 This is Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. It's a given Wednesday morning and it gets more interesting every day. This is History Lens. And the handsome fellow on the screen is John David Ann. Hi John, nice to see you. Smile in the face. Hey, you're too kind. I like your comment. It shouldn't be a surprise to anybody. This is History Lens. And today we're gonna talk about a post-mortem on the 2020 election and more because so much has happened since Election Day in 2020. John, you're an historian at HPU, written a lot of books, a lot of books about American history. This is a very challenging time to try to make sense of it. Have you finished making sense of it yet? I think there's light at the end of the tunnel, honestly. If you had asked me that yesterday, I would have said I'm still making sense of it. Today, things look clearer to me. So yeah, I mean, of course the attack on the Capitol, the insurrection, unprecedented. We've never had a domestic terrorist group and insurrectionists that attacked the Capitol like that before. The only other time the Capitol was attacked, of course, was by the British in the War of 1812 and they burned it to the ground. Fortunately, these attackers did not do that. Apparently there was some thought. There was somebody, I don't know if they were in the Capitol or not, but they had Molotov cocktails, which of course are incendiary devices. And if they had been thrown in the Capitol, lit and thrown, it could have burned the Capitol down. So we're lucky that didn't happen. Terrible tragedy that five people died in a Capitol, police officer died. And it's an unprecedented thing. And it's also unprecedented to have the occupant of the White House inciting this mob. We've never had in our history of a sitting president who stoked the fears and the motivations of such extremism and anti-government extremism. It's illogical, right? It makes no sense that the government itself, the prime representative of the government would encourage protesters to attack the government. It's completely illogical, but there it is. I mean, that's Trump in a nutshell, completely illogical and quite dangerous, still very dangerous at this moment. We don't know what will happen. Jay, you and I talked about the possibility that the report that there have been threats of, threats against all of the state protests that all of the state capitals on the 17th, coming Sunday, whoa, there's a lot to deal with. But we can put it into some historic, we've already begun to put into some historical perspective and talk about the election results as well. So it's not all bad. Well, we're learning a lot from it. I think it's a painful lesson and we'll continue to be a painful lesson until Trump is gone, gone, gone. But at this point, from a history professor point of view, I would really appreciate your thoughts about what threats came together to make these things happen. I mean, Trump had enablers. It wasn't him alone, he could not have done it alone. And he had 70 million people vote for him as a cult figure. And so the threads in American history, in American sociology, contributed to that. And so that, if we appreciate that and understand that, maybe we could make reasonable predictions as to what will happen now. Although I would add to that, the way humanity works, the way history works, one person can change the course of history. We've seen that all through human history. One person can do it. Pence could do it. Trump could do it. Right. Nancy Pelosi could do it. You know, there's all these people that could. So whatever predictions we make, it's subject to that ephemeral, unpredictable principle that one person could change it. So anyway, what threads are you seeing here in terms of American history and what do they teach us for the future? Right. So part of it is a question about extremism, right? So what's the history of extremism in this country? And, you know, we've had, and we have to talk about right-wing extremism because of course these were right-wing extremists. There's been this disinformation that this was somehow false flag operation of Antipa. That is, there is no evidence of that. That is completely false. All of the people who have been arrested have been identified as right-wing extremists, supporters of Trump, supporters of QAnon, proud boys, this kind of thing. So, but when we look at right-wing extremism, I think we have to look back to probably the fifties is, you begin the fifties and the sixties, you begin to find some examples of right-wing extremism. And the one that I think of, which is it wasn't violent, but it was there in the 1950s was the John Birch Society was a complete, you know, if you wanna think about the roots of Trump's conspiracy theories, okay? And that's really what drove his campaign in 2012 and then again in 2016. The root of this lies with the John Birch Society in the 1950s. Now you can go back all the way to the beginning of American history and find conspiracy theories. I think we've talked about that before, but I mean, John Adams, you know, in the 1790s running a brothel in the White House, there's some crazy stuff. But the thing about the John Birch Society is that the organization was based upon conspiracy theories. The founder of the John Birch Society, Jack Welch, a candy magnet, you know, he sold candy, made lots of money. He wrote a book that was just filled with conspiracy theories that was kind of the founding bible of this organization. Now they believe that the communists had infiltrated every level of American government, they accused Eisenhower and his brother Milton of being communist agents. I mean, it's just this really crazy stuff. Well, can we define the term conspiracy for a minute? And I think inherent in the way you, you know, describe it is a conspiracy theory is not true. It's a lie. And it's a lie about how other people are scheming and planning and plotting to do very nasty, you know, negative things. Is that a fair description of a conspiracy theory? Yeah, it's a lie. And it's a lie about, usually about government and about the nefarious, the supposed nefarious actions of government officials. In the case of Jack Welch and the Eisenhower's, Dwight Eisenhower, president and Milton Eisenhower's brother was that a president Eisenhower was actually working for Milton, who was the number one communist agent working for the Soviet Union in the country. So the idea was the conspiracy was that Eisenhower was actually working for the Soviets completely untrue and really laughable until you begin to think about how conspiracy theories have invaded our politics in the last four years and even, you know, affected the acceptance of this election and then the incitement of this insurrection that took place last week. Well, you know, it strikes me from what you say that that the person who spreads a conspiracy theory knows, knows that it's not true. But there will be a reason, there will be a reason that this individual spreads it. Let's take Trump, for example. So he spreads a conspiracy theory and encourages it, you know, does all he can to support conspiracy theories. But why? He knows that he is throwing disinformation out there. What benefit does he get out of doing that? Right. So to talk about Trump and conspiracy theories, we have to talk about the Berther movement. And this was the movement that started, was started essentially by Trump and his supporters in during the Obama presidency that somehow Barack Obama was actually not born in the United States and therefore could not legitimately be president of the United States and therefore his entire presidency was illegitimate. And so the benefits, so this is the conspiracy theory that gained ground, you know, that first Trump run and then of course it really gained ground towards the 2016 election. And this is, so what Trump gained out of this was he gained a movement. There were lots of people who actually believed what Trump said when he started, you know, when this conspiracy theory was spread, they actually believed it. I mean, I have friends whose parents actually believed this. So there's no truth to this. I mean, Obama released his birth certificate. There's no truth to this, but nonetheless, the benefit for Trump was he developed a movement. And actually I think this eventually gained him the presidency because he decided, Trump decided. Look, one conspiracy theory works. Why not a whole raft of lies and conspiracy theories and denials? And so essentially he based his presidency on this. So, you know, that's one of the real dangers that took place over the last four years and it's something we still have to fight against is this idea that Donald Trump can say it's false news and therefore it's fake, you know, or he can, you know, consider an election illegitimate and therefore it's, you know, without any evidence, it's illegitimate. There was no evidence of widespread fraud in this election. It was tested by over 60 lawsuits. If he didn't find any, and yet there was, there's a sizable part of the American population who at least a few days ago, before the insurrection, believed that this election was illegitimate, that there was somehow massive fraud which had resulted in Joe Biden's win and stolen the election away from Donald Trump. Complete falsehoods. Yeah. But none of that. There was a very interesting social media video by Arnold Schwarzenegger who was a child, you know, I think he was born after the war in Europe and he spoke about what happened in Europe because there were people who bought into that the way a lot of American people are buying into it, bought into Hitler's big lie. And the big lie continued after the war. And then there was this moment of revelation where they realized that it was a lie and then they felt terribly guilty. And it was a, you know, they never got over it. His parents, his, his generation, the parents' generation never really got over it. They were guilty for believing that for the rest of it. So anyway, my point is that, you know, the big lie is what Hitler used to get into power. And that's what we have here. We have the big lie. We have multiple big lies, outrageous lies that Trump has been doing. And my question to you is, is there kind of a soft point in American culture and history? Maybe different, maybe worse than what happened in Europe. But perfectly middle-class people who could make, you know, rational decisions all of a sudden bought into the big lie. And here we have 70 million plus people who have bought into a lot of big lies, not only birther, but all the lies since then they completely accept them. Is this a flaw in American society? No, I mean, as you pointed out, Jay, other nations have experienced this where demagogues defined as a systematic lie or demagogic politicians like Adolf Hitler told lies that were effective, that people actually believed and wanted to believe. So here's the thing about it. If this is important, the Hitler example is quite important because this is really when historians began to study the big lie was after World War II. And we studied Hitler's big lies in the 1920s and 30s, the main big lie that Jews were responsible for the German loss in World War I. Now we have to understand that first of all, the Germans lost the war and there was this loss psychosis or psychology. People were very angry and upset about the loss and the elites were upset about the loss. And so they were open, right? They were open to the idea that somehow we could blame one particular group. And of course, Jews who were quite prominent in German and Austrian society, not in politics so much, but in business and in the professions were actually the cause of this. But Jews of course had been attacked and there was a strong anti-Semitism already existing in Germany. So that made it an easy play for Hitler. Let's blame the Jews for this. And so you have to have a public that's ready to believe the lie, okay? And I think that's kind of true with this election because Donald Trump did such a good job preparing the way of doing groundwork that this is a fraudulent election. Postal services is screwing up. The mail and ballots can, fraud will happen with them. So he laid the groundwork for this lie. And then of course, you also have the pandemic which made people put people on edge. It made people concerned about their futures and put fear in their hearts. And anytime you put fear in the hearts of people who are maybe not very educated or prone to kind of like strong men or demagogues, then the ground can be laid. So the ground for this particular circumstance I think was laid by the pandemic and laid by Trump himself. And of course what goes along with the pandemic, unemployment and fear for what's going to happen to us, what's going to happen to our culture, our family. And the cultural fears of course have been stoked over maybe a couple of decades that somehow the real conservative, conservatism in the United States is being lost that we should somehow return to the 1950s and have that kind of a society. Yeah, a white society. Right. An inherent in the birther issue, inherent in the capital insurrection last week, is the fact that Trump is playing on racial prejudice. He's playing against the blacks. I don't know if people clearly see that, but if you connect the dots, what you get is a racist and he's going after the blacks and the Mexicans. Yeah, no, it's quite true. And this is, in times of distress in American history, this has also been so like anti-Semitism in Europe, anti-black, racism and demagoguery against blacks and then violence against blacks, very common response in times of distress. After World War I, for instance, troops come home, economy falls into a depression, pardon me, a recession. And then of course you have a pandemic as well in 1919, 1918 and 1919. And so there's great fear in the country and what happens there are race riots throughout the, throughout the country and all of the major cities. And these race riots are not started by African-Americans, they're started by white mobs who go into African-American neighborhoods and begin to kill people and burn down buildings. It's really horrible what happens in 1919, but yeah. So this process of, you know, in academic academia, we call this the process of other, creating an other who you can hate, who you can despise, who you just- Scapegoats, scapegoat. Yes, it kind of, yeah, I mean, popular vernacular scapegoating, yeah. So this is very common, it's very important to have a scapegoat if you're going to perpetuate a big lie or conspiracy theory like Trump has. So, you know, immigrants, right? Mexicans, Muslims. And now Trump has never said, you know, blacks, but in so many words, he has said of blacks. And, you know, it's pretty wild stuff. So, and then, you know, of course, there were insurrectionists who had, insurrectionists had the Confederate flag. That's a white supremacist symbol there. So yeah, definitely racism in the Berther movement itself. This is, you know, at its most basic level, the Berther movement was the expression of whites who were fearful of a black, putting a black man in the White House would allow him to dominate them. Blacks need to stay in their place. That's their thinking. They don't belong in the White House. And we certainly can't have them dominating us. The fact of slavery in the Civil War. There is a psychology that runs through American history from slavery that involves this fear of domination. Because, you know, quite frankly, you know, whites dominated blacks and then, you know, what's to stop blacks turning the table? Why wouldn't they with their resentment try to dominate whites? This has been a fear for a long time. You see it in the development of the, in the state constitutional conventions that took place in between the 1820s and the 1870s. There was discussion of, do we give free blacks in these Northern states in, you know, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana? There's 24 states that bring, that become states and have to write state constitutions in that time period. And almost none of them allow African-Americans full civil rights. And they're, they say this. I mean, they admit, well, we do not want the black man lording over us. We don't, we do not want the black man to be our master. These are paraphrase of quotes from these constitutional convention proceedings. Another example, and that it, you know, it's part of this is the state of Oregon, right? We consider Oregon to be kind of a progressive icon and especially Portland, right? It's a, you know, progressive city. It should be very racially progressive. It's the whitest city in big, it's large city in the United States, 6% African-American. The state of Oregon, when it came into the union had the most restrictive laws against African-Americans in the nation. It came into the union in 1859 and it had a law completely excluding, pardon me, completely excluding African-Americans from the state. You could not even go there to resign. So what, you know, what you described, and what's, you know, has always seemed clear is that the U.S. has some flaws in this department. We have the scapegoating floors, we have the racial division, racial racism. And we have things that Trump could have capitalized on and he did. He did that in order to become a cult figurine and get power. And so here we are when he's, you know, he's going as far or further, much further than he's ever gone. He's created the attack on the Capitol. He is likely to, well, he is also creating attacks on state capitals around the country. Talking about having a million people, a million men. Didn't talk much about the women. A million men, you know, show up in Washington and elsewhere, which I don't know what's going to happen in that number, but it's going to happen in some number. So, you know, really the uncomfortable question is, if we look at what has happened under Trump and we realize that these flaws have existed open for opportunistic, you know, opportunistic leverage all this time and he has found the leverage just the way Hitler found the leverage in Europe. Where does that take us? And what kind of forces can play against that, push back against that to clarify, you know, our society and make it safe again? Yeah, so of course a very different situation than Germany, Germany in the 1920s was a democracy, but it was a very young democracy. Germany had suffered an insurrection right after World War I, a very unstable democracy. They didn't really, you know, the people of Germany had been, there was a kind of a very kind of authoritarian democracy even before World War I, but it was very much hamstrung by the monarch, of course, the Kaiser before World War I, but so you have this democracy that is very kind of in its infant stages and it's unstable and it's made even more unstable by the fact that their economy just round to a halt with hyperinflation in 1923 and 24. So it's not the same situation in the United States, we've had a democracy for over 200 years and it's a democracy that has actually grown. Okay, you know, elites voted in the 1790s by the 1840s and all whites voted after the Civil War, then African-Americans, at least technically kind of theoretically had the African-American males had the right to vote. Then in the early 20th century, then women got the vote and then in the civil rights era, then voting rights were encapsulated for all American citizens. So we have grown in our democracy and I think actually that history really matters. I think our experience of democracy really matters and I think we're seeing that now that those who value the constitution, those who value our democracy and democratic values are coming to the fore and they're pushing back really hard. One of the big questions that has emerged that had what happened last week, John and I think there'll be a lot more discussion of it is who exactly was in that mob? And, you know, they may have worn crazy clothing and those hats and everything. One fellow who was the son of a judge in Brooklyn, I find that very interesting. The one without the clothes on with the Viking hat. We don't know yet. We don't have a profile of who was there. I mean, I guess you could say that it's a lot of profiles. They come from all over the place, but it's hard to find a common denominator what would bring people together in that sort of absurdity. And I guess one of the things that strikes me and I think it will strike me more as we learn more is that a lot of the people there were middle class, had a home and a car. A lot of the people there had ordinary lives and including police officers, even there was a legislator and there was this fellow ox who has been arrested here in Hawaii who ran for office as a conservative. I mean, people from all walks, including ordinary walks of life in this country have been involved, not only in the movement, but in the violence. And that to me is totally remarkable. And question, how do you clean that up? How do you show them that you're a judge? And that's not the way. How do you correct this extraordinary violation of our government? So first of all, we do know where some of them, what their affiliations are and what's driving this. And we know that there was a pretty widespread representation by Proud Boys, which is a fairly new right-wing extremist organization founded in 2017 in New York. Their leader actually was headed to the march and he was arrested on his way to the march last Wednesday. We also know that QAnon supporters were there, another right-wing extremist conspiracy theory organization. And we think there's another organization here which is very shadowy called Bugaloo. And the difference with Bugaloo is they're not just there protesting, they have as a part of their charter, the destruction of the United States government. They wanna start a civil war. So they're very kind of out in the open with their extremism, but it's hard to identify them because they don't have much of an organizational apparatus. The other two do. And so one response, of course, of the government, and this has happened in the past, is that the government prosecutes these organizations. You can do hate crime kind of racketeering prosecutions which actually hit them financially and put them out of business this way. This has happened many times in the last 20 years actually in the Northwest part of the country and in Michigan where you have these organizations that crop up like the White Knights and the Christian identity movement and there's a whole, there's a lot of them. And neo-Nazi groups and the government knew about these. And so they, prosecutors went to work and they put these organizations out of business by with financial racketeering charges. So you can get rid of the organizational structure. That's not such a concern. It's the ideas and the lies that are much harder that are kind of, you have to work at a much deeper level to get rid of conspiracy theories. You're not gonna get rid of conspiracy theories. You simply have to do a better job of communicating with the public and educating the public as to how to read media. And you also have to have social. So that involves me, right? I'm an educator. And so what I do now, I added an assignment in my American history course called a fake news report. I want students to, I asked students to go out and find an example of fake news. Tell me why it's fake news. Tell me what's true about it. So just basically distinguishing facts from fiction. And then the other thing is that the social media companies need to be held accountable and they're holding, they're now holding themselves more accountable. So it's a bit belated. They knew about these groups for a long time and they've tolerated this in the name of pre-speech. But the thing is, look, there are limits to pre-speech. I mean, Russo made this very clear. Jean-Jacques Russo, you know, the Enlightenment philosophers said, hey, in the social contract, he said, look, humans need to move from a kind of animal state of freedom to a civil liberty, where the power of the government can protect and place limits upon freedoms because this kind of idea that there's no boundary to freedom is a dangerous notion. It goes back to Hugo Black in one of the Supreme Court cases where he said, you cannot cry fire in a crowded movie theater. There are limits. And we're seeing people bounce off those limits now, but I'd like to offer something based on what you just said. It sounds like, yes, these organizations, the government, the FBI can contain them and even make them go away and has over time. And then they pop up again because the threat of this kind of ultra-conservatism still exists in the country. But one thing is this insurrection, last Wednesday, acts as a kind of lightning rod. What it says is, all that noise about free speech, all that noise about your right to protest and carry on like that, that you really did some damage here. And the government, the FBI and whatnot, now has a basis for going after the people who were there, those ultra-conservatives who were there on the basis of what happened. They're going to arrest, they're gonna find them, they're gonna arrest them, they're gonna prosecute them, they're gonna punish them. And so it offers an opportunity to cleanse, that's the wrong word, but to take care of that group, to contain that group and to show them that they can't do this. And I guess my question is, is that gonna work or will they just come on back again? Will the fact that there'll be a lot of prosecutions here and social media is closing down Trump and the like and big business is not supporting candidates who wanna run an ultra-conservative campaigns, is that gonna solve the problem? Does it go anywhere to solve the problem and does it solve the problem in a larger sense? Yeah, so I think it definitely makes a huge difference. Look, we've never had a demagogue as president before and now the Congress, and I think there's a chance that he will be impeached. The Mitch McConnell now has spoken out in favor of the impeachment. The Republican leadership, they're afraid for their party. And so they're gonna fight. What's going to happen now is probably a civil war in the Republican party, which is needed, speaking of cleansing. But so yeah, so I think this is, it's a moment, it's a kind of hinge. It's a turning point in history where Americans now are much more awakened to the dangers of this because we actually had to live with this for four years and it almost ended in a coup d'etat. So I think this is a moment where many Americans are waking up to this. You're not gonna get rid of this, but do we ever want to have a demagogue for president again in our political leadership? I have a hard time seeing how that's going to happen. At least a Trump type president, he, Trump has so damaged that movement with this action that I don't think that movement has a future at the national level, at the highest levels of government. I'll still be around. There's no doubt about it, but I think they're done in terms of leading national politics. And you know, the other thing that shows is we still have strong civil institutions beyond just our government. We have in our nonprofit sector, in our advocacy institutions, in our businesses, we have a much stronger social consciousness about the dangers of this kind of stuff now. So I think that I'm quite heartened by the very strong response of the business community and civic institutions to this because democracy is not just built on the vote. It's got this whole layer of civic organizations and NGOs that support democracy. It's not just built upon the government. So these responses are very important. So yeah, I- It may be one of those Second Amendment guys who carries guns around. And now I fully understand why Trump and his friends were advancing the Second Amendment because they understand that one person with a gun is worth thousands without guns and that's where it went. But let me ask you this, John, in closing, I just, a point of curiosity. You say, and I certainly agree that it's a matter of educating people to do critical thinking and not to be sucked in by demagogues. And that's the way we can beat this in the long term. But, and we know right now today, I'm sure you know them as well as I do, there are people in our community, all up and down, all up and down. It's not just some right-wing police that you might meet, but it's business people, it's military people. And they're Trumpers. Or at least until last Wednesday, they were Trumpers and they were likely to continue with Trumpers and students. And my last question to you, John, is when you talk to your classes and you have them identify the fake news, you get to think of how they think, you get to think of what their orientation is right now. Do you find, have you found that in your classes there are Trumpers? No, you know, the Trumpers are nearly non-existent at the university level, there's very small minority, you know, most vast majority of college students voted for Biden, they didn't vote for Trump. In fact, college students came out in much bigger numbers than previously and voted for Biden. So that's a really good thing. Now, the thing is, you have to kind of think about this as subsections of the Republican party, you know, you have one section of the Republican party that they're Trump crazies, right? They're irrational, they don't really know how to think critically about much of anything. That might be 20%, it might be 25%, it could be up to 30% of the party, you know, but then there's other Republicans, many other Republicans, about, you know, another 50% of Republicans who voted for Trump. And so what you're going to see in the Republican party is this kind of shedding taking place over the next several months. It's very clear where this, what direction this train is moving in now and it's a really good thing, it's a really important thing that it's begun to move in the direction of removing the Trump influence from American national politics. So that's crucial. One thing that's happening, John, is that whatever is happening, whatever movement we have, it's fast. And you and I, we hear on a given Wednesday, who knows what the conversation might be a week from today. Anything could happen. I hope you'll be available to continue our conversation so we can take stock of how these things play out. Thank you so much, John. It's always a pleasure to talk to you and learn from you. You're welcome, Jay. Great to be on the show. Take care. Take care. Aloha.