Transcript: Malcolm Nance, Counterterrorism Expert & Author, They Want to Kill Americans

MR. SCOTT: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Eugene Scott, a national political reporter on The Post breaking news team, and today best‑selling author and counterterrorism expert Malcolm Nance joins us to discuss domestic extremism, political violence, and American democracy in his new book, “They Want to Kill Americans.”

Malcolm, welcome.

MR. NANCE: Well, thank you very much. I'm very glad to be here.

MR. SCOTT: Glad to have you.

So it's important that you all know we want to hear from you. There will be ways that our audience can tweet us questions, and we'll share your thoughts and ideas with Malcolm as they come in, if you just go ahead and tweet to @PostLive.

So, before we get into your book, I want to ask you about the January 6th hearings, which you mentioned in that clip we just shared. What has been either maybe the biggest takeaway or biggest surprise that you would say you have seen from them so far?

MR. NANCE: Well, you know, I've been serving in Ukraine in the International Legion, and I've been viewing these hearings almost the exact way the average American citizen views them, which means every once in a while, a little snippet of what's going on shows up in their newsfeed, something that's said to be very interesting, and then life takes over, right? And they just don't come back to it or they don't hear about it for a couple of more days.

And what I've been able to glean‑‑and I've watched the hearings since extensively‑‑the most fascinating part that I feel is it appeared Donald Trump really intended to go to the Capitol and have himself declared president for another term, and I can almost see just how angry it got him that he was denied that, that the Secret Service didn't want to bring him to the Capitol, and then he went back to the Oval Office, went back to the room where he watches television, and watched for almost two hours, this siege of the building. And that must have really got in his craw.

But then, again, I really feel that at some point, he was preparing to go back and have himself declared essentially king.

MR. SCOTT: That's what it certainly seems like has been revealed so far. When we talk about the militia groups that were involved and the insurrection, do you think we've learned anything new about them?

MR. NANCE: Well, I mean, we've learned quite a bit about them. We've already for sometime knew about the internal organization of these groups. This book was started in August 2020. It actually went‑‑excuse me‑‑actually went out to the publisher in December 2020 and was pretty much completed last August, and we've not learned very much more about them other than the fact that we know who they are now. We know who the individual players, the perpetrators‑‑but many of them were known before. It's just the news media didn't understand the context in which they were forming these groups, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percent militia, and an entirely new wing of what I call the "Trump Insurgency in the United States," or acronym TITUS, which was the Republican Party itself is now an insurgent party that wants nothing to do with governing but merely operates in order to keep the pressure on to take power at some future date and then, of course, stop relinquishing power.

And then the third wing of the TITUS was the average Trump voter who saw all of the events‑‑and as you see right now, there's a poll that says‑‑I believe it's 57, 58 percent of all Trump supporters viewed the attack on the Capitol as an act of patriotism. They don't view it as a crime. They view it as them defending America, which means now we're at a point where a very large swath, millions upon millions of Americans view whatever crimes they do as legitimate forms of protests, even if it involves death, murder, mayhem, the‑‑you know, besieging our top institutions, whereas, you know, they have no problem watching a man get shot 90 times in the back while running away from policemen.

So, so long as they have this belief that they are the only ones who can be‑‑who are the arbiters of the law, that their version of America is the only version of America that's legitimate, and you see them cry in protest when the laws are applied to them, the people who are arrested in the siege of January 6th going to trial and finding themselves not remorseful but upset that they had to go into a real jail. Or people like Peter Navarro, they were upset that they were handcuffed when the police came to arrest them, things that normal Americans understand is what happens when you commit crimes.

This, I think, antagonizes them. It fosters their inherent sense of victimhood because they are the worst whining victors that we have ever seen in American history, you know, second only to the Southerners at the end of the Civil War, I should say. And this burns in them, and that is what fuels their energy to support Donald Trump and to start talking about revenge against other Americans.

MR. SCOTT: I believe you'd argued that that belief that these individuals have comes from what they have heard from the former president himself. Do you mind sharing a bit about how his rhetoric and words and tweets and speeches may have influenced these extremist groups as well as some of these everyday Trump supporters?

MR. NANCE: You know, it's interesting. I spent my entire life in Middle Eastern, Sub‑Saharan Africa, South Asian counterterrorism, and we have a general acceptance that radicalization of individuals when they hear speeches from terrorist leaders or radical clerics or go to a particular mosque or madrasa, and they hear this variation of what they think Islam is. Since 9/11, that has been accepted norms. No one questions that that's the radicalization path of the Middle Eastern terrorist, insurgent, or political extremist.

Now, if I take that template and I put that over the American citizen who is part of the January 6th insurrection or the Republican Party or their leadership in that they have a supreme leader who has a political philosophy or ideology that fires up and motivates a base of young men and women to carry out acts of violence and to organize themselves into cells, groups, and coalitions in order to effect radical change against the government, well, people act as if I come from Mars. It's just absolutely the height of hypocrisy to believe that other peoples in this world have radicalization pathways that Americans are immune to.

We are not immune to them. This is‑‑all of the philosophies, behaviors, and activities we see with Donald Trump have occurred at other times in American history. Anti‑Semitism is not new. White supremacy and white nationalism in the United States is definitely not new. But for the most part, what we've seen is a president of the United States that has harnessed all of the worst demons of the white supremacist cause in America since 1860. Of course, we always have to preface the American Civil War was the worst, but had harnessed these demons and has revived some of the worst, most revile beliefs in America, and then told this entire bloc of American citizens. As many of 75 million of them believe that they are against simple things like common decency or what we call "political correctness," right? They want to have the permission, and Donald Trump has given them the permission to speak negatively, loudly, racially against their own neighbors to the point of threatening them with violence with firearms, fists, and what they would use as collective threatening of their tribe or community. This is what Donald Trump has unleashed in this country.

There is no difference in that path of radicalization. If I was‑‑if I was an intelligence officer at MI6 or DGSE in France or the BND in Germany, I would be writing this up that the United States has an insurgent group or an insurgent society that is radicalizing in no different way than al‑Qaeda or ISIS.

MR. SCOTT: So, if anyone is just joining us and has not heard your responses to previous questions, I would like you to answer this clearly for them.

MR. NANCE: Excuse me.

MR. SCOTT: Your book is titled "They Want to Kill Americans." Who is this "they" you're referring to?

MR. NANCE: Yeah. You know, when I came up with that title, I usually‑‑you know, I was going to come up with a title like "The Coming Trump Insurgency." In fact, the subtitle was "The Coming Trump Insurgency." I had to remove it last year because the insurgency is here. It's exited. It's not only present. It's growing. It's growing further than I actually originally projected in this book. The takeover of the Republican Party by QAnon philosophy, not the crazy parts of adrenochrome and blood drinking of children, but that liberals and liberalism and the people that support them are inherently evil and must be confronted, if necessary, with force. That's a given now. Okay.

If you say something opposed to that at a Trump rally, you'll be booed down. If you say something similar to that, you will be cheered as a hero. We saw that in a speech by Charlie Kirk in Oregon when the one man said, "When can we start using our guns? When can we start killing?"

So the "they" that I'm talking about are your neighbors, and many of your neighbors no longer believe‑‑I mean, let me preface that. They believe in a variation of America which looks nothing like the last 245 years of incremental back‑and‑forth progress leading to a more perfect union, where the better angels of this nation help each one find dignity, decency, and equality. They don't want that anymore.

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The typical Republican Trump voter, armed militia man, people who support armed militia men‑‑and people ask me every day, "Malcolm, can you actually lump all the Trump voters into this category?" Yes, I can. They voted for this. They see this. They cheer this. They still go to rallies, and they endorse the inherent threat of violence against other American citizens, and they almost back the takeover of the United States Capitol as not a crime but as a benign, quite possibly beneficial effect against the government.

We are looking at the people who do your plumbing, who are your insurance salesmen, who may be your doctor. As we saw from the Capitol riot, one in five were members of the armed forces or retired veterans of the armed forces and law enforcement, and they are armed. And many of them love talking about how they outnumber and outgun people they call "liberals" and "communists," also known as the other 65 percent of America that didn't vote for Donald Trump, that they have more guns. And these are warnings not to be ignored.

MR. SCOTT: So what would you say to someone who would say or argue that these individuals do not want to kill Americans, but they do want to kill, perhaps, America as we currently know it?

MR. NANCE: Well, you know, it's fascinating because, you know, many of the mass shootings we're seeing are the very people that I'm warning you about, right? The shooting at Uvalde, the shooting at El Paso, the shooting at the Temple of Life in Pittsburgh, the shooting at the synagogue in Poway, the shooting‑‑you know, I mean, how many times do I have to go through this? They all have the same behaviors, patterns, and age brackets of the shooters because these people have templated what they want to do. They look at each other, and they‑‑all of this, by the way, originated‑‑this template originated with Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian who mass murdered 68 adults and children at a summer camp, who in his trial said the reason I did it as a white nationalist, dot, dot, dot, was to eliminate the entire next generation of Norwegian liberal politicians. These people take an absolutist view in their white supremacy and their white nationalism, and many of these incidents we're seeing rise, which people view as individual incidents, they're not. They are actually part of a pattern of operations that are very hard to predict. You don't know what's in the mind of the shooter until he buys his ammunition, goes out, starts livestreaming the massacres and starts shooting.

However, we do know what the motivating factors of many of them are, which is a belief that there is a white replacement going on in the United States, where people are being brought in by institutions deliberately to replace White people in America.

Now, you and I, the average American who hears that, thinks that's crazy, and they should think it's crazy. But now with Donald Trump trumpeting this, his entire administration, all of his supporters, his financial backers dropping hundreds of millions of dollars behind this message, what did you think you would be up against? Okay? This isn't a simple matter of a painter and veteran from World War I coming forward and taking power on the heels of the Great Depression, all right, and finding his way into power in Nazi Germany. It's not. This is an organized political party, which has decided that totalitarianism is not as bad as they think, and perhaps so long as the one woman said at a Donald Trump rally, "I never thought that I'd want a dictator in America, but if I have to have it, it should be Donald Trump." I'm not quite sure the American experiment was designed to overthrow itself in elections in order to establish, you know, Mad King Donald I after we had liberated ourselves 245 years ago from King George III.

MR. SCOTT: So where does this come from? Can you talk a bit about the roots, you know, of this current iteration of domestic terrorism? Because, to your point, this obviously started before January 6th.

MR. NANCE: Well, you know, if you go back through the entire history of the last 150 years, everything we are hearing today has sprouted up at some time before, whether it was the rank massive, you know, anti‑Semitism after the publication of the‑‑you know, the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," which was republished by Henry Ford and distributed not just in the United States but even in Germany, and it caused the Holocaust? So anti‑Semitism has been around for a long time.

Anti‑Black bias has been around since the moment they kidnapped most of our ancestors and brought them over as‑‑you know, to the United States to work as slave labor. There are many components of American history which are unsavory, which we have gotten over, the Scalp Act of 1749, where you could scalp an Indian for equivalent of a hundred U.S. dollars today and ethnically cleanse their land, the Asian Exclusion Act of the mid‑1840s, I mean, which discriminated against Chinese who were brought over to work on our railroads. The United States has a horrible history of terrible things, but we always overcame them with forward progressive movement and the embrace of the American experiment and dignity.

What's different now is that Donald Trump as a tribal chief has managed to unshackle the belief of the people who support him that they no longer have to behave with dignity. They no longer have to act like the typical American who has tolerance and support diversity and understanding of other people. There have been state movements even in the Trump administration themself. They removed the word "diversity and equality" from documents in the United States government, which is insane. We are the most diverse nation on this planet.

But this belief now‑‑and it really took off with the election of Barack Obama. Let's just be honest here. You know, the first Black president of the United States, Muslim middle name, comes from an ethnically different background, comes from the bizarre and weird state of Hawaii, which most people don't understand unless they visit there. That was just too much, and nothing he could do was right.

And then you saw the seeds of true violence coming with the taxed‑enough‑already Tea Party and the racism that was spouted at people who were doing the Obama, you know, stimulus plan and then Obamacare. You know, you talk to people in the Trump world. They view Barack Obama as one of the worst presidents of the United States, who apparently did nothing but cause 9/11, and I say that while rolling my eyes because he was not president. But they believe it, and this alternate reality that they live in now is being weaponized against other American citizens.

The question is‑‑and I'm going to pose a question that they ask on their own forums all the time‑‑what is their breaking point? When will they no longer tolerate the‑‑you know, withholding themselves and maintaining the laws? And believe me, a lot of them ask this question, that question of when can they use their guns.

MR. SCOTT: Your most recent answer makes me think of this Twitter question we just got from Manny Otiko, and he wants to know, "Why are Trump supporters so loyal to him when it's obvious he doesn't care about them? Is it white nationalism or tribalism?"

MR. NANCE: It's, in fact, white nationalist tribalism, if you can imagine that, right? They have moved away in their opinions to the point where‑‑you know, I mean, some people have argued, some cult experts have argued that this is a form of cultism, and it's interesting. I wrote two books about ISIS and al‑Qaeda ideology being fourth and‑‑fifth and sixth manifestations of cult movements in Islam, which is very hard to do in Islam, but it's happened before.

So what we are looking at is people who have‑‑or people who have removed themselves from the reality of the world that you and I see and empiricism of it to the belief that whatever the tribal leader who excites their emotions says must be true.

I know that there were interviews done by many interviewers who said they know he's a pathological liar. This man has lied 30,000 times, documented in office by The Washington Post. They know he's a BS artist. They know he doesn't mean what he says. They know that he laughs at them and mocks them sometimes, but he speaks like they do. He speaks to their world. He may be leading them around by a nose ring, but it's a nose ring that they're comfortable with. And it's a field that they want to be in, and that's the one where they are promised that the American experiment was for them only, and that all the rest of the people are losers, cheats, scoundrels, people out to grift the system. And it's absolutely amazing the people that he's generally talking about are the people that were his family and his administration.

And, again, I don't see this strictly because‑‑and by way was a lifelong Republican most of my life but in the same camp as Colin Powell who ended up as a hard left liberal by the way the Republican Party has left this world.

But, again, if I was an analyst at MI6 and I was drafting up a document for the prime minister or the Queen to understand the pathology of what's going on in the American psyche, it would clearly be that they are having a centuries‑‑a combined revival of virtually every conspiracy theory there in the last century, which would explain their victimhood, which would explain why they are becoming a smaller minority, why they can't have all the fruits of America and exclude everyone else from it.

And their politicians are doing a fine job of that. They are turning America into a caricature of what it once was, and they would prefer that caricature as a totalitarian dictatorship or, you know, small "k" kingdom than have the America that it was moving toward, which was diverse, peaceful, and with equality. They have no‑‑they have no desire to have that present.

MR. SCOTT: You touched on this a bit earlier, and I was interested in hearing you say more about whether or not this far right extremism that you're seeing is a global movement and why, if it is.

MR. NANCE: Well, in fact, I wrote a book a few years ago called "The Plot to Destroy Democracy," and it was really an analysis of Vladimir Putin and his intelligence agency and how they had managed to figure out in the early 2000s leading to the mid‑2000s that they could weaponize European and American conservatism, and that they could turn that weapon against their own‑‑against, you know, each individual electoral body and have them essentially vote for totalitarianism or autocracy in these countries.

So United Russia Party funded virtually every major European conservative party, AfD in Germany, OFD in Austria which, by the way, won power, which is fascinating because the OFD was started in 1952 by two Nazi SS officers, and then decades later, the Russians are funding their rise to power as conservatives.

Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the New Deal in Greece, the separatists in Spain, the Five Star party in Italy, which was an ultraconservative party, and in Sweden and in Netherlands, they were all joined at the hip by United Russia because Russia had become a culturally conservative nation and realized that the anti‑immigration movements that were going on in Europe just needed money, cash, and the right electoral figures.

Marine Le Pen in France was given 50 million U.S. dollars to knock down Emmanuel Macron in their first electoral matchup by Vladimir Putin himself.

So, you know, the United States was also a target. They started with the American evangelicals when no one would talk to the extremist right evangelicals. They started funding the alt‑right in the United States.

David Duke, the head of the KKK, has an apartment in Moscow that he shares with Richard Spencer, the American neo‑Nazi party leader. There are many ties overseas, but those ties ended with the election of Donald Trump because Trump then became the pinnacle avatar for all of the grievances of the extremist right in America. Russia really has had no influence since that time. They didn't have to. Donald Trump was carrying out, you know, his intention to change America into essentially an autocratic state, remove all the barriers of the trans‑Atlantic union, and help western democracy collapse on itself in what I call an "axis of autocracies," with Russia at the lead.

I just want to point out something. I'm a Javelin‑qualified missile operator in Ukraine, and when Donald Trump was impeached, he was, in fact, withholding the money so that Ukraine could buy those Javelin missiles, which would deter against the Russian invasion. And that's why he was impeached. These things are‑‑I use the word "incestuous," in a way, but, you know, all of it is happening before your very eyes, and it is accelerating in the last 100 and‑‑I'm sorry‑‑550 days since the January 6th insurrection.

MR. SCOTT: In your book, you detail the threat, you know, that Donald Trump poses to American democracy, but he would eventually fade. Although his support within the Republican Party is still strong, it's going to wane at some point. Is Trump or Trumpism more dangerous at this point in time?

MR. NANCE: You know, there is always going to be a transition away from Trump as the individual avatar for the TITUS, as I call it, but it's really Trumpism. And they will‑‑you know, these people, if you go to these Trump rallies, they are just so grateful that Donald Trump has removed the shackles of common decency and civil discourse and given them the permission slip to curse at people, yell at people, punch people, as they see fit, and to do it in the cause of maintaining white nationalism in the United States, you know, white supremacy, to where they don't have to feel like they're being replaced, which they are not.

So Donald Trump is just one cheeseburger away from removing himself away from the American political scene, right, if we want to be quite frank. He will not live forever, but I suspect what's happening now is a multigenerational phenomenon. And, unfortunately, the only thing that could break this fever is not talking with Trump voters and finding out what their angst is. Their angst is America, the diversity of America, the inclusiveness of America, the allowing immigrants of America, getting people opportunities to live in a better life. They no longer want that. Just ask them. They'll tell you straight up, there's too many immigrants in a nation made up of immigrants, you know.

And I can hear the Native Americans laughing even right now at that ridiculous comment. They no longer want America as it's existed. They want an America that they've manufactured in their own and Donald Trump's mind, which prohibits all of the progress America has made.

MR. SCOTT: Well, that was an eye‑opening and important conversation, Malcolm. I so appreciate you joining us this evening.

MR. NANCE: It is absolutely my pleasure.

MR. SCOTT: And thank you all for coming to Washington Post Live to spend time with us, and I am Eugene Scott. You can find more information about upcoming events on WashingtonPost.com and on the Post Live Twitter account, and more information about upcoming programs will be available to you there.

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