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12 | Pincer Attack: The Meaning of January 6th
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Donald Trump will never accept losing anything – whether an election or a bet. But that wouldn’t matter if he didn’t convince millions of Americans to make his grievances their own. This Ball of Thread unwinds what made the pincer attack...
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A Des Moines man who was seen at the front of the mob that stormed the US Capitol in January is going back to jail. Doug Jensen admits he violated the conditions of his release. And Jensen's own lawyer says his client has a compulsion to seek out conspiracies about the 2020 election. On the very first unannounced visit to check on Jensen, pre trial services found him breaking the conditions of his release. Now, Jensen gave his wife a hug and a kiss at the end of the hearing before he was handcuffed and taken away by the marshals. Are we recording this? Who specifically are you accusing of treason? Well, I think a number of people. Here's what I think happened to the United States in the past eight years. First of all, this is the completely crazy person, and this is something wrong with him. He ended up polarizing the country in a way that brings us close to fascism. Senator Vance, I'm going to ask you again. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? Did big technology companies censo a story that independent studies have suggested would have cost Trump millions of votes? And in accompanying that trains Republicans to just hate rule of law? So let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I want to thank you all. God bless you and God bless America. Thank you all for being here. You have to spin up the ball of thread before you can tell the story. I want to start with two counterfactuals. Were it not for Twitter shutting down Donald Trump's account in the days after January 6th, I think there's a very good chance Joe Biden would never have been inaugurated. Repeatedly, the Department of Justice has brought out evidence to suggest that Rhodes believed if the former president invoked the Insurrection act, that they could basically carry out these paramilitary plans that they had been putting together for several weeks. And back in the halcyon days when I thought there was a 50, 50 chance that Kamala Harris would win on November 5, it was probably lower than that. We now know. I nevertheless believe there was at least a 10% chance that Elon Musk and Trump would stoke political violence that would prevent her from issue one, would prevent her from being inaugurated. It's likely that we will see at least some attempts to delay certification if Trump is losing on election night. Delays like this have the potential to create chaos, undermine trust in the result, and fuel violence. I think that in the early part of November 5, where it looked like they were not getting the turnout, Trump was laying the groundwork for that. He was laying the groundwork for claiming that the vote was stolen in Pennsylvania. Less than 48 hours until election Day. Former President Donald Trump made yet another campaign stop in our part of Pennsylvania. Former President Donald Trump spent much of his nearly 1 hour and 440 minute speech at the Lancaster Airport Sunday on attacking the US Election system. The reason I want to start there is because Trump started the big lie. Trump started undermining the effects of the 2020 election in the summer and certainly in October. Right. Trump supporters had been repeatedly told over the course of many months that the election would be rigged against him and against them. And the reason I start with that is he didn't wait for the results of the. What Trump's going to do is declare victory, right? He's going to declare victory, but that doesn't mean he's the winner. He's just going to say he's the winner. Maybe he knew he was going to lose. It was a close election, so if he thought he was going to lose, he was misinformed. Or maybe, and this is what I want to lay out there, maybe he was just ensuring there was a way he was going to stay in power. Or maybe he didn't care. Maybe his project was, I'm going to undermine democracy. Regardless, this is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election, frankly. We did win this election. We did win this election. One other thing to remember about January 6th is that it literally follows straight out of the Hunter Biden quote, unquote laptop. It's the same team that does it. It's Rudy Giuliani and Bernie Kerik. As a friend of mine says, I don't believe in conspiracies, but I also don't believe in coincidences. When they're talking about what they did, they say, well, we already had this team put together. So we just moved from basically revenge porn targeting Joe Biden's son into the big lie targeting democracy. And in fact, there's a phone call. Trump called Jeffrey Rosen on December 27, 2020. That's when he started threatening to replace Rosen with Jeffrey Clark. The Washington Post reported that Trump's called his acting Attorney general Jeffrey Rosen almost every day about the so called fraud in the aftermath of the election. The Attorney General's top aide took notes about what the former President said on those phone calls. The New York Times was the first to report today on the contents of those notes. Donald Trump called his Attorney general as well as his deputy on December 27 of last year to ask him about claims of voter fraud that DOJ had disproved. That deputy Attorney general told the former president that the justice had no power to overturn an election to which Donald Trump replied, quote, just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me. Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me. In the middle of that conversation, he's like, oh, and also Biden. It's unclear exactly what he said because of the way the notes were taken, but at the very least he said, oh, and you need to go after Hunter Biden. And Hunter Biden actually gets mentioned in the January 6th speech. They don't talk about him. What happened to Hunter? Where's Hunter? Where is Hunter? They don't talk about him. Now watch. All the sets will go off. Well, they can't do that because they get good ratings. The ratings are too good. Now where's Hunter? You know, and how come Joe was allowed to give a billion dollars of money to get rid of the prosecutor in Ukraine? How does that happen? I'd ask you that question. How does that happen? Can you imagine if I said that? If I said that, it would be a whole different ball game. So he's got this Hunter Biden campaign that starts when he asks Volodymyr Zelensky to frame Joe Biden. Let's back up. A month before the call, Congress had approved $391 million in military aid to Ukraine to help them defend against Russia. But Trump told his staff to withhold that money. He wanted to talk to Zelenskyy first. He then gets this laptop in the days before the election. Joe Biden is a corrupt politician and you people aren't covering that. And that's not fair. Yeah, the FBI should be investigating. I don't know if they are or not, but they should be investigating them. And you'll have to call Ray and ask him, but that is. And why did they have those? And did they have it? Did they have that laptop for a long time and not doing do anything with it? There was the whole scandal about whether Shitter published it or not. Remember, the best thing that happened to us was Twitter and Facebook suppressing it because then everybody wants to see it. There's been an effort to retcon it. Big media, big tech, Democrats colluded to keep from the American people. Just days before, just days before the most important election we have, the presidential election, who's going to be our next commander in chief? The laptop was real. The eyewitness was real. The emails were real. The only thing fake was that collusion from those individuals, those entities, to keep important information from we, the people in the run up to the most important lecture we have. And, oh, by the way, they were joined by 51 former intel officials joined in the collusion. Jim Jordan has been very central in this to retcon. What happened with the laptop to say if the laptop had been published. The laptop, of course, it's a hard drive. If the laptop had been published, then Donald Trump would have won. They will still have you believe that Donald Trump is a Russian agent. Seriously, look at them and tell him, Donald Trump is the greatest American president in US History. Print that. And the way we do this is we walk him through everything. And, yes, that 2020 election was rigged. Just look at Hunter Biden's laptop. That's some of the grievance that Jim Jordan sows leading up to the 2020, 24 election. Congress literally spends millions of dollars to suggest that if the hard drive had been published more widely, then Donald Trump would have won, as he rightly should have won. The Hill says Republicans on the House Oversight Committee, the panel set to lead the probes if the GOP formally takes control of the chamber next year, are planning a press conference about their investigation into the Bidens literally the week after the election. So, Eric, at the end of the day, will anyone ultimately be held accountable? You know, if we have a proper system, they should be, Todd. I mean, the evidence is there, right? The pictures are there at this point. These efforts are, are seamless, right? Same team, same arguments. Trump, even on January 6, uses Hunter Biden as a way to stoke grievance. It's there right in the same speech where he's saying, if we don't stop this vote certification, we won't have a country. Even before the election, Trump decides he's going to declare victory regardless of what voters do. And that's unsurprising. Donald Trump was going to do that in 2016. You might remember in the lead up to the 2016 election, this, this flamboyant Trump campaign associate, a former Paul Manafort business partner named Roger Stone. He formed a political organization called Stop the Steel. The effort in 2016 very, very much paralleled the Russian effort to discredit democracy. You might remember in the intelligence community assessment about Russia's election interference, it said explicitly that Russian intelligence planned to shift its messaging if Trump lost and Clinton won, to say that the Democrats had stolen the election and Trump was the real winner. The idea was that would sow chaos in the United States. It could potentially even lead to political violence. Stone basically entrusted it to Ali Alexander, one of his trusted aides. So who is Ali Alexander? On November 4, 2020, Donald Trump falsely declared himself the victor. Waiting in the wings was Ollie Alexander. He publicly launched Stop the Steal, a campaign to get right wing activists to discredit mail in voting, disrupt vote counting, and falsely accuse local officials of stealing the election. Well, Stone awaited his pardon for having lied to obscure what really happened with Russia in 2016. Bannon didn't only say that the Trump campaign was receiving what it thought was inside information on WikiLeaks from Roger Stone. He also suggested that they believed that Stone was sort of orchestrating the release of the stolen Democratic emails. So, again, another continuity. This all flows. Thank you so much, Mr. Stone, for joining us. Break down what you think is front and center right now. What's important is not so much that Donald Trump lied about winning the election or harassed all of these people to try and find more votes. So, look, all I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more that we have. We're recording this before the Jack Smith Report comes out. I would be unsurprised if the Jack Smith Report has more details about how Trump stoked political violence. You and I both care about this. The TCF center in Detroit, in Michigan. What we saw were protesters representing supporters of President Trump and VP Pence upset, they say, with how things played out inside the TCF Center. When ballots were being counted, they were loud. They showed up in big numbers, and for the most part, they were peaceful. But also Fulton county in Georgia. Ruby Freeman and Shea Freeman Moss and one other gentleman, quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they're vials of heroin or cocaine. Ruby Freeman gets targeted. This gross lie about Shay Moss handing Ruby Freeman what they said was a thumb drive. What was your mom actually handing you on that video? A Ginger Mint. Targeting election workers in all the places they're counting the vote in black cities in the swing state. I received a call from my grandmother. This woman is my everything. I've never even heard her or seen her cry ever in my life. And she called me screaming at the top of her lungs, like, shay, Shay. Oh, my God, Shay. Just freaking me out, saying that there were people at her home, and they, you know, they knocked on the door and of course, she opened it and seeing who was there, who it was, and they just started pushing their way through, claiming that they were coming in to make a citizen's arrest. But what's important for our purposes is how Trump was able to get mobs out to help him. Okay. Like that was actually a part of. Roger Stone stopped the steal in 2016. And investigators actually went back to the 2018 Senate election in Florida. Their whole approach to what's going on in Florida is this argument that the only reason there's a recount, the only reason it's close, the only reason that Rick Scott might not win is rampant voter fraud is illegal activity by the Democrats. Democrats stealing the election. To understand how Stone and the proud boys did the same thing, rent a mobs to pressure to help Rick Scott get his votes counted. They are being organized under that same Stop the Steel banner that Roger Stone for the Trump campaign and apparently Russian intelligence Both prepped in 2016 in case Trump hadn't won the presidential election. And as far as we can tell, it's not just the same signage and the same slogan. It appears to be the same people personally who are involved in trying to pull this off. So you gave out the stickers yesterday? You gave out the stickers? Yeah. Yes, we did. You didn't told me last night you guys worked for Roger Stone. Roger's a good friend. He's a good friend. So there's this continuity. And of course, the continuity goes all the way back to 2000, when Roger Stone was involved in the Brooks Brothers riot. So Roger Stone always stoking violence. Right. But in 2020, what's different about it is the kinds of networks you see involved. Okay? Alex Jones is fundamentally involved. I've been racially attacked by black people, probably. Let's not exaggerate. 35 times. I've been racially attacked by Hispanics, let's not exaggerate five times, let me tell you. That's when you really get hurt bad. And, you know, compound fractures, you know, you name it, and oh, yeah, oh, yeah, you get hurt real bad. And the whole point is, is I am sick of it. I am sick of the fact that I have been racially attacked over and over and over and over and over. The America first crowd, the white nationalist crowd, is fundamentally involved. What was immediately clear to me was that this was about much more than a perception that some election had been stolen. This was a kind of racial backlash, a kind of uprising in the face of perceptions that white people were losing status, that power was being taken away from them. And Donald Trump's loss of the 2020 election was but the biggest sign of that loss of status. You've got Christian nationalists fundamentally involved. Christian nationalism often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation. Q An honors Fundamentally involved. There was this man known as Q Shaman, who has become a mascot of sorts. His tattoos appear to be images from Norse mythology, including a hammer of Thor and a triangle associated with the afterlife. The triangle known as Valknut, has been used by white supremacists before. So what you see is very early on networking happening. This is in November, right? You see networking happening to pressure the counting of the vote in black cities. New tonight, cities across this country preparing for protests being pushed by Stop the Steal. It's the group embracing President Trump's baseless conspiracy theory that the election has been stolen from him. More than 50 pro Trump rallies planned tomorrow, at least one in each state, plus Washington, D.C. trump says he may attend that protest, tweeting, I may even try to stop by and say hello. This whole story we're talking about is how does Trump's deliberate polarization of the United States bring the country close to fascism? And one of the answers is these groups, all of whom have a far right tilt to them become his mob. We combed through hours of footage and found evidence of a complex network of groups driven by conspiracy theories, white supremacy and a Trump infused brand of Christianity. Whereas in 2016, Roger Stone just had a handful of people. In 2000, the Brooks Brothers Riot was people in suits, people who would go on to sit on the Supreme Court. The real issue is what does Article 2 of the Constitution mean in the first instance? And it delegates authority directly to state legislatures. And the textualists on the Court, led by Justice Scalia, are paying close attention to that language. In 2016, Roger Stone had a handful of people. In 2016, Roger Stone's PAC launched stopthesteel.org, which was asking for $10,000 donations, purportedly back then to help uncover evidence of vote fraud against Donald Trump. In 2018, he had proud Boys, the angry Republican protests outside the elections offices in Florida. Right now, they are being organized under that same Stop Steel banner that Roger Stone for the Trump campaign and apparently Russian intelligence Both prepped in 2016 in case Trump hadn't won the presidential election. They didn't end up having to use it in 2016, but they're trying it on now to see how it works in Florida by the time you get to November of 2020. The cast of characters include Ali Alexander, a Roger Stone wannabe actually just got a message from Roger Stone. He began hashtagging Stop the Steel weeks before Election Day and launched a Stop the Steel website. You've got this network of people who have been consuming disinformation On. On especially Twitter. On. On Twitter and Parler and Telegram and Facebook. President Trump and his campaign didn't just prime his audience to be receptive to narratives of voter fraud. They inspired them to produce these narratives themselves and then echoed those false claims back to them. There's this absolutely phenomenal report that a Stanford group, Election Integrity Group, did showing who spread the most disinformation in 2020, and it's Trump and his sons and Cat Turd and Mike Roman, who was one of the guys who was charged with him in Georgia and Arizona. So you've got this massive production of disinformation leading up to the election. All of these operations actually spread across multiple platforms, and they usually went beyond the traditional social media networks. Some of them leverage recruiting sites, for instance, and others created accounts on alternative social media platforms like Gab and Pollr. In the case of one of the Russian operations, these accounts on these alternative platforms were what kept their operation going throughout the election week after the rest of their accounts on mainstream platforms had been disrupted. And that's not necessarily rooted in Trump's grievance culture. Right? You see Trump's grievance culture more in Trump's Where's Hunter? Which he's using. Again, this is the continuity he's using in rallies at the time Where's Hunter? But he's using this grievance culture to sow disinformation, just to sow conspiracy theories. It's like the pens don't work on these ballots. These ballots were thrown out. So he's using this culture of distrust to see disinformation at scale, to use social media to see disinformation at scale. Everybody's vote had to be counted. There was software involved at every step of the process. Therefore, it can easily be expanded to the whole election. It was a flexible narrative. And that's something we often see with conspiracy narratives that over time, they get less and less specific and more flexible. As you look forward to 2024. 2024, Elon Musk has bought Twitter. Elon Musk is the one spreading the disinformation. The new analysis shows that Elon Musk's false or misleading claims about the US elections have been viewed nearly 1.2 billion times on X from January up to July 2024, breaking his own platform's guidelines relating to disinformation. This, according to the center for Combating Digital Hate. Elon Musk is stoking riots in the UK during the summer and sort of prepping to do that. Elon Musk has Been using his own Platform X to pass comment about the unrest in the uk. I'll just quote you what he said. Civil war is inevitable. That was the quote he used in response to a video reportedly showing people throwing fireworks at police. Now, Prime Minister Starmer's office has said that there is absolute, absolutely no justification for these comments. And in fact, they've called on social media companies to do more to stop the spread of disinformation. Elon Musk has funded massive disinformation campaigns against Kamala Harris, specifically trying to stoke distrust around both sides of the Gaza conflict. We were just told Kamala Harris stands with Israel, that she's super pro Israel. She's part of a pro Israel power couple. Now we're being told she stands with Palestine against Israel. You see the issue here, right? Those two sets of ads can't both be true. They're diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive. But they're both made by the same pro Trump political action committee to micro target and manipulate vastly different groups of voters. It is the grossest, most cynical ploy I've seen in an election cycle that's rotten with cynical ploys. And it's all made possible by the world's richest man, Elon Musk. Again, continuity between what happened in 2020 and what happened in 2024. But what happens in getting people to the Capitol on January 6th? Right. We have this stuff that goes on in November. Dr. Kelly Ward. Yes, Dr. Kelly Ward, actually a physician. Friends across the swing states got together to sign certificates from electors saying that Trump had won the swing states. You've got top Republicans in each state willing to sign these fraudulent documents claiming that Donald Trump won. This was not something that was bubbling up at a grassroots level. And that's why you're seeing fake electors at the Arizona level and people at the campaign level and into the White House. What happens between the signing of these fraudulent documents on December 14 and January 6? We still don't know the full extent of this. Maybe we'll learn in the Jack Smith report. But in the immunity brief that Jack Smith submitted in October, just before the election, he had gotten new testimony from Ken Chesbrough, the guy from Wisconsin who kind of was behind the whole fake elector plot. He's the lawyer who pleaded guilty last year in the Georgia election subversion case. He then cooperated with prosecutors in Georgia and in other states across the country to avoid more charges. Chesbrough was in the Oval Office along with Reince Priebus and another one of the lawyers involved in the fake electors plot, Chesbrough and Trump had a side conversation about the import of January 6th. Look at this from Chesbrough's anonymous Twitter account called Badger Pundit. On the day Trump lost, he wrote, quote, trump doesn't have to get courts to declare him the winner. He just needs to convince Republican legislatures that the election was systematically rigged sometime between December 14 and December 19. And there are multiple theories about where this came from. They decided to make a go for it. On January 6, Trump sends out that tweet. In the tweet, Trump called for a big protest at the coming joint session of Congress on January 6 and told his supporters be there will be wild. He forwards a report from Peter Navarro, who's going to be back in the Trump White House. Trump announced that Peter Navarro will return as his senior counselor for trade and manufacturing. Navarro was in prison for several months this year for defying a subpoena from the House select committee investigating January 6th. Peter Navarro, whose Proton mail emails having to do with official business have still not been turned over to the National Archives. DOJ has been working on that for years. Peter Navarro sends out this report, which, by the way, Garrett Ziegler, who packaged up the Hunter Biden laptop and put it available online. Melissa Cohen, Biden confronted Garrett Ziegler. He's a former aide in the Trump administration and called him a Nazi piece of. Well, you know what comes next. Garrett Ziegler is one of the two Peter Navarro aides who's fundamentally involved in this propaganda effort about the vote count. Again, the continuity here. Then you immediately see that same network, white nationalists, Christian nationalists, QAnon ers, militia members. All of them immediately snap into work. One of the most historic events in American history has just taken place. They treat that tweet from Donald Trump on December 19th. They treat it as an order. President Trump in the early morning hours today tweeted that he wants the American people to March on Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021. Donald Trump is basically saying to them, we're being cheated. We are being cheated. And the way to prevent us from being cheated, the way to prevent democracy from being taken away from us, is for all of us to converge on the Capitol on January 6th and we're gonna take back democracy. He is now calling on we the people to take action and to show our numbers. There are some really fascinating narratives about how people did this. One of the most alarming ones is this guy Doug Jensen, me touching the White House. You guys have all seen pictures of Doug Jensen. He was one of the first people to enter the Capitol during the insurrection. He's the guy with the Q T shirt who was chasing Officer Goodman up the stairs of the Capitol. You may recall Officer Eugene Goodman led the group away from the Senate floor. He said after the fact he was doing it because he wanted QAnon to take credit for it. He also told agents he was, quote, all about a revolution, end quote, in that first interview. And he thought mass arrests were going to start with Vice President Mike Pence. That day, when Doug Johnson was interviewed by the FBI about why he did it, he described this path he had taken. He was a journeyman worker in Iowa. A union member, Special Agent Tyler Johnson, testified that two days after the riot, Jensen walked six miles to DMPD at the behest of his wife, telling investigators he went to D.C. to receive, quote, big news from President Trump and the Vice President and members of Congress would be arrested. But saying Jensen told him he had no intention of storming the Capitol until the President said this. We're going to the Capitol. He had been a lifelong dumber. He was prepared to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and then WikiLeaks dropped. The way in which people packaged up WikiLeaks made him distrust Hillary Clinton. So he went from preparing to vote for Hillary Clinton, as all good union Democrats would do, to deciding that he couldn't trust Hillary Clinton, voting against her getting sucked into Pizzagate. He was himself abused as a child, so he was prime target for getting sucked into pizzagate. He gets sucked into Pizzagate, and then he gets sucked into QAnon. The wholly discredited conspiracy claims prominent politicians and celebrities make up a group of satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles plotting against President Trump. The FBI has labeled QAnon a terror threat. As the QAnon story always goes, people start researching and they think that they're, you know, it's classic conspiracy theory. You get sucked in, you get involved with this network, you believe that you are saving children who, like him, was abused as a child. You're saving children. And that's one of the things that Donald Trump and his allies mobilized. Jensen wanted a revolution and to be a, quote, poster boy for QAnon and still believes the debunked theory, devoting most of his free hours to it. There's some reason to believe that the QAnon personality was being manipulated by some of the people who were manipulating WikiLeaks in 2016 by people close to Roger Stone. So this was in some ways deliberate, right? Let's take these QAnon people and mobilize them. And by the way, if you look at the people who made it into the Senate, the people who made it where they could most disrupt the the vote count on January 6, more than a proportional number were QAnon. They had a tremendous success at getting the bodies where they needed to be. Better success than the Oath Keepers, arguably better success than the proud boys at the Capitol. Their Q symbol stood high above the crowd and popped up again and again. Do not let them normalize codicilia. They were the ones who actually did the occupation of the Capitol. So you have narratives like that. You have narratives about this guy, Danny Rodriguez, who's Latino, lives in Los Angeles, petty crime, trying to look for meaning in his life, gets sucked into anti vax or anti mask at that point, which in the Los Angeles area is militia adjacent. So there's 3 percenters who are very close to that, proud boys who are very close to that. And again, he's looking for meaning in his life. He thought he was a patriot. He thought he was doing the right thing. He was listening to infowars. He was listening to all this garbage, garbage news online. And he actually literally believed that the election was stolen, as millions of Trump supporters do. He believes that Donald Trump is going to save democracy if he's the commander in chief and the leader of our country and he's calling for help. I thought he was calling for help. I thought he was. I thought we were doing the right thing. He also stupidly did an interview with the FBI without attorneys present. The federal judge overseeing the case rendered a sentence of 12 and a half years in prison, one of the longest so far in connection with January 6, calling Rodriguez a one man army of hate. And his interview is just stunning. I didn't know what was going to happen. I'm not a leader of anybody and I just hadn't. I felt what was good intentions of going and being involved in being a part of and joining whatever. I didn't know it was gonna happen. He goes with a bunch of buddies from the anti mask community from Los Angeles to D.C. and there's this stunning footage of him at the rally listening to Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani say, you need to go to the Capitol, otherwise we won't have a country. And Danny Rodriguez turns to the camera of some documentary people who are right there and he goes like this. He cuts the throat and he names Joe Biden. Joe Biden. If this had gone to trial if Trump's January 6th case had gone to trial, I guarantee you they would have used Danny Rodriguez's response, immediate response to Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump saying, go hunt down the Capitol. He goes to the Capitol, and in addition to breaking in and a bunch of other things, he's the one who almost kills Michael Fanon. Somebody hands him a Taser and he tases Michael Fanon, gives him a heart attack, almost kills him. I got you, Mike. That's my hand. When you're good. Two other men who helped attack Fanon have been sentenced to over 70 years in prison. Rodriguez is one of more than 300 rioters charged with attacking law enforcement on January 6th and among 1,000 arrested overall. So with. With Danny Rodriguez, who is this guy who just wants to find a way to get some meaning in his life so he can put some structure to it, Donald Trump gives him that structure. Donald Trump says, we're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we're going to the Capitol and attack it. And he almost kills Michael Fanon. He also says in his FBI interview, yeah, I thought I might have to kill people. Like, he came in thinking, I might have to kill people to do what Donald Trump told me to do to save democracy. And afterwards, he actually went back to an Airbnb in Virginia where he was staying with a bunch of other Trump supporters, and they celebrated. You see, the Proud Boys who win Donald Trump on September 29th in that first debate says, stand back and stand by. So Joe Biden says, will you renounce the Proud Boys? And instead, Donald Trump says, stand back and stand by. After he made this comment, Enrique Terrio, then chairman of the Proud Boys, said on Parlor. Standing by, sir, the Proud Boys membership immediately spikes. Would you say that Proud Boys numbers increased after the stand back standby comment? Exponentially. They're all speaking among themselves. He loves us. We're doing this. And they again view his cause is their cause. They view his orders, his path, his need to stay in the presidency as their need. On December 19, President Trump tweeted about the January 6 rally and told attendees, be there. We'll be wild. A day later, the Department of Justice describes how the Proud Boys created a chat called the Ministry of Self Defense Leadership Chat. In this chat, the Proud Boys established a command structure in anticipation of coming back to D.C. on January 6th. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why DOJ had to do more investigation to ever bring any insurrection charges, which they didn't. But maybe they'll talk about why they didn't in the report is because the Proud Boys actually kicked off the riot before Donald Trump finished speaking as the attack was unfolding. Mr. Tarrio took credit in documents obtained by the Department of Justice. Mr. Tarrio said in an encrypted chat, make no mistake. And we did this. And so. And that's a really important detail of timing because the Proud Boys never went to Donald Trump's speech. There's a few who did, but most of them just marched around a bit, went to the Washington Monument, tussled around a bit there, then march to the Capitol. And just it was in between the Ellipse and the Capitol where Joe Biggs came upon a police barricade. He breached that barricade, allowing the other rioters to go through and giving this sort of tacit endorsement to storming the Capitol. It was a pivotal moment for this entire riot. Speaking of continuity, people forget this and it's super important to remember. Joe Biggs in 2016 was a member of Infowars. He's also a former Infowars correspondent, and through that, was able to consistently put the Proud Boys in front of a huge, sweeping audience that Alex Jones enjoys. So Joe Biggs had been a sergeant overseas in America's war on terrorism. So we just stormed the Capitol. Yeah, we took the place back. That was so much fun. So much America. So much America. January 6th will be a day in infamy. And there's a lot of this. There are so many of the key players on January 6th who served in either Iraq or Afghanistan or both, and many of whom suffer from PTSD as a result, but many of whom really soured on the US Project as a result of serving in the war on terror. Joe Biggs is one of those guys. Joe Biggs comes back, gets involved with info, plays a key role in Pizzagate. He also plays a key role in the Seth Rich conspiracy with fox news in 2017. That's why he is nominally at least separated from Infowars. And that's how he becomes a key propagandist for the Proud Boys. Four days after the news networks called the election for Joe Biden, Joe Biggs, the gang's top propagandist, I would say, published a blog titled the second civil war is closer than you might think. Buy ammo, clean your guns. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. A lot of the Proud Boys don't even like Joe Biggs. A lot of them think he's too much of a thug. The group enters the Capitol together. Proud Boys are near them, including Joe Biggs, the organizer we saw earlier. He's entering the building for a second time. But you have Joe Biggs as this continuity. And Joe Biggs, if you look at the video from January 6, he grabs the guy who actually does start the riot around the shoulder, says something to him. Biggs huddles with an individual in a red hat and carrying a flag, who just minutes later is the first to charge the barriers. What he says remains contested. The guy he speaks to is a guy long history of violence, of domestic abuse, pretty well established criminal record. And then they just start assaulting cops. And one after another barrier goes down. The few police officers there quickly fall back. And the Proud Boys make up a large portion of the first wave to reach the base of the Capitol. They are making progress. And then the riot cops show up. The MPD riot cops show up. And if you can see in the video that the leaders of the Proud Boys. So Joe Biggs and Ethan Nordean and some others, they pulled back, and you can hear there's this video of Joe Biggs that you can't really make sense of, but where he says that he's talking to Alex Jones, right? So remember, Alex Jones, at Trump's behest, is leading the march to the Capitol. President's gonna finish. President's gonna finish in 10 minutes. And he just told the crowd, let' walk down Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania. So stay here. President Trump. Listen, President Trump, we. We got our crew back there. President Trump just announced that he's done in 10 minutes. He wants everyone to march with him. He's going to be in the march. So here in Pennsylvania. And we're going. It's down Pennsylvania. All right. Roger Stone was supposed to be involved but got pissy and so didn't. So it's Alex Jones, Owen Schroyer. China, Joe's got to go. China Joe has got to go. China Joe has got to go. Ali Alexander is there. That was the person who came up with the January 6th idea. They're leading the march to the Capitol. Info wars. Info wars. Info wars. Infowars. Info wars. Infowars. Infowars. Infowars. Info. The Proud boys who are in conversation with. With Owen Schroyer, with Alex Jones. They have long ties to Alex Jones. They. They pull up, they hold back. Alex Jones arrives. More people arrive at the Capitol. Alex Jones decides he's going to go to the east side of the Capitol. The building is more than two football fields in length, and barricades erected on the east side are defended by just dozen officers. That effectively serves as a pincer attack on the Capitol. It's now that protesters all along the east barricades surge forward. So you've got the proud boys who show up before the speech ends, never having attended the speech, kick off the riot while Donald Trump is still speaking, and then seem to wait for Alex Jones to deliver more bodies. After the riot, police show up, seem to wait for Alex Jones to, and then they conduct this pincer attack again. Many of these guys are military background at ground level. Officers are so overwhelmed that just a few cover this crucial access point. Several proud boys see the weakness. That's really one of the reasons the Capitol got completely overrun. A lot of the guys who got to the Senate, for example, entered on the east side of the building. Alex Jones brings them to the top of the stairs on the east side of the building, Chance, and it gets the out of there because he doesn't want to have anything to do with this. And he's terrified. And oh, by the way, remember that Kenneth Chesbrough whose idea was the whole fake elector's plot? He's shadowing Alex Jones the day of the riot. He says he just showed up. You know, he says he didn't. He wasn't doing anything, he was taking video. But he's shadowing Alex Jones now for the first time, CNN has identified Kenneth Jesper outside the Capitol on January 6, shortly before a mob stormed the east side of the building. So it all kind of coalesces at the Capitol. This is how it was successful, right? Until you finally get enough bodies to start pushing them back. And the reason it was successful is you had this network of people, proud boys, white nationalists, Christian nationalists, QAnon, anti vaxxers, and then just Trump supporters. A lot of the Trump supporters were the ones. A lot, not all, but a lot of them were the ones who really were tourists. All they did was make it a much bigger problem. As this is happening and as thousands more swell outside, Trump composes a tweet, not to calm his supporters, but to blame his vice president. He writes, mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution. At this very time, Pence and his family are being taken to safety, along with an aide who's carrying the country's nuclear launch equipment. If it had just been the proud boys, they had 200 people when they started, it wouldn't have been that much of a problem for the cops. But it snowballed and it snowballed because you had this network of people, all of whom had come to believe in grievance, had come to see in Donald Trump there on grievance. So much more than just rallying for President Trump. It's really rallying for our way of life, the American dream. Against fake news, the group Latinos for Trump involved both the lawyer Kelly Sorrell for the Oath Keepers, who was also the lawyer for Latinos for Trump, and this other woman who was super close to Enrique Tarria. All those people end up in a garage on January 5th. I want you to meet this. Pleasure to meet you. Nice to meet you. Susan Arena. Hello. And Stuart, Pleasure. Pleasure's on mine. And we don't know what happened. Enrique Tadrio, remember, gets arrested for burning a BLM flag and for bringing weapons to D.C. gets arrested, he stays overnight, he gets released and says leave D.C. but before he leaves D.C. he and Stuart Rhodes meet in a garage with these people who were just in the White House. On December 12, Judge Tim Kelly said colloquially, I'm not going to liken what the proud boys did to, you know, plotting to blow up a government building. However, it was the blowing up of the American process, of the peaceful transfer of power. So the militias sort of serve, especially the proud boys, far more than the Oath Keepers serve as a backbone for the attack. But what it really depends on is Trump having mobilized thousands, millions of people with this grievance narrative. While Trump's supporters grew more aggressive online, he continued to rile up his base. On Twitter, he said there was overwhelming evidence that the election was the biggest scam in our nation's history. As you can see, the president continued to boost the event, tweeting about it more than a dozen times in the lead up to January 6th. For Trump, that grievance narrative involves a two step process. In 2020, in 2024, when we talk about it, it involves a one step process. But in 2020, the two step process is leading them to believe he's been deprived of his democratic victory. And then a translation of that into this belief that these people had to storm the Capitol to protect democracy 201. They did believe that. You hear them in their sentencing and they would say, I, you know, and some of them disavowed those beliefs, But I'd say 60% of them still firmly believe that the election was stolen from Donald Trump by the deep state or by the elite or by D.C. doug Jensen spoke in court today, asked for leniency, but didn't accept any responsibility or express any remorse for what happened. Didn't disavow. QAnon didn't disavow election lies. They believe that they have a legitimate grievance and to protect democracy. They were right to storm the Capitol. And that is what Donald Trump is going to do when he pardons them. He's going to say they were right. The only way they could protect democracy was by storming the Capitol. When Time magazine asked you if you would consider pardoning all the rioters, you said, yes, absolutely. You called them patriots. 140 police officers were assaulted that day. Their injuries included broken bones. At least one officer lost an eye. One had two cracked ribs, two smashed spinal discs. Another had a stroke. Were the people who assaulted those 140 officers, including those I just mentioned, Patriots. Patriots who deserve pardons. You see these polls where right wingers are like, I believe that democracy is under threat. I believe that Trump will do more to defend democracy than Kamala Harris or Joe Biden. And the reason they say that, and they legitimately believe this is because Donald Trump succeeded in turning his grievance tale about the deep State into a tale about him being deprived of his due election. Do you pardon what's going to happen? Oh, absolutely, I would. You would pardon them if they're innocent? I would pardon them. They've been convicted. And by the way, the Supreme Court just under. Well, they were convicted by a very, very tough system. Another one of my favorite, Jan Sixers is a guy named Hatchet Speed. And Hatchet Speed, he was military. I'm not sure if he deployed, but he was a SIGINT guy. And so on January 6, I believe he was working for an NRO contractor. So for satellite contracting. Right. There were probably 10, 15, 20 gen sixers who had top secret SCI clearances when they attacked the Capitol. And he was one of them. He was an NRO contractor. And even more terrifyingly to me is he either had already moved then or moved subsequent to January 6th. The Naval Reserve. He did his monthly training for the Naval Reserve at Andrews Air Force Base. So he was on Andrews Air Force Base as a cleared contractor, as a cleared reserve trainee, on a monthly basis. And in the wake of January 6, Stewart Rhodes went on a weapons buying spree. He spent $10,000 on weapons, Hatchet Speed spent 50,000 on weapons. And ultimately he bought two things that count as silencers in Virginia. And that's where he was first jailed. But he was a guy who was again, looking for some meaning. And he had interviewed with two groups. One is a military group, sort of conspiratorial but the other one was the proud Boys. And he had kind of settled on the proud boys. He's like, these proud boys are going to give me meaning. I'm going to join this militia. And so he was not yet fully a proud boy when he showed up on January 6th. What he was though, was an unreconstructed Nazi. Trump supporters and many of these groups often deny that they are racist. But the visual evidence on disposal at the Capitol said otherwise. An OK hand gesture hijacked to read WP for white power, a neo Nazi tattoo, a Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt, and a gallows built that day to frame the Capitol. Hang the traitors. Hang the traitors. Let's get in there. Let's go. Come on. Come on. It looked like a scene from the Turner Diaries, a novel that the Anti Defamation League calls a blueprint for a white supremacist revolution. In the story, the heroes slaughter race traitors like journalists and politicians on what is called the Day of the Rope. Every single in there is a traitor. Every single one. Hang em up. The only one stands up for us is Donald Trump. I mean, they ended up sending an informant after him. He describes that he wanted to go after Nancy Pelosi on January 6th. And then after January 6th, he still described this kind of meaninglessness and this fury and an affection for Hitler. And so here he is, still has a top secret clearance. Training monthly at Andrews air Force base. $50,000 of weapons wants to take out the government of the country. That's an extreme example. That's a terrifying example to my mind. And he's in Virginia, right? The Oath Keepers are one of the largest anti government militia organizations in the US today. And they claim to have tens of thousands of law enforcement officers and military veterans in their ranks. They vow to protect America from what they call the New World Order. A lot of it is the aftermath of the War on terror. I think there's a lot of people in the United States whose sense of exceptionalism was badly damaged by the war on terror. Whether it's losing in Afghanistan and Iraq, whether it's being asked to do ungodly things in Afghanistan and Iraq, whether it's the torture, whether it's the drone strikes, whether it's the surveillance, whether it's being trained to kill Muslims without question. And they come out of there as badly damaged people. Then you've got the financial crisis and you've got this dramatic loss of wealth for huge numbers of people. And then you've got Covid. Another big group of Jan Sixers are Small business owners. One of the guys in the Oath Keepers who's not military, owned a tattoo parlor in New York. He became famous because he defied shutdown orders and still gave his tattoos. I'm Gina's Beverly Hills on Instagram, and they dox the shit out of me. They try to ruin my business. They shut me down. The famous woman, Gina Bisignano, who was buddies with Danny Rodriguez, is a good old boy. Like, he just loves America and he's not into identity politics. I'm not. You know, I just. I don't understand why people have to identify each other by their skin color. She also, by the way, probably would show up in an eventual trial of Donald Trump because she went from hearing Trump say, you got to go get Mike Pence, to say, we gotta go get Mike Pence. And so she is somebody that you can measure how Trump's targeting of Mike Pence led somebody to go to the Capitol and say, we've got to go after Mike Pence. Come on, guys. We need patriots. You guys, it's the win. More people, More people. What are they doing? We need the people. Anyway, so that's Gina Bisignano. She's famous because she cried or she got gassed on January 6th and her mascara ran, and so she had these big black eyes. What are you, a guy or a girl? Keep going. And I'm gonna tell you something else. You're a Nazi and you're brainwashed by MKUltra. She wore, like, Prada or something to insurrection. And Gina Bisignano is a salon owner. And so, same thing. Small business owner. Covid, anti masker. Is there something wrong with not wanting to have a lockdown? Is there something wrong with wanting freedom? That kind of desperation, if you will, that kind of panic that ensued through Covid is what led her to travel across the country and throw away her life. Although she, to her, I guess, credit, she hasn't served much jail time, like a month or two, partly because she reneged on her plea deal and now she'll get pardoned. So she's one of the people who played the lawfare game as well as anybody. So kudos to her, I guess. You know, people need to, like, really do the research. There is real human disaffection. The same kind of low outcome voters that Trump turned out in droves in 2024 in bigger numbers in 2024. Same kind of, you know, like, meaninglessness of life. Trump gave them meaning, and he gave them meaning through his claims that he was being targeted by the deep state in 2016 I declared I am your voice. Today I add, I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution. Let all these people to come to DC on January 6th and throw their lives away and Trump is going to turn them into heroes in a few weeks time and their batch, their investment in Donald Trump will have paid off. Thanks for listening to Ball of Thread. To support this series go to patreon.com ballofthread we appreciate your sharing this work with anyone who cares about the Constitution and please consider giving us a five star rating wherever you get your podcasts.