On the Far Right with Mike Wendling
Podcast Transcript

Chris Browne:

Hello and welcome to a special episode of Radicals in Conversation, the monthly podcast from Pluto Press, one of the world’s leading independent radical publishers. This is episode one of Beyond the Ballot Box, a new miniseries exploring some of the major political currents in U.S. politics. With the presidential election just around the corner, American politics is increasingly the focus of international attention, as well. Electoralism, reproductive justice, the climate crisis, Palestine, a resurgent far right, the criminalization of protest and the militarization of policing are all swirling in a maelstrom that is unlikely to abate. Whatever the outcome on November the fifth, it’s our plan to dive into many of these issues over the course of these coming episodes. And I’m delighted to be joined in this endeavor by my esteemed colleague and friend, James Kelly. James is Pluto’s publicity and social media manager, and he’s also a native of New Jersey. So it’s really exciting to have him on board for this US miniseries to share his perspective and insights in addition to those of our guests. 

In this episode, James and I sit down with Mike Wendling, US National digital reporter for the BBC based in Chicago. Mike is the co-founder of the BBC’s Disinformation Unit and was editor and presenter of BBC Trending. He has decades of experience covering extremism, the American far right, social media and disinformation. He’s also the author of Alt-Right: From 4-Chan to the White House and the new book Day of Reckoning: How the Far Right Declared War on Democracy, which was published by Pluto earlier this year.

We talk about how the movement, known as the alt right, morphed over the years of the Trump presidency in response to events such as the COVID 19 pandemic and the January six Capitol riot. We talk about the ways in which conspiratorial thinking has bled from the fringes of the far right into the mainstream Republican movement and the ways in which Donald Trump has reshaped the party and the wider political terrain.

We get Mike’s reflections on the recent Republican and Democratic national conventions and the extent to which the assassination attempt on Trump and the substitution of Harris for Biden on the Democratic ticket have changed the electoral calculus less than two months out from the election. 

Before we get underway, a reminder for listeners that you can get 40% off both Alt-Right and Day of Reckoning through plutobooks.com. You just have to use the coupon PODCAST at the checkout.

This is Mike Wendling on Radicals in Conversation. 

—

Okay, brilliant. So yeah. Mike, thanks for joining us on the show today. It’s a real pleasure to have you here in the office studio today. It’s a slightly different set up. We’re also joined by my colleague James Kelly. Really excited to have him on the show for this miniseries as well.

James Kelly:

It’s great to be here. Thanks.

Chris Browne:

So, okay, for context, I guess we’re recording this episode a few hours before the televised debate between Trump and Kamala Harris. At the time of recording, the national polling averages have Harris ahead 47% to 44%. And those numbers haven’t really moved much in the last couple of weeks. But the reality is, obviously, we’re in for a really close race whether or not tonight’s debate moves the needle.

So, anyway, that’s really just for context in terms of when we’re recording this, because a lot might happen…

Mike Wendling: 

A lot has happened!

Chris Browne:

Yeah, exactly. So for listeners, the date is the 10th of September. Anyhow. So, Mike, perhaps we could just start off with something pretty obvious. Could you just introduce yourself briefly, tell our listeners who may not be familiar with your work a little bit about your background and the work that you do professionally?

Mike Wendling: 

Yeah, sure. Well, I’m Mike Wendling. I’m a reporter currently working for the BBC as national digital reporter for the U.S. in Chicago, and I’ve done various jobs at the BBC. And going further back at other organizations, I have specialized recently in extremism, disinformation, the far right, conspiracy theories and other sort of fringe things in the Internet that float around every day more and more.

My previous book for Pluto was Alt-Right: From 4-Chan to the White House, and this latest one was sort of a natural evolution, I suppose. Throughout that time, I was mostly based in London, but I relocated to the US where I’m from, two years ago, and it struck me as I went back to my home country just how deeply conspiracy had wormed its way into the right of American politics, in particular in the United States. At the same time as the Trump movement, which looked pretty dead after Donald Trump left office, had become increasingly mainstream. And now, like you say, we’re at this point where it’s going to be a very close election and it could be Donald Trump in the White House again.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, brilliant. So as you’ve already said, your new book, Day of Reckoning: How the Far Right Declared War on Democracy, that came out in May from Pluto, and you’ve alluded to the previous book as well, Alt-Right: From 4-Chan to the White House, which was published in 2018. And as you say, it kind of feels like this book is a sort of sequel to that one.

And I think, you know, you note in the introduction to this book that the movement that dominates the right wing fringes today has its roots in that political movement known as the alt-right, which is the subject of the previous book. So that seems like a good place to start really, with the alt-right. Could you outline briefly some of the unifying features of that movement, which is, you know, admittedly a kind of broad coalition, if we can use that word?

Mike Wendling:

I mean, it took me a whole book that’s twice as long as the current one to explain all the sort of facets and tensions, you know, because there were tensions in the alt-right. I mean, I said I suppose I would say that you don’t hear people talk necessarily about the alt-right anymore. And that’s not necessarily because the alt-right has gone away or those people have gone away. In fact, you know, some of the people who are very prominent in that movement are still around and still sort of making content or, you know, being involved in politics.

It’s just that a lot of the ideas and the characters have actually sort of moved a little bit more into the mainstream. You know, a lot of them have and a lot of them have sort of gone off the deep end or have been canceled in various ways, you know, but that’s just sort of the fact of life of politics.

And something I try to get at in the new book, you know, the alt-right was always opposed to, I guess, the Republican establishment. There were sections of the alt-right that were really obsessed with race. Most of the alt-right was very into white identity politics of some stripe or another. How racist they were or how into neo-Nazism they were was always sort of like a bone of contention that was pretty wide.

But they were all sort of in that general sphere. And, you know, it was a movement that was largely born and developed on the Internet. So it was about visual language. It was about memes, it was about Pepe the Frog and posting on 4-Chan and it was about sort of ignoring convention and just sort of giving one or two fingers up to the establishment, depending on what country you’re in.

And you can kind of see in that description how it dovetails in some ways with Donald Trump and the sort of MAGA movement. And that’s really sort of propelled him, although, you know, once Trump did take office, he wasn’t always sort of pleasing to that crowd. A lot of what he was doing was as a conventional Republican president in terms of just cutting taxes for the rich, for instance; not something that was like a huge priority for the alt-right.

You can kind of see that some of these characters, although not all of them, some of them are, you know… Trump is just not extreme enough for them, have kind of reemerged, now that he has reemerged in U.S. politics, although he he never really went away. You know, certainly he’s now getting more attention than he has before, you know, since he was in the White House.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, I think it’s really interesting. And you write in the book how, you know, the alt-right was kind of an oppositional outsider sort of movement. So there was this kind of dilemma moment when, you know, Trump won in 2016. And I think you kind of talk about how the movement reacted or fared having got their candidate into the White House. And you refer really to three kind of key events during the Trump presidency in terms of the impact it had on the alt-right and the sort of unraveling of that movement in a sense. So you’ve got Charlottesville in 2017, the pandemic, of course, and then the January 6th Capitol riot, which, you know, runs like a seam throughout the book.

So could you talk us through these three events in particular and maybe say a little bit more about their significance?

Mike Wendling:

Sure. Sure. So the tensions within the alt-right really sort of came to a head in Charlottesville, where you had hardcore neo-Nazis. Let’s remember that the march in Charlottesville was called Unite the Right. And they really, the organizers of that, even though they were very extreme, some of them really thought that they could scoop up all the sort of, you know, not moderate conservatives, but sort of, you know, not not neo-Nazi types and not radical types, along with some very, very serious extreme people, including, you know, people have subsequently been charged and convicted with all sorts of crimes and been involved in much more sort of extreme organizations.

And, you know, for a moment there, it looked like they had had a triumph. You know, it looked like they had pulled off this torchlight rally. Yeah, there was some sort of fighting with anti-fascists, but they looked like a unified mob. You know, the following day with the violence and, you know, the death of an anti-fascist protester and the injury of many others and widespread fighting kind of showed the ugly side of that.

And it was at that point that the alt right became kind of unfashionable, you know, the infighting and the bickering turned up and the label to some people became very toxic and certainly to mainstream Americans. That sort of woke them up to that. It’s no secret that that is what inspired Joe Biden to run for president again. He perhaps might not have, but he explicitly said that in his speech when he opened his campaign for the 2020 presidency. Then, you know, you move on to the pandemic and you know the significance of the pandemic, I think was it radicalized people in a different way, which is it’s really a point where we saw a lot of conspiracy, you know, a lot of sort of stress and a lot of people being online, a lot, you know, a lot of questioning.

And, you know, there’s sort of various arguments about whether certain government orders to stay home or to wear masks were within the purview of the state, essentially. And some of those things were, you know, perfectly sort of, you know, I guess, legitimate arguments to have. For many, many people that turned into outright conspiracism and the idea that the government was out to control you, that it was all a plot to rig the 2020 election, various states in the U.S. loosened their rules on postal votes, for instance, to allow people to vote from home.

And so they didn’t have to have the risk of catching the virus. You know, at the same time, Donald Trump was spreading conspiracies of his own about voting, which became a major theme and is still a major theme of his politics today. Certainly, he is ramping that theme up as we head to the election. He keeps saying that there is going to be cheating by the Democrats. You know, there’s no evidence of systemic cheating, but it’s a theme that he and his supporters, they absolutely believe; millions of them believe. And then, you know, all of this, of course, culminated in January 6th in that riot at the Capitol and the invasion of the Capitol, where, you know, a lot of people from these various different strands of the alt-right and the far right in the US showed up.

And the, you know, it’s always remarkable to me how sort of, you know, history might move one way or the other. I was covering the trial of the Oath Keepers militia, and in Day of Reckoning, I talked to the son of the Oath Keepers’ leader. You know, about some of the events that were happening around that time and how he was viewing them. And, you know, it would only take one issue of a command to get a lot of weapons that the Oath Keepers had stashed across the Potomac River in Virginia in a hotel room to the Capitol. And then, you know, the shooting were to start and who knows how things might have turned out differently then. That looked like, you know, that might be the exit of these people from the national stage.

And yet here we are again talking about this years later. And Donald Trump is still on the scene. And the people who were supporting him that day are still on the scene. And I think probably, you know, what we’re trying to… or what we’re sort of seeing, rather, is the attempt to rewrite some of that history by Trump and his allies who are calling the people who were participating “patriots” and “heroes” and some of them were treated unfairly. Of course, Trump himself doesn’t specify which ones he would release from prison, or pardon them if he were elected president. But you’re hearing this reflected more and more on the right. So you have Marjorie Taylor Greene, the representative from Georgia, who’s a really sort of good emblem of this sort of new far right movement in Congress. Just held the hearing the other day into the “unfair treatment of the January 6 prisoners.” So it’s becoming a much more sort of mainstream thing. And, you know, that would be surprising to somebody who woke up on January 7th when Americans of all stripes were pretty aghast at what had happened. The rehabilitation of that event is really interesting.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that touches on a few things, like firstly, the sort of equivocal relationship that elements of the far right have with violent extremism. I mean, there are bits in the book about ‘murder denial’ and ‘motive denial,’ which are all sort of wrapped up in this kind of conspiratorial sort of thinking a little bit, but ultimately about downplaying the violence of far right actors. And then, yeah, the reframing of violent extremism as sort of patriotism, you know, necessary action that’s been taken to save or protect the country somehow. So some of these groups, you know, like the Oath Keepers, didn’t fare particularly well after January 6th but other groups like the Proud Boys have managed to sort of – yeah, I think you refer to a kind of ‘calculated ideological ambiguity’ which they have and an ability that they’ve had to sort of pivot to other issues, I guess, since January 6th, notably to sort of attacking trans and gay people as part of a wider societal moral panic, as a way of enduring.

So yeah, could you say a little bit more about like groups like The Proud Boys and yeah, how some of these groups have morphed their agendas and so on?

Mike Wendling:

I mean, you know, one of the things that you sort of saw by studying the alt-right and sort of, you know, tracing this kind of passage, that particular sort of groups or even sort of communities that were online that sort of focused around various like websites like 4chan or, you know, even personalities and influencers and stuff, is that they would be like they would form, they would break apart. There would be infighting, there would be fighting between the groups. But the energy was always constant. You know, it was almost like a law of physics or something like that. So while the, like you said, the Oath Keepers, when Stuart Rose, the Oath Keepers’ founder, went to prison, he was the head of the snake, really. And it was just sort of cut off and it was gone. 

The Proud Boys fared better even though their leaders also went to prison. They were more sort of a dispersed, locally focused and in some ways sort of less tooled up and military focused group, you know, So they were easily able to sort of say, you know what, we’re just garden variety conservatives. You know, we are not the people stashing guns, even though there was, you know, a huge contingent of proud boys at the Capitol and and certainly violent ones, you know, when many of them have been convicted for violence that day, they managed to survive. You see these days, the Proud Boys actually sort of splitting internally is a little bit complicated, but essentially it’s sort of more radical proud boys who definitely want to go sort of more in a political direction versus the people who, you know, are far right but want to sort of remain true to the sort of party spirit of the original Proud Boys.

And yet the people who are getting involved in these things, they just want belonging of some description. You know, it’s rare that somebody will be involved, heavily involved in a far right group, leave it and not do anything. You know, afterwards they’ll find some sort of outlet for their energy. You know, in some ways, because of the dissolution of some of these groups, the Three Percenters is another one that I cover in the book that has largely gone away as like a national organization or as like a cohesive movement.

But certainly, as I said, there’s still millions of Donald Trump supporters and still millions of them who believe in vote fraud conspiracy theories, and millions of them who get very excited about this and who are really getting very excited about the next election and their idea that Kamala Harris is a communist and must be stopped at all costs.

And so you have this you know, you may not have a group that’s uniting these people, but they are talking to each other online. And, you know, in a in a more sort of dispersed and fragmented way, it makes it sort of the possibility of collective action amongst these far right groups a little less likely. And, you know, I don’t like to make predictions, however, the chances of a January 6th type, everybody come to Washington and we’re going to catch the police by surprise and they won’t know what’s hit them… doesn’t seem very likely to me. You know, because all those elements don’t seem to be in place. But on the other hand, it also makes it more unpredictable. So, you know, in the book, I talk a little bit about, you know, sort of isolated cases, the prospect of people who might decide to take independent action, small groups of people who might decide to do things to, they would see it as, you know, protecting American values or whatever their focus is.

Whereas, you know, most people would kind of see it as a violent election interference. So that is, you know, by no means a foregone conclusion, but probably like the biggest risk and and kind of a scary one because it’s so unpredictable.

James Kelly:

I’m really interested in sort of the radicalizing forces behind this movement. And I hope you don’t mind indulging me in a hypothetical, but in the hypothetical world that we all wish, where the COVID 19 pandemic doesn’t happen, do you think these groups still would have found their way back into the mainstream?

Mike Wendling:

That’s a really interesting question. I guess I could just answer with another hypothetical, which is hypothetically, that could have made Donald Trump president again. You know, I mean, like, let’s not forget, before the COVID pandemic, it was looking pretty good in terms of like the basics of the US economy, for most people. The incumbent always has a big advantage.

So had the pandemic not happened, had say, George Floyd not been murdered, you know, that was probably a contributory factor. And everything that happened around then, I think that probably like the energy had always been there, because you know what I mean? The the sort of underlying conditions that have never sort of really been replaced and, you know, I don’t really sort of get into this so much, but like, you know, is it sort of the loss of traditional masculinity, you know, as very narrowly defined or, you know, their sort of economic status and, you know, the changing demographics, you know, America is becoming Browner and Blacker. I don’t necessarily see that that would have changed so much. The one thing probably, you know, if we could sort of like just pluck the COVID pandemic away – if only – is that and it’s not really confined to the far right, but it certainly sort of has given them rocket fuel.

But the conspiracism that we really saw take off around then, in many different countries – it happened in Britain, too, it’s just that in Britain, a lot of the people who were sort of tied to that did not really have a hold on mainstream politics, you know, and it just so happens on the American right and in the Republican Party, there is a fair amount of tolerance for, again, Marjorie Taylor Greene and what she says about vaccines. So, yeah, I think, you know, on balance, it certainly was pushing a lot more people into that arena who might not have previously been so wrapped up in conspiracies.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, I mean, conspiracy is a huge part of the book, really. A lot of these groups that you’re talking about have that conspiratorial mindset in one way or another about one thing or another. You know, one example is the “big lie.” You know, the idea that the 2020 election was rigged, Trump actually won and there was this kind of widespread voter fraud which kept him out of the White House.

And this theory has, you know, persisted over the last four years alongside many others. So, yeah, Could you say a little bit about why you think it is that conspiratorial thinking has gained so much traction in the last few years on the right?

Mike Wendling:

In some ways, these things are very hard to measure, you know what I mean? So some conspiracy theory experts who I spoke to in the course of writing this and researching it will say, you know what, Actually, it’s not as if conspiracy thinking is any more now than in the past. And, you know, I try to be sort of like agnostic because I’m not sort of a hardcore researcher and there are hardcore researchers out there.

But certainly its influence on politics is has ratcheted up from sort of previous years. You know what I mean? I’m just about old enough to remember, you know, in the sort of early nineties, the militia movement in the United States and yeah, you know, the Oklahoma City bombing and those far right groups were equally conspiratorial. And certainly there were, you know, not necessarily like domestic terrorist groups, but politicians of all parties and none who were into conspiracy theories around then.

You know, and that’s just, I suppose, the sort of ebb and flow of history to one degree in terms of how influential this stuff gets. So there is that. And then, you know, there are the the unusual sort of circumstances of Trump himself and how Trump, one conspiracy theory expert, said, you know, how did Trump distinguish himself in 2016 when he was running for president?

And it was kind of by his base was the conspiracy or the suspicion base. You know, it was the people who were attracted to him for saying, yes, wild things about immigrants and building walls and stuff, but also about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. You know, I mean, inflammatory stuff, the kind of stuff where you sort of say, did he really believe it? Or is it just because it’s whipping up everybody online and bringing them to his side? And it does. And, you know, part of that, of course, is the nature of social media and how it works and how inflammatory ideas and pithy wild stuff tends to go viral in a way that laborious explanations of fact do not. So certainly that is part of the whole sort of stew of this conspiracy world that we find ourselves in now.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, definitely. I mean, it also seems like, you know, for many of us who consider ourselves to be sort of rational people, to be labeled as a conspiracy theorist is like a bad thing, But it doesn’t seem to be so much of a pejorative in a lot of these circles. In fact, you know, it’s something of a badge of honor, because, you know, if the mainstream believes it, it must be a lie. And it just means, you know, you’ve got the kind of inside track on what the real truth is, I guess. And I don’t know, does it feel like that’s changed as well, the fact that it doesn’t have this negative association with it so much?

Mike Wendling:

You know, so in the book, I recount the story of, you know, driving around Florida and tuning into right wing radio and the host saying, you know, they say this is conspiracy theory, but actually today’s conspiracy theory is tomorrow’s news. And when you go to the store to prepare for the hurricane that’s going to land next week, make sure you get some extra water, because we’re all going to be in lockdown in two months.

Now, it was about a year ago. So if that didn’t happen. But the brilliant thing about conspiracy theories is, well, in terms of like strategy, is that you only need to be right once and the debunkers need to be right all the time. You know, they need to have 100% record. If you say, you know what, we are convinced – and, you know, like I’m not saying that I ever said this or that you know, many fact checkers said this, although some did – you know, I’m convinced that the COVID virus did not come from the lab in Wuhan. Right. And then you have some credible people say, oh, wait, hold on a second. We’re not quite sure about that. You know, and then the conspiracy theorist can say, aha, you were wrong about that. What else are you wrong about? Or We were right about that. And you know, what else are we right about? 

That’s why any example of voter fraud, for instance, is seized upon. You know, I mean, Donald Trump will tweet about a case of voter fraud. I mean, voter fraud exists, right? I mean, it’s extremely rare, but there are cases people go to prison, you know, get criminal convictions for this. It’s not as if it’s completely absent. It’s bad logic. But for people who are minded to believe a politician like that who has all these followers, they’re minded to believe it. And so, you know, it must be true if he says it.

James Kelly:

Yes. So in the book, Mike, you talk about the role that conspiracy driven right wing influencers and podcasters play in the MAGA movement, something that gets a lot of airtime that we’ve talked about here today is, and especially during an election season, are the false theories about immigrant voting. These theories claim that mass numbers of undocumented immigrants and non-citizens are voting in American elections deliberately aided by Democratic policy.

Can you tell us what allows this misinformation to thrive? And now that the Democrats have taken this hard right turn on immigration, legitimating many of the concerns of Trump voters in an attempt to outflank the GOP, are they helping perpetuate these theories, too?

Mike Wendling:

Yeah. I don’t know if they’re helping to perpetuate these specific theories. I would say, you know, there is a triangulation effect going on for sure. The Democrats are trying to say, you know, we’re just as tough as you, and I suppose we should all just keep in mind that like as we said at the start, it’s going to be so close that, you know, if you can do some sort of policy that shears off 1% of the other guy’s vote, that’s actually like a really significant thing.

Whatever your values are, be damned right? It may in the minds of some people feed into these. But I feel like the narrative of illegal immigrants voting is kind of nonsensical in one way, and it’s completely driven by the top. And another is, is that Donald Trump and his allies are talking about this kind of thing. I mean, you don’t really need to have too much exposure to immigrants in the United States to realize that they are thankful to be there and they will not do anything that would put that in jeopardy.

Now, obviously, there are counterexamples to that, but why would you risk, if you come from a country with a poor security situation that you fled and in some cases spent a lot of money to leave and put yourself at great personal risk to come to the United States, why would you cast a ballot? That does not seem to be a logical decision.

So you know, if you just sort of think about it at that level, it doesn’t make any sense. Yeah. If you have some sort of interaction with immigrants, you know, asylum seekers or even illegal immigrants, you just realize that that is not what they’re setting out to do. The tricky bit in sort of debunking these things, I suppose, comes when the language and over the years Trump and his allies and the far right influencers have been so good at masking their language and their sort of true intentions and talking in codes and stuff.

So if Elon Musk, for instance, says, you know, yes, they’re importing immigrants so that Democrats will always win elections, he has the out by saying, you know what, I’m not saying that all these people are coming here or that there is a deliberate thing to bring them here. It’s, he can say, yeah, they’re simply allowing them and eventually they’ll become legal citizens and eventually they’ll vote.

Elon Musk is maybe a bad example because I think actually he probably is increasingly, judging from his tweets, believing in some of the more sort of extreme rhetoric. But some of those conservative and far right and fringe influencers definitely maintain a sort of ambiguity about their conspiracy theories. You know what I mean? That makes it very difficult to check or debunk.

I mean, to my mind, it often shows sort of the limitations of fact checking. I mean, fact checking is a sort of a journalistic enterprise. And I know a lot of fact checkers and they’re really excellent at their jobs and very dedicated and hardworking people. And they have to work so fast. I don’t want to sort of like denigrate what they do, but there is always a limitation there because the far right, particularly those sort of like influencer podcast people have built in a strategic ambiguity in their messaging. They’ve really learned not to be pinned down.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, no, I think that touches on something and it seems like a lot of this is kind of non falsifiable, right? You use that word in the book, but even leaving that aside, you know, even if, like you say, there’s limitations with fact checking, even if you’re able to prove something is untrue, it doesn’t always seem to be an effective way of dispelling some of these widely held beliefs.

And, you know, maybe that brings us back to Trump and the sort of Trumpian style of PR, you know, no shame, no apologies, lots of lies and outlandish statements which are easily disproved. And yet the debunking of which makes no sort of dent in his popularity. You know, some of the things Trump has done and said would have been considered career ending in another era.

Right? Another more innocent time. But if anything, it only allows his support base to grow more fervent. So yeah. Do you feel like it is Trump’s Republican Party now and that the other candidates that were in the field before he became the nominee again were having to appeal to these kinds of conspiratorial fringes?

Mike Wendling:

In a word, yes. I mean, like I was a couple of months ago in the Republican National Convention and see the lineup and the speakers and you see Tucker Carlson gets a speaking spot and Marjorie Taylor Greene gets to speak. But what you don’t have is you don’t have any former Republican president speaking, you don’t have a Bush up there.

You don’t have a Mitt Romney type talking. It really is in terms of that core party, the Trump Party, now. And you have to, I think, probably to get on well. I mean, a really good example is J.D. Vance. Right? So obviously, J.D. Vance was a Never Trumper. You know, he was always a conservative of various stripes. But, you know, he had to bend the knee to Trump, first of all, to get a Senate seat and get Trump’s endorsement for that.

But now to be his right hand man. Trump has also remade the sort of structure, you know what I mean? He’s he’s put his daughter in law in charge of the Republican National Committee, and, you know, his allies are installed in top positions. And it’s very interesting, You know, at some point, I suppose, again, this is going to be a little bit speculative, but like at some point Trump’s going to go one way or the other, right? Through politics or simply, you know, natural mortality or, you know, he almost got shot!

So there’s that and cults of personality have a way of unwinding in very unpredictable and strange ways. And I won’t sort of venture any more about how that might happen, but there will be a sort of post-Trump Republican Party at some point. Who knows what it’s going to look like.

Chris Browne:

Hmm. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that makes sense. And, you know, one of the constituent groups of the Republican base is Christian nationalists, right? You talk about them in the book as a dynamic force within the movement. And yet Trump has always seemed a bit of an odd figurehead for them, you know, for anyone kind of espousing traditional family values or whatever. And yet he has become this sort of messianic figure for many of these people.

Mike Wendling:

Yeah. You know, and I sort of did some reporting on this after the book, unfortunately. But I found some very fascinating things in Iowa. So obviously, Iowa is the first presidential contest and it has a caucus, which is a very sort of weird, interesting and grassroots way of doing politics, where everybody has to sort of gather in little high school gymnasiums or town halls or whatever.

I was doing some research beforehand into sort of the changing nature between Trump and evangelicals. You have this guy who’s divorced and cheated on his wife and all this other stuff; foul mouthed, not very Christian, you know, in the traditional sense. And yet evangelicals love him. During the Trump administration, there was a spike in white Americans who identified as evangelicals, but also did not regularly attend church.

And that seems really weird, right? Because, like evangelicals attend church, that’s what we know. We know where to find them on Sunday. But it’s explained by people who study this. And, you know, particularly in Iowa, where in the Republican Party, you have to appeal to those people to win the state of Iowa and get that momentum if you’re going to win as a Republican.

And really what has replaced the church for many people is Donald Trump and the larger sort of ideas of the right wing media sphere. So, you know, it might not necessarily be sort of like, you know, fringe podcasters or Pepe memes, but it could be Fox News and right wing talk radio, for instance. And so instead of building a community around the people who you live with and who worship in the same way you do, you’re tied into a larger movement of your neighbors who might wear red hats.

Chris Browne:

Yeah. And another interesting thing that came through in the book is because obviously the far right, it’s a disparate movement, right? We know there’s lots of different groups, lots of different competing interests, personalities, agendas. But one thing that many of these groups and different parts of the right seem to coalesce around is this kind of moral crusade of like protecting the children from moral corruption or protecting them from pedophiles.

And this seems to link some of the more conspiratorial side with, you know, more mainstream conservatives. And, you know, it’s manifested itself recently in sort of alarmism around, you know, drag queens doing a breakfast book club for children or whatever.

Mike Wendling:

It’s a big theme in the QAnon side of things, too, you know, that really sort of links that energy up with the sort of, you know, rejection of anything to do with trans rights that happens, you know, very sort of broadly on the right, these days.

James Kelly:

You kind of answered the question a little bit, Mike, but I was wondering if you think there is a MAGA movement that can exist without Donald Trump. Do the core ideas of the movement stand on their own? Could someone step in and lead Trump’s base or or do you think this movement is inherently tied to Trump’s identity and influence?

Mike Wendling:

I think, you know, now, having gone to a number of speeches by Donald Trump this year and also seen a number of speeches, you know, by a whole bunch of other politicians, I think he’s he’s got a sort of skill, I suppose, that’s been honed over his sort of years in the entertainment world. You know, it doesn’t really have much to do with the business world or whatever he did, you know, in buying and selling buildings or, you know, going bankrupt or whatever. It’s more of he has his shtick and the people who are attracted to it like it. And it’s, you know, and it takes a lot of practice and it actually takes a fair amount of stamina. And you come across politicians, some very successful politicians who just don’t really have that sort of connection with the audience that he has. So in some ways I doubt it. But, you know, there are, of course, other charismatic politicians.

I couldn’t really sort of like name the most likely ones off the top of my head, but maybe you would see it come not from the world of politics. Maybe you wouldn’t see it from the US Senate. Maybe you wouldn’t see it from like the Parliament here or the Prime Minister or whatever. But you could see it from the world of TV, somebody who we’re not sort of thinking about, you know. Or maybe the world of podcasting, you know, maybe that’s going to sort of give us the next Trumpian leader. It’s a difficult one to pull off, but not impossible, I don’t think.

James Kelly:

Certainly be very interesting fireside chats, if that were to happen.

Chris Browne:

I guess you’ve already alluded to the fact that you’re originally from the States. You know, you lived over here in Britain for a couple of decades and then moved back a couple of years ago. So yeah, I guess what were you expecting to find, you know, politically speaking, you know, on the ground in your home country when you move back in 2022?

And were those expectations met? And maybe this also ties in with, you know, like you said, Trump has this connection with a certain portion, a large portion, you know, millions of people. He speaks to them or speaks their language. And at the same time, a lot of people absolutely hate him. You know, there’s a lot of polarization. Do you feel like liberals, progressives, people on the left in America have a proper grasp of the true nature of the far right or of the appeal of figures like Trump? Because you get the sense that as much as the sort of conspiratorial echo chambers exist on the right, they obviously exist on the left too. So, you know, yeah, how much interaction is there between increasingly polarized sections of society and how much were you yet taken aback by the prominence of these ideas which we’ve been discussing when you returned to the States?

Mike Wendling:

Yeah, You know, as a journalist, I sort of go in and out of these communities. It’s actually kind of a privilege to work for the foreign media and, you know, and the BBC, because I have access to a whole bunch of different communities that I can report on from very far right, the very far left, depending on the story.

And I think that there is not a whole lot of sort of understanding outside those bubbles, you know, But then I, you know, to be completely fair about it, I don’t know if there ever was, you know, I mean, I remember sort of being among sort of political bubbles when I was younger and I didn’t really sort of feel like there was a whole lot of understanding and definitely a feeling of separateness.

If you grew up in a midwest town, you know, I went to a university in Ohio in a small town, and, you know, if you were hanging with the punks in that town, yeah, you had a community that was sort of like the bands coming in and the small group of people that you knew but didn’t feel like really connected to the wider world.

You know, here, no matter what your subculture is, you kind of in this day and age at least, it’s like, you know, you have some sort of connection. So, you know, maybe it’s even gotten a little bit better in terms of, you know, we now know about these things, but Certainly, I don’t think people sort of understand where people are coming from very much more, even if they know what they’re saying online.

I mean, like in terms of polarization and what I was expecting when I moved over in the summer of 2022, it was not a foregone conclusion that Donald Trump would continue his grip on the Republican Party. People were very, you know, talking about bread and butter issues around the midterm elections. You know, there was certainly an active abortion rights movement, and that became a big political issue.

But it wasn’t being dominated by the fringes, really. You saw some pushback from not just the left, but the center in terms of that. So it was looking like almost a reversion to some sort of like previous normal. I won’t call anything really normal these days, but like I say, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that that Donald Trump would sort of rise again.

But then, you know, it didn’t take me very long to understand just how deep that sort of fringe that we used to call the alt-right had burrowed into politics; didn’t take me long to sort of discover that the conspiracy of voter fraud or the anti-vaccine activism had phenomenal support from a lot of people and a lot of surprising people. And the whole sort of underbelly of of American politics. You know, I don’t even know if you can call it an underbelly anymore. It quickly became apparent to me how large and powerful those movements were.

Chris Browne:

Mm hmm. It’s interesting what you’re talking about, how bread and butter issues were kind of dominating around the time of the midterms. What do you think is dominating now in the discourse? Because I guess political memory is short on the one hand. I mean, you know, we’ve referenced the assassination attempt, but that already kind of feels like old news. And you kind of wonder how much political capital Trump can bank from that come Election Day. But, yeah, what are the big issues that are being talked about at, you know, say, the Republican National Convention and indeed at the Democratic National Convention?

Mike Wendling:

Yeah, I mean, it seems almost sort of irrelevant to talk about what happens several weeks ago, you know, the story I like to tell is how the Republicans were riding high. And certainly it looked like if Joe Biden were to stay in the race, that he would have a very, very low chance of winning reelection. The idea that he was just too old and too out of it had just taken hold.

And what’s interesting is that to my mind, having sort of sat and watched Donald Trump give his very long speech – about twice as long as we had expected, and really sort of like going for the audience in the room rather than the millions of people watching at home – he probably lost a chance to win back a lot of people who were maybe sort of on the fence about him in 2020 or may have voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

And then, of course, several days after that, Joe Biden was no longer an issue because he dropped out of the race. You know, the the problem with identifying any particular issues is that by the time you actually sort of put this out, it could be completely different. You know, like right now, people are still talking about the economy, people are talking about immigration, but people are also talking about how disliked Donald Trump is by large segments of the population.

You know, Kamala Harris has been refining her platform and it’s not always clear where she stands on every issue. But maybe that’s a strength, rather than a weakness. You know, I really don’t know. At the Democratic convention, I was with the protesters and of course, they were talking about Gaza most of the time. Most of the protests were focused on the situation there. And it’s definitely a thing that brings together, you know, I wouldn’t sort of like exaggerate the power of that movement for Gaza in the United States, but it’s definitely there and it’s definitely a solid thing. And people are passionate about it and and they’re not going anywhere, you know what I mean? And, you know, if you’re Democrats, that’s probably one of the things that you’re going to worry about, appealing to those people who are naturally inclined to at least try and keep Donald Trump out and might stay home because you support Israel.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, I mean, I was going to ask how effectively you think the Harris / Walz ticket has been in contesting the political terrain and offering, I suppose, an alternative vision of America that might tempt back, well, some of their own voters, you know, particularly because of the situation in Gaza. And given Joe Biden’s relationship with and support for Netanyahu and how disaffected that’s been for a large chunk of their base, especially in, you know, what is a close contest like we’ve been discussing.

Mike Wendling:

Yeah, you know, there is the base but I suppose you know you have to think about most people aren’t looking at politics like that. You know, politics is not the base politics in some ways, fringe politics or far right politics isn’t base politics necessarily even. But we’ll leave that aside, that could be a whole other hour conversation. You know, the issue with something like Gaza is that it’s not… it’s bringing tens of thousands of people out into the streets of Chicago, not hundreds of thousands or millions, but tens of thousands of people in the right places swings the election. It really has the potential of doing that. So it’s the idea that the margins are so thin rather than there is sort of like a really effective movement. And there is a you know, I was outside the convention walls with the protesters, but I was also inside and talking to and interviewing delegates who are firmly in the Democratic Party, but also very, very opposed to the Biden policy on Israel and Gaza.

And so some people are persuadable. And I feel like, you know, I haven’t done a whole lot of coverage on that particular issue recently. As you get into the election, you sort of see how people may go one way or the other. Now, certainly they weren’t even bothering to put big protests. I mean, there were protests outside the Republican convention, but they weren’t putting their energy into trying to persuade Donald Trump and the Republican that they should get a place on stage, for instance, because that wasn’t going to happen.

And so whether you do a political calculus and you say, I’m going to vote for a third party or not vote or whatever, or you hold your nose and vote for the person who you think might somehow advance your interest later on in some way. You know, for a lot of the people I’ve spoken to, it’s like a very personal decision and it might come down to the wire.

Chris Browne:

Yeah. I mean, maybe to bring this back full circle to talking about the potential for some kind of political violence a la January 6th following the election. You know, I’m quite late to the party with this, but I’ve been watching Succession. I’m on like the penultimate episode of the final series. So, yeah, spoiler alert. But yeah, there’s this presidential election in the show, which is I guess a sort of fictional version

of the election we’re having now. And on Election Day, there’s this mysterious destruction of, I think, postal ballots in Wisconsin. There’s a fire and tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of ballots lost. And it’s this kind of pivotal determinant of the outcome of the election, right. Which ultimately ushers a fascist into power. So watching this now has kind of made the looming election in November suddenly feel a lot more tense because, you know, when you’re talking about these fine margins and we’re mindful of the Capitol riot four years ago and wondering what lengths some people might be willing to go to this time to ensure they get, you know, quote unquote, the right result.

So, yeah, I guess, what are your thoughts on what the mood is like? Is it tense?

Mike Wendling:

I think in some quarters, obviously, you know, people like myself are sort of watching these things all the time. Day to day, it probably doesn’t feel like that. However, as we get closer, I think we’re talking something like 57 days or 56 days to the election. As we get closer, I think probably people will start to feel it, you know, and it’s when people are talking on the streets or, you know, talking to their neighbors and expressing their views on whether they think it should go one way or the other. And as well as when the rhetoric heats up, I think, you know, Donald Trump has spoken more in the last few weeks about the voter fraud issue as he sees it. You know, his conspiracy theories about voter fraud, because he was pretty assured when Joe Biden was the candidate. You know, he was feeling very confident. Republicans were very were feeling hugely confident at the Republican convention.

But now they’re worried. And now the polls have obviously, you know, in some ways flipped or, you know, depending on how you read the polls, they certainly have moved in the Democrats’ direction. And so you you now have a large dose of paranoia being injected via Donald Trump into the mainstream. And again, I said about chances of another January 6th probably being low in terms of that exact scenario playing out because the organized groups are weaker because the authorities are ready, you know, frankly, because the White House is controlled by Democrats. And, you know, so if Joe Biden wants to give the order to put the National Guard in, it won’t be sort of putting them in against his own supporters. You know, I mean, if something like that were to happen. 

But yeah, like the you know, the Wisconsin scenario, I’m pretty positive that there will be viral videos on election night and people sort of alleging that some random box is actually a box of ballots that’s either being thrown out or secreted in a count in, you know, wherever Georgia or Pennsylvania or Arizona, wherever. And, you know, the rest is maybe down to luck. And a lot of people will be holding their breath. You know what I mean? American democracy. I mean, like British democracy. It’s sort of in terms of the structure of voting relies upon people in local areas with a variety of different views, trying to like do some sort of collective action. You know, for one night, you know, and that’s a kind of a thin thing to hang it on if you think about it. And we’ll see.

James Kelly:

So we’re recording this podcast on the day of the first presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. I’m interested in what you think about these presidential debates from the point of view of a disinformation expert. Are these debates more spectacle or are they still a great way for voters to learn more about the candidates?

Mike Wendling:

It’s interesting because I was looking today at how many people actually watched them and, you know, even the most popular debate in 2020 was watched by about, I believe, 72 or 73 million people. That’s less than half of the number of people who actually voted, right? People are consuming these things in bite-sized chunks. I don’t know whether that is any sort of different from what we’ve seen in the past. In some ways big set piece events like this, you know, which are very concentrated in what they’re going to say, and live television actually aren’t that prone to misinformation, disinformation. So, in other words, I don’t think we going to wake up tomorrow – famous last words, but I don’t think we’re going to wake up tomorrow and see that there’s going to be like a deepfake clip that’s going to go viral and that loads of people are going to think that Kamala Harris professed allegiance to the Communist Party or, you know, Donald Trump gave a Hitler salute or anything like this.

Right. That tends not to happen because you can always just check the tape. And millions of people do watch live and they they know rubbish, disinformation. And the misinformation comes in sort of the vacuum of low information. It comes out of the blue when people sort of make up stories and they’re either not debunkable or not debunked fast enough; the white hot heat of the election where you see a viral video clip and you don’t really know what’s going on, but somebody is telling you what’s going on their own narrative, even though they weren’t there.

So, you know, it’s a very difficult sort of game of whack-a-mole to play, but that’s just sort of the nature of the beast.

Chris Browne:

Brilliant. Well, yeah, I think that’s probably a good place to leave it. We’ve covered a lot of bases. There’s more in the book, which you haven’t really touched on, but that’s fine. You know, listeners can go away and grab a copy. It really is an excellent read. James and I were just talking about that earlier. Yeah, excellent book.

So congratulations on that. And yeah, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today.

Mike Wendling:

Oh, thanks for having me.

James Kelly:

Thanks, Mike.

Chris Browne:

That was Mike Wendling on Radicals and Conversation in episode 1 of our new miniseries, Beyond the Ballot Box, focusing on some of the major political developments in the US. As ever, listeners can get 40% off both Alt-Right and Day of Reckoning on plutobooks.com. Just use the coupon PODCAST at the checkout. If you enjoy the show, then please don’t forget to like, share, subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts. We’ll be back in October with our next episode. So until then, thank you for listening and goodbye.