clip. answer the question, how does the federal government impact your life? >> be passionate to express your view matter how large or small you think the audience will be. and know that in the greatest country on earth, your view does matter. >> to all the film makers out there, content is king. remember to be as neutral and impartial as possible in your portrayal of both sides of an issue. announcer: c-span awards $100,000 in cash prices -- prizes and a shot at the grand prize of $5,000. for competition rules, tutorials, or just how to get started, visit our website at -- journal" continuous. host: tonight the pbs frontline series airs a documentary

american two the correspondent behind that is ac thompson from frontline and also a reporter from pro public up. mr. thompson, thanks for joining us. >> thank you for having me on. host: this documentary has been out before, has been revised per is new? guest: what we want to do a year after the insurrection is talk to people on the hill, talking to law enforcement, be out in the world at rallies seeing what people are talking about and what people are interested in and what we really found is if you go to arizona, michigan, if you go to wisconsin, georgia, you go to rallies now, there is a massive interest within the republican base in so-called election integrity issues and there's a very widespread belief

that's animating people on the ground that the 2020 election was a historic fraud and that democracy has been usurped and the joe biden is an illegitimate president and that was to me the most interesting and disturbing aspect of our new reporting. this sort of fringe extremist conspiracy theories have absolutely migrated to the mainstream. host: we further sentiments before leading out of the election. what did you learn differently about what you just said? guest: here is the thing. i thought after january 6 700 people getting arrested, all of that that you would see a decrease in this sort of sentiment. that it would be people would be saying maybe we were wrong, maybe we don't want more people to die storming the capital and

i don't think that's happened at all. what we see is in many places republican leaders do not want to embrace these conspiracy theory issues but the republican base are driving them and in some cases what's interesting is the sort of ideas people articulating on the ground borrow from earlier sort of progressive and left-leaning ideas about election reform and are now being applied to today. ideas like no voting machines, paper ballots only, one day voting. some of which were articulated earlier by people who lean left. host: you had a chance to talk with the current chair of the january 6 select committee. what were you hoping to get from that interview? guest: what was so interesting

to me about talking to chair thompson and also we talked to adam schiff as well. is it's clear their interests are not just in the mechanics of what happened and what transpired in the halls. that they are interested in the broader context, the culture of disinformation and mapping the links as far as possible to the trump receipt -- regime and the trump circle. that was an interesting thing that they found very concerned about how to stem the flow of misinformation and disinformation without trampling on people's free expression. host: we will show you a little bit of that interview. this from the pbs frontline series american insurrection. [video clip] >> people who i talked to on a

daily basis who actually tell me that what i saw and experienced on january 6 really didn't happen. >> people, do you and say january 6 didn't happen. >> they say it was the black lives matter folk, it was antifa dressed up as trump people. in addition to that we have millions of folks out there who are convinced that those individuals who broke into the united states capital there were some of the greatest patriots. >> they say these are heroes. but people like you are the enemy. >> absolutely. that's why this committee is so important. host: can you elaborate on that portion of the discussion? guest: one of the things i found

was there's this persistent belief and i heard this from elected officials in states around the country that january 6 was in some way false flag, that it was a psion that was engineered to make the trump movement look bad and then perhaps it was on -- antifa who was behind it, but that what happened that day and what's been reported is not actually what happened. that's another thing that was a notion that's more widespread than i understood. host: he is with pro-public and a corresponded from frontline series american insurrection. democrats, 202-748-8000, republicans 202-748-8001. independents, 202-748-8002. of the events he went to, what

were those events, who did you talk to specifically? guest: i was at the release of the audit in arizona, looked at the maricopa county ballot in 2020. i went to election integrity events in the state of michigan and a gop county fundraiser outside of detroit in lansing. i went to the trump rally in perry, georgia. i went to other events in atlanta around this issue. i met a bunch of these people including many of the people running for office either for secretary of state or governor or other state offices. host: that's where you learned the sentiments you initially thought would subside

strengthened over the course of time. guest: absolutely. at the trump rally in georgia there were tens of thousands of people there. the former president spends a good chunk of his speech bashing immigrants, bashing refugees from afghanistan saying they will ruin the country, bashing the media, bashing so-called radical left marxist democrats and then he spends a lot of time bashing so-called rinos and blaming members of his own party for helping to conspire to steal the election in 2020. he spent a long time talking about these elaborate election conspiracy -- election fraud conspiracy theories. you see people throughout the audience who are wearing shirts and holding signs and saying

things to indicate they believe joe biden is not a legitimate president of this country and this is not a small crowd. this is what i'm finding around the country. host: tony is in fort lauderdale, florida, independent line. good morning and go ahead. caller: good morning and a happy new year to you all. sometimes people say the quiet part out loud and general milley mentioned this was our reichstag moment. i went back into history. february of 1933. the reichstag building was burned down. just like our capital attacked, horrible event. the big fear i have is that what the government did in 1933

exploited that just like they are exploiting with the witting or unwitting help of the media. to crush dissent and pass laws that accumulate more and more centralized power and this is my fear. we have fbi, hundreds of people arrested and hopefully they will go to jail for a long time. what is congress doing trying to investigate when congress should be trying to legislate. they are trying to find -- all i hear from them and from you always insurrection, insurrection, insurrection. let's get trump trump is gone, he is not coming back. he may have his dead enders that he is not coming back. get over it. host: that's tony in florida

pride -- in florida. guest: i think all of us have reasons to be skeptical of congress at various times. the fact-finding and investigative process we are seeing their has been some of the most useful information and excavation we've seen so far. what the senate did to understand this security breakdown was quite useful. i think what will end up coming out of the house select committee will probably be quite illuminating simply because they have subpoena power and a broader mandate than the fbi does. the fbi is going in a very close and confidential way to find criminal wrongdoing and that's not necessarily the mandate of the select committee and i think that's an important fact-finding process that we should be looking forward to. it would be great if it looked

more like 9/11 commission and was more bipartisan, but i don't think that's necessarily the fault of the committee for how it's turned out that way. >> six democrats, two republicans. did any members of the committee express any concerns about politics interfering with the work of what the committee intends to do? guest: not to me. what they did sort of -- i was speaking with them shortly after the wall street journal released the facebook files and i think that was an ongoing sub current was how do we deal with this world where information is what you get from your social media sources and you get through your filter and you think you're talking to people -- and you are talking to people who only agree with you. host: debra in maryland, democrats line. caller: good morning and thanks

for taking my call. i think journalists bear a lot of the responsibility for this, the belief by so many republicans that the election was stolen. whenever the topic comes up you just go that's crazy. why not answer specifically line by line what they are alleging and put out the proof. i know the proof is there. in pennsylvania i keep hearing they didn't follow their own procedures and so forth. but the one case out of the 62 that the republicans won was when justice alito said they couldn't use those votes that came in after election day, they had to segregate them and not count them and they didn't and there were only about 10,000 or so anyway. be specific. i don't understand why someone doesn't put out a book going through line by line these allegations and explaining why they are not true.

i've even been tempted to write a book. journalists should be on this and put out a book. host: that's deborah there in maryland. caller: i think there's a good point -- guest: i think there's a good point there paired when i was in arizona for the release of the audit, the mainstream media and the right-wing media interpreted the audit in totally different ways. the headline you got in mainstream sources was arizona audit confirms joe biden won the election. what the right-wing sources highlighted were questions that the audit raised about potential irregularities in the voting and they took a totally different message from it. those irregularities have been shown to not be so irregular

that i think that sofas level take -- surface level take from the media was not helpful. it would've been useful to have a deeper exploration of the issues. host: does your documentary look at say if antifa was involved as some would claim and take a look at that and debunk it specifically? guest: no. maybe we should have. maybe we should have gotten deeper into that, but that is one we took at face value is not being true and we have multiple people rebutting that. it wasn't a thing we felt like we felt like we need to dive deep on because we had multiple people saying i was there, of the evidence is this and that's not what happened. host: can you elaborate on that? guest: it was a note i got from one of my bosses in the edit that was like you guys raised

this three times. do you think that's too much. host: al joins us from massachusetts, republican line. caller: how are you doing. host: you are on, go ahead. caller: i have a few comments. can you tell me when the democratic party has ever been censored in the united states of america in the media, on social media, on the news, that would be one question. when has the democratic party ever been censored. number two, how, the national guard wasn't there and all this stuff is not being allowed to be seen now that it's being taken off the air so we can see everything that happened because we know there was somebody from

the fbi was there waving people in because it was planned, the whole thing january 6 so trump's people would look bad. they shouldn't have fallen for the trick but they did. and number three is you know that in america, i know you are a socialist, it's knocking to work. we are not going for communism. host: caller. i want to talk to you by your second point you said it was planned. he hung up. go ahead. guest: i love coming on your show and every time i do i get branded a socialist or a lackey for george soros. which is always hilarious to me and if i was destined -- that notion is pretty rampant is this

had to be a false flag, that this had to be some sort of plot against the republican party rather than a plot by members of the republican party or supporters. that is a very widespread notion and there are no facts that have come out to support that. no facts have come out that i've seen. we have had 700 plus arrests and nothing in those court documents, nothing in for example the fbi interrogation videos which we've seen that would indicate there was -- that this was a conspiracy by the left to make republicans and the trump movement look bad. host: to the caller's point, does your documentary look at security issues of that day and who is responsible? guest: no. we do not. we added about 10 or 12 minutes and that's honestly an entirely

-- it could be its own film and probably should be. host: paul is in massachusetts, democrats line. caller: thank you for your work. i did see the first program you did and it was with great alarm. my question to you is related to the psychology of these people. after 9/11 there were two interesting professors speaking about a condition called narcissistic injury which basically is where people become grandiose and want to have a greater cause, it fit the terrorists but also to me fits the kind of this mass hysteria with the rise in nazi germany or fascism, which these people are very close to in terms of my perception of them. did any of that come up in your

research or discussions with experts in the fbi or anywhere else? i guess people just believe what they want to believe about the election. i wondered if that was something you touched upon. guest: i was on the phone with a january 6 inmate yesterday and i think one thing that's worth thinking about and i think you touch upon this is when you talk to people who were there and allegedly involved in the insurrection, they are not motivated many of them buy worse intentions, they are motivated by what they believe to be best intentions. they believe that democracy was being destroyed, that the electoral process had been disrupted, that trump was the rightful president and that what was going on by certifying the vote was this effectively some

sort of elaborate coup. and so to them as you suggested, this is a heroic mandate to go and save the republic and this valorous action is for the good of the country and that is a hard thing to grapple with and a hard thing to wrap your head around. there were people in that group who were ultranationalist, white supremacist, folks of different very ill extremism, but there were a huge number of people that felt like i'm being told my country is being destroyed. this is what donald trump is telling me, what right-wing media is telling me. this is what my facebook pages telling me. and everyone around me thinks this so i want to go save the country. i want to do the right thing and they see themselves in the same way as the architects of the

american revolution. 1776 is a term thrown around all the time in these circles. grappling with peoples best intentions rather than their worst and understanding what does that mean and understanding how do you deprogram people who absolutely believe they are operating from a place of love and heroism. i do not know. host: you said to -- you spoke to someone currently in prison because of the events? how would he describe his experience. some people calling in talking about how they are being treated. did he express any of that to you? guest: yes. here's a fascinating thing. the january 6 inmate's a lot of them call the lockup they are in

as d.c. gitmo and they like to compare their conditions to those prisoners who are held indefinitely by this government under questionable productions. it's interesting because these are guys who are not leftists, human rights activists who are concerned about those folks who are being held at guantanamo before and they draw the comparison. their concerns about the treatment they've received are absolutely worth investigating. i think they are absolutely concerning. despite the severity and severely seriousness of the crimes which they are confused -- accused, you have to preserve basic human rights and basic

standards in any car sorrel situation and i think that's absolutely a thing that is worth exploring further. i would say i'm concerned about the things i'm hearing out of those facilities. host: give me an example. guest: specifically lack of proper nutrition, lack of medical care. the fact that when the marshals service came in which the marshals service is the entity which contracts with local lockups to house federal prisoners while they are awaiting trial. they came in and did an inspection and moved a bunch of presenters out of the d.c. jail and then closed a bunch themselves that are there and labeled them uninhabitable. there are concerns about the quality of the standard within that facility.

another thing i will say, as a journalist who's trying to reach out to prisoners and talk to about what we did in this film. we interviewed someone is facing charges of being involved in the plot to kidnap the michigan governor gretchen whitmer. it is often very hard to even locate federal prisoners awaiting trial. there's not a transparent system to do that. unlike local prisoners, you can't even figure out where these guys are. with the d.c. prisoners from january 6 they are not getting video visits, you cannot communicate with them through video. there's a lot of different issues. if i'm going to be sympathetic to the human rights concerns of prisoners it's going to extend january 6 prisoners, prisoners

accused of basic run of the mill crimes. all of them have human rights that need to be per -- respected. host: todd in massachusetts on our republican line. go ahead. caller: thank you for taking the call. the only comment i would make, it sounds to me like the gentleman on has a pretty good heart and he looks like he is trying to follow things, trying to share time on both sides of the issue. i guess what i would like to point out is he indicated, i don't know if that's the producers or where it came from that he wasn't able to or chose not to spend time on things like antifa and the security issues that were obviously a huge problem with respect to that day . i guess my comment would be folks on the left wonder why

people that look at things from the right side, why they are skeptical as they are and i guess it would say it's probably a lot of room for that. this institutional bias on a lot of this reporting. i think your guest whether he did it intentionally or not pointed that out to you on air. host: that's todd in massachusetts. mr. thompson, go ahead. guest: the point was that we had spent a lot of time on the film addressing the conspiracy theories about antifa being involved or it being a false flag operation. we may be didn't debunk them in the depth that we could have, but we do hit on it repeatedly. for us, to understand what we did with this film is it is a portrait of the movements on the far right leading up to january

6. the original film takes you to january 6 and stops there. because of that, we did not spend a ton of time analyzing the failures of the capitol police, the failures of intelligence leading up to january 6. like i said, we probably could and should and that is a great film to make. it's just not the film we made. predominantly the work we did was before january 6. would we want to do in the update is fast-forward and think about what comes next and for a lot of people the people involved in january 6 are out of sight, out of mind, if that's overpaid this is the biden aronow. things will be different. we wanted to say maybe it won't

be that different and maybe this is a persistent movement and belief set that is not going to go away. >> the film introduces us to a gentleman. who is he? guest: he is the guy who is a -- he is a u.s. air force airman, a special securities attachment in the air force. he is accused of killing two law-enforcement figures. one a federal protective services officer in california, the other a deputy sheriff. he was a member of the far right uber libertarian movement called the boogaloo boys which migrated from online into the real world in 2020 and was tied to a series of fairly spectacular acts of political violence. host: here is that interview. [video clip] >> it's about people who love

freedom, liberty and they are unhappy with the level of control that the government takes over our lives. being free to do what you want as long as you don't hurt anyone else. >> aren't you accused of hurting someone? >> that's what i'm accused of. back to the example, that's what i wanted to get to. the freedom of choice, the freedom of expression. >> he pled not guilty and would not answer questions about the shootings. >> did you find it hard to get them to actually -- >> he would just deny and start every question. >> how did you come to this? because you said you didn't read a lot before. >> basically through friends.

the air force, once i joined the air force. i traveled around the world, i met people from all over the world just talking to people changed my whole view. >> do you think he's saying he found these radical ideas in the military? >> yes. i think mainly from my conversations with him he was definitely radicalized by the air force. >> i love my country. there's not a day that goes by that i don't miss putting on the uniform, the air force uniform and going to work and doing my part. >> justice after charlottesville i was seeing an extremist inside the military. and based on the berkeley teams reporting, he was far from alone. caller: mr. thompson -- host:

mr. thompson, put some context of that how it goes to the point of january 6 and the focus of your film. guest: this has been an enduring problem in the u.s. military which is there has been a small minority of servicemembers over decades who have been drawn to extremist viewpoints and extremist activity and we have seen this with members of the military involved in neo-nazi skinhead gangs in the 90's and 2000. we saw this with the shooter in wisconsin who was a former servicemember who then committed a massacre -- racially motivated massacre. and we sought with the boogaloo movement which the professed aim of the movement is to overthrow the u.s. government. i identified around 20 current

or former service members who were involved in the movement. my colleagues at uc berkeley found even more online supporting these ideas. when you bring it to january 6 what you see is there were concerning numbers of particularly veterans who were involved in reaching the capital that -- preaching the capital that day. that finally caught the attention of the pentagon. what you've seen since then is more concerted action to deal with extremist currents in the service then we've seen in decades. host: the producer and director of the film american insurrection which you can see on pbs tonight. jack in iowa, democrats line. caller: good morning. i am a bona fide democrat. i registered democrat, i voted

democrat, i voted absentee. our county auditor is a democrat. something i don't want to go into depth because i have a question. i got five requests for a ballot , but i got the ballot before i even requested it. what's interesting is our auditor resigned from office, that's kind of fishy. here's the thing about your documentary. there's a picture -- we all know what happened at st. john's with trump. in my research, nixon ringed the white house with two rings of buzzers and he stationed machine guns in the white house because he was afraid of being overwhelmed. mr. thompson, would you consider putting together a documentary

comparing richard nixon and protection of the white house versus what i'm get a think is the slipshod protection of the capitol building by nancy pelosi. guest: my next film is going to go deep into these election issues, so doing the mechanics of the intelligence and policing failures that day is not what i'm going to do what i do think somebody should and i think the absolute legitimate questions to ask. in the months leading up to january 6 that we saw in d.c. was very professional, very sophisticated policing the metropolitan police department with the stop the steal protests. they were professional, humane and they generally deserve --

i think what you see when you look back at january 6 is that handoff from the metropolitan police who are policing the rally to the capitol police who are defending the capitol building that things go very badly when the capitol police have to step up. host: independent blind, good. caller: thanks for letting me speak. my number one thing is nancy pelosi, when she was ripping up that stated the union address, there were a lot of consequences for those actions and that was partly -- i don't know. went right up to that building. i could tell you -- the stolen election, i could tell you how it happened. the dnc registering these illegal immigrants and it

happens in maryland and when you register, the real id and all of that associated with that, they register you to vote. that's how the steel just happened that's only one person and he was very honest in what he just said and also this congress were january 6, this is a third impeachment pretty much. host: to your second point as far as the dmv being involved, where did you hear that? guest: my own -- caller: my own experience. you are registered to vote. i was surprised that they -- the real id came about because in -- maryland one of the states they registered illegal aliens. they give them an idea and say bring me back your id and a lot

of them did not do that and that's why the real id you have to get the mom with a star. host: then how do you directly relate that to the conversation about january 6? caller: i was just saying this is -- that was a part of the stolen election and these people really do have a point per eight i understand it clearly. nobody connected that, but that's what i believe. host: mr. thompson, from what you heard from him, you can respond. guest: you get all different variations on this theory and there's all different types of angles that people take. the big one people talk and the president took on january 6 in his speech is the notion that the dominion voting machines which were used in many of the

swing states that they were somehow wirelessly hacked by secret teams of hackers we've never identified to this day using a secret algorithm to switch votes from trump to biden. that's on the more lurid end of conspiracy theories. the version we are hearing today is something that goes back to earlier notions around voter integrity and issues explored by an earlier wave of republican activists. i've seen reports on that exact issue and have never found totally compelling evidence that that is happening, that illegal immigrants -- undocumented immigrants are being registered to vote. i have seen the stuff debunking

it in the stuff for and i've never seen it on -- convincing on a wide scale. caller: good to talk to you. i've been watching frontline for many years and have always seen it as omitting a lot of information. i find it amazing -- are you familiar with a guy named barney apps? guest: no. caller: he's an unindicted co-conspirator and he can be seen all over the footage rousing people and telling them to march into the buildings and it's also interesting to me that you didn't focus on president trump offering the national guard to nancy pelosi and her

refusing it. host: to go back to your first point caller do you mean ray apps? caller: yes. host: go ahead and finish. caller: nancy pelosi refusing the president's offer for assistance from the national guard. the information -- omission of information on frontline is a major problem. i hope if you do another episode on this you get into some of that. this ray epps guy would be a great interview. host: you can respond if you want. guest: we can move on. host: as far as the follow-up to this i know this interview has been revived, what still lingers? guest: i think there's a lot that still worth exploring and will be explored.

people like john eastman, to the president, to the group gathered at the willard hotel. people who end up in the building. that's what i'm hoping will come in the coming months. i think the intelligence failures of that day have not been entirely understood. how various different intelligence agencies gathered information, and those were not -- when you look at the reporting the senate has done, we understand better that the capitol police were really not

prepared for this day. there are questions about why that wasn't the case. and lacked the proper riot control needed. some of that we do understand to take a softer posture from, fred -- rational leadership who are obviously indirect communication with the sergeant at arms. some of those questions still remain. host: the pbs frontline film airs tonight at 10:00 eastern time on pbs. ♪ >> what is your question or comment for rush? that is how james golden, better known for over 30 years as -- would greet callers to the rush

limbaugh radio program. mr. golden has written a book about his time as call screener, show observer and producer with the most popular radio talkshow over the past 30 years. rush limbaugh died february 17, 2021. in his book, a tribute to his former boss and friend, he writes about his love of radio and how the limbaugh program came together behind the scenes. announcer: on this episode of book notes plus. book notes plus is available on the c-span now cap or wherever you get your podcasts. >> senate minority leader mitch mcconnell and other gop leaders spoke to the press about their legislative agenda. senator mcconnell began by addressing the democrat's push to end the filibuster, saying chuck schumer is "trying to break the senate."