How Facebook caused January 6th (with Charlie Warzel)

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:28Ryan Broderick?

  Hey Panic World listeners, have you been curious about what we're putting on our Patreon? Well, if you don't want to pay a lot of money to find out, now's the chance for you, because we have a promo code, Panic. If you put it in on our Patreon, you'll get the first month for 50 cents. We couldn't make it free because of some reason. So you can pay 50 cents to listen to all of our bonus content, and now we have quite a lot of it, actually. And we're always adding more stuff. Go over to patreon.com/panicworld, type in Panic at Checkout, or whatever the signup page looks like.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  Jesus, Ryan. You go to patreon.com backslash panic world, and when they ask you for money, you put in the promo code Panic, all caps. That's Panic, all caps, patreon.com/panicworld.

• 1:19Ryan Broderick?

  Great.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  Let's start the episode.

• 1:22Ryan Broderick?

  Hello, Charlie. Welcome to Panic World. How are you?

• 1:25Speaker 03

  I am happy to be here. Happy to be, I'm sure, like, what, you guys like to, like, you know, ambush, right, with, with things I should know, but...

• 1:33Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, you've listened to the show. Perfect. That's good.

• 1:35Speaker 03

  I've done my research.

• 1:36Ryan Broderick?

  We're getting a reputation. That's good. Yeah, we're gonna...

• 1:38Speaker 03

  I'm doing my research, you know?

• 1:39Ryan Broderick?

  We're gonna introduce you as an expert, and then we're gonna undermine your expertise for about an hour.

• 1:44Speaker 03

  This is great.

• 1:45Ryan Broderick?

  Cool.

• 1:46Speaker 03

  Perfect.

• 1:47Ryan Broderick?

  To kick things off, just a really simple, easy-to-answer question, which is like, what's your favorite funny moment from the January 6th insurrection?

• 1:57Speaker 03

  Oh, man. My funny moment is personal to me.

• 2:01Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 2:02Speaker 03

  We did this like reporting project when I was at the New York Times where we had all this like cellphone location data from people that were like there and we were trying to confirm that they were there.

• 2:12Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  And so there was a morning, like probably like January 12th or something like that, where I just went through and was just cold calling people and asking them, were you inside the Capitol building on January 6th? It was just like truly like at nine in the morning and just all of them just like stumbling and like fumbling through it and like sometimes confessing.

• 2:35Ryan Broderick?

  That's good. Can I read you my favorite, you know, ignoring your fantastic work, my favorite piece, my favorite written piece about January 6th?

• 2:43Speaker 03

  Yes, please.

• 2:44Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so this was written on January 7th, 2021, in what appears to be the 4chan Random Board B.

• 2:52Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 2:52Ryan Broderick?

  And it reads, "Imagine spending the better part of the last five years having your brain and ego melted by uninterrupted poll exposure, the 4chan Politics Board, flying to Washington in the middle of a pandemic to hear Trump whine about Oprah and Mike Pence at a rally, marching up to Congress on his orders to smash shit and then mill around aimlessly. You go home and you hear that Biden won anyway, and all of your favorite Twitter news sources named like Patriot Newsman of the West with avatars of Roman statues have posted your photo online and are labeling you a gay communist Antifa actor. Then the next day, the God Emperor you pasted into Warhammer memes puts out a video cucking himself and bending the knee. I'm sorry, those were heinous acts. Papa, please let me tweet again, Jack. You can't leave DC because the airlines have dubbed you a flight

• 3:36Ryan Broderick?

  risk. You can't stay because the cops are actively looking for you after one of their own died. Your roommate at the only hotel that would accept you is a guy named Based Kekastani1488, who wants to show you his Goblin Slayer torrents, which is like a very sexual assault heavy anime, by the way. The sun is going down and you're getting cold."

• 3:57Speaker 03

  That's good. That's very good. That's basically a short story.

• 4:01Ryan Broderick?

  I think it's like the most concise portrait of the day for me. Like it lives in my memory.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  It's it's beautiful. My other favorite thing was everyone like milling around like the sad hotel lobbies after.

• 4:11Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  Kind of like psyched about what they did and then like having the slow reality set and it's like, oh, we're going to jail.

• 4:17Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, we're domestic terrorists now. That's interesting.

• 4:37Ryan Broderick?

  I'm Ryan Roderick and welcome to Panic World, a show about the various witch hunts and foul freakups bubbling up out of the darkest corners of the internet. Joining me today is Charlie Warzel, an expert on many dark corners of the internet. He's a writer for The Atlantic. He's a longtime friend of mine, sometimes rival or adversary. My Virgita, if you will. So to kick off today's episode, I have two, two halves of one question. So the first half is on January 7th, 2021. Did you think that the storming of the Capitol was a political success for Trump and his supporters?

• 5:14Speaker 03

  Hmm, no, I didn't.

• 5:16Ryan Broderick?

  Do you think it is successful now?

• 5:20Speaker 03

  Probably, yes.

• 5:22Ryan Broderick?

  Great, great, because that is the thesis of today's episode.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  Glad to be on board.

• 5:26Ryan Broderick?

  Because I, I, I too felt like, oh, okay. We did it. We, we, we, we've made it through. Biden is president. Maybe we can fix things and as of like, I don't know, November 5th, 2024, I started to think. Maybe they did win.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I certainly.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  To an embarrassing degree, like, overestimated or underestimated, whatever, however you want to choose to do it, like, I, the retconning, like, I had, I had no idea.

• 6:01Ryan Broderick?

  Me neither.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  That people were like capable of that much and like should have been like truly all the, all the shameless actors were already in place and had been doing that, but I, but like, it's hard to put yourself back in that moment, right? Like in, like the, how people felt like on January 6th, how people, like how mad people were on January 7th. And like in that moment, it was very, very difficult to believe that that was anything other than like the, the dog caught the car.

• 6:30Ryan Broderick?

  I think I, I over indexed the amount of violence that seemed to have been planned, but did not happen. You know, the reports of the zip ties and the bombs and sort of like the idea that they were going to hang Nancy Pelosi in the front lawn. The, none of that stuff happened. And so then I was like, okay, like that's good. And now it's like, well, maybe that wasn't even the point to, to a degree. But rather a display of force to show that they could if they wanted to, which is sort of a, something to think about as we go further into today's episode, but I want to start at the very beginning, which is a crazy time called the mid 2010s, where social media

• 7:10Ryan Broderick?

  platforms incentivized or otherwise epically failed to stop people from radicalizing on their sites, which of course all culminates in January 6th. Charlie, you and I were sort of covering a similar story on two sides of the planet at the time. Would you say it's fair to, that between like, let's say 2014 and 2021, this massive kind of like radicalization wave was spreading across the planet largely because of basically three or four platforms? Do you, do you feel like that is like a, still a fair assessment now 10 years later?

• 7:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it felt ridiculous at the same time as it felt like really durable.

• 7:49Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 7:50Speaker 03

  I remember you were traveling to like a different country every like

• 7:54Ryan Broderick?

  We'll get there in just a second. Yeah, cuz I wanna know what you know cuz I wasn't here. So we're gonna do a little trade. So to actually to start, like, can you talk to me about like, what was America like between like 2014 and 2019? Cuz uh, you weren't at Charlottesville, but you, right? But you were covering a lot of the stuff that kind of led us in that direction. So like, what were the conversations like inside of tech companies with researchers here? Like, were people taking it seriously?

• 8:20Speaker 03

  There were all these weird moments of like potential energy, especially with the tech platforms, leading up to, whatever, let's say Donald Trump's election. But the ones, like, the first one that I really remember that was like very tech platform centric was like Twitter was like, dealing with like ISIS and stuff like that. But when Ferguson happened and all the protests happened in Ferguson.

• 8:44Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 8:44Speaker 03

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

• 9:25Speaker 03

  we weren't really experiencing that, like livestreamed on the ground in America. Like, we were seeing that, like, you know, overseas, but so

• 9:32Ryan Broderick?

  There were no livestreams, for instance, of like the Arab Spring. I mean, there was like news coverage, but the idea of the, a normal person pulling out their phone and being like, here's my portal into social unrest I had never seen before.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, and even just like, like Twitter was like extremely alive with this stuff. And there was nothing. Like, Facebook was like a ghost town with it. Like, it was Like Ferguson was not happening on those platforms.

• 9:54Ryan Broderick?

  That's

• 9:55Speaker 03

  And there and there was this feeling when you would like look into it and like when I was trying to like report on it that it's like, oh, okay, these are editorial, like these companies are making editorial decisions based upon what seems good, what seems like sometimes brand friendly or not. And then like Twitter was having its own thing where it was just like a cesspool and they were trying to figure out like how not to like censor ISIS beheadings, but also not have them on the platform.

• 10:18Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  And you had this like this strange ground swell of like, oh, these networks are actually like very good for broadcasting chaos. These companies are making these decisions and also very clear at this time, they had no fucking clue what they were doing. Like they were banning people and then bringing them back. I reason why I go back to like to Ferguson is it really felt like a little bit of a, you know, if Gamergate was like the template of how we argue online, like Ferguson was like what, how these chaotic news events will like start to unfold, right?

• 10:55Ryan Broderick?

  That's so interesting.

• 10:56Speaker 03

  People on the scene who are, you know, either just reporting or, or like you said, participating and being bystanders and broadcasting it. But then you have this whole like audience.

• 11:07Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 11:08Speaker 03

  Watching, participating and like forming these narratives on the fly. And you could sort of watch that, like, you could watch that whole like division happening between like, you know, choose your own adventure, how you want to interpret this event and people saying like, oh, this is like a unraveling of the social fabric of America. Look at these people, you know, like horrible racist crap and like interpretation. And then you had all these people that were like, this is like a genuine protest movement, right?

• 11:36Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  You get like the Black Lives Matter potential out of all of that. And it's like, it's very interesting to look at that as some of the first like real glimpses there.

• 11:47Ryan Broderick?

  I hadn't connected that, but I think you're right in terms of just like how we process these events and how the platforms were just not prepared for them. And I remember speaking to I spoke to someone at YouTube during the rise of like far-right YouTube as we are sort of beginning to notice this stuff. And I actually asked him, on the record, I was like, "You essentially erased ISIS from the internet. Like, why can't you just do that with neo-Nazis?" And he gave me a quote that, to paraphrase, was essentially like, "We can't determine who is a Republican and who is a neo-Nazi based on language." And he was like, "Unfortunately ISIS is really good at branding, so like, we could just knock their branding down really easily. But like, far-right extremists are a little more fluid

• 12:30Ryan Broderick?

  with how they operate." Which I always kind of held on to. For me, I was not taking this stuff probably as seriously as I should have, because I, I mean, you know this, I came from like the 4chan age where the idea of like, 4chan being important, I just never, they were always sort of like this chaotic other actor. I just didn't see them as this serious social force. And it wasn't until I was living in London and Brexit happened, the summer before Trump was elected. And I remember waking up the next day being like, "Trump's gonna win. Like, this is it. Like, this is happening." And just watching that spread across Europe for the next couple of years was, I mean, I think it mirrored what we saw here. It was just a lot of conservatives learning how to use technology much faster than leftists or liberals.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Do you want to know my moment of Trump's gonna win? It was, so like, yeah, we were watching all these different things happen, taking them sometimes not seriously at all, but like, you know, our colleague at the time, Joe Bernstein, was like, very good at like, putting his finger on like, "No, no, like, the Chan and like, you know, video game."

• 13:34Ryan Broderick?

  He was very early with that, yeah.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  Gamer gay people, like, there's like a culture there, and it may seem like either inscrutable or, you know, like stupid to you, but like, there's something durable that's building there. But for me, sort of like, seeing that on the fringes was the Republican National Convention, and Alex Jones was like downtown in Cleveland, like with a bullhorn.

• 13:59Ryan Broderick?

  Was this when he was on the tank? Did he have a tank?

• 14:01Speaker 03

  I don't think, I don't know if he had a tank.

• 14:02Ryan Broderick?

  No, this was different. Yeah, he had a tank later. Okay, yeah.

• 14:05Speaker 03

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

• 14:22Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  He's like being sort of not welcomed, like on the floor of the RNC, but like right outside the gates. Like the people were like, no, no, this like, I want, let's hear from this guy. And I was like, shit.

• 14:33Ryan Broderick?

  So it's, it's funny you say this because this has come up a few times in our episodes where like a lot of millennials that we interview sort of described this moment at some point in the mid 2010s for everybody had this moment where they're like, the funny thing that I was laughing at online, people aren't laughing at anymore. Why aren't they laughing at it? And like everyone of our sort of age cohort seems to have had this moment with technology where, and I think it sort of extends to a certain level of media literacy where if, if you were one of the first generations to grow up online, you kind of understood that like Alex Jones is a crazy person. And like, it's funny because he's like talking about like jet fuel melting steel beams or whatever. And it did feel like in the mid 2000s, the internet expanded to, thanks to platforms like Facebook and YouTube,

• 15:19Ryan Broderick?

  to normal people who may have not had the same sort of exposure to internet irony. And I do think that's like a driving force of, of a lot of this, like circa 2016. It's just like context collapse around internet irony.

• 15:33Speaker 03

  If you go back and watch Infowars stuff, which I've done in the, from like,

• 15:40Ryan Broderick?

  Cause you were just a fan, you just, you just liked it.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  You just, you know, if you, if you do what you love, you never work a day in your life. So that's what I do, watching Alex Jones clips. But like 2010, 11 Alex Jones, there's even that like performance element to him.

• 15:57Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 15:58Speaker 03

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

• 16:15Ryan Broderick?

  Richard Linklater, I think, right?

• 16:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:17Ryan Broderick?

  He's talked about Alex Jones appearing in a Skinner Dark, and he's like, yeah, he was just like the crazy guy on public access. Like, I didn't know he'd be like the leader of a neo-Nazi movement.

• 16:25Speaker 03

  Exactly what you said, right? Like reaches this other audience that treats it like kind of deadly seriously in all these different ways. And then it's like the flywheel, right? Because then they're like, oh, these are true, but like, these are like, like we can sell so many supplements to these people. And then it just like, at some point, everyone stops joking. It's not really clear when.

• 16:44Ryan Broderick?

  So in 2017, when Charlottesville happens, like, do you remember the lead up to that in terms of like tech policy? Like, were there, were large tech companies aware that this was going to happen? Like, did they, did they seem to really understand, like, what was about to happen in Charlottesville?

• 17:02Speaker 03

  I think my read on that was the 2016 election happens and, you know, within like 50 minutes, like, the next morning, you know, like, there's like, but people are like hunting around for like, who, you know, who to blame, sort of. And I think like, the platforms do catch like, a ton of flack, like, right in the beginning, that is like, sort of warranted, also sort of not warranted, you know, it's a mixed bag. It's like, a lot of people are like freaked out, angry. Like, you had all these, like, Facebook and Twitter employees, like, posting, like, "I'm sorry," and then deleting the posts, like, on Wednesday morning after the 2016 election. Anyway, they were caught in this, like, did we fuck up? And,

• 17:46Speaker 03

  like, sort of defensive crouch. And at the same time, like, you know, they're starting to get called in front of Congress, and, you know, having those, like, some of those hearings. I think they felt it was much more electoral, like, it was much more like, to do with ads, to do with, like, interference.

• 18:00Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 18:00Speaker 03

  And less to do with, like, the fact that, like, no, no, no, there are these, like, Facebook groups, having people fester in, like, toxic ideologies, or like, planning, you know, like, militia activities, right?

• 18:14Ryan Broderick?

  Sure. Yeah, I don't think Zuckerberg thought about militia activity when he was, like, raiding girls' hotness back at Harvard, you know?

• 18:20Speaker 03

  I think what they realized was, like, shit, we have a genuine problem, but probably on the order of a genuine PR problem, and not like a genuine societal problem. So I think, like, right, like, leading up into that, Facebook is different than Twitter. Like, Twitter was in the process of, like, detoxify, right?

• 18:40Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, for people who don't know this, like, Twitter, for most of its history, was sort of run like a Burning Man village. Like, it is, it has never been a functional company, but pre-Musk, it was, it was, it was like, someone's- Compound in North, like New Hampshire, like it was not a functioning anything.

• 18:58Speaker 03

  It's like a Burning Man Village was run by like McKinsey consultants.

• 19:03Ryan Broderick?

  Well, which is honestly what Burning Man is now. It's like

• 19:06Speaker 03

  True, true.

• 19:06Ryan Broderick?

  McKinsey consultants being one shotted by fifth dimensional ayahuasca demons. And like, that's essentially what Twitter was for about a decade.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  I saw this the other day. I was like going back to try to find like an old story of mine and I didn't even in, I don't even remember writing this story. But like somebody sent me like in the email chain of like all the Twitter executives trying to decide whether or not right around this time to ban Milo Yiannopoulos from Twitter.

• 19:33Ryan Broderick?

  Classic.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  Absolutely tortured like Jack Dorsey is a CEO at the time, like all these different, you know, executives there, like mid level, whatever's like, let's loop so and so in, let's do this, like trying to parse the policy like it's like the Supreme Court, you know, like

• 19:49Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 19:49Speaker 03

  Like the originalists of the whatever. And like, you know, like, and it was just ridiculous. And like, meanwhile, it was like, yeah, well, you know, he is just like making life hell for like tens of thousands of people on this platform or like mercilessly trolling this person. They're like, yes, but did he say the N word or did he just say N word? You know, it's like, stop, just like stop.

• 20:10Ryan Broderick?

  I'm going to anonymize this as best I can because it was told to me off the record. But I, I know that this did happen, which is that at a fairly large tech company, they wanted to get rid of Alex Jones at one point. And they had nothing in their policies that applied blanket. So they, they had an executive, like the top executive at this company watched like nine hours of Alex Jones with a finger on the ban button, just waiting for him to screw up. And he just so happened to do it and they were able to pull him from, from the platform. Which is just like, guys, like if you're, if your C suite is having to like be a community moderator, like at that level, your policy just doesn't work. I don't think.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  It was this real like, we're calling balls and strikes here. We're like trying to get Al Capone on tax evasion, you know, like

• 20:55Ryan Broderick?

  No, this is exactly it. Yeah. We're trying to get Al Capone to say like a slur on camera, essentially.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:02Ryan Broderick?

  On the other side of the planet, like where I was, it was really interesting where you had a bunch of Trump wannabes pop up, you know, like Gert Wilders in the Netherlands or Marine Le Pen in France and European politics doesn't really work the same as American politics. So they didn't do super well. And I was at a lot of these elections, they would not do super well, but Parliamentary politics is a long game. So like the Nigel Farage's, the AFDs in Germany, they're doing quite well now because they just kept going, but they were sort of using this playbook. And this was, I think, when Europe and the EU in particular started to get interested in these platforms. Like the conversations that you were having in America, we didn't have in Europe until like a year or two later.

• 21:45Ryan Broderick?

  And I timestamp that by the sort of final piece here before we get to the actual insurrection and the lead up to it, which is the March 2018 revelation, if you will, about Cambridge Analytica, which as a reminder for listeners who were not following this, Cambridge Analytica was sort of like a content marketing firm that claimed that they could use crazy insidious data science to micro-target you across the internet, but specifically on Facebook. And it was this crazy, overhyped, and I believe essentially not real scandal that I do think got a lot of normal people for the first time interested in what Facebook had data on. But what are your thoughts? That wasn't fucking anything. What are you talking about?

• 22:28Speaker 03

  Um, it was a well-made key to like fit the lock of like modern discourse at that moment, right? Like again, we're still in the

• 22:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  Like post 2016. Surely people didn't vote for Donald Trump. Like surely they were, you know, like psychographically profiled.

• 22:47Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  Right?

• 22:49Ryan Broderick?

  They were brainwashed. They were Donald Trump would never win the popular vote.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  Essentially like

• 22:53Ryan Broderick?

  They were brainwashed by the computer.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  The true part of Cambridge Analytica is the idea that like platforms are using your information and splicing it granularly to serve you things. Like we really weren't talking in popular culture about the algorithm or anything like that before that time.

• 23:12Ryan Broderick?

  That was it. Yeah.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  This is, may not like, sound like it makes sense, but like it was a lesson that I used when I started like covering like crypto and web three and all those things.

• 23:20Ryan Broderick?

  It's so funny. Yeah, me too, actually.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  When something is like wildly complicated like that and like you just have all these people who are just like, can't tell you basic facts, but they can tell you like all the web of like, you know,

• 23:33Ryan Broderick?

  It's probably not that complicated.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  It's, it's not. It's like literally just buzzword.

• 23:37Ryan Broderick?

  It doesn't exist. Yeah.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  Yes, I think so. I mean, it was, it was a classic sort of like

• 23:44Ryan Broderick?

  Would you say a classic moral panic?

• 23:46Speaker 03

  Yes, and like a liberal conspiracy theory.

• 23:49Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, true.

• 23:50Speaker 03

  And one that's like, again, rooted in like a little bit of fact, like for sure.

• 23:55Ryan Broderick?

  What's really useful about this story is that it exposes that the media doesn't totally understand what's going on, the platforms don't totally understand what's going on, the politicians think they understand what's going on, but don't, and it creates an environment where things are clearly ramping up. The wheels are falling off the bus. And after 2016 and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook was determined not to be a story anymore. They were in full defensive position, and the company's focus was primarily to not get blamed for whatever was being caused by their platform. I want to run through for you a bunch of stuff that happens between 2019 and October 2020, because I had forgotten it was getting this crazy across the whole internet. In

• 24:39Ryan Broderick?

  June 2019, YouTube changes its algorithm to deprioritize borderline content. Do you remember this?

• 24:45Speaker 03

  The phrase, yes, is.

• 24:46Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, so basically stuff that like doesn't violate their policies, but like is bad. So they're like, okay, no more of that. Then, a couple of months later, at the beginning of 2020, Facebook believes that election-related violence is on the horizon, after a huge pro-gun protest happens at the Virginia State Capitol. So they say that they're going to start focusing on polarization instead of misinformation. They believe that like those two things are different somehow.

• 25:14Speaker 03

  What does that mean? Like, what does that?

• 25:16Ryan Broderick?

  It doesn't mean anything. None of this means anything. But what it does mean is that they're no longer fact-checking viral posts. That's how I interpret it. If a representative from Facebook wants to reach out and tell me why I'm wrong, we'll put it in the next episode. But that's how I interpret it. May of 2020 is the first time Trump tweets about election fraud. Twitter labels it, which it's never done before, which causes a huge controversy. About a month later, Reddit bans R. the Donald.

• 25:47Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, because they've just spun out of control and then they create the Donald dot win. I think you're like a big user over there, right?

• 25:53Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 25:53Ryan Broderick?

  But like, yeah, you're a mod, you're a mod.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  A lot of good.

• 25:56Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, you love that. You love to post. Um, a month after that, Facebook, uh, announces that they've noticed militarized social movements on the platform and that they're cracking down on it and going specifically after QAnon. Of course, uh, a report in October by, uh, TTP, uh, the Tech Transparency Project. Uh, this is like their big viral report pre-election shows that they didn't do absolute, they did jack shit. Like nothing actually changed or happened. Uh, and then in October 2020, uh, Trump uses, uh, a bunch of Proud Boy terminology in public. And that's when Twitter creates their playbook for preparing for Trump inciting violence.

• 26:37Ryan Broderick?

  And then in October 14th, all of this gets thrown out the window because of Hunter Biden's laptop.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  Oh, man. Yeah.

• 26:45Ryan Broderick?

  Um, America's boyfriend, uh, ruined all of the prep that all these platforms were doing. And suddenly just everyone kind of forgot about the, like, the nine months of lead up where every platform essentially was like, there's going to be violence and the violence is going to start on our platforms. And then it all got thrown out because of a Republican moral panic.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  Another phenomenal example of something that like I saw in the moment, not realizing that's like, no, no, this is the right. We've isolated the incident we're going to be talking about for like the next 15 years. Like the biggest moment of lore in the, uh, in the, you know.

• 27:17Ryan Broderick?

  We're still talking about it.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  I know.

• 27:19Ryan Broderick?

  He just got pardoned like a week ago. I mean, we just came through two domestic terrorist incidents, uh, right off the heels of Trump being reelected, which I don't think is a coincidence. Obviously they had different politics attached to them. There was another terrorist attack in Berlin that seemed similarly motivated by kind of this right wing fervor that's happening online. This stuff isn't going away. In fact, by all accounts, it's become much worse and much more normalized. And so I wanted to read you something that you wrote after January 6th about people who become election deniers. Because I feel like you zero in on, look. I'm not a big fan of your writing. Like, I'll be honest. Like, I'm not a big fan.

• 28:03Ryan Broderick?

  But I do think this one actually does zero in on... Sorry, I have to stop nicking you. It's just so fun and easy. Uh, but I do think this one really zeroes in on the psychology of the kind of person who gets sucked into online political rabbit holes. So you wrote, "Mr. McGee is 26, a soft-spoken college student and an Army veteran from Augusta, Georgia. Look at his Facebook activity today and you'll find a stream of pro-Trump fanfare and conspiracy theories. He also saw a sharp rise in engagement, more than 50 comments and nearly a dozen shares. On November 6, he wrote that he'd 'rather die on my feet than live on my knees,' garnering 106 comments and 134 likes. By the time he drove from Tennessee, where he lives now, to Washington to march in the Capitol, his Facebook group had swelled

• 28:48Ryan Broderick?

  to more than 61,000 members, and he was eager to meet some of them in person." And what I think is so fascinating about this is that, like, you and I are exposed to levels of internet traffic that, like, no human brain should ever have to deal with. So, like, our incentives are all screwed up as people who publish online. I had never considered the idea before I read this that the average person would be going from, like, 3 likes to 100 likes and be like, "I'm gonna kill every politician."

• 29:18Speaker 03

  100%. It's... Well, the first time that I really started to notice this was actually right after Trump won in 2016. And I noticed that, like, all those people that you would... We now know, like, Jack Posobiec, like, Mike Cernovich, that dude Bill Mitchell, um, all those guys, I realized, like, their backgrounds at some point, they were, like, failing, like, cunt, like, uh, like, content marketers, right? Like, they were, like, trying to do, like, executive coaching, or, like, some kind of weird thing, or, like, help you grow your business on LinkedIn, or, like, you know, do some sort of thing like that. And then just like failed and failed and failed and failed and failed.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  And then like tweeted one time about Donald Trump. And it was like, you know, this huge swell of likes. And they're like, that's the thing. Like, that's what I've been chasing for like, you know, seven years on the internet. Jack Posobiec is like, one of the most like important in the MAGA ecosystem, like, you know, Twitter influencers, like goes on Alex Jones all the time. He like started out writing Game of Thrones fanfic.

• 30:27Ryan Broderick?

  Is it any good?

• 30:28Speaker 03

  I, you know what? I'm not really a connoisseur like you are. I think you should, I think you should spend some time with it, honestly.

• 30:33Ryan Broderick?

  I should, I should go check it out. You're right. Okay.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  But like, it was very clear that like, like the guy, you know, the thing of mine you just read, like, it was these people being like, I've been waiting forever to find somebody to respond to the thing I'm putting out in the world.

• 30:48Ryan Broderick?

  That's so crazy.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  You hit this moment where they're like, there it is. And I'll chase this feeling as far as it goes. It puts me in jail as a domestic terrorist.

• 30:58Ryan Broderick?

  That's so wild. This is the kind of energy that we go into the election with. And obviously Biden wins. There's a ton of election denial. YouTube is trying to take down election fraud videos. Twitter refuses to do much other than just sort of like label stuff. Reddit doesn't have any moderation policies around the election that we can see, even though there's a massive spike in fraud claims there. This is also the same time where the Stop the Steal group starts to form on Facebook. It grows by 300,000 people in one day. And that's just the main group.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  I think it was, it started, obviously, the day after the election day. And we still didn't know what was really going on. And I just remember someone saying like, check out this page. And I looked at it and I was like, oh, 7,000 people. Yeah, that's kind of concerning. No big deal.

• 31:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 31:48Speaker 03

  And then like, someone's like, no, refresh the page. Like, there's, there's 28,000. And I was like, no, it says 7,000. Refresh it. It's like 52,000. It was like, happening so quickly. It was truly, I like, I've almost never seen that kind of speed. And it was just positively alarming.

• 32:07Ryan Broderick?

  And before we go to break and sort of talk about the day, I do want to end with this sort of this quote from Lisa Kaplan, the chief executive of Alethia Group. It's like a misinformation watchdog that did an interview with NPR around this time. So she said, "There's not a single meme or a single post that is necessarily going to cause somebody to bring their zip ties to the Capitol. It's a slow drip narrative that ultimately changes people's perceptions of reality." And I think like a lot of people look at the Stop the Steal stuff and go like, oh, it grew that fast because everyone was being brainwashed at that moment. It's like, no, they've been brainwashed for like a decade and then finally someone just opened the release valve. That's how I view it. And

• 32:50Ryan Broderick?

  we're going to talk about what happens when you open that release valve right after the break.

• 33:02Speaker 00

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• 33:31Speaker 04

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• 33:36Speaker 05

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• 33:38Speaker 04

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• 33:55Speaker 05

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  Escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.

• 34:03Ryan Broderick?

  So, January 6th. Hot or not, did you like it? Like, how do you feel? So, can I tell you my January 6th story?

• 34:11Speaker 03

  Oh, I'd love to hear it.

• 34:12Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so I was living in Brazil at the time, and the night before, I had eaten some Brazilian sushi that did not smell exactly great. And I had kind of forgotten that January 6th was the next day. So, I spent most of the day in the bathroom, throwing up and doing other things, while following it on my phone.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  You had like the, you had like the, like the true 4D experience, right?

• 34:36Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  You're supposed to experience January 6th with like IBS, right?

• 34:40Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly.

• 34:41Speaker 03

  Like, your gastrointestinal distress. It's great.

• 34:44Ryan Broderick?

  I have, I have often, though, compared sort of watching America during this time period from overseas, it's like, you know in a movie when the astronauts see like the bombs from space? Like, I watched, I watched Trump get sworn in from a bar in Tokyo, and like, that's how I felt. I was like, "Oh, America doesn't seem to be doing very well."

• 35:01Speaker 03

  I was like 12 feet away from the whole Capitol building, um, when he got sworn in, and it felt about the same.

• 35:10Ryan Broderick?

  You were there for like the American carnage moment?

• 35:13Speaker 03

  I was, yeah. It started to rain the moment he spoke. Like, it was like this kind of grim day, that it just like started pouring rain, like the moment that Trump took the stage to speak, and it was like, "This, fuck, this is on the nose, this is, this is tough."

• 35:27Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, Chiaroscuro is real, and it can happen in real life. Let's run real quick through what the platforms were doing on January 6th. So Twitter has no crisis team. Uh, it is just, they're just, they're just rolling with it like a normal day. Here's one incredible detail that our researcher Adam found. So, a senator's aide sent a message to Twitter's safety team, saying, "It's amazing to me that people like Ron Watkins still have Twitter accounts." So Ron Watkins, obviously being like the head of A-CHN, to which Twitter's head of US policy replies, "Who is Ron Watkins?" And then the aide texts back, "For real?"

• 36:13Ryan Broderick?

  Facebook is getting 40,000 fake news reports an hour. It is the most that they've ever received since 2016. And many Facebook employees have later said that they feel directly responsible for a lot of what happened that day. YouTube hosts multiple people live streaming the attack. Some of them getting tips, like money tips from live chats. You and I have talked about this, sort of like the Robocop dystopian feeling of like, someone getting a tip jar update as they're trashing Nancy Pelosi's office. And unlike Facebook, which has sort of shut down the search capacity for Stop the Steal, YouTube still allows it, totally fine.

• 36:52Ryan Broderick?

  And Twitch didn't have that much going on that day because Twitch streaming on Twitch is just too complicated to do outside.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  It's really hard. Did it set up like the OBS thing?

• 37:02Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, you can't have OBS running on like a computer on a, you're pulling like a dolly cart with a gaming PC on it.

• 37:08Speaker 03

  It would have been pretty sweet though. That would have been a nice rig.

• 37:12Ryan Broderick?

  I guess like, looking back on it, what bothers you the most about sort of the day?

• 37:18Speaker 03

  I'll be like very honest, I published a column that day and it was freaking pre-written, basically. Like, not to like the level of violence, but like-

• 37:28Ryan Broderick?

  By the way, for listeners, that is normal in journalism. It's not a conspiracy. We pre-write things like obits, breaking news sometimes, that's a real thing.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it was simply like I was writing about like the protest level, right? And the whole point of the column was like, this is exactly what we're saying. Like, this didn't happen in a vacuum. It has been leading to this for years. If you were paying attention, you knew that people were mad. You knew that people, there was going to be like a release moment, like you said.

• 37:58Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  They were all headed there. There were no guardrails really to like stop this. A lot of people weren't taking it seriously. So like that, that's what I mean by like that, that stuff was already like in my brain. And it was very easy to, you know, express in the moment, but I, I think it's like that, that idea of like not knowing who Ron Watkins is, is like a good thing for like a normal person, but if your job is to be like in charge of the tech politics, like you should have, you should have some understanding.

• 38:30Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 38:31Speaker 03

  So I, I would say that's the thing that like bothers me about the, about like the platform response.

• 38:37Ryan Broderick?

  About a year or two before this, it was pre pandemic. I want to say it was like 2018, maybe I went to Davos and I went to like a pop up that Facebook had at Davos. And

• 38:47Speaker 03

  You live the life, man.

• 38:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. I mean, you know, I was, I was bouncing around, baby. Uh, I was on that live, I was on that Facebook livestream money, you know, I got to publish direct to, to Facebook or whatever. But I went to Davos and I met, I bumped into Sheryl Sandberg at like a Facebook pop up and it was, I was trying, you know, it was off the record, not that anything was said that was interesting, but I was trying to like gauge like, I mean, there were violent protests like literally down the street specifically about Facebook. And I walked into the Facebook pop up and all of the, all of the screens they had up were just about like hurricane relief that year that Facebook had helped with.

• 39:23Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 39:24Ryan Broderick?

  Facebook truly believed possibly up until January 6th, that the majority of the use of its platform was for civic engagement in like a healthy, good way.

• 39:34Speaker 03

  One time, like our former colleague at BuzzFeed, John Herman had this great line about Facebook, like in 2013, which is basically

• 39:42Ryan Broderick?

  He was so early to this stuff.

• 39:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. Was basically like,

• 39:46Speaker 03

  when you work at Facebook, you use all of Facebook's products every day. Like you don't use like email, you just use like Messenger, right? Like you don't use, like you use Facebook for work. You do all these things. Like your whole life is lived in the Facebook ecosystem. In this like sterile way that like no human being in the real world would ever use it. And it like warped the minds of a lot of people working there. Like, no, no, this is like a wonderful networking tool, right? And it's like, like, you have no idea what happens when, like, that piece of technology that you built, like, enters actual human hands, like, the, like, the first thing they're gonna do is create, you know, like, furry groups, and then those people are like-

• 40:27Ryan Broderick?

  Apparently, it's AI photos of Jesus made of crabs. Like, that seems to be the big one.

• 40:32Speaker 03

  Well, that's, yeah, that's now. That's because we have good technology now.

• 40:34Ryan Broderick?

  That's because, that's because tech is fixed now. So I want to switch gears just slightly, because one of my favorite pieces, other than the 4chan post, of course, about January 6th, was the one that you put together using Parler data. So I wanted to kind of have you talk through, for the audience who may have not seen this at the time, what you did, how you did it, and sort of like, how it changed your concept of January 6th. Because I feel like, of everything I read, no one really had a better sense of the actual movement, and like, how people were operating and using technology on the grounds.

• 41:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, some of it was Parler data, but it was like, we'd been doing a lot of, like, reporting on, like, you can download, like, a weird app that you use one time, and that app is like, running in the background, just like-

• 41:17Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  spying on your location everywhere, selling it to third-party data brokers, whatever. So we had, like, access to, to some of this stuff, some of it in, like, real time, and we had published this, like, seven-part series about all of it. Like, we'd found Donald Trump's Secret Service agents in the data, all this crap. And it was just very clear that, like, this was bad, there was a lot of money to be made, no one was gonna stop it. And then, when January 6th happened, part of, like, the early changing of the narrative was this idea, especially coming from Donald Trump, that, like, he did not incite anything, right? That, like, he went out there, and he gave the speech, and he said what he said, used some language that, like, oh, yeah, if you're gonna be, like, super ungenerous, maybe it meant, like,

• 42:02Speaker 03

  you know, go to the Capitol and talk to your representative or something, but, like, clearly what he was saying was that, if you're pissed off, like, you know, go tell them, like, go do something about it, right? Because of that, we, we realized we had, like, access to this type of information, and we were like, A, let's see if what it looks like, these little green dots that we had, like, were they in the Capitol? And then it was like, can we see them travel, right? And it's very clear, and it's like, a lot of people at, like, the Capitol, like, or like, the, like, the ellipse or whatever, like, listening to Donald Trump speak- And like immediately just

• 42:36Ryan Broderick?

  They all go from Trump's rally to a store to buy those like big Oakleys.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  The gas

• 42:41Ryan Broderick?

  And then they, yeah.

• 42:43Speaker 03

  And it's just like very clear that there's like a cause and effect happening here.

• 42:48Ryan Broderick?

  Do love when you're dealing with Donald Trump. Reality becomes so abstracted by nonsense that you have to be like, people at point A walk to point B. You have to break down like literally like how people moved around in a physical space to like get around his like crazy bullshit.

• 43:06Speaker 03

  The result of that, and it's, it happened this entire like election season is you sound insane.

• 43:11Ryan Broderick?

  You sound crazy.

• 43:12Speaker 03

  I literally was sifting through

• 43:16Speaker 03

  probes of cell phone data to prove that when Donald Trump was like, go to the Capitol, that

• 43:23Speaker 03

  you seem absolutely nuts. Like you're just corkboard and stringing to prove reality happened. Um, yeah.

• 43:29Ryan Broderick?

  So in another piece right after that, you, you, you described like the people there being cocooned in lies, which I thought was a kind of a fun way to think about. Uh, I assume permanent brain damage from Facebook exposure, but here's some of the things you listed that people believed. Uh, that 13 senators were refusing the election results, that Trump was quoting QAnon conspiracies to overturn Georgia. Another quote here in Nashville, federal investigators announced they are looking into evidence that suggests that Christmas, the Christmas bombing suspect, who everyone forgot about. Remember that guy?

• 44:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. Was it Nashville?

• 44:05Ryan Broderick?

  In Nashville. Yeah. He blew up Nashville and everyone just sort of moved on from that.

• 44:08Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 44:08Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Apparently he believed in lizard people, which I think is why people forget about, like, people don't realize that if the thing you believe is crazy enough, everyone will forget you did it. Like, that's why everyone's like obsessed with like the CEO killer, because his thing's like super real. So we're going to never forget that one.

• 44:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:23Ryan Broderick?

  But if you believe that like the earth is flat and you can dig to the bottom by blowing up like a major metropolitan area, people are just going to ignore that because it's too weird.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  It's true. Also, we will forget about the, the healthcare, uh, CEO killer. Like we will.

• 44:37Ryan Broderick?

  Because of the tat, well, because of my tattoo, like I'll never

• 44:40Speaker 03

  That's true. That's true. No, it's with you forever. That's

• 44:43Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's with me forever.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  Charlie, remind me after the episode to send you Ryan's, uh, Luigi fanfic. It's surprisingly moving. Question for both of you before we move on.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  Ahead of January 6, what did you think was going to happen? Did you think that anything like the storming of the Capitol could actually, or would actually happen here?

• 45:08Speaker 03

  If I'm being incredibly honest, like, the answer is no in terms of like a coup, right? Or like a Capitol insurrection. But I just remember the sun was setting over the Capitol and there's this one like AP photo of like all the people like sort of on like the back of the Capitol and there's like, it's getting like really dark and it just looks so fucking ominous and it looks like like a Renaissance painting.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:33Speaker 03

  And someone tweeted it, I remember at the time and was just like, I cannot believe this is real. That was the feeling, you know? Some guy pulling a gun and shooting someone or, you know, like driving a car through a crowd, horrifying. But like the act of overtaking one of the most famous buildings in the country, you know, the one that like is sort of the monument to our government. Symbolically, it's just fucking bananas. It would have been weird to imagine it that, you know, like people would have thought you were nuts if you were like showed an image like this is what's gonna happen.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Ryan, what do you think?

• 46:09Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I feel similarly, which was that we could see it happening, we could see it building online, obviously.

• 46:20Ryan Broderick?

  I just sort of assumed that some kind of adult in the room would stop it before it got to the point it got to. And I, I look back on that period of time and I realized that's how I felt for four years, essentially. Like, I sort of always just thought like, oh, like someone will step in, someone will, someone will make this not happen. I felt that way about COVID in the first couple of weeks. And I, I, I, yeah, I look back on all of the work I did across the late 2010s and just think like, There was no adult in the room and I always just assumed there was going to be. And maybe that was because I'm like a young, over-parented millennial or whatever. But like, I just always assumed that someone would swoop in and, and, and fix it.

• 47:03Ryan Broderick?

  And so even like as I was watching from my toilet seat, the Trump supporters storming the, the Capitol building's lawn, I just kept thinking like, well, they're not going to get inside. And then when they got inside, I was like, well, they're not going to like go into people's offices. And then I was like, well, they're not going to kill people. And luckily they did it. I mean, people did die, but like not like, not what they possibly were planning to do. Uh, uh, and so, yeah, I, I just sort of spent the entire day going, well, clearly someone will stop this. And, I mean, they did to a degree, but.

• 47:39Speaker 03

  It's worth, just since we're like in the day right now, talking about it, like it's worth remembering how fucking grim that moment was. Like, it was like, there were like six hours of daylight, there was like a vaccine, but only like a couple of people had it. And we weren't sure like, you know, what the future was going to.

• 47:59Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, you're talking about like the aesthetics of the actual day, like the moment in time. Yeah, I know. Okay. Yeah, you're right.

• 48:04Speaker 03

  Like, like cases are surging because it's the winter again. There were parts of the outrage in the moment where people were like, they're in the Capitol and they're not masked. Like just, it's like, good to just remember that.

• 48:15Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 48:15Speaker 03

  Like, there was this weird.

• 48:17Ryan Broderick?

  Put on a mask before you storm the Capitol.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  There is this feeling of palpable tension everywhere. And I, I think a big part of that is just everyone's stuck in their homes and like relentlessly online.

• 48:31Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, you did my favorite thing that a guest on this show can do, which is that you led into exactly where the next part of our script is going, which is a quote from one of your pieces. So I'm going to, uh, I'm going to end our section before we go to break by reading this.

• 48:43Ryan Broderick?

  But what is perhaps most frightening is that the alternate reality that many Trump supporters and anti-vaxxers and QAnon believers cling to doesn't exist. A fact that sooner or later will avail itself to many true believers. And it is at that moment of cognitive dissonance, the moment the bubble begins to burst, that the plausible danger that experts have been worrying about for years becomes real. And after the break, we're going to talk about whether or not it did become real. Uh, spoiler, I think it did. Uh, it seems like you do too, uh, but we're going to get to that right after some fabulous words from our sponsors.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  Hosts Thanksgiving with industry-leading quality standards from Whole Foods Market. There are no antibiotics in their meat department, ever, so carve up turkey and spiral-cut ham with peace of mind. Shop organic sides like stuffing mix and cranberry sauce from 365 Brand. And guess what? All their delectable pies are made with no high-fructose corn syrup. Gourmet Thanksgiving flavors with the quality you want, only at Whole Foods Market.

• 49:51Speaker 04

  I don't know what I'm doing. Need a break. Forget it, I quit. Escape to Pluto TV.

• 49:56Speaker 05

  This is objectively fantastic.

• 49:58Speaker 04

  Relax into the movies and shows you already know and love, all for free. Schwing! Even our news is uplifting.

• 50:04Speaker 06

  You stay classy, San Diego.

• 50:05Speaker 04

  Watch Tommy Boy, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The X-Files, Wayne's World, and so much more. We're not worthy! The best things on TV really are free.

• 50:15Speaker 05

  You just have to know where to look.

• 50:17Speaker 04

  Escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.

• 50:24Ryan Broderick?

  So I kind of already asked you, like, you know, how you felt after the day versus how you felt now, but were you surprised by Trump winning in November, the second time around?

• 50:38Speaker 03

  Um, surprised maybe in, like, how it happened, I guess. You know, like, I'm surprised by, like, the direction of some of the switches, but surprised by him winning, like, no, like, it is a coin flip situation. I think a good place to be always thinking about this stuff is, like, especially now on the internet, and, like, you've written a lot about this, like, nobody really knows what anyone's, like, doing. Like, it is really kind of difficult to tell whether or not, like, you're wrangling a very specific type of vibe that you want to wrangle. Like, it was very easy for me to say, like, to look at, you know, Trump and, like, the

• 51:19Speaker 03

  podcasts that he was going on and the type of person and, like, tell a very clean story that, like, ultimately ended up being true. But there's a way in which you're like, it's hard to know for certain, like, what's really going on in the minds of different people and, like, where they actually are.

• 51:35Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's the right way to take this because I want to throw an idea at you that I've been kind of noodling on recently, which is that...

• 51:43Ryan Broderick?

  Essentially, content moderation, as we understand it, died on January 6th. And that the majority of the biggest platforms that we use every day, I think we're probably going to give it up anyways and switch to AI. But I think a large, I think a large majority of them looked at what happened and were like, I'm out. Like, I don't know how to deal with you people, I'm out. And I do think that like, everything that we've sort of seen with how the direction Meta has gone, the Elon Musk purchase of Twitter, the sort of TV-ification of YouTube, I think it's all about making sure that they're never hauled into a congressional hearing again to explain why they destroyed democracy. Even if it means that their platforms become shittier on a day-to-day experience.

• 52:25Speaker 03

  When you look at the way that like Mark Zuckerberg talks now, and a lot of these sort of like reactionary tech billionaires or whatever, like, there is this feeling of true embarrassment about what happened with COVID. Like, this idea of like, we freaked out, right? Like, and it's like a total, you know, revisionist history thing, like, totally not remembering March through, you know, May of the pandemic, like, not remembering the actual feelings of like, you know, the, all the protests across the country, all this stuff. It's like, they're remembering it from the period of like, yeah, no one wants to go get like a booster shot now because like, they're fine if they get COVID.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  You know, like, everyone's had COVID 5 million times. They're thinking of it as this massive, embarrassing overreaction that was like, super left-coded, right?

• 53:17Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  The idea of like, oh, we like, really, really showed our hands in this embarrassing way and like, tamped down all this misinformation. Meanwhile, it's like, there were more trucks in New York City.

• 53:29Ryan Broderick?

  Dude, we turned a park into an open-air mortuary.

• 53:32Speaker 03

  And, and, and people are like, I don't know, I mean, we, we, we totally freaked out, we're sorry. And I think it was a genuinely radicalizing moment for them, where they're like, we never want to be perceived this way. We never want this like, history again of like, looking back. And then it all kind of like culminates in January 6th, right? Like, we drove...

• 53:50Ryan Broderick?

  Interesting.

• 53:51Speaker 03

  I don't know if they feel like they played the part in like, driving some of those people nuts, but like, the content moderation part...

• 54:00Speaker 03

  Did radicalize like a number of MAGA people, right? It was like.

• 54:05Ryan Broderick?

  I think, I think that is exactly it, yes.

• 54:07Speaker 03

  And so, yeah.

• 54:08Ryan Broderick?

  I think they, I think for a lot of people who maybe, if maybe they missed the Cameron Ringe Elilika stuff, or like the people on the right who didn't care about Trump and the content moderation stuff, they get to COVID and they're like, wait, the platforms can do what to what I'm looking at?

• 54:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:22Ryan Broderick?

  And I think that, I think that is a totally clear line there. But I do think that if we're going to be talking about sort of the legacy of Jan 6, it's important to point out that it, it, maybe, maybe it hasn't caused, but definitely we've seen similar insurrections since, so I wanted to run through a couple of them. So in December 2022, 25 people were arrested in Germany after they were caught plotting to storm the Bundestag to overthrow the government. Obviously, on January 8, 2023, Brazil had their golpe, or their attempted coup, where Bol, uh, do you know the word for Bolsonaro supporters, by the way?

• 54:58Speaker 03

  No.

• 54:59Ryan Broderick?

  In Portuguese, I love it, Bolsa Minions?

• 55:02Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 55:03Ryan Broderick?

  So the Bolsa Minions, uh, they tried to storm, uh, the federal buildings in Brasilia. Uh, Brazil was much more aggressive about content moderation, uh, after, like their Supreme Court went like scorched earth on YouTube and Facebook. And then November 2024, uh, there's, uh, protesters in like a pro Putin region that was tried to secede from Georgia and occupied government buildings and sort of did an insurrection there. And then, of course, most recently, kind of a reverse insurrection we saw with South Korea in 2024 at the end of the year, where South Korea and President Yoon Suk Yul declares martial law and there's a whole big protest. It doesn't totally fit the narrative, but I think it's sort of interesting to point

• 55:44Ryan Broderick?

  out that post-American insurrection, I do think that there is this sense that you can just sort of overthrow the government now, uh, which maybe had not been as palpable of an option in modern life before that.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  Well, there's, there's a, there's a rich history of overthrowing the government in the, like throughout, throughout history, uh, for sure. We didn't, we didn't invent it on January 6th, but.

• 56:09Ryan Broderick?

  We did, we did, we didn't.

• 56:11Speaker 03

  To your point, we invented doing it as content.

• 56:14Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, I think that's, I think that's it, that we, we, we taught people that you could go super viral if you tried to overthrow the government.

• 56:22Speaker 03

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

• 57:05Speaker 03

  why don't we just, you know, take a little, you know, monocultural event?

• 57:11Ryan Broderick?

  So, once again, thank you for, for taking me right where we needed to go, which is the question that my producer Grant had kind of asked me before you started the recording today, which is, do you feel like January 6th was the end of American mono, of a kind of American monoculture? Because I don't really totally buy the idea we don't have one. I mean, we just did like the pop girly summer. Like clearly there is like a national conversation in America today. But I do wonder if like, the 20th century version of monoculture kind of died on January 6th in America?

• 57:41Speaker 03

  I, I, I don't know. The, the way that I would answer that, what definitely died? We had this monocultural event. And we chose to remember it in two separate, completely separate ways, you know, like, like, I think that there is something about that, that like, like, I, I saw recently, like, right after, like, Trump won, and I can't remember who it is, but I saw a number of people like dragging up old tweets from people who are like supporting Trump now, that were like from on January 6th or January 7th, being like, you never forget how you feel in this moment, like never for one second. And then now they're like, Mr. Trump, oh my God, like, like, when do I get to come

• 58:25Speaker 03

  down to Mar-a-Lago? I think when you have a moment like that, that everybody watched from 40,000 angles with their own eyes, in the moment, with genuine shock, whether you were for it or against it, like, it was like, this is happening? Like, what?

• 58:42Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 58:43Speaker 03

  And then it is remembered completely differently, you know, in good or bad faith, whatever. I think that that does something to a monoculture where it's like, well, what's the fucking point? You know, like truly like if we can't decide on whether storing the Capitol was a thing that happened and that it was, you know, not good. I it's like, what are we doing?

• 59:06Ryan Broderick?

  It's funny. My knee jerk idea was to compare it to like, the only thing I've ever seen more documented in my life was probably 9/11. And then I was like, oh, but we can't agree about that either. So like, I that might actually just be an American symptom.

• 59:19Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 59:20Ryan Broderick?

  Because like you think, for instance, that like 9/11 happened and I know the truth, which is that like, it was, you know, an inside job.

• 59:27Speaker 03

  Sure. And do you do the thing where I have glimmers of like, what if the internet was like, fully functional on 9/11? And then it's like, it's so bad, like, it like, it like unboots my brain. I just sort of like, like.

• 59:40Ryan Broderick?

  You're describing having a nightmare? Yes, I've had that nightmare. Yeah.

• 59:43Speaker 03

  It's a wild thought.

• 59:45Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I feel I feel like we have seen what it would look like. The insurrection is as close as probably we've gotten.

• 59:50Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Rightfully so, right? It drove liberals like mad, right? It made this idea, democracy is on the ballot.

• 1:00:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:01Speaker 03

  Happen, which is also a thing that like, turned a lot of normies off. And it's really interesting to think about it that way, too. But you're prosecuting the case here of like, January 6 working for Trump. And it's like, I'm believing it more and more the more we're talking about it.

• 1:00:19Ryan Broderick?

  Now that we've gone through all of this, do you feel like it was politically successful, let's say?

• 1:00:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so. And I think I think it was politically successful, perhaps not in what it did to, like, in the minds of like, the MAGA folks, right? Like, I kind of think they're sort of already like bought in.

• 1:00:45Ryan Broderick?

  Locked in. Yeah.

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  It's kind of the way it is. But I think what it did, I think it drove the MSNBC style of liberal rightfully kind of insane, right? Like, part of it was the, the bad faith misremembering of what happened, the, the downplaying it, all the different, you know, like FBI actor, you know, stuff like that, like instigators that were that were there.

• 1:01:14Speaker 03

  Then you had like the hearings and all this stuff and this, this notion, again, rightfully so, that like democracy is under attack from these people, that these people are willfully denying reality. Like Biden's entire reelection campaign was the most grim, like, like incredibly serious, like hushed voice. I mean, part of that was because he was, he's very elderly, but

• 1:01:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, he's not doing so well.

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  But is this, this like notion of like, like there's no celebration, there's no joy, there is no nothing, like you have a duty to show up stone-faced and like, you know, vote to protect this country in this way. And it's like, not a thing that for like two, three years that like, a lot of people like want to hear constantly repeated, right? And it starts to become, even though it happened, right? Even though we've just spent all this time talking about how bad it was, how it was a failure on so many different parts of like, our society and culture and government, there's still this thing where like, people don't necessarily always want to be reminded of it, right? In the same way, we just talked

• 1:02:21Speaker 03

  about how describing what Donald Trump does can make you sound insane, like just when you're trying to describe it. I think that that's a little bit of like, what happened to like Democrats is like, describing what's happening to the country makes you sound, if not insane, just like really like strident and really sort of like, like, like a hall monitor, right?

• 1:02:41Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's exactly it. In a lot of ways, the insurrection kind of made the deep state real, in the sense that like Donald Trump always wanted to be this anti-establishment candidate, even though of course, he's like connected to like some of the oldest dark money that's ever existed in our country, with like conservative forces that are just like, you know, so powerful, it's like frightening to even think about them. And yet, when they show up at the Capitol building, They were able to create this sort of pearl clutching, democracies at stake, hall monitors, as you sort of said, and they turned the media into that, they turned the Democratic Party into that, they've kind of created the boogeyman that they always

• 1:03:25Ryan Broderick?

  claimed was there, which, you know, like, they were gonna kill those people, like, those people should be freaked out, I'm freaked out thinking about it, but the average American, I don't think really processes that way, like, they see it as just like, yeah, things got out of control at a Trump rally, and now like, no one will shut up about it, and like, I can totally understand why they think that.

• 1:03:46Speaker 03

  Right, you know, when you spend enough time looking into all this stuff, like, this shit is all on a razor's edge, right, the things tip one way or the other, and are just vastly different, right, when we started this, I was like, I think it was probably like helpful, and now I think like, yeah, it placed

• 1:04:02Ryan Broderick?

  I've radicalized you.

• 1:04:03Speaker 03

  The entire democratic establishment into this like defensive kind of crouch, where it's like, we don't have a lot to offer, because we just need to tell you how bad it is, you know, like, how serious this is, and again, I don't like, I don't totally fault that, like, I think it's, you should offer people, you know, politics that make them want to vote for you, but at the same time, like, you're saying, like, it is a 9/11-style trauma that the country faced, and yet, like, the nature of like, I guess, you know, trauma or traumatic events the 21st century is that they happen, and we have to move past them like very quickly, or you're a hall monitor.

• 1:04:42Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly, uh, trauma, addressing trauma is not cool, you heard it here first, folks, as Charlie said, and I agree, uh, the body doesn't keep the score unless you're a nerd, um, but no, I think, I think you're right, and I think that a lot of the checks and balances from the tech world that we were sort of counting on did not work, and this horrible thing happened, and now many countries around the world know that this horrible thing can happen if they want to, and they can use it to go viral, or they can use it to sort of create a false consensus, and it is just this thing that happened, and now it can happen again and again and again, if it wants to, if, you know, if someone wants it to.

• 1:05:22Speaker 02

  Uh, one final question, actually, for both of you.

• 1:05:24Ryan Broderick?

  Go for it, what do you got?

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  If the day had been more violent, do you think we would have been able to memory hole it the way that we have?

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  I it's such a it's it's such a hard question and it's it's it's like a genuinely terrifying question because I think I mean A I think the biggest thing is like they could have maybe overthrown the government right if like a bunch of people got like if they were extremely violent I don't know what if there was violence more violence and still so few consequences right you like shudder to think about that

• 1:05:59Speaker 02

  Ryan what do you think

• 1:06:01Ryan Broderick?

  Honestly, I did not love the movie Civil War by Alex Garland, but I think that's probably a fair depiction of what would have happened in that timeline if there was a violent insurrection. I mean, there were there were scholars talking about America heading into a second civil war throughout the first Trump presidency and I think that if if there had been politicians who were murdered on January 6th, I don't think that would have made Trump less powerful, but I do think that would have split the country in a way that was extremely dangerous. And that's not to say that we're not in a dangerous timeline now, but it's like a

• 1:06:42Ryan Broderick?

  different it's like a different thing like we're we're sort of now sleepwalking into an oligarchy or like a soft dictatorship, whereas I think if if if politicians have been executed on January 6th, or if the protesters had been organized enough to like hold the building and like encamp there for days or something, we would have been looking at like a much more violent, chaotic period than we ended up getting. That's sort of my my reasonable take, I think.

• 1:07:15Speaker 03

  I'm not I'm not sure, but I do think there was violence that day. It was awful. There was, you know, people died, but it could have just been so much worse.

• 1:07:27Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

  I think that's a double edged sword. When it like skirts the line and like norms don't change. Like, and I think this is part of the democratic problem where they're like, he's fascist. It's like the end of the world, but like everything still functions. It has the effect of kind of just feeling like entertainment. I think we are caught in the middle of that. It's real, it is on the knife's edge of, of going haywire and nothing works. And that's terrifying. But every time that it's like, the fight kind of seemed like watching a football game. It, it creates a sense that like, we can just tune into this each week.

• 1:08:04Speaker 03

  It's a, it's a really, really good point. I think that's what's like really interesting about this, like United Healthcare Shooter guy. Like, there's this notion of so much like fear and, and pearl clutching around like violence happening. And then like a really palpable understanding from a lot of people of like, again, consequences. And again, this idea of like, you know, shaking loose the idea that like some, something can happen to someone. Right? There is some kind of change, or if there is no change, people will make it themselves. And, you know, in more radical ways. I think it's, it's hard to know what would happen, but I think you are right.

• 1:08:46Speaker 03

  That like there, even with January 6th, there was this kind of feeling. And a lot of people, a lot of Americans especially, really believed that like, these institutions are durable. Like I can, I can look away like, oh, that was, that was a crazy, you know? Like you said, the season finale, right? Like, we'll see where they pick it up.

• 1:09:05Ryan Broderick?

  It's a, yeah, it's a season finale. Uh, then the show goes on hiatus for four years and here we are. We get tuned back in with all of our favorite characters. There's some new ones, got Elon Musk in the mix. You know, it's, it's, it's like Cheers when they replace Diane or whatever. Um, and that seems like a really uplifting and nice note to end this on. So I want to thank you for coming on today's show. Um, if people want to follow you, Charlie, where can they do that?

• 1:09:30Speaker 03

  Well, I, I write for The Atlantic and, uh, all my posts go out as, as a newsletter, uh, called Galaxy Brain for them. And I'm on, uh, I'm on Blue Sky.

• 1:09:40Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:09:40Speaker 03

  It's, yeah, it's been fun.

• 1:09:42Ryan Broderick?

  I like it.

• 1:09:42Speaker 03

  It's fun.

• 1:09:43Ryan Broderick?

  But yeah, no, thank you. This was, this was a blast. This was super. This was the most uplifting, fun conversation about January 6th I possibly could have imagined.

• 1:09:50Speaker 03

  That's awesome. I really, dude, I was going back through and to both of you. It's like a really fun show.

• 1:09:54Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you.

• 1:09:55Speaker 03

  I know, I know so much of like what you're going to talk about and I'm like locked in for all of them. And I think that's just like a testament to like, you guys make it fun.

• 1:10:03Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you, thank you.

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  I had a few more questions for Charlie after Ryan had a leave, but um,

• 1:10:10Ryan Broderick?

  Not questions that are better than what I would have asked, but I just didn't feel like it, to be honest.

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  Many are saying that it's the best part of the episode and you can only find that out if you go to patreon.com/panicworld and listen to how good the show would be if there was just one less factor involved.

• 1:10:30Ryan Broderick?

  I just think most people won't do that because they were satisfied with what I did, but let's say you aren't, you can go to our Patreon, patreon.com/panicworld and you can listen to Grant's scraps.

• 1:10:44Speaker 02

  And if you use a promo code PANIC in all caps, you get to listen for 50 cents for the month and uh, help us uh, eventually really hate each other. Right now it's a bit, but who knows, you know, if you keep giving us enough money, who knows where we'll be if the show gets to continue.

• 1:11:03Ryan Broderick?

  You should just think, hmm, is this worth 50 cents? And you can make that decision, you know, yourselves. But in all, but in all seriousness, thank you guys for subscribing to our Patreon. Uh, it helps us keep the show running and it is fun and I like it. I like, I like our Patreon. It's good.

• 1:11:25Speaker 02

  Panic World is a Garbage Day production. It's written and produced by Grant Irving, hosted by myself, with research from the always fantastic Adam Bumis. A huge thanks to Gabby Cash for designing the incredibly deranged art for this show. And a huge thank you to Kat Ridgesc, our lovely video editor. And if you'd like to sponsor an episode, you can reach out to Multitude, our wonderful partners, multitude-productions ads. We have a Patreon, which you can find at patreon.com/panicworld. And I'd like to end this episode with an important reminder. Log off and touch grass while you still can.

• 1:12:02Speaker 04

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