Well, that's where things get actually kind of interesting, because I think that there's some truth to what he's saying. Now, granted, I don't think that there's any reason why the man hates him being explained here or anything like that. But I do think he's touching on a dynamic that was real of his show, which was that he was pretty effective at radicalizing police officers and military.

I think there are people who are very interested in the idea of an ethnicity and would actually like to work to make it happen. I think there are other people who would have, in a different situation, just continued to be passively racist until they died, but who got whipped up into the idea of it and became something else. Sure, sure. If it weren't for this asshole, I would have run a store and I've kind of been an asshole to people and no one could ever have truly proven that I was racist. But thanks to this guy, now I'm all out over the place throwing my business around, right? Yeah, now I'm an American Renaissance and I'm writing hateful screens that are getting shared around. I'm a thought leader now. I was so close. I could have just been a guy and now I'm a massive internet racist. Yeah. Yeah, I think that happened fairly often.

I became radicalized as an anti-fascist. Yes, but I mean, yes. You were. Yeah, oh my god! Like, you know, I think so much of radicalization is just, like, being in a bubble where you get exposed to, like, the same self, like, reinforcing material every day, every hour, where you're, you know, in this bubble of like-minded people. And I would say that, like, being in those bubbles as someone whose identity is, like, Diametrically opposed to everything they stand for and, like, knowing that they wanted to, they, not only personally, but also just, like, on an identity category basis, like, as a feminist, as a woman, as a Jew, like, they want me dead. Was, yeah. Yeah, you're a triple threat, literally. Yeah. It was a tremendously radicalizing experience.

It's that groups, including white supremacists, see fertile radicalization grounds within these movements. And that is true.

No, and no one is immune. No one is too smart, too accomplished to get hit by the right asshole speaking the right poison into their ear at the right time.

He's incentivized to find new things to spill the tea about, as it were. Eventually, you're going to end up in Holocaust denial. Exactly! Eventually, you're going to run out of things that are interesting, in quotes, to your audience, and you're going to find way more fucked up conspiracy stuff.

I would assume that it has something to do with eroding critical thinking skills based around various... I don't know how I would put it, but just like things... The longer you stay in communities that are based on just blind acceptance of nonsense, the more susceptible you are to co-opting. So you could stay in a crystal community for a really long time, and nothing could happen because maybe you and... Your friends just like crystals. And maybe you meditate and you ascribe some effects of meditation to the crystals themselves. You can all have a really good time. Now, let's assume that somebody is a fuckhead who comes into your crystal community. A super spreader, if you will. Yeah, and starts sowing ideas of, like, I don't know. I don't even know exactly the form it would take. I think people are vulnerable in those communities to being co-opted by people who have bad will. And I think that that's why you see that. Less than just like, it's inevitable that it will happen. I think that a lot of those ideas are really attractive. I speak for personal experience, too. Human potential stuff has always been really fascinating to me. And so you can find yourself gravitating towards those communities and they become Just large collections of people who are sitting ducks for very talented radicalizers.

I've long believed that one of the more dangerous aspects of Alex's content and the worldview he disseminates is that it prepares his audience for harder core things. Because Alex has built a worldview that's so thematically reliant on historical antisemitism, but he's insistent that he's not, he allows his audience to internalize these themes without realizing where they come from. When he does so, they're likely to see the same things being echoed in the rhetoric of people like Michael E. Jones, who, unlike Alex, does not deny that he thinks the Jews are the problem.

I don't know for good, but yeah, I think it probably is. I'm not saying that I'm ready to say like, hey, Cambridge Analytica is totally to blame for it. I know you were using it as a film example, but yeah, I do think that the distortion and the... The sort of radicalization on all fronts that has happened since 2015 or so, it probably does affect even this.

She was radicalized during the Clinton administration by the universities. Focus on globalism and the effects on human life of HR practices, gaslighting by corporations.

We have successfully radicalized the Pentagon.

We have successfully radicalized the CIA.

We have successfully radicalized the President of the United States.

I don't think that there's a one-to-one parallel, but what is the same, or at least is very similar between the two, is that they're very easy entry points into things that don't appear to be what you're getting involved in. Right. In the same way that Glenn Beck, back in the day, was a very important piece of radicalization towards hard tea party stuff, and people like Alex Jones, in the same way... Joe Rogan exists as a sort of tepid bath that you can get into, that the water rises really fast and you don't realize it.

As he gets involved with Alex Jones, whether it's because he recognizes how good Alex's scam is or whatever, he becomes radicalized a little bit. And he starts to go down a harder path with Alex. His videos that he starts putting out on YouTube are more hardcore. They're a bit more... You know, it goes from him in a news studio doing this shit to him in his office. At a webcam doing 30-minute videos that are a bit more extreme.

One of the chief concerns that educators had was the fact that the language that was being used seemed very anachronistic, like holdovers from 1930s anti-Semitism, which seemed odd to be coming from 15-year-olds. The conclusion they came to was that there was very likely some kind of radicalization happening that these students had been the target of, which they then became the distributors of.

Those people are still there. People are going to become more radical because they feel that these sort of actions reinforce his narratives.

People are going to become more radical because they feel that these sort of actions reinforce his narratives.

Well, it was when he started watching David Icke videos. Because he does say, he knew that the story was going to come out and that the reporter was asking people about him. And so he took to Twitter and started revealing stuff that does not come out in the article, except from his Twitter. And so, like, one of the things he said was, like, don't tell Alex, but David Icke was the one who actually woke me up. And so he started watching David Icke videos and looking into his reptilian worldview, and that eventually led him to Alex.

And that is, radicalization is driven in large part by victimization narratives, whether it's fear of big brother watching, big banks looting, big government seizing one's guns, or a big global war on Islam. A document like FM 3-39.40 is read as confirming the worst fears of an unusually wide spectrum of political dissenters, radicals, and would-be violent extremists from the right, left, and other. Gasoline meet match. So radicalization is driven in a large part by victimization narratives is really the most important piece there.

But what it's going to do is it's going to convince some people on the fringe who are close to radical Islam to go all the way. And they will hear that and think, hey, white people think that we're all radical. I might as well be.

That was radicalized partly by Alex Jones. Partly. I mean, he's the most mainstream voice of the people who radicalize them. Behind the scenes, there are tons of those websites and shit. There's a whole Byzantine network of monsters out there. But yeah, he does. He's responsible for a lot of terrible shit.

Well, I mean, I don't know how solid the reporting on this, but from what I've been able to find, Tamerlan Sarnev, one of the Boston bombers, was a big InfoWars fan, too. So, like, I mean, and I know Alex's argument that he would make any of these.

And either way, what he's doing is feeding into separation. He's feeding into radicalization, balkanization, the thing he's super afraid of. He's making his followers so much further from the rest of the general population.

The Branch Davidian Church... Incident? I hate to call it that, but that was a foundational moment in his radicalization.