Transcripts For CSPAN Discussion 20240704

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 deanna for q a and i can stop sharing slides. Ms. Lee thank you both. Super interesting. Just a reminder to everyone, if you have questions, go ahead and put those in the q a. We do have a couple already so i will get started. Todd, ryan, it will be at your discretion. You two can fight over the answers. First question, how does social media correlate with veterans joining or participating in extremism activities . Mr. Helmus the short answer is i dont know specifically, but we do know more broadly that social media is a key sort of radical radicalizing agent as it were. Not because theres anything inherently bad about social media but it does connect will with like ideas and like people. And it provides oftentimes a venue for individuals to engage in dialogue and debate and discussion, which is all great. But oftentimes you get into these sort of ideological funnels were people become more extreme, politically extreme, then they have their social network that likewise oftentimes becomes more politically extreme. And that can oftentimes sort of ignite facilitate further radicalization because people are online and sharing content and sharing extremist content, getting reinforced for sharing that content. They are getting reinforced for even more extreme ideas amongst their social network. And they feel emboldened because without the social media, you would never know. It would be hard to connect with these groups. But with social media, it is easy to connect and feel you are not alone and many people have these views. So, social media is a key radicalizing agent. I dont know whether veterans are more likely to rely on this. My guess is probably not. My guess is that it is probably an equal opportunity issue but ryan may have other ideas. Mr. Brown yeah, i would say it is a common but unnecessary pathway for what we have seen. Both in former extremist more broadly and in the conversations we have had with veterans. It is kind of an option, one of many pathways. We were struck at the number of facetoface connections that seem to be supporting a lot of these beliefs or even kind of little cohorts and groups who believe similarly about the need for Political Violence. A lot of it seems to be so there are some very clear narratives where that was the primary radicalization pathway and then later it became facetoface. There are quite a number of examples where it is all facetoface, especially with older veterans who may not be as likely to be tech savvy. They are extremely tech savvy older veterans as well but it is all over the place and we dont have an answer specifically yet statistically yet. Ms. Lee we have a couple of questions here about certain types of extremism. Im just when to paraphrase. I know the word you talk about today focuses on far right extremism if i am remembering a study correctly. Can you talk about the prevalence or risk that compared with islamic extremism and the other hand over other types of extremism you have found this in your work or maybe other studies you have done . Mr. Brown i will start by saying the veterans that he we did not look specifically at islamic extremism, and a lot of todds prior work has focused on that. In terms of the overall risk, i think we have seen a shift over the last decade or so towards not necessarily islamic and there still is a risk but todd, you want to . Mr. Helmus terrorism fluctuates and wanes. We know it holds sway forever. They are fed by changing ideologies from the population, and that is why you see the 70s leftwing extremism was the most trouble medic and resulted in the most attacks. There is a period where animalrights extremism was common and it might still be but then 9 11 we saw islamic extremism and it was al qaeda first and now isis seems to be the most eminent islamic actor prominent islamic actor. Some military personnel did at that time im sure some converted but we know there was an attack at fort hood back in 2008 Something Like that. It killed a number of service personnel. That was emblematic of the risks we were staying at that time but it seems to have gone away a bit at least in the United States and even the middle east, whereby rightwing i mean muslim extremism is on the ebb and rightwing extremism is on the ups. These things evolve and at some point, right wing stream is and will fade away and we will see other forms. Mr. Brown among former extremist we have seen ideologies witching. There seems to be a common driver for some extremists people who get swept up in his movements that leaves them for example the first to join rightwing causes in the leftwing causes partially trying to fight and rights the wrongs of their past actions. The potentially international extremist movements. There is a lot of movement there, and our work shows that extremism suggests extremism is one of a number of pathways for some police to selfmedication that could otherwise have been joining gangs or otherwise could be joining groups involved with extreme drug use. There is a little bit of a right time, right place phenomenon radicalization. Groups gain and lose sway in their capabilities and resources too as we fight them. So, one of the dangers is to take our eye off what the emerging trends might be. Right now, we are driven by the numbers very focused on rightwing extremism but that does not mean that is going to be the predominant threat forever. Ms. Lee very interesting to think about that in terms of trends. Has rand worked with the doj on combating stream is him stream is him . Who mean the charge . Mr. Helmus rand has dumb reports on extremism in the active military and those reports were funded internally. They were not commissioned by the doj. The dod initially took this seriously. Lloyd austin initially set initial policies and they had one day that they had everyone take a day off and do a training on extremism lamented a new policy on morning people who were leaving the service that they might be at risk of recruitment. They put in charge gentlemen named bishop garrison who led a working group on this topic and issued recommendations. It happens that only one of his recommendations that their Committee Working Group issued has been adopted. Since then the dod has backtracked on the extremism threats partly because it is receiving some extremism is inherently a political act and because of that, there are challenges in addressing it. He saw this with countering islamic stream is him 15 years ago in muslim communities that were concerned they are being targeted and now conservative audiences till they are being targeted by counter rightwing extremism initiatives. Because of that, has become inherently a political issue for the military to take a robust effort. That said, we still do not know to what extent military needs implement 11 new policies to address this. Most of the terrorism acts that people with military backgrounds been involved in were done by veterans. Veteran was a bit greater risk and their protective factors inherent to the military with chain of command, units, a social mill lieu that people are tech to and they are working hard have social connections. There are protective factors and more oversight for military personnel but you dont have those for veterans. It may make addressing them more challenging. Ms. Lee ok, can you talk a little bit about the differences you solve a Service Branch . We had a question related to that, what is driving the greater support extremist ideology in groups among the marine corps and to a lesser extent air force and other branch differences, other insights would be helpful. Mr. Brown right now we have guesses. There are a few studies of branch of Service Culture that are very recent or empirical. So, some of the thoughts we have gotten from including from former marines or marine corps veterans are that there is an ethos of every marine is a rifleman and a lot of emphasis towards direct action. Often being the first in are being extremely expeditionary. Those characteristics that we talked about in terms of predisposition to action, commitment to mission, those may be particularly difficult to come down from after leaving the military service. It could be that groups are able to capitalize on that and convert that will to action and sort of mindset to extremist causes. That that said, thats still a guess and we dont know that thats whats happening. Similarly, with the air force, there have been anecdotal reports of fundamentalist christian or tendencies in the air force academy but these are anecdotal one off reports. We dont know whether there is an overlap so qanon has kind of helped grow its the ranks of its believers by drawing on some judeochristian ideology. Again, this is just a guess. We know that as much as it pains me to say it, we know qanon is relatively popular within the evangelical church. Not popular like everyone does it. The rates are higher among evangelicals than non evangelicals. To the extent that the air force bringing in more evangelical personnel than they might be at risk for that. Ok, does maritals or more broadly, other demographics like marital status have any potential effect on the potential extremism . Todd i dont have data on that in my head so im not certain. Ryan in our prior study, we saw there are a few cases of people getting converted by their spouse. There are many more cases of people getting pulled into extremism than establishing a healthy relationship, sometimes while they are in the Extremist Group and then getting pulled out because of commitment to their families. The greater stability and other kinds of things that romantic partnerships and family relationships can initiate. My guess is in terms of pathways out of extremism, there is a protective factor there. We dont know how that plays out differently among veterans versus the overall population. Deanna ok, i think i know the answer to this but will you be looking at past cases of veteran extremism like Timothy Mcveigh and Terry Nichols or the veterans who were Branch Davidian and then the militia moved in . Maybe its what insights these specific cases offer if any or are there plans to examine these situations . Todd i think we did a review of those cases really on. Todd ryan yeah, its a great question. I have not done a review of those questions but its a great idea. Other researchers, i know there have been other studies that do look at some of those. Those guys are almost surely at the start of data. There is like a quantitative picture of the risk of veterans. Im sure there is less understanding of the detailed radicalization trajectories they have. Im not familiar with and unsure studies have been done but if not, they should be done. Thats a great idea. Ryan ryan in terms of future direction and complementing that, more recent case studies as details emerge in Court Documents and other places would be an interesting way of looking at this. The thing that interviews or studies of extremist reformer extremist of us are a lot of details about the pathway so there is confirmation in studying just them. Thats why we turn to a survey population where we are not sampling extremism, we are sampling overall demographics. I hope we get better understandings in the future of cases that could have been or people who are maybe attracted to causes but were pulled away from them by other veterans or their social network. Thats the kind of knowledge we hope to develop more on this offramp and protective factors as well as the unfortunate cases that resulted in attacks or convictions through investigation and introduction of land attacks. Deanna what concerns have you seen as far as active duty sharing grievances with Extremist Groups in western or Eastern Europe with potentially posing a threat to u. S. National security . Maybe some of your work on russian disinformation might speak to this . Todd its a great question. I would urge the questioner to check out report by Heather Williams at rand. Its on racially motivated extremism. They focused work on europe. They do look at that issue. There are several concerns. One is just shared grievances and im sure they do but also whether or not there is collaboration or coordination or joint Fundraising Initiatives between them. I think those are really important questions to get asked. We know that the white supremacist or theremv movement in europe is relatively strong. It certainly affects some countries particularly like germany who has had some issues with extremism in their ranks but even the activeduty ranks and they sort of remove those folks from their services. Is an important question but i dont know the exact answer to what level that coordination is happening. Im sure the grievances are somewhat similar and we also see there is propaganda that can Cross National boundaries. A classic example is the attack of the Christs Church in new zealand where an attacker went into a mosque and murdered tens or hundreds or wounded hundreds of muslim parishioners. He livestreamed that attack and that livestream really galvanize the International White supremacist movement. Im sure those videos are Still Available for those who want to diligently look through them. It sort of like pornography for extremist ideals. Its not only radicalizing but even worse, its galvanizing and pushing people toward action. We certainly see that. Ryan yeah, we know that russian disinformation and propaganda targeting the u. S. And trying to support racial divisions so they will lend support to anything that is racially dividing in the u. S. We know they did that during covid. They also capitalize on white identity western supremacy or feelings of insecurity that the great replacement theory capitalizes on. They use a lot of these themes and we know there is some travel from White Supremacists to fight in the war, the russian war against ukraine. There are concerns with nazi sympathizers on both sides. We worry about training. I mentioned earlier about switching from right to left. There are individuals who join the war in syria on both sides who were extremists. That is a way of continuing the thrill of being involved in a cause but also getting real experience with smallgroup tactical movements and with explosives and weapons and just getting further traumatized and drawn into the violence. We also know that extra mist groups will try to get individuals involved because getting in facetoface combat helps drive home some of those emotional patterns that further devolve into extremism, that they are being attacked and there is an enemy and so forth. I think the transnational piece, we are concerned about how that piece reinforces or provides opportunities. Deanna for those of you in the webinar, the Heather Williams report is linked in the chat if you want to check that out. Have you looked in any potential connections between trauma and radicalization toward extremism . Todd no, not in a systematic way. A friend and colleague published something a number of years ago on that topic. I think we hypothesize that there is a connection there. But i dont have hard evidence to support that. Ryan we see it in the trajectories or narratives we have studied for her prior work on former extremists. There is a lot of mention more than statistically you would expect overall population to respond like that. Childhood trauma, sometimes trauma in the extremist organizations, like todd said, we dont know what the precise causal role is but it does seem like there is enough evidence to say that extreme groups are taking advantage of emotional and social vulnerabilities and they are transforming this to a kind of addiction to involvement in extremism as a temporary promotion emotional pass. We also have cases where there doesnt seem to be evidence of trauma we can tell in the radicalization trajectory. Its not like we see it in 100 of cases. Todd we did find like 2 3 of those participants, when they gave us their stories, indepth stories, we can identify often times a life altering event like some sort of major life event. Sometimes it was a trauma like attempted suicide or major let down that they would consider traumatic in a typical way but it could be a major let down or a loss of a job. It caused them to rethink their life. If you look at conversion, religious conversion often times, it follows these major life events something major happens in someones life and it causes them to rethink everything like what ive like what have i been doing with my life . At that moment, they are open to new ideas. We saw that in the previous study that one of the ideas was the sort of getting involved in neonazi organizations or the kkk or al qaeda. Whether thats trauma, i dont know but we did see that. It looks like they deleted a question earlier and it was about the risk of extremism from veterans from iraq and afghanistan. Its important question. Its one we are not able to answer. Our study cannot address whether a 40yearold veteran is more or less likely to become extremist or support extremist ideals than a 40yearold nonveteran. We dont have the sample size for that and the statistical controls require real study. We want to do that study but we have been able to do . We need to recruit veterans and nonveterans together to conduct representative studies and surveys. Its a key issue what role these folks have coming back from iraq and afghanistan with combat experience. Potential trauma and what role that might play. They could be at an increased risk and its an important question to answer but unfortunately our research could not answer that. Deanna is conducting a study like that feasible . Todd yeah, we just need to recruit a representative sample survey. And a representative sample of veterans and nonveterans and we need a large enough sample size or probably oversample certain demographics like those who might have come back from iraq and afghanistan and make those comparisons. You need to do both studies of the same time and record complexed statistical weighting. Thats what we need to do is we need to do both surveys the same time. Deanna sure. This next question has a little bit of an panicked joke with it. I worked on a project with the world bank on preventing deadly violence. These were only development interventions. What i remember most is the countries having success against privation is at the fabric of governance, public life and popular culture. The marginalization of violence was a continued society effort. Do you see any countries out there that more closely match the model for the u. S. . Todd its an interesting question. 10 years ago, when our primary concern was islamic extremism, i wouldve said the u. S. Was a good example. Compared to europe. Europe seem to have a much worse radicalization problem than the u. S. And partly it had to do a lot with the ability of the u. S. To take in immigrants and the diversity approach mindset. That made it more welcoming for muslims and limited the degree to which they radicalized. Europe, not as well. I dont know the answer for that on this sort of new variety of extremism we are dealing with. Ryan ive seen some kind of presentations on programs in germany that one was in germany that seems to have a better crosssection and integration, some of these preventative approaches. I think that the current level of Political Polarization especially in the u. S. Make it difficult but i cannot say i have a specific country in mind that would provide a model for the u. S. To copy. I would say we have a ton of work to do. We have massive countries geographically but a lot of work to understand where the generation of the threat is happening, especially because the terrorist threat is so distributed. The location of groups or headquarters or membership is no longer a good measure of anything. Its especially in under resourced locations, many of which happen to be remote in the u. S. Go undetected for quite a while. We just have anecdotal examples now we dont understand the spatial distribution and i think we have a long way to go for that for the preventative approach to be properly substantiated. Those issues can be challenging but we also have to be careful about pushing back against that because what weve seen online is that censorship sometimes it works, sometimes it creates more radicalization elsewhere. Deanna i think that kind of gives us a segue into what i think is the essence of the next west and which is how do you go about sharing Accurate Information about this important topic with government decisionmakers and the public and may be correcting misinformation on the perceptions that are out there about the veteran involvement in violent extremism . Is there a formula to that or is it about spreading the word is much as you can . Todd we do not make any kind of categorical assertions about the risk of veterans for extremism. This is a limited study that we assessed. There is a lot of other variables that go into potential radicalization. I want to avoid the notion that we have a categorical denial that veterans are problem or potentially problem. Its a positive study for veterans and there is more research that has to be done but we have been engaged with a lot in the Public Sector on this study, probably more than most. We have briefed staffs of congress and brief representatives from the white house and the nsc. This is probably our second or third webinar on this matter. We are getting the surround but what would you say, ryan . Ryan its a great question. Its hard to correct misinformation about who is responsible are at fault are at risk because there is so much polarization and fingerpointing in certain Public Discourse at the moment. There are people, including former extremist who are doing, challenging people who are pursuing others and trying to pursue prosecutions against those so they recruit veterans and others. That broader healing question of can we stop having these impressions about these overly simplistic ideas about who is at risk and was at fault. Thats a Civil Society question that i wish i knew the answer to. I think we are just hunting around in the dark for solutions. As well as trying to have civil conversations that are supported by data if there is data on an issue with ones friends and neighbors. Thats a great way to do it and then larger forums are a great way to do it. We still have a long way to go. Todd we need to do more research on this topic. Thank some have taken the report to suggest that we dont need more research and thats not true. We know Extremist Groups are trying hard to recruit veterans disproportionately. Caret doing that and how can we stop them . We know some veterans have joined in her in these movement so how do we deal radicalized them or disengage them from these movements . How can the Government Support them and how can we support veterans as they transition from active duty service where its a hyper social supporting environment where you work on your own and now you have to make do by yourself. Thats really important. As well as just understanding the radicalization process for veterans. Is that different from others . A lot of questions that have yet to be answered on this. Deanna absolutely and you both have lettuce elegantly into the final question. Its a simple one is there somewhere vibrant veterans can find out about these surveys and who conducting them . Todd for our studies, no. We work in a survey firm but there are survey firms you can go out to and sign up to be in their surveys. Some might be for veterans and some might not be. We work we do our work through nord so you can sign up with them and be part of their panel. Ryan thats the National Opinion and research center. Deanna great, i will encourage folks to do that if they are interested. That is all we have time for today. I want to thank everyone for their thoughtful questions and their attendance today and thanks to those who joined us via cspan. If you are in the webinar, we have a short question only poll that will pop up on your screen. 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