Daniel and Jack respond to the Jan 6th 2021 attack/coup-attempt on the Capitol Building, Washington D.C. Content Warnings. * Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. From Jan 2021 onwards, patrons get exclusive access to one extra episode a month, plus other extra benefits. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 Episode Links/Notes: Robert Evans, "How the Insurgent and MAGA Right are Being Welded Together on the Streets of Washington, DC" https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2021/01/05/how-the-insurgent-and-maga-right-are-being-welded-together-on-the-streets-of-washington-d-c/ NY Times "The Daily" Georgia Runoffs Part 2. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/05/podcasts/the-daily/georgia-election-purdue-loeffler.html Nick Fuentes Stop The Steal DC Speech: https://www.bitchute.com/video/qLNtMz6yKUyO/ Full Livestream "Save America" Rally Jan 6, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ht20eDYmLXU Mother Jones,"Meet the Right-Wing Trolls Behind “Stop The Steal”" https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/11/stop-the-steal/ Ali Alexander claims he put together the January 6 rally with three Republican Congressmen. https://twitter.com/jason_paladino/status/1347943638203068417?s=20 Ali Alexander being terrible on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Onesecondname/status/1139298351369768960?s=20 Alex Jones says he paid $500,000 for rally that led to Capitol riot: https://twitter.com/Vicky_ACAB/status/1347799969609228289?s=20 Video of police officer assault by Stop the Steal rioters. https://twitter.com/joshscampbell/status/1347749675777011714?s=20 Eric Munchel of Nashville, TN. Zip Tie Guy One: https://twitter.com/AricToler/status/1347756693250330628?s=20 Larry Brock of Texas, Zip Tie Guy Two: https://twitter.com/AricToler/status/1347756693250330628?s=20 Footage from inside the Capitol during the coup. https://twitter.com/insidernews/status/1347646782659031043?s=20 BakedAlaska Inside Capitol Building. https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=aRdK0_1609982302 Kim Kelly, "Is the "QAnon SHaman" From the MAGA Capitol Riot Covered in Neo-Nazi Imagery?" https://t.co/rw5LEvWWbZ?amp=1 "Given his penchant for showing up to protests shirtless, face-painted, and sporting a horned helmet like some kind of racist Party City Viking who took a wrong turn and ended up at Burning Man, Angeli’s many tattoos are often on full display, including his large trio of Odinist symbols. He has a mjolnir, or Thor’s Hammer, on his stomach, an image of Yggdrasil, or Tree of Life, etched around his nipple, and most significantly, placed right above his heart, a valknut, or “knot of the slain,” an old Norse runic symbol turned recognized hate symbol that is popular among white supremacists. In addition, the mjolnir has become a symbol of identity among self-proclaimed “heathens” (which is often code for white supremacy-aligned pagans)." Talia Jane January 6 photodump. https://twitter.com/itsa_talia/status/1347215672133251078?s=20 "The National Justice Party Stands in Solidarity with the Uprising of January 6th." https://nationaljusticeparty.com/2021/01/07/the-njp-stands-in-solidarity-with-the-uprising-of-january-6th/ Betsy Phillips thread on January 6. "The first important thing to realize is that they won." https://twitter.com/AuntB/status/1347161090061463552?s=20 Megan Squire is quoted here about boogaloo plans to return for inauguration day https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/right-wing-extremists-vow-return-washington-joe-biden-s-inauguration-n1253546 Maggie Koerth, Authorities Tepid Response Not an Aberration https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polices-tepid-response-to-the-capitol-breach-wasnt-an-aberration/?ex_cid=story-twitter Talia Lavin, this isn't 1776 all over again, it's the reaction against Reconstruction https://www.thecut.com/2021/01/this-isnt-the-revolution-they-think-it-is.html Talia Lavin, When a Conspiracy is Deferred it Explodes https://newrepublic.com/article/160814/trump-protesters-attack-us-capital Robert Evans, Extremists were able to lay siege to the US Capitol because America's law enforcement ignored warnings of right-wing extremism for years https://www.businessinsider.com/capitol-siege-happened-because-police-ignored-right-wing-extremism-warnings-2021-1?r=US&IR=T Mike Davis, Riot on the Hill https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/riot-on-the-hill Melissa Gira Grant, This Isn’t an Insurrection. It’s an Alliance. https://newrepublic.com/article/160816/congress-mob-law-enforcement-alliance Right Wing Watch, Capitol Breach Preceded by Widespread Calls for Violence on Pro-Trump Social Media https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/%e2%80%8bcapitol-breach-preceded-by-widespread-calls-for-violence-on-pro-trump-social-media/ Neil Faulkner, Fascist Riot in Washington https://www.anticapitalistresistance.org/post/the-fascist-riot-in-washington QAnonAnonymous Podcast Episode https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/episode-125-coup-anon-feat-elle-reeve-eleanor-janega Citations Needed Podcast https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/us-media-incapable-of-criticizing-maga-mobs-without-evoking-racist-cliches-about-third-world Worst Year Ever Episodes https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-week-of-2021-is-going-well/id1478794003?i=1000504749630 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/happy-coup-year/id1478794003?i=1000504570156 Stuff They Don't Want You To Know podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-attack-on-dc-part-i-breaching-the-gates/id732915228?i=1000504755639
I'm Jack Graham, he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, about what he learned from years of listening to today's Nazis, white nationalists, white supremacists, and what they say to white nationalists, white supremacists, and what
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
And we're back with episode 77, and it's still not Tom Metzger part two.
I'm I'm sorry to have to tell you.
But it is a product of two primes, 7 and 11.
So, you know, there you go.
Maths joke.
Lovely.
Because, yeah.
That's all I have to offer you is math this week.
Yeah.
Well, that is STEM, so it's the most important thing, obviously.
It's the most important thing, yeah.
Clearly.
That's what you come here for.
I'm going to teach you calculus eventually, if we get to episode, you know, 2050 or something.
You'll know how to do integration.
That's my long-form goal.
There's something to look forward to, everybody.
I'm just trying to distract Jack at this point, I apologize.
I know what you're doing, don't worry.
Yeah, no, no, it's fine.
It's still not.
It's been a tough week.
It's been a tough week, the first week of 2021.
And if I'm a little boozier than usual, I apologize.
Tough in what way?
I can't imagine what you're referring to.
Can't imagine why.
Yeah, that's kind of what I was trying to say, which is it's still not Tom Metzger Part 2 because, yeah, stuff.
Which we're going to be talking about because this is the capital coup episode.
Not that it was really a coup.
Yeah.
It attempted coup.
Yeah, sort of, sort of.
It depends how you define coup.
The nth, the nth attempted coup of the last, you know, couple of months here in my country.
And probably the one that was the closest to success.
Well, you know, if they keep trying, they'll get it right eventually.
Yeah.
Well, you know, well, wait, wait till 2024.
That's the other answer.
We'll get there.
We'll get there.
It's OK.
It's fine.
But yeah, before we get into that, I just want to say hi to new followers and new patrons.
I think Daniel probably has had the same experience as I have, which is that since we did the last episode, lots of new people have been turning up, which is absolutely lovely.
Yeah, it turns out that when you give people an incentive to give you a dollar a month, they do so, which is nice.
And also, when terrible things happen, people tend to follow me on Twitter.
I get spikes in my Twitter follower count whenever something bad happens in the world.
It's like, oh, we need to be following you now.
That's how that works.
That's the other thing, yeah, because sometimes the news is so terrifying that people come and follow us, which is great, I like that.
People go, that guy might know a little bit of something that's going on here, and I'm like, not really, but thank you for the follow anyway, it's good.
We'll take what we can get.
But yeah, we still haven't recorded our first patron-only episode, but we're still planning to do that.
It's going to be a movie episode, that's going to be fun.
And we are going to get to Tom Metzger Part 2 at some point, but as I say, we've got to talk about the recent events in Washington DC.
But before we get to that, I believe we have some TRS news, is that right?
TRS Paywall news at that, and this is- The exclusive Top Flight stuff!
Yeah, the stuff!
I am working on, what I said was gonna be our first Patreon exclusive, was a look at some of the TRS Paywall content, and some old TRS stuff.
And this is kind of related to that, but they are very upset at the fact that I am sharing their paywall content, even with commentary outside of their paywall.
And they really only, I've said before that the TRS crew are, you know, they will talk about me Without naming me, but they will actually name me behind the paywall.
That's where they'll name me.
So that their hardcore audience knows not to go listen or they'll poison the well.
That will become a part of a future bonus episode, a near future bonus episode.
I was listening today to the Fashion of the Nation podcast from Wednesday, which is their paywall show, and their paywall shows typically are quote-unquote deep dives on bits of American history or kind of European history, where they get to just blame the Jews for a lot of stuff, as opposed to sort of more newsy-oriented ones they do for the main audience.
But they did like an hour and a half or so on the Capitol coup.
And then dove into a history of Richard the Lionheart, who... All right.
Well, yeah, it's a bunch of bullshit.
Anyway... No, really?
Yeah, yeah, no, it's a ton of bullshit.
And even, you know, like, as an American, I mean, you know, we do not get a ton of European history and British history in our kind of mainstream Like, high school history curriculum in the U.S.
Like, we get, you know, a little bit, but, you know, which king is which.
We basically get, like, the Magna Carta, and then King George, and then, like, oh, we're done with all of that.
Like, that's kind of all the British history that we get, or English history, or UK history that we get.
Yeah, George III's the last one you have to worry about.
Lucky you!
And then Winston Churchill shows up much later.
Winston Churchill shows up much later, but he's, like, kind of secondary to FDR.
Sounds about right.
They were both secondary to stuff.
They got into a bit on the Facts of the Nation episode, they got into a bit of the history around York Castle in 1190, and I'm wondering, just as the British man on this podcast, if that means anything to you.
No fucking idea.
Okay, yeah, this is this was kind of like the very early Pogrom of the Jews in England.
Oh, right.
Yeah.
Yeah, so And related to Clifford's Tower I'm not sure exactly what the what the kind of I guess Clifford's Tower is a part of the York Tower or whatever.
Anyway, this is all This isn't really part of what I'm going to play for you right now, but it does give you, it's the context, this is what they're kind of talking about.
And so, let's just play this little TRS Fascination clip.
And this is Jazz Hands McFeels, who has not been doxxed, but has been very loose with some details about his personal life lately, so I expect that's not going to be too much longer until somebody figures out who he is.
And James Alsop, I think, does show up at the end of this clip.
We're going to play this, and whenever they say, we're not in favor of genocide of the Jews, this is the clip that you should... I mean, this is completely ordinary stuff that they just say all the time behind the paywall, where the ordinary people can't get to it without paying into it.
Let's just play this little clip and then we'll come back.
Hang on a minute.
Let me just clarify.
They're definitely not in favor of genocide of the Jews, is that right?
No, they're definitely not.
Well, let's play it.
You don't mean there's a twist in this tale?
It's only 50 seconds long, so you don't even get a lot of context, but you don't really need it for this, so.
Okay.
But the title that I gave to this little clip is, Nip the Problem in the Butt.
So, you know, you can kind of see where this is going, maybe.
So, yeah.
It's good.
It shows that, well, it shows two things.
Not that they were totally base, because if they were totally base, they would have just built Clifford Towers, like, all over the countryside and put people inside of them.
They seem to they don't seem to understand the nature of the threat and I'm not going to do like hindsight 2020 on them but They could have done us all a very big favor and nipped this problem in the mmm-bud very early on, but instead they tried to work with them until they got finked and tricked, and then they got mad, but then ultimately didn't deal with the problem, and they would unfortunately pass the problem to some other European country.
We're gonna kick you out, you go to France, then you go to Germany, then you go here and there, and, you know, you have a new generation to fool each time.
So, yeah.
So my apologies, I clipped that before James Allsup shows up on that.
But that's Jazz Hands McFeels.
And what the story of Clifford's Tower in 1190 in the Pogrom of the Jews was that all of the Jewish people, about 150 people in York, were forced into this tower.
were threatened and they elected to kill themselves rather than to be burned alive inside the tower.
And there's some evidence that some number of them did not manage to kill themselves before they were burned alive and were actually burned alive.
And so while in the episode, just to be fair to our Nazi enemies here, they don't believe this is a true story.
They believe this is an exaggerated story, because of course they do.
Because this is the only standard thing that they have to say about any bad thing that white people have done in all of history.
It's like, well, that was just an exaggerated bit of nonsense that didn't actually happen.
The Jews are lying about this.
But...
They present this, Jazz Hands presents this as, well, you know, if they were really doing the right thing, they would have just built a bunch of these towers, rather than just expelling the Jews to other countries, because ultimately, if you expel from England, They just go to France, or they go to Germany, or they go to the Netherlands, or whatever.
And so really what England should have done in 1190 is just to nip this problem in the bud.
And if you're asking what that means, other than expel them from your country, and you think about the story of Clifford's Tower, which they pretend isn't real, but they're clearly saying should have been real.
I mean, I don't know.
Do I need to explain this further?
I mean, I don't know.
Not really.
These guys pretend that they're not doing this, and yet it is ridiculously easy.
I just ran into this randomly while I was listening to podcasts this afternoon.
In between prepping for this podcast, I was listening to other Nazi podcasts.
And literally they're just sitting there going like, yeah, I mean, yeah, you really could have just dipped this problem in the bud 1190 if they just killed all the Jews in England, it would have been fine.
It would have been great.
Yeah.
Um, yeah.
So, uh, so they are in favor of killing all the Jews.
I thought, yeah, I thought there was going to be a twist and it was, it was like, it was like an M. Night Shyamalan movie.
It was amazing.
It's not really a twist, it just turns out that people who call themselves fascists of the nation, who call themselves third positionists, who are holocaust deniers, and who think Hitler did nothing wrong, despite their protestations to the contrary, it's very easy to find them saying things like they actually think all the Jews should be murdered.
I mean, I don't know, it just seems, it's very...
Yeah, yeah.
They really do have a one-size-fits-all approach to all these things, don't they?
Which is just, it didn't happen, but it should have done.
It should have, yeah.
Exactly.
So yeah, congratulations.
They're going to be very mad at me for sharing more of their paywall content.
They're going to say, I didn't address the thing of why it's bad to kill all the Jews.
That's what they'll say.
That's right, we didn't offer a counter argument.
Why shouldn't we kill the Jews?
I just said they're saying we should kill the Jews.
But really, my thing is, they say they're not.
And I mean, if they would just admit that they are, I wouldn't have to make this point over and over again.
You know, so just say, yeah, we want to kill the Jews.
Like, just say it.
Yeah.
And, you know, makes it easier for me, then we can move on to do something else with our lives.
That's right.
Yeah.
Not that, of course, I think it's okay that they should say that, but, like, you know, just be honest about it.
Just stop lying.
Exactly.
That's all I'm really saying.
Stop lying.
Yeah.
And then we can all move on, as you say.
And wouldn't that be nice?
Yeah.
Anyway, that was our bit of TRS paywall content, which we're going to do until they get very angry at me over that.
Yeah, so future Patreon bonus content will be Sven just being very upset at the fact that I'm sharing their paywall content to the world.
Well, I'm not saying that annoying them is a good reason to do anything by itself, but it is.
Yeah, Sven says he's gonna find which account is mine on their paywall, which, that assumes that I only have access to one, by the way.
Ooh!
They're gonna figure out which account is mine and charge me double, which, you know, anyway.
They'll close you down and you'll hop to another account.
I will hop to another account.
Or I will ask one of their many fans just to give me the content, which, you know, they do show up in my DMs from time to time and are like, did you hear they were talking about you?
Yeah, it turns out, show of voice, your fans are really excited when you talk about me, and they make sure I know about it, so it's fine.
Anyway.
What a strange world it is.
We should talk about the coup now?
I was going to say, yes, speaking of which, the Capitol, we're recording this on the, I think it's the 10th where I am now, and it's... Yeah, it's the 9th where I am.
Saturday, January 9th, 2021.
About 8, 8.15 in the evening.
So we're a little bit... Events may change.
Events may change in the next two days or so before this gets released.
We're a little bit out of the, late out of the box with this.
You know, most people with podcasts have already done a couple of episodes about this now.
Well, you know, it's a thing, you know.
The problem that you and I ran into is that we live on opposite continents and so, you know, have to...
We have full lives and don't do this for a living.
Yeah, that's it.
If you want us to be quicker off the mark, give us more money, basically.
Give us the money to live in the same house.
I learned a long time ago, if you really want to get a consistent podcast schedule out, do it with someone you live with.
That's the easiest way.
Yeah, and then this could also be a kind of flat share comedy as well.
Yeah, it'd be The Odd Couple.
You know, with Nazis.
Yes, the old couple with conversations about Nazis.
Yeah.
But yeah, the capital coup.
Yeah, go.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
So this is, man, there's so much to say about this.
The whole, the whole thing that kind of goes on here and I don't know I guess I guess it's funny that like we didn't record too much in December And I was kind of working on other stuff for a while like since the election I'm kind of looking at other angles and a lot of this sort of like stop the steal Protest stuff.
It's not that I wasn't watching it, but I wasn't paying that close of attention to it because it's kind of like I Kind of took it as this kind of like MAGA We're going to show up and protest and nothing much is going to come of it, except for, you know, some street violence and stuff.
And I'm not like downplaying that, but like there were just other things that were kind of taking my attention away.
And I was focusing more on like the legal apparatus and the way that the sort of like the military and the Republican Party, et cetera, were playing with this, the sort of the Trump legal challenges and the sort of like batshit insane.
You know yeah stuff that was kind of coming out of Trump in terms of like challenging all this And so my angle kind of came at well the Republicans are taking it seriously the military is taking it seriously You know they're all very much even the media for the large part is is even the right right-wing media is kind of playing this to the We're done with Trump.
We don't need him anymore, and we're happy to take the loss for now and then come back in a few years.
It's not that I didn't think the Stop the Steal movement was major.
It's not that I didn't think it was important.
It was just kind of like, it was kind of on the back burner for me.
And I knew the January 6th protest at the Capitol was going to be kind of a big thing.
But I was a little bit caught blindsided with just how aggressive this ended up being.
Yeah, me too.
You know, I'm not proud of that.
I mean, it's just sort of like we all kind of have our little things we follow.
And I knew that Nick Fuentes had been kind of like parlaying himself as part of this, but I kind of took it as more him like grifting on the movement as a way of kind of putting himself closer to the inside of this kind of like far-right fringe of the Republican Party.
Which is true, but maybe, you know, it was kind of like one of those things of like, once I kind of saw what happened on the 6th, one of my things was, well, I need to be, I need to go back and start paying a little bit more close attention to Nick Fuentes.
So, definitely one of my plans for 2021.
I think the February episodes will be very Nick Fuentes focused, if that makes sense.
Fuentes February.
Flint is February is that fun?
Oh man.
Yeah, no, not so much.
Um, so The Stop the Steal movement was really is really kind of the brainchild of this guy Alec Alexander And I've got some I've got a piece from Mother Jones.
It kind of goes through some of the major figures that were involved in this movement or I kind of like I
Grifting on it and they end up being a bunch of like alt-right figures Like Jack Posobiec and Mike Cernovich and you know, it's kind of some of those other guys But um, Ali Ali Alexander kind of goes back in Republican politics It kind of French Republican politics all the way back to the Tea Party and he seems to be this person is kind of you know I think he's like 35 or so now and so he's been at this since his mid-twenties kind of always gravitating towards whatever is the
Kind of the demagoguery du jour of the day.
And what I wanted to do was to kind of use this and kind of the way that I want to frame this, because as you say, there have been a lot of people who have already done a lot of like really good work and kind of analyzing this and kind of talk about what was happening on the ground.
But I wanted to use this as a way of demonstrating the fact that the like what we're gonna see from the Republican Party in the next few years and that is there is this very clear and Overt bifurcation that is happening within the Republican Party.
Yeah, which has always kind of been a thing but the fact that Donald Trump will not go gently into that good night and Is essentially creating a very clear cleavage between the sort of Trump loyalist base and the more kind of quote unquote respectable tax cuts, you know, Chamber of Commerce style Republicans.
And, um, ideologically, there's not, like, there's not a huge, there's not a huge gap between, like, Donald Trump essentially has given the Republican Party everything that that kind of crew wanted, but has not given the base the things that really kind of excited them back in 2015 and 2016.
He has not really built a wall.
He has not really done You know, a lot of the more, like, as much as, like, sort of the racist policies have been, like, horrifying and terrible, he did not end, like, birthright citizenship.
He did not build, you know, a 2,000-mile border wall.
He didn't do a lot of that kind of stuff.
And so there are a lot of people who are really disenchanted and, in fact, are the people that I follow most within this kind of, like, the vestige of the alt-right and the vestige of this kind of dissident right, these kind of overtly National Socialist types.
Have kind of left behind Donald Trump and the Republican Party completely, for the most part.
But there is still a huge MAGA crowd, people who were, again, that kind of Republican base in 2016 and 2015, who really believe in him, who really believe in him as a person, who are completely disenchanted with what you and I might call reality.
Little things like that, yeah.
Little things like that.
So the way I want to start this, and you know, I apologize for kind of like giving us that kind of slightly exaggerated, you know, kind of elongated intro there, was to actually play a little clip from the New York Times Daily podcast.
It's called The Daily, and it's from, this episode is from the 5th of January, which was obviously the day before The attempted mass coup of the Capitol.
And the reason that this is interesting is because during this episode, they did a two-parter on the – so the Daily Podcast is a daily, like, usually about 30-minute podcast that The New York Times does.
And believe me, I'm not uncritically quoting The New York Times here, but there's some really interesting stuff here, and that's why I think it's important.
They did some good reporting, and I want to show it here, and I want to kind of talk about some stuff that they didn't necessarily get into.
No, it does happen occasionally, yeah.
It does.
So, on the 4th, they did release an episode about the Georgia runoff elections, and these were the senatorial Georgia runoff elections for the two Senate seats, which were too close to call on election night.
Which they had the kind of automatic runoff for and so on the fourth they did a an episode about They kind of followed around some of the Democratic operatives They interviewed Stacey Abrams and did some stuff kind of talking to people on the Democratic side about how they're how they see this kind of election occurring and then on the fifth they did an episode looking at the Republican side and about half of that is you know kind of Republican operatives knocking on doors and that sort of thing and
And then the other half, they actually interviewed someone who was, um, it's hard to kind of get a real clear kind of reading between the lines.
They found somebody who kind of had worked within the Republican Party, but who was nonetheless kind of more of a normal voter, somebody who wasn't deeply plugged into the party itself.
But who had – they found through because this woman who calls herself Amy had worked on some of the – like had manned the call center for kind of the stop the steal kind of stuff.
And had done some of the – some phone banking and stuff.
And presumably, that's kind of how they found her.
And they do about a 20-minute interview with kind of interpolations and sort of, like, it's really interesting.
But what it does is describe the process by which this woman, who was from New York originally, who grew up as kind of this, like, kind of generic Democrat, Moved to Georgia and sort of becomes this fairly standard Republican and who has kind of like let her brain devolve into what I've been calling Fox News brain and just sort of accepts a lot of these facts.
And so I'm playing about three minutes of this, which I have clipped slightly and kind of consolidated.
I actually I have put a link to this in the show notes.
I would recommend you listen to this whole episode because the extended clip is actually really interesting.
So what I'm going to do is play this and then we'll talk about it briefly about kind of some of the stuff that's said in this in this bit if that's okay with you.
People would just beside themselves upset.
This has been stolen.
How could we let this happen?
What are the Republicans doing?
We are furious.
We need to act.
We need to get moving.
And in between those emotionally wrenching calls, she said she did talk to a couple of people who were reporting things that to her ear sounded suspicious, like a male poll worker from a county in a different part of the state.
They stuck him on a chair outside the room.
I'm saying everything that was said to me four years ago that I didn't like.
It's not fair.
It's, you know, it's not a legitimate election.
I'm saying everything that was said to me four years ago that I didn't like.
It's not fair.
It's, you know, it's not a legitimate election.
It was so confusing to Amy.
Are we drinking the Russia Kool-Aid like they did, you know?
Like, is this okay?
Russia, Russia, Russia!
Fraud, fraud, fraud, you know?
And I say this to myself every day.
This is what people on the left were going through the day after Trump won.
For days, every time she turned on her television or picked up her phone, she saw some new report that enraged her.
She listened to hearings where lawyers got up and made what sounded to her like very credible and specific accusations.
66,000 underage people voted.
Over 10,000 dead people voted.
2,600 felons voted.
But she told me the thing that finally sealed the deal for her was that press conference that Rudy Giuliani had, where he brought out a huge stack of signed affidavits from Trump supporters alleging that they'd seen fraud.
The affidavits that he wouldn't show, those ones?
I see what you're saying, but yes, he would not show them.
However, to me, I wouldn't show them either.
Amy thinks it can be dangerous to be a Trump supporter.
People have been doxxed.
People have been harassed.
People have been hurt.
In fact, earlier, she'd asked me not to use her husband's name.
He's a data guru who works in tech.
I'd like to keep him out of it.
There's a big fear on our side that we could lose our jobs for being... You didn't know?
especially certain companies.
He used to work for a company out of Silicon Valley, and he was terrified.
If I was active, he would lose his job.
Has conspiratorial kind of thinking grown over the last four years?
Yeah.
And that's because of two things, in my opinion.
Number one, the media, as I've harped on.
And number two, the fact that so many of these conspiracies have come out over the years.
It's almost impossible not to believe them.
It gets almost easier every time.
As for Georgia's runoff elections on January 5th... I have zero confidence in my vote counting on January 5th.
Zero confidence.
And so I think the thing that I come away with, and which may not be as completely clear from the three minutes I played for you, is I think there is this thought that people who get into the kind of conspiracy theories, or get into the QAnon stuff, or the stop the steal, or believe that the election was stolen, who kind of end up kind of enraptured in this kind of Fox Newsiverse.
are, you know, stupid, ignorant hillbilly, you know, etc.
I mean, I think there is a kind of classist thing that kind of comes along with that.
Yeah.
And I think what, what was not, I mean, not surprising to me, and I don't think it's surprising to I think a lot of our listeners necessarily.
But what I think needs to be emphasized is that this woman is She is able to, she is aware that people think she's crazy, right?
For believing that the election was stolen.
Yeah.
And I mean, you know, in parts of this interview, she talks about like, Dominion Systems is like, you know, actively stealing votes and like, she lays out some fairly concrete Conspiracist nonsense, which, you know, kind of comes which which is, you know, completely, you know, like not justified at all.
Like even in the clip I shared with you, she's talking about, oh, 66,000 underage voters, which there's no evidence of that.
But she's believing the the messaging that's given to her by sources that she thinks are reliable.
And the reason that she thinks that Fox News and some of these other sources are reliable is because She believes that the mainstream media, quote unquote, like CNN and MSNBC, et cetera, are not telling the full truth about Trump and are not are kind of in the bag for Democrats.
But I think certainly with MSNBC, I think there is a kind of – I think even on the left where we kind of call it MSDNC, right?
Where there is this kind of – Rachel Maddow is essentially the voice of the Democratic National Committee.
That's not exactly a controversial point.
That said, there's a difference between what Rachel Maddow does and what Fox News, even on a good day, does.
And in the sense that even a DNC talking point is much closer to the truth than whatever Fox News is spewing.
It's certainly much closer to the truth than, you know, sort of the even friendlier stuff from Newsmax to One American News or Epoch Times or kind of whatever is spewing.
That said, the reason that I think, the reason that I'm playing that now, the reason that we're talking about it is that It demonstrates...
The power of this kind of narrative, this kind of, well, I like Donald Trump.
I saw him speak.
He said some things that I didn't think anybody else was saying.
And I don't consider myself a racist, and I don't really support all that kind of stuff, but I think he'll bring jobs back, or I think he'll do this, or I think he'll do that.
He won't get us into foreign wars.
And people who are not as deeply kind of plugged into political life, people who have not been reached out to adequately by the left, you know, it is a failure of the left.
And I don't mean just liberals.
I mean the left to not, you know, actively reach out.
It's a failure of unionization.
It's a failure of all this kind of thing that there is no kind of counterpoint to this narrative in a lot of people's lives.
Right.
And if this is sort of the voice of a normie, of a normal person who is vaguely kind of connected to Republican politics, who has, you know, at least a sort of justification for the things that they believe, but who is not someone who is going to go to the Stop at least a sort of justification for the things that they believe, but Who is not going to, you know, but this is kind of like the normal adoration.
Attitude of someone who is a fan of Donald Trump and who you know watches Fox News every day this helps to explain how Demagogues and how these kind of far-right figures and how?
you know, the Stop the Steal protest, Ali Alexander is able to hype up this reality and able to hype up this belief within people, within this group of people that this election has been stolen, that the Democrats are acting in this overtly fraudulent way in order that the Democrats are acting in this overtly fraudulent way in order to put their person in charge and to destroy Donald Trump just because they hate Donald Trump as a person and not for kind of any other kind of ideological reason beyond they
And so if you do believe that Donald Trump is out there kind of fighting for you as the little guy or, you know, kind of standing for your values or whatever, and the Democrats are, you know, trying to induce full communism on the United States, which you and I know is ridiculous, it's,
It helps to get into that mindset and to understand that, like, there is a reason that these people believe this, and that this is the kind of normal operating mindset of a huge percentage of that 74 million people who voted for Donald Trump in November, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
And it does illuminate why, for instance, I think it's something like, I can't remember the percentage, but it's a huge percentage of Republicans believe that the Crowds assault on the Capitol building was, you know, justified, was fine, was a good thing.
There have been a couple of different polls and they vary slightly based on, I mean, it's, you know, the early polls were like something like 56% of Republicans believed that the, you know, the Capitol was justified.
I think that's probably an overstatement, the real number is probably closer to 20-25%, but that's still like a huge number of people, right?
It's still a huge number of people.
And, you know, if they actually believe these things, if they actually believe that an election has been stolen by people who want to take their freedoms away and control the media and are covering the whole thing up, etc.
Then, yeah, you can understand why they feel that way and why a certain sliver of that group are going to be driven to the point where they, aside from the actual sort of far-right people that were there, The MAGA people, you know, they're going to turn up to try to do something about it, however inchoate and ill-formed their thoughts about what they're going to do are.
You can understand how they get to that point.
It does kind of beg the question, which is why they believe in Donald Trump in the first place, but I think that's probably well outside of our scope.
Well, I mean, I think that's, you know, there is a, you know, it's weird that like American media is so, and sort of American politics is so, You know, one side or the other, it's you're a Democrat or Republican, you believe in one or the other.
And I think a lot of people, there is this kind of tendency to triangulate a bit and kind of say, well, I kind of take some of one and some of the other.
And so, you know, the Democrats, I believe in the Democrats on some side and also like the Republicans, maybe they're all corrupt and
Like, they are all corrupt, I don't disagree with that, but this sort of, like, need for this kind of, like, false balance does play into the way that people respond to this stuff, and it does play into, like, it's an active strategy of Fox News, it's to say, we're fair and balanced, we're the center, we're not even giving you the right-wing talking point, we're giving you the centrist talking point, as opposed to those far-left radicals over at CNN, right?
Which, I mean, you know, you and I, I think, Our audience would recognize that CNN is at best a center-right news network, but that's not the way it's seen within the US media landscape, right?
We don't have a left-wing network in this country.
Sure, but that does still beg the question as to why a certain section of the population are watching Fox News and believing that's the center instead of watching CNN and believing that's the center.
Well, I think that, I mean, I think that the reality is that, you know, there are, you know, increasingly, and this is something that I've kind of run into since 2016 in particular, is the number of people who
Really have kind of done the what kind of gets called the Blue Maga thing of, you know, kind of imbuing MSNBC and Rachel Maddow with the same kind of uncritical acceptance that some people on the right will treat with with Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson.
Oh, sure.
Yeah, there is this.
And that's not something that's necessarily new.
But I think particularly with the election of Donald Trump, Um, the kind of blaming Trump and Trump alone for these problems for the kind of systematic problems becomes a thing that is very financially relevant for, uh, sort of a lot of the what we call the mainstream media, you know, the kind of the centrist media, um, MSNBC, the Washington Post, New York Times and, um, They do end up kind of like saying, well, Trump is the only problem and Trump is the thing.
And again, we on the left to kind of say, uh, well, no, they're like big systemic problems that are not going to be solved by getting rid of Trump.
And in fact, if you're focusing wholly on Trump, then you're actually kind of getting in the way of solving those problems.
Um, but that's how we get Joe Biden.
So, uh, you know, um, but, but I think that, uh, you know, Again, I guess I guess you're right.
It is slightly outside of our remit here but like watching this for the last few years and kind of watching the way that the political Like the way that the news be and the kind of the political mainstream is kind of shifted in this direction of just kind of becoming Increasingly focused on like this one personage of Donald Trump in this one figure who sort of represents Either great good or great evil, regardless of any kind of other larger structural thing.
I mean, it is not good.
It's not good.
No, it's definitely not good.
I don't know about this woman.
I haven't heard this episode that you've presented the clips from.
But it's interesting, you know, she's displaying a persecution complex, which is very characteristic of the people that support Trumpism.
She thinks she's going to lose her job and her husband's going to lose his job just for being a Trump supporter.
I'm not aware of that being a huge phenomenon in the United States.
And this is a woman in Georgia.
Just to be clear, in deep red, deep south Georgia, who thinks she's going to lose her job if people think she supports Donald Trump?
So anyway, please continue.
She thinks it's dangerous to be a Trump supporter.
She is convinced that the media is, I mean it sounds from the clip anyway, that she's convinced the media is
I mean you see this this is one of the problems because I would agree the media does cover up all kinds of shit But it's not working in the way that she's obviously thinking and it's not they're not they're not You know, they're not covering it up in a conspiratorial sort of way It's well, you know, it's it's it's Chomsky and the propaganda model with it with a few add-ons, you know from our perspective, but Everybody go read manufactured consent.
Yeah, but she's She talks about the Russia Kool-Aid.
I would argue she's got a bit of a point there as well.
There's no doubt Russia did try to interfere in the election and Russia is a pretty nefarious actor on the world stage.
I've got no time for Putin.
And absolutely, Russia has meddled in US politics and US elections in a corrupt and gangsterist way.
On the other hand, some of the stuff that, well, I mean, you've mentioned Rachel Maddow a few times.
Some of the stuff that Rachel Maddow has been coming out with about Russia and Russian conspiracies to destroy the United States, it's unhinged.
So, you know, I would agree with a lot of what she's saying.
But it's got this twist where it's turned into this, you know, and that's my question.
Why is her perception of these things, of injustice in society and an unreliable media, and various other things that are common to Trumpism, which kind of, in a way, if you squint at them, if you change their reference, etc., they've got a point.
Why is it that they're trained on this object instead of another?
Why is it that they're trained on supporting Trump?
Well, and I think it ultimately comes down to the fact that Trump serves things that resonate with people like that because of their position in the world, their social position, their class position, their racial position.
I assume this woman's white.
Yeah, she's white, she's a mom, she works.
So, like, the way they enter the segment is, like, it's – she was, like, wearing, like, elf ears and, like, an elf costume and giving, like, presents to the children at her son's school.
But couldn't hug the children because of COVID risk.
Like, she's sort of this, like, very dedicated, like, house mom.
She's, like, an independent real estate agent or – no, an independent sales person.
Right.
There you go.
Which can mean a whole lot of things, you know.
So there is a class positionality, which I didn't include in the clip.
Again, I recommend that people go and listen to the whole thing.
I think the whole thing is actually pretty fascinating.
And I included a link to it in the show notes.
You can go listen to it very easily.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that's perfect.
You can't be too schematic about these things, obviously, but the Trump support, the base of Trumpism is that kind of middle layer of people, people in the squeezed middle, and generally speaking, white people who have this feeling of persecution and lost opportunity and lost privilege.
Because they're living in a world that has been in some form of slow-motion crisis for pretty much their entire lives, and they're also threatened by... Certainly my entire life.
I mean, she's probably about my age, so yeah.
And they're threatened by the encroachment of people that want justice, and they perceive things like Black Lives Matter, etc., as a threat to their You know, their position in the world.
It's basic to this positionality, this middle class, stroke petty bourgeois, white suburban, middle class, settler position in the world.
So that, I think, is ultimately where we get the answer to why Trump.
Because what Trump is saying, the content of Trumpism serves, by serving that feeling of resentment and threatened privilege, it serves ultimately that feeling about the world, doesn't it?
Yeah, and there's a, I mean, again, stuff that I didn't necessarily include, that I didn't include in that clip, but which is in the kind of larger context, is she's from New York originally.
Her parents were sort of like mainstream Democrats because, hey, the Democrats are for the working people.
This is how she describes her background.
There may be some myth-making there.
I'll take her at her word for the purposes of this podcast episode is that like her dad kind of said, we're Democrats because the Democrats are for the working people.
This would have been, you know, back in the 80s or whatever, when there was a stronger kind of union membership and the Democrats were more closely aligned with that kind of that side of.
Society, right?
She moved to Georgia something like 20 years ago and it kind of sounds like as she she just kind of accepted the larger kind of cultural mores of the people that she lived around and like I would be fascinated to either talk to this woman or to to listen to the kind of the unedited episode because I would you know it sounds like it's a very
Good interview the the the interviewer does Kind of question her in several places or kind of like interject kind of like factual stuff and kind of intermission from time to time which Challenges some of the things that she's saying so like they it does do a pretty good job of kind of like You know looking at her Treating her both as a person and as someone who is clearly wrong and very fundamental things but
I'd be interested in knowing, you've been in Georgia since 2000 or so, since the beginning of the Bush years.
What's your religious background?
How did you feel about George W. Bush?
How did you feel about the Iraq War?
How did you feel about Obama?
Did you vote for Obama?
There's so much that gets left on the cutting room floor here.
If you just kind of cut from, I moved to Georgia in 2000, I kind of became a Republican, and then blah blah blah in 2020, I'm a big time Republican getting more and more into Fox News kind of personality.
She also describes kind of having conflicts with people that she knows at work.
Who are kind of more democratically, you know, inclined, which is its own kind of problem.
Again, let's not lean into thinking the Democrats are blameless or anything, but, like, there is a, I don't know, there's a tension.
There's a tension that you kind of get from that, and I think there's a deeper story to this woman.
And I'm not, like, I'm not blaming, I'm not trying to use her as a As a scapegoat and I'm not trying to, you know, I'm trying to use this person and this kind of mindset and I'm trying to use that audio as a bit of trying to explain.
How otherwise very reasonable people who are plugged into this disinformation network, who are plugged into Fox News, who are plugged into this kind of like right-wingosphere, believe that their country is being taken away from them by the Democratic Party, by Joe Biden, who is a fundamentally A fraudulent person.
And also, I mean, I'm going to play a clip from Donald Trump speaking at the rally on January 6th here in a second, but if I say to someone like that, and I work with people who are Republicans, I know people in my day-to-day life, You know, through friends and family, etc, etc, who are Republicans, who voted for Donald Trump, who voted for Donald Trump twice.
I guarantee you that's true of just about anybody living in the United States outside of like some very, very blue areas.
If I were to say to her and say, you know, well, look, Donald Trump is, like, super fucking racist, and look at all the things he's said.
It's also very easy to point to, well, yeah, but Joe Biden was, like, in favor of segregation in the 70s.
He was best friends with Strom Thurmond.
Like, he literally spoke at Strom Thurmond's funeral.
You know, like he has like you can point to equally as many statements made by Joe Biden, which are just as fucking racist, right?
And like, you know, there's a lot of kind of hand wringing among the liberal commentary at that.
Donald Trump got two or three percent more of the African-American vote in the Hispanic vote in 2020 than he got in 2016.
And I think there's a very clear like answer that's just like, well, You know, maybe Joe Biden is kind of uniquely bad on these issues, right?
You know, there are very good reasons to go, like, better the devil I know.
And I don't necessarily, I don't agree with that.
I think that it's better to vote for the Democrat, even if the Democrat is Somewhat.
Like, I think Joe Biden is better than Donald Trump, but I think there are reasons to vote for the Democrat regardless.
But at the same time, like, there are very good reasons to not want to vote for Joe Biden, and these are legitimate things that maybe we shouldn't have put Joe Biden in that position.
Anyway... Well, this is it.
If this woman does come from a family background where they voted Democrats because the Democrats were the party of the working man, she might very well feel that the Democrats have abandoned the working man.
And you can question the extent to which they were ever actually for the working man, but if you put that to one side...
Yeah, yeah, the Democrats fucking did abandon the working man!
They've shelved it!
There was certainly a much closer relationship between the Democrats and at least trade unions and the AFL-CIO, etc.
Up until basically Bill Clinton was elected like that was kind of the the sea change was right about then like up and up into the mid and late 80s there was still a Pretty strong kind of relationship and then once kind of Clinton and the DNC and the new left Democrats kind of came in That all that got crushed.
It was just you know, it was over.
It was neoliberalism all the way Neoliberalism, exactly.
It's a neoliberal party.
That's the problem.
Neoliberal capitalist party.
And, you know, this woman, as many of these people do, in this sort of middle layer, she probably still thinks of herself as, you know, a working person.
And, of course, there's a sense in which people in the middle class, even petty bourgeois people, are working people, but it's not the working class in that sort of sense.
And what's happened there is that they've, that layer of people have become detached from that class.
And that class, broadly speaking, understands, you know, particularly like the black working class.
Very, very clearly understands the threat posed by Donald Trump as opposed to the threat posed by Joe Biden, because Joe Biden's not a friend of the workers, but Donald Trump poses a unique threat.
And ultimately, you know, well, I mean, it's no surprise that I'm going to track it all back to class, is it?
Sorry, I keep wanting to move forward, but it's a fascinating conversation, and I think it's worth having.
Like, you know, if you're this woman, and you've also been fed the – again, sort of the Fox News, kind of the right-wing-averse lies, and even the Democratic Party will kind of treat – they've accepted this kind of basic logic that, well, you know, more capitalism and more free enterprise, quote-unquote, and more of this.
Improves the economy and so while like, you know, you don't need a union because ultimately we're just gonna cut taxes and cut regulations and everything's gonna grow that much faster and your wages will go up and like people particularly younger people are Rejecting that more and more and this is part of what we're gonna get into here in a second.
But I You know, people within that kind of class position, people who are my age, who the economy treated better than the economy treated me, are kind of like, hey, I'm doing fine.
And, you know, hey, better economy, I can sell more, I don't have to deal with so many rules, my employer thinks it's great.
My employer probably sent me an email that said, like, go out and vote, and remember to vote for pro-business candidates, which they're not supposed to do, but they will definitely do.
It totally happens.
Again, we could talk about unionization, but unionization sucks for most people in the United States.
The reason it sucks is because most unions have their hands tied by regulations.
They've been crushed over and over and over again.
A giant.
I mean, that's an overwhelming problem, you know, because you tell people, I mean... Democrats are not going to change that.
Joe Biden's not going to change that.
He's not.
Of course, Donald Trump isn't either, but Donald Trump will talk about bringing the jobs back, etc.
Yeah, he'll talk about it, and Joe Biden will as well, but they trust Donald Trump to do it more than Joe Biden, not because Donald Trump is actually going to be better at it, but because
A long history of ideological, you know, manufacturing of consent within both parties has convinced the majority of the American people, particularly in this kind of middle upper class, particularly in this kind of frame, that the Republicans are quote-unquote better on the economy because they know how the economy works, because they're not going to create big government, etc., etc., etc.
And while that's all a bunch of complete bullshit, which you and I know, and I think most of our audience knows, that is absolutely endemic to the way that Americans think about these things.
And we have to sort of start challenging those basic assumptions before we can even begin to reverse course on this, right?
I mean, again, just one more aside, I had somebody in my house, I had a repair person in my house doing some work because there was some stuff that I didn't feel myself competent to do.
He made a very good wage.
He made better wages than I did that day, I assure you.
And I asked him, hey, are you a part of a union?
And he's like, oh no, the union guys, like, they're not allowed to do this and that and the other, and I can kind of go in and do the thing and I make more money, etc.
And, like, you want to argue, but at the same time, I mean, how do you argue with that, ultimately, without kind of challenging that kind of, like, we have to start, kind of start at a more, like, basic level before we can kind of begin to have that conversation.
So, we are far afield.
From the coup.
You know, the problems of unionization are not the problems of this podcast, but I wanted to go through this because I think it's important to understand the background that leads to, like, it's not just about like a couple, like a handful of hotheads created this situation in which They could get a bunch of Nazis to come out and do this.
That wasn't the thing.
This is a mass movement because it's built on, like, decades of ideological work and misinformation that comes from the largest news and media outlets in the country almost universally, right?
Without any kind of, like, pushback from a more left-wing voice.
And I think that's essential to kind of understand how this thing happened.
So let's let's move forward here and I'm going to one of the things that happened on January 6th was that there was about a four hour event in which many people within the Donald Trump It's bandy universe spoke including Donald Trump and I did not watch the whole thing.
I included a link to the kind of Bloomberg News Livestream event from on YouTube.
So if you want to watch the whole thing, you can.
It's a bunch of nonsense.
But I did want to include this bit from Donald Trump speaking on the day on January 6th before – significantly before the actual sort of like capital coup.
So let's listen to – for the first and hopefully last time on this podcast, let's listen to a bit of Donald Trump speak.
Oh, great.
And my apologies.
My apologies to the audience and to Jack.
And I was told by the real pollster's.
We do have real pollsters.
They know that we were going to do well and we were going to win.
But I was told if I went from 63 million, which we had four years ago, to 66 million, there was no chance of losing.
Well, we didn't go to 66.
We went to 75 million.
And they say we lost.
We didn't lose.
And by the way, does anybody believe that Joe had 80 million votes?
Does anybody believe that?
For years, Democrats have gotten away with election fraud and weak Republicans, and that's what they are.
There's so many weak Republicans, and we have great ones.
Jim Jordan and some of these guys, they're out there fighting.
The House guys are fighting.
But it's incredible.
Many of the Republicans, I helped them get in.
I helped them get elected.
I helped Mitch get elected.
I helped... I could name...
Twenty-four of them, let's say.
I won't bore you with it.
And then all of a sudden you have something like this, and it's like, oh, gee, maybe I'll talk to the president sometime later.
No, it's amazing.
They're weak Republicans.
They're pathetic Republicans.
And that's what happens.
If this happened to the Democrats, there'd be hell all over the country going on.
There'd be hell all over the country.
But just remember this.
You're stronger.
You're smarter.
You've got more going than anybody.
And they try and demean everybody having to do with us.
And you're the real people.
You're the people that built this nation.
You're not the people that tore down our nation.
The weak Republicans, and that's it, I really believe it, I think I'm going to use the term, the weak Republicans, you got a lot of them, and you got a lot of great ones, but you got a lot of weak ones.
They've turned a bly eye, even as Democrats enacted policies that chipped away our jobs, weakened our military, threw open our borders, and put America last.
Did you see the other day where Joe Biden said, I want to get rid of the America first policy.
What's that all about?
Get rid of?
How do you say I want to get rid of America first?
Even if you're going to do it, don't talk about it, right?
Unbelievable what we have to go through, what we have to go through, and you have to get your people to fight.
And if they don't fight, we have to primary the hell out of the ones that don't fight.
We primary them.
We're going to, we're going to let you know who they are.
I can already tell you, frankly, Wow, it's inspiring.
It really is.
To hear such a great orator.
I've got chills.
Well, interesting.
I mean, you and I are laughing at this, right?
But that is more energized than I've seen Donald Trump in a speech.
In a couple of years, right?
This sounds more like what he sounded like in 2015 or 2016.
He's energized.
He has enemies again that he is actively fighting against.
He is calling them weak Republicans.
There are some good Republicans, but most of them, they're weak.
They're, you know, I am strong.
I am, you know, you are the good people.
You're my people.
And I mean, he's been calling out Republicans.
I mean, he called out Mike Pence in the speech, who he wanted to do the kind of bullshit legal argument.
Yeah.
That would return the electors to the states and let the legislatures decide, which any legal expert will tell you is like, at best, a dubious proposition, despite, you know, that there was this sort of legal conspiracy theory among the far right that this was the thing that he was allowed to do.
He heavily criticized Brian Kemp, who is the governor of Georgia, who signed up, who, you know, was kind of a Trumpist Republican, who signed off on allowing the electors, the Joe Biden electors, to be seated to the Electoral College.
Donald Trump has taken Must have been very galling for Brian Kemp to be called out by Donald Trump after everything he's done to chuck black people off the voter rolls in Georgia.
Well, but that's a standard Republican issue, right?
And here's kind of the thing.
When we did the Trump Loses episode a few weeks ago, I kind of looked at that and kind of went, look, he doesn't have the support of the Republican Party.
He doesn't have support of Fox News.
He doesn't have the support of the military.
He doesn't have support.
And so this is going to kind of go nowhere because None of the people in any position of authority are supporting this, right?
Unlike in 2000, in which it's one state, it's super, super close, and it's very easy for them, because they happen to be ahead in the voting, in sort of the initial count, so you can just stop the recount, and then sort of declare yourself the winner, and the Supreme Court swung their way.
They rely on this visage of respectability in order to maintain their sense of authority.
And what Donald Trump, in his sort of raw form, does is to deny them that.
What Donald Trump does is to, you know, kind of knock over the table of cards.
and spew everything everywhere and say like, "No, this is the way I want to do it and I won." And because there is a kind of presumption within this kind of far right media sphere that will kind of like play along with him and that will support him because of ratings and this isn't even on the right wing, this is NBC and CNN and all the other things, they will play his clips and then they will like kind of vaguely go, "Well, both sides, etc."
But like kind of treat him as this kind of figure of Respectability kind of by nature because that's how they maintain their access Because they're willing to do that and because he has kind of had that Opportunity so long because he's had that advantage for so long.
He kind of expects to still get it but You know, reasonable people who are educated in these things kind of look at the vote totals and they look at, well, look, there are four states.
You've got to flip.
And the numbers are larger than you're going to get from just a simple recount.
Like, this is not something that, like, this is just going to look like nonsense if we try to overturn all this.
Like, it lays bare the power play if we overturn all of this.
And we will suddenly seem illegitimate and we will not be able to actually do the things that we want to do.
We will lose this kind of this kind of this kind of sense of legitimacy, which they don't have now because they're suppressing votes because the system is fundamentally corrupt.
But they maintain by pretending to have this air of it.
Right.
And so what they do is they look at the numbers, they look at the writing on the wall and go, look, Donald Trump is done.
We cut him loose, we cover our asses, and we move on, you know?
And we'll get him back again in a couple of years because that's how the game is played.
That's just how the Republicans and Democrats, they just swing back and forth, they do the thing, whoever's in power, and actually it benefits them in some ways to not be in power because they're not responsible for anything.
I think the Democrats are going to be really upset now that they've actually happened to win both of those Senate runoff seats.
Now they actually have to pretend to do something for at least the next 18 months.
Yeah.
And they are not gonna like that.
No, they're not.
Yeah, like, Joe Biden is gonna, like, change the fucking world.
But Donald Trump doesn't see it that way, because, like, he's ultimately only interested in himself, right?
Yeah.
And so he'll go out there and he will do the thing of like, no, this is stolen from me.
And I think based on that hour-long audio clip that was shared from the meeting he had, Um where he was from from Georgia where he's like saying I need I need 11,270 votes or whatever exactly Just overturn that like he believes that he that this is stolen from.
Oh, yeah.
I think this is a pose I think he actually believes that it's stolen from him One of the lines that like you heard from that clip is you know Does anybody really believe that Joe Biden got 80 million votes?
How could Joe Biden this boring guy nobody cares about how could he get 80 million votes and it's like 80 million people hated you that much, that's how you get 80 million votes, you know, that's the real answer, right?
With the proviso that, you know, believe just means something different for Trump and people like him, I agree.
I'm convinced that he believes, quote unquote, believes it, yeah.
Right, yeah, no, absolutely.
Again, all of this plays into how this thing happened, because then what happens is Alexander and other kind of grifter alt-right figures, these kind of fringe-y figures who want to align themselves with the Trump movement, who are perfectly fine being shit on by Republican establishment figures, because they were never going to be in those circles anyway, because they're the fringe right.
Attach themselves to Trump and attach themselves to this movement and attach themselves to stop the steal partly to kind of bolster their own Bonafides partly to fill their coffers, which I think is kind of part of the thing with Trump Anyway, he raised more money Since the election than they did before the election.
Oh, yeah, he's raised like 300 million dollars To like fight the kind of legal battles in terms of stop the steal and that's really gonna go off to pay his Deutsche Bank creditors eventually, but So he's drifting off of his own people.
That's all Donald Trump is doing at this point I mean, I'm sure he continues to want he wants to continue to be president I'm sure he believes that he should continue being president and But at the same time, it is ultimately about what's good for Donald Trump.
He's not actually trying to fight for the people who voted for him in any way.
No, no.
And in fact, the fact that he threw the money under the bus at the first opportunity.
We could do a whole episode about the response from the actual Nazis I follow from this, from the January 6th thing.
It's a completely, another fascinating thing where they've completely been like, Wouldn't it, like, they believe that the invasion of the Capitol building was this amazing thing that happened, and this astonishing thing that should have happened earlier, and wouldn't it be nice if it was in the service of someone who wasn't this complete dipshit narcissist, Donald Trump, who wasn't actually going to do anything.
They say he's, like, beholden to Israel, and that's why, you know, the thing.
But, you know.
Right.
If Donald Trump were a more effective fascist, he would have been leading the charge.
He would have been in front of this group.
He would have charged in with them and demanded that this be stopped.
Like you can imagine.
This is the dry run for what the really dangerous one is going to do in four or eight or twelve years, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And I think that's what... I'm sorry we're not talking much about the actual... We are going to talk a bit about the capital, the invasion itself.
We're coming at it from an oblique angle, it's fine.
If you want, like, the basics, there's plenty of places to go, don't worry.
Right, right.
Like, this was the angle I took on it.
I wanted to kind of come at it slightly differently, and I wanted to put it in this cultural context, because I think this is not something that I'm seeing from other people covering this.
So that's why I'm doing this.
So that's what Donald Trump was saying, and he goes through a big, like, 20 minutes of that speech.
If you listen to the whole thing, which you shouldn't, it's... you shouldn't.
He goes through and like recites all the 66,000 underage voters and 10,000 dead voters here and 17,000 ballots over and over again and any one of these things would be more than the vote count totals and the differences and I won and really it's all just a fake that Joe Biden that the Democrats have just stolen this from us and superficially he's very convincing because he's got all these numbers that he's spewing and he's got all this stuff that he's saying and He wouldn't be just lying about this, right?
He wouldn't just- You couldn't just come out with numbers that weren't real.
I mean, come on, they're numbers, for God's sake!
And in fact, Amy, in the Daily Podcast, which I shared earlier, she kind of uses that same logic.
It's like, well look, these are professional people, right?
These are elected officials.
They wouldn't just do this.
They wouldn't just say things that weren't true, just for their own benefit.
No, they would.
That's exactly what they're doing.
That's exactly... yeah, they did.
Yeah, no, this is complete nonsense.
It doesn't have any reality.
Like, you know, when the advert tells you that the particular sugary orange drink it's trying to sell you makes... a glass of it makes your child, you know, 97.4% more alert during the school day, that's science, because you couldn't just make that up.
You know, that's too... You couldn't just make that up, or you certainly couldn't, like, pay Four out of five dentists, all five of them were paid by the Society for High Fructose Corn Syrup Improving Children's Teeth, and four of the five of them actually agreed with our product.
The fifth one had a conscience at the last minute, but that's the logic, right?
Yeah, there's a reason grifters come out with numbers and use spurious rigor, you know.
Because it sounds convincing, and people do feel that way.
No, absolutely.
And if that's an authority figure, I mean, I don't... Again, there's a class basis to the way people perceive that sort of thing from different figures, yeah.
All of us carry in our brains the... I'm not trying to make false equivalents here, right?
But all of us carry in our brains things that we believe that we don't have a really good reason to believe that we believe, right?
I mean, that's just... We all use heuristics to short-circuit our reasoning process, and there are things that I believe are true that if you made me sit down and prove it on a paper and give you citations for it,
It would be tough for me to do and I think we all do that to some degree Because we just kind of believe and you know We believe certain authority figures and like some of that is justified and some of that is not But if you got a guy in a nice suit and a tie who's sitting there and telling you yeah we've got like really clear serious allegations of voter fraud and you believe that person has been kind of trustworthy in the past and And it's fighting against this kind of corrupt, democratic, left-wing, radical establishment.
You're perfectly happy to believe that person now.
And convincing that person that, no, actually, that guy has been lying to you for 20 years, and I can prove that to you, then I sound like the crazy person.
When in fact, I'm right.
He has been lying to you for 20 years, right?
But I'm not Sean Hannity.
I don't have a TV show where I can...
My thing is always to try to get at the social and material basis of why people believe this and not that, you know, but yeah, that's it.
You're gonna find the things that are said by this guy more convincing, more intuitively authoritative because of the social position you occupy, yeah.
Well, and, I mean, just in terms of the material position, I mean, that's not that difficult to, you know, kind of establish.
You know, if I'm a kind of upper middle class, sorry, not in the Marxist sense, but in the sort of traditional... Yeah, sure, in the Marxist sense, yeah.
You know, if I'm in that kind of, like, if I make $75,000 a year as an independent contractor or as a salesperson or kind of whatever, And I rely on an employer who, you know, if I'm working in an industry, I'm working in the oil industry, I'm working in pharmaceuticals or working in whatever.
And, uh, I rely on, you know, those kinds of, uh, my bonus relies on, you know, a certain level of profitability that comes from kind of low taxes and low regulation, then I'm much more inclined to respect a sort of like kind of Republican talking head talking because that's better for, that's better for me.
That's better for my bottom line.
And if I'm doing better because of those kinds of policies, I may feel bad for the people in poverty, but that's kind of out of sight and out of mind.
In my immediate point of view, yeah.
You're going to be much more likely to think of yourself as one of the people who built this country, and people who don't have as much as you on the streets complaining and fighting the police who guard your property, you're going to be much more likely to perceive them as the people who try to tear it down, quote unquote.
Yeah.
And this does feed directly into the question of the capital coup, because there's been another explosion of this nonsense about, you know, this is why the left is losing, because these are the people that they refuse to listen to.
This is the rural working class, the forgotten rural working class.
You know, and that is complete bollocks.
You only have to look at these people to see who they are.
These are the petty bourgeoisie.
These are the middle classes.
You know, you can't afford to larp as the Punisher in fucking riot gear.
You can't afford to get there, take the day off in the middle of a work week, you know, in the middle of a pandemic.
Just look at these people.
They fit directly into that class-basis theory of fascism.
I mean, it's so... Every one of them, of course, nothing's that schematic, but you know what I mean.
Right, right.
No, yeah, I think we can kind of play that way.
But like, Ted Cruz is tweeting about this, so, you know, like, I can't believe you would call all of these people who are just fighting for what they believe was right and fighting for their democracy.
I can't believe you would call them fascists and racists.
And again, like, I may have, like, stand for AOC a little bit in a previous episode, and that was not...
That was not like to stand for AOC specifically as much as to kind of use her as a model for like what a better vision of you know talking for these same kinds of talking points without the fucking
Vicious racism was gonna be better, but like she she retweeted and responded to him and let's come complete, you know refuting kind of kind of level I'm being like Saying exactly what I would have said, you know in that same circumstance I actually giving like the actual left-wing talking point on this and like no These are people who stayed in like hundreds of dollars a night hotels these people flew in paying thousands of dollars to be there and These are not the repressed working class people.
These are wealthy people who are fighting, who have literally invaded the US Capitol in an insurrection so that they can keep their guy in charge against the established rules of how we actually run our elections.
Like, you know, regardless of how you feel about the legitimacy of that system, because that system is fucking bullshit.
Like, believe me, I'm not a fan of the U.S.
electoral system, but these are the rules that we live under.
We all agreed to these rules.
Like, this is how the political system works.
Biden won.
There's no question about that.
Yeah, absolutely.
No empirical question about that.
He ran away with it, as it turns out.
Which is lucky, because if it had been thinner, they would have had a chance of making something.
If it had been 300 votes in Florida, I think you would have seen a very different kind of Yeah, and that was openly the plan.
I mean, Donald Trump wasn't shy about saying this.
You know, if it's thin, we can test it, and we use lawfare, and if necessary, you know, this would have been his version of the Brooks Brothers riot.
That's why they pushed through Amy Coney Barrett in the last minute, was to make sure there was a 6-3 Republican majority on the court.
So if it came down to that, they could push it through.
And it turns out that the votes were just better than At least on our end, they were better than we ever could have thought they were going to be.
Yeah, to a large extent.
Even with the kind of razor-slim margin, it was high enough to go, yeah, no, it's over, it's done.
Yeah, to a large extent, because the black working class organized and said, fuck this, we need rid of this guy.
Yeah.
I mean, in Georgia in particular, I mean, I think there's probably a little bit of a, you know, a standing for Stacey Abrams.
I think there are very clear reasons to look askance at Stacey Abrams, most notably her friendship with Michael Bloomberg, who is one of the worst people in American politics.
But, like, he helped her get in in 2018 and donated a bunch of money to her campaign.
And she accepted that and she kind of, kind of sort of endorsed him in 2018.
And we can, if she, to the degree that she continues in American politics, I am going to bring that up on a regular basis.
But she absolutely did a whole lot to reshape the way that Georgia's door knocking campaigns work.
And to the degree that Georgia has turned blue in this election cycle, and for these two Senate seats, we owe a lot to Stacey Abrams as a human being to make that happen.
I think we can actually see the gray area in this, right?
Yeah, again, as I say, nothing's that schematic, is it?
But yeah, all these people in the mainstream media, CNN and MSNBC, who are having sort of pearl-clutching rage-gasms, you know, oh they're rampaging through the people's house and all this crap, you know, if it had been a closer election and if he'd ran away with it the way he was, Trump I mean, you know, openly planning to try to fiddle it,
In that way, with a combination of fudging and lawfare and, you know, his own version of the Brooks Brothers riot, etc., which is what this would have been in an alternate universe where it was a tighter election.
Those, you know, and the Supreme Court had come through for Trump and they'd stopped recounts or whatever.
These exact same people, they'd be saying, well, you know, we have to respect the process and, yeah, they'd be letting him get away with it.
As indeed they go along with right-wing coups in places like Bolivia and Venezuela when it's being coordinated by the United States, by the way.
Oh no, absolutely.
And I think that one of the things that I think we should find really troubling here about the coup attempt, and really all of these, is that, but particularly the thing that happened on January 6th, was that the You know, there's some question about who called in the National Guard.
Yeah.
Because it was kind of reported that Trump called it in, but then it was sort of like maybe Pence did it, and there is, I don't know, there's kind of up in the air as to who, you know, as to exactly what the sequence of events was there.
One of the things that's kind of...
Left unstated is that had the National Guard been called in, it would have been under Trump's direct direction in D.C.
The way that the law works is that the National Guard is under the direction of the state governor in whichever state that they're called up in.
And in D.C., because D.C.
is not a state, it's under the direction of the supervision of the president.
I think there was a, it seems like there was some hesitation on the part of the National Guard, the people who were in that chain of command to actually come into DC, precisely because of a question of like what exactly they were going to be asked to do by Donald Trump in that moment.
Oh, that's interesting.
And this is part of the, this is part of the kind of thing of, Getting Trump out of office like impeaching Trump immediately with two weeks left in his term or using the 25th amendment To remove him from office.
That's that's part of what's kind of happening behind the scenes.
It seems is there's a very real question about what Trump might do for the next two weeks before he leaves office and what kinds of other techniques he would use but um had the had the same
invasion of the state, or the U.S. Capitol happened, and had the U.S. military been on board with Trump, had they had the cover, had they had the, you know, the CIA to support Donald Trump in the attempt, the CIA to support Donald Trump in the attempt, you could very easily see a delay in the counting of the Electoral College.
You could very easily see a sort of de facto coup actually being very successful in that moment.
Like, this is, like, it didn't happen that way on January 6th because there was no establishment force that was fully behind Donald Trump because of personal things that, because of just kind of the material reality it didn't happen that way on January 6th because there was no establishment force that was fully behind Donald Trump because of personal things that, because of just kind of the material
Like, they signed on to the sort of more establishment Republican side of this schism.
But it's not easy, it's not hard to see another version of this that went very, very differently, and where this could have been the end of anything that resembles a democracy in this country.
Yeah, with a few tweaks.
The beginning of a one-party rule.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, it could have very easily been the other thing.
All the elements were there except for, A, kind of a dedicated plan on the part of the Capitol Hill Hill rioters, and any kind of, any degree of, like, real kind of institutional support.
So, um...
I don't know how much you want to talk about the extent to which the people that rioted in the Capitol did or didn't have a plan, or some of them did.
Oh no, we can definitely.
I mean, we're at an hour and a half, but we can go on.
I think this is worth talking about for sure.
Yeah, I mean, one of the most disturbing things about it is that, I mean, everybody's talking about the obvious disparity between the way the police reacted to this and the way the police react to Black Lives Matter protests, etc.
And, you know, I'm not downplaying that for a moment, but that has been well covered.
And it's kind of, you know, even Joe Scarborough can talk about this.
When Joe Scarborough is the voice of fucking reason, right?
Yeah, but the point is it's so obvious that even he can talk about it.
And again, I'm not downplaying the hypocrisy and the disparity.
It's a serious issue.
But it's also kind of, I mean, certainly I think to probably our listeners, it's kind of obvious.
Well, I mean, of course, you know.
But the, I mean, I read a very good article by Melissa Girogrant about how effectively what happened wasn't It wasn't really a conflict, it was essentially an alliance between the rioters on Capitol Hill and the cops.
Because, of course, the cops are overwhelmingly pro-Trump, and cops have their own social position within capitalism, etc.
etc.
I included a link to Baked Alaska's stream.
Baked Alaska, who is Tim Giannetti, who is We could do an episode on him.
He's just not that interesting.
He's kind of a lower-tier alt-right figure.
He was at Unite the Right.
He was on the poster for Unite the Right.
But on his livestream, you literally see the cops fist-bumping some of the protesters.
Yeah, and infamously, they're taking selfies with them and stuff.
They're taking selfies.
I mean, they just let them in.
There are a bunch of Twitter threads about some of the people who are in this, which we probably won't get into.
Go check out those Twitter threads.
There's some really kind of like fascinating stuff in there.
But I would argue ultimately, you know, the fact that we're not, well you rather, are not now living under some form of fascist post-democratic Trumpist government ultimately tracks back to, like if there's one single fact, it's probably the fact that the National Association of Manufacturers basically dumped Trump, you know?
Because big capital is done with this guy.
And fascist governments, as opposed to fascist movements, happen when there's some sort of serious crisis in capital accumulation.
Now, there's definitely a crisis in capital accumulation in America at the moment, caused largely by COVID and the resultant recession or depression, but big capital... Well, COVID just accelerated what was already happening.
Absolutely.
But, I mean, it's the trigger for a massive crisis.
So there's definitely that blockage in capital accumulation.
And that is, at economic base, it's one of the things that is crucial to the formation of fascist governments.
But the, you know, big capital in the States just has no confidence in Trump to resolve that problem.
If it thought Trump was the guy to resolve the problem, then you'd be in big trouble.
But it's very sensibly, I think, convinced of the opposite, you know?
Big capital wants Biden in.
Well, I just, one of the, again, one of the things that you can, like, kind of, again, not to stan Bernie Sanders, but, If Bernie Sanders had won the primary and the general election had gone the same way, would Mitch McConnell had been as sanguine about turning over the reins of government in the way that he was with Biden, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Would would the establishment have been, you know, like, you know, and as milquetoast as Bernie ultimately is and as much as a reformist as he is and as much as he's willing to work within the system and as hamstrung as he would have been as president of the United States under, you know, the system.
I think there's a very clear thing of like, you know, if it ended up being like, oh, Bernie Sanders is going to be our next president.
I think the Republican Party would have probably been much more like, no, we really do need to, you know, get the Supreme Court in on this and make some decisions a little bit differently and let's fight this a little bit harder.
Bernie might be a reformist, but he's not a conservative, whereas Biden essentially is a conservative.
I mean, Biden is... I mean, again, we said this earlier, and man, the liberals listening to this, they're going to hate me for this, but you know... Well, they're not even going to understand most of this, frankly.
It's going to be a foreign language.
It's just gibberish to a liberal.
I'm joking.
I try to reach out to the liberals listening.
I know there are some liberals listening.
I had a very nice chat with a liberal in private messages the other day and I said, you know, I give liberals a lot of stick.
It's all in good fun, don't worry about it.
I'm just on the, I'm just on the like, you know, there's a, there really is a really good case like on a personal level to say like, you know, if it wasn't for the kind of institutional Democratic versus Republican Party, like if these two men were switched in their party affiliations, There would definitely be a case to go, yeah, Trump is probably a better choice than Biden on a personal level.
You know, at least, I mean, you know, I mean, there is now Trump is like completely incompetent and like failed completely on the COVID thing, you know, like that's completely true.
And, you know, that I'm not, I'm not discounting that.
But like, you know, Biden has done some really shitty things in his life.
Biden's a fucking horror show, let's not soft-pedal it.
Can't wait, the next four years are gonna be fun.
Oh, it's gonna be great fun, yeah.
There were people among that crowd, you know, most of the crowd I would say is kind of just MAGA people who were just in there to take selfies of themselves inside there and kind of cheer and get a thrill out of it and not really have any idea what they're doing.
But there were undoubtedly people in there, you know, there's the now infamous picture of the guy dressed up as the Punisher or whatever with fucking zip cuffs.
There were guys in there with homemade napalm.
There are two zip-tie guys.
There are two zip-tie guys.
So I included links in the show notes to the two.
Literally in the two days since this happened, three days since this happened, they have both been identified.
None of them by law enforcement, by anti-fascist and open-source intelligence researchers.
What a surprise.
Publishing this shit online.
It's just amazing.
Yeah.
But again, you just- Robert Evans said in one of his podcasts he did on this, and I'm I'm still in this for him, but I agree, so I'm repeating it because I agree with it, is that there were kind of three groups of people who were in that Capitol Hill invasion, and that was kind of ordinary MAGA people who supported Trump and who were just there, as you said, for the selfies and for the lulls and for the believing they were doing something and who kind of got involved in something that was bigger than they were.
Right.
Mm-hmm.
Then there are the kind of the live streamers and sort of the personalities, the big Tlaska kind of going in and doing the live streams and just trying to get like money through their DLive accounts, which most of those people have now been delisted from DLive, which is amazing because DLive doesn't do that shit, but It's great.
Nick Fuentes is one of them who no longer gets to be on DLive, so he's lost a couple hundred thousand dollars a year.
Great.
Good to know.
Congratulations.
We'll see what he ends up doing with his life now that he's not getting, now that he's not getting the DLive money.
He'll find some other way to grift, I assure you.
And then there were the, like, the hardcore, like, they came in to kill people.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, you know and and you combine that with like one of those zip tie guys literally brought his mom There's a threat.
He's sitting there.
Stop the steal or my mom will shoot.
That's a blast from the past.
He's literally standing there next to his mom.
She comes in.
They do the cap.
Afterwards, they go and they get a drink together at the hotel bar.
They're filmed on a live stream talking about it.
He's the zip tie guy.
What's he gonna do?
Like, find Nancy Pelosi and put her in cuffs and put a bullet in her head and... Well, yeah, conceivably.
Mom's gonna applaud?
I mean, you know, I saw somebody... I mean, they were chanting Hang Pence, you know, and not overly concerned about Mike Pence, you know, but... Yeah, who is fucking terrible.
But, uh, you know, I mean, he aligned himself with the other side of that, right?
And, um, it is, it is kind of... He's a traitor.
Trump called him one, essentially.
Oh yeah, no, definitely.
I mean, and this is the thing that I'm trying to highlight with the episode is that, you know, there's this disparate group of people who have sort of like aligned themselves with Trump, who are this kind of like right wing, or at least this sort of like version of the Republican Party.
And then there's this other wing, which is more that kind of corporate wing, the more
Low taxes and low regulation kind of wing the the Chamber of Commerce wing which is sort of the more establishment Republican Party And this is it reflects on that's also happening as I think we've demonstrated at least you know in previous episodes There's a split on the Democratic Party between kind of the younger movement who are more kind of in that Democratic Socialist wing who believe in you know, you know something that looks a lot more like a social democracy versus that kind of corporatist Democrat thing and right now the
Groups that are in power are the corporatist wing of each party, right?
Who are actually in control of the US government like so it swings from a corporatist Republican corporatist Republican to a corporatist Democrat and the corporatist Democrat will be like better on LGBTQ issues and some of the other you know kind of kind of social causes and will have vaguely higher taxes and will, you know, be slightly better on things like in slightly improving access to health care, etc.
Whereas the Republicans are just fucking ghouls who just want to, like, crush everything and will, like, crush any kind of, like, right to abortion and all that sort of thing.
But ultimately, they kind of share very similar material goals.
And then the sort of, like, the far wings are, again, that kind of, like, young social Democrat side of kind of the Democratic Party, the kind of the Barney, the AOC, the Squad people.
And then on the right side, you've got QAnon and like actual fucking Nazis, you know?
Yeah.
And there is a sense in which, you know, what we're going to see, at least if we're looking at the right wing, if we're looking at the Republican Party in the United States, is we're going to see Which version do we see kind of coming up in the party in the next two to four to eight years, you know?
I think there's a very real possibility, depending on kind of how things go in the next, you know, couple of weeks and what Trump does afterwards and sort of how things go, I think there's a very real possibility that you see a kind of resurgent Tea Party kind of phenomenon led by figures like Nick Fuentes, led by figures that are, you know, in these kind of alt-light spaces.
Who have a kind of respectability within this kind of like Republican subgroup at least, who will kind of come in and start to kind of take the reins of this party from the more corporatist wing.
You will see this kind of civil war over there, and who actually kind of gets to be like the next Republican presidential candidate is going to depend on how successful they are ultimately.
And like This isn't I mean, this isn't over right?
Like, you know, I feel I feel like you know People get upset at me sometimes because it's like can't you just be happy for like 20 minutes?
And it's like no we come it's it's it's getting like this.
It's worse now It's worse now that it was in 2016 like we were in more damage today than we were on November in November 2016 Yeah Right?
Yeah.
There is a greater danger, and it's partly because people have stopped paying attention.
It's partly because people want to go back to brunch.
And you know what?
The liberals want to go back to brunch.
Hey, just get out of the way.
That's kind of the angle.
But you know that Joe Biden, the Biden administration, You know, I was going to tweet this this morning and then I just didn't.
But, you know, the Clinton administration, eight years of Clinton were a popular, a personally popular president who was scandal ridden, who was beset on, you know, was beset constantly by scandals created was beset constantly by scandals created by Republican malfeasance.
Who ended up moving further, moving the party further right in an attempt to appease those forces and who ended up quietly making things worse for just about everybody in the country who wasn't like super wealthy.
But was ultimately kind of treated as a figure of, as a positive figure because he wasn't as bad as the Republicans would have been.
And that's what the next four years of Biden are going to be.
That's, I mean, you know, that's the good version.
Yeah.
And he absolutely will go after anti-fascist organizers and anarchist organizers.
Oh yeah.
That's just, you know, it's going to be Standing Rock times 100.
It's going to be, you know, Ferguson.
Absolutely.
Like all of that.
It's going to be more Obama, but even worse, because I think Biden is further to the right than Obama.
Oh, absolutely, yeah.
I mean, that's partly why Biden was selected to be Obama's veep running mate, you know, because he was considered to be on the right of the party, so it was considered to balance out Obama, who was perceived as being very far left for a Democratic.
Who ran as an incredibly progressive candidate, and who I was very excited about in 2008.
And, you know, not falling for that one again, let's just put it that way.
Yeah, but it's the trend of neoliberalism, increasing state authoritarianism, and it's certainly been the trend in the United States.
And the best you can say about the democratic turn at the helm is that it slows slightly.
I mean, that's pretty much the entire case for voting Biden, which is that Trump was Unusually worse.
Trump was fascistic.
He was so much worse than normal.
He was to the point of being fascistic.
We needed this breathing space.
The problems that Trump represents still have not gone away.
Trump himself is not going away.
But you get Biden in and It becomes a little bit less urgent and you get a little bit of breathing space.
And Biden, as you say, Biden's absolutely going to go after anti-fascists.
He's absolutely going to go after the left.
You can already see it in the response to the capital coup.
They're talking about how it's anarchy and how it's extremism and stuff like this.
They're going to institute legislation they don't need.
anti-terrorist, quote-unquote, anti-terrorist legislation they don't need to combat things like this.
And they're going to use it to go after the left as much as, if not, almost certainly more than they go after the right.
And that's just something you could expect anyway.
But the thing we need to do is to try to use the relative breathing space, getting Trump out of office, and the defeat that that is.
It's undoubtedly a defeat to try to use those things against the movement further and further right that is undoubtedly going to keep growing in the next four years, completely unaddressed by Biden.
And that's got to be that the battle against that has got to come from below.
It's got to come from anti-fascist organizing from below.
And we've just got to do, I mean, we've got to rebuild unions worldwide.
We've got to build mutual aid networks.
We've got to build a real left sensibility.
Working class power.
We don't have a working class, and we don't, I mean, we don't have much time.
Like, I mean, you know, I just...
I don't know.
I don't know that there's an answer.
I mean, I don't know.
We do the best we can, ultimately.
People ask me, what can I do?
And it's like, go feed somebody.
I mean, that's the answer.
Go take care of somebody who needs your help locally.
Go work at a food bank or something.
Because that's ultimately, long term, that's almost all you can do right now.
Help in whatever little way you can.
Look to the small things.
Look to the little things you can do right in front of you, rather than try to look at the big picture.
Make a real material difference.
That's what I really urge people to do at this point.
Any form of organizing, really, is somewhere to start.
All right.
Have you got another clip?
Almost two hours.
I do.
It's a Nick Fuentes clip speaking on the Capitol steps.
So there was some, there was a tweet that seemed to show Baked Alaska with Nick Fuentes kind of behind him on screen.
Uh, that appears to not be Nick Fuentes.
Um, because like at the time that that photo or that video was, would have been taken, um, Nick Fuentes was, uh, standing on the steps, uh, a few hundred feet away, you know, half a mile away, giving a, giving a speech.
And, uh, I have a clip from that speech in which, um, well, this will, uh, This will give you a sense of kind of where this kind of dissonant right, alt-right, far-right, you know, kind of Nazi-lite movement is going in the foreseeable future.
This gives you a look at what's going to happen over the next four or eight years.
So let's go ahead and play this clip and then we'll kind of wrap up.
How does that sound?
Okay.
Can I just ask, was Fuentes there alone or was he there with like a load of groipers?
Oh, he had a bunch of gripers, yeah.
There were a ton of people on his.
At least there were America First flags.
Like, if you look at the footage, there's all kinds of America First stuff kind of strung around there.
Um, so yeah, no, he, he had a, he had a big crew of people and some of his, uh, kind of close, close friends were there.
I don't think Michelle Malkin was there, um, interestingly, but, but Fuentes, Fuentes has really like hitched his wagon to stop the steel stuff and really kind of use that as a way of, again, ingreasing himself within this kind of like fringier alt-light.
side of the Republican Party and really kind of like establishing himself within this, within that movement and kind of moving himself further away from the, you know, kind of more disreputable tights like Mikey Nock and Richard Spencer, you know, kind of those figures becoming more this sort of, this you know, kind of those figures becoming more this sort of, this sort I mean, he's been, he's been trying to get Tim Pool to let him on Tim Pool's live stream.
He's been, he's been kind of calling for that and complaining that, that he, that Tim Pool apparently won't return his phone calls.
What is interesting, because Cassandra Fairbanks, who is a close and personal friend of Tim Poole, and who is definitely closely affiliated with the griper movement, is on the show all the time.
So, you know, Tim Poole knows Tim Poole knows more than he wants to let on, I think, is kind of the key to that.
He knows who he can get away with having it and who can't.
And maybe the Holocaust in Ireland, Leo Tididite at the right, has a ton of clips talking about the Jews.
Nick Fuentes is not a person.
Yeah, it might expose old Baldy McDickface's grift a little bit too much.
It might very well, yeah.
I thought actually we'd spend more time talking about the various groups that were there, because we had Proud Boys were there, and the Three Percenters, and loads of the... Yeah, there were a ton of groups, and the thing is that a lot of that is kind of up in the air at this point.
It's kind of unclear exactly who was there, but it's kind of a group.
You did have Proud Boys, you did have more mainstream MAGA types, you had a ton of Q people.
Oh yeah, big Q. Well a Q and Marga is almost the same thing now, isn't it?
It is and it isn't.
I mean, I don't know.
I feel like Q is sort of its own, like there's a, I don't know, there's a, it's a Venn diagram maybe of, you know, there's, there's some overlap there.
It's a very tight one.
It's, it's tight.
It's tight.
I don't disagree.
I mean, you know, but I feel like there is a difference between these kind of like, I support Trump and I believe in making America great again and the more kind of conspiratorial, almost like religious kind of nature of like the Q conspiracy.
But I think there's a lot of, Like a lot of the Q talking points, you kind of file off the serial numbers and kind of feed them into kind of the more, you know, kind of mainstream magotypes.
They would kind of agree with it.
But I think when you get into the more like, you know, kind of the more like really absurd stuff that comes with, you know, the more overt Q side.
I think that people do kind of reject that.
Well, this is one of the things about Q. It makes it extra dangerous.
It's very good at sort of appearing in various strengths and guises and therefore being syncretic.
It can kind of meld all these different tendencies together.
Anyway, sorry, go on with the forwentas.
Oh, no, no, not at all.
There are so many places we can go with this.
That's the thing.
We've been sitting here for two hours and I feel like, you know, we could go for another four.
Just kind of talking about this.
Like, we really haven't talked about, like, the actual, like, incidents at all.
I mean, you're right.
There were, you know, there were people planting bombs.
I was I was kind of skeptical at first about the whole, like, were there really bombs there?
Like, pipe bombs?
I was.
And I saw photos because, you know, like, it was like... I was even in this kind of group chat that I was in, and I was kind of like, do we have evidence that there were bombs other than, like, the cops say so?
Because the cops will always say, oh yeah, we found bombs, and it's like, well, you know, like...
Another one there is a report going around like they smeared shit around the place and I I'm very skeptical of that I don't know if that's confirmed yet But that is very much the sort of thing you hear, you know, and it often it usually turns out to be to be not true the one that I believe is that is that there were they went into like Nancy Pelosi Pelosi's office and like They smelled piss.
Apparently people were urinating in particular places.
And this is more the sign that there were people out there who had discrete plans for this, right?
Because if I just went to the Capitol for a protest, And I found myself inside the Capitol building.
I don't know where the fuck Nancy Pelosi's office is, or Mike Pence's office is, or Mitch McConnell's office is, but there were people who went straight there who knew exactly where it was.
I was listening to a podcast, I think it was Worst Year Ever, and our friend Molly Conger was on.
Yeah, that was on Some More News, actually, we'll put a link in the show notes.
Right, yeah, and she was saying how she thinks that when they arrest these people and they get into their computers, they're gonna find schematics and shit like this.
Oh yeah, I definitely agree with that.
I think a lot of these guys just had no... they were just going along with the crowd, but there were definitely people who had a plan.
And I think, you know, I'm really interested to see kind of what...
What they find in some of these guys is computers and kind of what what exactly how far along this was planned Also, I mean the other thing and and I included a link to a piece that Robert Evans wrote and published the day before this event and when she described like in some detail like the the lines Of like, very public people talking about the things that we're going to do at the Stop the Steal protest, right?
You know?
Like, talking about like, bring zip ties, and we're gonna like, we're gonna capture Nancy Pelosi, and we're gonna do this, we're gonna do that.
And then the cops kind of come out and go, well, how did we know?
Like, we had no idea.
I've read loads of articles about just the crescendo of chatter, you know, credible chatter as they say online about this.
Nobody whose job it is to look at this has any excuse for not knowing this was coming.
I will I'm gonna push slightly I agree completely I like I'm not I'm not disagreeing with that and not to like stand the cops or anything like that but obviously not but It's also like the people who like follow this stuff regularly and the people who like kind of Follow this world and see the forum posts and see the list of the podcast and stuff absolutely This is like standard rhetoric, right?
Like this isn't, it's not unusual to say, to have like an event like this and going like, we need to string them up with nooses.
Like that's like completely standard rhetoric that you see from these things.
And so, uh, it is, it is like after the, after the Christchurch massacre happened, like I read the manifesto and kind of went like, You know, my biggest response to that was like, this sounds like really normal in this world, right?
Um, yeah, it was zip tie guy, the zip tie guy, the one from Nashville.
I found his, uh, I saw his Facebook.
There's a, there's a link to an archive of his Facebook and the show notes.
Um, I found, I found a, I read his Facebook before he pulled it down or somebody pulled it down.
And I mean, it's a little like, you know, Like, they're, like, right-leaning people I went to high school with who have Facebook profiles that look just like that.
Like, it's not, like, it's not, this isn't, like, super extreme Nazi shit.
This is, like, you know, normie right-wing kind of alt-media stuff.
You know?
Like, it's, you know, it's not even Alex Jones tier.
You know what I mean?
And so, like, this isn't, like, to defend it, this is just saying, like, that the, kind of, the rhetoric has moved so far, and it's so extreme within these groups, that even, like, the quote-unquote normie-tier people are absorbing really, really nasty stuff, right?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I was just thinking, like, if it's, you know, if you're a Fed or whatever, and it's your job to protect the Capitol building, and you've got all this going on, maybe, Maybe actually have some cops around, you know?
Well, and again, Molly Conger kind of said in that episode, you know, she We're talking about, like, look, I know what the DC police can do.
I was there in December, and I saw them, like, take down, you know, like, much smaller protests of people just, like, marching along with a banner that says Black Lives Matter, and who got, like, treated more roughly than, like, these people did.
Well, as I say, it's so glaringly obvious that it's even on, like, the mainstream network news, you know.
They're talking about it there, because they can't not talk about it, because it's so fucking obvious that they'd look like they were covering stuff up if they weren't talking about the disparity.
Right, right.
And, um, yeah, I mean, you know, and, uh, you know, it's become kind of a right-wing talking point at this point.
Like, uh, you know.
Look, it was a bunch of, a bunch of patriots kind of went in to express their discomfort, but they didn't burn anything down.
They certainly didn't, you know, they didn't protest, they didn't burn down a police precinct, they didn't burn down a Wendy's, they didn't like, they talk about like three months of Black Lives Matter protests.
Clearly, this is the, this is where these people learned how to do this and got the permission by the, you know, leniency shown to Black Lives Matter.
That's where they got the, the, the, The belief that they could just walk in and do this, and it's like... I mean, you're not even wrong, right?
No, it's just... I know it's completely pointless to talk about their hypocrisy and their shamelessness, but it's just... Sean Hannity calling this a peaceful protest.
They killed a fucking cop!
They bashed a cop's brains out with a fire extinguisher.
I mean, sorry, I'm not laughing out of recognition.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, again, can you imagine if Black Lives Matter had killed a cop?
Exactly.
No way.
Exactly.
You know, yeah.
As I say, pointing out the hypocrisy is completely useless, but there is just a bit, I don't know, if you're like me, there's just a bit permanently at the back of your brain, constantly itching with just outrage, you know?
How do you have the fucking shameless nerve?
How do you have the gall to do this?
It seems that we have lost the support of Mike Pence.
The Republican state legislators and the Republican Senate will do nothing for us.
So we've got only two more weeks with a Republican president before a totally unified Democratic government.
We've got to make the next two weeks count.
And we have got to make a list of every last House Republican and every last Senate Republican and make sure that their political careers in this country are over forever!
Yeah!
Because Republican voters, as evidenced by the result in Georgia yesterday, are done voting for Rhinos!
We're done voting for traitors!
We're done voting for people endorsed by Mitch McConnell!
Destroy the GOP!
Destroy the GOP!
We know that the Democrats would rig the election.
And we know the Democrats are going to push liberal policies.
The Democrats are our enemies.
What we don't expect is that Republicans will betray us at every turn!
I don't know about you, but I will take an enemy any day of the week over a traitor!
And that's what the Republican Party wants.
It is full of traitors to their president, traitors to the people, and traitors to this country!
We're not going to take it anymore.
74 million Americans voted for Donald Trump on November 3rd.
85% of Republicans believe that this election was stolen and every single conservative in this country knows that the legitimacy of this democratic system is over.
It means nothing I included that because, again, the future split, or the coming split, the current split among the Republican Party.
Nick Fuentes is, ultimately, it's not really that much of a different message than the National Justice Party stuff that we were listening to a few weeks ago, right?
It's very similar rhetoric, although it's much more sort of like right-wing Republican talking point as opposed to sort of like trying to reach out to sort of that, you know, old-school Democratic establishment, you know, kind of the disaffected Bernie types.
It's more that counter positionism, right?
But it's absolutely Nick Fuentes.
Saying the Republican Party has fucked you over for the last time, we need to burn it to the ground and take it over.
Yeah.
And this is gonna be, you know, the future of the Republican Party is either, you know, Mitch McConnell or Nick Fuentes, basically.
Those are your two choices.
Alien versus Predator.
I also do kind of laugh at the tough guy language, and I don't like to sort of make fun of someone's appearance because it's a low bar, but Nick Fuentes is like 5'6 and 120 pounds soaking wet.
He's got a lot of tough guy talk for literally living in his mom's basement.
But what is the aim?
I mean, the aim is to split the Republican Party or to actually just convert it fully to... Well, the aim for Nick Fuentes is, first of all, to sort of build his own brand.
Well, yeah, of course.
To get more and more people involved with it.
But it looks a lot like, I think in practice it looks like, not voting for, you know, RINOs, Republicans in Name Only, I don't know how well that term travels across the country, you know, across the ocean.
Um, you know, not voting for, uh, quote unquote, the cookie Republicans, not voting for the establishment Republicans, not supporting them, not giving them money, um, primarying them possibly.
I mean, you know, it's sort of building this America first side of the party, which is kind of more hardcore and is built around sort of like changing the Republican Party from within in a way, you know, through affecting culture, through building this kind of little D-life empire through building this kind of little D-life empire that he has through building this kind of like online resource.
In a way, you know, Nick Fuentes is sort of the inheritor of that kind of 2016, that 2014 to 2016 alt-right online culture.
Like he has learned how to be that figure who can kind of maintain some kind of online presence, who can maintain a relationship with the kind of larger party apparatus, even if it's sort of the friendier elements of that party apparatus, while also even if it's sort of the friendier elements of that party apparatus, while also kind of encouraging a more kind of ethnocentric ethnostate, you know, racialist underlying premise, you know, and to
He he tends to he will name the Jew, but he will typically do it through the lens of like a religious difference as opposed to an ethnic difference But he's very clearly kind of using the same kinds of talking points.
He's just sort of like softening it slightly But yeah, I mean and I think you know Nick Flint is is somebody that you know again I've kind of taken my eye off the ball a little bit with Nick Flint is mostly because I You do not.
He does a lot of content.
Nobody wants to.
Nobody wants to do this.
Nobody wants to keep their eye on Nick Fuentes in any sense.
But he's hugely important.
He may be the most important single figure out there right now.
And so, you know, that's definitely kind of like 2021.
I'm kind of like, well, I guess I need to start paying more attention to Nick Fuentes now.
Yeah, so expect some more Nick Fuentes content down the line, you know?
If that's not an advert for the future show, I don't know what is.
Yeah, subscribe to the Patreon, we're gonna make fun of Nick Fuentes a bunch.
It's gonna be great.
Yeah.
Well, so much to say, but we've been going a long time already, so... Yeah, this is our second longest episode.
Well, I'll try to edit this down as much as possible, but this is still going to be a long one.
So yeah, I'll force myself not to get drawn into a huge next topic.
You know, we're done.
I don't have to do it.
I'm already talking too long about the fact that I'm not going to talk anymore.
I'm good at this.
Well, you know, we said we'll try to do, since we're definitely planning to do only every other week now, we're going to try to do a little bit longer episodes.
So congratulations, longer episode!
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah, I suppose time will tell what happens to the Republican Party.
I find it hard to imagine them ever becoming explicitly anti-Semitic as an institution.
Not for moral reasons, but for various other political reasons.
But, you know, the base is pulling them right, and they'll go, they'll go, you know?
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, and this is the thing, I mean, this is kind of what I Don't Speak German is kind of about, right, is that what we're seeing in these Online spaces and what we've been seeing since the beginning of the alt-right and you know 2014 or so when it when it kind of first became this kind of online force is this use of these online spaces to normalize certain kinds of racialist rhetoric and normalize certain kinds of
far-right ideas, which, you know, anti-Semitism is kind of like the fringier version of, like explicit anti-Semitism, I should say.
It's sort of the kind of the final form of it in a way, you know?
But like all the, even like kind of the anti-transgender stuff and sort of the anti-gay stuff and like, you know, the race realist sort of this IQ stuff.
I mean, part of the reason that I've been covering the IDW to the degree is because, you know, that's one of the ways that sort of this race realist stuff kind of gets like put into this frame.
And while, you know, Charles Murray is no fan of Nick Fuentes or Mike Enoch, Mike Enoch will absolutely use the bell curve as like an example, as sort of the urtext for pushing his beliefs.
Part of their standard operating procedure, part of their basic manual is, well, look at the IQ scores and look at the stuff, and they don't even have that argument anymore in 2021.
They're way, way past that.
And, you know, what's going to happen in another four years?
It may very well be that like, you know, you already see if you if you go on to any like YouTube video about the Holocaust, you'll find Hollow hoax, et cetera, et cetera, all through the comment sections and already in certain parts of, um, you know, uh, kind of the younger online, you know, online spaces that cater to young people, you'll find, you know, uh, well, I don't want to join the military because I don't want to die for Israel, you know, sort of thing.
And, um, certain kinds of, uh, you know, kind of overtly antisemitic language, you know, kind of low key Holocaust denial or, well, you know, the Jews were in Hollywood, et cetera, et cetera.
That's already fairly acceptable standard procedure, and where does that go again in another four years if we're not aware of it and we're not fighting against it every step of the way?
That's what we're doing here.
If it didn't matter, I've got better things to do with my time.
You know, like, I don't know, like, the reason we do this is to, it's not to, it's not just to tell jokes about how stupid Nick Fuentes is, it's to let people know what's happening in the real world so that we can combat it as it is, right?
You know, so.
That's right, yeah.
Okay, that was episode 77.
If you stuck through the whole thing, thanks for doing that, and we'll be back.
Do you know what the next episode is going to be about?
I suppose it depends if there's... Tom Metzger, Tom Metzger Part 2.
So I should say there's a chatter, much like there was chatter about January 6th, there's now chatter about January 17th.
Yeah.
And of course, Inauguration Day.
And Inauguration Day, yeah.
January 20th.
So, you know, we may do another quick bonus episode about all the terrible things that happened on January 17th.
So, we will see.
But no, the plan is to finally do Tom Metzger Part 2.
Well, this is it.
If the next one is Tom Metzger Part 2, then you'll know that we dodged a bullet.
Joe Biden was not assassinated on January 20th.
Well, oh God.
Trump went out of his way to say, I'm not going to be at the inauguration, and it's hard not to interpret that as kind of a, you know, I'm not going to be there.
Back in the long ago days when Donald Trump had a Twitter account.
Back when he could tweet, yeah.
Oh man, that was a very amusing few hours when he went through like five Twitter accounts.
Yeah, it was like whack-a-mole, wasn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah, no, it's a thing.
But yeah, no.
Don Metzger Part 2, or the assassination of Joseph Robinette Biden.
It'll be one or the other, I suppose.
Kamala Ascends, that will be it.
Kamala Ascending, yeah.
And we will also be recording our first patron-only episode.
Our first patron-only, which will be, what's it called?
The movie, yeah.
Yeah, it'll be on Peter Watkins' Punishment Park.
Punishment Park, yeah.
Couldn't remember the title off the top of my head.
But yeah, Punishment Park, that'll be our first.
I know I promised to do the bonus about Mikey and I laughing about Birth of a Nation.
We might put that out this month too, but Punishment Park will be easier to produce.
So we're definitely going to do that one this month.
Hopefully we'll get that one out to you shortly after this episode comes out.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
If you enjoyed the show or found it useful, please spread the word.
If you want to contact me, I'm at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore, Daniel is at Daniel E Harper, and the show's Twitter is at IDSGpod.
If you want to help us make the show and stay 100% editorially independent, we both have Patreons.
I Don't Speak German is hosted at idonspeakgerman.libsyn.com, and we're also on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, and we show up in all podcast apps.
This show is associated with Eruditorum Press, where you can find more details about it.
