What once was fringe is now just normal. To chat about the new, strange normality, Jake, Julian, and Travis are joined by USA Today extremism report Will Carless. Carless has reported all over the globe for two decades, and has just released the first episode of his new video documentary series "Extremely Normal."
The crew chats about the James Comey indictment, Trump's executive order declaring antifa "domestic terrorists," attempts to rewrite the history of January 6th, and why some young men continue to be drawn towards the message of Andrew Tate.
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Extremely Normal from Will Carless and USA Today
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Check out our new podcast series network Cursed Media and binge the entirety of our new show Science in Transition by Liv Agar and Spencer Barrows: https://cursedmedia.net
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Political Prosecution Play00:15:05
Welcome to the QAA podcast, episode 342.
What's normal anymore?
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
Does Travis need a wellness check?
This title is.
I think it's a valuable question to explore as things get continually stranger.
It's fair.
It's a fair question.
Yeah, I think our guest today is going to help us explore that a bit because I think there are many excellent reports.
Reporters who cover extremism and conspiracism, and they work for either, you know, independently or for established outlets.
But I think you'd actually be pretty hard pressed to find a reporter in this field more seasoned or better traveled than our guest today, Will Carlos.
Will Carlos is an award winning national correspondent for USA Today.
And before joining that paper, he reported on hate and extremism for Reveal at the Center for Investigative Reporting.
He served as head of investigations at the nonprofit newsroom Voice of San Diego.
He worked as a foreign correspondent.
For public radio international slash global posts across South and Central America.
Over more than two decades in journalism, he has traveled to more than 80 countries, reporting in many of them.
His newest project is a video documentary series called Extremely Normal.
And the first episode is an intimate exploration of the draw that the Manosphere influencer Andrew Tate has on many directionless young men.
Will, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with us.
Thanks, Travis.
I guess seasoned is just like a good synonym for old.
Like I'm just the old guy at this point, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, we taste better.
You know it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, thanks.
It's great.
It's great to be on again.
I'm a huge fan of the show and I always enjoy talking to you guys.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is like, yeah, I always enjoy your reporting and the way you really, really get into the weeds on a lot of these topics.
So I'm really interested in getting your perspective on some news items before we get into your most recent project.
The first of all, which is that the storm in some form has arrived.
Maybe not quite exactly what QAnon was expecting, but it's like, In that direction, because like, you know, one of the big fantasies of QAnon is that like all their hated political enemies will suffer serious legal consequences.
And by serious, I mean rounded up and sent to Gitmo where they are hanged.
It appears that the Trump administration is like kind of trying to make that real by prosecuting former FBI director James Comey.
Yeah.
I guess they'll start here.
You know, they wanted Clinton, you know, up on the scaffolding, but they'll start with Comey and a lying to the, you know, lying to the FBI charge, I'm sure.
I think he's starting with.
People that like nobody really cares that much about.
Well, yeah, and like people, it's funny because Comey, you know, if you go back and look at the data, him reopening the investigation into Clinton, you know, days before the election, arguably did more in favor of Donald Trump than anything else did.
So he's kind of starting with one of his own, which I don't know.
It doesn't seem like the best, doesn't seem like the first rung of the storm to me, you know?
I think what makes it interesting, though, in this context, in the context of, You know, the storm.
And I think I messaged you that this morning, didn't I, Travis?
I was like, is this the storm starting?
And I think what makes it interesting is the fact that this is kind of happening like a judicially or like, you know, kind of largely outside of the kind of prosecutorial system, right?
Because I was reading in the Times this morning, I guess, that the career prosecutors at the DOJ were just like, there's no case here, right?
And then his hand picked U.S. attorney was just like, yes, there is.
Like, we can find a grand jury, you know, to put a case together.
And I think.
I think that's what makes it really interesting, as opposed to, like, you know, look, these are minor charges, right?
He's not going to go down for a long time.
But it's just the fact that there's this kind of parallel prosecution track that Trump is just waving a wand and making happen is what makes this so extraordinary, right?
Yeah.
Opening prosecutions, it's like just opening your VPN before you surf the internet.
I think presidents will just kind of establish a few prosecutions before they get going in the future.
I mean, why not, right?
I mean, I used to live in Brazil, and that's kind of what happens in Brazil.
It's like whatever president isn't in power is in prison, right?
That's kind of how it works.
Everyone gets to take turns.
I mean, I do think all politicians should do a prison stint if they want to be in charge of anything.
Yeah, I agree.
Wait, wait, wait.
This is going to backfire because I think that's what happened with Hitler.
Okay, I'll take it back.
No comment.
Well, you know, it's look, it's an indictment, right?
It's something that they can hang there.
I mean, I was looking in and checking on all of the old Spygate slash QAnon influencers, and they are, oh, they are like, Digging into their closets and finding all of their old Spygate gear and, you know, putting it into the washing machine and getting it nice and shiny.
I think that's where we're going to go.
That no matter what comes of this, at the very least, and we've seen Trump do this, you know, before, is just getting people, just getting something to talk about.
Whatever happens to Comey is kind of irrelevant.
This will still be milked and used as, you know, the first domino is falling.
Yeah.
It's just part of this overall paradigm shift.
Right.
Just we're throwing out the old book, essentially.
I mean, and I think it's particularly ironic that this is happening to Comey, right?
Because Comey, you know, the report essentially said, like, we probably should charge Trump with some crimes on this, but I'm not going to do that.
I'm going to leave that up to Congress.
I'm going to leave that at arm's length, right?
And boy, I bet he's regretting that at this point.
But I mean, you know, here you have Trump essentially doing the absolute opposite, which is like, we don't have, we don't really have a lot to go on, but we're going to bring charges anyway.
It's like the bizarro world version of what was happening.
When was that like four years ago, five years ago with Comey?
Well, yeah, they're like so desperate to just play rope a dope that they're, I think that they're just, I think Julian's right.
From now on, when, you know, during the debates, the president, you know, the presidential candidates will run on the top three people that they'd like to prosecute.
That'll be part of policy now.
And they just want, you know, that, well, they investigated us, so we're going to go and we're going to investigate them.
And we're going to, you know, they're going to do this, I think.
For everybody, they're going to find whatever they can just to get it in the papers, just to get the headline, just so they can spin a narrative around it.
I mean, it seems like a pretty obvious political play.
Either that, or it could be just a true anomaly, and the political establishment sort of turns its back on it and says, Look, this is a disgrace.
We shouldn't be doing this, and things go back to normal in three years.
But your guess is as good as mine.
Yeah.
Well, they shouldn't have treated Donald Trump as some sort of anomaly to the U.S. system instead of like a natural kind of extension.
Of it or a natural evolution of like where we were heading in the first place, they were like, oh, yeah, suddenly there's going to be, you know, a reckoning, even though George Bush had no reckoning.
Former presidents that have committed, you know, clear crimes have had no repercussions, have had the opposition completely drop it as soon as they take office.
And then this time around, they're like, wait a second, this guy is actually particularly bad.
And even that was theater.
I mean, you know, we don't really make any rich or powerful people like feel deep, deep consequences.
Well, that's the kind of devil's advocate MAGA argument here.
Right?
Is essentially, look, yeah, okay, we're shifting paradigms, but you'll shifted paradigms when you impeached Donald Trump twice and when you, you know, investigated him and did all of this stuff.
So, I mean, there is a bit of a devil's advocate argument here that, yes, this is paradigm shifting, but, you know, the paradigm also shifted in the opposite direction against Trump, to be fair, right?
Yeah, I would just say that, you know, if you're going to pretend that there's like actual, you know, justice at work that can affect the president, the sitting president, then, um, That's a precedent.
And I think that that's what's so funny is that they weren't willing to go all the way because they do know the consequences of that.
Right.
Because then Pelosi's in jail for insider trading.
I mean, there's nobody that almost nobody wouldn't be in jail for something or other.
And so they kind of like stayed in the middle.
And I guess I'm hoping that he stays in the middle as well, that a lot of it is just bluster and theater.
Well, that was my point, right?
It's like not only did sort of they, the royal they, not go all the way, but like this particular person didn't go all the way, right?
And now he's facing these charges.
So.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
I never know with all of this stuff.
Look, these guys are all politicians.
And as far as Comey's concerned, you know, his name's back in the spotlight.
He's back on the front pages.
Like, there's a bit of me that's just like, how much of this is just political theater and none of these people really care?
And they're all kind of smoking cigars at the end of the day and having a whiskey together and just kind of saying, you know, like, we'll charge each other, but it's never going to go anywhere.
I don't know.
I don't know how serious these charges are, but my understanding is that it's, you know, it's not going to be a big deal.
A huge deal, even if he's found guilty.
Yeah.
I mean, I just want to congratulate Comey for launching his 2028 presidential campaign.
There you go, right?
I mean, you got to think about that, right?
Yeah.
The charges, he got two counts one on making a materially false statement, and there's another on obstructing a congressional proceeding.
So prosecutors allege that Comey falsely testified that he did not authorize anyone at the FBI to serve as an anonymous source, and his testimony impeded Congress's oversight work.
And then, like you mentioned, this was like they had to get through a different prosecutor to get this one.
So, Reuters reported that U.S. Attorney Eric Seibert resigned after expressing doubts about the case and was instead brought by Lindsey Halligan, a former Trump lawyer who is newly appointed as U.S. Attorney, who personally took the case to a grand jury, which is an unusual step for a top prosecutor.
And apparently, she has never actually prosecuted the case herself.
So, my two thoughts on this is like number one, it is kind of like weak sauce.
Compared to, I guess, what the more deranged kind of like QAnon people are expecting.
You know, it's not treason.
It's not human trafficking.
It's a couple of, you know, procedural kind of charges.
No, yet.
Not yet.
Maybe we'll see if they keep asking.
Well, they tried to charge, they tried to bring a third charge, a third count about another alleged false statement, but even the grand jury wasn't impressed by this.
So it wasn't indicted for that.
So I feel like they struggled to get even these two.
And, you know, it's like the maximum sentence for both of them would be about.
Five years and like no one gets the maximum sentence.
And even if they do get some sort of sentence, no one serves whatever sentence that the judge says.
And the other thing is that I can imagine how this will backfire.
It's like if this case is as so weak that they can't even get a prosecution, well, doesn't that make the Trump DOJ look pretty impotent that they brought a fairly weak case to the courts and they couldn't get it to the finish line?
Well, I don't think it matters anymore.
I think that no matter where this case ends up going, the people on the right will say, The deep state came in and saved him, or they kept him out.
You know, there will be a, you know, a nefarious actor who came in.
And if the charges spiral, and oh my gosh, wait, it looks like he actually did do some bad stuff that's worth looking into.
You know, the liberals will say, like, this is a political.
What I guess I'm trying to say is, none of this will have any impact whatsoever on where people's minds are at, what they believe.
Whatever happens, the facts will be nicely siphoned into like two mainstream columns and then a handful of like fringe beliefs on the outside of what's really going on.
We've seen this with every single other, you know, other political prosecution, really.
I mean, going back to the Mueller report, so many people thought this was going to lend, you know, they were.
Wringing their hands about perp walks and Trump in the orange jumpsuit and all of this stuff.
And when it didn't end up having any real material consequences, people just decided that what Mueller set out to prove was real and true.
And, you know, Trump's corrupt and escaped punishment.
You know, it's just.
Has Jake answered your question yet, Travis?
Yeah, yeah.
Have I?
Have I?
Does anything matter?
Let Will maybe.
It's all theater.
It's all a win win, anyway, as far as Trump is concerned, because no.
You know, you're not talking about Epstein anymore, right?
It's like whether he's found guilty, how the trial goes, whatever it goes, it's all diverting attention from the Epstein scandal, right?
So it's in pure sort of optics, political optics, like it's a win-win, however it works, right?
Yeah, I suppose so.
I don't know.
I think it's funny, Travis, that you are like thinking about whether the DOJ will lose its reputation.
Cause I think that like the institution's reputations are like deeply in the shitter, like no matter what.
Bolted, right?
I mean, you mentioned the prosecutor who resigned.
I mean, we also have, I mean, how many people have we had who have either been kicked out of or have left the FBI or the DOJ in disgust and have then gone and either leaked stories, you know, whether it's the big scoop last week about the immigration czar.
I'm blanking on his name.
But, you know, Holman.
Yes, Holman.
All the whistleblower from the DOJ who was just so disgusted at what they were doing with the immigration cases and Flying people out of the country.
Like, I mean, I don't know.
I mean, that to me is the bigger story here.
Whether Comey ends up sort of going to some holiday camp for a year or so on some charges and then uses that as a springboard for his election is kind of minor compared to the wholesale just attrition and dismantling of our federal judicial system, our federal system of prosecution and investigation.
It's just like that sort of stuff.
Is what scared me as an extremism reporter, as someone who studies the really bad guys and the really bad people who are out there doing bad things.
Just what I'm so worried about is all the attention and all the institutional knowledge and just kind of focus of these major federal agencies is just being either lost by attrition or just focused elsewhere.
And that's what kind of scares me.
I mean, I'm really not worried about the DOJ losing credibility as much as I was thinking about Trump's base being frustrated with Trump.
If, like, if they feel like he has all the cards, he feels like he has everything he needs to, like, really prosecute his political enemies and he can't even secure a conviction.
I don't know.
That'll allow Comey to really more credibly claim that this is all a political prosecution and springboard into greater publicity if that's what he wants.
Do you genuinely think that'll change anybody's mind, though?
Yeah, probably not.
Antifa and Law Enforcement00:15:49
Yeah.
It might make people slightly more like black-pilled, but I mean, what other option do they have?
And are they going to switch sides?
No.
Not a chance.
Yeah, maybe, yeah, maybe black.
Pill is probably the route they go.
Well, and also look at like Trump's first term.
Like he essentially ran on, I'm going to throw Hillary Clinton in jail.
He didn't do anything, he didn't put anybody in jail.
The slogan was literally lock her up, right?
I mean, that was the slogan.
Yeah.
That was the slogan.
And he so failed in that that there had to be like an anonymous, you know, 4chan poster that was like, don't worry, everybody who voted for Lock Her Up.
Lock Her Up actually is happening.
Trust us behind the scenes any minute now.
You know, it's like that was, he drew that out for four years.
They'll find another way.
It's, you know, I think that Comey escaping conviction and then doing like another book tour and potentially announcing a presidential run, like, They'll be like, ah, this was always the plan because once Comey is president, then he really is subject to, he really can be taken down in a way that will really make the.
I mean, we're too, it's too easy to just like write our way out of this, I guess, like, you know, as if I'm like a television scriptwriter.
Now, this may be just the beginning of Trump using federal law enforcement for political ends.
So, according to reporting from the New York Times, a senior Justice Department official has instructed more than half a dozen.
U.S. attorney's offices to draft plans to investigate a group funded by George Soros, the billionaire Democratic donor.
So we'll see if that goes anywhere.
But, like, you know, he seems like he feels emboldened.
It was like everyone who's really, really irritating him.
He feels like he's able to use his prosecutors to go after now.
You guys won't be getting your annual bonus checks from George Soros this year, guys.
Sorry.
No, pity.
Gosh, what'll happen if Trump gets, you know, because it's one thing to get the indictment.
Right?
If you've got a lawyer who's sort of like, sure, we'll find a jury that'll indict on this.
I'll get a couple of pilled people together.
We can do this.
You know, if he gets the Comey indictment, Soros, what if he gets all of the indictments and then no convictions have?
Like that, essentially on a public stage, it plays out that these people actually haven't done anything, you know, worthy of securing an actual conviction.
Now, that'll be interesting.
You also have to hold that up against the system of grand juries, right?
I mean, yes, okay, you can get.
That the saying is something like you can get a grand jury to indict a cheese sandwich if you need to, right?
Sure.
But I don't know what the stats are, and maybe some smart listener can look them up.
But generally speaking, prosecutors will use grand juries to bring cases that they already know are very strong, right?
These grand jury cases very seldom fall apart.
Like if you can get it past that stage, then you're going to bring it.
So what will be interesting will be not so much whether these cases fall apart, but how rare that is in the context of grand juries and these.
Big federal prosecutions because I think I'm right in saying that that's extraordinarily rare.
Like, you don't bring a grand jury prosecution that then just like falls apart with a whimper.
Like, that rarely happens.
Yeah.
Will, I also wanted to ask you about Trump using an executive order to declare Antifa a domestic terrorist organization.
Now, I've read that such a declaration is essentially legally meaningless.
There's no federal statute to make a designation, but you know, we're in a strange time.
Yeah.
Legally speaking, you are like, you know, the letter of law and like how the law is.
Practice are diverging.
So, I mean, this is how the executive order reads in part.
All relevant executive departments and agencies shall utilize all applicable authorities to investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any and all illegal operations, especially those involving terrorist actions conducted by Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa.
Oh, well, there goes that's bad news for all the crisis actors, or for which Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa provided material sources.
Including necessary investigatory and prosecutorial actions against those who fund such operations.
Well, it's interesting that we're having this discussion after the previous one, right?
Because, as you mentioned, Travis, like legally, in a purely black letter law sense, declaring Antifa a terrorist organization doesn't mean anything.
We don't have a domestic terrorism statute.
Ironically, a lot of people on the left after January 6th and before January 6th, when we had all the shootings coming from the far right, were saying, we desperately need a domestic terrorism law.
We need a statute so that we can charge these people with domestic terrorism.
And some more sort of seasoned people out there were saying, well, hold on a minute, because if someone like Trump gets back in, they can declare Antifa terrorists and then they'll start putting people in prison.
So I think Antifa kind of dodged a bullet there that there was no law passed.
But to answer your question, this is in the context of what we were just talking about, right?
Look, Trump at this point controls the DOJ and controls the FBI.
He has his top lieutenants in charge of the FBI.
He is installing whoever he wants and getting rid of who he doesn't want at the DOJ.
And so the mere kind of laser focus in on Antifa, yeah, it doesn't matter legally, but it matters enormously procedurally.
It matters enormously in terms of who the FBI and DOJ are going to go after.
And they've been given a very, very clear signal.
We want you to go after people like the Soros Foundation, and we want you to go after anti fascists, like violent anti fascists around the country.
And so, you know, every FBI office in every major city, every DOJ, every U.S. attorney around the country has literally got.
The memo, right?
That's the memo.
Like, go after these people.
And I actually covered a case in San Diego a couple of years ago that was very precedent setting in this, which was a case, a big case against, we called them the San Diego 11.
And this was 11 anti fascists.
I think I was maybe on the show talking about it a couple of years ago.
And that was precedent setting because it was the first time that anti fascists had been charged kind of like a gang, right?
They'd been charged with conspiracy to commit riot.
And the prosecutors in that case, it was a local prosecution, but it It was successful.
And so that set a blueprint that I'm sure federal prosecutors around the country are looking at.
You know, that's what I think is the real impact of this is going to be the changing focus of like federal law enforcement.
Well, and just their idea of Antifa is essentially people of color in like black sweatshirts.
You know what I mean?
Like they're just, I think they're just going to use it to go after, you know, more people that Antifa or not, they want off the streets, you know?
It's just, it's, I mean, the original like meaning of, Terrorism, in terms of how it modifies how the government and the agencies can treat you, it's just a suspension of your civil rights, essentially.
So it's, you know, obviously, like we should have maybe fought harder when this was put in place, but we've already kind of defined by law that terrorists are not really full human beings.
I think we should have done a lot of things, maybe.
I think that the analogy here would be post 9 11 law enforcement focus on Islamist terrorism and the overreaches that happened post 9 11.
What you saw is like Awful human rights and civil rights violations against the Muslim community in this country because federal law enforcement got the memo, we want you to put radical Muslims in jail.
Like that was the memo that went out.
And so every investigator, every prosecutor in the country, that's what they were focused on.
And that's why they, you know, sent spies into mosques in New York and places like that, you know, and ended up running a whole bunch of very dodgy sting operations against young Muslim men and kind of, you know, selling them weapons and selling them explosives and stuff.
I think that's what we're going to see against, uh, against.
Sort of anti fascists in this country is like this.
It's not so much like, look, I've faced down and have my own kind of run ins with like violent anti fascists and like they can be pretty scary people.
Like there are some pretty scary like Antifa out there, but they're a very small proportion of what you can call the anti fascist movement.
Right.
And so what I'm interested in is like, do they just go after the people who are legitimately out there trying to kind of ferment revolution and sort of, you know, enact actual anarchism?
Or are they going to go after, you know, kind of grandmas and 17 year olds who like have read too much Karl Marx?
Like, That's going to be the interesting thing.
I mean, I think they're going to continue to entrap teenagers.
They're just going to switch to like trans teenagers and then we're good to go.
They'll basically do the like plot the crime up until the point where the crime has to be done and then they'll, you know, arrest them and be like, we saved the world from another thing that we planned, another thing we convinced a 17 year old to do.
But then, not to get too meta about it, but I mean, if you, you know, we mentioned grand juries, we've mentioned, you know, we've mentioned just then like stings.
Like, is the problem that the focus is currently on these like leftist like activists or is the problem that we have These sort of fundamentally very dark and secretive systems of putting people in prison, which often involve essentially scamming them and essentially doing a sting operation against them or enacting a very secretive grand jury that nobody ever gets to see and no one ever gets to look inside that process.
I think that's the bigger question here, right?
Is the focus the problem or is it the system, the way that we do this, the problem?
Well, and in addition to this sort of secret.
Processes of law enforcement and how they will abuse this new directive.
I'm also worried that you're going to have like a bunch of George Zimmermans, you know, who are like out on the street and they see some kids in black hoodies or whatever.
And they're like, it's antique.
You know, like I'm also worried against the guys who want to take the law into their own hands and whatever they think is antique.
You know, they think they've got a directive now as well, even though they're not law enforcement or they're former law enforcement or they're friends with people who are in law enforcement.
Enforcement.
So I think there's like a whole, even another layer to this that's also very, you know, worrisome.
I think I'm going to say something that might get me in trouble here.
And I hope it doesn't, because I think that, you know, I want to say that this is predicated on 10 years of covering extremism.
But my general kind of understanding of the far left versus the far right is that the far left tend to be, and when I talk about the far left, I mean the extremist far left, like true, you know, anarchists and true, like, anti fascist, like, agitators.
And they tend to be very smart people.
They're university educated.
They tend to be like higher socioeconomic, you know, from a higher socioeconomic background.
They're pretty smart people.
And as such, they know when to not go out and get themselves into situations where they could, you know, where they could find themselves the target of law enforcement.
That's often not true on the far right.
You know, a lot of people on the far right, a lot of kind of, you know, neo Nazis and people tend not to be very well educated, tend not to be very smart.
And they tend to be the, That, you know, not only to be targeted by kind of law enforcement stings, but also they are more willing to kind of put themselves out on the street when they might be in danger.
And so I think that's why we haven't seen large scale Antifa activity.
We haven't seen a lot of big protests.
I think that's largely because they know that not only are the George Zimmermans out there, but they also know that law enforcement's paying very close attention to them and they're, you know, I guess kind of biding their time and, you know, they don't want to go to prison.
And so they're being sensible about it.
I mean, that's nothing new.
I mean, the institutional power, the Police power, military power in general is willing to cut slack to far right way more than far left.
Even if they do have to kind of police them, there's a bit of a wink and a nudge.
And historically, the power structures have not been weighted, certainly to help the left or give them a benefit of the doubt.
So, yeah, I think it makes sense.
I think it makes sense that the right have not learned the skills of being subtle because they kind of know they can mostly get away with it.
They don't really need to.
I think that I can objectively, as a journalist, say that.
I think I can say, look, I mean, the FBI is a very conservative organization.
It always has been.
And I mean, there was that famous memo in the wake of the January 6th.
Prosecutions where a lot of FBI agents were saying it was like the secret letter where a lot of the FBI agents signed on saying, like, we think that these prosecutions, you know, are overreaching and stuff like that.
And it's like, that's all you need to know about, like, you know, they didn't want to prosecute, or a lot of people in federal law enforcement were reticent to prosecute Gen 6ers because, you know, they agreed with them essentially, right?
Or they didn't think they were that bad.
Yeah.
I mean, there's like, if the roles were reversed, even if it was just like a group of people who call themselves Antifa and they, let's say, And this is totally speculative, but let's say they burn out a Walmart, just like destroy a Walmart.
The Democratic Party would never come to the rescue for them.
They would never argue for their release.
They would never eventually be pardoned.
There just isn't anybody supporting it.
They'd be shot.
Yes, that's true.
Exactly.
I mean, there's layers to that.
I think I also like the important context of this executive order is part of a long running effort, starting with the Trump administration to turn Antifa into an all purpose.
Boogeyman.
I think it's probably best exemplified when, in 2017, when the alt-right troll Microchip started this petition to declare Antifa a terrorist organization, received over 300,000 digital signatures.
And Microchip told Political that same year that the intent of the petition was to, quote, bring our broken right side together after Charlottesville and to prop up Antifa as a punching bag.
Microchip went on to say, quote, so the narrative changed from, I hate myself because we have neo-Nazis on our side to, I really hate Antifa.
Let's get along and tackle the terrorists.
You can call it an extreme form of whataboutism.
So I think that's really the real broad.
It's not based upon a real sophisticated understanding of like, you know, a political organizing on the, you know, on the grassroots level.
It's based upon this, basically.
That's the Enrique Tarrio school of thought.
That's his, you know, the head of the Proud Boys.
That's what the Proud Boys are all about.
They're like, we're not white supremacists.
We're not like misogynist.
We just hate Antifa because they're the real terrorists, right?
That's a kind of a.
A 2023 kind of, you know, sort of argument that you heard all the time.
I think we should talk about the trans issue too, right?
I mean, we should talk about the FBI.
You guys read about the FBI kind of starting to call trans terrorism like nihilistic terrorism, which is like just an extraordinary step.
Like when there was the Minneapolis shooting a couple of, like, what was that, a month ago, you know, a shooting that was actually committed by a trans person, right?
I wrote a story saying, yes, you know, this was a shooting done by a trans person, but This is an anomaly, and this is like percentage wise, we're still about right in terms of how many transgender people commit shootings compared to how many transgender people there are in the country.
But I pointed out in that story that actually that shooting was almost certainly like all the experts looked at what the writings that the person left behind, that the shooter left behind, and said this individual left behind a lot of indications that they were part of the nihilistic shooters, right?
Labeling Domestic Terrorism00:05:16
They were one of these people who were just obsessed with.
With school shootings and shooters and becoming a saint and all the rest of that kind of nasty, dark stuff.
What happens two weeks later?
The FBI literally starts to call trans, any shootings committed by trans people or their sort of allies, they start to label it as nihilistic attacks.
And that's the complete opposite of what all the experts say.
And they're basically using and weaponizing that term against trans people.
And I think that that's very analogous to what's going on with Antifa.
It's the whole boogeyman idea, right?
Like, yes, Antifa are the boogeyman, but hey, trans people are increasingly the boogeyman in this country, too.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Will, as someone who was in DC for January 6th, I'm also curious about your perspective about the recent push to rewrite the narrative about those events.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
So, House members voted to officially establish a new panel to investigate the events around January 6th.
It will fall under the purview of the House Judiciary Committee and be chaired by Representative Barry Loudermilk.
So the goal seems to be to exonerate Trump and the right generally for the events of that day.
I think the sentiment is best summed up by a recent tweet from Marjorie Taylor Greene, which said this J6 was a fedsurrection.
I said it on January 6th while it was happening.
MAGA doesn't do things like that.
We don't riot.
We don't loot.
We are not the party of violence.
The left is.
I mean, that's an airtight argument.
My side is good and pure and doesn't do bad things.
Therefore, whenever it's accused of doing bad things, it was actually the other side.
So, like, Will, what do you make of this?
I guess this attempt is like framed January 6th as like a plot by corrupt elements of the Trump government, and the right had nothing to do with it.
I mean, I'm only amazed that, like, the head of that, whoever's doing that organization, that new investigation, that they didn't put Tucker Carlson in charge.
Like, I mean, that's what I'm really surprised at.
I mean, I don't know.
Like, are you going to, again, are you going to change anyone's mind in this?
You know, like, if we all, you can all go, anyone who wants to can go watch the videos of what happened.
Like, I was there.
I watched it happen.
You know, like, it was very violent.
It was very scary.
It was like, it was all the things that the videos clearly show that it was.
But I think, you know, that Marjorie Taylor Greene tweet's very interesting.
I think, and again, not to kind of get too like meta and big brain on this, but I think the fundamental problem here is our political lexicon, right?
We still talk about things in these kind of stark, You know, left versus right ways.
And I think that the reality is that most of MAGA don't consider themselves on the right.
Like they consider themselves in this kind of, you know, in this sort of like magnetic field that, you know, between the two ends of the political horseshoe, right?
And so when you hear people say like that, the reason that people find it so hard to understand that, like, you know, that largely it was conservatives and people on the right who committed these acts on January 6th is just because they don't self identify as that.
You know, they see themselves as this sort of like, Almost like liberals, right?
Almost like liberals in a classic sense.
But look, to answer your question, yeah, January 6th was a terrifying, violent, awful display of, like, you know, thuggery.
Like, there's no question.
I was there, I watched it happen.
And any attempt, I mean, there have been five years worth or four years worth of attempts to try and whitewash it.
And this is just another one of those.
Yeah, to me, this feels like, I feel like in the minds of conservatives or MAGA, like, it's already been whitewashed.
Like, they already believe it was these inside acts.
That procted people to do bad things and that it was a peaceful gathering, but there were these inside infiltrators.
I think they just want like official language of that.
You know, it's like not enough to know it in their soul.
They need like a government, you know, some sort of like government investigation to label it as such.
In the same thing that they're doing with Comey, where it's like, okay, well, now he's really indicted.
Like, of course, they thought he was a criminal and deserved to be prosecuted, you know, from day one.
But I think now they just want it to come from some kind of Quote unquote official source, so they can point to that and say, See, see, see, we were right all along, we were right all along.
Yeah, and they'll feel just as empty as they felt before, and they'll feel just as empty as they did before.
I'm not sure you're quite right on that.
And what I want to couch is like you said that you think that MAGA needs that.
I don't think that they do.
I think the people that need that are the people who are in the middle, the people who aren't quite, they're not fully red pilled, they're not fully MAGA, they're still on the fence.
It's the swing voters.
Like this investigation, this kind of official, this sort of like putting an official seal on the whitewash, just to mix metaphors, is aimed at the swing voters.
It's aimed at the people who aren't quite decided on it and who don't, who Frankly, can't be bothered to go do the research themselves and want to be told which way to believe.
Like, they want to give that sliver of the population that vitally important sliver of the voting public.
Like, they want to carve off a few more of those and make sure that they are, you know, that they're convinced of that version of events too.
Like, MAG is already convinced.
They already know, you know, like they already know what they feel about January 6th and it's not true.
Yeah.
Redefining Truthsayers00:15:05
Now I want to talk about, yeah, your new investigative series.
Extremely normal, which is very intriguing, very on the ground.
It seems like you got a great team behind you.
So, this is new for USA Today.
So, what are your goals for this series?
Yeah, it's really exciting.
So, a few months ago, I went to my editors and I said, look, I think we're looking at something different when we think about extremism in this country.
I don't think that we can continue to kind of really talk about this in the same way.
We need to be a little smarter about it.
And so, we came up with this concept of extremely normal.
And essentially, what This is a series of short documentaries that are going to examine different ideologies, movements, individuals that were once considered extremists, were once on the very fringes of American politics and are now firmly on the mainstream.
So that's the idea.
We want to look at movements that are either on that arc or that have made that arc, and we want to examine kind of how that happened and how did these things that were once either conspiracy theories or just like fringe ideologies that.
Very few people believed how they got to running the country essentially and to dominating the political discourse.
And that's the goal of Extremely Normal.
And yeah, as you mentioned, our first episode looked at the manosphere and toxic masculinity and misogyny and just how I think that's a perfect example of something that would have been pretty abhorrent and fringed not that long ago.
And now it's like most of our neighbors' kids are into this stuff and it's a very real thing.
And so that's what we looked at in our first episode.
Well, when you're sitting in the fighting gym and you go, now, how many of you guys like look up to Andrew or you follow Andrew?
I can't remember exactly what your question was, but basically everybody in the room kind of raises their hand that it's a very normal thing.
And this is despite there's, you know, there's in the doc, there's this young woman who's also in the class and she gets up to speak and says, you know, hey, I'm noticing that my students' behavior towards girls in the class is shifting, you know, once they've sort of like found this.
You know, particular influencer.
And still, you know, at the end of the movie, the guy who runs the dojo is like, no, I think he's like a misunderstood guy.
And these don't seem like violent, awful people.
They mostly seem like shy kids that are looking for community.
They're looking to, you know, they're looking for discipline.
It's just, it's, yeah, I really loved and was also so saddened at how, you know, how non rigid our political beliefs, and especially in young people, have become, you know, that there isn't necessarily an archetype anymore or a stereotype that you can point to and say, This type of person believes this type of thing, and this is how it's going.
Yeah, it's a good example of this stuff just kind of seeping out into the soup of popular culture.
Yeah, it's, you know, the number of times I would kind of describe this project to like friends or acquaintances, and they'd say, come on, like nobody really like respects Andrew Tate.
Like they all think he's an idiot.
And I'd say, like, no, that's very much not the case.
Like that is, you know, you have to go out there and you have to talk to people.
And, you know, for this project, I spent a long time kind of going around to different MMA gyms, like all over Southern California, just like trying to find, or just like talking to people and trying to find the perfect kind of group of people who could tell this story.
And as I say in the documentary, like these young men that I talk to, you know, the whole time I was kind of expecting to find these like awful, like, you know, horrible little kind of trolls.
And the reality isn't that.
Like the reality is that these are, as you point out, they're young, lonely men, you know, who don't have a kind of, don't grow up in the kind of archetypal world that we grew up in or that I grew up in.
And they are struggling for answers.
And this is where they find their answers is online.
And it's very, very difficult to distinguish.
Like, particularly when you look at the way that our politics acts, when you have the top politicians in the country kind of like, you know, shouting at each other on social media and calling each other cuss words, it's like it's very difficult to distinguish that from Andrew Tate or whatever other, you know, huckster is out there who's trying to sell you on their worldview.
And so it's a confusing world for these young men and they get sucked into it and they get attracted to the kind of, you know, the good stuff that these guys preach, which, you know, they do preach some good stuff.
But then they also, along the way, are kind of taking in the violent vitriol and the misogyny and everything else.
And it's depressing.
It's kind of scary.
And I think every parent of young boys needs to know about it.
And that's the point of the piece.
There was a really sort of like troubling bit where you played a clip from one of Andrew Tate's interviews at some point during the episode.
And he's kind of bragging about like, yes, I am a misogynist.
And like, yes, of course I'm a sexist.
And it really struck me as an attempt to sort of like redefine these terms.
And especially for like young people.
You know, to look at the word like misogynist or to look at, you know, sexist and to say like, oh, that's like an old term that like used to be used to shame people, but like we've evolved out of that and we're taking that back.
Like really frightened me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, there's a lot going on there.
There's a couple of analogies there to kind of other worlds and extremism, right?
I mean, this is, this is very analogous to white supremacists going from, and neo Nazis going from talking about how, you know, people of color are kind of inferior and everything else to like talking about white.
You know, white heritage or white culture and the need to protect white culture, kind of moving into the Patriot Front kind of model of like, this is the way we need to talk about race, is no longer in terms of denigrating other races.
It's in terms of like, you know, protecting our own race.
And it's like, no, it's just racism, like dressed up in a different way.
And that's what Tate's very good at.
He's very good at, Tate and these others are very good at saying, like, we don't hate women.
Like, we just love men.
You know, like, we're not anti women.
We're just anti, like, violent feminism or whatever it is.
And it's just, A reframing of the same old kind of tropes and hate and everything else.
And then, you know, in the same breath, they'll kind of make jokes about how, like, oh, I'm never going to let a woman kind of drive my car and stuff like that.
And women can't be trusted.
And it's like, guys, you know, you're not, I was about to say you're not fooling anybody, but of course they are fooling millions of people.
And they're certainly not going to get any more frequent dates.
If you tell a woman that you don't think she's fit to drive a car, yeah, it's probably not going to go.
You might continue to be very lonely.
You would hope so.
Yeah, I have a clip from your first entry in this documentary series here.
When I first learned there were a bunch of Andrew Tate fans at Batista's gym, I expected to find a group of monsters.
I thought they'd be ranting sexism, frothing about how much they hate women.
But that's not what I found.
We have a lot of pressure on us to be successful.
And that comes from anywhere, especially social media.
You're seeing rappers, musicians, you're seeing actors, all these people with a lot of money that we don't have.
And Andrew Tate steps into that a little bit and gives some hints.
Well, yeah, he does.
He just gives people hope.
Like, as far as men go, there's not a lot of good male role models out there.
And I'm not saying he's the best person to look up to, but if you're picking and choosing things, there is a lot more good than bad that you could take.
Wait, there are so many good male role models out there.
What is he talking about?
Maybe not in his algorithm.
Yeah.
I mean, when we tried to feature, we featured one of them in the show.
You know, we spend a few minutes like talking to a guy from Detroit, a guy called Jason Wilson, who's like just a remarkable human being.
Oh, yeah.
He was awesome.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's very, he's very cool.
And he's, you know, he's, We chose him because he's kind of ultra masculine in a way, but he's also like very thoughtful and very respectful towards women.
So the point was look, if you want to, if you want to do sit ups and get a six pack and like, you know, do martial arts and all the rest of it, like you don't, you don't have to also be a misogynist.
You can also like, you know, respect women and love women in the way that, uh, that this guy does.
And so he was, um, yeah, he was a good, he's a good role model.
And I'd argue there's a lot of, a lot of guys like him out there too.
What I really liked about that first episode there is that you really showed just how like, Simple and small, the entry points into this content is.
Young men go like, Well, yeah, I want to get a little more fit.
Yeah, I want to make more money.
And maybe you just find them kind of funny.
And those are such easy ways to fall into the content.
And then it ramps up into more extreme misogyny.
Not only more extreme misogyny, but other forms of extremism too.
So we interviewed an academic by the name of Cynthia Miller Idris, who's just written a book called Man Up.
And we don't get into it.
That much in this.
I think we mentioned it a little bit, but, you know, in kind of 17 minutes of a documentary, we couldn't get into everything.
But one of the things that she studied very closely is how, you know, that sort of thin end of the wedge that not only are you kind of being sucked into the algorithm and looking at this, and then you get into kind of more misogynistic content, but like there's a very clear through line from misogyny into white supremacy, into anti Semitism, into other forms of like hate and extremism.
And that's what Cynthia's book like goes very into that.
You know, there isn't a mass shooter out there, really.
There are very, very few mass shooters out there who didn't have a history of misogyny and violent misogyny against women.
Like, the correlation is extraordinary.
And they all found their way, not they all, but like the vast majority of them, you know, have come down that path to extremism.
And that's another element of why we need to take this, you know, very seriously as a society.
Yeah.
What kind of amazes me is, you know, a lot of people are shocked by like the language that Andrew Tate uses.
But if you go beyond like the facade of, you know, kind of like liberal, Interpretation of what capitalism can yield, right?
A free world where we're all equal and everything is according to your meritocracy is real.
But if you look at the actual way the system is working, it is essentially the way that Andrew Tate says it.
That's why they think he's such a truthsayer.
It's like, what is essentially the value of the way we organize society?
More money, you're better.
If you have money, you can get women.
I think that violence and don't let anybody humiliate you because we're all in a Competition with each other.
There's no communal project.
So, it's always kind of amazing to me, just like Donald Trump is an avatar of our era, I think Andrew Tate is as well.
And sometimes people confuse the cult of personality around someone like that with a genuine trend that happens when, you know, the kind of official narrative of where we're heading with this system, you know, this free market capitalist system clashes with the reality on the ground for a lot of these young men.
Yeah.
The only kind of chink in that logic is that, you know, Andrew Tate has been charged, right?
I mean, he's been charged with sex trafficking, he's been charged with rape.
There are Lawsuits against him.
And, you know, he could, he could very well end up going to prison.
But I mean, yeah, essentially, yeah.
I mean, look, here's a guy who's made millions and millions of dollars out of essentially like exploiting women in one way or another.
And he's used that, you know, that vast wealth and that his vast following to just kind of like steamroll over any sort of like niceties and formalities of society, right?
He's just like, he's just like, I'm just going to do whatever the hell I want and say whatever the hell I want.
And yeah, in many ways, that's sort of the, I don't know, the kind of the dream of commercialism, right?
It's like you get so rich and so powerful that you can do whatever you want.
And, you know, I think there are parallels between that and what we see in everyday politics.
And I'll leave it at that.
Yeah, there's definitely, you know, that contradiction of like seeing Trump up there and thinking of him as an anti establishment figure when he's, you know, like very much a product of like capital accretion and all of these trends.
And that's obviously like something that, you know, kind of applies to Tate as well.
But I mean, Is Tate wrong that women in general are treated as a product, especially sexually, and that they're consistently objectified, that they're consistently tied with a high status as a person in society?
I mean, that's what I find so tricky about some of these figures is that they've read the writing on the wall.
They're just reading you the writing on the wall.
Like, that's what Trump fucking made his whole thing.
You know, he's like, well, yeah, I'm one of them.
I'm obviously like a silver spoon, you know, like rich, a credit fiend, you know, just kind of like endless wealth.
Doesn't really matter what I do.
I'll always get away with it.
And he just turned to the camera and finally said what a lot of politicians weren't saying, which is like, all these people are crooked.
I used to buy these people.
I mean, I think the bigger trickiness with Tate and his ilk is even more fundamental than that.
It's that a lot of what they say makes sense and is perfectly reasonable advice for young men, right?
Like, a lot of, if you look at the bulk of what Tate and the rest of the Manosphere say, it's essentially along the lines of like, you know, make your bed.
Don't eat too many burgers.
Like, you know, go for a run, get some sleep, drink water, you know, study in school, don't get into trouble, don't drink, don't do drugs.
Like, all of this stuff that, like, most people who are in the kind of mental health industry say are pretty good things for young men to do.
You know, obviously, where Tate differs is that he then takes that and he spins it off into his kind of vile misogyny as well, right?
And so he brings in this other stuff.
But that's where I think the real danger lies with.
Tate and these guys, it's that you have to listen to quite a lot of Andrew Tate to hear him say something nasty against women, but he does say it, right?
Whereas, yeah, horrifying.
Yeah.
Whereas, you know, whereas obviously, like, you can get all of that advice and not get the nasty stuff as well.
Like, and I think that's the main point of our piece and the main point of like having Jason Wilson in there and just kind of offering some advice to parents is it's like, look, here's what your kids are going to say.
They're going to come back and they're going to say, but, you know, he's just telling me all this good stuff.
And it's like, yeah, but is he?
Is that all he's saying?
Because it's not.
He's also saying these other things.
And, you know, he accused us and other people accused us of like just cherry picking his statement.
It's like, well, yeah, I mean, okay, we kind of did, but you did say them, you know, like, and that's our job is to point out like the controversial stuff that you're saying because it comes along.
It's all part of the package, it comes along with everything else.
And when you're 12 or 13 years old or younger watching this, like, you can't differentiate between those two things.
It's all kind of part and parcel of the same messaging, right?
And that's what's so scary about it.
MLM Messaging Tactics00:04:03
Yeah.
Yeah, and he'll be, he'll always be put, you know, forward in the algorithm before somebody who's telling you all those positive messages, but not, you know, attaching them to outrageous statements that are going to make the front page, both like because people hate him and people love him.
And by front page, I mean top of the algorithm.
I sound like an old man, but yeah.
Seasoned.
Seasoned is the word, Jillian.
Yeah.
That's, that's the reality is like, that's the secret sauce, right?
Is that he's brasher and less controlled in the way he speaks than anybody else.
He's willing to say things that are so outrageous that they would shock your parents if you're like, I don't know, a teenage boy.
You'd love to shock your parents.
And so, like, again, the entire system is set up to facilitate an MLM, you know, sex trafficking grifter who yells at you, shows off his cars, and comes in hot in like short form vertical format.
I don't know.
It's bang.
Dude, I think you nailed it.
I was listening to that one young man, and he's saying, You go on the internet, you go on social media, what do you see?
You don't see poor people.
It's all cars, clothes, you know, fashion, traveling.
Here's, look at me.
What am I eating?
What restaurant am I in?
You know, here's a picture of the menu.
It's like, this shit has been around forever.
Cause like, I remember when I was in junior high or high school, there were all sorts of like, I can't remember the names, but it was like pickup guides, you know, how to pick up artists.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like how to trick women into liking you.
And literally the advice base of all of these, cause of course, as like a non athletic, like somewhat, you know, not like super masculine boy, I was like very worried about.
You know, how was I ever going to get a girlfriend?
I looked into some of these things and they all dealt with treating women badly.
They all dealt with treating women and viewing women as someone easy to manipulate if you have the right technique.
But what's different with Tate is they can see him, they see the fitted jacket.
I mean, I think he looks ridiculous, but like, I don't know, young people, they see the big glasses and the Ferraris and all of that stuff and the wealth.
And like, that's a huge part of it.
Think is that like the it's like they can see him too.
It's not just his message anymore.
It's it's hard to argue like that everything is a market, everything is a free market, everything regulates itself if you make it a commodity.
And then to argue, wait, wait, you're seeing women as commodities now?
You're seeing highly sexualized women that we've been presenting you for years within this like free market system?
You're seeing them as commodities?
Oh, I'm shocked.
I mean, everything pointed there, like the entire funnel leads you there.
Yep.
And at the bottom of the funnel is Andrew Tate.
There he is.
That's right.
That's right.
Bulging biceps and all, waiting to catch you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
With multiple human trafficking charges.
Like, you've got to ask yourself why, consistently in the last, like, couple decades, the most cynical fuckers on earth are getting ahead real well.
Like, surprisingly well.
Like, shockingly well.
Well, I would counter that and say, you know, for every Andrew Tate, there's a thousand or ten thousand, like, you know, sad little hucksters getting nowhere.
You know what I mean?
Like, sure.
That's how MLMs work, though, you know?
Well, yeah, but I mean, Andrew Tate's also sort of a product of his own.
He's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy, right?
I mean, he kind of got rich first and then got famous later.
And if you look at how he got rich, it's like very, very dodgy and very sketchy.
And he's now probably going to go to prison for it.
So it's like, I guess I'm just trying to like, I'm trying to like, you know, I think a lot of young men feel that.
I think that they watch it and they think, I just need to be like this person to get ahead.
But I think, you know, what they don't see is all the pathetic people who are trying to get ahead just like him and are actually just like leading very sad, very unhappy lives because they never learned how to, you know, how to treat half of the human race, you know?
And that's really what we're trying to get across in the piece is just like, look, there are other ways of doing this.
And like, these guys are not.
You know, being honest with you, you know, like, yeah, like it will make your life worse.
Snoop Dogg Episodes00:03:29
I think that's what really needs to come across.
It's like, this actually will not help you.
Yeah.
But it's understandable how people get there because it's all, you know, that's always been the role of like media and, you know, TV and now social media.
It's like to show you the inaccessible dream that if you win the like lotto of life for no apparent reason, usually nothing to do with merit, if you win the lotto of life, you can access this.
And the majority of people receiving that message and adapting to it and falling into these kind of scams are people who, You know, think like I'm just a, you know, as Steinbeck said, a temporarily embarrassed millionaire.
Like, I'm about to, people are about to recognize that I'm actually really unique and cool.
So, the process of individualization, you know, and the process of selling the American dream as it gets thinner and thinner and less and less likely for the average human being, that's, you know, it's, it all goes together, I think.
Yeah.
And the misogyny is nothing new.
I mean, look, Snoop Dogg, Snoop Dogg was preaching misogyny 20, 25 years ago.
You know what I mean?
And like, he's still doing pretty well.
He's never stopped.
We've never stopped.
And we love Snoop Dogg.
Snoop Dogg is hosting all of our events now.
Never understood that, by the way.
Never understood why he and other rappers of that era just get a pass for their pretty overwhelming misogyny.
Just as an aside, but it's like, okay, we're just going to give them a pass.
It was a different time.
Whatever.
So, Will, what can we look forward to seeing in the future episodes of Extremely Normal?
Well, we're currently in production on a show.
I think I can talk about it, but I mean, I'm not going to get too into it, but it broadly looks at The Maha world, obviously very much in the news these days, make America healthy again, and, you know, kind of vaccine politics and that sort of thing.
That's what our next episode is going to be about.
I've got future ideas for episodes.
One of them would be looking at the rise of not just anti Semitism, but Holocaust denial specifically, as a, you know, like it's now a topic of conversation among young people in this country, right, who are sort of discussing the legitimacy of Holocaust denial.
And it's like, well, I thought we'd.
Decided that, you know, it's like apparently not like that's that's now being debated by young people.
And another idea we kind of have in the works is to look at the changing nature of discourse online and how what we're kind of phrasing as like rage debate has has become the norm.
Like these shows where you know you have sort of like one liberal against like 20 conservatives and then it's all aimed towards getting like a 15 second like viral clip of like so and so owns so and so and and and just how that is eroding our human ability to kind of debate and discuss things and it's just turning people.
Against each other.
And, you know, how, again, that used to be something that you'd occasionally see on the fringes.
And now it's just like, that's how people talk to each other at dinner parties about, did you see this?
You know, did you see this clip?
And that's now a political mainstream.
So, yeah, wherever it's something that was once extreme and has now become normal, like that's where we're after.
That's the sweet spot.
And I'd encourage any of your listeners who have good ideas or good topics to hit me up because I'm all ears.
Cool.
Fantastic.
We'll put a link to that in the show notes when our new episode is going to be released.
I mean, these documentaries take time to produce and to get out, but I mean, we're hoping to get something out in the next three weeks to a month is the ideal.
Yeah.
All right.
We'll be on the lookout for that.
Thanks so much for taking time to speak to us today, Will.
Understanding the Rat00:02:06
Thanks, Will.
Thank you, guys.
It's always a great conversation.
I appreciate it.
Yeah.
Always a fascinating discussion.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast.
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Your message, not to Obama or Brennan, but to directly James Comey today.
Yeah, I mean, I think that James Comey, you're going to go down in history as a former FBI director who tried to.
Stage a takeover of the United States of America and basically take down a duly elected president of the United States of America.
That's what he's going to be known as.
He is an evil, treasonous SOP, and he knows it.
I don't care how arrogant he can get, because he can get very arrogant, but that's what he is.
And it's not just him, but Comey, that's what he is.
He really is a person who thinks he can actually.
Do whatever he wants to do because he was in a position to do it.
And that's where the American people need to understand.
When you, we have to be very conscious of what it is that we are, who it is that we are putting into power inside of our government, state, you know, local, state, and federal.
Because these are the types of people that are in there now.
And Comey is at the nexus of it.
And he will be convicted.
But, you know, let's see if he helps expose some of these other names that you just mentioned.