Transcript
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Charlie Sykes (0:24)
Spinquest is a free to play social casino void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details. Hey everyone, we are live from Maga Mondays. Welcome back. What a weekend. Kind of a shitty weekend, honestly. But you know, we're here to sort of do the serious and silly. I will note we were, while we were prepping for this backstage, getting our audio set up, getting the Internet set up, we did notice that there's a couple people in the comment section, you sickos who are waiting for us. One comment in particular that I need to shout out. It is ali can con 6510 writes every minute. Sam is late. I'm doing a shot at tequila. He won't let us public down much. Ollie, I was a little bit worried about you. I was gonna go on about a couple minutes late, but I didn't want you to get sick. It's 10am on Monday. You shouldn't be shooting tequila. So hopefully we made it on time. I think we did. I think we're on time. Will, how you doing, buddy? Good.
Will (1:22)
You know, I mean, I. Obviously Saturday night's news was pretty jarring, but otherwise, you know, hanging in there. There's, you know, it will have some from the party circuit and you know, I, I'm, you know, there's a lot of news going on, so I'm excited to discuss.
Charlie Sykes (1:36)
There's a lot of news going on. Obviously we're gonna leave with Saturday night. I've had a couple discussions already on these channels about Saturday night. Let me just stress those were for, you know, reaction videos that I did live with Bill here at Mega Monday. This is a Borg Takes Product. Uh, and we are, you know, doing another live stream. We hope you like these. They're, you know, we do this conversation every Monday. It's on YouTube, it's on substack bulwark.com. it's 10am and sometimes we just like to riff and have fun with it. But because of what happened on Saturday night, I just wanted to start with a little bit of a, kind of a monologue if, if you're, if you'll allow me. So, yeah, this show is about right wing Internet culture and extremism. And we, we look at what's going on in the maga Internet, but it's not really possible to do that right now without talking about a little bit about what happened on Saturday night. So we don't really know necessarily with absolute certainty what the motivations of this alleged wannabe assassin were. But I think we do know enough to say that he was radicalized, obviously. Radicalized enough to take a train across the country with a shotgun apparently in order to try to kill people. And if that's not radicalization, I don't know what is. And look, the manifesto that was apparently uncovered that a number of different outlets have reported makes clear that he was anti Trump and that he felt that he had to take violence to effectuate the type of outcome that he wanted. And so Bill has said it, he said it again in his Morning Shots newsletter, which you should get if you aren't a subscriber already. But it's not acceptable, obviously. And I would just say for folks who are watching this program who like this product, and we love you for that, folks who read will stuff on the regular, you know, I think it's important to understand that this type of online culture that breeds conspiracy thinking, that breeds racism, that breeds violent impulses, it's not exclusively the product of the maga Internet. And that this moment is a moment for reflection and to recognize that these trends that are dangerous, that can be comical, but that are dangerous, that they do exist across the spectrum. So I'm not trying to be like a both siderists here. You can make your own independent judgment about what happened in this instance, in any other instance, and what sparks these instances and all that stuff. What I am trying to do here, maybe in artfully is just make a plea to recommit to civil discourse and to civil disagreement and to recommit to the foundational principles of truth and I guess most importantly of liberal democracy. So, yeah, that I want to just get that off my chest before we dive into it. So with that said, we're going to take a little time to talk about how this administration and its MAGA supporters have responded to what happened at the near shooting at the White House Correspondents association dinner. And that is not so much with a plea for liberal democracy as it is a push to build the President's ballroom. They seem to be completely focused on the ballroom. It happened instantaneously, like within minutes. Every account was tweeting about the ballroom. Now, I know Ashley Sinclair, who used to travel in those circles and has become somewhat of a kind of like what she would position as a truth teller about what MAGA Internet is like, says that the White House has this sort of list that they push out talking points to where, you know, you can see it in moments like this. And it, you know, there's been a bunch of screen grabs of these different magic accounts, all talking about building the bottom. But I don't know, Will, is that, like, your understanding of how it works where they all get sort of like their directives and they go with it?
