They Will Come for Andrew Callaghan

Callaghan has begun to poke the only beast that can stop his rise: a politically connected corporate media hell-bent on self-preservation.

If you don’t know who Andrew Callaghan is by now then get with the fucking program. His should be and I hope, in time, will be a household name nationwide. He took an important step in that direction on the day before the ball dropped, as his first feature-length documentary, This Place Rules, went live on HBO Max. It’s about the events that led to the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, as Callaghan saw them unfold in the streets and behind closed doors. He spent months in his RV hopping from Trump rally to Trump rally, interviewing Q Anon conspiracists and other Stop The Steal types — figures ranging from the totally unknown to the internationally notorious. You jump from a stranger babbling in the street to Alex Jones pouring Jameson down Callaghan’s throat mid-bench press.

If you’re a fan of Callaghan’s but haven’t watched the documentary yet, do it, it’s worth it. It’s essentially a higher production value, bigger picture Channel 5 video that met but didn’t exceed my expectations. In other words, the film is full of funny and heart-wrenching footage, but there’s nothing earth shattering here, and there’s little that feels fundamentally new for Callaghan. I say “little” because there are two key exceptions, one involving an unnerving confrontation between Callaghan and a deep state pedophile conspiracy theorist, and one involving intimate in-home footage of a family — father, mother, and three young children — that was entirely devoted to Q Anon. In these scenes, Callaghan shows us he’s far from plateauing, that he’s hungry to reach new heights of craftsmanship.

But enough about the documentary. I didn’t sit down to write about This Place Rules, but about the press tour Callaghan’s been on to promote it. So far he’s been interviewed on primetime cable television by CNN’s Don Lemon and in front of a live audience by NPR’s Robin Young. If, after his performances in these two interviews, other mainstream media outlets are dumb enough to invite Callaghan on, then they deserve the deaths his appearance will no doubt accelerate.

I once wrote that a key to Callaghan’s success was his silence, his measured avoidance of taking a clear position in the culture war trenches. For the most part he’s still abiding by that unofficial rule — but now he’s telling bastions of the liberal corporate media to their faces, publicly, that their sensationalist business model is driving people into the arms of the right-wing extremists they endlessly fixate on as existential threats to American democracy. He no longer seems content to let the contrast between his content and theirs do the talking for him. By allowing his subjects to do and say what they will for the camera, and not editing out whatever doesn’t advance a given narrative, Callaghan has always been a potent counterexample to this country’s most prominent cable news talking heads. Now, with this same characteristic style featured front and center on the HBO Max homepage, the corporate media is feeling threatened, and they’re inviting him on to ask him exactly the kind of bad faith gotcha questions that Callaghan has risen to fame by religiously avoiding. He’s not been shy about speaking his mind, and it’s exhilarating to watch.

Right off the bat in his CNN interview, the anchors ask him about his interactions with Proud Boys top-dog Enrique Tarrio, who they note was not at the Capitol on January 6, but “still played a role” in the riots and is “facing some of the most serious charges stemming from that day.” Callaghan is tight-lipped out of the gate, sensing that they’d honed in on Tarrio in an attempt to pigeon-hole him as a right wing extremist watchdog. Don Lemon presses him for details, so Callaghan flips the script on him:

Callaghan: The movie’s not just about the Capitol Riots, it’s also about media echo chambers, you know what I mean? And, like, the dangers of the 24-hour news cycle, and how the mainstream media, like Fox and even CNN, compete for views by running constant news cycles based upon fear, division, outrage, panic… probably to, like, sell ads.

Lemon: Yeah. I’m not exactly sure — first of all, I don’t agree with what you’re saying — but I’m not exactly sure how that played into people going into the Capitol and rioting on January 6. There’s nothing “fake” about CNN—

Callaghan: Oh, no, I’m not saying, like, “fake news.” I’m just saying, like, ramping people up and increasing division during that period of time… and then watching people fall down the conspiracy rabbit hole.

Lemon: I think more people would consider what’s happening online, and what happened with the former president and the messaging that he was putting out there with Q Anon and so forth—

Callaghan: Oh, yeah, I definitely agree 100% with that as well.

This exchange leaves the viewer wondering if Lemon and Callaghan are living in parallel universes, with Callaghan residing a plane above Lemon, such that he’s able to understand Lemon’s perspective while Lemon is blind to his. Callaghan didn’t perfectly articulate his point, but the best version of his argument would go something like this: the American public has grown so tired of blatantly skewed and often actively hostile coverage from the cable news establishment, so mistrustful of our once widely trusted media institutions, that they’re abandoning ship in unprecedented numbers. But their appetite for news and punditry hasn’t vanished, so they’re seeking alternate sources, often winding up in obscure corners of the internet. Navigating those corners without superb media literacy often ends with being sucked into the vortex of extremist conspiracy theories like Q Anon, and that’s how CNN contributed to what went down on January 6.

The only response Don Lemon could muster to this argument was that CNN is definitely not fake news and that Trump and internet radicals are bad — a hollow retort, given that Callaghan concedes the point entirely and it does nothing to undermine his position. Callaghan’s worldview does not merely differ from Lemon’s, it incorporates its strongest aspects and leaves the rest behind, then integrates those aspects with ideas wholly absent from Lemon’s. A higher plane.

In the NPR interview, this basic dynamic blossoms hilariously into full form. Early on, Robin Young delivers a long-winded question to Callaghan centered on the idea that his film contains a “riff of false equivalency.” Constantly, she complains, we see rightwing extremists, who insist that Democrats eat babies, pitted against leftwing groups like Antifa, who we know are a “stunningly small” and only loosely affiliated gaggle of protestors — hardly a threat, though perhaps responsible for some of the violence at the BLM protests of 2020, which, by the way, we know were 93% peaceful. What’s with the false equivalency, Andrew??? Are you saying Antifa is just as bad as QAnon??????

Except, as Young acknowledges a few moments later, the film explicitly notes those facts about Antifa. And, as Callaghan says in his answer to the ridiculous question, the film is not about leftwing extremism — the only reason Antifa appeared is because they often clashed with the rightwing extremists who were the film’s main characters. In other words, as Young put it herself, that’s where the tension was on the streets in the weeks preceding 1/6. Callaghan was just accurately depicting the lives of his subjects, and reading “false equivalency” into that says a lot more about you than it does about the film. In fact, Young so immediately and thoroughly contradicts the premise of her opening question that one wonders whether she was even allowed to write it, or whether her bosses made her ask it with a gun to her head. Again, it took all of two minutes for Callaghan to concede entirely a point that a mainstream media talking head framed as combative, when in fact it failed to come into the slightest friction with any of his views.

Moments later Young waltzes unwittingly into an absolute gem, a clip that should be played on repeat in primetime for at least the rest of 2023. Doubling down on the false equivalency theme, she objects to Callaghan’s lumping together CNN and Fox News as the liberal and rightwing variants of the same problematic corporate media. She prefers to think of one cohesive “mainstream media,” which consists of liberal outlets like CNN and NPR. Then there are progressive media organizations to its left, and “absolute rightwing media” to its right.

Callaghan: So you don’t consider Fox mainstream media?

Young: Uhhh, not when you’ve got Tucker Carlson saying—

Callaghan: It is. It’s mainstream media.

Young: Well, it’s considered so by people more to the right—

Callaghan: Fox is definitely mainstream media.

Young: …but, they lie. How’s that mainstream?

Callaghan: *exasperated laugh*

*audience joins in laughter*

Eventually, Callaghan tries to explain, as simply as possible, why he sees similarities between the style of coverage seen on CNN and Fox, despite their content being far from equivalent:

I’m not drawing an equivalency. I’m saying the mainstream media echo chamber stokes culture wars and fears and division to sell ads to their sponsors ‘cause they’re corporate backed.

*audience cheers, claps*

She moves on to Alex Jones. Her first question is what Callaghan wanted to get from him. He answers succinctly, and then she asks:

Um, the drinking with him while he lifted weights… *audience laughs* …I’m serious, you know, this is one of the most despicable Americans in our history. How do you think the Sandy Hook parents would feel about—

Now, Callaghan had started smiling indignantly at the suggestion that Jones, who’s no doubt despicable, is among the most despicable characters to ever walk American soil. But when she started asking about the Sandy Hook parents, his head snapped toward the audience with a look of disbelief. He interrupted her:

Callaghan: —Is this really…?—

Young: — you drinking with him.

Callaghan: *exasperated* whaaaat? *audience laughter* You’re asking me this?

Young: Yes.

Callaghan: Well, the lawyer who represented the Sandy Hook families told me he loved the scene and thought the film was great.

At this point, the audience is so much on Callaghan’s side that you can feel the energy through whatever screen you’re watching on, and they erupt into applause. It appears utterly impossible for Young to imagine why a journalist who sincerely wanted Jones to open up to him would do something fun with him, like chugging whiskey while weightlifting. But it’s not impossible. It’s just that the zeitgeist dictates, via corporate overlord middleman, that people like Young ask bullshit gotcha questions that bring out the worst in most subjects — but not in Callaghan, who just tells her candidly that her question felt really pointed and negative and was putting him “in a bad vibe,” before moving on.

The zeitgeist also dictates that people like Young aggressively fact-check, in real time, any “problematic” personalities that, for some reason, still agree to sit down for an interview — another technique that produces exactly the results you’d expect, which is to say, conversations completely devoid of meaningful insight. Callaghan told her as much, as bluntly as possible:

Young: Tell me about your methods, because you don’t correct [your subjects] in real time.

Callaghan: Yeah, it doesn’t work.

*audience laughs*

Callaghan: I mean, to try to slam dunk on someone, or belittle them, or catch them in a contradiction might be appealing to a more liberal viewer, who just wants to demonize these people and make them feel as dumb as possible, but in reality I actually am more curious about how they got there, and how they were radicalized, and what we can do to help people like that in the future.

*applause*

Young insists that correction isn’t always about belittling. It can serve a purpose — to educate the corrected. She offers up CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan as an example of someone who spends a lot of time with rightwingers, but who does correct their erroneous thinking in real time, and who has “a really nice way” of doing so. Callaghan replies, simply, by asking “and how do they feel about that organization?” Answering his own question, he says “they scream fake news every time they see a CNN crew.”

If I were Young, this interview would send me into an existential spiral, and I’d reenter the world only after completely reinventing myself. It was as though every other question or statement that left her lips was hot off the presses at the Liberal Corporate Media factory. Her behavior in that interview was the platonic form of the kind of media dysfunction that drove Andrew Callaghan to become who he is today. He was ready for everything she threw at him, and without going out of his way — just by answering her questions honestly — he made an absolute fool of her, and through her, all the worst parts of the mainstream media.

And the important part is he wasn’t singularly focused on trouncing her. He opened with “I used to listen to NPR every day, so it’s great to be here.” He cracked jokes here and there, he affirmed her statements when they were spot on. Toward the end, comparing him to Hunter Thompson, Young said “you go into chaos; he is the chaos,” and Callaghan replied, excitedly, “exactly! That was perfect, you nailed it.” Even having been put, time after time, “in a bad vibe” by her dumbass questions, Callaghan was open to being surprised by Young, and was therefore impressed by her eloquently expressed, acute observation.

In an interview largely about interview styles, Callaghan perfectly embodied his own, and Young perfectly embodied the contemporary mainstream media’s. By the end, Callaghan came off much more affable, authentic, thoughtful, funny — in short, much cooler. I cannot imagine a young person watching the interview and coming away with anything but an appreciation for Callaghan and what he represents, and an aversion for Young and what she represents. Which is to say that, when they face off in public, an independent media personality like Callaghan will, time and again, win the hearts and minds of the audience over an establishment talking head.

The only question is how often they’ll face off like that, if at all. Callaghan has shown them the likely outcome. In a fair fight, he’ll whoop their ass. If they were smart, they’d stop inviting him on air. And maybe they’d shoot some emails to the folks over at Instagram and YouTube, too, where his audience is biggest, and where Elon Musk is not king. Shadowbans could do him damage, and would be unbelievably easy to justify using some of the same arguments Young voiced: he doesn’t correct people in real time, so who knows how many viewers are converted to or fortified in the dangerous beliefs his videos depict, and we all know what those beliefs caused on January 6, 2021.

Callaghan is poking the beast. It’s a thing of beauty, but he should proceed with caution. They will come for him.

We all know what happened when poor Eli roused the beast