J6 One Year Later, Ep 2: The Radical Right Shows Up
Brad speaks with journalist and researcher Teddy Wilson, who has spent a decade covering the Radical Right in the United States. Teddy describes the J6 rioter network map he has built, showing the connections among the 725+ rioters who have been arrested in the year since the Insurrection. He paints a picture of how radical right groups like the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, and 3 Percenters were already at the Capitol before anyone else arrived. He also connects J6 to a lineage of right-wing terrorism in the USA.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, a faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB, and we are back with our series, J6, One Year Later, and we're talking about January 6th, the insurrection at our nation's capital.
And in order to do that today, I'm joined by a great guest, and that's somebody whose work I've admired for some time and interacted with on Twitter and other places, and that is Teddy Wilson.
And so before I introduce folks to all the things you're doing, Teddy, let me just say thanks for being here.
Well, thank you very much for having me.
It's a real pleasure.
I've listened to the podcast for quite a while now, and so I'm really grateful that you gave me the opportunity to join you here.
I'm excited because I feel like your view on everything we're going to talk about today is really important and you're going to have a kind of insight and a perspective that others will not.
Folks, Teddy is a journalist and a researcher, somebody who's been covering Uh, the radical right, the Christian right, the conservative movement for over a decade.
Uh, somebody who is a freelance journalist, but does a lot of writing, uh, at his newsletter, and that is Radical Reports.
And so we'll give you all the info for that, uh, when we wrap up today.
Uh, but, uh, let me just start by asking you this, uh, Teddy, you're somebody who's Intimately familiar, probably all too familiar with the radical right in this country.
And by radical right, we mean religious communities.
We also mean what some people might call the alt-right, and so on and so forth.
I want to get into some of that in a minute.
I just want to ask a question I'm asking everybody, which is, it's been a year.
If I asked you to characterize January 6th, in a nutshell, what would you say?
What was that day?
What was it?
You know, that's a really interesting question, and I've been thinking a lot about it in the last few days, especially after listening to your to your previous interview with Sarah Posner.
And.
You know, I think.
I think it was a lot of things to a lot of different people, I think, depending on your perspective.
You know, I think a lot of people Viewed it as, um, you know, a clear cut insurrection, you know, as a attempted coup.
Um, uh, some folks viewed it as an act of patriotism or, you know, a, um, an act of revolt or what have you.
And I think for me, I think I can't divorce it from kind of the, the recent historic context.
And what it means within the history of the radical right in this country, particularly the extremist right.
And so I view it kind of on a continuum, not as a singular event that just happened on January 6th, but as part of several events that have happened.
And what I mean by that is I look at that and I think, especially for the extremist right, In the country, I think that they have come to view January 6 as an event similar to that of Ruby Ridge or Waco.
For your listeners that may not be familiar, Ruby Ridge was a standoff in the mountains in which some folks that were involved in the Patriot movement We're in a standoff with federal authorities and folks ended up dying in this cabin.
And then for Waco, that was the siege in the spring of 1993, I believe, here in Waco, Texas, just up the road from me, actually, with the Branch Davidians and David Koresh.
And I think it's, you know, there's Significant differences between all three of those events, but I, I see that as part of kind of a continuum of, of, uh, you know, radical right extremist, uh, in their, uh, kind of clashes with the government.
And I think it's, it's, I think it's important to kind of think about it in that context.
Um, so yeah, that's, that's, it's hard for me not to, not to think of January 6th and not think of those other events and similar ones.
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