On today’s show, host Christina Lieffring, news and politics editor at Tone Madison, speaks with Mike German about his new book, Policing White Supremacy. German is a former FBI agent who worked undercover in white supremacist and militia groups, and his book documents the threat that violent far-right groups pose to the public and how the FBI ignores that threat.

White supremacy and white supremacist violence are foundational in the US, German says. Law enforcement agencies are more likely to focus on leftist social movements than white supremacists groups even though white supremacists groups are more violent and more deadly. Even the FBI downplays white supremacy and refuses to see it as a national security issue, despite German’s reporting, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” which shows explicit racism within law enforcement. He says that white supremacists are actually a threat to law enforcement officers, but somehow this is tolerated.

Lieffring and German talk about how white supremacy informs the Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11, and the January 6 insurrection. Despite the fact that white supremacist groups enact more violence than foreign groups, the FBI uses language that mischaracterizes what’s going on. And no one at the federal level tracks the number of people that white supremacists kill. German says that the pardoning of the January 6 insurrectionists sends a message that they can get away with future violence. And those pardons send a message to the FBI that they do not have an imperative to investigate these groups. 

Mike German is a fellow with the Liberty and National Security program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School. He has worked at the ACLU and served sixteen years as an FBI special agent. He is the author of Thinking Like a Terrorist as well as Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide: How the New FBI Damages Our Democracy and Policing White Supremacy (The New Press).

Featured image: remix of the cover of Policing White Supremacy by Sara Gabler/WORT.

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