Today, Dan and Jordan retreat back to the past to look at what Alex Jones was up to back in 2013. In this installment, Alex spends most of his time getting mad at a pro wrestling storyline he thinks is about him, and getting super defensive about a murderer he clearly identifies with.
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
| Hello, Alex. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm Jordan. | |
| We're a couple dudes. | ||
| Let's sit around, drink novelty beverages, celebrate America, and talk about Alex Jones. | ||
| Indeed we are, Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| What's your favorite cookout food? | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| What are we talking about grill-wise? | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Do I love a grill? | ||
| Grill me up. | ||
| I love going out and grilling. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Love... | ||
| I love how every park... | ||
| You go down by the lakefront, too. | ||
| It's the same thing. | ||
| You wander around, throw a rock, you'll hit a fucking grill somewhere. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You love a grill? | ||
| I love how there's just built-in installation grills in places. | ||
| Can't get enough. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I'm stalling. | ||
| Those are fun. | ||
| I'm stalling. | ||
| Because, I don't know, probably hot dogs. | ||
| I think it's great. | ||
| Hot dogs? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're not a brat guy? | ||
| No. | ||
| Any of the leaf sausages? | ||
| I do not appreciate that snap that a lot of people love. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Texturally, I do not enjoy it. | ||
| Of course you don't. | ||
| There are things that I don't enjoy, and one of them is feeling connected to the animal aspect of what I'm eating. | ||
| Like, I really don't like eating meat off a bone. | ||
| I don't like the snap of it because it feels like you're biting through something involved in an animal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| So it almost, like, physically grosses you out. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| There's a piece of it that I just... | ||
| I don't... | ||
| I would probably be vegetarian or vegan if I had any restraint or control over my diet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| Of course, of course. | ||
| But one of the reasons I do not like the recognition of the animal in what I'm taking in... | ||
| I'm fine with chicken breasts, though. | ||
| You are... | ||
| I might have something to unpack there. | ||
| You contain multitudes, Dan. | ||
| But that doesn't have as much of a textural sensation as like... | ||
| Hitting a bone. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or the innard snap of a brat. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| I'm not a huge fan. | ||
| So many of my food issues are texture-based. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not just... | ||
| You're going to go with hot dog over just a great hamburger. | ||
| Just a good hamburger. | ||
| Oh, look. | ||
| A good hamburger is nice, too. | ||
| But yeah, I probably would go... | ||
| There's a simplicity. | ||
| There's a raw simplicity to a hot dog. | ||
| And I can appreciate that. | ||
| But then, beyond that, I don't know. | ||
| Tater salad. | ||
| Can you grill tater salad? | ||
| No, I mean, I like having Ron White come to my... | ||
| For those of you who don't know who that is, he is a comedian who goes by tater salad. | ||
| This is a podcast where I know a lot about Ron White and Alex Jones. | ||
| And I only know what you tell me about Alex Jones, but I know enough about Ron White. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Blue Collar Comedy Tour. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| Ron White. | ||
| Hell yeah. | ||
| Tater salad. | ||
| So, Jordan, today we are going over... | ||
| We're back in the past. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Real quick, do you mind? | ||
| I just want to say, on our last episode, in the character of a proud boy, I used silly little girl as a derogatory term. | ||
| Well, coming from the mouth of the proud boy. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, in that character. | ||
| And it's something that I, because I was pretending to be a proud boy, assumed everyone would hear as being, this is what an evil person does. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| This is what a shitty person does. | ||
| But at the same time, it still came out of my mouth. | ||
| I heard it and felt like I'm participating in this idea of silly little girl being an insult, being something that you wouldn't want to be. | ||
| And I think that's bullshit. | ||
| I do not want to participate in that at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you mean is bullshit? | |
| Because that almost sounded like... | ||
| Now it sounds like, fuck you! | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| I got real scared. | ||
| This is the episode where Jordan turns fucking free speech advocate on us all. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| And now I want to say that I wasn't being in character as a Proud Boy. | ||
| I am a Proud Boy! | ||
| No, I think it's terrible to use that. | ||
| There's nothing... | ||
| I think there's blind spots that you can have as you go through life, and I think that that's probably one of them. | ||
| We talked about this before we started recording, the idea of, well, sure, you are in a character where you are personifying somebody who is bad saying something bad. | ||
| And I don't think that anybody who heard the episode didn't understand that. | ||
| But at the same time, at what point... | ||
| Does that excuse fall apart? | ||
| And it might be much earlier than you just subconsciously believed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Because in that character, you still wouldn't be throwing around the N-word. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course not. | |
| Or something like that. | ||
| Even though they might. | ||
| Pretty quick and easy way to tell if they're a bad guy, right? | ||
| But it doesn't make it any better. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's just a lack of creativity on my part. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That's what I see it as. | ||
| Or just, you know... | ||
| Subconsciously not recognizing how it might be heard to somebody else. | ||
| Yeah, it's just a reminder to be more thoughtful and direct and honest in my actions instead of just letting everything fly out without ever even thinking about it. | ||
| Or examining myself. | ||
| Thank you, everybody, for bringing it to my attention, too. | ||
| Amen. | ||
| So, today, Jordan, we're going back to the past. | ||
| We are covering February 19th and 20th, 2013. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And almost nothing from the 20th, because that is a fucking full of tumbleweeds just floating down the street that February 20th episode. | ||
| And one of the reasons is that... | ||
| So, on our last episode, we covered July 1st, 2019. | ||
| Alex was very extreme. | ||
| It was very scary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And then on the 2nd and 3rd of July, he did not really develop anything at all. | ||
| It was very much a holding pattern. | ||
| And it would have made for a very boring, very pointless episode. | ||
| So from the present day, there's not really much to go over. | ||
| And then also, a lot of these Wacky Wednesday folks are very disappointing right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They're really dropping the ball. | ||
| I don't know what's going on with Carrie Cassidy, but she's not coming through with content. | ||
| So, we're back in the past. | ||
| And this is actually pretty interesting. | ||
| I think today, though maybe underwhelming in importance, based on our last episode where him and Stuart Rhodes are calling for civil war and all that shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| I remember vaguely something like that happening. | ||
| I do think that something very interesting and fun happens on this episode. | ||
| And it starts right here in this first clip from February 19th. | ||
| When we come back, the top stories. | ||
| The demonization of the Tea Party goes into ultra, ultra high gear. | ||
| Folks, WWE creates racist wrestler to demonize the Tea Party. | ||
| And guess who he's a fan of? | ||
| Alex Jones. | ||
| On WWE. | ||
| They're really getting desperate. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Jack Swagger. | ||
| WWE. | ||
| Jack Swagger has come along and is now a character who is anti-immigration. | ||
| He is... | ||
| This is great. | ||
| We've talked about him on the show before, haven't we? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| When Marty filled in one time, he and I talked about this a little bit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah. | |
| But within the context of the timeline, it's very interesting. | ||
| I'm going to try not to get too much into the stuff that me and Marty talked about so there's not, like, heavy overlap. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But it's so fascinating to me that this is when this happens. | ||
| This is just on the heels of Alex being on Piers Morgan's show. | ||
| This is just, I don't know. | ||
| Well, that's probably why the reference was included there. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| It's a good couple months only after Sandy Hook. | ||
| This is a fucking turbulent time frame. | ||
| Now he's got a fucking guy in the WWE who's pretending that Alex is a fan of him. | ||
| Yeah, that's pretty great. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| He has to feel like he's kicking butt right now. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But one of the issues that Alex has is that some people think... | ||
| Wrestling is real. | ||
| And in as much as they are fighting, you do still have to put your body through a lot. | ||
| It is real in that sense. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| They're amazing storytellers. | ||
| That is real in that sense. | ||
| And they don't get health insurance, which means they're real people like the rest of us. | ||
| Everything is predetermined, though, and they're doing storylines. | ||
| But Alex believes that some people are incapable of understanding. | ||
| That it's, you know, storytelling is a medium. | ||
| I believe him because of him. | ||
| Well, that's one of the examples that he uses. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Himself. | ||
| People say, oh, wrestling, that's fake. | ||
| Nobody believes that. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| I'd say about half the wrestling fans, I grew up in Dallas, Texas, folks, around it all, okay? | ||
| You know, I'd go to the shopping mall, there'd be the Von Ericks there, everybody yelling and screaming, running after them. | ||
| I'd say about half the kids in my neighborhood thought it was real. | ||
| And then they, you know, get to be teenagers and pile drive some neighbor kid and put them in a coma. | ||
| That actually happened. | ||
| I believe that was you, Alex. | ||
|
unidentified
|
God damn it! | |
| If I recall, that was you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Every story! | |
| Every story! | ||
| Hey, man, those Nigerian scammers, I know a couple people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jesus Christ, Alex. | ||
| So his argument that people think that wrestling is real is like... | ||
| Me and my friends back when I was a kid thought it was real. | ||
| It's like, well, to be fair, there's a couple variables apply. | ||
| One, that's when you were really young. | ||
| And then two, that was back when kayfabe was way more seriously protected. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like the idea of the business back then of like, if you're seen in public with someone you're feuding with... | ||
| You better start fighting. | ||
| If you two are at a bar, having a drink together, you have to start fighting. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| There's a story about, I think it was Cody Rhodes told about his dad, Dusty Rhodes, about how he would fake an injury around the house because it was part of his wrestling storyline. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Even when he's home alone with his family, he'd have a bum leg from something. | ||
| Why do we ever even bother with Daniel Day-Lewis? | ||
| That guy fucking sucks compared to 90s wrestlers, apparently. | ||
| Yeah, in the 80s and 70s. | ||
| There's a real method back then. | ||
| It's seriously taking it very seriously because if the illusion is gone, then the illusion is gone. | ||
| Yeah, and you're never getting it back. | ||
| Yeah, and especially back then, that was what a lot of it was sold as. | ||
| These were heroes, and they were actually fighting each other. | ||
| If you have them buddying up off hours, it takes a while. | ||
| We really want to fight each other. | ||
| Let me at him. | ||
| And so, you know, whatever. | ||
| Alex, when he was younger, was much closer to that era of wrestling than 2013. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So, in this next clip, we already heard Alex say that he thinks about half of the wrestling audience thinks it's all real. | ||
| Yes, himself. | ||
| Here is where that takes a real spin for the weird. | ||
| And some people go because it's a joke. | ||
| I totally get it. | ||
| I've thought about going to it for entertainment purposes. | ||
| You know, I went to a monster truck deal. | ||
| I mean, it's fun to do that. | ||
| It's a big joke for most people. | ||
| But for a lot of people, WWE, it's not a joke. | ||
| And now their demographics are about half. | ||
| I saw this in the Wall Street Journal last year. | ||
| About half the WWE attendees and viewers are Hispanic. | ||
| What? | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Because it's big down in Mexico, the whole fake wrestling thing. | ||
| What are we doing here? | ||
| I have a Jack Black movie about that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| What are we doing here? | ||
| Where a Catholic priest goes and becomes one. | ||
| Naturally great. | ||
| Why are we doing this? | ||
| It's big, okay? | ||
| And so the new audience, and now I've learned it's not just Jack Swagger. | ||
| Most of the white people are now going to be idiot, bad people who are racist and hate Hispanics and then get defeated by guys with Mexican flags. | ||
| That sounds funny. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Does it? | |
| That's right. | ||
| That's what it's going to be. | ||
| He's heard that from now on it's not just Jack Swagger. | ||
| It's going to be all white dudes getting beaten up by minorities and stuff. | ||
| Man, that would be an interesting creative turn for the WWE to take. | ||
| I think their fan base would not appreciate that as much as Alex thinks they might. | ||
| No, maybe not. | ||
| Well, maybe. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think it would be an interesting experiment. | ||
| And one that was not undertaken after 2013. | ||
| Are you sure? | ||
| Positive. | ||
| It's interesting that earlier he said that half of the audience can't tell if it's real or fake. | ||
| They think it's real. | ||
| And then now half of the audience is Hispanic. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Interesting these ratios are the same. | ||
| It does sound interesting. | ||
| So there's something interesting happening in Alex's discussion of whether or not people think that the WWE and pro wrestling is real. | ||
| He accepts that a lot of people get that it's scripted, but in defending his claim that a lot of people also think that it's real, he points out that half of the audience is now Hispanic, as if to imply that this cross-section of the audience is in some way less capable of understanding that wrestling is a storytelling art form. | ||
| That alone is deeply bigoted of a position to have. | ||
| And this is only made worse when Alex slips up a little bit and says this a little bit later. | ||
| And the commentators are like, yeah, Jack Swagger gets that Alex Jones fan mail. | ||
| Limbaugh likes him too. | ||
| And you're like, well, it's just a joke. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| The viewers out there watching it, mainly illegal aliens, about half their audience, are sitting there really believing it's real. | ||
| And really believing that I'm sending fan mail to Jack Swagger. | ||
| So, in the first clip, he said the audience who was incapable of telling that wrestling was fake was half the audience that were Hispanic. | ||
| And now, just a little bit later, he's saying that half of the audience is illegal immigrants. | ||
| This is how Alex sees this segment of the population. | ||
| They're all illegal immigrants to him, whether they are or not. | ||
| Whether they're documented or not, he is using a Mexican, Hispanic, and illegal immigrant interchangeably. | ||
| Yeah, they're synonymous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's fucked up. | ||
| That is fucked up. | ||
| Beyond that, there's some true comedy to what Alex is doing here. | ||
| To explain that, I need to explain a little bit of what's going on. | ||
| And like I said earlier, Marty DeRosa and I covered this in a past episode a little bit, so I'm going to try and just hit the main bullet points. | ||
| In 2013, Alberto Del Rio was the WWE heavyweight champ. | ||
| His character was a little bit of a flashy, cocky Mexican guy. | ||
| One of the things that the WWE is known for doing, often very poorly and distastefully, is that they make some of their storylines mirror things that are happening in the real world. | ||
| In this case, the writers, for better or worse, decided that a good foil for their flashy, cocky Mexican champion would be an anti-immigration right-wing dude who constantly throws out dog whistles, like constantly saying, we the people, after saying something vaguely racist and threatening. | ||
| Which was what Jack Swagger's character, for the most part, was. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| The writers built this feud around the idea that Jack Swagger and his manager Zeb Coulter would cut promos about how they're what America really is about, until Rio didn't belong here and certainly didn't deserve to be champ. | ||
| The plan, obviously, is for Swagger to be a big shithead who antagonizes Del Rio, all culminating in a pay-per-view where Del Rio defeats the racist villain. | ||
| And that's more or less what happened. | ||
| It's just basic wrestling storylines, all things considered, with one very basic and massive twist, namely that the ethnic character was not the default bad guy. | ||
| Yeah, that's good! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's nice! | ||
| Whether you're a fan of it or not. | ||
| It's pretty dumb to try and argue against the idea that pro wrestling has xenophobia in its DNA. | ||
| So much of the business has been built on noble white heroes defeating scary, sometimes ethnic, but sometimes not foreign heels. | ||
| So, of course, there was the very unfortunate case of the group Kai and Tai, who were a late 90s group of Japanese wrestlers who had their promos dubbed like they were in an old Godzilla movie. | ||
| And they might or may not have been in Yakuza and also tried to cut off Val Venus' penis. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I remember Val Venus's penis. | ||
| I remember that. | ||
| I remember that being in the 90s and thinking, this is fine. | ||
| And I'm sure Alex did too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And now that I look back on it, I'm like, wow! | |
| They could just do that, huh? | ||
| I'm going to guess that Alex didn't do an episode of his show about how this is demonizing Japanese Americans. | ||
| I really don't think he did. | ||
| There have been plenty of very racist gimmicks that are kind of embarrassing to look back at, like the witch doctor Papa Shango, or the dancing African warrior Saba Simba, the literal terrorist Muhammad Hassan, or the cannibal headhunter Kamala. | ||
| The list goes on and on. | ||
| The roots of so many easy bad guy tropes were created with guys like the Iron Sheik, Nikolai Volkov, and Sergeant Slaughter when he decided to side with Iraq during the Gulf War. | ||
| They often do this very poorly and with very little class, but ultimately what the WWE is in the business of doing is creating emotional responses to their product. | ||
| One of the best ways to do that is to create characters that fit pretty easy archetypes and have them yell at each other about how their archetypes are in conflict with each other. | ||
| Right now, for example, in the WWE, one of the top bad guys is Daniel Bryan, and his character is basically just a preachy vegan environmentalist. | ||
| Wait, he's a bad guy now? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Last I heard, we were all big fans of him! | ||
| No, everyone still loves him, because he's really talented. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he's really good at his character, but he's a bad guy. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He won the WWE Championship and remade the belt with hemp, because he refused to wear a belt made of dead cows. | ||
| Hilarious. | ||
| He's a guy who's taking a lot of the stereotypes of liberals, of eco-crusaders, and then he performs them as a bad guy with amazing skill. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| I haven't heard any vegans or environmentalists or liberals screaming about how this is meant to be. | ||
| And I suspect it's because they're not a bunch of big old dum-dums. | ||
| They get that there are certain things that are kind of annoying about their positions, and it's in good fun to see those things exaggerated to create a villainous character out of it. | ||
| This is how the Tea Party folks and Alex should have responded to Jack Swagger if they were adults. | ||
| They should have realized and recognized that, yeah, there do seem to be a bit of, you know, at least a couple of fucked up racists among our ranks, and that's something that could stand a little bit of exaggeration or parody in the interest of telling a compelling wrestling story. | ||
| Ultimately, it could have even been an opportunity to have a much-needed conversation about what is and what is not acceptable within their communities. | ||
| But they can't do any of that for two reasons. | ||
| Especially people like Alex. | ||
| One, they took it personally. | ||
| Deep down, they knew that the things that Jack Swagger and Zeb Coulter in their characters, the things that they were exaggerating and parodying, were actually things that they themselves believed. | ||
| And they took the presentation of Swagger as the bad guy for holding those beliefs as a personal criticism. | ||
| And two, they're goddamn con men looking for anything they can do to raise their profile. | ||
| The fact that Jack Swagger said that he liked Alex Jones is the best fucking thing to ever happen for Alex Jones. | ||
| Getting on Piers Morgan's show was big for Alex's exposure, but Alex knows that this has the potential to be gigantic. | ||
| The rub is that it can only be gigantic if Alex can capitalize on it. | ||
| And laughing it off as a storyline in wrestling, that's not how con men capitalize. | ||
| Ultimately, I think it's super interesting as a glimpse into how desperate all of these right-wing folks are for attention. | ||
| Alex and Glenn Beck both went completely nuts when a wrestling character mentioned them, because they knew that if they could penetrate that market, they had a chance to really balloon their ranks. | ||
| It's also interesting to see this happen at the time it does. | ||
| We're seeing that in February 2013, Alex is in a very defensive position about media covering him. | ||
| There's the weeks-long freak-out about Piers Morgan that seems to be coming to a close, kind of. | ||
| Then on our last episode, we saw him freaking out about CNN and The Atlantic accurately covering him. | ||
| This opportunity to lash out at the WWE could not have come at a better time for him. | ||
| And I bet we're going to be hearing a whole lot about this in the future. | ||
| Yeah, that sounds right. | ||
| I'm going to guess that he makes the biggest deal. | ||
| I'm not stoked. | ||
| I'm fucking stoked as shit. | ||
| It sounds like in the clip that he's actually just mad they think that he would send a fan letter. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| He sounds like... | ||
| And they think I would send a fan letter? | ||
| How dare them? | ||
| So one of the things that's really interesting about this, and this is something that me and Marty discussed, is that they did not care about Alex Jones, the WWE. | ||
| This was far more about Glenn Beck. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Because Glenn Beck was actually on mainstream TV at the time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| Of course. | ||
| Whereas Alex is just on his own platform. | ||
| So in the same way that Alex is trying to latch on to the WWE to try and get some attention, the WWE recognized that this is also a really good carny thing for us. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Because if we could fuck with them... | ||
| We could all make money off this. | ||
| This is good business for both of us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So as soon as the people like Glenn Beck and Alex Jones started to push back on them, they dove full on into it. | ||
| But it turned bad because Glenn Beck started calling wrestling fans idiots. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, no! | |
| And he started to get really shitty about wrestling fans and how they're all fucking stupid. | ||
| And you're kind of even hearing Alex expressing some of that with the idea that they can't tell what's real or not. | ||
| So, in an unprecedented event in pro wrestling, I don't know if... | ||
| I'm sure this may have happened at some other point, but I can't think of another time. | ||
| Jack Swagger and Zeb Coulter cut a promo where they explained what wrestling is to Glenn Beck. | ||
| And here is the beginning of that promo. | ||
| My name is Zeb Coulter. | ||
| And I am Jack Swagger. | ||
| And we are real Americans. | ||
| We believe in the First Amendment. | ||
| We say the things that need to be said whether people want to hear them or not. | ||
| We are here to prevent this once great country from eroding into bankruptcy both financially and morally. | ||
| We believe in some very simple principles. | ||
| We believe that if you live in this country, you shouldn't speak Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, German. | ||
| Or hell, even Pig Latin. | ||
| You should speak English. | ||
| We believe that real Americans are struggling to find jobs because people from other countries are sneaking across our borders and are willing to work for next to no money. | ||
| They're stealing jobs from real Americans. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thieves. | |
| And we believe that if you sneak across our borders and are in our country illegally, then you should leave. | ||
| And if you don't want to leave, well, that's where Jack and I come in. | ||
| We will make you leave. | ||
| And we believe that the world champion of WWE, Alberto Del Rio, is a perfect example of the problems that plague our country. | ||
| Which is why Jack Swagger is going to beat Alberto Del Rio at WrestleMania, win the world title, and begin to set things right in this country. | ||
| But Jack won't be alone. | ||
| He will have an army of support behind him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We the people. | |
| Oh. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Hey, Glenn Beck. | ||
| What you just saw is what we call a promo. | ||
| It's a scene we record to elicit a positive or negative reaction from our fans. | ||
| See, we are entertainers. | ||
| My name is Jake Hager. | ||
| And I'm Wayne Cowan. | ||
| We are performers for WWE. | ||
| Zeb Coulter is the character I play. | ||
| Jack Swagger is the character Jake plays. | ||
| We aren't in the political business or the immigration business. | ||
| We are in the entertainment business. | ||
| Everything we do as our characters is designed to tell stories. | ||
| Right now, the story we're telling is that Zeb Coulter... | ||
| And Jack Swagger are using the current, relevant, and topical story of immigration to target the WWE world champion, Alberto Del Rio. | ||
| Also a character played by my friend, Jose Rodriguez. | ||
| In our story, we are the antagonists, and Alberto is the protagonist. | ||
| They're just explaining storytelling at this point. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| And you'll notice, like, in the middle of that, he said... | ||
| I know. | ||
| Because they're interested in Glenn Beck. | ||
| Not in Alex Jones. | ||
| I imagine if Glenn Beck... | ||
| I wish... | ||
| I dreamed this sequence happened, but Glenn Beck is home alone and he just starts watching this and then the TV starts talking directly to him. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| I had that moment right there where he just says, Glenn Beck, I was like, oh my god, it's like in a horror movie where the TV just starts talking to you and then you get fucked up by a ghost. | ||
| Even though the strictness of the kayfabe rules and all that aren't as severe now... | ||
| It's still bizarre to see wrestlers be like, this is not my real name. | ||
| I'm a character. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| And I think some of it is due to the, like, these people were really insulting the audience of wrestling. | ||
| And I think that wrestlers and the company itself probably took a bit of offense to that, at least on some level. | ||
| And so this whole promo is largely like, you're calling our audience stupid. | ||
| Let us explain why you are stupid. | ||
| Yeah, in fact, you, sir, are the dumb one. | ||
| So it's directed specifically at Glenn Beck, and that leads to them giving Glenn Beck a little bit of an invitation at the end of the promo. | ||
| We look forward to continuing to tell provocative, funny, dramatic, and sometimes controversial stories with characters of all backgrounds and beliefs. | ||
| Many of your followers are WWE fans, and they understand the difference between reality... | ||
| Are you out of touch with your audience, Glenn? | ||
| Or are you just a stupid political commentator? | ||
| Mr. Beck, we cordially invite you to Monday Night Raw in Dallas at the American Airlines Center. | ||
| This Monday, where you can deliver a five-minute unedited rebuttal to our global TV audience and a sold-out crowd of 12,000 stupid wrestling fans. | ||
| You see, real Americans like Zeb Koster and Jack Swagger won't stand for the systematic, methodical destruction of the country our forefathers built. | ||
| Alberto Del Rio is part of this problem, and we're going to fix it. | ||
| We the people. | ||
| Thanks, buddy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's why he needed Zeb Coulter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Because he's not as good on the microphone as Zeb is. | ||
| Yeah, I can see that. | ||
| Zeb is pretty fucking electric. | ||
| Zeb is dynamic. | ||
| So one of the things that's amazing about this is, like, that's such an awesome response. | ||
| Like, hey, Glenn Beck, we'll give you five minutes to get your ass booed off. | ||
| He would have been booed for five minutes. | ||
| It would have been merciless. | ||
| I imagine he didn't go. | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, I'm sorry. | ||
| God, I wish you had audio of that. | ||
| But also... | ||
| Alex has got to be furious that he didn't get the invitation. | ||
| He didn't even get nothing. | ||
| It's in Texas. | ||
| He's got to be furious. | ||
| Because Alex would have gone. | ||
| I don't know if he would have. | ||
| He might have sent Rob Dew or something. | ||
| Hey, Dew, get your ass booed at. | ||
| And then when you get booed, I will say, I wouldn't have gotten booed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You did a bad job. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Oh, that'd be great. | ||
| Perfect setup. | ||
| Perfect. | ||
| Now, the other thing, too, is that, like, if you really listen to that promo, except for rolling the R in Del Rio, that doesn't sound that different from what Alex says at all. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's not that different. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well... | |
| It's a parody, slightly. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Only very slightly. | ||
| See, that... | ||
| Like, I think they couldn't help but take it personally, because if I understand correctly, Beck and Alex both took it personally, and that pretty much ruined a golden opportunity for all parties involved to just keep that conflict machine rolling and rolling and dough. | ||
| I think Alex might have been willing to engage with it like that, but since they were focused on Beck and didn't give a shit about Alex... | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| Maybe he didn't have a chance to do work. | ||
| You know, do the job for him. | ||
| Yeah, because... | ||
| But I think also, probably, they never would have gotten involved with Alex in any real way, because Alex would never allow himself to look bad. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| He wouldn't do the job for somebody. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| If you're gonna get involved... | ||
| If you are Alex Jones in this situation with this storyline, let's say, and the WWE brings you in, the way they'd probably bring you in is to, like... | ||
| Say whatever you want and then get fake attacked by Alberto Del Rio. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, of course. | |
| And then Zeb Coulter saves you or something like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Easy peasy. | |
| Yeah, and Alex would never go along with that. | ||
| That's true, because he'd have to appear to be getting his ass kicked first. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The only way he would agree to it is, like, if I can yell at people for... | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| How do we present that? | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, you're not doing it. | ||
| But yeah, I mean... | ||
| What you take offense to is the fact that he's the bad guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It's not the characterization, it's only that he's the bad guy. | ||
| Because he's saying things that are very similar to their positions and what they believe. | ||
| I mean, he's saying things that are similar to it, but I think his actual positions are exactly what they believe. | ||
| It's heavy overlap. | ||
| The problem is, the parody is more accurate than what he presents, if you understand what I'm saying. | ||
| To an extent, yeah. | ||
| They're far more racist in parodying that kind of character. | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| Yeah, probably. | ||
| He would have been the good guy. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And one time, the white guy doesn't win. | ||
| I can't be having that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Cannot have it. | ||
| So the big problem is that the owners of the WWE, Vince McMahon and Linda McMahon, they're fucking sellouts to the GOP. | ||
| That's what's going on here. | ||
| Here's Alex complaining about Linda McMahon. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Doesn't matter what I really said. | ||
| Because CNN... | ||
| And MSNBC and all these other outfits are preying on their audience just like Vince McMahon and his establishment Republican wife. | ||
| Oh! | ||
| Establishment Republican wife. | ||
| Now we'll get into why that's silly, but before we do, Alex has got to talk some more shit about Linda McMahon. | ||
| I'm excited. | ||
| And it's the Republican Party, the Republican Party leadership... | ||
| I mean, he spent tens of millions. | ||
| How much did she spend running in the Senate? | ||
| It was some record number. | ||
| Is it 50, 60 million? | ||
| Look up how much McMahon's wife spent on her Senate run for me. | ||
| I think it was like 60 million or something, my memory serves. | ||
| The point is, she couldn't even get in, and so now they're just throwing themselves at the power structure's feet. | ||
| Look, we'll do whatever you say. | ||
| So the argument here is that the GOP hates the Tea Party, and so because the McMahons are such establishment GOP folk, they're falling at the feet of the GOP in order to demonize the Tea Party by way of a character. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| They did it. | ||
| Linda McMahon ran for Senate in Connecticut in 2010 and 2012. | ||
| She's mostly remembered for losing both times and spending shitloads of money on each campaign. | ||
| She spent approximately $100 million on those two campaigns. | ||
| And according to USA Today, $77 million of that was her own money. | ||
| Even after she lost those races, she stayed around in the world of politics as a mega-donor for Republican candidates. | ||
| What you have to understand is that the WWE has a whole hell of a lot to lose if they're subjected to regulation. | ||
| The way they classify their wrestlers as independent contractors has been the subject of a lot of conversation recently, and if they had to treat them like an employee, with the protections that come from that designation, their profits would be cut drastically. | ||
| Drastically. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Spending $100 million on politics is a pretty small loss compared to what they would lose if more left-leaning ideas about workers'rights were to become ascendant and more universally applied. | |
| The idea of these people who are, like, growing old with these injuries that they sustained. | ||
| Yeah, every part of that is logical. | ||
| In the 2016 campaign, Linda McMahon donated $7 million to Trump-aligned Super PACs. | ||
| She and Vince were big supporters of Trump's campaign, which shouldn't surprise anyone too much since Donald Trump was entered into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013. | ||
| And he was inducted into the Hall by Vince McMahon himself. | ||
| From 1995 to the present day, the only two people that Vince McMahon gave Hall of Fame induction speeches for were Donald Trump and Stone Cold Steve Austin. | ||
| I hate everything. | ||
| I hate everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| No! | ||
| If you're Vince McMahon, how do you not give Stone Cold's induction speech? | ||
| The two of them were such a big part of the Attitude Era, the defining feud of that time. | ||
| Makes total sense. | ||
| And then Donald Trump. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Also, a little fun irony, the WWE Hall of Fame ceremony takes place on WrestleMania weekend. | ||
| It's all part of a days-long celebration that they have. | ||
| Trump was inducted in 2013, which, if you're paying attention, is the same year when Alberto Del Rio fought Jack Swagger at WrestleMania. | ||
| It's this same year that we're talking about right now. | ||
| And that's why he ran for president in the first place. | ||
| He was just mad that Del Rio won. | ||
| Could have been. | ||
| Also, Trump was booed offstage when he gave his acceptance speech. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yay! | |
| It turns out the New York crowd was not super into a guy they were very familiar with who's been a piece of shit locally for a couple decades. | ||
| Yeah, pretty much everybody. | ||
| Yeah, bad idea to induct Trump into the Hall of Fame in New York, I think. | ||
| So the McMahons and Trump have had a really interesting relationship over the years. | ||
| They began working together in 1988, when Trump was instrumental in helping the then-WWF bring WrestleMania IV to Atlantic City. | ||
| They hosted the event at the Atlantic City Convention Hall, which was called Trump Plaza in advertisements. | ||
| They would return to the venue for WrestleMania V, making it the only place to host the event in two consecutive years ever. | ||
| In 2004, when WrestleMania was in New York, Donald Trump was in attendance. | ||
| Jesse Ventura interviewed him and asked if Ventura were to get back into politics, could he count on Trump's support? | ||
| Trump said 100%. | ||
| To which Ventura yells to the crowd that it seems like we need a wrestler in the White House in 2008. | ||
| It's very grim to watch in hindsight. | ||
| Also, Jesse Ventura. | ||
| Very heavily dyeing his beard at that point. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Very dark beard. | ||
| That was when he was doing that? | ||
| Was Eddie already gone completely bald at that point? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He might have been wearing a bandana. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's pretty cool, though. | ||
| He is pretty cool. | ||
| In January 2007, Vince McMahon was in the ring during what was supposed to be fan appreciation night on Raw. | ||
| But instead of appreciating the fans, he proceeded to call them ungrateful and basically made it all about himself. | ||
| In the middle of his skit, he's interrupted by Trump on the big screen, who tells him that he's better than Vince, and then Trump dumps a bunch of money on the fans out of I hate everything. | ||
| I hate everything. | ||
| Trump was even then obviously in no shape to wrestle, even though Vince swole as hell. | ||
| So they decided to choose fighters to represent them who would then compete in a hair versus hair match. | ||
| The loser would have to shave their head. | ||
| And if you're not an idiot, you knew from minute one that mean Trump was going to win. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| There's no way Trump's shaving his head. | ||
| Not a chance. | ||
| Vince chose Umaga to be his fighter, and Trump chose Bobby Lashley. | ||
| Who he described in an interview with Imus, Don Imus, as, quote, Bobby Lindsay, a black gentleman and the strongest man I've ever seen. | ||
| Bobby Lindsay. | ||
| Did he... | ||
| Did he just mandingo us? | ||
| Did that just happen? | ||
| It's a mess. | ||
| So Stone Cold was the special ref for the match. | ||
| So after Lashley won and they shaved Vince's head, Stone Cold and Trump celebrated in Stone Cold fashion, which is to say that Stone Cold chugged some beers and then gave Trump a stunner. | ||
| It's completely bizarre and very grim in hindsight. | ||
| Yeah, this is all a tragic, tragic thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, what's interesting about this is the timing. | ||
| This was in January 2007, and that collaboration between Trump and the McMahons, that's the point when it was heating up. | ||
| But behind closed doors, behind the scenes, they were collaborating a bit more as well. | ||
| Donald Trump had been running the Trump Foundation, which New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood described as being engaged in a, quote, shocking pattern of illegality. | ||
| In their 2015 IRS filing, the foundation admits to self-dealing or transferring assets or income to disqualified individuals. | ||
| He used more than $250,000 of foundation money to settle disputes arising from his golf courses and hotels. | ||
| He used $20,000 of foundation money to buy a portrait of himself that no one else wanted to buy. | ||
| It doesn't seem like too much of a controversial statement to say that there is a pattern of illegal behavior surrounding the Trump Foundation. | ||
| You could have gotten rid of the foundation. | ||
| Sure, but I'm talking specifically about that. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Trump stopped putting his own money into the Trump Foundation in 2006. | ||
| And his biggest donor in 2007 was Vince McMahon, who gave the Trump Foundation $4 million in 2007. | ||
| The foundation's total stated fundraising that year was $4.1 million. | ||
| And Vince McMahon would go on to give another million in 2009. | ||
| If you count it all up, you're looking at an amount over $12 million that the McMahons have given to Trump between 2007 and 2016. | ||
| So it makes a lot of sense that when Trump was elected, one of his first positions he filled was to make Linda McMahon his head of the Small Business Administration. | ||
| She served in that position until recently. | ||
| On April 15, 2019, it was announced that she was going to be moving on to become the chair of the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action, the exact same super PAC that Sheriff David Clark became board member of after he left the sheriff's office. | ||
| Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski is also a senior advisor for America First Action. | ||
| Fun fact, America First Action, between 2016 and 2018, spent over $460,000 of the money that it brought in at Trump-owned properties. | ||
| They paid over $120,000 to two firms directly tied to Sheriff David Clark. | ||
| There is a clear pattern that you can decide for yourself. | ||
| I don't like that all of this is happening. | ||
| I think it's bad, first. | ||
| I think the thing that I hate most about it is probably how obvious it is and blatant and how nobody's doing anything about it. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of people have made some pretty salient points about how it seems like these Trump super PACs are just places where people who get cast off and maybe know stuff end up getting parachutes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| People have suggested that. | ||
| I don't know if you could prove it, but it seems like, huh, all these weirdos who are really big Trump boosters and then become unaffected anymore seem to all funnel into these America First policies and America First action. | ||
| Yeah, and I doubt their opinions on a lot of stuff are very valuable towards a campaign arm, and maybe they're more just about getting a lot of money. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Could be. | ||
| Anyway, my point here is that the McMahon family has been deeply involved with Donald Trump for decades. | ||
| There's a real irony for Alex to be calling them out as GOP stooges in bed with the New World Order here in 2013 when they had a huge part in Alex's hero getting elected as president. | ||
| And there's another funny piece here, too. | ||
| The McMahons got paid. | ||
| When Trump won the election, he gave Linda a job that she had no business doing, even though she was primarily... | ||
| She had no small business doing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Even though she was primarily known as a pro-wrestling promoter and a person who spent $100 million losing elections, he still gave her a job. | ||
| She was an embarrassing entity, and Trump still put her in office, something that he would never do for Alex. | ||
| The McMahons are Trump collaborators. | ||
| Alex is a useful idiot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| There's a big distinction there, and it's really funny to hear him back in the past being like, little does he know all the stuff. | ||
| Man, he doesn't know anything. | ||
| We didn't know anything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| None of us had any clue, because this all sounds like a fucking joke, Dan. | ||
| It does. | ||
| None of this sounds... | ||
| This is a fucking SNL sketch. | ||
| This is not the goddamn world. | ||
| It's very bizarre. | ||
| So, in this next clip, Alex calls for a boycott of the WWE, which is cool, because he's real into boycotts of stuff. | ||
| And then he says something kind of grim at the end. | ||
| You witch bucket of pus! | ||
| Okay, and I'm telling everybody, boycott the WWE and the rest of it. | ||
| They are anti-American filth. | ||
| Out there trying to imply anybody that wants sovereignty and doesn't want this country bankrupted. | ||
| The illegal aliens are being brought in here to vote take our guns, folks. | ||
| I'd rather convert them and turn them over to liberty. | ||
| But let me tell you, that's not happening. | ||
| The globalists want the illegals here. | ||
| I don't want them here. | ||
| It's simple. | ||
| Globalists are for it. | ||
| I'm against it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So you're just a contrarian. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You haven't thought through your positions? | ||
| Just contrarian. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| The idea there at the end is really fucking dark and stupid. | ||
| That sort of idea of like, I would love to try and convince these folks to love liberty and my positions, but it's not even worth it to try and convince them. | ||
| They are brainwashed by the left or too stupid to understand my positions. | ||
| Therefore, enemy. | ||
| That's very bad. | ||
| Also... | ||
| I would love to get a supercut together of all the times that Alex and Paul Joseph Watson have been so mad that someone wants to boycott Chick-fil-A or something like that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| How dare you! | ||
| How dare you do a boycott! | ||
| Right. | ||
| Fuck off. | ||
| Calling for a boycott of the WWE. | ||
| Immediately after they call for a boycott of something. | ||
| It's so stupid. | ||
| They're all so fucking... | ||
| It's infuriating. | ||
| It's only infuriating when it comes to principles. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When they pretend to have some sort of a high ground, that's when it's infuriating. | ||
| Yeah, it makes it so... | ||
| It's so annoying because it's so laid bare how little... | ||
| How they just... | ||
| There are no consequences in their sphere. | ||
| Nah, shit don't matter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
None. | |
| So, Alex is up in a tizzy about Jack Swagger, but it turns out, across the pond... | ||
| Over in jolly old England. | ||
| Yeah, they got Swagger Jack. | ||
| Paul Joseph Watson is also pissed off about this. | ||
| Why? | ||
| And he has created a special report about the issue. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And here's a little piece of it. | ||
| The WWE commentators said that these two racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant hate figures received fan mail from none other than Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Alex Jones. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Swagger! | |
| Daniel Bryant, we're going to put him away. | ||
| Well, Zeb's got a lot of fan mail so far from Rush Limbaugh. | ||
| Bags of it. | ||
| Or Alex Jones, for that matter. | ||
| Glenn Beck, I think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Or Alex. | |
| It's clearly a joke. | ||
| That's what they're operating off of. | ||
| They're laughing. | ||
| The commentators are laughing. | ||
| They're making a joke. | ||
| They're not even saying that he literally got fan mail from any of those people. | ||
| That is an exaggeration for humor of his patrioty positions. | ||
| He played that, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| He played that? | ||
| That's from Paul's report. | ||
| Okay, Paul, that's disqualifying. | ||
| Anybody who listens to that, nobody's going to then get their hackles raised again. | ||
| Well, they would if you already frame it. | ||
| If you frame it as being real. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, the way he came out, it's just incongruous. | ||
| He's coming out like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
These people are hating on all of us. | |
| And then you play that clip and you're like... | ||
| They're joking. | ||
| Eh, that's weak. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You got nothing, man. | |
| The commentators are fucking joking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're laughing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's nonsense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Even if it... | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So, whatever. | ||
| We may get back to this here in a bit. | ||
| We may not. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| But in this next clip, I found this to be really illuminating. | ||
| It's Alex doing a rundown of the day's headlines. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And... | ||
| If you pay close attention, or don't, you'll see that all he's doing is reading Drudge. | ||
| Update. | ||
| Russian foreign minister finally takes Kerry's call. | ||
| We're going to get into all that. | ||
| Kremlin accuses Texas' mother of killing adopted son. | ||
| Son trashes Ted Turner in race. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Of course, I'm reading off the Drudge report. | ||
| The really important news is Robert Plant hints he's open to Zeppelin reunion. | ||
| I ain't going to do that without John Bonham. | ||
| Good point. | ||
| I don't know where to live! | ||
| What is going on? | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| He even is open about it. | ||
| Like, I'm just reading off headlines that I haven't read the stories of on Drudge Report. | ||
| You're not doing a news show. | ||
| You're not doing an analysis show. | ||
| You are cold reading headlines from Drudge. | ||
| That's half of his career. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, it's irresponsible. | ||
| That is amazing. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So, in this next clip, Alex wants to talk about the youth culture causing violence through video games. | ||
| And wrestling? | ||
| Psych meds. | ||
| No, he's off the wrestling. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| It's sort of a triumvirate. | ||
| Video games? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Psych meds. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And the devil. | ||
| See, everybody keeps wondering why every one of these mass shooters has been a first-person shooter video game addict in every case, and they've been on serotonin reuptake inhibitors or other psychotropic drugs. | ||
| You mix those things together, people then give in to the prevailing youth culture of devil worship and destruction, and then they think it's really cool to go kill little kids. | ||
| My response to that is like... | ||
| Shut up, old man. | ||
| Yeah, is this the satanic panic of the 80s? | ||
| Are we... | ||
| I think it is. | ||
| Is he somebody's mom? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What is going on here? | ||
| You can't be more of an old man than that. | ||
| Like, these video games are making people... | ||
| The kids listening to... | ||
| Metal music, man! | ||
| The prevailing culture in the youth of the devil. | ||
| They love the devil. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The youths. | |
| Oh, fuck out of here. | ||
| Oh, they're having lipstick parties. | ||
| Are your youths doing weird shit today? | ||
| They might be. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-oh. | |
| Rainbow parties. | ||
| Rainbow parties. | ||
| Not lipstick parties. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, whatever. | |
| It's all the same fucking lie bullshit that nobody ever did. | ||
| So, on this episode, Alex, he descends into a lot of long graphic fantasies about how he thinks the globalists are probably going to kill him. | ||
| And then he keeps insisting that he's never going to hurt his family or himself. | ||
| But for the bulk of the show, I had no idea why he was doing that. | ||
| It just seemed out of place, seemed very bizarre. | ||
| And then towards the end of the show, he brings up this case as a way of leading into an introduction for his next guest, who is investigative reporter, non-investigative reporter, Wayne Madsen. | ||
| Let me give you the background on this. | ||
| Document cam shot police. | ||
| Former airline pilot and conspiracy theorist. | ||
| See, it's okay, because he's a conspiracy theorist. | ||
| He didn't trust the government. | ||
| He wrote a book. | ||
| He worked as a contract pilot for black ops. | ||
| That's why they had government people, the mainstream admits, take everything out of his house after he was dead. | ||
| National security came and took everything out of the house. | ||
| Former airline pilot and conspiracy theorist shot dead his two teenage children and his dog before turning the gun on himself. | ||
| Because the police say so. | ||
| The neighbors all say he was great and super nice and didn't even keep his gun loaded and said he was being followed because of his book, The Big Bamboozle, Philip Marshall. | ||
| So Wayne Madsen's going to come in and he's got a big report on this Philip Marshall. | ||
| This is where Alex is getting his ideas, that the government is going to come kill him and kill his family in order to make it look like he killed his family. | ||
| Sure, okay. | ||
| Because that's the premise that Alex has for this Philip Marshall guy. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So Philip Marshall was a pilot who had some connection to the CIA. | ||
| He was involved with Barry Seale, and in some capacity he was mixed up in Iran-Contra, but not as a major player, but some side piece. | ||
| Some soft rice. | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But with more, like, credible connections to it than Larry Nichols. | ||
| Than just a bunch of phone calls. | ||
| In addition to that, he was a bit of an author and a 9-11 conspiracy theorist. | ||
| He had published a book in 2008 called False Flag 9-11, and a book that Alex just brought up, The Big Bamboozle, which had been published in February 2012, so a year before this all went down. | ||
| On February 2nd, 2013, Marshall and his two children, aged 17 and 14, were found dead. | ||
| The children were shot as they slept on their couch, and then Marshall turned the gun on himself. | ||
| The reality of the situation is an intense tragedy, but what Alex Jones and his associates have done to distort the situation and use it to their advantage is a travesty. | ||
| All of this traces back to Alex's guest that he's about to bring up, Wayne Madsen. | ||
| And it's important to remember that Wayne Madsen often just makes shit up. | ||
| He's the guy who said that Hillary Clinton's personal chef was murdered and had a note attached to him that said, call Larry Nichols. | ||
| That did turn out to be true, though. | ||
| And that's far from the stupidest shit that Wayne Madsen's reported. | ||
| You might notice that Wayne Madsen doesn't come on Alex's show anymore in 2019, and that's because these two dudes now hate each other. | ||
| Madsen has decided that Alex is working for Israel. | ||
| Which is on brand for him, since Madsen pretty much thinks Israel is behind everything that happens that he doesn't like. | ||
| Anders Breivik was secretly working for Mossad. | ||
| That's something that he reported, for instance. | ||
| Sure, he reported that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| After Marshall and his children were found dead, Wayne Madsen went to the town that they lived in and investigated things for himself. | ||
| And what do you know? | ||
| He found no evidence that Philip had killed his children. | ||
| So Wayne concluded it must be a secret assassination hit meant to punish him for the book he published a year prior or something. | ||
| I can't believe they let him at the crime scene. | ||
| I don't think he was. | ||
| Oh, you don't think he was? | ||
| Well, then how... | ||
| So wait. | ||
| I think he was sneaking around, like... | ||
| Of course they didn't let him at the crime scene. | ||
| I think he was sneaking around with binoculars. | ||
| Or maybe, because it's, you know, a couple weeks after. | ||
| He might have been able to get close enough. | ||
| Like, everything was probably processed by that. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I'm saying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course you found no evidence that he shot his kids. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Asshole. | |
| I went to Dallas to find out if there was any evidence that he killed his kids two states away. | ||
| Oh, I thought you were going to do the JFK assassination. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I went to Dallas to see if I could find any hints. | |
| So, to that question of there being no evidence, I suspect that Wayne didn't look too hard. | ||
| Because here's some of the stuff that he seems to have missed. | ||
| Beginning in at least 2008, Philip Marshall and his wife, Sean Plummer, began having severe problems in their marriage, which seems to be pretty much all his fault. | ||
| In November 2008, Plummer's sister told the police that he told Plummer that she, quote, will not see December, which is one of many overt threats that he made to her. | ||
| Plummer's sister had reported on multiple occasions being afraid for her safety as well as that of Marshall's children. | ||
| She reported that, quote, On December 5, 2008, Philip got into a physical altercation with Plummer's sister, which led to Plummer getting an emergency protective order against him, which he violated. | ||
| Throughout this time, Philip was clearly involving their children in their domestic problems. | ||
| When the protective order was issued, police reviewed phone messages, which turned up one that Philip had left for his daughter. | ||
| Quote, Mikayla, this is Daddy. | ||
| We're going to have lunch. | ||
| We need to talk right now. | ||
| If not, something is going to happen. | ||
| There's no circumstances under which it's acceptable to threaten your children like that. | ||
| That is deeply abusive. | ||
| Plummer initiated divorce proceedings then, back in 2008, but decided to withdraw the motion and try to make things work in 2009. | ||
| In October 2012, she decided it wasn't going to work and filed for divorce again. | ||
| All of the details at the scene of the crime match up perfectly with a double murder-suicide. | ||
| ... | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Phillips' fingerprints were on the ammunition box and gun magazine. | ||
| The bullets that were used matched a specific type of ammo that he'd purchased days before at a Big Five sporting goods store, as confirmed by receipts and security video from the store. | ||
| Police searching the house found his safe unlocked. | ||
| In the safe, they found his box of ammunition, which accounted for all the bullets and everything, and his wedding ring was sitting on top of it. | ||
| They also found five bags of medical marijuana, with a note next to it that said, quote, Hi, Sean, which is his wife's name. | ||
| Medical records reviewed after the murders revealed that Philip had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2006, and due to his episodes of depression and mania, he'd been grounded from flying commercially in September 2006. | ||
| They also found that in the more recent past, Philip had been suffering from chronic pain and had been visiting clinics trying to get pain medication. | ||
| The bottom line is this. | ||
| There's a whole mountain of evidence that Philip Marshall is the guy who did this, and that he was struggling with a lot of very difficult issues. | ||
| There are long-standing mental health battles, as well as substance abuse issues. | ||
| And beyond that, and more importantly, he clearly had a history of domestic violence, which is the single factor that you will almost always find in the histories of people who do things like Philip did. | ||
| I feel a certain amount of empathy for what he must have been struggling with in his life, but that disappears really quick when you consider how he treated his wife and children in that 2008 to 2009 stretch, and probably plenty of other times that are less documented by police Wayne Madsen doesn't know shit. | ||
| And almost all of this conspiracy nonsense comes directly from him. | ||
| You go to websites that are reporting on the conspiracy and have questions, in quotes, about it. | ||
| Almost all of it directly goes right back to Wayne Madsen's reporting. | ||
| God. | ||
| That's another thing that is not... | ||
| You know, when we bring up gun control and all that stuff, we talk mainly about the never-ending mass shootings that occur in this dumb fuck country. | ||
| That is another one of those things is that most gun deaths are suicides and this kind of situation. | ||
| One reason that I would love gun control is just because I don't think I should be allowed to have a gun. | ||
| And I mean that on my personal level of I can't have a gun because that to me, just the mere fact of owning it is owning like an off button. | ||
| And one of the things that is shown over, borne out in study after study when talking about psychological profiles of people who commit suicide is that if you just get a little bit more time, the moment will pass. | ||
| I think that you and I can both speak to that from experience. | ||
| But that said, I think that's a shitty argument for gun control. | ||
| No, it's not an argument for gun control. | ||
| It's something that I think is involved with gun control. | ||
| I'm not saying that that's why we should have gun control. | ||
| Just because it's bad for you to have a gun, or bad for people in a lot of states to have a gun, per se, that doesn't mean that no one should. | ||
| And I don't think you're making that argument, but it would be easy to mishear that. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| I'm not making that argument. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it does... | ||
| It's a good reason for there to be more considerations when you're buying a gun, let's say. | ||
| More factors should go into it. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So the reality of the situation with Philip Marshall is very sad and very... | ||
| I mean, there's no other way to put it. | ||
| It's just incredibly sad. | ||
| It's a horrible turn of events. | ||
| And the way Alex editorializes on it and just makes stuff up... | ||
| About how he imagines the whole thing went down is just next-level monstrous. | ||
| And then look at his sweet little kids. | ||
| Can you guys document cam this or actually punch it up? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sweet, beautiful, wonderful children. | ||
| Loving, kind eyes. | ||
| He has loving, kind eyes. | ||
| Dead. | ||
| You didn't want to kill him down the street. | ||
| You wanted to discredit his book. | ||
| Just like a drone. | ||
| Obama says they can kill 200 people at a wedding to get one bad guy, they claim. | ||
| Well, it's the same thing. | ||
| Collateral damage. | ||
| You're going to kill Haji's all day to demonize them. | ||
| How about the little redhead girl and her brother, huh? | ||
| Let's grease them, huh? | ||
| I bet they begged before you splattered their brains all over the place after you'd already killed Daddy. | ||
| I bet they screamed and cried. | ||
| Oh, because the good guys run America. | ||
| Oh, such good guys. | ||
| Let's show him mowing the yard with his son. | ||
| This is what they do. | ||
| They come to your house and they grease you and your family. | ||
| If that isn't true, what he's doing is so fucking gross. | ||
| And it's not true. | ||
| Based on the evidence available. | ||
| He's just making up a storyline about a human tragedy. | ||
| That's fucked up. | ||
| A very serious tragedy. | ||
| Can you imagine what his ex-wife is going through? | ||
| Like, it's still only a couple weeks after, and here Alex is on air talking about her children like this. | ||
| It's fucking awful. | ||
| That's fucked up. | ||
| And it's because Wayne Madsen is a shithead. | ||
| In this next clip. | ||
| We get Wayne Madsen starting to just report erroneous information about the situation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Unfortunately, you know, he was estranged from his wife, but it was very amicable. | |
| Oh, was it? | ||
| Oh, was it amicable? | ||
| All right. | ||
| What are you basing that on? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Here in this next clip, this is just Wayne Madsen making shit up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The thing that really is puzzling is a... | |
| He told people that he had this 9mm Glock, but he said, a lot of good it'll do me. | ||
| I don't have any bullets for it. | ||
| It was registered, so they knew he had it. | ||
| But the only thing the sheriff leaked out was that they found Phil Marshall's wedding ring on a box of that 9mm ammo at the scene. | ||
| And everybody who knew him told me, they said, Phil hasn't worn a wedding ring since he was separated from his wife. | ||
| So where did the ring come from? | ||
| It came from when he took it off his finger. | ||
| Like, what do you mean? | ||
| What do you mean, where did it come from? | ||
| What the fuck are you even saying? | ||
| Oh, good, what a lot of good this gun will do me. | ||
| I don't have any ammo. | ||
| There's fucking video of him buying ammo days before and a receipt that was found. | ||
| Like, this is such bullshit. | ||
| He's saying nothing. | ||
| He presents himself as a fucking investigative journalist. | ||
| The facts contradict everything he's saying. | ||
| He doesn't know about the domestic history. | ||
| That the police were investigating and had police reports about that seemed to contradict the amicable end of the marriage. | ||
| The fact that the police were aware of the security footage from the Big Five sporting goods. | ||
| Wayne Madsen doesn't know that shit, or if he does, he's just lying. | ||
| Just completely lying about this. | ||
| And what he has to fall back on is, I talked to a neighbor who said he seemed like a nice guy, which is what people say about people. | ||
| Every single fucking time. | ||
| It happens consistently. | ||
| It's a cliche. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I wouldn't even say that if it was true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If I had a very quiet... | |
| Kind and polite neighbor who I was interviewed by fucking local TV after he murdered people. | ||
| I wouldn't say he was very polite, kind, and quiet. | ||
| I'd be like, that dude's a fucking murderer! | ||
| I would probably not say anything, but I also think a lot of the times when people say, like, yeah, he was always a nice guy, it's not defending them. | ||
| It's an expression of shock. | ||
| Almost like, wow, he seemed like a nice guy. | ||
| Yeah, it's just... | ||
| It's just a boring response now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So in this next clip, Wayne lies more. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Phil Marshall was not diagnosed in any sort. | |
| He did have a little issue with depression some years ago, but the only thing he had been treated for with any sort of medication recently was a bad knee. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| You ought to minimize the mental health issues that he had. | ||
| Just years prior, he... | ||
| Was grounded as a pilot because of them, and they continued after. | ||
| Like, it's not, this is not okay. | ||
| This reporting is not okay. | ||
| Can you just straight up lie like that? | ||
| I guess you can. | ||
| I really, what does he do? | ||
| Wayne Madsen? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What's his job? | ||
| He's a fucking shithead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He does this. | |
| I mean, yeah, but how does he make any money? | ||
| He's bad at even doing this! | ||
| He's huge in these circles, though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| Well, I don't think it's true, but he presents himself as an ex-CIA guy or something like that. | ||
| He's like a political Project Camelot guy, you know? | ||
| Man! | ||
| Big, big heroic backstory, pretends he's got a lot of scoops, a lot of sources, and then just is treated like... | ||
| I don't know how he... | ||
| Actually makes money. | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| Yeah, it is weird. | ||
| It seems like he's just bad at everything. | ||
| He's not good on the radio. | ||
| Probably Google Ads. | ||
| He's not good at the job that he purports to have investigating anything. | ||
| No, pretty bad. | ||
| So these have been untrue things. | ||
| These have been things that fly counter to the actual facts. | ||
| When he has to give a reason for why he thinks that Philip Marshall couldn't have killed his children and himself, this is what he's got. | ||
| We've only got five minutes left. | ||
| You've got the floor. | ||
| What other tidbits do you think are important for people to know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the biggest one of all, Sean Payton was the coach of the New Orleans Saints. | |
| What? | ||
| He was let go or suspended for rules violations. | ||
| Phil Marshall was such a fan of the Saints and Sean Payton. | ||
| He personally hired planes to fly over Saints games in multiple stadium venues, trailing a banner that said, Free Sean Payton. | ||
| He would have committed suicide and killed his two kids two days before the Super Bowl was held at the Saints' home field at the Superdome in New Orleans. | ||
| Really? | ||
| That alone made people say there's no way he did it. | ||
| And that's just a, you know, I'm not a big football fan, but people who were football fans said there's no way he could have done this. | ||
| That is real bad thinking. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| He loved the Saints. | ||
| The Super Bowl was being held in New Orleans, and so he couldn't have possibly committed suicide prior to that. | ||
| Because he'd put it off until after the Super Bowl. | ||
| I don't think that this is a good understanding of how people in crisis act. | ||
| When you're in a mental health crisis... | ||
| Other things, they're not as important. | ||
| Things that you used to find great enjoyment in, you no longer really feel that much for. | ||
| Hobbies fall away, pastimes, groups that you're involved in, you just drop out of. | ||
| It's something that is very common to people who are in major depressive episodes. | ||
| So the idea that, oh, he loved the Super Bowl, that is not good thinking. | ||
| This is bad investigative journalism. | ||
| You think bad! | ||
| This is only okay to bring up as, like, you know, he loved the Super Bowl. | ||
| It's a shame that... | ||
| Well, I mean, I guess he murdered his kid, so I don't really feel bad that he missed the Super Bowl. | ||
| But, you know, that's the only... | ||
| There's a human interest angle to it of... | ||
| But it's so superfluous. | ||
| I feel like Johnny Cochran wrote that alibi for him, for Christ's sake. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| Yeah, it's ludicrous. | ||
| He would never want to miss the Super Bowl. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| That's your, like, ha-ha, the government fucked this one up. | ||
| They didn't think about the Super Bowl. | ||
| If only they had done it three days later, then it would be believable. | ||
| Then obviously I would agree that this happened for sure, but it was two days before the Super Bowl. | ||
| That's why I went looking. | ||
| But by the way, like, the 2013 Super Bowl, like, it was in New Orleans, but it was the Ravens and 49ers. | ||
| Like, if he's a big Saints fan, just because it's at the stadium. | ||
| I don't, no, no, we're not doing this. | ||
| We're not even in. | ||
| How dare you engage with that argument? | ||
| I'm not engaging. | ||
| I'm pointing out how it's even worse thinking. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I don't even want to think about it. | ||
| I don't even want to allow it to be something that I did think about. | ||
| All right, fine. | ||
| So here is Alex. | ||
| What Wayne's doing, I think, is inhuman. | ||
| It's really disgraceful to the memory of these people. | ||
| Yeah, he's a nightmare. | ||
| The children. | ||
| Their loss, the family. | ||
| What he's doing, under the guise of, like, I just want the truth to get out. | ||
| What he's doing is such a massive disrespect to them. | ||
| It can't be overstated how... | ||
| I don't know how you can sleep when you act like this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is... | |
| This is... | ||
| One of the examples that I will use from now on when I say that ghosts aren't real. | ||
| Because if ghosts were real, Wade Madsen is getting haunted as fuck. | ||
| Maybe he is, and that's how he makes his money. | ||
| Ghost tours. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ghost tours? | |
| Of his own apartment. | ||
| Of his own house. | ||
| Of his head. | ||
| Perhaps. | ||
| So what he's doing is terrible, but what Alex is doing is pretty bad, too. | ||
| And here is him just reporting on Wayne's stuff as if it's fact. | ||
| Yeah, it's a great way to demonize 9-11 truthers and, quote, conspiracy theorists. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Well, another victory for the New World Order. | ||
| I bet they really enjoyed killing those little kids, just like the drones do every day. | ||
| It's all part of the freedom. | ||
| But the government loves us. | ||
| I forgot the two billion bullets are to take care of us. | ||
| Stay there, Wayne Madsen. | ||
| It's two billion bullets now, apparently, not 1.6. | ||
| I mean, like, all this is, it's the same thing, or it's the same impulse as the Jack Swagger stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| It's only important because I'm worried that it makes my team look bad, or whatever. | ||
| It's like, this guy, because there is one trait that's similar, we're both conspiracy theorists, I must deny that he is capable of doing something horrendous. | ||
| And that's just not okay. | ||
| It's not okay to deny the ability of someone to do terrible things because you think it looks bad to you. | ||
| That is pathetic. | ||
| It is... | ||
| I mean, it's just... | ||
| It would get redundant if I kept saying this, but it's just bad thinking. | ||
| Yeah, it is bad thinking. | ||
| It's a bad thing to defend anybody just because they're on your team regardless of their actions. | ||
| It's good that it doesn't work. | ||
| It's good that it's an ineffective strategy. | ||
| It's great that we have Trump and Kavanaugh and all of those guys. | ||
| Oh, never mind. | ||
| It does work. | ||
| It works perfectly. | ||
| It works so well. | ||
| It can work, and that sucks. | ||
| So, in this next clip, we're done with Wayne Madsen. | ||
| I just really think that that was a shocking display of just people being terrible. | ||
| Yeah, I want to be done with Wayne Madsen forever. | ||
| Yeah, I was shocked. | ||
| When Alex said Wayne Madsen was coming up, he announces at the beginning of the show sometimes who his guests are. | ||
| He's like, Wayne Madsen's coming up like, this is going to be boring. | ||
| And then it was like, holy shit, you guys are terrible. | ||
| I started to look into the case and found these articles with the police reports in them. | ||
| Just direct contradictions from Wayne Madsen. | ||
| He's like, well, I went to the town. | ||
| I was there. | ||
| Like, you didn't... | ||
| You're leaving a lot out of this story because it's not the story you want to tell. | ||
| You want to tell the story that defends you. | ||
| And you're not a factor. | ||
| This isn't about you. | ||
| Okay, here's what we do. | ||
| I gotta pitch for you. | ||
| Alright? | ||
| We do a regular ghost hunting show. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| But instead of doing the, like, let's go to Alcatraz or feeling out ghosts there, we just go to places where shitheads like Wayne Madsen and Alex Jones and all of those people have fucked over people's lives and exploited their deaths. | ||
| And we just tell those stories and we're like, I can't feel any ghosts around here right now. | ||
| I guess ghosts aren't real. | ||
| Well, the problem with that is that physically it's a lot of different places. | ||
| Like, Wayne is in Washington, D.C., Yeah, we gotta get that Discovery Channel money. | ||
| Okay, I'm in. | ||
| All right, I'll pitch it. | ||
| But then we'd have to go to, like, California to the crime scene where Wayne Madsen crafted his bullshit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Then we'd have to go to Washington, D.C. where Wayne had his part of the interview, then Austin for Alex's part. | ||
| This is going to... | ||
| This is an expensive show. | ||
| We've got a lot of overhead. | ||
| This is going to come into money. | ||
| I don't know if we're going to be able to do this. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So we're done with them. | ||
| Fuck them. | ||
| They suck. | ||
| This next clip is just kind of funny because Alex says something that's pretty funny. | ||
| Look at what the police will go along with. | ||
| Look at what parents will go along with and teachers. | ||
| Look at our culture. | ||
| Bombarded with psychological warfare poison to turn us into a cross between a game show, a gulag, and a casino. | ||
| It's Max Keiser who coined the term the casino gulag, but I would add to it, it's like a game show casino gulag. | ||
| It's so funny that... | ||
| Is he just describing The Running Man? | ||
| Well, probably there's some piece of it, yeah. | ||
| The next day, on the 20th, he's completely obsessed with Death Race 2000. | ||
| Okay, well there we go. | ||
| Of course it's a movie. | ||
| It's just really funny to me that he's talking about a casino game show gulag when, in 2019, he is completely... | ||
| The most public, disgraceful bootlicker for a guy who ran casinos, came to prominence as a game show host, and is running gulags. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| It is kind of on the nose. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You go back to 2013, he's like, these police state... | ||
| Casino game show gulags. | ||
| Now let me really grease the wheels so this casino running game show host guy can run gulags that I justify him running. | ||
| I don't like that coincidence. | ||
| That coincidence bugs me. | ||
| That enrages me, in fact. | ||
| Dan, do you remember how many times I've been angry at us being dragged along by fate as though everything made perfect weird rhyming sense? | ||
| That's not okay that he accidentally got that right. | ||
| Bullshit. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Goes to show. | ||
| I'm angry. | ||
| So, for a large part of the end of this episode, Alex is really mad at L.A. Mayor Villaraigosa. | ||
| Sure, why not? | ||
| We're not busy. | ||
| It turns out that someone has been putting up stickers. | ||
| And posters of Alex's shit illegally in Los Angeles. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| And so Alex has gotten a bill for the removal of those. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he's not happy about it. | |
| He goes on to say, like, what if someone had spray painted, like, some McDonald's thing somewhere? | ||
| Would McDonald's get the bill? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I mean, it depends on if the property owner complained. | ||
| I assume the reason that you're getting a bill for this is that it was on maybe city property or somewhere that people complained about. | ||
| Because I'm sure that the city wouldn't even remove it unless people complained. | ||
| Like, they just let it be. | ||
| Who gives a shit? | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, like, Obama, if someone put a pro-Obama spray paint up somewhere or some irremovable or difficult-to-remove poster or something, yeah, I bet that someone would get a bill for that if people complained and the city had to take care of it. | ||
| But anyway, Alex was furious about this, and so he complains about it a bit in this next clip. | ||
| City of Los Angeles, the mayor! | ||
| The mayor! | ||
| I don't need courts! | ||
| I don't need proof! | ||
| I don't need facts! | ||
|
unidentified
|
I am the mighty Antonio Villarosa! | |
| And in that corner, the population! | ||
| We don't need no stinking courts for them! | ||
| Just send them bills and threaten them! | ||
| I am king! | ||
| Alright, let me go to Max Keiser. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, I need your help. | ||
| It's invoice number 201-2000-4913. | ||
| Tell them you need help on that invoice number. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, they'll probably try to sue me over that. | ||
| Fine! | ||
| You want a fight? | ||
| You got one! | ||
| You hear this all the time! | ||
| He's trying to enlist his audience to harass, like, clerks in L.A. about a fucking invoice for probably, like, $1,000. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Ridiculous. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| I'll say that maybe it is a waste of time to try and send him a bill about that. | ||
| Maybe that's a little bit... | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| Absorb that in the tax money. | ||
| I'm fine with that. | ||
| Did he specifically direct people to put stuff up? | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| No, because you remember, he has to say all the time, put them up in legal and lawful places. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that's true. | |
| This is why. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because he gets bills. | ||
| For Infowars sticker removal. | ||
| That's so funny. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I like the imaginary rule system that these guys work under. | ||
| Alex is like, the mayor! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mayor! | |
| Who can do whatever he wants in a sarcastic way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But if it was the sheriff, he'd be fine with it? | ||
| Not if it came down against him. | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But if he heard this story and it was a sheriff who sent a bill somewhere else, he'd be like, exactly right! | ||
| Sheriffs can do all of that shit. | ||
| Like if it was a sheriff coming down on some liberal person, he'd be like, well, that is just a good, noble lawman. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's why we have the sheriff as the highest law in the land. | ||
| Alex fucking imagines that Villaraigosa is coming around and being like, ha-ha, I'm going to bill Alex. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| As if it's not some sort of department thing that just has... | ||
| The city stamp on it with a signature? | ||
| Ridiculous. | ||
| So Alex is now feuding with Antonio Villarigosa. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course, of course. | |
| So that's great. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I look forward to that being continued. | ||
| Yelling about that invoice for a week. | ||
| So Max Keiser comes on, as Alex insinuated. | ||
| How's MaxCoin doing? | ||
| I think it's still not good. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But Max Geiser wants to talk about how Alex has now escalated into two billion bullets. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And Max's point is that bullets are going to become a commodity, where there aren't going to be many of them that are going to be very expensive. | ||
| I almost think that he's advocating people buy them as an investment. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| But I only pulled this clip out because, listen carefully, Alex mumbles something very weird. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, a gun without a bullet doesn't do much good. | |
| It's like a tractor without gas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, so the bullets are always the weak spot in this whole theory. | |
| And they are hoarding all of the bullets. | ||
| The bullets will not be unavailable at Kmart or Walmart or anyone else. | ||
| What just happened there? | ||
| He's saying that bullets are cute, and then he's... | ||
| Cute little bullets. | ||
| Sweet little bullets. | ||
| That's so weird. | ||
| Does he say that? | ||
| He has to say that to himself privately. | ||
| I think that must have been a thing that he thought that accidentally came out of his mouth. | ||
| I feel that way. | ||
| Like, he had a thought fart. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| But I do think, yeah, I mean, I think there's a sincerity that he's expressing, and that is that he thinks bullets are cute. | ||
| Yeah, that's gross. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| That's weird. | ||
| So, in this next clip, you know, you kind of get a sense of, you know, what Max Keiser is here to do, and that is, of course, to sell gold. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Then you'll see panic buying in gold around the world. | |
| The central banks will triple and quadruple their panic buying. | ||
| But they probably already reached that. | ||
| They've just been keeping it quiet per globalist request. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I agree. | |
| What? | ||
| I think, as you know, that we could happen any day, a massive kind of trap door is open beneath the bond market and gold prices skyrocket. | ||
| What's going to happen to places like Southern California when we really go into the Depression? | ||
| They don't really have great analysis of what's going to happen to Southern California, but that's the place for economic advisors on Alex's show. | ||
| Almost without exception, everyone that comes on has to either directly say or imply that any day now gold is going to go through the roof because Alex works for a gold company. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| Yeah, because none of that happened. | ||
| It's sad. | ||
| So they go to break. | ||
| And they're listening to the commercials during the break, apparently, because Alex comes back from break laughing. | ||
| You know, this hour is brought to you by the Squatty Potty. | ||
| It's actually not one of my sponsors, but Max Keiser's in there now. | ||
| You're not going to get any serious news out of him because he heard the Squatty Potty ad. | ||
| So ridiculous. | ||
| Anyways, I find myself laughing more and more because stuff's getting so crazy, and now I realize I've been right about almost everything, and it's going to get as bad as I think it's going to get, and the general public still has no idea. | ||
| He's been wrong about everything. | ||
| Pretty much everything. | ||
| And he's also wrong that the squatty potty is hilarious. | ||
| He's crazy. | ||
| This is so like, oh, the youths with their video games. | ||
| I have got to forward you this commercial that I saw. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a potty, but it's a squatty potter. | |
| I don't know how hilarious it is that, like, people having, you know, a little slight elevation in their legs is helpful to the system. | ||
| I don't know how hilarious that is. | ||
| Hilarious. | ||
| But it turns out I'm probably wrong. | ||
| It's for when they're pooped. | ||
| Al Gore probably has a squatty potty art. | ||
| That's enough. | ||
| Let's go to Joe in Florida. | ||
| Joe, you're on the air with the inventor of the squatty potty. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Still going? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Are you there? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| We're on Squatty Potties, both of us. | ||
| I'm going to stop now. | ||
| Yes, you're on the air with Max Kaiser. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Three Squatty Potties jokes in 17 seconds. | ||
| That's bananas. | ||
| That's impressive. | ||
| It is not funny. | ||
| No. | ||
| Hilarious. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| It's not funny. | ||
| It's hilarious. | ||
| It's objectively not funny. | ||
| It's pretty funny. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| So that's it for the 19th. | ||
| I mean, we see him getting into the pro wrestling narrative, which I'm always excited for. | ||
| And then this super disgraceful recording about Philip Marshall. | ||
| And then Max Keiser and him joking about poop. | ||
| So that's a fucking ride right there. | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
| That is nuts. | ||
| And then the 20th is a show that I would describe as mostly full of... | ||
| Poop? | ||
| No. | ||
| From his squatty potty? | ||
| I mean, it's full of shit. | ||
| No, what it is is there are episodes that I run into from time to time that are just, this is Alex phoning it in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's fucking impressive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| All right. | ||
| The skills that he has, like the ability to say nothing passionately for long stretches. | ||
| Yeah, that's tough to do. | ||
| But there are episodes where you'll just be like, it's been half an hour. | ||
| You haven't said anything, but you're yelling. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or it's just the same, like... | ||
| Stock little bits. | ||
| The globalists are trying to de-industrialize. | ||
| They want to crash the dollar. | ||
| It was all the greatest hits just strung in a row. | ||
| They're eugenicists with nothing. | ||
| Just the general things. | ||
| The general shit thrown all over the place. | ||
| And that's what most of the 20th is. | ||
| It was a hard listen because it was so nothing. | ||
| Let me ask you a quick question. | ||
| Do you think... | ||
| That he thinks about his show after he's done? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| You don't think for... | ||
| Not a chance. | ||
| Because I was just thinking about it. | ||
| I was like, how could you do that unless when you went home you didn't even ask yourself, like, was today a good show? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| He doesn't even consider it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Not a chance. | ||
| There's no good or bad show. | ||
| No. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Whatever is, is. | ||
| And I admire that a little bit, because I dread about our episodes, and I feel a great amount of anxiety before, after, just not usually during, but before and after, quite a bit. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| He's a psychopath. | ||
| I think it's the difference between caring and not. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think he understands that he's talking shit, and who cares? | ||
| As long as you're keeping the money coming in, that's really what this is about. | ||
| He's fighting an imaginary enemy, so he doesn't have to worry about them killing him. | ||
| He doesn't have to worry about actually winning the battle with the globalists, because it's all bullshit. | ||
| It's like Madsen's reporting. | ||
| He's not like, oh man, I did a really bad job on this one. | ||
| He's like, I just don't care. | ||
| You're only hurting people who can't hurt you back. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Because even if Alex's audience turned on him, generally, he's never going to be in a place where they can get to him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| He lives in a fucking secure compound. | ||
| He lives in a redoubt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I think that there's something to that. | ||
| You just sort of lose your sense of caring when there aren't any stakes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When all of your stakes are imagined. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| So, on the 20th, there is one thing that's interesting. | ||
| I wanted to play this, but instead I'll just kind of describe it for you. | ||
| Because it's too long. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| A caller calls in, and he's like, hey, we need to be up front about this. | ||
| And Alex, I'll say this. | ||
| I'm saying this, not you. | ||
| So you don't have to get criticized for this. | ||
| It's the Jews. | ||
| Okay, thanks. | ||
| So then they're just supposed to then have a normal conversation? | ||
| You know what? | ||
| They did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| Of course they did. | ||
| Of course they did. | ||
| Alex was like, well, thank you for letting me off the hook for this one. | ||
| Yes, of course. | ||
| It is the Jews. | ||
| Well, it was really interesting because Alex was pushing back a little bit, but not much. | ||
| It was a very strange thing where when you get a caller like that, you know what they're saying. | ||
| And you don't need to then be like, yes, there are Jewish mafias and Italian mafias. | ||
| You don't need to do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, you don't. | |
| You should probably be like, I gotta go. | ||
| I gotta go. | ||
| Sorry, man. | ||
| But he doesn't. | ||
| I thought it was really interesting because he does keep him on the line for like 15 minutes. | ||
| They have a long call. | ||
| Well, he doesn't get to talk anti-Semitism with people all the time. | ||
| Not on the show, you know? | ||
| He's got to be oblique about it. | ||
| This time he gets to really dig in there. | ||
| But he's not. | ||
| He's resisting it. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's a resistance, but it doesn't seem aggressively resistant, if that makes sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's wishy-washy to an extent. | ||
| I wanted to pull some clips out of it, but I felt it would be a disservice to not playing the whole thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was tough. | ||
| But we do have a few clips from the 20th of other things, and one of them is Alex. | ||
| This is just, I think, a precursor of the world of cruelty he would go on to become the mouthpiece of, because I think that you can see little shades of a delight in the downfall of others in this next clip. | ||
| And I get a little bit of an evil, sick, twisted enjoyment, which is fleshly and worldly and bad, but I just can't help it. | ||
| That all the people think they're on the winning team and serving corruption? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, you're really going to get it. | |
| Oh, man, you think you're on the winning team? | ||
| You think you opened the door for this to come in? | ||
| And you think it's going to take care of you? | ||
| You really think you're safe under those wings? | ||
| You've got another thing coming. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Got another thing coming. | |
| Yeah, and we already know that he said that he does that fake laugh when he's really angry. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that leads me to believe that this is coming from a place of anger, which makes the comments even weirder. | ||
| I just don't appreciate or enjoy people expressing a delight in others' downfall, even if you disagree with the other people, especially because what he's kind of discussing is deaths. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it's not just like, you know, you don't get your way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or something like that. | ||
| It's death. | ||
| Yeah, that does seem to be a huge component of their non-zero-sum game, or their zero-sum game kind of outlook towards politics. | ||
| Like, if my progressive causes are championed and put into place, I am not going to laugh because it makes my enemies fall, downfall. | ||
| Like, honestly... | ||
| The stuff that I want to put in place makes even my enemies' lives better. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, like, I don't want universal healthcare for the winners. | ||
| No. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, but for some reason their world doesn't exist. | ||
| Like that. | ||
| They just can't process that. | ||
| But this is what you see on, like, election night. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| When you had Alex and Roger and the entire enforcement staff laughing at people at Democratic watch parties crying. | ||
| It's that... | ||
| That fake laugh carries over to three years after this, that night. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And, I mean, if anybody needs... | ||
| To be made clear, what they were laughing at is people crying about exactly what's happening now. | ||
| The children being in camps, people dying, the bills in Alabama, and those sorts of restrictions on abortion. | ||
| Those are the things that Alex was mocking people for being afraid were going to come. | ||
| So put that into sharp focus. | ||
| His cruelty has always been there. | ||
| His very bizarre beliefs about spiritual shit have also always been there. | ||
| Because in this next clip, he expresses a very strange belief about why society exists. | ||
| That's the currency. | ||
| Hard human sacrifice. | ||
| That's how the world really works. | ||
| The modern world and the world government is set up to carry out the orderly extermination as a sacrifice to Gaia. | ||
| Their Gaia is Lucifer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So, civilization exists in order to make it easier to sacrifice human beings to Gaia, the Earth goddess. | ||
| Stop right there. | ||
| Who is actually Lucifer. | ||
| Stop right there. | ||
| I would like you to explain what. | ||
| So, you need to kill a lot of people in order to make Gaia slash Lucifer happy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Why do we need to make Gaia slash Lucifer happy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Boom. | |
| I thought it was for... | ||
| I thought it was for, like, farming and shit. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| It was for Gaia. | ||
| It's in order to become gods or something. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| That's a complicated cosmology. | ||
| Well, it's really great that the break happened right there. | ||
| So he doesn't have to explain any of that. | ||
| Nor come back from commercial. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| So, unlike... | ||
| Jack Swagger. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And Zeb Coulter. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The racist WWE characters who hate the Mexican champion, Alberto Del Rio. | ||
| Love it. | ||
| Put a little stake on there. | ||
| So unlike those dudes, Alex has only legitimate complaints about Mexicans. | ||
| He called them all. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm being facetious. | ||
| He does not. | ||
| He complains a lot about La Raza. | ||
| On this episode, on February 20th. | ||
| You know, there's the basic misunderstanding of what La Raza means and that he believes it to be a specifically only Hispanic nationalist group that seeks to destroy all non-Hispanics, which is ludicrous. | ||
| But in complaining about them, he says something that, again, is very bizarre for the present day. | ||
| Are trying to force Hispanics into this Raza. | ||
| And when you're in the Raza, you're anti-gun, you're pro-abortion, you're pro-globalism, and you're pro-socialism. | ||
| And it's going to be game over, folks. | ||
| Game over because they've attached nationalism and race consciousness, which is very powerful. | ||
| See, they wanted to get rid of that in the U.S. so there'd be no sovereignty. | ||
| Even nationalism's a no-no. | ||
| Alex in 2013 is warning about connecting race identity to nationalism, which is kind of his entire show in 2019. | ||
| I just don't like how complete the dismantling has to be. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| But it's only because he doesn't believe this stuff. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| The dismantling isn't really dismantling. | ||
| It's a facade falling away. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| I just mean how thorough it is. | ||
| We're getting a point by point. | ||
| I think every episode we go to in the past now... | ||
| It's like there's at least one thing where you can draw a direct parallel to today, and he's doing the opposite. | ||
| And it's a new thing every time. | ||
| It's like La Raza's coming out here, and it's super dangerous, because what they've done is attach nationalism to race consciousness. | ||
| Now, at the same time, a couple years later, I'm... | ||
| We're going to be hanging out with a lot of people who are pretty super into race consciousness and nationalism, but it's fine because they're white race conscious. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It becomes super clear that all of this doesn't matter. | ||
| All of this doesn't exist. | ||
| It doesn't mean anything. | ||
| It only has to do with feeling like white people will be targeted by X, Y, or Z. Yep. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's the only thing that underlies any of the positions that he has. | ||
| That fear arises almost certainly because they assume that... | ||
| Well, because that's what they want to do, basically. | ||
| That's because what they do want when they get power is to take away the rights of these people, to do all that stuff. | ||
| So they assume if they were to gain power, they would want to do the same to me. | ||
| It does not occur to them that you could not do it. | ||
| Maybe not take away all rights. | ||
| I think that might be too much to put on Alex from everything I can tell, but certainly make secondary. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, I don't know if looking at Alex in 2013, I would be at all comfortable assuming, I don't even know now, really, if I would say that, like, if he had everything go his way, he would completely make all non-whites not have civil rights. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Or anything, like, any protections or anything like that. | ||
| But he would like to... | ||
| He would pave the way for somebody who would. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Whether consciously or not, probably. | ||
| What he would be more interested in is upholding a system wherein people who were unlike him were considered secondary or different or weird, as opposed to him and all of the traits that are like him, which are normal, and anybody like him is completely incapable of committing any kind of bad act. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| That's what he wants to uphold, which is functionally very similar. | ||
| Quite frankly. | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| If it isn't immediately a fucking holocaust, it leads to one. | ||
| That very thought process, everything that goes down... | ||
| It certainly happens to go down that road. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's like, yes, sure. | ||
| You didn't want to outright cause a holocaust, but all these little things start popping up, and then all of a sudden you have to add this restriction, and that makes this person angry, and then you have to put down this thing over here, and then finally somebody's like, well, shit, let's just get rid of them. | ||
| It's how it goes. | ||
| It's a road. | ||
| And I don't care if he doesn't want that. | ||
| He's doing it. | ||
| Yeah, so in the last clip we have here, I just think it's a crazy glimpse into Alex's psyche. | ||
| We know that he relates everything from movies to reality. | ||
| He can't really tell the difference between the two. | ||
| Obviously, one of the big movies that he doesn't talk about as much, but obviously, without a doubt, is one of the most foundational movies for him is Network. | ||
| I have long believed that he believes himself to be Howard Beale. | ||
| He believes himself to be this guy who's mad as hell and won't take it anymore. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| Up against a system that works against him and wake up! | ||
| Sure, except he's the... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it did not surprise me that in this February 20th show, he plays a clip from Network and starts talking back to it as if he were Howard Beale. | ||
| This is bizarre. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And galactic structure of things today. | |
| No, they're not, you fraudster. | ||
| Shut up, Bernie Madoff. | ||
| Shut up, Ken Lay. | ||
| Shut up, Bloomberg. | ||
| Shut up, Al Gore. | ||
| No, I will not take your fraud anymore. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, you're not getting through to me. | |
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| One of the things that makes it even more crazy to me is that it's not very performative. | ||
| No. | ||
| Like, he's just talking back to it as if you would talk back to somebody. | ||
| Not like his normal screaming, sort of like, ah, over-the-top character. | ||
| At the end there, it's like, am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? | ||
| No, you're not getting through to me. | ||
| Like, he's responding as if it's actually a conversation, which is outside of his performance style generally. | ||
| Here's what it felt like to me. | ||
| It felt like that's something that he does in private, and we weren't supposed to be seeing that. | ||
| It does feel a little bit like that. | ||
| Much like saying that bullets are cute. | ||
| Yeah, I feel like I was standing by a closet door looking out at it as he's saying that to a movie. | ||
| Like, that was gross! | ||
| Yeah, it feels weird. | ||
| I don't like feeling that. | ||
| But I think it is a little bit of a glimpse into his psyche. | ||
| He believes he is Beale. | ||
| And also, he talks to a lot of movies. | ||
| I would assume so. | ||
| It feels like he can do a better job than the protagonist a lot of times. | ||
| Screw you, Hoosiers. | ||
| I'm going to take the ball. | ||
| I can run fast. | ||
| Show me the money! | ||
| What you have here is an interesting couple days, a little bit. | ||
| I think that you're seeing a weird development of how attention-starved Alex is in 2013. | ||
| Like, willing to engage in not very optimized publicity stunts. | ||
| The going to Piers Morgan, like, going on Piers Morgan's show, good. | ||
| Well done. | ||
| You did exactly what you needed to do. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Showing up at the gun shop in Texas, you did a good job after the fact, but how you confronted Piers was very not optimized. | ||
| Not good. | ||
| Asking to go back on his show repeatedly and looking kind of sad and weak does not work very well for you. | ||
| But you wanted to go back on his show because the first one was so good. | ||
| Should have been antagonistic. | ||
| I understand why Alex would behave like that, but that's not very good. | ||
| The way he's trying to turn any media coverage of him into a scandal, not good. | ||
| The WWE stuff, he's not doing this right. | ||
| There is a way he could have gotten so much press out of this. | ||
| And all it involves is a little bit of humility and a little bit of a sense of humor. | ||
| If he had done that, he could have played this so well. | ||
| Because Glenn Beck's not showing up. | ||
| He wouldn't show up for that. | ||
| But Alex is desperate enough to show up. | ||
| If he'd just play ball, he could have done it. | ||
| But instead, he's doing the unoptimized version of this feud with the WWE. | ||
| He comes out looking fucking silly. | ||
| Because they want Beck. | ||
| He's responding to them talking about Glenn Beck and casually mentioning him in a joke that the commentators make. | ||
| This is a sad person who really wants... | ||
| He got a taste of that attention from Glenn Beck and he wants it back. | ||
| He wants to feel... | ||
| I'm sorry, from Piers Morgan. | ||
| And he wants to feel that again. | ||
| He wants another hit. | ||
| And he's not getting it. | ||
| Alex doesn't even know that he's the squatty potty in this story. | ||
| He is. | ||
| He is. | ||
| He is quite a squatty potty. | ||
| And then, I don't know, it's interesting to me because this path that we're on is, we're supposed to be figuring out his rhetoric after Sandy Hook, and there's these stretches of time where he doesn't even bring up Sandy Hook. | ||
| Like, it's not something that he's primarily interested in. | ||
| And we saw it flare up when... | ||
| He saw how popular these conspiracy theories about Sandy Hook were. | ||
| We saw his attention peak when he found that YouTube video that had 10 million views. | ||
| And he had the professor on to be interviewed about his crazy nonsense. | ||
| I think that these trends that we see with his desperate attention things, with Piers Morgan, with any criticisms of him... | ||
| Really responding aggressively to them. | ||
| The WWE stuff. | ||
| I think that that trend is going to lead him down his dark path. | ||
| But that's just my sense that I have right now. | ||
| I think it's related, but on a secondary level. | ||
| Though we're not seeing development of Sandy Hook narratives, I think we're seeing the essential pieces of the stage that needs to be set for him to go down really dumb, bad paths. | ||
| And we're already seeing dumb bad paths. | ||
| The way he covered this Philip Marshall story is unacceptable and undefensible. | ||
| It's a short jump from that to saying they were actors at Sandy Hook. | ||
| He doesn't need to be less dignified in order to get to that point. | ||
| But I think he will need to be motivated in some way by his desperation. | ||
| And I think we're seeing the kernels of it. | ||
| This is fucking wild, man. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty bizarre. | ||
| It is a long string of things that should have some consequence to them, but apparently just don't. | ||
| I think misery is a consequence, so there's that. | ||
| Yeah, I suppose. | ||
| It's cold comfort, but at least there's some... | ||
| Well, it's kind of like obedience training, you know? | ||
| The consequence has to come very close to the event, otherwise you don't learn the lesson. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's one of those things where, like, yeah, the consequence for all this is that he's miserable and he's probably going to go broke and everything, but, man, maybe if he'd just gotten hit with that right away, we wouldn't be where we are, you know? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think about that a lot. | ||
| Like, one of the things that I reflect on a ton, because, you know, like, a lot of this work comes down to listening to his show, researching, and then also reflecting on what is going on here. | ||
| And one thought that I can't ever get away from is how many times... | ||
| we had a chance to not be in the situation we're in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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Like how many times people had an opportunity to, like whether it's the people who have sued him and then let him go with a, like giving an apology. | |
| Or the people who knew things that could have warned everyone. | ||
| People who had inside information. | ||
| And maybe they signed a nondisclosure agreement, but they could have been brave and stood up and been like, no, no. | ||
| This is dangerous. | ||
| I know something that is helpful or could be helpful to people. | ||
| There are so many times in the past that we could have not gone down this path. | ||
| Alex could have been brought low earlier, and it didn't happen. | ||
| Also, it is interesting, the idea that proximity, the punishment in the act, the proximity thing, because it is so right. | ||
| The idea that no matter what happens now, it'll never be able to... | ||
| Alex won't experience that as the consequence of actions years in the past. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| He just can't process it. | ||
| Yeah, and maybe that's just a human thing, and that's not his fault that he can't process it. | ||
| But it is unfortunate, because his inability to process it will probably just turn into his next narrative. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, that's fun. | ||
| Yeah, probably. | ||
| I'll just feed his victimhood and his feelings of I've been wronged by everybody even more. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we have that to look forward to. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hey! | |
| Anyway, we'll be back on Monday with a new episode. | ||
| Hope everyone had a great fourth. | ||
| And the weekend goes wonderfully for you. | ||
| You guys have some cookouts where you can have, I don't know, if you want a brat, have a brat. | ||
| Don't let me be the guy. | ||
| Hey, nobody's going to stop eating a brat just because Dan says so. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Don't let me be some kind of square. | ||
| Not letting you eat meat off the bone. | ||
| Enjoy your lives out there. | ||
| It's good stuff. | ||
| But we'll be back on Monday. | ||
| And until then, we have a website. | ||
| We do. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| We are also on Twitter. | ||
| You bet we are. | ||
| Knowledge underscore fight and go to bed Jordan. | ||
| We're on Facebook. | ||
| You can go to iTunes. | ||
| You can download the episode there. | ||
| You can do that. | ||
| Here's a new one. | ||
| You could share the episode to, like, your favorite social media platform of your own. | ||
| Pick all the platforms that Alex is banned from and go ahead and share our episode on them. | ||
| That'd be great. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Shouldn't take too long. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So as we get to the end of this, I would say that Jack Swagger, WWE, former WWE, now boxer of some sort, or mixed martial arts, I think he's in now. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He wasn't great on the mic. | ||
| No, and he's also kind of a shithead. | ||
| He recently tweeted the where we go one, we go all. | ||
| So he might be a Q&A guy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, no! | |
| Oh, God damn it! | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| Jack Swagger might be a bit of a dum-dum. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I don't think he's killed anybody. | ||
| But 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |