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Jan. 27, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:37
THE OATH KEEPER Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1008
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Thank you.
Thank you.
I agree, but I think he needs to divide it first and then unite it on a new basis.
I'll explain.
I'm going to consider a simple new solution to health care that involves replacing Obamacare with something a lot better.
And Stuart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, joins me.
He's going to talk about Trump's commutation of his sentence and also the larger significance of January 6th.
Hey, if you're watching on YouTube or Rumble, For listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
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I want to begin by reflecting on this idea that is pushed pretty aggressively now in the culture and by the media, that Trump should be a uniter.
For the Democrats, there is an element of gross hypocrisy in all this.
They never bother to unite.
When Biden comes in, he might say rhetorically, I'm going to be a great uniter.
But right away, he sets about aggressively pushing his agenda, going after Republicans and conservatives.
In fact, not only going after them rhetorically, but going after them politically, going after them prosecutorily.
Indicting them, trying to lock them up under various pretexts, the FACE Act, parents protesting school board meetings, of course, January 6th.
So there's no talk of unity when they are, or there's no practice of unity when they are in charge.
And yet, when they're on the defensive in the minority, they lose the election, suddenly it's time to unify.
And what the Democrats mean by unity is that we should take what we want and we should take what they want and kind of meet halfway.
As I mentioned, they don't do it, but they want us to do it.
And I think they're a little shocked that we aren't doing it.
Trump isn't doing it.
Now, Trump did some of it in 2016, and other Republicans have usually done it, which is to say...
Bended toward what the Democrats want to find some kind of meet them in the middle type of compromise.
But what Trump is doing is he's following a model that I think is very indicative of transformational presidents.
And that is he is dividing in order to unify.
In other words, there was an interesting observation made by the historian Arthur Schlesinger, who apparently was having a conversation with Clinton.
And Clinton was talking about the fact that he liked to govern from the middle, as, by the way, Bill Clinton mostly did.
And Arthur Schlesinger said that although great presidents are unifiers, they're unifiers in retrospect.
What a strange thing to say, but here's what it really means.
that the The president begins in a very divisive way.
Think of Lincoln.
Even think of FDR. I'm making this point in a kind of neutral way.
They were highly controversial.
They were highly divisive.
In one case, Lincoln was assassinated by a Confederate Democrat after the Civil War.
But the country came together after Lincoln.
Pretty much on a Republican basis.
And it stayed that way from 1865 all the way till the 1920s.
The Republicans, in fact, had the dominant majority.
And then FDR kind of did the same thing.
He divided the country.
He was extremely divisive.
In fact, he said things like, he said of the people who hated him, he said he welcomed their hatred.
He says, there are people, captains of industry, big business, they hate me and I welcome their hatred.
Meaning, I'm taking them on.
I'm going to expose them, deride them, humiliate them, run them out of town, so to speak.
And then the idea was, I'll reunify the country.
Essentially, on the basis of an embrace of the welfare state, an embrace of democratic principles.
And in fact, FDR did that.
The country was, in a sense, unified.
I'd say unified in that Republicans didn't seriously contest for power.
Until the 1950s.
And even then, they were very much beholden to the welfare state.
In a sense, the FDR era, which began in 1932, didn't really end until 1980 when Reagan was elected.
And Reagan was, in his own way, a divider in order to unify.
And that's how we got the Reagan era from 1980 all the way to Obama.
Trump, I think, understands this in his bones.
I'm not sure he has done this kind of an historical survey.
He doesn't really need to.
But this is the new Trump, and I think this is the transformational Trump.
This is the Trump that will go down in history.
Trump would have been a significant figure no matter what.
But if Trump had only won in 2016...
And then pushed out in 2020, and the Democrats got power, and then won this election in 2024. Trump would be seen as someone who obstructed the Obama era, but then Obama got his third term through Biden, and perhaps his fourth term through Kamala Harris.
Obama would have been the defining figure of the age, and not Trump.
Instead, What we have is Trump bringing the Obama era to a rough and sudden end in 2016. The Democrats steal the 2020 election and regroup with Biden, but it's a flailing presidency from day one.
And then Trump seizes it from them again in 2024. So I think when you match Trump against Obama, and Obama's done a lot of damage.
He has had, in a sense, three terms to do it.
And so there is a lot to be undone.
But I think Trump becomes, not Obama, the towering figure of the age.
I saw an interesting article that calls Trump the new American Caesar.
And the article...
Just reading the title, I thought, I didn't read the article, but it seemed obviously kind of negative.
Trump is the new American Caesar.
This, of course, plays into the idea that sort of Trump is a dictator, Trump is an autocrat.
Caesar, of course, wanted to be...
Emperor of Rome.
He wanted to bring an end to the Roman Republic.
This is all the kind of image of Caesar.
And it's an image of Caesar that is highly influenced by Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, where in some ways, Brutus and Cassius, the two guys who organized the conspiracy against Caesar, are the heroes.
And they are the ones who get rid of Caesar, assassinate Caesar.
Even though at the end, of course, Brutus and Cassius are themselves defeated by Mark Antony, and in a sense, the spirit of Caesar prevails in the end.
Now, I was thinking about this idea of a Caesar with regard to Trump, because there is something larger than life about Trump.
There is something that looms large, larger than a normal politician fighting his way through...
The thicket of democratic politicking.
And all you have to do is look at all the people around Trump.
Look at even the people on the Republican side.
There is a kind of a gap, a chasm between them and Trump.
And then I thought back to Caesar, because the interesting thing about Caesar, now Caesar himself, of course, was not elected.
But neither, of course, were Brutus and Cassius.
They were part of the Roman aristocracy.
They were part of the Senate.
They weren't directly elected either.
Many of them got their positions because they came from noble families.
And the real difference between Caesar and the Senate was not that one was elitist and the other was not.
They both were, in a sense, from the elite.
Their sources of elitism might have been different from Caesar's case, military conquest.
That's what set him, in a sense, apart.
And for the Roman senators, it might have been noble birth, the patrician lineage, and so on, family connections.
But the key point was that Caesar was, in fact, on the side of the people.
In fact, Caesar's power came from being able to mobilize the people against the aristocracy, against the class represented by Brutus and Cassius.
And this is really what Trump does, isn't it?
The distinguishing feature of Trump is the normalcy of his discourse.
The fact that he talks like a normal person, as if he's having a conversation with you at a time when virtually no other politician does that.
Politicians speak in a certain type of lingo and Trump doesn't.
And this is why you have a lot of ordinary people who, even though they are far removed from Trump, I mean, they couldn't dream of having Mar-a-Lago, a place like that for themselves.
They aren't billionaires.
They don't have a private plane.
They don't have their name, if you will, in gold letters.
They don't own golf courses, any of that.
They haven't been on The Apprentice.
They aren't the ones who said, you're fired.
They're not cultural celebrities.
So they couldn't be more different than Trump.
And yet, not only do they identify with him, but he genuinely relates to them.
I'm struck by the image when Trump went to North Carolina and he's standing there with a bunch of people at the press conference and you look at them and they're like, at least two or three of them look like mountain men.
They look like they are from the hills and yet Trump treats them with unflagging courtesy and dignity and he gives them the microphone and one or two of them talk about how insurance companies screwed them over.
And I thought to myself, I haven't seen this kind of a scene.
Normally, presidents will have meetings, but it's all staged, and they're handpicked people, and the handpicked people have been rehearsed, and they know exactly what to say.
And it's all part of a kind of tableau, or it's all kind of an act that is being put on for the media and for the American people.
And with Trump, you don't get that.
You get something quite different.
And so this is, if you will, a different sort of man coming at a unique time in history.
And it's fascinating to be alive, to watch it, and to be a part of it.
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I want to talk about an important article that was published in The Hill by two economists with Johns Hopkins University.
One of them is Guy Bai, G-E, and the last name is B-A-I, who's a professor of accounting and health policy.
This is someone I actually wanted to have on the podcast.
However, Gi Bai has gotten an appointment from the Trump administration, I believe at the Department of Health and Human Services, so can't be on the podcast because of the confirmation hearings coming up.
It's kind of a general prohibition.
Don't make public statements.
Just hold your fire until the hearing itself.
But there is nothing to stop me discussing this article.
Trump has been doing a lot of unilateral things, as he has the right to do, and I'm glad he's doing them.
The executive order is kind of a blizzard of those, and all of this is a real exercise of executive power.
However, the laws are not made by the executive branch.
The executive branch has a lot of interpretive latitude in the enforcement of laws.
And that affects policies like Remain in Mexico on the border side.
It affects policies regarding all kinds of things.
But laws ultimately have a permanence that is different from an executive order.
Because think about it.
If Trump makes an executive order...
The executive order endures while Trump is president, but the moment that a Democratic president comes in, they can undo the order and they can do the opposite.
And that is, in fact, what has been happening.
Trump had a series of executive orders in 2016. Biden undid pretty much all of them the first day of office in January of 2021. And now Trump has kind of gone and undone the Biden executive orders and has his own.
But laws are more difficult to change because if Congress passes a law with the House and the Senate and then the President signing it, it doesn't matter if there's a Democratic President the next time because unless that Democratic President has a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate and can get their own law passed, they are stuck with the law as it is.
This is a key point.
This is how we got stuck with Obamacare.
Obamacare was passed by the Democrats with one vote.
And if I remember, it was John McCain, I think, who gave it the decisive vote in the Senate.
Absolutely horrible.
And that's going to be a real stain on McCain's legacy.
We've been living with Obamacare.
Republicans have talked about undoing it, but they actually haven't done that.
And part of the reason that they haven't been able to do it is because what are you going to put in its place?
There's been a lot of ambiguity about what would replace it.
Whenever you pass a law, people become somewhat used to it.
They become habituated to it.
They become inured to it.
And so when you change things, you need to have a recipe for what you're going to do.
And that's what makes this article interesting and important.
The title itself is quite remarkable, How Making Health Insurance, Insurance Again, Will Improve Healthcare.
The implication here is that Obamacare isn't really insurance, and that is in fact true.
Let's look to see why.
Let's think about what insurance really is.
Insurance is a bunch of people Who can foresee the possibility of some kind of calamity?
Consider a hurricane.
Consider a fire.
And so what you do is you have a bunch of people put their money into a pot.
That's called the insurance pot.
That's what the insurance company gets, these premiums, which are a price that people pay for getting the insurance.
And then if the calamity occurs, generally a calamity that is unlikely, rare, but devastating, Then people suffer heavy losses, but that's okay because lots of people have put money into this pot.
Only some of them are facing the calamity, so the insurance company is in a position to make the heavy payouts that it takes to compensate people for these devastating losses.
Now consider that insurance under Obamacare doesn't really work like that at all.
People get insurance to pay routine healthcare expenses.
They are insured for checkups.
They are insured if they have a cold.
Sometimes they may have a modest copayment.
But nevertheless, insurance is weighing in to cover healthcare in general.
So what is the difference between healthcare and, let's say, a flood or a fire?
The answer is that in healthcare, you have routine expenses.
And you have catastrophic expenses, and health insurance, government-sponsored health insurance covers both of them.
So what this article is saying is don't do that.
Let's separate the two.
Let's separate catastrophes from routine health care.
Now, the reason that this makes a lot of sense is think about an analogy like someone...
Because when we talk about healthcare, people will say, well, yeah, but, you know, we need to give people healthcare because healthcare is a right.
Without healthcare, people can't survive.
Kind of like saying, you need to give people food because food is a right.
Well, food may be a right, a right against starvation, at least certainly in an affluent society, but still the government doesn't cover the cost of all our food.
The government says there may be a few people, a minority, a segment of our society that can't pay for food, so we're going to give those people, let's say, food stamps.
Everybody else pays for their own food.
Now, with regard to health care, why don't we have people pay for their own routine health care expenses?
There might be a few people, again, a small minority in our society that can't afford it, and so the government would then subsidize those people.
But the majority of people, the run-of-the-mill American, can afford it.
Now, some people will say, well, but healthcare is kind of expensive.
Well, guess what?
The reason that routine healthcare is expensive is because it is covered by insurance.
Think about it this way.
The doctor knows, the hospital knows, the healthcare provider knows that you, the customer, are not paying.
And since they know that some third guy is paying, they have no hesitation in jacking up the price.
This is what anybody would do when someone else is paying.
And so the customer has no incentive to say, hey, why are you doing eight checkups on me?
Why are you doing 17 different tests?
Do I actually need 17 tests?
Or is it the case that you're billing the insurance company for all those tests?
So this is the reason that routine healthcare costs more than it ought to.
And I say this because, not based upon some theoretical argument from some economics textbook, Americans for...
Decades, if not centuries, paid their own routine healthcare expenses, and they were quite able to do it.
Now, this is entirely different from paying for catastrophe.
Think of something like auto insurance.
Does the government insure you in getting, let's say, for example, having your car washed?
No.
Does the government insure you in getting an oil change?
No.
Do you need car insurance in order to cover routine expenses of maintenance?
No.
By and large, insurance is for serious...
Eventualities.
You have a car crash.
Your car is totaled.
Your car is smashed.
You need a new car.
In those cases, insurance steps in.
Why?
Because those events are rare.
But everybody has to maintain their car.
Everybody has to wash and clean their car.
Everybody has to get the snow off their car if they live in a snowy environment.
And the same is true with health care.
We need, in other words, if we're going to have some kind of government type of insurance, I'm not sure we need any, but if we did, We would need catastrophic health insurance.
When I say I don't, I'm not saying that we do.
It is possible for people to buy catastrophic health insurance.
But let's say you have a government program.
I think what this article is saying is, let's limit it to catastrophic health insurance.
And because catastrophic events are rare, that type of insurance Would be a lot less expensive.
So healthcare is a giant burden on our economy.
And the reason for it is that it is abused all the way.
And look, the ordinary person using healthcare is abusing it too.
Why?
Because they have an incentive to abuse it.
And they have an incentive to abuse it for the simple reason that they are not the ones paying.
If you went to the grocery store and somebody told you, listen, here's a cart.
Get whatever you want.
But when you show up at the counter, you're not going to be the one that pays.
Everybody's going to go, well, all right.
Well, then instead of getting my normal one carton of eggs or two cartons of eggs because I got a big family, I'll get seven cartons of eggs.
I'll just load up the cart.
Why?
Because when I show up at the counter...
I'm not paying.
Some third guy who doesn't even know what's in my card is going to be footing the bill, and this is great.
So you have an incentive to abuse the system.
The grocery store has the same incentive to abuse the system.
They know that you're not paying, and so they're going to bill some third guy.
And so the whole thing becomes a racket.
Obamacare is that.
It's a massive racket.
By the way, the insurance companies were all in on it.
They were in on the racket because Obama was forcing them.
Well, he was really forcing American citizens to buy insurance, even those that didn't want to.
And so he was creating mandatory customers for these insurance companies, and they were like, this is fantastic.
This racket works from our point of view.
So what this article does is it offers at least the beginnings of a way out.
Return insurance to what insurance is supposed to be.
Insurance is supposed to be...
A way of compensating for or covering rare catastrophic events, not routine events that you can pay for yourself.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
Guys, I'm very happy to welcome back to the podcast Stuart Rhodes.
He is the founder of the Oath Keepers.
He's had a very distinguished background.
He went to Yale Law School.
He was on the D.C. staff of Congressman Ron Paul.
He was a law clerk on the Arizona Supreme Court.
He's also an honorably discharged, service-connected, disabled army airborne veteran.
And he got an absolutely absurd sentence for January 6th.
In fact, he was convicted, among other things, of seditious conspiracy.
He was facing a long jail sentence, but he has now been commuted by President Trump.
And that's something we're going to want to talk about.
It's GiveSendGo.com slash G-A-F. Stuart, thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
This was after you had been indicted and you had been charged, but prior to your conviction.
Can you talk a little bit about what you did on January 6th that led to this conviction?
Because this is, to me, such a scandal in and of itself that I think people who haven't heard it need to hear it and people who have heard it need to hear it again.
Yes, of course.
An honor to see you again.
An honor to see you for the first time, actually.
We talked, was on the phone while I was in pretrial solitary confinement, actually.
So, yes, we were there, Oath Keepers was there to do security for two permitted events on Capitol grounds.
The Latino for Trump rally in Area 7 of the Capitol grounds and the Ali Alexander event on Area 8 where members of Congress were slotted to speak that day.
So that's why we were there.
Some of our men, along with all the other people that were around the Capitol, got sucked in and went up the stairs and went inside 20 minutes after Congress had already recessed and long after somebody else had already entered the building.
The doors opened from the inside and they wandered inside.
What that did, though, is give the deep state...
I was standing on the outside trying to locate my security team.
I didn't go inside at all.
I didn't tell anybody to go inside.
And, of course, I didn't insult any police officers.
In fact, none of my guys did.
So that gave the deep state their opportunity.
Because we're Oath Keepers, we're targeted for who we are, not for anything we did.
Very much like in the Soviet Union.
Show me the man, I'll show you the crime.
And what they wanted to do out of the gate was create a false narrative that made it into a, you know, dangerous insurrection.
So they featured Oath Keepers and Proud Boys were the only people that were charged with this conspiracy, members of our two groups, as their way of amping up this false narrative that they wanted to set with Trump as the kingpin.
So a good way to look at it is a manufactured fake conspiracy case with Trump as the central kingpin and all the rest of it is cast as his co-conspirators.
And that's why they prosecuted us for that worst charge of all and railroaded us through a show trial in Washington, D.C. where you're going to have no chance of ever being found not guilty.
I refused, though, to plead out.
Some guys did.
There were two of our men, Todd Wilson and Josh James, who pled to seditious conspiracy.
And then signed onto a stack of lies against the rest of us.
They turned on us and turned on President Trump.
Sadly, in some ways, what happened with them is that they were given probation only.
I went through a trial, and because I would not submit, even at sentencing, I told the first thing I said to the judges, I'm a political prisoner, like President Trump.
My only crime, so-called, is opposing those who are destroying our country.
Because I would not submit, would not express remorse for something I didn't do.
He handled me with 18 years in prison.
But the men who rolled over and gave up were given only probation.
I'll let you know how ridiculous this whole thing really was.
They were pardoned, though, by President Trump.
And I agree with that because they were innocent.
But sadly, though, I was only commuted.
And there's another 13 men, Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, that were commuted only.
So now we're very grateful, of course, to President Trump for letting us out of prison.
But I'm still a second-class citizen.
But I'm wiped with all my veterans' benefits.
The VA sent me a letter letting me know I have no rights as a veteran any longer.
And in fact, I can't even be buried in a veteran cemetery, which is the ultimate slap in the face to a veteran.
And I'm not the only one.
There are other veterans in that group also.
Joe Biggs, Dominic Pozzola, they're also veterans.
And so what we're going to advocate for now is that President Trump go all the way and pardon us and restore our rights completely.
Because right now, the D.C. judges, they're booted in the back of our neck.
In fact, Judge Mehta, in response to me going to the Capitol the other day, On Wednesday, I went to the Capitol to advocate for other men who were still in prison, members of Congress, and the Judge Mehta immediately slapped an order, an amended order, banning me from Washington, D.C., and banning me from the Capitol.
So, that's where we're at.
I mean, what you're saying, Stuart, is, just to start at the end, is that if you are commuted as opposed to pardoned, you don't actually get all your rights back, right?
You are let out of prison.
But you're still facing significant legal supervision and oversight.
And you still have it on your record.
And judges like Ametha can put conditions on you and say things like, you can't show up in Washington, D.C. because presumably you remain some kind of a threat.
And yet, as you said...
You were in the vicinity of the Capitol, but you didn't set one foot in the Capitol.
You said, I think, that the other oath-keepers that went in, none of them, I understand, had weapons.
They went in unarmed.
And so, what was the basis for being able to try to claim this conspiracy?
A conspiracy to do what?
What actions were actually conducted to carry out this conspiracy?
None.
In fact, the men who went inside, led by Kelly Meigs, our Florida leader, they actually helped police multiple times.
Officer Harry Dunn was in a confrontation with other Trump supporters, and he was on his M4 and looked about ready to fire.
He was so amped up that our guys stepped in between their backs to Officer Dunn and put their hands towards the other Trump supporters and de-escalated on both sides.
But at trial, Officer Dunn perjured himself on the stand.
Lied about what happened there.
And another officer, Officer Lazarus, said that he witnessed this violent or potentially dangerous confrontation with the Oath Keepers.
And it turns out, as Steve Baker discovered in the video footage that was later found, Lazarus was under the Senate in the Senate tunnels at that time.
He could not have been there.
So both officers lied and said that they were together to bolster this false story that, oh, the Oath Keepers were actually being confrontational.
So we caught them in perjury.
And I know that perjury's been done in other cases, but we happened to catch them red-handed.
Stuart, you know, there were probably some guys who went to D.C. who were not a member of any kind of group, right?
They just went down there.
They knew Trump was having a rally.
And it would be difficult for the government to surveil or to know who these people were in advance.
But in the case of the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, any kind of group like yours, You would imagine that the government would have made significant efforts to infiltrate the group or surveil the group in advance, before that.
Do you think that they were doing that to the Oath Keepers?
Were you aware of it beforehand?
No.
Well, actually, in one case, not.
We come to find out at trial that one of our national leaders, turns out, was a paid informant.
I still can't say this person's name under a gag order from the judge.
But the New York Times exposed this person.
So, you know, God took care of that.
But we do know that Jeremy Brown, a Special Forces veteran who's a member of Oath Keepers from Florida, was approached in October of 2020 by two DHS officers who tried to recruit him to become a paid informant against the Oath Keepers.
He not only refused to do it, he recorded the interview that they did and blasted all over the media and embarrassed them, you know, exposed them.
In retribution for that, that's who I was advocating for in Congress on Wednesday, by the way.
So he's still in custody because it's a federal case out of Florida.
What they did is they raided his home, and very much like the raid on Mar-a-Lago, the first thing they did is they turned off his security cameras so he couldn't see what they were doing.
And then they discovered two grenades in his gun safe that did not have his DNA, did not have his fingerprints.
So they set him up in retribution.
Like Chuck Schumer said, if you mess with them, they've got six different ways from Sunday of getting their revenge.
They planted fake evidence on him.
President Trump needs to pardon that man.
He's an Army Discharge combat veteran, Special Forces officer, and he did nothing wrong at all.
He needs a J6-er, because he was with us on J6. He had a misdemeanor charge for J6, but the fruit of the poisonous tree, the only reason they went down and raided his house in Florida is because he was outside the Capitol.
Didn't go inside.
He was escorting an old lady, the mother of one of the speakers for Ali Alexander's event, escorting her back to her hotel and keeping her safe.
And that's how they got a hold of him.
But then he went and got the revenge for him turning down the offer to be a paid informant.
So he's a stand-up patriot.
Unlike some, he didn't turn on President Trump.
He didn't, you know, I wouldn't say in prison speak, he didn't bitch out.
So he stayed loyal, and I think he deserves pardon.
We'll be right back with Stuart Rhodes.
Give, send, go.
By the way, give, send, go.com slash G-A-F-5-B. We'll be right back.
I'm back with the founder of The Oath Keepers, Stuart Rhodes.
We're talking about his sentence following January 6th.
Stuart, you were talking about the fact that they accused you of seditious conspiracy.
You go before a jury.
What did the judge tell the jury that gave the jury the slightest idea that you were carrying out some kind of conspiracy?
Well, because they had no statement by me.
In fact, they had multiple witnesses saying that I never told anyone to go inside.
And in fact, two witnesses, one of the government's own witnesses, said that yes, when they came out of the Capitol, one of the guys who took a plea deal testified, Jason Dolan, that when they came out of the Capitol, the prosecutor asked him, what did Stuart Rhodes say to you?
And he walked up to him.
He said, well, when we told him, Rhodes, that we had gone inside, he said that was stupid.
That's what I told him.
That was stupid.
And another witness testified to the same thing.
So their default, or their fallback, was to instruct the jury, that's what the judge did, that they could infer an implied conspiracy, which means unspoken, to exist as the oath was walking steps together.
They could infer an implied conspiracy, an unspoken agreement, and they could use our free speech, my political speech, as state of mind evidence against us.
So that's all they have is our free speech.
And the fact that the guys walked in the Capitol.
So that's all they needed.
Because a D.C. jury, first of all, they drew the jury pool from the alleged victim pool.
The judges themselves described D.C., all the residents, as the victim on January 6th.
And the judges themselves described themselves as victims, too.
So the judges were drawing the jury pool from the victim pool.
It's as though you were accused of robbing a Walmart.
And they drew the jury from the people who were at the Walmart on the night of the crime.
That's how absurd it is.
They refused any venue change.
No J-6 got venue change.
Of course, the reason why, they didn't want any precedent that President Trump could use when he was then put on trial.
They wanted to make sure that Trump would be locked into D.C. also.
It's a complete kangaroo court show trial.
The setup was in from the very beginning.
Their whole point was to manufacture this false narrative.
Railroad us through, get us found guilty of this conspiracy and say, see, there really was a conspiracy, and then stick Trump at the top of it.
That's what they were going to do.
I mean, Stuart, I don't even know the feeling that would have gone through my mind if I was facing the kind of sentence that you got.
Did you feel like this is something that you were going to be spending years and years and years in prison?
Were you confident that things would be turned around?
Did you expect that you would get out?
How did you go through this?
Well, at first, they threatened all of us with life in prison.
The prosecutor sent a letter to everybody saying, we consider this analogous to treason, so therefore we're going to ask for life in prison.
I think that's how they scared the guys that took a plea deal.
That terrified them.
I threw mine in my toilet.
I was in solitary confinement in Alexandria Jail.
I spent over a year in solitary confinement, pre-trial, during trial, and after trial.
When I got that, I just laughed and threw it in the toilet because that's where that belongs.
I can't be bought.
I'll never turn my back on my country.
I'll never betray my oath.
As a Christian, I will never bear false witness against anyone else.
The only person I could have turned against would have been President Trump.
I'm on the top of the poker pyramid.
They had other guys turning against me.
They were trying to pressure me to turn against President Trump.
It's not going to happen.
And Enrico Charlo was the same way.
He was told he'd go home.
They told him directly.
If he said that Trump told him to go there, that he could just go home that day.
He refused to bend the knee.
I refused to bend the knee.
And my co-defendants, Kelly Maggs, Kenny Harrelson, Jessica Watkins, also refused to bend the knee.
So we went and faced the music.
That's what's kind of...
Frustrating for us because the guys who did plead out, like Todd Wilson or Josh James, they got pardons by President Trump.
And I agree with that because they are, in fact, innocent of those charges.
But those of us who went to trial and never turned on him got commutations only.
So I really do think that the right way to handle this, I would say, is all of us who got commuted because we were targeted for who we were, proud boys and oath-keepers, nothing to do with what we actually did.
I believe that we deserve pardons.
That's what I think has to happen next.
One of the things that I hear the Democrats say, and this is their effort to sort of make a point, is they say, well, you know, it's one thing to pardon the guys who were nonviolent, but there were violent guys on January 6th who got into fights with the cops, who swung batons or pieces of PVC pipe and so on.
But the interesting thing is that...
You guys who got commutations instead of pardons were manifestly non-violent.
You didn't swing a baton.
You didn't swing a PVC pipe.
Why do you think, do you think that this is a case where because the charges were so serious, the Trump people and Trump said, listen, we can't go as far as pardoning these guys.
Well, let's just do a commutation.
What do you think was the reasoning for doing that?
That's their perspective.
They have convinced him, at least for the short term.
That's appropriate.
But like I said, though, no Trump supporter.
In fact, President Trump himself, of course, knows that if you were put on trial, whatever he's accused of, they're going to find him guilty.
So it doesn't make a difference what you did or did not do.
What they accuse you of, you'll be found guilty of it if you go to trial.
I was actually found not guilty of two charges, though.
I was found not guilty of a conspiracy to disrupt Congress or to obstruct Congress.
I was found not guilty...
of conspiracy to prevent officers from discharging their duties, which tells me that the jury used my open letters to President Trump, my political speech beyond J6, because my open letter said that President Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act, do a mass declassification of all the dirty secrets and exposure, I call it a data jump, but do a mass declassification and exposure of all the dirty secrets that the CIA, FBI, DHS has, which is how they control people.
I said the secrets are the swamp water, the swamp creatures swim in.
It both protects them and controls them.
So as long as they do what they're told, they're protected.
When they get out of line, they could be exposed.
And that's how politicians that are corrupt, that are compromised, can be controlled.
I believe that's exactly what happens in Washington, D.C. That's what I said.
So the jury saw that, of course, the call on him to vote the Insurrection Act.
And I said that Oath Keepers would stand by, along with all other military veterans, of course, to answer the call if he would call us forth as the militia, as he has full authority to do it under federal law.
So that's what they looked at and said, "Oh, that's the conspiracy in their minds.
This is the conspiracy of me advocating that President Trump use the Insurrection Act." I'm sure a D.C. jury saw that as being, that is enough.
The judge never told them about the Brandon Rivers v.
Ohio standard of protected speech unless you're inciting imminent violence that's likely to occur.
He said nothing about any kind of line or beyond that speech is protected.
He said any speech that by the defense can be used as state of mind evidence against them.
That's what he told the jury.
So that he invited them to use my political speech as state of mind evidence to get where they wanted to go in the first place.
Do you think, Stuart, I mean, that it seemed like for a while that this January 6th narrative was largely in the control of the left?
It's the power of the media.
There was the continuing torrent of misrepresentations and lies by the January 6th committee.
On the other hand, you now have Trump's election.
You seem to have a new vibe or a new mood in the country.
Do you think that the true story of January 6th has or will come out?
Or are we still up against the wall?
No, I think that it's become obvious now That was all about getting President Trump.
It was about disqualifying him under the 14th Amendment for being able to run.
It was about putting him in prison, if they could.
Or it was about also making him unelectable.
All of those attempts failed, which is why they had to try to kill him twice.
And I don't believe that was just lone gunmen.
I do not believe that.
But all of that has failed.
You know, God has used, as the Bible tells us, what men mean for evil, God can use for good.
Just as Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers.
And then later betrayed by the master's wife for false accusations, the same thing, and put in prison.
All that was used for good.
The same is true for what has been done to us and what has been done to President Trump.
The harder they have attacked him, the stronger he has become, and the more eyes have opened.
So I think across the country, I was just at the rally in Nevada where he spoke yesterday.
By serendipity, I was flying into Vegas to drive down and pick a truck up that a lady had donated.
Her husband was a fire chief and passed away and donated a pickup truck to me.
And I have nothing.
So she donated the pickup truck.
But I stopped off at the rally there.
And people were, you know, coming up to me and thanking me for taking a principled stand and not pleading out, not turning out President Trump.
So they're thanking me.
And all of them know it's false narrative.
I think at least half the country or more now understands that.
Same goes in prison.
When they saw President Trump being attacked and now he's a felon in chief, that would make him more popular among all the inmates.
When he got shot in the ear and stood up like a man, He had a warrior's reaction and pumped his fists in the air.
The whole unit, black, brown, splanic, black, and white, all just leaped up under their feet and put their fists in the air and said, he's a legit OG. That's the prison speak for the highest honor you can give somebody.
And another inmate said, no question.
But I believe that's what he won the election.
Because people saw that reaction.
First of all, they knew that God had saved his life.
But second, they saw his true character came out.
He's a fighter.
He's a lawyer at heart.
You can't fake that.
He just jumped up and put his fist in the air.
That's how a lawyer reacts.
So I think that that's where he won the working man vote across the board.
And people know and understand that this is all a bunch of nonsense.
It's only in the echo chamber of Washington, D.C., leftist circles, and the media circle that they continue to say, but you're an insurrectionist.
I went down to the Capitol on Wednesday to go advocate for Jeremy Brown and met with his congressman, Gus.
I'm sorry if I got his name wrong, from Florida.
I went in there with another Special Forces retired guy, Ivan Raiklin.
We went and talked to the congressman.
Then we went afterwards down in the basement to have lunch.
And folks were walking up to me and asking me to take selfies with them.
And then the media models came out.
We just sat there for an hour and talked to the media about Jeremy Brown and about the guys in D.C. jail who had not been let out yet.
D.C. has been slow walking, letting these guys out.
Even though President Trump's an immediate release for all the guys that got pardoned.
And like you said, a lot of the guys that got pardoned were accused of violence.
And I was all about them being pardoned.
Here's why.
Like I told the media, I wrote articles, we gave you a pundit saying the same thing.
In America, you're presumed innocent of proven guilty.
And it's proven guilty in front of a jury of your peers, an impartial jury of your peers, and in front of an impartial judge who protects your rights of the accused, that demands exculpatory evidence to be turned over under Brady, gives you an opportunity to present witnesses.
None of that happened for any of our trials.
The jury was not unbiased, was not impartial.
The judges were not impartial.
We were not allowed, for example, we couldn't show a video of Ray Epps on the night of the 5th in front of a crowd in Washington, D.C. Saying, tomorrow we need to go into the Capitol.
He was actually saying, articulating a plan and encouraging others to do it.
What we were accused of doing, he was doing on video.
And yet, we were not allowed to show the jury that.
We couldn't show the jury the video of Ray Epps whispering in the ear of Ryan Samsel before Ryan Samsel pushed over the first police barricade.
We couldn't even mention Ray Epps' name.
So as an example of things, we were not allowed to show the jury.
And, of course, they perjured their witnesses.
They did not turn over the video that would show us that Officer Lazarus was actually someplace else when he said he was with Officer Dunn.
We couldn't catch him in the perjury at trial.
Only later, Steve Baker found that and brought it forward.
Amazing stuff.
Guys, I've been talking to Stuart Rhodes, now commuted January 6th political prisoner.
You can support him.
Here's the Give, Send, Go.
Give, Send, Go dot com slash G-A-F-5-B.
Hey, Stuart, so much to talk about, but thank you very much for joining us.
One last point.
Yeah, go for it.
After Judge Bennett saw that we were in the Capitol talking to congressmen in the media, we slapped all those Oath Keepers with an exclusion order from D.C. But thankfully, Ed Martin, the new D.C. U.S. attorney, has stepped in and filed a motion condemning what the judge did and saying the judge is not respecting President Trump's intent.
He did not intend for any of us to be on a supervised release when we were commuted.
So they're fighting it out right now.
I believe that Judge Mehta has shown his true colors.
It's all about our free speech.
And my hope is that President Trump will slap down that restriction, but any surprise release restrictions.
But I do hope he evince it as part of all of us.
Because otherwise, no matter what, they're going to have their boot in the back of our neck and they're going to keep on pressing us down.
It's not going to stop.
You're making a good point that the pardon would basically wipe out the judicial order and restore back to you your full rights.
That's right.
Yes.
And it would help us, save us from being, because what they'll do to men is if they're a convicted felon, is they'll bring somebody out to falsely testify, test a lie against you, to say, I saw him with a gun.
They're going to revile it.
You go back to prison for five, ten years for felon in possession just based on a lie.
That's what can be done to you.
So it's better for us to be pardons.
We're not under that.
That kind of threat.
All right.
It's a very real threat.
Thank you.
And God bless you.
You're one of the only mainstream media guys or national media guys who interviewed me.
I was a guest who interviewed me while I was in solitary confinement.
All the rest of them ran ahead.
So thank you for being my man of honor.
Absolutely, Stuart.
Terrible injustice.
And thank you for coming on to share.
God bless you.
Thank you.
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