“This Will Be The Most Violent Election Of Our Lifetime” - Robert Pape #1154

34:49And so that's over 10 ,000 court documents we've been through. We've had research teams. So we know an enormous about what happened on January 6th. And it didn't just end on that day, because January 6th was such a convulsing event that it largely radicalized much of MAGA. Not all of MAGA, but it largely radicalized MAGA and changed MAGA from what it was before January 6th to what it's becoming now. and President Trump is quite content with that. He's, to this day, on Truth Social, his video speaking at January 6th to remind everybody that it was such a good thing. A quick aside, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I've started every single morning the same way for the last five years now, which is a cold glass of water with Element in it.

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36:17Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Elements' most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below. You're heading to drinklmnt.com slash modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modernwisdom. What's the percentage that you equate from January 6th? You said five to seven from some of the more left-leaning protests. What's the percentage? Well, I would say, well, once we had the 120 ,000, and then we have 10 ,000 that were actually surrounding the capital. And that's the real number I would put at, say, about 10 % or 8%. And then the others who actually burst in, the roughly 1 ,600, it is just a fraction of the others.

37:04But what I would say is that there really is, when you watch the videos of how this unfolds, it becomes pretty clear to me anyway, as somebody who has studied operations that had the police not simply let them in, had the police really decided to stand there and fight. I mean, they already got beat up. Almost 200 of them went to the hospital. Five committed suicide afterwards, but almost 200 went to the hospital. So had they decided to literally stand and fight to death to prevent them from coming in, I think there's a good chance you would have had many more than the 1600 come in. Because I think what happened is that once you had that burst through breaking the doors, breaking the windows, actually burst their way in, I think a lot of folks were just happy to content.

37:57And whether they decided they might have gone in later or not, they were just happy to let that first phalanx go through. But had there been actual resistance to that more than there was, I think this could have actually been a lot worse than what we saw on January 6th. The third are the protests that happened on college campuses after October 7th. So we need to remember that we have just come through, not just a few days or a few weeks, but almost an entire year from October 7, 2023, through the end of spring 2024, of a variety and waves of violent protests on college campuses, where college protests, this is on the left.

38:48So we also, So I also conducted large-scale surveys of over 5 ,000 college undergraduates, 5 ,000 ordinary adults right in the middle of this period to really understand the nature of those protests, who was protesting, what their identity was to the extent they would tell you on a survey, and so forth. And so, again, to get deep dives into this. And what you saw was a similar wildfire on the left that you saw with George Floyd, except not as violent. So just to be very, very clear, the George Floyd protests were extremely violent when it came to property damage, literally burning down police stations, burning police cars, destroying businesses.

39:40with the campus protests. The fact is the ones who stormed into the classrooms, who went into the libraries, it was pretty scary. If you were a student there, and we have this in the surveys and also text boxes where people wrote in what their feelings were, the students were pretty scared of what happened because they didn't know how violent it was going to get. But as a matter, It wasn't as violent as the George Floyd protests, but nonetheless, it's another instance of violent populism. When I say the era of violent populism, and I'm not only describing lone wolf assassinations and assassination attempts, I'm also describing the large instances of collective political violence.

40:32And what's special about this era, our era, of American violent populism is it's occurring on both the right and the left. When we look at the 1960s, it's almost all violent populism on the left. When we look in the 1920s, it's almost all on the right. So in this era today, what's special is not just that we're living through it. That's, of course, what's really impactful for us here. but also that it's happening on both the right and the left. And the truth is the right and the left don't like to admit how much violence is happening on their side. And I know because I've been in the media on all those sides over the last five years talking about this.

41:24And I can tell you that... Everyone wants to finger point at the opposite side as opposed to their own. And I want to say that you said everyone does. There's a temptation to do that. Many do like to finger point only at the other side. There have been instances, and a growing number of instances I want to point out, where you might not expect you would get more balance. and it's just very important to see that it is heavily divided, just as you would expect in this era of violent populism, because if tens of millions of Americans are supporting violence for the political goals they support, they're also going to tend to excuse it because they support that violence.

42:11So they're going to tend to excuse it. They're not going to want to admit it or they're going to want to, and it's really, you can almost see the stories that are written. So if there's a lone wolf, let's just focus on lone wolf. If there's a lone wolf attacker who is attacking a Democratic target, right away, people will assume, well, that must be someone who's leaning pro-MAGA or pro-Republican, and then also the reverse. Well, what are the news stories? Usually the news stories are literally the same structure, which is the more left-winging media. If the attacker is coming from the left, we'll talk about mental illness.

42:52We'll talk about things other than the political motive. What about the right-wing media when the attacker the other way? Almost exactly the same. So you can, Chris, you can almost change, take the same formula story. And now I think with ChatGBT, it's literally easy to do. It's pretty formulaic. and just put in the different names. But it's not 100%. I just want to be clear that in this show we're on now, we're talking about both sides. Over the last year and a half, I have seen real effort here by certain organizations that try to do more to talk about both sides. I've seen effort by certain political leaders to try to talk about both sides.

43:38They don't get as rewarded as much for it. They don't get as rewarded, And nonetheless, many of them are still going down that road, Chris. That's something that we should look at and just notice. What do we get wrong when we imagine the archetype of someone who supports political violence? Oh, absolutely. What are these people like? Absolutely. There's a standard stereotype that our data totally shatters, just completely. And it basically hasn't been true for the last five or six years as this stereotype has come out. But the standard stereotype is that the person is unemployed, the person is rural, the person is part of a militia group, and they're usually male, and they're usually between, say, 18 and 24, 25 years old.

44:29And that stereotype, by the way, was true from 1990 to about 2014 or so, 2015. 15. But that stereotype started to change under when President Trump came into office. But oh my goodness, did it change with the Jan 6th, the collective political violence that we have just been talking about. So the new stereotype, Chris, before I go into examples, are essentially well-educated, middle-class Americans, nice homes, and a 401k, and they wear a suit and tie. That is your standard insurrectionist. That's whether you're a social justice warrior. If we pick Luigi Mangione, just to put some concrete examples on this, this is someone who's coming from generational wealth.

45:27This is not unemployed. This is somebody who went to prep high schools. This is somebody who went to Ivy League, Penn, University of Pennsylvania. This is somebody who got to live a very nice lifestyle in Hawaii. If we look at the most recent, we can look at all three Trump would-be assassins, but let's just look at the most recent one, which is in April. His name is Cole Allen, 31 years old, highly educated, engineer. This is somebody who in his manifesto, he is explaining that he feels called to the duty to respond to all the social injustices that are happening on the part of the Trump administration.

46:14And the Gen 6 profile is especially telling here. So I went through all 1 ,575 of the individuals And what was stunning, and we have pictures of their actual professional jobs, not just what the violence they were doing in the Capitol. What was stunning are the 45 % who are business owners, who are doctors, who are gynecologists, who are nurse practitioners. A lot of gynecologists at January 6th? Well, several. They were definitely investigating a small hole. Well, okay. I'm not going to make that. I'm going to leave. You're the podcast guy, so I'm going to let you do that one. But what I'm pointing out is that we, on January 6th, the media right away ran to a narrative of these are silly people wearing silly hats.

47:14They are militia group members. Only 10 % were members of militia groups. And this isn't just hand-wavy understanding. You see, when you go through the court process, you are indicted, and then nearly all of those 1575 were actually sentenced. What people may not know who don't do this professionally for a living is when you go all the way through the court system and you get to sentencing, your whole background, whether you're a militia group, all of that comes in at sentencing. It's a very sophisticated profile. Oh, for sure. Because how do you know the risk of recidivism for an individual when you're going to sentence them unless you don't have all of that background?

48:02And with the January Sixers, since most of the investigations were being done by the FBI, there was plenty of manpower to go and actually collect their detailed profiles. So when I give you these backgrounds, we have high, high confidence of their backgrounds. And the point is, these are people, notice all of these different individuals that I'm talking about, these are people with something to lose. We're used to thinking that this profile of someone who does political violence are the losers, the marginal. If their life gets thrown away, well, it wasn't a good life anyway. it. Not when you live in Elmhurst, Illinois, not when you look at where they're from, they're from in the States they're from, um, they are from the nice suburbs.

48:51Sorry to say they're going to be from the nice suburbs in Austin here. They're not from the panhandle of Texas. So we could take the, all the numbers, we could literally give you a map and show you where all of the Jan Sixers who came from Texas came from by their actual residents. Cause you have to have that information and you would see they're in the nice suburbs around Dallas. They're in the nice suburbs around Austin. They are not in, well, very few anyway, are around the panhandle of Texas. Why would someone with a career or a family or a house or an education, a lot to lose, risk everything for politics?

49:29If these people are from such nice backgrounds, previously, if you've got nothing to lose, it seems like an easier trade to go and invade the Capitol or set a police station on fire or try and assassinate the president. Why would somebody that's got something to lose go so far and risk a lot in the sake of politics? Because they think they're about to lose it all in the next couple of years. What is happening, Chris, is that we are going through a set of social changes in the country that are putting large swaths of the public on pins and needles about what's going to happen to them and people like them when the other party wins.

50:08Because when the other party wins, the other party has been zeroing out benefits for their side. So we have this unbelievable pollution disaster in East Palestine, Ohio. This is mega country. I am born in Erie, Pennsylvania. That's just on the other side of where this area of Ohio is. So I'm from Western Pennsylvania. And what did you see? You saw virtually no Democratic leader, certainly not President Biden, show up to actually show sympathy. And there were months of story after story after story of all of the problems there. And then if you look at what people on the Democratic side of the aisle think when Republicans come in, they think Republicans are going to take away their vote because Republicans are constantly looking for ways to zero out birthright citizenship.

51:09And maybe they couldn't get it through this time, but maybe they'll get it through the next time. So if you look at both sides, and you see this in our data, both sides of very well-off people are petrified that when the other side wins, the other side is going to take away their nice life or their future or the future of their kids. How does a normal person become radicalized then? It's a matter of think of it as a group. you're not being the individual person is going to be radicalized to take violence as an individual or as part of a mob where the mob is like a wildfire. I was just explaining it's kind of starting peaceful and then over the period of hours escalates into something that's violent.

52:01But when you talk about the support for political violence, that's a different story. When you talk about that. That is the normalization of political violence is a cascading phenomenon, unless there's actual pushback by political leaders. Okay. So to try and use my bro science summary, both sides are increasingly worried about what the opposition is going to do to the future of the country and their ability to reverse the changes to the future of the country to get back into power. Because you've got this smoldering furnace, there is immediate communication 24 hours a day, which allows the most inflammatory comments to be self-selected using social media and pushed to the top.

52:52And then this increases the preparedness for both sides to say, we are okay with increasingly extreme measures in support of our political goals and in defense against the opposite side's political goals. Is that like a fair summary of where we're at? That's a fair summary. And Chris, the only thing to point out is there's little pushing back on that. So notice - Even if people don't endorse political violence, people - Oh, that's interesting stats. So how many people that don't endorse their own side's political violence are in the silent few that don't object to their own side's political violence?

53:32So we have, in our surveys, we have routinely 65%, 70 % of Americans who abhor political violence. They are the silent majority, Chris. But they don't have a good vehicle to express that. We have been tracking this for years. And so you might think that, oh, there's a political leader who would run for president, and what's their number one thing they're going to run on ending political violence in America? Where's that leader? On either side? That that's her number one issue? Okay. So what I'm pointing out is that when I say, you asked me, how was it occurring? And I'm explaining that cascade and the social media, but there's something that's left out of that picture, which is where's the pushback?

54:29And it's not because the public isn't there. In fact, as I'm explaining to you, two-thirds to 70 % of the public routinely, survey after survey, abhors political violence. And that is that missing factor that can actually maybe not fully solve our problem, but can help us to get through the social changes that we're experiencing it without breaking the country apart. Because now the country is, as I'm explaining to you, becoming more radicalized over time. That's what those numbers in our survey show. But there's still a large, the majority of the country today abhors political violence, but they don't have a good spokes.

55:17They don't have the leaders. They don't have the vehicle to express it. Where does it tend to be expressed the most, I would point out, is on podcasts. So I don't necessarily want to give one side benefit because I've been on so many. I don't want to, you know, sort of, but if you push me, I can name some. But I'm just telling you that there are literally folks in the media who have over the last several years taken it on as if not their number one mission, number two or three, to really try to give voice to this silent majority that abhors political violence. And that on social media is something that could grow.

56:01And I'm just pointing out that it's not because they're the minority. It's they're a silent majority, meaning that there hasn't been created the natural vehicles, the natural leaders in order to vocalize that. But this is truly the missing weapon against the rise of violent populism that we're experiencing in our country. Yeah, I understand. There's two things that I'm trying to separate out here. One is sentiment, and the other is action. So it seems to me that a lot of what we've been talking about so far is the support for people using political violence, either in support of their own political desires or against the other side's political desires.

56:45how much does the normalization and support in what is still a minority right around about overall 25 percent 30 percent or so of people support that is what are the indications that the normalization of the support of political violence actually leads to political violence because that's not necessarily true. That doesn't necessarily track. What you need is a focal point to bring that normalization of political violence into concrete action. This is what I mean by a wildfire analogy. This is what I said earlier when I was explaining what we're heading toward with the American domestic escalation trap, this cycle I'm about to explain.

57:37But let me start by explaining it with a wildfire before we get to the political violence. How does a wildfire happen? You have masses of dry wood combustible material, and then you have a spark. Some bastard with a cigarette. A cigarette, a cigar butt, they walk away. Think of that as the focal point. so that is how you get a wildfire you can have that massive material that dry wood it can sit there for months and months and months you might even go through a whole year and not have actual wildfire but once you have a lightning strike once you have that cigar butt thrown out the fact you had months and months of nothing that doesn't stop it because it goes up like that that's the issue with normalization of political violence and that's what you saw that's what you saw in january 6th.

58:26So you had a buildup of mass support, thinking that the election was stolen, a lot of anger. And what happened on literally January 6th and at the ellipse during President Trump's speech, the focal point, which was the trigger and the spark that turned that mass of combustible material into action. So is there in your research a suggestion that people who are in support of political violence are also more likely to enact political violence themselves? To the extent we can track that, yes. But I want to just point out - Because to me, that's what's important, right? Yes, the support of political violence is crucial because it's a temperature check for what's happening in society at large.

59:18But you could have 100 % of support and you could still have zero actions, right? Just being in support of something doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to go out and do it. That's right. But keep in mind, I'm going to give you an answer that's an actual social scientist giving you an answer. And when I said yes to the extent, you might say, well, but Bob, that's exactly what I meant. But let me just give you an example of what I mean. See, We normally can't put on the couch the perpetrator of political violence, but sometimes they do things that's just as good. The individual who attacked the Pelosi, Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi's with the hammer, he was arrested and put in jail in San Francisco.

1:00:03And 10 days later, on a Friday, a local radio station wanted to interview him and it's still on the web. and they for some reason people the jail said okay which is a little odd but nonetheless they did so he got on and the first thing out of his mouth was he wanted to apologize to all the many people in the country for failing to kill nancy pelosi he knows they wanted her dead he knows he that he had the opportunity and he wanted to apologize for failing in this part of a cause part of a community. So when you ask for the hard evidence, so this is my job as a social scientist. I'm not just a journalist, not just connecting dots loosely.

1:00:49I have to find that kind of a case when you say, show me the overlap. And we have them, but this is what it looks like. Because what you can see in that behavior is somebody who's a true believer, not just in the cause, but in the publicity for the cause. Let me give you another set of examples. Uh, Alan Cole, Alan, who was the third attacker for, uh, Trump just before his, uh, assaults, um, uh, at the dinner, he, uh, sent out a manifesto to a bunch of friends and family members. And he makes it quite clear that he believes he's essentially a social justice warrior. He's effectively a Robin Hood who is going to make personal sacrifices to do what others wouldn't do, even though they want the same outcome.

1:01:46He says this in his manifesto. So when individuals make manifestos, not always, But often the purpose of the manifesto is to connect with that community they believe is going to support their actions. They want to tell that community why they're doing it. They want to embrace the affinity between their violence and what the community values. And that's what the manifestos are physically doing. The writing is meant to do that. They also, by the way, apologize to usually their loved ones for they're not going to be around anymore. So they're going to say things that will be personal. So when you hear there's personal things, it's usually because it's a son apologizing to his mother that he won't be there to help her in her old age, stuff like that.

1:02:37But these are the pieces of evidence, Chris, where when you look in detail, you can see that strong overlap of the support for political violence and the violence itself. In other news, if you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole, the RP Strength app is the best place to start. I've been in the gym for 20 years, and it wasn't until the past few years that I had the best training sessions of my life, and RP was a massive part of that. And actual scientists built this thing around one obsession to beat up their high school bullies and provide the most science-backed effective path to maximizing muscle gain.

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1:03:46That's rpstrength.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Do you think the main problem is violent extremists or the people that sympathize with them? Oh, the people sympathize with them by far, by far. I think that would be surprising to most people to hear. Well, it may be, and it might make them feel uncomfortable because when they joke at the coffee, when they're at the coffee maker at the office and they're saying, yeah, we got to get those Trump assassins better shooter training. This is effectively support for political violence, Chris. They may not like to accept that. They probably will feel uncomfortable hearing this.

1:04:24But the fact of the matter is that when there is mass support for political violence, this translates into actual political violence. This is true domestically. So if we break out of the American context, we look at Northern Ireland, the Irish Republican Army that conducted decades of terrorism in Northern Ireland. You can see immediately as public support for political violence among Catholics in the fall of 1969, we actually have the opinion poll data here, as it actually grows, that's what gives birth to the IRA. It's not the other way around. It's the IRA is responding to the public support for political bonds.

1:05:10Coming back to the American case in the 1960s, we have the Weather Underground, which is a group of anti-war protesters from the 1960s who break off. And then they form literally a terrorist group, an American terrorist group, and conduct over 20 bombings to protest with the bombings. they thought of it as protest, the Vietnam War. Well, they too are responding to the perceived, what they perceive is this huge amount of community support. And how do we know that? They wrote books about it. They detail it. They explain this. They explain how, in fact, one of the things that they, as the weather underground evolves over time, is after they do about 20 or so of the bombings, they start to write that they're just surprised there's not more falling in their wake.

1:06:05They thought there was going to be much more support for their actual violence. And then they're disappointed that there's not as much coming as they were expecting. So you can see in their calculations, their thinking, that support for political violence animating them. And one of the reasons they just go out of business on their own is, of course, the Vietnam War ends, but also they just come to see that there just weren't many takers for that violence. That didn't stop, though, 20 instances of bombing. Right now, is this violent populism something that's exclusively happening in America, or is this a trend that we're seeing that's sweeping across the world?

1:06:49So it's starting in other mature democracies. So it hasn't gotten as much traction in other democracies. And I don't mean other immature democracies. So when we study political violence around the world, we're used to studying political violence in, say, authoritarian countries or countries that were a democracy for a few years. They kind of transitioned from authoritarianism to democracy, and then they slid back. That's the usual group of countries that we used to think about political violence in. When I'm answering your question, I'm talking about Canada. I'm talking about Germany. I'm talking about Britain.

1:07:29I'm talking about France, just to be very, very clear. And what we saw are the beginnings of this in other countries. In Germany, for example, we saw around the time just before we had January 6th in our country, there was a similar storming of the Reichstag in Berlin. Many Americans don't even know about that because they just weren't focused on Germany. Well, the Germans were. And when I was conducting this research, the chancellor of Germany in September 2022 flew me to Berlin for an entire week in the chancellery meeting with every single top leader of the CDU, his party, and also that's like the defenseman.

1:08:16I mean, every single top person, multiple times, by the way, and then also leaders of other parties as well. For example, I went to the parliament to meet with the Green Party for long sessions as well to go through all of the detailed analysis here. And that I am told because I didn't go back six weeks later, but I'm told that played a powerful role in rolling up the plot to assassinate the chancellor six weeks later so that they headed off a big assassination plot that was underway. I've also worked with the Canadian government. I've worked with the British government because the social changes that are underneath what's occurring in violent populism in the United States are occurring in other mature Western democracies.

1:09:05They're occurring a little bit of a lag a little bit later. And so maybe now is a good time that we haven't had a chance to really talk about the key social drivers of this. So there are really two social drivers, Chris, of violent populism in the United States. And then the Iran war is making it worse. So the biggest driver of violent populism in the United States is a demographic shift. For the first time in our country's 250-year history, the United States is transitioning from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy. um this um in 1990 we were 76 percent non-hispanic white as a population today we're 57 percent non-hispanic white in about 15 could be 20 years depending on deportations and now you can see why deportations matter so much uh is when we'll be 49 percent non-hispanic white as a people Now, that demographic shift, just to be clear, this is all happening now in this tipping point generation.

1:10:20It's not the case. If you look back all the way to 1776, we have been essentially between 80 and 85 percent white as a people going all the way back in that period of time. So it's not like this is ebbed and float. Well, this demographic shift is of tremendous political importance, Chris, because it dramatically impacts which of the political parties are going to win. The Republican political party is much more heavily white than the Democratic Party. It dramatically influences the composition of those parties. It explains the meteoric rise of President Trump on his issue of immigration and why, when President Trump came down the escalator in 2015, talked about immigration, he almost instantly rose to the top.

1:11:15And then within six or nine months, he had knocked out just about every one of the other Republican leaders who were on the other side of his immigration issue. Jeb Bush, number one. And this has been his signature issue. And now it's morphed into deportations because what this represents, not for every Trump voter, but for a large fraction of Trump voters, what Trump who Trump represents first and foremost is stopping, if not reversing this demographic shift. Now, at the same time, there are many people on the left who see the rise of President Trump, Donald Trump, and the MAGA movement, and the rise of immigration and what that means for the demographic shift.

1:12:04They want to keep the shift going, Chris. They want to accelerate the shift. How many of these people do you think know the implication of more non-white people in my country means more voting people either against my cause or for it? What we have in our data is the ability to correlate stuff like that. So with our opinion survey, the key, key thing that matters more than anything else, Chris, is that if you are worried, America is, whites in America are being deliberately replaced by the Democratic Party. If you worry about that, you're not just more likely to vote for Trump, you're four times more likely to support political violence for Trump.

1:12:48Four times more likely. If you believe America is a racist country and always has been, which is kind of the mirror image on that question, you are two and a half times more likely not just to vote Democrat, but to support political violence against Trump. So this issue of the demographic shift, it's not just loosely connected with violent populism. It goes right to the core of what's occurring in our country. And it explains the period of violent populism, why it's occurring now and not 30 years before or 30 years from now. Because it could have just been people not wanting to see their culture change.

1:13:38It could be people not wanting house prizes. In the 90s, culture wars were sort of not wanting to see culture change. Now, you're at the tipping point generation. But there's a second social change, Chris, and this gets to your point on housing economics. Side by side with this demographic shift has been a mass wealth shift to the top 1%. This starts in the late 1980s. In the late 1980s, about the top 1 % controlled about 17 % of America's wealth. That's a lot, but still 17%. Today, at least it's as of two years ago, that's the most recent data. It's 26%. What does that mean? That means the bottom has lost all that money.

1:14:33So when you are going to buy a house, when you're going to pay rent for an apartment, you suddenly have a negative pie over the last 30 years. You're not gaining ground from where your parents were. You're losing ground from where your parents are. I call this wealth shift to the top 1%, putting the rest of us in a negative sum society where we're suddenly worse off economically with each passing year. Now, what does that mean? That means the people who have are worried they're going to have less and less and less. And that also means that that combines with the demographic shift. So you have a situation where with the demographic shift, you're worried the other party is going to get in power.

1:15:31And what are they going to do? They're going to help their own and they're going to take even more from you. And both sides think that. So it's almost a mirror image, Chris. So we live in a world where in the mainstream, those that have are increasingly worried they're going to lose over time. And the key focal point for that is an election. It's an election. So remember you asked, how does it go? How do you get from this mass sentiment to actual action? Well, the elections matter, Chris. And we saw that in November 2020. And unfortunately, we're coming up to another focal point election with these midterms because we're already seeing the mass sentiments that I've just laid out for you that are incredibly worried.

1:16:29We already know we have a focal point coming, and it could be literally the day, January 6, 2027, when whoever is supposed to win, whoever thinks they're winning, is going to get seated or not. And what we face, Chris, are the following three stages. And if I could lay this out in three stages. Stage one, you have the actual vote, the actual election, and the outcome is a legitimacy see shock, meaning it's a razor-thin margin. The losers in a razor-thin margin election don't think they legitimately lost. Whoever the loser is going to be, they're not going to be happy. And I think the other side cheated them out.

1:17:13And you're already starting to see this on both sides. Then we have stage two, which is the focal point of literally seating the Congress on January 6th. And what happens? Either whichever side loses, if it's the Republicans that lose, you have President Trump. And is President Trump going to stop the Republicans from putting pressure on the Congress? Really? What if it's the other way around? What if it's the Democrats who are the losers and they show up to the mall and they start to protest? You have President Trump, and President Trump has already been talking about Insurrection Act. He's already been talking about what?

1:17:55Bringing out the military to suppress Democratic protesters. So what I'm trying to explain is that as we go through this election cycle, this process, we're going to see stage one, which is the legitimacy shock to discover that we're not really sure who exactly won that election. Number two is the focal point where somebody's supposed to be seated. Those winners are supposed to be seated. But will the losers just accept that that will happen when they don't think they lost? and then number three if you do have that stage two where there's another january 6th style event you don't just have this over you get stage three which is prolonged violent opposition before we continue how many times have you found yourself hugging the toilet throwing up not because you drank too much alcohol but because the non-alcoholic beers that you drank tasted like garbage and that is why i'm such a huge fan of athletic brewing co their non-alcoholic brews taste just as good as the real thing and the best part there's no hangover no headaches no more ruining your daughter's dance recital i didn't want to stop enjoying tasty drinks i just wanted to stop paying for it the next day and you can too find athletic brewing co's best-selling lineup at grocery or liquor stores near you or best option get a full variety pack of four flavors shipped direct to your door right now get 15 off your first online order by going to the link in the description below or heading to athleticbrewing.com modern wisdom using the code modern Wisdom at checkout.

1:19:23That's athleticbrewing.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Near beer terms and conditions apply. Athletic Brewing Company, fit for all times. How worried are you about the midterms? Oh, easily, way more than 50%. This is way too dangerous. So the rise of the mass sentiments, Chris, that we've seen in our data, um we uh when when this happened um a year ago so in uh june 2025 uh we had the hortman assassination and i published a big piece in the new york times that we're on the brink of a period of major political violence it's about to occur and i warrant that if uh based on the um uh sentiment data that we had then, which is not as bad as now, but we had then was already very worrisome, that we had to worry that we would have assassination attempts against people on the right and that we would have President Trump use military-style immigration enforcement in cities like Chicago, and then it later became Minneapolis.

1:20:32And then what happened just three months later, Chris, we had the Charlie Kirk assassination, we had Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, and we had Metro Blitz in Minneapolis. Basically, all those concerns that I laid out in that middle of June, 2025 op-ed literally happened just a few months later. And what you hear today is the sentiments here for political violence are much higher. And you're hearing a similar set of warnings by me here today, which is we are really on the brink of the most dangerous elections in our lifetimes. And there's no signs of any pushback of this by our political leaders.

1:21:19You hear almost no political leaders being concerned about political violence occurring, certainly not by their own constituents. To the extent you hear about political violence, the leaders are perfectly happy to call out the other side. But unless the leaders will restrain their own constituents, you get the cycle that I'm describing. Do you think this situation of political violence would be worse or better if the Democrats had won in 2024? I'm not sure how much it would have changed, Chris, because it's a function of the social changes. I know people want to believe that if only their side won, everything would be fine.

1:22:03That's not what this book is telling. And maybe that's a frustration because people just want to hear, oh, yes, just the Democrats just win, then we're all hunky-dory, or if the Republicans win, we're all hunky-dory. That's not what's occurring. What's occurring is the two social changes I just laid out for you. We are continuing to go through a demographic shift in our country from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy, which is going to have profound effects on our two political parties and who will win future elections. We also are continuing to have wealth shifts go to the top 1%.

1:22:39It's not true that we are restraining our billionaires. Essentially, both parties are perfectly happy restraining the other side's billionaires, But we don't have demonstrated evidence that each party will actually reverse course and start to truly change the wealth shift to their own billionaires. The support of economic violence as opposed to sort of physical violence. I guess in your predictions, why was there not a concern about the prediction of a right-wing assassination of a democratic politician? Your concern was— No, there was in the fall of 2022. This was exactly, so there's just more to tell you about this.

1:23:34So literally in the fall of 2022, I am warning key authorities about the rise of possible assassination attempts against Democratic leaders. And then the Pelosi attack happened just a few weeks later. So literally, this pattern that I keep pointing out to you where we're doing these surveys, Chris. And the surveys are tracking the sentiment and support for political violence in the United States. And I'm taking seriously, because of my knowledge studying political violence all around the world, that this is a pivotal factor in whether that violence will occur. It's not just a trivial factor. It's a pivotal factor.

1:24:18And there are chapter and verse instances where I've warned, and I've warned about it when the sentiments go up on one side. And that is with national sheriffs associations, political leaders in Washington, D.C. So this isn't just a matter of what you're seeing now is me talk about this in the public. And normally, so the last time I was on, I told you I advised every White House since 2001. So that's multiple Democratic White Houses, multiple Republican White Houses. What you're seeing with Professor Pape over the last year or so, six months for sure, is now talking to the public in general through social media.

1:25:08Basically laying out as much detail as I would normally be presenting in those private meetings. The only difference is in the private meetings, you really need the 30, 40 page detailed slide presentation where you're going to answer every single one. You have brilliant questions, Chris. Believe me, when you get inside those closed door rooms here, it's like a bunch of bees stinging you from all different directions. and you better have every single answer nailed down. How much of the domestic civil discord do you think is self-generated and how much could be encouraged or manufactured by America's enemies?

1:25:48It's hard to know for sure. We had the best studies of this were actually done at the University of Cambridge in the aftermath of Trump's victory in 2016 and 17 because this was when there was a huge concern was Russia manipulating the election for Trump. If so, how? And Russia did have an internet research agency, it was called. And this is out of St. Petersburg. We know the location of it, which was dedicated to actually influencing and polarizing American attitudes on social media. So there's a certain set of scholars at the University of Cambridge. Your listeners can go and they can go find this with this information.

1:26:41And they will discover that it appears to have been modest. That is not trivial, but not overwhelming. So what appears to have happened and what you can do as a foreign government is it appears as if you can take issues of this violent populism, the social change issues, and you can magnify them, say, 10 or 20 percent. But it doesn't look possible to make them up out of whole cloth. At least that's what the science of this has shown so far. Maybe we'll see in the future. This may change. I understand AI is coming. But what I'm telling you is up until now, the reason I say we are our own worst enemies and not it's China manipulation or Russia manipulation is not because I haven't looked for China and Russia manipulation.

1:27:34It's that to the extent we can actually test it in a social scientific way to see how much it has actually moved the needle, it appears to be relatively modest. You know there's that line about whether there's aliens in the universe and they say there's one of two explanations and both are equally terrifying. One is that we're alone in the universe and the other is that we aren't. I think about that when it comes to civil unrest domestically, that there's two explanations. One is that this is curated, germinated, seeded, manufactured, catalyzed by some foreign power. And the other is that the home nation is just turning around and kicking the ball into its own goal over and over and over again.

1:28:14I'm going to give you a real test of this because your listeners will all have been on social media in the last four or five months, and they will know the Lagos videos that Iran has made. So I assume you know what I'm referring to. I have no idea what you're talking about. Oh, my gosh. Okay. Can we pull this up, JB? Yeah. Can we just get some of the Lagos videos here? Iran, Lego. Iran on social media. Lego videos. They're called the Lego videos by the cluster. And what you'll see is that, especially in March and April, Iran made many, many, many videos that were embarrassing for President Trump, showing he was falling down on his butt all the time or constantly slipping on a banana peel.

1:29:03He would try to get into meetings and he would keep getting thrown out because the allies didn't want him, things like that. So what they were trying to do, what Iran was clearly trying to do, this was almost, I mean, surely state sponsored by Iran, was trying to manipulate American opinion about the Iran war. Okay? So that's what I'm trying to tell you. So, yes, let's call up some of these Lagos videos so that we can see some. What's the price of oil? Dad, please be patient a little longer.

1:29:49Can you open the Strait of Hormuz? Who are you even? I have the biggest military on earth. Whatever you say, Mr. Trump, the Strait is all yours. beat it because i've already talked to iran and the strait will be open shortly thanks everyone we are the best everybody knows this there are hundreds of these chris okay okay and these are an effort to embarrass president trump to make uh the public uh move away from the war now in the survey that i have been talking to you about that we conducted just less than two weeks ago, we also asked questions about the Iran war. Do your support for the Iran war?

1:30:34Because we wanted to know how does that interact with violent populism, which we haven't talked about yet. But on this issue, what you see with support for the Iran war, Chris, is dominated by the cleavages that already existed in America before the Iran war. And those are the cleavages of violent populism that exists in our country. And what you are seeing in our surveys, other surveys, is support for the Iran war is falling out heavily along pre-existing divisions in our country. Is that surprising? Yes, because in every war since World War II, every single war, we have seen a rally around the flag effect when the president of the United States from whichever party, and it's been both parties, and we have data going all the way back to the 1950s.

1:31:31when the president of the United States says it's important enough that we're going to use force, you get at least a short-term, couple-months bump of a rally around the flag effect, even from the other party. People just defer to the president on foreign policy. Maybe they won't stay with them long, so I'm not telling you they're just going to ride and die with that president and so forth. But what I'm telling you is this has been a phenomenon that has been going on for, what, seven decades now? So a long period of time, many, many wars. This is the first war where that's not true. The first war where it's not true.

1:32:09And if the Iran propaganda was going to matter, you might think they would move Republicans. They're not moving. The Republicans are mostly, I'm not 100%, of course, behind this war. Many are upset at Israel about the war, But that's what they're upset about. They're not. The Iran propaganda, to the extent that foreign powers can truly just make up out of whole cloth and move the American public 180 degrees from where it wants to go, there's no evidence of that, Chris. Not just little, there's no evidence. and even medium movement of the public by foreign powers, much, much, much less than you would think.

1:32:51And the Iran war Lagos videos is a perfect example of that because they're literally not moving the key constituency you would have to move to move the war. It's the MAGA constituency that Trump cares about. So if you don't move MAGA, you're not really moving Trump. Which foreign powers do you think benefit the most from America's civil unrest? Without a doubt, it's going to be Russia and China for sure. And it's because the more that we are internally conflicted, the more that we're a house divided, to pick one of Abraham Lincoln's phrases, the more that we will just not be paying hardly any attention or bad attention or make bad mistakes about international affairs.

1:33:41Because we will just, our attention span will just be so consumed by what's happening domestically. And I do believe this is one of the issues that the White House has with the Iran War, which is as much as the Iran War is probably the – in our opinion surveys, it's certainly one of the top issues with the economy. I think that for the White House, they have just been very, very focused on politics, which have been very intense in our country. But that's what's consuming a lot of President Trump's behavior. That's why he's talking about things like the ballroom. room and what he, this is, these are issues not that may not, they may seem on one sense trivial, but they matter to ordinary people.

1:34:29Ordinary people can understand them. And President Trump understands ordinary people pretty well. That's how he got elected twice. So he is, he is, he's, he may well be the most brilliant politician we've had since Ronald Reagan. And so he is, when he is focusing on issues that on CNN you'll hear being dismissed, you know, why is he wasting his time on these trivial matters when the price of gas is going up? It's, I think, because he's focusing on domestic politics. And those are issues that we call these the low propensity voters sometime, which is a kind of a kind of, I think, a dismissive way to talk about people.

1:35:09I think President Trump sees them as key voters and he is thinking well they care about this so he's going to care about this and that is what I mean when I say the White House has been very focused on domestic politics. and I'm not trying to tell you I agree that should be the priority of the ballroom over the price of gas. What I am trying to tell you though is that that's one of the issues I see with President Trump is that I think he certainly believes himself that he knows his base better than anybody else and one of the things that means is what they care about and I think you see they They care about whether they call something the Lake of America, whether they call it the Gulf of America.

1:35:57And he has really been an incredible politician. I mean, literally to get votes, I think President Trump is maybe the best we've seen since Ronald Reagan. How much of the civil unrest and the changes that you're looking at here are downstream from the Trump era? Because it seems to me that the inflection point starts around about the time that he was introduced to politics. I know that you've got your underlying changing demographics and wealth inequality that maybe he contributed, maybe he didn't. That would have probably been largely outside of what was going on with regards to Trump. But maybe to do with the rhetoric, to do with the fear of am I going to be able to get access, to be able to reverse decisions that the other side has.

1:36:45It's no longer a game of tennis. It's a game of tennis where one other side might take the ball and run away with it, which means I can't play anymore. how much of what you're talking about with civil unrest could just be an effect of Trump? And given that, how much could potentially chill out come 2028? So if I had to put numbers on it, I would say 50 % of this is due to the social changes I laid out. 25 % is due to President Trump and 25 % is due to social media and other factors that I would just lump in another group of things. So, um, which is probably the exact reverse of what most people want to hear, because if you are anti-Trump or pro-Trump, you would like to focus on Trump.

1:37:34You see what I mean? So it doesn't really matter whether you're anti or pro, we see this in our focus groups. People love to either love Trump or hate Trump. And so they like to exaggerate, I believe, Trump's influence. Other people, though, focus on things like social media a lot of times because they have kids. And we saw this in our focus groups as well. They have kids and they're worried about it's not so much they think about their own consumption of social media, they worry about their kids. So they, I think, put a little bit too much weight on that. What I think is missing here for most people is the powerful influence of social changes in driving political violence.

1:38:17And why is that so important to me? It's because if you want to know why has Lebanon had civil wars for decades and decades, this is rooted in social changes. This isn't because of a certain leader of Hezbollah or not, because they've been killed so often. They don't have that much stability of the leaders of Hezbollah. It's not because of the—it's because of the deep demographic problems. What are some of the big issues going on inside of Israel? Deep demographic problems, even among Israelis, religious and secular Israelis. So when you look at the tensions in societies, Chris, and I studied those for decades because keep in mind, I've only been focusing on American political violence for five years, but for 30 years focusing on political violence around the world, social changes are crucial to understand political violence.

1:39:18And so this is what I think is missing in our discussion of this in our country. we're focusing on a lot of what I would say is the symptoms or the secondary factors I had big debates with certain uh media editorial boards in 2022 I don't want to again name names because I don't want to embarrass people but they were trying to come to grips with this work because remember I'm saying the media and this includes the most famous media are getting the profile wrong of the Jan Sixers, for example. And I'm showing them 40-page slide decks that this is all wrong. They're missing it by maybe not 180 degrees, but by 150 degrees anyway.

1:40:04And so I'm getting in these big discussions on exactly this issue, Chris. And these are people that were not very pro-Trump. So they would say, well, Professor Pape, these social changes you're talking about, they're not going to matter because we're going to deplatform Trump. We're deplatforming Tucker Carlson. And you're going to see, Professor Pape, that you're wrong about the priorities. Well, those very same media organizations came back and they've been publishing a lot of my work. And it's because we did deplatform Trump. We did deplatform Tucker Carlson. And guess what happened, Chris?

1:40:38We did not actually diminish any of those fires or any of those impacts. And I believe a lot is because they are reflecting these social changes and the anger on their side with the social changes. And when I watch Democratic politicians, Mamdami, for example, he's reflecting the other side. So I am seeing as new politicians come up. So who has had the meteoric rise on the left where before he won reelection to a major office, we had never heard of his name before, Mamdami. It's almost the Democratic Trump, right? Trump comes down the golden escalator. Yes, we had vague, knew he was on The Apprentice, but who really paid attention?

1:41:27Suddenly he comes down and Trump doesn't just come down and get in the mix. He becomes, within a short period of time, the leader, Mamdami, almost exactly the same. What are the key issues they're running on? The key social change issues I'm talking about right here. These are their core issues, Chris. And these are the core issues that are not just like polarization and we disagree a little bit on tax rates. Oh my goodness, this is existential politics, much bigger than that. And that is what's happening to our country. It's what's breaking our country apart. It's what's driving the social changes or what's driving the era of violent populism.

1:42:12And we literally see it happening right in front of our eyes with the newcomers who are suddenly meteoric household names when nine months before they run for office, we had no idea. We couldn't have picked them out of a whole bushel full of apples. We just never could have done it. Bob, I appreciate you very much. This is awesome. Congratulations on the book. Where should people go to check out everything you got going on? Come to my new YouTube channel, Pape on the Politics of Force, that I started since the last time I was here, literally two weeks ago and my sub stacks, especially the escalation trap, because I'm going to be talking about the domestic escalation trap.

1:42:55And I do hope people will go to Amazon and get a copy of this book because there's so much in here we haven't had a chance to talk about, Chris. And I just so appreciate you spending the time with me. Thank you so much. I appreciate you too. All right, until next time. Goodbye, my beauties. See you. Dude. Push your limits, train with precision, see the results at equinox that's high performance loving iconic spaces that inspire personal training backed by real data unlimited group fitness classes from yoga and pilates to strength and conditioning elevate your post-performance ritual with saunas steam rooms cold plunges and more everything you need to lock in and unlock your potential at equinox start today at equinox.com