So they actually forged these certificates and they put it in writing and it is in. 00:41 the custody of the National Archives. 00:44 This probably suggests why President Trump and others are resisting having their records turned over. 00:50 But I'm sorry to repeat myself, but this is not normal, people. 00:54 This is not the normal kind of story that you read, and this is not the normal... 00:59 Well, welcome to the Bulwark podcast. 01:02 I know a lot of you had said, hey, Charlie, could you give us something a little bit lighter, a little bit more upbeat? 01:07 And I've heard you, but instead we decided to do this today. 01:11 And we are joined by Barbara Walter, professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego. 01:18 As you probably might have known, if you've been paying attention, she studies civil conflict, political violence and terrorism. 01:25 And her new book is How Civil Wars Start. 01:29 and how to stop them. 01:30 Okay, so Barbara, thanks for joining me. 01:32 My pleasure. 01:33 If we can't be cheerful, we can at least be very interesting today, okay? 01:38 Barbara Walter That's the goal, yes. 01:40 Charlie Sykes Okay, so I guess the main question is, you study civil wars, how they start, how to end them, and I guess the question is, is America right now closer to civil war than most folks might think? 01:50 Barbara Walter Yes, it is. 01:51 I wish I didn't have to say that, but it's true. 01:55 And I'll tell you why we know that. 01:59 So there's people like me who study civil wars. 02:02 I've been studying civil wars for 30 years, and I focused almost exclusively outside the United States. 02:09 So there's been over 200 civil wars since the end of World War II. 02:14 I've studied every single one of them. 02:16 And I'm not just interested in the details of a single one like Afghanistan or Syria. 02:22 I'm really interested in the patterns that we see across all of these countries. 02:27 And one of the things that we now know is that the same factors tend to emerge before civil wars, no matter where they break out. 02:37 Charlie Sykes So you wrote about this. 02:39 I mean, so you have studied places like Syria, Lebanon and Northern Ireland. 02:43 And we don't think of our political world as being like that. 02:46 But, you know, you see signs that most people miss. 02:50 And you wrote and I can see those signs emerging here at a surprisingly fast rate. 02:56 What are you seeing? 02:58 Barbara Walter Well, I'll tell you why I wrote the book. 03:00 Starting in 2017, from 2017 to 2021, I was on a task force that's run by the US government. 03:08 It's called the Political Instability Task Force. 03:10 And our job on that task force was to come up with a predictive model that helped the US government predict where around the world countries were likely to experience political instability and political violence. 03:26 And the U.S. government was interested in this because they wanted to know if important countries, our allies or countries that were strategically important, were about to get into trouble so that they could potentially do something about it. 03:39 And so we sat around and it's really a bunch of eggheads and data analysts like myself. 03:45 And we sat around and we thought about what are all the possible factors that could put a country at risk of civil war? 03:51 And we thought of some common ones or commonsensical ones. 03:54 like poverty or how ethnically diverse a country was or whether there was deep income inequality. 04:01 We actually thought of over 50 different variables that might matter. 04:05 And we put them into a model and it turns out to our great surprise that only two came out highly predictive. 04:14 The first was what we call anocracy, and that's a fancy term for partial democracy. 04:20 It's countries whose governments are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic. 04:26 You could think of them as partial democracies, failing democracies. 04:31 Fareed Zakaria calls them illiberal democracies. 04:34 So that's the most important factors. 04:36 Charlie Sykes And the word is anocracy. 04:38 Anocracy. 04:39 That's a new one for me. 04:41 Barbara Walter Anocracy. 04:42 Right. 04:42 Most people think that governments are either democratic or autocratic, but there's really this continuum. 04:48 And it's the governments that are in the middle that are the most unstable and the most violence prone. 04:56 The second factor is whether a country's population begins to organize itself politically, not around ideology, but 05:08 but around identity, whether it's ethnic identity, religious identity, or racial identity. 05:14 And if you put partial democracy together with this sort of ethnic factionalizing, those are the countries that are most at risk of civil war. 05:23 Now, of course, I'm on this task force. 05:25 We are not allowed to look at the United States. 05:28 We never talk about the United States. 05:30 We're talking about Syria, and we're talking about countries in Africa and Central Asia. 05:36 And I'm sitting there and I'm looking what's happening in my own country. 05:40 And I couldn't believe that these two factors were emerging here. 05:46 And as you said earlier, they emerged at a surprisingly fast rate. 05:51 Charlie Sykes I mean, so let's keep going through this checklist, because, you know, some of the things you mentioned before, like poverty and ethnic diversity and income inequality, those are not necessarily worse. 06:00 But you're talking about people splitting along these identity lines, which would be what racial, religious, geographical lines. 06:07 Also, when dominant groups feel that they're losing their power, they're losing their privileged status, that that's one of the factors and the loss of faith in the political system. 06:18 Give me some others. 06:19 Things like that that really stand out. 06:22 Barbara Walter Well, anocracy and this identity politics, racial politics are the most important. 06:29 And then when you think about, okay, what are the triggers? 06:31 Those are underlying conditions, right? 06:33 A country can be an anocracy for 30 years. 06:37 Its politics could be defined along racial lines for decades. 06:41 Those don't change very much. 06:43 And so people often ask me, they're like, okay, then how do you explain the timing of civil wars? 06:48 What triggers civil wars? 06:50 And 06:50 And we actually have a sense of what does. 06:54 And in my book, I have a chapter called When Hope Dies. 06:59 And it really is when the group in society that's disaffected, and I'll talk in a second about who those groups tend to be, the aggrieved groups, the angry groups, the 07:12 change in the political system. 07:15 They tend to work within the system as long as they can. 07:19 And that makes sense. 07:21 Most people don't want war. 07:23 Most people want to avoid war at all costs. 07:26 And so they'll do everything possible to try to affect change by working through conventional politics. 07:34 But when that no longer works and when it becomes clear to them that that no longer works, that's when the more extreme elements of that group start to say, listen, we have to shift to violence because if we don't, we'll never reach our goal. 07:50 And there's two observable indicators that they often use to figure out that the system will never work for them again. 07:58 And one is a series of failed elections, right? 08:03 If your group continues to lose elections in a democracy with one person, one vote, what that's really telling you is you don't have the votes to win. 08:14 And that democracy is no longer serving you. 08:17 And if you think about the 2020 elections, I think the 2020 elections were devastating to Republicans. 08:25 They had historically high turnout. 08:29 They... 08:30 They had enormous turnout in that election and they still lost by almost 8 million votes. 08:37 And so what that's telling them is even if they have a great ground game, even if they convince a high percentage of Republicans to go to the polls, they still don't have the numbers to win. 08:48 Charlie Sykes And the second factor is when- If in fact they believe the numbers, right? 08:53 I mean, there's a huge number that appear to be in denial about that. 08:57 Barbara Walter Well, and again, I think you have to think about the players here as there's really two players involved. 09:03 There's the elites within the Republican Party, and then there's just average Republican voters. 09:09 And they truly believe that the election was stolen. 09:12 They're not making this up. 09:14 They truly believe it. 09:15 The people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, they truly believe that they were being patriotic and they were saving this country and they were doing their duty. 09:25 It's the elites that are feeding them lies. 09:28 And the elites are feeding them lies that the election was stolen because that's the only means they can hold on to power at this point. 09:36 And so they have to convince. 09:38 They have to convince the members of their party, average Joes, that our democracy is broken and 09:49 They can't say, well, Lena, let's go to authoritarianism because we don't have enough votes. 09:56 No, they're going to say that our democracy is broken, that it's bad, that we have to do something else. 10:05 And so I actually don't blame the average Joes because that's what they're being told. 10:11 I blame the elites. 10:12 And of course, historically, we have a name for these people. 10:16 We call them ethnic entrepreneurs. 10:18 And I'll give you a perfect example of an ethnic entrepreneur, Slobodan Milosevic. 10:24 You probably remember him. 10:27 When the Soviet Union collapsed and Yugoslavia became independent, suddenly all the politicians in the former Yugoslavia, suddenly they had to face competitive elections for the first time ever. 10:42 Milosevic was a tried and true communist. 10:46 He had been a member of the Communist Party. 10:47 He had power because he was a communist. 10:49 He was a good little foot soldier for the Communist Party. 10:53 Suddenly he's cut loose and he has to face competitive elections and he knows that. 11:00 that communists are not popular in the newly independent Yugoslavia. 11:04 Nobody is going to vote for him because they know of his communist past. 11:10 So he has to figure out a way to convince 11:14 voters to vote for him and not somebody else. 11:18 And suddenly there's a crowded competitive marketplace for politicians. 11:24 And he's very smart. 11:25 And he looks around Yugoslavia and he said, ethnically, which is the biggest group in this country? 11:33 And it was Serbs. 11:34 Serbs had a plurality of people in the former Yugoslavia. 11:39 And he was ethnically Serb. 11:41 So he went out there and he began to foment lies. 11:45 He began to tell Serbs that they needed to band together because if they didn't band together behind a Serb, a strong Serb leader like Milosevic, then the Croats were going to do that before them. 11:58 And if the Croats got power, they were going to turn on the Serbs and they were potentially going to kill them the way they did in World War II. 12:05 And so he created this narrative filled with lies that created the sense of fear and threat and insecurity among the Serbs. 12:16 And lo and behold, they banded together behind him and he became president. 12:22 And so when I think about the Republican Party here, you see a similar dynamic and you see a similar dynamic in Brazil and in India with Modi and in the Philippines with Duterte. 12:33 It's it's ethnic entrepreneurs creating this sense of fear and threat to get average people behind them. 12:43 Charlie Sykes So let's look at the United States now, according to what you've written. 12:47 The United States has, and these are your words, already gone through what the CIA identifies as the first two phases of insurgency, the pre-insurgency and incipient conflict. 13:01 And when The Washington Post wrote this update, it's pointing out, you know, time will tell whether the final phase, open insurgency, began with the sacking of the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6th. 13:12 Yeah. 13:12 This is, we've gone through, what were the pre-insurgency and the incipient conflicts? 13:17 I mean, obviously, January 6th didn't come out of anything, but that's the pattern that you're identifying. 13:24 Barbara Walter Yeah, so let me give you a little background on this because it's fascinating. 13:28 So the CIA has a manual called Guide to Insurgency, and it's available online. 13:34 It's in the public realm. 13:35 If you Google it, you'll find it. 13:36 The last iteration was, I think, the 2012 edition. 13:39 And you can pull it up on your computer and you can read it. 13:43 Now, again, the CIA is not allowed to look at the United States. 13:47 When they put together this manual, they weren't ever thinking about the United States. 13:52 They were thinking about places like the Philippines. 13:55 They were thinking about places like Afghanistan. 13:58 And they're trying to figure out how do we 14:01 how do we identify the early warning signs so that we can actually do something to halt the insurgency before it gets into the open insurgency phase? 14:13 So for your listeners, if they pull this up and they read it, what is shocking about it is how similar the 14:23 the patterns are here in the United States. 14:25 You cannot read that insurgency manual without thinking about the last few years here in the United States. 14:33 And the guy who probably knows the most about this is a guy called David Kilcullen. 14:38 He's an Australian counterinsurgency expert. 14:41 He's written a lot about where the US is on the CIA's insurgency scale. 14:49 And he also was an advisor to Petraeus. 14:52 He's advised the U.S. government of various things. 14:56 And he has said, we're at that second of three stages. 15:01 When January 6th happened last year, he said, you know, this could be the start of the open insurgency situation. 15:09 And the open insurgency stage is where you now have a consistent series of attacks. 15:17 So the Capitol could have been the first one, but then you would have, let's say, a bombing of a state Capitol somewhere else. 15:24 You could have had a series of attacks. 15:26 of targeted assassinations against opposition leaders. 15:29 You could have had some more mass killings, for example, in synagogues or black churches, but it would be a consistent series of attacks. 15:39 And obviously that has not happened yet. 15:43 And so Kilcullen has said, you know, we're still at that second stage, which is called the incipient conflict stage. 15:51 Charlie Sykes So you use the word civil war, but you also write about the troubles in Northern Ireland, which lasted about 30 years. 15:58 Is it more likely that we're going to see something like the troubles than, you know, sectional blue versus gray battlefield civil war? 16:07 I mean, when you use the term civil war, what manifestation? 16:11 Is it more like the troubles, the sporadic violence that you described just now? 16:17 Barbara Walter Charlie, I'm really glad you brought this up because oftentimes when I talk to people and even some of the reaction I've gotten to probably the biggest... 16:28 potential criticism that I've seen out there on the internet about the book is, oh, we're never going to have another civil war. 16:34 Do you really think we're going to have these two big armies meeting on the battlefield? 16:38 And the answer is no, that's not what it's going to look like at all. 16:42 That's a 19th century version of civil war. 16:45 The 21st century type of civil war that we're seeing is very, very different from that. 16:50 It's going to be decentralized. 16:52 It's going to be fought by multiple different factions, militias, paramilitary groups. 16:59 Sometimes they'll work together. 17:00 Sometimes they'll compete with each other. 17:03 They're going to be relying on unconventional tactics like terrorism. 17:08 Terrorism will be a big part of it. 17:11 Some guerrilla warfare. 17:12 They will be targeting civilians, unlike what you saw in the American Civil War. 17:19 And the way for maybe Americans to think about it, and most people don't know this, in 1860, the U.S. military was actually quite weak. 17:29 It had about 16,000 soldiers under arms, 16,000. 17:32 And most of them were stationed west of the Mississippi to control the Native American population. 17:40 And so if you're the Confederacy, the Confederate states, and they already for decades had their own militias, which they could quickly bring together to form the Confederate army. 17:53 If you're the Confederate states, it wasn't crazy to think that you could defeat the 17:58 the American military in 1860. 18:00 It is crazy to think you could defeat the American military today, which has over 2 million soldiers under arms who can be transported quite quickly around the country. 18:11 And so they have to utilize a different strategy. 18:15 And the strategy that I think you would see here is a strategy that you see across many civil wars today, which is this 18:23 So basically domestic terrorism? 18:36 Domestic terrorism. 18:38 Yeah, exactly. 18:39 Charlie Sykes So because the question I always have when I hear discussions like this is, okay, who is shooting who and how does it start? 18:48 I mean, your whole book is how does civil war start, but how does the shooting start? 18:54 Who shoots who? 18:57 I know we don't know, but I'm just, what's the pattern? 19:00 How does it go from incipient to actually hot shooting bullets? 19:05 Barbara Walter I mean, the key becomes to create a moment of deep uncertainty. 19:13 So do you remember on 9-11 when you woke up, you probably turned on your television. 19:20 Well, here I was on the West Coast, so it was already happening early in the morning. 19:25 You turn on your television, you suddenly see that something terrible is happening. 19:31 You don't know if there are going to be more attacks. 19:34 You know that they're shutting down the airports. 19:37 You know that there are still planes flying. 19:40 You don't go to work because you feel like you have to stay home to try to figure out what's going on. 19:48 Everything suddenly gets suspended. 19:51 And that's what the instigators of violence are hoping to achieve. 19:58 And once people are in a sense of deep uncertainty, deep insecurity, and a sense of fear, they're looking to see if the government is, you know, is the government out there? 20:12 Is the government doing something to protect us, to fix this? 20:16 Yeah. 20:16 And if they start to sense that the government isn't in control or they aren't sure who is in control, and then let's say suddenly they see armed individuals in their neighborhood, in their city, or on TV, they start seeing areas that appear to be controlled by somebody besides the government. 20:36 It creates this scenario where people start to decide, well, who am I going to support? 20:46 Who's going to protect me? 20:47 And when I talk to people who lived through civil wars, there was this couple who lived through Sarajevo. 20:54 Well, everybody I talked to who lived through civil wars said the same thing. 20:58 We didn't see it coming. 20:59 To this day, when we look back... 21:01 We still can't believe it happened. 21:04 And yet people like me who study this, we know the warning signs. 21:08 It's just that average citizens don't know the warning signs. 21:12 And so they go about their daily business. 21:14 This couple in Sarajevo, they were having baby showers and they were going to their friends' houses on the weekend and they were going to their jobs every day. 21:22 And they heard certain things were happening, but they didn't want to believe it. 21:28 And then they were busy, and so they were distracted. 21:31 And then you have people like Milosevic who are telling, or their own leaders who are telling them something different. 21:37 And so they don't want to know, they don't want to see, and they just hope it will go away. 21:43 And so this couple said, you know, it... 21:46 We were just going about our everyday life. 21:49 And then one night the lights went off and we heard machine gun fire in the hills. 21:56 And then, of course, it goes very rapidly. 21:58 You know, maybe the next day you go to the grocery store and there's a roadblock, you know, four streets away. 22:04 And you're like, who's manning that roadblock? 22:06 And you don't really know. 22:07 And then suddenly there's a sniper on the building so that you're scared to go out of your house. 22:12 And so that's how you tend to see it happening at the local level. 22:16 Charlie Sykes So I don't want to be morbid, but I keep coming back to this this flashpoint. 22:21 And I've thought about what happened on January 6th, particularly one moment when one of the Washington police officers, Officer Fanone, was down. 22:32 And, you know, some of the protesters, rioters were saying, you know, take his gun and kill him. 22:35 And he was actually thinking, you know, what if I took my gun? 22:38 What if I if I shot? 22:40 What if any of those officers would have fired their weapons? 22:44 How much worse this could have been? 22:46 And so how the what is the spark? 22:50 Do you have police, federal agents who are serving a warrant who are fired upon? 22:54 We've seen that before. 22:56 Federal agents who are trying to seize an illegal cache of weapons that they think might be used for domestic terrorism that leads to a fire fight. 23:05 In many ways, it's remarkable that there was, given the open carry in so many states, that there haven't been flashpoints in places like the capital of Michigan or down in Texas. 23:18 But it feels like it's almost inevitable. 23:21 And then the question is... 23:23 Is that a moment of sobriety where everyone steps back or does it become a cycle? 23:29 And in some of the things you're describing, the first shot leads to the second shots. 23:35 It inspires more violence, more fear, more paranoia. 23:39 And it just sort of, you know, goes that gets out of control. 23:42 Is that is that a realistic fear? 23:46 Barbara Walter So this is a really good point. 23:47 Absolutely. 23:48 And again, what we know of from the really extensive scholarship on how nonviolent protests turn into violent protests, how fringe extremist groups suddenly become more popular and gain significant followers. 24:08 A lot of it has to do with how the government responds to early, well, let's call them protests, but it could be 24:15 you know, early attacks. 24:20 Think of the January 6th participants as extremists within the far right. 24:28 Clearly, they're willing to take measures that most conservatives, most Republicans in the country would not have been willing to take at the time. 24:37 Their challenge is how do they convince more moderate Republicans to back their cause, to come to agree that these more assertive and even violent methods are justified. 24:53 And we know from our studies on protests and on terrorism that the best way to do that is to provoke a disproportionate response from the powers that be, from the government. 25:05 Right. 25:05 So that if the government had responded to the January 6th attackers by mowing some of them down, first of all, it would have been ready martyrs for the cause, which that movement would have gladly used. 25:21 But it would have been in some ways... 25:24 considered hard evidence to people who might be sympathetic to that cause, but weren't willing to go as far as using violence. 25:33 It would be hard evidence to them that perhaps what the extremists in their party were saying was true, that the government was inherently against them, that the 25:47 to be their leaders. 25:49 And so how the government responds is very important. 25:54 And it could, if it responds too harshly, it could have the effect of radicalizing even more people to the cause. 26:02 Charlie Sykes Well, let's talk about some of the blowback you've gotten. 26:04 The economists thought that some of your assessments were far-fetched. 26:08 I think the Times of London said they were overblown and 26:11 Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times said she's not yet convinced that we are an anocracy and thinks that you underplay the difference between countries moving away from authoritarianism toward democracy and those going the other way. 26:24 And she also argued that the U.S. becoming more like Hungary seems more likely than civil war because Republicans work to maintain power, whether voters want it or not. 26:35 So just your reaction to that, because you've gotten some pushback saying, come on, we're not 26:40 It's the United States. 26:41 We're not going to actually start shooting each other. 26:42 Barbara Walter Yeah. 26:43 So there's really two points there. 26:44 The first is, you know, for example, the economists said we're not going to have another civil war. 26:51 And what the author of that really meant was we're not going to have another 1860 civil war. 26:57 This is just not going to happen here. 26:59 And I completely agree with that. 27:01 I don't think that reviewer actually read the book because I spent a lot of time talking about this new type of civil war that we're seeing and 27:09 That's really more of an insurrection and that we absolutely will not see a second civil war like the old style. 27:17 And in fact, I argue that it's actually quite dangerous to think that because if that's what we're looking for, we're going to be unprepared for what really is going to happen. 27:29 And then the Michelle Goldberg piece is was really smart. 27:33 And, you know, she argued that the U.S. isn't really quite an inocracy yet. 27:39 And that, you know, we we don't really know if these declines in democracy are going to lead to war. 27:47 And I guess my response to that is I don't code the data. 27:50 I didn't suddenly decide that the United States was a monocracy. 27:55 The data that we use on the task force comes from a nonprofit organization called the Center of Systemic Peace. 28:02 They've been collecting data for decades. 28:06 And in some respects, it doesn't really matter how they code inocracy. 28:13 All we know is that the way they code it, those are the countries that 28:18 Those are the countries that tend to experience civil war. 28:21 And it was the center of systemic peace that downgraded the United States to anocracy. 28:28 And I guess there's one other point that I think is important. 28:32 And Goldberg wasn't able to be this nuanced in her article earlier. 28:38 But I am in the book. 28:40 So the scale from full autocracy to full democracy goes from negative 10 to positive 10. 28:47 It's a 20-point scale. 28:49 The autocracy zone is from negative 5 to positive 5. 28:54 Where civil war is most likely is between negative 1 and positive 1. 29:00 The United States, when it was downgraded to an inocracy the first time in January of last year, was downgraded to plus five. 29:09 So it's not yet in the super sweet spot of high risk of civil war within this inocracy zone. 29:17 That would take it being downgraded further to a... 29:21 plus one, a zero or a negative one. 29:24 But it is for the first time in the zone. 29:28 And so what that tells us is if the United States continues to decline, if the United States doesn't strengthen its democracy, if the Republican Party is successful in undercutting more of the checks and balances on the executive, for example, then we are going to, our risk of civil war is going to increase even further. 29:49 Charlie Sykes So let's talk about your thoughts about January 6th. 29:54 You gave an interview to a journalist from the Sunday Times of London 29:58 And you told her that you thought, I'll summarize this, that the January 6th was really kind of a wake up call because it could expose Trump and his supporters, their true colors. 30:08 And I think you described it as the gift that America needed to wake up because those of us were sounding the alarm had been getting nowhere with it, which I think a lot of us thought at the time. 30:18 So a year later, clearly a lot of Americans hit the snooze button. 30:22 Barbara Walter Yes. 30:25 Charlie Sykes We didn't wake up. 30:27 Barbara Walter Since January 6th. 30:28 Yeah. 30:29 So I do think something. 30:32 So Joe Biden was elected in November of 2020. 30:38 And I do think that the left here in America breathed a collective sigh of relief that they thought, oh, you know, now now we're safe. 30:47 Everything is going to be OK. You know, Uncle Joe is in the White House. 30:52 And again, for those of us who study civil wars, we don't really care who's in the White House. 30:59 What we care about is how strong is our democracy. 31:04 Full liberal democracies, those that get a plus 10, do not experience civil wars. 31:11 So all people like me care about is... 31:14 Since Biden was in office, has our democracy gotten stronger? 31:19 Are we now moving up the democracy scale? 31:23 And the answer is no. 31:25 We are still at a plus five. 31:30 There have been no reforms to our democracy, whether in terms of voting rights, whether in terms of eliminating the filibuster, whether in terms of, I mean, you name it, whether in terms of more checks and balances on the president. 31:44 And so from my perspective, the risk continues. 31:50 And actually the way I think about it is the way I think about something like the risk of smoking. 31:57 We know from the task force that countries that have these two factors, inocracy and ethnic factions, are at about a 4% annual risk of civil war. 32:09 That seems small, but it's not. 32:13 If those two conditions do not change and they continue for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, after 30 years, the risk of civil war in the United States with those two conditions unchanged would probably be above 100%. 32:29 So I could start smoking today and my risk of dying of lung cancer this year would be really, really small. 32:37 But if I continue to smoke for the rest of my life, the risk would increase and eventually it would be quite high. 32:44 Charlie Sykes So this interview that you gave with Sarah Baxter in The Sunday Times was was disturbing on a number of different levels, including, you know, Baxter, who has both American and British citizenship, shares the story that her neighbors in Pennsylvania predict civil war and kind of a matter of fact way with kind of a gleam in their eye. 33:04 And you've noticed this, too, that it does seem like there are some Americans that are excited by the idea of civil war, people who think we need some culling. 33:17 I mean, you're picking this up that suddenly something that was unthinkable is now becoming thinkable and has now become desirable for some Americans. 33:26 Barbara Walter Yes, I think that's true. 33:28 You know, Charlie, it would probably be better to talk to somebody with a degree in psychology because they would understand this more. 33:37 But I'll tell you my layman's take on that. 33:41 I do think that most Americans have had no experience with war, right? 33:47 World War II is a long ways away from 33:49 And we've had a volunteer army for a very long period of time. 33:54 So most Americans have no experience with war. 33:57 And so they don't understand the horror of it. 34:00 They don't understand how destructive it is or how pervasive the costs are, not only when you're going through it, but for generations afterwards. 34:10 And I think they think of it as a game, as something exciting, an adventure. 34:16 And I think that's really, really dangerous. 34:19 And, yeah, and then I do think that if we have a culture that sort of, you know, not only embraces guns, but almost glamorizes guns, then it's not a big leap to say, oh, well, you know, wouldn't this be exciting, right? 34:37 Charlie Sykes Well, and also we have people playing around with the idea of national divorce, which I've been predicting for some time that the next thing is going to be, you know, secession, that sort of thing. 34:45 So Yale's Jacob Hacker analyzed your book and he said that everybody in power should read it immediately. 34:52 And but he breaks down. 34:54 I asked you the question. 34:56 What can we do about this as opposed to just bringing our hands about it? 35:03 I mean, obviously, make democracy work better. 35:05 But but are there tangible things that can be done to at least mitigate or lower the threat of these kinds of troubles you're describing? 35:14 Barbara Walter Charlie, are you talking about us as individuals or us as a society or us as a government? 35:18 Charlie Sykes Us as a society, us as individuals. 35:20 You write books, I do podcasts. 35:21 So, I mean, that's what we do, right? 35:23 But what can people in power, in Congress, in the White House, what can they do if they want to say, okay, in the time that we have now, with the power we have now, what can we do to prevent or lower the chance that this thing is going to break apart like this? 35:40 Barbara Walter So I'm going to say something that we haven't talked about at all. 35:43 I think probably the single biggest, easiest, most important thing that we could do right now is to regulate social media. 35:52 And I don't mean regulate the content. 35:54 You could put whatever content you want on social media. 35:57 But what we need to do is regulate the scale by which information is being disseminated at a rapid rate online and 36:07 and the degree to which recommendation engines are preferencing the most incendiary information, the type of information that creates fear, that builds a sense of threat, that increasingly divides society, and that actually gives a huge mouthpiece to extremists on both sides. 36:37 Charlie Sykes But how do you do that? 36:38 How do you do that consistent with the First Amendment? 36:41 Barbara Walter So I, again, this is not my area specialty, but the best information on this comes from a guy named Tristan or Tristan Harris. 36:53 He is a former chief ethicist. 36:56 for Google. 36:57 And he left Google because he was so disgusted with what he was seeing about the business model, where the business model was all about keeping people attached to their devices. 37:11 And the recommendation engines were then designed to do this. 37:15 And it turns out that the stuff that kept people on their devices was stuff that tended to be untrue and stuff that tended to foment extremism. 37:25 hate and fear. 37:27 And he started a nonprofit called the Center for Humane Technology. 37:31 And it is a fabulous website. 37:33 And on that website, he has a stream of podcasts. 37:37 And I listen to every single one. 37:40 And he's interviewing chief engineers at the big tech companies. 37:45 And he's having them explain in really accessible, interesting ways how the recommendations work. 37:52 and what they're doing. 37:54 And they don't talk about halting free speech at all. 38:00 They say the same thing. 38:01 They're like, put whatever you want on Facebook. 38:05 But don't allow Facebook to then create a recommendation engine that cherry picks the worst material that's there, figures out who's susceptible to 38:17 to that message, and then push more and more extreme messages towards them. 38:22 And that's what I think everybody should be listening to. 38:25 Charlie Sykes What about cracking down on the militia groups? 38:28 Barbara Walter So that is definitely possible. 38:31 So the previous... 38:33 peak in the number of militia groups in the United States was right after Timothy McFay's attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City in the 1990s. 38:43 That was actually a very rich time for militias. 38:50 Many of them were on the far right, but there were a lot of far left militias back then. 38:55 And after the bombing, the FBI was really, really aggressive about going after these groups, infiltrating them, arresting the leaders. 39:09 And you saw almost an immediate reversal in the number of militias. 39:14 And it really kind of plummeted until about 2008. 39:17 And then the trend reversed itself when Obama was elected president. 39:23 And you started to see 39:24 once again, a surge in the formation of these militias this time, um, uh, uh, most of it, over 70% of it was on the far right. 39:35 Um, and so, you know, the FBI knows, um, 39:39 about these groups. 39:40 It knows how to infiltrate the groups. 39:43 I'm sure after January 6th, again, that's why it was such an important wake-up call. 39:48 I'm sure they've been quite active trying to implement many of the same policies. 39:55 Charlie Sykes You know, one of the things that really struck me from last year was the reaction after this militia group was they made arrests with the militia group that was planning on kidnapping Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan. 40:08 You would have thought that that would have been a massive wake up call, that things had really gone off the tracks. 40:13 And yet you look back on it and it was scarcely a blip. 40:16 And it was I keep trying to draw up the scenarios which would go, OK, now it's really, really bad. 40:21 But after what happened with what almost happened with Governor Whitmer, 40:24 and what happened on January 6th, it's kind of hard to imagine what that would be, that shock of reality that would get people to say, okay, we ought to be very alarmed about this. 40:34 Barbara Walter So again, if you go back to that CIA manual on insurgency and you were to read how they identify whether a country is in this, the second stage, the incipient conflict stage, what they say about that is this is the stage where you have these disaffected groups and 40:56 They are now forming militias, and they are starting to engage in isolated attacks. 41:05 And the manual says, basically, the thing to worry about this stage is that the government is not yet aware that this is part of a larger movement. 41:18 They tend to see these attacks as the result of lone wolves, an isolated and idiosyncratic 41:26 And therefore they don't take it seriously and they don't connect the dots. 41:30 And of course, I think that's what the Whitmer kidnapping was. 41:34 Just like the McVeigh, like people talked about the Timothy McVeigh. 41:37 And if you were to ask people about Timothy McVeigh, I bet 99% of the people you asked would say he was a lone wolf. 41:44 He was not a lone wolf. 41:46 He probably was a member of one of the biggest militias in Michigan, the same militia that participated in the plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer. 41:57 His pickup truck had pages from the Turner Diaries in the back seat. 42:04 The Turner Diaries is considered the Bible of the far right. 42:08 There's videos of people who attacked the Capitol on January 6th. 42:12 There's a video of a guy holding up the book, the Turner Diaries, and 42:15 and telling the cameraman, you should read this book. 42:19 So again, this is part of a larger movement and people haven't really put it together yet. 42:29 And that's why I actually think January 6th was a gift to the American people because it made it impossible to ignore or deny that there is this cancer growing in our midst. 42:43 Charlie Sykes The book is How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them. 42:46 Barbara Walter, thank you so much for spending so much time with us on today's Bulwark podcast. 42:51 Barbara Walter It's my pleasure. 42:52 Thank you very much. 42:53 Charlie Sykes And thank you for listening today. 42:54 I'm Charlie Sykes. 42:55 We will be back tomorrow. 42:56 We will do this all over again.