4.4 • 4.9K Ratings
🗓️ 15 January 2021
⏱️ 47 minutes
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In the last week of his presidency Donald Trump is being purged from the political mainstream. Congress has impeached him again. He has been booted off social media. A major golf tournament has been pulled from one of his courses. How should Donald Trump and his followers be held to account for damaging American democracy?
We speak to Elizabeth Neumann, who led the counterterrorism office at the Department of Homeland Security, and Megan Squire, a professor of computer science at Elon University who tracks online extremism. The Economist correspondents Steven Mazie and Leo Mirani also join us.
John Prideaux, our US editor, hosts with New York bureau chief Charlotte Howard and Jon Fasman, US digital editor.
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0:00.0 | Hey there, it's Jay Cunfrey here from the award-winning high performance podcast |
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0:35.0 | The pizza at Comic Ping Pong gets great reviews. It's on one of those wide avenues that stretch |
0:41.2 | for miles through Washington's swankier suburbs. There's a vegan pizza for 16 bucks. Of course, |
0:48.4 | if you want to try it yourself these days, you'll have to get takeout or brave the patio seating |
0:53.2 | in January. Just before the 2016 election, Comic Ping Pong's Instagram picked up a load of |
0:59.7 | new followers, but they weren't commenting on the food or the distressed industrial decor. |
1:05.9 | The messages said things like, we're on to you. Staff started getting death threats. |
1:13.3 | Once on day afternoon, a month after the election, a 28 year old white man walked in with an |
1:18.3 | assault rifle. He'd been reading about John Podesta's hacked emails. People were saying they |
1:23.7 | revealed how Hillary Clinton's campaign boss was part of a pedophile ring linked to the Democratic |
1:29.0 | party and run from the restaurant's back rooms. A shot was fired, but police quickly surrounded the |
1:35.1 | place. Edgar Welch came out with his hands above his head. No one was heard. |
1:41.2 | Asked what he thought when he found that the fictional child victims he wanted to rescue weren't |
1:45.5 | there, Welch said later, the intel on this wasn't 100%. Pizzagate was a warning of how readily |
1:54.3 | regular Americans could take up arms against a phantom threat when their online diet of pet photos |
2:00.1 | and sports gossip is spiked with ludicrous conspiracy theories. Mr. Alifantus, the restaurant owner, |
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