Massive Media Layoffs Expose Collapse in Public Trust, w/ Hannah Cox. PLUS: New Video Deepens Jan. 6 Pipe Bomb Mystery, w/ Darren Beattie
Timestamps:
Intro (0:00)
Mainstream Media in Crisis (7:53)
Interview with Hannah Cox (38:49)
Interview with Darren Beattie (1:02:28)
Ending (1:43:47)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight...
It is not an exaggeration to say that major parts of the liberal corporate media are now in complete freefall.
Just in the past few weeks, some of the most recognizable media brands have suffered massive layoffs or even been brought to the brink of extinction, including the Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, NBC News, Sports Illustrated, National Geographic, and Business Insider.
BuzzFeed, months ago, completely abolished their news division.
Just this week, the LA Times laid off 25% of its already decimated newsroom in just one day, just months after it laid off 13% of its workforce.
It is hard to put into words just how extreme and complete is the implosion of Brooklyn-based liberal digital media over the last several years.
Given that difficulty, I am forced to rely upon one of the giants of American journalism, A prophet of digital media and a true pioneer in how to report on teenage influencer TikTok houses, the Washington Post's Taylor Renz, who in a video this week about all these events said, quote, pretty much the entire digital media ecosystem that myself and a lot of other millennial journalists came up in has been completely hollowed out.
Indeed it has.
There is no doubting the truth of that statement.
But what is missing, so conspicuously and revealingly from all of these discussions by these failing journalists, not just the Dean of Digital Media Teller Ends, about the collapse of their industry around them is what role they themselves have played in generating this massive failure.
They love to whine and cry in public when their jobs disappear.
They're very adept in blaming others for why nobody cares about what they write and say anymore.
They're very passionate and condemning and heaping scorn on the sectors of the media that are actually growing and thriving, namely independent media, where free discourse and political heterodoxy are permitted rather than crushed.
But the one thing they will never ever do is look in the mirror and ask what they did to contribute to the destruction of the large sector of media to which they belong.
And really, it is hard to blame them for refusing to look at that.
If your face were covered with unsightly boils and open wounds and oozing infections and unidentified, unsightly growths, you too would be reluctant to gaze upon your visage in the mirror.
You'd do anything to avoid that.
But the irrefutable truth is that with the exception of a few media giants, such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, most of the liberal corporate media is in full-scale collapse.
The public hates them to the extent that they care about them at all.
Every poll shows that.
The American mainstream media is held in lower esteem than just about any other group in America, with the possible exception of pedophiles and telephone marketers.
And even there, they're just barely ahead of those groups.
I really do try hard not to take pleasure in other people's misery and suffering.
It is, in my view, unhealthy for one's soul to do that often.
But I do take pleasure in the destruction of industries and companies that I regard as deeply harmful and toxic for society, and that absolutely includes the vast majority of these failing media outlets, which have become little more than servants of establishment power and deliberate disseminators of disinformation and propaganda for partisan ends.
And the collapse of trust and faith in mainstream journalism is an important development in American life and one that is really worthy of examination and yet it so rarely receives that examination because the guardians of our discourse are the ones who most want to avoid it and so that today is what we will do and to help us engage in that analysis we will be joined by the media analyst and commentator Hannah Cox
Who's response to tell Lorenz's state of the media dress was both scathingly hilarious but also deeply illuminating.
Then, the journalist who has done among the most important work in exposing many of the lies and deceits surrounding the mythology and official narrative of January 6th has been Darren Beatty, the political scientist from Duke, the former Trump speechwriter, and the founder of the news site Revolver News.
From the beginning, Darren has exposed all sorts of inconsistencies and unproven claims in the state's narrative about January 6th, from the FBI's role, to the mysterious involvement of people like Ray Epps, and especially the still unsolved case of the alleged domestic terrorist who was said to have planted pipe bombs near both the DNC and RNC headquarters, including one near Kamala Harris, one of the central allegations that made January including one near Kamala Harris, one of the central allegations that made January 6th seem far scarier
Yet newly discovered video evidence has enabled Beatty to break down much of what we were told about these pipe bombs and has raised serious questions about who it is who planted those and why.
We will talk to Beatty about this and about the latest in the January 6th investigations.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
In the United States over the past several decades, we have watched the collapse of all sorts of industries as the American Midwest has been de-industrialized, as all kinds of industries like factories and coal have been gutted.
And usually it's a very sad thing to watch.
People lament it because large numbers of people lose their job, people lose their livelihood, communities get Shattered as a result of all of that.
It's been one of the principal reasons why so many Americans are disillusioned with and angry toward the political class.
One of the first times I really believed Donald Trump was going to win the 2016 election was when Hillary Clinton went to West Virginia and gave a speech and said, look, it's time for you to get over it.
Accept it.
Coal is gone.
There are going to be new jobs.
You can learn how to do other things.
There's no more coal.
And then Donald Trump went to West Virginia three weeks later, mocked Hillary for scorning coal workers, and said, I'm going to do everything I can to save the coal industry.
And I watched an interview with a West Virginia coal miner who said, when asked, look, I'm not really sure that Trump is going to be able to, but the fact that he understands the difficulties that this poses for our community and is at least aware of it and not scornful of it and trying to say we're going to do something to help you is something infinitely better and more inspiring than what Hillary claim came and told us to say.
One of the very few exceptions to the negative emotions that people generally have when they watch industries fail is watching the collapse of the liberal corporate media.
It has been going on now for many years.
In fact, prior to Donald Trump, the model of how corporate media was going to sustain itself in the digital age was something that almost nobody could figure out.
It was really an inherently unsustainable model.
And it was really the arrival of Donald Trump that gave that industry a sugar high.
He saved so many jobs in media, especially the people who most hated him.
Every anti-Trump network, every anti-Trump website saw a skyrocketing of business solely from people who couldn't get enough content about Donald Trump, especially negative content about Donald Trump.
Liberals became monomaniacally obsessed about politics, but all sugar highs eventually caused a crash.
And as people got tired of hearing about that every day, and especially once Trump went away, All of that got exposed, and then the collapse really started accelerating.
And so while you have a couple of giants in the media industry that are really consolidating almost everything, eating it all up, like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that have really become successful models, pretty much the entire rest of the media is collapsing all around it.
And the reason is, is because they don't provide anything of value.
They don't provide anything that people want.
If you want liberal opinion, which is all that they ever offer, you can just go to the New York Times and get it.
You don't need any of these other media outlets for it.
They just offer nothing but the same repetition.
It's extremely predictable.
It's extremely banal.
There's no ideological heteroxy permitted.
There's no vibrancy within them.
And on top of that, they have been caught lying over and over and over again about so many of the most crucial issues.
Our country was dominated for three years by a deranged conspiracy theory that most media outlets got on board with.
And when you add up all of these failures and all of these kind of gutting of the passion and vibrancy of the industry, of course people started turning away.
They still want to know about politics.
They still want to be informed.
They just stopped trusting these media corporations that they understood had been lying to them, and they began looking elsewhere, which is what explains not the collapse of media, as people like to say, Just the collapse of one sector of media, a big sector to be sure, but one sector which is the liberal corporate media.
And yet, independent journalism continues to thrive in ways that are hard to explain.
Now, for whatever reason, over the past two months, three months, and even over the past several weeks, this trend has really accelerated to the point where so many of the most recognizable and longest-standing media brands are just starting to collapse in complete freefall.
And even the billionaires who decided they were going to invest in media outlets sort of as a charity project.
We saw that with Jeff Bezos in the Washington Post.
We saw it with Steve Jobs' widow who bought the Atlantic.
We saw it with Pierre Midiard and many media outlets like the Intercept where I used to work.
But now the Bulwark and Bill Kristol's various projects are all starting to abandon media as well because billionaires don't actually like to lose money year after year after year.
And that's what's happening.
Because when you have a public that has contempt for the product that's being produced and contempt for the people who are producing it and they no longer trust it and value it, there's no way to get enough of their attention to be able to monetize it.
Hear from the New York Times just this last week, or actually this week, you see the headline there, Billionaires Wanted to Save the News Industry.
They're Losing a Fortune.
Quote Time Magazine, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, owned by Mark Bainoff, Jeff Bezos, and Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, are still losing money.
The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times all lost millions of dollars last year, people with knowledge of the company's finances have said, after considerable investments from their owners and intensive efforts to drum up new revenue streams.
In the middle of last year, the Times was on track to lose $30 million to $40 million in 2023, according to three people with knowledge of the projections.
Last year, the company cut about 74 jobs, and executives have met in recent days to discuss the possibility of deep job cuts, according to two other people familiar with the conversations.
Mr. Bezos hasn't fared much better at the Washington Post.
Like many news organizations, the Post has struggled to hold on to the momentum that it had gained in the wake of the 2020 election.
Sagging subscriptions and advertising revenue led to losses of about $100 million last year.
At the end of the year, the company estimated eliminated 240 of its 2,500 jobs through buyouts, including some of its well-regarded journalists.
Well-regarded from the New York Times perspective, but that's 10% of the Washington Post's newsroom being laid off despite having the backing of one of the two or three richest people on the planet.
The Atlantic, which Laurene Powell Jobs bought in 2017, has set a target of reaching 1 million combined digital and print subscribers and achieving profitability.
The company said it had more than 925,000 subscribers as of last summer, though it was still not yet profitable.
The difficulties facing the companies are getting only more severe.
Here from yesterday, NPR, tells an even grimmer story.
The title is A Look at the Wave of Layoffs Hitting the News Industry.
The LA Times has confirmed, and its employees are letting us know online, that it has laid off about 115 journalists in its newsroom of what had been only about 500.
That represents about 22-23% layoff happening in a single day.
The Washington Post just laid off 10% of its ownership.
Like the LA Times, it is owned by a civic-minded billionaire.
We at NPR went through a 10% cut last year.
Here from the USA Today from two weeks ago, January 12th, the headline NBC News lays off dozens in latest bad news for U.S.
workforce.
See 2024 job cuts so far.
USA Today confirmed the NBC News layoffs on Friday.
Other companies starting off their new year by slashing their workforces included Google, Twitch, Amazon and Discord.
The layoffs at NBC, first reported by Puck News, are the latest in an onslaught of cuts made in the journalism industry throughout 2023, including by NBC News, which slashed 75 jobs the same time last year, according to a timeline provided by Forbes.
Now, I can spend all night, literally, reading to you articles like this from these exact media outlets that are in the part of the industry that is failing.
And you will find everything in there about how deep these cuts are, how unprecedented they are, about how so much more is coming because the scenario is only getting worse and worse and worse.
You'll see attacks on their competitors, like an independent media who they claim is responsible for spreading disinformation and doesn't provide the kind of responsible journalism that these outlets provide.
You'll see all kinds of emotional, heart-tugging posts about how sad it is that these people are losing their jobs.
These same people who went around telling other people in dying industries, oh well, too bad there are no coal jobs, go learn how to code.
And yet they treat the collapse of their own industry as one of the world's greatest tragedies.
You'll find everything In these articles blaming Donald Trump and the Trump movement for undermining faith in American journalism.
The one thing you will never ever find and believe me I have been talking about this for a long time so I look far and wide for any effort to find it is any kind of self-reflection.
Any kind of effort on the part of the journalists who are in these failing sectors to ask of themselves why is it That the kind of journalism I'm producing has no market.
Why is it that the public hates me and my colleagues?
I began my journalism career not by working at a major media corporation but by just simply starting a blog one day in 2005 and I was able very quickly to build a large audience because what I was writing about and the way I was writing about it, obviously there was a market for it.
There were people who were craving it and they couldn't find it elsewhere.
That's how you succeed in journalism.
When I was at The Intercept and it was funded by the billionaire Piero Midiard, people thought, well, we don't have to care about things that are beneath us, like trying to get people interested in our writing, trying to develop an audience.
I used to always give a speech to them that I knew fell on deaf ears, which is that there's no such thing as good journalism that people don't listen to or care about.
Journalism is not poetry, which can be ignored for two centuries until it's discovered under a bed, and then poetry experts say, wow, this is real art.
Poetry and art can be beautiful and of the highest quality, independent of the impact that they have.
That is not true for journalism.
Journalism is not an art.
It is solely a function of how it can affect society for the better, of how it can expose secrets, make people aware of things that they ought to know about, that the powerful are doing.
But if you don't have a way to attract people to be interested in what you're saying, no matter how beautiful your article is, no matter how well constructed and well written, how nice the graphics are, if nobody's reading it, by definition, it's not good journalism.
And that is the problem, one of the problems, with The corporate media that is largely liberal, which is overwhelmingly the vast bulk of what they are, especially in the age of Trump.
They all decided that their mission, their overarching mission, was not to inform the public, but was to defeat Donald Trump and his movement.
And so they all became homogenized.
They all became activists.
They all became overtly partisan.
And they all became copycats of one another.
There's barely any dissent.
Who is a kind of maverick within corporate journalism?
The minute there is one, they're gone.
Even at Fox News, Tucker Carlson started gradually and then rapidly deviating from standard conservative politics, and despite having the best ratings, he was out.
The one thing corporate media does not tolerate is any sort of heterodoxy, any sort of challenge or divergence of views.
Real debate possible.
You can have debates between Republican and Democratic strategists about horse races, oh Nikki Haley's gonna win, no she's not.
But not about the real issues governing how power is dispersed in the United States.
And then on top of that you have all those media frauds, major media frauds, in which the country has been drowning for years.
That come not from 4chan or Facebook or social media, but from the largest media corporations in the world.
And you just look at polling data, and we will show it to you in just a second, that shows that people just hate journalists.
They hate corporate journalists.
They do not trust them, and therefore have no interest in what they're saying.
Now, there are other macroeconomic factors that are playing a role in the collapse of these media companies, to be sure.
The monopoly of Google and Facebook and ad revenue, the difficulty in monetizing content in the digital age, the fact that people don't have subscriptions that come to their house anymore, that people have expected to be able to read content for free, these are all cultural changes that have affected Media outlets, as these media outlets weakened, they got taken over by venture capitalists who just wanted to suck the profit out of them and didn't care at all about the bones that they left these institutions in.
But none of that would be happening if these institutions maintained the trust of their readers and had a lot of people interested in what they had to say.
Because if you look at new media, if you look at independent media, people who had the ability to attract interest in their work And who develop trust and faith in their viewers are doing better than ever.
The media is not failing.
The media that is composed of corporate media corporations, liberal media corporations, Brooklyn-based digital liberal corporate outlets, they are the ones that are failing.
And therefore, it's not that hard to understand why.
It's because their behavior has caused, deservedly so, the public to lose, not just trust in what they say, but interest in everything they're doing.
Now, one of the people who has decided that she is a success story, who regards herself as one of the giants of American journalism, is Taylor Lorenz, who used to work at the New York Times, caused one drama after the next.
Then made her way to the Washington Post.
She basically, as we're going to show you, started her career by hanging outside of houses that are filled with 16 and 17 year and 18 year old TikTok influencers where she would try and induce them to speak to her and give her secrets.
She would go and get 17-year-olds canceled.
And so she built a TikTok platform just by using the names over and over of 17-year-old boys who were extremely popular among adolescent girls, even though she was 40, when doing it.
And somehow this convinced her that she's some kind of like giant of American journalism who now is in a position to issue state-of-the-media addresses, similar to the way the president issues a State of the Union address.
And so she went to TikTok to talk about the reason why her entire generation basically has proven to be complete failures.
And I think it's really worth listening to what she has to say, obviously not because there's any wisdom in it, but because it illustrates the pathologies and sicknesses that have caused the collapse of That part of the media and the unbelievable inability to accept responsibility even though she purports to say some of this is Our fault.
You'll see in the way in which he says it, it's really just the pretense of accepting responsibility but not actually any attempt to grapple with the true pathologies of media.
The entire journalism industry is basically in a freefall.
Today the Los Angeles Times laid off 115 employees.
They wiped out their entire DC bureau in an election year.
They laid off Pretty much all of their sports teams, they killed their entire tech and business section, they laid off breaking news writers, social media editors, the list goes on.
But what's really dark is this is just the latest in months and months and months of layoffs in the media industry.
In fact, tens of thousands of journalists have been laid off in the past year.
Major media companies like BuzzFeed News have completely shuttered their news operations.
Time Magazine also just laid off a ton of people, and oh, Sports Illustrated basically shut down last week.
Pretty much the entire digital media ecosystem that myself and a lot of other millennial journalists came up in has been completely hollowed out.
And it's not just digital media.
I gotta just let her repeat that sentence because I love it so much.
It's like kind of sweet dessert just entering my body and animating every one of my cells.
Listen to this sentence.
The area of media that myself and a lot of my fellow digital millennial journalists has come up and have been completely hollowed out, that is exactly what has happened.
and a lot of other millennial journalists came up in has been completely hollowed out.
And it's not just- The area of media that myself and a lot of my fellow digital millennial journalists has come up and have been completely hollowed out.
That is exactly what has happened.
And there are very good and valid reasons for it.
And while I said, as I said, I don't take pleasure in watching people lose their jobs and be sad about it.
I absolutely take pleasure in the hollowing out of industries that are very toxic and damaging to our society and to our republic, which includes this one.
Just digital media sites.
Local news has been obliterated.
The newspaper industry is cratering.
Radio is essentially dead, aside from NPR, which has been gutted.
Meanwhile, hundreds of workers at Condé Nast, the parent company of pretty much every major magazine from GQ to Vogue to The New Yorker to Vanity Fair, are on strike because they're also facing impending layoffs.
Even mainstream national media outlets owned by billionaires like the Washington Post, where I work, and The Atlantic, where I used to work, have done layoffs.
If you're a young journalist today, there's almost no on-ramp to traditional journalism.
Even if you do get a job, journalists' salaries have been stagnant and even declined.
And by the way, we don't make that much to begin with.
I don't think people understand how bad the world would be without journalists.
Oh, people understand that the world would be bad without journalists.
In fact, that's exactly the problem we have, is that none of these people are actually journalists.
They do not perform the journalistic function.
The journalistic function, and if you go and look at What people for hundreds of years have been describing as the core purpose of the press, the reason there's a freedom of the press guarantee in the First Amendment, is because we need a mechanism to confront and undermine and subvert and check institutions of authority and the most powerful people in our country.
That's what journalism is for.
It's to bring them down pegs.
It's to expose their secrets.
And what instead has happened is that these people who work in these corporations have done the opposite of that.
They're the ones who are causing our country to be without journalists, even though they bear the HR title of journalist because they have done the opposite of what that function is.
They serve power.
They disseminate its propaganda.
They do not challenge or investigate these institutions of authority.
The people they investigate and challenge are ordinary citizens in the country.
Teo Lorenzo's biggest story as a journalist was uncovering the private citizen who ran the Libs of TikTok account.
Taylor Renz has never challenged or exposed any lies or secrets or corruption in the CIA or in the FBI or in Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.
I think her second biggest story is that one time she was in the App Clubhouse.
And she heard somebody use the word retarded and she ran to Twitter and told like a tattletale and she attributed it to Marc Andreessen and it turned out Marc Andreessen had not said that so she had to correct her second biggest story.
Taylor Lentz has more corrections appended to her stories.
than almost any person working in media.
And the amazing thing about that is her stories are so trivial that it's almost impossible to even get an editor to care enough to correct them, and yet she has a mountain of them.
Long ones, big ones, major ones.
And yet she seems to think she's the success story, and on some level, bizarrely, she kind of is, given that she's at least been able to draw attention to herself just because she's so She's just such an extreme, she's almost like high camp at this point.
I have to say that I've kind of come to appreciate Taylor Ennes in the way that just these kind of people can have this sort of campy, iconic appeal.
But there's nothing positive about her journalistically, except for the fact that she provides a window into the pathology that is causing it to collapse.
So she is right that society is worse off without journalists.
And the problem is, is that the more people employed by these big media corporations, the less journalists we have.
And that's why I say it is not just well deserved, but a cause for celebration to watch these outlets That have done far more misleading and far more propagandizing and far more attacking of ordinary citizens than powerful, break down and collapse and disintegrate because they're anti-journalism and not journalism.
And because of their failures, people are paying increasing attention to independent media, people who have offered something the public is interested in to develop a level of trust and faith.
That you can find people who will inform you, who will do their best to tell you what they see is happening.
You may not always agree with them, but you know that they are at least doing their best and have no constraints, no corporate constraints on the sorts of things they can and can't say.
Do you know how many times during Russiagate, when it was dominating the news, when I was out there constantly Expressing skepticism and doubt and pointing out all the evidentiary flaws in the primary Russiagate narrative that every day almost every major corporate outlet in this country was ratifying and endorsing.
I got emails or DMs from people who work inside these media outlets, people who are kind of mid-career, writing to me and saying, thank you so much for doing what you're doing.
I wish I could do it, but I feel like I can't.
Because in corporate media, in liberal corporate media, the minute someone steps out of line or sticks their head up in any way to challenge liberal orthodoxy, They get mauled by liberal Twitter, they become the first on the list for when layoffs happen, and the last to be hired.
Because no editor, no news outlet wants to be screamed at by liberals on Twitter for having hired a heretic.
And every journalist who works in these major corporations knows that the only way to advance is to stay in line, to be conformist, to serve orthodoxies and never to question it.
And nothing is more corrosive of the journalistic spirit and ethos than that.
And that is why these sectors are collapsing.
Now we're about to have a guest on who's response to Taylor's video was fantastic.
And I don't want to take too much away of what I'm going to ask her about and what she's going to say.
But I do think it's important to note that Taylor Lorenz's State of the Media address in which she's claiming that traditional media is dying is true.
The question is, why does traditional media deserve not to die and who is it that killed it?
Those are the questions that she would never ask.
I don't want to go too much into Taylor Renz.
I don't want this to be focused on her.
I do find it hard somewhat times to resist discussing her because it's just such a extreme case of somebody who kind of illustrates all the diseases plaguing journalism.
She's just undisguised about what she is.
So she does kind of serve as almost like a textbook for understanding what's been happening in corporate journalism.
But the fact that she's considered the success story is so ironic.
This is how she began her career.
This is how she built the platform.
Here's from the outlet Digiday in March of 2020.
Here's the headline.
How the New York Times' Taylor Renz gets teenagers to talk about their digital habits.
And it's all about how she would lurk outside these popular TikTok houses filled with 17 and 18 year old boys.
And people assume she must be like in her early 20s because who else would do that?
And it turned out she was like well into middle age.
She's very sketchy about what her age is, I think in large part because of this.
But getting 17-year-olds to talk to her and exposing their secrets and then finding cancelable tweets that they posted when they were 14 is the way she built her platform.
And it illustrates what corporate journalism has become, turning their guns And all the resources that these outlets provide, not on the powerful people in society, but on the ordinary people in society, typically the ordinary people who challenge the powerful.
That is what has corroded and corrupted journalism more than anything other than their willingness to spread lies and propaganda in order to advance their partisan agenda that primarily centers around the monomaniacal effort to defeat Donald Trump.
Just before we get to our guests, I just want to show you a couple of data points that illustrate just how little esteem Americans hold these kinds of media corporations in.
Here from Gallup, October 19, 2023, so just a couple of months ago, you see the headline, Media Confidence in the U.S.
Matches the 2016 Record Low.
Quote, the 32% of Americans who say they trust the mass media a great deal or a fair amount to report the news in a full, fair and accurate way ties Gallup's lowest historical reading previously recorded in 2016.
Another 29% of U.S.
adults have, quote, not very much trust, while a record high 39% register, quote, none at all.
And we've recently showed you polls that basically the only people who have faith and trust in almost every major media corporation other than Fox News and Newsmax are Democrats.
So you have an entire industry catering to one political party that represents about 30 to 35 percent of the public that is constantly having to feed them and validate their views because the minute they alienate them, The dwindling audience that they have will dwindle even further so they're captive to their audience in a way that really can't be overstated.
I once talked to a host at MSNBC who told me that they don't get episode by episode ratings, they get segment by segment ratings.
And they told me, and this is 2014 or 15, that whenever they would put on a guest that was critical of the Democratic Party, you could watch The audience just click away and go somewhere else.
They didn't want to hear it.
And that conditions those people.
And that means never criticizing the Democratic Party until they become more and more homogenized, more and more banal, more and more predictable, more and more willing to lie, and therefore less and less trustworthy and less and less interesting to huge numbers of people who don't identify as Democrats.
That is the state of corporate media in the United States.
The problem is that for those people, their part of the media is the media.
The reality though is that there is a big part of the media that is thriving, it's the part that has not fallen prey To those defects.
So, when I watched that video from the Washington Post's Tell Lorenz, the one I just showed you, in which she kind of postured as the dean of digital era American journalism, sermonizing about what went wrong and what she referred to as her sector of the media, I was so transfixed by the utter absurdity of that person that I really could not muster a rational analysis of anything she said.
Taylor, by the way, now identifies as a disabled person because she claims she suffers from long COVID and various immunosuppressive disorders, which is more or less exactly what one would expect from her.
So perhaps the deep compassion that I feel for her predicament also prevented me from being able to dissect this address that she delivers to the public about the state of the media.
But fortunately, someone put into words exactly what my sentiments about all of this She is the media analyst and political commentator Hannah Cox, who, among other things, is a fellow of one of my favorite D.C. activist groups, the White Coast Waste Project, which has done a remarkable job in building a very bipartisan coalition to oppose federal spending on gruesome and completely unnecessary medical experiments which has done a remarkable job in building a very bipartisan coalition
And in a single tweet, Hannah not only identifies the glaring and hilarious flaws in Lorenzo's pretentious speech, but way more importantly, she identifies these broader developments governing the collapse of traditional corporate media and the rise of independent media.
So as soon as I saw that tweet, I reached out to her and asked her to come on to discuss her analysis and was very delighted when I learned that she had the time to do so tonight.
And we are very delighted to welcome her to her debut appearance on System Update.
Hannah, thank you so much for taking the time.
I'm excited to talk to you about all of this.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm a huge fan of your work, so it's wonderful to be here.
That's nice of you to say.
Thanks.
So, before we get into these broader themes, and like I said, I don't want to make this focus on Taylor Renz in part because it's not particularly significant, even though it is extremely entertaining to talk about her.
I just want to get your, kind of, what was your visceral reaction upon listening to that video?
Well, I, like you, just love to hate on Taylor Lorenz.
I think that's the only reason she has a career is because she just makes people so angry they can't look away.
It's a total train wreck.
And, you know, I run an independent media company called Base Politics.
We are a non-profit, but we are in this sector where we are focusing on new media, on podcasts, on YouTube, on Instagram and TikTok.
And I found it exceedingly condescending, first and foremost, her assertion that journalism is dying.
Journalism is alive and well.
People appreciate actual journalism and they're willing to pay for it.
What's dying is the mainstream legacy media that has failed to innovate, And that also, like you said, has become more of an arm for the state and more of a propaganda machine than actual journalistic outlets.
So I guess they don't assign who moved my cheese to read in journalism schools these days, but I think people like Taylor need to pick up the book because the amount of entitlement that came across in this video really just slaps you across the face.
You know, she's saying that these outlets are owned by Billionaires and yet they're laying all these people off as if because these people are billionaires, they should have to keep losing money for crappy work that people don't want to pay for.
At the end of the day, her work and that of many of her colleagues is not creating value for people.
People don't trust it.
I saw a recent poll that actually said 50% of Americans believe that the mainstream media intentionally lies and misleads them.
And so she doesn't connect this fact that in order to have a job in doing something, you have to create value in that job.
And she's no longer doing it.
She expects to still have a cushy job and thinks all of her other colleagues should as well.
Meanwhile, the people I think who have worked in the sector for some time, who have energy, who are entrepreneurial, who have this sort of innovative genes, they've left these companies because they are very restraining, because you cannot speak truth to power within them, because they often are so bipartisan that people really can't Talk about things that matter or ever sort of cut through all of the noise out there.
And so those types of people have already left, and they're doing just fine on places like Substack and YouTube.
She tries to undermine people in this kind of capacity and say that they're not as trustworthy, they can't be fact-checked, or their videos are too short.
What people want is shorter video, and sometimes long-form video as well.
But on top of that, this assertion that these people are less credible than her is Hilarious, because the mainstream media gets it wrong all the time, you know, from COVID.
They were not the ones that broke the story, by the way, on who was actually funding that Wuhan lab.
It was the White Coat Waste Project, who you mentioned earlier, who I'm a fellow for, who happened to be doing the work of journalists because they were filing Freedom of Information Act, trying to figure out if gain of function was happening, because it is animal torture.
And so they had sort of the smoking gun.
They couldn't even get the mainstream media to publish that information for well over a year.
And it wasn't until Rand Paul took that information and countered Dr. Fauci with it, that all of a sudden you saw the mainstream media start to change their tune and say, oh, maybe we were funding this lab.
Maybe this thing could have been lab created.
I think the amount of trust that people have lost in these institutions is valid.
They are not in any way more credible.
Their fact checks are often laughably incorrect.
I recently had to run a fact check on the fact checkers at USA Today a few weeks ago because they were claiming that there isn't a kill switch that they put in place for all vehicles beginning in 2026.
Representative Thomas Massey was trying to get that overturned, and they were calling him crazy, saying that this hadn't been passed and using really ridiculous language to sort of dance around the fact that that was exactly what was in the legislation.
Really big things like COVID and its origins to war to basic pieces of legislation and what's in them and how it's going to impact the American people.
They aren't doing their job.
They are not credible.
There's no way that you can hang their hat on what they're doing.
And so people are right to turn to independent media.
And lastly, I'll say just before I pause, you know, I also thought there was a lot of a victim mentality in Taylor's video, which you often see from Taylor.
She really likes to play the victim.
And I just think that it is such a slap in the face to journalists who are actually putting their lives on the line.
There have been over 80 journalists killed in Gaza in the past couple of months as they are trying to report on war crimes that are happening there.
You yourself have put yourself on the line and endangered your safety, both in the U.S.
and in Brazil at times.
Julian Assange is still sitting in prison for his reporting.
I mean, there are so many journalists who are doing incredible work and who really are sacrificing everything to bring people information and to try to push back on the powers that be.
And so for her to try to play victim was just really disrespectful, I thought, to the actual craft of journalism. - That time that she went on MSNBC and started weeping about how essentially she's so endangered because people criticize her on the internet when she has never to the actual craft of journalism. - That time that she went on MSNBC and started weeping about how essentially I've never challenged a single person of any power.
I've watched people like Julian Assange rot in prison.
I've seen journalists killed in war zones.
Several governments have attempted to prosecute me and illegally spy on me and all kinds of journalists who, as you say, put themselves in danger all the time.
And these millennial journalists who basically have turned themselves into arms of the powerful Really believe that because they're occasionally criticized by people on Twitter who then aren't censored that they are actually somehow really victimized and you know what it was amazing one time or a couple times now Taylor Renz has been allowed to write articles and columns that refer to me And, you know, I know I'm polarizing to a lot of people, but my journalism and my career speaks for itself.
And she was permitted to repeatedly refer to me as if it were my title as a right-wing influencer, as though I'm like some sort of TikTok dancer, while, you know, she continues to call herself A reporter and the reason is is because ideologically the Washington Post sees me as an enemy and therefore anything goes and I think that's so much of what people have come to realize about this kind of new crop of journalists is they have thrown all caution to the wind.
The other thing I just want to pick up on what you said The, obviously it's always going to be the case that media outlets are going to make mistakes.
This has been the case forever.
Human beings make mistakes.
Human institutions are fallible.
The solution, though, when you make a mistake is that you own up to it as quickly as possible and you account for how that error happened.
You apologize for it.
You correct it.
You retract it.
The lies that we're talking about that this sector of the media has told that is now failing are not trivial stories or incidental details they got wrong.
They were the ones who, for the first several months of the pandemic, pronounced that it was proven that the COVID pandemic did not emanate from a lab in Wuhan and that anyone who said otherwise was engaged in false conspiracy theories to the point that they got censored from the internet.
The thing that drives me the craziest to this day is that prior to the 2020 campaign, they ratified the CIA lie that came from the bowels of the CIA that the reporting on Hunter Biden and his activities in Ukraine and in China in connection with the Biden family was Russian disinformation.
Everyone now knows that was a fabrication.
Not one media outlet that spread those lies has ever felt the need to come and say, Here's why we got this wrong.
We apologize for having done so.
Here's what went wrong.
Here's what we're going to do in the future.
Why do you think it is that people like us can kind of look at these lies that they have told on so many critical stories?
They drown the country and Russiagate for two or three years only for that investigation to end, debunking the core conspiracy theories.
So many examples that you can give.
And I really think they don't see that, that they don't see that they have been more responsible for the dissemination of disinformation than almost any other source of information in the United States.
Why is it that you think they're so incapable of understanding the validity of these critiques?
Oh, I don't think it's that they misunderstand.
I think that they are arrogant.
I think that they have every assurance in their minds that the government's going to come in and save them and shroud them from competition.
They're working all the time for this right now, right?
And Taylor Lorenz is notorious for going after tech and saying the government needs to regulate tech companies more.
And you'll often hear them going after things like Section 230.
There was the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act.
They're introducing all these bills saying, we're trying to protect journalism.
We want to make sure that Journalists can still compete in a modern world, but really what they're trying to do in these pieces of legislation, when you dig into them, is eliminate independent competition.
They are really trying to ensure that independent media outlets, independent journalists, cannot compete with them.
They're trying to find ways where they can get together and collectively bargain with social media companies so that only their articles and links can appear, essentially.
I mean, it's really, really corrupt, but I think because they do work so hand-in-hand with the state, and you're correct, they absolutely worked with the state to censor people on social media during COVID.
But, you know, oftentimes when they're getting their facts or they're bringing you their sources, it's just people in government that they're talking to.
It's not like they're going on the ground and really, like, getting in the nitty-gritty and doing serious reporting.
They're just calling their buddies in the intelligence community and then just trotting out whatever line they're given from these guys.
But because they have had that cozy relationship for so long, I think I think they have every assurance that they believe the government's going to come in and save them and squash their competition.
And they really don't.
I don't think they have totally wrapped their minds around just how far out of the gate this is.
And that's because they have been so slow to innovate.
Most of the people who are running these newspapers or who are writing for them, They're not the innovators.
The people who are, they're already out here doing the kinds of work that you and I are doing, so they don't quite understand just how far gone it is.
TikTok is now the top search engine for, I think, 40% of Americans and growing every day.
People increasingly do not trust institutions whatsoever.
They're seeking out individuals that they like, That they have, you know, good relationships with, that they identify with online.
That's who they want to get their information from.
They have a healthy distrust of the media.
And they've seen how corrupt the media is as well, not just in their horrible reporting style, but in the tactics that they use.
You know, Taylor herself has outright doxxed people.
So, I mean, she's gone so far as to actually publish people's home addresses and work addresses and then has the audacity to go and cry about online bullying and harassment that she faces.
They lie about people, they ruin their reputations, they try to get people fired.
I mean, people are not going to forget this kind of thing.
I think when it comes to the pace of the media and how often they're wrong in their reporting, That can slip by people because Americans are busy and there's just so much news coming at them every day.
But these deeper sentiments about the way they behave, I don't think are going to be forgotten.
But I do think people need to be on guard against these kinds of legislation they're trying to pass in order to try to squash competition.
You know, it's interesting.
You have this, you know, kind of this other side of the story that Taylor and people like her cannot comprehend.
And if you look at all these stories about how the media is failing, they talk about the only sector of the media that they are in, that they know, that's the only sector of the media that they recognize, even though under their noses, millions and millions of people literally are turning to
Other alternatives and to get their information from people who they've never even heard of and have no idea exist even though they command much bigger audiences than those people and you wrote in one of your tweets and you're in one of your paragraphs in response to this video quote you said journalism is not in free fall contrary to what Taylor N's claims the dinosaur legacy media is and that's precisely because it no longer offers journalism but is really just a state propaganda machine
Now, I recently had Tucker Carlson on my show, and we both talked about the fact that when we were in our last jobs in media, mine with The Intercept, his with Fox News, we both believed when we were there, genuinely, that we were free to say whatever we wanted.
We were free to report on what we wanted.
We had no real constraints.
And it was only once I quit and he got fired and we decided to embark on our own did we realize how many kind of subliminal limitations there were on the kinds of things we could actually say or were willing to say because of how much difficulty it would create with our colleagues or with our employers if we were actually to say it.
It was the most liberating thing in the world for me to leave The Intercept and become completely independent, for him to leave Fox and you see the change in him as well.
I don't know if that's something that you can compare, but because of how independent you are, do you feel this kind of passion and liberation for the work that you do that I really think is missing in all these people who labor at these media corporations?
There's no joy in what they do, there's no vibrancy, there's no freedom, and you can just see the passion drained out of their soul.
Do you feel that as somebody who's in independent media and feels excited about what you're able to do?
Yeah, you know, I never worked for corporate media, but I did sort of work in the nonprofit sector for much larger institutions, all of which were sort of in the libertarian vein, which is mostly where I place myself.
But even within those institutions, I definitely felt that kind of parameter around me, you know, trying to keep donors happy, trying to ensure that your boss was happy with what you said, not speaking out on certain issues.
I think that even as an independent media person now, You do still have some of those obstacles because of how the algorithm is, right?
You want to retain followers, you want people to click, you want people to watch, and it is a bit difficult.
Even though I'm a libertarian, when I'm critical of, say, Trump on something, I'll often lose 100 followers immediately because I have people following me who like him.
There is audience capture, and I think anybody working in this industry has to be very cognitive of that and really work to push back on it.
That's one reason I formed my company, Base Politics, as a non-profit, because I wanted to actually shield myself from those market incentives, right?
We want to be successful, we want visibility, but we want to make sure we are always able to speak out when it's necessary, to speak out when it's scary.
Right now, it's a little scary on the right to speak out against Israel, and does really push back on some of the foreign policy around that.
I think that if you are just dependent on clicks or you're just dependent on people sort of within your echo chamber to support you, the likelihood that you do that really does diminish.
So we do take that into account with my company and we do work to push back on that, but I think unfortunately a lot of people in media, they really don't think through those things and And that's why you end up seeing the media consistently on both sides becoming a little bit more and more to the fringes, right?
Because they're just playing to their echo chambers when really most of America is not on the extreme left or right.
They're in this middle ground here.
And they're, I think, hungry for something that's more nuanced.
They're interested in other ideas, other ways of looking at things.
I think it's pretty much inarguable at this point.
The two-party system is failing the majority of Americans in this country.
And so there is interest out there, but in order to reach those people, you do have to overcome the algorithm barriers that want people to stay online, and so they want to feed them, you know, what they think they'll like over and over and over.
And then you also have to overcome that sort of audience capture.
I love this J.K.
Rowling tweet that she made in her book, Harry Potter, where she said, it's really easy to stand up to your enemy, but it's a lot harder to stand up to your friends.
No, I'm so glad that you're saying that.
I mean, there's audience capture for sure in independent media, but there's also a ton of audience capture in corporate media, because as I said, everything is so polarized now.
The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, NBC News, ABC News, they talk primarily to liberals, primarily to Democrats, and they know that any material that cuts against that grain will lose them audience, and so they don't do it.
There's a lot of people in independent media who I see who are relying on this kind of polarization model where they just feed People every day, the kind of ideological preconceptions that they want to be validated.
And I've often talked about how there were times in my career when I had to say things or report things or analyze things in a way that I knew were gonna alienate a significant portion of my audience.
As difficult as it is to do, if you're focused on short-term metrics and you know it's gonna result in a lower audience or people being angry at you who support you for a couple of weeks or even longer than that, At the end of the day, what you're doing is building a long-term audience that is coming to you not because they want you to mimic or recite the things that they're saying.
They want you to be honest with them because that's the thing they hate most about corporate media is they perceive this lack of honesty.
And I'm glad to hear you say what you're saying because I think a lot of people have a hard time with that.
But over the long term, you will build an audience, and I mean, we've seen this in the last four months with how many viewers and subscribers we lost over our coverage of Israel, and yet on the net, you end up building your audience and you replace people who only want agreement with people who want to be challenged, who want to be, have thought-provoking content, even if it is difficult for them to hear things because they don't agree with them.
And I really think that, like, one of the key points you made is that, look, Some parts of media are dying, but it's being replaced by independent media.
And I do worry that independent media, if it becomes this kind of polarized silo system where everybody's just feeding a partisan or ideological crowd, every single day will start to replicate the worst pathologies of corporate media, but there's so much in independent media of people who feel free enough to be able to kind of be honest with their audience that I think an alternative is being constructed.
And in the long run, that's the thing that gives me the greatest hope.
That's exactly right, Glenn.
You build the audience that you want, and I think you've built an incredible free-thinking audience.
That's our goal as well, and we've seen that too.
There's a lot of smart, thoughtful people out there.
I often have people in my audience say, I come from the left.
I don't agree with you on everything, but I like listening to you, and that's my kind of people because I'm in that bucket too.
I constantly want to be exposed.
to new ways of thinking and other ways of looking at things and we need to find those people and instill more of that in our society where people are intellectually curious and they're hungry for more information and they have some humility about the way they look at the world.
So I know they're out there and I think this is an incredible time in the age of information.
It really is.
Amazing to see the gains that we've already made.
We're not for independent media.
We would not know the truth about things like Hunter Biden's situation.
We would not know the truth about what happened with COVID.
There's so many things that Americans are now having far greater access to that, you know, they were gatekeepers for so long that were prohibiting us from really trying to figure out what was going on beneath the surface.
So we're at the cusp of something really great.
I think this is something that is empowering for average Americans.
It really is something that gives them the tools they need to fight back and take more active role in their society.
So I'm excited about it as a whole.
I do think we have to keep in mind, you know, those pitfalls that we could fall into.
But on net, we've got over 160 people, million people making content these days.
Of course, not all of them are necessarily political, But of those, about 50% now are full-time.
So independent media is thriving, it's growing, and anybody who's willing to compete, who's willing to come in and innovate, I think is going to thrive.
And those who don't, they need to learn how to code.
They deserve to not have jobs in journalism anymore.
Absolutely.
I mean, it's interesting that the most successful person in independent media over the last decade is probably the person who is most difficult to pin down in terms of partisan or ideological allegiance, and that's Joe Rogan.
And I think he kind of proved that the vast majority of people are not served by a model that adheres to one ideological or political line.
That's not what they want.
That's not what they trust.
And I think ultimately that is the success for independent media, and it gives me a lot of hope.
Not just seeing the part of the media that deserves to die, but the part of the media that deserves to thrive.
And I think your response to Taylor's video captured that so well.
I'm really appreciative you came on and took the time to talk to me about it.
I'm going to have you on once to talk about the White Coat Project, which is a group that I love so much and that entire cause.
But thanks so much, Anna.
It was great to talk to you, and I hope to do so again.
Absolutely.
- Absolutely, good to see you, Glenn. - Have a good evening.
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TWC.help/Glenn Ever since January 6 emerged, it has been characterized by a lot of things, one of which has been a series of lies that were told both by the government and by the media, all with the intention of making that day seem far more serious and menacing and dangerous than it actually was.
One of the worst examples was the continuous, repetitive, and melodramatic claim that, That the people who went to protest that day took a fire extinguisher and bashed in the skull of a Capitol Hill police officer named Brian Sicknick to the point where they murdered him in a very gruesome way and over and over for hours and hours throughout that day One media outlet after the next continued to repeat that claim.
It was their leading reason why this mob was a horde of murderous monsters, and it turned out to be a complete lie.
Brian Sicknick went that night, called his mother, said he was fine, said he felt great, didn't even go to the hospital.
He didn't die on January 6th as they claimed over and over.
In fact, no one died on January 6th except for four different pro-Trump supporters, two of whom dropped out of a heart attack, one from a speed overdose, and one Ashley Babbitt who was killed by a Capitol Hill police officer who shot her at point blank range.
And so Brian Sicknick didn't die until the next day, and the coroner determined that he died of natural causes, not by having his skull bashed in with a fire extinguisher.
And this is what you see in these events all the time, are all kinds of lies in order to scare people into believing that the event is much worse than it is, that they become more submissive and more willing to give up power to the institutions of authority like the CIA and the FBI.
And the members of Congress who wanted to seize a lot of power in the name of fighting this scary insurrectionary movement.
And one of the main stories that actually emerged that fueled this narrative was the claim that a domestic terrorist actually planted very dangerous pipe bombs, one at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, the other at the Republican National Committee headquarters, and one of which came very close to being able to threaten the physical safety of the vice president-elect of the United States, Kamala Harris.
Fast forward two years later, actually almost three years later, and we have no idea who this pipe bomber was.
We're talking about one of the most surveilled areas in one of the most surveilled cities in all of the United States, Washington DC, near the Capitol, near all of the major centers of state power, and somehow the FBI has not been able to find Who it is who supposedly planted these pipe bombs.
Now, one of the journalists who has been one of the very few who has been intrepid and aggressive about questioning a lot of these narratives and challenging them and proving with evidence that some of them is false is our friend, friend of the show, who's appeared many times to talk about his reporting along the way, Darren Beatty, who is a political scientist from Duke and a former Trump speechwriter and the founder of Revolver News, where he has done a lot of this reporting.
And he has now We've obtained some evidence, some video evidence that came, I believe, from Thomas Massey in the Capitol that has helped him really break down a lot of the bizarre doubts about the narrative that emerged specifically about this pipe bomber.
We're always happy to have Darren on.
He is always very thoughtful in everything he has to say, very measured in his words and in his claims, and we are always delighted to see him.
Darren, great to see you.
Thank you for coming on to talk to us about this.
Fantastic to be back.
Thank you, Glenn.
Absolutely.
So before we get into these specifics and this new evidence and kind of the questions that have been raised, you know, one of the things I always try and stress, because I've noticed this so often, is that so often when there's an event that can be used by the government to put the population into greater degrees of fear, There's always an attempt to kind of try and exaggerate how bad it actually was.
Even if it is bad, there's always an attempt to kind of add scary claims about it.
This was done with anthrax and I think people have forgotten how crucial the anthrax attacks were to
Elevating the climate of fear after 9-11 to make people think that it's not just the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that could be attacked But suburbanites in their own home through their mailbox One of the kind of safest symbols of American safety and the role that played in elevating fear Just before we get into the details talk about the importance of this claim about how these pipe bombs were laid and how that was used to create a narrative about January 6th
Absolutely.
There are a number of dimensions to this.
And, you know, there are two major categories that we've covered extensively and really launched in the national conversation that I call the twin smoking guns of the Fed's erection.
One is the story of Ray Epps, which we've talked about in another context.
And the other is the story of the pipe bomb, which we've covered extensively for almost three years now.
Now, these pipe bombs, according to the FBI and according to surveillance footage, presented to us from the FBI.
Incidentally, surveillance footage that comes from the DNC surveillance cameras.
We'll get to that in a bit.
According to this footage in the FBI, these pipe bombs were planted the evening before on January 6.
There's one pipe bomb that's called the RNC pipe bomb, but really the whole RNC-DNC parallelism is something of a retroactive Fiction.
The pipe bomb that was first discovered, but planted second, behind a back alley, behind a trash can in a back alley near the Capitol Hill Club, that was planted around 8.30.
And there's the second pipe bomb, the DNC pipe bomb, that was planted at approximately 8 p.m., according to the footage.
Now, the surveillance footage.
Presented to us by the FBI that comes via the DNC.
Now this latest bit of footage that you mentioned, and I think the footage itself is a good segue into the larger pipe bomb story, because no matter where you are in terms of your understanding of the overwhelming evidence that the pipe bomb situation is dirty, and indeed some type of operation, The video itself that we're about to look at, simply as a self-contained matter, is explosive and scandalous no matter how you look at it.
Even if you close your eyes and ears to the overwhelming evidence of federal involvement in January 6th, this video as a self-contained matter is pretty explosive and I'd like to walk the audience through it if you guys have some clips on B-roll.
Yeah, so we have Uh, three clips.
I think, are they, is Darren going to be able to see these clips?
I can describe it.
Don't worry about the heat roll too much.
No, no, but I just want, what I want is to, because we didn't, we didn't pick all of them.
I know you had a long Twitter thread analyzing, you know, I think like six or seven videos.
I'll discuss the most salient.
Okay, so hopefully we chose what you consider the most salient.
But let me show you first, the first video we have.
You'll be able to see it on the screen.
You can kind of talk during the time that we're playing it.
I think this was the first one that was just kind of used to show the pending of the pipe bomb.
So let's look at this and then you tell us what you think we need to.
And let me just say it's dated, this is from, this one is dated January 6th at 1.05 PM, right?
Okay, so let's take a look at this.
So here we have an individual with a backpack approaching these two SUVs.
We now know that individual is a plainclothes Capitol Police officer.
He's informing the SUV here, the driver's side.
This is a Metro PDS-TV.
He's informing the individuals in this car of the presence of a pipe bomb merely feet away.
This isn't just an ordinary Metro PD car.
This is part of a Secret Service detail, and the black SUV is Secret Service, but even the Metro PD car is part of the Secret Service detail.
Here we see the person go to the black SUV.
He's informing The individuals there, the detail, the Secret Service officers, the presence of a pipe bomb merely feet away, and ultimately the camera will pan to the benches where the pipe bomb is placed.
Now, the first strange thing about this is, after being informed, this is Secret Service, after being informed of the presence of a pipe bomb merely feet away, it will take them over a minute to even bother getting out of their vehicles.
At which point, they simply stand and lounge around in the most lackadaisical fashion imaginable.
If viewers can see it here, or they can go to revolver.news and watch the video, watch the video for yourselves and ask yourself, is this how I would imagine the Secret Service would respond to being informed of an explosive device?
While this whole thing is happening, you have people walking by, like just civilians, walking very close to these cars.
Well, I'm getting to that.
Even in this first video.
I'm sorry, I should have asked this before and I don't mean to interrupt your train of thought, I apologize, but are we only seeing these videos now and where did they come from?
How did we get access to these videos?
So there's a bunch of footage obviously from the Capitol Police.
This security camera is a Capitol Police security camera.
It was not released in the 70, 90 or so hours that the new speaker released, even though he promised $40,000.
It kind of got lost in the whole hoopla over the other Capitol videos.
This was a specialized thing.
This is something that Thomas Massey, as a result of extensive conversations and his deep familiarity with our research at revolver.news, he actually has taken an active interest in this pipe bomb question specifically, and he kind of heroically persisted with Kevin McCarthy directly to the point that, you know, he had some leverage with Kevin McCarthy and basically used it on this.
Kevin McCarthy was forced to pull teeth to get this video released.
This is only seven minutes, but I think without question, this is the most important January 6 video in existence.
And it was sort of released very quietly and it's been out for four months, but nobody's really, really told the story of how and why this is so significant.
And this is what I've done recently.
And, you know, it's now it's kind of everywhere because it's so self-evident once you see it, that here you have a secret service detail being informed the presence of an explosive device.
There's a extraordinary lack of concern, not only for themselves, for their own lives, for the life of their protectee, who is then VP elect Kamala Harris.
And we'll get to that in a second.
That's very significant significant.
And most egregiously, as you point out, pedestrians walking by, in fact, the most flagrant example of this is another clip, which you guys may or may not have, it's fine if you don't, of a group of children actually crossing the street in the direction of this pipe bomb, walking within feet of the benches where the pipe bomb is placed, and the Secret Service agents are just standing there, not warning them, not a care in the world for these kids, for themselves, for not warning them, not a care in the world for these
It's very clear that these Secret Service agents know that the pipe bomb is a dud, that it's inert, that it's fake, that it poses no danger.
Then the obvious question is, how the hell did the Secret Service agents know that this bomb is a dud?
Let's look at the second video.
I think we have three clips.
Are you able to see these on the screen as we're playing them?
All right, so let's look at the second one and tell us what we're seeing here.
Yeah, this is not going to be the Children Crossing.
The Children Crossing is approximately 109, somewhere in the 109 area.
But, I mean, still the idea is that by now they have been informed that there is supposedly a dangerous pipe bomb.
Yeah, this is the part where they sit around in their vehicle for about a minute, as I mentioned.
They sit around in their vehicle after being informed for almost a minute, then they get out.
Then there's about two minutes of them just lackadaisically standing around with no concern whatsoever.
Then at approximately the 109 minute mark, that's when you see them allow a group of children across this very street that you're looking at.
And at that point, the video does show the benches where the pipe bomb is actually placed.
Then shortly after that, a Capitol Police officer walks right up to the pipe bomb, snaps a photo, gives a thumbs up signal, after which point the Secret Service detail for the first time in the whole seven minute video actually hustle.
and get the hell out of Dodge.
That's the first time the whole video, they scramble to get away.
Now, and then the video expires.
This is only seven minutes, is explosive seven minutes.
But I have sources who've seen a more extended version.
And what happened shortly after that is kind of funny because they actually get a bomb safe robot to come in and dismantle it.
The very bomb that they were just lackadaisically standing around, that they're unconcerned of its, you know, danger it poses to Kamala Harris, the VP-elect, who they're supposed to be protecting, and then to this group of children, no concern.
And yet somehow, after they get that money shot from the Capitol Police officer who gives the thumbs up, then they progress to this spectacle of getting a bomb-safe robot to dismantle it.
It doesn't make any sense.
Again, it's very clear that they knew that the bomb posed no threat, but the obvious follow-up question is, how in the world would Kamala Harris's Secret Service detail know that this bomb was fake?
Now, let me get to another thing that is so obvious.
Before we move on to that, first of all, let me just show this third clip we have, and people should go and watch all the clips on Revolver News.
It's also On your Twitter feed, it went mega viral.
What is this that we're seeing here, Darren?
Is it just still more of them?
We're at 107 here.
So again, the guy is still there.
He hasn't left.
This is the person.
So here they are standing around lackadaisically.
This is after they got out of their cars.
So I mean, again, I described it.
This isn't particularly interesting.
They're just standing around.
Then at the 109 is the most egregious kind of flagrant example of their unconcern, because that's when you can see the children crossing.
And then at around 110, you can see the Capitol Police officer snapping a photo.
So again, I invite people they can go to revolver.news and watch these clips.
I think I've described them pretty well.
And But that's the footage, and as I pointed out, once the footage expires a little bit later, that's when they get the bomb-safe robot, which, again, doesn't make any sense.
But let me get to an obvious and damning question.
Before we get there, let me say this.
This is the thing that when I read what you had to say, and now that I'm listening to you further explain, is the question that I had, which is, so let's say it's possible that You were able to look at this bomb and just on sight kind of see that it's a joke, right?
That it's not an actual serious threat, that it's not a real bomb that could possibly explode.
Like I imagine if I tried to create a pipe bomb, you would immediately look at it and know that there's no chance that it would detonate.
But then the question becomes, why has this narrative lingered for so long that this is a serious pipe bomb?
Why are there rewards out for it?
Yeah, go ahead.
Let me know.
I mean, look, anybody who's ever dealt with the Secret Service whatsoever, they're not going to make an inference and say, oh, this kind of looks like it might be fake.
That is a profound violation of protocol.
If they find something that even remotely looks like—and these were convincing, whether or not they were actually operative is another question—but you can see photos of them.
They don't look obviously fake.
And even if they were obviously fake, it's still a flagrant violation of protocol.
We're dealing with the Secret Service of the United States tasked with protecting the VP-elect, the first woman of color VP-elect.
Anybody who's dealt with the Secret Service knows that there is zero chance that, according to normal protocol, they would just see it and, you know, make a guess and say, this kind of looks fake.
So that, that needs to be ruled out.
Well, and again, I mean, I was just making that devil's argument, but like, you're like, I'm just saying, like, That was like a defense of them.
So, okay, we looked at this pipe bomb.
We didn't really jump and get all excited because we knew it was fake.
But then, why wasn't that part of the story from the beginning?
Let me point this other thing out.
This is at 1.05.
This is already after that first pipe bomb was discovered at 12.40 p.m.
So, another bomb had already been discovered.
Which is, you know, also kind of bizarre.
And I'd like to get to the full narrative of that.
But let me jump to the first obvious and damning thing about this.
I'm sorry to keep interrupting.
We're going to take all the time we need.
But here, I just want to show you, we actually do have the video clip at 109.
So since you've referenced it several times, I just want people to be able to see it.
I think this is where the children are crossing, just so people can visualize what you've been describing.
I think this is the clip that you were talking about.
Were there people walking by?
Yeah, so the bomb is right by the foot of that further bench.
And notice there's a cup of coffee that's open.
It's a very windy day.
So that cup of coffee, empty cup of coffee, is the mug, whatever it's called.
That had not been there for a long time.
Someone was sitting there very recently, and I'd love to know who.
So, here they are.
Look at how they stand around.
The bomb is literally at those benches.
They're within the blast radius, and they don't give a damn.
Okay, so go ahead.
Go ahead with the rest of your analysis.
Keep going.
Keep going.
Yeah, I think it stopped there.
Do we have this next?
OK.
Do we have this?
Yeah, no, I don't think we have the rest of that video, but... No, I think it's a lost cause, but it's fine because we've described it.
And again, the full breakdown is on the piece at Revolver News.
So now please let me get into the... Go ahead.
Go ahead.
I promise I won't interrupt.
Go ahead.
OK, because it gets to what you're saying about how in every other domain the regime is interested in amplifying and exaggerating to the point of absurdity the significance of January 6th in terms of it being a domestic terror event.
I should have you know in your audience, the government officially considers pipe bombs to be weapons of mass destruction, by the way.
So this is the most domestic terrorist element of the event that the media and, you know, the Democrats have spent considerable time and resources and energy in amplifying as a significant event of domestic terrorism.
Kamala Harris's In the building at this time, the Secret Service agents who are utterly lackadaisical, who clearly know the bomb is fake, are part of Kamala Harris's Secret Service detail.
Kamala Harris studiously covered up the fact that she was in the DNC building on that day.
studiously.
In fact, she successfully covered it up for almost a year, after which point it was leaked.
She's never even publicly acknowledged the fact that she was there.
Now think about this, Glenn.
Kamala Harris is one of the most politically opportunistic creatures on this planet.
Why would she forego the opportunity to milk politically the fact that she came in within a hair's width of the January 6 pipe bomb, which, according to reports, had live explosives on it and had explosive material on it?
Why would Joe Biden, for that matter, who thinks January 6 is sufficiently serious as to warrant An entire speech.
And look, this guy can barely get out of bed.
If he's going to give a speech for longer than an hour, it means it's important to him.
He gave a speech on the third anniversary of January 6th for over an hour.
And in this time he neglected to mention that his own vice president nearly lost her life to the dangerous Naga pipe bomb.
That's very weird.
And it makes us wonder how dark and how damning And how embarrassing does the truth have to be for these salivating political opportunists to leave that yummy bar of chocolate untouched on the table?
You'd think that would be the most memorable and repeated talking points the whole January 6th that Kamala Harris The VP-elect, the first woman of color, so forth and so on, was actually in the building with the pipe bomb.
Especially, as you pointed out, I'm glad you mentioned Brian Sicknick in the intro.
Think of the great contortionist lengths they have to go to exaggerate this nonsense about Brian Sicknick and have that blow up in their face because it was utterly false, the story that he was bludgeoned to death by the Magomob.
But here you have an actual case of the vice president being in the building with the bomb, and she doesn't mention it, Biden doesn't mention it.
They actively cover that up.
So let me just probe that a little bit, because at the time, they did make a big deal out of this.
This was a part They made a big deal about it, but Kamala Harris covered up her presence.
That's what I'm pointing out.
She covered up her presence in the DNC while the bomb was there.
I'm trying to understand this speculative theory, which is the idea that People put these pipe bombs there to make the January 6th event seem like a more serious or more aggraver expression of domestic terrorism.
And yet, why then wouldn't they have exploited it for that purpose?
Well, that's a very good question.
I don't have all the answers here, but at the starting point, we see a very bizarre thing where the Secret Service is informed of an explosive device within feet of them, and they clearly know that it's fake.
They're protecting the VP-elect, and against all political interests, she covers up the fact that she's in the DNC.
So this is only the beginning.
So we're looking at the video of the discovery of the bomb.
At the point at which that DNC bomb was discovered, it had been sitting out there fairly conspicuously by that park bench for over 17 hours.
According to the surveillance footage presented by the FBI, it was planted Around 8 p.m., 8 p.m.
the evening before.
So it was sitting there conspicuously for over 17 hours, undiscovered by motorists, undiscovered by pedestrians on a very high foot traffic morning on the 6th, undiscovered by the regularly stationed physical security guard that we proved is regularly stationed right there by the garages of the DNC, and then undiscovered by the Secret Service.
That are on record as having conducted a sweep prior to Kamala Harris's entry into the building.
The same Secret Service who, when informed of the presence of the bomb, exhibited zero concern and clearly knew that it was fake.
Right.
So now let's go to the RNC bomb, the first bomb.
Before we leave the DNC bomb, I just want to ask you this question.
It actually applies to both.
To be totally honest, every time this issue comes up, I always forget, I always forget that there was two pipe bombs that were alleged to have been planted as part of this event.
Yeah.
And there's no reason I should forget that because if that were the case, that would be far and away the most serious part of January 6th.
As you said, it's the most domestic terroristy part of What would have happened?
And yet here we are three years later, and despite the fact that the DOJ has launched what they claim is, and I think is actually clearly the case, the largest law enforcement investigation in the history of the department, more resources expended to make sure that every single person even remotely involved in January 6th is hunted down no matter what they did or didn't do, There should be rage, right?
That the FBI has not yet discovered the culprit of who planted these.
Is there any anger in the political class?
Is there pressure on the FBI or questioning of the FBI about why these people haven't yet been found?
In fact, before we move to the RNC, so again, we've covered this extensively.
And when we were marked upon the fact, this was before we had this video and the whole Secret Service clearly knowing it was a dud and so forth.
But the simple fact that the DNC bomb, given how conspicuous it was, was undiscovered for 17 hours, including undiscovered by the Secret Service itself.
Was so bizarre and implausible that our investigative team at Revolver News revisited the surveillance footage presented to us by the FBI.
And we proved definitively, because we're wondering, did the pipe bomber actually plant it when they said it would?
Because it's so implausible that it would be sitting out there for that long undiscovered.
So we reviewed the video.
We proved definitively That the FBI is in possession of a camera whose angle would settle that question, whose camera whose angle, if indeed the pipe bomber actually did plant it when they said it would, would provide clear shot of that happening.
And yet, they have not.
presented that to the public.
They've chosen to use their two security cameras that they use at the DNC for the footage they put out.
Obviously, these cameras have different angles, they have different physical positioning.
The one that they chose to depict the pipe bomber allegedly planting the bomb is the one with the worst angle.
So why wouldn't they present the footage of the better angle that would Definitively show the pipe bomber planting the bomb.
And for that matter, it would make a good, you know, PR thing, because you'd have the clear footage of that happening.
They've provided no answer to this.
Furthermore, we've shown that an overwhelming likelihood the footage itself is tampered with, because the frame rate of the footage is 1.6 frames per second.
That's unheard of.
The worst commercially available surveillance cameras in terms of frame rate are around 8 frames per second.
You go on a road trip in the middle of nowhere and find the most dilapidated gas station you can.
You look at a security camera, that's going to have eight frames per second.
And we're supposed to believe that the DNC headquarters, with all of the VIPs coming and going and working there in a high crime city, the DNC building, not that particular one, but the DNC building a break-in was the catalyst for one of the most notorious political scandals in American history, Watergate.
So we're supposed to believe that the DNC building, not only did they just, you know, go the cheap route and get the worst camera.
They went out of their way to scour every antique store in the country to find like one of the three surviving cameras.
And also the official position of the U.S.
security state is that the greatest threat to American national security is not ISIS or China or Iran or Russia or North Korea but right-wing extremism.
So you would think they would understand that the DNC I wanted to set that up, Glenn, just to say that it's kind of bizarre that the DNC and the Democrats are not, you know, we prove, this is, this is simply a logical proof here.
We're running out of time.
So let's talk about that.
I wanted to set that up, Glenn, just to say that it's kind of bizarre that the DNC and the Democrats are not, you know, we prove this is simply a logical proof here.
We know they have two camera angles and they chose to show us the bad one.
The fact that the Democrats themselves as a party are totally uninterested in uncovering the identity of this ostensible MAGA terrorist who planted an explosive device outside of their national headquarters.
That is weird in the same way that the Kamala Harris thing, Kamala Harris not mentioning the fact that she was within a hair's width of this bomb is, you know, that's an order of magnitude more damning, but it's all in the same universe of doesn't make any sense.
Let's go to the RNC bomb, because here's where, believe it or not, here's where it really gets crazy.
So, the RNC bomb was actually the first one that was found.
As I mentioned, it's not really an RNC bomb.
It was planted in a back alley by the Capitol Hill Club, which is adjacent to the RNC.
This bomb was discovered, we're told, by a random pedestrian called Karlyn Younger.
According to Youngert, she found this bomb behind a trash can in Back Alley at 1240 p.m.
She proceeded to inform a security official in the Capitol Hill Club, who happened to be a former Capitol Police officer, and the Capitol Police began responding to this first bomb at 1250.
The first and decisive breach on the west perimeter of the Capitol, the famous breach that we've covered in our now classic piece, Meet Ray Epps, which is not just about Epps, but all of the suspicious activity at the Peace Monument prior to that breach.
And this, by the way, is the iconic breach with the bike rack with, you know, Ray Epps whispering to the guys.
That occurred at 1253 p.m.
That occurred at 12:53 p.m., three minutes after this lady randomly finds the bomb and the Capitol Police start responding to it.
Karlyn Younger, again this random pedestrian, reported that when she found the bomb, it was equipped with a mechanical kitchen timer that could go to an hour, but had 20 minutes left.
It turned out the timer was stuck on 20 minutes, but it looked like there was 20 minutes left because it was stuck on the dial there.
So let's do the math, Glenn.
Well, 1240 p.m., 20 minutes stuck on the dial.
1240 plus 20 minutes is 1 p.m., which is exactly when the certification of the vote proceeding was to begin.
So let's step back and fully digest this infinitesimally implausible coincidence.
This pipe bomb, we're led to believe, was sitting behind a trash can in a back alley for over 16 hours, only to be randomly discovered almost to the exact minute as to be perfectly synchronized, not only with 1 p.m.
certification vote, but more importantly, with the 1253 p.m.
initial and decisive attack on the west perimeter of the Capitol.
The timing was so spectacularly synchronized that then head of the Capitol Police, Stephen Sund, espoused the theory that these pipe bombs were planted as diversionary devices, not intended to go off.
And additional support for that theory is the fact that they were both equipped with these mechanical timers up to an hour, and they were planted the evening before.
So the latest they could have actually gone off, if they were intended to go off, would be like 9.30 p.m.
or something in a back alley.
The night before, on January 5th.
But instead, they were discovered in perfect synchronicity with the certification of the vote and the attack on the West Perimeter.
Now let's jump to the video we just looked at of the DNC bomb being discovered.
That's at 1.05 p.m.
That's scarcely 15 minutes after the first one was discovered at 12.40.
So the diversion theory makes complete sense, but there's one hiccup there.
How would this pipe bomber Count on both of these bombs sitting in their respective locations undiscovered for 16-17 hours and then just randomly and coincidentally and independently being discovered within a 15 minute time frame that perfectly coincides with the unfolding of the attack on the Capitol.
Yeah.
You know, this guy should instead of planting the pipe bombs, he should have bought a lottery ticket with that kind of luck.
Yeah.
Or maybe it wasn't luck.
Maybe it was something else.
But I'll leave that as an exercise for the audience.
But I'll only say at one more point.
So the head of the pipe bomb investigation, the FBI, someone called Steven DeAntuono, who incidentally cut his teeth as the head of the Detroit field office, where he oversaw the disgraced entrapment operation known as the Whitmer where he oversaw the disgraced entrapment operation known as the Whitmer kidnapping He was the public face of the pipe bomb investigation, of all people.
He retired early, which was weird because people don't retire from the Washington Field Office.
That's a stepping stone to the rarefied floors of the Hoover Building.
But he retired, I think, clearly because he had a guilty conscience and it was too much for him.
He is working at KPMG now, believe it or not.
He volunteered himself before the Judiciary Committee in his retirement to answer questions.
And Thomas Massey was brave and enterprising enough to ask him very pointed questions based on our research at Revolver.News.
And I think your audience would be interested in some of his answers. So he was asked about the surveillance footage. No answer whatsoever. He was asked whether the FBI used geofencing technology to identify this pipe bomber because it's a perfect setup.
We know from this surveillance footage where the person was and when, and there's no one around, so it's perfect for geofencing, which the feds have actually used successfully to identify other January 6 participants.
Stephen D'Antuono's body language got very uncomfortable, and he said, well, actually we did try to use geofencing to identify this pipe bomber.
But the telecom company in question got back to us and said, for this specific time and for this specific place, our data is corrupted.
After which he pleaded for the then stunned members of the Judiciary Committee not to entertain any conspiracy theories.
For our purposes, it gets even better because he was asked about the people who discovered the pipe bombs, because in light of the extraordinarily coincidental, the implausibly coincidental circumstances under which these two bombs were discovered, again, perfect synchronicity with the attack on the Capitol, you would think they would be suspects.
And Stephen DeAntonio said, yeah, I know it's investigation 101 that the people to discover the bombs would be suspects.
Well, do you know who the guy was who discovered the DNC bomb?
No, I don't know who he was.
Do you know if he was interviewed by the FBI?
No, I don't know if he was interviewed by the FBI.
This is the head of the entire investigation who doesn't know whether the people who would presumably be the key suspects, at least initially, were even interviewed.
Yeah, I mean this is, you know, I have to say, first of all, obviously people should go and look at Revolver News because a lot of these evidentiary analyses are difficult to convey in an interview.
You should interact with the All the video and all the kind of breakdown, I wanted to give people a sense of what it is, but you know, honestly, Garren, at the end of the day, for me, the most persuasive part of what you're doing is the fact that it is almost inconceivable to me that you have this storyline, that you have what they've been looking for forever, which are like MAGA terrorists, right?
people planting pipe bombs, classic terrorism, at these two locations.
And the interest level over the last three years in finding out who did this has completely disappeared.
There's no anger.
There's no movement.
There's no push.
There's no interest.
It's like it's completely disappeared.
It served its purpose, its narrative purpose, and now it's gone.
And the fact that when every single last pebble has been overturned as part of this investigation, When every single last pebble has been overturned as part of this investigation, the most significant crime that was committed as part of all of this would be left unsolved and everybody would be fine with it, as seems to be the case.
On top of all the, you know, very uncharacteristically humble failure to exploit it politically on the part of people like Kamala Harris and Joe Biden to push this narrative, these are the kinds of things that raise the biggest questions independent of the kind of breakdown of this analytical these are the kinds of things that raise the biggest questions independent of the kind of breakdown of this analytical evidentiary questioning that you're raising that, you But it is bizarre.
I always forget that there was a pipe bomb allegation made as part of this story because of how completely disappeared it has become from our narrative.
I'm really grateful for your work in general, but in particular for your pursuit of this story, because every time I'm like, oh yeah, There was like that, those two pipe bombs that we still don't know who was responsible for them.
And no one seems to care.
No one seems interested in finding it out.
No one seems angry that we don't actually know.
And that by itself is immeasurably suspicious.
So anyway, as always, people should be looking at revolver.news.
People should be following Darren's work.
We are obviously going to continue to have you on the show to talk about this and other developments in January 6th.
And as always, we're very appreciative of your time and your excellent work in pursuing this so diligently.
Thank you so much, Glenn.
Have a good evening, Darren.
Thank you.
You too.
You too.
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