Speaker 1: Col Zone Media. Nicholas Young was at work on the
Speaker 1: morning of August third, twenty sixteen, when federal agents showed
Speaker 1: up to arrest him. He appeared before a judge a
Speaker 1: few hours later, shackled but still wearing his department issued
Speaker 1: uniform pants. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority had already
Speaker 1: issued a public statement announcing that he'd been fired, but
Speaker 1: the reporters in the room all took note of the pants.
Speaker 1: Nicholas Young had just become the first police officer in
Speaker 1: the United States to be arrested for a federal terrorism offense.
Speaker 1: As he was being processed into federal custody, FBI agents
Speaker 1: were searching his home, his truck, the backpack he'd been
Speaker 1: carrying at the time of the arrest, and his worklocker
Speaker 1: number forty five at the Metro Transit Police Department District
Speaker 1: two substation. Box after box of evidence was carried out
Speaker 1: of his townhouse in northern Virginia. Agents collected nineteen firearms,
Speaker 1: eighteen thousand rounds of ammunition, seventy pieces of body armor,
Speaker 1: and sixty bladed weapons ranging from daggers to swords, But
Speaker 1: they also seized another kind of evidence. Nazi paraphernalia, a
Speaker 1: framed portrait of Hitler, a Nazi flag, a tie tack
Speaker 1: in the shape of an SS lightning bolt. On his
Speaker 1: hard drive, they found photos of a dinner party he'd hosted.
Speaker 1: All of the guests were wearing Nazi SS uniforms. The
Speaker 1: agent's photographed, inventoried, and packed away dozens of pieces of
Speaker 1: evidence that could be used to show that Nicholas Young
Speaker 1: was a Nazi, but that wasn't what he was charged with.
Speaker 1: He was in prison for supporting ISIS, and there's a very
Speaker 1: good argument to be made that he didn't really do
Speaker 1: anything at all. I'm Molly Conger in this. It's weird,
Speaker 1: little guys. This is a story where nothing happens, no
Speaker 1: one really did anything. A lot of the key players
Speaker 1: in this story don't even actually exist. The only crime
Speaker 1: Nicholas Young stands convicted of is a single count of
Speaker 1: providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization.
Speaker 2: But he's never met a real terrorist.
Speaker 1: There's no evidence at all that Nicholas Young ever had
Speaker 1: contact of any kind with an actual member of ISIS
Speaker 1: or al Qaida. He sort of knew a guy who
Speaker 1: was recruiting fra al Shabab, but even the undercover agent
Speaker 1: investigating them both said Young had nothing to do with that.
Speaker 1: The only member of isis Nicholas Young, ever thought he
Speaker 1: knew was a confidential human source on the FBI payroll,
Speaker 1: and after years of prodding and encouragement, he sent this
Speaker 1: friend two hundred and forty five dollars worth of gift
Speaker 1: cards to the Google Play app store.
Speaker 2: That's all.
Speaker 1: I made a note of this case in my messy
Speaker 1: collection of odds and ends years ago. Buried somewhere in
Speaker 1: this indecipherable mass of text, I wrote Nazi cop joins
Speaker 1: isis question mark and paste it in a couple of links,
Speaker 1: something to come back to later. I guess it's impossible
Speaker 1: to say now what I was thinking when I wrote
Speaker 1: most of the things in my little notes app, but
Speaker 1: I'm almost positive I first came across this case while
Speaker 1: I was just browsing.
Speaker 2: I like to see what's out there.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I'll just waste a few hours punching in keywords
Speaker 1: to search through federal court filings, and I think in
Speaker 1: this case the key word was fry Corps. One of
Speaker 1: the exhibits in this case is a photograph of Nicholas
Speaker 1: Young's truck parked in his driveway, and in the photograph
Speaker 1: he can see his vanity license plate, which read FRII Karp.
Speaker 1: If you've never driven through Virginia. Vanity plates are hugely
Speaker 1: popular here. Almost everybody has one. We have more than
Speaker 1: any other state. I think it's because they're really cheap here.
Speaker 1: They only charged I think ten dollars a year to
Speaker 1: put a personalized tag on your car, and it's fifty
Speaker 1: or seventy dollars in a lot of other states, and
Speaker 1: Nicholas Young chose to pay ten dollars a year to
Speaker 1: drive around northern Virginia advertising his affinity for the Fry Corps.
Speaker 1: That's a term for the collection of loosely affiliated nationalists
Speaker 1: paramilitary groups that formed in Germany after World War One.
Speaker 1: They weren't Nazis technically, since there was no Nazi Party yet,
Speaker 1: but many leaders in the Free Corps would go on
Speaker 1: to join the Nazi Party, guys like Ernst Rome, Heinrich
Speaker 1: Himmler and Rudolph Hess. They were the shock troops for
Speaker 1: what was to come, carrying out acts of extra judicial
Speaker 1: violence against left wing movements in Germany in the years
Speaker 1: after the First World War, and the kind of guy
Speaker 1: who romanticizes the idea of joining a nationalist street gang
Speaker 1: to beat up leftists is the kind of guy I'm
Speaker 1: interested to know more about, especially if that guy is
Speaker 1: a cop. So that's how he ended up in my notebook.
Speaker 1: But like I said, his fondness for Nazi memorabilia has
Speaker 1: nothing at all to do with how he got arrested.
Speaker 2: So I made my note and I forgot about it.
Speaker 1: As interesting as I found all of these exhibits related
Speaker 1: to his collection of Nazi paraphernalia, there's a very important
Speaker 1: question to be asked here. Why was a jury allowed
Speaker 1: to see them. We'll get back to that in.
Speaker 2: A minute, but first I should.
Speaker 1: Explain how this came ended up in front of a
Speaker 1: jury at all. The Federal Bureau of Investigation spent six
Speaker 1: years on this case, kind of. They spent six years
Speaker 1: trying to connect Nicholas Young to something anything. His first
Speaker 1: contact with an FBI agent was in September of twenty ten,
Speaker 1: and back in the fall of twenty ten, the agents
Speaker 1: were casting a wide net. They were interviewing scores of
Speaker 1: people who'd known a man named Zachary Chesser. Chesster was
Speaker 1: arrested earlier that summer, for threatening Trey Parker.
Speaker 2: And Matt Stone.
Speaker 1: Yes, that Trey Parker and that Matt Stone, the creators
Speaker 1: of South Park. Chesster had taken an interest in Islam
Speaker 1: after graduating from high school in two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: and he soon got involved with Revolution Muslim, a website
Speaker 1: run by two American Muslim converts that pumped out ro
Speaker 1: al Kaita propaganda for an English speaking audience. Plooed guilty
Speaker 1: pretty quickly in October of twenty ten, and he was
Speaker 1: eventually sentenced to twenty five years in prison. But the
Speaker 1: court record in Young's case is pretty vague on the
Speaker 1: subject of Zachary Chessar. Intentionally so the prosecutor often refers
Speaker 1: to Chesser as a friend of Young's, but in reality
Speaker 1: they were barely passing acquaintances.
Speaker 2: But this was the global War on Terror.
Speaker 1: And a twenty year old white boy had threatened the
Speaker 1: creators of a cartoon over depictions of Muhammad, so a
Speaker 1: lot of doors were getting knocked. When agents finally spoke
Speaker 1: to Nicholas Young two months after Chessar's arrest, he seemed
Speaker 1: shocked by the charges and said if he'd had any
Speaker 1: idea Chesser was planning something violent, he would have reported it.
Speaker 1: There's no indication in the record that this conversation was
Speaker 1: alarming or suspicious. Nicholas Young barely knew Zachary Chesser.
Speaker 2: And he was a cop.
Speaker 1: But now Nicholas Young had an FBI file in a
Speaker 1: counter terrorism investigation. So three months later, in December of
Speaker 1: twenty ten, Young was attending a friend's wedding. At the reception,
Speaker 1: a man introduced himself to Young as Khalil and struck
Speaker 1: up a conversation. Khalil worked for the FBI. He later
Speaker 1: testified that he'd attended the wedding to try to get
Speaker 1: close to another man, a man named sale al Barmawi.
Speaker 1: The record is again very vague when it comes to
Speaker 1: why al Barmawi was the subject of this undercover operation,
Speaker 1: and he's never been arrested or charged with the crime,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't look like he lives in the United
Speaker 1: States anymore. But in two thousand and eight, al Barmawi
Speaker 1: was a member of the Muslim Student Association at George
Speaker 1: Mason University, so he may have crossed paths with Zachary
Speaker 1: Chessar during that single semester that Chesser was enrolled. There After,
Speaker 1: Khalil met Young, though he kept in touch for about
Speaker 1: a year and a half. The undercover maintained a friendship
Speaker 1: with Young, meeting for dinner, watching movies at his house,
Speaker 1: going for.
Speaker 2: Walks, and just chatting.
Speaker 1: The prosecution emphasized that Young was hanging out in radical
Speaker 1: circles and he had dangerous friends, pointing specifically to a
Speaker 1: man named Amine al Khalifi, who was later arrested for
Speaker 1: attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. Alarming, right,
Speaker 1: But the government is less forthcoming about the fact that
Speaker 1: it was the undercover who introduced Young to al Khalifi,
Speaker 1: and the fact that el Khalifi was only arrested after
Speaker 1: he was provided with a fake gun and a fake
Speaker 1: bomb by the FBI agents who drove him to Washington,
Speaker 1: d c. And dropped him off to carry out the
Speaker 1: suicide attack they'd planned. I want to get one thing
Speaker 1: out of the way here. I'm not defending Nicholas Young,
Speaker 1: certainly not defending ISIS. ISIS doesn't actually even come into
Speaker 1: the story. There's no real ISIS here. And when it
Speaker 1: comes to Nicholas Young, oh, he's a police officer with
Speaker 1: a house full of Hitler posters. You know, I'm not
Speaker 1: on his side here. That should be obvious, and I'm
Speaker 1: not denying that he made some alarming statements throughout the
Speaker 1: course of the investigation. In one conversation with the undercover,
Speaker 1: he was furious about the way that the FBI had
Speaker 1: approached his friends and family when they were asking questions
Speaker 1: about whether he knew Zachary Chesser. He allegedly fantasized about
Speaker 1: finding out where the female agent lived so he could
Speaker 1: kidnap and torture her. That's a very scary thing to say.
Speaker 1: But when the undercover submitted his report about that conversation
Speaker 1: in March of twenty eleven, he wrote that he didn't
Speaker 1: think Young was serious. In other conversations with the undercover,
Speaker 1: Young admitted to torturing animals as a child. He talked
Speaker 1: about how much he hated the FBI and said that
Speaker 1: he believed it was possible to sneak weapons into the
Speaker 1: federal courthouse undetected, and he was paranoid who was always
Speaker 1: talking about using phones and taking the batteries out of
Speaker 1: his phone when he wasn't using it. He said he
Speaker 1: was stockpiling weapons, and he hinted that any cop who
Speaker 1: tried to search his house would run into problems. But again,
Speaker 1: all of these conversations took place in twenty eleven. The
Speaker 1: undercover submitted the reports, but nothing rose to the level
Speaker 1: of a prosecutable crime. He was talking a lot of shit,
Speaker 1: but he owned those guns legally, and he didn't do anything.
Speaker 1: It's not my preferred dinner conversation, but legally speaking, fantasizing
Speaker 1: about jihad at the chilis in Alexandria, Virginia isn't terrorism.
Speaker 1: He did travel to Libya twice in twenty eleven to
Speaker 1: provide aid to anti Gaddaffi rebel forces during the Libyan
Speaker 1: Civil War. He had a bumper sticker on his truck
Speaker 1: that said Libyan Civil War VET Siege of Misrata, And
Speaker 1: he really was in miss Rada in April and May
Speaker 1: of twenty eleven during some of the most brutal fighting there.
Speaker 1: On re entry into the United States after that trip,
Speaker 1: he told the ICE agent who interviewed him at the
Speaker 1: airport that he'd had to cut his trip short, returning
Speaker 1: home ten days earlier than he'd planned because things had
Speaker 1: gotten too dangerous there. He returned to Libya a second
Speaker 1: time later that year, and he made no secret of
Speaker 1: either trip. Both times he was interviewed by a federal
Speaker 1: agent at the airport on his way home. When he
Speaker 1: was interviewed by the FBI after his second trip to Libya,
Speaker 1: they attempted to recruit him as a paid informant, and
Speaker 1: he declined.
Speaker 2: Again. It doesn't look like.
Speaker 1: He broke any laws here, at least not in the
Speaker 1: United States laws. I don't know what Libya's position on
Speaker 1: the situation might be, but the FBI was still investigating him.
Speaker 1: If they'd found any evidence that he joined a terrorist
Speaker 1: organization in Libya, they would have brought it up a trial.
Speaker 2: Again.
Speaker 1: Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I'm super comfortable
Speaker 1: with the idea of American cops packing their own body
Speaker 1: armor to fly off to some civil war halfway around
Speaker 1: the world. But the United States government didn't see fit
Speaker 1: to charge him with anything in twenty eleven or twenty twelve,
Speaker 1: or twenty thirteen, or twenty fourteen or twenty fifteen. In
Speaker 1: twenty twelve, the undercover who'd been hanging out with Young
Speaker 1: since twenty ten moved on. One of the other men
Speaker 1: that he'd gotten close to was more interesting to the government,
Speaker 1: so the agent's focus shifted. Young was interviewed once more
Speaker 1: by the FBI later in twenty twelve when he was
Speaker 1: crossing the Canadian border after visiting a woman he'd been
Speaker 1: romantically involved with, but other than that, the investigation was dormant.
Speaker 1: Two years passed before the FBI sent Nicholas Young a
Speaker 1: new friend, a confidential human source who called himself Mo.
Speaker 1: Young met with Moe twenty times in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 2: They were close. They didn't just talk about jihad.
Speaker 1: They talked about work, about dating, about Young's struggle to
Speaker 1: overcome the depression he'd fallen into after his father's death
Speaker 1: in two thousand and seven. He thought they were friends
Speaker 1: when they talked about ISIS. It was Mo who brought
Speaker 1: it up. In several conversations. Young even tried to cool
Speaker 1: his friend's enthusiasm for the group, telling him he didn't
Speaker 1: need to join ISIS, and he warned him to be
Speaker 1: cautious about what he posted online and who he talked
Speaker 1: to about things like this. To be fair, Young did
Speaker 1: eventually offer some advice about how to travel overseas without
Speaker 1: arousing suspicion, and he agreed to help Mo with his
Speaker 1: cover story by sending him a text that would corroborate
Speaker 1: the lie that he was going on vacation in Turkey.
Speaker 1: Young believed that his friend was going to Syria, and
Speaker 1: before Moe pretended to leave for Syria, the pair used
Speaker 1: computers at a FedEx store to set up special email
Speaker 1: addresses that they could use to communicate during the trip.
Speaker 1: Young went to the FedEx store several times over the
Speaker 1: next year and a half to send and receive emails.
Speaker 1: In December of twenty fifteen, over a year after Mo
Speaker 1: pretended to leave for Syria, FBI agents came to Young's
Speaker 1: house twice to ask him if he knew anything about.
Speaker 2: Mo, and he did lie.
Speaker 1: He told agents that he'd had no contact with Mo
Speaker 1: since he left for Turkey in late twenty fourteen, and
Speaker 1: he had no way of getting in touch with him.
Speaker 1: He then emailed Mo to tell him that the FBI
Speaker 1: was asking about him, and that right there, that is
Speaker 1: a crime. It is a crime to lie to an
Speaker 1: FBI agent about a material fact relevant to a criminal investigation,
Speaker 1: even if it's a fake criminal investigation. Moe wasn't real,
Speaker 1: but Young didn't know that. In those interviews, he was
Speaker 1: consciously obstructing what he believed to be a real investigation,
Speaker 1: but that wasn't really enough to pull the trigger on
Speaker 1: an indictment. They needed him to do something, something they
Speaker 1: could take to a grand jury. In July of twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: an undercover agent posing as MO reached out to Young again.
Speaker 1: He said, Isis needed gift cards. They needed someone in
Speaker 1: the West to buy gift cards and then send them
Speaker 1: the codes on the back, and they needed those gift
Speaker 1: cards because that's what they used to set up the
Speaker 1: messaging accounts that they used to communicate with supporters in
Speaker 1: the West. MO said they'd had guys in the UK
Speaker 1: who'd been buying the gift cards, but they stopped sending
Speaker 1: the codes. Young wrote back, why were the brothers in
Speaker 1: UK told to stop?
Speaker 2: Inshallah?
Speaker 1: More codes will come your way many sting operations and
Speaker 1: setups in this area. He didn't agree to do it
Speaker 1: right away. He was cordial, he was inquisitive. He hoped
Speaker 1: things would work out for the beast, for his friend,
Speaker 1: but he wasn't willing to do it. That same week,
Speaker 1: two FBI agents working on the case were texting each other.
Speaker 1: The first agent wrote, let's hope he goes one more
Speaker 1: step further and his colleague replied just one more step,
Speaker 1: to which the first agent responded one huge step with
Speaker 1: four exclamation points, and the second agent wrote one small
Speaker 1: step for US, one giant leap for slow decline, slow decline.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they would just write SD. That was Nicholas Young's
Speaker 1: code name. They'd been calling him that for years. In
Speaker 1: the summer of twenty sixteen, six years into their investigation,
Speaker 1: they were frustrated he was too cautious, too slow, too
Speaker 1: unwilling to take a next step. They decided to ratchet
Speaker 1: up the pressure. They sent him more and more emails
Speaker 1: from MO about the importance of the work he was
Speaker 1: doing over there.
Speaker 2: MO told him horror.
Speaker 1: Stories about bombings and what was being done to Muslim children.
Speaker 1: And as they're goading Young into taking action behind the scenes,
Speaker 1: one agent commented that they'd just hit the case with
Speaker 1: a defibrillator. After a few days of this convincing, Young
Speaker 1: drove to a best Buy in Fairfax, Virginia, and he
Speaker 1: bought a handful of Google Play gift cards. Finally, in
Speaker 1: July twenty eighth, twenty sixteen, Nicholas Young sent a text
Speaker 1: containing twenty two sixteen digit codes, each one from the
Speaker 1: back of a Google play gift card redeemable for ten
Speaker 1: or fifteen dollars. The total value was two hundred and
Speaker 1: forty five dollars. The best Buy receipt was still in
Speaker 1: his backpack when he was arrested a few days later.
Speaker 1: So he didn't do it right. I mean he did it.
Speaker 1: He bought the gift cards. And when he bought the
Speaker 1: gift cards, he really did believe their purpose was to
Speaker 1: allow ISIS to set up messaging accounts to communicate with
Speaker 1: prospective fighters in the West. That's what Moe told him
Speaker 1: they were for. There was no coded language. There's no
Speaker 1: room for misunderstanding here. Most said they were for ISIS,
Speaker 1: So technically yes, that is material support for terrorism. He
Speaker 1: doesn't deny that he bought the gift cards or that
Speaker 1: he texted the codes to Mow. That's not in dispute.
Speaker 1: The real drama in this case is the unhinged trial
Speaker 1: strategy pursued by the government. Remember I said at the
Speaker 1: top of the episode that I was surprised to see
Speaker 1: that the jury had been shown so much evidence of
Speaker 1: Nicholas Young's collection of Nazi memorabilia. It was his fondness
Speaker 1: for Hitler that first brought this case to my attention,
Speaker 1: But ultimately that part of his life had nothing to
Speaker 1: do with this case. So how did it wind up
Speaker 1: in the record at all? If you're not someone who
Speaker 1: spends a lot of time sitting in a courtroom, you
Speaker 1: might not be asking yourself that. After all, why wouldn't
Speaker 1: a jury get to see all the weird shit they
Speaker 1: found in this guy's house? Isn't everything the cops found
Speaker 1: in their evidence? I know I'm about to tell you
Speaker 1: that the judge in this case was asked that question
Speaker 1: and he decided the answer was yes. But typically the
Speaker 1: answer to that question is no. Pictures of this guy's
Speaker 1: Nazi themed dinner party in two thousand and seven are
Speaker 1: very interesting to me, but they don't actually tell a
Speaker 1: jury anything meaningful about whether or not he knowingly financed
Speaker 1: terrorism in twenty six sixteen. Not to get boring about it,
Speaker 1: but this is a pretty textbook example of something that
Speaker 1: fails to satisfy the only two federal rules of evidence
Speaker 1: that I could name for you off the top of
Speaker 1: my head. It's both irrelevant and highly prejudicial. Relevance is
Speaker 1: easy to explain. That's rule four oh one, and it
Speaker 1: reads evidence is relevant if a it has a tendency
Speaker 1: to make a fact more or less probable than it
Speaker 1: would be without the evidence, and b the fact is
Speaker 1: of consequence in determining the action. That's pretty straightforward. It
Speaker 1: does just what it says on the tin. You know,
Speaker 1: does seeing this piece of evidence tell you anything about
Speaker 1: the facts at issue in this case? Does knowing he
Speaker 1: had a Nazi tattoo on his neck give you any
Speaker 1: valuable information about the gift cards? It really doesn't easy enough.
Speaker 1: I know I'm always telling you I didn't go to
Speaker 1: law school, but Rule four h three and its state
Speaker 1: court equivalents are something I hear argument about in I
Speaker 1: think every case I've ever sat through. Quote the court
Speaker 1: may exclude relevant evidence if its probative value is substantially
Speaker 1: outweighed by a danger of one or more of the
Speaker 1: following unfair prejudice, confusing the issues, misleading a jury, undue delay,
Speaker 1: wasting time, or needlessly presenting cumulative evidence. So sometimes evidence
Speaker 1: that gets excluded is relevant. It passes the relevance test,
Speaker 1: it would help a jury make a determination about the facts,
Speaker 1: but it's inflammatory, it's prejudicial. Its probative value, so whether
Speaker 1: or not it tells you anything is outweighed by the
Speaker 1: prejudicial impact it would have. There's information to be learned
Speaker 1: from it, but there's a real likelihood that it could,
Speaker 1: for example, make the jury too emotional to be fair
Speaker 1: and impartial. Sometimes that means that a jury won't see
Speaker 1: particularly graphic crime scene or autopsy photos because those would
Speaker 1: upset them without meaningfully adding to their understanding of the case.
Speaker 1: In a lot of cases where I hear this argued,
Speaker 1: it's usually because the defense doesn't want the jury to
Speaker 1: be told about their client's affiliation with a hate group.
Speaker 1: They might file emotion ahead of time, asking the court
Speaker 1: to prohibit any mention of it, or prohibit the introduction
Speaker 1: of evidence that a defendant who did something like assault
Speaker 1: a black person or vandalize a synagogue. They might not
Speaker 1: want evidence introduced that they have a swastika tattoo or something.
Speaker 1: The idea is that you don't want the prosecutor to
Speaker 1: be able to flood the jury with a bunch of
Speaker 1: images that will leave them thinking, damn, this is a
Speaker 1: really bad guy and he needs to be punished. The
Speaker 1: jury is supposed to decide if the state has proved
Speaker 1: the elements of the case. The jury decides did this
Speaker 1: person do this crime not. Is this defendant a good person. So,
Speaker 1: even if the evidence might contribute a little bit to
Speaker 1: their understanding of the facts of the case, it may
Speaker 1: be that this evidence is more likely to sway the
Speaker 1: jury into making a decision for the wrong reasons. And,
Speaker 1: to be honest, most of the time I hear this argued,
Speaker 1: I feel like the jury should have gotten to hear it.
Speaker 1: They deserve to hear about the racist shit this guy's
Speaker 1: getting up to in his extra curriculars.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: One example that comes to mind right away is during
Speaker 1: the lawsuit against the organizers of the Unite the Right rally,
Speaker 1: the judge ruled that it was unfairly prejudicial to introduce
Speaker 1: evidence about one of the organizer's past. There was plenty
Speaker 1: of evidence about statements leading up to, during, and immediately
Speaker 1: after the rally, but in a case involving a racially
Speaker 1: motivated violent conspiracy, the judge felt it was unfairly pres
Speaker 1: judicial to tell the jury that one of the defendants
Speaker 1: had previously been convicted of something you could fairly call
Speaker 1: a racially motivated violent conspiracy, specifically that he'd want stolen
Speaker 1: machine guns from the army and given them to the
Speaker 1: clan so they could start a race war. So I
Speaker 1: was under the impression that the bar was pretty high
Speaker 1: for this kind of thing. So as I'm picking through
Speaker 1: the filings in the Nicolas Young case, it seemed very
Speaker 1: weird to me that they were able to convince a
Speaker 1: judge to let them show the jury so many pictures
Speaker 1: of Hitler. What does Hitler have to do with Jihad?
Speaker 1: Why would pictures of his Nazi tattoos help a jury
Speaker 1: decide if he was guilty of buying a gift card
Speaker 1: for Isis. Unfortunately for you, the answer is another boring
Speaker 1: bit of legalese. The defense wanted to argue that this
Speaker 1: was a case of entrapment. That word doesn't mean when
Speaker 1: you think it means. I can promise you, unless you
Speaker 1: practice criminal law, I can almost guarantee you that whatever
Speaker 1: you think entrapment means is not what a judge thinks
Speaker 1: it means. An undercover cop doesn't have to tell you
Speaker 1: they're a cop, even if you ask. They can lie
Speaker 1: to you about anything and everything. Undercovers and informants can
Speaker 1: do illegal stuff with you. It can even be entirely
Speaker 1: their idea. They can buy you the gun, put it
Speaker 1: in your hand, and drive you to the crime scene.
Speaker 1: Almost every scenario you can think of for an undercover
Speaker 1: cop is so outrageously over the top. Complicit in the
Speaker 1: planning and execution of a crime isn't entrapment.
Speaker 2: It does happen.
Speaker 1: It's rare, but it is technically possible to succeed in
Speaker 1: arguing that you're not guilty of a crime because an
Speaker 1: agent of the state induced you to do it. It
Speaker 1: can work, but it's never worked in a terrorism case.
Speaker 1: According to an article in the Journal of Criminal Law
Speaker 1: and Criminology, I read the whole paper twice before I
Speaker 1: realized I know the author, and I probably could have
Speaker 1: just asked him nicely to explain it to me in
Speaker 1: smaller words. But that's my punishment for getting all my
Speaker 1: writing down in the middle of the night. Of the
Speaker 1: hundreds of terrorism cases brought by the DJ in the
Speaker 1: first decade after nine to eleven, Thomas Frampton wrote quote
Speaker 1: in the popular press, the improbability of such plots has
Speaker 1: generated skepticism. Several authors have suggested that the FBI, in
Speaker 1: its zeal to demonstrate tangible success in the fight against terrorism,
Speaker 1: has been improperly manufacturing nonexistent terrorist schemes. The FBI is
Speaker 1: catching guys who almost did something they were never going
Speaker 1: to do. But despite the fact that almost all of
Speaker 1: the terrorism related prosecutions in the United States are based
Speaker 1: on sting operations where the would be terrorist was induced, coached,
Speaker 1: and aided every step of the way by a copper informant,
Speaker 1: no one has ever prevailed in court by asserting an
Speaker 1: entrapment defense. So what is entrapment? In order to successfully
Speaker 1: argue entrapment, you have to show that a state actor,
Speaker 1: so a copper, a paid informant, induced you to commit
Speaker 1: the crime, and that you lacked the predisposition to have
Speaker 1: done it on your own. The first part's easy. The
Speaker 1: informant and the undercover agent coaxed him into it.
Speaker 2: It was their idea. They begged and pleaded.
Speaker 1: They spent years insinuating themselves into his life. They got
Speaker 1: close to him. The agents were having private conversations behind
Speaker 1: the scenes about how to push him over the edge
Speaker 1: to actually commit a crime. They were essentially saying to
Speaker 1: each other, this guy isn't going to break the law
Speaker 1: unless we make him. But the second prong of the
Speaker 1: test is slippery. Sure, maybe the government talked you into
Speaker 1: committing the crime. But you wouldn't have actually done it
Speaker 1: unless you were predisposed to doing things like that. Right,
Speaker 1: If you weren't the kind of person who had a
Speaker 1: natural predisposition to commit this crime, you wouldn't have This
Speaker 1: crime is obviously in your nature. For this part of
Speaker 1: the test, there are some courts that use what's called
Speaker 1: an objective test, asking the question would this have worked
Speaker 1: on a reasonable person? But most courts, including the federal courts,
Speaker 1: use a subjective standard. So the question becomes, was this
Speaker 1: particular defendant predisposed to committing this crime? Now? I read
Speaker 1: a couple of papers, but if you ask me, this
Speaker 1: is the law saying does the defendant have bad vibes?
Speaker 1: And the answer, it turns out, is always yeah. Determining
Speaker 1: whether someone is predisposed towards crime is alarmingly vibes based.
Speaker 1: It's not just a question of your criminal history. You know,
Speaker 1: have you done something like this before? Have you even
Speaker 1: tried to do something like this before? No. It opens
Speaker 1: up the door for an exploration of your character, and
Speaker 1: that's something that's normally very much off limits in a
Speaker 1: criminal trial. As Prampton wrote, quote, the defense is unusual
Speaker 1: because it makes a searching inquiry into the defendant's character
Speaker 1: or criminal propensities the centerpiece of the criminal trial. This
Speaker 1: stands in marked contrast to the traditional focus of Anglo
Speaker 1: American criminal jurisprudence, which generally spurns such evidence as irrelevant
Speaker 1: to the central issue of moral blameworthiness for a particular
Speaker 1: volitional criminal act. In a twenty fourteen report, Human Rights
Speaker 1: Watch suggests that it may not even be possible for
Speaker 1: an entrapment defense to work in a terrorism case. The
Speaker 1: nature of the argument requires the jury to make a
Speaker 1: determination about the defendant's character. They're not deciding if the
Speaker 1: defendant is guilty or not guilty of the crime. They're
Speaker 1: deciding if this is an innocent person.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 1: This character inquiry makes it exceptionally difficult for a defendant
Speaker 1: to succeed in raising the entrapment defense, particularly in the
Speaker 1: terrorism context, where inflammatory stereotypes and highly charged characterizations of
Speaker 1: Islam and foreigners often prevail. And that is how we
Speaker 1: ended up with dozens of exacts its demonstrating that Nicholas
Speaker 1: Young loved Hitler. Young's attorneys tried to keep this evidence
Speaker 1: out at emotions hearing. Assistant US Attorney Gordon Kromberg argued
Speaker 1: that quote, the Nazi stuff in this case is very
Speaker 1: much related to the.
Speaker 2: Isis stuff.
Speaker 1: The Nazi stuff is related to the Isis stuff. A
Speaker 1: great deal of ink was spilled on the subject in
Speaker 1: motions back and forth. But I'm not convinced by Kromberg's argument,
Speaker 1: nor that of the expert witness he put on the
Speaker 1: stand to explain it to the jury at trial. I'm
Speaker 1: not saying that there's no conversation to be had about
Speaker 1: the curious phenomenon of cross pollination within online communities of
Speaker 1: right wing accelerationists and Salafi jihadists. I'd intended to devote
Speaker 1: a little more time to exploring that in this episode,
Speaker 1: but I think it's a longer conversation for another day.
Speaker 1: There's been some interesting writing in just the last five
Speaker 1: years on the nature of this trend within some fringe
Speaker 1: online spaces of melding the narrative and esthetics of neo
Speaker 1: Nazism and Islamic extremism. The trend itself isn't necessarily new,
Speaker 1: but all of the scholarship I can find is fairly recent.
Speaker 1: But it is out there, and we've already talked in
Speaker 1: passing about several examples of this phenomenon. Remember Brandon Russell,
Speaker 1: the founder of Adam Woffen. Back in twenty eighteen, he
Speaker 1: was sharing a house in Florida with three other members
Speaker 1: of his neo Nazi terrorist organization when one of them,
Speaker 1: Devon Arthur's, murdered the other two. Arthur's had recently converted
Speaker 1: to Islam. And remember Ethan Melzer, the young Army private
Speaker 1: who communicated classified troop movements to someone that he thought
Speaker 1: was in Al Qaida because he thought a little had
Speaker 1: would help kick off the kind of worldwide violence necessary
Speaker 1: for the race war envisioned by his particular brand of
Speaker 1: neo Nazism. And in a more general sense, it's not
Speaker 1: even all that rare to see your average neo Nazi
Speaker 1: terror enthusiasts talking about things like white Shariah or white Jihad,
Speaker 1: borrowing the language and symbolism, or drawing inspiration from groups
Speaker 1: like al Qaeda or ISIS, And in a broad sense,
Speaker 1: they do have things in common. On the extreme end
Speaker 1: of both of these ideologies, you have misogyny, homophobia, anti semitism,
Speaker 1: glorification of violence. Think about terogram, where you have the
Speaker 1: idolization of the mass shooters that they call saints, these
Speaker 1: people who have killed and died for the cause. What
Speaker 1: is that if not a martyr. White supremacists have been
Speaker 1: calling for RAHOA for decades. That's a shortened form of
Speaker 1: the phrase racial holy war.
Speaker 2: So you can kind of see.
Speaker 1: Where the edges of these things could bleed together a
Speaker 1: little bit. It's an interesting topic to explore, and there's
Speaker 1: not a clear cut answer here about how sincere any
Speaker 1: particular actor is. What's a meme, what's a recruitment tactic,
Speaker 1: what's trolling? What's just equal opportunity, love of violence? It's
Speaker 1: all over the map, and it's evolving. I'll pop a
Speaker 1: few links in the show notes to a few papers
Speaker 1: on the topic that I thought were interesting. But I'm
Speaker 1: going to come back to this when I've had some
Speaker 1: time to do a little more reading. So I'm not
Speaker 1: saying there's no basis for an argument that Nicholas Young's
Speaker 1: interest in Nazi memorabilia could potentially be relevant to his
Speaker 1: material support of ISIS. There is room here for a
Speaker 1: conversation about some interplay between his belief in these ideologies.
Speaker 1: But I am saying that I thought about it. I
Speaker 1: considered the facts of the case that are on the record.
Speaker 1: I read a pretty significant chunk of the extant literature
Speaker 1: on syncretic extremism, and I gotta say I think they
Speaker 1: violated the civil rights of this Hitler enthusiast. I take
Speaker 1: no pleasure in telling you that Nicholas Young is an
Speaker 1: extremely unsympathetic individual. No one is more upset than I
Speaker 1: am that I have to tell you that. I don't
Speaker 1: think they were fair to the cop with the Nazi tattoos,
Speaker 1: and he say some pretty wild stuff about jihad.
Speaker 2: To those informants.
Speaker 1: But I don't think it was proper to present these
Speaker 1: two things as reinforcing evidence of one another in a
Speaker 1: criminal trial. Again, I'm not even saying there's no possibility
Speaker 1: that these things were intertwined for him, but that's not
Speaker 1: what they put on the record. This evidence was produced
Speaker 1: to counter the entrapment defense. It was produced to show predisposition.
Speaker 1: The entire purpose was to show the jury that this
Speaker 1: is a bad guy who believes bad things, so he
Speaker 1: probably does bad things.
Speaker 2: And that's not how it's supposed to work. For this case.
Speaker 1: Doctor Dovid Gartenstein Ross was hired by the prosecution to
Speaker 1: prepare a report on quote the relationship between affinity for
Speaker 1: Nazism and inclination to support militant Islamic groups. The first
Speaker 1: ten pages of the report are I guess they're supposed
Speaker 1: to be a resume, but it's in narrative form. It's
Speaker 1: not the traditional CV that's submitted to the court when
Speaker 1: you offer up an expert. And then what follows is
Speaker 1: just a loosely connected series of largely unsubstantiated statements and anecdotes,
Speaker 1: and it all somehow adds up to the conclusion that
Speaker 1: Nazis and Isis both hate Jewish people, thus making them
Speaker 1: ideologically similar in such a significant way that it would
Speaker 1: be common and expected for someone to drift from one
Speaker 1: worldview into the other. And he ends with the bold
Speaker 1: pronouncement that quote, I conclude that evidence in individual's affinity
Speaker 1: for Nazism is related to the question of whether that
Speaker 1: individual is predisposed to supporting militant Islamist groups. This report
Speaker 1: was written shortly after the case was filed back in
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, and at that time there was no meaningful
Speaker 1: existing scholarship on this phenomenon. He cites none. It doesn't exist.
Speaker 1: The academic writing produced on the topic in the last
Speaker 1: few years does recognize the existence of this ideological soup
Speaker 1: that exists at the far fringes, But most of the
Speaker 1: authors I've read seem to agree that it's not common,
Speaker 1: it's not universal, and it's not well documented enough to
Speaker 1: make a conclusion like that. When you read a study,
Speaker 1: you should look into how it came to be written,
Speaker 1: who wrote it, what's their background, what did they study,
Speaker 1: where did they work, did someone pay for it?
Speaker 2: What else have they written? Is there any publicly.
Speaker 1: Available evidence about their beliefs or their motivations. You can't
Speaker 1: always answer all of these questions, and god willing, the
Speaker 1: answers are usually pretty mundane. In this case, the report
Speaker 1: was paid for by the government. Doctor grtnstein Ross was
Speaker 1: paid sixteen thousand dollars for his work on the case.
Speaker 1: That in itself isn't unusual or cause for concern. You
Speaker 1: often see it presented that way in a trial. You know,
Speaker 1: the opposing council insinuating that the expert is only saying
Speaker 1: what they've been paid to say. But it's not weird
Speaker 1: to pay an expert for their time, and serving as
Speaker 1: an expert witness can be a significant time commitment. So
Speaker 1: question answered not a huge red plaque. His background appears
Speaker 1: to be in Islamic extremism, both as a past participant
Speaker 1: and a current researcher. After dabbling briefly in Islamic extremism,
Speaker 1: he went to work in a nonprofit called the Investigative
Speaker 1: Project on Terrorism. The IPT is one of the leading
Speaker 1: purveyors of pseudo academic Islamophobia, and it's cited as an
Speaker 1: example of groups with quote thinly veiled political motives typically
Speaker 1: infused with poor scholarship and extremely selective reporting in a
Speaker 1: twenty fifteen issue of Critical Studies on Terrorism. After a
Speaker 1: brief stint there, doctor Grtnstein Ross moved on to the
Speaker 1: Foundation for Defense of Democrat, where he's been since two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven. The FDD claims to have been founded
Speaker 1: in the aftermath of nine to eleven to address the
Speaker 1: global threat of terrorism, but the original incorporation paperwork shows
Speaker 1: that it was founded in April of two thousand and one,
Speaker 1: several months before nine to eleven, and the original stated
Speaker 1: purpose of the organization was providing quote education meant to
Speaker 1: enhance Israel's image in North America. They revised that mission
Speaker 1: statement after nine to eleven, and they've sought to distance
Speaker 1: themselves from their original mission as a pro Israel lobbying group,
Speaker 1: but public disclosures of their lobbying expenditures show a disproportionate
Speaker 1: interest in pro Israel and anti Iran measures. A founding
Speaker 1: board member and a primary donor to FDD is Trump
Speaker 1: Megadnor and former Home Depot CEO Bernie Marcus. And. After
Speaker 1: Trump's win in twenty sixteen, several analysts of the Foundation left,
Speaker 1: claiming the organization was limiting criticism of Trump in their analysis.
Speaker 1: The Foundation for Defense of Democracies has been called an
Speaker 1: anti Muslim fringe group by Duke University sociologist Christopher Bale.
Speaker 1: Farid Hafez, a political scientist at Salzburg University, identified FDD
Speaker 1: as a key player in what he calls a transatlantic
Speaker 1: network of Islamophobia. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to
Speaker 1: Colin Powell, has accused the Foundation of knowingly peddling falsehoods
Speaker 1: to push for war with Iran. The progressive think tank
Speaker 1: Institute for Policy Studies has noted that while the organization
Speaker 1: is quote an ardent critic of terrorism, it has not
Speaker 1: criticized actions taken by Israel against Palestinians that arguably fall
Speaker 1: into this category, and for what it's worth, Iran's Ministry
Speaker 1: of Foreign Affairs has designated the Foundation as a foreign
Speaker 1: terrorist organization. So I guess two can play at that game.
Speaker 1: And the prosecutor who put this expert on the stand
Speaker 1: is no stranger to accusations of Islamophobia of his own.
Speaker 1: Gordon Kromberg has been called a loose cannon by legal
Speaker 1: ethicists and has been accused of personal animus against Muslim defendants.
Speaker 1: When the subject of a grand jury subpoena requested a
Speaker 1: postponement until after Ramadan.
Speaker 2: Kromberg called it quote part of the.
Speaker 1: Attempted Islamization of the American justice system. According to a
Speaker 1: complaint from that individual's attorney, Kromberg quote became agitated in
Speaker 1: the court room and said, quote, they can kill each
Speaker 1: other during Ramadan, they can testify before a grand jury.
Speaker 1: When Ahmed Abu Ali, a United States citizen, was arrested
Speaker 1: and tortured in Saudi Arabia, the man's lawyer asked Kromberg
Speaker 1: if his client might be returned to the United States
Speaker 1: to face pending charges here, and Kromberg reportedly said, quote,
Speaker 1: He's no good for us here. He has no fingernails left,
Speaker 1: though he denies making light of the fact that Ali
Speaker 1: was being tortured. In another case of an American accused
Speaker 1: of supporting a foreign terrorist organization, Kromberg explicitly instructed the
Speaker 1: jury to disregard testimony offered by Muslim witnesses because their
Speaker 1: religion teaches that it is acceptable to lie to non believers.
Speaker 1: Law professor Wadis Said told The Intercept in twenty twenty
Speaker 1: one that Kromberg has a history of provocative stances and quote.
Speaker 1: The positions that he has taken are quite tendentious and
Speaker 1: even vindictive in terms of his mindset toward the person
Speaker 1: he's targeting.
Speaker 2: I'm not so naive.
Speaker 1: As to think it's unusual for a prosecutor to exaggerate
Speaker 1: for dramatic effect, But I just think it's important to
Speaker 1: evaluate the source of a fantastic claim. So when a
Speaker 1: man stands in front of a jury and says that
Speaker 1: a couple of gift cards should send a man to
Speaker 1: prison for fifteen years, you should take a minute to
Speaker 1: check out his track record. Perhaps the most egregious bit
Speaker 1: of evidence offered at trial was an honest to god lie,
Speaker 1: I mean, showing them all the Hitler stuff. That was real.
Speaker 1: That was real evidence. He really did have those things
Speaker 1: in his home. I just don't think it was appropriate
Speaker 1: to use them as evidence in this case. But throughout
Speaker 1: the case, Kromberg claimed that Nicholas Young had attended a
Speaker 1: neo Nazi rally in two thousand and one, and in
Speaker 1: a later article published by doctor Gartnstein Ross in the
Speaker 1: Journal of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, he suggests that
Speaker 1: this is evidence that Young actually converted to Islam in
Speaker 1: two thousand and seven, six years later because of his
Speaker 1: interest in Nazism, as evidence by his attendance at this
Speaker 1: Neo Nazi rally. The problem is that didn't happen. A
Speaker 1: former classmate test In two thousand and one. They were
Speaker 1: both taking a course on European racism taught by Professor
Speaker 1: Aaron Gillette at George Mason University. As part of a
Speaker 1: class project. The two students attended a dinner hosted by
Speaker 1: a neo Nazi group where British fascist Mark Catterill would
Speaker 1: be speaking. Their professor arranged for them to attend and
Speaker 1: even interviewed Catterall after his speech. Mark Catterall was living
Speaker 1: in Virginia at the time. Running a group called the
Speaker 1: American Friends of the British National Party, and the dinner
Speaker 1: was organized by the neo Nazi group National Alliance. And
Speaker 1: here's a weird little guy's Easter egg. I think that
Speaker 1: this was one of those weekly dinners that was hosted
Speaker 1: by Sam Francis at a Thai restaurant in northern Virginia,
Speaker 1: those dinners that a Ron Paul Staffer was outed as
Speaker 1: occasionally attending, but characterizing a school project, one that had
Speaker 1: been signed off on by their history professor as evidence
Speaker 1: that the defendant had a history of attending Nazi rallies,
Speaker 1: which in turn shows that he's predisposed to trying to
Speaker 1: fund isis that's outrageous. Like I said, Nicholas Young is
Speaker 1: not a sympathetic character. He's definitely a weird little guy.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of salacious details about his interests
Speaker 1: that were, in my opinion, improperly presented to the jury
Speaker 1: under other circumstances. It's the kind of stuff I would
Speaker 1: expect to see in a case where a guy really
Speaker 1: did try to do some kind of terrorism, the kind
Speaker 1: of terrorism I write about. But they charged him for
Speaker 1: buying some gift cards, which he did do sure, but
Speaker 1: only after a six year investigation involving hundreds of man hours,
Speaker 1: a team of handlers, a two year relationship with an
Speaker 1: undercover agent, another two year relationship with a paid informant,
Speaker 1: an active encouragement to commit the crime in question. Throughout
Speaker 1: the case, the prosecution implied that Young had committed a
Speaker 1: wide variety of other crimes. In one filing, it's implied
Speaker 1: that he had bomb making materials, but none were presented
Speaker 1: as evidence and he wasn't charged with it. There are
Speaker 1: repeated assertions that he's been illegally purchasing steroids online and
Speaker 1: having them shipped from overseas. They even claim to have
Speaker 1: found illegal steroids in his home on the day of
Speaker 1: the arrest. He's accused of plotting to smuggle guns into
Speaker 1: a courthouse, of plotting to kidnap an FBI agent, of
Speaker 1: joining a terrorist organization in Libya, but it wasn't charged
Speaker 1: with any of that. Did they think they couldn't prove
Speaker 1: those things? Were they padding out the allegations to make
Speaker 1: the underlying case look more serious?
Speaker 2: Who knows? In the end, they.
Speaker 1: Relied on an anti terrorism statute that is notoriously abused
Speaker 1: in sting operations that target Muslim Americans. This former FBI
Speaker 1: agent Mike Jerman wrote in his recent book Policing White Supremacy,
Speaker 1: the material support for Terrorism statute is quote used in
Speaker 1: FBI sting operations that manufacture terrorism threats to produce statistical accomplishments,
Speaker 1: so law enforcement resources are disproportionately allocated to combating foreign terrorism,
Speaker 1: which then results in agents being quote pressured to demonstrate
Speaker 1: their success even if no genuine plots exist. This is
Speaker 1: a question I keep running into on the show. What
Speaker 1: is terrorism? Whose crimes matter to us more importantly, whose
Speaker 1: crimes matter to the government. What kinds of violence are unacceptable?
Speaker 1: What kinds of violence are allowed? What message is being
Speaker 1: communi in the decisions that they make about who, how,
Speaker 1: and when to prosecute and for what. Despite a twenty
Speaker 1: seventeen report from the United States Government Accountability Office which
Speaker 1: showed that right wing extremists are responsible for three times
Speaker 1: the number of domestic attacks as compared to Islamic extremists,
Speaker 1: we don't use the same words.
Speaker 2: To talk about these things.
Speaker 1: When Dylan Roof murdered nine people at a Bible study
Speaker 1: at a Manual African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South
Speaker 1: Carolina FBI Director James Comey said, quote, terrorism is an
Speaker 1: act of violence to try to influence a public body
Speaker 1: or citizenry.
Speaker 2: So it's more of a political act.
Speaker 1: And again, based on what I know so far, I
Speaker 1: don't see it as a political act, not a political act.
Speaker 1: Dylan Roof was very clear about his motivations. He had
Speaker 1: a manifesto. He intentionally left people alive so they could
Speaker 1: tell the story of what happened in that Bible study.
Speaker 1: He was trying to incite a race war, a civil
Speaker 1: war once again ignited in South Carolina, and fought over
Speaker 1: the right of black people to exist freely in the
Speaker 1: United States. That feels very political to me, but that's
Speaker 1: not how we talk about it. As Bruce Hoffman wrote
Speaker 1: in his book God's Guns and Sedition, terrorism as it
Speaker 1: is currently defined in American law treats domestic terror and
Speaker 1: foreign terror very differently, and in the book he refers
Speaker 1: to this case directly, noting that Young was sentenced to
Speaker 1: fifteen years in prison. The average sentence for this charge
Speaker 1: providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization is thirteen
Speaker 1: point five years. Domestic terrorism, on the other hand, often
Speaker 1: results in significantly shorter sentences, even in cases where we've
Speaker 1: used the word, even in cases where the crime is
Speaker 1: much more serious. I mean, first of all, you can't
Speaker 1: even get charged with an equivalent offense. You are free
Speaker 1: to materially support organizations that absolutely should be called a
Speaker 1: domestic terrorist organization without consequence. That's allowed. You can't send
Speaker 1: a ten dollars gift card to ISIS, but you can
Speaker 1: give everything you own to Adam Woffin. Hoffmann lists several
Speaker 1: contrasting examples. So Brendan Russell, the founder of Adam Woffin,
Speaker 1: was arrested in twenty eighteen after officers found his bomb
Speaker 1: making workshop while they were investigating the double homicide committed
Speaker 1: inside his home by his roommate. Russell was released in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one after serving most of a three year sentence,
Speaker 1: and he immediately got back to work planning another active
Speaker 1: domestic terrorism.
Speaker 2: He was convicted.
Speaker 1: Earlier this year for cons firing to take out the
Speaker 1: power grid in Maryland, three years for a garage full
Speaker 1: of bomb making materials and full knowledge that he was
Speaker 1: going to reoffend, but fifteen years for some gift cards.
Speaker 2: Writing about the legal.
Speaker 1: Double standard of defining terrorism, Australian criminologist Helen Taylor wrote
Speaker 1: that quote, the asymmetric use of the terrorism label entrenches
Speaker 1: fear of the other. That is, because we only talk
Speaker 1: about terrorism when we mean Islamic extremist terrorism, we come
Speaker 1: to associate Islam with terrorism. This has obvious negative consequences
Speaker 1: for Muslims. Of course, the last twenty five years have
Speaker 1: been an unending litany of civil rights violations, but it
Speaker 1: also prevents us from appropriately addressing any other form of terrorism.
Speaker 1: The inability to recognize terror when it is something other
Speaker 1: than Post nine to eleven hysteria leads to right wing
Speaker 1: extremist violence being deprioritized. Terrorism investigations are thorough. I mean,
Speaker 1: think about Zachary Chesser, right, the FBI spent six years
Speaker 1: investigating a man that he spoke to twice over a
Speaker 1: year before he made an online threat against the creators
Speaker 1: of a cartoon. But right wing extremist violence, because we
Speaker 1: can't call it terrorism, is quickly relegated to lone wolf territory,
Speaker 1: and there's little attention page of the environment that radicalized
Speaker 1: the perpetrator or potential sources of support and encouragement within
Speaker 1: his network. If the government put even ten percent of
Speaker 1: that energy into investigating and prosecuting far right extremists. They'd
Speaker 1: be drowning in prosecutions. It would not take six years
Speaker 1: to catch your average American neo Nazi agreeing to engage
Speaker 1: in a terrorist act.
Speaker 2: But is that useful? I mean, ultimately, I think the.
Speaker 1: Word itself is dangerous territory. In the twenty four years
Speaker 1: since nine to eleven, the word terrorism has largely served
Speaker 1: as a tool for increasing state surveillance or systematically violating
Speaker 1: civil rights and engorging law enforcement budgets, and it hasn't
Speaker 1: made a safer But if we're going to use that word,
Speaker 1: if we're going to have that framework, we need to
Speaker 1: think about what we mean when we say it. As
Speaker 1: Taylor writes, quote, labeling an act as terrorism serves as
Speaker 1: an official statement about the severity of the crime. It's
Speaker 1: a legal framework, sure, but it's a statement about what matters.
Speaker 1: Maybe there's no grand theory of change that I can
Speaker 1: offer you here. Giving the government more tools for prosecution
Speaker 1: probably won't really help. They're already making ideal, logical choices
Speaker 1: about how to use the tools they have. I guess
Speaker 1: the only real takeaway from this story is that no
Speaker 1: one is ever going to text you demanding the codes
Speaker 1: off the back of a gift card for any legitimate reason.
Speaker 2: Usually it's a scammer.
Speaker 1: Pretending to be the irs to scare your grandma into
Speaker 1: emptying her savings account. But sometimes it's an FBI agent
Speaker 1: pretending to be your friend. Who joined isis? Weird Little
Speaker 1: Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: It's researched, written and recorded by me, Molly Hunger. Our
Speaker 1: executive producers are Sophie Leuchtermann and Robert Evans. The show
Speaker 1: is edited by the wildly talent of Gry Gigan. The
Speaker 1: theme music was composed by Brad Diggert. You can email
Speaker 1: me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com.
Speaker 1: I will definitely read it, but I probably.
Speaker 2: Won't to answer it.
Speaker 1: It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
Speaker 1: show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Speaker 1: Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
Speaker 1: of my Weird Little Guys