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This is Our Body Politic. I'm the creator and host, Farai Chidea. I've covered politics for 30-plus years and interviewed white supremacist and nationalist for the past 25. The reason is simple. They too are my fellow Americans. Much of mainstream journalism has ignored them or marginalized them, assuming that their relevance had long passed. It hasn't. I was at the

Capitol on January 6th interviewing peaceful protesters who'd come for the Stop the Steel Rally,

like Jay, a young black man from Massachusetts who supported Donald Trump.

I don't listen to the media anymore. I used to, and I felt like I was being brainwashed at the end of the day.

I left before the storming of the Capitol building, but I did see the energy of the crowd that day building to a fever pitch. I was there again

two weeks later on inauguration day. No one knew what would happen, but security this time was

tight. And luckily, nothing violent went down. So when I went back to the Capitol on September 18th

for Justice for J6, a rally in support of the January 6th insurrectionist,

I didn't expect to see much activity.

There was a guy who just rolled by us on a scooter with a Great Dane or some other sort of

large dog in a camouflage backpack saying pro-American anti-Biden.

But he is actually one of the few protesters who appear to be here right now.

That was a bit of an audio diary of me walking into the crowd.

And the person who I was describing turns out to be a self-described former Army Ranger, Jeremiah Shivers, originally from Colorado.

And those soldiers or those patriots, you know, some of them, you know, deserve to be in there, obviously, for what they did.

...