Proudboy crypto meme coins, JFK Jr's t-shirt design, Sebastian Gorka's snuff film, multiple nazi salutes… Julian and Anthony conclude their adventures at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center. But not before being totally demoralized.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes:
https://patreon.com/qaa
Anthony Mansuy: https://x.com/AnthonyMansuy
Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
https://qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Welcome to the QAA Podcast, episode 314. Two Frenchmen at CPAC, part two of two.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Fields, Anthony Mansfield, and Liv Akar.
Who is here from Prudential Media?
Raise your hand.
USA! USA! USA! USA! Those of y'all that have a badge on you are credentialed media.
Notice how a majority of them did not raise their hand.
They're part of the problem, okay?
We're not going to go there yet.
So here's the deal.
A lot of people don't understand how these folks were weaponized against.
I'm going to break it down for you.
And these are the individuals and institutions that are going to be facing the accountability.
The justice, the comeuppance, and because my last name starts with an R, Raiklin, I prefer the term retribution.
Okay?
So here's how it's going to work.
Article 1 branch of government.
Oh my god, did she say loser with a small dick?
The man being called a loser with a small dick is Ivan Raiklin, who looks like an albino orc.
He looks like Yakub's first white creation.
He looks like he's asking Harry for his key at Gringotts.
He's speaking at the center of a group of about 70 people, 20 or so of which are journalists.
We're in an open patch of grass just northeast of the Capitol building.
Clusters of cops stand nearby watching.
A few protesters are also in attendance, including two young women, both of whom came alone.
They're doing their best to disrupt the gathering.
Their styles are quite different.
One of them is yelling phrases like, fuck the Proud Boys, stop platforming Nazis, and Ivan is a loser with a small dick, while blowing a whistle repeatedly.
The other is using a bullhorn in a way that makes Rob Zombie sound like Dave Matthews.
Oh my god, this is absolute chaos.
The people being addressed in that last clip are those who organized this little gathering in the first place.
A coalition of Proud Boys, including their leader Enrique Tarrio, Oath Keepers, including their leader Stuart Rhodes, and other January 6th Capitol rioters.
They've returned to the scene of the crime to make a few speeches and announce two things.
One, they are being represented by Ivan Raiklin in a lawsuit against the Department of Justice.
And two, to fund this, they are launching a meme crypto token called ProudCoin.
12% of the supply of which is being donated to a J6 victim fund that ostensibly will pass the tokens on to families of capital rioters.
Now, I looked this up and within a few hours it was down 97.6%.
You can see the graph here.
Each one of these little things is 15 minutes of time.
Coincidentally, that percentage is the same number as the temperature of my brain as it slowly cools until I am no longer alive.
I think that it might be like a processor where it works better at a lower temperature shake.
As long as you don't freeze, I think you'll be smarter.
Yeah, I'm like seriously undervolted right now.
Yeah, you can't see the graph, listener, but let's just say it's a pump and dump if there was very little pump.
If it was mostly dump.
Mostly dump.
So they were trying to rug pull to raise funds.
Did they successfully raise funds at all through this rug pill for the scheme, or was it just a money vacuum?
I don't fucking know, but I'm sure.
I'm sure that the J6 people weren't logged in and able to cash out within the first 30 minutes.
Their shit is worth nothing, probably.
But whoever had more supply than them at the top here and just dumped into people as people started buying, that's the person who made money, or those people.
It's a cold, crisp, windy day in Washington, D.C. I know you'd like that one, Jake.
I love it.
Raiklin dropped out of his role at the DIA in 2018 to launch a failed bid to represent Virginia in Congress.
He made a name for himself as a far-right activist and lawyer back in December 2020 when he invented the Pence Card, a rumor that a law existed allowing Mike Pence to reject election results on the third Wednesday of that month, which would somehow keep Trump in office.
This didn't happen, and it wasn't true to begin with.
No such law exists.
But that basically kicked off the whole, like, we need Pence to, you know, change the results and people going into the Capitol.
He reappeared in January of 2024 when he wrote and circulated a deep state target list of 350 people he thought should be raided by constitutional sheriffs from rural conservative counties, which would deputize 75,000 military veterans who were supposedly fired by the military for refusing to get the COVID-19 military veterans who were supposedly fired by the military for refusing This is an insane idea for a variety of reasons.
The first is that there were only a bit over 8,000 people who left the military due to vaccine mandates, so it's going to be hard to deputize 75,000 of them.
The second is that constitutional sheriffs don't legally exist and are just a concept made up by a pilled political group and private company founded in 2011 by an Arizona sheriff who was part of the Oath Keepers militia at the time.
Can't believe this guy passed the bar.
Yeah, no, yeah.
I think in America, they just give that shit, like, out in the gotcha machines.
Probably just, like, it's kind of like one of those you put a penny in and it flattens it out.
Yeah, that's it.
Your bar card is sort of, yeah, printed on the back.
We've covered the constitutional sheriffs in the past, by the way.
We have like a whole episode about this whole rabbit hole.
But yeah, anyways, members of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, or CSPOA, believe that they are sovereign sheriffs who can disregard laws they find unconstitutional.
This is legitimately fucked up because there are many actual sheriffs in the organization, so the beliefs do end up having real-life effects.
But...
The idea that this organization is going to deputize 75,000 people and conduct raids on whoever Ivan Raiklin decided to put on a list is pretty unlikely.
It's basically like Q promising the storm, but it appealed to more sophisticated libertarian rubes because Ivan Raiklin is a former National Guardsman in Green Beret and he didn't pass around the deep state target list by posting it on 8chan.
Anyways, nobody was deputized.
The raids never happened.
Another fucking bust.
By October 2024, Raiklin was spreading bullshit attempting to preemptively discredit the election results in the event that Trump lost, which he didn't.
So at the time, he claimed falsely that Arizona, Georgia, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Wisconsin should declare their state's electors for Trump before, yeah, the results were even in.
That didn't happen, and Trump won anyway, so it didn't matter.
He appeared at the Rod of Iron Ministries Freedom Festival.
This is the gun nut offshoot of the South Korean Moonies cult to explain that he had, quote, a plan and strategy for every single component of the election.
He also said that, quote, January 6th is going to be pretty fun.
So my man was counting on a second January 6th after Trump lost, which, you know, Trump won.
None of this happened for the third time.
So based on Raikland's previous track record, I doubt like anything was ever going to happen.
But it did manage to attract the attention of a couple of brain dead GOP congresspeople who briefly promoted the idea.
This guy has no juice.
Like, if there was a fascist queue, he would be cheering it on from the sidelines.
Yeah, absolutely.
So throughout all these grifts, Raiklin called himself Trump's Secretary of Retribution.
No such position exists.
No matter, Raiklin seems to have found a new way to get attention.
Representing the Proud Boys, supposedly, and the Oath Keepers and J6ers in their suit against the DOJ. We will see if that ever happens.
For now, it's just a promise, and the funding for the lawsuit is attached to a meme coin, and Ivan Raiklin's supposed to be the lawyer, so I don't know.
This might all just be PR. But I'd love to see the files on his computers with the plan he has for every single part of the election.
I'm sure they're there somewhere on his laptop or his computer.
Oh, I'd love to see what's on his computer, but for another reason.
Earlier that day, Raiklin had been at CPAC talking a big game to any journalist who would listen.
That's what he was doing here too, except he wanted to sound extra badass around the Proud Boys.
The J6 cover-up committee, I call it the J6 fed-surrection cover-up committee, already spent 10, 2 years, over 10 hearings, prime time, leveraging you little bitches, all of you, to manipulate the entire country, all of you, to manipulate the entire country, the jury pool, and the judges.
I'm talking about the credentialed press here.
Boring.
These guys sound horrible.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it was just, I mean, you can hear the environment was insane.
It was like screaming nonstop.
So, Anthony, you know, what did you think of like the actual moment where they were doing the press conference there on the grass?
I didn't even listen for a second, actually, because the second it started, the woman with the megaphone started appearing on the scene.
And I... Didn't even want to listen.
So I just kind of like went around the whole crowd to try to find interesting characters to follow and speak with and stuff.
But I checked out really quickly and just started speaking with one of the cops telling me that he has no opinions.
Why does that work when stuff like this happens?
Sure.
Also, they escorted out the first two counter-protesters and I heard the cops saying that it was their First Amendment rights.
To be on the lawn of the Capitol and not be disturbed.
And not be disturbed.
Yeah.
And one reporter at some point actually went to one of the cops saying that he actually said, like, I can't hear anything.
You need to do something.
And because of the protesters doing a lot of noise.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
What amendment in the Constitution is the right to hear the albino orc?
Yeah, that was very, very depressing because at the same time, it was extremely noisy, so not nice to be around it.
So yeah, no, it sucked.
It sucked really bad.
Really bad time.
The sound that all of the Proud Boys make when Ivan says, you bitches, and they all go like...
It's just like, oh my...
God, like, these guys go home and people have to deal with them?
They've got, like, friends and stuff?
No, I think more their mothers have to deal with them with the Proud Boys.
I feel like the Proud Boys are an especially petulant, like, group.
Ugh, what a bore.
There was, like, I was, like, kind of briefly behind one of the Proud Boys and he had, like, little notifications pop up on his phone and it was clearly, like, his girlfriend and it was just like, be careful, be careful.
I love you.
My boyfriend is so brave.
He's going to see back.
He's so fucking stupid.
He's going back to the Capitol.
He's going back to where he was arrested.
This fucking dumbass.
Please be careful out there, sweetheart.
We didn't mention the guy who looked a bit like Jamiroquai, you know, with a yellow suit, a furry shabka with ear flaps.
And he was playing pop and disco songs and changing the lyrics to them, like saying the Proud Boys are pedophiles to Michael Jackson's Don't Stop Surrogate Enough.
But like, Proud Boys are the pedophiles, Proud Boys are the pedophiles.
But the lady, but the real hero was the lady with the whistle.
She was another level.
Yeah, she continued on.
I had briefly accosted Enrique Tarrio, who's been the quote-unquote chairman of the Proud Boys since November 2018, in the lobby of the Gaylord Resort and Convention Center.
He was busy drumming up interest for the Capitol gathering among reporters.
I pretended to be a fan and brought up the timing.
Their little stunt was set for Midday Thursday, which was prime CPAC hours.
You're gonna compete with CPAC. I think that we trend harder than CPAC tomorrow.
That's my bet.
Trend harder than CPAC? The guy who's thinking in, like, 2014 Twitter terms.
I know.
I think we're going viral tomorrow.
Our hashtag is, look, you're going to go viral.
Yeah.
I'll bet he looked real smug when he gave you this information, telling you he's going to trend harder.
Yeah, and, like, all the reporters were just like, oh, how can I set up, like, an interview with you, Mr. Tario?
Like, it would be so interesting to hear your take on.
But anyways, his boasting was somewhat undermined the next day.
We will hold those responsible to account.
And we will never stop fighting for the truth, for liberty, and for justice.
Hoorah!
And now, to talk further about the powerful tool that helped us take this fight to the next level, I'd like to invite Ethan Nordean to speak more about the monetary vehicle we've created through the success of the Proudcoin and our innovative approach to crypto.
Sorry, just in the middle of that, it really dawned on me that she's just, like, going at it.
Continually.
Never, ever stopped.
They were great.
There were moments where she was whispering in these guys' ears saying they had small dicks.
She wasn't always screaming.
There were quiet moments.
That's good.
You want to do quiet loud.
That's the formula right there.
You have a small dick.
I heard one sad hoorah in there.
You're so lame.
So the guy he is invited to the stage, Ethan Nordean, and another guy in attendance, Joe Biggs, they actually escaped 18 years in jail when they were pardoned by Trump.
So obviously they served some of that.
Stuart Rhodes, also in attendance, was serving the same amount of time.
Tario, who was mysteriously absent the day of J6, was given 25 years for seditious conspiracy.
And yeah, there's basically zero chance that they would be here today if it weren't for a world historic fumble by the Democratic Party and the reinstallation.
For many people, being sentenced to decades in jail would temper their enthusiasm to participate in a street gang that exists to distract the media from the GOP, beat and stab leftists, and ally itself with people like Ivan Raiklin.
But maybe Fitzgerald was wrong.
Maybe American lives do have second acts, unimaginative, shitty reboots.
It certainly feels like the second Trump term is going to be exactly that.
Anyone who faced judicial consequences for first term bullshit is going to do the exact same thing with less passion and a get out of jail free card.
So pretty fucking grim.
Anthony and I had followed the Proud Boys and other J6ers to the Capitol.
What we had experienced there was an organization on its best behavior.
They wanted the story to be their Proud Coin, not the fact that a guy punched a girl half his size because she was protesting his press conference.
And they held back until they couldn't.
Even at the beginning of the press conference, there were J6ers letting slip what they really thought instead of sticking to the talking points that would allow these budding crypto entrepreneurs to have a successful meme coin launch.
Also, like, what is the official line?
Because, I mean, I remember after J6, it was like Trump was DOA politically and everyone was like, this was a terrible thing.
It seems like at least maybe a third of the country has, like, hallucinated, what, that it was good that J6 happened?
Yeah, now he calls them, like, J6 hostages and, like...
You know, he's completely reversed that.
Yeah.
Now they're heroes, actually, and victims.
Which, like, I don't know, maybe, like, I live in, like, a functioning liberal democracy or quote-unquote functioning, but I can't imagine.
Like, how does everyone else in America feel about this?
I guess people are just too tired to care at this point.
Just so many news items that has happened that it's like, whatever.
The zone is flooded.
No idea.
So here is Philip Anderson, a black J6-er in his late 20s.
In the video, he's walking with Enrique Tarrio, who's grinning uncomfortably because Anderson is saying the quiet part loud.
He believes that all the reporters present are Democrats, and he wants them to be put in jail.
So yeah, this is from, like, the beginning of the gathering, when the cops asked the Proud Boys to move to the Northeast grass from the Eastern Pavilion.
And they complied, and so did the press.
Everyone moved there, but this was on the way.
The J lost.
The Democrats lost.
We all got pardoned.
We all got out.
And now we're going to throw you Democrats in prison.
I hope you're ready.
We're throwing all of you in prison.
This was your idea.
You chose to persecute people to death.
Now you're going to get a taste for the next four long years.
We're going to throw you in prison.
Get ready.
Get ready.
You can't run neither.
You can't run.
Why are they pretending like they didn't, you know, break the windows and break into a government building?
Like, it seems as if they've severed themselves, like, from the actual crime.
And, like, all they remember is, like, arriving to the Capitol.
And then when they started listening to Michael Flynn or Trump, the severed part of them took over.
They went into, like, the severed innie like it was someone else.
Yeah, and then...
Yeah, that was my innie.
Yeah, and then they woke up in jail, like, in...
Like, handcuffs in the court being like, what the fuck happened?
You see that with a lot of, like, the, like, very reactionary pseudo-conservatives that they, like, claim to, like, tradition and law and order and, like, the status quo in their country, but their, like, reactionary beliefs are way more extreme than that.
And so, like, they claim the legitimacy of, like, the law and the Constitution, but in reality they want something that is, like, much more fascist.
Yeah.
Much more reactionary.
So they end up making these really bizarre claims that are just completely contradictory from their actions compared to what they've done.
Which leads them to be like, no, actually J6 was a peaceful protest because that's what our older institutions say is good.
So that's the thing that we were doing.
In reality, they were trying to undermine that.
They say it was basically like a peaceful protest that got, like, encouraged to violence by the feds.
So they call it, like, a fedsurrection right now.
That's the line.
So it's like Lockean rightful revolt against, you know.
Yeah, I mean, that is not consistent with the chatter in any of, like, the group texts or even, like, what people were posting publicly on Facebook, like.
Like, you know, a lot of people went there to do exactly this.
Tario's sheepish attitude while Anderson was threatening reporters with jail was pretty consistent with his attitude throughout.
He'd come here to represent himself as a non-violent, law-abiding citizen who was unfairly prosecuted under Biden's communist regime.
But the truth is that Tario loves violence.
It's been a consistent behavior in his life and certainly his history with the Proud Boys.
The last time he went to jail, the clash that he was involved in left four stabbing victims.
The propensity for violence among the gathered men made the protesters all the more brave.
They were, like, short, mostly female.
They didn't hide their faces.
They did not relent, and eventually it paid off.
After the J6ers and some of the core Proud Boys split up, Tarja was answering media questions near the Senate fountain, and one of the protesters held her phone between him and the reporter.
He smacked her wrist and, like, made the phone go flying, and the Capitol Police stepped in and arrested him.
Anthony, you were involved in this?
Can you tell us how you were involved?
In the video, you can see Anthony just grabbing Tario's arm just to make sure he doesn't hit again.
Yeah, basically I decided that...
The lady with the whistle was the hero of the day.
So I was basically following her around, not caring about anything else.
I'd actually given her a piece of paper with my phone number because I wanted to interview her.
Jesus Christ, what a Frenchman.
You're still trying to get her number in the middle of all this?
I did that with the Team U, Jamie Required 2. Yeah, so she was following Thario as he was giving an interview with a journalist.
And basically, the journalist was trying to follow up with Thario, so taking his phone number.
And the Whistle Woman actually started filming over the phone so she could get Thario's phone number.
And that's when he lost it.
And so he slapped behind him and the phone fell.
And maybe I became a witness, maybe not.
Yeah, we have no comment on that.
And I think that's why she...
I don't know, you guys maybe know about the legalese and stuff, because I don't know why she didn't call me back.
Maybe it's because I'm a witness to...
And she was trying to press charges.
She cannot be in contact with me, right?
Yeah, that's why, man.
I mean, let's spend the episode figuring out why girls call you back.
If you have a witness that is, I can attest that this has personally helped me out.
Okay, here we go.
Lawyer Jake.
Well, I was in a situation, I was in a situation, I was in a really bad car accident, and there was a witness who basically was willing to go on record with the police and with our insurance company that the guy who hit us was like, I was actually in contact with that witness.
If there is a witness who can support your side of the story and potentially be on your side to give testimony that's in your favor, you're definitely going to want to be in contact with that person.
So Anthony, I'm not sure maybe why she hasn't called.
She probably has other things going on.
Maybe she's got a guy already.
The charges were, I think, the smallest level of assault you can get or whatever.
He was out later that night.
Let's put it that way.
While Antoni was being a government informant and Vichy politician, I was standing at an empty plaza with a fountain at its center, and after all the yelling and chaos, the silence felt pretty fucking good.
There was only one other person near me, a young woman who had also clearly been covering the event, and she turned out to be a French journalism student that had traveled to CPAC to write her master's thesis on the American right wing.
She was just, I mean, this was like her first, like, you know, going out to an American scuffle.
And yeah, she was kind of in shock.
And she asked me, like, is the beat always this insane?
And I didn't really know how to answer.
I mean, I suppose it always is.
I mean, the Proud Boys aren't my usual bread and butter.
They're humorless.
They're a lot less happy than the average QAnon event attendee and way more prone to violence.
Anyways.
And the crazy thing is that she actually went there because of me.
She got in touch with me to try and figure out how to cover Washington after Trump's re-election.
A few weeks ago, a few months ago.
And I told her, you need to do underground reporting.
And she found this event.
And she went.
And I was there.
I didn't know she was going to be there.
And it turned out that I was the same young journalist.
So shout out to Chloe, by the way.
She's a really nice person.
And there's a very good journalist in her.
Hell yes.
We love young journalists that Altony is needlessly putting in danger.
Anyways, we all kind of retreated to a bar to gather ourselves after what was a dynamic day near the United States Capitol.
But because Washington, D.C. is cursed, the bar was across from the Heritage Foundation.
So just this giant fucking building.
There, if you don't know, a key player in Project 2025. And we saw two young women, independently of each other, who traveled there that day to stand and protest against the initiative.
So all in all...
Young women are the only thing in this country, like, standing between us and the end of it all.
So, that's cool.
After our big day at the Capitol, Altony and I returned to our hotel near Embassy Row.
It was Friday night, but neither of us had any energy left.
Tomorrow, Trump would be speaking at CPAC, and I'd have to catch a flight back to L.A. soon after.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Last episode ended on Wednesday night, before the meat of the conference had even begun.
So I guess we'll start the very next day, when I found out my press pass had been disabled.
Thursday, February 20th, 2025. My ride pulled over to the side of the street to let a long motorcade through.
Vice President J.D. Vance was in one of the many black SUVs he was scheduled to speak that morning.
Security had definitely thickened.
I had to go through a metal detector, a bomb dog, and a bag search before even accessing the hallway outside of the main conference room.
I walked right up to the press pass booth, where a young woman told me to scan my QR code at one of the terminals.
I was in a hurry to get it over with so I could make my way into the main event and see Vance.
Hmm, it says disabled, the young CPAC volunteer told me.
Indeed, it appeared that the machine had found me in the system, and my pass had been revoked.
So to this day, I still don't know what happened.
Maybe they approved me first and then had a second layer of scrutiny that revealed me as a treacherous scumbag.
Anyways, I mumbled something about already having the International Summit badge.
Like, couldn't I just be issued a normal one to replace it?
And she told me, oh, you got to wait in line, speak to the proper press ops people and sort it out.
So at that point, my two options were to raise a stink and attract attention to the fact that my pass had been disabled or just use the International Summit pass for the next two days.
Oh, yeah.
yeah the main bold text says only for international summit yeah yeah not much I decided to wing it with the badge.
So I was kind of at first wearing it backwards, and I'd be like, oh yeah, flip it if needed kind of thing.
But they would let me through.
But the first check, I went up the escalators towards the main auditorium, and the two badge check volunteers were peering down at me.
I was praying that they wouldn't look too closely.
And right as I passed them, one of them called out to me, Sir?
Sir?
I froze and turned slowly.
Could you just flip your badge, please, so we can see the front of it?
I obeyed, trying to stay calm.
She briefly looked over the badge, then looked at me.
Oh, sorry we bothered you.
Just keep it facing that way.
I couldn't fucking believe it.
She made me turn the badge and I still got away with it.
And this is the point in the episode where I genuinely have to thank CPAC and Matt Schlapp for being such horrible little penny pinchers because the entire badge checking staff was made up of volunteers and the great majority of them were pretty old.
So I would wear my badge for the next three days without anybody stopping me again.
Oh my god.
Thank you so much, Mr. Schlapp.
Oh my god.
like level level of security as like the, the bad guys in like a Jason Statham action movie.
I made my way into the press pen at the back of the room.
On stage, the vice president was being interviewed by Mercedes Schlapp.
It was an extremely boring conversation composed of questions designed to promote Vance as a charismatic everyman fighting for the American people.
Topics included illegal immigration, abortion, young men being feminized by the woke libs, and other such trash.
My notes from that day read, quote, an absolute suck job of an interview.
I won't bore you too much with Vance, but it's worth listening to this clip of Mercedes Schlapp setting up immigration issues in a very familiar way for our listeners.
Let's dig deeper into the immigration issue.
Sure.
We've seen and you've met many of the victims, people who have family members who have died.
Yes.
And tragically, tragically murdered.
Those angel families in the hands of these criminal illegal aliens.
Sure.
What's your message to these families?
And then what is your message to these horrific drug cartels and human traffickers who have preyed on the most vulnerable in the world?
You're literally a beard.
Like, through the whole clip, that's Mercedes Schlaff, right?
Yeah.
Anything she says, I feel like I just can't process with all the insane Schlaff stuff.
Yeah.
I mean, it is the most QAnon setup ever.
It's like, let's talk about immigration and the children who've disappeared and the evil cartels who are trafficking them.
It's like, what the fuck are you talking about?
I was thinking that this feels like a clip playing on the news in RoboCop.
It feels like a dystopian future where you're like, oh, okay, so the fascists have won and this is your kind of average news program before the events of the movie are about to unfold.
Yeah, it's definitely as if...
The fascists have won in the United States.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Definitely.
It's like that.
It's like a movie that would represent that.
This is what it would be like.
Well, it is like the movie.
Well, the movie is like reality.
But the movie that I was referencing came out so many years ago.
Maybe the fascists had won then.
I don't know.
The 80s?
Yeah, can't think of any right-wing victories in America.
Sitting with Anthony, I couldn't help but notice that phone notifications were going off all around us like popcorn.
One guy was watching a video.
He had just filmed a Vance walking out on stage, and it was looped for Instagram, so it just kept repeating the same opening line, like, let us welcome the greatest vice president.
Let us welcome the greatest vice president.
Let us welcome the greatest vice president.
I was surrounded by iPad boomers.
Everyone is so cooked.
Every single generation.
Like, for so long, it was just young kids, and then boomers found out what iPads were, like, how to post things on your phone and get likes.
And that is, like, the end of civilization, end of, like, American society.
There's no going back.
That's what it sounds like.
Later, Anthony told me he wished he had taken LSD, and I could not have related less.
Like, to be fucked up for this, I would have absolutely freaked out.
The day was packed with just dipshits.
Fucking people like Michael Knowles and like worthless panels called shit like, Culture Warriors, take your truce and shove it!
And my personal favorite, Black Rock Life's Matter, crushing woke boardrooms.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
I mean, that really takes the fucking cake.
They won, like...
Yeah.
Some of the most normal stuff I heard from the stage came from the mouth of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and he said that they were going to, quote, take a blowtorch to the regulatory state.
So that gives you an idea of just how insane the rhetoric was up there.
People cheered for the elimination of the Department of Education.
They cheered at the idea that thousands of criminals, including American citizens, would be deported and indefinitely held in a sprawling Salvadoran megaprison with the help of President Naib Bukele.
They cheered at the idea that ICE would double in size and rehire those that were let go for misconduct.
Sebastian Gorka, who has somehow found his way back into the White House, described sitting with Trump to make a military decision.
Mr. President, there is an ISIS terrorist enclave, a cave complex in northern Somalia, which our government has been surveilling for more than a year and a half.
The president looked at me and Mike and said, what do you mean?
We've been watching jihadis.
And Mike said, well, yes, the former administration and Joe Biden didn't want to kill them.
President Trump looks up from the resolute desk and said, kill them.
I thought, what happened to Dove Trump?
I thought he was going to end all the global wars.
Yeah, man.
Fell for it again, award, etc.
This next clip really drives home how we are all processing reality through fiction.
It's not just you, Jake.
I was the first, actually.
They're all copying me.
That's right.
Less than 30 hours later, I am back with my boss, Mike Waltz, with my team members underneath the West Wing in the Situation Room.
It's like I'm in an episode of 24 or a Jason Bourne movie.
And we were watching this video.
Play video.
It's a grainy satellite image of a mountainside, and it is about to disappear into a mushroom of smoke.
Here is Gorka prepping his audience for the snuff film.
That is a leader of ISIS responsible for training, recruiting, financing and deploying jihadis across the world to kill Americans and our friends and allies.
Hiding out in a massive cave complex in northern Somalia.
We are watching this live.
But remember, ladies and gentlemen, this is not a movie.
This is real life.
And this is what President Trump did to him.
You're watching this live, which is like, no, you're not.
No, no, no, no.
How much influence does Gorka have now?
Is he talking this up?
I mean, I assume he's talking his influence up.
A little bit, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But he's definitely in that kind of counterterrorism.
I don't fucking know.
He's underground.
He's in the situation room with the president.
Yeah, he's watching the Zero Dark Thirty cams.
I mean, that's something.
They let him in.
A lot of the convention felt like it had two talking points.
Donald Trump is amazing, and we must arrest, incarcerate, and sometimes murder our enemies.
From a stage on the expo floor, Israeli politician Amihai Chikli told convention-goers that his country was, quote, teaching the West how to win a war, which is, I guess, genocide, yeah?
He's actually a minister.
He's not only a politician.
He's a minister in the Netanyahu government.
The West did come up a few times, mostly during European politician speeches, and their kind of slogan has become Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christian values.
Just meaningless.
Yeah, there's a lot going on here.
It's obviously just LARPs, right?
Like, remembering old civilizations that, like, right-wingers think are awesome.
Yeah.
But it's particularly funny because it's like Greek philosophy, okay, so like loving boys, that makes sense.
Yeah, it's cool how many Neoplatonists were there to speak about the Rome of the Forms.
Roman law, which I believe Roman law literally crucified Jesus.
And Christian values, the values of the guy crucified by the last thing.
So I think it does check out.
It does check out.
Also, like, of course you have Roman law.
Like, European legal systems were built on Roman.
Like, that's why there's all the land.
Yeah, that's kind of their point.
It's like, this is what the West is.
I see.
Eventually paying too much attention to all of this stuff just kind of destroys your brain, which is why Anthony and I, taking a relatively leisurely break, missed Elon Musk's entry and accepting of a chainsaw on stage by Argentine president Javier Millet.
But I did get to watch it later on YouTube.
This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy.
Chainsaw!
Oh, God, he's so fucking right there.
What is this?
I mean...
Chainsaw!
Chainsaw!
I know we're supposed to be making fun of people who violence is all they can think of, but I'm having a hard time watching this clip and not fantasizing about the chainsaw accidentally turning on and kind of flailing around.
Ah.
Ah.
Oh.
We've done plenty of coverage of Elon Musk, so I won't spend too much time on this, but it is genuinely insane how fucked up and incoherent he was during CPAC. He could barely string a sentence together.
His big gold chain was clinking on the lapel mic.
He wore sunglasses the whole time.
And it was a surreal experience to be in the audience with a large group of people who are just supposed to love and support this guy.
One question in particular they asked him brought out the crackhead.
I've been fascinated by you for a very long time.
Thanks.
I've never seen anybody that can do so many things at the same time.
I mean, you've got the rockets, you've got the cars.
I've always wanted to ask you, what is it like inside your mind?
Is it just a thousand miles an hour?
Yeah.
Does it ever stop?
Do you sleep?
How much do you sleep?
Paint us a picture of inside of the mind of a genius.
Like, how do you do all this?
Can you answer that question?
It's not an easy question.
I mean, my mind is a storm.
So...
It's a storm.
See how slowly he goes?
Like, you know...
It's like the idiot, like, you know, like the Sherlock writers, how they represent, like, geniuses, and it's the dumbest shit ever.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Did anyone see that tweet where he's, like, clearly in some sort of K-hole in the back?
Maybe this wasn't CPAC, this was elsewhere, but it's, like, a representation of his internal monologue, and he's like, the sound system in this room could be 20% more optimized.
It was like, because these guys are fucking idiots, they can't recognize someone else who's, like, a fucking idiot.
Yeah.
While he was hesitating before answering, an old lady next to me turned to her friend and was like, he's such a genius that he can barely speak.
And she was being serious.
So that tells you how we are all experiencing different realities.
The interview ended with another round of Elon waving around the chainsaw, but in his other hand, he also waved a portrait of himself that someone handed him from the audience.
So that was really cool, and I was glad to be there for that.
Steve Bannon had to follow Musk, which was tricky for him because he had talked mad shit about Musk just, like, a few days prior.
He called him, like, an illegal alien and shit.
I don't even know.
And he was also pretty pissed, probably, that he got bumped at CPAC. Like, I think Elon might have personally requested to bump Steve Bannon because, yeah, that's who he displaced.
But like any good general, Bannon rallied and rose to the occasion making arguments that sound a lot like QAnon logic.
And it was Divine Providence Hand that let them steal 2020.
Because we had to see how depraved they were.
We had to see how demonic they were.
We had to see what they were prepared to do to this country.
And what did you do?
Did you ever falter?
No, you did not.
Did you ever doubt?
No, you did not.
Did you ever question?
No, you did not.
And you know what it brought us?
Sweat is just, like, drenching his face.
Like, it's just completely dripping down.
Yeah, he's a pretty wet boy in general.
He's got an oddly, like, Trump cadence.
Yeah, I was noticing that, too.
The weird low register.
He's also, like, dressed like he's, like, gonna go out, like, hiking in the woods with his, like, hound dog.
Yes, that is the new, like, far-right thing in Europe, too.
He's wearing this coat.
Is this coat?
Yeah.
This coat with the corduroy lapels?
It's like the old hunting jackets.
Yeah, yeah.
So he's basically saying, we had to lose so that you could see, so the enemy could reveal itself as demonic.
It's pure QAnon.
Yeah, these guys are fucking insane.
Yeah, they're out of their mind.
Steve Bannon stole back the spotlight from Musk, of course, by adding what I call a little spice to his speech.
The only way that they win is we retreat.
And we're not going to retreat.
We're not going to surrender.
We're not going to quit.
Fight!
Amen!
That...
You can't see it, but he did a Nazi sword.
Jake has lost it.
This one sent him over the edge.
Well, he's like, he's clearly, it's like a combination of two, like, hilarious things, which is he's repeating what Trump said, you know, after he got, you know, after the tiny little piece of his ear got nicked by the assassin's bullet, and everybody starts to rile up, and then it's almost as if he gets carried away.
He's like, oh yeah, this is going so, like, I've been, you know, I was formerly an actor.
I've been on a stage.
stage.
I've been improv-ing and I know what it's like when you, all of a sudden the audience is moving, you get excited and his, it's almost as if he can't help himself that he throws this Nazi salute.
It's like, ah, it's so, I just, yeah, it's very Dr.
Strange love, like holding down your own arm.
Yeah, it was such a timid Nazi salute.
I feel like that is not a gesture that's meant to be done half-heartedly.
No, it really isn't.
Not that I would know or anything.
So, Antony, you remember, like, I saw this live and I was like, I think he fucking did a Nazi salute.
And Antony had not seen it.
And then on our way back, we were in the cab and I was like, no, I swear to God.
So I pulled up the footage of, you know, of the speech and we kind of like scrubbed through it.
And Antony, please tell us who was correct, who was right, who was the big boy?
I was actually taking notes.
Of course.
That's why you missed.
That's why you missed it.
Yeah, we used to it, you know.
And yeah, you were right.
And you actually, we checked Twitter after that and nobody had tweeted about it.
There was no articles and it was...
Probably about an hour later, an hour after it actually made it.
And so you decided to post it.
And the far-right leader in France actually cancelled his speech in protest of the Nazi salute, which is its own story.
I think it made like six million views in a couple of hours, your clip.
And the flurry of articles came after that.
So yeah, Jordan Bardella cancelled his speech as a result of this.
Julian, might I say how problematic it was for you to call it a Roman salute?
I put that in quotations because I was making fun of the right for referring to it that way.
But yeah, you're right.
I should have just said Nazi salute.
Yikes, yikes, yikes.
Yeah, because the guy with, to go back to the French subject, the guy who has in its ranks people who used to run bookstores with Holocaust denying books, cancels his speech because of a Nazi salute.
Yeah, that tells you how clear it was.
We want to do the racist policies, but please don't show the racist symbols.
That's just like a hindrance for us.
Yeah.
So before we continue with the horror and the blood and the bones, let's take a little...
Comedic break to discuss hanging out with Vincent Fusca, aka JFK Jr. This guy's everywhere.
My main role, like, I just basically, like, just to cope mentally, I had to fixate on something, and my main goal was to buy one of those t-shirts from him.
It says, Trump's guardian angel, and it has, like, what looks like an American flag, like, neckerchief, but he's, like...
We've photoshopped it out, and it's the shape of like an angel, kind of, you know?
Like the way a neckerchief is around your neck.
It kind of looks like an angel.
And it's like floating above the crowd the day of the Trump assassination.
So I think his new shtick is that he's not – I mean JFK Jr., yes, obviously, but also maybe he's Trump's guardian angel because he's like the only guy who appears in the background during the assassination attempt who just looks around confused instead of like ducking and like freaking out.
Well, yeah.
I mean, yeah, that's – everybody knows guardian angels.
The way that they save you is by being really confused, not sure what's going on, looking around.
So, the problem was that he only had, like, one t-shirt that he was carrying around, and he kept telling me that he wanted to give it to Nigel Farage, but I still convinced him, like, hey, come on.
He was like, yeah, I want the t-shirt to get back to France.
I want the French people, you know, to see this t-shirt.
I don't know how he imagines things.
Like, maybe the plane lands and, like, welcome back, Anthony and Julian, you know?
Yeah.
Did you bring us anything?
Yes, I brought you this t-shirt and it becomes like the viral sensation in France.
Like, have you heard of the Trump's Guardian Angel t-shirt?
It's signed.
It's hung up on the Eiffel Tower for everyone to see.
Something like, I don't know what he imagined, but the difficulty arose when I tried to pay him for the t-shirt and he had no understanding of his own phone.
He has one of those like big flip open phones and it took me like, I'm not kidding, like half an hour to get him logged into his own PayPal.
So I could figure out his username and get the money to him.
And by the way, his name on PayPal is New York, New York.
Because I think he filled in first and last name by mistake as just where he was.
So I finally got him to take the money through PayPal.
And I got my t-shirt.
But then...
We were discussing it, you know, and I wanted to, like, ask him, like, straight up, you know, because he's always, like, very secretive and cheeky about, like, whether or not he's JFK Jr., and now he's secretive and cheeky about whether he's Trump's guardian angel.
Both things that he knows, people believe.
I mean, this one's a bit more like Inception.
Like, he wants people to kind of start to believe this second new thing.
But here's our little conversation.
In order for Trump to have got out of it alive, he had to have a guardian angel that day.
You think you were?
There's a lot more to talk about, but you know what?
You think it was you?
I don't know.
I don't know.
You think it was another person known as JFK Jr.?
Could be.
Could be.
You know too much.
You know too much.
You know, this is...
Wonderful.
Because how disappointing would it be if you finally, you know, you had a nice interaction with Fusca, and he was, like, on his game.
He had a whole box, all the sizes you could want.
You know, he's got a QR code to scan, get right to his PayPal.
It would have ruined him as a creature, as a place in American political folklore.
But the fact that he didn't know his password, he didn't know how to use his big folding phone, the fact that he's still being, like, kind of coy about...
Which persona he's going with that day?
It just adds a little bit of authenticity to the aura surrounding the story of Vincent Fusca.
It really helps reinforce that the JFK Jr. thing was not him.
It wasn't because he skillfully planted the idea.
It was pure chance.
He's trying to rewrite.
He's like, oh, this JFK Jr. thing is annoying.
I want to be the guardian angel instead.
But you can see I included for Jake and Liv a little photo of me literally, like, using his phone with him.
Did you ever take off his hat?
Did you ever see him without his hat on?
No, never seen it.
It's like you said, Jake.
I think if we take off the hat, the whole head just pops off.
We discussed this, but...
I like the idea to work.
The funny thing that I'm realizing from looking at this photo is we kind of look similar in some ways.
Yes, it's true.
This is just a photo of two Italians.
Yeah.
Trying to use a phone.
This is just a nephew and unk.
Straight up.
Oh, man.
Vincent Fusca does have family, I'm sure, somewhere.
I'm so curious, like, what they think of him.
Like, oh, crazy Uncle Vince.
He's like, he's, I don't know, people think he's some politician or whatever, and he goes to these conventions and sells hats and t-shirts.
He's actually made, I think he told me last year he made something like $475,000.
I mean, he's doing really well.
There's no way he's making that much money because he hasn't gotten his shit set up.
Yeah, he could be if he knew what he was doing.
Yeah, I think that his family probably knows him as what he was before people started talking about JFK Jr., which is just a guy who was riding around in a giant white van that had been completely decaled with like Trump 2020 and like pictures of Trump that he later crashed.
True Kennedy form.
Yeah, he totaled it.
Well, he did it.
Hillary arranged.
Yeah.
A Hillary mobile smashed.
I wish this podcast was just about Vincent Fusca.
I feel like he's such a happier person.
The rest sucks.
We just followed him.
We just followed him.
Talked to him.
He was a host.
A host.
That's true.
Like a little safe, like, mind sanctuary.
Yeah, it really is.
In the CFC pack.
Yes, exactly.
You nailed it, Julie, and this was a little bit of respite, you know?
We found a campfire where we could restore our HP and all the enemies respawn around us.
Yeah, you can spend whatever souls you still have with you to slightly upgrade your intelligence or something.
To buy a Guardian t-shirt, you can spend your souls on a Guardian t-shirt.
After the main stage calmed down, Antoni and I headed for the exits.
We needed to get out of this place.
On our way out, I noticed Enrique Tarrio milling around the lobby talking to various reporters, which is when he told me about the gathering at the Capitol that I described at the top of the episode.
That night I slept poorly again, chased by unnameable monsters through mazes that dissolved with mourning.
Friday, February 21st, 2025. I arrived too late for the morning rosary, which I had planned to attend at least once.
That was assuming I had the stomach for some extra folklore, which I didn't.
There was nothing interesting here.
This was an unremarkable evil place, and that's exactly what I felt walking around the CPAC expo floor.
Nothing.
It would only be later, days later, when I was back in LA, that the symptoms would manifest, like radiation poisoning.
Anthony and I stood in a bit of a daze near the War Room live broadcast.
Bannon was interviewing two children who were there with their mother.
It's a whole family vacation.
Instead of going to Disneyland, they're going to CPAC, he told their mom.
Anthony wanted to get Bannon on record about the Nazi salute and Jordan Bardella's subsequent cancellation.
This did come to fruition.
An AP reporter brought the incident up, and Bannon did not mince his words.
So this is Anthony's recording of that interaction.
Because I waved to the crowd like I did at the Front National seven years ago.
He's a pussy, he's not a man, and he will never be the leader of France.
Le Pen made a bad decision in picking this guy.
He may be a pretty boy, he could talk the talk.
This guy's weaker and more of a pussy than Macron.
Yeah, he was pretty pissed.
Bannon also mentioned the Great Awakening from the expo floor, which made my ears perk up.
They're here because they don't understand you because the American people have been sheep for so long, right?
Just following.
You haven't had your Great Awakening.
Now that you have your Great Awakening, you're not paying attention to the elites anymore.
This was his reasoning for, like, why mainstream media showed up to, like, document CPAC and stuff.
One of the most cursed things I heard was Bannon interacting with a guy who evaded the FBI for the entire Biden term and was now at CPAC. The Bonnie and Clyde of MAGA. We love you, sir, and I'm just honored to be here.
We're honored to have you here.
Now, what's the secret?
Not that we would need to know that, right?
But just in case, what's the secret for avoiding them?
Because the FBI's got drones, they got cameras everywhere, they got people, they got informants.
What is the key to avoid the FBI for four years?
The secret is the MAGA Underground Railroad.
Elderly patriots that are willing to stand up for what they believe in.
Whoa!
We'll talk afterwards.
So you just, like, stay hidden in, like, an 80-year-old's house who doesn't have, like, Wi-Fi and still has, like, dialogue modems?
You're like J6 and Frank in, like, the attic of, like, an old MAGA lady.
Oh, God.
I can't imagine just, like, being on the lam with, like, old MAGA people for four years.
Are you kidding?
I'll bet they loved it.
I'll bet they were like, well, and we meet down at 9 a.m.
for tea and cookies.
Prayers every morning.
They're like, oh, yes, ma'am.
Thank you.
Do you think I could plug my PlayStation in the attic?
You ever, like, meet an old person who, like, clearly has a lot of ideas and, like, no one to talk to about them?
Like, it's just like that for four years straight.
Awful.
I guess, like, there's a new FBI and they don't care anymore.
This kind of confuses me.
I think that, like, they were all pardoned, so he also got pardoned.
I'm not sure, but...
Preemptive, because, yeah.
Yeah, it's hard to believe any...
It's hard to, like, think of any other moment in American history where you could just, like, avoid the FBI for four years.
Then you're just like, chill.
Yeah.
Like, it's like, fine now.
It's like, what?
You're like, oh, I made it.
The guards have passed.
Their vision cone has disappeared.
Yeah, I lost my stars.
It's fine.
I found a uniform.
I sculpted around the expo floor aimlessly, trying to take as many pictures as possible.
I found a European guy walking around with a haircut that would remind absolutely anybody who sees him of a certain German leader.
Okay, that's, yeah.
What do you think of this haircut?
Yeah.
It is straight up Hitler's haircut.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Nearby, a doctor wearing a kippah was advertising his book.
He runs a thing called Do No Harm, which supposedly protects doctors from identity politics.
So could you read the title of this book?
Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns.
I see on the right they have, what is that, Chloe Cole or whatever, like the detranscrifter.
So I assume it's like a, I think about how new doctors are like approving of all these, you know, woke prescriptions for people and that you'll be medically liable if you don't like go along.
Yeah, yeah.
The subtitle is Why Turning Doctors into Social Justice Warriors is Destroying American Medicine by Stanley Goldfarb, MD. So, really cool vibes to just have, like, I don't know, just guys in kippahs walking around next to guys and wearing literal, like, Hitler haircuts and talking about, like, the Western civilization and how Europe has to, like, rise up.
I mean, it can't be a coalition.
That maintains itself for four years.
Like, I refuse to believe.
I mean, even now, there's, like, ruptures in it already.
But, like, I refuse to believe they'll be sit happily in a room for four years, especially if, like, the opposition is so limited.
Like, they'll just start fighting each other.
Especially as time begins to run out.
You know, once they're two years in and they haven't really, you know, haven't really done anything or anything as grand as they have hoped to execute, I think the pressure will be on and, yeah, the rats will be expelled.
I don't know.
For me, that might be wishful thinking.
I mean, I think, like, Zionism is a huge part of the new fascist coalition.
Like, that's just kind of a given now.
And, like, they've turned their eyes to Islamists and people who are even more, like, other.
Yeah.
I mean, one of the sides will win, I think.
And it's probably the Zionist portion because it's more moderate than the explicit, like, anti-Semites.
Or, like, the rapid anti-Semites.
But they will.
I think they will fight.
There will be some major conflict between them.
One can only hope.
Yeah.
One booth was for an organization called Men's Equality Network.
And there was just like this middle-aged man sitting there alone wearing a big blue t-shirt that said hashtag gender equality for men.
And if you zoom in a little bit, it shows all the main issues that men face.
Education, health, the boy crisis, false allegations, violence against men.
Shared parenting, crime, partner abuse.
Reproductive rights.
Yes.
And then it shows, like, people are pregnant.
So is this, like, is a woke thing?
We're, like, wrapping up.
I'm confused what the angle for reproductive rights would be.
It's, like, family court, maybe?
Yeah, you have, like, you have access to the child.
Like, it's not just the woman's, even if you're a deadbeat.
Right.
What if you don't want to abort, but the woman does?
There we go.
I think that's maybe.
Yeah, yeah.
The organization behind this is called the International Council for Men and Boys, and their website is just menandboys.net.
Which is just like...
Oh, boy.
Jesus Christ.
If you fucked that up and put a com or a.org, I mean, who knows what you might find?
Who knows?
You might like it.
You know, for guys who claim to hate wokeness, it sure seems like they're standing up for a lot of social issues.
They're obsessed with identity.
They are identity politics guys now, yeah, definitely.
They're more identitarian, especially the Dems.
The Dems don't actually give a shit that much about identity.
They were doing it kind of cynically, and they're like, well, okay, look, if we even perceive that it's sabotaging our electoral campaign, we'll drop it.
Republicans are like, we don't give a fuck, we will lose.
Five elections in a row while doing this insane identity politics shit until it works.
So that, yeah, some guy who has, like, eight priors can regain custody of his child?
Yeah, exactly.
Liv, did you say all that while holding a Pez dispenser?
Yeah.
I got a Hello Kitty Pez dispenser.
What the fuck?
What is happening?
Incredible!
Wow, you truly are a hero.
A hero of the people.
I don't like Pez.
They taste just like sugar.
Political takes, but then rocking a Hello Kitty Pez dispenser.
It's like I'm fidgeting with it.
I need something to fidget with.
You're so much fucking cooler than we'll ever be.
I have autism.
I like Hello Kitty.
We like Hello Kitty, too.
That Pez dispenser full of estrogen.
Exactly.
My partner is currently playing the Hello Kitty Animal Crossing style game.
It's really good.
Deep.
I gotta give that a shot.
Thank you.
Yeah, it's a nice calming game.
Good music.
Pretty graphics.
It's on PC and Switch only.
I can see that you guys just want to escape this episode so bad.
Jake's like, can we just talk about Hello Kitty?
Yeah, I hate everything that you're talking about.
It's so depressing.
It's so depressing to see these people get together and believe they're winning and have that also be true.
Yeah, like this is their image for the future that they are currently in charge of.
Yeah, exactly.
That they're also...
It was way funnier when they were the underdogs.
There were also photo opportunities on the expo floor.
So I included here, it's like a giant backdrop that says deportation center.
And you can stand with Trump and his border czar, Tom Homan.
And if you see in the bottom left and right, there is Joe Biden and Kamala Harris behind the bars.
Yeah, they've deported both of them.
I don't know.
It's not clear.
But it's just so much sadism and weird cruelty.
It's kind of disorienting.
The vibes were not much better upstairs in the hallways near the main stage.
I ran into a few ignominious celebrities, including Tim Ballard, Mike Lindell, Laura Logan, Sebastian Gorka.
He was being interviewed by a conservative version of The View called The Mom View.
That is one thing about the view is that moms hate it.
Moms don't watch it.
Yeah, but it's because this one's made by Moms for America, the organization.
It's like, what if our view, it's the mom view?
So he was being interviewed for that.
There were some outlets recording live segments that I recognized, like Newsmax, the Epoch Times, but most of the actual booths had been rented by incredibly obscure, tiny, independent outlets trying to make a name for themselves.
So everybody was here.
Wake Up with Patty Catter.
Hot Talk with the Ox featuring Dan the...
The John Fredericks Show.
The Godzilla of Truth.
The Alec Lace Show.
Patriots Prayer News, The Lawyer Dana Podcast, Proverb Media View, Standing for Freedom Center, The Daily Signal, and my personal favorite, The Jeff and Bill Show, which had a hand-drawn sign depicting them as little stickmen.
All the stars are here, folks.
Yeah, you can see it.
All the stars are here.
You can see the little stickmen.
One of them's wearing a giant, like, gallon hat.
That's awesome.
Because one of the real guys is wearing a giant gallon hat.
That's right, so it's really representative.
So it's really, you know which one is which, you know who's Jeff.
And I bet they are so interesting to listen to.
I bet they have lots of fire takes.
That's right.
Before I knew it, Antonia and I were in a car on our way to the Capitol.
We had quite an afternoon ahead of us with the Proud Boys.
Saturday, February 22nd, 2025. Our journey was coming to an end, but not before one final day of jubilance and cruelty.
My belly was a mess.
I had stress-eaten a delivery meal from a barbecue place called the Federalist Pig on my hotel bed the night prior and then fallen into a troubled sleep.
By the time we got to CPAC, the place was crawling with Secret Service agents securing the venue for Trump.
Moments earlier, we missed Eduardo Verastegui, a Mexican actor-turned-politician, doing another Nazi salute.
This guy sounds like a car in GTA, first of all.
That's why I'm going to join the Elon Musk and President Trump's movement.
My heart goes out to all of you.
Fight, fight, fight.
Yeah, sure, they're just doing it.
I guess, who's stopping them?
Nobody.
Nobody gives a fuck.
Everyone's too tired.
He's like, I too am going to do the pretend it's not a Nazi salute and then do it.
He put a bit more heart into it.
He was a bit more pronounced.
Obviously, the plausible deniability of like, no, he was just throwing his hands up is totally gone.
That one, I still believe the part of my brain is like, people won't allow that to happen.
Surely...
The average person looks at that and goes, that's fucking insane.
But maybe not.
Maybe people don't care anymore.
They just go, that's fake news.
Yeah, I guess.
That's AI. He's obviously hitting the salute.
Any person with eyes can see that.
Yeah, they all are.
But it's just, I guess like the...
Politics of, like, resentment and resenting the other side of the culture war is so strong that it's like, well, it made you guys mad.
Yes, exactly.
So we have to say it's not a thing.
And then also, you know, it's so funny that you guys are mad about this.
We're going to keep trolling you.
Yeah, exactly.
Because if they actually had any kind of...
Self-awareness whatsoever.
And even, you know, cared about optics in any sort.
I remember when, like, it came out that the OK sign, you know, the three fingers was, like, some sort of, like, nod to, like, white supremacy.
And I was like, all right, well, I'm just, like, never going to do that symbol again.
Like, I just, OK, like, well, I don't want to be associated with any of that.
So I'm just, like, not going to make that OK sign, you know?
And, like, that was as, like, a private person, you know, just as a private person in my life interacting with, like, friends, family.
Whatever.
So to embrace a Nazi salute on a public stage after it's been, you know, signified as a Nazi salute, after you kind of, to do it almost as it's like a joke and I'm trolling but I'm still gonna do it, is like, it's kind of a perfect analogy of like the Republican fascism which is like couched as a troll.
It's so they can kind of secretly, not so secretly, just sort of infuse what they always really believed and actually believed and actually want, but it's...
It's like 4chan and the chanspeak allowed them to filter this in in a way that...
It could be, like, widely embraced because it didn't feel so nasty, like, at first.
I don't know if that makes any sense.
Yeah, it's just a joke.
I still have to believe, because they're trying to do it with, like, the, you know, okay symbol white power thing.
They think it's the same.
There's still some impulse in me that, like, thinks that has to be, like, a stupid move.
That you can't do the same thing.
Like, the okay sign, there's so much plausible deniability.
You're just doing the okay thing.
People do that with their hands who are normal people.
The Proud Boys were doing it at our gathering.
Yeah, I guess there's just no infrastructure.
Especially in, like, right-wing discourse, there's no infrastructure to be like, that's bad.
Well, it's like we discussed in the first episode.
It's like, would it be anti-Semitic if Israel was here?
And then they sit down with, like, the far-right Austrian Nazi party, basically.
It's like, yeah, yeah, I mean, this is it.
This is the new way.
It's like the amount of anger in, like, American people is to the point where it's like, the only thing that will suffice is, like, violence, death, and murder.
And there's, like, one party that is...
I've got this distant cousin of mine who I see on Instagram all the time, and he's a hardcore Zionist, and the shit that he posts is more Nazi than any Nazi thing that I've ever seen, and talks about the way he talks about Palestinian people, the extermination of them, describing them as dehumanizing language, calling them rats, cockroaches, all of this stuff, and I'm like, wow, if you were...
We're angry in the United States.
It's not just that, like, oh, man, tough times.
I'm angry.
It's like, I must murder and kill.
Like, we've reached a level of, like, disgust with our fellow or your perceived political enemy or whatever it is that anything less than, like, violence, like, will not suffice.
It's really terrifying and feels very bad.
Yeah, like those like the right wing Israeli like politician is representing the interests of the Israeli nation state where like anti-Semitism abroad might be a motivating factor for immigration and also like facilitates political alliances for the state.
The interests ironically of like the religious group entirely and the state itself become sort of antithetical.
It's like, yeah, you kind of want to be harder for people elsewhere so that they come to Israel so that the reason the raison d'etre of the state continues.
Brastigy's half-hearted attempt to out-Hitler everyone was a perfect representation of what was in store for us that day.
More of the same fascist red meat thrown to a crowd of baying pigs.
What even was the point of being here?
The only way this event should be covered was with President G's tactical nukes.
Xi, please, Dongbang missile, aim it right at the convention center.
Nothing confirmed this more than Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff and maybe one of the most unpleasant goblins to look at in his speech.
Every single day, the entire White House staff, the entire administration, the entire cabinet on behalf of President Trump and his extraordinary leadership is getting.
The lies out of our schools, the men out of women's sports, the poison out of our foods, the woke out of our military, the predators off our streets, and the illegal aliens the hell out of our country!
In an effort to outdo even Miller, Mark Levin and his wife were on the stage a bit later, capturing a form of Zionist fascism that uses shock tactics to justify a genocidal agenda.
These bastards must be eradicated.
It's that simple.
You don't take a nine-month-old baby and a four-year-old little boy and their mother and torture them, strangle those kids with your bare hands, chop up their bodies so nobody they think will notice.
Remember when that mother was being pulled with her kids and she knew the people doing this are subhumans.
They are rabbit.
They're not animals.
Animals don't do this.
Donald Trump knows this.
These are the same people who attacked us on 9-11.
These are the same people who decapitated 70 black Christians in a Congo church 48 hours ago.
All of them.
This is the enemy.
It's not about land.
It's not about borders.
It's not about any of that.
They seek to extinguish us, these Islamist terrorists, and we're going to have to extinguish them before they even have a shot at extinguishing us.
The relationship with, like, fundamentalist Islam is always, or especially recently, very odd.
It seems like a lot of the American right, especially the more, like, manosphere, I guess, part of it is, like, embracing it because it's like, oh, it's based, like, it's a way of controlling women or whatever.
But then you get, like, the foreign policy people speaking, and it's back to, like, Christianity is what's good.
That we need to, you know, Islam is the enemy.
But then also, I mean, in this conversation, I guess, like, the enemy is also Christian because it's like Central American immigrants who are broadly Christian population.
So I guess, yeah, it is just like an undefinable outside enemy that has to be extinguished, just incoherent.
Mark Levin is a scary dude.
If he were in better health, I'd be worried about him becoming a bigger force in politics.
He has like a AM radio.
He has a Fox show now too, but I discovered him on AM radio years ago.
And he's always been this violent.
Like that is his thing.
He is...
Yeah, he's completely psychotic.
I mean, completely psychotic.
But I think he basically...
That's a perfect example of, like, how you usher in fascism.
Like, your children are under attack.
These are animals.
They're subhuman.
They're gonna chop you up.
They're gonna, you know, kill everyone you love.
That's why we have to exterminate them.
And, I mean, that's...
I mean...
Like, where do you go from there?
It's just that, like, we've reached the end point.
Next is killing.
Yeah, like, in terms of rhetoric, that's the final step.
Yeah.
It's the final solution.
Yeah, exactly.
It's so fucking cursed, and it's not funny, and I want to die.
I feel so bad.
I resent you, Julian, for doing this episode.
I went to this thing.
I remember while you were there, you were telling us, you were texting on the group chat, just being like, this is fucking awful.
It's not fun anymore.
I remember when we started going to...
Live events, and it was kind of exciting and kooky and weird, and QAnon was, they were really just kind of testing the waters of how, which ideas would stick to the wall, and who were going to be, who was going to kind of rise above the chum in terms of, you know, influencers, and now it is, it's like you said, we've reached the end already, and it's only March, you know?
Like, I don't know what four years of this...
No, I don't think they know.
And that terrifies me as well, because if they're kind of winging it, they're just going to wing it into violence, because like you just said, based on these clips that we're listening to, we're there.
We're at the point where we're saying these people need to be exterminated.
These people need to be deported.
Yeah, I mean, they just deported a green card holder for just having pro-Palestinian views, you know?
I mean, this is it.
Like, we are...
Crossing the line into, like, let's purge people who don't agree with this new kind of Zionist-fascist alliance.
I mean, it's fucking depressing.
Yeah, the infrastructure is just there.
And what was the talk about doubling the amount of ICE agents and bringing back people fired for mistreating people?
Yeah, bringing back the good old boys.
The infrastructure is just straightforwardly there.
There's no major reforms that really need to be done.
Just start telling them.
Yeah, ICE is always being champing at the bit.
Let them loose.
The constitutional sheriffs aren't a real thing, but they could be.
But they'll do, yeah.
It's real if people do it.
I mean, that's kind of how Doge works, too.
Exactly.
You're not allowed to?
I don't give a fuck.
We're doing it.
Yeah, like, the Constitution is a piece of paper.
Like, if it doesn't actually stop people from doing this, then it's not real.
Or not real for this sake.
And also there's the intensity thing because they cannot do like one or two months of rhetoric like this and start acting like it and then stop.
People will ask for more.
It seems like that.
And that's how it seemed like also at CPAC and online too.
So it's like if they start like this, what's four years going to look like?
Later on the stage, Ambassador Elise Stefanik, who will be representing the United States at the United Nations, called the UN the true den of anti-Semitism.
She said that the fight to support Israel was one between good and evil, light and darkness, life and death.
She promised that the firing of heads of universities who didn't sufficiently support Israel was, quote, just the beginning.
I could not have felt worse at this point.
There were no non-dairy options, and the milk I'd put in my coffee was causing me horrifying indigestion.
It was a small comfort to know that I was crop-dusting everyone around me.
That makes sense.
There's no woke milk options.
None of it's pasteurized as well.
Now they get to, you know, here's the result.
I love to fart anti-fascistly.
That's all we got, folks.
Before Trump took to the stage, we were treated to one of the worst renditions of America the Beautiful I have ever heard.
Truly, no notes.
Perfect representation of how ugly and evil this country truly is.
Here we go.
America.
It's the greatest country.
America.
God shed his grace for me.
Oh, God bless America.
After four days of this shit, Trump's speech was truly besides the point.
The American empire was shedding the veneer of liberalism, and its project was coming to fruition.
The Fourth Reich.
Always has been.
750 military bases around the world.
Unending proxy wars and military interventions.
Full support for genocide.
Total rejection of the United Nations and the International Criminal Court.
As I stood in the roaring crowd, I could see myself for what I was.
A tiny speck caught in a great current, rushing into a dark hole.
CPAC had won.
I loved CPAC. Great stuff.
Yikes!
Good times.
I genuinely, this episode, writing this stuff, attending there, has short-term wrecked my life.
I'm not going to sugarcoat it.
I am in a terrible state, and I need a bath, and I need to...
I don't know.
Do good things for myself and love people and be loved.
I don't even know what to say.
This is the lowest I've ever felt covering any of this shit.
We love you, dude.
Love yourself and everyone around you.
I love each and every one of you.
I love each and every one of you listening.
I am so sorry that we are here as a podcast.
That there's still a need for it and that it's gotten worse.
Yeah, that the need for it is just reporting the regular news.
Yeah.
Oh man, what the fuck.
What are we going to do?
What are we going to do?
Game over, man!
Game over!
Oh, Jake, I've got a great idea.
You should go to patreon.com slash QAA and sign up for $5 a month.
You can get all of the non-main episodes, which we promise will only be covering Vincent Fusca and funny movies.
We're going to be covering cartoons.
I will say, the premium episodes tend to be less depressing than the main.
Don't promise that.
You don't know what the next one is.
I don't know what the next one is.
No, the next one is that spam Nazi guy.
Oh, yeah.
That's kind of funny, though.
Jake, that one's funny.
That one's better than this.
It is funny.
It's certainly funnier than this.
It's funny.
Which tells you a lot about where we've gone.
Like, how far we've gone.
Spam Nazi is kind of funny.
Hey, don't worry.
We're going to cheer you up with the episode of a guy who was found fucking burned to death in his car who ended up being a Nazi.
Yeah.
Yeah, man.
Yeah.
Hey, cheer the fuck up.
Cheer up.
Cheer up, buddy.
Put a fucking smile on that face.
Yeah, but that's funnier than real.
Political power at their, you know, pat themselves on the back event doing, like, multiple Nazi salutes and talking about, like, the extermination of, like, anybody that, you know, doesn't sort of...
Our website is qaapodcast.com.
Who wants to go?
Fuck it!
Who would go?
Who would go to listen to more of this?
This depressing stuff.
No, don't say that.
Don't say that.
They have to.
For Julian's sanity's sake, so he can afford mental health care.
If Travis was here, he would have put the kibosh on this entire talk.
We have to maintain a nice smile.
Yeah, he would have told us right away, Jake, don't tell the listeners that they shouldn't be enjoying the content that we put so much work into.
We did, and, you know, I mean, we're going to keep doing it, but I need some downtime.
Let's put it that way.
Anthony, thanks so much for both being my anchor out there and coming on these two episodes.
People should go follow you at Anthony, that's just Anthony, M-A-N-S-U-Y on Twitter.
And then also, if you're in France, pick up a copy of Society, Anthony's piece on CPAC and a much more interesting angle, in my opinion, the kind of Doge angle and the federal workers that are currently kind of speaking out.
You have some really great interviews with that.
You really go in depth.
Yeah, I got a little taste, a little preview.
Oh!
Well.
Don't pretend you're about to read, Jake.
It's not audiobook yet.
Oh, interesting.
That wasn't very nice.
No, no, it wasn't.
That's true.
That was mean.
Oh, fuck.
I suck, man.
Such a piece of shit.
I would say that I'm kicking you while you're down, but actually I'm down and I'm kicking you.
I'm kicking your ankles.
Exactly.
And it's not like I'm feeling great.
It's like I'm kind of trying to extend the episode so that I don't...
I don't have to, like, close the computer and, like, be with my thoughts.
