have a conversation here skip and i go ahead yeah well david i have some common interests and in the topic of this book and i've which i've read and i recommend to you i think this is a really important book for understanding the politics of this country and the current state of affairs but i want to want to go back just a little bit here and asked dave how he got into writing about you know laboring in this particular vineyard how did you how did you start writing about the far right hate groups  actually goes back to the very start of my career in journalism i was all of nineteen years old when i went to work at the little newspaper in sandpoint idaho and was maybe the editor of of publicity and we were very reluctant to give it to them i used to actually get a letter city editor from guy named robert matthews who with his letters were very memorable because they were always in all caps and they were all riddled with medic garbage and i actually called him up once and he lived in meddling falls which is over in northeast washington and call up to explain to him why we weren't running his letters but he never did figure that one out and within a couple years i was no longer at the daily b by then i had moved on to other  southern idaho but within a couple years all of the panhandle was really a wash in this wave of hate crimes attacks on minority businesses jewish businesses mixed race families were being of the order which was led by my friend robert matthews robbie was there is there about toll of these guys in the order and they committed about twenty four twenty five  bank an armored car robbery as in they also committed the assassination of a radio talk show host in denver named ellen burke who had the audacity to attack them on air robbie who is cornered by the but the legacy still lingers on partly because they actually see skinheads and racists actually go out to be i and when see here on the anniversary of his death and held a memorial gathering out common in the old right but anyway so again i didn't i didn't do anything until the ninety's so you know it's interesting thing because people people are often surprised that they were neo nazis in the pacific northwest and i remember when i was editing eastside week i got a letter from a reader and we had been writing about what was going on in idaho this would be in the early ninety's and she she said you know i just i don't understand how in a place as wonderful and green and whatnot as the pacific northwest we could have such a thing as as nazis and but in fact when you look at the history of this region it's not surprising at all and and it's something both you and i have done so you know you had these kind of outlaw guys in the in the eighty's ruth robert matthies the order and then it morphed into supremacy attempt first real attempt to sort of mainstream itself mostly by stripping out its overtly racist and anti semitic elements so they weren't obvious and they were clear and this may build them to present themselves as as being just concerned about the constitution and the flag and patriotic love of america and that sort of thing which is what they do and you know and this actually goes back to new did some really great work in the last few years on the old klan in the northwest and how how the northwest has actually been host to these really racist elements for years and years and years going back even to the civil war but more particularly to the early twentieth century and the funny thing is there wasn't a lot of difference in the sort of who i mean when i can compare the stuff that was going on in the ninety's when i go to militia meetings very similar very similar to the sort of rhetoric that was common in the klan in the silver shirts in the one nine hundred twenty s and thirty's well yeah that that's one of the things that  really struck struck me was the silver shirt movement which was national and there was this they had her to the black shirts of the brown shirts it was the american fascist the silver legion national d he found washington state and the pacific northwest in general but certainly washington state very fertile grounds for recruiting and in fact he headed is one nine hundred thirty six presidential campaign here in washington state we were the only state that put him on the ballot and so he moved here and and this was you know overtly nazi i mean this was started in the late twenty's but by the time he was here hitler was in power that kind of thing and that's one of the things that struck me in reading your book and things that we've talked about is the tactics of william dudley pelley anti semitism the militarism the  fabricating of complaints against the legitimacy of the president they believe the silver shirts believe that that warren g harding had been murdered that that herbert hoover was not a citizen anyway i bring that up because you mentioned the parallels and one of the things that you talk about in the book that i think is really important is this idea that these movements half create a kind of false universe for their followers and we hear a lot about fake news and we hear a lot about conspiracy theories but i wonder if you could talk about what is the what is the world these folks are are living in they're designing for themselves sure well and  i call it all to merica it's because it's like an alternative universe and i first observed this in the ninety's when i was reporting on the patriot militia movement that they actually create this unit alternative universe for themselves and for their followers to dwell in that sort of was parallel to ours but their world view is totally different because they didn't really believe in the usual what is basically the foundations of what's factual what's true and what's not they vote by believing in all of these conspiracy theories they essentially throw all the rules of logic and reason and factuality in evidence right out the window  and instead replace it with innuendo and wild speculation and that's how it works so in that alternative universe now in the one nine s this alternative universe primarily consisted of believing in the new world order black helicopters were going to be coming in and taking people away rounding them up into concentration camps fema camps actually got their start promoting patriot militia theories and that's it but you know the course is you can see the who following at the alternative universe eventually took on all kinds of different tom potence once we reached like nine eleven it became really developed really while the only univers which was all these nine eleven truth or nine eleven truth conspiracy theories so on and so forth prior to that it had been primarily stuff that came out of the old posse common tadas movement including yeah the the belief that the constitution doesn't really allow for a federal government doesn't allow the federal government on land that the sheriff is the highest law enforcement officer in the land county sheriff and have seen all these beliefs still filtering through to this day because they were really fueled the standoff at the mouth were national wildlife refuge and the bundy ranch standoff as well but they're also really very much standard part of the belief system of the patriot militia movement now which as i hate to tell you this it's incredibly wide spread in rural america i mean it's it's everywhere and in every region of the country so bo's going to ask you what it would how would you buchanan for example he's been around a long time we're not surprised about his politics and he would be considered somewhat mainstream i think he certainly has been treated that way over the years yeah although we don't i definitely categorize him as a white national in the book there are a lot of components to the radical right the reason i kind of he is the the umbrella of all to america is that because they all share this alternative universe or at least various versions of it you know they they all this alex jones they all believe in a variety of conspiracy theories but they have logically they come from a lot of different backgrounds so the main radical right complement that section of the radical right that a lot of the book focuses on is the patriot militia movement because it was kind of the wellspring of this whole alternative universe but by two thousand and eight or two thousand and nine we were seeing a lot of other radical right elements coming into play that were not part of the patriot militia movement and these are the particularly the white nationalists white supremacists and some some very serious native says well we'll is this it was this a response to the election of yeah yeah that was primarily when really saw was that after obama's election the tea party phenomenon became a massive conduit for mainstreaming  patriot militia belief system the republican party and most of mainstream republicans had really resisted this sort of conspiracist worldview from most of that first decade mainly because they were you know nine eleven truth or the conspiracy theories and and the main villain of these theories was george w bush so you have republicans are anything but enthusiastic when it came to these conspiracy theories  for during bush's years but when was obama was elected and we started getting a whole panoply of conspiracy theories about him you know that he was going to take away gods that he was secretly a communist and that he was actually raised by radicals and that he was not a an american citizen and that his faith his birth certificate  and those became you know part of that really that whole tea party movement but the tea party movement within a few year really within a matter of months was just flooded with all of these  militia figures that we saw and probably the most prominent of them the best example i can give you this is the oath keepers which became very much a tea party affiliated organization  virtually a patriot militia organization and they actually go out and try to recruit members of the military and law enforcement to radicalize them to bring them into this extremist belief system so so what was the what was the impetus for this book well i really wanted to write a book about knew from his two thousand and eleven run that he had really managed to gain some ground by pushing the birth or conspiracy theory he was basing his old campaign on a right it was cause for concern and sure enough right there that first day first announcement about him and bashed mexicans call them criminals and rapists and things like that and  and that was concerning both were really i mean the the main reason i became concerned is realized i needed to write a book about it was that right along with his candidacy we suddenly saw all this energy this organizing energy and recruitment and really spread into social media of all these right wing radical groups in particularly the albright which was a new phenomenon so what is it about trump that you think is resonating in general but also resonating with this particular constituency is it simply that he is kind of not dog whistling but actually speaking to some of their very specific beliefs and concerns but the first thing is i mean he is an authoritarian he's an authoritarian figure he's a classic authoritarian leader and he's appealing to people on the basis of his  more about the armies of followers who raise them to power they have because these are these folks have very specific personality traits and very specific personality profiles and right wing authoritarian what they call them and they have you know three different basic clusters of traits one is authoritarian aggression which is to be aggressive against anyone who does not submit to the will of the leader and the other one is authoritarian submission which is submitting to the legitimate leader but if they see the leader as not being a legitimate as they did with obama or bill clinton or would have with hillary clinton then they're the opposite of authoritarian they see those people as illegitimate and try to drive them from power and seek to persuade them as illegitimate through whatever means they can  including suggesting that they're not real americans so that's kind of how that whole symbiosis works so yeah the problem is less the the actual there was the america first there was the german american blue and there were the silver shirts there were you know a number of these groups but they all had kind of competing agendas and never seemed to really go anywhere right heart partly i think it was because the charismatic leader in america at that time was franklin roosevelt who is the antithesis right yeah but is is trumping unite or in that sense it's all yeah yeah yeah no he's very zen he's been this charismatic figure that all of the i mean one of the things that was kind of interesting when i started studying the all right really about three years ago and two thousand and thirteen fourteen when they started happening  they all right is definitely a new phenomenon it's basically white nationalism rewired for the twenty first century and it's designed to it's not your grandfather's clan it's very it's it's very socially adept it's technologically adept and they are they use humor and the use social media and the use of these means in these ideas and i was in it's very much geared towards recruiting people eighty ages eighteen to thirty white males almost solely and i the whole idea of behind what they are trying to recruit him on is these various grievances that young white males have and so much of the politics and much of what you see going on in the right is very trans university of washington milo yap with us now where you were at that time was and saw some of the things that happened there firsthand yeah and you know we're talking about some of these people who are  you know speaking to this this this generation that you're talking about tell us a little bit about that event and what you saw what you witnessed there and because that that's i mean i've been covered protests on red square before so it seemed to felt like just one of those normal things but what it actually happened was they lined all the people who were going to see milo outside of the hall where he was speaking and wouldn't let anybody in and so all these people were in a big long line to get in and they were standing there and all the protestors started coming in and basically surrounding them and for the most part you know ninety nine percent of those protesters were nonviolent and peaceful but were you know letting them know that they didn't approve of their all right politics in the black bloc folks showed up and started getting violent and i got hit several times and you know and one of the third time the last time i got it it knocked the camera out from my stick that i was using and it went across the ground and i was standing next to this young tall man who had been acting as a peacekeeper all night and he has a gun to my phone i went and picked it up and turned back and there was a young man laying there on the ground had been shot by one of the writers and it took them a couple months to figure out there was actually the wife of there is guy that had been watching all night who was going around clearly caught trying to cause trouble and i was keeping an eye on it and sure enough that it wasn't him that actually shot him he was the guy that got in a tussle with the peacekeeper and his wife pulled a gun and shot the peace keeper so that was the end of that presentation and yeah i've had to cover several of these have been down to visit that horrible sherwood i will i've been refraining from cursing  berkeley in april when there was another big demonstration there and then you know and that was the one who were for so the boulder flying over my head then i saw an intact brake drum flying over my the i think i'm going to watch out from above it was a very traumatic and it was really ugly i've got a couple pictures from that that hopefully i'll show you do you think we're going to see more violence well  i hope not i think people in the empty freshest movement are starting to understand that these guys are trolling them that they're trying to create situations where they just they want the violence because that's what nazis do that's what fascists do they always they always feed on violence especially at this stage in their development is their way of a making their opponents look bad and be making themselves look good so it's win win for them so is it ok to punch a nazi it's not much as i'd like to you know richard spencer does have the world's most punch will face but i don't recommend punching  just because it's what they want if you i mean if you want to help them win go ahead if you want to beat them then you have to outsmart these guys are smart they're not stupid they're not like i say they're not your grandparents clan and they know they know what they're doing they have a very specific strategy in mind they very much want to use democracies institutions to turn it against itself they wan use free speech the concept of free speech very cynically as a weapon to turn around and club their opponents with when in fact they have they themselves have no respect for the concept of free speech  just as happy if their opponents i mean part of the problem is that that i've gone to the these demonstrations most of them have been you know they have their free speech and then these thousands and thousands of demonstrators are exercising their free speech in and and the only time that it gets out of hand is when one of them's picks a fight and a lot of times it's as right we're actually starting fights so you know and he goes both ways you know nobody's innocent in that but it's is pretty ugly scene so i'm very concerned mostly concerned that you know we have seen a lot of patriot militiamen showing up at these saints and there are carrying arms  i'm very concerned somebody is going to get shot one stays we've already had a couple shootings and we just had a shooting them to cheating down in gainesville florida at a richard spencer event who are the figures that stick out from from your research that maybe we haven't heard of but we should be paying attention to me mentioned richard spencer he's obviously someone we're aware of  who who are some of the people that we might not know that are drivers it's well they're actually believe it or not right here in seattle there's a guy named greg johnson who runs one of those powerful  house organs of the all right movement called counter currents he just moved here about a year ago but we have learned about a mainly through these undercover reporters who have been going out and showing up at going to these all right events one was a stranger reporter who did a terrific job getting inside and touching it no uncovering about these guys are talking about being secret agents at their workplaces a lot of these guys are tech workers who are working in the tech fields and they are saying yeah don't reveal your white nationalist views your coworkers but just secretly act like a white nationalist by not allowing black people in your teams and and in terms of the all right itself is really one of his more significant figures because he's attracted this huge following and it's the editor of the daily storm or a young man named andrew angle and now you may know that richard spencer lives half the year in whitefish montana and he tried to do a rally over there in montana and urs actually is his mother owns property in montana and she got crossways with some of the local real estate folks there including a jewish woman who then was besieged by all right trolls on social media and  received all kinds of threats and these were all sent in to these flying monkeys were all sent into action by hand harangue glenn at the daily storm or because he was trying to defend richard spencer you southern poverty law center for whom i am the west coast correspondent to say that they did what they do well which is they are taking young mr england to court  for his inappropriate for the leading the threats against his jewish woman and their anglin is now on the run he's in hiding because he doesn't want he's been taking the daily star daily starmer got taken down from its original provider and is now coming out of albania i think yeah it was a provider in albania and it's keeping it up but there's a local company that's protecting it washington state company it's protecting its free speech from the to service attacks yep denial that's right so those are some of the main players every there's a whole world of them out there but those are the main the guys at least on the right to be aware of and then there's also always the patriot militia movement which is really a different segment of the radical right maybe  probably the main players in that movement or stuart rose the leaders leader of the if keepers and richard mack who's head of the outfit called the constitutional sheriffs and peace officers association and they are they recruit sheriffs and policeman into the constitutionalist belief system he's very closely associated with the bundy family and yeah and he met with jeff set him recently moved to seattle in the in the sort of tech connections and but it reminds me that there are several movements in the northwest that are encouraging all white immigration to the northwest to create what they call the american readout or you know harold covington yeah who has the northwest front pod cast yeah  cascadia flag colors so everything looks very wholesome and very kind of you know green and cascadian but you know it's many of these folks have you know the old oregon country as well as prime territory well this goes back as you know i mean that was played the area missions moved out or appear from southern california in seventy six was they wanted to make the pacific northwest an all white homeland that was their plan and it was actually the plan actually because that concept goes back even a decade before that  named pastor bob miles who was a klan leader in upstate michigan dearborn and the miles of credit character yeah he was actually the first one to propose he wanted to create an all white homeland and he looked around the country he said well the best place for our way is the pacific northwest because they have they have the fewest minorities of any part of the country which was kind of by design i w actually goes back to the eight hundred forty s and fifty's with the black exclusion laws in oregon and yeah and the efforts to keep this area white and segregated that's right and and that legacy is not unnoticed by some folks yeah yeah and there was clearly a part of richard butler is thinking when he moved the area nations up to a quarter lame or to him like that was always part of their program was that they wanted to create this white homeland here in the northwest and that is lives on today with their greg johnson counter currents and these white nationalists who want to create this white homeland and i want to ask another personal question which is i know that when i have done research on the history of this stuff i get in a really bad mood and i find it really hard to process and i have to spend a lot of time looking at the trees in the water to kind of regain some sense of sanity and how do you process this i mean you spend money you've spent years in the in the muck here it's not easy it's actually you know it's honestly it's been really hard this past year because on the these events these rallies that i've been covering  kayak and that's how i get this out of my system a lot of it honestly to tell you the truth for you know the first decade of you know previous you know the two thousand  one forward i was a stay at home dad and i had a little girl to raise and believe me that when your daily life is sweet like that makes everything easier so yeah that was part of how i but yeah absolutely spiritual renewal is really important and spending time out in nature is kind of how i do it i was an environmental reporter when i started doing this writing well before we get here slideshow or your little presentation i wanted to ask what you think the audience i mean when they read this book and they say you know learn about these trends and what not what can they do what can we do well that's the thing it and of course i do have some suggestions at the end and talk about how we change our approach and part of it has to do with kind of what's killing us because part of because the left does it when we see ourselves as heroic the first thing we do is name an enemy and that was that's how the right far right works is when they they go out and start creating enemies even when they aren't there and so i think that escaping that dynamic is going to be really key to us and this ultimately person our in our personal behavior you know i don't think we're going to get out of this but the top down approach i think i see all of the great social change of ten fifteen years has come up from the ground up you know gay marriage marijuana change for all of the great changes have come not come from our leaders it come from people changing it from the ground up and i think if we're going to deal with this phenomenon we have to do it on the ground personal person over dinner tables and our business dealings in our friends acquaintances and everything we do and a lot of it is going to have to do with changing how we deal with stuff because or doing isn't working most of all i really want people to come away hopefully just i think that people the people need to understand that the moc see liberal democracy but just democracy in general is under siege right now not just in america but all around the world and it's been attacked by pr they're even gaining power in germany the far right is ascendant and these people are fundamentally absolutely anti democratic they do not believe in democracy they do not believe in equality and they are hostile to all of those principles and it's you know you people need to understand that we are you know we've had one hundred years of a stable liberal democracy and we've kind of taken it for granted we always assume that we're just going to have these institutions around the respect for the vote the sense of community that comes from that from from a liberal democracy  those kinds of things are really under attack right now and we need to stand up we need people need to wake up and understand that their way that everything that we take for granted now in terms of our stable democratic institutions are under attack and from this movement and also from without and we need to really be standing up in their defense i do think that the ultimate defense as they say they try to use institutions of democracy against turn it against itself i think we also need to use the institutions of democracy to defeat them and that begins with getting out playing games of them is not going to work oh you're going to do a little presentation sure and then and then we'll do take some questions from the  well that the tea party has received tremendous funding from particularly in a number of billionaires and things of that sort did you in your research come across any link between the funding they close to the party and the funding that and we know very little about them except that they're funded by all these billionaires like the coax and they have some real far right wingers and white nationalists sitting on that council for national policy in steve bannon's on it too yeah there's there's this very murky area it's very hard to put a finger on it partly because they you know they cover their money so you can really go and find out exactly how many people are getting how much money but clearly some of these organizations such as richard spencer's outfit hi my name is adrian weller and i'm with the radical women and as we all know the fascist program for women is not very attractive so my question is i've been part of a lot of of than at least two fascists rallies here in new york in seattle and you haven't mentioned you've mentioned that it has to be from ground up and i agree but you haven't mentioned the need to organize really massive numbers organize disciplined and taking them on in numbers which i think is the only way to push them back you can't just do it over the dinner table and i just wonder what you think of that yeah and i  think they're hostile to journalists the anti factor the black bloc people and right right but there are that in that we just going to say so like when i showed up at u w  january twentieth first i was really very happy because the main people that were there were these socialists and leftist groups or very clearly were there to demonstrate peacefully and  that's a very effective way of doing it especially if you can make it clear that you're shunning them or that you know actually my my all time favorite fascist demonstration or counter protest took place in two thousand five when jim ram and his national socialist movement tried to hold a nazi rally on the capitol steps in olympia and they were met by a crowd of olympia people from a limpia who all came out and clown masts and basically sat and made fun of these guys all day and basically mooned them and it was is a wonderful thing for one thing everybody had a great time except the nazis the of very positively so everything about it would change their main my biggest issue with the counter protests that i've seen so far is that nobody cares about actually persuading anybody and particularly the public all they care about is making their demonstration that i punched a nazi you know that's what i that's what's happening at these demonstrations whether it's what i am covering them and that's what i can see this is after the portland back stabbing but unfortunately at the next park over was black bart folks and very thing went to hell as a result because the whole demonstration turned into a series of violent acts and so those were you know and i just don't think that that's particularly a leap that that's how you lose but i do absolutely think that you have show up and show up in numbers to demonstrate to them that they are not the majority in fact they really like to think that they're much of the majority but every single one of question here about a use of force question the two kind of anointed entities in our society that are given the use of governmental force or the cops and the military i was alarmed i think it was the washington post this morning had a story about how the russian propaganda is now targeting arse our men in uniform and our service members and up to thirty percent of them have now have at least some point supremacist leanings i'm wondering this is kind of a new wrinkle that's emerging cops there had their fascist edge but bet our the military has always been kept a fairly hard line about that and that seems to be evaporating now i'm wondering if you could comment and maybe talk about what could be done about that actually it's been an ongoing problem for probably twenty years right that we've been the s p l see is certainly been observing the large flow of the large attempts to recruit members of the military into these quite extremist groups for some time but the f b i in two thousand and eight did it by the way the story that furring to is a piece that came out just today that showed that it demonstrated that there are look there's this huge segment of the military that something like forty percent of all people who are of color in the military are encountered white nationalism within the ranks and that this white nationalists and even white people are encountering it and it became really an issue that the f b i investigated and report that they published in two thousand and eight that really is you know pointed out that this is going to be a growing problem one of the real issues then your ordinary malicious love is and this is we've actually been very lucky with most of our history of domestic terrorism in american that most of these are right new streams are not typically competent but  guy like tim mcveigh or eric rudolph changes that equation considerably because they are competent at those things and so they're really a threat and it's a real cause for concern unfortunately the year after the f b i put out their report v h s also did it put out a bulletin warning law enforcement that in these extremes are going to be recruiting members of the military and veterans and the right wing media got ahold of it fox news and rush limbaugh michelle malkan and they turned it into a giant right wing cause celeb and forced janet napolitano to apologize for the bulletin the so so that thing that particular media blow up really really hurt our efforts to kind of keep proper tabs on writing domestic terrorists in this country so we're finally just getting b a story back in mid ninety's that shocked me into knowing how this element has is always here and that was if you could you probably know the story better than i do but was when the all right overcame the old men the odd fellows on capitol hill are now actually took over that clump for a while until  l just add to that that in researching you know it in the one nine hundred thirty s we had actual nazis here in seattle because they were representatives of the third reich stationed on the west coast  good time many of the domestic pro fascist groups spoke at various venues in town including oddfellows and also what used to be what's now the egyptian theater was the site of  actual major pro nazi rally and it turned into a riot when anti nazi demonstrator showed up so that i think about oddfellows hall in those buildings i can drive around capitol hill now without looking at those people and because they were first going to set off a bomb on the dance floor and then have everybody scatter for the the exits and then they're going to have bombs going off in the exits and and fortunately the f b i cut into that and busted him and that never happened but then of course just a few years ago neighbors got firebomb begin by this time muslim extremist but well it was not you see on capitol hill at night eleven twelve at night these pickup trucks full of these guys with their dark glasses yeah who carts and these and their girlfriends with blindingly belonged here i mean miles yeah and one of the things that's been going on in couple of years bill for years that the neighborhoods tried to deal with but city fathers have just done nothing about is this really costly get these guys from out of town from the