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Political violence is never, ever acceptable in the United States.
Political violence is never, never, never.
It has no place in a democracy.
None.
Give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.
So let's start marching and I salute you all!
USA!
That's what happens when election lies are pushed through the media.
Who has the ultimate authority to deploy the National Guard?
The ultimate authority rests with Trump.
He saw people saying, hang Mike Pence.
He was instigating violence against Mike Pence.
The U.S.
Department of Homeland Security had already declared that the greatest threat to the U.S.
homeland was not ISIS or Al Qaeda, but instead domestic extremists, far right extremists to be exact.
So, let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.
I want to thank you all.
God bless you and God bless America.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the second Zero Hedge debate.
Yeah, I actually think what Destiny and what Ed are saying are very important.
First of all, I was going to say that I think one of the problems with how these things are debated is that a lot of people these days have very binary prisms for understanding things.
A lot of that comes from YouTube debate, where you have to declare yourself on one side or the other.
So Destiny said, oh, everybody either hates this insurrection, thinks it's an insurrection, or they deny it happens, or they think it's good.
And there's so much middle ground, namely that, for me, This was a political protest that spilled over into a riot where a small minority of the people engaged in violence.
I don't think we want to urge that to happen.
We don't want to defend that.
I consider that lamentable.
But the fact that it's laughable to call this an insurrection is actually demonstrated by the examples that they're using.
This was a three-hour riot that was extremely easily subdued.
It doesn't remotely compare to any prior insurrections, let alone to the Civil War.
The only people who were killed on January 6th were four people, all four of whom were Trump supporters, two of whom dropped out of a heart attack and one from a speed overdose, because these were not exactly a well-trained militia.
And when Jack Smith went to charge Donald Trump with multiple crimes, he had a lot of options to charge him with, and he charged him with a lot of crimes, including very dubious ones.
He did not charge him with inciting an insurrection for reasons that I think we ought to ask ourselves why.
But the fact that this is such a minor event in history is demonstrated by the fact that the media, who needed this to be a major event, immediately started lying about what happened, saying that Brian Sicknick Because the media knew that if you can't say that even one person supposedly perpetrating the insurrection killed anybody, pulled out a gun, let alone discharged a weapon, all of which is true, it's a joke to call this an insurrection.
At best, it's a riot.
of what the coroner said were natural causes.
Because the media knew that if you can't say that even one person supposedly perpetrating the insurrection killed anybody, pulled out a gun, let alone discharged the weapon, all of which is true, it's a joke to call this an insurrection.
At best, it's a riot.
And that's the reason why Trump hasn't been charged The only time he ever commented on January 6th about whether he thought there should be violence or not was when he said the following.
He said, I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.
He urged them to be peaceful in how they went there.
To the extent there was violence, I think you can make the argument that the FBI informants, that even the New York Times admits were there, were the ones that urged it.
But even if the people who were there were the ones responsible, at best, this is a riot.
You could so easily make the case that the 2020 riots were a far greater insurrectionary threat than anything that happened on January 6th.
Let me just say, what happens is when you gather together to debate a particular question, you're supposed to debate that particular question.
The particular question that we were presented with is, we're going to debate January 6th and whether it was an insurrection.
Now, I don't blame Destiny.
And Ed, for not wanting to debate that, for wanting to debate a whole set of other issues about whether Trump acted improperly, whether he was naughty and the things he did after the election, because there is no argument to make that what happened on January 6th rises to the level of insurrection, and that's why an extremely aggressive prosecutor named Jack Smith
decided not to charge Donald Trump with that crime because he knew there was no way that he could possibly bring a conviction against anybody, let alone Donald Trump, who told everybody to be peaceful when going to the Capitol.
about whether or not that was actually an insurrection, whether that rose to that level.
And even in a colloquial sense, what we've called an insurrection in the past is in a completely different universe.
But on the issue of whether there was a real belief on the part of Donald Trump that elections were stolen, I don't understand how anybody could doubt that aside from the fact that you have to get into Trump's head.
In the last three elections that Democrats lost in 2000, 2004, and 2016, a very large number of Democrats believed and asserted that the election was stolen, that the election was stolen and was the byproduct of fraud, and the president was as a result illegitimate.
Well, When I started writing about politics in 2005, The idea that George Bush was the real loser of the election, Al Gore won, was the view of every single liberal and Democrat that I knew.
In 2004, there were objections claiming that Karl Rove had interfered in the Ohio vote with the Diebold machines and cheated to make John Kerry lose and George Bush win.
And then in 2016, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats said that Donald Trump was the illegitimate winner, that Russia had helped him, and they tried to convince the Electoral College to abandon the certified results of the state.
Obviously, you go back to 1960, and a lot of historians believe that election was stolen.
So it's not like Donald Trump was the first person to ever wonder or believe that an election was stolen from him.
It's a very significant tradition in American political history.
if you know anything about politics before 2016.
And if Trump believed that the election was stolen, and while it's true, a lot of people in the Justice Department and a lot of people in the White House told them they didn't think it was.
He did have advisors and lawyers telling him that they think there was evidence of it.
Then the question is over, even on these other issues, about whether or not Trump engaged in some conspiracy against the United States.
But the issue is, is January 6th an insurrection?
I actually want to ask a question that I would love to hear everybody's answer to.
But before I do that, just want to say about federal judges, This year, in the last six months, four different federal judges — a district court judge and then an appellate court unanimously — found that the Biden administration gravely violated the First Amendment.
In fact, the greatest assault on free speech The court said in decades, maybe the history of the judiciary by systemically pressuring big tech to censor the internet and purge it of all dissent by threatening Big tech companies using the CIA, the FBI, and the CDC with punishment if they didn't censor the internet.
You may not agree, but according to your standard, four different federal judges concluded that, which is infinitely worse in terms of an abridgment of freedom or an attack on the Constitution than anything that Trump is accused of doing.
That's not true.
That's not true.
That's a digital insurrection out of the deep state.
Digital insurrection.
Can I put a pin on one thing real quick?
I just want it to be noted.
Hold up.
Everybody hold up.
Glenn, Glenn, please finish your point and then we're going to move on to the response.
The question that you asked Ian is, is this a coup?
If you look at how other coups are perpetrated, and I think a lot of this is that if you're an American and you have this very soft history, you don't know what a coup is, you think that like what CNN tells you a coup is a coup.
Usually the way coups work is the leader of the country, whoever is in charge of the military, orders the military to seize control of the levers of power.
Trump was the commander in chief on January 6th.
The military was duty bound to obey his orders.
They had a right to disobey if they were illegal, but if this were a coup, why didn't Trump order the military to seize control of power and turn over the election process to him?
Why didn't he order the armed factions that form the law enforcement part of the military and the executive branch that serve under his command to do that as well?
That's what happened in a coup.
That didn't happen here because Trump wasn't trying to perpetrate a coup.
He wanted the Department of Defense to seize voting machines and the DOJ turned him down and told him... Well, the worst thing he did was try to take Biden off the ballot.
Remember when Trump said Biden cannot run and have the Justice Department take Biden off the ballot?
Oh God, that was Biden.
Sorry.
The January 6th committee, that's what Alex was alluding to just a second ago, is one of the biggest shams in the history of Congress because what happened with the January 6th committee was we had a long history of 225 years of tradition in the United States Congress where whatever investigative commissions would be created within the Congress, the minority leader and the majority leader would each select the members of that committee to ensure there was fair representation by both parties.
Nancy Pelosi For the first time in the history of the United States, a Speaker of the House refused to allow the Republicans who were chosen for that committee by Kevin McCarthy, at the time the Republican Minority Leader, to be seated on the panel.
And as a result, the Republicans said, we're going to have nothing to do with this.
and the only quote unquote Republicans that were chosen was Liz Cheney who ended up losing her seat by 36 points and Adam Kinzinger who didn't bother running again because they were so unrepresentative of the Republican Party, it was a completely partisan commission.
And on top of that, none of the videotapes that were available was made available to the public except for very deceitfully chosen snippets by Adam Schiff and by Liz Cheney.
And it was only within the last several months that we saw all of the video footage.
And what it showed makes a joke of the idea that this was a coup.
You had people peacefully walking into the Capitol, led by many of the police officers who encouraged them to enter peacefully, which they did.
The vast majority of people who were there at January 6th aren't even charged With using violence.
And that's what makes this whole debate such a preposterous joke.
If you look at how coups are carried out in other countries, you could make a much better case that the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 was an insurrectionary movement.
And the reason it matters, Destiny, is because if you're going to make arguments, there has to be an important test, which is do you apply the same principles you're claiming to profess and believe in to cases where it undermines your partisan allegiance and your ideology, not only where it helps it.
That's one of the key tasks for determining the authenticity of your argument.
And so if you don't think the 2020 protest movement was an insurrectionary movement against the United States government, there's no way to claim what January 6th was, especially since Trump could have done so much more to cause a coup that he did not do because that wasn't his aim ever.
If you want to talk about applying the same standard, would you have been OK in the year 2000 if Gore refused to certify the vote because he didn't like what was happening in Florida? - A lot of Democrats did want him to do that.
Can you answer that question?
Glenn, answer the question.
Yes, a lot of Democrats were angry about that.
I'm asking if you would be okay, personally, if he refused to certify the vote.
You won't answer the question.
You want to answer the question in 2016?
Would you have been OK if Biden?
Because if you really believe that an election is stolen, if the Democrats claim they did, then it is kind of odd to say we're just going to concede that and allow George Bush to march into power, even though we believe that he actually stole the election.
That is kind of an odd place to start.
No, it's not.
It's not all that odd.
We live in a democracy.
There are appropriate forums through which you can challenge- Did they not battle that out in the courts, though?
And they lost.
Okay, there you go.
Trump was battling it out in the court.
And he lost.
Once you lose, anything past that is vigilantism.
Vigilantism, directed at the government to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to entrench your own power, is an attempted coup.
That's what he tried to do.
That's not what Trump did, though.
He told them to be peaceful.
He told them, go and be peaceful at the Capitol.
We're not talking about the peaceful protesters.
And if he wanted them to be peaceful, he would have called on the National Guard as soon as they started rioting, but he didn't do that.
You're talking about the legal process of the congressional and judicial process.
That was not a legal process.
If he had ordered the military or some other FBI or any of those agencies, the CIA, to go and use violence on domestic soil in order to ignore those court rulings the way people do when they're trying to implement coups, you would have a good argument.
He didn't do any of that.
He invoked all of his legal rights in the judiciary and in the Congress.
He lost and he walked out of the White House on January 20th.
He did not have to be dragged out.
He wasn't arrested by the military, which is what happens in coups.
So much of this is because you only started paying attention to politics in 2016.
You only live in the United States.
You have no idea about history or anything that happens in other countries.
You have no idea what a coup is.
This is a coup.
Glenn, you bring that up.
Glenn, you bring that up and you're trying to use Hawaii as an example for something that was comparable, where both slates of electors were actually duly elected by the people there in the 60s.
Hawaii and South Carolina, these other historical examples that people go to from multiple states of electors, are not at all comparable.
Both of these things happened prior to 2016.
There are no examples in U.S.
history, or if you want to give me one since you know so much history prior to 2016, give it to me, is there any other examples in U.S.
history where the president is telling the vice president to unilaterally not certify the vote?
Has that ever happened before?
That's a totally separate question.
No, that is what happened on January 6th.
It doesn't matter if it's the first time that it ever happened.
Even if it's the first time or the 10th time, it's still not a coup or an insurrection.
A coup or an insurrection is when you use violence and force in order to seize control of power outside of the legal process.
So if there's no violence, it can't be a coup.
Wasn't there violence?
I saw violence.
How much violence do you need?
25 grams.
to be the coup. - How much violence do you need? - The most violence happened on the Capitol on January 6th. - 25 grams. - The most amount of violence happened to the January 6th protesters, not from them.
Again, not a single protester whipped out a gun, let alone used a gun.
That is an extremely weird coup. - How many years?
Glenn, what would you call it if the president was able to entrench his power by asking his vice president to throw out the vote unilaterally, which is what he was trying to do?
Do you want to deny the facts?
Do you want to deny that it's a coup?
What part?
A coup.
You're lucky it wasn't a real coup.
It shows the weakness of the argument, but if that had happened, my guess is it would have ended up in the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court would have made the decision about whether Mike Pence exercised his proper authority as Vice President, and then Donald Trump, if he had run out of options, would have left the White House on January 20th without any need for military force or police force, exactly how he did, and I would have called that the exhaustion of all of the legal remedies available to the President in the event that he thinks that an election was called.
Exactly, and therefore it would have been just the way The Bush v. Gore thing played out.
Exhausting your legal options, getting up to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court makes the determination.
Let Darren finish.
If both of you accept that then, then if the Supreme Court says that because of Amendment 14, Section 3, Trump can't be on the ballot, you would both accept that as well?
I wouldn't, but I think that would be authoritative.
Why would that be authoritative?
But Donald Trump, one man, centralizing power among himself to remain in power.
That's not authoritative.
He didn't do that.
That's not what happened.
That's what he tried to do.
That is what happened.
I know you only read tweets and headlines, Glenn, but believe it or not, that's actually what happened.
He wanted a 10-day, that was our goal, was a 10-day Senate investigation into the Constitution.
That's not what was happening behind the scenes.
First of all, on the issue of the ballots, there have been split decisions on this and even Democratic judges in Colorado and then the Democratic, very partisan, Secretary of State in Rhode Island as well as in California have all said they don't think it's appropriate to remove Trump from the ballot because he has not yet been charged with, let alone convicted of, Wait, which case was that?
So I want to be very deferential to Destiny's incredible achievements in constitutional scholarship.
But there are actually a lot of even Democratic Party elected officials who are saying, as well as judges of the California, of the Colorado Supreme Court, who were appointed by Democratic Party governors, who are saying that you cannot actually remove somebody because to remove them from the ballot is to punish them for a crime insurrection that Trump has never been charged with who are saying that you cannot actually remove somebody because to remove them from the ballot is to punish them for a crime insurrection Wait, why are you citing the dissent?
Glenn, what?
Why are you setting a dissent and you're bringing a losing case?
Like it proves your point.
That's what I thought.
Okay.
He just knows people are dumb.
You know you're scared of Glenn.
Let him continue.
No one's ever been taken off the ballot without being convicted.
Okay.
Glenn, continue and then Darren's going to ask.
The Secretaries of State of California and Rhode Island have also said the same thing, but it's true.
The Supreme Court will decide.
I'm very confident they'll decide Trump can remain on the ballot, and then that will resolve that issue.
The question I have, I have a few questions quickly.
One is, why didn't anybody like Jack Smith charge Trump with engaging in an insurrection?
If Trump was engaged in an insurrection or inciting an insurrection, you would hope, I would think, that he would be charged with that.
I don't think he was, so I'm happy he wasn't.
But for those of you thinking he was, why wasn't he charged with it?
And then the second one is, I just want to know, given that the 2020 riots did have a lot of people in there who were nonviolent and were there not for insurrectionary reasons, but had a lot of people who were anarchists and insurrectionists and who engaged in a lot of violence, a lot more than was done on January 6th.
Do you also think that the riots of 2020 constituted an insurrection?
I'm just trying to understand to get a sense for what your definition of insurrection is.
Glenn, do you think that the 1992 riots... Can you just answer that?
I can give answers too.
I don't think that Black Lives Matter was an insurrection.
I do think 1992 riots in LA was an insurrection.
George Herbert Walker Bush...
Senator Black, that made it not an insurrection.
What did it lack?
So it was a protest and the violence was when the police clashed with the protesters.
The violence was not against the government in order to stop the government from doing something.
There weren't antifa and anarchist groups there that explicitly say they were using violence to overthrow the government.
That didn't happen.
They were firebombing federal courthouses!
God, that's not true!
The bombs on the courthouses, there's nobody, it was at nighttime, there's nobody in there.
They were not obstructing anything.
The firefighters got excited!
Arson's a serious crime!
They were not there to obstruct an official proceeding of a government.
I just burned down a courthouse.
I want to ask Glenn.
Do you think 1992 was an insurrection?
You didn't answer Glenn's question.
I just did answer it.
Alex, I did answer it.
I specifically answered it.
Yeah, but no, no.
Alex, I did answer it.
I just, I specifically answered it.
Glenn, please, yeah.
You answered it.
But I mean, I think the 1992 riots, I think I recall at the time thinking the insurrectionary, the insurrection act was inappropriately in vogue.
I'd have to go back and really study the 1992 riots to see the extent of the violence.
But I do think that you're asking that indicates why the 2020 riots are way closer to an insurrection than anything happened after the 2020 election.
And the reason you're afraid to say that it is an insurrection is purely for ideological and partisan ends.
No, that's not true.
You asked too many questions, let me finish.
There's riots every week in America.
The Democrats were saying the Black Lives Matter riots were good and bailing them out.
The Democrats were saying be violent every week.
Everybody get the clubs, get in, get in.
Take the club and get in.
Get in, get in, get in.
When we talk about an insurrection.
I got your ass.
I want to ask Glenn, what do you think, man?
Glenn, do you think that this thing was stolen?
I think the election was rigged.
I don't, I'm not somebody who thinks the election, that there's evidence conclusive that the election was stolen.
I do think we should be a lot more attentive to when election processes get changed out of the blue.
Like, oh, because there's COVID, we're going to have a ton of new conventions for how we do mail-in ballots.
I think there's a lot of potential for fraud there.
I don't think there's evidence that I've seen, at least, that's conclusive that the 2020 election was stolen.
I do think though it was rigged in all sorts of ways from internet censorship to all kinds of interference on the part of the U.S.
security state lying and saying that a very incriminating story about Joe Biden was the byproduct of Russian disinformation when it absolutely was not.
Facebook and Twitter censoring that story right before the election.
These are all examples of corrupting rigging by institutions of authority on the question of whether...
No, I'm not somebody who thinks there's evidence that it was stolen.
Well, how would you define the difference between rigging it and stealing it?
Rigging it is when institutions of authority cheat or act corruptly in order to manipulate public opinion to prevent stories from getting to them, like those news stories about Joe Biden and the way that he exploited his family connections in Ukraine and China to profit for his family, and lying about it and saying that it's Russian disinformation, censoring the Internet to prevent and lying about it and saying that it's Russian disinformation, censoring the Internet to prevent stories from getting to the public, having the security state, the CIA, and the FBI that's supposed to have no role in our politics, being the ones
That's all examples of rigging and manipulating our democracy the way that we accuse Russia of doing.
The U.S. security state, the corporate media, Twitter and Facebook did that way, way worse.
Stealing the election is dumping ballots that were legitimately cast or fabricating ballots in favor of one candidate or the other that actually weren't cast, manipulating the machines in order to have the loser be the winner.
That's what I would distinguish between rigging and stealing.
Do you think that Donald Trump asking Jeffrey Clark to go and threaten the DOJ that if they don't sign on to a false letter trying to bully states into claiming there was mass election fraud by claiming the DOJ had actually done something when they hadn't?
That was testified to under oath.
Do you think that would be considered an act of corruption?
The whole point is, if Trump legitimately believed that the election was stolen, as Democrats believed in 2000, 2004, 2016... This is right.
No, that's not right.
It's not answering the question.
I'm answering the question.
I just can't do it in seven seconds.
If Trump believed genuinely that the election was stolen, then all of those steps that he undertook to try and present to Congress the way to alleviate the stolen election, to have courts reverse the stolen election, to have Mike Pence exercise what he thought was his constitutional authority, Might have been wrongful but they weren't illegal and they most definitely weren't a coup.
Well I just I mean I only heard the last four minutes of the conversation but I'm still always amazed by I really don't understand the argument because The FBI in the U.S.
security state before January 6 was saying that they regard the greatest threat to national security not as being ISIS or al-Qaeda or Hamas or Hezbollah or China or any other foreign threat.
They regard the greatest threat as being right-wing domestic extremists, in whom that was included on many lists—the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, And all of the people in the groups that they said orchestrated January 6th, Is the argument that you think that the FBI was not monitoring and infiltrating those groups?
Because there's actually a ton of evidence that the FBI had their hooks in all three of those groups.
And not only had their hooks in them, but on January 6th had informants on the ground who were pretending to be Trump supporters who were talking in real time to the FBI about everything that was happening.
So I just want to understand what the claim is.
Is the claim that the FBI was not involved in the groups that organized January 6th and didn't have informants with them that day?
They weren't instigating.
That's your claim.
It came out that the vice president of the Oath Keepers was an FBI informant.
The Proud Boys had at least three and as many as eight.
And the New York Times itself reported that there were FBI informants in the Proud Boys who were inside the Capitol texting their handlers as the event unfolded.
The whole context for this conversation is, again, I mean, you just keep going back to it because it's so easy to see.
I didn't say that.
I didn't say that.
of the FBI like, oh, they don't do this sort of thing.
Earlier, I think it was Ed who said, wait, why would the New York Times run a pop piece?
Do you think they're working with the FBI?
Like that idea to him is so different.
I didn't say that.
I didn't say that.
It was me.
No idea what the history of the FBI is in this country.
They have no idea that the FBI throughout the entire war on terror did this over and over.
They have no idea that the FBI throughout the entire war on terror did this over and over.
They would target and entrap all sorts of vulnerable Muslims to engage in plots that the FBI created in order to create a narrative that the FBI was needed because there was a much bigger threat of Islamic terrorism than there actually was.
The FBI has been infiltrating and then using provocateurs to encourage groups to commit crimes so that the FBI can gain more power, can spread this narrative.
You have to be incredibly naive or only paying attention to the news since 2016 and thinking Donald Trump is the only issue not to understand that this is what the FBI has been doing for decades.
And so to have this like naive attitude like, oh, it's the New York Times working with the FBI.
That is what the media in this country has been doing.
You have no evidence of it.
You're making it.
You're just making theories up.
By the way, if I can just add a nice little colorful detail there.
The author of the Ray Epps puff piece that asked none of the questions that would get to the core of his involvement there.
It's a total puff piece, you can read it yourself.
The author of that, his previous work, includes the CIA authorized account of the Sinaloa cartel.
Yeah, the whole thing, like listening to them, I honestly, it's like listening, I don't mean to be insulting, I'm just saying this, you know, it's what it sounds like, like seventh graders who are in civics class and have this understanding of how the U.S.
government works, like, oh, the FBI investigate and they discover crimes and then they go to the courts and the courts are very honest and the courts are apolitical and the courts make rulings and
Everything that has happened in January 6, and you can even look at the people they picked and choose who to expand the law, the people who ended up getting prosecuted on felony counts, even though they were nonviolent, had these incredibly novel interpretations of law that were used against them to turn nonviolent demonstration and nonviolent political protest into felony by taking this post Enron law and giving it a stretch meeting that it never had before.
And the reason so many of them plead guilty is because they know that if they go into court, they're going to have rulings against them.
Because a lot of these judges, especially in Washington, are not only Democratic Party judges, but the entire system is furious to watch people go and put their feet up on Nancy Pelosi's desk.
So the entire system decided that this has to be punished regardless of what the law provides.
You had the FBI with their hooks inside all of these groups.
But I do understand that if you believe in this story of American propaganda that the FBI is these upstanding law enforcement people and they don't do that, and then the courts go and make rulings, then you're going to end up with this image of what the three of them have, which is this idea that this was one of the worst attacks in American history.
The courts have ruled everything the government did in this case is consistent with their longstanding view before January 6th, that these groups are criminal groups.
They need to be criminalized.
Trump's movement is a threat to the United States, and the entire part of January 6th was designed to define them as an insurrectionary movement so that they could criminalize them, which is exactly what they're doing.
Plus, plus, plus, on the Owen subject, we don't have the money!
Owen didn't have the money for a criminal trial.
890 convictions are guilty pleas.
Two acquittals.
Two.
890 to two.
How many of those were accused of violence?
One second, one second.
890 convictions are guilty pleas, two acquittals, two.
890 to two.
So is that-- How many of those were accused of violence?
How many of those were accused of violence?
I believe 170 or so were for violent acts.
Illegal tarraining?
Exactly.
A tiny number, a small percentage of the people-- Let Glenn talk.
The Supreme Court is and they should be.
You gotta make sure.
Let Glenn talk.
Go ahead.
You understand that usually what happens in the United States with nonviolent protesters or even with violent protesters is they don't get charged with anything.
A tiny percentage of people who use violence throughout all of the Black Lives Matter protests ended up in jail because the ideology in which they were protesting was one that was considered positive and friendly by the institutions of authority.
They were on the side of Black Lives Matter.
They didn't prosecute that.
The Trump movement and the right-wing extremists, as the government calls them, are considered enemies of the state.
It's not the same, though.
And that was why the entire law enforcement Let me finish.
I'll take a five minute break.
Let me finish.
It's not the same to compare Black Lives Matter protesters and protesters who entered the Capitol building during the certification of the election.
Those are not... Democrats have bombed the U.S.
Capitol.
Democrats have bombed it.
They burned down courthouses and burned down police stations and they had within them people who were insurrectionary.
And they got charged, as they should have.
They got charged.
Yeah, I think this is really the nub of everything.
Like, I really do think that the three of them actually believe what they're saying.
I'm not, like, actually realizing this.
And the reason they believe it is because they don't know the history of the war on terror.
They don't know the history of the Cold War.
They don't know what the CIA and the FBI and the U.S.
security state have been constructed to do and the role that they played in our domestic politics.
Every single time that there's some new crisis, the CIA, the FBI, the permanent power faction in Washington, and it's not like some crazy conspiracy theory Dwight Eisenhower warned a bit on his way out of the presidency in 1961 when he called it the military-industrial complex because he had seen how it was growing beyond all democratic accountability.
Every time what they need to do is convince somebody to be scared of something, to be scared of communism, to be scared of terrorism, to be scared of domestic terrorism.
And they convince people that some minor event, relatively speaking, in the history of the threats to our country, like the 9-11 attack, which is a terrible thing, but they exaggerated wildly the threat of foreign terrorism to basically institute the Patriot Act and warrantless eavesdropping and all of the things that turned our country more authoritarian.
They were announcing that before 9-11.
They used 9-11 to do it.
They were announcing before January 6 that they wanted to turn right-wing extremists into domestic terrorists.
And they used January 6 and this extremely inflated narrative about what it was.
It was a riot of out-of-control people, a few hundred of them, that they turned into an insurrection that they're now They're weaponizing the justice system and they're creating a precedent, I hope you guys understand this, where they're now taking a non-violent protest.
Remember, most of the people charged in January 6th are charged with non-violent protests and they've made it now so that they can charge those people with felonies and put them in prison for years.
That was the Q Shaman, four years in prison for a non-violent protest.
That's the precedent that you're endorsing with this narrative.
The idea, again, that for the FBI to be infiltrating these groups is a conspiracy theory, again, requires an understanding of the FBI that's childlike.
And what Destiny was saying before is, oh, we're just using what they've done in the past and therefore concluding they must be doing that in the future.
He just ignored all the evidence we've been presenting for the last two hours, including the fact that the FBI, by their own admission, had informants in all three of the leading groups that organized January 6th and were talking to informants on the ground at the Capitol.
Who is the head of the FBI?
Who's the head of the FBI?
As far as the January 6th defendants are concerned, it is true that they're getting sentences similar to what people get when they're charged with felonies.
The point is that it is insane that non-violent protesters are being charged with felonies in the United States.
That is what never happens.
And pointing to Black Lives Matter is not to say, oh yeah, that's whataboutism, so we're admitting that this was an insurrection and that is too.
The point is that what the government is doing, if you look at the disparate treatment between the two, is picking and choosing which movement they like ideologically and politically and which they don't, and punishing much more severely the one that they don't, which is what January 6th is about.
Going into the Capitol building, going into the Capitol building with weapons saying, hang Mike Pence, hang Mike Pence.
No, that's not a violent crime, but are you saying that that doesn't warrant a felony conviction?
That's absurd.
People are actually calling for the hanging of the Vice President of America.
I'm gonna be honest.
I'm gonna be honest.
No, no, Alex, hold on one second.
The majority of people who were charged with felonies in January 6th are non-violent offenders.
What did they do, Glenn?
What did they do?
They created an interpretation of the law that was enacted after Enron, that was designed to criminalize accountants from obstructing fraud at the corporate level.
What did they do?
Every single... It's the meaning of it, to mean that if it's a non-violent protest, any non-violent protest now at the Capitol can be charged with a felony.
Do you understand that?
You're glossing over the facts.
You're glossing over the facts, Glenn.
People get six-month sentences.
People get six-month sentences for going in the damn thing, being waved at by police.
No, but here's the facts.
The people who got the felonies were either violent, they were taking part in a conspiracy, or they went into the House chamber.
Those are the people who got it.
The people who walked into the Capitol building- That's not true.
It is true.
No, it's not.
Look it up.
It absolutely is true.
Google it.
I just gave you a specific example earlier.
Conspiracy?
Conspiracy?
Give me the example.
What did he do?
Thomas Caldwell.
What did he do?
He was not violent, and he did not go into the Capitol.
Let's talk about Thomas Caldwell for a minute.
- What was his conviction? - What was his conviction? - What was his federal prison? - Let's talk about Thomas Caldwell for a minute. - And then also real quick to Glenn's point, keep in mind that when you're saying that BLM wasn't treated the same because of the government and how they, you're not just alleging the federal government at that point, you're alleging every single state government and city municipality that's in charge of arresting people are all on the same page.
The feds are in charge of prosecuting everybody in every state?
Thomas Caldwell was part of the seditious conspiracy.
He was part of the conspiracy by the Oath Keepers.
That's why he got charged with a felony.
When Black Lives Matter happened, every single blue state mayor and every single blue state governor laid in on the side of the writers because they were petrified of being demonized as being racist that they didn't support everything the Black Lives Matter movement did.
So yes, the Black Lives Matter movement had corporations.
is sponsoring them.
They had Kamala Harris urging and raising money for people to get out of prison who were imprisoned and prosecuted for having engaged in violence as part of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The entire establishment was on the side of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The entire establishment hated the January 6th defendants.
That's the reality of our government that you don't understand. - The reality of our government that you don't understand.
It's after the Supreme Court to decide. - Can I just say what my dream is?
My dream is that Ed and Brian and Destiny have to actually live through a real coup so that they can then come back to the set and be like, oh my God, you know what?
I'm so sorry for saying that what happened in the Capitol for three hours against the most militarized and powerful government to ever exist in human history got anywhere near a coup or an insurrection.
A coup or an insurrection.
A coup is generally when people in power or people who are trying to get into power marshal the force of the armed factions of that country and use it to eliminate the legal process and take over.
So for example, if Trump had called in the military on his side on January 6th, or he had gotten the military to block people from trying to remove him from office on January 20th, that is always what we say is a coup.
Nothing that looks like what happened on January 6th.
The other thing I just want to correct Destiny seems to have this, like, debate me sort of thing point that he thinks he keeps making that's so smart, which is when you say... Why does he waste so much time on catty comments?
There must be something better for him to say.
No, you're the one that is throwing lines.
There must be something better for him to say.
We're about to change gears.
Let Glenn finish this thought and then we're moving to our audience questions.
I've done this little debate tactic like eight times.
I've listened to it for two hours.
So if you say, this person did this and it's wrong, and then someone else says, what about this person, this politician you love?
He did the same thing.
Destiny says, oh, you're admitting that both of them did something wrong.
No.
One of the reasons why you say things like the Black Lives Matter protest was never considered an insurrection is not to say that January 6th was also an insurrection and therefore you should treat the Black Lives Matter one like an insurrection.
The point is to say the Black Lives Matter wasn't treated like an insurrection because people like Ed and Destiny and Brian love the Black Lives Matter movement because it's unaligned with their ideology.
These are liberals who hate the Trump movement politically and therefore want to criminalize it.
But pointing to other examples- I'm against all rioting, just to be clear.
Isn't it admitting that the one that you start with is wrong?
You're just trying to show that you're not applying consistent principles when your ideology is at stake.
No, that's not true.
If that was the case, then when you're accused of defending a coup, then you argue why it's not a coup.
That's how the argument works.
If somebody says, I think that Trump engaged in a coup— One of the ways that you show that it's not a coup is by saying that the things that you like that are done that are far more insurrectionary are things you won't call an insurrection because those things— No, Glenn, I'm sorry.
And to try and make it about Alex when there are six people here presenting all kinds of evidence that you're not equipped to deal with, I think it's just a pathetic way to try and end this debate.
And the last thing I want to say is, it's really given like a kind of amazingly vivid mindset into the minds of Trump-era liberals who have really come to see The US security state and the courts and prosecutors as their political allies in their war that they're waging against people who disagree with them.
And they have this like very romanticized view of what the FBI is, what the DOJ is, how the court systems work, how the federal government works.
And all of this reveals this so well because what's happening here is so manifest, which is that all of these agencies are being abused because the Trump movement is considered the gravest threat to establishment power in this country, which is why the bipartisan establishment is against it.
To try and make this about Alex and Sandy Hook is a really pathetic way to end the debate.
I think you guys have done a good job defending your views.
