Knowledge Fight dissects Alex Jones’ December 19, 2012, broadcast, where he weaponized Sandy Hook’s tragedy—claiming a staged shooting via misquoted police reports and later insinuating parents faked grief—while promoting extremist gun culture through figures like Stuart Rhodes (Oath Keepers) and Ted Nugent’s racist history. Jones falsely ties show cancellations to political persecution, mocks veterans’ families, and pivots from conspiracy theories to divisive harassment tactics, all to sustain his anti-regulation agenda. His rapid, baseless shifts reveal a calculated strategy to undermine trust, not spontaneous outrage, leaving hosts disgusted by the exploitation of real victims for ideological gain. [Automatically generated summary]
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And it's one of the reasons that I find that, like, dealing with the present-day stuff, at least this last week, especially, incredibly difficult to figure out an angle on.
Yeah.
Because, quite frankly, I don't know what's going on with that story.
Because I was wrestling with trying to figure out a way to still do an episode about it, but leave room for whatever the actual reporting on this is is yet to come.
Right.
So I was like, you know, I can go over tons of hate crime statistics and stuff like that.
And we have done that in the past.
I'm like, well, that would just be a rehashing of stuff.
I was thinking about like, oh, well, why don't I do a breakdown of the 2017 Department of Justice report about the Chicago Police Department?
It's one of the times where it's like, I'm so grateful we don't do a new show because every part of this story, you see how shitty all of the media and everything really is.
Also, it leads me to think that perhaps his staff lacks creativity.
Because if the sickest things that they can think of are things that they can prove with a Google search that the government is doing, they aren't very creative.
So I recognized as I was editing the last episode that it really hurt us emotionally, I think, or at least me, that I started with 10 minutes of that Gladio breakdown.
help soften it up so in this second clip jordan uh we find out that alex jones we've speculated that alex needed cover in order to make uh audacious claims about sandy hook yeah He needed some sort of cover, and we've theorized that maybe it is those weirdos like Wolfgang Halbeg or something like that.
I think in this next clip, Alex has found his cover, but it's not some sort of external thing.
It's an underling that he's going to throw under the bus.
I don't know if he does, but he probably should if he's smart.
And by the way, Rob Dew did a report last night with news clips, with eyewitnesses.
These aren't rumors.
Saying, oh, I saw the guy in the camo in the bag, and he said, I'm not the one, and the cops took him away, and they won't say who he is.
And yeah, it looks like the guy that was in the school with the other person.
Folks, they did this.
What you do.
And remember all the over 100 FBI deals, even mainstream media admitted, where they would go find mentally ill people and give them a bomb, train them, take them to bomb the Christmas tree in Portland or whatever.
And then it came out they were setting up mentally ill people.
And this guy was now under psychiatric daily visits.
All it took was him producing a special report that Alex could point to as proof that things don't add up.
The conspiracy angle that they decided to take is the idea of the second shooter, specifically the guy who's seen being arrested in the woods in Camo, as Alex is describing.
As it turns out, the police detained a number of people in the woods on December 14th.
It kind of makes some sense.
If you look at the area around the school, while it would be unfair to say that Sandy Hook Elementary is surrounded by woods, it wouldn't be too far off.
Most of the school's north to west side was woods, as well as the east-southeast side, with only one paved driveway leading to the school.
With that road obviously blocked off, the woods became a preferable way to reach the school for people who had reason to want to be there.
That was the case for two reporters who were trying to get better coverage than they were being allowed to at that point.
The police confronted them, guns drawn, questioned them, and released them.
This isn't the case Alex is thinking of.
I just bring it up to highlight that there was a lot going on that day.
What Alex is doing here is he's relying on the unreliability of first-hand accounts of crises in order to create the narrative that he wants to deliver.
In this case, he's combining two people into one story and possibly even three.
It's even possible that he's not doing that intentionally.
It's just ultimately how reporting goes when you go too hard too early when you don't have any of the facts.
One of the things Alex is probably operating off is early reports about Chris Banfredonia.
Chris was a parent who was on the way to the school to make gingerbread houses with the first grade class when he heard popping noises.
This man being described by this first-hand witness.
He didn't come out of the woods and was being interviewed by police who determined him to be an idiot who was in the wrong place.
He saw flashing lights, got really curious, and decided to check out what was going on, but had nothing to do with the shooting, which was long over by the time he was detained.
poor dumb bastard yeah that would suck so hard to have to oh my god to walk by parents grieving children's in handcuffs them looking at you thinking it's literally the worst oh my god curiosity could bring you to Oh, Christ.
And if this was high school, if like if this was in our time in the late 90s when we would have been in high school, there would have been high school kids walking in the woods looking for thrown away porn bags.
So the police interviewed him, searched him, and his car, and since he wasn't involved in the horrific crime that had just occurred, they decided not to release his name, which I think is a really good call.
So, yeah, it gave the appearance of a chase, but it was not.
Ultimately, there wasn't anything to any of this.
The supposed second shooters and people in the woods ideas are all easily explained once the information starts to trickle in.
And this really highlights one of the main problems with what Alex Jones does.
He constructs narratives out of the suspicions that are only reasonable because of the absence of information available.
I could have a conversation with him now about the second shooter idea and how it's stupid, but if I were in studio on December 19th, 2012, if he asked me who was that guy, I could only respond with, I don't know, we'll see.
You remember the old Patrice O'Neill bit where he's like, I never litter because I don't want the chance of like I toss a receipt into the into the bushes and then there's a dead body and now I'm suspect number one.
So now to Alex's other idea about the FBI setting people up and that shit.
So while it is true, and I'm not going to argue that the FBI doesn't have a real dicey history in terms of setting people up for stuff, I find it absolutely hilarious that the only example Alex can come up with is this Christmas tree bombing.
That is a story of the FBI post-9-11 all too often.
Well, a lot of the times, and not a lot of the time, but a practice that has been covered and talked about is that the FBI would find potential terrorists, and in order to justify their expanded budget, they would essentially teach the terrorist how to make a bomb and then ask him to do the terrorism and then arrest him after he was caught.
There are plenty of examples of that, and that is true.
And this event actually set off an interesting debate about whether or not the FBI had entrapped Mahmoud, seeing as agents had been in contact with him for months after he came up on their radar.
He was on said radar because he wrote for a publication called Jihad Recollections and was in contact with a man in Pakistan who was known to the FBI as being a terrorist recruiter.
So they knew that entrapment would be a good defense for Mahmoud.
And since things, should things ever reach that point, the undercover agents were overly cautious and tried to talk him out of the attack.
From an article in Washington Monthly, quote, aware of entrapment legal defenses, undercover agents offered Mahmoud multiple alternatives to mass murder, including mere prayer.
But he insisted he wanted to play a quote operational role and even picked his target.
Told he'd likely kill a lot of children, Mahmoud said, Yeah, I mean, that's what I'm looking for.
Though I don't know how I feel about how embedded with him the agents were, this is not a good example of the FBI inventing terrorists out of whole cloth.
Mahmoud had made his intentions to commit a violent mass casualty event totally clear, independent of and prior to the FBI getting involved.
There are better examples Alex could have chosen, for sure.
But most of the examples he would be able to come up with are minorities or left-leaning groups who have been selectively targeted by law enforcement.
The story he wants to tell is one of right-wing oppression at the hands of a federal government who's labeled them all the terrorists.
But reality doesn't match up with that.
In a 2012 article in Rolling Stone by Rick Perlstein, he lays it out really well.
The goal of these FBI entrapments and pseudo-entrapments is one of storytelling.
Because they're involved on some level, the FBI can control how the bus goes down, at what point the plot is disrupted, whether there's media attention or not, etc.
They can essentially use the investigation to help them tell the story they want the public to hear to get them to focus where they want them to focus.
That's why, from the 60s until the present day, these stings are almost exclusively used against left-leaning groups like Occupy and the anti-war movement, with Muslims being a very common target in the past 20 years or so.
But it's never the right-wing groups they do this to.
Right-wing terror plots are generally found out after the case, after something goes wrong on their own, or they carry out the plot, or someone from the group defects, something like that.
They flip and tell the law enforcement about it.
There are so many examples of white nationalist, white supremacist groups from the last 30 years or so, and none of them had to do with the FBI prodding them to carry out whatever attack they were.
And that's something I'm starting to think about is like, I think the debates might be real, but I don't think they're the way he wants to present them.
I'm starting to suspect that the debates were people like Alex was saying the government killed all these kids and then other people saying they're all fake.
But, you know, the reason that he has to do these things and he has to keep diving in is because he's in pain when he sees what's going on in the world.
And it is so painful to see the fact that our country has gotten to this point and is in the grip of hardcore mafia that is dangling 20 dead, sad little children and their families and the sadness they're going through in our face to terrorize us and say, you're not a good person if you don't turn your guns in.
You're not a good person if you don't go along with all of this.
You are a bad person if you don't submit to all of this tyranny.
20 families, way more than that, were irrevocably changed.
Yeah.
So many people's lives were completely destroyed.
And you're like, they're dangling these dead kids in front of us to terrorize us when I haven't read any of the fucking articles I even talk about about the perceived tyranny that's coming.
So Alex is using statistics out of context to argue that the UK made restrictions to gun ownership, and then violent offense numbers jump dramatically.
If you just look at the raw numbers, you can make that argument.
But in order to do so, you have to ignore literally all of the context surrounding those numbers and numerous investigations and publications put out by Parliament.
In 1997, the UK passed the Firearms Amendment Act of 1997.
Prior to this, there were regulations in place about registration and whatnot, but this act effectively banned private ownership of handguns.
This act was passed in part as a response to the Dunblaine school massacre, where a man entered a school, shot 16 students between the ages of five and six, shot a teacher, and then killed himself.
This is referred to as the UK's first and only school shooting, possibly because they took action.
So that's some of the backdrop for why the Firearms Act was considered, but it doesn't provide the necessary context to understand and explain why Alex is lying about crime rates.
And if he were a serious person at all, he would have every reason to know what I'm about to tell you.
In 1998, Parliament pushed through changes in how police departments were to count crime statistics.
Prior to this, there was no real standardization between departments, so you ran into issues where an identical crime could be classified completely differently depending on what department investigated it.
This obviously led to completely unreliable information and an unclear portrait of what crime in the UK actually looked like.
So it's a little bit like the difference between crime reporting in Chicago and crime reporting in Joe Arpaio's neck of the woods, where crime reporting in Chicago would include rape, and in Joe Arpaio's world, they're like, that doesn't even really happen.
And there was nothing in place that would be encouraging them to standardize or anything like that.
So they made new counting rules and introduced the National Crime Recording Standard, which led to a large jump in crime stats, including a 118% jump in violent crime alone.
Part of this was because departments were now required to include indictable and possibly indictable crimes in their statistics.
And they also changed their reporting to reflect one crime report for each crime or victim as opposed to one crime per criminal.
That is to say, if I went out and stabbed three people, that would be counted as three crimes now, whereas before it would have just been one.
Then in April 2008, the Home Office made another change to the way they counted offenses that would lead to a large jump in statistics of serious violent crimes.
They began to include, quote, gross bodily harm with intent as a serious violent crime, whereas previously it would not have been.
This boils down to situations where the assailant intends to do gross bodily harm but fails to do so.
That would not have been considered an instance of gross bodily harm assault previously and now was.
This change came as the result of a 2006-2007 assessment by a cross-party review board that determined that the definition of violence was not defined clearly enough.
And to get a better picture of crime as it exists, it would be wise to include attempted violence and credible threats of violence as counting as serious crimes.
This alone led to a massive spike in reports of serious violent crimes, with no actual additional crimes being committed.
Statisticians have analyzed the data, and their assessment is largely that crime is fairly close to flat or even down, but that there's an outward appearance that has been on the rise since 1998 because of these changes to how crimes are reported and counted.
Unfortunately, 1998 is right after the UK essentially banned handguns.
So all the optics are in place for Alex to take these statistics totally out of context and present the image that they banned guns, then boom, violent crime went through the roof.
Either Alex doesn't know this explanatory context, in which case he's an idiot and doesn't understand the issues he covers, or he does know about this and he's intentionally lying about it, and neither are good.
I mean, it's impossible to know for sure, but yeah, I err on the side of he doesn't know just based on the fact that I think he's more stupid and reactionary than he is conniving.
I've got to be nice to my wife and kids, too, because my son was up here yesterday, and he'd come over and pat me on the shoulder, and I'd be like, hold on.
So this next clip, I mean, we don't really have much to go on from that last one other than Alex just being weird.
But he gets back to Piers Morgan.
And, you know, this is great because this is sort of a prelude to when Alex actually goes on Piers Morgan's show and does that great publicity stunt that he does.
While Piers Morgan is calling Larry Pratt a liar on Communist International Network last night while a foreigner, nothing is foreigners, but I mean, don't come to my country and tell me to give up my rights, especially when I had a war with your king over this 200-something years ago, punk.
While he's talking, I'm going to be showing statistics where their crime rate exploded in England, highest in Europe after they took the guns, and how our crime rate is dropping.
Guns are saving this country, and they are taking each little crime and making it huge on the news to give you the perception.
Just like Jaws made people think there were great whites eating everybody.
Yeah, in terms of the argument that he's putting forth, I will say I agree with the premise that Jaws did cause a lot of people to be afraid of sharks unnecessarily.
And Alex, at another point in this episode, he revisits this theme, and he's talking about how, like, after Jaws, a bunch of beaches almost went bankrupt.
Calling all patriots, calling anyone who's awake and under globalist mind control.
They're stealing the pension funds, imploding the dollar, getting rid of the borders, bringing in world government, total NSA spying, 1.6 million bullets, armored vehicles and treaded tanks being cashed and delivered into all major municipalities in preparation for total war against the American people, total federalization of police.
They're trying to fire all the good cops and have nothing but insane people that will give your wife cavity searches without warrants on the side of the road with no probable cause, just randomly.
So no gun programs on there to speak of, unless you count something like NCIS as a gun show, which I don't think you would.
So if you check in with Nielsen, they have the ratings for network and cable programming combined.
And the top 10 most watched programs of 2012 were all number one through eight being NFL football.
Number nine was the Summer Olympics opening ceremony, and number 10 was the Grammys.
Their top 10 ratings for regularly scheduled program was three entries for the NFL, two entries for American Idol, two entries for Dancing with the Stars, then NCIS, The Voice, and the show Vegas.
They have a top 10 of programs that were recorded to watch later, like on DVRs.
And what do you know?
Zero gun programs.
Just Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Justified, Fringe, Sons of Anarchy, American Horror Story, and of course, Suits.
So also, this Entertainment Weekly article provides breakdowns for all these different demographics, like adults 18 to 49 and adults 25 to 54, and none of them contain any gun shows.
I literally have no idea what Alex is talking about.
I can't make sense of it.
It does not track with any of the actual statistic keeping places.
So at this point, Alex brings back in another guest he's already had in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, and that is Stuart Rhodes, the guy who started The Oath Keepers.
He's having these really extreme gun dudes on very regularly.
It's almost like, you know, I don't know how to describe it, but you remember when Jimmy Kimmel Live first started, and he'd have a guest co-host that would be there for a week?
Yeah, that makes sense, though, because in this time, especially, even if he's not doing his own bookings, which he probably has a hand in, but even if he's not doing them solely, naturally he would want to surround himself with the most psychopathic gun people that he can in order to insulate himself from any kind of empathy that he might feel.
The same way that he's putting that shit out in order to make his listeners afraid and distract them from the tragedy of the situation, he also needs to be distracted.
That's like Trench Cox, the founding father, said.
He said, The Congress has no power to disarm the militia, their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier are the birdfly of an American.
Funnily enough, after the country was founded, Cox declared himself a Whig, but then within five years decided he was actually a Federalist, which then helped him secure a position as the revenue commissioner in the Washington administration.
Then, a few years later, he decided he wasn't really a Federalist, but was actually a Democratic-Republican.
Curiously, around the same time that someone from that party, Thomas Jefferson, was president, who then made him purveyor of public supplies.
Because he changed parties so frequently and so opportunistically during the first few years of the country's existence, many began leveling accusations that he was actually a British spy and a Tory.
I'm not sure about those accusations, but I do know that his critics would refer to him often as Mr. Facing Both Ways, which is.
As far as nicknames go, I think that is a better nickname than Mr. Worldwide, which, of course, is Pitbull, but not as good a nickname as Mr. Steel Your Girl.
He was widely credited with pushing for cotton to be the main crop grown in the American South.
It's worth mentioning that he was opposed to slavery, as he wrote in a letter from 1808 to his wife Trunch Dix.
Quote, were the slave trade right, safe, and constitutional, a single year would give us the cotton business, which they do now, referring to other countries.
But as labor is and is likely to be in America, we shall make a progress a little slower, but not less certain in transferring to our hands much of this business of raising those supplies.
Though philosophically opposed to slavery, Cox's actions in rallying for and lobbying towards a southern economy largely based on cotton ended up being one of the greatest drivers towards the rationalization of and acceptance of slavery in America.
From PBS, quote, within 10 years of the cotton gin being put into use, the value of the total United States crop leaped from $150,000 to more than $8 million.
This success of this plantation crop made it much more difficult for slaves to purchase their freedom or obtain it through the goodwill of their masters.
From 1790 to 1810, close to 100,000 slaves moved to the new cotton lands in the south and west.
From 1810 until the Civil War, 100,000 slaves were forced westward each decade, half a million in total.
As cotton cultivation spread, slaveholders in the tobacco belt, whose crop was no longer profitable, made huge profits by selling their slaves.
This domestic slave trade devastated black families.
American-born slaves were torn from the plantations they had known all their lives, placed in shackles, and forced marched hundreds of miles away from their loved ones.
The enslaved populations in cotton-producing states saw increases of 27.5% per decade in the early 1800s, and it can all be traced back to the exact problem that Tench Cox was clearly aware of in his 1808 letter, namely that if we do this reasonably, it'll take a while.
If we had slavery, we could take over this market in a year.
So speaking of that 1808 letter I was telling you about a little bit from, Cox has an interesting rationale for what benefits there were to getting into the cotton market.
Quote, the Southern militia, as it is conceived, would acquire the spirit of a core if the state governments were to make a blue cotton cloth with white or yellow cotton under the clothes this spring, summer, and autumn for peace uniforms.
It would certainly take at this moment, if introduced under impressive auspices, and would have effects equally important in the good of the militia, natural manufacturers, and this great and novel cultivation.
Though opposed to slavery, Tench Cox is at least partially directly responsible for creating the market where slavery exploded and got way, way worse.
And his reasons for that, he could make a lot of money, and that the Southern militia could get cool uniforms.
This type of shit happens every time some gun show or some bullshit conservative leaning thing gets canceled.
All the Alex Jones types take the cancellation that was due to some network decision-making that ends up getting the same sort of thing that gets any other show canceled.
And they repurpose it as proof of a war on conservatives in the media.
It's so goddamn lame, but I realize that maybe I should have co-opted that argument to see if I could have got that disappointing futuristic show that had dinosaurs in it.
It was called Revolution.
See if I could have got it a second season.
Maybe they could have figured it out and writed the ship.
So immediately after he loses this gig at the Idaho Casino, two more of his shows at Tacoma, Washington's Emerald Queen Casino were canceled, ostensibly for similar reasons.
Also, in 2012, Ted Nugent was kicked off a concert at Fort Knox, being put on by the goddamn Army, where he was scheduled to open for REO Speedwagon and Styx.
This was in the lead up to the 2012 election back in April of that year.
So the Army wasn't thrilled with the recent comments Ted Nugent had made in a video posted on the NRA's official YouTube page.
Quote: If Barack Obama becomes the president in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.
If you can't go home and get everybody in your lives to clean the house of this vile, evil American-hating administration, I don't even know what you're made of.
Considering he'd also previously called Obama a, quote, subhuman mongrel, there's a decent chance that this one should have also been canceled for racism.
Also, just because it's fun, the day before Ted Nugent was kicked off this Fort Knox concert, he'd come to a plea agreement on charges he was facing for illegally killing a black bear in Alaska and transporting it across state lines.
Strangely enough, he'd killed that bear for an episode of his show Spirit of the Wild that aired on the Outdoor Channel, which should give any network second thoughts about having him on your network, even leaving aside all the stuff about how he clearly likes underage girls and he's a flaming racist.
It turns out he also, beyond all the just humanity disrespecting things about him, he also doesn't respect nature and responsible hunting the way he pretends to.
It's almost like that's all just a character these people wear to be able to go kill things.
It's kind of like that's what they're really into.
Also, in a moment of delicious irony, in July 2018, Ted Nugent himself banned guns at his concert at the Berglund Center in Virginia.
The venue is city-owned, so management cannot deny open carry permits of citizens unless it's specifically requested by the performer.
The manager of the club, Robin Cion, said that the request came from Nugent's team.
Quote, given the things that have happened at nightclubs like Pulse and what happened at Manchester, Nugent's security people are taking extra precautions.
When the subject of guns came up, Nugent's people said, oh, no, our agreement says no.
During the show, which was far from sold out, Nugent used his stage pattern to talk about how great he is, which isn't a surprise.
He also used the time to specifically insult a man named Andy Parker.
Parker's daughter and co-worker were murdered at Bridgewater Plaza by a disgruntled former co-worker who shot them.
So Parker decided to buy a billboard calling Nugent a draft-dodging racist has-been.
Yeah, he doesn't strike a good tone there with the whole, hey, hey, look at this idiot still grieving the death of his family or whatever it is like that.
I said a prayer for him and then worked my ass off to make sure that this will continue to happen.
The issue is that the reason that Nugent would be mad at this guy is because he's bringing up the idea that he's associated with the NRA and these people make gun registration, gun regulation impossible.
And then it is so funny that at this concert where he's screaming about this guy, his team had said no guns in the venue.
When you find something like that, that's what really sets me off.
Like, to an extent that I usually don't get too worked up.
But that sort of thing.
Someone like motherfucking Ted Nugent, one of the worst pieces of shit in the world, between his clear love of underage women, his violent threats towards public officials, his overt racism, his clear inability to live by his own principles as it relates to preservation of wilderness and nature, which is supposed to be his big thing.
And why he loves guns and crossbows so much is because it's like, oh, I respect nature and help it with the balance and all that shit.
All that stuff's hypocrisy.
And then you have an instance like this where it's like, I fear for my own safety.
Exactly what you said.
And so I say no guns at the venue where I'm at.
That's not even a principle for you.
You stupid asshole.
Make it so everyone else gets hurt, and then you wield what power you have to try and insulate yourself from your own fans.
Somehow, the end result of our years, like when we end this podcast, our years-long discussion of Alex Jones will really be boiled down to fuck Ted Nugent.
I think it'd be more fun if Lindsey Buckingham just went on on stage and was like, hey, this next song is going to be another one of our hits, but also, let's kill the president.
Donald Fagan just loses it in the middle of a peg and starts screaming about assassination.
Could be.
So I think there's one thing that's really confusing me, and I think it's partially because he has all of these same guests on all the time, is that I don't know where a lot of our players are.
You know, like a lot of the people that we know from Alex's world, where are they?
Going back to Stuart Stewart, it says, my personal pledge of resistance against any attempt to disarm us by means of an assault weapons man, give us your pledge here on air.
And I hope that others speak out with their pledge because we are the majority of people that know how to tie their shoelaces.
You know, the welfare heads and stuff don't count.
We are the power in this country, but we better exercise it now.
Well, yeah, and what's happening now is you're finding out who the actual, you know, who the mealy-mouthed fake conservatives and fake constitutionalists really are.
All these big outlets that are taking guns off the shelf, all these conservatives, so-called conservatives who are now willing to put guns on the table and talk about a busalamous ban.
These are people who never understood the right to bear arms, never understood the Constitution, never understood liberty in the first place.
And so this is going to be a dividing issue among the political right in this country.
He also even goes so far as to say it's a career-changing moment for politicians and for people.
Like what he's describing there is like, this is an opportunity for us to radicalize people and make sure that our ship is free of people who have resisted that radicalization.
Because I think that you've made this point in the past episodes that we've had about Sandy Hook.
Once you get past that point, no matter how decently or reasonably you present yourself, you're past that point.
And so people who stuck around with even if it is just sort of the conventional GOP line of resisting any gun legislation at all, any regulation, you're past that point.
So I think that it's interesting that you can see the awareness there.
I think that that's interesting that they, like from a couple days after Sandy Hook, there's even an awareness that what they're doing is getting any moderation out of this thing.
In order to push the Overton window so far that what we would consider a moderate radical like or just a moderate GOP Republican like Marco Rubio is actually now an incredibly radical politician, but the Overton window has just moved so far right that you're like, well, that must be moderate because he's not openly saying kill the president.
Well, and I think there's an awareness among people like Stuart and Alex that if everybody was exactly what they wanted, the world and governing would be unmanageable.
If everybody was goddamn Louis Gomert and Steve King, like these Tea Party politicians that they pushed for.
So he needs those people in order to keep the ball moving or whatever.
And then he needs the Louis Gohmerts of the world to be like, this is what we need.
We need more of this.
With the full recognition that, no, what you need is a goddamn Mitch McConnell who's exactly what you hate.
It's insane.
You need to radicalize, but you need to bring the people who know how to do the work along with you and keep them somehow cloistered from the outright association with denying Sandy Hook, being a Nazi, those sorts of things.
Because if all of your people who know how to get anything done are like you, then it becomes too clear what your party is about.
It's a way for they, and it's so important for the moderates, like not moderates, for the fucking evil, conniving pieces of shit like Mitch McConnell and Marco Rubio to have these assholes around in the same way that it's important for our assholes to have those assholes around.
Because the moderate guys can paint themselves as moderate while at the same time being the most fucking radical douchebag conservatives that you can be.
Because you can always point to Steve King and say, I'm not him.
And that's what Alex's entire career is based on: being that guy, being the Steve King of radio or whatever, for like Rush and Hannity to be like, I'm not fucking Alex Jones over here.
So I'm not racist personally, but I am going to vote for every possible candidate that I can find who will promote racist policies, even if they're not saying the quiet part loud, because they're not Stephen King, who is the one who's, or Steve King, who is the one saying the quiet part loud.
It's fucking disgusting how well they do their job and how shittily people, God, oh, this is why we lose, Dan.
So in that clip, I thought that was very interesting.
You know, you see that, those sort of dynamics in play, and what appears to be at least on some level an awareness of that being what they're doing.
But in this next clip, Alex takes this independence pledge or whatever that Stuart Rhodes is doing, which again, 100% is just, we're not going to take your guns, which is the Oath Keeper's initial pledge to begin with.
And he's just saying also, in addition to that, if you vote to take away our guns, we will vote you out of office, which again is sort of implied by their entire existence.
I want to say here on air, I think I'm going to make a video about this that I pledge to never turn in my lawful illegal firearms, that this is all a hoax.
And I pledge to expose the illegitimate occupational government we have that openly is becoming a dictatorship.
And I pledge my name, my treasure, my honor, my family to it.
You know, I've pledged to call for secession to reconstitute the republic, and that got a lot of national attention because I knew this was coming.
I mean, he's not saying that, but he's kind of saying that he's kind of saying that.
So, when it comes to that radicalization question, though, the idea of trying to use this to get rid of the milquetoast people and what have you, that, you know, makes sense.
Kind of makes sense why you would do that in their world.
But in this next clip, it becomes very scary because Stuart Rhodes starts talking about these specific people he wants to be on his radicalized team.
But as a person, you're morally obligated to do those things, especially when you have as huge a platform as Alex, because to do otherwise is to do harm to people.
But they really don't understand what a double-edged sword is, do they?
Because if your angle is what we need to do is radicalize the military with right-wing pro-gun propaganda in order to make sure that if something does go down, we have the military on our side who will then presumably go to the liberal cucks' homes and take their whatever they're doing.
And it's like you realize when you make that a norm, then that is okay to be used against you.
Like when McConnell is like, let's get rid of the filibuster for blah, da, all that stuff.
Okay.
You realize, though, that later on that can be done to you.
You're fucking up by doing this because by and large, as history has progressed, progression has happened.
So no matter how much you want to try and break the system to fuck up that progression, all that that's really doing is ensuring your own fucking downfall later on as the pendulum swings.
So like we, like you talked about the last time we talked about the pendulum, if you really slam it as hard as you can, maybe it doesn't swing back.
It's obvious if you start looking at, and especially, it's probably the gift of having time, you know, being in 2019 and looking back at this stuff and recognizing how quickly Alex flipped on so many of his long-held positions once he knew he was safe from whatever tyranny may be encroaching.
So, yeah, I mean, there is that, but like behind all of it, the flimsiness of the narratives, the way that time has shown that his anger towards tyranny and authoritarianism doesn't mean anything, it makes you start to realize that all of this stuff is just like, we have to make sure they don't do it.
I'm not saying that it's bad to cite V for Vendetta or anything like that.
You can make whatever movie reference you want.
But I just start to realize that Alex has no literary references.
He claims he's read all these books and he has such a dearth of knowledge about these sorts of things.
And every single time he brings up a philosophical concept or some sort of an idea as opposed to citing a book, citing a philosopher, anything like that.
If you're good at distilling information down to like an accessible chunk, which I think Alex is to a certain extent, he makes complicated subjects very easy to understand.
And he gets this call from a guy who's frustrated by the idea of, like, I call the senator's office and I leave him a message about, you know, like, this is bullshit.
But at the same time, a lot of the times that he was complaining about stuff in the Trump era was when, I don't know, some people went and bullhorned Tucker Carlson's house.
That sort of thing I think is okay, but the idea of like following someone around or something like that, it's just that to me is like, that's pretty gross.
So in this next clip, Alex is reading an article about gun grabbers.
It's not important.
It has nothing to do with anything real.
But Alex says he has a Freudian slip in this clip, a Freudian clip, that he says something that is so fucking accurate, and he doesn't even realize it.
So in this episode, we've seen a lot of like just sort of standard Alex Jones.
There's a lot of it that we're not listening to necessarily.
I was listening to him like, this could have been 2009.
Like, it's pretty, like, there's a lot of standard operating Alex Jones, which is interesting because the other days haven't really been as, like, regular.
And so now to see him kind of be in a place where he's comfortable enough now, because Rob Dew's made that special report.
And he does just his gun defense narratives, and that seems to be much more comfortable territory for him.
At the same time, that solidifying of the government did this.
They did it.
This is the government doing it in order to then launch the op to take our guns and stuff.
That is bad.
In the beginning of the episode, Alex, or not, the beginning was towards the middle.
Alex gets a call from a guy who's like, did you read the article in Veterans Today about how Sandy Hook was retribution on behalf of Israel for something or other?
And Alex shoots him down.
Alex, like, this is a guy suggesting a conspiracy that Israel did Sandy Hook.
We're not at like a towers don't fall like that unless there's charged explosives at the right exact point, and we can prove that this is how they fell and all that shit.
We're finding more and more videos of parents of the children laughing and giggling and looking excited and then saying off camera, do I read off the card?
And then walking up and breaking down on camera on TV.
We need to have private investigators look into Sandy Hook.
Okay.
Hitler blew up his own Capitol building to bring in martial law.
Europe, Australia, New Zealand banned most guns after staging mass shootings.
This is the day after he took that call from the guy who knew Victoria Soto, the teacher who died.
And Alex had put up a picture of her.
He's reporting on air, talking about this video of the father, I believe his name's Robbie Parker, who was laughing nervously before giving a press speech.
And we've talked about this in times past.
The idea of how people grieve and how you respond to nervous situations is it's ridiculous to make a claim like he was laughing before that interview.
That means he's faking this.
Most people don't have to give press conferences ever.
Most people aren't good at public speaking.
You and I both have years of experience doing stand-up.
And so our response would be very different than Johnny come lately off the street or whatever.
If we were pulled in front of a camera, we wouldn't have as much.
And now you just consider this as a person who didn't expect any of this to be in his life mere days prior.
The only reason you would ever cover this story or bring it up with any suspicion is if you're intending to introduce the idea that his kid didn't die and he is an actor.
That is the only fucking reason to do this.
There is no reason to cast suspicion on the family if you believe that people died there.
And I need to make this very strongly at this point.
This doesn't match with the narrative that he's been building for the previous days.
This doesn't match with anything that Larry Pratt, Rhodes, Stuart Rhodes, that weirdo who loves guns, his friend, Matt Williams, the senator or the congressman who was on the other day, any of his guests.
None of these people have suggested in any way that this stuff is fake.
Alex is doing this on his own.
He's bringing up this story of the idea that this father is laughing and reading off cue cards on his own.
Like, why would you want to investigate this if your suspicion wasn't that they were lying and were fake?
Because the only end result, if you think it's real or are presenting the public-facing appearance that you believe it's real, so we get into that mess a whole bunch.
How else would we have a gun culture so entrenched in this fucking country that after a mass after a tragedy that can't even that I still can't even really fucking comprehend?
How is it possible that no action was taken after that?
Especially considering we know that in the UK, one mass shooting happened.
No, no, no, no.
One school shooting.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
One school shooting happened and they went fucking, hey, this gotta stop.
The only way it makes sense for our culture to have No legislative reaction to this is if people like Alex can turn that corner in such a short period of time to unify their message of nothing can be fucking done ever.
Nothing can be done about this.
Because if it took him three weeks, maybe people would have finally gotten the goddamn picture in three weeks.
But if it takes you a day or two to say that it's all fake.
That the propagandists' weapon and their advantage over decent people is weaponizing the unknown.
Like the idea of we don't know all the facts.
I mean, you can get all if you're a decent person, you can watch that video of this father and not come away with it with any confusion or suspicion or anything like that.
But a lot of these other things, the anomalies that he's already starting to bring up of his own accord, things like the second shooter ideas and stuff like that, he weaponizes the idea that we don't all have the reporting on it.
We don't have the information.
And it just bums me out to such an extent that I can't prove this, but I don't understand how this isn't a financial motive for him.
Like, I don't understand someone doing this who isn't getting paid a lot.
Like, I don't, I know that I can't back that up, and I don't like to speculate about stuff, but, like, there's only two ways that this makes sense.
One is that his show makes him so much fucking money.
And he's not even selling the supplements at this point.
He's just selling his magazine.
I mean, I have copies of it thanks to Keegan.
Got us some of those copies, and they're terrible.
I don't know who would be buying those.
I can't imagine them being super expensive either.
And then subscriptions to his website.
I could see some revenue flow from that, but the amount of money that it would require to make someone behave like this so quick, it just screams to me that someone's got to be in his ear, even back then.
I don't disagree that there's a high incidence of that in those sorts of fields.
But to me, this I just don't understand it.
Even if you're a sociopath.
Because you don't.
Like what I keep saying, you don't need it.
It's not necessary.
If he's a psychopath and what he cares about is defending his guns and stuff like that, the idea that the families are actors and that sort of shit doesn't help.
It doesn't do anything more for him than the government came in and killed these kids.
In fact, the government came in and killed these kids is probably better for him than the these people are actors.
But for the serial killers, another aspect of that is always wanting to be the smartest person, wanting to outsmart people, wanting to do it in public.
There's a reason, like, the zodiac killer didn't need to send fucking letters.
I don't disagree with that assessment in terms of like his mental state and how far gone he is.
But I still think there's got to be some undisclosed something.
I don't know what it is.
It could be financial.
I think it has to be.
Like from where I'm standing, what I know about following Alex and how he operates, it really feels like there has to be some deep financial motivation in turning this weird.
But then at the same time, he also is beholden to a lot of really bad sources.
So there are people like the Steve Pachenix and shit like that of the world who are in his ear, and there could be some really nefarious influence that hasn't reared their head yet.
We don't know who or what is going on that is motivating this.
And I think that this conversation here that we're having is the reason why this must continue.
This investigation.
Like, it's not, like, I'm not nearly done trying to find context clues from this stuff just because five days after fucking Sandy Hook, he's already taking dumbass pieces of the conspiracy stuff that's being thrown around and using it on his show to insinuate that the victims weren't really victims.
And yeah, I mean, like, places like Reddit and conspiracy boards were, you know, they were, they were hopping.
It was a different time for conspiracy than it is nowadays.
Like, I think we've talked about this a bit.
I think Alex has been playing catch-up with the conspiracy world in present day with him creating fake Zach, his alternative to QAnon and all that stuff.
Whereas back then, Alex was kind of like a big, much bigger deal.
It's like if I were to put myself in that kind of headspace of, and I'll never.
But like the idea of even for even for us, okay?
For some reason, because of this show, somebody kills somebody in my family.
Somebody kills them.
And they do like an interview with me.
My reaction would almost certainly be like a weird laugh cry.
Just like, I can't believe this is happening.
This is a silly storybook joke.
I'm crying.
I don't fucking understand anything that's going on right now.
So if you wanted to call that a con, if you wanted to use that video as like a proof that nobody in my family died, you would almost certainly have all kinds of shit.
Like, there's no way that I could have any control over my reaction.
And I imagine there's a hundred other press conferences of less publicized events that you could find where people are, you know, awkwardly or uncomfortably goofing off and then get some message whenever the person starts interviewing them.
And so many murder trials have those eyewitness accounts that are, you know, later on found to be fucking stupid where they're like, well, the person wasn't acting affected by it, so they probably killed him.
I mean, that even came up when we were covering the Anders Breivik episode where the second shooter, alleged second shooter, was a kid who was a victim on Utoya Island who people thought didn't respond as traumatized enough.
But still better than talking about Alex in the present day.
I have to stress that.
As much as this is a real big bummer and not pleasant, I would do this a hundred times before I talk about whatever hay he wants to make out of hate crimes.