Because they have pushed that word like a thief pushes a stolen tv meanwhile they golf clapped last summer as anarchists and radicals literally burned american cities to the ground resulting in two billion dollars worth of damage and how many countless people have died since then for this experiment with our cops
It’s so more than a little strange that they’ve spent so much time on the insurrection narrative i mean after a while you have to wonder why is it they’re still talking about it because they aren’t really talking about it they’re they’re uh insisting that it was an insurrection without really giving us anything
Strangely their insistence focuses uh on the unquestionability of the whole situation well i have some questions and today’s guest asked these questions in a more recent article for revolver news titled meet ray epps the fed pervect protected who appears to have led the very first
1-6 attack on the us capital but it goes deeper than that it’s more of an expose and a very comprehensive one at the center of all of it is this mysterious guy from arizona named ray epps a name everyone should know and a name that you will not hear on cnn
Npr msnbc or from the administration we know that he was on the fbi most wanted list he was one of the first 20 people added to the list but he was removed just one day after revolver published an article about him that alone would seem to be enough to raise the alarm
We know this guy ray epps was there we know that he was encouraging trump supporters to go into the capital the night before the rally there’s footage of him doing it in response of him telling people who are trump supporters hey we got to go in and take over the capitol people that
Were trump supporters began to chant fed fed fed because they felt he was a fed plant as well as the footage of him on the morning of january 6 telling people to go to the capitol 30 minutes before the end of trump’s speech recently in a house oversight hearing representative thomas massey asked
Attorney general uh garland about the situation and garland was surprisingly close-lipped about the matter this whole thing ends in a question not an answer the question is why well we don’t know but we need to find out and merit garland is not the guy as you
Will find out at the end of this podcast not the guy to really be looking into it today’s guest has devoted himself to this cause please welcome darren beatty you may not know this about me but i’m a man of taste i mean
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Built.com go there use the promo code beck 15 save 15 off your first order at built.com promo code back 15. So darren how does a a guy who’s a professor at duke university who likes donald trump hey how did you even get that job was that undercover and then you left there to go speechwrite for donald trump yes well i was an academic that was my first profession i
Majored in mathematics as an undergraduate and did a phd in the philosophy of mathematics as presented through the lens of a german philosopher martin heidegger and then i was teaching at duke and one of the interests i had was sort of the underlying logic behind various political
Coalitions and i had a thesis that essentially the underlying logic behind the republican coalition had become obsolete post-cold war and it was due for a certain type of realignment and in fact i presented this thesis through a course i was teaching called left right and center and
Contemporaneous to that course we saw it play out in real time with the emergence of uh trump and to a certain extent with the emergence of sanders on the left so it was very interesting to teach that and of course i was i was not just a detached theoretical observer i was a
Supporter of trump i supported the underlying realignment that i thought he represented and symbolized and i was in fact if you can believe it the only non-tenured academic in the country to have publicly uh endorse trump’s candidacy and i was also the only faculty member at duke to have correctly predicted the election
Which i think irritated them even more i think it probably did so what is the realignment um that you you saw right well there was a number of factors i mean a lot of things have changed since then and so to some extent the analysis requires its own kind of update
Yeah but at the time um you know you just saw the you know the same types of refrains coming out of gop and the rest messaging as though we’ve never gone kind of beyond the reagan years as though the kind of economic philosophy represented in the reagan years was somehow
Essentially connected with the various other positions for instance on foreign policy on cultural policy and so forth and i think a lot of times because people see various political issues packaged together they assume that there’s some type of essential coherence when in a lot of cases they’re packaged
Together in an arbitrary way or maybe not entirely arbitrary but contingent to the underlying political circumstances that existed and i think the way that a lot of the gop platform in the movement conservative platform was constructed it was very much attached to the peculiar circumstances of that cold war period
And required a certain type of uh substantial software update as it were in order to address the emerging challenges of the 21st century so we and uh yeah we we have free aligned i mean i find myself i’ve always been a freedom of speech guy you know first amendment is really all
Of them are but the first amendment especially with what i do i’ve always been there and the left used to be the champion of that and now we’re on opposite sides i’ve always been a guy who said well you know big big corporations what are they going to do
Not realizing what corporations that are bigger than countries um and many countries in the cases of these corporations now combined can do and are doing so now i’m i’m almost i wouldn’t say i’m an anti-corporis but i’m i i’m very suspicious and i want nothing i want our government to do nothing with
The private sector uh at all that’s that’s a huge change just in me we are all flipping and finding ourselves in in in proximity of very strange bedfellows right and i think it’s simply a matter of pragmatically addressing the uh predominant threats to liberty that exists today and it takes
Different forms and this is i guess a partial update from the issues i was focused on back during the trump candidacy back then it was uh somewhat significant and even a little bit novel to suggest oh we need to reassess our relationship between sort of economic theory and liberty and there’s this sort
Of simplified version of what free market is when really people use that term so loosely as to encompass a free market of the neighborhood lemonade stand in the free market of something like major institutions like goldman sachs but the market in which goldman sachs exists is
Not the same market as the kind of neighborhood lemonade stand yes and we didn’t we didn’t quite have the vocabulary to um recognize those important distinctions but i would say that at this point we may have gone a little bit far in the other direction at at first it was
Necessary to say like look just because these big tech companies are technically in the private sector in a very technical sense doesn’t mean that we should simply ignore the overwhelming threat that they pose to free speech and the ability to deliberate in the public sphere which is a precondition of a
Democratic society correct you need free speech in order to have the democratic society and so i think just because everyone was sort of so fixated on this public sphere private sector distinction it was important to say look just because the threats are coming from the private sector doesn’t mean we should ignore
Them because there is sacrosanct by virtue of not being but i think at this point i’m almost inclined to kind of push back in the other direction in the following sense is i think ultimately what big tech is the the major companies facebook and all these other things you
Cannot understand ultimately what they are without recognizing that they are essentially extensions of the american state and in fact and the government at the highest levels in the state department and other spheres they use google facebook and these other entities as an integral component of their public diplomacy operations of their propaganda
Operations it’s used to facilitate our objectives we saw this with the arab spring clearly exactly exactly and in fact and that’s not even to mention the de facto revolving door that now exists between the high level positions at these tech companies and the government and also the fact that these companies are doing
Major contract work for the government so i think the the ultimate position is not quite all public versus private the ultimate i think recognition we need to make is at the highest level that distinction is not very meaningful the public the sector and the and the private sector blend and
In the case of big tech these companies are not ultimately private sector in the way that we imagine and i think that’s important when we try to assess solutions because you can’t solve the bottleneck simply by saying oh we need some other kind of private sector competitor because at that level in the
Economy everything blends into uh the state and ultimately the bottleneck to solutions is the security state um which has been a uh primary driver of the censorship regime that we have and i think that could be a an interesting segue i think into uh the biggest story really of the past
Few years that encompasses a lot of my reporting on one six which is the fact that the entire national security apparatus in this country has been repurposed and redeployed domestically and that includes the big tech companies and so far as their instruments of the security state the entire apparatus we
Have is now been reoriented towards silencing and suppressing precisely those insurgent populous energies that animated the trump candidacy but also animate other populist movements on the left as well and that’s where we find ourselves i think it’s a very dangerous place and many people are still coming to realize
That this is the reality and how dangerous it it actually is what do you think it’s going to take to get people to wake up i mean it is so clear and obvious i mean just uh in cop 26 today i think it was the president announced um a partnership with his administration
The united states government and the world economic forum and 20 i think it’s 20 or 25 different companies um where it’s a public-private partnership this is this is should be terrifying uh especially when you see groups like um you know bill gates and microsoft standing up on the stage as well
Um i mean this is everywhere is is it going to be too late by the time we wake up that’s a tough question i mean it remains to be seen and i think uh partially it’s it’s a matter of uh political psychology on the right and this is why my news organization
Revolver.news i think we are uh a premier organization especially catered to the right to illustrate the threats uh presented by this repurposed national security state and i think there’s a reason that traditionally a lot of the best critiques of the security state have come from the left because
Dispositionally the left to be generous to them they like to they have to think of themselves as critics of uh uh uh corrupt institutions of power now i think in practice we can all see that the left overwhelmingly functions as an instrument of those powerful institutions but as a matter of
How they need to think of themselves they have to think of themselves as challenging powerful corrupt institutions whereas on the right i think there’s a very different political psychology at work and that is people on the right want to think of themselves as venerating just institutions of authority and so
It’s a more difficult proposition to get people on the right to recognize that these institutions many of which you’ve had a history of venerating and supporting like the fbi like the dod at its highest levels like the national security apparatus more broadly that these have become extremely corrupt and are
Basically pointing their guns and their fingers at you and i i have to tell you i don’t think that you i don’t think the problem uh is that big getting the right to realize that i think i think with when you see what happened to donald trump and you know i
Said this all during that if they can do this to the president of the united states what power do you think you have over them um i mean if they can destroy lie uh cheat steal uh fabricate um eavesdrop spy on the president the average person has no chance and
For the very first i’ve always been very pro-law enforcement and pro-fbi etc etc you know i i’m skeptical about corruption but i’ve always felt like it’s you know a few bad apples when it comes to washington dc there isn’t an institution that i believe in now i believe in the
Principles that were lined up by our founders and are you know up for show for the little people in the uh archives but those are never used by those institutions it seems to me and you don’t you don’t know where to turn you know you can’t turn to the press yeah you
Can’t turn to the government uh where do where does the average person turn and that’s why i think your reporting is is so important and i i want to get into the way this has been used um for january 6th and um uh and ray epps i want to get into but i
Think we should start with whitmer um and and tell that story yes no whitmer is a very important story and um actually the the very first piece that kind of focused the appropriate narrative on january 6 before the first revolver dot news piece that really analyzed the charging documents in
Relation to the oath keepers and presented the thesis that there’s very likely fbi uh involvement here before that there were disparate narratives going on like oh it was a bunch of people taking selfies and there’s a lot of truth to that oh it was antifa or some but
There wasn’t the appropriate focus um uh before that and part of the reason is that you know we hadn’t looked at the charging documents and seen this kind of reverse ricoh structure whereby you have a lot of the little fish wallowing in prison where and the bigger fish
Heads of the militia groups in some cases just enjoying their lives walking away free um but also it’s just again i think it goes to this kind of veneration for the institutions there’s trust in authority saying like you know maybe they would do this but they wouldn’t do that the feds
Wouldn’t you know go into incitement and of course if you look at the long history of the fbi it’s it’s it uh it’s very clear that they are capable of doing those things and they have but we pointed out in this very first revolver piece that you don’t need to go
Back to the 60s and look at the history of the fbi you just need to go back a couple months before the so-called siege of the national capital to this michigan plot that you mentioned now what was the michigan plot many of your viewers probably heard
About it in the context of the media ginning up this idea like oh the trump supporters are terrorists they tried to kidnap the michigan governor and whatnot well it turns out that out of this so-called michigan plot 12 of the 26 plotters were either fed agents or fed informants
12 out of 26 which is a remarkable ratio now just a couple more and you know it’s really a federal right no no it’s it’s it’s remarkable so that alone is is a whopping statistic but what else well most people think of it this michigan plot as the plot to kidnap the governor
Which it allegedly was but it was also a plot to storm the state capital to storm the state michigan capital so there’s an interesting similarity there it also involved predominantly an organization called the three percenters which is one of the three main militia groups also imputed to the quote unquote insurrectiony aspects of
One six and so you have the same militia group the same plot storming the capital only in this case we know for a fact that 12 out of the 26 so-called plotters were actually feds and i always say the cherry on top of the michigan case is that
The fbi director of the detroit field office who was presumably overseeing this entire infiltration operation in michigan the day after these so-called plotters were arrested fbi director ray promoted this detroit field office guy to the dc field office his name is steven d’antoino he was promoted to the dc
Office where he went on to oversee the 1-6 investigations so there are many many fascinating fascinating parallels to say the least now i like to be very precise in what i’m claiming what i’m not claiming i’m not saying that the fact that the michigan case which involved one of the
Same militia groups involved the same plot to storm a state capital and whose uh director was promoted to dc the day after the plotters were arrested i’m not saying that all of those coincidences logically imply that 1-6 was the same thing i’m saying that there’s independent compelling evidence
For 1-6 but for those who have some kind of heuristic blockages though this this couldn’t really be plausible we wouldn’t really do that i’m saying look you you don’t need to read a history of the fbi all you need to do is go months back where they’re doing precisely the same
Thing that i’m suggesting went on in one six it doesn’t you don’t need an intuition boost from going back in history you just need to look at what they did a couple months before involving the same groups in the same plot so let me stop here um there was a book uh written
I’m trying to remember who wrote it called blacklisted by history and i read the first couple of chapters and it was kind of a red pill and i read the first couple of chapters and i realized if this were true it would change me i would have to
Change a lot of the things that i believed about our history about government et cetera et cetera and uh and i i i closed the book and said i’ve got to talk to the author first i want to know the author i want to make sure
He’s not a crazy man and you know um and i called him i think he was over in england and he made perfect sense and so i read it and it changed my mind that book changed me um i saw events in american history in a different way
This is one of those things but this one if this is now it’s not history and it involves the the most respected american law enforcement and the highest law enforcement agency in america and i think it’s frightening to go down this road i would imagine if
I’m listening to you there’s a big part of me that doesn’t want to believe this whether it’s true or not i don’t want to because what it means can we talk about the psychology of this just a little bit before we move on no absolutely and it gets back to kind
Of what i was saying earlier is that i think part of especially the conservative political psychology is we want to be defenders of just institutions of authority but what happens when those institutions are far from just and not only are they unjust but they’re hostile towards us that’s that’s a very
Difficult position to be in versus those on the left who are already primed to challenge unjust institutions of authority at least according their political psychology we want to be in a kind of country where we can support our law enforcement institutions especially the fbi we want to be able to support our
Generals in the military and so forth and we want to be able to do this and so it’s a tougher pill to swallow to see that they’re actually not functioning anywhere near the way that we would we would want or expect i think it goes deeper than that it goes to
Well then i’m alone if i believe this the power structure is now against me and all those things i used to hang on to of you know truth justice in the american way those are all gone and so now i have to chart a new course and it’s completely foreign to me
To not have the faith that the good guys win in the end right and i totally understand that and i wish i could present some kind of um optimistic rejoinder in which i kind of sincerely believe but it’s a difficult position but i would say that it’s
Better to have a sober understanding of the reality than to rest on on fiction because it’s only on the basis of a sober understanding of what you’re up against that you’re actually in a position to address it even if it’s a long hard uh road versus i think um in
Terms of the implications uh many people again on the right are so um i think inordinately focused on winning elections not to say that it’s a bad thing to win elections obviously it’s a great thing and we had a great result in virginia the other day but i
Think it’s important to note that winning elections can only get you so far if you have the security apparatus against you and i think that the story of the trump administration um illustrates that uh very well is that you can have the the people on your side but if every
Major institution is against you there’s only so much you can accomplish and especially when the national security state is against you when you have organizations like the fbi army counterintelligence and so forth looking at right-wing groups as national security targets to infiltrate and to set up that is a profound political bottleneck
That is not captured in this kind of narrow focus on winning elections so i’ve been uh inclined to say that unless and until we bring this national security bureaucracy to heal and back within its appropriate place pretty much all of electoral politics will be fake and performative because it will run up
On this bottleneck and um because there’s this feeling of being so alone and helpless when you recognize the institutions that are raised against you there’s this strong urge to just kind of suck on electoral victories like a pacifier and to pretend that you know these this is the answer to it but the
Answer i think it needs to be much more robust much more difficult it uh it requires um narrative focus which i think i’m very happy that our reporting has provided some narrative focus but the solution is much more difficult than simply oh we need to win the next election because
Uh yeah so let’s let’s go to the solution after we talk about the issue let’s start with uh january 6. what most people will tell you happen is uh they were you know um uh verifying the vote uh and people went to go speech some people went they got out of hand
Some of them were were dangerous or crazy and most people there were not the police were completely surprised by it nancy pelosi hadn’t done anything to make sure that uh we had more security there but she was surprised by it and it took everybody by surprise uh and uh and then we
I’m not sure if we got the bad guys i know we i know we’ve got a lot of grandmas but i’m not sure if we got the bad guys that’s pretty much the narrative that i think you would hear from the average person that you know is
Middle of the ground or leaning right right and um yes so what what’s important about the narrative of one city and how much and how much and how much of that is how much of that is even true what i just said right well
Some of it some of it is true i think the the general truth about the people that you see in the in the footage and everything is that there were people there for trump rally uh that there were some things that the capitol police did that sort of incited
Uh the energy of the crowd unnecessarily and a lot of people got caught up in sort of crowd psychology that was i think ginned up by various provocateurs which we can get to but people did get caught up in the crowd psychology um in many cases the doors at the capitol were
Open and so all of these factors combined you get what you see the notion that any of the uh uh criminal activity on one six elevates anywhere near uh 911 which is now the preferred comparison in the government and the regime media is totally absurd um the only person killed in cold blood
Was a trump supporter veteran called ashley babbitt so so in that respect um uh that’s basically what the narrative is as for the infiltration that’s a very specific subgroup and that involves some of the militia organizations that as you’ll note in the reporting on one six it’s
The militia groups that did this quote unquote military stack and which was you know not very impressive in the first place but there there’s a very narrow group of sort of militias that are being charged with conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding those are the most serious
Charges uh the oath keeper militia group specifically is the most prosecuted group associated with one six and when you look at the militia groups especially at the leadership level that’s when it starts to get very suspicious as to what role did the feds play and as i mentioned in the very
First revolvers thesis piece presenting this we looked at the charging documents related to the militia groups and what we found is in many cases the people referenced in those charging documents who were occupied a more senior position than those people charged whose behavior is more egregious than the people charged
They’re referenced but they’re not in indicted and so we said here’s a real question that the feds have to answer how do you account for the selective non-prosecution of more senior militia members who if the other people are indicted they’re doing just as much if not more how do
You account for that and in a follow-up piece we zeroed in on a very specific person that is stuart rhodes who’s the founder and head of the oath keepers and we pointed out the extraordinary degree of federal protection that he seems to enjoy that is very difficult to provide
An innocent explanation for and so i’m happy to go into detail so let’s go there uh to details of that um but this is this is i think an important part of the story um and there are two sort of uh narrative possibilities when klobuchar senator klobuchar asked fbi director ray she said
Don’t you just kick yourself that you didn’t have any informants in there and you just weren’t ready you weren’t ready for the event so don’t you just kick yourself and he said oh yeah we will try to do better next time and so forth she set up the question for him to
Deflect she didn’t say did you have she said don’t you kick yourself that you didn’t have well now we know for a fact that they did have in fact there was a new york times piece that came out essentially vindicating some of our original reporting at revolver news and
The new york times piece uh talked about a proud boy who was in the capitol that day texting his fbi handler contemporaneously throughout the entire day now it’s one thing if the feds had informants what that means is that the feds would have been informed in advance and they simply for whatever reason
Decided to do nothing to provide the requisite security to prevent it so they sit back and just let it happen on purpose presumably for um political reasons but there’s an even darker possibility which i think the evidence points to strongly which is more than just that they were informed
And they did nothing but some of the key most proactive players in some of the most egregious elements of one six we’re actually government affiliated or government people and that is to say there’s a distinction between the government knowing in advance and doing nothing and the government taking a more proactive participatory
Role in inciting the event and the latter category is precisely what we saw happened in michigan and i think it’s also what we see uh in one six well that would explain why they did nothing um let’s go back prior to 1-6 when did this plot do you think started
Do you have any idea um i don’t what i do know is that there is in the mountains of documentary footage and all the video that exists related 216 there’s footage of one person who explicitly and repeatedly calls for going into the capital the evening before and that person is ray epps
And this is not just some random crazy in the crowd who comes up with an idea you know maybe on drugs and say oh let’s go into the capital guys and then that’s it no he’s going from group to group on the fifth the evening before and you know there are different people
On the streets there for different reasons some people were pissed off about the election some people just wanted to support trump some people just wanted to see what was going on there are people clashing with black lives matter there’s a lot of different people different energies and he went to the
Various groups refocusing them on his stated michigan uh his stated mission sorry his stated mission which was we need to go into the capital and he was not received very well people in fact it’s you know explicitly said no this guy’s a fed he didn’t give up
And he didn’t disappear in fact he was there it was a veritable where’s waldo situation on the sixth he’s literally everywhere all sides of the capital uh seeming to persist with his michigan directing people to the capitol saying we need to go into the capital that’s where our
Problems are and then remarkably but not surprisingly given his past statements the very first breach of the capital grounds the barriers which occurred as trump was speaking it’s important to point out this was before the main crowd went to the capitol at all there were people by those barriers who broke them down
And the very first breach of the capital grounds a guy called ryan samsel who’s uh in jail and has been uh persecuted in jail under pretty horrible conditions but he was the guy who first broke down the uh fence and ray epps was standing right by him and whispered in his ear
Two seconds before he breaks down the barrier this is the and and where is he we he’s at his ranch right now initially the fbi put his face on its 20 most wanted people for january 6 they said they did their whole spiel where they say we need the public’s help
In identifying this man the internet being the remarkable sort of crowd source research tool that it is came up with his identity within days the feds did nothing with it just crickets until finally like four months later the day after revolver news ran its piece on oath keeper founder and leader
Stuart rhodes the day after that the fbi quietly scrubbed reyes’s face from its most wanted database and ever since then they’ve had nothing to say about this guy who of all people from the video evidence seems to be if there’s anyone who’s one of the main orchestrators of the initial breach
It’s this guy and he’s riding around in the golf cart by his ranch and other people the grandmas are rotting away and abu ghraib style conditions in dc prisons that doesn’t add up so tell me it doesn’t tell me who he is what do we know about him
Well we know that he is a veteran he’s a marine veteran he is um i would say in many ways quite impressive i was particularly impressed by his professional demeanor throughout the fifth and the sixth there was a lot of you know a lot of energy in the crowds a
Lot of people like calling him a fed like he’s the equanimity uh that he demonstrated was professional and quite impressive he was there he he i it looks like he was there to do a job and he was focused on that job he had a natural kind of command over the crowds it’s
Remarkable how he’s just standing there saying people go here people go there people listen to him because he seems like a uh he has an authoritative presence in that respect um but he was very focused very cool very detached and professional which again i think is a big red flag
Because one of the things that you typically see in provocateurs is this bizarre this the kind of bizarre uh combination of emotional detachment with kind of radical suggestions whereas there are a lot of people who got emotionally kind of wrapped up in in the event and they were not cool and
Detached and it whereas he was so you know cool as a cucumber let’s go into the capital radical suggestions combined with a detached uh demeanor uh so that’s another interesting thing about him um another thing which might explain why the fbi decided to scrub his face the
Day after the revolver news report on oathkeeper stewart rhodes is that he is a former president of the arizona chapter of the oath keepers um so that’s kind of interesting and and in our piece we present all kinds of uh footage from the past of him paddling around with stuart rhodes and
Such his former boss his former oath keeper boss so that’s also an interesting thing about him um and that’s that’s basically that’s basically it all right so i mean we had a nationwide search this was i mean they were they took the military down put it on
You know stand you know standby to be able to get anybody who might be a radical you have this guy that they identified early there’s tape of him orchestrating and he’s on the most wanted list and then they don’t arrest him they don’t question him nothing
Not that i know of like it’s possible that they questioned him and we just don’t know about it but he’s he’s not indicted he’s not indicted now there’s a possibility that they questioned him and he agreed to kind of cooperate and that’s why they’re not touching him i don’t find that explanation terribly
Persuasive simply because of the seemingly profession professional provocative role that he played on january 5th and and january 6 and the fact that in my judgment looking at uh the footage of him he appears to be the one of the primary orchestrators of the initial breach so who could he be
Who could be he be informing on he seems to be a major player in that and so the idea that they would just kind of leave him after putting him on their top 20 most wanted uh is very bizarre and so i think the case of ray epps is uh
Is hard to present an innocent explanation for and similarly i think the case of stuart rhodes which uh if we have time i get it let’s go there now he is let’s go there now so what is your what should your audience uh know about him we’ve we’ve done so much extensive
Reporting on him so for the full stuff go to revolver.news read the full report it’s incredibly comprehensive but what are the cliff notes with this guy so here is the founder and the leader of the oath keepers which is the most prosecuted militia group associated with one six the oath keepers is uh
Involved in all of the boogie man type reporting on one six of the military stack of the conspiracy all of this stuff all of the boogie man reporting is really most concentrated in the oath keepers and stuart rhodes is the founder of the oath keepers and when you look at the charging
Documents i’ll take a specific one so there’s an individual called thomas caldwell who is presented in the media as a leader of the oath keepers it’s in fact he’s not a leader far from it he’s not even an official member he’s someone oh my gosh stuart who stuart rhodes uh
Uh met at a at a uh some kind of political rally before and they got to talking and basically that’s how caldwell got wrapped up in it he’s a 60 year old disabled uh uh military that um he’s not terribly threatening in any capacity but he’s indicted he faces very serious
Charges conspiracy charges and the remarkable thing is if you look at the documents and his charges the government’s case when they argue for the existence of this conspiracy rely overwhelmingly to the point of near exclusivity on stuart rhodes’s statements and actions and again to to give the full account you have to look
At the article or we need more time i’m just giving the cliff notes but if you look at those documents the government relies overwhelmingly near exclusively on stuart rhodes’s statements and actions to constitute the conspiracy that they’re charging thomas caldwell for which is very strange because if it were a ricoh type
Situation where they don’t know their way around guys yeah they they go after the little guys to get the big guys they only do that when they don’t have enough to go after the big guys whereas in the case of rhodes um there’s uh evidence of him trespassing
On the capitol which is a stupid and trivial charge but others have been charged for it and if they’re as desperate as they claim to be for him they could have gotten him for that uh furthermore if they’re charging caldwell for this conspiracy and they’re using rhodes’s statements and actions to
Constitute that very conspiracy they could have you know it’s very puzzling why they haven’t gone after him and and perhaps even more puzzling than the fact that stuart rhodes after eight or nine months remains unindicted while a lot of the underlings and fellow travelers remain indicted is the fact that
Rhodes hasn’t even been properly searched so a lot of people even people who aren’t charged with 1-6 related things people who have the remotest association with it have received the um have received the full kitchen sink treatment by the fbi in terms of the feds going to people’s houses knocking
Down the door yeah i know a couple in alaska that that exactly you know early in the morning while they’re laying in bed they come knocking on the door and throw them down and i mean exactly and they take everything every single electronic device in the house they take there’s even cases of
Them taking like some 11 year old girl’s tablet because it happened to be in the house so that’s the full treatment and that’s the treatment that people get who aren’t even charged the feds are just saying oh they might have communications with people who that we might want to
Charge and yet in the case of stuart rhodes whose phone calls are everywhere in the charging documents um who’s the founder and head of the most prosecuted group associated with one six the extent of the search that they conducted on him was they took a single cell phone from
Him when he was in his car four months after january 6. four months after you ex how how does or do they just not answer how how does somebody they don’t know they don’t answer they don’t answer they they don’t answer but i would offer a a possible
Explanation and that is this that they don’t want his electronic communications because as we saw in the story of new york times story of this proud boy in the capitol texting his fbi handler and as we saw in the michigan case one of the key informants uh basically got
Outed because of a leaked text message between the informant and the handler the feds don’t want the electronic evidence because there’s something called the brady rule that obliges the prosecution and the government to hand over all potentially exculpatory evidence to the defense and that would certainly include evidence regarding
Informants and undercover agents so if if it is the case that rhodes has some type of undisclosed relationship with the feds they would have every incentive not to collect his electronics give him four months to dispose of whatever kind of uh incriminating communications he might have and then do just a total uh
Uh just total performance art type search where they take a single cell phone four months after and even in that case according to a lawyer for for rhodes uh she suggested that that search pertain to their investigation into someone else so that may not even be an investigation
To roads and yet all of the left-wing media all of the mainstream media they’re the ones now who want to trust uh the authorities they’re saying any minute now any minute now they’re gonna get rose because he’s the big bad orchestrate of the whole thing any minute now and they’re just afflicted
With this profound cognitive dissonance because the most parsimonious and persuasive explanation for why he enjoys such federal protection is not one that these mainstream and left-wing journalists want to entertain because then they’d have to acknowledge that they are serving these powerful and corrupt institutions rather than challenging them
And that this whole narrative that’s been set up not just to throw grandmas in prison for trivial offenses but in a larger sense the whole narrative that’s been set up to cast over 70 million americans as domestic terrorists for their political beliefs that that whole narrative is based on
Not just a lie but a malicious lie and a malicious scheme by their own government the very national security institutions that want to prosecute this false domestic war and terror were responsible for setting up the false narrative in the first place this is so crazy i mean this is the
Reichstag fire and i think we found out did we find out in the end that it was the the communists that said it but it could very well have been uh you know the nazis who said it and blamed it i remember on january 6 when this was
Happening before the break-in before the speech i said if you’re going please watch who you’re standing next to i mean this just feels like the perfect opportunity to have a reich dog fire when i first when i first saw it it didn’t seem to me that it was um
I mean i’ve been around conservatives for a very long time they’re not the ones that burn up the capital you know what i mean um right and yeah there’s yeah there’s a remarkable uh record of of all the trump rallies that how many have there been riots like
Zero right and and that’s and that’s why it was so obvious when someone like ray ep said we need to go into the capitol it was so obvious that he wasn’t part of the group and and that’s why people literally started chanting fed fed fed
After he said that because it was so out of keeping with the ordinary conduct of uh of those trump supporters of those uh you know americans who just wanted to express their beliefs peacefully in a an organized demonstration so so so let me go back to because you’ve made
This point a couple of times that the prison uh situation or the jail situation is atrocious uh right i you can’t hear this except from one of their attorneys um you know you there’s congress just said hey you gotta go look and they came back and said oh no
There’s nothing bad there it’s it’s fine um other parts of the jail are worse um but they’re part of the jail seem to be okay what’s the truth on how these people are being held well this is a subject on which i’m you know i’ve taken an interest but i can’t
Claim to be a subject matter expert and there’s a great reporter uh who’s sort of uh my uh partner comrade in reporting this uh called julie kelly and she’s a expert on the conditions in these prisons which i can only say from what i’ve what i’ve read um are really atrocious they’re people
Being held in solitary confinement there are people in all types of horrible conditions there’s um you know mold and all you know a lot of these people are old and they’re not in a position health wise to uh to live under these kind of squalid and difficult uh conditions and there
Are some cases of direct physical abuse on the part of guards in fact ryan samsel the person who um allegedly is the first person to break the the barrier after ray epps whispered in his ear two seconds before he was beaten up by guards and i find his case actually very interesting
Because first of all he knows what reyes whispered in his ear i find that very interesting he knows i don’t think that he is a fed i think he’s someone who is just kind of uh foolish and suggestible who did something uh very stupid and unstable uh
That doesn’t mean he deserves to be brutalized by prison guards but um he certainly would know what raep said and he might have more insight into the other people who are orchestrating the initial breach and it could be an intimidation factor it could be why they’re beating him up
Because they say look you know if you if you go public with what you might or might not know about rayapps or these other people you’re gonna have hell to pay and additionally it’s interesting that whereas all these other people the government prefers to charge like multiple charges with conspiracy charges sam
Is charged as a stand-alone case which also doesn’t make any sense because there was like coordinated activity leading to that initial breach so why in so many other cases including the oath keepers cases they charge a bunch of people in conspiracy and they hit this guy with stand-alone cases it
Seems like they’re deliberately constructing things so as to cordon him off from the other people that he was coordinating and communicating with leading up to that initial breach in order possibly to protect uh people like ray epps so is there such a thing as a fair trial here is there is there is
Such a thing as getting to the bottom of this those are two different questions um i hope that there’s a possibility of a fair trial there’s so it’s it’s a dubious prospect um in dc that’s for sure so the jurisdiction will matter other factors will matter in some cases these people have um
Incompetent uh legal counsel and in some cases it might even be worse than incompetence uh which is something i’m looking into but is too speculative at this point to go into greater detail um but as for will the truth come out well i did mention a uh this thing called the brady rule
And and that does oblige the government to hand over potentially a sculptory information that could involve information about informants in the michigan case the lead defense counsel in that case i believe his name is blanchard has made this a key part of the defense strategy to point out the extent of
Infiltration and the nature of what the informants were doing it’s one thing if it’s just they have informants passively sitting around it’s another if the informants provide such proactive support for the plan that it wouldn’t have happened had it not been for the fed’s involvement and it looks
Like that’s the case in michigan and that’s become a key part of the defense strategy i think similarly the defense counsel in the 1-6 cases they need to get up to speed they need to wake up they need to take some cues from the michigan case and they need to make the
Infiltration the federal involvement in one six a key part of their defense strategy i think that will help their uh uh their their uh the defendants and also will help the american public get the full truth or at least the fuller truth about exactly what happened on
That day why do they not want to why why do they not want us to see the tapes what do you think is on the tapes that’s another great question um i don’t know i can only speculate i i could imagine that if the tapes were made available you’d see
A lot more inches instances of provocateur type activity i think even more so you’ll see instances of uh maybe capital police officers letting people in the building and so forth and that would discredit the narrative that people were just bashing bashing in and going in most people went in when it was
Already uh inviting them with with open doors and as for the people who were bashing down the windows and so forth they appeared to be coordinated and they’re dressed all in black and we still don’t know who these people are and i suspect that maybe the government has footage of that type of
Activity that they don’t want the public to have so um so those are just some possible reasons in the in the aftermath we had um uh we had the capitol police go silent with the police officer that shot which is bizarre because you know the name of the
Police officer within five minutes of a discharge of a gun in almost all cases um and then you had the the nancy pelosi authorized the capitol police to get uh pentagon equipment to become an intelligence agency and listen and track people in dc tell me about that well it’s an interesting development and
The capital please seem to be expanding their operations they’re opening up a shop and base in florida they’re expanding it’s it’s it’s strange uh but they enjoy certain advantages for instance capital uh police as a legislative institution they’re exempt from foia which is an advantage for a uh
An institution of that sort yeah um it’s but yeah it’s it’s it’s very bizarre um it’s it’s disturbing that that would happen to any kind of um sort of enforcement organization the kind of militarization that you see especially when the militarization now is basically pointed at 70 plus million
Americans who happen to object to the direction of the the biden regime and otherwise so it’s uh it’s just part of this new trend this new domestic war on terror uh aimed aimed at all of us trump involvement any involvement what’s that any involvement from donald trump um in terms of what
Any of the stuff that happened on january 6th well i mean he gave gave a speech but i think that’s entirely uh appropriate as a speech i wish that he would um uh lend his voice toward the narrative of potential fbi involvement potential government involvement and just generally
Um i would say i wish he had taken a kind of more active role in uh expressing concern for the people who have been uh unjustly uh prosecuted uh as a result of uh 1-6 as for the kind of the idea that trump is sort of incited or is part of
The conspiracy i think that’s very far-fetched and ridiculous but i will point out that it’s it’s an interesting tie-in that the head of the january 6 commission in congress his name is benny thompson now benny thompson in his personal private capacity uh initiated a lawsuit against donald trump against roger stone
Against the proud boys and against the oath keepers and in this lawsuit he presents his own theory of the case and in this theory of the case the oath keepers and proud boys were coordinating with trump’s inner circle to plan this riot in advance which i think is fairly ridiculous
But what’s interesting about this is that the oath keepers appear there there’s have a star role in benny thompson’s personal lawsuit presenting his theory of the case and he even sent this uh lawsuit to rhodes to notify him of it and had like a big you know bold letters attention stuart rhodes
Now benny thompson is the chair of the 1-6 commission and he hasn’t said a word about stuart rhodes he has no interest in stuart rhodes he’s just as uninterested in stuart rose’s communications as the fbi and government are and and the commission is demanding the communications record of seemingly
Anyone who set foot in the capitol within a month of one six everyone except for roads so i just think that’s a an additional detail that’s quite remarkable that the head of the commission did a lawsuit presenting a theory of the case in which stuart rose
Rhodes takes a key role and now that this guy runs the entire january 6 commission he’s expressed zero interest in stewart uh so so tell me you you said earlier that maybe that you know that we had uh we had a way out uh that you had some suggestions on what
Could be done what are those well um there are some uh historical precedents for bringing the national security state to heal i think we’re somewhat uh at a distance from being able to achieve this in the same way but we should focus our efforts toward that end there is
Something called the church committee that you might recall uh that was set up a big kind of congressional commission that basically detailed the uh excesses and abuses of the intelligence community the cia the fbi and attempted with some degree of success to bring them back under the
Kind of fold for a little while appropriate democratic control um i think for various reasons it would be difficult to replicate that now but i think it should be a focus and i think people on the right should understand the uh corruption and abuses and basically the current configuration of
The national security state as the predominant bottleneck to any kind of true political victory can win elections you can have electoral victories but you won’t have political victories until this national security bottleneck is somehow addressed and the first step of that i think is delegitimizing these uh institutions in
The eyes of the right because they still maintain a certain degree of implicit uh authority and it’s very important that they be exposed for what they are and their corrupt activities be exposed and i think ultimately it does matter it doesn’t get us everywhere but it does matter
If these institutions are no longer viewed as essentially legitimate by the 70 plus million people that they’ve effectively declared war upon and from there i think there needs to be a real political focus there’s such a kind of phantasmagoria of the news cycle there’s a certain kind of add element of how
Conservatives process media it’s like this is a big story and then the next day um ao aoc will wear a dress that we don’t like and that will be the new story and then something else biden will do some outrage but it’s really important to have persistence and focus on this in particular
And um i think we have to a large degree we have not let this narrative go away and i’m very proud of my news organization revolver dot news for sticking to it we are going to keep sticking to it and this wasn’t supposed to happen like this narrative wasn’t
Supposed to get out of pandora’s box we’re still supposed to be disjointedly talking about oh there were antifa there it wasn’t supposed to get to the stage where now every major conservative populist uh uh person in the country is talking about this narrative including you know including
You and a lot of other very major voices in the uh uh in the conservative media space it wasn’t supposed to develop like this and so i think they’re very scared uh that explains the yeah i think the same could be said for the reporting from the daily wire
Which i think it should be nominated for a pulitzer won’t be but should be uh on what was happening in virginia with the school district and i mean it’s the same apparatus right being used by the same people um and if if a journalist wouldn’t have exposed that the narrative would be completely
Different and once it’s exposed the problem with this one is it’s very complex um yes even though it even though it’s it’s not i mean we we um i guess we just need to find out you know who these guys really are how how did you know how did they
How did ray epps get rolled up into this well that’s a very interesting question and there’s a broader history and context to this and i’m glad i’m glad you mentioned that um that in fact the uh government began its sort of robust infiltration efforts specifically into right-wing militia groups that all
Kicked off in earnest in the early 90s now i think it’s important to mention in this context that this is not merrick garland’s first rodeo in fact in the early 90s merrick garland was working for the doj and the clinton administration and his portfolio was the domestic extremism
Portfolio he was in charge right around with that first major infiltration operation called patcon okay that that led in let into oklahoma city and i think part of the reason that the government and the regime media are freaking out so much about uh this kind of uh revolver news
Narrative of one six is not just for what it exposes about one six which is huge enough but once people see that they’re going to start saying what other events have we been i saw one this i saw one this morning about timothy mcveigh because you remember that there
There was a third man that no i mean tons of witnesses saw yes now this is so huge it’s so dark i’ve looked into this extensively i’m not uh uh ready to report on it fully there’s been a lot of reporting out you know going back to knives but i think
The public is now just starting to get prepared to hear the full truth about these things and it’s absolutely true there’s so many dark details about oklahoma city and it’s no coincidence that merrick garland was one of the key hatchet men was one of the key janitor cleanup guys for this
Event and they’re getting the old band back together now merrick garland is head of the justice department just as the government is kicking off its new and improved and perhaps even more aggressive uh domestic war on terror to address the threat posed to the corrupt elements of government by the resurgence of a
Kind of uh uh populist uh element uh within american politics the internet sure changed everything uh absolutely that’s why they need to censor it yeah absolutely that’s why they need to censor it so can i ask you just real quick and we’ll have you back
On um you know a later date for an update but also i’d like to talk to you about this are you familiar with alexander dugan yes i am and his fourth political theory yes yeah where do you what are your thoughts on that well that’s that’s not something that i
Really have the expertise on as i mentioned i’m uh a political uh theorist by former profession um and i wrote my dissertation on a german philosopher martin heidegger who’s someone that dugan has uh commented on and wrote a book on i’ve read his book on heidegger uh some of it is interesting um
Other parts of it i would critique uh dugan is kind of an interesting uh interesting voice in sort of interpreting this uh transitional phase that we find ourselves in geopolitically uh in uh but um uh that’s pretty much that’s pretty much as i would say in generic terms but if you have this
What if specifically about the fourth political theory are you uh um the way that um uh the language that he uses is very appealing uh to people who feel like a lot of conservatives do right now um right you know they they’re they’re they’ve lost something they’re being told their
Country is no good they’re uh told that they’re no good etc etc it’s corrupt uh and it’s very appealing and uh is a uh is is another leg on the table that um i watch um interesting because i think that uh there are other there are other forces out there that
Would like to keep people under control or to destroy uh the nation and um and i think he’s one of them quite frankly that would that he’s one of the forces who would destroy this nation yeah that is looking to start a whole new order uh a whole new um uh
Not just this nation but this nation and the west i mean he is he’s pretty clear on that um well um yes and i i guess what i would say that’s not specific to dugan but because dugan can kind of be thought of as a sort of political philosophical archetype for sort of
Uh eurasia or eurasianism as a an alternative to america i think that um we really need and especially with the rise of of china which is in some ways involved with that although the relationship between russia and china is a very complicated one and not necessarily configures to
Uh the presentation that dugan gives but just to keep it uh generic i would say that the rise of china is a very important thing going on right now and it’s important not simply is to say oh we need to demonize the chinese and point to all of their abuses i think the
Diminution of america’s role geopolitically and the uh dissipation of america’s prestige is something that should really give us pause and not occasion us necessarily to criticize our rivals but to use it as a mirror to hold up to ourselves because um it is going to be the case that if we
Are no longer a serious country which i think we become largely a joke country not only a joke but an evil country yeah and what do we what do we represent geopolitically what do our armed forces represent it represents disseminating the very woke poison that we inflict on our own domestic population
And the rest of the world is going to be just as tired of it as a lot of us are but unlike the conservatives who are relatively impotent politically within the united states to challenge the dominant american regime there are going to be major competitors with real self-sufficiency that present
Legitimate alternatives to the woke prison that the united states has become and so uh i and i i think that in certain ways multi-polarity geopolitically is something to be cautiously welcomed because i view china certainly not as a free nation but i don’t view the united states as a
Free nation either and i would rather have competing authoritarian regimes with different taboos than a one world situation with the same taboos and for all of china’s faults you can there’s actually a popular tweet that i had um senator marshall blackburn tweeted a photo of winnie the pooh saying
Look how free we are in america that i can tweet winnie the pooh whereas in china it’s an insult to president xi so you can’t do that look at me i’m showing how we have free speech in the united states by tweeting winnie the pooh and i responded to her
Great how’d you do george floyd you can’t do it in china you can it’s it’s not that we have free speech here and they don’t in china or vice versa they’re just different taboos and i think increasingly one thing that people on the right especially if they’re labeled as dissidents by their
Own government will take advantage of is something that i call taboo arbitrage which is basically taking advantage of the fact that there are different taboos in different parts of the world and in fact it sounds crazy but it might be the case that in the future professors who are
Fired for violating the dictat of wokeness in the u.s will be hired at chinese universities and so it’s just one of those things i think again we want to be in a position where we say america is the best america’s the freest but we’re not kidding ourselves
If we’re there yeah and we should look at the rise and the increasing competence of countries like china not as an occasion to just saber rattle and say how bad they are but to honestly look at ourselves and say are we really going in the direction where we’re going to be capable
Of controlling the 21st century and are we going to be deserving of controlling the 21st century and i think the answer to both both of those questions at this point is a resounding no no i agree i agree um i have i’ve said for a long
Time if we don’t face up to our past and we also don’t uh uh don’t stop this spin away from you know the founding principles um we’re gonna we’re gonna make the germans look like rookies i mean our technology alone could enslave the entire world and if it’s not us it’s
Going to be china and we’ll be in bed with them i mean we’re doing some really frightening things that i never expected my country to be involved in we’ve been involved you know i’ve had a problem with ghost you know ghost planing people if you’re gonna torture at least have
The the balls to say we’re gonna do it don’t ship it off to a third country and then say your hands are clean but i think americans are ready for those tough conversations to say look this is what we have done in the past this is what we’re doing right now
And stop it i mean i think afghanistan was a very good example of this people watched that and they they recognized dishonor and that’s why they stood up because that’s not who we are supposed to be that’s what the left says us that we are that’s what the rest of the world says
We are but that’s not what the average american thinks of when they think of an american soldier that was dishonorable on so many levels and that was a good sign to me that americans saw that and went ick i don’t want anything to do with that right right no it’s absolutely true and
As much of a disaster as the entire afghanistan affair was i think you know those types of resounding global embarrassments i would hope could at least have the silver lining of forcing that type of radical critical self-reflection that our country really needs but un unfortunately it doesn’t
Even seem like afghanistan is is enough uh it might require something even more humiliating before we really say like wow we need a profound we need a profound course correction in this country because the hierarchy of taboos and the nature of accountability in the united states of america now is such
That a general will suffer more severe repercussions if it comes out that 20 years ago he used the n-word then it will if he loses a war correct a nation with that kind of priority of accountability is a joke nation that will not uh predominate in
The 21st century well we um we were a joke in 2000 we had just gotten back our financial institutions had just gotten back wagging our finger at them in 2006 in china saying you have to adopt the american banking standards look at this you’re going to collapse and then we
Collapsed and they laughed at us the same thing happens with afghanistan and what are we doing today we have our president trying to lead the globe in in climate change uh which is just the the great reset is the next uh i think slave tactic uh from the big corporations so
Thank you so much for being on the program and thank you for having me you bet thank you very much appreciate it you better you
