MAGA Built a War Machine and Now It's Pointing in the Wrong Direction

September 5th, 2023, Washington, D.C.

A federal judge sentences Enrique Tarrio to 22 years in federal prison.

Seditious conspiracy.

The longest sentence handed down for any January 6th defendant.

And here's the thing about Enrikay Tarrio that I need you to hold on to.

He wasn't just some fringe guy who wandered in from outside the movement.

He was built by the movement.

The Proud Boys

didn't and doesn't exist in a vacuum.

They were recruited through the same rallies, the same rhetoric, the same fundraising emails, the same infrastructure that the MAGA apparatus spent years constructing and

perfecting and pointing at its enemies.

The machine worked exactly as it was designed.

And then on January 6th, 2021, someone forgot to check which direction it was facing.

to the tune of about 22 years.

a 22 year sentence.

And then January, 2025 Trump pardons him.

So the machine that built him aimed him and then watched a federal court put him away for two decades.

That same machine reaches back in and pulls him out.

Like nothing happened.

Like the 22 years was just a rounding error.

It's less like a pardon and more like a loop completing.

And that is exactly what it is.

And Tadrio is not the only one.

He's just the clearest example of something much larger that we've been watching happen in slow motion for years.

The MAGA movement spent a decade building a war machine, fundraising infrastructure, media infrastructure, legal infrastructure, a mobilization apparatus of genuine scale and

sophistication.

And somewhere along the way, it stopped being able to tell the difference between its enemies

and its own members.

And that's what we're here to talk about today.

And welcome back overlap listeners.

I am Joshua.

And I will.

And listen, before we get into it Joshua, I have to say I've been waiting for this one.

Yeah, Will's actually been texting me about this one for three weeks.

Maybe.

as far as you know.

Because every time I thought I understood the shape of this story, he sent me another document and then it got more complicated.

I sent you to the House Select Committee final report at 1130 on a Tuesday.

You did.

You did do that.

My wife was not well pleased.

My sincerest apologies

She's heard it all before.

Okay.

So overlap listeners, we are genuinely glad you're here this week because this one is going to take you somewhere.

This is not a comfortable episode, but it is, I think, an important one.

And I want to be honest with all of you about what we're doing today.

Yeah, we're not here to dunk on anybody, although we're probably going to do a little bit of that.

That's not what this show is, right?

What we're here to do is trace a specific arc, a very specific, very documented arc of how a political movement builds infrastructure, what that infrastructure actually does, and

what happens when the machine actually gets turned around.

Because here's what caught my attention.

DOGE, the famous Elon Musk operation, the Department of Government Efficiency, the unelected advisory body, excuse me, with access to federal payment systems, by February

25, it had cut roughly $2 billion, $2 billion, not $2 trillion, lest you be misled on that, in federal contracts and grants.

And a significant portion of those cuts landed in red state districts, rural hospitals, agricultural subsidies, veteran services.

Republican members of Congress started pushing back almost immediately.

That's Republican members, the same party as the president, in case anybody's keeping track.

The people whose constituents donated to his movement voted for his movement, built this movement from the ground up with small dollar donations and yard signs and showing up at

rallies in January in Washington, DC.

rallies in case you can't see the air quotes.

And this is where the systems metaphor that lives rent-free in my brain becomes unavoidable, right?

You build a load balancer, you build it to distribute traffic, to protect the system, to route pressure away from critical infrastructure.

But if you set it up the wrong way, if you misconfigure it, if the rules that governing it, right, governs where the traffic goes are wrong from the beginning,

really doesn't matter how powerful that machine is.

It doesn't matter what size the GPU is or how much RAM or how big the CPU.

It will route the damage straight into the nodes that you need the most.

And there are real people inside those metaphorical notes.

I think that's what we need to remember today.

Yeah, so that's the whole episode.

Today we're walking you through how the machine got built, what it was built to do, and exactly who it is hitting right now.

So make sure you stay with us.

Let's start with Anthony Kennedy.

January 1st, 2010, the Supreme Court issues the Citizens United versus the FEC, and Kennedy writes the majority opinion.

And the line that matters, the line that built this machine, is this one.

Independent expenditures.

including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.

That's the sentence.

That's the load-bearing wall of every single thing that comes from the Citizens United decision.

And we really need to understand what that sentence did in practice.

Before Citizens United, there were limits.

They weren't perfect.

They weren't airtight.

But there were limits on how much money corporations and outside groups could pour directly into influence apparatus of an election.

After that sentence, the floodgates opened, not metaphorically, but structurally.

The technical term is super PAC.

The practical term is unlimited.

You can now raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on political messaging as long as you don't technically coordinate with the campaign.

And technically coordinate became one of the most aggressively lawyered phrases in American political history.

If you needed a clue as to where this was headed, Mitch McConnell celebrated that ruling publicly, enthusiastically.

He'd been fighting campaign finance restrictions for years, and he genuinely believed, or at least argued publicly consistently, that money in politics was a free speech issue and

Citizens United was his vindication.

And here's what I'd like you to hold on to about that moment, because it matters for everything that happens afterwards.

The people celebrating Citizens United in 2010 believed they were building infrastructure for the conservative movement broadly, for the Chamber of Commerce, for corporate

interests, for the traditional Republican donor class.

At that time they were not thinking about Steve Bannon.

They were not thinking about Brad Parscale running digital operations for a real estate developer from Queens who was going to hoover up small dollar donations from retirees in

Florida.

They built a highway.

They just didn't control what got on it.

You know that's the thing about infrastructure.

You build it for your purposes and then it just exists out in the world and other people decide to use it for theirs.

Fast forward three years to 2013, and this one is more complicated because the grievance here is not exactly manufactured.

The IRS, under a division run by uh Lois Lerner, had been scrutinizing applications for the 501C4 tax-exempt status.

you volunteer with an organization, nonprofit, usually they're in the 50C3 category, and donations you make to them are typically tax-deductible.

This one is the C4.

It's a political entity and those donations are not tax deductible.

It's basically the kind that actually lets you make donations and you do the political organizing without actually disclosing how much money or where you're sending it or who

you're sending it to.

And they were basically flagging applications that had words like tea party or patriot in the name.

If you were alive during that time, you know what that group brought about.

So that's what the IRS was doing.

And then Darryl Issa turned it into a congressional firestorm.

Ted Cruz turned it into a fundraising email.

the, right?

Though you'd have to it to him in Mexico, right?

Depending on what's going on in Texas.

But the conservative grassroots, people who genuinely believe the government was targeting them based on their political beliefs, that belief became foundational.

Now the inspector general report confirmed that progressive groups were also flagged, right?

The process was kind of a mess.

It wasn't some sort of clean partisan targeting operation the way it has and still is portrayed on television and in congressional hearings.

But here's the thing about this grievance infrastructure, right?

Accuracy is kind of not the point.

The point is the story.

And the story was the government is your enemy.

The establishment is your enemy.

You cannot trust the institutions.

You need your own parallel system.

And we talk about parallel systems here quite a bit.

And then they built one and that's what people miss.

The response to the IRS controversy wasn't just outrage.

It was organization.

They got to work.

I mean, they accelerated an entire ecosystem of conservative groups, fundraising platforms, media outlets, all of which were operating explicitly outside the traditional

Republican party structure.

Because remember, no technical coordination with the party.

Yes, so that was outside and eventually in competition with it, which is important to denote.

because the Republican Party thought it was going to benefit from all this energy, and it did for a while.

for a while.

So 2016, right?

And this is where we need to actually talk about Brad Parscale because Brad Parscale is not a household name.

It's not somebody you'd recognize, but he is genuinely one of the most consequential digital operatives in recent American political history and not in a way that gets

discussed enough among the people who know.

Right, he was Trump's digital director for the 2016 campaign, correct?

Yes, Trump's digital director and what Parscale built along with the infrastructure that would eventually become WinRed, W-I-N-R-E-D, was a small dollar online fundraising

mechanism that was technically extraordinary.

Like from a pure engineering standpoint, they were doing things with email list segmentation and donation page optimization that were really ahead of the curve.

And through that, they raised about $280 million in 2016, which was at the time a staggering number for a small dollar online fundraisers.

But the architecture of how they raised it, right?

That's what actually matters because we're not just asking.

They were not just asking for donations, right?

They were selling this urgency like this.

had to be done now and time is wasting and they were selling threat.

A lot like Fox News.

The emails were calibrated to produce a specific emotional, like somatic response.

You are under attack.

The enemy is at the gates.

Your donation is the last line of defense.

Send now.

Alright, I want to stop there because I think people who haven't been on the inside of one of those email lists don't fully understand what we're describing.

These weren't just aggressive, your classic aggressive fundraising emails, you know, it wasn't just the classic bag.

They were, and I don't use this word lightly, psychologically engineered.

The subject lines, the countdown timers, the language about matching funds, and that often didn't work the way they implied.

I mean, everything was carefully crafted.

Yeah, pre-checked boxes for recurring donations, which, that'll be a bigger story later, but the point is, in 2016, they built this machine that ran on manufactured emergency.

And it worked.

$280 million worth of campaign donations, it was working.

And then 2020 happened and the emergency became real, or at least it became the thing they told donors was real.

Trump loses the election, depending on who you ask, right?

And within days, the Save America Pack and allied groups launched what becomes the Stop the Steal fundraising operation.

$250 million more, not part of the original 280, 250 more in the weeks after the election, weeks after the election.

So the House Select Committee on January 6th documented this in their final report.

$250 million raised in the name of fighting the stolen election for legal challenges for protecting the integrity of the vote.

and the money did not go to legal challenges.

Not primarily.

Not even close to primarily.

The select committee found that the Save America PAC actually transferred $40 million to a nonprofit called the America First Policy Institute, which is not a law firm, which did

not file election lawsuits.

The money went to Trump's political operation, to events, to a hotel that Trump owned, to allied organizations.

Let's sit with that for a minute, dear audience, because the donors, and we're going to talk about specific donors in a later segment, but the people who sent that money sent it

because they believed the election had been stolen.

They sent it because they were told their donation would fund the legal fight to prove it.

And it didn't.

You know what that is, technically, in any other context, right?

Yeah, if a charity told you that your donation was going to feed children and it went to the CEO's vacation home, we have a legal term for that.

We have several legal terms for that and some not so polite terms for that.

So I wanna be precise here because the legal situation is still, still ongoing and complicated.

The fine print on some of these solicitations was technically broad enough to allow the transfers.

That's not an accident.

That is a designed system.

That's someone somewhere making sure that the fine print covered what they actually already intended to do.

I mean, if they didn't leave the boxes unchecked for repeated donations and things like that, if it was down to that manufacturer, down to that level of detail, you know that

this was not an accident.

But here's what gets me.

The people who built that architecture built it using the infrastructure that Citizens United created.

The super PACs, the dark money vehicles, the 501C4 that didn't have to disclose as donors.

I every one of those decisions from 2010 forward made this easier to do.

Yes, that infrastructure that they built, that super highway of money, it got well used.

And it got used by people who were in some cases the same people who built it.

In other cases, just people who figured out the on-ramp.

And then January 6th, which is where the mobilization infrastructure, the email lists, the rally networks, the social media amplification systems and algorithms, all of it, turns in

a direction that I don't even think the people running it really anticipated.

I mean, look, maybe some of them did.

That's a question that I honestly can't answer.

Yeah, and you wonder why we talk about a war machine.

I mean, by January 6th, have Rudy Giuliani at the ellipse saying, trial by combat.

Mo Brooks is there.

And then the crowd that this machine spent years building, building with urgency, building with threat language, building with the explicit message that the enemy is inside the

gates and normal rules do not apply.

That crowd heads for the Capitol.

And here's the thing.

I want you to understand about the January 6th revelations, right?

What it revealed about this machine, the proud boys, the oath keepers, these organizations recruited using the exact same emotional infrastructure and stimuli, the same language of

an existential threat inside the gates, right?

The same framework of the enemies within.

Stuart Rhodes built the Oath Keepers by targeting military veterans and law enforcement officers, people with real training to hurt and kill people with the message that the

constitutional order was under attack and they were the last defense.

And Enrique Tario built the Proud Boys into a national organization with chapters and hierarchy and operational coordination.

These were not random people who showed up angry.

These were organizations with planning.

Organizations that use the movement's infrastructure to recruit, to fundraise, to communicate.

And on the 6th January, they use that infrastructure to coordinate an attack on the actual building where Congress was certifying our election.

So Tario got 22 years, Rhodes got 18.

Seditious conspiracy.

The longest sentence is handed down for January 6 offenses.

And then Trump pardoned him, like we said in the intro.

Which is, I mean, you build a machine, the machine does what you built it to do, the people who operated it at its most extreme get convicted of seditious conspiracy, and then

the person at the top, the person who the whole machine was built for, pardons them.

Yeah, that's not a malfunction, right?

Nothing went wrong.

And I want to be clear about that.

That is the system operating as designed by the people who designed it.

So the question we're building toward, the question this whole episode is actually about, is what happens when that system starts hitting the people who actually funded it, who

voted for it, who showed up in January cold weather to be a part of it?

Because by February 2025, DOGE is cutting rural hospital funding in red districts.

And the veterans who stormed the castle in 2021 are finding out that the VA services they depend on are in the crosshairs of the next deficiency operation run by the world's

richest man.

And that machine doesn't actually have like a loyalty setting on it, right?

That's what we're gonna show you next.

So let's start with the money, right?

Because the money is always where the pattern is the clearest and we have the records for it, right?

Like that's the data.

In the weeks that followed after the 2020 election, the stop the steal operation raised over $250 million, right?

So through the Save America pack and other groups that were aligned with the MAGA movement.

And the pitch was explicit, right?

This money was going to fight the stolen election in court, fund the legal battles, protect your vote.

And remind me again how much we had actually went to election litigation.

It was just a fraction.

It was practically a rounding area.

So the House Select Committee documented that right in their report.

The money went to his political operation, to events, to vendors connected to the Inner Circle.

So the donors thought they were funding lawyers, but they were just funding the operation of that apparatus.

And this is not a first time this trick has been played.

This is the exact same mechanism we traced in segment one through the Tea Party Pack ecosystem.

Same pre-checked recurring donation boxes, the same emergency language.

In me at the gates, send money now, money goes somewhere the donor never intended.

Yeah, WinRed.

So I'm going to talk about WinRed for a second because it's the infrastructure version of that fraud made into an entire platform.

WinRed is the mandatory small dollar fundraising platform for Republican candidates.

Mandatory in the sense that if you want to access the entire party apparatus, the voting lists, the calling schedules, the fundraising, you know, campaigns and programs and flyers

and mailers and callers and all those other things.

all those other things that annoy the hell out of all of us, what we get during the big election season, then you have to run your donations online through WinRed.

And WinRed had pre-checked boxes that enrolled donors.

Oftentimes, your grandma and your grandpa, who are sadly and sadistically still Republicans for some reason, often low-income donors.

people giving $20 because they believed in the cause, right?

In recurring weekly or monthly charges that they didn't really authorize, in a lot of ways, these are the same people that are falling for scams, where callers are asking them

to send Bitcoin and their children are in prison and they need gift cards in order to be able to get them out.

it's...

it's...

you have to laugh a little bit because otherwise you'll cry.

How much money are we talking about here?

The FCC investigation and the Senate Finance Committee inquiry put refunds alone at $122 million.

That's just the refund number, right?

That's not the total that was actually taken.

That was just the amount that got clawed back after people noticed their bank accounts being drained.

And these people being drained are like the most devoted, right?

They're the people that were willing to give a response to these letters in the first place, believing their republic was in danger.

Those are the people who got taken for the ride the most, right?

because they were the most trusting, right?

mean, and here's what I want our listeners to understand directly.

If you gave money to any Republican candidate through the online platform between 2020 and 2024, you should go look at your bank statements.

If you are here from, and you were a Republican from 20 to 24, welcome, thanks for being here.

Thanks for listening, but you should check your bank statements.

to make sure, right?

Not as some sort of like political statement, but as a practical matter.

You should really see with your own eyes and check whether you were enrolled in something that you didn't sign up for.

This is not like hypothetical, right?

Like the FTC found this, the Senate confirmed it, and $122 million in refunds means $122 million that had to be asked for back, which means there were people who never asked

and never got it.

And of course the philosophical problem here that I keep coming back to is that the mechanism requires belief.

This doesn't work on cynics, it works on people who genuinely convinced that their system was under attack.

The more sincere the donor, the more of a target they are within that system.

like just like hypnotism right?

It's the people who are who are the least prone to hypnosis right?

They're the true believers and that's not like the feature right?

Like sorry that's the feature not the bug.

It's the feature like I usually say it's not the bug it's not a bug it's a feature.

Right.

And then you get to Project 2025, which is a whole different kind of machine, not a fundraising operation, but a blueprint for governance.

And the Heritage Foundation launched it formally in 2022.

Kevin Roberts, Paul Dans, Russell Vaught, $22 million to build a 900-page manual for dismantling the entire federal government and replacing career civil servants with

political loyalists.

By this point, if you don't know what Project 2025 is, you need to listen to some of our previous podcasts, specifically the one about Russ Vought.

Russ Vought specifically because Vought is the through line that I don't think enough people have actually tracked here, right?

He ran the Center for Renewing America, which took almost four and a half million dollars in donations between 2021 and 2023, specifically to develop the Project 2025 policy

framework.

And then in January of 2025, of course, like we all know, he becomes the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

He is now implementing from inside the executive branch, the blueprint that he was paid to write from outside of it.

which is not just a revolving door, our favorite revolving door uh system here, it's actually a planned deployment.

And that's exactly what it is, right?

The mechanism they built, Schedule F, this is the executive order that allows the administrative to reclassify federal workers in policy influencing positions as at-will

employees, which sounds, you know, bureaucratic until you understand what it means in the real world.

It means that on January 20th, 2025, the administration had every single piece in place.

to begin mass firings across the DOJ, the FBI, the State Department, and dozens of other agencies.

Career professionals who had served across multiple administrations were gone overnight.

And it bears noting that some of those people were Trump supporters.

Some of those people were absolutely Trump supporters.

And that's the part that should really land for you guys who are listening out there.

The machine does not check your voter registration before it fires you.

Schedule F does not have some sort of loyalty exemption.

If you're a career civil servant in a policy influencing role, you are vulnerable regardless of who you voted for.

Regardless of how many rallies you attended, regardless of how many times you stormed the Capitol, broke a window, and shit on Nancy Pelosi's desk.

Which brings us to Elon Musk.

And we should talk precisely here because I think the vagueness or imprecision about how people talk about Doge actually obscures just how alarming it really is.

Please.

Elon Musk donated $277 million to Trump and the Republican causes in the 2024 election cycle.

That is not a typo.

That is not a misstatement.

$277 million.

And in return, or alongside that, or as part of the same transaction, depending on how cynical you want to be, he gets handed the reins of the newly formed Department of

Government Efficiency, which is not a department at all.

has no statutory authority, and has been given total access to federal payment systems and personnel databases.

And SpaceX, Musk's other company, has received over $15 billion with a B in federal contracts.

So the man cutting federal spending has 15 billion reasons to make sure certain federal spending doesn't get cut.

think the slogan is Mars or bust.

But the cuts that did happen, that is the part that genuinely surprised me when I looked at the numbers, the Doge operation by February 2025 had cut roughly $2 billion in federal

contracts and grants.

And a significant portion of those cuts landed in red state districts, as we said before, rural hospitals, agricultural subsidies, VA services.

And when those Republican members of Congress started pushing back out loud and on the record because their constituents would not let their phones stop ringing as to why the

hospital 30 miles away was suddenly losing federal funding.

Yeah, suddenly they're guilty of ethics violations.

The machine, as you said, doesn't have a loyalty setting.

I think that was the right thing to point out.

And it's structural.

It's not accidental.

When you build a system optimized for extraction, whether it's extracting money from donors or compliance from government employees or political power from institutions, that

system doesn't suddenly become nurturing when it turns on its own base.

It does what it was built to do.

And here is where the historical through line from segment one really becomes undeniable.

We talked about how the post-Watergate reforms created the architecture that the money eventually learned to route around, right?

Citizens United in 2010 just blew the doors off of what was left of that architecture.

And what Citizens United enabled, what anti-

than he Kennedy's majority opinion explicitly protected was the flow of unlimited money into political speech, which sounds mostly principled until you watch $250 million raised

in the name of election integrity get entirely redirected into a political operation while the donors thought they were funding lawsuits.

Kennedy wrote that the appearance of corruption was not enough to justify restricting speech.

That actual quid pro quo corruption was the standard.

And what we have watched since 2010 is a 15 year demonstration of exactly how much extraction can happen below that standard.

Yeah, I want to end on kind of Ronna McDaniel, Ronna McDaniel, because I think she's kind of the case study that makes this personal in a way that the amounts and the dollars and

all of that stuff doesn't actually make it personal.

Okay, I didn't know we were going there, but let's talk about McDaniel.

So, Ronna McDaniel spent years as the RNC chairwoman, building the Republican party apparatus in direct service of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.

She defended him publicly through two impeachments.

She redirected party resources toward his priorities.

She was a loyal operator of this machine.

And then in March of 2024, Trump's people decided she had to go.

She was pushed out of the RNC chairmanship.

Her replacement was Michael Watley and Lara Trump, Trump's daughter-in-law, you might remember, who then redirected RNC's resources entirely toward Trump's legal defense fund.

Which is a remarkable thing to do with a national party's infrastructure.

And then NBC News hired her as a contributor.

And within days, MAGA media figures, including voices at properties connected to NBC, attacked her credibility so ferociously that NBC rescinded the contract before she had

been seen on air one time.

She built the machine and that machine ate her in less than a news cycle.

There's something almost Shakespearean about it, except that Shakespeare at least gave his tragic figures a little more time on stage.

I think that's the dark humor and I'm kind of moving past it.

Here's what I want to leave you with from this segment because this is the briefing that really matters, right?

The system we're describing, the fundraising infrastructure, the Schedule F, governance blueprint, the Doge operation, the WinRed platform, these are not separate things.

They are all pieces and cogs and components of a single machine that was built over 15 years.

using the legal architecture that Citizens United provided, the donor energy that the Tea Party movement generated, and the digital tools that Brad Parscale in the 2016 campaign

really pioneered.

And that machine is now running at full capacity inside the federal government with Vought at the OMB with, I mean, no longer anymore, but Musk running Doge, which is now completely

a defunct organization.

But Cash Patel as well, still at the FBI.

running into issues with his drinking problems lately.

And Newmall, the aging boomers who funded it, voted for it and gave their $20 a week on recurring donations are now watching their rural hospital lose funding.

Their VA services get reviewed for cuts and their neighbor who worked at the FBI for 20 years gets walked out of the building.

And those veterans who stood outside the Capitol in that cold January day, the small donors who got enrolled in recurring charges they didn't ask for, the party officials who

spent years building infrastructure and then got humiliated out of their jobs in a single news cycle, they're all inside the same pattern.

Which is the pattern we traced from the beginning, right?

I mean, the machine was never built to protect, it was built to concentrate power.

And just like the guillotine, once you concentrate that power in a war machine, it doesn't ask who votes for it before it lands on you.

And it really doesn't matter, right?

If we build a hammer, hammer has one job.

It's to hit a nail.

So it doesn't matter if you're a blue nail or a red nail.

It's meant to hit nails.

So coming up now, we're going to talk about what it actually means for the people who are figuring that out right now.

The ones who F-A'd and now they're F-O'ing.

So let's start with Enrique Tario.

Right.

We talked about him in the beginning because I think, I think his story is the one that contains the most, I don't know what the right word is, compression, right?

Everything we've been describing for the last two, 20 minutes or so live inside of what happened to just him.

Well, let's start there then.

Who is he?

So we talked about him earlier, but he is the national chairman of the Proud Boys.

He built that organization, or at least the version of it that became the nationally visible apparatus that is using the exact infrastructure we've talked about.

The rallies, the social media algorithms and amplification, the MAGA aesthetic for whatever that means, and the MAGA rhetoric in the sense that they were fighting on the

edge of something like

really big, right?

Like some this historic movement that's finally going to take America back.

And he believed that.

I do think that he did believe that for everything in the record.

It seems like he genuinely believed he was part of a movement that was going to change the country.

And for his part, he organized that movement around January 6th.

He did.

organized around January 6th.

He wasn't physically inside the Capitol during the breach.

But as the prosecution established, he was the central planner for everything that happened, the coordination, the communications, the strategic intent.

In United States versus Tarrio case number 21, CR 175, the US District Court for the District of Columbia.

In May of 2023, he was convicted of seditious conspiracy.

And that was from a DOJ press release from September 5th of 2023.

And seditious conspiracy is not a minor charge.

No, it's the most serious charge that exists short of treason, right?

Which is immediately punishable by death.

And in September of 2023, he was sentenced to 22 years in federal prison, like we talked about earlier, which was the longest sentence handed down.

The second longest was 18, that Eric guy who, was his organization again?

The other proud boys.

I forget the name of that organization.

Yeah, I'm sure they're proud to call themselves something.

But let's sit with that 22 year number for a second.

I mean, that's when we say 22 years, that sounds like, it's a verdict.

It's a data point.

We've been talking about it in terms of comparison with other sentences, but at the end of the day, it's a human life.

Um, you know, that is depending on how old when you go in, I mean, that's your forties, your fifties, some of the prime years, maybe.

Here's when your body changes and your parents pass on and your kids grow up and

That's not an abstraction.

Yeah, he went in believing he was really serving something, Like he thought he was a Nelson Mandela type and that the movement had his back, that he was doing sanctioned,

encouraged, celebrated by the people at the top of the apparatus he'd given years of his life to building.

And so what happened?

Well, he sat in prison for over a year.

And then in January 2025, when obviously Trump finally pardoned him, he was let go.

Which sounds like a resolution until you think about what it actually means.

Well, what does it mean to you?

Well, it means that the pardon wasn't about Enrique Tario.

It was about the movement's relationship with its own mythology.

Trump pardoning the January 6th defendants is a political act.

It's a message.

It's infrastructure management.

Tario was just useful on the way in and became useful again on the way out.

But the 22 months he sat in a cell, those months don't get pardoned.

Those are just gone.

And the machine used him, right?

Completely.

And then the machine decided when he was done being used, he could just go.

So Stuart Rhodes is the second person I want to talk about and his story sits kind of right next to Tario's, but has a different texture to it because of who Rhodes was before

all of this.

All right, tell me.

Stuart Rhodes was the oath keepers founder.

And the oath keepers were not a fringe organization in the way sometimes people assume.

They recruited specifically from the military veterans and law enforcement, active duty retired people who had sworn an oath to the constitution and who Rhodes told over and over

again that the oath didn't expire when the service did.

And they had a continuing obligation and that the moment was coming when that obligation would be called in.

And he built some real numbers on that argument, a real membership.

Yes, he did.

A real membership, real infrastructure, real presence at events across the country for years before January 6th.

He organized a paramilitary presence at the Capitol on January 6th.

The oath keepers were there in a coordinated, structured way.

Right.

This wasn't spontaneous.

This wasn't a bunch of people hopping on a plane.

That case, that was the United States versus Rhodes, which is case number 22, CR 15 for the legal weirdo heads.

He was convicted of seditious conspiracy.

in November of 2022 and sentenced to 18 years in federal prison in May of 2023.

And these are the men who spent years being told they were the tip of the spear.

Which is exactly the language that the movement used, right?

The tip of the spear, the last line of defense.

The people who understood what was actually at stake while everyone else was asleep.

And the people who used that language and built their rallies and ran the email lists and collected donations?

Where were they when the sentences came down?

Well, they were running for office.

They were launching podcasts.

They were signing book deals.

I keep thinking about the specific quality of that kind of betrayal, because it's not like these guys weren't warned, right?

The legal exposure was visible.

The risk was real.

It was documented.

But the movement they had served spent years training them to distrust exactly the institutions that would have told them to stop.

The courts, the press, the legal system.

The professional class that might have said this is going in badly for you specifically.

Yes, but they were epistemically sealed inside of the apparatus, right?

And the apparatus didn't protect them when the consequences actually arose.

But eventually Trump pardoned Rhodes too, right?

January 2025?

Yeah, he did.

And I want to be careful here because I don't think that the pardon is really meaningless, right?

And it mattered to those men, right?

But the pardon came after the years, after the sentencing, after that time was actually served, the machine decided the timeline, not them.

The third story I want to tell is uh kind of different in kind because Ronna McDaniel didn't actually go to prison, right?

She was a storm building.

She was by most measures one of the most powerful women in the Republican Party.

We talked about her earlier.

This is the one who got pushed out, right?

Yeah, Trump just decided he wanted different leadership at the RNC and that leadership just redirected those party resources like we talked about earlier directly to his

campaign and the whole Lara Trump thing.

And she was left unwelcome pretty much everywhere,

Yeah, the movement basically just made her toxic to the mainstream institutions that might have taken her in, you know, like a CEO ship at some other organization.

Because the movement itself had already kind of discarded her.

She really didn't have ground to stand on anywhere.

That's a different kind of cost than 22 years in a federal prison, but I don't think it's a smaller kind of cost.

I if you think about it, it's what it shows is that the machine doesn't distinguish between you and the people you intend to target with it.

You know, the ones who carry the guns versus those who carry the briefcases.

When the machine is done with you, it's done with you, right?

It leaves the same thing behind.

A person where there was a person once, sort of a shell of a person left.

Yeah, she gave she gave seven years to an apparatus that was never going to protect her.

She gave Rhodes, sorry, of the the Oath Keepers gave decades of his life to a militia that the movement celebrated and then watched get prosecuted without meaningful intervention

until it was politically useful for for the intervention.

And then Tario organized, you know, a historic event that the people who encouraged it spent the next three years saying.

they had nothing to do with it.

They tried to stop it.

They weren't encouraging violence, yada, yada, yada.

Yeah, I think what I want the listener to hold on to here is that these three people are not the same.

Their choices are not equivalent.

The legal and moral weight of what Tario and Rhodes did is genuinely different from what McDaniel did.

I'm not going to collapse that into one thing, But the pattern that consumed them is identical.

The same machine made promises of belonging and protection and purpose.

And when the cost came due, the machine was somewhere else entirely.

The specific weight of specific lives, right?

That's kind of what we said we were gonna talk about.

And I think these three lives, the chairman, the founder, the party official, I think they kind of hold it.

Not all of it, right?

But enough that you can feel what the shape of this actually is.

You can definitely feel it.

So here's where we are.

You've spent, I don't know, 30, 40 minutes with us inside of this architecture, this thing.

We know who built it.

We know who it consumed.

You know that the consumption wasn't a bug.

It was kind of the design.

The machine was never built to protect the people who operated it.

It was built to generate political energy.

And when the energy is no longer useful, the people who generated it became expendable.

That's not a theory.

That's what happened to Ron McDaniel.

That's what happened to Stuart Rhodes.

That's what happened with Enrique Tario.

Three very different people with very different moral ledgers.

And the machine left all three of them in the same place.

And I think the synthesis before we get to what you actually do with this is pretty simple.

Authoritarian adjacent political movements don't protect their own.

They protect the brand.

And when protecting the brand requires sacrificing the people who built it, that sacrifice happens without ceremony.

The lesson for anyone still inside that machine is pretty clear.

But the lesson for the rest of us, for the people who are watching this from the outside and trying to figure out what they're supposed to do, that lesson is a little different.

And that's the one I want to spend the last few minutes on.

Yeah.

So here's, here's what we want to talk about first of what you can actually do.

Now I'm not going to pretend for a second that this is going to be quick or easy.

but what we do see is that this machine is eating itself.

We see the, the exits recently in, different offices, we see, articles of impeachment filed against the department of war.

Secretary.

So it's sorry.

It's still hard for me to say.

We see, you know, Patel is now kind of falling apart.

He's gotten rid of Bondi.

The labor secretary resigned.

I mean, it's we're watching this machine eat itself.

Right.

But there are some things that you can actually do.

So one of the first things I would do is I'd go to the States United Democracy Center at States United.org.

Right.

And so what they do is they track the kind of institutional capture that we've been describing, right?

The places where the machinery of elections and governance is being kind of colonized quietly by people who've made very clear what they want to do with it.

They produce actual research, right?

They file actual legal challenges and they have a tool on their site that lets you see what's happening in your specific state.

That's where I'd start because it kind of grounds you.

in what's going on around you, not just at the big level, like, what do I do?

What do I do?

But somewhere that you can see it for yourself.

It takes this sort of abstract thing that we've been describing and puts it on a map with your county and your state and your city.

And I keep coming back to the work being done at the Protect Democracy project at ProtectDemocracy.org.

They're specifically focused on the structural vulnerabilities that allow what we've been describing to happen, which is basically, know, like they're, they're, that's what the war

machine is looking for, right?

That's being targeted at those vulnerabilities and places like ProtectDemocracy.org are going to like, they're, basically finding those holes and they're protecting people from

those vulnerabilities.

They're not a protest organization.

They're not asking for people to march.

They're doing the slower, less visible work of building legal scaffolding that makes the next chapter harder.

The next attempt harder, I should say.

And that work is genuinely underfunded relative to how important it is.

If you have $20 a month and you want it to go somewhere that actually creates durable change and that betters our democracy, that's where I'd put it.

And you will have to make sure to check that checkbox for the recurring donations.

For the people like me who actually want to be doing something with their hands, something that feels a little bit more immediate, we're obviously going to point to Indivisible.

You can go to indivisible.org.

I know that name is familiar to a lot of you who got activated in 2017 and then kind of drifted away from it.

I'd ask you to go back because what Indivisible does well is exactly what I think about when I think about systems pressure, right?

They built a model for constituent contact that actually works.

Not the kind where you just like sort of sign the petition and it just goes away and to avoid somewhere, but the kind where you show up to a district office with 12 other people

and a specific ask with your name on a sign in sheet and that leaves a mark, right?

That gets logged, that change.

sort of changes the calculus for a staffer who's deciding what to put in the weekly briefing for a member of Congress, right?

A phone call or 12 might not make it, but 12 people showing up and saying, we're here about this issue is really gonna push that needle a little bit further.

And over the long term, on the years long commitment rather than the this week or today activities, I want to name something that doesn't get talked about in these conversations

very much, which is the Election Reformers Network at electionreformers.org.

They're focused on the administrative layer of elections, basically the non-glamorous part, right?

The poll workers, the election administrators, the canvassing boards.

Those are the positions that the movement we've been describing has been quietly targeting for these last three election cycles.

Filling those positions with people who believe in the process is not exciting work.

It doesn't trend.

You're not going to see it pop up on social media.

But I would argue it's one of the single most important structural things that a motivated citizen can do between now and the next federal election.

Absolutely.

And these are the people that our current administration is specifically targeting when they ask for voter registration records from a statewide election for federal purposes.

But here's the thing I do want to be honest about.

None of these organizations are going to save anything by themselves.

None of us listening to this podcast or doing this podcast are going to do anything by ourselves.

What they need from you and what we need from you is not your money, right?

It's your time and it's your willingness to be a node in a network that applies consistent pressure over a long period of time.

The machine we've been describing was built over decades, right?

You're not gonna dismantle it in a news cycle.

You're not gonna dismantle it in a presidential term.

Right, because the people that got crushed by this machine we've been talking about got consumed in the first place because they believed they were belonging to something

powerful and they were going be protected by something powerful.

And the people who are going to stop the next version of this machine, which is being built as we speak, we don't know necessarily where or by whom, but the next version is

going to be stopped by people who understand that protection has to be mutual.

You build it together, it doesn't hold.

And that's the actual lesson of most of these podcasts, right?

Not that the machine turns on its own.

We know that.

We've seen it happen, right?

The lesson is that the alternative to a machine is a community.

And communities are built one person at a time with accountability running in every direction.

which is harder than building a machine, but also the only thing that's ever actually worked in the long term.

All right, so before we get out of here, uh we start talking about the things that kind of surprised us from our research and our findings in our episodes.

So I want to say the thing that actually kind of got under my skin this week, and it's not the big stuff, right?

It's the win-read number.

$122 million in refunds to elderly and low-income Trump donors, right?

People who gave what they had.

and the platform had pre-checked a box that said, keep taking it.

And then when they tried to get their money back, they actually had to go to court to fight for it and go to the FTC and say, hey, look, this is illegal.

It violates the law.

The machine and the machine didn't care, right?

They didn't care who built it.

They just process transactions, right?

That's the part I really was, I guess, angry about.

What really grinds my gears?

But, uh

Yeah.

So that was from me or these weren't enemies, right?

These were the movement and the platform just ate them anyway.

I think my standout from this week was Ronna McDaniel, not because I have any particular sympathy for her, but because the timeline is almost surgical.

And she spent years building the apparatus.

She absorbed every humiliation the principal required of her.

She was publicly loyal past any reasonable threshold.

And then within 72 hours, like three days of NBC announcing her hire, the people she protected in her career and collected like a debt and then...

And then they just spit her out.

They chewed her up and spit her out.

They did not honor the contract, the real contract.

But I guess the contract was always you serve the machine and the machine serves itself.

And so she signed off on that contract, but I just don't think she read the fine print.

Yep, that is absolutely true.

Don't forget, you can find us at fof.foundation.

You can subscribe on Castapod.

That's the platform that runs our website, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

You can leave a review if you're so inclined.

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It does more than you think it does.

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And then I'll say this and I'll let Will close this out.

So Steve Bannon raised $25 million to build a wall that didn't get built.

He got pardoned for defrauding the people who gave him the money and is currently broadcasting daily from what appears to be a boat.

This machine is not a meritocracy.

It's not even a particularly good racket.

It's just very loud and it's been running longer than most people have been paying attention to it.

So pay attention.

Maybe don't give anybody a $25 million for a wall.

And maybe check that the machine you're building, well first of all, don't build any machines.

Read the fine print and all, well, yeah, not war machines that turn on your own country, preferably, but yeah, if you're building a machine, read the contracts, read the fine

print, stay out of the way, make sure it's not gonna get turned around and pointed at you one day because, I mean, that's really not what democracy's about.

And I hope that if you got nothing else out of this episode, you got that out of it.

Until next time.

Yeah, that's it.

That's the overlap.

Bye!