On this episode of Monday Thought Crime Monday, we are joined by Jack, Andrew, Blake, and Jack's brother Jack to discuss the events of January 6th, 2011. Jack talks about the events that took place on that day, Andrew talks about how he was subpoenaed by the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Andrew tells us about what happened to him that day.
00:00:26.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:01:46.000I mean, I've got the Capitol right behind me over my shoulder.
00:01:49.000I'm here in Washington, D.C. And if I understand correctly, I am the only one of the four of us who was actually at Capitol Hill on January 6th four years ago today.
00:02:45.000People know that I was subpoenaed by the January 6th committee and we had a lawyer, but I had to go through 10 different lawyers before the 11th said yes to represent me.
00:02:55.000That is how, just let's say, how toxic anything surrounding January 6th was.
00:03:04.000Was that if you were even remotely connected, or not even connected, just in the universe of the discussion, which is where I was.
00:03:54.000So, thoughts, guys, and kind of your lessons over these last four years.
00:03:58.000Wait, wait, I just gotta say, I gotta say, so I have, um, cause I'm me, I read everyone's, um, January 6th testimony that was released publicly and I definitely gave an extra effort to read anyone that I'm friends with.
00:04:14.000So one of my personal favorites was Charlie's January 6th testimony because he didn't answer any questions.
00:07:49.000But no, I mean, look, that was a very expensive, very trying thing unnecessarily, right?
00:07:56.000And because, look, I mean, Steve Bannon went to prison by this very same committee.
00:07:59.000Peter Navarro went to prison from this very same committee.
00:08:02.000I mean, it was, you know, serious stuff.
00:08:04.000And so, but just going through that whole process, it definitely, I'll speak, I can speak candidly about this part.
00:08:12.000There's nothing to talk about, but I'll just let the testimony speak for itself.
00:08:16.000Which is, my testimony will tell the whole story.
00:08:21.000Is this, look, and I think it's very clear that this hardened me in a way where I knew we had to win or else this country was going off a lawfare cliff, the likes of which we would not survive.
00:08:32.000The likes of which that would completely obliterate this nation and destroy this country.
00:09:31.000Because, Charlie, what they're trying to get you to do, and I know you know this, what they're trying to get you to do is throw people under the bus.
00:09:36.000They're saying, throw this person under the bus.
00:09:58.000I'll tell you, Mr. Kirk, if you wish to shorten your response to invoke the Fifth Amendment to something that is not as wordy as that, to save us some time, I'm fine with that.
00:10:10.000But, like, this is the big scandal here, and Charlie hit the nail on the head.
00:10:15.000The fact that he had to go through 10...
00:11:33.000You know, we're going to make sure you get through this.
00:11:35.000It was really comforting, actually, to meet with him and hear the way he does business.
00:11:40.000So if anybody finds themselves in that spot, by all means, give Jeff a call.
00:11:44.000But, I mean, the fact you had to go through that in the first place.
00:11:47.000I mean, talk about what Jack was saying, a real low point.
00:11:50.000And, I mean, we had Timothy Hale on the show.
00:11:55.000It's like this solitary confinement for 14 months.
00:12:00.000What you went through was terrible, but it was nothing compared to what so many...
00:12:05.000Normal American patriots had to experience as a result of...
00:12:10.000It wasn't just a low point for MAGA. It was a low point for the country.
00:12:13.000And the fact that we still have people like Sonny Hostin or Hostin and even now Hakeem Jeffries invoking Pearl Harbor from inside the Capitol after a cringy moment of silence with Chuck Schumer inside the Capitol saying that this was a day that will live in infamy.
00:12:38.000We're still dealing with this stuff that these people are so deranged that they thought it was worthwhile dragging half the country through the mud, calling everybody fascists and Nazis and all of these terrible things.
00:14:05.000Because in 2020, we had COVID and we had the whole George Floyd thing.
00:14:09.000And the regime, the elites, whatever term you want to use for sort of the people who set policy and set the agenda, they went basically all in on lockdowns and that you couldn't say COVID was Chinese and that was a conspiracy theory.
00:14:24.000And they also went all in on the racial reckoning attack.
00:14:29.000And what they did by doing those both at the same time in such a massively dramatic and traumatic way is they staked a ton of their credibility on something that very quickly and obviously turned out to be wrong and bad.
00:14:43.000And that, when they followed it up right after 2020 in January 6th with, oh, and also this is a domestic insurrection and we need more sweeping powers to do all of these things.
00:14:57.000They had just staked so much of the reputation on something, and it blew up.
00:15:02.000And also, thanks to COVID, that's really what created the impetus for building so many more alternative institutions for communicating with people.
00:15:12.000That's what helped Rumble get off the ground, for example.
00:15:15.000And within a few years, Rumble was a thriving ecosystem.
00:15:23.000Excesses of 2020, I think, are what also prompted Elon Musk to say, I'm going to buy Twitter.
00:15:28.000And obviously, him liberating Twitter in 2022, as he did, paved the way for so much of what we've been able to accomplish over the past two years.
00:15:35.000So I think it's really, throughout, it was the hubris and the excess of those in power that drove a lot of what happened.
00:15:44.000It's kind of like I was saying, I don't think...
00:15:47.000He still probably would have pulled it off, but I sometimes wonder, would Donald Trump have faded away if they had just let it alone?
00:15:54.000If they'd said, we're going to stop talking about him, he's banned from everything, and just never report on him.
00:16:24.000And they did, and that really got everyone bonded together, and it laid out clearly what the stakes were, and I think it played a central role in us getting where we are today.
00:16:38.000And that was August, so Charlie's testimony was before...
00:16:44.000I guess at the beginning of the summer of 22 and then this was towards the end of the summer of 22. So yeah, Charlie, your testimony was even before the Mar-a-Lago raid, which was, again, I mean, this was just a time where a lot of people were saying, hey, let's get on the DeSantis train and let's forget about Trump and Trumpism without Trump.
00:17:05.000And, you know, Charlie easily could have walked in there and, you know, maybe life would have been a lot easier to simply go in there and say, well, you know, I mean, you know, Don Jr. said to do this and I was on the phone with the president and I said that and whatever, whatever, you know, but he didn't take the easy road.
00:17:22.000I don't think any of us took the easy road.
00:17:24.000And, you know, it was at a time where it was seemingly wide open, but you know what they say about the wide gate and the narrow path.
00:17:34.000Well, I mean, I want the audience to appreciate just the stakes that not only the country was up against, but from a personal level, I mean, this is no joke, and Charlie, you know, feel free to chime in here as much as you want.
00:17:49.000We were actively discussing what happens if we lose and how to protect ourselves, because we were just assuming that, you know, the suits were going to come in and...
00:18:04.000And to live in that kind of reality, with that actually being a plausible reality, knowing that you didn't...
00:18:13.000You're exercising your free speech and activating people on the ground.
00:18:18.000You're trying to do everything by the stinking book, as close as you possibly can, double, triple, quadruple checking, everything, even holding yourself to a standard that's above what the law even states because you know that if you trip up, even a little bit of paperwork error could land you in the gulag.
00:18:34.000I mean, this is how much scrutiny everything that we touched, everything that we put out, everything that we were doing behind the scenes had to go through.
00:18:44.000And it was simply because of what happened after J6 and what they did to squash political dissent.
00:18:51.000And, I mean, there was a few names, I'm sure, on that list that they had.
00:18:54.000I know there was a file that was huge on Charlie inside the committee.
00:19:32.000And look, I mean, I just I'd lived a little bit of it compared to the January 6th or I mean, not even close.
00:19:37.000I mean, these guys went through absolute hell and people that literally were, you know, is the government going to come after me?
00:19:43.000Is the government going to raid my house?
00:19:45.000And I mean, the only comforting thing is that as soon as Congress was reaching out to us, that there was a pretty good understanding once we started.
00:19:54.000You know, setting up the discussion that the FBI probably was not going to come sweeping.
00:20:05.000But, you know, there was this concern that first month, those first couple of months after January 6th, it was like open season where we were worried that they were just going to go after anybody that had any sort of remote connection.
00:20:22.000And not that there was anything that would be found, but just the public embarrassment and they coming through your office and grabbing your devices and just would have been even more trying.
00:20:48.000Before we move on to other topics, we know that there was that reporting over the weekend regarding pardons for the J6ers, looking at somewhere around 1,000.
00:21:14.000He really made this central to the campaign in general.
00:21:18.000But when it comes down to it, do you think it's going to be more of this blanket idea or is it going to be more of like, you know, sort of a pick and choose kind of thing?
00:21:28.000Not pick and choose, go through, you know, excuse me, categorize, I said that wrong, you know, kind of put them into different buckets and say, OK, these will be day one.
00:21:47.000Yeah, I think there is going to be, the ones that are clear-cut cases, I think are going to be day one.
00:21:53.000I think there's going to be some that received really, really harsh sentences for the trespass, meaning that they might have been guilty of something all of us on this show right now would say.
00:22:14.000I'm not even, you know, suggesting certain people did certain things and didn't, okay?
00:22:18.000But if you did something where you hit a cop or if you vandalized something, and I'm not just talking about walking through the Capitol rotunda.
00:22:26.000I'm saying if you did something we would all agree of common sense, maybe you get that sentence commuted if you've already served your time.
00:22:33.000That might be a different review process.
00:22:35.000I would think there would be very, very few instances where the sentencing would be upheld.
00:22:43.000And I'm not speaking on behalf of the administration here, but I'm even talking about the Proud Boys and things like that, where they got...
00:22:50.000Jack, you probably know the sentencing more specifically, but it was like 20-something years for a seditious conspiracy for the Proud Boys.
00:23:06.000All I know is that even those cases, I would say even the cases where criminality was found, and maybe some of it could be proven, the hammer came down on these people in such a...
00:23:23.000I think it was one of the first times this had been used since the Civil War against somebody.
00:23:32.000And really we have to come back to the fact that these were patriots.
00:23:36.000Most of the vast, vast, vast, vast majority were patriots that were coming to the Capitol.
00:23:41.000Begging the country to look at what people thought were fraudulent votes or that were fraudulent practices, whatever, in the 2020 election.
00:23:52.000They were not there to overthrow the democracy.
00:23:54.000They were not there for any of that stuff that the left likes to say.
00:23:57.000It was not a day that will live in infamy like Pearl Harbor or World War II. This was, I think, a real opportunity to say, hey, we want the states to look at these votes again.
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00:25:35.000So, I think we should talk about this thing Blake has been talking about.
00:25:41.000We used to have this thing that we did on the show We called it Deep Web Reveals, and some of them included explaining things to Charlie Kirk.
00:25:52.000Folks don't know this, that Charlie really does not use the internet.
00:25:55.000He kind of goes around, pokes around here and there, but it's just not something that he's ever done, really, in his life.
00:26:02.000Like the Jonathan Haidt book that came out, The Anxious Mind and the Childhood.
00:26:07.000It's like, Charlie's not on social media ever.
00:26:09.000So, Blake, there was something that came up on the Internet on Reddit that was going pretty viral that I thought would be interesting for us to explain here on ThoughtCrime.
00:26:20.000It's sort of getting back to our old roots on ThoughtCrime here.
00:30:46.000I read this thing from top to bottom and there's multiple posts and then she waits a couple days and then she comes back and you can tell that her thinking has changed.
00:30:55.000It is the best troll job I've ever seen if it's a troll because it actually feels very authentic the way that her thinking develops over time and you can tell that she's then made up her mind about certain things and then...
00:31:10.000She's actually reacting to some of the comments saying that they've shaped her thinking.
00:31:13.000I mean, it's a very well-done troll if it's a troll.
00:31:17.000The other thing is, I actually have lived in the UK for some time.
00:31:38.000I want to read this line just because it is the best line from it and it is what caused me to send it to everyone, which is, so this is the woman saying, I ignored him for the rest of the day, but we spoke at tea and I asked him, why does he want to do this so bad if he's not gay?
00:31:55.000He said he's interested in how gay men's lives differ from straight men's and that, unfortunately, Once the gaycation begins, it is simply impossible for a man to resist, and he must, quote, surrender himself, mind, body, and soul to the gaycation, or be destroyed.
00:33:15.000Although the post does come with trigger warnings for internalized homophobia and accusations of homophobia.
00:33:23.000But people assure her, the commenters assure her that it is not homophobic to be upset that your husband wants to ditch you to go on a gaycation with his brother-in-law.
00:33:35.000She also also at one point, one of the commenters suggests that she could take a straightcation and go up to I think she says Manchester and say whatever happens in Manchester stays in Manchester.
00:33:54.000And at which point he gets very upset and accuses her of abusing the gaycation.
00:34:00.000And not giving the gaycation the proper respect it deserves.
00:35:19.000He wants to keep his family intact and still cheat.
00:35:22.000I mean, I guess one of the best ways to make it so they don't suspect you of cheating with women is to just very loudly say that you're cheating with men.
00:35:32.000That would be a weird way to go about it.
00:35:52.000And I think, first of all, just the idea of you wanting to be better at something, I think is a phenomenal thing.
00:35:59.000Acknowledging that you're not who you yet want to be and that you want to aim at a higher point and that you want to be a better version of yourself.
00:36:10.000I look back at my life, some of the greatest accomplishments I have have been thanks to New Year's resolutions.
00:37:17.000Like, to me, it's like an arbitrary, you know, the calendar is kind of arbitrary to begin with, in the sense that we know that it's a couple of years off from the birth of JC himself.
00:37:28.000So the numbers are like, well, we just sort of started the numbers at one point, and there they are.
00:37:35.000I'm not saying it's arbitrary in the sense of theologically, but that's a different conversation.
00:37:44.000But that being said, a resolution is important, but I would reframe it as a daily resolution.
00:37:49.000Say, this is what I'm going to do today.
00:37:52.000This is what I'm going to do this month.
00:37:54.000This is what I'm going to do in this progression.
00:37:58.000In the military, we had different ranks.
00:37:59.000So this is what I'm going to do while I'm at this rank to get to the next rank.
00:38:02.000This is what I'm going to do in my personal life, etc.
00:38:05.000But just, I don't know, like the idea of like, oh, it's New Year's Eve and now it's 2024 and now it's 2025. It just, to me personally, it never really had much resonance at all.
00:38:13.000And it's kind of like, you know, the cliche, you go to the gym on January 1st, which, you know, actually we did do, by the way.
00:38:21.000So we were in the gym January 1st, January 2nd.
00:38:54.000It's the promise you make that you almost have social approval to break because everyone expects it to fail.
00:39:00.000And what I will say is funny is the one time I, not the one time, but the most memorable time I made a very big shift in my life where I really changed a lot of my behavior all at once.
00:39:10.000I'm not sure why, but it didn't happen at New Year's.
00:39:13.000It happened, I remember it very well, it happened on April Fool's Day.
00:39:24.000It's bad, but I think most of them have vanished off the internet.
00:39:26.000And the time that I fixed it was on April Fool's Day, 2018. No, it was 2017. 2017. And I'm not even entirely sure what happened, but I remember the details of the day very well.
00:39:38.000I went with my roommate, his girlfriend, and a friend of mine, and we went to King's Dominion, an amusement park in central Virginia.
00:39:47.000And while we were driving down there, I thought, You know, it's gross.
00:40:20.000And it was very funny because at the time I remember thinking, I don't think I can maintain this level of intensity for the rest of my life, but I can maintain it as long as I can.
00:41:09.000I just kind of go through like, oh, who are people I haven't contacted before and people I haven't reached out to and just spend a lot of time doing that and trying to just send a bunch of messages.
00:41:25.000So I said I read all those books in 2018 and then this is, you know.
00:41:30.000TMI, but after I had my thing in 2020, Google it if you care, I didn't read a book for six months, and I read a lot more than I did after that happened.
00:41:43.000But I do want to, I want to try to read 50 this year.
00:42:30.000I feel like I'm still living up to a resolution that I am bound and determined to keep.
00:42:35.000Maybe this is too much behind the scenes, but Charlie and I and a few others were in a small room probably about four years ago, Charlie, I want to say.
00:42:45.000Maybe it was five years ago where we mapped out how we wanted to see the Charlie Kirk show grow.
00:43:21.000If you know that you're not going to keep a resolution, then they're useless.
00:43:25.000But the second you honor a promise that you make to yourself, that your yes be yes and your no be no, the more that you believe in yourself internally and you do build this momentum, kind of like what Blake was talking about.
00:43:37.000As soon as he took one step in the right direction and he didn't eat food the next day, he ended up...
00:43:45.000And I think that's the psychology of resolutions, is that once you actually honor something that's hard internally and mentally for you, the next day is easier, and you keep going, and all of a sudden you build this momentum, and the psychology shifts to becoming, I'm not going to do this, why am I even trying to do this, to, wow, I can't believe I made it this far, I really want to keep going.
00:44:10.000Something really profound and powerful happens, and you become a much more powerful person when you start honoring your own resolutions to yourself.
00:44:18.000So I would say, wherever you're at, I love resolutions, they don't have to come at New Year's, but do something really hard and make yourself keep doing it, and you will become a more powerful person as a result of that.
00:44:30.000You can actually trust yourself when you commit to doing something that you're going to follow through, and that's a really powerful way to live your life.