Jacob Ware, research fellow at CFR, discusses how serious the threat of political violence in the United States is and what the Trump administration must do to ensure that such threats do not proliferate. Laura Esposito, public safety reporter at the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, speaks about her experience reporting on extremist events in Alleghany County, Pennsylvania. The host of the webinar is Carla Anne Robbins, senior fellow at CFR and former deputy editorial page editor at the
New York Times.
TRANSCRIPT
FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Local Journalists Webinar. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR.
CFR is an independent and nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher focused on U.S. foreign policy. CFR is also the publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.
This webinar is part of CFR’s Local Journalists Initiative, created to help you draw connections between the local issues you cover and national and international dynamics. Our programming puts you in touch with CFR resources and expertise on international issues and provides a forum for sharing best practices. We’re delighted to have nearly a hundred journalists from forty states and U.S. territories with us today. Thank you all for being with us. We will be sending the video and transcript from this on-the-record discussion out to all of you. And we will post it on our website at CFR.org/localjournalists.
We are pleased to have Jacob Ware, Laura Esposito, and host Carla Anne Robbins with us today to discuss reporting on extremism and political violence.
Jacob Ware is a research fellow at CFR, where he studies domestic and international terrorism and counterterrorism. He is the coauthor of the book God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, which was published in 2024. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and at DeSales University.
Laura Esposito is a public safety reporter at the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where she covers the people and the communities most affected by trauma, injustice, and public safety issues. She has reported extensively on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the 2024 presidential election, and on the ground in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
And Carla Anne Robbins is a senior fellow here at CFR and cohost of the CFR podcast,
The World Next Week. She also serves as faculty director of the Master of International Affairs Program and clinical professor of national security studies at Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs. Previously, she was deputy editorial page editor at the
New York Times and chief diplomatic correspondent at the
Wall Street Journal.
So I am going to turn the conversation over to Carla to have the exchange with Jacob and Laura, and then we will turn to all of you for your questions. And we hope that you will use this forum to share your best practices and things that are working in your community as you’re doing your reporting. So, Carla, over to you.
ROBBINS: Thank you, Irina. And thank you, everybody, for joining us. And thank you so much, Jacob and Laura, for being here today. There is an enormous amount to cover here about this. And just to give you a sense of how we’re going to do this, I’m going to pitch some questions to the two experts and then we’re going to open it up to you all. And you can—please more questions. And I always have questions, but you guys are—you guys are covering this daily. I mean, and we can all learn a lot from each other. So please don’t hesitate to—don’t wait for the, you know, time when I back up. Just jump in right now, anytime, with questions. It’ll help the conversation.
So I’m not really even sure what the new normal is right now. You know, in the wake of January 6, and poll after poll after poll in which we see these shocking numbers of Americans from both parties who say that they—you know, they endorse the use of violence to—they say it’s to save the country. I mean, this really to me is just—I couldn’t even imagine this a few years ago. So, Laura, can we start with you? Pennsylvania was the site of an assassination attempt that we all saw. And it’s sort of extraordinary images here. And you’ve written about a whole bunch of other incidents in Pennsylvania, which obviously was an absolutely essential swing state there. How widespread were the problems in the run-up to the election? And did we hyperventilate about this, or was this really a serious problem?
ESPOSITO: This was definitely a serious problem. And thank you for having me, again. But something that, you know, a lot of advocates and people doing all the on-the-ground work to mitigate political tensions just kept repeating is, you know, these problems have been prevalent in Pennsylvania in previous election cycles for a long time now. You know, Pennsylvania does have that divide. They have the two big cities on opposite ends of the state.
And then there’s a lot of really rural areas. You know, Allegheny County, where I do primarily a lot of my reporting, you know, votes pretty blue most years. But then Butler County, the cite of the Donald Trump assassination attempt, is a very deep red state. So there is a lot of divisions. And they’ve really only broadened, you know, over the past few years. But there’s been more of a national spotlight on it this time around than ever before, which was the major difference.
And, you know, having that large media presence from all corners of the globe, especially during the assassination attempt of president—or, President-elect Trump really, I think, does create even more political tension. You know, there’s a lot of these people in these rural communities who aren’t media trained, you know, aren’t really prepared to handle when, you know, international news organizations are, you know, set up outside of a volunteer fire department agency.
And they also experience—you know, these people on the ground where a lot of this was happening—they experienced, you know, the threats that journalists often experience. Where if they spoke on the record with a journalist, suddenly the whole country is reading these stories now and they’re receiving death threats of their own. They’re receiving, you know, an influx of worrying messages. So that really also just put a lot of people at odds with each other. So this is definitely a—we’re not overhyping the issue, to say the least.
ROBBINS: So I—you know, you have written about, other people have written about the Philadelphia man charge was threatening to skin alive a state party representative who was recruiting poll watchers, Nazi banners hanging from the city’s bridges, people who, you know, not willing to go, advocacy organizations pulling canvassers from the streets. I suppose, what I—are these sort of one-offs in different places? Or did you see this, as and law enforcement, see this as a more organized? Were there groups behind them?
ESPOSITO: So I think there’s a little bit of discrepancy over the actual definition of political violence, which I think does prevent a lot of the time people from realizing that this is a chain reaction and an effect. So political violence, when people think of it, they think of, you know, a president assassination attempt. But political violence is defined by the Institute of Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University Law Center as ideologically driven threats, harassment, intimidation, or physical violence that makes people less comfortable engaging in core democratic processes. So that can mean, you know, being involved at town council meetings, or running for elected office, speaking their mind in a protest, or, you know, just being more open about their political beliefs and ideologies.
And all of what you described are examples of political violence because of that reason. But many people don’t see it that way. So in Pennsylvania, you know, we—Pittsburgh is also the site of the deadliest act of antisemitism in United States history, the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in 2018 that killed eleven people. So we have had issues with antisemitism for a number of years now. You know, before and after that. The community has really banded together in the day since, but, you know, the Israel-Hamas war has really exacerbated those issues. And we have seen a flare up since October 7 of last year.
And on top of that, you know, those campus protests that have been happening all across the country, you know, they’re affecting Pitt and Carnegie Mellon all the same. And because of that added political and tension here, from, you know, past traumatic incidents this city has sustained, it has, you know, just been a little bit—a little bit deeper here, deeper felt here, and throughout. So these incidents are all connected. But I think people often neglect to call it as such, because of the—people tend to fear the idea of just classifying things as political violence. You know, they don’t want to overstep. They don’t want to make it sound like it’s something that it’s not. But it’s really important that in journalism coverage, as well as, you know, when politicians use this term, we know exactly what that definition is because these are all, you know, connected, yes.
ROBBINS: Thanks. So, Jacob, Laura is describing a broader phenomenon, which is the profound polarization in our society, rise in hate crimes. We know that there are hate crime reports that exist. And whether it’s, you know, the great replacement theory—(laughs)—you know, lots of things that we’ve seen that have been going on for quite a while here. But you wrote that—you know, that the United States is in a heightened threat environment, that was before the election, heading into election day, with multiple extremist factions threatening to disrupt the electoral process. Nationally—and I understand it’s hard to separate out, you know, what is sort of the general polarized environment and what is specifically intended to disrupt the electoral process—do you have a sense of how many events, you know, the marginal difference, and were there actual disruptive things going to the election that you say were intended to disrupt the election process?
WARE: Well, first of all, thank you so much, Carla, for having me.
To answer that question, I think I’ll start by just uplifting something that my co-panelist, Laura, said about political violence, which doesn’t just include, to Laura’s point, those major incidents that we think of when we think of terrorism or assassinations. It also includes what you might call a daily drumbeat of low-level violence that really can be quite widespread and disruptive. I think in the lead up to the election most of us who were working on election violence were most concerned about January 6-type incidents, or further incidents from—similar to the assassination attempt on former President Trump. Those appear not to have happened. But absolutely we have seen that daily drumbeat continue.
I wrote a piece for
Lawfare magazine in September that wrote that election violence already start—had already started. And one of the incidents, for example, I pointed to was an attempted mass shooting that was going to target a concert in the Atlanta area in April, in order to start a race war before the election. That’s clearly an act of political violence that, fortunately, was stopped. And also clearly something that’s designed to upend the political process. To answer your question most directly, I would say that the incidents that occurred in Georgia, the bomb threats, to me, are most likely an act of attempted election disruption.
And also to continue the game of kind of definitions here, most definitions of terrorism—which is the phenomenon I really work on—including the definition that was advanced before 9/11 by my coauthor and CFR Senior Fellow Bruce Hoffman, says that terrorism is violence or the threat of violence for political or ideological goals. The threat of violence matters too. And I think when factions have threatened to intimidate voters are polling places, when they are arriving at locations with firearms, when you have low-level threats against neighbors and family members based on who they’re voting for, that all contributes to this culture of violence, of fear, that most likely swung people, whether that’s enough to determine the election or not. So certainly, we had a—we had a heightened threat environment.
Now, we were most concerned—those of us working on this topic—we were most concerned about the days after the election when there probably wasn’t going to be a result, and we were going to be in a kind of information vacuum that conspiracy theories were going to fill. And that that sense of uncertainty was going to really lead to radicalization and mobilization to violence. That uncertainty did not arise, as we all know. It did not—we did not have uncertainty for long after the election. And I think from a counterterrorism standpoint that really helped kind of tone down the tensions and the violence. You know, politically speaking that has other implications, of course.
ROBBINS: So we didn’t hear a lot about, you know, who was behind these potential threats. And we certainly haven’t heard a lot about the alt-right groups. In fact, we don’t even hear the term alt-right very much anymore. You know, the Oath Keepers and, you know, the people who organized January 6. And certainly, we haven’t seen a January 6 level, in part because the election was called and in part because the people who stormed the Capitol won. (Laughs.) The people who supported—that’s—let me say that again. They didn’t win, but the candidate they supported won.
So is—I suppose there are two questions. One is, have we not—did we not see it because of the simple fact that these people wanted President Trump to win and President Trump won? Or have we not seen it because there was—we were much more—law enforcement was much more conscious this time of the threat? President Biden’s administration had—you know, they declared domestic terrorism a serious threat. They had a domestic terrorism policy. How much—and the leaders of, you know, the alt-right groups are in jail. How much is it, you know, successful domestic counterterrorism policy, and how much is it just that we didn’t have the things that we were worried about, the context, the environment, and one team won?
WARE: I would say the biggest—personally, I would say the biggest factor that stopped broader violence is we didn’t end up with a call to arms. That call to arms would have arrived if Trump had failed to win the election. Maybe that’s a partisan point. Maybe it’s overly political. But I don’t think that can really be questioned, after what happened in 2020. If they’d lost the election and the election had come down to places like Philadelphia, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, you would have had a call to arms. And that would have inspired violence.
The other element, honestly, Carla is good police work and good luck. You know, the fact that the gunman in Butler missed his target is luck. The fact that that shooting in Atlanta was stopped is good police work. If those things don’t happen in tandem, you have more violence. And so I think we were—we were fortunate in that regard. Now, you mentioned the domestic terrorism strategy. This strategy was released in June 2021. I think the data would tell you it’s been somewhat successful. I mean, we did effectively roll back a lot of domestic terrorism during the Biden administration. Laura mentioned the 2018 Tree of Life shooting that occurred during the Trump administration.
That was one of a number of far-right terrorist attacks are struck in the U.S. during those four years, from Charlottesville, to El Paso, to Poway, to January 6, of course. The only incident—major far-right incident that comes to the top of my head during the Biden years was Buffalo. Perhaps you could make an argument that the strategy is working. I would counter that by saying, you know, this drumbeat of violence shows—the drumbeat that both Laura and I have described—shows that, in fact, we’re not making great headway into this movement at a strategic level. We’re having a lot of tactical victories in stopping violence. We don’t appear to be making great gains.
And I think that’s because we’re facing major headwinds. I mean, the number-one counterterrorism recommendation I would make today is rhetoric based. It would be having politicians tone down their rhetoric, both violent rhetoric and existential rhetoric. That isn’t happening. I would make recommendations for social media companies to try to moderate some content. In fact, we’re going in the opposite direction. And so the domestic terrorist strategy the Biden administration provided, that will almost certainly be rescinded now in January, might have made incremental gains. I’m not sure. I think the fight against this kind of violence and against this kind of polarization remains a generational struggle for our country at this moment in time.
ROBBINS: Yeah. Laura, I want you to sort of pick up on that. And I want to ask this question about what you saw about local law enforcement and the state government. Your governor, you know, Shapiro, did have a task force, was determined to avoid a disruption of the election, raised an alarm consistently about it. Did the police do a good job? Did they break up rings? Were there—I mean, because, yes, I mean, certainly the sea in which the fish swim is pretty important, but there’s also—you know, there’s a fundamental law enforcement aspect of counterterrorism as well. Did the police do a good job? Did they—did they identify—you talk to these people—do they identify that there were—there were big groups? Or did they see this as lone actors that they were going after, that they were playing whack-a-mole?
ESPOSITO: So, you know, state law enforcement, as well as, you know, local and city law enforcement had all been collaborating in the lead up to November for a long time. We also knew that there was an added layer of scrutiny because there was a bit of a lack of trust in law enforcement agencies, specifically in Pennsylvania, post what happened on July 13, where there was huge gaps, you know, within the Secret Service and other agencies and a chain of command, which led to a bullet grazing President-elect Trump’s ear. So there was a lot of, you know, meeting up.
And also what I think is often neglected from this conversation are the grassroots organizations that have been working in the lead up to November for a very long time as well. Here in Pittsburgh, for example, we have the Black Political Empowerment Project, which is a nonpartisan group focused on, you know, safe and fair elections and mobilizing, you know, the Black voters. And they had been meeting in the interim with the Allegheny County Sheriff’s Department, Pittsburgh police. We actually had our police chief step down a couple of days prior to the election, which threw things a little bit into chaos. But we regained—I would say, the law enforcement did regain control quite well. And there was a lot of conversations across these lines.
And there’s also these groups across Pennsylvania that are, you know, poll watchers. So there were poll watchers stationed at much of the places in the surrounding areas to Pittsburgh and in the southwest Pennsylvania region. And their jobs are essentially—you know, they work on a volunteer, nonpartisan basis to keep watch, to make sure that everybody is able to vote, and there is no voter intimidation happening. That being said though, on election day, for example, I did respond to reports of a man in Carrick, Pennsylvania coming in and—coming into a voting booth, reportedly inebriated and making a string of racist and disparaging comments that was intimidating poll workers and people who were voting.
And definitely, I mean, who’s to say if he scared of people from actually voting? But the judge of elections said he definitely might as well have. And I would say the response—the police response to that, the Allegheny County Sheriff’s Department, appeared, I would say, right when I got there, so about fifteen minutes after the call was made, and did stay outside of the polling place for the remainder of the time it was open. The guy did eventually return about forty-five minutes later to explain his side of the story to police, while I watched that occur. And they—and he was not arrested because he did not approach the polling place again. But it struck fear into a lot of people who were there.
And what was also sad about it was, in speaking to the judge of elections and the people in these—who vote at this polling place, at a(n) elementary school yearly, they said that this happens with this particular person every year. He shows up. He makes these comments. And eventually he has to be removed from the voting site. He was wearing, you know, a Trump shirt and was waving flags outside, and was also making a string of accusations that somebody voted under his son’s name—which was not true. (Laughs.) And so, like you said, it’s important to look at how the election results panned out.
We knew pretty early on, on Tuesday night, the direction in which this was—this election was going. And earlier that day President-elect Trump was making comments about Philadelphia voting booths. Those comments were silenced when things started, you know, to look positive for him and his party. But he was making those comments in the beginning. And there were issues at hand because of that. And I do believe, you know, both sides have described each other as grave threats, but when, you know, a candidate routinely leans on false narratives it can incite, you know, a distrust in the system, and people to go to those playing locations and accuse polling workers of voter fraud that did not exist in that place.
ROBBINS: So, Jacob, President Trump has called January 6 the day of love. He’s referred to jailed insurrectionists as political prisoners. And also suggested that he’s going to issue pardons for some, potentially all, of them. It’s not clear how many. According to
USA Today, as of this week 200 people remain imprisoned on January 6-related charges. And that doesn’t include defendants who have been sentenced—sentenced to prison and assigned to a facility but have not yet reported. So there’s a considerable number of them. So here’s my question. And among the people who are still jailed are the head of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. And they’re looking at a lot of—a lot of years here.
What impact would pardons, either blanket pardons or pardons of high-profile leaders, have on these groups, which we have not heard a lot from? Would it re-energize them? Would we have to worry about these groups again? Or would—you think they’re just going to—do you think they’ve been in some way intimidated, and they’re going to go back to their—wherever it is they came from?
WARE: It’s a tremendous question. I’m not sure I have a confident answer on it. Part of the reason for that is I have felt that the January 6 deterrence factor that you think would be in place based on the—based on the charges involved, has already been eroded. Now, people were punished for the crimes they committed. And I think—
ROBBINS: More than 660 of them, I think.
WARE: Yeah. People were punished. And I think that’s important from a criminal justice standpoint. But the deterrence, the opprobrium that you—that you think that this case, right, the largest investigation in FBI history, would implement, I think, has been eroded by, as you say, four years of rhetoric calling them warriors, heroes, patriots, political prisoners, martyrs. And so a pardon would almost be more of a confirmation of that, as opposed to something drastic and different. Worth noting too, of course, that, you know, the overwhelming majority of January 6 defendants have already been released. They committed relatively minor crimes. The people who are left now are people who committed more serious crimes.
The groups that you mentioned, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, they were effectively broken up, effectively destroyed by January 6 and the prosecutions. And the Proud Boys, at least, returned to more local-level activism. They were involved in, for example, protesting drag queen story hours. The Oath Keepers, I think, were effectively broken up without their leadership. Yeah, if those people are pardoned, I would expect them to reorganize, or at least to feel a seal of approval from the presidency. I felt at the time, when the leaders of those groups were prosecuted and convicted of seditious conspiracy, that it was a real watershed moment.
What I mean by that is there’s a famous case from 1988 where the U.S. government tried fourteen White supremacists at Fort Smith, Arkansas on seditious conspiracy charges. They tried to prove that this movement is attempting to overthrow the government of the United States. And they failed. Those fourteen people were acquitted. And that sent a message to the movement that this activity is legitimate and it’s legal. January 6 was the opposite message. And that was a real achievement for the prosecutors, to prove that this movement, that these people, these groups, these leaders, they are attempting to overthrow the government. And that is unacceptable. And they’re going to pay a legal price for that.
You know, unwinding that, beyond just the heartbreak of people who have worked really hard—patriots who have worked really hard for their country to ensure peaceful, secure elections, and ensure that people who try to disrupt that pay the price—beyond that, I do fear, of course, that it would—that it would send a message of support. And we’ve seen that over the years. I mean, you know, the Charlottesville impact is very strong in terms of these people believing that the president sees them as very fine people. This would—this would be another stamp of approval.
ROBBINS: So we already have two questions in the Q&A. I’m going to call on people to voice their questions. And you can also raise your hand, and we can call you directly, depending on how you want to do this here. Robert Chaney, would you like to give voice to your question? Or would you—if so, can you identify yourself and speak? Or I can just read it for you. I do not hear from Robert Chaney.
So the question is, “ideologically driven” assumes an ideology. Much of the political violence I’m tracking doesn’t seem to have a unifying central ideology to trace back to a leadership or central source. Do you think there’s a central source? If not, how do we probe a diffuse manifestation of violent frustration? Laura, do you feel like the people that you, you know, are doing this, that there’s a shared ideology? Or is this just frustration at work here?
ESPOSITO: I think it’s a number of things. We can’t classify, you know, a certain group of people as a monolith. I think a lot of people are really unaware that they fit into, you know, categories where they are committing political violence. I will give you a great example. Right before the election Westmoreland County, about an hour outside of Pittsburgh, held their annual Halloween parade. And one of the floats—and this, you know, broke into national news a couple days later. One of the floats in the Halloween parade, held by the volunteer fire department, was secret service snipers on a golf cart, and someone who was depicting vice president Kamala Harris being led in chains behind this golf cart.
So I would assume that a lot of people are aware, you know, the oppression that Black people have endured in the United States of America, and what that symbolizes by dragging a black woman in chains behind a golf cart. And in talking to the people, you know, the organization behind this float has not been publicly identified. But in the people that, you know, in videos seemed unfazed by, you know, this really horrific image, it seems as though they’re almost unaware of what this symbolizes. So the central source—it’s a hard question. I don’t believe that all these people fit into the same category.
I think that a lot of people are, yeah, really just unaware of what political violence actually is, and what it can mean, and what kind of message that they’re sending to the rest of the world with different acts. I mean, a lot of it, I think, you know, comes from just finding community online, though. And it fosters and festers in that comment section. And that really is the common thread to everything else. These, you know, radical forms of media and radical forms of, you know, corners of the internet, a lot of the things that have turned violent in Pennsylvania have been, you know, formed on the internet, in online groups. So that is the common thread. But I wouldn’t say that there’s a shared common ideology.
WARE: Robert, it’s a—it’s a fantastic question. Unfortunately, my answer for you is, it’s all of the above. And in fact, I think that is what’s making this such a chaotic and unpredictable and frightening moment. Certainly, we have organized far-right groups. Some of the militias we’ve mentioned. Those are the kind of people who gathered on January 6. We have an unorganized far right. Most of the violence that we see in this country from the far-right is lone actor violence. For example, the Pittsburgh shooting. We have organized far-left groups. We have an unorganized far-left, which might emerge on inauguration day, for example. We have state actor-inspired violence. Keep in mind, for example, the Springfield bomb threats. Those were clearly inspired—clearly orchestrated by a foreign government. You have Salafi jihadist groups like the Islamic State who attempted to bomb an election facility in, I think, Oklahoma, before they got caught. You have people who fit none of those above groups. You have people who are mixing and matching ideologies.
This is why I think I described this as a heightened threat environment, because it’s not just—like, around 2019, for example. 2019 was a year where we felt we finally had a pretty good feel of domestic terrorism and what the threat was. It was the kind of actors that struck Laura’s city. It was lone actors inspired by great replacement theory who were targeting soft targets, usually places of worship, using firearms. We saw it in Christchurch, New Zealand. We saw it in Poway, California. We saw it abroad. That was the model of violence that we were seeing. 2020, and the COVID pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter protests, it just blew everything up. And at this point, we’re dealing with an extremely chaotic threat landscape with all kinds of actors, with all kinds of grievances, sometimes without a clear ideology, as you describe, who are all kind of equally—not equally. I should not say equally. But all, to some extent, violently mobilized.
And this is why—I mean, I say this as a counterterrorism researcher—this is why I think we face such headwinds in the U.S. from a counterterrorism standpoint, with our gun laws in this country. Because counterterrorism experts and criminologists, we look at threats as some kind of equation, some kind of factor of intent and capability. So when those things are both high, that’s when you see violence. Right now, intent to violence is clearly heightened in our country. That’s the story of the book that I wrote. That’s the story of everything that Laura is describing. That’s why we’re meeting here. The problem in this country is when intent is high people have the capability straight away. And that is a real, real challenge, from a threat prevention standpoint. It is a real uphill battle to try to prevent violence when you have such a capability-rich environment.
ROBBINS: So, thank you for—both of that. We have a question from Lici Beveridge from the—who’s a social reporter from the
Hattiesburg American. Lici, would you like to ask your question? Or I can do it. I mean, this is a—this is a question I very much want to know, as a journalist.
Which is: How do we cover stories of political violence from the victims’ perspective, without putting them in the crosshairs? And she says, our organization rarely uses unidentified sources. And she fears that would create more harm to people who are already traumatized.
ESPOSITO: I mean, I could start there. It’s the age-old question. And it’s a really difficult one to answer. I don’t think that, you know, as reporters we can guarantee exactly what’s going to happen when we publish a story. And we can’t really promise our sources anything of the sort, which is—which is difficult. You know, I think it really depends on the situation, on a case-by-case basis. We witnessed after the Trump assassination attempt, like I said earlier, you know, people within Butler County were receiving death threats after going on the record, even just as directors of emergency services or, you know, municipality figures. And at the same time we have a, you know, duty to our readership in our community, to allow them to hear from trusted sources, like people who are on the ground doing the work, of what’s happening in Butler County.
So when it comes to protecting people I believe having those open conversations, first and foremost, with them about what they’re comfortable sharing, what they’re not comfortable sharing. Letting them know that the door is open to—when you’re—when you’re interviewing sources that have gone through traumatic incidents, I think that the entire demeanor shifts. And certain things that you wouldn’t do when interviewing someone who has not just been through a very traumatic incident you would employ here. You know, it’s very important to allow them to have a lot of—a sense of control and power in these interviews. You know, in safe environments and comfortable environments.
You know, allowing them to, you know, maybe have somebody present with them that they trust and in those rooms when interviewing is—you know, a lot of it is really just allowing them to feel safe and feel like they can put their trust and respect into you as well. And then making it clear to them that you can’t promise them anything afterwards. That when this story goes live, you are not in control of the audience, because that’s something that, you know, as journalists, we need to be sure that they know what they’re agreeing to. And when it comes to unidentified sources, I mean, that’s a—it’s a difficult one, I think, in every newsroom. If this information gets released about this person, how will it affect their lives? That is absolutely a question we should be asking ourselves before we go and hit publish on something.
And those are conversations that we should be having in the newsroom with our editors every single day. I’m lucky that I’m able to have those kinds of conversations and that we are really able to think about those things. But also we have a duty to the public to show them the kind of sourcing that we have, you know, rebuild their trust in us, as, you know, people reporting on the ground. If we just use purely unidentified sources all the time, I don’t really know how we can foster that connection with our community because why would they trust us? So it’s a fine line. And I fear that I haven’t given you a straight answer. But unfortunately, there is none. So I hope that helped, though.
ROBBINS: That’s an extraordinary question for someone who’s been a foreign correspondent, which is where I started out, in scary places. And, you know, the idea that we’re asking this question in the United States. I mean, certainly when people covered the Civil Rights movement, which—I’m old, but I’m not that old—and that we’ve come back to that, I find that really—I remember working when I worked in Cuba, and there was a period of time when the government didn’t have as much control because it ran out of money in the early ’90s, and people were suddenly willing to talk on the record. And I remember saying to a couple people, you know, I work for the
Wall Street Journal. And it’s—you know, this story is going to come out at, you know, 6:00 in the morning. And they didn’t have the internet in Cuba. And at 6:02, the Ministry of Interior is going to have this faxed back to them. (Laughs.)
And I remember this reasonably famous economist who was central to this story, and incredibly, in the face of the government. And she said, we are not children. But most—I mean, she was a leader of the resistance. Most people are not—you know, most people can’t make choices like that. And but you have to give them—allow them to make the choices. And how you balance that is a really hard thing. So I think we have a responsibility to explain to them what it is. And even though you really want everyone to talk on the record, this is a really hard one. And it’s a great question.
The other question that was—that Lici raised, which was how do you protect yourself when you’re doing this? Particularly after, you know, all the threats that have been issued against journalists, including most recently the president-elect saying that he wouldn’t mind reporters getting shot?
ESPOSITO: You know, another hard question. (Laughs.) I think it’s really one of those case-by-case basis scenarios. As reporters, we—unfortunately, we should probably start doing more of this—but when the story happens you tend to just go without really thinking of yourself as an individual involved in the situation. But, you know, there—something that I’m really happy about in this media climate is there are a lot of organizations who are ready and willing to provide support, especially for, you know, women, nonbinary journalists, you know, different groups. The International Women’s Media Foundation, for example, does some phenomenal work. You know, I personally was a part of one of their one-week training sessions on reporting on the ground in the United States. You know, most of their—as you were saying, most of their workshop used to be based on when you’re reporting on the ground in different countries and, you know, war-torn areas.
But we have those problems here now. And we need to, you know, rise to the challenge instead of just acting like it’s not happening here, because it is. So having those resources. And something that they, you know, really recommend is engaging in apps and things such as DeleteMe, looking up your own online footprint is so, so important as a journalist, especially because in this new age of media, you know, having our faces and explaining the stories, and people knowing that we’re real people and not AI, has really helped to regain a sense of trust with journalists in the communities that they’re covering. But then it also opens us up to scrutiny, and for people to know who we are, and potentially find out where we live. And, you know, these things happen. So, you know, DeleteMe is a really great resource in which you can see how big your digital footprint is, and, you know, the people that you love and how, you know, open they are on Facebook.
I had to ask my mom to go private on Facebook. She was a little bit upset about that. (Laughs.) And so I had to explain to her why, using DeleteMe. So that digital footprint is really, really important. And also, just covering protests. I mean, a little—always being on the outskirts, being very, very aware of when things could potentially escalate, and not being in the middle of things but being on the sidelines. Always mapping out an exit route. You know, whenever I’m going to a protest, I have to make sure that, OK, if this were to happen, here’s where I will go after that. Keeping in close contact with your editor or, if you don’t have an editor, a buddy or the freelance photographer that you’re with. Just that open line of communication is so, so important.
And really, just staying alert, you know, to your surroundings and what’s happening. And keeping a—keeping a go-bag at all times, something—your press badge, holding it at all times so in the event that police come that you’re able to quickly identify yourself as a member of the media. And just all the tools and resources that you need—extra chargers, things. It’s just being alert really. number one.
ROBBINS: So Tiffany Zeno, who’s from WNBC-2 TV in New York, has a question. Tiffany, would you like to give voice to your question? And I think that Jacob’s done some really interesting work, not so much on the lived experience of a reporter, but how much racism played a role in this campaign. Oh, OK. OK, you’re right, this is not something that—I can read it for you, OK. But I’m a woman. I’ll—give me credit for that one.
The one word/issue that I’ve not heard mentioned here is the R word, racism. The threat is heightened for those of us who are Black journalists, especially when we are in the field. Even though you can’t speak to lived Black experience, what advice would you give to those of us who face incredible challenges in this field? I mean, I think all the advice that Laura was talking about—and I will tell you that we here in Local Journalists did do one of these local journalists webinars with the International Women’s Media Foundation talking about this training. We can send out links to that. We can also send out links to their extraordinary workbooks that they do. And the training is an extraordinary thing.
But, yeah, it’s even worse, I mean, for journalists and journalists who were identified as “other” by these groups of people. And, you know, you guys have got—I mean, this is a really hard thing to do. And, you know, this is—but training is a really big part of it. And having support from your newsroom is absolutely essential. Jacob, can you talk a little bit about how much racism played a role in this—in this campaign and in organizing the extremist response here?
WARE: Sure. I can—I can give it a go. And then I’ll—I have a couple of thoughts on the last question as well, if I can do that briefly.
Certainly, racism was a huge part of this campaign. In particular, a kind of a twinning with sexism that those of us in the field refer to as misogynoir. Kamala Harris faced sexist and racist backlash, but they really went in tandem. You saw that very clearly, I think, when—in the last few days of the campaign, when President Trump, I think, was in North Carolina, and there was a catcall about Kamala Harris being on the corner, or something like this. And he mentioned that he loved—he loved North Carolina. She was hypersexualized in a way that is unique, I think, to Black women throughout our history. The term that historians use, and I think it’s probably a term that is based on language that White supremacists would have used, is the Jezebel trope. She really faced that very, very prominently. And she handled it with a tremendous amount of grace, but I have a difficult time believing that it did not play a role in her failure to win over enough voters.
Now, on the previous question, I’m going to use this to combine as well. I don’t know what the best practices are for reporting on victims but let me give you a couple of examples of what this looks like when it’s really well done. Those two examples are Charleston, South Carolina and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2015, we’re all familiar with the Mother Emanuel racist, White supremacist shooting at that—at that church in Charleston. After that incident there was a fascinating narrative that spread among our country about how the individual who committed that shooting, a neo-Nazi, a White supremacist, had wanted to start a race war. And that hadn’t happened because the Black community in Charleston had chosen to forgive him. And they’d chosen to show grace.
One of the best articles I have ever read is—and I hope, Tiffany, I think it was, I hope this kind of—it could be an example for you of how to leverage your positionality. One of the best articles I’ve ever read is a profile of the gunman and his victims by a Black journalist called Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, I think. The article is called The All-American Terrorist or an All-American terrorist. It’s in GQ. And in fact, that article won the Pulitzer Prize. And it is magnificent. And she is incredibly powerful at using her—the way that she looks, the way that she presents as a Black woman, as a tool. She weaponizes it in her reporting. And it is—it is marvelous. And one of the things that she finds is the Black community in Charleston never forgave him. That was something that was invented about them to make White people feel better about what had happened. And that’s a story we never would have known if a Black woman didn’t thrust herself into the story and tell the story that the victims wanted to hear. So it’s so important. And I think that’s a great example of it being done well.
Another one is Pittsburgh, Laura’s hometown. The Tree of Life shooting happened in a neighborhood called Squirrel Hill, a neighborhood that prides itself on its diversity, its openness, its welcomeness. And they were beyond offended, horrified by what—the hate that visited that community. And they have taken that narrative into their own hands to try to build something stronger. I’m intimately involved with a nonprofit—an annual conference called Eradicate Hate, which happens in Pittsburgh every year. Victims feature prominently at that conference in terms of using their own experiences to try to shed light and try to redefine Pittsburgh not as the city where hate visited, not as the city that’s the site of the deadliest antisemitic attack in our country’s history, but as the city that knew how to respond, as the city that was more resilient. And that is a victim-driven narrative.
I’ll just tell you personally as well, real quick, I am a victim of gun violence. I’m a gun violence survivor. I wouldn’t tell you that if I wasn’t willing to share my story. So if people are willing, then they will reveal that to you. I think that’s a big tool. And I think you mentioned that, Carla. You have to give people the right to share their story if they want to. We can’t make that determination for them. So I hope that helps answering a couple of those questions. Thank you.
ROBBINS: Thank you. I mean, this is—this is hard. It’s hard for everybody. And thank you. And these are really fabulous questions. And in the chat, there’s people who are—in the Q&A people are giving advice as well about, you know, the go-bag, and writing things on your arm. And this is a really interesting mixture of sort of moral dilemmas, and personal threat, and practical challenges, all of which you got to think about really quickly as things are happening. I remember our daughter when she was in college in St. Louis. And she said she wanted to—she wanted to go to Ferguson for the protests. And, you know, here I am as a mother and a foreign correspondent screaming, no! And, at the same time, going, I can’t stop her from doing this. And my husband, a long-time foreign correspondent, said—was giving her advice. Stay on the outside of crowds. Look for snipers on the top of buildings. (Laughs.) I mean, this is the sort of advice that Laura is giving. I mean, these are things that—these are survival things.
And I certainly hope that everybody’s—you know, everybody’s office, is working with them. And one of the things that’s different from when I came up in journalism and now is how many—how many people don’t have the support because they’re freelancers. I mean, at least if you’re in an office you’ve got your colleagues who may be a little older, a little more experienced, or, if you’re lucky, someone has brought in the IWMF or some other group to do the training for this. So the sharing that’s going on here right now is—and, Tiffany, thank you for posting that article—you know, this is something. And so if you guys send us stuff, we’ll also—you know, we’ll distribute it to our whole—our whole email list as well, because it’s—you know, this—we definitely have to—I sound evangelical here now—(laughs)—we definitely have to share.
So here’s a question that I have. And there’s also a question from Antonio Fins. So why don’t we—why don’t we go to that? Antonio, do you want to ask your question? Or I can do it. I might edit it a little bit. (Laughs.) I can—Antonio Fins from the
Palm Beach Post, is asking you about the choice of Matt Gaetz as attorney general. And that, you know, there are concerns that that he would lead the vanguard of a retribution administration against prosecutors and others who have worked to prosecute and disrupt extremist groups. He’s asking whether you share that concern. I’m going to add to that, how much power does an attorney general have to hobble the efforts of the FBI, the efforts of law enforcement to go after extremist groups? I mean, how much—how much can they—how much can an attorney general mess with law enforcement?
WARE: Well, I would—I would counter that by saying there’s going to be another loyalist as director of the FBI. So it will be a tandem job, I would imagine, if that’s the path they’re going to go. This was absolutely something that we saw in 2016, that there was a dismantling of our domestic terrorism infrastructure. I’m thinking particularly of the Department of Homeland Security, where much of our prevention work is funded, was really scaled back at that time. So, you know, from a real counterterrorism standpoint I do worry a lot about some of the steps that are being promised within the civil service.
Listen, President Trump, he’s right about at least one thing. The deep state that he has spoken about all these years, I believe it’s a—it’s a real thing. Most of us refer to that as civil service. There are people in our country who have made a determination that they want to take lesser-paid jobs, work long hours, relocate to the nation’s capital, because they’re patriots and they want to help keep our country safe. They want to keep the train on the tracks. Those people are being demonized now. And I think it’s not just the Matt Gaetz appointment. It’s others too. It’s John Ratcliffe at CIA. It’s the Department of Government Efficiency that’s been promised. It’s the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s the promised dismantling of the secretary of—the Education Department.
There is a broader assault on civil service, on government infrastructure. And that dismantling, I think, is very dangerous from a counterterrorism standpoint because we have designed and implemented failsafes at various levels of our government that makes it more difficult for people who wish Americans harm to fall through the cracks. And if you start dismantling those failsafes, then people are going to fall through the cracks. And so it’s very concerning, the idea that we have unqualified ideologues in these positions, whose priority is not maintaining the Department of Justice, and its resilience, and its work, but in fact undermining it. It is quite, quite frightening.
ROBBINS: So with that happy thought, we have just a few minutes left. I wanted to—and, yes, as a long-time editorial writer, I’m with you on this. (Laughs.) A technical question for both of you. Where do you get your data on this? I know, you know, I’ve looked at the FBI, as long as there still is data, before the data disappears. You know, I’ve looked at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligent Project, you know, George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. Laura, where do you get your data on a state level, on local levels, on a national level? Where do you go, if you—if you want—if you want numbers? Because numbers are important.
ESPOSITO: So unfortunately there’s still a huge gap in reporting data. And Pennsylvania is actually the—really on the low end of that one. So when the FBI changed the way that they tracked data in recent years, they gave a lot of time to let, you know, these local and state organizations and agencies know that. But still, I mean, a lot of places have not made that transition. So it’s still—there’s still a lot of lapses in crime data, violent crime data on a case-by-case basis. But, you know, a lot of it is having to go to cities and small municipalities themselves, getting the data from them, and then doing it yourself. So, you know, if you’re lucky enough to be in a news organization with data reporters, that’s typically how they spend a lot of their time.
But outside of that, there’s also really great nonpartisan organizations that, you know, do that tracking and, you know, look into that data. And, you know, for example, a lot of nonprofit newsrooms do a lot of great work in tracking data. The
Trace, for example, which is a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering gun violence and a place that I used to be a fellow at, just launched their Gun Violence Data Hub a few days ago. Which I anticipate they’re going to be expanding it. And they’ve been spending a lot of time on that. And, you know, the
Marshall Project has, you know, several of these—you know, their nonprofit news explorer, nonprofit agencies explorer. And a lot of these, you know, nonprofit newsrooms that have cropped up, they can—they’re, they’re very, very helpful for accessing data. And, you know, the Southern Poverty Law Center.
There’s a lot of really great—you know, you mentioned Georgetown. There’s a lot of really great, you know, think tanks, and within these universities, and Common Ground USA. You know, it really varies. But something I also think is really important—and I just, you know, recently had this talk—is right now, as we’ve all been citing a lot of polling data and data throughout this election cycle. I think a mistake as journalists we often make is neglecting to be very transparent with where we’re getting said data. It’s how we can build trust with our communities. If we’re reporting—you know, Reuters, for example, does a really great job of reporting exactly, you know, when they’re doing polling, if it’s from a left-leaning law center or from a right-leaning organization. You know, the Anti-Defamation League is a place that is often cited, but not a lot of people know what the Anti-Defamation League actually is.
And I think it’s really critical that we make more of an effort to show our readers that—exactly where we are getting this data, and acknowledge and be transparent about the fact that there are often gaps. And, you know, we’ve run into a lot of that throughout the Israel-Hamas war and in the lead up to this election, when polling said one thing and then the results said a completely different thing. And, you know, being just transparent about data is really, I think, a way that we can try to bridge this divide between communities and journalism.
ROBBINS: Thank you for that. And, Jacob, last word to you. Where do you get your research—you’re called a researcher, which I—what a cool job. Where do you get your data on which you base your analysis?
WARE: Basically, I would just uplift everything that Laura said. I think that was the right response. The government data tends to be not very good. And there are reasons for that. One is we don’t really have uniform definitions in our governments of hate crimes and terrorism. Another reason is some law enforcement jurisdictions don’t report. We know that that kind of data is underreported anyway, because minority communities in a lot of cases don’t self-report hate crimes because they are fearful of government. So often, frankly, government data can be—if not dismissed, then needs to be taken with a heavy grain of salt.
The best data, I think, comes from—comes from nonprofits and university research centers. And I’ll just double down on what Laura already said. The ADL has an annual report called hate in numbers, or the year in hate, something like that. Southern Poverty Law Center, of course. George Washington University Program on Extremism. The START Program at the University of Maryland. A group called NCITE at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. New America, a think tank here in D.C. All of those groups take data. And there are little differences in all of those data sets. And so what I try to do is, you know, collate them and see what the gaps are. Fortunately, you know, at least in terms of lethal violence, the numbers are low enough that you can kind of go through individual cases and determine what you want to include and what you don’t.
To summarize, the data is going to tell you that we’re in a heightened threat environment. We have more incidents this year than usual. The University of Nebraska, Omaha reports that we have a record this year of threats to public officials. And most of that violence is going to be perpetrated by actors on the violent far-right, White supremacists, and antigovernment extremists conducting racist, anti-immigrant, misogynistic, antisemitic hate crimes. That is the story of extremism today in our country. And I think those are the organizations that are best placed to tell that story.
ROBBINS: Well, I want to thank everybody for—I want to thank Laura, and I want to thank Jacob, and I want to thank all the—everyone who joined us, for great questions. Please send us your articles that you write about these things. We will share information with you. And I’m going to turn this back to Irina. And I am going to run out because I have to go teach a class now. Those pesky students of mine. (Laughs.)
WARE: Thank you, Carla.
ROBBINS: Thank you so much for this great, great conversation, and great questions from everybody. And great sharing of best practices in the Q&A.
FASKIANOS: Absolutely. And just to—I second all of that. We will send the link to the video and audio and transcript, along with links to all the wonderful resources that were mentioned. I also want to just highlight Jacob Ware’s work here at CFR, and Bruce Hoffman. We are nonpartisan, so you will find a lot of information, and blog posts, and whatnot on our website. So do come back to CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for the latest developments and analysis on international trends and how they’re affecting the U.S. And, of course, please do share your suggestions for future webinars and how we can be a resource for you and what you’re doing in your communities. You can email us at
[email protected]. So thank you all. And happy teaching, Carla.
ROBBINS: Thank you. Thank you, guys.
FASKIANOS: Jacob might be running off to a class too, who knows? (Laughter.)
ROBBINS: Be safe. Be safe, everybody.
FASKIANOS: Yes, please. Thank you.
(END)
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