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.
I want to introduce our panel of incredible people, as I said earlier, and I'm going to start from the end and give you guys a chance to introduce yourselves.
Hey everybody, Glenn Greenwald, I'm a journalist, I'm the host of System Update on Rumble.
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 that we don't talk over each other, that we end up listening to each other.
The real value of humanity, one of the most powerful tools we have is communication, so I think tonight's going to be an exemplary example of that.
Let's go, let's go, let's go for this.
The first question I got for you guys, and this is really for the entire panel, and anyone that wants to start it off, maybe we can start with you Edson, just because you're on the end and we can move around, is January 6, 2021.
Was it an insurrection?
And before you answer, before you answer, I want to read this.
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 uh... on
the day of the certification of vote
where donald trump has friends continue to try to delay the peaceful transfer of
power by contravening the certification of the electoral college vote
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 6th Committee, which they've
now been destroying their records because the records show the opposite of what they
said.
Trump and all of us had a stage rented by the Supreme Court.
He was supposed to have another rally there.
We showed up.
Before Trump ever finished his speech, people were getting tear gassed and hit by bullets
and there were a bunch of provocateurs leading an attack against the police and they broke
through.
And then this million plus people then got blamed as insurrectionists and Biden gave
a big speech yesterday saying they're all terrorists.
So by that extension, Kamala Harris as the VP candidate was bailing people out of jail
that burned down police stations and firebombed federal buildings.
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 could 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.
People taking off their antifa stuff and putting on the the the 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... Fake arresting them.
How were they fake? They would grab them and arrest them and then drag them in and high-five them, you know,
take the handcuffs off and high-five them. Those videos, what people are gonna take everything I say,
they're gonna put it on X and show what I said. That's where we dominate.
Yeah, and so, and so, and so what I'm getting at here, let me just, let me just tell you this.
What I'm getting at here is, they now admit hundreds of federal officers were there.
So when Trump started his speech, this whole thing began with Ray Epps saying go into the Capitol. He told the Jan 6th
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.
They were led and driven by provocateurs and other groups.
They were others, then they opened the doors and the police waved them in in hundreds of videos.
They walked through the velvet ropes and then they indict over a thousand people that just walked through velvet ropes.
And then now we're told in the National Security Directive of President Biden, the number one threat is the American people.
And he had a declaration of war yesterday against all Trump supporters and says to protect democracy, we're not going to let you vote for Trump.
So as Stalin said, I care not who cast the votes.
I care who counts them.
Well, Biden doesn't care who cast the votes.
He cares who's allowed on the ballot.
So we've already won.
No one's buying this.
And when this happened three years ago, The Wall Street Journal had a printer retraction, but they said I was there as a coward telling people to attack.
Well, no, they wouldn't let me put the video on Twitter before I was saying don't go in.
But the truth is it's coming out.
And so so that's the bottom line here.
And this attempt by Biden to.
Cast the American people as the enemy in all these movies about martial law and civil war and race war.
That's their only hope.
Because the corrupt, evil Democratic Party and its evil twin, the Republicans, they've lost power and populism is rising.
Quite frankly, this was not an insurrection.
It was an insurrection 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 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?
But it was really about... So just to be clear, the person that's defending the J6 rioters won't say that the Confederate states were engaged in insurrection.
The Insurrection Act 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 don't need to violate that statute in order to be partaking in an 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.
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 that comes from YouTube debate, where you have to declare yourself on one side or the other.
So Destiny said, oh, everybody either hates this insurrection, thinks it's an insurrection, or they deny it happens, or they think it's good.
And there's so much middle ground.
Namely that, for me, This was a political protest that spilled over into a riot where a small minority of the people engaged in violence.
I don't think we want to urge that to happen.
We don't want to defend that.
I consider that lamentable.
But the fact that it's laughable to call this an insurrection is actually demonstrated by the examples that they're using.
This was a three-hour riot that was extremely easily subdued.
It doesn't remotely compare to any prior insurrections, let alone to the Civil War.
The only people who were killed on January 6th were four people, all four of whom were Trump supporters, two of whom dropped dead of a heart attack and one from a speed overdose, because these were not exactly a well-trained militia.
And when Jack Smith went to charge Donald Trump with multiple crimes, he had a lot of options to charge him with, and he charged him with a lot of crimes, including very dubious ones.
He did not charge him with inciting an insurrection for reasons that I think we ought to ask ourselves why.
But the fact that this is such a minor event in history is demonstrated by the fact that
the media who needed this to be a major event immediately started lying about what happened,
saying that Brian Sicknick was murdered when he had his head bashed in through a fight
with a fire extinguisher, only to learn that actually he called his mother that night.
He was fine, he died the next day of what the coroner said were natural causes.
Because the media knew that if you can't say that even one person supposedly perpetrating
the insurrection killed anybody, pulled out a gun, let alone discharged a 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 Where it's a far greater insurrectionary threat than
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 of 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 at all.
Hold on, Alex.
Let Stephen finish his thought first.
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 I can explain that if you want.
elect different electors and then when they wouldn't do that create a plot to
create fake electors and then when Pence wouldn't accept that try to
capitalize on that final three-hour riot at the Capitol building to also make
phone calls and tell people to decertify their vote or to switch their electors.
At the time, each state decided, or the state decided to certify two sets of electors.
Decided to choose two different slates of electors.
Depending on how it went.
But they were certified by the states.
They were in the middle of a recount.
Well Trump tried to get us certified.
None of us were certified yet.
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 Electrumistola...
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 certified the Kennedy electors, and Kennedy ended up winning that state.
What Trump did was Trump tried to get the states to certify an alternate slate of electors.
They refused because the court said there's no no they're there.
And then when that didn't go through, Trump decided you 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.
If we want to be precise in terms of the scope of the debate, I think it's about January 6th, and so the lead up to it might be relevant to some of the criminal indictments, but it's technically speaking outside the scope of the January 6th discussion.
If we're going to bring it into the discussion, I think there's an operative word there, knowingly.
And that's operative within the context of the charging documents, but the idea that Trump thought that he lost the election and he was knowingly lying and knowingly engaging.
No, he believes, I guarantee it, whether you believe it or not, Trump believes that the election was stolen and he was using the legal recourses available to him at the advice of his legal advisors.
So you can't vote for somebody Because they make up a bunch of stuff, and he's not found guilty anywhere, but you guys just parrot it over again like two men.
Glenn's in remote from Brazil, so Glenn, anytime you have something to say, it's helpful for me if I see a visual cue, maybe your hand goes up, I can tell you have something you're gonna say now, but let us know.
Let me just say, what happens is when you Gather together to debate a particular question.
You're supposed to debate that particular question.
The particular question that we were presented with is we're going to debate January 6th and whether it was an insurrection.
Now, I don't blame Destiny.
And Ed, for not wanting to debate that, for wanting to debate a whole set of other issues about whether Trump acted improperly, whether he was naughty and the things he did after the election, because there is no argument to make that what happened on January 6th rises to the level of insurrection, and that's why an extremely aggressive prosecutor named Jack Smith Decided not to charge Donald Trump with that crime because he knew there was no way that he could possibly bring a conviction against anybody let alone Donald Trump who told everybody to be peaceful when going to the Capitol.
about whether or not that was actually an insurrection, whether that rose to that level.
And even in a colloquial sense, what we 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, did that have a vibe?
The idea that George Bush was the real loser of the election, Al Gore won, was the view of every single liberal and Democrat that I knew.
In 2004, there were objections claiming that Karl Rove had interfered in the Ohio vote with the Diebold machines and cheated to make John Kerry lose and George Bush win.
And then in 2016, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats said that Donald Trump was the illegitimate winner, that Russia had helped him, and they tried to convince the Electoral College to abandon the certified results of the state.
Obviously, you go back to 1960, and a lot of historians believe that election was stolen.
So it's not like Donald Trump was the first person to ever wonder or believe that an election was stolen from him.
It's a very significant tradition in American political history.
If you know anything about politics before 2016, And if Trump believed that the election was stolen, and while it's true, a lot of people in the Justice Department and a lot of people in the White House told him they didn't think it was.
He did have advisors and lawyers telling him that they think there was evidence of it.
Then the question is over, even on these other issues about whether or not Trump engaged in some conspiracy against the United States.
The whole thing is a big rotten... So they can find partisan... They found the Secretary of State of Maine took Trump off the ballot because she had one hearing in a YouTube video.
I actually want to ask a question that I would love to hear everybody's answer to.
But before I do that, I just want to say about federal judges.
This year, in the last six months, four different federal judges, a district court judge and then an appellate court unanimously, found that the Biden administration gravely violated the First Amendment.
In fact, the greatest assault on free speech the court set 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 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 what CNN tells you a coup is a coup.
Usually the way coups work is the leader of the country, whoever is in charge of the military, orders the military to seize control of the levers of power.
Trump was the commander in chief on January 6th.
The military was duty bound to obey his orders.
They had a right to disobey if they were illegal, but If this were a coup, why didn't Trump order the military to seize control of power and turn over the election process to him?
Why didn't he order the armed factions that form the law enforcement part of the military and 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 Supreme Court that Trump has his picks on, that's currently 6-3 conservative, they're the ones who are going to make the final decision on that.
I wanted to be known that every single time you try to talk about any of this 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 June 6th.
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Without having to invoke every other Democratic leader's name.
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, had a brawl, and then the cops go, come on in!
Everybody come on in!
So Alex, Alex.
Everybody sees those videos now.
You call this the new Pearl Harbor, worse than 9-11.
3,000 people.
Do you disagree?
Let me ask you this.
Do you disagree With them claiming this was worse than Pearl Harbor or 9-11.
It's unprecedented that a President of the United States would do everything within his power to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to the next President.
No, no, it took him an- no, it was the riot was happening, he spoke for an hour and a half, it started then, then he got back to the White House, watched it like 30-40 minutes, and then shot a video.
He got back to the White House, he got Mark Meadows delivered a note on his desk that Ashley Babbitt had been shot and he sat there sipping Diet Coke for an hour and a half.
The guy that you called your leader, how many pardons did Trump do for the patriots that got unfairly charged with crimes?
Everybody on X, Kim's saying they didn't beat a woman to death.
Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I just- Can I Woo!
Yeah, so out of a million people, a few lunatics were there, and you call it like Martians invading and blowing the Earth up, like Glenn Greenwald said.
The scope, I think, matters, and that's what we're really getting at when we talk about insurrection.
The courts are politically weaponized, so I wouldn't even rest the legitimacy and the question on the determinations of the courts, which we can see are Running away with pretty wild and ridiculous theories.
These people were under oath Republicans and they testified.
The people who didn't testify within the Trump circle, there were dozens who 5th Amendment, 5th Amendment, 5th Amendment.
They refuse to say a word.
So, you're going to tell me that the people that testified under oath are the liars, but the people that said things in the public but failed to say anything under oath are the ones that are telling the truth?
But what we're happening is, Darren is going to continue what you were saying about finishing up your thought, and then we're going to Glenn Greenwald.
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 that were called upon to testify under oath.
No, the Secret Service actually said we would love to testify and they weren't allowed to.
The two Secret Service agents in question, that specific anecdote, were not allowed to testify.
So why would they take the second-hand report from Hutchinson when they could have interrogated directly the people who would have been direct witnesses to that?
The January 6th Committee, and that's what Alex was alluding to just a second ago, is one of the biggest shams in the history of Congress because what happened with the January 6th Committee was we had a long history of 225 years of tradition in the United States Congress where 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, a Speaker of the House refused to allow the Republicans who were chosen for that committee by Kevin McCarthy, at the time the Republican Minority Leader, to be seated on the panel.
And as a result, the Republicans said, we're going to have nothing to do with this.
the only quote unquote Republicans that were chosen was Liz Cheney who ended up losing
her seat by 36 points.
And Adam Kinzinger who didn't bother running again because they were so unrepresentative
of the Republican Party.
It was a completely partisan commission.
And on top of that, none of the videotapes that were available was made available to
the public except for very deceitfully chosen snippets by Adam Schiff and by Liz Cheney.
And it was only within the last several months that we saw all of the video footage and what it showed makes a joke of the idea that this was a coup.
You had people peacefully walking into the Capitol, led by many
of the police officers who encouraged them to enter
peacefully, which they did.
The vast majority of people who were there at January 6th aren't
even charged with using violence.
And that's what makes this whole debate such a preposterous joke.
If you look at how coups are carried out in other countries,
you could make a much better case that the Black Lives Matter
protests of 2020 was an insurrectionary movement.
And the reason it matters, Destiny, is because if you're going to make arguments, there has to be an important test, which is do you apply the same principles you're claiming to profess and believe in?
to cases where it undermines your partisan allegiance and your ideology,
not only where it helps it. That's one of the key tasks for determining the authenticity of your
argument. And so if you don't think the 2020 protest movement was an insurrectionary movement
against the United States government, there's no way to claim what January 6th was, especially
since Trump could have done so much more to cause a coup that he did not do because that wasn't his
I think there were two arguments. You wanna answer the question.
In 2016, would you have been okay if Biden- One of the questions is that Gore,
Because if you really believe that an election is stolen, as the Democrats claim they did, then it is kind of odd to say, we're just going to concede that and allow George Bush to march into power, even though we believe that he actually stole the election.
You're talking about his use of the legal process, of the congressional and judicial process.
He went and tested...
If he had ordered the military or some other FBI or any of those agencies, the CIA, to go and use violence on domestic soil in order to ignore those court rulings the way people do when they're trying to implement coups, you would have a good argument.
He didn't do any of that.
He invoked all of his legal rights in the judiciary and in the Congress.
He lost and he walked out of the White House on January 20th.
He did not have to be dragged out.
He wasn't arrested by the military, which is what happens in coups.
So much of this is because you only started paying attention to politics in 2016, you only live in the United States, you have no idea about history or anything that happens in other countries, you have no idea what a coup is!
Glenn, you bring that 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, in the 60s!
Hawaii and South Carolina, these other historical examples that people go to from multiple slates of electors, are not at all comparable!
Both of these things happened prior to 2016.
There are no examples in U.S.
history, or if you want to give me one since you know so much history prior to 2016, give it to me, is there any other examples in U.S.
history where the president is telling the vice president to unilaterally not certify the vote?
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.
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?
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?
That shows the weakness of the argument, but if that had happened, my guess is it would have ended up in the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court would have made the decision about whether Mike Pence exercised his proper authority as Vice President, and then Donald Trump, if he had run out of options, would have left the White House on January 20th without any need for military force or police force, exactly how he did, and I would have called that the exhaustion of all of the legal remedies available to the President in the event that he takes on the election.
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?
He didn't do that and he left is the point and that's the reality and now they say we can't vote for him even though we all know Biden's gonna win by 10 million votes.
The reason why he didn't call them off is because Kim, Giuliani, and Eastman were making phone calls to other senators and congressmen asking them to decertify the electoral vote.
I'm saying that as the right was raging on and he was sitting there sipping his Diet Coke, if this really made him and his followers look bad, why didn't Donald Trump make a video immediately?
If they bring in, which they've done, 10 million illegal aliens in the last three years, and then that gives them, with the congressional seats and the census, more Democrat seats in the Congress, is that not... Undocumented aliens, undocumented immigrants are not voting.
Okay, so why don't we ask the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the Proud Boys, the ones who were actually indicted and convicted of seditious conspiracy.
They're not saying that Donald Trump personally communicated to them to go to the Capitol.
What they're saying is the reason why they were there, which I think over 147 convicted people have thus far in their convictions, have said the reason why they were there is because Trump called them to go there.
Not personally.
You know how many of those people cited Ray Epps as the reason why they were in the Capitol?
That Congress wasn't acting, that Mike Pence was supposed to be the guy to do it, but he hadn't heard good things about them, and they needed to go down to the Capitol building to protest.
It's not about him being ahead in the polls or not, it's about whether or not he engaged in insurrection, and if the self-executing part of the 14th Amendment allows states to remove him from the ballot.
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So, where's the, where's the, where's the conviction?
If you think it's so bad that courts are kicking him off the ballot, what do you think about Trump doing the birtherism 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 ballots, 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 Colorado Supreme Court who are appointed by Democratic Party governors who are saying that you cannot actually remove somebody because to remove them from the ballot is to punish them for a crime, insurrection, that Trump has never been charged with and therefore has never had the opportunity to defend himself the way a criminal does.
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 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 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 thinking 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 non-violent and were there not for insurrectionary reasons, but had a lot of people who were anarchists and insurrectionists and who engaged in a lot of violence, a lot more than was done on January 6th, Do you also think that the riots of 2020 constituted an insurrection?
I'm just trying to understand to get a sense for what your definition of insurrection is.
Everybody get the clubs, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, get in, I want to let Stephen finish this off.
When we're talking about an insurrection, I think all three of us here would agree that if there was a congressional session or a state legislative session and people were voting on it and BLM rioters went up and they tried to firebomb the house to stop the vote, I think all of us would agree that's an insurrection.
unidentified
But you guys, you guys, you guys, you guys, hello, oh my god, I almost finished a sentence.
All of us here agree that, obviously, over the entire course of the BLM riots, 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 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.
Personally, I don't like the way the 14th Amendment Section 3 is written.
I've got a lot of friends who'll hate me for saying that.
And I think that the Supreme Court probably will rule against it.
Because the problem with the 14th Amendment is the self-executing part of it means basically anybody involved in that balloting process of putting them on the ballot could make that determination.
The Declaration of Independence, and you want to talk about 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 the Democrats are putting out 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 first or see how we're being set up and You stay set up, but Donald Trump is the one setting you up.
You'll have 5 million views, and it'll be you, and it'll be all the news articles where Milley says he'll resign if Trump's National Guard, and then they did it again, and then General Flynn's brother... That wasn't for January 5th, that was the Rockingham City protests.
I know, I know, I know.
That's where it begins.
And he asked again, and they also... Yeah, it's all there.
Yeah, 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.
100%. Absolutely not. 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. I guess define stolen. Define that for me
before we answer the question. Well, I mean, as Professor Epstein and others have said,
they do it way before suppressing the 100% Biden laptop, giving you 96% Google Democrat
I mean, it's all the stealing's done before in the algorithm and the censorship of the control.
I remember five years ago when I was being deplatformed, they were denying I was being deplatformed and saying there was no censorship.
Now we know from the weaponization hearings that all this is going on and now they're telling us you can't vote for him because he said we won't let you vote for him.
Why is it, if the election was being stolen, why did every single person that Donald Trump trusted to investigate come back and say there was no evidence?
Every single person that Donald Trump trusted to investigate, meaning the Vice President, the Department of Justice, the Cyber Security Division of the Department of Homeland Security, all of his White House counsel, every- I know how it works, I know, you're farming TikTok clips, okay?
That's what we're doing right now.
unidentified
But the reality is, is almost every single person that he asked to investigate Two minutes ago, you said all of them, now it's almost.
Do you think that Donald Trump asking Jeffrey Clark to go and threaten the DOJ that if they don't sign on to a false letter trying to bully states into claiming there was mass election fraud by claiming the DOJ had actually done something when they hadn't?
That was testified to under oath.
Do you think that would be considered an act of corruption?
If Trump believed genuinely that the election was stolen, then all of those steps that he undertook to try and present to 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?
Like Glenn says, this is... Alex, you pointed out, oh, that the votes, they went up way at night, they went up way high, Trump was winning and all of a sudden Biden pulled ahead at like 1 a.m. Red Mirage. Yeah, but do you understand that the
media basically told the American public that this is what happens basically every election?
Yeah, they pre-programmed it at Red Mirage. No, do you understand? No, it does happen
every election. Do you understand what actually, why that happened? No, I'm not smart enough
That's why they had to, all over the, block the windows out, kick everybody out, claim water mains broke, let me talk, let me talk, and then magically, on the surveillance cameras, just keep loading the machines over and over again.
But let's, you're right, no no no, let's stop.
You're right, no no, I agree with you.
Trump actually lost, so why are you so scared to let him run again?
I think what Biden did, I think what Biden did was, here's what Biden did for the shot, okay?
What happened was, Rappensperger and everybody in Georgia looked over all the tapes you're claiming about, but the ballots 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 Rappensperger, and for Finally, Giuliani has come out saying that it was false, but it was his First Amendment right to lie about it when Ruby Freeman took him to court for defamation because he lied about something you could clearly see on video evidence.
Okay, well this is a question, Darren, firstly, do you think, if you want to talk about it, do you think the election was rigged or stolen, but also is it protected speech to question an election and claim that it was stolen?
The point is, is that the State Department runs around the world looking at everybody else's elections, and the number one thing you get sanctions for is taking a candidate off the ballot.
And that's what Democrats are doing right now, and America sees that.
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 CRU that boasted of this and took credit for it.
I think the thing that's most instructive, 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, I have Democrats, during the impeachment for this, they shut it down when finally Trump put a five minute video on of Democrats saying, attack them at grocery stores, attack them 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 reason.
Now they finally indicted him because they know it's a weak spot and their operation only lasted for six months.
Let me tell you, we're not playing clips for tit 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-fiving and saying, I'm a federal agent, I just helped run the attack.
I think with the illegal alien voting thing is what's happening is they're coming in and then they're being counted in the census, which then adds more electoral votes.
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, repeatedly calling for people to go into the Capitol, and prefacing his seemingly rehearsed remarks in each case, saying, I'm probably going to go to jail for this, I'm probably going to get arrested for this, you need to go into the Capitol.
The next day, he flew across the whole country, presumably to go hear Trump's speech.
He skipped Trump's speech.
Instead, he was a veritable Where's Waldo, everywhere on January 6th, directing people, go into the Capitol.
It's in that direction.
That's where our problems are.
Then amazingly, he's pre-positioned right at that initial decisive breach point on the west perimeter of the Capitol, and he's whispering into somebody's ear just seconds before the bike racks are broken through.
He texts his nephew, I orchestrated it.
On paper, think about it, he's like a 6'3", former Marine, who is wearing camo gear and a Trump hat, and he just happens to have had a leadership position in the Oath Keepers.
The most demonized and heavily prosecuted... He used to, right?
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 6.
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 in to 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
is 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 Kinzinger, who's never met a Trump supporter,
he doesn't want to see rotting in jail for 50 years, that Adam Kinzinger will defend
more aggressively than Epps' own lawyers.
And now, almost three years after...
The government finally says, okay, we're going to hit you with a wrist-slap misdemeanor, as though people are so simple-minded to think, well, if the argument hasn't been indicted, therefore he's a fed, if we indict him now, even if it's a misdemeanor, even three years after, no matter what the circumstances, this constitutes a refutation and totally wipes away the mountains of suspicious evidence surrounding the character of Ray Epps.
So, the people who were charged with anything but misdemeanors were people who used violence and people who went into the House chamber, where the joint session was, and the people who were involved in a seditious conspiracy.
He's telling people in advance of the speech we need to go to the Capitol because somehow he got it in his mind that everything would end up at the Capitol.
Then you can go back and watch it on your- the Revolver story's up there.
For every single thing that you assert about him, that he's in video whispering into a guy's ear, you say it in the rest of your article, all he's doing on the day of, when the protesting's 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 Sam Searle testified to, is he said, hey, the cops are on our side or the cops aren't enemies. They
both say something to that effect.
And that seems to synergize with everything else he said on that day. You go on to say that that
guy immediately after was the one that broke down the fence.
No, he's not. You can see like 15 people right next to him that are all trying to break down the
fence. Yeah, the guy goes in eventually, but if we truly believe that this guy is a federal agent or
is working to instigate the riot, we've laid out absolutely nothing supporting that. Just
some video footage of another boomer being at the rally. No, no, no, no. That was, that
was there. If you want to say that, why was he removed from the FBI list? I mean, why was he
removed from the FBI list?
Like, all the information is out there.
He said that after his video was identified, and people on X started to identify him, and then because all of his online stuff is incredibly easy to find, he started to get phone calls, he started to get harassed, he started to get threats, so he called the FBI as soon as this was brought to his attention, and he told the FBI, hey, this was me, and here I am, and this is what's happening, and the FBI took him off the list.
Because what you did, because I read your article, is you looked at two archived versions of the website and you didn't have a 12-month archive.
For some reason, you assumed that the recent snapshot that you took at 2021, you think that that was the first time the page has been changed.
That was just the first time the page has been archived.
I don't think the FBI has made a statement on it, but what 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 and then people were making videos and then he called the FBI and he said, hey, I need to talk to you and this is what's going on.
If he was a Fed, why would they remove him from the list when everybody's clearly looking at the list?
He was one of the only people removed.
Why would senators be defending him so vigilantly?
So and let me just I don't want to get lost in these weeds.
I just wanted to say something quickly So you're saying he said we need to go into the Capitol
Peacefully and you point out correctly that in many instances caught on video. He's engaged in what you could
call de-escalation of the crowd and he's not
Urging people to violence.
That's all correct.
I never said he's urging people to violence.
He was absolutely a provocateur and his mission as stated and as implemented and as orchestrated by his own Verbatim text was he wanted people to go into the Capitol Peacefully.
Nobody here is saying that he didn't say that and he didn't want people to do that, but the claim is that there's some sort of... That's illegal!
That's fine!
He can be charged for it!
Do you think anybody here cares 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, are you saying that- The 6'3 guy that looks like he's dying of type 2 diabetes and arthritis is somehow some intimidating marine captain that's sending people into the capital.
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 in the U.S.
security state before January 6th was saying that they regard the greatest threat to national security not as being ISIS or al-Qaeda or Hamas or Hezbollah or China or any other foreign threat, they regard the greatest threat as being right-wing domestic extremists, in whom that was included on many lists, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, and all of the people in the groups that they said orchestrated January 6th.
Is the argument that you think that the FBI was not monitoring and infiltrating those groups?
Because there's actually a ton of evidence that the FBI had their hooks in all three of those
groups. And not only had their hooks in them, but on January 6th had informants on the ground who
were pretending to be Trump supporters who were talking in real time to the FBI about everything
that was happening. So I just want to understand what the claim is.
The claim that the FBI was not involved in the groups that organized January 6th and didn't have informants with them that day?
It came out that the vice president of the Oath Keepers was an FBI informant.
The Proud Boys had at least three and as many as eight and the New York Times itself reported that there were FBI informants and the Proud Boys who were inside the
Capitol texting their handlers as the event unfolded. So they recorded the garage,
The context in the immediate aftermath of January 6th, by the words of Steve Sherwin, who was in charge of the prosecution, their posture was one of quote-unquote shock and awe.
They were going after everyone.
They were hitting them very hard.
Now again, think about central casting.
On paper, Ray Epps, he's the 6'3", former Marine in camouflage gear with a Trump hat, the only guy caught on video as early as the 5th telling people to go into the Capitol, who's there on the 6th.
Directing people of the Capitol, who's right there pre-positioned at that initial breach phase.
and this and and and and helping rams on exactly and
he happens to be a former head of the oath keepers and you're not telling us bizarre wait a second
you're not telling me it's at least a little bit bizarre that of all january six participants
he's the only one who gets a new york times puff piece he's the only one who gets a sixty six uh... sixty minutes
sympathy segment he's the only one that adam kinsinger
The criminal complaint acknowledges that he engaged in quote-unquote felonious behavior, but among the mitigating factors that they cite is, oh, this poor guy was a victim of all these conspiracy theories.
Why were people writing I want to just quickly answer the question about, your question basically, if he was an asset, why did they go after their own asset?
Why would they indict their own asset?
That happens all the time.
In fact, that's almost the norm, that ultimately when the assets... In the mafia, when they have undercover people, they'll indict them just as a cover.
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.
I think you need a better argument.
Really fast, really fast.
where there is the informant Steve Robeson who is a longtime over decade
long informant who was part of the entrapment scheme in Michigan case with
striking perilous to January 6th by the way and he when he became inconvenient
was indicted by the government there's so many cases. For breaking the law, for actually breaking the law.
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 us.
Exactly.
So wait, wait, let me answer this comprehensively.
So first of all, It's extremely strange, given how conspicuous and egregious and concentrated his behavior was, that he somehow was able to avoid the obstruction of official proceeding charge, number one.
Number two, there are even more serious charges they could have given him.
In fact, in the series of videos that we put out, there's one specific exchange he had with another guy.
He said, when we go in, Leave this here.
We don't want to get shot.
So when we go in, leave this here, he's referring to that individual's bear spray.
That individual ends up going into the Capitol, committing violence, and doing a whole bunch of
other things. And this is a bizarre case because this guy, who is super egregious, has to this day
not fully been charged.
His case hasn't even gone to a district judge yet.
So let me give you a sense.
Let me give you a sense.
Because when we're evaluating these things, we have to compare them to standards applied to others.
But there was no evidence because he broke the agreement that he signed and then he pled guilty and said, I broke the agreement that I signed and agreed to the sentence that the sentencing guy got.
We can provide these arguments, we can provide the evidence, we can provide the testimony,
and all you do is go, "Oh, well I don't trust the courts.
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 finish one thing.
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 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 can't even finish my thing.
I think it's because when I talk, you get really afraid.
Now, I want to get back to Darren, because there was a question that was, uh, we took a tangent, and also, Glenn, I think you look like you're about to say something, so if you wanted to speak first.
Oh, 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 have done far less egregious things.
And second of all, 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.
Stuart Rhodes literally said that if Trump doesn't impose the Insurrection Act that we need an insurrection and he said storm the Capitol and he went into the Capitol and he hurt police officers.
And you call for people to- Joe Biggs said- Joe Biggs went into the Capitol.
But have you looked at the Telegram messages where they're basically instructing people where to go and where they're at and that saying, hey, we stormed the Capitol, we took the Capitol.
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, 7th graders who are in civics class and have this understanding of how the US 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, 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 non-violent had these incredibly novel interpretations of law that were used against them to turn non-violent demonstration and non-violent 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 going to have rulings against them.
Because a lot of these judges, especially in Washington, are not only Democratic Party judges, but the entire system
is furious to watch people go and put their feet up on Nancy Pelosi's desk.
So the entire system decided that this has to be punished regardless of
what the law provides.
You had the FBI with their hooks inside all of these groups.
But I do understand that if you believe in this story of American propaganda,
that the FBI is these upstanding law enforcement people and they don't do that, and then the courts go and make rulings.
Then you're going to end up with this image of what the three of them have,
which is this idea that this was one of the worst attacks in American history.
The courts have ruled everything the government did in this case is consistent with their long-standing view before January 6th, that these groups are criminal groups.
They need to be criminalized.
Trump's movement is a threat to the United States, and the entire part of January 6th was designed to define them as an insurrectionary movement so that they could criminalize them, which is exactly what they're doing.
You understand that usually what happens in the United States with non-violent 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.
It's not the same though.
If you want to actually make these- Let me just back up briefly and I'll shut up.
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 instead of the Capitol is the White House, and there's thousands of people at the White House fence, and they push through the fence, do you think those people deserve more of a criminal penalty than people that were rioting in, I don't know, LA?
All right, we're going to take a, well actually we're not going to be taking a break, you may be, but I want to ask you guys, we're talking about these people in prison, these prison sentences, so we're going to, I want to talk to you briefly about if you think these prison sentences that some of these people are getting are justified or not, and then we're going to be taking questions from the audience from Zero Hedge Premium, so if you haven't signed up at zerohedge.com, sign up for the premium service, and you may be able to get a question before we wrap.
But what do you guys think?
I mean, let me start with you, Darren, because I haven't heard from you.
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 sentencing.
I think they're all crazy.
Even those top sentences for the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, 20 years, 18 years.
It's simply insane when you think about, you know, again, all of it has to be comparative.
Are people guilty of murder who get less prison time?
And the self-described, self-professed posture of the DOJ in the immediate aftermath of January 6th is one of shock and awe, which ominously, but kind of unwittingly accurately, 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 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.
Let's go on the line with Glenn again and then all you guys but I just want to say something.
This is important folks.
In June of 2021 Biden put out a national security memorandum which you just mentioned saying Right-wing extremism is the number one threat.
Then he defined that as white supremacism and then said, questioning open borders, questioning elections, questioning lockdowns, questioning four shots.
That's in the report.
I've shown it hundreds of times on air.
Literally declaring the people enemy.
Then he gives a speech with this red background with Marines.
I thought I was watching Adolf Hitler.
And then yesterday he gives a speech saying, they're taking over, they're a danger, we're at war, all off a riot at the Capitol.
At best, it's a riot, and obviously provocateur.
So, this is a branding of 80 million voters plus as a political enemy.
This is extremely totalitarian, extremely dangerous, and I was there, I know.
You're in a crowd of hundreds of thousands, tear gas is coming down, you can't even see what's happening at the Capitol.
You're saying, don't go in there, we've got a stage.
I go there, there's a stage, no one there.
I mean, we were set up.
And I was set up, and thank God that I waited 30-40 minutes.
I didn't know what to do.
I was like, this is weird.
How do I lead a crowd that's already left?
I was there.
And so all I'm saying is this is not the basis to indict populist Americans.
and say they're terrorists and and and if our the US government spent the equivalent of 10 trillion
dollars you know they spent a trillion in Afghanistan of real current numbers but the
estimates now are 10 trillion in current dollars in Vietnam and the Vietnamese wouldn't give up
so Swalwell says we'll use F-16s we'll just kill Americans and take your guns F-16s don't take
guns folks I don't want a civil war I don't want violence but the entire deep state couldn't defeat
the Vietnamese and now they want a war with the American people while they have one with Russia
And while they have one with China, this is madness.
It needs to stop.
I don't want a war with Democrats.
I don't want civil war.
I don't have some dream of this.
But this is the election strategy of Joe Biden is civil war.
Yeah, I think this is really the nub of everything.
Like, I really do think that the three of them actually believe what they're saying.
I'm not, like, actually realizing this.
And the reason they believe it is because they don't know the history of the war on terror.
They don't know the history of the Cold War.
They don't know what the CIA and the FBI and the U.S.
security state have been constructed to do and the role that they played in our domestic politics.
Every single time that there's some new crisis, the CIA, the FBI, the permanent power faction in Washington, and it's not like some crazy conspiracy theory Dwight Eisenhower warned a bit on his way out of the presidency in 1961 when he called it the military-industrial complex because he had seen how it was growing beyond all democratic accountability.
Every time what they need to do is convince somebody to be scared of something, to be scared of communism, to be scared of terrorism, to be scared of domestic terrorism, and they convince people that some minor event, relatively speaking, in the history of the threats to our country, like the 9-11 attack, which is a terrible thing, but they exaggerated wildly the threat of foreign terrorism to basically institute the Patriot Act and warrantless eavesdropping and
all the things that turned our country more authoritarian.
They were announcing that before 9/11, they used 9/11 to do it.
They were announcing before January 6th that they wanted to
turn right wing extremists into domestic terrorists.
And they used January 6th and this extremely inflated narrative
about what it was.
It was a riot of out of control people, a few hundred of them,
that they turned into an insurrection, that they're now
weaponizing the justice system and they're creating oppression.
where they're now taking a non-violent protest.
Remember, most of the people charged in January 6th are charged with non-violent protests, and they've made it now so that they can charge those people with felonies, and put them in prison for years.
That was the Q Shaman, four years in prison for a non-violent protest.
That's the precedent that you're endorsing with this narrative.
I think that if we want to talk about knowing history and understanding history and contextualizing
history, I think if we want to run with that argument, then we need to do real journalist
work while we do it.
It's not enough to say the FBI or the CIA has done this 10, 20 years ago and then blindly
assert it every single time it happens to fit whatever political narrative you want
to tell.
If you want to tell a story, the person telling the story needs to find evidence to support
it.
Sure, if you want to say the FBI or the CIA or any other domestic agency has been involved
in spying on Americans and doing bad things, that's fine.
We all know that it's happened.
That doesn't mean that you don't have to find evidence in the future of it happening.
And so far, there was no evidence of it happening on January 6th.
As many times you want to throw around the follow politics before 2016 or whatever.
Well, we're in 2024 right now.
Find some information from today or find some information from January 6th to today.
It's not enough to just keep appealing to the past.
You pretend like that's going to do your homework for you and that somehow you can make all
of these accusations without having any real evidence.
As far as this claim of like there are novel uses of charges or people don't do charges
like this.
As I said over here, like most of the sentences have been within sentencing guidelines.
A lot of these have been done with a Trump appointed judge.
The idea that these charges are novel, that people don't face prosecution like this, there's some element of truth to that, but this is also a novel situation.
We have never had a president in the United States try to resist the peaceful transfer of power like this.
This has just never happened before.
And you can keep screaming about Hillary Clinton, you can keep screaming about BLM all you want and talk about the blown-up fire stations 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.
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 the fact of the matter, then do that. Say, "Yeah, Trump did try to
cite an insurrection. Yeah, Trump did fail. Yeah, it was a riot. I don't know why you
Well, they had three trials in Michigan, and one of them, it was a mistrial, and they let most of them off, and the other, 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.
including the first World Trade Center bombing and they admit all that and I've
interviewed the people involved, Ahmad Salam, all of them that knew they were into the
bombing he came and said why have I cooked a real bomb and they let it go
forward. With Whitmer the same team involved in January 6 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 the original war on terror.
You don't need to go back to the ample antecedents that exist going way back into our nation's history.
Just go back to the mission case.
The parallels to January 6th are striking.
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 beat his wife on the way home from a swingers 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 Robson, in the context of does the government ever burn its own informants?
The idea, again, that for the FBI to be infiltrating these groups is a conspiracy theory, again, requires an understanding of the FBI that's childlike.
And what Destiny was saying before is, oh, we're just using what they've done in the past and therefore concluding they must be doing that in the future.
He just ignored all the evidence we've been presenting for the last two hours, including the fact that the FBI, by their own admission, had informants in all three of the leading groups that organized January 6th and were talking to informants on the ground at the Capitol.
As far as January 6th defendants are concerned, it is true that they're getting sentences similar to what people get when they're charged with felonies.
The point is that it is insane that non-violent 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 whataboutism, so we're admitting that this was an insurrection, and that is true.
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.
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.
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.
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 if 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 in prison 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.
We're forgetting one thing and that is that you can commit a crime, you can commit a felony and it doesn't have to be violent.
There's plenty of felonies on the books that aren't violent including breaking into a federal building Breaking through police lines and going into the Senate chamber as Congress people are trying to certify an election.
And all I'm telling you is, is this This Biden announcement that currently the number one threat is the Trump supporters and Trump must be taken off the ballot.
You can punt to the Supreme Court, but they're literally trying to preclude Americans from voting for who they want.
Not inflation, not war with Russia, not open borders.
I mean, give me a break, man.
We had a million plus people there, a few hundred not in fights with the cops, and you act like it's the biggest thing since... It's a pretty big deal.
You had all your investigations and you lost every single one.
When you lose in court, you go to the next day.
Remember in 2016 when all the conservatives said, well you know what, if we would have lost the election, you know what we would have done the next day?
We would have went to work.
Well here you are four years later still crying about the outcome of the election.
My dream is that Ed and Brian and Destiny have to actually live through a real coup so that they can then come back to the set and be like, oh my god, you know what?
I'm so sorry for saying that what happened in the Capitol for three hours against the most militarized and powerful government to ever exist in human history got anywhere near a coup or an insurrection.
Because usually it's helicopters taking over media, killing the opposition, troops, and then you're claiming women with American flags and being waved in by police as a coup.
So define to me, all of you first, and then Glenn, and then the professor, what is a coup?
Since this was the most devastating evil coup ever.
I know, 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 say... Why did he waste so much time on catty comments?
If somebody says, I think that Trump engaged in a coup... One of the ways that you show that it's not a coup is by saying that the things that you like that are done, that are far more insurrectionary, are things you won't call an insurrection because those No, Glenn, I'm sorry.
These are from ZeroHedge.com from some of the premium users of the website have sent in some of the questions.
This one's actually a question for what they call the Blue Team, which right now is going to be the three guys, Ed, Brian, and Stephen.
The question is, The New York Times acknowledged that there were FBI informants in the Capitol on January 6th, and then they give a link to the New York Times article.
Given the agency's history of entrapment, is it a stretch that some agents may have provoked the riot?
And then there's a follow-up question.
Why was law enforcement so ill-prepared for the insurrection, in quotes, despite the presence of informants?
So the first question, first part of the question is, is it a stretch that some agents may have provoked the riot?
You know, the follow-up part of this question, why was law, I think law enforcement was so ill-prepared for the insurrection, again in quotes, despite the presence of informants.
This is from Space Worm, just so you know, Space Worm from Zero Edge.
I think the ill-preparedness came because Trump's deployment of the National Guard in the past, especially in D.C., had caused a lot of people to be uncomfortable with National Guard being present in the Capitol when the certification of vote 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.
Yeah, so I said a larger context, which is a larger five hours, eight hour deposition, right?
I just told the truth.
I said a larger context.
I'm explaining that the public's been lied to so much, there's a major loss in confidence, where people then don't believe anything they're told, and that's dangerous.
Madeline Albright told Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes, I ordered 500,000 children killed because I thought it was a good thing to do, I'd do it again.
She's a great person.
I questioned Jussie Smollett, I questioned W.E.B.
Nixon in Iraq, I questioned 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 it's very dangerous.
I talk about that every day on my show.
And Joe Rogan just last week said, you know, Alex Jones isn't totally right, but he means to be right.
Informative than CNN.
They lie on purpose.
And the public has lost trust in the system.
That's dangerous.
What do you do?
So that was the full discussion.
Let me give you another example.
They say in court.
Jones in a custody battle said, I'm an actor.
Everything I say is fake.
I've offered a $1 million reward for that.
I didn't say that.
They wanted to put like now a 15 year old video back then.
It was like a nine year old video of me as the joker saying all these horrible things, take drugs, kids, you'll die.
It's great.
So kids wouldn't take drugs.
Reverse psychology.
Hold on, hold on.
They wanted to introduce that in court, and my lawyer said, when Jack Nicholson plays the Joker, he's not really the Joker.
And when Alex Jones is in Waking Life, or Scanner Darkly, or any of this stuff, when he's being an actor, it's not what he really means.
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
And the last thing I want to say is, it's really giving like a kind of amazingly vivid mindset into the minds of Trump-era liberals who have really come to see The US 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.
I wanted to answer the user's question about the lack of preparation.
Because it involves a lot more than the question of the National Guard.
For additional context, There's the Norfolk memo coming out of the Norfolk office of the FBI.
Extensively cataloging threats to the Capitol including maps of tunnels, all kinds of indications that there was going to be a major event at the Capitol on that day.
There was extensive government infiltration of every single militia group imputed to January 6th.
We know that Enrique Tarrio 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 Oath Keeper Jeremy Brown.
Who has been attacked and persecuted by the government.
Because when he was approached by JTTF agents in December of 2020 to recruit him as an informant, he recorded the exchange and the encounter and put it out there on the internet.
The JTTF agents said, there's something going to happen in January.
We want you to be an informant for us.
We know that there are several influencers, including Milo, Who parlored, or whatever the tweet version is for parlor, put out a message on January 5th saying, I was just approached by federal agents, whatever they have planned on the 6th is huge, don't go there.
That's just a number of examples.
Oh yeah, and there was Donnell Harvin, he was the head of the Homeland Security Office for the DC Fusion Center.
His predictions were remarkably specific and accurate.
His office came up with the idea that we need to have body bags.
We need to focus on the Capitol at 1 o'clock.
Specifically, we need to be concerned with explosives planted on side streets that could serve a diversionary effect.
Therefore, allowing for an attack on the Capitol.
These are just some of the highlights of examples of the government being in a position to know in advance what was going on.
And it wasn't just that there was an ordinary level of security at the Capitol, which is inconceivable when you think of the fact that there was a major proceeding there, that Trump was there giving his 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.
As you can imagine, the judicial process is very aggressive in pushing against any types of entrapment defenses.
And many defense lawyers, in some cases, reasonably so, want to dissuade their clients from entrapment type defenses because their goal is not to uncover the truth about entrapment.
Their goal is to do the best for their clients in those specific cases.
There are some, but not as many as you would think, but not because this isn't relevant to the truth, but because if you're a lawyer, even a good faith lawyer, you are 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 that my client ends in jail.
I would think that evidence that a federal agent led you to commit a crime or acted in a way that made you want to commit a crime would be pretty, 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.
Well, I think that would be a fantastic idea, but again... Why didn't Trump do it?
Why didn't Trump do it?
Trump's not in a position to do it right now.
Yeah, but right after J6, before he gets kicked out, I want to point out... Well, I mean... Or why not in the days before, if he thinks that there's... I mean, there is not really a window of opportunity for that to happen.
It's convenient for the regime not to have a legitimate and disinterested fact-finding commission to truly get to the bottom of the real questions that matter in relation to January 6th.
I would say for there to be a legitimate committee, it would have to include people who are genuinely interested in pursuing not only the questions that Benny Thompson and the hyper-partisan Democrats wanted to find out, but people who are sympathetic to the other side who would be willing to pursue the questions that I've raised and have been raised That were not addressed at all in the committee, because all they were interested in was demonizing Trump and setting up a criminal proceeding for Trump.
They weren't interested in getting to the bottom of the questions.
Why was there uniquely poor security?
What was going on with the level of federal infiltration?
These questions are all asked as part of the 847 page report.
I invite you to read it at some point.
The reality is that McCarthy at any point could have put five Republicans that he chose on that committee.
But because Nancy Pelosi said no to two of them, I think banks in Jordan that were actively being investigated or would have been the subjects of the J6 committee, he said no to anything, and now we get to say it was all a sham?
Even though the majority of the people interviewed were Republicans?
Even though, as was stated earlier, every single person near Trump... You're banking a lot on the Republican issue, but it shouldn't be a surprise to you, many Republicans, institutional apparatus of the party, It's not necessarily friendly to Trump.
unidentified
There are many Republicans that are hostile to Trump.
If every single person in government, if every Republican, if every Democrat, if every judge, if every person in the United States that is in Trump's peripheral ends up hating Trump or not wanting to work with Trump, at what point do you say... Well, we're not saying every... At what point do you say... Christopher Wray is not... At what point do you just say... I've been gone for 10 minutes, let me respond, I'm listening.
You can't just run back in here and cut me off, okay?
Wow, not inflation, not open borders, not human smuggling, not... Would a president try to circumvent the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in U.S.
It wouldn't surprise me if there's a lot of crossover with, like, white supremacy groups and them being, like, organized like a domestic threat, but my guess would be domestic threats in the U.S.
is probably fairly low to the total security of the U.S., so I don't really care that much about it.
He's not allowed to be voted for because Section 348 of the 14th Amendment says that if you have been a prior vote taker and you have been engaged in rebellion and insurrection, you're not allowed to run for office again.
And then I do, seven days a week, live on air, 11 a.m.
to 3 p.m.
weekdays.
Saturday we do special reports different times.
Sundays 4 to 6 p.m.
Infowars.com, Ford's last show, now real Alex Jones back on, what was Twitter now, X. And we're here, we're fighting hard, we're promoting freedom, and we want everybody to tune in and see what we're doing.
The first time I've ever moderated a debate with five people and then somebody coming in digital, which has its own... And if you want to see more of this...
