Today, Dan and Jordan bring you a little bonus episode where they sit down and have a little chat with Jared Holt from the Sh!tpost Podcast. Jared is a compatriot in the realm of studying right wing propaganda, and it was a real treat having the chance to compare some notes.
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a first-time caller. | |
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your work. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| No, Jordan, in the studio right now. | ||
| He has gone home for the evening. | ||
| He has fulfilled his eight-hour shift here at the podcast, and he has clocked out, put his little time card into the machine, went to chunk, and he locked up when he left. | ||
| He mopped the floors, and we appreciate his service. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| I am here, though, to do a little introduction for a bonus episode that we got for you here. | ||
| Today we had the privilege and the luxury. | ||
| That is something to consider when you're trying to find this. | ||
| And I believe that at the end of this episode, when we're doing plugs, I may have talked over... | ||
| It was a really great time, a real thrill, a treat to sit down with somebody, have a little conversation, somebody especially who spends as much time looking at and focusing on and digging into the world of Alex Jones as I do, and he also has far more... | ||
| scope to the things he looks into with, you know, monitoring and looking at right-wing propaganda. | ||
| So it was a real nice time to sit down with him, and I thank him very much for his time. | ||
| Please do check out his podcast. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I was going to go to the mailbag and listen to some voicemails, but... | ||
| As I sort of thought about it, I realized that that feels a little bit weird without Jordan here. | ||
| So we'll get back to some policy wonk shout-outs and some voicemails from the good people out there when he is back in studio. | ||
| But for now, please enjoy this very special bonus episode of the podcast with Jared Holt. | ||
| Check out his podcast, Shitpost Podcast, and do follow him on Twitter. | ||
| At Jared L. Holt. | ||
| Guys, thanks for listening, and we'll be back with a regular episode real soon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a policy wonk! | |
| Hello. | ||
| Yeah, it's great to be doing a show with somebody who watches as much Alex Jones as I do. | ||
| I don't come across that very often. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| It's a rare thing in this world, in this day and age, to read out. | ||
| No, pass. | ||
| Pass. | ||
| You don't want me to do the Family Matters theme song about this? | ||
| Alright, fine. | ||
| Yeah, I find it very difficult, generally, to have a lot of conversations with people, because I end up knowing too much about various worlds that are unsavory to most people. | ||
| Yeah, it can be kind of tough, right? | ||
| It's like, this is almost like an alternate reality in itself, and I feel like once you get that in your brain, it's hard to... | ||
| Understand how other people wouldn't know it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Like, you guys, there's all this... | ||
| It's like, you know, you have a friend who takes mushrooms for the first time, and they tell you about, like, everything that you're missing out on, and it's all just sort of illusions. | ||
| I've made the point that the only person who Dan could actually speak to is Alex Jones, and they would try and kill each other. | ||
| They would cancel each other out like antimatter and matter. | ||
| Oh, bitch. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Oh, because Dan spends as much time listening to Alex Jones talk as Alex Jones listens to himself talk. | ||
| That may actually be fair. | ||
| I basically study him full-time now and have been for the better part of two years. | ||
| So really digging into his narratives, really trying to unpack where they come from, and really just doing research into what's the source of this. | ||
| Something I don't think a lot of people care to pay too much attention to. | ||
| So have you read the book Them by Ron Johnson? | ||
| John Ronson's book, yeah. | ||
| John Ronson, yeah. | ||
| I haven't read all of them, but I've read a lot of excerpts and listened to tons of interviews of him talking about Alex. | ||
| And the perspective that he has is, it scares me a lot because I think that he could do a lot to take Alex out, quite frankly. | ||
| Or at least ruin his image in front of his audience, and I don't know if he does enough. | ||
| Yeah, like, if there's one guy that I want to go on InfoWars, I think it's him. | ||
| He's been on a bunch of times. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He comes on almost as an amused observer of Alex. | ||
| I guess probably because he has that sort of documentarian's distance, he never is too pointed about, like, Alex, you know you're making this stuff up to his face. | ||
| Yeah, I don't understand why he would go on, but he has a bunch. | ||
| You know, like, Ron Johnson has that sort of documentary approach. | ||
| How did you get into this originally? | ||
| Well, I made the mistake of watching Infowars coverage of the election in 2016, and through... | ||
| A bit of a coincidence. | ||
| I just saw the ugliness that was behind it. | ||
| I was trying to amuse myself because I thought, like, for the most part, political pageantry is a little bit boring. | ||
| And so why not spice it up with Alex Jones screaming about stuff? | ||
| I thought that would be a lot of fun. | ||
| But then... | ||
| You look too closely at it a little bit. | ||
| I think you see what it's really about. | ||
| And what I saw was just an organization that was dedicated to reinforcing whiteness and maleness against the supposed other of equality. | ||
| And it really bummed me out. | ||
| So I just started trying to dig into it. | ||
| And at the time, me and Jordan... | ||
| We're hanging out a lot and drinking a bunch and screaming at each other at bars. | ||
| And so we just decided to do that because I kept talking to Alex Jones. | ||
| No, at the time it was actually the complete opposite because what was going on is Dan and I had this weird, intense friendship that would last one night and then we wouldn't see each other for six months. | ||
| We would get together and we would talk for like seven hours and I'd be like, okay, cool, goodbye. | ||
| This was, for me, like a lot of an excuse just to hang out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So those sort of things merged a little bit. | ||
| Our desire to hang out with each other helped create the show. | ||
| And then my theory, my working theory from about two years ago that Alex was operating a sort of chauvinist white supremacist organization. | ||
| So that was sort of the jumping off point for my research and nothing has disproven that. | ||
| Yeah, it's only been reinforced greatly. | ||
| So if I get what you're saying, you watch InfoWars for the friendship. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't watch InfoWars. | ||
| The original conceit for the show is I don't know anything about Alex Jones. | ||
| What Dan told me was my entire entrance into the world. | ||
| And it has, I would go so far as to say ruined my life in a very positive way. | ||
| Yeah, that's sort of the slogan of our show. | ||
| Go to bed somehow? | ||
| I think go to bed turned into our unofficial catchphrase. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| I mean, it has brought a lot of joy and wonderment to my life. | ||
| But at the same time, I'm sure you can relate too. | ||
| I'm sure you have probably a similar experience with... | ||
| All the research that you do on your end about how becoming aware of these worlds makes you realize how much more there is even beyond this that you don't even know about. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I have sort of a similar background where it was probably two and a half years ago I first hopped aboard the Infowars train, popped my Brain Force Plus, and sat down to... | ||
| Just consume The Alex Jones Show in almost its entirety, like, every day. | ||
| And then on Mondays, I would, like, watch The Weeknd stuff. | ||
| My secret to it is playing it at, like, one and a half speed. | ||
| That's smart. | ||
| That's smart. | ||
| Dan has not figured that out yet. | ||
| I have actually recently had someone tell me that's what I should do, and I think I'm going to have to. | ||
| Yeah, I play it fast and then I skip the commercials. | ||
| And you can crank through an episode of The Alex Jones Show if you're dedicated in an hour and a half. | ||
| But some of the stuff I've picked up is really similar to the stuff you've picked up. | ||
| It's hard not to see these white nationalist tropes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh yeah. | |
| And also, like you said, this sort of chauvinist mentality exhibited on air, both through like the character of Alex Jones and also through some of the guest selection and some of the recurring themes that show up every week on the show. | ||
| And like most recently, they paired with the Proud Boys, which is Gavin McKinnon. | ||
| Oh, my friend, they have been on the Proud Boys tip for a long time. | ||
| And the only thing I really remember about that appearance was he was trying to make the argument that most blackface was reverent. | ||
| It was actually a very respectful thing to African Americans. | ||
| What I remember about that episode was screaming a lot at you for making me aware of the fucking Proud Boys. | ||
| Yeah, that was a tough, tough day. | ||
| Yeah, and now recently he's been just having random Proud Boy members on. | ||
| Oh, like Rufio Stickman? | ||
| Yeah, like Rufio, who was in Portland. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Rufio! | |
| Rufio! | ||
| Oh, sorry. | ||
| Hook. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can't get away from it. | |
| Yeah, I mean, he's having people on that have gotten into violent altercations with counter-protesters and stuff. | ||
| It is sort of glorifying that and rewarding that with what became over the years a national platform. | ||
| I will tell you this. | ||
| The biggest mistake that you have made is not listening to the commercials because they might be my favorite part. | ||
| If you skip through the commercials, you miss some gold here and there. | ||
| Less nowadays, but back in the past, you used to have a lot of really fun commercials. | ||
| Diamond Gusset Jeans is my favorite thing that has ever existed. | ||
| He had an advertiser called Diamond Gusset Jeans that we did some research into and found that all of their customer reviews were... | ||
| I ordered a large, but this is a medium. | ||
| They just said, like, every one of them is just like, I got a random pant size, and then whenever I sent it back, the shipping was like $30, and they didn't send me any other pants. | ||
| Like, it's fantastic. | ||
| And then back in 2009 or so, too, one of his sponsors was the Most High Family Ministry, which is a legitimate cult that was running a real elaborate scam operation. | ||
| And he took them on as a sponsor. | ||
| Those sorts of things are pretty fun. | ||
| But generally, I agree with you. | ||
| You should skip the commercials nowadays. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| There's not much juice in those berries. | ||
| But the ad pivots. | ||
| When he goes into a screaming rant about how everyone's coming to kill you, and they're going to take your children, and they're going to take them into the basement, and they're going to do horrible things to them, and everybody's going to die, and everybody's going to be destroyed. | ||
| By the way, we have Easter specials still. | ||
| Free shipping. | ||
| Yeah, free shipping. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| You can get brain force. | ||
| You have no idea. | ||
| The globalists will destroy you if you don't give me money. | ||
| Fatality is about making your dick hard all the time. | ||
| My favorite person who does the ad pivots is Roger Stone whenever he's guest hosting. | ||
| Those are beautiful. | ||
| Have you seen those? | ||
| He's a smooth, smooth daddy, that Roger Stone. | ||
| I hate Roger Stone, and yet in the same way I kind of view him reverently as a trickster god just dancing around the earth. | ||
| Sort of like a father figure? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| Yeah, he has the nature of, like, sort of a gentleman grifter absentee father. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| I can see that. | ||
| There's a little bit of a feel like that to him. | ||
| Oh, God, did you just psychoanalyze me in a way that I don't feel comfortable with? | ||
| I apologize. | ||
| He's good. | ||
| I think that that's a lot of his just inborn slickness that Roger has, and then also he's very... | ||
| Chameleon-esque. | ||
| So he's taken on a lot of those affectations that Alex already had with those smooth transitions to an ad. | ||
| It's interesting to see that sort of like Infowars virus infect people. | ||
| Like Owen Schroyer's... | ||
| We can watch him right now sort of starting to learn how to do the pivot. | ||
| Not doing great. | ||
| No, but it's still... | ||
| It's coming in there. | ||
| He shows a little bit of potential. | ||
| I still maintain that the only person who is going to make it through this whole thing somehow unscathed is Roger Stone. | ||
| Like, he's going to be a cockroach at the end. | ||
| Like, even if a nuclear bomb hit Austin, he'd just, like, slink away fine. | ||
| Yeah, he'd just, like, crawl out of the sewer and be like, we've got some excellent specials in the Infowars story. | ||
| Yeah, pretty much. | ||
| Undoubtedly. | ||
| So, yeah, I, um... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's kind of interesting because as we go through, I try and approach Alex and this whole studying that we're undertaking with as much of an open mind as I can, an open heart. | ||
| I try not to condemn him too quickly without cause. | ||
| It's weird because every episode or so, every few episodes definitely, we end up learning things that are sort of transformative in terms of our understanding of Alex. | ||
| We learned not too long ago that he's had at least ten abortions in his life. | ||
| Not him personally. | ||
| He's paid for at least ten abortions. | ||
| Not like he's some kind of Mr. Mom, like Arnold Schwarzenegger. | ||
| Not like that kind of thing. | ||
| And more troublingly, he did say on air that some of the women who got these abortions did... | ||
| Did not want it. | ||
| And so there's things like that that you learn, and it sort of reframes how you look at Alex Jones, the character, and the man. | ||
| And I bring this up, because I don't know if you were listening to his show on Monday of this week, on what would that have been? | ||
| Oh, sorry, Tuesday, on the 21st. | ||
| Did you listen to that show by chance? | ||
| I'm thinking. | ||
| I've been a little bit busy with other stuff, and I have to go back, but... | ||
| I'm trying to remember if I got to that one. | ||
| I'd like to see if I can play a clip for you. | ||
| Because we have a goddamn doozy. | ||
| This is something that I think everyone needs to know about. | ||
| Let me see if this will play for you. | ||
| Google would love to have me arrested and killed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Guaranteed. | |
| See, I've never killed anybody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Technically one guy. | |
| Technically I didn't. | ||
| The point is, I've never killed anybody. | ||
| Did that come through? | ||
| It didn't come through. | ||
| Oh, no! | ||
| God damn it! | ||
| Our tech issues are terrible. | ||
| Spark notes it for me. | ||
| I'll send it over to you. | ||
| Suffice it to say, Alex Jones confessed on air that he might have killed somebody in his life. | ||
| To give you a rundown of the clip, it's him going like, I guarantee Google would kill me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Guarantee. | |
| And I've never killed a guy. | ||
| Except that one guy. | ||
| I mean, technically I didn't kill him, but he had some health issues and he didn't later, but technically I didn't. | ||
| And you're like, what? | ||
| Yeah, it always amazes me, like, the weird personal details that Alex lets out. | ||
| Because, like, if you remember back to, you know, his custody trial, when was that? | ||
| Good day. | ||
| A year ago or so, right? | ||
| Yeah, I would say about a year ago. | ||
| Yeah, whenever his lawyers, like, gave this... | ||
| Deposition that Alex Jones is a character played by Alex Jones. | ||
| He's playing himself or something. | ||
| It's very easy to see what InfoWars is doing as stage art in a way. | ||
| But every once in a while these weird details come out that don't seem like it's acting. | ||
| They're a little startling. | ||
| I think that I've reached my Malcolm Gladwell tipping point of time listening to him. | ||
| I think I've gotten to a point where I can pretty well suss out when he's saying something he thinks he shouldn't say. | ||
| Or when he's lying. | ||
| And I generally find that when he's lying about something, he adds a bunch of extraneous details and fleshes out the story really well. | ||
| And when he's telling the truth, it's something like that where he's like, I never killed a guy. | ||
| Well, there's one guy. | ||
| Anyway, I technically didn't. | ||
| Anyways, the Chinese are destroying all of us, but I didn't kill a guy. | ||
| That's the sort of thing that leads me towards, like, this is not an act. | ||
| This is somebody struggling. | ||
| It just brings me back to that claim that Alex Jones made that he slept with 200 women by the time he was 16. Oh, yeah. | ||
| Y 'all remember that? | ||
| Oh, we remember that. | ||
| I kind of believe that with a little bit of embellishment on his end. | ||
| It's probably more like maybe 40 or 50 or something like that. | ||
| Which is still too many. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Too many. | ||
| But one of the reasons that I believe that is because he's described a childhood that was full of trauma in terms of... | ||
| When he was a young boy, he talked about one time he got stuck under a house and they were fumigating the house and he was just stuck, he was like trapped under a house with extermination chemicals and he got hit in the head when he was really young by something really giant. | ||
| With a giant rock, yeah. | ||
| Or it was like a cinder block. | ||
| Yeah, and he talks about how his mom, when he was six, kicked him off her knee and said, you don't get love anymore. | ||
| Oh, that was my favorite. | ||
| Because she wanted him to be a man and not a mama's boy. | ||
| And let's talk about goddamn Nock. | ||
| He also may have killed his dog. | ||
| He had a dog named Nock. | ||
| And he very graphically described killing him on one episode. | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when he talks about having sex with tons of women younger than most people would consider normal... | ||
| I think that you take into account a sort of very chaotic childhood, and it doesn't seem that far out of the consequence or the result that you might expect from someone like that. | ||
| And let's face it, he was hot. | ||
| He was when he was younger. | ||
| He was super hot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, man. | ||
| Yeah, I can see where you're coming from. | ||
| And then even further, not just in that conversation where he was talking about how many women he'd slept with before he was 16, He also, when he had Mike Rotondo on, the guy who was 30 years old and his parents sued him to get him out of the house, Alex was trying to give him a pep talk, and he said that by the time he was 12, he'd already become a man, saying that he had had sex at 11. And whether or not, you know, you want to... | ||
| It's probably he thought it was a good idea, but even so, you know, sexual activity at that young of age could be very traumatic to somebody. | ||
| No, he's lionized his own sexual abuse. | ||
| Like, he was truly sexually abused, and he's playing it off as like a... | ||
| If you take his words as truth, like what he's describing is a child being victimized. | ||
| Right, absolutely. | ||
| So, that sort of thing is always like, you know, he says he had sex with 150 women? | ||
| Maybe he has. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| It's awful that he considers that a brag, but I don't know. | ||
| So I'd be interested to hear, like, you seem to, you know, you have the perspective that, like, Alex Jones has experienced a seemingly major trauma in his life. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| You know, and it is sort of fascinating to see that play out in the form of a... | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| You know, how do you see that play out, like, during Infowars segments? | ||
| I think that one of the ways is that he manifests, like, really childish thinking. | ||
| Like, the way he creates artificial cause and effect all the time, that sort of thing. | ||
| His leaps of logic and his just inability to... | ||
| He always refers to primary sources and stuff like that, but he never actually understands the context that those sources come from. | ||
| And it's very adolescent. | ||
| So I would say that to some extent, the entirety of his show is a manifestation of someone who's... | ||
| Being frozen in time. | ||
| Yeah, a kind of intellectual arrested development where he's just not able to wrestle with nuance. | ||
| He's very angry. | ||
| He feels like he's lost something and he's mad at... | ||
| Some nebulous entity out in the world that he feels has deprived him of that. | ||
| He really does, like, if you read so much about serial killer, like, backstories, he has so similar a childhood that you're like, well, at least you didn't kill, like, 15 people. | ||
| Just one in theory. | ||
| Yeah, practically. | ||
| Technically. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe. | |
| Technically, just one. | ||
| Allegedly. | ||
| Alleged by Alex. | ||
| No, no, it's confessed by Alex. | ||
| Yes, I don't know. | ||
| It's tough to say because you have these sorts of things and these trends and you kind of want to give somebody a bit of pity, but at the same time it's very difficult when you actually listen to what he puts out into the world and how he's affected a lot of people. | ||
| So I'm actually interested. | ||
| How did you start doing this? | ||
| Was this like work or did you just become fascinated by this? | ||
| Alex? | ||
| It was a little bit of both. | ||
| I used to work at this place called Media Matters for America. | ||
| Soros. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nazi collaborator Soros. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| I went to an Alex Jones press conference when he was in D.C. one week. | ||
| Wasn't that one recently? | ||
| Yeah, it was earlier this year. | ||
| You lucky duck. | ||
| Oh dude, that was an experience. | ||
| And once he figured out who I was, he just went off. | ||
| On you specifically? | ||
| Yeah, he singled me out in the crowd and he's like, that guy works for a Nazi collaborator. | ||
| I think I saw this in the live feed. | ||
| Yeah, that's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, that was me. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| We're very excited for you. | ||
| Yeah, that was a hell of a day. | ||
| But, yeah, so I started doing stuff with Media Matters and, you know, there's like a weekly... | ||
| Sort of mix of stuff I had to listen to, like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Alex Jones, and I just thought the Infowars stuff was more interesting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Or at the very least, more entertaining. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| It was like watching a daily train wreck. | ||
| So I sort of stuck on that, and now that I do work at a place called Right Wing Watch, which for the record does not get Soros money. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| Good to know. | ||
| I don't think Alex cares, but... | ||
| No, no, no, absolutely not. | ||
| And I just sort of stuck with it, I guess, and I thought about different ways I could approach it any time he's in the area or at an event that I think I might go to. | ||
| I try to work that angle into it and try to figure out how it fits into the broader Infowars universe or Zeitgeist. | ||
| Yeah, and something that's become really fascinating to me, I'm interested to hear your thoughts, is just sort of this trauma-inspired train wreck that happens on air every day. | ||
| The sorts of people that it attracts, because Alex Jones has mega fans, and he has a lot of them that will travel to go see. | ||
| Him or other InfoWars hosts at different events. | ||
| And it's always the most curious bunch of people. | ||
| How so? | ||
| Well, it's a lot of live streamers, first off. | ||
| That's something I've noticed at a bunch of events. | ||
| People with their own sort of spin-off live stream, right-wing conspiracy theory-styled shows that are there to hopefully... | ||
| Interview Alex Jones or meet Alex. | ||
| One thing I think that sort of triggers in my mind is that really makes sense because most of Alex's employees came from contests that he ran. | ||
| Like Leanne McAdoo and David Knight were both people that came into the fold through contests. | ||
| And Owen Schroyer came aboard because he was making antagonistic YouTube videos and he got in touch with Alex. | ||
| Millie Weaver's, I believe, fairly similar. | ||
| So a lot of his actual employees... | ||
| Feed the myth that if you just go find him and you're doing something, he'll bring you aboard. | ||
| And then even beyond that, back in the day, most of his callers, like nowadays, they'll call in and be like, Alex, I want to tell you that Alpha Brain is the best, and now here's my question. | ||
| Whereas back in the day, you'd get callers and they'd all be like... | ||
| Hey Alex, I'm putting together an InfoWars rap album. | ||
| Can I plug it? | ||
| That was fun. | ||
| Everybody would call in with their own thing and plug it. | ||
| So Alex was kind of like a distribution center. | ||
| His radio show was like this place that you could get your thing out. | ||
| And I think he really encouraged that ethos in his audience. | ||
| So I'm not too surprised to hear that now... | ||
| The YouTube streaming stuff has become so much more prevalent that that's still the case. | ||
| What's more interesting, not to one-up you like a douchebag, what I find more interesting is how much he openly disdains his listeners. | ||
| Hates them. | ||
| He hates his listeners. | ||
| Anytime somebody calls in, there's a certain expectation of like... | ||
| You're going to say some dumb shit, and I'm going to have to pretend that it's okay. | ||
| And he'll just often just cut people off and act like his own narrative is what you were talking about. | ||
| And he'll just be like, hey, did you know that space is owned by dogs who live in their own home? | ||
| Well, yeah, of course I did. | ||
| And that's why the Chinese are running everything now. | ||
| And you're like, you didn't engage with that. | ||
| Yeah, he does that a lot. | ||
| He does that even to his own guests sometimes. | ||
| Oh, yeah! | ||
| There are probably only like five or six guests that I've seen that he always gives deference to and always gives respect. | ||
| There's like the Rogers of the world. | ||
| There's this guy named Steve Quayle who's like this weird religious prophet of some sort. | ||
| Alex never cuts him off, treats him like a king. | ||
| Well, he's a prophet. | ||
| How can you cut off a prophet? | ||
| Yeah, you don't cut off the prophet. | ||
| That's just rude. | ||
| Did you think Elijah was cut off all the time? | ||
| Hell no. | ||
| You listen to what Elijah has to say. | ||
| I don't even know if he died. | ||
| No. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| By the way, did you guys book that prophet for this? | ||
| We have a prophet law statement. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I'm going to move on. | ||
| Yeah, something told me that mine was going to be here, but I don't know, man. | ||
| I guess I was wrong. | ||
| Prophets are notoriously flaky. | ||
| That's what I've found. | ||
| The guest that I would say is my favorite, I think, just because of the weirdness. | ||
| I don't know how much you have wrestled with Steve Pachanek. | ||
| Are you aware of Steve Pachanek? | ||
| I am. | ||
| I'm sorry to hear that. | ||
| Most people aren't, and they should be. | ||
| You know, like Alex Jones, he's on everybody's lips. | ||
| Everybody's writing big write-ups about him and all this, and no one really knows. | ||
| The nature of, like, one of the big sources of his narrative. | ||
| Now, admittedly, the most interesting that Steve Pachenik ever did was get a call from Alex in the middle of a hurricane and bitch out at him. | ||
| Like, for the first time, Steve Pachenik was just like, Great, Alex. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| We're going to talk about your narratives right now. | ||
| I'm in a goddamn hurricane. | ||
| There was a... | ||
| Was it during... | ||
| It was that Florida hurricane not too long ago. | ||
| Alex called him to do an interview on the show, and as soon as they started talking, Steve was like, Alex, I thought you were calling to ask how I'm doing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was like... | |
| This is rude. | ||
| He was personally offended by it. | ||
| It was fantastic. | ||
| Yeah, but Steve Pichemic uses his, like... | ||
| Former, like, State Department status to lend Infowars credibility, which, if you don't know who he is and, like, how far out he is, that that could, if you're gullible, I guess, or susceptible or new to who this guy is, that could be a little concerning. | ||
| Yeah, and, like, even as recently as, like... | ||
| I don't know, six months ago or so, he was on David Knight's show, Real News, and was talking about how Sandy Hook is fake, which is kind of running counter to Alex's efforts to, like, let's not talk about this ever. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So, yeah, Steve Pachenik is a wild man. | ||
| The only thing that saved Alex there is David Knight's show is too boring to listen to ever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I skip it most of the time. | ||
| It's a wise decision. | ||
| Guy's a human quail. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think we talk about anybody, but all of his co-hosts and all of his guest hosts, we all just like, nah, hard pass. | ||
| You're not crazy enough. | ||
| They don't have it. | ||
| No, but that's also part of Alex's hiring strategy, is he's always going to hire people who he feels like aren't a threat to his supremacy. | ||
| Like, the closest one is, what's his dumb face? | ||
| Owen Sawyer? | ||
| No, no, no, the British. | ||
| Prison Paul. | ||
| Paul Joseph Watson, yeah, yeah, who should be lit on fire and then just peed on forever. | ||
| And even that guy is too much of a ponce to ever really compare to Alex's intense, toxic masculinity. | ||
| But I do have to admire Paul's dedication to the brand. | ||
| Whenever he made this video about soy boys or whatever, Someone pointed out that the Infowars brain force thing that he's always selling contains soy, and he just doubled all the way the fuck down. | ||
| He's unflappable. | ||
| You gotta respect it. | ||
| Oh, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| He has that kind of smugness that you can't punch out of somebody. | ||
| He has that face that just drives people crazy, and he knows it, and that's his weapon. | ||
| It's really... | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It really works with his really fast edited videos that he puts up. | ||
| It really is good for trying to piss off people and sort of invigorate the base that likes to piss off other people. | ||
| But put him in front of a camera for five minutes without fast cuts and he's kind of hopeless. | ||
| He's not really very good without his editing. | ||
| That's his real talent. | ||
| Understanding the attention span necessity. | ||
| He is willing to cut and almost by himself go at 1.5 times speed. | ||
| He can say something really boring, but he says it so quick that you skip over the stuff and you're like, oh, he's saying something racist here. | ||
| Yay! | ||
| Paul has mastered the art of Creating outrage and Alex Jones, I think, attracts people just because he's so eccentric. | ||
| But sort of circling back to this question of who watches InfoWars, you sort of had that, you called it like a Malcolm Gladwell analysis of Alex Jones. | ||
| I'm curious what you think the history and... | ||
| What mannerisms of Alex Jones might be able to tell us about his viewership, at least in the most general sense? | ||
| I can tell you Dan has the serious answer to this one. | ||
| I think that it's changed over time, certainly. | ||
| I think that probably... | ||
| You know, in the probably late 90s, it was a lot of really hardcore militia folk who were listening. | ||
| And then as you got into the early 2000s, I think you probably could make a case that there were a lot of dyed-in-the-wool libertarians, and there were a lot of people who were dissatisfied with George W. Bush. | ||
| So he even probably had some weird left-leaning libertarians in the mix. | ||
| And then as soon as Obama got in, I think you saw... | ||
| White! | ||
| You saw a real shift in terms of that, but I still think you maintain a lot of the libertarian folk. | ||
| I don't know exactly when things changed, because I haven't listened to all the episodes that he's ever done, but I know from looking at online communities now and hearing comments about him now, there are tons of people who think that he's sold out. | ||
| And is a shill, particularly for Israel. | ||
| People make that argument a lot. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| The true believers in terms of his fan base of the libertarianism that he embodied years ago, I think a lot of those people have left him. | ||
| I don't really know what his fan base is like outside of scammy opportunists like those YouTube streamers you were mentioning. | ||
| And people who are full of hate. | ||
| I'm not sure exactly. | ||
| I think he's most emblematic of the Republican Party as it is now. | ||
| Like, his brand is overtaken by the Fox News and all of that stuff. | ||
| Because prior to Trump's ascent into global monstrosity, his brand was cruelty. | ||
| His brand was, whatever it is we can do to hurt the weakest members of our society is what we need to do. | ||
| And they've overtaken that. | ||
| So now he's kind of left with this weird conglomeration of sovereign citizens, white nationalists, people who want to say they're not anti-Semitic yet at the same time are so anti-Semitic. | ||
| And then, of course, artificially inflated Russian bot. | ||
| My biggest theory is that nobody but us actually kind of listens to him. | ||
| I think it might be you and Dan who are the only people who listen to what he has to say and everybody else kind of puts him on or doesn't as background music. | ||
| What we found out is now that he's off YouTube and Facebook and all of that stuff, he's on like 30 radio stations. | ||
| Give or take. | ||
| In large to medium markets. | ||
| Who's to say how many 200 population towns he might be on a little transistor or something? | ||
| That's a medium market? | ||
| No, I'm saying that he might have a ton of little tiny towns around the country where he's broadcast. | ||
| But I did an analysis of major and medium markets and found his radio reach is much smaller than he pretends. | ||
| Yeah, and... | ||
| Something I've been watching as, you know, since Alex Jones has been pulled off of all these platforms, you know, there was like a relative spike in interest and, you know, as a result, traffic to the Infowars site, like right after that happened. | ||
| Now it's starting to fall back down, sort of closer to the normal range. | ||
| And I'm wondering if it'll stay at that normal range or if we'll see that start to dwindle. | ||
| Well, it's like when Breitbart, when the artificial, when they had to remove the... | ||
| There's an article about how there was a suspicious pattern in Breitbart's traffic where they went up almost at a vertical line in their traffic. | ||
| Meteoric rate. | ||
| And then stayed around that level, and then, like... | ||
| I don't know, I think it was like nine months later, they had another vertical line downward in their traffic that clearly indicates artificial inflation of traffic. | ||
| And I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what to expect from Alex. | ||
| I know that whatever interest he got, like with him bragging about being the number one app and stuff like that, that was even overblown. | ||
| He was the number one in the trending apps because everyone was running to it like rats trying to get off a sinking ship. | ||
| They needed something to hold on to. | ||
| I think Candy Crush is still number one, or whatever it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Probably. | |
| I think Back to Normal is probably where you're going to be for a bit, especially because the midterms are coming up. | ||
| I think that he has a built-in narrative about that. | ||
| I think people are still invested in trying to see him through on whatever... | ||
| Like, whatever the storyline of this season of the show is, with his I'm a free speech martyr and that stuff. | ||
| Yeah, I think that was season five of Mad Men. | ||
| Yeah, people want to see the conclusion of it, and then I think you'll probably see diminishing returns. | ||
| Either way, whether the Republicans win in the midterms or they lose control of the House and Senate, I think either way, Alex kind of loses a lot of momentum and a lot of natural interest. | ||
| Infowars being pulled off some of these bigger platforms. | ||
| A little bit of a disclaimer, I had sort of what ended up being a little bit of an accidental role in that. | ||
| You were the Spotify guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What?! | |
| Yeah, I was the one who got Spotify. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No shit! | |
| And then that just sort of snowballed, and I had no idea it was going to turn into what it turned into, but... | ||
| Here we are today. | ||
| I'm curious to get someone else who understands the InfoWars universe's take on what now? | ||
| Or how does this affect the brand? | ||
| Simply as somebody who doesn't study it and is only there to react on it and create my own nonsense theories. | ||
| I think he's actually done. | ||
| Like, I don't think he's... | ||
| Because right now, he's the cause for so many of these people. | ||
| And as we know from any cause, Twitter and all of that stuff is going to let it go after a couple of weeks. | ||
| And once he stops being the cause... | ||
|
unidentified
|
The cause celeb as it was. | |
| He is just going to disappear. | ||
| And it's just going to be people, even the ones who are hardcore listeners, are going to wind up getting bored. | ||
| Because as we've listened to over the recent episodes, he's really kind of putting out the same nonsense. | ||
| And it's not as much fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Before he got taken off... | ||
| I feel like what you did, and I believe it was inadvertent and everything. | ||
| I don't think that you were, like, gunning or anything like that. | ||
| I believe you're a hero, but anyways. | ||
| I think that what you, in essence, did was kind of force the narrative forward. | ||
| Because he was in a bit of a holding pattern, and by him getting kicked off stuff, he's able to progress to the next logical step, which is, I'm a victim, I am... | ||
| The first target in terms of free speech, X, Y, and Z. And when that started to happen, one of my firm convictions, I believe, at the time, and I still believe this would be the case, was that he needed to use that as a jumping off point to do something else. | ||
| Not like turn on Trump or anything like that, but he needed to respond to that change in the status quo by now really going full Lenny Bruce. | ||
| Like, getting down to the brass tacks, sitting on his show as boring as it may be, reading over regulations, reading over terms of service agreements or something like that, you know, trying to, like, make it, make himself a respectable, legitimate argument. | ||
| Because he never does that. | ||
| And when we started to listen to the episodes after he got kicked off of, like, Facebook and YouTube... | ||
| You just saw him doing the exact same things. | ||
| And, like, it's just yelling about the chai comms, screaming about how Soros is evil, just doing the same, like, I gotta sell my fish oil, all that stuff. | ||
| And when I saw that, I just, I got the sense that, like, he's either waving a white flag of surrender or he doesn't realize that he's already dead in the water. | ||
| There's nothing, there's nowhere to go past the end of this narrative, if that makes sense. | ||
| The most exciting moment, I think, for us with Alex in present day was whenever he said that Trump shoved ISIS up his dirty asshole. | ||
| That was the night that Trump bombed Syria. | ||
| Yeah, because we were both watching him in this transformation from crazy guy who screams about chimeras and shit. | ||
| And then becoming just a guy who's a partisan hack, who's just like, hey, the Republicans are great and all of this stuff, and all the leftists are trying to kill you. | ||
| And on that night, we could have seen the real turning point for him. | ||
| He could have changed his narrative and become something so much better than what he is right now. | ||
| It wouldn't have been better. | ||
| Well, more interesting. | ||
| More entertaining, I suppose. | ||
| Less repetitive. | ||
| That night when he was crying drunk on air, screaming about Trump, as we say, shoves ISIS up our dirty assholes, the option that he would have then is to turn on Trump and be like, I'm going to fix this. | ||
| I'm going to be the hero that's needed. | ||
| And in reality, what you need him to do is shut up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You helped make this mess that we're in. | ||
| We don't need you to clean it up. | ||
| He's like a baby who knocks over a bottle and then doesn't know how to clean but is trying to be like, oh, let me help, let me help. | ||
| And you have to just be like, baby, go sit in the corner. | ||
| I'll take care of this. | ||
| Adults need to step in. | ||
| You know, I'm not mad at you. | ||
| Yeah, no, because, like, if I am remembering that same night, which I assume that I am, it's a... | ||
| He didn't... | ||
| Use that to turn on Trump or really defy him in a major way. | ||
| Instead, it was like, Trump, we love you, we elected you for a reason, but this wasn't good. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| By the end of the night, he was very much like, we're on our own now, that kind of thing. | ||
| He was putting out... | ||
| Granted, he was pretty drunk and needed Owen Schroer to sit there by his side to keep things going and moving forward. | ||
| You could see Owen Schroer's look of surprise after every sentence he said of just like, What? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| We should have had a production meeting! | ||
| I believe at one point Owen was like, hey Alex, we should probably get off air. | ||
| Oh wait, wait, I remember this. | ||
| And then it went on for another hour. | ||
| He played me that clip and I was like, oh, it's certainly going, thank God some, not thank God, like, oh, it's a good thing that some reasonable person is getting Alex off the air. | ||
| Alex, you gotta go to bed. | ||
| Nah, nah, I got more shit to say. | ||
| And yeah, so by the end of that, he was in full turn-on, flip-on Trump mode. | ||
| And then the next day, he got on his show and said, you know, hey, everything's cool. | ||
| We still support Trump, but this is stupid. | ||
| That sort of thing. | ||
| Dan's theory was that Roger Stone texted him furiously or called him all night, trying to convince him otherwise. | ||
| That's part of my theory. | ||
| I have some other theories about that, but maybe that isn't mine. | ||
| Oh, I think I found this. | ||
| Is this when he's like, Donald Trump shit his fucking pants at the fucking moment and shit all over everybody? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| That moment, right? | ||
| So good! | ||
| Yeah, there's some... | ||
| So he did some strong work that night. | ||
| That was a real... | ||
| None fucking cult for Donald Trump. | ||
| That was a good night. | ||
| Okay, yeah, I remember this. | ||
| That was like one of the last... | ||
| Most recent times that I've been like, that's Alex, baby. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That's my boy. | ||
| Because we did, we did investigate, not we, Dan investigated 2015. | ||
| And we did this whole long series because... | ||
| 22 episode series? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, because we really streamline things. | ||
| You know, when we put out three-hour episodes, we're really trying to condense it down into... | ||
| Probably a 55-hour-long presentation. | ||
| But I wanted to go back to 2015 to find the exact day that Trump announced his candidacy and see where Alex jumped on board. | ||
| I thought the most interesting thing that the media wasn't telling me at all... | ||
| Even though everyone was saying that Alex Jones is the voice of Trump or whatever, and clearly Alex was on board with Trump, no one had any idea why. | ||
| And I wanted to try and figure that out, so I spent countless hours at my then-day job just going over, listening to all of the episodes, taking notes. | ||
| One of the things that I found that was the most surprising was that when Trump announced his candidacy, Alex hated him. | ||
| He was very clear about how Donald Trump was a part of the mob. | ||
| He said that Trump was a front man for consortiums on the East Coast. | ||
| And so he was just very clearly... | ||
| Coming out with, like, I know that this guy is involved with illegal financial operations and stuff like that. | ||
| And then over the course of months, we saw him go from that position to, Jesus, this guy is mean. | ||
| He hates immigrants. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| But I still love Rand Paul. | ||
| And he never wavered on that point at all for months and months. | ||
| And then it happened in a week. | ||
| Well, it didn't, actually. | ||
| And this is one of the misconceptions that a lot of people have. | ||
| Well, no, it didn't. | ||
| No, I'm just kidding. | ||
| A lot of people have this misconception, and I think it's a really easy mistake to make, and that is that once Roger Stone came, Alex flipped. | ||
| And that's not true at all. | ||
| Roger Stone showed up on November 9th, 2015. | ||
| It was his first appearance on the show. | ||
| And he did some good work in terms of trying to get Alex to love Trump by saying, like, Trump loves guns. | ||
| You'd like him. | ||
| He carries a gun everywhere. | ||
| That sort of thing. | ||
| But Alex still didn't endorse Trump until the middle of December. | ||
| Or he didn't get on board with him and say, this is our guy, Rand Paul's not good enough until December. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So his path was much more complicated than I expected to find. | ||
| And yeah, I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was really kind of... | |
| Dan, it was a slow transition, I admit. | ||
| I do think that the rhetoric happened, though, very quickly. | ||
| Like, even near the end of his eventual love of Trump, the evolution that took a while, it was still like, well, you know, Rand Paul's my guy, but I'm starting to like this Trump fella. | ||
| He hates non-white people, and I hate non-white people, so maybe we're doing good. | ||
| And then all of a sudden, it went from... | ||
| Trump is still mobbed up to... | ||
| Trump is a secret sleeper patriot. | ||
| He has been working undercover for 30 years in order to turn himself, finally, into the patriot that we all need to save us. | ||
| He is the Messiah. | ||
| No, you're wrong, though. | ||
| I apologize. | ||
| God, I love you. | ||
| That's not correct. | ||
| You're my favorite. | ||
| What you're recounting is like a central plot line. | ||
| Have you guys read Jerome Corsi's book? | ||
| Wait, is it the book about QAnon? | ||
| Killing the Deep State? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I would never read a Jerome Corsi book. | ||
| I admit, I spend a lot of time listening to Angel Warriors. | ||
| I only look at his memes. | ||
| But I don't have time. | ||
| I don't have time to read a Jerome Corsi book. | ||
| It's some excellent fan fiction. | ||
| It's probably some of the most creative I've read in a while. | ||
| Well, actually, interestingly, Jerome Corsi was one of the people who was telling Alex in July of 2015 that Trump was full of shit and that he didn't mean to run for president. | ||
| So his whole writing a book about the deep state, as you're saying, and all this fan fiction is kind of exactly the opposite of what he was saying in 2015. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The reality, though, Jordan, is that... | ||
| This is essentially our podcast, wherein I say something and Dan explains why I'm wrong. | ||
| He didn't switch to Trump as our savior until a bit later. | ||
| He got on board with Trump largely because of... | ||
| That narrative that you did mention with the he's working behind the scenes. | ||
| There's a deal between Assad, Putin, and our rogue military. | ||
| That counter-coup narrative, as we refer to it. | ||
| That was being told to him by Roger Stone and Steve Pachenik behind the scenes, who are working together in a group that they have on air referred to as the 45 group. | ||
| So I'm convinced that the two of them were working in concert to try and flip Alex Jones because they knew of his propaganda potential. | ||
| And that happened towards the end of 2015, probably more towards December, when Trump appeared on Infowars himself. | ||
| Yeah, I'm curious, you know, especially as we go into the midterms now when we're recording this, you know, we've had sitting congresspeople and, you know, congressional candidates and that sort of thing appear on Infowars, I think, just for the sake of the size of the audience that I guess it once had. | ||
| I haven't seen any, like, real numbers recently. | ||
| And just sort of that idea that it is a propaganda tool. | ||
| And I'm really curious to see now that InfoWars has been pulled from so many platforms, if we're going to see the same type of high-profile figures holding power who are trying to wield InfoWars in the same way, or if it's going to sort of go the way that Breitbart did, where Breitbart can still get some guests. | ||
| High-profile guest, but it's not thought of as the same, like, wieldy, attack dog sort of outlet that it once was. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that, I mean, Matt Gaetz was the last sort of sitting politician, I think, who's gone on. | ||
| Yeah, and he went on there and complained about getting called a conspiracy theorist, which was just beautiful to me. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And then apologized for going on and was like, I shouldn't have done that. | ||
| I won't do that again. | ||
| Which, fair enough. | ||
| But I think his reach, even within his own sort of crew of guests, is going to diminish. | ||
| Let alone the people who might go on just to pander to an audience, like Matt Gaetz clearly was doing. | ||
| I think that even some of those other people who are just essentially running cons will realize that this is not a profitable place for us to go on. | ||
| And so I think even a lot of his roster of guests will diminish. | ||
| And that's one of the big things that we, or at least I have learned from all of the analysis that Dan has put together of Alex's cast of characters, is that these are all con men trying to run their own game, kind of hanging on. | ||
| Like you were saying, the guys who are hangers-on trying to get their own YouTube show with Alex's cachet involved in that. | ||
| We see so many different people who go from Alex Jones to fucking, what is it, Carrie Campbell. | ||
| There's an ecosystem of... | ||
| Of confidence games that really is most of the right wing media sphere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Kind of at this point. | |
| I mean, if you look at, like, who's a regular guest on Alex Jones, it's people like Mike Cernovich, it's people like Roger Stone, it's people, you know, they're people that, you know, they have their own, whether it's, like, some bullshit book or, you know, like, some of these guys have their own supplement line. | ||
| You know, or whatever they're selling, you know, I agree with that. | ||
| I think, you know, you look at Infowars guest rotation and it's a relatively small pool of people. | ||
| And they all have their own shit that they're trying to do. | ||
| And I almost wonder if that's... | ||
| Another indicative sign of the stage of Infowars and its growth, where people are coming on Infowars to be on Infowars, not because anything substantial or majorly consequential is happening on the platform, or that they expect to wield real influence anymore. | ||
| I think that some people definitely did. | ||
| Before. | ||
| But I think what they got out of it was money, quite frankly. | ||
| Because I know recently we sometimes cover Project Camelot and Jim Baker episodes too because they do the same sort of con maneuvers. | ||
| And on an episode of Jim Baker's show recently, he was talking about how when he sells a guest's book, he buys a ton of their books and then he sells them. | ||
| So there's a financial incentive for the guests to come on because they automatically sell this large chunk of books. | ||
| And when you look at Alex Jones' business model with the InfoWars store, most of the time when these guests come on, he's selling their books on his store. | ||
| So there is probably, and I can't confirm this necessarily, but it only stands to reason that a lot of these guests who are coming on end up selling... | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Go way down the batting order. | ||
| Well, but see, that's one of the things that I don't like about his, as you were saying, he's got a smaller rotating cast of characters. | ||
| Like, when we go back in time with Alex, one of my favorites was, what's his name, General Stubblebine or whatever? | ||
| He's dead. | ||
| Yeah, but when he went on the show, his wife was essentially selling a $25 postcard with a magic sentence that would get you out of any crime. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It gets you out of getting vaccinated. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's right. | ||
| Even better. | ||
| She was selling a laminated card that said, don't stick me. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It was like, oh, you're the kind of guest that I want. | ||
| I don't want Cernovich being a bitch on your show. | ||
| There's kind of like a fun crazy that's less existent nowadays. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| As long as we keep Health Ranger Mike, I think we'll be good. | ||
| Did you read his report that apparently got to the president? | ||
| No, I didn't. | ||
| You didn't read the Adams report? | ||
| It was, I believe it was... | ||
| It was really long. | ||
| Was it Wesley Adams who did it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Okay. | ||
| It was a lengthy treatise that Mike Adams had written about the state of conservative shadow banning. | ||
| That the president needed to see. | ||
| Which is our 51st state, actually. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I knew that he was sending that, but I didn't realize it was Health Ranger Mike doing it. | ||
| Oh yeah, it is. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| I know, right? | ||
| What kind of world do we live in where a guy named Health Ranger Mike is allowed to do any of this shit? | ||
| The proprietor of naturalnews.com, full of all kinds of your medical woo. | ||
| Whatever you want to not believe, he'll help you not believe it. | ||
| Yeah, and the thing, like, he'll have Health Ranger Mike on every once in a while just to be like, we've tested the supplements, they're fantastic. | ||
| Also, you don't need vaccines. | ||
| Yep, fuck those. | ||
| Vaccines will kill you. | ||
| Hey, come on! | ||
| Ginkgo biloba! | ||
| You just need iodine. | ||
| Deep earth iodine, Dan. | ||
| Don't sell it short. | ||
| There's something really interesting, too. | ||
| If you go and look at all those supplements that he sells, all the super male vitalities and everything, they're all brought to you by Dr. Group, who is his fake doctor. | ||
| He's a chiropractor. | ||
| But he runs this place called the Global Healing Center. | ||
| And if you go and look at his website, he has all the exact same products for sale, just with different names that kind of sound like medicines. | ||
| And it's a really interesting dynamic that the two of them have where they sell the same stuff, but Dr. Groups sounds like medicine. | ||
| Alex sounds like it's combat gear because they know their audiences. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's the same thing. | ||
| It's another version of the same con. | ||
| Yeah, it's like they all have their own private label. | ||
| They all buy it from the same retailer, and then they just put their own name on it, and they're like, this is completely different! | ||
| More likely, Dr. Group buys all of it, puts it all together, and then Alex does the same thing that he does with people's books, in theory. | ||
| And he's selling Dr. Group's stuff on private label. | ||
| I like the image of Dr. Group putting it all together himself like he has a workshop like the elves. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That'd be fun. | ||
| That would be fun. | ||
| Well, I think we should go ahead and start to wrap this now that we have finally discovered once and for all that the InfoWars products really are as... | ||
| As good as they say. | ||
| Oh yeah, we fixed it. | ||
| If they are rip-offs. | ||
| I guess on a closing note... | ||
| I can't get out of bed in the morning unless I have my bone broth. | ||
| I'll tell you that right now. | ||
| The only thing... | ||
| My big takeaway, I think the big thing that we discovered this evening is that with fewer people going on the Alex Jones show, I think the Jim Baker show is about to get way... | ||
| More popping off. | ||
| Man, I'll tell you, it's already been popping off. | ||
| Those buckets are not to be believed. | ||
| The fact that Jim Baker's show had on the lady who... | ||
| Paula White Kane. | ||
| Paula White Kane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Who is the single greatest con artist I think we've had. | ||
| That's your position. | ||
| At least in the current times. | ||
| I still think Larry Nichols is much better. | ||
| Larry Nichols, call Larry Nichols. | ||
| If you die, definitely make sure to pin a note to your chest that says, call Larry Nichols. | ||
| But she is running such a con. | ||
| In a way that somehow she gave a benediction for Trump or whatever? | ||
| Well, she's his sort of personal preacher. | ||
| Right, and she... | ||
| There's nobody who could be less aligned with any kind of Christian theology that you could imagine. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| She's married to the keyboardist from Journey. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That's enough for me. | ||
| Inexplicably true. | ||
| I would say it's interesting that you're putting it that way. | ||
| You think Jim Baker's about to pop off. | ||
| I think he's already reached his sort of zenith, as it were. | ||
| He's plateaued. | ||
| He's going to stay about where he is. | ||
| I say keep your eyes on something like Project Camelot. | ||
| I think that's much more likely to get really popular. | ||
| Because that's... | ||
| Really fringe. | ||
| That's really weird. | ||
| They just talk about the secret space program all the time and have, like, weird liars on. | ||
| And the biggest guest they have is a murderer from 1993 or whatever it is. | ||
| The Pendragon case. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, man. | |
| Mark Richards. | ||
| By the way, just so you know, any time you try and wrap up a show, we're going to wind up talking for 85 more minutes. | ||
| So please just be as insistent as possible. | ||
| Well, to wrap up the show... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Perfect! | |
| Should I just answer everything with that? | ||
| No, just end the phone call! | ||
| Jared, it was a lot of fun to talk to you. | ||
| I apologize, this was kind of all over the place, but it's nice to speak to somebody who focuses on this stuff as well. | ||
| It's a rare treat, in my personal life at least. | ||
| Yeah, it was a real pleasure. | ||
| Wonderful. | ||
| So, for my podcast, where can they check out Knowledge Fight? | ||
| KnowledgeFight.com is our website that's got all the information that folks need, perhaps. | ||
| The best thing to do to find us is to go to our Facebook group, inexplicably enough. | ||
| It's called Go Home and Tell Your Mother You're Brilliant, which is based on that clip that I was talking about with Steve Pachanek earlier, where he... | ||
| I bitched out on Alex for a while. | ||
| He just ends with saying, great, you did a good job. | ||
| Go home and tell your mother you're brilliant. | ||
| Five stars, whatever. | ||
| Bananas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| Well, if you're looking for my podcast, you can find it on iTunes and all over the place. | ||
| It's called Shitpost. | ||
| Yeah, the high is an exclamation point. | ||
| Oh, by the way, are we allowed to say all of the yelling swear words that I did on your podcast? | ||
| It's called Shitpost. | ||
| Okay, fair enough. | ||
| Well then, fuck this noise! | ||
| But Shitpost is with the I like it's pink. | ||
| You know, the singer Pink. | ||
| Alright, I got it. | ||
| The I was an exclamation point. | ||
| Yeah, I tried to type the word shit into iTunes and they weren't having it, so... | ||
| Those motherfucking pieces of shit. | ||
| Jared, I believe that you are a victim of tyranny, online censorship run amok, undoubtedly. | ||
| Your free speech is being squashed because you can't put shit onto iTunes. | ||
| Also, just so you know, I originally tried to email shitpostpodcast at gmail.com, and instead I found out that that is owned by a Mexican podcast. | ||
| That just started and they were not having it. | ||
| Wait, what? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I emailed it and the guy was like, yeah, so we just started like a couple weeks ago. | ||
| We're in Mexico. | ||
| Anyways, you don't want to talk to us. | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Well, cool, guys. | ||
| That's great, Chad. | ||
| Yeah, thank you so much. | ||
| We had a great time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| Take care. |