Is extremist ideology still fringe?

Curious City

WBEZ Chicago

Society & Culture, Education, Public, Chicago, Arts, City, Radio, Curious, Investigation

4.8 • 642 Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2025

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Extremism in America has been on the rise. Last episode, we looked at extremist groups in Chicago and how they terrorized select groups of people and influenced housing policy in the city during the 1950s. But what does extremism look like today? Curious City host Erin Allen talks with Odette Yousef, a national security correspondent focusing on extremism at NPR, about why it’s less about fringe groups and more about ideology that has permeated our culture. “January 6 was a good example of how everything has changed,” she says. “That to me was really a milestone in terms of how extremism looks in this country, because I think we have long expected it to come out of small cells or groups. And here it was just everyday Americans who had gotten really kind of radicalized until the point where they participated in the violence that day.” She also talks about how extremism has shown up in Chicago and how the city compares with other large American cities.

Transcript

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0:32.9	You can get extremism on the far left and you get it on the far right.
0:38.9	It really comes down to what is the information that people are getting?
0:46.4	What is the information that they are believing?
0:50.0	And the guardrails fell off of that a long time ago in terms of helping Americans understand
0:59.3	what the common set of sources are for factual information.
1:08.1	What's up Chicago? I'm Erin, and this is Curious City.
1:14.2	Extremism is on the rise.
1:17.2	A bipartisan think tank in D.C., called the Center for Strategic and International Studies,
1:22.3	looked at 30 years of data on domestic terrorism.
1:26.2	They found that since 2019, the number of domestic
1:29.6	terrorist plots against government targets, motivated by partisan political beliefs, was nearly
1:35.6	triple that of the last 25 years combined. So in other words, since the year 2000, domestic terrorist plots have been most concentrated
1:47.0	in just the last five years or so.
1:54.0	Last episode, we talked about Chicago's history with extremist groups, how they terrorize specific
2:00.0	groups of people and influenced housing policy in the city.
2:03.6	This episode, I'm talking with Odette Yusuf. She's a national security correspondent focusing on extremism at NPR about the rise of extremism today.
	...

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