A panel consisting of Ed Krasenstein, Brian Krasenstein, Stephen Bonnell (Destiny), Alex Jones,
Darren Beattie and Glenn Greenwald discuss the events surrounding the 2020 presidential election,
including the Capitol riot and Trump's attempts to stay in power. Different opinions are expressed on
whether it was an insurrection or not, with topics such as legal implications, historical context,
political discourse, electoral challenges, and free speech rights being touched upon. The discussion
also covers the treatment of January 6th protesters compared to other non-violent protests like Black
Lives Matter, suggesting a double standard in how cases have been handled. They mention instances
where FBI agents or informants were involved in organizing both events, and argue that this might be
evidence of a larger conspiracy to exaggerate threats for political gain. The issue of selective
outrage is also brought up in relation to the BLM riots and January 6th rioters.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security had already declared that the greatest threat to the U.S. homeland was not ISIS or al-Qaeda, but instead domestic extremists, far-right extremists to be exact.
unidentified
So let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.
I want to thank you all.
God bless you and God bless America.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the second Zero Hedge Debate.
It is an honor and a privilege to be asked to moderate this debate.
I'm Ian Crossland.
I'm going to be moderating tonight.
And the debate tonight is going to be about January 6th, 2021.
Some things happened on that day, and we're going to be talking about them from start to finish as best as possible.
We have an incredible panel of human beings that I'm going to be introducing shortly.
But before I do, I want to talk a little bit about Zero Hedge, who's putting on the debate.
Zero Hedge was a company founded in 2009.
It's a libertarian, fiercely independent and counterculture news organization.
They are also, they have, on their website, they have a premium service that I want to talk about before we get started.
You can go to zerohedge.com and sign up for the premium service, bypassing the advertisements to get exclusive financial, economic, and geopolitical knowledge and data.
It's highly articulate information.
It's a great, really great organization.
And it also gives you access to the secret Twitter feed or the X feed, formerly known as Twitter.
What's up, Elon, in case you're listening, with market-moving financial advice, real-time updates.
It's a great service.
So you can go to zerohedge.com, sign up for the premium service and get started there.
And from there, we're going to jump into it.
I want to introduce our panel of incredible people, as I said earlier.
And I'm going to start from the end and give you guys a chance to introduce yourselves.
A little logistical problems intervened, and I wish I could be, but I'm really looking forward to participating.
And I just want to echo Alex.
Think what Zero Hedge is doing is so important, organizing these kind of substantive structured debates among people who obviously disagree pretty strongly on things and yet nonetheless can have what I hope will be a civil and spirited debate, what I expect it will be.
So I'm really looking forward to it and I appreciate being asked.
Yes, that is my job is to make sure that it maintains civility, structure, organization, and that we don't talk over each other, that we end up listening to each other.
The real value of humanity, one of the most powerful tools we have is communication.
So I think tonight's going to be an exemplary example of that.
Let's go.
Let's go for this.
The first question I got for you guys, and this is really for the entire panel.
And anyone that wants to start it off, maybe we can start with you, Edson, just because you're on the end and we can move around is January 6th, 2021.
Was it an insurrection?
And before you answer, before you answer, I want to read this.
This is actually what the, it's called 18 U.S. Code 2383, Rebellion or Insurrection.
Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years or both, and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
It technically doesn't define insurrection.
It's the code talking about what I guess what an insurrection is.
Of course, they use the word insurrection in the actual code itself.
And I base that on the fact that 20 court decisions called it an insurrection.
And the fact that there was a bill passed in the Senate that called them a mob of insurrectionists.
I think the bill passed, or it was in the House of Representatives, 406 to 21.
That was a statute to award the police officers medals.
And it referred to these individuals as insurrectionists.
So, I mean, I think the term can be subjective.
I think, you know, people can say nobody was charged with violating section 2383 of Title 18, which is insurrection and insurrection and rebellion statute.
And nobody was, right?
But I don't think that defines whether the event was an insurrection.
When I say insurrection, I don't mean everybody there was partaking in insurrection.
There were people who were peaceful, people who, the people who walked into the Capitol and did nothing, I don't think that they were insurrectionists.
I think they violated the law, but I don't think they were partaking in insurrection.
I do think the Proud Boys were partaking in insurrection.
I think you could say Donald Trump incited the insurrection.
I would say the plot from start to finish is quite obviously an insurrection.
The only way to get around that is to either justify an insurrection, which is what most conservatives do.
They don't realize it, or to deny that an insurrection could ever happen.
Or, if you're not aware of all the facts of what happened, I think that Donald Trump and his cronies had a very coherent plan that they tried to enact from start to finish, starting with false claims of voter fraud, leading to false slates of electors that filed themselves as state electors under perjury, which is what they did, up to the violence that happened on the day of the day of the certification of the vote, where Donald Trump and his friends continued to try to delay the peaceful transfer of power by contravening the certification of the Electoral College vote.
And I want to make sure that we don't force this into like what they want to call a debate debate where you got to be waiting to called on or be called on or anything.
So if any of you guys, Glenn, you as well, man, if any of you guys want to jump in.
I want Glenn to go, but I just want to say something here.
I was there and I was investigated and subpoenaed by the Justice Department in at least five criminal investigations and I was forced to testify in front of the Jan 6 committee, which they've now been destroying their records because the records show the opposite of what they said.
Trump and all of us had a stage rented by the Supreme Court.
He was supposed to have another rally there.
We showed up.
Before Trember finished his speech, people were getting tear gas and hit by bullets.
And there were a bunch of provocateurs leading an attack against the police and they broke through.
And then this million plus people then got blamed as insurrectionists.
And Biden gave a big speech yesterday saying they're all terrorists.
So by that extension, Kamala Harris as the VP candidate was bailing people out of jail that burned down police stations and firebombed federal buildings.
So and the idea of Biden's speech yesterday, making his whole campaign about January 6th, saying political violence is never good.
The Democrats are the ones that call for political violence.
So I was there with a bullhorn, but I can only reach 100 yards out when the tear gas was hitting me saying, don't go in, don't fight the police.
This is a setup.
And we have hundreds of videos.
And so, regardless of what the left tries to do, they're all out there of people taking off their antifa stuff and putting on the Trump garb and the police fake arresting people attacking them and then high-fiving them.
I mean, this has all come out in the new footage, and it's all getting fake arresting them.
They would grab them and arrest them and then drag them in and then high-five them, you know, take the handcuffs off and high-fi them.
Those videos, people are going to take everything I say, they're going to put it on X and show what I said.
That's where we dominate.
And so, what I'm getting at here, let me just tell you this.
What I'm getting at here is they now admit hundreds of federal officers were there.
So, when Trump started his speech, this whole thing began with Ray Epps saying go into the Capitol.
He told the Jan 6 committee, yeah, it's true, it's in his text messages.
He told family, I orchestrated it.
So, under pressure, they finally indicted him, but only recommends six months.
So, a few hundred people got manipulated into fighting the police.
They were led and driven by provocateurs and other groups.
They were others, then they opened the doors and the police wave them in in hundreds of videos.
They walk through the velvet ropes, and then they indict over a thousand people that just walked through velvet ropes.
And then, now we're told in the National Security Directive of President Biden, the number one threat is the American people.
And he had a declaration of war yesterday against all Trump supporters that says to protect democracy, we're not going to let you vote for Trump.
So, as Stalin said, I care not who casts the votes, I care who counts them.
Well, Biden doesn't care who casts the votes, he cares who's allowed on the ballot.
So, we've already won.
No one's buying this.
And when this happened three years ago, the Wall Street Journal had a print of retraction, but they said I was there as a coward telling people to attack.
Well, no, they wouldn't let me put the video on Twitter before I was saying don't go in.
But the truth is, it's coming out.
And so, so that's the bottom line here.
And this attempt by Biden to cast the American people as the enemy and all these movies about martial law and civil war and race war, that's their only hope because the corrupt, evil Democratic Party and its evil twin, the Republicans, they've lost power and populism is rising.
Quite frankly, this was not an insurrection.
It was an insurrection, there would have been guns.
And it's in the Declaration of Independence that it's our right and duty to get rid of a government that's destructive of what the people want.
But I'm not calling for violence.
We're winning this politically, but we're being cast as about to be violent the next 10 months because all these indictments and all these attacks to not let Americans vote for who they want aren't working and are backfiring.
And all the big Democrat lawyers now admit it.
Axel Rod admits it.
Carville admits it.
They all admit this attempt, like we're in Venezuela or something, to take Trump off the ballot when he's never been convicted of insurrection.
This is a military tribunal, U.S. code, from the Civil War.
If a military tribunal found you were guilty of being involved in insurrection, that meant after the war ended, can I ask you a question?
Was that because there were rebellions during Reconstruction at the end of the Civil War?
And they were saying if you lead an uprising against the Northern occupation of the South, you're precluded from running from office because they were worried about Southerners getting office again, like Jefferson.
No, so no, I do not support the Civil War or slavery, and I'm not a quote Confederate.
Yeah, I actually think what Destiny and what Ed are saying are very important.
First of all, I was gonna say that I think one of the problems with how these things are debated is that a lot of people these days have very binary prisms for understanding things.
God, that comes from YouTube debate where you have to declare yourself on one side or the other.
So Destiny said, oh, everybody either hates this insurrection, thinks it's an insurrection, or they deny it happens, or they think it's good.
And there's so much middle ground, namely that for me, this was a political protest that spilled over into a riot where a small minority of the people engage in violence.
I don't think we wanna urge that to happen.
We don't wanna defend that.
I consider that lamentable.
But the fact that it's laughable to call this an insurrection is actually demonstrated by the examples that they're using.
This was a three-hour riot that was extremely easily subdued.
It doesn't remotely compare to any prior insurrections, let alone to the Civil War.
The only people who were killed on January 6th were four people, all four of whom were Trump supporters, two of whom dropped dead of a heart attack and one from a speed overdose because these were not exactly a well-trained militia.
And when Jack Smith went to charge Donald Trump with multiple crimes, he had a lot of options to charge him with, and he charged him with a lot of crimes, including very dubious ones.
He did not charge him with inciting an insurrection for reasons that I think we ought to ask ourselves why.
But the fact that this is such a minor event in history is demonstrated by the fact that the media who needed this to be a major event immediately started lying about what happened, saying that Brian Sicknick was murdered when he had his head bashed in through a fire with a fire extinguisher, only to learn that actually he called his mother that night.
He was fine.
He died the next day of what the coroner said were natural causes, because the media knew that if you can't say that even one person supposedly perpetrating the insurrection killed anybody, pulled out a gun, let alone discharge the weapon, all of which is true.
It's a joke to call this an insurrection.
At best, it's a riot.
And that's the reason why Trump hasn't been charged with an insurrection.
The only time he ever commented on January 6th about whether he thought there should be violence or not was when he said the following.
He said, I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.
He urged them to be peaceful in how they went there.
To the extent there was violence, I think you can make the argument that the FBI informants that even the New York Times admits were there were the ones that urged it.
But even if the people who were there were the ones responsible, at best this is a riot.
You could so easily make the case that the 2020 riots were as a far greater insurrectionary threat than anything that happened on January 6th.
So not much of those indictments are actually focusing on the three-hour riot itself.
The unprecedented act that there is no answer for, that Kamala Harris or Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton have not engaged in is using knowingly false election claims for months to try to pressure state electors to change their vote.
And then when they wouldn't do that, beg them to elect different electors.
And then when they wouldn't do that, create a plot to create fake electors.
And then when Pence wouldn't accept that, try to capitalize on that final three-hour riot at the Capitol building to also make phone calls and tell people to decertify their vote or to switch their elections.
What happened with Trump was that Trump tried to get the states to certify a second slate of electors based off of conspiracy theory crap that the election was stolen.
What Trump did was Trump tried to get the states to certify an alternate slate of electors.
They refused because the court said there's no, they're there.
And then when that didn't go through, Trump decided to get his own slate of electors above the states that were not certified and tried to use that to force Mike Pence to say that Joe Biden didn't win these electoral votes.
So if we want to be precise in terms of the scope of the debate, I think it's about January 6th.
And so the lead up to it might be relevant to some of the criminal indictments, but it's technically speaking outside the scope of the January 6th discussion.
But it's worth it.
If we're going to bring it into the discussion, I think there's an operative word there, knowingly.
And that's operative within the context of the charging documents.
But the idea that Trump thought that he lost the election and he was knowingly lying and knowingly engaging.
No, he believes, I guarantee it, whether you believe it or not, Trump believes that the election was stolen and he was using the legal recourse available to him at the advice of his legal advisors.
Most of his legal advisors, most of his legal advisors, most of his legal advisors said that this idea was raised.
Well, no, but he had legal advisors who were telling him that you tried to search hard enough, you can't find anybody to validate an opinion.
But what you've just done is what I opened with, which is saying he thought the election was stolen, therefore he was justified to engage in insurrection.
Let me just say, what happens is when you gather together to debate a particular question, you're supposed to debate that particular question.
The particular question that we were presented with is we're going to debate January 6th and whether it was an insurrection.
Now, I don't blame Destiny and Ed for not wanting to debate that, for wanting to debate a whole set of other issues about whether Trump acted improperly, whether he was naughty in the things he did after the election, because there is no argument to make that what happened on January 6th rises to the level of insurrection.
And that's why an extremely aggressive prosecutor named Jack Smith decided not to charge Donald Trump with that crime because he knew there was no way that he could possibly bring a conviction against anybody, let alone Donald Trump, who told everybody to be peaceful when going to the Capitol about whether or not that was actually an insurrection, whether that rose to that level.
And even in a colloquial sense, what we've called an insurrection in the past is in a completely different universe.
But on the issue of whether there was a real belief on the part of Donald Trump that elections were stolen, I don't understand how anybody could doubt that aside from the fact that you have to get into Trump's head.
In the last three elections that Democrats lost in 2000, 2004, and 2016, a very large number of Democrats believed and asserted that the election was stolen, that the election was stolen and was the byproduct of fraud, and the president was, as a result, illegitimate.
When I started writing about politics 2005, the idea that George Bush was the real loser of the election, Al Gore won, was the view of every single liberal and Democrat that I knew.
In 2004, there were objections claiming that Karl Rove had interfered in the Ohio vote with the D-Bold machines and cheated to make John Kerry lose and George Bush win.
And then in 2016, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats said that Donald Trump was the illegitimate winner, that Russia had helped him.
And they tried to convince the Electoral College to abandon the certified results of the state.
Obviously, you go back to 1960, and a lot of historians believe that election was stolen.
So it's not like Donald Trump was the first person to ever wonder or believe that an election was stolen from him.
It's a very significant tradition in American political history.
If you know anything about politics before 2016, and if Trump believed that the election was stolen, and while it's true, a lot of people in the Justice Department and a lot of people in the White House told them they didn't think it was.
He did have advisors and lawyers telling them, telling him that they think there was evidence of it.
Then the question is over, even on these other issues about whether or not Trump engaged in some conspiracy against the United States.
But I mean, Glenn, since the election, and these guys haven't talked to either Professor B. We Hillary was in videos two days ago saying Trump's going to steal this election.
So just about the, just, I actually want to ask a question that I would love to hear everybody's answer to.
But before I do that, I just want to say about federal judges.
This year, in the last six months, four different federal judges, a district court judge and then an appellate court unanimously, found that the Biden administration gravely violated the First Amendment.
In fact, the greatest assault on free speech the courts had in decades, maybe the history of the judiciary, by systemically pressuring big tech to censor the internet and purge it of all dissent by threatening big tech companies, using the CIA, the FBI, and the CDC with punishment if they didn't censor the internet.
Now, you may not agree, but according to your standard, four different federal judges concluded that, which is infinitely worse in terms of an abridgment of freedom or an attack on the Constitution than anything that Trump is accused of doing.
The question I want to ask is the question that you asked, Ian, is this a coup?
If you look at how other coups are perpetrated, and I think a lot of this is that if you're an American and you have this very soft history, you don't know what a coup is, you think that like what CNN tells you a coup is a coup.
Usually the way coups work is the leader of the country or whoever is in charge of the military orders the military to seize control of the levers of power.
Trump was the commander-in-chief on January 6th.
The military was duty bound to obey his orders.
They had a right to disobey if they were illegal.
But if this were a coup, why didn't Trump order the military to seize control of power and turn over the election process to him?
Why didn't he order the armed factions that formed the law enforcement part of the military and the executive branch that serve under his command to do that as well?
That's what happens in a coup.
That didn't happen here because Trump wasn't trying to perpetrate a coup.
The Supreme Court that Trump has his picks on, that's currently 6'3 considered.
They're the ones who are going to make the final decision on that.
I wanted to be known that every single time you try to talk about any of the stuff related to Trump, it's so many Democrat names that come out of people's mouths.
I don't know why people can't just engage on the facts of what happened on and in the events leading up to Jay 6 leadership.
We're saying unprecedented that a president of the United States would do everything within his power to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to the next president.
unidentified
He said, I want you to peacefully march down to the Capitol.
As he was saying, telling people to go into the Capitol, as he was saying, he wants to drag Nancy Pelosi out of the Capitol and hopes her head hits every stair on the way.
Just finished my point before you cut me off.
He wanted to drag Nancy Pelosi out and let her head hit every stair on the way out.
The scope, I think, matters, and that's what we're really getting at when we talk about insurrection.
The courts are politically weaponized, so I wouldn't even rest the legitimacy on that question on the determinations of the courts, which we can see are running away with pretty wild and ridiculous theories.
Weaponized court systems.
So there's that.
And then, you know, these, you know, sure, there are random nut jobs who are around D.C. on that day and any other day.
And so I don't think that's relevant to the ultimate question of whether it was a coup, whether it was an insurrection.
And as I said before, the stuff about Trump and the legal theory behind his multiple-part plan, that could be an interesting discussion.
It's technically outside the scope of the debate.
But again, I would reiterate, anyone who knows Trump, anyone who knows people who knows Trump, 100% certainty Trump genuinely believes that the election was stolen.
He had multiple legal advisors.
Many of his advisors were trying to sabotage him from day one.
Just because he was advised by one of these snakes doesn't mean that he therefore agrees with what they say.
He agreed with the people who told him it was stolen and that he had legal recourse to address that, which he implemented.
So there's nothing that rises to an insurrection or coup about that either, even though that's outside of the scope of our discussion for today.
So you're going to tell me that the people that testified under oath are the liars, but the people that said things in the public but failed to say anything under oath are the ones that are telling the liars.
Yeah, well, the thought was just about is Hutchinson.
She said a lot of things.
I believe she was the one who said that Trump reached over to the steering wheel and told the Secret Service this or that, which was a bizarre thing because the Secret Service agents in question weren't the ones that were called upon to testify.
No, the Secret Service actually said we would love to testify and they weren't allowed to.
The two Secret Service agents in question, that specific anecdote, were not allowed to testify.
So why would they take this secondhand report from Hutchinson when they could have interrogated directly the people who would have been direct witnesses to that?
The January 6th Committee, and that's what Alex was alluding to just a second ago, is one of the biggest shams in the history of Congress because what happened with the January 6th committee was we had a long history of 225 years of tradition in the United States Congress where whenever investigative commissions would be created within the Congress, the minority leader and the majority leader would each select the members of that committee to ensure there was fair representation by both parties.
Nancy Pelosi, for the first time in the history of the United States, as Speaker of the House, refused to allow the Republicans who were chosen for that committee by Kevin McCarthy, at the time, the Republican majority leader, minority leader, to be seated on the panel.
And as a result, the Republicans said, we're going to have nothing to do with this.
And the only quote-unquote Republicans that were chosen was Liz Cheney, who ended up losing her seat by 36 points, and Adam Kinzinger, who didn't bother running again because they were so unrepresentative of the Republican Party.
It was a completely partisan commission.
And on top of that, none of the videotapes that were available was made available to the public except for very deceitfully chosen snippets by Adam Schiff and by Liz Cheney.
And it was only within the last several months that we saw all of the video footage.
And what it showed makes a joke of the idea that this was a coup.
You had people peacefully walking into the Capitol, led by many of the police officers who encouraged them to enter peacefully, which they did.
The vast majority of people who were there at January 6th aren't even charged with using violence.
And that's what makes this whole debate such a preposterous joke.
If you look at how coups are carried out in other countries, you can make a much better case that the Black Lives Matter protest of 2020 was an insurrectionary movement.
And the reason it matters, Destiny, is because if you're going to make arguments, there has to be an important test, which is, do you apply the same principles you're claiming to profess and believe in to cases where it undermines your partisan allegiance and your ideology, not only where it helps it.
That's one of the key tasks for determining the authenticity of your argument.
And so if you don't think the 2020 protest movement was an insurrectionary movement against the United States government, there's no way to claim what January 6th was, especially since Trump could have done so much more to cause a coup that he did not do because that wasn't his aim ever.
If you want to talk about applying the same standard, would you have been okay in the year 2000 if Gore refused to certify the vote because he didn't like what was happening in Florida?
Because if you really believe that an election is stolen, it's the Democrats claim they did, then it is kind of odd to say we're just going to concede that and allow George Bush to march into power, even though we believe that he actually stole the election.
We're talking about the legal process of the congressional and judicial process.
He went and if he had ordered the military or some other FBI or any of those agencies, the CIA, to go and use violence on domestic soil in order to ignore those court rulings the way people do when they're trying to implement coups, you would have a good argument.
He didn't do any of that.
He invoked all of his legal rights in the judiciary and in the Congress.
He lost and he walked out of the White House on January 20th.
He did not have to be dragged out.
He wasn't arrested by the military, which is what happens in coups.
So much of this is because you only started paying attention to politics in 2016.
You only live in the United States.
You have no idea about history or anything that happens in other countries.
You're trying to use Hawaii as an example for something that was comparable where both slates of electors were actually duly elected by the people there.
In the 60s, Hawaii and South Carolina, these other historical examples that people go to for multiple states of electors are not at all comparable.
Both of these things happened prior to 2016.
There are no examples in U.S. history, or if you want to give me one, since you know so much history prior to 2016, give it to me.
Is there any other examples in U.S. history where the president is telling the vice president to unilaterally not certify the vote?
It doesn't matter if it's the first time that it ever happened, even if it's the first time or the 10th time, it's still not a coup or an insurrection.
A coup or an insurrection is when you use violence and force in order to seize control of power outside of the legal process.
But I just don't understand all of the insanely arbitrary caps that we're trying to create to try to say that it wasn't a coup.
Well, there was violence, but there wasn't enough.
There was a subversion of the Democratic process, but it didn't end up working.
Like, if the plan would have gone as Donald Trump wanted it to have gone, which is Vice President Pence unilaterally tossing out the Electoral College vote, and if Donald Trump would have retained power past when he was supposed to lose it, what is that, if not a coup?
Well, I know you won't answer because you probably know he's guilty.
That's fine.
What about Glenn?
Glenn, what would you call it if the president was able to entrench his power by asking his vice president to throw out the vote unilaterally, which is what he was trying to do?
Shows the weakness of the argument, but if that had happened, my guess is it would have ended up in the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court would have made the decision about whether Mike Pence exercised his proper authority as vice president.
And then Donald Trump, if he had run out of options, would have left the White House on January 20th without any need for military force or police force, exactly how he did.
And I would have called that the exhaustion of all of the legal remedies available to the president in the event that he was going to be able to do it.
If both of you accept that, then, then, if the Supreme Court says that because of Amendment 14, Section 3, Trump can't be on the ballot, you would both accept that as well.
The reason why he didn't call them off is because him, Giuliani, and Eastman were making phone calls to other senators and congressmen asking them to decertify the electoral vote.
I'm saying that as the riot was raging on and he was sitting there sipping his Diet Coke, if this really made him and his followers look bad, why didn't Donald Trump make a video immediately?
If they bring in, which they've done, 10 million legal aliens the last three years, and then that gives them, with the congressional seats in the census, more Democrat seats in the Congress, is that undocumented aliens, undocumented immigrants are not voting.
Okay, so why don't we ask the oath keepers, the three percenters, the proud boys, the ones who were actually indicted and convicted of seditious conspiracy, why they did it.
What's the point of argument there that Trump was stolen?
And people assume that they interpreted that as meaning, oh, we need to go to storm the Capitol, that that's somehow Trump's fault and he's criminally liable for it and it rises to an insurrection.
That Congress wasn't acting, that Mike Pence was supposed to be the guy to do it, but he hadn't heard good things about them, and they needed to go down to the Capitol building to protest.
It's not about him being ahead in the polls or not.
It's about whether or not he engaged in insurrection and if the self-executing part of the 14th Amendment allows Trump found guilty for the 14th Amendment, read it.
Somebody, can we bring the 14th Amendment up on yourself?
If you think it's so bad that the courts are kicking him off the ballot, what do you think about Trump doing the birtharism card for Obama for how many years?
That was the first big political thing he was known for.
It was challenging whether Obama was even born in the United States in an attempt to get him kicked off the ballot.
Yeah, so first of all, on the issue of the ballot, there have been split decisions on this, and even Democratic judges in Colorado and then the Democratic, very partisan Secretary of State in Rhode Island, as well as in California, have all said they don't think it's appropriate to remove Trump from the ballot because he has not yet been charged with, let alone convicted of, insurrection.
So I want to be very deferential to Destiny's incredible achievements in constitutional scholarship, but there are actually a lot of even Democratic Party elected officials who are saying, as well as judges of the California, of the Colorado Supreme Court who are appointed by Democratic Party governors, who are saying that you cannot actually remove somebody because to remove them from the ballot is to punish them for a crime, insurrection, that Trump has never been charged with and therefore has never had the opportunity to defend himself the way a criminal is.
The secretaries of state of California and Rhode Island have also said the same thing, but it's true.
The Supreme Court will decide.
I'm very confident they'll decide Trump can remain on the ballot, and then that will resolve that issue.
The question I have, I have to have two questions quickly.
One is, why didn't anybody like Jack Smith charge Trump with engaging in an insurrection?
If Trump was engaged in an insurrection or inciting an insurrection, you would hope, I would think, that he would be charged with that.
I don't think he was, so I'm happy he wasn't.
But for those of you who think he was, why wasn't he charged with it?
And then the second one is, I just want to know, given that the 2020 riots did have a lot of people in there who were nonviolent and were there not for insurrectionary reasons, but had a lot of people who were anarchist and insurrectionist and who engaged in a lot of violence, a lot more than was done on January 6th.
Do you also think that the riots of 2020 constituted an insurrection?
I'm just trying to understand to get a sense for what your definition of insurrection is.
But I mean, I think the 1982 riots, I think I recall at the time thinking the insurrectionary, the insurrection act was inappropriately invoked.
I'd have to go back and really study the 1992 riots to see the extent of the violence.
But I do think that you're asking that indicates why the 2020 riots are way closer to an insurrection than anything happened after the 2020 election.
And the reason you're afraid to say that it is an insurrection is purely for ideological and partisan ends because liberals were engaged in an insurrection.
When we're talking about an insurrection, okay, I think all three of us here would agree that if there was a congressional session or a state legislative session and people were voting on it and BLM rioters went up and they tried to firebomb the house to stop the vote, I think all of us would agree.
Over the course of the BLM riots, there was lots of violence.
I think everybody on this side of the table is okay with charging.
Everybody here is okay with charging and convicting anybody that was guilty of a violent act.
However, violence, no matter how much, does not make an insurrection.
It's the obstruction or rebellion against the United States for the Jack Smith obstruction charge, obstructing an official process like certifying the vote.
The Secretary of Defense, the man who he would have to call to call in the National Guard, the Secretary of Defense specifically said under oath that Trump never did that.
And it's my right to say that, but then, oh, covering up the windows with signs and then all these trucks pulling in and then the graph where Trump's above and it perfectly shoots up and then wins.
Well, I mean, as Professor Epstein and others have said, they do it way before suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop, giving you 96% Google Democrat links.
I mean, it's all the stealing's done before in the algorithm and the censorship of the control.
I remember five years ago when I was being deplatformed, they were denying I was being deplatformed and saying there was no censorship.
Now we know from the weaponization hearings that all this is going on, and now they're telling us you can't vote for him because he said we won't let you vote for him.
Why is it if the election was being stolen, why did every single person that Donald Trump trusted to investigate come back and say there was no evidence?
I said that everything that every single person that Donald Trump trusted to investigate, meaning the vice president, the Department of Justice, the cybersecurity division of the Department of Homeland Security, all of those White House counsel, every yeah, I know how it works.
I know you're farming TikTok clips, okay?
That's what we're doing right now.
unidentified
But the reality is, is almost every single person that he asked all of them to investigate.
I'm not somebody who thinks the election, that there's evidence conclusive that the election was stolen.
I do think we should be a lot more attentive to when election processes get changed out of the blue.
Like, oh, because there's COVID, we're going to have a ton of new conventions for how we do mail-in ballots.
I think there's a lot of potential for fraud there.
I don't think there's evidence that I've seen at least that's conclusive that the 2020 election was stolen.
I do think, though, it was rigged in all sorts of ways from internet censorship to all kinds of interference on the part of the U.S. security state lying and saying that a very incriminating story about Joe Biden was the byproduct of Russian disinformation when it absolutely was not.
Facebook and Twitter censoring that story right before the election.
These are all examples of corrupting rigging by institutions of authority on the question of whether it's evidence that it was stolen.
Rigging it is when institutions of authority cheat or act corruptly in order to manipulate public opinion to prevent stories from getting to them, like those news stories about Joe Biden and the way that he exploited his family connections in Ukraine and China to profit for his family and lying about it and saying that it's Russian disinformation, censoring the internet to prevent stories from getting to the public, having the security state, the CIA, and the FBI that's supposed to have no role in our politics, being the ones to cook up those fabrications.
That's all examples of rigging and manipulating our democracy the way that we accuse Russia of doing.
The U.S. security state, the corporate media, Twitter, and Facebook did that way, way worse.
Stealing the election is dumping ballots that were legitimately cast or fabricating ballots in favor of one candidate or the other that actually weren't cast, manipulating the machines in order to have the loser be the winner.
That's what I would distinguish between rigging and stealing.
Do you think that Donald Trump asking Jeffrey Clark to go and threaten the DOJ that if they don't sign on to a false letter, trying to bully states into claiming there was mass election fraud by claiming the DOJ had actually punched them when they had it?
If Trump believed genuinely that the election was stolen, then all of those steps that he undertook to try and present the Congress the way to alleviate the stolen election, to have courts reverse the stolen election, to have Mike Pence exercise what he thought was his constitutional authority might have been wrongful, but they weren't illegal and they most definitely weren't a coup.
If he thought that the election was stolen, he was allowed to tell the DOJ that they needed to sign on to a false letter claiming they'd found election fraud.
What happened was Rappensberger and everybody in Georgia looked over all the tapes that you're claiming about, but the ballot's being ran three times.
Not only was that information false, Trump was told that it was false.
Trump knew that it was false.
Trump repeated it over and over again, including in a call to Raffensburger.
And finally, Giuliani has come out saying that it was false, but it was his First Amendment right to lie about it when Ruby Freeman took him to court for defamation because he lied about something you could clearly see on video evidence.
Firstly, do you think, if you want to talk about it, if you think the election was rigged or stolen, but also is it protected speech to question an election and claim that it was stolen?
I subscribe to the sort of rigged versus stolen distinction, and I'm more in the rigged category.
And I think that's the more meaningful type of interference is the censorship, is all of the other tools that have been deployed in order to rig the election.
I think that's more significant than the sort of more hyperbolic claims regarding hacking the machines and or so forth.
The claim that Trump was making these kinds of things.
What happened is the only people who have standing in Colorado to bring a suit are people who can vote in the Republican primaries, which means either Republican voters or independent voters.
Although the suit was brought in their name, the lawsuit was spearheaded and was paid for and was organized by a Democratic Party-aligned group called Crew that boasted of this and took credit for it.
The things that's most instructive to see what Donald Trump wanted to happen that day is that when he sat down and he watched the violence unfolding on TV, when he saw the people fighting with cops, when he saw, when he got notification that Ashley Babbitt had been shot, Donald Trump did not take steps to stop the violence that day.
Instead, him and Giuliani made phone calls to senators and congressmen trying to get them to stall the vote.
Nobody is upset because Donald Trump said fight like hell.
People are upset because for months or years, really, even in 2016, Donald Trump has consistently attacked and undermined the electoral process with absolutely no good reason.
Now they finally indicted him because they know it's a weak spot in their operations.
They're only asking for six months.
Let me tell you, we're not playing clips for tip for chat here, but everybody's going to, I want everybody on X to get these statements and put all the clips of women putting onions in their eyes and the cops fake arresting people and high-firing and saying, I'm a federal agent.
I think the illegal alien voting thing is what's happening is they're coming in and then they're being counted in the census, which then adds more electoral votes to that.
Well, I can attempt to answer the question about federal involvement because my reporting or reporting at Revolver News is largely responsible for changing the national conversation in that direction.
But here's a guy who's the only guy caught on camera as early as January 5th, repeatedly calling for people to go into the Capitol and prefacing his seemingly rehearsed remarks in each case, saying, I'm probably going to go to jail for this.
I'm probably going to get arrested for this.
You need to go into the Capitol.
The next day, he flew across the whole country, presumably, to go hear Trump's speech.
He skipped Trump's speech.
Instead, he was a veritable where's Waldo everywhere on January 6th, directing people, go into the Capitol.
It's in that direction.
That's where our problems are.
Then, amazingly, he's pre-positioned right at that initial decisive breach point on the west perimeter of the Capitol, and he's whispering into somebody's ear just seconds before the bike racks are broken through.
He texts his nephew, I orchestrated it.
On paper, think about it.
He's like a 6'3 former Marine.
He was wearing camo gear and a Trump hat, and he just happens to have had a leadership position in the Oath Keepers, the most demonized and heavily prosecuted, right?
He doesn't the most demonized and heavily prosecuted militia group associated with January 6th.
And the regime doesn't touch him.
However, initially, his behavior was considered to be so egregious, he was one of the first 20 people added to the FBI's most wanted list about January 6th.
He was prominently featured in the New York Times' ominously titled Day of Rage.
Of all the clips the New York Times could have found and chosen, they chose Ray Epps to represent their thesis that this was a pre-planned insurrection to storm the Capitol.
And then when the discussion of federal involvement came into being, one of our major pieces at Revolver News, literally the next day is when the FBI quietly removed him from their list.
And all of a sudden, he went from FBI's most wanted and featured in the New York Times' Day of Rage to New York Times does a fully dedicated puff piece on him.
60 Minutes does a sympathy segment on him.
He's the only January 6th participant that Adam Kinsinger, who's never met a Trump supporter, he doesn't want to see rotting in jail for 50 years, that Adam Kinsinger will defend more aggressively than Epps' own lawyers.
And now, almost three years after the government finally says, okay, we're going to hit you with a wrist slap misdemeanor, as though people are so simple-minded to think, well, if the argument is hasn't been indicted, therefore he's a Fed.
If we indict him now, even if it's a misdemeanor, even three years after, no matter what the circumstances, this constitutes a refutation and totally wipes away the mountains of suspicious evidence surrounding the character of Ray Epps.
So the people who were charged with anything but misdemeanors were people who used violence and people who went into the House chamber where the joint session was, and the people who were involved in a seditious conspiracy.
A theory that there was a conspiracy that took place.
So he doesn't fall into any category that any of the other protesters fall in because he didn't fall into any of those three categories.
So he got charged with a misdemeanor.
Other people, the conspirators, the people who used violence, and the people who went into the House chamber are the ones who were charged with felonies.
He's telling people in advance of the speech, we need to go to the Capitol because somehow he got it in his mind that everything would end up at the Capitol.
And you can go back and watch it on your revolver story is up there.
For every single thing that you assert about him, that he's in video whispering into a guy's ear.
You say it in the rest of your article.
All he's doing on the day of when the protesting is getting violent is going up and down telling people, don't fight with the cops.
Don't fight with the cops.
The cops are on our side.
That's what he's saying the entire time.
The idea that he said that the entire day, but the one guy whose ear that he whispered into, that unfortunately we don't have audio capture of, that he and Samsuel testified to is he said, hey, the cops are on our side or the cops aren't enemies.
They both say something to that effect.
And that seems to synergize with everything else he said on that day.
You go on to say that that guy immediately after was the one that broke down the fence.
No, he's not.
You can see like 15 people right next to him that are all trying to break down the fence.
Yeah, the guy goes in eventually.
But if we truly believe that this guy is a federal agent or is working to instigate the riot, we've laid out absolutely nothing supporting that.
Just some video footage of another boomer being at the rally.
If you want to say that, why was he removed from the FBI list?
I mean, why was he removed in the realist?
Like, all the information is out there.
He said that after his video was identified and people on X started to identify him, and then because all of his online stuff is incredibly easy to find, he started to get phone calls, he started to get harassed, he started to get threats.
So he called the FBI as soon as this was brought to his attention and he told the FBI, hey, this was me and here I am and this is what's happening.
Well, I mean, I can tell you why it's not true, okay?
Because what you did, because I read your article, is you looked at two archived versions of the website and you didn't have a 12-month archive.
For some reason, you assumed that the recent snapshot that you took at 2021, you think that that was the first time the page has been changed.
That was just the first time the page has been archived.
I don't think the FBI has made a statement on it, but what Epps testified to was that he either saw a video of himself or a friend saw a video of himself or a friend saw him on the list where people were, and then people were making videos.
And then he called the FBI and he said, hey, I need to talk to you, and this is what's going on.
If he was a Fed, why would they remove him from the list when everybody's clearly looking at the list?
He was one of the only people removed.
Why would senators be defending him so vigilantly?
Why was he quietly removed right when the question of federal involvement became a major part of the national conversation?
So, let me just, I don't want to get lost in these weeds.
I just want to say something quickly.
So, you're saying he said we need to go into the Capitol peacefully.
And you point out correctly that in many instances, caught on video, he's engaged in what you could call de-escalation of the crowd, and he's not urging people to violence.
That's all correct.
I never said he's urging people to violence.
He was absolutely a provocateur.
And his mission, as stated and as implemented and as orchestrated by his own verbatim text, was he wanted people to go into the Capitol peacefully.
Nobody here is saying that he didn't say that and he didn't want people to do that.
But the claim is that there's some sort of federal.
That's fine and he could be charged for it.
Do you think anybody's here care if he gets charged for that crime?
The issue is you're saying that he was doing it under the direction of a federal agency.
Yeah, this guy that looks like he's dying of type 2 diabetes and arthritis is somehow some intimidating Marine captain that's sending people into the Capitol.
That was your claim that you've provided zero evidence for, and you don't in either of the articles that you write about him.
Well, I just, I mean, I only heard the last four minutes of the conversation, but I'm still always amazed by I really don't understand the argument because the FBI and the U.S. security state before January 6th was saying that they regard the greatest threat to national security not as being ISIS or Al-Qaeda or Hamas or Hezbollah or China or any other foreign threat.
They regard the greatest threat as being right-wing domestic extremists on whom in whom that was included on many lists, the Oath Keepers, the three percenters, and all of the people in the groups that they said orchestrated to January 6th.
Is the argument that you think that the FBI was not monitoring and infiltrating those groups?
Because there's actually a ton of evidence that the FBI had their hooks in all three of those groups and not only had their hooks in them, but on January 6th had informants on the ground who were pretending to be Trump supporters who were talking in real time to the FBI about everything that was happening.
So I just want to understand what the claim is.
Is the claim that the FBI was not involved in the groups that organized January 6th and didn't have informants with them that day?
It came out that the vice president of the Oath Keepers was an FBI informant.
The Proud Boys had at least three and as many as eight.
And the New York Times itself reported that there were FBI informants and the Proud Boys who were inside the Capitol texting their handlers as the event unfolded.
The context in the immediate aftermath of January 6th, by the words of Steve Sherwin, who is in charge of the prosecution, their posture was one of quote-unquote shock and awe.
They were going after everyone.
They were hitting them very hard.
Now, again, think about central casting.
On paper, Ray Epps, he's the 6'3 former Marine in camouflage gear with a Trump hat.
The only guy caught on video as early as the 5th telling people to go into the Capitol, who's there on the 6th, directing people to the Capitol, who's right there pre-positioned at that initial breach phase.
I want to just quickly answer the question about your question, basically, if he was an asset, why did they go after their own asset?
Why would they indict their own asset?
That happens all the time.
In fact, that's almost the norm that ultimately when they have undercover people, they'll indict them.
When the assets become liabilities, they indict them.
In fact, we don't have to go too far into the past to get a case of that.
There is the Michigan fednapping case or the Michigan kidnapping case where there is the informant, Steve Robeson, who was a longtime over decade-long informant who was part of the entrapment scheme in Michigan case with striking parallels to January 6th, by the way.
And he, when he became inconvenient, was indicted by the government.
And then you're saying he's turning around and he's suing Fox News for defamation, which is going to open up all sorts of cans of worms with discovery that he's going to have to provide legally in front of a court.
No idea what the history of the FBI is in this country.
They have no idea that the FBI, throughout the entire war on terror, did this over and over.
They would target and entrap all sorts of vulnerable Muslims to engage in plots that the FBI created in order to create a narrative that the FBI was needed because there was a much bigger threat of Islamic terrorism than there actually was.
The FBI has been infiltrating and then using provocateurs to encourage groups to commit crimes so that the FBI can gain more power, can spread this narrative.
You have to be incredibly naive or only paying attention to the news since 2016 and thinking Donald Trump is the only issue not to understand that this is what the FBI has been doing for decades.
And so to have this like naive attitude like, oh, is the New York Times working with the FBI?
That is what the media in this country has been doing.
By the way, if I can just add a nice little colorful detail there, the author of the Ray Epps puff piece that asks none of the questions that would get to the core of his involvement there.
It's a total puff piece.
You can read it yourself.
The author of that, his previous work, includes the CIA authorized account of the Sinaloa cartel.
He was charged with obstruction of an official proceeding, which would have been a very easy charge and a fairly typical felony charge given to me.
So wait, wait, let me answer this comprehensively.
So first of all, it's extremely strange, given how conspicuous and egregious and concentrated his behavior was, that he somehow was able to avoid the obstruction of official proceeding charge.
Number one.
Number two, there are even more serious charges they could have given him.
In fact, in the series of videos that we put out, there's one specific exchange he had with another guy.
He said, when we go in, leave this here.
We don't want to get shot.
So when we go in, leave this here.
He's referring to that individual's bear spray.
That individual ends up going into the Capitol, committing violence, and doing a whole bunch of other things.
And this is a bizarre case because this guy, who is super egregious, has to this day not fully been charged.
His case hasn't even gone to a district judge yet.
He's a badass guy that helps disabled children and is literally like a super good person.
No criminal issues in his life other than protesting.
He is with me saying don't go in.
They charge him and in the charging documents say Owen's lying.
He doesn't work for Infowars.
That's in the charging documents, the sentencing documents.
The judge says, I'm putting you in these months in federal prison because you just questioned the election again and gave three examples of why he did it.
But there was no evidence because he broke the agreement that he signed, and then he pled guilty and said, I broke the agreement that I signed and agreed to the sentence that the sentencing guy.
You can skirt by on providing any hard evidence for literally a single claim that you've made today.
There hasn't been any evidence provided to support any of the claims made today.
And you are hand-brushing away every single other claim that's made literally talked about under oath by people that were loyal to Trump, by people that Trump trusted over and over and over again.
And at the end of the day, what could you possibly be advocating for besides an insurrection?
I didn't finish the thing.
I think it's because when I talk, you get really afraid.
I think he could and should have gotten far more serious charges.
The first example is the easiest and most readily available obstruction of official proceeding, which is basically the standard charge for people who've done far less egregious things than Absolute.
That's not an ironclad law pertaining to the application of that charge.
Secondly, there's a far more serious conspiracy charge that the government had available to them if we use the standards that they've applied in similar January 6th cases.
But have you looked at the Telegram messages where they're basically instructing people where to go and where they're at and that saying, hey, we stormed the Capitol.
Yeah, the whole thing, like listening to them, honestly, it's like listening.
I don't mean to be insulting.
I'm just saying this.
You know, it's what it sounds like.
Like seventh graders who learn civics class and have this understanding of how the U.S. government works.
Like, oh, the FBI investigate and they discover crimes and then they go to the courts and the courts are very honest and the courts are apolitical and the courts make rulings.
And everything that has happened in January 6th, and you can even look at the people they picked and choose who to expand the law, the people who ended up getting prosecuted on felony counts, even though they were nonviolent, had these incredibly novel interpretations of law that were used against them to turn nonviolent demonstration and nonviolent political protest into felony by taking this post-Enron law and giving it a stretched meaning that it never had before.
And the reason so many of them plead guilty is because they know that if they go into court, they're going to have rulings against them because a lot of these judges, especially in Washington, are not only Democratic Party judges, but the entire system is furious to watch people go and put their feet up on Nancy Pelosi's death.
So the entire system decided that this has to be punished regardless of what the law provides.
You had the FBI with their hooks inside all of these groups.
But I do understand that if you believe in this story of American propaganda, that the FBI is these upstanding law enforcement people and they don't do that.
And then the courts go and make rulings, then you're going to end up with this image of what the three of them have, which is this idea that this was one of the worst attacks in American history.
The courts have ruled everything the government did in this case is consistent with their long-standing view before January 6th that these groups are criminal groups.
They need to be criminalized.
Trump's movement is a threat to the United States.
And the entire part of January 6th was designed to define them as an insurrectionary movement so that they could criminalize them, which is exactly what they're doing.
Usually, what happens in the United States with nonviolent protesters or even with violent protesters is they don't get charged with anything.
A tiny percentage of people who use violence throughout all of the Black Lives Matter protests ended up in jail because the ideology in which they were protesting was one that was considered positive and friendly by the institutions of authority.
They were on the side of Black Lives Matter.
They didn't prosecute that.
The Trump movement and the right-wing extremists, as the government calls them, are considered enemies of the state.
And that was why the entire law enforcement mechanisms were distorted.
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If you want to actually make these-Let me just back up Glenn briefly and I'll shut up.
And they're, you know, it's consistent with what we're talking about, this amplification of January 6th into this false domestic terrorist act.
And, you know, the stakes.
What are the stakes involved?
The reason it's being amplified in this fashion is to justify the further weaponization of the national security apparatus against Trump supporters and to suppress the energies associated with Trump's movement.
Therefore, you have these crazy sentencings.
I think they're all crazy.
Even those top sentences for the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, 20 years, 18 years, it's simply insane when you think about, you know, again, all of it has to be comparative.
There are people guilty of murder who get less prison time.
And the self-described, self-professed posture of the DOJ in the immediate aftermath of January 6th is one of shock and awe, which ominously but kind of unwittingly, accurately recalls the Iraq war and the war on terror.
This is not an accident.
It's very fitting that the Department of Homeland Security is the tip of the spear when it comes to this repurposing of the national security apparatus.
It was the Department of Homeland Security that said white supremacy is the number one national security threat.
And by white supremacy, they mean Trump.
All of these people have also said January 6th was a white supremacist insurrection.
Hillary Clinton has said that MAGA is a white supremacist slogan.
So that helps to contextualize and clarify what they mean when they say white supremacy is the number one national security threat.
And so basically, these people, even the people who committed illegal acts, are in effect political prisoners because of the political context of these prosecutions, which are vastly overblown and could only make sense within this political context of the weaponization, not only of the national security state, but unfortunately now, also the legal apparatus.
And let's go on the line with Glenn again and then all you guys.
But I just want to say something.
This is important, folks.
In June of 2021, Biden put out a national security memorandum, which you just mentioned, saying right-wing extremism is the number one threat.
Then he defined that as white supremacism and then said, questioning open borders, questioning elections, questioning lockdowns, questioning four shots.
That's in the report.
I've shown it hundreds of times on air.
Literally declaring the people enemy.
Then he gives a speech with this red background with Marines.
I thought I was watching Adolf Hitler.
And then yesterday he gives a speech and saying, they're taking over.
They're a danger.
We're at war all off a riot at the Capitol.
At best, it's a riot and obviously provocateur.
So this is a branding of 80 million voters plus as a political enemy.
This is extremely totalitarian, extremely dangerous.
And I was there.
I know.
You're in a crowd of hundreds of thousands.
Tear gas is coming down.
You can't even see what's happening at the Capitol.
You're saying, don't go in there.
We've got a stage.
I go there.
There's a stage.
No one there.
I mean, we were set up.
And I was set up.
And thank God that I waited 30, 40 minutes.
I didn't know what to do.
I was like, this is weird.
How do I lead a crowd that's already left?
I was there.
And so all I'm saying is this is not the basis to indict populist Americans and say they're terrorists.
And if the U.S. government spent the equivalent of $10 trillion, they spent a trillion in Afghanistan of real current numbers.
But the estimates now are $10 trillion in current dollars in Vietnam.
And the Vietnamese wouldn't give up.
So Swallowswell says, we'll use F-16s.
We'll just kill Americans.
We'll take your guns.
F-16s don't take guns, folks.
I don't want a civil war.
I don't want violence.
But the entire deep state couldn't defeat the Vietnamese.
And now they want a war with the American people while they have one with Russia and while they have one with China.
This is madness.
It needs to stop.
I don't want a war with Democrats.
I don't want civil war.
I don't have some dream of this, but this is the election strategy of Joe Biden is civil war.
Yeah, I just, I think this is really the nub of everything.
Like, I really do think that the three of them actually believe what they're saying about like actually realizing this.
And the reason they believe it is because they don't know the history of the war on terror.
They don't know the history of the Cold War.
They don't know what the CIA and the FBI and the U.S. security state have been constructed to do and the role that they played in our domestic politics.
Every single time that there's some new crisis, the CIA, the FBI, the permanent power faction in Washington, and it's not like some crazy conspiracy theory.
Dwight Eisenhower warned a bit on his way out of the presidency in 1961 when he called it the military industrial complex because he had seen how it was growing beyond all democratic accountability.
Every time what they need to do is convince somebody to be scared of something, to be scared of communism, to be scared of terrorism, to be scared of domestic terrorism.
And they convince people that some minor event, relatively speaking, in the history of the threats to our country, like the 9-11 attack, which is a terrible thing, but they exaggerated wildly the threat of foreign terrorism to basically institute the Patriot Act and warrantless eavesdropping and all the things that turned our country more.
They're authoritarian.
They were announcing that before 9-11.
They used 9-11 to do it.
They were announcing before January 6th that they wanted to turn right-wing extremists into domestic terrorists.
And they used January 6th and this extremely inflated narrative about what it was.
It was a riot of out-of-control people, a few hundred of them, that they turned into an insurrection that they're now weaponizing the just system.
And they're creating a precedent.
I hope you guys understand this.
They're now taking a nonviolent protest.
Remember, most of the people charged in January 6th are charged with nonviolent protests.
And they've made it now so that they can charge those people with felonies and put them in prison for years.
That was the Q shaman.
Four years in prison for a nonviolent protest.
That's the precedent that you're endorsing with this narrative.
I think that if we want to talk about knowing history and understanding history and contextualizing history, I think if we want to run with that argument, then we need to do real journalist work while we do it.
It's not enough to say the FBI or the CIA has done this 10, 20 years ago and then blindly assert it every single time it happens to fit whatever political narrative you want to tell.
If you want to tell a story, the person telling the story needs to find evidence to support it.
Sure, if you want to say the FBI or the CIA or any other domestic agency has been involved in spying on Americans and doing bad things, that's fine.
We all know that it's happened.
That doesn't mean that you don't have to find evidence in the future of it happening.
And so far, there is no evidence of it happening on January 6th.
As many times you want to throw around the follow politics before 2016 or whatever, well, we're in 2024 right now.
Find some information from today or find some information from January 6th to today.
It's not enough to just keep appealing to the past to pretend like that's going to do your homework for you and that somehow you can make all of these accusations without having any real evidence.
As far as this claim of like there are novel uses of charges or people don't do charges like this, as was said over here, like most of the sentences have been within sentencing guidelines.
A lot of these have been done with a Trump-appointed judge.
The idea that these charges are novel, that people don't face prosecution like this, there's some element of truth to that, but this is also a novel situation.
We have never had a president in the United States try to resist the peaceful transfer of power like this.
This has just never happened before.
And you can keep screaming about Hillary Clinton.
You can keep screaming about BLM all you want and talk about the blown-up fire stations in the congressional halls.
The reality is that none of those situations were like this one.
If you want to keep appealing to those and saying those people should have been charged with crimes, we agree they should have been charged with crimes.
But to even do the whataboutism, you have to already concede that you are wrong on all of the merits about the current people you're talking about.
Every single time we talk about Donald Trump and you go, well, what about when Hillary Clinton or Biden did it?
Oh, okay, then you admit that Trump did?
Because if you want to admit that Trump is guilty of every single thing that we've been accusing him of, which is what you're doing when you go, what about the other guy?
Because it seems like you're just trying to appeal to hypocrisy at that point rather than the fact of the matter, then do that.
Say, yeah, Trump did try to cite an insurrection.
Yeah, Trump did fail.
Yeah, it was a riot.
I don't know why you keep saying most of the peaceful.
No, don't ask me.
Let me finish my one point one time without being interrupted by you.
I came running back because you heard me talk.
You had to interrupt me.
I came running back at you.
I was so excited for it.
Okay.
I don't understand this rhetoric of mostly peaceful riot.
Yeah, it was mostly peaceful.
A lot of riots that have riot aspects don't have a lot of peaceful people there.
And a 10,000 riot.
It's not always 10,000 people riding.
It might just be 100 people riding or 1,000 people riding.
But the reality was, there was one event on January 6th at the Capitol building.
Well, they had three trials in Michigan, and one of them, it was a mistrial, and they let most of them off, another, and they finally got a few convicted.
It came out in court that the feds went and found a bunch of basically homeless potheads.
And just like Glenn was saying, the New York Times article, they were more accurate, 97% of Islamic plots were hatched by the FBI, including the First World Trade Center bombing.
And they admit all that.
And I've interviewed the people involved, Ahmad Salam, all of them, that knew they were into the bombing.
He came and said, why have I cooked a real bomb?
And they let it go forward.
With Whitmer, the same team involved in January 6th from the FBI went and set these people up.
And that came out in the mainstream news.
So we know they, this isn't, you guys were saying, we don't want to go back to 10 years ago.
You know, I've sat there for six, seven minutes, you know, out there smoking a cigarette while you're just going on and on and acting like you're being censored.
You're like, there's no example recently of them doing something corrupt or bad.
The second one had to recuse himself because he was moonlighting in his private security firm and leaking details of investigations in which he was involved.
But in every single, it wasn't just that there were informants.
Every active step instrumental to this so-called plot was undertaken by one of the informants or one of the agents.
One of the informants, as I mentioned, him, Steve Robeson, in the context of does the government ever burn its own informants almost all the time.
First, the idea, again, that for the FBI to be infiltrating these groups is a conspiracy theory.
Again, it requires an understanding of the FBI that's childlike.
And what Destiny was saying before is, oh, we're just using what they've done in the past and therefore concluding they must be doing that in the future.
He just ignored all the evidence we've been presenting for the last two hours, including the fact that the FBI, by their own admission, had informants in all three of the leading groups that organized January 6th and were talking to informants on the ground at the Capitol on that.
As far as the January 6th defendants are concerned, it is true that they're getting sentences similar to what people get when they're charged with felonies.
The point is that it is insane that nonviolent protesters are being charged with felonies in the United States.
That is what never happens.
And pointing to Black Lives Matter is not to say, oh, yeah, that's what about isn't.
So we're admitting that this was an insurrection and that is too.
The point is that what the government is doing, if you look at the disparate treatment between the two, is picking and choosing which movement they like ideologically and politically and which they don't and punishing much more severely the one that they don't, which is what January 6th is about.
In interpretation of the law, they created an interpretation of the law that was enacted after Enron that was designed to criminalize accountants from obstructing fraud.
To Glenn's point, keep in mind that when you're saying that BLM wasn't treated the same because of the government and how they went, you're not just alleging the federal government at that point.
You're alleging every single state government and city municipality that's in charge of arresting people are all on the same page.
In terms of unfairness, wait, the feds are in charge of prosecuting everybody in every state.
When Black Lives Matter happened, every single blue state mayor and every single blue state governor weighed in on the side of the writers because they were petrified of being demonized as being racist that they didn't support everything the Black Lives Matter movement did.
So yes, the Black Lives Matter movement had corporations sponsoring them.
They had Kamala Harris urging and raising money for people to get out of prison who were imprisoned and prosecuted for having engaged in violence as part of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The entire establishment was on the side of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The entire establishment hated the January 6th defendants.
That's the reality of our government that you don't understand.
The reality of our government that you don't understand.
No, no, the reality of our government that you don't understand is that police orders don't come down from the federal government or even from the governors.
Policing is done at the municipal level.
The idea that governors are dictating the BLM rights are not all federally prosecuted.
These are state crimes that are happening within state.
They're getting a bunch of money.
The idea that the governors themselves, the governors are dictating, the governors themselves are dwindling the policing policies to all of these different departments.
Where's the evidence of any of that?
When is the one message, one email, one memorandum, one thing saying, don't arrest protesters, don't convict them.
We're forgetting one thing, and that is that you can commit a crime.
You can commit a felony, and it doesn't have to be violent.
There's plenty of felonies on the books that aren't violent, including breaking into a federal building, breaking through police lines, and going into that federal building and going into the Senate chamber as Congress people are trying to certify an election.
Not inflation, not war with Russia, not open borders.
I mean, give me a break, man.
We had a million plus people there.
unidentified
A few people got in fights with the cops, and you act like it's the biggest thing since it's a pretty big deal when a president tries to overturn a legitimate election.
My dream is that Ed and Brian and Destiny have to actually live through a real coup so that they can then come back to the set and be like, oh my God, you know what?
I'm so sorry for saying that what happened in the Capitol for three hours against the most militarized and powerful government to ever exist in human history got anywhere near a coup or an insurrection.
Because usually it's helicopters taking over media, killing the opposition, troops, and then you're claiming women with American flags and being waved in by police as a coup.
So define to me, all of you first, and then Glenn, and then the professor, what is a coup?
Since this was the most devastating evil coup ever.
No, Destiny is now the incredible giant of journalism and the constitutional scholar.
I used to be, as Destiny said.
But anyway, a coup is generally when people in power or people who are trying to get into power marshal the force of the armed factions of that country and use it to eliminate the legal process and take over.
So, for example, if Trump had called in the military on his side on January 6th, or he had gotten the military to block people from trying to remove him from office on January 20th, that is always what we say is a coup.
Nothing that looks like what happened on January 6th.
The other thing I just want to correct, Destiny seems to have this like debate-me sort of thing point that he thinks he keeps making that's so smart, which is when you're talking about the same thing.
Has done this little debate tactic like eight times.
I've listened to it for two hours.
So if you say this person did this and it's wrong, and then someone else says, What about this person, this politician you love?
He did the same thing.
Destiny says, Oh, you're admitting that both of them did something wrong.
No, one of the reasons why you say things like the Black Lives Matter protest was never considered an insurrection is not to say that January 6th was also an insurrection and therefore you should treat the Black Lives Matter one like an insurrection.
The point is to say the Black Lives Matter wasn't treated like an insurrection because people like Ed and Destiny and Brian love the Black Lives Matter movement because it's unaligned with their ideology.
These are liberals who hate the Trump movement politically and therefore want to criminalize it.
unidentified
But pointing to other examples, I'm against all rioting, just to be clear.
If somebody says, I think that Trump engaged in a coup, one of the ways that you show that it's not a coup is by saying that the things that you like that are done that are far more insurrectionary are things you won't call an insurrection because those things done to advance.
These are from ZeroHedge.com from some of the premium users of the website have sent in some of the questions.
This one's actually a question for what they call the blue team, which right now is going to be the three of you guys, Ed, Brian, and Stephen.
The question is: The New York Times acknowledged that they were FBI informants in the Capitol on January 6th, and then they give a link to the New York Times article.
Given the agency's history of entrapment, is it a stretch that some agents may have provoked the riot?
And then there's a follow-up question.
Why was law enforcement so ill-prepared for the insurrection in quotes despite the presence of informants?
So the first question, first part of the question is: is it a stretch that some agents may have provoked the riot?
You know, the follow-up part of this question, why was Law, how do you guys think law enforcement was so ill-prepared for the insurrection, again in quotes, despite the presence of informants?
This is from Space Worm, just so you know, Space Worm from Zero Hedge.
I think the ill-preparedness came because Trump's deployment of the National Guard in the past, especially in D.C., had caused a lot of people to be uncomfortable with National Guard being present in the Capitol when the certification of what was happening.
So as they were having conversations prior to establishing security, I think they took a lot of extraordinary bureaucratic measures to make it so that I think that day, if the National Guard was going to be deployed, it either had to be, I think, Miller or Walker.
I think one of those two had to be direct authorization.
So I said a larger context, which is a larger five-hour, eight-hour deposition, right?
So I just told the truth.
I said a larger context.
I'm explaining that the public's been lied to so much, there's a major loss in confidence where people then don't believe anything they're told, and that's dangerous.
Madeline Albright told Leslie Stoll of 60 Minutes, I ordered 500,000 children killed because I thought it was a good thing to do.
I'd do it again.
She's a great person.
I question Jesse Smollett.
I question WDs in Iraq.
I question everything.
And I'm proud of everything I've done.
And all that stuff is PR firm garbage.
When I talk about the general public, because the media lies about almost everything, loses trust in anything, that creates a general form of psychosis and is very dangerous.
I talk about that every day on my show.
And Joe Rogan just last week said, you know, Alex Jones isn't totally right, but he means to be right.
He's more informative than CNN.
They lie on purpose.
And the public has lost trust in the system.
That's dangerous.
What do you do?
So that was the full discussion.
Let me give you another example.
They say in court, Jones in a custody battle said, I'm an actor.
Everything I say is fake.
I've offered a $1 million reward for that.
I didn't say that.
They wanted to put, like now, a 15-year-old video.
Back then it was like a nine-year-old video of me as the joker saying all these horrible things.
Take drugs, kids.
You'll die.
It's great.
So kids wouldn't take drugs.
It's reverse psychology.
And hold on, hold on.
They wanted to introduce that in court.
And my lawyer said, when Jack Nicholson plays the Joker, he's not really the Joker.
And when Alex Jones is in Waking Life or Scanner Darkly or any of this stuff, when he's being an actor, it's not what he really means.
Well, first of all, I want to say that we are out of time here because it's been three hours, but I did just want to say I do think that attack on Alex is a bullshit attack.
We are here because we want to talk about January 6th.
We want to talk about whether and to try and make it about Alex when there are six people here presenting all kinds of evidence that you're not equipped to deal with, I think it's just a pathetic way to try and end this debate.
And the last thing I want to say is it's really given like a kind of amazingly vivid mindset into the minds of Trump era liberals who have really come to see the U.S. security state and the courts and prosecutors as their political allies in their war that they're waging against people who disagree with them.
And they have this like very romanticized view of what the FBI is, what the DOJ is, how the court systems work, how the federal government works.
And all of this reveals this so well because what's happening here is so manifest, which is that all of these agencies are being abused because the Trump movement is considered the gravest threat to establishment power in this country, which is why the bipartisan establishment is against it.
To try and make this about Alex and Sandy Hook is a really pathetic way to end the debate.
I think you guys have done a good job defending your views.
I think you should leave it at that.
And we definitely have to go because it's been three hours.
His point was just that if you were lying about that or if you had psychosis about that, how do we know that that's not coming about half the show we talked about?
I wanted to answer the user's question about the lack of preparation because it involves a lot more than the question of the National Guard.
For additional context, there's the Norfolk memo coming out of the Norfolk office of the FBI, extensively cataloging threats to the Capitol, including maps of tunnels, all kinds of indications that there was going to be a major event at the Capitol on that day.
There was extensive government infiltration of every single militia group imputed to January 6th.
We know that Enrique Tario had an extensive conversation with the head of Metro PD Intel.
And that's just one example.
We know the VP of the Oath Keepers was an FBI informant.
We know there are at least eight other informants in the Proud Boys, including informants who are texting their handlers simultaneously as they were in the Capitol and as the events unfolded.
We know of the oathkeeper Jeremy Brown, who has been attacked and persecuted by the government.
Why?
Because when he was approached by JTTF agents in December of 2020 to recruit him as an informant, he recorded the exchange and the encounter and put it out there on the internet.
The JTTF agents said, there's something going to happen in January.
We want you to be an informant for us.
We know that there were several influencers, including Milo, who parlored or whatever the tweet version is for Parler, put out a message on January 5th saying, I was just approached by federal agents.
Whatever they have planned on the 6th is huge.
Don't go there.
That's just a number of examples.
Oh, yeah.
And there was Donnell Harvin.
He was the head of the Homeland Security Office for the DC Fusion Center.
His predictions were remarkably specific and accurate.
His office came up with the idea that we need to have body bags.
We need to focus on the Capitol at one o'clock.
Specifically, we need to be concerned with explosives planted on side streets that could serve a diversionary effect, therefore allowing for an attack on the Capitol.
These are just some of the highlights of examples of the government being in a position to know in advance what was going on.
And it wasn't just that there was an ordinary level of security at the Capitol, which is inconceivable when you think of the fact that there was a major proceeding there, that Trump was there giving a speech.
Ordinarily, there would be threat assessments, which there weren't.
It's not just that there was an ordinary level of security.
There is a uniquely absent security on that day, uniquely poor security on a day with a major certification proceeding on a day in which President Trump was there to give a major speech on a very controversial question directly pertinent to that proceeding.
As you can imagine, as you can imagine, the judicial process is very aggressive in pushing against any types of entrapment defenses.
And many defense lawyers, in some cases, reasonably so, want to dissuade their clients from entrapment-type defenses because their goal is not to uncover the truth about entrapment.
Their goal is to do the best for their clients in those specific cases.
There are some, but not as many as you would think, but not because this isn't relevant to the truth, but because if you're a lawyer, even a good faith lawyer, you are required to give advice to your client that's not, oh, what's most likely to uncover the full truth about the broad event of January 6th, but what's most likely to keep my client out of jail or to minimize the time the government is.
I would think that evidence that a federal agent led you to commit a crime or acted in a way that made you want to commit a crime would be pretty exculpatory evidence right there.
And like I said, there are people who are pursuing that.
There is a significant backlash to that within the judicial system.
So even given how much it's rigged now, it's additionally rigged when it comes to those specific types of defenses because they're so subversive to the larger narrative that the government's trying to promote.
It's convenient for the regime not to have a legitimate and disinterested fact-finding commission to truly get to the bottom of the real questions that matter in relation to January 6th.
I would say for there to be a legitimate committee, it would have to include people who are genuinely interested in pursuing not only the questions that Benny Thompson and the hyper-partisan Democrats wanted to find out, but people who are sympathetic to the other side who would be willing to pursue the questions that I've raised and have been raised that were not addressed at all in the Republicans.
But the Republicans.
Because all they were interested in was demonizing Trump and setting up a criminal proceeding for Trump.
They weren't interested in getting to the bottom of the questions, why was there uniquely poor security?
What was going on with the level of federal infiltration?
These questions are all asked as part of the 847-page report.
I invite you to read it at some point.
The reality is that McCarthy at any point could have put five Republicans that he chose on that committee.
But because Nancy Pelosi said no to two of them, I think Banks and Jordan, that were actively being investigated or would have been the subjects of the J6 committee, he said no to anything.
And now we get to say it was all a sham, even though the majority of the people interviewed were Republicans, even though, as was stated earlier, every single person.
If every single person in government, if every Republican, if every Democrat, if every judge, if every person in the United States that is in Trump's peripheral ends up hating Trump or not wanting to work with Trump, at what point do you say at what point you are going to be?
At what point can we not say maybe Trump was actually genuinely a horrible person, or maybe Trump actually genuinely tried to circumvent legal processes in order to coup the government, or at least whatever you would call him asking Pence to unilaterally elected.
This is a question from Fred C. And the question is, will Destiny address, quote, is white supremacy the biggest domestic threat faced by the United States?
And I open it up to the panel after you give an answer there, Stephen.
No, that's an executive order in June of 2021 put out by the negative policy choices or what are the bad things that are happening because of that declaration.
We have to be clear about what's really happening.
The standard Democrat voter, these people don't care about the so-called insurrection.
That's not Biden's audience.
Biden's audience is to speak in support of this phony legal theory that's being served as a pretext to remove him from the ballots and therefore in the defense of Democrats.
He's trying to rally the deep state saying Trump's going to persecute us and arrest us if we don't stop him because they've committed all these crimes.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security had already declared that the greatest threat to the U.S. homeland was not ISIS or al-Qaeda, but instead domestic extremists, far-right extremists, to be exact.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security had already declared that the greatest threat to the U.S. homeland was not ISIS or Al-Qaeda, but instead domestic extremists, far-right extremists, to be exact.
unidentified
So let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.
I want to thank you all.
God bless you and God bless America.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the second Zero Hedge Debate.
It is an honor and a privilege to be asked to moderate this debate.
I'm Ian Crossland.
I'm going to be moderating tonight.
And the debate tonight is going to be about January 6th, 2021.
Some things happened on that day, and we're going to be talking about them from start to finish as best as possible.
We have an incredible panel of human beings that I'm going to be introducing shortly.
But before I do, I want to talk a little bit about Zero Hedge, who's putting on the debate.
Zero Hedge was a company founded in 2009.
It's a libertarian, fiercely independent and counterculture news organization.
They are also, they have, on their website, they have a premium service that I want to talk about before we get started.
You can go to zerohedge.com and sign up for the premium service, bypassing the advertisements to get exclusive financial, economic, and geopolitical knowledge and data.
It's highly articulate information.
It's a great, really great organization.
And it also gives you access to the secret Twitter feed or the X feed, formerly known as Twitter.
What's up, Elon, in case you're listening, with market-moving financial advice, real-time updates.
It's a great service.
So you can go to ZeroHedge.com, sign up for the premium service and get started there.
And from there, we're going to jump into it.
I want to introduce our panel of incredible people, as I said earlier.
And I'm going to start from the end and give you guys a chance to introduce yourselves.
A little logistical problems intervened, and I wish I could be, but I'm really looking forward to participating.
And I just want to echo Alex.
I think what Zero Hedge is doing is so important, organizing these kind of substantive structured debates among people who obviously disagree pretty strongly on things and yet nonetheless can have what I hope will be a civil and spirited debate, what I expect it will be.
So I'm really looking forward to it and I appreciate being asked.
Yes, that is my job is to make sure that it maintains civility, structure, organization, and that we don't talk over each other, that we end up listening to each other.
The real value of humanity, one of the most powerful tools we have is communication.
So I think tonight's going to be an exemplary example of that.
Let's go.
Let's go for this.
The first question I got for you guys, and this is really for the entire panel.
And anyone that wants to start it off, maybe we can start with you, Edson, just because you're on the end and we can move around is January 6th, 2021.
Was it an insurrection?
And before you answer, before you answer, I want to read this.
This is actually what the, it's called 18 U.S. Code 2383, Rebellion or Insurrection.
Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years or both and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
It technically doesn't define insurrection.
It's the code talking about what I guess what an insurrection is.
Of course, they use the word insurrection in the actual code itself.
And I base that on the fact that 20 court decisions called it an insurrection.
And the fact that there was a bill passed in the Senate that called them a mob of insurrectionists.
I think the bill passed, or it was in the House of Representatives, 406 to 21.
That was a statute to award the police officers medals.
And it referred to these individuals as insurrectionists.
So, I mean, I think the term can be subjective.
I think, you know, people can say nobody was charged with violating section 2383 of Title 18, which is insurrection and rebellion statute.
And nobody was, right?
But I don't think that defines whether the event was an insurrection.
When I say insurrection, I don't mean everybody there was partaking in insurrection.
There were people who were peaceful, people who, the people who walked into the Capitol and did nothing, I don't think that they were insurrectionists.
I think they violated the law, but I don't think they were partaking in insurrection.
I do think the Proud Boys were partaking in insurrection.
I think you could say Donald Trump incited the insurrection.
I would say the plot from start to finish is quite obviously an insurrection.
The only way to get around that is to either justify an insurrection, which is what most conservatives do.
They don't realize it, or to deny that an insurrection could ever happen.
Or if you're not aware of all the facts of what happened, I think that Donald Trump and his cronies had a very coherent plan that they tried to enact from start to finish, starting with false claims of voter fraud leading to false slates of electors that filed themselves as state electors under perjury, which is what they did, up to the violence that happened on the day of the, on the day of the certification of the vote, where Donald Trump and his friends continued to try to delay the peaceful transfer of power by contravening the certification of the Electoral College vote.
And I want to make sure that we don't force this into like what they want to call a debate, debate where you got to be wait to be called on or anything.
So if any of you guys, Glenn, you as well, man, if any of you guys want to jump in.
I want Glenn to go, but I just want to say something here.
I was there and I was investigated and subpoenaed by the Justice Department in at least five criminal investigations and I was forced to testify in front of the Jan 6 committee, which they've now been destroying their records because the records show the opposite of what they said.
Trump and all of us had a stage rented by the Supreme Court.
He was supposed to have another rally there.
We showed up.
Before Trump ever finished his speech, people were getting tear gassed and hit by bullets.
And there were a bunch of provocateurs leading an attack against the police and they broke through.
And then this million plus people then got blamed as insurrectionists.
And Biden gave a big speech yesterday saying they're all terrorists.
So by that extension, Kamala Harris as the VP candidate was bailing people out of jail that burned down police stations and firebombed federal buildings.
And the idea of Biden's speech yesterday, making his whole campaign about January 6th, saying political violence is never good.
The Democrats are the ones that call for political violence.
So I was there with a bullhorn, but I can only reach 100 yards out when the tear gas was hitting me saying, don't go in, don't fight the police.
This is a setup.
And we have hundreds of videos.
And so regardless of what the left tries to do, they're all out there of people taking off their antivased and putting on the Trump garb and the police fake arresting people attacking them and then high-fiving them.
They would grab them and arrest them and then drag them in and then high-fi them, you know, take the handcuffs off and high-fi them.
Those videos, people are going to take everything I say, they're going to put it on X and show what I said.
That's where we dominate.
And so what I'm getting at here, let me just, let me tell you this.
What I'm getting at here is they now admit hundreds of federal officers were there.
So when Trump started his speech, this whole thing began with Ray Epps saying go into the Capitol.
He told the Jan 6 committee, yeah, it's true, it's in his text messages.
He told family, I orchestrated it.
So under pressure, they finally indicted him, but only recommends six months.
So a few hundred people got manipulated into fighting the police.
They were led and driven by provocateurs and other groups.
They were others, then they opened the doors and the police wave them in in hundreds of videos.
They walk through the velvet ropes and then they indict over a thousand people that just walked through velvet ropes.
And then now we're told in the National Security Directive of President Biden, the number one threat is the American people.
And he had a declaration of war yesterday against all Trump supporters that says to protect democracy, we're not going to let you vote for Trump.
So as Stalin said, I care not who casts the votes.
I care who counts them.
Well, Biden doesn't care who casts the votes.
He cares who's allowed on the ballot.
So we've already won.
No one's buying this.
And when this happened three years ago, the Wall Street Journal had a print of retraction, but they said I was there as a coward telling people to attack.
Well, no, they wouldn't let me put the video on Twitter before I was saying don't go in.
But the truth is it's coming out.
And so that's the bottom line here.
And this attempt by Biden to cast the American people as the enemy in all these movies about martial law and civil war and race war.
That's their only hope because the corrupt, evil Democratic Party, and its evil twin, the Republicans, they've lost power and populism is rising.
Quite frankly, this was not an insurrection.
It was an insurrection.
There would have been guns.
And it's in the Declaration of Independence that it's our right and duty to get rid of a government that's destructive of what the people want.
But I'm not calling for violence.
We're winning this politically, but we're being cast as about to be violent in the next 10 months because all these indictments and all these attacks to not let Americans vote for who they want aren't working and are backfiring.
And all the big Democrat lawyers now admit it.
Axel Rod admits it.
Carville admits it.
They all admit this attempt, like we're in Venezuela or something, to take Trump off the ballot when he's never been convicted of insurrection.
This is a military tribunal, U.S. code, from the Civil War.
If a military tribunal found you were guilty of being involved in insurrection, that meant after the war ended, can I ask you a question for us?
Was that because there were rebellions during Reconstruction at the end of the Civil War?
And they were saying if you lead an uprising against the Northern occupation of the South, you're precluded from running from office because they were worried about Southerners getting office again like Jefferson.
No, so no, I do not support the Civil War or slavery, and I'm not a, quote, Confederate.
Because nobody there was charged with violating nobody that nobody there was charged with violating section 2383, the insurrection and rebellion statute.
Yeah, I actually think what Destiny and what Ed are saying are very important.
First of all, I was going to say that I think one of the problems with how these things are debated is that a lot of people these days have very binary prisms for understanding things.
God, it comes from YouTube debate where you have to declare yourself on one side or the other.
So Destiny said, oh, everybody either hates this insurrection, thinks it's an insurrection, or they deny it happens, or they think it's good.
And there's so much middle ground, namely that for me, this was a political protest that spilled over into a riot where a small minority of the people engaged in violence.
I don't think we want to urge that to happen.
We don't want to defend that.
I consider that lamentable.
But the fact that it's laughable to call this an insurrection is actually demonstrated by the examples that they're using.
This was a three-hour riot that was extremely easily subdued.
It doesn't remotely compare to any prior insurrections, let alone to the Civil War.
The only people who were killed on January 6th were four people, all four of whom were Trump supporters, two of whom dropped dead of a heart attack and one from a speed overdose because these were not exactly a well-trained militia.
And when Jack Smith went to charge Donald Trump with multiple crimes, he had a lot of options to charge him with, and he charged him with a lot of crimes, including very dubious ones.
He did not charge him with inciting an insurrection for reasons that I think we ought to ask ourselves why.
But the fact that this is such a minor event in history is demonstrated by the fact that the media who needed this to be a major event immediately started lying about what happened, saying that Brian Sicknick was murdered when he had his head bashed in through a fight with a fire extinguisher, only to learn that actually he called his mother that night.
He was fine.
He died the next day of what the coroner said were natural causes, because the media knew that if you can't say that even one person supposedly perpetrating the insurrection killed anybody, pulled out a gun, let alone discharge the weapon, all of which is true.
It's a joke to call this an insurrection.
At best, it's a riot.
And that's the reason why Trump hasn't been charged with an insurrection.
The only time he ever commented on January 6th about whether he thought there should be violence or not was when he said the following.
Said, I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.
He urged them to be peaceful in how they went there.
To the extent there was violence, I think you can make the argument that the FBI informants that even the New York Times admits were there were the ones that urged it.
But even if the people who were there were the ones responsible, at best, this is a riot.
You could so easily make the case that the 2020 riots were as a far greater insurrectionary threat than anything that happened on January 6th.
