Steve Baker: Investigative Journalist | EP 299

Take a look behind the curtain with a real whistleblower, an American patriot. Prepare to embrace the uncomfortable truth, because this program has no time for comforting lies. Here is civil liberties enthusiast, Second Amendment defender, and recovering FBI agent Kyle Serafin. Well, hello my friends. Welcome to the Kyle Serafin Show. Today is Thursday. It is May the 2nd, is that right? That's what it says on the

computer here. May the 2nd, we just got raided by the Amrad Pod. Thanks for joining us. If you guys were just watching Steve and Garrett over on Amrad Pod, you can find them at rumble.com/amrad Pod and they do that live on Tuesdays and Thursdays. They dump right into us and we get going at 0930 here Eastern Time on rumble.com/kyle Serif and if you guys are in the live chat, which you can see folks are saying we are rolling already, you guys can hit the like button, you get the

subscribe button. If you want to follow the channel. You can also hit the notifications. That little bell lets you know when we go live. Although I always get those updates like very, very late in the game. Maybe you guys do as well. I get all of Seb Gorka's updates like an hour and a half or two hours after he's already been rolling. Anyway, welcome to our our

channel today. If you guys are watching anywhere else, there is a link in the description to get to rumble.com/kyle Serafin where you can join us over here. And we've got an outstanding and fantastic guest I'm looking forward to. As usual. He may not be a a unique experience over here on the Kyle Serafin Show, but he is one of our favorites. We've got Steve Baker going to jump on in just one second.

Before we do that, let's go ahead and let's go ahead and say thanks to the sponsors that keep the program on the air. And most importantly, I wanted to read a review from one of you coming in from twitterpatriotcoolers.com patriotcoolers.com promo code. Kyle, here you go, This is a good afternoon. Kyle coming from John, heard of you first on the Dan Bongino show, then I heard your story. I subscribe to your podcast. I've been listening ever since.

I'd like to say thanks for your no BS Christian based worldview and commentary, but I also wanted to say I was looking for a high quality cooler to use in BBQ competitions and camping and traveling. So I gave Patriot coolers a try, tried out the 50 quart cooler, that's the same one that I have and I love it, he said. Unfortunately, even though the workmanship was top notch and the quality was excellent, FedEx

damaged it during shipping. They dropped a brake rotor on her or something and so there was only cosmetic damage. No functional damage, no internal damage. Took pictures and sent it to Patriot coolers, let them know and I said I didn't want to return it. I just wanted them to know what happened.

They said they insisted on making it right and that they would either give me a 50% refund on the price I paid or send me a brand new cooler and tell me to keep the old one absolutely blown away by that kind of customer service. You just don't see it anymore. Just wanted to let you know that I'll be a lifelong customer to Patriot coolers. Thanks for keeping up as a sponsor. You betcha. That's how we do it.

They're they're great people. Guys. Promo code Kyle, Kyle at patriotcoolers.com That's how you can go and get your own. The 50 court is the way to go by the way. It's awesome. It's it's great for the weight and it works really well and we appreciate them sponsoring us also. Just say a little quick thanks to my buddies over at Catholic Vote we have a new channel over. It's rumble.com/catholic Vote.

You guys can follow them there. You can go to catholicvote.org and get the loop if you want to get the best 2 to 3 minutes of emails. And they also actually are putting links to our new little podcast that we're doing with them called Between the Lines. Long form commentary, but it's still a short podcast. Does that make sense? It's a long on one topic as opposed to what we do today where we're hitting more and more current events.

Let's not waste any more time. Let's bring the man and my friend, there he is. Well, I got to unmute you up here on the click stand by Mr. Steve Baker. Steve, welcome back to the program. Morning, Kyle. How are you today? You look very dapper. I like that purple on you. Hey, thank you. Thank you. I I'm just trying to explore my inner queerness this morning. You know the stop. How dare you? Oh. That's too well, no, I no, I I

just. I just read this article by the, or at least a post from the Oversight Project at Heritage, posting some new governmental initiative in our farming community to bring queerness to our farming community. Because the Lord knows that for our food development that is the most important thing, that we need to make sure that everybody is well fed and and our food supply is safe. With queer people. Queerness.

Queerness. Everybody who's ever been around a farm knows that's actually one of the most important things that all farmers discuss is sexuality. It's usually referred to as husbandry though, and they're just talking about whether the right animals are getting on top of the other right animals. So maybe we're trying to do some cross pollination there. Some explore the sexuality of animals. Can you even use that word husbandry anymore? Is that that sounds rather

politically incorrect. It probably is, but I'm fairly confident that's the scientific term on it. There are entire degrees in the in agricultural universities which are even those can't get away from the fact that male plus female equals little babies. And then you get more whatever you're looking for, right? I just remember, you know, growing up in and being out in the rural areas of Louisiana, we had to move around the implements of husbandry on the highways.

I have. I have a question for you. As someone who grew up in that area, is it possible that the state of Louisiana's primary export are mosquitoes? Well, believe it or not, there's a state that's worse than Louisiana with regard to mosquitoes, and that's Minnesota. Minnesota is. You wouldn't think so. Land of Lakes, though. That far. What's that? Land of Lakes. It's the water thing. That's. It, that's it. You got over 10,000 lakes, You got, you know, 10 gazillion

mosquitoes. So it's it's pretty bad, really, really bad up there. And I've lived in both extreme, so I can attest. To that I assume that I did a walk across the the country. We went from San Antonio, the Air Force Base there, and we walked all the way out to to the Panhandle of Florida. And Louisiana was hands down the worst. Although very cool too.

Because like some of the neatest people in the middle of nowhere, just on rural Route 90 and you're out there or you know US Hwy. 90 and you're just in the middle of nothing and you can't see anything. And then suddenly there's a bar and you know mom and pop bar and really nice people. But as we were kind of rocking through this area, we double timed it past all of the mosquito pits, which are, I think, growing rice officially. But in reality, it's just

mosquitoes. And we would have black sheets of mosquitoes that hit on the sweat of our bodies and you just wipe them off and you'd have just a handful of them and you probably could eat them if you wanted to die from encephalitis or whatever they have. All right, let's, let's set up what we're going to be talking about today, because I think we've got some fun stuff to get into. We want to talk about the curious case of John Sullivan, which you've been doing some reporting on.

You got some credit from Ryan Riley over at NBC, who you have respect for, but I don't. So that's always fun when the curious, the curious respectfulness comes in. And then I also want to do a discussion about investigative journalism. We have you actually titled on the the the lower third here As an investigative journalist, I think you earn that title. There are others that claim it. I want to kind of do a primer for folks.

We've done a little bit of this, but the sort of the, the critical evaluation tools required to look at novel information coming in from quote UN quote investigative journalists and how do we assess whether or not they are in fact investigating or they're just spewing their own, their own feelings. So that's where I kind of want to go, if that works for you. Yeah, absolutely. Let's talk about John Sullivan. Why is John Sullivan an

interesting case? I want you to kind of set up who he is, what his relevance was to the January 6th, maybe the the legends around January 6th and then who he actually was and and kind of what happened with him. Let me let me lay the groundwork by saying that just the fact that you and I are going to discuss this topic here is going to put you and I both yet again, or should I say even more clearly on a lot of people's

targets. Because you can't, you can't tell the truth about the conspiratorial sacred cows without them painting you, you know, with the same brush. I mean just just, I mean Kyle, look just this morning reading after you posted that we were going to be doing this today, I'm seeing people saying that nobody's going to watch this.

I I've got a I've got a a tweet here from a guy that you know tags you and me and he says that we're part of a multi channel network of shills that have infiltrated the truth movement to attack Trump and Q by attacking General Flynn and I don't even know what that means I. Don't know what that means either. But here's the best part. That guy doesn't know what that

means either. Either that I I've come to the conclusion over the last five or six days especially that these guys are just making shit up. I mean there's because you can't be as disconnected from reality and completely. I mean are they that ignorant? I mean I had, I had this this one guy who's absolutely online saying that he's going to take me down. He's going to reveal the truth about me. He's going to reveal the truth about my connections to all the various underground agencies.

All of the the dark money, all of the the the federal you know psyops groups and he's he's going to prove it all. So he leads, he leads that. So this is, this is what he leads with. He says, For instance, on January 6th, you didn't even attend Trump's speech so that you could be on the front line to attack the Capitol. And I'm like, you know, my videos of me at Trump's speech have been online for over three years. Factually inaccurate. It takes that, yeah, it takes

that much of A of work. I mean, just Googling to prepare yourself for a statement like that and to lay the groundwork for his own veracity and what he's going to do at calling himself an investigative journalist. By the way, I want to there's the ground set. I set you up. There, it sets up what I think when we first spoke, the first time that you and I ever sat down, one of the things that I think I dropped on you that that has resonated was the idea that January 6th was this American

Rorschach test. When you look at it and tell me what you see, I know a lot more about the other things that you see. I can kind of, I can assess the way that you look at the world and whether your ability to evaluate things critically or not and so on. So I'm going to add another thing to it. The way that people reacted to the 2020 COVID hysteria was a it was a fork in the road for many people, including conservatives,

it was definitely a fork. Like, I think 2016 was a fork in the road for for people on the left, They decided that they could either say I don't like Donald Trump, but I'm a human being and we'll see what happens. Maybe it'll be good, maybe it'll be bad. We'll just assess each individual action. That was the left's fork. And some of them just said no matter what happens, this guy is Hitler reincarnate. And so everything he does is bad.

So that was the left. On the right, I think 2020 we went and we saw people who otherwise believe in systems, they believe in institutions like the media. If it's on, like I've had people tell me, well, it's on TV. It must be like, they must have checked that, right?

It's like, well, no, you don't know how TV works or radio or anything else or podcast, but but people had an opportunity and they divorced themselves from all of these pillars, these anchors that help them kind of, like root their sanity in some sort of grounding. And that was the medium. And that was law enforcement. It turns out it was public health, it was the medical institutions and it was government because public health and government were intertwined.

The media was out there pushing the narrative the the the law enforcement was the ones actually out there on the front lines shutting down business and so on. And so they said all these things are are off, all bets are off. And they had two options. Trust no one, which is the old X-Files piece, which is why I actually have The X-Files on my wall.

I have that little I want to believe, but also trust no one or they did what this guy just did which is that any thought that I have that leaps to my head is good enough because that's apparently what that what these institutions are doing. So now I'm going to participate in being whatever, say whatever I say goes. No facts required. So with that said, let's talk about John Sullivan and piss everybody off. Let's do it.

Because that's what. That's what ultimately happens whenever I talk about this character and I, and I have to, and I have to also precursed this, this conversation by saying much of what I have personally dismantled about John Sullivan's conspiratorial reputation over the last six or eight months since I've been working on his story has been dismantling my own presuppositions, my own preconceptions, my own misconceptions about him.

Because I also bought into not just not just a a false narrative, but one that you know, had a pretty solid foundation. In fact, at least there was history. At least there was a lot of video of this guy doing controversial thing. There's a lot of video of this guy doing antifa things. There's a lot of video of this guy calling for the, you know, throwing, you know, taking, ripping Trump out of office, you know, before the November election.

There's a video of this guy carrying scary weapons around and wearing black block and selling that stuff on on his website and in making insightful speeches in in that whole Black Lives Matter activist space. There's plenty of history there. Before we get too deep in, start with that. Well, let me just give people the the context too. John Sullivan, many of you guys have seen him.

He was the guy that filmed the last few moments of Ashley Babbitt. He filmed the, the, the shooting and he's the guy that sold it to CNN, which I understood like we'll get into where that went and monies and all that kind of stuff. But he was on the ground on January 6th. Many people said he was the the best evidence that Antifa was the ones actually leading this charge. He's kind of is he mixed race or is he? Is he part black? He's got darker skin. Yeah, he he's adopted into a

white family. He and his brothers are all black young men adopted into a black family. But you'll see him with the goatee and the mustache. If you if you've seen the photos, you've seen him with like I think a camouflage Trump had on some of the photos of

this going around. He's got kind of like the the net Gator on. So as you guys were thinking about January 6th, and you're thinking of the evidence that there was a bunch of Antifa people running around, John Sullivan is the face of that evidence for most people. And Steve Baker's good, you know, went after the sacred cow of this must be true. So you've been digging into it wherever you want to go with it. Yeah, well it starts just two weeks after January 6th. I interviewed his brother.

You know the the the one thing that must be understood by most people is that John Sullivan, when he was there on January 6th, for whatever his purposes were and whoever else he was connected with or not, whatever his background was or not, he was in fact there shooting a documentary. Or actually, this young lady by the name of Jade Sacker, who was actually an established documentarian, had chosen to do a story on John and his brother James. They were poor opposites politically.

They had a unique background. They had they were adopted, black kids adopted into a white Mormon family. The father was a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the Army. And so there was a unique story. So you've got this one brother that has gone hard left in his activism. The other brother's gone hard right in his activism. One of them is apparently associated with Antifa and BLM. The other guy is associated with the Proud Boys. OK, so that's the that's the basic understanding.

So this girl comes in unique story. I'm going to do this. So when she came to DC on the 5th, she was there to follow John around and whatever his activities were going to be as part of the documentary process. It's what you do when you're a filmmaker.

And so that that was the the the function of their day on on the 6th and then two weeks after that and then of course after all that we saw from John Sullivan and I I consider him at least one of the top three top five most significant figures, certainly most interesting figures of January 6th of all of them and in in the in that learning as quickly as I did

about his brother. I managed to get his brother on a podcast just two weeks later and interviewed him and his name's James Sullivan and James proceeded during this time to tell me a string of lies that I did not know was a string of lies at the time. Turns out the brothers don't like each other very much at all. They are, they are highly competitive. They are not Blood Brothers by the way. They were adopted by, you know, from two different black

parentages. And so they were brought together into this family and they became very competitive as teenagers and sometime in their late teens, they actually became very estranged. And then over the last several years haven't spoken to each other at all, but they've spoken about each other quite a bit more.

So James about John and John about James and and then suddenly with all of this attention that John earned on January 6th because of that video he shot, look we we we would have known about John for his antics on January 6th, but we would have never considered him one of the most interesting figures except for the fact he caught the definitive video of the day. He caught the single most dramatic video of the day, somebody being killed by a law

enforcement officer. All right, So with that, with that said, and then he was on Anderson Cooper that night with the this filmmaker, Jade Sacker. So talking to his brother, his brother proceeded to tell me what you know, I had no reason to not believe him. And you know, I have my own worldview and I have my own presuppositions about how the world works. And here's the brother that ostensibly is coming from the right side of the political Ledger, which I of course, learn more to anyway.

And so consequently I took what he told me about John's activities that day, as you know as as truth to the point that for at least two years I just assumed that what he told me was correct. That John for instance, had been recruiting for some many weeks A to bring an entourage of Antifa

or his followers to DC that day. And there is some discord channels where in fact John was making the attempt to do that and he was putting the invitations out there and he was posting that they were going to meet and have a a confab at the Washington Monument at 11:00 AM on January 6th before they went and did all of their, you know, dastardly deeds.

And so that was the plan. And then he told me that that morning in BLM Square, early that morning that John was there with boxes full of trump hats handing them out in BLM Square to all of the followers that would wear those trump hats and and then obviously go in and start doing their destructive processes as Antifa is known to do. And so that and John was going to leave that.

If we were going to call, if we were going to be in the statement of facts, the the affidavit, this would be the hereafter known as the plan would be throwing on Antifa hats or throwing on Trump hats and going and doing Antifa stuff, you know, essentially as Trump supporters. That's exactly right. And that he was also part of that plan was is that they were his followers from all over the country were going to embed themselves in all of these

buses. So the local buses, you know these groups, right wing groups that were advertising or pro mega groups were advertising that we're going to take 50 people from such and such a town in Kansas or whatever and we're going to go to DC and that they were going to surreptitiously embed themselves in those in those groups and that's how they were going to all arrive and get there. So this was the plan and and some other details as well.

So I carried that with me for the next couple of years, but I never forgot about Sullivan. And then all of a sudden basically Sullivan dropped off of the the radar stream of the mainstream media by if you anybody can Google this if they want to. By July of 2021, he was no longer discussed. He had some legal proceedings. Obviously there were there were things happening in his case because he was arrested. He was charged with a series of

crimes, including felonies. That day he had received payments for his video of Ashley Babbitt being killed in excess of $90,000. He received $35,000 from CNN, $35,000 from NBCA. Few other chunks of change from some other agencies around the country, but the bottom line is, is that once he was arrested, the government sees that money because ostensibly you're not supposed to profit from participating in an illegal event.

So that's their justification for seizing that money, I think by the time they got it. Do you want to tell people, like, how exceptional that amount of money is? Everyone thinks that if you catch this like great shot that suddenly you're going to be wealthy, like even $90,000. It's a lot of money, but it's not that much money. You know that that could be gone in a year.

You caught a pretty good video as well I would say one of the top few most definitive videos right of of Ashley Babbitt actually being wheeled out and that resulted in what kind of payments do you ballpark I've. Probably made over the last three years, somewhere in the realm of about 3 grand off of that video. So 90,000 is relatively exceptional which is it's you're not usually paid for the content that you catch, it's usually the the duration of the video.

You're paid by the minute or by the second, you know, some sort of thing of that and then a little bit of a bump based on how noteworthy it may have been. Yeah, that's that's about it. So for, for instance, when HBOHBO licensed my videos directly for their documentary, which came out I think in November of 21, and they, they licensed a dozen clips from me and and the and the the basic rate for documentary work and for film work is about $1000 a minute.

All right, those 12 clips, it did not even add up to a minute. It added up to about $700.00. All right, so that, so you know, I got a credit on a an HBO documentary, but my grand total was 700 bucks out of the whole, the whole thing. And then they only used like 4 clips, of course licensed 12, they used four and that that's how it works. Right. I just wanted people to have

that clarity of of vision. One the the discrepancy between the cost and and obviously that was the video of the day but still 90 grand is very high and you caught some others that were in in close running to that and that's not where you got paid. Maybe so. But bottom line it, Bottom line is, is is. You're not going to get wealthy

off of one of those. You got to be a guy out there doing it every single day, like DG on the scene or Fort Fisher or some of these other guys that are professional riot chasers. And they're they always seem to be in the right place at the

right time, you know? But you know when you when you're the same, when you're the same guy that catches Kyle Rittenhouse's, you know, three shots, and you're also the same guy that catches the first barricade breach at the January 6th and the 1st breach of the doorway on January. That's a You got a you got a golden horseshoe up your investigative ass, I would say, but. Well, some people, I mean that's just an exposure thing, right?

If you're if you're at enough places, eventually you're going to be in the right place. And I think anyone who's been in crowds that are that are non friendly, you start getting a sense of reading a crowd. Reading a crowd is just like watching guy. I've been on rivers before. You've probably done this too. You get on a river and somebody tells you, oh that that's where the rock is and there's this

there. They can see the hydrology by just looking at the top of the water and they know what's underneath it. I don't know what's underneath it. People who chase crowds like that, they start feeling that energy. They know where things are about to get spicy and they angle themselves, but it takes, you know, exposure to it. So anyway, OK, so that's what's going on. John Sullivan gets the $90,000 hit. He has the money taken away because you can't profit from

your crime. He's been charged and he disappears off the radar somewhere in 2021. In July, you said. Yeah, yeah, July 21 he goes away, he disappears. The only appearance he or mentioned whatsoever is on the 1st anniversary of January for or January 6th on of 22. He did a couple of local television appearances out of Salt Lake City area where he was lived because understand, he was also under house arrest at the time because he was not. He was not put in pretrial

detention. A lot of people go, well, see, he's obviously a plant. He's obviously a fed. He's a favored son of the government narrative because he wasn't put in pretrial detention. Well, he wasn't put in pretrial detention as most of those who were nonviolent were not. There are a couple of exceptions like Enrique Atario, Stewart Rhodes, Ken Harrelson, the Oathkeepers that were not violent, that were also put in

pretrial detention. But that that's a whole another can of worms and a genuine conspiracy that we'll we'll just say. But the the the point being is that he did disappear completely. There were just hundreds and hundreds of motions and things filed back and forth. There was a lot of legal work taking place behind the scenes. It was just not being covered by the press at all. And again, the conspiracy is, well, that they were covering it up.

No, they're just that's just the way that those, these legal affairs correspondence with mainstream media work that they don't typically cover all of the back channel stuff that's going on between trial attorneys and the government, the prosecutors, and what the judge's minute rulings are and things of that nature. Unless it's Donald Trump, then we hear, you know, everything. We hear every time one of them

flushes a toilet. But that's the that's the difference between a a figure like John Sullivan and Donald Trump. But he did popped back up on my radar screen because I was actively watching and waiting for when his trial would happen. Because I had the misconception that in fact maybe they were trying to make this guy's, you know, crime sins, whatever go away. Because he had a he had a couple of judge changes.

Interestingly, another thing added to his conspiracy theory is his first judge was named Sullivan. So you know, with me, I, I've had people ask me online but wasn't wasn't you know, he related to the judge. Was the judge's dad. Was the judge's uncle. You know, think things of that nature, right? Because that's how the system works. The system is so blind that we're willing to give a kid into

the same courtroom as his dad. Yeah, by the way, his dad was a was an adoptive father, as you mentioned. So even that's funny. So it's like.

Right, right. And and then and then to make conspiratorial matters worse is the fact that John and James Sullivan's father, being a former or retired Lieutenant Colonel from the Army, he had the same name exact same name as an Air Force general actually involved in the intelligence community and with some controversial past actually reprimands from the government in in in that regard.

So to this day, that persists is that the Air Force General is his dad, and therefore obviously he's connected. It doesn't matter how many times you set the record straight there, they just don't believe me. Well, this is, this is something we talk about in this program a lot, the illusory truth effect, which is to say that once something gets lodged in someone's brain, then they are unwilling to let that depart with novel and accurate

information. They hold on to the old lie instead of the new truth, which is which is now being exposed. So that's part number one. But the other thing it also tells us just how uncritical those out there making comments who are fully, fully comfortable saying things that are absolutely false, making allegations that you or I are getting a government paycheck that were somehow Deep State operatives. I saw it this morning. Apparently James O'Keefe was out there talking about how Seb Gork

and I work for the CIA. Like all of the stuff is comically stupid. But if you're willing to, but if you've given up the anchors of reality and everything, that I think is a good idea and I'm just going to hold on to it. And not only am I going to hold on to it, I'm going to scream it from the roof and say that it's true because I believe it, that's good enough for me. Then we end up in this world where John Sullivan could be anything and his dad could be a

general. That's a secret that's, you know, working against the government. Like all this stuff is is silliness. But these are all symptoms of a of the of the real disease. The disease is a disconnection from reality. Which is. But it's the saddest part of the whole thing, I think, is that people have just given up on trying to find out what is true with a capital T. And this, and this is how easy it can happen, all right? I consider myself to be a critical thinker.

I'm a very much a skeptic. I'm not somebody that buys into conspiracy theories very easily anyway. But I had his brother implant in my mind two weeks after January 6th that John was handing out MAGA hats in BLM Square. So Fast forward, more than 2 1/2 years later, almost three years later, this kid finally comes to trial, right? And I'm going to be there. I am going to cover this trial.

I'm going to cover the trial of somebody who possibly, quite likely was involved in setting this whole thing up in some manner, some way. Or what, whatever. That's what I'm thinking going into this trial. And one of the things, particularly in a trial like that is that the government is going to put together a video reel of every single moment of that kids life that's ever been on video as part of their presentation, which is what they

did. But more importantly to me, having gone into this with the idea now I've seen videos of John that day, it never registered to me that he was wearing a Black Hat because James had implanted that thought in my head. That it was a Red Hat. Well, that it was he. It was actually a camo hat, but it was a it was a a camo maga hat. Right. But but you're what I'm saying is, is that in your mind this is almost like that change

blindness. You expect to see something and even though you're seeing the reality is different it doesn't necessarily enter in that your brain is replacing it with this new information. Everybody and I think there are pictures of him but they're from other days where he's wearing a Red Hat with the black Gator. That's the famous picture.

So when that's in your head and that's a famous picture that is being explained and and you know they do this all the time with like Trayvon Martin. Everybody has this picture of Trayvon Martin graduating high school even though he was years away from that. So all the OR Michael Brown, you know, this is a game that is played in the media. Introduce the image and let that sit. And in the same way, the brother of this guy, James Sullivan, introduced Red Maga hat into your head.

He's handing him out in the square. You've seen a picture of him with a Red Maga hat. So that's in your mind. It's hard to break that out because again, it's that illusory truth effect. There's a reason why we hold on to that. I've talked about the biology of it. But, you know, you want to be able to hold on to information

that's been repeated. If it's folklore for your people because it might keep you from eating a Berry that kills you or in going down a Cliff that's going to end up in your death, or, you know, some animal that looks friendly but ends up tearing your throat out, whatever that may be. There's a reason why we hold on to these things historically, like going back into antiquity. But anyway, all right, so we've

got this guy. He's wearing a. Candle. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm now, I'm now at the the trial and I'm actually running into and having conversations in the courthouse hallway in the dining hall with John Sullivan and his mother. I'm having conversations and the first thing that I learn is that John Sullivan himself is not the monster that he even presented himself to be. And when I say that monster, you know, the left wing, hard left radical activist, he he was actually very gentle, very well

spoken much. You know he when he's when he's speaking in front of a BLM crowd, he will do what, you know, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris do. They will take on the expectations of that more ghetto kind of you know, voice, whatever. He doesn't speak that way at all. He was raised in a white Mormon military household. And speaks he. Doesn't talk right. And he speaks that way and he's very intelligent and so and so he was a very, very different guy in this, this setting in the

trial itself. Now as I mentioned before, now we're starting to see the videos and and it's it's more than just a day in the life of Sullivan. They're showing history. They're showing the day before. But when the day starts, basically you have to understand, not only are there 2 active cameras going almost all day long, I'm talking about from the time they leave the hotel till the time they get back to

their hotel. You have Jade Sacker's camera going the documentary and you have his camera going. He has at least one or two cameras going at all times. And then of course all of the other interactions they have with CCTV, other open source video captured from police body cams to other people's cell phones, other other photojournalist in the area. There was an amazing avalanche of video of him on that day, and the first thing that kicked my ass was no MAGA hat. Ever.

All day. That photo was from Not That Day. And if I had that wrong in my mind, what else did I have wrong? And all of this goes back to two weeks after January 6th. A guy told you there was a box of red MAGA hats. We're handing them out in BLM Square, and that's going to be the game. And that's what happened on that

day. You've held on to it, you've internalized it, you've made it true in your mind, and then you're debunking it by watching the actual video, this novel truth coming in, presented by the government, which is going after the guy. And I have said multiple times in my writings and in my interviews, podcasts and otherwise, is that I have changed my mind about incidents and characters related to January 6th many, many, many

times. Because the more information, the more new data you get, the more evidence, the more videos that are are revealed. If you're not honest enough with yourself to to learn from the new evidence as is presented, then you're just not an honest broker and you don't deserve to be doing this job. And so when I was faced with that situation, the trial is already on. I am now digging apart and I am shredding every preconception I

had. So as far as I was concerned, in that moment, every single thing that I had carried with me for over 2 1/2 years in my mind about John Sullivan was was all on the table. There were no sacred cows whatsoever. Everything was open to examination, examination at this point and I was open to learn So

what the reality was. This is the critical feature, and This is why I think that our two topics are going to are going to blend very well, this mindset of being open to being wrong, because that's what you're talking about. You had a a preconceived conception or a preconceived notion of who this man was. You believed it. You had information that some people would call evidence, but we would more accurately call it was just a data point.

That was a guy talking. That guy didn't turn out to be an honest broker. He was moving some agenda. You find that out later, but you have this belief based on some information. And then it's kind of like it's, I always think of this is like a Pluto. What is it? Plato's cave, The Cave, The allegory of The Cave, Right. So if people are not familiar with this famous allegory, this famous story, it's people sitting and they're looking at impressions on the wall of a

cave. There are some reflections and they're seeing the shadow and they believe the shadows are the reality, right up until they step out of the mouth of The Cave and realize that they are just seeing a projection. It's a shadow. People are also in three dimensions. They are not just shadowy figures that are projected on the wall. And there is so much more depth and reality to it.

And you have to basically throw out all your notions and say everything that I believed was accurate, that the whole world was a was just a cave, you know, silhouette show. It is not that it is. There's more to it. And I was just sitting in a tiny little area looking through this tiny little scope. You've done that. But this is a broader lesson, I think, for the way people need

to be taking in information. Whatever it is that you want to believe, you should immediately start from the assumption that it's false and try to disprove what it is that you want to believe. That's the I want to believe. But also trust no one attitudes you want to believe. That's human nature you like. Someone talked to you and he told you a story. Why would you not want to believe him? Because it's it's tough to think people sat there and lie to your face or that they don't know.

Anything well it's it's it's especially impactful when the person telling you this is his brother. Right. And you and you also haven't done the background on the brothers yet to find out that they had been estranged for several years and were bitter bitter rivals did not like one another weren't speaking I don't think. I think if I remember what the the mother told me is that I think by January 6th the two brothers hadn't even spoken in like 3 years.

But you're bringing this idea that the concept of brother equals two people that know each other, respect each other, support each other. All the things that you brought, That's your lens of looking at the word brother and who this person would be if this was your brother, perhaps, but but then you'd find out, like, I've got a brother I haven't spoken to in eight years, like on his choice, he just, he hasn't spoken to me. So if you said, oh, this guy has an opinion, you know, he hasn't

seen me in a decade. He doesn't know anything about what I'm about and but you don't know that if you just take the word brother and you assign value to it. So again it's that dismantling all the way down. This is a guy. This is a biological or a familiar relationship but it doesn't mean what their actual personal relationship is. We got to just deconstruct all this stuff. Yeah. It takes a ton of work. I'm. Sure you might. Go ahead.

Yeah, and you might. You might, you might have a brother who is, you know, running a crack house and and you drop a dime on him to the local cops because you're trying to save him. You're doing that out of love for him, you know? So there's there's all of these. You don't. Or I could. Or I could be running a crack house and I don't want the competition, so there could be, you know, there's a lot of motives that can happen with just the same fact pattern.

Anyhow, I just want people to be critical thinkers and and distrust what you and I are saying as well. They should go out there and read it. They, you know, assume that people are not giving you an honest take if you don't know what their angle is. And in the case of the brother, you didn't know his angle.

Yeah. And and I don't, I don't want to spend this whole time going through every single incident of John's day, John's life that I believe does not comport with the conspiracy theories because A, those who have already bought in are not going to let it go anyway. They're going to further attack me and you for even having this conversation. So it doesn't matter anyway.

But but I'll I'll I'll just, I'll give you just an overriding blanket idea about this to kind of allow us to move move on to whichever direction you want to go next. Is that Sullivan? And, And by the way, Sullivan, John Sullivan and having spoken with his parents, interviewed both his mom and his father. We don't all agree on.

My final conclusions after I've put everything through my much more critical thinking filter than I did initially 2, 1/2, three years ago, after I've gotten infinitely more data about him, about his life, about his prior career, his career as an activist in in the BLM ANTIFA space, all of these things. The one thing that I know about him, and this is my conclusion and it's not his father's conclusion, is that I believe that this kid was a wannabe leader in that space.

He actually on his YouTube videos that he posted even after his arrest when he was not supposed to be involved in social media because that was one of his pre pre trial restrictions. He was still posting online and he was calling. He called himself, he typed himself out in his titles of his videos. BLM Antifa leader, he called him. That's what he called himself. All right.

And that, and that almost always is a role that you choose for yourself as opposed to a title, somebody else's scribe. I mean, it's one thing if the media calls you that. Unless he was being sarcastic, is there any chance he was doing that in a in a fun way? He that's what he claimed later.

So when I interviewed him in the courthouse and talked to him about that, 'cause I have screenshots of that, I took screenshots of those, some of those videos and and he indeed flat out told me that he was trolling by doing so. I mean, I can't discount that because if you go look at the bio that I've chosen, I've seen your bio as well. You and I have a sense of humor that is fairly dry to certain

people, especially in writing. So when I tell people I'm a constitutional extremist or a civil liberties enthusiast, that's actually pretty, pretty silly. That's a that's a joke that doesn't land to everybody. And they go, well, he's a constitutional supremeist. It's like, no, no, no. I'm just saying that the basic liberties should be everybody's business. I'm. I'm trying to point myself out that that should be a regular guy thing. Same way yours. I've seen your pronouns that

you've listed which are funny. It's just some people have a a take that in plain writing doesn't always convey. So OK, so he made some arguments that hopefully we're or he was trying to convey. It didn't stop him from being convicted. No, it didn't. But but he so I I was. Let me finish up that first, that first thought and then we'll get into the the aftermath. Is that what I saw from all of the video? And I've seen more video than

anybody else. I'm the only journalist that covered every single minute of his trial. Nobody else did. There were some guys that came in and out. You know, your your buddy Ryan Riley. He came in and out of the courtroom a few times and there was other things going on in. It's a big courthouse. There's a lot of trials going on. They're going, they're going in and out. They're bouncing around.

Yeah. And and you know the guy from Washington Post, guy from WUSA 9, the girl from Gateway Pundit. They're either there were there were some others that came in and out but I sat my ass in that hard bench every single day for 5-6 days of that trial and never left. And and so the point being is, is that I I had access to more information, the good and the bad.

The prosecution and the defense. And then I had more access to video that nobody's seen because John Sullivan himself has given me two hours of unreleased video that I've not gotten permission to release yet. Everybody release it. Release it. I don't have permission. That's not how you are. I don't own it, right.

I don't own it. And and so I'm hoping that once he's transferred to his, you know, wherever he's going to live out the next five or six years of his life, that facility, then he will, he will ultimately be processed and be given access. And I can go sit down with him and do a jailhouse interview with him and I hope to get permission either from him or or his family to to release some of this video. But the is he. Does he have a criminal record? No, not a not a criminal record.

Although he was arrested at another event of BLM style protest in Provo, UT that he helped organize. There was a shooting there and because he was the organizer of the event, he was arrested, as you know, as a as an accessory. But the reality was, is that he had no part in that shooting whatsoever and that he was released and charges were dropped. So no, no federal criminal convictions before. So he should be, he should be, you know, dealing with the first step back as well, which is to

say something like a 50%. He he sentenced to six years, we should see about 50% in change of that served would be the expectation. It it well there the yes there is the first step, but then there is also the January 6th step, we'll just call it. Basically these guys are being forced to serve 75 to 80% of their their time regardless of what you know has and there's controversy about that as well. Understood but. Essentially, the full six years, maybe not, but he's going to be in.

He's going to do hard time in a federal prison, which is not going to be a fun thing for him, which is not what you'd expect for someone who is on the whatever the conspiratorial set up that was leading the MAGA people to their fates, he he also went down for this is the real. Yeah. And I and I and I don't, I don't have to say this to you, but I'll, I'll, I'll do it as well anyway, as a test. What do you think the conspiracy theorists are saying about his six years?

Oh, now we got to make all kinds of excuses. The mental pretzel work, right? Is that what we're talking about? They're going to that. It's not going to actually be served or he's going to be. Yeah, he's going to be, yeah, he's, he's going to be on an island in Bali somewhere or he's going to be in one of the you. Know the DOJ luxury hotels that they put you in instead of jail? Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right, but.

Listen, once, once you go down the rabbit hole of anything I believe is good enough, then you also can go down the rabbit hole of fantasy. It's the reason why people who know nothing about the federal government, who nothing about the DOJ, who know nothing about the process, who've never seen this before, who've never paid attention, they have all these, like, novel ideas, none of which are based in reality or fact.

And so of course, why wouldn't there be a, you know, a DOJ black site on Bali where you can put your, your most favored operative so they can serve their time in a nice way. This is, you know, this is a fantasy world. Our our government is not that functional. You've seen a lot of it recently. I want to give people kind of a little insight on how functional and how capable the US federal government is at pulling off anything from what you've been able to see.

Well, the first thing that you always do is you default to incompetence before you go to malevolence or you know, malfeasance. How often are you right in that in? That guess 99% of the time, because when you're talking about the single the larger the government, the more incompetent it's going to be by default, you know by just by rule. And we have the largest government in the history of the world. Therefore we have the single most incompetent government in

the history of the world. So you have to start there every single time. It's a good assessment by the way. Yes. And so when when with that, with that foundation again laid, you go back to this overview that I have of Sullivan is that he was a wannabe in the space. He was actively self promoting to the extent that even the Antipa and BLM groups were disavowing him, forbidding him to come and associate with them and participate in their own events.

The the Seattle group before January November of 2020 they actually put out a a an alert and a bulletin and said don't let this guy near us. In fact they even said and believed that he was a quote UN quote double agent of the right. And guess who, guess who believes that? His own father. Right, of course.

When is there is there an analogue in another space that we can that we can compare him to as far as somebody that has this kind of back and forth like whether it be in the media space that people are are calling you know this kind of double operator where there's so many conspiracies and many of them are grounded in non reality. I'm just putting you on the spot

for an analogue of some kind. I'm I'm just thinking of the ones that I know that are double operatives and that's yeah, that's my too that's the first that's the first things that come to my mind. You know, you know, there there are there are journalists, for instance, that are absolutely mouthpieces for our intelligence community when when the when the IC, the FBICIA or anybody DoD needs to have a CYA story written for them to help cover or help shape a narrative about

an event. And this has happened with January 6th, because it's happened decades and decades and decades. There's a reason why we call it the Mockingbird. You know, it's it is the IT is in fact known. And I happen to know of a couple of them myself that that is what they do. Yeah, there's one. There's one or two over at the New York Times and there's one or two over at Newsweek. And they are friendly sources that are like official, unofficial channels of disseminating the government

position. What's interesting is those people are always shown as, like, you know, leaking the truth like this leaked memo. But that leak is an intentional leak, which makes it actually sort of like an unofficial press release. They go right to the folks and they get their side of the story. And almost always, it's not like a reveal, it's almost always a

threat. When I look at it, 'cause I know who these guys are, I can't think of the guy's name over at Newsweek, but I know his first name is William. Who am I thinking of? Arkin. Yeah, Arkin, yeah. So and he did the piece about the the sort of like the agave and he sort of like released that. Well, first of all, Steve Friend and I have been talking about that, about that for a while. But when you look at it, that's not a reveal.

That's a threat saying we're going to be coming after these people and you're on notice. And it also tells the people that are friendly to that going like, look, we're going to go after these people. Don't you worry about it. We see them just like you see them. In any case, there are operatives like this that that are real. The problem is, is when some people are an op and other people just act foolishly, then you get those folks that just everything is an op because they

just get so simple. They're overwhelmed in the training environment. We would call that like overwhelmed by circumstances. It's when there's too many stimuli and you just can't process, you just go. Everybody's a Fed, which is so lazy. Well and and I and I, like I said, I keep trying to close this thing up a little bit so we can move on past Sullivan. But let me just give you a couple of a couple of these other examples of of what you were talking about here.

Once they have it and you you mentioned the biology of it and and there there truly is a biological function to this inability to dismiss the reality that you've created in your own mind. But I've had people over the last few days since I did this kind of synopsis about Sullivan on the X after his sentencing hearing on Friday that have sent me photos of who they thought was Sullivan.

Another black guy in the area, even in the area of the OR, or a dark skinned guy in the area of the Babbitt shooting and said see there he is wearing his red MAGA hat. And no, that's not Sullivan and the funny the, the worst ones are the ones that send me the photo of that guy from Sullivan's camera. So it's it's across the room. So Sullivans holding the camera way over here, this guy is across the room. They have no idea that that photo is coming from his camera, right.

It's a screenshot from that and they don't know it. You know, and it's and and it's it's. It's rather it's rather embarrassing when you get into the racial aspect of that is you realize you just fell into the whole deal of you seen one black guy, you've seen them all kind of, because that's exactly what they ended up revealing

themselves as doing. The best thing is, is I was talking to someone the other day about like a, a Chinese operative was looking at, you know, probably assume that some white guy was the same as another white guy. This is, this is, you know, racial stereotypes are are just the way we're programmed for our eyes. It's pattern recognition. It's laziness. But but yeah, that doesn't mean that you're a bad person.

It just means you should always, whatever it is that you assume, you should just try to disprove it. Especially when it's coming from the guy's camera that you're claiming is the guy and the guy's actually holding the camera, as is documented by another camera. So in any case, that's very fun. That's a fun little debunk. Yeah so but these are these types of things are happening.

I mean I've had hundreds of these messages since Saturday of these type no I and they say to you, you can't tell me what I, you know what I saw with my own eyes. Oh yeah, I can. Cause what you saw with your own eyes didn't happen. Right. And eyewitness testimony is famously terrible. It's full of all kinds of things. Reconstructed memory. If you told somebody what happened or they went out and read news media.

This is why it's really hard for juries to go out there and they have to, you know, a jury of your peers that gives you a fair look. That's why it's not, you know the why the standard of of proof in criminal cases is so high, it has to be, you know, beyond any reasonable doubt. You couldn't be a reasonable person who has a doubt. You're supposed to be able to do that, and most people don't even know what that means. I don't even think people can grasp the concept of that in any case.

And I told. I told. I told people in my ex thread on Saturday. I said if you if you have, I'm opening it up for a Q&A, and that's what I called it. I called it a Q&A thread and I will take your respectful and reasonable questions. But as soon as it turns into, you know, this flame war, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna cut you off. I ended up. I know you like to block people.

I just mute them. I. Block them now because I don't want to see the the bar that says that they're muted because I don't want to because I know I'll click on it because I want to know and I just want to get rid of them. I just don't want them to see what I'm doing anymore. So I I I spent more time muting people this weekend than I ever have in all of my years on social media because they can't help themselves. They believe what they saw and they send over their evidence.

That isn't evidence at all. Most people, most of these types of people, they think that their theory is evidence and and if I don't chase their theory, if I don't investigate their theory or their hypothesis or their notion or their hunch that somehow, someway, I'm obviously a Fed myself. And this is you know kind of probably where we're going to go, you know here a little bit more into this call but are this

podcast. But the the point being that the seal up the the the John Sullivan deal is in fact when it came down to the end of the trial or by the in the first couple of days I kind of felt like that the the government was mailing it in a little bit and I was going I even I even tweeted about it there you know there I think there's softball in this thing he may he may really be you know part of the part of the the plan or part of the the the action on J6.

And then they came out with the long knives Kyle and they were brutal. They were brutal. They took him down and and they should and and he was he this kid was a cool collected operator but when they really came after him they broke him because he did testify on his own behalf. And you know you know the rule

is there. It's a very very rare person that can stand up under the cross examination by the prosecutor if it's a good one And he did not stand up Well he he he cracked and he lied and he lied on the stand and the jury caught the lie and. That's devastating. Yeah, your your credibility is gone. There's a reason why. Law enforcement officers, The minute that you lie on the stand, basically your law enforcement career in testifying is over. They call. It supposed to.

Be Yeah, it's supposed to be. It doesn't turn out to be the case. But yeah they call that Giglio. So you have to be truthful at least to the best of your ability or you can always say I don't know which you know that's the that's the Jim comedy technique. It's like I don't recall or I don't know it's a it's a neat trick you can only do it so many times you should recall some

things if it was your case. But but yeah, you honesty and truthfulness, you don't get that back in front of a jury that's once it's done, it's done. And and the easiest way to not have to worry about that is just saying the things that are true and factual and if you're in the right then you're in the right. Doesn't mean that the jury's going to you know decide in your favor. But I I've never been afraid of a cross examination. I I enjoy it.

That's not debate by the way. That's just you asked for information and I will provide it to the best of my ability. So interestingly enough he did get knifed. He did, you know, get convicted. And six years is not the shortest J6 sentence, not even close. And and interestingly again for a nonviolent offender, the judge remanded him into custody immediately after the jury pronounced him guilty on all counts. And typically that's not the case even with January 6th

defendants. I know that that's the what people think. They think that there's 200 people being held in the gulag right now with with you know without due process and they're being denied a trial and and that's not true either. There's like 15 or 16 guys currently being held in pre trial detention and that's it. Now there's hundreds more who are serving time or have served time related to January 6th, but there there's not hundreds being

held without a trial. That's a that's a another bogus misconception floating around. But he was remanded into custody, custody immediately and thrown into isolation. Now, ostensibly and probably rightfully so, the DC jail put him in isolation because they were not going to put him in the Patriot pod, as they call it, at the DC gulag with the other J Sixers. And so they put him into isolation. And as we know, you know, that's torture in and of itself by another, you know, by another

means. And he spent five months before his sentencing hearing in isolation. And even my colleagues in the MSM were aghast when they saw him in the courtroom. He had been mentally already broken and he was not healthy. And from a you know, you see it, you see it in in in the countenance. He was not the same guy they had seen five months before. Isolation is is devastating to the human being, you know, We all need some outlet of another person to validate that we exist

in the world. It seems like the whole No man's an island game. But you know, Count of Monte Cristo style, you can go back and watch Hollywood's partake of it and just imagine yourself sitting in a place for five months where you got nothing but your own thoughts in a brightly lit room, in an uncomfortable bed and nowhere to move around and no freedom of movement. And and your thoughts are only going to go inward and darker and darker.

The spiral's going to be there or you're going to find God and you're going to be on your knees praying, which some people do that as well. And I know friends that have done that. So, you know, people cope with it, but with no training and no background in that sort of thing. And you went out there from, you know, trying to be snarky and funny and then you get and you're being accused of being one thing. They don't, they, they didn't go easy on this guy as the main

point. And he's not living in Bali, in the in the secret DOJ black site for the, you know for the participants that that further the regime's agenda. Yeah, and and for the people that say I'll believe it when I see it, Well, I talk to his mother frequently still and she's broken hearted. I bet those parents love their, they love their son. And just as any parent does, regardless of the crime they commit.

And and and. And they're broken hearted about what's happening to him and they're living through the pain of that themselves and it's real. So this is a real human he did bad things. He said scary words just like all the other J6 defendants that have been overcharged and over prosecuted and over sentenced.

Again, whether we're talking about the scary words that Stewart Rhodes said or we're talking about the scary words that John Sullivan said, if I'm being consistent on both sides, I come down on the side that this guy was in fact, I I wouldn't say wrongly prosecuted, but he was certainly over prosecuted. He was over sentenced.

He did not deserve six years for nonviolent because in by way of comparison, there were in fact violent offenders on January 6th, including those who did in fact assault law enforcement officers who got less time than this nonviolent defendant. Yeah, it's all about profile. It seems like the the higher profile gets more time. You know, six years in federal prison is more than some sex offenders get under, You know,

creating child pornography. There's a lot of them, you know, massive assaults with serious physical injuries, life altering injuries. To the victims on Indian reservations, they'll walk away with, you know, 2-3 years, they'll be out in 18 to 25 months. So these kind of things happen. Six years is a long sentence. That is not a guy who was, you know set up for for success and is smiled on by the government and they let him out the back door while they were too trying to do something.

Anyway, it's it's interesting. The the key is, is that you learn how to change your perspective and you and once again you you saw your own biases, your own instincts coming in from some novel or an initial idea and then you had to dissuade yourself of that and that's hard to do. The only way you do that is you're constantly self evaluating. You said the words I had to, you know, tear up every preconception that I had. Anything that I that that they were all.

In your head it it angers, you know, look, I I'm, I'm one of those guys that I get mad at myself when I'm when I get something wrong. That's why. That's why I tell people all the time and I've even done this in the you know, Capitol police work that I've done. I said, I've told and I've challenged people. I've challenged the Sedition Hunters. I've challenged the Capitol Police.

I've challenged the government. The DOJI said if I've got this wrong give me the data that proves that I'm wrong and I'll write a story about it. And and I I did that recently. You know, I I initially did a story, a story of, you know, about one. One of my sideline stories about officer former officer Harry Dunn was the N word that wasn't right. He was claiming the thing that actually made him famous was not his heroics.

That was all built up. Later he created that scenario after he was made famous by the press for going out and saying that inside the Capitol he had a group that were chanting the N word at him, as many as this is his quote. 30-40 fifty people were chanting the N word at him inside the Capitol.

And of course what I said was, from all the video review I've done, is that it would be absolutely impossible in the most videoed event in the course of human history that if that had taken place, that the MSM would not have led every single January 6th story from then until the end of time with an example of the N word being chanted. It didn't exist. That's right.

And it didn't happen. And in that process I said I in my story, I said if you have evidence, if you have a video, I said send it to me and I'll publish it. Right. And guess what? A sedition hunter sent me one example of a person in the crowd shouting the N word. It wasn't in the Harry done

scenario. Harry was nowhere near sure and nobody could hear it anyway because it was in the the, you know, the the, the, the cacophony of all the the chaos that was going on out there on the West battle line. But it was a cell phone video capturing somebody saying the N word. And so you know what I did? Wrote a story about it. Yeah, I I published. It here's the one but and and the key is is this.

It's like, OK if I tell you something wild happened and you say I don't believe you, and then you get evidence that something that is a 1/5 or 110th or one 100th of the thing that I said that was wild. And you say, oh, well, I'll accept that one, 100th of what you said is true. And thank you for presenting with you. Will you dial back yours, 'cause I'm going to go and adjust that what I said didn't happen, it fractionally happened and you

should do the same. That's how we come towards where truth is, if you come from some wild experience, I mean, I had an experience, you've probably done this before. You've been in a car accident, are you? Are you the best person to say what the car did as the driver or the passenger in the car that was in the accident? No, not not even close. Yeah, you have no idea, Right. So I know based on looking at the reconstruction, what must

have happened. But my experience is that I spun like a top around and around and around for like 35 minutes across, you know, wet roads. And I ended up, you know somehow in a place that didn't make any sense, up over a median and broke an axle on a vehicle, you know, hit the hit the the the rear wheel so hard that it broke the axial inward. None of that makes any sense because it was the driver side

rear. I have absolutely no idea how a left hand turn resulted in the left side of the vehicle getting hit. It should have been the right hand because the right hand was the. I wish I should have been spinning counter clockwise, but somehow I had a counterspin that went counter clockwise or went clockwise rather and I had that that rear tire hit. It's like, I don't know what the hell happened. Anybody who saw it probably saw the car, like, spin and then

switch directions. That must have happened, overcorrected something like that. That's what goes on the guy behind the wheel. They don't know. They just see the horizon spinning around and then suddenly they're swearing and, you know, the vehicle's broken forever. Like, that's a terrible feeling. You don't know necessarily. And so that that that experience of eyewitness testimony is some

of the worst. Unless the eyewitness is a dispassionate observer that's just sitting out and happens to be you know bystander testimony is better than the person who was participating. I don't really care what the the participant said. I've had women come and tell me that this is a wild story. You ready for this? Because this will be fun for you.

You tell me how likely this is. I was on an Indian Reservation and I had two women get into an interview room with us and their parents and their aunts and all the family members which is always a great way to do an interview and and the police chief for the for the res. And they told me that they were in a a verbal confrontation at a casino on the res. Then they got in their cars and they drove home.

And the people that were in the verbal confrontation with them followed them and staked them out for an hour and a half or two hours while they were at another place. And then followed them out to their cars where they sat for another hour and talked. And then followed them all the way to their homes where they stopped them in the roadway, pulled them out of the vehicles, beat them both unconscious,

potentially raped one of them. And then took the vehicle that they had just been pulled out of and stole it. Stole their vehicle. And then went joyriding in it and broke some things and crashed some other stuff. And did all this destruction. Then came back and then put them back into their vehicle. Then drove them back to their house, parked the vehicle that was all wrecked in their parking

spot at their their home. Dragged them out of their car unconscious, tucked them into their beds, put the keys on the counter and lock the door behind them as they left. And that was the story that was pitched. Yeah, I'm totally sold, right. And then you go out there and you look and you're like, OK And then well, it turns out, well, there's actually someone who's videotaping that.

And it was 2 occupants who got into a fight and wrecked their own car and played slalom, you know, with a with a couple of trees and then smashed another vehicle. And then they went home and they parked it and they were too drunk to remember any of it. And there was no sexual assault and there was no evidence of it. And suddenly you're the bad guy because you're like, there's no way that that what you said was true. Occam's razor, it it's it's

actually impossible. Plus there were eyewitnesses, bystanders who didn't care what happened and they didn't see that it was one car on the road. So when you have these kind of things happen, it's like, OK, well, somebody told you something and they have an angle. And somebody told you something about John Sullivan, and he had

an angle. And once you realize what the angle is, you're like, well, you just don't want to pay the insurance payment on that that wrecked new truck that you have, 'cause you got a $75,000 truck with with, you know, $50,000 for the damage. But see, but see that that just that just happened in in one of my most recent stories that I published a couple of weeks ago. The title of the story is No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. And this was the story of a guy

that I I got a call from. He had already been through the trial Jace's J6 trial. He had already been convicted. His sentencing hearing was coming up in a couple of months. He had already petitioned the government three times for a retrial and he had this. He had this incredibly believable story about him having assisted a dozen or so law enforcement officers inside the building and helped them work their way through the the more hostile elements of the

crowd. And then LED them to the door. And that those were the actual law enforcement officers who then Tarik Johnson and the two Oath Keepers then came up the stairs and on the east side. And then then extracted them

through the crowd. This was his story and he told me that he would had been denied access to the videos this exculpatory evidence that would show that he was doing the work of a you know a good person and and assisting law enforcement that day and it was denied to be presented in his trial. And could you please help me find this video very believable, very well spoken gentleman named Damon Beckley.

And I took that call only about four days before I was coincidentally going to be spending an entire week in the Capital CCTV viewing room in DC with two other Blaze analysts that were going with me. And so I thought, OK, well, you know, as it is, I'm going to be there anyway. Sure. I'll assign one of my guys to

check out your story. So I put one of my guys on it and I'm, of course, I'm monitoring, looking over his shoulder as the day progresses for this guy through the Capitol. And actually what we saw on video was 180° out of phase with the story that he gave me over the phone. It just didn't happen his either. His brain was Swiss cheese, like mine was that day. Because I'm not a riot chasing, you know, journalist. That's not what I do.

And and you were just talking what that's what brought this story to mind. When you're talking about a dispassionate observer or or somebody that's experienced, an experienced war correspondent is probably going to handle that situation better than somebody like myself who's not experienced in that situation. That's right. And and and so especially the more experience you have and the more exposure you have to that kind of highly kinetic situation

that's going on around you. And in this particular situation I went I called the gentleman back that night and I was trying to let him down gently and A and a Damon man I I gave him a couple of examples of how my own brain was Swiss cheese that day. I didn't I I don't recall things that I or things that I thought I saw. I didn't see you then when I looked at my own videos I like oh crap I you know I was there.

I don't even remember that and and so I I tried to explain that to him and he said no no he goes you've got to go check and and he tied it in he goes you can see me in John Sullivan's video at the main house door and blah blah blah blah blah and he's and he's just he's carrying on carrying on. He said I I must have. He goes, maybe you're right. But he said I must have went back in because I'm telling you, this happened and we have these. I mean, I have, I have his court

documents. I have everything. I I know exactly when he went in the building. Right when he left the building. We had great photography of him. He was easy to pick out of the crowd on the CCTVI, Put my guy back on it for another day and full day in there. It just didn't happen. So what did this guy do? So now I have done the work to try and help this gentleman and try and help him either get a retrial or at the very least help him in his sentencing. Yep, sounds like you're right.

So what? What do you think was the net result of? That. Oh, I'm sure he was so grateful. He goes online and then starts saying that I deliberately hid. Well, first of all, he told he told his followers online that I had found the exculpatory information and that I had told him that on December 22nd. Well, we never even talked to him. You know, there is such a thing as a call log.

You know, it's very easy to see that I've either texted or spoke to him on December 22nd, so he's very specific about that. And then the second thing he says is that I chose to hide and bury his exculpatory video to help me with my case. Of course. Why not? This is the problem, though, because people, people who are serious and understand how logic works, and a lot of people don't. In our criminal system, you don't prove your innocence. That's not required of you.

We don't do the Perry Mason thing where there's a, you know, the defense attorney is actually out there proving who did the real bad thing, and you were just accidentally set up and it just looked like you. That's not how the system works. They have to prove that you are guilty of the elements of a crime, which are very specific, and they are laid out in a thing called pattern jury instructions. The jury is judging based on an objective set of criteria.

Now, they're going to bring their subjective bias to it, but you have to look at things where they are going to push the envelope and the fact pattern has to show that you did the thing that is being alleged beyond any reasonable doubt and that nobody would question it. And they have to feel very confident that the government proved their case. You don't have to prove you're innocent. You're presumed innocent. This is the nature of of our system and it that's actually the best way to go.

The problem is, is that people, especially folks online, which is why social media is not real. And I don't worry about it. I don't have 130,000 people following me. Anywhere I go, there's just me and sometimes my kids and there's not a reality. To making the argument. You have to prove that you're not a Fed Steve Baker. You have to prove that you're not in bed with something. It's like, no, you need to present evidence that you think what you think is true is actually factually true.

And and this is where we'll we'll wrap up with not a too long thing. But James O'Keefe just came out with a new video yesterday and this was the biggest story he's ever done. That's very embarrassing for him. I think that should be very embarrassing because when you get information, you have to look at the lens that the person is presenting that information in. Do they know that they are being held accountable to their words? Is it testimonial?

In the case of a honey potted, you know, undercover camera, what is the motive of the person that is delivering said information? And in this case it's ACIA Contractor, supposedly a green badge. In the federal service, we have green and blue badges. The blue badges are permanent employees. The green badges are like long term temps. They can be disposed of at any moment. You can kick somebody off a contract and bring somebody new

on any day. Some people do it because they're retired feds and they're a former blue badge and they want to get another income. Some of them just aren't good enough to be hired on in the OR. There's not a need for that permanent position and and the government wants to be able to flex it. So there's a lot of reasons for green badges. This guy flashes an IC badge, which everybody gets. I got you can get into Langley, you can get in the State Department.

You can go any of the buildings. Not a big deal. I got it as a brand new agent for no reason. Just because they said, hey, you should get an IC badge. And I went, oh, OK, I got an IC badge. Now you have in your wallet. It's like and this guy, like, I broke my damn pin on the back of it because I didn't know what the pin was because I never used the thing. I went into the state Department like twice. So you can get this kind of stuff.

But when we look at these people, right, And you evaluate them, when a guy is on a date, what is his goal? What is the objective of the information he's purveying on the date? If you were, you've been on some dates in your life. You've seen some people in some bars. 90% of the time is to get laid. Let's say less less aggressively we would say that he's trying to make the other person like them. Would that be fair? You're trying to OK, You're trying to vibe with another

human being. Yeah, two guys on a date. Yeah, yeah, I'll agree with that. So that's the grinder journalism in this case. The video we just saw was actually a female and a male. The man is significantly older from the female. Based on the hands and the skin that I saw, I just would guess. But that's how James does things.

Very, very beautiful women. And if you're a, let's say, late 40s guy talking to a late 20s, early 30s year old female and you're presenting information and she's really hanging on your every word because you are the most interesting man that she has ever met. A little bit of embellishment goes a long, long way in that setting. I guess if you're a guy that's not married to the truth.

And if your goal is to say that you're some computer cyber analyst guy who's a program manager, which would maybe be like AGS 14 level in the Bureau, that's what our program managers are. So you're a you're a first line supervisor maybe as a contractor and you want to present yourself to be the big Dick guy that knows what the director of the CIA knows. Look, the presidential daily briefings are given out by different intelligence agencies.

They all bring their, their, their stuff to it, right. There's not green Badgers on that. There aren't contractors because that's a permit. That's a serious, serious thing. They may be green Badge reporting and analysis, that's on it. But they're not the ones that see have eyes on to the to the daily briefing. Those are long term, trusted people. Anyhow, and and let's be honest, the guys that really know this kind of stuff, they're not going to talk about it. They're smart enough.

Not to. Right. We don't. Don't do it. If you've been in this for a long time, if you're looking for clout, you're going to talk about it. The people that I know that worked at the CIA, it took forever to get them to tell me that They were the guys that I knew, that worked in special forces that were serious, quote, UN quote, quiet professionals. The ones that we thought we were dealing with. Those guys are very cagey about it. What did you do for a living?

I was in the army. Oh, are you still in the army? No, no, I retired. What kind of work did you do? You know, I was. I was an infantryman. And you're like. OK or or I'm I'm in public relations or something. Yeah, they might give you a fake story. The ones that are smart would weave in the truth. And if you get down, oh, you're an infantryman by training, is that you're in love in Bravo? No, I worked on some other kind of projects. Interesting, like, you have some deployments.

Yeah, I've got 11 deployments in the last 18 years and you're like, cool. Were you at a Bravo? I have, I have AI have a family member in the IC and they don't talk about it. It's just a need. To know basis and you don't need to know. And when asked when asked, the first lie they tell is about what they do for a career. Right. There's a There's this old kind of goofy thing, and the FBI doesn't have secret agents, even though the agents seem to think that they are. And we know this now from

dealing with them a lot. But the question was, is how you going to get someone to trust you if you can't even tell them what you do for a living? It's like, I work for the FBI and I work in counterintelligence. I'm looking for people that want to help me in the mission of America. If you're on the wrong team, you're still in America. This is still my backyard. There's one way to operate. Or you can go out there and be like, well, I work for the government.

I work for the DOJ. It's like, do you work for the DOJ? No, You're an FBI agent. Just be who you are. And anyway, when people try to embellish things and they want to dance around the edges, the oldest game in DC is called Spot the Spook. Everybody does it. You've seen it. Everybody wants to spot the spook. It's like, oh, are you really, Are you really working for this part of the government or you work for the government?

The people who try to play up and get mysterious about their jobs and try to act like they have a lot of influence usually have none. And the ones that try to downplay it are trying to ward off that thing because they know they can't talk about it or they lose their jobs. I will take the person that is very nonchalant and I will take them way more seriously than the guy being like, here's my badge. I work in the IC, look what I do for a living. I work in the China Mission Control unit.

It's like you're full of shit. You don't know things and and I know that because you're not trustworthy, because you're on a date with a stranger telling them about the stuff that you're not supposed to be talking about. It's because you don't know enough for it to matter. And by the way if anybody read the Durham report or anybody saw the, you know, the Crossfire Hurricane 2019, Horowitz Report,

we already know this stuff. We know the government went after Trump like that's been it's been proven by actual investigators, not by goofballs that claim it. Or some pretty. Girl and and you and you know and you know that I've I've played spot to spook because when I I was involved in a particular meeting with a particular guy that I've written a particular story about and this was an off the record meeting.

And all of a sudden I see, I see that guy that kind of shows up and he's pretending to be. And then all of a sudden he does this with his phone pointing at you. And then and as soon as I see that I start, as soon as I see that, I start taking pictures of them and I've sent you. That's right. Yeah. And and those people tend to be very like either incompetent or new sort of surreptitious photographers.

We've had them follow us and we're pretty confident that when we were in Florida, me and and Steve Friend and and we're out with Garrett O'boyle and and George Hill and like you know you walk around, you see totally alerting behavior because you used to watch people do that behavior and you would critique it. This is the easiest thing that I was going to end with. As someone who used to be a paramedic and I was an instructor, I instructed new

paramedics. Even though I didn't have a ton of experience in time, I'm a very dispassionate observer. When you are working on a patient, you only know so much. There's a reason why in any code or trauma Bay, they always assigned one nurse to just document what happened, not hands on stands back. And just this is what happened, this what the vitals were, this is how the patient reacted. This is when we pushed it. This was the time stamp.

They do that without getting their hands involved because the minute that you get involved in the treatment or in the scene or in the moment, you lose objectivity.

You can't be objective. And so I will have very competent, brand new squared away, knows all the book answers to everything going on. Paramedics who forget to do basic treatments like maybe give somebody Zofran because they keep ripping off their mask and vomiting and all you want them to do is get oxygen because that's the problem. They're having trouble breathing and you just let them do it because they'll never know it unless you let them go through

the experience. You ask them those Socratic questions, they come to the truth, like, oh shit, there was a better way to handle that, and I didn't do it. Now I'll know the next time I'm in the fray that when I'm seeing this behavior, I've now done it. You have to get people to learn how to divorce themself and turn down the volume on their

personal experience. We're seeing this massive amount online of people just failing to be skeptics to say to question their own assumptions the way you did with John Sullivan, the way that we should be doing with every bit of data that comes out. We all know that there is corruption in our government, and we all want to believe it all the time. Like, don't. Like the minute that you want to believe something is the one time that you should be the most skeptical.

That's why you're an investigative journalist. That's why you're able to do the thing you do. That's why you and I are buddies and why I like listening to what you have to say. I I know that you will disconnect and you will, you know, disable that, that instinct and you'll fight it, and then you'll go and prove yourself wrong if you can 'cause that's actually a win too. I I I think it's probably the way to approach every particular situation in which you're investigating.

Because if you are investigating with the end goal already in mind, then you're going to do everything in your power to achieve your presupposition. Yep. And that should never. It's the opposite of science. Like you said hypothesis earlier, the whole point of science is you think that something is going on. You go out and attempt to disprove it. You create, you create an experiment to disprove it, and if that's experiment is not successful, successful, then you

do it again and you do it again. And you keep trying to disprove the hypothesis until you run out of any logical experiments to evaluate whatever your assumptions are. And then you can basically say it's more likely true than not. Even that is not conclusive, but most people don't even have the word evidence and know what that is. And unfortunately, you not finding the thing that the guy told you that he knew happened on a day when his brain was Swiss cheese. But it's not evidence that

you're a fed. It turns out, even if that's the common supposition it it's very frustrating for for those who are watching it, I think. But anyway, if you listen to this podcast, you guys know, you know what it's all about and you know what we're trying to do. We're trying to get to T capital T Truth by trying to just dismantle our own assumptions as we do so, and knowing that we're fallible. Kyle, as usual. Man, it's a pleasure, always. I appreciate you you make my thoughts more clear.

I hope that's the same. I know you're going to be writing a piece on this. Where can people follow the the work? What's the best place to follow your work? Right now? I know we've kind of moved from Sub Stack and now you're doing the Blaze. Where do you? Want. Yeah, Locals. Locals. Yeah, I'm still on.

I'm still on the locals. And I do provide some kind of insider details about what's going on with my life, about what's going on with my case, even some behind the scenes things on some of the stories that I work on. And so they can definitely go there and they can basically find me anywhere at TPC for USA. And and in terms of my locals, it's just TPC, the number for usa.com obviously on X at at TPC 4, USA, same thing on Facebook TPC 4, USA.

But all of my stories that are I'm working on with the Blaze, be they video or or written articles, they've actually given me my own URL and it's theblaze.com/truth. I actually feel pretty honored that they they gave me that theblaze.com/truth. I will add that to the show notes for those of you who are looking for it, folks. Follow Steve Baker who is our friend and a suspendable and an awesome guy. And thanks for jumping on with me on this Thursday morning my friend.

As always, thank you Kyle. All right bud, let's let's pivot over here. We'll say thanks to the folks that support the program. If you guys want to support us, you can also get something tasty out of it. Matt Hat jerky.com/kyle again, that's Matt. Hat jerky.com/kyle. Matt with two TS Hat with 1T Jerky. Use the promo code. Kyle, Kyle, you'll save 20%. That's a good deal. It's great product, it's flavorful, it's tasty, and we only promote it because I actually eat it myself.

I really like it. It's a high protein snack that has a, you know, natural natural creation. It's not some garbage you get out of a grocery store or you get it out of a out of a a gas station. Check them out mat hat jerky.com/kyle that supports us with a a tasty product that you might want. We'll also we'll go ahead and let you guys know that you can support us by going to my pillow too.

I'm still waiting. I have waited for it with a long, long slow boat from from Minnesota, mypillow.com/kyle. I'm trying to get my bath sheets, folks. I hate having lousy towels and my towels are starting to get to that point where they're just like ragged and they start smelling no matter how many times you wash them. Use promo code Kyle over on mypillow.com/kyle mypillow.com/kyle promo code Kyle saves you up to 50%. I used it myself. I think it was like a 30%

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Lastly, we'll support the merch store and you guys can do so as well. That's my friend Garrett o'boyle making the shirts like this patch. Oh, this patch on this side. Here it is. We've got the PVC patches available. We've got the T-shirts. You guys can get the Kyle's here and show shirts. The Dash. Suspendables.com Again the Dash suspendables.com promo code Kyle will save you 10%. They're just supporting them. No money in it for us, as we continue to tell you, But it is

cool. And if you guys want to put something on that lets people know you listen to the Kyle Serafin show you support, the suspendables, you can do. So we've got the hashtag. Are you suspendable on the back or the PT shirt, which is probably my favorite. It just says suspendable and stencils. You'll get questions, People want to know what it means and you'll let them know. It doesn't mean you got

suspended from the FBI. It just means that you're willing to get some discomfort in your life for doing the right thing. We're always appreciative for you guys supporting my friends over there. All right, five star review. Let's throw one on the screen and let's wrap this sucker up. This one is coming from MLC Russell. Coming out of the beginning of last month, it says, God bless the suspendables. A little long one here, but we'll do it anyway.

Get your interesting, relative humorous, spiritual, and helpful daily dose of information with Kyle. His guests, like Steve Baker and the Suspendables Co stars, are engaging in informative topics that are relevant and interesting. His podcast offers a fresh perspective and seems designed to help you understand why the government is not working for you anymore, even offering tips on what you can do about it. Prepare or repair.

That's the that's the word folks Highly recommend the Kyle Seraphin Show. Five stars, including five little emoji stars Really appreciate the five star review. That's fantastic stuff and that we're grateful all of you. If you guys have not already, make sure that you have hit the like button over on Rumble. You can subscribe to the channel, hit the notifications and you may not know it, but we have a website itskyleseraphin.com. If you guys have questions, comments and I left out.

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