In Knowledge Fight #329, Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes dissect Alex Jones’ August 4–5, 2019, broadcasts, where he weaponized the El Paso and Dayton shootings to blame Democrats, QAnon, and "globalists" while ignoring debunked claims like Epstein conspiracies or altered social media profiles. Jones misrepresented Mexico’s crime stats, conflated unrelated false flags, and promoted absurd theories—like fake shootings due to lack of injuries—to deflect accountability, framing gun violence as a leftist plot while dismissing Trump rally-linked hate crimes. His apocalyptic "war against Satan" rhetoric culminates in self-promotion, exposing a pattern of manipulative deflection that fuels extremism while evading real solutions. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
I hope that this won't be as awful as that sounds like it's going to be.
Because I don't, I guess what I'm trying to sort of string out here is sort of the, like, 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.
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.
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.
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 one.
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.
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 Madeline Albright said something really fucked up 23 years ago, so obviously the globalists would do false flag shootings, like that can't mean he's got much to go on.
The comment that she made, Madeline Albright, that is, she made it 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, a 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: 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 was exasperated that our TV was showing what amounted to Iraqi propaganda.
I must have been crazy.
I should have answered the question by reframing it and pointing out the inherent flaws in the premise behind it.
Saddam Hussein could have prevented any child from suffering simply by meeting his obligations.
Instead, I said the following: 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, you know, whatever you feel about Madeline 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's 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 Madeline 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, but something tells me that Alex is going to be totally cool with it because globalists.
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.
So we've already got a horribly out-of-context clip of Madeline 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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm listening to this and I'm going, well, like, here's 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.
Like, it seems like so many of those GOP people were like, woke up yesterday morning filled with like, can't wait to tell people why white nationalist terrorism is not a problem.
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, but 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 limbings 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.
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 suicides seems to lead people to emulate the circumstances of the original suicide.
This is called the Werther effect, named after a character in Goethe'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 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 rights 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, it does appear the public at large are able to distinguish fact from fiction, which we know is a struggle for Alex.
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 as 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Poverty Law Center article in: 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.
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 the 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.
After the shooting, there were allegations that someone had gone into this shooter's My Life 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, the noble Donald Trump holding the bag.
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.
This is a case of dumb-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.
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, they 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.
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 of the story, which also isn't real.
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.
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.
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 to make their argument, as opposed to being the product of thorough and methodical analysis of case studies.
The only reason that somebody would operate this way, the way that Alex is clearly describing Millie as operating, is because they're trying to create a distraction.
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, you just pitch 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.
You know, these people are such psychopaths at this point.
I always wonder if, like, Mitch McConnell, 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.
I know it's not funny to laugh about these people being shooters, but Alex is like, his whole thing is so built on the defense of particularly white males.
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 and incubators, or they stage other events where real people die, 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 onto all this supposed shooter's 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.
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 his shit is weak and he doesn't want to get sued.
He hides behind this, why is it wrong to question things, horse 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.
It'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, and the second was W. Bush and his administration.
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, My Life, was changed to say that he was a follower of QAnon, and his designation as a registered Democrat was changed to Republican.
I do not understand why you would do that unless you are a fucking idiot.
Like that whole two days before this mass shooting happened, Alex Jones predicted that a false flag would shit was going to happen and you didn't do a goddamn thing.
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 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.
I will give you one theory on why he hasn't used it because he just said that they convinced them that they're convinced them into believing they're working with the president.
I would say also that 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.
So people study what's going on in 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 say they're going to blow up ICE facilities.
They're going to need a pretext to make it look like that's legitimate.
So 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 provide real crime statistics he feels the FBI is covering up.
He needs to validate his contention that the crime statistics are fake.
He needs to substantiate how lowering media coverage of Epstein matters at all in terms of his prosecution.
He needs to substantiate his claim that the media is promoting minority crime against whites.
He needs to demonstrate that FBI director Ray is a deep stater.
He needs to prove that the Clintons run most of the FBI.
He needs to specify what most of the FBI means.
He needs to show a citation for where the FBI 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.
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 10 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.
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, burn down ICE facilities, and try to start a civil war.
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.
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.
It has a deeply unpleasant user interface, so I don't want to dig through it and try and find the fuck he's talking about.
But after he keeps bringing it up, I was like, fuck.
All right, 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 No, 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.
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.
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.
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 No 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.
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.
Alex is absolutely a stochastic terrorist.
He demonizes particular groups and individuals he disagrees with in such a way that he absolutely has to have reasonable expectation that someone might be inspired to hurt or kill them.
I don't believe an adult could not understand the connection between rhetoric and possible inspiration.
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 worshiping 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.
In court, McCaslin 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 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.
The mental image of him going in and thinking he's about to get into a gunfight and then his flashlight goes out and he's just like, oh, oh, I want to go to bed.
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 Oathkeepers 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 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.
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 validates the warning of the FBI report and demonstrates that this is a problem we should be taking seriously and should have taken seriously long ago.
Alex goes the other direction.
The FBI report was pre-hyped for the shooting.
So when it happened, it would be blamed on people like Alex.
This is a man who knows that the world that he's helped create, the world of paranoid anti-government extremists, is one where this is going to be, 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 Mayak report.
He saw it as a ratings bonanza.
His show has changed a lot since then, though.
And now a report like this coming from the FBI, it seems like it terrifies him.
No, I mean, in the wake of what was it, the Nebraska GOP, the representative who was like, hey, dudes, we got to stop with this whole 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.
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.
Yeah, where 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.
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 it 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 when you 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.
Still crazy, I agree, but that's the only way that 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 no, 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 assesses in some cases anti-government, identity-based and fringe political conspiracy theories very likely encourage the targeting of specific people, places and organizations, thereby increasing the risk of extremist violence against such target.
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.
So I can't disagree with them.
unidentified
So 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 infringe, 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, 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.
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.
So the main narrative I would say that Alex is selling.
A lot of these things, the FBI memo, the talking about the babies and incubators, weapons of mass destruction, Madeline Albright stuff, a lot of that is justification.
The main narrative is that the My Life profile was changed.
Yesterday on the phone with my reporters and literally were like, yeah, let's see if the family work in the psychiatric business because it's always that.
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 timeframe of what Alex is talking about.
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 around it because it was this guy who just was passionate about astronomy.
I just know, oh, the shooter's dad was PTSD expert, had a two-year degree, but was above a bunch of psychiatrists with 10 years of education running Pentagon programs in Dallas.
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 and countless other things.
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.
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.
So 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 grave.
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 of a sociopath.
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 Colin Byne, Eric Harris was on psych meds, but Dylan Kleibold wasn't.
How does that factor into this overly simplified, stupid narrative that they sell?
And also, when I was looking into this, there was this insane thing where right-wing sites and these anti-psych med sites were like, yeah, Eric Harris is on psych meds, but Dylan's records have never been released.
And they have fuck you.
So they're pretending that there's cover-up because it doesn't match the information.
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.
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.
Yeah, that makes sense why you're having really quick this complete zero on your show.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So we, you know, 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 to believe, 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.
Well, but also, I mean, what you're getting at there, too, is like a kind of important point, and that is that we already have qualifications about free speech that have to do with mitigating damage.
You can't do things that cause harm to people with your speech.
I think it's a hard conversation that we all need to have.
I think that 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.
And I think that maybe sometimes their absolutism about free speech really belies other priorities that they're trying to hide behind free speech to defend.
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, does that make sense?
It was General Mill K. Carton 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 it over because they know they can have their own communists stage 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 Jesse 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.
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.
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.
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-the death penalty.
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, and the statistics don't even show that.
I mean, I'm not being mean because it's still a low statistic, but you had a 10 times chance of your white being attacked or robbed or killed by a black person.
You got a 10 times chance of your black being killed by a black person.
Doesn't mean 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 whatever reason.
But you see, it's all how they play games with the statistics.
Was it the crossover episode we did where I said he thought we were race traitors and you're you were like you were a little bit like whoa, hold on to anonymous.
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.
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.
That's really just him projecting his own feelings about having cultivated such a stupid, uncritical audience.
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 the 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.
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 the 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.
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.
So 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.
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 mindheim technology is creating transhumanists, which all of the media, all of the media is transhumanist.
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.
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 has 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.
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 worthwhile to take the time to get into that.
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.
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.
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?
You know, 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 because we don't get all bent out of shape every time someone in Mexico gets shot.
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 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.
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 had been involved, you know, there were a lot of posts on Achan, that he had 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.
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.
But, you know, so that caveat aside, you know, that was the conversation that people were having.
There is a clear motivation that was behind it.
And people were 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 H-Chan and Gabb, 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 the 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 a central talking point of all these right-wing media outlets.
The demographic fear propaganda of quote-unquote Americans being replaced by immigrants is the bread and butter of Alex Jones talking points.
I always call turning points talking points, USA.
Very different.
Tucker Carlson and countless other outlets.
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 and 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 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.
Like, 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.
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 may be behind the El Paso shooting, and they need to protect themselves from that reality being discussed.
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 Pesobic 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 Donktum?
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.
I mean, I don't know what else to say other than at this point in time, it's kind of pretty clearly obvious that the right-wing media is complicit in mass shootings.
And just to be clear, I think I did, you know, 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 indicators like a lot of times that is the case.
Like, I don't, I don't I'm 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.
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.
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 loved Alex or was a huge Ben Shapiro fan, it doesn't matter.
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 like the paddock came and he was supposed to be selling guns to these people.
Or so he thought, but it was really they were going to cause the they were going to do this shooting to cause a distraction so they could have their assassins kill the crown prince.
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, 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 want because he was already doing exactly what they want.
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?
If Steven Paddock was a Patsy arm dealer, why had he been casing hotel rooms overlooking other music festivals?
Why did he book rooms at 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.
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 your 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.
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 10 seconds looking into this, he would realize he is a big, dumbasshole.
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 Bastrup, 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 Lorenburg, 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 could totally open carry your gun without a permit.
You can definitely own guns and conceal carry in North Carolina.
At securelife.com, the website's a 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?
Like, 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 like the intuitive thought I had is just there are so many people crammed in together and BE tends to make just enough noise to fuck up everybody else's night.
Well, it's because he thinks that if so, and it 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.
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.
The last 10 shooters or so all said they hated Christians and that they love 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.
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?
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, like, 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 media sphere.
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.
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 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.
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 Costra Nostra.
La Cosa 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 that 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.
She was 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.
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 got to 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.
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.
And then secondarily, I knew that 8chan had their issue by Monday.
So Alex would be aware of that.
And 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.
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 8-chan caused this individual to go and do this.
What happened with 8-chan 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 the 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.
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.
Because people will be like, oh, this comment could be traced back to me being a real racist pile of shit.
Pretty soon after Cloudflare dropped them, 8-hand 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 8-Chan 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.
Other, you know, 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.
In this next clip, Alex is complaining about Trump.
And he's, you know, 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.
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 for a due process.
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 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 and 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 Niera 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 Knowleton was controlled by the Saudis.
4.
There's no evidence that she was 18.
5.
No one claimed she was 14.
She was 15.
6.
In her testimony, Neera 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.
7.
Nowhere in her testimony does Niera say that the baby's 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 not much more.
I mean, 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?
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.
So if you're missing, if you miss that, because we pause 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.
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?
Like, 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 they'd 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 the 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.
The leftist savior who just shows up right at the moment when the left is being exposed, when our whole agenda is falling apart.
And when Trump's defending our borders, supposedly evil racists, right as Antifa announces nationwide, funded by Alexander Soros, that they are going to be marching Across the U.S.'s 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.
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 turning out toilets and the people are being killed when they're actually coming here from the countries that are collapsing.
You think you're going to a drill, or you think you're taking part in 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.
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.
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 like brainwashed or something, and so they end up like 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 this, 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.
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.
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.
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 whatever it's saying, 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.
This whole situation, I mean, let me tell you, if you just shot 20-something people, I don't care what police department is, you're going to get your ass kicked some.
This guy does not have a blemish on it.
And I guarantee you, this guy would have been jumped 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 with that incident, generally when they're white and they surrender.
Dylan Roof and James Holmes both come to mind as shooters who were taken in without being beaten up.
I don't know what to say other than I would hope the 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.
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.
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 say second suspect is dead.
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'd 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'd 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 uncredible, 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 who were reports of people who think that 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 build 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.
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.
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 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, and yet Alex continues to use it as some sort of a way to be like, everything's set up.
Yeah, it's pretty clear that our current strategy of like, 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.
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.
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 hard-line Christian identity separatists would shoot the SPLC trying to take over on site.
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.
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 Pieczenik.
So, Leo Zagami, again, does not fail to bring the.
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.
Also, as it relates to Steve Pieczenik, 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 Pieczenik in Italy, which is real fucked up stuff.
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 three hours that we've been talking and listening to these clips, multiple different explanations have been proffered.
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 be it's in a fucking box locked tight even as the razor tries to escape and tell them the very obvious reality.
And I've actually infiltrated years ago the black block groups that were basically what Antifa has become.
And those groups are very easy to both infiltrate, manipulate, and buy because, I mean, they are mostly of them are living with money that comes either from the rich parents or either from the state.
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 like, I just question, we just question the events.
Going over the past two days of his show, it's almost like watching a man convince himself he's not a, because it seems like he's.
This entire thing is him creating all of these narratives and all 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.
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 who include atheists who are Satanists but don't know they're atheists.
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?
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 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.
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 censors 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.
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.
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.