Ep 240 | Should Pardon ALL Jan. 6 Defendants?! | John Strand | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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Are the January 6th defendants heroes or villains?

Did they all storm the Capitol with the intent to dismantle democracy?

Or were there patriots that were there?

These patriots that were caught in a trap laid by their own government?

Or is it a little of both?

I'm not sure.

The truth...

is never simple, but the truth is important.

Today I have a man with me who spent a year in prison, including four months in solitary confinement.

That is the definition of cruel and unusual punishment.

Now,

he spent all that time in prison.

The Supreme Court is the one that released him for what came down to four nonviolent misdemeanors.

Sound fair?

I think he's clearly a victim of injustice, but...

Does that make him a patriot?

Should we take his plans to restore justice for the January 6th defendants seriously?

Should President Trump?

You will decide in the end.

Welcome, the author of the new book, Patriot Plea, January 6th Defendant, John Strand.

Before we get to John, let me tell you about Burna.

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Legal in all 50 states, no background checks.

All you have to do is go to burna.com.

Burna, B-Y-R-N-A dot com.

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John, I want to take you through

your story and try to do it almost chronologically, at least for a while.

So where were you January 6th and why were you in Washington?

What were you doing?

Great question.

Thank you so much for having me on, Glenn, and allowing me to share this story.

It's the story of my life in America.

But

I've been working my career as an artist in Los Angeles, as an actor and a model for a long time.

And then in 2020, COVID lockdowns, I could tell the world was changing dramatically.

And I, for the first time, became sort of politically active at that point in my life.

Not because I was looking to get into politics.

I just wanted to push back against lockdowns.

But that ended up becoming synonymous with the ongoing

presidential campaign of President Trump.

So I was leading a freedom rally in Los Angeles called the Beverly Hills Freedom Rally.

President Trump actually retweeted that, became really well known.

We had tens of thousands of people coming into Beverly Hills to support the freedom and liberty movement, as I saw it.

And that's how I got to meet Dr.

Simone Gold, who founded America's Frontline Doctors, which rocketed to the stage during the COVID chaos.

And that's why I was in Washington, D.C.

I actually would have been leading my own rally in LA to support the Stop the Steal effort, asking for an audit, a forensic audit of the election.

But because of Frontline Doctors, we were scheduled to be on the East Coast for a whole two-week speaking tour.

January 5th and 6th were two dates on that tour.

And Dr.

Gould had been invited to participate in a rally with a government-approved permit alongside of a number of congresspeople and other national figures.

And I was her communications director and security guard at that time.

So I was there.

So when you were there, you obviously attended the rally, Stop to Steel rally.

When you went into the Capitol,

did you go in with the intent of stopping the certification of the votes?

Or what was your intent when you went in?

I didn't intend to go in.

So once I was in there, my intention was simply to figure out how we got in.

How did you get in there first then?

So there was some confusion during the course of the day.

This is one of the aspects of January 6th that people often gloss over or have not had a truthful accounting of.

It was a very long day.

There were over a million people in the city.

There were a variety of activities scheduled in advance.

There were, I think, over a dozen different permits that had already been secured for various free speech activities that day.

Ours was just one of many.

So we had attended the morning event at the ellipse where President Trump spoke famously.

And then it had been expected in advance that there would be a march, a protest march, as is very common, along Constitution Avenue from the ellipse to the Capitol for afternoon events that would have incorporated speeches and so forth.

We traveled that distance and arrived at the Capitol building to find, to our confusion, that there wasn't a stage where you would assume there would be a well-set up environment to have congresspeople and other national figures delivering speeches.

But the audience was there.

So the way I describe this, this is truly, I think, the best way to understand the reality and the context of what happened on January 6th, particularly in the afternoon as we approached the Capitol building.

It would be as if you had purchased tickets, planned for a year in advance with travel and arrangements to go to the Super Bowl.

And then you pile into the stadium and literally at game time, an announcement says, so sorry, folks, the team didn't make the plane, so they're not here to play the game.

So we'll just have to schedule it for next year.

But you have 100,000 people in a stadium that have planned all year to watch the Super Bowl.

What do you expect to happen in that environment?

So

we had.

Okay, so I didn't even know this part of the.

So

there was a planned speech with congressmen coming out and officials coming out and talking to this crowd?

Yep.

It's all this is all well documented.

There was no surprise here, planned weeks in advance.

Organized by whom?

This particular rally, oh, gosh.

The permit poll for ours might have been for, I can't remember if it was some health and freedom conference or if it was the, I don't think it was the Stop the steel rally group okay they had i think a different permit but there were multiple groups with multiple permits i just know that we were part of a group expected to speak alongside of lauren bobert marjorie taylor green lance gooden paul gossar wow um and the list goes on

okay so then you're standing there there is no event what goes through your head and how do you end up inside

What went through my head was this does not make any sense.

And I'm not not going to just say, oh, well, I guess we'll come back next year.

I wanted to give it a few more minutes to determine where are all these people that were committed to coming and doing this event.

And what is it exactly that happened?

So I didn't see a stage, but I did see a whole bunch of people.

And I didn't see anything else concerning.

I didn't see violence.

I didn't see anything along those lines, but I just saw kind of a lack of organization.

And I was specifically looking for law enforcement and crowd control measures and I saw almost nothing.

I think five or six police officers standing up at the top of the steps in front of the Columbus doors and that was it.

So we stood there in the plaza for a few minutes trying to determine what was happening.

It's well reported now that cell phone communication was almost entirely not functional that day for hours and hours.

And certainly at that moment, we could not get messages in and out or very infrequently.

So that was making confusion,

increasing the confusion.

So the crowd, though, because regardless of cell phones or anything else, they're all just moving from the ellipse to this plaza by the tens and hundreds of thousands.

So the crowd was filling up and they moved their way into the plaza and on the stairs.

Dr.

Gold looked at me at one point and said, I don't know exactly what's happening.

And before I just go home and give up, I want to at least try to address the people that are here.

I have an important message and whoever will listen to me, I will shout and just try to be heard because that was her obligation, her mission.

She was dedicated to it for especially at that time, the the urgency of the the COVID lies were really pressing on her mind.

Right.

So I, you know, I had this internal calculation in the book, Patriot Plea.

I tell this story and I explain, you know, I have security.

guard instincts and experience that told me we should have a recalibration and sort of check what happened and why.

But Dr.

Gold said, look, I just got to go to the crowd because they're here.

They're forming and something needs to happen and i thought well if she starts calmly addressing them that at least gives a focal point for what should happen that could be a good thing potentially

there was nothing else really to do other than just leave but she didn't leave and i had to make sure that she was safe so i stayed with her uh she just walked up the steps lots of people milling around we tried to get a balcony position over to one side where maybe she could have a vantage point where people could hear her but the crowd was so thick up there that we couldn't quite get into that spot and we kind of got funneled into between the balcony and the East Columbus door.

So we were on the right side of the doors, but not too far from them.

And over the course of another 10 minutes, again, the crowd is still building and filling as people walk over.

And we got pressed towards the top of the steps, kind of squashed like in a mosh pit at a concert.

It was kind of exciting, but also sort of weird, like, what are we doing here?

But I continued to monitor the energy around me, the activity, and I did not see still anything at this point violent, criminal, or even really angry.

I mean, certainly there were people generally upset about the election issue, but the tenor of the crowd, the tone of things was still very First Amendment,

America First, we're here to be who we are, express our opinions, and potentially listen to some important people speak about it.

And that all changed, Glenn, in a singular moment.

I remember it seared into my memory when just a boom.

It sounded like a bomb went off and the crowd panicked.

Now, the crowd was already packedly tight, tightly packed, but that flashbang, which sounded like a grenade and then several ensued and then smoke filled the air, turned the tenor instantly.

And there was panic.

There were shouts and screams.

I understood we were under assault generally, just instinctively, but I couldn't actually see it.

Too many people pressed around me.

And then I basically just tried to keep Dr.

Gold from getting stampeded or crushed in that moment until, you know, maybe five, eight minutes later, uh the doors in front of us opened from the inside

and we standing there which by the way this is we

I don't want to go just brush past that the Columbus doors are are metal big heavy metal doors that don't open 10,000 pounds of bronze yeah right

they don't open up without

somebody opening them from the other side and it's electronically opened at this point you know it's it's held together you're not storming those gates those Those gates should have never been opened.

We still don't have an answer, as I understand it, on who did open those gates, but someone with authority did open those gates.

And you say that was part of this turning point?

Well, it was a turning point.

I will be accurate with you about the specifics as I understand them, though.

It's actually a non-government citizen who was prosecuted by the Biden DOJ.

I believe his name is George Tenney, who

opened the doors from the inside by using the emergency release mechanism because there are two sets of doors.

The 10,000-pound bronze outer doors called the Columbus doors are supposed to be locked with a padlock, but they were unlocked and swung open.

I don't have a good answer as to why that happened.

And that's no small detail because those outer doors being swung open visually give an obvious invitation to enter the doors.

That's a ceremonial entrance.

You don't swing them open unless there's a reason.

And in that protest moment, many people, and myself included, thought perhaps they're allowing people to come up to the doors or even walk through the Capitol, particularly when there were so many people, not a stage, no other crowd control measures.

Where are these people supposed to go?

What are they supposed to do?

So over the course of time, it seemed that, okay, Either they're going to have more police come and say, please leave and go this way, or they'll open the doors and have people walk through, which is what ended up happening.

Now they're saying that they didn't allow that and all the other things they're saying, but of course, you know, that's not the honest reality of the situation.

But in the moment, that turning point, I'm crushed up against the doors, the crowd around me.

I'm simply trying to keep Dr.

Gold upright and safe and praying, literally, praying and hoping, okay, cops are going to come and disseminate the crowd in an appropriate manner.

And instead, they attacked the crowd, whipped them into a frenzy, and then allowed the doors to become open inside.

The crowd flushed through and

I was pushed inside.

I mean, I could not have just stayed there.

There was a avalanche of people behind me pouring in these doors.

Dr.

Gould actually stumbled over the threshold.

There's video showing that I keep her from actually being trampled, pick her up, move her straight forward away from that melee.

And then what happened next?

I mean, you see two uniformed officers go right past us.

They could have said, hey, go this way or that way.

They went right past us to other people.

We just proceeded calmly straight ahead, found ourselves in the rotunda with red velvet ropes, and then we stayed within the red velvet ropes essentially for the rest of the time we were in the building, just wondering how do we appropriately get out of here.

So

when you talked

afterwards, Rolling Stone said you sent a private text message after January 6th that said, we stormed the Capitol.

It was insane.

What do you mean by that?

Yeah, they love that text message.

That was at trial.

Thanks to Rolling Stone for crowning me MAGA Zoolander.

That was the best marketing campaign I ever could have asked for.

That's right.

I love it.

So consider them friends.

But yeah,

I mean, that was just naturally what was in my mind, but I'll explain why I said the words.

First of all, the analogy about the Super Bowl is the exact same idea here.

So

I always ask people, when you get excited that your high school or college football team,

they're an underdog and somehow they had an unbelievable fourth quarter comeback in the last 10 seconds, they score the last touchdown and they win the game that they never should have won.

What happens?

You storm the field.

Is storming a violent act?

Well, of course not that kind of storming.

Obviously, we didn't mean we stormed the capital like our troops stormed Normandy.

They had guns and they intended to kill people with them.

That's a violent storming.

When you storm the field in excitement, it's not violence, it's exuberance, and it's a celebration.

So, the storming term really was more appropriate in that sense of things.

No one had guns, no one was intending to assault anyone or certainly overtake the building or the government, because that's just ridiculous.

But to say you stormed in all at once in a crowd moment of excitement is what ended up happening.

And I know it was insane.

Right.

Hang on just a second because I'm trying to put these two storylines together um before you write this you um are in the capitol you just told me you were kind of pushed in you were just trying to get out uh and it sounded like an insane situation um totally you're also by explaining storming you're also saying you were excited and it was a victory so what was the victory what was the excitement that you were feeling

The excitement and the victory was really what I understood before I even got there.

When Dr.

Gold was first booked to be a speaker at this event and she said, should I do it?

And we knew that there would be a large crowd assembling because her mission wasn't political.

It actually was nonpartisan, advocating for medical freedom and not wanting to get into the politics.

But because of censorship, we had to go where people collected in person to hear.

Otherwise, we were silenced.

So we said, absolutely, we're going to go.

But I knew in the back of my mind that this was a historic moment forming.

I had no idea what was actually going to happen with January 6th as we now see it, of course.

I couldn't have known that.

But instinctively, I knew it was historic.

And of course, I was proven right even beyond my wildest imaginations.

As all of this insanity was happening, confusion, weirdness,

walking through the rotunda and all of that history, and it just, you're in awe of the 250-year experiment of America, and realizing, because again, The context here is the illicit election that is no small detail and a really serious part of this story and of our history.

We were aware of that, and the million people that showed up that day, whether they made it inside the building or not, they had to take time and expense of their own when it was really unpopular to do so, to push back because no one wanted to, you were considered an idiot and a radical and a lunatic if you challenged the election.

Now we can see that's actually what happened.

But it wasn't popular or credible, so to speak, to do that at the time.

And I understood the history of the moment in the sense of a million people showing up being brave enough to do that.

And that's what I thought was the victory: that they stood firm in their convictions and they exercised their First Amendment.

So, at what point did you

feel like

this could be trouble?

I could be in trouble here.

I could face prosecution.

Did that happen at all on January 6th when you were in the Capitol?

Did you have any feeling that this could become a problem?

No, not in the sense of I personally being prosecuted, not on January 6th, maybe the next day, but even the next day,

basically

my instinct or my frame of reference is the fake, we call them fake news for a reason, right?

They're constantly distorting and lambasting and hyperbolizing and just, it's insane.

So the next day I'm thinking, okay, they're trying to make this sound like a terrorism event or whatever they're calling it, insurrection.

What does that even mean?

But it just didn't sound credible because i was there glenn i was in the crowd i saw and you didn't see it didn't make sense to me but

because you were on the other side of the capital with the columbus doors you also wouldn't have seen the people that were breaking the windows and uh and fighting on the stairs so you had a different vantage point when did you realize that stuff was happening

I started to see those vignettes the next day and probably by January 8th.

Yeah, probably by January 8th because the first day cells were still down.

It was hard to get much content.

I was just sort of debriefing with my immediate team that was around me.

But the next two days, then you started to get a sense that, wow, okay, there were some more violent moments that happened that I was unaware of.

Of course, now I understand how those actually occurred.

And I firmly believe the evidence clearly shows that.

Wait, hang on.

Hang on.

Hang on just a second.

I want to come back to that.

I want to get to that.

Okay.

I just want to take it first chronologically, and then we're going to take it apart and what we've learned since.

So

when did they come to arrest you?

How did that happen?

When did you know, okay, this is something that involves me now?

I could go to jail.

So I didn't have any sense of it the day of, like I said.

The next couple of days, we realized this was being portrayed at least as much more.

I had people, actually the next day, they sent me an FBI most wanted list poster, and I was in the top row, Glenn.

Wow.

You never forget your first time being on an FBI Most Wanted List.

I bet you don't.

I hope not to find myself there, but I bet you don't.

Do you have it framed?

I hope as well.

Hope as well.

It's still framed at the top of the FBI's Twitter profile, Glenn.

I'm not.

Four years later,

my mug shot is a cell cell phone camera of me and my trademark Maverick aviators and black leather gloves, you know, standing by Dr.

Gold as she's trying to preach the message of truth and medical freedom to the world that will listen in the rotunda.

But that picture is still pinned to the top of the FBI Washington Field Office X profile.

It's insane.

So

a couple days, I got that picture and I got the sense that, okay, they're clearly working this up into something much, much bigger.

But again, because I was there, I saw what I saw, and because I know who I am and what I did and what I didn't do, I know I didn't do anything unlawful.

I know I had no criminal intent.

I know I was scheduled and invited to be present and I was doing my job in my official capacity and that's the only thing I did.

I had a rock-solid alibi, regardless of what anyone else may have intended to do or otherwise.

I knew I was completely innocent.

So I had no intention of saying or proceeding otherwise.

But we did have advice like, you should probably get out of D.C.

We just stuck to our travel schedule.

We were there another couple days and then back to Florida for other speaking events and then back to Los Angeles.

So 12 days later, January 18th, the irony is not lost that it was Martin Luther King Day.

And on a Monday morning on MLK Day, in a quiet two-bedroom apartment in Beverly Hills, where we had a

headquarters for the organization at that time, we were on a conference call with several colleagues, and our lives were forever shattered by blood-curdling, screaming yells yells so loud that my head literally vibrated, as did the walls.

We could barely register the shock and wonder, are we under attack by criminals?

When our door was pulverized by a battering ram, literally, and flooded into our apartment, 20 off-armed officers in black tactical gear and machine guns and red laser sights bobbing on your chest, like a Jason-born action movie.

It was terrorizing.

It was abhorrent now that I think about it.

Even in the moment, shortly after the shock wears off, I realized this is the U.S.

government

assaulting peaceful citizens in a major city in the U.S.

as if we were terrorists.

This is backwards.

This is so wrong.

And

I've only since then been able to contemplate and really measure the impact of that trauma, not just on myself, but hundreds and hundreds of J6 Americans have had this, have had this assault.

So did they call you at all and say, hey, can you come in for an interview?

Hey, here's this wanted poster.

We know where you are.

You know where we are.

Can we just talk?

There was no communication.

And did you think about reaching out and saying, hey, I'm on your wanted FBI most wanted poster?

I mean, should I come in?

Dr.

Gold actually had the Washington Post reach out a few days before our arrest and say, would you do an interview?

And she wanted to be forthcoming about what happened.

So she said, well, sure, why not?

And yeah, I was there.

I was invited to be there.

I gave my speech.

That's what happened.

I did nothing wrong.

So I don't really have anything else to say about that.

And that was days before.

But no, the FBI, the U.S.

government did not advise us or request a meeting or say, come turn yourselves in or anything.

They just broke our door down

on a Monday morning and clearly intended to terrorize us, demoralize us, silence us, and really send a chilling message throughout the community and throughout the country that the U.S.

government is in charge.

Yeah,

and we'll get into this later.

I think they were trying to send the message that it's not necessarily even the outcome.

It's the whole process that we'll put you through that

should scare you and everybody else.

So what was the process like?

They pick you up.

They take you to jail.

You get an attorney.

What are you charged with?

What do they say?

Man, so your point is exactly right, Glenn.

The process is the punishment, and they plan to punish you.

I mean, at every juncture, at every possible nook and cranny of the bureaucratic machinery, they will weaponize it.

And I mean, that goes down to the last detail.

Like, for example,

first of all, I explained the raid and the assault, which was just egregious.

People can die from those mismused tools of violence.

And I was disappeared for four days without a phone call.

I mean, that's so outrageous.

Dr.

Gold had to hire a private investigator to find out what had happened to me and to force the government to allow the bond process to happen to bail me out of jail.

They should have bailed me out within hours, obviously, but they chose not to for whatever excuses they love to pull because they can do whatever they want.

They're the government.

I vanished.

No family member, no lawyer, no, no one knew where I was for four days until we pressed the issue there then when i get out then i'm you know given a public defender and arraigned and explained this is what we're charging you with and it was i i could hardly understand what they were even saying obstruction

wait wait wait wait wait wait when you got in there you know you have a right to a phone call did they deny you your right to a phone call

yeah

I

can't, I mean, the first, so they dragged me into a jail, processed me, threw me in a concrete cell, ignored me until the next day,

didn't answer a single question or give me a chance to talk about anything, dragged me into a car, drove me across town to another jail, then processed me in this little like two foot by two foot room with a screen, COVID rules, so that I could see the magistrate, who then said whatever he said.

I was so disoriented I could hardly understand.

He said, I'm not letting you bail out.

Then I got dragged away into an isolation unit in the MDC.

That's the FBI's federal facility in Los Angeles.

Banging on the door, can I have a phone call?

Banging on the door, can I have a phone call for three straight days?

No, no, no help, no response, no phone call, no nothing.

Four days later, strand, pack up your crap, get out on, you know, get out of here.

And they dumped me on the street.

And then, thank God, I found where the public defender's office was, walked there and said, could you please help me?

I have nothing to my name.

And then someone found me and picked me up off the street four days later.

Wow.

Okay.

So

I wouldn't want a public defender with all of this going on.

You have a public defender.

How long did it take it from this point to the trial?

And did you have a sense, like, you know,

Alfred Hitchcock is one of my favorite movie makers, filmmakers, because it's always the innocent guy who's like, wait, I can't believe this is happening.

You know, what you just described happened in North by Northwest

his movie.

And

you have to believe, as his characters always do, okay, this is just a mistake.

This is going to work itself out.

Justice is, I'm going to get to somebody reasonable.

Did you have that feeling?

And did it ever go away?

Or when did it go away?

I mean, in this opening week or so after the January 6th event and the arrest, it was so

fascistic.

I really don't think there's a better word to describe it.

It was fascism, weaponized government pointed at a citizen for a politicized purpose.

And, you know, after the first few days of the shock of January 6th wore off in terms of the narrative that they're selling about it, it was obvious to me, of course this is political.

Of course, this has to do with Trump and the election and

the uniparty attack on American populist resistance.

That's what this came down to.

So I've understood that ever since then.

In those opening couple of weeks, it was so

tyrannical.

It was so totalitarian that I didn't really expect justice or reasonability at all because

I couldn't even get anyone to answer my basic question about how can I have a phone call to reach my mom or my attorney.

And after a few days of that being completely ignored, you start to lose hope that reason has any part of this equation.

Once I got bailed out and took maybe a few weeks or so to get rid of the public defender and find an appropriate attorney, convene with my co-defendant now, who's my colleague, Dr.

Gold, and the whole organization, the nonprofit we work for and our team, and then absorb what was actually going on, then you realize, okay,

this is a whole new ballgame in America.

We are squared up against the entire might of the federal government currently weaponized and controlled by the Biden administration generally.

And, you know, your question became a recurring theme.

Will we ever find reasonability?

Will we ever find the rule of law still functioning?

And at every turn, Glenn, at every turn, we found it completely hijacked, completely inverted.

and utilized in a two-tiered system where they continue to mouth the message of the rule of law.

Nobody is above the law, they say, perched prominently above you as they swing down a sledgehammer.

Right.

I mean, I'm not a journalist, but I mean, I work with journalists.

And as we were trying to find out what was happening,

we...

We couldn't find out anything.

I mean, I called congressmen, I called senators.

Where are these people being held?

How can we talk to their attorneys?

As members of the press, we couldn't break this wall of silence.

As members of Congress and the Senate, they couldn't break the wall of silence.

At the beginning, this was

what you did, you were just almost in a China-like way disappeared.

Yeah,

our families and our attorneys couldn't break the wall of silence.

If your direct attorney cannot reach his client, what country are we in?

Correct.

Correct.

Okay, so let's go to the trial now.

They're charging you with obstruction of, or jury tampering or obstruction of justice, was both of those.

Well, so everyone calls it obstruction of justice colloquially.

And they use that.

That term, obstruction of justice, to basically say you're obstructing what duly should happen

and blocking the government from performing its duty.

So in that general sense, it sounds like, well, that's not good.

We shouldn't allow citizens to do that.

But

the exact title of the parent statute, Obstruction of an Official Proceeding,

is what they say.

But I was charged specifically with Title 18, U.S.

Code 1512 C2.

And 1512, the title of that statute is tampering with a witness, evidence, or informant.

Witness, evidence, or informant.

Okay.

Now, that sounds like a trial.

Also, if you go back to where the law came from, and this matters, because in our system, legislative intent actually matters.

It's not acceptable to just take English and

scrabble it into a weapon to your fashion and your liking.

What the legislators intended matters.

When the legislature passed 1512 into into law, and you know this because the president at the time, George Bush, said this when he signed it.

He said this should never be mistakenly used against political protesters.

He actually said that.

It's on record.

Wow.

And the purpose of the law, clearly, was to close a accounting loophole that ensued from the Enron Energy Corporation scandal.

And they basically said, oh, it was our attorneys that shredded documents that tampered with witness witness or evidence.

So you can't prosecute us for it.

So they closed that loophole and said, if you

delegate

your tampering of a witness, evidence, or informant to a third party, the third party can be liable.

What does that have to do with protesters that are complaining about illicit election and gathering

in their house of government to redress, you know, ask for redress of grievances per the First Amendment?

What does that have to it obviously has nothing to do with it.

is how the Supreme Court ruled, which

got you out of prison after only a year in prison.

Let me go now to

they charged you, they convicted you.

What is it like standing as

an innocent man?

And even at your worst, if you would say, okay, well, I was in the Capitol and I can, you know, this parading thing, I can understand how you give me a ticket, maybe, maybe, okay?

You give me a ticket for something, or I get a slap on the wrist.

When they came at you and said guilty, and

the judge said prison,

what was that like?

I mean,

it was serious, Glenn.

I'm not going to say otherwise.

That is a sledgehammer.

Prison is a sledgehammer.

I describe it in my book as watching a freight train in reverse, like in slow motion, that's coming at you because I knew this was coming before it happened, but I'm kind of slowly moving ahead towards it.

From the arrest to the trial, was over a year and a half.

It's a long time.

A lot of stuff happened during that period of time.

Terrible stuff.

Civil rights abuses, persecution, exhaustion, defamation,

constant assault from the media, betrayal from friends and my family.

I was digitally assassinated for my entire career that I had really spent my life and put my life, or I'd taken a lot of risk in my life

to do what I've done, putting myself out there to

be an actor and a model in these things that are very difficult to try to achieve.

And I had all of that was, I I was digitally assassinated in a heartbeat on January 7th.

None of that existed anymore.

And then suddenly I was propped up by Rolling Stone and everyone else as this target, come and destroy this guy.

And they spent a year and a half destroying me before I even got to court.

It's pretty amazing.

And of course, I've lived some of that.

It's remarkable.

It's remarkable.

Remarkable.

It really is.

And so that there's more to that story, details in the book that people really should dig into and that we should really talk about in our country as far as being honest with ourselves, what is happening, what we've allowed to happen, and how we get guardrails back on.

Because the guardrails have become swords in the hands of an enemy that is stabbing us with them.

So, before we get to those solutions, let's pause here for a second.

And before we get to what they did to you in prison, talk about anything that you feel needs to be addressed here

on that.

So, we have to reclaim the essence of innocent until proven guilty,

right?

We just had Daniel Penny sacrificed on the altar of DEI and BLM garbage insanity.

And it's going to take a lot of reverse engineering to sort of give him a reasonable life back.

And don't people like that.

I don't think you ever do.

People don't understand.

And

this is a baby comparison to you.

But, you know, for 10 years, the media and powerful people came after me with all their guns ablazing and did everything they could to destroy me and paint me.

And I will never get that opportunity with maybe 40% of the country to ever be anything other than that.

And that's a big deal.

You know, when, you know, you don't, you don't, you don't notice when you have that.

Everybody has that.

You know, the opportunity to just be somebody and have people address you and take you for who you are

as long as you are displaying that.

You don't understand what it's like to walk in where lies have been spread about you and you have 40% of the room who will hate you forever, no matter what you say.

Yeah.

You cannot unring that bell.

Absolutely, Glenn.

That is true.

true.

Of course, I can tell that you understand this, you empathize because you've experienced it yourself.

So, anyone that does personally experience it, it will be a lot more real.

But this new era with technology and the speed of, you know, the speed of lies

and just the incendiary nature that they just catch on fire and burn your life to the ground in an instant, and you can never have that life back.

It is a huge thing.

So,

the loss of the brain.

You know what it is, is the loss of honest people and honest questioning.

You know, I've always believed in the system of justice we have here because I've always believed that an innocent person could be caught up in something, but there would always be someone in the system that would go, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

You got to give them the chance to be heard.

And we don't just, we don't have kangaroo courts.

This was a kangaroo court.

And when you lose the ability

as a society to

find honest people who may disagree with you, but go, wait a minute, hang on just a second.

I disagree with him, but he has this right.

We have to do it the right way.

When you lose that, you have nothing left.

That's right.

Yeah.

Disagreement does not mean

dishonesty.

Right.

So disagreement doesn't mean, doesn't mean because we disagree, it doesn't mean you lose your rights.

You're still a human being as valuable as I am.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Okay.

So

you're convicted.

You're sentenced to prison.

What is the sentence you're given?

32 months.

So almost three years of my life in a prison facility, along with three years of supervised release and continued government abuse after that.

So another six years of my life on the hook to be

annihilated beyond the two plus years at that point that had already been shooted up in the government blender.

And what we failed to talk about was you get this sentence because they try to make a deal with you and say, look, we can make all of this go away.

That's right.

You know, we'll stop destroying your life if you just admit.

I mean, this is very 1984.

Just two plus two equals four.

And

you wouldn't admit when you're standing there and you realize I've had three years in prison.

Did you ever have a second where you went, oh my gosh, what have I done?

I should have taken that one.

Not one second.

It was so clear to me, Glenn, at the very.

You realize how odd that is, right?

I do.

And that was somewhat the point.

That was kind of the point.

I mean, fundamentally, Glenn, the real point, like I said, is that we have to have clarity on what right and wrong is.

We have to have,

it is our duty and

it is essential in order to preserve our future and preserve the integrity of our system,

which without integrity, it will,

you know, it will devolve and destruct, like you mentioned.

So to preserve that integrity, we have to have total clarity.

on what is good and evil and what is right and wrong.

So some things are not moral.

Some decisions, there's not an obvious right answer, but sometimes there are.

And when there's an obvious right and wrong answer, and particularly when it's really uncomfortable to make the right choice, that's when it's so important to do so.

Yeah.

So when you get to prison, you know, you think of prison as a couple of things.

In America, you think, okay, you might have got shafted by the system originally, but the prison system is a completely different system.

And now it's got its own problems.

You know, you've got the violence in prison, you've got all of that, but you don't expect the

you wouldn't expect the same kind of punishment for the same reasons to be happening in prison.

Do you know what I mean?

I do.

Unless it's a fascistic country, you don't expect the prison to take out political vengeance on you.

But that's not what you found, is it?

No, I found precisely the opposite.

I found that the prison system has been hijacked like every other part of our government.

And

all these institutions have been bent and fashioned into weapons to serve

the violent will of those in power who demand that they keep it.

So

I mean, man,

the trial, like you said, so many lies, so many in-your-face distortions and manipulations and just violations of their ethical and legal duty.

For one thing, it was very clear that the jury was going to convict me because they're from D.C.

They're Washington, D.C.

residents.

95% voted with full open hatred against President Trump.

Obviously, they're going to not just convict me.

They were looking to crucify me and it was, you know, and it was enjoyable for them.

So the prosecutor didn't have to openly lie about evidence.

He could have just said he was there and he's one of them, and you know, take it from here.

But no, they've spent all this energy lying, manipulating evidence.

My website and book shows all of this in great detail.

It's shocking, actually.

And it's something we really need to dig into.

It didn't just happen to me.

And it's part of that kangaroo court.

When we say kangaroo court, Glenn, we're not exaggerating.

It is fully, truly that.

And then in prison.

Especially in Washington, D.C.

Yeah, especially in D.C.

In prison, and I was not in a D.C.

prison.

I was in a federal facility

starting in Florida.

But I have paperwork from the BOP

that acknowledges that the reason that some of their rules were rearranged in order to clearly torture me.

psychologically and in horrendous physical conditions and in supra isolation, meaning totally cut off from all contact

with my family and attorneys for an extended period of time.

That was happening because of the fascist fingers of the Department of Justice, specifically the FBI and the AUSA, Assistant U.S.

Attorney's Office, which I believe traces back to Mr.

Jason Manning, the actual federal prosecutor who prosecuted me at trial and put me into that prison in the first place.

So what rules did they rearrange for you?

What happened to you?

In prison, I was pulled aside in this office with no one in it with a gentleman who worked for the security division of the prison who basically said, do you know who I am?

Because I know who you are and I'm watching you.

I said, I don't know who you are.

I'm not surprised that you know who I am because that's become pretty well known at this point.

And he said, well, let me break this down for for you.

You know, I know you are all big on constitutional rights and talking a big First Amendment game and this and that, but this is my kingdom and I rule here.

So you better get that straight real fast.

And clear intimidation, but I'm not sure.

Well, sorry, the Constitution applies to prisoners as well, sir, but go ahead.

Oh, it's supposed to.

But, you know, our founding fathers called the Constitution a parchment barrier.

And there's a reason they use that terminology.

It's only going to hold so far as the men holding that parchment have the integrity to understand what it means and how it's supposed to be applied.

Yeah.

So he threatens you.

Basically, he threatens you.

Oh, absolutely.

Well, I told him, I said, sir, I am not looking to cause trouble.

I know you're in charge here and I want to abide by whatever your rules are.

Please just explain them to me.

But I do have a First Amendment and I plan to continue exercising it.

I don't have a bone to pick at this point with the prison.

I wasn't there to complain about prison.

I was there to continue highlighting the fraud of January 6th, the corruption of the DC court system, and the fact that I'm innocent.

And so are many other J6ers who I need to continue to advocate for.

And I'll do that from prison.

I don't, it doesn't matter.

I'm here to do a job.

So I explained to him that me being in prison from my point of view was a deployment in service of my country as a political prisoner.

And he was maybe agnostic on that, but basically said, I'm in charge.

But he seemed to indicate like, okay, we can manage that.

But he wasn't honest with me.

And I was basically entrapped into supposedly breaking their rules about some technicality about the phone system, even though they broke their own rules by failing to give me the written rule book that explains all of these details.

And then later said, well, you broke this rule from page such and such in the rulebook.

And I said, what rule book?

They said, didn't we give you that on day one?

Because the policy stipulates we must do that.

Nope, Nope, no rule book.

I had no idea about this rule.

The rule you told me was you have to submit the people you want to talk to on the prison communication system.

It's controlled and monitored.

Of course, I understood that.

Submit those people.

And if we approve it, then you can talk to them.

Well, I did that.

I talked to them.

And then they said, You broke the rules.

You're going in the hole.

And then, long story short, they disappeared me for four straight months of horrific isolation abuse.

I can barely explain.

I heard about you at this point.

I mean, what you were going through.

I heard that you were in

solitary for four months.

And again, we tried to get senators and congressmen to give us any details what's happening, and they were blocked at

every corner as well.

What is solitary confinement like?

I mean,

it's terrible.

Physically speaking,

it's very suffocating.

It's just very harsh.

And it's very

desolate.

So I think maybe that's a good word to describe that in addition to being very uncomfortable and very intimidating, there is this element of total despair that creeps in very quickly, but continues to gradually build.

And you realize you're being strangulated by this sense of despair that you can't quite see or identify, but there's no remedy for it.

You have nowhere to turn.

You have no one to talk to.

You have no honesty or logic or rationality in an explanation of anything.

Most of the people there ignore you or are rude to you.

So it's like being in a, I describe it as, imagine you were on a submarine, Glenn.

So you, you know, like, I said, I'm on deployment, so this is a military mission.

I'm trying to take it seriously, but I know I'm in a war and there's people that are against me or whatever.

I'm on a submarine and suddenly someone trips me and I fall into this closet.

The door swings behind me.

I jump up, but the door's already locked.

I'm banging on the door.

And then I suddenly hear this sound as the submarine I could tell is dropping to the bottom of the ocean.

And then

it hits the bottom.

No one is coming.

You keep banging on the door.

No one is answering.

And then after a few minutes, you realize I am stuck in this concrete closet in the bottom of the ocean.

And I don't know if anyone knows or cares that I'm here and if they'll ever come and get me.

And then another day goes by.

And then another day goes by.

And physically, you are miserable, and that pain is compounding with every day.

So it's everything is compounding by the hour, by the day, by the week.

You're supposed to have a phone call.

Do you have a window?

Can you see time

pass?

One sliver of a window.

So yeah, I could see daylight in the day.

Well, at least in one solitary unit.

In another solitary unit, it was so dark and the window was so slim that actually I couldn't see day.

So different solitary units have different conditions.

The one I was in that I spent the most amount of time in

was a concrete square hut.

with various isolation units.

I couldn't see these people, but the inmates were

savage, like animals, screaming, yelling

constantly, almost never stopped throughout the course of the day.

At night, they would be exhausted and fall asleep, but during the day, it picked up again.

I hyperventilated at one point because I just couldn't get away from this cacophony that sounded like the dark corners of hell.

I mean, it was hellish in that sense, very literally.

did you get to go outside at all did you because I've

you know I have to you have to have an hour or something outside right

so the policy says you must have an hour of recreation per day

and when people hear recreation they think you get to stand outside you get to dig your toes in the grass you are human on a planet.

No.

No.

First of all, they ignore that rule half the time.

So I was in a concrete shoebox for about 164 hours a week.

But for the two or three hours that I might actually get the wreck time, they just dragged me to a different part of that concrete building where they had taken the ceiling off with a cage above it.

So you could see the sky through the cage.

You're in a dog cage inside of a concrete building where you can see a piece of the sky.

That was their recreation.

for

four months like that

and they're supposed to give you

they're supposed to give you a phone call glenn even in isolation the rules stipulate a phone call at a minimum every seven days and when you are in those isolation conditions that phone call is the difference between life or death.

You will scratch their eyes out to get that phone call.

I was ready to scratch my own eyes out just to hear the voice of my mom or my girlfriend or my attorney or someone tell me,

we're still here and we're going to get you out of this hell.

They violated that?

You didn't get it every week?

Nope.

It took almost three months.

before a lawyer got through a call,

and it took four months before I was finally taken out of solitary.

And that was only because of Congressman Matt Gates bringing the fire in Congress and bringing the weight down on the BOP to realize they better start changing some things.

So they whisked me out of the middle of the night to spite him because he was going to come and visit on site.

Middle of the night whisked me away before he could get there to take me to a different facility.

And I was finally taken out of solitary.

You were put in general pop?

In a different prison, yes.

I was finally finally put in general population in Oakdale in Louisiana.

And that's where I ran.

Was that a

Martha Stewart kind of prison?

No.

No, definitely not a Martha Stewart prison.

Slightly less terrible than Miami, still a terrible place.

I detail that in the book as well because I had six months there.

to kind of learn how quote-unquote normal prison works.

And I had at least the opportunity to have a shower every day.

I had the opportunity to kind of structure some of my own time to process what I had just gone through the previous six months

and to wrestle with a lot of questions with God and with myself and with what I believed my country to be before this happened.

And so I wrestled through those questions.

I read some books and then I wrote my own book while I was there in general population.

When you were in solitary,

Could you read books?

Did you have access, or is it just you and your thoughts?

There's a lot of you and your thoughts, but I did get some books.

Again, the rules stipulate they're supposed to provide books to you.

They did at times.

They don't always follow those rules either.

But I did get some books, and I had a few guards that were nicer than others.

So I had a few guards that tried to make sure I had a book and a Bible.

They blocked my U.S.

mail.

Wildly illegal.

It's just not acceptable in this country.

There's no law that allows that to happen.

That is against the law to block U.S.

mail from a U.S.

citizen.

But they blocked most of my mail for most of those entire four months.

But I did have a couple guards that would sneak some letters into me.

Okay.

So

let's talk here about, I mean, there's so much more, but you can get it in your book.

But you're fascinating to talk to.

Let me start with where I am and tell me where we differ.

Okay.

I have a problem with people who were

violent, and that is the police

and people who were in the masks breaking windows and, you know, fighting.

But it's hard to tell who was a good guy defending themselves and a bad guy, you know, wishing intent on the cops.

And I think at this point, everybody would have spent their time in prison.

If this was a normal case, everybody would have already served enough time.

And I don't think it's fair to, you know, Donald Trump says we have to take it case by case.

And I understand that thinking, but when you know that something has been wrong with with a prosecutor, you don't just let the

one guy that you know for sure has been wrongly prosecuted.

If that pattern appears in other cases, you got to let everybody go because

you know something's, yes, you know something's wrong.

So just based on that concept and that law,

Every single person should be released because you can't go back and say, well, this guy, you know, this guy wasn't as bad because you don't know.

It was the same people involved that did you.

And we know that was wrong.

So how do we do anything other than say, everybody out?

Everybody's out.

100%.

Time served.

100%.

Right.

You are correct, Glenn.

You are absolutely right.

And I don't think there's a credible argument against what you said.

It is absolutely, fundamentally clear that this process was totally corrupted.

It was irredeemably tainted,

legally speaking.

Correct.

And people, I guess, would argue and say, well, but the violin, but that's not the way it works.

We have this for a reason.

I'm not making up something new.

I'm not asking for something that hasn't been done before.

This is our rule of law, is it not?

Exactly.

That's the term I wanted to say.

When we say the rule of law, what does it mean?

It means there is a pre-established rule by which we comport our behavior, by which we comport our review and investigation, by which we comport our administration of justice.

And that rule says, that rule says that if the government is shown to be nefarious or corrupt or even just derelict,

you must throw it out.

And it's very simple.

Why, Glenn?

It's very simple.

Why?

The founders told us, I believe believe George Washington, when the people fear the government, there's tyranny.

When the government fears the people, there is liberty.

And George Washington also said government is not eloquence.

It is force.

It's a fire that will burn things to the ground if you don't keep the guardrails.

So Thomas Jefferson said

we must speak no more about the good intentions of man, but we must bind them down by the chains of the Constitution.

Correct.

Now here's the thing on on this, is

when this rule has ever been enacted before, you don't get mad at the person,

the judge or

whomever that says, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

All of this has to be thrown out.

You're supposed to get mad at the prosecutors.

You're supposed to say,

You morons have done this in a legal way.

You've let bad guys go and you've persecuted good guys now.

It's not the judge, or in this case, not Trump that is making this judgment.

This is the way it's supposed to be because you screwed up.

And without that slap on the face, not on the wrist, but on the face of the prosecution, you'll never change anything.

100% agree with you.

And I wouldn't call them morons.

I would call them knaves and scoundrels because they weren't stupid.

They knew what they were doing.

This was political, of course, and ultimately it was evil.

It was highly unethical.

It was wrong.

It was an egregious abuse of their prosecutorial power and of their government-issued positions of authority.

It was immoral.

It was wrong.

And it was gravely evil and has caused an incredible amount of destruction and even death.

So that's not an exaggeration at all.

But

Glenn, we want to...

Don't forget the, before we get to the prosecutors, the first step was not the prosecutors, but elements of the government that facilitated and instigated this.

There's a lot of evidence of pre-planning.

For example, the FBI

operation, the Whitmer fed napping hoax, well documented.

No really argument against this.

The FBI field director, Steve D'Antuono, of the Detroit Field Office, oversaw that operation and then was reassigned to D.C.

right before January 6th.

So a lot of interesting, credible evidence, but we'll put that aside.

We'll say, say, for the sake of argument, without assigning negative intent or criminal intent to the government, we can see with our own eyes clearly what they physically did that was egregious violation of their duty and their protocols.

So that created the conditions and accelerated.

When you said you are upset about violence committed by people in black gear breaking windows, so am I.

But those people aren't in jail.

I am not aware, please correct me if I'm wrong, but but I'm not aware of the military style tactical units all dressed in black, which of course you can't identify them, who were the insurgents that first broke the windows to gain the initial access to the building that then allowed people to blunder in and then open the doors for me and I stumbled in.

Well, I just know that I've never seen conservatives dress like that

before.

I've seen Antifa dress like that.

I've seen the government dress like that, but I don't generally see conservatives dress dress like that or act that way.

But that doesn't mean they couldn't have been, but we don't know who they were because it doesn't seem to be any effort to get those guys.

My view on this whole thing is: you know, we find out that there's 26 informants, FBI informants that are there.

And those aren't necessarily good guys, you know what I mean?

They're informants,

you know.

But at the very least,

that would lead one

the understanding not to believe to the understanding of the truth the FBI had 26 informants that were there on the ground that means yeah at least that means at least 26 FBI agents knew what was coming if it was planned okay if it was planned by these you know this grassroots you know vigilante group that means 26 FBI agents knew that was coming coming.

So then explain to me how the National Guard wasn't there.

Explain to me how the police weren't alerted.

If you had the FBI knowing,

this is the most

innocuous

charge I could possibly bring on the FBI is,

okay, so you weren't involved,

but you knew it was coming and you did nothing.

That's the best scenario.

What do you think happened?

I think

we know for certain that Nancy Pelosi and Muriel Bowser are

officially entrusted with the responsibility to protect that building.

They openly denied the 10,000 National Guard troops that President Trump had duly authorized and done his part to

make a possible.

Right.

So there's a handful of people.

Right.

What do you attribute that to?

Just

incompetence, hating of Trump, what?

No, I attribute it to, I mean, it's just not reasonable to think that these people are that dumb.

It's just

they didn't get to the positions of power that they are by being dumb.

They're not dumb.

They're smart.

They're just very, very unethical and immoral.

And I think evil is really the accurate term.

So clearly.

Clearly, Pelosi and many other people benefited by creating the conditions for a violent event of conflict, which they could then misrepresent and distort and exploit in a myriad of ways.

This isn't a grand conspiracy theory like they had the map of the whole thing from the beginning necessarily, right?

But they've game-planned and wargamed these things, as we've noted.

And they very clearly denied 10,000 troops that obviously should have been there.

Remember, my first thought when I walked up to the building was, I don't see the stage, and why aren't there cops or crowd control here?

Because there's a million people coming to see a speech.

It's just objectively insane.

So, you know, the optics that they complained about were really the optics of making them look completely derelict as government officials.

But because they have the bully pulpit, the microphone, and all the government weapons pointed at us, they can just shout their story.

They can parade the January 6th Unselect Committee show trial, literally a show trial, for a year and a half on primetime television, gaslighting us all to death.

So that's how they get away with it.

But if you're calm and reasonable and objective and you go through the evidence and you're not taking Nancy Pelosi's side or President Trump's side or anyone else, just what actually happened here.

It's not that hard to figure out what happened.

And it's not that hard to, you could say, speculate, but we could speculate that Pelosi and company clearly had motives and

they had an objective.

They had an agenda to advance and they had an opportunity to exploit by facilitating the conditions for an event of violence to occur that never should have happened.

And without the government's involvement, it would not have happened like that.

Right.

So, with even with you, you are saying they allowed the conditions, they maybe even encouraged the conditions a little bit.

But

we have cops on video taking fence down.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

That doesn't explain like the pipe bomb or anything like that, which

clearly

that was that was what was that?

I mean, that just seems planted by

people who did have a master plan.

They may not have said, oh, this is the way it's going to happen at the Capitol, but they wanted to make sure that something happened

and those pipe bombs were put in with somebody with an agenda.

The vice president was moved to where one of those pipe bombs was for a reason.

And it seems to me they just didn't need that reason

anymore.

And so just brush it aside.

Right.

Does that seem reasonable to you?

Absolutely.

Contingencies, right?

Again, these people aren't stupid.

And also, as we mentioned, there isn't one single quarterback of everything.

I mean, I don't think generally.

that you can say the grand conspiracy ends up with this person calling all the shots.

It doesn't quite work like that.

So

there's overlap and

there's disarray to things.

But yeah,

there's just a lot of evidence and

all aspects of it should be investigated honestly and completely by the incoming

administration.

We have to have answers to this.

I had a meeting.

I didn't have a meeting, but

one of my

guys who was working for me at the time, he was kind of a right-hand guy.

He had a meeting that was asked for by the Soros organization.

And so my right-hand man met with the right-hand man of Soros.

And we interpreted this clearly as

a threat because it started with

your boss is going to stop saying these things about my boss.

And it only went downhill from there.

And I talked to somebody right after who knew George Soros and had worked with George Soros.

And I said,

what do you make of this?

And he said, that was clearly a threat.

He said, now glenn

here's what you have to understand

george soros is not going to give the order to go kill you or disrupt your life he said he doesn't need to there are enough people that want his attention want to be in his circle that will take it on their own and

they would be willing to do something and then let it be known in that inner circle that, you know, I was the guy who took care of that problem for you.

There are so many,

there are so many interests that you don't have to have a central committee planning.

This stuff can happen organically on its own if, like you say, you allow the conditions to be right for it.

So we don't need to have a star chamber planning all of this.

Right.

And it's because of the reality of human nature, right?

I always tell people that the genius of the founding fathers was to recognize one singular concept with total clarity, and that is the fundamental, inescapable, unchanging reality of human nature.

It devolves towards evil, and it collects power in one place in a totalitarian manner.

Power always collects in one place, and people always seek it.

So that's why I keep saying guardrails.

That constitution is guardrails to channel human nature in a productive direction and counterbalance it against itself.

Yes.

All right, let me ask you a couple of final questions here.

If you could go back and speak to yourself on January 5th, 2021, what would you say to yourself?

Man, it's an interesting question framed that way.

I can't imagine on January 5th that I would tell myself,

go to the Capitol grounds on January 6th.

That would be, yeah.

I mean, God never calls us to do something painful on purpose for the sake of being painful.

That would be sadism and foolishness.

So God calls us to be wise.

I believe firmly and honestly, I can tell you this from my heart, that I was as prepared and wise in the moment as I was able to be at that time.

So, I'm proud of what I did and how I did it, and I conducted myself honorably.

I will answer to God for that, and I am satisfied there.

But if you had told me on January 5th and I knew ahead of time, I would have adjusted

based on that information, of course.

The last

question,

you know, I know

many of the players that are going to go into power here soon.

I know Cash Patel very well,

and I have a lot of respect for Cash.

And Cash and I have had conversations on air long before he thought he was going to be in charge about things like the Epstein

list,

the Diddy

problem, this particular problem.

And we are looking at, and people don't really understand this.

And I think you do.

We talked about Hitchcock.

People don't understand movies are not totally made up.

They do reflect real life.

And I've had times, and I know you have, had times where you're like, I'm in a movie.

It's weird.

I can't believe I'm in a Jason Bourne movie all of a sudden.

Right.

Those movies would tell us when you have this much power, this much money,

this many famous people with so much at stake,

these things are never really

fixed.

They're never, they never re.

The Epstein list will not be released.

The P.

Diddy, he might go to prison, but what about all the people that were there?

Will we ever know them?

Are you optimistic over the next four years

that this next administration with Donald Trump is serious enough, knows what they're facing, and brave enough to do this and to take this all on and expose it.

So I love that question because it brings me right back to the book that I wrote while I was in prison.

I'm in prison going through all of this insanity and abuse and even

despair.

And I realized, you know, this comes down to me in this moment and what I choose to do at the moment.

This comes down to the choices I make on how to respond to suffering and pain and I believe that our country is amazing because it calls us to remember the sacred

the sacred truth of the human spirit and individual sovereignty.

America is all about you and me as individuals.

So I am optimistic because it isn't just about President Trump and his administration.

Now, I love President Trump.

I'm very proud of him and a valiant supporter, will continue to be.

But President Trump, by and large, also understands the reality that this is about you, the American.

And so, if we remember that, if we reclaim that, and that's why I love to talk about a red pill revolution, a revolution is the overthrow of an existing system.

Now, we don't want to overthrow our constitutional system.

We want to reclaim and revive it.

But we do have to overthrow the spirit of evil, the spirit of corruption, the spirit of

selfish, self-seeking, centralized power and the lies that they use as weapons.

We have to overthrow that system so that we can reclaim the American Constitutional Republic for ourselves as American citizens.

And if each one of us commits to doing that, there is no weapon formed against us that will stand.

I will tell you that that is exactly the answer I have come to.

I just wrote predictions on 2025, and I talked about Epstein this kind of case, and said, I don't think it will happen this year, but it doesn't mean that it won't happen.

But the only thing standing in the way of its happening

is apathy.

If we realize how much power we actually have and we stand up and say, no.

Our children are being raped.

They are bringing children in for pleasure.

This system is corrupt.

I want to know who is part of that corruption.

I want this

judge, the prosecutors, the FBI,

the DOJ.

I want all of it.

And I want the bad guys.

In a fair trial, I want the bad guys to go to jail.

I want this to be clean.

And if we all stand up, it's the only thing that will,

because nobody is, you know, Donald Trump has already risked his life.

How many people are really, truly willing to risk their life to expose this stuff?

Not as many as you would hope.

I mean, look at the number of FBI agents that stay quiet, even though they know what's happening is wrong.

We have to be the ones that demand it.

And that is...

That has been great.

Yeah.

Go ahead.

That is my Patriot plea, man.

The patriot plea, right?

That's my call is that we need to raise up a remnant.

It won't ever be everyone, but the American Revolution, this country, the United States of America formed in 1776 with 3%

of the colonists participating in that effort.

3% was the remnant.

And I tell a story in the book about Gideon, a Jew that God found in a wine press and said, you, mighty man, are going to save the nation of Israel from the hordes of Midianite marauders.

And he's like, me?

Like, I don't have anything going on here.

God said, it's not about you.

It's about me and your obedience to the call.

Raise up those who are willing to exercise uncomfortable courage.

And it was, he had 32,000 Israelites that initially answered.

And God said, that's too many.

I want the remnant.

I want those who are really willing to stay strong when the going gets tough, who when the government says, I'll give you a golden parachute plea deal.

And you know that plea deal is a lie that's being used to crucify thousands of your American citizens and to propel totalitarian government forward.

And you say no.

God wants that remnant, but it's 3% or whatever percent it is.

It's a minority.

But it's the tireless minority that Sam Adams spoke, lighting brush fires in the minds of men with truth and the opportunity of courage.

We just have to exercise it.

John Strand, the name of the book is Patriot Plea.

You can find it by going to johnstrand.com, johnstrand.com.

John, as always, thank you.

God bless you.

No, thank you, Glenn.

Honor is mine, and God bless you and our great country.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.