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well returning now to tomorrow's january 6 anniversary it's not just what happened that day that's harrowing it's also the conflicting ideas of what democracy is in america thirty time emmy award-winning
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journalist bill moyer shares his views and concerns in the new pbs documentary preserving democracy which airs tomorrow he spoke with hari sreenivasan alongside historian kathleen bullo who also
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features in the film about the day and the danger of another insurrection professor ballou bill moyers thank you both for joining us first i want to start off here we are about a year later
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and given the information that we have now on what happened in january 6 who took part how close we came to the insurrection succeeding i just want kind of your
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overall thoughts on maybe where we're at what you see um professor blue let me start with you i think what has become very clear is that the challenge of january 6th is complex because we have to confront two
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very distinct but equally dangerous threats to our democracy and to people who live in the united states one of these is the threat of extremist violence coming from the white power and militant right groups that comprised a
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small percentage of people who attended the rally and broke into the capital on january 6th things like mass casualty events infrastructure attacks and assassinations the other is a thread that
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is i think quite new which is that these groups are making entry into our mainstream media the ideologies are coming into our media into our politics um and even into our atlantic elected office holders that means that we also
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have to confront the threat of authoritarian governance i want to get a reaction from both of you to a clip that i'll play here with adam kinzinger in his office
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[Applause] you see all the rioters come in and really are kind of standing outside of the house floor at that point and that's when i realized this whole
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place is breached [Applause] i had been targeted on twitter people saying we're going to come get you we're going to find out where you are and so the only thing you can go through your head is they're going to know where my
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office is and i may have to defend myself from your office here this window looks out on part of the mall what could you see i could see people all through there i open this window
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and when you open it you can hear nothing but scream shouts and the thing that stood out the most is like explosions and it was the non-lethal munition that was being used
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this has only happened to me probably twice in my whole life but i had a real sense like there's just a sense of darkness over the place like a sense of evil that descended over the place and i just remember looking out the window and
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like this is one of the worst things i've ever been part of the scenes that we saw there what adam kinzinger congressman kensinger was describing is what a lot of us are remembering from january 6.
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what sticks in your mind from the events of that day i watched that my wife judith and i watched all of the events on january 6 and i kept i kept shuddering frankly
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shivering when i saw the confederate flag in the state in the u.s capitol it never had been there before they got very close the rebels uh the the senators the secessionists got very close when they were pushing against
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the union troops in virginia and maryland but they never were able to put that flag on the capital of the united states of america and i kept you know i closed my eyes
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that night and thought i come from a part of the south that drove the truth about slavery from the newsroom they drove the truth about slavery from the classroom
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they drove the truth about slavery from the pulpit and the next thing we know is that that confederate flag flew over 13 states of the united once united america we can't let that happen again we have to fight
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honorably we have to fight fairly but we have to fight fiercely to make sure that flag and all its symbol all is symbolism white supremacy slavery uh inequality
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do not take root because that i believe that insurrection on january 6 was the first flawed effort of what can happen again even next year in state capitals
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around the country imagine that scene in the michigan state capitol the georgia state capitol the texas state capitol the arizona state capitol the pennsylvania state capitol it's too late then to do anything but fault call on armed
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forces to try to save us we don't want to get there we can save ourselves if we create that sense of belonging to the most important but precarious
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experience in human history which is the effort of people to govern themselves bill you know some of the polling that had happened with republicans post january 6 and then later on paint a very
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interesting trend 56 of republicans characterized what happened as quote defending freedom and 47 percent characterize it characterize it as patriotism i mean the ideas of what
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democracy is in america seem to be in question well beyond the specific events of january 6 and by a huge proportion of the people who are
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one of the two largest parties in america right now exactly i i've long said that um that democracy in america is a series of narrow escapes and we may be running out
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of luck because it is possible we have seen in the past for a minority of an electorate to determine the outcome even if it doesn't match what the majority would have approved of
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you take over a party by starting as we learned from people who've done it before with seizing control of the press now the right wing in this country has
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created its own media as equal in force as any other we have in the country they're writing the election laws to favor them they've got a grip on 20 to 20 25 state legislatures and
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governors around the country irrespective of what the majority say in a one-time poll taken at a particular moment they have what it takes to mount a larger insurrection a larger
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sabotage a larger claim to controlling the instruments of the party and therefore being the opponent of whomever the democrats put up in 2024. professor berlu you have researched extensively
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how white power movements in the united states how they basically intersected with politics how powerful they've been at times and how seemingly weak at other times what is the reason
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why there seems to be a resurgence now so in addition to many contextual factors that we face today ranging from covet to economic crisis to black lives matter protests to all of these things
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that act as push factors for activists to enter these groups we're also living through a sort of cyclical relationship with vigilante and white power activity if you look back through the long run of
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american history the uh peaks in clan and other groups similar groups um in pixar memberships align more consistently with the aftermath of warfare than they do with any other
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factor more consistently than they align with poverty immigration civil rights gains economic distress populism any other number of explanations that we might test out
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don't hold up as well as the aftermath of war now it turns out that that phenomenon cuts across simply people who have served it's not just about returning veterans although returning veterans and
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active duty troops have played an outsized role in escalating the violent capacity of white power groups over time but what we find is that all of us are more violent in the aftermath of warfare
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that measure goes across men and women across age across who did and did not serve in war so there is this moment of opportunity after warfare that these groups capitalize on in order to recruit and
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radicalize now we are now in the aftermath of the longest war our latest longest war as one historian has called it the war in afghanistan and what we've seen is a very prolonged
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sort of combat where the people fighting this war have come home um and been largely not acknowledged within our culture we have not watched coffins draped in american flags coming
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home we have not followed the war on television the way we did in prior combat so what does that mean are we going to see a sort of delayed uh surge that then peaks all at once are we going to see all of these people come
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together and peak we don't know but certainly we are in the middle of a rising ground swell and certainly we are experiencing one of these historical peaks bill do you think that
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there is any scenario where the forces from within the united states seem to be more powerful in
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destroying the union than forces from outside by that i mean not just questioning the veracity of our elections uh suppressing the rights of people to vote
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i mean these are these are not things that an external force is foisting upon us these are things that we are choosing right now to change the nature of what we consider democracy
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yes one of the presidents who experienced backlash grover cleveland wrote a letter to a friend of his and said the great ship of democracy like other vessels
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may be sunk by the mutiny of those on board and that's where the danger has always been the shay's rebellion the secession of of of the south didn't come from abroad it came from people who want to keep
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slavery and keep and want to destroy the union and and we still have we these are secessionists by other means and they really don't like the union i don't cover my wall and
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nice wallpaper paintings i covered in clippings i i keep the clippings taped to the wall and the clippings are astonishing our constitutional pricing is already here the shining city on a hill is ready to ignite america is
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closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe cia advisor stands democracy on the edge on and on it's frightening trump is systematically laying the
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groundwork to steal the 2024 election trump's next coup has already begun republicans are erasing decades of voting rights gains before our eyes in assaults on democracy state lawmaker
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makers target the courts georgia republicans purge democrats from county election boys we receive these in the media in in bits and pieces we see them in segments but they constitute a
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critical mass of change determined by people who want who want to take this country back as they say take it back from people of color take it back from progressives take it back from
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advocates of civil rights equal rights and it's very very dangerous i think that's absolutely right and i wish that there was a feature on twitter or tick tock or somewhere where people get their news um that where that's just you
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reading these headlines because it's the aggregation of all of these stories that really sounds the alarm and you know one question i get asked a lot because i'm a specialist in in the violent extremist part of what we saw on
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january 6 is about you know relative amounts of danger but you could subscribe to every story about say the proud boys and only be reading a tiny fraction of the
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problem because it's not just that it's the entire groundswell of white power and militant right activity plus the attack on voting rights plus the chain of command issues in national guard units which we've also seen and things
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like the south dakota governor sending the national guard under the funding of a private donor to do border enforcement um in in ron desantis's call for a non-national guard
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state militia quote unquote for florida um and we see those sovereignty struggles mirrored in groups on the extreme right that don't recognize the federal government or any authority higher than
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than the local sheriff we're at a crisis point that just boggles understanding i want to play a clip from the film that talks about how a coup is still possible let's take a
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look january 6 is now a fact of our history if it was possible to have a failed coup on january 6th it is also possible to have a successful coup it sounds very
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simple but it's a huge change democracy if it is anything at all it is losers consent people who lose leave and they try again next time
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trump still hasn't really conceded the 2020 election what the 2020 election revealed was that the rules that govern this are very loose and very and rely on norms of self-restraint and forbearance
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once you discover how to steal an election it's hard to unlearn that lesson and so that's why i think looking forward this is one of the greatest risks facing our democracy we have had hearings we've had
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investigations we've had a number dozens of arrests of people who were involved yet absent from that are any of the elected officials who
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gave support to this uh helped plan it um what do you think that says if there is such a carve out so to speak professor blue i'll start with you
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i think this is where we see the sort of two goals of the process of accountability really articulated because we have to pay attention both to the individuals who committed violence
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on january 6 and to the sort of planning mechanisms accountability questions especially among our elected officials my hope is that that is what the january
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6th commission will be able to begin to deliver perhaps the lawsuit by the attorney general can begin to deliver some of that information but what we have to ask is when we have that information
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what kind of dent can we make in the false narrative that has now been so thoroughly circulated in the body politic and i think this goes back to a bigger question about the long history of white
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supremacy in the united states we are by far not the only nation that struggles with white supremacy racial violence racial injustice and incomplete articulations
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of democracy there are many other countries who have faced these issues but we are very unusual in how little we have done to have a real national conversation about that shared history
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and you can see this appearing across the political spectrum i mean i think even the slogan make america great again is at its bottom an argument about history who america is what america is
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when we were great can greatness be achieved again these are historical arguments that require us to have an idea of the shared legacies that we bring into the present moment and these
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deep histories of anti-democracy illiberalism conflicts about sovereignty and power all of those conversations have to happen for all of this to get resolved because that public
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opinion needle can't move until we confront some of these problems this is what i think fuels the division and polarization that is is the real issue here well i'm not
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a pessimist i'm not giving up on democracy uh i deal with the we all deal with the bad news the anecdote i know if it's true or not but the story is told that in the middle of the waterloo campaign uh
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napoleon said to his uh his uh his valet if if if if the news from the front is good do not wake me if the news from the front is not good wake
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me immediately you want to hear the bad news i want to hear the bad news that's why i do the journalism i do not because i love dwelling in in the bad news but i believe in informed people who know the difference between a lie and the truth
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are the are the people who are going to save us and that includes republicans and that includes democrats this includes independence we need a mass mobilization to save the constitution if i if i can put it that way that's why
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this fight that professor blew us so eloquently written and talked about is important to recapture the discussion and debate of history so that we look and see ourselves for what we've done wrong at the same time we look and see
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the brave men and women who fought to change it and we can imitate them in many many ways that goes for lawyers it goes for journalists it goes for everyday people down where what their main contribution is to stand in line
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and long on a long cold morning and vote that's what we need in this country is to instill to invigorate to challenge with the whole idea of what democracy is it's about us it's about you and me if
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we can do that and see the elements that are threatening it we're going to be okay the film preserving democracy airs on pbs stations on january 6th professor kathleen blue bill moyers
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thank you both [Music] [Music] you
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