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elizabeth neumann share life podcast interview snapshot

Written by Jason Montoya. Posted in Society.

The Rise of Christian Extremism and the Path Back to Peace — Discussing the Kingdom of Rage With Elizabeth Neumann

Note: This page includes affiliate links to Elizabeth's book.

Welcome to a listen to a listen-to-learn episode of the Share Life podcast.

In this conversation, I'm speaking with Elizabeth Neumann, author of Kingdom of Rage: The Rise of Christian Extremism and the Path Back to Peace.

She worked in the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. In our discussion, we talk about hostile extremism in America and discuss the recent Trump assassination attempt, the rise of extremism, and the challenges we face this presidential election year.

kingdom of rage book cover

About Elizabeth, Author of Kingdom of Rage

With over two decades of experience, Elizabeth served across three Presidential Administrations - on the inaugural staff of The White House Homeland Security Council under President George W. Bush; advising the Office of the Director of National Intelligence during the Obama Administration; and as the Department of Homeland Security’s Deputy Chief of Staff and Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention in the Trump Administration.

Elizabeth is the Chief Strategy Officer for Moonshot, an organization that supports governments and community partners to understand and prevent violence. She is also a national security contributor for ABC News; Board Chair for the National Immigration Forum; and a Fellow of the fourth class of the Civil Society Fellowship of The Aspen Institute, and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.

Conversation Questions & Highlights

Elizabeth shares JM Berger's definition of extremism in her book, as follows:

"the belief system that an in-group’s success or survival can never be separate from the need for hostile action against an out-group."

I had my stint with political extremism in 2006, and I've witnessed the mainstreaming of Radicalization in the last five years. It's been stunning how many people I know that have been radicalized.

Elizabeth is helping us understand what's happening, what's at stake, and why this hostile extremism is a problem. 

Here are the highlights of the conversation.

The Problem of Radicalization

  • I've got a list of questions to ask you about extremism but it would be worth addressing the elephant in the room with the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Based on your expertise, how should we make sense of that situation, especially when there is so little information about the motives behind it?
  • Tell us about humiliation and narratives of grievance, fear, and anxiety.

Taking Responsibility and the Way Forward

Prevention & Intervention

  • In chapter 12, you talk about reaching the zealots. Being a recovered one and looking back at that season, it can be difficult to recognize that there often is little you can do in a short amount of time to make a difference. If change does come, it’s hard and long fought. Tell us more about this dynamic.
  • In chapter 10, you talk about doing life with people that are different than us. How do friendships with people who have different religions, politics, and ways of life help protect us from extremism?

Connect With Elizabeth

Listen To This Discussion

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You can also find this discussion on Pocket Casts, Itunes, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts under the name, Share Life: Systems and Stories to Live Better & Work Smarter or Jason Scott Montoya.

Watch This Conversation

Click here to watch this discussion on YouTube directly, or click play on the embedded video below to begin streaming the interview.

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Podcast Episode Chapters & Key Quotes

  • 00:00 Introduction and Background
  • 02:49 Defining Extremism
  • 06:35 The Role of Fear and Outrage
  • 09:10 The Erosion of Healthy Norms
  • 13:49 The Motivations Behind Extremism
  • 18:18 The Danger of Indifference
  • 22:12 Analyzing the Recent Assassination Attempt Against Trump
  • 26:28 The Changing Nature of Ideology
  • 29:22 Understanding the 'Why' of Extremism
  • 31:53 Finding Purpose and Transcending Fluctuating Life Circumstances
  • 36:58 Grief, Humiliation, and the Inability to Process
  • 41:05 Engaging with Extremist Ideology and Seeking Simple Solutions
  • 45:43 Responsibility and the Path to Peace
  • 59:36 Hope for Change and the Potential for Progress

Key Quotes

Podcast Episode Transcript

Jason Scott Montoya (00:01)
Welcome to a Listen to Learn episode of the Share Life podcast. I'm Jason Scott Montoya, and in this episode, I'm speaking with Elizabeth Newman about violent extremism in America. Elizabeth, say hello to everyone.

Elizabeth Neumann (00:14)
everybody.

Jason Scott Montoya (00:15)
Thanks for joining us. With over two decades of experience, Elizabeth served across three presidential administrations on the inaugural staff of the White House Homeland Security Council under President George W. Bush, advising the Office of the Director of National Intelligence during the Obama administration, the Department of Homeland Security's Deputy Chief of Staff and Assistant Secretary of Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention. That's long.

and the Trump administration. Elizabeth is a chief strategy officer for Moonshot, an organization which supports governments and community partners to understand and prevent violence. She's also a national security contributor for ABC News, board chair for the National Immigration Forum, and a fellow of the fourth class of the Civil Society Fellowship of the Aspen Institute, and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. So you're involved in a lot of things.

Elizabeth Neumann (01:12)
I am busy these days.

Jason Scott Montoya (01:15)
Well, I want to just kind of set the stage and talk about what is extremism. And you bring up in your book, J Berger's definition as the belief system that an in -group success or survival can never be separate from the need for hostile action against an out -group. Now, I had a little bit of my own stint with political extremism in 2006. And

I witnessed the mainstreaming of radicalization in the last five years. You've probably seen it going on much longer than that. But it's come home in a lot of ways, where it's in our neighborhoods in a lot of ways. And so I've been stunned by just how many people I know that have been radicalized. Some people I won't know it, and then I'm having conversations with them and I'm like, wow, this person's radicalized. Maybe they're not in a violent way, but just in an ideological way.

So what's going on? Why is this happening? And why is it a problem now? Am I just more aware of it? It's always been there.

Elizabeth Neumann (02:20)
No, and this is part of the reason I love Berger's definition because it's a extremism as a term we use in lots of different contexts. And when it gets used in the context of violence and terrorism and we say that political party or that candidate is extremist and you hear this on on media a lot by various influencers.

Like they're not using the term precisely, right? In my version of the world and the way that my profession looks at it. They're using it to describe things with these broad brushstrokes, but I don't find that very helpful, right? Like when we weaponize the term, be like you're an extremist or they're an extremist, it's a shorthand and we're not actually getting to the root of the issue. It also does a disservice to actual extremism. And that's why definitions matter. So extremism from a security context.

Jason Scott Montoya (02:48)
Yeah. Yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (03:15)
is tied to the hostile action. But it's hostile action in the context of a group, an in -group perceiving a threat to their success or survival by an out -group. And the problem that we have right now is that without the hostile action, take that out of it, just that first part of the definition of an in -group perceives a threat to their success or survival by an out -group, that is the entirety of our politics these days. Everybody will tell you,

Jason Scott Montoya (03:43)
foundation in many ways.

Elizabeth Neumann (03:44)
Yes, like you've got to vote for our candidate because the other side is going to ruin our country. It is the most consequential election of our lifetime, the end of democracy if we elect this person or that person. And and look, I you're not going to change the politicians or their campaign consultants who produce all those commercials because outrage, anger and fear sells. It is like one of the most powerful, powerful emotions. It's why

social media works, it's designed to get you outraged and designed to keep you scared because it gets your eyeballs and that gets ad money. The influencers on TV, they get their viewers because they're constantly whipping you into a frenzy of fear and outrage. We always talked about it back in the day, if it bleeds, it leads, right? You remember, like, this is like kind of quaint conversation compared to where we are now, but that used to be the common

Jason Scott Montoya (04:37)
Yeah,

Elizabeth Neumann (04:44)
Why is the news always negative? Well, because that's how you get viewers. Nobody turns in at six o 'clock to see puppies in rainbows. They want to know, is my community still safe and why did the mayor steal the money? And right, it's corruption, it's violence. That's what gets eyeballs and sells newspapers. And now we've just amplified it with social media. So part of this is just human behavior.

Jason Scott Montoya (05:02)
Yeah,

Elizabeth Neumann (05:10)
And we live in an age where that human behavior can be exploited so easily and cheaply. And so if we have to acknowledge that's the world we live in. And so if you want to operate differently, you're going to have to make choices to be conscious that that is how the world operates. They're intentionally trying to make you angry and fearful. And then also,

find ways to break that cycle and remove yourself from it, right? Because we're just constantly saturated in it. So here's the problem. If that's our normal steady state is constant fear and outrage from our various media sources, then it becomes not too hard for somebody to step in and say, you know, this existential threat, we might need to do something more than vote and donate money to our candidate of choice. We might need

to do something violent. And that's the hostile action piece. And as ideologies form, they usually start not saying, let's build a bomb. They're starting with, we got to do more. Get out and vote or get out and protest. And then it might be like, well, we need to be prepared for a bad day. So maybe we need to stockpile some weapons, which, is allowable under the Second Amendment. That's totally doable. But when a political party or a group that's

Jason Scott Montoya (06:08)
Yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (06:35)
organizing around a certain ideology starts going down that path, it usually doesn't stay there. It turns into a spectrum of actions. And the good news is most people don't ever progress to the worst part of the spectrum. But hostile action isn't just violence. It's a whole suite of concerning behaviors. And it starts with threats and intimidation, bullying and harassment, which are for the most part,

not criminal, although, you know, in times and places it can be. You can often use civil law to push back against it. But generally speaking, we've just allowed society, civil society to police that, right? Like we raise each other, we raise our kids, we have norms in how we treat a police officer or how we treat a school teacher. And it is, of course, not through threats and intimidation and bullying and harassment.

And then the upper end of the spectrum is where you get into that criminal space. It might be hate crimes or destruction of property. And then you get into terrorism and genocide being the upper end of that spectrum. The problem of the moment that we live in is that our norms have just kind of gone by the wayside, particularly COVID. COVID was this big amplifier where all of a sudden we could.

yell at the flight attendant or at the school board member or the school teacher because, well, COVID was hard and I'm just going to yell at you because I can. And so like all of a sudden we are yelling at people and bullying and harassing and leaving voicemails on people, know, people who serve as local county commissioner or the election judge and threatening their grandchildren because, you know, I'm pretty sure

Jason Scott Montoya (08:01)
Interesting,

Yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (08:26)
stole the election and like preposterous conspiracy theories and saying things either in online spaces or through voicemail that you almost never would say in person or certainly not in a way that somebody could discover you. So it starts kind of on that lower end of the spectrum. And then as you feel empowered or as other people encourage you, maybe you do do it in public. Maybe you do associate your name with those threats.

Jason Scott Montoya (08:38)
yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (08:54)
And if it goes unpunished, you just kind of keep accelerating it, not just punished, but if it gets lauded by your community. And that's how you end up with more and more people willing to commit violence as a solution to this us -them context that our politics is creating.

Jason Scott Montoya (08:56)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, and we're both parents. So it's like if you let your kid keep doing the bad behavior from set two year old to high school, like it's going to escalate, right? And then it's going to be harder to deal with later on versus early. Right. I would imagine the proactive approach is the ideal here.

Elizabeth Neumann (09:25)
Exactly.

Well, and I think it's okay for us to just reflect. 2020 is really hard. So is 2021, even 2022. Like we went through some really, really tough years and we're kind of out of it, but our norms have not reset. And so like part of the message that I have with the book is, hey, we've gotten used to something that's actually rather unhealthy and does lead to violence.

Jason Scott Montoya (09:40)
Yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (09:56)
We've gotten used to this idea that we can treat each other with disrespect. And while there are places where they can penalize it, so you saw in the flight attendant example, after a number of fairly well publicized examples of people losing their mind on an airplane against a flight attendant.

airlines came out and says, like, you will be prosecuted and you can do that on an airplane. There's laws on the books that give a lot of discretion. You're not going to fly our airline again. You're going to get on the no -fly list. So there are places where they were able to kind of use the law to reestablish norms, but there are other places where those tools don't exist. So it really requires the good men and women of society. And I mean

Jason Scott Montoya (10:25)
Yeah, yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (10:46)
mainstream people who haven't lost their minds to be like, no, no, this is not how we treat our teachers. This is not how we treat our school board. And kind of to stand up and say like, knock it off. you know, go take a walk. I understand you're really upset, but we've got to find a better way to disagree. And the problem is we're all exhausted and we're tired of yelling. And so we

Jason Scott Montoya (10:52)
Yeah,

Elizabeth Neumann (11:10)
Two, polarized extremes that dominate our national conversation. It's all that's on social media. And most people, and I'm thinking, I could list off 10 names right now in my life of people who are like, I'm out. Like, I'm just not even going to participate in this. This is not worth my time. I've got kids to raise. I got a job to perform. And I'm out. hey, in some ways, good for you. Like, there's no reason for us to be swimming in this toxic soup of media and fear and outrage. The problem is,

When the good people say I'm out, then all you're left with are these extremes fighting it out. And we need the good people to kind of step back in to civil society and reestablish those norms because there's way more of the exhausted majority than there are of the polarized people yelling at each

Jason Scott Montoya (11:55)
Yeah, they just have to, it's just a collective action problem. Yeah, yeah. So I think I wanna just slice the hostile piece of that, the difference between someone, like someone might call some, like a Democrat or Republican extreme because they have this social program or they have this immigration program. But I think it's really important to, that the type of extremism that we're talking about and that we're concerned about.

Elizabeth Neumann (11:59)
It is a collective action problem. It's great way to frame

Jason Scott Montoya (12:23)
is this the type of extremism that goes outside of the rule of law? Right? Is that is that a good way to frame

Elizabeth Neumann (12:30)
That's right. Yeah, I like extremism if you were to look it up as a definition in web stores, like one of the definitions is something that's outside of the mainstream, right? It's on the edges. And so you can certainly talk about an extremist policy, meaning this is like there are only 2 % of.

US citizens that support this policy, like it's extremist and that it's not representative of what the American people want. And I'm not saying that politicians can't talk about it that way. It's just that in the world that I operate in, where we're countering violent extremism, we're not talking about extremist policies, we're talking about people who have embraced an ideology that they're the only solution involves hostile action.

So that's a very different type of extremism than applying the term to say, a policy matter or, mean, even look, historically, you could take some beliefs that we think are the norm, they are the mainstream right now, such as that we're all created equal. And like, that was extreme 1000 years ago. No, no.

Jason Scott Montoya (13:22)
Yeah.

Yeah

Yep.

Elizabeth Neumann (13:49)
the thousand years ago, there was a king that was ordained by God and maybe even semi deified and depending on your where you were living and basically there's a hierarchy and like the serfs yet. No, they are not the same as the king. But in American value system, like we were founded on this kind of radical idea that all men are created equal. And so we kind of bucked, you know, 2000 years of

how humanity, human beings organize themselves and said, we're going to try this self -government thing. Like, and that was crazy. That was an extremist idea at the time. And now it is like one of our most cherished values as Americans. having an extremist idea in that broader context, nothing wrong with that. Like sometimes really great things come out with things that are not in the mainstream. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the violent extremists in that Berger definition, the way we apply the term.

Jason Scott Montoya (14:24)
Yeah,

Yeah. And I would say that the violent extremist is actually antithetical to that core value, right? In the sense that in a different society, maybe in the Roman Empire, like that type of thing, they were very against insurrections. They kind of mastered shutting them down. But in terms of, yeah, it's the cultural context and the values and then whether...

Elizabeth Neumann (14:55)
It is.

Jason Scott Montoya (15:12)
the violence is actually a good thing or a bad thing, because there are cultures around the world that the violence actually is valorized, right? Yeah. So I think that's important to just recognize, because I think that lower layer, the layer you're talking about, that security form of hostility and potential of violence is the one we all take for granted, but that if

Elizabeth Neumann (15:19)
That's true, that's very true.

Jason Scott Montoya (15:38)
but that we need to actually steward and maintain or it will get worse, right? Is that a way to put it? Good point.

Elizabeth Neumann (15:44)
That's right. I love that framing. We, you know, if you go back to the anecdote that's ascribed to Benjamin Franklin and nobody quite knows if it's true, but like, you know, what kind of form did we, of government did you decide upon Mr. Franklin? And he says, a republic, if you can keep it. Like self -governing, we're only 250 years in as of two years from now, right? Like, we,

we are still demonstrating the weaknesses of this. And part of that is in self -governing, there's freedom of speech, there's freedom of ideas. One of the big challenges from a counter -terrorism perspective, if you are a US official, is that we have way more restrictions on what we can do to combat terrorism domestically than our counterparts in other parts of the

Germany is a great example. In Germany, it is illegal to fly a Nazi flag or promote Nazi ideas. If you do that in the United States, that's protected First Amendment right to do. Now, you can't then go and try to explode a bomb or hurt people with that ideology, but you can hold those ideologies. And so what it becomes

it places more of a burden on society to kind of push back against evil ideology because the government can't. It takes, it becomes the responsibility of churches and just parents raising kids and, you know, any other form of like local institutions to say these are the values that we hold important tolerance and, you know, listening to people.

Jason Scott Montoya (17:28)
Yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (17:41)
and disagreeing peaceably or being curious. Like these are all good virtues and values we want to encourage in our society. And as more people are isolating themselves as they're stepping out of the public square, partly because we're busy, but also partly because like, man, the public square is really messy right now and it is not pleasant to be in. And if I say something, I get my head bit off.

because I framed it the wrong way. Because the majority, we call them the exhausted majority of the country are like, this is too hard. When they step out, there's nobody stepping up for those virtues and values and character. That is absolutely essential for this whole construct of a republic to work. So the danger is not just we have more people who

Jason Scott Montoya (18:18)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Yeah

to work. Yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (18:38)
cognitively open to committing violence to achieve their aims. The danger is that the fact that we are at that point that tells me we have so many people that have stepped out of the public square, so many people that are not fighting for those values and virtues. And I don't mean like the 10 commandments, though, hey, that's good too. Let's talk about that. I just mean tolerance.

Like it's okay for somebody to have a different opinion than you and that doesn't make them evil. I had a conversation with somebody this week who was younger just out of school and expressing how hard it was in the context of what's been happening with Israel and Gaza to have had a relationship with an organization that would, you know, by

veins in the far left or not really just the left, but the academic left would be perceived as unacceptable. And he was not quite sure how to even share that he had built a relationship with people in that organization and they were good people who had interesting ideas and he didn't fully disagree with them, but he was like, but they're not evil. You're like, right. Like they're just human beings and they see the world differently. So when we like do this zero sum us them,

Jason Scott Montoya (19:51)
Yeah. Yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (20:01)
binary, you're either all with me or you are my enemy, we end up in a very dangerous space. And so we need rational people to kind of step back into that public square. I even say in my book, like, don't think the space, I don't think we're in this place because people consciously were like, well, I'm just going to let the extremists take over. I just think that good people have a really hard time understanding that there is.

actual evil out there and that our indifference actually empowers the evil. And so I'm part of the reason I wrote the book was to educate like, no, no, we do have a problem. And we can't ignore the problem anymore because like our kids are dying. Our young men are getting recruited into this. It is it is really devastating what is happening to our youth in particular.

Jason Scott Montoya (20:47)
Yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (20:58)
We need to wake up to this disease that's taken over and step back into that public square and start reestablishing healthy norms because they're kind of like guardrails that prevent the extremism from coming into the mainstream.

Jason Scott Montoya (21:13)
Yeah, I like that. So I want to dive a little bit more into that. Before I do, I think it would make sense for us to just talk about the elephant in the room, which is the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump that ended up killing someone, injuring some people. like it could have changed. It could have caused a lot of horrifying results for our country. So I'm glad it was a failure, but it's a very confusing situation because we don't know a lot about the shooter. We don't know about his motives.

There's also lot of people that are concerned about just the security, what was in place, what wasn't, what was allowed. And that is the type of extremism we're talking about, that type of lawless extremism that people are essentially taking things into their own hand. we don't even know if it was a political motivation, but help us understand that situation. How should we look at it in a healthy way?

And what should we not be doing when we're looking at it?

Elizabeth Neumann (22:12)
Yeah.

Yeah, what we shouldn't do is jump ahead of the investigation, right? Like the FBI and, you know, other law enforcement agencies are doing the painstaking work of trying to piece together how this young man came to a place where he attempted to shoot Donald Trump. And some of the things that we know so far are a little out of the usual and some of them aren't.

so initially we were hearing, we're not finding anything online where he's posted stuff. We're not finding a manifesto. That was a little eyebrow raising because usually there is a manifesto. Usually there is some sort of online footprint. What we have since learned is that his, he may have been taking operational security measures, using a burner phone, using

pseudonyms online. So it actually is just taking investigators a lot longer to exploit his electronic devices to figure out where he was engaging, what he was ingesting, what he was posting. So there's probably more to come on that. The FBI just last week in a hearing said that they found some recent postings they believe

are attributed to him, but they were still working on it. But they date back five years, which puts the shooter at the age of 15 or 16, so quite young. And he was engaging with anti -immigrant hate and anti -black hate, racist content. And just to put that into context, that's around the 2018, 2019 timeframe. So pre -COVID and in high school, and this like one of

I read, when I put those, you know, saw this reporting, just was like, ugh. Like one of the things I think we're doing a poor job as a security community, educating parents is how prolific extremist content is online and your kids are seeing it. If they have access to a smartphone, an iPad or their own device, like a computer.

Jason Scott Montoya (24:31)
Yeah, we had a situation with one of our kids where I went into one of the discord channels he was in and it was really bad and we had to have a conversation with him about it. And he's only, you know, he's just a little over 10, you know? So, yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (24:38)
Ugh, I'm sorry. Yeah.

Exactly. And I think that's, it's not unlike the conversations that we have to have about sex and drugs and vaping. You have to assume they're being exposed much younger than you think like it's even possible. Usually when they're exposed, no good.

Jason Scott Montoya (24:54)
Yeah. Well, and it made me, yeah, well, I was gonna say, it made me think of like, extreme, like, recruiting in other countries, like in the Middle East with these young kids, like all of a sudden now we're having to deal with that same type of dynamics. It was kind of, it's a real moment, yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (25:04)
Yeah.

Yes. Yeah, no, it's very real. And it's not to panic parents. It's just that it's one more thing we got to be talking to our kids about. You just start early, talk often. You don't have to have major conversations. You don't need to overwhelm them. You do need to know what they're seeing online. Like in our house, it's like there is no privacy.

Your dad can see what I'm seeing. I can see what your dad is seeing. We don't have any privacy between us. Likewise, there is no privacy here for you. We will see everything that you're seeing. Yeah, it's an accountability and protection thing. And so, you you start there and then you kind of say, like, look, there are people online who would love to cause you harm. And there are any number of harms. It's not just extremism. And you just need to age appropriate, of course, developmentally appropriate. Let them know.

Jason Scott Montoya (25:34)
Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's a protection too, it's not just,

Elizabeth Neumann (26:02)
when they need to come ask you about things. Because that's the key is like, you just want to keep the dialogue open with them. And so back to the shooter, it is apparent that he was engaging in forums that were glorifying violence for glorifying, you know, hate in general. And while I think the thing that shocked everybody is like, you're choosing to shoot a candidate.

former president and candidate for the Republican nomination. So clearly this is a politically motivated attack. That does not, we don't have evidence of that right now. Now, maybe that shows up. Maybe something happened to switch him from engaging in what would generally be considered right wing violent extremist content. But here's the other thing that I think is underappreciated in the public and just...

security geeks like me pay attention to. Increasingly, ideology is much looser than it used to be. Like 20 years ago, ideology for al -Qaeda was very rigorous. Like you had to read a bunch of stuff to join the group. There was like gatekeepers of who owned the propaganda, who owned the ideology itself. This is what it means to be al -Qaeda. There are no gatekeepers anymore. It's whatever somebody comes up with and posts on that channel that you happen to hang out with. And

Jason Scott Montoya (27:00)
Yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (27:27)
half of the time they're just creating new content to entertain one another. And so like you'll stumble across memes or ideology and you're like, that makes no sense. We have a growing group of Salafi jihadists. So this is Al -Qaeda ISIS types who are also like pro neo -Nazi. You're kind of like, would, hmm. They're white supremacists who generally

like people from your countries. We have stories of people in Iran, really pro neo -Nazis in Germany. So there's this weird thing that's happening in what we consider the third generation of internet -based terrorism. it has to do with, ideology is much weaker. It's much more vibes is maybe a great way to explain it. And increasingly with young men,

It is much more about the nihilism than it is about a specific ideology. It is disaffected young men. They're isolated. They're angry. They don't feel like they have any purpose or meaning in life and nothing that will ever come of their life. And so you might as well end it in a blaze of glory. And this individual looks a lot more like that to me than like a militia violent extremist or a white supremacist violent extremist who used terrorism for different purposes. This just

Jason Scott Montoya (28:49)
Yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (28:52)
is a very troubled young man. All of them, by the way, are very troubled, but very troubled individual who didn't see any purpose to life and wanted to find glory and significance by doing something big. And there happened to be a Trump rally near his house. We know he Googled both Biden rallies, Trump rallies, other political figures. This just was the target of opportunity. And that's why it happened. Investigation will tell us more, but

Jason Scott Montoya (28:57)
Yeah,

Elizabeth Neumann (29:22)
One of the things that is very normal for us humans is we want to know the why. And the why is actually not tied to the ideology. We now know that. We didn't know that post 9 -11. We overemphasized ideology after 9 -11. But the why is almost never tied to ideology. It's underlying psychosocial factors.

Jason Scott Montoya (29:40)
Well, Well, and the nihilism layer is almost more disturbing than if it was a political motivation, because it's easier to understand where the nihilistic approach is. It's a lot darker in certain types of ways.

Elizabeth Neumann (29:56)
It is, it's darker and I mean, moving into my faith, it's harder to answer absent a faith. It's harder for like when you see secular roles like governments and academics actually struggling with, it's called the problem of boys or the challenge for young men.

Jason Scott Montoya (30:07)
Yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (30:25)
There was a book that came out last summer of men and boys and it's just like an academics trying to understand and grapple with something has broken for our boys. They're not maturing into men at the same rates, you know, in the same milestones that, you know, men 20 years ago were and why is that and why are so many of them depressed or anxious? Why are suicide rates higher? And so he's exploring all of these.

Jason Scott Montoya (30:41)
Yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (30:52)
effects and just one of those downstream effects is they're more willing to commit an act of violence. Extremism is just one plausible solution or solution is the wrong word, plausible. It's one more societal ill that's coming from a bigger question of like, are societies not helping boys develop into men of purpose?

What's fascinating is as for the secular world to try to grapple with answers there, they're having a hard time. not to say that Christians have better answers, but I do think when we're able to say your dignity and worth comes from being made in the image of God, and that he has a purpose for you, that

Like if you believe, right, if you don't believe that, that doesn't help you. But if you believe that, like, there's a lot of significance and belonging that comes from being a child of God. And that pushes back against the world's message that you don't

Jason Scott Montoya (31:52)
Yeah.

Yeah, and finding purpose in our creator that transcends or overrides maybe a lack of it in another way. It's sort of this steady eternal purpose that as our life's purpose in the more immediate sense fluctuates, we have sort of this foundation underneath it.

But I think a lot of that is, there's a lot of layers to that. mean, when you talk about that, guess kind of tether it or tie it into the dynamic of in the book, you talk about grief or you talk about humiliation. Grief is also another thing you talk about too, which is something, but let's talk about humiliation, grievance, fear and anxiety. So I think that's a part of it because we're all out of control here.

Elizabeth Neumann (32:43)
Hmm. Hmm.

Jason Scott Montoya (32:58)
We want to alleviate that anxiety. I don't know if you've seen the inside out too, but it's about anxiety. so yeah. The meme I saw around is it's made for adults that won't go to therapy.

Elizabeth Neumann (33:03)
Not yet. Is it? My kids have seen it. They loved it and I need to see

That's pretty funny. That's good. That's good. Yeah. So the one of the things that we have learned in studying terrorism and why people join terrorist groups or why people commit mass attacks is that it's not it's not really ideology that it's unmet psychosocial needs. And those psychosocial needs are usually triggered by some life crisis. So the the needs are a need for significance and belonging.

And they are often triggered by, say, a loss of a loved one, loss of a job, an experience of humiliation, some sort of great uncertainty. Think COVID. All of our lives were disrupted, and you can't control it, and you can't put it back together. So some sort of life crisis exposes that these are unmet needs.

Jason Scott Montoya (33:55)
Yeah,

Elizabeth Neumann (34:08)
probably were unmet to begin with. But sometimes it can be like, I had significance when I had that job. I lost that job. I have lost my significance. So sometimes it's tied to the crisis. But sometimes it's just, this was always there. But the crisis really brings it to bear. And most of us are going to have crises in life. Like, if you're a Christian, you are warned that as a Christ follower, you will have trials. You will have.

Jason Scott Montoya (34:34)
Yep.

Elizabeth Neumann (34:35)
persecution. Like if you're living the life the way you're supposed to, there will be persecution. And yet, the reality is living in America and 2024 life's pretty good. We don't have to suffer anything like our ancestors did. So when we do have discomfort, it's a very American thing for us to try to fix it, right? Like, okay, well, I'm just going to get back out there and get a new job or, you know, we don't

like when we lose somebody like a death or a relationship, we almost don't even know how to grieve. Like as a society, we've lost the muscle memory of what grief looks like. And some of that's because our society is so advanced, people don't die very frequently. Whereas, or we don't see it, we're not exposed to it. You know, if you flashback 200 years ago, your great grandparents,

Jason Scott Montoya (35:21)
Or we don't see the death itself directly.

Elizabeth Neumann (35:29)
You know, they probably lost multiple children, multiple siblings growing up. They probably gave birth to many children, some of whom who didn't make it through childhood. They might have lost multiple spouses. Life was very hard before modern medicine, and there was no guarantee you were going to make it to the ripe old age of 45. So death was like just a part of life for our ancestors. It is not.

for us, which is a huge blessing. Like what a measure of common grace that the Lord has allowed us to have these advances for us to live longer, to enjoy more life with our loved ones. It's awesome. The downside, though, is we're not very good at grief. So when people are suffering and we can't fix it through medicine or medicine's just limited or people have died, like

We don't know how to walk with those who are walking through grief. We don't know how to do it ourselves. And I do think some of our entrapment and anger and outrage is actually tied to the lack of knowing how to process grief. What's the first stage of grief? Well, you go through the anger, right? Like you go through the anger stage, then denial, then all the other ones.

Jason Scott Montoya (36:44)
Acceptance, yeah.

anger. yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (36:53)
Right? Like we're just like stuck on stage one. We just are perpetually angry because we can never actually go through a grieving process.

Jason Scott Montoya (36:57)
Yeah. Well, yeah, there's a, well, there's a book called The Grieving Brain that I read. And when I was reading it, I was like, my goodness, our country has so much grief that we, like, it didn't make, it didn't click until I kind of read this book. And I think the 2020 and COVID and the social stuff was part of that. But there's probably grief even before that. I mean, I almost wonder if there's grief about 9 -11 that we haven't all really dealt with and acceptance.

Elizabeth Neumann (37:19)
For sure.

Well, and I think even our sins, as a, know, grappling with the Civil War, the post Civil War period, like there are churches that have, you know, went through a process in the kind of starting in the 1990s. And then really, you know, if you read some of the racial reconciliation movements, stories like,

Jason Scott Montoya (37:33)
Yeah, that's a good way.

Elizabeth Neumann (37:48)
there was significant progress being made and then it became politically untenable to be talking about racial justice or just like, can we look at our history with a clear lens and not color it rose colored tinted glasses that like, it wasn't that bad. Can we just be honest about this was an atrocity? What we did to immigrants from Japan during World War II was an atrocity. What we did to the Native American

Jason Scott Montoya (38:05)
Yeah.

Mm

Elizabeth Neumann (38:18)
peoples that were here before us was an atrocity. What we did to black people that were enslaved was an atrocity. Like we need to be able to see history clearly in order to then repent, in order to then maybe move towards some sort of reconciliation. And there were groups that were trying to do this over the last couple of decades, but it all got kind of cut short. I I agree with you. think like 2020 was this,

collective moment of a whole lot of pent up, un dealt with grief. And, and I still don't think that for many of us, I think a lot of people have done good work there, but a lot of us are still stuck.

Jason Scott Montoya (38:59)
Well, yeah, historian Timothy Snyder, he says, you when you essentially deny a past event that a group you affiliate with participated in, you're essentially saying that you're okay if it happens again. And I think that's a big part of what you're describing is if we don't deal with these sins,

We're gonna do them again and then we're gonna have two sins, you know, double the sin to deal with and that's not how you deal with sin. So it just gets, it gets worse and then it creates cycles of revenge and other issues that get broken into

Elizabeth Neumann (39:30)
Bright.

And so all of that kind of feeds into a space for that vulnerable individual who, and we use the term vulnerable intentionally in the field because we actually believe that the people that eventually go and carry out mass attacks could have been prevented if intervened with earlier in the process. That we just have individuals with brokenness,

Jason Scott Montoya (40:03)
Yep. Yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (40:08)
They've experienced a life trauma. They don't have good coping skills. They don't know how to grieve. They don't know, they don't have people around them perhaps because we're extremely isolated these days to help walk with them through whatever life crisis they have. They may have other risk factors too, but generally speaking, there are people with these experiences, these life crises.

don't have proper protective factors, and then they get exposed to extremist ideology. And that's the role of ideology. It's not that ideology by itself is so attractive. It's that you're in this vulnerable place and you're looking for answers. And extremist ideology thrives on people that just want simple solutions, black and white. My world has turned upside down. I'm very uncertain. I'm very angry. And ideology comes in and says, here's who to blame. The reason you're experiencing this is so -and -so's fault.

the deep state, Jews are often a common trope that it's all some sort of global cabal that, and this is who you blame for the reason that things are not going well for you. But I have a solution for you. We can actually fix this. But their solution is not voting. Their solution is not exercise your first amendment right or go to counseling. Their solution is hostile

Jason Scott Montoya (41:11)
The Blaine group,

Yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (41:34)
The solution is we got to take out the out group. that's for some individuals, that is a very appealing message. it's not, because it feels like it's meeting those needs. It gives them a sense of belonging. They're now finding their identity in that ideology. I belong with all these people that think like I do. And they're finding significance. I can do something about this problem. And so it's a false.

Jason Scott Montoya (41:48)
Yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (42:01)
solution. It's not really going to meet those needs, but it's a mirage. But that's the way that in the moment they perceive

Jason Scott Montoya (42:02)
Mm -hmm. It's a mirage, yeah.

Yeah. Well, and it is interesting just to kind of overlay that in terms of like Christ being like crucified, like crucify him. We don't want to take it on ourselves. Let's bar anger towards this innocent man. So I want to kind of tether that kind of to the responsibility side because that's really the blame and the grievances sort of, let me destroy my enemies to let me take responsibility for them.

So in one of your interviews on the bulwark, you said you felt that your side is more responsible for more deaths and destructions than the other side, and you felt a sense of responsibility to clean your own house. And as someone who is like a lifelong Republican, who's kind of a remnant outsider because I've been pushed out by not conforming to what it's become, and January 6th is really a big moment for me to see

But I just relate to you when you say, I want to take responsibility for myself and my group instead of blaming the out group and pushing my grievance on them. Tell me about that, where that comes from, and what's going on there.

Elizabeth Neumann (43:21)
I mean, I think the first way that I thought about it was through the professional lens. Post 9 -11, we asked the Muslim community to please push back against the messages of violent jihad being a core part of your faith. So we needed moderate Muslims to step in and say, no, no, this is not what our faith teaches. And I kind of felt like if we were so audacious to walk to them and say, like, hey, can you push back against this? We're not saying it's your fault.

We're not saying like you are responsible for what happened on 9 -11, but can you help us in this fight and push back against this ideology so it doesn't spread? And many of them did. Many of them put painstaking efforts into exegeting their scriptures and trying to explain their interpretation of what godly jihad is and not involving violence.

we can have a separate conversation about a non -Muslim examining their faith. That's kind of not the point. The point is, if we asked that community to push back against the violence coming from their community, shouldn't I be talking to my community since the violence was coming from my community? And I use the term my community quite literally.

a number of people from my county that I grew up in or the county I went to school in that were arrested for crimes that occurred on January 6th. I mean that not just geographically, I mean it kind of philosophically or politically, like the language that was being used on January 6th justifying this as revolution. I mean,

These were all phrases and rhetoric that I grew up with, believed at one point. And we had Christian symbols everywhere. Like we had a prayer in the Senate, we had Bibles, we had prayers outside on blowhorns. Like it was saturated in Christian iconography and Bible verses and prayer. And so it felt very personal to me. Like to me, you're abusing my faith.

Jason Scott Montoya (45:25)
Thank you.

Elizabeth Neumann (45:43)
you're abusing my conservative principles. And by the way, you're my literal neighbors that I grew up with. And we all kind of were in the same soup, if you will. I don't want to say toxic soup, but just like the bubble. I was in that Christian conservative bubble of North Texas. And so I know exactly where you're coming from, but I'm like, no, no, violence is not the way to address the grievance here.

Jason Scott Montoya (45:43)
Yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (46:12)
And it was really puzzling to me, like, how can I see this so clearly? But they did not. And I remember I had a moment during my service in government where I had the opportunity to go to Poland for a work engagement. And I went a weekend early so that I could go to our Auschwitz. And I had a reaction that I wasn't quite expecting. It was a reaction of

One of the lessons of this place is you can't look at this as, look at those Germans or the complicit people of this area that made Auschwitz possible. You're blown away at the systematic way in which they exterminated people. It just is German ingenuity. They were systematic in how they brought so many people in, got as much work out of those that could, and then

Destroyed anybody that wasn't valuable to them had nothing left to offer and it was painstakingly engineered so that was your first thought and then you're like there is no way that this can be done without Hundreds thousands of people contributing and how did none of them? See the evil of this like how does that happen? How do you get so blinded to it? And for me like the takeaway

Jason Scott Montoya (47:39)
Yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (47:41)
It's not that the Germans and the Nazis were evil. It's that any of us could be evil. And it goes to that great line that Solzhenitsyn has that the line of good and evil goes through all of us. There but for the grace of God go I. And so my walk away from Auschwitz was this humiliation of I can't, I can't cast, just look at this and go those people back then, they were really evil. I need to examine myself. Could

Jason Scott Montoya (47:54)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (48:11)
Could I have been persuaded to turn a blind eye and contribute to this horrifying atrocity? so it was just a year or two before January 6th that I had had that moment and was doing a lot of thought work on that. again, terrorism is my, this is like my field. I spend a lot of time trying to think why do bad people do bad things?

And so like it was one of those moments of realizing there, but for the grace of God go I like, how am I not the bad guy? I could be and I need to be humble about that. And then January six happens and I just, grappling with all of those themes really kind of drove me to kind of explore it more in the research and writing about the book to be able not only to answer some questions for myself, but to hopefully equip others.

with an understanding of not only of the threat, but the fact that we can do something about the threat, that we don't have to live with this level of violence that we thankfully after two decades have been doing so much good academic work in this space to better understand how you do build resilience factors in our kids, how you do build protective factors for individuals that are vulnerable and that we could find a path, like literally called the book and the path back to peace because I do genuinely think

Jason Scott Montoya (49:34)
Yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (49:36)
that we can work towards a path towards peace here. But it does require those good people on the sidelines of getting engaged and getting involved.

Jason Scott Montoya (49:45)
Yeah, and speaking out, even though you might be, like for me, as a Republican speaking out about against Trump and his violent rhetoric and the things that I have an issue with, I get the wrath of MAGA. But I think it's important because for me it was like, have something important to say and I need to say it and I can't let that deter me

Because otherwise the ship that we're gonna just keep going the direction enough people don't intervene and speak their voice We're just gonna keep going this the same down. We're gonna keep spiraling downward So I guess you know The other thing I would When you talk about the path to peace and intervention I think one thing that I think is important to recognize and you talk about this in the book This very hard to intervene in someone's life It's it's not easy and it's not short it

it could be a multi -year heavily investment just to get someone to just shift. I think that's an important thing. But here we are, it's 2024 and it's an election year and we don't have that much time. how do you, what's your, what wisdom and advice do you give us? Because I do have concerns about the hostility. I mean, when 2020 unfolded, I essentially, I saw the deception that Trump was.

Elizabeth Neumann (50:50)
Mm -hmm.

Jason Scott Montoya (51:13)
speaking about the allies with the voting and the tallies and the results. And I just sort of put my shoes, I said, if I believe that here's what I would do. And I kind of anticipated something like January 6th happening and it did. I do that same thing with myself for this year and I'm going, okay, there are a lot of landmines along the way this year. How do we navigate that?

Elizabeth Neumann (51:41)
Yeah, it's...

Jason Scott Montoya (51:41)
and what advice, what insight do you have for us on that topic?

Elizabeth Neumann (51:47)
pray. the path we have in front of us is a long term healing path. the, when I say long term in the order of 10 to 20 years, there's that much damage that has occurred. we are so fractured, so polarized, the, the investment, is needs to be primarily local.

needs to be primarily in younger generations and any number of ways to be engaged. it's a much longer, probably a whole other podcast to talk about like, you what are those, you know, long -term things, but just, I would say to those that are parents educate yourself about these protective factors that you can build into your kids about how to protect them from extremism. have a whole.

host of recommendations in the book and then the appendices in the book. If you are a youth leader or a teacher or anybody that's engaged with youth, you have an important role here too. Investing in building resilience in our kids, grit, that's been a fun buzzword of late, building grit into our kids, that actually really matters. The ability to experience failure and overcome

not because you achieve perfection, but because we're not defined by our achievements. building resilience in our kids is long -term effort, which will bear fruit and help those of us that are old and hard to change in our ways to start to see, maybe we got it wrong, and these younger kids have a better way of seeing the world. So that would be my first plea is.

to reengage in your local communities with your neighbors, proximity really matters. When we're actually talking to people and they have skin and you're literally flesh to flesh, it's really hard to otherwise. It's really hard to label people. And inevitably, even though we are more sorted as communities now, inevitably, if you engage,

particularly in an urban environment, if you're able to engage in some non -political engagement, like volunteer at the soup kitchen or volunteer at the animal shelter, you're eventually going to run into people who have a different worldview than you on any number of topics. And that's really healthy for us to be curious and learn from people that are different than

If you have the ability to travel and to get out of the United States, that's another really healthy way to be exposed to like the you know, like it's not all about us. It's not all about the United States. There's a whole other world out there. So all of the proximity to people different than us really helps. Okay this year I am concerned about violence this year. I do think that maybe on the plus side it's not COVID. COVID was

Jason Scott Montoya (54:47)
Yeah. Yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (55:05)
Definitely an aggravator that led to a lot of that unrest in the summer that led to some of the violence. You had a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands to stew on things. So maybe, maybe now that people are back and busy with their lives, you can go to little league games, you can go to the college football games. There's more things to take that anger and be like, you know what, I'm going to shut off the TV and I'm going to go to the football game tonight.

And that's healthy. That's a great way to reconnect with there's more to life than politics. So maybe that helps tamp down. But we are also seeing organized extremist groups try to reconstitute, try to recruit. We are seeing rhetoric start to increase, particularly because we have a female at the top of the Democratic ticket now who is a person of color. Those two things, the organized, especially white supremacist and anti -government extremist groups.

perceive as a threat. So I do think you're going to have some organized stuff get attempted, which can sometimes trigger the more mass, less organized groups to kind of come alongside. And then you never know, it kind of depends on the candidates themselves. Things that they say can sometimes influence somebody to do something, even if they don't mean it in that way.

We just know enough about how this works that perceiving that an influencer or a candidate is suggesting that violence is necessary can cause somebody to mobilize. So this is where you go back to if you see something, say something, to be vigilant in public spaces. It is a heightened threat environment for any number of causes, not just domestic, but foreign threats or on the increase.

And then finally, I would say that if you have somebody in your life that you're really worried about, it is really important to seek help, to not brush it aside. Now, what should you be worried about? Somebody that's withdrawing, somebody that's communicating that they're contemplating violence against themselves or against others. It might just be an aside comment. They're not necessarily telling you all of their plans, but they...

might say it under their breath. Somebody that does have access to weapons would be a pretty big concern in that kind of context. nobody is expecting a bystander, a parent or a loved one to know whether that person poses a threat. But the plea is please reach out and ask somebody to help you make that assessment. You can go to law enforcement. Law enforcement sometimes is limited in what they can do and they might refer

the individual to a mental health professional. And if you don't feel comfortable calling law enforcement, there are organizations that can help you think through whether the behavior you're observing is of concern. Parents for Peace is one of those organizations that I would recommend. There are also in various spaces in schools, in states, some trained mental health professionals, but it is a weakness right now in the country. don't have enough.

mental health professionals in general, and we don't have enough mental health professionals that are trained to know how to engage with at -risk individuals. So that is a known challenge in our moment. Like we just don't have enough trained counselors, but don't just brush it aside as my encouragement. Like be persistent, try to find somebody who can help you make this assessment and see if you can get that individual help before they might.

do something that causes them to lose their life or cause others to lose their

Jason Scott Montoya (58:57)
Yeah. Well, I appreciate you sharing and I know you've got to get going. So what are any other final words or thoughts before we close out

Elizabeth Neumann (59:06)
I guess I always like to end with something hopeful, is like, look, and Jason, you and I were talking about this before. There is nothing new under the sun. We are in a challenging time. There are certain historians that view the moment that we're in as that liminal age or a gray space, a gray zone, and that we're switching from an old epic or era to a new. And in that shift,

There's a lot of uncertainty. There's a lot of pain. There's a lot of tension because people don't know what's coming and new is scary. so the thing to remember is that usually, usually the next era brings, it always brings new challenges, but it also usually brings progress. But we can't assume we have to work towards it. We have to create the progress that we're hoping for.

Jason Scott Montoya (59:43)
Yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (1:00:06)
So this is a time to be engaged, even though it's hard, it's very hard, but it's a time to be engaged and invest in our communities and build the flourishing societies that we think we can have and to not let those, what is relatively a very small percentage of toxic voices that are dominating our national conversation, don't let them intimidate you. Build the community that you want for your family. Focus local where you actually have some control and a voice.

and do great things because out of those small local community changes, you end up totally changing the character of a nation. That's how we rebuild a flourishing society and build that path back to peace.

Jason Scott Montoya (1:00:46)
Yeah. And that middle majority, you know, we have a, have a, if we all play a little bit of a part. And I think of Martin Luther King Jr. as just a great example of what you're describing. And that kind of building up over time into something that really transformed our country and modeled so many ways to navigate these dynamics in ways. I mean, he, did it in ways that like, I just can't imagine being able to do what he did under the type

system he was under, you know, in terms of the anger and he had he could have embraced the grievance and the anger and yet he chose love and he's shows forgiveness and responsibility and and he changed helped us change the nation so

Elizabeth Neumann (1:01:17)
That's right. That's right.

It's a great, it's a beautiful picture. And a good reminder that as dark as it seems right now, and I can't imagine as he's like writing the letter from a Birmingham jail, like it must have felt very dark at times. And look what he unleashed, like what amazing changes came from his leadership and his perseverance, his love, his like unconditional love.

and commitment to nonviolence to affect change. Like that's what we need. We need more people willing to lay down, I don't mean hopefully literally, but lay down their lives nonviolently to bring about the change that you're wanting to see.

Jason Scott Montoya (1:01:59)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So go get Elizabeth's book, Kingdom of Rage, it's on Amazon. Anywhere else you might buy it, digital. Do you have a voice, an audio version yet? Okay. okay. Do you do anything else? You blog, you do interviews.

Elizabeth Neumann (1:02:25)
There is, there is an audio version. There's also an electronic Kindle type version too.

Yeah, I'm thinking about a substack. Do you think I should do a substack? Okay, maybe I'll look into

Jason Scott Montoya (1:02:38)
I think you should, I think you should, especially for like, at least the next four months, five months.

Elizabeth Neumann (1:02:45)
That's a good point. Maybe I just need to start small. I think it's rather intimidating to think about like, like, do I have to write like for the rest of my life? Maybe I'll just start small.

Jason Scott Montoya (1:02:55)
Yeah, I think just it could be just for this little window that we need help, Elizabeth, help us. And then if it's then you can retire and come back to it later. But yeah.

Elizabeth Neumann (1:02:58)
Okay, thank you for that encouragement. I appreciate that.

Good plan, I like this.

Jason Scott Montoya (1:03:11)
So, but do you have a website or anything that you want

Elizabeth Neumann (1:03:13)
I do, Elizabeth Newman, and Newman spelled N -E -U -A -N -N .org. And you can find me on social, though as I just encouraged us all, we shouldn't be on social as much as we probably are, but at News Summit's N -E -U -S -U -I -T

Jason Scott Montoya (1:03:33)
Well, Elizabeth, thank you so much for sharing your life and your insights. There's so much more you have to share, so people go check out the book. A lot of good stuff. It gets real practical, too. If feel alone in the battle, this is a good one to read. I hope enough of us can make a difference with those that are caught up in the extremism in our local communities. Thank you.

Elizabeth Neumann (1:04:00)
Thanks, Jason.

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