It is well known that President Donald Trump likes to watch Fox & Friends every morning. So it is likely that the commander-in-chief was watching Thursday when a young man at a diner in Riverside, Missouri, schooled Fox News reporter Todd Piro on the particulars of the Green New Deal.

But even if Trump didn’t see it, everyone else did. As of Friday, a video clip of Fox’ interview with Jack, a customer at The Corner Cafe, had been viewed about 2 million times—boosted in part by a retweet from Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who cosponsored the ambitious plan to decarbonize the economy.



When your ‘gritty, guy-in-a-diner’ news profile doesn’t go quite as expected 😂



This week’s #GreenNewDeal MVP goes to... ⬇️ 🏆 https://t.co/gL5vBltpfX — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 4, 2019

In the interview, Jack appears like a random dude sitting in a random diner at 6 a.m., who just happened to know a ton about climate policy and just happened to disagree with everything that Fox News stands for. That is likely why almost every article written about the segment thus far (and there are a lot) does not explain who Jack is or why he was at The Corner Cafe that day. The mystery is part of the virality.



But Jack, whose last name is Vandeleuv, doesn’t want his identity to be a mystery. The 23-year-old from Overland Park, Kansas, told me he’s a volunteer climate change activist with the Sunrise Movement—the same group that’s led the charge for a Green New Deal.* And his presence at the diner on Thursday morning was no accident.

Here’s a condensed and lightly edited transcript of our conversation: