Vigilante Democracy Returns: David Noll

November 26th, 2024

”The playing field is currently tilted in favor of these vigilante policies.”

We discuss the long history of vigilante democracy in the US and its return in our current politics. The playing field is currently tilted in favor of these vigilante policies, but blue states can level the playing field by playing constitutional hardball. David Noll reminds us that the American people have beat back movements to use vigilante power to enforce a reactionary agenda time and again.

David Noll is the co-author of Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy. He’s also the Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development and a professor of law at Rutgers Law School, as well as an academic fellow of the National Institute for Civil Justice.

Your civic action toolkit recommendations from David are:

1. Get involved in local politics

2. Resistance works and there are a lot of opportunities to resist authoritarianism

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Credits:

Host: Mila Atmos 

Guest: David Noll

Executive Producer: Mila Atmos

Producer: Zack Travis

• Transcript

  David Noll Transcript

  Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Thanks to Masterclass for supporting Future Hindsight for a gift that's always on time and lasts a lifetime. You cannot do better than Masterclass. Masterclass always has great offers during the holidays, sometimes up to as much as 50% off. Head over to Masterclass.com/hopeful for the current offer now.

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  Mila Atmos: [00:01:02] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast on a mission to spark civic action. I'm your host, Mila Atmos. I'm a global citizen based in New York City, and I'm deeply curious about the way our society works. So each week, I bring you conversations to cut through the confusion around today's most important civic issues and share clear, actionable ways for us to build a brighter future together. After all, democracy is not a spectator sport. Tomorrow starts right now.

  The election is behind us and we have been hot and heavy on the fascism-is-coming- home-to-roost-for-real-this-time beat. And it's no use to kvetch about the cabinet member appointments, the daily chaos that is about to emanate from the White House, and the continued onslaught of disinformation and misinformation in the media. We have to actually do something.

  And to arm us with a plan to beat the Christian nationalists at their own game, we're joined by David Noll. David is the co-author of Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy. He's also the Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development and a Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School. He is an academic fellow of the National Institute for Civil Justice, and previously clerked on the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

  Welcome, David. Thank you for joining us. David Noll: [00:02:32] Great to be here.

  Mila Atmos: [00:02:34] So you write in your book that old habits die hard and older prejudices die harder still. And you say this actually, in fact, over and over again. These are, of course, animating factors that power vigilante democracy. And while vigilante democracy sounds sort of self-explanatory, and I think we have kind of like a visceral understanding in our bones, and we know it well in the form of the Fugitive Slave Laws and Jim Crow, i would still say, though, that this expression, vigilante democracy is not exactly mainstream. So let's start there. How do you define vigilante democracy?

  David Noll: [00:03:15] Fantastic. And thanks so much for having me on. So what we're trying to do in the book is shine a light on the way that reactionary political movements in the US have, throughout our history, used vigilantes to further their agenda. And specifically have used the tools of law to make vigilante behavior part of our normal political life, almost so that people become habituated to the presence of vigilantes and snitches and militias in what's going on around them. And the story of the book is really a story of vigilantism coming back. As you say, right, our first huge experiment with state-sanctioned vigilantism in the United States was the Fugitive Slave Act. It went away after the Civil War. There's then a long period of vigilantism during the Jim Crow era, and then it sort of recedes from the scene. And what John Michaels, my co-author, and I see happening is particularly in the period since the January 6th insurrection, these kinds of Jim Crow type tactics of encouraging vigilantes through law have made a roaring comeback.

  Mila Atmos: [00:04:26] Yes. Well, so I want to tie this back to the culture wars, or not tie it back. I want to tie this to the culture wars, because I think a lot of people misunderstand what's happening. Or maybe misunderstanding is the wrong term, but I think they almost diminish it to a status of "this is simply the culture wars," and "this is America." So tell me about how culture wars are different and how the culture wars do fit in with vigilantism.

  David Noll: [00:04:54] So people start thinking about the culture wars. You know, at the end of the 70s, the early 1980s, particularly as abortion becomes an issue that the right

  uses to mobilize voters. Right. Prior to Roe, sort of the general story is that the parties were not polarized around reproductive choice. And then, you know, many people have told this story post Roe. There is an effort in the Republican Party to mobilize voters who are outraged about abortion and think that every pregnancy should be carried to term. And we start to use culture wars as this sort of label for politics that is focused on how people live their lives and their personal choices, and specifically on the idea that they should live their lives according to a sort of right-wing morality and the teachings of fundamentalist Christianity. So I think, as you are alluding to, you know, people tend to sort of just think about this as part of the background noise. You know, the Republicans are against abortion and Democrats are for it. Or in the most recent election, we saw a big fight about trans rights and whether trans people would be allowed to exist in public spaces. And our tendency is to sort of take those and say, oh, you know, people are just far apart on those issues, and we're just going to keep fighting because we have these fundamental disagreements. What John and I argue in the book is that there's something deeper going on, because when you have a political movement, especially one that's using vigilantes, that seeks to use the power of the state and use the power of vigilante action to penalize people and to push them out of public life, that has an effect on democracy. Because if you cannot go to work, if you cannot go to a school board meeting without your identity being challenged, then that is sending a message and it quite literally excludes you from the public conversation. And so we're trying to make that link between the culture wars as something that people fight about and what it does to our democracy, and to show how in leaning into the culture wars, the right is really making a play to exclude some people from civic life.

  Mila Atmos: [00:07:12] Yeah, I think you showed that really well in the book, actually. And you have so many examples. But one of them that really struck me was actually the Anti-maskers and how something that even though people were maybe reluctant to wear masks now suddenly it was acceptable for people who didn't want to mask to basically ruin it for the rest of us. It's like, you know, it's a it's not exactly this, of course, but it it feels a little bit like the tragedy of the Commons. Right? Except on steroids and worse. But so tell us a little bit about how that inverted rights.

  David Noll: [00:07:53] Yeah sure. So we call that "dissenter vigilantism." right. Because it's people who dissent from, in this case, public health rules that are getting to call the shots and that are imposing their will on their communities. And, you know, Virginia

  Governor Glenn Youngkin is associated most famously with these policies. You know, after he came into office, he said, I'm putting into place a policy and we can talk about whether it was legal or not. You know, if you don't want your kid in a mask at school, they can go to school maskless. So that happened at a time when everybody was sick of wearing masks and, you know, sort of got tired of the pandemic. And so people tend to think of it sort of through an individual rights frame. But again, drawing the connection back to democracy, what we see happening is that individual members of the community are imposing their will. Right. If you have a pandemic with an airborne disease, it's kind of a trope that like, there is no such thing as a truly personal decision, right? Your decision is going to affect everybody in school. It's going to affect people with elderly family members. And so of necessity, we have to make decisions as a society and we have to govern collectively. And what we saw there, right, was an effort to empower the most radical anti-public health actors in the community and impose their will on everybody in their schools. And, you know, sometimes people will say to John and me, is this really vigilantism? Right. Is there really, are there really harms? But, you know, of course there are, right? People are getting sick. People are dying because these people, these families, have been empowered to override the judgment of their community.

  Mila Atmos: [00:09:28] Yeah. I love the way you put that, because we have asked a version of this question over the years about masking, anti-masking and rights, negative rights, positive rights. But the way that you just made the direct connection to democracy is really well done. I want to turn here to what we should be expecting with the Trump administration, because of course, we are bracing ourselves for the impact of a second Trump term on our civil rights, our reproductive rights, you name it. All the rights. And one sliver of hope that people have been talking about is that the previous Trump administration suffered from a lot of dysfunction, chaos, and incompetence. But reading your book, I'm discovering that legal vigilantism will pick up the slack, if you will. So could you explain exactly how legal vigilantism works and how it will pick up the slack from anything that may or may not be coming out of the Trump administration?

  David Noll: [00:10:25] Yeah for sure. Let me just preface that with a general observation about Trump and the way that the second administration is going to work. You know, I think what Trump does is bring together a lot of groups and a lot of factions on the right that don't necessarily agree with each other about everything. And so you

  have sort of extreme anti-regulatory people. You have sort of the trade hawks. You have the culture warriors and you have people who care about judges. And what Trump does is offer them a pathway to power, because he has this ability to mobilize voters and win elections, at least by small margins. So as we enter Trump 2.0, all of these groups that I think of as, as hangers-on, or people who I don't want to say taking advantage of Trump, but people who are using Trump to further their particular agendas are going to be coming into positions of power in the White House, in federal agencies. Republicans are going to have a trifecta. And so there's also going to be control of Congress. And that gives the lawyers and the lawmakers who are putting these supports for vigilantism into place, the opportunity to do them at the federal level. And so our book is mostly a story that's focused on the states, because the present-day part of the book is focused on how states are empowering vigilantes to really fight against democracy and to wage these extreme culture war battles. What we're going to see is those state policies being transplanted to the federal level, and an effort to put them in place so that they apply across the country, instead of just in states like Tennessee and Texas and Florida that have put them in place so far.

  Mila Atmos: [00:12:10] Yeah. So it'll be more like living in the old East Germany, except maybe more out in the open. Because if you think about the Stasi, they did this in secret. They would snitch on you behind your back and somebody would knock on your door. But if you live in Texas, I mean, somebody could just do this out in the open and there would be... It would not be called snitching. I mean, it almost seems that that's child's play. And this is much more dangerous.

  David Noll: [00:12:34] Yeah, it's a really interesting comparison because in East Germany there was that pervasive snitch culture where, you know, you never knew whether the secretary or the taxi driver, or your next door neighbor was actually an agent of the state. And, you know, when we talk to people in Texas or we talk to people in other states where they have put these sort of snitching regimes in place, you know, health care providers, pharmacists, folks like that very much are aware of that and are careful about what they say, which is just a shocking development that people are living in the US this way. The distinction that I would draw is I think of East Germany as a state-dominated kind of authoritarianism where, right, somebody snitches to the government. And then if you engage in wrongthink or if you, right, if you do something that that embarrasses the party, it's the state that punishes you. What we're seeing with

  these, these vigilante-empowering policies is really sort of an effort to set vigilantes loose and allow them to operate pretty independently of the state. So just to take the simplest example, all of these red states have enacted laws that encourage people to carry guns in public places. That's, in our view, done with the objective of suppressing dissent and skewing the political debate in a more reactionary direction. But once you do that, right, once you encourage folks to show up at polling places or, you know, drag queen brunches with AR-15s, it's not like the people who are putting this in place can walk it back, you know, unless they turn to sort of reasonable gun control laws. Right. They're setting these vigilantes loose in society, knowing that they have a certain agenda. But there's also something really dangerous to it. And I think you sort of see this in the Trump assassination attempts, right? Or sort of people who are really amped up and angry and empowered end up doing kind of unpredictable things, even though we know that they're generally sort of sympathetic to what the right is up to.

  Mila Atmos: [00:14:38] Right. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of like saying the party of law and order is encouraging lawlessness, right?

  David Noll: [00:14:44] Well, I mean, just so there's no doubt, all of this, I think, is deeply intentioned with the idea of rule of law and some of our most fundamental constitutional commitments.

  Mila Atmos: [00:14:53] Of course. Well, I feel like since you mentioned Texas, let's talk about Texas and SB8, because this is, in a way, the perfect example of vigilantism. And you mentioned the pharmacists, doctors, neighbors snitching and turning on each other. Tell us a little bit about how that works. I know that we have heard this many times, but how does this law actually work and empower everyday people to be vigilantes?

  David Noll: [00:15:17] So this is a law I think a lot of folks have let it be forgotten, given everything that's happened over the past few years. But this is a law that Texas put in place in 2021 before the Supreme Court overturned Roe. And it did a couple of notable things. So the first was it simply banned abortion after what the law described as a fetal heartbeat was detected, which isn't actually medically accurate, but we can come back to that. So that was sort of a direct challenge to Roe and to federal authority. And then on the enforcement side, what SB8 did is it said that any person may bring a lawsuit against an abortion provider or anybody who "aids or abets an abortion." It offered a

  $10,000 bounty if you brought a successful lawsuit. And then there was a whole host of procedures that stacked the proceedings in favor of the people who would bring these lawsuits, essentially ensuring that they're going to win no matter what the Supreme Court said the federal constitution required with respect to reproductive choice. So when SB8 came into effect, there was a lot of discussion about whether this was sort of evading the power of the courts to say what's constitutional or not constitutional, because when a law is enforced exclusively by private parties, it's difficult to go into court and get, say, an injunction against the attorney general or against a state official who might enforce it. But when you take a step back and look past that sort of technical debate, this is really it's an invitation to Texans to surveil, snitch on, people in their communities who are engaging in choices that anti-abortion extremists don't agree with. And the power of the law comes from the fact that enforcement is done by extremists. Right. This isn't Texas. This isn't the attorney general's office that's doing this. You can get in touch with Jonathan Mitchell, who's the lawyer who is thought to have drafted the law. If you think somebody is engaging in SB8-prohibited activity, and he will gladly work up a lawsuit and drag you to some county in Texas that you've never heard of, right? In order essentially to penalize people for exercising their reproductive rights.

  Mila Atmos: [00:17:37] Yeah. Thank you for explaining it this way, and also for putting it in the context of that. Having passed before the Dobbs decision, I think that's really important. And the $10,000 bounty. I really feel like we're just we're surrounded by bounty hunters against each other. And I don't know if you know the numbers, but how many times has this law been used?

  David Noll: [00:18:00] Just a handful. Right.
  Mila Atmos: [00:18:02] Because people don't want to snitch on each other or or

  because it's too cumbersome. I'm just curious.

  David Noll: [00:18:06] No, it's because of it's, you know, it's I don't want to call it clever, but it's designed in a really devious manner. It targets abortion providers who, you know, of course, are doctors who have a medical license and are, for better or for worse, very risk-averse individuals. And it is saying that anybody can bring suit against them if they participate in a prohibited abortion. And so it's really that, you know, lawyers call it the interrorem effect, right. The power of terror, that is doing the work. Mitchell has

  brought a few lawsuits against abortion funds. There's a suit against somebody who tried to or who did go to Colorado to secure an abortion against people who were involved in that. But really, the point to take from this is that you don't need a lot of actual litigation for vigilantes to be controlling the way that people live. And we can think about the Jim Crow South, right? There's a period of really intense, horrible racial violence at the beginning of Jim Crow. I mean, this is really morbid, but if you look at the statistics on the number of lynchings, then lynchings drop as you get into the first decades of the 20th century. And that's not because the white supremacist had been vanquished or vigilantes were disempowered. It's because everybody knew how things worked. Everybody knew that if you challenged the racial order, or if you stepped out of line as a Black person, then both the state and private individuals would come after you with murderous violence.

  Mila Atmos: [00:19:38] Right. Right.

  Mila Atmos: [00:19:42] We'll continue with David Noll in a moment. So don't go anywhere. You won't want to miss this episode's civic spark. One small step we can all take to be more empowered and ignite collective change.

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  And now let's return to my conversation with David Noll.

  Mila Atmos: [00:23:59] Well, let's talk about what can be done about this. One of the things that people do or have been doing, of course, in the wake of this bill passing in Texas, is to cross state lines to get reproductive care. And here is where blue states have the power to step in. Just like the Fugitive Slave Act allowed slaveholding states to reach into free states. Now, blue states can play constitutional hardball by enacting laws that would impact every state in the nation. Maybe we're getting a little bit wonky here,

  but can you iron this out for us? You suggest a blue model state law that would protect interstate travel. Tell us more.

  David Noll: [00:24:36] Yeah. So just the backstory here is that after Dobbs, we saw a huge flow of people going from states like Texas to places like Illinois, California, where abortion remained legal. And it was such a blow to the anti-abortion movement. When you read what they're writing, when you look at their debates, they thought that Dobbs would come down and it would be sort of like the promised land. And finally, state legislatures would have the authority to dictate when people were required to carry pregnancies. And that didn't happen. We saw large numbers of Texans going, say, to California and to the right wingers, they saw this as a real problem. So what we're seeing now is an effort to prohibit interstate travel for unlawful purposes. And so the same folks behind SB8, their new thing is they're trying to get cities and towns and counties to enact what they call abortion trafficking ordinances, which actually would make it illegal to use the roads to travel to another state for the purpose of engaging in activity that Texas doesn't allow. And so when you talk about this, people say, oh, you know, that can't possibly be constitutional, right? Like, this is like, you know, I can like,

  Mila Atmos: [00:25:48] Also, who's going to know? David Noll: [00:25:49] Right.

  Mila Atmos: [00:25:49] Like who knows. Like I'm I'm driving to work and I work on the other side of the state line.

  David Noll: [00:25:53] Well, I mean, that's the vigilante piece. Is that is that it could be. It could be anybody.

  Mila Atmos: [00:25:58] Yes.

  David Noll: [00:25:59] But I mean, sort of the basic point is that, you know, people say, oh, I can, you know, I can go to Vegas and gamble, even though, you know, gambling isn't really allowed in New York. How could they do this? And the answer is they're just going to do it, right. They're going to pass laws that are probably going to be declared

  unconstitutional when the lawyers litigate a lawsuit, and it goes all the way up to the Supreme Court.

  Mila Atmos: [00:26:20] Takes years.

  David Noll: [00:26:21] And it takes years. And in the interim, people are going to be threatened. People are going to be deterred from using the roads. And this is the current state of play. This is sort of a theme John and I returned to throughout the book. Right. It's mainly red states that are doing this. There hasn't been pushback. So you were asking about sort of what blue states can do.

  Mila Atmos: [00:26:42] Yes.
  David Noll: [00:26:43] Really.
  Mila Atmos: [00:26:43] They need to push back or need to do something.

  David Noll: [00:26:46] Right. And so, you know, just a super simple measure that blue states can take is to enact laws that impose civil liability and criminal liability on people who interfere with your ability to travel to New York, Illinois, wherever. Right. You know, there's a difference between that and what the vigilante states are doing, because when you do that, right, it's trotting out heavy legal machinery, right? You might be threatening these lawyers or these, you know, these local town council people with pretty serious damages. But it's in the service of something that's unquestionably constitutional. And that is, you know, frankly, just essential if we're going to continue to have a union and people are going to have the ability to travel from state to state. And so, you know, it's just a really nice example of how the playing field is currently tilted in favor of these vigilante policies. And we need to be looking to blue states. We need to be looking to other jurisdictions to to sort of level the playing field and make sure that these red state moves don't go unanswered.

  Mila Atmos: [00:27:48] Yeah, well, I'm hoping that blue states will really enact many of these laws that you suggested. You have a whole list. I encourage everybody to read the book. It's excellent. But I'm also wondering if they're actually going to do it. And I'm heartened, though, by some of the things that they've already done. So one of the

  things that I thought was a really, really clever was prop 12 in California. What California did is throw its economic weight around in order to impose conditions on the rest of the nation. So tell us a little bit about what the aims were of prop 12. And what did it accomplish?

  David Noll: [00:28:26] Yeah. So prop 12 is a California law that was passed through the ballot initiative process, right. In other words, adopted by voters rather than put in place.

  Mila Atmos: [00:28:35] That's another question I have because like the state legislature did not do this. It was the people. But so like everyday people have to band together and do this in the blue States. But let's return to prop 12.

  David Noll: [00:28:45] Yeah, there's there's a whole debate over whether citizen initiatives are preferable to to legislation that comes out of the legislature.

  Mila Atmos: [00:28:53] Yes. I mean, when it comes to something like this, I was a little bit surprised, I have to say, because it's, you know really I don't want to say it's esoteric because it isn't. But I also thought, you know, this is an interesting citizen ballot measure. But let's go back to prop 12. What is it and what did it accomplish?

  David Noll: [00:29:08] Yeah. Sorry.
  Mila Atmos: [00:29:08] No, it's okay, it's okay, it's good.

  David Noll: [00:29:09] So so prop 12 says that when meat is sold in California, the animals that were used to produce the meat have to be raised in a humane way. And the standards that it puts in place are you know, pretty basic, right? It's, it's essentially saying that animals can't be tortured while they're being raised. And the way it works is, it doesn't tell people in other states what to do. Right? There's no direction to farmers in Kansas or wherever the chickens or the cows are coming from. Instead, it says, if you want to sell these products in California, they have to comply with our standards for how animals are raised. So there was a huge legal battle about this, because right on the one hand you say, okay, California's just regulating its market. You know, just as California might say, you can't sell exploding toasters in California. Right. It's saying if you're going to sell.

  Mila Atmos: [00:30:04] You can't buy exotic skins.
  David Noll: [00:30:06] Right. Exactly. Yeah. Right. Exactly.

  Mila Atmos: [00:30:08] Like, if you want to buy exotic skin shoes, you have to buy them someplace else. Carry them in your hand luggage. It's kind of funny, but continue. It's very California.

  David Noll: [00:30:17] Yeah. Yeah.
  Mila Atmos: [00:30:18] But also California, notably, is the fifth largest economy in the

  world.
  David Noll: [00:30:22] Exactly.

  Mila Atmos: [00:30:23] And therefore has outsized economic power both in the United States and beyond.

  David Noll: [00:30:27] Right and these are you know, I'm not an animal law expert, but my understanding is that these are sort of animal welfare standards that are akin to what the EU is doing.

  Mila Atmos: [00:30:35] Right. It's not so crazy.

  David Noll: [00:30:36] You know, it's a pretty reasonable regulatory measure. And so we got this fight over prop 12 that went to the Supreme Court. And on the one hand, California was saying, well, we're just regulating our market. We're just controlling what can be sold in the state. And the businesses that were challenging the law, which was just sort of a who's who of conservative business interests, said, no, take a step back. This is really about California telling Kansas how farms have to be run in Kansas, and that will not stand. Right. That's inconsistent with states' authority under the Constitution. And what's really surprising about the case is that the California law was upheld by a group of what we usually think of as right wing Supreme Court justices who said that, right, a state does have power to regulate what happens in the state. And

  yeah, that's going to affect what happens in other states. But a state doesn't overstep when it does that it has power to regulate its own market.

  Mila Atmos: [00:31:37] Mhm. Yeah. Were you surprised, I guess, when the conservative Supreme Court ruled in favor of California?

  David Noll: [00:31:43] Totally. I have a pretty skeptical view of the Supreme Court these days. And I thought that the fact that the business community was lining up behind the challenge to this would really influence the justices decision making. And it's not often that the Supreme Court surprises me in a good way these days. But when I saw the decision, when I read it, I thought, all right.

  Mila Atmos: [00:32:03] All right, all right. Well, so in terms of the longer term strategy of beating the Christian nationalists at their own game, it seems like we can look to prop 12 in California as a bit of a benchmark. Right. But so where else could we see something like this play out. Is there something in the works right now that you can talk about, or is there something that you foresee as sort of low hanging fruit?

  David Noll: [00:32:27] Yeah, I mean, so just to sort of play out the idea, the prop 12 case establishes that states can do this. And the argument John and I make is that, you know, if you can do this for chickens that are sold in a grocery store, you know, shouldn't states be using this power to protect the civil rights of, say, people who are denied access to reproductive choice or families with trans kids that are being targeted in states like Florida and Texas. And so we think that the case creates authority for blue states to engage in these kinds of measures. So how can they use this power? How can they use their ability to regulate their market? The simplest interventions just have to do with the state's own money, because New York, Illinois, California, right. These major population centers have huge pension funds that can make a difference in the way that you're doing investing. So just a really simple intervention is to sort of stop investing in states that are that are doubling down on empowering vigilantes and putting in place these authoritarian schemes. If you want to be a little bit more aggressive, you can start regulating access to the blue states markets, right, and say, okay, if you're going to sell something in California and you're a company that does business in Texas, or if you're headquartered in Texas, maybe there's standards with respect to civil rights or with

  respect to not supporting these right wing authoritarian projects that should be put in place. And then, you know sort of ...

  Mila Atmos: [00:33:59] So like you can't sell MyPillow guy pillows in California.

  David Noll: [00:34:02] Right, right, precisely. Or really sort of the way the law would be written is you would say that if you want to access the market, right, there are certain things you can't do, right? You can't be using company resources to be subsidizing Citizen vigilantes or to be putting these kinds of policies in place. And then sort of the most aggressive set of proposals are really sort of take their model from divestment. You know, the experience of divesting from countries that are engaged in, you know, grave human rights violations. And I know that sounds hyperbolic, and I know that it sounds kind of shocking that we would be proposing this with respect to states in the union. But when you look at the trajectory of these state laws and how rapidly they are rolling back, what I still think of as basic civil rights, it makes the kind of sense to approach them as more like those kinds of foreign states that have really suffered severe democratic decline.

  Mila Atmos: [00:34:58] Mhm. Mhm. Well, so we are talking about blue states passing legislation that essentially would impose a nationwide standard. And so that requires actually governments, state governments to take action. Where is the place where everyday people can take action.

  David Noll: [00:35:17] Mhm. Well, unfortunately we're now at a point where just building support networks is going to be the first order of business. There's going to be a lot of people who are targeted now, not just by red states, but by the federal government. And the first thing that we need to do is make sure that we're taking care of people who are being targeted, people who are fleeing jurisdictions where they're being targeted for exercising basic rights. And that takes work. Right. You know, we've seen, as you know, as migrants have arrived in blue states that blue states don't really have the infrastructure to be welcoming people into their communities. And that's even though when you look at what the economists say, we know that they make these massive contributions in terms of what they're adding to society. So part of it is just sort of protecting people, making sure that you're safe, providing refuge for people that are being targeted. The next thing I would say is that, and I'm certainly guilty of this, you

  know, sort of folks in the center and folks on the left have a tendency to think of democracy as something that happens around elections. And so, you know, maybe every two years, you know, you start paying attention and you start watching Nate Silver and you...

  Mila Atmos: [00:36:26] You want to lose your mind.
  David Noll: [00:36:27] You throw some money. Yeah. Yeah. It depends. It depends. It

  depends how much your mental health can take. But you participate episodically. Mila Atmos: [00:36:35] Yeah,
  David Noll: [00:36:36] And.
  Mila Atmos: [00:36:36] Episodic. Yes.

  David Noll: [00:36:37] For better or for worse, that's not the way that politics on the right works. And a big piece of that is that on the right, there's Fox News and sort of a whole network of associated entities that are keeping people politically engaged. And that's why, you know, going back to the vigilante stuff, that's why vigilantism is a viable strategy. Because if people didn't care, if people weren't really riled up about the possibility that someone might play in a high school sports team that didn't align with their sex assigned at birth, it wouldn't be a big deal, right? But what sort of right wing media does is keep people in this constant state of alarm and readiness to act and on sort of on the other side, we lack that because there's not those institutions where people are staying involved in democratic politics just as a part of their life, the way you might go to church or the way you might see, you know, participating in a neighborhood association. And so I think both as a matter of keeping your sanity and as a way of building political party, I'd really encourage people to look to those local opportunities for political participation. You know, maybe it's a, you know, a pro-democracy group that's in your neighborhood. Maybe it's your local Democratic Party, but I think there's going to be a big payoff from that kind of stuff. And people will say, oh, well, you know, that's not really going to change anything. Having done the research for this book, let me tell you, SB8 started as these rinky-dink town ordinances where Jonathan Mitchell and the activist who he works with were literally going town to town, persuading these town

  boards with maybe 5 or 10 people to adopt them. And it built into a Texas law that effectively changed the way abortion is regulated in the United States. The little stuff can make a big difference. And so, you know, don't sleep on your school board. Don't sleep on, you know, your town planning commission. All of this stuff does have the potential to turn into something much larger.

  Mila Atmos: [00:38:32] Oh yeah. No I agree. I mean, the small stuff becomes the big stuff and even the small stuff, if it stays small... You know, we had a guest who said, if it's worth doing for all of society, then it's worth doing for one person.

  David Noll: [00:38:44] That's right. Yeah.

  Mila Atmos: [00:38:45] And so don't shy away from, quote, the small stuff. So I've been thinking about you mentioned giving refuge and talking about these cities and states that are willing to continue to provide refuge and are saying currently out loud that they will protect migrants. But Trump has recently said that he is going to make the military engage in mass deportations. And so now I feel like we're jumping from vigilantism to actually just straight authoritarianism. So talk a little bit about that. And like, is the Blue State Refuge really going to make a difference?

  David Noll: [00:39:24] Mhm. Yeah. And that's a really nice distinction because you know folks in the Academy have been thinking about how mass deportation is going to work. And some of the earlier reporting suggested that it was going to be driven by sheriffs and other local officials who are effectively deputized as federal immigration agents. Trump is now talking about using the military. I continue to think that we're going to see more of a vigilante model.

  Mila Atmos: [00:39:52] Okay, so you don't think the military will do this?
  David Noll: [00:39:54] Well, I'm not going to say that. I'm not going to say that anything

  won't happen.
  Mila Atmos: [00:39:57] you don't know, none of us know. Yes.

  David Noll: [00:39:59] But, you know, I do think that within the officer corps, they're trained on what the armed forces can legally be used to do. That's part of the ethos. And people are serving in the armed forces because they believe in the Constitution, right. And they believe in America. And I think getting a sizable number of folks in the military to go into blue states and carry out this scheme is is going to be a really big ask. And so I continue to think that it's going to be more of an effort to mobilize local officials and sheriffs to do the dirty work of rounding people up and then trying to deport them without hearings than sort of a large scale military mobilization.

  Mila Atmos: [00:40:41] So if that's the case, then how can we fight back?

  David Noll: [00:40:44] Yeah. Well, I think JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, has the right attitude where he said, "if you're coming for people in my state, you're going to have to go through me." And right. The first order of business has to be that this is going to be resisted. We can't go into this with the attitude that it's inevitable, that it's that it's going to happen no matter what. And Pritzker had the law on his side. He has the Constitution on his side, and I think that's a tremendously powerful point in his favor, adding to the fact that if anything, like what the Trump campaign promised happens, there's going to be just massive shocks to business.

  Mila Atmos: [00:41:23] in red states, too, in red states, right, where the migrants, the immigrants who are undocumented, you know, working in slaughterhouses. They are in Tennessee.

  David Noll: [00:41:33] Right.
  Mila Atmos: [00:41:34] You know, so, like, what are they going to do?

  David Noll: [00:41:36] Right. And so I think what we're seeing in this transition period with Trump is what I see as a process of testing boundaries. It's, oh, I'm going to put Congress into recess so I can appoint whoever I want. It's like, come on, dude. You know, or you know, like, oh, you know, I'm going to appoint Matt Gaetz as attorney general despite allegations of essentially being a groomer. Right. There's this sort of debate that goes back to the first Trump administration about whether you should take this seriously or literally, and people go back and forth.

  Mila Atmos: [00:42:09] Well, how about both?

  David Noll: [00:42:10] Yeah. And I see it as as really sort of looking for the weak points in the system. Can I do this right? Right. Can I change Congress so that I'm allowed to appoint whoever I want? You know, if I say that the Army or the National Guard is going to go into New York and start doing deportations, is there going to be pushback against that? And so as we enter this period, it's really important to be cognizant of what's happening. And Trump, for all his talk of being a big strongman leader, isn't that hard to push back against. You know, he made a huge play in the Senate leadership contest to put Rick Scott as the Senate majority leader. He got 13 votes. Right. And so on the one hand, this stuff is terrifying and we need to plan for it. And we need to plan for resistance. On the other hand, people need to recognize that resistance works, and there's a lot of opportunities to resist the more authoritarian things that the administration is talking about.

  Mila Atmos: [00:43:03] Yeah. Thank you for that reminder. Resistance works. So we're all going to have to remember that as we go forward here every day. So of course the election is behind us. And Trump won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, very narrowly. It seems like electoral vigilantism is not worth discussing, but it is. So we know that despite the decentralized election system all over the United States, voting in the US is actually safe and secure. And I just saw Lara Trump after the election concluded, talking about wanting to make voting more uniform across the nation and on Fox News, I was very surprised. And my first thought was, wow, that would make it really easy to steal elections if they can do this. So what are you happen electorally moving forward, assuming that we will have elections?

  David Noll: [00:43:55] Yeah. So there's these long running battles about who gets to vote and how the votes are counted. And when we talk about electoral vigilantism. What we're talking about is using vigilante power to influence that. So maybe that takes the form of guys with guns showing up at polling places to deter voters from voting by mail. The scenario that didn't play out this election, because Trump won by a sufficiently large margin, was putting pressure on those local election boards that do the crucial work of tabulating the results and reporting them up. Prior to the election, there was a lot of talk about those boards supposedly having authority to investigate fraud, and the conspiracy

  theory was that large numbers of non-citizens would be voting. And if the election had gone the other way, I'm pretty confident that we would have seen a very well orchestrated effort to push county canvassing boards to throw out votes on the basis of supposed fraud. So when you see something like a proposal for national voting standards, I look at that in the context of these long running battles about voter suppression, and the play will be with Republicans controlling Congress to put in place voting requirements that make it more difficult for groups that lean Democratic to vote. I haven't seen any proposals that would sort of federalize the way that elections are conducted. The model would probably be very similar to other federal legislation that puts in place minimum standards that the states have to respect. And so this is less of a vigilante effort than it is, you know, sort of like what Georgia did in 2021, where just making it much more difficult to exercise the franchise and the play is just to do that everywhere, you know, because we know that all of these voter suppression laws have some effect at the margin. And in a world where your elections are perpetually decided by 1 or 2 percentage points, if you can carve off half a percent of the other party's voters, that can make a real difference.

  Mila Atmos: [00:45:58] Mhm. Mhm. Well, every week on Future Hindsight, I ask my guest to share a civic spark. One small step we can all take to be more empowered and ignite collective change. So what's a good way to turn the insights that you've shared with us into action?

  David Noll: [00:46:15] I'm going to go back to the point of engaging in local politics, because I think that that is going to be enormously helpful as we seek to build countervailing power. I also think it's just going to help people get through the next four years to to know that you're not alone, to know that there are people who believe in democracy, who believe in the idea of an inclusive, pluralistic democracy. So I really encourage people to get involved in that work.

  Mila Atmos: [00:46:40] Yes. Yes, we say this almost every week, I think, on the show, but yes, we agree we should really get engaged locally because I really think that the everyday human to human contact is going to be more important than ever. You know, as opposed to doing something like, let's give $10 for my phone to the local elected official who's running for re-election. Which is not to say that that's not useful, but it's less powerful than doing the person to person work.

  David Noll: [00:47:07] Yeah and I mean, I can just say, you know, also, if you're a person who is online and I can't criticize anyone who's online because I'm a fairly online person, but there is just a huge difference between the way that people think about politics and take action in offline spaces and in online spaces, and sort of the more that you're involved with local organizations and local politics, the more you're going to see that. And I don't want to say that the the online debates are irrelevant. But as we saw in the election, they don't match up with what people are really concerned about and what's really sort of driving their political choices.

  Mila Atmos: [00:47:42] Mhm. Mhm. Yeah. That's true. So I know we're in a depressing moment in right now. But one thing I've been wondering is whether this isn't the ultimate opportunity to really make the US a full and vibrant democracy. And I'm hopeful that Americans will seize that opportunity. So for you, looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?

  David Noll: [00:48:05] Well, I dedicated the book to my kids, and I said, to my kids in the hopes that the vigilantes will lose again. And there's a powerful lesson in that. We have beat back this movement to use vigilante power to enforce a reactionary agenda time and again. It is the story we're telling in the book. It's part of the story of America, is that there are these surges of vigilantism generally to enforce white supremacy, right, and to resist the development of an actual democracy. It's awful when we have these moments of retrenchment. People are harmed. People have to flee from from state to state. But this is a battle that we've won before and people have won it honestly under much more difficult circumstances. If this is something that folks could do in the 1960s when the Civil Rights Act was passed and the Voting Rights Act was passed and the vigilantes were primarily targeting black Americans. It's something we can do now when the right has turned its sights on teachers, doctors, families with any kind of LGBTQ family member, people who just don't want the Ten Commandments taught every day in their public schools. The weak point in the right's strategy is that it just sweeps so broadly that unintentionally, they're creating this coalition of folks who are being targeted. And if if we the targets, stand in solidarity, there's real power there, and we have an opportunity to be part of the story of resisting vigilante democracy.

  Mila Atmos: [00:49:39] Yeah. Well, thank you for that reminder. And that was indeed very hopeful. Thank you very much for joining me on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show.

  David Noll: [00:49:48] Thanks for the discussion.
  Mila Atmos: [00:49:49] David Noll is co-author of Vigilante Nation: How State

  Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy.

  Remember, civic action doesn't have to be complicated. It's about small steps that spark progress, like sharing this episode with a friend. So let's recap this week's civic spark and fire up our collective power. David tells us that we shouldn't sleep on your town council or your school board. It's true. Going toe to toe with vigilantes in our democracy sounds scary, but resistance works. You're not alone in your resistance, especially if you start small human to human. Democracy is going to matter more and more. So get out there and get engaged locally. Getting involved in local politics is going to help us get through the next four years.

  Mila Atmos: [00:50:40] Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Michael Waldman. He's president and CEO of the Brennan Center for justice at NYU School of Law, a nonpartisan law and policy institute that focuses on improving systems of democracy and justice. The Brennan Center is a leading national voice on voting rights, money in politics, criminal justice reform and constitutional law. That's next time on Future Hindsight.

  Oh, you're still here. I guess you just can't get enough of Future Hindsight. In that case, you should sign up for the newsletter. Just go to Future hindsight.com to sign up for free. Then every week we'll come to you. Thanks for tuning in. And until next time, see clearly, act boldly and spark the change you want to see.

  This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me.
  The Democracy Group: [00:51:48] This podcast is part of the democracy Group.