Latest news with #RobertPape
ABC News
12 hours ago
- Politics
- ABC News
Iran was 'running to the bomb'. Some say it's now in a nuclear sprint
Despite a ceasefire being declared between Israel, the United States and Iran, we're now "moving into a true danger zone". That's what Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago is predicting, anyway. Twelve days of deadly air strikes and missile launches may have ended for now, but Professor Pape, an expert in global security affairs, has a warning. Iran is likely to speed up its nuclear program — which the US and Israel say has been the primary target of their massive strikes this month — in the wake of the attacks. He told CBS the country's conservative regime would "probably" now "sprint to that nuclear weapon". US President Donald Trump claims his country's bombing campaign had "obliterated" three of Iran's nuclear sites. However, even senior White House figures — including his deputy, JD Vance — admit the Iran may still have enough uranium to make 10 atomic weapons. Iran has already said it plans to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), aimed to limit the spread of nuclear weapons globally, and stop co-operating with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which had previously inspected its facilities. Professor Pape is worried the program will speed up in the shadows, saying "we're not going to be able to see it coming". "That is the real danger zone we're moving in to. "People are focusing on the things they can see, and then maybe counteract. "What the problem is, is what we can't see, and what we won't see, because Iran is not going to tell us exactly how they're fashioning that remaining nuclear material, and whether they have some other nuclear sites we don't even know about." Retired IDF General Yaakov Amidror spent more than three decades in Israel's military and has previously advised the country's prime minister on national security. He says his division uncovered intelligence in the 90s that Iran had a nuclear weapons program and told the ABC the Gulf state had more recently been "running to the bomb". "How did we know? Because they have enriched uranium for years, and they had, at the beginning of the war, more than 400 kilograms of enriched uranium up to 60 per cent. "They needed a few weeks to enrich it to military grade." Assessing the impact 12 days of fighting has had on Iran's nuclear program is difficult. The most high-profile targets Israel and the US attacked were facilities at Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow. While Mr Trump has been bullish about the damage done, a leaked preliminary report this week says otherwise. Before this attack, US intelligence had reportedly predicted Iran could have been as little as three months off developing a nuclear bomb. The classified report leaked to The New York Times and other outlets this week claimed it had been "delayed but by less than six months". On Wednesday, local time, multiple Iranian state media outlets reported the country had already begun repairing the Natanz nuclear facility. Jason Brodsky is the policy director at United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI), a US-based not-for-profit which bills itself as "formed to combat the threats posed by the Islamic Republic". He's studied the region extensively, and believes these latest attacks could have set Iran's nuclear program back "years". He described Mr Trump's decision to order the US bombings at the weekend as a "gutsy move". "It will change Iran in many ways as well," Mr Brodsky told the ABC. "I was always concerned about eroded American deterrence vis-a-vis Tehran. "I think they took advantage of America's self-deterrence after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and other deeply divisive wars that took place during that time. "The Islamic Republic thought it could get away with murder — with everything. "The United States sent a very loud message, that we are not going to be deterring ourselves any more with respect to your nuclear program, and your proxy activities," he said. There are conflicting accounts swirling elsewhere, too. In an interview with the Associated Press, Israel's ambassador to France, Johsua Zarka, claimed at least 14 Iranian nuclear scientists had been killed in the 12 days of fighting. "The fact that the whole group disappeared is basically throwing back the program by a number of years, by quite a number of years," he said. Alain Bauer, a leading criminologist and national security expert, told French broadcaster BFM TV Iran's most prominent 20 nuclear scientists had been moved to Russia before the attacks. James Acton, a co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is sceptical about how much the country's mission to build an atomic weapon had been set back. "The problem the United States and Israel have is that Iran almost certainly has materials and equipment, in locations we don't know about," he told the American Broadcasting Company. He said it was unlikely Iran's highly enriched uranium, which was previously stored at Isfahan, was destroyed in the attacks. "This is material that is stored in things that look very much like scuba tanks. It's that small. Tracking that material is going to be exceptionally difficult," he said. Iran has claimed about 400kg of it was moved before the US dropped its bombs. "I tend to believe them," Mr Acton said.
Forbes
3 days ago
- Politics
- Forbes
No, Israel's Air Campaign Isn't Futile: 'Airpower Alone' Is A Straw Man
Israeli Air Force F-35 fighter jet In his recent article 'Israel's Futile Air War,' Robert Pape argues that Israel's effort to destroy Iran's nuclear capability and pressure the regime through airpower is doomed from the start. He claims that only ground forces can achieve such goals, pointing to historical U.S. operations as cautionary tales. But Pape's central premise—that 'airpower alone' cannot accomplish strategic objectives—does not only misinterpret modern military history but also distorts understanding of the nature of joint operations and of how to best employ military forces to attain political goals. Furthermore, and fundamental to appropriately invalidating his conclusions, neither the civilian nor the military leadership of Israel claims that Israel can accomplish its strategic objectives using 'airpower alone.' Warfighting at a campaign level does not occur in any domain 'alone'—not on land, at sea, in space, in the electromagnetic domain—or from the air. Israel does not rely on airpower in a vacuum. It applies air and space capabilities in coordination with special operations, cyber operations, psychological warfare, and strategic messaging. That is the modern model of coercive power—and it has proven itself before. If boots on the ground were the magic ingredient, the U.S. would have prevailed in Vietnam at the peak of ground force employment in 1968; in Operation Restore Hope in Somalia (1993) against a hostile warlord; and in Operation Enduring Freedom (2001) in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003)—both extended ground occupations with hundreds of thousands of land forces—but they didn't. Military victory depends on a far more complex set of variables that characterize the desired effects associated with achieving the political objectives of a particular operation. Those variables include strategy, operational concepts, technologies, tactics, and of course the conditions and environment of the specific conflict. Pape is entirely wrong to suggest one set of means is superior to another absent this broader assessment. 'Airpower Alone' Is a Straw Man Pape argues that Israel is falling into the trap of believing it can achieve its goals through airpower alone. But this is not what Israel believes—it is Pape's mischaracterization. No credible strategist views any domain in isolation. Israel does not have to occupy Tehran to deter Iran's nuclear ambitions; it must impose high, repeatable costs that degrade capabilities, lengthen timelines, and keep the regime off balance. The idea that only land invasions can achieve military objectives belongs to a bygone era—one that has cost the United States dearly in blood and treasure. The blunders of U.S. ground-centric military strategies in both Afghanistan and Iraq offer the most recent evidence. Desert Storm: Airpower Was Decisive Pape's dismissal of airpower's effectiveness ignores perhaps the clearest counterexample—Operation Desert Storm (1991). During that campaign, U.S. and coalition forces employed airpower during all 43 days of the war, but it was only on day 39 that the first ground forces were committed. Airpower paralyzed Saddam Hussein's regime and rendered his military ineffective. Airpower negated the Iraq's command and control systems, obliterated its air force, suppressed its surface-to-air missile systems, and devastated its ground forces—all before coalition ground forces entered Iraq and Kuwait. When ground operations began, the Coalition soldiers required only 100 hours to finish the war and to reoccupy Kuwait. This largely involved rounding up Iraqi Army troops already defeated by airpower who were looking for U.S forces to whom they could surrender. Of the over 500,000 U.S. troops deployed to the Gulf, 148 were killed in combat. While any loss of life is unfortunate, that astonishingly low figure underscores the strategic value of using airpower to dismantle the enemy's warfighting machine before exposing ground forces to risk. Had the United States pursued a traditional attrition-based ground-centric campaign the death toll on both sides of the conflict would have been enormously higher. Yet as decisive as the air component was in Desert Storm, that does not diminish the necessity of using ground forces to execute the operation. Clearly, Desert Storm represents a successful example of using airpower as the principal instrument of war, with ground forces in a supporting role. Desert Storm was thus an exemplary demonstration of true jointness—using the right force at the right place at the right time to achieve a given objective. Enduring Freedom: Strategic Success, Undermined by Mission Creep Another example Pape ignores is the opening phase of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. The United States rapidly achieved its core national security objectives using airpower as the key force, supported by indigenous ground forces and a small contingent of U.S. special operations forces providing intelligence: 1) the Taliban regime was removed from power; 2) a friendly government was established in Kabul; and 3) the Al-Qaeda terrorist training camps in Afghanistan were dismantled. The United States met all these objectives by December 31, 2001, without deploying tens of thousands of ground troops. The success was swift, efficient, and decisive—an exemplar of the asymmetric application of airpower and supplementary capabilities. But instead of recognizing success and withdrawing from the area with a warning not to repeat husbanding Al-Qaeda or we would return, U.S. political and military leaders defaulted to the traditional belief held by the Army-dominated leadership at Central Command headquarters and incorporated in U.S. military doctrine of the day: that only a traditional ground presence could secure the peace. As a result, the United States eventually deployed hundreds of thousands of ground troops—the ostensible 'decisive force.' In one of the costliest examples of mission creep in U.S. history, the objectives in Afghanistan shifted from disrupting terror networks to 'winning hearts and minds'—in essence, trying to transform a 16th-century tribal society into a modern Jeffersonian democracy. The result was a 20-year quagmire with over 20,000 U.S. casualties that ended with the Taliban returning to power following a humiliating U.S. capitulation—proving that the early air-led campaign had achieved more in three months than ground force occupation did in two decades. Contrast this with Operation Allied Force (1999), a 78-day NATO-led air campaign that unseated Slobodan Milošević and halted human rights abuses in Kosovo with no NATO lives lost in combat. Israel Understands the Lesson Unlike the ground-force-dominated leadership of the U.S. military over the past two decades, Israeli leaders today have no intention of changing Iranian society or democratizing Iran. They are applying precision air and space power to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, eliminate senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) leaders who pose a threat to their country, damage critical infrastructure used to secure Iran's nuclear objectives, and erode the regime's ability to control events—all while minimizing their own exposure and the risk of escalation. This is not fantasy. It is the smart use of airpower—and, in conjunction with other means, it can achieve desired political outcomes. Strategic Delay Is Strategic Success Pape sets up a false binary: Either Israel eliminates Iran's nuclear program, or it fails. But this ignores how modern coercion works. Damaging Iran's nuclear facilities, decapitating its leadership structure, and repeatedly disrupting its enrichment efforts forces Tehran into a permanent state of caution. That amounts to success through delay—a repeatable outcome, sustained through intermittent precision attacks. With air superiority established over Iran, Israel has already secured the means to exercise this strategy option over and over again. This strategy also keeps Israel's alternatives open. Tehran must now reconstitute its nuclear program under threat. Iran would undertake any new effort to enrich uranium or build covert facilities under the shadow of Israeli air attack—which imposes a degree of strategic control over Iran. Boots on the Ground? No Thanks Pape implies that the only path to success is the deployment of massive ground forces—a strategy that would lead Israel into the exact kind of grinding occupation it seeks to avoid. The lessons of U.S. ground operations in Afghanistan and Iraq—where U.S. ground forces succeeded tactically but failed strategically—should warn analysts away from such logic. So should the results of the Russia-Ukraine war. Neither Russia nor Ukraine has proven able to secure air superiority in that war, resulting in a stalemate and devolution into an attrition-based struggle. Russia has suffered nearly a million casualties to date and that number is growing at a rate of 1,500 a day. Israel has no appetite for repeating America's or Russia's misadventures based on old paradigms of warfare. That is why it is leveraging the domains where it holds clear superiority: air and space. Conclusion: Control of the Sky Remains Vital Airpower does not offer a panacea. But it is also not the fragile fantasy Pape suggests. When applied strategically—as in terminating World War II in the Pacific, breaking the Iraqi army in Desert Storm, bringing down the Taliban in the early phases of Enduring Freedom, ending Serb atrocities in Allied Force, and now Israel's effective air operations over Iran—airpower can achieve real, measurable results with dramatically reduced risk and cost, providing strategic advantages not otherwise achievable. Pape's straw man of 'airpower alone' obscures the actual lesson: that modern conventional airpower integrated with intelligence, cyber-attacks, special operations and other tools can shift the strategic balance—without occupation, without regime change, without the illusion that democracies can be built with bayonets, and without masses of casualties. Israel's air campaign is not a mistake. It is a masterclass in 21st-century coercive strategy.
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘Our era of violent populism': the US has entered a new phase of political violence
It has been a grim couple of weeks in the US, as multiple acts of politically motivated violence have dominated headlines and sparked fears that a worrying new normal has taken hold in America. Last Saturday, a man disguised as a police officer attacked two Democratic legislators at their homes in Minnesota, killing a state representative and her husband, and wounding another lawmaker and his wife. The alleged murderer was planning further attacks, police said, on local politicians and abortion rights advocates. The same day, during national 'No Kings' demonstrations against the Trump administration, there was a spate of other violence or near-violence across the US. After a man with a rifle allegedly charged at protesters in Utah, an armed 'safety volunteer' associated with the protest fired at the man, wounding him and killing a bystander. When protesters in California surrounded a car, the driver sped over a protester's leg. And a man was arrested in Arizona after brandishing a handgun at protesters. Later in the week, a Jewish lawmaker in Ohio reported that he was 'run off the road' by a man who waved a Palestinian flag at him. Police in New York also said they were investigating anti-Muslim threats to the mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. The political temperature is dangerously high – and shows few signs of cooling. 'We are in a historically high period of American political violence,' Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, told the Guardian. 'I call it our 'era of violent populism'. It's been about 50 years since we've seen something like this. And the situation is getting worse.' He said the US is in a years-long stretch of political violence that started around the time of Donald Trump's first election, with perpetrators coming from both the right and the left. In 2017, the first year of Trump's first presidency, a leftwing activist opened fire on a group of Republican politicians and lobbyists playing baseball, wounding four people. In 2021, pro-Trump rioters attacked the US Capitol. In 2022, a conspiracy theorist attacked then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband with a hammer, and a man angry about the US supreme court's rightward drift tried to assassinate justice Brett Kavanaugh. Trump survived two assassination attempts in 2024; the Pennsylvania gunman's bullet missed Trump's face by a few centimeters. The Israel-Gaza war has contributed to the tension. Last month a gunman murdered two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington DC; the alleged perpetrator, an American-born leftwing radical, described the killings as an act of solidarity with Palestinians. A couple weeks later a man in Colorado attacked a group of pro-Israel demonstrators with molotov cocktails. Pape directs the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, which studies terrorism and conflict. He noted in a recent piece in the New York Times that his research has found rising support among both left- and right-leaning Americans for the 'use of force' to achieve political means. The May survey was 'the most worrisome yet', he wrote. 'About 40 percent of Democrats supported the use of force to remove Mr. Trump from the presidency, and about 25 percent of Republicans supported the use of the military to stop protests against Mr. Trump's agenda. These numbers more than doubled since last fall, when we asked similar questions.' Americans are not only polarized, but forming into distinct and visible 'mobilized blocs', Pape says. He also notes that acts of political violence seem to be becoming 'increasingly premeditated'. Quantifying political violence or 'domestic terrorism' can be difficult, Pape said, because the FBI does not track it in a consistent manner. The best proxy, he said, is often prosecuted threats against members of Congress. Those 'have gone up dramatically, especially since the first year of Trump's first term', he said, adding that the threats have been 'essentially 50-50' against Democratic and Republican lawmakers. The US Capitol police, which protects Congress, reported in April that the number of threat assessment cases it has investigated 'has climbed for the second year in a row'. While both sides have committed violence, Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University's Program on Extremism, thinks that Republican political leaders carry more culpability for the violent climate. 'We haven't seen the mainstream political left embrace political violence in the same way,' he said. He noted that while Luigi Mangione, the man who allegedly murdered a healthcare insurance executive last year, could be considered leftwing, he was 'more of an anti-system extremist' who also hated the Democratic party. In contrast, 'when you look at the rhetoric and language being used in neo-Nazi mass shooter manifestos, it's almost identical to Stephen Miller posts', he added, referring to the White House aide. Quantifying violence is also tricky because it can be difficult to determine ideological motives or causal relations. People died during the 2020 George Floyd protests and riots, but it is not clear to what extent all of the deaths were directly related to the unrest. In 2023, a transgender shooter attacked a Christian private school in Tennessee, killing three children and three adults; while the attacker had railed against 'little crackers' with 'white privileges', investigators concluded that the attack was most motivated by a desire for notoriety. This April, someone set the Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro's mansion on fire while he and his family, who were unharmed, slept inside. Although Shapiro is Jewish and the alleged perpetrator made remarks condemning Israel, the suspect's family members have said that he has a long history of mental health problems. In other cases, acts of violence are ideological but don't fall on to conventional political lines. Earlier this year, a man bombed a fertility clinic in California; the suspect was an anti-natalist – or self-described 'pro-mortalist' – who was philosophically opposed to human reproduction. Pape believes that the current wave of violence and tumult is only partly a reaction to Trump's polarizing politics. 'He's as much a symptom as a cause,' he said. The more important factor is 'a period of high social change … as the US moves from a white-majority country to a white-minority country. And that's been going drip, drip, drip since the early 1970s, but around 10 years ago we started to go through the transition generation', Pape said. The closest analogue is probably the US in the 1960s and 1970s, when the civil rights movement, the hippy counterculture, the Vietnam war, and Black and Latino nationalism were accompanied by a wave of political assassinations and other violence as white supremacist groups and others harassed and killed civil rights leaders. There was also a wave of leftwing violence. Domestic terror groups such as the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground attacked judges, police officers and government offices. In 1972, according to Bryan Burrough's 2015 book Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, there were over 1,900 domestic bombings in the US, though most were not fatal. Later, the 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of the anti-government militia movement, which culminated in Timothy McVeigh's 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma federal building. That bombing killed 168 people, and is the most deadly domestic terror attack in US history. Lewis thinks that violent rhetoric is now even more normalized – that there is increasing tolerance of the idea that 'political violence, targeted hate, harassment, is OK if it's your in-group … against the 'other side''. American political leaders need to condemn political violence, Pape said, ideally in a bipartisan way and in forms that show prominent Democratic and Republican figures physically side-by-side: 'The absolute number one thing that should happen … is that president Trump and governor Newsom do a joint video condemning political violence.' After Melissa Hortman, the Democratic state legislator in Minnesota, was killed last weekend, Mike Lee, a Utah senator, published social media posts making light of her death and insinuating it was the fault of the state's Democratic governor, Tim Walz. Lee later deleted the posts, but has not apologized. Walter Hudson, a Republican state representative in Minnesota who was acquainted with Hortman, said he has been thinking about the relationship between political rhetoric and violence since Hortman's death. 'I think it's fair to say that nobody on either side of the aisle, no matter the language they've used, would have ever intended or imagined that something they said was going to prompt somebody to go and commit a vicious and heartless act like the one we saw over the weekend,' he said. He acknowledged that rhetoric can be a factor in violence, however. 'I don't know how we unwind this,' he said. 'The optimistic side of me hopes that it's going to translate into a different approach.'
CNN
6 days ago
- Politics
- CNN
Political Violence Is Rising. What Can We Do? - CNN Political Briefing - Podcast on CNN Audio
Gov. Tim Walz (clip) 00:00:01 This was an act of targeted political violence. Peaceful discourse is the foundation of our democracy. We don't settle our differences with violence or gunpoint. David Chalian 00:00:13 Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota addressed his state and the country after the killings and attempted killings of two state Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses. He condemned the violence and urged others to do the same. Gov. Tim Walz (clip) 00:00:27 We must all, Minnesota and across the country, stand against all forms of political violence. David Chalian 00:00:34 In the days since the shootings, many have. We saw statements this week from politicians across the political spectrum. President Trump posted on Truth Social that, quote, "Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America." These shootings are the latest in a rising tide of political violence, one that my guest today has been closely tracking. Robert Pape has studied political violence for 30 years. He's a political science professor at the University of Chicago, where he directs the Chicago Project on Security and Threats. For several years now, the center has observed an increase in support for political violence on both the right and the left. We talked about what he describes as a normalization of political violence in America, why it's happening, and what, if anything, can be done about it. I'm CNN's Washington Bureau Chief and Political Director, David Chalian, and this is the CNN Political Briefing. Robert, thank you so much for joining me, really appreciate it. Robert Pape 00:01:40 Thanks for having me, David. David Chalian 00:01:42 'You wrote in a New York Times op-ed this week that you believe we may be, quote, "on the brink of an extremely violent era in American politics." Obviously, we saw the horrific assassination and attempted assassination in Minnesota over the weekend. But as you know better than anyone who studies this, political violence is not new in America, but the research shows that we have seen perhaps an uptick in political violence. So, why do you think we are on the brink of a potentially extremely violent era? Robert Pape 00:02:18 David, I have been studying political violence for 30 years. For most of that time, I've studied international political violence. For the last five years, I have spent an enormous amount of time focusing on America itself. And the reason for that is for the last 5 years, we have begun to see not just upticks of political violence and not just one off events. We've begun to see a string of acts of political violence that, over five years, when you put it together, it's an era I call America's era of violent populism. Now, yes, we have had political violence, we've had acts of political violence here before the last five years. But you have to go back to the 1960s to see the whole set of events that have happened in the last 5 years. But let's just go back. Let's go back to the summer of 2020 when there were many, many peaceful George Floyd protests, but 5% of those George Floyd protest were riots. News Clip 00:03:28 A wave of protests over the death of George Floyd spread from coast to coast on Saturday and spilled over into the morning. Peaceful protests took place, as well as acts of vandalism in cities large and small. Robert Pape 00:03:39 Then we have January 6. Over 1,600 individuals, Trump supporters, stormed the Capitol in an effort to overturn an election. News Clip 00:03:48 An angry mob was whipped into a frenzy yesterday. President Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani, incited the crowd before they went to storm and terrorized the Capitol. Robert Pape 00:03:59 Let's go to 2022. We see the attempt to assassinate Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House. It doesn't get her. She doesn't happen to be there, but it almost kills her husband. News Clip 00:04:10 Paul Pelosi still in intensive care following surgery after a violent attack at his home Friday that left him with a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and his hands. Robert Pape 00:04:20 Right after October 7, we see campus unrest, essentially students storming buildings in ways we have not seen again since the 1960s. News Clip 00:04:32 At campuses across the country, once peaceful protests turning violent. Robert Pape 00:04:36 Let's just keep going to farther in 2024, two assassination attempts against Donald Trump. News Clip 00:04:44 The FBI, as I speak, is investigating a second assassination attempt of former President Trump just about two months to the day after Trump was shot at a rally in Pennsylvania. Robert Pape 00:04:55 And then of course he wins, and now we come to he is inaugurated and what happens almost immediately on the heels of his inauguration, we have dozens and dozens of attacks, political attacks against Tesla stations. News Clip 00:05:10 Police responded to 911 calls early Tuesday morning reporting gunshots and flames at the Tesla repair center. Robert Pape 00:05:16 Let's go into April. In April, we have the arson attempt against Governor Shapiro in Pennsylvania. News Clip 00:05:23 Josh Shapiro and his family evacuated in the early hours this morning as police responded to what they're calling an act of arson. Robert Pape 00:05:31 'Then let's go still further. Let's go into May. We have the murder of two Israeli staffers in a pro-Palestinian act of political violence. News Clip 00:05:41 Two Israeli embassy staffers killed outside a Jewish museum here in D.C. The U.S. Ambassador to Israel is calling the shooting a quote, "horrific act of terror." Robert Pape 00:05:50 And then what happened just last weekend? We have last weekend, assassination and attempted assassination against Minnesota lawmakers, and he had another list of 45 targets. David Chalian 00:06:05 I'm curious how you tie the polarization, meaning the sort of Republican and Democratic divide and sorting ourselves and the way that our politics informs so much of how we sort ourselves in the country, how that intersects with this moment of this uptick in violence. Robert Pape 00:06:23 'So what we have done is we've done research to get at the taproot of what's occurring in that polarization. Yes, there's institutional reasons. Yes, there's social media, but there are deeper things happening, David. And what we are seeing is we'd been going through an era of dramatic social change. And that is what's underneath this polarization and what's in common with the 1960s, which was another era of social change that led to violent populism. So what are the social changes I'm talking about? Change number one is demographic. We are shifting from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy for the first time in our 250 year history as a country. Now, that's been happening drip-by-drip over the last several decades. So if you go to 1990, you would see about 75% or so of the American population was non-Hispanic white. Today, just in the last year that we have the census data, it's 58%. So we've seen quite a change. And in fact, what we're experiencing on that front started about 10 years ago, we started to move to what I call the tipping point generation. It will take about 20 years to go through this point where you're going from about 60% to about 48%, and that corresponds with the rise of Donald Trump, why he became a meteor when he rose and why his lightning rod issue was immigration, because as we're going through this change, David, this will affect politics, and it's very obvious that it will, which will then have other consequences. And so you have people on the right who don't want that change to go on. They'd like to reverse it and therefore support things like stopping immigration and also deportations in very aggressive ways. And now you have also then that provokes the left to be concerned, well, wait a minute, maybe these changes which they see as social good aren't going to happen. And therefore they want to keep the change going and also maybe even accelerate the change. So you get a spiraling effect, David, that's really dramatic. Now, there's another social change that's been happening parallel with this, which is economic. In the last 30 years, we've also shifted a dramatic portion of our wealth to the top 20% of America. And that, of course, a lot of it to the top 1%. And this is the top 20% and top 1% who are both Republican and Democrat. So this is not a Republican-Democrat issue. This is an elite versus everyone else issue. The more people are energized and really deeply worried on both the right and the left about the issue of demographic change, the more they support political violence. And what we've done to study this is we've conducted nationally representative surveys of support for political violence by Americans. We've been doing them since 2021. We just did the last one in May. And what you can see is the more they are concerned that elites now completely run the country and they can't have a say, the more they support political violence. So these factors are not just happening like out there in a culture war that doesn't matter. No, we're now having, we are going from cold culture war to hot culture war. And why it's not just these words polarization. David Chalian 00:09:59 We've just described this moment, the current state of political violence in America. We're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we'll talk about what can be done. Stay with us. All of this to me begs this question, which is, what is the antidote? How do we fix this? You hear after some of these tragic events that occur of political violence, we've got to turn down the temperature, we got to lower the rhetoric. Is that sufficient? What are the fixes here? Robert Pape 00:10:43 Well, we have to understand that because political violence is political and because we have about 10 to 15% on the right and another 10 to 15% percent on the left supporting political violence now, the behavior of our leaders, our political leaders is really, really helpful. Is it totally sufficient? No, but it's the key first step because after all, if you can't get leaders to condemn political violence, how would you take more serious steps? And what I've been calling for, for several years now, is for leaders to step up and not to condemn just violence by the other side, but to condemn violence even when it's adjacent to their own constituents. And in fact, just with Minnesota, we see Mike Johnson making a statement. We even see Donald Trump issuing a statement. David Chalian 00:11:33 'And we saw the complete bi-partisan delegation in Minnesota issue a joint statement with one voice condemning the political violence. Robert Pape 00:11:41 Well, and that's where I was going to go because you see now we've reached such a pitch, and it's become so intense, and we're starting to mobilize now. And so what we need now is we need more serious joint statements. The Minnesota delegation, absolutely the best beginning, but I am calling directly for President Trump and Governor Newsom to make a joint statement and, ideally, a joint video where they will jointly say they condemn violence across the political spectrum, whoever that comes from. And I realize that sounds like a tall order, David, but so, too, did several years ago when I started calling for political leaders simply to condemn violence when it was adjacent to their own party. And that's now happening. We need to identify what would really help, and we need as people, as ordinary citizens, we need to demand that our leaders condemn political violence and make more joint bipartisan statements, and where better than the president of the United States and the Governor of California. David Chalian 00:12:50 Yeah, I just wonder beyond our political leaders, you know, does everything really permeate from our political leadership, or is there some other input that needs to be happening here as well? Robert Pape 00:13:01 The political leaders are actually a way to push back. And you see our surveys also find that 75% of Americans abhor political violence and they want our leaders to make these bipartisan statements. The real thing those leaders do with those joint statements, David, is they empower the 75% so if somebody's at the water cooler and they start laughing, oh yeah, we got to get those shooters of Donald Trump, some better training. You can get some pushback from others at the water cooler and say, hey, no, I know we don't like Trump, but we don't have to go there, okay. Well, that's how you actually turn the dial back. But where does that all begin? How do you develop that? Well, you have a national conversation like we're having right now on this podcast, and then you also have national leaders come together, and this starts to push things back, and this is how we really will do it. And if we don't, then I'm afraid the summer here could be quite dicey, and we're heading into a tumultuous 2026 midterm. David Chalian 00:14:06 My last question for you is you pointed a couple of times to the 60s and the political violence we saw in the 1960s. Is there a lesson to be learned about how the country emerged out of that era of political violence that can be applied here? Robert Pape 00:14:21 There's actually a couple of lessons here. So lesson number one is, in the first part of the 1960s, the left mobilized the civil rights movement, and they adopted very peaceful means. Now there was some state violence, but the left was very peaceful, and they achieved a lot of success. In the later part of 1960s, this was where the violence on the left was most manifest, and what did that do? That brought in Richard Nixon, so law and order. So one of the big messages here is that it's very important for people to hear that protest is the heart of democracy, and it can work, but if it gets into violence, it is very likely to produce the exact opposite of what people want. The other thing to say is that in that era, one of the big accelerants, it wasn't just the civil rights movement, it wasn't just the women's rights movement and gender issues, it was also the Vietnam War. And so we were able, because the Vietnam War was having such deleterious effects on who we sent to the war. We sent the people who were the poorest people to die in Vietnam, not the rich people like Donald Trump, not Dick Cheney. And so what we need to see is that yes, there can be some steps we can take, but those steps were bipartisan when they were taken. They were not one side. And what we did is ended conscription, and we also pulled back from the Vietnam War, but those things were bipartisan. So David, what I'm talking about on the bipartisan is not the be all and end all. I don't mean to say one video by president Trump and Gavin Newsom is going to solve everything, but we've got to start there. If you can't get the joint statement, how are you ever going to get the bipartisanship on these more difficult issues? And so this is why I say we start here and then we go forward. David Chalian 00:16:12 Professor Robert Pape, thanks so much for your time. Appreciate it. Robert Pape 00:16:15 Thank you for having me, David. David Chalian 00:16:17 That's it for this week's edition of the CNN Political Briefing. Remember, you can reach out to us with your questions about Trump's new administration. Our contact information is in the show notes. CNN Political Briefing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Emily Williams. Our senior producer is Dan Bloom. Dan Dzula is our technical director and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. Support from Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Jon Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. We'll be back with a new episode next Friday. Thanks so much for listening.
New York Times
11-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Pardoned by Trump, Jan. 6 Defendants Assail Those Who Worked on Their Cases
In one post, a rioter pardoned by President Trump after taking part in the storming of the Capitol expressed his 'joy and happiness' at just how badly prosecutors who worked on cases like his own were 'hurting right now' after some of them were fired. In a different post, another pardoned rioter taunted agents who worked on investigations linked to the events of Jan. 6, 2021, ridiculing them for worrying that they would be revealed and asking sarcastically, 'Why would you be afraid of us knowing your names?' In a third post, yet another rioter granted clemency by the president featured the image of a document that clearly showed the name and cellphone number of the F.B.I. agent who oversaw his case. In the past few weeks, an increasing number of Jan. 6 defendants who benefited from Mr. Trump's mercy have gone on the attack on social media, lashing out at the agents and prosecutors who worked on their criminal cases. The pardoned rioters have assailed these law enforcement officials as 'traitors' or 'evil,' often doxxing them by posting their names, photos and contact information online. Many of the messages are likely protected by the First Amendment and, at least for now, there is no indication that they have led to any violence. But the posts also suggest a mounting and disturbing desire for revenge on the part of the pardoned rioters, and experts have raised concerns that the frequency and number of the digital attacks could increase the risk that violence might eventually occur. 'The bottom line is, it's extremely dangerous,' said Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who has studied the Jan. 6 defendants for more than four years. 'Research tells us that efforts like this help to make it seem as if targeted attacks are actually popular and have a mantle of legitimacy. That itself could nudge assailants over the edge.' The torrent of online anger comes as many of the federal officials subject to it were already under pressure from the Justice Department itself. More than a dozen prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases were recently fired from the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, and the department has sought information about thousands of F.B.I. agents and employees who worked on Capitol riot investigations. Those moves have left many law enforcement officials feeling as though the agencies that employ — or employed — them no longer have their backs. And their sense of disappointment only deepened last week after the new U.S. attorney in Washington, Ed Martin, vowed to investigate a different set of threats: those that were reportedly made against employees working for Mr. Trump's close ally Elon Musk. 'There is certainly a lack of public support for Jan. 6 prosecutors and agents from political appointees in the Justice Department,' said Alexis Loeb, a former federal prosecutor who supervised many Capitol riot cases. 'But there are still people in the department and the F.B.I. who recognize that threatening people just for doing their jobs is simply wrong.' Inside the F.B.I., agents and others who worked on the cases are deeply concerned about losing their jobs but also fear for their personal safety, given that the Justice Department asked for names of employees who handled the Jan. 6 investigations and a terrorism case. The inquiry into the riot became the department's largest, leading the F.B.I. to open about 2,400 cases, more than half of which resulted in charges being filed. Brian Driscoll, the F.B.I.'s acting director, said in an email on Thursday to bureau employees that the Justice Department was aware of the 'risks posed to you and your families should these lists become public.' He noted that F.B.I. personnel could become victims of doxxing or swatting, when false emergency calls are placed with the intention of drawing a heavily armed police response. He also pointed to internal guides that F.B.I. personnel can use to reduce their digital footprints, making it harder to be targeted. The attacks by Jan. 6 defendants against federal law enforcement were only the latest in a series of such assaults reaching back to Mr. Trump's first term in the White House. In August 2022, after the F.B.I. found reams of classified material during a court-authorized search of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump's private club and residence in Florida, social media erupted with outraged posts by Trump supporters. One of those supporters, Ricky W. Shiffer, was so angered by the search that he tried to break into an F.B.I. field office near Cincinnati and ended up being killed in a shootout with the local police. Something similar, but less dramatic, happened this spring after Mr. Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts at a criminal trial in Manhattan. After the verdict, pro-Trump forums online erupted with hateful messages about the jurors in the case and apparent attempts to leak their personal information. 'Hope these jurors face some street justice,' one anonymous user of a forum wrote. 'Wouldn't be interesting if just one person from Trump's legal team anonymously leaked the names of the jurors?' This weekend, Mr. Trump's new homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, made claims on social media that the 'corrupt' F.B.I. was behind a recent leak revealing that a 'large scale' immigration enforcement action would soon take place in Los Angeles. 'We will work with any and every agency to stop leaks and prosecute these crooked deep state agents to the fullest extent of the law,' Ms. Noem wrote. Ms. Loeb began seeing messages targeting her online even before Mr. Trump offered clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the Capitol attack. After a right-wing journalist posted on social media in December that she was leaving her job as a federal prosecutor before the change in administrations, she experienced a surge in attacks, including one post that identified her by name above an image of gallows. 'That's the cure for corruption,' the caption said. But the volume of posts increased sharply after Mr. Trump's reprieves, which seemed to embolden many of the defendants. Some began assembling lists of agents and prosecutors, collecting names and photos from their compatriots. When one of the defendants asked online on Monday whether he should build 'a public database' listing the names of all the Jan. 6 prosecutors and agents, he got dozens of affirmative responses. 'I can contribute,' one of his fellow defendants replied. 'I am going to get my popcorn ready,' another wrote. In the immediate aftermath of Mr. Trump's clemency grants, two of the country's most prominent right-wing extremists — Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys and Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers — asserted that they wanted Mr. Trump to seek revenge on their behalf against the investigative teams that worked on Jan. 6 cases. 'Success,' Mr. Tarrio said at the time, 'is going to be retribution.' Last week, Pam Bondi, the new attorney general, started what appeared to be the first step toward that goal when she announced the formation of a 'weaponization working group' inside the Justice Department. One of the group's missions, Ms. Bondi said, would be to examine what she described as the 'improper investigative tactics and unethical prosecutions' arising from the department's Capitol attack prosecutions. How she had reached those conclusions remains unclear. But the online messages from the Jan. 6 defendants themselves have added an additional threat, Mr. Pape, the political scientist, said, by making public the personal information of several prosecutors in particular. Mr. Pape said that people who saw addresses and phone numbers on social media could choose to use them as what he called 'targeting information.'
