We begin our seventh year (!) with a conversation with special guest Teddy Wilson, the journalist behind Radical Reports, on the state of the January 6th convictions, prosecutions, and investigations in the looming shadow of a second Trump presidency. Episode Notes: https://bsky.app/profile/reportbywilson.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/radicalreports.bsky.social https://www.radicalreports.org/ Teddy's previous IDSG appearances: https://idontspeakgerman.libsyn.com/123-moms-for-liberty-with-teddy-wilson https://idontspeakgerman.libsyn.com/bonus-hanging-out-with-eiynah Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. 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 Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
Hello everybody, Jack here, just with a quick message before the episode proper.
This episode is a conversation between your usual hosts and Teddy Wilson of Radical Reports.
Unfortunately, owing to technical snafus, Teddy's side of the conversation didn't record tremendously well, it didn't sound all that great.
I've done my audio editing magic as much as I can, and I've made it, I think, perfectly listenable.
There might be...
Times where you find it a little bit hard to hear what he's saying.
I've done the best I can, but it is all on there, and it is well worth hearing, so please stick with us and enjoy.
This is I Don't Speak German.
Here we talk about the far right, their fellow travellers, and what they say to each other when they think we're not listening.
The show is hosted by Daniel Harper and me, Jack Graham.
We're both he, him.
Be aware, we cover difficult, sometimes nasty subject matter, so content warnings always apply.
And welcome back, listeners, to another episode of I Don't Speak German, the first episode, I'm presuming, unless something happens in the interim, the first episode of 2025. It's a whole new year.
I think, as Dorothy Parker once said, what, we're having another one?
And I'm here with Daniel Harper, of course.
Daniel, how was your new year and all that sort of stuff?
Oh, it was...
I mean, once you get above the age of 23, I think it all just kind of sloshes together.
Jack and I were kind of talking beforehand that I've always marked my birthdays as more like the new year resolution does not come on January 1st, but on my birthday.
And so right now, I'm just like, well, I got three months to kind of think about this before I really have to, you know, feel the impending doom of, like, my own mortality.
So it's the beauty of having, like, a March birthday is you get that little, I get to wait till spring, basically.
So that's where we are.
Nothing like starting on an upbeat note.
So thanks for that, Harper.
That's practically the ray of sunshine.
Eventually we'll all be dead and won't have to worry about this anymore.
It'll be our children's problem.
Unexpectedly Keynesian opening.
In the long run, we're all dead.
But we are lucky.
It's not just us this time.
We are very, very happy and honored to welcome back to the podcast for his return appearance with IDSG. The excellent Teddy Wilson of Radical Reports.
Teddy, are you out there listening to our inane drivel?
Yes, thank you so much for having me on.
I am listening with great amusement.
Thank you.
That's very charitable of you.
So as I say, Teddy Wilson is the excellent reporter behind Radical Reports, which Teddy's been on the show before to talk about Moms for Liberty.
And we've talked about his site on this show before.
Great reporter.
And, Teddy, you, I believe, have been...
Daniel and I have had to confess to Teddy that we're not really up on the subject that he's come on the show to talk about this evening.
Neither of us have really done our due diligence on this subject, you know, because we do have a couple of other things that we pay attention to.
But, Teddy, you have come on the show today to talk to us a little bit about what's been going on with the whole January 6th schmuzzle and the committee and all that sort of thing.
So, tell us, what have you been working on with that?
Right, well, I mean, over the last, Jesus Christ, it's been almost four years.
Coming up.
At the time of recording.
I have been doing quite a bit of reporting and tracking of what has happened since the January 6th election.
Primarily focusing on...
All the different court cases, and then of course the January 6th investigation by the House Select Committee.
And then specifically over the last several weeks, I've been focused on reporting on what's going to happen with the investigations in the criminal cases and other things related to January 6th as President-elect Trump is set to take office on January 20th.
And the consequences of that, both in terms of the possibility of him pardoning either all or many of the January 6th defendants and the possibility of him and people in his administration either taking both in terms of the possibility of him pardoning either all or many of the January 6th defendants and the possibility of him and people in his administration either taking revenge on and targeting people that took part in either the January
That's primarily what I've been focused on in the last month, kind of thinking through and reporting out what are going to be the consequences for what happens when a president who encouraged a violent insurrection comes back into office.
And so that's pretty much what's been my primary focus the last month or so.
Yeah, it's quite a situation.
A president who essentially incited, at the very least, and I think that's putting it mildly, incited an attempted overthrow of the established democratic government of the country.
Not only not held accountable for that legally in the four years since, but re-elected and about to take back power.
Well, after some legal work has been done, but while legal work is still going on, on the cases of people that took part in his insurrection.
It's almost, well, like so many things that we live in as normality now, it's almost unbelievable when you put it in bold terms.
Yeah, and it really stands, I think, in stark relief when you compare it to what has happened internationally.
So, the aftermath of a similar insurrection in Brazil that happened a couple of years later, on January 8th.
And the communities in Brazil are going about preventing Jairel Bolsonaro for attempting to run for president again.
And then more recently, you have South Korea, who basically has stated a similar event.
It's occurring martial law in how...
The parliament there, Whiffley rebuked him and impeached him and his successor, the vice president, took over.
So it's really something that America has now become a place where presidents can act with impunity, it seems.
And then you have institutions like the Supreme Court validating that as well.
And I think that has some pretty terrifying consequences that we might have to live in the next four years.
I mean, to be clear, I just want to clarify this.
Republican presidents can act with impunity under this system.
I would hesitate to guess, as much as I detest parts of what the Democratic Party has become, that a future President AOC can act in any kind of similar way.
Yeah, I mean, I try not to play the, imagine if a Democrat did this, you know?
Imagine if Obama did this, or if...
Clinton did that, or Biden more recently did that.
But I mean, I think, I mean, just looking at the far-right response to President Biden's recent pardons and commutations, you can argue about the merits of some of his commutations.
I mean, I think I tend to applaud his commutations of the 40-something federal inmates that were on death row, right, muting their sentences, preventing incoming President Trump from going on another federal death penalty killing preventing incoming President Trump from going on another federal death penalty And you can argue about whether or not he should have pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, for his things he was convicted of.
But I think the response from the right has been to kind of rage and ask their teeth about it.
And it's remarkable how Little they care about any perceived hypocrisy of it, right?
It's that charge of hypocrisy.
It just doesn't seem like it matters anymore.
It doesn't seem like a useful piece of rhetorical...
It's been years since any kind of accusation of hypocrisy is at any kind of real staying power.
I think on both sides to some degree.
I don't think that's a...
I think that's a just modern American politics problem.
By the way, I've been making a project of, like, tuning into Megyn Kelly on a regular basis.
So I am very, very well acquainted with, you know, exactly all of the problems with the Biden pardons of both his son and many other people.
So, yeah, no, Megyn Kelly is...
Yeah, there's an episode of that.
Don't worry.
That's a slow burn.
But, you know, I kind of have been, like, dipping my toes back into, like, normie politics by following, like...
Megyn Kelly, kind of relentlessly, on the right, and Ezra Klein on the left.
Those are my bellwethers for left-right politics in the United States.
And I think that's kind of valid in the sense of I can bear both, and they're both interesting in their own ways.
Anyway, I'm off the topic.
But anyway, Jack, you probably have things to talk about that are not Megyn Kelly and Ezra Klein.
That is a nightmare blood rotation right there.
Anywhere near that.
I will give Maggie Kelly credit for one thing.
I don't often watch her.
I usually see clips of her.
But I have come to appreciate the liberal usage of the word fuck this year.
I tend to appreciate it.
So I will give her credit for that.
Leaving Fox News for SiriusXM was probably the best thing that ever happened to her career, honestly.
Well, I'm glad to hear that there is an episode in this and that you're not just hurting yourself for no reason.
Because, as Teddy says, that's a nightmarish diet.
Yeah, I mean, aside from the observation that I think accusations of hypocrisy cast against the right have no traction because, in a very real sense, they're not hypocrites because their open ideology is that...
Certain people are better than other people and just should be allowed to do what they like and that there are no rules for them, whereas there are rules for other people.
If that is your ideology and you openly espouse that, then when people accuse you of having a double standard, then you can just shrug and say, yeah, exactly.
That's what we're saying.
Aside from that, let's wrestle ourselves back onto the topic, January 6th.
What is going on in...
The ranks, shall we say, if you know, in the ranks of people who were involved in the investigation and who are currently still involved in attempts to investigate and prosecute people behind this, there must be nervousness, surely?
There is.
And I'll start with the law enforcement side of it first, and then we kind of discuss what live reporting has thrown up regarding the people that work on the committee that were staffers.
What we've seen on the law enforcement side is that investigators and prosecutors and law enforcement has continued to investigate those who have participated in January 6th.
Primarily, it's focused on people that entered the Capitol and part in violent actions.
You know, there are constantly new arrests that are taking place.
Just about once or twice a week, there are new arrests being made.
There have been more than 1,500 people arrested for participating in the Capitol riot.
And like I mentioned, the vast majority of recent arrests seem to have been people that weren't just the people that entered the Capitol and walked around.
They have been people that assaulted police officers or participated in other kind of violent actions.
Those people have continued to be arrested and charged.
It's been interesting, while the prosecutors and law enforcement have continued that, we've seen a lot of consternation from judges overseeing a lot of these cases in recent months, kind of seeing what has been kind of potentially coming down since Trump was elected, understanding that there's a good possibility that many of these people that are before them in court might get pardoned.
And a lot of the defendants...
have essentially been kind of arguing that they shouldn't face any jail time because they're probably going to get pardoned anyway.
And then there's even now U.S. attorneys or people within federal law enforcement and prosecutors that are kind of making their way for the exit before Trump takes office.
Just this week, the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., who is a big part of the...
Investigation on January 6th, announced his resignation, and he's leaving as an attorney before Trump takes office, I think.
And so on the law enforcement side there, while there has continued to be investigation and prosecution of those that participated, I think there is a sense of maybe unknown of what might be next, at the very least.
And to a kind of a fearful attitude of what might be next as well.
On the investigation side, you know, I've reached out to more than a dozen former staffers of the January 6th Select Committee, you know, either directly or indirectly as the intermediary, pretty much in the weeks following the election.
And it turned out that only one person would end up going on the record with me.
A few others would speak only if they were given anonymity to protect their identity.
There was even a few others that seemed to want to talk to me, but then as we got closer to the new year, I ended up backing out and deciding they didn't want to speak either publicly or even on background.
there ended up being a surprising amount of kind of fear from these people, it seems, as President Trump was getting closer and closer to taking office again.
And I think a lot of that is the things that he said publicly about wanting to prosecute and put in jail the people, the members of Congress that served on the committee, as well as his supporters and potential members of his administration have talked openly about seeking as well as his supporters and potential members of his administration have talked openly about seeking a recribution and You know, Especially when it comes to the staff members, you know, these are people that are essentially several servants.
Many of them have worked in Arab government before.
Many of them are lawyers.
These are people that are not kind of notable household names, but several of them have faced threats and harassment online from the far right in different places online.
And I think there's a real worry that about kind of both from the potential of being targeted by the Trump administration or administration officials, but also about being targeted by Trump's supporters and being harassed and targeted for death but also about being targeted by Trump's supporters and being harassed and targeted for death threats or other That's kind of where we are at the moment, kind of weeks away from President Trump taking over to office.
And of course, we have seen an emboldening.
Since the re-election of Trump, we've seen, I believe, an uptick in harassment and stuff like that from his supporters, including stuff from Elon Musk, who has specifically targeted people on Twitter, or X, I suppose.
Yeah, absolutely.
Elon Musk was something that was brought up.
He's an individual that was actually brought up more than once by the people I talked to.
I can imagine.
Him and Vivek Ramaswamy and their so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the Doge Cabinet, or whatever the fuck they want to call themselves, he has gone after essentially random government workers on Twitter, formerly known as Twitter, now X, and targeted them.
And when you have more than 200 million followers and you call, you know, target random government workers, that creates a real security risk for those folks, right?
And so I think a lot of these people that have worked either for the committee or elsewhere done investigations on January 6th, I think there's a real worry that people like Trump or other kind of far-right, you know, social media influencers might use their giant megaphones to target people.
So yeah, that's a big part of it.
And in addition to that, when you kind of delve further down the rabbit hole, you know, there is a real kind of visceral, nasty kind of anger towards anyone within the Biden administration that took part in those investigations.
and you see people claiming that not just the people that are members of Congress that served on their committee, but their staff and anyone associated to be prosecuted and tried for treason and face other kind of really nasty, but their staff and anyone associated to be prosecuted and tried for treason and It gets dark really fast the further you go down those rabbit holes.
Yeah, it's a very frightening combination of the possibility of official persecution or official interfering in the legal process is some combination of the two from above, as it were, and then unofficial harassment and intimidation. and then unofficial harassment and intimidation.
I think when you add into that...
Someone like the possibility of someone like Kash Patel taking over the FBI. You know, someone that's been extremely vocal about wanting to use this giant federal law enforcement agency to enact a resolution against some perceived political opponents.
I think it does create a real, the fear of real legitimacy.
But it's not just...
It's an amazing question for a lot of people.
It's almost like, when is this going to happen to people, either to me or to people I know?
But yeah, it's a real fear, I think.
And it's underguarded, as we kind of laid out there, by whether or not it comes from an official source.
It could come from supporters and other far-right extremists.
It has created a real security nightmare for people.
There's this weird sense in which the boundaries between these different wings of this same movement are blurred now.
And I think DOGE, or whatever you want to call it, Department of Government Efficiency, that's not an official organisation, is it?
It's not an actual ministry of government or anything.
And yet it seems to be it's being treated as if it has governmental power or is potentially going to have governmental power.
Almost just by virtue of the fact that everybody involved in this loosely speaking organization has decided to pretend that it does.
So at the same time that they're chipping away at the legitimacy of these actual government and legal processes, they're sort of importing a kind of unofficial shadow government, which seems to be half pretend government agency, half...
I know there are splinters in the movement now, obviously, over the whole visa thing, because Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been saying things that MAGA doesn't like about visas for migrants involved in the tech industry.
Even so, there's a weird sort of blood join there, isn't there, I think?
Yeah, and I think I saw some of those splinters even earlier.
In an issue related to kind of all, right, we've talked about the potential for people that invested in January 6th facing prosecution or harassment, either legally or extrajudicially.
But there's another component to this, and that's the potential for Trump, when he gets into office, to pardon either all or some of the January 6th defendants.
Where we've seen fissures within kind of the greater MAGA world was about that very issue, about whether or not Trump should issue a blanket pardon for anyone, all 1500 people that have been charged and tried or convicted for any of crimes related to January 6th, or if he should just pardon anyone that was charged or convicted of nonviolent offenses.
And about...
If you look at the cases, depending on how you categorize violent offenses, about 400 to 500 of those capitalized defendants have been charged with some kind of violent action, whether it was assaulting police or other kind of violent actions or either themselves being armed or using things they found as weapons.
So that leaves about 1,000 people that were charged with relatively misdemeanor crimes.
And so that has been kind of a fissure within the MAGA movement.
But I think you're right.
The debate over H-1...
I can't remember the acronym.
What is it again?
I couldn't remember either.
H-1B, is it?
H-1B. So those are the visas for highly skilled immigrants to come in the country.
People like Musk and a lot of the other kind of...
Billionaire tech bros are big fans of them because that allows them to import, essentially, programmers and other people with highly sought-after tech skills with the idea that they'll be able to essentially pay them less than Americans, I think, is the naked real economic sense there.
And that's been a big fisher recently.
Between kind of the nativist way of the MAGA movement and this kind of newly founded kind of tech bro part of it.
And I think that's kind of been also kind of part of the discussion about what is all this going to look like once Trump actually comes into power and has kind of leverage of power at his disposal?
Who is going to be more influential within his administration and all of that?
But yeah, that's, getting back to the pardons, that's one of the things when I was talking to the people that worked on the committee, they were all pretty worried about what would happen if Trump pardoned a significant number of the people that had been convicted of participating in January 6th, particularly if he did a blanket pardon and just pardoned everybody, because there's this real worry about what would happen if all of a sudden you have...
Figures like Stuart Rhodes, who's the former leader of the far-right Melissa group, the Oath Keepers, that was highly involved in organizing January 6th.
Or people like Enrico Tario, who's the former leader of the Proud Boys, who was also really highly involved in organizing and planning January 6th.
If you have leaders like that, people that have been convicted of sedition and other violent crimes, suddenly able to kind of...
Leave prison and go right back into the far-right extremist movement, you know, all of a sudden with a lot of street cred because they went to jail for Trump, right, essentially, and that seems like it would add a real kind of debt-fuel injection into the far-right extremist movement.
It's hard to predict what that would look like, right, since the Oath Keepers essentially doesn't exist as an organization anymore, but the crowd voice is arguably more organized and evolved into something.
Much different than it looked like on January 6th.
It is much more decentralized.
There's not a national level leadership.
And so it's hard to predict kind of what it would look like.
But from everybody I've talked to, that's one of the most concerning things for them is what happens if President Trump pardons all these people.
You know, you'll have a president that incited, at the very least, incited an insurrection back into office.
The leaders of that insurrection will be back out on the streets.
I mean, it's just kind of the worst-case scenario.
We're kind of staring at the patient.
Yeah, and with the perception created that there are no rules anymore, at least for the, you know, while Trump or somebody like him is in power, and I'm sure over the next four years, they'll be doing everything they can.
People behind Trump, certainly, will be doing everything they can to try to just institutionalise far-right rule, no matter what elections say.
If these people are just let out again, whether or not they take up organising where they left off, probably not directly, but even so, they will be out.
The perception will be created, I suppose, that while they, or their side, are in charge of the government, there are just...
No legal rules.
I suppose that's the fear, and it seems pretty well-founded.
Well, there's no legal rules for people on their side.
I think when you start thinking about kind of further down the road about what may happen, like imagine if there are kind of similar protests, if there are similar protests on college campuses as they were last spring, right?
College students and a coalition of various people.
I mean, you can easily imagine Trump sending out the National Guard and other military elements, right, to put down those protests.
But if you see something similar on the opposite end of some far-right militia group trying to take over some compound or something, it seems likely to be treated with Do you have a sense of how likely this
is?
Do you have any kind of, you know, beyond just the sense that all of us have, is that, well, it's all just going to burn down because that's just how the world works now?
You know, because I think there's an argument to be made that, like, despite, Trump says a lot of shit, right?
You know, like, you know, we're going to free all the J6 defendants.
Turns out, like, well, we're going to let, like, a handful of people go, and, you know, we're going to, you know, backhand with Roger Stone or whatever, and, like, ultimately, it's just going to be a sound and fury, you know, sound and fury to find nothing on this, you know?
And so, like, I don't know, do you get a sense from your interviews, from your research?
Like, is this something that, like, Like, how likely is this?
And I, sorry not to criticize, I'm not saying it's not important to think about regardless, but, you know, I don't know, do you have a sense of that?
And if the answer is no, then we can just cut all this, but I'm just curious, you know, what's the, if you do have a sense of...
No, no, no.
It's an important question, and I think I would put it into two different categories.
First of all, touch on the party.
I think it is highly likely, both from kind of just discussing some things with the people I've interviewed, talking to other kind of experts, and kind of...
That Trump pardons at least some portion of the January 6th Amendment.
I think it is less likely that he would issue a more blanket pardon that just pardons everybody, but I would say there's also a non-zero chance that he would attempt to do something like that.
I think the more problematic part of that for Trump and his advisors would be figuring out a way to craft a language.
In a way that would work, that would cover everybody.
So it would have to include people that have been convicted.
It would have to include people that are currently on trial, people that have just been charged or arrested, and probably people that participated in it and haven't been arrested or haven't been charged yet.
There's been plenty of people that have been, that were there on January 6th and entered the Capitol that have been named.
Kind of basically unnamed co-defendants or have been named in indictments that haven't themselves been indicted or arrested yet.
You know, there's been several people in recent months that have been arrested, you know, months and in some cases years after they were identified as people that were inside the Capitol.
So I think for Trump to kind of give a blanket pardon to everybody, you know, I'm not a legal expert, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a constitutional scholar, so I can't give you a kind of detailed Explanation of what that would look like, but I think that would be the problem with that.
That said, I think it is highly likely that we would pardon some portion of the January 6th defending.
When you look at the J6 far-right activists, the people that are really wrapped up in this and are really invested in the pardon, they almost uniformly have been calling for a blanket pardon.
And so they're not going to be happy unless Trump kind of just pardons everybody.
So we'll see what happens with this party.
As for kind of the retribution and revenge campaign, right, when you think about how Trump and people that he may appoint to his administration may go about kind of exacting their revenge on people, I think some of it just depends on...
Kind of who the target is and how they decide to try to exercise the levels of power.
And there are going to be impediments to what they want to do institutionally.
It doesn't matter that Tash Patel has said that on day one, if he is confirmed as the director of the FBI, that he would like...
Close down the Hoover building, right?
And kick everybody out and make them go fight crime.
Like, he's not literally going to be able to close down that Hoover building one day one.
And so, and there's a, you know, even kind of within kind of federal law enforcement, there's, there, those people are, for all intents and purposes, supposed to be apolitical, right?
But, and that's a...
That's a whole other discussion about whether that's true or not, but I think for a lot of these people, their inclination to try to use the levers of power to kind of exact revenge, they're going to run into problems.
Now, you know, outside, it's different by different agency, too.
You know, you can imagine scenarios where Trump is able to, in his kind of...
Acolytes are able to install people in different positions of power to maybe not prosecute, but definitely harass people.
You can imagine them trying to use the IRS to go after people with audits or what have you, using different federal agencies to conduct investigations without pretext.
So how successful they may be, it just kind of depends on what part of the government they're trying to use.
And kind of built an impediment there.
I mean, fortunately for us, I think these outlandish dream scenarios, these revenge fantasies that the far-right and the MAGA movement has about, that have really sound like kind of queuing on at this point we've been trying to see about kind of arresting everybody and putting Adam Schiff in jail.
Like, that's just not going to happen.
But I think at the very least, I think Trump and his supporters and the people he puts into power can make life really difficult for a lot of people in many different ways.
So we'll just have to see how that all plays out.
So that's all to answer your question.
I guess there would be yes and maybe.
Yeah, no, I actually want to dig into that a little bit more, if you don't mind.
And, you know, one of the things that I notice in my work is This sort of dichotomy on the far right and among the different phases of the far right is to how much they are personally loyal to Trump or to the Republican Party really is a distinct difference.
And one of the things I think we saw in 2019 with the rise of the terror grand people and the Atomwaffen stuff and the way that that sort of comes into play is in this sort of like Trump was disappointing enough long enough to certain elements of the far right that you started to see this kind of rise of I don't always like the term, but, you know, for lack of a better term, the accelerationist kind of, you know, terrorist-like side of things, right?
And so, like, for one thing, we certainly can argue, or we can kind of not argue, but discuss, you know, what happens for the people who are loyal to Trump, you know, if he does or does not, you know, pardon, you know, all these people or some of these people or any of these people, etc., etc.
But also, like, I wonder, like, if he is seen by...
Certain bits of the more fringy right, the more extreme right, as to not going far enough in this matter, does that become a new source of a new stochastic terrorism in 2025 or moving forward, if he's seen as being in some way antithetical to their goals?
Is that something you've considered, or is that something that you would necessarily worry about?
Because that would mean, you know, I mean, I think, you know, this is controversial, but I think arguably the two Trump assassins are ultimately, or the attempted Trump assassins were, you know, disaffected right-wingers to some degree or another, to the degree that we can kind of understand them at all.
And do we see more of that?
And is that something that might be, like, kind of percolating in these people's heads of, you know, if we want to maintain control, ultimately, we have a tiger by the tail at this point.
And so, you know, there is this sense of like using the institutions to sort of like curb the impulses of their own worst members.
And so I know that that may be outside of your domain of like where you want to take this, but it's certainly something that I'm thinking about.
No, no, I think it's a important topic that.
I think it's an important thing to think about.
And I think you put your finger on something.
I think there has been plenty of evidence that many parts of the far right were disappointed with President-elect Trump's first term in office, especially around things like immigration.
There was a lot of evidence of the far right that were disappointed, basically, that he didn't institute, you know, essentially kind of a full stop on any immigration, legal or otherwise, and didn't kind of believe the kind of nonsense that he actually built the wall and all this and didn't kind of believe the kind of nonsense that he actually built And I think.
I think you saw that play out leading into the election day when figures like Nick Fuentes basically said that he wasn't going to go out and vote for Trump or campaign for Trump or how he put it.
And other kind of elements of the far right and the white nationalist movement said that as well.
Like the leader of Patriot Pride after the election and gave his 10 or 20 minute diatribe to his supporters that basically said like, you know.
It's great that Trump got elected, but he's an imperfect vessel for our goals or whatever, and we don't really trust him.
Particularly, a lot of what drives, I think, the mistrust of Trump within the far right is his overt support for Israel.
That's a real contention for them.
Just to show, because some of the people I follow, this is the primary mode of thought.
This is kind of my wheelhouse here, so maybe I'm taking you off here.
Off your track a little bit, but please continue.
I just wanted to interject that.
Among the people I follow, this is very mainstream thought.
Do we continue to reject Trump, or are we willing to wait and see, is the spectrum of opinion among the people I follow.
Yeah, and I think the way that plays out over the next four years, or however long Trump remains, is...
I think it depends on what he does and how things play out and who he listens to.
But I think there is the possibility that it could create more disaffected people within various parts of the far right.
I think whether or not it leads to an increase in Accelerationist, kind of far-right violent extremist kind of actions is difficult to tell.
I think I would, one thing I've been very curious about, and it kind of relates to the immigration part of it, is how do extremist elements of kind of this unophobic border militia types react to Trump's immigration policies?
And if they don't think he's being hardline enough, if he's not...
If he's not, you know, militarizing the border the way they want him to, if he is not actually deporting, you know, rounding up and deporting millions of migrants and undocumented people, I think you could, I could very easily see kind of those extremist elements of like the border militias and others down kind of near the U.S.-Mexico border kind of taking part in what amounts to kind of...
White supremacist terrorist actions, you know, kind of, I think that's, for me, that's a real worry.
Oh yeah, no, I definitely agree with that, no, 100%, no, absolutely.
And I think, and then elsewhere, I think some of it just depends on kind of the internal dynamics of kind of the far right, like, and who is influential at any given time, and kind of this ever kind of ebb and flow of, like, you know.
Within the far right, there's so many different centers of gravity around, and there's so many different constituencies, and there's so many different people.
Who is in favor?
Who is out of favor?
Who is in favor within the corridors of power versus who is in favor within the broader movement, I think, is another question.
So not only are there multiple centers of power, there are multiple sources of power at this point.
Although I would argue that within the people who are, at least within spinning distance of the mainstream, there is this resolute focus on Trump, what Trump wants.
I think that's something that I've been seeing by studying Megyn Kelly and Jack Posobiec and Charlie Kirk and those kind of figures in the last few months.
It is very much like, you know, whatever Trump wants, Trump gets.
And that's how you maintain favor within...
You know, within, like, that segment of the kind of media, media political infrastructure at this point.
And I think these are the people that are, like, pushing the hardest at, like, well, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta pardon them all.
You gotta do, I mean, I was listening to Jack Soby just before we got on this call, and he's literally calling for, you know, we gotta get revenge for Ashley Babbitt at this point.
Like, he's going much further than, you know, anything that, that you're seeing in, like, the New York Times or Fox News or anything like that.
And this is still a relatively mainstream source, you know, within.
No, I mean, I think I agree.
I think there's multiple levels to this.
Like, I think you have kind of what, you know, I think you and I would consider kind of the mainstream of kind of writing discourse, kind of like this Fox News kind of ecosystem.
And then you have kind of a level down where you have like things like human events and And Breitbart and everything else.
And then you have another level down where you have things like Gateway Pundit and like kind of all these other kind of conspiracy kind of laden places.
And I think also kind of I'm going to be interested in, I think this time around, and this has been kind of openly discussed, I think, within kind of political kind of chattering class about how this time around a lot more kind of D.C. establishment Republican types are really interested in working within kind of political kind of chattering class about how this time around a Like when we first took office in 2016, it was really difficult for them to staff the White House and the rest of the executive agency.
And this time around, it's basically like, you know, everybody at the Heritage Foundation, everybody at America First Policy Institute, all these right wing think tanks, like there's going to be filling spots.
And so I wonder how that's going to kind of play out.
And if before, because you had so many more fringe figures that ended up in the administration, And so now it's like an open question of whether or not...
I know he's...
Well, I think he's publicly said he's not going to be in an administration, but whether or not somebody like Michael Flynn would end up in this version of the Trump White House is kind of an open question.
And so...
And will that change over time?
Like, you'll have this influx of all these kind of young conservative right-wingers from all these different kind of establishment DC think tanks or kind of staffers of GOP members of Congress, whoever, that kind of fill in the administration.
And will that, will over time, will they kind of filter out and you'll get more fringe figures?
And then on top of that, you have to kind of consider the fact that, like...
Within these kind of establishment spaces, whether it's big things or kind of staffers and other places, there's plenty of people that are kind of buttoned up.
They're buttoned up their certain time, but they're definitely on the fringe ideologically.
I mean, yeah, these are the 26-year-olds who are coming in now.
We're 16 listening to Andrew Anglin and the Daily Shoah back in 2016, right?
They just know to hide their power level better because of what they saw in the first Trump administration.
Now they're adults.
Darren Beattie is arguably one of these people.
He has a very cushy position within certain media ecosystems.
Jack Posobiec himself was a character within these movements who just managed to not talk enough about the Jews to keep his position within this ecosystem.
Obviously, that's not within the quarters of power, but I think a lot of these young Republicans, they're Nazis.
They're just secret Nazis.
They've just learned to not say it out loud.
One of the more influential and prominent young Republican groups is the New York Young Republican Club, which is essentially a young fascist club organization.
like they are quite literally kind of neo-fascist kind of embrace kind of various like Hungarian fascist ideas and things it's and so I could easily see a lot of those kids enter the halls of powers that way too And like you said, they've learned their lesson.
Like, you're not going to, there's not going to be probably, you're not going to catch Paul Gosar's staffers anymore posting on, you know, 4chan or wherever and get caught kind of peddling kind of, well, not that that's even controversial anymore.
Like, I was about to say peddling race science, but that's kind of become in so many places now.
I mean, I mean, we might not find like a 26 year old staffer with a secret Reddit account or a secret 4chan account, but apparently, according to some reporting, we might find Elon Musk with a secret 4chan account.
Anyway, I know we're far in a field.
Jack, I'm sorry.
I've been dominating this conversation for a bit.
I know you've had a lot of stuff you wanted to talk about, so if you want to take the reins of this.
I've taken us far in a field because I think it's fun.
You've saved me asking the questions I was going to ask really.
So, um, no, I mean, yeah, important things kind of, these are kind of the second level questions when you think about what this administration is going to look like.
I think it's important to start thinking about the reality of having so many of these people in power and what it may look like over time.
And also important to think through the ways in which fissures and divisions will start showing up in the far right.
Because I think one thing that the right has...
Always done really well.
The left has really had a difficult time kind of replicating this.
The right has always been good at identifying kind of the fissures and divisions within the left and pushing on them in order to break up the coalitions within the left very effectively.
And the left just hasn't been as effective at doing that within the right.
And there are plenty of those kind of fissures and divisions within the right.
It's just kind of identifying them and kind of...
Figuring out ways to exploit them.
So, yeah, I think it's an important discussion, especially when you consider kind of who are the kind of vocal, kind of influential talking heads.
I mean, I think when someone like Laura Loomer is getting headlines, I mean, that seems like only a win-win for people that want to oppose fascism, right?
What is there any more clown-like figure in American politics than Laura Loomer?
I mean, I literally popped popcorn and sat there with my Twitter timeline as you saw these figures argue about whether or not X was a place for free speech anymore.
You know what I mean?
It was just this amazing confluence of events.
And I think that might be a silver lining for people like us is we'll get to enjoy a lot more of that nonsense in the coming years.
I mean, the far right is, if they're anything, they're buffoonish and entertaining.
Not to dispute your point about the clownishness of Laura Looma, but really at this point, is Elon Musk any less clownish?
And whereas Laura Looma has apparently failed to insinuate herself permanently at the top levels of this movement, Elon Musk has...
For all the, you know, supposed disagreements and tensions, he's clearly succeeded.
And he is pretty much now, I mean, he just recently changed his handle on Twitter to, you know, a Nazi meme.
Keckius Maximus.
It's literally a 2015 era, like, Nazi meme.
It's a game of gay.
It's a teenage game of gay fucking meme.
Not even a current meme.
Like, it's an old meme.
It's a stale meme.
Yeah, yeah.
Like, come on, Elon.
You know, like, you gotta...
Step up your game, guy.
My take on that is $200 billion goes a long way.
Although it turns out he's not going to be Speaker of the House, as I was seeing on my news feed.
What is his name?
Johnson.
Johnson was re-elected to that position.
That's right.
He got his 218 on the first ballot.
Yeah.
That actually hooks into something that I wanted to mention, which is that, you know, There was a lot of chatter in some quarters leading up to this election of the Speaker for this new term of Congress about all this.
I mean, this stuff, the big argument about H-1B and the supposed tensions between Musk and Trump and the argument between Loomer and Trump via his pseudonym Adrian Dittman, etc.
There's been a lot of talk about all this stuff.
In some quarters, all these, you know, MAGA is coming apart, you know, the base are angry, and sure.
But I think what people perennially miss about, certainly sort of mainstream commentators perennially miss, is that internal conflict is constitutive to fascist movements.
I mean, you were talking earlier, Teddy, about the possibility, you know, like border militia people might, you know, be dissatisfied with Trump's immigration policy or whatever.
Yeah, sure.
And the trouble with that is that that sort of thing, like, you know, the radicalism of these fringe aspects, they push the leadership forward, even as the leadership disavows them and stuff like that.
And this leads me to, I think what I was going to ask was, what I hear from all this is like a huge recipe for chaos.
I mean...
Project 2025. People in the Trump administration are going to be trying to institute Project 2025, which is going to be...
They're incredibly ambitious and they're very fanatical ideologues, these people.
So they're going to go for this.
They're going to go for all this stuff that they say they're going to go for, I think.
You know, the mass deportations and the complete overhaul of the administrative state, the destruction.
They're going to go for it.
And it's going to create chaos.
Putting Kash Patel in charge of the FBI, if that happens, that's a great example.
That's going to cause chaos, because he is a fanatical ideologue who's going to try to do the ludicrous things that he says he wants to do.
The trouble with that, you know, I think I worry about the mainstream conversation, the mainstream reporting on this is going to be, oh, chaos, inefficiency, none of it's working.
Missing the fact that the chaos is how, so often it's how they get things done.
I mean, Project 2025's, what is it, Schedule F? Yeah,
I think what you'll see is there's going to be kind of multiple layers of things that are happening all at the same time.
I tend to think kind of through what it was like back in 2017 when Trump took office for the first time and kind of the chaos that we saw, particularly in that first three, six months, that first year, right?
It was just kind of these nonstop chaotic things that were happening.
And I think we're going to see something similar again.
And I think it's going to be...
So it's going to be...
And that's part of the recipe.
That's part of the effectiveness of all of this, right?
You are going to have a lot of noise in different places, all happening at the same time.
Some of it's strategic.
Some of it is just kind of a feature of kind of this kind of style of far-right authoritarian kind of pseudo-populist kind of ideology and how they govern.
And so...
You know, Trump's going to come into office.
They're going to try to do a lot of executive actions all at once again, just like they did in 2017. And they're going to kind of, what Steve Baden famously said, you know, flood the field with shit or whatever he said.
And so, and create a lot of distractions.
And so, there's going to be that happening.
There's also going to be like this.
I think one thing that's going to be different is the media and social media environment is just much different now than it was back in 2017. And so that's going to be a variable of what narratives take hold and what the media decides to cover in certain ways.
That's going to be a big question mark.
But at the same time that all of this is happening, you're right, there's going to be...
You know, we were talking earlier about this influx of all these people from places like the Henry Foundation and all these other, you know, right-wing think tanks that are going to try to establish and kind of create all these different policies from this Project 2025 playbook.
I think we're going to see them kind of do that.
And, I mean, I think it's likely, more likely than not, that they'll be much more efficient this time around at instituting policy.
Not necessarily because, like, Trump has learned any lessons or kind of the people that he surrounds himself that have learned lessons.
But I think by nature of who will be filling the executive branch, they'll just be more effective at doing it.
They'll have more, they will have more people with more experience within the government.
I mean, I like to think the apparatus is like made itself around Trump's image to a certain degree.
Like, you know, that's kind of the big story of, you know, 2024 election to, you know, the next couple of years.
I think that's really going to be the big picture.
You know, at least that's my feeling of it is, you know, now he's got a whole apparatus around him that is supporting him because he's the winner now.
And I think the fact that he won in 2024 crystallized that in a real way because I wasn't seeing it to this degree until he won.
Like, there was still skepticism until he won.
And now that he's won, it's like, all right, all, you know, streets ahead.
Well, I mean, on top of that, you have all the different guardrails that have been removed from these quote-unquote guardrails.
The kind of institutional structures that were impediments to him during his first term, you know, including, you know, the Supreme Court, basically.
Most especially the Supreme Court.
I think that, I mean, I think you care.
I mean, Sorry, as an avid 5-4 listener from the beginning, you can't overstate the importance of the reshaping of the Supreme Court by Donald Trump.
And for the next four years, he's probably going to get two more justices on.
He will have personally appointed half the Supreme Court at some point.
It's insane.
It's absurd.
Again, sorry not to interrupt, but this is...
This is real bad.
I don't know.
We're kind of wrapping up here, but if you have a big picture statement, it's like, things are bad right now.
The major impediments that you will face will be the courts.
Not the Supreme Court, but a lot of the lower courts.
Biden and the Democrats in Congress were successful at appointing a lot of judges to I will give them credit.
They have been preparing for the eventuality that Trump would be re-elected for more than a year.
Plenty of organizations, whether it's like the ACLU or, you know, the various kind of LGBT legal defense funds and all these other legal orgs that are going to be dropping lawsuits kind of many times like the minute after Trump signs executive actions, They're going to be facing legal challenges, any kind of when they try to change rules, agency rules, those are all going to face challenges.
So while Trump and his people within his administration might not face any kind of real kind of institutional impediments from these kind of rank and file kind of civil servants, as they did last time, they're going to still be every kind of move they make is going to be challenged.
And so, I mean, we're just going to have to see how it all plays out.
I think where it's, I think where we'll see a more difficult time of that is kind of what Trump can, how Trump can willpower, if he can figure out how to willpower in creative ways that, you know, the people that want to oppose his administration haven't thought of.
That's going to be kind of the chess game.
And if the people around, I mean, I'm sure when you kind of watch these figures, I'm sure that people like Steve Miller have been spending the last year just dreaming up.
Like, all kinds of ways in which they can kind of exert power and kind of do in runs around kind of the checks to the executive branch.
So it's going to be, it's going to be, I don't know if fascinating is the right word, but it's going to be fascinating to see how this all works out over the next year or two.
And we'll see it kind of almost immediately, right?
This is going to be like a tsunami that's going to hit us.
On January 20th, right?
We're not gonna have to wait.
It's gonna see how this all plays out.
It's gonna happen in our faces almost immediately.
And we didn't even get into, like, the more obscure people within the movement.
Like, I mean, there's, like, Nick Fuentes and then those guys, but then there's, like, the weird people that are kind of a level down, you know?
Beards and Beardly was, like, strangely relevant for about 15 minutes, you know?
And I'm like, yeah, I've been tracking that guy since 2017. What are you talking about?
Oh, my favorite recently is I've gotten a lot of mileage out of this.
It's because the GOP is just like full-on conspiracy mode now.
I've been able to talk a lot about the Kim Trail conspiracy people.
Sure, sure, yeah.
They're introducing bills all over the country now recently.
It's just going to be like...
We haven't even talked about that level of things, like the conspiracism that's just built into...
It's not just the people on the ground doing the chemtrail nonsense who are kind of harmless.
Now it's legislators who are talking about this shit.
It's like, yeah, no, this is...
Oh, God.
The next four years, my friends, I'm reminded there's a moment right after George W. Bush was elected, Stephen Beldzer, Was on The Daily Show when, you know, and forgive me for talking about Jon Stewart in a positive way, but Stephen Belzer had a, sorry, Richard Belzer, Richard Belzer, Richard Belzer.
He had a line that's like, the world is going to burn to ashes, but you and I, my friend, will eat like kings.
And that's kind of where we are.
We will eat like kings, you know.
My favorite part of kind of following the Kim trail strap.
There's, like, the random people that I found, like, that are, like, into it.
Like, Naomi Wolf.
What the fuck?
I mean, I know she's been gone for a while, but the fact that she now spends so much time on Twitter just posting random pictures of clouds, and is like, oh my god, look at this!
I'm like, oh my god, Naomi.
What's up?
I was about to butt in a minute ago and say Naomi Wolf is eyeing up state legislators.
She thinks my time has come.
I can get someone finally to deal with this square cloud issue.
I haven't looked at Naomi Wolf in so long.
The moment when she wrote an entire book and then went to promote her book and a single question of like, that's not what the thing you said means.
Death recorded does not mean they were executed.
It actually means they were not executed.
And if you knew how to read these documents, if you had even 1% of the level of knowledge you were to have in this matter, and, like, I can't imagine.
I just, like, that's a level of embarrassment.
Like, I would go off and never be seen again.
I would become a hermit, like, sitting in a cave somewhere, you know.
That event, Matthew Sweet just completely dismantling the central thesis of her entire book in one televised interview.
That is what drove her mad.
I mean, that is what is at the root of all of this.
I mean, she was bad before, but she is now just, like, yeah, just beyond the deal.
I would argue that Naomi Wolf's, like, most significant crime, though, was forcing Naomi Klein to have to write a book, basically saying, this is not me.
No, I'm the good one.
I'm the good one.
It's fine.
Yeah.
No, no.
It's funny, I nearly raised Naomi Klein earlier, because I was thinking about...
You know, the shock doctrine as sort of the idea of like the chaos being an opportunity for them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I've brought that book up a lot in the last few months in relation to kind of all the kind of climate chaos that we've been seeing and in relation to like how extremist movements take advantage of it too.
Like what we saw kind of from these militia groups in Appalachia kind of taking advantage of the hurricane.
We've seen other white supremacist movements take advantage of these natural disasters.
Patriot Front handing out water and stuff in Ohio after the train derailment.
All that kind of shit.
Alex McNabb of The Daily Show was literally a victim of Hurricane Helene.
He was in some of the news coverage at the time.
I couldn't find the particular telegram post.
I was looking for them and it's like...
You know, but apparently he was, like, pictured in, like, super local news coverage on this stuff and, like, was absolutely used to get his propaganda.
And then there were other people who were like, you know, we're going to go hand out water and blankets and food, etc., etc.
So, like, these right-wingers are definitely going to use all this, you know, the increasing instability caused by climate change.
They're going to use any crisis to their advantage.
Well, we saw it, didn't we?
First time round, Trump presidency.
You know, I mean, that caused chaos enough by itself, and then the complete, complete mishandling of the COVID pandemic beginning.
The chaos caused by that, that's, you know, all these people, they just, they were on that like flies on shit.
And the response to the uprising, even, I mean, you know, like, I don't know, I was going to say even more so, but I think it's kind of 50-50 ultimately, but, you know, certainly, you know, Antifa gets to burn down cities, and we can't even...
Yeah, Antifact is to burn down cities, and we don't even get to walk through the Capitol, you know, peacefully, little grandmas carrying lecterns.
That's a crime now.
Sedition against the U.S. government, you know?
Well, why is RFK Jr. going to be in charge of American healthcare, you know?
Yeah, exactly.
I think, well, I think climate change is, like, the perfect kind of example of kind of why Trump got reelected, right?
Because, like, Americans, like, we have...
Bad short-term memory, and we can't think very far ahead.
Like, we can't fix climate because, like, if it's more than, like, a month away, like, we know the Super Bowl is about to happen, but we don't fucking know what's going to happen a year from now, much less 10 years from now, right?
That's, like, not relevant to us.
I think a big part of it was, like, I think most Americans forgot what happened, like, for eight years.
Like, most Americans don't remember what 2017 was like, you know?
It feels like everybody just forgot, like...
That there was, like, chaos at the airports, you know, when that Muslim ban and all this stuff, like, all this stuff happened.
And it feels like so many people just kind of memory hold it.
And the same with COVID. Like, COVID, like, that was the end of the Trump administration that last year, and it was fucking nuts.
But I think when you look at kind of the breadth of American history, like, we don't do things to fix things unless it gets just astronomically bad.
The New Deal arguably wouldn't have happened without the Depression being as bad as it was.
We had to have a decade of just wrecked poverty for millions of Americans before we passed the New Deal and these basic social safety nets that were eventually passed by Europe and everybody else.
We still don't have universal health care or whatever.
And the entire story of American politics since the New Deal has been the attempt to destroy it.
The financial crisis, I think the fact that we saved the economy prevented us from instituting the real reforms that were needed.
And arguably, I saw some commentary on this yesterday or something.
Obama had the opportunity, but if he had taken the opportunity to really regulate the banks and to use his political capital on this, you wouldn't have gotten the Affordable Care Act, and that was his priority.
I'm not defending Obama here, but once you understand how the power works, once you understand how these people make decisions, it is one of those, look, if I was in that situation, do I really stick it to the banks and crush the financial system?
And I will definitely only get one term, and I'm not going to get any of my other legislative agenda done?
Or do I play soft and try to do the best I can on my other stuff?
I don't know.
The more I try to understand politics, the more I do not understand electoral politics in the slightest.
And what's actually going on in these people's heads.
It's something that fascinates me, but it's ultimately an unknowable fog to me.
That's where I land on it 90% of the time these days.
And then with COVID, I think...
We kind of got lucky.
Like, COVID wasn't, like, it was horrible.
COVID wasn't that bad.
COVID wasn't that bad, you know?
Somewhere near worst-case scenario, right?
You had, like, a million people die, but the mortality rate was relatively low.
It wasn't near what, like, the Spanish flu was or all these other pandemics.
And also, it was, like, the Spanish flu, like, killed a lot of young people, a lot of young, healthy people in their teens and 20s, right?
That didn't happen with COVID. And also COVID, like, if you live where I live in Texas and different places, kind of, like, COVID, like, it was really difficult to see kind of the effects of COVID. Kind of, like, it wasn't like people that lived in bigger, like, cities and kind of more urban areas where, like, there was a lot of death and people kind of saw kind of the freezer trucks out on the sidewalk.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like, that just didn't happen in a lot of red states.
And so I think you had this kind of...
These two realities that were happening.
I think that was a big problem.
I'm terrified of what might happen if we get hit by another pandemic, especially in the next four years.
It's much worse.
Can you imagine it comes 2024 and there's another global pandemic that happens because Trump cut another government agency?
With RFK as head of HHS, this is Like, entirely possible!
This is entirely possible!
Like, let's kill another...
It might even be happening.
Yeah.
Well, then it might be like a measles tendon.
You know, you never know.
Oh my god.
It's so easy to get really dark at this point.
Yeah, well, that's kind of where we live, unfortunately.
You know, but, you know.
Yeah, if we were studying history 50 years from now, we would say, oh, that's a fascinating era of history.
The thing is, we get to live through it.
So, you know, it's always best to see it from behind.
But, you know, so that's where we are, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know if that thing about the Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times.
I don't know if that's real or apocryphal, but it is pithy, by the way.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, thank you very much for coming on the show again, Teddy.
Where can our listeners find your work if they don't already know where to find it, which I find unlikely, but tell them anyway, just in case.
Yeah, you can find my work online.
You can subscribe to my newsletter.
It's at radicalreports.org.
I have a free and paid version of my social media.
Primarily, I'm on Blue Sky at the moment.
I no longer post anything on Twitter.
Mostly, you'll find me on Blue Sky.
That's been a nice bright spot over the last few months.
It's been a real resurgence in flowering of this community on Blue Sky.
It's been something really wonderful to watch, how that has come about.
