Hello, Prestigeon to your soul.

That's conversation to your soul.

I'm Danny Bessner, here as always

with my friend and comrade, Derek Davidson. And we're excited to welcome to the podcast today. Rachel

Kleinfeld, Rachel is a senior fellow in the Democracy Conflict and Governments Program

at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And she recently co-authored

an article with Nicole Bibin-Sataka titled How to Prevent Political Violence. So we're going to

talk about political violence. So Rachel, thank you so much for joining us. So great to be here.

So I guess it might make sense to just start with the problem. What is the state of political

violence in the mid-2020s

in the United States and around the world, particularly in Western Europe? And how has that differed

from what's been going on recently? Sure. So the U.S. has had rises and falls and its political

violence over its history, you know, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, but also when the No Nothing

Party came in to being in the 1830s and started attacking immigrants and so on, the civil rights

era was an era of high political violence, especially the 50s right before the civil rights era.

So we've had this before. We are at another local high,

is how I would look at it. It has been spiking on every possible measure since 2016.

Most of that in the United States is threats rather than actual violence, but we're also seeing

the biggest sustained rise in hate crimes far above the 9-11 spike or the post-9-11 spike.

We've seen threats against judges more than double from 2016 to 2021. Threats against Congress

go up 10 times from 2016 to 2021. And these threats, well, they're not the same as physical violence, serve some of the

same purposes. They scare people, especially in a country as armed as America is. And so you're

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