Jared Holt joins Dan Friesen to dissect Alex Jones’ propaganda, tracing two years of research into themes like white supremacy and conspiracy theories—including Jones’ claims of killing someone, sexual abuse as a child, and 200 women by age 16. Holt recalls Jones accusing him at a press conference of working for George Soros-funded Media Matters, while InfoWars was deplatformed by Spotify, Facebook, and YouTube in 2021. They debate Jones’ fading influence post-ban, his reliance on fringe platforms like Project Camelot (hosting convicted murderer Mark Richards), and his past guest rotation, including Roger Stone and Health Ranger Mike Adams, whose theories allegedly reached the White House. Ultimately, the episode frames Jones as a symptom of broader media decay, where credibility is weaponized and censorship ironically fuels extremism. [Automatically generated summary]
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, sure, why not?
The pleasure of sitting down with Jared Holt from the shit post podcast, which you can find all over wherever podcasts are found.
But be forewarned that it is shit, but with the eye is an exclamation point.
So 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 him while he was saying his plug.
I apologize.
So now we're doing it up top.
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 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.
And yeah, 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, Shit Post Podcast, and do follow him on Twitter at JaredL Holt.
Guys, thanks for listening, and we will be back with the regular episode real soon.
I basically study him full-time now and have been for the better part of two years.
So, you know, 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.
It's something I don't think a lot of people care to pay too much attention to.
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.
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.
But yeah, I don't understand why he would go on, but he has a bunch.
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.
Like we would get together and we would talk for like seven hours and then I'd be like, okay, cool, goodbye.
So this was, for me, like a lot of an excuse just to hang out.
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, Media Corporation.
So that was sort of the jumping off point for my research.
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.
So I have sort of a similar background, whereas 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 weekend stuff.
My secret to it is playing it at like one and a half speed.
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.
Oh, yeah.
And also, like you said, this sort of chauvinist mentality exhibited on air both through 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've paired with the Proud Boys, which is Gavin McInnes' group.
Yeah, I mean, last year, early last year, Gavin McGinnis was on, and the only thing I really remember about that appearance was he was trying to make the argument that most blackface was reverent.
And it was actually a very respectful thing to African Americans.
Yeah, I mean, he's having people on that have, you know, gotten into violent altercations with counter-protesters and stuff, and like is sort of glorifying that and rewarding that with what became over the years a national platform.
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 send it back, the shipping was like 30 bucks, and they didn't send me any other pants.
And then back in, like, 2009 or so, too, he was one of his sponsors was the Most High Family Ministry, which is like a legitimate cult that was running a real elaborate scam operation.
And he took him on as a sponsor.
Like, those sorts of things are pretty fun.
But generally, I agree with you.
You should skip the commercials nowadays, like, with the brain force.
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 it's everybody's going to die, and everybody's going to be destroyed.
By the way, we have Easter specials still on free shipping.
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, soaking Discord wherever he goes.
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.
And so 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.
Like we learned not too long ago that he's had at least 10 abortions in his life.
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 there's like 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.
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 what the consequence or the result that you might expect from someone like that.
And then even further, he talked about 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 want to, it's probably he thought it was a good idea, but even so, sexual activity at that young of age could be very traumatic.
So, I'd be interested to hear, like, you seem to, you know, you have the perspective that, like, Alex Jones has experienced seemingly major trauma in his life.
Absolutely.
You know, it is sort of fascinating to see that play out in the form of a daily broadcast.
You know, how do you see that play out during InfoWar segments?
I think that one of the ways is that he manifests 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 under like 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 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 backstories, he has so similar a childhood that you're like, well, at least you didn't kill 15 people.
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.
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 Limbosch on Hannity, Alex Jones.
And I just thought the InfoWars stuff was more interesting.
And I just sort of stuck with it, I guess, and thought about different ways I could approach it.
Anytime 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.
It's just sort of, you know, this trauma-inspired train wreck that happens on air every day.
Like 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.
That's something I've noticed at a bunch of events, is it's 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 Jones or try to get a job with Alex Jones.
One thing I think that that sort of triggers in my mind is like, 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 Schroer 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.
Like anytime somebody calls in, there is 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 it'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, that's, you didn't engage with that.
Was it during 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.
Yeah, but Steve Pieczenik uses his former State Department status to lend InfoWars credibility, which if you don't know who he is and how far out he is, that could, if you're gullible, I guess, or susceptible or new to who this guy is, that could be a little concerning.
And even as recently as, 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.
But I do have to admire Paul's dedication to the brand.
Whenever he made this video about Soy Boys or whatever, and 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.
Well, I think that it's changed over time, certainly.
I think that probably 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 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 sort of scammy opportunists like those YouTube streamers you were mentioning and people who are full of hate.
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 a 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 views.
Like, one of the my biggest theory is that nobody but us actually kind of listens to him.
Like, 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.
Like, what we found out is he's now that he's off YouTube and Facebook and all of that stuff, he's on like 30 radio stations to give or take in large to medium markets.
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 auric 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.
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 story like whatever the storyline of this season of the show is with his I'm a free speech martyr and that stuff.
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.
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.
He needed 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, trying to 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 Facebook and YouTube, we just saw him doing the exact same things.
And it's just yelling about the Chi-Coms, screaming about how Soros is evil, just doing the same.
I got to sell my fish oil, all that stuff.
And when I saw that, I got the sense that he's either waving a white flag of surrender or he doesn't realize that he's already dead in the water.
There's nowhere to go past the end of this narrative, if that makes sense.
Yeah, because we were both watching him in this transformation from crazy guy who screams about chimeras and shit, and then becoming just the 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.
Yeah, no, because if I am remembering that same night, which I assume that I am, 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.
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.
Because 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.
And 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, that he was a bad, bad guy.
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.
Well, actually, interestingly, Jerome Courcy 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.
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.
The counter-coup narrative, as we refer to it, that was being told to him by Roger Stone and Steve Pieczenik 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 Congress people 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 it, I guess, it once had.
I haven't seen any real numbers recently.
And just sort of that idea that it is a propaganda tool.
And I'm really curious to see, you know, 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, you know, Breitbart can still get some guests and high-profile guests, but it's not thought of as the same wieldy attack dog sort of outlet that it once was.
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 Gates 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 anymore.
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 Cassidy?
Project Camelot.
And then we've got the same people going on Jim Baker's show.
And all of this stuff we find is people running a con and then the other con men kind of propping them up.
They're people that 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 the InfoWars guest rotation, and it's a relatively small pool of people.
Yep.
And they all have their own shit that they're trying to do.
And I almost wonder if that's like another indicative sign of sort of like 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 Hamelot 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 5,000 books to Alex for the appearance that they're coming on.
There's essentially a sort of an in-kind version of pay-to-play that's going on with like a consignment deal with their books.
And I think that a lot of people, as we move forward, with his diminished reach, won't see that as an investment that's worthwhile anymore.
And he'll probably end up having to go way down the batting order.
Like, if you go and look at, like, I mean, 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. Group's sounds like medicine.
Alex sounds like it's combat gear because they know their audiences.
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 good as they say.
Oh, yeah, we fixed it.
If they are rip-offs, but I guess I'll close you note.
I just the only thing, my big takeaway, I think the big thing that we discovered this evening is that, you know, with fewer people going on the Alex Jones show, I think the Jim Baker show is about to get way more popping off.
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 Pieczenik earlier, where he bitched out on Alex for a while.
He just ends with saying, Great, you did a good job.
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.