June 17, 2024’s Knowledge Fight episode dissects Alex Jones’s bizarre burger conspiracy—tying Chuck Schumer’s Father’s Day post to "pod people" claims—while critics mock it as a failed provocation. The show pivots to an interview with Mike Wendling (Day of Reckoning), exposing far-right groups’ election-driven violence, from 2018’s March for Our Lives (which failed to curb gun laws) to January 6th’s blurred ideological lines. Wendling warns of escalating paranoia, like Project 2025 backers, but doubts resistance can stop authoritarian shifts, comparing it to an unstoppable force. Jones’s fringe theories contrast sharply with the interview’s grim reality: extremism thrives on distrust, not just delusion. [Automatically generated summary]
And if you're somebody who is in the business, in a business like wrestling with your brother and you pass away, I think obviously you would want your brother to succeed and do great things, even if it means kind of carrying on this vein that you had been doing.
Joe Dallas is a good wrestler and a great character in and of himself.
They were like a more poppy version of Simon and Garfunkel, but from Norway or whatever.
And then they were on the Ninja Tunes label in the UK, which had everybody who was like an underground producer, a bunch of, like, you know, it had like lemon jelly.
It had like roots manuva.
It had a bunch of really, really cool stuff on there.
And Dr. Judy Mikovich is also joining us in studio in the third hour as well.
Peter McCullough, Dr. Judy Mikovich.
So I'm going to table all the COVID news that is totally off the wall, insane, until that happens.
Then we've got some really good unintentional comedy that I don't just go with comedy for comedy's sake, but if it's illustrative, if it's illustrative, if it really gets people to switch on their thinking cap, I'll do it.
The problem with this story is it reminds me of a bunch of other examples of this.
So there's four burgers, and there's like one of them has a piece of cheese on it, which appears, but it also, like, it looks like it's more than one slice of cheese.
So maybe it's just set there for the moment, and then they're going to break it up onto the other.
Because seriously, folks, not just Schumer, but the Clintons and a bunch of others put out photos over Father's Day showing how human they are, flipping raw hamburger and then putting it on buns with cheese.
And remember, they want us to, quote, eat the bugs.
This is the same level of thinking that was the underpinning, the backbone of help my teacher is an alien.
Right?
Isn't that how they discovered that their teacher was an alien of some sort when the teacher took the mask off and had to eat something that was not of yes, a burger on an English muffin?
But the reason that I wanted to play this and bring it up is because this is an example of Alex trying to bait the media into covering him that didn't work.
This is another version of the like, I'm going to eat my neighbors.
But in the case of the I'm going to eat my neighbors, it was so sensational and so it got people.
It got like all these outside of his media bubble.
Yeah, accounts to post the video of him and make fun of him and stuff like that.
He was trying to bait people into covering, oh, he thinks that Chuck Schumer is an alien because of this burger.
Because to a pod person, doesn't even know how to turn on a gas oven or charcoal for that matter, doesn't know how to grill a hamburger and get it juicy and sizzling and get it just ripe and put the piece of cheese on it and slide it onto that delicious bun.
You just crispy a little bit on top of the, just throw the buns on about 30 seconds, get a nice little toastedness to it.
They know nothing about any of that.
Easiest thing that cooks a hamburger.
I was looking at hamburgers when I was six years old.
By the age of four, my dad's like, you come over here, you grill it, you learn to do it.
About once a week, my parents say, hey, I was about eight years old, cook us French toast and scrambled eggs.
When you're done, go mow the yard.
And they weren't being mean to me.
They didn't want an invalid, didn't know how to run the.
I remember one time my dad goes, well, it's time to reroof the house.
And I was thinking it's a good family project.
We got plenty of money to hire roofers.
We're not going to do that.
Your uncle's coming over next Saturday.
And we're going to go today and buy the shingles.
And we're going to strip that off tomorrow.
And then we're going to reroof the house Saturday.
I remember my dad pulling up at 3:30 at the school on Friday.
It was in the spring.
We go home.
We tear off about half the shingles, didn't get it done.
Got dark.
Got up the next morning, pulled off the rest, and then roofed most of the house, me, my dad, and my uncle, into the night.
And then the next day we got up Sunday morning.
My dad said, Yeah, we're not going to go to church today.
We're going to finish roofing the house.
And by about one o'clock, we were done.
And my dad said, We're going to Billy Bob's and getting you a chicken fried steak, son.
And that was just, it wasn't like some big thing.
It was constant.
We're going to roof the house.
We're going to skin a buck.
We're going to run a trot line.
And to these pod people, they don't even know how to grill a hamburger.
And they look at us and they think, these are weirdos.
They walk in here, these leftists, they're like, what's the engineer doing with a firearm on his side?
Well, why do we have armed security here, too?
It's all bonded.
Because we're not rolling over, bending over, waiting for somebody to come after us.
We're like these churches that have the deacons that are armed.
So when some crazy Satanist comes in or some Islamists and starts shooting people, most of the time they don't kill one person before they get killed because there's trained men with guns that kill them.
Like, I think it's fine to clown on people for like, you don't know how to make a burger, ha ha ha, or whatever, because you're rich and out of touch and, you know, extra.
It has part of the messaging, and I believe the way that this works is that they're trying to make eating meat look unappealing because they have these raw meat and these gross burgers and stuff.
And so if you're watching it, you subconsciously are more willing to eat bugs.
So, anyway, this was all just a very desperate attempt at trying to get people to cover this in a way that Alex could capitalize on and get some media attention out of.
I mean, I don't mean to say this lightly, but Stringer Bell may have had some of the most important words of our time, which is just, are you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?
A law says you can't, in knowing of a bankruptcy and collections coming, you can't knowingly then move stuff as if like the deadline, aha, you can't catch me until there's no home base law.
Man, does it sound like Alex is explaining exactly that?
It really does kind of sound that way.
Oh, wow, it's his dad.
It's a totally separate person.
It's totally different.
Also, I think that if I were one of the family members of the Sandy Hook victims, or as a plaintiff, I think I would be probably very offended by the assertion that I have no agency of my own and that everything, whenever you hear anything that I say, you're supposed to hear that as the CIA saying this.
I think that that would probably be something that I would not be thrilled to hear.
Yeah, it's almost as if that during a time period wherein he thinks it will be advantageous for him to apologize to people and appear as though he has the capacity for human compassion, he does.
But then whenever it is no longer advantageous, he does not.
However, however, there is also a balancing paranoia, right?
And I found it very, very interesting when, you know, when Donald Trump was getting arrested and showing up in court and whatnot, you didn't see huge, massive protests, even in Florida, the home territory, right?
What did you have?
You had Laura Loomer walking around in a t-shirt that referenced Hitler or whatever, and a few like online streamers or whatever, right?
And why?
Why?
Because if you look at what they're talking about online, it's that they are so afraid.
They believe their own hype.
You know, they believe that the feds are in their movements and everywhere and that it's everything's a trap.
So that's kind of mitigating, right?
And I honestly do not think that we're going to see, you know, we certainly won't see like a repeat of the Capitol riot because the police will be more prepared and they'll be sort of like, you know, don't go to the Capitol because that'll just sort of do what we did last time.
It won't work.
It didn't work last time.
You know, it didn't manage to really stop the transfer of power.
But, you know, there's that sort of like being eaten by your own paranoia, which is really interesting.
But then it also, as you say, makes it like very unpredictable what might happen.
And we know that there's people bent on stopping the result of an election.
I think this is where I want to, and this is quite a part of why I appreciated starting exactly where we are.
Because there's so much in your book that falls into a strange almost middle ground, I would say.
Not on one side or on the other so much as all of these people, like what you just described, you know, when you describe that as paranoia, these people saying, we're not going to go to these, we're not going to do this stuff.
We're not going to show up there because there might be the feds.
There might be all these people in there.
When you describe that as paranoia, them being afraid of that, you think you're saying, oh, they're overblowing it.
This is ridiculous.
But I mean, it would seem kind of silly to me for there not to be feds in these groups at this point, right?
I mean, it's just because you're being sold that it could be the feds coming to break down your house doesn't mean it's also not good advice to not show up at a Donald Trump arrest, right?
I mean, if, okay, so, but if you look at sort of how the actual like story progresses, right?
So, you know, there were in there were informants within the Oath Keepers, within the Proud Boys, sure.
And some of those informants were members of the group, right?
And what people just like, you know, don't sort of like get really when they're in the conspiracy land is that doesn't mean they were agents, right?
They were informants.
And there's like a really big difference between those two things, you know.
You know, we know, and like you covered it before, like, you know, the history of law enforcement and far-right groups and extremist groups is really kind of murky.
You know what I mean?
In this country, in other countries, you know, it's not very straightforward.
But you take that sort of grain of truth and in classic conspiracy methods, you spin it into how come they won't say how many agents were in the crowd that day?
So, so, but, but see, this is kind of what I'm interested in: that idea of, you know, in terms of all of these groups, and if you go through your kind of meet, you've you've kind of analyzed and classified a lot of different groups of people.
You know, you have your QAnon groups over here, you have your Christian nationalist groups over here, you have your proud boys, you have your etc., etc.
All of these things.
And I keep asking myself, in regards to Dakota Adams, the son of Stuart Rhodes.
And, you know, perhaps maybe not a great sort of like template, I think, for like somebody who's leftist, just because you know, he, you know, it's sort of like, if you want a bootstrap story, you know, this, this is it, you know, get yourself out of an extremist lifestyle and just try to provide for your family.
And, and, you know, I mean, he was, he was just working really hard.
When we were there for a week in Montana, um, we were just snatching whatever FaceTime we could get with him because, you know, he was going to college, you know, at his job, had to, you know, take the kids to trick-or-treating.
It was late October.
Um, you know, it was he was grafting, you know, and he and he and he still is grafting.
Um, so, um, you know, and then it's like family dynamics are very unusual too.
unidentified
If sure, you know, if our and you're a psychopathic lunatic, yeah, absolutely, right, exactly.
Um, I was like, I kind of in a cod psychology way, I always think of like, you know, the way people uh rebel as teenagers, right?
Um, and this is you know, all sorts of movements, not like exclusive to extremist movements.
I mean, I didn't you sort of grow up in a not, I don't want to say it's a similar environment, but in a heavily absolutely no, it's 100 religious environment.
Except my parents were, uh, you know, I guess just folk, you know, not neither of them had shot their eye out, uh, which is huge, huge, uh, I think personally.
But, but as far as belief systems go, I would say that there are very little daylight between them.
And, you know, so I didn't, but I, you know, rebelled against my Catholic upbringing, say, you know what I mean?
Like in a really minor way by, you know, dressing poorly and not going to church.
Sure, sure, sure.
Um, you know, so it's hard for it's hard for like somebody like myself, I suppose, to sort of put myself in the shoes of somebody like that.
Um, but um, you know, he's on the front line out there, you know, he's he says, um, there are people in this community, uh, you know, which he, which he loves because he, you know, he has friends and he has support and he has his family.
Um, but it's also kind of alienating to him because they talk about how, you know, the we're going to go door to door and kill all the Democrats.
But certainly, you know, people who might have engaged or not rather not engaged in violence or not gone into the Capitol, you think that he might be at the top of his list, which includes the ringleaders, right?
Stuart Rhodes's main hope is that Toronto, Donald becomes president again and then pardons all of them and then hires specifically as the militia of the state.
And he's allowed to go around killing people whenever he wants, probably including his fucking son, because he's an absolute psychopath.
If you look at, if you sort of timeline it against what was happening in politics, national politics at the time, what you have is you have a campaign that to the most fervent Trump supporters was like, lock her up, right?
Hillary Clinton needs to go to jail.
Sure.
Pizzagate really takes off in the couple of days after he goes on to 60 Minutes, the president-elect Trump after he gets elected.
And says, you know what?
I don't think that's a real, you know, legitimate thing that, you know, we're not going to lock her up.
That was just campaign.
And so like, you have this energy, right?
I don't really have any way of proving this.
It's just an interesting coincidence in my mind, I suppose.
And suddenly, then you have this focus on these fake pedophiles in a pizza parlor, you know?
Sure.
And that gets people riled up.
So, um, you know, Donald Trump, you know, might say, These uh capital rioters, well, you know, I've looked at it actually, and nah, I'm not gonna do anything about it.
That doesn't solve the problem because then people will be like, you know, all those people who are very, very obsessed about it, and there's many people who are obsessed about this and call them political prisoners, and they've managed to build a movement and they managed to sort of get the ear of Donald Trump.
What do they do then?
You know, what do they do then when their hope is gone?
I mean, like, I guess when we say like a Bernie Sanders presidency, where he like fails to, this is like very, very hypothetical to this, to the third degree or whatever.
Like, I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't rule that out, you know, for sure.
Like, it's hard to say specifically what would have happened, but I certainly wouldn't, I certainly wouldn't rule that out.
You know, we obviously, like, I go into political violence in the United States and how it comes, you know, mostly from the right, not exclusively, but mostly, mostly from the right these days, in terms of murders, terrorist attacks, and whatnot.
There's historical periods where the opposite has been true, you know?
I use it, I suppose, as a description of the stakes that a lot of people on these fringes believe, you know, are going to be sort of thrown down around the election, right?
But like, you know, what I would like to interrogate, I suppose, and I, you know, because the book deals with the far right and what they believe, it's not so much, you know, what the people on CNN are talking about.
I always just look for specifics, you know.
I look for like anecdotes and how this actually sort of plays out on the ground and what people in Iowa think about it, you know, to take a random place.
I am, you know, sometimes I hear this talk and I think I really don't know what people mean by how it's going to herald the end of democracy or like, you know, what just what do you do to justify like stopping that if you believe that that's true?
You know, I suppose, you know, it's very interesting to read, was it Project 2025, you know, these reports that say, you know, this is how Donald Trump would run his next administration.
Sure, You know, but then again, a lot of that stuff is, you know, we're going to, you know, root out all these civil servant type people, right?
Sure.
And that doesn't necessarily to me to be sort of like three alarm fire type territory.
Right.
There's courts that will get involved with this kind of stuff.
There are people who will be, you know, very active from day one, as we saw the last time that Donald Trump got elected.
I was having dinner with a friend earlier this year, and it was in New Haven, right?
In New Haven, Connecticut.
And so I was sitting there.
I was actually doing a story on Democratic politics, not in New Haven, but nearby.
And this old guy, I had never, I hadn't seen him for years.
We're sitting in a pizza place, and he's, you know, he's a very sort of like left guy, right?
He's a very left-wing guy.
And we're just talking about politics, and he says to me, if Trump gets in, who's going to stop him?
And I just looked around the room.
I looked around at all the sort of Yale students that we were surrounded with in one pizza place in New Haven and the whole and the blocks surrounding us.
It's like the heart of liberal America in this, you know, blue state in a completely blue region.
I think that is a reference to the hardest core of the hardest core, right?
Sure.
That is a reference to, again, like I try to be as strict, descriptive as possible.
It's, you know, it's sort of crazy, like in American journalism where you're like, no, actually, I'm paid not to have skin in the game or take a side, right?
So, and it just so happens I, you know, my expertise is in the far right.
And so I'm looking at these people and there's all sorts of like interpretations or assumptions or whatever that come along with that.
But that specific chapter goes into the people who don't believe that there's any political solution.
And like they are hellbent on violence, right?
You're talking about, you know, violent terrorists, domestic extremist groups, you know, which, you know, like a lot of people in the in the book I sort of like talk to, even though they're fringe or extremist groups, these people are very difficult to even find, you know?
Sure, sure.
These people certainly won't talk to you in any sort of like friendly manner or give any sort of reliable information.
So, you know, that's that's my way of summing up what they think, unfortunately.
There's some of the more scary elements, certainly.
I mean, and obviously the scariest of them are the like, let's uh, let's go hot shooting war kind of thing.
Uh, and I recognize that.
But my, my question upon reading that chapter was: if there is a political solution, right, which would be like electing Biden or whatever, uh, or or, you know, whatever it is you'd like, but that will be met with violence.
Is it a political solution?
Do you know what I mean?
Like, is the political solution in this regard to elect Trump in order to avoid the violent response that you might get if you elect Biden?
And, you know, we saw during the first Trump administration about how these sort of things fractured, because suddenly you're in power and suddenly you actually have to do things that matter.
And then you're not going to sort of please the alt-right at the same time as you're going to please the, you know, tax-slashing, you know, club for growth or whatever.
I guess, you know, when you go to the hardest core of the hardest core, are they going to be very pleased with Trump?
Well, you know, they're not sort of like down the line for him, I guess.
Now, that is, I mean, essentially an extortionate voting base saying that if you elect the candidate we don't like, we're going to J6 you, which is what they did.
So they've established that that's what they're going to do, right?
So then should we not expect that we're being extorted?
Should we not say that a political solution is voting for Trump, whereas a violent solution is voting for Biden?
That's yes, some of these elements like that's probably a good way to think about it, right?
Because, like, you know, if you have, um, if you think that there's a political solution, you don't start like start a foundation, you know, you're not like Mike Lindell.
You don't sort of like advertise on Fox and then like, you know, develop some sort of what he has now is some sort of weird thing where like you can all sort of be poll monitors and organizations or whatever, you know what I mean?
Sort of like parallel universe, things like true the vote, you know, and and they make these movies and social media output and stuff.
So, yeah, if you truly think that there's no political solution, you don't do those things because like you think they are useless.
On the other hand, like in the back pocket, there's always sort of a threat of like, yeah, we're gonna do something.
I think you know, we don't need to hear that much about that right now because it the polls are looking very good for Donald Trump or a lot better than you might expect, right?
So it's like they haven't, you know, you don't hear sort of overt threats, you know, hey, we're going to do a big march because we know that this fix is in, you know, right.
I mean, I'm sure we'll hear some of that later in the year.
Like, this is the thing about those arguments that I find so interesting of like the engagement arguments that I see from that kind of Twitter space that like, you have to call us the alt-right, otherwise we'll all be so mad at you.
We call you far right because you have extremist views and guns and social relationships.
And also, you are prepared to back those views up with violence, as you know, blah, You know what I mean?
So, yes, you have to use shorthand sometimes, but I'd like sort of, you know, drilling down to like specifics in terms of actions and beliefs.
And, you know, and obviously, like a lot of the people there, it's, it's, you know, Trump says the communists and the fascists and you know, he's and the globalists or whatever.
I get messages from people who actually are arguing in good faith.
Like they're rare, which is disappointing.
Right.
Because I am interested.
And if I, and, and, you know, the really annoying thing is that when you think that somebody is arguing in good faith and and they aren't, you know, sure.
You know, there's, they're sort of saying, you know, I'm not a Trump fan, but I would really like to know why you think that, you know, what he says is a conspiracy theory or whatever.
And nine times out of 10, those people are actually sort of like fully signed up to voter fraud is rife and Democrats are eating babies or whatever.
You know what I mean?
Sure.
But, you know, there is one out of 10.
But they are actually, they are like a curious person and they're like, hey, now we have the social media thing.
And so I can reach out to somebody specifically and they might or might not.
So, then by that, if we're going to transpose that back to the alt-right thing, you're saying that 90% of the alt-right are Nazis.
If that's if that's what your descriptor is, is that one time out of 10 there is somebody who is arguing in good faith, then that one time out of 10 there is somebody who's in the alt-right, and you are describing them as alt-right when they're Nazis.
You know, it's like that's not, I wouldn't sort of put a name on it.
Like, um, I think you know, what sort of happened with the alt-right is well, like a you know, that that was never a term that was very sort of like incredibly well defined.
In my last book, I tried to define it as much as possible.
And in fact, I did the same kind of thing.
I was like, there's all these sort of people, there's like, you know, these Menonist people, and then like there's an incel subset or whatever.
They don't always get along, you know, they share a lot of beliefs.
What is their common ground?
Their common ground is they think that Donald Trump is great, and they whatever version or flavor of extremism that they're promoting, they think that like he's going to push it.
Um, so you know, look, again, it's like I don't think it's like super useful.
You can call them Nazis, and look, I got people who, you know, I like to talk to people.
Although I would probably say that alt-right is, you know, not number one, uh, it quickly became a toxic brand to the nation of at large, I would think, particularly after Charlottesville.
Um, and number two, it became a naff brand, and that is actually actually more powerful, right?
Like, oh, that's that thing from like five years ago.
Like, everybody sharing Pepe memes these days is like a boomer, right?
Yeah, that's for me, and they're, you know, Like high on K or whatever, but like, oh, it's only it's just like they, you know, you, if you look at like the substacks that these people pump out, it's just like, oh my gosh, get some new memes or whatever, you know.
Um, and and that is in a weird way is almost like more powerful than um any one, any like specifically one of these groups could could go.
Because look, I have I have no doubt that the groups that I look at in the book will go the way of all the other ones that you know were in my book about the alt-right.
It's like half of them are defunct or you know, just fizzled out, um, got arrested.
Uh, it's this sort of cultural stream, I suppose, that's more important.
Yeah, I mean, there's there's definitely that, there's definitely that.
I wonder, and this is why we talked in advance about how I wanted, I was definitely going to bring up religion in this regard, especially in the way that you've just described these fractured, splintered, uh, competitive, and frankly, incompatible beliefs all united around one thing.
Uh, it's hard not to think of religion, that old-time religion.
Uh, whenever you hear, oh, no, I'm a QAnon guy, and oh, I'm a Catholic, and oh, I'm a blah.
It's all the same, uh, in my estimation.
Like, the way that you've written these characters, uh, all of these like classified groups is that if you drill it down, somewhere along the line is magical thinking, right?
So, yeah, without you've put it in a way that I don't necessarily put it, but let me put it like I have a knack for that.
Like, you said that Trump the man, Trump the Man versus Trump the idea.
Like, yeah, no, um, it's it's like the spirit, right?
Right, like it's you've heard it, yeah, yeah.
Um, it look, it's it's very uh, this isn't in the book because I, it, it, I sort of did this after I wrote the book, but um, I was in Iowa to um do some reporting on evangelicals and Trump, and my editor suggested this to me.
And I thought, oh, gosh, I'm not sure.
Um, I mean, obviously, I'll do it because you know, boss says, but um, but I find it actually like tremendously fascinating.
And specifically, what was fascinating about it is obviously we know that you know, when Trump came on the scene in 2015, evangelicals were like, hmm, not sure about this guy, he's divorced, Divorced.
It's a bit of a playboy.
Sure.
Not one of us.
Now they love him.
And what has happened, what happened since he became president was that the number of evangelicals has gone up in this country, right?
And weirdly, church attendance keeps declining.
So you have a lot of evangelicals who don't even go to church.
And they're actually their faith is in a relationship with leaders and other community members that do not have anything to do with a church or your pastor or whatever, which is traditionally how this what people look to for leadership.
And instead, it's politicians and it's Donald Trump.
And it's kind of an interesting and often people, I think, like, you know, don't get quite get it right when they call it a cult or like they call it worship of Trump.
You know, I don't think it's that.
I think that's actually kind of belittling to a lot of these people.
But it's certainly like a cultural and religious identity that's all become tied up.
And it's a definite trend.
Like, you know, statistics bear it out and the experts bear it out.
And you can, I mean, you can see it in these places.
And it part of it, that's another thing that frustrates me is that idea of you're calling them an evangelical because they self-identify as that.
But that doesn't mean that it doesn't mean anything in terms of what is an evangelical.
If all it is, is I self-identify as an evangelical, then exactly how is it possible for these people to make large pronunciations about what evangelicals believe if all it is is just people who self-identify as whatever on any given day.
So I don't know, would some of these people, okay, so Christian nationalists would be like, oh, you can be an evangelical and not be a Christian nationalist.
Like that, I think that's probably as specific as I can get about it because, you know, we can have a very long conversation about what Christian principles are and how they should specifically be implemented in government if you believe that.
Right.
Sure.
But that's the baseline definition.
And, you know, there's plenty of evangelicals who do not believe that.
I'm genuinely interested in your book and how these definitions are functioning within the context of your book.
If that makes, does that make sense to you?
I'm not trying to put forth anything.
I'm interested in the connections between all of these different chapters because in the center of your book are like very delineated chapters with very specific kind of groupings.
Oh, yeah.
Interested in how these are the same and how they're different and what it is that makes them different that makes them specific.
Because if they are different and they are specific, then they each require a specific and different response.
So look, I mean, obviously these groups, there's a tremendous amount of overlap between these groups.
You know what I mean?
Totally.
I am trying, you know, I'm trying to sort of make it sort of make sense in a way.
Otherwise, it could just be like, you know, in 50 shots and words of stream of consciousness, you know.
There's what I always like to say, I suppose, and like this is going to be like a little bit wishy-washy, but there's a tremendous amount of overlap, but also there's like tremendous infighting.
The infighting happens on the level sometimes of like theory and ideology, ideology, but like more often on personalities, right?
unidentified
Like you have people, you might have energy, yeah.
Have Christian nationalists, and some of them won't talk to other Christian nationalists because they, you know, snubbed them at a party or like whatever, you know, totally got involved in that with their husbands or wives or whatever.
For the reasons that I've just outlined, you know what I mean?
Like, you're a far-right fringe extremist organization.
Like, end story.
And maybe that's a very like clear example.
Other examples are not going to be so clear, which is why I'm hedging a bit about the thousands of people who are out there at January the 6th.
You know, every single one.
And then, you know, again, it's, it's the whole sort of you see the parallel in the conspiracy world where it's like, you know, if you are wrong about one thing, they only need to be right, like most of the time, right?
Like mainstream journalists, commentators, experts, or whatever, if they're wrong once, then in the eyes of those people, like they just like wail away at it.
You know what I mean?
I think it's, it's, it's more than just PR, though.
I think it's more just like, hey, let's have some sort of like dedication to the truth and, you know, objectivity in like a very broad sense, right?
And that's why, that's why I'm not going to be like, hey, all those people are Nazis, you know?
I'm not, I don't even, you know, I think that maybe some of those people didn't even know what they were up to, you know?
I mean, like, no, I'm not saying that as an excuse, but I'm saying it's like, it's, it's, um, you know, it's like, you know, there's debate over language.
Okay, so let me, let me put it like this.
Yeah.
There's, were some people sort of like looking to overthrow the government?
What I'm trying to say is in terms of the in terms of the differences between these things, in terms of Michael Flynn, I will call him a Christian nationalist, even if he tells you he's not, because I know his intent is bad.
Aren't you looking into the hearts of the J6 people only they're not fascists because they said so, because I believe them when they said so, because they wrote it down in court?
Like, it's a case by case, it's a case by case basis.
You asked me this before, uh, before we came on about how I know.
Like, how do I know if the wife of Stuart Rhodes or Alex Jones is accurately describing what their role was in those organizations, like in Oath Keepers or InfoWars, right?
Yeah.
And there's okay, so look, it's it's pretty, I don't want to call it simple, but straightforward.
If there's specific sort of things, facts, like, hey, uh, you know, I met him on this date, blah, blah, blah.
All right, well, let's check that, you know, thing things that are checkable.
When people have memories about things, and this is true in a completely different context for January the 6th, you know?
So, you know, one January the 6th guy was like, you know what?
I just walked in there.
You know, I was just protesting.
I walked, I was in there for like 10 minutes.
Now I can check that he was in there for 10 minutes, right?
Is his stated intent?
Should we take that with a grain of salt?
Yeah, possibly.
We can set that against, you know, what does the judge in the case say, right?
And in that particular case, the judge says, well, you're sorry, you're going to prison.
You were part of a rebellion against the United States, right?
Obstructing an official proceeding.
That's that.
Like, you can't really sort of, you can't really put it, you can't really sort of pin down to that sort of degree of specificity.
You know, I mean, you're saying that the results could be the same.
And again, that's like a completely, in fact, that is like the actual danger, right?
It's not that a majority of the population is going to believe that voter fraud is just going to completely wipe out the election and then they're going to march on Washington and burn down the White House and then Donald Trump will be dictator for life or whatever, right?
Like that doesn't happen for, but that, but that does happen when a lot of people who are in the area just sort of go along with it.
You know?
Yeah.
So I think that that raises, actually, your question raises kind of like a reasonable that's the idea, though, isn't it?
Is that when you tell me about Christian nationalists being different from evangelicals, right now, Christian nationalists are ascendant, which means evangelicals will fly right alongside them.
And you could say, yeah, nationalists are below the earth, wondering about how to get out from underneath their goblin holes.
Now, this is what I'm kind of, I'm kind of interested in in regards to kind of this, this whole thing as a whole is the idea of what I, what I think is called a, or what I'm calling an accurate falsehood, something that is totally accurate and yet is 100% false.
Yeah.
So there's one thing that Kelly Jones said that is why this kind of sparked in my mind and why I haven't been able to let go little kind of definition kinds of things the whole time is Kelly said, we started at JFK assassination theories and then we wound up at January 6th or whatever it is.
This is so to me, whenever I keep hearing people talk about the state of the United States, et cetera, et cetera, I 100% am delighted that people thought we were good.
But this is a lateral move from the birth of the country.
And, you know, I like, I think that a lot of these people, like, particularly when, like, it particularly sort of gets me when you hear all these sort of like the massive amount of stuff about so-called censorship, right?
Which is basically just people getting like shadow banned on Twitter or whatever.
I'm not saying that's a good thing.
There's like arguments for and against or whatever.
It's debatable, but they have no idea what it's like in Uganda, you know, or like, you know, the Democratic Republic of Congo, where like, you know, oh, oh, yeah, you, you think that you're going to get thrown in jail for a tweet or whatever?
Like, let's go to some, you know, countries where let's go to India where they just like shut the internet down.
They're just like, hey, in this state, we're just going to, we're just going to shut the internet down today.
It's fine.
Okay, you, you want some censorship?
We can show you some censorship.
And again, I'm not sort of trying to like minimize things to say that they're not like, you know, they might not be doing something wrong or whatever, but you need to get some perspective, some of these people.
You know, you can say, um, well, okay, like if you look about, if you, you know, you we're obviously being roiled about debates over anti-Semitism and the Middle Eastern conflict and, you know, anti-Muslim sentiment and whatever.
Um, I always find it kind of surprising how surprised Americans are when this stuff sort of comes home.
Um, I, October, I think it happened in October, um, you know, just a few weeks after Hamas and Israel kicked off.
So, um, you know, I went to the boy's funeral.
It was a completely gut-wrenching experience.
You know, of course, you know, there's thousands of people in Gaza who are being killed right now, right?
And this is just, you know, one child, right?
But there's kind of an assumption, I suppose, that, like, hey, you know, this should be like safe or neutral territory, or this kind of stuff shouldn't happen here.
Even from people, many of whom who were in that crowd in the funeral who were immigrants, you know, from Gaza or from the West Bank or whatever.
It's in some ways it's sort of like you think, well, that's hopeful.
And I'm really glad that you think that you found safety.
Obviously, you didn't because you have this guy who allegedly murdered this small child.
I mean, the one thing that, like, I guess, like, you know, not living here for so long teaches you is that like you got to take every country on its own terms.
You know, often when I look at American media, I don't really want to sort of give too many people a kicking here, but I just feel like some of the debates just sort of lack that perspective.