By mid-afternoon of Jan. 4, it had become increasingly clear that a slew of far-right actors were gearing up for violence at the Capitol. Tim Pool derided and dismissed the accurate reporting out of hand.
Of all the ideological enemies Pool, 35, rails against on YouTube for an audience of millions each day, few stack up to the mainstream press. In his mind, coverage of then-President Donald Trump’s instigations and the mounting threats was yet another example of the media’s “depravity,” he said.
“What do you think they’re going to do?” asked Pool. “It’s so stupid.”
Two days later, a mob stormed the Capitol, whipped into a frenzy by nonsensical claims of a stolen election and determined to put a stop to the constitutional transfer of power. To date, nearly 600 alleged rioters—a mishmash ofTrump backers, QAnon adherents, and members of militias and extremist groups—have been arrested.
Throughout the fall of 2020, the wildly successful YouTube pundit had spent countless hours hyping the blinkered legal strategies and half-baked fantasies about voter fraud animating the online right. At the same time, in each video Pool tried to separate himself from the hardcore conspiracy theorists. After all, he was just commenting on the news.
What Pool kept secret from his younger, overwhelmingly male, decidedly right-leaning audience during this time is that he seemed to have a pretty good idea what might happen on Jan. 6.
“Dude, I’ve had messages from people saying that they’ve already got plans to rush to D.C. as soon as Nov. 3 goes chaotic,” Pool said in early September during a recorded conversation reviewed by The Daily Beast.
A few minutes later, Pool added: “The right-wing militias, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, and just the Proud Boys and Trump supporters, they are going to rush full-speed to D.C. They are going to take the White House and do whatever they can and paramilitary.” (Pool made these comments to then-colleagues at the media company he started. The following month, Pool used his YouTube platform to say the Oath Keepers had been unjustly “smeared” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He habitually comes to the defense of the Proud Boys, as well.)
This glaring omission was not out of character for Pool. Far from it. A former digital media journalist who originally built up his name with on-the-ground reporting and livestreaming, including stints at Vice and Fusion, Pool now postures as a rational centrist or “disaffected liberal” who grew to loathe the excesses of the left. If you buy Pool’s branding, he stands in contrast to the bulk of his journalistic peers: “evil” “liars,” he says, who’ve supposedly capitulated to the agendas of Black Lives Matter, antifa, Democrats, Big Tech companies, feminists, and the like.
This self-generated mythology—an anti-authoritarian truth-teller whose successes stemmed from confronting “the machine,” as Pool puts it—bears little resemblance to reality.
