From WNYC Studios, it's Brian Lair, a daily politics podcast.

It's Monday, July 18th.

Malcolm Nance is back with us now.

For 34 years, he was in the U.S. intelligence community combating terrorism,

mostly focused on international terrorism. But these days, now out of government, he's focusing

on the terrorist threat from Americans to other Americans, especially right-wing violent

extremism, which has been the dominant strain, as the FBI and everyone else has said.

Malcolm was here and had a lot to say during the Russia investigation.

Some of you will remember, with his knowledge of that country's interest in destabilizing Western

democracies, he had a best-selling book about that called The Plot to Hack America.

Now Malcolm Nance has a new book called

They Want to Kill Americans, the Militius, Terrorists and Deranged Ideology of the Trump

Insurgency. Malcolm, always good to have you on. Welcome back to WNYC. Well, I'm glad to be here. I wish

I could be in the studio.

And I wish you could too. I thought it might be useful for our listeners to spend a little time first looking at some of the different violent extremist groups whose names have been in the news and how they are different from each other and how they overlap.

Is it a good place to start to ask you to distinguish between the oathkeepers and the proud boys? Because I think a lot of people hear those names. Oh, the elf keepers. Oh, the proud boys. But they don't really know what they are. Right. It is a good place to start because when I end this, you're going to be quite surprised where all of these people end up, or you might not be surprised.

So let's start with some of the most well-known. The biggest is the oathkeepers. The oathkeepers was started by an ex-US Army individual named Stuart Rhodes. He went out and became a lawyer and set up this organization,

which originally their mandate was to get U.S. military and law enforcement personnel

to swear that they would never take part in operations or activities in the United States

against American citizens, which is going to be very ironic

when we get to January 6th. So Stuart Rhodes' organization was pretty much designed to oppose Barack

Obama's use of the U.S. military and training exercises around the United States. There was a famous

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