 One of the political predictions that you've publicly made, Matt, is that there's going to be some sort of political violence unfolding this year, or at least you're worried that that's going to happen. And part of that seems to come down to how people view what has transpired in this country over the past four or five years. Specifically, the touchstone there is January 6th. And you wrote a piece that I think drew a lot of fire calling out Vivek Ramaswamy's comments on January 6th. Let me pull that up here. The headline is Vivek Ramaswamy really, really wants you to know he thinks January 6th was an inside job. And I highlighted a passage from here. This is what Vivek had to say about January 6th. There's now clear evidence that there was at the very least entrapment of peaceful protesters similar to the fake Gretchen Wittner kidnapping plot. The FBI won't admit how many undercover officers there were in the field on January 6th. Capitol police on one hand fired rubber bullets and explosives into a peaceful crowd, who then willingly later allowed to enter the Capitol. That doesn't add up. If the deep state is willing to manufacture an insurrection to take down its political opponents, they can do anything. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. What is the fundamental problem with Ramaswamy's formulation there? And what are your worries about how this kind of increasingly, that if this formulation is increasingly accepted or embraced by mainstream political figures, what effects are you worried that that's going to have on American civil life? That is not clear evidence of entrapment or the manufacture of an insurrection. It is not. It is not. That's not clear evidence of that. You show me the clear evidence. It's the beginning noting that there's been an admission that at least a handful of FBI informants were in the field that day. And that's by the FBI in hearings over the summer. Noting that is not clear evidence. It is the beginning of a series of questions. And those questions then should lead you to where the next place that you would find evidence for this, especially if you're going to say that this is very similar to the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping in which, like so many cases after 9-11, the FBI had people, like people who were pretending to be people that they were not, not just informants, not just sort of like saying, hey, these guys over here are doing it. They were cooking up the plot themselves to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, a plot that was never going to happen, it's private among a small group of somewhat gullible people. We've seen this over and over again. We've written about this over and over again at reason, including back long before Vivek Ramaswamy expressed any interest in the subject in any kind of public way. So the next place that you would look in a place like Gretchen Whitmer is like, OK, is testimony from those people as part of the charging documents in the case? Is it part of the criminal conviction when it goes to trial? In those entrapment cases, they were. And that is typically how that goes. That's how we learn about it. That's how in the case of Michigan, some of those charges were thrown out, although they were then retried, in the 889 convictions that have happened related to the January 6th riots in Capitol Hill, 200 of which involved violent activity, there has been zero cases. As far as we know, as far as I'm aware of, in which that showed up in the charging documents, and that was part of the trial, testimony, evidence from agents, provocateurs, informants in the field. So if this is clear evidence, it would show some fingerprints somewhere, unless I'm still holding out the possibility here in general, like we should suspect the FBI, having a default suspicion in a deep one is totally fine. So then where do you look? So the way that you can imagine that this was, that we wouldn't need to use that testimony that could have been there is just by simply that the actions of the people charging through barricades, causing injury to more than 100 Capitol Police, that their actions alone were enough to convict them. But that should lead you to, and so therefore they didn't need this testimony, even though they could have totally done it, but that should lead you to another conclusion, which is to say, the way that you avoid that kind of entrapment, and let's remember that, since I wrote that article of Vivek has now called January 6th, Entrapment Day. The way to avoid an entrapment is to not bust through barricades and break windows and fight with Capitol Police officers while trying to enter the Capitol building on the day that they're supposed to be certified in the presidential election. You could totally avoid it by not doing any of those things. And I don't say that cheekily. And I don't say that in a way to be like high-fiving these grossly long sentences of various Proud Boys members. I don't think that the insurrection, the sedition charges, I don't think that those were appropriate. I think they're way too long. I agree with Vivek Ramoswamy that people who are nonviolent shouldn't be serving prison for their activities on that day. I agree with him. But it's not clear evidence of entrapment. It just isn't. And he also said that the Capitol Police are just the same as the FBI. No, they're not. They're different. They're actually different organizations. And if the Capitol Police, and the other two things that he's pointing to as clear bits of evidence were like, well, look, they did tear gas and rubber bullets over here, although very small amounts. But they let in the barricades over here. So look, they're just like letting them right in. That doesn't add up. It's a chaotic scene. If anyone who has been in a riot knows that it doesn't add up. Riots are crazy moments. Like everyone is acting in strange ways. And if the Capitol Hill police were in on it, that means that they ushered in, but first of all, that means that all of the interviews that have been done with them, they all managed to just sort of like be completely disciplined about not spilling the beans on the worst day in the history of the Capitol Police. They're like, okay, we'll just totally swallow this conspiracy. It's hard to whistle a blower. Yeah. How many people would have to be in cahoots for all of this to add up, right? Like it would have to be hundreds and hundreds of people who've all perfectly synced up their stories with not a crack in sight and not even anybody privately sort of admitting to their groups of friends, what's what, right? I do want to get to the beginning of Zach's question, which is because it's not one-sided. It's not just January 6th is my worry about violence. The way that I'm worried about violence related to January 6th is that it is clear that the Republican Party, the mainstream of the Republican Party is not taking responsibility for January 6th. Clear majority is when you poll Republicans either blame it like on Antifa or the FBI or Ray Epps or whoever's in their imagination who did it or they say, yeah, it's fine. Like it's justified because Biden stole the election. So like that's not taking responsibility for human action at all. You have to like own the agency of it one way or the other in my estimation, or else you are basically intellectually greenlighting further violence. And on the left, that is the same in different ways, but that overall dynamic is the same with the 2020 post George Floyd riots, which killed 14, 19 people. I forget the exact number, huge amounts of damage. And not just that, but Portland was on fire for a hundred consecutive days. People were just like, you know, besieging and throwing human shit at the police building in downtown Portland. Over and over, there's burning stuff day after day. We boarded up New York City, Manhattan, which I don't think is a Trump, a big Trump supporting region. We put plywood on windows here because we assumed that if Trump won, the people who didn't like him would riot. So that says to me that we've normalized a lot of political violence and the post October 7th demonstrations, which I mentioned before, which do irritate me to great effect because it keeps me from getting home. And that's just no good. If we're allowing small groups of raggedy ass protesters to close bridges to prompt the evacuation of the White House, which happened the other day, that says to me that we haven't thought, we haven't come up with a plan on what to do. If you behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated in the famous formulation. And so if that all it takes is a couple of beardies and some college dropouts to block a bridge that well, that seems fun. Let's block O'Hare airport. Let's snuggle LAX. The worst thing is that they're not college dropouts. They in fact graduated from their liberal arts schools and now wants loan forgiveness from the rest of us. So it's important to note that. But I do also, I was confused by the boarding up windows all up and down Fifth Avenue on election day. This past go around as well, especially because one of the things that was most striking to me was that sleep number, the mattress store was boarded up. And I'm a little bit like, were you seriously expecting the looting of mattresses in Manhattan? Like, how exactly was that going to go? Like, please play this out for me. But you're pretty tired and like from a long night of rioting and needed a little rest. But I think your point is well taken. And I think you're writing on this actually at least shakes me out of this mindset where since this has just been the state of play for the last, I don't know, frankly, since 2020 summer of 2020 post George Floyd, it was very much normalized. But even before that a little bit, we saw Zach and I were just talking recently about all of the carnage in Ferguson, Missouri. And basically how that was sort of, obviously there have been different waves of protests LA in the 90s is another good example that you mentioned earlier. There have been these waves of protests and riots that have popped up. But to some degree, I kind of feel like from 2014 and then we had a little pause when things were kind of good and decent from 2016 to 2020. And then 2020 up until now, these eras where it feels like small groups of people exerting extraordinary influence and really affecting other people's abilities to live their lives, shopkeepers' abilities to actually earn a living for themselves, people's abilities to go out their business unmolested. It's kind of increasingly rare and it's important to kind of whip our heads, snap our heads out of this. And remember living in such a politically tumultuous era is not a normal thing. This is not aspirational, this is not good. This is not how every single era has totally been, though obviously there have been these waves of it, but at least for the last four years, the fact that this is at least to me feels like a fact of life is a hugely problematic thing where it does feel like political violence has sort of increasingly, it's like we increasingly act like if it's for the right cause, it's no big deal. And actually it's really important to say no, no matter the cause, it's a really fucking big deal. I think that's the key point is that the excusing of it and the cowardice from political leaders to condemn political violence if it's coming from your side more or less, that's what Matt is describing with January 6th, that's what we saw with these riots and that denying of personal agency, which I would think is something that libertarians would be particularly attuned to and able to recognize like the importance of agency and responsibility, but I do think it's becoming an increasingly unbridgeable divide among libertarians and other small government types who more or less believe what Ramaswamy says about January 6th and the lead up to it. And those of us who think there's, there might be some shadiness, there might have been some egging on, but don't see the evidence of some massive setup. And that's not even to say that the entire insurrection framing or narrative is exactly right either. I just think there's a lot of contributing factors and blame to go around, which you can trace all the way back to if you wanted to be getting so the Trump administration and the Russia investigation and the discontent, I think a lot of it legitimate about how that was handled, the outrageous, the lies and the bad policy around COVID, the media, the political hypocrisy and defenses of looting. It's all a valid discussion, but if one of us believes that January 6th was a manufactured plot to stop us from discovering the truth and the other just doesn't see the evidence for that, it's such a different view of reality. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our new show, Just Asking Questions. You can watch another clip here or the full episode here. New episodes drop every week, so subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel to get notified when that happens or to the Just Asking Questions podcast on Apple, Spotify or any other podcatcher.