Kai Wright: It's Notes From America. I'm Kai Wright, and you're listening to our special podcast only series on the election. We've named it On The Call because each week, until election day, I'm just calling up people I think are smart about some aspect of this historic political moment.

A little curveball for this edition. A few weeks ago, I saw a new film that left me shook, y'all. I mean shook. It's called War Game, and it's a documentary about far right radicalization inside the US armed forces and what might happen if there's another January 6th style insurrection, but this time led by active duty troops who have become extremists. This film is a documentary because it is not an entirely fictional scenario.

A few years ago, at the one year anniversary of January 6, three retired generals published an op-ed in the Washington Post in which they issued a dire warning. They pointed out that 1 in 10 of people charged with crimes from January 6 had military records. Then they walked through all these other indications that extremism was and is spreading among active duty troops. They recommended that officialdom begin running War Game simulations to prepare for what might happen in January 2025 if those troops joined the violence.

A veterans group called the Vet Voice Foundation heard that recommendation, took it seriously, and designed just such a simulation, gathering up people with national security experience from across five different presidential administrations to roleplay a federal response to that scenario. When they did it, they allowed two documentary filmmakers to capture the action and make a movie about it. Here's a bit of the trailer, just to give you a flavor.

Speaker 2: My fellow Americans, it is undeniable that this past election was stolen. To all those members of the armed forces, join with us to defend our liberty and land.

Speaker 3: Seated around this room is an incredible diversity of professional experience, spanning the last five presidential administrations. Most of you have sworn under oath to defend the constitution. What happens when those in uniform break that oath?

Speaker 4: January 6th demonstrated the possible false sense of security.

Speaker 5: The next insurrection could involve members of the active duty military turning their weapons around on the folks that they are there to protect. One of the recommendations was to wargame what that might look like.

President Hotham: I am President Hotham, Chief Executive of the United States of America.

Speaker 4: You have six hours to avert a civil war and ensure the peaceful transfer of power.

Speaker 6: Mr. President, we are going to be starting the game in three--

Kai Wright: That's the new documentary film, War Game. A few weeks ago, I led a conversation about the film and about the simulation itself at the film forum here in New York. They screened the movie, and then I spoke with a panel that included the co-directors.

Speaker 7: Please welcome the directors, Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber.

Kai Wright: Yes, the thing is scary as hell, but as Tony put it, there is a positive note.

Tony Gerber: I think the film is a rally and cry for reasoned leadership. You see reasoned leadership in process. That's one of the inspiring things about the film, maybe one of the takeaways, in spite of the fact that it's been called the scariest film of the year, I think by Rolling Stone.

Speaker 8: It's a film about de-escalation, not escalation. I think we need more de-escalation, not more escalation.

Kai Wright: We talked for a long time with questions from the audience at the film forum about how to do that, about what de-escalation takes. I want to share some of that conversation with you. In particular, I want to share some of what the people who designed the simulation told me. Like I said, it was put on by a group called the Vet Voice Foundation. Vet Voice's CEO, Janessa Goldbeck, produced it. She's a retired marine. Retired Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman was an advisor. You may recall that name as a member of the National Security Council under Donald Trump. Alex helped expose Trump's infamous phone call with the Ukrainian president, in which he tried to make aid for Ukraine dependent upon them helping find dirt on the Biden family. I asked Alex and Janessa the basic question, why is radicalism spreading in the military, and what can be done about it.

Janessa Goldbeck: I think we have to remember that the military is a reflection of our society. Any problem that we see in the military is a problem that is across American society. The reality is that we've all seen it, whether it's at your Thanksgiving dinner table or someone you know from college or high school, everyone has seen people that they love or care about drift into these spaces of extremism or unbelievable fictions about our country and what's happening in our world. We see those things in the military, too.

One of the things that inspired this project from the beginning was that the idea of asking ourselves, should we be paying more attention to extremism in our society or in our military, has been politically polarized as something that has been called by members of the right as disgraceful to the government, disgraceful to the military, to even question the idea that there might be people who are characterized as extremists in the military. As you see in the film, many of us who have worn the uniform believe that it is our duty to make something that we love and care about better than when we were there and when we left it. That means we need to look at things that are wrong or broken in our society and fix them, and work to fix them.

There are plenty of ways to address these things. They've been produced by people much smarter than me, and lots of things that Fortune 500 companies do, as simple as literally looking at the Facebook or social media of people before they join an institution or an organization that we're not doing because it is considered so partisan and so polarizing. I will say that at the end of the day, where I feel today, I feel much more hopeful today than I did when we made this film.

I don't think this problem goes away with one election cycle. There are a lot of people who are feeling disenfranchised, and are feeling left out, and are feeling like democracy isn't working for them. Whether or not it's democracy, or corruption, or corporate capitalism, there are a lot of things that Democrats and Republicans, the far right is really owning the extremism space. There are a lot of things that we, as Democrats, people who are Democrats, can do to actually look at what we're putting out into the world and say, why are people feeling so disconnected, why are people feeling so disenfranchised by the system that we've brought here, and what can we do to fix that.

Kai Wright: Indeed. Let's start bringing some of you into the conversation as well. You raise your hand and they'll come around with a mic.

Speaker 9: Oh, my goodness. Thank you for this brilliant and terribly, terribly important film. The question I was going to ask is very similar to your last one about what can be done. I'm curious, nevertheless, about the coincidence within the extremists in the military at all ranks, between their dissatisfaction with the economy problems. The kinds of things that Trump does put forward is something the people follow him for despite the fact that he has no record of doing anything about them. Can you bring together the fact that the military don't treat their veterans properly? To what extent can that be resolved? You made comments about the fact that the army was not dealing with this, the Congress was not dealing with this. When you just say there's much that we can do, could you be a bit more specific?

Kai Wright: To what extent the disaffection amongst veterans can be.

Janessa Goldbeck: If Elizabeth Newman were here, she's the blonde woman that you see in the film who was actually worked in the Trump administration. She's an evangelical Christian Republican woman who has become one of my closest friends through this project, which really speaks a lot about the crisis that we're facing. We don't agree on a lot of things, but we agree that democracy should continue. We are in that fight together, in that foxhole together.

What she will tell you, as a person who has spent her entire life working in the homeland security space, is that the majority of people who wind up in the extremism space are people who have a grievance or a perceived sense of grievance. It isn't just people who are coming back from war who are not taken care of, but it's people who are experiencing grievance in our own society. Maybe they got injured on the workforce and they lost their job, and they suddenly are destitute. Any one of us could come up with a million examples of ways that people have experienced grievance in this country. What the far right and what the MAGA movement provides people is an outlet, a reason, a person, a scapegoat, a race to point to and say that this is why you have these problems in your life.

I think that the challenge for people who want to bridge that divide is not to say, "Look at all these things that we did. Look at all these ways we've made things better." My career wouldn't be possible without the work of people who came before me. I'm an out lesbian woman who served in the Marine Corps. I know that I owe so much to everyone who came before me and who bled and worked to give me what made my career possible. It is incumbent upon us to not just look to the past, but to look to the future and say there are a lot of people who are suffering in this country, there are a lot of people who are working extraordinarily hard to make ends meet and they're not making ends meet, and what can we do beyond, say, pat ourselves on the back, we're the good guys, we got all these good things done, what can we do to make things better for people and communicate that in a way that actually matters. That, I think, is the challenge for all of us, not to just stand in our righteousness and say, "Well, gosh, look at these crazy people over here saying crazy things," but to actually say, "There is a deep well of suffering in this country. It isn't just about patting ourselves on the back, but looking to the future and looking to who we can lift up the voices we can lift up and promote into positions of leadership so that we are taking that next step and bending that arc in the way it should be bent.

Kai Wright: Quickly, Tony or Jesse-- Yes, please. Does the film play a role in this? Are there ideas about how this film can be brought to veterans or to service members?

Jesse Moss: For one, I think we're embodying it here. The courage of an audience to come out and face something that's fearful, to be willing to look at it and then to talk about it, is really, I think, the fulfillment of what we hope for with this film. We saw represented, and as Janessa said, sharing space with people who don't agree with you politically on everything, but you share common purpose. That seems like a very unusual space in American life today. To represent that, to model a good and healthy politics is, I think, something that we can put into the world.

Credit to Janessa and Alex and their team for letting us poke our cameras around this kind of confidential space, and to trust us and let us make the film we wanted to make. We're going to be taking the film to cities around America having conversations like this. That's what we can do.

Kai Wight: Question in the back.

Speaker 10: Hi. Thank you for the very interesting display and the learnings from the War Game. My question, and definitely with the understanding that you can't learn everything you like to learn out of War Game, but it seemed to me that it was just very focused on the president and his cabinet, and his advisors. In a true national crisis, we would expect to see the president trying to manage the nationwide situation with other leaders, whether it's congressional leaders, governors. We saw a little bit of this, but it seems like what we really saw was a test of how the president's cabinet handles things, but not really the whole country's leadership.

Janessa Goldbeck: I love that question. Thank you, and please come on the road with me when I talk to funders about our future wargaming. I absolutely agree with you there. This war game happened not on its own. There are a lot of amazing organizations doing similar wargaming around the country, mostly focused on the federal level. Alex and I have been humbled to be a part of a lot of those different war games. They're mostly focused on the federal apparatus, Congress, the agencies, the White House. We felt like all of those democracy oriented groups were doing great work, but none of them are focusing on the military aspect, which, in our mind, the insurrection act was this piece that people were not paying enough attention to, which now, since the Heritage Foundation published Project 2025 has taken this outsized role in all of our imaginations because they put onto paper our worst fears.

In Project 2025, they declare that the president, in the first 100 days of his administration, should use the active duty military to send forces into blue states and police the streets with active duty military. They should use active duty military to deport people who are suspected of being here illegally. This is a massive break in how we as Americans envision our civil military relations. When we made this scenario, we didn't know that this report was going to come out, that there was going to be a candidate who was going to be so wholly backed by people who wrote this thing, but we wanted to examine that piece.

One of our big learning points at Vet Voice, from this scenario, was there are so many leaders at the state and local level around the country who don't have access to the type of expertise that many of people in the federal government have, or people who work at that level have. Now we're going out into states, and we're doing similar exercises, actually, starting in Arizona in two weeks, with local leaders and local civil society leaders and journalists to try to prepare them for some of the decision making that they might have to make around an election or post election.

Completely agree. I think we can't lose sight of the fact that at the end of the day, most of the people who will be on the front lines of decision making, the Maricopa County Recorder, who stood up to Trump in 2020, just lost his primary to an extremist on the far right. He was a Republican who said, "Absolutely not. I'm doing my job, and this is my job." These are the people that we need to be supporting in our local backyards. Those people need a lot of support. It isn't just what happens at the presidential level, although that is sexier to put on screen. It is the folks who are going to be on the front lines, who are going to need to know what their rights are, know their legal limits, and know where to go for help when something might turn the wrong way.

Kai Wright: As we saw in Georgia.

Janessa Goldbeck: That's right.

Jesse Moss: Making a set of the Maricopa County Recorder's office definitely doesn't sound as scintillating the White House sit room.

Kai Wright: One of the most striking moments in our conversation at the film forum came when someone from the audience stood up to speak as somebody who is still serving in the armed forces right now.

Matt Pelak: Thanks for being here, and great film. Matt Pelak, been in the army for the last 28 years, National Guard for the last 20. I just want to touch on, it's not just a left versus right thing. Both administrations, both sides have done things to make military service members feel disconnected and curious and really wondering why they joined. The global war on terror went on for 25 years. We don't really have a lot of answers behind that. The Biden administration withdrawal from Afghanistan was a complete disaster. It's just as much about making military members feel like they're there for the right reasons as much as it is like making independent voters feel like they're voting for the right candidate.

How do we get the message to party members on the right and the left, whoever's in power, to let military members know, hey, we value your service, and we're not going to abuse you? A lot of governors politically use the National Guard. I've been in several states, Texas and New York, both have done that quite a bit. How do we use this film as an example to show governors how much their actions impact National Guard service members' actions?

I just want to make sure that everyone knows that this isn't just about you have good military members and bad military members. We're all here for the right reasons. We love this country. I love this country. There's an onus on the government to do the right thing no matter what political party you're coming from. How do we use this as that platform?

Janessa Goldbeck: Hell, yes, brother. Thank you for that question, and that statement and question. Let's give him a round of applause, please. This is one of my great frustrations. I think everywhere we've screened this film, people have come up afterwards and said, "How can we help these poor service members who are broken, and they're drifting towards extremism?" Don't send us to fucking bad wars. That's a start.

Question your government. I voted for Obama. I organized for Obama. We were in Afghanistan and Iraq for eight years while he was president without a sense of where we would get out. Less than 1% of the American public serve in uniform. The fact is that most Americans are disconnected for people in service. It's easy for corporations to give us a free hamburger on Veterans Day or whatever it is, and for people to feel good about that. I appreciate that, truly. Who doesn't like a free hamburger?

At the end of the day, democracy is a contact sport. You can't just send people to die in foreign countries because it's easier than to question the people that you voted for and agree with. Democracy doesn't mean that you have to agree 100% with the person that you elected. It means that you trend towards the person that you elected, and you are actually, you have a stake in re-electing them, which means that your voice matters and you can shape their opinion and decisions. I think that at the end of the day, I hope this film is in universities and in places all over the country. We're taking it across the country because of individuals who have seen the power and the value of this film. They've stepped up. They've written us checks that have allowed us to take it to swing states and to places we wouldn't otherwise be able to with a humble little film like this. We absolutely want to start conversations in places where this type of conversation doesn't normally happen because it's uncomfortable. Uncomfortable conversations breed reflection, and we want to encourage and inspire more reflection.

Kai Wright: That's Janessa Goldbeck, CEO of the Vet Voice Foundation. She and her organization produced a simulation of a future insurrection, this time led by radicalized active duty troops. The simulation is featured in a new documentary called War Game, and I led a panel about it during a screening at the film forum in New York recently.

Let's take a break and then I'll share another part of our conversation at that screening when we talk about the propaganda that's radicalizing people.

Welcome back. I'm sharing parts of a conversation I led following a recent screening of the documentary, War Game. I spoke with the filmmakers and with two people who produced the simulation we witnessed in the film. It's a fake attack on the Capitol following a contested election, but this time led by radicalized members of our armed forces. Retired Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman helped make the simulation. He was, of course, bullied out of the National Security Council after decades in service when he testified before Congress about Donald Trump's infamous phone call with the Ukrainian president in which he tried to make aid for Ukraine contingent on finding dirt about the Biden family.

Anyway, someone in the audience asked, "Vindman, how do you deal with the reality that for many of the people who have been radicalized, who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, this is not cynicism, they truly believe that the 2020 election was stolen?"

Alexander Vindman: I think the fact is that propaganda is a tool used extensively because it's so effective. There's a reason that you hear Donald Trump months before any election saying, "If I lose the election, it's because the election was stolen," and saying that repeatedly until certainly his partisan supporters believe it, and then enough people cast doubt. The Russians use this kind of tradecraft on a habitual basis just to cast doubt over whether there is an absolute truth. That is almost an impossible battle. There are narratives that are pervasive from decades ago. The Russians, Soviet Union spread a lie that, for instance, AIDS was engineered to traumatize and affect the African continent. That's still a pervasive narrative in various corners of the African continent. These are things that are extremely difficult to dispel.

I think being aggressive and responding immediately to these false narratives has to be part of it, part of the way you do battle in this sphere. I think what we are doing, we're spending vast resources on resiliency. I was in the White House when we were preparing for the 2020 election. We spent vast resources on making sure that our elections were hardened against state actors. Being able to communicate that to the public and to the parts of the republic that are receptive to these messages is about probably the best we can do. There are corners that we're not going to be able to reach. People love their conspiracy theories. You might get swathes of the population, but you're not going to capture everyone.

Janessa Goldbeck: Can I say something else?

Alexander Vindman: Yes, good.

Janessa Goldbeck: I was just going to say that I think also we need to not think the worst of each other all the time. Yes, there are people who believe, to their core, the election was stolen. My dad is one of them. He also saw this film, by the way, and he loved it. He loved that we printed his words. He was like, "People will see this." I was like, "I'm going to make this joke. I'm going to tell this joke." He was like, "I'm all for it." People are complicated.

There was a poll that was done right after Trump was-- the assassination attempt, and it was done by an independent group that's focused on turning down the rhetoric in this country. They asked Republicans, the day after the assassination attempt, "Do you think that this justifies violence against Democrats?" 14% of people that they polled, Republicans, said yes, so the vast majority said no.

Then they asked Democrats and Independents, "What do you think Republicans said? What do you think they thought about violence towards Democrats?" Democrats and Independents thought that the amount of Republicans who said violence is justified was four times what it was in reality.

Let's all remember, while there are people out there who I vehemently disagree with, and there are people out there whose views I vehemently abhorred, that the vast majority of Americans want to live in a free, safe, free from politically violent country. Let's not put ourselves in the mindset that everybody is out there to get us, and let's try to have the conversations led that lead with empathy around these tough conversations. Because if we don't do that, we're going to rocket ourselves into a more terrifying situation.

Alexander Vindman: Just the last thing to finish this point. I think one of the antidotes to these conspiracy theories is participation. I think the fact is that we don't have enough people participate in our democracy. It's a team sport. People going to vote at their polling station and actually seeing the process unfold, seeing that there is integrity in what they're able to see, they're not going to be able to see the whole thing all the way up the chain. That's quite helpful.

Many people, especially now, are motivated to volunteer and be election monitors. That's another thing. These are locals, folks from within their community that are talking about what they observed. That's an extremely important thing. I think we tend to look at elections as kind of one-off events every year. Some people, every four years, they only participate in presidential elections. I think that's a mistake. If you look within your community, you don't see these scary notions that are being propagated in the far corners of Internet or sometimes even in mainstream media channels. You don't see rampant crime and blood on the streets. Those things don't resonate. Engage people on what they actually are seeing, not what they're being told, but what they're seeing with their own eyes.

Kai Wright: We have time for one final question from this fantastic crowd.

Speaker 11: Actually going off of what you were talking about in terms of propaganda, I was really shocked at the absolute inability of anybody in the room to deal with the media. Of course, you have to edit, you can't do everything that's in the room, but what is what we saw a reflection of what was going on in the room in terms of the lack of messaging? From the two of you, is that really what you think what's going on right now, this incompetence, sorry, but from my perspective, the incompetence of their ability to actually get a message out?

Janessa Goldbeck: This will stun you, but it was pretty tough to cast 35 roles of people who had decades long careers on Capitol Hill or in the military, who were willing to appear in an unscripted exercise on film around a scenario that not just requires moral fortitude to take on, but also actual physical courage. Because a lot of these people have been on the tail end of actual violence that's been directed towards them for even examining this problem.

It was very important to us to cast people who either had held these roles in the past or were very proximate to them, and that were available and willing and had the courage to do so. I will say that the room looked pretty much like what you would expect an administration room to look like today. These are senior officials. I think if you look at our media environment now and you think about all the things that you hear from friends or acquaintances or whatever, this is the world we're in today. We're in a completely fractured media environment where people are not just living reading different newspapers, but they're living on different planets, and that there is no regulation, no regulation at all that our government has been able to come up with. Some of that, maybe because some of our elected leaders don't know what TikTok is, they don't have it on their phone, but also just the fact that we cannot as a society agree what should we be doing.

Other countries, by the way, are doing this better than us. It's not like we're trying to reinvent something out of whole cloth. Leaps and bound is ahead of this. We put the EPA into place for a reason. Right now there is fentanyl in the water when it comes to disinformation and misinformation, and we have no regulatory agency that's out there trying to stop it. I don't anticipate that this election, we're going to get through that, but hopefully in the next few years, maybe a decade, we will figure it out as a society because right now we are just living in a cloud of mosquitoes.

Kai Wright: On that note, we're going to wrap it up.

Janessa Goldbeck: Have a great night.

Kai Wright: So that we don't leave on the cloud of mosquitoes. I started, Tony and Jesse, by asking you what you were trying to achieve emotionally because I wasn't totally clear what I experienced emotionally, both terror and inspiration. What did you experience? In the course of it, did you emerge terrified, inspired? What did you experience?

Jesse Moss: I hope how some of you feel, which is this exercise, as theater, helped to exorcise some demons that we're carrying to take hold of this monster that we face that is sometimes hard to perceive, and the way that art can hopefully function. It made me feel healthier, because I think I'm carrying the trauma that many of us are carrying and we hear so poignantly about from Janessa and others and Alex, too. That felt healthy to me. It felt, yes, what we should be doing, exorcism.

Kai Wright: Tony, you want to add anything?

Tony Gerber: Yes, I'll add one thing. I hope that we've moved beyond this idea of normalcy bias, and I think we have. Effectively what that means is it's an assumption that because things have always worked out, that they always will, and that's not necessarily the case. I think we're in this moment where we need to circle the wagons and come to terms and agree on what is irreplaceable and precious about our democracy, because there are tremendous vulnerabilities. I think you see that in this film. At the end of the day, I think that's positive, that if we walk out of here, maybe traumatized, but at least understanding the inherent dangers of the insurrection act, the vulnerabilities of the peaceful transfer of power, those are wins, if you guys walk out of here with that.

Janessa Goldbeck: I'll just say, exorcise your right to vote.

Kai Wright: Thank you to our filmmakers, thank you to our game makers, and thank you to all of you for wonderful questions.

Thanks to you, dear podcast listener, for coming along, too. Also, a hearty thank you to the film forum here in New York for hosting this conversation. You can find out more about the film itself at wargamefilm.com. I'm Kai Wright. Talk to you again soon.

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.