Nov. 1, 2022: The troubling future of political violence in America
Even though it was Halloween, two political extremists were unmasked yesterday, one on each coast.\nWhat they said tells us a lot about the future of political violence in America.\nIn Washington, at the Oath Keeper trial, Graydon Young, the first Oath Keeper to plead guilty to charges related to storming Congress on Jan. 6, broke down in tears as he apologized for his role. \u201cI guess I was acting like a traitor against my own government,\u201d he said.\xa0\nIn San Francisco, an FBI agent who specializes in investigations of domestic terrorism \u2014\xa0 that is, \u201cprimarily\u201d Americans \u201cwho commit violent criminal acts in furtherance of their political or social ideology\u201d \u2014 filed the criminal complaint against David DePape in which we learned the horrific details of the attack on Paul Pelosi.\xa0\nWe tend to think of the Oath Keepers and groups like it as the face of political extremism and violence in America. But domestic politcal terrorists are increasingly more like DePape. The big trend is what terrorism researchers call \u201cungrouping,\u201d in which individuals need no formal organization to recruit and indoctrinate them with fringe ideas when they have easy access to them online \u2014 and major political figures endorsing them.\nSubscribe to the POLITICO Playbook newsletter\nRaghu Manavalan is the Host of POLITICO's Playbook Daily Briefing.Jenny Ament is the Executive Producer of POLITICO Audio.