Today, Dan and Jordan continue their investigation into how Alex Jones behaved in the immediate aftermath of the shootings at Sandy Hook. In this installment, the gents learn more about how awful Ted Nugent is, discuss UK crime statistics, and struggle with Alex taking a serious turn in his rhetoric for seemingly no reason.
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your work. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| I'm Jordan. | ||
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around, drink novelty beverages, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Oh, indeed we are, Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Dan! | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Have you ever seen a symphony orchestra live? | ||
| Yeah, when I was a kid. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What were your thoughts? | ||
| I don't even shit. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| I'll tell you what was more impressive. | ||
| Over the weekend, I went out to the AAW Pro Wrestling event. | ||
| Shout out to Marty and Sarah from Marty and Sarah Love Wrestling. | ||
| Got some nice seats. | ||
| Hell yeah! | ||
| We were in the balcony. | ||
| Okay, is that good? | ||
| I thought it was just gonna be the balcony, like, seating in the balcony. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| This was the VIP section. | ||
| Oh, you were, like, in a... | ||
| This is where, like, Marty's, he does commentary for AEW, so he was up there doing, that's where his booth was. | ||
| No shit! | ||
| The pro, like, all the wrestlers, the locker room was up in the balcony. | ||
| It was absurd. | ||
| That's awesome! | ||
| I felt ludicrous. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because everyone was going nuts for stuff, and, like, I was just like, hmm. | ||
| I think the biggest response I had to things was just going, uh-oh. | ||
| Somewhat nonplussed, then. | ||
| No, I enjoyed the hell out of it. | ||
| I'm not the type that goes, ah! | ||
| Right. | ||
| Unless I'm wasted and I wasn't super drunk. | ||
| That was a smart idea. | ||
| You would have fallen out of that balcony. | ||
| But big news, the Young Bucks showed up. | ||
| Very popular indie tag team. | ||
| A little bit of a surprise appearance. | ||
| They showed up. | ||
| They're huge, man. | ||
| The place went apeshit. | ||
| As big as the Young Turks. | ||
| Yeah, bigger. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bigger! | |
| Bigger! | ||
| They showed up and beat the shit out of the Lucha Brothers. | ||
| A couple of luchadors. | ||
| See, now this is what I'm talking about when we talk about entrenched racism. | ||
| They were trying to set up a match for their upcoming preview. | ||
| Yeah, what did they build a wall around them? | ||
| Christ. | ||
| Did not. | ||
| They super kicked them and then gave them some pile drivers. | ||
| That's a metaphor for America right there. | ||
| It was a super fun time and better than any symphony philharmonic you can come up with. | ||
| Oh, great. | ||
| Well, that's disappointing. | ||
| You're an un... | ||
| Uncultured loon, sir! | ||
| No way, it was great. | ||
| A lot of people kicking each other in the face. | ||
| Doing weird flips. | ||
| Those could not be more diametrically opposed things. | ||
| Do you want to go to the symphony orchestra tonight? | ||
| Nah, let's go see professional wrestling. | ||
| Same difference. | ||
| One fan in the front row got fucked up by one of the wrestlers. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Because he touched him. | ||
| Like, this dude was like... | ||
| The wrestler touched him or he touched the wrestler? | ||
| He touched the wrestler. | ||
| And then he got his ass beat. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He got his shirt torn in half and punched a couple times in the face. | |
| It was really hard. | ||
| Same thing happens at the symphony orchestra all the time. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| Third chair clarinet gets fucked up. | ||
| Getting out of line. | ||
| It was really hard to tell if it was fake or not. | ||
| It was one of those things that I couldn't really... | ||
| I didn't respond like, oh, God, or anything like that. | ||
| This might be totally staged. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Anything at a professional wrestling show could absolutely be staged. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So you go in there with that sort of level of awareness, and I was told from reputable sources that it was absolutely not faked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That dude punched the shit out of me. | ||
| Okay, that sounds right. | ||
| It was nuts. | ||
| Anyway, good times. | ||
| I know a lot about that show. | ||
| I don't know anything about that show. | ||
| I also know a lot about Alex Jones. | ||
| I only know what you tell me about Alex Jones. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| So, Jordan, today we've got an interesting, fun episode to go over. | ||
| But before we do that, we need to give a shout-out to a couple of new donors, people who have signed up and are supporting the show. | ||
| Oh, that's nice. | ||
| Yeah, so first of all, Shiny Kari, thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you so much, Shiny Kari. | ||
| Thank you very much, Shiny Kari. | ||
| Next, Marion. | ||
| Marion, thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Sorry about that. | ||
| Forgot the last letter on the name. | ||
| I apologize. | ||
| Thank you, Marion. | ||
| Next, we've got Peter. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Peter. | ||
| Next, Shitpost Podcast. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you so much, Jared. | ||
| Thank you so much, Jared. | ||
| Great podcast hosted by Jared Holt. | ||
| He's now a policy wonk. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| Very exciting. | ||
| Thanks, Jared. | ||
| Also, and finally, thank you so much to somebody who has donated on a little bit of an elevated level. | ||
| We appreciate it also very much. | ||
| So, Brian with a Y. Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a technocrat. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Go home to your mother and tell her you're brilliant. | ||
| Someone sodomite sent me a bucket of poop. | ||
| Daddy Shark. | ||
| Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. | ||
| Jar Jar Binks has a Caribbean black accent. | ||
| He's a loser little titty baby. | ||
| I don't want to hate black people. | ||
| I renounce Jesus Christ. | ||
| Thank you so much, Brian. | ||
| Thank you very much, Brian. | ||
| If you'd like to support the show and you like what we're doing, you can do that by going to our website, knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Click that button that says support the show. | ||
| We would appreciate it. | ||
| Please do. | ||
| Be kind. | ||
| So, Jordan, today we are going over December 19th, 2012. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It is another January. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| Four in a row! | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You've become addicted to this. | ||
| A tiny bit. | ||
| Because I had feelings and suspicions that things were going to start moving a little faster. | ||
| And I wanted to stick with it. | ||
| But I also 100%. | ||
| Intended to do a present day episode for today. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I listened to a good bit of Alex's shows, a couple days worth, and I'm not going to cover it. | ||
| I'm just not. | ||
| I'm not going to engage with it. | ||
| Okay, okay! | ||
| I'm not defending myself to you, nor to the audience, but I think it deserves an explanation. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| One of the reasons that I refuse to cover it. | ||
| A defense, if you will. | ||
| Eh, maybe. | ||
| If you want to play semantical games. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| A lot of the episodes that I've been listening to, they'll end up like, I start listening to him like, wow, this is bullshit. | ||
| And then an hour later, I'll realize he's still talking about the same thing. | ||
| stuff that he's been covering is trying to perpetuate the idea that all hate crimes are fake because of the Jussie Sloan situation. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I'm out. | ||
| We won't. | ||
| Well, at least not right now. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Because, quite frankly, I don't know what's going on with that story. | ||
| It's an incredibly confusing story. | ||
| Every time there's an update, it's like, oh, he totally paid off those guys. | ||
| And then the most recent update is like, no, he was sending people text messages, giving them support for food and money and a workout plan. | ||
| And you're like, whatever, you guys figure this out, and then I'll have a take. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I'm torn in between two worlds of a lot of the details of the story sound wild. | ||
| But that doesn't mean they're not true. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| They sound wild. | ||
| It's a wild story. | ||
| On the other hand, I have zero trust of the Chicago Police Department. | ||
| So I can't make heads or tails of this, and I refuse to take a side on it, and I can't deal with Alex Jones' bullshit with that space. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, with that perspective. | ||
| Because I was wrestling with trying to figure out a way to still do an episode about it, but leave... | ||
| There's 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| 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? | ||
| That wouldn't be a bad idea. | ||
| It wouldn't, but there's no clips in there. | ||
| Those motherfuckers are evil as shit. | ||
| It would just be me reading about how they found it was unconstitutional policing. | ||
| On a mass level. | ||
| All over the... | ||
| They have a dark site for torturing people! | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I just... | ||
| As I was listening to those episodes, I just became increasingly frustrated. | ||
| And, like, whatever we can bring to that conversation is not now. | ||
| It will be later when we know what the story is. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And to choose an angle on it now is irresponsible. | ||
| And I think that one of the reasons that... | ||
| It's not like we haven't been aware of this story. | ||
| We haven't talked about it on the show because it would be wrong to. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| 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. | ||
| Everybody jumps to... | ||
| Everybody involved. | ||
| Everybody involved in this story is doing a shit job at it. | ||
| There's a lot of jumping to conclusions, a lot of... | ||
| A lot of people sensationalizing this, and maybe not a lot of that is the media in terms of the sensationalizing stuff, but some of it is, and then a lot of it is just the bouncing, the ping pong ball of Twitter going back and forth. | ||
| Bad faith actors, bad faith arguments on, just flying. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so until there's more clarity on that, I don't want to talk about it. | ||
| And Alex is talking about it a fucking ton. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| It makes things so much simpler when you can blame black people for problems. | ||
| So I check in with the president and I waste a bunch of hours and I'm like, I'm not doing this. | ||
| So we retreat back to 2012. | ||
| To Sandy Hook, we retreat! | ||
| Well, because there's a clarity to it of time. | ||
| Right! | ||
| It makes it much more doable. | ||
| No, I understand, but you understand the irony. | ||
| It is pretty weird. | ||
| So, we're talking here about the 19th of December. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And last we left off, Alex was pretty much, you know, he's made it clear that he is all about defending guns. | ||
| On top of that, on our last episode, it became very clear that he was... | ||
| Easing himself into solidly saying that he believed that the government did it. | ||
| He's getting really close to saying that the victims were actually made of Play-Doh. | ||
| And the government killed them as a... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So here's where we start off on the 19th. | ||
| Alex discusses some games that he likes to play with his staff members. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| And let me tell you something. | ||
| It's always many times worse than I even know. | ||
| In fact, I've had a little sick game around the office. | ||
| It's really journalistic. | ||
| The sickest thing you can think of, we'll search engine it, and the government's doing it. | ||
| What? | ||
| They're doing everything. | ||
| Folks. | ||
| What? | ||
| Let me get back to this, okay? | ||
| Even without Congress, Obama could act to restrict guns. | ||
| That's a headline. | ||
| That's just people talking. | ||
| Articles about, like, what could he do without the full government? | ||
| It's not important. | ||
| It's not as important as the game of what's the sickest thing you can think of. | ||
| I guarantee the government's doing it. | ||
| I'm pretty sure if you were to actually play that game by the rules that you've set, you would all be, at the very least, on a watch list. | ||
| Perhaps. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| I think it speaks to a bad staff. | ||
| You're not good at this game. | ||
| No. | ||
| So I started with that because it's a little bit... | ||
| What do you know? | ||
| A little weird. | ||
| A little weird. | ||
| What's the sickest thing you can think of? | ||
| A little low stakes on that first clip. | ||
| Furby saying the N-word? | ||
| Government's doing it. | ||
| No! | ||
| Yep, there's a whole department in Idaho that's staffed with racist Furbies. | ||
| Norcom. | ||
| 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 ten minutes of that Gladio breakdown, as opposed to starting with something that's inconsequential. | ||
| So I threw that in there now, and now in clip two, Jordan. | ||
| You softballed us? | ||
| You lulled us into a false sense of security? | ||
| It's more about hitting the ground with a little bit of momentum as opposed to getting thrown out of a moving car. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Instead, you're giving us ice cream and then throwing us out of a moving car. | ||
| Hey, put that ice cream on your wounds. | ||
| It'll help. | ||
| Soften it up. | ||
| So, in this second clip, Jordan, we find out that Alex Jones... | ||
| We've speculated that Alex needed cover. | ||
| In order to make audacious claims about Sandy Hook. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He needed some sort of cover. | ||
| And we've theorized that maybe it is those weirdos like Wolfgang Halbig 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 Dude 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. | ||
| Yeah, it looks like the guy that was in the school with the other person. | ||
| Folks, they did this. | ||
| What you do... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-oh. | |
| And remember all the... | ||
| Over a hundred 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. | ||
| He was about to be committed. | ||
| He's going. | ||
| He's on these drugs undoubtedly. | ||
| He's a wind-up toy. | ||
| They bring him in. | ||
| They kill him. | ||
| He's wearing a mask. | ||
| The real shooters kill. | ||
| Exfiltrate out. | ||
| I mean, they've done it before. | ||
| So Alex now has a Rob Dew special report from the Nightly News. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That is enough. | ||
| He is now not just saying, like, it's my gut. | ||
| He's saying they did this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Yep. | ||
| That's pretty... | ||
| Write it down. | ||
| Write it down. | ||
| The 19th of December. | ||
| That's all it took. | ||
| Fucking Rob Dew. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So Rob Dew has this story that Alex is reporting on. | ||
| And we see that Alex has definitively turned the corner. | ||
| He's not saying that his gut is saying this is fake. | ||
| He's reporting that it's fake. | ||
| All it took was this Rob Dew dick... | ||
| I say that as if I don't know who he is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| His asshole, Rob Dew. | ||
| You ever hear about this Rob Dew character? | ||
| 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 the 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 Manfredonia. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Alright, that's a crazy thing. | ||
| That's like... | ||
| That's like he's five days away from retirement. | ||
| I'm amazed he didn't get killed in the whole situation, too. | ||
| He tried to get into the school, checking a few windows and doors before police approached him, told him to get on the ground, and handcuffed him. | ||
| He was detained briefly, but was released and reunited with his daughter, who was hiding in a classroom. | ||
| Another man who was detained and cuffed briefly was described by a first-hand witness to TV reporters on the scene. | ||
| And here is the description. | ||
| With handcuffs. | ||
| He walked by us and said he didn't do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was a grown man. | |
| A grown man, yeah. | ||
| He's sitting in the front of the police car over there now. | ||
| So, I mean... | ||
|
unidentified
|
He didn't have a gun? | |
| No. | ||
| I didn't see any gun. | ||
| Just had him handcuffed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he walked by us and looked into parents' eyes and said, I didn't do it. | |
| How was he dressed? | ||
| Camo pants with a dark jacket. | ||
| So, this man also didn't come out of the woods. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You poor dumb bastard. | ||
| That would suck so hard to have to... | ||
| Oh, my God, to walk by parents grieving children in handcuffs, them looking at you thinking that you... | ||
| It's literally the worst situation. | ||
| Oh, my God! | ||
| That curiosity could bring you to. | ||
| Oh, Christ! | ||
| But you never expect that's what you're going to walk into. | ||
| Of course not! | ||
| We all have had situations in our lives where we're, like, trying to peek at... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Some cop pulled somebody over on the highway or whatever. | ||
| And if this was high school, 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 mags. | ||
| Any one of them could have walked out of the woods. | ||
| Or smoking dope. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Oh, that's so fucked. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| 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 smart! | ||
| Really good call. | ||
| Oh, my God! | ||
| So, we don't know who this guy is, necessarily, and I don't think there's anything all that suspicious. | ||
| He was dressed in camo pants and a dark jacket, which is very likely where Alex is getting that detail from. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| The story about this guy. | ||
| Alex is getting the idea of the man in the woods from a different report of the man found in the woods. | ||
| But in the chaos of the day and the imprecise reporting that came out of it, something completely benign became incredibly suspicious. | ||
| The man who was supposedly found in the woods was an off-duty policeman in plain clothes who was responding to the incident. | ||
| There was a bit of confusion because he wasn't in uniform. | ||
| He didn't run from the police or get arrested. | ||
| People were just confused because of how it appeared for two uniformed cops to be running with a non-uniformed cop. | ||
| It made it look like a chase when the three of them were actually running together. | ||
| 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 19, 2012, if he asked me who was that guy, I could only respond with, I don't know, we'll see. | ||
| Yeah, some guy. | ||
| And that's where the propagandist has the ultimate advantage. | ||
| Their willingness to weaponize the unknown. | ||
| Once all the information is out, they can't control the narrative to suit their purposes. | ||
| So, when there's a situation like this, it's of the utmost importance that they act fast. | ||
| And that time, when the concrete is still wet, they can carve whatever initials they want and it'll leave an imprint forever. | ||
| But if they wait too long, the concreteness of information that is solidified will make it impossible for them to make a dent. | ||
| Nice metaphor. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| And this brings into focus also what I feel about Alex's coverage of Jussie Smollett right now. | ||
| You know, he's playing with the uncertainty of information. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he has the advantage now because of that. | ||
| When there's more information, he won't have that advantage, no matter what the story ends up being. | ||
| But for now, for me to cover his take on it, I would be the guy in studio saying, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| So there's no way to tackle that. | ||
| God, it's so hard to... | ||
| Because you can immediately put yourself into that position of, like, some random-ass coincidence. | ||
| And if the cops had released that guy's name, he might be dead by now. | ||
| Easily. | ||
| Like, he could easily have been murdered by one of the people giving death threats to the parents of the people who are being... | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| There's a hundred possibilities. | ||
| Jesus, that is so fucking terrible. | ||
| Just a coincidence makes you, oh, jeez. | ||
| I hope I don't walk by anything. | ||
| I'm not going to walk anywhere ever again. | ||
| I mean, I think it's my understanding that Chris Manfredonia's name is only public because he ended up giving interviews. | ||
| I don't know if the police released his name either. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But, like, I don't know. | ||
| I think it's probably one of the rare, not super rare, but kind of... | ||
| Not as common as we would like moments of police being like, right on. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do not let people know who they are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Protect this guy because you've turned him into a target. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He turned himself into it. | ||
| He wandered there. | ||
| Yeah, he just wandered in there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That reminds me so much of the Patrice O 'Neal. | ||
| You remember the old Patrice O 'Neal bit where he's like, I never litter because I don't want the chance of like, I toss a recede into the bushes and then there's a dead body and now I'm suspect number one. | ||
| Like, that's exactly that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you remember that? | ||
| No. | ||
| So he's referring to the 2010 car bombing plan in Portland that was to take out their Christmas tree lighting ceremony. | ||
| This was an instance of a would-be terrorist unknowingly working with an FBI agent who was undercover to plan the attack. | ||
| The FBI made sure that the bomb was incapable of detonating, and after Mohammed Osman Mahmoud used his phone to set off the inert bomb, he was arrested. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So... | ||
| Which is kind of bullshit. | ||
| That is a story of the FBI post 9-11 all too often. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Dear Jihad Recollections, I never thought this would happen to me. | ||
| Not a bad bit. | ||
|
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Not a bad bit. | |
| So they knew that entrapment would be a good defense for Mahmoud. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| 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 within 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 the FBI. | ||
| In a 2012 article in Rolling Stone by Rick Pearlstein, he lays it out really well. | ||
| Because they're involved, on some level, the FBI can control how the bust 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 movements, with Muslims being a very common target in the past 20 years or so. | ||
| But it's never the right-wing groups. | ||
| 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 in 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. | ||
| They were willfully ignored. | ||
| By law enforcement. | ||
| Even on a federal level. | ||
| Like the National Guard asshole. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And these aren't the ones that they want to publicize because they don't fit the narrative that they're trying to present. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Alex is weird. | ||
| He's weird. | ||
| This Sandy Hook garbage is garbage. | ||
| Agreed. | ||
| But Rob Dew has made that story, so now he has cover. | ||
| To jump whole hog into this was fake, the government did it. | ||
| The whole thing is fake, thanks to Rob Dew. | ||
| Intrepid investigative reporter Rob Dew. | ||
| And so now, Alex, I think he feels pretty comfortable about this now. | ||
| I think he's sort of landed smoothly into the position of, alright, I can say it's fake now. | ||
| Yeah, if you want to play that clip for the is this fake, it's pretty solid. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Right. | ||
| I think it still is in the ballpark of, like, I don't think you could sue him for it unless you were the government or something like that. | ||
| It's not crisis actor yet, but it's definitely him. | ||
| Like, any time he's like, we have debates. | ||
| No, you just literally said they staged it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, those were the real debates. | ||
| Not it was real, or it was fake. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
|
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I think he likes to present. | |
| It was just how fake was it. | ||
|
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Exactly. | |
| What version of fake was it? | ||
| And I'm willing to bet... | ||
| Also, they weren't debates. | ||
| I bet there were... | ||
| It was a narrative progression of him having guests on and people saying they were all actors or whatever. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| I think that the debate thing is sort of a funhouse mirror of reality that we're seeing now. | ||
| But still, that to me, even Alex saying the government went in and killed all the kids, it's disgraceful and disgusting. | ||
| But it's what you'd expect from Alex, and I think it's safe ground for him. | ||
| Like, I don't think it's legally actionable. | ||
| I think it's disgusting. | ||
| I think it's exploitative. | ||
|
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But I still don't think, like, I think it's what he does. | |
| I think that's his brand. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think you can be... | ||
| I don't think there's anything you can be charged with if you just say the government did it. | ||
| Like, that's borderline... | ||
| That's just like saying the government killed... | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, I mean, and they definitely killed Robert Kennedy, but we don't know about John. | ||
| It's him saying the government did any of the thousands of things that he says that they did. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I mean, it's kind of just like, if the narrative never progresses from there, which we know it does, it would still be like, I'm just, I'm put off by it. | ||
| Yeah, you're gross. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're a disgusting human being. | ||
| You're a complete monster, but it's still not like... | ||
| It's still not career-defining fumble level, like it will be. | ||
| And I find that fascinating. | ||
| I find that really interesting. | ||
| Yeah, it's another situation where he doesn't know when to end a paragraph. | ||
| If you just said it was fake and then put a period at the end of it, we'd all hate you and we'd all move on. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's so painful for him. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You are a bad person if you don't submit to at least reasonable gun fucking control laws. | ||
| You're a bad person. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or you're a bad person if this is the way you behave in the face of a tragedy and a crisis. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| You're a bad person not because of your gun positions, but because of how you're behaving, I would say. | ||
|
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. | |
| That's kind of how I would rewrite that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That is another one of his classic, like, oh, you don't understand why we're calling you a bad person. | ||
| You just went, these sad little kids. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's the bad person part. | ||
| They're dangling them out in front of us. | ||
|
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| No, no, no. | ||
| You're a bad person. | ||
| Days ago, 20 families, way more than that, were irrevocably changed. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Whoopty shit, Alex. | ||
| That's a bad person. | ||
| That is a really bad person. | ||
| That is the type of person who, if you met them in a bar and they said one sentence, you'd be like, Nah, I'm out of here. | ||
| You're fucking gross. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're fucking gross. | ||
| So, speaking of bad people, Alex now has a guest on, who he's already had on since Sandy Hook. | ||
| He has Larry Pratt back on, which is the Gun Owners for America. | ||
| That's his organization, the more extreme version of the NRA. | ||
| And Alex is having him on because the night before, Larry went on Piers Morgan's show. | ||
| And Piers Morgan called him a fucking idiot. | ||
| Right, because he is. | ||
| I don't like being involved in that because Piers Morgan is a fucking idiot too. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| It's one of these things like, let him fight. | ||
| But Piers Morgan was talking about how we should have some sort of gun reform. | ||
| That sort of conversation. | ||
| Larry Pratt is like, look what happened in England. | ||
| You guys took the guns and crimes through the roof. | ||
| All that stuff. | ||
| And we're going to talk about that in a second, but first, Alex is going to make that point, and Larry is going to agree with him. | ||
| I just need to establish that to prove how fucking stupid these people are. | ||
| What about the fact that, I mean, England's crime rate doubled after they took guns. | ||
| I just showed their own numbers. | ||
| They're the most dangerous country in Europe. | ||
| Who's the safest Switzerland with more guns per capita than we've got? | ||
| Does not compute. | ||
|
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That just doesn't fit in. | |
| So, the UK violent crime rate. | ||
| It doesn't fit inside my cranium, Dan! | ||
| Let's see if this fits inside yours or... | ||
| I don't think it can! | ||
| So Alex is using statistics out of context to argue that the UK made restrictions to gun ownership and then violent offense numbers jumped 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 Dunblane School Massacre, where a man entered a school, shot 16 students between the ages of 5 and 6, 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. | ||
|
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I just had to take a big, deep breath there. | |
| You read that sentence and you were like, I'm just going to let Jordan take a big breath. | ||
| Let's just breathe on that one, Dan! | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| On a basic level, perhaps, yes. | ||
| Similarly, yes. | ||
| And there was nothing in place that... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, yeah! | ||
| Right, that makes fucking perfect sense. | ||
| Then, in April 2008, the Home Office made another change to the way they countered 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. | ||
| So all the hooligans finally got picked up, essentially. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's the same fucking autism shit all over again. | ||
| And we talked about this with Sweden, too, how they count crimes changed at a certain point. | ||
| It makes it look like there's a massive increase. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No, and even then, based on what we know now, it's hard to come down anywhere other than... | ||
| Both at the same time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, he's ignorant of all the stuff other than the fact that stuff would disprove what he's saying. | ||
| He knows that what would disprove what he's saying exists, but he does not bother to learn about it. | ||
| It would be too threatening to know. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So you stay... | ||
| It's almost plausible deniability kind of thing. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, possibly. | ||
| 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... | ||
| I think he's more stupid and reactionary than he is conniving. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that's probably a fair... | ||
| I mean, there's still some conniving in him. | ||
| Don't get me wrong. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Base cunning, if you will. | ||
| And it changes day to day. | ||
| But in this next clip, we find that he has been so intense since Sandy Hook about how he knows that there's the war coming. | ||
|
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That's not good. | |
| Because the globalists are going to come take his guns and everything. | ||
| That he has been mean to his kids. | ||
| That doesn't surprise me. | ||
| No, that part doesn't at all. | ||
| But where the clip goes did not make me happy. | ||
| I'm usually nice to the crew. | ||
| I'm going to be honest with you. | ||
| I've got to be nice to my wife and kids, too. | ||
| Because, you know, my son was up here yesterday, and he'd come over and pat me on the shoulder, and I'd be like, hold on. | ||
| And I've never been like that in my life, and it's because I am in total war mode. | ||
| Yeah, come on. | ||
| Patriots, we've all got to be nice to each other. | ||
| And we've all got to be nice to our husbands and wives and our crew members and all of us. | ||
| I know as patriots and people that are informed, we know evil when we see it. | ||
| But let's keep the ammo downrange because I've got to tell you, at a sixth sense animal level, I know I'm under attack. | ||
| And I knew it was coming before this happened, I told you. | ||
| I mean, it's on. | ||
| And folks, my gut tells me they staged this. | ||
| They bare minimum, that guy was a... | ||
| Now the police say all the computers have been wiped and Easter bunnies are real. | ||
| And the other shooters are saying, don't worry about that. | ||
| And there were other people. | ||
| They did it. | ||
| My gut tells me they did it. | ||
| This is a different level of my gut told me they did it. | ||
| This is him reporting it and then... | ||
| Every now and again bringing his gut into the conversation instead of it being based on his gut. | ||
| Also, fun fact, Alex got divorced like a year after this. | ||
| Yeah, that makes sense. | ||
| And they didn't wipe the computers. | ||
| Adam Lanza tried to destroy his computers before doing the attack. | ||
| And he did not do that totally successfully, although a lot of the information was lost, is my understanding. | ||
| I haven't done a deep dive on that yet, but as I recall, it was him who did that. | ||
| Which makes sense. | ||
| That would make sense. | ||
| A lot of people do that. | ||
| So this next clip, I mean, we don't really have much to go on from that last one other than Alex was 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. | ||
|
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| This is sort of a dry run of that where on his own show he screams at Piers Morgan and tells him to get out of America. | ||
| That's nice. | ||
| While Piers Morgan is calling Larry Pratt a liar on Communist News Network last night, while he's a foreigner, nothing against 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. | ||
| Kind of a touchy subject. | ||
| Neither of you were involved in that, by the way. | ||
| Why don't you get out of my country? | ||
| You and Fareed Zakaria, get out. | ||
| Get out, you Bilderberg trash! | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| Get out of my country, scum! | ||
| I mostly kept that in there because the excuse me is so weird. | ||
| He yells, get out of my country, you Bilderberg trash. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| Get out of my country, you scum. | ||
| I can't think of any... | ||
| You know what? | ||
| A lot of people don't want to swear on this show, and that includes me. | ||
| And Bilderberg trash is the worst insult I can think of. | ||
| That's not going to be... | ||
| Problem for the radio stations? | ||
| No, they had to bleep that out. | ||
| That's totally bizarre. | ||
| No, they had to bleep that out. | ||
| Excuse me and then do the exact same thing a second later. | ||
| So weird. | ||
| In Alex's broadcast, Bilderberg trash might as well be the C word. | ||
|
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|
You know? | |
| Like, it's bad. | ||
| I do agree with you on that. | ||
| I think that he may feel that way. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| But... | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| So weird. | ||
|
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|
So weird. | |
| Can we... | ||
| That's the type of shit that I... | ||
| Do not understand at all. | ||
| That idea that you have a fucking personal vested interest in the Civil War, or the Revolutionary War. | ||
| I fought a war 200 years ago to kick your king out. | ||
| No one was involved with that. | ||
| Alex is his ancestor's race memory. | ||
| Oh god, it's so stupid though! | ||
| His ancestors still live within his barely chest. | ||
| You know that. | ||
| He's talked about it a hundred times. | ||
| We buried the hatchet into Native Americans because both countries are fucking garbage. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| That's a conversation he doesn't want to have. | ||
| No, I doubt it. | ||
| But he is the embodiment of all who have come before, and of course his ancestors were all these great people who did all the revolutions. | ||
| At the very least, Piers Morgan isn't. | ||
| No, but his ancestors were under the king. | ||
| I don't care! | ||
| They were redcoats. | ||
| No, here's Morgan's ancestors where the Redcoats were at Lexington and Concord when Alex's ancestors kicked their ass. | ||
| That doesn't track. | ||
| Alex is sick of it. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| Who cares if it tracks? | ||
| It feels good to Alex and that's what matters. | ||
| But neither of your, even your ancestors still didn't really care. | ||
| They were both just working stiffs, man. | ||
| Or they were all working stiffs. | ||
| Not Alex's ancestors. | ||
| They were generals. | ||
| Part of being under the king is you just have to do what he says. | ||
| Like, you should feel some sort of empathy for the redcoats. | ||
|
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|
Nah. | |
| Alex's family was all about freedom. | ||
| Pierce's was tyranny. | ||
| Oh, damn it. | ||
| That's all you need to know. | ||
| It's that simple. | ||
| I buy that from Pierce. | ||
| Just little outfits. | ||
| So Alex loves guns, but he makes a pronouncement in this next clip that I found a bit upsetting about how great guns are. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Five great white deaths a year! | ||
| Not real, folks! | ||
| This isn't real. | ||
| I guess Jaws isn't real. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| I'm still going to go with Sandy Hook was real, though. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I think that's where I land on the Jaws v. | ||
| Sandy Hook argument. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Isn't that weird that one of the greatest movies ever made? | ||
| I don't know if I would go that far, but it was great. | ||
| Also wound up having disastrous effects. | ||
| Like, the sharks weren't even real in that movie. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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And we killed millions of sharks because of it. | |
| 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. | ||
| There was no one coming. | ||
| I used to live in fucking Hawaii. | ||
| I have family who live in California. | ||
| Most beaches don't. | ||
| It can't fucking charge you to go on the beach. | ||
| Beaches went bankrupt? | ||
| Right. | ||
|
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|
What? | |
| Beaches are like parks. | ||
| Beaches went bankrupt? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We had to get rid of all of our sand! | ||
| I think what he probably meant to say is tourism went down to tropical places. | ||
| The concession stand was struggling, but the beach went bankrupt. | ||
| Man's last battle against the shores, Dan. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Goddamn. | ||
| Crazy shit. | ||
| So he, in this next clip, raises the alarm. | ||
| And puts the word out that it's time for all good men to come to the aid of the party. | ||
|
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Oh, that's not good. | |
| Calling all patriots, calling anyone who's awake not 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 billion 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. | ||
| We are entering authoritarianism. | ||
| Yeah, but is anything bad happening, though? | ||
| All that stuff's pretty bad. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Is that what he was talking about? | ||
|
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|
Mm-hmm. | |
| I mean, it's all bad, but he's still exaggerating pretty much all of it. | ||
| The reason I played that is the calling all patriots. | ||
| We're in authoritarianism. | ||
| And it's like, well, how would someone hear that? | ||
| They would hear that as a call to... | ||
| Especially after talk of the Revolutionary War and stuff like that. | ||
| You would obviously hear that as a, it's time to overthrow this fucking government. | ||
| They did this terrorist attack on children because they want my guns. | ||
|
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It's time to roll. | |
| You know, you kind of have to... | ||
| You hear that sort of thing and... | ||
| Especially with the laundry list of supposed crimes, of which many are absolutely... | ||
| True. | ||
| Some of them are fair. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Just bring up the NSA and you're right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Militarization of the police, absolutely. | ||
| Fine point, but it's not to have war on the patriots or something like that. | ||
| That's where you go off track. | ||
| No, it's have war on the minorities, Alex. | ||
| You should be for that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're jumping the gun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're supposed to be upset about this later. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| When you got a white guy in charge. | ||
| But one of the reasons that I kept it in is because I think that there's like... | ||
| An extremeness to that. | ||
| And then there's an extremeness in comedy as to what he says immediately after that. | ||
| So there's that laundry list of things that the government's doing. | ||
| And then he says this. | ||
| We are entering authoritarianism. | ||
| But the gun culture laid down by our forebearers in a fight against the Redcoats is now reactivating and is the number one shows all over TV. | ||
| And you look at the top ten shows on cable. | ||
| Half of them are gun shows. | ||
| Everybody's getting into guns. | ||
| I told you we've been winning culturally, but the Empire was going to strike with everything they've got. | ||
| So, it's interesting. | ||
| Why is it that the next thing he says is, like, everyone loves gun shows? | ||
| Like, it's not like he's talking about, like, a place you go and you can buy a gun under the radar. | ||
| He's talking about TV shows about guns. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you can still find... | ||
| What is he including in that? | ||
| Does he have a vested interest in one of those gun shows? | ||
| Is there... | ||
| Well, you can still find the ratings for TV shows back in 2012, and they don't reflect anything close to what Alex is saying. | ||
| He's presenting the idea that gun shows make up half of the top ten shows on cable. | ||
| So Deadline is a breakdown of the 2012 TV season on network channels, so I checked that out to see if there were any gun shows on there. | ||
| Two and a half guns. | ||
| Sunday Night Football. | ||
| Young Gun Sheldon. | ||
| Sunday Night Football came in number one. | ||
| Sunday Night Football Guns. | ||
| Big Bang Theory was at number two. | ||
| Big Gun Theory. | ||
| The horribly disappointing show about a futuristic world with dinosaurs in it that was called Revolution came in at number 13. Wait, what show? | ||
| You don't remember Revolution? | ||
| I do not remember Revolution. | ||
| It was like the future, but there's no more electricity, and then there's dinosaurs, because they have to go back into the past. | ||
| It's complicated. | ||
| All right. | ||
| It was very disappointing, though. | ||
| The premise got me very excited. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| You thought it would be like Lost with Dinosaurs. | ||
| You need to fill my post-lost world. | ||
| Your lost lost. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that came in at number 13. Betty White's prank show, Off Their Rockers. | ||
| What? | ||
| Just missed the top 100, coming in at number 101. | ||
| What? | ||
| Zero gun programs. | ||
| She had a show called... | ||
| It was old people pranking people. | ||
| In retrospect, that sounds pretty great. | ||
| Came in at number 101. | ||
| 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 ten most watched programs of 2012 were all number one through eight being NFL football, number nine was the Summer Olympics opening ceremony, and number ten was the Grammys. | ||
| Their top ten ratings for a 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 ten 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. | ||
| Exactly what you would expect. | ||
| That's, I mean, the shows that people watch. | ||
| Yeah, that's a cross-section of the masses of whom TV is the opiate. | ||
| So TV Guide put out a list of the top 25 most-watched shows of the year, and that includes both network and cable. | ||
| Duck Dynasty could maybe be called a gun show. | ||
| That was the only one I was thinking that I remember from that time having an outsized popularity for how stupid it was. | ||
| And that one came in at number 21. Well below Modern Family and post-Charlie Sheen version of Two and a Half Men. | ||
| I'm not sure that qualifies as something that would scare the globalists. | ||
| That Duck Dynasty's at number 21. Right, right, right. | ||
| Oh no. | ||
| So all that seemed incredibly unsatisfying, since it all still involved network shows, even the ones that had both network and cable. | ||
| And since Alex is specifically talking about cable shows, I didn't feel done. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And this is in order. | ||
| The Walking Dead. | ||
| The Closer. | ||
| Rizzoli and Isles. | ||
| Major Crimes. | ||
| Pawn Stars. | ||
| Rizzoli and Isles? | ||
| Everyone loved it. | ||
| Dallas. | ||
| Sons of Anarchy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Suits. | ||
| Suits? | ||
| And Jersey Shore. | ||
| What was Suits about? | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| Jersey Shore counts as a gun show because they were always taking their shirts off. | ||
| Go not to the gun show. | ||
| I think you could make a terrible argument that Pawn Stars might be... | ||
| Because they sometimes have antique guns on it, but it's not regularly. | ||
| Would shows like Gundam Wing be considered gun shows? | ||
| No, that's just part of the word. | ||
| Look, I don't know. | ||
| I don't think any of those are gun shows, necessarily. | ||
| I mean, I guess Sons of Anarchy, there's violence in it. | ||
| Major crimes, I'm sure some people got shot. | ||
| That's just like a procedural kind of drama. | ||
| I was looking through this list, I'm like, I don't know what half of these fucking shows are. | ||
| No clue. | ||
| I don't know what Suits is. | ||
| I don't want to know what Suits is. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| I'm fine with it. | ||
| I don't know what Major Crimes is specifically. | ||
| See, now I think of Major Payne. | ||
| Suits, I got no idea. | ||
| Perception, I have no idea what that was. | ||
| I don't really know what Rizzoli and Isles was. | ||
| I've only heard people make jokes about it. | ||
| Wait, was Rizzoli and Iles the one with Zach from Saved by the Bell and what's-his-face? | ||
| Mark Paul Gosselaar? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And Breckenmeyer? | ||
| Yeah, was that that one? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| That's Franklin and Bash. | ||
| They're the same fucking show! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're all the same show! | ||
| Austin Legal or whatever it is. | ||
| The ampersand, the blank and blank is, yeah, it's trouble. | ||
| I don't know what any of those things are, but I do know what revolution is. | ||
| Because I was very disappointed about it. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, that's kind of infuriating that you can just say that. | ||
| Yep, I know. | ||
| That is almost legally actionable. | ||
| Like, all of television should be able to sue him for libel. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| I was very confused. | ||
| And I don't know if we're going to find out more about it in a little bit. | ||
| Oh! | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe we will. | ||
| You're looking like a tease. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Great. | ||
| 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? | ||
| No. | ||
| He used to have, like, it was a week and you'd have, like, Snoop Dogg was the guest for the week. | ||
| I do not watch any of the late night shows. | ||
| I don't either, but I remember that because I was, like, 19 when it happened or something like that. | ||
| It was kind of an innovative, interesting idea. | ||
| It feels the same way with this rotating cast of these gun weirdos. | ||
| Like Larry Pratt coming on twice in like three days. | ||
| Stuart Rhodes coming on twice in like three days. | ||
| It seems like these are the only people he has any interest in putting their message forth. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's possible. | ||
| In 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. | ||
| Yeah, that may be the case. | ||
| He wants them to keep him on the straight and narrow, which is neither straight nor narrow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just a path shaped like a gun. | ||
| So Alex has Stuart on, and he starts at the top of the hour. | ||
| And as we know, the first segment of the top of each hour is not broadcast on the radio. | ||
| That's for the station. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Each radio station gets to do what they want with that first, like, six minutes. | ||
| And so Alex has already said, I want to talk to Stuart Rhodes, and then whatever he says, we'll recap it. | ||
| That sort of thing. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Good radio. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Professional. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And so as they're going out to break, Stuart Rhodes starts talking about how the militias are great. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| He has a quote from the founding father. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| I don't want to hear it. | ||
| Well, you're gonna. | ||
| Damn it. | ||
| And then Alex makes a declaration right as they're going out to break that solves a mystery that I think we've had for a very long time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's like Trenchcock's county father said. | |
| He said, the Congress has no power to disarm the militia, their swords, and every other terrible implement of a soldier are the birthright of an American. | ||
| Stay there, I want the full quote when we come back. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| The birthright is military arms. | ||
| So, we've wondered what he means by your birthright. | ||
| Well, there it is. | ||
| Turns out it means military-grade arms. | ||
| Is that just for natural-born citizens, or are immigrant citizens allowed to also have that birthright? | ||
| That's a question I can't answer based on Alex's stuff. | ||
| You know, I don't know. | ||
| I know what my gut tells me. | ||
| It's that it's fake. | ||
| So, did you catch the founding father that was being quoted there? | ||
| I heard the name, but I couldn't. | ||
| Place it. | ||
| I had to replay it a number of times, and I still had to Google and try and find out who he's talking about. | ||
| Did he say, like, Trutch something? | ||
| Tenchcox. | ||
| Tenchcox? | ||
| That sounds fake as fuck. | ||
| We need to retroactively remove that name from Founding Fathers. | ||
| It's T-E-N-C-H-C-O-X-E. | ||
| Boy. | ||
| Now, I would say on the list of Founding Fathers... | ||
| Tench Cox comes in way, way down the list. | ||
| I really can't believe that's a real name. | ||
| In fact, I would go so far as to say he wasn't a founding father at all. | ||
| He was just a fucking guy who was around in the 1700s who loved militias. | ||
| That's good enough for Alex and Stuart to consider him one of the great founders of this country. | ||
| He was a guy who was around. | ||
| 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 Great. | ||
| Great. | ||
| 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... | ||
| All right, guys, guys, founding fathers, fucking... | ||
| Pick up your game. | ||
| Mr. Facing Both Ways. | ||
| Jesus Christ! | ||
| As far as nicknames go... | ||
| You could have called him Janus! | ||
| You guys knew about history! | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's true. | |
| You guys knew about mythology! | ||
| 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. Steal Your Girl. | ||
| Definitely not as good as Mr. Steal Your Girl. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Facing Both Ways is the hero of Stuart Rhodes. | |
| That is the weakest shit! | ||
| Guys! | ||
| It was pretty scathing at the time. | ||
| I believe it was scathing at the time. | ||
| Mr. Lies out of his face all the time. | ||
| Also, Tench Cox was widely credited... | ||
| I still can't believe that's a name. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Quote... | ||
| To his wife, Trunch Dix. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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 Tenchcox 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a labor question. | ||
| It's one of the things that I hate now thinking about in regards to, like, your... | ||
| Tenchcocks? | ||
| Well, no, that's a fun name to think about. | ||
| No, in regards to, like, your elementary school education where you're like, and one of the biggest inventions of the time was Eli Whitney's cotton gin, and they didn't provide that... | ||
| Asterisk next to it. | ||
| Footnote, Eli Whitney's cotton gin led to a massive explosion in slavery. | ||
| And it's a horrifying thing. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And Tenchcox wanted cotton to be king. | ||
| Unintended consequences, perhaps. | ||
| So speaking of that 1808 letter I was telling you about that I read a little bit from? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Cox has an interesting rationale for what benefits there were to getting into the cotton market. | ||
| Quote, Yeah. | ||
| And his reasons for that were that he could make a lot of money and that the southern militia could get cool uniforms. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That sounds a lot like a founding father, though. | ||
| Sounds a lot like the Stuart Rhodes Alex Jones founding father. | ||
| That has all the same fucking connotations of our current politicians, where they're like, hey, look, I think climate change is bad. | ||
| I don't want to move on it, though, because I am getting a lot of money, and I think we can make a lot of money if we don't do anything about it. | ||
| That's all I'm saying. | ||
| You get this. | ||
| You demystify it a little bit. | ||
| Why is Stuart Rhodes quoting Tenchcox as a founding father? | ||
| Why does Stuart Rhodes know who Tenchcox is? | ||
| Well, because he's the motherfucker who inadvertently or surreptitiously made slavery super terrible and was a big supporter of the militias. | ||
| Right, but... | ||
| Missed a face in both ways. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| Jesus. | ||
| But... | ||
| But then that means that what he is reading about in history... | ||
| Is the guys who made slavery worse and militias. | ||
| But I think he just ignores that part. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| The making slavery worse part isn't a calculus for him. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's just about like, oh yeah, he wanted Cotton to be awesome so that these awesome southern militias could get uniforms. | ||
| Right, but that speaks to... | ||
| That's the part that would be covered in the book that they would be interested in reading. | ||
| Exactly, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| You and I have never heard of Tenchcox because we're not reading crazy militia fucking deifying books. | ||
| I might have heard of him at some point, but you'd think he'd remember. | ||
| You would have to remember that. | ||
| On my deathbed, I'll be like, dude, Tenchcox. | ||
| That'll be your rosebud. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You'll be like, what is he talking about? | ||
| Tenchcox. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That sounds so fucking stupid. | |
| God. | ||
| Wild. | ||
| Man. | ||
| A little interesting history lesson. | ||
| Anyway, in this next clip, Alex gets back to the laundry list of things. | ||
| That he has to be upset about. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Such as the founding father, Clench Butts. | ||
| This has more to do with the oppression of gun culture. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Stores from Walmart to Dick's are saying we're not going to sell semi-auto. | ||
| Cheaper than dirt. | ||
| Biggest online seller of guns. | ||
| Not going to sell guns. | ||
| Three Discovery Channel shows canceled in 24 hours. | ||
| One of them the second highest rated on the network. | ||
| Aha! | ||
| Now we have a new clue to what he was talking about with the TV shows. | ||
| He's talking specifically about Discovery and History Channel TV shows. | ||
| Well, not History, it's all Discovery. | ||
| So we can find what are the shows that were cancelled in 2012. | ||
| The last one is clearly what he's talking about with the TV shit for this entire time that he's been talking about TV gun shows being so awesome. | ||
| I should have known it was just some bullshit where he's like... | ||
| I like this reality show and it got cancelled. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| He's the Firefly fan of gun shows. | ||
| It would be easy to assume that the show was cancelled because of Sandy Hook, given the timing of the announcement of its cancellation. | ||
| But according to Deadline, sources at Discovery said, quote, the decision was quietly made a while ago. | ||
| However, it didn't come to light until today. | ||
| It wasn't so much cancelled as it was not picked up for a third season. | ||
| And the reasons given were that the network felt that there wasn't any story left to tell with the characters on the show. | ||
| And more importantly, their ratings in the second season, quote, finished down double digits from CBS. | ||
| Had a bit of a sophomore slump. | ||
| No more story left to tell. | ||
| About what? | ||
| Gun people? | ||
| People who have American guns? | ||
| It really does seem like that's a quick story. | ||
| Like, you don't even need Ed Burns for that documentary. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Tim Allen! | ||
| 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 out and righted the ship. | ||
| They wouldn't have. | ||
| No, probably not. | ||
| No. | ||
| Anyway, Alex is an idiot and he's just mad that his favorite show, American Guns, got canceled that had bad ratings. | ||
| That is so fucking pathetic. | ||
| But you hear that the way he's talking there, he's like, three shows on Discovery got canceled. | ||
| One of them had really high ratings. | ||
| One of the highest ratings in the network. | ||
| That's probably Dirty Jobs. | ||
| Because that was a pretty popular show. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it also was in its late seasons. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And Mike Rowe doesn't want to do that anymore, probably. | ||
| And he's also a conservative douchebag, so it probably was because they were putting it... | ||
| He made some Facebook posts supporting trickle-down economics, Dan. | ||
| We gotta get him off our fucking airwaves. | ||
| Even if it was, it has nothing to do with guns, like Alex is presenting it. | ||
| But, it turns out, there's one more show that got cancelled. | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| I don't know anymore. | ||
| They just canceled the other big show. | ||
| So it's actually four shows. | ||
| Ted Nugent. | ||
| High rated. | ||
| High rated. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Because it was good looking women out there learning how to shoot, men shooting, target practice, how to build guns. | ||
| I'm telling you, I'm telling you for years, the gun culture has been on fire. | ||
| So Gun Culture's been on fire, Ted Nugent's show is cancelled, and this is bullshit. | ||
| Because it had high ratings. | ||
| High ratings! | ||
| I didn't know Ted Nugent had a show, so already that's a bad sign. | ||
| Spoiler alert, he didn't. | ||
| Okay, well what the fuck is happening? | ||
| So an interesting thing happens when you search Google for Ted Nugent show cancelled. | ||
| It turns out that the Nuge is the kind of guy who's pretty familiar with that kind of thing happening. | ||
| As it relates to his show on Discovery, it didn't get cancelled. | ||
| According to Discovery, Nugent had a thing that was on there called Gun Country. | ||
| It was, quote, always intended to be a one-hour special. | ||
| You know, Jordan, like something that isn't a recurring show. | ||
| No, but what? | ||
| They just did a one-off, one-hour thing with Ted Nugent and some guns. | ||
| They also said that it, quote, fared poorly in the ratings. | ||
| Nugent claimed that he was working on a series with them, but spokespeople from the network said that is absolutely not true. | ||
| Interestingly, in other Ted Nugent show cancellation news... | ||
| In 2014, multiple shows on Nugent's tour were cancelled. | ||
| One of them, at an Idaho casino, was cancelled with the venue citing issues with Nugent being a racist. | ||
| Really? | ||
| An Idaho casino? | ||
| According to Billboard, they quote, booked Nugent without realizing he espoused racist attitudes and views. | ||
| And they quote, did not detail which of Nugent's specific views it opposes. | ||
| Which is kind of an open question, since he says so much racist shit. | ||
| It's hard to pin down. | ||
| Yeah, if I listed all of the racist comedians that I've ever met who still work regularly at casinos, it would be a long conversation. | ||
| So immediately after he loses this gig at the Idaho Casino, two more of his shows at Tacoma, Washington's Emerald Queen Casino were cancelled, 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 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. | ||
| You would think. | ||
| But also, that's a fucking threat, that he's going to murder the president. | ||
| Yeah, that's pretty much exactly what that is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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 kill 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 is a flaming racist. | ||
| Well, I'd never kill a polar bear. | ||
| He might. | ||
| Those are white! | ||
| It turns out... | ||
| He also, beyond all the 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. | ||
| Ted Nugent is a real piece of shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He's a real piece of shit. | ||
| He's an asshole onion. | ||
| There's so many layers to it. | ||
| He's like, oh, we could talk for days about how fucked up he was. | ||
| I thought we were done with how fucked up Ted Nugent was. | ||
| I knew all I needed to know. | ||
| And now there's more pieces of his assholery. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| 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 Sion, said that the request came from Nugent's team. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Makes sense. | ||
| Yeah, no, I agree with all those. | ||
| So Nugent took to the stage and said, quote, If I get too political, fuck you. | ||
| This is dedicated to everybody, including those dumb motherfuckers who are protesting me because they're still grieving. | ||
| When you lose a loved one, we pray for you. | ||
| When you lose a loved one, we prayed for him, didn't we? | ||
| How the fuck do you hate the Nugent family when we're praying for you, you dumb fuck? | ||
| So many ways. | ||
| So many ways! | ||
| Oh, man, I can list a whole long list. | ||
| Oh, so many ways. | ||
| Can I hate you, Ted Nugent? | ||
| I would say a classy move would just be ignore it. | ||
| Ignore the billboard. | ||
| Don't go on stage and start screaming about this dumb motherfucker who's still grieving. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And he thinks I'm some sort of asshole. | ||
| 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's so funny that at this concert where he's screaming about this guy, his team had said no guns in the venue, which makes it now a disarmament zone that all these people are so afraid of. | ||
| You have no guns there, now you're sitting ducks for the guns. | ||
| Nugent claimed that he said all guns were welcome and that the venue and the evil media are lying. | ||
| To which the venue replied, quote, we stand by what we said Tuesday night and this is the end of our Ted Nugent story. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I thought that the answer to bad people with guns is good people with guns. | |
| I thought that, like, if you're afraid of the Pulse nightclub shooting, then you should have more good people, your fans, there with guns. | ||
| Or you actually don't believe that. | ||
| You banned guns at your own fucking concert. | ||
| Well, he doesn't want to get hurt. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| Stupid sons of bitches. | ||
| I hate this shit. | ||
| I hate him. | ||
| I hate that. | ||
| When you find something like that, that's what really sets me off. | ||
| 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 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. | ||
| It's fucking bullshit. | ||
| People should be deeply ashamed of themselves. | ||
| If they could feel shame, they would not be themselves. | ||
| That is the underlying issue there. | ||
| And then the fucking cowardly nonsense of like, I didn't say that. | ||
| I didn't say that. | ||
| Oh, that is so cowardly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fake news. | |
| That is so cowardly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fake news. | |
| I'm a big fan of any pithy statement simply because of its brevity. | ||
| Just that, and that is the last we have to say on this story. | ||
| That is the end of our Ted Newton story. | ||
| Yeah, nailed it! | ||
| That recalls the, what's the, if we conquer you, we'll burn your cities to the ground, and then the reply message is, if. | ||
| Like, damn, that's fucking good! | ||
| Yeah, and it leads me to believe that they're right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| That sort of a response is like, come on, Ted. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Cut it out. | ||
| A good pithy response makes you win the argument regardless. | ||
| They could have been lying out their teeth, but with a statement like that, you won. | ||
| So, bottom line, fuck Ted Nugent and everything he stands for, and the horse he rode in on. | ||
| Fuck Ted Nugent. | ||
| The guy is just the worst. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the true goal. | ||
| We stealthed this in here. | ||
| I look forward to the next time he comes up because I can't imagine what more awful things we can find about him. | ||
| He's a bottomless well. | ||
| I've never read anything good about him. | ||
| Do you understand that? | ||
| I've never read a single thing that's good about him because Alex can't write. | ||
| He's said good things about him. | ||
| But also I question the source. | ||
| I've never heard anybody be like, you know who's a great guy? | ||
| Ted Nugent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a good question. | |
| Has he ever even had a well-reviewed album? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| I think that Double Live Gonzo is considered one of the best live albums. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I think so, as I understand. | ||
| I would have gone with Portishead live in NYC, but that's just me. | ||
| Budokan! | ||
| Just the venue? | ||
| Can you imagine? | ||
| Also, I was thinking about that Fort Knox show with Nugent, REO Speedwagon, and Styx. | ||
| Can you imagine REO Speedwagon being like, we're going to kill the president? | ||
| He got kicked off that fucking show. | ||
| Imagine the fucking guy from Styx acting like that kind of an asshole. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wish... | |
| More bands just turn towards that. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I think it'd be fun. | ||
| One is plenty. | ||
| I think it'd be more fun if Lindsey Buckingham just went 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! | ||
| Alright, let's go, guys. | ||
| Donald Fagan just loses it in the middle of a peg and starts screaming about assassination. | ||
| Could be. | ||
| I think there's one thing that's really confusing me, and I think it's partially because he has all 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? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're around somewhere. | ||
| Steve Pchenik is glaring in his absence. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, he's around. | ||
| Alex and him are both big Sandy Hook deniers for a long time and initially. | ||
| So, like, I expect to see him somewhere. | ||
| I can't find him anywhere. | ||
| All these other dudes, too, like Gerald Salenti is nowhere to be found. | ||
| Peter Schiff isn't around. | ||
| I don't know who else. | ||
| Paul Craig Roberts. | ||
| None of these guys. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| In this next clip, we do hear about somebody. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But he's not on or anything. | ||
| But we do hear about somebody and where he's at as it relates to Sandy Hook. | ||
| You'll see some of these headlines. | ||
| How the Newtown Massacre Became a Mind Control Event by John Rappaport, great investigative journalist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, boy. | |
| Oh, hang up that goddamn picture! | ||
| Turns out Rappaport was into, they're using this to brainwash people. | ||
| Mind control the public. | ||
| Of course he is. | ||
| Classic Rappaport. | ||
| Oh, go fuck yourself, John Rappaport. | ||
| I'm sure he'll show up pretty soon, too. | ||
| Like, Alex is now reminded of him, and now I imagine we'll get some of that juicy Rappaport action. | ||
| Stuart Rhodes is on because he has a new Pledge of Allegiance, or Pledge of Independence. | ||
| Nope, nope, done. | ||
| Cancel it. | ||
| Cancel this whole fucking show. | ||
| I don't want to hear this goddamn new Pledge of Allegiance. | ||
| I don't even like the regular Pledge of Allegiance. | ||
| That shit is fucked up. | ||
| It's not a Pledge of Allegiance. | ||
| I kind of misspoke. | ||
| It's more of a Pledge of Independence. | ||
| But it's all just the same Oathkeeper shit. | ||
| It's still just like, we're not going to take guns from people. | ||
| If you try and take our guns, that's a line in the sand. | ||
| I pledge this as a line that I won't cross, all that stuff. | ||
| And it's like, you're just reiterating the same fucking shit you say all the time. | ||
| It's no big deal. | ||
| So trust me, it's not going to be too offensive. | ||
| And I do believe that if we play this out and listen to it, you'll see what Alex is doing a little bit. | ||
| He's using Stuart a little bit. | ||
| In addition to Stewart using him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Very symbiotic thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So anyway, Alex starts it off on a bad foot. | ||
| Going back to Stewart. | ||
| Stewart, it says, My personal pledge of resistance against any attempt to disarm us by means of an assault weapons ban. | ||
| 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 don't 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. | ||
| It is because we know what he's talking about. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We know his code. | ||
| That's the welfare queen coded link. | ||
| These dumb welfare heads don't know how to tie their shoes. | ||
| We're the majority. | ||
| We're the ones who count. | ||
| White! | ||
| There is that subtext to it entirely. | ||
| White! | ||
| So, in this next clip, this is what I think is actually the most important thing. | ||
| This doesn't really speak to Alex using Stuart. | ||
| But Stuart accidentally says something that I think is entirely accurate. | ||
| Get innocent people killed. | ||
| Well, I mean, that's the end result of what they're trying to do. | ||
| But they're talking about stage one, not stage three. | ||
| I gotcha. | ||
| 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 an assault on this 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 and assaults. | ||
| No shit. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That's 100%, like, what is behind what he's saying. | ||
| And he's absolutely 100% accurate. | ||
| Because I think that you've made this point in the past episodes that we've had about Sandy Hook is, like, 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. | ||
| You are radical. | ||
| And that's what he's describing. | ||
| Kick the dummies out. | ||
| So I think that it's interesting that you can see the awareness there. | ||
| I think that that's interesting, that 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. | ||
| Getting it all as extreme as we can make it, because it has to be. | ||
| That sort of thing. | ||
| While at the same time saying that their opponents are politicizing this event, they're openly admitting... | ||
| That our main goal with this is to radicalize people. | ||
| And radicalize politics. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And the interesting thing that I think is probably, like, I think they might be aware of this, but not necessarily. | ||
| I don't know, but they don't kick out everybody who... | ||
| Or it's not like, hey, we get past this point, everybody who's still on board and isn't voting against our Second Amendment or whatever, get them all out. | ||
| Because there's people who are still the cuck conservatives, as they might be called. | ||
| Like a Marco Rubio is still around. | ||
| And I think that, like, to sane people, Marco Rubio is still past the radicalization point. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But people like him are still important as punching bags. | ||
| for people like Stuart Rhodes and Alex Jones. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They need those moderate radicals. | |
| In order to push the Overton window so far that what we would consider a moderate radical, 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... | ||
| Like, if everybody was exactly what they wanted, the world and, like, governing would be unmanageable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, if everybody was goddamn Louis Gohmert and Steve King, like these Tea Party politicians that they pushed for. | ||
| There actually would be a revolution. | ||
| Well, if it was, like, if that was all the Republicans that were in office, they would get nothing done. | ||
| They have no idea how to do anything. | ||
| It would be scandal after scandal. | ||
| Or they would all get voted out. | ||
| And the ultimate end result of that would probably... | ||
| You just described Trump! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well... | |
| No. | ||
| He got nothing done. | ||
| Well, they did pass the dumbest tax cut and everything else in history. | ||
| But you still needed McConnell to do those things. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And McConnell isn't somebody that Alex likes. | ||
| He thinks he's a, you know, GOP shill. | ||
| I'm sure he likes him much more now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But back then, he's like, fuck that guy. | ||
| So, like, he needs those people in order to keep the ball moving or whatever. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then he needs the Louie Gohmerts of the world to be like, this is what we need. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's an interesting system. | |
| And I think – I don't know. | ||
| 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 we're not that guy. | ||
| See? | ||
| We're compassionate conservatives. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's what Alex's entire career is based on, is being that guy. | ||
| Being the Steve King of radio, or whatever, for Rush and Hannity to be like, I'm not fucking Alex Jones over here. | ||
| All at the same time making people who otherwise would be like, hey, racism is bad. | ||
| Still vote for racist policies by saying team sports, you know? | ||
| Well, we can't vote for Democrat, period. | ||
| No matter what happens. | ||
| They're globalists. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Steve King, who is the one saying the quiet part loud. | ||
| It's fucking... | ||
| It's disgusting how well they do their job and how shittily people... | ||
| God. | ||
| 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 in 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 don't know. | ||
| I guess that's better than your pledge saying, we'll kill you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's a media blitz kind of thing. | ||
| I think probably just trying to get some attention. | ||
| But Alex piggybacks that. | ||
| And he's using it to get himself attention. | ||
| And you'll see that in this next clip. | ||
| Because I want to pledge with you, 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 and legal 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. | ||
| Seems like you like national attention. | ||
| It almost seems like Alex is trying to one-up him, you know? | ||
| Come on! | ||
| He's kind of trying to one-up Stuart. | ||
| Yeah, he still has to do that petty thing of his like... | ||
| Well, I've made pledges before, and that got a lot of national attention. | ||
| I said we're going to succeed. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, your pledge is great, but I mean, my pledge... | ||
| I know, I love your pledge. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I put my life, my treasure, my family on the line. | |
| What have you done, Stuart? | ||
| 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, like, 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is the great victory we have in the Internet. | |
| The freedom of speech on the Internet and on radio is what's turning the tide, and the powers that be know that. | ||
| And it's turning the tide in the ranks. | ||
| I would just encourage people to really focus on the guys with the guns. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is so incredibly important. | |
| You might not get a chance to vote for Rand Paul in 2016. | ||
| Stop looking only at politics. | ||
| Focus on the guys with the guns. | ||
| I just urge you. | ||
| I don't care if you do it through Oath Keepers or how you do it. | ||
| Hand out DVDs. | ||
| Turn them on to your radio show. | ||
| Whatever it takes, wake them up. | ||
| If you want to help us, that's what we're trying to do. | ||
| Pass. | ||
| There's a lot of the guys with the guns. | ||
| God. | ||
| I kind of do want to focus on the guys with the guns, though. | ||
| And I'll tell you why. | ||
| Because they have a lot of guns. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that is... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey. | |
| Not for nothing. | ||
| Responsible gun owners, cool. | ||
| There have been, in the group, there were some really interesting threads by responsible gun owners. | ||
| At the same time... | ||
| This is what I keep trying to tell you. | ||
| At the same time, if you have a lot of guns... | ||
| That's something that should be paid attention to. | ||
| Because there are a lot of guns there. | ||
| Anytime there's a lot of guns anywhere. | ||
| I think it's possible for a person to pay attention to that themselves. | ||
| Like, I think if you recognize, I have a lot of guns, that is kind of, you know, that's something that's a little bit outside of the norm. | ||
| And you keep track of that yourself. | ||
| Go to therapy or whatever. | ||
| Check in on it. | ||
| And you find, you find the like, yeah, it's alright. | ||
| I just like guns. | ||
| I'm safe and responsible about it. | ||
| That is enough. | ||
| Yeah, that's great! | ||
| Keep doing that! | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think that when you say, we want the people with the guns, and you're people like Stuart Rhodes and Alex Jones, you want them for bad reasons. | ||
| I would say, I'd like the people with guns, but not to do anything I want them to do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want them to calm down. | |
| Like, the battle for the hearts and minds of these hypothetical people with guns is like, they're like, get ready. | ||
| The end is coming. | ||
| We will need to fight. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's their angle. | ||
| My angle is, cool it. | ||
| That may be why we're struggling. | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| That may be why we're struggling to get the... | ||
| Because our message is like... | ||
| Wait for the information. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Act on reality. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That is not as much fun as, they're coming for you! | ||
| Get down! | ||
| Totally. | ||
| It's not as fun to wait. | ||
| As it must be to get tons of retweets and stuff speculating about what Jussie Smollett did or didn't do. | ||
| It's not as fun to hang in the back and wait for information to come out and grieve along with America as it is. | ||
| It's much more fun to say, this shit was fake and make more money off it. | ||
| None of the stuff that is the right thing to do in these situations feels good or is the most fun. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's such a reminder, and it never fails to be important to remember. | ||
| The reason that this is so difficult is because we're just big, dumb apes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, in this next clip, Stuart Rhodes and Alex have been talking about the ways that we can get these people with guns to our side. | ||
| And one of the ways that Stuart's talking about it is, like, just find some land outside, like, a barracks and put up a billboard. | ||
| They can't stop you. | ||
| Like, and then everybody, all the soldiers that are there will see the, like, InfoWars billboard or whatever, and then they're in. | ||
| Wow, that's the most terrifying evil strategy I can think of. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then Alex doubles down on it. | ||
| Exactly, folks. | ||
| A few thousand bucks. | ||
| Huge billboard outside the base. | ||
| Savage the enemy. | ||
| Engage them. | ||
| They are attacking us with dead children right now, saying we did it. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| You've got to get back with the truth and hammer them hard, or they're going to win. | ||
| They are, to use military terminology, because that's what this is, we are being overrun right now. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| We have been winning the hearts and minds with the enemy. | ||
| The empire has just struck back. | ||
| That is terrible. | ||
| Alex is being attacked by dead kids. | ||
| Or with dead kids. | ||
| That's garbage. | ||
| That is hot garbage. | ||
| They just... | ||
| And I get it because they've kept winning for such a long time by being evil and stupid. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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 equivalent of guns. | ||
| He's talking about, he has that caller who's like, I'm in globalist houses. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And he's telling them, don't kill the police, go and find the globalists. | ||
| So yeah, presumably what he's talking about is like... | ||
| We get them on our side and they know to go kill Soros. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or whatever. | ||
| 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-da-da-da-da, all that stuff. | ||
| Okay, you realize though that later on, that can be done to you. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| 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 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. | ||
| But that's not how this fucking works, man. | ||
| Like, this is a bad idea. | ||
| It does if you secure a dictatorship. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That's the version of the pendulum getting stuck in the other wall. | ||
| But that's what they're ostensibly fighting against, and it's so fucking obvious. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| It's so obvious that they're not fighting against that. | ||
| No, totally. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That sort of thing. | ||
| You start to look back on this stuff and you see how flimsy and superficial it is. | ||
| You see how it's not based in anything. | ||
| It's mostly distraction tricks. | ||
| It's mostly sleight of hand nonsense. | ||
| It's like, look at this headline, look at this headline, they want to kill you, buy my products. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Even back here, he's not selling products necessarily, but he's still selling subscriptions to like Prison Planet TV and stuff. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| We have to make sure they don't do it, and if in the process we end up doing it, well... | ||
| That'll be what happens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that'll be greater freedom. | |
| Yeah, once we crossed that line, either we go forward into fascism, or we pull back, and since we're lunatics, we will never, ever, ever pull back. | ||
| So, in this next clip, Alex gives a rousing speech about how ideals, they're not as mortal as the flesh. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| He gets pretty into it. | ||
| He gets pretty into it. | ||
| And, of course, the only ideal that he's talking about is I get to keep my guns, everybody gets guns. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But the way this plays out and what he gets to at the end is such a damning indictment of who he is as a person. | ||
| And stop being cowards. | ||
| Oh, they may put me on a list. | ||
| They may come get me. | ||
| Folks, if you give in to that fear, it's over. | ||
| I'm all in. | ||
| I'm with Stuart Rhodes. | ||
| I will never submit to the New World Order. | ||
| I will never go along with them. | ||
| I stand against them no matter what happens. | ||
| And they can kill us individually. | ||
| They can politically destroy us. | ||
| They can assassinate our character, but it's still a fraud. | ||
| God knows who you really are. | ||
| And they can kill your body, but they can't kill your soul. | ||
| And they can't kill your ideas, like V says, after they just spread him with bullets, and he's got the bad guy, the dictator. | ||
| He's got him right there, and he says, flesh and blood can die, but ideas, ideas are bulletproof. | ||
| And that's when you really start living. | ||
| When you step across from the fear and step into an idea. | ||
| Here's my problem. | ||
| If Alex Jones had read the things that he professes to have read, he would have such a better reference for that kind of an idea than V for Vendetta. | ||
| No, come on. | ||
| V for Vendetta. | ||
| That's all you needed to know. | ||
| There are a hundred references you could make very easily about the idea of ideas being immortal and the flesh being weak. | ||
| That sort of thing. | ||
| Your ideas live on past you. | ||
| Oh, yeah, like any of them are greater than V for Vendetta. | ||
| Well, I'm not mad about the idea of using... | ||
| Written by douchebag Alan Moore. | ||
| Who Alex thinks is a Satanist. | ||
| Who Alex thinks... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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, like, 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. | ||
| He's like, it's like V said. | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| Good books are usually harder to read. | ||
| But he says he's read them, is my point. | ||
| Right, but they're also harder to say, then. | ||
| I mean, not necessarily, but the point being... | ||
| If you're good at distilling information down to an accessible chunk, which I think Alex is to a certain extent, he makes complicated subjects very easy to understand. | ||
| He does it poorly. | ||
| Yeah, but he's not going to quote Brothers Karamazov or anything like that. | ||
| Because he can't. | ||
| He could. | ||
| He could lie about it. | ||
| His listeners haven't read it either. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| Any of these things. | ||
| You could just do that. | ||
| It's just like one of the brothers Karamazov said. | ||
| Watch out for bears. | ||
| I wonder about it if it is just a thing where it's like he knows that his audience is borderline illiterate as well. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| And so you appeal to them on the ground that they probably have seen V for Vendetta. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good point. | ||
| That's actually a good idea. | ||
| If it's that, then I understand. | ||
| But at the same time, I would say I pretty much have never heard him accurately cite a book. | ||
| It always goes to movies. | ||
| It's always some sort of a pop culture reference. | ||
| Has he referenced Dune? | ||
| You have. | ||
| Yeah, he has. | ||
| That's the benchmark for high literature. | ||
| He definitely has. | ||
| I doubt he's got any James Joyce quotes in his back pocket. | ||
| I'll say that right now. | ||
| He does know the name, though. | ||
| I've heard him mention Joyce before. | ||
| Alex takes some calls, and he's still got Stuart Rhodes on the phone, but the two of them take some calls, and he gets this call from a guy who's frustrated by the idea of, like, I call the, like, senator's office, and I leave him a message about, you know, like, this is bullshit. | ||
| We need you to be weirder, or whatever. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| Whatever the message, one of Alex's... | ||
| Listeners would give a congressperson. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And so he's frustrated by that. | ||
| Till the week. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then Alex has an interesting suggestion about what he should do with that frustration. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the aides are like, well, I'll pass a comment on him. | |
| I mean, it's just amazing. | ||
| Well, listen, calling him isn't bad. | ||
| It's better to write him a letter. | ||
| It's also better to go when they go to these public speaking events, like at the grocery store of the church, to go and call them out. | ||
| Remember at the original Ron Paul tea parties where the Republicans took them over and gelded them? | ||
| People went and shouted Republicans and Democrats down. | ||
| That's what we need. | ||
| That's what we need. | ||
| Shout people. | ||
| Flash forward to Trump being in office and Alex complaining. | ||
| How dare you not even smile and clap? | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| Complaining about- You disrespect the system! | ||
| The very idea of people doing exactly what he says they need to do now. | ||
| How dare you not give blind fealty to somebody lying to your face? | ||
| 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- No, some people went and bullhorned Tucker Carlson's house. | ||
| How dare you! | ||
| Or they went and yelled at Sarah Huckabee Sanders while she was eating. | ||
| Alex is saying that we need to bullhorn people at speeches or something like that. | ||
| So you could be reasonably like, okay, well, maybe it's a thing about decorum in people's private space. | ||
| Unfortunately, Alex says this. | ||
| Now, we need to go and bullhorn congressmen's houses. | ||
| We need to bullhorn their events. | ||
| We need to put private investigators on them because they're all committing crimes. | ||
| Any gun grabber out there is a mafia trash. | ||
| We need to go put private investigators on people. | ||
| That's targeted harassment. | ||
| Is that even legal? | ||
| I'm not sure it is. | ||
| Can you hire a private investigator to follow your congressman around? | ||
| I don't know what the line is there. | ||
| I really should have looked into it in terms of legality. | ||
| Could we do that? | ||
| I don't think I'd be comfortable with it. | ||
| I feel like we can't, but at the same time... | ||
| If we could, I really think it wouldn't be a bad idea to hire a private investigator on Mitch McConnell. | ||
| Oh, I thought you meant on Alex. | ||
| Legally, I'm not sure what the stance is on this, so I'm reticent to comment. | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| But I will say, from my heart, I would say don't do it, because it invades people's private space. | ||
| Inevitably, you're going to end up finding stuff that has nothing to do with whatever you're curious in, and that's a violation of people that is unnecessary. | ||
| Like, whatever problems you have about Mitch McConnell, for instance, should stay in the political realm, or whatever. | ||
| Like, what if you put a PI on him and you find out he's cheating on his wife? | ||
| Hooray! | ||
| What do you do with that information? | ||
| Tell people. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Fuck that guy. | ||
| That's vindictive of you. | ||
| That's wrong. | ||
| Yeah, I'm fine with that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| If you want to live in that space, cool. | ||
| I don't want to live in that space. | ||
| I'm not going to do it. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| But you would hypothetically do it. | ||
| I hypothetically wouldn't. | ||
| I would not want to know those sorts of things. | ||
| I think the main reason I wouldn't do it is because I couldn't afford it. | ||
| If you could find a PI to just look into, like, financial connections or something like that. | ||
| Then that's more like a researcher or something like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| I find, like, that would be okay. | ||
| Or, like, what an attorney general should be doing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| On the other hand, like, with... | ||
| All you're doing is farming out stocking to a professional, basically. | ||
| Well, yeah, but you leave it up to the professionals because they're going to do a better job of it. | ||
| Right, they're good at stalking. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| They're not comfortable with it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| But Alex 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. | ||
| It blew my mind. | ||
| The gun rights gang insists that it's not about guns, it's about not letting crazy people have guns. | ||
| I agree, and I'd like to propose that crazy should be defined to include anyone who fetishizes guns. | ||
| No, we fetishize tyrants that want to take us over. | ||
| We're obsessed with knowing the history of it. | ||
| He fetishizes tyrants! | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| No shit you do! | ||
| Yeah! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| Yeah, you're not wrong! | ||
| I don't think he knows what the word means, but at the same time, he's expressing the truth. | ||
| Yeah, what does... | ||
| You do fetishize tyrants. | ||
| What does he think he's saying? | ||
| He thinks it means, like, we're enthusiastic against the tyrants. | ||
| Really? | ||
| That's what I think he's trying to express, but no, in reality, you fetishize tyrants. | ||
| Yeah, he's the one who said that Stalin was a complete badass. | ||
| Total stud. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Total stud. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| 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, that 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 Dews made that special report. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We can hang our hat on that. | ||
| Sandy Hook, done. | ||
| Checkmark. | ||
| Yeah, he kind of wants to slip out of it. | ||
| 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 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. | ||
| This is a guy suggesting a conspiracy that Israel did Sandy Hook. | ||
| And Alex is like, look... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They have a general quoted in the article. | ||
| Did they name him? | ||
| And the guy's like, no. | ||
| He's like, look, this is no good. | ||
| And I was like, holy shit, Alex. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What are you doing? | |
| So Alex talks for another minute or so, and then he's like, look, Veterans Today has a great name, and it's a great URL. | ||
| Like, he's jealous of the URL. | ||
| No, that's fair. | ||
| Veterans Today has a great name. | ||
| And then he gets into talking about how they had... | ||
| Like, said he was an asshole in the past. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Petty! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Got it. | |
| I was like, this doesn't really work for him. | ||
| Because in other contexts, he probably would have been like, I'm excited to hear this. | ||
| Yeah, tell me about it. | ||
| It's not like I want to blame Israel, or me speaking as him. | ||
| It's not like he wants to blame Israel, but it would have been interesting. | ||
| But now you bring in the Veterans Today thing. | ||
| If you hadn't said Veterans Today, he would have been like, fuck yeah! | ||
| That takes him into the, like, fuck them part of his brain. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There has not been a ton of what you would call conspiracy shit about this. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| Other than his broader, the government did it, there's not a ton of specifics. | ||
| There's that second shooter stuff. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that's kind of like, eh, you know, that's misreporting that happened early on. | ||
| You don't want to engage with how reporting works. | ||
| Yeah, we're not at like... | ||
| You kind of understand where it comes from, or... | ||
| 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 not there yet. | ||
| We're just at, like, this is bullshit. | ||
| Government did it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then, so here, at the end of this episode, we find the clip where everything changes. | ||
| It is bizarre, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The evidence later came out. | ||
| What about Putin getting elected? | ||
| This thing looks really, really bad. | ||
| So, here's where this becomes untenable. | ||
| This is where this, days later, is taking the turn that I even predicted would come much later. | ||
| The only reason you would bring up something like that is if you're going to suggest that these people aren't real. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Why? | ||
| 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 is 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. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Mr. Talks out both sides of his face. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| We would have much less discomfort with speaking in front of cameras. | ||
| Now, granted, if we were talking about a situation where we had lost loved ones or something like that, maybe we would be right in the same boat. | ||
| How the fuck could you even put yourself in that space to imagine what a supposedly normal reaction would be? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I was bringing our stage preparation and internal intrinsic training in it to bring another variable to it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, even taking that aside, who knows how we would respond to that. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And it is, what, five days later? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Five days later, he is at least speculating that they're fake. | ||
| That they're actors. | ||
| And to your earlier point, what is saying we need to hire private investigators for these people? | ||
| What are you going to find? | ||
| Other than professional harassment. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So for his listeners... | ||
| What if you're a freelance private investigator? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or if you're a listener who can't afford a fucking private investigator, well now you're a private investigator, it's time for you to do some sleuthing and fucking harassing them. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And you're doing it for the greater good because what do you know what you're going to find? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You go and you're trailing this guy with your binoculars. | ||
| You know, you're peeping in his window. | ||
| You see that his kid's still alive. | ||
| Bada bing, bada boom. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Closed case. | ||
| Like, why would you want to investigate this if your suspicion wasn't that they were lying? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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, as we get into that mess a whole bunch, we know that he knows it's real. | ||
| But we keep saying, like, he thinks it's fake. | ||
| But that's just what his narrative is. | ||
| When we say he thinks it's fake, it's what he's telling his audience. | ||
| He knows it's real, and he has from day fucking one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But, if you think... | |
| If you want to present the idea, Then you have to think that there's a... | ||
| It's just so fucking baffling to me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't understand why anybody would do this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Even him. | |
| He's ruined his defensible position by covering this. | ||
| Um... | ||
| We sow the seeds of our own downfall from the very beginning, I guess? | ||
| Perhaps. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know how... | ||
| Poetic it is to... | ||
| Like, from the jump, if your goal is to cast aspersions on literally everything, sooner or later, you're gonna get yourself into fucking trouble. | ||
| If I were Alex Jones in this position, and someone brought me this, like, let's say it's Rob Dew, because he's already in the hopper. | ||
| Hi, Dan! | ||
| Hey, Rob. | ||
| I'm Rob Dew! | ||
| Let's say Rob brings me this video that everyone's suspicious about on the internet, of like, oh, look at him, he's laughing before the interview. | ||
| If you bring that to me, and I'm Alex Jones, and I've already worked for a couple days to build the, it's all about taking our guns, the globalists came in, and they had commando teams and killed the kids or whatever. | ||
| And you are still like totally everyone died. | ||
| That's the rock we're standing on or whatever. | ||
| I would be like, huh. | ||
| Let's not talk about that. | ||
| I'd be like, okay. | ||
| I see how that would be a natural reaction someone might have to immense stress. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Let's punt on this one because we don't need it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It just comes down over and over again to you don't need to do this. | ||
| No, he doesn't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm so frustrated. | |
| I've never felt this way about Alex, like, listening to him, like, just a, stop, stop! | ||
|
unidentified
|
You can do all you need to do without any of this! | |
| I screamed about this on the last episode, and I feel it so much more passionately now. | ||
| This is all unnecessary! | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it's... | ||
| It is impossible for him not to. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| That's the thing that is a fun push-pull there, is that even on some level I'm sure he knows that he doesn't need to do this. | ||
| He's already got his gun defense narrative going on. | ||
| It's the Icarus. | ||
| Somebody eggs him on. | ||
| Somebody's like... | ||
| Hey, what about this? | ||
| And he's like, I'll look into it. | ||
| Or like, hey, what about this? | ||
| And he's like, ah, that sounds right. | ||
| And hey, what about look? | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| I'll go even fucking further than you. | ||
| I've had three people call me telling me to look into this. | ||
| Well, guess who's the master of looking into shit? | ||
| Me. | ||
| It's all fake. | ||
| I look into things. | ||
| Well, he didn't say anything about him being an actor in that last clip. | ||
| He did insinuate it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So now, here's how he ends the show. | ||
| We're going to play a clip from a CNN press conference with Robbie Parker. | ||
| And people that have seen this video, for radio it doesn't really translate. | ||
| We're putting it up at Infowars.com. | ||
| Right now Aaron Dykes is posting it. | ||
| I had this hours ago. | ||
| I've just been so busy I haven't got to it yet. | ||
| We're going to play it on PrisonPlanet.tv. | ||
| And I've seen this before and he's laughing. | ||
| He looks really excited. | ||
| And then he says, do I read off the card? | ||
| And then he walks up like he's an actor and then breaks down on camera. | ||
| I mean, it's like, ha, ha, ha, yeah, ha. | ||
| Oh, I read this card, okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, it's like, whoa, whoa. | |
| And maybe under the stress, that's just what happened. | ||
| And then maybe being in front of the camera, maybe it's, I mean, folks, we got to get private investigators up to Sandy Hook right now. | ||
| Because I'm telling you, this stinks to highest heaven. | ||
| I hate that so much. | ||
| Because it shows such an awareness of what the reality is within the creating suspicion and demonizing a grieving father. | ||
| Maybe that's just how people react to stress. | ||
| You know goddamn well that's the answer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| He knows exactly what the truth is. | ||
| He said the word. | ||
| He came up like an actor. | ||
| And then did his stupid fucking character work about like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like as if to mock... | |
| Whatever reaction he was having. | ||
| And then at the same breath comes in with, I don't know, maybe that's how people respond to high-stress situations. | ||
| But we need private investigators down there. | ||
| This is fucking garbage. | ||
| I didn't expect, I'm pissed a little bit. | ||
| I didn't expect it would come this fast. | ||
| That's crazy to me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I really thought we had the fucking couple weeks. | ||
| Yeah, our investigation might be over. | ||
| It's not over. | ||
| It's not over yet. | ||
| We did four episodes. | ||
| We thought it would be at least a while before he decided that... | ||
| We thought there would be some emotional distance between when he goes from, this is real and it's affecting me, maybe the government did it, but it is still children who died, to, it's all fake. | ||
| Even the people who died, the parents, they're all actors, all of this shit. | ||
| But he's not saying that yet, he's just deeply insinuating. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It happened on Friday. | ||
| That cannot be real. | ||
| This is Wednesday. | ||
| That can't be real. | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| This is crazy to me. | ||
| How did it happen that fast? | ||
| Yeah, but it makes perfect sense. | ||
| No, totally. | ||
| It makes perfect sense. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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's what I was talking about at the beginning of this episode. | ||
| Yeah, you're absolutely right. | ||
| That the propagandist's weapon and their... | ||
| We don't know all the facts. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| 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. | ||
| I don't understand someone doing this who isn't getting paid a lot. | ||
| I know that I can't back that up, and I don't like to speculate about stuff, but 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, someone has to be motivating this. | ||
| See, I'm actually going to go the complete opposite direction. | ||
| There is no way that a reasonable human being could get enough money to make this change that quick. | ||
| I recognize and I totally understand your bafflement at this behavior. | ||
| At the same time, I'm baffled that people kill eight people and eat them. | ||
| You know, like, I'm baffled that the Zodiac Killer was a thing. | ||
| This is not the reasonable human financial interest. | ||
| This is a fucking serial killer. | ||
| Of course you can't understand that. | ||
| But he's so high-functioning in other avenues and other areas. | ||
| So are, like, CEOs. | ||
| So are, like, all the CEOs. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| They're all fucking psychopaths. | ||
| Not all of them. | ||
| That's painting with a massive broad brush. | ||
| I don't disagree. | ||
| 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 these people are actors. | ||
| Right, 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, you know? | ||
| Like, that didn't help his cause. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, the Unabomber didn't need to send those letters. | ||
| That's what got him caught. | ||
| He could have just bombed people. | ||
| Nobody had any idea about that guy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The only difference is that this didn't end Alex's life or career or anything like that. | ||
| It didn't bring any actual consequences. | ||
| So it's not quite like the things that got serial killers caught. | ||
| The Golden State Killer didn't, you know, like that wasn't until recently. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm just saying, this dude is a fucking serial killer. | ||
| I don't disagree with that assessment in terms of 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 and where, like what I know about following Alex and how he, he operates, it really feels like there has to be some deep financial motivation in turning this weird. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
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But then at the same time, he also is beholden to a lot of really bad sources. | |
| So there are people like the Steve Pachenics and shit like that of the world who are in his ear and there could be some like really nefarious influence that hasn't reared their head yet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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We don't know who or what is going on that is motivating this. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think it's weird. | ||
| It's unacceptable. | ||
| Because to me, that smacks of a certain kind of hope, which is a weird way of putting it. | ||
| You want an explanation? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In the way that I see your reaction, it's like, it has to be something more than this guy is just a serial killer. | ||
| Because at the very least, I could understand this guy if it was money. | ||
| Because... | ||
| You and I would never fucking do something like this, no matter what the price tag. | ||
| No. | ||
| But we can understand somebody who would. | ||
| We recognize that those people exist for a price. | ||
| They'll do that. | ||
| But the only problem that I have with that is all the times that we've seen Alex show restraint. | ||
| You know, and those sorts of things. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| And even in that last clip, him giving the awareness of, like, maybe that's just how people respond. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, that is not what you'd expect out of a serial killery mentality. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It would be going full bore or... | ||
| Maybe he's just a bad serial killer. | ||
| Possibly. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe he's just bad at the one thing he's good at. | ||
| And I think that this conversation here that we're having is the reason why this must continue. | ||
| This investigation. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How long did that even take to penetrate? | ||
| Was that an immediate thing? | ||
| It was pretty quick online, yeah. | ||
| I think that interview probably was the night before, if I recall correctly. | ||
| Places like Reddit and conspiracy boards were hopping. | ||
| It was a different time for conspiracy than it is nowadays. | ||
| 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 Zack, his alternative to QAnon, and all that stuff. | ||
| Whereas back then, Alex was kind of like a much bigger deal. | ||
| He was on the Vanguard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I don't feel like him covering this is like him feeling pressure from the conspiracy world to cover it. | ||
| If only because he had other callers who were speculating about other conspiracy stuff, and he shot them down. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| I think your assessment of me wanting an explanation that probably is impossible to ever figure out, I think that's fair. | ||
| I'm still not going to... | ||
| I'm not going to stop looking... | ||
| I didn't ask you to stop looking! | ||
| I understand. | ||
|
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Alright. | |
| I'm just... | ||
| I'm putting a little button. | ||
| I know. | ||
|
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I love you too. | |
| I love you too. | ||
| I'm not going to stop looking for context clues that are possible. | ||
| Because mine ears hear... | ||
| Cha-chings. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| We'll figure it out. | ||
| Until we figure it out. | ||
| I'm bummed out as hell, man. | ||
| It shouldn't have taken this little time. | ||
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It really shouldn't have. | |
| Every other one of our investigations has been like, wow, we're six months into this. | ||
| And this is a big investigation, too, in terms of life-changing events for him. | ||
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Yep. | |
| And it took 20 seconds for him to speculate that it was fake or whatever and then find his bearings and still say that it's real and these people were killed and I believe the official story of it and it's so sad to all these folks and then now five days after he's already comfortable speculating that people were actors. | ||
| He used the word actor even in that last clip. | ||
| I can't. | ||
|
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Fuck him. | |
| Like, if I were to put myself in that kind of headspace of... | ||
| And I'll never. | ||
| But, like, the idea of... | ||
| 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 use that video as a proof that nobody in my family died, you would almost certainly have all kinds of shit. | ||
| There's no way that I could have any control over my reaction. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That's bananas. | ||
| That's bananas. | ||
| 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 a 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. | ||
| And you're like, you don't fucking know. | ||
| I mean, that even came up when we were covering the Anders Breivik episode. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| The second shooter, alleged second shooter, was a kid who was a victim on Utoya Island who people thought didn't respond. | ||
| Traumatized enough. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That sort of thing. | ||
| Traumatized enough is the best way to... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I mean, yeah, that mentality is... | ||
| There's a lot of it, and it's bad. | ||
| Anyway, I hate this. | ||
| I hate it, too. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I don't want to do that. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| And I don't think our audience really wants us to do that either. | ||
| And if they do, sorry. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| But we have a website. | ||
| We do have a website, Dan. | ||
| You do. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We're on Twitter. | ||
| We are on Twitter. | ||
| Our handle is at knowledge underscore fight. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| We're on Facebook. | ||
| We even have a Facebook group called Go Home and Tell Your Mother You Rebellion. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Anything else? | ||
| iTunes. | ||
| We are on iTunes. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| You can download, subscribe, leave a review. | ||
| All those good things can be done. | ||
| People still leaving reviews. | ||
| It's very kind of you. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I would say that of this episode, the imaginary second shooters at Sandy Hook did not kill anybody. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I can say that because they don't exist. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But there's one guy who technically probably has killed a guy. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| And his name is Alex Jones. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
| Alex, I'm a first time caller. | ||
|
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I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |