I thought about all the brave officers I’d known over the years and trusted with my life, and the attacks on the Capitol Police made me furious. I looked at the Trump flags waving amid the chaos on the television screen and thought about all the times some sanctimonious right-winger had lectured about how they “backed the blue” and believed in “law and order.” Where were they now? Were they in the crowd waving those flags? Attacking police officers with clubs and firing pepper spray in their faces?
This was no ordinary riot. It was not a protest that got out of hand. As we’ve learned, it was a coordinated assault on our democracy with the goal of reversing the election and keeping Trump in power. As one hard-core Trumpist from Michigan explained later: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”
I had feared something like this might happen, had warned about it as far back as 2016. In our third debate in that campaign, Trump had refused to commit to accepting the results of the election. If he lost, he would claim it was rigged. Violence was a staple of his rhetoric. Hostility to democracy and the rule of law was a core element of his “strongman” brand. (It’s no surprise, but deeply concerning, that during his June 2024 debate with President Biden he once again refused to commit to accepting the election results). I had conceded on national television and attended Trump’s inauguration, despite serious concerns about Russian interference, just as Al Gore had conceded in 2000 when the Supreme Court stopped the recount in Florida—a recount he seemed likely to win. In 2020, by contrast, without any basis other than he had lost, Trump refused to concede and whipped up the Big Lie to incite his followers to reject the outcome. All of that led predictably to the insurrection on January 6. When you start viewing the other party as traitors, criminals, or otherwise illegitimate—for example, if you spread the lie for years that our first Black president wasn’t actually born in the United States, or if you lead “Lock her up!” chants at your campaign rallies—politics becomes a blood sport. Soon enough, actual blood gets spilled.
Of the many awful images from the Capitol that day, one that caught my eye and sent a chill through my heart was the picture of a Trumpist defiantly carrying a Confederate flag through the halls of Congress. The man was eventually sentenced to three years in prison for his role in the insurrection, including using his flagpole to attack Eugene Goodman, the heroic Capitol Police officer who famously managed to divert the mob away from fleeing senators. The judge noted that using a Confederate flag to assault a Black police officer was particularly hateful.
The prominent presence of that racist flag was a reminder that this violent spasm was not an isolated incident and that Trump is not an aberration but an apotheosis. The image encapsulated a long legacy of hate. It reflected the Republican Party’s strategy, starting in the 1960s, of embracing white supremacy in order to wield power. It captured the GOP’s increasing radicalization over recent decades, including rejecting core democratic principles such as accepting electoral defeat and condemning violence and extremist groups. Trump didn’t invent any of that, but he took it to the next level.
A few months after January 6, while filming the Apple TV+ series Gutsy with Chelsea, I met two women who knew all too well the consequences of whipping up hateful rhetoric and racist violence. Down in Virginia, I sat on a covered porch with Dawn Collins and Susan Bro. Rolling thunder threatened rain that never came, while Susan tried to teach Dawn and me to crochet (I’ve never figured it out). Dawn and Susan were brought together by a terrible bond. Dawn’s son, Richard Collins III, was twenty-three years old and a newly promoted lieutenant in the Army when he was fatally stabbed at the University of Maryland, for no reason but his race, by a member of a white supremacist group while he was waiting with friends for an Uber. Susan’s daughter, Heather Heyer, was killed while protesting the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, when a neo-Nazi deliberately plowed his car into the crowd, fatally injuring her. Losing a child is the worst thing that can happen to a parent. If they had given in to despair and bitterness, no one could have faulted them.
But instead, over tangled purple yarn and glasses of white wine, both mothers told me how they spend their days: combatting hate and doing everything they can to make sure other parents don’t face the same horror. Dawn and her husband fought for stronger hate crime laws in Maryland, launched a scholarship foundation in their son’s name, and lead programs designed to break down racial barriers. Susan started a foundation in her daughter’s name to advocate for stronger hate crime legislation around the country and the anti-racist causes that Heather believed in so deeply. Dawn told me that every chance Susan gets to speak about her daughter, she makes sure the world knows about Richard, too.
Somehow, when their lives were touched by senseless hate, Susan and Dawn found love and purpose. It gives me hope that they choose to honor Richard’s and Heather’s memories by working for a better world. “What else would I do right now?” Susan said. “We’re moms,” Dawn added. “We didn’t ask for this. But now that it has come to my door, we have to buck up and do what we have to do.”
Sadly, I’ve known too many moms like Dawn and Susan who’ve lost children to racist violence. During my 2016 campaign, I became close with a remarkable group of women known as Mothers of the Movement. Among them was Sybrina Fulton, whose seventeen-year-old son, Trayvon Martin, was shot and killed while taking a walk to buy Skittles at a convenience store near Orlando, Florida, in 2012. He was unarmed—just a Black kid wearing a hoodie in America. Lucy McBath’s son, Jordan Davis, was shot in Jacksonville, Florida, while listening to music in a car that a white man thought was too loud and too “thug.” There are so many stories like this, so many grieving parents. Yet like Dawn and Susan, these mothers were able to turn their mourning into a mission. Lucy even ran for Congress and won.
Mothers like Dawn, Susan, Sybrina, and Lucy already knew what many other Americans woke up to on January 6: Racist rhetoric can lead to violent action.
What can we do about it? I wanted to understand how normal people get drawn into a life of hate and violence—and how they can pull themselves free. So I went to see Shannon Foley Martinez, a former white supremacist who now works to deprogram and rehabilitate people leaving hate groups. Shannon took Chelsea and me (and a small film crew) canoeing near her home in Athens, Georgia. It wasn’t lost on me as we paddled along that we weren’t far from the site of the last documented mass lynching in America, Moore’s Ford Bridge, where a mob of twenty armed white men shot and killed two Black couples in 1946. One of the women killed was seven months pregnant. To this day no one has been held accountable for their murders.
Back in the 1990s, from the time she was fifteen until she was twenty, Shannon was active in the violent white supremacy movement. She attended Klan rallies, tagged public property with swastikas, assaulted people of color, tear-gassed a gay nightclub, and underwent paramilitary training to prepare for the race war her neo-Nazi leaders promised was imminent. Her comrades were white supremacists like the fanatics who years later carried torches through Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us!” and like many of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6.
Then, remarkably, she managed to get herself out and change her life. Now Shannon helps people escape violent extremism. She’s seen how the dangerous, hateful movement has metastasized. The rise of social media allowed white power leaders to more easily reach and radicalize thousands of new recruits. Hate-fueled memes and videos circulate online, evading detection in the dark corners of the internet with coded hashtags and innuendo. Things only got worse when Trump publicly and proudly fanned the flames of racial resentment from the campaign trail and then the White House, emboldening white supremacists to emerge from the shadows.
I saw firsthand how fast conspiracy theories could spread and radicalization could take hold. During the 2016 campaign, a shocking number of people became convinced that I am a murderer, a terrorist sympathizer, and the evil mastermind behind a child-sex-abuse ring. Alex Jones, the right-wing talk-show host, posted a video about “all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped.”
This was not the first time that I was the subject of wild conspiracy theories or partisan rage that veered into mania. In the 1990s, supermarket tabloids used to splash headlines such as “Hillary Clinton Adopts Alien Baby” across their front pages. I was even burned in effigy by a crowd in Kentucky furious that I had proposed taxing cigarettes to help fund universal health care for all Americans. The president of the Kentucky Association of Tobacco Supporters chanted “Burn, baby, burn” as he poured gasoline on a scarecrow in a dress labeled I’M HILLARY. By 2016, I fully expected to play a starring role in the fever dreams of extremists at the margins of American politics.
But something had changed. The margins infected the mainstream. Social media gave conspiracy theories far wider reach than ever before. Fox News and other right-wing media outlets gave repeated outlandish lies “credibility.” And before Trump, we’d never had a presidential candidate—and then an actual president—who used the biggest bully pulpit in the world to be an actual bully and traffic in this kind of trash. The results were tragic but predictable. In early December 2016, a twenty-eight-year-old man from North Carolina fired an assault rifle inside a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C., because he had read online that it was the headquarters of my supposed child-sex ring. Thankfully, no one was harmed. But the pizzeria attack foreshadowed the violence to come: QAnon followers and militia members storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021; mass shooters leaving behind manifestos riddled with misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, and other conspiracy theories promoted in far-right (and far-left) echo chambers.
Shannon is doing what she can to fight back. She rescues people she meets online, at white supremacist rallies, or through concerned loved ones. When she’s trying to deprogram white supremacists, her approach is not to try to change their politics but to help them address their trauma and move away from resorting to violence. “I’ve found you can’t argue people out of their deeply entrenched worldview. They just entrench further,” Shannon says. So she asks a lot of questions and patiently listens. What drew them to the white power movement? How is it serving their life? Why are they afraid of leaving? What might their lives look like without hate? These connections can take a long time to develop, and even longer to lead to de-radicalization. Disengagement, she says, is a process—not an event.
That’s how I found myself in a canoe with Shannon and a young woman she’s mentoring named Samantha, who recently left the white power movement with Shannon’s help. Samantha was introduced to white supremacist groups by an abusive ex-boyfriend, an organizer of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where Susan’s daughter was killed and whom Samantha would later testify against. Samantha helped me better understand how people like her are recruited into and radicalized by white supremacist groups. Most people, she acknowledged, are not initially comfortable with racist slurs or Nazi rhetoric, so recruiters lightheartedly introduce offensive humor to appear less violent than they really are. But the more time members spend online in alt-right chat rooms and channels, the more they get used to the ugliness of the ideology. When you stop being shocked, you start being radicalized.
It would have been so much easier for Shannon to have left this dark chapter in her life in the rearview mirror and never look back. It’s not like she has extra time on her hands: Shannon bartends thirty hours each week and cares for her eight children. But she feels a powerful responsibility to make amends for her past.
I wondered whether Shannon’s thoughtful, empathetic approach could offer lessons not just for rescuing radicalized individuals but for healing our wounded country. What will it take to pull us out of the madness? Is there any way to drain the fever swamps so we can stand together on firmer, higher ground?
I also marveled at the empathy Shannon managed to summon for even the most (yes, let’s say it) deplorable bigots. She has known the worst of the worst and still finds room in her heart for them as human beings, still believes it’s worth the effort, the emotional labor, to reach out to them.
I’ve struggled with this myself. In 2016, I famously described half of Trump supporters as “the basket of deplorables.” I was talking about the people who are drawn to Trump’s racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia—you name it. The people for whom his bigotry is a feature, not a bug. It was an unfortunate choice of words and bad politics, but it also got at an important truth. Just look at everything that has happened in the years since, from Charlottesville to January 6. The masks have come off, and if anything, “deplorable” is too kind a word for the hate and violent extremism we’ve seen from some Trump supporters.
In 2022, an editor at a major American newspaper reached out to ask if I would write an op-ed reflecting on my “basket of deplorables” comment six years on. A gunman in Buffalo, New York, had just massacred Black shoppers at a supermarket, reportedly influenced by the racist “great replacement” theory, which had been promoted aggressively by Tucker Carlson on Fox News and embraced by many Republican leaders. The New York Times had published a meticulous investigation that found that on more than four hundred episodes of his top-rated cable news show, Carlson explicitly pushed the incendiary claim that immigrants and people of color are displacing whites. The newspaper editor said that he and his colleagues spent a half hour at their editorial meeting talking about this report, and “the notion that the most racist show on cable news is also the most popular stuck with a lot of us.” Several editors, he said, brought up my “deplorables” comment and “how prescient” I had been. Did I want to write an op-ed about it?
It was tempting. In 2016, I warned about the rising influence of the alt-right and the threat to democracy from a political movement that endorses violence and refuses to accept basic norms of decency and pluralism. I was largely mocked or dismissed by many in the mainstream media stuck in a “both sides” straitjacket. Now they finally wanted to listen, but they were still intent on exploring this threat primarily through the lens of a six-year-old political controversy. I found that approach emblematic of the media’s shortsightedness and declined the offer.
I do wish that back in 2016 people had heard the rest of my comments and not just the word “deplorables.” I also talked about the other half of Trump supporters, “people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.” And, I emphasized, “those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.” That’s especially true because many are living with unresolved trauma in their lives.
Empathy for people you agree with is easy. Empathy for someone you deeply, passionately disagree with is hard but necessary. What Shannon does, feeling empathy for Nazis and Klansmen, is damn near superhuman. As a Christian, I aspire to this kind of radical empathy but often fall short. Talking about the “deplorables” in 2016, I said, “Some of those folks, they are irredeemable.” Part of me would still say this is objectively true. Just look at the lack of remorse from many of the January 6 insurrectionists who’ve been convicted of sedition and other crimes. But another part of me wants to believe something else. I’d like to believe there’s goodness in everyone and a chance at redemption, no matter how remote.
Shannon is remarkably optimistic for someone who spends so much time with Nazis. “Hopeless people,” she told me, are “easily controlled and manipulated. But hopeful people can move mountains.” It isn’t easy to keep hold of that hope, but Shannon doesn’t think there’s any other choice. Our country has “mountains that need moving,” she said, so “I feel an obligation to hope.” As a small emblem of that hope, Shannon covered her tattoo of a white power symbol with a beautiful tattoo of a heron, looking free and ready to soar.
Democracy has been under attack and in retreat all over the world in recent years, but often in subtler, less violent ways than we saw on January 6. Authoritarian politicians like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, and Vladimir Putin in Russia cloak their power grabs behind the veneer of electoral legitimacy. They get elected and then use the power of the state to dismantle the institutions of democracy. I can’t tell you how many times as secretary of state I had to explain to some foreign leader that winning an election was not enough if he turned around and ruled like a dictator.
It was heartbreaking to watch once vibrant and hopeful democracies like Hungary slowly slide backward toward authoritarianism. I remember the exuberant early days after the fall of communism, when Hungarians were celebrating their new freedoms and looking ahead to a bright democratic future. In 1996, I spent a glorious summer afternoon walking through the narrow streets of old Budapest in a straw hat, watching people laugh and shop and enjoy the wide-open possibilities of their liberated country. I also met with women and children from the country’s largest minority group, the Roma, who have faced centuries of discrimination. We all hoped that Hungary’s new democracy would bring acceptance and opportunity for the country’s minorities.
Orbán actually helped lead the opposition to Soviet rule and promoted democracy. And when he served as prime minister the first time, from 1998 to 2002, he was a conservative but not yet a demagogue. He even brought Hungary into NATO. But when he returned to power eight years later, things took a darker turn. Orbán whipped up hatred of immigrants, Jews, Roma, and LGBTQ+ people. He called for women to return to their homes and produce more children for their country. He consolidated power, rewrote the constitution, manipulated elections, attacked the independent media, and cracked down on dissent.
When I visited Budapest as secretary of state in 2011, I warned Orbán in private that this was a dangerous path and then publicly urged him to protect the free press, independent courts, and constitutional checks and balances. Orbán wasn’t listening. He had grown arrogant, contemptuous, addicted to power.
There wasn’t any single dramatic moment you could point to—no burning of the Reichstag, no tanks rolling through Tiananmen Square, no January 6—but Hungarian democracy eroded under the relentless pressure Orbán deployed. It’s become essentially a one-party state, with opponents marginalized, propaganda on the airwaves, corruption in the ministries, a thumb on the scale in the courts, and, above all, an unconstrained leader with an insatiable taste for power and no attachment to democratic norms or values. Minorities are persecuted. Migrants are scapegoated. Civil society has largely been crushed.
With a record like that, it’s not surprising that Orbán became an ally of Vladimir Putin and an icon for right-wing extremists in the United States. In March 2024, Orbán visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago and endorsed his campaign for president. Trump, who makes no secret of his admiration for dictators and tyrants the world over, praised the Hungarian leader. “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán,” Trump raved. “He’s fantastic.” I have no doubt Trump would love to replicate Orbán’s authoritarian tactics here in the United States.
“Fascism,” as Yale history professor Timothy Snyder put it, “is might over right, conspiracy over reality, fiction over fact, pain over law, blood over love, doom over hope.” It’s a threat that Madeleine Albright, who passed away in 2022, knew well. As a girl, she fled first the Nazis and then the Communists—a refugee twice over by the age of eleven. Madeleine grew up to be a fierce champion of democracy. As my husband’s secretary of state, she stood up to dictators like Serbia’s Slobodan Milošević. She was also my traveling companion and guide on trips to her native Czech Republic, Hungary, and other former Soviet bloc countries. In recent years, she became increasingly alarmed by democratic backsliding around the world, including here at home.
In 2018, she sounded the alarm in a prescient book, Fascism: A Warning, which drew on her firsthand experience with authoritarianism and described Trump as the first president in the modern era “whose statements and actions are so at odds with democratic ideals.” After the January 6 insurrection, Madeleine imagined Abraham Lincoln weeping. “My family came to America after fleeing a coup, so I know that freedom is fragile,” she wrote. “But I never thought I would see such an assault on democracy be cheered on from the Oval Office.”
I’ve spent more than half a century in the crucible of politics. I’ve seen the best and worst of it. And at the end of the day, I still believe deeply in American democracy because I believe in the basic decency of the American people. I believe that if you dig deep enough, through all the mud of politics, eventually you hit something hard and true: a foundation of fundamental values and aspirations that still binds most of us together as Americans.
This is a lesson I learned a long time ago and never forgot. In the summer of 1972, I went door-to-door in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas trying to register new voters for the election between President Richard Nixon and Senator George McGovern. The communities I visited were tight-knit, hardworking, and understandably wary of a twenty-four-year-old blond girl from Chicago who spoke no Spanish. Yet many families opened their homes to me. Mothers and grandmothers who worked long hours for not much money invited me to sit at the kitchen table, drink very strong coffee, and talk. So did college students studying late into the night and union workers up early in the morning. Some of the people I met were immigrants, and some were among the original inhabitants of the area, with ancestors stretching back generations in the valley. Some didn’t know they were eligible to vote or didn’t see why they should. But for many of the people I registered, politics wasn’t a game; it was about making life better for their families. Democracy wasn’t a concept in a civics textbook; it was a promise that had inspired them or their parents to leave behind everything they knew to build a new future in a new land. America wasn’t just a place on a map; it was a dream that was worth working and fighting—and, yes, voting—for.
One of my guides both to the area and to the struggle to realize America’s promise was Franklin Garcia, a Mexican American labor organizer and civil rights activist. He drove me around South Texas and introduced me to people and places I never would have found on my own. When I went door-to-door, Franklin often came along, vouching for me to skeptical Texans. He would offer to come inside, assure our hosts that I was someone to be trusted, and translate conversations where necessary. When a man told us he’d never voted before, Franklin helped me explain in specific terms how voting could lead to better jobs and schools, clean water, and housing. When a woman said she was scared to register even though she was a citizen, Franklin seconded my points about how important it was to set an example for her children and how we all have to participate for the community and our country to thrive. McGovern lost that election in a landslide, but I gained a better understanding of American democracy that has lasted me a lifetime.
On January 6, insurrectionists erected a gallows near the west front of the Capitol and chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” Like the Confederate flag they carried inside, it was a throwback to America’s ugly past and a preview of what the future could hold. But we don’t have to accept that fate.
Just two weeks later, with the bloodthirsty cries of the mob still ringing in my ears, I went to the Capitol to attend Joe Biden’s inauguration and show support for the peaceful transfer of power. Trump didn’t show up. That same morning, from her home in Georgia, Shannon Foley Martinez recorded a video appealing to followers of QAnon who might be “grappling with a sense of confusion, betrayal, shame, embarrassment, and anger.” This was a chance to move forward.
