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Hey everyone, you're watching The Jack of In Show and I'm your host Jen Pan. Thanks as always for tuning in and watching and please hit like and subscribe if you haven't already.

All right, so on today's show I will first be speaking to Will Summer. He is a journalist over at The Daily Beast and I'm going to be speaking to him about kind of the state of QAnon and other conspiracist and far right extremist groups.

Sort of since the January 6th Capitol riot of 2020 through to today, we're going to be looking at what those groups have been up to, what they look like now, whether they still have any influence over the Republican party and what that could mean leading up to midterms.

After Will, I'm going to be speaking to two scholars over at Stanford University about Columbia's upcoming presidential election. They just had their first round of elections and left wing candidate Gustavo Petro is now in the lead, but he's going to head to a runoff with a sort of right wing populist candidate later this month.

So I'm going to be sitting down with those two scholars and speaking about that election and what it could mean for Columbia and also the Latin American left in general.

And finally, I am very excited to have Anna Kasperian and Nando Vila back on the channel. You of course remember them as the co hosts of Jacobin weekends from last year.

They've been busy, but we have managed to get them back. I'm going to be speaking with both of them about the recent California election and kind of their thoughts on on what happened in both LA and in San Francisco.

What the left can kind of learn from these two elections and what they all mean for California politics going forward. So I, like I said, that is coming up very excited to have Anna Nando back.

But first, let's get to Will. All right, so I'm now here with Will Summer. He is a politics reporter for the Daily Beast, also the co host of the podcast fever dreams and he is currently working on a book on QAnon titled Trust the Plan.

Will, good to see you. Thanks for having me. So obviously, as I just mentioned, you report on QAnon and other elements of the right among other things. And I, you know, I really wanted to have you on today to kind of, I guess, take stock of the Republican party and the right in general as we're kind of leading up to midterms and specifically the ongoing influence or perhaps lack there of of kind of these conspiracy theory elements on the right.

So obviously we are in the midst of an ongoing congressional hearing on the January 6th Capitol riot. And I want to start there because if I recall you were actually on the ground reporting from the Capitol riot in 2020.

And I believe you had sort of reported on some of the elements, some of the, you know, QAnon and other conspiracy theory elements that were present there.

Now it's sort of my impression that, you know, there's been a bit of a kind of legal and social crackdown on on some of those elements since 2020, right?

So I guess the first question for you is like, what is the state of QAnon and some of these other fringe extremist groups since 2020?

Yeah. So I think, you know, for those of us outside of these movements, I think the state of things is pretty grim looking.

I think the right is really united with whether it's more moderate Republicans, people who kind of see themselves mainly as Trump supporters.

And in these fringeier elements, we think about militias, white supremacist groups, and QAnon.

And of course, there's a lot of overlap between all those groups. I think right now they're all really united around winning in the midterms and getting Trump back in office in 2024.

In the case of QAnon, Q, the sort of anonymous figure behind QAnon hasn't posted since December 2020.

So on one hand, you might think, well, that sounds like QAnon's over.

But I think there's a lot of evidence that QAnon in many ways is stronger than ever.

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