Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 816: A Mole Infiltrated the Highest Ranks of American Militias. This Is What He Found

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

https://www.propublica.org/article/ap3-oath-keepers-militia-mole

This episode of Cognitive Dissonance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from Glory Hole Studios in Chicago and beyond, This is Cognitive Dissonance. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way, we bring critical thinking, skepticism and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big or makes us mad.

It's skeptical, it's political, and there is no welcome mat. Today is Thursday, January 16th. It's not, it's not really, but it is when you're hearing it. Yeah, it is. You know, it is for you in the time dimension. So it's long form day. Cecil, it's long form day.

And it's ProPublica too. Because we love ProPublica. Amazing journalism happens at ProPublica. We're big fans. Do you read it on the daily or do you just poke around at it? ProPublica doesn't publish a lot of stuff all the time. But whenever I get an alert, because I'm subscribed to their mailing list, so whenever I get an alert I almost always check out what they've written.

I was going to ask, because we pay for it, We donate to it. It's free, but we donate to it because we like the work. But I will admit that I think 90% of the articles I've read from ProPublica are articles you've found. I never remember to go there despite how much I enjoy their journalism. Their journalism is top notch. It's truly outstanding journalism. It's top notch. They have excellent journalists. And they work with other companies too. So they'll work with other journalistic organizations and then they'll just publish on ProPublica. But yeah, I mean, these are the people

who broke the stuff with Clarence Thomas. Yeah. You know, they were early on with the Dobbs decision before it came out. They knew stuff was gonna happen. They broke a lot of stuff. they've been really, really a solid news organization that I like quite a bit. And that is worth, you know, a lot of people were asking sort of

what's worth your money nowadays. And that was one of the ones that we've still kept with. Yeah, they're, they're terrific. So we're going to talk about this article, uh, the militia and the mole. Uh, pro public,ublica reporting highlights. Let me, this is actually kind of nice. I can give you a little highlight overview and then we'll talk about it in detail.

A freelance vigilante, a wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover, climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn't tell police or the FBI. He didn't tell his family or his friends. He penetrated a new generation of militia leaders, which included doctors and government attorneys. Experts say that militias could have a Renaissance under Donald Trump.

A Renaissance? A Renaissance! Let me, I hope the guillotine has a Renaissance under Donald Trump. My guy, absolutely. Oh, Luigi's for everybody. Yeah, man. He sent ProPublica a massive trove of documents, the conversations he secretly recorded give a unique and startling window into the militia movement.

You know, I got to tell you the truth is that when you sent me this article, I was like, oh, let's do this. And then when I read this article, I immediately thought, I kind of wish we did a citation needed on this. It's so wild. I know. It's so wild. I thought the same thing. I thought the same thing.

I thought, you know what? This would be an amazing citation needed and I have to write soon. So maybe I will. Maybe you will. Double trouble, baby. Double promise. I don't want to double dip like that.

Oh, it is. General promise. But yeah, I will say, this guy's story is that he's a gay fella from Utah. He has some trouble with the law. The law basically put him in jail. He has time to sort of reflect, read Thoreau, read Bertrand Russell, read Karl Marx or whatever. We gotta pause real quick here, because I wanted to make a note of this,

so I'm glad you talked about his reading. He also reads Cormac McCarthy. Cormac McCarthy? I forgot about that! I like... Yeah, man. I just immediately was like, why is that in a prison?

Yeah. Like, if you don't want people killing themselves in prison, why would you put... I've read four Cormac McCarthy books. Four. And each, yeah. I read No Country for Old Men, All the Pretty Horses,

The Road, and Blood Meridian. How's No Country for Old Men? It's very good. Yeah. Yeah, All the Pretty Horses I Had a Hard Time Getting Into. That's a hard one. That for me was really hard to start once I got into it. It took probably 100 pages before I gave a shit.

Blood Meridian's probably the bleakest and most difficult thing I've ever read. Like it's just hard to read and then it's also bleak and sad and upsetting. And then The Road is just everything. The same thing. Ever. But The Road is an easier read.

It's not structurally difficult, but like, it's just every sad thing that you could possibly feel all in one book. I feel sad. And you turn the page like, well, sadder. I don't know why those would be in a prison. That's all I'm saying.

If I'm in a prison, my life is already bleak. I don't need Cormac McCarthy to make it actually worse. Right. Right. Which he would do. I would look around in prison and be like, this is better than reading Blood Meridian. Like I feel better about my death. I'm in paradise right now.

This is way better. So it just made me laugh that he's like, oh yeah. That's so funny. His book choice was pretty hilarious. But anyway, so he gets out of prison, heads to Utah, decides what he wants to do with his life is become a survival expert and teach people survival classes, teach people outdoor skills and survival classes. And so he starts doing that and he's trying to do it as a job, as sort of like a gig thing

where he's trying to, you know, put himself out as an instructor, but it's, it's going slow and it goes slow until he gets a call from one of these malicious. And one of these malicious is like, hey, we'd love it if you would take us out and show us. And what they asked for, so he's also, by the way, this guy is also, he took up Krav Maga and Muay Thai because he enjoyed fist fights, it said.

And then he also spent 40 days alone in the desert with only a knife living off chipmunks and currants. And then- Yeah, wait, to celebrate a birthday. To celebrate a birthday, yeah. You guys, that's what he did to celebrate his birthday. Yeah, was he- And he's like, I wanna eat a chipmunk

for fucking three and a half, 40 days. Yeah, with, but I wanted to read this. The militia, what they wanted was, they wanted to train in evasion and escape, but this guy says you need to work up to that. So instead, they call him Williams in the article, but that's not his name. But instead they said that the person,

the main person who is in the article, the gay fellow from Utah, his name's in the article, quote unquote, Williams. He says, you need to work up to that. So for three days, Williams taught them the basics of survival, wilderness survival, but with a twist, how to stay alive while trying to stay hidden. Now, that should scare you like that. Those words together, right?

That should show you what militias some of these militias are doing in the world. Yeah, I did, part of me read that and kind of laughed a little bit though. Like I do find it scary because, you know, clearly they are working to prepare for something, right? They are working for nefarious purposes. Sure. You don't go off into the woods

trying to stay hidden from who? Well, obviously pursuers, right? Well, obviously, pursuers. And who are the pursuers of militias? Well, probably government entities who are like, hey, you're not well regulated enough. And we are hunting you down. But I kind of laughed because there's also a sense that I get that these militia guys are very often

out playing forest war, when the majority of all people and activity takes place in urban environments. The utility of blending into the backwoods of Utah seems to me to be pretty low if I'm gonna do any, you know what I mean? If I'm gonna do something in the world, I'm gonna do it in Washington, DC, or I'm gonna do it in New York, or I'm gonna do any like, you know what I mean? Like if I'm gonna do something in the world, I'm gonna do it in Washington DC,

or I'm gonna do it in New York, or I'm gonna do it in Chicago. I'm gonna do it where people are, where centers of power are. The actual skills that would be more useful would be more like urban combat skills. This sort of like woods craft stuff is like masturbatory,

in my opinion, oftentimes. Yeah, what struck me is like, that's where you go to hide after you've done this dastardly stuff in the urban centers. Like that's what it made to me was like, this is a group of people who wanna do forays into places to do bad shit and then flee for a while and live out in the woods without a fire that doesn't smoke, you know what I mean?

So no one can see them and then go back and do horrible shit. That's what it screamed to me. And you're probably right. You're probably right. Yeah, that's what it screamed to me. And the people that they recruit, you know, you're talking about white supremacists, there's a big deep tie to white supremacy

through all this entire article. They talk about all these different, but then they also talk about like law enforcement. Like there's a lot of law enforcement. These are not uncapable dudes, right? This is not, you know, you know, they want to, you know, they talk about like the people who run around in the forest and they're like, ah, they don't have anything. They don't know what they're doing. And you're like, no, man, these are guys.

This is a guy who has a quote on his wall. One of the, one of the guys who has a quote on a wall, he's a law enforcement officer who's like, I really liked the most dangerous game, which is men or whatever. Yeah. Hunting men. Yeah. Okay. This guy's a little off.

I mean, and not only a little off, he's also a guy who can do something with that in a way that's very scary. It is. And to that point, that same law enforcement officer who's part of this militia shit when he was talking and he's on tape, they've got like hours and hours and hours of these guys on tape. When like he's on tape talking, he talks about like the reason he liked law enforcement was because of the violence and excitement.

Yeah. Yeah. And he even says like the law enforcement enforcement guys like, yeah, they say, you know, violence never solved any problems, but as a cop, I know it does. Yeah. I know it does. It's like, oh, yeah, oh, yeah. Like, yeah, you, this is it. It's funny how many systemic problems are revealed from this one article.

Right. You know, because it is. You listen to this or you, you know, Tom's going to read it so you could listen to it. Or if you read it, you can see there's this, as you read it, you think there's so many different things that are wrong that are happening that are wrong. This gentleman who's out, you know, who's, who's a part of this militia or at least sees this militia trains them one time, then says, you know what? They felt a little white supremacist to me. I don't really like them. I don't really want to deal with them anymore. And he kind of quit doing it. Then he sees them on January 6th in the Capitol. He sees one of the patches that they were handing out when he, when they finished his training, he sees one of these patches and he thinks, did I train these guys?

Did I do something bad here? And then he realizes, you know what I got to do? I got to infiltrate this group, which is the craziest thing, the craziest thing you could think he thinks. And he's not a, you know, a far right guy. What he wants is to infiltrate this group and just get as much information about what they're doing and then share that with the authorities. But he doesn't know what he's doing really.

And he just starts collecting massive amounts of information, recording people and then, you know, taking pictures in the middle of the night when he's spending the night at people's places. And he's just collecting all this massive amounts of information that he hopes will be useful when he finally breaks this story and gives all this information. He wants to publish this for information online. That's his plan. Well, and it's, it's, it's nuts because this is a fantastically dangerous sort of vigilante undercover investigation, right? And he's describing that there's a whole network of people that are doing this kind of work.

He's not the only one. He's really, really successful at it though. He moves up the ranks of these organizations. At one point, for one of the organizations, it was the Oath Keepers or some shit. Like their Utah branch, the Oath Keepers, they make him their local director of intelligence. He's like the grand poobah. He gets to wear the hat.

So like he's not just in it, he's rising through the ranks. He's achieving levels of like trust and access and authority. levels of like trust and access and authority. And he actually infiltrates three different militias at the same time. It gets so weird at one point. It gets so weird at one point that like, he then assigns to himself that he's gonna go like stake out the Democratic Socialist Club or whatever.

And he goes there and he sees another oath keeper there. Yeah. Yeah, and he's like, oh shit Is that guy? Also here on a mission like me or is he actually a lefty who's actually doing so there there's all this like cross-platform Vigilante spy versus spy shit going on Yeah, it's crazy and they And I want to get back to, I want to read a quote from some of this because it'll show you sort of who's involved

in what they're doing. Says he took note of job titles of leaders he met like an Air Force Reserve master sergeant. And this reporter confirmed this through military records who recruited other airmen into the movement. Williams attended peril military trainings. Williams attended paramilitary trainings. Williams is the guy who's this vigilante spy, where he group practiced ambushes with improvised explosives and semi-automatic guns. He offered his comrades free lessons in hand-to-hand

combat and bonded with them in the back country hunting jackrabbits when the militia joined right wing allies for causes like gun rights, they went in tactical gear. And that's something you've seen before, but like, think about this. This is a group that's actively recruiting from the military. So the military is trained. We, as a nation, we say we need a bunch of soldiers in this world. We're creating soldier after soldier in our country, and we send these people off to boot camp. We teach them how to kill.

We teach them how to use guns. We teach them how to use advanced weaponry of all different types and sizes. And then someone comes in who's part of that group already and says, Hey, by the way, I'm part of this militia that's also got a cops and other people retired military in it and a strong white supremacy streak in it and an anti-government when it's Democrat streak in it. Yeah. Yeah, man. And like when we spend our taxpayer dollars training traders to become

experts at things like what we saw, you know, the January 6th commission really exposed this. We saw that the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys both were present at January 6th. And they were not just milling about in the crowd, yelling and chanting. They performed reconnaissance ahead of time. They knew where the weak spots were. They were calling the shots. Before the march actually took place, a lot of the Oath Keeper guys were already at the cap.

And they were there to help direct resources, human resources into vulnerable points in order to gain access to the Capitol. We're trading people not just on the weapons, but on tactics. So these guys, and we've seen that it's effective. That's the other crazy thing. These militias, I know I was goofing around before,

but like these militias, when I was growing up in the 90s, there was a militia movement. There's probably always been one, but there was a militia movement in the 90s. And I remember the militia movement in the 90s. And like they were all over like in Michigan and other places.

And a lot of these guys were a bunch of clowns running around playing paintball in the woods. You know, they were. But they're not all like that. And when they coalesce as they have, and they organize the way that they have, and they have tools that they're gaining from their training as law enforcement or their training as military, and then they're passing that down into tactics, now all of a sudden these militias are a real force to be reckoned with. Like they're a real physical danger and they're

also a danger to our democracy. Yeah. Yeah. You know, a literal danger to our democracy. It's, it's, it's kind of crazy that this is allowed to exist. What it feels like, Cecil, is knowing that there are terrorist cells. Yep, yep. And just saying like, yeah, that's like a little branch of Al-Qaeda. They got a place down over on 82nd Street. Yeah, that's over by the ISIS clubhouse. And I know- It feels just like that.

But I know what the response that we'll get is from people who will say, well, there's left-wing militias too. Sure, but if they're violent and they're training on tactics and violence, they should be exterminated. Like they, you can't, not exterminate, that's crazy. I'm sorry, that's just crazy language. I don't mean that. But like, we should-

Can they be exterminated with extreme prejudice? Dream prejudice. This stuff. But yeah, we cannot support violence and because there's no way to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. Yeah, yeah. Right, and that's the reason. Yeah, and vigilantes don't have to answer to anybody. That's the other reason is vigilantes don't have to answer to people.

They answer to themselves and to their own ideals. It's different than having a place in some sort of force, like an air force or whatever, or some sort of company of soldiers. It's different than that because those people answer to something. There is something, they took an oath, whatever. These people, they have their own ideals

that no one asks them to do this and they're doing it. You know, there's a very big difference. There's also professionals. One of the things that they mentioned is there's an OBGYN, by the way, related to United healthcare group, by the way, they mentioned in the article very specifically, but they, this is, there's like an OBGYN. So you're talking about professionals, right?

You're talking about people who in their day jobs are professionals in a field that are probably well off or wealthy that are part of this group. So think about the funding that they have, right? Think about the funding that this type of group can have in order to buy things and get like, you know, electronics and types of surveillance equipment or, you know, guns for people, et cetera.

Pay to move people around the country. Exactly, the amount of money that you can use now, you've expanded. These aren't just people who are, you know, don't have a lot of means. We're talking about people who are in this group that have a lot of means. That's also scary, right?

It's also scary that there's an OBGYN guy who's on one of the boards for these militias. Because like I read this article, Cecil, and like this guy is doing, if he's not doing vigilanteism, he's doing gonzo journalism. Yeah. Right? So there's kind of a fine line there about whether or not he's breaking laws, whether or not his intent is to enforce a law or enforce a rule or whether his intent is to produce a kind of journalism. And so I'm not 100% sure what his intention here is,

but I think like I struggle because I read this story and I'm like, yeah, fundamentally, man, I'm right there with you. Like I agree with where you're trying to go here. And so I sort of like, I don't like the right-wing militia nut jobs because they're, you know, vigilante nut jobs. But at the same time, I'm pro this kind of journalism.

So it's not exactly the same, but I do feel attention. Sure. You feel a little bit of dissonance there. I get it. I, I, you know, his intention is hard to know cause he's a liar. So you don't know, right? Like there's, they go to great pains to show that this guy genuinely does lie about stuff now

he does have a treasure trove of Recorded tape and he also has diaries that he recorded where he was, you know It seems that his motives were to bring to the world This you know this group of people to show that they're doing bad shit behind closed doors and to expose them so this group doesn't exist anymore. I think that those two things seem to be the thing that he is trying to do. But it's hard to know his intention because you're not sure because he like they he's genuinely a person who's untruthful.

So you're not sure whether or not he's a bit it's like the bad narrator in the movie. You're not sure whether or not it's true or not. But regardless, he has all this stuff and he wants to get it out to the world. He wants to give it to reporters and he wants to see if there's some way that police can use it. And the thing that is most frustrating is that some of this stuff may be badly gotten and gotten in a way that's illegal. And if that's the case and it's not usable, then you've wasted all this time, you've exposed this group,

but you've wasted all this time and the people who might have done bad things or were planning to do bad things, you can't actually do and the police can't actually prosecute them because you've poisoned the well of us being able to try them for an offense. And that's actually causing more damage in some ways than exposing them. Yeah, this is, this is interesting because if I take the stance that he wasn't

trying to do police work, but he was trying to do journalism, the problem there is like journalists are also trained on ethics and they are also trained on how to vet sources. They're also trained on how to, you know, not step over certain lines. And there, you know, there's a lot of training that goes into journalism. And in order for them to understand how to produce,

vet and get to the bottom of things in a way that, you know, is, is at least problematic and creates the most social good. That's, we try to train journalists to do that. When you sort of just take it on yourself, what was interesting to me is that he was fantastically successful. Just, I mean, he gave, he got access at these very high levels. He tricked all of these people. At one point, he even gets like some kid involved,

like some like 18, 19 year old kid who becomes like his like, I don't know, like lackey to some degree. Is mentee or something. Yeah. And he gives this kid all these assignments, you know, for him to go do under the guise of mentorship that is just like this tremendous information gathering resource.

He does an enormously good job of doing this sort of infiltration. Yeah. It's really impressive. It really is impressive. And at the same time, you're like, yeah, but once he got all this, he didn't know what to do with any of it. He gives it to ProPublica, but like before he gave it to ProPublica, he had been trying to shop this around and trying to get anybody to pay attention and to bite and to do something with this information.

That's the other problem with like, totally gonzo independent journalism, is that once you get the goods, you don't have any backers. You don't have any like resource or anything to sort of like help you vet it, edit it, you know, fact check it. It's all just stuff in a box. He's a guy with stuff in a box. He got a lot of really interesting shit. And like from that stuff and ProPublica, I think went through great pains to verify and vet it. They interviewed dozens of people. They independently fact-checked stuff that they reported. It does seem like these militias are very much on the rise. Yeah.

Like he is pointing to a movement that is seeing its rebirth in Donald Trump. What do you think about, you know, this article ends with these couple of paragraphs, and I want to read a couple of these. The result was something he had longed hope for, a wave of paranoia inside this militia. he had longed hope for, a wave of paranoia inside this militia. Quote, it's a fucking risky thing we get involved in, the group's founder said in a private message. Trust nobody. There's turncoats everywhere.

Sowing that distrust is why Williams, that vigilante spy, is going on the record, albeit with his original name. Pardon me. Albeit with his original name. Pardon me. Albeit without his original name. He still plans to release thousands of files after the article is published, evidence tying sheriffs and police officers to the movement, his proudest coup, plus other records he hopes would become ammo for lawsuits. But Williams wants to let his former comrades know, and there's a slur

in here by the way, I just want to say that I'm going to read a slur, quote, a faggot is doing this to them, end quote. He thinks his story could be the most effective weapon. Every time militia members make a phone call, attend a meeting or go to a gun rage together, he wants them thinking in the back of their heads, this guy will betray me. And I thought, you know, if that's the, if that's what it's going to do and make it so like there's less cohesion in these groups, less trust in these groups, that's sometimes a good thing. But if you make it so that you can't actually prosecute them, or that you've created a situation where they're now on guard for real investigators that want to

come in and do these things, now you're creating a system that we can't actually do anything with. So was it worth it? Yeah, that was actually the real sticking point for me too. I think he's way overly optimistic. I think he's looking at a short-term result and reading into it, uh, a long-term result. I think, yeah, in the short term, does it sow some seeds of distrust? Of course it does. Right? Is everybody looking over their shoulder like, oh shit, is it Jim? Is it Phil? Is it, you know, Ed? Like, yeah, I 100% believe that. But naturally any organization as obviously robust

and full of people taking it seriously as these militias are, what they're going to do is they're going to harden all of their systems, their communication and trust systems. They're gonna harden those systems. And they're gonna make those systems less penetrable by the FBI and by other news organizations or law enforcement organizations.

So they're gonna make it, ultimately what they're gonna do is teach them to be better, right? This is like, this is the reason you always finish a full course of antibiotics. Right? Yeah, it's a great analogy. You know, like, what we're doing is we're gonna leave

them more resistant to the same tactic. Yeah, it's a great analogy. It's a great analogy. I also thought when I was reading this, thing that struck me was how much it felt like kind of a part-time job and a shitty one at that. There's like Zoom meetings these people have to go to. Like boring Zoom meetings they have to talk to each other on. And I just, it felt like some of the things

he mentioned, I thought, gosh, the dues for this job, for this work, seem really, really expensive to me. Yeah, man, like there's like kind of weirdly a lot of bureaucratic bullshit involved with like, like at one point, like even when he like wants to get like named, he wants to get like a promotion, he has to go and like ask for a promotion and the guy gives him a promotion and he's like, hey, you know, you really did a good

He uses like this corporate bullshit speak, you know when he gives him the promotion He has to get rid of the guy who's already there. He has to get that guy fired The whole thing just feels like I don't know. It's it's a lot less It's a lot less exciting You know, it's it just is. It just sounds like, yeah, like you said, like is if I'm if I'm in a revolution and they want to have a fucking teams meeting about it, like I'm sorry, get on your teams channel. We're sorry. No, I'm done.

That's I'm going to shut my camera off and you'll just see my Shagavara icon. This revolution could have been an email. Yeah, I am actually worried though. Oh yeah, Cecil. Like I'm laughing, but I'm actually worried. Like this is scary. This is a scary thing to see that this guy is part of this and then to see sort of the people involved. And I know we've heard for a long time that these people are involved, right?

I mean, fucking Rage Against the Machine was singing that law enforcement was involved in white supremacy movements years ago. So we knew that they were, but it's weird to see a guy who's part of a smaller militia see that these people are actually part of these, you know, this sort of, you know, this,

this group of people who could be very harmful if left unchecked. I don't know what they are going to do. That's the thing I kept thinking about Cecil is, you know, for the last four years, they didn't really do much. Right? They didn't really do much. Now that Trump's in charge, Trump will just do all the things they want to have done using the actual levers of power. Yeah.

So what's left for these guys to do? Well, I'll tell you what, you don't train with a bunch of fake explosives and guns because you don't want to use explosives and guns. Yeah. I am also of the mind, and maybe I'm wrong about this, so like whatever, but I am also of the mind that these sorts of organizations attract a certain kind of person. And that part of what they're looking for isn't to create a peaceful world that looks like this. It's the violence and excitement.

They want the violence and excitement. They're not, these are not like soldiers trying to just make a more peaceful world that looks like their right wing, you know, dream. And if the right wing dream was in place, they would have no need for these guns. Oh, I'm just, I'm a reluctant soldier picking up my gun to defend my, that's bullshit.

I think these groups attract a certain kind of person who want to commit violence. And all the rest of the ideology stuff may be sincerely held, it may not be, but I think it's fucking flexible because at the end of the day, what they want to do is hurt somebody. Yeah.

You know? And I think that because in part from this article, you know, at one point they're told not to go to, there's a rally or something, I forgot what the rally was, but there was a rally, like, and it was in support of like a civil rights issue and they were, they were told not to go to it. And the one guy said, Oh, I was disappointed.

I wanted to go. I have a lot of aggression. I wanted to get out. So he wasn't, he didn't want to go to this civil rights thing because he wanted to counter protest because of a sincerely held belief. Yeah. He wanted, he's just a guy who wants to fuck shit up. He wanted the excitement.

He wanted a bar fight. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing that strikes me too is, we're hearing Trump's rumblings that he's going to pardon all the January 6th people. So, when you see him at his rallies, when you see Trump at his rallies,

he's said in the past, go ahead and knock those people around, et cetera. Trump doesn't, I don't think it's above Trump to have someone who's his arm to do violence for and then also accept that those people did violence and then he'll be like, what, like you did violence against people I don't like, I don't care. And nothing will happen to you. And so, you know, that's also chilling too, is that something like that could happen. So we see these groups of people who might just be small arms for Trump to go do stuff that he can't maybe right now direct real actual American forces to do, but then he

doesn't care that it actually happens. He's actually happy when they do the things that he wants to see them do, which could be terrorize other parts of the United States that he doesn't like. Yeah, man. I think so. I mean, I think he's not above telling people to stand by. Yeah. Right.

I think we know, you know, if, if, if, would I, would it surprise me if bands of militia began roaming around looking for what they thought were undocumented workers? Yeah. Wouldn't surprise me at all. Would it, would it surprise me if there were another civil rights related protest like the George Floyd protests? Would it surprise me if the police and other institutions of power gave a free pass to these militias to go in and fuck

shit up? Yeah. Wouldn't surprise me a bit. Yeah. Wouldn't surprise me at all. The goal is to undermine democracy. You know, that's the goal from the top. These guys are all just pawns. They're all just people being used. They don't know they're being used, but they're just people being used. Yeah, they don't know any better. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] All right, well thanks for joining us this week.

A sad, terrifying little adventure through militias, but thank you for joining us. We'll be back on Monday with a full show, but we thank you for joining us. We'll be back on Monday with a full show, but we're going to leave you like we always do with the Skeptics Creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno Babylon bullshit. Couched in scientician double bubble toil and trouble, pseudo quasi alternative, acupunctuating,

pressurized, stereogram, pyramidal, free energy, healing, water downward spiral, brain dead, pan, sales pitch, late night info, docutainment. Leo, Pisces, cancer cures, detox, reflex, foot massage, death in towers, tarot cards, psychic healing, crystal balls, bigfoot, yetiens, Churches, Mosques and Synagogues, Temples, Dragons, Giant Worms, Atlantis, Dolphins, Truthers, Birthers, Witches, Wizards, Nuts, Shaman Healers, Evangelists, Conspiracy, Double-Speak, Stigmata nonsense. Expose your sides. Thrust your hands. Bloody, evidential, conclusive. Doubt even this. Thanks for tuning in.

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