5-4 Presents: Know Your Enemy on the 1/6 Insurrection

Hi everyone, it's Peter, one of the hosts of 5 to 4.

We're still taking a brief break, coming back next week.

And so this week we wanted to share with you an episode of Know Your Enemy, because we think you'll like it.

Know Your Enemy, if you're not familiar, is a leftist guide to the right, sponsored by Dissent Magazine and hosted by our friends Sam Adler, Bell and Matthew Sittman.

In this episode, they are putting the events of January 6th in the context of the broader conservative movement.

And I thought it was just sort of a very thoughtful discussion that you should hear.

So without further ado, here is Know Your Enemies, the afterlife of January 6th.

We will be back with a brand spanking new episode next week.

See you then.

All right, let's get going.

Welcome, listeners, to episode 36 of Know Your Enemy.

I'm Matt Sitman, one of your podcast co-hosts, and I'm here with my friend Sam Adler-Bell.

Hi, Matt.

Hey, Sam, how are you doing today?

I'm fine.

Yeah, I don't know.

Got a lot of work.

As my father always said, the man who loves his job never truly works.

Yeah.

And as I've gotten older, as I've gotten older, I actually think that's incorrect.

I think that's incorrect, too.

Yes.

But my dad's point was, you know, don't settle for a job you hate.

Yeah, no, that's that's good.

I'm excited to be podcasting today because

we have a great episode lined up, and it's a Matt and Sam special.

we're going to talk about the afterlife of january 6th yeah the insurrection we're past the point of of of the six month anniversary but yes imagine that we did it right then

yes we've just been interested in the way that event continues to play out the way it figures into the discourse and the way you know different parties have talked about it um

and it just was something that had been intriguing sam and i and we ended up going back and digging into it some and we're excited to talk about it and for those of you who think that we focus too much on, you know, just the intellectually rigorous and interestingly erudite factions of the right, this time we're going to get into some of the swampiest conspiratorial nutsos.

So don't worry.

Yes, that's right.

Well, should we do some housekeeping and then get to it?

Yeah.

As always, we're grateful for our partners at Dissent who sponsor the podcast and who provide a free digital subscription to everyone who subscribes to our Patreon at www.patreon.com/slash know your enemy.

If you subscribe at $10 a month or more, you get the Dissent digital subscription.

And for $5 a month, you get all of our bonus episodes, which we continue to do, a few of them.

Yeah, I'll just do a special plug here for the summer issue of Dissent, which has an essay by me on video games.

I'm sure all of you who listen to this podcast know me for my incisive criticism about video games, but that's true.

It's about labor and video games.

But also, it's such a stacked issue.

We've got

a lot of former Know Your Enemy guests.

Sarah Jones has a piece.

Sam Moyne has a piece.

My friend Aviva Stahl has a piece.

Michael Kazen, who hasn't been on the podcast, but is a spiritual father of the podcast, has a piece.

A lot of my favorite writers are in this, and I'm so pleased to be in it too, which is all to say you should sign up for Know Your Enemy so you can get both a digital subscription to Dissent, so you you can read me and all those smart people and listen to our bonus episodes.

I mean, frankly, Sam, I feel a little left out not being in this issue.

Yeah, well, I talked to

towel up Tosh.

I talked to Tosh.

And I said, you know what?

Like, we've got to, we've got to keep him out of this.

Like, his head's getting too big.

It's important for him to be excluded every once in a while just to put him in his place.

Otherwise, you know, he'll take over the world.

But do check that out.

And you should subscribe to Dissent anyway.

In fact, you know, if you're into the monthly payment thing, I'm a, it's called a solidarity subscriber.

So I give them 10 bucks a month.

Yeah.

So consider that too.

It's a really great magazine and getting better and better.

Yes.

Also, we should thank Jesse, our producer, Jesse Brennaman, who it's continuing to be a pleasure to work with him.

He's done such great work for us.

And if you're wondering why we sound better lately, that's probably why.

Yeah.

I'm not going to take that personally.

But yes, Jesse is a wonderful, wonderful producer and a wonderful man.

And in addition to Jesse, Jesse, of course, we always want to thank Will Epstein, aka High Water for providing the music that you all love from this podcast.

Is that it, Sam?

Yeah.

Well, except for rate and review the podcast on iTunes.

Please do that.

Yes.

I want us to break into these rankings.

You know what I mean?

Like, shouldn't we be in the rankings, Matt?

Yes.

Although, did you see there was some article on a website I hadn't noticed before that listed the top 10 leftist podcasts you should listen to.

Oh, shit.

And we were on it.

I think we were number three.

Number three?

Damn.

I don't know if they were in order or if it was a ranking, but it was 10 podcasts you should listen to.

We were on it.

Number one, Red Scare.

Number two, Calm Town.

Number three.

Yes.

All right.

Well, I'm excited for this conversation about the afterlife of January 6th.

And here it is.

All right, Sam, let's get started.

As we mentioned in the introduction, our topic today is the afterlife of the 1.6 insurrection.

Or siege or storming the capital.

Capital or whatever.

Storming the capital.

Whatever you want to call it.

We're not going to get into the terminology too much.

No, who cares?

But yes, that is the topic.

Kind of the way it's factored into the discourse, you know, the way it's being argued and talked about, the place it's taken in our collective imagination, or rather the different places it's taken in our collective imagination,

which is not going to be just a navel-gazing episode on the discourse, because what we want to start with is kind of how, Sam, you and I have been talking about this a lot the last few days.

And, you know, what we want to do is, first of all, put it in a certain context.

Yeah.

Meaning, what kind of preceded it what followed it what are the right kind of political categories to think about it in like what else was happening the people involved who were they and what connections might they have to other um

uh aspects of right-wing politics and what's happening in the conservative movement and in the republican party yeah so that's what we mean by context when we think about it what other kinds of things do we associate it with in terms of uh you know everything we look at on the right on this podcast yeah you know um you know it we think it connects to some of what we've talked about before and we'll also you know say a little bit more about things we haven't touched on yet i mean i think we did an unbonus episode about the events like right after we did it that very day we did it was that it was sort of a red alert for know your enemy and it was so it was that very day kind of a snap reaction to what happened

So

now with the with the benefit of hindsight and information and reporting and stuff, we'll try to give a broader kind of sense of things.

I think like to start,

one thing that has struck me in thinking about this event since then is that because it was so shocking when it happened and because it was connected so intimately to all the madness that was already going on, Trump was denying that he lost the election.

He was insisting that it was illegitimate, that he should have won.

There was the beginnings of sort of just a backlash against our voting system in general.

There were fears of a coup.

The focus of January 6th became very narrowly confined by the days and weeks around it or months, I guess, since the election, right?

It was like, how did we get from the election in November to January 6th, you know?

And I think what I've noticed in thinking back and reading and sort of trying to contextualize it is that it's certainly true.

And of course, we've already made this argument on the podcast that Trump denying the results of the election is a very key factor.

It's a necessary factor

in producing this outcome.

In some ways, I think it is not a sufficient factor.

It's a necessary but insufficient factor for explaining what happened.

And the reason I say that is because I think that the antecedents to the January 6th events are

some

things that were going on in the far right, in paramilitary groups, in the militia movement before January 6th.

And I guess, like,

maybe the way to start this is to talk about now we've seen that like New York Times video of what actually took place, not just the like random images and short clips and stuff.

We've seen this kind of much more capacious picture of what took place that day.

And I think in order to understand what I'm going to argue about the preceding events, to understand what really happened on January 6th is important.

Yes.

And we'll put this in the show notes, the link to the New York Times video.

This is a video.

It's about 40 minutes long, and it was published June 30th.

So it's pretty new, pretty fresh.

And it's called Days of Rage, an in-depth look at how a mob stormed the Capitol.

And it's described as a six-month Times investigation that synchronized and mapped out thousands of videos and police radio communications from the January 6th Capitol riot, providing the most complete picture to date of what happened and why.

And as that description suggests, it's kind of like all the scraps of video they could find.

They synchronize them, kind of splice them together, and you get a more or less continuous unfolding of the day's events that's kind of narrated and has sometimes it'll pause and like emphasize like this person who was in this scene.

Right.

Right.

And this person talking on a radio to that person.

So it's really a remarkable feat of journalism.

Just the amount of time it must have taken and the resources involved is really something.

But this is the video.

Sam and I both watched it.

And I just wanted to say what it was before we got into it too much.

But it's really, I encourage everyone to watch it.

What stood out to you about that video that hadn't been clear to you about what happened before watching it?

Well, I would say, above all, I was struck by, if I can use this terminology, I think I'm borrowing this from you, Sam, when we were talking the other night on the phone, but the role of almost a radical vanguard of people there who, whether they were oath keepers or proud boys or 3%ers, you're kind of militia types, who

in the midst of probably a fair number of people who just were there for the Stop the Steel rally, right?

You know, find their way over to the Capitol.

In the midst of people who might have been a bit more clueless or just kind of going with the flow, these people really did seem to provide instructions to people on how to break into the Capitol.

They came with equipment, in some cases, weapons of various kinds.

They sometimes were in almost military-style gear, like tactical gear.

And they clearly had a plan for what to do.

And one thing the New York Times video makes makes clear is that online in the weeks and months leading up to this, there were talk of, you know, like floor plans of the Capitol being shared and strategies being discussed.

And, you know, it wasn't just spontaneous.

These were people, at least some of them, who knew what they were doing.

And I think the violence we saw and the kind of actual kind of push into the Capitol was...

directed by, you know, a relatively small number of people, perhaps, but who really were not just bumbling idiot Trump supporters.

Or, you know, whatever the stereotype would be of why these people were essentially clueless and innocent.

Yeah, well, there's this one of the narratives, we'll get to more of this later, that the conservative movement initially used to kind of downplay January 6th.

It's like, look, most of the people who got in there were just like tourists.

You know, they were like, they thought they were allowed to go inside the Capitol and walk around and,

you know, look at the portraits of former presidents and stuff.

They got bussed in and had a great time down in D.C.

But I think that the interesting thing about seeing how clearly the militia movement played a vanguard role, as you say, in breaking the windows, breaking the barricades, like subduing the police sufficiently so that people could get through.

It's kind of, it strikes against the idea that like the whole event was the consequence of kind of just lackadaisical policing, allowing a bunch of delusional rubes into the Capitol,

that there was like a very deliberate plan on the part of a small number of people.

I think at the same time, it does suggest that

the number of people who are there to engage in a concerted act of like anti-democratic insurrection,

using violence and coercion to achieve it, was smaller.

It's not like the 10,000 people who were there were all like, we're going to get to go into the Capitol, but a small vanguard were.

And a lot of people followed them.

They followed their orders, they followed their instructions, and they followed their lead inside.

I think that's exactly right.

It's understandable.

If anyone has been in like a bar fight, right, or been in a crowd when the spark flies and suddenly, you know, people go a little crazy, it's totally believable to imagine a throng of people already agitated, right?

Who are being told, including by Trump, that his landslide election victory was stolen.

It's not going to take a lot to get them ramped up, even if it was, again, a relatively small number of people who were the ones setting the fire, so to speak.

Yeah.

The other thing that struck me about the videos,

it goes back to something I think we said

when we did our original episode, is that there is such a mix of

hapless, humorous ineptitude and just silliness.

of some of the people who were in there, mixed with genuine menace, you know, like genuinely menacing behavior.

And I remember when we talked about it initially, that was something that we were having to reconcile ourselves to, which was that like the QAnon shaman is funny, not scary.

In one sense, yes.

Yeah.

And, but, but the guys with literal zip ties wearing tactical gear, some of them former cops in military, you know, wearing helmets, fighting cops.

there to achieve a particular goal and, you know,

like slamming on doors and saying, like, where are you?

Where are you?

to legislators.

Yeah.

No, not funny, menacing,

deeply disturbing.

And I should say that's another thing that I noticed from the video, or one of my takeaways watching the 40-minute New York Times video was, I think, how violent it was.

Yeah.

Because a fair number of the videos they draw from are sort of from within or very close to the crowd, right?

So you get a sense of the noises,

the physicality of it yeah and you know the people who say that this these were all unarmed people i mean no the capitol police people were spraying them with mace or or bear spray equivalent you know things like that they often had kind of handheld weapons to help you know break in to certain parts of the the capitol subsequently some of the people who were arrested um

later on like uh one person,

a 70-year-old guy from Faukeville, Alabama, who was arrested, they found inside inside his pickup truck, which he had parked, 11 Molotov cocktails in the form of mason jars filled with ignitable substances, rags, and lighters, as well as a handgun, an M4 carbine assault rifle, and rifle magazines loaded with ammunition.

You know, I guess you could say having a gun in your car is not so damning, but having Molotov cocktails suggests that you had something else in mind at some point.

Or at least you were prepared to do something else.

Right.

So when we talk about the rioters more broadly, I think it can be overplayed how armed they were.

Yeah.

Right.

I think some language that's sometimes used to describe them, kind of like more flippant language on Twitter, say, you know, it can be exaggerated, but it's also an exaggeration in the other direction to portray them as all, again, bumbling, mostly peaceful people who, you know, didn't have anything on them that would.

be a problem.

In particular,

this core vanguard of people from a lot of whom

were previously connected, already connected to the militias that Matt named earlier, three percenters and oath keepers.

I want to get to that, Sam, and kind of push you on the connection to the various kind of militia movements and some of the protests, anti-lockdown protests in various states during the pandemic.

But also, you know, in addition to this kind of vanguard, or maybe they were a part of it in some cases, but there were state legislators there.

ex-military, ex-police.

It's actually kind of disturbing, I think, the number of people who had some formal political role or like role in our policing, military, et cetera.

Yeah.

That suggests, again, they were not just kind of random everyday people, but people either with, you know, if you're a state legislator, your place in the party is significant in a way.

Yeah.

Right.

Like it's not just a random Republican voter.

And again, people with various degrees of connections to.

the security state, police, military, et cetera.

Yeah.

I mean, the woman who was killed, Ashley Babbitt, she served, right?

She was in the armed forces in some capacity.

And we'll talk about that a little later on because she's becoming, you know, the kind of martyr of this for the right.

But tell us more about the militia movement, Sam, because this is something you've been digging into.

And your arguments persuade me, but let's get into it some.

Yeah.

I mean, basically

there are people who know a lot more about these movements than I do, and I haven't really written about them or researched them all that much.

But one of the things that's very clear, which I think has gotten lost in the sort of discussions about January 6th, I think in part because people want to link it exclusively to Trump inciting them, the reality is that like

things like what happened at January 6th in terms of militia movements busting into state capitals happened multiple times throughout 2020.

Militia groups stormed the statehouse in Michigan multiple times.

Eamon Bundy and other people people involved with his movement were arrested inside of the Idaho State House

multiple times.

This is a headline from December 21st, 2020.

Armed protesters break into Oregon's State Capitol building, break windows, assault journalists, hit police with chemical agent.

The Oregon State Capitol building on December 21st, 2020.

It's exactly what happened on January 6th.

Yes.

There's been some interesting reporting that actually Jesse, our producer's former colleague, Micah Michael Loeinger, has done for WNYC about Zello, which is a sort of walkie-talkie app that the militia movements were using all year and then used on January 6th.

And it's one of the places that prosecutors have actually derived a lot of the most damning evidence about the involvement of militia groups in January 6th.

But they were communicating on these networks

in a way that suggested that they had done this before.

You know, like the way that the siege of the Capitol took place had antecedents in the anti-lockdown protests that had taken place at state capitals all across the country.

So that's like one very important moment here.

Yes.

I think we forget.

I mean, even I forget, but like, remember the Michigan siege on the Capitol where there were people with, you know, there were oath keepers with guns inside on the floor of the Capitol protesting the lockdowns.

And there was the plot, the plot to kidnap.

the Michigan governor.

And, you know, however, you know, sketchy that might be

in terms of like, you know, the actual plan, it's still, they were, that's what they were talking about.

Yes, exactly.

There's some evidence to suggest that there were a lot of FBI informants involved in that plot.

Yes, exactly.

They did, in fact, you know, at least get indicted for it and have plans to do it, whether or not some Fed convinced them it was a good idea.

And I just want to insert here, too, if you remember, careful listeners, if you go all the way back.

to one of our earliest episodes, the one on the illiberal right, we were talking about what was happening in Oregon and at the state level, where now we're seeing all this anti-democratic, you know, kind of voter suppression legislation.

You know, we kind of had our eye on that stuff for a while.

And what was happening, if you recall, I think, was Oregon legislators fled the state.

But what was unique about it, it wasn't like the Democrats leaving Texas, right?

Where they like have a case of Miller, Miller White, right?

And like get on a bus or something.

These were like, uh, legislators who their security was essentially provided by, I think, the Bundies.

Yeah.

or very similar types.

You know, so the militia was were actually kind of providing security for

some of these right-wing legislators.

And we know, too, they've, I think, some of these groups involved in January 6th were like Roger Stone's muscle.

Yeah, that's right.

When he goes around giving talks and stuff.

Yeah.

And

the other thing I want to point to as an antecedent to January 6th is after all these lockdown protests, the next big mobilization for the militia movement was,

of course, the the Black Lives Matter protests and riots over the summer.

So, when those started taking place and there was property destruction, of course, these militia movements, especially those with something of a white nationalist bent, were very eager to go out into the streets in various cities or drive their car to a city in order to participate and show up in tactical gear, holding their guns, and like you know, protect a gas station or a Kmart or something from looters.

Like, bonus, they're black, but

nonetheless, like, the other big

organizing moment for the militia movement in America in 2020 was the protests.

Because, I mean, there were tons of stories about them mobilizing and showing up and standing outside of gas stations and stuff with, you know, fucking assault rifles and full tactical gear.

And then, of course, the most famous example of the consequences of them having done this, which is to say, bring a bunch of guns to a protest, was the Kyle Rittenhouse encounter, where in Kenosha, Wisconsin, he killed two people and maimed another, the 17-year-old kid who brought a gun that he had barely used to this protest to kind of like...

play the militia, even though he didn't really have much involvement with militia up to that point.

And for various reasons, which you can read, we'll put in the show notes, this very very good New Yorker article about him and his family and how this all went down.

He ended up killing two people.

And the reason I point to that is because it's not just that, you know, that

it's terrible that that happened and it reveals how dangerous it is to have civilians thinking of themselves as vigilantes who are enforcing a form of, you know, social order and hierarchy that the police, for some reason, aren't willing to enforce to the degree that they want them to.

That's dangerous.

But the thing about Kyle Rittenhouse is he becomes very much a cause celeb for the far right, the right in general, honestly,

and the militia movement too.

And the militia movement is able to raise enormous amounts of money, nominally for Kyle's defense.

Though if you read that New Yorker article, there's a lot of moments in which basically the people who are surrounding Kyle and offering sort of PR and

legal help are actually raising money that they're not giving to the family and they're not really actually helping with his defense.

In fact, Kyle Rittenhouse's mother, this is reporting in the New Yorker piece, thought that the two of the lawyers who had sort of, you know, plunged on Kyle as a,

you know, kind of a way to raise their profile and as a cash cow for their own agenda,

she thought that they left him in prison, in jail, longer than he needed to because they had already raised millions of dollars to pay his bail in order to raise more money.

Right.

And importantly, one of those people who joined the cause of defending Kyle Rittenhouse,

you know, the unfairly maligned teen vigilante, was none other than Lynn Wood.

Oh, yes.

Lynn Wood,

one of the real breakout stars of, you know, the final season of the Trump show.

Yeah.

Or what we hope is the final season.

I mean, what a piece of work.

Yeah.

This guy is.

We were talking before we started recording.

I had forgotten that he was, he's kind of known as a celebrity lawyer, but he represented Richard Jewell

in the Centennial Olympic park bombing in Atlanta.

He represented the family of John Benet Ramsey.

And he represented former U.S.

Representative Gary Condit,

who people will remember from that, like that hazy pre-9-11 scandal, right, where the Chandra Levy, the intern who disappeared and was murdered.

And also, Linwood was hired by Herman Kane to respond to the sexual harassment allegations during one of his presidential runs.

Wow.

Just like a forest gump of

celebrity political ambulance chasing scandal bullshit.

From Jean Benet Ramsey to Herman Kane.

That's quite a swath.

And the important thing about Lin Wood, of course, is that he becomes completely essential to the public and legal campaign.

to delegitimize the 2020 election.

Yeah.

So like, for example, Georgia officials like Governor Brian Kemp and the Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, he called for them to be imprisoned because they were working with the Chinese to rig the vote for Biden.

Wood made allegations about John Roberts, I believe on Twitter, that he was involved in QAnon somehow.

Yeah.

He's a big QAnon guy now, Lynn Wood.

Yes.

And this is all even just like the top line summary on Wikipedia, but also called for Mitch McConnell to be arrested.

He said Mike Pence should face execution by firing squad.

You know, so like kind of just like the nuttiest, you know, version of the election conspiracies, he's behind them.

Yeah.

But he's not just behind them or spouting them.

He's, he was a, he and Sidney Powell.

Sidney Powell were kind of the dynamic duo behind a lot of the state-level lawsuits, I believe, right?

Yeah, that's right.

On behalf of Trump.

Yeah.

Right.

So, so just to like summarize this, what's, what's, what's, what's fascinating about Lynn Woods' fingerprints on all of these moments is that you can see how we get in 2020 from the militia mobilizations against the lockdowns in various states where they're doing statehouse sieges, right?

They're doing this very same model.

That headline I read from Oregon in December, where they literally...

did exactly what they were going to do later on in DC to Kyle Rittenhouse being involved in the BLM, in the militia mobilization against BLM, and then Kyle Rittenhouse's case becoming a cash cow for the militia movement.

There's this, all of this thing where these militias, local militias sort of identify him as one of theirs, right?

And then they're raising money nominally for Kyle's defense, which then they take like a 20% cut from for themselves.

And, you know, like it did, I'm sure, you know, this is speculation.

So like, you know, this isn't any of the charging documents or anything.

And I haven't seen reporting to like prove this.

But like, think about

how do these guys get these expensive fucking guns, this expensive Kevlar bulletproof vests?

How do they get all this stuff?

Well, one way that they were raising money throughout 2020 was by saying we need to defend this kid who shot some BLM protesters.

And then we're going to take that money and buy stuff for our militia with it.

At the same time, the people who are involved in raising all this money for Kyle include Lynn Wood, who's then using some of that money for the lawsuits that he's filing against states who verified Trump having lost the election.

Right.

Like literally

in the New York article, there are moments where it's like somebody, you know, it's Mike Lindell, the My Pillow Guy, contributes money to something, some fundraiser that Lynn Wood is doing where he thinks he's giving money for.

Kyle Rittenhouse, and it turns out that it's earmarked for stop the steal.

I'm sure Mike Lindell doesn't care about that, but I'm just saying that like there's all these moments where there is, in terms of funding, this slippery and slipping, sliding, sloshing thing between the money that's being raised for Kyle Rittenhouse, that's funding the militias, and then that's also funding the

Stop the Steel anti-democratic agenda.

There was a New Yorker piece on Lynn Wood.

It reported that

this is a great little detail.

When Nixon resigned, he cried.

Oh, yeah.

Well, he didn't get a giant tattoo of him on his back like Roger Stone.

So he obviously didn't really care.

And in this New Yorker piece, they also identified that some of his other clients include Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Oh, yeah.

It says Wood appends heart emojis to their correspondences.

Oh, very nice.

He and Marjorie Taylor Green.

Yeah.

I love the thought of them texting each other with all these emojis.

Yeah.

When just like deranged shit.

So anything else on the this kind of opening January 6th connection to the militia movements to Kyle Rittenhouse, his legal team, the money raised for him.

Yeah, one thing I don't want to overstate, this isn't like some conspiratorial, like the far right and this, and the conservative movement are all like in cahoots and it's all very coherent.

It's not like, and I'm not trying to do the, you know, pegboard.

Yeah, Charlie from It's Always Sunny.

Yeah, I'm not trying to do it.

The famous meme of him.

But I do think, and there's going to be something I get to later, which also relates to this, is that there's a connection between the far right, the armed militia movement, and some of these people who are like the crankiest cranks of Trump world.

And I think that like, I'm not meant to be doing scaremongering about this.

The militia movement is extremely small.

And I do think that the like law enforcement crackdown, federal crackdown on the people who participated in January 6th is having a very damaging effect on their ability to operate in a way that they did, I think, to a maybe unprecedented degree of success throughout 2020.

You know, 2020 was like a boom year for the militia movement in terms of lockdown protests, showing up to BLM stuff, getting all this money from raising money for vigilantes.

But I think January 6th is sort of the culmination in a way.

I think it would be too naive and optimistic to say that it's...

that it's the end of this kind of mobilization.

But I do think that the vanguard of the January 6th insurrection, the people who actually pushed through the cops and broke the windows and got in there, they were training for a whole year.

Maybe not literally the people who did it, but they were watching people who were part of their movements associated with the same kind of politics doing this kind of mobilization all throughout the year.

I mean, I think partly maybe one reason it's easy to kind of forget some of these connections or never learn about them in the first place or not kind of perceive them as real in a certain way might be because these are not people on Twitter exactly.

They might be on Twitter in a literal sense, but it seems like the forums in which these people are communicating is not like forums that you and I hang out in.

And so, you know, the impression you get might be from idiots on Twitter, right, where most journalists lurk, saying this or that about January 6th, or, you know, having that be your main experience of it through social media that most people use and then, you know, the images broadcast through television and otherwise.

But I don't know.

It just feels like a world that I don't have the firmest grip on in some ways.

Yeah, me neither.

Me neither.

You know, not at, not at all.

And I, and I, and I think, like,

as I think we'll probably discuss when we talk about some of the like ideological left's interpretations of January 6th, there's always a danger of overstating like the power and the breadth.

the influence and even like the militancy of these groups the actual armed insurrectionary, extra-parliamentary, vigilante right.

There is a danger in overstating their numbers and how much of a threat that they in particular pose, especially, you know, in comparison to like

conservative politicians just destroying democracy using legislation.

Legislation.

Yeah.

But yeah, nonetheless, if you want to understand what January 6th was about, you have to understand these people.

Yes.

And of course, you know, it was the lie that Trump had the election stolen from him, that he didn't actually lose.

That That just as a reminder to listeners, we said this on a couple episodes, you know, a few months back when we were talking about the raft of legislation at the state level aimed at voter suppression.

And, you know, you can read or listen to interview after interview with state legislators who say, we passed this law because we need election security.

because the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Yeah.

So,

you know, I also place January 6th as a particularly kind of violent moment in the rights turn against democracy.

And especially, you know, by the right, I mean sort of elements of the Republican Party, elements of the conservative movement, and then, of course, these militia types, you know, some of those kinds of groups whose formal relationship to, say, you know, the conservative movement or the Republican Party may be ambiguous or tenuous, but nevertheless, they're all kind of facing the same direction, shoulder to shoulder, which is, you know, majoritarian democracy is a problem.

And in this case, you know, they attacked the kind of seat of American democracy.

I know that sounds kind of cheesy and patriotic to say, but I do think for me,

that was the symbolic value of it was really something.

Yeah.

You know,

it was aimed at preventing the peaceful transfer of power.

Yeah.

And the certification of an election.

And Trump told them to march on the Capitol.

He didn't tell them what to do, but he told them to do it.

And up to that point, he had told them that the fucking election was stolen from them and democracy was imperiled.

It is worth noting.

I mean, it's so Trumpian, and it gets at the mix of menace and absurdity we've put at the heart of Trumpism from the start, which is he told them to go march on the Capitol, right?

And I think twice during that speech, he actually said he'd go with them.

And then his fat ass just went back to the White House and watched it on television.

Yeah.

I mean, it's really, it's kind of so trumping that he, he kind of pushes other people to do things and then washes his hands of the results.

Yeah.

Right.

Or tries to distance himself or, you know, act like, what?

How did I did that?

Or why would you blame me?

Right.

But it is striking that the rhetoric from Trump is was that of fighting, take back our democracy.

There were clips, I think in the New York Times video even of, I want to say it was Jason Miller on like Fox the night before using militaristic language, right?

About stopping the steel.

Yeah.

And it's just, where did people think that was going?

Yeah.

Like it was a kind of constant barrage of militaristic, violent language that seemed to permeate all the stop the steel stuff in the days leading up to January 6th.

Yeah.

And some people took them seriously.

So I want to

just point out one more thing before we turn to the way January 6th has been metabolized by different factions of the right and left.

This is something that I just didn't even know, or if I knew it, I forgot.

But there were mobilizations at state capitols all over the country on January 6th.

Yes.

Staffers at the Utah State Capitol were ordered to evacuate the building.

In Georgia, police escorted Brad Raffensperger to safety because militia members were gathered outside the Capitol building where he was in Atlanta.

In In Olympia, the perimeter of Washington Governor Jay Inslee's mansion was breached by a large group of pro-Trump protesters.

Protesters at a rally in Salem burned Oregon Governor Kate Brown in effigy as police urged people to avoid the area of the statehouse.

Fistfights broke out in Sacramento outside of the statehouse.

And in Kansas, state police monitored a group of protesters who had entered the statehouse in Topeka.

So this was a tactic.

It was engaged in by a bunch of different people in a bunch of different places.

Probably in every instance, only a small number of them were connected to the militia movement, which had planned to do this in the way that they had done earlier in the year over COVID lockdowns.

But I do think that's just important to point out.

Honestly, I forgot about.

the fact that it happened at state capitals too.

Yeah.

Like it's one of those things the day of on January 6th, as all the audiences from the Capitol are, you know, they're streaming it.

It's like in the mix of tweets and news stories and photos and, you know, everything else that was kind of coming at us.

I do remember the reports from state capitals and it just fell out of the conversation because, you know, obviously what happened at the Capitol in Washington was

the preeminent story.

And the fact that it was kind of so wild and hard to get your hands around exactly what happened or what was happening, you know, just made, I think, those state level stories fade.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, should we turn to some more kind of discourse?

How have different factions of the ideological left and right made sense of what happened?

I think we've sort of made our case for what we think happened.

And

we haven't said anything about like, you know, how hard should the book be thrown at the people who are involved in this shit.

I will say, I guess we'll get into this with the leftist accounts.

I'm not here for a new like war on terror, even if it's against white domestic, white nationalists.

I don't think like our legal system, our policing apparatus, our investigatory capacities of the federal investigators have more than enough power to investigate people according to like constitutional principles.

We don't need any of this war on terror shit to make it more possible.

We don't need to suspend the Fourth or First Amendment in order to take these people down.

Just, you know,

I've always been a, you know, a civil libertarian at heart.

And despite as we, as we talk about how scary this stuff and dangerous these people are, I'm not like, I'm not cheering for the new war on terror, you know, to the extent that something like that is in the offing.

Right.

No, I totally agree.

And I think from the left, that has been one of the main concerns.

I think sometimes to the point of not seeing clearly what did happen.

Yeah, exactly.

But it, but, but it is worth noting that.

And again, I don't know what the correct answer would be, right, in terms of how to charge some of these people, what they should be charged with, you know, how you might distinguish the various kinds of people involved, if you can.

You can see what they're being charged with.

You know, like on New York Times, it has like a list of notable indictments, and it's not, it's not that severe for the most part.

You know, it's like

entering a federal building and not leaving when you're told

some people obstruction of justice if they like deleted a video that they posted on Twitter initially or something.

There's people like getting charged with disorderly conduct.

And if people had weapons and they like hit police officers with them, then they're getting tougher charges.

But it's not like people are being whisked away to Guantanamo or anything.

Right.

But it's still a concern.

And it's worth saying.

We support civil liberties on this podcast.

Yes.

Yes, definitely.

So, you know, it's always, I always feel a little bad when we criticize some of our comrades, say.

You know, it happened during the fascism episode where we disagreed with some people we respect and admire.

And that'll, you know, be the case here.

But, you know, it's a lot of it comes down to a difference in emphasis, I think, sometimes, but maybe sometimes not.

And I feel like one kind of representative piece from the left perspective was published in Jacobin from kind of friends of the pod, Danny Besner and Ben Burgess.

Yeah.

I've been on Ben's podcasts.

Me too.

And Danny's, of course, fun to spar with on Twitter and

a good sport most of the time.

Yes, and fun to have a drink with too, I can say.

But they

had a piece in Jacobin on January 15th.

So before we knew some of this, but that itself might be indicative of something.

Yeah.

But it was called Trump is a threat to democracy, but that doesn't mean he's winning.

And just to give you a sense of the piece, they definitely, you know, are critical of what happened.

They're not sympathetic to Trump or his supporters at all in the sense of what they did on January 6th.

But I think this piece is instructive because, well, you know, in its second paragraph, it says this, last week's storming of the U.S.

Capitol, which appears to have been undertaken by a loose mob of ragtag QAnon conspiracy theorists, has sparked another round of this great endless debate.

And the debate they mean is kind of whether what Trump was going for was a coup, right?

And they also relate it to the fascism debate.

And they say those who argue that Trumpism is a form of fascism saw this in the insurrection, a genuine threat to the United States democratic institutions.

But for those like us who consider Trumpism a manifestation of excellent American trends and Trump himself to be an ineffectual leader, the events of January 6, while a disturbing escalation in the violent and erratic tendencies of Trump and his most hardcore supporters, were ultimately important because they demonstrated the weakness of Trump's position.

And it's sort of portrayed as the last and strangest episode in the desperate attempts to somehow reverse the results of the election.

Right.

So, one thing they object to, again, is the language of coup, which they say, you know, if this is a coup, then kind of any deranged action, even if it had no chance of succeeding, can be reasonably called a coup.

Yeah.

So they say, you know, any bizarre event from Charles Manson's attempt to foment a race war that would transform the United States to the bombings carried out by the many tiny organizations in the 1970s that consider themselves to be carrying out a revolutionary war against the government could be classified as a coup.

Yeah.

Well, Sam, what's your initial reaction to that?

Well, I hope I'm not being unfair, but that part seems super specious.

Like, the difference, the obvious difference, like, is that no sitting president encouraged Charles Manson to do what Charles Manson was doing.

Yes.

Like,

the important distinction is whether it was so totally feeble.

and ridiculous what Trump was trying to do, what his intentions were, is what he apparently believed was possible, that he would ultimately be named

the president again.

No matter how feeble, what he was doing was trying to subvert a legitimate election.

And in the context of January 6th, it was encouraging in so many words, or at least contributing to a sense of urgency that these militia people and others interpreted as licensed to do violence on his behalf.

Like it's just not, it's not comparable to those, to that set of examples.

Yes.

Yes.

The feebleness is important, and I think people can overstate how tenuous our grasp on democracy was during those weeks and months because it was feeble.

But it's not nothing that the sitting president wanted to take power illegitimately.

Yes.

No, that's true.

And just to be fair to Danny and Ben, where they end up going with this is

partly a terminological debate.

But in that sense, it's also kind of a branch of the fascism debate for them.

And they say, our point is that there is the potential for very real and very negative political consequences if the fascism and coup narratives become the dominant frameworks through which leftists and liberals understand the threat posed by Trump and QAnon.

So for some reason, now QAnon is the main focus here.

But they say, in our opinion, these narratives distort how our friends and comrades on the left think about the Democratic Party, tech censorship, police power, and also worry that it would empower the Biden administration

to kind of further beef up the national security state.

But in that sense, it is kind of treating it as an adjacency to or a kind of sub-debate within the fascism debate.

And their answer is pretty similar, right?

That the main concern seems to be handing liberals or the Democratic Party,

the government in general, an alibi or

reasons to continue ratcheting up.

the power and reach of the security state.

Yeah.

I guess, Matt, you know, we basically basically agree about this question, so it won't be that fun for the listeners.

But

I just think that like one can share their concerns about all those things, which I do.

You know, like I don't want the security state to become more powerful.

I like spent, I spent most of the first part of my like career either in advocacy and or in journalism, like reporting on privacy and surveillance and

violations of the Fourth Amendment.

I'm a big believer in due process in every circumstance, every circumstance in which somebody is accused of a crime.

I'm concerned about this stuff all the time.

I share their concerns.

Nonetheless, like, I'm not convinced to like interpret a set of political phenomena in front of my face in a way that I don't think is right in the interest of not giving ammo to, you know, the big liberal behemoth.

Like, I'm going to interpret what happened in terms of what I think actually happened.

Yes.

You know what I mean?

And then I'm going to continue to advocate and make clear that I don't think that means that we should have a new war on domestic terror.

And I don't think that that means that the security state and the intelligence community are like the most beautiful, wonderful liberal heroes.

Like, I just think I can do both.

Yes.

No, I agree.

I mean, the first thing should be see what's in front of your nose, to borrow Orwell's line, right?

Like, and I don't think you should pull your punches about that for concerns about what might follow, because I think you can address those things directly themselves.

Yeah.

Right.

Just as you're describing.

And I just think that's a, as I put it in our fascism episode, it's kind of already, it's starting by kind of triangulating or, right, positioning yourself amid other positions in the discourse

rather than attending to the thing itself and trying to find out just what happened.

Yeah.

Now, again, this piece was written in January.

I know, yeah.

But, you know, that might itself speak to a certain problem, which is a kind of urge to get quickly to a certain position.

Well, look, I mean, on the other hand, I admire the fact that they interpreted a growing danger that liberals might get fully behind some kind of massive empowerment of the security state to prevent this kind of thing from happening again.

And that they wanted to nip it in the bud by making sure that leftists, at least, wouldn't be like, rah-rah, let's go infiltrate and arrest every person who's ever signed up for some kind of like white nationalist listserv.

You know what I mean?

Like, I honestly think the left is frequently in danger of condoning stuff like that, which is, in my view, like very much a violation of the First Amendment, whatever you think of the,

you know, when it's a violation of the First Amendment.

So I do, I respect it in that regard, but I also hear what you're saying.

It's like, get the takeout, get the takeout before we really know what happened.

And I think that like some of the things that we've learned subsequently, as we were just talking about, like, suggest that only a small number of people were really like had like genuinely insurrectionary and violent intentions right

but it's also not true that no one there did

yes and as we kind of floated at the start of this episode i'm i don't want to say i'm totally agnostic about the terminology used i tend to say insurrection uh because i do think coup is not quite right yeah but i also feel like riot makes it seem it i think riot loses the specific

specifically political dimension in the sense of what they were trying to stop and what that kind of symbolically, what the value of it was.

Yeah.

You know, like riots, I think, as we've discussed in the podcast, have political dimensions, but it's not like when you're rioting, when you're rioting in the street and you're breaking windows at Bank of America, the purpose of doing that is to like stop people from being able to use that ATM the next day.

Like, that's not really right.

It's not really what it is.

But when it comes to this moment of like violent protests, these people were literally trying to achieve a particular political goal, which was to prevent the authorization, legitimation of the election via the legislative process that was taking place inside of the Capitol at that time.

Yes, yes.

I did want to make one point, which is the emphasis on Trump's ineffectualness and weakness.

Again, there's something off about that to me because it's...

Everyone's ineffectual until they aren't.

Yeah.

Right.

You know, it's, it's like Hemingway talked about, you know,

people going bankrupt, and he said it happens slowly than all at once.

Yeah.

You know, and I think there's something to that in this regard, too, which is, you know, it's true this failed, but when you look at what the Republican Party, both nationally and at the state level, has done since,

like, Trump failed because, you know, the Georgia Secretary of State stood up to him, or that's one reason he failed, right?

Yeah.

Like people he wanted to decertify the results or find votes votes for him.

That position now is stripped of power because the new legislation passed in Georgia.

Yeah.

Right.

And so to me, again, when you locate January 6th on this kind of turn against democracy continuum,

that to me, what we've seen happen since

is actually Republicans using their power, not ineffectually, to change the way we vote and count votes in this country.

Yeah, exactly.

This sort of ecstatic, absurd manifestation of anti-democratic impulses in Trump's effort to, you know, steal the election have been domesticated in the

movement to, you know, basically disenfranchise lots of people or create a political check, a partisan check on the outcomes of elections in various states.

I totally totally agree.

But, you know, beyond the left, I mean, to me, it's when you look at the broader right and their response to this, kind of moving from left to right, you know, it really is one of the things we've emphasized on the podcast for a while is the way right-wing intellectuals give themselves permission to go along with things or even just like, okay, what's the main

main focus about January 6th should be.

You could debate that, but Trump instigated it.

You can look at the people involved, look at their aims, look at what followed from it.

But it seems like to me, when I'm perusing, especially now, because there was that moment where it seemed like maybe some people in the Republican Party, I didn't have much, many high hopes at all, but it was so shocking that it was like, well, maybe some people with some

conscience, you know, whether in the Republican Party or on the broader right, would kind of realize just how bad things had gotten, how dangerous it was.

And now, you know, you turn to National Review and it's, well, Joe Biden misspoke about this aspect of what happened or why a commission to investigate January 6th wouldn't really be a good idea.

Yeah.

And, you know, it's kind of nibbling at the edges and just kind of leaving, you know, you could read some of these pieces.

And if you were someone who believes the election was stolen from Trump, you could kind of leave that belief in place and just kind of, you know, then go along with these more marginal arguments about why the way Democrats are handling it is bad or why the liberal press is misstating or exaggerating this or that.

And sometimes reporters will make mistakes.

You know, I'm not saying there is a, you know, no reason to ever correct the record or fact check or anything like that.

But that seems to be the kind of moderate right or the mainstream right in the sense of

institutions that maybe

have some anti-Trump people or never Trump people still in them and kind of are caught between, They're neither fully on board with Trump, but they're not totally in full opposition either.

And there's this kind of ambiguity on the right.

Just like after the election, there were people who didn't say the election was stolen and didn't necessarily spin wild conspiracy theories, but would say something like, what's wrong with auditing?

Yes.

What's wrong with just making sure?

And it kind of gave people an excuse to sort of keep going along with what Trump was saying and doing.

Just to be bend over backwards, to be fair.

I am sure if I did an exhaustive review of National Review, right, or looked at the Twitter feeds of everyone associated with National Review, there would be some people who have at some point forthrightly condemned what happened.

Well, they all condemned it at first.

But now, again, that's the slightly more responsible and mainstream, right?

But of course, we know they're not really in the driver's seat right now.

They're not.

So, Sam, we've been looking at some people more explicitly pro-Trump.

Yeah, so we've got the National Review folks like muddying the waters as they always do.

They want to be anti-Trump a little bit, but they don't want to be too anti-Trump.

They want to hold on to some kind of good standing amongst their liberal cocktail party friends.

But

where's the real shit?

Well, one of the pieces that I've been fascinated by for a while was published.

A few months ago.

It was published, well, it was published back in February now.

And it's called Once Upon a Presidency

by Joshua Hocheschild, who Catholics will know him because he teaches at Mount St.

Mary's in Maryland, which is a Catholic university.

But he was kind of famous for a bit.

He taught at Wheaton, the evangelical college outside Chicago, and converted to Catholicism.

And it meant he lost his job there because he wasn't Protestant.

Papist, papacy.

Lost a job to papacy.

Right.

Doesn't happen so often anymore.

But this piece, Once Upon a Presidency, it's sort of like written as if it were an imaginative recreation of how a relatively innocent, patriotic, good-hearted person could have found themselves participating in the march on the Capitol on January 6th.

So, for example, this is how it starts.

It says, this is literally the first paragraph.

Let's say you've long been disaffected with political parties.

You don't trust them.

You care about politics, but you don't see much promise in the standard candidates.

And it goes on from there.

Let's say, let's say, let's say you even have suspicions about this or that.

Then at one point he says, then along comes Trump.

Is his candidacy a joke?

Hoax child rights.

Is he worth paying attention to?

Is this a publicity stunt?

He says things that seem to make sense to you.

And moreover, he says them effectively.

He inspires followers.

He beats opponents.

He doesn't put up with the establishment bullshit.

You don't like him, but he shows an attractive charisma, a fighting spirit.

It goes on in that vein, right?

Right.

And it says a lot of, I mean, there are a lot of things identified in it it that just don't make sense.

Like it says Trump wasn't beholden to anybody.

He didn't owe anybody anything.

Right.

That's deranged.

He's the king of debt.

He's talked to everyone.

You know, like, like, there's never been a more over-leveraged president in American history.

Right.

I mean, it goes through Trump winning in 2016 and then, you know, how the media turned on Trump and the Russiagate stuff.

And so it kind of locates conspiracies about Trump actually winning the 2020 election in like people rejecting the mainstream media because they supported Trump in 2016 and thought the media was just trying to kneecap him.

That was the real coup, right?

Going after Trump with the Russiagate stuff.

And so, you know, it's a, it's a pretty ridiculous piece.

You know, a lot of it, again, just wouldn't

withstand any scrutiny factually or even logically.

And is this is published in the American Mind?

This is actually in the American Mind, which is one of the, it's a Claremont-affiliated site.

It's a Claremont site, yeah.

And so this to me was really shabby, like intellectually in his writing.

Well, it sounds to me like a very like,

you know, it's meant to be like this sympathetic account of how somebody with a set of grievances and dissatisfactions with the political status quo could become a Trump supporter and end up, I guess, I mean, you haven't got to this part, but like end up.

walking into the Capitol past all the other guys wearing bulletproof vests and helmets and carrying zip ties or whatever, you you know.

But

it's that's funny.

It's one of those funny things that happens with the like intellectual right that has sympathy for the populists, right?

Yes.

Is that on one hand, it's like,

we're on your side, we get what it's like.

But on the other hand, it's so fucking condescending.

It's like, oh, you little baby stupid, stupid idiot.

Of course you would be taken in by this guy.

Like, of course you would end up like, like, oh, you got led by your stupid little nose to end

walking through a broken window into the Capitol building or whatever.

I don't know.

I mean, I'm sure that's not the only takeaway, but you read those threads that are like, here's what it goes through the mind of a Trump voter over the past four years.

It's like, I don't know.

I mean,

I'm sympathetic to the fact that he's a con man.

He took a lot of people in.

But I think in their effort to be maximally empathetic, they sometimes

sound like they're treating grown adults like kindergartners.

At the very least, they're kind of ventriloquizing these people.

Yes.

You could talk to one of them rather than write a kind of create, do this creative writing assignment.

Yeah, that's true.

But I'll get to the denouement of this piece and then have a little revelation afterward.

He says this, a little further down the piece.

This is the part that's so,

just listen.

As the election nears, Trump seems more popular than ever before.

Okay.

Sure.

After four years, people aren't just taking a risk on an unknown quantity.

They are voting for someone who presided over a robust economy, created jobs, reduced minority unemployment, kept us out of wars, brought troops home, reduced energy prices, reframed diplomacy in the Middle East, and so on.

His opponent, who typifies the establishment choice, is uncharismatic and frail.

Most polls say Trump doesn't have a chance, but the polls were wrong last time.

And most of them are connected to media sources you already don't trust.

And he says, so, leading up to the election, you are aware of issues with questionable rule changes, all which magnify the problems endemic to ballot harvesting, signature matching, unclean voter rules, vulnerabilities in voting machines, and disputes about when and how ballots have to be returned.

So, you know, this guy, it's, he's basically just describing someone being, having their minds destroyed by right-wing media.

Right.

And

saying, you know, well, people have good reason to be suspicious.

And there are all these problems with, you know, voting that he doesn't really specify or go into or offer any proof of.

And from there, that's how you end up at the Capitol on January 6th.

I won't keep reading from this piece because it's kind of too long and it loses steam.

But the amazing thing is, after he published this piece, kind of, which is, again, kind of pitched as an almost fictional, you know, imaginative account of how someone could do this, it turns out he was there on January 6th.

So this whole thing, he was like describing himself.

Oh, my God.

Perhaps.

He doesn't say that, but

he was there, as as local media reported, after some students at his university found this piece and were upset by it.

Wow.

It became like a minor story.

Just write it from your perspective.

Why did you go, motherfucker?

Yeah, so it's actually an act of cowardice, too.

He could have just said, I believe this.

Yeah.

I believe, actually, that the vote harvesting theories are correct.

Right.

But he didn't.

Or I don't believe it, but I mean, like, as

I suspect is true of most everyone who works at Claremont.

Not that he does, but I'm saying he published in American Mind.

They don't believe it.

They just think it's a useful fiction.

They think it's worth, it's like, as long as enough people believe that Trump legitimately won the election and Biden is a fake president,

that's all to the better for their aims.

I mean, these guys are not fucking idiots.

They're not rubes.

They watch Fox News, of course, but they don't believe everything that's said there.

Right.

A couple notable things.

One is the portrayal of most of the people there on January 6th as, you know, just kind of good-hearted, patriotic people with real questions.

And in a numerical sense, that could be true, but it really misses the character of the thing.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

And also then the just kind of just asking questions sort of approach to the election.

Yeah.

And you can, you can see that one purpose of people like we were describing earlier, the Lynn Woods of the world, is to make guys like this seem reasonable.

Oh, yeah.

Because once you circulate or kind of inject into the discourse questions about voter fraud and you start spinning these conspiracy theories, then it's like, well, that's one side of the debate.

Right.

And the other side of the debate is that there wasn't massive fraud, ballot harvesting, so on and so forth.

There wasn't actually

a plan between Biden and the Chinese government to throw the election.

There wasn't actually someone who snuck in and changed the

internal parts of the voting machines.

But you can understand why people might have thought there was.

Right, exactly.

That's what this guy's saying.

the good, the good, the good, you know, more reasonable types on the Trump right can be, can say.

But it was all so weird, wasn't it?

And like, you can understand how someone might have thought this or that, which, of course, like, they thought this or that because the president fucking said that it happened.

Yes.

And the president's lawyers said that it happened.

Yes.

No, it's so maddening because no one will say.

Election fraud happened and here's the proof, right?

Real proof.

It's more that they say, well, maybe something like that that happened or it's plausible to believe something like that happened and then it's just you know the doubt is sewn and then it turns into the both sidesism right you just kind of two sides of this debate one argues for election fraud the other says it wasn't a fraudulent election and you know well you just have to ask questions and work through them but as you're saying this is all the product of lies trump and people and his allies in the media and elsewhere have peddled yeah yeah yeah it's not it didn't start from some some empirical observation that made sense.

Or even like a grassroots movement.

You know, it started from the people at the top who didn't want to accept the legitimate outcome of the election, for sure.

Yes, exactly.

So I'll take us in another direction.

Sure, pretty soon.

Which I think really underscores like the kettle logic.

of the right, which is to say that there's no problem if like simultaneous explanations for some phenomenon are like mutually exclusive or incoherent.

So like, on the one hand, we've got this idea that everybody who was at that protest was just like a good-hearted conservative who had some questions about what happened and were just showing they were they were there out of their patriotic obligations and anything that happened was, you know, whatever.

Like they were just tourists, right?

Like this is the thing that a lot of conservatives were saying right after the after the events.

They were like, well, look at most of these people are just walking around.

Like they got invited to DC for a little tour of the Capitol.

They didn't even know they weren't allowed to be in there.

At the same time, the big new hotness on how to explain January 6th, which some of our listeners may know if they're Tucker Carlson viewers or watchdogs,

is the idea that January 6th actually was an inside job.

Right.

Which just sounds absolutely nutso,

but I'll explain.

Basically,

there's a guy named Darren Beattie who might be recognizable to listeners.

I'll explain what he says first.

What he has suggested on his website is that because in the charging documents for some of the people who have been arrested and indicted for January 6th, there are people who are named as unindicted co-conspirators.

Beattie is suggesting that those people are all FBI operatives or informants who in fact organized the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, encouraged people to do it as a pretext, basically, to engage in a crackdown on conservative organizational politics in the country, which we're now undergoing.

This is the theory.

There's been like compelling debunkings of even the unindicted co-conspirator thing, where it's like, that's not how they would describe those people in the charging documents, which is like the sole basis for this speculative piece where he says what federal agencies were on the ground and

what involvement did they have in this thing taking place.

But just so listeners are like keeping score here, now we're saying actually there were FBI agents who encouraged the people who were there to do something violent and illegal in order to have a pretext to crack down on the whole conservative movement using the police state.

Tucker Carlson ate this shit up and has done like three episodes where he has said explicitly, quote, FBI operatives were organizing the attack on the Capitol on January 6th.

On Fox News, this is what he says.

Now, Matt Gates, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Paul Gosar

have all embraced this theory.

They're all saying, yes, it was an inside job.

We need a congressional investigation into which federal agencies were on the ground on January 6th.

Of course, there's an irony here, which is that all of those elected officials voted against the congressional, you know, the bipartisan congressional investigation into the the events of January 6th.

You know, like if you wanted to know what actually happened there and you thought the FBI was involved, maybe you should want there to be like an impaneled congressional investigation into what went down, but they all voted against it.

Now, this is all insane.

And I think probably listeners don't need to be explained why it's insane.

And it's clearly like.

a way of exonerating Trump, exonerating everybody who is there.

It was all a deep state plot to undermine, I don't know, to undermine Trump.

And then, of course, to create this new kind of war on conservative activists that's being engaged in by the FBI now.

But what I want to note is who Darren Beattie is, because he's never come up on the podcast before.

But this guy was hired as a speechwriter for Trump.

And he was fired in 2018.

So this is the originator of this theory of the inside job.

He was hired as a Trump speechwriter.

He was fired in 2018 because he appeared on a panel with a white nationalist, Peter Brimlaw.

Oh, yes.

He's a co-founder of V Dare, co-founder of V-Dare, which, as listeners may know, is named for the first, supposedly the first child born to white English settlers in the Americas.

Virginia Dare.

Virginia Dare, exactly.

It's a straightforwardly white nationalist, anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi website.

After being fired by the Trump administration because of their blow up about the fact that he appeared on this panel with Peter Brimlaw, he was hired by Matt Matt Gates in April 2019.

And then he was rehired by the Trump administration on November 19th, 2020, after the election.

Excellent.

And here, but this is the real kicker.

He was rehired to be a board member on the Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad, whose main task is seeking out and overseeing the preservation of overseas sites related to the Holocaust.

Wow.

Amazing.

So this guy who was fired for the the administration for having participated in an event with a neo-Nazi anti-Semite is rehired by the administration in November 2020 to be a member of a panel that focuses on overseas sites devoted to the Holocaust.

Amazing.

Crazy.

What's this guy doing now?

I don't know, just tweeting and

going on Tucker Carlson and talking about how the fucking January 6th was an inside job.

That's what he's doing.

He was on Charlie Kirk's podcast the other day.

I was telling you this, Matt, earlier, that the fascinating thing about this inside job thing is that like listening to Charlie Kirk talk to Darren Beattie, he was like, I'm so thrilled because this isn't a direct quote, but this is sort of the vibe.

He was like, I'm so thrilled because now we have a narrative that feels good.

Now, like, like, like, like, it doesn't matter what's true, but like this, this narrative, this idea that.

the whole thing was an inside job and it was actually all part of the deep state conspiracy against Trump and against, you know, conservatives, That feels good as a set of as a way of thinking about what happened.

And, and he was like, and it's really being taken up, you know, Carlson, these elected Republicans are suggesting that it's the reality.

I mean, you know, whatever.

Like, it's not like anybody had any delusions about Charlie Kirk's good faith or honesty.

But one of the things that's interesting about it is it's just clear that it's just like, okay, here's a plausible theory.

We'll throw it at the wall.

It's not plausible, but like this, this exonerates us from ever having to face down the fact that our politics literally produced this outcome.

Yes.

Yes.

And this line, too, it's also, you can find it at the American Conservative.

Listeners might not be surprised to hear that.

Yeah.

J.

Arthur Bloom has a piece June 22nd.

Of course the FBI was infiltrating January 6th groups.

Yeah.

And as you pointed out, the kettle logic here is, okay, was this really just a bunch of peaceful tourists doing nothing?

or was it actually such a big deal that it's actually an FBI plot to bring down the right and you know Trump supporters, which is it?

Yeah, you know, it's like the all the right's various theories don't entirely add up or totally make sense, they don't have to, yeah.

And it's and it's um, it's not implausible that there are like um FBI informants embedded in sure um sure in militia groups, um, that would be totally within their purview,

um, but um

like it doesn't make any sense

why

this thing that would like potentially threaten the lives of members of Congress,

they're going to be like, let's, you know, like, let's just give this a shot.

Let's convince these people to

try to do a violent insurrection at the Capitol on this particular day.

It's part of our long-term goal to like.

arrest Charlie Kirk.

Yes.

Now, what I find interesting,

kind of the reason we proceeded the way we have moving from left to right, is you can see on the right that actually, like

chronologically too,

starting with January 6th and then tracking the evolving, shifting rhetoric on the right about this, that it's moved from some initial defensiveness, right, where it seemed like, you know, Mitch McConnell said something that maybe was a little critical, right?

Or during the impeachment hearings, even after January 6th, Mitch McConnell said, of course, Trump's culpable in some moral sense or just not in a legal sense, right, for incitement.

Like it was a very kind of legalistic reason for not voting to impeach Trump, but it also did contain some criticisms of him, however mild.

And, you know, of course, there were the efforts we've detailed to just kind of ask questions about what happened, downplay it in various ways.

But now we're actually seeing that this has become a weapon for the right.

Yeah.

And not only is it, you know, the kind of Tucker Carlson, American conservative, you know, lying about the FBI infiltrating these groups and it being an inside job, more than infiltrating, right?

Actually, kind of carrying out this attack in some ways.

You can see it's now a shift from defensiveness to actually offense, going on the attack.

And the other, the other kind of prong of this is that the young woman we mentioned earlier, Ashley Babbitt,

who she was 35 years old, she was shot while trying to force her way through a barricaded door.

Yeah.

She now has become

the kind of right-wing martyr of this whole episode.

Yeah.

I mean, Trump at a recent rally kind of got into this and say the headline from the NBC story was, Trump makes Ashley Babbitt killed in the Capitol riot into a martyr.

And so you can actually see that it's continuing the offensive.

It's actually weaponizing conspiracy theories or unknowns about what happened or, you know,

even mistakes that might have been made into a way to make the January 6th insurrection not a black mark on the Trumpist record, right?

Not something that should make any decent person wary of ever supporting someone like Trump again, but a reason to support him.

He's once again the kind of truth teller who is telling what really happened to Ashley Babbitt.

And his allies like Tucker Carlson are telling us what really happened on January 6th, which is the FBI, right?

It was instigated by them.

It was an inside job.

yeah and and so they're actually again going on the offensive weaponizing these things no longer even really feel need to explain away much yeah exactly it's like you never have to feel any shame you never have to feel bad about anything everything that you've ever done is good and everything that our movement has ever tried to do is good like don't like that that that brief moment after january 6th where people were like well this went too far trump went too far forget it forget it no one did anything wrong to the extent that anything anybody did anything wrong, it was the FBI forcing them to do it.

And the people like Ashley Babbitt who died are martyrs to our cause.

It's all like feel-good, affective, pumping up.

And that's,

it's not surprising that that's where it ends up, but you know, there's no, there's certainly no principle

or humility or sense of justice or fairness at work there.

It's just

will to power and the desire to feel unencumbered by guilt about anything that's ever happened.

Yes.

Yeah.

But Sam, speaking of going on the offensive, there was another interesting bit of research you wanted to bring in here.

Yeah.

You were listening to a very interesting podcast.

Yeah.

As the listeners know, I listened to quite a lot of Claremont Institute podcast content

and on the American Mind podcast, Michael Anton, who

briefly a deputy national security advisor for Trump.

He, as you'll know, as many listeners will know, was the author of the Flight 93 election piece in Claremont Review of Books.

It was written under a pseudonym initially, but it was about why conservatives absolutely had to vote for Trump or else, you know, the planes going into the building.

And he hosts a podcast called The Stakes.

That's part of the American Mind suite of podcasts.

And one of his buddies is a guy named Curtis Yarvin.

Curtis Yarvin is like a Silicon Valley guy.

He used to go by the name, was it Menchus Molebug?

Yes.

He's a neoreactionary, a monarchist, a literal monarchist.

He said he might have come up briefly in our conversation with

Tara Isabella Burton.

Oh, yeah, probably.

Very, very briefly.

Probably, very briefly, though.

He's a monarchist, straight up.

He believes that we need to have a new anti-woke reactionary dictatorship to unseat the regime of progressive liberalism in this country.

He imagines people like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel as serving that role.

He thinks that America needs a new Caesar.

And the context of this conversation between Yarvin and Anton, Anton invited Yarvin on his podcast, was to discuss that argument, you know, basically like, why, why a dictatorship?

Why not democracy?

And Anton, who is nominally, you know,

a Democrat, small D,

and, you know, a West Coast Draucian,

was like, you know, I don't agree with this guy about everything, but he's got some interesting things to say.

So let's talk about it.

And in the course of this conversation, they started talking about

basically what would it take for like a new American Caesar to take power and reverse all of the terrible things about the regime and replace it with something better.

And they tended to agree that

Trump couldn't do it on his own because it's just so deeply embedded in the bureaucracy, in the way that our legislative system works.

There's so much you have to destroy before you even start building.

Like there's so many, there's so many, the infection and the rot is so deep in the regime.

And a Yarvin solution is explicitly to, you have a president who takes, who gets elected.

They acknowledge while they're being elected that I'm going to take power and immediately declare emergency rule, and I'm going to unilaterally destroy all the parts of our government that are the seed of the former liberal progressive anti-racist woke regime that is undermining you know the full flourishing of American greatness and stuff like that.

Anton is you know playing along doing this kind of cutesy thing with with Yarvin where he's like having to be like sort of tongue in cheek and like, of course, like given my affiliation with the Claremont Institute and my being a very serious uh conservative i cannot say yes i agree with you that we need a new american caesar but nonetheless at a certain at a at a certain at a certain point at a certain point they they have this discussion where they're talking about how would this be possible like even if on a reinauguration date for trump that he declares emergency law and a state of emergency and um like how would he have the legitimacy to do this and basically anton anton presses yarvin he says yarvin initially says you'd need like all the people who are Trump supporters to be hooked up to this.

Like, this is the crazy, like, Silicon Valley part of Yarvin.

Like, he's like, you'd need everybody who's a Trump supporter to have their phone, given their phone number to the Trump movement.

And all of them need to have this app on their phone running with notification privileges, he says.

And so, so that, so that Trump could literally just control everybody like little remote control bots and tell them where to go when he's like basically

doing this coup against democracy.

And Anton says, now I'm going to read from this text so people can hear this.

Anton says when the opposing regime has all the cops and the justice system and everything and they're and they're they rouse and arrest these people as they've been doing with zeal over January 6th, how does this continue?

You know, how does this, how do they succeed anyway?

Yarvin says, because on January 6th, you had 20,000 people.

If you had 2 million people and their goal had been to support the president, if you had what the Libs thought January 6th was, and Anton sort of says, or what they say they thought it was, blah, blah, blah.

This is Yarvin responding.

He says, I don't like to talk about this much because I have to get too animated, but let's imagine what it would have meant in a country like, say, Egypt.

This is, say, imagine January 6th in a country like Egypt.

Anton says, yeah.

Yarvin says, what it would have meant in a country like Egypt is instead of 20,000 people in one place, you had 20 million across the whole country.

You have a complete human barricade around every federal building.

And you're saying, support the lawful orders of this new lawful authority.

And furthermore, that Trump network doesn't just extend into civilians.

Obviously, there are police forces, police officers who are Trumpians.

They might put on a special arm ban in the day.

The thing is, people are always like the cops and the soldiers are pro-Trump.

But those people don't act as individuals.

They follow orders.

So essentially, you have to be willing to say,

when we have this regime change, we have a period of temporary uncertainty which has to be resolved in an extremely peaceful way what that means is a state of emergency in the White House it means the president is basically taking direct control over all all law enforcement authorities a state of emergency in basically every state not only are you federalizing the national guard and turning it out under federal orders you have this resource in addition to the resource of your vast popular network.

You're basically, like Caesar, using all the force available to you.

And that's what you have to do.

Oh my goodness.

And Anton says, all this comes down to you think that this combination of forces would be sufficient to overcome the power centers of the regime.

And Yarvin says, yes, the thing is, we're not talking about anything that is not, that is out of the picture of either American legal or political history.

That's insane and arguable.

And Anton says that.

But just so, just like

the listeners can understand this, like all this time, conservatives are saying, obviously, there's not a coup.

Obviously, like, we're not like, Trump wasn't trying to, like,

illegally take over the country and replace our existing government with a new kind of government.

Then you have Michael Anton, former Trump official, on the podcast of the Claremont Institute, the home of basically the highest brow pro-Trump populism,

talking to an actual monarchist who believes in installing a new American dictator in the style of Caesar, saying, Here's how we could have done January 6th right.

And Anton sitting there, you know, just entertaining him and having a good time.

Interesting idea.

Maybe that would have worked.

It's amazing.

Yeah, it's amazing.

And talk about Kettle logic.

Like, on the one hand, it was just a peaceful protest.

On the one hand, it was an inside job by the FBI.

On the other hand, if we had done it right,

we actually could have won.

Yes.

And Sam, as you pointed out, Moldbug is like he, he's,

you know, like there are reports of, you know, dinners that like Peter Thiel would hold, right?

Yeah.

And this guy, this guy's like, at one level, you can say he's like a crank with this blog who achieved a certain kind of notoriety, but you're kind of like in a niche way.

Yeah.

Right.

But on the other hand, he has access to people who have access to Trump.

Yeah.

Like the degrees of separation are not that far.

And as you're saying, he's appearing on the this podcast, you know, hosted by a former Trump administration official who is one of the, you know, more significant intellectuals in the Claremont circles.

Yeah.

So what do you make of that?

I mean, I, I hope that the listener's jaws are on the ground.

Like, I honestly like mine is.

Yeah.

I'm trying to even figure out what to say.

The part about the, the kind of, it's both like kind of absurd,

but also scarily plausible to imagine an app like that.

Right.

Like it's, it's, it's not totally, I mean, it is crazy, but it also, again, I'm not saying it would work, but it's just I don't know.

It's not not that out of the realm of I mean the scenario is seems unlikely, of course, but you know, I'm I just was wondering how it was going to play out practically or like what practical suggestions he had.

And I was not expecting that revelation.

Yeah, it's really fascinating.

Anton says,

so it's an app to recreate sons of liberty style, quote unquote, protest.

And then later on,

Jarvin says, after Yarvin says, like, well, there's totally, there are precedents for this in American history.

And Anton says, well, what do you mean?

Like, I don't really see how.

Yarvin says, have I ever pointed you to the Wikipedia page for the wide awakes?

Which is.

So Yarvin is saying

Lincoln had a paramilitary militia.

He says, my favorite brain-breaking historical Wikipedia page, the idea that Lincoln had his own basically SA

or Proud Boys or whatever you want to call them.

It's been completely airbrushed out of history.

I mean, it's too much to get into the White Awakes, but like, you know, these are like radical abolitionists who did like hardcore destructive protests to demand the abolition of slavery.

You can see how it's pretty nasty and insane to suggest that like

Trump supporters trying to

install him as the like white nationalist godhead of America would be equivalent in his mind to the White Awakes.

But the thing is, like, what's notable about this, the plausibility is hard to assess.

But I think that, like, the fact is that, like, so many people on the right and some of our comrades in the left are like, nobody was ever really thinking about doing this seriously, you know, like actually a coup, actually.

creating a dictatorship, actually suspending the legitimate democratic order.

But of course, Curtis Jarvin was thinking about it because that's what he thinks about.

And he's friends with Michael Anton, who worked in the Trump administration.

And then Michael Anton is connected to the

pro-Trump think tank, which is deliberately trying to seed a generation of intellectuals who are bought into their project for the next

Trump or the next Trump-like administration

to be filled with people who are true believers in this project.

I just think

we would be naive

to think that this kind of thing is totally beyond the realm of possibility.

And certainly it's the case that anybody who insists on the idea that like January 6th couldn't have been or was not thought of by anybody in the conservative movement as a legitimate ploy to undermine the regime, to steal its legitimacy, not that it was a plausible outcome of what was actually happening, but that those are the terms in which certain people in the conservative movement might, at least in retrospect, have been thinking about it.

That's absurd.

It's clear.

It's on the, I read it to you.

You can listen to the podcast.

Yes.

It's there.

And you know, Sam, one of the things I was thinking of as you were, you know, unspooling this possible plan for Caesarism.

By the way, it's also interesting because Caesarism, just when I said that word, I was thinking back to, you know, the debates about Lincoln that we've covered on the show.

I know.

And how that was the charge against Lincoln.

So it's.

Well, and Yarvin derives authority, his legitimacy for this project from what Lincoln did.

Yes, yes.

It's just going to be a good idea.

And FDR, second term.

That's the other thing for Steven.

God, we got got to.

Anyway.

Yes.

But where I was going with this is, you know, I can say as someone who was deeply, deeply involved in the conservative intellectual movement in my youth, relative youth, that this kind of thing, I never heard anything like this ever from anyone.

And, you know, I was at the Heritage Foundation.

I did, you know, weekend retreats with ISI and Liberty Fund.

I was on a podcast.

I recorded an episode of another podcast.

I was a guest on it this week earlier.

And I pointed out that, like, Charles Kessler, who for a long time edited the Claremont Review of Books, I had a beer with him once.

I knew these people.

I spoke to them.

I was in seminars that were like off the record.

No one ever was floating like coup plans or plots like this.

And to me, what is so dangerous is these simply simply having that conversation with Yarvin on that podcast, given

who the host is and who sponsors it and all that, that is a kind of escalation of possibility.

Yeah, I think so.

And a real marker of the shift in the intellectual climate on the right.

Now, of course, of course, for a long time, we've shown the deep anti-democratic roots on the right.

However,

it really does seem like,

and I think I mentioned this at the time, this does not exonerate at all, of course, anyone in the 50s and 60s, say, writing for National Review who oppose desegregation and that kind of thing.

But it does feel like a slightly more contained argument they're making.

They don't want black people to vote.

They don't want the racial hierarchy upset in a very specific way, meaning they oppose legislation and

other government programs for desegregation and more possibly for civil rights.

This is like coup,

how you could install a Caesar figure.

The kind of explicitness and frequency of these kind of discussions on the right and the way now they're just part of the air we all breathe, to me, is itself a genuinely alarming progression

in a bad way.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, you know, the way I think about it is that those, obviously there's a discontinuity in the sense of what anti-democratic means are justified to achieve some kind of conservative end.

But of course, like this tactic is entertained because we're actually closer in some ways than we ever have been to an actual multiracial democracy.

Like

back then, you could just say, like, let's not support support this or that piece of legislation to make the country more democratic.

Those things pass, things progress in a certain direction.

And, you know, even though it's completely insufficient, from these people's perspective, white people are in danger of not being a majority.

And this kind of like racial egalitarian thinking, which they call wokeness or they call critical race theory or whatever they call it, that's the thing that needs to be like unrooted from, you know, the regime.

And it's, you know, it's, it's the same impulse.

It's just, we don't want multiracial democracy.

We didn't want it then.

We don't want it now.

But the actual march of, you know, like this makes it sound like a little overly sanguine about the progress, but like, like, it's true that racial progress has gotten to a point where

these people, they overstate it because they're catastrophists by nature, but they

think that we're at the doorstep of the end of white hegemony.

And so what is needed is extra parliamentary violence plus anti-constitutional suspension of democratic norms and legislative attacks on voting rights.

Like it all, we have to throw everything at the wall because

we're on the precipice of the end.

Yes, yes.

And I would just remind listeners, that was the argument we made in the fascism episode, or something very close to, which is, as you were getting at, the anti-democratic racial politics of the right in, say, the 50s and 60s, it meant something more discreet, right?

You oppose desegregation, or you oppose this piece of civil rights legislation.

But now, as you're, I'm tracking with what you're saying, it's, it's, things have progressed enough, and especially the election of a black president, Barack Obama,

I think the reason the kind of scale and frequency and depth in certain ways of the right's anti-turn against democracy or the latest phase of it is precisely as you're getting at it.

It's like the whole regime feels like it's slipping away from them.

Yeah, that's what they think.

They think it already has.

Well, yes.

And so the measures needed to combat it become more extreme, too.

As the kind of extremity of the peril, as they identify it grows, so does the vehemence and kind of radicalness of possible responses to it.

Yeah, that's what it seems like to me.

Well,

with that said.

Well, that's not a very happy note to end on, but you know.

It happens.

It happens.

We're not going to end on some other note just for the hell of it.

Yeah.

I also, by the way, I also don't feel the need to end with some like tidy summary of our views on 1.6.

You know, I feel like they've kind of come out in the wash as we've discussed all this.

It's a complicated thing.

And yeah, I mean,

I think we've given the listeners more than enough to chew on and hopefully something that they haven't heard everywhere else.

That's right.

Well, thanks, Sam.

Thank you.

It was fun.

Yeah, very fun.

And thank you, listeners.

We'll see you soon.

See ya.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.