Angry Planet - Proud Boys, January 6, and When a U-Haul Is a Clown Car

Episode Date: June 17, 2022

The January 6th committee has gone public with its hearings and once again the Proud Boys are in the news. Charges against 5 members of the group, including its leader, Enrique Tarrio have been superseded. Now, we’re talking about straight up sedition.So, it’s time to look again at what this group — and related groups — did on January 6, and just how dangerous they really are. We’ll also talk about accelerationism, what it is and what accelerationists want.Joining us are two people who are following the situation closely: Matthew Kriner is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism. And Jon Lewis is a Research Fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello, welcome to Angry Planet. I am Matthew Galt. And I am Jason Fields. This time, it's a seditious conspiracy. The January 6th committee has gone public with its hearings, and once again, the proud boys are in the news. Charges against five members of the group, including its leader, Enrique Atario, have been superseded. Now we're talking about straight-up sedition. So, it's time to look again at what this group and related groups did on January 6th and just how dangerous they really are. We'll also talk about accelerationism and what it is and what do they want.

joining us are two people who are following the situation closely. Matthew Criner is a senior research scholar at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism. And John Lewis is a research fellow at the program on extremism at George Washington University. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having us. All right. So first of all, this is only tangentially related. But I would be remiss if I didn't ask you what you thought about the Patriot Front bust that happened over the

weekend. Can you tell the audience in case they don't know what happened? You're both nodding and what you made of it. Yeah. So over the weekend, a neo-Nazi group known as the Patriot Front was arrested as they arrived in a U-Haul to a Pride rally taking place in Idaho. And I think it's really important just, you know, to make very clear that, you know, despite the fact that this group is typically decked out in American flags, American Eagles, the same kind of uniforms that we see them in pretty frequently that this is a neo-Nazi group and this is a group that time and time again has used rhetoric, has used hateful language that not only incites violence against the outgroup, but this is specifically a group that time and time again has evidenced the ability and

the means to commit violence in the name of that ideology. And you know, you started out by saying it's a bit tangential, but there's actually a through line between the proud boys and the Patriot Front elements that we see today, you know, very active in the sort of political violence or political intimidation space, and that's accelerationism. Both entities have a through line of that in their core constituency, in their membership, and their factions. And with Patriot Front, what we've really seen over the last year or so here is that the influence of the rise above movement or its successor entities wielded. the rise and the so-called active clubs. They've been training members of Patriot Front and helping radicalize them further for many months. And when I say training, I mean literally physically training them, getting them out into open parks where they do physical combat training and really just push them to their physical limits.

And that's part of the sort of militant accelerationist playbook. And what we've seen with this targeting of the Pride rally is actually probably more the influence of the RAM and active club ideology, which is a bit of a departure for Patriot Front, which likes to do these really ridiculous flash shows up, showed up at the, out of the back of a U-Haul. They did this in Philly. They did it in Washington, D.C. They put a bunch of those American flags out, and they walk around like they're the coolest kids on campus. But in reality, they're often fairly cowardly, and they run away pretty quickly from any kind of confrontation. The influence of the will arise and the rise above movement, sort of larger network is actually,

in discouraging for us because it tells us that the Patriot Front members that are being influenced by them or interacting with them are probably going to stop being so cowardly and start to be a little bit more proactive or willing to fight. And that's going to really change the tenor of Patriot Front overall. What's Rise Above? So the Rise Above movement was a neo-fascist accelerationist group that was very active in Southern California and across the United States. They were actually charged with intent to riot, which is fairly familiar to what we saw with the Patriot Front individuals, which again tells us that there's some level of influence there. But the leader of Robert Rundo is one of the most hardcore militant accelerationsist active today.

He's actually outside of the United States and has been interconnecting and networking with a lot of neo-fascists across Europe that are pretty well known probably to your listeners, such as Azov Regiment, as well as other neo-fascist groups in Germany and Serbia and even some Russians. I think just very quickly what that kind of speaks to that I think Matt and I have talked about a lot previously, and I'm sure we'll touch on here, is the threat that we look at from the violent far right today is far less about these kind of individual pillars for these silos of groups as much as it is about this kind of interconnected movement. right. Hatred Front itself, I mean, emerged out of Vanguard America, which itself was a neo-Nazi group that is probably most well known for its role in the events of the United Right rally in Charlestville, as well as the fact that James Fields, who committed the hate crime at the end of the rally. No relation. No relation. He was, he was, you know, infamously now pictured marching with Vanguard America with a shield, and even though they obviously disavowed him afterwards and say, he wasn't a member, that very quickly led to this kind of dissolution and rebranding. But I think it's important to say that that trend of kind of, you know, organizational death and rebirth in that cycle is a very common trend we see among these far-right groups.

And I think it's very important just to say that, you know, the life or death of the proud boys, Patriot Front, Rise Above movement are indicative of the strength of the movement, but not necessarily a one-for-one correlation of how well we're doing it, combating domestic terrorism today. So one of the reasons I wanted to bring them up, and you guys did a really good job of subverting me early, is because you see the images of these, what is it, like 30 of them in the back of a U-Haul, getting pulled out. Some of them were obviously mugging for the cameras as they were being arrested. They look ridiculous. The proud boys on the surface, when you start learning about, especially the early, you're not.

days like the tattoos and the being punched as an initiation ritual while you're reciting serial brands. It's so silly. A lot of this stuff is so silly and bizarre and ridiculous. And it's easy to look at that and dismiss it, I think. Right? It is. And I think that there's sort of a double-edged sword when we talk about this. Like as researchers or as observers, we look at that and think, what the hell are they up to? Like, why? are they punching each over serial names? But it serves a couple of purposes. One, it sort of, I think, takes the edge off some of the hardened elements of the core.

What are we as proud boys, right? Like, ultimately, the goal is for them to get out and go beat the hell out of somebody else. Like, that's really what their purpose is. The same thing with RAM. Ultimately, they're pushing people towards dispositioning of getting out and beating somebody up, if not worse. Patriot Front talks a big game. They get caught up in these little U-Haul moments.

They look really stupid, objectively. stupid on social media. But that's part of the goal is to get more attention, get people focusing on them so that when they do something again, it seems like, oh, wow, they're really all over the country. But the arrest records show us that it's actually a few select number of individuals that are traveling all around, right, doing this stuff. They had to bring people from out of state to accomplish that goal. On the other side, we look at this as researchers and analysts, and we say, you know, there's a darker element to making it fun to be in the initiatic spaces of these organizations. You start to really make it more comfortable for someone to make a joke out of

beating somebody up. You get more comfortable with it physically, emotionally, and mentally. That's really critical when we talk about radicalization practices of these organizations, particularly in the far right, who are heavily dehumanizing their outgroup or their people they don't like. And when it comes to things like the pride attack or attempts of that kind of thing or whether it's political enemies, you have to do a little bit more to make that person truly a dehumanized thing in the minds of those that are radicalizing because ultimately they're they still look like an American right they're still just standing there in front of you so you have to get them over that hump of I'm not quite ready to throw a punch at that and that initial bid those cereals and

stuff those have a really important role to play in getting someone more comfortable just throwing a fist at a random person and I mean I think part of it too that we have to consider as researchers as as individuals who who write about this and speak about this is that you know you don't want to be a self-fulfilling prophecy where there's more coverage of these groups, there's more conversation of these groups. You kind of laugh them off, write them off as, you know, look at these ridiculous guys, how they pile into this clown car, U-Haul. You know, and I think, you know, something Matt and I've talked about and we'll probably try and write something on in the near future is kind of, you know, how important it is to,

I mean, obviously called neo-Nazis, neo-Nazis, but, you know, we saw what happened in the last five, six years with, again, groups like proud boys, even groups like oathkeepers, groups like Rise Above, where it's easy to look at them and not take them seriously. It's easy to look at them and kind of laugh at, again, you know, some of the initiation rituals or kind of some of, some of their, you know, moments of, you know, less repute. But, you know, the reality is these are these are groups that preach violent rhetoric that villainize every single out group under the sun and that attempt and seek out actively acts of violence against those outgroups. And again, I mean, we'll talk about the proud boys here. And, you know, it's easy. It's easy.

to make fun of the crowd boys, but they had an active role in the event of January 6th. And, you know, that is something that I don't think should be discounted here. I just want to sort of get to grips with one thing, because we're talking about, you know, 15 guys in a van here. And I guess we're talking about a larger number on January 6th, but I really always wanted to understand the kind of threat these guys really genuinely pose. You know, they don't seem to be planting. bombs. Not that I'm trying to give them ideas, but, you know, the kinds of terrorism that other groups have carried out, they seem very public. Yeah, I mean, this is a really good point.

I think it kind of gets to the sort of third angle of when we talk about the aesthetics or the practices of that seem a little idiosyncratic or jokey, sort of shit-posting in a real life, if you will, of these organizations. And that's the fact that organizationally speaking, whether their networks or hierarchical structures, they have a tendency to fall apart at times, whether it's due to egotistical infighting, whether it's due to informants or FBI infiltration or local law enforcement infiltration or even anti-fascist infiltration who do incredible work getting in there and just kind of messing with their heads. I mean, Patriot Front is probably one of the best example of anti-fascist activists sitting in their chats waiting for a moment and then just

saying, hey, by the way, I'm Antifa and they all just scatter like cockroaches in the light. it's it's one of those moments where you sort of you want to have that schodenfreude but at the same time we have to recognize that that's one or maybe two or three individuals sitting in a group of a couple hundred right on the national calls for the Patriot Front so I think I think what we when we look at this we see okay one organizationally they're not always the most effective which means their output in terms of like whether we're going to get to the point of them throwing bombs or placing bombs in situations probably not likely right I think that's that's realistic to say that Patriot Front is probably not going to put bombs down anytime soon.

But that leaves a whole host of other activities that are just as dangerous and violent. Two, intimidating people in a political manner, that's still a form of terrorism. That's still a form of political violence. Discouraging people from showing up at polling stations or their school board like Proud Boys do or making them feel uncomfortable going to a thing that's protected by the First Amendment, such as a Pride event. Those things are still forms of political violence that create danger and accountability. community and other people will gravitate toward that, regardless if they themselves are part of that organization. So we saw individuals with AR-15s in the periphery of that pride event.

These are kind of like lights that bring bugs in the dark. You know that moss will come to these spaces. The flame is lit. Someone might still do something even if they're not part of the Patriot Front. So that sort of culmination of activity raises the overall tenor and risk for those spaces. And then three, the fact that they're willing to engage in physical violence above and beyond just the intimidation, that's a very real threat. And that's something that I think people often overlook when we talk about domestic violent extremists or domestic terrorists. I'm using sort of air quotes there for those that are just listening. And I think what we have to understand is that is in and of itself a considerable risk in the American public. People weren't throwing bombs. People weren't shooting

guns on January 6th. They were throwing punches, taking physical blunt objects, and leading the the crap out of cops, and trying to stop the election. These things are not disconnected. They're tied together. And one activity in Idaho ultimately can lead to things like that in January 6th in Washington, D.C. And I mean, just to kind of close that thought, I mean, a point that others have made since the Patriot front arrests and really indirect kind of relation to what Matt just brought up there is, you know, would we be having that same kind of, is it a threat, is it not a threat, where's that line conversation if it were 30 Salafi jihadists who just piled out of a U. Hall or, you know, 15, you know, guys with ISIS flag sitting outside a polling station.

You know, I think, you know, I think it's important for us to admit that, you know, for a variety of reasons, you know, chief among them, the First Amendment and the lack of, you know, any kind of domestic terrorism statute and the kind of dichotomy there, you know, there is a kind of double standard when we talk about the threat that comes from these spaces. And I think a lot of it, you know, when you talk about Gen 6 especially, it is something that forced a lot of Americans to recognize that the call was coming from inside the house and that, you know, terrorism can, you know, really come from the homeland, not just like, you know, the guy who is living in your town, but the guy who you truly think is part of your in-group,

you know, the guy who Moses lawn goes to church every Sunday and who, you know, pays your neighbor's cable bill, like, they can also be terrorists. And I think it's, you know, it's very important that, you know, that that's not lost here as well. I think another place that people get, and we're going to get to the January 6th stuff, I promise everyone. I've got two more table-setting questions I need to ask, though. I think another place where people get caught up when we talk about this stuff is that we paint everybody with the white nationalist neo-Nazi brush pretty broadly. And things get complicated with some of these groups like Patriot Front. Yeah, I mean, all 31 of those dudes were white guys piling out of a van.

Proud Boys is a little more complicated, right? It's run by a guy named Enrique Otario, who I think didn't he run the, yeah, Latinos for Trump in Florida? He's not a white guy. Nope. Right? So what's like, can you explain how important is white nationalism, not necessarily to the proud boys, but to like American domestic terrorists in general? That's a big question. I think, you know, white nationalism, white supremacy.

neo-Nazi activity, these things are, who, the history of that in America is we could spend a whole episode of just that, right? We could go back to the, the, do a Lincoln Rockwell episode. Oh, gosh, yes, please. We could go back to the McVeigh incident, right, the attack that he perpetrated, and just spend weeks on that, right? I think there's, the influence is so pervasive that it's almost difficult to answer in a straightforward way other than saying extraordinarily important to the American domestic

bound extremist space. Where I think we have to be careful, particularly when we look at the contemporary space, is that those labels have meanings, those labels have purposes. And from an analytical standpoint, they fall apart a bit when we try to put it, like you said, on organizations like Proud Boys that have minorities within their ranks. Enrique Atario is, he's not white. I mean, it's that simple. He's not what we you consider to be a standard white Anglo-Saxon Protestant person in the United States. There's others like Tony Tosa, who is definitely not white. He is a Pacific Islander, if I remember correctly, by ethnicity.

The reality is ultimately the tie-through there is fascism. Fascism doesn't have to be white. I mean, plenty of fascist dictatorships were present in the post-World War II era in during World War II that had absolutely nothing to do with Aryan or white supremacy notions. Now, they parrot those notions because ultimately they, they try to tie back to that legacy or they try to say that that makes them some sort of supremacist element of human existence that they're tapping into some higher purpose of human behavior or psychology or whatever they want to talk. Society, it's BS, frankly. I mean, they're just

trying to find a reason to promote their, I want power over others and I'll do it violently if I have to or because I enjoy it. So when we look at the groups like proud boys, we're better served to call them what they are, and that's fascists. Neofascist, cryptofascists, however you want to really get down into it. They have factions within that are overtly white supremacists, right? So factions of them are, some of them are white nationalists. They want nationalistic notions for white people. They'll say things like the 14 words or they'll perpetuate narratives and aesthetics and ideologies within that are pursuant of that. But that does not mean as a whole that each of these groups are that one monolithic thing. And I think that's the important part to take.

takeaway. And I mean, just a table set to talk about January 6th, I mean, we talk about the oathkeepers, right? I mean, if you go look, I mean, Sam Jackson has kind of defined that extraordinarily well in talking about, you know, anti-government, anti-authority, patriot militia. They showed up on January 6 to, you know, in essence, support the government in power and prevent the transfer of power to the next democratically elected president. I mean, you know, if you had told oathkeepers members in 2009, you know, as they were forming, you know, right as Obama came into office, that in a couple election cycles, they'd be going to the Capitol with the hopes that the president would call them up as a militia and invoke the Insurrection Act. I mean, that would fly in the face of 95% of their rhetoric from 2009,

up to 2016. And I think that when you talk about, again, like Matt said, fascism, these groups that see authoritarianism, see individuals who they think support the, you know, if not all of, then the vast majority of their ideal. their policy, that they're in-group goals, they will form bonds of convenience, right, alliances of convenience. And again, we saw that with January 6th where you have this coalition of everyone from neo-Nazis, white supremacist, proud boys, oathkeepers, QAnon, sovereign citizens who, you know, nine times out of ten would not be in the same room together, but had a common enemy that drew them there that they were going to act against violently. And I think that when we talk about a lot of the coalition stuff, that's the important takeaway here.

I sort of put a finer point, put a finer point on this real quick and say that, you know, even within the spaces of overt an explicit white supremacy or white nationalism, there are disagreements. It's a stratification. There's a spectrum of what people believe. Some people believe that Idaho and other states out west should have been completely separated from the rest of the United States and all white people go there. Others believe that every black individual should be expelled from the United States or

just outright executed and massacred. we have to remember that we can't just use labels as monolithic concepts. They have to be given that that sort of spectrum approach because humans are varied. We have interpretations that are individualized. And that plays out so much more when you don't have a strong hierarchical group like the ones we have today. So Proudways, they might have hierarchy, but they are very autonomous at some local levels. So I got a question about the alliance with Trump himself. because that's who they were supporting on January 6th, right? I mean, they weren't trying to put Enrique Tario in power. I'm sure maybe some of them wouldn't mind that. But do they see Trump as a fellow traveler? Or do they see him as anything, you know, something even greater than that?

I think it's hard to say precisely what they think of him because there's a lot of variations within, particularly. the proud voice on him, some kind of view him as not going far enough or not really serving their purposes. Some of the actually biggest discord within the proud voice has been how much people are willing to be a part of the promotion of the state, if you will, which, you know, Trump ultimately was the state for a while there. And I think as president, you know, that's sort of the reality. So Tario led the proud voice in a direction that was far more embracing of that space than I think some of the more militant accelerationist or diehard fascists that reject any kind of liberal democracy within

the proud boys, those individuals would probably more so than they were comfortable with if we look at some of the chats and the debates between. Yeah. And I mean, I think it's also muddy just kind of by the nature of the proud boys, right? I mean, something Matt and I have talked about and written about with CTC and in other spaces is how much of their mobilization was driven by the individual chapters and how much variance there was in, you know, the Proud Boys chapters who were going up to Portland versus a random Proud Boys chapter in Maine, for example, right? And I mean, even post-January 6th, you do see, you know, I wouldn't say a split, but you would see, again, a good amount of variance where you have some chapters like the ones down in South Florida

that still are trying to cultivate very meaningful ties at the local level with, you know, local Republican or GOP officials and others, you know, some of the more extreme, some of the more anti-Semitic ones, some of the more explicit white supremacist ones who, like Matt said, center their ideology around the rejection of the state as a whole and view their primary goal now as violent opposition to the enemy, which in this case is, again, the left, Antifa, and, you know, sitting here today, you know, anti-LGBQ, anti-trans, you know, all that. And really, if we look at what Trump is for more than just a proud voice, he's a lightning rod. He's a moment of the coalescence within this really, really broad space of reactionary right individuals and ideologies that, you know, centralize these views into a mainstream space behind the pulpit of the presidential seal.

And I think that's really important for us to look at is that even those that rejected the state from a fascistic standpoint within the proud boys, they still saw them as a useful tool, right? They still thought, well, it's still better than where we have with Biden or with Obama. So fine, let's keep it. It's better than that. Ultimately, you know, stand back, standby. He's signaling to them in a way that they are okay with, even if they disagree with him ideologically or the willingness to engage with several democratic processes. And I think that's really important for us to look at because, you know, ultimately what that means is Trump represents the institutionalization of democratic decay. he is ultimately the primacy of American Democratic decline.

And what these groups feel is that that's a good thing. They look at that and they say, hell yeah, right? Like, that's how they engage with this. So regardless of what happens with Tar. Let me take that opportunity then to, as you were continuing to answer, my last table setting question, will you explain to us what accelerationism is?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So accelerationism is a very broad concept that has many different philosophical interpretations or technical interpretations, depending on where you look at it. For our purposes, as counterterrorism researchers, we call it militant accelerationism. That is both something we've assigned to the phenomenon as well as what the individuals that perpetuated have called it themselves. Ultimately, it is a set of tactics and strategies that is meant to take the system's weaknesses, exploit them, maybe perpetuate them, maybe perpetuated. leverage them against one another a bit, and then use that to sort of collapse the social structure, often violently. And what we've seen is groups like Atomoff and the base, proud boys, any of the others that perpetuate these notions or explicitly identify as such, try to make themselves the wedge that drive social structures apart in the United States. they'll fixate around things like First Amendment, try to say that leftist groups like Antifa are essentially, you know, the opposite of the First Amendment and that the proud boys or whomever is acting is the, you know, the Paragon of the First Amendment and that they have to violently defend it, right? And by doing that, they sort of keep building this sort of broad chaos within society. Others that like the Adam Woffin Division, where they will intentionally take actions of a terroristic approach using that as a

means of like propaganda, the deed, which many of our counterterrorism individuals would be familiar with, or even just people familiar with terrorism wouldn't understand. And by doing so, exacerbate the state response to them, right? So if they can make the state overreact, then it sort of creates this feedback loop of maybe crackdowns on firearms, crackdowns on right-wing individuals. And these are narratives they can spin out. And ultimately, in their minds, this creates a positive feedback cycle across society that allows it to, you know, beyond the control of anyone else, collapse. Long wind way of saying violence helps collapse society, often with a fascistic intention. And, I mean, you know, I think it's always important to talk about, you know, some of the folks who have been researching this for a long time, right?

I mean, folks that Matt and I both, you know, have built on, I mean, folks like Brian Hughes, Cynthia Miller, Idris, Michael Lodenthall, whose work has been really pivotal in kind of shaping a lot of this discourse and really helping, you know, sort through some of the noise that I think comes with this kind of shift that we've kind of seen on the policy side of, you know, U.S. counterterrorism apparatuses, you know, U.S. terrorism researchers and scholars who are dealing, again, like we talked about earlier, with this shift into this very muddied, very unclear milieu that, again, doesn't track cleanly in a one-for-one way with, the past 20 years of counterterrorism policy that we've built up in the United States. And so I think a lot of this is trying to just kind of make sense of some of the chaos and kind of speak to what a lot of the trends that we're seeing are. All right. So with 30 minutes of table setting, we're done and background that I do think we needed. The January 6th hearings are public now.

I would say that they are very slickly produced with the idea that the public is going to be watching this and engaging with it in mind. I've been very interested to see, like, Fox News didn't really run with it the first couple days and is now like, oh, shit, we've got to be on this. Just broad thoughts. What do you think about the way it's being presented and the information that we're getting out of it? Yeah, I think, I mean, so far, as you said, it's been very well produced. You know, I think one of the things for me personally, right, so the program on extremism has tracked every single of the 825 federal cases to date, right? I've looked at hours and hours and hours of the footage, you know, thousands of pages of

court documents, more than I'm comfortable admitting on this for pacer costs. But the reality is, is that, you know, that 12-minute video clip that they played on the, on the first day was extraordinarily powerful. And I think that that, you know, showing the American people, you know, who, again, by all accounts, saw what happened, watched what happened, if not in real time in the days and weeks after, but really just forcing Americans to grapple with, you know, seeing with their own eyes what took place that day. I think, you know, broadly, that there's been a lot of discourse around what's going to come of this, what's the impact and everything. I think, you know, the most important thing here from my perspective on the research side is, you know, setting the public record, you know, for the future. And I think that by all accounts, what we've seen so far, I mean, they've done diligent work. They've done, you know, I'm sure thousands of hours of depositions, expert

testimony. And then now obviously these public hearings to kind of put the icing on the cake for the public side. But, you know, really, you know, I think the hearings themselves are about, you know, just showing their work to date. You know, I would say that the, before these public hearings, the moderate view, which is I think more thunder on the words moderate view. That's great. Which I think I shared for a while was that this was a fairly disorganized group of idiots. Absolutely everyone should be in jail. Terrible. What happened. Disgusting. But it wasn't, this was not a coup attempt. It was not necessarily an organized event meant to overturn the election. How is that idea completely fallen apart based on what we're hearing from these hearings?

Yeah, I mean, if we look at what the narrative is they're laying out with the evidence that they have, it's to turn that on its head. It's to say that this was far more coordinated. This is far more pernicious than the immediate, you know, discourse around it may have suggested. I mean, analysis that I was doing, others were doing immediately after, and I'm talking literally late night January 6 and to January 7, there were live streams of Proud Boys members that showed Proud Boys leaders that are now under charges for suspicious conspiracy literally talking about being in contact with Secret Service agents on that day

in anticipation of Trump coming to the White House and watching. This is on video. We can see with our own eyes here with our own ears. And I think the problem is there was a mountain of data and information that came flooding like an avalanche down on top of the American people. And so the best way to make sense of that was to look for the most evident easily attained evidence at the time. Those of us that are practiced at looking at groups like the proud ways and others knew where to look. And it was hard to get it out there in a way that was not sensational or not, you know, maybe making a mountain out

of a molehill that maybe they're just kind of chatting each other up saying, oh yeah, yeah, I talked to secret service. Like, we don't know for sure. The longer it's gone, the more I think we've seen that that has a lot more weight behind it. And the reality is that the evidence that they're bringing is damning. The question is, what is the American people and the electric are going to do with it? And what's the DOJ going to do with it? That's where I'm sitting at this point. Can you, for people that may have been like half paying attention, when you say it's damning,

can you walk me through, like, how coordinated was this? How damning is this evidence? Like, what, what are the, without giving me like a three hour, you know, without giving me like a three-hour deposition like we would have seen at the trial. What are the, what are the high notes here that make that connection? Yeah. So again, with the obvious caveats that the DOJ indictments are allegations and that the committee is still obviously pushing through all their public-facing work. I think what has been shown so far suggests close collaboration and coordination between extremist groups, organizers of the various rallies and individuals in the orbit of

the administration. I think that there's still a lot of kind of moving parts and uncertainty in some of the specifics. And I think obviously, you know, a lot of the big pieces that could still drop, I would expect to come on the DOJ side, you know, who have, again, like, I think the way I've always kind of considered this is, you know, DOJ has been slowly working from the, from the very bottom, right, the kind of very first rider in the doors, the grandma from Iowa took some photos, all the way up to now, obviously, Enrique Atario, head of the proud boys through it, roads, totally oathkeepers. Whereas the committee has kind of started, you know, at the very top and slowly try to trickle down and kind of trace some of those roots, some of those connective tissues.

And, you know, I think it's not until we start seeing on both of those fronts a lot more of the public evidence. You can really say for sure. But, you know, I think that that kind of nexus between, again, the extremist groups, the organizers who brought, again, tens of thousands of individuals to D.C. and individuals in the administration who continue to push the stop the steel conspiracy all altogether in that event. In one thing I really want people to understand is that this is not the first time the proud boys and the earthkeepers have showed up at the same event with the intent to carry out similar goals. We've seen it in the past when they engaged at Berkeley, the university

out there in California, where far right provocateurs were coming to speak about the violations of First Amendment on a hyper-liberal campus in their minds, right? And we both in organizations came and said very similar things just about why they were there, what they were trying to accomplish. Both came ready for combat. I mean, it's just that simple. Tario may not have been there himself. I can't recall it's off my head. But like the proud boys were.

There were representatives at a higher level there. This is not, and that's not the only example. There's many other examples of sort of co-traveler nature between either the oathkeepers and the proud boys together or them with more aggressive groups like RAM or Adamoff and division representatives. not that they were necessarily coordinating together, but they fixate on the same social focal points, right? So when we have something like Stop the Steel that hits across the entirety of the American conscious, it's damn near impossible and illogical to think at some point

there's not going to be coordination amongst those that are like, hey, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Maybe I should do something about that. Well, if not them, than me, right? Logically speaking, there has to be some level of connection between them. What we're seeing now is that logic play out with evidence and with really strong evidence that it wasn't just a coincidental meeting in a garage. It was intended. There were planned efforts between the two that looked very similar.

And ultimately they had the same goal. And I think that's the point. Tear down democracy. Prevent democracy from being perpetuated because they don't like the politics of the person that's coming in next. Tario is interesting because he wasn't there on the sixth, right? he was in Baltimore. Right. Yeah.

The couple of the cops had run him off, essentially the day before, right? Yeah. He told him not to be there. Yeah. So he had been arrested upon arrival into D.C. in connection with the events in the summer when he had, when he had been accused of stealing and, I believe, burning Black Lives Matter banner. And then when he was arrested, he actually had two high capacity magazines with

with Crowd Boys logos on them as, as he was arrested. And so, yeah, I believe the, the, the, the, the, The current trail as they painted is he was arrested. He was booked. His phone was taken. Then he goes to the garage meeting where he's pictured with Stuart Rhodes, leader of the oathkeepers, Kelly Sorrell, General Counsel for the Oathkeepers, veterans for Trump individual, I believe Latinos for Trump individual,

as well as an independent photographer who is maybe not so independent, who I believe gave Tari O her phone to then begin communicating with the proud boys during this period of time. And then afterwards, I believe, is when he, when he goes to Baltimore, where he remains. But then as the government alleges, continue to communicate with with proud boys, individuals and leadership up to and through the events of the six. And what's interesting is if you look at the composition of those individuals in that garage, like these are all, these are all elements that were leading the pro-Maga, pro-Trump movement from 2016 onwards at various different stages.

They helmed it at various points, or regionally speaking. So the fact that they all come under the stop to steal banner and they all come into that garage, like it just raises a lot of questions. Like, how'd that come about? That's really curious. Like, those are the questions

that DOJ is picking at, right? So I have a question about DOJ. I have a terrible feeling in my gut that everybody except those who are important are going to be charged. I think the important people probably won't. But that's me. So I guess this threefold question, do you think there is a chance of prosecutions that are worth having?

And how does that impact one way or the other, whichever way the decision goes, these groups? Because it's going to be a big impact, I'm assuming. Yeah. And I mean, I guess we have to start out by saying neither of us are lawyers, right? Neither of us have worked at DOJ. We just have talked to folks at DOJ and done, you know, and investigation stuff from research standpoint on these things. That being said, I understand where your concern comes from.

I think the history of this, especially in the domestic right-wing space, has been that key individuals for conspiracies in the past have somehow managed to elude any kind of sentencing or any kind of serious repercussions, whether that's for their involvement of violence, extremist networks or their involvement in actual sedition charges, which has occurred in the past. Ultimately, to go to tackle your second part of your question, though, let's say every single one of them is taken off the board from the violent extremist group network standpoint. There are all those groups and the ideas that existed within them are going to live beyond those

people. So whether or not the oathkeeper stays as quote unquote the oath keepers moving forward, ultimately their existence will carry forward in a way that is still meaningful to their own mobilization or those that are sympathetic or part of the membership core. And that's the same with the proud boys. And we've actually seen that since January 6th. The proud boys have been hyperactive. I mean, they haven't slowed down at all.

It's almost like they're thumbing their nose at DOJ saying, come and get me. And I think what we'll see is, you know, as John talked about earlier, there is a decay and rebirth understanding of a lot of this space that it's playing out right in front of our eyes. They don't really care about the legal democratic system of a Democrat. You know, they don't care. They just, they would rather go out and do what they're going to do. And results be damned, they'll do it. Yeah.

And I think to the credit of DOJ, I mean, it has to be said that, you know, it's, it's certainly been a slow moving kind of set of investigations of prosecutions to date. Although, you know, from what they've put forth, especially as it relates to the proud boys, it took them a long time to even get into Enrique Atario's phone that they seized before January 6th. I believe it wasn't even until around the one-year anniversary that they even said that they were able to get into it and start doing the imaging. But again, you know, I think it's certainly a different set of questions of whether, you know, it will be the domestic violent extremist leadership and those groups as opposed to kind of some of the other individuals in that next we talked about. But, you know, I think certainly most of the significant members of the proud boys and the oathkeepers who have been publicly identified to date have either been charged or there is significant evidence to suggest that they may be cooperating in some way, shape, or form. And we've seen that, you know, with individuals who were with Stewart Rhodes on the 6th, there were in communications with Rhodes on the 6th, as well as, you know, a handful of high-level proud boys who were in direct contact with this.

leadership cadre going into the six. And so I think that does paint this picture of, you know, again, like Matt said, not necessarily an indication of organizational collapse, but evidence that DOJ has been doing a pretty efficient job in sweeping up most of the high level, domestic violent extremist folks who they can prove engaged in a conspiracy on that day. Well, I can buy that. I think, all right, my cynical question, like the most cynical aspect of my question is like, I can't imagine them actually charging Donald Trump. However, I may feel about that, you can probably guess. But how does that impact these groups more broadly? I mean, there's no impact really against Trump, who will then obviously run in 2024. Does that have an effect on these guys?

Yeah, of course it will. You know, regardless of whether they view him as their paragon of virtue of from their ideological standpoint, right? Like there's dissent, like I said before, and the proud boys and elsewhere, it would, the use of state apparatus power from DOJ or from Congress or whomever would have the authority to take some direct action against President Trump for his role that day,

or proceeding that day, ultimately would invigorate and give some sort of confirmation bias to a lot of the views that they have that the state is working against right-wing individuals and thinking. And, you know, we can see how that would play out. It doesn't take much logic to get to the point where they say, well, F. Like, if that's the way they're going to play it, let's start doing something a little bit more aggressive. I can point at very specific networks and say, that's precisely what they'll say. And they will absolutely motivate individuals and encourage them to go out and take violent action.

Hell, they're already doing it. And there's no direct action against President Trump yet. So, yeah, cynically looking at it, I think it's going to. to have a pretty positive, so to speak, positive correlative response within those spaces. What actions are taken against Trump will likely encourage supporters or just far-right extremists to take more direct response to their perceived enemies, leftists, the government, anybody that presents to something they don't like, whether that be LGBTQ, et cetera, or to individuals that just are a little bit more moderate than that. they will go that route.

And just to, again, just kind of close that thought, I think the, you know, with the caveats, again, that, you know, my focus is domestic violence extremism and not necessarily the political side. I think, you know, the sad reality is when you look at a lot of the landscape today is that, you know, the Pandora's box has been opened, right? The willingness of the right to latch onto and engage with its very online, very reactionary side that, again, as we've seen time and time and time again, continues to espouse violence has just kind of been accepted as you know this is the base this is who we target this is who we go after and so you know regardless of what happens at the end of this kind of committee investigation regardless of what happens at the end of the DOJ investigation whether or not there's a charge whether you know whatever happens in 2024 you know the reality is is that the the playbook has been written right and whether it's whether it's trump whether it's someone

else the you know what what succeeds has been made very evident um And so, you know, I think as you look forward in terms of, you know, projecting out, you know, what the response is by these groups, the reality is that somebody will try and appeal to them, you know, in the next year, two years, three years, regardless of who that may be. My money is on Trump. I'll just say it. It's my money is on him. Well, so we're doomed. Probably. No, I think that's a bit of the, if we take the worst case scenario, there's very clear.

outcomes that are very bad for democracy in America. But there are plenty of things between now and then that can be done, that should be done that can stem the tide at least. I've got one final question. So it seems like, and you just tell me if I'm wrong, in like the past six months, all of these groups, and I think the American right wing in general, has landed on the out group that it is going to, that it is going to prosecute news violence against, right? Why? I don't even know. I mean, can you get, have you guys noticed the same thing? I mean, I'm talking about, of course, gay and trans people, right? We've seen an increase in violence against those people in their spaces in the last few months. Why do you think that that group was the group that was chosen? And I know it's not like, there was not like a committee hearing, right, where they all sat down and said like, this is what we're doing. It's kind of something that naturally developed. Why do you think that that is where the, that's where it's going. Yeah, so I'll just take the first crack at this. You know, I think you have to kind of situate this and place it in the context of how this kind of, again, burgeoning mainstream right-wing

ecosystem has continued to inspire violence in the name of those narratives, those grievances, time and time again. I mean, even if you just want to start in 2020, I mean, right, you go, you know, COVID-19, you know, anti-lockdown, anti-mask, anti-vax, you go into the summer, you have, you know, the protests, the racial justice protest, and kind of the counter response to that. You have, like, you talked about this kind of massive stop-the-steel conspiracy that brings in all the different kind of pieces on the, on the board for the right. And then even post-January 6, right, you have the free-art political prisoners. You have Jan 6th was a false flag. It was Antifa. It was the FBI. And then, you know, moving forward, you have, you know, anti-critical race theory

stuff. And then now, as you kind of hit on the, you know, the newest kind of target, you it has been the kind of anti-LGBQ and specifically kind of anti-trans, you know, drag show, rooming stuff, all of that. And I think when you, when you kind of put that all together in, in that kind of timeline there, what you see is it's, it's the same environment that keeps creating the same narratives, that then the same groups that we keep talking about go out and, you know, protest or riot or threaten violence or intimidate or harass, the members of that out whoever it is, whether it's Gresh and Whitmer, whether it's racial justice protesters, whether it's, you know, election officials. It's, you know, everyone is fair game when,

you know, in the eyes of this ecosystem, it's, it's a culture war. And you see that rhetoric time and time again, right, where it's not just, you know, these people are bad. It's, these people are anti-American. These people hate you, hate your values. They hate what you stand for. And they want to take everything that's yours. They want to take, you know, what makes America great is you. And they want to take everything. that you represent away from you and destroy your future. And when you have that rhetoric, you know, for a year, year and a half, two years, you know, it's only a matter of time before, A, a group like Patriot Front, you know, loads 31 other

guys into, you know, a hot U-Haul and tries to go commit a riot against, you know, a pride parade. Or, you know, in kind of, you know, far more, you know, concerning kind of stark ways, you know, an 18-year-old in Buffalo thinks, you know, this is it. Like, it's time to stop ship hosting, great replacements a real thing. I have to go shoot up a supermarket, right? And that's that's kind of the kind of dual threat challenge here, where it's like you have the groups you've talked about here, right? Patriot Front, proud boys, oathkeepers.

But you also have kind of your lone actors that kind of, again, especially during COVID, sitting in these online spaces, sitting in 4chan and Eat Coon and Kiwi Farms and just, you know, absorbing this content again and again and again. And like the challenge that we always talk about here is it only takes one. It only takes one individual to think enough is enough. I've heard this in my ear for a year and a half. I've seen it online for a year and a half.

Everything they say is right. There's no political solution. And I have to now commit violence to stop what's happening in this country because somehow no one else will. To put a through line here on all the points that John raised about the various things that have contributed to the current anti-trans panic and the political agenda against gay and trans individuals in the United States, it really stems from, and it goes back to anti-Semitism. And the reason I say that is because there are specific ideological tenets and books such as the protocols of the elders of Zion,

which lay out every single one of those components that he mentioned as a tool of the Jewish people to manipulate and control global existence for humanity, particularly within the United States and Western democracies. And when we look at the deeper motivations of much of these organizations that are perpetuating the violence and intimidation of these ethnic minorities and these minorities that are trying to just get equal respect within the law and within society, two things are in play. One, it's working for them. They're getting a little bit better circumstances overall, incrementally, not as well as we might like for those of us that want to see more aggressive policies and protections in place, but they are getting wins. And that threatens some individuals in our country existentially. They see this as an existential threat. So they look for an answer and they say, well, it's the Jewish people manipulating them to get rid of white people. And that's sort of what comes down to it or what it comes down to.

And when we look at the political side of that, we're seeing emerge of those extremist actors that are violently taking care of it in their minds. Or as the Buffalo shooter said, if someone else isn't going to do something that I need to, right, we see this. the same rationale, but from a political standpoint. In Florida, we see, don't say gay laws going into effect, while someone's got to do something about Disney. This is the same mentality, and they're invoking the exact same rationales and arguments that stem from the same places, such as the protocols of Elders of Zion. So as we see that mainstreaming effect occur, particularly under the Trump administration, this is not just analytical assessment. This is evident, like we have clear evidence now coming out of the J6 space and others, that they're using the narratives that are deeply

anti-Semitic at their core, even if they don't present explicitly so. When you have that in the mainstream, when you have that on the extremist violent far right, when they look at each other and say, hey, I kind of like what you're doing. That's where we're looking at right now. That's why we're seeing such a strong resonation against trans individuals and gay individuals in this country. In many respects, it's because it's the last, not in the last, but it's one of the easiest and one of the most recent places of progression out of the left that the right sees as an existential threat to them. So they say, okay, I can quickly go after this. And by targeting trans and gay individuals, you can resonate across a lot of other background narratives that are very

prominent mobilizers for the right, nuclear family, things like the traditional values, not getting rid of your Christian values, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You could go down the line for days. So targeting there, it's an easy political hit as well. as a very deep ideological hit. And I think that's why we're seeing it so heavily resonating at this point. Well, I think that that's a nice and depressing place to end, which is what we like to do here at Angry Planet. When we get to anti-Semitism, you know, I know we've arrived. We've always, you know, you finally, it all comes back down to some weird thing, some Russian guy wrote in the 1980s over and over again forever.

It was the 18th. What was it the 1700s? 18. It was the 18. Okay. Yeah. Matthew Kreiner, John Lewis. Thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through all of this.

Thank you very much. Appreciate it. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners, as always, Angry Planet is me, myself, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Nodell. If you like us, you really like us, please sign up at Substack, AngryPlanetpod.com or angryplanet.substack.com, where $9 a month gets you bonus episodes and commercial-free versions of the mainline episodes. I've got a bonus about India that Jason recorded.

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