Alex Jones and InfoWars monetized fear through supplements like lead-laced bone broth, while spreading misinformation that fueled real-world violence from the 2011 Tucson shooting to the Sandy Hook harassment campaign. Hosts Robert Evans and Ben detail how Jones weaponized gaslighting tactics to sell products, linking his rhetoric to incidents ranging from the Boston Marathon bombing rumors to the Las Vegas false flag claims. Ultimately, this analysis reveals how Jones's business model of perpetual fear mirrors modern information warfare, causing tangible harm to victims' families and society at large. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Selling Supplements to Conspiracists00:14:48
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
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In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
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Hey, everybody.
I'm Robert Evans, and this is Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
And this is part two of our epic three-part podcast on Alex Jones.
He's an innovator.
He's an inventor.
He's the Steve Jobs of selling supplements to crazy people through the internet.
And today we're actually going to talk about his business selling supplements to people through the internet.
The working title of this episode is How Alex Jones Got Rich at the Low, Low Cost of People's Lives.
My guests on part two are the same as my guests on part one, Noel and Benjamin from Stuff They Don't Want You to Know and Ridiculous History.
Guys, great to have you back.
Thanks for having us back, man.
We're thrilled.
Yeah, I don't know.
I'm a little downtrodden, more than thrilled, but let's just roll the dice, man.
Let's see where this goes.
This crazy train.
I'm getting a Schadenfreude kind of vibe.
That's what I'm really saying.
It's like I would like to be as rich as Alex Jones, but I would never sacrifice my sanity for that.
You know, just it's just not worth it to me.
It seems like he is, he has taken the wrong, he took the blue pill and he is down the rabbit hole.
And the tale is still untold because I get the feeling there are going to be some twists and turns in this episode.
There will be, and there's going to be a lot more in the third episode.
But for right now, let's talk about 2017.
That's when Infowars Life started selling a new product, Caveman, which is a powdered bone broth protein drink supplement.
It was billed as...
I'll let Alex Jones explain what it was built as.
That is undoubtedly the jewel and the crown of InfoWars Life products.
Caveman, we lost our vitality because we just ignored the ancient traditions.
You used the meat for sustenance, the fat for cooking, but you use the bones for strength.
We are now introducing Caveman by InfowarsLive.com, the ultimate and true paleo-nutrition with bone broth, turmeric root, chaga mushroom, and seven total primal superfoods in a single great-tasting formula.
The bone is so amazing.
From the outside structure, I like the way he says that.
Chaga.
Chaga.
It's evocative, right?
Also, isn't this the stuff that he seemed to have a tough time drinking on his own show?
He sure did.
They've pulled most of those videos, but he's clearly barely able to get it past his gullet.
But no, I mean, no, it seems like a really great product.
So great that scientists from the Center for Environmental Health, an independent watchdog group, decided to try it out for themselves.
Now, one of the things that's neat about the Center for Environmental Health is that Alex Jones and Infowars had actually used them as a source on the dangers of lead poisoning in several of their articles.
So they're clearly a group that Alex views as legitimate and respects.
That's why it's so funny that they, when they reviewed Caveman and another product, MycoZX, which is a blend of potent herbs and enzymes meant to detoxify the body, when they reviewed those, they found, quote, people who take the MycoZX product would ingest more than six times the daily limit for lead under California law.
Now, Caveman did better.
It only included twice the recommended daily limit of lead.
But that's a lot of fun.
Is this just a byproduct of the manufacturing facilities that he used?
Like, why is there lead contamination in these products?
Because that's how Caveman is.
Is it an active ingredient or is this just like an accident?
I have no idea.
I have a conspiracy theory to propose.
Okay.
So we know that exposure to lead impairs cognitive function.
Is there a method to the madness of including this in a nutritional supplement?
I mean, maybe, because there's actually been a study in South Africa studying people who are competitive shooters versus people who are competitive archers.
And they found that competitive shooters had a much higher blood lead level than competitive archers, even though, you know, the tips of the arrows and bullets were both made of lead.
So that shouldn't be too much of an issue.
It just appears that people who get exposed to lead more in their youth are more aggressive and also more interested in firearms.
So maybe this was Alex just trying to sell, because he also sells gun parts, AR receivers and stuff.
So I don't know.
Maybe this is a good idea.
I think we're onto something.
I think we are onto something, you guys.
I love the conspiracy that Alex Jones is giving people lead poisoning to sell them gun parts.
Yeah.
And to make his show more believable.
Hey, and you can get the t-shirt on tpublic.com.
Alex Jones is giving his listeners lead poisoning to sell gun parts.
Those t-shirts.
Those t-shirts do have twice the recommended daily limit of lead as well.
Well, but I pour all of that in there.
All of our listeners know that they get a little extra lead from my shirts.
So we don't know if any long-term health consequences will come as a result of Alex Jones selling people poisoned bone broth.
Any casualties from that scheme will just be more bodies on the pile, though.
Alex Jones has made himself a very wealthy man, but he's done it by trading in the health of his listeners and the health of the nation for sweet, sweet fear dollars.
See, the InfoWars store, as I mentioned in the first podcast, launched in 2006.
At first, it just sold normal things for a conspiracy theorist to sell.
You could buy t-shirts, bumper stickers.
I'm sure everyone listening to this saw some of Alex Jones' bumper stickers about 9-11 was an inside job back in the...
Yeah, you've seen Infowars stickers on everything.
They would sell his documentaries there, and he had a handful of goods aimed at helping people survive the perpetually coming apocalypse.
Between subscriptions, ads, DVD, and t-shirt sales, Infowars was making an estimated $10 million per year in the mid-aughts.
Now, that's gross, not net.
So what Alex would take home was much, much less than that, because he had a big expense, I mean, millions of dollars to run a huge studio and the videos and stuff.
But that was the gross profit, around 10 million by the mid-aughts, 2008, 9, 10.
Wait, was he still a millionaire at the end of the day, though?
He may not have been at this point.
Okay.
Yeah, I don't know when he became a millionaire.
He was probably starting to, because I'm sure he was getting a decent cut of that.
But also, it's a very large studio.
You know, he must have had significant operating costs.
In 2013, Jones reworked and relaunched the store as Infowars Life, which is where he sold that poisoned bone broth.
He now sold overpriced nutrition and health stuff, including Secret 12, a $29 bottle of liquid B12, InfoWars Life Bullet colloidal silver.
I think it's fun to call it a bullet because you're supposed to put it up your butt.
And he also sold $14 tubes of toothpaste.
Are you guys curious about what kind of toothpaste Infowars sells?
I'm guessing it doesn't have fluoride in it.
No, no, no fluoride.
You're really right about that.
I happen to have an ad for that toothpaste.
It's camouflaged as a part of his normal show.
In this camouflaged ad, Alex receives a call from a guy named Frank who tells Alex that he's been braggy lately, who basically chastises Alex for bragging.
And Alex just immediately starts screaming at this fake caller and says that he's the tip of the spear and he needs his help.
And then drums start playing and Jones begins ranting about how he's up against the globalists alone.
He repeatedly says, I need your help, Frank.
We're going to play the video now.
Remember, this is a toothpaste ad.com right now and help fund the Infowars.
Do you understand?
I need your help, Frank.
Free press needs your help, Frank.
Support good oral health with our one-of-a-kind super blue fluoride products.
Oh fuck.
So this is what they call in the biz native advertising, by the way.
And it's like he's natively advertising his own shit on his own show.
It's like, this is genius, man.
If it wasn't so sleazy, I would give this guy a pat on the back.
God.
It's all in-house.
And plus, you can see the ingredients.
You know, if anyone hasn't gotten a chance to watch this ad, non-fluoride toothpaste with iodine, nano-silver, plus peppermint tea tree oil, recommended by Alex Jones.
And they basically put his name in the place where you would see recommended by nine out of ten dentists.
Well, who would you trust?
Alex, a dentist, or Alex Jones, who is the son of a dentist?
Lest we forget, exactly.
Alex Jones' father was a dentist.
He's got the bona fides there.
So that ad should give you an idea of the intellectual tenor of an average Infowars ad.
According to a BuzzFeed interview with a former employee, quote, he can sell 500 supplements in an hour.
It's like QVC for conspiracy.
Now, some journalists suspect that the vast majority, if not all, of InfoWars' profits now come from these supplements.
So for most radio hosts, like a guy like Rush Limbaugh, the big money is in syndication.
If you're doing a syndicated radio show, the syndicate charges stations to run your show, and then they give you a big chunk of that money.
But Infowars is syndicated by Genesis Communications Network, a right-wing radio network that operates on a barter model.
So they give their content to radio stations for free.
So Alex Jones doesn't get any money from his show being sold to a radio station.
But Genesis gets to actually put in the ads.
So instead of the radio station picking what ads runs during their shows, Genesis gives them the show for free, but picks the ads that go on it.
Now, GCN doesn't share their ad revenue with Alex Jones.
Instead, Alex splits the ad time on his show with Genesis.
New York Magazine investigated this, and I'm going to quote from their report on the matter.
If you call Alex Jones' ad sales team, the employee told me, you'll probably retire before you hear back from them.
When I asked him why, he explained that Jones uses his three minutes per hour to sell his own dietary supplements, and Jones can choose to tout his own products beyond that as well during the rest of his show.
So, in other words, quote, he doesn't get any syndication fees from GCN.
He doesn't get a cut of the advertising that GCN sells, and he doesn't sell his three minutes per hour of national advertising time.
The radio show makes no direct money for Alex Jones.
It's all about selling his dietary supplements.
So, yeah, he figured out a new tactic that I think he was probably pretty much the first person to use, where he completely eschewed outside advertising and really almost any outside money for his show and supports it entirely by selling people lead-tainted bone broth and other such wonders.
It's infomercial wars.
Yes.
Wow.
I've never really thought about this aspect of it before, but I was joking earlier about the stupid industry buzz term native advertising.
And that's sort of when you like disguise the ad as part of the content.
And he's totally doing that, like with this toothpaste ad where it's like, this is a legitimate caller who has a concern about his oral health.
And then all of a sudden, it's like graphics going across the screen.
And it's like, good lord.
It's so egregious.
It's amazing.
It is.
And if I can get a little bit into the inside baseball a little bit, like that's part of why podcasting is a lucrative thing is because when you have someone in your ear, when you listen to them for hours and hours and hours a week, there is a level of trust that you develop for that person that you don't get through a lot of other mediums.
And so if a person says, hey, I use this thing and I enjoy it and it's beneficial to me, you're more likely to trust that person than like just some random ad on TV.
Everyone's started to figure that out now, and it's part of why this form of media has taken off so much in the last few years.
Alex Jones locked this shit down in 2013, which is, again, he's a pioneer, you know?
Yeah, it's fascinating.
Of course, while there's a good way and an evil way to do it, the good way is to not sell people lead.
Sell them bidets, you know?
Just no.
Yeah, bidets, beds, bed-installed bidets.
But this is all powered by alarmism, though.
If there was a comedy podcast where somebody had a running inside joke about, you know, some kind of orange juice that they like.
Or Doritos.
Or Doritorita.
The snack that fights back.
Or Doritos, the snack that fights back.
Yes, how could we forget?
But this seems different because it's preying on these very powerful, scary, primal emotions and reactions.
Yeah, exactly.
He's not saying, hey, I use this bed at home, buy this bed, or hey, like, I like this type of juice, drink this juice.
He's saying, the globalists are trying to rob your body of iodine.
FDA Approved Medical Claims00:07:27
Take these iodine pills.
Like, there's a difference.
One of them is fine and the other is kind of unspeakably evil.
But let's move on a little bit.
Well, I mean, we're going to keep talking about this.
But yeah, in Alex Jones' eyes, there is no inappropriate time to start shilling for supplements.
Another former employee recalled, quote, when the Fukushima nuclear disaster happened, Alex bought tons and tons of potassium iodide.
And oh my God, did we sell that?
Another good example of Alex, you know, taking advantage of his fans is this ad for DNA Shield.
Like many of his ads, it starts as a news story, something about how our hormones are under attack by pollution and GMOs or whatever.
He mentions that, quote, the elite are already taking expensive, fancy, rich person supplements to deal with the poisoning of the globalists.
He claims to have copied their recipe secretly and made it much more affordable so the common man can defend himself from the globalists.
So let's play the rest of this ad for DNA Shield.
Sure, so expensive it's hard for the general public to get them that are growing the telomeres in the DNA, that are spurring mitochondrial growth and keeping cells alive, that are causing nerve regeneration.
This is stuff you're allowed to say because it's patented and been certified because it's now supplements going into the whole nutraceutical realm.
This will not be an infomercial for the next hour, except for about five minutes of it.
But I am here today to announce DNA force, ladies and gentlemen.
I'm sorry, DNA force.
Yeah.
Oh, boy.
He's what a special guy.
Now, Jones claims these miraculous pills were developed in part by his dad, who he says was, quote, involved in FDA-approved nutraceuticals.
So it's not FDA-approved, but his dad was involved in other things that were FDA-approved.
Is nutraceutical even a real word?
I mean, Alex, that seems made up.
Yeah.
Wow.
It's like a sci-fi show science jargon.
Yeah, it's like a weird portmanteau of like nutrition and pharmaceutical, I guess, but it's like basically that's yeah, because he wants to make it seem like he's giving people real serious medical things for serious medical issues.
And so he can't just say these are nutrition supplements.
They're nutraceuticals, which is also a term that the FDA doesn't watch at all.
So I'm sure that helps too.
So he insists that DNA force, right?
I think I wrote SHIELD in the script, but there's shields and forces.
His nonsense DNA pills, he claims, are better and less expensive than the $600 pills the elites use.
I'm going to play another clip.
$600.
Because, ladies and gentlemen, one ingredient that's in this cost $12,000 a kilo.
$12,000 a kilo.
The next ingredient costs $7,000 a kilo.
The next, less expensive, $5,000 a kilo.
Another one, $3,400 a kilo.
We bought it directly from the certified, patented FDA-approved whole nine yards, laboratories that make it.
We had it scientifically mixed at Dr. Group's factory facility at the highest standard to bring in InfoWarsLife.com DNA force.
Anyway, it costs $134.95 a bottle.
But Robert, that's an amazing deal, though.
Did you hear that one ingredient that was $12,000 a kilo?
$12,000?
Also, it's more scientific because he's using the metric system.
You know, that's like real science there.
And also, you'll note that he says the facility where he bought the ingredients is FDA approved.
Again, it's run by a guy named Dr. Griff.
Did I hear that correctly?
That's his street name.
Dr. Griff is a different.
So he gets the ingredients from an FDA-approved facility, and then they go to Dr. Griff's facility.
I don't think the FDA has approved Dr. Griff.
He does have Dr. Griff on as a guest in another ad that I found for this.
And Dr. Griff theorizes that pills like these might help people live to be 120 years old.
So that's cool.
Cool.
Oh, great.
For just $134.95 a bottle.
Yeah.
It's remarkable.
So whenever Alex does an ad for these, he's emphatic about the incredible quality of his products and the purity of their ingredients.
He seems to prefer using himself as an example in his ads whenever possible.
Oftentimes, this means taking his shirt off, as it will in this video that we're about to see.
Or, you know, listen to.
I would talk to anybody that hasn't worked for spectacular.
Look, we want to sell you good stuff that works, so you keep buying it anyways.
But the point is, this is stuff that counters the globalist and funds the InfoWar.
That's why I'm so excited about it.
I want to thank you for continuing to support the InfoWar.
Alex Jones signing off for InfowarsLife.com.
If you're watching this transmission, you know damn well you're the resistance.
He is a little bit of a drink.
First of all, that sounds like a man wearing no shirt.
Second of all, I love that he refers to it as a transmission.
That is all.
And I love how he brings you into it.
If you're listening to this, you're damn well part of the resistance.
You know damn well you're part of the resistance.
He is the reddest man.
I saw him in person once at the Republican National Convention.
He gave a speech outside of it.
And I thought then, I've never seen a man whose skin gets so red when he yells.
Well, that was in Waking Life, too, because his animated avatar and that is like bright red and getting redder and redder and redder.
It's obviously like part of his cartoonish character.
It is remarkable how red he can get without his heart exploding.
Yet, I mean, he's only 44 and he looks like 60.
He's only 44 years old?
Yeah, he's like 43 or something in that video that we just listened to.
Yeah, he looks like you wouldn't guess Danny DeVito was more than about a decade older than him, just looking at the two of them.
But Danny's got like 30-some years on him.
It's remarkable.
So, BuzzFeed's Charlie Warzel actually bought some Anthroplex, which is the product that shirtless Alex Jones was advertising there.
He sent it over to a testing lab to have it analyzed.
Now, Anthroplex, which costs nearly $30 a bottle, is boasted as basically a zinc supplement.
That's what he's claiming, is that the globalists are robbing your body of zinc and Anthroplex will give you enough zinc to be as buff as shirtless Alex Jones.
So Charlie Warzel sent this Anthroplex off to be checked out by a lab, and the lab report that came back said, quote, if you're extremely zinc deficient, the value is not going to be significantly helpful.
It calls Anthroplex, quote, a waste of money and points out you could actually get another zinc orotate supplement for around $5 with an impactful serving size.
So his zinc supplement that's $30 a bottle contains almost no zinc.
Well, in his defense, all they said was it's not going to be significantly helpful.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah, it's six times as expensive as a normal zinc supplement and has less zinc in it.
Oh, God.
Classy Alex.
So not only does Alex Jones sell bad, sometimes toxic supplements to the gullible, he's also pretty abusive to the companies he partners with, basically finding businesses that are in trouble and strong-arming them into giving him deals in exchange for the Infowars endorsement.
Quoth a former employee, I've seen him undercut a company that sells survival straws for $25, force them down to $10, and then sell them at $50.
Undercutting Zinc Supplement Prices00:03:24
So that's fun.
Just to give you a little bit of an idea of the way Alex Jones does business, if you want to know how we do business, it's time for some ads.
So here's me selling you things that aren't filled with lead and that I will guarantee you have as much zinc as we claim that they have.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, it was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Dog Whistles and Poison Fears00:16:12
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
We're talking about Alex Jones and how he made his millions.
We just got done talking about at least one of his shirtless ads.
Now, Infowars, in addition to selling supplements, also holds regular money bomb telethons.
And that's what they call them as money bombs.
These are super long fundraisers, sometimes over 27 hours in length, that are there to raise funds for an already for-profit company.
These often raise reportedly $100,000 in just a single day.
In an interview with BuzzFeed, one former employee reported feeling, quote, sick to my stomach when a donor charged their donation to a credit card and then explained that this was because their house had been foreclosed.
I'm convinced after working there that fear sells as well as sex.
Judging by his profits, maybe it sells even better.
So I bet you're wondering what a money bomb looks like.
So I'm going to play an excerpt from one of his money bombs from, I think, 2010.
Is it like a Google bomb?
No, it's sleazier than that.
Oh, great.
Let's go.
FivestarSub.com.
Take charge of your health now by calling 800-340-7091 or see Calvin on the web at 5StarSub.com.
Alex Jones here with vital information concerning our nation's fragile food supply.
Folks, there are some truly dangerous trends forming, and I think it's important for my listeners to do three things right away.
Number one, study the past.
History really does repeat itself.
Number two, learn to spot the dangerous food shortage trends.
Number three, take decisive action.
A perfect storm is brewing or a global food crisis.
That's why I'm telling everyone to read the new book, Rising Prices Empty Shelves.
Warning signs that trigger the deadliest famines in history.
Don't get caught unprepared when the crisis hits.
This book is only available at risingpricesempty shelves.com.
Yeah.
So.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Isn't that a slick way to sell a book?
Yeah.
And he's doing a great movie voice.
I thought he was about to be like in a world where you have to buy this book in order to know when you need to buy food that you can also buy from us because we sell survival food.
Yeah, Alex Jones.
So if you're a regular listener and viewer of InfoWars, I'm going to guess you either think Alex Jones is hilarious, which is probably 50%, or you really, really trust him, which is probably another 50%.
I think one of his strengths is that he was probably, yeah, one of the first people to realize that it was possible to sell people a lot of things if you develop that kind of trust and rapport with your audience.
And he's been very good at that.
At least one former senior InfoWars employee has stated that Alex based his empire off of televangelist networks.
He admired, quote, their knack of using trust and faith to market things.
Shilling supplements has been outrageously profitable for Alex.
In 2012 and 2013, prior to launching the InfoWars lifeline of products, InfoWars made about $5 million a year gross.
In 2014, the company made more than $20 million in gross revenue.
Alex Jones went from being moderately well off to, well, I'm going to quote from a New York Times article about his divorce.
Mr. Jones bought four Rolex watches in one day in 2014 and spent $40,000 on a saltwater aquarium.
The couple's assets at the time included a $70,000 grand piano, $50,000 in firearms, and $752,000 in gold, silver, and precious metals in the safe deposit box.
So by 2014, Alex Jones is definitely a rich man.
And I can't think of anyone I less want to have $50,000 in firearms than Alex Jones.
That is a concerning thing.
So yeah, that New York Times article also notes that, quote, most of his revenue that year came from the sale of products like supplements such as Super Male Vitality, which purports to boost testosterone or Brain Force Plus.
And in case you're curious, Jones claimed that his $317,000 shopping spree was a post-divorce necessity.
It's a free country, and I had to restart my life, which is fair.
It is indeed a free country.
No law forbids Alex Jones from getting rich, selling crap to whoever.
Only here's the thing.
The entire Infowars business model relies on fear, convincing people that an X-File scale conspiracy is perpetually moments away from tearing them away from everything and everyone they love.
Fear of radiation or terrorists or globalist poison campaigns is what sells the radiation shield supplements, body armor, and water filtration systems that Alex Jones shills.
And speaking of water filtration systems, you guys want to check out an InfoWars life ad for that?
Yes, so very much.
Their filters are impregnated with silver, a natural antibiotic.
On top of that, they're bigger, so they filter faster.
You don't have to prime these the first time you use them.
It's amazing.
Go to Infowars.com and click on the shopping cart link to see the entire family of these babies.
Now, the fluoride they under our water is so tiny that most filters can't cut it out.
But ProPure has their system that will, again, reduce it to non-detectable levels, almost get...
So again, the thing that is important there is that he's not just selling a water filter.
He's saying people are being poisoned.
Like, he's saying you are being poisoned.
They are sneaking fluoride into your water to poison you, and this filter will remove it, and other things will not.
No, they're not sneaking it, though.
It's like a thing that municipalities do.
They put fluoride in the water.
It's a known thing.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a known thing, but he's telling people that this is part of a conspiracy to damage you.
The globalists are trying to hurt you with poison in your water, and only this filter will help.
But when you literally tell people that they're being poisoned by a group and then name specific people like Barack Obama or Democratic lawmakers as members of that group, it's possible that you might just sort of inspire a couple of shooting sprees, which is what we're going to get into next.
I mean, I think that's like episode three material, right?
Like the whole idea of like how finally now everyone knows that this is hate speech.
Oh, no, it starts way earlier than episode three.
I just want to say before we go on, this video clip with the with the water filters is he's like an evil Billy Maze in this thing.
Evil Billy Maze is a good way to look at it.
And these things are very menacing looking.
They're very, very large and very shiny and metallic, and they look like something that would be in like a meth lab or something.
It's very strange.
Yeah, and I think that probably plays to like the people who are going to want to buy this want everything to look cool, right?
Like that's why he doesn't say these are just zinc supplements.
It's survival shield.
And these would go really well in my, you know, bomb shelter.
Yeah, it'll look cool next to your wall of guns.
Like, you know, and it will look cool next to your wall of guns.
So at 4.12 a.m. on January 8th, 2011, Jared Lee Launer made an incoherent MySpace post that referenced the nation's, quote, 5% literacy rate and the, quote, longest war in United States history.
He was not talking about Afghanistan.
He was talking about the InfoWar.
Attached to this post was a picture of a handgun on top of an American history book.
Roughly three hours later, he traveled to a Walmart and purchased ammunition.
Then he took a taxi to a safeway at Casas Adobas, Arizona, where Representative Gabrielle Giffords was holding a meeting with her constituents.
A little after 10 a.m., Lautner opened fire on Giffords, grievously wounding her, killing six people, and wounding 13.
Unlike most mass shooters, Launer was stopped before he could kill himself and was arrested on the scene.
Now, a number of things were very wrong with Jared Launer.
Some of his friends have stated that he hated Giffords in part because he hated the idea of women holding positions of power.
He also hated George W. Bush, probably because he believed 9-11 was an inside job.
And he believed that, among many other things, because Jared Launer was a gigantic fan of Alex Jones.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, investigations into Launer's life revealed that he was a huge fan of the Jones-produced film Loose Change.
This led to a storm of condemnation of Alex Jones and Infowars.
The writer of that Rolling Stone article I keep quoting interviewed Jones five days after this shooting.
Jones compared the condemnation of him and his, you know, Infowars to McCarthyism, which, oddly enough, he's also said was a good thing at other times.
So he's not a consistent guy.
But Jones accepted no responsibility for inciting Launer.
Quote, during these societal upheavals, it's messy.
A lot of bad things happen.
And yeah, you're going to have paranoid schizophrenics that get set off by the crazy things corporations and governments are doing and by those who are exposing it to them.
But we can't allow ourselves to become paralyzed.
If a schizophrenic takes three hits of acid in the forest and sees demons in the trees and snaps, do you cut down the trees?
Which you don't, but I would argue that if you find someone who only sells acid to schizophrenics, you probably stop that guy.
Yeah.
So at that point, Alex Jones wasn't even willing to accept that the shooting was entirely legitimate.
Quote, the whole thing stinks to high heaven.
This kid Launer disappeared for days at a time before the shooting.
My gut tells me this was a staged mind control operation.
The government employs geometric psychological warfare experts that know exactly how to indirectly manipulate unstable people through the media.
They implanted the idea in his head by repeatedly asking, is Giffords in danger?
So every account I found makes it clear that Alex Jones was not Launer's only road into the world of insane anti-government conspiracy theories.
Jared had a voracious appetite for that stuff.
Alex Jones and Infowars, though, were clearly part of his intellectual development.
I'm going to leave it up to you guys and to the listener to decide how much blame, if any, you think Mr. Jones deserves.
So right now, I don't know how you guys are feeling in terms of is he at all responsible for this?
Is his rhetoric responsible for this?
Yes.
Yes, it is.
I think to a degree that it's inarguable that there's not some responsibility.
It's not as if he's only saying vague things.
And many times, in many situations, there are specific, what we would call calls to action.
You know what I mean?
And targets.
Find these specific people and playing on this primal them or us mentality, it makes people feel as if the only choice they might have, especially if they're already unstable, is to take some sort of violent action.
So he is, he's not going out and shooting people himself, but people are being shot to some degree because of his actions.
Yeah, it's like dog whistle racism or something, but like literally kind of implanting subliminal messages in the minds of unstable potential shooters.
You know, I mean, I think it's inarguable that he is to blame.
Which makes it ironic that he's talking about people being programmed by specific phrases and terms.
You know, it's, it's at the very least cartoonishly ignorant and perhaps hypocritical.
Yeah, willfully hypocritical.
And it's interesting to me, too, you say like he puts calls to action in.
And I think what's so upsetting about Alex Jones, I think it would be less upsetting if he had inspired all of these attacks and legitimately wanted to because he believes that there's a real globalist conspiracy to poison everybody.
But I think he gets people amped up and feeling that they're under attack.
And some people interpret that as a call to action to do violence.
But he's just trying to sell them stuff.
That's what they call it in marketing scripts.
The end of ad copy is called the call to action.
It's like when you tell people the thing they need to buy.
I mean, that's literally what he's doing, but it's got this weird dual effect.
It's, oh man, it's painful.
It's terrifying.
And, you know, if you, the listener, aren't quite on board with sort of our theory of Alex Jones being culpable in a lot of killings, let's hear from a few more InfoWars fans.
Does the name Richard Andrew Poplowski mean anything to y'all?
It didn't mean anything to me before I started researching.
I don't recall.
Oh, no.
This is not one of the most famous shootings that we've had, but we've had a lot lately.
He was a former Marine who in 2009 got into a spat with his mother.
Someone called the police, and Richard greeted them wearing a bulletproof vest and wielding an AK-47.
He opened fire and killed three police officers.
Poplowski's friends and family knew that he regularly talked about the growing police state, which who doesn't these days?
He also ranted about a coming collapse and seemed to see himself as a sort of patriotic revolutionary.
Here's the Anti-Defamation League's report on him.
Quote, Poplowski visited the site InfoWars frequently, shared links to it with others, and sometimes even posted to it.
One of his frustrations with the site, though, was that it didn't focus enough on the nefarious roles played by Jews in all of these conspiracies.
Quote, for being such a huge players in the endgame, he observed in a March 29th, 2009 posting to InfoWars, too many InfoWarriors are surprisingly unfamiliar with the Zionists.
Another time, he was more hopeful, noting that, quote, racial awareness is on the rise among the young white population.
So, Alex Jones has had some allegations of anti-Semitism leveled at him.
He, of course, denies any kind of prejudice or bias.
Other people have suggested that the term globalist, as used by Alex Jones, is basically a stand-in for the word Jews.
There's no way to prove that, but I can prove that some people interpret Alex Jones that way.
I'm working on another side project as my career as a freelance journalist where I'm collecting the stories of 75 different fascist activists and how they came to be what they call red-pilled.
And in that community, that term generally means came to believe the Jews controlled the world.
So I found a number of posts in people talking about how they became red-pilled on these private fascist forums where people reference Alex Jones.
So I'm just going to read one of those quotes.
And this is from one of the chat rooms where the first Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was planned.
Quote, InfoWars actually did a good job of prepping me for the JQ Jewish question.
As much of their facts are fairly true, they just change the names.
So a lot of people interpret his stuff that way, whether or not that's Jones' intention.
What is the Jewish question when they're using that term?
It means the idea that Jews are behind a global conspiracy to take over the world and dominate politics all over the world.
Well, it's like even sort of like during the Depression, there were a lot of movements to eliminate, you know, government control of, you know, finance or whatever.
And they used the term like bankers or financiers.
And that was a dog whistle term for Jews at the time as well.
Absolutely.
And even, you know, Hitler in his, when he was being more careful with his racism, he had a lot of dog whistles.
And yeah, it's just a common thing with these people and has been for a while.
And so Alex Jones will, of course, say that that's not at all his intention, but it is very clear that some people at least interpret him that way.
And he has to be aware of that, right?
I can't believe he's ignorant of it, right?
But I don't know also.
And again, Alex Jones would deny any allegations of anti-Semitism.
And I have no evidence that he is secretly trying to propagandize people in that particular way.
FEMA Camp Conspiracy Theories00:04:09
Alex Jones obviously denied any responsibility for the Poplowski shooting.
He said this to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, quote, if anybody should be blamed for this, it's the Marines.
They're the ones who trained him to kill.
And it probably is true that Poplowski was more dangerous with his AK-47 due to the fact that he had Marine training.
But Alex was the one who trained him to see a gigantic government conspiracy lurking behind every failure and setback in his life.
It was Alex Jones who really started the spread of the FEMA concentration camp conspiracy.
And it just so happens that shortly before his rampage, Poplowski posted a YouTube clip of Glenn Beck ranting about FEMA concentration camps.
If you remember from the last episode, it was not uncommon in the early aughts for stories to start on Alex Jones' site and then filter up to Glenn Beck's primetime show.
And one of the stories that started that way was the FEMA concentration camp conspiracy.
So that's where we are right now.
It is time for some ads.
You can take this as a call to action, but not a call to commit horrible crimes.
Please don't commit any horrible crimes.
Just enjoy these products and services.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
If you play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, it was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Real Consequences of Deception00:15:49
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
We just got finished talking about the Poplowski shooting where he killed three police officers.
Was a huge fan of Alex Jones.
We talked about Jared Lee Lautner, who killed six people, huge fan of Alex Jones.
I want to talk a little bit right now about how InfoWars is a very well-documented vector for the spread of fake news.
There's a scientific study that was carried out by the University of Washington in 2015, where they looked at three different fake news stories that had spread after the Boston Marathon bombing and studied how those myths had initially started spreading on Twitter before they filtered out into the mainstream.
And they traced one of these myths that a group of Navy SEALs had planted the bombs at the Boston Marathon back to Infowars.
Quote: Links to the Infowars website were the first links to appear in any tweets related to this rumor.
Their precipitation to the first peak in misinformation further demonstrates how external content can help Twitter rumors evolve and spread.
Now, Kate Starbird, one of the researchers on that study, has become an activist in sort of informing people of the fact that there is a concerted effort to spread fake news throughout our culture right now.
She noted at the time we thought it was pretty insignificant, but things look different in hindsight.
But as far back as 2015, there was documentation that InfoWars had become a major vector for fake news that filtered out and reached the mainstream, which I find interesting because 2015, I wasn't paying any attention to Alex Jones or Infowars.
So, yeah, it turns out Infowars is very popular among the kind of people who wind up in gun battles with the police.
In 2010, Byron Williams got into a gunfight with several Oakland police officers when they pulled him over for driving like a nut.
Williams was wearing body armor and armed with both a handgun and a 308 rifle, which is more firepower than most Oakland commuters tend to carry.
When Byron survived his gun battle and surrendered to the police, they started asking him what was going on and why he had body armor and weapons.
He said that his goal was to, quote, start a revolution by traveling to San Francisco and killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU.
As you may have guessed, Williams was a gigantic fan of Alex Jones, who loved to rant about the Tides Foundation and the ACLU.
He actually found out about the Tides Foundation because of a Glenn Beck rant, but I'm going to give you one guess as to where the Glenn Beck story started.
Here's what Alex Jones told Media Matters when he was asked about this particular shooting.
This goes to a classic lie that has been retreaded: that this fellow follows Glenn Beck and Alex Jones.
This is a classic guilt by association tactic.
It is just more of an attempt to imply that anyone who criticizes corruption is contributing to an atmosphere that will cause another Oklahoma City bombing.
Yeah.
So he's pretty consistent.
Yeah, but not, I guess, pretty consistent at practicing the convenience of association, right?
He wants to be associated with things when they have consequences or results that will help his bottom line.
But is, I mean, reading back over that quote, that's matrix-level dodging, isn't it?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I mean, this is guilt by association.
He's saying that I'm just criticizing corruption and they're trying to tie me into terrorist attacks.
When the reality is like, no, you're telling people that there is a secret war on to destroy them and their lives.
And then when they take you seriously and fight back against this secret war, you say, well, that's not what I meant.
Like, yeah, it's frustrating.
You guys remember that dude who walked into the Comet ping pong pizzeria with an AR-15 because he thought children were chained up in there?
Well, that guy had liked Alex Jones and the InfoWars on his Facebook page.
He told the New York Times he listened to Alex Jones on the radio.
This guy said about Alex Jones, quote, he's a bit eccentric.
He touches on some issues that are viable, but goes off the deep end on some things.
Which I love that that's the guy who brought a rifle into a pizza restaurant because he thought there was a secret child molestation campaign was like, Alex Jones gets a little bit crazy sometimes.
He's a bit of a kook.
He's a bit of a kook.
You have to take it with a grain of salt.
I believe that was Pizzagate, wherein that same guy was searching for children who were held in a non-existent basement.
Yeah.
And Alex Jones was a big proponent of Pizzagate and also a big proponent in general of the idea that there's a secret pedophile conspiracy running the entire government and all Democrats are pedophiles trying to make the world into a pedophilic empire of some sort.
Yeah, which is unclear.
Didn't this have something to do with Hillary Clinton's emails?
Were there like some exchange between her and one of her campaign people where there were like all these like secret words, code words that meant, you know, this is where we're keeping the children, the virgins.
Yeah, or just terms for scheduling a time to get together and have pizza.
Right.
This is a popular like place for lawmakers, this Comet Pizzeria.
It was like a picture of the picture.
Yeah, it's a big DC place.
It's popular.
It's right in the middle of things.
But yeah, it's even easier when you decide that normal words are code words for terrible things.
Like pizza is a code word for child molestation.
Well, then, like, anybody's email is going to have references to child molestation in it.
Kids love pizza.
They drink pizza.
Yeah.
Or cheese pizza because CP is childbirth.
Yeah.
Something like that.
Oh, there you go.
Oh, well, now it's rock solid.
Now Benjamin's on board.
I'm so on board.
So I love that quotation, though.
Alex Jones goes a little off the deep end.
Just a bit.
He's a little touched.
Says the guy.
He should go on.
I bet there's more.
I bet there's a lot more.
You guys remember in 2011 when Oscar Ortega fired his rifle at the White House from the window of his car?
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
It was a big story.
One of his friends told the New York Times that he had recently watched The Obama Deception, The Mask Comes Off, a documentary written and produced by Alex Jones.
I don't think I remember the subtitle, The Mask Comes Off.
Yeah, that may have been a sequel.
I don't even know any of it.
He's made a lot of documentaries.
So that may have been the sequel to the Obama deception, The Obama Deception, The Mask Comes Off, but I don't know off the top of my head.
It's like the born movies.
There's the Obama deception, the Obama precedent, the Obama whatever.
Yeah.
I would 100% watch an action movie series that actually starred Barack Obama as himself waking up with CIA training.
That would be fucking amazing.
Joe Biden is wheel man.
Yeah.
And, you know, Joe Biden's probably the one who says, I'm getting too old for this.
Yeah.
He's kind of like the grizzled Michael Caine, you know, like he'd be wielding the sawed-off shotgun.
You know what, guys?
I mean, since we're bringing someone here, I don't want to lose the flow.
I'm just going to text him.
Yeah.
Michael Kaine?
I'll just, I'll group text Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Michael Kaine.
Oh, great.
Yeah, Ben's got the context.
Because now we've had a couple presidents who started off in TV and movies and became president, but we've never had a president who became a television star after being president.
And I really think we're overdue for that.
Anyway.
That's 2018, yeah.
But so I imagine then that Alex Jones probably also denies any association or culpability.
Yes, he denies any association.
That's going to be across the board.
I don't have a specific quote for that one, but yes, he does not take any responsibility for Ascar Ortega shooting at the White House after watching a documentary about how Obama wants to take our freedom.
Did you guys hear about Jared and Amanda Miller's 2014 shooting spree in Vegas?
These were the two guys who left Clivin Bundy's land, headed to Vegas, and then ambushed and murdered two police officers in order to spark a revolution.
They killed one other person outside of a Walmart.
Five people in total, including the shooters, died from all of that.
Jared and Amanda were both regular commenters on Infowars.
At one point, Jared made a post on InfoWars about killing police officers.
Alex Jones declared the shooting to be a false flag carried out by the Obama administration to solely the good name of right-wing extremists.
But unfortunately for Alex, randomly declaring murder sprees to be false flags is a tactic that, after about a decade, eventually came back to haunt him.
On December 14th, 2012, Adam Lonzo walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and shot 20 children and six adults dead.
Adam Lonzo was not a fan of Alex Jones, was not connected to him in any way that I'm aware of.
But Alex Jones was a fan of insinuating and sometimes outright claiming that mass shootings were government false flag attacks carried out in order to justify a gun ban.
And that's exactly what he did in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings.
Lenny Posner, father of Noah Posner, the youngest victim of the Sandy Hook massacre, says he probably listened to an episode of the InfoWars podcast as he was driving away from dropping off his son for what would be the last time.
Like millions of people, like me, and I'm going to guess like you guys, Lenny enjoyed conspiracy theories.
Now, he believed in some of them.
He definitely had some baddie beliefs at the time, but he wasn't a blind, crazy fan of InfoWars or Alex Jones.
He watched him because Alex is entertaining and funny to watch, right?
Like pretty much everyone who's listened to this podcast so far, he thought Alex Jones was entertaining, but not anyone to take too seriously, just like the Comet Ping Pong guy.
That changed after Sandy Hook.
I'm going to play a compilation of a few of the things Alex Jones said about that mass shooting as compiled by CNN.
And we'll get into why I have to use a CNN clip in a little bit here.
But here's Alex talking about Sandy Hook.
The official story of Sandy Hook has more holes in it than Swiss cheese.
My gut tells me the White House, people controlling the governments were involved in this.
So don't ever think the globalists that have hijacked this country wouldn't stage something like this.
They kill little kids all day, every day.
And it's not our government.
It's the globalist.
I mean, they're doing it.
They're doing it.
They're staging it.
Yeah.
So.
Okay.
I can't even laugh at that.
Is this the crisis actor thing?
Yeah.
Well, this spread out of that.
You know, he didn't start out by saying that all of the deaths had been, but that's part of the Alex Jones thing, is that if other conspiracies crop up around a conspiracy he started, then he'll entertain all of those theories.
And he definitely, we'll play some clips later of what he said about the parents, but he was open to the idea that no children had died in Sandy Hook whatsoever.
So after, you know, this, partly as a result of Alex Jones' broadcasts about the Sandy Hook shootings, the Sandy Hook truth movement started to grow and spread.
Nuts began traveling to Sandy Hook to film the town and document evidence that it was in on some bizarre government conspiracy.
At one point, when Lenny Posner was checking into a hotel, the man behind the counter saw his hometown on his ID and said, quote, oh, Sandy Hook, you know the government did that, right?
So, yeah.
It wasn't all little incidents like that.
People started to believe that the families of the victims were in on the false flag shooting because, according to one variant of the theory, there were no victims.
Lenny and his, at the time, wife began to suffer harassment and even threats from strangers who thought they had faked the death of their six-year-old son from money.
The couple split up not long after Noah's death, but the harassment caused them both to move out of Sandy Hook, hundreds of miles away from their son's gravesite, which they couldn't visit anyway, out of the fear that some nut with a gun was camping out and waiting for them.
Lenny said this to the New York Times, quote, conspiracy theorists erase the human aspect of history.
My child who lived, who was a real person, is basically going to be erased.
Yeah.
Which is...
Yeah, that's probably the best codo we could possibly get for this episode.
Conspiracy theorists erase the human aspect of history.
This is like when shit gets real.
I mean, obviously shit's already gotten real with like, you know, poisoning his listeners and all this shit and just duping people left and right.
But this is when there start to be real consequences and like real weight behind this bullshit that he's spouting.
Yeah.
And it's just, it's like a boiling point where you can't deny it anymore.
No.
He does experience some serious fallout from this, right?
Yeah, and we'll be getting into the fallout in part three of this episode.
I do want to note that we had to use the CNN supercut from all those scenes of Alex Jones ranting about Sandy Hook because none of the videos where Alex spread that theory are still up on InfoWars.
Oh, I wonder why.
Yeah, he deleted them after a massive lawsuit threatened his livelihood.
It was possibly illegal that he did this.
And in fact, Mr. Jones and his company were sanctioned for deleting, quote, extensive social media materials and reportedly hundreds of hours of video.
That's like when Trump deletes his tweets, only, you know, different.
So what does the base of InfoWars think about Jones and co-deleting all this footage?
Well, I mean, I don't think any of them have said anything about it.
At least I haven't read any of that.
Like, it's like, it's if Trump deletes his tweets, like, his fans just don't sort of acknowledge the thing that got deleted.
You know, Jones will usually portray it as we're constantly under attack by the globalists.
They're always trying to shut us down, so we have to do things to protect ourselves.
I think those people would be like, this is clear evidence that the conspiracy is real because the government had to go after Alex and make him take it all down in order to, because they're trying to keep a lid on it.
Here's the other thing, though.
I don't want to get us too off topic, but if the globalists are that powerful and that amoral, then why are they so ineffective?
Why is his show still on the air?
There's so many things that don't add up.
Yeah.
And if you think about Alex's whole career, the line that he believes about himself makes no sense.
It's like how he was back in the late 1990s calling his show the final edition.
And here, 20-some years later, he is still saying all of this stuff.
He's never been stopped.
Nobody's come after him.
Well, it's like you said, it behooves the doomsday prophets for the doomsday never to come because that way they can keep cashing in on these suckers that believe every word they say.
And it's just, it's like gaslighting 101.
That's what he does.
You know, I mean, yeah, it's nuts.
Well, and this is a common thing for conspiracy theorists.
And it's also a common thing.
It's something they share because obviously not everyone who's a fan and not, I'm going to say not most people who are fans of InfoWars are anti-Semitic or who are fascists or whatever.
But if you look at sort of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories as spread by the fascists, it's always this conspiracy is always all-powerful, but simultaneously too dumb to stop them.
That's the same thing with Alex's stuff.
Like there's this conspiracy that's all powerful, but also we're so smart and so woke that we can defeat it by doing these things.
But it needs to be both.
Like it does need to be a constant threat because number one, that's how you sell the supplements, but also that's how you keep people amped up.
But they also need to feel like they're doing something to fight it by supporting InfoWars and sharing its stories on Twitter and Facebook and whatever.
Propaganda Fuels Constant Threats00:08:24
I think it's no accident that's called InfoWars because warfare works the same way, right?
Like we, you know, companies make billions and billions of dollars by us being in a constant state of terror and war, and it makes people like need them.
And if, you know, if we had peace, it'd go out of business.
That's no good.
You know?
And it's also interesting to me that the title InfoWars, because Alex Jones is such a pioneer in fake news.
And now we are all across the world, everyone listening to this, in the middle of a war that is being fought in large degree via information.
And I'm going back to like, if you talk about the, I think it was 2010, the Russian invasion of Georgia started with a fake news blitz, the Ukrainian civil war.
I've talked to people.
I've reported on that one, like from that war.
When you talk to people who live in the parts of eastern Ukraine that were first effective, they were like, yeah, it started with internet and television propaganda.
So in a weird way, by picking the name InfoWars for his site, he kind of did predict and define what was going to be happening in the next couple of decades.
And he really was the first person to weaponize the internet in an effective way.
I don't think he intentionally did it because he was just trying to sell supplements.
But like, there is definitely a connection between how Alex Jones has accidentally helped to spark so many shootings and how ISIS will do stuff like put out propaganda to hundreds of thousands of people in the hopes that one person will drive a bus into a group of crowded people.
Like it is they're doing it intentionally, and he was not trying to get anyone killed.
He just wanted to sell supplements.
But it's the same tactic, essentially.
It's the same idea that if you fill people with propaganda and convince them that they are being targeted and attacked and the situation is dire, some of them will do crazy things.
And you can just let that happen as a side effect of trying to sell bone broth, or you can a targeted attempt to make that happen.
But either way, it's the same tactic.
Where does that leave us now, Robert, at the point where it sounds like there was litigation that was to some degree effective, right?
It didn't tamp down his base, but it did, I think, show that he's not bulletproof.
So where are we now?
Where does this go?
Well, where we are, at least in the podcast we're telling, is Alex Jones has been sued by the families of the Sandy Hook victims that he sort of made into scapegoats for a lot of his listeners.
Where we're going to be in the next episode is I'm titling the third one, The Fall of the House of Jones.
So yeah, the Sandy Hook families are not the only people who sued him, although it is very possible that that lawsuit will be the thing that finally brings his empire of bullshit crashing to the ground.
It's a really tremendous story, and I'm excited to bring it to you and to all of you listening right now on Thursday when we drop part three of this Alex Jones podcast.
And there will be a lot of Schadenfreude in that one.
So if you've been frustrated with all of the death and lies and nonsense and racism and dirty gym socks on his ears, you'll get some catharsis in this next episode.
Before we get into that, you guys want to plug your pluggables?
Absolutely.
So we are host of two different shows.
You can find Noel and myself on Stuff They Don't Want You to Know, where conspiracy realists and skeptics alike apply critical thinking to the world of conspiracy theories.
Yeah, I think we actually recently did an episode on the whole Alex Jones turning the frogs gay, that whole debacle.
But man, I just, I'm learning more than I ever wanted to know, thought I wanted to know about this absolute peach of a human.
We also host a show together called Ridiculous History that kind of looks at some of the lesser known, more oddball, fun, bizarro tales throughout human history.
And it's a nice little snackable 30, 45 minute podcast, and we have a lot of fun doing it.
Why do British lawyers wear wigs?
Yeah.
Peruch.
There's a reason.
There's a name for it.
There's a reason.
There's a reason.
It's a weird one.
What do we do today?
We did one today about how maybe some British people during the Napoleonic War hanged a monkey because they thought it was a French spy.
So stuff like that.
And you can find every episode of every podcast we have ever done on ridiculoushistory show.com and stufftheydon'wantyutonknow.com.
If you didn't catch it in the first episode, we highly recommend checking out our ridiculous episode that features a cameo from How Stuff Works Own Robert Evans.
This is true.
This is true.
That was a lot of fun to do.
And it's the one where Robert coined the term chock full of Nazis, which I have pitched super hard as being a behind the bastards teapublic.com t-shirt.
We shall see if that comes to pass.
Or if any coffee sponsors want to behind the bastards branded coffee.
That's basically your coffee.
I'm Robert Evans.
My Twitter is I WriteOK.
I've got a book on Amazon, A Brief History of Vice.
You can find this website on behindthebastards.com with all of the sources for today's episode.
You can also find us on Twitter and Instagram at at bastardspod.
And I just want everyone to know the globalists are trying to sap all of the iodine out of your body.
But if you give me $40, I have a pocket full of dirty iodine pills that I will pour into an envelope and mail to you.
Isn't that a spin doctor song?
Yeah, pocket full of dirty iodine pills.
All right.
You can buy our t-shirts on TeePublic.
They will stop the globalists from pulling the iodine out of your blood, especially the Nacho's Not Nazi shirt.
That one really helps you retain a lot of iodine.
So I recommend that.
Anyway, you can catch the conclusion of our thrilling three-part story on Alex Jones on Thursday.
Until then, I love 40 Crescentia.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
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He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
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Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
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What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
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This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
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Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.