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Sept. 29, 2021 - One American - Chase Geiser
38:17
Darren J. Beattie | Revolver.News Uncovered Evidence Linking The FBI To Jan 6 Insurrection | OAP #17
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Okay, great.
All right, so thanks again for coming on.
If you will, just to start, will you go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background?
I know that you have a fairly sophisticated background in terms of your education.
It's very diverse too and your experience with the Trump campaign.
So a lot of things that I would love to talk about with you.
And if you could just kind of let the audience know what the scoop is, that'd be a great way to start.
Yeah, so I'm Darren Beattie.
I'm currently founder, Revolver.news, which is doing very well so far.
And I'm very proud of what we're doing there.
Before that, I was a speechwriter for President Trump in the White House, as well as a policy aide.
And before that, this entirely different life that you alluded to, I was an academic.
I was actually a professor of political theory at Duke.
And yeah, that's in a nutshell my history.
Very cool.
So I noticed that your dissertation was on Heidegger.
And I know very little about Heidegger.
However, I did minor in philosophy in college.
And I did take an analytical math models course where we read a graphic novel called Logicomics?
I think Heidegger might have been in that book.
I don't know if you've ever read that book, but if you're into math.
I'm aware of it.
Yeah, I think it's like Frege and other.
Yeah, Russell was in it.
Wittgenstein.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's a pretty cool book.
That was a great class.
But what is your dissertation about?
Well, dissertation, its title is Martin Heidegger's Mathematical Dialectic, Uncovering the Structure of Modernity, which should make it obvious why it's such a page turn.
And in fact, on the Duke website that houses my dissertation, the file size is extremely messed up.
I don't know what the issue is with that, but it recently reached over 10,000 downloads, which underscores this different trajectory my life has taken.
Had I stayed in academia, if I were lucky, it would probably have, say, 50 downloads.
And so now, in addition to the 50 Heidegger scholars who've read it, you have all kinds of journalists who are invariably reading it to make sure I don't use any N-words or any kind of crazy stuff that they can write a hit piece on.
I tried to do a little bit of a reading up on you just to prepare for this conversation.
And it's basically they're saying because you wrote about Heidegger and he was a member of the Nazi Party, you are therefore a white nationalist.
That's what some of these outlets have been claiming.
And of course, that's obvious to me that that isn't true.
But what's the, like, why, did it start with the controversy about a speaking engagement that you participated in during the Trump campaign?
Is that where this whole like, I don't know, fiasco with bad press covering you started?
Because wasn't there some sort of allegation that you spoke at like a white nationalist convention?
I don't know.
Yeah, there's, well, there was this issue with me speaking at the Macon conference, and then I released the talk that I gave that really had nothing objectionable.
It did have a Heidegger reference, but it was hardly even about Heidegger.
As you point out, there's, you know, the idea that there's anything objectionable to writing about Heidegger is not only absurd, it's unlettered and extremely low class.
And I think that's basically the position that most of our journalists are in.
If you look at most of their journalists, they're people who have never had original ideas in their lives, never had any brave ideas in their lives.
They have extremely limited education.
So to these simple-minded Philistines, the idea of writing about Martin Heidegger, who's generally regarded as one of, if not the most important thinker of the 20th century, that can seem scandalous.
But I'm actually scandalized by the mediocrity of our journalist class and the response to this Heidegger dissertation, which no journalist covering it could ever come close to understanding.
That's what really does scandalize me.
And so it's helped to develop in me, I think, an entirely healthy and really rejuvenating contempt for journalists.
Well, correct me if I'm wrong.
My historical knowledge is not exactly astute.
But wasn't every German during the time period of Heidegger a member of the Nazi Party?
You have to be well, I mean, I don't know if every single German was, but it was certainly what you needed to do to get along and to have any kind of professional position.
It's basically, you know, in some ways, from a sociological perspective, it's much like kind of being woke is today.
You know, it's a precondition for any kind of professional advancement in America, what I call the globalist American empire.
It's a kind of similar thing to Germany, but we're living a different age.
And, you know, the difference is, you know, there's still evil now as there was before, but the evil now is actually just far less lettered, far less sophisticated.
And you're just dealing with mental children, really, who have no background to speak of in terms of education or appreciation for real thinking and deep thinking.
And so part of my curse is having to deal with such unimpressive opposition and such unimpressive enemies.
So how did you make the transition from Heidegger to writing speeches for a president?
Right.
Well, not exactly the most natural transition to go from the mathematical dialectic of Heidegger to my first speech assignment in the White House was the pardoning of the Thanksgiving turkey.
Which was actually a big hit.
It's actually one of my favorite assignments, you know, now that I look at it in retrospect.
But, you know, it's just a different life path.
And academia wasn't what I wanted it to be.
It wasn't this kind of safe haven for eccentrics who wanted to study big and profound but practically useless ideas, a place that tolerated a certain type of eccentric.
It turned out not to be that at all.
And it really came to represent maybe the worst of both worlds.
Like if you're going to sell out, you can sell out for a lot more money than remaining in academia.
And if you wanted to be a purist in the real sense, academia was not exactly the best place for that either.
And so the people for whom people who are able to thrive in academia as a result of that kind of weird selective pressure was a singularly distasteful type of person.
For the most part, there are exceptions to that.
As Trump said, some I assume are good people, and there are some good people in academia.
They're great people at Duke.
And I have a lot of respect for a handful of people there still.
But academia generally, it just is a letdown for structural reasons that are not even as related to politics as one might think.
I say that if it were an issue of a bunch of highly intelligent, high IQ, eccentric people discussing the finer points of Marx and things like this, that I could tolerate and even enjoy to a degree.
But no, it's really the dead soul of the HR corporatocracy had kind of worked its way into academia and destroyed, destroyed it for its kind of magical potentials.
So when did you I can tell that you're passionate about this issue both in academia and journalism in terms of intellectual integrity and rigor.
When did you become what made you become passionate about the issue?
Because it's, you know, it's something that's really easy to ignore for most people, right?
Most people don't really care, in my opinion, and they just are worried about paying their bills and going about their life.
But like, when did you get fired up about the issue of intellectual integrity in these domains?
Well, it's just one of those things.
I think certain people are afflicted by it, you know, and sometimes I think it's a curse and sometimes it's a wonderful thing.
But I used to say that, you know, I just have this congenital disease.
It's just a horrible disease and it's called giving a fuck.
Excuse me for saying that, but it's a disease.
To really give a fuck is a disease and it's a weird thing.
And it's not necessarily something to champion or not because it's just a complex part of one's being, but that's how it is, whether you like it or not.
And I don't think people can really have too much of a choice in it.
And it expresses itself in different ways.
But the kind of when I say that giving fun, I mean like having a concern for a larger sphere and kind of have one's efforts directed towards some kind of larger destiny of things.
I think that's it's just a weird personality type, frankly.
Yeah, yeah, I understand.
When tell me, we got to get in.
I know you don't have too much time today, so I definitely want to get into Revolver News.
And I don't want to just talk about the major story that broke recently, but I want to hear how you came up with the name, how you started it, what was sort of the plan that caused the formation of this new news outlet.
Right.
Well, you know, the original idea was, you know, there's an opening left by Drudge Report, and there was an opening for a kind of political news aggregator that people could really get into because there's a tremendous amount of disappointment in the Drudge Report.
So originally, a lot of our marketing at Revolver.news is that we're the new Drudge Report.
And still a lot of people come there, you know, they multiple times a day because it does have world-class aggregation.
We find great stories, great headlines, and have a real magic touch behind the selection of stories and the presentation of stories.
But it wasn't just a drudge report.
There's this different function that was entirely alien to Drudge Report, and that's an investigative function.
And that's another element of Revolver.news that I think has really contributed to its brand of, you know, the first major thing we did was commission a study.
Top academics and then a top official in government, actually, who all for various reasons have to remain unknown and for now unsung.
But they got together and they put together a remarkable study, a simple study, but a remarkable study, basically doing a cost-benefit analysis of the COVID lockdowns.
Because at the time, a lot of the conversation was dominated by this false choice between health and the economy.
And a lot of people I knew were very established economists in academia and government were saying this is kind of a ridiculous framing for the discussion because there is a large body of economic literature showing health effects per delta increase in unemployment and so forth.
Yeah, every 1% unemployment increases, 36,000 Americans die from like 19 study or whatever.
Yeah, I'm familiar with that.
Exactly.
So there were just a couple major studies in the literature with that.
And it wasn't an incredibly ingenious idea.
It was just a simple and important thing that nobody had done before, at least publicly.
And so we drew upon that economic literature.
We applied it to the lockdowns and showed what I think most people's common sense already told them, which is that the lockdowns are far more devastating to people's livelihoods than the disease itself when you use the only, I think, metric that makes sense, which is life years.
So that was our first big story.
And that was a big hit.
President Trump tweeted it, talked about it.
A lot of people, Tucker did a whole segment on it.
Tucker Carlson did.
And then from there, we just, you know, it was off to the races.
It was, you know, we were completely on the, you know, all the riots over the summer, the Kyle Rittenhouse issue that a lot of other outlets on the right were kind of squeamish about getting ahead on.
But we were ahead of it.
We said Tyler House, you know, what he did was pretty much self-defense.
And the New York Times itself basically came out and confirmed our analysis on that.
Well, I mean, I saw the video.
I don't know what else he was supposed to do.
Right, exactly.
And then and then maybe up until this point, the most brand defining element of Revolver was this series on the color revolution issue.
And I said this in a previous interview, but I think it's definitely worth repeating here.
And there's different types of journalism.
There's opinion journalism, and there's definitely a place for that.
And in some ways, that's what I'm most inclined toward.
But it has its limitations.
There's investigative reporting and breaking news, which I think is a very exciting thing to do.
But there's a different category.
And I think this is the category that Revolver is in is not only breaking news, but breaking news in a way that redefines and in some cases creates new narratives.
So for instance, we already know that, you know, Joe Biden is a bad, bad guy, right?
And so if you're an investigative reporter and you uncover something bad that Joe Biden did, that could be very interesting.
That could create a new cycle, but it doesn't require any conceptual transformation.
People doesn't rebrand the issue.
Exactly.
People are already primed for that versus, and of course, people are going to watch this and say, oh, people, you didn't invent the term color revolution.
Well, I never claimed this.
But the term color revolution as a concept that is a fairly normal part of political discourse on the right, I think that's basically owes itself to this Revolver.news series on the color revolution.
And the reason I think that's so important and not just something, oh, that was interesting in the past, but now it's over.
The reason I think that's important is that it just goes to show as you can tweak, if you could tweak things in seemingly subtle way and have a profound impact.
Because up until that point, the vocabulary that a lot of conservatives used to describe this bad stuff going on in government was the deep state.
Now, there's nothing wrong with the term deep state generally, but it's so amorphous and vague, it doesn't have a real punch to it.
It doesn't have the specificity that it needs to really generate a response and a reaction.
Whereas using a term color revolution, which is directly associated with a certain subfaction within our national security apparatus, people freak out.
And of course, the most famous piece on this was about a particular individual, Norm Eisen, which also I think adds to the effect of it.
So attaching a name and a face to the problem, but also in talking about a color revolution, brought to people's attention a certain model with which the national security apparatus exerts control abroad and how we've seen them do this domestically as well and a specific network of people.
And so they freaked out in much the same way that they're freaking out now with this new piece.
But it helped prime people on the right to say, this isn't, there's more to the discussion than just the left and the right, the Democrats and the Republicans and the bad socialists and the good capitalists.
There's really this really important transformation that's occurred that the right needs to understand that I think Revolver.news has been in the forefront of helping guiding people to this new reality and giving them the conceptual and rhetorical equipment to deal with it.
And that is the weaponization of the national security apparatus itself domestically against the American people and the political weaponization of it.
And the use of this kind of color revolution, which is this national security term that has a national security context and directly imputes a subfaction of the national security community and showing how that's relevant to our domestic politics, that is something that is very new.
And so to do that is not only breaking news about this specific individual, Norm Eisen, which is interesting enough in its own right, but it does so in a way that requires a real conceptual and narrative transformation.
And that's what I think is so powerful and so important about it.
And just to end as an addendum, I think it's related to really understand the kind of differential political psychology of the left and the right.
And there's a reason that the left traditionally has been much better at covering the malfeasance of the national security state.
It's because as a matter of political psychology, people on the left absolutely have to understand themselves as critiquing unjust power, as critiquing unjust institutions of power.
Now, in my view, they don't do this.
In my view, the left, for the most part, is either irrelevant or it actually serves to advance the very powerful institutions that they like to think of themselves as criticizing.
But that's beside the point.
As a matter of political psychology, they have to think of themselves as doing that.
Whereas on the right, there tends to be a different animating political psychology.
On the right, people aren't so much interested or inclined toward challenging unjust institutions of power as they are in defending or even venerating just and well-functioning institutions of power.
And so what do you do when every single institution in this country is a scam and corrupt and not only a scam and corrupt, but actually weaponized against people on the right?
It's a much heavier lift to convince people on the right that, look, all of these institutions that you're inclined to venerate, it's not just the institutions you've already been primed to dislike, like academia, Hollywood, and so forth.
It's that national security apparatus as well, including the military at its higher levels.
That's a much harder thing to do.
And there isn't that conceptual infrastructure in place to allow people on the right to fully situate themselves within this new reality.
Well, I think that the shift may be from defending real organizations and institutions like traditionally we're back to blue.
Traditionally, we're very pro-military, right?
But maybe it's switching to a metaphysical notion, right?
So instead of defending real institutions, now we have to perceive what we are defending as like the Constitution or the ideals behind it.
So it's interesting to see how rather than just fighting for specific policies or in defense of specific institutions, now we're fighting in defense of traditional American values and principles.
Like we're constantly citing the Constitution in a way that we didn't really have to do maybe 30 years ago when there was a little bit more consensus on both sides of the aisle about the legitimacy and respectability of that document.
And so it is interesting to see this shift.
And I think that we have some growing pains in terms of moving from a reactive party to a proactive party in that sense.
So I totally agree with what you said.
It was really well put and interesting.
Thank you.
So I didn't mean to cut you off, but I just wanted to throw that in there as a thought.
So just for the listeners who haven't had a chance, and I'll link to Revolver News and some of these stories that are broken, but for listeners who haven't had a chance to read the very in-depth piece that recently broke, can you just kind of do an overview of what was covered and revealed?
Yes, I can do that.
And then unfortunately, I have to wrap up after that.
But this is very important.
So this became, I would say, probably the biggest story in the country and it generated tremendous hysteria from the left-wing media, which is actually very interesting and telling.
And actually, it enhanced my confidence level in the piece even more so after seeing the manner in which the regime media, as I call it, responded to this.
But in short, the thesis is basically, we've all heard the narrative about 1.6 that most of the people really weren't doing anything wrong.
They were in there taking selfies and so forth.
I think that's basically true.
We've all heard the narrative about Antifa and left-wing infiltrators.
There might be some truth to that as well.
I haven't looked into it tremendously.
But there's a narrative that was just completely missing from this.
And that is that to what extent did the FBI or some other government agency, to what extent did they infiltrate any of the key militia groups imputed to 16?
Because if they had infiltrated these groups, particularly at the higher levels, why didn't they do anything to stop this?
The official narrative about 1.6 is that this is an intelligence failure, which is of course convenient for them for two reasons.
Firstly, it distracts from this possibility that Revolver.news raise and everyone's freaking out about, which is that maybe it was an intelligence failure.
Maybe it was actually an intelligence setup.
But secondly, to say that this is intelligence failure invariably brings up the next question, which is, okay, how much more money are you going to give us?
More budgets and an enhancement of the already dystopian surveillance apparatus installed in this country.
That's what that means when they say, oh, it's intelligence failure.
That means we need even more powers to invigilate American citizenry and we need more money.
That's what that means.
And so what this piece does is it explores, well, why hasn't anyone looked at whether it's a setup?
Why isn't anyone asked to what extent was there infiltration?
And for anyone just hearing this for the first time and saying, wait a minute, that's just a step too far.
In the words of Paul Ryan, that's just not who we are.
Well, there's a subsequent piece that we released of all kinds of cases of the FBI doing this.
In fact, the case of the first World Trade Center bombing is absolutely fascinating and outrageous.
An FBI informant actually played a part in building the bomb.
The FBI knew about it and they didn't stop it.
And it was one of the biggest terrorist attacks in our country up to this point.
So there are outrageous examples littered throughout our history, littered throughout the FBI's history.
But the point in this big bombshell revolver article was that we don't need to go back to J. Edgar Hoover.
We only need to go back a couple months before this so-called storming of the Capitol to Michigan, where this now largely forgotten kidnapping plot.
Now, this plot, so-called plot to kidnap the Michigan governor, also involved, coincidentally, a plot to storm the Michigan state capitol.
Interesting.
The alleged mastermind of this plot is also said by the government to be a leader of a three-percenter group.
Now, the three-percenter is one of the main militias associated with 1.6.
Interesting.
So we have a storming of the Capitol plot.
We have one of the same militia groups.
Now, here's where it gets very interesting.
Of the 18 plotters, we now know for a fact that at least five out of that 18 were federal operatives, either as undercover agents or informants.
Five out of 18 is a hell of a ratio.
And as a terry on top, the FBI field agent in charge of this infiltration operation, the head of the Detroit field office, just days after these so-called Michigan plotters are arrested,
FBI Director Christopher Wray suspiciously and quietly promotes this guy to a key position within the coveted DC field office, where he goes on to, you guessed it, investigate 1.6.
Now that is a remarkable set of coincidences.
And most people are absolutely blown away by this.
Now, of course, this series of facts does not establish anything in particular about 1.6, but for anyone resisting the thesis from the very outset, because that's just not something we do, not only do we have a long history of doing it, but it happened just months before the siege of the Capitol with the same plot, with one of the same militias, and with one of the same FBI guys involved in the investigation.
And so with that reinforced intuition, Way went on to look at the actual 1.6 cases.
And we set up the argument as follows.
We said, there's this shock and awe standard of prosecution applied to those indicted with 1.6 related crimes.
The best example I like to offer, although there are many examples, there are hundreds of people.
If you read Julie Kelly from American Greatness has great reporting on this.
Hundreds of people locked up right now for nothing crimes as political prisoners under conditions that if it were happening into some foreign country that didn't play ball with us on some kind of energy deal, the State Department would say we need regime change there.
So we could pick any of those.
But I think a good example for this shock and awe standard of prosecution is an individual named George Tanios, who was in the, you know, he didn't go in the Capitol.
He was around during the melee.
He had a bottle of bear spray on him.
His companion came up to him and wanted to get some bear spray.
He said, is it time to spray some cops?
George Tanios said, no, no, not yet.
For saying no, no, not yet, when his companion attempted to take his bear spray, possibly to spray cops, George Tanios faces 60 years in prison for conspiracy to assault an officer.
Because he used the word yet, which implied that he planned to do it in the future?
Possibly, yes.
Unbelievable.
And the amazing thing about this is the whole reason the bear spray was such a big deal in the first place is that that was the second narrative that the press and the government descended upon after the first narrative regarding the death of Officer Sicknick was refuted largely by Revolver.news.
The original narrative was this Officer Sicknick was bludgeoned to death by the MAGA mob with a fire extinguisher.
Revolver.news released a extremely popular piece read by everybody, basically saying, no, this isn't the case.
They basically agreed New York Times retracted that narrative and they descended upon the next narrative, which he died of bear spray.
Revolver.news did another analysis, a comparative image analysis on the images that the FBI released.
We said there's no way in hell that Officer Sicknick was even sprayed with bear spray because bear sprays don't have this type of heat register on an image.
Turned out we were right about that.
And so now the official story is Officer Sicknick died of natural causes.
And so the whole reason that the bear spray was such a serious issue is totally moot now.
And furthermore, the guy didn't even give the bear spray.
He didn't spray anyone.
His companion didn't even end up spraying anyone.
And for saying no, no, not yet, he faces 60 years.
That is a severe standard of prosecution.
So we look at this standard of prosecution.
We say, well, if that severe standard is applied to George Tanios, why is it that there are so many unindicted people referenced in these charging documents who seem by their actions and their speech to have done just as much, if not more than that?
Why do they remain unindicted?
And could it be the case that some of these unindicted persons, in particular, those who occupy senior positions within these militia groups, could it be the case that some of those unindicted persons are unindicted on account of a prior relationship with the federal government, either as informants or undercover agents?
Is it possible that they just are negotiating a plea deal?
Well, that's possible.
I don't know.
I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know.
So I'm just trying to play devil's advocate to see if there's any lawyer.
Anything's possible.
I don't think it's especially likely in all cases, particularly because why wouldn't they be arrested and slapped with something very serious and then negotiate on the basis of that?
I mean, I can't believe that.
And you probably don't need them to plea or bear witness either because there's so much documentation in terms of video surveillance.
Yes.
And also, if we're talking about senior senior people, which are the ones that I'm interested in, the whole point of pleaing is to get the big fish.
So why would we have this reverse RICO process where this poor sandwich shop owner like George Tanyos is facing 60 years and people who would otherwise be considered much bigger fish, they're getting the plea deal.
That's kind of weird.
So what's the incentive for the intelligence community to be involved?
Do you think that they were just trying to be undercover and monitor these organizations and they got a little carried away in order to maintain their cover?
Or do you think that they actually had incentive to instigate what we saw?
Well, I think it's important, like once we get into these really granular explanations, is like the intelligence community is not monolithic.
They have all kinds of different subfactions, even within particular agencies.
These kinds of things are extremely hyper-compartmentalized.
And so to use general terms like what does the intelligence community want or what does the government want, I think that almost gets to a it's overly overly broad.
But I certainly think that it's just given the history of this.
And again, people should go to revolver.news and read the past five cases that this is very much part of the modus apparendi of certain elements within our government is to put in people who are not only informants and looking at things but people take active steps who play an active role and in many cases historically the fbi has thwarted terrorist plots that basically wouldn't have come into being had it not been for fbi informants and agents and so
So I think that's I think it's very possible that there's something like that with some of these unindicted persons in the one six case.
And that if that's the case, then this whole narrative of an intelligence failure is totally blown out of the water.
In fact, we don't even need the incitement aspect.
All we need is the infiltration for them to have sufficient foreknowledge such that we can ask, why the hell didn't you stop it?
Why would you have sat back and let it happen?
But if there's more of an incitement element, then that's even more damning.
And the question is, why would they do that?
Well, look at the political utility of this false January 6th narrative.
It's being used to justify this new domestic war on terror, which is other than this new Cold War with China.
It's one of the major things in the budget in the in these intelligence communities.
That's why the Department of Homeland Security is declared white supremacy as the number one national security threat.
So it completely advances this new imprimatur for the national security state, which is this War on Terror 2.0, this Patriot Act 2.0 that this time is going against patriots.
So that's that's what their incentive would be.
And but on that note, I really do need to run.
And I think that's why I'm not going to run.
i have another yep i really appreciate you coming on it was really a joy to speak with you and i could i could listen to you for hours and um i hope that we uh have the opportunity to to communicate again in the future thank you for all you're doing uh and i appreciate you coming on thank you really really liked it my pleasure i started this podcast because it occurred to me that there was a concerted effort to shame america and what it means means to be American.
When I ask myself, what can I do about this?
It's really hard because I'm not a political action committee.
I don't have a tremendous amount of followers.
I certainly didn't when I started.
I am one American.
One American Podcast reinforces the values and ideals of America.
It reinforces Americanism by having conversations with key influencers of all sorts of different backgrounds, beliefs, but with one thing in common, the belief in America and that America is inherently good.
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