Speaker 1: I'm Anny, I'm Noah, this is Devin, and this is
Speaker 1: no such thing. The show where we settle our dumb
Speaker 1: arguments and yours by actually doing the research. On today's episode,
Speaker 1: we're talking about the resurgence of assassinations. We'll talk about
Speaker 1: the Luigi Mangeoni case, and we'll interview a professor from
Speaker 1: the University of Chicago who's been studying political violence for decades.
Speaker 2: There's no no such thing, no such thing, such, thank.
Speaker 3: Such, thank.
Speaker 2: You.
Speaker 1: All Right, quick note that this is what the three
Speaker 1: of us are deeming to be an emergency episode based
Speaker 1: on what's happening in the news, and for that reason,
Speaker 1: it's not going to be structured like a normal episode
Speaker 1: of no such thing. We're talking about the rise of
Speaker 1: political violence, right. We have big newsworthy examples like January sixth, obviously,
Speaker 1: the attack on Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi's husband, the two
Speaker 1: different Trump assassination attempts, and all that kind of leads
Speaker 1: us to this case where this guy, Luigi Mangioni allegedly
Speaker 1: assassinated the CEO of United Healthcare. People suspect that this
Speaker 1: had to do with like frustrations with the healthcare industry,
Speaker 1: but what the three of us are trying to figure
Speaker 1: out is why all of this political violence seems to
Speaker 1: be on the rise. And so, yeah, I think it's
Speaker 1: a fair question, like is political violence on the rise?
Speaker 1: And you know, why does it feel like this is happening.
Speaker 4: It's interesting because we've gotten in many ways used to
Speaker 4: mass shooting events, these sorts of things mm hm, and
Speaker 4: this is obviously close to that, but very different, and
Speaker 4: I think that's why you do see more sympathy for
Speaker 4: the cause. Yeah, perhaps where it's not just random killing
Speaker 4: of normal citizens, it is targeted in this specific way. Yeah,
Speaker 4: which does make more of a statement. I'm curious to
Speaker 4: hear why we are seeing arise in that. Yeah, it
Speaker 4: was interesting, like this kind of violence like when it
Speaker 4: has a motivation, and when the motivation of the violence
Speaker 4: is like something that a lot of people can agree with,
Speaker 4: like obviously not the killing itself, but when the cause,
Speaker 4: so to speak, has this sentiment that's against the way
Speaker 4: that like healthcare runs in this country. You know, we
Speaker 4: did see like a very layered, very interesting reaction to this.
Speaker 5: Just antidotally. What I've noticed is that people feel more
Speaker 5: disconnected from the system in a way you just taught
Speaker 5: this with like low turnout during the election yea amongst
Speaker 5: young people, and I think few people I think are
Speaker 5: over going through the means of the system to see results.
Speaker 5: And now I think, you know, we don't exactly know,
Speaker 5: like you're saying, there's this suppose in manifesto, we don't
Speaker 5: exactly know what the motive was here. Yeah, but I
Speaker 5: have seen people respond in a way that suggests that
Speaker 5: they are open to people finding creative ways around the system.
Speaker 5: This seek change, you.
Speaker 1: Know, not to perpetuate my reputation as a Bernie bro
Speaker 1: but like I think he and Elizabeth Warren had kind
Speaker 1: of the quote unquote correct take on this thing, which
Speaker 1: is to immediately like condemn the shooting, but then try
Speaker 1: and figure out why this is happening. We you know,
Speaker 1: we don't know shit about this. So we are after
Speaker 1: the break, we are going to talk to Robert Pape,
Speaker 1: who is a professor at the University of Chicago and
Speaker 1: he's been studying political violence for decades. So let's just
Speaker 1: talk to him. Hello, Professor Pape, thank you for doing this.
Speaker 1: Can you just start by telling us who you are.
Speaker 6: My name is Robert Pape. I'm a professor of Political
Speaker 6: Science and director of the University of Chicago Project on
Speaker 6: Security and Threats. I study political violence. I've been studying
Speaker 6: political violence for thirty years. For the last four years
Speaker 6: I have studied American political violence rather extensively. Obviously, I've
Speaker 6: got a lot of things to say, you know, I've
Speaker 6: done a bunch of things on this in the last week,
Speaker 6: and I'm going to be studying political violence here in
Speaker 6: America it looks like easily the next five years.
Speaker 1: Let's just start there. I think like you've mentioned that
Speaker 1: there is this trend, and it's an upward trend, and
Speaker 1: you don't think it's going anywhere. Can you just walk
Speaker 1: us through what exactly that trend is, how you measure it,
Speaker 1: and where you think it's going to take us.
Speaker 6: The way you measure political violence in the United States
Speaker 6: or in Iraq or Afghanistan anywhere around the world is
Speaker 6: really pretty much the same. What Political violences are acts
Speaker 6: of violence that are meant to send a political message
Speaker 6: or have an impact on society as a whole, or
Speaker 6: to change the behavior of an actor, whether it's a
Speaker 6: government of corporation in any particular in any particular direction.
Speaker 6: So whether you want to defund the police, whether you
Speaker 6: want to get the university administration to stop supporting Israel,
Speaker 6: whether you're trying to stop an election that is the
Speaker 6: transfer of power. These are just some of the examples
Speaker 6: that all fit under the hood of political violence. Now,
Speaker 6: starting about five or six years ago, we started to
Speaker 6: see an unbelievably noticeable trend upwards in lone wolf political
Speaker 6: violent attacks. Obviously, the CEO murder fits a lone wolf factor.
Speaker 6: So in twenty eighteen we saw the Tree of Life
Speaker 6: Life shooting.
Speaker 2: A tragic day in the city of Pittsburgh, a mass
Speaker 2: shooting apparently driven by hate at a synagogue in Squirrel Hill.
Speaker 2: At this hour, eleven people are confirmed dead, six more injured,
Speaker 2: including four Pittsburgh Police officers.
Speaker 6: What you had was you had a lone wolf attacker.
Speaker 6: And then he left a manifesto, and his manifesto was
Speaker 6: all about what's called the Great Replacement, which is this
Speaker 6: idea that whites are being deliberately replaced. Then in August
Speaker 6: twenty nineteen, we saw another mash shooting, this time at
Speaker 6: a Walmart in Al Paso, killing over twenty Hispanics. And
Speaker 6: this too, he left a manifesto about the Great replacement
Speaker 6: really the identical political theory, this time blaming the issue
Speaker 6: of the Hispanics in this complex political conspiracy theory. And
Speaker 6: then we saw in May twenty twenty two the Buffalo shooting,
Speaker 6: where again you have an attacker. He's killing approximately ten
Speaker 6: innocent African America just standing in line at a top supermarket. Here.
Speaker 6: They've done nothing to him. He doesn't know them from Adam.
Speaker 6: And he too leaves a manifesto, this one hundred and
Speaker 6: sixty pages long. So these are clearly acts of also
Speaker 6: about the Great Replacement. What those three attacks have in
Speaker 6: common is those shooters we're trying to advance the agenda,
Speaker 6: a political agenda against what's called the Great Replacement. This
Speaker 6: is a right wing conspiracy theory that's been around for years.
Speaker 7: What Joe Biden is doing now will change this country forever.
Speaker 7: So again, why is he doing it? There's only one
Speaker 7: plausible answer. You're not allowed to say it out loud.
Speaker 7: In political terms, this policy is called the Great Replacement,
Speaker 7: the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from
Speaker 7: far away countries.
Speaker 6: But in these cases, these shooters are leaving manifestos articulating
Speaker 6: this political agenda and that's why when I saw the
Speaker 6: writing on the shellcasings of the CEO killing.
Speaker 8: CBS News has confirmed from law enforcement officials that the
Speaker 8: words deny, defend, and depose we're written on shellcasings at
Speaker 8: the scene. Investigators are now looking into if those words
Speaker 8: point to a motive related to insurance companies' responses to claims.
Speaker 6: Right away, the clear signs of a politically motivated attack,
Speaker 6: even if there was somehow an additional personal motive involved.
Speaker 6: And the more we've found out, there appears to be
Speaker 6: no beef that this guy had with the actual healthcare
Speaker 6: insurance company itself. We're finding like virtually no connection at all.
Speaker 6: It appears to be almost one hundred percent politically motivated,
Speaker 6: and that is really a common thing. You often get,
Speaker 6: these mixed motives, you see what I mean, So people
Speaker 6: are sometimes saying, well, is that only one hundred percent
Speaker 6: politically driven. Often what you find are volatile individuals. They
Speaker 6: have their own reasons for being on the edge of violence,
Speaker 6: for their own psycho social reasons. Many of them are
Speaker 6: mentally ill. But then you have this political motive layered
Speaker 6: on top and their belief that their act will become popular.
Speaker 6: That often nudges them over the edge.
Speaker 5: So we've been thinking about this obviously a lot over
Speaker 5: the last couple of days, but I don't think those
Speaker 5: two examples came up for us at all during our conversations.
Speaker 5: I guess in our minds we hadn't been thinking about
Speaker 5: mass shootings as fitting into this larger conversation about political violence.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and the fact that people who are anxious about
Speaker 4: this great replacement theory end up being the primary source
Speaker 4: of political violence.
Speaker 1: Professor, We've been asking why there's been this general increase
Speaker 1: in political violence. Is the answer to that question as
Speaker 1: simple as the demographic shifts that have been happening around
Speaker 1: the world, or is there more to it?
Speaker 6: I would say the big tap route is the demographic shift.
Speaker 6: We are going through a historic transition in our country
Speaker 6: from a white majority democracy to a white minority, truly balanced,
Speaker 6: multiracial democracy. This helps to explain a lot of the
Speaker 6: virulent reaction to Donald Trump.
Speaker 3: You know, when they let I think the real numbers,
Speaker 3: fifteen sixteen million people into our country.
Speaker 1: When they do that, we got a lot of work
Speaker 1: to do.
Speaker 4: They're poisoning the blood of our country.
Speaker 1: That's what they've done.
Speaker 6: Because you have folks who are really on the let's
Speaker 6: call them on the right, who are very nervous about
Speaker 6: this transition that's about to happen, and they would like
Speaker 6: it to be more managed or more carefully done and
Speaker 6: slow down. That's where this general nervousness is from. Where
Speaker 6: are they going to come out in this transition? And
Speaker 6: then the others polarization, social media, Trump's character in his
Speaker 6: personal style of politics. I would say those are three
Speaker 6: additional factors, but they're like secondary.
Speaker 1: So you've been walking us through the general rise in
Speaker 1: political violence over the years and how it's tied to
Speaker 1: the great replacement conspiracy theory and that there is demographic
Speaker 1: change happening all over the world. But the conspiracy part
Speaker 1: is that it's being done deliberately to wipe out white populations.
Speaker 1: And then you get these lone wolf characters who are
Speaker 1: radicalized by this and they end up being the source
Speaker 1: of political violence. In the past few years, but we've
Speaker 1: been really interested in assassinations, specifically political violence that is
Speaker 1: targeted towards a specific person, like this healthcare CEO. Have
Speaker 1: you been tracking assassinations? Are those on the rise as well?
Speaker 6: So in twenty twenty two, we saw not just that
Speaker 6: plot against Justice Cavanaugh.
Speaker 1: A man who fully say planned to kill Supreme Court
Speaker 1: Justice Brett Kavanaugh is charged with attempted murder this morning.
Speaker 6: And then also in October twenty twenty two, we saw
Speaker 6: the assassination attempt against Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi,
Speaker 6: which missed her but almost killed her her husband.
Speaker 8: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office says that someone broke into
Speaker 8: her home in San Francisco this morning and violently attacked
Speaker 8: her husband.
Speaker 6: Then in the next summer of June twenty twenty three,
Speaker 6: there was an assailant trying to live stream and attack
Speaker 6: against Barack Obama's home.
Speaker 7: A man who Polisse was armed with explosives is arrested
Speaker 7: outside the Washington, d C. Home of former President Barack Obama.
Speaker 6: And then of course we've seen the two assassination attempts
Speaker 6: against Donald Trump, and there is a whole spate of
Speaker 6: attacks against congressional leaders that collection right there, just that
Speaker 6: number that I identified. You have to go back to
Speaker 6: nineteen sixty eight. You have to go back to that
Speaker 6: year which saw the assassination of Martin Luther King.
Speaker 3: Some very sad news for all of you, and I
Speaker 3: think sad news for all of our fellow citizens and
Speaker 3: people who love peace all over the world, and that
Speaker 3: is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed
Speaker 3: tonight in Efica.
Speaker 6: Then just a few months later you had the assassination
Speaker 6: of Robert F. Kennedy, who was then the leading contender
Speaker 6: for the Democratic presidential nomination when he was assassinated. If
Speaker 6: you just focus just on that issue of assassinations, you
Speaker 6: can see right away that we're at a historical high.
Speaker 6: We are on a slippery slope of normalization of violence
Speaker 6: in our country. I call this the era of violent
Speaker 6: popular What we find in our surveys is that between
Speaker 6: five ten percent of Americans sometimes even fifteen will support
Speaker 6: political violence for grievances. Political grievances they also endorse. And
Speaker 6: that's thirty million people. That's a lot of people. So
Speaker 6: I'm not at all surprised by what happened with the
Speaker 6: CEO here. What happened is is you guys all probably
Speaker 6: know if you go to his ex account before he
Speaker 6: was arrested at that McDonald's, he literally had only sixty
Speaker 6: seven six seven followers on his x account. Within twelve hours,
Speaker 6: it was four hundred thousand four hundred thousand. Now there
Speaker 6: are folk songs for this guy.
Speaker 5: For now a Manngioni's locked in a cell nearly identical
Speaker 5: to this one.
Speaker 2: His supporters are donating tens of thousands of dollars to
Speaker 2: online legal defense funds.
Speaker 1: So why is that based on your research, why is
Speaker 1: there such strong support for this specific assecent destination.
Speaker 6: Well, I think it's been strong because at the tap
Speaker 6: root of this political violence is anger. The one third
Speaker 6: of this healthcare company's claims are denied, approximately one third.
Speaker 1: That is outrageous.
Speaker 5: It's more than double the industry.
Speaker 6: Standard political anger. And that anger is real, and you
Speaker 6: can't talk people out of their anger. So our strategy
Speaker 6: has been not to try to talk people out of
Speaker 6: their anger. What we think you can do is help
Speaker 6: them redirect their anger away from violence and toward politics.
Speaker 6: I don't think talking people out of their anger is
Speaker 6: the right strategy. What the strategy should be is to
Speaker 6: have them redirect that anger, which a lot of times
Speaker 6: is based on reality. I'm not denying that, okay, I'm
Speaker 6: telling you that's real. So you don't try to talk
Speaker 6: people out of this anger, because if you do, you're
Speaker 6: just gonna make them more defiant. That's just the way
Speaker 6: it is. If I try to talk you out of
Speaker 6: something you're mad about, you're going to dig in. Okay,
Speaker 6: So no, that's not the idea. The idea is how
Speaker 6: can I encourage you to make it more productive so
Speaker 6: that you'll actually have a way to change the system
Speaker 6: in a productive way. Because you see, if the anger
Speaker 6: just leads to this political violence, the system may end
Speaker 6: up getting burned down. But a lot of times what
Speaker 6: comes in, and we see this in revolutions is something
Speaker 6: dramatically draconianly what right wing. I mean, much worse than
Speaker 6: Donald Trump. You think Donald Trump's bad? Nothing like the
Speaker 6: Ayatola Halmoni in nineteen seventy nine that started out as
Speaker 6: a liberal revolution against the shaw of Iran and then
Speaker 6: it became seized and taken over by unbelievable hardliners. That's
Speaker 6: the real trajectory these when you get real violence.
Speaker 1: Like this, professor, you have warned us of a future
Speaker 1: that is bleaked, to say the least, But is there
Speaker 1: a way to avoid it? Like what can we do
Speaker 1: as a society that would result in a decrease in
Speaker 1: political violence.
Speaker 6: It's important in this case to recognize even more than
Speaker 6: in the others here, that anger, that anger needs to
Speaker 6: have some place to go. And that's what I'm trying
Speaker 6: to say in different ways in my writings in the media,
Speaker 6: on the podcast, and I really think we will ultimately
Speaker 6: have a softer, a medium, soft landing here in twenty
Speaker 6: thirty five. But I think we need to realize this
Speaker 6: isn't just gonna happen on its own. But I do
Speaker 6: I'm not really pessimistic, really, I'm realistic about the challenges
Speaker 6: we face, and I actually think we will come out
Speaker 6: of this because I really believe when I'm encouraging these
Speaker 6: the politicians to do, it's really directly in their interests here.
Speaker 6: I've been studying this for a long time, and I'm
Speaker 6: articulating a strategy many of them have never heard of before.
Speaker 6: They've all been told, well, you just want to talk
Speaker 6: the violent person out of it. I'm not telling you
Speaker 6: that's the way to go that. I'm telling you that
Speaker 6: is a pretty much a dead end. You've got to
Speaker 6: focus on the part of the public that's already upho
Speaker 6: its political violence and move them and their anger, which
Speaker 6: many of them have, in this more productive direction. Now
Speaker 6: we can actually solve some of these problems as opposed
Speaker 6: to we're going to get violent about it and that's
Speaker 6: not going to solve anything.
Speaker 4: Folks.
Speaker 1: This has been completely fascinating and illuminating. Thank you so
Speaker 1: much for joining us.
Speaker 6: I love this conversation. I just really appreciate how much
Speaker 6: you folks really are looking to have a different kind
Speaker 6: of conversation about this. It really speaks you know, this
Speaker 6: is one of the reasons we're going to have that
Speaker 6: soft landing.
Speaker 1: So that was illuminating. I do understand a little bit better,
Speaker 1: not just the rise in political violence, but also just
Speaker 1: generally why it's been happening and response. Yeah, response to
Speaker 1: it as well. Quick note to the listener, thank you
Speaker 1: for listening to this episode. I know it's not the
Speaker 1: normal kind of episode of No Such Thing. Let us
Speaker 1: know how you feel about it, if we should be
Speaker 1: doing things like this.
Speaker 5: More reactions to the news in our future question mark, but.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks for listening. No Such Thing is produced by Manny,
Speaker 1: Noah and Devin. The theme song was by me Manny.
Speaker 1: Thank you to our guest, Robert Page, professor at the
Speaker 1: University of Chicago. For more, be sure to subscribe to
Speaker 1: No Such Dot Show and feel free to reach out
Speaker 1: to us at Manny noahdevinat gmail dot com. We're off
Speaker 1: next week for Christmas, but we'll be back in two weeks.
Speaker 1: See then,