Today, Dan and Jordan take a look at some present day episodes of The Alex Jones Show to check in and see how Alex has responded to the recent shootings. A lot of it is very predictable, but some of it reaches impressive levels of weird and dumb. Plus, it turns out Alex has a new catchphrase which is also weird and dumb.
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| It's time to pray. | ||
| I have great respect for knowledge fight. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
|
unidentified
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Dan and George. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
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Andy in Kansas. | |
| Stop it. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your room. | ||
|
unidentified
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Knowledge Fight. | |
| KnowledgeFight.com. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| I'm Jordan. | ||
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around, drink novelty beverages, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Indeed we are, Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| What is your favorite tweet? | ||
| Tweet? | ||
| Tweet. | ||
| Have you ever had a favorite tweet, or is this a completely, like, do not give a fuck situation? | ||
| I think my friend, comedian Zach Peterson, a while back, I only remember a few actual tweets. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Well, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| They're so ephemeral, it seems important if there's one that you do remember. | ||
| Zach Peterson, great comedian, wrote one time way back, back in the olden days. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Years back. | ||
| Fuddruckers is run by the Builderburgers. | ||
| Builderburgers. | ||
| That's not bad. | ||
| That's not bad. | ||
| And then the only other one I remember is Murphy Lee from the St. Lunatics. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| Me and some other comics were going to St. Louis to do a show, and we were driving on the way, and Joe McAdam, very funny comedian, check out his sketch group of butt. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| He was in the car. | ||
| We were heading to the place, and we're like, let's see if any St. Louis celebrities will come to the show. | ||
| And so we tried to tweet it, like Nelly. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And of course, we ended up getting into the other St. Lunatics, and Murphy Lee were checking out his Twitter feed, and it was great. | ||
| He was dropping some gems, and the only one... | ||
| One I remember was, don't nobody love these hoes, but everybody loves Raymond. | ||
| That's pretty good. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| I don't know, but it's pretty good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What does that mean? | |
| That's not bad. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| Anyway, I thought it was funny. | ||
| That is funny. | ||
| There's a show where I know a couple of tweets and quite a bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| And I don't know any tweets and nothing about Alex Jones. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Jordan, today what we're doing is we're in the present day and we'll be going over the span of August 4th and 5th, 2019 and be covering Alex Jones' immediate coverage of the shootings in El Paso and Dayton. | ||
| Great! | ||
| That's what I love. | ||
| I hope that this won't be as awful as that sounds like it's going to be. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Because I don't... | ||
| I guess... | ||
| What I'm trying to string out here is I think that if you're particularly sensitive to these topics, then proceed with caution. | ||
| But also, I don't know if it's as horrible as you're going to imagine the content we cover will be. | ||
| But then again, I'm jaded, and I don't know. | ||
| I could be entirely off in terms of how people experience things. | ||
| So anyway, fair warning, I guess, is the headline. | ||
| So we're going to get into that. | ||
| It's interesting to see how narratives are built in crisis mode and in real time. | ||
| And I'm excited to go over all of that. | ||
| But first, Jordan, we've got to take a moment to say thank you to the people who have signed up and are supporting the show. | ||
| So first, Justin, thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Justin. | |
| Thank you, Justin. | ||
| Next, Helen. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Helen. | ||
| Next, Zachary. | ||
| Not Alex's source. | ||
| Nor Zach Peterson. | ||
| Neither. | ||
| Although Zach Peterson had a great tweet. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| A couple years back. | ||
| This guy probably had some other great tweets also. | ||
| Thank you so much, Zachary. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Zachary. | ||
| Next, Claudia the Nomad. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Claudia the Nomad. | ||
| Then finally, I'd like to say thank you to some people who donated on an elevated level. | ||
| We appreciate it very much. | ||
| So first of all, Emily, thank you so much. | ||
| MCF, thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you and an apology to this person because I mispronounced their name the first time. | ||
| I thought it was Roop Groove. | ||
| It was actually Roop Groove. | ||
| Almost mispronounced it again. | ||
| But thank you. | ||
| And then finally, I'm just here for the Alex Jones laud-awful movies. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're all wonderful technocrats. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Crikey, mate. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| Have yourself a brew. | ||
| How's your 401k doing, bro? | ||
| We got to go full tilt boogie on this, Watson, all right? | ||
| Let's just get down to business. | ||
| We ain't making that money off that heroin. | ||
| Why are you pimps so good? | ||
| My neck is freakishly large. | ||
| I declare Infowar on you. | ||
| Thank you so much, Emily. | ||
| Thank you, MCF. | ||
| Thank you, Roop Grove. | ||
| And thank you, I'm Just Here for the Alex Jones Lot Awful Movies. | ||
| Thank all of you very, very much. | ||
| If you'd like to support the show, you can do that by going to our website, knowledgefight.com, clicking the button that says Support the Show. | ||
| We would appreciate it. | ||
| It would be lovely. | ||
| Now, Jordan, this is going to be an interesting thing. | ||
| I've been really... | ||
| I was struck with a really interesting thought while I was going through a lot of this episode. | ||
| And one of the things that I wanted to do is I wanted to sort of pose a question, almost. | ||
| Sort of a guiding idea or thought to have in our minds as we go through this. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| And it's kind of a question that's been taken over by conspiracy theorists and people who oftentimes are leading people down bad roads. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, right, right. | |
| Who killed JFK? | ||
| Well, I mean, you could apply it to that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And it's the question of what if. | ||
| You know, what if Oswald didn't shoot him? | ||
| Right. | ||
| What if? | ||
| And that leads you down the road to considering possibly, you know, unwise sources. | ||
| And, you know, it leads you down bad roads. | ||
| I want to hold on to that idea of what if, particularly in terms of Alex Jones. | ||
| What if he's wrong? | ||
| You know, like, for himself, what does that mean he's doing? | ||
| You know, like, if we're wrong, what does that mean? | ||
| That means, well, first of all, Alex needs to show me. | ||
| He needs to prove any of his points. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And I'm willing to be wrong. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But what real-world consequence does it have if we're wrong? | ||
| People could errantly start caring about other people and become empathic. | ||
| Right. | ||
| In an incorrect way. | ||
| It would be terrible if people did that. | ||
| I mean, that's certainly a possibility. | ||
| Maybe we would be negligent to a globalist takeover. | ||
| But I'm not sure we're going to be able to do anything about that as is or anybody listening. | ||
| Doubtful. | ||
| So there's that. | ||
| What if Alex is wrong? | ||
| He is... | ||
| Terrorists. | ||
| I want to hold on to that question as we go along and just let it ruminate. | ||
| So also, one of the things I wanted to point out before we get started is that I've been noticing in the present day that Alex Jones has a fucking catchphrase that he's working on. | ||
| Did I do that? | ||
| That would be great. | ||
| The tone he delivers it in is kind of the same. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Sort of like a mischievous tone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Here is a super cut of him saying his catchphrase from these two days episodes. | ||
| See how it works? | ||
| See how it works? | ||
| See how that works? | ||
| See how that works? | ||
| See the however? | ||
| He says that condescendingly after he thinks he's made a point. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| In 2019 times, he says it all the time. | ||
| See how that works is his mic drop. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I'm going to keep track of... | ||
| I'm going to keep running. | ||
| See how that works. | ||
| So we can see how it works. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| So we start on the 4th, and that was Sunday. | ||
| And he records in the evening time. | ||
| I think it's like 4 to 6 his time. | ||
| So by that point, he had every reason to be aware of both shootings. | ||
| He does not seem to be aware, or he seems to be aware of, but doesn't seem to care all that much about the Dayton shooting on the 4th. | ||
| Almost the entire thing is about the El Paso. | ||
| And I don't know why that's the case. | ||
| I'm not entirely sure. | ||
| It would be probably unwise for me to speculate. | ||
| But just so everyone's aware, almost everything he talks about for this first August 4th episode is about the Texas situation. | ||
| And so he starts, and one of the things that's really important that Alex needs to do whenever he's getting ready to get into speculative, I'm going to create a conspiracy mode, he needs to justify that. | ||
| He needs to justify the behavior since... | ||
| People rightfully call him out all the time about how what he does is really fucked up. | ||
| And so he does that by appealing to history. | ||
| Start of the next segment. | ||
| Right out of the break. | ||
| We're going to come with music. | ||
| We're going to play Madeleine Albright here on air. | ||
| Saying 500,000 children is a good price to pay. | ||
| Cutting off their medicine. | ||
| That's what Bill Clinton did. | ||
| Sanctions ten times worse than what George Herbert Walker Bush did. | ||
| And he was a war criminal as well. | ||
| But oh! | ||
| No, they would never stage a false flag terror attack. | ||
| They would never wind up a leftist to carry out an event. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| So we already have the insinuation that the shooter in El Paso is a leftist, which will develop as time goes on. | ||
| But he appeals to this, like, why shouldn't we question things? | ||
| Madeleine Albright said that these sanctions that killed a bunch of kids were a good price to pay, and so they don't care about kids. | ||
| Why do you think they care about people shopping? | ||
| And that being how Alex starts his show has me really worried for him. | ||
| If Alex is relying on an argument as flimsy as Madeleine Albright said something really fucked up 23 years ago, so obviously the globalists would do false flag shootings, that can't mean he's got much to go on. | ||
| If that's the opening volley, that's the pin. | ||
| Yeah, well, it is unimpeachable logic, Dan. | ||
| Well, certainly. | ||
| The comment that she made, Madeline Albright, that is, she made that in an interview with 60 Minutes, where she expressed that the consequences of sanctions against Saddam Hussein's government were worth it when weighed against the benefits. | ||
| That's a horrible thing to say, and she definitely shouldn't have said that. | ||
| That is my position, and it's also Madeleine Albright's position. | ||
| Alex always plays that clip of her, little tiny clip from the 60 Minutes interview, but never discusses how she deeply regretted that interview, and guilt about her comments plagued her. | ||
| She said in her book, Madam Secretary, quote, little effort was made to explain Saddam's culpability, his misuse of Iraqi resources, or the fact that we were not embargoing medicine or food. | ||
| I must have been crazy. | ||
| I should have answered the question by reframing it and pointing out the inherent flaws in the premise. | ||
| I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it. | ||
| As soon as I'd spoken, I wished for the power to freeze time and take back my words. | ||
| My reply had been a terrible mistake. | ||
| Hasty, clumsy, and wrong. | ||
| Nothing matters more than the lives of innocent people. | ||
| I'd fallen into a trap and said something that I simply did not mean. | ||
| This is nobody's fault but my own. | ||
| It's interesting to me because take whatever you like, whatever you feel about battling Albright, good or bad, out of the equation. | ||
| It's really hard for me for this not to be seen as one of the most apologized for and corrected statements made by a politician that I can think of. | ||
| Albright's been very clear that she didn't make the point that she'd meant to, that she wishes she could take it back, and that what she said was stupid. | ||
| You can find so many times where she's criticized herself, like from her own book to the time that Amy Goodman bum-rushed her at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. | ||
| She'd been very clear about this. | ||
| It's just kind of wild to me that Alex takes this as proof of exactly what he wants it to be proof of by depriving it of context and any of Albright's later statements where she tries to clarify what she meant. | ||
| It means what Alex says it means, because this show is about constructing a narrative. | ||
| Also, it's hilarious to me that Alex spent so much time discussing how horrible Madeleine Albright's comments are about sanctions, but simultaneously supporting Trump's sanctions on Venezuela. | ||
| Trump is legit talking about a blockade to push for regime change there, which would be devastating to the citizenry. | ||
| It's basically an act of war. | ||
| Yeah, I'm pretty sure blockades are only ever used in wars. | ||
| It's a real aggressive act. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean... | ||
| If he doesn't turn on Trump for that, I mean, I don't know what you could say. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Why would you and then think that you get any mileage out of playing a clip of Madeleine Albright misspeaking on 60 Minutes? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But see, this is the thing. | ||
| It's important that he justify ahead of time what he knows he's about to do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, if I'm going to get into rank speculation about these horrors, these atrocities that have happened, then I'm going to... | ||
| Need to be like, well, they do this stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's what he's doing. | ||
| It is interesting to me that I can't think of any Star Wars movie where Alex isn't probably on the bad guy side. | ||
| Like, he's already on the Trade Federation's blockade of Naboo. | ||
| He's already there, man. | ||
| He loves that shit. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| That's why he always plays the Imperial March. | ||
| We need some Jedi. | ||
| So we've already got a horribly out-of-context clip of Madeleine Albright that Alex is going to use as preemptive justification for his narrative spinning. | ||
| So it's really funny to me that this is what he says almost immediately after that. | ||
| If you tuned in today and you want us to break down the current climate and current system we're in, you found the right place. | ||
| That's what you found. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I don't know exactly what's going on. | ||
| In El Paso. | ||
| But I do know that the media is using the crisis to try to cause a race war in this country, and that the corporate media has been pushing massive, massive, massive cultural division in an attempt to get an explosion. | ||
| There's been a full-on, full-on press for that, nonstop, continually. | ||
| So it's interesting to me that he says that I don't know what's going on, but I do know that the media's making a race war. | ||
| Yeah, it's amazing to me that we do this show, because that means that you continued listening after that point, whereas if it were me or a right-thinking person, I assume it'd be like, the media's trying to start a race war. | ||
|
unidentified
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Cool. | |
| Click. | ||
| Click. | ||
| Out. | ||
| Bye-bye. | ||
| Are you the media? | ||
| Aren't you the media? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Haven't you been inspiring racist terrorism for a while now? | |
| It does feel like that is the case. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| The thing is that we're wrong and everybody like us is wrong. | ||
| What if? | ||
| We're dumb crypto-globalists or something. | ||
| That sounds right. | ||
| Because Trump doesn't fomentate, Jordan. | ||
| That's dumb. | ||
| I don't even like hearing you sarcastically say those words. | ||
| It makes me so angry. | ||
| If you don't like hearing me sarcastically say them, you're going to hate hearing Alex sincerely say them. | ||
| I can't do it. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| Beto O 'Rourke and all the rest of them up there totally capitalizing on it, blaming the president. | ||
| When you can clearly blame the Democrats if you believe their official story about what's happened here by foaming all of this up and making it about race war. | ||
| When Trump's not made it about race or your color or where you're from, he's made it about the law. | ||
| Well, they're the ones that are invoking all this hate, always saying that Trump is the one that is invoking it all. | ||
| But you're dealing with people that think, hey, 500,000 kids have died. | ||
| I mean, that's like 1999 under the Clintons in just a few years. | ||
| And they admit they've died because you won't let medicine or food come in. | ||
| And she says, yeah, it's a good price to pay. | ||
| They don't care about 500,000 dead children. | ||
| But, oh, oh, 20 innocent people get killed in El Paso. | ||
| All gun owners are to blame. | ||
| Trump's to blame. | ||
| Alex Jones is to blame. | ||
| QAnon's to blame. | ||
| They're all to blame. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, they're all to blame. | ||
| How illustrating is that? | ||
| I'm really shocked he didn't end with See How That Works. | ||
| Yeah, that is kind of surprising. | ||
| Given the current style of his broadcast, I cannot believe that. | ||
| He's trying a variation on the theme. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty close. | ||
| So you see there, he has to weave it back to the Madeline Albright comment, because it's so foundational for what he feels is justifying. | ||
| Like, he knows what he's doing. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| There isn't any part of me that doesn't... | ||
| Like, no. | ||
| I guess I can't be 100% certain. | ||
| But everything I've learned from studying Alex Jones makes me very confident that he enters the studio and he knows that he's going to be producing manipulative narratives about real-world events. | ||
| He knows that's what he's doing. | ||
| And in order to make it feel like this is justified and make it look like that's not what he's doing, point to Madeline Albright saying this. | ||
| Bada-bing, bada-boom, we're in the clear. | ||
| They don't care about human life because of this. | ||
| Now I'm cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I am... | ||
| I don't know if I'm too jaded or if I've become more mature. | ||
| If I'm just older. | ||
| But I managed to keep the red flames of fire and burning hatred. | ||
| in my head instead of screaming them out through my mouth because once he started talking I swear to God I just wanted to The level of neighbors that you would have to yell back at me would make your neighbors angry. | ||
| You've got a tough day ahead of you here. | ||
| I know! | ||
| This is going to be rough. | ||
| This is going to be fucking rough, Dan. | ||
| LaCroix isn't going to be enough. | ||
| I'm listening to this and I'm going... | ||
| The only thing I can think of is at least it doesn't sound like he woke up and was super stoked to go on his show and... | ||
| Justify white nationalist terrorism. | ||
| It seems like so many of those GOP people woke up yesterday morning filled with, can't wait to tell people why white nationalist terrorism is not a problem. | ||
| It's disgusting. | ||
| I think you might be wrong about him. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| Maybe he's just a little tired. | ||
| Well, he also recorded his 16-minute immediate report on Saturday. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh. | |
| He had already worked on his day off, so he was a little excited. | ||
| Gotcha, gotcha. | ||
| Halfway expected him to pop champagne just like a 2016 election and fucking laugh. | ||
| Well, we'll see where it goes. | ||
| There's another thing that he needs to do. | ||
| He needs to fully... | ||
| Cloister himself within some sort of protective blanket about his behavior. | ||
| It's clear. | ||
| He has to paint the globalists who he's blaming for all of this as heartless, non-caring about human life, totally demonic, boom. | ||
| So you do that with the Madeleine Albright thing. | ||
| Then you have to defend against the idea that this person who committed the actual crime could have been motivated by anything, really. | ||
| Oh, of course. | ||
| You kind of have to diffuse that from your conversation, and you can do that by also sort of blaming the globalists. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know why I question mass shootings? | ||
| Because real mass shootings happen. | ||
| We have a lot of evil, sick people in the world. | ||
| But why do mass shootings happen? | ||
| They're statistically still rare, but the media hypes them up. | ||
| And so mentally ill people begin to think it's how they become superstars. | ||
| In the old days, it was known that whether it was the Sears Tower, or before that, the World Trade Centers, or the Empire States Building, or the Chrysler Building in New York, that you might go six months when nobody jumped off of it. | ||
| This is in criminology manuals. | ||
| It's taught in psychology. | ||
| This is well-known information. | ||
| That when one person jumps off the Sears Tower or the Chrysler Building or the Empire States Building or any building, that almost always, within a few days, someone else comes and tries to jump off the very same building. | ||
| It's how copycats work. | ||
| It's how lemmings going off a cliff operate. | ||
| Well, when you've got hundreds of movies and thousands of TV reports every year and just newspaper articles everywhere. | ||
| About mass shootings. | ||
| And instead of suicide by cop, just go out and shoot a bunch of people. | ||
| So, what Alex is doing here, what he's talking about is a real thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But he's kind of close to describing a real thing. | ||
| I would say he's still a little bit off. | ||
| There's a phenomenon that researchers have found where media coverage of notable suicide seems to lead people to emulate the circumstances of the original suicide. | ||
| This is called the Werther effect, named after a character in Gertha's book, The Sorrows of Young Werther. | ||
| In the book, Werther is rejected in love and shoots himself. | ||
| After the book's release, there were reports of young men emulating Werther, though it's hard to tell how much of that reporting is sensationalized in and of itself, connecting disconnected cases to the book. | ||
| It was the late 1700s, after all, and it's hard to say with certainty how much of that is You know, accurate. | ||
| Whatever the case, the phenomenon was named and history has shown that there does seem to be a bit of a connection between high profile suicides and rising suicide rates. | ||
| This was seen after Robin Williams took his life, when researchers saw an almost 10% increase in suicides over what their model would have predicted. | ||
| This is something that's really almost impossible to prove a causal link between, though. | ||
| There's no way that demonstrating interesting patterns that seem to indicate that suicide numbers go up after the media covers a suicide, There's no way to definitively say that's what's causing it. | ||
| There's a ton of other variables that could be influencing that pattern that are impossible to control for in any ethical experiment. | ||
| That said, if Alex wants to take the position the coverage of a suicide does trigger copycats, I'm not going to fight him too much on it. | ||
| It's worth pointing out, however, that studies trying to determine if this effect applied to fictionalized portrayals of suicide, like in the show 13 Reasons Why, they tried to study that, and they found that the results were inconclusive. | ||
| So it's pretty ungrounded for Alex to assert that movies and TV shows, or the right's favorite boogeyman, now video games, have any bearing on causing this sort of copycat behavior. | ||
| An article in Scientific American said that this phenomenon doesn't seem to apply to TV and movies because, quote, Yeah. | ||
| One thing I'm going to take a strong issue with here, though, is that he's trying to make this apply to all phenomenon, which I don't think he's in any way established. | ||
| If we take as accepted that high-profile suicide can have an effect on suicide rates in the immediate aftermath of news reports about it, it doesn't follow that this phenomenon exists for mass shooters. | ||
| It very well may, but the research that he's using to justify his claim about suicides does not extend to mass shooters. | ||
| That's a leap that he has not earned the right to make, and is based solely on his own assessment. | ||
| I find the evidence to be pretty overwhelming that there is a copycat phenomenon going on as it relates to mass shootings, but I don't believe it's appropriate to say that it's the same phenomenon that is seen as it relates to suicide. | ||
| When you make that simplistic and unfounded leap, what you're doing is attempting to whitewash all the other motivations that the shooter may have had. | ||
| None of them matter, because all they were doing is there's just another suicidal kid who the media convinced should go shoot up someplace. | ||
| That is, in essence, the sort of behavior you would expect out of someone conducting a cover-up. | ||
| Not because they were involved in the shooting or anything like that, but because on some level they know that their ideas and the things that they put into the world might have been. | ||
| Beyond anything else, I find Alex's position on this to be absurd and downright offensive. | ||
| If he believes that media coverage of things make them more likely to be copycatted, why does he spend so much time salaciously covering any crime an immigrant commits? | ||
| Isn't he worried that he'll cause copycat immigrant crimes? | ||
| If he's so worried about this phenomenon, why does he obsess about the threat of Antifa? | ||
| Isn't he concerned that that's going to cause copycats? | ||
| The way he carries out his broadcast doesn't support the argument he's making here. | ||
| He's absolutely fine engaging in the exact same behavior he's condemning the media for in every single other circumstance that doesn't involve gun violence. | ||
| And there's a very easy to figure out reason why. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| I think we can guess. | ||
| You've got this deflection. | ||
| You've got this framing with the Madeleine Albright quote. | ||
| You've got this deflection with misinterpretation of the copycat effects that people experience. | ||
| And then what you need to do is you need to minimize the situation. | ||
| Sure, it's bad, but it's not that bad. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So what I'm saying is just in Cancun, it's all over Mexico. | ||
| There's thousands a week getting killed. | ||
| You never hear about it. | ||
| And their lives are just as important as the poor people, God rest their souls, the 20 people who got killed. | ||
| At the mall, at Walmart, they're saying wherever. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| So, you know, Alex is playing fast and loose here a little bit, I think. | ||
| Like, the way he's talking, you could easily get the impression that he's saying that thousands of people are killed in Cancun a week, which is completely insane. | ||
| There were 540 murders in Cancun in 2018, which is way too many. | ||
| To be comfortable with. | ||
| But it's far less than thousands a week. | ||
| If he's trying to say that there's thousands of murders a week in Mexico, that's even an absurd number. | ||
| There were 33,341 murders investigations opened in Mexico in 2018, or approximately 641 a week. | ||
| Again, that's a much higher number than we would like to see, but Alex's embellishment of these things is super irresponsible. | ||
| To say that there are thousands of murders a week in Cancun, or even Mexico as a whole, is to create an exaggerated image of what's going on in that country. | ||
| Ironically, if he believes that there are thousands of murders a week in a city in Mexico or just Mexico, he's even more of a complete monster for opposing people making refugee claims. | ||
| But that's a separate issue, and no need to get into that necessarily. | ||
| And furthermore, it's kind of offensive to say that the media doesn't talk about the violence and cartel crime going in Mexico. | ||
| From my perspective, I've seen plenty of coverage of it. | ||
| Alex is trying to paint a false equivalence by making an exaggerated, completely untrue claim about the murders in Mexico and saying that that is what the media should be covering, simply as a way of deflecting from people having a very needed conversation about gun violence in our country. | ||
| And again, it's pretty simple to see why he would do that. | ||
| Ugh. | ||
| I hate that fucking... | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, you're gonna complain about the mass shooting at Waco or at El Paso or whatever it is? | ||
| What about... | ||
| In Laos, a guy was killed yesterday. | ||
| Isn't his life as important as... | ||
| And the media's not talking about that? | ||
| What about that? | ||
| What about that, Dan? | ||
| Huh? | ||
| Come at me! | ||
| It's a strategy that's just inherently a trap. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It... | ||
| It makes it so no matter how you reply, you either get bogged down into an unwinnable conversation that the person who's trying to bait you into the conversation, they also do not care about that at all. | ||
| No, not even a little bit. | ||
| And then the alternative is that they get to paint you as someone who doesn't care about people in foreign countries dying. | ||
| It's possible to care about multiple things simultaneously, even passionately. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| It's war games. | ||
| The only way to win is not to play. | ||
| Perhaps. | ||
| So we get to the big narrative. | ||
| Now, in this next clip here, this is what's going to guide Alex's belief that this is a false flag, that the El Paso shooting was set up by the globalists, and then they're using it to demonize Trump, Alex, the Patriots, all that good stuff. | ||
| Right, they were wearing Adidas shoes, which everybody knows is the official footwear of the globalists. | ||
| Sure, that could be. | ||
| That's probably a more interesting theory than what he's got. | ||
| But this will be... | ||
| The underpinning of it all. | ||
| So up to this point, we've got all of the preparation that's needed in order to justify this sort of behavior. | ||
| And now this is the behavior. | ||
| But we're hearing on every Sunday News show, Donald Trump did it. | ||
| Donald Trump, Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson. | ||
| Southern Poverty Law Center has put out the reports within hours of the shooting. | ||
| It happened at like 11.30 in the morning. | ||
| I knew about it at 12.30. | ||
| I was already working. | ||
| And here came the Southern Property Law Center article. | ||
| Oh, social media showed he liked Alex Jones and QAnon. | ||
| Then I noticed it was confirmed that someone was in control of this person's social media and was erasing that he was a Democrat and was erasing that his dad gave money to mass shooting victims and was an anti-gunner and was a psychologist running a psychiatric facility. | ||
| It's always the same. | ||
| And so in live time, and I have the articles, I'll cover them, they were removing he was a Democrat, they were removing all this stuff, they were putting my name in there. | ||
| I would say that when you hear stuff like that, you kind of get the sense that Alex is kind of eager to be associated. | ||
| I really think... | ||
| I just wrote down... | ||
| Remember when you said earlier that he doesn't seem anxious for it? | ||
| Never mind. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I just wrote down, he's like, I really wish I got more headlines saying that I was involved in this. | ||
| He's going out of his way to put himself in the conversation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Donald Trump and me. | ||
| You know, two equal people who are part of this whole situation. | ||
| And QAnon. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Even if there's a loose connection between yourself and a shooter, like he was your fan, there's a way to cover that with dignity, and this is not it. | ||
| What Alex is doing is trying to deny that the shooter was his fan, if he was, and then creating a greater conspiracy on top of the whole thing that places the focus squarely on himself. | ||
| This is Alex's strategy to make himself the real victim of the shooting, more or less, which is a monstrous behavior, and something he should be deeply ashamed of. | ||
| I really wanted to get to the bottom of this and see if there was any truth to what Alex was saying, but I was kind of impeded in my ability to do so because there wasn't any coverage of this social media stuff on Infowars' website, which is really where you think the proof would be if this was a conspiracy that Alex was going to put out on his show, and yet there was nothing to be found there. | ||
| It took a little bit of digging, but I figured out what was up. | ||
| This is a story about these shooters' My Life page. | ||
| For those of you who don't know, MyLife is a website that uses publicly available information about people to create profiles of them. | ||
| It's super fucked up, and I hate that I now know that it exists. | ||
| Wait. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| It's just a data aggregator that creates a profile for you? | ||
| Sort of, yeah. | ||
| You don't have to have any involvement with it. | ||
| So it can make a profile regardless of whether or not you have ever heard of MyLife? | ||
| Yeah, I believe so. | ||
| After the shooting, there were allegations that someone had gone into this shooter's MyLife page and changed his political affiliation from Democrat to Republican. | ||
| They'd further added references to him being a QAnon believer, an NRA supporter, and an incel. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| This was the work of leftists trying to cover up that this guy was one of them. | ||
| And then they were going to leave the noble Donald Trump holding the bag. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| The problem is that the shooter didn't even have a profile on MyLife until after the shooting. | ||
| One was made for him right after the first news broke with his identity, and when it was first put up, there was no political affiliation listed. | ||
| After that, someone edited it to say that he was a Democrat, with no evidence provided. | ||
| They also put his religious beliefs and ethnicity as Antifa. | ||
| Then people started editing it to say that he was Republican and into QAnon. | ||
| And honestly, from there it got even wilder. | ||
| People just kept editing it. | ||
| Yeah, this became a Wikipedia entry. | ||
| Donald Trump is a national hero. | ||
| Edit. | ||
| Donald Trump is not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Edit. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| At the point that Snopes decided to stop following the edits to the profile, his bio said, quote, registered Democrat, and his political affiliation was listed as Republican. | ||
| So it kind of come to a truce. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| This is a case of dum-dums on both sides trying to edit this guy's profile in order to make him fit a specific box that they want him to fit. | ||
| My Life is a super easily edited website, and they explicitly say about the information on the site, quote, we cannot fully guarantee its accuracy. | ||
| The point here is that even in ideal circumstances, My Life is not a place where real information should be pulled from, unless it can be verified elsewhere. | ||
| Alex is pretending that it is his social media page and it was scrubbed, when in reality it was a page created by people wanting to portray him as Antifa that was then edited. | ||
| He's reporting the second part, but not the first. | ||
| Because Alex Jones hates context. | ||
| He loves narratives. | ||
| It doesn't matter if they're true. | ||
| It just matters if they sell. | ||
| Also, here's the story that Alex is spinning about the shooter's father. | ||
| The father is a mental health counselor who treated people with post-traumatic stress disorder. | ||
| About a year or so back, the Veterans Administration had referred a guy to his clinic to help with his PTSD, which was the result of a man showing up at his door and shooting him. | ||
| The father had worked with the guy and had set up a GoFundMe page to help him with the immediate expenses that he was unable to cover on his own. | ||
| This is what Alex is making sound suspicious and is proof of a conspiracy. | ||
| The fact that his father worked in the mental health field and that he had helped one of his patients setting up crowdfunding so they wouldn't go bankrupt as a consequence of them being shot. | ||
| Legitimately, Alex is a huge piece of shit. | ||
| There's no two ways about this. | ||
| Shouldn't he be in favor of veterans receiving treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder? | ||
| Shouldn't he be in favor of therapists helping them set up crowdfunding for their bills since Alex is so goddamn opposed to the state paying for that shit? | ||
| Think for one second about why he would take these things that he should be in favor of and just put a little tone on them and make them seem suspicious and proof of a conspiracy in this instance, and I think you'll pretty easily figure out why he's operating this way. | ||
| Why is he operating this way? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Every time you do that, I'm going to wait a beat and then ask you the question. | ||
| So get prepared for that. | ||
| Do you see? | ||
| Do you see now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So you see how that works? | |
| You see the narrative that Alex is setting up, which is that this page was edited to cover up that he was a Democrat. | ||
| When in reality, the situation is super easily edited. | ||
| It wasn't even there before the shooting. | ||
| It's nonsense pointlessness that shouldn't be addressed. | ||
| It was an attempt at propaganda that then ping-ponged back and forth between people who were editing his page. | ||
| And then that ping-ponging itself is now being used as Alex for propaganda to make his spurious claims. | ||
| So that's where we're at. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| Now Alex lies explicitly about that My Life page. | ||
| But here it is, leftist-changed shooter Patrick Crucius' My Life page after Saturday's shooting from Democrat to Republican. | ||
| It had been up for years that he was a Democrat. | ||
| Up there for years. | ||
| Years. | ||
| All this stuff. | ||
| But see, now it gets changed after he's in custody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, boy. | |
| I'm busy lying. | ||
| Thoughts. | ||
| What am I thinking? | ||
| Say that it's me. | ||
| That I made him do this. | ||
| Here's a shot right here for TV viewers. | ||
| Just right here. | ||
| No one said you made him do it. | ||
| No. | ||
| I honestly don't know where Alex is getting the this page was up for years thing from, but he's definitely trying to drive that point home. | ||
| He says it twice in that clip, and those weird long pauses are definitely upsetting. | ||
| But it's absolutely not true. | ||
| I was thinking that it would be a weird thing for him to make up himself, but if he did, that would indicate that it's something that's important for him to attach to this story. | ||
| The story of the My Life page appears to have been broken by Jim Hoft at the Gateway Pundit. | ||
| It has a pretty full encapsulation of the narrative, the post on Gateway Pundit, namely that it asserts without any proof that leftists were the ones who were editing the profile to hide that he was a registered Democrat. | ||
| The article in its current form has a correction at the bottom of the page saying that the page, the My Life page, was created after the shooting. | ||
| But it's not correcting any explicit claims that I can find in previous versions of the article. | ||
| Like, the previous versions didn't allege that it had been up for years the way Alex is. | ||
| I legitimately can't find that claim in any of the places where Alex is known to gather his information from. | ||
| Obviously, I can't possibly know what kind of sick and cheap impulses drive Alex to behave the way he does, but if I had to guess, I would say this is an indication that he's fully aware at this point, when he's reporting this, that the page was made after the shooting, and that whenever whatever troll created it put the page up, it was made to make it look like the shooter was Democrat and Antifa. | ||
| Alex needs the perception to be that this page had been up for years, because the fact that it hadn't completely destroys his cause for suspicion here. | ||
| It also underlies how easy it is for anyone to edit my life pages. | ||
| If Alex's listeners understood the specifics of the situation, they would know that there isn't anything suspicious about this. | ||
| It's just trolls on the internet going back and forth editing a meaningless page that the shooter had zero to do with. | ||
| If Alex's narratives are to work at all, he needs the audience to not understand the specifics of this situation. | ||
| It's in his best interests that they believe misinformation, so that's what he offers them. | ||
| Grasping for some kind of lie. | ||
| Something. | ||
| And then hitting on the, like, it's been up for years almost in the moment. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that long pause afterwards was him being like, I know that it's not been up for years. | ||
| Or I wonder if it's someone in his ear being like, Alex. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's possible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alex. | |
| That's possible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's just not true. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're asserting this as fact and you're lying to people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| You're either indicating that you don't know what you're talking about or you're lying. | ||
| One of the two. | ||
| I would say the... | ||
| The worst that the voice in his ear would do is, Alex, you made a mistake on that. | ||
| It has not been up for years. | ||
| No way would the producer be like, Alex, quit lying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's their bread and butter. | ||
| Yeah, but I think even they might realize, like, Alex, you're drifting into behaviors that have gotten you sued before. | ||
| Like, you're not going to get sued about saying that this page had been up for a long time, like, for years, like, in direct opposition to reality. | ||
| But that sort of behavior, if applied to other areas of this story, could get you screwed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alex, reign it in. | ||
| Reign it in! | ||
| I think there might be... | ||
| I hope someone is giving him that call because he's not reigning it in. | ||
| I'll tell you who isn't. | ||
| Barnes. | ||
| Barnes is in his ear going, like, keep on going. | ||
| I got a job coming soon. | ||
| Barnes, I think, is smart enough to stay the fuck off air in this aftermath of a tragedy. | ||
| I think he knows, like, fuck this. | ||
| I'll let Alex do this. | ||
| It's so crazy what guests he ends up actually having. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Is the nuge coming on to say that everybody was fine? | ||
| Nope, nuge is smarter than that. | ||
| Fair. | ||
| The people he gets. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh boy. | |
| So Alex talks about this, how he had talked to reporters that he works with at Infowars. | ||
| Unfair to call them reporters. | ||
| Yeah, that's... | ||
| His employees. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He had spoken to his underlings about the coverage that they were going to put out about this story. | ||
| And I think he says a little bit too much in this next clip about their intentions. | ||
| And then he just fucking... | ||
| Fumbles the ball really hard while trying to remember past conspiracies. | ||
| So we're punished for really reporting what's going on. | ||
| So I don't know who this guy is, but I'm talking to Millie Weaver and I'm talking to my reporters yesterday afternoon. | ||
| And Millie says to me, well, I'm going to look and see if his parents are psychologists because, you know, they're usually the psychologists like she sort of listed the cases where the shooter, and I'm going to cover this coming up. | ||
| In Aurora, remember that? | ||
| Colorado. | ||
| Said he was under mind control. | ||
| Said his family did it to him. | ||
| Said that a psychologist did it to him. | ||
| And it turned out that his psychiatrist was the former head psychiatrist in the Air Force over a DARPA program that puts brain chips in troops. | ||
| You can't make that up. | ||
| Well, I remember that one, and yes, you can. | ||
| Someone can make that up. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| First things first, at the end there, Alex is completely mixing up his narratives about the Aurora shooting. | ||
| We covered it back in the 2013 investigation, but the narratives about the DARPA program and the Air Force psychologist, which are both bullshit on their own, are completely different lies. | ||
| It's supposed to be that James Holmes was in a DARPA program and got a bunch of money from DARPA, and also that his psychologist, Dr. Fenton, was an Air Force mind control doctor. | ||
| Because Alex knows that all the shit he talks about is basically bullshit. | ||
| He doesn't care about being accurate about any of it. | ||
| He cares so little that he doesn't even realize that he's combining two narratives into one. | ||
| Also, I don't remember mind-control chips being part of the conspiracy back then. | ||
| So I guess it's a later development in the story, which also isn't real. | ||
| Yeah, me neither. | ||
| I remember we talked about that pretty extensively and well-researched, but now he's adding some Manchurian Candidate stuff in there. | ||
| I think that was always kind of the flavor of it. | ||
| But then also, he's lying. | ||
| Even about the lie about the jailhouse stuff. | ||
| That just comes from a book of a guy who was trying to get... | ||
| He wrote the book because the state's attorney didn't believe him. | ||
| He was trying to shop for a shorter sentence. | ||
| It's all bullshit. | ||
| And they're still like, oh, my family did it to me. | ||
| That's completely... | ||
| That's not even part of the conspiracy back then. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why are you doing this? | |
| Add anything you want. | ||
| It's all lies anyways. | ||
| Add whatever you need for the narrative you're trying to push. | ||
| But it's such a lack of professionalism even within the area of lying. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's why he's got the greatest job in the world. | ||
| It's crazy that... | ||
| He doesn't even need to keep his lies straight. | ||
| It's crazy that even people who believe him and listen to him don't notice and be like, hold on. | ||
| You are sloppy. | ||
| It's a doomsday cult saying, we're going to go down on December 15th, 2003, and then when the date comes, the cult stays, and he's like, I misread it, and now it's 4,000. | ||
| They don't give a fuck what it is. | ||
| They're there for the fun. | ||
| And now they're excited to learn that James Holmes' family is. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And that proves that people's families, when they're psychologists, it's dangerous. | ||
| So I think the most important thing here is that what Alex is describing when he's talking about with Millie Weaver, that's a textbook case of confirmation bias. | ||
| Like, before setting out to do any of the research, Millie Weaver has told Alex that she feels like a lot of mass shooters'parents are psychologists. | ||
| She's entering the research with a conclusion already decided. | ||
| She's not setting out to find out if mass shooters have psychologist parents more often than would be expected. | ||
| She's setting out to find a few examples that fit her decided talking point. | ||
| And then she's going to make a propaganda video presenting it as if it means anything. | ||
| I legitimately don't even care to engage with that shit. | ||
| No, not even a little bit. | ||
| It's such a transparently dishonest way to try and make an argument that whatever the ensuing product is, it's meaningless. | ||
| And ultimately, whatever rebuttal I could make would be equally meaningless. | ||
| I could point out to you tons of mass shooters whose parents weren't psychologists, but ultimately that wouldn't really have proved any greater point other than to show that the examples that Millie or Alex would be using would be cherry-picked intentionally. | ||
| I feel like climate change isn't happening. | ||
| Prove to me that climate change isn't happening. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The only reason that somebody would operate this way, the way that Alex is clearly describing Millie is operating, is because they're trying to create a distraction. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Anything to not talk about guns. | ||
| Anything to not talk about radicalization. | ||
| both in terms of right-wing shit and in terms of misogyny. | ||
| All of these conversations are too threatening to the underpinnings of the world that they profit off of. | ||
| So to defend that toxic hellscape, he has pitched the theory that all these shooters are the children of therapists and set out to find a few examples to make a video about. | ||
| This is pathetic and transparent behavior and lame. | ||
| These people are such psychopaths at this point. | ||
| I always wonder if like... | ||
| Like, Alex Jones goes home and looks at Rex and goes, I'm helping to make sure that you might die in a mass shooting. | ||
| I'm helping to make sure that the next mass shooting happens. | ||
| Or raise the risk. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I'm making sure that another mass shooting is going to occur. | ||
| That's my job today. | ||
| Today is the day that I say, one more mass shooting! | ||
| At least! | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| It's... | ||
| They just don't feel anymore, right? | ||
| Well, this is where we get back to that what if question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's like, what if you're just full of shit about all this? | ||
| What are you bringing about? | ||
| Another mass shooting. | ||
| What? | ||
| Anyway, in this next clip, Alex discusses the three shooters from the past week or so. | ||
| And he says something about them. | ||
| And then realizes... | ||
| I should not have said that. | ||
| Mic down for this. | ||
| This is... | ||
| If there's a moment of levity... | ||
| In this, it's Alex's response to realizing what road he's almost about to go down. | ||
| We've got the garlic shooter, the El Paso shooter, and the Dayton shooter. | ||
| These guys coming out of a cloning tank? | ||
| I mean, what the hell's going on with these boys? | ||
| That long pause, I think, is an indication that what he had just done has been like, these are all young white men. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's like, look at these three shooters from the last week. | |
| They all look the same. | ||
| Oh, what characteristics do they share? | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| I know it's not funny to laugh about these people being shooters, but Alex, his whole thing is so built on the defense of particularly white males. | ||
| He realized he accidentally stumbled on the truth. | ||
| If I continue to follow this thought, I am going to be like, oh, look at all these young white men shooting places. | ||
| Hey, Melly, these three guys look a lot alike. | ||
| Do you want to start going back through a lot of these mass shooters and see if they have a lot of things? | ||
| Oh, we're going to have to... | ||
| We're about to go to break. | ||
| Millie, you can't make videos anymore. | ||
| Millie who? | ||
| So that's kind of like the silliness of his nonsense. | ||
| So I think that Alex realizes he's got to even further defend what he's doing and his behavior. | ||
| And so he again appeals to the past and other things that have happened. | ||
| So you see, it's worth it to the left to kill people, to lie about WMDs, to stage things. | ||
| And so if they lied about dead babies in incubators, or they staged other events where real people died but somebody else did it to get us on board to their agenda, then it's normal. | ||
| In fact, you should question everything. | ||
| And they caught the left. | ||
| We'll cover this next segment. | ||
| Going on to all this supposed shooter of social media where he was a Democrat. | ||
| And changing it over to Alex Jones. | ||
| Paul Joseph Watson, QAnon, and Donald Trump, and we have all the screenshots from the Wayback Machine. | ||
| They don't even care they're getting caught. | ||
| So, I mean, that's all just the My Life stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| I think that that clip very neatly demonstrates how Alex Jones manipulates people. | ||
| It's pretty complex, so I'm going to take this piece by piece. | ||
| The first element is the completely deceptive argument that he's just questioning an event. | ||
| That's bullshit. | ||
| He's building a case that these shootings are false flags and he knows that's what he's doing because this shit is weak and he doesn't want to get sued. | ||
| He hides behind this. | ||
| Why is it wrong to question things for shit whenever all of his reporting is guiding listeners to a clearly planned conclusion that this is a false flag. | ||
| And that is the work of a true coward. | ||
| The second element is the basic argument he's using to justify the act of questioning things, which, again, is not what he's doing. | ||
| He is misinforming. | ||
| He argues that because something in the past was deceptive, it stands to reason that all future things could be. | ||
| And honestly, I don't have a problem with that argument. | ||
| It's a basic position of skepticism that's probably healthy. | ||
| The problem comes when we realize again that Alex is not just questioning things. | ||
| He's building misinformation narratives. | ||
| If he were questioning things, he would approach the situation from a position of caution and a hesitance to report anything definitively. | ||
| Instead, what do we see? | ||
| We see Alex creating a talking point that all these mass shooters are the kids of psychologists who are probably secretly working for DARPA and misleading his audience about the edits that were made to a My Life page that the shooter had nothing to do with. | ||
| This is not questioning. | ||
| This is misinformation propaganda meant to guide his listeners away from the aspects of the story that are threatening to his business, his worldview, and his revenue stream. | ||
| Now, he's only able to justify his argument by employing the third element of his manipulation, and that is on full display here, and that is the complete meaninglessness of terms. | ||
| The examples he comes up with, the babies and incubators thing and weapons of mass destruction, who was responsible for those lies? | ||
| The first was an excuse to get into the first Gulf War and the second was a pretext for the war in Iraq. | ||
| The first was a George H.W. Bush administration Ah, but they're both globalists. | ||
| Well, but see, that's the thing. | ||
| In this argument, Alex has defined those two Republican administrations as the left. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| This is incredibly manipulative framing. | ||
| To call the Bush administrations the left is to give up on even the slimmest pretense that you're talking about anything real. | ||
| The left is just another name for the globalists or the deep state for Alex now. | ||
| So whatever anybody, you know, whatever anybody he doesn't like did something, hey, it's all them, it's the left. | ||
| This is how children think. | ||
| And it's really stupid to hear a 45-year-old man carrying on like this. | ||
| It's embarrassing. | ||
| But here's the thing. | ||
| There's no non-embarrassing way for Alex to make the arguments that he's trying to make. | ||
| Oh, no, absolutely. | ||
| So he has to. | ||
| He has to do things like this and move around quick enough and pray that people don't take the time to recognize what he's doing. | ||
| These are tricks. | ||
| He's using tricks. | ||
| They're very, very clear. | ||
| And effective, unfortunately. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, they're very distracting. | ||
|
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Yep. | |
| Because you almost didn't even catch that, the left. | ||
| Part, did you? | ||
| I mean, I just filter out whatever it is he thinks. | ||
| Like, if he says the left, I'm like, it doesn't fucking matter. | ||
| If he says globalist, it doesn't fucking matter. | ||
| It's anybody he feels like hating today is part of Antifa. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, in this next clip, we get to Alex playing a special report that is about how he predicted the El Paso shooting in advance. | ||
| As we said he did. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We very much said when he was building those narratives way back when that he is pre-justifying a mass shooting being a false flag. | ||
| Well, certainly. | ||
| But he did... | ||
| As I understand in some of the clips I had heard, he did predict something was going to happen in El Paso. | ||
| But I cannot explain that entirely. | ||
| And I will over the course of this show. | ||
| So I don't believe that he gets credit for being a psychic. | ||
| But here is a bit of that special report. | ||
| Two days after Alex Jones predicts that false flags are going to be carried out and blamed on the QAnon movement and American patriots, lone gunman Patrick Crucius is arrested for the El Paso massacre. | ||
| His social media page MyLife was changed to say that he was a follower of QAnon and his designation as a registered Democrat was changed to repatriate So you can see that this My Life thing is just an essential piece. | ||
|
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| This is huge. | ||
| It's everywhere throughout both of these episodes. | ||
| It's the bedrock of why are we questioning things? | ||
| Well, because we're misleading you about this. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I do not understand why you would do that unless you are a fucking idiot. | ||
| Like, that whole, like... | ||
| Two days before this mass shooting happened, Alex Jones predicted that a false flag would... | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you didn't do... | ||
| So you knew that some shit was going to happen and you didn't do a goddamn thing about it. | ||
| Well, you realize he yells about it. | ||
| That... | ||
| So the fuck what? | ||
| That's not something you should take pride in. | ||
| I predicted that that's fucking stupid. | ||
| He doesn't care. | ||
| No, of course he doesn't care. | ||
|
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See how that works? | |
| See how that works? | ||
| Well, the reality is that Alex says that there's false flags coming literally every day. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| So it's not that big a deal for him to have... | ||
| There was a propaganda narrative that was going around that involved Antifa and El Paso. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And that's the reason why Alex said El Paso when he was talking about a coming false flag. | ||
| It's just his normal, there's gonna be a false flag. | ||
| Summer of rage. | ||
| It happens every single day. | ||
| And it just so happened that he was in the middle of working on this other propaganda narrative about Antifa coming to El Paso. | ||
| So it's a confluence of events that is... | ||
| It creates the appearance that Alex is onto something, when in reality it's the most normal thing to expect from his show. | ||
| And it's not that he has very strong predictive abilities. | ||
| So, in this next clip, the globalists created QAnon. | ||
| I don't know if you know that. | ||
| I did not know that. | ||
| This is a new development. | ||
| I was going to say, we've been pinging back and forth from liking to disliking QAnon for a while now. | ||
| Not you and I. Alex. | ||
| Certainly not. | ||
| Last, I remember hearing he was anti, but then he also thought that there was some good information that came out of it. | ||
| Specifically contracts or whatever. | ||
| That wasn't from Q. No, that was 4. That's right. | ||
| That was 4chan. | ||
|
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Gotcha. | |
| But QAnon was on 8chan. | ||
| And bye-bye, I think. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what the status is, but I think it's gone. | ||
| Anyway, Alex thinks that the globalists created QAnon. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And there's a reason. | ||
| They're cutting into his business? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| This is a great conspiracy. | ||
| If I were grading Alex's conspiracies, I'd be like, you sat down and thought about this for a minute. | ||
| At least. | ||
| This one's up? | ||
| It's not good. | ||
| It's still stupid. | ||
| But compared to some of the other weak bullshit he tries, this is at least like, all right, you at least have a cause and effect here. | ||
| And I'm just thinking about, man, Antifa's getting ready to launch more terror attacks. | ||
| How are they going to launch these attacks that have the media cover it up, but then act like it's part of a civil war? | ||
| They're going to need some type of right-wing group that they can cut out and blame. | ||
| But because libertarians and Christians and conservatives know not to be offensively violent because we're law-abiding and because we understand they're trying to set us up, we've never taken the bait, even when Antifa attacks us. | ||
| But if you've got a Q movement, it's perfect to have globalist informants and foundation operatives and deep staters that are in the FBI particularly. | ||
| Go out, reach out, wind up people believing they're working with the president to attack a dam or to go kill the Gambino crime boss or to kill their brother with a sword or whatever. | ||
| And it just becomes this giant cauldron now because they identify with it. | ||
| They can then be set up and then that can be the excuse to see, oh, it's not just Antifa. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Q did this. | ||
| See, that's a good conspiracy, and it's really what he should have been saying all along, more or less. | ||
| Because the vagueness and the complete mystery and anonymous aspect of Q is the sort of thing you can paint whatever you want on it. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| I think Alex didn't do this before because he was afraid of losing too much of his audience who were into Q. And, of course, Jerome Corsi, back when he worked for InfoWars, was writing a fucking book about Q. Right, right, right, right. | ||
| Until that went south. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, yeah, I think that this is the sort of thing that you can get some mileage out of. | ||
| Because it achieves the goal that you want it to achieve. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which is... | ||
| It creates a justification for all right-wing violence. | ||
| Right. | ||
| More or less. | ||
| You could just attribute it to that. | ||
| It's all the left, actually. | ||
| Right. | ||
| All real stuff is the left. | ||
| And then all the rest of it is also the left. | ||
| But they're doing it through QAnon because of the mysterious anonymous nature of it. | ||
|
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| All the foundation people can hide. | ||
| I mean, it's really... | ||
| It's the greatest gift Alex could have ever had. | ||
| I don't know why he hasn't used it yet. | ||
| I will give you one theory on why he hasn't used it. | ||
| Because he just said that they convinced them into believing they're working with the president. | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| So that kind of suggests that it's very easy to believe that you're working with the president while committing white terrorism. | ||
| While committing terrorist acts, I guess. | ||
| It definitely does. | ||
| Yeah, it seems like it would be easy. | ||
| Alex's conception to trick yourself into thinking that you were doing that for the president. | ||
| Based on everything the president says, I'm clearly working with the president. | ||
| Which alone is a bad sign. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I would say... | ||
| Also, he doesn't want to attack people who imagine that they're working for the president because it opens too many boxes for him about his tenuous association with the White House. | ||
| Yeah, he needs people to believe that they're working for God and vengeance is his, sayeth the Lord. | ||
| And that Alex is in constant contact with the White House. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| He doesn't want to call that into question. | ||
| So, there's a lot of stupid shit that Alex has been saying so far. | ||
| I think I can say that with some confidence. | ||
| But you should know that he's very smart. | ||
| I really don't think so. | ||
| But do you know why he's smart? | ||
| Providence? | ||
| He studies. | ||
| No, that can't be it. | ||
| Study wasn't on his four ways to learn. | ||
| Well, I study things. | ||
| I watch what's happening. | ||
| And I saw the FBI director, Ray, come out that's a deep stater and say white people are terrorists, they're striking everywhere, they're incredibly dangerous, even though the statistics really don't even show that. | ||
| He gave out false statistics. | ||
| They ignore all the, quote, minority crime against whites that is exploding because the media is promoting it. | ||
| We're not saying the average minority is a bad person, but the media is promoting these attacks. | ||
| And then I saw all the FBI reports coming out saying the conspiracy theorists that... | ||
| Say the Clintons are involved in child trafficking. | ||
| Why, they're going to launch terror attacks. | ||
| That was clearly a cover for all the Jeffrey Epstein news that's coming out. | ||
| And then I saw the FBI come out and say, that is the Clintons that still kind of run most of it, and say that QAnon's going to launch terror attacks with Alex Jones. | ||
| And I went, okay, it's clear. | ||
| Antifa says they're going to El Paso. | ||
| They said they're going to blow up ICE facilities. | ||
| They're going to need a pretext to make it look like that's legitimate. | ||
| And lo and behold, it happens two days later. | ||
| Did they blow up ICE facilities while we weren't paying attention? | ||
| No. | ||
| I didn't see that. | ||
| You literally can't say things like that, what he just said in that last clip on this show where you're trying to hide behind the I'm just questioning things defense. | ||
| What Alex Jones did right there was make a gigantic conspiracy in order to maintain his absurd and dangerous worldview, which is not the same thing as being skeptical. | ||
| Just imagine all the things that Alex needs to substantiate to make that clip mean anything. | ||
| He needs to show a citation for where the FBI He said that QAnon | ||
| was going to launch terror attacks with Alex Jones. | ||
| He needs to show when Antifa said they were going to blow up ICE facilities. | ||
| He needs to show literally any connection between the El Paso shooting and Antifa coming to El Paso. | ||
| He needs to do all of these things. | ||
| And he can do all of those things in one second. | ||
| Hold on, Dan. | ||
| Jangling keys! | ||
| Jangling keys! | ||
| He just doesn't have the time on his show because it's not four hours. | ||
| Oh, it is four hours now. | ||
| Oh, it is four hours. | ||
| Oh, all right. | ||
| Jangling keys! | ||
| Until he demonstrates or proves any of this stuff, it's all just rambling bullshit based on nothing. | ||
| None of that means anything. | ||
| That was a one-minute clip, and there's like ten unsubstantiated claims that he throws out in order to build his notion that the El Paso shooting was done to create a justification for Antifa to attack people. | ||
| This is shitty work, and I need to be clear about two things. | ||
| One, I don't need to rebut any of this. | ||
| It's all meaningless ramblings rolling forth on the head of a paranoid man who knows his scam is running out of gas. | ||
| I don't give a shit about trying to demonstrate why this theory is stupid and makes no sense. | ||
| Two, this is not questioning things. | ||
| This is a narrative that Alex has built, both from his own imagination and things he probably found on 4chan or 8chan, which he's now passing off as the official unofficial story of what happened. | ||
| I know this is probably getting repetitive, but it needs to be said over and over again. | ||
| Alex is not questioning things. | ||
| He's creating and disseminating talking points for misinformation campaigns, which is all he does. | ||
| He's creating Facebook arguments. | ||
| He's creating... | ||
| Somebody posts something... | ||
| Ironically, he's not on Facebook. | ||
| No, exactly. | ||
| But somebody posts something like, we gotta stop gun violence, and then here's a study, and then somebody goes, well, da-da-da-da-da, it's fucking... | ||
| Pointless and stupid, and it just keeps us from doing anything. | ||
| He's trying to give a little bit of, like, he's trying to disseminate talking points. | ||
|
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Yeah, exactly. | |
| That's all it is. | ||
|
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Yep. | |
| So one of the things that Alex kept bringing up, I think I've mentioned this already, is that the idea that prior to the shooting in El Paso, Antifa had announced that they were going to lay siege to El Paso. | ||
| Burned down ICE facilities and tried to start a civil war. | ||
| I really don't remember the official spokesperson for Antifa bringing that out on account of, one, he doesn't exist. | ||
| It's anti-Tifa. | ||
| And, two, what are you fucking talking about? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, for most of the episode he's talking about, I just kind of let it slide because I know that Alex is full of shit, especially when it comes to railing about Antifa. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| He just makes shit up. | ||
| And even when it is based on something, it's based on some random post on a message board full of Nazis. | ||
| There's a deeply unpleasant user interface, so I don't want to dig through it and try to... | ||
| I'd find the fuck he's talking about. | ||
| But after he keeps bringing it up, I was like, fuck, alright, let's see what he's talking about. | ||
| Did Antifa plan to invade El Paso? | ||
| I'll bite. | ||
| This is all based on a right-wing misinformation campaign that mostly traces back to Andy Ngo, the completely neutral and very legitimate journalist who helped fuel the concrete milkshakes narrative a little while back. | ||
| On July 29th, Andy posted a couple pictures of flyers put out by a group called Border Resistance, advertising their upcoming tour, including stops in Santa Cruz, Oakland, Minneapolis, Chicago, and then their last stop in El Paso on September 1st. | ||
| Andy posted these flyers with the commentary, quote, Antifa is leading a Border Resistance militancy training tour that will converge on a 10-day siege of El Paso. | ||
| The promotional image shows border enforcement officers being killed and government property firebombed. | ||
| From there, the narrative got rolling. | ||
| People just started to mirror Andy's framing of the event. | ||
| Fox News used Andy's tweet as a source so they could write a story about how Antifa was going to start a terror campaign in El Paso. | ||
| And now the narrative has found its way to Alex. | ||
| And that's what he was basing his prediction that there was going to be a false flag in El Paso on. | ||
| According to them, this was Antifa. | ||
| And they were coming to bomb ICE buildings in El Paso. | ||
| Unfortunately, all of that is right-wing propaganda bullshit. | ||
| The website for border resistance clearly lists the groups involved, and none of them are known to be associated with Antifa, which is a stupid framing of the point, since Antifa isn't a centralized group in any meaningful way. | ||
| One of the main groups involved, the Hecate Society, said, quote, We are not offering militancy training. | ||
| We're having educational workshops about what's happening on the border and how to work better inside of communities. | ||
| It's not militancy training in any way. | ||
| Which was Andy's framing of it. | ||
| Well... | ||
| Not reality. | ||
| But that's because they're... | ||
| Preempting, or at least co-opting, or maybe just full-on projecting that that's what they're doing. | ||
| Well, of course. | ||
| They're just going to make flyers. | ||
| They're creating militant operations, so they have to attribute to the left a military operation in order to justify them creating a military operation. | ||
| Which is what Alex is doing in that clip that I said was a fairly decent conspiracy. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| At least cause and effect-wise. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the Hecate Society said that the image that they used on the poster, the one of protesters shooting arrows at an ice castle, was meant as satire and not to imply any kind of intention of violence, and that they were going to change it to avoid any further misunderstanding, which I would point out is an intentional misunderstanding. | ||
| Yeah, fuck that. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| The reality of the situation is that an immigrant rights group was planning a tour where they would have workshops about how to best respond to worsening situations in their communities and around their communities. | ||
| And they chose a possibly ill-advised picture for their flyer. | ||
| From there, imaginative shitheads like Andy Ngo ran with it and created a whole narrative of planned terror campaigns and decided to call this group Antifa because it fit their pre-existing narratives. | ||
| This story was a lie, but it didn't get a ton of traction until after the shooting in El Paso, at which point it could be incorporated into a larger conspiracy. | ||
| It's fascinating, really. | ||
| It started out as just a way to smear and obstruct the organizing capabilities of non-white peoples trying to protest conditions at the border, and ultimately, through the worst possible coincidences, it turned into a narrative that Alex is using to argue that the El Paso shooting is a false flag. | ||
| Hey, that's just synergy, Dan. | ||
| That's, in their world, a happy accident, I guess. | ||
| That Dr. Seuss book, Oh, the Places You'll Go, comes to mind. | ||
| I don't know why, but this conspiracy narrative, when it's born, you don't know where you're going to go. | ||
| It's bad. | ||
| Do you see now? | ||
| Yeah, I see how it works. | ||
| So, in this next clip, Alex... | ||
| This is another really essential framing for him. | ||
| Whenever he's trying to craft the presentation of these horrible events as false flags. | ||
| There's something that he has to do. | ||
| This is... | ||
| I don't know how to set this up, but this is important. | ||
| It's their pre-hype that's so obvious. | ||
| Oh my god, the Nazis are going to be attacking any minute! | ||
| They're everywhere! | ||
| They're Trump! | ||
| And then it happens. | ||
| So what he's talking about with the pre-hype there is that FBI memo that came out that was talking about conspiracy theory-related violence is a rising threat. | ||
| Alex Jones is a painfully stupid guy, but this is one of those moments where you see how he's been pretty smart in crafting a worldview where the exact consequences people warn his rhetoric has can be recontextualized as proof of the very conspiracies he talks about. | ||
| I don't believe an adult could not understand the connection between rhetoric and possible inspiration. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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Between this strategy and the leaderless resistance organization of the right wing extremist cells, it's very easy to inspire lone wolf terrorists to action, all while keeping any real fingerprints or concrete connections to a minimum. | |
| It strains my credulity to imagine Alex hasn't been aware of this phenomenon for a long time. | ||
| Because of the lies he told about his trip to the Bohemian Grove, he inspired a man to show up there heavily armed, intending to kill Grove attendees who Alex had convinced him were there worshipping the devil and possibly even sacrificing children to Moloch. | ||
| 37-year-old Richard McCaslin, calling himself the Phantom Patriot, entered the Grove, explicitly hoping for a shootout. | ||
| He told the San Francisco Chronicle, quote, I was expecting armed resistance, and I would have fired back if I was fired upon. | ||
| When sheriff's deputies found him, he was armed with, quote, a double-barreled shotgun assault rifle hybrid, a two-foot-long sword, a.45 caliber pistol, a crossbow, a knife, and a handmade bomb launcher. | ||
| Handmade bomb launcher. | ||
| That seems just like too much to carry. | ||
| I would also guess that the handmade bomb launcher might not have been effective. | ||
| I really kind of hope that he... | ||
| Should that have been field tested? | ||
| If he had used it, we wouldn't have had to worry about him anymore is kind of how I feel about that. | ||
| He would not have been successful in the handmade bomb launcher situation. | ||
| Quite possible. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| In court, McCastlin testified that he was inspired to do this from watching Alex's documentary, Dark Secrets, about Bohemian Grove. | ||
| So he, quote, spent a year collecting weapons and staking out the grove. | ||
| He said, quote, I was acting on reports that inside the Bohemian Club were incidents of child abuse and human sacrifice. | ||
| Those weren't reports he was acting on. | ||
| They were Alex's propaganda having its intended goal. | ||
| The story is honestly a pathetic tale. | ||
| From this article of the San Francisco Chronicle, quote, McCaslin was wearing a bulletproof vest, blue fatigues with Phantom Patriots spelled out in red letters across the chest, and a rubber skeleton mask when he crept into the grove. | ||
| Fuck you cosplaying pieces of shit. | ||
| Fuck off! | ||
| He quickly found himself hopelessly lost and bouncing off trees in the pitch dark after his flashlight went out. | ||
| Fucking good. | ||
| Feeling almost silly, he said he felt his way into a cabin, flopped down on a cot, and went to sleep. | ||
| The next morning, McCaslin said he discovered the club's giant... | ||
| What a loser. | ||
|
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Ugh. | |
| You're pathetic. | ||
| going in and thinking he's about to get into a gunfight and then like his flashlight goes out and he's just like, oh, I'm going to go to bed. | ||
| Paul Blart, white terrorist. | ||
| It's goof. | ||
| It's goofy, but I mean, it's goofy with a murder intent behind it. | ||
| It's really scary and kind of goofy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| McCaslin did all that in 2002. | ||
| Alex had to have known as early as then that what he was doing was playing with fire, and he doesn't care. | ||
| He knows the consequences of his actions. | ||
| He knows what could happen, and he knows what he's doing to people, and it just doesn't matter to him. | ||
| Alex knows he's not the only person who has this effect on their audience. | ||
| He knows that plenty of right-wing terror cells exist in this country because he often interviews people from them. | ||
| He has Stuart Rhodes on from Oath Keepers a ton over the years. | ||
| He's had Gavin McGinnis from the Proud Boys on a ton. | ||
| He even pathetically tried to debate David Duke on his show. | ||
| He knows this ecosystem exists, that he's a part of it, and that there are people who are much more dangerous even than him. | ||
| He knows that this country has a right-wing violence problem, and he's known it his whole career. | ||
| He knows that if the right law enforcement bodies started taking that problem seriously, he's completely fucked. | ||
| Even forgetting about possible legal consequences of his actions that could come, I don't know how that would work, but you've got to be kind of worried. | ||
| It's a hypothetical thing. | ||
| But even leaving that aside, if society started having the right conversation about the nature of this form of inspiring terrorists, he knows that his business model doesn't work anymore. | ||
| So he preemptively attacks any attempt by law enforcement to even look at the problem rationally. | ||
| We saw this with the MIAC report back in 2009, and we see it here again, as the FBI has released a report discussing the connection between conspiracy theory and the growing terrorist threat in this country. | ||
| He has to attack these things and pray they go away, because it's his only shot at self-preservation. | ||
| Yeah, it's exactly like the gun lobbies getting a bill passed that says it's illegal to investigate gun violence. | ||
| You know, like, that's a huge win. | ||
| That's a huge win for them, and a huge loss for the fucking continued existence of humanity. | ||
| And here's where the craft of it comes in, Jordan. | ||
| He could easily just say that they're trying to make us look bad, and he does that sometimes. | ||
| But the way he frames it here is gorgeous. | ||
| The FBI put out this report about conspiracy theorists and terrorism, and then someone committed a terrorist mass shooting a little while later. | ||
| Well, one might look at that and say that the mass shooting validated Sure. | ||
| This is self-protection. | ||
| This is a man who knows that the world that he's helped create, the world of paranoid anti-government extremists, is one where there's going to be way more violence in the coming weeks and months, most likely. | ||
| The only way to continue to own the market space that he does as this world worsens is to do everything possible to make sure that law enforcement doesn't take this issue seriously. | ||
| And the best way to do that is to frame every attempt to take it seriously as a piece of the false flag shootings themselves. | ||
| Honestly, this is pathetic. | ||
| And from where I'm sitting, all it signals is fear. | ||
| In 2009, Alex wasn't afraid of the MIAC report. | ||
| He saw it as a ratings bonanza. | ||
| has changed a lot since then, though. | ||
| And now a report like this coming from the FBI, it seems like it terrifies him. | ||
| And I think it should. | ||
| Because I think his show has changed. | ||
|
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I think that... | |
| Like, maybe in 2009 you could make an argument that FBI making a report like the MIAC report doesn't really affect Alex. | ||
| It doesn't really. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| First of all, it was only a descriptive report. | ||
| It wasn't prescriptive in any way. | ||
| But even if it were, it wouldn't really involve him. | ||
| It was about actual militias. | ||
| It was about actual extremist cells. | ||
| So, like, that is just red meat for him. | ||
| This, I feel, it seems very different. | ||
| It seems like he recognizes that... | ||
| This is an actual threat now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And his show exists in such a way that he is now kind of what they're talking about. | ||
| Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. | ||
| Now, granted, he's not in that memo by name at all, but either way. | ||
| No, I mean, in the wake of, what was it, the Nebraska GOP? | ||
| The representative who was like, hey dudes, we gotta stop with this whole, like, let's kill immigrants thing. | ||
| And the GOP party there was like, register as a Democrat, you're out. | ||
| It's kind of like, wow, you guys are all in on terrorism. | ||
| You know, there's no, if you're kicking people out for saying, please stop inciting terrorism, that kind of suggests that you're a terrorist party. | ||
| Or at least you just don't care. | ||
| Or at least you just don't care, which is, I don't know. | ||
| In some ways worse? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| From a moral standpoint. | ||
| So I think that Alex is a little bit afraid of this memo. | ||
| I think it's possible. | ||
| I sense his tone being a little bit different. | ||
| But I also have a strong suspicion that he also just hasn't even read it. | ||
| Exclusive FBI document warns conspiracy theorists are the new domestic terror. | ||
| Yahoo! | ||
| Thursday! | ||
| QAnon, Alex Jones, and it says anyone claiming there's pedophile rings with the Clintons. | ||
| Actually says that. | ||
| Actually says that. | ||
| So they're talking about you, Alex. | ||
| I'm positive, based on that riff that Alex hasn't read, the FBI threat assessment that came out at the end of last week. | ||
| But he's using it as a basis for saying that this whole weekend of shootings was a globalist false flag. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Or he's using it as like, this was the pre-hype. | ||
| They got it going. | ||
| This report came out. | ||
| It was the pre-hype, as Alex is saying. | ||
| Then the shootings happened. | ||
| conspiracy. | ||
|
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What this fails to take into account is the FBI didn't decide to release the report when it did. | |
| It was written in May 2019 and was clearly the product of a bunch of research, considering that it covers extremist actions from January 2008 to the present. | ||
| The document was released when it was because that's when Yahoo News obtained it and printed it. | ||
| To assert that the timing is a conspiracy is to claim that prior to May, the globalists knew that these three dudes were going to commit mass shootings when they did so they would know when to leak the report to Yahoo. | ||
| It's a completely absurd thing to think. | ||
| Actually, take a second to stop and think about what Alex is implying. | ||
| I mean, unless you're also including that they were already planning the attacks, and so, of course, they knew when the three people were going to cause these mass shootings. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Still crazy. | ||
| Yeah, no, no, no. | ||
| Don't get me wrong. | ||
| Still crazy. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| But that's the only way that that works. | ||
| It implies such a bigger conspiracy than what it sounds like at first when Alex is pitching it. | ||
| Coming out of his mouth, it sounds like, oh, I guess that makes sense. | ||
| The report came out and then there were shootings. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But what that would require is insane. | ||
| I'm certain that Alex didn't read that report, mostly because he's just completely lying about what's in it. | ||
| At no point do they say that anyone who believes in conspiracies is a domestic threat, and the report doesn't mention Clinton or Alex once. | ||
| If you read the report, I do think that Alex has every reason to be scared by it. | ||
| Quote, The FBI is mostly talking about QAnon, but I think that sentence pretty much sums up how I feel about Alex in the present day. | ||
|
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|
Yep. | |
| So I can't disagree with them. | ||
|
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|
They can even get rid of the word fringe from there. | |
| This report is a threat assessment, and it assesses the threat posed by anti-government, identity-based, and fringe political conspiracy theories to be a real one. | ||
| Welcome to the party, FBI. | ||
| It's probably too late to do anything about it, and I do not trust the FBI to follow through on this. | ||
| Not even a little bit. | ||
| But it's a positive sign. | ||
| I'll reserve judgment on this until we see more of how things play out. | ||
| But for now, I'm going to treat this as it is. | ||
| An internal memo that doesn't necessarily change anything. | ||
| Yeah, the... | ||
| Who was it? | ||
| The guy who's like, we're discouraged from doing anything about white nationalist terrorists because we don't want Trump to feel like we're attacking his base. | ||
| Like, that's a simple encapsulation of America right now. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| It's a bummer. | ||
|
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|
Yup. | |
| So, the main narrative, I would say, that Alex is selling, a lot of these things, the FBI memo, the talk about the babies and incubators, weapons of mass destruction, Madeleine Albright stuff, a lot of that is justification. | ||
| The main narrative is that the My Life profile was changed. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's the big piece. | ||
| They changed it from Democrat to Republican to covered the tracks, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| That's his smoking gun. | ||
| He might as well be Antifa. | ||
| So that's one. | ||
| And then number two is that his dad worked in psychiatry. | ||
| Or in psychology. | ||
| Enough for me. | ||
| Proven. | ||
| So Alex gets back to that second narrative now. | ||
| The idea of shooters having parents who are in the psych business. | ||
| This isn't good. | ||
| Yesterday on the phone with my reporters and literally were like, yeah, let's see if the family are working the psychiatric business. | ||
| Because it's always that. | ||
| And maybe it's just an anomaly. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Maybe it's just that. | ||
| Because, you know, document cam shot, please. | ||
| Here's some of these articles. | ||
| This is out of Psychology Today. | ||
| Harvard's experiment on the Unabomber. | ||
| CIA mind control. | ||
| He fails to provide any other examples of a mass shooter whose parents were psychologists or psychiatrists. | ||
| Yeah, but one of them was the Unabomber, so... | ||
| What does that even have to do with anything? | ||
| Well, he bombed universities. | ||
| Did his parents put him in MKUltra? | ||
| I mean, you know, it was a summer program and they didn't want to deal with him while he wasn't in school. | ||
| Like, that's the only thing that makes sense to me. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| It's like boarding school, the MKUltra program. | ||
| So you got that, which is great. | ||
| Because he's saying that there's... | ||
| Multiple examples. | ||
| He doesn't have any examples. | ||
| Then he jumps over to distracting you with, like, look over here. | ||
| May I tell you about my friend, the Unabomber? | ||
| And then he skips from the Unabomber over to the Aurora shooter, James Holmes. | ||
| And he's already completely fucked up his conspiracies from 2013 about this. | ||
| And he goes even farther for it. | ||
| Like, he really is adding a ton to that conspiracy. | ||
| Now, this is an emergency situation, man. | ||
| Throw everything in the kitchen sink. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You understand, the Aurora shooter told jailmates, I was drugged up, I've been electroshocked, I'm in a DARPA program, and I blacked out, and I don't know what happened, but police get me out of here, they're going to kill me. | ||
| It turned out, his dad runs the DARPA, NASA Human Brain Interface with Computer Program, including electrodes in the brain. | ||
| That was 12 years ago, or was that happening? | ||
| You can't make that. | ||
| Then they... | ||
| What? | ||
| What? | ||
| What is he talking about? | ||
| Yeah, you can't make that stuff up, Dan. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| I assume if you just Google who his dad is, you'll find that he's the head of the NASA brain interdimensional travel project of 2028. | ||
| That wasn't part of the narrative. | ||
| Like, that wasn't part of the conspiracy theories at all back when Alex was going over this stuff. | ||
| And also that 12 years ago timeline doesn't work out. | ||
| Because that would have been 2007 and that was before the shooting. | ||
| That shooting took place in... | ||
| 2012. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| So the Aurora gunman, James Holmes' dad, his name was Robert Holmes. | ||
| He testified at his son's trial, and in the course of the investigation, a lot of information became publicly available about him. | ||
| He was a retired financial analyst working in the field of credit cards. | ||
| NASA! | ||
| He was a NASA financial credit analyst. | ||
| He did not work for NASA. | ||
| In mind, melding or whatever the fuck Alex is rambling about. | ||
| His mother, Arlene, was a nurse, so that's in the healthcare field. | ||
| Nursa! | ||
| Financial analyst to the... | ||
| Stars! | ||
| I don't think that's what Alex is talking about. | ||
|
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Doubtful. | |
| There's a large chasm between NASA mind control expert and registered nurse. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Let me try and bridge that with DARPA? | ||
| DARPA. | ||
| DARPA. | ||
| I think what's going on here is really simple, actually, and it might demonstrate how stupid Alex Jones is and how dumb he thinks his listeners are. | ||
| There's another guy named Robert Holmes who was an amateur astronomer who was the subject of some human interest stories that came out in 2007, which is 12 years ago, which is in the time frame of what Alex is talking about. | ||
| So he's got some shitty Googlers working for him, and that's what we're doing now? | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| That's where we're living now. | ||
| That's the world we're living in, huh? | ||
| So this other Robert Holmes was so good at watching the skies that NASA gave him a grant to do it full-time so he could quit his day job, which led to a lot of feel-good press. | ||
| Because it was this guy who just was passionate about astronomy, and NASA was like, you're so good at this. | ||
| We want you to be able to do it on your own, but as a job, which is so cool. | ||
| I like that a lot. | ||
| That is very cool. | ||
| A man with a telescope should really look into that. | ||
| Bruce Cezal? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| No NASA grants for him. | ||
| Doubtful! | ||
| Honestly, this might be generous of me to assume that Alex is talking about this. | ||
| It legitimately might be that he just made this up. | ||
| Entirely possible. | ||
| Enough details are similar. | ||
| Same name as his dad. | ||
| Time frame being relevant to when this Grant story was coming about. | ||
| There are enough coincidences there to give you a pause before dismissing it as an outright coincidence. | ||
| But whatever the case, it's not true of the Aurora shooter. | ||
| This is Alex just talking shit. | ||
| That's fucking stupid. | ||
| Financial analyst. | ||
|
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That's infuriating. | |
| Yep. | ||
| So, Alex, in this next clip, we already heard him at the beginning of the episode say he doesn't know what's going on, and he repeats that, and then gets close to what might be, what do you want to call it, flippant libel? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Flippant slander? | ||
|
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|
Okay. | |
| So I don't know what's going on. | ||
| I just know, oh, the shooter's dad was PTSD expert, had a two-year degree, but was above a bunch of psychiatrists with... | ||
| Ten years of education, running Pentagon programs in Dallas. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Why is it always that? | ||
| Why? | ||
| Why? | ||
| Oh, but Daddy's also a New Age guru. | ||
| It's always the same. | ||
| Like Sandusky's a New Age guru, you see? | ||
| What? | ||
|
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|
I'm sure there's nothing going on here. | |
| Everything's fine. | ||
| Nothing to look at here anymore. | ||
| I feel like what he's heavily implying is some sort of like he abused his son or mind controlled him. | ||
| I would assume he's trying to describe him as fucking his son. | ||
| I mean, if you're going to compare him to Sandusky. | ||
| Yeah, that's the only... | ||
| Why else? | ||
| Because he's a good football coach. | ||
| Like, what are you fucking doing? | ||
| Yeah, it's close. | ||
| There's no other thing he's known for other than being a Penn State football coach. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| There's no other thing. | ||
| But I'm saying, I think Alex is real close to that line here. | ||
| Like, if he continues down this path, he's going to be behaving in the exact same way as he did towards the family members of victims of Sandy Hook. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| And countless other things. | ||
| I think someone around him better stop him. | ||
| No! | ||
| Don't! | ||
| Don't! | ||
| Slander us! | ||
| Come on! | ||
| Come on! | ||
| Give me one! | ||
|
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|
Give me one! | |
| So, the shooter's dad had, and does have, a master's degree, which is all his line of work requires. | ||
| He apparently also practiced some non-traditional medicine, which is why Alex is calling him a guru. | ||
| Right. | ||
| All this is complete bullshit, and Alex needs to calm the fuck down. | ||
| Pretending that a veterinarian and chiropractor, pretending they were actual doctors, is what bought him a house. | ||
| So you can take that tone and shove it right up his ass. | ||
| I don't give a fuck about your impugning this guy's mental health credentials. | ||
| Chiropractors have to have a... | ||
| Do they even have to have... | ||
| There's a special degree for that. | ||
| Yeah, that's an issue. | ||
| But it's more legitimate than... | ||
| Oh, for sure, for sure. | ||
| Than like a homeopath. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Also, a naturopath, whatever the fuck. | ||
| Also, I found the article that Alex is reading there. | ||
| It's on the Inquisitor, and he just doesn't know how to read. | ||
| This is really a big problem. | ||
| He's saying that the father was over Pentagon programs in Dallas, but the actual sentence that he was reading was, quote, that the dad was, quote, a facility director of DAPA psychiatric programs in Dallas. | ||
| DAPA. | ||
| Alex thought it said DARPA. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| Alex thought it said DARPA. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| That's too stupid. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I know it's true. | ||
| It is. | ||
| But that's too stupid. | ||
| It said DAPA, and he thought it said DARPA. | ||
| That's so stupid. | ||
| DAPA stands for Drug and Alcohol Program Advisor, because he works in addiction medicine. | ||
| Because he works in addiction medicine. | ||
| Alex is legitimately the most embarrassing person to study in the world. | ||
| You always want there to be something interesting at the root of his lies, but sometimes he just doesn't know how to cold read. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| This is embarrassing. | ||
| This is lame shit. | ||
| If you are listening, you are a cowardly moron, you fucking piece of shit. | ||
| So, in this next clip, Alex gets a guest. | ||
| I haven't heard this guy on before, but man, he has got the lamest voice. | ||
|
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|
Okay. | |
| I hate to critique people for their voice, because a lot of that you can't really control. | ||
| And I would never critique him for his voice if this wasn't a completely fake voice. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I just wanted to bring up one thing. | ||
| I have yet to find a shooter, and obviously we're still learning about these two nutcases from the last 24 hours, but I have yet to find a shooter who was not on SSRIs or some form of brain-altering chemical in the short time that I've been following this. | ||
| I'm sure in your 25 years you have yet to see a single shooter who did not have some kind of brain-altering chemical shrinking their gray matter. | ||
| I mean, that's it. | ||
| And almost always their parents. | ||
| Our psychologists are in DARPA! | ||
| So now we've got that reinforced. | ||
| So Alex is really crushing it with the big-name relevant guests these days. | ||
| This is a guy named Tom Papert. | ||
| I'm guessing that Robert Barnes thought the block was too hot and Count Dankula was busy, so Alex got Tom Papert to come in. | ||
| This Papert guy, he runs a Twitter page called The Honest Media, and it is a ghost town. | ||
| It's just dumb MAGA retweets being spammed out to his less than 400 followers. | ||
| I guess he's relevant here because he created a Facebook page called God Emperor Trump. | ||
| Which seems healthy. | ||
| I don't like that. | ||
| I would like him to be eaten by sandworms, so there's something similar there. | ||
| His LinkedIn page has a bio on it, and it's just, quote, as seen on the Alex Jones show, and then in parentheses, LOL. | ||
| I'm not sure what the LOL is supposed to mean there, but whatever. | ||
| You guys gotta figure out humor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The writers are not doing well. | ||
| Tom Pappert has that dumb MAGA radio voice I've come to hear so often from these guys with aspirations of starting their own media outlets on YouTube. | ||
| I swear that vocal cadence he's putting on is all over the place. | ||
| It's like these dum-dums don't realize that people doing the impressions of the 80s and 90s DJ voice. | ||
| They're making fun of it. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| It's not like, hey, that voice is cool. | ||
| Hey, we're gonna be out here on the... | ||
| Like, yeah, no, you're fucking stupid. | ||
| Anyway, Tom Pappert opens up his appearance on the show. | ||
| By saying that he's never heard of one single case where a shooter was not on psych meds. | ||
| And to that I say, you should probably shut the fuck up, because all you're really saying is that you've never looked into it. | ||
| It's so manipulative to be like, I don't know anything about this topic, but you should probably accept my blanket assertion about it. | ||
| Why isn't anybody who's supporting Islam, why aren't they coming out and condemning these acts of terrorism? | ||
| Very similar. | ||
| Nobody ever does it. | ||
| That's why you look in the media and you never see it. | ||
| All you're doing is showing your own stupidity and saying, I don't know what I'm talking about. | ||
| Tom asked for one example, so I guess I can start with 15-year-old Jared Michael Padgett, who killed a fellow student, wounded a teacher, and then killed himself back in 2014. | ||
| Actually, he can't start there. | ||
| He can get to that right after he goes and straight up fucks himself. | ||
| This level of irresponsible bullshit and misinformation, particularly after a weekend of such tragedy, is seriously dangerous. | ||
| And for him to have no information to base his point on and make it anyway is legitimately the act. | ||
| No, I don't understand. | ||
| It's one thing to have a point. | ||
| I guess it would be hard to make this point. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I can't defend it. | ||
| Never mind. | ||
| No, I don't understand how we're not having the conversation that all of these people are complicit in these mass shootings. | ||
| Well, because no one's ever heard of Tom Papert. | ||
| Yeah, well, he's not related to Tom Papa. | ||
| No. | ||
| Very funny comedian, Tom Papa. | ||
| No. | ||
| So, according to a 2015 study by Dr. Peter Langman, who runs schoolshooters.info, 73% of cases of high school shootings that he studied involved shooters who were not on any psychiatric medication at all, nor had they ever been. | ||
| That number dropped to 71% when he looked at college shooters and 59% in the stray adult cases that he included in his studies. | ||
| Even if the number went down as the perpetrator got older, the vast majority of cases did not involve shooters who were on psych meds. | ||
| Some of the higher-profile cases involve people who had histories on meds, but not all of them do. | ||
| For instance, in the case of Columbine, Eric Harris was on psych meds, but Dylan Kleibold wasn't. | ||
| How does that factor into this overly simplified, stupid narrative that they sell? | ||
| Psych med by osmosis. | ||
| By proxy. | ||
| If he touches your hand, you get psych med on you. | ||
| You've got Munchausen psychs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wanda Munchausen psych. | ||
| And also, when I was looking into this, there was this insane thing where right-wing sites and these anti-psychmed sites were like, yeah, Eric Harris is on psychmeds, but Dylan's records have never been released. | ||
| Oh, fuck you! | ||
| So they're pretending that there's a cover-up because it doesn't match the information. | ||
| Get the fuck out! | ||
| Yeah, it's wild. | ||
| I am not going to engage with an argument until you're fucking... | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| So look, here's the deal. | ||
| These people don't know what they're talking about. | ||
| Tom Papert is saying that he's never heard of a shooter who wasn't on psych meds, when most of them aren't. | ||
| In his defense, he is deaf. | ||
| Ooh, that's a good theory. | ||
| That's the only thing that... | ||
| He's only heard of them because there's a huge talking point in the right-wing conspiracy world. | ||
| Most likely because it's an extension of the globalists are trying to pacify everyone with meds so they can take over and make a one-world government narrative. | ||
| And throw a little anti-vax stuff in there, too. | ||
|
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|
Get it all in there. | |
| Sure, anti-science, anti-medicine. | ||
| Yeah, put it all in there. | ||
| If you only take in media through the lens of liars like Alex, you get the sense that, hey, all these shooters seem to be on psych meds. | ||
| If you look at reality, you see that Alex is lying to you, and it's not hard to see why people like him are lying. | ||
| Also, I'm still waiting for Alex to give me one more example of a shooter whose parents are in the psychological. | ||
| I'm sure there are some, but he's steadfastly refused to give me even one example. | ||
| So I choose that to mean not good things for his argument. | ||
| So Tom Papert sucks. | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| I was wondering, like, why is he on the show? | ||
| I mean, I know that he does this God-Emperor-Trump account, and, like, that makes some sense. | ||
| It really shouldn't be that easy. | ||
| It's not that easy to rock a rhyme that's right on time. | ||
| It's tricky. | ||
| And it's tricky to get booked on Alex Jones' show. | ||
| Here's what you have to do. | ||
| Tom Pappert was a great patron. | ||
| He heads up some of the biggest pro-Trump sites out there, which is important because they can censor everybody off Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, but Infowars.com, Newswars.com. | ||
| That's really important because then people have their own sites and he's also the manager of one of the great TV stations we're on. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| He's the manager of one of the great TV stations we're on. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| That solves problems. | ||
| That makes sense really quick. | ||
| This complete zero on your show. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So the prevailing consensus is that this shooter in El Paso released this manifesto and it's being treated pretty roundly as His actual manifesto. | ||
| And if it's too believed, I think the assumption can easily be made that he is inspired by a lot of the very similar motivations that are amplified by people like Alex, people like Tucker Carlson, people all over the right. | ||
| So you have that perception, and that's what's being discussed in a lot of the more sensible areas of the internet. | ||
| But Tom Papert, man. | ||
| He knows that this guy was not right wing. | ||
| He knows. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And here's his evidence. | ||
| If you look at his LinkedIn profile, he doesn't have any Second Amendment stuff on there. | ||
| He doesn't have any Alex Jones quotes on there. | ||
| But somehow they managed to learn all this. | ||
| It's absolutely fascinating. | ||
|
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|
So... | |
| In order for him to define somebody as a right-winger, they must have Second Amendment stuff or Alex Jones quotes. | ||
| On their linked fucking in-page. | ||
| I didn't see either of those necessarily on his. | ||
| I just saw I was on the Alex Jones show, LOL. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| This is real stupid. | ||
| That's your standard of proof, huh? | ||
| But, I mean, I just, you know, play stuff like this to be like, this is the stupid shit these people are saying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| At what point are we going to really get into it? | ||
| Like, if you can't... | ||
| When are we going to deal with obfuscation being applied to mass shooters and you're complicit? | ||
| Maybe the reporting side, there's a First Amendment argument, but the opinion side... | ||
| It's got to be. | ||
| We've got to start prosecuting these people. | ||
| And then you're like, oh, no, they're going to scrap my free speech. | ||
| They already fucking are. | ||
| And it's not happening. | ||
| So fucking do it. | ||
| Well, but also, I mean, what you're getting at there, too, is the kind of important point. | ||
| And that is that we already have qualifications about free speech that have to do with mitigating damage. | ||
|
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|
Yep. | |
| You can't do things that cause harm to people with your speech. | ||
| You can't threaten to kill people. | ||
| You can't extort people through your words. | ||
| You should be able to. | ||
|
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|
It's free speech. | |
| You can't do those things. | ||
| Those are crimes. | ||
| You yell fire in a crowded building or whatever. | ||
| You cause a stampede. | ||
| You could be held responsible for your words legally. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So there is already a precedent that some sorts of speech do cause the kind of damage that we do not believe that it's protected. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, I mean, it's just a conversation. | ||
| And I don't think it's as simple as saying, like, these words hurt somebody, therefore they're bad. | ||
|
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|
No. | |
| Or they're illegal. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| I don't think it's that simple. | ||
| I think it's a hard conversation that we all need to have. | ||
| Like, I think if we're going to help this problem, that is a priority conversation to have. | ||
| So we can get the sense of where people land on it. | ||
| I think absolutists are probably going to get in the way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Unsurprisingly. | ||
| And maybe sometimes their absolutism about free speech really belies other priorities that they're trying to hide behind free speech to defend. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think that's... | ||
| The case with Alex. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| These people know what they're doing. | ||
| So, also, this episode's really weird to me because I kind of expected to get in and it'd be a lot of the stuff about the El Paso shooter, a lot of stuff about the Dayton shooter. | ||
| I expected to be largely focused on that. | ||
| And Alex doesn't talk about a ton of it. | ||
| Like, he does. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And a lot of the stuff is related to those things. | ||
| But a lot of the things that I think are the most interesting things he says are side points, kind of, if that makes sense? | ||
|
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|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| That belie incredibly fucked up positions. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In this next clip that we're going to listen to here, I think he's advocating for retaining the death penalty. | ||
| But his reasoning for it is ludicrous. | ||
| It was General Ben K. Parton was the former head of Air Force Weapons Development. | ||
| He was a retired three-star general. | ||
| And he said, Alex, they get rid of the death penalty in countries that communists are about to take over because they know they can have their own communist staged terror attacks, blame it on the nationalists, and then they get out of jail later. | ||
| And I was like, really? | ||
| And see, so think about the really smart ones. | ||
| Don't just do a Jussie Smollett where nobody attacked him. | ||
| They actually do the real attack with their cohorts. | ||
| Sometimes people go to jail and play the part of a nationalist. | ||
| You see how that works? | ||
| You see how that works? | ||
| No. | ||
| I have no idea how that works, Dan. | ||
| So now it's important to retain fucking capital punishment because if we don't, then the communist agitators will know. | ||
| That they can commit whatever crimes, blame the nationalists, and they'll just go to prison and blah blah blah, they'll get out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| I want to say I understand some of that. | ||
| But it doesn't make a goddamn bit of sense that he can go fuck himself. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| What the fuck are you even talking about? | ||
| Here's the position I'm coming from. | ||
| I understand exactly what he's saying. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I just don't understand why he believes me. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. | ||
| Betting Kate Parton told me this shit. | ||
| Jesus, dude. | ||
| Fuck off. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think that's a good reason to keep the death penalty around. | ||
| I feel like there's so many problems with this administration. | ||
| In that sentence, you might as well be like, we need to keep the death penalty around because if we don't, the snorks are going to come to real life and they're going to attack us all and take our shoes away. | ||
| You talked to Benton K. Parton. | ||
| I did. | ||
| He was a retired Air Force general talking to me about snorks. | ||
| I think that all this is is that there's a conversation that's starting up about How Trump wants to bring back the federal death penalty? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And Alex needs a defense for that. | ||
| And this is the defense he's decided to go with. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| That's pretty lame. | ||
| I think he, like, I don't know this to be 100% sure, but everything I understand about his earlier positions, I think they would be very anti. | ||
| Wasn't he anti? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The death penalty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It seems like that would be in line with his... | ||
| More libertarian stances. | ||
| Yeah, and also just the government shouldn't be allowed to kill people. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But now he's fine with keeping them in cages and letting them die in there, so who gives a shit? | ||
| So that's one thing that I found that I was like, holy shit, what are you doing? | ||
| This is nuts. | ||
| And in this next clip... | ||
| Remember earlier I mentioned that he needs to substantiate... | ||
| No, it was a long time ago. | ||
| I mentioned that he needs to substantiate some of the stats that he uses. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| In this next clip, I'm thankful that he tries, sort of, but he also fails. | ||
| But having the FBI come out last week, along with the FBI director, and say, white people are the threat, white people are the racist, when the statistics don't even show that. | ||
| I mean, I'm not being mean because it's still a low statistic, but... | ||
| You've got a ten times chance of your white being attacked or robbed or killed by a black person. | ||
| You've got a ten times chance of your black being killed by a black person. | ||
| It doesn't mean an average black person is a criminal. | ||
| It just means there's a certain percentage that's super criminal and believes it's okay to do because for whatever reason. | ||
| But you see, it's all how they play games with the statistics. | ||
| Swing and a miss. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's all about how they play games with the statistics? | |
| He's playing a game here. | ||
| He's fucking it up. | ||
| So it's almost breathtakingly unsettling to hear Alex make literally no differentiation between white supremacist groups and white people. | ||
| He hears the FBI director say that white supremacist groups are committing more violence, and the way Alex reports that is that he thinks the FBI director is saying that white people are bad and a threat. | ||
| I don't think it's an unfair reading of that to say that Alex Jones seems to think that being white and being white supremacist are the same thing. | ||
| And that's a deeply disturbing thing to hear from someone who's so clearly into white identity. | ||
| Yeah, we... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| You were like... | ||
| What was it? | ||
| Was it the crossover episode we did where I said he thought we were race traitors and you were a little bit like, whoa, hold on. | ||
| Oh, he thinks we're race traitors, Dan. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| At the end of that clip there, he accuses the FBI of playing games with statistics. | ||
| Playing games with statistics, which is funny because just before that, that's exactly what he was doing. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| When the FBI is discussing a rise in white supremacist violence, they're talking about crimes that were specifically motivated by white supremacy, not crimes that white people do where a non-white person is the victim. | ||
| If a white guy robs someone who happens to be black and in the process kills them, That's not necessarily a crime motivated by white supremacy, so it wouldn't be included in their statistics. | ||
| It's very easy to understand. | ||
| This is elementary stuff. | ||
| Yeah, it is not hard. | ||
| And the fact that Alex is operating on this completely infantile level means that he either doesn't know anything about what he's talking about or he's confident that no one listening does. | ||
| It kind of makes sense why he always screams about how the mainstream media thinks the public is dumb. | ||
| It's really just him projecting his own feelings about having cultivated such a stupid, uncritical audience. | ||
| Yeah, I imagine Stefan Molyneux feels the same way a lot of the time. | ||
| probably bangs his head on that vent a lot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report in 2017 that analyzed connections between violent crime offenders and violent crime victims. | |
| They found that you're overwhelmingly more likely to be a victim of a violent crime perpetrated by a person of the same race as you than by someone of a different race. | ||
| If you're white, you're four times more likely to be the victim of white-on-white crime than black-on-white crime. | ||
| What Alex is saying is not true, and it is a racist talking point. | ||
| This is just super racist shit that Alex is saying on its face. | ||
| What this is is a misuse of statistics in the name of creating a racist talking point, which is then being used to somehow deflect attention away from the very real fact that white supremacist violence is on the rise. | ||
| The ADL identified 50 extremist-related murders in the United States in 2018, the highest number since 1995, when the Oklahoma City bombing happened. | ||
| And this was a 35% increase from 2017. | ||
| Every single one of those extremist-related murders was carried out by extremists with links to right-wing groups. | ||
| All of them. | ||
| When FBI Director Ray gets up and says that they're seeing an increase in cases involving white supremacy-related violence, that's why. | ||
| There are more cases because there are more crimes. | ||
| Alex knows that he can't have this conversation on real terms because reality does show that right-wing white supremacy-motivated violence is on the rise. | ||
| So he moves the goalposts. | ||
| And it's not surprising that he chooses to move the goalposts into outright racist talking points like black-on-white crime. | ||
| It's because he's a huge racist. | ||
| Another thing Alex probably doesn't want to address is a recent study that came out of the University of North Texas. | ||
| Researchers compared counties where Trump held his rallies in 2016 with completely comparable counties with similar populations, racial demographics, location, level of known active hate groups, etc. | ||
| They found that counties that hosted a Trump rally saw a, quote, 226% increase in reported hate crimes over similar counties that did not hold a rally. | ||
| But that's probably a coincidence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ooh, ooh, ooh. | |
| Or maybe, maybe, Jordan. | ||
| It's just that the globalists reported a ton of fake hate crimes in the counties where Trump held his rallies so some political science professors could uncover those statistics two years later. | ||
| That's probably what happened. | ||
| That's the only explanation that I think makes any sense. | ||
| Because these globalists are sneaky. | ||
| They're sneaky. | ||
| Do you see now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you see how it works? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Assholes. | ||
| That sums it up. | ||
| So if, you know, if you need to, I think we all at this point probably need to get this out, like a little bit of a palate cleanser. | ||
| We're all not feeling great, probably a little bit mad at Alex, think he's doing a terrible job. | ||
| A little bit? | ||
|
unidentified
|
A little bit? | |
| If we want some schadenfreude, just a little bit, I invite you all to enjoy what I'm going to describe as one of the least inspired plugs I've ever heard him give. | ||
| Other talk show hosts plug every segment. | ||
| As everybody knows, the real advertising is during the show. | ||
| Well, whatever. | ||
| We had a big sale last week. | ||
| It's extended a few more days. | ||
| We've got to end it. | ||
| It's the giant mega sale. | ||
| Save InfoWars sale. | ||
| Stop the clowns when we covered the whole debate sale. | ||
| 50-60% off store-wide. | ||
| InfoWarsStore.com. | ||
| Double Patriot points in your next order. | ||
| Who gives a shit? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's, uh, whatever. | ||
| That is a man circling the fucking drain. | ||
| If you recall, last we left off in the present day episodes, Alex was talking about how if he doesn't sell out the warehouse, he might be done. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| He has not sold out the warehouse. | ||
| Doesn't seem like it. | ||
| If the Save the Infowars special is continuing. | ||
| Extended another few days. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's his 4th of July special as well. | ||
| Well, there is a new special. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Easter? | ||
| Uh, no. | ||
| He does announce it. | ||
| I don't think I have a clip of it. | ||
| It's the anniversary of him getting banned from Facebook sale. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, man. | |
| Oh, man. | ||
| It's the banniversary. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| It starts up a day after this or whatever. | ||
| Whenever this one ends. | ||
| Whenever the Save InfoWars sale ends, the banniversary sale ends. | ||
| With the same exact price. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yes, okay. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| That's what I thought. | ||
| 50-60% off everything. | ||
| Double Patreon points. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
When he was listing off the new special, like, you just changed the name. | |
| Yep. | ||
| This is ridiculous. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So, good. | ||
| We can all enjoy that a little bit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, at this point, I think Alex is kind of bored with Tom Papert. | ||
| They do not have good... | ||
| Surprise! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I find him to be a chore. | ||
| So, Alex goes to calls, and I'm playing this call because you should, man... | ||
| Because we should all be afraid? | ||
| Very, very afraid? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm afraid of this caller. | ||
| Is it actually fucking Anders Breivik, for Christ's sake? | ||
| No, I don't know if he has long distance in prison. | ||
| That's tough. | ||
| Although it is a very nice cell, apparently. | ||
| But, you know, this caller is scary. | ||
| And then secondarily, the fact that Alex doesn't hang up on him immediately also scares the shit out of me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How you doing, Alex? | |
| Good, brother. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, man, I've experienced this myself, and I was ready for it. | |
| I was in a cybernetic. | ||
| I should say that he's talking about the idea that these shooters are mind-controlled. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| He experienced that himself because he was in a cybernetic program. | ||
| Yes, that makes sense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I'd already been through something similar to what they're doing to these people. | |
| And you can YouTube targeted individuals and just look at the people that are giving their testimony there. | ||
| And it'll show you how this Mindhive technology is creating transhumanists, which all of the media, all of the media is transhumanists. | ||
| You know that the supposed Aurora shooter's dad ran the DARPA program, and the son was in it, and he said he was under mind control. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, look, that is a misdirection. | |
| I guarantee you that everybody has this nanotechnology that's driving these people these days. | ||
| And if you want to see, that's the problem. | ||
| This is going back and forth. | ||
| You've got these different nano-mafias, and everybody tries to pin it on the other people with technology. | ||
| And they'll leave little details in there like that that set people up. | ||
| And it goes back and forth, back and forth. | ||
| And nobody wants to talk, because if it does, it buries all of them. | ||
| And I've had to deal with this. | ||
| This technology came here and tried to turn me into an operative. | ||
| And if you ever want somebody to give you... | ||
| An interview and tell you exactly how this stuff operates, I'll be more than happy to do it, Alex. | ||
| Well, God bless you, brother. | ||
| Give us your info. | ||
| Let me ask Tom Papadou. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| What? | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| I know that's a brush-off, but still. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| But still. | ||
| Yeah, Jesus. | ||
| So there's nano-mafias. | ||
| There are nano-mafias. | ||
| I've always known that. | ||
| Are they small people in mafias, or are they mafias that are small? | ||
| I believe, from context clues, that what he's saying is that everybody has a chip in them. | ||
| Everybody's got a chip in them. | ||
| And then there's these nano-mafias that control certain people. | ||
| Like, this mafia controls a billion people. | ||
| This mafia controls a billion people, and they're at war with each other, using the people whose chips are in them against each other. | ||
| That's what I hear that guy saying, and I'm just like... | ||
| I thought he was just talking about how everybody in the media is transhumanist with... | ||
| Well, that's in there, too. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, yeah. | |
| Of course. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Well, that one I should have taken as read. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| If we got nanomafias, we're all in trouble. | ||
| James Holmes' dad is a DARPA mind control guy, but that's a misdirection. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It is. | ||
| He's part of the nanomafia. | ||
| This guy. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| You know, it would have been fun. | ||
| It would have been fun. | ||
| I want to hear that call on a show in 2009. | ||
| We could have had a great time with that. | ||
| I would rather hear that guy get a show than Barnes. | ||
| So at the beginning of Tom Papert's appearance, he showed up and he said, I've never heard of a shooter who wasn't on Psych Meds. | ||
| And now, as we close the interview with Tom Papert, here's his tone. | ||
| He's changed it ever so slightly the way he's presenting the information. | ||
| It's irresponsible to not point out that every major mass shooter, again, the information has not come out about these two most recent ones, but virtually every single mass shooter has been on some type of prescription mind altering chemical drug, an SSRI, antidepressant, something like that. | ||
| So the first time he was saying, I've never heard of one who wasn't. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I haven't looked into it too deeply. | ||
| Now he's saying virtually all of them. | ||
| Virtually. | ||
| Virtually. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you see the ever so slight... | ||
| Qualify that statement just a little bit. | ||
| But it's also making it much more of a declarative thing, as opposed to, I don't know, that's how this works. | ||
| By degrees, you acclimate to a narrative, and then... | ||
| Set it up, and then say it's yours. | ||
| With a slightly different variation on it, to cover your ass. | ||
| So we got one last clip of Alex here from this fourth show, August 4th. | ||
| And I mentioned this at the beginning of the show. | ||
| He almost doesn't bring up the Dayton shooting at all. | ||
| And I think that's really weird. | ||
| I think it's a little bit weird. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is a little bit weird. | |
| But I have some other thoughts on it, which I'll get into in the next episode as we go over the next episode. | ||
| But as he closes the show, I think I'm only... | ||
| I don't know why I'm playing this clip. | ||
| I think it's upsetting. | ||
| It has nothing to do with the shootings. | ||
| I think this is just deeply upsetting to show that whether or not this is sincere, this is the way Alex wants to present that his mindset is. | ||
| And that, to me, is just deeply, deeply disturbed. | ||
| I'm a selfish person, I'll tell you. | ||
| I need your prayers because the enemy is attacking all my family because they're trying to get me. | ||
| But they're attacking all my family. | ||
| So people will just pray for my family. | ||
| That would be really good. | ||
| I'm not trying to be a wimp here or a victim. | ||
| It's just that my family... | ||
| And I'll be honest. | ||
| If they need to burn, burn them. | ||
| God knows that. | ||
| The enemy knows. | ||
| If my family's got to get burned and all this, I'm not happy about it, but it's going to happen. | ||
| Because I'm going to lose them anyways. | ||
| Better they get burned up right now. | ||
| But they're coming after my family. | ||
| Politically, psychically, it's not fun. | ||
| And I'm not a wimp about this, but I'm glad you're dialed in, brother, because it's really painful to put it on the line. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| We're never going to get across the line if we don't put our family on the line. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I'm fighting for my 10-year-old, that's for sure. | |
| I'm fighting for my son and his future. | ||
| Still talking to a caller. | ||
| That's really fucked up. | ||
| I really, really, really don't like the mindset that's being set there. | ||
| Because whether or not Alex is sincere about that in terms of his family, who knows? | ||
| He could just be bluffing and talking braggadocious because he knows that at the end of the day there aren't real stakes for him. | ||
| He's talking bullshit. | ||
| He's not up against some kind of fucking New World Order, One World Government, some kind of assassin psychically trying to take him out. | ||
| Nothing like that. | ||
| It's all bullshit. | ||
| He knows that all this is is, like, Entertainment and performance. | ||
| He's up against filing Chapter 11 is all he's up against. | ||
| But that's the thing. | ||
| I can't say with any certainty whether or not he believes his own narratives enough to actually be feeling that way or whether it's entirely performative. | ||
| But what I do know is that by talking like that... | ||
| He is making it okay for his audience to feel like that. | ||
| He is normalizing the idea of like, well, if your family's got to be sacrificed, I am a leader in this community, and that is the way I view our struggle. | ||
| And so, you need to get yourself to a point where your families can burn if they got to. | ||
| Yeah, it backs up his whole, or maybe it more aptly fits in with his whole We're fighting a holy war situation. | ||
| Like, if God is involved and God knows everything and your family gets taken away, that means that your family was meant to get taken away and you should still be willing to sacrifice everything because God is there for you and they're going to get their reward in heaven, which is totally not 72 virgins. | ||
| It's a completely different reward in heaven. | ||
| Yeah, I just... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's unsettling. | ||
| It's unsettling to hear stuff like that. | ||
| And I think that this is probably one of the longest times we've spent on a Sunday episode. | ||
| And I think it's because Alex is grappling to try and understand how to proceed after this shooting in El Paso. | ||
| And I think that because of the freshness of it, because of how he operates, we're able to really see a lot of illuminating points about how this propaganda works. | ||
| And I think it's... | ||
| I think it's worthwhile to take the time to get into that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I just keep thinking about how... | ||
| The thought that keeps coming into my head is how many sanctions the U.S. would put on a country with our current government. | ||
| So many fucking sanctions. | ||
| That's an interesting thought. | ||
| Interesting thought. | ||
| Maybe an embargo. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, exactly. | |
| They blockade around us. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So when I was going over this, I was like... | ||
| Fuck, this is so much. | ||
| There's a lot to get into, and a lot of it is side issues to the shooting. | ||
| I'm like, do I not get into this? | ||
| I think that all the side issues kind of relate back a little bit to the mindset that Alex is in and how this is unfolding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| And so I felt like there wasn't really a good option in front of me. | ||
| But I also knew that there was more news that happened by the 5th. | ||
| And Alex would have had to, like... | ||
| Be aware of more of the fullness of the situation, of the multiple events. | ||
| And so I felt like it would be an incomplete thing if we didn't get into the fifth. | ||
| So I was struggling with it, and I thought, like, okay, maybe we should do two episodes and put them both out on Wednesday. | ||
| And what I decided is that's stupid. | ||
| Let's just do a long episode. | ||
| Yeah, if we're going to do two and put them out on the same day, we might as well do one. | ||
| And especially as I got through the fifth, as I started getting into that, I realized that so much of it would be relying on things we talked about in the coverage of the fourth. | ||
| It didn't make sense to do it separately. | ||
| So, anyway. | ||
| I mean, maybe do a couple policy wonk shoutouts now. | ||
| I was thinking about doing interlude music or something like that, but when have we ever... | ||
| Let's all go to the love. | ||
| When have we ever gilded the lily like that? | ||
| No, never. | ||
| So here is Alex starting out the fifth Monday episode. | ||
| And I think it says all you need to know. | ||
| I don't know exactly what's going on in El Paso. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I was like, this music is taking a while. | ||
| And that's not all of it. | ||
| There's a full minute of music at the beginning of the show. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| And I think that I don't really know what's going on in El Paso. | ||
| I think that's a part of a pre-recorded special report. | ||
| Because it then goes into... | ||
| Like a special report. | ||
| So I don't think that Alex just said that and then started one. | ||
| I think they just played a bunch of music. | ||
| Probably Alex was like, yeah, fuck it, play a special. | ||
| I don't want to do the five minutes that doesn't go out on most radio stations. | ||
| Fuck it. | ||
| Play John Bowne's report. | ||
| Bury him. | ||
| So I just like that jam, too. | ||
| It gets me a little amped. | ||
| I do. | ||
| In terms of Alex Jones' intro music, that's up there. | ||
| It's certainly no policy of truth, but it's still pretty good. | ||
| So we get back into this episode. | ||
| Alex comes in. | ||
| He's actually in studio. | ||
| And we got an interesting thing here where Alex once again needs to deflect from the fact that there is this gun violence and these shootings. | ||
| And he does so by pointing again to Mexico. | ||
| Most of the deaths were caused, though, by firearms. | ||
| And Mexico has a complete ban on the civilian ownership of firearms. | ||
| But Mexico has a crime rate and a firearms death rate that is the second highest in the world only after Guatemala that also has a total ban on guns. | ||
| So, you know, Alex is playing really fast and loose here again. | ||
| Like, he's really irresponsible with a lot of these times he cites anything. | ||
| Like, what is he saying? | ||
| Is he saying that the crime rate in Mexico is the second highest in the world or that the gun death rate is? | ||
| Is he saying both? | ||
| Like, it's unclear what he's saying. | ||
| I'm not too positive that I care to compare countries by crime rates. | ||
| I just don't know if that's a really productive statistic to use as a measuring stick, since different countries have different laws, so something that's a crime in country A might not be in country B. Similarly, different countries have variably functional criminal justice systems and varying degrees of systematic corruption, so I'm not positive that comparing crime rates is going to be the best use of our time. | ||
| Also, even if it meant anything, there's no way in hell Mexico's crime rate is the second highest in the world. | ||
| And there's even less of a chance that Guatemala is number one. | ||
| Did Alex forget how many countries there are in the world? | ||
| Did he forget about all the countries in Africa and the Middle East that he loves to demonize so much? | ||
| Like, what is he doing? | ||
| I find it to be a specious and stupid argument to even bring that up just because that is like saying, well, he's not talking about a country, he's talking about its people. | ||
| He's not saying Mexico. | ||
| Has a crime problem. | ||
| He's saying Mexicans have a crime problem. | ||
| Somewhat, but it's weird that it doesn't even track with his other sort of perceptions. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, but I mean now he's... | ||
| It's off the top of the dome, I guess. | ||
| So it's just like, whatever's in front of my face at any given point in time, I can remember. | ||
| And then beyond that, I'm... | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I also have no idea where Alex is getting his numbers from about Mexico having the second highest gun death rate behind Guatemala because he never cites where he's getting it from. | ||
| And I can say that I've poured over data from NPR, tons of news stories, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and none of them come close to matching what he's saying. | ||
| I do not accept his point, which is to say I think he's making that shit up. | ||
| Countries like Honduras have way higher gun death rates than Mexico, and it's totally illegal to buy and own guns there. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| All this is just a ploy he's using to try and argue that we shouldn't take gun violence in the United States seriously. | ||
| And fair play to him, sort of. | ||
| I mean, people absolutely should care a lot about the violence in other countries, and particularly we should care about the ways in which our country's foreign policy is affecting the violence in those countries. | ||
| I think there's a lot of credible, credible voices out there speaking on this topic. | ||
| And I just don't think that Alex, a guy who overtly supports Bolsonaro and has been vocally in favor of regime change in Venezuela, is the sort of... | ||
| guy I want to listen to on that subject. | ||
| Bolsonaro, who came out and said that he hopes all criminals are shot dead in the streets. | ||
| Hey! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Crime rates! | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Also, there's a gross irony that every single fucking thing that Alex is about, everything he's about, is America first. | ||
| Everything is about our sovereignty and fuck the rest of the world until the conversation becomes about gun violence in America and then we gotta deflect. | ||
| So weird. | ||
| So weird. | ||
| Odd. | ||
| So weird. | ||
| So weird. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| So, in this next clip, he begins to finally talk about the shooting in Dayton. | ||
| And, of course, it's just deflections. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But he also is trying really hard to tie the El Paso and Dayton shootings together. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Because that's important for him. | ||
| Now, in every case where they have social media that we're able to see, these shooters are obsessed with shoot-em-up video games. | ||
| They're incels. | ||
| They all basically look the same. | ||
| And they say that they're in two... | ||
| The occult. | ||
| Almost all of them. | ||
| There was another, shooters a few years ago, remember, down by Galveston, south of Houston. | ||
| And he was into Satanism. | ||
| And he was mad at everybody. | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| The individual who's a big Antifa leftist, on his Facebook, on his Instagram, Paul Watson's written a big article about it with screenshots of it, said, I love Satan. | ||
| I hate Christians. | ||
| I hate Trump supporters. | ||
| And so he was wearing a mask and ear protection and all the rest of it, just like the other shooter in El Paso, Texas. | ||
| Isn't that interesting? | ||
| Isn't that interesting? | ||
| So one thing that I find very interesting about these two shootings happening in the span of a few days was that it offered a really interesting glimpse into how different groups of people take in information. | ||
| When the information was coming out in the case of the El Paso shooter, that he'd been involved, you know, there was a lot of posts on 8chan, that he'd released a manifesto clearly laying out that he was doing his shooting as a political statement against the immigrants who he felt were invading the country, there was a response. | ||
| He was a terrorist. | ||
| Well, sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, he was saying himself. | ||
| Putting out that manifesto. | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| Again, we're working under the assumption that the manifesto is 100% real, which I think that there's good reason to believe that to be the case, even if it's not 100% concretely. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So that caveat aside, that was the conversation that people were having. | ||
| There is a clear motivation that was behind it. | ||
| And people on the left were quick to point out that the rhetoric was nearly identical to the rhetoric that's put out by Trump and Fox News. | ||
| And they probably would have said Alex Jones, too, but no one really cares too much about him anymore except us. | ||
| They pointed to a trend of people online, particularly on 8chan and Gab, who are radicalizing each other and how this trend is something that it would be unwise to think stops here unless we take things seriously. | ||
| People in the right-wing world were defensive, as we saw in that last episode with Alex. | ||
| Because, of course, they were. | ||
| But this is an important distinction. | ||
| I don't think that anyone I saw commenting on this was really trying to connect the El Paso shooter to Trump and the world of right-wing propaganda based on superficial similarities. | ||
| It's not like he wore a MAGA hat in one picture and everyone was like, aha, that's why he did it. | ||
| The connection was made because in that manifesto it was clearly expressed why he did the shooting and the reason for doing it is, you know, a central talking point of all these right-wing media outlets. | ||
| The demographic fear propaganda of quote-unquote Americans. | ||
| bread and butter of Alex Jones, Talking Points, I always call Turning Points Talking Points USA. | ||
| Very different. | ||
| Tucker Carlson and countless other outlets. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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The important connection is that the guy, isn't that the guy possibly liked Alex Jones or Paul Joseph Watson. | |
| It's that he was motivated to commit his crime by the same erroneous and white nationalist rhetoric that they make a living off disseminating. | ||
| When the Dayton shooting happened, it was very interesting to see how these very same groups responded to a different set of circumstances. | ||
| Again, I'm not saying any of this as if I'm making a universal claim that every person on each side of the ideological spectrum behaved a certain way, but generally what I saw was one side go 180 and the other side reflect. | ||
| When information started to come out that the shooter in Dayton wasn't a right-wing extremist worried about the invasion, in quotes, of immigrants, and that his politics might have been to the left, the right-wing propagandists who were running interference for Trump a day earlier and saying that just because he loved Trump doesn't mean they're guilty for the shooting immediately flipped the script and started saying that this was an Antifa lunatic and started blaming all leftists. | ||
| The surface-level details were in their favor on this one, so they did what they always did, attack. | ||
| Conversely, what I saw from people on the left was the exact same level of horror and heartbreak that they'd felt for the people in El Paso, but with a layer of introspection. | ||
| There was an acceptance that just because this person is on your side ostensibly politically, it doesn't mean that they might not also be a murderer. | ||
| And I saw people trying to make sense of that. | ||
| Throughout the day, as more information became available, a clearer picture took shape. | ||
| It became increasingly clear that the shooter was a dangerous misogynist. | ||
| A classmate of his from high school told the Daily Beast that she'd called the police after she started getting texts from him about how she was on his, quote, rape list. | ||
| She told the Daily Beast, quote, I was not surprised at all when I heard his name on the news yesterday. | ||
| We all predicted he would do this ten years ago. | ||
| When she'd called the police back in high school, he got a slap on the wrist over the threats. | ||
| And because they weren't taken more seriously and the process didn't go through, he was still able to buy guns. | ||
| For the most part, I saw people taking stock of how even in presumably progressive communities, there's still a lot of unaddressed and under-addressed problems. | ||
| Misogyny is not a right-left problem, and I saw many people taking note of this and discussing it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He might have had an undiscovered manifesto about Medicare for All being behind his shooting, but until that comes to the surface, it just doesn't appear that the Dayton shooting was motivated by his politics, which is a big distinction. | ||
| It's not really a productive discussion just to note who did something. | ||
| It's important to get into the why of it. | ||
| It really feels deeply inappropriate to make these situations analogous the way Alex is doing, trying to make them the same. | ||
| I've researched a ton of killings for this podcast, and the Dayton one kind of fits more into the mold of the non-political versions of this, which is to say that there's a history of violence directed towards women in his past. | ||
| From everything I can tell, that's what's going on here. | ||
| Yeah, it's a truth that we've mentioned over and over and over again, is that there's usually violence against women, if not always. | ||
| Yeah, it's a very high indicator. | ||
| It's dudes. | ||
| It does appear that this is more the story of this. | ||
| And sure, he had left opinions. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's something that we all have to grapple with. | ||
| You have to understand that agreeing on political issues doesn't necessarily mean that everybody is on the same page. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| People in this right-wing propaganda sphere are working hard to make these two shootings equivalent, and honestly watching it has made me sick. | ||
| I know it's not new behavior, but the way they pivoted from defense and deflection about El Paso to feigned moral outrage about Dayton was shocking, even for someone like me, who watches a lot of this stuff. | ||
| It really seems to me that this sort of behavior only really makes sense in the context of these propagandists being fully aware that their rhetoric and worldview that they're perpetuating... | ||
| I didn't see any prominent voices on the left arguing that the Dayton shooter was a false flag because he agreed with some of their politics. | ||
| I didn't see anyone insisting that he must be a staged killer who did what he did to demonize the left so we can't ever pass the Green New Deal. | ||
| This is a very teachable moment because I want to make this abundantly clear. | ||
| These people like Alex do not question things and come up with insanely stupid conspiracy theories because, They're questioning things. | ||
| They do it because they're trying to cover up and deny the real-world consequences that come from having a thriving extremist right-wing media in this country. | ||
| Without that extremist right-wing media, most of these people have nothing, so they need to protect it. | ||
| Like, legitimately, who the fuck is Tom Papert without this white nationalist wave that he's riding? | ||
| That's an extreme example, because even with it, he's nobody. | ||
| But who is Jack Posobiec without all this disinformation game that he's running? | ||
| Who's Jacob Wall? | ||
| Who's Scott Adams? | ||
| I mean, I guess he has Dilbert. | ||
| Who's Carpe Donctum? | ||
| Who are any of these motherfuckers? | ||
| Their relevance and revenues rely on the protection of this extremist right-wing media, and so they protect it no matter what. | ||
| And I don't see that similar behavior being engaged in as it relates to people on the left with the Dayton shooting. | ||
| I see circumstances being dealt with as they are from people except the right-wing propagandists. | ||
|
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|
Yep. | |
| I mean, I don't know what else to say other than, like, at this point in time it's kind of pretty clearly obvious that... | ||
| The right-wing media is complicit in mass shootings. | ||
| In continued mass shootings. | ||
| Maybe ten years ago we could have had a different conversation. | ||
| Maybe that's a different story. | ||
| But at this point in time, there is nothing else to say but they are complicit. | ||
| It's horrifying in many ways. | ||
| And just to be clear, I think I saw some people in the initial right after the Dayton shooting. | ||
| Speculating that it was a white supremacist shooting. | ||
| And I think that part of that is because... | ||
| We just had a white supremacist shooting six hours before. | ||
| Well, and there are often those indicate, like a lot of times, that is the case. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And those people that were making those speculations, generally I saw corrections after it turned out that this wasn't the case. | ||
| And I saw restraint on other people's part in terms of, like, let's not assume what motivations are there until there's more information. | ||
| And I just, I don't, I don't, I do not see that from people who are associated with Infowars. | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| I see intention behind what they're doing. | ||
| And it really bums me out. | ||
| But it is interesting. | ||
| Like, I don't, I don't, I'm... | ||
| I'm horrified about the events that have happened, and I feel terribly for the people in Dayton and El Paso and everywhere else that have been touched by this. | ||
| And I know that there's some listeners that we have who are from those places, and it's just awful. | ||
| And I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It just sucks. | ||
| It is something that I have also been thinking about recently. | ||
| To what extent... | ||
| Have we helped create this rise in white nationalists? | ||
| You and me? | ||
| No, I mean, people... | ||
| Everyone. | ||
| Like, the constant capitulation of, like, okay, we need to stop and think about how the right wing is going to take this. | ||
| That thought process, to me, has been one of the sleeper factors in creating all of this. | ||
| Right-wing power. | ||
| Like, this constant, like, what do they think about? | ||
| What do they think about this? | ||
| You see that now with all the think pieces about, like, well, they could take the problem seriously, but it would be seen as being biased against conservatives. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| All of this stuff is, like, every step of the way, we have enabled them by considering their feelings above their actions. | ||
| How else can we put it other than to say, We don't want to say this because they'll get angry about it. | ||
| And so now we are allowing them... | ||
| Now we're not pushing through gun control. | ||
| At Obama, we don't want to put single health pair forward because they're going to demonize us on the right. | ||
| They're going to demonize us. | ||
| So what we want to do is we want to create a compromise. | ||
| We want to create this compromise where one does not exist for them. | ||
| They are not at a negotiating table. | ||
| They are not negotiating. | ||
| This is not a negotiation. | ||
| This is not something where the right and left can... | ||
|
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It's a hostage crisis. | |
| Yeah, it is an absolute hostage crisis. | ||
| And they are holding all of us hostage. | ||
| And it can't... | ||
| I don't want to go too far, because we've had this conversation, and I've gone too far. | ||
| Although it does seem like when I went too far back then, I was not in the current context. | ||
| You can still be fairly accurate and still be too far. | ||
| You can be both. | ||
| Oh yeah, that's certainly true. | ||
| But it's hard not to... | ||
| Ascribe a certain amount of desire to these people as well. | ||
| It does feel that way. | ||
| It's hard not to say that Mitch McConnell wants another mass shooting. | ||
| But it might not be that that's the primary thing that's desired. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| It's side things that unfortunately cause this. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, it's grim. | ||
| It's grim. | ||
| It's grim shit. | ||
| So in this next clip, Alex talks about the shooter in Dayton's appearance. | ||
| And, I mean... | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Evil, evil eyes. | ||
| Always got that weird, lazy, satisfied look. | ||
| That's the look of demon possession. | ||
| That's the look they've all got. | ||
| That sick, enjoyable look. | ||
| How much he loves Elizabeth Warren. | ||
| How much he loves Bernie Sanders. | ||
| How he wants to kill fascists and he loves Antifa. | ||
| Now he can't wait to go to hell and serve Satan. | ||
| And he hails Satan. | ||
| Almost every one of them, when you dig, is into the same thing. | ||
| I thought they all were the children of psychologists. | ||
| So this is going to be one of the larger overriding things about the Dayton shooting. | ||
| And I'll be honest, Alex doesn't talk about it nearly as much as you might expect him to, based on the fact that it's like, well, he is, you know, very... | ||
| Clearly on his social media accounts indicating that he has left politics. | ||
| It seems like this would be what you want to dance on. | ||
| Instead he turns it into just like it's all about him being into Satan. | ||
| Which is weird to me. | ||
| It's very weird. | ||
| But I think I can make sense of it as we go along. | ||
| But the only thing that I think is super important about that clip is just it's so highly demonstrative of how... | ||
| He operates. | ||
| It's like when there's a right-wing guy who's into Trump and, you know, loved Alex or was a huge Ben Shapiro fan. | ||
|
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|
Doesn't matter. | |
| Doesn't matter. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| Who cares if you love him? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Psych meds. | ||
| It's Antifa. | ||
|
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False flags. | |
| But then you've got this. | ||
| He loves Elizabeth Warren. | ||
| And Satan. | ||
| That behavior is nuts. | ||
| And the thing that you can hear is that level of glee. | ||
| Like, look at me. | ||
| I get to do my fun voices now. | ||
| Yesterday, when it was a right-wing terrorist, I'm not allowed... | ||
| Oh, no, it's a deflection. | ||
| But now, today, I get to be like, he wanted to kill your children, and he wanted to eat you, and that's because he loves Satan. | ||
| You know what else, too? | ||
| He spirals on this episode and starts talking about some stuff that I had never expected to hear. | ||
| It's so weird. | ||
| He's sitting here, and I show up, and I'm expecting... | ||
| Just nothing but dancing on Democrats. | ||
| Hey, there's your boy. | ||
| I expected that kind of childish bullshit. | ||
| And instead, I get this. | ||
| But here's the big issue I'm going to tackle first. | ||
| President Trump came out after the Vegas massacre that was an internal Saudi Arabian civil war. | ||
| They used a CIA U.S. gun dealer to bring guns to the hotel room to get around the fact that they couldn't fly in with the guns. | ||
| There were 10,000 Saudis meeting in Vegas. | ||
| They flew in on their jets from the Saudi military, mainly the Saudi Air Force, was having a convention there. | ||
| Crown Prince was there all nine yards. | ||
| He was in the same hotel. | ||
| He goes believing he's going to sell weapons to them. | ||
| They kill him and then carry out the mass attack as a way to terrorize Trump. | ||
|
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This is ludicrous. | |
| What the fuck did he just say to me? | ||
| I've never heard Alex lay out exactly what his conspiracy theory is about the Las Vegas shooting, and man, it makes sense why he rarely does, because that sounds nuts. | ||
| So 10,000 Saudis and the Crown Prince, MBS, are all staying in the same hotel. | ||
| Well, the 10,000 I don't think are all in the hotel. | ||
| Yeah, that'd be a... | ||
| Big hotel. | ||
| Even the Mandalay Bay. | ||
| Yeah, what are we talking about? | ||
| Quadrupling up? | ||
| Got to get some bunks. | ||
| Quintupling up on these... | ||
| Get some cots. | ||
|
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Yeah, man. | |
| This is part of like a 4chan conspiracy theory that has to do with like an attempted assassination of Prince Mohammed bin Salman that was supposedly carried out and then the Las Vegas shooting was a distraction to get people to... | ||
|
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Like the paddock came and he was supposed to be selling guns Oh, okay. | |
| Right. | ||
| It's nonsense. | ||
| But that's what Alex is sort of cribbing from. | ||
| He's taking that and then getting the assassination of MBS out of it and inserting embarrassing Trump, which is crazy. | ||
| Trump went to Saudi Arabia in May of 2017 and touched the orb. | ||
| The Las Vegas shooting wasn't until October 2017. | ||
| So maybe, oh, get this, maybe? | ||
| What do we got here? | ||
| Maybe the orb was the first attempt to embarrass Trump, but it didn't work, so they had to do the Las Vegas shooting. | ||
| Maybe that's what's going on here. | ||
| That seems a bit like a strange escalation. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I would assume there would be a middle step. | ||
| Touch the orb. | ||
| Between touch the orb and let's kill hundreds of people? | ||
| I think there's a middle ground there. | ||
| What motivation did the Saudi government have to want to embarrass Trump? | ||
| Like when he went to Saudi Arabia, he and the king signed a series of letters of intent to sell Saudi $350 billion in weapons over the course of the next 10 years. | ||
| Trump has been very consistent about being into Saudi Arabia before the Las Vegas shooting, after the Las Vegas shooting, after Jamal Khashoggi got murdered, after Congress blocked $8 billion in weapons sales to Saudi back in May and Trump just ignored it and went ahead with the sale anyway, after Congress passed resolutions blocking him from selling arms to Saudi Arabia and concerned about their actions in Yemen back in July. | ||
| lie and then Trump vetoed it and went ahead with the sale anyway. | ||
| Trump has been very consistent since day one. | ||
| He does not give a fuck. | ||
| There's literally no motive for the Saudis to concoct some elaborate terrorist attack in the United States to embarrass Trump into doing what they This is a theory, like I said, that was circulating on that poll board. | ||
| But it's so completely full of holes that if you find it being discussed in other non-insane message boards, it just gets torn to shreds. | ||
| There are a thousand holes in the story, not least of which, why? | ||
| There are 10,000 holes in the story, Dan. | ||
| If Steven Paddock was a patsy arm dealer, why had he been casing hotel rooms overlooking other music festivals? | ||
| Why did he book rooms and hotels in Chicago, Boston, and another one in Las Vegas, all overlooking big tourist venues? | ||
| If he was just a guy getting some guns for these Saudi folk, why was he doing that shit for? | ||
| It's not like this is even worth exploring. | ||
| Alex would just say that the Saudi Arabians tricked Paddock into going to those hotel rooms so they would leave a compelling paper trail to keep people from finding the real truth. | ||
| And that's why this game is never worth playing. | ||
| I have no interest in... | ||
| You said 10,000 Saudis... | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| Or no, no, no. | ||
| He said... | ||
|
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|
Fuck you. | |
| Fair enough, fair enough, fair enough. | ||
| Yeah, he said 10,000 Saudis and Prince MBS, and I was like, get the fuck out of here. | ||
| I'm not even going to listen. | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that was like, alright, we're off track here. | ||
| Yeah, a little bit. | ||
| We are off track, Alex. | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| We're in uncharted territory if 10,000 Saudis and MBS are hanging out. | ||
| 525,600 Saudis. | ||
| I just want to show off the pipes. | ||
| Well done. | ||
| So that was wild. | ||
| Then Alex just starts rambling about guns and how they're great. | ||
| And he gets into something very interesting. | ||
| I loved this clip. | ||
| Because he's so wrong. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Like, he's just so wrong. | ||
| He couldn't be more wrong. | ||
| But the truth is, you've got a lot better chance of somebody trying to break in your house with a gun in cities where the public's been disarmed. | ||
| Because let me tell you, thieves will break in your car and stuff in most areas of Texas, but they don't come in your house because they'll get their ass blown off. | ||
| Home invasions are very rare here. | ||
| In Chicago, in New York, in Detroit. | ||
| In every leftist area, like Baltimore, Maryland, they are epidemic. | ||
| Oh, my. | ||
| B&E's. | ||
|
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I think that makes no sense. | |
| He's so wrong. | ||
| Like, even on an intuitive level, it makes more sense for the opposite to be true. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| Because if you're in a city, you don't have to... | ||
| Well, there's some interesting things going on here. | ||
| Alex has absolutely no idea what he's talking about. | ||
| He seems to think that burglaries are happening all the time in these blue cities where the public doesn't have guns, but that's entirely just based on his feelings. | ||
| That's not backed up by any proof. | ||
| If he spent ten seconds looking into this, he would realize he is a big dumb asshole. | ||
| First things first, as a Chicagoan, I feel the need to point out that Chicago doesn't even have the highest burglary rate in terms of cities in Illinois. | ||
| That honor goes to Danville, the hometown of Gene Hackman, which is 50 miles closer to Indianapolis than it is to Chicago. | ||
| Danville is in Vermillion County, which voted 62.4% for Trump in 2016. | ||
| So whatever. | ||
| The U.S. city that has the highest rate of burglary is Bastrop, Louisiana, which is in Morehouse Parish, which voted 55% for Trump in 2016. | ||
| Both U.S. senators from Louisiana are Republicans, and five out of the six people they send to the House of Representatives, including Alex's good buddy Steve Scalise, are also Republicans. | ||
| The city in the U.S. with the second highest rate of burglary is Blytheville, Arkansas, which is weirdly in Mississippi County, which voted 53.4% for Trump in 2016. | ||
| Both senators from Arkansas are Republicans, and four out of the four members of the House from the state are also Republicans. | ||
| It is a very red state. | ||
| The third and fourth most burglarized cities in the country are Lumberton and Laurenburg, North Carolina. | ||
| North Carolina was Trump country in 2016, and both senators from North Carolina are Republicans, as are eight of the 11 House members. | ||
| There's actually 13 seats, but two are vacant. | ||
| You can totally have guns in Louisiana and even get concealed carry permits. | ||
| You can absolutely get all the guns you want in Arkansas, and you can totally open carry your gun without a permit. | ||
| You can definitely own guns and concealed carry in North Carolina. | ||
| As securelife.com, the website's security company, they reviewed the 2017 FBI statistics, and you know what they found? | ||
| New York is the state with the least burglaries in the country. | ||
| Chicago's burglary rate isn't even 10% of Bastrop's, and it's actually slightly lower than Austin's. | ||
| Nothing Alex is saying means anything. | ||
| He's just making shit up that feels right to him, and he's making a pretty safe bet that no one in his audience is going to doubt him or have the mental horsepower to realize he's full of shit. | ||
| But he is full of shit. | ||
| He has no idea what he's talking about. | ||
| And more often than not, he's just saying shit with no evidence to support. | ||
| And he's saying it as if it's definitive fact, as he did here. | ||
| You have to be very stupid to trust this dude. | ||
| He's a bluffer. | ||
| He's bluffing. | ||
| You know what's interesting, too? | ||
| I was looking into this, and some of the people who are experts in the field... | ||
| I don't know if you can prove this necessarily, but they theorize that urban areas actually have much lower rates of burglary. | ||
| And one of the reasons is because there's apartment complexes and high-rises, which are much more difficult to commit burglaries in. | ||
| Well, the only thing that makes sense, or the intuitive thought I had, is just there are so many people crammed in together, and B&E... | ||
| It tends to make just enough noise to fuck up everybody else's night. | ||
| That's probably a huge factor, too. | ||
| If you're in the suburbs or if you're in a small town in the middle of nowhere, there's a yard between you and your neighbor. | ||
| You see that fifth floor up there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How's anyone going to break into that? | ||
| No shit. | ||
| You're going to have to go through three layers. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's much easier to break into something that's just a single unit on a ground floor than it is... | ||
| So there's tons and tons of... | ||
| Like, just dwellings that are super elevated or behind multiple walls. | ||
| Well, and even our houses are, a ton of houses share a fucking wall, almost. | ||
| You know, there's a foot of space in between each house. | ||
| Or there's tons of buildings that have, like, entrances that are only accessible through courtyards. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which make it, like, why would someone break in? | ||
| You're completely exposed in this area. | ||
| And there's always somebody awake and there's always a light on and there's always somebody looking. | ||
| Or at least you assume there is. | ||
| That doesn't mean there aren't any burglaries in the city or anything like that. | ||
| But the rates that Alex thinks are happening in these, I mean, let's be fair, mostly predominantly non-white populations. | ||
| Or at least he associates with non-white populations. | ||
| Baltimore, Chicago. | ||
| Cities. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I mean, that's the perception that he has, but it's not true. | ||
| It's based on him just making things up on what he assumes is the case. | ||
| Which, like, honestly, behaving like that kind of puts a little bit of an asterisk around most of the things you say. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If you can that confidently deliver something you're making up, man, you are a suspect. | ||
| Well, it's because he thinks that... | ||
| If so, and I can kind of see where he might feel confident when he's making that up, is if you think that Chicago is murder city USA. | ||
| Then I'm guessing he probably just assumes that if Chicago has a high rate of murder, then it must have a high rate of every single possible crime available. | ||
| We're just crime-ridden, doing everything. | ||
| Everybody in Chicago is committing crimes all the time. | ||
| If that's the case, then I would really love for him to say, I assume Chicago has higher crime burglary rates. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because that would be honest. | ||
| Because the fact is, it doesn't. | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| So, go fuck yourself, Alex. | ||
| On behalf of Chicago, go fuck yourself. | ||
| For so many reasons. | ||
| Go eat a hot dog with ketchup. | ||
|
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|
We'll catch you on Damon and Fullerton, and we'll fuck you up. | |
| Meet me at the Six Corners. | ||
| Wait, which one? | ||
| The new Six Corners or the old Six? | ||
| Fuck you, which one? | ||
| What, the old town? | ||
| What are we talking about? | ||
| The original Sears Six Corners? | ||
|
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|
Meet me at Willis Tower. | |
| Doesn't exist. | ||
| I don't do a good Chicago accent. | ||
| So both of those last two clips were like, what are we doing? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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|
Las Vegas shooting conspiracy, okay. | |
| Burglaries are high in cities, wrong, okay. | ||
| This next clip blew my fucking mind. | ||
| It legitimately, I was like, Alex, what are you saying? | ||
| What are you saying? | ||
| He seems to be expressing a desire to go back to a bygone age. | ||
| But that's not... | ||
| Out of the norm for him. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| He wants a farm. | ||
| He wants to retire. | ||
| He wants to live in the forest. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But the specifics of the context in which he's talking about it make me very upset. | ||
| There always has been these other people. | ||
| But in the old days, we dealt with them. | ||
| The village would recognize them. | ||
| And the first time they got caught doing something weird and sick, well, you know what the village would do. | ||
| And usually their parents would even join in beating their brains out. | ||
| People didn't put up with this type of crap. | ||
| The old days, you acted sick and weird, said you wanted to kill kids, got caught doing something weird. | ||
| Well, where'd Bob go? | ||
| Well, nobody knows where old Bob went. | ||
|
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All right. | |
| The last ten shooters or so all said they hated Christians and that they loved Satan, except the El Paso shooter. | ||
| Because they've expunged all his stuff and then putting fake stuff up about how he's a Trump supporter. | ||
| You know, that's admitted that his social media was anti-Trump. | ||
| Democrat. | ||
| I mean, there's screenshots of it. | ||
| It's confirmed, but it didn't matter. | ||
| It all got put out there. | ||
| It all got force-fed on Saturday. | ||
| We've been banned from the larger Internet. | ||
| We couldn't counter it. | ||
| And so now, it is the accepted fact that the supposed Lone shooter in El Paso, Texas, was a Trump supporter, even though we have all the screenshots from his social media, and they changed it. | ||
| We ought to be asking, who changed it within 30 minutes? | ||
| Who was able to do that? | ||
| Anybody. | ||
| Anybody can do that. | ||
| Literally anybody who knows how to use the internet. | ||
| It's not like you need a super hacker. | ||
| No, it's a change of my life thing. | ||
| And that's the other thing, too. | ||
| I think we didn't do a good enough job of really calling him out on this, is presenting my life as social media is absurd. | ||
| That means something very different. | ||
| It's closer to the white pages, as I understand it. | ||
| Yeah, kind of. | ||
| A profile. | ||
| Not the white papers. | ||
| No. | ||
| But like a phone book. | ||
| Could be the white papers. | ||
| We called it that. | ||
| So yeah, and this is why I wanted to really drive home at the beginning of the episode how central that is to so much of his suspicions. | ||
| Because now anything that happens can be called into question because of this misunderstanding that he has about the My Life profile being changed. | ||
| He can get away from any kind of the assertions that this manifesto is his. | ||
| He can get away from any indications that he had similar beliefs to the right wing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's very useful. | ||
| The very convenient misunderstanding of how my life works. | ||
| Almost too convenient. | ||
| Almost suspiciously convenient. | ||
| Now I want to talk about the rest of that clip. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| Alex is so goddamn fucked up. | ||
| Every time I think I've heard his weirdest position, he goes and swings for the fences and catches me off guard with something like, back in the day, the village would kill people before it gets to this point. | ||
| That's fucked up. | ||
| Haven't you read The Lottery, Dan? | ||
| Or The Fucking Crucible? | ||
| The Lottery was like random, though, right? | ||
| So there was a part of me that was inclined to just say, hey, look at this weirdo who thinks it's a good idea for communities to kill people who break their local mores. | ||
| But I think there's something this this is so weird that it deserves a little more analysis. | ||
| What Alex isn't mentioning is that in these villages he's talking about, presumably in the early days of America that he fetishizes so much. | ||
| These rules were straight-up theocratic. | ||
| In the early 1600s in Virginia, it was illegal to not attend church twice a day. | ||
| You had to attend church twice a day. | ||
| If you broke that law three times, you'd be enslaved for six months rowing boats. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Humans are stupid. | ||
| These early systems of village justice were not at all what Alex imagines they were, where the community just gets together and deals with the problem early and then everyone seals their lips like they're in La Costa Nostra. | ||
| La Costa Nostra. | ||
| More often than not, the people who were the targets of community justice were such because the community just thought they were weird, probably because they were gay, or just they didn't fit into the insanely rigid social structure that was enforced at the time. | ||
| The Salem Witch Trials are a great example of this getting way out of hand. | ||
| Like many of the victims of that chapter in our history were just women who didn't play by the repressive rules of the patriarchal system in the villages that they lived in. | ||
| One of the people who was killed was a woman who married a slave. | ||
| Another was a woman who just didn't want to go to church. | ||
| Neither of these women posed a threat to others in the way that a mass shooter does today, and killing them was not an act that protected anything other than the repressive status quo. | ||
| Many groups like the First Nations and Maori, they had in place systems of restorative justice on the community level, but they didn't involve secretly disappearing people. | ||
| So I think that might be a little different than what Alex is talking about, although an interesting idea that they have. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| Unfortunately, Toni Morrison died. | ||
| Rest in peace. | ||
| She is amazing, but the quote that's going around recently, to paraphrase, is something along the lines of... | ||
| If you need to tear somebody else down to feel tall, then you have a problem. | ||
| And it seems like white people need to do that. | ||
| Maybe they have a problem. | ||
| Is that a quote? | ||
| No, I paraphrased it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, fair enough. | ||
| If you take what Alex is saying as plainly as you can, I think he's saying that we should go back to a system where we kill people we're suspicious of so they don't end up becoming a problem later. | ||
| And I gotta say... | ||
| That's an insanely big swing for someone who claims that one of his favorite parts of Western culture is due process. | ||
| It sounds kind of like that might just be a buzzword for him. | ||
| Back in the old days, we didn't have due process, and it was easier to solve problems. | ||
| I love due process, but we could do away with it. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do away with it, process. | ||
| He yells about due process all the fucking time, and now he's like... | ||
| Yearning for the days when the mob would kill weird people. | ||
| Yeah, I'm confused about why he loves mob rules. | ||
| And their parents would bash their brains in along with them. | ||
| Like, what the fuck? | ||
| Get out of here. | ||
| No shit. | ||
| Get out. | ||
| So one of the things about doing the Monday episode as well as the Sunday and looking at both of them was, first of all, the dissatisfaction with Alex not talking about both shootings on Sunday. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| And then secondarily, I knew that 8chan had their issue. | ||
| By Monday. | ||
| So Alex would be aware of that. | ||
| I mean, that's where he gets a lot of his information from, both 4chan and 8chan. | ||
| So I knew he'd be kind of bent out of shape about it. | ||
| He doesn't seem nearly as mad about it as I expected. | ||
| It's very weird. | ||
| I mean, obviously he's opposed to them not being around. | ||
| Yeah, free speech, censored, etc. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| And he's misrepresenting the story about what happened, and so that means that he cares a little. | ||
| That's a weird way to put it. | ||
| He cares, so he lies. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's an accurate way to put it. | ||
| It's a weird thing to be true, but I think it is true. | ||
| So here's him getting into that story. | ||
| The fact that this individual supposedly uploaded this manifesto to 8chan, and now 8chan's been taken down off of their internet provider, is beyond dangerous, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| And next they're talking about taking away URLs as well, as if 8chan caused... | ||
| This individual to go and do this. | ||
| It's just preposterous. | ||
| I think there's an interesting conversation to be had there that's not preposterous. | ||
| But Alex is misrepresenting the situation here with 8chan a little bit. | ||
| For one, there is a real problem with dudes getting radicalized on that site. | ||
| And there's a very consistent pattern of it that we've been seeing. | ||
| Beyond that, a ton of Alex's fake information he just pulls directly from 4chan and 8chan. | ||
| So making it a little bit harder for him to find that low-hanging fruit might actually be a good thing for him. | ||
| Like, maybe if he has to work for it a little bit more, it'll bring out that fighting spirit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That old get him back in mid-season form. | ||
| Or he'll quit even sooner. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| What happened with 8chan wasn't that they had their site taken down. | ||
| Were the government to do that, I would agree that that would probably be a little bit of a bad precedent to set, and I don't know how in favor of it I would be. | ||
| I would like the end result, but I don't think I'd like the process. | ||
| In reality, what happened... | ||
| Was that Cloudflare, an internet security company, decided to stop working with 8chan, leaving them with no protection from hackers and denial-of-service attacks. | ||
| Most websites have security services they can work with, that they do work with, and that allows most sites to regularly not get disrupted all that often. | ||
| Those websites have terms of service, though. | ||
| So if you're running a WordPress page and the content is outside what they allow, WordPress will take down your blog. | ||
| 8chan doesn't have really any rules. | ||
| So, in essence, their relationship with Cloudflare was becoming a thing where Cloudflare was just protecting a website where increasingly dangerous and illegal things were going on, and no one was doing anything about it. | ||
| Cloudflare has no obligation to protect 8chan, and they decided that they'd had enough and severed their relationship. | ||
| That's their right to decide. | ||
| After the Unite the Right rally, Cloudflare dropped their services from being used by the Daily Stormer. | ||
| This is something they can do, and honestly should do. | ||
| If 8chan or the Daily Stormer exist as entirely toxic, hate-filled spaces, no company should be forced to work with them and provide services that allow them to maintain their space as long as there are other companies in that market space. | ||
| So it's not like a monopoly. | ||
| It's not a monopoly, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I get what you're saying. | ||
| No one man should have all that power. | ||
| Yeah, and that has nothing to do with even protecting their free speech. | ||
| It's just more of a, this is bad. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| One of the only things that allows these chans to exist and operate the way they do is intense security and anonymity protection. | ||
| It's created a place where users are free to throw out racial slurs, cheer on mass shootings, plan mass shootings, call for genocide, and whatever other horrible shit you can imagine. | ||
| A lot of it's probably insincere, but the single thing that makes it possible is anonymity. | ||
| Without a company like Cloudflare providing that anonymity protection, the entire game falls apart. | ||
| People will be like, uh-oh. | ||
| This comment could be traced back to me being a real racist pile of shit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's what protects them. | ||
| It's for people who can still feel shame. | ||
| In the real world. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Pretty soon after Cloudflare dropped them, A-Chain announced they'd gotten security from BitMitigate. | ||
| But that quickly fell apart when it was found out that BitMitigate was really just selling services from another company, Voxility, who said, fuck that shit, and pulled their services. | ||
| It's not a coincidence that BitMitigate is also the company that came in to protect the Daily Stormer after they were kicked off Cloudflare. | ||
| I'm going to guess they would say it's a protecting free speech thing, but I don't buy that shit for a second. | ||
| Anyway, the situation as it stands now, as best as I can tell, is that 8chan doesn't have solid security in a company that will work for them and work with them. | ||
| And that could effectively be the end of their effectiveness as a radicalization hub. | ||
| We'll see, though. | ||
| Some other shithead could come along and work with them. | ||
| Some other company could agree to do it. | ||
| And may have already by the time we're recording this and put this out. | ||
| Or a whole new hub could pop up in short order. | ||
| For the time being, I think it's an effective disruption of the process. | ||
| And while that doesn't necessarily solve the problem, I think it's probably a positive thing. | ||
| That's my feeling on it. | ||
| De-platforming is a good first step. | ||
| It's never a bad idea. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's an action. | |
| At the very least, it's fucking something, because nobody else is doing a goddamn thing. | ||
| So, we've seen bad work on Alex's part so far. | ||
| I mean, the Sunday show is full of... | ||
| A lot of nonsense. | ||
| But so far, we've seen Alex misreporting this story. | ||
| We've heard him read. | ||
| The DAPA versus DARPA thing is just... | ||
| That was on Sunday. | ||
| Unexcusable. | ||
| Unexcusable. | ||
| Wipe it off the block. | ||
| I can't wipe that off the block. | ||
| Well, I mean, for the purposes of this next clip. | ||
| Well, for Jenny, never mind. | ||
| So, I mean, he's talking about Mexico's crime rate in nonsensical ways. | ||
| He's rambling and just making stuff up about burglary rates in America. | ||
| And so it's really funny when he says something like this. | ||
| We're going to go to break and we come back. | ||
| I've done too much preparation for this show. | ||
| My head is spinning. | ||
| I don't just put these hundreds of articles out here as a prop where, look, I've got all the research. | ||
| I learned a long time ago that computers can crash. | ||
| They change stories. | ||
| They remove stories. | ||
| So I've been on air 25 years. | ||
| For 25 years, used to it took like a couple minutes to load an article. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| 25 years ago? | ||
| So I learned that if I got an article loaded, I would print it so I don't have to read it. | ||
| Also, if you hear that popping and stuff, I've noticed that lately in his present-day episodes, the sound quality is so much worse. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know what the deal is, but his present-day episodes have high-level quality problems. | ||
| It's not your earphones. | ||
| It's not us. | ||
| That's on his end. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, it's pretty weak. | ||
| That's sad. | ||
| He goes on to ramble about how people at old radio stations got mad at him for using all the printer paper, so he bought his own printer. | ||
| Why are you telling us this? | ||
| There's no way that those are not... | ||
| Props? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No shit. | ||
| They're maybe, maybe too deep. | ||
| Maybe too deep on an article. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No shit. | |
| The rest is blank paper. | ||
| No shit. | ||
| Come on, Alex. | ||
| Just admit it. | ||
| In this next clip, Alex is complaining about Trump. | ||
| Trump had been talking about putting red flag laws in place where people who are red flags on this maybe make it so they can't get guns. | ||
| At this point, you could have told me he was trying to outlaw red flags as a way to help gun control. | ||
| And I'd be like, of course he is. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| So Alex is not into that. | ||
| But he's also not nearly as mad about that as you might expect. | ||
| I thought for sure I'd tune in this show and he'd be like, Trump's on thin fucking ice. | ||
| He's not. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| He seems totally fine with the whole thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| If Obama had done that, we might actually be in a civil war right now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Alex is like, this is unnecessary because there's already this sort of thing. | ||
| He said, I love Satan. | ||
| Here's a little tip. | ||
| When someone says, I love Satan and can't wait to die and go to hell, that's what he said, and I'm going to kill people, you don't need some red flag act that gets rid of due process. | ||
| Look at that guy. | ||
| Pale. | ||
| So, real quick, I just want to be clear. | ||
| Alex is talking about, like, you can use the Baker Act to put these people, you know, and to that point, people tried. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The people who are the targets, the young women who are the targets of his harassment in high school tried. | ||
| So, Alex, I will say, on paper, yes, there are things in place that can help in these sorts of situations. | ||
| But the conversation is about how these things don't work, and we need to take this more seriously, and possibly that can be done through further legislation. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But anyway, would you believe that Alex spins his wheels a while? | ||
| And then kind of turns this into ranting about himself. | ||
|
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|
Sure. | |
| Have that distant stare like a little spoiled rotten baby. | ||
| Probably jerks off 50 times a day. | ||
| I mean, we know the exact M.O. of these dudes. | ||
| Women run from them. | ||
| They're creeps. | ||
| Because I guarantee you daddy wasn't home and nobody ever beat his ass. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I hate you so much. | ||
| I mean, that guy needed to have his ass kicked royal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I guarantee he was a bully when he was... | ||
| You were a bully! | ||
| I love the fake origin story they put out on me. | ||
| Totally made up all eyes that I was a bully. | ||
| That I was beating up people smaller than me. | ||
| No, I was bullied. | ||
| And I beat the living hell out of people once I hit puberty. | ||
| That's what happened. | ||
| Why are you doing this? | ||
| Like, why did you start ranting about the Dayton shooter and then turn it into, like, he needs to get his ass kicked? | ||
| He was probably a bully. | ||
| Everyone says, I'm a bully! | ||
| I was bullied! | ||
| Why? | ||
| Stop making this about yourself! | ||
| Everything is about him. | ||
| He's a malignant narcissist. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| So, this shooter in Dayton, and also the one in El Paso, chose some accessories to use during their shootings. | ||
| And Alex believes that he knows why. | ||
| You know this Ohio thing was a copycat. | ||
| Dress the same, wore ear protection, everything. | ||
| Because they're used to wearing the headphones when they play the shoot-em-up games, and he was into that too. | ||
| Oh, great. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| Great. | ||
| We're not talking about video games. | ||
| No, we're not. | ||
| I'm done. | ||
| If anybody's like video games, then they're done. | ||
| There's no argument. | ||
| We're not arguing. | ||
| This argument was settled ten years ago. | ||
| Go back in fucking time and do it. | ||
| I'm not doing that. | ||
| I present that without comment. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just, that's what Alex, that's the level he's operating on. | ||
| Oh, I wasn't talking about, I wasn't talking to you specifically. | ||
| Oh, no, I thought that was a suggestion that I was going to say, okay, we're not talking about this. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| So earlier on Sunday's episode, Alex brought up the babies and incubators, which he blames on the left, strangely. | ||
| And, you know, that's sort of the justification for why you get to question things. | ||
| And, again, he's not questioning things. | ||
| He's creating misinformation. | ||
| It's very clear. | ||
| He brings back up the babies in incubators, and this is fucking fascinating to me. | ||
| We have a right and a duty to look at every event as if it could be staged. | ||
| Take the babies in the incubators. | ||
| Again, 1990. | ||
| Desert Shield. | ||
| The buildup before Desert Storm. | ||
| The offensive. | ||
| And they came and testified that they saw babies by the hundreds pulled out, their brains bashed out. | ||
| The girl had never been to Kuwait. | ||
| None of it happened. | ||
| She was the daughter of a PR firm controlled by the Saudis. | ||
| She was four years older than they said. | ||
| She was 18. She wasn't 14. It was a lie. | ||
| We've talked about the specifics of the babies and incubators narrative on a past episode, so I don't want to go all the way back deeply into it, but I want to point out just a few things here that are a huge problem. | ||
| There's a lot of problems with the 1990 testimony that was given about the Iraqi security forces stealing incubators from Kuwaiti hospitals and leaving children to die. | ||
| I'll not pretend that there aren't. | ||
| However, it's woefully simplistic for Alex to pretend that the testimony was the only reason George H.W. Bush began the Gulf War. | ||
| I'm sure it was a piece of it, and while it's an incredibly complex situation, it does appear that some of that testimony was not accurate. | ||
| All of that's fine, and if Alex wanted to discuss the testimony on those terms, I think there would be a great use of his time. | ||
| That might be something an actual skeptic might do. | ||
| Someone like Alex would prefer to embellish and exaggerate things in order to use this example to help justify his unjustifiable position that he deserves to have a knee-jerk reaction to every act of white people committing terrorist acts, assuming that they're somehow fake. | ||
| That clip we listened to right there was 31 seconds long, and in it Alex said seven completely not true things. | ||
| One, the girl who gave the testimony was named Nira al-Sabah, and she had most certainly been to Kuwait. | ||
| Two, her father was not a member of a PR firm. | ||
| Her father was Saud al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. | ||
| Three, the PR firm in question was Hill and Knowlton, which was working with a group called Citizens for a Free Kuwait. | ||
| I can find no evidence to support the claim that Hill and Knowlton was controlled by the Saudis. | ||
| Four, there's no evidence that she was 18. No one claimed she was 14. She was 15. Six, in her testimony, Nira doesn't specify how many babies were taken out of incubators, but in written testimony later that wasn't under oath, she put the number at 15, which is far lower than Alex's bullshit about hundreds. | ||
| Seven, nowhere in her testimony does Nira say that the babies' brains were bashed in. | ||
| She just said that they took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor. | ||
| That is a staggering amount of details to have wrong in such a short burst of words. | ||
| And some of this may sound pedantic, but I really need to stress that even when Alex kind of has a good point, he's wrong. | ||
| It's pathological for him. | ||
| Even when the circumstances of something are in his wheelhouse and a story should be a slam dunk for him, he can't resist the urge to lie about it and make it even more sensational. | ||
| Part of that is just that Alex doesn't know much about the stories he's telling. | ||
| That's a big part of it. | ||
| But another thing, he's like a Jesus lizard. | ||
| He's only able to stay above water and skip from spot to spot on the surface because he has no conception of the depth of the water. | ||
| If the Jesus lizard made any use of anything other than the surface of the lake, it would sink. | ||
| And the same is true of Alex. | ||
| Both make a great, impressive spectacle, but there's so much more of the water that they're missing. | ||
| And as I read that, I'm like, was I high when I wrote that? | ||
| I'm sorry I gave you a face. | ||
| I gave you a face. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I was feeling it. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was like, I must have written that at three in the morning. | |
| I stand by it. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I get the analogy. | ||
| I do. | ||
| It works. | ||
| So anyway, Alex, he doesn't know anything about this case, or if he does, he's intentionally exaggerating and misleading things because it helps him make his claim that it's more justified for him to quote-unquote question everything, which is flimsy. | ||
| So in this next clip, Alex, man, he's just all over the place. | ||
| But I actually, I like this clip. | ||
| I'll be honest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I like this clip. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You know, they have Hollywood movies like Wag the Dog. | ||
| Bill Clinton liked that movie so much with Dustin Hoffman and Willie Nelson. | ||
| Point of order. | ||
| That's not the billing on it. | ||
| Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Maybe Dennis Leary third. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I would... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Who's the lady in... | ||
| Anne Heche. | ||
| Anne Heche gets top billing over fucking Willie Nelson. | ||
| Get out of here just because you know him. | ||
| That he staged it. | ||
| A year after it came out, exactly that, in real time, in the same area. | ||
| So if you missed that, because we paused in the middle, he's arguing that Bill Clinton loved Wag the Dog so much that he decided to do it. | ||
| And man, I love Wag the Dog. | ||
| I think it's a fantastic movie. | ||
| Although, I will say I haven't seen it since I was 19 or so. | ||
| Yeah, I haven't seen it in a long, long time. | ||
| I'll be the first to admit there's a lot of similarities between the situation depicted in the movie and some of the details of the Lewinsky affair. | ||
| There's also a bunch of differences that you need to wrestle with if you want to make this kind of argument. | ||
| The first is that in the movie, the war is fake. | ||
| They don't bomb anyone, actually. | ||
| It's just all for show. | ||
| If Alex is arguing that Clinton faked bombings because he loved Wag the Dog so much, even though he would have to know that people would say, hey, are you wagging the dog right now? | ||
| Legitimately, Clinton's Secretary of Defense was asked about Wag the Dog under oath. | ||
| This is a really popular movie in 97. It's not like Clinton would see that movie and be like, we're going to do exactly this and no one will ever put the pieces together. | ||
| I would argue that the fact that there are many surface-level similarities makes it less likely that the bombings were an attempt to change the media coverage, since that plan would be painfully transparent and there was a cool movie with a catchy name people could use to be like, hey, that's what you're doing. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| Now, that said, the bombing that the military carried out around the time of Lewinsky, when Monica Lewinsky testified in front of a grand jury, the bombing was in Sudan. | ||
| In Wag the Dog, they put on a fake war in Albania because they know that no one knows anything about Albania. | ||
| Alex says that Clinton carried out an attack in the same area. | ||
| And I should tell you that Albania and Sudan are not in the same area. | ||
| Ah, a few thousand miles, give or take, is no big deal. | ||
| About two thousand. | ||
| No, give or take, no big deal. | ||
| Albania is in the Mediterranean, whereas Sudan is south of Egypt and Africa in the Sahara Desert. | ||
| Not very similar or close. | ||
| As Alex sits in his studio. | ||
| Doing his show. | ||
| He's closer to Nicaragua. | ||
| He's closer to Haiti than Albania is to Sudan. | ||
| And I would not say his studio is in the same area as Nicaragua. | ||
| Ridiculous. | ||
| Nonsensical. | ||
| But I love that. | ||
| I love that. | ||
|
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|
Alex lives in a world where he thinks that Bill Clinton saw Wag the Dog and is like, let's do it! | |
| Oh, God. | ||
| Love it. | ||
| You have to take those moments because everything else sucks so much. | ||
| A brief moment of unfiltered levity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So in this next clip, he plays Report from The Weeknd. | ||
| This is from The Weeknd, right? | ||
| This is his Monday show, but he's playing a clip from The Weeknd. | ||
| And keep in mind... | ||
| A clip from his own show on The Weeknd? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And I think... | ||
| This is just trash. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Trash. | ||
| They act like this is somehow bad. | ||
| I'm very proud of what I said here. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| NBC reports Patrick Crucius, the leftist savior who just shows up right at the moment when the left is being exposed and our whole agenda is falling apart. | ||
| And when Trump is defending our borders, supposedly as evil racists, right as Antifa announces nationwide funded by Alexander Soros that... | ||
| They are going to be marching across the U.S. and meeting September 1st in like 26 days in El Paso to crush the Border Patrol and to lay siege to them. | ||
| These are quotes. | ||
| They put out graphics showing American flags burning. | ||
| They put out graphics showing dead ICE officers. | ||
| And I said, what are they planning to stage? | ||
|
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I said this on Friday's show. | |
| What are they planning to stage and on Thursday's show? | ||
| What are they planning to stage ahead of Antifa showing up right on time at El Paso so that it looks legitimate when they attack physically the ICE agents and call them Nazis and say kids are drinking out toilets and the people are being killed when they're actually coming here from the countries that are collapsing. | ||
| The reason I play as much of that is because I want to make this abundantly fucking clear. | ||
| Alex is pretending that he's questioning things, and that's why the media is afraid of him existing. | ||
| That is not questioning things. | ||
| That is a narrative. | ||
| He has a narrative. | ||
| And that was during the weekend. | ||
| That isn't on Monday's show. | ||
| That is his knee-jerk reaction, is a formed narrative that has people to blame, it has villains, it has a storyline, it has a reason, it has a... | ||
| Baked in false narrative about this Antifa tour that's going to end in El Paso. | ||
| This is what he does. | ||
| This is not questioning things. | ||
| This is disinformation and propaganda. | ||
| But it's not good propaganda. | ||
| It's evil. | ||
| This is evil propaganda. | ||
| Well, I mean, it's not just evil propaganda. | ||
| It's not even good evil propaganda. | ||
| It's bad evil propaganda. | ||
| But it works, man. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's a problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That is a problem. | ||
| So, you know, we got big guests so far. | ||
| We had Tom Papert. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We had Tom Papert. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| We had that one guy who called in and he had nano-mafia. | ||
| I don't count him as a guest. | ||
| I feel like he's a guest. | ||
| Future employee. | ||
| And now we get to guest we're more familiar with who's just as much of a shithead as Tom Papert, and that is the Health Ranger. | ||
| No! | ||
| He's not allowed. | ||
| Mike Adams. | ||
| He's not allowed. | ||
| This is one of Mike Adams' theories that he has going about these shootings. | ||
| And man, I want to say this before we start it. | ||
| I'm going to say it after we end it. | ||
| This dude is fucking stupid. | ||
| People were really shot and killed. | ||
| None of us are saying that that didn't happen. | ||
| What we're asking the question is, why was this violence taking place, or why was this person dispatched to this Walmart in El Paso to carry out this shooting? | ||
| And if he was on a suicide mission, why was he wearing hearing protection? | ||
| Why was he wearing eye pro and ear pro, as we say in the shooting community? | ||
| You only do that if you expect to survive. | ||
| Which is why I don't believe that his so-called manifesto is real at all. | ||
| I think the manifesto... | ||
| Well, let's explain how this works. | ||
| You think you're going to a drill, or you think you're taking part of something because you're in the Q movement, and Trump's got you as a secret agent, and you get set up in the process of it, then you get given electroshock therapy a few hours later, and you never remember what happened. | ||
| Oh, that's how it works. | ||
| I think Alex is also eating lunch. | ||
| So, that's stupid. | ||
| I want to say, I promise I was going to say this, so Mike is fucking stupid. | ||
| And I want to say this, he is a complete goober. | ||
| Listen to this dumb fuck. | ||
| Look, this is insane. | ||
| These dudes present themselves as gun experts and passionate about the gun world, and yet here they are trying to pretend that the only reason someone would wear ear and eye protection is if they expected to survive. | ||
| Yeah, it's definitely not because you would want to continue to be able to see and... | ||
| That's part of it. | ||
| Like, legitimately, how fucking stupid do they think the people they're talking to are? | ||
| Just off the top of my head, I can come up with a bunch of reasons why someone who expected to die would still wear ear and eye protection. | ||
|
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How about they're used to doing so? | |
| Is it outside the realm of possibility that these are people who shot regularly so they're in the habit of practicing appropriate safety measures? | ||
| Is that seriously not even a possibility? | ||
| What about comfort? | ||
| Even if you expect to die, that doesn't mean you want to risk blowing out your eardrums right before you do. | ||
| Or how about the notion that these dudes knew that they would be more effective carrying out a shooting with ear and eye protection? | ||
| That's what I was thinking. | ||
| It's kind of like some kind of a kickback or powder or whatever gets into your eyes mid-shooting. | ||
| That's going to limit your efficacy, as will ringing pain in your ears. | ||
| It's entirely possible that these guys just saw using ear and eye protection as being part of maximizing the damage they'd be able to inflict because they would be protected from the little things that could derail their shooting prematurely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| For Mike Adams to argue with a straight face that using eye and ear protection is somehow proof that the El Paso shooter expected to live is a gigantic leap of logic. | ||
| He hasn't proven his premises, and he hasn't earned his conclusion. | ||
| He's just talking shit, and he knows he's talking shit. | ||
| The reason the possible other reasons they might wear protection aren't discussed is because Mike and Alex have a specific conclusion they need to get to. | ||
| The misinformation is towards a desired goal, not some kind of skeptical analysis of things. | ||
| That's just abundantly clear. | ||
| So now they're presenting the idea that you have these guys who are brainwashed or something, and so they end up... | ||
| The globalists have dispatched them there. | ||
| That's now the operating function that they're going off of. | ||
| And Alex is kind of being rushed out to break, but he makes reference of something that has to do with the technique and the system that the globalists use. | ||
| And it kind of piqued my interest, because I hadn't heard him mention this before. | ||
| We're going to break down how they set people up on the other side, the Arlington Road system. | ||
| Stay with us. | ||
| He's like, oh shit, he's about to break something real. | ||
| I'd never heard this discussed before. | ||
| And then it kind of disappointed me because when he came back from the commercial break, he explained it and here's what it's all about. | ||
| Folks need to know that the left's tools to start a race war. | ||
| That's the race in the hole. | ||
| All the movies, all the Netflix, all the TV shows are race war, race war, race war. | ||
| And so I think Trump's right to come out and say, hey, white supremacism is terrible, even though we know this guy's a leftist and the other guy's an admitted Antifa member that loves Satan. | ||
| I get why Trump's doing this politically. | ||
| It's still very dangerous with his base to talk about getting rid of due process with red flag laws. | ||
| But, again, Arlington Road came out, I don't know, 15 years ago. | ||
| Jeff Bridges. | ||
|
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There it is. | |
| He's a libertarian professor. | ||
| All right. | ||
| He's a critic of the government. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Having too much power. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| And there's this weird shadowy right-wing group. | ||
| The movie pretty much, it's shadow government CIA. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| They set him up. | ||
| He believes he's stopping the truck bomb. | ||
| But all they really do is trick him to get in there when it goes off so they can then put it on the news to make it look like he's a terrorist. | ||
| And look, it's a respected professor that did this. | ||
| Let's go to the audio. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| So then Alex just plays Minutes. | ||
| Of the end of Arlington Road. | ||
| Of course it's a fucking movie. | ||
|
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The Arlington Road system is a movie. | |
| I was thinking that he was genuine. | ||
| I was like, oh, I haven't heard about the Arlington Road system. | ||
| There must be some sort of transportation. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Arlington Road system. | ||
| Not the Arlington Road system. | ||
| You got tricked the same way I did. | ||
| I thought it sounded like maybe it's something, but it's a fucking movie. | ||
| It's always a movie. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| There's one crucial problem with Alex's theory about the movie Arlington Road, and that is that in the movie, Jeff Bridges' character is not set up for a terrorist attack by the FBI or the deep state, but his neighbors are the ones who do it, who are terrorists, who are looking for someone to carry out the attack they planned in such a way as to make it look like it's a lone wolf attack to protect their terrorist cell so they can continue operations. | ||
| Again, we run into this thing where Alex can't defend any of his ideas except by referencing movies, and so often the movies he cites don't even make the points he thinks they do. | ||
| Especially when he tries to cite a book. | ||
| That's when we get into real trouble there. | ||
| It's so crazy. | ||
| So anyway, Alex plays minutes of this at the end of the movie. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| That can't be true. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Is he eating lunch again? | ||
| I think he might be. | ||
| I think he might be. | ||
| But he does chime in a couple times, and I think it's pretty funny. | ||
| It's a really good movie. | ||
| You want to know how these people work, folks? | ||
| This is it. | ||
|
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And tell them. | |
| You're right. | ||
| You're going to see scripts. | ||
| CIA. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What did he just say? | ||
| He said that it's a great movie and most of these scripts are written by the CIA. | ||
| And by extension, that means you can learn about how they operate through this. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I thought that's what he said. | ||
| He did. | ||
| But I assumed that you couldn't possibly be that stupid. | ||
| Arlington Road was not written by the CIA. | ||
| It was written by Aaron Kruger, who also wrote The Ring. | ||
| Three Transformers movies and the new Dumbo. | ||
| I can find no evidence that he is CIA. | ||
| Also, Arlington Road is not a good movie. | ||
| It's a paranoid, convoluted mess of a movie with tons of plot holes that make no sense. | ||
| Did you watch it? | ||
| I saw it a long time ago. | ||
| I have not gone back. | ||
| But I did check some reviews just to refresh my memory and it's not universally positive. | ||
|
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Gotcha. | |
| Like I said, he plays a bunch of this. | ||
| Metacritic just gives it a rating of Alex Jones loves this movie, which is enough for people to be like, okay, good, good, I'm out. | ||
| So Alex plays a bunch of the movie, and I think he starts to realize, like, I'm supposed to be a radio show. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're not good for radio, but TV, you don't see it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Good, good, good, good, good. | ||
| Not good for radio. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And that was minutes in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So here is his sort of final piece about Arlington Road. | ||
| And I just think that there's... | ||
| You could see, like, a real problem, but it's so in line with his brain in this clip. | ||
| And it's on the news. | ||
| He's a right-wing terrorist. | ||
| And now the police take and take over. | ||
| So the end of the movie involves Jeff Bridges being set up for a bombing, and what you saw there was the explosion at the end when an FBI building gets blown up. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And Alex is missing a very vital point in the plot of this movie, and that is that the bombing of that FBI building was still definitely a terrorist attack. | ||
| Just because Jeff Bridges got set up, that doesn't mean that it wasn't still an organized, coordinated attack by an anti-government terrorist cell. | ||
| Sure, it's unfortunate that Jeff Bridges' good name has to be tarnished by the bombing, but whether it's saying he was a right-wing terrorist or saying that the group that set him up were right-wing terrorists, either way, it's still a movie about a right-wing terror plot. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
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It's remarkable how Alex rewrites both reality and fiction to fit his world view. | |
| In the movie, Tim Robbins and his wife are definitely terrorists, but Alex watches this movie and decides that they must actually be working for the globalists, and that's the writer's real point. | ||
| I know that art is subjective, and we all bring a lot of our own baggage to any media we consume, but I'm very unsettled by the way Alex consumes himself. | ||
| We don't bring that much baggage. | ||
| I tend not to. | ||
| I don't think... | ||
| Anybody brings that much baggage. | ||
| I think if Alex were to try and describe the plot to the writer, he'd be like, wow. | ||
| That wasn't my point. | ||
| I don't even want to know how Alex understands a fucking Wheel of Fortune episode. | ||
| I don't want to deal with how he rewrites that whole fucking fantasy. | ||
| So the whole time he's playing Arlington Road, Mike Adams is on hold. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Mike Adams... | ||
| Whatever, as long as you're on hold, you're not hurting somebody else. | ||
| So Mike Adams started things off with a dumb argument about eye and ear protection, and now he comes in with maybe a dumber argument. | ||
| I would say this is dumber. | ||
| If you are moving with a long gun, an AR or an AK, you're moving and trying to shoot targets that are running, it is extremely difficult. | ||
| That takes an expert marksman to pull that off. | ||
| That's not something that a casual... | ||
| A 21-year-old with no experience can accomplish. | ||
| So, Mike Adams is really bringing some soft bullshit today. | ||
| This argument is absolutely nonsensical on its face because it presumes one thing, and that is that these shooters had targets. | ||
| They weren't going into places like where they committed their crimes with the intention of shooting specific people, which admittedly would be hard. | ||
| And if that were the case, Mike might have a decent point. | ||
|
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Oh, yeah, yeah. | |
| They were intending to go into crowded areas and open fire indiscriminately, hoping to hit lots of people. | ||
| That's not quite as hard to pull off when you're moving. | ||
| If you aren't aiming at something specific, it's a bit easier. | ||
| To pretend that Mike doesn't understand that is so far beyond the realm of possibility for me. | ||
| He absolutely knows this shit, yet he pretends that he doesn't so he can spin these fucked up conspiracy narratives to protect his precious guns. | ||
| Again, this isn't questioning world events. | ||
| This is intentionally misinforming people to build propaganda narratives. | ||
| This is the business that Infowars is in. | ||
| Well, that and movie reviews. | ||
| That's the other business. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I wouldn't even go... | ||
| I wouldn't say they were doing too much reviewing so much as like... | ||
| Well, I mean, I guess a review is like, you should see this. | ||
| So, fair. | ||
| They are in the business of movie reviews. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| Elitism. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, in this next clip, Alex argues that the El Paso shooting was fake for a weird reason. | ||
| He has a very strange reason. | ||
|
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This whole situation, I mean, let me tell you, if you just shot 20-something people, I don't care what the police department is, you're going to get your ass kicked off. | |
| This guy does not have a blemish on him. | ||
| And I guarantee you, this guy would have been jumped on. | ||
| He'd have a black eye, a bloody nose. | ||
| He was lucky. | ||
| Something's going on. | ||
| I think it's really fucked up for a thing for Alex to be using the absence of police brutality to be a standard by which he judges if something was real or not. | ||
| I mean, there's countless examples of shootings where people are taken in without incident, generally when they're white and they surrender. | ||
| Dylan Roof and James Holmes both come to mind as shooters who are taken in without being beaten up. | ||
| I don't know what to say other than I would hope that police never take it into their own hands just to rough people up for no reason, even if they have just committed a crime. | ||
| That seems like exactly the kind of jackbootery that Alex seems to have based his entire career on being against. | ||
| Given that, it seems so weird to hear him legitimately suggest that the El Paso shooter was probably not the real shooter because cops didn't beat him up. | ||
| Sort of implying that the normal thing for cops to do in his mind is beat people up. | ||
| He's got a sick mind, this guy. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, on the other hand, the normal thing for cops to do kind of seems to be beat people up. | ||
| So, I get that thought process. | ||
| Because cops are, you know. | ||
| But he's not saying that to argue against cops beating people up. | ||
| That's an important distinction. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| So I guess that means that this guy wasn't the real shooter or something. | ||
| But now Alex argues that there were a bunch of shooters, which is something that he is kind of going off of. | ||
| You know, there were firsthand accounts of people who were saying that they thought there were, or that they heard that there were. | ||
| But again, a lot of that is not necessarily indicative of... | ||
| Total truth. | ||
| I saw that in the immediate aftermath of, like, it's possible that there may have been, and it's like, okay, everybody is saying it's possible, and there's a high likelihood that when we get more information, it will be or it won't be, but nobody knows. | ||
| And it's in the immediacy. | ||
| Of a fucking tragedy like this. | ||
| So much information is flying around. | ||
| Yeah, wires get crossed. | ||
| Yeah, for anybody to have been like... | ||
| Every single time there is something like this, there are suspicions of multiple shooters. | ||
| There are people who are there on the scene who think that they might have been multiple shooters. | ||
| A lot of the times that can be caused by echoing gunshot sounds from different directions. | ||
| And so I don't really care too much about those firsthand accounts. | ||
| At least, it seems pointless to engage with them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But Alex has another reason to think there was a second shooter. | ||
| Anna Giratali is a writer for the Washington Examiner. | ||
| She says, according to my law enforcement sources in El Paso, who gave me the apprehended shooter's name and age, a second suspect was killed when police responded to the Walmart shooting. | ||
| Police have not disclosed this info yet. | ||
| Mayor says otherwise, but my sources says second suspect is dead. | ||
| That's a real tweet. | ||
| Anna Giartelli did tweet out that law enforcement source of hers had told her that a second suspect had been killed. | ||
| But by the time Alex is on air here on Monday, she tweeted out a clarification based on an update she'd received. | ||
| It turned out the police had detained a second person who was armed at the scene, but they released him. | ||
| It was a case of somebody passing along bad information based on the chaos that was unfolding at the scene. | ||
| This is the sort of thing that happens during every crisis and tragedy, and it's why it's best for people who work for legitimate outlets not to amplify unconfirmed reports. | ||
| When they do so, it makes it easier for conspiracy theorists to weave the credibility of their outlet into the later conspiracies, as we see Alex doing here. | ||
| Bad reporting and reports of people who think there were multiple shooters on the scene are not evidence of anything suspicious. | ||
| These reports are all investigated. | ||
| It's just that in the immediate aftermath of an event like this, it's easy for misinformation agents to use any confusion, any slip-up, to make it look like there's something more nefarious going on. | ||
| In the past, I've likened it to concrete that's not yet dried. | ||
| In the immediate period right after an event like this, Alex and his ilk can easily imprint their suspicions and narratives onto the story. | ||
| But once the cement dries, once the actual information starts to come out, that becomes a whole lot harder. | ||
| That's why Alex made his video on Saturday, on his day off, about this. | ||
| Immediacy is key, which is another big reason that he desperately needs to get back on social media. | ||
| The game is way easier. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Yeah, if he was like a Jesus lizard running across concrete, yeah. | ||
| Fair, fair enough. | ||
| I'm sorry, I had to come back. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| It had to come back. | ||
| You knew it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You knew it. | ||
| So Alex thinks everything's fake, and it was all a setup. | ||
| And one of the ways that he tries to argue that here is to bring up David Hogg, one of the guys from the Parkland shooting. | ||
| And I think that's particularly offensive because he's talking with Mike Adams, the guy who made Hogwatch.com, and engaged in what could amount to targeted harassment of a child. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| So anyway, here's what Alex has to say. | ||
| David Hogg said he was at home when the shooting happened and got thereafter. | ||
| But then he's in videos. | ||
| I'm inside. | ||
| I'm in the closet. | ||
| He's outside shooting. | ||
| I mean, which David Hogg is telling the truth here? | ||
| This is based, we talked about this before, but this is based on intentional misrepresentation. | ||
| By the right wing of a video where David Hogg says after school he came back to the school to shoot stuff. | ||
| He was in the school and then went home and then came back. | ||
| It's very simple. | ||
| But because he says that he, you know, left and went back to the school in that clip that they can take out of context, they're able to create the appearance that his story is inconsistent. | ||
| This is bullshit. | ||
| It's been explained over and over again, yet Alex continues to use it as some sort of a way to be like, everything's set up, all the media... | ||
| No, you're the one doing it. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty clear that our current strategy of, I suppose, dealing with this stuff is to counter it with either information or, I suppose, the left's own version of misinformation is ineffective. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| It's just not doing the job. | ||
| Because he's still allowed to say this bullshit. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| So something needs to stop at the root before we ever even get to, like, here's Snopes. | ||
| We need Snopes to, you know... | ||
| I think there just needs to probably be civil consequences. | ||
| Yeah, there really does. | ||
| This shit can't go on. | ||
| But I don't think it should be from the government. | ||
| I just think that people... | ||
| I honestly think that... | ||
| There should maybe be a class-action lawsuit of all the people that Alex Jones has maligned. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it would probably be too difficult for one of them to go through all the litigation. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Maybe if tons of people who he's seriously maligned over the years got together. | ||
| I don't know what the answer is. | ||
| That's probably not it either. | ||
| But anyway, Alex, he feels like he's being blamed for that El Paso shooting. | ||
| And he has a culprit for the blame. | ||
| Who's putting the blame on him? | ||
| It's the SPLC. | ||
| I'm going to go with me. | ||
| And you can see the media saying it's Trump's fault. | ||
| It's all gun owners' fault. | ||
| It's QAnon's fault. | ||
| It's my fault. | ||
| It's Paul Joseph Watson's fault. | ||
| The Southern Primary Law Center that kind of writes the scripts for all this. | ||
| We know they ran L.A. City, the Oklahoma City bombing. | ||
| That even came out in federal lawsuits and court documents that they were controlling major white supremacist groups across the country. | ||
| They came out and said, oh, look, it's QAnon and Alex Jones. | ||
| This guy's a fan of them. | ||
| Off of people going on his social media, taking down that he was a Democrat. | ||
| And adding that it's us, I mean, that right there is just bombshell information. | ||
| This whole thing is unraveling, Mike Adams, incredibly quick. | ||
| Well, we know you'll be following and covering it all. | ||
| Probably will be. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we get back to the My Life narrative there at the end, too. | ||
| This is so essential. | ||
| Jordan, did you know that Elohim City still exists? | ||
| I did not know that. | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
| That is nuts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, it does. | ||
| God damn it, we got a... | ||
|
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|
Man! | |
| We got some shit to figure out, Dan. | ||
| Elohim City was founded in 1973 by Robert Millar after he'd run a couple of evangelical churches and camps around the country. | ||
| He had a smallish flock that he'd gathered and they settled in the woods in Oklahoma to set up their isolated utopia free from government depression and that pesky multiculturalism. | ||
| Oh, also they were adherents to the Christian identity movement and thus they didn't feel like their white supremacist beliefs were actual white supremacy. | ||
| It was just a recognition that they were white and therefore God's people. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| Ha, interesting. | ||
| This keeps coming up. | ||
| They had a lot of connections to the Aryan nations, as most right-wing separatists do. | ||
| Four Elohim residents were members of the Aryan Republican Army, who committed a string of 22 bank robberies between 1994 and 1995 to get money to fund white supremacist groups. | ||
| Many believe that the 400-acre Elohim city compound provided a safe haven for ARA extremists to plan and train. | ||
| The SPLC was not running Elohim City. | ||
| They definitely had an informant there for some time, but nothing that Alex is claiming to have been proven has been proven. | ||
| The SPLC was founded two years prior to Elohim City, so you'd kind of have to believe that it was one of their early projects that they cultivated for 20 years or so before the Oklahoma City bombing, or I guess you could imagine that they somehow took over the compound, which is pretty unimaginable, considering Robert Millar was in charge until he died in 2001, at which point his son John has taken over. | ||
| It doesn't make sense that these hardline Christian identity separatists... | ||
|
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|
Nah. | |
| Nah. | ||
| Spade's a spade, Dan. | ||
| They would shoot the SPLC trying to take over. | ||
| On sight. | ||
| They might shoot anybody who's wearing a shirt that says SPL and they just assume that it has the C after it. | ||
| Yep. | ||
|
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What Alex is claiming requires evidence, and he never provides it. | |
| This is the same sort of bullshit he tries to pull when he says that the Klan are all just feds. | ||
| It's his way of taking real right-wing terror groups and entities that he's kind of has some ideological overlap with and then making them all fake. | ||
| Oh, sure, the Aryan Republican Army robbed a bunch of banks as part of a plan to violently overthrow the government, and they had deep connections to this Christian identity compound, but that was all just the SPLC. | ||
| None of it's real. | ||
| Now. | ||
| Those Antifa contracts I found on 4chan, those are totally real. | ||
| And proof that Soros is trying to start a race war. | ||
| To quote Alex, you see how that works? | ||
| Ah, nicely done. | ||
| See how his manipulation works? | ||
| Nicely done. | ||
| Now, Jordan, I know we're deep into this episode, but I think we're about to get our second wind. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Because we had some bad guests so far. | ||
| Tom Pappert, shit. | ||
| Mike Adams, terrible. | ||
| But I got a guest coming up for you. | ||
| I know a few things about him. | ||
| He's Neo. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Get out of here. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| He is the prophet of Matrixism. | ||
| No, he's not even allowed to be on this show now. | ||
| This is, it's today. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| Leo Zagami is back. | ||
| These are the people who answer Alex's call. | ||
| What the fuck is he doing on? | ||
| It's unclear. | ||
| But we do learn something. | ||
| Alex, he brings up that he's about to be on the show. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| We learned something big about him. | ||
| This was not a part of his backstory before. | ||
| Okay, we got Leo Zagami, who's an expert on false flags. | ||
| He actually worked in the Italian Air Force and was involved on the edge of Operation Gladio that was a NATO plan staging hundreds of terror attacks to blame it on the left to maintain control. | ||
| Some of our other guests were in and around Italy at the same time, like Steve Pacinic. | ||
| So, Leo Zagami, again, does not fail to bring the heat. | ||
| It turns out, not only is he the heir to the Illuminati throne, not only is the reincarnated Jesus, as admitted by the Vatican and the Jews, not only is he single-handedly responsible for 9-11, he also apparently was involved in Operation Gladio. | ||
| Leo Zagami is so full of shit, but goddammit, he's ambitious, and I really respect him for that. | ||
| According to his own bio, he was DJing in the UK and had become a fixture at a bar called Legends when his career was disrupted when he had to return to Italy to, quote, do an obligatory year of bollocks in the military. | ||
| That was in 1987. | ||
| So, allegedly, Leo was in the military doing an obligatory year of bollocks, and that somehow led him to get mixed up in Gladio. | ||
| Gladio was first publicly recognized by Italian authorities in 1990, so Alex might be taking that to mean that it was operational until 1990, so Leo could have been involved in 1987, but this is not accurate. | ||
| Even if you believe the widest-eyed conspiracy versions of what Gladio was about, it definitely was not in action as late as 1987, and a rave DJ doing an obligatory year of bollocks before going back to the club circuit would not be involved in any of the clandestine operations that were going on to begin with. | ||
| But they weren't going on to begin with. | ||
| He positions himself as like the Forrest Gump of stupid shit. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| He is anywhere and everywhere that's even close to his bio. | ||
| Unreal. | ||
| This is all bullshit. | ||
| Fuck him. | ||
| But Jordan, you know what I love about this? | ||
| I love that the only thing Alex really has to sell this narrative to his audience on is that Leo's Italian. | ||
| That's all he's got. | ||
| That's it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He might as well have a fucking... | |
| What's his name? | ||
| Mario? | ||
| No. | ||
| Shit. | ||
| Father Guido Sarducci. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| There's literally zero other proof of any of the things that Leo's saying. | ||
| That alone is enough. | ||
| Like, just him being Italian is enough. | ||
| Jesus Christ, everybody is stupid. | ||
| If you listen to him, I wish you're fucking stupid! | ||
| Also, as it relates to Steve Pachenik, what Alex is referring to is how Steve was involved in the botched hostage negotiation of kidnapped Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro. | ||
| It's a really insane and complicated story that I would love to get into right now, but we are way too deep into the show, and I honestly think it kind of deserves its own episode, so we might do that in the future. | ||
| The tale of Steve Pachenik in Italy, which is real fucked up stuff. | ||
| So, Leo, he's Neo, he's Leo. | ||
| Yes, yeah. | ||
| And he's here to stay. | ||
| The prophet of Matrixism. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So he comes in here, and he has a different theory about these shootings. | ||
| And it's interesting because what you have to understand is, like, even over the course of the last, like, three hours that we've been talking and listening to these clips, multiple different explanations have been proffered. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they all are sort of compatible to each other in some form. | ||
| Literally every explanation that has been offered has been as far away from Occam's razor as... | ||
| Like, they are building a house around that very specific razor in order to... | ||
| And it's in a fucking box locked tight, even as the razor tries to escape and tell them the very obvious reality. | ||
| It's fucking gods! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, uh, dudes. | ||
| Guns and dudes and white people. | ||
| Toxic masculinity run amok. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| So those aren't the theories that are... | ||
| So here's what they're doing, basically, as I see it. | ||
| There is a unifying theory that is behind all of the various different theories. | ||
| But they're throwing out a number of different things. | ||
| Whether it's brain control or they're leftists. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Whatever feels best is what they'll run with. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So in the day, like the day after, the next day, it's still in the sort of feeling it out phase a tiny bit before seeing what we'll run with. | ||
| And I guarantee that this is not what they're going to run with, what Leo Zagami brings to the table, because this is nuts. | ||
| Last week, we had this triggering word by one of the aspiring candidates, this dark psychic force mentioned by Marianne Williamson. | ||
| And we'll play that next segment since you mentioned it. | ||
| What was she invoking there? | ||
| Well, this is a trigger word, because once you trigger these words subliminally, the agents get in action. | ||
| And Marianne Williamson actually published a tweet between her and the father of the air puzzle shooter. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So there is a connection. | ||
| Let's just say it. | ||
| It's a New Age cult. | ||
| People think they're getting into the New Age, but really, once they get into it, they're being programmed. | ||
| You're getting close to slandering this father. | ||
| So yeah, Marianne Williamson said dark psychic energy, and that was a trigger word to activate these shooters. | ||
| Okay, you know, I know a lot about my impulses, and they come from an upbringing. | ||
| Of this type. | ||
| But goddammit, if I didn't want to fucking slap Leo Zagami after I heard him say those words. | ||
| Like, it's never a good idea. | ||
| No violence and shit, but fuck, somebody needs to slap him! | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That can't be done! | ||
| I don't know, I think it's... | ||
| You can't do that! | ||
| Ah, it's interesting. | ||
| Also, that tweet between the shooter's father and Marianne Williamson was five years ago. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| I don't know how deep a connection... | ||
| And it was... | ||
| It was not a substantial... | ||
| Tweet, interaction. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| Shut the fuck up, Leo. | ||
| So Alex asks a rhetorical question. | ||
| Go back to the Matrix. | ||
| Matrixism. | ||
| Where he came from, I guess? | ||
| Is that what we're doing? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| He's Leo. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So Alex asks a question in this next clip that is meant to be rhetorical, but I actually have an answer for him. | ||
| And then he spirals, after asking this question, not coming to a good answer, into just, I mean, his theory. | ||
| And I have this sense of urgency, this sense of I'm upset at myself that there's something I need to do, there's something I need to say to stop this, because we know more is coming, and we know both these guys were leftist. | ||
| They were so sloppy, they didn't even cover up their social media when they said, I hate God, I hate Christians, I hate fascists, that means conservatives and Christians, I'm going to kill them. | ||
| And then it all gets taken down and replaced with fake stuff. | ||
| And you go to the Wayback Machine and the Google Archive, and it's really them saying, I'm a Satanist. | ||
| Hail Satan. | ||
| And then we watch them in real time change it. | ||
| I've now learned on both of them. | ||
| And how huge is that? | ||
| He's expanding this My Life narrative now. | ||
| But when he starts that, he's like... | ||
| What can I say to stop this? | ||
| Honestly, him saying that makes me want to cry. | ||
| It does. | ||
| Like, for real, I heard him say that. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| The answer is literally the opposite of everything you fucking say. | ||
| The answer is probably nothing. | ||
| Go away. | ||
| Go away. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| And he says, because we all know this is going to happen again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| That makes me want to fucking cry. | ||
| There's a very clear thing that he could do, and that is come clean. | ||
| Admit that he's been scamming people for a very long time and it's gotten way out of control. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| But he's not going to do that. | ||
| He's too deep, I guess. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Fucking monster. | ||
| I'm going to skip this next clip because it's just Leo Zagami explaining this is all about trying to take guns. | ||
| He's like, the U.S. is one of the only countries where you can have guns. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| Fuck off. | ||
| I'm going to skip it because we've got to get to this next clip. | ||
| Because not only was Leo Zagami in Gladio, we find out he was also... | ||
| Your Forrest Gump analogy is so right. | ||
| Listen to this shit. | ||
| And I've actually infiltrated years ago the black bloc groups that were basically what Antifa has become. | ||
| And those groups are very easy to both infiltrate, manipulate, and buy. | ||
| Because, I mean, most of them are living with money that comes either from the rich parents or either from the state. | ||
| So he's infiltrated Black Block. | ||
| Man, he has got some solid improv chops there because there's no way he had that in his back pocket before getting on the show, right? | ||
| I started rambling about Soros and Antifa. | ||
| Yeah, and then he's like, and by the way, I was in Black Block. | ||
| Like, no way do you just pull that, you know, like, that's pulled from thin air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's solid. | |
| That is solid shit. | ||
| I am not in favor of torture, so I would not do any torture. | ||
| But I would love to make some sort of an arrangement. | ||
| Where Leo Zagami would have to answer my questions. | ||
| And just interview him about everything. | ||
| Tell the truth or just answer the questions? | ||
| Tell the truth. | ||
| Tell the truth. | ||
| Yeah, I was going to say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I would actually... | ||
| I would actually... | ||
| I actually see both. | ||
| I would be fine with both. | ||
| I would want one interview where he gets to lie and one where he gets to tell the truth. | ||
| I think I would prefer the one where he gets to lie because it would be way more interesting. | ||
| Yeah, it would be way more interesting. | ||
| Well, actually, that's probably not true. | ||
| If he told the truth, the stories of his early DJ days would probably be real crazy. | ||
| Well, I bet he doesn't remember much. | ||
| I bet he does. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| He's pretty lucid. | ||
| He said he was known as a... | ||
| I mean, just of those days. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He said he was known as the guy who was partying. | |
| Not all drugs ruin your memory. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| So, Alex makes a... | ||
| We're coming to the end here. | ||
| And in these last few clips, I think you see where Alex... | ||
| Sort of the old Alex. | ||
| Not like old old Alex. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| The Alex you're used to in 2019 shows up. | ||
| He starts making panicky predictions. | ||
| He gets really extreme. | ||
| And then he ends the show with outright narcissism. | ||
| Here's the first clip where he makes his insane prediction. | ||
| And keep in mind, he still, throughout this episode, both of these episodes, is trying to defend himself by saying, I just questioned. | ||
| We just questioned the events. | ||
| Keep in mind, this is not questioning. | ||
| This is making a prediction. | ||
| We now know this is happening. | ||
| That's the Rubicon we've passed. | ||
| They intend to remove populist and Trump. | ||
| They're committed now, and they're really going to try it. | ||
| And when they finally try to remove Trump and the rest of his support, they're going to shut the Internet off. | ||
| So I think that's why we're all so freaked out. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| This is it, folks. | ||
| They're going to go for it. | ||
| Right now, they're going to go for it. | ||
| That's not questioning things. | ||
| That's becoming... | ||
| They're gonna go for it. | ||
| That's the product of all the narratives that you've created over the course of the last two days. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| This is the... | ||
| Now I am experiencing the narratives that I have built along the way. | ||
| This is the natural end result of that. | ||
| If all of this other stuff that I've said over the course of these episodes is true, then the globalists are making their move. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which, I mean, we hear that all the fucking time. | ||
| But because of the severity of the real-world situation, it becomes so much worse. | ||
| He's using real tragedy to say a standard talking point of his. | ||
| That's what it all leads to, is just the same shit. | ||
| That's really offensive. | ||
| Going over the past two days of his show, I... | ||
| It's almost like watching a man convince himself he's not a bad human. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's okay. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it seems like this entire thing is him creating all of these narratives and other people adding in narratives on top of that, all of which is to distract himself from the fact that he's a fucking murderer. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Well, if you think that, you might not be thrilled to hear, as this episode wraps up, he seems to be pretty He almost seems to be expanding who he'd like to see targeted by folks. | ||
| Democrats this year, they love this kind of things, and they love Satanists because, of course, they are all prevalently atheists. | ||
| They're not necessarily Satanists. | ||
| They are Satanists without knowing it, because anybody who is an atheist is actually a Satanist, and that's a big problem that we're going to have in the future. | ||
| We're going to end up probably with a war of believers against Satanists. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Let's talk about that coming war with the Satanists, because it's here. | ||
| This is a war against Satan. | ||
| It's God versus the devil. | ||
| That's all there's ever been, all there will ever be. | ||
| Stay with us. | ||
| So, I mean, he's calling for a holy war that he says is already here. | ||
| And it's a war between his version of Christianity, I suppose, And all Satanists, to include atheists who are Satanists but don't know they're atheists. | ||
| Also Christians who don't believe what he's believing. | ||
| Glitterbug Christians who are actually worshipping the devil. | ||
| All Satanists. | ||
| The left? | ||
| Satanists. | ||
| Hillary Clinton is literally a demon. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure he lumps Islam in there, too. | ||
| Yeah, oh, for sure. | ||
| It's just a battle between his Christian identity-veering beliefs against everybody. | ||
| This is apocalyptic nonsense, and it's fucking dangerous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't want... | ||
| I don't want to get into a war because the right-wing terrorists committed an act of terrorism and then blamed it on the left and used it to justify... | ||
| Calling for a holy war? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't like that. | ||
| That seems unfair at least. | ||
| At least it seems like an escalation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It seems uncalled for. | ||
| So we have this last clip here, and it starts with what I would describe as kind of an evangelical plea, like sort of a, you know, we need to get right with God, which is what you expect. | ||
| It's super weird that a lot of people don't understand this, and we don't maybe make enough of a point of it that so often this show does just turn into, like, God. | ||
| It becomes like a weird religious show. | ||
| Televangelism. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But it very quickly veers off course into what I would describe as Alex almost... | ||
| Defining himself as what you need to find. | ||
| And they are planning a bloody revolution here. | ||
| They're planning massive censorship across the country and the world. | ||
| This is a time to be praying to Christ. | ||
| For justice and for freedom and that God's spirit come into you and lead God and direct you. | ||
| But it's also time to be politically and culturally active and it's time to spread the word about Infowars.com and Newswars.com and override the AI sensors to override their systems and to let people know, hey, here's the name that must not be spoken. | ||
| Here's what the world fears. | ||
| Here's the guest and the information and the history and the analysis that is the cure to the globalist poison. | ||
| There's a sense there that's almost like it starts with him saying, you've got to go get God, but also there's a ramping up. | ||
| It's like, you've got to get people to come to me. | ||
| I am the only answer to the globalist poison. | ||
| I am the cure. | ||
| That is an insane level of messianic narcissism that's coming on the heels of him talking with Leo Zagami about having a holy war. | ||
| And in the context of all this stuff, it's just, this is insanity. | ||
| This whole thing is insane. | ||
| Yeah, I've been writing this thing, so I've been doing a bunch of research into all kinds of different stuff, and that led me into rereading the New Testament actually earlier today. | ||
| And if there is anyone who is going to hell according to Jesus' rules, Alex is... | ||
| Boom! | ||
| Top of the list. | ||
| He's in trouble. | ||
| Even in that clip, he's nailed, like, half the Beatitudes. | ||
| Like, he's gone with the Sermon on the Mount. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here with that shit. | ||
| Well, that's just for Glitterbug churches. | ||
| Even Jesus' new covenant is gonna fuck him up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he was divorced! | ||
| So throw that on top of there! | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Committed adultery! | ||
| Throw that in there! | ||
| Yeah, he's in trouble. | ||
| Fucking he is fucked! | ||
| I mean, we come to the end here, and it's been long. | ||
| I'm exhausted. | ||
| Emotionally and physically. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I look at this and I think it's kind of weird that we didn't talk that much about the shootings themselves or anything. | ||
| I don't think that's weird at all. | ||
| I think that makes perfect sense. | ||
| I don't know if it's weird or not, but I went where Alex led me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's kind of... | ||
| Where we are. | ||
| Why would Alex want to go anywhere near the reality of the show? | ||
| Why would he want to go anywhere near that? | ||
| Because you cannot learn anything about those shootings and not go, oh, fuck, we've got a real problem. | ||
| The details of these shootings point to many, many problems. | ||
| But the shootings themselves are part of the problem of guns. | ||
| That's a big part of it. | ||
| We should absolutely be talking about white supremacist terrorism, which is rampant. | ||
| We should be talking about misogynist dudes who are legion. | ||
| But, man, they wouldn't be able to kill all these people if they didn't have fucking automatic rifles. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| If they didn't have all these fucking guns. | ||
| And maybe there's a better conversation than I can have on the best gun control measures, but they sure as fuck wouldn't have walked into a Walmart and killed all these people if they didn't have a fucking rifle. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| And there's a hundred other problems that we're facing in this country, and I don't mean to give short shrift to any of them by focusing on this. | ||
| But it's what Alex is talking about on these two days. | ||
| Anyway, we'll be back on Friday. | ||
| Indeed we will. | ||
| Something less this. | ||
| Oh, God, please less this. | ||
| Too much. | ||
| I'm tired. | ||
| I can only imagine. | ||
| We'll be back, but we have a website. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
| It is. | ||
| We're on Twitter. | ||
| It's at knowledge underscore fight and at go to bed Jordan. | ||
| We're on Facebook. | ||
| We are on Facebook. | ||
| You can download our show by going to iTunes. | ||
| You could also leave a review. | ||
| You could also just scour the internet for different things that have both knowledge and fight in them. | ||
| Generally speaking, we keep episodes of our show in the D-G connection, because you rarely see the E-D-G-E connection, you know? | ||
| So we keep them in between the D and the G. Put a little line in there and you'll get it. | ||
| I don't feel like our outro is particularly appropriate for this episode, so I will end by saying... | ||
| I am the Jesus lizard. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |