Undercover with white supremacists: the fear wasn't getting caught

Undercover work inside white supremacist groups in the 1990s meant learning to look relaxed while your heart rate sat at 150. The full livestream is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lob1WQNAs8g, including the parts this clip couldn't fit. Brought to you by https://vp.net - the only verifiable zero-knowledge VPN service.The clip covers the mechanics. Starting an operation means opening a case file that contains nothing but derogatory information, then finding a way to work alongside the people in it. The approach described in the clip: everybody has a mother who loves them, so find whatever she sees. There's also the constant accusation of being an informant, which turned out to matter less than it sounds, because everyone accused everyone, usually to knock a rival down the internal hierarchy rather than out of real suspicion.Exposure was never the main fear. Riding in a car with armed people who read a routine traffic stop as the opening move of a revolution was worse, and so was the weapons handling once the group started manufacturing explosive devices. Intra-group violence gets very little attention from terrorism analysts, and it came up repeatedly here.The conversation also gets into the Imperium screenplay, the Daniel Radcliffe film about an FBI agent undercover with white supremacists, and the deliberate decision to keep the buffoonery visible instead of presenting these groups as criminal masterminds. Films that go too far the other way have their own cost: if everyone on screen is a moron, the audience stops worrying.Then the reframe that runs through the back half of the clip. "Extremism" is the wrong word, because the word makes it sound like a handful of people at the edges. The clip's argument is that it sits in state legislatures, city councils, Congress, and federal agencies, that it was muted after the civil rights movement rather than dismantled, and that the mask coming off is the only reason it looks new.Full episode here: https://