Select text to annotate, Click play in YouTube to begin
00:00:00
it's Ken Harbaugh with against all enemies for today's episode I want to share part of an interview with Miles Taylor who was one of the few people to have seen the cruelty and callousness of
00:00:11
Trump's White House from the inside as a senior official in the Department of Homeland Security and then speak up about it his second book blowback just came out and it is a powerful warning
00:00:23
about what a second Trump term would mean for the country you can catch our full interview on burn the boats but here on against all enemies I wanted to focus on the risks that people like miles take when they stand up to
00:00:36
right-wing extremists here's just a sampling of the kinds of voicemails that Miles gets on a regular basis simply for telling the truth about Donald Trump believe it or not I have edited this
00:00:49
heavily to take out the most violent and depraved threats what's left will still shock you [Music] what you're doing to president Trump is disgusting
00:01:03
you're disgusting people you're evil and you're going to go down you are a traitor yeah we're gonna talk to you you're not gonna be able to walk down the street you're
00:01:15
an anti-American lead the country you're not welcome here anymore you're anti-American to hate your country get out because you will deserve that Baptist Health
00:01:28
and I think you would be God willing hope the bear you want to sleep in giant would come in my man we started against all enemies because of the clear and present danger posed by
00:01:42
domestic extremists I worry though that when we think about extremism we sometimes picture shadowy Fringe groups operating on the margins of our society that's absolutely a thing and my co-host
00:01:54
Chris Goldsmith exposes these groups and their members like no one else does but what is uniquely dangerous about the moment we're currently living in is not the presence of groups with violent
00:02:06
anti-democratic agendas we've actually always had those in this country what's most frightening is the fact that expressions of violence have become normalized the celebration of fascist
00:02:18
Behavior has become mainstreamed if you've been watching against all enemies you know that we showed you video from a moms for Liberty convention where the speaker doubled down on quoting Hitler
00:02:30
approvingly and the crowd went crazy this kind of behavior is incompatible with a diverse Democratic Society it's why we are pushing back miles and I get into that in this excerpt from our
00:02:43
conversation we cover a lot more ground in the full interview on burn the boats so please check that out as well thanks everyone here's man miles it's a thought that 80 million Americans or 70 million plus Americans voted for
00:02:57
Trump uh the last time around is is terrifying and even the the positive results in the last midterms I don't think inspire a whole lot of confidence still far too close for comfort and you
00:03:10
wrote this about trumpism we didn't snuff it out rather we looked the other way as Cinders lit the dry underbrush of our Frank society and spread like wildfire right now the winds favor the
00:03:23
Fanatics from a historically divided electorate To Grim public attitudes about political violence and that's what really scares me the most this rhetoric
00:03:34
and not just rhetoric but the activities of extremist organization fomenting carrying out acts of political violence uh we're we're approaching very dangerous times reminiscent of the the
00:03:48
late 1850s yeah this is the type of thing that you know can I always say this if you told me 10 years ago I was going to be talking about the prospect of a new American Civil War I would have said you know miles hit his head one too many
00:04:01
times you know what's wrong with that guy but a lot of the folks that I spoke to for this book were using that type of language you know I'll go back to Fiona Hill who I mentioned earlier who'd been a trump advisor for much of the
00:04:14
administration Fiona used a term called Soft secession her warning was that if Trump or a savvier successor won the White House you would see the start of soft succession movements in the United
00:04:26
States in other words red States and blue States increasing increasingly separating themselves from the legal architecture that undergirds our democracy uh and and in her view when you go and study
00:04:39
foreign Civil Wars and civil Strife that's usually the first indicator you see before something moves into more violent conflict is this period of soft succession her comment was where actually in it right now but there was
00:04:52
another Trump official who in these conversations said to me that he predicted uh if Trump won that there would be at least legal Civil War in this country if not actual violence and his comment was you know it's not going
00:05:03
to be battalions you know on an Open Fields it's going to be a different type of Civil War one that includes low-level violence political assassinations uh and civil stripe in major U.S cities and
00:05:15
that political assassination piece is the one that really worried me you see this a lot uh when you look back in history that moments where a major leader is attacked or God forbid killed
00:05:27
can spark uh more widespread violence and light the dry underbrush of dissatisfaction in the political system and right now we're seeing the warning signs basically blinking red as much as
00:05:41
they've been since 9 11 on that front so you know law enforcement officials told me they're seeing more chatter about threats to public servants than at any point since 9 11 we saw a tenfold increase in threats to elected leaders
00:05:54
from the beginning of the Trump Administration until the end of the Trump Administration but more fundamentally can Americans attitudes towards political violence have surged in a favorable way I think NPR found
00:06:07
that 25 of Americans have a favorable view of violence towards the government in certain circumstances which was a high water mark and then there was the famous University of Chicago survey last year that found one in 10 Americans
00:06:21
believed Donald Trump should be forcibly reinstalled in the white house I don't care where your political stripes are you have to look at that data dispassionately and say that that really is dry under brush that's ready to be
00:06:34
lit on fire in the wrong circumstances as you use the phrase and everyone uses it red States and blue States and that always makes me nervous when we are talking about Civil War because it it
00:06:48
presumes the kind of possibility of a clean break that we saw in the 1860s that just can't happen this time it's it's a liberal conceit you often hear
00:07:00
that oh we'll just write off the red States you know Texas can go its own way we'll see how they do without federal dollars need to dispense with that because there are good people in Texas fighting for
00:07:12
progress and we're not going to have a clean break um it's it's just not possible and I know you don't believe that either because you you introduce some really
00:07:25
helpful framing like the digital Mason-Dixon line can you talk about these fractures in in a modern society an integrated Society like we have today yeah it well and I think a lot of
00:07:38
Americans feel this viscerally because it's become so much more personal I mean it used to be that political conflicts were a thing that you could turn off on the news but now for really the first
00:07:50
time in modern history Americans feel concerned about their own neighbors and are unwilling to go to bonfires and picnics where they're worried they'll run into someone of another political persuasion I mean I think we've all
00:08:03
probably been guilty of it we've all said it to a friend or a family member like oh man you know those are Maca people we're not going to hang out with them or the opposite you know folks on that side of the aisle saying you know we're not going to hang out with those crazy Libs we're becoming much more
00:08:16
divided at the household level uh and some of that also is shown in the data I mean if you look at political polarization in the United States it's not so much about red States and blue States anymore it's about zip codes and
00:08:28
there's really shocking data that shows red zip codes are getting red or redder and blue ones Bluer and Bluer so you have these little pockets right next to each other all over the United States where people are self-selecting into
00:08:40
communities based on their political beliefs and and this is the highest rate we've ever seen it since polling began in that space so the phenomenon is really hyper localized
00:08:52
um and that gets to some of the solutions here are not short-term Solutions they're long-term fixes and you know I think this is another thing that people sense in their
00:09:03
gut and the data also backs up and that is you can say roughly that 10 of the ideological Extremes in the United States are making the decisions for the other 90 of us and that's roughly
00:09:16
validated when you go look at the fact that right now uh you know only 20 of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing really really really low but
00:09:29
Congress has a 95 re-election rate in other words the average member of Congress overwhelmingly wins reelection when they run so how can Americans have such a low view of Congress but the majority get reelected and the reason is
00:09:42
because most of those decisions about who wins races happen in the primaries and in Most states you're not allowed to vote in the primaries unless you're a registered member of that party which means the ideological extremes go out
00:09:54
kick the candidates in the primaries and then the rest of us are left in the general election with people who are too extreme and we have to pick the worst of two evils that simple defect right now in our system has resulted in an
00:10:07
increasingly polarized electorate and increasingly polarized Society but the only way to fix that are long-term structural democracy reforms and that will take decades
End of transcript