Militarily military members as the basis for their work. This was hosted by the rand corporation. I think we can go ahead and get started. First of all, let me introduce myself. My name is deanna lee. I am part of the Digital Communications team here at rand, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, Global Research organization that tackles the Worlds Toughest problems. I am very happy to welcome you to todays policy lab on a very important topic, addressing violent extremism in the United States. Our policy lab series is designed to give an opportunity to hear directly from rand experts about todays most important policy issues. I am really pleased to see so many folks have joined our zoom webinar. I want to welcome folks watching and listening on cspan one and cspan radio, both broadcasting live. For those who have joined on zoom, have you house rules. We will have time at the end of the presentation for a short q a session. If you do have questions, please post those in the q a forum on zoom, not the chapter disabled. However, you can check the chat for additional information. We posted links relevant to todays information. Finally, some technical notes. Closed captioning is enabled. You can display the captions by selecting that option in the menu bar at the bottom of the window. We will make that recording Available Online at a later date. All right, i think we are ready to get going. I will tell you a little more about our speakers, todd helmus and ryan brown. Ryan brown is a senior behavioral social scientist at rand. His work concerns the role of culture and social networks in driving risktaking, violence and other destructive and selfdestructive behaviors. His current work focuses on individual, social and cultural drivers of domestic extremism and he does research that betters the lives of rural and remote populations, with a focus on American Indian and alaska native groups. Ryan holds a phd and an ma in anhtropology from emory university. And recieved postdoctoral training in Population Health from the robert wood johson Foundation Health and Society Scholars program at uc berkeley and san francisco. Todd helmus is a senior Behavioral Scientist at the rand corporaiton, and a nationally recognized expert on disinformation and violent extremism. He specializes in the use of data and evidencebased strategies to understand and counter disinformation and extremism. He has studied threats caused by deepfakes, russian propaganda targeting the u. S. And europe, and the use of social media by violent Extremist Groups and has led researchers on the effectiveness of online interventions to prevent radicalism. He holds a phd in Clinical Psychology from wayne state university. Ryan, todd, take it away. I will be back in a bit for the q a. Mr. Helmus thank you, everyone, for joining us. It is an honor for ryan and i to present the results of this study we recently did on a really important issue, affecting the nation. So, ryan, did you want to show the slides . Great, next slide. We are able to bring this study to you because of the generosity of the rand Epstein Family veteran policy institute. They conduct research to improve the lives of those who have served and support them. We also recieved a generous grant from the Tawani Foundation to enable this work so we are super grateful to those, the tawani and rand epstein center. Anyone who has followed knows rand has done a lot over many years on the terrorism issue. We famously helped organize and run one of the central databases of terrorism events in the u. S. We no longer do this but we do conduct a host of different policy Research Studies to address extremism. I, myself, have been doing work since soon after 9 11, focused on al qaeda radicalization and recruitment. And then, when Osama Bin Laden was killed, isis came on the scene and rand started doing work then. But rand has done a lot of Domestic Work on domestic extremism. Ryan brown and i coled a study on violent extremism in america where we conducted interviews with former violent extremists. We can talk about some of that work today. But rand has also done other work, including the rightwing or raciallymotivated extremism and extremism in the military. So, this continues a long line of work ryan and i, and more broadly rand, have done this over the years. Next slide. So, january 6 is really what sparked americas interest in the issue of veterans. Soon after the riots, reports were suggesting that 20 and sometimes even 25 of those who were identified in the riots had military pasts. Sometimes current military affiliations. I think we are all aware of ashli babbitt, the air force officer who was shot and killed during the assault. And also the proud boyss membership is heavily loaded with veterans. In fact, three out of four members of the proud boys convicted of seditious conspiracy were former military members. So this has raised a concerns. We are concerned about the veterans issue in extremism for a couple of different reasons. There is concern that veterans can offer a lot to Extremist Groups. They have skills and capabilities, not only military and Tactical Training skills but leadership skills, which could potentially make the groups more violent and deadly. I think more broadly, america certainly since the time of civil war has really acknowledged the responsibility that america as a society has to the veteran community. So we want to do everything we can to help veterans live fulfilling, safe and secure , healthy and fulfilling lives. So addressing threats on the extremism front is really important. Next slide. Oh, and i will say that i forgot to mention in the previous slide that the initial 20 to 25 references of veterans being engaged in extremism has dropped down considerably. So they were revised down to either 13 or 18 depending on who is measuring it. George Washington University pins it at 13 and have a more structured way of how they include people in their data set. Whereas the university of maryland auspicious Terrorism Center had them at 18 . The university of marylands center also suggests that the number of veterans politically motivated in violence is increasing over the last 12 to 15 years. So, again, another issue to be concerned about. But one thing we havent done, is we have not seen what prompted us to do the study is that we do not know to which level veterans support terrorism or domestic extremism issues in the United States. And understanding the prevalence of this is important for a couple of reasons. One is a basic caveat that show supporting extremist ideology does not make one a terrorist. Ryan will talk more about this conclusion of our brief, but it is important to at least do this as a form of barometer. So ideally we can track over time to assess the degree to which veterans may be more or less at risk. And we do presume that supporting extremist causes does lend one at risk to violent extremism. There are a lots of other factors that go into joining terrorist movements but it is understood that at least having some intellectual affinity with a terrorist movement is often times a precondition. Next slide. So, we did this study and in fact conducted a representative survey among veterans which is not a trivial task. We were lucky in that we were able to work with an existing rand study that was conducting the representative survey among veterans. We were able to add some questions that related to extremist costs. Here you see the topics included. He asked our sample of nearly 1000 disciplines about their support for white supremacist, black nationalist, proud boys, antifa, and asked about three ideologies we know can drive extremist movements or actions. One is Political Violence. Support for Political Violence. The second is the qanon conspiracy. And finally, the great replacement conspiracy. I will talk more about what those are in a moment. So we basically took the , questions for this from existing surveys out there because we wanted to be able to identify how our numbers compared to what might be representative surveys of the general public. So we used the same questions. When i show you the results, you will see that we do make some comparisons and ryan will talk about this more than a bit but we make pearsons with some degree of humility, recognizing we have different examples and different samples, Different Survey methodologies, different demographic makeups among veterans compared to nonveterans. That determines how we interpret the results. All right, so here are the key findings. One thing we noticed overall is that among support for Extremist Groups like white supremacist and proud boys, the veterans sort of underperformed in a good way, compared to the general representative survey. For White Supremacists, only 0. 8 of the veterans we sampled expressed support for white supremacist movements like the kkk or neonazi organizations, in comparison to 7 in the general population. Support for black nationalist organizations we have no comparison for that but that was around 5 . For proud boys, it was at 4. 2 compared to the general population of 9 . Four we also for antifa, we also see a similar trend of about half of veterans compared to 10 in the general population. This will be my last slide and then i will turn it to ryan. We asked about three ideologies. One is Political Violence and the wording on these questions is important. The way we asked the question is, because things have gotten so offtrack, true american patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country. General populations find that about 18 of respondents agreed with that statement. We see a comparable percentage among the veteran population at about 17. 7 . So, relatively comparable numbers on that. For qanon, the question was, for those not familiar with this conspiracy theory, the government and financial worlds in the u. S. Are controlled by a group of satanworshiping pedophiles who run a global sex trafficking operation. In the general population, we again see around 18 supporting that whereas our study, we documented about 13. 5 among veterans. Finally, the great placement theory that posits that a group of people in the country are trying to replace people born in america with minorities who share the their views. It was around 24 percent generally and the veteran population was around 29 . So fairly high on most of these , marks. Ryan, do you want to take it from here . Mr. Brown yeah thank you so , much, todd and everyone. We also break down these results by branch of service. Army, navy, air force, marine corps. What we found is veterans of the marine corps showed higher for higher support for black nationalist, proud boys, and antifa. Which means if you look at support for any of these groups, the veterans and marine corps are twice as likely to show support for one or more of these groups than the army, air force, or navy veterans. We also break down branch of Service Support for the specific ideologies and beliefs. And again here, we saw marine corps veterans showed higher support for Political Violence. And that true patriots may have resort to violence to save our country and higher support for the great replacement theory which is there is a conspiracy to replace nativeborn americans. Both marine corps and air force veterans showed higher support for the qanon narrative of satan worshiping pedophiles running the country. The marine corps shows some increased support for both ideology and theory. We can talk a little bit during q a about reasons for that. We also looked at overlap in support for specific groups and endorsement of Political Violence. The reason being that it would be particularly concerning to see a lot of concordance. The good news is the degree of overlap and supporting the need for taking up arms against the country and support specific groups was pretty mild. Theres a couple of ways of looking at it. The overlap was greatest for antifa and the proud boys. But if you take everything for supporters, only a little less than 20 of supporters also supported Political Violence. For proud boys, around 33 of those supported the proud endorsed Political Violence. You can look and say 18 of veterans supported the violence so how many supported proud proud boys are in people . When you look at it that way, it is less than 10 . That supporting antifa or proud boys. On the one hand, that is may be good news because you do not see a lot of concordance in supporting groups but it makes us wonder for the 18 which is pretty high, do not support a group right now or one that we did not measure or assess which is highly possible for that kind of a are these folks ready to be radicalized to a cause or group that does not exist yet . We do know that the extremist right is evolving more rapidly than it has in the past. It is much less dependent upon specific Group Membership and it has been in previous decades. Ok, so todd hinted at this. But the veteran population in the u. S. Is demographically very different than the rest of the u. S. Population. On the one hand, the military has been the great integrator and represents broad crosssections of the u. S. Ablation. But it is still quite different, so veterans are in the u. S. On average tend to be older and more likely to be men and the military as predominantly male. Is predominantly male. That means we are comparing veterans and the overall u. S. Ablation. And they both represent samples u. S. Population. And they both represent samples of each but it also means we are not power to support these civic comparison. We cannot answer, is the average 40yearold veteran male more likely to support extremism than the average 40yearold nonveteran mail. That is a different question and needs a Higher Powered survey to ask pacific questions for groups specific questions for groups with or without veteran status. That is one major limitation and is related to a pattern in findings recently that todd nodded to or described at the beginning of the presentation. So we have this study at a start to take specific examples of those who were involved in mass casualty plots or tax or tax. Or attacks. These are things that are either thats either occurred or were interdicted. They found Prior Military Service was the largest risk factor for participation in one of these plots or attacks. So, two kind of contradictory patterns or findings here. We are showing there is lower support overall for these groups or ideologies, but there is a pattern of what seems to be later moment in extremist greater involvement in extremist activity. That had us wondering things like may be pipeline is narrower. So overall, members of servicemembers who have separated from the military and are now veterans are less likely, on average, to support extremism. But if they do radicalize, they have a predisposition to action. There are a number of reasons this may be the case. There are selection factors for joining the military. You are also trained to be mission driven, action driven. These are all just guesses right now. But it really makes us wonder what is happening to drive these contradictory findings. As todd mentioned, even if overall percentages are lower, their capabilities of one of those being commitment to action for extremists it will make them, as we know, likely to try to target veterans in their recruitment attempts. It is not only the acquisition of skill but also Extremist Groups get the impression of legitimacy because of the high status of veterans. What do we do with this . There are a few different directions. So right now, we are conducting interviews with veterans over the phone to understand a bit more about their experiences serving in the military and separating from the military and adapting to civilian life and how this might be related to extremism. This is an area of hypotheticals at the moment. We have a lot of anecdotes about how trauma can lead to hatred and how loss of camaraderie with these individuals or for Extremist Groups to replace the camaraderie and draw veterans into their ranks. We have a lot of stories but we are still gathering data. Two that end, to understand this issue more closely, including comparing like groups. The 40yearold male comparison. We are also going to need more survey research, more drilling down on case studies. We are at the very beginning of understanding what might be driving particularly the higher association or involvement in actual plots . What might be driving this and what can we do to better support veterans to protect them from recruitment into Extremist Groups and just to improve their lives which is part of the Greater Mission of policy. With that, i think we have a poll question we wanted to put to the audience. And you may have had ideas about this at the beginning but now we sort of want to assess with both the data we presented in the discussion here, how concerned are you about veterans and extremism . So i think you will see a question pop up here and please go ahead and select an option. We will keep this open for probably 30 seconds or so as responses accumulate and then take a look at the distribution of results. If you have already voted, please go ahead and start putting questions in. We are happy to have a good amount of time for q a on this. Ok, all right, so we see some results. About 10 not concerned and the rest very concerned or somewhat concerned. Ok. So i think now, i will turn it , back over to dea