December 16, 2012: Knowledge Fight dissects Alex Jones’ Sandy Hook episode, where he initially accepted the official narrative—20 children and seven adults killed by Adam Lanza—before pivoting to debunked vaccine-autism links, Homeland Security "threat" documents from 2009, and the misrepresented Arms Trade Treaty (2014). Jones’ slippery-slope claims about guns, Prozac, and violent video games mirror outdated satanic panic rhetoric while ignoring military game tech’s actual uses. His cautious phrasing avoids outright denial but still fuels conspiracy, revealing a pattern of exploiting tragedy for anti-government propaganda—undermining credibility even as his paranoia persists. [Automatically generated summary]
One time, so every year for the summer, my parents and I, and my brother, we would drive across country to visit our relatives in California, and my parents would never pay for hotels.
And we were at one, and we were like, I was just like, I wanted a fucking hotel because it had been like two days we've been on the road or so, and I was just fucking tired of these campsites.
And so we go to a KOA place, and my dad's all like setting up the tent, and he's all excited about like, ah, this is great, isn't it?
So, Jordan, on our last episode, we started our Sandy Hook investigation, and I warned you that there was a decent chance I was just going to barrel through.
Today, we're going to be going over December 16th, 2012, and that is because the 15th was a Saturday.
Alex had no show.
So he had some time to regroup, figure out what his narrative was going to be, because I know that it would be wrong to say anything too definitive, but you saw a lot of uh-oh on Wednesday's episode.
A lot of trying to figure out where he was going to land on things.
And we are going to be here for the next two hours.
Obviously, Friday morning, we had the Connecticut mass shooting, 20 dead children, seven dead adults.
We now have at least the mainstream media's image.
After blaming his brother and others, we have a mainstream media report on who supposedly did this.
We're going to be breaking those down.
But today, I want to drill into not just the people attacking the Second Amendment savagely and viciously right now, and the attacks that we're now seeing entered in legislation, but also via executive order that Obama's talking about outside of law restricting our guns.
I want to look at the psychology of the control freaks throughout history that always seek to disarm the people.
And I think because of the initial speculative, inaccurate reports that were coming out, I think to a certain extent, a day and a half, two days later, you could still have like, we might get more information on this, and it might end up that this is wrong, also.
But that's just a function of reporting and it being a developing story, not of a cover-up or anything like that, which is what he's sort of suggesting.
So, like I said, I think that that's still kind of like, meh, I don't like the idea that he wants to spend most of the rest of his show talking about the psychology of gun grabbers.
So, in this next clip, though, you hear Alex say something that is very comforting at the beginning of the clip and then wander into very unterritory that doesn't inspire confidence.
If you believe the official story, and I tend to only because this fits in with the real, because there's been some stage ones that have even come out before, like Sir Hen, Sir Hen, and other events.
But when you have a real mass shooting like this, it's always the same thing.
Almost every case, it's a white male, white, sometimes Hispanic or Asian, if you just want to profile it from a law enforcement perspective.
Okay.
Just almost unheard of to have a black mass shooter for whatever reason.
Just profiling here.
Almost always Caucasian, 25, 18, 25, generally even closer to 20.
And normally they are mentally ill.
They've normally been in psychiatric care.
A lot of times it is something I've dealt with their whole life.
Autism, of course, has gone from 1 in 25,000 30 years ago to 1 in 58 now, according to the British Medical Journal and the medical journals here in the United States.
We have similar numbers to what they have in England.
You can debate whether it's 1 in 37 or 1 in 120, but the numbers globally in the Western world are settling in at about 1 in 58.
This is just a name of all sorts of people brain damaged in utero from different chemicals and things that are in the food chain, and then things that they also get once they're born.
So I don't like that characterization of people who are on the autism spectrum, first of all.
And then, second of all, that clip is, to me, the path of Alex Jones because it starts with, if you believe the official story, and I tend to, which is good.
And that sort of same mentality carries on into this next clip, that same path, that same weird journey from a defensible place into a real, not defensible place.
I myself have three children, one of them a four-year-old girl.
And we were all very depressed and very upset up here on Friday because I think almost the whole crew has children and most of us have young children.
And when you see a robot, because that's what this guy was like, and it's an incredible, if you had to profile a subset of people that keep doing these things, even though mass shootings are flat in the last 20 years, about the same every year, this year's actually been worse than the last decade or so statistically.
He wouldn't behave this way if there wasn't an awareness on some level that whatever I end up saying eventually, and I don't know if he, I don't know how much awareness he has of even that, but like no matter where the end of this road is, the beginning of the road is awareness that this is real.
I mean, it's not, it's kind of, it's a little bit like that, you know, I have three daughters, so I understand what it's like when women are providing issues.
But again, it's a huge loss because it does indicate that when he does start saying those things later, it's built on a foundation of him absolutely knowing that this is real and he's bummed out about it.
Like, because that makes him talking about guns and how they want to grab them and all that stuff a little more palatable because he's at the same time recognizing the horrible tragedy that these families and survivors have had to go through.
So that's kind of the sugar that helps the pill go down or whatever.
So there's, again, we're speculating about it's almost impossible to know exactly what is going through his mind, but these are some of the things you kind of think might be going through his mind when you deal with someone like this, an inveterate liar.
It's like a small broken ring in the chainmail, you know, of like, this guy is a psychopath, but for one brief second, you can see that missing scale in the underbelly of Smaug, you know?
And I'm sure he says it a bunch, but I don't know when he does.
I don't believe, based on our last episode, I don't believe the story that all of these nefarious weirdos like Wolfgang Hellbig came along and convinced him it was fake.
He was already ready to believe it the minute after.
So that kind of loses a little bit of its credence to me.
Right.
But I still don't know what the path is.
And there's a real decent chance, like we speculated on the last episode, that he needed those sorts of people to give him the cover to make the arguments that he intrinsically wanted to make.
Maybe because they're better for traffic to the website.
Maybe because they're better as a way to reinforce his they want your guns narratives.
There's an example of that that's super egregious.
That will be on our next episode, but we'll get to that when we get to it.
Okay, for now, Alex wants to make the argument.
He wants to talk mostly about guns, of course, and in this next clip he's going to use some sources that I think might be a little biased on the issue to make the argument that all cultures over time that are authoritarian in nature, they want to take your guns and they will stage crises in order to do it.
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That was the first thing I want to tell you should have taken knives.
There is a blueprint that has been followed in Soviet Russia, in Nazi Germany, in communist China, in Japan, in Australia, in New Zealand, in England, in Germany it has been followed, in Brazil it has been followed and again, there's been documentaries made about this.
The NRA has written books Jews, the preservation of firearms, ownership's written books on the subject.
I've studied it, have you and they always use school shootings or mall shootings in every case for the media to say, aren't you for the children?
This wouldn't have happened if we didn't have semi-auto handguns and rifles.
And then they ban the handguns and rifles and then they register all the other guns and then they have a mass shooting where somebody uses a Balt Action and then they ban those, and that's how it works.
There are variable gun laws throughout, even just the countries that he's naming yeah uh, and.
And historical countries yeah, that he's naming it's a woeful oversimplification of things, just to be like.
They do this, they stage these attacks in order to take guns.
But the reason he's doing that is because that is what he'd like, the story he'd like to tell.
Yeah, about Sandy Hook, because it works more if he believes that every authoritarian country throughout the course of history has staged these attacks in order to erode gun rights and gun laws, and he believes that Obama is an Aspiring authoritarian Hitler, then it follows from those two premises that the conclusion is that Sandy Hook is fake.
agree with you but he's very close to like what he wants to say is like basically they marched uh him in that building adam lanza and they had somebody else dressed like him uh who shot up everybody He was all drugged up.
They killed him in the school and then covered it up and stuff like that.
That's the version of it that seems like what he wants to tell.
The actor stuff, I don't think is even on his mind.
And I think that one of the things that interests me the most about this investigation and the unknownness of it, the sort of great expanse we're walking into, unlike a KOA campsite.
Even if we come to the conclusion that the actor stuff is stuff that invaded Alex's world, I still don't think that lets him off the hook for anything.
Absolutely not.
So, even if we find that out, that's just an intellectual curiosity satisfied as opposed to a like, oh, that's an excuse.
Alex is way off on this UN treaty he's going on about here.
The treaty that he has to be talking about is the Arms Trade Treaty, which wasn't actually passed until December 2014, but had been in the works since 2001.
Since the process began to try to get this thing signed, it's been the focus of a ton of patriot propaganda, specifically that it was the world government signaling they were about to take everyone's guns.
The problem is that that treaty doesn't do anything of the sort.
The arms trade treaty, as the name might suggest, was about international illegal weapons trafficking.
That's very clearly and specifically what it was talking about.
Creating international agreements to put in place instruments to help clandestine or help limit clandestine black market arms trading, which I assume is something Alex might be into, or at least he should be, since it kind of gives legal, law-abiding gun owners a bad rap.
It's a very boring interview, so we're not going to actually listen to any of it.
He has a.
They don't actually talk about Sandy Hook really at all.
Of course.
They talk about threats to guns.
The treaty itself, this UN arms trade treaty, it goes so far out of its way to stress that individual states are not bound by this treaty to alter any of their domestic laws.
I'm going to read to you from page one, where it specifically reaffirms, quote, the sovereign right of any state to regulate and control conventional arms exclusively within its territory, pursuant to its own legal and constitutional system.
The treaty even gives countries a back door to leave the treaty at any point if they feel like it isn't something they want to be a part of.
As it says in Article 24, quote, each state party shall, in exercising its national sovereignty, have the right to withdraw from this treaty.
They even say that they don't have to give a reason to withdraw.
And the only qualification that they even give is that if a country withdraws, that doesn't mean that they're immune from consequences for breaking the treaty, but only if they broke the treaty before they withdrew.
That's the only qualification that they even really claim.
The only thing I can think of that Alex would be talking about here in other thing other than this treaty is the UN report that they released in July 2001 about a conference that was held about, quote, eradicating the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons.
Not surprisingly, this also doesn't say anything about eliminating citizens' rights to own guns, and actually includes this bit of language that I found a bit surprising.
We reaffirm, quote, the right of self-determination of all peoples, taking into account the particular situation of peoples under colonial or other forms of alien domination or foreign occupation, and recognizing the right of peoples to take legitimate action in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations to realize their inalienable right of self-determination.
This shall not be construed as authorizing or encouraging any action that would dismember or impair totally or impart the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent states conducting themselves in compliance with the principle of equal rights and self-determination of all peoples.
Wait, so does that actually, if I understand that correctly, does that mean that if you are like the Virgin Islands and you decide that you want to be your own country, illegal weapon sales are fine?
I mean, they're straight up saying they explicitly recognize the right of occupied and colonialized people to take up arms against their oppressors, which is cool.
But I guess if you came to a point where you could demonstrate or had a good argument that the United Nations in and of itself was making it so you had no self-determination or freedom or your inalienable rights, then by their own words, yeah, you should be able to take up arms against them.
It kind of seems like the idea there is similar to, you know, like France recognizing the United States as a country immediately following the Declaration of Independence.
You know, like the UN will immediately recognize if you're a colonized state, if you're like Haiti, they'll be like, hey, fuck it.
And I'm positive that hasn't been used well or anything like that.
But it's in the language of the meeting.
Yeah.
This report that they put out in July 2001.
The language in both that report and the eventual arms trade treaty does discuss the need for regulation and oversight of weapons importers and exporters, since that would be one of the only ways you'd be able to find illegal weapons trafficking.
So I would bet anything that this is what Alex is exaggerating and lying about.
He views any attempt to deal with the problems created by the illegal use of guns as being an attack on his legal ownership of guns.
And that's a position that requires him to create strawmen out of every perceived attack on guns, which unfortunately undermines whatever he wants his point to be.
Oh, and also the U.S. signed that treaty, but it's never been ratified, so we're not really even subject to it.
Ratification would have required two-thirds vote in the Senate.
And since the treaty was signed in 2013, even though the Democrats had a 53-45 lead over the Republicans in that session of Congress, McConnell was still the minority leader.
There's no chance in hell Obama was going to be able to sway enough Republicans to get the treaty ratified.
Also, the quote: civilian ownership of any firearm in the United States threatens a legitimate power monopoly of the state is not a quote from the UN at all.
It's a quote from right-wing blogs and talking points put out by the NRA and the Heritage Foundation in order to undermine support for the treaty.
None of Alex's information reflects reality, nor does it come from the places he's asserting that it comes from.
And even that power monopoly of the state is such libertarian language that there's literally no way anyone except some sort of libertarian-leaning think tank or blog would phrase it that way.
So in this next clip, Alex, it's good that we've listened to a bunch of 2009 because we know a lot of those narratives that he was using in 2009, and he's using them still in 2012, but sort of talking about them as if they're current, as opposed to being things we heard him talk about that were dated even in 2009.
And I want to give a full episode about that, but it comes so piecemeal that I'm not really fully able to satisfy that request.
But I think in this Andy Hook investigation, we are going to accidentally hear him talk a lot of shit about video games.
And it's interesting because that is something that he's using to attack Adam Lanza in the same way that he's using he's a Prozac head, all that stuff.
There's a lot of crazy psychos out there, and they usually grab you and go and torture you.
There's some psychos, though, that want to kill you right on the spot.
It's kind of like eating in, going into the restaurant to eat, not getting the hamburger bag and going home to eat it.
Most psychopaths want to go home and take their time.
A lot of these psychos like torture people, take their time.
But a small minority is usually just programmed by video games.
They're brain damaged.
I'm already got into this.
In fact, I want to say they're evil and think about what I do to them.
But really, folks, it's always just some weird goth nerd kid who's brain damaged on a bunch of drugs, watching devil movies all day, playing video games.
But that sort of mentality and that idea, it really does become like.
Neither of us are super big fans of slippery slope arguments, but like it does become a situation where you're like, well, what is it that you're actually complaining about?
The other kid who stays in the picture, Robert Evans.
The idea of, I mean, he's not literally talking about the devil, but like the what is the point where your like this is no good is satisfied.
It's a very censorious position to have, and it is not something you expect to hear from someone who is into free speech, who's a libertarian, who believes people should live and let live or whatever.
It's nuts.
Like that alone should be an invalidation of Alex pretending he has the principles he professes.
The idea that he's condemning these reporters trying to harass the families when we know that the end result of so many of his actions and I'm not saying that in some abstract sense.
Like, there are people who have sent death threats to the families and gone to court, and part of their probation has been, you can't listen to InfoWars.
Like, that sort of stuff.
It's not some sort of wacky idea that we have that a lot of his listeners have this impulse to harass these family members.
I guess what you're laughing at is that he knows better.
In the same way that that clip earlier that we played where he's giving condolences to the family is so demonstrative that he knows something really bad happened.
That is an indication that he knows that other people's actions can cause negative reactions for the victims.
It is kind of like that should be played in his trials of like, no, I know this is intentionally awful because he himself said that it was intentionally awful to do the thing made happen.
And if that's the case, then you should be off the air.
I mean, maybe not by legal mandate or anything like that, but if you don't know, if you don't realize that what you're saying will lead people to harass these people, dox them on the internet and shit like that.
If you don't realize that, then you're playing with fire that you don't have any mastery of.
Was trying to figure out the slot to put him in that would be so low stakes, and my mind wouldn't allow me to go to celebrity gossip because the publication would be sued immediately.
But the point of what I was trying to get at is put him somewhere low stakes instead of this incredibly powder cakey, very high-stakes world that he's operating in.
Because that would be that sort of like the punishment, it doesn't fit the crime, but it might be the only, it might be a therapeutic way to go about it.
The reason that I said you've got to have that to be a class and stuff like that, like a workshop, is because you need to have someone discussing with him the way he's misreading these things and confront him with it in a setting that he can't leave.
Well, the only reason I resist any of that sort of sentiment is because, like, if we were still the United States as it is now, but a territory of the United Kingdom, I don't think it would be better.
We could be Canada.
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We could just have the queen on our money and everybody'd be fine.
I think, quite frankly, if the, like Alex is describing, the thing that set off the Revolutionary War was guns and people having their guns taken, then it wouldn't be the Second Amendment.
And I should say that a good bit of this episode that I've just fucking cut out because I don't really give a shit is him yelling about how Obama cheated to win the 2012 election.
The whole thing was rigged up one side and down the other.
And this is a desperate establishment that knows you're waking up to them, that knows the gun culture is spreading, and liberals are buying guns everywhere.
It's even on television and print media.
They're now admitting this.
And so they're panicking, desperately saying, oh, conservatism's dead.
If you're saying that the old mainstream media is in crisis because they know because they know that even liberals who still believe in the mainstream media are buying guns, then they have to create this situation in order to get the liberals to stop buying guns.
That's the thing that I think that's most interesting from this Friday to Sunday jump is that the tease was so I don't think Alex was even in control of it necessarily based on his, like, I would say just based on the fact that you and I were so like, well, maybe what he's doing is this on Friday.
And now on Sunday, I think we're on much solider ground that it's, there's a tease.
I know that my audience is going to understand that I don't trust what's going on, even if I say I believe the mainstream stories.
But I don't know how much of that is intentional and how much of that is just the result of he's had to sit with this for a couple days and he's more ready to talk than he was on Friday.
But he's talking about video games and like these shoot-em-up games were created by the Department of Defense and all this stuff.
And interestingly, Alex is kind of right about that, but he's also kind of wrong in terms of the video games of the Department of Defense and the Pentagon.
What he's right about is that DOD funding was involved with some of the earliest video games, like back in the 1950s.
There's a man named William Higginbotham who worked at Brookhaven National Lab, and he created a game called Tennis for Two on some of the early computers that they had there to try and make their lab more interesting to visitors.
It's basically an early version of Pong.
His salary at the lab was paid for by the government, and so you could make the argument that they helped create video games from that.
Then in 1993, the Marines noticed the rising popularity of Doom, and they wanted to see if there were ways to use the new technology to help supplement their training regimen, particularly because it would be way cheaper than what they had been doing previously.
It's not the games themselves that have application for training, and thus explain the reason that the Pentagon has for a long time been funding the underlying research.
It's the technology that is used to make the video games.
For instance, with Doom, it was the innovation of navigating a 3D environment.
With shooting games, it's the collaborative team elements that you can recreate and the need for immediate decision-making that's built into the structure of the games.
So those sorts of things are very big innovations in technology simulating.
Like that sort of computing simulation.
It's not that the games themselves are training you.
They have used the technologies that have been developed by the development of these games, which is why they invest in a lot of video game companies.
Like THQ made a bunch of money on government contracts and stuff like that.
Because what the game development allows by the breakthroughs that they make are the training things that the government and the military and the Marines can use, get to use those technologies.
As technology has gotten so much better, and as the video games, the controls of them have developed over the years, you are essentially able to create something that is very similar to flying a plane that you don't have to fly a plane to do.
That is in everyone's best interest from a financial standpoint, from a safety standpoint.
Right.
Even though learning to fly a plane apparently isn't as hard as everyone thinks.
Not sure Skyrim has many training applications, but the point is that is an important distinction to bring in about the difference between what the DOD and the Pentagon were interested in in terms of video games as opposed to how Alex is presenting it.
He's presenting it as they paid all this money in order for these games to get created so everyone would play them and it'd be shoot them up and then they'd all be ready to kill.
But I also think that, you know, in terms of if you're going to train people anyway, doing it that way, paying for so many video games I've gotten such enjoyment out of probably only existed because of technology that there was underlying funding from the government in order to create.
Anyway, no matter how many times Alex has seen The Last Starfighter, which you mentioned earlier, this is just not how it works.
There's no intrinsic training that you get from playing a first-person shooter that you wouldn't get from playing like Tetris in terms of decision-making.
All of those snap decisions and stuff like that that are created by a first-person shooter game where someone's coming at you, you got to shoot them.
It's the exact same thing as you got to flip that block.
It's the same part of your brain in terms of that stuff.
You don't experience a desensitization about death from video games unless you were probably already on that path to begin with for any number of possible reasons.
That is not about the video game.
It's about the person who's experiencing the game.
And if you are a libertarian, that should be a big consideration for you.
The more important aspect of the military and video games is that they found that they're way more effective as a recruiting tool than as a training instrument.
And that's their largest interest these days, at least.
Games like The Call of Duty, all of those games, are essentially propaganda to a certain extent.
And they were way worse a decade or two ago.
Some of the games that were coming out were overt army propaganda games.
Anyway, another thing that Alex doesn't consider is that the investment that the military has put into the development of these technologies has other applications as well.
For instance, doctors are able to use simulations in controlled therapeutic environments to help returning soldiers who are experiencing PTSD.
It's obviously not a perfect treatment at this point, but it's shown a lot of promise in terms of helping soldiers deal with traumatic events and manage negative emotions.
So there is that payoff that comes from the investment that they have in the technology also.
So all of this is to say that Alex is fucking stupid.
He is dealing with this on a one-dimensional scale as opposed to thinking about like, huh, what were they doing?
Why?
It is weird that a lot of video game history has the government funding behind it.
But if you just scratch beneath the surface a tiny bit, it doesn't.
It's not nefarious.
It's nefarious if you think that the military just wants to kill people in other countries.
And that argument, I'll hear.
I'll hear that argument.
But in terms of like trying to train the culture in order to be dumb-dumb serial killers who will go around and shoot people, that's fucking stupid.
That is on the level of the satanic panic argument.
But it is strange for video game technology to be both a therapeutic element and at the same time the element that people use to desensitize people to violence.
It's not an invalidating argument because but I also don't think that the way that the military uses the technology and the simulations that they create, I don't think it's to desensitize people to violence.
His argument is: I think that this guy was set up by the globalists, and I'm going to find the thinnest straws to pull at in order to make that argument.
One of them is video games, and I have a built-in narrative.
I just don't think it's come up any time that we've been covering him.
I think this is probably a narrative of his that's probably existed since Columbine.
For sure.
Probably his entire career in terms of like the Department of Defense created video games in order to sensitize people to violence and blah, blah, blah.
I think that's probably a major narrative he doesn't pull out very often because it's not often all that applicable.
Yeah, what if somebody just gave him Sim City early enough where he was like, well, I'll take all these conspiracy theories and create my own world and oh my god, this happens naturally.
I think we got a new wrinkle of his narratives that is sort of more elusive, that was driven out of its little hole, little hidey hole by this school shooting.
That's good.
That's worth something.
Anyway, we have one more clip, and Alex gets a call, and this caller says that it's fake, that the shooting was fake.
You know, what would drive the son whose father was the vice president and tax director of General Electric Energy Financial Services, the Connecticut shooter, his dad was the VP?
That is the worst fucking response possible because that caller is expressing things that are a big part of the Sandy Hooker's fake world, and I assume Alex is probably going to run with in the future.
And his response is to cut him off and be like, I don't want to go there, but also I smell something when it's rotten.
So it's like, I don't want to go there, but I'll still insinuate.
In terms of what we're looking at in Sandy Hook's stuff, he's very clearly signaling what he wants to do and where he's at, but he hasn't said the things we need yet.
This is the Alex Jones that they want to present, that his lawyers want to present in court when we know that the Alex Jones that's real is the one from 2015 saying it's fake.
And the other thing that I need to bring into really sharp focus is because I got some feedback from the last episode about like you need to talk to Sandy Hook lawyers about this and stuff like that.
I've gotten a couple emails about that.
And one of the reasons that, first of all, I will never do that is because why?
Second, they know this.
And then, third, everything that we're talking about is outside of the statute of limitations.
Even him in 2015 saying it was synthetic completely.
There were actors.
I thought there were kids who died there, but it turns out there weren't.
All that shit.
That is still outside the statute of limitations for defamation in the jurisdictions he's being sued in.
So there isn't a real productive reason to bring this to the conversation.
But I didn't have to dig too far to find these things.
It's like it's available.
And I believe that anybody doing their due diligence, if they're suing Alex Jones about what he said about Sandy Hook, they know what the fuck he said at this time.
They know it's not legally actionable, but it's important for their case so they would know these things.
To be aware of it.
So I don't have any real interest in that angle of this.
This is entirely human and intellectual based.
Just understanding what he was doing, how his brain works, how does a person fall into that deep of a hole?
How do you go from this point where it's clear that he recognizes that people died to whatever version of the conspiracy he lands on first?