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We're going to be talking to Richie McGinnis, a true independent journalist.
That's what we like to do here.
Buckle up and get ready to make sense of the madness.
And we are back.
We are now joined by Richie McGinnis, the author of Riot Diet, One Man's Radical Ride Through America in Chaos.
All right, brother.
So I read your bio.
You're about a decade younger than I am.
Still a pretty young guy in my book anyway.
You know, I don't like to think of myself as too old, but let me tell you right now, man, once you hit really after 40, it's the road to 50.
There's really no 45 marker.
I don't know what I'm going to say after 50.
But one of the big things that I've always tried to do is get as much source material as possible and not make prejudgments because you don't know how another person really feels from a 30-second soundbite or a clip of them maybe in their worst moment.
But if you are on the ground and you're observing something for a long period of time and you're seeing groupthink, I think that that is a very helpful way to see not only where the culture is, but where the mindset of some of these people are.
So you've done a ton on the ground over the last probably decade plus at this point.
Let's start with how you get into this arena, what independent journalism means to you.
And I also know that you did a stint at the Daily Caller.
What was that kind of transition like into that and then out of that?
That's a great question.
And I moved to DC in 2008.
And actually, I was watching Loose Change in high school.
And that was one of the reasons I decided to study Arabic.
I studied Arabic at Georgetown in D.C.
And, you know, I went to D.C. in 08 as a young, idealistic 18-year-old thinking, you know, hope and change, folks.
You know, listening to Obama's speeches in the run-up to that, his win in 08.
And that was knocking on doors on his behalf in Virginia.
I volunteered as a campaign canvasser.
And I thought, you know, he promised to pull the troops out of the Middle East in an op-ed in 2008, summer of 2008.
They all said they were going to shut down Guantanamo Bay?
Yes.
Every single damn one of them up on that stage.
There were two people, by the way, that were actually sincere when we're talking about the Democratic primary.
You had Mike Gravelle and Dennis Kucinich.
They probably would have done what they said, but John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Joey B. the gangster, Biden, down the line, the Barack Star, all were getting out of the Middle East and they were all shutting down Guantanamo Bay.
Go ahead.
Yeah, exactly.
And so watching Obama's first term while I was in college and studying Arabic, and then I lived in the Middle East and Amman Jordan for five months right before the Arab Spring in the semester leading up to that.
So I was in Tahrir Square in December of 2010, which was like a month before everything popped off over there.
And then just seeing the way that the Syrian Civil War was managed, the way that the Iraq war, you know, he obviously didn't pull the troops out.
And I became very disillusioned with the promises that were made and not kept once Obama took office.
So I decided to abandon my Arabic and Middle Eastern history education and go work in media.
So I interned at Al Jazeera Arabic.
This is my second semester senior year.
I went to work at MSNBC, NBC, Washington, and I worked as a production assistant there, got Rev Al Sharpton as tea and toast.
That was my one of my jobs was I was a PA.
A true gangster, by the way.
Again, I mean, you're talking about the nicest guy.
I mean, I can't imagine what he was like behind the scenes.
But for those that don't know, I mean, Al Sharpton was a bag man for the Franchise Mafia family, according to Michael Francesi.
Decades ago, you know, when, again, you didn't have as much of a media presence and HBO was just like cable was just coming up.
They did a real sports, I think it was with Bob Costas, where they showed Reverend Sharpton making a $10,000 cocaine deal.
Okay.
In a white suit and a cowboy hat.
You cannot make this up.
And about 200 pounds fatter, too.
Yeah, he was way.
Well, that was pre-Tawana Brawley.
And I know that we have that age gap, but I was also, I lived in that area just above the city where the Tawana Brawley scandal had come out.
And another thing about that, those magical 80s moments is that talk show hosts.
So we still had straight news, but now all of a sudden, talk show hosts like the Phil Donahue's, it's the Oprah era.
A lot of people forget Morton Downey Jr.
Morton Downey Jr. used to have Al Sharpton on all the time, all the time.
And they really started creating these personas.
I mean, this was a true gangster that now is a political pundit on one of the most authoritative sources out there, mainstream media.
500 grand from the from Kamala Harris's campaign to his foundation.
They gave him a half million bucks to do that interview.
I wanted to ask you about Al Jazeera because that's also really interesting because, I mean, again, that time period of the war of terror, Al Jazeera was supposedly like an arm of Al-Qaeda, at least according to, you know, the mainstream media and how it was perceived.
But during that Obama era, where there was kind of this time period of a transition from Al-Qaeda to ISIS, Al Jazeera suddenly became more of a mainstream outlet, something that was more acceptable.
And they started hiring Western media personalities that had kind of left, kind of like RT did.
They tried to do Al Jazeera America for a little while.
That was after I left.
But at the time that I was there, I was doing Al Jazeera Arabic, which was an Arabic show broadcast.
It was called Min Washington, which means from Washington.
And it was broadcast to the Middle East.
It was actually not even in high definition.
It was in 480.
This is like 2012.
And I saw the way that Al Jazeera Arabic, their coverage was extremely conservative for their Muslim Arab audience in the Middle East.
Al Jazeera English had a totally different tune.
So literally out of the same building, two floors above, there were two completely different versions of the stories that were coming out of DC coming out of the same outlet based on whether it was Al Jazeera Arabic or English.
And that opened my eyes to the way in which media coverage can really be skewed and present people with two completely different realities.
And obviously working at MSNBC, there was a certain bend, you know, and I saw the way that the people who worked there really, to put it frankly, looked down upon what you would call the flyover Americans who ended up voting for Trump in 2016.
And I transitioned from MSNBC, NBC.
I was bartending as a second job because I was making $12 an hour.
And I started.
By the way, in New York City, folks, that's not only not livable.
Like, I don't even know if you can stay in a hostel.
And before you go even further, you know, I was just down in Long Island for a buddy's funeral, and it was one of my fraternity brothers.
So a bunch of my brothers I hadn't seen in a while.
My one buddy, he works for NBC over in Rockefeller Plaza, and he's always looked down upon me.
I mean, it's just that smug, I know more than you attitude.
And I'm just going to say it like, and I love the guy.
I mean, we hug all the time.
We text, we rib each other.
But all I'm going to say is all of a sudden he developed an autoimmune disorder and he's got weird patches on the top of his head.
And I'll tell you right now, there is no way there will ever be any convincing of him that this magical disorder that just popped up in the last couple of years had anything to do with the old boopity boop.
And it's really just, it's really unfortunate because it is kind of like this mindset where you can't, it's impossible almost to get out of that box because there's so many other people surrounding you that if you question one thing, you get so much pushback and that becomes your life that you don't even want to address anything surrounding that.
It's very hard to break free.
Yeah.
And I guess I did break free just because I was offered a job to work for Mark Levin, who's a conservative radio guy.
And during the interview, they were like, well, we're going to tell you who it is.
It's this big star.
It's Mark Levin.
And I, you know, feigned surprise.
Wow, that's amazing.
What a big star.
I knew the name, but I didn't really know who he was.
I went home and Googled Mark Levin and I was like, wait, this guy's the second biggest radio personality in the United States.
I've been working in media for five years and I didn't know who this guy was.
How sheltered have I been growing up in the New York area, then moving to D.C. and working in D.C.
And I realized that there's a whole other half of America that I hadn't been exposed to.
So I was working there from 15 through Trump's election.
And when Trump got elected, my friend, who was my bartending buddy, actually, he worked at Daily Caller.
And I just saw the crazy views that they were getting on Facebook, particularly.
They have a massive front page audience and the video was pretty poor quality as far as the production was concerned.
So I took a 30% pay cut to go work at the Daily Caller in May of 2017.
And that was a little bit different.
Let me just stop you right there.
I think that's important to note.
We don't do this for money.
Okay.
I can't even, you know, I can't, I don't even want to get into the behind the scenes of all the, you know, alternative media stuff, et cetera, et cetera.
But just like you, you know, it's not so much that I bounce around.
When I am independent, I'm independent.
Sometimes I get offers.
But, you know, I've seen so many of these startups go under.
Like you said, you're for the number two radio guy in the world.
You don't even know him within the mainstream realm, right?
And, you know, Mark Levin, I'm kind of aware of him because obviously with my relationship with Alex Jones and the talk radio arena, even before that, I was into both sides.
And as bad as Stern is now, I often credit Stern with getting me into talk radio to begin with.
But I remember the days of Air America when the Democrats and the left tried to do their deal.
I used to listen to Jerry Springer or Al Franken or a number of those people.
Pacifica Radio is still around over on the West Coast.
I still listen to some of those people.
I think it's good to have that variety.
But like you said, sometimes you got to make the jump to what makes sense because it's not, I mean, guys, making $12 in New York City in 2012, I'm telling you bare minimum, you've got to make $30 an hour working 40 to 60 hours a week to have like a 400 square foot apartment there.
Like, like if you, that's, and most people have two or three roommates.
It's nightmarish.
I can't.
I had roommates, yeah, for sure.
You've got to do it.
You just mentioned that your Daily Caller buddy had a job as a bartender where you can actually make real money.
Because by the way, like the tips are the real money.
I know I ran a bar in New York.
I did similar things.
Like, even working for the media, you're supplementing your income because most of us aren't in it to put a bunch of makeup on and read a teleprompter and make a bunch of money to sell a narrative.
We actually care what's going on in the world.
So talk about that shift.
Yeah.
So that was in May of 17.
So Tucker Carlson had been on the weekends at Fox, but that was right when he took over the primetime slot.
And it wasn't until then that he became the hero for half of America and the villain for the other half.
And I didn't really know how the toothpaste was going to come out of the tube, but you know, workplace became typecast.
And by the way, let me stop you again because most people don't know this.
Daily Caller was really Tucker's thing.
But if you go back far enough, he was mentored by William Crystal, one of the biggest neocons out there, Peanut guys.
And he was also very integral in the Daily Caller in the beginning.
And really, obviously, there was a break at some point.
And now Tucker Carlson loathes William Crystal and talks about it at quite some length.
And by the way, I don't know if you saw the documentary War Game yet.
They did a, did you check it out?
Where William Crystal is playing the Steve Bannon Roger Stone character, but they're actually directing militants and members of the National Guard to cause violence.
I mean, total insanity.
Exactly.
And I think, well, and I think that Tucker's transition speaks to how much the country has changed in the last eight years.
Because I think for him, the moment, I don't want to speak on his behalf, but he certainly the Iraq war, I think, woke him up to the way in which the neoconservative agenda is focused on making money for massive defense companies rather than the American citizens and sending these kids overseas to go get maimed and killed in some desert somewhere.
But the Daily Caller, yeah, it was actually, I would call it, I call it anti-establishment because at the time in 2016 and right when I took over, there were still a lot of Bernie supporters who followed Daily Caller because it was kind of the, you know, holding Hillary to account during the election.
And they were obviously, for good reason, mad about the way that Bernie's campaign was effectively sandbagged by Hillary Clinton.
And so the caller did lose those Bernie supporters and it became largely a pro-Trump outlet.
And so most of our audience supported Donald Trump through the Trump years and running a video business during the Trump years with a pro-Trump audience was like playing baseball with a weighted bat.
But, you know, I was running a video operation.
Live Stream Security Concerns00:15:33
So a lot of our people were creative types and not by any stretch of the imagination, you're button-dubbed conservatives.
But what was interesting to me was the way that the newsroom function, you know, there was a very open environment where people, whether they were interns or the CEO, were free to speak their minds.
And that was interesting to me because I always thought coming from the left was, you know, pro-free speech.
And it was very interesting to work in that environment and eye-opening to see, oh, wait, like I can't say what I really think at NBC in the newsroom.
It's like a funeral home over there.
And over here, everybody just yapping off about whatever issue of the day it is.
And I think that that really like shows the way that the sands have shifted both in Washington and culturally in America.
Because, you know, me being pro-free speech and anti-war through my college years, that was a left-wing position, you know, anti-George Bush.
And now, I don't know, I guess, does that put me on the right?
I mean, listen, I always say it like this from people.
I go, look, I'm politically homeless.
I don't like seeing dead kids in my feed.
I'm not necessarily a peacenick.
I understand we have to have a military.
That doesn't mean I'm a war hawk.
I like common sense.
And oh, everybody goes, oh, you're a libertarian.
I go, look, if you were to pin me against the wall, I say I'm a constitutionalist because it's the perfectly imperfect document, right?
It gives us. all these rights.
It's there for the little guy and it can be amended, but not by a democratic vote.
Like, oh, we're in a democracy.
That's how it works.
To amend the Constitution, you need a two-thirds and then a three-quarters for it to be ratified.
I want people to think about that.
It's a totally different thing.
It's a separation of powers.
And look, it knew out of the gates it was going to have to change.
Obviously, black people aren't three-fifths of people.
Obviously, women have the right to vote and be a part of society.
They amended it.
That's the whole deal.
They did it.
It's perfect.
Like, again, it's the only imperfections in that document have really been what has led to now, which we're not a constitutional republic and that we really have an executive within an executive.
And I kind of want to get into that aspect maybe a little later on in this that kind of supersedes.
We'll see what this administration can do, but accountability.
And our Constitution and Bill of Rights was based in accountability.
You know, that's why it's there.
But we haven't seen anybody on that upper echelon be accountable for their actions, whether it be in the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA.
The list goes on, and I think that's a problem.
We got to take a quick break.
We are going to come back with the author of Riot Diet, Richie McGinnis.
Fascinating conversation.
More making sense of the madness after this.
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And we are back.
Now, I know I went on a little bit of a rant there for my political beliefs.
With good reason.
With good reason.
And what you mentioned about the executive within the executive, that was eye-opening for me while I was working for Mark Levin, seeing him talk about Obama writing tens of thousands of executive orders and what he called his pen and his phone.
And, you know, I didn't quite realize how exactly the executive had effectively taken over the powers to declare war, taken over the power to legislate in all those ways.
And so when Trump took office, you know, I think he won based on a change platform.
And I don't think anybody can deny that, both in 2016 and in 2024.
And I think it's really hard for people in DC media to grasp like. how it is that somebody could vote for Barack Obama and then vote for Trump.
But I think a lot of people, you know, I didn't vote for Trump, but I understood why people did, especially working, you know, for that side of the media.
And fast forward to the end of the Trump years, the pandemic hits and our MO was doing on-the-ground reporting, you know, man-on-the-street style stuff.
And nobody wants to watch like a 25-year-old kid sit on a Zoom conference from their bedroom and talk about COVID.
So our business effectively exploded when the pandemic hit.
And I go through that in the book, how our revenue went out the window.
But when the protests all started, it was very obvious from the beginning that our folks were out there with their cell phones rather than these big fancy cameras.
And we were able to blend in in a way that the corporate media wasn't.
So we set out with a simple mission when those protests and riots started, just go out, film what's going on and relay it to the viewer without commentary and let them decide for themselves.
So we would go out there for peaceful protests and we'd broadcast those and we'd go out there for the not so peaceful ones as well.
And I'm very open in the book with which ones were peaceful, which ones weren't, and which videos made money.
And the answer to that is if it bleeds, it leads.
And so I think the reader gets a very close inside look, not only at who was on the ground, why they were there, but also how it was that the longer context of longer clips that we recorded were then, you know, cannibalized into these little sound bites by this news outlet or that news outlet to prove a partisan point.
So whether it was the Proud Boys beating up on somebody outside the chaz or it was what I call the umbrella gang, because no one's going to tell you if they're Antifa.
If you're like, yo, are you Antifa?
Like you might see a flag here or there, but it's by definition of the way that the group functions under the radar, unlike the Proud Boys.
So I call them the umbrella gang.
But whether it was the Proud Boys or the Umbrella Gang doing violent stuff or the cops beating up on the protesters excessively, we were going to, we were going to show that.
So it wasn't about capturing the content that our audience wanted to see so much as just going out there and letting the cookie crumble the way that it did.
Now, let me just say this.
That's really the power of live streaming as well.
Unfortunately, on January 6th, I was able to live stream the walk from the ellipse about halfway up to the Capitol before my cell phone got jammed up and I could no longer stream.
And I comment on that too.
It's definitely like, yeah, it's hard to get self-service when there's a lot of people, but also there's definitely some jammers that were employed in certain situations.
I'm glad you said that because a lot of people don't realize that aspect of it.
I put out my footage, I don't know, maybe like two hours after I got home that night, you know, and I ended up doing it on a left-wing broadcast.
It was actually Graham Elwood was live on the air.
And I'm like, hey, man, you know, I just got back.
I'm like, some of the things you're saying is true.
Some are not.
You know, I've got about an hour's worth of footage.
Let's play it.
And that the powerful thing about the live stream is it's in real time and it's unedited, right?
So if you want to take that clip, like you said, and cannibalize it, somebody is going to have a retort if you are not being factually honest about that, if they saw the live stream and clip more of it.
I think that's important, right?
To contextualize these things.
Because as I approached on January 6th, first of all, there were huge differences right out of the gates, even before people were going to the Capitol, from the January 6th protests to the December protests.
You know, you mentioned Antifa, you mentioned police presence.
In December, when I was at Stop the Steel, it was very organized.
There were cops everywhere.
Big portions of the street in DC were all blocked off.
And I actually did live stream that night.
I think YouTube eventually took it off, but you can find it on Rumble and other places where I reposted it.
And there was a face-off, if you will.
One side was the Proud Boys.
Maybe you were there.
I was there.
You're probably in my footage somewhere.
I mean, I was up towards the front.
Basically, I had started at the hotel where Alex Jones was speaking after like Roger Stone and all those guys.
And I think it was Joe Biggs that called everybody over and said that they were going to go do that march.
Me and my buddy said, all right, well, this is where the action is now.
So we went there.
But right in the middle of the street, you had a large police presence.
It was not allowed to escalate.
In reality, you know, those groups didn't get within 100 feet of each other.
But my main point is that not only was there law enforcement everywhere, when I tried to get back to my hotel, it took an hour and a half because they wouldn't let me take the streets.
Yeah, I wouldn't let you go through BLM Plaza.
Yeah, you had to go through this very weird maze.
And then finally, I got up to one blockade where I'm at the block of my hotel and they don't want to let me through.
And I'm like, that's my hotel.
I'm like, I can't get around any other way.
Will you please let us through the third part?
And they're like, yes, okay.
And then they watched us go in.
There was security there.
None of that on January 6th.
One of the things that I really remember is when I was coming to the Capitol, number one, I noticed the lack of security.
But number two, they had that big barrier.
It was almost like a concert barrier where they weren't even letting you bring in like a selfie stick, right?
To film or anything like that.
There were literally hundreds, if not thousands of backpacks stacked up on each other at phone poles and surrounding areas.
And all I'm thinking is the, if you see something, say something days of the terrorists.
And I want people to remember the night before, somebody planted pipe bombs throughout the city on CCTV with a backpack on.
If you don't think that Secret Service had seen that footage or that by that time, or that would have been a security threat if it was a threat, you're ridiculous.
They knew it wasn't a threat.
And it shows the absurdity of the whole situation and how they set it up to fail.
Yeah, we still haven't got the jury's still out on who the pipe bomber was.
And all we have is like footage that like, it's like five frames a second of some guy.
Completely manipulated.
Listen, whether they're putting out the right guy in this New York City assassination thing, right?
I don't know with the CEO.
Within 24 hours, we got something, right?
This has been buried for almost four years.
New York City is maybe as surveilled or maybe a little less surveilled than DC.
D.C. may be the most surveilled place on the planet.
You're telling me they got nothing on this guy?
Give me a break.
And that was the question I had when I showed up as well, because I was actually, like you said, I knew there was going to be no internet.
So I was at home managing my team, running the live stream of Trump's speech.
And my now wife told me I see the cops running in opposite, in opposite directions.
She was on the roof of Rayburn, which is one of the house office buildings.
And I was like, okay, if cops are running in opposite directions, something's going down.
I threw on my bulletproof vest, my bulletproof backpack, my ballistic helmet, and my gas mask.
And the moment I got down there, I actually skateboarded my Uber hit traffic.
So I hopped on my skateboard, skateboarded the last mile down Independence Avenue.
And my first thought when I showed up was like, wait a second, why am I better prepared than 90% of these cops?
Because the MAGA guys, a lot of them had their own pepper spray.
They were spraying the cops.
They were running away.
The cops were spraying them.
They were running away.
And I was just standing in between, fully covered.
And, you know, my hands were burning a little bit holding my phone, but that was it.
And I was like, why is it that I have a gas mask on and these cops don't have a gas mask?
So that's the one thing I try to express to people about January 6th is like the police had no chance from the beginning.
And they fought valiantly.
I mean, there's this whole narrative of they let them into the building.
It's like that is secondary to the bigger question of why were there so few police officers?
Because they were doomed no matter what.
It's not like they didn't fight hard enough to maintain the building.
It was just there was 150 of them and like, you know, 8,000 people.
And let me stop you just for a second.
Some of the footage I show so people can kind of understand the encroachment.
I get there after the first breach, but you haven't gone up the three levels yet of the Capitol.
They're kind of getting in that first level.
But if you watch the footage, basically you had the police lines at each level.
As people came up, there would be a baton here.
There would be a spray there.
They would leave them alone because they couldn't group up on them.
The only large police presence after the fact on the Capitol would have been on the second level, which I filmed extensively in that tunnel hole where you have Scarfman on the thing.
And I mean, at one point, I don't know if you've seen this footage.
No one else talks about it, but someone tried to pass up a literal sledgehammer during that event.
Yeah, I landed on a crowbar when I was on the East at the East Doors as they were being forced out at the very end of the whole ordeal.
And the question is, is like, it wasn't even a crowbar, it was a pry bar.
So it's like a crowbar, but it's even longer.
And as they were forcing everyone out, they pepper sprayed everybody.
A cop, I was so well dressed that they thought, you know, I was one of the bad guys, yanked my gas mask off, pepper sprayed me, knocked me to the ground, and I landed on a pry bar.
And the question there is like, who brings a pry bar to a protest unless they have the express intention of cranking open some heavy doors?
And so that's, I mean, that's a question in and of itself.
But with all that being said, you know, the simple fact that the police were doomed from the beginning, I've seen abortion marches with more security than they had on January 6th surrounding the Capitol.
Why Bring a Pry Bar?00:03:24
And the other weird aspect of it was I was on the west side where I actually climbed up the tower of the media tower that was pre-constructed for the inauguration.
And there were all these scaffoldings.
And I describe in, so the first book goes through the summer of love.
The second book, which is coming out in early 25, that covers all the MAGA stuff.
But I've finished writing the second book.
And I write how the scaffolding surrounding, you know, that was there for the spectators of the inauguration, it actually like functioned in that moment as like a siege tower.
It made it even harder for the police to defend that Western Front because everybody was able to like filter in through these gaps in the side and climb up the scaffolding and bypass the lines that they had established.
So I was like, this almost looks like it was built to make it as difficult as possible to defend the area.
And by the time everybody went in there, you know, I was faced with the decision.
I was up in the inauguration tower filming the breaking of the police line, saw everyone streaming in.
I was like, well, I guess I have to go in and follow them because I'm not going to trust the police and the feds to tell us what happened.
And that was the same mentality that I had during the BLM stuff.
It was like, yeah, it's after curfew, but somebody needs to be out here to show people what's going on.
And we can't trust the police to do that.
That's literally the job of the press.
And so, you know, people are like, why did you go in?
You're an insurrectionist or this or that.
I had congressional press credentials and I was displaying those as I went in.
So I was allowed to be there even if that stuff wasn't going on.
But, you know, if we're not going to do it, then who's going to do it?
And I broadcast all the footage regardless of whether or not the MAGA guys were acting violently in that particular clip or not, or the police were the ones.
Which is important.
Which is important.
You've got to put out the truth, not just your narrative.
Look, I often talk about: look, when you pan around, the vibe once the vast majority were up there and the police, like they said, there was that one area where there was kind of conflict.
Otherwise, it was like a Dave Matthews band concert.
Everybody, there were grandmas out there.
There were beach balls.
I mean, other than the people that were actually actively trying to smash windows, I filmed some people, you know, like you said, the inauguration was just around the corner.
There were like these makeshift boards for platforms taking up and trying to cut the audio wires.
I have no idea why they were doing that.
But again, I got it all on video, you know.
And one of the things that I think is important is you have to remain neutral.
Like, like you said, you didn't vote for Trump.
I did, but I'm no, I didn't march out there with a MAGA hat.
I wasn't sitting there protesting.
I don't join groups and cosplay, which to me, that's what both sides of these people are: Antifa and Proud Boys.
I'm there, especially at that moment.
You know, we're going to take a break in a minute, but I often said this because this was, you know, pretty far into the COVID-19 nightmare.
And I had seen certain individuals in certain states take over their city capital, right?
And I said, you know, if we do this thing the way that Occupy Wall Street did it, and we set up camp and it's organized and it's not, and we're just in DC.
Now, you don't necessarily even have to be right on the Capitol.
You know, you can be around the peripheral, et cetera.
Donor Deck And Coin00:02:32
That would have made sense.
That's not what, I mean, if you think about it, it started and then it fizzled right out.
What, like three hours after the sun went down?
There was nobody there whatsoever.
And the media had their narrative.
I want to get into that and so much more.
Riot Diet is the book.
Richie McGinnis is our guest.
Great conversation.
More making sense of the madness after this.
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And we are back.
Kyle's Protest Dilemma00:13:14
So kind of wrapping it up on January 6th, et cetera, you know, I wasn't even going to go.
I was actually with Dylan Avery, who I had done loose change with.
We did not go there together.
It just so happened by the ellipse.
I saw Dylan.
And by the way, Dylan had a mask on.
I made him take it off.
Shame on you, Dylan.
Had to tell that really quick.
A couple people did at the time.
And I was just like, you're hanging with me, bro.
We're not going to, I'm not cosplaying with you.
We're not doing.
I'm like, Dylan, we've known each other since we were in our early 20s and lived together.
Like we raised dogs together.
Get the stupid thing off your face.
So anyway.
Unless it's a gas mask.
You know, at the time, so here's the funny thing.
You know, Dylan and I are walking.
We're leaving.
I'm going.
I'm going back to Iowa.
I'm going to where my car is parked.
He was staying somewhere outside of DC, and he gets the phone call that someone's been shot at the Capitol.
So he gets the Ashley Babbitt call.
He still ends up going home.
I get a text from Pat Militich, UFC Hall of Famer, who ended up getting raised.
You know, he didn't go into the building or anything like that, but he took a picture with Joe Biggs.
He ended up losing his job.
I mean, very volatile times over these things.
He says, hey, you've got to get up here.
Things are going down.
I'm like, well, I guess I got to go up there.
So I was literally, had I left 20 minutes earlier, I probably wouldn't even have covered any of this.
You know what I mean?
All this stuff still hasn't hit a crescendo, right?
The media, like I said, got their little narrative.
I got so many phone calls.
My mother, are you okay?
Is everything all right?
I'm like, mom, I'm fine.
You know, like one of my ex-girlfriends who I hadn't talked to and are you all right?
I'm like, everything's fine.
You know, we're fine.
Talk about the perception versus the reality.
And after you were inside and you kind of came back to report on it, were you kind of shocked what the narrative was surrounding the whole event within 24 hours?
I was, I would say, well, I wouldn't say that I was shocked because I had already covered all the PLM stuff.
I was a witness and a victim in the impending trial of Kyle Rittenhouse.
And Kenosha was a real eye-opener for me just to see what I witnessed firsthand versus the narratives that were being spun up of he's a white supremacist or he's a hero.
Basically, those two different versions of the story.
And, you know, the reality being this is a dumb kid who went out with good intentions and really bad things ended up happening.
But so after Kenosha, you know, I was, I was privy to the fact that the media was willing to manipulate the reality on the ground for the sake of proving a partisan point.
But the extent to which, you know, actually when I was pitching this book, this was in like In late 2022, when I really started seriously writing, all the publishers told me that Trump, this is old news and that Trump wasn't running again, or that he wouldn't make it through the primary because of January 6th, even the conservative publishers.
And the other thing they told me is I had to pick a side if I wanted to sell books.
And I'm like, my story is the story of being stuck in between whether it's the protesters and the cops or the prosecution and the defense or the left and the right.
And I'm just trying to tell the story of what I saw on the ground.
Who were they?
Why did I aim my camera where I did?
Why did I ask the questions that I did?
And even the publishing industry, you know, was just as partisan as the news business.
So I wouldn't say I was surprised by the way that it was spun up.
But, you know, with the January 6th Commission, I mean, for four years, all they did was talk about this.
And I think I tweeted over the course of the last four years multiple times, like, do you guys know what you're doing?
Like, you gave wall-to-wall coverage to Donald Trump during the 2015 to 2016 election, and you're calling him Orange Man Bad all day, every day.
And all you're doing is adding fuel to the fire.
You're empowering him by talking about him incessantly.
And so with the January 6th stuff, that's why in 2024, I mean, I wrote both these books with the expectation that Trump would win because, you know, it was so obvious that he was running on a change platform.
And whether it was Biden initially or Kamala Harris, obviously, weren't proposing the same level of change that Trump was running on a platform of.
So not only did I know that Trump was going to win, but I also knew like that the Trump era and his brand of populism was here to stay.
And so that's like what I'm trying to get into in the book is not only what happened on the ground, but what did the media say about it afterwards?
And culturally, as a country, how have we dealt with these American tragedies?
And the answer to that question is pretty obvious.
It's like we dealt with it very irresponsibly.
And the way in which people were sitting in their fancy studios spinning up these narratives to basically, you know, satisfy this tribe or that tribe and feed them the content that they wanted to hear, that is, I think that was the same across the BLM to the MAGA stuff.
But the interesting thing is when you had the MAGA stuff pop off on January 6th, you know, the whole thing got flipped.
So it was like, whenever I was out at a BLM protest or the MAGA stuff, you always have a huge crowd and most of those people are out there with good intentions.
And then you have a couple of scurrilous agitators who have the intention of instigating the police and of banging into the shields.
And then one of them gets pepper sprayed.
And then there's the Lord of the Flies effect, which is like once you see one of your fellow tribesmen get pepper sprayed and clubbed to the ground and you get a little pepper spray in your eye, you get a little tear gas going, that turns on a different part of your brain.
And it's pretty easy to turn into a monkey man at that point where there is no thought process.
It's just pure primal circuitry.
And that's the one thing that I get across in the firsthand perspective is like, here's what it was like to be there.
And here's, you know, that, how that primal aspect of your brain can get awoken.
And I go through very honestly about like, I was in the Capitol and this guy had rolled up a joint.
And I actually followed them to the house doors and I was on the other side of the house doors where they had the guns drawn, the sergeant at arms.
So I was on the other, the wrong end, the business end of a Glock, and thought I was going to get caught in the crossfire again, like I did in Kenosha.
And literally six minutes later, they finally, reinforcements came and they pulled people off the door.
We went back out into the rotunda and this guy had rolled a joint and he was, he just decided that he was there to smoke a joint.
So there were people who were trying to break down the doors and stop the count.
Then there were people who were just like, hey, check this out.
You know, I'm in the Capitol.
I'm going to roll a joint.
But he asked me if I wanted some.
And I was like, I'm on the clock.
But in that moment, the truth is that I wanted a puff of that thing because I was so jacked up on adrenaline and your common sense just goes out the window.
And like, I obviously would be probably still in jail if I hadn't accepted that.
But, you know, at the moment, like, there's this primal aspect of our modern minds that I think we neglect even exists anymore, but it certainly does.
Listen, that's the whole thing.
We still have fight or flight, right?
We still have instincts, genetically based, by the way.
I think that we pass those things on.
And like you said, groupthink is a real thing.
Before we go to our final break, you know, you mentioned kind of briefly that you covered, you know, Kenosha and BLM and the Chaz.
All of this was kind of a new phenomenon for my generation.
I know that you're a little bit younger, but there was really no time in American history other than the LA riots after the Rodney King verdict that we had had any kind of large-scale riots in the country.
And even then, that was a localized event.
And I was a New York guy and that was literally all the way across the country.
When we talk about Ferguson, et cetera, it almost seems like a slow incremental burn.
But then when you get to the Chaz, where you're sitting there and you're interviewing a guy with a fully automatic, you know, and a town that's been taken over, that was not something I thought was possible in America at that point.
We're talking about decades past the LA riots, where the LA riots had some wild shiznick, everybody.
I mean, you had guys on the tops of their businesses with sniper rifles or guns and just shooting people.
And they never got, you know, went to court for that.
Nowadays, you get caught on subway with somebody attacking people and you choke that person out.
You're on trial for murder.
I mean, things have shifted in a very odd direction, not only in the justice system, but the allowance of these quote-unquote protests to turn into riots and then to kind of turn into something much more.
What are your thoughts on that?
I totally agree with you.
And I may be a little bit younger, but I agree that this was basically the first like widespread national civil unrest that we'd seen in one or two generations.
And you're right.
There was a very, there was a weaponization of our justice system that was partial to one cause and not partial to the other.
So Chaz is a great example where the police commissioner Carmen Best, she's actually the first female and the first black police commissioner of Seattle.
She ceded that police precinct to the protests in the spirit of, quote, de-escalation.
And what was the first thing that those protesters did?
Well, they didn't put up a wall.
They put up barriers is what they called them at all of the, along the border.
So they had barriers and then they had armed guards protecting those barriers.
And that really is indicative of the way, you know, that people have this idea of, oh, you know, Trump and the wall, it's terrible.
But then when you're actually in a situation where you want to defend your own dominion, well, you're employing the same tactics.
And so if you look at the way that the people who were in front of the Portland courthouse, for example, they'd be agitating police and they'd get in a skirmish with cops.
They'd get arrested and then they come back the next night.
They get out on bail and they come out the next night.
And if you compare that to the way that the January 6th protesters slash rioters were, they threw the book at them.
And Kyle Rittenhouse is another great example of that, where, you know, because he had a rifle and because he was perceived to be from this side and not that side, they threw the book at him as well.
And it wasn't until thank the streamers and all of the independent media who were there, because if Kyle had been on trial without all the video footage that was there and without the testimony of people who were actually on the ground, then I think he'd probably still, he'd be in prison right now.
Without like without people understand, and that's the thing.
There are still, I mean, there are some people that never saw that footage.
And I would see that, like, yeah, I was talking about it with you early.
I ran a bar.
So I would see stuff from, you know, my 20-something-year-old bartenders about this.
I go, you realize that a convicted pedophile threw a Molotov cocktail at him right before that.
They're like, what?
And then you show the guy cursing at him to him.
And then you show the Molotov cocktail being thrown.
And then you show that he gets rushed in that initial one.
And they're like, oh, well, I didn't quite understand that.
And I remember even then, the very bizarre narrative that was kind of circulating was that he had killed black people.
Yeah, the amount of people after the trial, because I testified in that trial.
And after the trial, the amount of people who contacted me and were like, wait, I didn't even, I can't believe I thought that this was like a race-based shooting.
And that narrative that had been spun up, I mean, every single person, the three people that he shot, Joseph Rosenbaum, which was right in front of me, Gage Grosskowitz, and Anthony Hubert.
Groskowitz survived.
That was the guy who had his bicep shut off.
They're all white guys.
But what I do get into in the book is they, if you look deeper than just the surface level narratives, you see that Kyle Rittenhouse had, his father was an alcoholic.
Anthony Huber had an absent father, Gage Groskowitz, Adson father.
And Joseph Rosenbaum was sexually assaulted by his stepfather.
And then he, the people that he sexually assaulted and he was put in jail for that.
And he had just left a mental institution before he arrived in Kenosha.
But the kids that he abused are in jail for the same crimes.
So there's like this intergenerational tragedy on both sides of the spectrum that really was at the very core of what happened in Kenosha because where was Kyle's dad?
You know, it's almost like a strong male presence is kind of important to bring people.
And listen, you know, my father, you know, I wouldn't say that he was totally absent, but dead by the time I was 16 in prison.
My stepfather, love him.
Strong Male Presence Matters00:07:45
You're a gem.
But at the same time, I don't, you're right.
We can't ignore these culturally significant things because one of the big things that I have seen culturally change is the breakup of the family, right?
And that is, you know, you wonder why you have these types of behavior, people seeking things at such a young age.
Like, you know, my buddy, Christine T. Harris, he, he was down in Kenosha.
He filmed a lot of that stuff.
I've talked to him.
Yeah.
And, you know, he talks about how it really felt like Kyle was there to play Call of Duty.
You know, he, you know, like.
You said that on the night of.
Exactly.
And that's the thing.
Like, we have to look at all these different aspects of it.
Like, I don't love the fact that it has to be Rittenhouse out there with a gun.
He's going there with that mentality with what?
The developmental brain of a teenager.
And I got to tell you, look, not that I've changed that much.
I'm very similar to the way I was 16.
There are a few things that have shifted, folks, in the last 30 plus years.
We got to take one final break.
Great conversation with the author of Riot Diet, One Man's Radical Ride Through America in Chaos.
We will be back with Richie McGinnis after this.
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And we are back.
Richie, we got about five minutes.
We've covered a ton of ground.
I got to have you back, especially when you put out the second part of this book.
Sure.
Run down for me why you did decide to write this in kind of novel form right now.
Obviously, it's not fiction, but you've got a two-parter.
You're telling a story.
There is a narrative.
It's maybe outside the realm of just the objective journalism that you put out via the video camera.
You are expressing your viewpoints in this.
So tell me about that journey.
Well, I looked to, like you said, this is the first time that our generation has really confronted such widespread civil unrest.
So I thought to myself, well, let me look to the previous time that we faced something like this.
And I point to the counterculture movement of the late 60s and early 70s, of which my parents were a part.
And I read The Joan Didians and The Hunter S. Thompsons.
And what I realized in reading those books, it's more narrative nonfiction.
And they're taking you through their own story.
And rather than, you know, I think in the Trump era, so many people, every book is like, here's why my side is right and yours is wrong.
And it is an approach of like, I'm going to tell you the objective truth of right and wrong.
But what I was going for was more actually of a subjective lens of what I witnessed and experienced.
So putting you in my shoes, my subjective reality during that time.
And in doing that, you're able to access a greater truth than you would if I were just to try to tell you who was right and who was wrong.
So I went in with that approach.
And really, the method of writing, you know, I had 3,000 videos from on the ground and I'm making sense of all this chaos.
The very process of that was actually therapeutic for me, coming out of that chaos and making sense of it myself.
And so the book itself is a journey into the belly of the beast.
And then, you know, I emerged from the other side.
I wouldn't say, you know, fully intact, but it was my family and my friends and my close coworkers who, when CNN took my comments on Tucker Carlson after the Kenosha shooting out of context and claimed that I was supporting, you know, a conservative claim of self-defense, I was like, that's not what I said.
I gave objective observations, had me on to correct the record or prepare for court.
But my first instinct was like, I'm just going to, I'm just going to go on Twitter and I'm going to say CNN's a poopy pants and they're the worst and they're all idiots.
And my boss was like, no, dude, there's a way to go through this.
He was a Jarhead.
He was in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And so he was like, calm down, take a deep breath, and we're going to go through the proper channels.
And so I think the reason why I wrote the book in that way is because.
It puts a human face not only on the narrator, but also on the people who are on the ground of like, what was it like to interact with these people?
Why did they say they were there?
And, you know, why did I aim my camera where I did?
What would you like to leave the audience with?
How can they get the book?
And what are you up to now so people can support your work?
Well, you can get the book at the Bezos Boutique, Amazon.com.
You can also go to pigeonpress.com.
That's my pigeon right here on the microphone.
That's my publishing company that I started because I just wanted to tell the story in my own way.
I have the author of Jar Head, Anthony Swofford, as my editor.
So I figured I didn't need the publisher anyway.
And yep, there it is.
And you can follow me, Richie McGinnis, R-I-C-H-I-E-M-C-G-I-N-N-I-S-S on all social media platforms.
It's the same.
No spaces, no nothing.
And now, you know, I'm finishing this book.
I've got one or two other ones in the works.
But, you know, if something does pop off at inauguration, maybe I'll see you out there on the ground this time.
Listen, man, I got to be honest.
I don't really want to do much more traveling.
No, I don't.
I don't, I don't either.
Even though I haven't been on the ground as much the last couple years, I have been speaking on the Reawaken America tour about transhumanism.
You know, again, not a right or left issue, everybody.
And I'd like to just take a break from going, you know, all across the country four or five times a year.
I'm just hoping the guy doesn't get shot.
I'm hoping for a de-escalation in global warfare.
I'm hoping for a better economy.
Just the basics, everybody, because it's not about left or right to this guy.
It's always about right and wrong.
You know that, Richie.
Thank you so much, man.
We got to do another hour as soon as you put out the part of the book.
Guys, you know the drill.
We're here five days a week on Patriot.tv, where the truth lives.