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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Two days after the deadly riot at the Capitol, we have Senator Cory Booker to talk about it later this hour. Also, since it's Friday, it's our weekly Ask The Mayor segment with Mayor Bill de Blasio. That'll be at 11:30 today, a little later than usual to accommodate some things in the mayor's schedule. Senator Booker at 10:25, mayor De Blasio at 11:30.

We can now confirm that a US Capitol police officer died yesterday from injuries sustained during the insurrection that brings the total count of lives lost to five. One woman was fatally shot by police and three people died of what they're calling medical emergencies. Calls for the president's removal from office intensified yesterday as top Democrats threatened to undertake another impeachment if vice president Mike Pence does not invoke the 25th amendment, which begins a removal process in the cabinet. Here is soon to be Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer.

Chuck Schumer: Well, I don't care if you're Democrat, Republican, Liberal, Conservative from the Northeast, South, or West. If what happened yesterday doesn't convince you that the president should be out of office now, then something is very wrong with your beliefs about democracy.

Brian: Now, those close to the vice-president say that he's not interested in invoking the 25th amendment and democratic lawmakers are set to meet today to discuss next steps. When Senator Booker is on later in the hour, we will certainly ask him about that but first, as the dust settles on the events of Wednesday and more tragedies come out, right wing politicians and right-wing media pundits are already spinning the story, claiming Trump's supporters did not breach the Capitol, it was actually Antifa.

Matt Gaetz: Some of the people who breached the Capitol today were not Trump supporters. They were masquerading as Trump supporters and in fact, were members of the violent terrorist group Antifa.

Laura Ingraham: There are reports that Antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd.

Sarah Palin: We don't know who all were the instigators in these horrible things that happened today. I think a lot of it is the Antifa folks.

Drew Hernandez: The rumor is that even possibly Antifa insurrectionists possibly could have infiltrated some of these movements and maybe instigated some of this.

Brian: That was Congressman Matt Gaetz, Fox News host, Laura Ingraham, former Governor, Sarah Palin and reporter Drew Hernandez on Tucker Carlson. We played those clips only to show that even after a riot based on lies by the president, a new narrative about the riot is taking hold based on lies about it. What happens to the conspiracists after an instantly iconic horror in American history takes place at their hands? Will it shake people who are mildly involved loose from a dangerous or delusional fringe?

Will there be a backlash by people who are Republican conservatives on policy, but will end the Trump era thinking the whole thing went horribly wrong or will the conspiracy theory white supremacist collection of movements just go a little more underground for a while or not even go underground and continue to flourish anyway, even without a president of the United States fueling it with the incredible power of the presidency?

With us now is Brandy Zadrozny, investigative reporter for NBC News where she mostly covers misinformation, disinformation, and extremism on the internet. Hi, Brandy, thank you so much for some time today. Welcome to WNYC.

Brandy Zadrozny: Thanks for having me.

Brian: Do you have a sense of who was at the event on Wednesday? What percentage was QAnon versus Proud Boys versus Boogaloos or Neo-Nazis or anything like that?

Brandy: I probably can't give you a percentage, but all of the above is definitely the exact right list that you just gave. What's happened is in the last year, these groups have converged. A lot of that's been online activity. A lot of that has been anti-lockdown protests that brought everybody out to the streets to air whatever grievances they had and then also fueled by misinformation and disinformation about the election results, it's caused them to come out again and join forces.

Now, in terms of who was at the rally, you did to be fair, have a lot of general MAGA types that we saw at the last two 'stop the steal' rallies and there were children there, there were older people there, there were wheelchairs, there were your regular MAGA crowds, but then when we saw the violence at the Capitol, that was really where the most extreme elements of the internet really came out into the real world and like you said, a lot of QAnon activity, a lot of QAnon apparel that we saw, a lot of known QAnon people that we'd just seen at other QAnon rallies, like the guy in that full head dress without a shirt with makeup on, he was a QAnon person. There were others.

Then you saw a lot of the militia types that we had seen at anti-lockdown protests that we had already seen statewide converging on their capitols, threatening their governors and their elected officials. It was a multi-headed monster of all of these groups coming together and doing what we saw them do.

Brian: I see people are already calling in. Let me see that everybody has the phone number because a lot of people might have questions about this for Brandy Zadrozny from NBC News, who looks into these movements deeply and reports on them. 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, your question's welcome, or you can tweet a question @BrianLehrer. How much, Brandy, of what led people to storm the Capitol was this idea that the election was stolen, that specifically, versus everything else that feeds into that.

Brandy: Again, it's really hard to say what's in the minds of these people, but we can tell from their online posts that it-- For the QAnon people, this was the day-- They really thought this was their Independence Day. This was the day where they were going to disrupt the counting where either Trump was going to somehow magically retain the presidency or Pence would save it at the last minute. When he didn't, this was their last option and so that was fueling them.

You have to realize with QAnon people, they really believe that they are on some global mission to stop this pedophilia ring that they've imagined up in their mind of Democrats and the Hollywood elite and the media. When you saw those pictures of them storming the castle, they were on this mission from their god or their messiah, Donald Trump. With the militia types, it's again, unclear, it's just a general idea of tyranny, fear of taking their guns away. There's some hatred for the state with Boogaloo type, just general grievances and plain old white supremacy. There's a lot of different elements to this. It makes it a little bit hard to pinpoint.

Brian: You wrote about the death of Ashli Babbitt. What can you tell us about her life and how her death is being perceived in the internet circle she frequented?

Brandy: Ashli Babbitt was an air force veteran. She came home in 2018 after several deployments overseas, and she got remarried and became really radical, a really radical Republican, a really radical conservative. She from her Twitter account, at least, she had several thousand tweets and you could follow her thinking and as she fell down the rabbit hole because it first started with very-- In 2016, she was very Fox News, pro-Donald Trump.

She would tweet at Fox News hosts all the time. She watched a lot of Tucker Carlson. He was her favorite and she was just anti-immigration, very Republican, very conservative, and then around 2018, 2019, 2020, she starts getting into QAnon stuff. Again, she talks about pizzagate, which is the state conspiracy theory that child pedophilia ring was being run by Democrats out of a pizza shop. That's obviously untrue and it led to violence, a shooting inside the shop. She subscribed to that belief and then she subscribed to QAnon belief, and she was going to Trump boat parades wearing QAnon apparel and tweeting about QAnon and QAnon conspiracy theories.

One of her last tweets was talking about how this is the storm that she's been waiting for and that she was going to fulfill her promise, her life's mission and she was shot and killed by D.C. police when she tried to break into a door. I've been thinking a lot about her because I with many other people watched the video of her death. It's really pointless. I report on these conspiracy theories a lot, and to see the last moments of someone's life be given for such a lie is really upsetting.

Brian: Police have to be held accountable whenever they shoot a civilian, and we'll ask Senator Booker about that when he's on, but the day before the rally, that tweet that you refer to, I have that here from Ashli Babbitt. "Nothing will stop us. They can try and try and try but the storm is here, and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours, dark to light." The storm refers to a certain QAnon myth, correct?

Brandy: Yes, the storm was spawned out of this weird video of Trump lined up with military officers, I think in 2017. Where he was lined up with them and reporters asked, "What's going on?" He said, "The storm is coming." They're like, "Mr. President, what do you mean?" He says, "You'll see." QAnon people took that to be the day when Donald Trump who in their mind is leading a secret war against all these pedophiles would bring us all to justice. He would march them through the streets, put them in Guantanamo Bay, military tribunals and execute all of them. That is the storm.

When you see them storming the Capitol, breaking into the Capitol, and you hear that she's wanting to execute the storm, or that the storm is coming. You can only imagine what they plan to do had they gotten ahold of any Democratic lawmakers.

Brian: We have a caller with a question about the storm. Let's take her right now. That's [unintelligible 00:11:53] in Manhattan. [unintelligible 00:11:55], you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling today.

Caller 1: Yes, and we love your work, Brian, you're so crucial right now. Brandy, we love your work. Ben Collins of NBC reporting was talking about this storm and the idea that Trump would be the one to execute and imprison his political and cultural enemies. I'd like you to further elaborate on this idea, and also this idea of the Boogaloo and the second civil war that seem to have-- We're not hearing too much about that, but I heard something in terms of social media where what happened Wednesday was the skirmish on what they see as a second civil war. Further elaboration on those two points and I'll listen over the air. Thank you so much for your work.

Brian: Thank you, [unintelligible 00:12:58]. Brandy.

Brandy: Sure. Again, the storm, she's exactly right. Ben Collins is a dear friend and colleague, but the storm is just-- These people really believe that Democrats and Hollywood elites are sacrificing children and eating them, in some cases, and that's what they're fighting against. The end of the storm is that we're all, and I say we because members of the media are also included, especially those who report on QAnon, that probably includes me, are going to be rounded up, marched through the streets, and literally executed. It's really scary stuff.

Regarding Boogaloo-- There are just so many different groups now. To be an extremism reporter is to really have your hands full, but the Boogaloo are a group of anti, I would say, establishment, anti-police. Sometimes they're far right. Often they're far right, but sometimes they have a libertarian faction in them. Sometimes, they're full of white supremacists. Sometimes, they're not, but the Boogaloo people are like the people that threatened to or concocted a plan to kidnap and murder the Michigan governor, Governor Whitmer. They believe, and they're hoping for a second civil war.

The name Boogaloo is an internet joke for a really silly breakdancing movie called Boogaloo 2, Electric Boogaloo, and they want to overthrow the government. They dress in fatigues with patches, and they are military LARPers and not in the capital, but usually, when they protest, they carry long guns, and they have been threatening and intimidating Black Lives Matter protesters all throughout the country over the spring in summer. We saw those people out in full force at the Capitol too.

Brian: Question from a listener on Twitter. Please talk about the Nazi and white supremacist messaging on the rioter's t-shirts. Do you know what that refers to?

Brandy: Yes. Bellingcat laid this out really well in an article but at the 'stop the steal', rally you saw a lot of Nazi iconography and white supremacist iconography or iconography that has been repurposed or stolen and used by white supremacists. You saw a lot of that on shirts, you saw something called-- I saw one man wearing a shirt that said Auschwitz prison guard. There was lots of stuff like that, it's disgusting, and the commingling of these people with your MAGA types and your militia types, it's so hard to even know what you're looking at half the time and part of that confusion, it really seems to be the point.

Brian: Another question from Twitter. "We'd love to hear Brandy talk about how verse she thinks Trump himself is in all these online theories. Seems to me that since the election, he's become fully enmeshed," the listener writes.

Brandy: Well, we always wonder how far up this goes. Let's take QAnon for example. People have been asking me forever, "Do you think that he'll actually ever explicitly promote QAnon?" He had one weird press conference where he said, "I don't know much about them, but I hear that they really hate pedophilia, and they really like me," and that was a wink-wink nod. He has spent the last several weeks literally retweeting and promoting conspiracy theories that were hatched in QAnon land. Lin Wood, the lawyer, and Sidney Powell, the former Trump campaign lawyer are known figures in the QAnon community.

They tweet insane or when Lin Wood was banned, they were tweeting insane things about QAnon and pedophilia ring. I don't know how I can't know this stuff, honestly, but in terms of the conspiracies and how much he knows, I think that what was really telling was his conversation with Brad Raffensperger from Georgia, the Georgia tech secretary of state that was leaked, because in that conversation, Trump showed an impressive grasp of the conspiracy theories that are swirling on the weirdest and darkest parts of online. I can't say how close he is with specific figures, but how close he is with the conspiracy theories and the ideology of these groups, it's a straight line.

Brian: My guest for another few minutes is Brandy Zadrozny, investigative reporter for NBC News, where she mostly covers misinformation, disinformation, and extremism on the internet. As we're taking a closer look at the groups that fed in to the participation into the riot in the Capitol on Wednesday. There were plenty of Blue Lives Matter flags at the event on Wednesday, and yet the relationship between the police and some of these groups as I understand it is complicated. Some Proud Boys groups have renounced supportive police in recent months, as they've been arrested for violent crimes. How did you see the dynamic between the police and protesters play out on Wednesday?

Brandy: It's almost like these people were never really backing the Blue but just looking out for their own interests, or when the Blue backed them, they were fans until they started breaking the law.

Brian: Well, what about the Blue backing them? People are asking Mayor de Blasio to look into whether anybody in the NYPD participated. We don't have the answers to that yet. What about the Blue backing them?

Brandy: There's some concerning reports, and you can see the videos yourself of police taking selfies with the protesters, of police just opening literally opening the gates for-- I said protesters and I mean rioters, but for opening the gates for them. There have been numerous reports of some, not all, some policemen aligning themselves with white supremacist movements or QAnon movements. It's an issue for sure and the day before the rally, the Proud Boys, he calls him the chairman, but the leader of the proud boys, this guy, Henry Tario, he was arrested by D.C. police and after that arrest, you can see on Telegram and the channels that the Proud Boys used to communicate, they were just flooded with a very quick reversal on their supposedly pro-law and order pro-police stance and they were immediately threatening to hurt and kill police and to burn down the Capitol.

Brian: We have somebody calling in who says he was at the rally on Wednesday and since you report on people like him, we're going to take this call. Vincent in Bayville, you're on WNYC. Hi, Vincent.

Vincent: Good morning. Hi. How are you guys? I just like to give the audience [sound cut] what's happening in DC on the 6th.

Brian: Go ahead.

Vincent: Are you there?

Brian: We lost part of your set-up there, but go ahead.

Vincent: Well, okay, I'll start over. I wanted to give your viewers an accurate view of what was happening down there on the 6th and that is-

Brian: Or at least your view, but go ahead.

Vincent: Okay. Well, it's a view of what was it? Two or three million people, I think they estimated. It's a view of a lot of people and this is important, I think, because it's a site that's being lost and that is that these two or three million people that gathered down in D.C. feel that this election is unconstitutional and we know it's not constitutional because they didn't check the signatures on the mailings and they admit to that. That's one breach of one law. We feel that we're being jipped. We feel that-

Brian: More than 15 court rulings disagree with that it was unconstitutional, but go ahead.

Vincent: That is questionable. They are [unintelligible 00:22:05], you're right, but it's a question as to who's pulling the strings on that and we feel that this is being stolen and that this is not a democratic election and that's really our beliefs here, not everyone down there was a Trump supporter and to be honest, what I saw was a lot of uniting and that's exactly what this country needs, Brian. I think you'll be the first one to say it if maybe you weren't on the air. We need to unite. There was all different groups there. You can call them hate groups if you'd like, they're people that have beliefs and their views. There was a lot of peace there.

There was only what the media, you guys, seem to show the rest of the world. That's the only thing that the rest of the world sees, is all this violence at the Capitol building but you're mitigating the rest of the day where millions of people conjugated together peacefully and united as one. Let's also not lose sight-

Brian: Around those issues. Vincent, because we're almost at a time in this segment, I'm going to only take that much from you today. We do appreciate you calling in and Brandy, how would you put Vincent's call in context or fact-check it?

Brandy: It's hard to fact-check. If you tried to, yes. I don't even know what state he's talking about. I assume he means Georgia where the president has long claimed that he wants to see the signatures. Georgia is a state in which they do have signature verification that they're required to by law. That's not clear what he's talking about necessarily, but that's not true, and like you said, the courts have exhausted every conspiracy theory, every claim that the election was somehow stolen from Trump and said that's not going to fly here.

Brian: Were there millions of people there on Wednesday? Do you have account?

Brandy: I don't have account. I think the last count, it was hundreds of thousands but there were a lot of people there and like I said at the beginning, at the first part of the rally, there were children, there were older people, there were lots of people that were just pro-Trump MAGA people who have drunken the Kool-Aid and believe that this is stolen, even though every fact flies in the face of that assertion.

I'm curious to hear from him, what now, now that the president has reluctantly conceded? I'm curious about his position now because he spoke about coming together, but what I'm seeing online is either people like him that seems like they would accept that moving on to, or people who are more QAnon people, more extreme people who are still not conceding, still don't think this thing is over, or people that have gotten very angry with the president and feel like they've been, one guy told me, woken up, and now they're not just going to forget about all this. They're not just going home. What do you do with that activated extremist community? That all remains to be seen.

Brian: Well, what does your reporting indicate about that, for example, what do far right groups have planned for Joe Biden's inauguration? Anything that's on your radar?

Brandy: Well, I know the QAnon people specifically are still talking about hope that's left and they're pointing now towards that date, towards January 20th, it's unclear what their plans are yet for that date. It's hard because QAnon people are less organized than, I would say, militia folks. They all converge and then you see what happens but they are still holding out hope for sure and that's the theory.

Brian: I want to play one more clip from Twitter of a Trump supporter inside the Capitol Wednesday. Her name is Jenny Cudd.

Jenny Cudd: Vandalize anything but we did, [laughs] we did, as I say that, we did break down the Nancy Pelosi's office door and somebody stole her gavel and took a picture sitting in the chair, flipping off the camera and that was on Fox News. Patriots got down on the floor and were sitting in the House members in the senator's chair.

Brian: Besides we didn't vandalize anything, but we broke down Nancy Pelosi's door, I'm struck by how casual she is. It's a joke. What to make of that levity in such a serious situation where five people got killed?

Brandy: This word that stuck out to me when I was listening to that is just giddy, the giddiness, I don't know what else to say about it. I don't know about that woman's ideology, I don't know if she's MAGA or QAnon, it's hard to tell. I think what's scary is that the most extreme ideas and conspiracy theories are now so prevalent and have spread so far and so fast into all types of radical conservative that it is in fact hard to tell, but that behavior, it's just appalling. It's so sad. I'm just a person, but that makes me so sad. I don't have any reporting about that. I'm just so sad.

Brian: How important is Trump's Twitter presence or Trump's White House presence to this movement?

Brandy: That we're going to find out really soon. We talk about deep platforming a lot in this space and Trump has two major platforms right now. He has the White House physical, the real-world position of president, that platform, and then he also has huge followings on social media. He has an influencer platform unrelated to his position as president, he's knocked off Facebook. He's not allowed on indefinitely perhaps for inciting violence.

He was kicked off Twitter for a while, had to remove some tweets, and is now back but if he's kicked off for good of that platform as well, what we know about deplatforming is that you lose a core part of your audience and that's the audience that is on these platforms to stay. That's not going to parlor or to some alternative platform because those platforms are awful. They're hard to use. They're just not good. They don't have the user experience power of the major platforms, you'll lose a major part of your core audience.

Trump has 88 something million Twitter followers right now. He won't bring those all over to an alternative platform, but the ones that will go with him are the most toxic and the most radicalized. Then, you'll have a space where just the craziest, most radical followers of Trump are all in an echo chamber with him. That's dangerous, whether it's the president or the soon to be former president or a white supremacist or a conspiracy theorist like Alex Jones. That's where that gets dangerous, but at the same time, those people aren't able to recruit anymore and they're not able to spread their toxicity to the average population. They're kicked out of polite society, as it were.

Brian: We mentioned the name, Ashli Babbitt. We should mentione the name of the police officer, the Capitol police officer, who is now dead. His name was Brian D. Sicknick. He joined the Capitol police in 2008, is what I'm seeing. What do you know about the circumstances of his death and do you have a sense that his death will become conspiracy fodder as well?

Brandy: All I know about his death is that he was attacked with a fire extinguisher and then he later died from his injuries. I have not seen conspiracy theories yet surrounding his death, but you can be sure they will come soon as they have for Ashli Babbitt, whose death is not only pointless, but it's also a little more-- Well, it's tragic because the very community that she gave her life for, the lies and the conspiracy theories that she ultimately sacrificed her life for, are the same ones that are swirling around her own death. People are calling it a false flag, saying she doesn't exist, saying she's still alive. All of these conspiracy theories are now pointed at her, you can be sure they'll come for the fallen officer as well.

Brian: People are saying she's still alive?

Brandy: Yes.

Brian: There was the story that Antifa was going to infiltrate the rally that began last week. Congressman Mo Brooks claims that he was briefed about it and was so scared of Antifa coming for him, that he slept in his office for days leading up to Wednesday. We played clips earlier of people who are mainstream in a certain respect, Sarah Palin, Laura Ingraham, and a Congressman Matt Gaetz repeating this, that it was maybe Antifa posing as Trump supporters, not these Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol. Where does that story come from and is there any grain of truth to it at any level?

Brandy: The Antifa lie comes from Donald Trump. He's been using Antifa and Black Lives Matter as a boogeyman for conservatives to point the finger at and say, this is the real problem. Now, of course, this flies in the face of the head of the FBI, Christopher Wray, has said that these are not-- Antifa is not our main concern, what's our main concern is violence from the extreme right, and that's what we're seeing.

Now, Antifa is a thing. It's a very loose collection of radical left groups who fight what they believe to be fascism, including the probably president, most anti-fascists would include the president in that. Anti-fascists really came on the scene in Portland, where they fought a group called Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys who were coming to their cities to fight them in the streets, and so they came out and fought back.

Now anti-fascism, isn't just fighting, although they do do that, what it also is, is what we're seeing right now, it's doxing and shaming people who are aligned with fascist movements. After the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, you saw a lot of anti-fascists pointing to people that were at that rally and getting them fired from their jobs and were not a polite society, as we say, right? Showing, unmasking them. That's what we're seeing from the Capitol right now, antifascists doing that unmasking work.

What has happened though, and what's scary is that Donald Trump used them for fundraising, said, "We're going to beat Antifa, they're scary, they're going to come to your white neighborhoods and loot and burn everything." He used this specifically that language in fundraising for years.

Brian: We have 30 seconds left in the segment, Brandy, just warning you.

Brandy: He used them as the boogeyman for years and now his allies have all taken up that flag too. The scary thing about that is that now, conservatives in towns throughout the country and in DC, see anyone in black and call them Antifa. There was a photographer, a new photographer who was near, it looked like he was about to be beaten to death because he was in all black and they were calling him Antifa and beating him, dragging him out. It was terrifying and that's the violence that comes from these lies.

Brian: On that thought, we leave it with Brandy Zadrozny, investigative reporter for NBC News, where she mostly covers misinformation, disinformation, and extremism on the internet. Thank you for that deep dive into the groups who participated in Wednesday's riot. We really appreciate it.

Brandy: My pleasure, I'm such a fan. Thanks.

 

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