Democrats vs Republicans: Who Is Actually More Violent? - Robert Pape

Key Takeaway

Practice disciplined political consumption today: before sharing, endorsing, or joking about a political conflict, ask whether your response condemns violence from your own side as clearly as it condemns the other side’s. Robert Pape’s central warning is that mass sympathy and social approval—not only committed extremists—can normalize escalation. Replace inflammatory content with sources and conversations that distinguish peaceful disagreement from threats, intimidation, or violence.

Episode Overview

Robert Pape argues that the United States is in an era of “violent populism,” marked by substantial support for political violence on both the left and right. He explains how social change, economic insecurity, political rhetoric, social media, and high-stakes elections can combine to turn widespread grievance into collective or individual violence. The conversation focuses on understanding the underlying conditions rather than treating political violence as a problem caused by only one party or a handful of isolated extremists.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Democrats vs Republicans: Who Is Actually More Violent? - Robert Pape from Modern Wisdom. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

People of the UK and Ireland, if you want to come and see me live, tickets are very limited for my live tour this October, but they are still available. Dublin is already sold out, however, if you're a fan of modern wisdom, if you love psychology, philosophy, human nature, personal development, and you want to hear stories that I definitely can't tell on the internet, then come and see me live this October. chriswilliamson.live has got all of the tickets. Dublin is completely gone, but there are limited tickets everywhere else.

I'll see you soon. chriswilliamson.live. We discussed this recently on the debate, but I wanted to give it a full treatment, because I think this topic feels very critical to the current conversation. What is the number one threat to America, in your opinion? The number one threat to America is not from a foreign government, even Iran. It's not from a fringe militia group. It's from tens of millions of Americans who support political violence. Once you have support for political violence lodged in the mainstream of society, this changes everything.

Is this a new era of political violence? It's a new era. It's an era I call violent populism, because I want to explain that we have had, almost every year since the founding of our country, 250 years, some type of political violence, some type of militia group, an assassination attempt here or there. That's not what we are living through now. This is a new paradigm. This is a different world. It has happened a few times before. I'm sure we'll talk about this in the 1920s, the 1960s, but as for almost everybody listening to this show, we are in an era of historically high political violence and historically high support for political violence that will change the election that we are about to go through in ways that we may not really be prepared for.

How unprecedented is this? Because I think back to the Vietnam War and there were protests around that. That felt like civil unrest domestically. And prior to that, there's been all manner of... I mean, there was a civil war not even that long ago, right? Well, the Civil War, 1860. Let's just remind ourselves that that is a long time ago. I'm talking to someone with a country that's a thousand years old. You know what I mean? Well, okay. So maybe from your perspective, it was just the other day, but for Americans, that is a long time ago.

In the 1960s, we need to recall that that was over 65 years ago. So that's a long time ago. And that means that although there will be a few of us baby boomers who were born, I'm right at the tail end of the baby boom generation. So there will be a few of us who were born. But even I can't really recall personally the 1960s because I was just way too young. So the fact is, yes, there have been precursors and other eras of violent populism where you have a whole spate, waves of assassination attempts, waves of violent protests.

And side by side with that, large millions and tens of millions of Americans supporting political violence. But it is actually a historical anomaly in our country. It is not simply the same as it was 10 years ago, or the same as it was 15 years before that. But the big picture here is that we are in an era where we have experienced not one, not two, but three assassination attempts against Donald Trump. Two when he was running for president, one when he was president. These three are just a small number of the many assassination attempts and assassinations that we have seen over the last five years.

You have to recall the assassination attempt against Nancy Pelosi, missed her but almost killed her husband. Brett Kavanaugh, that's a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Josh Shapiro, the arsonist, burned down large parts of his house while his family was there. He was sleeping in the house, including him. He was governor. He's governor of Pennsylvania. Just literally a year ago and two days, so we're speaking on September 12th, but on September 10th, 2025, Charlie Kirk, a major political activist, a podcast host beloved by tens of millions of Americans, was assassinated while he was having one of his quite frequent debates, debating people on a college campus.

So this only touches the assassination attempts, Chris. We haven't even talked about the violent protests as part of the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020, where yes, most of the George Floyd protests were peaceful, but five to 7% of them were not. And when you have 28 million Americans engaged in the summer of George Floyd protesting, five to 7% is a terrifically large number. And we could go on and on, January 6th, etc. How is violent populism different from ordinary populism? Ordinary populism, you can think of as political polarization.

You can think of as peaceful protests. Violent populism is where you have mass support for political violence in the body politic. So the difference between populism, where you have many millions of people, tens of millions of people who are upset about the establishment, they believe the establishment has largely locked them out of many benefits that are there just due. That's the ordinary understanding of populism. Well, that's an understanding that can be completely peaceful. It can generate wholesale changes of political parties. It can bring new people into politics.

Violent populism is a different animal. Violent populism is taking a lot of that anger in the mainstream, and it is transforming into political violent anger, where there's support for political violence, which is going to then encourage actual political violence. What are the numbers around how supportive Americans are of political violence? So for the last five and a half years, at my center, the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, we have conducted 20 national surveys of support for political violence in the United States. The book goes through all of them.

The book, though, doesn't cover the most recent survey, which we literally just completed in the field 10 days ago, which means we just got the data six days ago, which means I'm revealing it here on your show for the first time in front of anybody. Nobody else knows what this data is on support for political violence. What we are seeing in the data is not a normal election coming. What we're seeing is a cycle that I call America's domestic escalation trap, where whoever loses in the midterms, we are likely to see not just simply passive acceptance or even peaceful protests.

We are likely to see violent protests, whoever loses, that may be larger than January 6th. And I say that, Chris, not just to be alarmist, but it's because of the data, and that data is literally screaming at us. So we fielded a nationally representative survey of support for political violence in the United States, as we have done. This is our 21st, so we've been doing this every three or four months for the last five years, and the numbers jumped off the charts compared to what we have seen before.

So what do I mean by that? We ask questions such as, do you support political violence to remove President Trump from the presidency or to prevent President Trump from being president? That is the anti-Trump or anti-MAGA political violence. Normally, we would see several years ago, 6% of the American public support anti-Trump political violence, maybe 9%. In September 2025, just before Charlie Kirk was assassinated, it was 14%, already fantastically high. That's over 30 million Americans, just to put that in numbers. What did we find this year, the next year, that we just really, the numbers just literally came in off the presses?

25% of American adults support the use of force to prevent President Trump from being president. That equates to 65 million American adults. That's 44% of all Democrats, self-identified as Democrats, in our survey. This is a stunning number, Chris. This is not just another turn of the data, and the data doesn't bounce all over the place in case people think, oh, it's just randomness in the data. Also, we know what those numbers mean more than just with check boxes. Chris, we have conducted, over the years, focus groups.

We have hours-long focus groups. Think of them as like a podcast, like what we're doing here, except with 70 people, done with a European moderator. It's helpful to have a European moderator, so it produces a little bit less bias on the part of the people involved in the focus groups. More than that, we've also done further what are called survey experiments to understand what people really mean when they say the use of force is justified to prevent Trump from being president. What we found is 55% of the time, they mean assassinating President Trump with rifles as the attempt that failed at Butler.

They say this in so many words when you push them. Now, not everybody, but 55%. Just keep in mind, that's a very healthy number. When I say 25% support the use of violence, this is not, oh, they just mean yelling at President Trump. There's others beyond that 55% that mean having a January 6th-style democratic riot like January 6th, but it's among Democrats. That use of force phrase that we have, Chris, now, we also have, before we just only focus on the support for political violence on the left, at exactly the same time- I was going to say, what is the split between Democrat support for political violence and Republican support for political violence?

Let's still stick with pro-Trump, anti-Trump because this is the best way. We have lots and lots of questions, but this is a good way to capture this. We also ask questions about the pro-Trump support for political violence. In particular, since Trump has become president, and notice there has been Democratic protesters, we like the question, do you support President Trump using the U.S. military to suppress Democratic protesters? Now, he has not done that yet, but using the military to suppress Democratic protesters is a very violent way to suppress Democratic protesters.

16% of Americans, almost all of them, of course, Republican, 16% of Americans support President Trump's use of the military to suppress Democratic protesters. That is approximately 40 million Americans. So, you put these two numbers together, the anti-Trump support for anti-Trump political violence and support for pro-Trump political violence, and what do you end up with? 100 million Americans supporting political violence as we are running into the midterms. This portends that the midterms will be the most dangerous elections in our lifetimes. I don't mean just literally on the day of the midterms.

I don't mean at the ballot box. There may well be issues, exactly. It will be first and foremost about the counting of the vote and then seeding the, quote, winner in January, just as it was in 2021 on January 6th, that the actual violence related to the November 2020 election was not on the election day, November 2020. It wasn't even in December. It was literally on the day that Congress was going to certify the winner, and that happens in Congress again on this year. Most likely the day will again be, Chris, January 6, 2027, again a Wednesday.

It seems to me like the political violence, at least, that you focused on so far is anti-Trump and then anti-anti-Trump. Very much so. A lot of the time when I've heard some of this data that's been put out recently, the FBI or the CIA say that the single greatest domestic threat to America comes from the right, not from the left. What about right-leaning threats that are like initiatory rather than reactive? So those studies, which I go through in detail, those studies that you just quoted were right until 10 years ago.

So it's very important to understand, Chris, that we need to lift the hood on some of the headlines that are often used as clickbait to get a lot of attention on the studies. Once you lift the hood, you will see that the studies that say most of the political violence is coming from the right, and then the other counter studies that say, oh, no, no, it's coming from the left. Once you lift the hood and actually go through the annual data point by point, you will see that they come to almost exactly the same conclusions.

And where they disagree is, where's their starting point? Do they start in 1990 or 1980? In which case, absolutely true. Let me just pick 1990. If you go for 35 years, from 1990 to 2025, and you say, in that 35-year period of time, of the lone wolves, and that's what we're talking about because they don't usually include at all January 6 or George Floyd. They're not counting the violent crowds at all in these studies. They're just focusing on lone wolf violence. The truth is, yes, it would be over that 35-year period a majority from the right.

If you started in 2015, absolutely, it's going to be maybe not a majority from the left, but very heavily balanced left and right. And so the truth is that it's a matter of the time frame. And what does that mean? That means the nature of political violence in our country has changed over the last 10 years. We're not in the same era we were in in the 1990s. We're not in the same era we were in after 9-11 from 2001 to 2005. We are in a new era.

That is why I gave it a name, violent populism. And that new era dates pretty much to the beginning of President Trump's first term. And much of the violence since then, not 100%, of course, but much of the violence, as you correctly said, is either pro-Trump or it's sort of anti-anti. So you had a nice way to really see that as President Trump came into office, he represented a tremendous angst about a certain set of social changes that I'd like to explain. But just as he was representing angst about those social changes, there were others who felt increasing angst that Trump was going to reverse those changes and send them back.

That is what you're describing as there is the anti-Trump and anti-anti-Trump. There's the anti-Trump and the anti-anti. Yeah, it feels like reactionary and re-reactionary. That's right, because at the root of it is not just a personality. There are issues related to political rhetoric. Absolutely. I've spent years studying that. But that is the second level. The first level, Chris, what's determining why we're in the era of violent populism now, as opposed to 20 years ago or 20 years from now, is that we're in the tipping point of certain social changes that are happening to our country.

Trump is a symptom of those changes as much as he is a cause of those changes. And so once you understand the deeper social changes that are occurring, that are leading to this tipping point generation, now we can see why we're in the era of violent populism and why it's likely to possibly get quite worse over the next five to 10 years. In other news, have you ever noticed how some websites make it ridiculously easy to buy while some feel infinitely harder? Back in my day, I had to walk 10 miles to the local store.

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So upgrade your business and get the exact same checkout that we use at Nutanix with Shopify. You can sign up for a free trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com slash modernwisdom. That's shopify.com slash modern wisdom. Is there a difference between the style of violent populism on the right and on the left? Well, they certainly like to say there is. So I spend a lot of time, Chris, studying political violence on the right and the left. I study the perpetrators of political violence on the right and the left.

I study the detailed cases of the three would-be assassins of President Trump. You can look at Luigi Mangione. We can look at the assassin who killed Hortman. She was a key leader in Minnesota, and then also her husband literally assassinated her. And so I spend lots of time doing that because before I did this book, Chris, for 20 years, I studied terrorism. I compiled all the suicide terrorist attacks around the world after 9-11. That's over 8,000 individual cases of suicide attacks. I'm very familiar with studying the individual perpetrators of terrorist attacks, including the most deadly in the world, and also tracking their manifestos, what they say, how much the manifestos reflect personal grievances versus social grievances.

And so what you see, and I don't mean to paint a moral equivalence on the right and the left, but in terms of basic operations, how they relate to the mass support of political violence in the country, there's a lot of symmetry. There's a lot of symmetry between the right and the left. The key thing that most people don't know about political violence is that mass support fundamentally changes the scale of political violence you can expect in a country. And this is happening in the United States, but it's not unique to the United States.

It's true in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 80s. It's true in Lebanon in other periods of time. So what we're experiencing in the United States, we have specific social changes that are unique to what's occurring in the United States. But the basic pattern here that I'm trying to explain of once you have mass support for political violence, this matters because it nudges volatile individuals who are volatile for their own psychosocial reasons. Yes, many of them have personal pain. Many of them have personal issues. But what it does is when there is mass support for political violence, it nudges those volatile individuals over the edge because they have an additional motive for carrying out the political violence, which is social approval.

They can expect that when they carry out their violence, there will be approval by many, many, many people. You definitely saw this with Luigi Mangione. I think like canonical example. Canonical example. And it's also in the age of people ask, well, is this all a product of social media? Social media matters, but it's like pouring gasoline on an underlying fire. And what's the gasoline? You can see the social approval almost instantly. I'm interested in what happens if you spread out from individual actors. I understand that if you're an assassin, one person trying to kill another person or successfully killing another person, that's a big deal.

It tends to be kind of great men of history inflection points. It might get a lot of headlines. But when we're talking about mass support for mass political violence, if you're using numbers in the tens of millions or hundreds of millions, this is not going to be a hundred million individual assassins. But as of yet, I haven't heard you really talk about folding in the rioters. What does it look like? January 6th was a lot of fucking people. George Floyd was a lot of people. So we have seen over the last, since the summer of 2020, we have seen three main instances of collective political violence in the United States.

Some went on for a period of time. Some were just one day. So the first was the summer of 2020 with George Floyd and the starting with at the end of May when George Floyd was killed and the video of his death went viral. There were in the top over 100 cities in the United States, almost daily protests. And those went on for months. Chris, at my research center, the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, we tracked on a daily basis all of the protests, both peaceful and violent, in the top 50 cities every single day during that summer.

And what you saw was that most were peaceful. That's absolutely true. But there was a very clear pattern, which was the peaceful protests would start usually in the afternoon, often at about 1 o'clock and usually at a downtown area or a downtown square. And then it would go on. It would usually go on through the early evening, at which point a lot of times the protest conveners, the people who started the protest, they just wanted everybody to just go home. But that's not what happened. Most people went home, but a lot of people stayed.

And that's when the violence happened, when the sun went down. So you could see a very, very, very clear pattern here. And this is maybe not absolutely 100%, but oh my goodness, it's stunning when you see this on a daily basis in 50 cities in America, how what starts as a peaceful protest effectively has, Chris, splinter groups, which splinter off. They're the ones who are burning down police stations. They're the ones who were destroying the businesses and so forth. And so you have for that summer of 2020, you have tens, you probably have 20 million, 25 million Americans who legitimately think that they were there and it was truly a peaceful protest because they went home.

They just went to bed. They just went home. But that didn't end when they went home. It's going to be highly frustrating if you are a genuinely peaceful protester that wants to go out and, and, you know, hold the sign and do the thing during the day. And then the headline that's used by the side you're trying to protest against is not peaceful protest. It's the small number of people that then continued it on into the night. That's right. It'd be highly irritating. But let me go on with January 6 to show you said the parallels.

Okay. So again, we're saying five to 7% of the people involved in the George Floyd protest also engaged in violent protest. Majority of that was at night. Interestingly, January 6 was also during the daytime, but also you, the five to 7% rules is active here. So on January 6, President Trump called the crowd weeks before it was December 19th. He sent out this famous tweet on Twitter about come January 6, it will be wild. And then people came to the ellipse in Washington, which is near the Washington Monument.

People who have been there know. And that mall can hold many, many people. And about 120,000 people came that day to listen to President Trump. Others speak that day. Giuliani spoke that day. President Trump was the last speaker as he typically is at his rallies. And what happened during that period is President Trump really pushed up the energy and passions of the crowd. He made it absolutely crystal clear. He went state by state reciting his litany of exactly where the election was stolen from him, state by state, number by number.

And then he focused the crowd. He focused them on the weak Republicans in the Congress, and he named them Mitch McConnell. And then he also said in the one he was worried the most about was Mike Pence. Would Mike Pence, who's his vice president, do the right thing? And by that, he explained, stop the certification of the election because Pence could have literally stopped that. And so he had the crowd focused on this. And then he said, and we will march, and I will be at the head of the march right down now to the Capitol, and we will demand the right result.

This is the language he used. And so what happened during this hour speech is actually starting within about 10 minutes into the speech because he says the same thing multiple times and if you watch his rallies, he often returns to the same themes over and over. So he did that here too. So people right away got the message that Trump wanted them to go march down and pressure the Capitol and Congress. And so that started to happen within 15 minutes of his speech. We actually have this all record.

We have tape of this. We have so much cell phone and so forth. And what you see unfold is that the crowd as it gets there, they start to, they're bursting. There's 10,000 suddenly from the whips who now move all the way down to surround the Capitol. They're so big, they burst right through the bike. What is the defense of the Capitol? It's three perimeters of bike fences and 200 cops. And suddenly there's 10,000 people, 10,000 people. Well, no surprise, they burst through the bike fences which are these outer, what they called outer perimeter defenses.

And right at around 2.15 when Mike Pence formally certifies the election is when Trump puts out a post and he hadn't been posting a whole lot here. He put out a post saying, Mike Pence, let us down. That is when the crowd bursts through into the Capitol itself, burst through the doors, burst through the windows. That's when the hang Mike Pence, that's when the scaffolding, all of that is happening during this period of time. And it's really, now that we have the detailed videos that we can analyze and keep in mind, I study political violence.

This is what I've been doing for 35 years. So I know quite a bit about military operations. The last time we were on, you have to recall, I taught for the US Air Force. So I'm not just somebody who's a general consumer of this. It was really stunning to see how the crowd essentially like a wildfire spreads. And once that wildfire spreads, Chris, there's just, with 200 cops, there was no way they could contain that wildfire. But how many actually burst into the Capitol? 1,600, 1,600.

So just keep in mind, we started at 120,000. Then we had 10,000 surround the Capitol. How many literally burst through? We did the actual violent part of January 6th. And this was not the, as Tucker Carlson has tried to describe this, the grandmas. There were 400 others who kind of wandered in as the grandmas, who I'm not putting in the 1,600. They were not actually prosecuted, those other 400. So there were 400 others who, after this was over, they're walking through, looking at things. That's not the 1,600.

No, the 1,600 are the ones bursting through the windows, bursting through the doors, taking poles, like literally, I don't know if I could take this, but literally a pole like this. And they didn't have weapons with them. So they literally took flag poles or they took the bike racks and they beat the police with them. And we have pictures of the nine, of 600 of the 1,600 doing that one by one by one. So when I say that this was a violent protest, this is a wildfire, which is spreading.

And what was the important thing during this roughly three-hour period of time is President Trump did nothing to call them off until the very end at 4.15. So it went on for about three hours until President Trump finally made a video and said they should go home. And he loved them for what they did. And ever since, President Trump has been glorifying the January Sixers. He has pardoned them all, every single one, regardless of how violent they were, all 1,600, or it's about 1,575 to be exactly.

And our center studied every single person who was prosecuted for January Six, all 1,575 case by case by case. And 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 Six. And it didn't just end on that day because January Six 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 Six 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 Six to remind everybody that it was such a good thing. A quick aside, you 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. Element is an electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. It's a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium.

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Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash Modern Wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash Modern Wisdom. What's the percentage that you equate from January Six? You said five to seven from some of the more left-leaning protests. Well, I would say, well, once we had 120,000 and then we have 10,000 that were actually surrounding the Capitol. 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. But 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 1,600 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 and whether they decided they might've 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 7th, 2023, through the end of spring 2024, of a variety on waves of violent protests on college campuses where college protests, this is on the left.

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.

With 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 gonna 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.

And 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 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, and I can tell you that- Everyone wants to finger point at the opposite side as opposed to their own. And I wanna 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 growing number of instances, I wanna 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. So they're going to tend to excuse it. They're not going to want to admit it, or they're gonna wanna... And it's really... You can almost see the stories that are written. 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-leaning media. If the attacker is coming from the left, we'll talk about mental illness. We'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, right? It's pretty formulaic, and just put in the different names. But it's not 100%. I just wanna be clear that in the 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 to try to do more to talk about both sides. I've seen effort by certain political leaders to try to talk about both sides.

They 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. And that stereotype, by the way, was true from 1990 to about 2014 or so, 2015. But that stereotype started to change under when President Trump came into office, but oh my goodness, did it change with the Jan 6, the collective political violence that we have just been talking about. So the new stereotype, Chris, before I go into the next one, I want to talk a little bit about the new stereotype.

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, you're our social justice warrior. Um, uh, if we pick, uh, Luigi Mangione, just to put some concrete examples on this, uh, this is someone who's coming from generational wealth. This is not an unemployed, is not unemployed. This is somebody who went to prep, uh, prep high schools. This is somebody who went to Ivy league, uh, uh, Penn university of Pennsylvania.

Um, this is somebody who got to live a very nice lifestyle in Hawaii. Um, if we look at, uh, the most recent, uh, uh, of that, we can look at all three Trump, uh, assassin would be assassin, but let's just look at the most recent one, which is, uh, uh, which is, uh, April, his name is Cole Allen. 31 years old, highly educated, uh, engineer. Um, this is somebody who, uh, 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, uh, the Trump administration and, um, the gen six profile is, is especially telling here.

So it went through all 1,575 of the individuals who, um, uh, 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, um, who are, um, uh, doctors who are gynecologists, who are nurse practitioners, gynecologists to January 6th. Well, several, several, they were definitely investigating a small hole. So, well, okay. I'm not going to make the, I'm going to leave the, you're the podcast guy.

So I'm going to let you do that one. But the, but what I'm pointing out is that, is that, uh, we, uh, on January 6th, the media right away ran to a narrative of, uh, these are, um, silly people wearing silly hats. They are militia group members. Only, 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 1,575 were actually, uh, 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 how recidivism, the, the risk of recidivism for an individual when you're going to sentence them, unless you don't have, uh, all of that background and with the January 6th or since they were being, um, uh, 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, um, we have high, high confidence of these, 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. 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. Sorry 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, um, Austin. Uh, 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.

If 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, because 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. This is, 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. I went to, 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, and 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. But 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 the, 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 into power, 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 push to the top. And 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 a defense against the opposite side's political goals. Is that 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. Uh, 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. So, so 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 our number one issue. Okay. So what I'm, what I'm pointing out is that the, when I say you, 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. Where is the con and 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, uh, 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, today abhors political violence, but they don't have a good spokes, uh, they don't have the, the, 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, uh, you know, sort of, um, but if you push me, I can name some, but I'm just telling you that there are literally, um, uh, 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. And I'm just pointing out that it's not because they're the minority it's there 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, uh, the missing weapon against the, the, 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.

How much does the normalization and support in what is still a minority, right around about overall 25%, 30% 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? Cause 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, um, uh, what we're heading toward with the American domestic escalation trap, this cycle I'm about to explain, but 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 with a cigarette, a cigarette, a cigar, but they walk away that think of that as the focal point. So that is how you get a wildfire. You can have that mass of 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 six. So you had a buildup of mass support thinking that the election was stolen, a lot of anger and what happened on literally January six 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 the, 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. To me, that's what's important, right? It's yes. The, the support of political violence is crucial because it's a temperature check for what's happening in society at large, but you could have a hundred percent 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 let me, 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, 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 and ten 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 Part of a cause part of a community. So when you 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 I 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 Allen Cole Allen who was the third attacker for Trump just before his assaults at the dinner he 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. He says this in his manifesto so when individuals make manifestos not always but often the purpose of the manifesto is Connect 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 there that the writing is meant to do that They also by the way, apologize to usually their their loved ones for they're not going to be around anymore So they're gonna 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 Yeah, but this is 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 in My life and RP was a massive part of that actual Scientists built this thing around one obsession to beat up that high school bullies and Provide the most science-backed effective paths of maximizing muscle gain It tells you your exercises how many sets reps and weights that you need to do everything So all that you have to do is show up and lift if the RP app could wipe your ass for you It probably would and it adjusts automatically every week based on how you're actually progressing for me following a proper Evidence-based plan has made a massive difference and if you're serious about training, it'll do the same for you, too Right now you can get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to RP Strength comm slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom a checkout.

That's RP strength comm slash modern wisdom a 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 you know joke at the coffee You know when they're at the coffeemaker at the office and they're saying yeah, we got to get those Trump assassins better better shooter training This is effectively support for political violence Chris.

They may not like to accept that they they probably will feel uncomfortable hearing this but 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 when 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. Yeah, it's not the other way around. It's the IRA is Responding to the public support for political violence coming 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 protests 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 if they explain this they explain how in fact One of the things that they that is 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 following in their wake They're there they thought there was going to be much more support for their 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 trend that we're seeing that's sweeping across the world So 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 we're when we study political violence around the world We're used to studying political violence and say authoritarian countries or countries that were a democracy for a few years They've 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 and that's not what I'm when I'm answering your question. I'm talking about Canada. I'm talking about Germany. I'm talking about Britain I'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 we had January 6 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 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 chance where he meeting with every single top leader of The CDU his party and also that that's that's like the defenseman I 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 it 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 they'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 so they're 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 is in the United States are 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 this in 1990 we were 76% Non-hispanic white as a population today. We're 57% Non-hispanic white in about 15 could be 20 years depending on Deportations and now you can see why deportations matter so much is when we'll be 49% Non-hispanic white as a people now that demographic shift just to be clear This is all happening now in this tipping point generation It'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 flowed 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 parties 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 and 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 they 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 four times more likely If you are if you believe America is a racist country and always has been which is kind of the mirror image I'm that on that question You were 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. It could be people not wanting house prizes 90s Culture wars. We're 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 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 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 so 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 this wealth shift to the top 1% putting the rest of us in a negative some 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. Other party is going to get in power. And 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 they are, um, uh, we live in a world where in the mainstream, those that have are increasingly worried they're going to lose over time and they, 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, uh, in November, 2020. Um, 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, we already know. We have a focal point coming and it could be literally the day, January 6th, 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 shock, meaning it's a razor thin margin, the losers and 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. And 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 bringing out the military to suppress democratic protesters. So what I'm trying to explain is that as we go through this election cycle, this, 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 of that, 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.

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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 it's it's, but we had then was already very worrisome that we had to worry that, uh, we would have assassination attempts, uh, against people on the right and that we would have president Trump use, um, uh, military style immigration enforcement in cities like Chicago. And then it later became Minneapolis. And 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 January, June, um, middle of June, 2025 op-ed literally happened just a few months later. And what you're here today is the, the, uh, 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, you hear almost no political leaders, uh, 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? Um, 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.

That'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%. Uh, it's not true that we are, um, uh, restraining our billionaires. Uh, essentially both parties are perfectly happy restraining the other side's billionaires. But we don't have, um, demonstrated, uh, evidence that the, uh, each party will actually, um, a 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 a prediction of a right wing assassination of a democratic politician at your concern?

Oh, well, no, there are currently there was in the fall of 2022. We, this was exactly so, so there's just more to tell you about this. So literally in the fall of 2022, um, I am warning key authorities about, uh, the rise of possible assassination attempts against democratic leaders. Uh, 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. Um, 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, uh, 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. And then, um, uh, and there are chapter and verse instances where I've warned and I've warned about it when the violent, the, the sentiments go up on one side. Uh, and so, and that is with, uh, national sheriff's associations, um, uh, political leaders in Washington, DC. Uh, so this isn't just a matter of, um, 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. Um, so that's multiple, uh, democratic white houses, multiple Republican white houses. Uh, what you're seeing with professor Pape over the last a year or so, six months for sure, is now talking, uh, to, um, the public in general, through social media, basically laying out, um, uh, as much detail as I would normally be presenting in those private meetings. The only difference is in the private meetings, you really need a 30, 40 page detailed slide presentation where you're going to answer every single one, you, you have brilliant questions, Chris, believe me, when you get inside those closed door rooms, uh, here, it's like, um, a bunch of bees stinging you from all different directions.

And you better have every single answer nailed down. Yeah. 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? It's hard to know for sure. Um, we had, uh, the best studies of this were actually done, um, at the university of Cambridge, uh, in the aftermath of Trump's victory in 2016 and 17, because this was when the real, there was a huge concern was, uh, Russia manipulating the election for Trump. If so, how, and, uh, Russia did have an internet research agency.

It was called, um, and this is out of St. Petersburg and other, we, we know like the location of it, which was dedicated to actually, uh, influencing, um, and polarizing American attitudes on social media. So, uh, there's a certain set of scholars at the university of Cambridge. Your listeners can go and we can, they can go find this with this information and 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, uh, this violent populism, the social change issues, and you can magnify them say 10 or 20%.

But it doesn't look possible to make them up out of whole cloth. At least that's what we have. That's, 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, uh, 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 Russian manipulation. It's that, uh, 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, this, 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, uh, 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. 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, J.B.? Yeah. Can we just get some of the Lagos videos here? Iran, Lagos. Iran on social media. Lagos videos. They're, they're, they're, they're called the Lagos videos by the cluster by, uh, and, and what you'll see is that, um, especially in March and April, uh, Iran made many, many, many videos, um, uh, that were, uh, embarrassing for President Trump, uh, showing he was, he was like falling down on his butt all the time or, or constantly slipping on a banana peel, or he couldn't, he would, he would try to get into meetings, uh, and he would keep getting thrown out because, uh, the allies didn't want him, things like that.

So, so what they were trying to do, what Iran was clearly trying to do, this was almost, I mean, surely state sponsored by Iran, uh, 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. Can 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. And these are an effort to embarrass President Trump, to make the public 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, your support for the Iran war, because 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 exist 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, when 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 him long. 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 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. And if the Iran propaganda was going to matter, you might think they would move Republicans. They're not moving. 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. And 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. Because 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, it's 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 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. Ordinary 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's, he, he may well be the most brilliant politician we've had since Ronald Reagan.

And so he is, when, 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. I 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 I'm not trying to tell you, I, I, 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 what I, one of the issues I see with President Trump is that I think he, he, 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 care about whether they call something the Lake of America, whether they call it the Gulf of America. And he has, has really been an incredible politician. I mean, I, I would not just, I mean, as 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, it's no longer a game of tennis.

It's a game of tennis where one of the 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? 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.

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. You 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. And 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.

And 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 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. And 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 de-platform Trump. We're de-platforming Tucker Carlson and we are 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 de-platform Trump.

We did de-platform Tucker Carlson and guess what happened, Chris? We 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, Mamdani, for example, he's reflecting the other side. So I am seeing as new politicians come up. Who has had the meteoric rise on the left where before he won re-election to a major office, we had never heard of his name before, Mamdani.

It's almost the Democratic Trump, right? Trump comes down the golden escalator. Yes, we knew he was on The Apprentice, but who really paid attention? Suddenly 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. Mamdani, 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. And 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. And 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. Hi there. I am fully charged and here to tell you Toy Story 5 is now on Disney+. It's been too long, cowboy. Woody, Buzz, and Jesse are back for a brand new adventure with some seriously cool new tech. What? Holy butterscotch. You said it, Jesse. So save your batteries and watch the global phenomenon at home. And the best part?

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