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March 15, 2019 - Knowledge Fight
01:41:25
#276: January 1-2, 2013

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.

Participants
Main voices
a
alex jones
08:54
d
dan friesen
01:07:08
j
jordan holmes
20:57
Appearances
Clips
p
pastor david manning
00:02
| Copy link to current segment

Speaker Time Text
alex jones
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.
alex jones
I love you.
dan friesen
Hey, everybody.
Welcome back to Knowledge Fight.
I'm Dan.
jordan holmes
I'm Jordan.
dan friesen
We're a couple dudes like to sit around, drink novelty beverages, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones.
jordan holmes
Oh, indeed we are, Dan.
dan friesen
Jordan.
Jordan.
jordan holmes
When was the last time you were illegally fired by a millionaire?
dan friesen
Uh...
I feel like every time I've been fired, it's been called for.
jordan holmes
Yeah.
dan friesen
And no one...
I don't know the monetary status of the people who have fired...
jordan holmes
Like, personal?
dan friesen
Well, I don't know if I've worked for millionaires.
jordan holmes
Yeah, see?
dan friesen
I know I've worked for some people who have postured as millionaires, for sure.
unidentified
Right.
jordan holmes
At the car wash, I assume.
unidentified
No, no, that guy postured as a 20,000 pair.
jordan holmes
Yeah, your immediate supervisor?
unidentified
No, no, no.
jordan holmes
No, not...
dan friesen
I worked for a guy who owned a sandwich...
unidentified
Uh-huh.
dan friesen
Called WG Grinders.
I guess he didn't own the place, but he was the franchise owner.
jordan holmes
WG Grinders?
unidentified
Uh-huh.
dan friesen
WG Grinders.
jordan holmes
That sounds like a robber baron in the 1920s.
dan friesen
Yep, it does.
It was one of my earlier job experiences.
I was very young in the...
There's a place with, you know, they make the toasted sandwiches.
They were one of the early places that had that, like, that Quiznos-style toast.
jordan holmes
Hey, hey, don't use brand names here.
dan friesen
So, yeah, WG Grinders.
That guy, my boss there postured like he was pretty rich.
I don't know if he was, though.
I guess.
I mean, where else have I been fired from?
So many places.
jordan holmes
I'll tell you what, I've only ever been fired from one place.
dan friesen
Bob Goodrich, the guy who ran Goodrich Theaters.
jordan holmes
Oh, Goodrich Theaters.
dan friesen
He didn't fire me, but I'm sure he was a millionaire.
jordan holmes
But it's got to be direct.
I got it direct from the source.
dan friesen
I know you want to fucking talk about it.
Just go ahead.
jordan holmes
No, I don't want to talk about it.
dan friesen
You're a son of a bitch.
unidentified
Are you serious?
jordan holmes
No, of course not.
dan friesen
Okay.
jordan holmes
Absolutely not.
I was fired on Tuesday, Dan.
I know I've told you the story.
I was fired on Tuesday.
dan friesen
I feel like the people want to hear the story.
jordan holmes
I would assume so.
By Scott Kluth.
Who is the boyfriend of one of the real housewives of New York?
dan friesen
I didn't know as we started this that you were going to be naming names.
jordan holmes
Oh, hell yeah, I'm naming names.
dan friesen
No, I'm deeply uncomfortable.
jordan holmes
Oh, I don't have a fucking problem here.
dan friesen
The opinions voiced by Jordan do not necessarily represent those of Knowledge Fight LLC.
jordan holmes
We are not an LLC.
Which is why you don't even need to worry about it.
They're coming after me.
You got nothing in here.
dan friesen
So you got fired.
jordan holmes
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.
dan friesen
Hashtag not sponsored.
jordan holmes
And it was like I heard swelling music come up behind him.
His speech was written by Aaron Sorkin, Dan.
dan friesen
Yeah.
So this is a plug.
Because we're walking down a hall as he told you this.
jordan holmes
Exactly.
This is a walk and talk.
dan friesen
Yeah.
jordan holmes
This is a plug for the National Labor Relations Board.
dan friesen
Look it up.
See if you're fucked over.
This guy is doing good work.
jordan holmes
He's doing good work.
dan friesen
So yeah, you know, it's perfect timing in the world that I would be in the middle of trying to move while you get fired.
jordan holmes
Yeah.
dan friesen
And enter a very complicated process.
jordan holmes
Legal dispute?
unidentified
Yeah.
jordan holmes
Can't be more exciting in our lives right now.
dan friesen
Times are good at Knowledge Fight HQ.
jordan holmes
Yeah.
dan friesen
Keeping our spirits high.
One of the things that helps us keep our spirits high.
jordan holmes
That is a good point.
dan friesen
Is that there are a lot of people out there who are signing up to support our show and what we do, and we appreciate it very much.
So let's give a shout out.
Do some people who have signed up to support the show.
First, I'd like to say thank you to Eric.
You are now a policy wonk.
alex jones
I'm a policy wonk.
dan friesen
Thank you, Eric.
jordan holmes
Thank you very much, Eric.
dan friesen
Next, Heather.
Thank you so much.
You are now a policy wonk.
alex jones
I'm a policy wonk.
dan friesen
Thank you, Heather.
jordan holmes
Thank you, Heather.
dan friesen
Next, Amanda.
You are now a policy wonk.
alex jones
I'm a policy wonk.
dan friesen
Thank you, Amanda.
jordan holmes
Thanks, Amanda.
dan friesen
Next, Rob with two B's.
You are now a policy wonk.
alex jones
I'm a policy wonk.
dan friesen
Thank you, Rob.
jordan holmes
You know what the second B is?
That's fucking Rob Stark is what that is.
unidentified
Could be.
dan friesen
Or the second B could be for badass.
jordan holmes
That's nice.
dan friesen
Badass policy wonk, Rob.
jordan holmes
What's the first B for?
dan friesen
I'm not sure.
jordan holmes
Okay.
dan friesen
Probably bagels.
Like bagels in the morning.
Finally, I'd like to say thank you to somebody who took their donation and bumped it up to a little higher level, and we appreciate it very much.
So, Caleb, thank you so much.
You are now a technocrat.
alex jones
I'm a policy wonk.
Go home to your mother and tell her you're brilliant.
pastor david manning
Someone sodomite sent me a bucket of poop.
alex jones
Daddy Shark.
Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop.
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.
dan friesen
Thank you so much, Caleb.
jordan holmes
Thank you very much, Caleb.
dan friesen
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.
We would appreciate it.
jordan holmes
Please do.
It would be helpful.
dan friesen
So I'd like to start out this episode today by giving a little bit of an apology.
My language was a little sensational in the last episode.
I know that I called myself out for these thoughts I'm having about Alex maybe being dead or stupid.
jordan holmes
Yes!
dan friesen
I called myself out for that, but it's still not the kind of conversation I like to even introduce to our show.
Especially because a little more time has gone on and the mystery is solved of where has Alex been?
jordan holmes
Right.
dan friesen
I found an Austin American...
jordan holmes
He's been living in our 2012 episodes.
dan friesen
If only.
A happier time for him, weirdly.
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.
jordan holmes
Right.
dan friesen
But none of the stories that I had read up until that point had any kind of specifics of timeline.
However, I found an article in the Austin American Statesman from last week.
That was talking about last Thursday he had a court appearance at which the judge decided that he had to sit for a deposition this Thursday.
So on the 14th of March, he had to sit for a deposition.
I'm still not sure why that means he was gone for a week, but that has to have something to do with it.
Maybe he had to go to Connecticut to give the deposition?
I'm not entirely sure.
jordan holmes
Possible.
dan friesen
There's something going on with that lawsuit that explains his absence and his time away.
jordan holmes
Yeah, that's a good question.
If the lawsuit is brought in a specific state, you...
Do you have to go to that state to give the deposition, or could you just do it by video in Texas?
It seems like you would have to go.
dan friesen
I would think.
I don't know.
I don't know how it works.
But I do know that he has cases pending in Texas and in Connecticut.
jordan holmes
Well, that's nice.
dan friesen
I don't know.
There's so much non-transparency in terms of how this legal case is proceeding.
And so a lot of the details are very murky, and that's something that was missed by our speculation.
Although I do think that we did bring up the possibility that the legal cases were getting real and that could explain his absence.
And, you know, sometimes that's where the mind takes you.
jordan holmes
He was in a terrible place.
Yeah, it's an entirely reasonable thing to speculate after listening to how terrible a place that he was in.
unidentified
Right.
dan friesen
And then to see him gone for that long, it was mysterious.
jordan holmes
No, if you or I did that on this show, everybody in the group would be like, holy shit, one of them's dead.
dan friesen
People start posting stuff on the group when I just don't post something until later than usual.
jordan holmes
That's right, that's true.
dan friesen
So, look.
It is what it is.
I think that probably explains pretty much all of this.
The case is getting real and he's in a bad place.
jordan holmes
Most likely.
dan friesen
So he came back on Thursday on the 14th.
He was back in studio doing part of his show.
So everything is somewhat back to normal.
But we did not have time before recording this episode because we're recording on Thursday to cover what he was at.
Because I watched like half an hour or so of it and it was pretty boring.
Not enough present day stuff to go into, so we're going back to no longer 2012.
jordan holmes
2013.
dan friesen
January 1st and 2nd, 2013.
jordan holmes
Let all acquaintance...
What's the secret of 2013?
dan friesen
Oh man, the secret of 2013.
jordan holmes
Is it Megyn Kelly?
dan friesen
Man, this episode is so fucked up.
This episode is crazy for like...
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.
jordan holmes
Right.
dan friesen
You know, like, we expected a good bit of Sandy Hook.
jordan holmes
We got Somali pirates one night.
unidentified
Basically.
jordan holmes
It happened, yeah, who knows?
dan friesen
Out of nowhere.
jordan holmes
Out of nowhere.
dan friesen
He's roguish that way.
jordan holmes
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's a cad in many ways.
dan friesen
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.
unidentified
Right.
dan friesen
He finishes the year laughing about how people thought that he thought it was the end of the world on December 21st.
jordan holmes
Yeah.
dan friesen
And telling people this is a red crisis level emergency.
The gun grabbing is going to happen.
It's nuts.
So you expect that to continue, and it kind of does.
jordan holmes
Well, but, you know, we've all had that end-of-the-year malaise where it's like, after the holidays, you're not really focusing on anything.
You're just kind of coasting throughout your day job.
New year rolls around.
Then you start to get that new feel for a month, and then it all goes away, and it goes back to shit.
But, you know, you get that feel.
dan friesen
He's really feeling it on the first.
jordan holmes
Yeah.
dan friesen
And you can hear that in this first clip.
alex jones
It is the first day of 2013.
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.
I am going to make a new official film this year.
I've not announced that yet.
I will.
dan friesen
He doesn't.
That's trash, man.
jordan holmes
But did he find his soul?
dan friesen
I don't think so.
jordan holmes
Because he said he was doing some soul searching.
unidentified
He did not then.
dan friesen
I hope he didn't.
Because that would be a bad indication of what his soul looks like.
jordan holmes
I was going to say, because if his next statement is, after I did some soul searching, I'm going to put out more information.
That does not suggest there's a lot of depth to that soul.
dan friesen
No.
No, it doesn't.
Well, I mean, he's like, this is going to be the most informative year.
That's the equivalent of just saying, I'm going to eat healthy this year.
unidentified
Oh, yeah.
dan friesen
For sure.
It's so vague as to be like, at the end of the year, I think I did.
alex jones
I don't know.
dan friesen
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.
With Skousen.
Joel Skousen.
jordan holmes
Did not know about that.
dan friesen
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.
unidentified
Oh, that's...
dan friesen
I actually think we probably should cover it.
jordan holmes
Is that good information?
dan friesen
It's too long to just talk to Joel Skousen.
jordan holmes
Right.
I assume that's 15 minutes?
dan friesen
Oh, God.
It's really long.
It's so long.
It's longer than that Jacob Wall documentary that I watched.
jordan holmes
Not good.
dan friesen
Why'd I watch that thing?
jordan holmes
I don't think it was a good idea.
dan friesen
Man, it was 20 minutes long, and it felt like two hours.
jordan holmes
You really gotta go hard to be shittier at your job than Project Veritas.
dan friesen
I was sincerely thinking about covering it for this episode, just because it was like, well, that would be easy.
Yeah, that's a slam dunk.
It lasted about five minutes.
There wasn't enough content in it.
Legitimately, so much of the documentary is Jacob Wall and Laura Loomer just sitting around or standing outside a door.
jordan holmes
Okay.
That's some compelling footage right there.
dan friesen
It's terrible.
Still probably more visually stimulating than Strategic Relocations, Alex's final documentary.
jordan holmes
Ah, gotcha.
What were his places to bug out to?
dan friesen
I don't know.
I don't remember.
I did watch it, but I don't remember.
jordan holmes
Because sometimes we...
dan friesen
The woods!
jordan holmes
Sometimes we mock things, but I mean, what if we looked into it and there was like, I don't know where to hide my guns, Dan.
dan friesen
Jordan.
jordan holmes
I never read it.
dan friesen
I guarantee there would be some useful information in there.
jordan holmes
See, there we go!
dan friesen
Which I'm not...
It doesn't pain me to admit that.
I don't care.
I think there probably would be some stuff like...
You know, because even these, like, crazy survivalists do have some pieces of good information.
Like, you should know how to get water.
You bet.
Everyone should know that.
jordan holmes
I agree.
dan friesen
Yeah.
So, I don't know.
It's just the matter.
jordan holmes
It's at the store.
dan friesen
It's a matter of scale, is the thing.
So, Alex, here on January 1st, says it's going to be the most informative year ever.
I'm going to do this thing.
I'm going to crush it.
The rest of the show is dog shit.
unidentified
Yeah, of course.
jordan holmes
Of course.
dan friesen
It is a no man's land.
I listen to it.
I can find...
Nothing worth discussing.
jordan holmes
What is he even talking about?
dan friesen
It's a lot of, like, Dianne Feinstein sucks, she looks like a demon kind of stuff.
jordan holmes
Fair.
dan friesen
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.
unidentified
Oh, okay.
dan friesen
It has nothing...
Nothing to do with implying in any way she still wants to do that or would still push that legislation.
But Alex is playing so fast and loose with that.
So he's using that to make the argument that Dianne Feinstein is announcing that Mr. and Mrs. America, get ready, I'm coming to take your guns.
jordan holmes
I thought she was referencing that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie movie.
dan friesen
Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
jordan holmes
Oh, that's the one.
dan friesen
Come on, man.
jordan holmes
All right.
dan friesen
That's where they fell in love.
And that Doctor from House was in it as a secondary character, Angelina Jolie's friend in the movie.
Can't remember her name.
Jennifer Morrison.
So January 1st is trash.
There's nothing going on there.
jordan holmes
That was a fun little romp through your thought process.
dan friesen
A to B to C. So we jump in on the 2nd, January 2nd, and Alex, in a span of 10 seconds, can't remember what year it is.
jordan holmes
We're not going to release that much information this year.
alex jones
2013 is already getting a little long in the tooth here.
It is the second day of January 2012.
dan friesen
Still writing June on his checks.
jordan holmes
Still writing June on his checks.
dan friesen
That's crazy.
jordan holmes
That's the whole reason you kept that in.
dan friesen
Also because it's crazy how fast that happens.
jordan holmes
Yeah, that was quick.
dan friesen
But I'm not judging him too harshly because he has that rhythm of it's already bank day.
And he says it every day, so it's going to take a little while to train that out of you.
jordan holmes
It's already the third day of March 2014.
dan friesen
And he does not explain it.
All why he's saying that the year is already long in the tooth in the second day?
jordan holmes
That was a really good question that I wanted answered.
dan friesen
It's not answered.
jordan holmes
It's old?
dan friesen
Yep.
jordan holmes
He's just tired.
He's just like, I'm done with this year.
dan friesen
I'm sick of it.
jordan holmes
I'm fucking done with it.
dan friesen
Nothing has happened yet, and I'm sick of this year.
I did one bad show, and that's about it.
unidentified
We didn't even lose the great actor.
jordan holmes
What was his name?
Snape?
What was his name?
Professor Snape?
dan friesen
Dumbledore.
jordan holmes
No.
dan friesen
Didn't Dumbledore play Snape?
jordan holmes
You're killing me.
Why can't I remember his name?
dan friesen
Rickman.
jordan holmes
Rickman.
Alan Rickman.
He was still around in 2012.
2013 was still a good year.
dan friesen
Fine.
jordan holmes
As long as Rickman's around, it was a good time.
dan friesen
You know what else was around?
unidentified
What?
dan friesen
Lying about primary sources.
That was still around in 2013, as Alex does in this next clip.
alex jones
Again, when I say something, I always double-check it.
Yeah, Larry Summers in 1991.
And Wikipedia has a link to the official memo that he put out.
We'll put that on screen.
Go ahead and scroll down, but it's also in mainstream news.
Where he said, let's ship our toxic waste to Brazil.
That'll help get their population down as well.
unidentified
Whoa.
jordan holmes
That's explicit.
alex jones
And he goes over the reasons, well, you need to be gotten rid of.
So, again, this is their attitude.
dan friesen
So, the memo in question doesn't say that it would help get rid of people or anything like that.
But there are a couple problems with Alex's story that he's telling here.
unidentified
Like what?
dan friesen
About this Larry Summers memo.
jordan holmes
Like what?
dan friesen
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.
It seems like that's good enough.
jordan holmes
It wasn't in his Encarta CD anymore, so he couldn't find it.
dan friesen
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.
jordan holmes
Right, right, right, right.
So somebody edited a modest proposal to make it look like they really wanted to eat those fucking babies.
dan friesen
More or less.
jordan holmes
Yeah.
dan friesen
In a 1998 piece for The New Yorker, the author of the memo, Lant Pritchard, who worked at...
unidentified
Lant?
dan friesen
Pritchett?
jordan holmes
Lant?
Oh, man.
Why do we always have weird-ass names on this show?
dan friesen
It's wall-to-wall.
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, Right.
Right.
unidentified
Right.
dan friesen
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.
jordan holmes
That sounds about right.
Did they find out who doctored the memo, or did that guy get away with it?
dan friesen
I'm not entirely sure.
The person who...
Seth Rich.
jordan holmes
I knew it.
dan friesen
It could have been.
jordan holmes
It could have been.
dan friesen
I'm not entirely sure if they ever were able to trace that down because I think it got leaked to a journalist and it might have been done anonymously.
So I think that's still an open question in terms of who done it.
But it's pretty easy to trace that it is bullshit.
The whole story.
So Alex, congratulations on starting 2013 very informatively.
Because I didn't know about that and I got to learn a little bit.
jordan holmes
Well, there we go.
It's a year of information all over again.
dan friesen
Most of the first was him talking about Dianne Feinstein and then continuing these they're coming for you guns, civil war is coming narratives.
And a bit of the second is that too.
But there's a trend that goes throughout where if Alex has been doing some soul searching, it's in a weird direction and it's about his own celebrity.
Because this next clip, Alex talks about how he's never tried to be in movies and then tells a story about auditioning to be in movies.
jordan holmes
There we go.
All right.
dan friesen
Which ends...
Very weirdly.
alex jones
I've never even tried to be in movies but have been offered a few times to be in some pretty big films by Tommy Pallotta and Richard Linklater.
dan friesen
Point of order.
Tommy Pallotta is Linklater's assistant director.
jordan holmes
I was going to say, I do not know who Tommy Pallotta is.
dan friesen
That's not two different directors.
That's the same project reaching out to Alex.
jordan holmes
Gotcha.
alex jones
And so I didn't have that experience there.
But then...
I got invited to go try out for some other movies.
dan friesen
It's called Audition.
alex jones
And some of the people associated with the films didn't even know that I was already an established radio talk show host.
jordan holmes
Surprise.
dan friesen
That is something you hear.
jordan holmes
What a dick.
What a fucking dick.
dan friesen
Isn't that awesome?
jordan holmes
Do you know who I am?
dan friesen
I went to audition for movies and people didn't know that I had a radio show.
jordan holmes
I'm already an established star!
dan friesen
Right.
jordan holmes
Of screen and stage.
dan friesen
So that's the sort of thing you'd expect from Alex.
But what happens next, you would never expect.
alex jones
And already, you know, on I think about 15 stations at the time, this had to be about 2000, and I was still pretty skinny then.
It looked a lot more attractive than I do now.
And they point blank at one of these casting studios asked me if I wanted to be in porn.
And I was like, are you kidding?
dan friesen
Alex got the porno offer, apparently, back in 2000.
jordan holmes
Are you kidding me?
I mean, what's the answer there?
Because if the answer is no, then yes, I was kidding you.
And if the answer is yes, we can talk.
dan friesen
I understand that Alex was a super attractive dude in his much younger years.
I've seen his broadcast from 9-11, let's say.
You know, like from 2001.
I don't know if he took a real downward slope in a year's time, but I don't think he looked great in 2000.
He looked like an average...
Maybe late 30s dude, even though he wasn't late 30s.
jordan holmes
Right, right, right.
dan friesen
But that's what he looked like.
He looked like someone's dad, basically.
jordan holmes
Well, after he lost out on the porn audition, he realized that it was just not going to work for him, and he just let himself go.
dan friesen
I turned down the skin flicks.
jordan holmes
Look!
dan friesen
My boat had sailed.
jordan holmes
See, I don't think he did.
I think he got rejected for one of the skin flicks, and that took him down the path that we're on right now.
dan friesen
It's entirely possible.
jordan holmes
I think so.
dan friesen
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.
jordan holmes
Well, he would have been great at the...
Crazy Man with Bullhorn in the Pirates of the Caribbean porn remake.
dan friesen
Sure.
jordan holmes
That would have been good for him.
dan friesen
I don't want to judge him because quite frankly, nothing I've ever done in my career even matches being Crazy Guy with Bullhorn in a Linklater movie.
And growing up, Waking Life was one of my favorite movies.
So the idea that Alex Jones is in Waking Life is pretty cool on some levels.
Even if it is because Linklater liked him and gave him the part, it's still an achievement in some ways.
I don't want to take that away from him.
But...
jordan holmes
Okay.
dan friesen
That story is fucked up.
jordan holmes
That story is fucked up.
dan friesen
Yeah.
jordan holmes
What movie was he auditioning for?
I want to know.
What would have been around 2000?
What, Titanic?
dan friesen
I was thinking...
No, that was 96. Good Morning Vietnam.
jordan holmes
Good Morning Vietnam!
dan friesen
It was a little bit before.
jordan holmes
That was a little bit before his time.
dan friesen
Do you think that he was supposed to play...
jordan holmes
I was thinking Harold and Maude.
dan friesen
I was thinking the Boghossian role in talk radio.
What other movies, did they make a Frasier movie?
jordan holmes
Was he on network?
dan friesen
That wasn't 2000.
Yeah, I can't think of any other radio movies.
So, in this conversation about, like, he went there, he was trying to audition for movies, and they said you should do porn or something like that.
He starts talking about the disgustingness of Hollywood and how evil it is, and he gets caught up in it and starts lamenting.
The women who have been chewed up and spit out by the system of Hollywood.
jordan holmes
Oh, is he just going to be real chivalrous on this one, huh?
dan friesen
Chivalrous combined with gross.
alex jones
The fame, the garbage, it means nothing.
But they control people with it.
But getting back to the analogy of America like a young farm girl from Kansas.
jordan holmes
You don't have to get back to that analogy.
alex jones
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.
jordan holmes
She could have been Mrs. America.
dan friesen
I think Alex has been listening to too much poison and maybe has just been listening to Mama's Fallen Angel a ton.
Live fast, Mama's Fallen Angel!
unidentified
What is this?
jordan holmes
What are we doing here?
unidentified
Is he trying to write a Tom Waits song right now?
jordan holmes
What is happening?
dan friesen
I mean...
Sure.
You know, the show business is exploitative.
You're not wrong.
jordan holmes
You're on the vanguard of thought on that one.
dan friesen
But this is weird.
So he's trying to compare this girl who he's clearly describing as...
There's connotations to it.
You know, perfect complexion, that sort of thing.
jordan holmes
Right.
dan friesen
As America.
jordan holmes
America has a perfect complexion, Dan.
dan friesen
And then you get down the road to, like, if only she hadn't have done that, she could have had an economy and found a man.
jordan holmes
Exactly.
dan friesen
That sort of thing is the good version, this could have gone, whatever, for that.
But he's trying to compare that to America, and America is at the hands of this mafia that's doing that to America.
And Hollywood is a part of it, but there's more.
And so then he starts rambling a whole bunch.
jordan holmes
Right, so if America had settled down, we could have gotten married to Canada and become Mr. and Mrs. America?
dan friesen
Canada is not a man, sir.
jordan holmes
Oh, well...
dan friesen
They bow to the Queen.
jordan holmes
Well, then what else do we got?
Are we staying in the Americas?
dan friesen
Long distance.
jordan holmes
Because we're not going to change our last name.
dan friesen
Long distance relationship.
jordan holmes
We're going to marry France?
dan friesen
Russia's single.
jordan holmes
Russia is single.
But I'm not changing my last name!
dan friesen
Yeah, that's a problem.
Russia is very traditional.
jordan holmes
Yeah, Mr. Russia and Mrs. America?
Russia would never allow that.
dan friesen
No, not at all.
jordan holmes
He would definitely keep us from voting.
dan friesen
So the metaphor does fall apart.
A little bit.
Upon closer analysis.
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.
jordan holmes
Okay.
dan friesen
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.
unidentified
Yeah.
dan friesen
I don't think he gets that far.
He only is complaining about it in some way as to say, like, there were terrible things going on there, but I could go buy beer there.
jordan holmes
Oh, okay.
dan friesen
And so he spends more time talking about how he got beer there than anything else.
jordan holmes
Okay, so it's not like...
It's not like he is trying to say, see, I can go anywhere because I am not a horrible racist.
I can go into the poor black neighborhoods.
dan friesen
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.
alex jones
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.
jordan holmes
It was like New York in the 80s.
alex jones
And we'd drive back to the rich neighborhood we lived in by the golf course and everybody'd get drunk.
But the point is, is that that's just one one hundredth of the stuff that goes on out there.
And corruption is acute.
It's sick.
dan friesen
I don't really...
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.
jordan holmes
Who does he think is the hero?
unidentified
Him!
dan friesen
He thinks he's the hero!
jordan holmes
He thinks he's the hero in this story?
dan friesen
Yes!
jordan holmes
But he's a fucking dick in this story!
dan friesen
Totally!
jordan holmes
He does not realize that, right?
unidentified
No!
dan friesen
No!
jordan holmes
He's like, okay, I am going to go to this neighborhood that is only existing because redlining is a policy.
dan friesen
Right.
jordan holmes
Right, and they've been specifically put down there to the point where, who gives a shit?
Let's sell this kid liquor.
I'm going to take that liquor back up to my rich fuck neighborhood, and I'm going to then try and sexually assault women.
dan friesen
I mean, to some extent, what he's describing is youthful shenanigans, to a certain extent.
Although he's talking about it with a very non-adult mindset.
Yeah.
That's the story you'd hear out of someone who is like...
Maybe in college reminiscing about high school years as opposed to a guy who's been on the radio for 17 years.
Is pushing 40 and has a family.
jordan holmes
Right, right, right.
dan friesen
You wouldn't talk, like, I don't know.
jordan holmes
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.
dan friesen
Yeah, I mean, I had a huge beard when I was younger and so I bought booze underage all the time, but it was so I could get drunk.
unidentified
Right.
dan friesen
It was.
jordan holmes
It was not to lure anyone?
unidentified
No.
jordan holmes
You didn't want to lure anyone anywhere, Dan?
dan friesen
I wasn't in the cards.
Just get drunk.
Play Prince of Persia.
Not a good game to play when you're drunk.
jordan holmes
No.
unidentified
Little platformers are tough when you're drunk.
dan friesen
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.
jordan holmes
Of course.
dan friesen
If you thought that first telling of that allegory was gross, strap it in.
This one's way grosser.
And it's more or less the same story.
Decides to tell it again, but go harder.
alex jones
You've got to understand how this works.
And America was like a beautiful supermodel that looked like Wonder Woman.
There's countries and ships, we call them women, by the analogy fits.
jordan holmes
What?
alex jones
And now...
jordan holmes
You shouldn't have to announce why your analogy fits.
alex jones
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.
jordan holmes
What?
alex jones
What?
What the shit?
What the shit?
Jeffrey Dahmer was authorized to do what he was doing.
Nobody's coming to help you, little kids.
And nobody's coming to help you, lady.
And they lock her up in there and half starve her to death.
And he comes back and says, I'll give you some food.
But don't you ever try to leave me again?
And a year later, she's dead.
Dead on a dirty mattress.
And that's what they're going to do to America, just like they've done to Nigeria and Brazil.
They're going to take us and they're going to squeeze us out.
They're going to strangle America because they like it.
dan friesen
This is...
unidentified
That...
jordan holmes
That was his Grandma Jones, wasn't it?
That's her literal life story.
dan friesen
No, she was soft killed with a polio vaccine.
jordan holmes
Oh, okay, that's right.
dan friesen
No, that's just Alex having...
That clip tells you way more about Alex than it does about anything else.
unidentified
Yeah.
dan friesen
That is a gross dude.
He's getting into telling this story.
You can hear an excitement of the grossness and the dirtiness.
jordan holmes
And then he punches her in the teeth.
alex jones
Knocks her teeth.
jordan holmes
And then he locks her in the closet for a week.
dan friesen
That's troubling.
That's a gross person.
jordan holmes
That's a dark fantasy.
dan friesen
Yeah.
jordan holmes
And there's nothing wrong with having that dark fantasy.
A lot of great writers have those dark fantasies.
There is something wrong with the way he tells it.
dan friesen
Yeah.
jordan holmes
Every part of the way he tells it makes me feel bad.
dan friesen
Well, and he's not using it for any, like, literary achievement or any goal.
Like, he's using it to scare his listeners.
That's it.
He's using it to reinforce, like, this idea of what his perceived enemies are doing to the United States.
So, I mean, it's manipulation, pure and simple, but it's manipulation by using gross buttons.
unidentified
Yeah.
dan friesen
It's, like, really fucking gross.
jordan holmes
Yeah, even the writers for Dragnet would be like, pull it back here.
Come on, man.
dan friesen
Yeah, so this is a weird place that he's in on this episode.
It's a departure from the rest of these days where he's not been real weird.
Just kind of trying to make you scared about gun grabs.
jordan holmes
Yeah.
dan friesen
This is much more like, this is a weird Alex day.
This is strange.
So he gets into talking about these shootings that are happening.
And he compares other killers from the past, other serial killers.
Of course.
jordan holmes
He's a big fan of Dahmer.
dan friesen
He comes to the conclusion that there's one thing that combines all of them.
jordan holmes
Liberals?
alex jones
You notice all the mass shooters.
Son of Sam, Ramirez, the Night Stalker.
jordan holmes
The Dog Walker.
alex jones
The last two shooters.
New York with the fireman, Lanza, if you believe that story.
jordan holmes
Angela Lansbury.
alex jones
All of them admitted devil worshippers.
All of them devil worshippers.
Devil worshippers are our problem.
dan friesen
Our problem is devil worshippers.
jordan holmes
Devil worshippers, huh?
dan friesen
He's going full satanic panic on this, man.
It's very weird.
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.
alex jones
Of course.
dan friesen
And now he's pivoted to...
jordan holmes
Hollywood.
dan friesen
Well, I think Hollywood is just...
That's unrelated.
jordan holmes
Oh, okay.
dan friesen
That's just general stuff.
jordan holmes
Right, right, right.
dan friesen
But then in terms of Lanza, we got now Satan.
It is Satan is the problem.
jordan holmes
He knows it's 2013, right?
Like, the Satanic Panic ended a while back.
dan friesen
Oh, yeah, and it was bullshit.
jordan holmes
And it was all bullshit.
dan friesen
But that's something that I don't like to hear on news shows.
What, that it was Satan?
jordan holmes
That it was Satan?
dan friesen
Yeah.
jordan holmes
I don't know.
dan friesen
I don't even like to hear that.
jordan holmes
I know Brett Baer says that all the time.
dan friesen
I don't even like to hear that on Dana Carvey SNL sketches.
Church Lady?
jordan holmes
I remember Church Lady.
unidentified
Okay.
jordan holmes
I was just letting you.
dan friesen
Yeah.
So in this next clip, Alex talks a little bit about Barack Obama, and we can see a little bit of a racial tinge to some of his comments.
But I really only kept this in because at the end he says something that with the present context is real weird.
alex jones
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.
I mean, it's like, it's okay.
dan friesen
It's funny that he's talking about eating children, considering he will seriously make that argument a few years down the road.
jordan holmes
Yeah, no kidding.
dan friesen
He's saying that as a flippant aside in 2012.
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.
jordan holmes
It is such a thing that he's pointing out, though.
If we, in that time, the right would say, oh, look at what Obama's doing.
He's ordering drone strikes.
He's doing all this stuff as a way to criticize him.
And you guys love that.
Liberals love it when he does that.
dan friesen
Liberals love war now.
jordan holmes
And the ones who didn't were like, no, we're not against that.
And then the centrist Democrats would be like, well, you're not being loyal.
You're just doing all this shit.
And it's like everybody who doesn't want that to happen.
Is being shit on.
And the people who say we do are the ones who are doing it.
Like, that's essentially...
It's the neocon worldview of loyalty or dishonesty.
dan friesen
Yeah, I think to an extent.
I think that you just had a situation where...
People aren't good at being their own watchdogs to an extent.
I think you see that to some extent with either party whenever they're in power.
They don't do a good job of calling out the ill deeds of the person who's on their team when they're in the presidency.
I think that's a natural phenomenon, and it's something that's unfortunate.
And there are forces within each side that do try to do that, but they're usually on the outskirts.
They're not usually the people who are closest to the actual levers of power.
So this sort of argument coming from the other side is always in bad faith.
Yes.
unidentified
Because they are...
dan friesen
understand to some extent we're going to do that once our guy is in.
Right.
unidentified
And we have done that like when Bush was in office.
dan friesen
Right.
unidentified
Or whatever.
jordan holmes
It's the GOP calling Ilhan Omar anti-Semitic.
Like, all right, guys.
dan friesen
Right, right.
jordan holmes
You know who you are.
dan friesen
Right.
So, in this next clip, we get a guest.
And this guest is something that really opened an area of exploration on this episode that I'm only getting a little bit into on this episode.
But I think it opens up a vista of understanding Alex in a different way.
And I think that's fairly surprising.
Because if you're not paying attention...
This guest would be super fucking boring.
This person would be not even a blip on your radar.
jordan holmes
Okay.
dan friesen
But you look into him a little bit, you scratch the surface, and he becomes...
jordan holmes
Dick Cheney.
dan friesen
No.
Oh, okay.
He becomes an introduction into some really fucked up worlds that Alex is connected to in ways that we might not have realized before.
Here is...
jordan holmes
Captain Mark Richards.
dan friesen
No, I wish.
Here is his introduction.
alex jones
The evidence is they staged Sandy Hook.
I want to go to Bob Fletcher.
unidentified
Wait, what?
alex jones
I appreciate him coming on today.
We had a lot of breaking news.
I wanted to get him on because he was a congressional whistleblower, an advisor on TV and things during the Iran-Contra affair.
dan friesen
Okay.
jordan holmes
I don't know if I want to know which way this is going to land.
dan friesen
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.
You know, it's sort of universal.
Every comic has that story.
I bet you do.
jordan holmes
I really don't.
dan friesen
I bet you do.
jordan holmes
No, no gig I've ever done.
dan friesen
Let's get six drinks in you.
jordan holmes
No gig I've ever done would have changed my career, let alone ones I haven't done.
dan friesen
Or some job or something.
There's always...
Every comic has some sort of like, if I'd gotten on that festival or it could have opened up for that guy, I was this close.
jordan holmes
Nope, I have never been close.
dan friesen
Fine.
jordan holmes
I can honestly say.
dan friesen
You're the exception that proves the rule.
jordan holmes
Far away from having been successful as ever.
dan friesen
I've had a fucking thousand of those conversations with them.
Some of them, me saying it.
jordan holmes
Fair.
dan friesen
If only I'd done that.
jordan holmes
Well, you've had a couple.
dan friesen
Sure.
unidentified
Yeah.
dan friesen
But it's the same thing with Alex.
All of his guests have that story about, like, I was mixed up in a Ron Contra.
The weird part is that a number of them aren't making things up entirely.
Even if they're embellishing a little bit to make a hero story for themselves.
unidentified
Right.
dan friesen
They're not, like, making it up out of whole cloth.
Like, Larry Nichols can lie about the extent he was involved.
But he was definitely making collect calls on behalf of the Contras.
jordan holmes
Yeah.
dan friesen
Like, he absolutely was doing that, so he was involved in some way.
jordan holmes
He was lying about the hard rice, but he was telling the truth about the soft rice.
dan friesen
He could have been, like, intern level, but he was involved.
jordan holmes
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
dan friesen
It's that sort of thing.
jordan holmes
For sure.
dan friesen
So Bob Fletcher ran a toy company in Atlanta in the late 80s.
In 1985, a guy named Gary Best came into his operation and offered to buy the company and pay Bob to stay on running the place.
Bob claims that gradually it became clear to him that Gary and a bunch of generals were selling weapons out of his former toy company.
And after the Iran-Contra hearings began, he recognized some of the people who were testifying as people who worked with Gary Best.
unidentified
Was he?
Was he?
jordan holmes
Fucking played by Robin Williams?
What is this?
dan friesen
No, it was LL Cool J. I don't know.
Top Secret, so not even he can get a hold of them.
No one can.
jordan holmes
The President could.
dan friesen
Trump could.
jordan holmes
We need to get to the bottom of this.
dan friesen
In the world of propaganda, it's always good to establish a villain, as Bob has done with Gary Best.
Because you could repurpose them later when you need them.
Like Bob did when he accused Gary of having a hand in the Oklahoma City bombing.
But we'll get to that later.
jordan holmes
That's a leap.
dan friesen
We'll get to that.
unidentified
Okay.
dan friesen
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.
But again...
jordan holmes
Hold on.
No.
Those two things don't...
dan friesen
We'll get to that in a little bit.
jordan holmes
It's a charade!
To Montana we go!
dan friesen
We'll get to that in a minute.
unidentified
All right.
dan friesen
For now, all you need to know is that since 2014, Bob Fletcher has rebranded as a Planet X Nabooru truther.
jordan holmes
Oh boy!
dan friesen
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.
jordan holmes
I'm liking his career path.
I'm not going to lie to you.
dan friesen
His website includes a section of photographic evidence of various claims.
It includes a picture of a ton of gold bars with a caption, quote, in all caps, All the gold is gone from Fort Knox!
The rest of the pictures are...
jordan holmes
That's it?
dan friesen
Yep.
jordan holmes
Okay, that's photographic proof.
dan friesen
There's more to the text.
jordan holmes
Does he have it?
dan friesen
No.
jordan holmes
Is he taking a home picture?
Is this a selfie?
dan friesen
It's just a bunch of pictures of bars of gold.
It could be...
Fucking stock photos.
jordan holmes
Because that'd be a supervillain move if I ever saw one.
dan friesen
The rest of the pictures are clearly photoshopped shots of space purporting to prove that Nibiru is coming and it's way bigger than the Earth.
The last picture he has posted suggests...
He suggests that it's a picture of a real-life wormhole, but it's just the moon with spirals drawn coming out of it towards the Earth.
jordan holmes
Okay.
It's in Cran, right?
dan friesen
It's unsettling.
jordan holmes
He's at, like, using video game footage as reality level.
dan friesen
Oh, any page level?
jordan holmes
Yeah, any page level.
dan friesen
No, I think it's a little better than that.
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.
alex jones
But people need to know that you know what you're talking about.
dan friesen
So, Bob Fletcher.
His bio that he wants Alex and his audience to know is that he personally was one of the bigger parts of starting the militia patriot movement.
jordan holmes
That's not good.
dan friesen
So Bob makes that claim on this episode, and it's not true.
But it's scary how close it is to the actual truth.
I'm looking at you meaningfully.
jordan holmes
If he went to the forest in Montana, you have to start a militia just to survive out there, I assume, right?
dan friesen
That was kind of part of the tease.
Yeah.
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.
jordan holmes
Good.
Hmm?
I...
No.
dan friesen
No.
jordan holmes
No, I don't want that.
dan friesen
Pretty scary.
jordan holmes
I don't want that at all.
dan friesen
The meeting was organized by extremist preacher Pete Peters, whose ministry largely...
jordan holmes
Goddammit, Pete Peters!
dan friesen
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.
jordan holmes
I'm sorry, was Whitey McWhiterson taken?
dan friesen
Beat Peters.
Rock rocks.
I mean, right?
Petra?
Latin?
Yeah.
Representatives of the Klan, Christian identity, the group Posse Comitatus, not the idea, and the Aryan Nations were all present.
jordan holmes
A literal murderer's row!
dan friesen
Yep.
This was a meeting that is literally something out of a comic book.
A gathering of villains who don't really even like each other meeting to discuss how to work against their common enemy, the federal government.
jordan holmes
We need to take down the government.
We also need...
All right, we're going to take your one under consideration.
dan friesen
We're going to have to table that.
jordan holmes
Yeah, we're going to put that up.
unidentified
Robert's Rules of Orders, Mr. Goblin, or whatever.
dan friesen
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.
jordan holmes
They're economic anxiety, Dan.
dan friesen
No, totally.
jordan holmes
They're not racist or anti-Semitic.
unidentified
Totally.
jordan holmes
Economic anxiety.
dan friesen
Totally.
jordan holmes
Absolutely.
dan friesen
And you see here from these groups, like the Aryan Nations and the Klan and Christian Identity, who are all meeting up to try and find ways to...
Get better recruitment.
They realize that they have to brand as being about economic anxiety as opposed to the actual racist shit that they were actually about.
So all that is to say is history doesn't repeat.
jordan holmes
Guys!
Hey, guys!
Everybody around here.
We know how we feel about the not-whites of all kinds.
And a lot of the whites, too.
But we can't say it.
We can't do it.
dan friesen
You want to.
It would hurt our recruitment.
jordan holmes
Klan members, I'm looking at you.
Take those hoods off.
dan friesen
Would you rather be successful or overt?
What would you rather be?
I think a lot of them probably overt.
jordan holmes
I believe in my principles!
dan friesen
So the meeting was a strategy-forming brainstorm, as well as a white supremacist corporate retreat.
Mm-hmm.
jordan holmes
Mm-hmm.
Jesus.
dan friesen
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.
alex jones
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.
You back down now, or you're going to pay!
jordan holmes
All right, can I get some stage directions?
alex jones
I'd like to thank our sponsors.
unidentified
Keep that in for humor.
dan friesen
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.
unidentified
Yeah.
dan friesen
Until 1992 when they had this meeting and decided to rebrand a little bit.
jordan holmes
Right, right, right.
dan friesen
Oh, funny story.
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.
It's insane to me.
This is a real, very serious problem.
jordan holmes
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.
What do they wear?
Patches?
dan friesen
Sure.
jordan holmes
Yeah.
And then you've got...
dan friesen
No, they sing that Clarence Carter song, Patches.
jordan holmes
Right, right, right.
And then you've got...
dan friesen
My family was a big old man!
jordan holmes
You've got your anti-text protesters holding up a sign that says the three people voted on the Fed.
dan friesen
Right.
jordan holmes
And they just have to find their way through the Holiday Inn Express that they were staying at.
That'd be a great movie.
dan friesen
I can't find a complete list of that 160, but I bet there's some other names in there that we would be very familiar with.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
jordan holmes
Henry David Thoreau.
dan friesen
Wayne Paul.
unidentified
Wayne Newton.
dan friesen
Sure.
Yeah, I mean, they had to have some entertainment.
jordan holmes
Now, that was the gig that if I had gotten...
dan friesen
That could have changed your career.
jordan holmes
It could have changed...
Well, who definitely would have?
unidentified
Yeah.
dan friesen
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.
Hmm.
jordan holmes
Isis.
dan friesen
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.
And it's not a benign starting of it.
jordan holmes
Oh, no.
dan friesen
That meeting was chock-a-block with racists, anti-Semites, and very dangerous people.
I think Alex might be in way deeper in a lot of this stuff than...
Well, I don't know about present day, but at least at this point in his career and earlier, I think he might have been way fucking deeper.
jordan holmes
Yeah, that's...
Who was the head of that mercenary group?
Blackwater?
Eric Prince?
That sounds like something that he masturbates to.
If he wasn't at that meeting, every night he dreams of being there.
dan friesen
It's something that Alex cries about not being there.
Yeah, that's probably true.
That's like his dream come true, to be in this room, this rarefied air with these people who are standing up against the federal government.
He could have considered himself actually a founding father of his dumb bullshit.
jordan holmes
With all the greats of white nationalist history.
dan friesen
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.
jordan holmes
Wait, so he was kicked out of the group for cheating on his own wife?
dan friesen
Yes.
jordan holmes
Okay.
dan friesen
That was a moral issue within the leadership of the militia of Montana.
jordan holmes
All right, because I was like, whoa, that dude fucked his brother's wife.
That's a whole thing.
dan friesen
No, no, no.
jordan holmes
That's a story.
dan friesen
I can understand how you could hear that from the pronoun reference, but it was his own wife.
Gotcha.
And yeah, so he started this Coalition for Men's Rights.
jordan holmes
Man, white men are great.
dan friesen
Yeah, I mean, you also see very similar tracks of...
Of where the hustle goes at different points.
jordan holmes
Then his son started this organization called Gamergate.
Like, fucking Jesus Christ, you guys are awful.
dan friesen
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.
Yeah, that's nuts.
One million percent.
jordan holmes
That's nuts!
dan friesen
So what happened, Jordan?
The short answer is that Timothy McVeigh happened.
Timothy McVeigh happened.
jordan holmes
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
dan friesen
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...
Pearl Harbor?
No.
jordan holmes
Oh, no.
dan friesen
Another terrorist attack.
The gassing of the subway.
unidentified
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
dan friesen
We talked about what that cult did.
That conspiracy theory was deemed so ridiculous that he was forced out of his own group.
He was kicked out of the Michigan militia because he was perpetuating those dumb ideas.
jordan holmes
You've got to be real dumb to be kicked out of a dumb organization like that.
dan friesen
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.
jordan holmes
Because they're the ones who thought that McVeigh was...
that these guys were betraying their ideals.
And the ones that stuck around are the ones who were like, yeah, McVeigh was absolutely right on.
So, of course we're not going anywhere.
dan friesen
Yeah.
Or they're the ones who internalized the idea that it's all fake.
jordan holmes
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
dan friesen
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...
Dangerous.
So who's the Michigan militia in this equation?
jordan holmes
The guy who started the toy shop?
dan friesen
No.
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.
I'm not making that argument.
Yeah.
unidentified
I'm saying spiritually they went too fast.
dan friesen
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?
unidentified
Right.
dan friesen
Or at least back at this point, like back when Bush was in office, why not try and run for office?
Or why not try and deal with this through legislation as opposed to we need to take up guns?
jordan holmes
Because we have a sympathetic ear.
dan friesen
Right.
jordan holmes
We know when Barack Obama's president, we don't have a sympathetic ear.
dan friesen
Right.
jordan holmes
So we're going to have to use...
dan friesen
Right.
jordan holmes
Guns.
dan friesen
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.
jordan holmes
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?
dan friesen
It seems unlikely.
I think probably they...
Maybe provided a support network early on.
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, they did not have...
jordan holmes
Oh, I didn't mean then.
dan friesen
Oh.
jordan holmes
I mean, like, as time has gone on.
dan friesen
No.
jordan holmes
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.
dan friesen
I don't think they could at the point where they started to get involved with Alex.
jordan holmes
Yeah.
dan friesen
I don't think so.
jordan holmes
But later on...
dan friesen
Yeah, I mean, Stuart was on the first time, like, in April of 2009.
And he, like, we've talked about already, he had a, like, a...
A blog spot paid for the Oath Keepers.
He didn't even have a normal website URL.
So I don't think that there's any...
I don't know.
I don't know.
This is the part of it that I think is pure for Alex.
I think whatever nefarious influence there could be, I don't think it has anything to do with this.
I think that this is closest to where Alex Hart really lies in some ways.
If that makes sense.
jordan holmes
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
When you peel away the layers upon layers of onions, he's like the guy who wants to dress up and play act as a soldier.
But only against non-white people.
dan friesen
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...
Real.
There are real parallels between them.
So you have these guests...
jordan holmes
History rhymes.
dan friesen
Right.
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?
jordan holmes
There's a tenth planet, Nabooru.
dan friesen
No, that was years later.
jordan holmes
That was years later.
dan friesen
He said, get ready for more bombs.
jordan holmes
Okay.
All right.
unidentified
Cool.
Cool, cool, cool, cool.
dan friesen
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.
That was...
Inescapably bigoted.
It was.
jordan holmes
Yeah.
dan friesen
And a lot of his influences are there.
The things and the messages that they had whitewashed and put out into the world are very consistently repeated in Alex's world.
And then guests who are from that world, like that literal meeting, and then from the things that grew out of that meeting, they're all there.
And it's...
jordan holmes
It's a leaderless resistance in some ways.
unidentified
Yep.
dan friesen
And Alex...
jordan holmes
Because you can't 100% tie them to each other, but...
dan friesen
We need those tapes, man.
We need to find those old episodes.
unidentified
Yeah.
dan friesen
I think there's a treasure trove of, like, things he doesn't want people to know.
unidentified
Oh, I bet.
dan friesen
All those tapes.
Oh, we've got to find those.
jordan holmes
Especially the time he told the story about the first time he did porn.
dan friesen
Right, right.
jordan holmes
I was at this audition and a guy was...
dan friesen
It kind of invalidates the story of this episode.
alex jones
I could get a job.
dan friesen
Yeah, so I'll call myself out a tiny bit for my analysis in terms of Alex being...
Because I think it is kind of overly simplistic to be like...
The militia of Montana and Michigan operated as one was informational and one was paramilitary.
Because there were other militias around, too.
But those were two very prominent ones.
I just look at it as, if you want a successful operation, you need to have those two things be separate from each other, yet working together.
You have to have the same goal of the people who are being trained in military tactics and the people who are putting out...
The propaganda.
You need to be on the same page, but you cannot be related.
You can't be the same thing because, let's say, one of these guys goes and shoots up something, then you jeopardize your propaganda outlet.
You have to keep them separated in some way.
And I think you see a mirror of it, Alex.
jordan holmes
Yeah, I agree with you.
There are very, very clear parallels.
History doesn't repeat.
It rhymes.
This is...
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...
Physical connections to each other.
Do you know what I'm saying?
dan friesen
Well, certainly.
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.
unidentified
Yeah.
dan friesen
You know, when that happened.
jordan holmes
But who hasn't?
dan friesen
Right.
But when that happened...
An essential piece of how things keep moving forward is Alex gets on air and says that this is a false flag and the government's trying to set him up.
unidentified
Right.
dan friesen
Or something like that.
Or when the MIAC report comes out.
That sort of thing is a real threat to the militia people on the ground.
It's not really a big threat to Alex in his operation or anything like that.
It's a big threat to them, so they need Alex to not be connected to them so he can lead some sort of a charge to get that redacted.
unidentified
Right.
dan friesen
Recanted.
jordan holmes
Right, of course.
Which is why it's effective.
unidentified
Right.
jordan holmes
Even though there should be consequences for...
dan friesen
One hand washes the other, as they say.
That sort of thing.
So, that's troubling.
jordan holmes
Not great.
dan friesen
A little bit later in the episode, they start taking some calls.
And Alex gets a call from a guy.
Who, I'm going to say, if I'm listening to this guy, I think he's, I don't know how much he's literally telling the truth, but he's scary.
unidentified
Okay.
dan friesen
And he confronts Alex about something.
alex jones
Let's talk to Joe.
jordan holmes
I was that girl from Kansas.
alex jones
You're on the air, police.
What's your take on this?
Are you getting that training?
jordan holmes
Alex.
alex jones
Yes, sir.
unidentified
Privilege.
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?
dan friesen
Let's be clear about this.
He's talking about terrorist cells that he and his buddies are involved in.
jordan holmes
Yeah, yeah.
If you say take control of the situation, but I'm not talking about kicking doors in.
dan friesen
He's talking about killing people.
jordan holmes
Either that or organizing Macy's style parades.
dan friesen
That's not what he's talking about.
jordan holmes
That's not what he's talking about?
dan friesen
No, but also notice Alex hasn't cut him off.
This is the sort of thing he is totally fine hearing until the call turns.
unidentified
The people that I hang out with, We're all ex-military.
I spent 20 years in the Navy, and I know that I swore an oath to the Constitution.
And the only thing that bothers me, sir, about you is that you were never in the military, so you never swore an oath to the Constitution.
And I have my doubts about you being a DOD plant.
And I want you right now, to your worldwide audience, to tell everybody that you are for real.
Because you offer...
You talk a lot, but you don't really offer any solutions.
And I'm an action person about solutions.
alex jones
I understand.
You're God and John Wayne, and I'm nobody.
I'm on air 17 years, just nothing but delivering the goods over and over again.
But I'm nobody and have no track record.
You, we don't know who you are.
Had a prank caller earlier.
Now you're calling in saying they're sleeper cells.
Look, I appreciate your call.
dan friesen
So he moves on, and he doesn't do a pledge to the Constitution.
So from this guy's standpoint...
jordan holmes
He is a DOD plant.
unidentified
Yep.
jordan holmes
Oh, boy.
dan friesen
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.
Which is, I don't know who the fuck you are.
jordan holmes
I have one issue with that guy's thought process, though.
If he were a DOD plant, I believe he would have had to swear an oath to the Constitution.
dan friesen
To work for the Defense Department?
jordan holmes
Yeah.
dan friesen
Yeah, maybe.
jordan holmes
I'm pretty sure that no matter which side that guy has landed on, he would have had to swear an oath.
The only way he didn't swear an oath to the Constitution is if he's fine.
That's it.
dan friesen
I'm not sure exactly how it goes.
I'm sure in his private moments, Alex swears to the Constitution.
All the time.
jordan holmes
Usually when he's coming?
dan friesen
Yeah.
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.
alex jones
All right.
Alex Jones, I'm the worst person on earth, okay?
I'm not, but just whatever fantasy you got, okay, it's true.
All right, now can we move on now?
Okay, you're a bigger man.
You're a better man.
I'm a bad man.
You're a good man.
Now, ignore all that now.
I'm bad.
You're good.
We got it.
You're John Wayne.
I'm crap.
Now, let's move on against the globalists.
They're the fight.
They're coming down on us.
Now's the time.
110%.
dan friesen
That's sad.
jordan holmes
It didn't hit him personally at all.
unidentified
Uh-uh.
jordan holmes
He doesn't care.
unidentified
Uh-uh.
jordan holmes
Oh, sure, sure.
You're whoever.
You're John Wayne.
I'm nobody.
Let's just move on.
dan friesen
I'm totally fine.
jordan holmes
Totally not offended by this at all.
You can't hurt my feelings.
unidentified
I've been on the radio for 17 years.
dan friesen
I have a track record.
jordan holmes
I get things done.
What solutions have I not proposed?
Have you not seen me propose?
dan friesen
Also, there's a weird thing, too, going on where Alex's response is like, Okay, you're good.
I'm bad.
Now let's move on.
It wasn't saying you're bad.
jordan holmes
No.
dan friesen
It was a conditional sort of judgment, even.
Like, the idea of, like, you didn't serve the army, so I have some questions about you.
Can you guarantee to me that you defend the Constitution?
jordan holmes
Yeah, it was almost an initiation kind of thing, where he's like, hey, man, I love you and I support you.
All you need to do.
Is swearing oath right now, and we're all on your team.
You've got our whole sleeper cell network ready to go.
dan friesen
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?
jordan holmes
Oh, okay.
dan friesen
But that's a bad faith thing.
That's a trap.
These people are trying to set some sort of a trap that, like, whether you sign it or not, they're going to make a big deal out of whatever you do.
jordan holmes
Yeah.
dan friesen
The only way to lose is to engage.
jordan holmes
Right.
dan friesen
That's not what this guy was doing.
If Alex had said, sir, I understand.
I haven't served in the armed forces.
I wish I would have.
I could go back.
I'd do it all over again.
I had a bum leg.
Whatever.
Whatever excuse he needs to make.
unidentified
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
dan friesen
He's like, and I assure you, I...
Have done everything in my life to uphold the Constitution that I hold so very dear.
Like, if he had done that...
jordan holmes
Then that guy would have been like, excellent.
Now, say where you want us to hit.
dan friesen
Maybe.
jordan holmes
Give us a target.
dan friesen
But then Alex could deal with that and gracefully get off the line or whatever.
I would assume that this guy would say, we salute you, we're on your side, or something like that.
jordan holmes
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
dan friesen
Everyone listening, they're not going to be bummed out to hear Alex salute the Constitution again.
jordan holmes
No.
dan friesen
So, like, there's no downside to it.
It's not a trap.
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.
jordan holmes
I kind of don't...
dan friesen
And get fucked up about it.
jordan holmes
I don't think it's that.
I think it's that the guy questioned Alex's manhood and Alex's mind.
Maybe.
The way that this guy presented it is...
I was in the military for 20 years.
I was in the Navy for 20 years.
All of the guys that I hang out with were ex-military.
We all swore an oath to the Constitution.
dan friesen
We're in sleeper cells.
jordan holmes
And you.
And that's where Alex was like...
Fuck you!
You think you're great?
dan friesen
Maybe.
jordan holmes
You think you're so fucking cool because you're in a fucking sleeper cell?
dan friesen
There may be some masculinity piece to it.
jordan holmes
Oh, I think there's a huge masculinity piece to it.
dan friesen
I think it's more about love of the Constitution.
jordan holmes
You think it's about love of the Constitution?
dan friesen
I think it is.
jordan holmes
He just loves it too much or not enough?
dan friesen
There might be...
Yeah, I think he thinks he loves it too much.
Much like Lenny and the mice.
Yeah.
That metaphor is pretty appropriate.
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.
unidentified
Of course.
dan friesen
By 2012, he's done that a thousand times on air.
He does nothing but talk about how much he loves the fucking Constitution.
jordan holmes
But he didn't do it to that guy's face.
dan friesen
That's true.
jordan holmes
And that's where that guy needs it.
I need you to look me in the phone and tell me that you love the Constitution.
dan friesen
Alex, get on FaceTime.
FaceTime me, bro.
jordan holmes
Hello, I swear to the Constitution.
dan friesen
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.
alex jones
Believe me, I know.
I have a, let's just say, great uncle.
It's really a great cousin.
But anyways, the whole story is he was an army officer.
And all he's told us was, he said, yeah, I did all this stuff and covered operations, so then they bring me in.
They go, here's your graduation in the CIA.
And it was dealing drugs and killing people in Chicago.
And he said, I'm not, well, I'm not going to, he didn't tell us much more.
The point is, is that the thing is, then I know other people who have done, I mean, this is like.
It's not like a big deal to work for CIA.
It's like working for UPS, except they're running around killing people.
I mean, it's a giant operation.
dan friesen
I mean, that's a big difference.
jordan holmes
Yeah?
dan friesen
That's one substantial difference.
jordan holmes
I mean, you know, not to split hairs.
unidentified
From...
dan friesen
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.
jordan holmes
Right.
dan friesen
Because they are.
When Alex gets on air and he's like, I have a great uncle, I mean great cousin.
Who was in covert ops, and then the CIA told him to kill people and deal drugs in Chicago, and he didn't do it.
And I know tons of other people.
If the CIA told him to go deal drugs and kill people in Chicago, and he said no, he's dead.
Right?
Right.
There's no way you're walking away from, hey, we want you to be disruptive and murder a bunch of people.
Just sign here.
Oh, you don't want to sign?
jordan holmes
Have you ever done porn?
dan friesen
Look, that's what's being expressed by that caller.
And it's really funny that only a little bit later in the show, Alex manifests exactly why the hardest core folk don't trust him.
unidentified
Right.
dan friesen
Because he's not trustworthy.
jordan holmes
No, I wouldn't trust him.
I wouldn't trust him even if I was his best friend.
dan friesen
If you were operating in a splinter cell or you imagined that you were...
jordan holmes
I wouldn't trust you either.
unidentified
No.
jordan holmes
If you're in any kind of cell, there's a problem here.
dan friesen
I wouldn't trust anybody.
No.
High stakes.
So this next group is the last one from this episode.
And it's Alex saying what needs to be done about the globalists.
jordan holmes
Oh, so he is proposing.
alex jones
And what's incredible, Bob, is they now are going to fully gut the country and bring it all down and rob us like a third world nation.
Bobfletcherinvestigations.com, amazing.
Look forward to having you back on very soon.
They are trying to move on us right now, but if we get the word out like Bob did, we can back them off again.
dan friesen
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.
jordan holmes
Yeah.
dan friesen
So, when Alex says, what we need to do is what Bob did in the past, that's not cool.
I was struggling to find a better way to put it.
jordan holmes
There you go.
I think we made fun of Alex for doing that one.
What was it?
dan friesen
You're saying the globalists are super uncool.
jordan holmes
Super uncool.
dan friesen
Bob Fletcher is super uncool.
jordan holmes
Super uncool.
dan friesen
Yeah, but you see here, this is what Alex is suggesting.
Now that this caller has confronted him and said that he doesn't have solutions, he has a solution.
That solution is do what Bob did back in the 90s.
And if you do do what Bob did in the 90s...
Going to end up with Oklahoma cities.
You're going to end up with Timothy McVeigh types.
jordan holmes
You're going to end up with a National Guardsman caught with a shit ton of fucking guns ready to start killing people.
dan friesen
You're going to end up with a guy from the Oath Keepers with a napalm bomb.
You're going to end up with all of this stuff.
jordan holmes
Letters showing up at CNN's office.
dan friesen
Sure.
Bunch of globalists getting bombs in the mail.
But it's all false flags.
jordan holmes
It's all false flags.
dan friesen
Don't worry about it.
jordan holmes
No big deal.
dan friesen
So, I just see, like, I want to call myself out a tiny bit, and I think that there is so much more to learn about this, this world.
jordan holmes
Yeah.
dan friesen
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.
jordan holmes
No, that's a Lord of the Rings trilogy level of information there.
dan friesen
Right.
But I think some of these things are important to introduce to the conversation.
In the same way that we did that episode about Bill Cooper, without...
Fully diving into him.
Introducing that into our world that we're able to discuss.
jordan holmes
Was Bill Cooper in with this movement?
He would have been old enough to be, right?
dan friesen
Yeah, Bill Cooper was part of the Arizona militia.
We take a toe dip because it's what Alex brought into the conversation.
He has Bob Fletcher on.
When I hear that name, I don't immediately think like, oh.
I know this guy who is second banana in the militia of Montana.
I don't have that encyclopedic knowledge.
So Alex says that he's involved in Iran-Contra.
I start looking into that.
Oh, two minutes later, he says, I started the militia movement.
That's like, well, now I have to look into this.
You start going down these paths, and these are the things that you start to find.
These parallels start to become clear.
You start to learn a little bit more.
I already knew a bit about the Montana militia, but you start to be like, oh, wait.
That was started by this guy who was there at this 1992 Estes Park Summit.
Who else was there?
Oh, shit, Larry Pratt was there.
Isn't that weird?
There's so much.
There's just so much.
jordan holmes
What did he have Bob Fletcher on?
We heard a little bit of it, but why did he specifically have Bob Fletcher on?
dan friesen
To talk about how they're going to take the guns.
jordan holmes
Right.
dan friesen
I mean, it's all just the same shit.
jordan holmes
Right.
dan friesen
It'd be very easy to miss.
jordan holmes
Well, that's what I'm saying.
It suggests to me that Alex...
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.
dan friesen
Because I think it would be super suspicious.
jordan holmes
It would be super suspicious.
So Alex himself was probably like, Dude, don't bring up that fucking shit!
Don't give me your actual intro.
dan friesen
Well, I mean, you saw even in that clip, he talks over him when he's like, I am one of the people who started the...
Yeah, you did.
jordan holmes
Huge, important.
Move on.
Move on.
Don't tell anybody.
dan friesen
Which in and of itself is strange, because generally he would want to be associated with this person who's a part of militia royalty.
jordan holmes
Exactly.
dan friesen
Which indicates in some way that...
There's a discomfort with where he stands, not in the hierarchy of the world, but in terms of where the narrative's at in the beginning of 2013.
jordan holmes
Yeah.
dan friesen
I don't know if he wants people to realize that a lot of these people that he's talking to are who they are.
Or they're such extremists.
jordan holmes
Well, I mean, it's Montana militia style.
dan friesen
It's only a fucking year and a half or so after this that he starts talking about Nabooru stuff.
Fletcher.
jordan holmes
Fletcher really jumps the Nabooru shark that quick?
dan friesen
2014 is when he started making appearances on Coast to Coast.
unidentified
Huh!
jordan holmes
That is strange.
That is a strange turn for the guy to start the modern militia movement and lead to the deaths of how many people at this point?
dan friesen
At least a few.
jordan holmes
To then just be like, you know what?
I think I reached the top of my profession.
I think I'm going to start talking about the 10th planet.
Is Michael Jordan playing baseball still?
That's the level of career change we're talking here.
dan friesen
I think you get to a certain point when you're kind of a con person and you're just like, well, this con has run dry.
There's nothing left in this well.
Let's try this one.
jordan holmes
Yeah.
dan friesen
It's the same thing that all of these people do.
Like Cernovich being a pickup artist.
And then getting into Gamergate.
And then jumping on the Trump train.
And then pretending he's jumping off it.
Same thing with Mark Dice being a memory scam salesman.
Then a pickup artist.
He wrote a book about it.
Then started getting into the There's Satanists Everywhere racket.
Wrote a book under the pseudonym John Connor that went popular online.
Then revealed himself as Mark Dice.
And started going on Alex's show.
Then tried to do comedy.
Like it's...
It's all, like, these people are all all over the place.
There's no discrete anchor.
And I can relate to that on some level, but just without the con.
jordan holmes
Hey, you're telling me.
dan friesen
Without the con intentions.
Like, I did stand-up for a long time, and then I stopped, and I'm doing this.
Like, I understand pivoting.
Like, there's nothing inherently wrong in pivoting.
I didn't mean anything wrong.
No, I know.
But when all of your pivots are scams, that's when it's a problem.
jordan holmes
Yeah, I think that's...
I think that's kind of endemic to their psychopathic narcissistic mind view of like, why the fuck couldn't I just do this?
You know?
dan friesen
Right.
jordan holmes
I'm the fucking great...
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.
dan friesen
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.
jordan holmes
Right.
dan friesen
There is an argument that you could make that Alex is spiritually in that lineage too in terms of trying to monetize.
Montana militia that didn't exist as strongly in some of those other more militaristically based militias.
jordan holmes
Right.
unidentified
Like how the Klan was an MLM.
jordan holmes
Like that whole thing.
dan friesen
Yeah.
unidentified
Yeah.
dan friesen
So there's a lineage there, too, that lives on.
I don't know.
My head is full of thoughts.
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.
jordan holmes
That is one thing that you have to do.
When you're in treacherous water, you've got to give it up to the Somali pirates because they know how to get through it.
dan friesen
They're good at the wheel.
jordan holmes
You've got to give it to them.
dan friesen
So, I don't know.
We'll see.
But also, I need to find those old episodes.
I know they're out there somewhere, and I'll just put the call out if anybody has any idea of how to get your hands on real old Alex Jones episodes.
jordan holmes
Well, they're in all the goddamn splinter cells.
That's the problem.
dan friesen
Yeah, I know.
Those places where those people wouldn't talk to us.
They're not listening.
jordan holmes
No, I don't think so.
dan friesen
Yeah, but if anybody has a line on anything.
jordan holmes
I swear to God, if the last Blockbuster standing has all those tapes, we're road tripping right now.
dan friesen
Well, I contacted Alex's old...
Blockbuster?
No, his old radio stations and the Austin Public Access Channel.
jordan holmes
Yeah.
dan friesen
And they don't even really know.
Some of them said, like, I think there's got to be copies somewhere, but we don't have access to them or anything.
Motherfuckers.
Got to find them.
jordan holmes
They don't have access to them?
unidentified
Mm-mm.
jordan holmes
CIA.
dan friesen
So, no, like, someone who worked there probably has copies.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But, yeah, it was that sort of thing.
jordan holmes
Who knows?
dan friesen
Fuck.
So, anyway, I need those.
I need them.
If you have them, let me know.
But, until we come back with another episode, and again, sorry, this is a little bit short in terms of our...
I was really hoping we'd have a nice, really long episode.
jordan holmes
Four-hour episode, yeah.
dan friesen
Because I have a little bit of my pressures alleviated.
I think I found an apartment.
jordan holmes
Yeah.
dan friesen
So like it was a bad week of stress throughout and you lost your job.
So like neither of us were doing good in terms of life stress, but your situation is pivoted Yeah, yeah, yeah.
jordan holmes
It's been a rough week.
dan friesen
Yeah.
jordan holmes
Our ability to traverse treacherous waters is coming to a close, hopefully.
dan friesen
Yeah.
So thanks for sticking along for the ride along the way.
And we'll be back next week.
jordan holmes
Absolutely.
In the meantime.
dan friesen
We have a website.
jordan holmes
We have a website?
Is it knowledgefight.com?
dan friesen
That's correct.
jordan holmes
That sounds good.
dan friesen
Yep.
jordan holmes
Do we have a Twitter?
dan friesen
We do.
It's knowledge underscore fight.
jordan holmes
Do we have a Facebook?
dan friesen
We do.
We also have a group on there called Go Home and Tell Your Mother You're Brilliant.
Now with over a thousand walks.
jordan holmes
What?
That's crazy.
dan friesen
Yeah, pretty cool.
jordan holmes
Yeah!
dan friesen
Thank you to everybody.
jordan holmes
iTunes, download, listen, review, etc.
dan friesen
All that good stuff.
jordan holmes
Patreon, all the good fun stuff.
dan friesen
Absolutely.
jordan holmes
Yeah!
dan friesen
But for now, I guess if we look at this, I would say...
jordan holmes
Boy, we did not have any winners on this episode.
dan friesen
I disagree.
I think there's one.
And his name is Let Pritchard.
The guy who wrote the Larry Summers memo that was taken out of context.
jordan holmes
Fair enough.
Fair enough.
dan friesen
Let Pritchard, I'm certain, has never killed anybody.
But one guy technically probably has.
And that is a gentleman by the name of Alex Jones.
alex jones
Andy in Kansas, you're on the air.
Thanks for holding.
unidentified
Hello, Alex.
jordan holmes
I'm a first-time caller.
unidentified
I'm a huge fan.
I love your work.
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