Panic World - How Facebook caused January 6th (with Charlie Warzel)

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

On January 7, 2021, did you think the storming of the capitol would be politically successful? Charlie Warzel joins us on the eve of Donald Trump retaking the White House to weigh that question as he and Ryan trace the origins of the insurrection and its ultimate impact on US politics. Our guest Charlie Warzel is a writer for The Atlantic and for his Substack, Galaxy Brain (https://warzel.substack.com/). You can follow him there or @cwarzel on X and Instagram, or @cwarzel.bsky.social. Catch the extended conversation and plenty of other great bonus content, plus ad-free episodes, by joining our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude, hit them up here: ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, panic world listeners. Have you been curious about what we're putting on our Patreon? Well, if you don't want to pay a lot of money to find out, now's the chance for you. Because we have a promo code. Panic. If you put it in on our Patreon, you'll get the first month for 50 cents. We couldn't make it free because of some reason. So you can pay 50 cents to listen to all of our bonus content.

And now we have quite a lot of it, actually. And we're always adding more stuff. go over to patreon.com slash panic world, type in panic at checkout or whatever the sign-up page looks like. Jesus, Ryan. You go to patreon.com backslash panic world. And when they ask you for money, you put in the promo code, panic, all caps. That's panic all caps. Patreon.com slash panic world. Great. Let's start the episode. Hello, Charlie. Welcome to Panic World. How are you? I'm happy to be here. Happy to be, I'm sure, like what, you guys like to like, you know, ambush, right, with

with things I should know. Oh, you've listened to the show. Perfect. I've done my research. We're getting a reputation. That's good. Yeah. We're going to, research, you know.

We're going to introduce you as an expert, and then we're going to undermine your expertise for about an hour. This is great. Cool. Perfect. To kick things off, just a really simple, easy to answer question, which is like, what's your favorite funny moment from the. January 6th, insurrection.

Oh, man. My funny moment is personal to me. Okay. We did this, like, reporting project when I was at the New York Times where we had all this, like, cell phone location data from people that were, like, there. And we were trying to confirm that they were there. Right. And so there was a morning, like, probably like January 12th or something like that,

where I just went through and was just cold calling people and asking them, were you inside the Capitol building on January 6th. It's just like truly like at 9 in the morning. And just all of them just like stumbling and like fumbling through it and like sometimes confessing. That's good. Can I read you my favorite, you know, ignoring your fantastic work. My favorite piece, my favorite written piece about January 6th?

Yes, please. Okay. So this was written on January 7th, 2021 in what appears to be the 4chan random board B. Of course. And it reads, Imagine spending the better part of the last five years having your brain and ego melted by uninterrupted poll exposure, the 4chan politics board,

flying to Washington in the middle of a pandemic to hear Trump whine about Oprah and Mike Pence at a rally, marching up to Congress on his orders to smash shit and then mill around aimlessly. You go home and you hear that Biden won anyway and all of your favorite Twitter news sources named like Patriot Newsman of the West with avatars of Roman statues

have posted your photo online and are labeling you a gay communist Antifa actor. Then the next day the God Emperor, you paste it into Warhammer memes, puts out a video cucking himself and bending the knee. I'm sorry, those were heinous acts. But please let me tweet again, Jack. You can't leave D.C. because the airlines have dubbed you a flight risk. You can't stay because the cops are actively looking for you after one of their own died. Your roommate at the only hotel that would accept you is a guy named Baste Kekistanni 1488 who wants to show you his goblin slayer torrents, which is like a very sexual assault heavy.

anime, by the way. The sun is going down and you're getting cold. That's good. That's very good. That's basically a short story. I think it's like the most concise portrait of the day for me. Like it lives in my memory. It's beautiful. My other favorite thing was everyone like milling around like the sad hotel lobbies after. Yeah. Kind of like psyched about what they did and then like having the slow reality set and it's like, oh, we're going to jail. You know, we're domestic terrorists though. That's interesting. I'm Ryan Roderick and welcome to Panic World. show about the various witch hunts and vowel freakups bubbling up out of the darkest corners of the internet joining me today is charlie warsall an expert on many dark corners of the internet he's a writer

for the atlantic he's a long-time friend in mine sometimes rival or adversary my regita if you will so to kick off today's episode i have two two halves of one question so the first half is on january 7th 2021. Did you think that the storming of the Capitol was a political success for Trump and his supporters? No. No. I did. Do you think it is successful now? Probably. Yes. Great. Great. Because that is the thesis of today's episode. Sweet. Had to be on board. Because I, I too felt like, oh, okay, we did it. We've made it through. Biden is president. Maybe we can fix things. And as of like, I don't know, November 5th, 2024, I started to think maybe they did win. Yeah, I certainly, to an embarrassing degree, like, overestimated or underestimated, however you want to choose it to do it. Like, the retconning.

Like, I had no idea. Me neither. That people were, like, capable of that much. And, like, should have been, like, truly all the, like, all the shameless actors. were already in place and had been doing that. But like, it's hard to put yourself back in that moment, right? Like, in, like, how people felt, like, on January 6th, how people, like, how mad people were on January 7th.

And, like, in that moment, it was very, very difficult to believe that that was anything other than, like, the dog caught the car. I think I over-indexed the amount of violence that seemed to have been planned but did not happen. you know, the reports of the zip ties and the bombs and sort of like the idea they were going to hang Nancy Pelosi in the front lawn. None of that stuff happened. And so then I was like, okay, like that's good. And now it's like, well, maybe that wasn't even the point to a degree.

But rather a display of force to show that they could if they wanted to, which is sort of something to think about as we go further into these episode. But I want to start at the very beginning, which is a crazy. time called the mid-2010s where social media platforms incentivized or otherwise epically failed to stop people from radicalizing on their sites, which of course all culminates in January 6th. Charlie, you and I were sort of covering a similar story on two sides of the planet at the time. Would you say it's fair that between like, let's say 2014 and 2021, this massive kind of like radicalization wave was spreading across the planet, largely because of basically three or four platforms. Do you feel like that is still a fair assessment now 10 years later?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it felt ridiculous at the same time as it felt like really durable. Yes. I remember you were traveling to like a different country every like two. We'll get there in just a second. Yeah, because I want to know what you know because I wasn't here. So we're going to do a little trade. So to actually to start like, can you talk to me about like, what was America like between like 2014

in 2019 because you weren't at Charlottesville, but you, right, but you were covering a lot of the stuff that kind of led us in that direction. So like, what were the conversations like inside of tech companies with researchers here? Like, were people taking it seriously? There were all these weird moments of like potential energy, especially with the tech platforms, leading up to whatever, let's say, Donald Trump's election. But the ones, like the first one that I really remember that was like very tech platform-centric. It was like Twitter was like dealing with like ISIS and stuff like that. But when Ferguson happened and all the protests happened in Ferguson, it was around almost like

the same time as the Ice Bucket Challenge. And there was this like idea like Facebook's like riding this high of like, man, this is a network for social good, right? Like this thing is like, yeah, sometimes like kids do dumb shit. But like really like ultimately we can harness this to benefit humanity. right and everyone's feeds were just like jammed with ice bucket challenge videos like racking up millions of views or whatever and at the same time these every night for like in that summer for a couple of days there were these huge fully live streamed protests that were going on that felt

like really chaotic in a way that like we weren't really experiencing that like live streamed on the ground in america like we were seeing that like you know overseas but so there were live streams, for instance, of like, the Arab Spring. I mean, there was, like, news coverage, but the idea of the normal person pulling out their phone, I mean, like, here's my portal into social unrest. I had never seen before. Yeah. And even just, like, like, Twitter was, like, extremely alive with this stuff.

And there was nothing. Like, Facebook was, like, a ghost town with it. Like, it was, like, Ferguson was not happening on those platforms. That's cool. And there was this feeling when you would, like, look into it and, like, when I was trying to, like, report on it, that it's like, oh, okay, these are editor. These companies are making editorial decisions based upon what seems good, what seems like sometimes brand friendly or not. And then like Twitter was having its own thing where it was just like a cesspool and they were trying to figure out like how not to like censor ISIS beheadings but also not have them on the platform.

Right. And you had this like this strange groundswell of like, oh, these networks are actually like very good for broadcasting chaos. these companies are making these decisions and also very clear this time they had no fucking clue what they were doing like they were banning people and then bringing them back the reason why I go back to like to Ferguson is it really felt like a little bit of a you know if GamerGate was like the template of how we argue online like Ferguson was like how these chaotic news events will like start to unfold right that's so interesting people on the scene who are you know either just reporting or or

like you said, participating and being bystanders and broadcasting it. But then you have this whole like audience. Yes. Watching participating and like forming these narratives on the fly. And you could sort of watch that like you could watch that whole like division happening between like, you know, choose your own adventure, how you want to interpret this event. And people saying like, oh, this is like a unraveling of the social fabric of America. Look at these people, you know, like horrible racist crap.

like interpretation and then you had all these people that were like this is like a genuine protest movement right right you get like the black lives matter potential out of all of that and it's like it's very interesting to look at that as some of the first like real glimpses there i hadn't connected that but i think you're right in terms of just like how we process these events and how the platforms were just not prepared for them and i remember speaking to i spoke to someone at youtube during the rise of like far right YouTube as we are sort of beginning to notice this stuff. And I actually asked him on the record, I was like, you essentially erased ISIS from the internet. Like, why can't you just do that with neo-Nazis?

And he gave me a quote that, to paraphrase, was essentially like, we can't determine which, who is a Republican and who is a neo-Nazi based on language. And he was like, he's like, unfortunately, ISIS is really good at branding. So like we could just knock their branding down really easily. like far right extremists are a little more fluid with how they operate um which i always kind of held on to for me i was not taking this stuff probably as seriously as i should have because i mean you know this i came from like the four chan age where the idea of like fortune being important i just never they were always sort of like this chaotic other actor i just didn't see them as this

serious social force and it wasn't until i was living in london and brexit happened the summer before trump was elected and i remember waking up the next day being like Trump's going to win. Like this is it. Like this is happening. And just watching that spread across Europe for the next couple of years was, I mean, I think it mirrored what we saw here. It was just a lot of conservatives learning how to use technology much faster than

leftists or liberals. Do you want to know my moment of Trump's going to win? It was, so we were watching all these different things happen, taking them sometimes not seriously at all. But like, you know, our colleague at the time, Joe Bernstein was like. like very good at like putting his finger on like no no like the the chan and like like yes you know video game he was very early with that yeah gamer gay people like there's like a culture there and it may seem like either inscrutable or you know like stupid to you but like

there's something like durable that's building there but for me sort of like seeing that on the on the fringes was the republican national convention and alex jones was like downtown in Cleveland, like with a bullhorn. Was this when he was on the tank? Did he have a tank? I don't know if he had a tank. No, this was different. Yeah, he had a tank later.

Okay, yeah, yeah. But he, like, that, the stuff that was coming out of his mouth was, like, very classic Alex Jones. Like, if you'd been on the internet, you, like, made fun of for a long time. And, like, crowds were just, like, gathering, like, at his feet. That was my moment where I was, like, like, shit.

Like, like, this. Yeah. He's, like, being sort of not welcomed, like, on the floor of the R&C. but like right outside the gates like the people were like no no this like let's hear from this guy and i was like shit so it's it's funny you say this because this has come up a few times in our episodes where like a lot of millennials uh that we interview sort of described this moment at some point in the mid 2010s for everybody had this moment where they're like the funny thing that i was laughing at online people aren't laughing at anymore why aren't they laughing at it and like everyone of our sort

of age cohort seems to have had this moment with technology where and I think it sort of extends to a certain level of media literacy where if you were one of the first generations to grow up online you kind of understood that like Alex Jones is a crazy person and like it's funny because he's like talking about like jet fuel melting steel beams or whatever and it did feel like in the mid 2000s the internet expanded to thanks to platforms like Facebook and YouTube to normal people who may have not had the same sort of exposure to internet irony And I do think that's like a driving force of a lot of this like circa 2016. It's just like context collapse around internet irony.

If you go back and watch InfoWor stuff, which I've done in the from like, because you were just a fan. Yeah, exactly. You just liked it. You know, if you do what you love, you never work a day in your life. So that's what I do with watching Alex Jones clubs. But like 2010-11 Alex Jones clubs. But like 2010-11 Alex Jones, there's even that like performance element to him.

Yes. The turning the frogs gay thing, like the viral clip, there's like so much performance there, almost like lightheartedness, like jestery kind ofness. When you talk to a lot of people who are like deep down that rabbit hole, a lot of people will say like, oh yeah, I watched Alex Jones as a kid for fun, you know? And like. Richard Linklater, I think, right? Yeah.

He's talked about Alex Jones appearing in a skinner darkling. And he's like, yeah, he was just like the crazy guy on public access. Like, I didn't know he'd be like the leader of a neo-Nazi movement. Exactly what you said, right? Like reaches this other audience that treats it like kind of deadly seriously in all these different ways. And then it's like the flywheel, right? Because then they're like, oh, these are true.

But like these are like, like we can sell so many supplements to these people. And then it just like at some point, everyone stops joking. It's not really clear when. So in 2017, when Charlottesville happens, like do you remember the lead up to that in terms of like tech policy like were there were large tech companies aware that this was going to happen like did they did they seem to really understand like what was about to happen in charles field i think my read on that was the 2016 election happens and you know within like 50 minutes like the next morning you know like there's like but people are like hunting around for like who you know

who to blame sort of. Sure. And I think like the platforms do catch like a ton of flack like right in the beginning that is like sort of warranted, also sort of not warranted. You know, it's a mixed bag. It's like a lot of people are like freaked out, angry. Like you had all these like Facebook and Twitter employees like posting like I'm sorry and then deleting the posts like on Wednesday morning after the 2016 election.

Anyway, they were caught in this like, did we fuck up and like sort of defensive crouch? And at the same time, like, you know, they're starting to get called in front of Congress and having those, like, some of those hearings. I think they felt it was much more electoral. Like, it was much more like to do with ads, to do with like interference. Sure. And less to do with like the fact that like, no, no, no. There are these like Facebook groups having people fester in like toxic ideologies or like planning, you know, like militia activities, right? Sure.

Yeah. I don't think Zuckerberg thought about militia activity when he was like. rating girls hotness back at Harvard. Yeah. I think what they realized was like, shit, we have a genuine problem, but probably on the order of a genuine PR problem and not like a genuine societal problem. So I think like right, like leading up into that, Facebook is different than Twitter. Like Twitter was in the process of like detoxify, right?

I mean, for people who don't know this, like Twitter for most of its history was sort of run like a Burning Man village. like it is like it is it has never been a functional company but pre musk it was it was it was like someone's compound in north like new hampshire like it was not a functioning anything it's like a burning man village was run by like mackinsey consultant well which is honestly what burning man is now it's like true true mcgitons being one-shotted by fifth dimensional iawasca demons and like that's essentially what twitter was for about a decade I saw this the other day. I was like going back to try to find like an old story of mine.

And I didn't even in. I don't even remember writing this story. But like somebody sent me like in the email chain of like all the Twitter executives trying to decide whether or not right around this time to ban Miloianopolis. Oh, classic. Absolutely tortured like Jack Dorsey was a CEO at the time. Like all these different, you know, executives there like mid level whatever's like let's loop. And so in, let's do this, like, trying to parse the policy like it's like the Supreme Court, you know, like, yeah. Like the originalists of the whatever and like, you know, like, and it was just ridiculous.

And like, meanwhile, it was like, yeah, well, you know, he is just like making life hell for like tens of thousands of people on this platform or like mercilessly trolling this person. They're like, yes, but did he say the N-word or did he just say N-word? You know, it's like, stop. Just like, stuff. I'm going to anonymize this as best as I can because it was told to me off the record. but I know that this did happen, which is that at a fairly large tech company, they wanted to get rid of Alex Jones at one point,

and they had nothing in their policies that applied blanket. So they had an executive, like the top executive at this company, watched like nine hours of Alex Jones with a finger on the band button just waiting for him to screw up, and he just so happened to do it, and they were able to pull him from the platform, which is just like, guys, like, if you're C-suite is having to like be a community,

moderator. Like at that level, your policy just doesn't work, I don't think. It was this real, like, we're calling balls and strikes here. We're like trying to get Al Capone on tax evasion, you know? No, this is exactly it. Yeah. We're trying to get Al Capone to say like a slur on camera, essentially. On the other side of the planet, like where I was, it was really interesting where you had a bunch of Trump wannabes pop up, you know, like Gertfielders in the Netherlands or Marine LePen in France and European politics doesn't really work the same as American politics. So they didn't do super well. And I was at a lot of these elections. They would not do super well, but parliamentary politics is a long game. So like the Nigel Farages, the AFDs in Germany, they're doing

quite well now because they just kept going, but they were sort of using this playbook. And this was, I think, when Europe and the EU in particular started to get interested in these platforms. Like the conversations that you were having in America, we didn't have in Europe until like a year or two later. And I timestamp that by the sort of final piece here before we get to the actual insurrection and the lead up to it, which is the March 2018 revelation, if you will, about Cambridge Analytica, which as a reminder for listeners who were not following this, Cambridge Analytica was sort of like a content marketing firm that claimed that they could use crazy insidious data science to. micro target you across the internet, but specifically on Facebook. And it was this crazy, overhyped and I believe essentially not real scandal that I do think got a lot of normal people for the first time interested in what Facebook had data on. But what are your thoughts?

That wasn't fucking anything. What are you talking about? It was a well-made key to like fit the lock of like modern discourse at that moment, right? Like, again, we're still in the, like, post-2016. Surely people didn't vote for Donald Trump. Like, surely they were, you know, like, psychologically profiled and do it, right? They were brainwashed. Donald Trump would never win the popular vote.

Essentially, like, the true part of Cambridge Analytica is the idea that, like, platforms are using your information and splicing it granularly to serve you things. Like, we really weren't talking in popular culture about the algorithm or anything like that before that time. That was it, yeah. This may not, like, sound like it makes sense, but, like, it was a lesson that I used when I started, like, covering, like, crypto and Web 3 and all those things. It's so funny. Yeah, me too, actually. When something is, like, wildly complicated like that and, like, you just have all these people who are just, like, can't tell you basic facts, but they can tell you, like, all the web of, like, you know. It's probably not that complicated.

Yeah, it's like literally just buzz for. It doesn't exist. Yeah. Yes. I think so. I mean, it was a classic sort of like. Would you say a classic moral panic? Yes.

And like a liberal conspiracy theory. Yeah. Yeah. True. And one that it's like, again, rooted in like a little bit of fact, like for sure. What's really useful about this story is that it exposes that the media doesn't totally understand what's going on. The platforms don't totally understand what's going on.

The politicians think they understand what's going on, but don't. And it creates an environment where things are clearly ramping up. The wheels are falling off the bus. And after 2016 and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook was determined not to be a story anymore. They were in full defensive position. And the company's focus was primarily to not get blamed for whatever was being caused by their platform. I want to run through for you a bunch of stuff that happens between 2019 and October

2020 because I had forgotten it was getting this crazy across the whole internet. In June 2019, YouTube changes its algorithm to deprioritize borderline content. Do you remember this? The phrase, yes, is. Yeah. Basically stuff that like doesn't violate their policies, but like is bad. So they're like, okay, no more of that. Then a couple months later, at the beginning of 2020, Facebook believes that election-related

violence is on the horizon. after a huge pro-gun protest happens at the Virginia State Capitol. So they say that they're going to start focusing on polarization instead of misinformation. They believe it like those two things are different somehow. What does that mean? It doesn't mean anything. None of this means anything. But what it does mean is that they're no longer fact-checking viral posts.

That's how I interpret it. If a representative from Facebook wants to reach out and tell me why I'm wrong, we'll put it in the next episode. But that's how I interpret it. May of 2020 is the first time. Trump tweets about election fraud, Twitter labels it, which it's never done before, which causes a huge controversy. About a month later, Reddit bans are the Donald because they've just spun out of control and then they create the Donald.

dot win. I think you're like a big user over there, right? Yes. But like, yeah, you're a model. A lot of good. Yeah, you love that. You love to post. A month after that, Facebook announces that they've no.

militarized social movements on the platform and that they're cracking down on it and going specifically after Q&N. Of course, a report in October by TTP, the Tech Transparency Project, this is like their big viral report pre-election shows that they didn't do absolute, they did jack shit. Like nothing actually changed or happened. And then in October 2020, Trump uses a bunch of proud boy terminology in public. and that's when Twitter creates their playbook for preparing for Trump inciting violence. And then in October 14th, all of this gets thrown out the window because of Hunter Biden's laptop.

Oh, man. Yeah. America's boyfriend ruined all of the prep that all these platforms were doing. And suddenly just everyone kind of forgot about the like the nine months of lead up where every platform essentially was like there's going to be violence and the violence is going to start on our platforms. and then it all got thrown out because of a Republican moral panic. Another phenomenal example of something that, like, I saw in the moment, not realizing that it's like, no, no, this is the, we've isolated the incident we're going to be talking about for the next 15 years. Like, the biggest moment of lore in the, you know, we're still talking about it. I know.

He just got parted like a week ago. I mean, we just came through two domestic terrorist incidents, right? right off the heels of Trump being reelected, which I don't think is a coincidence. Obviously, they had different politics attached to them. There was another terrorist attack in Berlin that seemed similarly motivated by kind of this right-wing fervor that's happening online. This stuff isn't going away. In fact, by all accounts, it's become much worse and much more normalized.

And so I wanted to read you something that you wrote after January 6th about people who become election deniers because I feel like you zero in on, look, I'm not a big fan of your writing. Like, I'll be honest. Like, I'm not a big fan. But I do think this one actually does zero in on, sorry, I have to stop necking you. It's just so fun and easy. But I do think this one really zeroes in on the psychology of the kind of person who gets sucked into online political rabbit holes.

And so you wrote, Mr. McGee is 26, a soft-spoken college student and an army veteran from Augusta, Georgia. Look at his Facebook activity today, and you'll find a stream of pro-Trump fanfare and conspiracy theories. He also saw a sharp rise in engagement, more than 50 comments and nearly a dozen shares. On November 6, he wrote that he'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees, garnering 106 comments on 134 likes. By the time he drove from Tennessee, where he lives now to Washington to March in the Capitol, his Facebook group had swelled to more than 61,000 members, and he was eager to meet some of them in person.

And what I think is so fascinating about this is that, like you and I are exposed to levels of internet traffic, that like no human brain should ever have to deal with. So like our incentives are all screwed up as people who publish online. I had never considered the idea before I read this that the average person would be going from like three likes to 100 likes and be like, I'm going to kill every politician. 100%. It's, well, the first time that I really started to notice this was actually right after Trump won in 2016.

And I noticed that like all those people that you would, like, we now know, like, Jack Posobic, like Mike Cernovich, that dude, Bill Mitchell, all those guys, I realize, like, their backgrounds at some point, they were like failing, like content marketers, right? Like they were like trying to do like executive coaching or like some kind of weird thing or like help your grow your business on LinkedIn or like, you know, do some. sort of thing like that and then just like failed and failed and failed and failed and failed and failed. And then like tweeted one time about Donald Trump and it's like, you know, this huge swell of likes. And they're like, that's the thing. That's what I've been chasing for like, you know,

seven years on the internet. Jack Posobic is like one of the most like important in the MAGA ecosystem, like, you know, Twitter influencers, like goes on Alex Jones all the time. He like started out writing Game of Thrones fanfic. And like, is it any good? You know what? I'm not really a connoisseur like you are. I think you should spend some time with it. I should, I should go check it out.

You're right. Okay. But like, it was very clear that like the guy, you know, the thing of mine you just read, like it was these people being like, I've been waiting forever to find somebody to respond to the thing I'm putting out in the world. That's so crazy. You hit this moment where they're like, there it is. And I'll chase this feeling as far as.

as it goes, even if it puts me in jail as a domestic terrorist. That's so wild. This is the kind of energy that we go into the election with, and obviously Biden wins. There's a ton of election denial. YouTube is trying to take down election fraud videos. Twitter refuses to do much other than just sort of like label stuff. Reddit doesn't have any moderation policies around the election that we can see, even though there's a massive spike in fraud claims there.

This is also the same time where the stop the steel group, starts to form on Facebook. It grows by 300,000 people in one day. And that's just the main group. I think it started, obviously, the day after the election day. And we still didn't know what was really going on. And I just remember someone saying, like, check out this page. And I looked at it.

I was like, oh, 7,000 people. Yeah. That's kind of concerning. No big deal. Yeah. And then like, someone's like, no, refresh the page. Like there's 28,000. And I was like, no, it's a 7,000.

refresh it. It's like 52,000. It was like happening so quickly. It was truly, I've like, I've almost never seen that kind of speed. And it was just positively alarming. And before we go to break and sort of talk about the day, I do want to end with this sort of, this quote from Lisa Kaplan, the chief executive of Alethea group. It's like a misinformation watchdog that did an interview with NPR around this time. So she said, there's not a single meme or a single post that it's necessarily going to cause somebody to bring their zip ties to the capital. It's a slow drip narrative that ultimately changes people's perceptions of reality. And I think like a lot of people look at the stop to steal stuff and go like, oh, it grew that

fast because everyone was being brainwashed at that moment. It's like, no, they've been brainwashed for like a decade. And then finally someone just opened the release valve. That's how I view it. And we're going to talk about what happens when you open that release valve. right after the break. So, January 6th, hot or not? Did you like it?

Like, how do you feel? So can I tell you my January 6th story? Oh, I'd love to hear it. Okay, so I was living in Brazil at the time. And the night before, I had eaten some Brazilian sushi that did not smell exactly great. And I had kind of forgotten that January 6th was the next day. So I spent most of the day in the bathroom throwing up and doing other things while following it on my phone.

You had like the, you had like the, um, like the true 4D experience, right? Yes. You're supposed to experience January 6th with like IBS, right? Like exactly. You're gastrointestinal distress. It's great. I have, I have often, though, compared sort of watching America during this time period from overseas.

It's like, you know in a movie when the astronauts see like the bombs from space? Like I watched, I watched Trump get sworn in from a bar in Tokyo. And like, that's how I felt. I was like, oh, America doesn't seem to be doing very well. I was like 12 feet away from the whole Capitol building when he got sworn in. And it felt about the same. You were there for like the American Carnage moment. I was.

Yeah. It started to rain the moment he spoke. Like it was like this kind of like grim day that just like started pouring rain like the moment that Trump took the stage to speak. And it was like this, fuck. This is on the nose. This is tough. Yeah, I mean, Chiaroscuro is real and it can happen in real life. Let's run real quick through what the platforms were doing on January 6th.

So Twitter has no crisis team. It is just, they're just rolling with it like a normal day. Here's one incredible detail that our researcher Adam found. So a senator's aide sent a message to Twitter's safety team saying, It's amazing to me that people like Ron Watkins still have Twitter accounts. So Ron Watkins obviously being like the head of A-Tran, to which Twitter's head of U.S. policy replies, who is Ron Watkins? And then the aide texts back, for real. Facebook is getting 40,000 fake news reports an hour.

It is the most that they've ever received since 2016. And many Facebook employees have later said that they feel. directly responsible for a lot of what happened that day. YouTube hosts multiple people live streaming the attack. Some of them getting their getting tips like money tips from live chats. You and I have talked about this sort of like the the robocop dystop dystopian feeling of like someone getting a tip jar update as they're trashing Nancy Pelosi's

office. And unlike Facebook, which is sort of shut down the search capacity for Stop the Steel, YouTube still allows it. Totally fine. And Twitch didn't have that much. going on that day because Twitch streamer streaming on Twitch is just too complicated to you outside. It's really hard. It's just really hard.

It's not an OBS thing. Yeah, you can't have OBS running on like a like a computer on a, you're pulling like a dolly cart with a gaming PC on it. It would have been pretty sweet though. That would have been cool. Yeah, it's rig. Um, I guess like you, looking back on it, what bothers you the most about sort of the day? I'll be like very honest.

I published a column that day and it was freaking pre-written basically. Like, not to like the level of violence, but like... By the way, for listeners, that is normal in journalism. It's not a conspiracy. We pre-write things like, oh bits, breaking news sometimes. That's a real thing. Yeah, no, it was simply like I was writing about like the protest level, right? And the whole point of the column was like, this is exactly what we're saying.

Like, this didn't happen in a vacuum. It has been leading to this for years. If you were paying attention, you knew that people were mad. You knew that people there was going to be like a release moment like you said They were all headed there There were no guardrails really to like stop this

A lot of people weren't taking it seriously So like that that's what I mean by like That stuff was already like in my brain And it was very easy to you know Express in the moment But I think it's like that that idea of like Not knowing who Ron Watkins is Is like a good thing for like a normal person

But if your job is to be like in charge of the tech platform politics. Like, you should have some understanding. Yeah. So I would say that's the thing that, like, bothers me about the, about, like, the platform response. About a year or two before this, it was pre-pendemic. I want to say it was like 2018, maybe.

I went to Davos, and I went to, like, a pop-up that Facebook had at Davos. And you leave the life, man. Yeah. I mean, you know, I was, I was bouncing around, baby. I was on that live. on that Facebook live stream money. You know, I got to publish direct to Facebook or whatever. But I went to Davos and I bumped into Cheryl Sandberg at like a Facebook pop-up.

And it was I was trying, you know, it was off the record, not that anything was said that was interesting, but I was trying to like gauge like, I mean, there were violent protests like literally down the street specifically about Facebook. And I walked into the Facebook pop-up and all of the screens they had up were just about like hurricane relief that year that Facebook had helped with. It's right. Facebook truly believed possibly up until January 6th that the majority of the use of its platform was for civic engagement in like a healthy good way.

One time like our former colleague at BuzzFeed, John Herman had this great line about Facebook like in 2013, which is basically like. He was so early to this stuff. Yeah. It was basically like when you work at Facebook, you use all of Facebook's products every day. Like you don't use like email. You just use like Messenger.

Right? Like you don't use, like you use Facebook for work. You do all these things. Like your whole life is lived in the Facebook ecosystem in this like sterile way that like no human being in the real world would ever use it. And it like warped the minds of a lot of people working there that was like, no, no, this is like a wonderful networking tool. Right. And it's like like you have no idea what happens when like that piece of technology that you built like enters actual human hands. Like the like the like the first. the first thing they're going to do is create, you know, like, furry groups and then those people are apparently it's AI photos of Jesus made of crabs. Like that seems to be the big one. Well, that's, yeah, that's now. That's because we have good technology. That's because tech is fixed now. So I want to switch gears just slightly because one of my favorite pieces other than the

4chan post, of course, about January 6th was the one that you put together using parlor data. So I wanted to kind of have you talk through for the audience who may have not seen this at the time. what you did, how you did it, and sort of like how it changed your concept of January 6th because I feel like of everything I read, no one really had a better sense of the actual movement and like how people were operating and using technology on the grounds. Yeah. Some of it was parlor data, but it was like we had been doing a lot of like reporting on like, you can download like a weird app that you use one time and that app is like running in

the background just like spying on your location everywhere or selling it to third party data brokers, whatever. So we had access to some of this stuff, some of it in real time. And we had published this like seven part series about all of it. Like we'd found Donald Trump's Secret Service agents in the data, all this crap. And it was just very clear that like this was bad. There was a lot of money to be made. No one was going to stop it.

And then when January 6th happened, part of like the early changing of the narrative was this idea, especially coming from Donald Trump that like he did not incite anything, right? that like he went out there and he gave speech and he said what he said, use some language that like, oh yeah, if you're going to be like super ungenerous, maybe it meant like, you know, go to the Capitol and talk to your representative or something. But like, clearly what he was saying was that if you're pissed off, like, you know, go tell them, like go do something about it, right? Because of that, we realized we had like access to this type of information.

We were like, A, let's see if what it looks like, these little green dots that we had, like, were they in the Capitol? And then it was like, can we see them travel? Right? And it's very clear. And it's like a lot of people at like the Capitol like or like the like the like the ellipse or whatever like listening to Donald Trump speak. And like immediately.

They all go from Trump's rally to a store to buy those like big Oakleys. The gas kit. And then they. Yeah. And it's just like very clear that there's like a cause and effect happening here. Do you love when you're dealing with Donald Trump. reality becomes so abstracted by nonsense that you have to be like people at point A walk to point B. Do you have to break down like literally like how people moved around in a physical space to like get around his like crazy bullshit?

The result of that and it's it happened this entire like election season is you sound insane. You sound crazy. I literally was sifting through. drove some cell phone data to prove that when Donald Trump was like, go to the Capitol, that you went to the Capitol. You seem absolutely nuts. Like, you're just corkboard and stringing to prove reality happened. Yeah.

So in another piece right after that, you described like the people there being cocooned in lies, which I thought was kind of a fun way to think about. I assume permanent brain damage from Facebook exposure. But here's some of the things you live. listed that people believed. That 13 senators were refusing the election results. That Trump was quoting Q&on conspiracies to overturn Georgia. Another quote here in Nashville, federal investigators announced they are looking into

evidence that suggests that Christmas, the Christmas bombing suspect, who everyone forgot about. Remember that guy? Yeah, was it in Nashville? In Nashville, yeah, he blew up Nashville and everyone just sort of moved on from that. Wow. Yeah, apparently he believed in lizard people, which I think is why people forgot about. Like, people don't realize that if the thing you believe is crazy enough, everyone will forget you did it. Like, that's why everyone's, like, obsessed with, like, the CEO killer because his thing's, like, super real.

So we're going to never forget that one. Yeah. But if you believe that, like, the earth is flat and you can dig to the bottom by blowing up, like, a major metropolitan area, people are just going to ignore that because it's too weird. It's true. Also, we will forget about the, the healthcare, uh, CEO killer. Like, we mean, because of the tattoo, like, I'll never forget. That's true. That's true.

No. It's with you forever. Yeah, it's with me forever. Charlie, remind me after the episode to send you Ryan's Luigi fanfic. It's surprisingly moving. Question for both of you, before we move on. Ahead of January 6th, what did you think was going to happen? Did you think that anything like the storming of the Capitol could actually, or would actually happen here?

If I'm being incredibly honest, like the answer, is no in terms of like a coup right or like a capital insurrection but I just remember the sun was setting over the capital and there's this one like AP photo of like all the people like sort of on like the back of the capital and there's like it's getting like really dark and it just looks so fucking ominous and it looks like a renaissance painting yeah yeah yeah yeah and someone tweeted it I remember at the time and was just like I cannot believe this is real that was the feeling you know some guy pulling a gun and shooting someone or, you know, like driving a car through a crowd,

horrifying. But like the act of overtaking one of the most famous buildings in the country, you know, the one that like is sort of the monument to our government, symbolically, it's just fucking bananas. It would have been weird to imagine it that, you know, like people would have thought you were nuts if you were like showed an image like, this is what's going to happen. Ryan, what do you think? Yeah, I feel. similarly, which was that we could see it happening, we could see it building online, obviously.

I just sort of assumed that some kind of adult in the room would stop it before it got to the point it got to. And I look back on that period of time and I realized that's how I felt for four years, essentially. I sort of always just thought like, oh, like someone will step in. Someone will make this not happen. I felt that way about COVID in the first couple weeks. And I, yeah, I look back on all of the work I did across the late 2010s and just think, like, there was no adult in the room.

And I always just assumed there was going to be. And maybe that was because I'm like a young, overparented millennial or whatever. But like, I just always assume that someone would swoop in and, and fix it. And so even like as I was watching from my toilet seat, the Trump supporters storming the. the capital building's lawn, I just kept thinking like, well, they're not going to get inside. And then when they got inside, I was like, well, they're not going to like go into people's offices. And then I was like, well, they're not going to kill people. And luckily they did it. I mean, people did die, but like not like not what they possibly were planning to do.

And so, yeah, I just sort of spent the entire day going, well, clearly someone will stop this. And I mean, they did to a degree, but. it's worth just since we're like in the day right now talking about it like it's worth remembering how fucking grim that moment was like it was like there were like six hours of daylight there was like a vaccine but only like a couple people had it and we weren't sure like you know what the future was going to oh you're talking about like the aesthetics of the actual day like the moment in time yeah no okay yeah you're like cases are surging because it's the winter again there were parts of the outrage in the moment where people were like, they're in the Capitol and they're not masked.

Like, it's like good to just remember. Right. Like, there was this weird. Put on a mask before you storm the Capitol. There is this feeling of palpable tension everywhere. And I think a big part of that is just everyone's stuck in their homes and like relentlessly online. I mean, you did my favorite thing that I guess on this show can do, which is that you led into exactly where the next part of our script is going, which is a quote from one of your pieces.

So I'm going to end our section before we go to break by reading this. But what is perhaps most frightening is that the alternate reality that many Trump supporters and anti-vactors and Q&M believers cling to doesn't exist. A fact that sooner or later will avail itself to many true believers. And it is at that moment of cognitive dissonance, the moment the bubble begins to burst that the plausible danger that experts have been worrying about for years becomes real. And after the break, we're going to talk about whether or not it did become real.

Spoiler, I think it did. It seems like you do too. But we're going to get to that right after some fabulous words from our sponsors. So I kind of already asked you like, you know, how you felt after the day versus how you felt now. But were you surprised by Trump winning in November the second time around? Um, it's surprised maybe in, uh, like, like how it happened, I guess, you know, like, I'm, like, surprised by like, the direction of some of the switches, but surprised by him winning, like, no, like, it is a coin, is a coin flip situation. I think a good place to be always thinking about this stuff is like, especially now on the internet and like, like, you've written a lot about this. Like, nobody really knows what anyone's like doing. Like, it is really kind of difficult to tell. whether or not like you're wrangling a very specific type of vibe that you want to wrangle. Like it was very easy for me to say like to look at, you know,

Trump and like the podcast that he was going on and the type of person and like tell a very clean story that like ultimately ended up being true. But there's a way in which you're like it's hard to know for certain like what's really going on in the in the minds of different people and like where they actually are. I think that's the right way to take this because. I want to throw an idea at you that I've been kind of noodling on recently, which is that essentially content moderation as we understand it died on January 6th. And that the majority of the biggest platform is that we use every day, I think we're probably

going to give it up anyways and switch to AI. But I think a large, I think a large majority of them looked at what happened and we're like, I'm out. Like, I don't know how to deal with you, people. I'm out. And I do think that like everything that we've sort of seen. seen with how the direction meta has gone, the Elon Musk purchase of Twitter, the sort of TVification of YouTube, I think it's all about making sure that they're never hauled into a

congressional hearing again to explain why they destroyed democracy, even if it means that their platforms become shittier on a day-to-day experience. When you look at the way that Mark Zuckerberg talks now and a lot of these sort of like reactionary tech billionaires or whatever, like there is this feeling of. true embarrassment about what happened with COVID. Like this idea of like, we freaked out, right? Like, I believe that. Yeah.

It's like a total, you know, revisionist history thing, like totally not remembering March through, you know, May of the pandemic, like, not remembering the actual feelings of like, you know, all the protests across the country, all this stuff. It's like, they're remembering it from the period of like, yeah, no one wants to go get like a booster shot now because like they're fine if they get. COVID, you know, like everyone's had COVID five million times. They're thinking of it as this massive embarrassing overreaction that was like super left coded, right? Yeah. You have like, oh, we like really, really showed our hands in this embarrassing way and like tamped down all this misinformation.

Meanwhile, it's like there were more trucks in New York City. Do we turn to park into an open air mortuary? And people like, I don't know. I mean, we totally freaked out. We're sorry. And I think it was a genuinely radicalizing moment for them where they're like we never want to be perceived this way we never want this like history again of like looking back and then it all kind of like culminates in January 6th right like we drove interesting i don't know if they feel like they played the part in like driving some of those people nuts but like the content moderation part did radicalize like a number of MAGA people right it was like i think i think that is exactly it yes and And so, yeah, I think they, I think for a lot of people who maybe, maybe they miss the Cambridge illilica stuff or like the people on the right who didn't care about Trump and the content moderation stuff, they get to COVID and they're like, wait, the platforms can do what to what I'm looking at.

Yeah. And I think that I think that's, I think that's, I think that is a totally clear line there. But I do think that if we're going to be talking about sort of the legacy of Jan 6th, it's important to point out that it, it, it, maybe maybe it hasn't caused, but definitely we've seen similar insurrection since. So I wanted to run through a couple of them. So in December, 2022, 25 people were arrested in Germany after they were caught plotting to storm the Bundestag to overthrow the government. Obviously, on January 8, 2023, Brazil had their gulpi or their attempted coup where, do you know the word for Bolsonaro supporters, by the way? No. In Portuguese?

I love it. Bolsomians. Wow. So the balsam minions, they tried to storm. the federal buildings in Brasilia. Brazil was much more aggressive about content moderation after, like their Supreme Court went like scorched earth on YouTube and Facebook. And then November 2024,

there's protesters in like a pro-Pooten region that was tried to secede from Georgia and occupied government buildings and sort of did an insurrection there. And then, of course, most recently, kind of a reverse insurrection we saw with South Korea in 2024 at the end of the year, where South Korean president Yun Suu Kiyol declares martial law and there's a whole big protest. It doesn't totally fit the narrative, but I think it's sort of interesting to point out that

post-American insurrection, I do think that there is this sense that you can just sort of overthrow the government now, which maybe had not been as palpable of an option in modern life before that. Well, there's a rich history of overthrowing the government in the, like, throughout, throughout history, for sure. We didn't, we didn't invent it on January 6th, but to your point, we didn't. To your point, we invented doing it as content. Yes, I think that's, I think that's it. We taught people that you could go super viral if you try to overthrow the government.

And I like, I like the reverse one because the one that just happened, you had like, instead of dudes storming the Capitol and live streaming it and getting like tip jarred donations, you had members of parliament scaling the walls and live streaming it to stop one. And, you know, it's really, it speaks to a very poignant cultural difference there of like lawmakers stepping up in big ways versus stepping aside. And but yeah, I think, I think like what we really did is we turned it into content. We were like very, very good at like, you know, there's nothing going on. You know, NFL playoffs are kind of like we're not quite at the super.

Bowl. Yeah. Why don't we just, you know, make a little, you know, monocultural event? So once again, thank you for taking me right where we needed to go, which is the question that my producer Grant had kind of asked me before you started the recording today, which is, do you feel like January 6 was the end of American monoculture? Of a kind of American monoculture? Because I don't really totally buy the idea we don't have one. I mean, we just did like the pop girly summer. Like, Clearly there is a national conversation in America today, but I do wonder if like the 20th century version of monoculture kind of died on January 6th in America. I don't know. The way that I would answer that what definitely died, we had this monocultural event and we chose to remember it in two separate, completely separate ways.

You know, like, yeah. Like, I think that there is something about that, that, like, I saw recently, like, right after, like, Trump won, and I can't remember who it is, but I saw a number of people, like, dragging up old tweets from people who are, like, supporting Trump now that were, like, on January 6th or January 7th being like, you never forget how you feel in this moment. Like, never for one second. And then now they're like, Mr. Trump, oh, my God. Like, when do I get to come down to Mar-a-Lago?

I think when you have a moment like that that, that every. Everybody watched from 40,000 angles with their own eyes in the moment with genuine shock, whether you were forward or against it. It was like, this is happening? Like, what? Yeah. And then it is remembered completely differently, you know, in good or bad faith, whatever. I think that that does something to a monoculture where it's like, well, what's the fucking point?

You know? Like, truly, like, if we can't decide on whether storing the Capitol was a monoculture, where it's, like, well, what's the fucking point? the thing that happened and that it was, you know, not good. I, it's like, what, what are we doing? It's funny. My knee jerk idea was to compare it to like, the only thing I've ever seen more documented in my life was probably 9-11. And then I was like, oh, but we can't agree about that either.

So like, that might actually just be an American symptom. Yes. Because like you think, for instance, that like 9-11 happened and I know the truth, which is that like it was, you know, an inside job. Sure. And do you do the thing? or have glimmers of like what if the internet was like fully functional on 9-11. And then it's like it's so bad.

It like unboots my brain. I just sort of like like. You're describing having a nightmare? Yes. I've had that nightmare. Yeah. It's a wild thought. Well, I feel like we have seen what it would look like.

The insurrection is as close as probably we've gotten. Absolutely. Rightfully so, right? It drove liberals like mad, right? It made this idea. democracy is on the ballot happen, which is also a thing that like turned a lot of normies off. And it's really interesting to think about it that way too. But you're prosecuting the case here of like January 6th working for Trump. And it's like I'm believing it more and more than more

we're talking about it. Now that we've gone through all of this, do you feel like it was politically successful, let's say? Yeah, I think so. And I think I think I think, I think. think it was politically successful, perhaps not in what it did to, like, in the minds of like the MAGA folks, right? Like, I kind of think they're sort of already like bought in. It's kind of the way it is. But I think what it did is I think it drove the MSNBC style of liberal, rightfully kind of insane, right?

Like, part of it was the bad faith misremembering of what happened, the, the downplaying it, all the different, you know, like FBI actor, you know, stuff like that, like instigators that were there. Then you had, like, the hearings and all this stuff and this notion, again, rightfully so that, like, democracy is under attack from these people, that these people are willfully denying reality. Like, Biden's entire reelection campaign was, the most grim, like, incredibly serious, like, hushed voice. I mean, part of that

was because he was, he's very elderly. Yeah, he's not doing so well. But is this, this, like, notion of, like, there's no celebration, there's no joy, there was no nothing. Like, you have a duty to show up stone-faced and, like, you know, vote to protect this country in this way. And it's, like, not a thing that for, like, two, three years that like a lot of people like want to hear constantly repeated, right?

And it starts to become, even though it happened, right? Even though we just spent all this time talking about how bad it was, how it was a failure on so many different parts of like our society and culture and government, there's still this thing where like people don't necessarily always want to be reminded of it, right? In the same way we just talked about how describing what Donald Trump does can make you sound insane, like just when you're trying to describe it. I think that that's a little bit of like what happened to like Democrats is like describing what's happening to the country makes you sound if not insane just like really like strident and really sort of like like a hall monitor right. I think that's exactly it.

In a lot of ways, the insurrection kind of made the deep state real in the sense that like Donald Trump always wanted to be this anti-establishment candidate. even though, of course, he's connected to some of the oldest dark money that's ever existed in our country with, like, conservative forces that are just like, you know, so powerful. It's like frightening to even think about them. And yet when they show up at the Capitol building, they were able to create this sort of pearl clutching democracies at stake, hall monitors, as you sort of said. And they turned the media into that. They turned the Democratic Party into that. they've kind of created the the boogeyman that they always claimed was there which you know like they were going to kill those people like those people should be freaked out i'm freaked out thinking about it but the average american i don't think really processes that way like they see it is just like yeah things got out of control at a trump rally and now like no one will shut up about it and i can totally understand why they think that right you know when you spend enough time looking in all this stuff like this shit is all on a razor's edge right the things tip or one way or the other and are just vastly different, right?

When we started this, I was like, I think it was probably like helpful. And now I think like, yeah, it placed the entire democratic establishment into this like defensive kind of crouch where it's like we don't have a lot to offer because we just need to tell you how bad it is, you know, like how serious this is. And again, I don't like, I don't totally fault that. Like I think it's you should offer people, you know. politics that make them want to vote for you. But at the same time, like, you're saying, like, it is a 9-11 style trauma that the country faced.

And yet, like, the nature of, like, I guess, you know, trauma or traumatic events in the 21st century is that they happen and we have to move past them, like, very quickly, or you're a hall monitor. Exactly. Trauma, addressing trauma is not cool. You heard it here first, folks, as what Charlie said. And I agree. The body doesn't keep the score unless you're a nerd. But no, I think you're right. And I think that a lot of the checks and balances from the tech world that we were sort of counting on did not work.

And this horrible thing happened. And now many countries around the world know that this horrible thing can happen if they want to and they can use it to go viral or they can use it to sort of create a false consensus. It is just this thing that happened. And now it can happen again and again and again if it wants to, if, you know, if someone wants it to. One final question, actually, for both of you. Go for it. What do you got? If the day had been more violent, do you think we would have been able to memory a hole the way that we have?

It's such a hard question, and it's like a genuinely terrifying question. Because I think, I mean, A, I think the biggest thing is like, they could have maybe overthrown the government, right, if like a bunch of people got, like, if they were extremely violent. I don't know. what if there was violence, more violence, and still so few consequences, right? You, like, shudder to think about that. Ryan, what do you think? Honestly, I did not love the movie Civil War by Alex Garland, but I think that's probably a fair depiction of what would have happened in that timeline if there was a violent

insurrection. I mean, there were scholars talking about America heading into a second civil war throughout out the first Trump presidency. And I think that if there had been politicians who were murdered on January 6th, I don't think that would have made Trump less powerful. But I do think that would have split the country in a way that was extremely dangerous. And that's not to say that we're not in a dangerous timeline now, but it's like a different, it's like a different thing.

Like we're sort of now sleepwalking into an oligarchy or like a soft dictator. leadership, whereas I think if politicians have been executed on January 6th or if the protesters had been organized enough to like hold the building and like encamp there for days or something, we would have been looking at like a much more violent, chaotic period than we ended up getting. That's sort of my reasonable take, I think. I'm not sure. But I do think there was violence that day. It was awful.

There was, you know, people died. But it could have just been so much worse. Yeah. I think that's a double-edged sword. When it like skirts the line and like norms don't change, like, and I think this is part of the democratic problem where they're like, it's fascist. It's like the end of the world. But like everything still functions.

It has the effect of kind of just feeling like entertained. I think we are caught in the middle of that. It is on a knife's edge of going, hey, wire, and nothing works, and that's terrifying. But every time that it's like, the fight kind of seemed like watching a football game, it creates a sense that, like, we can just tune into this each week. It's a really, really good point. I think that's what's, like, really interesting about this, like, United Healthcare Shooter guy. Like, there's this notion of so,

much like fear and pearl clutching around like violence happening and then like a really palpable understanding from a lot of people of like again consequences and again this idea of like you know shaking loose the idea that like something can happen to someone right there's some kind of change or if there is no change people will make it themselves in you know in more radical ways i think it's it's hard to know what would happen but i think you are right that like there are even with January 6th, there was this kind of feeling, and a lot of people, a lot of Americans especially, really believe that, like, these institutions are durable. Like, I can't, I can look away. Like, oh, that was, that was a crazy, you know, like you said, the season finale, right? Like, we'll see where they pick it up. It's a, yeah, it's a season finale. Then the show goes on hiatus for four years, and here we are. We get tuned back in with all of our favorite characters.

There's some new ones, got Elon Musk in the mix. You know, it's like cheers when they replace Diane or whatever. And that seems like a really uplifting and nice note to end this on. So I want to thank you for coming on today's show. If people want to follow you, Charlie, where can they do that? Well, I write for the Atlantic and all my posts go out as a newsletter called Galaxy Brain for them. And I'm on blue sky. Oh, okay.

Cool. It's, yeah. It's been fun. I like it. I like both guys. But yeah, no, thank you. This was a blast. This was super.

This was the most uplifting fun conversation about January 6th I possibly could have imagined. That's awesome. I really, dude, I was going back through, and to both of you, it's like a really fun show. Thank you. I know so much of, like, what you're going to talk about, and I'm, like, locked in for all of them. And I think that's just, like, a testament to, like, you guys make it fun. Thank you. Thank you. I had a few more questions for Charlie after Ryan had to leave, but not questions that are better than what I would have asked.

But I just didn't feel like it, to be honest. Many are saying that it's the best part of the episode. And you can only find that out if you go to patreon.com slash panic world and listen to how good the show would be if there is just one less factor involved. I just think most people won't do that because they were satisfied with what I did. But let's say you aren't. You can go to our Patreon. Patreon.com slash panic world. And you can listen to Grant Scraps.

And if you use a promo code panic in all caps, you get to listen for 50 cents for the month and help us eventually really hate each other. Right now it's a bit, but if you keep giving us enough money, who knows where we'll be if the show gets to continue. You should just think, hmm, is this worth 50 cents? And you can make that decision, you know, yourselves. But in all seriousness, thank you guys. subscribing to our Patreon. It helps us keep the show running and it is fun and I like it. I like, I like our Patreon. It's good. Panic World is a garbage day production. It's written and produced by Grant Irving, hosted by myself with research from the always fantastic Adam Bumis. A huge thanks to

Gabby Cash for designing the incredibly deranged art for this show. And a huge thank you to Kat Rijesk, our lovely video editor. And if you'd like to sponsor an episode, you can can reach out to Multitude, our wonderful partners, multitude. dot productions slash ads. We have a Patreon, which you can find at patreon.com slash panic world. And I'd like to end this episode with an important reminder. Log off and touch grass while you still can.