Alex Jones has been out of studio in the present day, so today, Dan and Jordan continue their investigation of what Alex was up to in 2013. In this installment, Alex gets very, very defensive about media coverage about him and has an interview with the second worst sheriff in the US.
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your work. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| I'm Jordan. | ||
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around, drink novelty beverages, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Indeed we are, Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Dan. | ||
| What up? | ||
| Have you ever been in a maze? | ||
| Corn mazes. | ||
| Have you been in corn mazes? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I feel like I have. | ||
| I mean, I grew up in central Missouri and we went to state fairs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So I feel like I have. | ||
| It seems like you would have had to, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But you've never had any memorable maze experiences. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Hmm. | ||
| That's a disappointment. | ||
| I don't... | ||
| I've been in... | ||
| I feel like I've been in haunted houses more. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I've been in some haunted houses. | ||
| I always found them unpleasant. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There was too much awareness for me that these weren't monsters. | ||
| They were people trying to scare me, and that made me resent them. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I didn't enjoy that. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I did one time go to a rave at a haunted house off-season. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| In Columbia, there's a big warehouse that during October time was a haunted house. | ||
| I don't know when this was, but it was not during Halloween season. | ||
| There were a bunch of people who held a rave there. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| I don't know how I got an invitation, because as much as I maybe should have been, I wasn't a part of that scene. | ||
| But I ended up, you know, a lot of industrial music, maybe not for me, but it was surreal to walk around the parts of the haunted house with the lights on. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Like, just wandering around, just seeing, like, all of these weird corners where people would hide. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| It was very fucked up. | ||
| It was a weird time. | ||
| I was, I, uh, I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| It's an interesting story, but looking back on it, I can't tell you if it was a good time or anything. | ||
| I don't know if it was. | ||
| It was just weird. | ||
| It was a weird night. | ||
| It was notable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It happened. | ||
| Yeah, definitely. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Not many mazes come up in my mind. | ||
| Well, on the way here, I had to navigate a maze. | ||
| I see. | ||
| Today is the day of the Pride Parade here in Chicago, as opposed to last weekend, which was the Celebration at Street Festival. | ||
| And Jordan very dumbly was trying to walk over here, not realizing he'd have to cross a parade. | ||
| Well, we live on... | ||
| Between us is the parade route. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you decided to try and get through it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Foolishly. | |
| I guess? | ||
| For some reason. | ||
| But I think there are still places where you can cross. | ||
| They're just pretty few and far between, right? | ||
| Really? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I don't think there's... | ||
| Like, are they going to hold up signs saying stop, like a crossing guard situation? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So what did you have to do? | |
| I had to backtrack all the way back. | ||
| It was only like a block. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| But I had to backtrack and go all the way around it, and then you have to do this ziggy-zaggy thing to get from... | ||
| Because Broadway is... | ||
| Ziggy-zaggy. | ||
| It's like a man show. | ||
| That's what I do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oi, oi, oi. | |
| Oh, don't. | ||
| No. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| This is a show where I apologize for accidentally making references to the man show. | ||
| As you should. | ||
| It's a good thing those guys never went on to do anything. | ||
| And I know a lot about Alex Jones. | ||
| And I only know what you tell me about both. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And today, Jordan, we've got an interesting episode to go over. | ||
| I have some things to say before we do, but before I say the things that I need to say before we get to today's episode, I've got to take a little time to thank some people who have signed up and are supporting the show. | ||
| We really appreciate it. | ||
| So, first of all, Philip, thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Phillip. | ||
| Thanks, Phillip. | ||
| Next, Brittany. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Next, Scott. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Scott. | ||
| Thank you, Scott. | ||
| Next, the law offices of Barnes, Barnes, Pettis, Enoch, and Barnes. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, law offices of Barnes, Barnes, Pattis, Enoch, and Barnes. | ||
| All I have to say is good work, Barnes. | ||
| Good work. | ||
| Then finally, I'd like to say thank you to somebody who donated on a little bit of an elevated level. | ||
| We appreciate it very much. | ||
| So, Saeed, thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a technocrat. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Crikey, mate. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| Have yourself a brew. | ||
| How's your 401k doing, bro? | ||
| We got to go full tilt boogie on this, Watson, all right? | ||
| Let's just get down to business. | ||
| We ain't making that money off that heroin. | ||
| Why are you pimp so good? | ||
| My neck is freakishly large. | ||
| I declare Infowar on you. | ||
| Thank you so much, Saeed. | ||
| Thank you very much, Saeed. | ||
| And if you're listening out there and you're thinking, hey, I like this show, I'd like to support what these guys do, you can do that by going to our website, knowledgefight.com. | ||
| There's a button that says support the show. | ||
| We'd appreciate it. | ||
| So, first thing I need to say is a little bit of a correction. | ||
| I had some bad information, some slightly in... | ||
| Complete information on our last episode and I was incorrect about the idea that PCP going away led to the development of ketamine. | ||
| That did happen? | ||
| That did. | ||
| So because PCP went away, no shit? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, cool. | ||
| I was incorrect about that. | ||
| Now, I will say that I was not incorrect about my contention that they are very different. | ||
| Yes, that is true. | ||
| There are similarities between the two, but they are very different. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I was wrong about that aspect of it, and I apologize for getting that wrong. | ||
| You're a big man. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| So I guess that's actually it in terms of that business. | ||
| So let's get to today's episode. | ||
| This is the other thing I needed to say. | ||
| It was my sincere intention, Jordan, to do an episode today here where we talk about Alex Jones' two-night coverage of the Democratic Party debates. | ||
| Oh no! | ||
| In 2019. | ||
| Oh, fuck off. | ||
| He was doing live coverage of both nights of the debates, calling his spectacular clown world, because all the Dems were clowns. | ||
| Right, right, right, clever. | ||
| I was getting really excited to see how far off the rails it was going to get, because, you know, his evening broadcasts have a real tendency to end up really fucked up with him drunk and yelling about how someone, uh, yelling at somebody, basically. | ||
| basically, in a really irresponsible way. | ||
| Sometimes he even cries and tells us about the four ways humans can learned things those are the great things yeah i sat down to dig in and get us some source material and it immediately became clear to me that this plan of mine was not going to work on the first night of the debates alex was not drunk it definitely feels like someone may have given him a stern talking to and the show is pretty much just a boring version of his normal show but with owen schroyer and barnes co-hosting It's a telethon, for sure. | ||
| And it's really less about the debates and more about Alex's victim status and how everyone's trying to take him down. | ||
| Ultimately, it was a huge disappointment to me, and it's four hours worth of bullshit that we don't need to go over. | ||
| So, I tuned into the Thursday show, figuring Alex has gotta have some next-day analysis to throw out. | ||
| I can almost taste how hard he's gonna go after Beto for talking in Spanish. | ||
| As the show started up, I could tell that what I was hearing was a pre-recorded message from Alex. | ||
| It sounds like he's recording it at like 4 a.m. inside a tin can, and it's basically just him accusing Elizabeth Warren of being on cocaine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Here is a taste of that. | ||
| The big takeaway. | ||
| Think about this. | ||
| Not just the fact that many of the participants looked like they had escaped from a lunatic asylum, and again, that... | ||
| Obviously, Elizabeth Warren, who's normally low energy, looked like she was ready to murder someone and had lightning bolts coming out of her eyes for two hours, guaranteed was on serious amphetamines. | ||
| Probably large amounts of it. | ||
| So it sounds like he's recording that in a fucking hallway. | ||
| Yeah, what is going on? | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| So that shit goes on for a couple of minutes, and then he has Barnes host the rest of the show, which is unlistenable. | ||
| But it does feed into your theory that Barnes is trying to take over Infowars. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| It's very possible at this point. | ||
| So I figured, alright, Alex must just be tired. | ||
| He was up late doing the live stream the night before, so he has Barnes cover for him so he can get his energy back for night two. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This gave me some hope that Alex was planning on having a big night to close out Clown World. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So I turned on night two, and my reaction was not unlike that of a Lovecraftian protagonist come face to face with some sort of eldritch horror. | ||
| Alex wasn't even on his own debate livestream coverage. | ||
| It was all Owen Schroyer, David Knight, and Barnes. | ||
| I've ever heard! | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| That is the worst! | ||
| They did play a two-minute recording that Alex sent in where he calls the Democrats losers and begs for money, but it sounds like it was recorded at about 4.10 a.m. in the same tin can he recorded the other day's message in. | ||
| And then Friday's show is just that same team again. | ||
| Alex is basically a non-factor in his Democratic debate coverage. | ||
| On Friday, it's just Barnes, David Knight, Noah and Troyer again. | ||
| He doesn't even get to make fun of how Marianne Williamson was there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She was funny. | |
| And he gets he doesn't even get to pretend that she's the face of the party. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I have a theory about what's up. | |
| Alex is supposed to be deposed in the Sandy Hook lawsuit on July 1st and 2nd or Monday and Tuesday of this week. | ||
| It's the Connecticut case where Norm Pattis is in charge. | ||
| Given the shit that's been happening with Alex between his horrible response to the illegal pornography that was discovered in Discovery and his very clear attempts to threaten opposing counsel and put a million dollar bounty on them, that sort of shit, I wouldn't be surprised if Norm is insisting Alex actually prepare for this deposition. | ||
| If you recall, he does seem like he at least kind of wants to win the case, as opposed to Barnes, who seems far more interested in logging hours on air on InfoWars and making the lawsuits milked for all the publicity they can bring, and then settling the cases whenever shit gets too real. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Pattis seems like an actual lawyer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, he seems like he... | ||
| Would get more market value out of a better outcome of the case. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| Or at least that seems to be his operating... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| We might be totally wrong. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| Possible. | ||
| But the timing of this makes sense that it was a situation where Norm made Alex come to Connecticut early, which would explain his absence as well as the shitty sound quality of the recordings he sent in. | ||
| He might have been filming it in an airport or something along those lines. | ||
| Whatever the case is, I have no new Alex to cover, and thus we're sticking around in the past to follow how Alex's narratives took shape in the weeks and months after Sandy Hook. | ||
| Today we are going over February 17th and 18th. | ||
| Some of it's fairly interesting and some of it is profoundly upsetting. | ||
| There will be one portion of this episode that I'm going to give a content warning for in advance because some of it's pretty fucked up stuff. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| But not all of it. | ||
| That's just a little... | ||
| That's just a segment of it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But... | ||
| Overall, I'm glad we're not doing the debates because I did not watch them and I do not care. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I fully don't care. | ||
| And Alex, his big narrative is like, you know, I've been... | ||
| Me and the subreddit, TheDonald, we got censored in advance of this so no one could attack Biden. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I'm scrolling through my Twitter feed and it's like all sorts of people on the left attacking Biden. | ||
| Biden sucks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I don't know if that's really what people were trying to avoid. | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah, it just makes no sense. | ||
| I don't really have a hot take on anything like that. | ||
| So it's better that we stay in the past. | ||
| Yeah, my only... | ||
| But we might be stuck in the past for a little while. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Because if Alex is in Connecticut doing this deposition, it might be an entire week where he's just out of studio. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| We'll see what happens. | ||
| So it's interesting because the February 17th to 18th, where we last left off, there was that Russian meteor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alex was getting pretty silly about it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Being a little bit irresponsible, insinuating that the end was nigh. | ||
| It's not going to kill us, but... | ||
| I mean, it might kill us. | ||
| But everyone lies in the government's line. | ||
| They might nuke us and then say it was the media. | ||
| Yeah, that's a fun one. | ||
| So we're going to see how that plays out on the next day. | ||
| Actually, not the next day, because that last one we listened to was a Friday. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And now we're jumping back on the 17th, which is a Sunday. | ||
| But before we get to today's episode, here is an Out of Context Drop. | ||
| From Alex Jones. | ||
| Little dog wants you dead. | ||
| You get that straight? | ||
| Big dog gotta act like big dog. | ||
| Big dog gotta be big dog. | ||
| Or big dog gonna be dead dog. | ||
| You got that? | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| More dead dogs. | ||
| Man! | ||
| How many times? | ||
| What is this dude? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| A lot of dead dogs in Alex's world. | ||
| Coming out of his mouth. | ||
| So, on the first clip you have here from the 17th, Alex is responding to some media coverage of his coverage of the Russian meteor situation. | ||
| And this is very defensive, very stupid, and Alex is very wrong about pretty much everything. | ||
| And then I have Atlantic Magazine going, Alex Jones said that the U.S. was attacking Russia with the meteorite that hit Friday morning. | ||
| The meteor that came into the atmosphere and Alex Jones is discredited. | ||
| And they linked to an article carried by DrudgeReport.com that clearly we were saying rumors and reports that the U.S. attacked Russia and that Russia shot it down spread. | ||
| And we go on to say we believe it's a piece of the stone meteorite. | ||
| Was it DA-14 that went by? | ||
| DA-14. | ||
| And that it was not a weapons attack on Russia. | ||
| So we write an article reporting on what's all over the Russian news. | ||
| We post it. | ||
| It goes viral. | ||
| One of the biggest stories on Friday, according to the sites that track that. | ||
| I'm going to cover that later on the list here. | ||
| And then they just tell their readers, Alex Jones said this, and Alex Jones is discredited when we said the opposite. | ||
| And more and more, the propaganda against us doesn't even make sense. | ||
| Unless you think your readers have IQs below room temperature. | ||
| So, this is a real serious trend that goes on for these two days, is Alex misrepresenting people talking about him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So, if you recall on our Friday episode, I made an explicit point of how Alex didn't need to report on dumb theories that he himself doesn't believe at all are true. | ||
| One of the problems is that over the years, there have been a lot of stupid theories that have come out of Alex Jones' shop. | ||
| And his writers are so bad at writing, so to the untrained eye, it can sometimes be difficult to tell what they're actually trying to say. | ||
| So, in this case, I wanted to figure out... | ||
| What was going on? | ||
| What was this Atlantic article? | ||
| What was the Infowars article? | ||
| Is there actually a misrepresentation going on? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I decided that if anybody can get to the bottom of any of this, it's probably me. | ||
| So I checked out this article in the Atlantic. | ||
| It has the headline, quote, Russian meteorite conspiracy theories debunked. | ||
| Here's what the Atlantic article says as it relates to Alex. | ||
| Quote, More wide-eyed theorists have suggested that the object may not have been a meteor at all and could have been a satellite that was shot down or some form of kinetic bombardment weapon aimed at Russia, the conspiracy-loving folks over at InfoWars. | ||
| So the beginning of that part is a quote from an InfoWars article. | ||
| The part that they're quoting is the part that makes it clear in the Infowars article that they're discussing, quote, more wide-eyed theorists. | ||
| Yeah, I feel like that's fine. | ||
| That's pretty much it. | ||
| The article goes on to discuss Vladimir Zurya. | ||
| Zirinovsky, in his claim that the meteor was a U.S. weapon targeting Russia, and it breaks down how that's nuts. | ||
| But at no point does the article say that Alex is advancing that view at all. | ||
| They take a quote from the article where Alex is, or the Infowars article, is saying that more wide-eyed theorists are suggesting this. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Yeah, doesn't that suggest that they're not advancing those theories? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, because they're calling the people who are advancing them more wide-eyed. | |
| Yeah, more wide-eyed. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, so that's totally fine. | ||
| That's actually almost responsible reporting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where you're like, some people are saying this. | ||
| It's totally fair. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the Infowars article itself was written by Steve Watson, and it pains me to say this, but if you decide to write an article on this stupid of a topic, this is about the best version of it you could write. | ||
| The Atlantic accurately covered the Infowars article. | ||
| They quoted the part of the story where Steve Watson had written about the wide-eyed conspiracy theorists believing this idea, which is a fair representation of the text. | ||
| No harm, no foul. | ||
| Yeah, everything seems fine. | ||
| Now, just because this Atlantic article accurately discussed Steve Watson's article, they might have been able to make a much different case if they took into account all of Infowars' output. | ||
| On February 16th, InfoWars published a special report titled, quote, Russian meteor shower or kinetic bombardment attack, question mark. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| That was published a day after Steve Watson's article. | ||
| Gotcha, gotcha. | ||
| On that same day, InfoWars published an article, quote, suspected meteor explosion reported in central Cuba. | ||
| They published this article with so little information that they weren't even sure it was a real thing. | ||
| So they had to add this absurd editor's note. | ||
| Quote, there is a lot, a lot in capital letters. | ||
| So they're yelling it at us. | ||
| There is a lot! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| There is a lot of disinformation floating around about this possible occurrence. | ||
| And then I wrote this in my notes parenthetically. | ||
| The word occurrence here is misspelled. | ||
| Good editor's note. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So in the editor's note, it's misspelled? | |
| Strong word. | ||
| That's the saddest thing. | ||
| Quote, no videos or images of the supposed meteor have surfaced from reputable sources at the time of writing. | ||
| Fun fact, the article that they then go on to post is just a copy and pasting of an article in Jin Ha. | ||
| The Chinese state-run paper owned by the Communist Party. | ||
| Something you definitely wouldn't think that would be on Alex's Rolodex of reliable sources to copy and paste articles from. | ||
| Wait, so... | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| I don't even want to unpack that. | ||
| Let's just let that be. | ||
| It's way too big a steamer trunk for today. | ||
| So between these types of bullshit headlines and the irresponsible reporting and Alex's insistences that the media came down in Russia could be related to the larger near-earth object making a pass by when he had literally no reason to think that was the case, it all adds up to Info was doing a really bad job with Meteor Panic 2013. | ||
| Their behavior shows a clear desire to kick off some sort of fear and paranoia, but it was very noncommittal, and I think that's what hurt them. | ||
| They went half speed, which any football coach will tell you is when injuries happen. | ||
| You're going to fuck up your propaganda game when you go half speed. | ||
| That's when you get hurt. | ||
| That's what happens. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| I think that's what happened with the meteor. | ||
| Get a little neck pain. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| I think that's what happened with the meteor panic. | ||
| They got noncommittal about it and ended up just fumbling real hard. | ||
| The situation is that the Atlantic article accurately covered Steve Watson's article. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Alex is projecting onto them some sort of lie that they're telling about him in order to demonize him. | ||
| And it's really silly. | ||
| That's basically how I would describe it. | ||
| So it kind of feels like Alex is defensive towards the piece that the Atlantic wasn't talking about. | ||
| No, I think it's he's defensive about his larger corpus of work. | ||
| Ah, well, yeah. | ||
| Because he's shitty at his job. | ||
| Yeah, you bet. | ||
| I mean, I would be. | ||
| And I think that it's also, like, I don't think he likes it whenever he's mentioned or InfoWars is mentioned at all in an article that has debunked in the headline. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So I think that he thinks that he's being associated with these things that are being debunked. | ||
| Right. | ||
| As opposed to him being one of the only news, in quotes, news sources. | ||
| That have a large platform that even dipped their toe into the dome. | ||
| But this was a kinetic weapon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| So they're the only people that you could cite in the U.S. media. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| I mean, that's on him. | ||
| So in a certain sense, Alex feels a little bit cornered. | ||
| Like, nobody's coming to rally behind me? | ||
| Oh, goddammit. | ||
| You're in the pool. | ||
| People are saying you're in the pool. | ||
| That's what's going on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So anyway, in this next clip we find out that, you know, Alex is frustrated about how the media is covering him. | ||
| And, you know, if he'd had his druthers, he'd never be getting this sort of coverage. | ||
| His life would be completely different. | ||
| Is he going to go farming again? | ||
| People like that absolutely are at odds with those of us that want to paint an oil painting. | ||
| We'll get back to this. | ||
| The people who are at odds with the oil painters are, of course, the globalists. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| And go sell it. | ||
| You know, when I was in college, I went and sold paintings on the street. | ||
| I said, I'm going to go do the true entrepreneurial thing. | ||
| And people actually came up to me on 6th Street, and I got a little art showing, and I made some connections, and suddenly I was selling paintings for $3,000, $4,000 a piece. | ||
| And I didn't even have time. | ||
| I was already successful. | ||
| Oil painting and had to quit to fight the New World Order. | ||
| I guarantee you, I would have galleries all over the country, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| I'd be selling paintings for $100,000 apiece right now. | ||
| But I'm fighting the New World Order and have built a media system that reaches 3 million people plus a day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| Lapsed artist who decided to quit in order to fight a perceived global war. | ||
| Never heard that before. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| Well, there's a big difference. | ||
| Apparently, the internet says that Hitler was vegan, so there we go. | ||
| Can't be Hitler if you eat red meat. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Alex's ex-wife, he worked for PETA. | ||
| So we're supposed to believe that Alex Jones was selling his own oil paintings for thousands of dollars on the boardwalk of Austin. | ||
| I don't know if it's a boardwalk. | ||
| People are walking by just going, I need to pay three grand for that. | ||
| I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt within the context of me thinking this is all bullshit. | ||
| But the way he's describing it, I believe he started selling paintings for cheaper on the street. | ||
| And then people started to come around later. | ||
| Because his work got so hot that they were like, fuck, I need to get me an Alex Jones. | ||
| I need to get me an Alex Jones. | ||
| I want to say this very clearly. | ||
| If anybody knows how to track down one of these oil paintings. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I don't know how I'll pay for it, but I will find a way. | ||
| Don't care. | ||
|
unidentified
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I need an Alex Jones oil painting. | |
| Of course! | ||
| Now, that being said, I'm not sure they exist. | ||
| But if they do, and anybody has one, or knows where I can buy one. | ||
| I'll probably pay like 200 bucks for it. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's about all I pay for it. | ||
| That's your max? | ||
| And by the way, Alex... | ||
| Don't start off telling people your max. | ||
| By the way, Alex, if you're listening, you need 200 bucks. | ||
| Just make one now. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I'd still buy it. | ||
| I'm disappointed that we haven't heard anything about his art up until now. | ||
| Never. | ||
| Never! | ||
| And I haven't heard him bring it up since. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| He's like an accomplished oil painter, and we've just never heard about this before. | ||
| It's part of why I don't believe it. | ||
| I mean, he's a pretend accomplished. | ||
|
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Right, right, right. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's in his fantasy backstory. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But what's not in his fantasy backstory, because this is very consistent throughout. | ||
| Killing dogs. | ||
| Well, there's that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Having a lot of feelings about the Nigerian emails. | ||
| He's still on that tip? | ||
| You bet. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Now, what's interesting about this is this clip comes after him doing his normal spiel about the Nigerian prince emails. | ||
|
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| But what's interesting is in this next clip we find that Alex knows about what happens in the second stage of the email scam, which implies he's probably... | ||
| He's the one! | ||
| And see, a lot of people would go do the Nigerian deal, pay the $5,000, not get the million, and then Prince Wabubi's representative would say, I will allow you to talk to Prince Wabubi on the phone. | ||
| But you've got to put $10,000 in and then you will get the money. | ||
| And many people would shell out five or six times up to $100,000 to get the money from Prince Wabubi. | ||
| So he knows what happens if you fall for the scam, how the scam evolves. | ||
| And also, where would he be getting the money to send to the Nigerian prince? | ||
| Oil painting sales. | ||
| Yeah, that does make sense. | ||
| It all fits. | ||
| Also, he took out a huge insurance policy, a huge life insurance policy on NONC, put it all together. | ||
| We figured it out. | ||
| Could be. | ||
| That's what happened. | ||
| All went to Wabubi. | ||
| This show is silly for a bit. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| I was listening to it, and I'm like, this is... | ||
| Not a good show. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| And then it becomes even worse, but in a much different way. | ||
| And that is because Alex has a guest that comes in. | ||
| And it is Oath Keepers founder Stuart Rhodes coming back in. | ||
| Gone weirdo extraordinaire. | ||
| Now, he says two things. | ||
| I mean, it's just all like... | ||
| We love guns. | ||
| They're going to take our guns. | ||
|
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Right, right, right. | |
| It's all standard nonsense. | ||
| 1.6 million cops. | ||
| Kill them. | ||
| Don't kill them. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But Stuart ends up saying two things that I found particularly interesting and worth discussing. | ||
| And here is the first one. | ||
| And we had a current serving sheriff, Sheriff of Fulton County, Tom Lurie, got up and said, my county, he says, my county is a Milan-LeBay County. | ||
|
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It's a come and take it county. | |
| Wow. | ||
| All of them to do is, you know, is your county a come-and-take-it county, or is it a bend-over in take-it county, is what I challenge the audience. | ||
| And a lot of them shouted back, it's a come-and-take-it county. | ||
| And so they're very focused on resistance. | ||
| They're not going to comply. | ||
| This Tom Laurie of Fulton County would, very shortly after this, retire. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I kind of imagined. | ||
| It's either retire or go to prison for those guys. | ||
| So you got Stuart Rhodes here coming in, talking about this is a Molon-Labe county. | ||
| This is a come-and-take-it county. | ||
| I thought that was really interesting. | ||
| So, in January 2013, Stuart Rhodes and the Oath Keepers launched what they called the Molan Labbe Pledge, where they declared that they will never register weapons, never obey any order to disarm people or compel registration of weapons, and that they would violently resist, quote, oath-breakers who try and disarm people. | ||
| On their website, they specifically say, quote, this is the pledge we published in January 2013 in response to leftist calls for more infringement on the right to keep and bear arms after the Sandy Hook shooting. | ||
| That writing is specifically signed by Stuart Rhodes and is explicitly saying that he was compelled to write this pledge for his group of gun weirdos in response to his feelings after Sandy Hook, which is interesting. | ||
| But I found this even more interesting since we know that before January, just before January, Alex had launched his Molon Labbe shirt, which he announced on his January 11th show was, quote, the best seller of shirts we've ever sold. | ||
| On that same show, he clearly doesn't know how to pronounce Molen Labbe and says, quote, Monelebe. | ||
| I remember that one. | ||
| We covered that episode. | ||
| We did. | ||
| The expression Molen Labbe had been popular among right-wing militia types for a while at the point when Alex made his shirt. | ||
| So he's clearly ripping off something that was cool in a subterranean world of extremists and trying to sell it to the mainstream. | ||
| Because he was even unaware of how to say it. | ||
| He was aware of it enough, but he didn't really know. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So he was laundering that kind of phrase. | ||
| That's the feeling I have. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| In many ways, that's kind of a perfect analogy for what he does with his rhetoric. | ||
| But what's more interesting to me is that Stuart Rhodes didn't make his Molan Labe pledge until after Alex released this shirt and it became a bestseller. | ||
| I think what you have here is an interesting glimpse at a business cycle. | ||
| In terms of rhetoric, Alex digs down into really fucked up worlds of insane right-wingers and brings back things that he can make acceptable to more mainstream audiences. | ||
| In the process, he monetizes them by creating shirts, hats, bumper stickers, all the like. | ||
| He takes this deep, gross world's ideas, shines them up, and then markets them. | ||
| Then... | ||
| The representatives of these fucked up worlds who Alex has platformed take the product that he's created based off the rhetoric that comes out of their worlds and sells it back to extremists. | ||
| I think that there's a cycle here that you can kind of see. | ||
| It's also the cycle of popularizing. | ||
| know the more you market this to people the more people see it and get associated with it and it normalizes molan labe so it popularizes that then the oath keeper guy brings it back You would make more money off this than if you just, like, let's say some weird 3%er shirt company made a Molon Labe shirt. | ||
| You'd have much more market penetration, centralization of concept. | ||
| It's synergy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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And it's also pretty easy to see Alex's entry to Trump shit having a pretty similar shade, with him stealing Hillary for prison as a line that he read on a bumper sticker. | |
| And then he turned it into some merch of his own, then sold it a storefront. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just find it very interesting, you know, that Oath Keepers had been around for years and they didn't do a Moulin Labe pledge until Alex released his Moulin Labe shirts. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's something. | ||
| There's something there. | ||
| The thing I'm wondering is... | ||
| Like, chicken and egg kind of situation? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, did the dumb Oath Keepers see that shirt, or talk to Alex and see that shirt out there, and then are like, okay, cool, we can capitalize on this. | ||
| Or, were they the ones who gave Alex the idea in the first place? | ||
| He puts the shirt out there, and then they can release their pledge because it's already popular or whatever. | ||
| I think it's probably closer to the second one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The world's wearing the Oath Keepers fester and such. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Going back to their formation. | ||
| And that whole Patriot Militia world. | ||
| Molan Labbe was something that was, like, the way I put it, was subterranean. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| It existed as a catchphrase and a code. | ||
| In those worlds already. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| I mean, it goes back to like the 300, the Spartans, you know. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| From like a historical perspective, you can go back that far. | ||
| But in terms of American ideas about it, it did exist since like the early 2000s at least. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| In those communities. | ||
| So I think Alex ripped it off from that. | ||
| Whether or not it was like the Oath Keeper saying, hey, Alex, here's a good sure idea. | ||
| But in terms of function, I think what you're describing is accurate. | ||
| Right. | ||
| In the way each serves each other's purposes. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And the way they're able to capitalize off the actions of each other. | ||
| So I think there's something there. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| So that was interesting to me. | ||
| But I think what Stuart says in this next clip may be even more interesting. | ||
| I think the fact that they're trying to start something physical shows how weak they are. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| They're running out of time. | ||
| And so, you know, it's really interesting to see this. | ||
| Everything's converging, and I think the window is short. | ||
| That's why I told my guys, I said, look, you know, plan in three-month spurts. | ||
| A sprint from now until April 19th. | ||
| Get as prepped as you possibly can. | ||
| It's not just about getting your public officials to declare which side they're on. | ||
|
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It's also about you, the veterans and gun owners, making sure which side you're on, and then getting prepped. | |
| You can't just be willing. | ||
| You have to also be ready and able. | ||
| So, this makes no sense. | ||
| None! | ||
| So, Stuart is saying that he tells his guys to prepare in three-month spurts. | ||
| So, you gotta do whatever you can by April 19th. | ||
| But this episode is taking place on February 17th, which you may or may not know is not three months before April 19th. | ||
| So, I decided to see what's three months before April 19th. | ||
| What was Stuart Rhodes up to? | ||
| And on January 19th, 2013, he was at a rally in Coeur d 'Alene. | ||
| In Idaho, but I can't possibly imagine this being where he launched his three-month preparation initiative. | ||
| Right. | ||
| His three-months nonsense has nothing to do with the choice of that date. | ||
| He chose April 19th because that's the date when the Battles of Lexington and Concord started back in 1775, kicking off the Revolutionary War. | ||
| We are grown-ups, aren't we? | ||
| I find this date choice really interesting because it tells you what these guys are obsessed with. | ||
| They're not really obsessed with the underlying causes of the American Revolution, because if they were, they could seek to memorialize December 16th in honor of the Boston Tea Party. | ||
| Or you could go with November 1st in memory of the passage of the Stamp Act. | ||
| Or even May 16th to immortalize the end of the successful conclusion of the six-year uprising of the regulators in the Carolinas. | ||
| There are many, many options for a date that Stuart Rhodes and his gun weirdo friends could choose, but he chose April 19th. | ||
| They chose this date because it was the day when their version of justification And they fantasize about being able to relive that so desperately. | ||
| Yep. | ||
|
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Scholars of the Revolutionary War would probably be unlikely to say that the war started with the battles of Lexington and Concord. | |
| They would probably be likelier to say that the escalation to a shooting war started then. | ||
| That is why the date resonates so much for these militia patriot folks, because they want that to happen again. | ||
| If they didn't, then they'd probably have a more robust analysis of the forces that led up to the eventual shot heard around the world, as opposed to just talking about how the British were going to seize a weapons cache, and that started the war. | ||
| It's fucking nuts. | ||
| For people so obsessed with the Revolution who scream about the answer to 1984 being 1776, it's wild that I have never heard Alex bring up the Intolerable Acts. | ||
| I've never heard him bring up the Townsend Acts, or how the Suffolk Resolves placed the Patriots of Massachusetts into a state of open rebellion against the British. | ||
| So of course the fucking British were going to try and seize a cache of weapons. | ||
| I've never heard any of that from him. | ||
| None of this sort of analysis. | ||
| Their argument is stupid, and I suspect that it's partially that way because their argument isn't sincere. | ||
| The idea that gun confiscation caused the American Revolution is not something that anybody could seriously argue on the merits, but it works really well if what you really want to do is mask your underlying desire to kill your political rivals and you need a justification. | ||
| That seems to be what's going on here. | ||
| And if it weren't, I think Stuart would have probably chose a different date for his imaginary end of three-month preparation nonsense. | ||
| I think these people belie what they're so interested in with the way they present history. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, it's been, and I've said this before, these guys really want to kill somebody and they know that they can't do it first. | ||
| Like, that's what they want. | ||
| They want justification. | ||
| They want to kill a human being and they can't do it. | ||
| Without any kind of reasoning. | ||
| They want to kill specific types of human beings. | ||
| You know, sometimes I don't even know if they care. | ||
| I think they don't want to kill their family, and beyond that, I'm kind of, all bets are off. | ||
| I think they would be pretty sad if they killed another militia guy. | ||
| Okay, fair enough. | ||
| Fair enough they would be sad. | ||
| Although, even then, maybe they'd be like, and he died for the cause! | ||
| Like, they're all fucking stupid. | ||
| Well, they would certainly skirt responsibility. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, for sure. | ||
| I think that's probably a pretty safe bet. | ||
| So that brings us to the end of the 17th. | ||
| That was a Sunday show, so it's a shorter show. | ||
| There wasn't as much going on. | ||
| Just Alex being very defensive about his coverage of the meteor, and then Stuart Rhodes yelling about guns, being really fun. | ||
| So now we get to the 18th, and in much the same way as Alex was very triggered about people talking about his meteor coverage, another bit of criticism. | ||
| Of his arguments has come out in the media, and Alex is not happy about this. | ||
| There was an AP article, what, Saturday, that ran in newspapers all over the country and was picked up by Fox News, CNN, you name it, all reported on it, saying that I basically made up 1.6 billion bullets. | ||
| And they say, well, the conspiracy theorist says this, it's true, sort of, but not really. | ||
| And then never say I'm wrong, or never give the proof, just list the 1.6 plus billion bullets, but just say it's no big deal. | ||
| Oh man, that guy got caught lying. | ||
| You know, he said he saw a red Volkswagen parked in his driveway, and there's the red Volkswagen, and he discredited. | ||
| You're like, well, but the red Volkswagen is parked there. | ||
| I know, isn't he discredited? | ||
| You know, that Alex, he said the sun would come up this morning, and did you see it came up? | ||
| Man, he's really discredited. | ||
| I mean, their propaganda has now reached cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs level. | ||
| I don't even get it. | ||
| It's so bad. | ||
| So, I mean, the analogy there would have to be, like, that guy said that he saw a red Volkswagen and it was going to be used to murder all patriots. | ||
| There is a red Volkswagen there. | ||
| It's not being used to murder all patriots. | ||
| So, why am I a liar? | ||
| There is a red Volkswagen there. | ||
| I do find his defense to be lacking in some respects. | ||
| It's intentionally obtuse. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It is spirited, though. | ||
|
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Yeah, certainly. | |
| It gets way more spirited later. | ||
| I don't have some clips of it, but he starts screaming about it. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| So here again, we have another instance of Alex trying to complain about the media covering him unfairly. | ||
| In this case, it's related to his constant argument that the federal government is buying up 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition, stockpiling it so they can wage war against the American people. | ||
| It's strange how the number 1.6 keeps coming up. | ||
| 1.6 million people represent 1% of gun owners who will kill cops if gun control measures are passed. | ||
| The government is buying up 1.6 billion bullets. | ||
| This is the sort of thing that I suspect is going to drive any numerologist who might be listening completely insane. | ||
| The average family has 1.6 children. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| It all means something, Dan. | ||
|
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Yep. | |
| It's the crypto Fibonacci number. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
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Not sure that even means anything. | |
| Fibonacci is a sequence, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alex, his complaints about the media's coverage of him are, once again, based on a very willful misunderstanding of what the articles are saying. | ||
| They agree with Alex that, yes, the government was buying 1.6 billion bullets, but his conclusion was stupid, and that very easily available facts contradict his stories that he tells in order to escalate paranoia. | ||
| All of the right-wing sites that cover the ammunition purchase constantly frame it as Obama buying all these bullets, as if he was personally building up a cash. | ||
| And again, that's intentional. | ||
| In reality, what happened was that the government had put out requests for people to bid on contracts to provide a very large number of bullets, presumably around the $1.6 billion number that Alex cites. | ||
| It might be less than that, but I'm not really interested in splitting hairs. | ||
| Yeah, who cares? | ||
| The reason that people are unwilling to say that Alex is right, despite him being pretty much right about the government ammo buy, is because all the stuff he says they're buying it for. | ||
| He creates hysteria and paranoia around this imagined intention behind the purchase, when the truth is that they were buying the ammo for training and shooting range purposes, and that the contracts they were looking to fill were for the next five years. | ||
| It's not like they wanted 1.6 billion bullets to show up ready to go tomorrow. | ||
| It was over the next... | ||
| The course of half a decade. | ||
| And their idea was that if they could lock in a contract with a huge purchase, the federal government might be able to get a better price on them. | ||
| At first glance, $1.6 billion is a gigantic number. | ||
| On second glance, it's still a gigantic number. | ||
| But if you start to consider how many federal law enforcement agencies there are and how many agents need ammunition to train and stay trained, if that number is reflecting a five-year supply for all those purposes, it doesn't really seem like that crazy a number after all. | ||
| Now, if you want to have a conversation about how insane it is that our law enforcement practices revolve so heavily around weaponry and how maybe we should disarm the police, I'm down with that conversation. | ||
| That's a very different argument than the one Alex is making. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I was going to say, you know, like, the fact that it is, the fact that it gradually becomes less, you know, ridiculous and insane, that it's 1.6 billion. | ||
| Seems ridiculously normalizing to something that is really, really bad to me. | ||
| No, totally. | ||
| And that's the experience that I had of looking into this. | ||
| It's like, man, it's crazy that we use that many bullets. | ||
| But I'm looking at it from an entirely different perspective than Alex. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| We can have complaints about the same thing, but the complaints be completely incompatible. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So the media was taking issue with Alex insisting that the bullets were for the government's use in a war against the patriots, which is a very, you know, especially when a very reasonable explanation is readily available. | ||
| They were pointing out that he was sort of right, because that's probably the most generous way to say it. | ||
| They might say he's right about a fact and wrong about an interpretation, but if I were running those media outlets, I probably would not have been so diplomatic. | ||
| I probably would have said that he was using a fact to lie, because that's what he's doing. | ||
| So his complaints fall on deaf ears a bit. | ||
| Isn't that fascinating how over the past few years of Trump we've gone in many circles from being like, we need to treat him fairly and we don't say that he lied. | ||
| We say that he mismanaged his facts or twisted things and now we're at the point where most news outlets are willing to just be like, Trump lied about that. | ||
| Not enough, probably. | ||
| Not enough by any stretch, but more than there were. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which, back in 2013, nobody would say that... | ||
| That Alex lied? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Nobody would say that Obama lied. | ||
| Except for Joe Wilson. | ||
| Except for those... | ||
| Yeah, except for those fucking... | ||
|
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You lie! | |
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| We're adults, right? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| So, most of this show that Alex is doing is about this. | ||
| Like, a lot of the show is taken up with his complaints about the media's coverage of him and how it's a psy-op or some shit. | ||
| Trying to discredit me by saying that I said that, you know, we attacked Russia with this meteor or the government 1.6 billion bullets. | ||
| Like, it's just constant. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This whole thing is just an exercise in defensiveness. | ||
| And in this next clip, I think I mostly pulled this clip because I think it's funny. | ||
| Alex, he plays this clip from CNN. | ||
| The Reliable Sources show, which is pre-Brian Stelter being the host. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So it turns out Alex has always had acts to grind. | ||
| Stelter isn't even the progenitor. | ||
| No, he just hates Reliable Sources. | ||
| He just hates Reliable Sources. | ||
|
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Which is almost a fucking perfect apt metaphor. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Of course he hates Reliable Sources. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's very on brand. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Discussion that's going on in the clip that he plays is someone, I don't know who it is, on Reliable Sources, like, why the fuck would Piers Morgan even book Alex Jones on his show? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Does anybody know what Alex Jones does? | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's the discussion, and then it's kind of funny from there. | ||
| They just lie to you, thinking you're stupid. | ||
| Here they are, yet again, and so we're discrediting these fraudsters. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| How did Piers Morgan handle Alex Jones? | ||
|
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Badly. | |
| The question really is, did anyone at CNN or on Piers Morgan's show ever see or hear Alex Jones before they booked him on the show? | ||
| Why do you say badly? | ||
|
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He let him have his say, and Alex Jones, all his views were on display. | |
| He got steamrolled. | ||
| Piers Morgan thought he was going to have an Oxford debating style debate about gun control. | ||
| You really think so? | ||
| Well, he kept saying it on the air, as a matter of fact. | ||
| And Alex Jones doesn't play by the way. | ||
| Piers Morgan always interrupts. | ||
| I love the idea that he's interrupting the clip to complain about Piers Morgan interrupting. | ||
| Damn it! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| It's a delicious irony there. | ||
| Yeah, he synecetically hates reliable sources and then also fucking interrupts ironically. | ||
| Yeah, so most of this show has been him having petty complaints about media articles about him to the extent that, like, this is... | ||
| Why are you covering that? | ||
| Uh, because they're talking about me. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, you know, obviously... | ||
| The audience is going to be having the same thoughts we are. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| That Alex is just covering any media coverage of himself. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| To sort of self-aggrandize. | ||
| Are we getting some callers? | ||
| No. | ||
| We're going to get Alex defending himself from the possible interpretation that he's just covering any news about himself. | ||
| You know, we don't normally cover ourselves. | ||
| Even when the Piers Morgan thing happened, we didn't talk about it that much. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| We've been forced now. | ||
| They're saying we said the U.S. government attacked Russia. | ||
| Atlantic Wire and others. | ||
| Just incredible fabrications. | ||
| When my entire crew, none of my riders, everyone, they said it was a stone meteorite fragment from DA-14. | ||
| It's just sad. | ||
| It's just sad. | ||
| Even his cameramen, after hearing that, must have been like, bullshit! | ||
| Bullshit! | ||
| Like, there's no way that you can say, we didn't even cover that Piers Morgan thing that much. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| Yeah, it's like, Alex, that's too big a swing. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Pull it back. | ||
| In his next clip, he complains a little bit more about this Atlantic Wire story. | ||
| And it's interesting because he's accusing them of lying while lying about them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| They interrupt too much. | ||
| This, by the way, was on CNN, too. | ||
| CNN, Atlantic Wire, a bunch of other publications that I said the U.S. government attacked Russia with a meteorite. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Or a kinetic weapon. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Where did I say this? | ||
| Didn't. | ||
| Put articles out saying that was disinformation. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| They say I said that. | ||
| And again, it isn't about Alex Jones. | ||
| They know that we represent what's left of America. | ||
| We understand the globalists. | ||
| We know their game plan. | ||
| We have millions of listeners. | ||
| We're growing exponentially. | ||
| They want to assassinate our character. | ||
| With the average Sally soccer mom, that's who watches CNN, on average about 108,000 viewers, total shadow of itself, but still it has authority with some bumpkins. | ||
| Some bumpkins. | ||
| Some bumpkins. | ||
| He is gaslighting hard. | ||
|
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| It's insane, too. | ||
| This is how he mainstreams illiteracy, basically. | ||
| No, he weaponized illiteracy. | ||
| Yeah, because what he's doing is he's responding to a false presentation of these articles, and then he's saying that they say that he said that they attacked Russia. | ||
| It's like, when did I say that? | ||
| When did I say that? | ||
| Right. | ||
|
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And my response to that is like, hey, when did they say that you said that? | |
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| And it's believable because for the most part you're like, obviously... | ||
| He can't read. | ||
| So this is sincere misinterpretation on his part when it's probably not. | ||
| It's malicious intent. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then I'm going to jump ahead towards the end of the episode now because Alex gets a caller later who Alex complains about how the media is lying about him. | ||
| And the caller has a really interesting response to it. | ||
| I mean, if they say I support Dorner, it doesn't matter if I was against him from day one. | ||
| They don't show any proof. | ||
| It must be true. | ||
| And then they giggle as friends of CNN. | ||
| They don't have real friends. | ||
| They just sit in their house watching CNN, and it reaffirms their delusion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mike, I don't expect anything more from literal demons, and that is why I've sworn off mainstream media. | |
| I didn't even know they were saying this about you, because I don't listen to it. | ||
| Sir, it's pell-mell. | ||
| I lied about the bullets. | ||
| I said the U.S. attacked Russia with a meteor. | ||
| Never said any such thing. | ||
| This caller is going to believe Alex's version of it and has sworn off any mainstream media so he didn't even know these things were being discussed. | ||
| He's never going to go find the articles that Alex is lying about. | ||
| And you've created a self-contained and inoculated lie sphere. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| An alternate reality. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| And that caller almost perfectly embodies the danger of this. | ||
| The gross aspect of it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And why it's so difficult to penetrate. | ||
| It's very much, it's exactly like a cult. | ||
| Like, it's him cutting off his family from any contact because they're suppressive persons. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The same thing is true of the media. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And the other aspect of that, I believe, also is pretty germane to cults, is that when the authority of the cult leader is called into question, there's some sort of dismissiveness or punishment. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we see that in another caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have one more question. | |
| I think it was 21.6 million bullets that Paul Watson had reported that the DHS had purchased. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's a lot of people online saying that he read the solicitation wrong, and that's actually like 240,000 bullets. | |
| Okay, well, okay. | ||
| Government's not arm into the teeth against us, okay? | ||
| Okay, everything's fine. | ||
| Everything's wonderful. | ||
| People online, probably robots. | ||
| Probably robots. | ||
| Yep, there you go. | ||
| So, I mean, any call into question of the idea that the cult leader is correct and infallible is immediately mocked. | ||
| Like, ah, these people saying that are robots. | ||
| And this leads to Alex going on a long rant, screaming about how right he is about everything. | ||
| I wanted to pull some clips of it, but, I mean, it's not any different than any other time we've heard him screaming and ranting. | ||
| Yeah, and it's one of those things that reveals every cult leader's deep and abiding insecurity as the driver behind all of this, that they never feel comfortable, and so they try and create this bubble where they always feel comfortable. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's a coping. | ||
| Fucked up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's an unhealthy coping mechanism. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| So Alex does this long rant, and I didn't even realize as I was listening to it that it was based on what that caller we just heard challenged him about. | ||
| Until in the middle of it, he discusses like, yeah, that caller, you know, he said we're not right. | ||
| And I'm like, oh my god, this is all in response to that caller. | ||
| Like, this is fucked up. | ||
| Shook him to the bone. | ||
| So he gets done with the rant, and then he says this, and it sounds like he is an angsty little teenager just screaming at authority. | ||
| And I'm sorry I started ranting earlier. | ||
| I should have more control. | ||
| It's just I'm so sick of the New World Order. | ||
| I'm so sick of everybody being so dumb. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm so sick of it. | |
| They just can't even navigate all these lies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god! | |
| Unprecedented tyranny is upon us. | ||
| It's so hard. | ||
| Unprecedented lying is upon us. | ||
| We're in deep trouble. | ||
| I'm sorry I went on that unhinged rant triggered by a caller questioning whether I got some facts wrong. | ||
| Even the slightest little bit. | ||
| I'm just sick of the New World Order. | ||
| I'm so sick of it. | ||
| Everybody's bothering me all the time. | ||
| Dad, Billy's starting a New World Order. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| He is a loser little titty, baby. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| So I warned you at the beginning of this episode that there was going to be a portion that was going to be difficult, and we have arrived at it. | ||
| So if you are particularly sensitive about maybe some fucked up topics, now might be a time you might want to question whether you want to skip ahead 20 minutes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Or so. | ||
| Go for it. | ||
| Because at this point on this February 18th show, Alex has a guest that I've never encountered in listening to his show before. | ||
| And it's someone I didn't really want to ever see show up. | ||
| But I saw a Piers Morgan interview a few weeks ago. | ||
| I was already trying to get the sheriff on when he went on Piers Morgan. | ||
| Sheriff David Clark, many of you have heard the ad that he ran, saying, look, I need you to be on the team here. | ||
| Many of you probably know who David Clark is, and if not, he's the sheriff who used to show up on Fox News sometimes and wear a cowboy hat with fake decorative military medals he'd just given himself. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Looking like a real dick. | ||
| He gained a fair amount of attention when he spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2016 and at CPAC in 2017, and he also started to imply pretty heavily that he was in consideration for a position with Trump's Department of Homeland Security. | ||
| That position never materialized, and we can all consider ourselves lucky that it did not, because David Clark is a fucking madman, and would probably be in consideration for worst modern sheriff if Joe Arpaio didn't exist. | ||
| Before he was the sheriff, David Clark was a Milwaukee patrol cop, joining the force in 1978. | ||
| As he rose through the ranks, Clark was very careful to present a manicured image to the media, and it paid off when he was selected to replace Lev Baldwin, who retired as sheriff of Milwaukee County in 2002, in the middle of his term. | ||
| From that point on, Clark ramped up his media presentation even further, expertly staging photo shoots, seeding stories that made the department look good into the media, and always being seen in a full uniform. | ||
| However, behind that facade was a very different person. | ||
| A retired detective who worked with Clark told Milwaukee Magazine, "The people who love him don't know him. | ||
| People who know him don't like him at all. | ||
| When he was in consideration for sheriff in 2002, he suspiciously wasn't endorsed by the Milwaukee Police Association, even though he was the only Milwaukee police officer running, which I think speaks volumes. | ||
| Yeah, when you consider how close-knit and fucking intense police unions are. | ||
| They do seem to support each other. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, a little bit. | |
| So when you got a cop running for sheriff and they're like, nah. | ||
| Fuck that guy. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There have always been warning signs that Clark might be a really bad dude. | ||
| In 1994, Clark was accused of using excessive force against a 15-year-old boy. | ||
| The child's mother filed a complaint after Clark, who was off duty, allegedly chased her son and his friends down, drew his gun on them, and made them lie on the ground. | ||
| The boy was one of five kids Clark saw throwing rocks at cars. | ||
| Accounts vary, with the mother saying Clark kicked her son in the head and side, causing bruised ribs, and Clark claiming he just, quote, used his foot to turn over one boy, which to my ears kind of sounds like a cop politely describing kicking someone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You got it. | |
| Whatever the case is, the complaint was dismissed, and the police commission ruled there was insufficient evidence in the case. | ||
| Clark's later career implies to me that this mother's complaint might have been valid. | ||
| Traditionally, it's been the role of the Sheriff's Department to, quote, patrol the highways, oversee the jails, and provide security in courts. | ||
| Beyond that, they're, you know, county-based duties, but the city policing was left to local police departments. | ||
| Was. | ||
| Even though the city is technically within the county. | ||
| One of Sheriff Clark's big things was expanding the role of the Sheriff's Department to involve itself in city matters. | ||
| As Milwaukee County Supervisor Gary Broderick put it, quote, He's imposed himself on some other law enforcement agencies, and it's uninvited. | ||
| It would be one thing if he was doing a great job with the normal responsibilities of the Sheriff's Office, and he just wanted to share his excellence with these other struggling departments. | ||
| But that was definitely not the case. | ||
| According to Milwaukee Magazine, in the first few months of Clark's first term, quote, one of his deputies got into a scuffle at the airport with Police Chief Jones. | ||
| A convicted murderer rattled a gun from a deputy in a downtown courtroom, then wounded the deputy before being shot dead by a police officer. | ||
| And at Wappin State Prison, two Milwaukee prisoners escaped from a van driven by two of Clark's deputies. | ||
| And sure, you could make the argument that it was just stuff that happened at the beginning of his term. | ||
| It's probably all just stuff that was lingering from Lev Baldwin's previous term, and Clark just hadn't had enough time to sort things out. | ||
| And you'd be wrong, because things got way, way worse as Clark's term in office continued. | ||
| On September 13, 2010, an epileptic man had a seizure while restrained in sheriff's custody. | ||
| Officers didn't seem to care or were so completely clueless that their actions made things worse. | ||
| 41-year-old James Perry died, and no one was held responsible. | ||
| On April 24, 2016, Terrell Thomas died while in custody in the Milwaukee County Jail. | ||
| The medical examiner's office will go on to declare the case a homicide, and when you get into the details, it's pretty easy to see why. | ||
| Thomas died of dehydration nine days after being arrested and brought to the jail. | ||
| Thomas had been arrested on suspicion of shooting a man, but hadn't been charged with anything yet. | ||
| He was also bipolar, so his behavior in the jail had been deemed fitting to place him in solitary confinement, which on its own would be enough for me to say, fuck David Clark. | ||
| The guards would claim that they did what they did because Thomas had previously tried to flood his cell, but I don't believe that has an explanation for why they shut off the water to his cell. | ||
| Fellow inmates told the Journal Sentinel newspaper that they could hear Thomas begging for water for days before he died. | ||
| And given the fact that he died of dehydration, I think it's a pretty good bet that they didn't give him any. | ||
| This treatment of a person is completely horrifying, regardless of what they may or may not have done to end up in custody. | ||
| The idea of being incarcerated somewhere, put in solitary confinement, then dehydrated to death over the span of days is a terror that no one should have to live through. | ||
| In the end, three jail employees were charged for Thomas' death, and Milwaukee County paid out $6.75 million in a settlement, but David Clark was never held responsible in any way, which is a travesty. | ||
| In July 2016, Sade Swayzer was incarcerated and pregnant. | ||
| Her newborn child died in that county jail. | ||
| In December 2015, Jennifer Dawson's newborn child suffered a similar fate after guards failed to provide appropriate health care. | ||
| That same year, Kristen Feibrink died of alcohol and heroin withdrawal in the county jail in Milwaukee. | ||
| There is a serious pattern of negligence and outright brutality that was allowed to exist under Sheriff Clark's watch, and it's all sickening shit. | ||
| In 2017, the Milwaukee County paid a $6.7 million settlement to a woman who alleged she was raped by a guard in David Clark's prison multiple times while she was incarcerated there. | ||
| At the time of her incarceration and assault, she was 19 years old and pregnant. | ||
| She eventually gave birth in prison and unsuccessfully sued the county for the fact that she was made to give birth while shackled. | ||
| This wasn't the only person who suffered this kind of treatment. | ||
| It's estimated that at least 40 women who have given birth in David Clark's jail have had to do so while handcuffed through labor. | ||
| Sheriff David Clark is an absolute monster, and if he had a shred of humanity in him, he would have resigned long before any of these people had to suffer what they did. | ||
| But he didn't. | ||
| Instead, he defended the practice of handcuffing women in labor and doesn't seem to think that he's had anything to do with the completely out of line and disgusting organization that he was in charge of. | ||
| You may notice that a lot of these problems seem to have gotten worse towards the end of his time as sheriff. | ||
| And probably that's because, by then, he was kind of phoning it in in favor of becoming a national media figure. | ||
| In 2015, he launched a podcast called The People's Sheriff on Glenn Beck's Blaze Network. | ||
| Weirdly, that same year, Sheriff Clark went on a six-day trip to Russia as part of the NRA delegation. | ||
| He was paid at least $6,000 to go on that trip from the group Right to Bear Arms, which was the group run by Maria Butina, who pled guilty in December 2018 to felony charges of conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent of the Russian state and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. | ||
| I have legitimately no idea what he was doing there or what any of that means, but it doesn't seem cool. | ||
| Clark was sheriff of Milwaukee County from 2002 to 2017. | ||
| One of the likely reasons he was able to stay in office so long was he was registered as a Democrat, even though he was very obviously a far-right conservative. | ||
| In 2003, he cheered on the Iraq War, going so far as to speak at a Support Our Troops rally with Scott Walker and Paul Ryan, where he expressed his awe for George W. Bush's, quote, will and courage. | ||
| Milwaukee is an insanely Democrat-leaning area. | ||
| The county has only swung Republican in three presidential elections since 1912, and two of those three times were Dwight Eisenhower. | ||
| Registering as a Democrat and being the complete opposite is a really smart move there, particularly once you're already in office. | ||
| You generally win any primary based on incumbency bias and name recognition. | ||
| Then in the general election, it's you versus a Republican. | ||
| This is exactly what you see in every election cycle for David Clark. | ||
| Relatively narrow wins in the primary and crushing landslides in the general election. | ||
| I'm not saying that this is what he did, but if you were a manipulative, power-hungry piece of shit, your plans might look exactly like what David Clark did. | ||
| When he stepped down as sheriff, Clark immediately took a position as a senior advisor for the Trump-backing super PAC, America First Action. | ||
| In 2017 to 2018 alone, right-wing billionaire Sheldon Adelson and his wife gave $10 million to that super PAC. | ||
| They also received a lot of donations from America First Policies, the political action committee we talked about a while back that is run by a former Trump campaign official and appears to be infested with Nazis. | ||
| They received a lot of donations from that group probably because they are affiliated. | ||
| America First Action is the super PAC. | ||
| America First Policies is a non-profit organization, but they're basically the same group. | ||
| This is a little bit of a non-sequitur. | ||
| But also, I know that David Clark is involved with one of Alex Jones' sponsors, Gun Owners for America, the insane version of the NRA run by Alex's buddy, Larry Pratt. | ||
| I was going to dig into that a little bit, but if you search for David Clark in Gun Owners for America, the first thing that comes up is a completely batshit article on the Gun Owners for America website. | ||
| It features an endorsement blurb from Clark, which is why it comes up in the search results, but the article really isn't about him. | ||
| The headline is, quote, Is Gun Owners for America in Your Will? | ||
| The article begins, quote, What is one thing you can do now that will ensure that the Second Amendment rights are well defended well into the future? | ||
| Answer, putting gun owners of America in your will or trust. | ||
| Estate settlements have been vital to the continued success of Gun Owners for America's efforts to defend your gun rights in the present. | ||
| It takes a lot of balls to be like, hey man, fuck your children and grandchildren getting an inheritance. | ||
| When you die, help us continue to be really weird about guns. | ||
| That is straight up movie plot con man shit. | ||
| It is. | ||
| That is straight up a con man fucking game. | ||
| A guy who marries old ladies gets him in the will and then... | ||
|
unidentified
|
God! | |
| And they're doing it with the explicit endorsement of Sheriff Clark, because he doesn't mind them fucking doing this kind of con bullshit. | ||
| No, because he's fine torturing people to death. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| He's literally fine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's cool. | ||
| I mean, the very idea of, like, when someone dies of dehydration in your jail after people who work for you turn off the water to their cell. | ||
| You go to prison. | ||
| You're a murderer. | ||
| You go to prison. | ||
| He is a murderer. | ||
| You are responsible for what happens in your jail. | ||
| He is 100% a murderer who is allowed to walk free because America is a fucking garbage fire of a country. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And some of this happened after this interview with Alex, certainly. | ||
| But some of it didn't. | ||
| Some of it was before. | ||
| And some of these indications are very clear in the time before. | ||
| There's every reason to have a very serious distrust of David Clark, even in 2013. | ||
| There were very serious problems with how he ran his sheriff's department, the encroachment of city police departments, the rhetoric that he was putting out. | ||
| It was a very serious concern. | ||
| And to see Alex buddying up with him, it's not unexpected, but it's fucked up. | ||
| I really, really don't like it. | ||
| You know who really loves play acting and wearing fake medals? | ||
| Mussolini? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| If you see somebody play-acting and wearing fake medals, it's a good thing to assume they're probably either a really good actor or a piece of shit dictator in waiting. | ||
| So I also didn't think it was too surprising to see him pop up based on the fact that Alex is really on to the sheriff shit right now. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Or has always been. | ||
| The constitutional sheriff. | ||
| Certainly. | ||
| County. | ||
| And the fact that I know that Alex, you know, the gun owners of America connection with David Clark makes total sense. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| The fact that he works with them, he was named like sheriff of the year. | ||
| Right. | ||
| At some point. | ||
| Also, just because this is a fun fact, and Larry Pratt runs Gun Owners for America, and he's in cahoots with Sheriff Clark. | ||
| Fun fact, Larry Pratt was super against the move to give Washington, D.C. senators back in 1979. | ||
| He was quoted as saying, quote, the amendment would bring in two senators who would probably be minority and would definitely be liberal on gun control. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| Why'd you have to bring up that first part, Larry? | ||
| Couldn't you just say that they'd be liberal on gun control? | ||
| Why is the first thought you have when discussing your opposition to the plan is that the senators would likely be minorities? | ||
| Weird. | ||
| Well, it's the same reason that Sheriff Clark was invited to speak at the RNC is because they want a black Nazi in order to justify... | ||
| Hating black people and pretending that it's not just because they're black. | ||
| It's a pretty strong trend that you see. | ||
| I was reading this article from 2003, and they quote Scott Walker from before he was governor. | ||
| He was just a city council member of some stripe. | ||
| And one of the comments that he has is that there's no way that a white sheriff could get away with saying these things about the black democratic leadership. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's like, yeah, because I know Scott Walker, that sounds pretty fucked up. | ||
| If it's Scott Walker saying that, then, yeah, I think we're... | ||
| It's like, yeah, I get what you're saying. | ||
| And it's awful for... | ||
| The worst part is how transparent... | ||
| It is. | ||
| Like, how transparent it really is, how racist and virulent they are. | ||
| It does seem that way. | ||
| Combined with a desperate need to appear otherwise. | ||
| To give themselves a veneer of... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's a serious piece of it, but I think when you look at David Clark, there's so many issues that are... | ||
| Probably more pressing. | ||
| Oh, no, no. | ||
| Far more. | ||
| Far more pressing. | ||
| Being used as a... | ||
| The fact that he's allowed to walk free is a pressing issue for me. | ||
| Being used as a racist Trojan horse? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Very serious and something that shouldn't be glossed over. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But being completely out of control with your department to the point where people's lives are at risk. | ||
| Or you're tying down pregnant women, basically, in your cell or in your prison. | ||
| Those sorts of human rights abuses are the things that we need to do triage on. | ||
| And thankfully, he's no longer in office. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So there's at least that. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But... | |
| And it's... | ||
| To me, the fact that the militia dudes... | ||
| Are so on his tip. | ||
| And the constitutional sheriff tip movement entirely is they always lionize and respect pure and utter psychopaths. | ||
| Like purely cruel psychopaths. | ||
| As almost an aspiration that they have. | ||
| Because it's like absolute power. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're trying to destroy their own empathy in looking up to psychopaths. | ||
| Well, I think that's a piece of it for sure. | ||
| And then I think the other part of it is like... | ||
| The constitutional sheriffs that exist, they constantly talk about how they don't have a boss. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, like, I don't report to the police chief. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| That sort of singular John Wayne-type image is something that they just can't get enough of. | ||
| That idea of putting themselves in that shoe and cleaning up this town. | ||
| Yeah, they want to do the walking talk. | ||
| If only I had the utmost authority and was in complete control of everything, I could take care of the problems. | ||
| And they project that onto these petty tyrants. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And almost without exception, every single one of these sheriffs that I have seen come up on Alex's show is like, they should be nowhere near power. | ||
| No. | ||
| These people are crazy. | ||
| They're serial killers, like literally. | ||
| Some of them. | ||
| They have killed multiple people. | ||
| Some of them. | ||
| Some of them are just crazy. | ||
| Yeah, okay, fair enough. | ||
| I will not endorse any. | ||
| Of these sheriff types. | ||
| But I think calling them all serial killers is unfair to one or two of them. | ||
| One or two of them are cool on that tip. | ||
| So I think that that probably is about the end of the really fucked up stuff about David Clark. | ||
| But there's some other stuff about David Clark that bears mentioning for sure. | ||
| And the first is, why is he on the show? | ||
| And it's because he just put out a PSA that Alex is super into. | ||
| And so, well, I mean, of course, Alex said in the last clip he was on Piers Morgan's show. | ||
| But I think that he was on Piers Morgan's show because he put out this PSA that was really fucked up. | ||
| And here's Alex introducing it, and then the PSA. | ||
| This is real common sense. | ||
| Let's go to that clip. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm Sheriff David Clark, and I want to talk to you about something personal. | |
| Your safety. | ||
| It's no longer a spectator sport. | ||
| I need you in the game. | ||
| But are you ready? | ||
| With officers laid off and furloughed, simply calling 911 and waiting is no longer your best option. | ||
| You can beg for mercy from a violent criminal, hide under the bed, or you can fight back. | ||
| But are you prepared? | ||
| Consider taking a certified safety course and handling a firearm so you can defend yourself until we get there. | ||
| You have a duty to protect yourself and your family. | ||
| We're partners now. | ||
| Can I count on you? | ||
| This safety message brought to you by the Milwaukee County Sheriff's Office. | ||
| So we got the payment there at the end, so we know who paid for it. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That PSA that Alex played is not the only PSA that Sheriff Clark made around this 2013 period of time, much to the chagrin of the Milwaukee County Finance Committee. | ||
| In 2012, Clark spent over $22,000 on personalized radio announcements, and by June 2013, he was already up to $19,000 of taxpayer money being used so he could grandstand and promote his own personal brand. | ||
| Naturally, this led to the Finance Committee voting to ban him from using county money to do this sort of self-aggrandizing bullshit. | ||
| Some dum-dums out there were arguing that they were putting a gag order on Clark, but Supervisor Patricia Jurczyk, who started the motion, disagreed, saying, quote, I don't have a bandana big enough to gag the sheriff. | ||
| You see, what she's saying is that he's a fucking blowhard. | ||
| That's nice. | ||
| These PSAs that he made are so fucked up. | ||
| If you really break it down, it's a sheriff telling people that police can't help them and they better get ready to kill someone breaking into their home, which is something that he strangely glorifies. | ||
| That's kind of what I thought I heard there, but I stopped for a second because I was like, there's no way that I just heard a sheriff Send out a PSA that's like, cops aren't going to be there fast enough. | ||
| You know what to do if you have a gun. | ||
| That's what he's saying. | ||
| That's what he's saying, right? | ||
| And it's really fucked up, too, because it's like, well, okay, you're in charge of the sheriff's department. | ||
| You're really insulting the other police departments that are supposed to be completely separate. | ||
| You're saying, like, these other organizations also can't respond in time. | ||
| It's really fucked up. | ||
| That's deeply, deeply fucked up. | ||
| In one of his other ads, he says, quote, and if you smell trouble... | ||
| Trust your instincts. | ||
| Be decisive. | ||
| Use the element of surprise against your attacker. | ||
| No! | ||
| And most importantly, be ruthless in your response. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| He's a fucking psychopath! | ||
| This dude is so fucked up. | ||
| That is fucking crazy! | ||
| He's so fucked up. | ||
| Sneak attack somebody you don't know is going to fuck with you and make sure that you kill them? | ||
| Well, if they're in your home... | ||
| You know, if it's a home invader, I understand using self-defense against them. | ||
| Obviously, it would be probably better to incapacitate them somehow as opposed to murder them. | ||
| Was he specifically talking about... | ||
| Yeah, I believe so. | ||
| The context is pretty clear. | ||
| Okay, good, because I kind of got the feel that he's of the, like... | ||
| He's not encouraging, like, random vigilante violence. | ||
| See, that's kind of what I'm hearing from time to time. | ||
| Just take the random part out of it. | ||
| So the premise of the PSA is that they're layoffs, and the Sheriff's Department employees are furloughed, so you know what that means. | ||
| It's time for citizens to be cops in their own little house-sized cities. | ||
| You see, the Department was going through some tough times financially. | ||
| Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. | ||
| Oh, that's good. | ||
| $7,800 for a police Harley Davidson. | ||
| $77,000 on... | ||
| Getting him a horse. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah, he got a horse. | ||
| And $24,900 in Disney Destinations training. | ||
| What's Disney Destinations training, you ask? | ||
| Taking your family to Disneyland? | ||
| I thought that it was possible that it was tour agent training. | ||
| Because if you look for Disney destinations, if you just Google that, it's like the tourism part of Disney. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But apparently it's supposed to be about, quote, Disney's approach to business excellence. | ||
| So they were getting training on Disney's standard of excellence in order to run their jails better or something? | ||
| It makes absolutely no sense. | ||
| Whatever they have to teach you has nothing to do with what a sheriff's department is doing. | ||
| It's a waste of $25,000. | ||
| Didn't we have... | ||
| Weren't there these trials where it's like, even if you're just following orders, you're probably also... | ||
| Like, you have a responsibility to not... | ||
| He's not following anybody's orders. | ||
| This is all him. | ||
| I'm talking about his employees. | ||
| Someone should have done something. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Also in 2012, Clark spent $75,000 of taxpayer money on 565 new Glocks, outfitted with glow-in-the-dark sights. | ||
| That was 565 guns for a department of only 275 officers. | ||
| County Supervisor John Weishand, Jr. said, quote, unless there was a two-for-one sale, there is absolutely no reason to justify this. | ||
| Roy Felber, president of the Milwaukee County Deputy Sheriff's Association, made an interesting point. | ||
| Namely, that this money could have been better spent helping reinstate laid-off deputies. | ||
| But Clark doesn't care about that shit. | ||
| Throughout his time in office, he constantly tried to cut costs by shifting responsibilities from sheriff's deputies to lower-paid employees like correctional officers. | ||
| Many of the jobs at his Milwaukee County Jail, like monitoring inmates, all those responsibilities are being shifted away from higher paid, more trained employees so that he could save money, all while spending excessively on things he thinks are cool, like glow-in-the-dark gun sights and a horse. | ||
| Which also kind of dovetails with these abuses that are happening in his jails. | ||
| Is it possible that that has something to do with the less qualified employees who are now in charge of monitoring inmates? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's for someone else to study. | ||
| You know, the only person who really needs a vigilante to handcuff them and ensure that they don't hurt the rest of the country is Sheriff David Clark. | ||
| We need a group of people to just hold on to him, keep him real tight, give him a bear hug. | ||
| Can you be sent to the Hague for things you do internally in the country? | ||
| I don't know, but at the very least he should be sent to one of his own prisons. | ||
| I don't wish that even upon him. | ||
| Yeah, fair enough. | ||
| The claim that underlies these PSAs and that he cares at all about layoffs or fiscal difficulties of the Sheriff's Department are complete bullshit. | ||
| He played a huge role in causing them, or at very least doing things that did not fix them. | ||
| And another factor to consider is how Clark's negligence and ego have cost the taxpayers. | ||
| It came out in 2016 that the county had paid at least $310,000 for Clark's lawyer to represent him in suits people brought against him. | ||
| In addition to that, the county had paid $83,000 more to defend itself in those suits. | ||
| That's about $400,000 that wouldn't have had to have been spent if Clark was decent at his job. | ||
| David Clark is like all of these supposed patriot sheriffs that Alex idolizes. | ||
| They're petty tyrants who, to varying degrees, terrorize the very people they're sworn to protect and serve. | ||
| In the strongest terms possible, fuck this guy and the horse he rode in on, which cost Milwaukee County $77,000. | ||
| I hate him. | ||
| I hate him. | ||
| I hate him so much. | ||
| He's really one of the worst. | ||
| I knew some of the awful and egregious things that he had done. | ||
| And I didn't even cover all of it. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| There's plenty of other stuff about feuds with city council people. | ||
| Well, that of course is there. | ||
| Any challenge to their authority whatsoever will send them into a cowardly tizzy. | ||
| I think he accused one guy who was questioning his budget of having a small dick. | ||
| Yeah, that sounds about right. | ||
| There's so much more. | ||
| We could have turned this into a... | ||
| Man, it's so ridiculous to me that there are no protections in place because everybody kind of just assumes that, well, we won't elect a psychopath, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, there needs to be something where we can all just go, like, no, no, no, no, redo. | ||
| Like, you can do a recount, but then you don't... | ||
| The idea of, like, a vote of no confidence? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, ironically, there was a vote of no confidence about David Clark in the Deputy Sheriff's Association. | ||
| They voted, like... | ||
| It was something to the two... | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| It was hundreds voted against him and like 23 voted for him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| You don't get kicked out of office for the Deputy Sheriff's Association being like, fuck this guy. | ||
| But I mean, if you have a financial council and they give you 77 grand to buy a horse, shouldn't somebody be able to just be like, stop it? | ||
| Because it came out of the money that should have gone back into the department. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| But it actually, it was from the civil asset forfeiture. | ||
| Which again, Alex, if you knew anything... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Trick people into fucking killing, yeah. | |
| So in this next clip, Alex brings Clark onto the show and thanks him for something that he is absolutely not doing. | ||
| Sheriff David Clark, thank you so much for coming on, and thank you for being an example of a real peace officer instead of one of these government types that's there to demonize the Bill of Rights. | ||
| Thank you for defending the Constitution, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a pleasure to serve. | |
| It's a pleasure to serve. | ||
| As long as I get my money. | ||
| Has Alex had any sheriffs on his show who have not tortured someone to death? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, like, Denny Payman probably hasn't. | ||
| He was just a crazy dude in a small town who made everyone scared. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| There's that version of it. | ||
| I mean, just because Joe Arpaio and David Clark have particularly flamboyant histories, that doesn't mean that all of these sheriffs have gone that far. | ||
| Now, maybe they would. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe they would. | ||
| They just don't have the opportunity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or maybe they happen to be in a place where there is better oversight of what they're doing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The circumstances weren't such that that happened. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Possibly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| But yeah, there's plenty of these dudes who are just, like, nuts. | ||
| Unreal. | ||
| Ugh! | ||
| He's a peace officer. | ||
| Fuck off! | ||
| He's a peace officer. | ||
| God! | ||
| So most of their interview is just about, like, hey, aren't guns great? | ||
| You bet they are. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| That's most of it. | ||
| And Alex is really trying to fish with him to get Clark to say that he would follow the Oath Keeper motto. | ||
| The Molon Labbe. | ||
| Basically. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Not in as many words, and he's not framing it as that. | ||
| But he's trying to get, like, a promise from him. | ||
| That he will not go along with any kind of confiscation of guns whatsoever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| We're not a bend over county or whatever. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That sort of idea. | ||
| Alex is clearly feeding questions in such a way as to be like, now tomorrow I can report that David Clark is along with America's greatest sheriff. | ||
| He's on board with our movement. | ||
| And the way Clark answers this question about why he would never get involved with gun confiscation is kind of telling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The people of Milwaukee County do not have to worry about me enforcing some sort of order that goes out and collects everybody's handgun or rifles or any kind of firearm and makes them turn them in. | |
| And the reason is, I don't want to get shot, because I believe that if somebody tried to enforce something of that magnitude, you would see the second coming of an American Revolution, the likes of which... | ||
| His reasoning isn't so much that, like, hey, it's the wrong thing to do. | ||
| I would get killed if I did that. | ||
| He has a tacit recognition in his reasoning that, like, if I did that, these fucking gun people would kill me. | ||
| Yeah, he's read Unintended Consequences. | ||
| That's terrorism. | ||
| It's the definition of terrorism. | ||
| We cannot do it. | ||
| Let's assume he, instead of... | ||
| GOP or ISIS. | ||
| Instead of David Clark supporting not taking guns or not regulating or anything like that, assume that he was a sheriff who did believe that maybe some sort of regulation, gun registration would be an appropriate thing. | ||
| He might have the same position that I would do this, but if I did, I'd get killed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In that circumstance, his ability to express his political belief is being terrorized by a group of people who have made it very clear that if you do anything like this, we will kill every cop in America. | ||
| Now, Alex isn't GOP back then, to be clear. | ||
| And David Clark is a registered Democrat. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So none of this is the GOP. | ||
| But this is this inspirational terrorism. | ||
| It's the same thing that got the Oregon climate bill destroyed, is literal threat of murder. | ||
| It has an effect. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's been having an effect for years. | ||
| And when you see this sort of thing on Alex's show in 2013, you realize that there's a pretty good indication to me that they know what they're doing. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It's intentional, using threats. | ||
| Tacit, implied, overt threats, whatever shape they might take on any given day, as a means of furthering their political ideology. | ||
| And that, my friend, is the definition of terrorism. | ||
| And for them, it's a win-win. | ||
| Because they can get more and more aggressive in their violent threats, especially now. | ||
| And then once anybody pushes back... | ||
| Either they win, or if somebody pushes back, they also get what they want, which is murdering people. | ||
| Or yelling about their free speech being violated. | ||
| Their inability to continue to engage in this verbal terrorism. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. | ||
| It's a good... | ||
| I mean, I don't know how intentional it is, but it's a good scam. | ||
| Like, if you have no ethics, you don't mind the fact that you're destroying society. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If you don't care about those sorts of things... | ||
| It's a pretty good hustle. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It really banks hard on them believing that the world is going to end before any kind of karma, before there's any kind of comeuppance for their actions. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| So in this next clip, David Clark is discussing how the left... | ||
| By the way, registered Democrat. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| The left isn't serious about violence reduction. | ||
| He's a centrist. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| He's trying to make the argument that all their gun control measures, all of the sensible gun control, it's not about violence reduction. | ||
| Because if they were serious about violence reduction, they'd get behind him and the initiatives he wants to put forward. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If they were serious about violence reduction. | |
| They would torture pregnant women. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They would get behind me. | |
| I'm talking about the left here in Milwaukee County. | ||
| And join me arm in arm in calling for longer periods of incarceration for repeat career criminals who have demonstrated over and over again that they're going to get a handgun, they're going to get a firearm, and they're going to perpetrate violence. | ||
| Because I want to torture them to death. | ||
| The only way that Clark, what he's saying, makes any sense here is if you assume that what he means is that he wants to reduce crime by locking people up forever. | ||
| That's the only way he could realistically be advocating for longer sentences being a way to reduce crime or violence. | ||
| Studies of repeat criminals have shown that longer sentences do not deter people from re-offending, primarily because a vast majority of criminals don't expect to get caught. | ||
| They do not generally adapt their behavior to the assumption of what happens if this crime doesn't go well. | ||
| They're generally an optimistic bunch in this sense. | ||
| The consistent finding is that the severity of a punishment does not have a determinant of value in terms of it being a deterrent. | ||
| But what does is certainty of punishment. | ||
| That is to say, crime would be very low if we lived in an authoritarian state because the odds of getting away with a crime would be very slim. | ||
| But that's not the kind of world any of us want to live in. | ||
| Alex has already voiced strong support for Clark, who is super into civil asset forfeiture, which should be a big problem for Alex. | ||
| So it's not surprising to hear Clark expressing another position that is in direct opposition with one of Alex's big things. | ||
| Longer prison sentences don't do anything to help lower crime, but you know what they do do? | ||
| They drastically raise the prison population. | ||
| According to the Sentencing Project, using information from the National Research Council, half of the rise in prison population that occurred between 1980 and 2010 was attributable to the growing obsession in our country with giving criminals longer prison sentences so politicians could posture like they're tough on crime. | ||
| Super predators! | ||
| Right, I mean, that's why we have a much larger prison population, because the mandatory minimums are a large part of it as well. | ||
| And it was a bipartisan affair. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Sheriff Clark's dumbass idea about reducing crime with longer prison sentences only makes sense if he's operating off a single variable calculation, and that variable has to be retribution. | ||
| He wants to be the one punishing someone very harshly, and he's trying to trick you into thinking he's doing it for your benefit. | ||
| Longer, harsher sentences do not deter first-time criminals because they don't expect to get caught. | ||
| They don't deter repeat criminals for the same reason, and because just think about it for one fucking second. | ||
| If you're in the mindset where you're going to commit a robbery, do you think that there's a single bit of difference between 20 and 30 years in prison being the possible sentences you could be looking at if you get caught? | ||
| If you're okay with 20, the other 10 isn't going to swing you back to your senses. | ||
| That's complete nonsense. | ||
| And if he's just talking about locking people up until they die or until they're, quote, too old to commit crimes, that's fucking insanely cruel and would end up ballooning the cost of incarceration past the point that society could probably carry it. | ||
| As people get older, the health-related costs they have go up, and that rises even higher in prison populations. | ||
| The cost of incarcerating people who are reaching the ages where many of them have steep medical expenses is a really dumb idea societally, especially considering all you would be doing is wasting money that could be better used on initiatives and programs that work to solve the problems that lead to crime. | ||
| But Clark doesn't want less crime. | ||
| He wants more punishment. | ||
| That is an important distinction. | ||
| In this monster of a human. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's why, what is it, Norway or Sweden that has the lowest recidivism rates? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And their prisons are well designed. | ||
| Something like three times lower. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And the maximum sentence is 21 years because really, what is the difference between 20 and 30 years? | ||
| And you can leave. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But a lot of this stuff is a process. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We're learning about this stuff and we're learning. | ||
| From the mistakes that we made as society went bad directions. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, some of us are learning. | ||
| Well, ideally. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Ideally. | ||
| I think that we're learning in terms of the scholarship and the research that we have. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The fact that everybody hates scholars and researchers, that's not a good thing. | |
| But whether society decides to implement those lessons that we've learned is a completely different question. | ||
| And if people like Sheriff Clark are allowed to roam free... | ||
| It doesn't seem like we're going to. | ||
| And people like Alex Jones can spit weaponized illiteracy that fights against people who study and research. | ||
| So in this next clip, Alex says goodbye to David Clark. | ||
| And I just want to make it clear, all the rest of the stuff that I cut out is just, guns are cool. | ||
| You bet they are. | ||
| It's just that. | ||
| It's a very stupid interview. | ||
| So anyway, this is their goodbye. | ||
| Well, God bless you, sir. | ||
| Hope to get you to touch base with us in the future again. | ||
| Thank you so much for the time, Sheriff. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
God bless you as well. | |
| All right. | ||
| Amazing individual. | ||
| A true patriot. | ||
| We need more like him. | ||
| We'll be right back with your phone calls. | ||
| We need more like him. | ||
| So after Alex goes to break and comes back, he is still riding high off this Sheriff Clark interview because Alex... | ||
| I guess I kind of agree with him. | ||
| He did get what he wanted out of it, which was Sheriff Clark expressing, I will not be involved in gun confiscation at all, which helps Alex. | ||
| That's a high-profile name that we're now adding to our squad. | ||
| So he's fucking high as a kite. | ||
| People like Sheriff David Clark Jr. | ||
| Of Milwaukee County, that's not a radical sheriff. | ||
| We've gotten radical anti-liberty people in everywhere to where someone who is what America is based on looks weird and sounds strange, basically, to the general public when they stand up for what's right. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| He's not radical. | ||
| Everyone's gotten radical. | ||
| I mean, I would say that he's not far off from what America was originally based on. | ||
| He's a lot farther off from our ideals of what we were based on. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| In terms of actual historical, you know, existence. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think Alex is always wrong about what America was based on. | ||
| Fair. | ||
| And we get a quote, a Thomas Jefferson quote, if you believe. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| In this next clip. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| About the founding of the country. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That led my research down a very interesting direction. | ||
| Love me some slaves, says Thomas Jefferson. | ||
| I mean, it's a citizen's right to defense to kill somebody in your house if you think they're a danger. | ||
| Or in many states, if they're trying to take your property. | ||
| And it's done to restrain evil. | ||
| Sure, most of the Second Amendment is about tyranny and government. | ||
| But a big part of it, as Thomas Jefferson said, the presence of firearms restrains evil everywhere they're present. | ||
| Really? | ||
| So, Jordan. | ||
| Really? | ||
| He said firearms. | ||
| Again, once again, we find Alex Jones quoting Thomas Jefferson, and I want you to guess, is this a real quote? | ||
| No, it is not. | ||
| Dan, I will tell you right now, it is not. | ||
| Easiest trivia game in the world. | ||
| Yeah, that one was very not hard. | ||
| For the thousandth time, this is not a real quote. | ||
| Shit, this isn't even a fake Jefferson quote. | ||
| This is a fake George Washington quote. | ||
| So, George Washington was said to have said the following in an address to Congress. | ||
| But keep in mind, this is a very fake and completely made-up quote. | ||
| Quote, firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. | ||
| They are the people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence. | ||
| The church, the plow, the prairie wagon, and citizens' firearms are indelibly related. | ||
| From the hour the Pilgrims landed to the present day, events, occurrences, and tendencies prove that to ensure peace, security, and happiness, the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable. | ||
| The very atmosphere of firearms everywhere restrains evil interference. | ||
| They deserve a place of honor with all that's good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, boy. | |
| Well, it's important to remember George Washington was kind of a shitty speaker and a shitty writer. | ||
| But also, that doesn't sound anything. | ||
| And he's a shitty president, and he did not sound anything like that. | ||
| It doesn't sound anything like any of his writers. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| That should be one very serious tip-off. | ||
| The prose is very unlike the way you spoke. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| That quote is from a piece written, most likely. | ||
| This is what the consensus is on this quote, that it's from a piece written in 1926 by PewDiePie by a guy named C.S. Wheatley in a magazine called Hunter, Trader, Trapper. | ||
| But Wheatley never tried to pass that off as a quote from Washington. | ||
| The interpretation that it's a Washington quote is an intentional misreading of his opinion article. | ||
| He's talking about Washington addressing Congress, and then that paragraph is there, but it's not in quotes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not as presented as Washington's words. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| That is just something that people have mistaken from his editorial article in... | ||
| Hunter Trader Trapper from 1926. | ||
| And that was the time wherein the Confederate South was really working hard to rebrand. | ||
| I don't know anything about C.S. Wheatley, so I don't know what his intentions were. | ||
| And from whatever thing I can tell, it doesn't seem like he was trying to run a con. | ||
| It seems like those are his words and his feelings, which is why this is interesting, because those are not Washington or Jefferson's words. | ||
| They are C.S. Wheatley's feelings about the history of guns, which would not have nearly as much gravitas were Alex to quote this correctly. | ||
| So, also, one dead giveaway that this is a fake quote that anybody should be able to tell, it's a fake quote when it's attributed to Washington, that is, is the mention of prairie wagons, which are certainly not something that would have been relevant in Washington's lifetime, seeing as the French owned the Great Plains and Washington would be dead before the Louisiana Purchase went down. | ||
| Also in Washington's lifetime, the use of the word pilgrim to describe the first colonists who came over was not very common. | ||
| That terminology didn't become popular until the early 1800s. | ||
| These sorts of indications should be red fucking flags. | ||
| Over the years, this fake quote was passed around, but where it picked up the most traction was being a big piece of rhetoric put out by the militia of Montana. | ||
| To quote D.J. Malloy's book, American Extremism, History, Politics, and the Militia Movement, quote, Not only does the militia of Montana's employment of these founding fathers typify the militia's arguments in respect to the Second Amendment and the importance of militias in resisting tyranny, it also provides another telling illustration of the extent to which the militias seek to identify themselves with the dominant tradition of American history. | ||
| The militia of Montana's desire to receive the approbation of these founders seemingly overwhelms the demands of historical accuracy. | ||
| Madison's words from the Federalist 46 are compressed and misquoted slightly, and those attributed to Washington and Jefferson are simply invented. | ||
| Malloy goes on to make a really good point. | ||
| There are a lot of quotes that militia folks use from this time period that are real, from people like Richard Henry Lee or George Mason or Patrick Henry. | ||
| But what do all those dudes have in common that people like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, who the militia folk constantly make up quotes for, don't? | ||
| Do you know what the difference is? | ||
| Um, Washington and Jefferson knew how to read? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| The people who the militia community quote accurately are pretty much all anti-federalists. | ||
| Or to put simply, they were the people back in the late 1700s who were opposed to the ratification of the Constitution. | ||
| The anti-federalists are really who the militia people are most in line with, but they're largely not seen as the founders of the country by most people who have a basic view of the roots of America. | ||
| People like James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, those are the people that people associate with the founding of the country, and they were all federalists. | ||
| So, in order to associate themselves with the rightful lineage of the country's founding, these patriot militia folk make up quotes that mirror their beliefs and attribute them to Federalists. | ||
| If I had to guess, I would say that Alex's constant misquoting of Jefferson and clearly distorted view of history is the result of him either knowingly trying to attach himself to that Federalist legacy, or him being so dumb that he's just been fooled by militia websites and newsletters he read growing up that were doing exactly that. | ||
| So I think that's probably a pretty good explanation for why Alex is constantly yelling fake quotes from Thomas Jefferson. | ||
| Quite literally, nobody hates the United States more than the people who profess to love the United States. | ||
| Their progenitors didn't want the United States. | ||
| They did not want the United States. | ||
| The anti-federalists wanted a severely weak, centralized government. | ||
| And believed that the president was just a replacement for a king. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And without the anti-federalists, he probably wouldn't have ended up with the Bill of Rights. | ||
| So there's arguments to be made that they weren't piles of shit or anything like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| But their arguments very much more closely mirror the militia movement and the people like Alex. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But they don't want to be like, we are like these people who were against the Constitution. | ||
| They don't want that. | ||
| So they create a fictitious connection with the people who were the founders and writers and ratifiers of the Constitution that they idolize and fetishize. | ||
| It's very interesting to me. | ||
| And cannot read. | ||
| And that's why all of Alex's information has to go back to lore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it can't go back to history. | ||
| No, absolutely not. | ||
| Because otherwise he's completely disconnected from the lineage of the founding of the country. | ||
| Anyway, just for fun, though, here's a real quote for you from Washington. | ||
| In the Revolutionary War, Washington said that militias were, quote, worse than useless. | ||
| He wrote to Congress saying, quote, they come in, you can't tell how, go, you can't tell them when, and act, you can't tell where. | ||
| They consume your provisions, exhaust your stores, and leave you at last at the critical moment. | ||
| Washington was not into militias. | ||
| No. | ||
| He thought they sucked and they needed a formal army. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So go suck on that, Alex. | ||
| Stupid asshole. | ||
| So in this next clip we get back to Alex towards the end of this episode after Clark leaves and he's sort of riding that high. | ||
| He gets back to complaining about how the media all just lies about him. | ||
| They're all just saying that I said all this shit I didn't say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I'm saying that they said that I said that even though they didn't say that I said that and I'm telling you that they did. | ||
| It's a bad who's on first about this meteor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I want to reveal an additional irony after this clip. | ||
| When it's kicked out of the Kuiper Belt outside the edge of the solar system or closer in the asteroid belt, whatever comet or whatever comes by and knocks them out of the regular orbit generally knocks some other stuff with them. | ||
| And so that's why you've seen the big stone meteors coming in. | ||
| Of course, it doesn't matter what I just said. | ||
| CNN and Atlantic Wire will just say that I said aliens did it or something. | ||
| But there you go. | ||
| Yeah, there's some footage. | ||
| Of one of the giant burning craters. | ||
| Man, that looks like something out of a movie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ugh. | |
| Whoa. | ||
| Empire Strikes Back. | ||
| Man, is that not awesome looking? | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| Look at that video of that crater. | ||
| I hadn't seen that one yet. | ||
| Is that out of Russia? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Looks like my wife. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Unbelievable. | |
| And that thing blew up. | ||
| That was just one piece of it did that. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| One piece of it. | ||
| What a fucking child. | ||
| So Alex is complaining about how he feels the media is covering his coverage of this recent meteor that blew up over Russia. | ||
| He's insisting, incorrectly, that the media is saying that he said it was secretly some sort of an attack on Russia. | ||
| He's very upset that they didn't... | ||
| They don't cover how accurately he actually is about stuff like this. | ||
| And they don't discuss his real point about the meteor, namely that the one that flew over Russia was a spur off of DA-14, or was related to it. | ||
| But that itself is shitty reporting that Alex should be criticized for. | ||
| I prefer to call it the 14th, if you will. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| DA-14 was making its closest pass to Earth that day, and this meteor over Russia exploded 12 miles above ground on the same day. | ||
| So a very irresponsible reporter might just conclude they're related. | ||
| It's two space things happening on the same day, so they must be connected. | ||
| Let's go to lunch. | ||
| Yeah, space isn't that big. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they weren't related. | ||
| All credible astronomers have been very clear that DA-14 and the Russian meteor Chelyabinsk had completely different orbits and had nothing to do with each other. | ||
| To quote NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, quote, the fireball was not associated with asteroid 2012 DA-14, which made a very close flyby of Earth just 16 hours later. | ||
| This is known because the two objects approached the Earth from completely different directions and had entirely different orbits around the Sun, and their compositions are dissimilar. | ||
| The timing of their arrival was certainly head-scratching, but it's a fucking big universe out there, and crazy coincidences sometimes do happen. | ||
| The Chelyabinsk meteor caught everyone off guard because it was below the threshold size for bodies that are monitored by the International Space Agencies. | ||
| That's why it came out of nowhere. | ||
| Which actually prompted a lot of people to start a conversation about like We need to start monitoring smaller shit. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Near-earth objects could fuck us up pretty quickly. | ||
| Even if they're smaller. | ||
| Even if they're smaller. | ||
| It wasn't at all a criticism that was being made by the mainstream media, but Alex absolutely deserved someone calling him out for his reporting that these things were at all connected. | ||
| Because the claim that they're connected isn't just some sort of slight inaccuracy or flub that means nothing. | ||
| It's part of the dangerous rhetoric that has no basis in reality that Alex puts out constantly. | ||
| Coming from Alex, the claim that the Chelyabinsk meteor was a piece of DA-14 is meant to further his argument that you can't trust any experts. | ||
| They told you that everything was going to be fine as DA-14 made a pass by the planet, but how about you tell that to the thousand or so people in Russia who were injured by Chelyabinsk, the explosion? | ||
| What appears to be just a simple instance of Alex being wrong is actually a functional piece of his anti-media propaganda. | ||
| Which is built on a misunderstanding or just an outright lie that these two things were connected when they weren't. | ||
| It's easy to gloss over this as just like, hey, you know, he's just dumb. | ||
| Which is what they did. | ||
| And I think I probably did the first time I heard him talking about it. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| But it's more nefarious than that. | ||
| Yeah, there's so much, like, even the stuff that should be a disadvantage, if you don't have any shame, Turns out to be an advantage for you. | ||
| You should feel embarrassed if you are dunked on that hard for being shitty at your job. | ||
| Instead of just doubling the fuck down and saying, actually... | ||
| I'm the best there ever was. | ||
| Because all I reported on was them being connected, which also isn't true. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And so then you take that inability to feel shame or take any responsibility for anything and turn that into a weapon towards the media that is trying to get you to feel those things, and you wind up cutting them off, and the people who listen to you create a fucking cult, and then everybody becomes a goddamn sheriff fucking Clark. | ||
| Or at least they think they're defenders of Sheriff Clark. | ||
| It may have been a little bit quick of a jump, but yeah. | ||
| You get my point. | ||
| The slippery slope there is real. | ||
| It's fucked up. | ||
| So we got one last clip here, and just to end things on a sort of... | ||
| Please God, tell me it's a good thing. | ||
| It's not good, but it's not bad. | ||
| Sort of a parsley-ish kind of thing, like a palate cleanser. | ||
| Alright, it adds a little something to muscles. | ||
| Yeah, this is the literal end of the episode, where Alex is taking a call from a guy who has some inside info. | ||
| About President Barack Obama. | ||
|
unidentified
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Someone in my family, Special Forces, and him and his unit received a medal from Obama for an achievement they got. | |
| And he said that Obama refused to look any of them in the eyes. | ||
| That he would look them in the shoulder, like would refuse to make eye contact with them, like they were beneath him. | ||
| And that he had a dead fish handshake. | ||
| You know, there was no muscle, nothing to it, you know? | ||
| Yeah, I've been told some pretty weird stories by people that know Obama, but I don't have authorization to tell those stories on the air. | ||
| I kept that in, or what made me most interested in this clip. | ||
| Let's listen again to this fake laugh. | ||
| There's the first part of the fake laugh that's ha-ha-ha-ha. | ||
| The very last part. | ||
| Focus on that. | ||
| I think that's creepy and weird. | ||
| It's super creepy and weird. | ||
| But also, like, what do you think he's holding back? | ||
| Like, has he just not formulated his Obama smells like sulfur yet? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Like, has he just not figured out what to do? | ||
| Like, what is he pretending he knows? | ||
| He knows for a fact from his inside sources that Obama has an aggressively average dick. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But you can't tell that because that's not really an insult. | ||
| Or is Andrew Breitbart unimpressive balls? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Unremarkable balls. | ||
| I mean, this caller is really thinking he's going to get some mileage out of he's a limp handshake. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Real great. | ||
| Real great. | ||
| What are we doing, guys? | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| It's pretty pointless. | ||
| Do you remember when people used to be like, I heard Obama has a limp handshake, and that's why we shouldn't like them, instead of, 22 people have credibly accused Obama of rape. | ||
| I think it's fine. | ||
| It is a deterioration. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A little bit of a slide. | ||
| And I fucking hated George W. Bush when I was in college and around that time. | ||
| I still do. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| I'm not too far away from you. | ||
| Lapsed painter? | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| What I'm getting at is I hated that dude. | ||
| He was the worst. | ||
| But if someone came to me and was like, he has a limp handshake. | ||
| That wouldn't rank. | ||
| No. | ||
| That wouldn't register. | ||
| Not even close. | ||
| And if I had a radio show where I talked about how Bush was terrible all the time, and some caller was like, hey man, I know a dude who met him and he had a limp handshake, I'd be like, get the fuck off the line. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Do you think you have the right to waste my time with that? | ||
| Even if I'm just about to end the show, now I'm extending the show. | ||
| Just to be mad at you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| You asshole. | ||
| We'll be back in a minute. | ||
| Hang on the line. | ||
| I gotta fucking hate this guy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hang on the line. | |
| You stupid asshole. | ||
| I've got some public disgrace to mete out. | ||
| Yeah, because you don't want to encourage that sort of behavior in your callers, and then all of a sudden you're like, now it's acceptable to call in with bullshit. | ||
| Petty rumors. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| It really cheapens whatever is going on on your show. | ||
| And that's saying a lot, considering you just fucking interviewed David Clark. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's trash. | ||
| The show's trash. | ||
| But at least it also promotes white terrorism and celebrates a guy who tortures people to death. | ||
| So, you know, good trash. | ||
| Good work, guys. | ||
| Interestingly, very little about Sandy Hook, though. | ||
| I kind of really can't wait for Barnes to host this show full-time, just so I don't have to deal with it. | ||
| Well, that will be the day that we do not return to the present ever again. | ||
| We'll be lost in space. | ||
| It's over. | ||
| But, yeah, I mean, if you look at this, it's a real bad couple days on his show. | ||
| Real wild. | ||
| The defensiveness is really interesting because it's really escalating. | ||
| I think that maybe a couple of stories came out that mentioned him, and he has a Google alert on his name. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| So he found those stories, and now he's responding to them so aggressively. | ||
| I think that might be something that grows in the future. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that might be a very serious trend. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And obviously, any time people brought him up in the past, he responded similarly. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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But it does seem like more is happening. | |
| It's taking over these couple of days. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's a constant thing he's talking about, which feels much more modern, Alex, than this 2013 period. | |
| The navel-gazing, the self-involvement is very representative of his present-day style. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, it kind of suggests that he's, you know, we always knew that he had a narcissistic streak, but as we see it kind of grow into the fucking... | ||
| When it's fed. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, exactly. | ||
| Like, again, when we're seeing the rise of Trump and how much he loves Trump and how much he's trying to emulate that behavior of just complete narcissistic self-aggrandizement, you know, then it starts to feed into him, and if you don't have any shame, like both he and Trump, then... | ||
| There you go. | ||
| You turn into whatever it is they became. | ||
| And it's interesting, too. | ||
| Pointless. | ||
| Because in this 2013 span, of course, we spent a lot of time discussing how he won't shut the fuck up about going on Piers Morgan's show. | ||
| Did you know he went on Piers Morgan's show? | ||
| He doesn't talk about it that much. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Good. | ||
| But I did hear a little about it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But what's interesting to me about that is that is narcissistic acting out to a T. But it also has the appearance of like, yeah, that is a big show on CNN for you to go on, and people were talking about it, for better or worse. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| People making fun of him on The Daily Show. | ||
| On the whole worse, but... | ||
| Yeah, but also people in those patriot weirdo communities giving him a thumbs up. | ||
| Or some of them being like, hey, you just made us all look like crazy assholes. | ||
| You just did a disservice to your own movement, probably because you're a Zionist shill. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, exactly. | ||
| You made us look like a crazy asshole, you Zionist shill. | ||
| Alright, dude, okay. | ||
| So he did get some of that from his own people. | ||
| But, you know, whatever it is, it's still a big deal. | ||
| There's a lot of people talking about it. | ||
| So it didn't strike me as like petty narcissism as much as this does. | ||
| Like this Atlantic article, him lying about what they're saying. | ||
| about it. | ||
| The stuff about the Fox AP article about the 1.6 billion bullets. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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Those sorts of things are much lower scale. | |
| People are not talking about this that much. | ||
| And even that clip of CNN's Reliable Sources is related to the Piers Morgan thing. | ||
| He hates reliable sources! | ||
| It's interesting to me. | ||
| And maybe it's just because it's been over this stretch of time, but it appears to me... | ||
| Ah, here's the way I would put it. | ||
| How? | ||
| The requirements for that which he will obsess about when it's related to himself seems to be falling. | ||
| Ah, ah, ah. | ||
| The threshold by which he would begin to obsess over himself. | ||
| I allow for the Piers Morgan thing. | ||
| I'll make fun of it, but I allow for it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Because that's a good PR stunt. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| If you're just a, like... | ||
| Respect the scam. | ||
| Sort of. | ||
| If you're a valueless, just sort of do whatever you can for PR kind of person, that's exactly what you would do. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| That's effective. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And tip my hat. | ||
| This is not. | ||
| This is petty as shit. | ||
| It's stupid. | ||
| It's defensive. | ||
| And it's all in service of growing his mythos. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Growing his sort of... | ||
| Yeah, it really doesn't get much pettier than responding to an article that quoted one of your writers correctly with no, like, real judgment of it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's pretty petty. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's not you that they're even talking about. | ||
| I wonder if the trend will continue. | ||
| And I guess we'll probably find out sooner than later. | ||
| Because if Alex is doing this deposition shit in the present day, he probably won't be on his show for a little bit. | ||
| So he may be stuck. | ||
| And these wacky Wednesday things. | ||
| There's nothing happening over at Project Camelot. | ||
| God damn it, Kerry. | ||
| Get on it. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It stinks. | ||
| So we'll be back on Wednesday. | ||
| But until then, Jordan, we have a website. | ||
| We do have a website. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
| You bet it is. | ||
| We're also on Twitter. | ||
| We are on Twitter. | ||
| It's knowledge underscore fight and go to bed Jordan. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| We're also on Facebook. | ||
| We are on Facebook. | ||
| We are also on iTunes and other podcastual applications. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can also find Dan's plants and they will drip rainwater that will actually sound like our podcast so you can listen to it that way. | ||
| Really struggling to try and... | ||
| Prune those babies. | ||
| Yeah, we're getting a little wilt going on there. | ||
| No, we're not. | ||
| It's just overcastness. | ||
| Not enough sun. | ||
| But, as we get to the end of this, this is going to be unprecedented. | ||
| This is really tough. | ||
| This is not a winner of an episode. | ||
|
unidentified
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No, no, no. | |
| I got one. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This is unprecedented. | ||
| Here you go. | ||
| Because it's a hypothetical person. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Person out there who owns one of Alex Jones' oil paintings and will be willing to sell it to me, I bet you haven't killed anybody. | ||
| You would have to not have killed anybody. | ||
| I bet you're a great person who's willing to let go of that probably terrible oil paid to get a reasonable price to just a nice podcaster out of Chicago who's looking for new decor. | ||
| Maybe you donate it. | ||
| You'll definitely be a raptor princess. | ||
| You have never killed anybody. | ||
| The one guy who technically probably has is Alex Jones. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your work. |