Techno libertarians, white nationalists and JD Vance are all linked to a movement known as the 'New Right.'

What is this movement and how has it influenced the Republican candidate for vice president?

Today, On Point: JD Vance and the rise of the 'New Right.'

Ian Ward, reporter with Politico and Politico Magazine. He reports on the conservative movement and the American Right.

Gil Duran, freelance journalist writing about tech politics.

Michael Malice, author of the 2019 book "The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics."

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: July has proven to be one of the most consequential months in American political history. With a new presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in Kamala Harris, and the recently named Republican vice-presidential pick JD Vance, American voters now have less than 100 days to understand what these two leaders truly believe and how they'd act on those principles.

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Yesterday, we talked about Kamala Harris. Today, it's JD Vance. Vance turns 40 years old on Friday, and if elected, he'd be one of the youngest vice presidents in American history. As such, his formal political record, right now, isn't all that long. He's only run for office once. That was in 2022 when he won the Ohio Senate race.

Vance was sworn in January 2023. So he's been a freshman senator for just a year and a half. It's hard to discern exactly how he acts on his beliefs with such a short voting record. But what are Senator Vance's authentic beliefs? What are the different places they come from? Part of the answer requires us to take a walk into the uncanny Silicon Valley.

JD VANCE: One of the things that consistently comes up in my campaign is this concept of redpilling. And if you've ever heard this term, it comes from the movie The Matrix, which as I understand it, is made by a couple of people who do not share the politics of the people in this room. But the basic idea is that once you see the way that knowledge is transmitted, once you see the way that public policy works in this country, it's very hard to unsee it.

CHAKRABARTI: In November 2021, during his Senate run, JD Vance gave the keynote address at the second National Conservatism Conference. The conference is a sort of who's who of what's been referred to as The New Right, it's a loosely affiliated group of American conservative intellectuals and activists and their influences draw from a variety of sources, religious, Academic, economic, apocalyptic, and technological.

That term that Vance used, redpilling, for example, it is, of course, originating from the 1999 cinematic classic, The Matrix. But the phrase found its way into conservative politics via the blogosphere, and philosophical explorations of a blogger named Mencius Moldbug.

MENCIUS MOLDBUG: Okay, what would happen if you basically turned this thing around and actually to be right wing was to be red pilled, which is clearly very far from the intention of that movie. What it meant to me was, first of all, a complete negation of the whole frame of thinking about politics and history that I was brought up in, which really had to be every bit the equal of sort of the frame breaking that you would have to do if you'd grown up under Soviet communism.

CHAKRABARTI: Moldbug is the pseudonym used by former software engineer Curtis Yarvin.

That was him in December 2020 on the Libertarian podcast Don't Tread on Me. Yarvin has been called an intellectual leader in the so called neo reactionary movement within the New Right. He says that he is a radical monarchist. His view is that humanity has only ever had three political operating systems, as he calls it, democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy.

And Yarvin sees American democracy as a failed experiment, one that's been taken over by oligarchy and whose only salvation is a form of American monarchy.

YARVIN: There's just no world in which you can do this without electing a president who says, I am the chief executive of the executive branch. I am going to reinvent the executive branch and the way I'm going to do it is simply by working around the one we have and creating a new one which has all the power. As for the people we have, they'll be retired.

CHAKRABARTI: We asked Curtis Yarvin for an interview. He did not respond to our request. His ideas, though, have found willing minds among some younger conservatives, especially those whose own experience winds through Silicon Valley, as JD Vance's does. Here's Vance in 2021 on the podcast Jack Murphy Live.

VANCE: There's this guy, Curtis Yarvin. Who's written about some of these things. A lot of concerns that said we should deconstruct the administrative state. We should basically eliminate the administrative state. And I'm sympathetic to that project. But another option is that we should just seize the administrative state for our own purposes.

I think that what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And then when the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say the Chief Justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.

CHAKRABARTI: Again, that was JD Vance in 2021. Now, Vance has never said that he's an unquestioning acolyte of Yarvin's. But Yarvin's ideas do have a stickiness to them. Yarvin also coined the term the cathedral, by which he means elite academic and media institution that he believes set the bounds of acceptable discourse, and by doing so distort reality to amplify their own power. Or in Yarvin's telling:

The cathedral is essentially the reification of the legitimate sources of information. So the cathedral is essentially performing the functions that a ministry of truth would perform in a classic Orwellian environment, and it's performing the functions that a religion would in a classic theocracy.

CHAKRABARTI: And once again, here's JD Vance in 2021.

VANCE: So much of what we want to do in this movement and in this country, I think, are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions, specifically the universities which control the knowledge in our society, which control what we call truth and what we call falsity, that provides research that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country.

And we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.

CHAKRABARTI: Curtis Yarvin has also been called the High Priest of the Dark Enlightenment. And his view of the U.S. 's future does get apocalyptically dark.

YARVIN: You're clearly, from my perspective, looking very much at a fall of the Roman Republic event here, in a best case scenario.

Worst case scenario is more like the fall of the Roman Empire.

CHAKRABARTI: Yarvin believes democracies inevitably devolve to systems that shore up oligarchies and that those oligarchies maintain power by claiming a tyranny of the majority. The only way out? An American Caesar to bring the failed corrupt system back into line.

Here's how JD Vance puts it, again in 2021.

VANCE: We are in late Republic. We're very clearly close to a point where the people don't have nearly as much power. The oligarchy has seized most of it. We are in the late Republican period. If we're gonna push back against it, we have to get pretty, pretty wild and pretty far out there and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.

CHAKRABARTI: Once again, that was JD Vance in 2021. We reached out to JD Vance's team and requested an interview. The senator's team did not respond to our request. Ian Ward joins us now. He's a reporter at Politico and Politico Magazine, where he covers the American right and conservatism. Ian, welcome to On Point.

IAN WARD: Hi Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: I put an amorphous definition around the New Right, which I'll admit was wholly unsatisfactory. So tell me, is it a movement? Is it just a loosely affiliated group of people? What is the New Right?

WARD: No, I think an amorphous definition probably fits what is ultimately an amorphous movement.

But the New Right is a group of writers, thinkers, politicians, activists, who came together in the aftermath of Trump's election in 2016 to figure out what was next for American conservatism. American conservatism for so long had been understood as this alliance between free market libertarians, foreign policy hawks and social conservatives.

Trump, of course, came into power rejecting two of those three major pillars, foreign policy hawkishness and economic libertarianism. And there was an enormous question in the aftermath of his election of what would take its place. The New Right were the people who entered this space that Trump opened up to chart the future of the conservative movement.

CHAKRABARTI: And you call the people who align themselves with the New Right predominantly younger and extremely online.

WARD: Yep, extremely online. And very insular too, this isn't thousands of people, this is a collection of 100, 200 people in Washington. in Silicon Valley, in places like Austin, New York, Miami.

It's a relatively small world. They have readers beyond that, but the people who are the core members of the New Right, it's not a ton of people.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so I'd like to understand from you, Ian, what their intellectual influences are, political, and of course, where the money's coming from.

But take a second to talk a little bit more about Curtis Yarvin, who is he and really, what role does he play in the spreading of the intellectual foundations of the New Right?

WARD: Yeah, Yarvin is one of these writers who the New Right is looking to for inspiration. Because of the system of the cathedral, which you described very aptly earlier, the New Right's looking beyond sort of mainstream institutions for its intellectual resources, right?

They're not going to colleges and universities primarily, or mainstream publications. Yarvin came to prominence as a blogger in the early aughts, in 2010s, this is the sort of intellectual ecosystem of the New Right. It's bloggers, it's podcasters, it's people who post on social media, it's YouTubers. There are more mainstream manifestations of the New Right now, you have think tanks who've adopted some of their ideas, or intellectual journals that are trying to mainstream ideas that sort of bubbled up from the alt world that Yarvin exists in.

But he's one of many intellectual resources that these people are looking to. He just happens to be a particularly prominent one now.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And this isn't any kind of like shadowy underground network. If you just do a quick Google search, which, I know you've done even more than that, Ian. But Yarvin, for example, he's really out there.

Unfortunately, he didn't say yes to our interview request, but there's tons and tons of interviews with him where he lays out his views very clearly. And it was surprising to me about how closely some of what he said aligned with what we've heard JD Vance say in the past.

Now we do have only about 30 seconds before our first break, Ian, but has JD Vance himself ever said, I am a proud member of the New Right? Or has he not explicitly aligned himself?

WARD: No, he's identified himself as a member of the New Right. He's cited Yarvin, as you mentioned, as an influence. I think JD Vance sees himself and wants to be a figurehead for the New Right.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Ian, I think I still, even in my reading of your reporting and others, I'm not sure I have quite a really solid sense of what the New Right as a movement says it stands for. It's definitely, as you said, a rejection of old school style conservative politics. But what would they say that they're affirmatively for?

WARD: I don't think they have a unified affirmative program. I think they've coalesced around sort of two primary ideas. The first is a sort of intellectual or ideological idea, and that's the idea that, what, liberals, small l liberals believe to be progress, what represents political progress for people on the center left and the center right is a mistake, that there's economic liberalization, technological innovation, the flattening of social hierarchies, that these things represent a march forward for society.

They collectively reject that effort. They say these things have led not only to unintended consequences, but to real harm and have set the nation on a path towards decline. We heard Yarvin earlier and Vance talking about imperial decline and Republican decline, you know, they really think that this political project that liberals have advanced under the guise of progress has actually been a form of regression, or even decline.

The second thing they've coalesced around, to a lesser degree, but still true, is that Trump is the vehicle for the reaction against those ideas. They might not agree on everything, but they agree that the movement that Trump represents can be a powerful force for the kind of counter revolution or counter reaction that they want to see happen in American politics.

So there isn't necessarily an affirmative plan, there's a diversity of views and a lot of actual generative disagreement within this world about what a policy platform should be, but they've coalesced around these negative projects of overturning the thrust of progress and remaking the Republican Party around Trumpian lines.

CHAKRABARTI: And overturned the thrust of progress because, just to underscore what you said, because they don't believe it's progress at all.

WARD: Yeah. No, they believe it's a type of decline. And the reason Vance is in part an effective mouthpiece for these views is that his biography and his life story to some degree lines up with the vision of America they want to promote.

He grew up in a post-industrial town that was, had struggled with drug addiction, unemployment, lack of family formation, that's the sort of vision of America they think this quote-unquote progressive agenda has led to. So in putting forth his life story, he's become a living example of the Republican decline they want to turn around.

CHAKRABARTI: In fact, that truth about Vance's upbringing, because no one denies that he had, he grew up in difficult circumstances. It's something that he's always talked about, but he's also been very recently talking about on the campaign trail. Just this week, he was at a rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota. And here's a bit of what he said.

VANCE: And I benefited, of course, from the incredible bounty of this country. I also benefited from a very tough grandmother who raised me because my own mom struggled with addiction. And I'll tell ya, there's a lot of things that keep kids on the straight and narrow, but one, for me, was a grandmother who told me when she found out that I was hanging out with a local drug dealer, JD, if I ever see you with that kid again, I'm gonna run him over with my car.

And then she added, and nobody will ever find out about it. And I believed her. And I came from that background, my friends, and I stand before you as your next Vice President of the United States. I love this country.

CHAKRABARTI: The Senator JD Vance at a rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota, just this week. And by the way, the choppiness in that audio was not from any editing that we did.

We did no editing in that cut. It was just an unstable video stream. Ian, I am curious though, so Vance's life story is one that the movement of the New Right can really elevate as saying, this is the direction we want to go. But who are the other political leaders in the New Right, because I'm not sure that they share the same background that Vance does.

WARD: Vance is an elite guy, despite his background, he went to Yale Law School, he worked in Silicon Valley, he had a New York Times bestselling book, he was a well published author and commentator. His life story culminates in this elite world. But the reason I started paying attention to Vance is I was talking to a lot of young conservatives in Washington who were, you know, who themselves identified either on the New Right or adjacent to the New Right.

And I was asking them who represents your worldview? Who on the national scene do you see as the figurehead for your system of beliefs? And they said, there's no one who comes close to JD Vance. It's JD Vance and then probably 6,000 feet. And then someone like Marco Rubio or Josh Hawley or Mike Lee in the Senate.

The other person they talk about as representing their worldviews, someone like Tucker Carlson. Tucker and Vance are of course close. Carlson advocated for Vance to be vice president. But what makes Vance interesting and unique is that he's young, he's of this generation a lot of the New Right come out of. And he was the only person on the national scene, with the exception of Blake Masters, the Senate candidate in Arizona who didn't win his race in 2022. Vance was the only person I was hearing who really authentically represented the beliefs of this cohort of people. So that's why I started paying attention to him and it's borne fruit, because now he's been elevated to the top of the ticket.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Now, how much does it matter to these young members of the New Right that you talk to, that a lot of Vance's adult experience does flow through Silicon Valley? We're going to talk about Peter Thiel in just a minute, but that sort of techno, I don't even know if I want to call it utopianism, but techno supremacy aspect of what it seems like the vision of the New Right entails, is that important?

WARD: Yeah, I think it's important insofar as they see parts of Silicon Valley as a kind of counter establishment to the deep state, quote unquote, in Washington. Again, they're looking outside of establishment institutions for political inspiration and political knowledge, and they see parts of the private sector, especially the private sector in Silicon Valley, as one repository of institutional knowledge, political knowledge, intellectual influence.

So yeah, I don't think the fact that he comes out of Silicon Valley is a turnoff to them, I think to the contrary, it adds to his chops

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so Ian Ward, stand by here for just a minute because on that front I want to turn to Gil Duran. He's a freelance journalist who writes about tech and politics.

Welcome to On Point.

GIL DURAN: Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so tell me your view or what your reporting has found out about how much the kind of thinking of the New Right that Ian has been describing is finding support and acceleration within Silicon Valley.

DURAN: Yeah, in my writing, I focus on how there's a dangerous ideology rising out of tech and Silicon Valley.

It views democracy as an enemy, views dictatorship as preferable, and sees billionaires as the savior of humanity. And in 2024, they've made an alliance with the Republican party under Trump, which is also flirting with things like dictatorship, pro natalism, truth denial. And the idea of being able to seize government and turn it to their own ends.

And so in my writing, I focused on some different rising sort of cult beliefs, something called the network state, which would break up the nation states into much smaller territories run basically by corporate dictatorships and people like Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, Mark Andreessen, Elon Musk are all at the center of these ideas.

And when I started covering them, I started covering them because they mattered in San Francisco. I could see them making some aggressive political moves to get their people and their leaders and their ideas into our local government. And I thought that eventually they would scale this nationally, but with JD Vance, they've done this all in a very short period of time. They've accelerated far beyond what I assumed they would with these ideas.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so let's talk about Peter Thiel more because of course he has a direct relationship with Senator Vance. Gil, remind us just quickly about Thiel and how he made his billions in Silicon Valley.

DURAN: Peter Thiel was part of what is called PayPal mafia, the group of people, including Elon Musk and David Sacks, who founded PayPal. And that was their first major success. He's currently the owner of Palantir, which is a massive surveillance software company with huge government contracts, has become a multi billionaire.

And as he's become wealthier, he's become a louder voice for some very unusual right wing ideas. I'd say he's very much viewed as like the godfather of the New Right. He funds think tanks. He funds people to carry these ideas forward. And I think the most important thing to understand about Peter Thiel is that in 2009, he wrote, "I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible."

So he's been very open about the idea for some new form of government, some new kind of civilization to take over. Once there's some kind of collapse. A lot of these guys have a view that there'll be some kind of collapse that we're heading toward, and they're preparing for that time, and preparing to seize power and have new forms of government once it happens.

And those forms of government are very anti-democratic, more like monarchy or autocracy. And as part of that belief, they see themselves as the supreme people in society who will be the savers of humanity and the leaders once this transformation takes place.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so just so that we know clearly the relationship between Thiel and Vance correct me if I'm wrong Gil, but JD Vance, actually Peter Thiel took him under his wing in the mid 2000s and or actually a little bit later than that. And Vance even started, what, a VC with Thiel's help, is that right?

DURAN: Definitely. JD Vance, I would say is largely the creation of Peter Thiel. He first met Peter Thiel when he heard him speak at Yale Law School in 2011.

Was very impressed by what he said. Spent hours researching him, found an email address, emailed him. Was invited to come to California sometime. And a few years later, JD Vance is in San Francisco working for Mithril Capital. Which is a company co-founded by JD Vance. When JD Vance decided to move back to Ohio, he started his own firm with help from Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel.

When Vance decides to run for Senate, Peter Thiel drops an unprecedented amount of money into the campaign and gets him the Trump endorsement, even though Vance had previously compared Donald Trump to Hitler, and then Thiel plays a key role in getting Vance on the Trump ticket in 2024.

So at every step of the way over the past decade, you don't have JD Vance without Peter Thiel. And so when you look at what Thiel believes, what he's talked about, what he has said on the record, what he's written, it's pretty terrifying. Someone who might be the vice president of the United States is so close and dependent on this person and his wealth and his beliefs.

CHAKRABARTI: So Ian Ward, let me turn back to you. Because Peter Thiel also essentially underwrote JD Vance's Ohio Senate campaign back in 2021-2022 to the tune of, I don't know, more than $10 million at least. What do you make of the relationship between these two men?

WARD: Yeah, if I can push back a little bit against something Gil said, I think understanding Vance as a creation of Thiel is a bit of a narrow framing to understand his worldview. Certainly, politically, Vance owes a lot to Thiel. As Gil said, he funded his Senate campaign, gave him a career in VC, so on and so forth.

But Thiel is one of the influences that Vance is looking to, to build this worldview, and I think part of what you have to keep in mind when we're talking about these intellectual influences for Vance is these are by and large people who are not offering concrete policy prescriptions, right?

They're people who are offering theoretical justifications. For new regimes, it's an incredibly abstract realm of thought. And so part of what Vance is doing I think when he points to intellectuals like Thiel and others is he's signaling to a certain group of people that he's up on the latest thinking, he's one of them.

He's in this world, he's hip to the latest trends, and the degree to which he's deriving concrete policy descriptions from any one of these people, be it Thiel, or be it Yarvin, or be it the other intellectuals he's thinking about. I'm not sure how much of that we can say, but he's certainly using them to signal his membership in the New Right.

Also, these are contradictory thinkers, a lot of them you can't square Thiel and Yarvin's thought with the thought of someone like the Claremont Institute necessarily. There are real tensions here and those tensions exist within JD Vance's thinking. So I think you need to broaden your frame a little bit to understand the full complexity of Vance's thought.

CHAKRABARTI: Gil, you want to respond to that?

DURAN: I think there is a plan. It's called Project 2025. And that's where all of these things are now merging. A plan to completely seize control of government, to fire up to 500,000 government bureaucrats and make government as a right-wing tool. So there is actually a plan.

And if you look, all of these different groups are converging under the Trump ticket in order to make a lot of this stuff happen. I think there are disagreements. I think there are places where the weird ideology of Silicon Valley doesn't really mesh with the traditional conservative religious based mentality.

But I think they have made an alliance in order to get as far as they can, and they know they're going to get farther under Trump than they are going to get under any Democrat, because this is still considered, would be considered very strange under a Democrat, and having worked in politics for a long time before returning to journalism, I'd say whenever you've got a politician who's hanging out right next to a billionaire for about 10 years, that billionaire is pretty much the boss.

And so I think we can't underestimate the dangerous influence of Peter Thiel on Vance. And not only Peter Thiel. Curtis Jarvin, there's a guy named Balaji Srinivasan, who has also written a lot about these ideas, said that Democrats need to be purged from government, has compared it to De-Ba'athification in Iraq, or Denazification after World War II. And you've got the exact same phrase, De-Ba'athification, Denazification, coming out of JD Vance's mouth, in a talk that he gave on a podcast a few years ago. There's a lot of confluence here. And there are some very specific ideas that recur in both groups, and they very much seem to be captured in many ways in Project 2025.

CHAKRABARTI: Gil, since you mentioned Project 2025, that is of course the project that's come out of the Heritage Foundation, including lots of thinkers both inside of Washington and outside in far-right conservative circles.

Now, the head of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, has a new book coming out in September. It's called Dawn's Early Light, and it's essentially Kevin Roberts' version of what's in Project 2025. Senator JD Vance wrote the foreword to Dawn's Early Light. And just yesterday, the New Republic actually published that foreword on their website.

And in it, Vance writes, "We need more than politics that simply removes the bad policies of the past. We need to rebuild. We need an offensive conservatism, not merely one that tries to prevent the left from doing things we don't like." That's from JD Vance himself in the foreword to Dawn's Early Light.

We have a lot more to talk about regarding the new right in just a moment. This is On Point.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Gil, you had said something a little bit earlier that I want to understand in much more detail. And this is about the beliefs of those, some of those Silicon Valley billionaires that you were talking about, regarding what they believe should be their natural role in ruling over actually political parts of America or different geographic locations, what were you talking about?

And tell me more.

DURAN: The idea is called the Network State and there's a book about it. It's free to read online. It also is reflected in Curtis Jarvin's work. He calls them patchworks. The idea is that nation states like the United States and other established countries are going to collapse and that they should be divided up into much smaller political entities that would basically be corporate run dictatorships.

And so everybody would live in a little town Yarvin calls San Francisco's version, Fisk Corp. And Fisk Corp would be governed by a corporate dictatorship with an all-seeing surveillance system to guarantee a public safety, and you'd have to have little RFID cards to swipe in and swipe out, and you'd have to have a certain level of income to be able to live in Fisk Corp.

So it's basically an idea for corporate dictatorship. Sounds pretty nutty, but they seem to talk about it a lot. Now there's the idea has evolved to something called the network state and Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen actually have a company called Pronomos, which is investing in the creation of these little corporate states in all over the world, there's one in Honduras called Próspera that's currently fighting with Honduran government, suing them for, I think, $11 billion. They're planning a city in the Mediterranean called Praxis. And so this is something they're actually trying to make happen. And in addition to people like Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen, who surprise, surprise, are also popping up as the big supporters of Trump.

You also have people like Brian Armstrong of Bitcoin and Naval Ravikant of AngelList. So people who would be seemingly normal, are investing in these ideas to basically undermine democracy and create new forms of government in the future. So if you look up network state, you'll find a lot more about that idea.

CHAKRABARTI: So Gil, though, I'm curious, when it comes to this, you and Ian do share an agreement that an animating factor of the New Right is this belief that American democracy is in decline, right? And some kind of radical change in governance will be necessary once the end of democracy arrives.

But regarding those Silicon Valley billionaires, Gil, do any of them possess any self-reflection about their role in democratic decline in this country, in terms of the concentration of their wealth, the kinds of technologies that they've created and resisted regulation thereof?

I'm thinking about when we're talking about virtual nation states, some of these companies already have achieved that status in power, if not on paper.

DRAN: Yes, they seem very strangely aggrieved, even though most of us would say they have accomplished and achieved and collected more than all the rest of us combined.

And they justify that they view that as their natural place in society. I think this is very much an ideology of supremacy. Of tech supremacy, of the wealthy, in many ways of white supremacy. And they believe anything is justified as long as they can protect their wealth from what they view is the unfair clutches of the public and of democracy and of nation States.

This is very much about escaping with their wealth out of the system, they call it exit, right? When you exit a company, you cash out. They literally use that term for democracy. We're going to exit democracy with everything we have. And so this isn't just about money. It's also about an ideology in which they should be the sovereign individuals who govern their own territories, much like back in the days of feudalism.

And this isn't something I'm guessing or assuming they write this stuff down. They talk about it in podcasts. They are very much upfront about it. And it's been shocking to me to see with few exceptions, people like Ian, no one in the mainstream media paying attention to this, we're led to believe that it's just about lower taxes and friendly regulations.

These guys have a dangerous ideology. They want to weaken the country from within and take over with their own forms of government. And I would say the threat here is on par with any terrorist group we've been fighting around the country, because these people have billions of dollars and they are actively working to take over our government at this very moment.