In Knowledge Fight #889, Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes dissect Alex Jones’ chaotic "Debate of the Century" (Part 2), where he peddled election fraud claims, dismissed Ray Epps’ text messages as orchestration, and misrepresented Biden’s J6 focus as a "deep state" ploy. Jones pivoted from Dominion voting machines to BLM comparisons, deflecting with Sandy Hook hoax denials and Trump’s alleged persecution threats, while Destiny Steven Bonnell and Ed Krassenstein exposed his contradictions. The hosts mock Jones’ incoherence—shifting topics, ignoring evidence, and appearing distracted—concluding that his rhetoric undermines accountability, enabling further conspiracy-driven chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
Talking about the culmination and summation and participation in the rest of the debate that Alex had with the Krasenstein brothers, Destiny, Glenn Greenwald.
So yeah, we'll probably do something about the Iowa caucus on Friday, but I don't know, game time decision if we punt that to Monday, just because we're doing way too fucking much.
When I mentioned him, I said that he was on Game Grumps, the YouTube channel.
And people have corrected, and I didn't realize this because I don't know all the intricate details, but he wasn't on that channel at the time, and I shouldn't have associated the two of them, because apparently that channel is fine, and it shouldn't be characterized by this person who is kind of a dick.
The point is that the State Department runs around the world looking at everybody else's elections, and the number one thing you get sanctions for is taking a candidate off the ballot.
And that's what Democrats are doing right now, and America sees that.
So Alex has claimed repeatedly on air that he has evidence and it's been proven that Dominion voting machines are part of the stealing of the 2020 election.
For him to pretend otherwise because it's inconvenient in this debate and it might get him sued is really pathetic.
Stick to your guns, young man.
So Darren's stance is interesting because I haven't listened to thousands of hours of him talk, so I don't know all the stupid shit that he's said over the years.
What I can do, though, is I can go over the articles that he's aggregated on Revolver News and see what kind of a message they sent.
So we've got a headline here, written by white nationalist Patrick Howley from National File, a website that Alex secretly owns, that says, quote, Exclusive!
Government agency believes Dominion uses cellular modems experts say could wreak havoc on an election.
Seems to be maybe implying those machines were involved in the SEAL.
Well, here's an article from Zero Hedge, the funders of the debate we're listening to, that was put on Revolver News.
Quote, Dominion whistleblower testifies on complete fraud at Detroit Voting Center.
Huh, that's weird.
Here's an interesting article from a site called Creative Destruction Media, which is just a blog editorial with the headline, quote, Obama and Pelosi didn't win elections in the last decade.
It was Dominion.
It really seems like a sentiment Darren wouldn't be supporting.
Here he is, linking to an obscure blog making that claim.
I think the thing that's most instructive to see what Donald Trump wanted to happen that day is that when he sat down and he watched the violence unfolding on TV, when he saw the people fighting with cops, when he got notification that Ashley Babbitt had been shot, Donald Trump did not take steps to stop the violence that day.
Instead, him and Giuliani made phone calls to senators and congressmen trying to get them to stall the vote.
I mean, I have Democrats, during the impeachment for this, they shut it down when finally Trump put a five-minute video on of Democrats saying, attack him at grocery stores, attack him at gang stations, attack!
Nobody is upset because Donald Trump said fight like hell.
People are upset because for months or years, really even in 2016, Donald Trump has consistently attacked and undermined the electoral process with absolutely no good reason.
So that clip is really interesting because you can kind of see how Alex's brain works.
The clip starts with Ian introducing the question of if J6 was entrapment.
Obviously, it's Alex's job to say that it was, and that the globalists did it to make Trump and his supporters look bad so they couldn't get their very cool and reasonable demand of an imaginary 10-day investigation that Alex insists is in the Constitution.
Incidentally, that's not true.
Ted Cruz is arguing that there should be a 10-day investigation, which was based on what happened in the 1876 election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden.
In that case, three states had sent dueling sets of electors for certification, whereas with Trump, no state actually sent two slates.
Trump and his allies tried to get and send fraudulent slates of electors to the states, or from the states, but they hadn't been approved.
So the circumstances are completely different, and there's zero reason to think that Trump was entitled to some sort of 10-day investigation.
There already been plenty of investigation.
He just didn't like the results.
So Destiny introduces the idea that it was Trump that entrapped the followers who thought he would have their backs if they got arrested.
Alex pushed back on that by saying that Trump told them to be peaceful.
The fight like hell line is evoked, and Alex says the people can use fight in non-violent context.
So Destiny brings up the fact that Trump did nothing to stop the violence, and this indicates his position more than whatever words he's using, like his inaction.
And almost as if he exists as a defensive crutch for Alex, Ian comes in as the moderator to ask a totally new question, and what they think of politicians saying that people should fight.
This allows Alex to again restate his normal position that fight can be set in a non-violent context, so in effect what Ian has achieved is to undo the point that Destiny made.
Alex can reset to the point before something came up that he couldn't really handle.
Beattie comes in and gets a little pedantic by asking about what about battleground states, to which Destiny explains that the context around words matters more, and that the problem is that Trump had been fraudulently attacking the electoral system the entire time he'd been running since 2016.
To rebut that, Alex says it was the Dems who were attacking the electoral system, who were, they were the deep state, who undermined Trump by calling him a Russian agent.
That brings up the next obvious point, which is if the system is so corrupt and the courts are hijacked entirely, then why would they ever fail to charge him?
Right.
All the while, Alex is trying to yell about what he wants to talk about, which is Hillary's been saying all this shit, and it's a complete non-issue.
In order to get back to that subject he wants to talk about, he has to constantly swat down the things Destiny is bringing up to try to keep the line of inquiry moving.
Like, Destiny's trying to stay on track somewhat.
So why would they fail to charge him if the system is so corrupt?
Alex's answer is that they didn't charge Trump with insurrection.
Destiny tries to repose the question because it wasn't answered, and Alex just keeps yelling, why is Hillary saying Trump's supposed to steal the election?
It's very clear, if you're paying attention, that this is Alex, like, it's veering off into non-sequiturs and bullying, but when the moderator steps in to say that they need to not talk over each other, Alex plays the victim and says that Destiny can...
talking over him and he's just going to dominate him.
Yeah.
This is very revealing because it shows what Alex thinks dominating is.
For him, conversation is a form of violence.
If Destiny's making a point he doesn't like, he isn't going to let him finish and then address it.
He's going to beat the shit out of him by yelling and make sure no one ever gets a point across and nothing gets fully articulated For a moderator to not understand that this is the game Alex is playing and for them to actively facilitate his...
it, it shows that this is not and was never meant to be a sincere debate.
This is clickbait bullshit, featuring a coked-out idiot bullying Essentially, Alex is dominating in his definition of the word because he's stacked the deck.
He's good friends with the people who run Zero Hedge, who's funding this debate.
It's being held in his studio.
Two of his opponents are the Krasenstein brothers.
The moderator is Tim Pool's stupidest co-host.
If these pieces weren't there, Alex's bullying would be disrupted.
If the moderator was competent, unbiased as a person, there would be there to keep things on track.
Alex, in that circumstance, would have been silenced and maybe kicked off the panel by this point.
I mean, specifically in the context of the debate, you eventually have to concede on, if you're going to have an honest debate, which we can't do, but if you're going to have these positions in competition with each other, you know, devoid of the people involved, eventually on one side you have to go, this is a factual inaccuracy.
And then, if you have to admit that one factual inaccuracy exists, that...
Spirals out of control until we go, oh, the debate is over.
Well, at very least, the people who have the burden of proof, which is saying that it was a manufactured event January 6th, have absolutely no evidence of that.
The people who are saying that it wasn't are well prepared to deal with any of the things that might come up in the course of the feeling and opinion based arguments that'll happen.
And so it's debating a factual...
Yeah.
But not in terms of facts.
But that's why it goes off into all these fucking side shits and no one defines any terms to use as a guide for like, this is what we mean by this.
There's no structure to the conversation because why would there be?
So Alex isn't used to saying these kinds of things about the election being stolen in front of people who aren't involved in the same scam as him, so he's unaccustomed to the response that you just saw there.
He can't back up this stuff about 2016, but more to the point, his explanation doesn't even make sense.
Even if there was a big landslide victory for Trump that year, why couldn't Hillary try the same plot?
Trump tried to send fake slates of electors.
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Because then it would look like the landslide wasn't as big.
This explanation, it's one that only works when you're just trying to patch up plot holes to make sure that people who've bought into your shit don't get stuck on something that doesn't make sense.
It's a band-aid type of explanation that's not meant to be examined because when you examine it or you try to sell it to someone who doesn't already agree with your underlying narrative, it sounds really stupid.
After the 2020 census, for the first time in the 171 years that it's been a state, California lost a congressional district.
It's projected that if current trends continue, including undocumented immigrant populations, California is expected to lose four districts after the 2030 census.
Alex is a liar, and unless there's a competent moderator in the I think I might know what Alex is talking about here.
So in the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats in California flipped six House seats.
I was able to find a headline from the California report that says, quote, are being brought in to raise populations to give blue states more house seats, which is what he's saying in that clip.
The most likely thing that happened here is that Alex skimmed that headline, or one like it, and his brain immediately filtered the words through his racist conspiracy theory filter, and that's what became reality to him.
So when they flip six seats, and the headline says Democrats six new house seats, he imagines it.
They said Ray Epps was a hero and did nothing wrong.
Now they finally indicted him because they know it's a weak spot and their operation are only asking for six months.
Let me tell you.
We're not playing clips for tip for tat here, but everybody's gonna, I want everybody on X to get these statements and put all the clips of women putting onions in their eyes and the cops fake arresting people and high-fiving and saying, I'm a federal agent, I just helped run the attack.
I think the illegal alien voting thing is what's happening is they're coming in and then they're being counted in the census, which then adds more electoral votes.
Throughout this debate, Alex will not stop ruminating on future Twitter dunks on the Krasensteins and Destiny, but you notice that he can't do any of that dunking himself.
He has the vibe of someone who's picking a fight and then stopping right before the punching starts, insisting that the other person's going to be real sorry when their big, muscly, imaginary friend shows up later.
It's pathetic, and a very strong indication that Alex can't handle arguing any of the points he's yelling very passionately about and shouldn't be in this debate.
Destiny is right there about the non-citizen immigrant voting in local elections, but I do wish he had some more of the details about that at the ready, because you could push back on this a little bit more strongly and demonstrate how wrong Alex is.
It would be good to see Alex try to defend not letting permanent residents be allowed to vote for the school board in the district where their child goes to school.
I'm sure he would just say, Twitter's gonna get ya, and move on, because that seems to be where he's at at the moment.
An important point that no one's picking up on in that clip is when Alex says that he knows the lawyers who aren't being allowed to put on defenses that would prove that there's all these federal agents provocateur.
He's talking about his own law.
Yeah.
Interest alone should make someone with the supposed credibility of Glenn Greenwald decline this invitation, but oh well.
Alex says this is going to get 100 million views on Twitter, so you can't turn down that kind of attention.
Incidentally, this entire debate is posted on YouTube on Destiny's channel, which had about 850,000 views at the time of when I was preparing this episode.
If you're preparing for a debate about whether or not January 6th happened, you shouldn't be like, I gotta make sure that I know my do-illegal-aliens-vote shit.
So what's going on in that clip is them talking past each other.
Destiny is correctly saying that Trump and his team had a plan for Pence to reject the legally selected electors, which is in effect overthrowing the election unilaterally.
However, Alex thinks his position is actually different, so he's pretending to disagree with that plan.
In Alex's mind, what Pence was supposed to do is reject these electors and the states would send back Trump electors, which is what he thinks they were supposed to do to begin with, and then Trump would win the election.
There's no possible future in Alex's mind where the Yeah.
If that happened, then there would need to be another very legal and very cool 10-day investigation to make sure we get things right.
They're saying the same thing, but Alex is trying to make his position sound less authoritarian and bad.
Because he's added fake nuance to his side, they can't really get to the rub, which is that Alex does believe that Pence was supposed to reject the results of the election, and that is why they were at the Capitol encouraging that to happen.
And that is something that Destiny tries to get to the core of a bit later in the debate and basically get Alex to recognize that what he is calling for is the overthrow of the country.
And he should be very fucking careful with his words about how he's reporting how that was responsible for the coverage of Ray Epps.
Epps may be getting probation for a few months now, but he's still suing Fox News for Tucker's coverage of him that led to his family being terrorized.
Darren Beattie was a frequent guest with Tucker, talking about Ray Epps' conspiracies, and if he's here taking responsibility for this stuff, he might just talk himself into getting sued, too.
Darren says something interesting here, that Epps was the first person caught on video saying that people should go into the Capitol.
That's not true.
I'm not sure who the actual first person was, but way before Epps said any of that shit...
One of Alex's fourth-hour hosts, Matt Bracken, literally said that they should do that on January 6th.
Folks, next week we have a chance to change the course of history.
It's not going to be done by Senator Hawley by himself.
We can't wait for some...
White hat, QAnon, secret insiders going to fix it for us.
That's not going to happen.
All of that has been BS.
That's been meant to keep the sheep going in line to the slaughterhouse, nice and calm, believing in some deus ex machina that was going to pull a rabbit out of the hat and save us.
We're not going to be saved by anybody above us.
We're going to only be saved...
By millions of Americans moving to Washington, occupying the entire area, if necessary, storming right into the Capitol.
We know the rules of engagement.
If you have enough people, you can push down any kind of a fence or a wall.
So, it's very clear if you read Ray Epps' testimony to the January 6th committee that he was talking about just going into the Capitol and having like a sit-in type protest there.
Here's a guy, you saw that, that was only part of the clip.
There's much longer clips about Ray Epps.
But here's a guy who's the only guy caught on camera as early as January 5th, repeatedly calling for people to go into the Capitol and prefacing his seemingly rehearsed remarks in each case, saying, I'm probably going to go to jail for this.
I'm probably going to get arrested for this.
I need to go into the Capitol.
The next day, he flew across the whole country, presumably to go hear Trump's speech.
He skipped Trump's speech.
Instead, he was a veritable Where's Waldo, everywhere on January 6th, directing people, capital it's there's only one waldo and he's that's where our notoriously difficult to find then amazingly he's pre-positioned right at that initial decisive breach point on the west perimeter of the capital and he's whispering into somebody's ear just seconds before the bike racks are broken through he texts his nephew i orchestrated it
On paper, think about it.
He's like a 6 '3", former Marine, who was wearing camo gear and a Trump hat, and he just happens to have had a leadership position in the Oath Keepers.
Like, Darren's supposed to be the guy who wrote the book on Ray Epps, and he got this whole demonization campaign going by writing about him and then going on Tucker to talk shit about him, and yet this is pretty thin.
So first off, at the end there, Darren says that the government won't touch Epps, but he just got sentenced to six months probation.
That isn't a problem for the conspiracy theorists, though, because they'll just say that the government only did that because they made such a big deal out of how they weren't punishing Epps, so the government finally gave them some punishment to try and cover up him being a Fed.
It's circular.
Once the narrative is set, any affirmative or negative decision that gets made is interpreted as proof of that narrative.
It's gospel that Ray Epps is a Fed provocateur, and part of the proof of that is that he wasn't prosecuted.
The fact that he has been prosecuted in no way shakes the narrative.
It's twisted into supporting it by fantasy writing stuff about it, like how the conspiracy pressure forced the government to charge Epps so people wouldn't think he's a Fed.
If they charge him, it's a cover-up.
If they don't charge him, it's proof that he's a Fed and that he ran J6.
The other points Darren makes here dumb, too, and if he cared at all, he could find explanations for them.
For instance, Epps explained why he said that he might get arrested if they went to the Capitol the next day in that famous video of him for the night of the 5th.
He testified that, and the larger video that Darren is referring to there clearly shows that Epps was out on the street around a bunch of agitators like Baked Alaska.
Epps tried to de-escalate the situation as he told the J6 committee...
So he told the J6 committee, quote, they were trying, there's only a few that were, by a few I mean five or six, that were trying to incite violence with the police, trying to get other people involved in it.
And I kind of recognized what he was doing, this Baked Alaska.
He would try and incite something and then stand off and film it and call it news.
I tried to get people not to engage in that.
First off, he very accurately assessed Baked Alaska's business model.
As for the possibility of getting arrested, he explained that by saying, It's pretty clear from his testimony that you can see what the thought process here is.
He encountered lifelong shithead and scam guy Baked Alaska and others trying to whip people into a frenzy to get into a confrontation with police or some kind of violence that night.
Baked Alaska obviously has a financial incentive to try to do that because that's prime content for him and he has no concern for the well-being of others.
Epps tries to calm things down and says that they should go into the Capitol the next day because he thinks the Capitol is open to the public.
He's saying maybe I'll get arrested as a way to make his proposal sound as exciting or threatening to the establishment as those agitators' plans of trying to incite street violence.
It was in a sense saying you may get arrested doing that tonight, and I might get arrested doing this tomorrow, but at least my plan involves some productive action.
It's misguided, and he was wrong about the Capitol being open, but it's not too difficult to understand the thought process that a...
In fact, probably the only person positioned to actually have an influence on these people by being six-foot-three and wearing camo and being a former Marine.
So next, Darren says that Epps flew across the country to see Trump's speech, but then he skipped it, and that's not entirely true.
Darren and his son made the trip mostly to be at the rally, but also because they wanted to visit Appomattox Manor, a plot of land that apparently includes some family history, including a place called Epps Island.
It was partially a trip that would pass on the family history to the next generation.
Epps told the committee, quote, we're proud of our heritage.
My family hasn't always been on the right side of history.
Some of them were, some of them weren't.
We have a lot to live up to, I mean.
And that's what we've tried to teach our children.
And it's a trip we plan to take in the future for our grandchildren that we all go and show off this great heritage that we have.
So Darren says that he's a Where's Waldo at the Capitol.
This is a comical portrayal, as if Epps was everywhere.
If the level of moving around he did was somehow suspicious, then everyone at the Capitol, including and especially Alex himself, is super suspicious.
Darren says he tells people to go into the Capitol, which he didn't do on the 6th.
He gave people some directions to the Capitol, but then that part is true.
There's a video of him from before the rally giving some people directions because, quote, it was pretty common knowledge that everyone was going to go to the Capitol.
It was common knowledge that that was the end point.
So Darren says that Epps is, quote, pre-positioned at the initial breach point, which is kind of sneaky language.
What's the difference between being pre-positioned and that just happening to be where you are?
He ended up at that barricade because that's where the group he broke off from the rally with led to.
Until he got to that barricade, he thought they were going to be allowed into the Capitol because it would be open to the public.
That mentality shifted and he realized that that wasn't going to be the case.
There's a video of him at the barricade saying, quote, when we go in, leave this here, likely referring to some kind of a weapon a fellow rallygoer was carrying, but we don't actually know for sure.
Epps testified that he doesn't remember saying that because his mentality shifted when he got to the barricade and realized they weren't going to just be let into the building, which is a little curious, but I can see there being a benign explanation for all that that doesn't involve him being a fed.
Both him and Samsell said that's what was communicated.
And if being around Ryan Samsell is such a suspicious thing...
There are pictures from January 6th where he's hanging out with his arm around Joe Biggs.
In fact, Samsell told the FBI that Biggs had pushed him to fight the police at the barricade, and there's a video of them interacting just before he started shaking the bike rack.
If Samsell's telling the truth, then a possible interpretation would be that Alex's former employee, Joe Biggs, told Samsell to go fight with the police and break down that barrier, which he started trying to do, at which point Ray Epps stopped in and tried to calm him down.
I'm not sure what happened exactly, but I have more familiarity with Joe Biggs' character.
I think it was largely because the Dominion-type narratives and that kind of election stealing stuff was fizzling.
And so I think it was an exciting way.
And I think there's probably also a piece of it that you're correct about, which is trying to deflect blame.
But I don't think it's just specific people.
I think it's as a whole for the event itself.
Because they don't want to take responsibility for wanting the thing that you're correctly assessing that they want.
I just mean, if you're going to pin it, don't do it on the guy who's kind of anonymous.
Throw one of the big guys to the wolves, and then you're not going to get sued, you're not going to have all this shit, you're not going to do the whole thing.
A second aspect of it is that one of the main reasons that he wanted to go along to DC was because he was going with his son and he wanted to look after him.
And his son and him got separated.
And so when shit kicked off, there's a very good chance that he was concerned about the well-being and whereabouts of his son.
So that could have also been a part of the not getting caught up in mob mentality.
There were some things going on in Washington and Portland.
I think...
It was Portland.
Yeah, it was Portland.
I think that's when Antifa had first come out, and we were seeing a lot of things.
They were burning things and doing different things on the news, and he thought it would be wise if we were to go there and try to direct them, get in with them and direct them to do things other ways.
I didn't agree with that, so we kind of split ways.
He left because Stuart Rhodes wanted to try and co-opt Antifa in Portland, most likely in relation to the Occupy Portland protest in 2011.
I'm not certain if that's the Portland protest he's talking about, but it would match up timeline-wise, and it matches with the tactics that folks in the extreme right wing used with Occupy protests, where they tried to infiltrate and co-op people to their side using things Yep.
There's no case here with Epps.
All of these points that he's bringing up, there's just nothing here except for kind of a feeling.
I mean, it's like when you listen to the round table people talk and just throw out something that is just patently either untrue or absurd, and then other people just start going like...
He was considered to be so egregious he was one of the first 20 people added to the FBI's most wanted list about January 6th.
He was prominently featured in the New York Times' ominously titled Day of Rage.
Of all the clips the New York Times could have found and chosen, they chose Ray Epps to represent their thesis that this was a pre-planned insurrection to storm the Capitol.
And then, when the discussion of federal involvement came into be, one of our major pieces at Revolver News, literally the next day is when the FBI quietly removed him from their list.
And all of a sudden, he went from FBI's Most Wanted and featured in the New York Times' Day of Rage to New York Times does a fully dedicated puff piece on him.
60 Minutes does a sympathy segment on him.
He's the only January 6th participant that Adam Kinzinger, who's never met a Trump supporter, he doesn't want to see rotting in jail for 50 years, that Adam Kinzinger will defend more aggressively than Epps' own lawyers.
And now, almost three years after, the government finally says, okay, we're going to hit you with a wrist slap misdemeanor, as though people are so simple-minded to think, Well, if the argument hasn't been indicted, therefore he's a Fed,
if we indict him now, even if it's a misdemeanor, even three years after, no matter what the circumstances, this constitutes a refutation and totally wipes away the mountains of suspicious evidence surrounding the character of Ray Epps.
That lawsuit is still active, and Epps has been very clear about how the spreading of these smears about him has led to his family being terrorized, so there's no excuse for Darren to not understand the consequences of his actions.
Ray Epps is not a public figure, so there's a lot less wiggle room for defamation defenses here.
There's no evidence that Epps' behavior being so egregious is what got him put on the FBI's wanted list.
It's a huge stretch to say that Epps was, quote, prominently featured in that documentary.
It includes the clip of him talking to Baked Alaska from the night of the 5th and the clip of him telling people how to get to the Capitol building, but all that's in the first seven minutes of the film.
The stuff after that that doesn't include Epps is way worse, and I would say that the Proud Boys like Biggs and Rufio Pan Man are far more prominently featured.
The FBI did have Epps on their most wanted list as it relates to January 6th, but they most likely removed him because as soon as someone I don't think this is suspicious, unless you're desperately looking for something to be suspicious about.
The idea is that the man wanted to use him as a patsy, knowing that he was a fed, and they could sort it out all secretly, but then Darren got the scoop, so they had to change tracks.
Because Darren had them all figured out, they removed Epps from the wanted list, and then the Times does this puff piece to paint him as a woe is me figure.
But here's the real timeline.
The Day of Rage documentary came out on June 30th, 2021.
Epps was removed I believe probably sometime between the night of...
He's telling people in advance of the speech we need to go to the Capitol because somehow he got it in his mind that everything would end up at the Capitol.
For every single thing that you assert about him, that he's in video whispering into a guy's ear, you say it in the rest of your article, all he's doing on the day of when the protesting is getting violent is going up and down telling people, don't fight with the cops.
Don't fight with the cops.
The cops are on our side.
That's what he's saying the entire time.
The idea that he said that the entire day, but the one guy whose ear that he whispered into that unfortunately we don't have, you know.
No, audio capture of that he and Sam Sewell testified to as he said, "Hey..." The cops are on our side or the cops aren't enemies.
They both say something to that effect.
And that seems to synergize with everything else he said on that day.
You go on to say that that guy immediately after was the one that broke down the fence.
No, he's not.
You can see like 15 people right next to him that are all trying to break down the fence.
Yeah, the guy goes in eventually.
But if we truly believe that this guy is a federal agent or is working to instigate the riot, we've laid out absolutely nothing supporting that.
Just some video footage of another boomer being at the rally that was there.
If you want to say that why was he removed from the FBI list?
I mean, why was he removing everybody else?
Like, all of the information is out there.
He said that after his video was identified, and people on X started to identify him, and then because all of his online stuff is incredibly easy to find, he started to get phone calls, he started to get harassed, he started to get threats, so he called the FBI as soon as this was brought to his attention, and he told the FBI, hey, this was me, and here I am, and this is what's happening, and the FBI took him off the list.
Because what you did, because I read your article, is you looked at two archived versions of the website and you didn't have a 12-month archive.
For some reason, you assumed that the recent snapshot that you took at 2021, you think that that was the first time the page has been changed.
That was just the first time the page has been archived.
I don't think the FBI has made a statement on it, but what Epps testified to was that he either saw a video of himself or a friend saw a video of himself or a friend saw him on the list where people were, and then people were making videos, and then he called the FBI and he said, hey, I need to talk to you and this is what's going on.
If he was a Fed, why would they remove him from the list when everybody's clearly looking at the list?
He was one of the only people removed.
Why would senators be defending him so vigilantly?
If Epps was a Fed, why would they remove him from the most wanted list?
If he's a Fed provocateur willing to engage in actions meant to incite people to storm the Capitol, you've got to think the guy's not above 10%.
Yeah, totally.
is number one, put him on the list in the first place, and then number two, remove him from that list and make things very suspicious.
Also, Destiny is totally right about pretty much everything about Epps, but he makes a critical error here, which is also kind of Darren's fault.
Destiny says that Darren has these two snapshots in his revolver article that are from the Wayback Machine of the FBI's wanted list, and that they don't depict when a page has been changed, just shows when it was archived.
The two snapshots that Darren has here are from February 16th, 2021, and July 1st, 2021.
The first one shows Epps included as...
photograph 16 and the latter does not include a photograph 16 at all jumping from 15 to 17. Darren has this wide gulf between the two snapshots there's no reason to believe that the page wasn't updated somewhere between those two dates and he's just assuming that it was on July 1st sure it could be any time in there and that's what destiny hasn't proven anything about right yeah this is sloppy work which destiny is calling out but I don't know if destiny pursued the second step here which is to check for himself the
They're archived constantly.
So there's a version of this particular site from every...
This doesn't prove anything that Ray Epps is a Fed.
It could easily just be that Epps' lawyer began the process of cooperation with the FBI in mid to late January, and it took a couple of months of back and forth or even administrative processes to get to the point where he came off that wanted list.
Destiny's general point here is correct, but he's challenging Darren on a point of fact that he seems to be incorrect about.
This isn't a great position to be in, and I understand how the snapshots in Darren's article could lead to that conclusion, but that wasn't because Darren was wrong.
This is an interesting case study in you and me, in a lot of ways, because there's a part of you that is excited, whatever the Destiny and Derek Beatty get into it.
So you're saying, he said, we need to go into the Capitol peacefully.
And you point out correctly that in many instances caught on video, he's engaged in what you could call de-escalation of the crowd, and he's not urging people to violence.
That's all correct.
I never said he's urging people to violence.
He was absolutely a provocateur, and his mission, as stated and as implemented and as orchestrated by his own verbatim text, was he wanted people to go into the Capitol peacefully.
Nobody here is saying that he didn't say that and he didn't want people to do that.
But the claim is that there's some sort of...
That's illegal.
That's fine.
He can be charged for it.
Do you think anyone here care if he gets charged for that crime?
The issue is you're saying that he was doing it under the direction of a federal agency.
The 6-3 guy that looks like he's dying of type 2 diabetes and arthritis is somehow some intimidating Marine captain that's sending people into the Capitol.
That was your claim that you've provided zero evidence for and you don't in either of the articles that you write about him.
He wants you to agree to that, which of course you have to.
But the real argument Darren is making is what Destiny lays out there, that Epps was doing all this under the auspices of being a federal agent provocateur.
Right.
This is a rhetorical strategy known as the Mott and Bailey.
It's named after an old-timey castle structure where there would be a part that was strong and easy to defend, the Mott, and an external part that was harder to defend, the Bailey.
The rhetorical strategy mirrors this structure where somebody has a position that's very easy to defend, in this case that Ray Epps said that he wanted people to go into the Capitol, and a much more difficult case to defend, in this case that Ray Epps was an agent provocateur working for the government or some other organization to entrap.
Trump supporters.
In terms of the castles, when the Bailey came under attack, people would retreat to the Mott because it was fortified and would stand up to attack better, and this is what you see a lot of folks do in argumentation.
The idea that Ray Epps is a Fed is a very difficult position to defend, so in order to support his position, Darren retreats to the more easy-to-defend position that Epps said that he wanted people to go into the Capitol.
It doesn't prove his point, but it forces agreement between himself and the person he's arguing with, and if people aren't paying attention to this, it can be a pretty effective strategy.
So my question to these people, then, would be, if the government is doing all this undercover Fed infiltration stuff, why don't you join them?
That sounds way more fun!
That sounds way more fun than you're hanging out at a little militia thing, and you clearly want to be part of the movie aspect of this stuff, so why are you not joining the government and becoming one of those people?
I mean, I just, if you really believe that there's the chance to go and be a, like, fed undercover, if you really believe fed undercover agents are everywhere all the time, you know, inciting people, become one of them.
So Darren's trapped because he has no other real evidence that Epps is a fed.
He has this recontextualized circumstantial nonsense.
So pressed on it like this, he's in trouble.
Destiny and Bed have agreed with the easy position to defend, but they still don't agree with the more difficult one.
So the next place this argument should go is Darren being forced to defend why he thinks Epps is a fed beyond all the stuff that he's already laid out.
Camo.
So...
He's tall.
And it's weird that this is where Ian jumps in to try and change the subject and throw things to Glenn.
That almost seems like him being able to tell that Darren was in trouble, and if that went on any longer, he'd be forced to say something like, it's just my opinion.
I mean, based upon the combination of what we know of Ian being working with Tim Pool and some of the things he said, it sounds plausible that there's somebody in his ear.
Well, I just, I mean, I only heard the last four minutes of the conversation, but I'm still always amazed by, I really don't understand the argument because the FBI and the U.S. security state before January 6th was saying that they regard...
The greatest threat to national security, not as being ISIS or Al-Qaeda or Hamas or Hezbollah or China or any other foreign threat.
They regard the greatest threat as being right-wing domestic extremists, in whom that was included on many lists, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, and all of the people in the groups that they said orchestrated January 6th.
Is the argument that you think that the FBI Was not monitoring and infiltrating those groups because there's actually a ton of evidence that the FBI Had their hooks in all three of those groups.
And not only had their hooks in them, but on January 6th had informants on the ground who were pretending to be Trump supporters who were talking in real time to the FBI about everything that was happening.
So I just want to understand what the claim is.
The claim that the FBI was not involved in the groups that organized January 6th and didn't have informants with them that day?
It came out that the vice president of the Oath Keepers was an FBI informant.
The Proud Boys had at least three and as many as eight, and the New York Times itself reported that there were FBI informants and the Proud Boys who were inside the Capitol texting their handlers as the event unfolded.
So Glenn's point is fair enough, but it still doesn't prove anything.
You could have a hundred informants inside a giant organization that is like the Proud Boys and still not have anyone who was in the upper levels of the group who were in the private messaging groups that were planning for the sixth.
And it is true that Greg McWordier, the VP of the Oath Keepers, was an informant, but we don't know what he informed about or the length of his existence in this role.
It's possible that he gave warnings that went unheeded, but we don't know that.
It's not clear.
So what is clear is that there are records of Stuart Rhodes and other Oath Keepers who aren't informants actively planning what they were going to do.
Another thing that is clear is that for over a decade on Alex's show, Stuart has been begging for the chance to try to overthrow the government, and he didn't need anyone to trick him into doing any of that shit.
But here again, you have Glenn performing an attempt at the same type of sleight of hand that Beatty used earlier.
He has an undeniable position, which is that there were informants inside the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, but the real argument that he's making is that the informants are actually the ones who caused January 6th, which is unsupported.
When the unsupported argument Glenn is making gets challenged, he retreats to the safety of the undisputable argument that there were informants.
And that's a lot of the shell game that's going on in terms of these arguments, and you can't get anywhere with it.
The context in the immediate aftermath of January 6th, by the words of Steve Sherwin, who is in charge of the prosecution.
Their posture was one of quote-unquote shock and awe.
They were going after everyone.
They were hitting them very hard.
Now again, think about central casting.
On paper, Ray Epps, he's the 6 '3", former Marine, in camouflage gear with a Trump hat, the only guy caught on video as early as the 5th telling people to go into the Capitol, who's there on the 6th directing people to the Capitol, who's right there pre-positioned at that initial...
So he lays out all this shit that doesn't amount to anything in terms of his argument.
Then he says, don't you think it's weird that he's the one who gets a New York Times puff piece?
And Destiny is pretty right on there.
Why did he get that puff piece?
So there's two possible answers.
One is because you guys chose him to be special by demonizing him.
And the other that Darren definitely doesn't want to touch is that...
Some of those buff pieces happened because they made him a giant scapegoat for January 6th, and it's led to his family being terrorized, so he sued Fox News.
That's why a lot of the media attention that exists recently has been there.
They're giving him some sort of special treatment, and maybe...
Maybe some other January 6th participants don't get that same treatment.
He's getting special treatment because Darren chose to make him special with a propaganda attack.
But because this whole thing has been challenged and Darren's entire shtick boils down to don't you think it's weird level statements, he's forced to moderate his stance to now being that he doesn't know if he's a federal informant for the government, but just that he was an agent of some unknown, unnamed third party.
This argument that Darren is making amounts to less than nothing, and he's said that, like...
So this is just a load of fun storytelling that doesn't really relate to the circumstances and reality at all.
Darren's still dodging the question Destiny's posing of why...
The New York Times and others are writing pieces about Ray Epps, which is obviously because he's suing Fox News for defamation, a large part of which is Tucker's coverage of Epps, most of which featured Darren Beattie as a guest.
Probably doesn't want to talk about that.
Returning to the question of if he's an asset, then why did they indict him?
By saying people do that all the time, if that's your rebuttal, that isn't actually helping us get any further towards making a case.
The people making the claim have the responsibility of backing it up, and in this case, it's Alex and Darren clearly saying that Epps is a Fed, or I guess now that he's an agent of a mysterious third party.
Saying they indict agents all the time is a dodge to Ben's question, but it doesn't get anywhere closer to showing that Epps is or isn't an agent, but it kind of feels like it does.
Also, if it's a person who's an agent of a third party, what relationship...
Why would the government give them special treatment?
So Ben clearly just realized that they were never going to Yeah.
Great answer by Alex, just saying, they know they control the jurisdiction.
And then moving on to Epps texting his nephew, which we already covered in this debate more than once.
Also, we see here the potential downside of getting involved on the side of a blustery, drunk Alex.
He's very explicitly saying that a concerted effort by Darren and Tucker, along with Alex, made Ray Epps the centerpiece of the right-wing narratives about January 6th.
If the people who are suing Fox News have any interest in adding defendants, Alex is going to have given them a nice roadmap.
Alex is in the clear since he and InfoWars are in bankruptcy, but Darren and Revolver have a fair amount to gain by not being sued here.
If I were Darren, I wouldn't be thrilled.
Destiny has a good point with Tucker, but I would just go the full mile on this one and bring up how Tucker is flat out.
Yeah, so if you lie because it's too scary or dangerous to your image to admit that you're wrong about something, you're not someone people should take too seriously.
It's a testament of how much a disaster our public information space truly is that he could say that openly on Dave Rubin's show like two years ago, and it made zero difference to his standing.
No idea that the FBI throughout the entire war on terror did this over and over.
They would target and entrap all sorts of vulnerable Muslims to engage in plots that the FBI created in order to create a narrative that the FBI was needed because there was a much bigger threat of Islamic terrorism than there actually was.
The FBI has been infiltrating and then using provocateurs to encourage groups to commit crimes so that the FBI can gain more power, can spread this narrative.
Gain more power.
You have to be incredibly naive or only paying attention to the news.
By the way, if I can just add a nice little colorful detail there.
So Glenn's correct that there are a bunch of entrapment plots that the FBI has carried out in the aftermath of 9-11 and in other circumstances throughout their history.
Proving or demonstrating that something could be an FBI plot because they've done some plots in the past is not the same thing that proving something is.
All that anyone on Glenn, Darren, or Alex's side is really able to substantially demonstrate is that it's possible that their conspiracy theories are true.
They can't prove them, and they have no proof to offer, but they could be true for all sorts of reasons.
The FBI has pulled entrapment plots in the past, even though I thought Darren and Alex were trying to avoid saying the federal government because they were scared to answer that question earlier, so they're not...
Here's the thing, though.
Destiny in bed showed up for the debate, which is essentially mean...
We've already established that they think this is something that can be debated.
which is to say it's possible that Alex's side is right.
They disagree, but they wouldn't debate something that they don't think is even in the realm of being possible because someone who believes something that is not in the realm of possibility is, by definition, irrational and beyond argument.
I would say that if you were going to bring up the FBI's track record as evidence they're framing conservative lunatics, barking up the wrong government agency for that one.
He was saying, or at least speaking in a way designed to heavily imply that Ray Epps testified at the J6 committee that he orchestrated the events that day.
It's extremely strange, given how conspicuous and egregious and concentrated his behavior was, that he somehow was able to avoid the obstruction of official proceeding charge, number one.
Number two, there are even more serious charges they could have given him.
In fact, in the series of videos that we put out, there's one specific exchange he had with another guy.
He said, when we go in...
Leave this here.
We don't want to get shot.
When we go in, leave this here, he's referring to that individual's bear spray.
That individual ends up going into the Capitol, committing violence, and doing a whole bunch of other things.
And this is a bizarre case because this guy, who is super egregious, has to this day...
Not fully been charged.
His case hasn't even gone to a district judge yet.
So let me give you a sense.
Let me give you a sense.
Because when we're evaluating these things, we have to compare them to standards applied to others.
It just doesn't really connect to finding any real answers.
Darren is right here, though, that Epps was charged with disorderly conduct, not disrupting the proceeding.
A likely part of this was that he was already on his way home to the hotel when the proceeding was actually disrupted, and because he was cooperative and pled guilty, So Darren doesn't specifically name the other person who Ray Epps is talking to in
that Leave This Here video.
And no matter where you look, I can't find anybody saying what his name is, which is weird.
So I watched that video, and Darren is saying that the guy, you know, Darren says that he's being told to leave his bear mace, but there's nothing of that sort on screen.
This is assumed that...
I've heard other people assume that maybe it was a club, but it could also just be the guy's bullhorn.
He's talking to a bullhorn.
There's no support to make a definitive claim but what Ray Epps was saying to leave behind.
To stake the position it was Bear Mace is strange.
So I went through a ton of charging documents and the FBI's page of folks who were arrested or of interest in the events of January 6th.
It took forever, but I think I figured out who the guy is.
He's wearing a fairly distinctive red and black plaid shirt and black hood.
His face is not visible in the video with Epps, so it's kind of hard to say for sure, but there's one other reason that I think I figured out who the guy is.
The person in the video has a bit of an accent, and I think that it comes from Philly.
The person that I have a suspicion is who Darren is talking about is a guy named Marshall Neif, and he didn't have bear mace.
But the problem with this theory is that Darren says that the guy hasn't even gone to a district judge, but Neif entered a plea agreement in March 2022.
And was sentenced to 41 months in prison that September.
So I can't say, because Darren pretends to know who this person is, but doesn't say a name, and just gives vague details.
But if that's who he was talking about, that case is in no way comparable to Epps.
He went into the Capitol, assaulted an officer, and there's a long track record of him planning with his friend, who he was also charged with actions in D.C. They wanted to, like, they hoped to start a war.
They hoped a war would start.
I don't know for sure if this is the right person, but if it is, These actions aren't comparable, so the charges are not a reasonable standard to compare these two.
We may never know what was going to play out, because Alex had to butt in there to complain about Owen Shroyer.
We may never get an answer of who this person was, because Alex had to...
They charge him, and in the charging documents say, Owen's lying.
He doesn't work for InfoWars.
That's in the charging documents, the sentencing documents.
The judge says, I'm putting you in these months in federal prison because you just questioned the election again and gave three examples of what he did.
He put tape over his mouth when they were letting leftists run around and throw red paint in Congress, and they said, "Sir, you can't do that." And he agreed that he wouldn't do it, and he didn't.
But there was no evidence because he broke the agreement that he signed, and then he pled guilty and said, I broke the agreement that I signed, and agreed to the sentencing guy.
This entire argument has been you, again, arguing for an insurrection, for rebellion.
All we have, everything we have over here is actual testimony under oath, actual judicial rulings, actual rulings by judges, actual rulings by Supreme Court.
We can provide these arguments.
We can provide the evidence.
We can provide the testimony.
And all you do is go, oh, well, I don't trust the courts.
Oh, well, I don't trust statements made under oath.
You can skirt by on providing any hard evidence for literally a single claim that you've made today.
There hasn't been any evidence provided to support any of the claims made today.
And you are hand-brushing away every single other claim that's made by people that were loyal to Trump, by people that Trump trusted over and over and over again.
And at the end of the day, what could you possibly be advocating for besides an insurrection?
Is that fundamentally, before we even get to what the definition or the conversation is, the motivation behind their position is to make it happen again.
Okay, here's why we're not going to tell you the truth about how that was an insurrection, is because if we say it was an insurrection, then we won't get to try next time.
Whereas if I lie about it, then maybe people will forget for a while, and then we'll get another crack at it.
Yeah, you excuse things, you try to make it look like, oh, that's not really real, in order to provide cover for and facilitate future acts of the variety.
There's a far more serious conspiracy charge that the government had available to them if we use the standards that they've applied in similar January 6th cases.
I honestly am not sure what Bette is talking about with Stuart saying they should shoot people, but I definitely think that's not out of character for Stuart, so I don't know.
What interests me the most here is that Alex is having to backpedal.
He says that Joe Biggs should have a year in prison.
Why?
Why?
He's willing to concede that Stuart Rhodes said that they should take over the Capitol and then shoot people?
Look, you know, just as Americans from across the country stormed up to Bundy Ranch to stand up for a rancher's family, you need to go to Washington, D.C. with the same conviction.
So Alex doesn't disagree at all with Stuart laying out exactly what they want to and plan to do.
They just didn't do it that time because time wasn't running out yet.
Trump had lost, but there was still hope that there would be an easy solution to this.
By January 6th, the inauguration was right around the corner, and if the election got certified that day, there was no other procedural way to stop Biden from taking office.
And why is that important to Stuart?
Because he's a man entirely obsessed with the idea of being in charge of his own state-sanctioned military.
He's been very consistent about this for the last decade in his appearances on Alex's show.
The belief that he was building a militia in the Oath Keepers and that they should be the state's muscle.
It wasn't relevant during the Obama years, so his focus was mostly on agitation and using civil unrest incidents to grow his ranks.
But when Trump got in, he was obsessed with the idea that Trump would call up the Oath Keepers as the real militia of the United States and he would be in charge of it.
Here's a small selection of times he talked about that on Infowars.
The President can call up the National Guard and call us up as the militia and we'll go suppress the insurrection.
So he could call forth the militia, which include the National Guard and all of us, as the militia, to suppress the insurrection.
He could call us up as the militia of the United States in the federal service right now and deploy us on the border, even if the governor of California doesn't want you to go.
The president could call us up as the unorganized militia under federal statute right now.
There's the organized militia as the National Guard, and then under federal statute, the unorganized militia as the rest of us.
And so President Trump certainly could call us up.
To go and execute the laws of the union and suppress the insurrection by the radical left and to repel the invasion down the border.
He could do all those three things by calling us up.
So even though the states have not formed militias, which they should, the president can call us up as the militia.
Stewart understood fully well that the opportunity for him to achieve his dreams and be a big boy in charge of a real army was slipping through his fingers.
If Biden got into office, there was no chance of him getting made into the real militia of the United States without an all out civil war.
So really, January 6th was the ultimate last inflection point for him.
It's very easy to understand his actions if you understand that he's been talking about what he wants for over a decade on Alex's show.
And this was the last chance to get it.
And Alex never disagreed with Stewart.
He was right there with him, spouting pseudo-history and nonsense about his flawed understanding of the Constitution to rationalize Stewart's bloodlust and his desire for power.
And, hey, I loved having him on the show, and I raised a bunch of money for him, and the Oath Keepers wouldn't exist without their exposure early days on InfoWars.
I basically facilitated the creation of this group.
Yeah, I do find it interesting how it seems impossible for people to take a lot of these people, or a lot of people at their word, whenever they go like...
I want something, repeatedly.
And then they try and get it.
People are like, why could they possibly have done this?
Whether or not it's because he has the razor instincts or because there's somebody in his ear telling him to do something, what matters is he's helping.
Everything that has happened in January 6, and you can even look at the people they picked and choose who to expand the law, the people who ended up getting prosecuted on felony counts, even though they were nonviolent, had these incredibly novel interpretations of law that were used against them to turn nonviolent demonstration and nonviolent political protest into felony by taking this.
Post Enron law and giving it a stretch meeting that it never had before.
And the reason so many of them plead guilty is because they know that if they go into court, they're going to have rulings against them because a lot of these judges, especially in Washington, are not only Democratic Party judges, but the entire system is furious to watch people go and put their feet up on Nancy Pelosi's desk.
So the entire system decided that this has to be punished regardless of what the law provides.
So it's one thing to be wary and critical of the FBI and any apparatus of the government, but it's another to act like this.
The condescending attitude, the fast talking, and the actual words he's saying are just an awful combination.
The FBI committing some awful acts in the past is not evident that everything they do is part of an evil plot and that no one is actually investigating real crimes.
The courts getting some cases wrong and there being some cases of corruption is not proof that the courts are all part of an evil plot.
Taking this kind of a blanket knee-jerk opposition is just as idiotic as saying that the FBI is always right or that the courts are always perfect arbiters of the law.
One's childishly naive and the other's childishly cynical.
You notice there that Glenn doesn't point out like which specific cases he's talking about, which is weird.
If you pay attention to what he's saying, he's not even really finishing sentences as he But he's talking about everything that happened in January 6th.
He's already wrong there.
He doesn't finish his thoughts, so we don't know exactly where that plane would have crashed.
Then he says that people were picked and choosed who have the law expanded to charge them.
Doesn't specify, you know, who these people are or what law that is.
So all of this comes into focus when he mentions the post-Enron law aspect of this.
He's talking about the Sarbines-Oxley Act of 2002, which was passed after the Enron scandal.
This had to do with obstruction of an official proceeding, and what Glenn is saying has some point to it, but he's way off track.
First of all, according to NPR's tracker of J6-related arrests, 245 out of the 1,241 people have been charged with obstruction of an official proceeding.
Many of these people are the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who did actively conspire to stop the certification of the votes, and many of the others are folks who acted particularly egregiously during the riot.
Like Robert Turner, who we mentioned on the last episode, the guy who hit three officers in the head with a fire extinguisher.
not all of them were that extreme or even violent but often those were the people who made contact with authorities.
You know, they're like, Isaac Thomas is another person who got charged Yeah, that's too many.
necessarily as throwing a fire extinguisher.
Sure.
But yeah, that'll get you obstruction of the proceeding.
People have discussed the strategy of using this statute in this way as the government trying to be creative about how they prosecute what is one of the most extreme events in recent history.
It's definitely a special circumstance, so the idea that they would consider an unconventional count to charge people with, that isn't insane as long as the charge is actually appropriate.
Some people have said that the law doesn't apply to something like trying to stop the certification of election, and that...
Question's pretty much settled.
It does.
However, there is a bigger question that does merit some examination, which is, what is the Mendoza line with this thing?
It's a pretty important question, since pretty much everyone who was there on the 6th, whether they went to the Capitol or not, was there with the aim of obstructing an official proceeding.
in a way that rises to the level of a felony.
That lack of clarity about the dividing line could end up being a problem in some prosecutions, but that's a matter that's gonna be played out as someone may appeal.
Over time, we'll get a better picture.
But even acknowledging this, what Glenn is saying is nonsense.
If they were charging everyone with this, then yeah, his points kinda make sense.
But maybe a couple people got this charge where it's questionable, and maybe those charges will be overturned.
I do understand that if you believe in this, like, story of American propaganda, that the FBI is these upstanding law enforcement people, and they don't do that, and then the courts go and make rulings.
Then you're going to end up with this image of what the three of them have, which is this idea that this was one of the worst attacks in American history.
The courts have ruled.
Everything the government did in this case is consistent with their longstanding view before January 6th that these groups are criminal groups.
They need to be criminalized.
Trump's movement is a threat to the United States, and the entire part of January 6th was designed to define them as an insurrectionary movement so that they could criminalize them, which is exactly what they're doing.
I understand that usually what happens in the United States with nonviolent protesters or even with violent protesters is they don't get charged with anything.
A tiny percentage of people who use violence throughout all of the Black Lives Matter protests ended up in jail because the ideology in which they were protesting was one that was considered positive and friendly by the institutions of authority.
I have zero idea how someone could enjoy listening to Glenn, and I listen to Alex all the time, so that's saying something.
The guy has the most undeservedly condescending tone that I've heard in quite a while.
There's no virtue or wisdom in pretending everything is corrupt because some things are.
You don't get to pat yourself on the back and declare yourself the king of nuance for that.
You can't go around calling everyone else junior high students when you have big, jaded high schooler energy.
Glenn thinks the government decided that the groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys were criminal groups before January 6th, and I guess he believes they used agents provocateur to start a riot at the Capitol to smear the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who are actively planning to start a riot at the Capitol in order to criminalize Trump.
followers.
This isn't a person who has a rational and measured criticism of the government and the misdealings they've committed in the past.
This is far more like an Infowars host than I think Glenn wants people to think he is.
I mean, the first problem is that the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys are absolutely Sure.
Sure.
Yeah.
Also, I don't know in what world Glenn thinks 170 convictions out of 890 being violence-related constitutes a tiny number or a small percentage.
That's a small percentage?
That's like almost 20%.
So he seems to just be kind of dishonest and ideologically driven to think that's small.
I'm certain that under 20% of FBI arrests involve entrapment, but if that were the number, would Glenn say that's a tiny number or small percentage?
I think not.
Then Glenn launches into another pretty dumb conspiracy, which is that people involved in BLM-related protests weren't charged for crimes because they were supporting a cause that the man liked, whereas Trump and his...
It's impossible to make this point and you see them try, but this is apples and oranges.
And on top of that, Glenn is just adding his imagined motivation for prosecutors charging Trump fans.
That's not based on anything other than his feelings, namely that he likes Trump and he doesn't like BLM.
A CNN analysis from 2021 found that, quote, D.C. police arrested more than five times as many people at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests last summer than they did during the day of the insurrection at the Capitol.
Business Insider did a breakdown of protest-related arrests and found that there were 69 arrests on January 6th at the Capitol.
Understandably, a lot have happened since, but that's a shockingly low number.
The protest that Alex is talking about with the Democrats bombing the Capitol was the protests on June 1st, 2020, and 194 people were arrested that day.
No one even stormed the Capitol, and no one was trying to disrupt the certification of an election, and yet over 125 more people were arrested at that Black Lives Matter protest than on January 6th.
There you have the protest in Minneapolis on May 26th, right after George Floyd was killed, where the police arrested 570 people for protest-related crimes.
That's almost half of the entire number of people who have been charged since January 6th.
And again, no one was trying to overturn an election.
You can say it stems from a hatred of the left or woke politics or the very obvious answer of racism.
But whatever the case, you could show them tons of cases of people arrested at those protests.
They insist no one is arrested at.
And it wouldn't pierce the narrative for them.
That's what this all comes down to.
And what Glenn is articulating is the narrative.
Trump is a threat to the corrupt and evil U.S. system.
So supporters are treated unfairly by the corrupt and evil U.S. system.
It's just a grievement porn.
Also, isn't Glenn supposed to be a big anti-stress?
The surveillance guy?
Shouldn't he be concerned with the government abuse Section 702 of FISA to investigate 133 Black Lives Matter protesters who were arrested in connection with protests?
I think he wouldn't, like, you know, they wouldn't do that kind of thing, since the government's sympathetic to their cause.
I'm sure that Glenn is concerned with police brutality, so I can't understand why he's not up in arms about how New York City had to pay out $13 million to 1,300 protesters in a class-action lawsuit after they were kettled into areas they couldn't escape from and then beaten and pepper-sprayed.
I imagine the police did that to him.
To show their support, you know, because they supported the cause.
Man, you can really get the feeling Alex just wants to do his show.
He wants to interrupt and make the pronouncements that he always does, and this interjection really doesn't make sense in the context of a debate, but as a monologue, sure.
This guy does sound like he could use some more iced tea, though.
Alex absolutely did say that all Democrats were involved in the violence and property destruction that stemmed from the social justice-related protests.
One million percent.
He thinks Kamala Harris personally bailed out violent criminals, so that should tell you how his radar is on assigning blame.
But he says it a lot to make himself feel better, that he doesn't assign group blame for things.
So he just repeats that self-reassuring statement in order to accuse his opponents of assigning group blame in that speech that Biden made last night during a debate that's supposed to be about January 6th.
I think they're completely overblown, and they're consistent with what we're talking about, this amplification of January 6th into this false domestic terrorist act.
Are, in effect, political prisoners because of the political context of these prosecutions, which are vastly overblown and could only make sense within this political context of the weaponization not only of the national security state, but unfortunately now also the legal apparatus.
Apparently Biden put out a memorandum that said white supremacy is the number one threat in terms of domestic terrorism.
But guess what?
That happened in 2004, too, and 2005, and 2006, and 2007, and on and on.
This narrative constantly gets replayed on Alex's show any time a public leader gives voice to concerns about how white supremacist and white nationalist groups pose a threat to public safety.
This narrative continues to get reused because Alex's content is driven by intense feelings of white victimhood, which is validated by being constantly told that the government just declared war on you because you're white.
In June 2021, Biden released his national strategy for countering domestic terrorism, which listed a threat that emerges, quote, from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists whose racial, ethnic, or religious hatred leads them towards violence, as well as those whom they encourage to take violent action.
This wasn't just white supremacist groups.
It includes all groups that could fall under that umbrella, but Alex, you know, he hangs out mostly with white supremacist types, so his view is a little narrowed by that.
It didn't say that people who questioned elections or didn't like vaccines were terrorists.
It said, quote, newer sociopolitical developments such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence will almost certainly spur some domestic violent extremists to try to engage in violence this year.
This isn't saying that if you're one of the people who questions elections or doesn't like vaccines, you're a terrorist.
It means that the sociopolitical climate created by these groups creates heightened concerns about domestic extremism.
Conspiracy-minded communities are often good recruitment pools for extremists.
Think about how many Infowars listeners probably became Oath Keepers because of how often Stuart Rhodes was on.
Being an Infowars listener doesn't make you an Oath Keeper, but it makes you more likely to have joined.
In turn, being an Oath Keeper doesn't make you a domestic violent extremist, but we've seen that it's a possible path towards it.
Further, conspiracy shit has the tendency to give cover to domestic violent extremists.
January 6th is a perfect illustration of that.
The giant crowd that was there obscured the violent extremists that were contained within, like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.
This is the exact same shell game Alex has been playing his entire career.
Go back to 2009, it's the same game with the MIAC report.
It just gets played over and over and over again because it works.
I think that if we want to talk about knowing history and understanding history and contextualizing history, I think if we want to run with that argument, then we need to do real journalist work while we do it.
It's not enough to say the FBI or the CIA has done this 10, 20 years ago and then blindly assert it every single time it happens to fit whatever political narrative you want to tell.
If you want to tell a story, the person telling the story needs to find evidence to support it.
Sure, if you want to say the FBI or the CIA or any other domestic agency has been involved in spying on Americans and doing bad things, that's fine.
We all know that it's happened.
That doesn't mean that you don't have to find evidence in the future of it happening.
And so far, there is no evidence of it happening on January 6th.
As many times as you want to throw around the follow politics before 2016 or whatever, well, we're in 2024 right now.
Find some information from today or find some information from January 6th to today.
It's not enough to just keep appealing to the past and pretend like that's going to do your homework for you and that somehow you can make all of these accusations about having any real evidence.
There's a pregnant silence between Bed's point and destiny, and I think that's because what Bed said kind of ruins all their arguments about the politically motivated prosecution argument.
And it involves, you know, people on the Darren Alex Glenn side are insisting there's a conspiracy of all these judges.
Wait, we charged many of them under the guidelines.
How does this work?
So it seems like it's not a politically motivated witch hunt.
But then, I gotta tip the cap to Destiny for that rebuttal.
It really does cut to the core of Glenn's entire premise with the condescension about how the FBI has done bad stuff in the past, so you can just assume that they did bad stuff this time.
It's a frustrating thing, because this is a solid rebuttal that would be difficult to deal with, but because of how the debate has been so poorly moderated and full of Alex's substance-fueled distractions, there's no way that this would...
It was able to come up in a coherent way where it was a counterpoint to something directly that Glenn had said that Glenn could then respond to.
As it stands, it just feels like a good point in the ether.
But Destiny goes on because, I don't know why, but...
Novel uses of charges, or people don't do charges like this.
As was said over here, most of the sentences have been within sentencing guidelines.
A lot of these have been done with a Trump-appointed judge.
The idea that these charges are novel, that people don't face prosecution like this...
There's some element of truth to that, but this is also a novel situation.
We have never had a president in the United States try to resist the peaceful transfer of power like this.
This has just never happened before.
And you can keep screaming about Hillary Clinton and you can keep screaming about BLM all you want and talk about the blown up fire stations and the congressional halls.
The reality is that none of those situations were like this one.
If you want to keep appealing to those and saying those people should have been charged with crimes, we agree they should have been charged with crimes.
But to even do the whataboutism, you have to already concede that you are wrong on all of the merits about the current people you're talking about.
Every single time we talk about Donald Trump, you go, well, what about when Hillary Clinton or Biden did it?
Oh, okay, then you admit that Trump did?
Because if you want to admit that Trump is guilty of every single thing that we've been accusing him of, which is what you're doing when you go, what about the other guy?
Because it seems like you're just trying to appeal to hypocrisy at that point rather than...
of the matter, then do that.
Say, yeah, Trump did try to cite an insurrection.
Yeah, Trump did fail.
Yeah, it was a riot.
I don't know why you keep saying Well, let me ask you this.
No, don't ask me this.
Let me finish my one point one time without being interrupted by you.
I know you came running back because you heard me talking.
You had to interrupt me.
I know you came running back and you were so excited for it.
Well, they had two trials in Michigan, and one of them was a mistrial, and they let most of them off the other, and they finally got a few convicted.
It came out in court that the feds went and found a bunch of basically homeless potheads.
And just like Glenn was saying, the New York Times article, but they were more accurate, 97% of Islamic plots were hatched by the FBI, including the First World Trade Center bombing.
So just to be clear, Alex doesn't have his facts right about the Ahmad Salam case.
We've covered that.
In terms of FBI entrapping the vast majority of their terrorism cases after 9-11, I don't think there's much doubt about that being a trend.
I found an interesting article from 2015 published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology titled Estimating the Prevalence of Entrapment in Post-9-11 Terrorism Cases.
The researchers reviewed 580 terrorism-related cases and found that about 9% of them posed real independent terrorist threats without any entrapment indicators, which is higher than the figure that Alex and his folks would cite.
However, the research led them to the conclusion that not all types of terrorism have the same level of indications of entrapment.
For instance, jihadi-related terrorism averaged 6.3 indicators of entrapment, whereas right-wing terrorists have an average of 2.8.
For comparison, left-wing terrorist plots averaged 10.2.
In their research, they found far more indications of government entrapment directed towards Muslims and the left-wing, and comparatively very little toward right-wing plots.
Alex brings up the Whitmer kidnapping plot, and I'll be honest, that one's messy.
But also, Alex is wrong.
There were informants, and as you've even pointed out, one of them was the second in command of the group, and there are entrapment indicators all around.
That being said, I'm still not convinced that the plot itself wasn't real.
Yeah, but more to the point here, Alex is bringing that case up because he's misrepresenting what Destiny said earlier.
Destiny said you point to all these times the FBI did wrong to prove that they did wrong this time, but what you're lacking is evidence involving this time.
Alex is using the Michigan case because his misrepresentation was to pretend Destiny was saying that these examples that they all gave weren't recent enough.
Alex does provide the connective tissue that's needed here, though.
He says the same team that did the Whitmer setup did January...
I have no idea what that even means in terms of the real world, but I do think that if Alex knows that the same team of setup artists who did the Whitmer plot did January 6th, why did we spend so long on Ray Epps?
Alex believes that all of these protests on the left are run by Antifa, and Soros had contracts with them to start martial law, but now he doesn't seem so emphatic about that.
These guys don't spend time trying to find the agents provocateur in the federal informants in cases of left-wing rioting, if you even allow the term, because they don't actually care about that issue.
They care about using the specter of informants and entrapment to excuse right-wing extremism.
Darren brings up Jake Sullivan as an attempt of some supposed fed who was at left-wing protests, but he wouldn't even know that guy if he wasn't an early attempt at a scapegoat for Jane January 6th.
Also, let's not forget that Alex, one of his employees, was caught on film desperately trying to buy John's footage of Ashley Babbitt being shot minutes after it happened.
To Glenn's point, keep in mind that when you're saying that BLM wasn't treated the same because of the government, you're not just alleging the federal government at that point, you're alleging every single state government and city municipality that's in charge of arresting people are all on the same page?
Almost all of us in D.C. Wait, the feds are in charge of prosecuting everybody in every state?
When Black Lives Matter happened, every single blue state mayor and every single blue state governor weighed in on the side of the riders because they were petrified of being demonized as being racist if they didn't support everything the Black Lives Matter movement did.
So, Bed lays out three groups of people who would have gotten felonies, and Darren replies that he has a counterexample, which is someone who's in one of those groups, namely a person who was involved in the seditious conspiracy.
That's just incoherent!
Then Alex just starts yelling about Owen, who didn't get charged with a felony and only got arrested because he didn't do his community service for a previous offense, and then this thing just falls to shreds.
It's, uh...
But yeah, Destiny does bring up a good point, though, that if you're, like, saying that all these BLM arrests and stuff are, you know, somehow, you know, there's a conspiracy to not charge them but do charge the federal people.
You're saying that every, like, local and state law enforcement...
The reality of a government that you don't understand, no, no, the reality of a government that you don't understand is that police orders don't come down from the federal government or even from the governors.
Policing is done at the municipal level.
The idea that governors are dictating No, this is federal.
No, the BLM rights are not all federally prosecuted.
These are state crimes that are happening within states.
Yeah, so Alex, I mean, just don't think that he's...
He's thinking very well.
He's clinging to these talking points pretty hard that he's focused on Biden's speech from last night and the big gotcha of his January 6th as big as Pearl Harbor.
He seems like he's patting himself on the back for getting that in our face.
Ian is trying to get things back to this Thomas Caldwell, because that was somebody who Darren Beattie had brought up as someone who wasn't in the Capitol, had got charged with a felony, and what do you know?
Destiny is now the incredible giant of journalism and the constitutional scholar.
I used to be, as Destiny said.
But anyway, a coup is generally when people in power or people who are trying to get into power partial the force of the armed factions of that country and use it to eliminate the legal process and take over.
So, for example, if Trump had called in the military on his side on January 6th, or he had gotten the military to block people from trying to remove him from office on January 20th, that is always what we say is a coup.
That's like the definition of maybe a military coup.
Tons of different types of coup, many of which don't involve the military at all, and many that don't require violence.
If this is the definition that Glenn is using, then nothing other than taking control of the military to stay in power is even describable as an attempted coup, which isn't a defensible position, but that seems to be where the head is at, which is kind of a problem.
That is kind of where we're struggling with, is because January 6th was stopped a little bit too early for people to really understand what was going to have to happen afterwards.
The question is, the New York Times acknowledged that there were FBI informants in the Capitol on January 6th, and then they give a link to the New York Times article.
Given the agency's history of entrapment, is it a stretch that some agents may have provoked the riot?
And then there's a follow-up question.
Why was law enforcement so ill-prepared for the insurrection, in quotes, despite the presence of informants?
So the first part of the question is, is it a stretch that some agents may have provoked the riot?
If he whispered into people's ears, if he was leading breach teams, why didn't any of the arrests, why didn't a single person...
I'm asking why I'm asking this though the next reasonable question why isn't a single person come out a test because we exposed him because he's he's the leader there yeah and he's there doing it on video he said I led this I did not answer my question I'm saying why anyone else come out I tested to this not a single person you know what a orchestra is right The conductor leads the symphony.
And all the musicians have to see the conductor and will tell you, that's my conductor.
unidentified
Why doesn't anybody else say, that was my conductor?
I think the ill-preparedness came because Trump's deployment of the National Guard in the past, especially in D.C., had caused a lot of people to be uncomfortable with National Guard being present in the Capitol when the certification of what was happening.
So, as they were having conversations prior to establishing security, I think they took a lot of extraordinary bureaucratic measures to make it so that, I think that day, if the National Guard was going to be deployed, it either had to be, I think, Miller or Walker.
Yeah, so I said a larger context, which is a larger five-hour, eight-hour deposition, right?
So I just told the truth.
I said a larger context.
I'm explaining that the public's been lied to so much, there's a major loss in confidence where people then don't believe anything they're told, and that's dangerous.
Obviously, Alex is half right about the context of the quote, but he's half lying.
He was talking about how the media lies so people don't believe what they're told, but he was also talking about himself and how that turned into a form of psychosis where he believed that everything was staged.
He still has that exact same relationship with reality that he did in 2012 when the shooting happened at Sandy Hook, and as he did in that deposition at that same time.
Whether or not the term psychosis is appropriate is another matter altogether.
But I do love how Alex is demanding that Bed cite the entire deposition in order for him to accept any of it.
Dancing around most of this interview, not providing sources for anything, and just gloating about how Twitter's gonna get you and give you a source tomorrow.
I think, genuinely, the smartest thing to do at this debate for, like, the Krasenstein would have been, like, moment one, just bring up Sandy Hook, and then let Alex just...
Marilyn Albright told Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes, I ordered 500,000 children killed because I thought it was a good thing to do.
I'd do it again.
She's a great person.
I question Jussie Smollett.
I question WMD's in Iraq.
I question everything.
And I'm proud of everything I've done.
And all that stuff is PR firm garbage.
When I talk about the general public, because the media lies about almost everything, loses trust in anything, that creates a general form of psychosis, and it's very dangerous.
I'm talking about that every day on my show.
And Joe Rogan just last week said, you know, Alex Jones isn't totally right, but he means to be right.
Now, a weird thing that Ben should have done is instead of talking about Alex, what he said about Sandy Hook, be like, hey, remember when you were interviewed by Glenn Greenwald and you said you were drunk when he said these things about the families?
And to try and make it about Alex when there are six people here presenting all kinds of evidence that you're not equipped to deal with.
I think it's just a pathetic way to try and end this debate.
And the last thing I want to say is it's really giving like a kind of amazingly vivid mindset into the minds of Trump era liberals who have really come to see.
The U.S. security state and the courts and prosecutors as their political allies in their war that they're waging against people who disagree with them.
And they have this, like, very romanticized view of what the FBI is, what the DOJ is, how the court systems work, how the federal government works.
And all of this reveals this so well because what's happening here is so manifest, which is that all of these agencies are being abused because the Trump movement is considered the gravest threat to establishment power in this country, which is why the I would prefer
Owen Schroer's source that he expanded on in his video that defamed Neil Heslund was an article that was published on Zero Hedge.
Alex then replayed that video and discussed the story on his own show, mirroring claims about Heslund and his murdered child.
Had it not been for this, it's likely that the statute of limitations would not have allowed the families to...
to Alex, though their pain and suffering because of his actions still continued.
That is true.
Zero Hedge posted that article as an attack on Hesslin appearing on Megyn Kelly's show, which also featured an interview with Alex.
Owen and Alex picked it up That's a complicated-ass relationship that underlies this debate.
I don't necessarily think that someone told Ian he needed to shut this down right away, just in case Bed was going to bring up Zero Hedge's role in Alex's suit, but he was very forceful.
More so than any time in this debate.
But I think the most likely explanation, I don't think that that's what's happening.
So, Destiny and Darren pick things up a little bit with the question of like, hey, it seems like every source of information that you don't like is biased, right?
It's convenient for the regime not to have a legitimate and Disinterested fact-finding commission to truly get to the bottom of the real questions that matter in relation to January 6th.
I would say for there to be a legitimate committee, it would have to include people who are genuinely interested in pursuing not only the questions that Benny Thompson...
And the hyper-partisan Democrats wanted to find out.
But people who are sympathetic to the other side who would be willing to pursue the questions that I've raised and have been raised that were not addressed at all in the committee because all they were interested in was demonizing Trump and setting up a criminal proceeding for Trump.
They weren't interested in getting to the bottom of the questions.
Why was there uniquely poor security?
What was going on with the level of federal infiltration?
He could have put five Republicans that he chose on that committee.
But because Nancy Pelosi said no to two of them, I think Banks and Jordan, that were actively being investigated or would have been the subjects of the J6 committee, he said no to anything.
And now we get to say it was all a sham, even though the majority of the people interviewed were Republicans, even though, as was stated earlier, every single person knew Trump.
At this point, I would be, you know, an hour ago, three hours ago, I'm with everybody else going like, Are you being insane for saying all the stuff you're saying?
Now I'm with Beatty being like, how are you not getting me?
If every single person in government, if every Republican, if every Democrat, if every judge, if every person in the United States that is in Trump's peripheral...
He ends up hating Trump or not wanting to work with Trump.
It wouldn't surprise me if there's a lot of crossover with, like, white supremacy groups and then being, like, organized like a domestic threat, but my guess would be domestic threats in the U.S. is probably fairly low to the total security of the U.S., so I don't really care that much about it.
So, interesting point that is brought up that is, oh, you're talking about all this persecution of Trump and all this unfairness, and Hunter Biden is being prosecuted by his dad's Department of Justice.
That it will be a more effective strategy to, rather than try and debate the right wing, to try and rope them into bets wherein you play games unrelated and they have to abide by the rule by the winner, right?
When I say I think that they did a great job or a good job in an unwinnable, impossible situation where nothing is really going to stick, I am in no way saying that I would do a better job or that anybody could do a better job.
I don't think that this is a productive enterprise, this engagement in this arena.
Right.
Because, for the most part...
What they're doing is stepping into a world where a fictional reality Is real.
But Alex won by a wide mile, and you cannot win a debate whenever it is totally fine for someone to get more than three woos in before a moderator goes.
Yeah, and when you're in a situation where you're in that person's studio, they're friends with the people who are paying for it, the moderator is clearly on their side, it's okay for him to step outside in the middle of the debate and get drunk and smoke cigarettes.
Right, I mean, like, it's a ridiculous proposition.
And that is an inherent problem with the false reality, because inside that false reality, his behavior is somehow not a problem, and it's not condemnable.
That, you know, and the family feud thing is a joke, but the only way to talk, the only way to conflict with Alex has to be Marshall or outside of the realm of his game, you know?
It has to be something where he's not allowed to talk in this way, in an effectual manner, you know what I mean?
And the illustration of him as an ineffectual, uninformed idiot that is this, this should, in any right-thinking world, erode his fan base considerably.
Even hours and hours ago, at the beginning of our coverage of this, I explained why Alex is an irresponsible choice to have on this panel, even without considering any of his behavior.
The circumstances of his very close connections to the people who did the insurrection.