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Notes from America with Kai Wright

The Wolf Pack of White Nationalism

Notes from America with Kai Wright

WNYC Studios

News Commentary, Politics, History, News

4.41.5K Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2022

⏱️ 50 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

There are no “lone wolves” in the terrorist violence of white identity politics. So what’s that mean for white people who want to confront it? First, assistant secretary for homeland security under President Obama and current professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Juliette Kayyem, joins host Kai Wright to help us make sense of the moment with tools from her new book, The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters. Read her article for The Atlantic in response to the mass shooting in Buffalo here. Then, Sarah Posner, reporting fellow at Type Investigations and the author of Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and The Devastating Legacy They Left Behind, helps us examine the packs in which these ideologies flourish, as candidates like Pennsylvania Republican Party's gubernatorial candidate, Doug Mastriano, continue to thrive.

Companion listening for this episode:

The Dangerous Cycle of Fear (4/11/2022)

Asian American New Yorkers explain how Covid-era violence changed their lives, and what’s at stake for everybody when we fear each other. Then, rediscovering community through food.

“The United States of Anxiety” airs live on Sunday evenings at 6pm ET. The podcast episodes are lightly edited from our live broadcasts. To catch all the action, tune into the show on Sunday nights via the stream on WNYC.org/anxiety or tell your smart speakers to play WNYC.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Have you heard about the mashing and buffalo?

0:03.0

I did.

0:04.0

What was your immediate reaction to that news?

0:06.0

My immediate reaction was just very distraught, feeling of hopeless.

0:13.0

I guess the thought was like, oh, again, this is just so upsetting.

0:17.0

And then just getting scared and thinking about the loved ones in my life

0:21.0

and just being reminded that anything can happen anywhere.

0:25.0

I wonder, has this event made you by chance think differently about

0:29.0

the people you may be friends with on Facebook or people who might be in your own personal life

0:35.0

who may be saying some off-handed things that you may be looking at different light?

0:40.0

Yes.

0:41.0

To a certain extent, I guess I didn't think of that directly in this moment

0:45.0

but I guess the thought does cross your mind.

0:47.0

You just don't ever know what anyone's capable of and it's really scary.

0:51.0

Welcome to the show.

0:57.0

I'm Kai Wright.

0:58.0

And you know what?

0:59.0

This is a really scary moment with the grind of awful news stories

1:04.0

and the onslaught of norm shattering events over the past several years.

1:07.0

It's a lot.

1:08.0

And amid all that, the extreme ideologies that motivate a segment of white America

1:14.0

can become abstractions.

...

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