#53 Clint Watts on Domestic Extremism

Mr Clint Watts joins the Cognitive Crucible and gives an FBI-perspective on domestic extremism. The conversation references a recent article on Clint’s Selected Wisdom substack: Virtual Insanity to Real World Calamity: “How Will Lies Power Domestic Terrorism in 2021?” Clint asserts that domestic terrorist groups are far from homogeneous. Particularly worrisome are young, largely single, largely male, “stochastic haters” who tend to be committed to violence and are accelerating destabilizing trajectories. Clint unpacks the landscape, discusses hard trade-offs between security and privacy, and provides some policy recommendations.

Link to full show notes and resources

Guest Bio: Clint Watts is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He previously was an infantry officer in the United States Army, and was the Executive Officer of the Combating Terrorism Center at United States Military Academy at West Point. Additionally, he was a Special Agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation where he served on the Joint Terrorism Task Force. He’s also the author of: “Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News.”

A Distinguished Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Non-Resident Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. Also a national security contributor for NBC News and MSNBC. Recently examined the rise of social media influence by publishing my first book entitled Messing With The Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians and Fake News. His research and writing focuses on terrorism, counterterrorism, social media influence and Russian disinformation. Clint’s tracking of terrorist foreign fighters allowed him to predict the rise of the Islamic State over al Qaeda in 2014. From 2014 – 2016, Clint worked with a team to track and model the rise of Russian influence operations via social media leading up to the U.S. Presidential election of 2016.

About: The Information Professionals Association (IPA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to exploring the role of information activities, such as influence and cognitive security, within the national security sector and helping to bridge the divide between operations and research. Its goal is to increase interdisciplinary collaboration between scholars and practitioners and policymakers with an interest in this domain.

For more information, please contact us at communications@information-professionals.org.

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