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Jan. 10, 2021 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying
02:30:15
DarkHorse Podcast with Jeremy Lee Quinn & Bret Weinstein: The Capitol Insurrection, A View from Inside
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Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
I am here with Jeremy Lee Quinn, and before I bring him on and he says, thanks for having me, I have a bone to pick with him.
He has been on the podcast before.
Many of you will have seen the episode he did on Antifa and the anarchist movement and protests, largely here on the West Coast, but across the country.
He is now in Washington, D.C.
Actually, I believe he's in Virginia, but has been in Washington, D.C.
and was there on the day of the riots that breached the Capitol building.
And Jeremy, I just have to ask you, what the hell?
You're reporting on Antifa and anarchism one day, and then the QAnon fringe on the right on a different day.
Don't you know you're supposed to stay in your lane?
What the hell is this?
Is it journalism or something?
Well, yeah, Brett, amazingly enough, these stories are connected, and they're intertwined in a very profound way when it comes to even the mainstream culture of right and left in the United States right now that in some sense aligns itself or gives cover to these actions, I would say, because these are populist
Movements I would I would characterize a lot of people have been asking me who was there I was there at the Capitol I went all the way up Burrowed my way through the crowd and I'll talk about what that was like because it was it was like being at a music festival Where you're trying to get to the stage But you're a whole football field and a half back and you have to burrow through People and you just come to blockade after blockade.
That's how It was an arena sized crowd I went prepared.
I thought Black Lives Matter Plaza was going to be the scene of the action.
So I was caught so flat footed that I rode up late, probably 40 something minutes plus into it, and left my gas mask in The rental car.
So I was flat-footed, to say the least.
I thought it's just going to be the afternoon protests.
The MAGA protests in the afternoon, from what we've seen at Freedom Plaza, both in December and November, were not my beat because they were not riotous or conflict-bound.
I thought that Black Lives Matter Plaza would be the scene of the clash, but the night before, on January the 5th, There was little to no Antifa-aligned activist groups that showed up at BLM Plaza.
It was just MAGA, who actually went up against the police line that was keeping them from only like three or four people at Black Lives Matter Plaza.
I thought that was the story that I was going to be covering and continuing with, which was these anarcho-activist groups clashing with the Proud Boys.
Of course, because the Proud Boys chairman gets arrested right as he steps into D.C.
That's a whole other thing.
I did not know that I would be in the Capitol.
Myself that day and I had that moment for everybody who's thinking what you went in I had that moment as I was thinking what happens do I go in as a journalist and I quickly reviewed my my thoughts on the on the free of the freedom of the press and the First Amendment so I When I got there, I was not in the first breach.
I will detail that later.
It was more towards probably one of the last breaches that I was documenting at the Capitol.
But as I said, why am I not staying in one lane?
These tactics, I've emphasized this since I spoke to the New York Times, these insurrectionary tactics, These ideas, so to speak, can be shared and they can be appropriated and expropriated from one group or radicalized political spectrum group to the other, I would say.
And in fact, they inevitably will be.
In fact, the anarchists have appropriated and frankly just learned these tactics from other movements around the world.
Not all of them, but many of them.
So there's this process of innovation in which these challenges to power are learning how to resist the machinery and the strategies that come back at them.
It's natural and it's inevitable.
I will say on the topic of your wondering whether or not you should go into the Capitol as a journalist, it seems to me that obviously there are reasons to be concerned for your own safety and not to go in, but as a journalist we needed you there.
We need as many eyes on the situation as we can get, so it's obviously a journalistically not only Defensible action, but clearly something that a journalist who's willing to take the risks should do.
That said, I think this leads to a very interesting set of questions because I hear a great many people playing with the idea of terrorism in this case.
I always feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up when people loosely invoke that term because they don't understand that it has become legally special and that a journalist who would ordinarily be protected by the Constitution might be endangered by provisions in particular of the NDA
NDAA 2012, which Chris Hedges, amongst others, a highly decorated journalist in his own right, compellingly argued in a federal court put him in jeopardy for having interviewed, I believe, members of Al-Qaeda.
And so there's a question about whether a loophole has been inserted into the American legal structure That might cause a journalist like yourself who is due constitutional protections to be jeopardized if somebody decided that what they were reporting was inconvenient.
So in any case, let me just say I regard you as courageous for having done it.
I see there is no moral compromise in you reporting on story that captivated the world it is exactly what you should have done and In the unlikely event that somebody decides to go after you for it.
I would just say You have my support.
Well, thank you.
I you know, I also thought to myself I've comes this far tracing these tactics because I was pursuing a story that was around different ideologies, but how critical mass gives cover for tactics.
That was my first paper that I wrote in June was called Under the Cover of Protests.
What was going on?
What were we not seeing?
What were we not getting from mainstream media, the ideologies, the subculture?
The subculture, that's the other thing.
That's the other thing.
I know a lot of people have a Viking seared into their mind.
I know a lot of people have a Viking seared into their mind.
And I asked my dad, he said, what do you think?
And I asked my dad, he said, no, I've seen him about 15 times.
He said, no, I've seen him about 15 times.
The eccentrics that make the headlines, that are social media, viral material, that spread like wildfire, the cherry picking.
All of this is important because it needs to be parsed.
We need to know how many people were there.
Was it tens of thousands?
CNN wrote hundreds of Trump supporters.
And it was an arena.
It was tens of thousands.
It was an arena size.
That's the best, you know, we don't have accurate counts come out yet.
I've been googling that like mad, but it was an arena size crowd, and I use that music festival analogy of just having to burrow your way over the course of, you know, 45 minutes or so just to get up to the Capitol.
And then you had these layers.
At the Capitol, you don't just walk up the steps and go in.
You had these terraces that were above that you could not get into them because they were interior stairwells that were shut.
So once they breached the police political blockade, once they breached that, again, with critical mass, just like the third precinct, I would say.
And people are, I know, people are going to say you can't compare the two from whatever their moral leanings and political interpretations are.
I will say this, I denounce, I denounce violence.
I am a pacifist at heart.
I'm I've said that before on your podcast So I will say that right right now if you are if you are sharpening your knives and getting ready to come out After me for what I'm about to report as far as nonpartisan truth about what I witnessed what I who I talked to that that went across the character spectrum of the right now again, I
I would say that what I saw were different types of protesters, but you had the critical mass, and somebody texted me, a reporter colleague, and she kept texting me, who was there?
Who was there?
And MAGA, I mean obviously it was connected directly to the President of the United States, and I have said that he bears full responsibility for what happened, because the speech This was one continuous motion from the speech at the Ellipse near the White House.
The march of the tens of thousands, the populist march, was scheduled as the wild protest.
And wildprotest.com was up until it wasn't anymore.
So what is wildprotest.com?
Wildprotest.com was an information site which I didn't get to see because I didn't click on it in time before it was taken down, but a conservative contact sent me a full list of the events that were happening the night before BLM Plaza, you know, and there were certain websites that were listed from organizing bodies.
Wildprotest.com.
If somebody is good at finding websites through Google Cache, it would be very interesting to look at it.
But it was a populist website that was promoting what the President of the United States himself termed was going to be a wild protest.
They ran with it.
Whether people knew, how much people knew or didn't know is very similar to the protests that we have seen all year long.
They were autonomous in nature in the sense that you had all these different, not everybody was paramilitary.
And some of those guys, I mentioned the Viking, I would say were even performative.
Right, right.
I must say, there's something about the focus on the Viking.
I think people have the sense there's something very wrong with that, and therefore we're just going to, you know, broadcast images of it.
But I'm I'm not more disturbed by the Viking.
In fact, the Viking in some sense seems to me like, you know, and I've seen some things on your Twitter feed and elsewhere, where he's interviewed in other contexts.
And while I think his understanding of what's going on in the world is incorrect, You know, I understand where he thinks he is.
So I don't see him as sort of the, you know, the high watermark of evil.
I see him as an interesting measure of just how divergent the mindsets have become.
But before we get there, You say, and you acknowledge, you don't know how many people were there.
I feel certain the federal government must have a near exact count because surely those plazas are amongst the most monitored places on earth and probably that count was generated automatically by systems that just simply can detect the fact of humans as individuals.
What I don't want to gloss over is the people who breached the Capitol were a small number of people benefiting from, I've forgotten your phrase, but basically the fact that the crowd changes the game theory such that a small number of people can do things they couldn't do under ordinary circumstances.
Right, you have cover.
You have cover.
From thousands of people, yeah.
Cover, which is exactly the same thing that I have argued creates looting, which is that a system that is built to prevent theft on an ordinary day is overwhelmed by natural or artificial events, and at the point people realize that that system has been momentarily suspended, they do things they wouldn't otherwise do.
But nonetheless, cover exists, but Let's say it's thousands to tens of thousands of people who are present, supporters of the president.
Those people were not in on nor were they necessarily even aware of the breach of the Capitol.
My understanding is many of them were far enough away that they learned about it later.
Is that accurate?
I would say that it was the rhetorical pattern, the rhetorical message was to essentially lay siege to the Capitol.
In other words, the first people that I interviewed, I went up.
That's the other thing I was trying to say is you couldn't get up.
So you had to go up scaffolding or you had to scale the wall itself, which we've seen many images of people doing.
So I was going up this rickety scaffolding.
People were climbing, Spider-Man-ing their way up in the interior of the scaffolding.
So it was this elaborate, elaborate march to the rotunda, that that group that was out front, that was paramilitary and eccentrics like Viking or the guy from Brooklyn with the pelts.
He was like a Jewish kid that was, you know, you had these performative eccentrics that were in on the drama of it.
But you had serious paramilitary folks and I speak to one in a live stream on my Twitter, which is at Jay Lee Quinn.
And I did a live with him two nights later in front of the Capitol and he called himself pro-coup.
He He was, even after that, he was still... Wait, wait, wait, wait, you gotta slow down there.
Because there are two mirror image versions of the term coup circulating in the same story, right?
So my understanding is a great many of the people who stormed the Capitol believed they were preventing a coup.
And you're talking about somebody who is pro-coup.
Right.
So I'm trying to... Not only pro-coup, he identified himself as a right extremist.
He said, I'm an extremist.
I said a fascist.
He said, I like to say federalist.
And then he espoused some very, I would say, unpalatable views, but he was very honest about who he was.
Such as?
Such as Weimar Germany and National Socialism, and then you start to go down that cultural rabbit hole that is very niche, in my opinion, of what we would call racist.
So, a neo-Nazi.
Without wearing any affiliations, I would say he satisfies the requirement that the leftist activists have been looking for, and I have been looking for, because I've constantly said, well, the MAGA people as a whole, I'm not finding that.
There may be outliers.
And I asked him, well, how many of you were there in your crew, in your unit?
And he kind of, you know, danced around it.
It didn't seem like he had a huge crew, but he was defining himself as paramilitary, pro-coup, and as an extremist dedicated to the President of the United States.
So I did find one, and I did interview him.
Cool.
We'll get back to him.
So, at the very least, in terms of our gallery of different perspectives that were present, you have a genuine neo-Nazi, self-defined, I would say.
I would say, yes.
He says feminist, but yeah.
He says, well, I mean, National Socialist.
Right.
Well, yeah, when he starts talking about it in a positive light, then you start to say, okay, we know where you're coming from.
I don't think we need to split hairs.
He's definitely in the neighborhood of a neo-Nazi.
We've also got a guy clearly carrying a Confederate flag in our Capitol.
Yes, the report said at least one, and I don't know what that means.
Yeah, let's say we've got at least one, right?
That's a pretty dramatic invocation of a very particular thing that the left frankly alleges is commonplace.
And I don't think it's as commonplace as the left says, but there it is in this particular incident.
You also have, what are we calling the guy with the horns on his helmet?
I'm calling him an eccentric and a shaman, a primitivist of some sort.
He has like this sort of paganist vibe to him.
Yeah, okay, primitivist, paganist, I've heard him called Beowulf, which I think frankly is not a bad nickname in this case, but he isn't I'm not defending him, but he isn't like those other two examples.
He is his own outlier, and less of an outlier because what he says in interviews that I've seen with him, I went looking for his YouTube channel, which is now suspended.
Oh, really?
Yep, it's gone.
Huh.
So I wasn't, you know, and we will get back to that, because I think this disappearing people's channels is a part of the big story here, and I'll get back to why.
But in his case, what he says in the clips that I've seen, he is convinced of the QAnon understanding of the events of the recent past, And he is there defending, I mean it's very much, I would say, you know, a much more standard view on the Alex Jones right, right?
He's espousing a view in which there are globalists, that they have targeted the U.S.
Constitution, and he is there defending the nation and that document.
Right?
Which is a very different motivation than the Confederate flag guy or the National Socialist Federalist that you met.
And so anyway, my point, I think this will be obvious to people who know me, is not that I'm defending any of these things.
I don't think any of them are defensible and none of them Justify the breach of the Capitol, but the point is you have an eclectic mix of people who breached the Capitol.
You have a much larger group of people who were present, who provided what you said was cover, who were responding to a message about a wild protest.
But here's what I think is afoot here, or at least partially.
Wild protest could mean something symbolic, right?
Wild protest, and I don't know, it sounds like you've seen at least recordings of what was on that website, I'm not even aware that the website existed, this is the first time hearing of it, but you could have a symbolic protest, which many of us would agree is a legitimate response to concerns about the way the wheels of government turn, and the fact is we can't hold people to the standard of
Only the accepted facts because the problem is if it's only the accepted facts and those who control What is accepted control, you know, obviously protest has to be able to voice concern about things even if it's not true so the question is what
What is the interaction between a president who is, I think, clearly sympathetic with people who were involved in something that I think is insurrection, right?
His encouragement of a Large number of people to protest something in a way that could have been a simple symbolic speech.
It could have been civil disobedience.
It ended up involving a small number of people with cover or a small fraction of them breaching The Capital, but how are we to sort between these things?
It's not one group of people of one mindset.
It is an eclectic mix of people who seem to agree on one thing loosely.
Right, and it's populism, and it's a cultural populism that binds it all together under leadership.
And this is, I had a terse, we'll get to it later, but I had a terse exchange with a leftist keyboard warrior type journalist
Activist journalist and we'll get into how that plays into all this and one of the the I point out that the tactics Between the leftists, you know were appropriated but also they had leadership and they had the president of the United States uniting them in leadership to follow their emotional through line to wherever it was going to to lead in this in this spirit of insurrection and
The things I heard said, the comments, of course, were 1776 will commence again.
I've been seeing that all summer long in response to COVID restrictions and what is defined as government overreach.
And I've ridiculed it, you know, I would go, I would argue with friends of mine who are on the right about this, because I was very, especially the first Two months of COVID.
I was very keyboard warrior myself about, all right, let's get in.
Let's do this.
Come on, California, where I'm from.
Wait, wait, wait.
What was your perspective at the time?
At the time, when we did not know what it was, my perspective was, all right, let's bond together as a nation.
Let's not make this political.
Let's get inside.
Let's do the things we need to do.
And then, you know... So wait, you were a COVID hawk.
You were not of the mindset... I was a COVID hawk.
And I even remember publishing a video of Santa Monica when people were still, you know, on the trails and biking and saying, what the heck is going on?
Why aren't we getting it?
Now, things changed a month and a half later when I actually said, okay, they're presenting research that the transmissibility of this outdoors is not, they don't have the evidence for this.
And in fact, it's being pointed to the contrary.
Shouldn't we be at least opening the beaches and being out?
And I got just mauled by really good friends of mine.
So you and I, unfortunately, we have to do this perfectly clearly because some people, what you are reporting on is so interesting and the focus of so much discussion that I think a lot of people are gonna see this who don't know you or me and they need to understand where each of us are coming from.
In this case, I was, and I would still say, I am a COVID hawk.
I am also Alarmed at the way COVID is being used and the way we are having a an absurd discussion surrounding the costs of things like Lockdown, closing public spaces outdoors.
I have been alarmed from the beginning about the fact that outdoors, and I'm not saying this isn't changing.
It could change.
Evolution could change this, and it may be involved in these new strains that appear to be more transmissible.
We can talk about that another time, but I am alarmed at both the danger of COVID and the response to COVID.
Um, so anyway, I think you and I found ourselves in the same bind where an attempt to figure out what was true, what was overreach, resulted in an allergic reaction of people who were clearly treating this in a partisan way.
Yes, absolutely.
And I've known this, I've felt it, and I've had dialogue, a friend of mine who I've known since kindergarten, who is on the opposite side of the political spectrum as I am, because I as a left progressive, you know, here I am, a former Bernie voter, and he's libertarian right.
And so he's very anti-mandated vaccinations and in that culture.
And so he was very hawkish on that side.
So I saw the culture war playing out.
But one thing I took away from it was that people don't want to be, this group is against government mandates, government overreach.
And I don't know how much that's being talked about as people process what they saw or what they think they saw play out at the Capitol on January 6th.
But I heard a lot about the Constitution.
I heard a lot about government overreach about 1776.
And these citations all work together in an attitude of cultural populism.
Now, I'm looking in as an outside observer.
I have a lot of contacts now because I've made contacts with other journalists.
I think I'm one of the only people from the cultural left who's out there immersing himself in both sides of this protest and going back and forth.
So, I keyed into that.
People were asking me, well, who was it?
Who was it?
Sure, that front line had to be paramilitary.
They had to be versed in tactics.
The fellow that we talked about who defined himself as federalist, but we're saying that there are some neo-Nazi leanings there, and he defines himself as an extremist.
He said he studied tape.
He said, you don't know how many hours of A video I've watched.
I studied Antifa, and he calls them Antifa.
And one thing, you know, when we spoke last time, I parsed what I say I call Antifa-aligned groups.
That's the terminology I use because there is no one singular Antifa.
And part of the belief that there is one singular Antifa that has communist leanings, that vacuum of information Our inability as the press to say exactly what's been going on since June and define that has left it open for conspiracy, I would argue.
And so these cultures of conspiracy are filling in the blanks with their own information.
And I held a very interesting, and all three of us got heat.
On New Year's Eve, I did a live stream with a Black Lives Matter organizer from Utah and a Proud Boys chapter leader from Utah as well, who befriended each other over the summer and started debating each other.
And they struck up this friendship and they realized that they were fighting about all this other stuff, but they had several points of commonality of interest when it came to police reform, prison reform, getting big money out of the elections, dealing with housing.
You know, they agreed on all of these fronts, and yet they were fighting about political identification.
And they came forward right after the president mentioned Well, actually, it was Joe Biden that mentioned it in the debate, and the president notoriously said, stand by, stand back, and stand by.
During that, they came out a couple days later, and they got very little coverage.
I think BET and maybe one right-wing publication wrote something about it, but it didn't get much play.
They realized, oh my gosh, we have all these points of commonality that we actually agree on stuff.
We did this livestream, and even the Proud Boy was saying, I'm nervous because there are people There are people who have military experience that are pissed off, that feel disenfranchised.
And I said, well, what did we expect in the sense that if you don't call it, if you're the media and you don't call it objectively, you don't tell it like it is since June, Wouldn't we think that other people would take these tactics once they're disenfranchised and it would all boomerang back on us?
Didn't we have the foresight to know that if we didn't say anything and let all these Groups play out locally using insurrectionary tactics and all the way from I saw skateboard you know there everything that from the helmets to the gas masks the skateboard to to the pedestrian tools I personally did not see one gun the whole time I was there.
And that's significant because the people on the front, apparently from photos, and it would be interesting to find out how many guns were there, but among the populist crowd, there were people with flak jackets, body armor, but there weren't people with arms that but there weren't people with arms that I saw.
So it would have to have been a very small minority.
But that all works under the same, that tactic of using these pedestrian, I saw a woman with coming out with a a chair a leg to a desk like one of these ornate swervy and it had been pulled off of a desk and she was and she was sorry and Holding it like a weapon.
And so this idea of using makeshift weaponry from pedestrian materials, that all comes from the leftist movement and what we saw over the summer of insurrectionist tactics from anarcho-antifa aligned groups.
And I do need to get to the difference between anarchists and antifa.
There's been a lot of talk out there.
The Antifa groups were not a part of this because it's ideologically opposite of what they were saying.
Black Lives Matter DC said, "Everybody stay at home." They said that.
At the same time, some affinity groups were planning Black Black action, but presumably at night at Black Lives Matter Plaza.
They were preparing for another repeat of what I was expecting to cover, which was November the 14th and December the 12th when those two groups clashed at night and started just LARPing and beating on each other.
So yeah, go on.
So those groups stayed home.
Those groups, for all I know, stayed home.
They had a couple of documenters that went in to take pictures, but from what we could see, they did not enter the Capitol.
They were culturally just there as a fly on the wall.
There are a couple things going on here, and I have to apologize to my audience here.
There are so many threads here that it is very hard to navigate this story and really paint it in any disciplined way.
And I regard that as a symptom of the fact that there is a kind of, there is a force that tries to prevent you from crossing the line.
It's one thing to report on one side or the other, but it's a sin to report on both.
It's a sin to try to figure out what the middle, Ground is where each side has it wrong what they might have right and so the point is There are very few people doing what you're doing.
There are very few people doing what I'm doing.
The reason there are very few people is that the pushback that you get, and the pushback even in terms of, you know, having your channels deplatformed and things like this, makes it a very hard road to navigate.
So what that means is that when somebody like you who has seen both sides of this, has been in the street, has circulated in both settings, that when you come to the fore, there are just too many things to say.
I have the sense that we could go for 24 hours and not fully exhaust all of the threads that are here.
So anyway, I'm not sure exactly what to do about that.
But yes, the tactics are deliberately Confusing.
They reside below a certain threshold so that it is much harder to tell the story.
So in Portland, for example, we had the Antifa BLM anarchists launching Fireworks at police officers and federal buildings, right?
Fireworks has a kind of a festive connotation.
It sounds fun and dramatic.
These are explosives.
Are they explosives designed to do a huge amount of damage?
They are not.
Are they dangerous?
Yes, if you point them at somebody.
So anyway, the point is it's very hard to report what happened, you know?
The fact that firearms were not Uh, at least common amongst those who stormed the Capitol is a fascinating fact, right?
These are almost certain to be very well-armed people who left their weapons at home while storming the Capitol, right?
I'm not sure exactly what that says, but it certainly says something.
Well, yes, there were not guns everywhere.
We've seen the pictures in Michigan when there were.
And one note, this protest at the Capitol, Salem, Oregon, you have to see that that was the canary in the coal mine.
that you had for the first time right-wing riots before Christmas at the Oregon Capitol.
Those, it almost, when you look back at that video, you think, oh my gosh, that was just a small, tiny, small-scale idea of what this sort of feeling was coming from the right populist crowd.
That was, you know, the Proud Boys did not show up.
If they were there, you wouldn't know.
And their chairman said, we're going to wear black.
And he said that we all thought in reference to expected clashes with Antifa-aligned activist groups.
But no, if they were there, there were lots of people that were all in black, and you couldn't tell who was who.
And this is something that I blogged the night of the 5th, which is, how will we know who is who?
Even on the night of the 5th, when I was at Black Lives Matter Plaza, And anti-COVID restriction, anti-government overreach types were, you know, yelling through the bullhorn and clashing with police trying to get closer into Black Lives Matter Plaza.
And there were some clashes.
I was seeing, we saw Proud Boys who were in all black.
And we also saw some people wearing the orange beanies of Shut Down DC, which is the group that famously showed up at, was it Josh Hawley's residence, outside and with a megaphone.
And so we saw some rightists, or people on the right, wearing these, people were appropriating left-wing accoutrements and costuming.
Okay, so this takes me back to something you said a few minutes ago, which I really want to highlight.
Yeah.
What you discovered, where you have a BLM activist and a Proud Boy discovering that they have a great deal in common, that there are things they disagree over, but actually bonding over the number of things that ought to unite them, Is, I think, the big hidden story here.
That in some sense we are fiercely divided so that we will not be fiercely united.
Right?
And this is why I started the unity movement.
This is exactly the danger I saw coming out of this election.
And the idea is there is a general sense of frustration at basically the public being frozen out of the well-being that is generated by our system.
Increasingly, systematically frozen out by a pervasive culture of corruption, much of which is legal.
And so the point is, if you have a legal culture of corruption that causes the government to do the bidding of those who can pay to have their bidding done at the expense of the public, it will create massive unrest and distrust.
And the fact that that unrest and distrust is divided into factions that are pointed at each other, rather than there being a broad recognition That actually, yes, Americans have a right to be very angry with what has become of their governmental structure and neither blue nor red is the solution to it.
Blue and red are the problem and How we Americans address that is a very difficult puzzle.
Increasingly, this week, I see people toying with ideas of the right scale, right?
New political parties, a recognition that the parties that we have are simply too compromised to be rescued.
That seems to me obvious, right?
But people are now discussing it.
And so, in any case, what I want to point out is that you're committing a kind of physical heresy by moving between these camps and listening to them both, because what you're going to find, what you are finding, what I'm finding by being someone from what I would say is the far left, not the far left that's in the street, but I come from a very left perspective, And I talk to all kinds of people on the right who are not what I was led to believe they would be.
Yeah, same.
So that discovery is, in some sense, the greatest threat to the narrative engine that wants everybody to stick to one version of events that tells them exactly who their the greatest threat to the narrative engine that wants everybody to stick to one version of events that And then turns off their processes of reason so they can't discover that's not even true.
And this...
The events at the Capitol play right into this.
But, you know, in some sense, you were there.
You're the key to understanding what actually happened.
Well I saw so many similarities and I tried to discuss it and of course maybe it was too early too soon because bringing this stuff up that that I was seeing the similar tactics similar strain of populism and one thing that I said is a riot is a riot is a riot and it's just the same stuff I'm seeing under different banners and people just got Furious with me.
And I understand that.
I'm not talking about the moral alliance to causes and how you interpret them.
I'm talking about the people there, what they were talking about as far as the Constitution.
And again, it's defining the crowd.
They define themselves united under patriotism.
So while they were trashing the Capitol, they weren't burning it.
And there's some other significant images that are being cherry-picked.
Again, this was a five-hour ordeal in which you had tens of thousands that were marching in and breaking police lines that were completely unprepared for this level of riot, mass riot.
This was just unlike anything I've ever seen in my life.
And once they'd breach one barrier, they'd breach another.
And You know, there were lulls where sure, law enforcement gave up and just said, threw up their hands, and you have a guy taking a selfie, and you have another image of people just going through.
But the problem becomes that we are so quick to jump on a narrative, an activist narrative, For a tribalist activist narrative that already the story's being written that makes its way to the president-elect of the United States and the vice president-elect before anybody has even spoken or asked a question to somebody that was on the ground.
Now I'm not just talking about the handful of reporters like myself that went all the way up and into the Capitol and talked to people and tried To get a beat on what was culturally going on.
I'm talking about, they didn't talk to anybody.
And already you have articles up from CNN before people have even left.
There's articles that are being written about, well if this was a BLM protest, And people are just going on this, they're not even looking to ask the questions of who's there, why were they there?
That's what journalists should do.
And yes, I am committing this heresy, exactly, because I get attacked on both sides for it.
And it's interesting to me that as I came down, I went up once and that was my scaffolding, It took a long time to get up to get all the way up the scaffolding and then I was stuck and I realized I couldn't get across to the terrace and I was high up And I, I'm one of the ones who climbed down the interior of the scaffolding and was, you know, monkey bars, monkey bars, uh, moving my way back down.
And it was dangerous.
And then at one point a guy yells, get out, you know, you know, and there were, cause there were dozens of people doing this.
And then there were dozens of people going up this scaffolding staircase, and then they were trying to pour over and then get up to the, the, the upper terrace.
And so there's a lot of the geography of how packed in we were into a small space has a lot to do with the other three deaths that we know about the shooting death that happened in the two o'clock hour but the other deaths there is a right wing Live streamer who I have a, uh, I don't even know his name.
He just goes by villain at villain report on, um, he's from your area and I've had some discussions with him and we exchange cultural notes because I know a lot more coming from the left than he does about what the left really is.
And I tried to tell him that this isn't one, you know, united communist, uh, effort on America and, you know, and then he has, he has, um, information that, that I tap into.
And I saw him coming out of what I would call the second breach at around the four o'clock hour.
And he was stunned because he saw a woman die.
And she, it was not the one who was shot, but, and names are swirling around in my head.
So I'm not going to name the victim, those who passed, but he was there and he said what happened was there was mace sprayed everywhere, Officers, people, and people were getting crushed up against the wall and he said people couldn't breathe and she collapsed.
They tried to resuscitate her and he said he tried to get a pulse and he couldn't and she passed right in front of him.
And so when I saw him coming out in the 4 p.m.
hour, he was dazed and And he didn't make it all the way in.
I went in later with a group that was in one of the final breaches.
So the confusion was widespread.
At one point I saw a canister when I was on the very top level being thrown from below.
to above.
The gas canister was making its way in the opposite direction.
So you had- So somebody picked up a canister that had been launched by police and returned it?
Yeah, possibly.
Again, this is an even fireworks.
Stuff was coming in every which way.
And it was, again, the identical tactics, the same thing that I've been watching.
One person said to me, I've been watching, you know, my website is publicreport.org.
And that's where I host the Unblocked podcast where I try to talk to people from that are activists on the right and the left and sometimes get them to have actual conversations on the same cast.
And he said, you know, watching all the clips that you've been posting, it's like I've been watching this movie since June.
And then all of a sudden at the end of that film was this blockbuster ending in which everything, you know, got turned up on itself.
And it was stunning.
And people thought, you know, what were people saying?
When I went inside the Capitol, I was approached by this scraggly sort of Duck Dynasty bearded fellow who had an American flag as a cape, and he walks up to me and he says, are you streaming?
Are you streaming?
And then I wondered, okay, you know, because if I was on the left, that would be shut down.
You know, I'd be shut down.
Because they, oh, they did attack the mainstream press pin and destroyed, you know, knocked cameras over and stuff.
They're very anti, this group was very anti-mainstream media.
But I was just holding a phone on a little, you know, stand.
And he says, are you streaming?
He's like, come with me if you want to see history.
And he was very dead serious.
And he leads me in through broken, like a broken glass area to where a whole bunch of them are just destroying furniture and trying to make some kind of blockade.
And I can go into detail of that later.
I can see you have a question.
Well, I do.
I want to highlight this issue.
There is a kind of, you know, unfortunately we don't have other versions, but there's kind of a yin-yang symmetry here, where it's not the identical same thing.
In fact, the relationship to the press on the Antifa left and the QAnon right appears to be inverse, and for reasons that I think we can We can understand, which is the press has proven, the mainstream press, has proved compliant to a phony narrative about the U.S.
being a white supremacist place in which, you know, blacks are fighting for their lives in the street every day, right?
It's a narrative that is provably false.
It may be a stand-in for a narrative that's true, but much harder to describe.
But in any case, the press is, the mainstream press, is looking for examples that point in the direction of Trump is the problem, it's the Republicans, the solution is blue, Biden is the answer.
And so the Antifa left has been utilizing that, and in fact they've been effectively trying to create incidents that the press can then edit down to something and say, aha, right?
The federal fascists came to Portland and this, you know, ragtag band of resistors fought them off, right?
Well, that's not what happened in Portland, but if CNN reports it, it becomes something.
So The Antifa left is playing the mainstream press and the QAnon right is allergic to the mainstream press because there's nothing there for them, right?
So anyway, these two sides have an inverse relationship and the destruction of those cameras rather than, you know, and the Antifa left is of course hostile to the individual who wants to report the story on the ground because that gets in the road of them Gaming the CNN, MSNBC system, right?
So anyway, that asymmetry is interesting.
That's very accurate.
I just want to take from that that when you talk about the narrative, I think I would rather push back a little and say that they're exploiting the Black Lives Matter populist movement.
It's being exploited By those who want to control the narrative and who have burrowed in as keyboard activists.
And that keyboard activism, and I'll get to it in a minute, was already happening one hour into what this big five-hour event was.
It was already being trying to get people to think that this was just people that walked in, like a couple people like in Michigan, that just walked in And I wasn't there, so I don't even know how to characterize that over, you know, back in the spring.
But the idea that people just waltzed in is patently false, ridiculous, and contrary to everything.
And people will see that as more video comes out.
That's why the video needs to be there, is that there were so many different breaches.
There were so many obstacles.
The police were overpowered.
At one point, a guy is climbing and Either an officer or somebody knocks him off and he falls.
You know, a story.
And we don't know if there's going to be more fatalities in the future because what was going on was an all-out siege of the Capitol.
And it was the critical mass, in other words, of the populace that was behind it, just like Minneapolis.
Of course, these are different.
I'm not weighing in politically on what one group of people thinks and another.
I'm just saying that there are, if you, if you don't want to look at similarities, then maybe don't, don't listen to me, I guess.
Well, right.
So, I mean, at the very least, I believe there are now five fatalities.
Yes, because an officer... The woman who was shot, a police officer died.
Three people, one of whom sounds like was overwhelmed.
Maybe they had medical problems and they were overwhelmed by tear gas.
Somebody else was crushed.
So, At the very least yeah Yeah, so I've been wondering about those three other fatalities.
I find it very conspicuous that they're reported as People died, you know in medical emergencies.
Well, I saw a man collapse Towards the end of it towards 5 p.m I saw a man just collapse and just fall to the ground and an older man and I don't know if it was one of the two male fatalities that that wasn't the officer, because a law enforcement officer also died.
So I did see that.
We were so packed in at certain corridors, if you were trying to get further.
And by the end, this was very interesting.
By the end, they were just trying to get people out.
Now, I was in the last group that came out of the Capitol.
There was gas everywhere.
We were being gassed.
We were being ushered out.
Still, some women who were next to me, there were like grandmothers for Trump, is a thing.
One group of the first groups that I interviewed were part of Grandmothers for Trump that were in the first breach and I live-streamed with them and they were hugging each other and they're saying, we did it, we did it, we showed them that this is our house.
So that was very explicit about what the populist attitude was from these moms from Orange County.
At one point a mom from Orange, I don't know if she was a mother, but she was an older woman from Orange County said, I'm going to latch on to you and she held on to me as we burrowed through trying to To get through.
So, toward the end, they were still resisting.
These two older women were still going against the cops and we were being pushed out.
I just kept saying yes.
I just kept saying yes, yes.
And I was trying to just put that energy because we were, you know, crammed up against what would be a fall if these railings are not, they're concrete barriers that are lower than, you know, Your torso.
And so I was just saying yes and trying to get out.
This is a very interesting thing.
As people were leaving at the very end, I heard people shouting traitor and oath breaker to the officers.
And it was mostly the Virginia State Police that was called in.
The Virginia State Police came in around four o'clock and they did a lot.
They were ushering out doing a lot of the heavy work towards the end.
Didn't the Virginia National Guard show up?
I don't know.
The cars that I saw all said Virginia State Police, and very clearly there was a massive Virginia State Police presence that was involved, especially towards the end of getting everybody out.
Some people were yelling, Oathbreaker and Traitor.
Other people said thank you to them.
So it was this bizarre dichotomy of people who are back the blue and a pro law enforcement were saying thank you for your service.
And then other people were saying oath breaker and traitor.
And that was going on right next to each other without them censoring the other.
In other words, one person then did, hey, did you say oath breaker?
It was... Right.
The idea was everybody gets to say what they get to say.
And in doing that, of course, you're going to cherry pick the eccentrics.
There is a guy with an Auschwitz hoodie or something.
And interestingly enough, when this happens similarly to in December, all of a sudden, They start, sites start popping up where people are trying to sell it, you know?
Oh, that explains it.
I went looking.
I saw that image of the guy with, I don't know, Camp Auschwitz or something?
Camp Auschwitz, yeah.
A horrifying thing like that, and I tried to figure out whether it was a reference to something, and I ended up at some site selling t-shirts that had nothing to do with anything, so I guess that explains it.
This is a tactic, and you don't know if it's from the Alt-right or the alt-left, so to speak.
You don't know which of the extremists are doing it, but this happened with the shirt of the 6M.
They translate it to saying 6 million wasn't enough, that somebody who was in the Proud Boys was wearing a shirt that said 6M something E or whatever it is.
Once people took that image, and then it was widespread, All of these sites started popping up, faux sites that were selling the shirt, supposedly, all over the internet to make it look like this was a widespread thing.
Well, no, so this is different.
I'm not saying that isn't the case.
I'm sure it is.
The thing I ran into was a site selling shirts that had nothing to do.
You couldn't find a Camp Auschwitz shirt there.
They were just selling what seemed to be random Slogans.
I think it was just somebody parasitizing the fact that there were suddenly a lot of searches on that.
Ah, I see what you're saying.
That happens as you have these people who get these shirts, probably custom-made, and then somebody, an activist, finds them, it goes viral, and then all of a sudden you have sites purportedly selling Okay, so there's one thing that's really important here then.
So what we are discovering, what I think both you and I know from experience, but is very, very clear in this incident, is that a tiny number of what I would call people on the fringe of the fringe, right?
Actual Nazis who you said the last time you were on my podcast that you had not encountered these people, even though that you had been told.
You've now encountered one.
I've now encountered one, yes.
You've now encountered one in the wild, okay?
That's an outlier, right?
A guy who would carry a Confederate flag into the U.S.
Constitution in 2021, I would say that's a different kind of outlier, maybe not as far afield.
A guy who would don a Camp Auschwitz t-shirt, these are extreme outliers who were in this group, but they were not Representative even of the extreme fringe that I've already said was involved in an insurrection into the Capitol.
And that fringe who was involved in the insurrection into the Capitol, whatever their reasoning was, left their guns at home at least for the most part.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
And then you have this large number of people outside the Capitol who some have told me many were unaware of the breaches.
Maybe that's not true, I don't know.
There was a rumor mill.
When I was in the crowd, you had a rumor mill going.
For example, at one point someone said that they got into Pelosi's office.
There was very intermittent cell phone reception because you had so many people.
It was that rock concert thing that you can't access the internet.
You couldn't stream.
So sometimes people were getting incorrect information about the woman who was shot and killed, but we did that.
spread like wildfire.
When we heard that a woman had been shot and killed, you know, some people had the age wrong and so forth, but that spread like telephone.
And that's how information was being passed.
You really couldn't parse what was true and what wasn't.
But we did know that somebody was shot and killed in the crowd.
And even though, you know, remember that's the 2 p.m. in this hour, and this goes through the 5 p.m. hour, people kept going.
People weren't going to leave.
Some cleared out.
It was like, okay, we were there.
But, you know, maybe the crowd went down to half, but people were still, I don't know if that's accurate, but significantly people peeled off.
I I had come down and I did a live stream.
That's when I talked to the grandmas for Trump that were congratulating and hugging each other.
From knowing each other from the circuit of going to these Trump rallies.
And then I went back up.
That's where the scraggly beard guy takes me up into the Capitol.
And we're in offices.
I didn't go to the rotunda.
We're in some offices which they have completely been destroying all the furniture and they're building some sort of barricade and arming themselves with table legs and making a charge through this sort of smaller corridor.
And again, you get down to performative eccentricity sometimes with these people up at the front.
The guy with the scraggly beard and the American flag as a cape starts going full John Fogerty credence.
It ain't me.
It ain't me, he said.
I ain't Joe Biden's son.
And then he opened the door and led the charge down the corridor and they got into these offices and just started ransacking them and trying to break out the windows.
And one guy was trying to get the Mac.
It was a big flat screen Mac and so forth.
I'm sure he never got it out because we got smoked out of that within, you know, 10 minutes or so.
So, I'm also getting this weird, you know, back to this sort of... Sorry, I just need to correct.
I said we.
They.
I was there.
I was there as a documenter.
And I want to make that perfectly clear because that's not something that I want to... Yeah, for what it's worth, it's clear to me that this is confusing because to the extent that you and other human beings are driven out of a room
by smoke or tear gas uh there is a we and then to the extent that you you were there reporting on them uh that's not a we right that's a them so anyway both of those things are live and i think uh you know my audience will understand the distinction but uh there's um There's something just very interesting.
You have, in effect, two different kinds of anarchism.
I've made this argument for many years, that there's a kind of, there's a thread that links the anarchists and the libertarians, the extreme libertarians, right?
That they believe in some very similar things, but they dress differently.
And in the case of Antifa, Anarchist, Black Bloc, you have this de-individuation, this attempt to blend in so you can't be identified, and there are obviously tactical reasons.
The primary reason to do that is tactical, that you can't be picked out of the crowd by law enforcement.
But on the other side, the QAnon right side, You have the inverse.
You have, you know, a guy literally wearing a Viking helmet, you know, bare-chested, right?
The guy's so identifiable that, you know, inside of hours of this happening, everybody in the West is aware of this person.
So there's this sort of hyper-individuation.
There's no Discipline whatsoever.
What are a bunch of grandmothers who think they're defending the Constitution Doing in an insurrection with a guy in a Camp Auschwitz t-shirt a Confederate flag and somebody who says he's Sympathetic with National Socialism.
I mean this doesn't make any sense.
It's chaos.
It was chaos and it wasn't Anarchistic and in more than the just a superficial way and I'll explain that as well But but yeah the grandmothers That we're all following the guy with the scraggly beard, as he, you know, quoted John Fogerty.
As he quoted John Fogerty, who, you know, presumably would want nothing remotely to do with this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I ain't Joe Biden's son, and they all went.
I mean, it was surreal, to say the least.
And, you know, the Confederate flag, which you mentioned, If you want to call it an outlier, it's the most consistent one, because the social justice left, or the progressive left, of which I am culturally from, sees it very different, very different, than other folks.
And it's a media divide on interpretation, and we know to decry it, but even when I was in Tulsa, The same performative thing.
A guy had a kiddie bike and the kiddie bike had a big long, you know, bendable pole going out the back with the small confederate flag on it.
But the idea of freedom of speech, in other words, I keep asking people, The material that you're reading, have people mentioned anti-globalization?
Have people mentioned being constitutionalists and freedom from government overreach?
Because these folks characterize themselves against big tech also.
I heard that a lot.
They were railing against big tech and big media and corporate media, especially as I said, they trashed their equipment at the media pen and the idea that this portrayal of them and their heritage and this is where I'm going to start sounding like an apologist and I'm not saying anything is a value judgment on the Confederate flag I'm
I'm just saying that they don't police, hey dude take that confederate flag down because there is a commonality of freedom of expression that is so specific and trumps
Everything else because they feel they're being policed as far as their freedom of speech all the way to history now to the history of the country that they're being Policed and they don't believe in that form of freedom of speech and then so you would say to yourself Why isn't somebody smacking that guy with a Camp Auschwitz?
Hoodie across the face and saying dude get the hell out of here, but that's they maybe they I I don't want to rationalize.
I don't want to make a value judgment.
I'm just saying the current of the freedom of speech, I will fight for their right to say it even though I don't agree with it.
That current is very strong in this libertarian-esque populist MAGA group.
So, okay.
Very good.
A couple things to say.
The right fringe, and I think the right fringe, you know, almost was geographically displayed in the assault on the Capitol, right?
You had a large number of people on the right fringe, and then that goes all the way up through these, the fringe of the fringe, who were inside wearing these offensive, symbolic t-shirts and everything else.
So that's not one thing, right?
You've got grandmothers who were committed enough to actually, you know, engage in an insurrection, presumably in favor of the Constitution, and you've got every other stripe.
They do a terrible job of enforcing any sort of There's nothing that rules out your ability to join that group, right?
And that indicts them.
The fact that you don't police the guy in the Camp Auschwitz t-shirt is, in fact, evidence that you're missing something very important.
The opposite thing happens over on the Antifa left.
Right?
Where there is this hyper-discipline.
You cannot deviate from this, uh, the exact description, right?
To say that not all cops are bastards is to declare yourself a fascist, right?
This is, it's the opposite problem.
And I will say, I take a lot of crap for, um, spending more time talking about the hazard of the extreme left.
than about the hazard of the extreme right.
Now, I think I'm in a better position to talk about the hazard on the extreme left because the left is my home, and so I see it better.
It's a natural, and I also feel it is my obligation in some sense to say, hey, look, there's all this stuff circulating on the left that's extremely dangerous, right?
I don't want that to become synonymous with the left.
I want it to be understood that there's a diversity of opinion, and that some of these people really just simply are crazy.
The fact that they're on the left doesn't mean they're my responsibility, so I want to highlight those distinctions.
But in any case, you've got folks on the far right who are not policing their membership so that, frankly, Nazis can circulate amongst them, even if most of them would not have sympathy with it, enough that you would have not encountered such a person until this enough that you would have not encountered such a person until this very extreme
But I will say things like the distrust and antipathy for big tech, right?
This is a very interesting issue.
The right thinks this is about them.
It isn't.
Big tech is policing anything that challenges their control over the narrative.
I have been tossed off of two platforms in the last year.
One of them personally, Facebook threw me off, and the other one, the Articles of Unity account, which was the official account of the Unity movement, which I initiated, was thrown off of Twitter and remained suspended.
I was able to fight my way back at Facebook, but the Articles of Unity account, which was decidedly nonpartisan, started by somebody from the left, was thrown off.
So in some sense, the responsible folks on the right need to understand that the fact that they face a kind of asymmetry when it comes to big tech isn't about right or left.
It is about control.
And the fact that Big Tech happens to view it, it's aligned with Team Blue, is confusing them.
And they should, they should get over it.
Interesting, I hadn't thought of that.
I mean a lot of my videos have been either squashed or I tried to report, I did not, the one city I didn't go to through all this was Kenosha, but I was in a position to grab all the feeds and edit them together and that video was going, just going, and then it all of a sudden was squashed.
My Billy, it's also a pay-to-play sort of thing.
You have to put money in to content to get it going in Facebook.
Now, here's something that I pointed out to a friend.
I used to work, when I was living in New York City, I took time off from journalism and I worked for a startup that got all this Google seed money.
And we were launched trying to figure out how material would be shared.
And they had a comedy division.
I used to work with comedians and be involved in that scene.
So I was working with comedians and stand-ups producing content.
They had fashion and then they had extreme sports, which I think was the only success that they had of those.
What they were looking for was how does content work on social?
What we are most concerned about is how can we create content And it gets engagement, and it's shared.
And at that time, they were hiring very young, you know, millennials, because the millennials would understand how that worked.
What you found out was that people, I think, I look back, that was like six years ago, and how that's evolved.
People, what, to answer that question, what are people sharing?
They're sharing Content that provokes outrage and consolidates this tribal outrage that is similar and you don't waver from that emotional response from that content.
That's what they figured out up until now, is that content that goes viral is shared because of these tribal uh, outrages that, that you are able to sort of ride from, you know, the algorithm.
And that's, what's profitable.
That's what's making money in, in web content.
So it didn't surprise me.
And I was preparing myself when I was coming down from the Capitol and I was thinking to myself, how are people going to interpret this?
Because I've been shut out with no cell phone reception from what's going on on CNN.
And I thought to myself, okay, they're anti-big tech, they're anti-media, they're pro-Constitution, you know, anti-government outreach.
How do I try to characterize this MAGA patriot thing?
that's happening because people keep asking me, well, who was there?
Was it Antifa?
No.
Was it anarchist?
Well, some people can be anarchistic on the right.
Anarchism is a very flexible personal philosophy and the leftist anarchists just, you know, a lot of them can't take that, but the classical anarchists, Kalei Lassen, who was one of the organizers of Occupy Wall Street, who I interviewed for my podcast, said, "Anarchism is a who I interviewed for my podcast, said, "Anarchism is a free for all.
It's a fuck-all attitude of anarchist spirits.
And he said, the second you start doing divisions, those classical anarchists, the old school, he said, I think I told you this before, he said, it makes me want to reach for my revolver, which is sort of this revolutionary sentiment.
Anna Antifa is definitely a social justice, left, anti-fascist.
Even I, for breaching the conversation, and you, they would label us as the opposite of anti-fascist, and we know how that game plays out.
So that's a very strict social authoritarian order on the left.
Anarchism is different because it's much more flexible and it can be applied to the right.
And that's why you have anarcho-libertarians that were militia in Kenosha who said, as long as you don't fuck with each other and you fuck with the government, we're with you, were the exact words.
And they said, all lives can't matter till black lives matter.
So they were aligned with a struggle But they were libertarian.
And then you had libertarian left, like the guy, his name was Ivan Hunter Harrison, and he was charged for shooting at the Third Precinct and yelling justice for George Floyd.
And he was aligned from another guy from the Carolinas who got busted for trying to sell, this was all Boogaloo stuff.
And the Boogaloo falls in that ambiguous territory, because he was busted for trying to sell arms to Hamas.
And then you have other Boogaloo who are trying to kidnap, You know, the governor of Michigan.
And one of them has an anarchist flag behind him.
So this hybrid, the way that the subcultures are intermingling way beyond our understanding of right and left goes very deep.
And this is just all a result of the internet.
Because as much as I was focusing on shared content and people making money from that content that provokes a symmetrical outrage, you also have people who are cross-pollinating in these very fringe, bizarre ways.
Well, you also have what I have argued is a essentially literal group psychosis, that what we have is incoherent, incomplete thought patterns resulting in behaviors incomplete thought patterns resulting in behaviors that make no sense except relative to some internal world, right?
So, So, you know, what is the correct reaction to a world in which cops shoot black people regularly and get away with it scot-free because that's just how things are, right?
The reaction to that world would be one thing.
It happens, it's provably not the world that we live in, right?
But if you are...
trying to sort out the truth of what world we do live in and the channels that are supposed to help you navigate what world we do live in are compromised then the answer is you're sort of reading tea leaves to figure out where you are and then some video shows up that suggests you live in that world and the answer is well okay let's go we all know we've been preparing for this we know what to do likewise you know what do you do
You know, in a world where, you know, the globalists have, you know, targeted the Constitution and are this close to establishing a new world order in which you're, you know, going to be a wage slave or worse for the rest of your life.
And so the point is, these are wrong descriptions of the world.
But they are flowing into a vacuum where the thing that is supposed to help us make sense of the world and figure out what world we actually do live in has been compromised and hijacked by various things, some of them utterly mundane economic forces, some of them systematic in their attempts to gain power and control.
And so anyway, it leaves a totally confused populace In which basically everyone is left to their own conclusions and when they extrapolate from them we all express horror at what some group of people is doing because it doesn't make any sense relative to the world we think we live in.
We have to do something about that.
The fact is, we cannot just point at others and say they're acting psychotically, because they are acting psychotically, but that description accounts for almost everyone, and the thing that is most necessary in order to cure the psychosis
Are people who are willing to do what you're doing and what I think I'm doing, which is to follow these stories where they lead, process the evidence irrespective of, you know, who it reflects poorly on, And try to grapple with its implication.
And, of course, the irony of ironies is that for doing that, we're everybody's enemy.
Which, you know, people really need to recognize that.
That whether you like what you're hearing or not, that the obligation to protect anyone who is at least trying to do this Dispassionately and fairly, right?
Whether they do it well or poorly, just simply the attempt is an indication of honor.
Well, and I found that there are some who are willing to talk.
As I said, I spoke and saw the blogger villain report, and we live streamed together afterwards and did a kind of debriefing of what we saw.
You know, he challenged me on why I voted for Biden.
I challenged him on other things.
But the dialogue was important because we weren't seeing each other as political adversaries.
We were trying to process.
And he's somewhat in his reporting of he live streams.
And when he comes on to his side behaving bad, he addresses it.
He captured a very graphic moment in December on the 12th where the Proud Boys moved unilaterally on an antifant group.
Now, that video would later be opportunistically cut to make it look like the Proud Boys were attacking some random couple.
Which wasn't the case.
It was a black bloc Antifa group.
And at the beginning he says, oh my gosh, this is Antifa.
They're in, uh, what, this is not good.
They're in the wrong area.
You had this, they were coming through or there's this big MAGA crowd and ended very violently and persistently violent, you know, and this is where you get to the madness of the mob.
It is no one group, no matter how moral they think they are, is immune to the total madness that takes place when adrenaline takes over and people are fighting in the street and they just are going as far as it will take is immune to the total madness that takes place when adrenaline And your reason is left at the doorstep.
I talked to one conservative who she's, I would say, controversial in the sense that of being one of these activists.
And even she was like the next day, I don't know what I'm glad I wasn't there.
I don't know what I would have done because she's one of these people who is operating on emotion.
for what I think is a very misunderstood representation of Black Lives Matter.
People who are anti-Black Lives Matter, we went over this and I received pushback from some viewers.
I think Black Lives Matter has been MIA.
I think it's been the leadership and all these other groups.
There has not been enough differentiation that the press has been willing to take on and say, okay, these are what these Antifa groups are, which we talked about in 2017, If you're the Washington Post and the Daily Beast, you ran articles about these Antifa groups and then you left it alone since then.
And so there hasn't been enough of distinguishing what anarchism is and anarchist tactics and insurrection is.
That we have an understanding this is not just a right-left thing, but they're a shared experience and the least of which is the total madness of the mobs.
Yes, absolutely.
So for people watching this who don't find themselves in one of these groups or the other, which presumably is almost everybody watching this, one thing to just track is This is a measure of a broad sense of profound and dangerous dysfunction.
You have lots of people acting very aggressively, attacking structures that clearly are essential to the nation and therefore to all of our well-being.
Across the political spectrum, right?
That is a measure of the dysfunction of the thing that is supposed to be protecting and guarding these people, right?
That shared understanding that something has gone wrong is It is a symptom, but it is a symptom of the thing that we have to address, right?
People are not going to allow themselves to be frozen out of the well-being that they generate or left to fall through a shredded safety net quietly.
So the particular way this is manifesting is interesting and perhaps unexpected, but the fact that people are in this mood so broadly is an indicator that, you know, the alarm is sounding and this is what it sounds like, is what I would say.
Yeah, and I saw a sign in December that said, now we revolt, and we was capitalized.
It was somebody on the right that was holding it, and it just, because that was of course after, you know, Biden's won the election, and I just had this ominous feeling going into the new year of, when is it going to boomerang back?
I did not know it would be so soon, so definitive, and on such a massive scale.
And one of the right wingers that I interviewed said, this is how he characterized it.
He said, these people, some of them have, you know, former military training.
And they don't.
They're upset.
The way that, you know, folks like us are portrayed constantly across the boards.
The fact that this stuff has gone on as long as it had on the left without the media really being honest with it.
He said, I'm very worried.
I'm very worried.
This is before, you know, the Capitol on January the 6th.
He said, I'm very worried about what is going to happen.
That's somebody who's considered a moderate.
And he was called a capitulator and so forth.
We will not capitulate is sort of the talking point from those on the right.
So I do want to address this experience of being in the middle of all this.
And you can tell that I'm still hyped up on it in the sense that I've not only was there to live, have the lived experience, but then I have to go and I have to research and stay up all night looking at all the stuff that I've missed and that I didn't see that, There were people, we were on the west side of the Capitol, there were people who came in from the east side of the Capitol even, you know, keeping track of the fatalities and what the processes.
You know, the New York Times wrote a piece in which they really lay out the different, the timeline and the geography of it.
Because people are, again, I have to say this is a five hour event.
There were highs and lows.
Of course, there were times where these folks were clashing with the cops.
And there were times where I'm sure it would have been, you know, turn on the good cop thing and try to just, and there were probably times of submission, where you have tens of thousands of people who have breached the capital of the United States of America.
Are you going to, you know, After people have died, one, a woman is shot, another woman we know was suffocated and trampled, and then two others die, possibly heart attack and other causes.
So you know people are dying.
At what point is that photo that you take to make your social justice point, where does that lie in that five-hour timeline?
Right.
That's significant.
And this is the other thing that that, you know, I came out a little heated about is that there's a picture on CNN.
It was a CNN photo and they ran an article saying, Comparing police reaction and look this is the first 12 hours you're gonna make you don't know you just don't know yet And you're already putting this stuff out there That's gonna make its way all the way to the president-elect of the United States, and you don't know do you know why cuz you weren't there?
You're somebody that's that's quarantined writing and Interpreting the Twitter feeds where do your Twitter feeds come from do you follow activists?
You probably do, and you're probably getting the viral clips that are cherry-picked, that come out, and they say, you know, look, this guy was taking a selfie, and you say, oh, these guys just walked in.
And you're making those claims.
Before the New York Times took a day and then they put it out and they gave an accurate You know who the sources are that are doing real journalism.
You know who those are who are jumping on a wave to get you outraged because they know that that makes money, that that facilitates engagement from viewers.
But the photo that went viral, that even my mom sent, was this photo outside the Lincoln Memorial.
And you see all of the National Guard in riot gear.
And the idea is, this was the response to Black Lives Matter, and these people just walked in.
What date was that photo from?
It was from June the 2nd.
Does anybody remember that on May 29th, the President of the United States was bunkering himself at the White House?
That's the 29th, 30th, 31st, 1st, that's the 5th day.
You're trying to tell me, what you're selling me, From this image on the fifth day of a national riot, the fifth day in Washington, even longer if you include Washington DC to be specific, even longer if you include the national crisis that we're in.
You're going to tell me, you're going to take that and you're going to take this guy getting a selfie at some point within the five hour siege that broke through the Capitol.
And yes, you did have people, as I said, saying traitor and oath breaker and others that were saying thank you for your service.
And you're going to cherry pick those two and you're going to make this grand claim without talking.
And you can do it.
That's fine if you're an activist.
But you're going to do it without talking to the people that were on the ground.
Any of them doing any journalistic, taking any steps to be a journalist and talk to people that were there and find out what were the attitudes?
Who was there?
How many times did they have to breach the police?
What was the structure?
Why were they going monkey bars up scaffolding?
There's a huge, this is a huge problem.
Cataclysmic event and people by the time I got to my car Friends I went to social media and there they were sharing those exact points.
They were saying and it was lined up.
It was just and You have to I trace it to the 2 p.m.
Hour and this is a very specific Tweet that I saw from a reporter who actually inspired me to come up to Portland over the summer Robert Evans he has been embedded with the leftists and And he markets himself as a watchdog for far-right extremism.
Business Insider had an article of his immediately critical of police and this is why this all happened.
But he tweets at 2.15 something that would be proven wrong.
And I just want to read this because if you have, and I don't want to single out Mr. Evans, he's somebody who I invited, full disclosure, onto my podcast because I pitched to him, we should talk about the difference of in-bed reporting domestically.
And he's also been abroad, I want to say to like Syria and other places, when you're embedded abroad and domestically, what issues does this bring up?
And I wanted to have a real conversation with him.
And so I did approach him previously.
But he tweets at 2.15, BLM supporters would have been shot with live ammo the instant they broke through the barricades.
That's 2.15 p.m.
We're an hour, you know, half roughly into this thing.
News isn't out yet that somebody was shot and killed in the neck.
So already the activist outrage is churning before the story is even a quarter on its way in real time.
The activists, the keyboard warriors, get this out there.
Now that's an account with 187,000 followers, many of them young, and that makes its way, and I'm not saying it's just one person, I'm saying there could be parallel thinkers that are seizing upon the same talking point.
Pretty soon you have CNN Van Jones is echoing this and saying young people feel this way, that if it were black people it would be this response.
So we're making no effort culturally to find out what happened, who was there, what they wanted.
They're just, again, it's heresy if you do anything beyond issuing the brand a fascist.
That's it.
That's all that this web Journalistic culture is willing to accept, and I don't even, I use the word journalistic in that term, excuse me, because how is this happening?
And in full disclosure, I gave him a terse reply.
I said one, you know, a woman was just shot, and we got into it a little because I I'm critical of this tribalism.
And I pointed out something that would be later confirmed by the extremist that the guy, his name was Mark.
This is the thing.
These people give their names.
They're not hiding behind masks.
They're saying we're here for the revolution and my name is Mark.
And this is the federalist who, self-described federalist, who has neo-Nazi, espouses neo-Nazi beliefs.
That's, you know.
That's the best that I could describe him.
He self-described extremist, and I'm sure there were others like him that were pro-coup.
So anyways, they were there, you know?
I'm not disputing that you had those people there, but that, the dialogue, became about race so quickly by keyboard activism, and it makes its way to younger people that are working for these big media companies that know social, just like when I worked for that company that had all the seed money.
They were trying to get young people to figure out, well, what can be shared?
And it's this tribal outrage stuff.
So I saw this develop in real time on Twitter.
The first place I saw this connection made was Ibram X. Kendi tweeted that I I hesitate to say exactly what he tweeted because I won't get it perfectly and obviously there's a hazard in that, but the point was effectively, we all know what would have happened if this had been black people.
And my immediate thought was, in 2021, I actually have no idea how it would compare.
Right.
I have seen so many instances where the simple fact that, you know, Black Lives Matter is being used as a banner provides an amazing level of protection from any police enforcement of the most obvious and important laws.
So, anyway, my sense was that this was the creation of a false fact, right?
The fact that we have been induced to accept is that the the breach of the Capitol looked very different because the people who were engaged in it were overwhelmingly white and the fact is even if that were true we don't know it to be true.
In 2021 there's every reason to suspect it's not true because we have seen a very different set of reactions
Having everything to do with race and a sensitivity to race that has allowed for all kinds of lawlessness and violence and destruction So, you know who knows but your point about if if you're a verificationist right if you're not an honest broker and you want to sell that story and You can look through months and months and months of riots and find places where the police reacted
Arguably aggressively, although to be honest it wasn't many of those, but over the course of many months you will have those instances and you want to compare it to this, you know, did you say five-hour siege of the Capitol?
Right?
A, you can't compare the two because one is happening in the aftermath of the other and so therefore whatever happened in the earlier phase has some impact potentially.
But if you were going to try to do an honest comparison, you would compare the first 12 hours, right?
And, you know, even then you couldn't do it because that which is being attacked is different.
An attack on the Capitol is different than an attack on the Federal Building in Portland.
So, in any case, the idea that you don't—it's not that they're failing to do journalism.
They're trying to avoid doing journalism, right?
What they want to do is they want to advance a story that explains why they are going to react in the way they are to this, right?
They need a story that's clean, and so if they have to manufacture it from whole cloth, By saying, oh, there's an alternative universe in which the opposite happened, and there was a massacre.
Why was there a massacre?
Because the people who were storming the Capitol weren't white.
Right?
Well, you just made that up.
Right?
That didn't happen.
What's more...
You know, as you point out, you do have the police shooting a white person inside the Capitol, which suggests that, you know, whatever the story is, it's complex and it's not a slam dunk that this was a timid response.
I think there is a legitimate question as to why The Capitol Police were not better prepared and why there was not backup given the possibility that something like this would happen?
Where was the National Guard, right?
I do think, you know, in light of where we are and all of the energy and heat surrounding the election and the counting of votes and the certifying of the election results, That it would have been wise to, you know, spend what would presumably be a relatively small number of million dollars to prevent this from occurring by having the capacity to resist anything that could be brought to bear.
I do wonder why that didn't happen, but nonetheless, the idea that there's some clear story and that we all know enough about the way things function to know that if the skin color of people who had breached the Capitol had been different that the outcome would have been the inverse, whatever that means, That's just nonsense.
And it did develop online as you watched people who had a decidedly partisan perspective attempt to figure out how to formulate what was happening in real time so that it fit their worldview.
There was no challenge to their worldview.
It just simply matched everything they'd been telling us all along.
It's something like this, the stories, the most profound stories, I said this about COVID, the most profound stories in our life don't affirm what we already know, they challenge it.
They challenge what we think and what our perceptions of the world are, if we really take a deep dive and don't cling to what our ideology is.
And this whole year has been that for me, you know, and starting from, you know, Yeah, and even before May, because of COVID, it's just been a cataclysmic year.
And I am worried if folks are too entrenched.
I think the question that you bring up is, why were they so unprepared?
We're going to learn a lot more, I'm sure, about that.
People who are much more insiders are going to be coming out with information that is going to be very interesting in regards to that.
But from my point of view, Why I was flat-footed was I left my gas mask in the car.
I said, that's for tonight, you know, because you're tracing a pattern where the daytime protests, whether it's been in Washington D.C.
at the Supreme Court or at Freedom Plaza where they had the MAGA Million MAGA March, has convened both on November the 14th and on December the 12th.
The clashes were happening at night afterwards, or at least when the sun was going down was when you had the political gang war of jets and sharks coming out and beating on each other's helmets and spraying each other and so forth. or at least when the sun was going down was That was consistently happening at night.
So there was this relaxed attitude, even on my part, which was, oh, I'll get there at 1.30.
I'll listen to a little bit of the president's speech first, and then I'll get there because I've got to save myself for tonight because tonight's going to be the big one.
So it was a departure from the law of the patterns that we had seen.
We hadn't seen a right-wing protest at day, with the exception again of the bellwether of Salem, you know?
We hadn't seen that in Washington, D.C.
Those million MAGA marches in front of the Supreme Court and at Freedom Plaza, you wouldn't even say mostly peaceful.
They were 100% peaceful.
That group.
So when it was expected that that group, for not even a third time, because they also went to Washington Monuments and the Supreme Court several times, as part of the pattern, it was not expected in my mind that we were going to have a siege of the capital of the United States of America.
It defied my imagination and expectation.
And I'm someone who said this whole time it's going to boomerang back.
The tactics, the animus, everything.
Filling in the blanks with what they don't understand because there's been no criticism about what's been going on.
Because the fascist narrative, you have to believe it or you're a heretic.
We knew all that and I still couldn't really see that it was going to be that big at the Capitol, even as I was walking up and burrowing myself into the crowd.
Well, that's fascinating.
I realize as much as it's hard to see even into the next few hours in circumstances like this, do you have any broader sense?
You've spent a lot of time on both sides of this battle between fringes.
Do you have a sense of where we're headed?
Well, my hope My hope, one, again, another contact, and a lot of these contacts are from the right, because quite simply, people on the left aren't out there.
They're not mixing it up in doing this.
It not goes for Antifa-aligned group protests, BLM, and the MAGA movement protests.
It's been mostly coverage from the right.
And when I talk to them, you know, one vloggers said, you know, I think these people have jobs to go back to.
A lot of them is what he said.
And he said, you know, I, and I got a message that even protests during the inauguration, there were initially supposed to be.
And before this, before the Capitol, it was already making its way around that the inauguration protests would be canceled from the right, which was this interesting sort of message of this is it, you know?
That morning, that was going around.
Now, I don't know if that's the case.
There may still be Inauguration Day protests in the nation's Capitol from the right.
I am not sure.
The attitude was, you know, from some people that, you know, and it depends on the fringe, those people are still pro-coup.
So to speak, that something else will still happen.
But even from someone who I saw burning a Black Lives Matter flag, who I said, that's something I, you know, am vehemently against burning other people's symbols, let alone a hashtag motto.
And for that person, it meant something different.
But, you know, there was a dialogue there where I said, that's not something I can obviously get behind.
And I just want to point out that everything you're projecting onto that slogan is all of this other stuff.
And then I asked the person, you know, maybe the communist flag, did you think?
And the person was like, oh, no, no, I have one that I'm going to burn.
You know, so that I engage with people that are on what we would call extreme emotional cliffs in regards to all of this is part of the story.
And that's why I engage.
That's why I talked to that person.
Because you know what was interesting?
When I talked to that person the next day after the seizure of the Capitol, that person said to me, I feel awful.
This is the person who said, I'm so glad I wasn't there myself.
Of course, they have to protect the Capitol.
Can you imagine, you know, if it wasn't us and it was another group, you know, what would we be saying?
There was this soul searching that was going on of, have we become the very thing that we said we were against?
Did we become that?
And that's a question that, in conflict, that should always be asked.
Yes, I think every side should be asking this, and frankly, you know, I hate to be somebody who's always saying, you know, things are worse than you think, and until we wake up to that, they're going to continue in that direction.
My feeling is we could be very close to turning the corner.
But if what we keep doing is doubling down on, you know, on our priors and basically buttressing whatever phony narrative we're being sold, then the trajectory is pretty clear, right?
We're headed to disaster.
Well, let me tell you, I mean, and we need that reflection.
It's just if the press will give it to us, and this is where it comes down to a part of a system that I've been a part of.
that needs to be held accountable, and there should be some whistleblowing.
I would challenge anyone who's been around this all year, who wanted to report something, but was told they couldn't, who had their stories rejected, who saw their institution pursuing a narrative, there is an obligation to tell the who saw their institution pursuing a narrative, there is an obligation to tell the truth of what was going on and
And let me go back to that CNN photo that was juxtaposed of, again, day five of the...
The Washington, D.C.
riots and was juxtaposed to somebody taking a selfie.
Because that narrative, again, makes its way from activists to mainstream media to the president-elect of the United States who came out and echoed the very same talking point that a Pacific Northwest activist journalist, leftist journalist, was tweeting at 2.15 p.m.
by the next day the president-elect is saying it.
And again, it's not just one person.
It was a lot of people because these people are all interlinked and they yes, they yes and each other.
They say yes and yes and and all of the activists, you know, there's a woman who who blogs for or writes articles for Teen Vogue, which I mentioned prior that has this big anarchist section as well of anarchist literature.
And, you know, I follow all these these people.
There is a social justice, anti-fascist group that is extremely quick to spin the narrative.
And these younger kids are hooked into them.
So they get, these accounts have 100,000 followers.
These younger folks start parroting it.
And so if you, tell me if you work for CNN and this is your bio, I'm not going to name the person.
But if this is your bio and social, I'm part of CNN's race and equality team.
This beat speaks to who this person is and sees the world.
Telling stories of multiculturalism, Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Asian American communities.
Now, that's something we're all for.
Me, at least.
And the intersection of race with sports, gaming, education, and more.
Now, as I gave that disclaimer in the middle of it to defend myself, From the fact that I was naming all, you know, diverse races of which I'm a part of, and of course I want equal opportunity and better understanding in this world.
If that, you know, what was it called again?
If that team is the race and equality team, which I'm for, sounds great, right?
And this speaks to your background and your experience.
If that lens is first and foremost on the internet with the young team of millennial and Generation Z writers and bloggers.
If that is always going to be the lens, I'm concerned, and I would give this challenge to any young people that are listening to me right now, because I was in Portland, and I did see moments where the pacifists like myself were at the Bullhorn, and some folks who were in Black Block were like, Willing to listen and willing to hear other ideas.
And if you're part of that group, have discussions beyond what's popular and getting the likes and getting the retweets on Twitter.
Have discussions even off Twitter.
You know, let's help us do us all a favor and have these discussions about ideas and ask yourself if everything really needs to be always through that lens and always through the people who are telling you to do that, who you retweet and you look to.
If it always has to be that because that may be somebody's personal obsession.
That may be somebody's identity of social justice keyboard warrior and everything about them and not enough about the people who are on the streets and the stories that we need to learn more about in regards to people who do not think like us and see the world like we do that inhabit the same nation that we do.
And that would be my challenge and my hope for young folks and everybody, because I get it from my friends.
Again, you know, my best friend since I was in high school hasn't talked to me since September and won't assort with a Trump apologist.
Again, not my... Yeah, it's not what you are, but if he sees you as that, then he, by his own rules, can't talk to you.
Well, one quote from another friend said was, what you're working against is the human brain in some ways.
That the way that we are stubborn and we insist on seeing things a perfect way, and if somebody challenged that, I have another friend who's Bless him.
He's so reliable that if I say anything about equal like trying to this is similar or or that make any comparisons I get a just a rant of profanity.
Which, uh, the best way, the best way to deal with, with profane rants is humor.
It just has to, it has to be, it has to be, we have to be able to laugh again.
We can't be so policed in every emotion that we have that we can't figure a way to laugh at the absurdity of, of what we have been through collectively for the last, you know, the last 11 months.
Yeah.
I agree with you.
I think in some sense, um, You have to be able to look at anyone with decency and see their humanity.
And then, you know, those with humanity, and it isn't everyone, but it's most of us, have to embrace nuance.
Which, frankly, the one thing you can know about nuance is that it's going to deliver you some things.
Some things about nuance are going to line up with what you expect.
And some things about it are going to go the other way.
And if your point is, I'll take the fraction of nuance that goes my way, you're not interested in nuance.
So we're all going to have to do that and somehow resist what comes back at us for engaging in that kind of heresy.
I'm going to ask five people that I emailed before I got to the Capitol.
Actually, the day before, I said this is what I had interviewed the chairman of the Proud Boys, which again, a huge heresy, back in September, and then tried to get comments.
And this is on Unblocked Podcast, which is part of publicreport.org.
I talked to him.
I got his views, and he told me he sees his only extreme view is that there should be no gun laws, which is interesting that he got himself arrested with two cartridges.
There are some that are speaking as if that might be deliberate to challenge gun laws and so forth.
But, you know, I don't want to get too far into that.
He is somebody who I interviewed because the Proud Boys have been on the receiving end of a campaign that you will never be more than white supremacists.
Not just that you are that, you will never be more than that.
There's no possibility for you to evolve out of that.
We've decided that's what you are because we've picked these instances.
But we have to ask ourselves how, and this is something I encourage, I'm not going to volunteer any opinions on the Proud Boys, I'm going to ask everybody to start doing their own research and figure out how extreme, when you listen to interviews, if the people who are, are these people platform ethno-nationalists?
I can answer that that's no, they're platforming something else and other conservative ideals that they say match up with this populist MAGA movement.
That's why you see them as security detail in Sacramento like I do when I have gone to Sacramento and so forth.
But again, the heresy of saying to people, Don't take my word for it.
At least look into it yourself, because the press has decided that certain people are beyond redemption, and they won't talk about it.
So if you're a publication that's decided that a particular group of people are beyond redemption, and for some publications and editors-in-chief it might be 70 million plus people, I challenge you.
I challenge those five people that I sent emails to who were members of the Raw Story, which is one of the big left tabloids, the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast.
If you're one of those people that work at these institutions that decidedly pursue one narrative, I challenge you to do other research and buck Your own viewership because we're not going to get anywhere unless you do.
If you keep making money and exploiting our divisions with this kind of sensational content that is, yes, you click up the engagement, you get the likes, and you profit off that.
But the price that we are paying as a society should trouble you when you try to decompress at the end of the day from everything that we are taking in from this heightened portrayal of anybody who belongs to the opposite political side of the spectrum.
Yeah, I agree, and I like your phraseology that they are exploiting our decisions for financial gain, and it's not only, you know, it's the risk that they're putting us to that's the most troubling.
Because if they keep exploiting it, there will be no putting this nation back together, and the frightening prospect of its coming apart, what that will do to the West, Who that will leave the world open to is, you know, the cost is incalculable.
So, yes, they have a moral obligation to stop doing that.
I would say, and it's not inconsistent with anything you said, but there are irredeemable people.
They're not common.
And that's the problem, is when you take, you know, large numbers, many millions of people, and you decide they're irredeemable, you're almost certainly making a serious error.
So, you know, are there people in the Proud Boys who are white nationalists?
I have very little doubt that that's true.
Yeah, absolutely.
But I don't think it characterizes them all.
In any case, it is the obligation of journalists to figure out what's true, not to impose what's true on the story, which is what most journalists are currently doing.
My interview with Enrique Tarrio, and I do challenge him on, you know, this is the dialogue that we need to be having, which is why is there a Proud Boys channel that has racist content?
And are you denouncing that?
He says he is.
He says that they do denounce that.
And he wants to see more denunciation from the left, of our extreme elements.
So this was a very real conversation that we had.
And one thing that he said was, I think the lesson is people need to be heard.
That's what they want, that he's platforming.
Not ethno-nationalism.
He's platforming that people want to be heard.
That should be a message to all of us, and I know it came from somebody.
You've are, most of this country is determined as a irredeemable individual.
I would, again, challenge you and say do your research.
Already Mr. Tarrio was, when I got out of the Capitol, I stopped by a Salvadorian restaurant, and I hadn't eaten, and Univision, the station that I am a freelancer for, maybe still, I don't know, because I haven't worked for them since I got furloughed, Jorge Ramos was debating Enrique Tarrio on national Univision News, and they were talking about these issues.
And I saw that and my jaw dropped because I did not expect a mainstream outlet to do it.
And they were speaking in Spanish and sometimes switching to English.
And I was watching Jorge Ramos, who we know is very left and anti-MAGA and has had his run-ins with the President of the United States himself.
And they're having this debate.
And I looked at that and I said, yes, that's good.
I'm proud that I worked for that.
organization that they're willing to take the risk and have that conversation in, you know, somewhat of a cultural bubble of Spanish speakers.
But those are the kind, we need to take that lead and have those kind of hard, tough conversations that don't go smooth.
And there's a butting of heads and, and you, you know, your viewers will get mad at you.
Let your viewers get mad at you.
Let your viewers be outraged that you talk to that person, that you platform to them.
What's the worst that's going to happen?
Yeah, well, you know, the fact is there's a large number of, well it's not a large number in absolute terms, but a significant quadrant of the podcast landscape demonstrates that actually, although yes, lots of people won't be interested in hearing things that violate their core beliefs, there's a lot of other people who are nothing but interested in hearing about perspectives that don't match their priors, and so
It's amazing that there's not a mainstream journalistic outlet interested in tapping into that.
I think that's going to have to be a story for another day, but the question of why that journalistic outlet doesn't rise and take advantage of the obvious hunger that many of us have for decent journalism, that's a real question.
I just, I hope that people can start talking to each other again.
Because I don't remember when it, I don't, I didn't know, it's like I didn't know that it got this bad.
And I'm standing at the Capitol, and it's being ransacked.
And, and I've stood other places that were ransacked.
And again, I don't make a differentiation of, to me, A riot or an insurrection.
To some anarchists an insurrection is an insurrection.
That's why they're the wild card here.
And you'll get people on the right that look back at the Capitol and say Antifa was there.
Well, I don't think you understand what you mean by that because Antifa groups are in that social justice leftist category.
But there are anarchists that cross over, because as one anarchist famously said to me on Facebook before deleting everything and blocking me, we don't care who's fucking shit up as long as they're fucking shit up.
Yep, that does sound like a familiar sentiment.
I think it's in all our interest to confront Extremism on our own sides.
And I've never seen this story just as a right-left story.
I've seen it as us as a nation addressing our bigger problems and polarization that drives us to these emotional passions where we can't even see to respect, talk, or let anybody be heard.
Yeah, I agree.
The fridges cannot be allowed to drive, frankly.
The patriots in all camps have to come together and begin to piece our national story together newly, because we are in jeopardy.
We do not agree on even the facts, but we can agree that this nation has immense potential, that it has never been perfect, that it has outperformed expectations in many regards and been a model for freedom across the world, and that the chances that starting with a fresh sheet of paper are going to result in a vastly better place are vanishingly low.
So let's get to the job of fixing it.
And those points of agreement, that the Black Lives Matter woman from Utah, her name is Jakari Kelly, And Thad is the Proud Boys leader that became friends and they realized that they both stood against white supremacy.
They could say that.
So they said they stood against white supremacy.
They were against the school-to-prison pipeline and that they were for prison reform.
They were both for police reform.
They're both for getting Big money out of elections.
And so that was half of the points of commonality when you move on to housing and mental health and other issues that we all have a common interest in addressing.
And if those two can figure out to have a conversation and come to agreement, then By God, we all should.
We all should be able to challenge ourselves and what our friends are going to think and how people are going to point the finger at us and call us heretics because we talk to the other side.
If they can do it, they even said as much on New Year's Eve on Unblocked Podcast when they were talking to me.
They said, if we can do this, other people can.
Right, and I think this has been the experience of any who have ventured into the no man's land in the middle, is that we discover actually that there is a tremendous reason for us to come together, and that in some sense I think one of the suspicions that many people who have made the journey happen onto is that somebody wants us divided.
That's why we're this way, right?
It's not that we're naturally divided, right?
Nobody, nobody reasonable wants one race to triumph over others, right?
People want a good world and the divisions are largely artificial.
And you have to ask yourself, well, is it, is it, because a lot of people come out with conspiracy.
I always, my answer to that has always been, is it conspiracy or is it incompetence?
And in my experience, there's been a vast amount of incompetence.
Well, there's incompetence, there's natural emergent processes, and there's conspiracy.
There will always be some admixture between these things.
Yeah.
The part of the story that has me shaking my head is the press, because that's who I've been representative of.
And that they couldn't see that this would boomerang back, that they couldn't see if we don't cover this violence, if we don't talk about it honestly, what our side is doing, In a polarized tribalized world of course all of these techniques everything that we've been doing is going to to be redirected and say well you think you're the only one who can do that?
This is and the one thing that I the one refrain in the capital Was this is our house, this is my house, this is our house.
That this belongs to the people.
That's the statement that they were making.
And when I came down and I was composing this in my mind, this tweet or post to my friends saying, hey, you know one thing that nobody discussed up there?
Ever?
You know what was not mentioned at all?
Race.
That's what was in my head.
And then I turn, I get into reception and everything is race.
Yeah.
Everything.
You could just doom scroll of a post about race.
And I said, no, that's not the takeaway from what I saw.
And there is some cherry picking that's pretty hilarious.
When Van Jones is talking about how young people are saying this on CNN, and he's talking about, well, if it were black people that were in the Capitol, They're playing B-roll from In the Capital, and right next to him is a person of color in the B-roll, which was just very kind of amusing.
I've worked in media, and timing the B-roll with what a guest is going to say is impossible.
You're playing this footage from the control room and he doesn't see it.
So he doesn't see that there's a person of color right next to him in the Capitol where he's talking about if this were black people coming into the Capitol.
And then who was also there was that young guy.
I think his name is Philip.
He organized his black and he's the one who got his two front teeth punched out by Berkeley Antifa when they mobilized against him in San Francisco on October the 17th.
And I saw that.
I was there.
And he gave a speech anyway and they were throwing bottles at him and there was only a dozen of them.
And then the crowd, that was that day, the crowd went all the way around the block and then beat the shit out of Trump.
A guy just because he had a Trump flag.
And it was a mob, a black block mob, customized shields.
That was the day that I talked about elders in the background that the young kids were coming back to and so forth.
Phillip was at the Capitol.
I interviewed him as well.
Oh, this is one thing, if it can be edited in.
I'll make up a page, publicreport.org slash Capitol.
Yes, this person is there.
capital and public report.org slash capital, I'll put in interviews that at the Capitol, including that, you know, proclaimed extremist that it showed, yes, this person is there.
I'm not sugarcoating this.
Also there was the, the, the grandmothers for Trump who said they were in the Capitol and that first breach.
Also, I talked to Villen when he came out after he witnessed the death of one of the women.
I also have Philip who is this very well-known, and those groipers hang around him because they don't That's interesting because they've been portrayed as racist and anti-semitic and then they hang around Philip a lot too.
In fact, at Black Lives Matter Plaza on January the 5th, he took his shirt off and he was there and they were saying, they were chanting, fuck BLM.
Him and them.
So it's all these weird sort of surreal alliances and cultural, you know, subcultural currents that are going on with certain, with these alt-right young people who are coming up as well.
And it's been hard for people to parse because it's just, you have to take a deep dive into it and At some point, I appreciate you reigning me in because I just have so much that I have learned and experienced that I can just keep going, you know?
There is an unending series of things and, you know, one of the things I detect in talking to you is that you don't necessarily realize how remote this story is to most people, right?
They're parsing just the thinnest sliver of what's on the surface, you know, in part because that's what they're being fed.
And anyway, there's Just the simple fact that the story is more complex than you think is, I think, a key part of the message, and I hope people will take it very seriously.
I hope so, too.
You know, I've been living that Charlie Day meme, where Charlie Day's at the cork board, and he's going like this, and it has all the strings attached, and I think someone even made fun of me with it, but it's...
The failure of our journalistic institution, that has me very worried.
My view on guns has changed because I used to argue against guns and banning assault rifles.
Though I do think there should be some control, especially for people under the age of 25, from what I've seen, in other words.
out there, but that's just my personal thing.
But what I'm saying is that this story challenged me because I saw a vacuum.
If your media institutions fail, then your leaders don't know what's going on.
Well, you could say the same thing about universities.
You know, basically all of the institutions are failing, and you're seeing journalism because that's your home.
But it's across the board, right?
There's really not a major institution that you can point to and say, that one's healthy.
And because of that, yes, our leaders are Flying blind there There's no one to tell them that their arrogance is going to you know crash the the airplane into the mountain And so anyway, that's why That's why some of us are trying to raise the alarm is that the danger of taking all of the things that allow civilization to function and screwing them all up at once couldn't possibly be greater, right?
We're flying blind and there's nothing more dangerous than that.
Well, hopefully I can get some people to open their eyes and just watch a little bit about who these people were at the Capitol.
And again, I've said I condemn all of this.
I'm a pacifist.
I don't believe in ideologies, even.
I'm trying to get the story.
And so on publicreport.org slash Capitol, With an O, capital.
I will put video of people that I talk to in the capital, and I'll just have that laid out on one page so people can listen to some of these characters, including the bearded John Fogerty fan, who led me into the fray, so to speak, and I said I would document.
And he kept saying, where's my press?
Where's my press?
And so he had an idea of what I was there for.
The point I will make, you know, some people, it was hairy.
I mean, it was, it was intense.
And I didn't feel the crowd would turn on me.
That's a feeling that I get when I go into BLM Plaza.
When I was kicked out of BLM Plaza in our second conversation, I tell a story about how I was worried that the crowd would turn on me.
And I even kind of There's a guy that was on the megaphone who I'd seen him sick people on to other people before.
So to kind of diffuse it, I kind of was just very even flirtatious with him of just being, no relax, I'm on your team kind of thing.
Because I knew if he saw me as a Trump supporter and he started yelling in the megaphone, I'd be mobbed by the black bloc.
And I even told them, I said, I'm an independent journalist.
And they said, No, you're not.
Why?
If you're an independent journalist, why are you?
You look like you just got out of a job from a construction site is what they said.
And I was like, And I started talking about anarchism, and they're like, see, that's the mistake.
You thought we were anarchists.
And it's just like, oh my gosh, I can't get anywhere with these people.
And they're like, what do you think about Juneteenth?
And I was like, I don't have plans.
What do you mean?
And I couldn't remember which one that was.
And I was like, Juneteenth, you know, I'm usually really good at dates.
And then I said something about Tulsa.
And I was wrong, because of course, it's the final emancipation from Texas.
The president had scheduled originally the June 20th rally on Juneteenth, and so I got confused with the Tulsa massacre, and all of a sudden they were like, nope, you're fash.
You're fash.
That's what we think.
You're fash.
And so I was escorted out, and it wasn't even good enough for me to be a block away.
They had to take me Um, uh, even further a block and a half, one full city block and a half away from Black Lives Matter Plaza.
So do I get nervous at the Capitol crowd?
Yeah, I got nervous in the Capitol crowd, but I knew that the fanaticism was, um, I didn't think it would turn on me.
Now villains said he saw one person with a camera who was confronted.
So it's not impossible, but the, but the MO,
Yeah, well, it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, where the need to curate what the public sees in order to justify what they're up to is so intense that, yeah, they can't afford to have somebody walking around asking questions, filming what they want, because it will upend their narrative.
Yeah, and let me read you one thing because now that we're just kind of fast and loose.
So I responded to Robert Evans' original, you know, because I said, I also pointed it out.
I said, they used every anarcho tool you all developed these last seven months.
Only they had the numbers and leadership to go big, so they did.
Look, that's a provocative statement.
Again, I even apologized on Twitter.
I said, look, I'm sorry.
I was terse because I had just come down from the Capitol and I couldn't believe everybody was talking about race.
And you're tweeting this at 2.15 before you've realized that a woman's been shot and killed and you're creating a false narrative that people waltzed in when I've just been in the thick of it.
And you're being a keyboard warrior.
So that was my point of view when I said that.
Later, I apologized for the terseness.
I said, look, we should we should debate about this, about embed reporting and what I'm trying to do, how that doesn't fit in and so forth.
And he said, you're not worth debating.
You're a liar.
Part of why we got where we are right now is by dating and debating and platforming idiots like you and acting like you aren't lying grifters.
For my part, I'm muting you.
Your time in the spotlight ended long ago.
Yeah, those are a lot of tried and true lines and approaches strung together as if they mean something.
Yeah.
Then he tweets later, not to me, the funny thing is, the funny thing about this is I'm not, capitalized, a particularly skilled investigative reporter.
I do very little of the cool shit my colleagues at Bellingcat do to unravel Russian assassination rings.
All I do is open browsers, type in URLs, and read.
Pretty much reflects what you were saying.
Yeah, I'm like, is he being ironic?
I can't tell.
So this guy, again, not only that, he published to his followers an email that I sent him to his crew and didn't tag me in it.
So I would only find it, again, if I went on another browser and looked for my name.
And all it is, how incriminating is this?
The email from me, from Jeremy L. Quinn, on December the 29th, 2020.
Hi Robert, I wanted to see if you would be up for a podcast conversation on either your platform or mine.
Best, Jeremy Lee Quinn.
And then he characterizes it, Jeremy Quinn, showing his true cards as a fascist sympathizer.
Here is a screen grab of an email where he tried to get me on his podcast.
This idiot was one of the sources for a New York Times article about dangerous anarchists who, quote, checks notes, broke some windows.
So the tribal signaling, even of the ironic left, Of, look, we know what we're doing, but you know what?
You don't get to talk about it.
We talk about it.
That's exactly what he's doing.
And what's his evidence?
An email of me asking him to have a conversation on a podcast.
I've seen some incriminating emails in my day, but that one takes the cake.
And then I got a kid responding to it.
Alt.
That's all he says.
It's just alt.
And then I say, oh, excuse me.
I was just trying to, you know, you play it innocent and naive, not because you're lying to them, but because you are naive enough to engage with them on good faith.
And you said, look, I'm just asking to have a conversation.
Now there were some issues, and if there were terse words, I'm just trying to get to common ground and so forth and have this talk.
And then I got this ironic, you have reached an automatic AI system, like they're writing just these snarky, this will generate a, please leave your concern, and this will generate a response.
And it's just like, oh, you guys are just, I can't.
I just can't.
I can't.
Yeah, please, you know, just please stop.
Just stop with it.
Stop with the Twitter culture.
Because the Twitter culture is, it seems harmless.
But you're actually Controlling this block-and-follow culture is just ruining us, just taking us down.
Yeah, it's making it impossible for us to navigate and find the humanity in each other.
On the other hand, I think your responsibility is clear.
You did say in that email, your channel or mine, which is a classic white nationalist dog whistle.
Yes, your channel or mine.
Yeah, your channel or mine.
Yeah, you outed yourself, but I mean, other than that, you've played it pretty well.
Yeah, oh man, it was, again, I told you this on the first podcast, you know, to wake up one morning and just see your name just being, you're called a white nationalist, somebody is tweeting at Jack Dorsey, Jack, you You know, Jack, this guy is, you know, he's infiltrated the New York Times.
And this is, you know, this is, can you, and it's just like, what are people doing?
What are we doing here?
There was a conversation, look, the article from the New York Times by Farrah Stockman, who's a Pulitzer, a woman of color and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, was asking questions of whether these anarchist tactics, insurrectionists, And if there was one criticism or differentiation, rather, from the New York Times article in my work is I emphasize the tactics.
I always say, look, these are shareable, virally enhanced, you know, tactics.
And maybe that wasn't emphasized enough.
And they seized on it and said, see, the New York Times is blaming the anarchists on everything.
Look, you know, and it's like, and then the socialist rag came out and said, conspiracy theorist Jeremy Quinn is echoing the talking points of Attorney General Barr and the President, as if that's my motivating, you know, and you just you can't have like an intelligent conversation.
Right, no, you can't.
It's designed to prevent intelligent conversation.
So anyway, I I greatly appreciate the attempt to bootstrap intelligent conversation in the midst of...
Insanity, which is obviously what has taken over.
All right, this has been fascinating.
I will say for my viewers, there is a Jeremy Lee Quinn Dark Horse episode up for you to look at.
There is another one that we recorded that has not been fully processed yet.
I think I'm going to put this one up next because it's so timely, and then the part B of our initial interview will go up probably next week.
Where can people find you?
PublicReport.org.
PublicReport.org is me documenting, I call it, subtitle it, under the cover of protests, everything that I witnessed and was able to aggregate through video from Minneapolis, which I did not go to Minneapolis until much later.
So a lot of the initial Minneapolis footage is, of course, aggregated footage.
But as being non-monetized, and I have not made a penny, I've lost, I've spent a lot on a credit card, But as being non-monetized, I considered this project publicreport.org as a fair use project for the public good.
It's a public service.
A public service.
Therefore, I am taking from other people.
So you will recognize other people's footage.
A lot of my own footage, which I have shot either in BlackBlock Dressed up myself in different cities like Portland, Rochester, New York, and in different cities in California.
Or not in Black Block at all when I was in Louisville and walking around in a flak jacket myself.
Or when I was in Trump territory, when I was in Tulsa at that rally on, it was June the 20th, and I was tailing the Proud Boys at that point, you know, with an American flag handkerchief to blend in and so forth.
So I've done it all, and at publicreport.org, there's a lot of material there that you could take a look at bit by bit.
I also interviewed anarchists, old school anarchists, who were, during all this, who talked to me.
Twin Cities Workers Defense Alliance put out a saying, don't talk to Jeremy Lee Quinn, because Information security.
Operation security.
I was against the interest of operation security.
I have to tell this one story.
When I did go to Minneapolis I went to the occupied zone.
There is still an occupied zone in Minneapolis of George Floyd Square, which is a mixed residential and business area where George Floyd was killed.
And it's a two block radius or so area with checkpoints on all four sides.
Uh, checkpoint, um, little, you know, makeshift shelters.
And you'll see that it's, it's a fuck-off cop zone, so to speak.
You have spray-painted barricades and so forth.
Um, I went in, you know, a couple times, and this one time I walked up, I was in all black, long black, you know, how I dress sometimes, and scarf and so forth, and a car picks, pulls up.
And the guy who says, I haven't met you yet.
How you doing?
And I introduced myself and he said, he introduced himself and he said, so you're on this barricade now?
And I said, I kind of, for a split second, I was like, what if I said I am?
What would happen?
And I said, no, no, I'm just passing through.
I'm in from out of town.
And I dropped a couple names of people I knew or whatever that were local.
But it was funny that, and it was similar to the first time I was in Black Block in California.
Somebody just recruited me and asked me to watch that alley to see if the cops were going to bum rush us, you know, and bull rush us rather.
and And that autonomous feeling of we don't know who's doing what.
Yeah.
And that was copied.
That's what I saw at the Capitol.
And that's what I keep trying to get people to understand.
Leftist autonomous organizing.
Everything down to your, you know, public face site of wild protest.
Because it's all this coded language of this is what we're doing and that's how those flyers work from the Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation Front.
We're doing this and then we there's all dress in black do this you know there's all these codes.
The operational Horizontally organized, decentralized, except, you know, there's always some sort of leadership.
And my theory is that what went down at the Capitol is because they had the biggest leadership, the President of the United States.
They had somebody that was leading them in spirit to do that.
And the President of the United States should be held accountable for that.
Well, he has to be held accountable for laws he actually violated.
You know, but that's that's a high bar.
So anyway, conversation for another time.
What's your Twitter handle?
Sorry.
Oh, yeah.
I need people on Twitter because I have I get attacked constantly and I have no sort of people around.
I don't want to use it.
A banned word.
I was going to say cavalry.
Some people have problems with that word.
I hear it's problematic.
But what I mean is I don't have people on my side.
I get attacked and that attack gets 890 likes, you know, and I say something and I'm lucky if I get one.
So if you want to join the fray, I'm at Jay Lee Quinn, which is at J-L-E-E-Q-U-I-N-N.
And you can also Google Unblocked Podcast and find publicreport.org, and there's different links to that as well.
Great.
Well, thanks so much for joining us.
Really appreciate the update.
And keep us posted.
Thank you for having me.
All right.
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