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.
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 Crosslin.
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 uh news organization.
They are also uh 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 uh sign up for the premium service, bypassing the advertisements to get uh exclusive financial, economic, and geopolitical knowledge and data.
It's uh highly articulate information.
It's a great, really great organization.
And it also gives you access to the secret Twitter fee or the X feed, formerly known as Twitter.
What's up, Elon, in case you're listening, uh, with with uh 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 uh from there, we're gonna we're gonna jump into it.
I want to introduce our panel of incredible people.
As I said earlier, and I'm gonna 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 uh that we don't talk over each other, that we end up listening to each other.
Uh the real value of humanity, one of the most powerful tools we have is communication.
So I think tonight's gonna be an exemplary um example of that.
Let's let's go, 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's 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 um 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 in prison, 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.
Um 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 called them a mob of insurrectionists.
I think the bill passed or he was in the House of Representatives 406 to 21.
Uh 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 twenty-three eighty-three of Title 18, which is insurrection and the 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 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 that Proud Boys were partaking in insurrection.
I think you could say Donald Trump incited the insurrection.
Uh 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 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 um on the day of the certification of the vote, where Donald Trump and his friends continue to try to delay the peaceful transfer of power by contravening the certification of the electoral college vote.
And what I I want to make sure that we don't force this into like what they want to call a debate debate where you gotta be wait to called on or be called on or anything.
Yeah, the two of them just went, uh 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 Jam 6 committee, which they've now been destroying their records because the record showed 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 Trumper 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 insurrectionist, and Biden gave a big speech yesterday saying they're all terrorists.
So, but by but by that extension, Kamala Harris is as the VP candidate was bailing people out of jail that burned down police stations and firebomb 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.
I could only reach 100 yards out when the tear gas was hitting me, saying, don't go in, don't fight the police.
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 the uh Trump garb and 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 giving fake arresting them?
And so, and so and so when I'm getting at here, let me just lett me let me say 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 recommend six months.
So a few hundred people got manipulated into fighting the police.
That 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 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 and says to protect democracy, we're not gonna 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 and and when this happened three years ago, the 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 where I was saying don't go in.
But the truth is it's coming out.
And and so that's the bottom line here.
And 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 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 insurrection that 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.
Axelrod 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.
No, if you don't need to be a full family, you don't need you don't need to violate that statute in order to be partaking in insurrection because the civil war was an insurrection and nobody got charged with violating that.
Yeah, I actually think what Destiny and what Ed are saying are very important.
Uh 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 interaction insurrection, thinks 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 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 out 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 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 the fire extinguisher, only for 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 the insurrection was not just the three-hour riot that happened at the White House afterwards.
I think that's the least charitable reading for everything that happened.
And that's not if you read any of the charges that either Jack Smith or the Georgia Rico case has alleged against Trump, are saying that in fact, not much of the focus is on the three-hour riot.
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 fate elect 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.
So what happened was that they did a recount and Kennedy ended up winning by I think 150 votes, and they chose the Kennedy electors, they certify the Kennedy electors, and Kennedy ended up winning that state.
What Trump did was Trump tried to get the states to certify 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 6, 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 if we're going to bring it into the discussion, I think there is 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 recourses available to him at the advice of his legal advisors.
If you search hard enough, you're going to 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.
That's for the Supreme Court to decide.
That's for the Supreme Court to the question.
According to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, it said that the United States sanctioned countries that take people off the ballot.
If we do want insurrection, you know it would probably be for things like circumventing the vote, like asking the vice president, for instance, to unilaterally win the election.
Let me 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 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 and the things he did after the election, because there is no argument to make that what happened on January 6 rises to the level of insurrection,
and that's why an extremely proud 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 Carl Rove had interfered in the Ohio vote with the debold machines and cheated to make John Kerry lose and John 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 to 1960, and it there's 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 Justiment 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 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.
I actually want to ask a question that I would love to hear everybody's answer to, but before I do that, just want to say about federal judges.
This year in the last six months, four different federal judges, uh, 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 wanted to ask is, the question that you asked Ian is, 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 was 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 the power of power and turn over the election process to him?
Why didn't he order the armed factions that formed the the law enforcement part of the military in the executive branch that serve under his command to do that as well?
That's what happened to the coup.
That didn't happen here because Trump wasn't trying to perpetrate a coup.
The uh Supreme Court that Trump has his picks on, that's currently 6'3 conservative, they're the ones who are gonna make the final decision on that.
Uh just 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 comes 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 JCA insurrection.
We don't have to invoke every other Democratic leader's name.
Uh no, his name's ding dong ding dong, destinate, whatever it is.
The point is, I was there.
There was a million over a million people, and they said police were attacking, and we got there like shooting tear gas, and then a bunch of feds helped break through with some idiots that got mad at a brawl, and then the cops go, come on in, everybody come on in.
We're saying unprecedented that a president of the United States would do everything with within his power to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to the next president.
As he was saying to 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 out.
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 you know the the legitimacy on the question on the determinations of the courts, which we can see are running away with pretty wild and ridiculous theories.
And then, you know, these, you know, sure, there are random nut jobs who are around uh DC on that day and then 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.
Um, and as I said before, the stuff about Trump and the legal theory behind his, you know, 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, a hundred percent 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.
These people were under oath, Republicans, and they testified.
The people who didn't testify within the Trump circle, there were dozens who Fifth Amendment, Fifth Amendment, Fifth Amendment.
They refused to say a word.
So you're gonna 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 state.
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 you know told the Secret Service this or that, which was a bizarre thing because the Secret Service agents in question weren't the ones who were called upon to testify under the United States.
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 antidote anecdote were not allowed to testify.
So why would they take the second hand report from Hutchinson when they could have interrogated directly the people who would have would have been direct witnesses to that?
And it's what uh Alex was alluding to just a second ago, is one of the biggest sams 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 whatever 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, the the at the time the Republican majority leader to minority leader to be seated on the panel.
And as a result, the Republicans said we're gonna have nothing to do with this.
And the only quote unquote Republicans that were chosen was Nick Liz Cheney, who ended up losing her seat by 36 points, and Adam Kinsinger 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 video tapes that were available was made available to the public except for very deceitfully chosen snippets by uh 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 could 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 gonna 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 6 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?
In 2016, would you have been okay if you're okay if that or why not 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 gonna concede that and allow George Bush to march into power, even though we believe that he actually stole the election.
You're talking about his use of the legal process, of the congressional and judicial process.
He went in process.
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 uh 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.
Glenn, you bring it up and 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.
That's a totally separate question from what the other thing is.
It doesn't matter if it's the first time that it ever happened, even if it's the first time of 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.
Well, here's a good question uh about who like staging a coup and emergent phenomenon, and if a crowd becomes violent and or if someone directs the crowd to become violent, uh this is actually the next question on my list.
Do you guys think that Trump was responsible for this thing?
And before he answered, I want to play a couple of clips.
We have clip one and two.
Uh these are from Trump's speeches on the day.
Uh I think the first clip is uh before the violence kicked off.
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?
What would you call it if Pence would have unilaterally thrown out the vote and Trump would have held onto power Trump was calling for a 10-day Senate investigation.
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 a the event that he's got to be.
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 de-certify the electoral vote.
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, uh, more Democrat seats in the Congress.
So why don't we ask the oath keepers, the three percenters, the the Proud Boys, the ones who were actually indicted and convicted of seditious conspiracy, why they did it?
It's like, wait, wait, Alex, it's like saying, you know, um Alex uh uh Charles Manson presumably thought Helter Skelter was, you know, telling him to kill.
The question is why are the people who are election was stolen, and people if 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 the government.
Well, I think I'm trying to be clear what the case is.
Yeah, what he wanted 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 to protest to protest what the election is.
If you think it's so bad that the courts are kicking him off the ballot, what do you think about Trump doing the birth card for Obama for how many years?
That was the first big political thing he was known for, was challenging whether Obama was even born in the United States in an attempt to get him kicked off the ballot.
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 were 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.
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 a few 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 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 the riots of 2020 constituted an insurrection?
I'm just trying to understand to get a sense for what your definition of insurrection is.
I think I think all three of us here would agree that if there was a congressional session uh or a state legislative session and people were voting on it, and BLM rioters went up and they tried to fire bomb the house to stop the vote.
All of us here agree that obviously, over the entire course of the BLM riots, when Democrats endorsed them storming is true.
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.
Let me say this the declaration of independence, and you would have an insurrection.
I want to fix this peacefully.
But I have a right, not from the Declaration of Independence, it already points out what's there, to abolish a government when the majority of us agree we're done with it.
So, and you got all these movies about civil war and the Democrats are putting out and Obama's putting out.
You guys better hope that doesn't happen.
We're trying to fix this peacefully.
But this is a load of crap.
To claim that Republicans and conservatives are this super viral, evil white supremacist terror group.
They're planning crap.
No one's buying that.
And conservatives and populists and America Firsters see how we're being set up.
I tried to put uh when I tried to have people that I know put clips of me saying don't go in the Capitol, they would take them down, or we show clips of people pulling off their antifigure, putting on Trump gear, and and you know all that.
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.
unidentified
Under oath, did Trump or say tell people two men can have a baby?
You're criticizing me for quoting somebody under oath.
What is your source?
If I have I'm quoting somebody that said something under the penalty of perjury, your source is you just know it that Donald Trump said it to the public.
Oh no, we're we're liable on air here, just like when uh this guy said that oh, you know, you're you know, you're claiming this was done, you don't have proof.
Those clips are all there.
Everyone's gonna pull those up, they're gonna see them.
Yeah, this is this is making me think about media manipulation in general and how sometimes you see things, sometimes you don't, sometimes things are real, sometimes they're not, and it leads me to my next question general for everybody.
And by the way, all six of you are doing phenomenally, especially you, Glenn, killing it from Brazil, my man.
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.
If anyone's well, I mean, uh as as per separ 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 uh in in the algorithm and the censorship of the control.
I mean, 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.
I mean 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 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 his 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.
But the reality is almost every single person he asked all of them.
I don't 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.
I go because there's COVID, we're gonna 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 uh interference on the part of the uh US security state lying and saying that a very incriminating story about Joe Biden was the byproduct of Russian disinformation when it 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 no, no, I don't, I'm not somebody who thinks there'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 uh 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.
Okay, so do you think that Donald Trump asking uh Jeffrey Clark uh 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 done someone 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, otherwise he would replace Rosen with Clark.
I think what Biden did was here's here's what Biden did for the shot, okay?
What happened was Rappensburger 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 Ravensburger, 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 it.
I I subscribe to the sort of rigged versus uh 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 uh that have been deployed in order to rig the election.
I think that's more significant and um than the sort of more hyperbolic claims regarding you know hacking uh the machines and or you know so forth.
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.
I mean, we I have Democrats that during the impeachment for this, they shut it down when finally Trump put a five-minute video on of Democrats saying attack him at grocery stores, attack him at gas stations, attack.
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 reasons.
No, I know the lawyers won't let them put defenses on.
Let me tell you something.
They said Ray Ebbs was a hero and did nothing wrong.
Now they finally indicted him because they know it's a weak spot and their operation only asking for six months.
Let me tell you, we're not playing clips for tip for tat here, but everybody's gonna 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 fighting and saying, I'm a federal agent, I just helped run the attack.
I think with the illegal alien um 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 give more congressional district.
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.
Here's a guy, you saw that that was only part of the clip.
There's much longer clips about Ray Epps.
But here's a guy who's the only guy caught on camera as early as January 5th, repeating repeatedly calling for people to go into the Capitol and prefacing his seemingly rehearsed remarks in each case, saying, I'm probably gonna go to jail for this.
I'm probably gonna go get arrested for this.
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 in 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 in 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 who was wearing camo gear in a Trump hat, and he just happens to have had a leadership position in the Oath Keepers.
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 be, 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 Roding in jail for 50 years, that Adam Kinsinger will defend more aggressively than Epps's own lawyers.
And now almost three years after the government finally says, okay, we're gonna 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.
I set aside three days ago for Ray Ep stuff, and it took me six hours to see it was one of the stupidest conspiracies I've ever seen in my entire life.
So the people who were charged with anything but misdemeanors were people who used violence and people who went into the the uh House chamber that where the joint session was, and the people who the people who um were involved in a seditious conspiracy, it had to be a conspiracy.
A theory that there is 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 conspiratists, the people who use violence, and the people who went into the House chamber are the ones who were charged with felonies.
Tons of people were listening to the speech on uh on cell phones and other things and broadcasting to other people.
Ray Epps was outside the speech.
There's on video, I know, because you posted in your article with him literally telling people, let's go, we're going, we're marching to the before the speech.
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 end.
You can go back and watch it on your the revolver story, is up there.
Um for every single thing that you assert about him, that he's in video whispering into a guy's ear, uh, 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 you know audio capture of, that he and Samsuel uh 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.
Uh 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 if you want to say that why was he removed from the FBI list, I mean, why was he removing the rally list?
Like all of 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 was been archived.
Well, the 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 like, 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.
No, that's nobody nobody here is 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 lateral.
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, but the six-street guy that looks like he's dying of type two 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 US security state before January 6 was saying that they regard the greatest threat to national security not as being ISIS or Al-Qaeda or Hamas or Hezbollah or Chino or any other any other foreign uh threat.
They regard the greatest threat as being right-wing domestic extremists, on whom uh 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 uh orchestrated nine uh January sixth.
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 multiple about everything that was happening.
So I just want to understand what the claim 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, they weren't instigated.
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 uh FBI informants and the Proud Boys who were inside the Capitol texting their handlers as the event unfolded.
About Epps, you know, so a couple of things there.
You don't find it a little bit strange.
Wait, wait, wait.
I'll get to you.
I promise you.
I promise you I'll address that.
But let's just consider the context.
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 fifth, telling people to go into the Capitol, who's there on the sixth, directing people to the Capitol, who's right there pre-positioned at that initial breach phase.
I want to just quickly answer the the question about your question basically if he was an asset, why did they go after his own 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 the FBI when they have undercover people, they'll indict them just as a 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 going he's turning around and he's suing Fox News for defamation, which is going to open up all qu all all sorts of cans of worms with discovery that he's going to have to provide legally in front of a court.
You think that if he was a federal agent, he'd be suing Fox News for deafness.
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 pots 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, it was the New York Times working with the FBI.
That is what the media in this country has been doing.
My God, the man is like a chicken with his head cut off for three days, including the day of the event, running around saying go in the Capitol, he's ramming signs into people.
He was not charged with obstruction of an official proceeding, which would have been a very easy charge and a fairly typical felony charge given to 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 helps disabled children and is literally Like uh 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 where he did it.
No, so Owen, Owen spends months in a federal prison.
But there was no evidence because he 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.
Oh, well, I don't trust statements made under oath.
Oh, well, oh, hasn't the FBI done this in the past?
You can skirt by providing hard evidence.
I gotta be able to do that.
You can skirt by it.
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 touched by 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, like what could you possibly be advocating for besides an insurrection?
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 in Ebbs.
First of all, that's first of all, that's not the case.
And second of all, that's not an ironclad law.
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 but have you looked at the telegram messages where they're basically instructing people where to go and and where they're at, and and that saying, hey, we stormed the Capitol, we took the Capitol.
Yeah, the whole the whole thing, like listening to them, I 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 learned 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 uh 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 meeting 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 gonna 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 like 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 gonna 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.
You understand that 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.
So, Alex, what if what if instead of the Capitol is a White House and there's thousands of people at the White House fence and they pushed through the fence?
Do you think those people deserve more of a a criminal penalty than people that were rioting in I don't know, LA?
If a bunch of Americans, when Trump was in the White House, stormed the White House fence guns with with weapons and make sure that the government was a very good thing.
Um, I think they're completely overblown, 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 um, you know, again, all of it has to be comparative.
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 um recalls the Iraq war and the war on terror.
This is 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 one 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 Glennigan and then all you guys.
But I just want to say something.
This is important, folks.
In 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 supremism, 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 provocatorium.
So this is a branding of the uh of 80 million voters plus as a political enemy.
This is extremely totalitarian, extremely dangerous, and and I was there.
I know you're in a crowd of hundreds of thousands.
You're 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.
Uh, I mean, we were set up, and and I was set up, and thank God that I waited 30, 40 minutes and 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 and and and so all I'm saying is this is not the basis to indict populist Americans and say they're terrorists.
And and and if our the US government spent the equivalent of ten trillion dollars, you know, they spent a trillion in Afghanistan of real current numbers.
But the the estimates now are ten 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 and take your guns.
F sixteens don't take guns, folks.
I don't want a civil war.
I don't want violence.
But the 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 to 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 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 US 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 nineteen sixty-one 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 the threats to our country, like the nine eleven 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 of the things that turned our country more authoritarian.
They were announcing that before nine eleven.
They used nine eleven to do it.
They were announcing before January sixth that they wanted to turn right wing extremists into domestic terrorists.
And they used January sixth and this extremely inflated narrative about it what 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 uh weaponizing the justice system, and they're creating a precedent.
I hope you guys understand this, where they're now taking a nonviolent protest.
Remember, most of the people charged in January 6th are charged with nonviolent protest, and they're made 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.
Biggs, Steward Rose, and uh Enrique Torrio, they were sentenced to some of the harshest sentences in out of all the January Sixers.
Who was a judge?
It was a Trump appointed judge, Timothy Kelly.
Now, if you look at the the worst convictions, the ones that received the largest sentences, 80% of them were actually under the sentencing guidelines.
80%.
These people didn't receive sentences that were any more harsh than anybody else in other crimes.
And these were people sentenced from a Trump judge, a Trump appointed judge.
So you're all saying that that oh the courts are rigged against conservatives or or Trump supporters.
But these are Trump judges.
Many of these were Trump judges that actually charge these not charge these people, but sentence these people.
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 ten, twenty 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 uh 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 6.
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, um, 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 uh 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 and you can keep screaming about BLM all you want and talk about the blown-up fire stations and 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, 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 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 mostly peaceful.
No, don't ask me.
Let me finish my one point watch time without being interrupted by you.
I came running back because you heard me talk, you had to interrupt me.
Okay, so let me let me just add some context here.
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, but they were more accurate, 97% of Islamic plots were hatched by the FBI.
Yeah, including the first World Trade Center bombing, and they admit all that.
And I've interviewed the people involved, Ahmad Salaam, all of them that knew they were going to do the bombing and 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 of 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.
You don't need to go back to uh the original war on Terry.
You don't need to go back to the ample antecedents that that exists going way back into our nation's history.
Just go back to the mission kin case.
And the the parallels to January 6th are striking.
Look, almost half of the so-called plotters turned out to be either informants or federal agents.
One of those federal agents had to recuse himself from the trial because he's beat his wife on the way home from a party party.
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 and all three of the leading groups that organized January 6th and were talking to informants on the ground at the Capitol.
As far as the January 6th uh 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 ism.
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.
So wait, when you're making that accusation, when you're making it in the Capitol building, going into the Capitol building with weapons saying, hang Mike Pence, hang Mike Pence.
No, that's not a violent crime, but are you saying that that's doesn't warrant a felony conviction?
That's absurd.
unidentified
Let me say something calling for the hanging of the black.
They created an interpretation of the law that was enacted after Enron that was designed to criminalize accountants from obstructing fraud at the corporate level.
That's the meaning of it to mean that if it's a nonviolent protest, any nonviolent protest now at the Capitol, you're charged with the glossing in the glossing over the facts.
And also real quick to Glenn's point, keep in mind that when you're saying that BLM wasn't treated the same because of the government 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.
Wait, the feds the feds were in charge of prosecuting everybody in every state?
When Black Lives Matter happened, every single blue state mayor and every single blue state governor waited 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 is 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.
We're forgetting one thing, and and that is that you can commit a crime, you can commit a felony, and it 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.
They're going into the Senate chamber as Congress people are trying to certify an election.
How is that how is that going over your head, Glenn?
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 th 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 so define to me, all of you first, and then and then Glenn and then and then and then uh you know the professor.
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.
So if you say this person is did this and it's wrong, and then someone else says, Well, 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 uh 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 of the rioting, just to be clear.
If somebody says, I think that Trump engaged in a coup, if 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.
This is these are from ZeroHedge.com from the some of the premium users of the website uh have sent in some of the questions.
This one's actually a question for what they call the blue team, which right now is gonna be the three of you guys, Ed Um Brian and Steven.
The question is Um 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.
Uh 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?
Uh 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?
If he whispered into people's ears, if he was leading breach teams, why didn't any of the arrested went in a single why didn't a single person come out?
I'm asking why I'm asking this, though, the next reasonable question.
You know, the follow-up part of this question, why uh why was Law think law enforcement was so ill-prepared for the insurrection, again in quotes, despite the presence of informants.
This is from Spaceworm, just so you know, spaceworm from Zero Hedge.
I think the ill-preparedness came because Trump's deployment of the National Guard in the past, especially in DC, 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 the direct authorization.
I mean, I 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'll do it again.
She's a great person.
I question Jesse Smollett.
I question WBC 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.
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 C and N. 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, Joe's in a custody battle said, I'm an actor.
Everything I say is fake.
I've offered a one million dollar 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 Darkley or any of the 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 it's a good idea.
We're talking about something 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 and I can't.
Yeah, the point we get to the point was just that that if you're if you were lying about that or if you had psychosis about that, how do we know that that's not coming back about the whole half the show we talked about?
No, I talked to if you look at the full clip of the transcript.
I said there's a group, there's a larger lie when we're lied to and lose trust, then out of that, when no one knows what's true, it creates a lot of problems.
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.
You know, 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.
And there was a stand up.
Up to the very, very highest levels.
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 JTDF agents said there's something gonna 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 six is huge.
Don't go there.
That's just a number of examples.
Oh, yeah.
And there was Don L. 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 vote 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 explosive 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 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.
And as you can imagine to be less than 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 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 uh 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 truth is exculpatory.
I I would think that evidence that a federal agent led you to commit a crime or acted in a way that that made you want to commit a crime would be pretty pretty exculpatory evidence right there.
And like I said, there are people who are pursuing that.
There's 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 hyperpartisan Democrats wanted to find out, but people who are sympathetic to 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 United States.
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?
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 being act 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, you're not going to be able to do that.
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.
This is a uh this is a question from uh C. Fred C. And the question is will destiny address quote, is white supremacy the biggest domestic threat faced by the United States?
And I opened it up to the panel after you give an answer there, Stephen.
I I don't know how the FBI judges domestic threat.
It wouldn't surprise me if there's a lot of crossover with like white supremacy groups and then being like organized like a domestic threat, but my guess would be domestic threats in the US is probably fairly low to the total security of the US.
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 you know, in the defense of documents.
He's trying to rally the deep state saying Trump's gonna persecute us and arrest us if if we don't stop him because they've committed all these crimes.
The first time I've ever moderated a debate with five people, and then somebody on uh coming in digital, which has its own um And if you want to see more of this, uh the great folks at Zero Hedge, like you said with their subscription service, they want to be more of this.
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.
It is an honor and a privilege to be asked to moderate this debate.
I'm Ian Crosslin.
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 uh sign up for the premium service, bypassing the advertisements to get uh exclusive financial, economic, and geopolitical knowledge and data.
It's uh highly articulate information.
It's a great, really great organization.
And it also gives you access to the secret Twitter fee or the X feed, formerly known as Twitter.
What's up, Elon, in case you're listening, uh, with with uh 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 uh from there we're gonna we're gonna jump into it.
I want to introduce our panel of incredible people, as I said earlier, and I'm gonna start from the end and give you guys a chance to introduce yourselves.
I had planned to be there in person, 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 uh that we don't talk over each other, that we end up listening to each other.
Uh the real value of humanity, one of the most powerful tools we have is communication.
So I think tonight's gonna be an exemplary um example of that.
Let's let's go, 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, Ed since just because you're on the end and we can move around is January 6, 2021.
Was it an insurrection?
And before you answer, before you answer, I want to read this.
This is um 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 there too, shall be fined under this title or in prison, 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.
Um 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 called them a mob of insurrectionists.
I think the bill passed, or he was in the House of Representatives 406 to 21.
Uh 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 said 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 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 that Proud Boys were partaking in insurrection.
I think you could say Donald Trump incited the insurrection.
Uh 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 and uh um on the day of the certification of the vote, where Donald Trump and his friends continue to try to delay the peaceful transfer of power by contravening the certification of the Electoral College vote.
And what I I want to make sure that we don't force this into like what they want to call a debate debate where you gotta be wait to call on or be called on or anything.
Yeah, that the two of them just went, uh 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 record showed 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 Trumper 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, but by but by that extension, Kamala Harris is as the VP candidate was bailing people out of jail that burned down police stations and firebomb federal buildings.
So and then 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 anti-face stuff and putting on the the uh Trump garb and 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 giving fake arresting them.
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 endowed him, but only recommended 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 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 and 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 and and when this happened three years ago, the 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 and so that's the bottom line here.
And 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 the corrupt evil Democratic Party and its evil twin of the Republicans, they've lost power and populism is rising.
Quite frankly, this was not an insurrection.
It was insurrection that 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 ten 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.
Axelrod 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.
You're changing the subject because they know it's even the Democratic Party lawyers on CNN say you have to be convicted under the 14th Amendment of this before you can be.
unidentified
You can't, you can't just get convicted under the 14th Amendment.
Yeah, I actually think what Destiny and what Ed are saying are very important.
Uh 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.
A lot of 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 interaction 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 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 out 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 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 for 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 discharged 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.
