'If You Can Keep It': Trump, Hate Speech, And Free Speech

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0:31A Hitler-praising group chat. A government official with a self-proclaimed Nazi streak. A swastika flag in a sitting representative's office. A covered-up tattoo of a Nazi symbol. Those are just a few of the racist, anti-Semitic forms of speech and expression notable political figures have been tied to in recent weeks. Vice President J.D. Vance has downplayed outrage over some of these incidents from his party as pearl-clutching. The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes like that's what kids do. And I really don't want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke, telling a very offensive stupid joke, is cause to ruin their lives.

1:15Later on social media, the vice president suggested anger should instead be directed at violent text messages that Jay Jones, who's Virginia's Democratic nominee for attorney general, himself sent in 2022. Meanwhile, President Trump has signed a memo designating Antifa and Black Lives Matter as terrorist organizations. It's part of the administration's larger effort to crack down on what it calls a widespread left-wing conspiracy to carry out acts of political violence. Today on If You Can Keep It, our weekly series on the state of our democracy, we're talking about the line between hate speech, violence, and political dissent in the eyes of the Trump administration.

1:55How does the government define and handle entities it labels domestic terrorists? What, if anything, could the government do to curb hate speech and political violence? I'm Jen White. And I'm Todd Zwilling. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. We'll be back with more in just a moment. Stay with us.

2:15Let's meet our panel. Joining us from New York is Faiza Patel. She's the Senior Director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Faiza, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. Also with us in studio is Cynthia Miller-Idris. She's a sociologist and founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, or PERIL, at American University. She's also the author of Man Up, The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism. Cynthia, welcome back to the program. Thanks for having me. And we should note that American University holds the license to WAMU, the station where 1A is produced but has no involvement in our editorial decision.

2:53So, Cynthia, how do these recent incidents of racist, anti-Semitic speech and expression fit into the current state of our politics? Yeah, I think that we're seeing several different trends happen all at once. One, we're seeing a steady increase since the 1990s in all kinds of terrorism and targeted violence. And recently we've seen an uptick in violence from ideologies motivated by the left, so including political assassination attempts, that kind of thing. But it hasn't declined on the other side, and the data shows that over the last decade, the biggest and most lethal threat is coming from what we would think of as far right.

3:31I think even bigger than that, though, is this new trend over the last several years of mass violence, targeted violence, that's never determined to be an ideological motive whatsoever. It's what we would call signal noise in the intelligence data, and that makes it very confusing to unpack because you still see all kinds of the other type of the old violence, but we also see this newer type. And what does your research say about how we're seeing this type of speech show up in political discourse, especially from elected officials? Yeah, well, what we do know, no matter what, is that the normalization and the legitimation of any kind of hate does ultimately spur and fuel the potential for mass violence coming from the fringes.

4:17So when you have the mainstream saying it's just a joke or this is just big talk or blowing off steam, those are quotes from even defense attorneys in terrorism and targeted violence cases that just tells people, guys, generally speaking, on the fringes that it's OK, that it's normal and that this is that they're just being silenced by triggered snowflakes who can't take a joke. What does it mean that we're seeing more of this speech in the first place? I mean, a congressman's office blamed an optical illusion on the fact that one of his staffers had a swastika embedded in an American flag. There are many, Jen mentioned many of the incidents on the right.

4:59There is also a Democratic Senate candidate in Maine who for years has sported a Nazi tattoo on his chest and appears, according to reporting, does not appear to be completely honest about how long he's realized he was sporting a Nazi-affiliated tattoo on his chest. So this has now migrated to mainstream politicians in ways that would have been career-ending. Absolutely. Career-ending a few years ago. The bar is so much—the bar is gone, right, in terms of what used to be career-ending, what used to have been shocking or outrageous or would have generated immediate shutdowns. both on the misogynistic side and on the racist side, and on open support for the actions of Hitler and the Nazi Party, which used to be just a complete taboo.

5:53You would never have seen that to people to say, like, well, Hitler wasn't so bad. I mean, those are the kinds of things that we're now hearing. And we also hear in our recent data of higher ed campuses, we see a lot of the repeating of the phrase, we are so back from young men, right? And so this sense of like, we're allowed now to say it. We can do it now. And I think that there's a real celebration around it too. It's not just like, there's no shame in it. Yeah. Faiza, there's a legal difference between offensive rhetoric and criminal acts. How is that defined in the law? So I think there's sort of three sets of issues to look at here.

6:37So one is what is domestic terrorism? And there are a number of crimes that are defined in the law that constitute domestic terrorism. And that is things like hijacking, attacking a federal building, arson in some instances. Then you have this realm of hate crimes where you have a criminal act, which is motivated by bias against individuals of a certain race or ethnicity or religion, etc. And then, of course, you have sort of really offensive rhetoric, you know, what in Europe they call hate speech, what we call hate speech. And that is not illegal in the United States. Now, in late September, President Trump signed an executive order designating Antifa, that's short for anti-fascist, as a domestic terrorist organization.

7:26Days later, he issued a national security memo known as NSPM7 about how the administration plans to counter domestic terrorism and organize political violence. Here's what Attorney General Pam Bondi said earlier this month about how the administration is going after Antifa. We're not going to stop at just arresting the violent criminals we can see in the streets. Fighting crime is more than just getting the bad guy off the streets. It's breaking down the organization brick by brick. just like we did with cartels. We're going to take the same approach, President Trump, with Antifa. Destroy the entire organization from top to bottom.

8:06Destroy the entire organization from top to bottom, Cynthia. Now, the former FBI director, Christopher Wray, and he's not alone in this, says Antifa is not a group or an organization, but a decentralized movement and ideology incorporates broad swath of the political left. In the September executive order, who does this administration identify as Antifa? And how do you square what pretty much everyone in law enforcement says about it with what the attorney general is saying about dismantling an organization brick by brick? Yeah, it's one of the more perplexing things, I think, for those of us who study this to see an administration who doesn't understand that Antifa is not an organization, There's no chain of command.

8:52There's no cell. There's no manifesto. There's no initiation rights that you sign up for, right? There's no way to undermine it the way you could in unlawful militia. It would be like saying we're going to undermine anti-government extremism or white supremacist extremism. It is a way of thinking and it is a movement and sometimes groups coalesce around it. But you can't go after an idea and shut it down. You certainly can't do that in a country that prioritizes free speech. What you can do is prioritize targeting criminal activity, but then you have to focus on the criminal activity, not the imaginary organization that one thing surrounds it.

9:29So then, Faiza, what does this designation actually accomplish? So I think actually they are trying to give themselves the widest possible scope for targeting individuals and organizations. If you look at the definition of anti-fascism in the National Security Memo, it covers everything from anti-Americanism to being against traditional notions of American family, to holding extreme views on migration, to anti-Christianity. I mean, it's a swath of ideologies. So I think what they're trying to do is to say anti-fascism is all these things, which is basically, you know, sort of a basket of opposition to the Trump administration.

10:17And that is conflated with individual violent acts, such as the murder of Charlie Kirk, and swept up into this broad conspiracy. And I think what the attorney general is trying to say and what the national security memo does is to basically say we're going after all of this. And it directs the federal law enforcement as well as the Treasury and the IRS to open investigations and start investigating and putting pressure, in essence, on anybody who's potentially associated with this movement. Now, we haven't seen them actually doing that yet, but it sends a very strong signal that people should be very worried about what's coming down the line.

11:04We'll head to a quick break here. But coming up, what the Trump administration stands to gain from blurring the lines between protected speech and criminal acts. That's just ahead.

11:18So, Faiza Patel, before we took a pause, we were talking about the new memo executive order from the White House designating Antifa a domestic terror organization and detailing how the administration would go after the speech and the people that it doesn't like. What about the legal reality of designating a domestic terror organization? We know that the government does this all the time overseas. Al-Qaeda is a terrorist organization. Hamas is a terrorist organization, but they're not American. What's the legal reality here about designating a domestic terror organization and the people who you say are part of it?

11:59Well, legally, it means nothing. There is no provision in the law that allows the president to designate a domestic group as a terrorist organization. And there's a really good reason for that, because if you go back and you look at the legal structure, it's a two-part legal structure. So there is a number of crimes that are defined in the law, which are crimes of terrorism. It doesn't matter if it's international. It doesn't matter if it's domestic. If you, you know, attack a federal building and they're able to prove it, that's a crime of terrorism, right? There's a separate provision in the law that has a very different take on terrorism, which allows you to designate foreign terrorist organizations, and then any support that you give, any material support that you give to the organization, regardless of whether your own act is criminal or even intended to support criminal activity, is per se a crime.

13:01So I think the analogy is, you know, if I send a$20 gift card to al-Qaeda, that's a crime. If I send a$20 gift card to an organization like, I don't know, the Proud Boys or the KKK, that is not a crime under the law, regardless of how you view that organization or how heinous you think they are. And the reason for that is pretty simple, right? And we see it right now, which is if the president could designate domestic groups as terror organizations so that giving them any money at all would be per se a crime, then he could designate, I don't know, the ACLU or immigrants' rights groups or groups working for the separation of church and state.

13:49So there's a whole swath of civil society that could easily be designated and basically shut down because nobody could give them any money. Well, the president's national security memo, again, this is NSPM 7, alleges that, quote, the surge in political violence in the United States is not random, but rather part of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation and violence from the political left. So, Faizan, just very plain terms, how credible is that claim? I think there's no evidence for that. Yes, there have been, you know, incidents which seem to be left-wing violence, right?

14:27I mean, I think, you know, the murder of Charlie Kirk is one that's normally described that way. But the idea that there is some kind of grand conspiracy is simply not borne out by the evidence. And let's also keep in mind that even when we talk about increasing numbers of either left-wing or right-wing violence, violence, the actual numbers are quite small overall when you compare it to the overall picture of violence in the United States. Yes, they're very impactful. Yes, we pay a lot of attention to them, and rightly so. But we're not talking about, you know, some enormous level of violence that's happening in the country.

15:08But Cynthia, I'm curious, in your research, what you've found around this idea of conspiracies and how that is driving some people further to the fringes. If this messaging is coming from the White House, there's this grand conspiracy and they're plotting against us. How does that drive people further down rabbit holes they may be skirting around the edges of already? Yeah, and I also just want to emphasize and back up what Faiza said with data I've got right in front of me from this most recent DHS report to Congress that got sent to me this morning on the data, which shows that the vast majority of terrorism and targeted violence last year was non-ideological at all, right?

15:51And so it's a lot of personal grievance that we see that is very difficult to disentangle. And I think—and then the next biggest category is racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism. And then you get anti-government extremism, which is less than half of that. And so I think when you – in anti-government extremism, meaning also it includes anti-authoritary, that's where you would see something like Antifa but also unlawful militia. So it's – the data really doesn't bear up what the administration is saying. What I can say about conspiracy theories is that the clearest indication we have of how it mobilizes violence is with the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which we have repeatedly seen motivate mass attacks both overseas in Oslo and Otoya, Norway and Christchurch.

16:35but here in El Paso, in Pittsburgh, in Poway, in Buffalo, I mean, you see it again and again and again, the idea that there's a Jewish and anti-feminist conspiracy to replace white people with multicultural communities and disempower white men, essentially. That's that conspiracy theory. And so we see that echoed in the language of replacing voters with immigrants. We see it in all kinds of things that are likely to spur violence in the future based on history. Which leading members of Congress have used in their fundraising language. directly leading Republican members of Congress. And the vicious theory that you just described is a staple of Elon Musk's social media posting and his rhetoric.

17:16Yes, absolutely. And we know that that kind of rhetoric, what we call stochastic terrorism, you know, can inspire. It doesn't mean it will inspire, but it can inspire fringe actors to believe not just in the conspiracy, but that they are obligated to take heroic action in order to thwart it. Well, Faisa, I want to come back to you on this memo, because as you said, it doesn't have legal teeth. It is more messaging and signaling that this is the direction we want to head in. This is the area of focus we want to have. So if we're talking about, for instance, going after nonprofit organizations that fall under this sort of anti-American, I'm using quotes here, label, what does that require from an agency like the IRS?

18:01What does that signaling tell them to do as they're investigating organizations that may or may not be legitimate? I think what it does is it tells federal law enforcement, so not just the IRS, but also the FBI and also DHS to a lesser extent, you know, go forth and find people and organizations and start investigating them. And that has, you know, that has a lot of risk for organizations. I mean, the very fact that if it becomes known that the FBI is investigating an organization for terrorism has a huge reputational risk. It's likely to have a huge impact on their fundraising because no one's going to want to be associated with that group.

18:52So actually, the very fact of investigation, I think, is a pretty big stick for the government. You mentioned the IRS. And obviously, a lot of these groups are nonprofit groups, which means that donations to them are tax exempt. And if the IRS now starts labeling these groups as being potential terrorists, that's again going to have a huge impact on their, both on their fundraising in the short term, but also on their reputation. And if the IRS were to actually take away the 501c3 ability to operate with tax-free income, then that would basically shut down a lot of organizations. Cynthia, there are so many blurred lines that we're dealing with now in this discussion and in the broader culture that we're talking about.

19:40On the one hand, the administration goes after universities and colleges with the pretext of fighting anti-Semitism. Then the vice president turns around and says edgy jokes about gas chambers. Don't get worked up about it. Who cares? You have to put those two things in your head. You have to keep in your head that the administration takes very seriously violent organizations that want to destroy America. They're going to go after them. Meanwhile, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, convicted of seditious conspiracy who, in the case of the Proud Boys, in their indictment amassed weapons in Arlington, Virginia, anticipating an armed response on January 6th, pardoned or had their sentences commuted by the president.

20:23So that's the cognitive space you have to be in to digest this conversation about extremism and perceived violence. So help us. Yeah. Well, I think there's several different things, I think, to point out here. One, I think if we were serious in this country about preventing terrorism and targeted violence, we'd look at what the single biggest predictor is of every mass shooter, which is a history of domestic and intimate partner violence. And so we know that 60 % of mass shooters have a documented history of domestic and intimate partner violence. And that doesn't even count things like stalking, harassment, rape threats, sexual assault, anti-LGBTQ issues.

20:58So we already know. We know what the biggest predictors are. We know that among the top three predictors of support for political violence or willingness to engage in it, and sometimes in some surveys, the number one predictor is misogyny. But we just don't address it. So, you know, instead we get caught in these debates about, you know, is this label applied to which type of group or not, which one should be illegal or not. I think on the ground, communities just want the violence to stop. What we have had is a 2 ,000 percent increase in terrorism and targeted violence since the 1990s. We're at 2.6 credible plots a day, half of which are successful.

21:35Nobody wants to live like that. And so I think that a lot of this is just polemical, you know, selling of something at the elected officials levels to try to persuade voters when what communities actually want on the Republican and the Democratic side is to be safe. Well, there was some effort during the Biden administration to get a better understanding of the dynamic you're describing. Tell us about that work and what's happened to it since. Yeah. So the Biden administration did try. I mean, what they did was separated hate-fueled violence from political violence in order to try to make it less political and then targeted hate-fueled violence.

22:11And so what they said is we're actually going to try for the first time to combine the issue of hate crimes and targeted violence directed toward racial and ethnic minorities or to anyone else for an identity-based attack and call that hate-fueled violence. And then out of that came a bipartisan organization called Bedrock that was formed by the former national policy advisors of the Trump, Bush, Obama, and Clinton administrations to try to say, can we take this and be nonpartisan about it? And they do have 70 organizations working hard to coalesce and join the group. But those websites now are all gone, right?

22:49Those initiatives are gone. Every bit of funding for the prevention of hate-fueled violence from the federal government is gone. And essentially, people have either been moved to work for ICE or for FEMA or other organizations, or they've left or they've been fired. And so there is no federal government response now on prevention. It's just on labeling, essentially, and trying to see if they can suppress civil and human rights at this point. Well, last week, the Justice Department indicted two people that alleges are members of Antifa. The two are facing attempted murder and weapons charges and now terrorism-related charges after a shooting at an immigration detention center in Texas this summer.

23:28The trial is scheduled to begin next month. Faiza, bring us up to speed in this case. What does the DOJ say happened? So according to the DOJ, there was an Antifa cell which was prepared and did attack. and a facility in the Prairieland facility, I believe it was, which was being used by ICE to hold people. And they shot the facility and they had rifles. And apparently there was a whole group of people, although the federal indictment is only of two individuals. I don't know if there's another indictment of others. So that, you know, to me, if what the DOJ alleges is true and is demonstrated at trial, like that is a kind of a classic case of terrorism that is prosecutable under the law, right?

24:22The law allows for that. As I mentioned at the top of the hour, I was like, you know, there's these 50 plus crimes of terrorism that are defined in the law. Among them are attacks on federal government facilities. So if you have a conspiracy to do that, then you are, you know, you can be prosecuted under the law. So that is a case that, if true, again, you know, we don't know. We don't know whether the facts are alleged are correct, et cetera. But that is the kind of case that actually the law is designed for. And the problem is, right, is what does the next case look like and what does the case after that look like and how much broader the circle is of individuals and organizations that they are going to go after?

25:10And yes, it appears that the Justice Department is planning ahead in the way that you described because the indictment also refers to these two defendants as part of the North Texas Antifa cell. Right. That's how they refer to them, really drawing attention in the indictment to the accusation that this is a terrorist cell. So so how does that achieve what the administration appears to be going for here that you've described? I think what it achieves is that it supports their thesis about Antifa being a violent terrorist organization. Because here they are indicting two individuals who, again, it's alleged, we don't know, who seem to have committed actual criminal acts that I think everybody would agree should be prosecuted.

25:57Right. And so you sort of start with the sort of strongest case you have. And that sort of, you know, makes it more credible that, yes, this is a, you know, this is a violent organization we should be going after. And then you can kind of expand out to groups that are more distantly linked to the violence. That's Faiza Patel. She's the senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Faiza, thanks for your time. Still to come, how polarizing rhetoric from the White House affects the perceived threat of left-wing violence. That's just ahead.

26:37Let's get back to our discussion and bring in a new voice. Rachel Carol Rivas. She's the Interim Director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Rachel, welcome to the program. Hello. Thanks for having me. So I just want to start with something that happened earlier this month. The FBI announced it cut ties with the SPLC after a push for MAGA allies on social media. On social media, FBI Director Cash Patel called the SPLC a, quote, partisan smear machine and says the move was made to combat, quote, anti-Christian bias. So, Rachel, how has your work of tracking extremism and hate changed over the past 10 months since President Trump regained office?

27:17Thanks so much for the question. You know, in many ways, our work hasn't changed because for 50 years, we've really been dedicated to making sure that communities, voices and experiences of being subjected to hate, harassment, violence, intimidation and bigotry are documented. And they're documented in a way that reflects what people are experiencing on the ground. And that included from our early years documenting the activities of the Klan and the way they repressed and violently assaulted people and were responsible for those crimes and how that impacts communities today. Though that non-governmental civil society kind of organizations that are across our country inflicting hate and anti-government extremist ideas, we put that on our hate map and our anti-government extremist map.