Today, Dan and Jordan continue their investigation into Alex Jones' reportage in the aftermath of the tragedy of Sandy Hook. As the new year begins, Alex is still deep in his "gun paranoia" holding pattern, but thankfully he keeps things interesting by telling a weird story about his past brush with Hollywood and interviewing a major player in the rise of militias in the early 1990's.
I got fired in violation of labor laws, which it turns out exists.
Even if you're not in a union.
And the main reason that I can't tell all the story under advice from people, but I can name names.
And I can tell you that the guy at the National Labor Relations Board...
It was incredibly helpful.
And after we had done all the affidavit and all that stuff, and everything was signed away and all good to go, I was like, hey, I just want to make sure I'm a comedian, I'm a public figure, I talk about stuff, I'm sure this is fine to talk about, right?
And he's like, yeah.
I wouldn't talk too many specifics, but let me tell you something.
It wouldn't be a bad idea to tell people about the National Labor Relations Board and what it is we do for workers all across this nation.
If you're out there listening and you're thinking, hey, I'd like to support the show and what these guys do, I like this show, you can do that by going to our website, knowledgefight.com, clicking that button that says support the show.
So I knew that Alex had recently learned, or the world had been reported in February, that he was going to have to sit for a deposition in his Sandy Hook defamation lawsuit.
One of the really frustrating things about studying Alex Jones and taking him in his own linear path is that he never gives you what you think you're going to get.
Yeah, and so, you know, we jumped into middle December 2012 expecting to have a fair amount of coverage of Sandy Hook and for it to go on a while.
And it just goes on for a couple days where he gets pretty irresponsible, says it's a false flag, suggests that people are actors, sort of abandons that entirely, and then just starts trying to agitate people towards fear that the globalists are taking their guns, which will lead to a civil war.
He stays in that holding pattern until the end of 2012.
I've done a lot of soul searching and I want to commit to you in this year that I'm going to put out the greatest output of information and of the highest quality that we have ever produced.
So, yeah, he's making these classic vague pronouncements of the new year.
He doesn't make another documentary because the last one that he ever put out, and that's a stretch calling it a documentary, was that strategic relocations.
It's just basically a really long interview he did with Joel Skousen where he's sitting in the studio with him and he's talking about where you can bug out to and shit like that.
And then he keeps saying that she has said, Mr. and Mrs. America, get ready to turn in your guns.
And in order to justify that, he plays a, like, years and years old clip of Dianne Feinstein talking about in the past, if she was able to get a bill through that would have taken everyone's guns, she would have done that, but she couldn't do it then.
Right off the bat, there's the problem that he's saying that Wikipedia has a link to it, which suggests that his research process was just to make sure there was something on Wikipedia about the memo, then forget that there's a second step that he needs to make.
The second problem is that if you read the Wikipedia entry about this...
The second paragraph on the page.
You just get down to the second paragraph.
You find an explanation that, one, Larry Summers didn't write the memo.
Two, the guy who did write it insists that in its proper context, the memo was meant to be satirical and a means to prompt intra-departmental debate.
And three, the version of the memo that was leaked in 1992 was doctored specifically to remove context to make it seem like those proposals that were being made were serious.
Quote, I strongly recommended that he say I had written it and that he had just signed it.
Larry said no, that wasn't his style.
Whatever he signed, he would take responsibility for.
And he took the flack.
In 2001, Pritchett spoke to the Harvard Magazine and specifically laid out what had happened.
Basically, the summation of his explanation is this.
Summers had requested that he read over the World Bank's Global Economic Prospects Report, which was largely about trade liberalization that year.
He was then tasked with writing a memo to Summers analyzing the arguments, which ended up being seven pages long.
One of the points Pritchard found dubious was the World Bank's argument that free trade would naturally and specifically, like automatically, lead to environmental benefits in developing countries.
Quote, Thereafter, Pritchard says, someone with access to the memo doctored it, combined the heading and the sentences on pollution and toxic waste, shorn of their context and the intended irony.
This one-page form, appearing to be a policy proposal, the memo then found its way into the pages of The Economist.
The version of the memo that Alex has read is the doctored one-page version, not the version that is the actual memo.
All he knows is that there's a Wikipedia article about it, and that's good enough for him.
He has no idea.
He's read the propaganda version of this from 1992, as opposed to the real version, and he claims that he's a scholar.
It would explain his weird anti-sex worker, anti-porn bias.
Because he was rejected from entrance into that world after the great star turns in Tommy Pallotta and Richard Linklater movies where he played Crazy Man with Bullhorn in two movies.
Beautiful black hair, green eyes, just perfect complexion, perfect proportions.
She goes to California because everybody told her she ought to be a movie star.
She was so pretty.
She was so Is this the story of the Black Dahlia?
Whoa!
That was fast!
Where else?
Had an economy, found a man, had a business, would have had children, would have had a life, would have been a grandmother, would have fully fulfilled her destiny of being a wholesome human.
But Alex is trying to make that argument, and so he starts talking about how there are, like, I don't even really know how he gets into it, but he starts telling stories about how back when he was a kid outside of Dallas, he'd go to the poor black areas of town in order to buy beer.
I'm not really honestly sure how that relates to the larger theme of the conversation, but it has to do with, like, mafias making these areas of town bad, and, like, the police are in with the mafias.
He's saying he exploited the terrible situation that these neighborhoods were in, that they didn't card people for alcohol, that sort of thing, without realizing that he's talking about sort of exploiting the very situation he's claiming to lament.
And it gets worse as this clip goes on where he talks about going to buy beer in these communities.
But a hundred times or more, I'd jump in the back of the pickup truck with my older buddies and we'd drive into South Dallas.
You could hear guns going off in the background quite a few times and people try to mug you and everything else just to get beer so we could have a party and get the cheerleaders over.
The problem that I have is he's not really dealing with even the scenario that he's painting.
And he just got done talking about how Hollywood chews up and exploits these impressionable young women.
And then he's talking about going to an impoverished community so he could buy beer to take it back to the rich place to lure cheerleaders to his house.
Yeah.
So, I don't understand exactly where the disconnect is there.
If you were 21 and it was your 21st birthday and you're talking and you're like, I remember when I was 15 and we used to do that, then it's like, eh, get out of here.
Especially when you can manipulate time back and forth.
So yeah, I don't know.
It's weird.
And in this next clip, Alex goes back to that metaphor that he was making about America being this young lady who's turned out by Hollywood and ends up as a prostitute who no one wants to have sex with and dies of heroin overdoses.
In the back of a flat with bed bugs feeding on us and cigarette burns and cuts all over us and almost all the hair is falling out and she's got double black eyes and the pimp is running a needle up into her vein to give her an overdose and get rid of her.
That's how they get rid of him.
He's running.
But see, we haven't quite gotten to that point.
There's always a point where the hooker goes, I'm going back to Kansas.
He's grasping at straws in terms of trying to figure out exactly what the narrative is about Sandy Hook, quite frankly.
He's already said that he's certain it's a false flag and the government did it, all that stuff.
But then in terms of this, he's still...
Unclear how to explain Lanza's role in it.
Because there's documentation of him existing before, and there's plenty of information that's available that he can't just make disappear.
So he has to still contextualize it somehow, and I guess the way he's choosing to, at least as of the beginning of January here, is he's already laid the foundation of the psych meds and video games and stuff like that.
Obama's a puppet too, but they want him to do it because the left loves it when he orders torture or wireless wiretapping or murdering people and U.S. military invading all over Africa, every African country.
I mean, they think that's really cool because he's...
Part black.
And I mean, it's just, it's cool.
I mean, it's like, I mean, he's, I mean, his dad was reportedly Kenyan or part Kenyan.
I mean, it's over.
I mean, he could poach the brains of small children and eat them for breakfast.
It'd be beautiful.
Because, I mean, look, he's got melanin in his skin.
But what he's describing, I think, is actually a fair point, but very poorly said, and the other point that he's making is incorrect.
The idea that Barack Obama can get away with these things because he's black is a deeply racist view.
But what he is pointing to...
Or at least I think he's trying to point to is the idea that probably a lot of middle-of-the-road Democrats didn't do a good job of keeping Obama's feet to the fire and demanding more out of him than he was delivering.
And I don't think that's a function of his ethnicity at all.
I think it's a function of them being on the team.
So Bob Fletcher is just one more in a long line of Alex Jones' guests who claims that they were deeply mixed up in the Iran-Contra affair.
It's kind of like how every comic you've ever met has that story about that one gig they almost got that would have changed the course of their career.
After Iran-Contra Special Prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh deemed Bob not worth his time, Bob decided that the Iran-Contra hearings were a charade and decided to head out to the woods in Montana.
And has made frequent appearances on Coast to Coast AM to discuss how this rogue planet is heading our way and how the elites are building underground cities to stay safe from its return.
It's at least decently done, like, MS Paint or whatever.
Okay, okay.
So that's this guy's career, but that's not nearly all he's been into.
And in this next clip, we get to hear a little bit from Bob, and he gives his own bio.
Alex gave him that bio.
Bob wants you to know something else about him.
unidentified
First off, some miscellaneous random notes that I made for myself for this morning's program just hit right on the head exactly what you've been saying.
I mean, it looks like you've been looking at my notes.
It's kind of like, well, I don't have to do anything because Alex has already covered it.
I mean, verbatim, almost word for word.
I'm making this assumption.
You realize that I myself was one of the primary people in creating what was the militia of the patriot movement.
And certainly not taking all the credit because there was a lot of people involved.
So, Fletcher was an early member and leader within the Militia of Montana, one of the first militia groups to form in the aftermath of the Waco standoff in 1993.
Previous to their formation, in response to the Ruby Ridge standoff, John Trochman, the actual guy who started the Militia of Montana, attended a meeting at a YMCA in Estes Park, Colorado, that would go on to be known as the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous, a conference where the modern militia movement was born.
160 self-described Christian men who were all very white met to discuss their discomfort about how the federal government was behaving, particularly as it related to Randy Weaver, the central figure of Ruby Ridge.
Before this point, a lot of the things that we've come to experience as being deeply interconnected, like white supremacist groups or tax protester groups or Christian identity groups or just vaguely but intensely anti-government groups, were not generally working together.
Extremists existed in those categories previously.
They're often unwilling to collaborate in any meaningful way.
This 1992 meeting in Colorado was an attempt to solve that problem.
His ministry largely centered on his argument that homosexuals should be put to death as he laid out in a booklet he wrote called Death Penalty for Homosexuals.
What grew out of that meeting was a strategy that now, 27 years later, we can see was probably pretty effective.
From Stephen Atkins' book, The Encyclopedia of Right-Wing Extremism in Modern American History.
Quote, The people drawn to these armed civilian militias would be mostly white, middle-class individuals who were not necessarily racist or anti-Semitic, but rather anxious and uncertain about the economy and their future.
As it turns out, some excuses for bigotry never stop being effective.
All of the ideas discussed at this meeting that was literally crawling with some of the worst of the worst in terms of white terrorism would be completely at home on any of Alex's shows from any point in his career.
All of these ideas are very close to Alex's milieu.
In attendance at this 1992 meeting was Louis Beam, then a representative of the Aryan Nations.
You may recall that Beam was the guy who came up with the concept or popularized the concept of the leaderless resistance, which Alex talked about being a part of in the mid-90s.
But we have the force, we have the capacity, we have the will, and we will not surrender!
We are the ones engaged in the force multiplication special ops.
We're the ones galvanizing organizations.
We're the ones with leaderless resistance.
We're the ones conducting a counter-terrorism sting operation against you, Bill Clinton, you traitor, you globalist agent, and you, Governor Bush, from your CIA, Brown and Harriman brother, banker, oil family.
We got your numbers, and we're galvanized, and we are moving forward.
And I'm only the messenger, and you be fully aware.
Eleven years prior to that 1992 meeting, Louis Beam was sued by the SPLC and forced to disband his 2,500-member Texas Emergency Reserve Militia, which he was training to, quote, reclaim this country for white people.
These people were very explicit about what they were about.
You know who else was at that Rocky Mountain rendezvous?
Larry Pratt, head of gun owners for America.
Someone who Alex had on his show as a guest twice in the week after Sandy Hook.
Pratt is said to have been the strongest proponent of the strategy moving forward being the formation of, quote, unorganized militias, which followed Beam's leaderless resistance ideology, thus making them almost impossible to infiltrate.
Larry Pratt was one of 160 people who were at this Rocky Mountain rendezvous where all of these...
The representatives from the Klan, Aryan nations, other neo-Nazi groups, Christian identity, tax protester extremists, all came together to strategize, along with Louis Beam.
Really bums me out because if that was the plot of a warrior-style road movie where, you know, you've got a small group of non-white nationalist small gang, right?
They go to this meeting.
They realize what's going on almost immediately.
Everybody locks the doors.
So now they've got to fight their way out through each different gang.
The Klan is all wearing white hoods.
The Aryan Brotherhood or whatever it is they wear.
As I mentioned earlier, a man named John Trochman was also in attendance at the Rendezvous.
He would go on to start the militia of Montana in January of 1994, or at least that's when it officially formed, but almost certainly existed previously underground.
Though they did occasionally take up arms and storm a courthouse, as they did in March 1995, most of the militia of Montana's work was on the information warfare side of things.
They were less paramilitary in nature and more of a mail-order militia.
They were like the publisher's clearinghouse for militia groups to get videos on how to start your own militia.
To quote Daryl Johnson, the author of that DHS report about the right-wing terrorism and how he was warning about that back in 2009, that report that got suppressed after organizing.
I mean, it puts things into perspective a little bit.
The idea that Alex is so vociferously defending these patriot militia types, when you realize a lot of the people he's actually involved with are the people who were the ones who started this.
So the militia of Montana, like I said, it was more of a mail order situation where they had the information side of things down.
But make no mistake, the militia of Montana was an out-and-out hate group.
The materials they distributed included a ton of white supremacist publications, work by Holocaust deniers, and plentiful articles referring to Judaism as the, quote, synagogue of Satan.
Trachman was a committed member of the Aryan nation before starting the militia, but tried to downplay that part of his life, most likely as part of the message that came out of the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous.
In order to win people over to our side, we have to pretend we're not racists and Nazis.
In an interesting turn of events, Trockman was kicked out of the militia of Montana sometime after 2006.
His brother kicked him out because he had cheated on his wife, which led Trockman to start a new organization called the Coalition for Men's Rights, which is basically a support group for men who had restraining orders against them for abusing their wives.
The Montana militia used shortwave radio and early message boards on the internet to rally the masses and let them know about the noble fight the patriots were waging against their oppressive federal government.
From an April 1995 article in The Guardian.
In speech after speech, they issue dire warnings of the coming threat.
Citing the Brady Bill, which obliges Americans to wait five days before purchasing a gun, and the 1994 ban on limited number of assault weapons, the leaders urge their audience to read the writing on the wall.
Gun control is only for one thing, they say.
People control.
According to the militia, it's all part of a wider and undeniable trend.
The government is now at war with the people.
Whether it be excessive taxes, expanding regulation, or planned national identity cards, Washington is constructing the apparatus of dictatorship.
McVeigh's actions completely derailed the militia community, in no small part because he was an embodiment of exactly what they had preached needed to happen.
But as soon as he actually existed, all the militia heads started making excuses and blaming everyone else.
The head of the Michigan militia tried to concoct a conspiracy blaming the Japanese as retaliation for...
Somewhat, but it also is indicative of the level of identity crisis that Timothy McVeigh had introduced into the...
The real face of what right-wing extremism was about had been revealed, although the attendees of Rocky Mountain Rendezvous tried so hard to conceal it.
And thus, recruitment went on the decline.
But, of course, the ones who did come around after that point were substantially more radical than the recruits had been previously.
So, this is the point where I'm getting a little bit, maybe I'm drawing connections that might be a little bit of a leap, but I don't think they are.
I'm not entirely sure, but I'll let you be the judge.
This is a woefully simplistic and CliffsNotes version of the story, but when you look at the players, you look at the motivations, you look at the connections, I find it hard not to come away with one very strong conclusion.
In the early 90s, the militia of Montana and the Michigan militia existed in a symbiotic state.
The Montana group got the message out and radicalized people through media, like shortwave radio and what have you.
The Michigan group gave them formal training.
Alex Jones is clearly at least a spiritual extension of the militia of Montana, as he is a media mouthpiece that spreads the narrative, disseminates propaganda, and radicalizes people towards the harder stuff, towards that paramilitary group that will give them the training that they need to become...
But the question is a little bit more complicated than just saying, like, it's this guy, or whatever.
Though the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous happened in 1992, it was before the election that year.
The militias did not officially begin their organization until mid-1993 into early 1994 after the election of Bill Clinton, the first Democrat president since 1981.
If you take Carter out of the equation, Clinton was the first Democratic president since LBJ and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
The rise of militias was as much about preemptively fighting against any further expansion of human rights to non-white citizens as it was about anything else.
But they were too hard and they were too fast and they overplayed their hand with Timothy McVeigh.
Whether or not it's like they intentionally sent him out to do that.
After the bombing of the Murrah building, the government was forced to pay attention to militia activity, and it hurt their ability to do much more than produce propaganda.
The Montana militia, living on through Alex, kept the embers burning until the time was right.
In 2008, Barack Obama was elected, and in the same way that the militias organized and met up to plan their strategies in Estes Park back in 1992, in early 2009, 30 far-right weirdos planned a summit on Jekyll Island in Georgia to plan their next moves in their struggle against the government.
A Democrat had been elected, and thus the time was right again to form their militaristic ranks.
I don't think there's a coincidence in there.
I really don't.
Because I think what you have with these groups is when there's a Republican in office, they know that whatever they care about isn't going to be infringed upon.
The window of discourse becomes so much closer to what they're into that why not just engage in the civil process?
The Jekyll Island meeting was organized by Alex Jones' frequent guest Bob Schultz of the We the People Foundation.
It was co-organized by another of Alex's guests, Edwin Vieira.
Another person who was there was Eric Cunningham, a representative of the Oath Keepers, the group in which Alex finally found the Michigan militia to his militia of Montana.
The Jekyll Island meeting involved planning how to radicalize town hall meetings that were being held around the country.
Tea parties were beginning to happen, and a perfect opportunity for recruitment was right there on the table, something that Alex and his Oathkeeper buddy, Stuart Rhodes, have openly discussed on the show in the past.
The meeting also involved learning from the lessons of the past.
Timothy McVeigh screwed things up for the militias for a long time and forced them into a position where they had to construct elaborate conspiracy theories to pretend his attack wasn't exactly what they wanted to happen.
But the problems of McVeigh also provided them with an unexpected benefit.
Because they'd spent years insisting the OKC bombing was a conspiracy, they'd created a built-in defense for any future events that could derail their movement.
When one of their members would inevitably take their anti-government message seriously, they had a built-in excuse to say that it's the globalists trying to make us look right.
I think that's where we find ourselves in 2012.
I think it explains a good bit of Alex's operation, to a certain extent, and how deeply entrenched he is in a lot of this militia history and seeing himself as a part of it.
But I also think that he's such a complete crazy that it obviously doesn't explain everything.
He has so many different places that he's pulling these negative influences from.
But I think that this is a huge one.
And I think...
I think on some level it goes back to even the beginning of his career.
Is it possible that these organizations that we're talking about, you know, we've theorized and all that stuff about some kind of dark money coming into his operation.
Is it possible that these organizations are the ones that kind of help prop him up?
Like, people who were of those communities probably looked to Alex as another voice in the media of their side.
So I think that there's probably material support in that way.
But, like, Alex only got on the air in, like, what, 95 or so?
And by that point, like, when OKC happened, a lot of these two big ones, especially the Montana militia and the Michigan militia, both lost a lot of their clout.
Like, you know, after 2009, after the Oath Keepers start coming in together, like, this is starting to be a group that can, you know, throw around money sometimes.
And 100% is surrounded by fascists, surrounded by bigots, Nazi-adjacent people.
And does his damnedest to make sure that you pretend that they're not those things in order to keep the appearances up so you can get more people in.
I think that's probably one of the biggest pieces of this.
I don't know.
There's a lot more here, and I think we're only just now starting to get into some of the glimpses of Alex's militia leanings.
And one of the reasons for that is I think it's probably a huge piece of his show in the era that we don't have...
I think if we went back to the 90s, I mean, we have just a small glimpse of stuff from the 90s, and in that glimpse is him literally saying, we are the ones with a leaderless resistance in the mid-90s.
So, like, the idea that I have, my working theory, is a lot of those episodes that we can't find would probably be very deeply soaked in malicious stuff.
And completely, like a lot of those guests even, like from that world, were probably fixtures of his show back then.
And now it's not so much.
He's grown and evolved.
And now we have, in the wake of Sandy Hook, you have, I mean, not that he wasn't a guest at other points, but you have Larry Pratt on twice.
In the week after Sandy Hook.
One of the guys who was at the fucking Rocky Mountain Rendezvous.
In the same week, he has Stuart Rhodes on twice.
The Oath Keepers guy, who is...
More or less, whether you like it or not, essentially an equivalent to the Michigan militia.
Because if you really look at it, what do you have?
You have a bunch of people from the Oath Keepers who, maybe it's not what the organization is about, but I can come up off the top of my head with at least five people who tried to plan terrorist attacks who were a part of the Oath Keepers.
And then you had Timothy McVeigh and Nichols, both at least attended meetings of the Michigan militia.
There are parallels that are very important and very...
So you have these guests who are gun-supporting weirdos, but there's also more to it than that.
And then now we have on January 2nd, as Alex has pivoted away from it being about Sandy Hook, and now it's about the exact same ideas that these militias were putting out in the 90s.
You know, this idea that the government's coming to take your guns and there's going to be a civil war, this is very much what the militias were saying after Ruby Ridge.
So, of course, what does he do?
He has one of the fucking main guys from the Montana militia on his show and doesn't bring up that he was one of the leaders of the militia of Montana.
He says that he was a whistleblower about Iran-Contra, when none of that is substantiated in any way.
But what is, is in the aftermath of Oklahoma City, Bob Fletcher, this guy who Alex has on his show, you know what his comment was?
So, I think that Alex is showing his cards a little bit too much.
And maybe I'm making a mountain out of a molehill.
And I...
It's not a molehill, but it might not be a mountain.
It might be a hill-mountain situation.
But if you look at this, I don't see any way to escape the fact that the influences of Alex are all present in the early parts of the militia movement in the early 90s.
This explosion of white nationalist militias and fucking murderers and all of that shit, it wouldn't be as often, I don't think.
I could be wrong, but we wouldn't see as much consistent violence if there weren't some sort of concerted ideology that ties all of these people together, and we would be able to do more if they had actual...
I mean, if the organizations that were doing the, you know, I don't know, let's say when one of the Oath Keepers, that guy was found with like a napalm bomb in his garage.
Yes, I just wanted to let you know that I've been speaking with you for over, listening to your program for over two years now, and nobody has ever called in to tell you what I'm going to tell you right now.
There are secret sleeper cells all over the country that are ready and willing to take charge of the situation, and I'm not talking about kicking people's doors in, all right?
So the other thing, too, is that, Alex, at the end there, is like, you're just calling in and saying that you're police.
We don't know who you are.
More than two, at least, callers previous to this have said that they're police and said things that Alex likes and things he wants to hear, so he automatically believed them.
He's only questioning this guy in any way because he's questioning Alex.
This is how you play the game with him.
You say what he wants you to say and everything goes fine.
You get out of pocket and he will actually respond to whatever you're saying like a normal human being might.
So this throws a little bit of a wrench in the gears, and Alex spins his wheels quite a bit, trying to deal with the fact that one of his callers has called him out, and he forgot to hit the dump button.
And I understand people's reluctance to do things like that when people confront you.
Like, I watched that Jacob Wall documentary, and the whole thing is him and Laura Loomer going around with an affidavit that they want Alain Omar to sign saying that she didn't marry her brother, right?
There's no trap here, but Alex is so defensive and weird that because this guy is critiquing the possibility that he isn't the patriot hero that he presents himself as, he's got to respond in kind.
I think that maybe there's a subconscious sliver that's about that.
Masculinity issue.
But I think it comes down to more, like, loyalty to the country and how dare anyone impugn...
And to be fair to this guy, whatever answer Alex could have given him is something he said on air a million times before, like swearing an oath to the Constitution.
So, anyway, in this next clip, Alex says something that kind of is the sort of thing that makes people like that last caller who is in a terrorist cell waiting to be activated somewhere in America think that Alex isn't on the up and up.
Knowing a lot of the criticisms that are thrown around about Alex in these communities online, these message boards, one of the issues that they have is that he constantly talks about having family and intelligence and stuff like that.
He constantly talks about family being in CIA and shit like that and vaguely referencing things.
He talks about his dad being a CIA dentist and all this shit.
That's the sort of stuff that makes these paranoid, real militia types, like the people who are...
The descendants of the Michigan militia, let's say.
They are suspicious of people like that who have familial ties to the intelligence organizations that they see as part of the enemy, part of what's trying to infiltrate them.
We can back them off again, and that's how Alex ends the show.
If we get the word out, we can win this again.
That's not what they did in the 90s.
They didn't get the word out in the 90s.
What Bob Fletcher was involved in was not getting the word out.
You could make a decent argument that the militia of Montana was less violently oriented than some of the others.
And that's probably why Alex would have Bob Fletcher on as opposed to someone from the Michigan militia or something like that.
his more comfort with someone who wears that uniform as opposed to someone who wears the other one.
But make no mistake about it, all of it grew out of the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous that was lousy with Nazis, Aryans, white supremacists, and people who didn't Wanted to blow up federal buildings, quite frankly.
And I think it would be probably impossible for us to, at any point, do an episode where we fully captured the militia movement in the 90s and how it relates to Alex and the consequences thereof and the parallels between 2009 and 1993.
Like, those sorts of things.
It would be something that would be a doctorate-level dissertation.
I purposefully gave him the intro of somebody who is involved with Iran-Contra, as opposed to giving the man's full credits, which include incitement to violence in all kinds of senses.
Like, it's something that you do kind of wish you could tap into from time to time with these guys where they're like, yeah, I'm just going to write a book about being a pickup artist now with no...
No research, no nothing, no history.
I'm not going to do any fucking work at all.
I'm just going to say a bunch of dumb shit because I know I'm the smartest human being on the planet.
Like, that's something you wish you could tap into when you needed it.
It's an unbridled level of confidence that is there.
And there's another little piece to it, too, and that is that I need to do much more research into this to make this claim like...
Very solidly.
But it does appear that the militia of Montana was like, you know, they were a mail-order kind of operation where they were selling these DVDs and informational things.
And I'm excited to see if any of this pops up going down the road here in the beginning of January or how Alex tries to navigate this really treacherous water that he finds himself in in early 2013.