hello, everyone. good evening and welcome. my name is nicolas and i helped direct events at the bookstore. books have been left for 90

years and counting. it is my pleasure to introduce rachel investigative reporter and frequent contributor to spl center.org journalism sector. her wor work has covered a myrif topics and she has reported extensively on the activities of the alt-american and their supporters. she will be saying a few words about the southern poverty law center before we launch into the discussion for tonight. so please welcome rachel to the strand bookstore. [applause] hello, everybody. my name is rachel and i manage investigative reporter for the wall center and i want to thank all of you for coming out and supporting what we do at the center. i want to take a minute in case you don't know the specifics of what we do. seeking justice, fighting hate and teaching tolerance.

the first, seeking justice we have lawyers and legal staff that are more talented than myself but do litigation on civil rights work all over the south and all over the rest of the come trade and teaching staff they produce material for educators so they can promote diversity and inclusion to classrooms. what we do is on the fighting hate side. we monitor and track hate groups and stray mists across the united states. what we called extremists is any group that has practices that attack an entire class of people for their characteristics so we kind of go across the spectrum for anything you could imagine based on this.

the reason i think the book is relevant and some of you may be coming out here tonight is because for a lot of people, the whole trumped phenomenon is coming out of the blue like it's bubbling up where did it come from. what he does in the book is it's not an anomaly or flash of lightning. it was an ongoing pattern and that's why the work that we do at the center is so important. when these arrive we can say no. i cover more of the areas of hate known as the old right for

a couple of reasons the biggest being that of my age, my generation and i recognize them and i know the tactics they are using and conjuring up their own brand that is very distinct from that of our parents generation. dave has a passage that is extremely accurate, where human decency and ethics are considered antiquarian jokes and empathy is only an invitation to insult. those are the kind of things we are facing right now and i see it all the time when i monitor them and so i really appreciate all of your support in helping us track these folks so they are not just the next media

phenomenon. it's just as destructive. some of the ways you can get involved is of course to donate to the center. specifically follow the blog, follow the work. people know who he is, get the word out there because we have information on who these people are more than anyone out there. thanks. [applause] >> thank you, rachel. tonight we are excited to host the investigative journalist whose work at newspapers and msnbc as a writer and producer of the national press club award for distinguished online journalism. he's edited the political blog crooks and liars and as a writer for the southern poverty law

center. his own blog on recognition and consecutive awards for the best series and northwest progressive institute named to the region's best liberal after david. he's also written several books one of which one to 2014 international book award for general nonfiction. joining david in conversation tonight is joe conason editor in march at the investigative fund and the man responsible for inviting david contributed to work at the investigative fund of newsroom journalists studied and have written about extensively as well among the published books are the hunting of the president's including the new republic, the guardian and "the new york times" to name a few. please join me in welcoming david and joe took the strand.

[applause] good evening. thank you for coming, everybody. we will get right into it. why did you write this book? we were bloggers back in the day but that is when we met and i know he has been working on this kind of political research since back then he knows more about this than anybody in the country, so why this book now? >> to tell you the truth, i

didn't plan to write this book. my last at the box office i followed it up partly because it was difficult to write as an environmental reporter for years i first started writing about the backlash story and so it was a hard hook to write a and i felt i needed to do something different.

i liked writing about the hate groups and hate crimes and talk to people about the coolest animals on the planet. i thought for my next book i'm going to write about humpback whales so in the fall of 2015 doing this work and watching what was going on on the ground with the far right groups they receive as this group gaining traction and by that spraying it was obvious, by the spring of

2016 or january, februar februag up with honest thought we had a serious problem on our hands partly because it was not just at gaining the vote also really providing a banner under which they could rally and organize and feel inspired. all this time you are working on the piece for us i worked for the investigative fund and we asked dave to do an analysis for us for domestic terrorism because it had occurred to me that there was a lot more domestic terrorism by the far right van any other group

including islamic terrorists. i asked dave to go through that and it took a while but he did. so during this whole period, you were going through that and it must have had an effect on your thinking for this book as well. >> it is the resistance to acknowledge the reality on the ground that domestic terrorism occurs twice as often by the extremists and islamists with a potential domestic terrorist out there. it's just vastly larger than what you would get. it's something that darrell johnson cover the department of

homeland security analysts who helped keep the database together and the guy that offered the 2009 memo that there's a huge media storm that veterans are being recruited into fox news but anyway, he pointed out to me this is part of what he was seeing as well the sheer numbers of extremists out there are counted in the hundreds of thousands of radical islamists are probably in the thousands of so it makes sense for law enforcement take them seriously and deal with it in an adequate basis but instead we

were seeing this really kind of ridiculous bias where they were being investigated by anybody but the fbi and they did a good job of staying on top of them when they need to come u up with the law enforcement in the agency really hold down a job. >> do you think that is because of the way that the issue was covered in the national media? is it because there's a reluctance on the part of of the mainstream national media organizations to name this and describe the breast o? >> you know this that if i worn the newsrooms and i was having

trouble getting my editors to approve it because they were scared of the liberal media bias and the toxicity of that claim was so bad by the end of the decade. >> cawley fascist a fascist, you are a liberal. >> if you just talk about neo-nazi as well its liberal media bias. i agree with -- i grew up a republican [inaudible] >> where does the title comes from, what is alt-american? on my website i banned the term

falsely accept when somebody else is saying it because i think it is a synonym for neo-nazi. tell me i'm -- why i'm wrong. >> it is a separate subject in regards but an important one. alt-america grew out of the realization that i had covering the malicious 1990s that they created this alternative universe for themselves to live in a bubble that lets them live alongside a bus in the day-to-day life but it is a totally different universe and of course the race office in the

'90s talking about the new world order into this mysterious plot for all of mankind and so on and so forth. it never went away. it never died and obviously never went away. it shifted gears to become an entity that was the main fuel of the conspiracy theory handle that. it didn't really capture the conservatives until barack obama's candidacy is when we first started to see if and when he was elected it took off. then the tea party movement that followed the election was set up

by the grassroots new friend and this is a project i did for the investigative fund i was seeing the wholesale movement so within a year i was going to these tea party gatherings and it was the difference between those gatherings and the militia milia gatherings i would see in the '90s. they were selling the same books and the same conspiracy theori theories. this is what has happened in the movement and then of course when

trump came along and 2011 of opting the burger conspiracy theories and a whole panoply of others, then it really started taking off and the rise of the movement kind of supplemented this in a powerful way to. they all live in that bizarre universe where he was a muslim and hillary was part of this

pedophilia conspiracy plot and so forth. so it is this alternative universe that they've created for themselves. yes, it does play off of the turmoil whic. >> which is? >> i understand people's objections to it. >> we've talked about it more. it's meant to sound innocent and normal and that is not what they are. the description of themselves they want to slip under the radar in a way with all of the other paraphernalia that would be objectionable to most people if they understood that is what it was. how do thos the richard spencerd

the various elements that are oval in their audiology far right reflect some streams that have existed for quite a long time in the country in a small way like the american not the party and other elements the vanguard party and so forth. how do they suddenly rise up in the midst of all this? the day had been relegated for a long time and fairly successfully so in working on

this stuff it's [inaudible] lewis who was a leader for many years is dead i and his pain wet away, his liberty lobby has gone away but the revisionists and other sort of nazi leaning outfits and ideologies he helped foster, they are still around. so explain how that all happened. >> part of this have to do, a lot of that has to do with the internet. before the internet came along, these people were spread out geographically and had a

difficult time getting together and a difficult time recruiting or spreading the ideology. the internet broke the barriers down so they could reach out to each other instantly across the country and organize very quickly. it's a night and day difference between the far right movement we were accustomed to. they were always looking backwards and feels right is very different since it arose out of the internet it has its origins and sort of culture that was surrounding as it became

this opportunity. >> can you explain that is becauswhat that isbecause you d. >> it was a controversy that happened in the videogame world in 2013 dot puzzled about the ability of gaming designers, feminist gaming designers to come up with ideas, structures for video games other than your male shooter games and the videogame community who live in their care and space -- parents basement and started harassing them in their house and really attacking them. and there was a really powerful antifeminist compliment to this end they started adopting all these conspiracy theories

including one that was invented by the white nationalists and this idea of the cultural marxism as you have probably heard the term. if you hear the term cultural marxism you should know that it was basically an invention of the white nationalist an moveme. >> it was constructed out of a whole cloth of political correctness and multiculturali multiculturalism. >> feminism. >> right, and feminism. so come it became what happened is on the internet forms and on the video gaming chat rooms and so the nationalists really began successfully gaming of the recruits and becoming very much a part of getting traction for the system is a pretty soon youe

all thisolve this racist ideoloy gaining a huge number of hit. one of the things they use social media and very clever ways to use a lot of humor more than any of us in this room with much approve of but it's a kind of humor that would appeal to a 14-year-old boy that likes transgressive humor. [laughter] beavis and butthead type. but that is a recruitment that is young white males between 16 and 30, and they are very successful when you are

recruiting them especially if they happen to be a lot of them arthatare suburban, a lot of the well-educated and a lot of them come from very economically stable and rich backgrounds but they all have this idea that they are under siege, white culture is under siege and they are standing up against it. >> that is interesting what you said about the economic circumstances because it has been a big discussion in our country everybody was upset about the fact that trump is president trying to figure out why there's been a debate about the reflective of economic anxiety or racial anxiety and clearly all of those elements play a part in the election but in this subset of the of

alt-right most of the people that seem to be associated and this was the economic class of the far right. >> the clan was working class to a great degree not david duke, but others into the white citizens councils were more of the upper middle class types. it is actually complex. >> i'm not going anywhere. >> i mean this is part of why i prefer to use alt-right rather than neo-nazi because i've been writing about this when we have to missions in northern idaho and that was early in my reporting career there is a

specific bandwidth of ideology they worship hitler and have swastika headbands and do all this stuff. for richard spencer's are more willing to go out there and all that -- >> we solve them in private -- >> in this complexity because it is a much more complex movements than just neo-nazi there is a lot of other elements. my feeling is we have the same sort of problem in the debate dealing with the patriot movement.

that's what they call themselves and we have to fall to death but the key is. when they hear old right after we shine enough ligh shining a y will think nationalist white supremacist. >> how did the media create a platform for this. you were talking about the

bubble that is very much a product of certain types of right-wing media. fox news more and more in that direction, rush limbaugh all the way down to the info war. how does that create and set the scene for the alt-right? everybody in the movement in the rationalization and explanation for the news events and daily this is something i saw them doing in the movement in the '90s they can take any news event and translate it through the prism of that ideology so that a hurricane in florida could be proof that the government was secretly manipulating the weather is a new world order so this is

something the universe creates for itself and definitely it is what keeps them because it creates a community now you can contact them on the internet. >> they have a problem when they did it for for instance the critic that they would take everybody's guns and then he doesn't. i know people putting up a propaganda don't care but what about the people that are the recipients was their experience as opposed to what they are being told or they want to believe?

>> it entails this compartmentalized thinking or you can hold contradictory ideas in the same place and right-wing authoritarians which is to say the followers who are believers of all of america that's where thingtheirthings when they get r it's one happy family. you said you think there are hundreds of thousands of them. only a few hundred of them ever show up and the league of the

south and all of the confederate types that date back to the council of conservative citizens seem to come together for these even though it is different from those folks but they all stand together but they don't seem to be able to get a group of people to come out. >> dot tiki torch march was a large number it was about a thousand people. i've covered a number of these events on the coast including the night of the inauguration

where a man was shot. there is a gripping part in the book about that. that was one of the largest crowds i have seen a lot of them come out and they are not necessarily committed neofascists. a lot of these folks are just there because the apolitical as so they want to go out and participate in a transgressive act. >> how big of a threat is it? you clearly wrote this book because you think it is an issue

that we have to deal with in one way or another and we should talk about how, but how big is it if you see hundreds of thousands if most of them won't show their face i think they are stilso afraid of losing their js and so this is really not acceptable in america at this point in spite of the presidentt and his various, you know, his son they message these people and i will get back to that. >> you can't really put a finger on in terms of its actual size because really what we are seeing is these massive audience numbers on the internet primarily that is one of the main indications, and the other element that is part of this is the militia movement which when

i go to rural america now i have to tell you it's everywhere now. it's kind of become this constitutionalist idea that you heard the bundy folks talking about in nevada and oregon starting this ideological stuff about how the sheriff is the supreme law of the county and at the federal government doesn't have any right to own public land and all this stuff. this is their version of what they call constitutionalism and it's kind of become the default attitude and much of rural america in every region of the country, south, south, west, so, northwest. i don't know about northeast. i haven't had a lot of experience here in this region in terms of on the ground. and most of the others i've been on the ground and can tell you it's everywhere so yeah it's

really troubling how pervasive it's become and a lot of it does have to do with the constant reinforcement that they get from supposedly mainstream media organizations such as fox news and it seeps over into places like cnn. when someone gets on cnn and has this stuff it's the same thing as far as i am concerned. >> in the book you say you don't think donald trump is a fascist. i wrote i thought he probably was but your explanation is actually very cogent and i believe in a sort of technical say he's not. >> what is he and why doesn't it make a difference?

>> somebody like richard spencer who believes in the ideology of make more money for donald trump and everybody loves me, that's donald trump. >> i would say that is a version of it. >> it's what we call th social dominance orientation which is a classic leader for the authoritarians they have different personnel to the profiles that they are made for each other. but it's really in the mold of huey long and others that have

come up throughout the course of our history but he's fa he is fd away the most successful that we have ever had in our history and the problem is people have this misconception and one of the worst quotes t gets around on te internet is this quote that says supposedly mussolini says that fascism is the marriage of corporatism and the government, totally fake quote. he never said that and not only that but she wouldn't have said that because although maybe if he did say it fascists are light-years and misleading answer it's not a credible source anyway. it really is ultimately a right-wing populism wildly out

of control and that's certainly if you look at the history of fascism in both italy and germany they were right-wing populists that just went crazy and so in the end it doesn't make a lot of difference because even though trump himself is not a fascist, he's raised this army of followers that are fundamentally a proto- fascist movement and a chili and some ways it does make a difference because a real fascist wouldn't have been able to do that. they would have turned out to a lothata lot of americans and ded being sorted within the range of normal he's been able to raise

this army without actually having any way that an actual fascists couldn't have. >> i don't i know you don't have a way to answer this but i'm still interested in your opinion. what do you think that they are doing when they cultivate these anti-semites and others so they've put out these sort of proto- fascist means a. he has no idea who j-juliett was when they talk about stuff like that but nevertheless, they know and have some idea of what is going on here i think and if they don't, somebody's told them, so what do you think they are up to with all this tax do you think they are consciously cultivating a fascist constituency?

>> i don't know that they are. there was an interesting quote. that's where the actual lead is a. it's what glenn thrush bid talking about trump and the nfl and how he was making this talking about the nfl and very near the end of the story there was this purpose of privately all of the advisers will admit that ultimately he sees himself as representing the interests of white people now and if you like it is forced on him by barack obama but he's going to be perceived and be the white people's president and fundamentally that is what they

were saying. that's what americans need to know. so, to me that is what was going on. he does these things come = to these things out of nature. somebody will bring a microphone to you and if you don't ask the right questions i will ask some. >> i don't know if this is the right question but what is your relationship with the religious right in these groups that you are talking about? it is such a potent area because i read recently that huckabee sanders, sarah huckabee sanders can stand up there and she's a

proud evangelist and says these things because she not only be the start donald trump should be protected but she believes that he was chosen by god so it's her duty to stand up there and defend him. >> so the question in case everybody could and here is how is the religious right factoring into this and citing as the example huckabee sanders and i will tell you i take everything that comes from this with many grains of salt. i spent a lot of time in arkansas and can tell you they are full of it but the answer please. >> sera postmark of this? msnbc last night for whom i did a piece for the investigative published in mother jones some of which is in the book and s-sierra is the specialist more so on this than i am. what i can tell you is there is

an ongoing debate within the evangelical community over the continued support for trump but the underlying dynamic is sort of something inherent in the christianity which is the authoritarianism and even speaking to evangelical christianity is the kind of authoritarian version of religion. >> should say right-wing evangelical christianity because that i isn't the whole thing but -- >> you're right, right-wing conservative evangelicals, southern evangelicals in particular. and sarah huckabee sanders wants to talk about authoritarianism you'll notice her say i don't think we should question a four-star general. that is authoritarianism right there, folks and authoritarianism is one of the

keys to understanding this movement because the people that are attracted to trump are primarily doing so because they have the personality type in a very specific profile and there are three components it's basically authoritarian submission which is the belief that you need to submit to the legitimate authorities and then there is the authoritarian aggression against anyone who does not set in it for anyone who is not a legitimate leader, barack obama or bill clinton and then finally the third component to the conventional wisdom is the belief that they represent the real america and that they are part of and really represent the feelings of society.

that is the core of the mentality and it is very common for th the right-wing authoritarians to also be christian evangelicals when there is a huge amount of overlap. >> also we have to remember that the southern evangelicals grew out of the attempt to suppress a shared ideology there as well. >> i'm just curious what the word give equal origin of the word populist is because to me

it sounds like popular but it's not popular. >> it just means of the people. it can be selective, but generally speaking it is very openly democratic and open to all kinds of people. right-wing populism is a very different creature and relies on this narrative of conspiracy that basically the ordinary working class people are being pressed by the elites at the top for manipulating the under class and sandwiching them in between and it's called the producer's narrative and that is a fundamental to th the right-wing populism.

>> my question is basically what do you think can be done about this because i think what he basically did this what people think that it's okay and not that they weren't there before so what do you recommend? >> it kind of lifted the lid off the national lid and the creepy qualities came crawling out of it that's how i feel. [laughter] i think there are two levels of which we can act. first is fundamentally anti-democratic. everything about it. they are openly hostile to democracy and its institutions. so it's really essential people read the book and come away from any message i hope that they get

that we are under assault by this movement and we are not taking it for granted because we think they will just continue to have a democracy in this openly hostile movement we are deluding ourselves if we think we can do that and it will succumb to the attacker must bthatattack unlesd defend it so there are two ways to do that one is organizing on a large scale there's a lot more of us than there are of them but over 40% of the country doesn't go out and vote, and we need to reengage people and revive

democracy. the reason people are voting as they feel politics doesn't actually affect their real lives, they feel like it is irrelevant to their real lives and if trump has done nothing else than it does actually affect my life. once we take advantage of that, we can organize and get people out to the polls and that will be the first step. they want to use the tools of democracy like free speech to destroy democracy. we need to use the assets of democracy and empowerment of every individual that it represents to defeat them and so i think that is on the large-scale. once they get into this bubble it is hard to get them out especially if you have

grandparents and relatives pulled into this stuff you've experienced it and it's like you could talk to a wall. it's hard work to pull people out of the alternative universe is hard work and ultimately it's going to come down to have to find a way to talk to each other again, we have to find a way to find a common ground where we can agree on what is real and what's not. how do we know what is truthful and accurate and what is false. that is the crisis point that we are at we need to deal with it and it can't be done from the top-down, it has to be from the bottom up, every individual out there engaging with people.

it seems like it is to show who they are and what they do and let them face the consequences of. >> i don't think that it's in terms of their home address and things like that but yes exposing them in their jobs and communities is absolutely

correct. they want to sneak in under the radar echo echo there was a where he got undercover with them and it was a great report and they were talking about it because one of the gateways is that they are easy to go into this movement and there's a lot of libertarians in it and so this is certainly a part of the path we are seeing.

they are talking about things like being secret agents for their work but they are not actually open about their racism they just don't hire a. of just happens that way so let's go ahead and expose them all we want. >> i was going to take one more question from the back. >> my question deals with the republican party and all this. you talked about libertarianism. if you read ron paul's old newsletters so that the whole resistance now i don't see that

as what is going to happen. a lot of these ideas are ingrained in all that stuff so i guess the question is how do we excise this from the party, do democrats just need to be more aggressive in what they classify republicans as? >> i wish i knew, honestly. i'm not a very good political strategist is a very dangerous

time. i think that is step one. >> i would say you have to make all of the officeholders on this stuff. that's the way to eventually force them to own it or separate. in each case in every race they have to be forcing them to answer this about the dog whistles and everything that has empowered us to an for every

opportunity to raise that as an issue because ultimately if they start to lose elections, they will run from it fast. >> that's really ultimately is the answer. >> we have time for just a couple more questions. >> i just want to say thank you so much for coming here to speak and i want to follow up on something that you said. what i've noticed in the past couple of days on the television on this kelly issue where he is gaslighting thhe'sgaslighting te civil war and i was think about the failure of the educational system in the country to teach what slavery was, but the civill war was and what exactly happened following the civil war so my question is do you think

that this phenomenon and everything else was going to happen whether or not she was elected? i feel like it is a disease that would have reared its ugly head at some point anyway. >> i don't think they would have been as powerful and cohesive. he played a critical role in getting them all to rally around a and even in 2015 before he announced, we were seeing signs. this is one of the realities of these people. they are contentious, paranoid,

angry and fighting with one another so this is one of the reasons they haven't gotten a lot of traction because they quickly split apart and break into these factions. >> they usually end up killing each other but i think there is a deeper answer to that question which is we never had this after the civil war. ..

>> one of the few good things that robert ely did was to say, don't build these monuments, become one country again. they were allowed to go forward with a lost cause narrative. a lot of other stuff that enabled -- the country never dealt with it. everybody knows that. this is why you still have to have annealing protest in the nfl. so many things grew out of real failure to do what germany did. now it's coming back in some way in germany. it's still quite small. we have a much bigger problem than that here. >> really for me one of the key was the utter failure of reconstruction. one of the things that really happened and was hidden i read a

terrific account of what happened in reconstruction a few years ago. a man named stephen wrote on terrorism that occurred during this time. we got the gone with the wind version of what happened in reconstruction which was the lacey blacks took over and we cannot run the states. there are put their feet up on the desk and eating watermelon and chicken. so why people had to stand up and stop this from happening and drive the carpetbaggers out. i got handed that, certainly i was taught in idaho that the real cause of the civil war was states rights. this is the legacy of the revision that took place around

the 20th century. even before we have this campaign of extreme violence against black people that drove them completely out of power created the grounding of jim crow laws the continued depression of black people in the south. the rest of the country while the south used its tradition of civil war stuff there is also a huge migration from the south of black people into rural areas in the midwest and northeast. they were mostly farmers. the vast majority of those people settled as farmers another hidden part of history you'll find you'll read a great

book called son downtown. what happened was there's a time between 1890 and 1840 of ethnic cleansing from the rural areas of the rest of the country. people put up signs on the towns in the west and northeast say don't let the sun set on you here. were no negroes allowed after sundown, essentially, we created the demographic situation we have today where blacks had to cluster into the cities for their own self-preservation. they had to flee the rural areas and to take up urban lives as factory workers because they can no longer farm. wasn't just the south, it was the rest of america as well.

that's the legacy we continue to deal with today and why we have to have annealing at nfl games. >> thank you for coming. my question has to do with form. but taking a creative nonfiction class and we've been talking about the importance of opening lines and establishing tones and creating suspense. i was struck by your opening line in which you synthesize the notion of trump announcing his presidency with dylan roof in charleston. what are your thoughts when you're coming up with something like this it's very provocative.

>> something that when i sat down to write the book i discovered when i was creating a timeline for. trump announces that i said the very next day was when charleston was. i thought that's an amazing coincidence because it actually speaks to the real subject of the book which is even though they don't seem they are very deeply connected so part of what i was doing was chocking the reader into self recognition. were familiar with both those events but we never connect them.

so it's a little bit of that shock and recognition to get people to think. the basic narrative technique. every writer wants to get a hold of their audience right away and say listen to this. that's what i was trying to do. >> thank you for that question. there's nothing to writer likes more than to get a literary question. thank you all very much for coming, i hope you get the book. [applause] [inaudible]

>> here's a look at some of the best books of the year according to "the san francisco chronicle". the report on how silicon valley became the center of technological innovation and "troublemakers. then after physics for people in a hurry. and grant, ron chernow explores the life of president ulysses s grant. one scene is unreleased images of african-american culture from the photo archives.

and walter isaacson's recounts the life of leonardo da vinci. >> there's a big delegation that goes from florence to milan that is led by playwright and poet, it has artists, engineers, and all things leonardo goes as a musician. because he does everything, he loves theater. he invented musical instruments including one that's like a violin, but he made it in the shape of a horse's head. he brings it to milan as a gift. but he kind of wants to stay there, and he's a little tired of being just a painter. he writes one of the coolest job

application letters in history. to the duke of milan. it is 11 paragraphs long. the first ten paragraphs are about engineering and science. he says i can make great weapons of war. something he had not done but he sketched out a lot. he said i can build great buildings and divert it's almost an afterthought when he said and i can also paint as well as any person. >> many others appeared on book tv. [inaudible]