#340: All About Steve
Today, Dan and Jordan take a moment to take a closer look at one of Alex Jones' main sources of incredibly bad information, Steve Pieczenik.
Sept. 6, 2019 - Knowledge Fight
01:59:10
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys, saying we are the bad guys. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
|
unidentified
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Dan and George. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love you. | |
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| I'm Jordan. | ||
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around, drink novelty beverages, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Indeed we are. | ||
| Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Dan! | ||
| What up? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What is the worst piece of advice you've ever got? | |
| Oh, I don't know. | ||
| Not just in stand-up or anything like that, but did you have a high school guidance counselor who gave you some terrible advice? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| The thing that comes to my mind the most here is like, you know, you start... | ||
| Start a show about Alex Jones! | ||
| No one gave me that advice. | ||
| The worst advice. | ||
| Gave me the counter advice to that. | ||
| Dan, don't do that. | ||
| sounds stupid. | ||
| The thing that comes to mind is like you think about like parents, you think about... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I guess this isn't so much advice as it is like just what sticks out in my head of like this was a bad move from like a good source of information. | |
| A well-meaning source. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I was really afraid of thunderstorms when I was a wee boy because I grew up... | |
| I had no idea what they were. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There aren't thunderstorms in Hawaii? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| That's bananas. | ||
| I'd never seen one in the four years that I was there. | ||
| No shit. | ||
| Yeah, and so when I'm 10 years old, coming into Missouri, and from what I know of Missouri in advance is that there are these things called tornadoes that happen there. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And they're always associated with thunderstorms. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Right, and so I have this built up in my head that if there's a thunderstorm, there's a decent chance there's going to be a tornado. | ||
| And in my mind, tornadoes are almost identical to hurricanes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Which I was very afraid of. | ||
| Which you're very familiar with. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So I had this just terrible fear when there were thunderstorms. | ||
| And so I was like 10 years old, and I was scared in bed during a thunderstorm. | ||
| And I call up for my dad in the middle of the night. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm like, Dad, Dad, we're going to die. | |
| He comes into my room, and he's like, Dan, don't worry. | ||
| The worst is over. | ||
| And then as soon as he says the worst is over, there's... | ||
| Ka-chum! | ||
|
unidentified
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A gigantic crack of lightning right outside the window. | |
| Of course! | ||
| It must have hit the neighbor's house, basically. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| So the loudest... | ||
| Because the universe had to send a fucking message. | ||
| The worst is never over, damn. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| The simultaneous lightning and thunder. | ||
| So the storm is right here. | ||
| And then as soon as the thunderclap subsided, the lights went out in the house and the tornado sirens went off. | ||
| So it was like this. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That is too funny. | ||
| It's almost like a sitcom moment where my dad had to be like, what the fuck? | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm trying to comfort my dumbass son. | |
| It's a good gamble to say the worst is over. | ||
| No, of course. | ||
| Generally, you're right. | ||
| Oh, no, absolutely. | ||
| But in this case, so that sticks out to me as like, I don't know if it's advice. | ||
| I guess the advice is don't be afraid. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| The worst is over. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| That he was way off. | ||
| Never. | ||
| And that solidified in my mind that we are going to die from a tornado. | ||
| Storms are scary. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| My dad has been proven 100% wrong. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What else can I not trust him about? | ||
| That became a bit of a meme between us. | ||
| The worst is over. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, Dad? | |
| Yeah, gotcha. | ||
| Very funny. | ||
| So I survived that thunderstorm and other tornado warnings in my time in Missouri. | ||
| I know a bit about it now, but I know more about Alex Jones. | ||
| Oh, and I only know what you tell me about Alex Jones. | ||
| That is right. | ||
| So, Jordan, today we've got an interesting, unique episode to present to the people. | ||
| And as promised at the end of our last episode, we'll be getting a bit into Steve Pachanek. | ||
| Stevie Peas. | ||
| I have done quite a bit of digging around, trying to find some information on this cat. | ||
| And I come away from it as confused as I was when I started. | ||
| Well, that was because you accidentally started researching Steve Perry. | ||
| Steve Perry is not the same guy. | ||
| A different person named Steve Perry will come up in this episode. | ||
| That can't be true. | ||
| Not the lead singer of Journey. | ||
| Are you sure? | ||
| There is a Steve Perry that I will mention later. | ||
| That's really weird. | ||
| That is super bizarre. | ||
| That's bananas. | ||
| You know what else is bananas? | ||
|
unidentified
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What? | |
| How great I feel about people who have signed up and are supporting the show. | ||
| What's bananas is how great that transition was. | ||
| You know, I sharpened my skills. | ||
| On the tornado fields of Missouri. | ||
| So, Jordan, today I've got to say some thank yous. | ||
| We've got a murder of wonks. | ||
| We've got a murder of wonks. | ||
| Today, just some wonks to get through and express our gratitude to. | ||
| So, first of all, Matthew, thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks, Matthew. | |
| Next, M. Liam, thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, M. Liam. | ||
| Next, Brian, thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Ryan. | ||
| Next, Daniel. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Daniel, my brother. | ||
| No, stop it. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Next, Louise. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Louise. | ||
| Next, Trevor. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Trevor. | ||
| Thank you, Trevor. | ||
| Next, TJ. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, TJ. | ||
| I would like to believe that that's either TJ as in Tijuana. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| The whole place. | ||
| All of Tijuana. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| Or TJ Lavin, host of the Real World Road Rules Challenge, a show that I no longer watch but did for way too long. | ||
| It's still on? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| And then finally, I'd like to say thank you to Wallace E. Punk. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Wallace E. Punk. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Is that a reference to something or is that a name? | ||
| It's like policy wonk but inverted. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh! | |
| Oh, goddammit, I didn't even catch that. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| I kept thinking of, wait, is that a play on Polk? | ||
| Like, I have no idea. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| I'm in presidential history all the time, apparently. | ||
| That's pretty amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, if you're out there listening and you'd like to support the show, you can go to our website, knowledgefight.com, click the button that says support the show. | ||
| We would appreciate it. | ||
| That'd be lovely. | ||
| So, Jordan, here comes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's in front of us today? | ||
| It's a profoundly complicated episode of this podcast. | ||
| As we dig through the past of Alex Jones' show in 2013 to learn more about how he ended up believing that no children died at Sandy Hook, we found that Steve Pchenik is absolutely the first person to make that argument on air in a way that Alex considers. | ||
| He thinks about it. | ||
| He even says that it's blowing his mind hearing Steve Pchenik say these things. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| We've encountered Steve many times in the past on Alex's show, and we've delighted in how he and Alex tend to get into fights on air, as they did in a lost episode of our podcast where Alex called Steve, who was in the middle of trying to survive Hurricane Irma. | ||
| Alex wanted to talk about how Trump was being surrounded by globalists and he was under attack, but Steve wasn't having any of it because he had water coming in. | ||
| And here is a little taste of that. | ||
| We don't need him on house arrest like Rapunzel. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| We don't need the president on house arrest like Rapunzel. | ||
| He's not under house arrest. | ||
| He's a grown man who has a theory to think that he does. | ||
| He's a grown man who brings in his own children to make decisions. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| I'm not here to judge the president. | ||
| He can do what he does. | ||
| But I am here to judge the republic because unlike many other people and like many other veterans, we fought in order to maintain the republic. | ||
| Whether Trump is here or Pence is here or Mickey Mouse is in the White House, you want to know what's irrelevant to us. | ||
| What's relevant to us is that the republic remains so that it has the integrity of the United States. | ||
| And Trump has gutted 50 years of globalists selling out the country in eight months. | ||
| Globalists aren't doing anything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alex, right now, Brexit is in such serious trouble. | |
| Ireland is in trouble. | ||
| Scotland is in trouble. | ||
| But that's the beginning of the separation. | ||
| Of course... | ||
| Yeah, but who told you about it? | ||
| I told you that years ago. | ||
| And I told you this would be the takedown of the system that was put in by the EU. | ||
| We're not falling apart. | ||
| Well, I mean, I give you credit for that, but we were pushing to bring down the EU 20 years ago. | ||
| I know that. | ||
| No, no, we weren't pushing it at all. | ||
| I was. | ||
| Before they even officially launched it. | ||
| I'm going to give you four stars. | ||
| Go home to your mother and tell her you're brilliant. | ||
| That's not the issue. | ||
| The issue. | ||
| Well, I'll tell you, in the real world, in the real world, I've been able to predict stuff other people haven't. | ||
| I said Trump was going to win two days before. | ||
| I think you're wonderful. | ||
| Alex, will you stop promoting yourself? | ||
| I'm not promoting myself. | ||
| I'm promoting facts. | ||
| I'm promoting facts. | ||
| 70 seconds, we'll be back. | ||
| That's one of my favorite clips of all time. | ||
| From the go home and tell your mother you're brilliant diss, which is just spectacular. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| To Steve Pachanek's just sick of the bullshit being, Globals aren't doing anything! | ||
| The Globals aren't doing anything line is spectacular. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I mean. | ||
| It's so amazing. | ||
| That dynamic is just fantastic. | ||
| I find it... | ||
| Endlessly hilarious that one clip that is so integral to our entire show was part of a lost episode from two years ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I'm glad that the clip finally gets played in a way that is earned. | ||
| Yes, that's half the reason we're doing this episode. | ||
| That clip just gotta be there. | ||
| And moments like that are really fun, Jordan, because Steve shares a relationship with Alex that most guests don't, in that Alex really needs him. | ||
| Or at least he did for a very long time. | ||
| Steve was a former State Department official and an expert in psychological warfare, and his proximity to Alex and his professed respect for Alex's work made him invaluable in terms of making Alex appear credible. | ||
| There's no way that Steve didn't understand that dynamic, so he could just yell at Alex a little bit here and there, which is always so much fun. | ||
| It upsets the normal power dynamic of the show, wherein Alex is the unquestioned king of all that he surveys. | ||
| The other side effect of this relationship is that Steve was pretty much able to say anything on Alex's show, and Alex had to treat it like a serious statement worth considering. | ||
| Like the time, who could forget, when Steve told Alex that Parkland was a false flag. | ||
| I don't know, sometimes. | ||
| Again, the Sandy Hook and this Parkland, they're all false flags. | ||
| And what you're looking at is the nonsense of the vestiges of the press trying to be relevant, as well as the FBI and a crooked... | ||
| So how long does this ghost dance go on, then? | ||
| So Parkland was a false flag. | ||
| Sandy Hook a false flag. | ||
| You heard him even repeat that there? | ||
| Even Alex is smart enough to be like, okay... | ||
| How many false flags are there? | ||
| How long are we going to keep calling these false flags, you idiot? | ||
| We can't call all of them false flags. | ||
| It's getting thin, Steve. | ||
| Or who could forget about the time Steve went on David Knight's show and just said straight up the Las Vegas shooting didn't happen. | ||
| Dr. Pretendik, let's go straight to the shooting in Vegas. | ||
|
unidentified
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Your comments. | |
| Let me tell you, number one, why I can't get on the internet. | ||
| The reason is very simple. | ||
| I'm being hacked. | ||
| The reason why you're hearing me now is another person's phone call. | ||
| So this is part of 9-11. | ||
| They can call it conspiracy, but everything you said, David, is the same thing I said within 24 hours of 9-11. | ||
| My CIA operatives admitted that they did it. | ||
| I had the names of the people involved. | ||
| They indicted Bush, Cheney, Chertoff, Giuliani, the Mossad operatives who blew up the building, and Condi, and as well as Cole and Pound. | ||
| And this is what happened. | ||
| So what we're happening... | ||
| What's happening now is a continuation. | ||
| Sandy Hook, false flag. | ||
| San Bernardino, false flag. | ||
| Yesterday in Las Vegas, a complete false flag. | ||
| It was absolute nonsense. | ||
| You could hear the verbiage. | ||
| You could hear the same setup as we had in Sandy Hook. | ||
| The narrative is so predictable that no one was killed. | ||
| There was no shooting. | ||
| And, in fact, what happened in the giveaway was this was the greatest. | ||
| Killing at all times of America. | ||
| That's distinctive of Trump. | ||
| He has to have the most and the best. | ||
| The sad part is that Trump fell into this system and is co-opted by the Department of HS, CIA, and FBI. | ||
| What we need to do in America now is demand the indictment of presidents, indictment of officials. | ||
| I don't know if it will happen, but this is enough reason to start a revolution. | ||
| So we got Steve saying Las Vegas, no one died there, no one got shot, and his phone isn't working because of 9-11. | ||
| I was about to say, if David Knight were any good as a host, he would say, have you tried turning it off and on again? | ||
| Hit the switch on the back. | ||
| Steve, have you tried turning it off and on again? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But David Knight, as I recall, his response was, I don't know about Las Vegas, but Sandy Hook, definitely okay. | ||
| What a fucking idiot. | ||
| Or, Jordan, who could forget about how in the lead-up to the 2016 election, Steve Pachanek claimed that he'd created Bernie Sanders as a PSYOP. | ||
| Well, Hillary's in a very serious problem, and once again, I want to thank your audience and you. | ||
| What we did was, in fact, to do a PSYOP on Hillary, which was, in effect, to create Bernie Sanders, to bring him out to co-opt her extreme left, and then to bring Biden in. | ||
| To co-opt your middle, and then to break up and fractionate her system. | ||
| So, we got, you know, we got him, he created Bernie Sanders. | ||
| Yeah, did... | ||
| I'm assuming Steve doesn't know that Leo Zagami is the reason that 9-11 happened, right? | ||
| He's working across purposes. | ||
| He doesn't have the Leo Zagami information. | ||
| It is kind of funny that on the same show, it's entirely possible to hear a guy who claims to have committed 9-11 as well as the guy who says that 9-11 was a false flag. | ||
| Well, it was a false flag done by Leo Zagami. | ||
| That's how we get it all together. | ||
| And the reverberation. | ||
| Things are turning off phones to this day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| One guy's phone. | ||
| And it is an old man in Florida. | ||
| So we have... | ||
| He created Bernie Sanders as a PSYOP. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| And Alex has got to believe this shit. | ||
| He's got to at least treat it as a credible thing. | ||
| Or who could forget about how also he had said that he created Trump and enlisted him to run for president. | ||
| Your take on Donald Trump, your take on Carson and where the country is. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| The truth of the matter is this is one of the most phenomenal American revolutions I have ever seen and the one we were waiting for, Alex. | ||
| I thank you and I thank the audience and I thank the so-called alternative media, which really became the mainstream media. | ||
| The reality is Trump had been monitoring this mainstream media for a long time. | ||
| I knew it. | ||
| He knew it. | ||
| Many of us had known that. | ||
| And in fact, when we put his name up for the next presidency, he took it. | ||
| And basically ran with it. | ||
| And this is the true expression of the moral majority and the fact that we are so tired of the people who committed the crime at 9 /11. | ||
| Now, once Trump gets in, my suspicion is many of them will be arrested. | ||
| So what we have is him pitching this narrative to Alex that he was part of a group of heroes who enlisted Trump to run as president as a counter-coup against Hillary Clinton, who's trying to pull off her own internal soft coup. | ||
| Fun fact, the narratives that Steve was promoting on Alex Jones' show in late 2015, as we saw in our 2015 coverage, they're shockingly similar to the things the people who are into QAnon believe. | ||
| You know, the idea of they're going to arrest all these people after Trump gets in. | ||
| There's good guy heroes in the intelligence services that are working to install Trump. | ||
| Had QAnon already become a... | ||
| No, that was later. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Did he create QAnon? | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm not trying to say that Steve is Q, but I wouldn't be too surprised to find out that the people who were running that scam, the QAnon scam, weren't at least in part inspired by narratives that Steve used to help persuade Alex to support Trump. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| There's so many little elements that are very similar. | ||
| Maybe that's something for another episode. | ||
| I didn't want to get into it. | ||
| Maybe that would be something we should leave to the guys over at QAnon Anonymous. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| And then there's perhaps my favorite thing that Steve ever convinced Alex of, and that is the idea that Steve does psyops, but he isn't doing them against the good and noble people who listen to InfoWars. | ||
| We had... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Steve Pachanikong. | |
| And a lot of folks hear Steve Pachenik and they don't trust him because of the positions he's been in. | ||
| I'm not saying you should trust him. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| But look at what he's told us over the years. | ||
| It's turned out to basically be true. | ||
| And he does do manipulative stuff where he was like, Jeb Bush should run. | ||
| He's a really great leader. | ||
| I really like him. | ||
| When he's saying George W. Bush is involved in 9-11 and should go on trial for treason. | ||
| And then it turns out he's been at the Council on Foreign Relations advising them to run Jeb Bush. | ||
| To set Jeb Bush up so they could then make it about 9-11. | ||
| I mean, when you're dealing with Pacinic, it is serious psychological warfare. | ||
| And he's not doing it to this broadcast. | ||
| He's here saying, America's going to win. | ||
| We're going to take the country back. | ||
| We're going to be positive. | ||
| Our military's going to be patriotic and not go along with this. | ||
| And it's been happening. | ||
| I'm not saying Pacinic is even 5% of the whole resistance at that level, but what he's saying is true and is being listened to. | ||
| And this broadcast is a format for that to happen. | ||
| That is very sad. | ||
| Yeah, that's not good. | ||
| It's always real sad to hear. | ||
| So looking over the period of time that we have, the various stretches of time, it's hard not to get the impression that a lot of the ideas that Alex has gotten and that have gotten him in the most trouble trace back to Steve. | ||
| But simultaneously, Steve's earliest appearances on Alex's show, claiming that 9-11 was a false flag, created a legitimacy in Alex's content that wouldn't have been there without a purported expert and insider backing them up. | ||
| Without being on the vanguard of the 9/11 conspiracy movement, Alex would never have been in the position to become what he later became. | ||
| And at least some of that credit for elevating Alex above the level of "just another weirdo yelling about shit" was getting Steve Pchenik to say on air that 9/11 was fake That is a massively important piece of Alex's trajectory. | ||
| Unfortunately, their relationship soured in 2017, ultimately reaching its breaking point on October 5th, when a caller asked Alex his thoughts about Steve saying that the Las Vegas shooting didn't happen. | ||
| It didn't. | ||
| Well, I mean, according to Steve, it didn't. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| According to everybody else. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| And reality, it did. | ||
| Forgot. | ||
| So Alex gets this caller, and here is his response. | ||
| Paul, we're going to go to Georgia and talk to Paul. | ||
| Paul, thanks for calling. | ||
| You're on the air worldwide. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello? | |
| Yes, sir, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I just want to bring up a point. | |
| Steve Ficinic came on yesterday on David Knight's show and said this whole thing didn't happen. | ||
| Are you aware of that? | ||
| Yeah, I think it's preposterous. | ||
| I've watched the raw footage. | ||
| I've talked to folks that were there. | ||
| You can't fake people dying and bleeding out. | ||
| And he can have his opinion. | ||
| I can have mine. | ||
| But I don't buy into that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it's almost like a disinformation campaign. | |
| Is he still working for the CIA here? | ||
| I mean, this whole thing... | ||
| Well, I think that's safe to say, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
...a deep state who, to provoke a response, this was an attack on middle America. | |
| The target, just like Colonel Schaefer said, just like Colonel Schaefer said, the target is the motive, and the top psychiatrist and everybody else. | ||
| Of course! | ||
| So Alex believes that Steve in 2017 is working for the CIA and he's running a PSYOP. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And he promised never to do that against the InfoWars. | ||
| You think you can trust a psych warfare guy? | ||
| It turns out. | ||
| So the other conspiracies Steve had fed Alex had kernels of ambiguity to them. | ||
| Like, we don't have any videos of Sandy Hook, so who's to say it actually happened? | ||
| Alex wants to believe that Bernie was a psyop against Hillary, because that seems fun for him. | ||
| And he wants to believe that a team of good guy patriot spies installed Trump as president to save the Republic. | ||
| So he's happy to lap up that bullshit. | ||
| But saying that the Las Vegas shooting didn't happen? | ||
| That's just too much. | ||
| Alex was already starting at that point to get blowback about his Sandy Hook coverage, and if he said that this shooting didn't happen, he had every reason to know that he was tacitly telling his audience that a gigantic number of people were crisis actors. | ||
| That Route 91 Harvest Festival had an attendee count of over 20,000 on the day of the shooting. | ||
| And that's a ridiculous amount of people to encourage your audience to potentially harass. | ||
| Plus, there's a high likelihood that there were multiple Alex Jones listeners at that country music festival, so Alex wouldn't want to alienate them or create some sort of... | ||
| I don't know what you'd even call it, but he would be disrespecting... | ||
| He would risk turning them into enemies. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I don't know, removing the whip to put it in Brexit terminology? | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| How are we doing there? | ||
| But Steve said it didn't happen. | ||
| And so Alex threw him the fuck under the bus and indicated that he was probably running a PSYOP on Alex and his audience. | ||
| Of course, that raises the question of what else was Steve manipulating Alex about? | ||
| It would be terribly naive to imagine that Steve was straight up with Alex about everything. | ||
| Then in 2017, he just decided to start fucking with him. | ||
| He turned heel! | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| That happens all the time. | ||
| How many times has Brock Lesnar been a face or a heel? | ||
| It's all the time. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| That's the worst example, because Brock Lesnar's a little bit above the distinction. | ||
| I don't fucking know! | ||
| He's more of a special attraction. | ||
| I gotcha, I gotcha. | ||
| He's just big. | ||
| He's just large. | ||
| He's not good guy, bad guy. | ||
| Just gigantic. | ||
| He's a brick wall. | ||
| He's there to provide resistance. | ||
| So I've taken a look at all the available information I can find about Steve Pachanik, and that's what we're going to discuss here today. | ||
| If you're looking for definite answers, I don't have too many of those. | ||
| Steve is way too complicated a guy with way too long of a trail for me to ever pretend that I can definitively tell you what he's up to or why he does what he does. | ||
| I can't help you with that. | ||
| It's confusing to me. | ||
| I don't know what he's doing. | ||
| Do you know, the thing about his argument for why Las Vegas didn't happen is somehow it is literally the only, perhaps, or not plausible, but of the implausible arguments that could be made, that one seems to be the most plausible of like, well, you know. | ||
| Trump's crazy. | ||
| He wants the biggest of everything. | ||
| So if he was going to orchestrate a false flag, it would be the biggest one in American history. | ||
| And you're like, fuck that. | ||
| Well, it's a piece of relatable psychology of what we know of Trump and his narcissism. | ||
| But it relies on just the weakest foundation. | ||
| Because you have to believe... | ||
| He's trying to get you to buy into the narcissism angle and then not realize what else you're... | ||
| Buying with it. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| That's the technique there. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| So all I can do here is walk you through what's known about Steve Pachanik's past and see if it matches the character that we've come to know as a wacky and cranky guest on Alex's show who doesn't like bad manners. | ||
| So let's jump in, Jordan. | ||
| That was my introduction. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Steve Pachenik was born on December 7th, 1943, the second anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, something that Alex Jones almost certainly thinks is a false flag. | ||
| I'm not sure, but I'm going to guess he does. | ||
| It would make sense. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| Yeah, why not? | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Everything is fucking fake. | ||
| How long is this ghost dance going to go on? | ||
| Steve was born in Havana, Cuba, to Jewish refugee parents who'd left their homes in Europe as World War II was gearing up. | ||
| Oh, so kick him out, right? | ||
| We're against him immigration-wise now? | ||
| No, no, we're fine with him. | ||
| Oh, we're fine with him. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The family relocated to France for some years, then made their way to New York City when Steve was eight years old. | ||
| According to his bio, Steve went to Cornell and received his bachelor's degree in pre-med and psychology in 1964, then proceeded to get his medical degree at Cornell as well. | ||
| He went on to do his residency at Harvard Medical School and simultaneously pursued a PhD in international relations at MIT. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This timeline has always confused me a little bit. | ||
| If you assume that Steve finished his undergrad work in 1964, then the assumption would be that he'd probably complete his MD at Cornell probably in 1968. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I mean, generally, there's four years of med school. | ||
| Yeah, if there's four, yeah, that makes sense. | ||
| Generally, you need at least to complete three years of residency before you're eligible for a medical license. | ||
| But that's at the low end of the spectrum. | ||
| So the earliest possible time I could see him finishing up his Harvard rotations would be 1971. | ||
| That seems almost impossible, though, considering he was doing those rotations while simultaneously getting a PhD at MIT. | ||
| That would be almost an inhuman workload. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, no. | ||
| Impossible. | ||
| It would be impossible. | ||
| No, it's impossible, but it's crazy. | ||
| No, it is impossible. | ||
| MIT has pretty high standards. | ||
| So does Harvard. | ||
| Their med school? | ||
| Not so bad. | ||
| No, it's a lazy man's med school. | ||
| It's a lazy man's med school. | ||
| All the law shit, yeah, for sure. | ||
| Their med school? | ||
| Toss it in there. | ||
| Now, it should be pointed out that a lot of people do take combined MD-PhD programs that often can take between six to eight years to complete, but that couldn't be what Steve is doing. | ||
| These are two different schools. | ||
| No, MIT and Harvard have a combined international psych warfare program with an MD. | ||
| Yeah, it must be. | ||
| That makes perfect sense. | ||
| So the reason this timeline sticks out to me as kind of fishy is that Steve entered the State Department in 1974, and it seems unlikely that he would have been able to complete all of that coursework and residency in the time before then. | ||
| It's not impossible, but if he did pull that off, he's basically superhuman. | ||
| When you add that Steve also claims to have reached the rank of 06 in the military, things become almost impossible to imagine. | ||
| Like, generally it takes 20 years of enlistment to reach the rank of 06. There are definitely variables that can make things go quicker or slower, but from everything I've read, 20 years seems like a pretty average tenure of someone when they reach that rank. | ||
| So now if you imagine that Steve enlisted on his 18th birthday, he would have to reach that rank 7 years quicker than average. | ||
| In order to reach that rank by the time he enters the State Department? | ||
| While also simultaneously obtaining an MD and a PhD from multiple universities. | ||
| Prestigious universities. | ||
| Basically breaking land speed records of collegiate achievement. | ||
| So what we're saying is this man is either a liar or the most brilliant human being alive. | ||
| And, like, I have to keep stressing this. | ||
| I'm not saying that's impossible. | ||
| I'm just saying that I have a very hard time believing that someone could do all of that in the span of 13 years. | ||
| Right. | ||
| All the information that's available about this stuff comes directly from Steve. | ||
| So I have no idea how much of it to believe. | ||
| If any of it can be substantiated, I will gladly tip my hat to his insanely impressive early career. | ||
| But for now, I view it with a healthy level of skepticism. | ||
| Can you get a Battlefield promotion to 06? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Like he was in action and he saved 300 people's lives? | ||
| False flag people's lives, by the way. | ||
| I don't think you can get all the way up there that way. | ||
| There is a consideration, too, of if you're a doctor and you join, apparently you can skip a rank or two. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, right, right. | |
| But that still doesn't help. | ||
| And here's why. | ||
| Steve describes his earlier years to Alex in this part of his career when he made his first appearance on Alex's show in 2002. | ||
| I was a very young 06. That's a colonel at the age of 32. I then went on to my training in psychiatry at the same time at Harvard. | ||
| At the same time, I got my PhD from MIT in international relations. | ||
| That makes things a little more complicated because Steve is clearly saying that he reached 06 at the age of 32. Then he went on to start his residency and PhD programs. | ||
| Even if he got his undergrad work and MD at Cornell out of the way previously, he would still be beginning the second part of his doctoral track at 32. And unfortunately... | ||
| That means that he would have to be at the State Department while he's a resident at Harvard and studying at MIT because he would have been 32 in 1974, the same year he's supposed to have joined up with the State Department. | ||
| Alright, so clearly this man is just dynamite. | ||
|
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Absolutely. | |
| He was just a consultant with the State Department initially, but in 1976 he was made Deputy Assistant Secretary of State. | ||
| So in two years, he rose through the ranks at the State Department, completed his residency, and got a PhD, if you believe his version of the story, based on the ages that he clearly is saying that he was. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And he was a colonel at the same time. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah, so did they have to call? | ||
| Wait, if you were a colonel, wouldn't you automatically start up higher at the State Department? | ||
| Then deputy, or then consultant? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, maybe not consultant. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's strange, yeah. | ||
| I'm sure there'd be some consideration, but his rank at the State Department isn't nearly even on my radar. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That's not even a concern of mine. | ||
|
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Exactly. | |
| It's just the logistics of these degrees and time. | ||
|
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Fair. | |
| It's just very difficult. | ||
| And again, I stress, this is all possible, certainly, but it's the sort of thing that I find hard to believe as presented. | ||
| Something feels off, and I'd be happy if Steve would be willing to produce his collegiate transcripts and service records. | ||
| I will applaud him for having probably one of the most impressive scholastic and military careers ever. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I would imagine that if I achieved these things... | ||
| I would fucking publish all of my shit. | ||
| I'd be like, oh yeah, you don't believe me? | ||
| Boom, here you go. | ||
| Here are my degrees. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Here's all the classes. | ||
| No, there would absolutely be a paper trail because all of those things, or any one of those things, would be a relative lifetime achievement. | ||
| And that's not to say that the fact that he hasn't published his transcripts means that they are not real. | ||
| That would be kind of faulty of me to accuse. | ||
| But I'm just saying that psychologically, I would do that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't publish my transcripts because I wasn't a good student. | ||
| So if you read any bio of Steve's, one of the things that you notice is that they're all pretty much the same. | ||
| They all have pretty much the same lines. | ||
| They all copy and paste. | ||
| A lot of the stuff that you find, like in his Wikipedia page, is just taken directly from his bio, which he has on his website, which I don't recommend people go to, because if you Google it, it gives you a warning, this site might be hacked. | ||
| Of course, of course, of course. | ||
| Well, he hasn't turned it off and on again! | ||
| I had to do all of this without going to his website, which was a bit of fun. | ||
| But you'll find, if you look at all of his bios, they say, quote, He has been credited with devising successful negotiating strategies and tactics used in several high-profile hostage situations, including the 1976 TWA Flight 355 hostage situation and the 1977 kidnapping of the son of Cyprus' president. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| So, these are not things that they're saying he was involved in. | ||
| He created the strategies. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yes, gotcha. | ||
| Now, he was only a consultant at the State Department before 1976 when this TWA 355 hostage situation happened. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| So, I guess in that time, the two years that he was consulting, he could have... | ||
| Devise the... | ||
|
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I don't know. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| No, that one's possible, at least. | ||
| Has anybody written a... | ||
| Well, actually, obviously, nobody has written a biography about him, correct? | ||
| Not that I'm aware of, no. | ||
| Not that it came up. | ||
| I don't even know why I would have asked that question. | ||
| If somebody had written a biography, you would just be reading it to me directly. | ||
| And questioning everything. | ||
| Yeah, and there would be a lot of copying and pasting going on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This might be as close as we're going to get to a biography of him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, that line about the... | ||
| He's credited with devising these strategies. | ||
| That is taken... | ||
| It's in his bio, and that's taken directly from an article in the LA Times, written by Robert C. Toth. | ||
| Toth doesn't say who credited Steve as creating these things, and if you read the article, Steve is the only source cited and the only person quoted about anything. | ||
| This seems important to me because the article is about Steve's involvement in the negotiations to free kidnapped Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, and I know in that article he is not being entirely honest about the situation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Makes me question it. | ||
| That's where all the things that cite his bio are cited. | ||
| That's the evidence that it comes back to. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And that article, to me, is dubious at best. | ||
| He's like a jailhouse informant. | ||
| Like, you're getting paid a lot of money to say that this guy did a murder. | ||
| I don't know if he did it or not. | ||
| You might be a little self-aggrandizing here. | ||
| The way I look at it more is the same way that Alex pays people to write articles that he then reports on. | ||
| The way that, like, this... | ||
| Reporters clearly talking to Steve. | ||
| Steve tells him things. | ||
| They're in this article in the LA Times, and then Steve uses blurbs from it for his bio. | ||
| It's that same circular thing that I see. | ||
| That's the feeling that I have. | ||
| And it seems strange to me that Robert Toth wrote two articles about Steve Pachanek in 1978 that are the primary sources for almost every element of Steve's bio. | ||
| There are other elements, but they also come from other articles that Steve is the source of. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That seems strange to me, man. | ||
| It's a good thing that Robert Toth isn't an anagram of Steve Pachanek. | ||
| Otherwise, it'd be too obvious. | ||
| That would be amazing. | ||
| It'd be too obvious. | ||
| This is completely unrelated, but a year prior to him writing these two articles about Steve Pachanek, Robert Toth was the Moscow bureau chief for the LA Times, and he was detained by the KGB on suspicion of being a spy. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I am convinced it's completely unrelated. | ||
| And that's just the KGB harassing journalists? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like, man, if I wanted to make a conspiracy out of this, that'd be a good element. | ||
| So far, it seems like literally everything, every part of Steve's life is somewhat conspiratorial. | ||
| Like, there's some element of, like, what the fuck is actually going on here? | ||
| I don't know if it's conspiratorial as much as it is, like, maybe potentially, like, intentionally cloudy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So things get a little more strange when you start to look at the specific cases that are mentioned as the ones that relied on Steve's strategies and consider them from a hostage negotiation standpoint. | ||
| First, there's the case of the hijacking of TWA Flight 355 back on September 10, 1976. | ||
| The plane had taken off at LaGuardia when five passengers claimed to have a bomb hijacked the flight. | ||
| The bomb was fake, and the hijacking was mostly an extreme publicity stunt by Croatian rebels who were seeking to gain attention for their cause of gaining independence from Yugoslavia. | ||
| That was also sponsored by Coca-Cola, so it was a big promotional thing. | ||
| It was an extreme. | ||
| It was an extreme. | ||
| Mountain Dew really went for it on that one. | ||
| They had no bomb, and this wasn't a normal terrorist hijacking. | ||
| A man who was on the plane related the experience to the Atlantic, saying that the lead hijacker told them, quote, We are going to pass out papers for you to read. | ||
| Read them, please. | ||
| You should not worry. | ||
| We have no intention of killing anybody. | ||
| All we want is for our declaration to be published in the American newspapers. | ||
| We are not asking for difficult things. | ||
| We want the world to recognize the injustices against our people, the people of Croatia. | ||
| After that, he said the mood became almost social on the plane, even with the hijackers. | ||
| He describes it as friendly. | ||
| That is fun. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| The picture that's painted by this guy in the Atlantic is nuts. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| It's terrifying, but at the same time also surreal, the way, you know, the first person account of being there and being like, it feels... | ||
| Like, friendly-ish? | ||
| Why is everyone acting friendly? | ||
| And then he's still pretty much convinced he's probably going to die. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| It's crazy. | ||
| Well, think about the whiplash you would experience from hearing somebody say, we're hijacking this plane and then giving you homework. | ||
| You'd be like, Jesus Christ! | ||
| Now I'm inconvenienced two ways! | ||
| That'd be frustrating. | ||
| You know, you're up there and you're like, can I trust them that they're not going to hurt us? | ||
| You obviously can't. | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| It's terrifying. | ||
| At one of the stops, the hijackers decided to let 30 people go. | ||
| They had 25 children and elderly and infirm people that they released, and then they asked the rest of the people if any of them thought they should be allowed to leave because of an illness or another problem. | ||
| They let one woman go because she was on her way to get married. | ||
| Many passengers began to identify with the hijackers, which many people have pointed out is a classic case of Stockholm Syndrome, named after Stockholm Europe. | ||
| In his discussion of other hostage situations, Steve has said a good policy is, quote, no ransom, no concessions, no negotiations, which is exactly the opposite of what resolved the TWA-355 situation. | ||
| The hijackers released everyone after they got exactly what they wanted, namely people publishing their political message. | ||
| The strategy employed in this standoff doesn't seem in line with Steve's stated beliefs, nor does it match the techniques he's used in situations he's been directly involved in. | ||
| And yet every single bio credits his innovations for resolving this hijacking, and yet they never specify what innovations they mean, which I find very curious. | ||
| Putting their stuff in the paper. | ||
| That was a pretty brilliant strategy. | ||
| Do what they want. | ||
| Yeah, I like that one. | ||
| Although... | ||
| It's very weird. | ||
| It does seem so far that the strategies we've talked about for hostage negotiation have not been very complex. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| Like, Steve's strategy, if you can call it that, is just be like, no! | ||
| I don't know if that's his universal strategy. | ||
| That's just what he said in a newspaper that he was interviewed by. | ||
| That's a good... | ||
| He describes that as a good... | ||
| Right. | ||
| At the very least, it's a good opening bargaining point. | ||
| You should show strength, perhaps? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I guess. | ||
| But also, most people say that a good strategy is to show willingness to negotiate because that buys you time and offers the possibility that the people who have taken hostages might screw up or they might change their mind. | ||
| De-escalate. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| So the confusion about this first case is only heightened when you consider the second case that Steve's methods are said to have resolved. | ||
| That's the December 1977 kidnapping of Achilles Kiprianu, the son of the president of Cyprus. | ||
| The kidnappers demanded the release of 25 prisoners, and if they didn't get what they wanted, they were going to send the president his son's head. | ||
| Ultimately, negotiations did not lead to the freeing of prisoners, like the 25 they'd asked for, but the negotiators did make concessions. | ||
| ... | ||
| These are situations where completely different approaches were taken to hostage negotiation, and neither of them match with the way that Steve operates, based on instances we definitely know about that he was directly involved in. | ||
| It's... | ||
| It isn't like hostages were never taken before 1974 when Steve supposedly entered the State Department. | ||
| And from what I can tell, these cases that he's credited with, designing the methods used to resolve, were actually resolved using pretty standard tactics that long predate Steve's involvement, his education, his employment. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Without anybody ever giving more specifics, I don't know what they're talking about. | ||
| And it doesn't seem to make sense. | ||
| Just from the perspective of, like, what's going on here? | ||
|
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Okay. | |
| New theory. | ||
| New theory. | ||
| Steve Pachanek is D.B. Cooper. | ||
| And he got hired by the State Department in a catch-me-if-you-can kind of scenario. | ||
| Like, the only way to catch a hijacker is with a hijacker. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| And then you can make up a false bio because you're D.B. Cooper. | ||
| Steve wasn't involved in the hijacking one, though. | ||
| Not important. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| He's Stevie Cooper. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So there are a few instances of real life situations that I can confirm Steve was definitely at least somewhat involved in. | ||
| Because people died, right? | ||
| No, you're thinking. | ||
| You're looking up. | ||
| That means that definitely. | ||
| I know that most of them people died. | ||
| I don't know that. | ||
| Turns out. | ||
| Isn't a great strategy. | ||
| To be fair, the TWA hostage plane hijacking, one cop did die in that. | ||
| Because the hijackers did leave a real bomb in New York in order to sort of show that they were for real. | ||
| And when they were trying to defuse it, it blew up and one cop died. | ||
| So at least one person did die in that. | ||
| Yeah, Steve also has been involved in some stuff that has killed people. | ||
| Yeah, sounds right. | ||
| One of these situations was the March 9, 1977 hostage situation in Washington, D.C. A group of Hanafi Muslims, who were a radical group that had splintered away from the Nation of Islam, took over three buildings in D.C., the B 'nai B 'rith Center, the Islamic Center of Washington, and City Hall. | ||
| The leader of the group, Hamas Kalas, made a number of demands. | ||
| Four of his children had been murdered in 1973, and he was demanding that the men who were incarcerated for that crime, as well as the murderer of Malcolm, Hmm. | ||
| I... | ||
|
unidentified
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I... | |
| Guys, I don't know if you want to be living out some Deadwood shit right there, like where the mob bring out the fucking murderer. | ||
| Like, that's not good. | ||
| That was one of the demands. | ||
| That's not a smart way of going. | ||
| He got that money back. | ||
|
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Sure! | |
| Further, he wanted... | ||
| That's such the easiest... | ||
| I want $750. | ||
|
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Okay. | |
| Sure. | ||
| You get it. | ||
| Further, he wanted the upcoming premiere of the film Muhammad Messenger of God cancelled since he deemed it sacrilegious. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And that premiere was cancelled. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he wanted the new Star Wars movie pushed up. | ||
| In 1973? | ||
| 1973. | ||
| In Jeffrey David Simon's book, The Terrorist Trap, America's Experience with Terrorism, the event is discussed, and according to his telling of the story, quote, the incident was finally resolved with the assistance of three Muslim diplomats, the ambassadors of Pakistan, Iran, and Egypt, who met with Khalas and other Hanafi leaders for more than three hours and read to them from the Koran, appealing to their consciences. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That has... | ||
| Zero Steve Pechenik. | ||
| Well, now let's compare that to what Steve told Alex about the incident in his 2002. | ||
| Steve hates Islam in general. | ||
| I don't know if that's entirely true. | ||
| You could get that impression, but I'm not entirely sure if I'm going to go... | ||
| Like, Alex hates him more. | ||
| Right, fair, fair. | ||
| So he describes his involvement in the incident and his 2002 debut appearance on Infowars. | ||
| Quote, I had three buildings here held hostage by a fundamentalist group called the Hanafi Muslim, and he knew he was being manipulated. | ||
| The FBI called me in and I used the Koran to take over control. | ||
| And eventually he couldn't help but follow the orders that we gave him, and he eventually released. | ||
| It was because of me. | ||
| Magic! | ||
| Steve used the Quran. | ||
| He read the Quran to them with, obviously, a thin magical thread that he wrote their names into a pillow on in order to control them. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| This seems like a slightly different version of the story than the accounts that I can find elsewhere. | ||
| He really downplayed those diplomats. | ||
| He really left them out of the story. | ||
| The ones who went into a hostage situation and tried to appeal to their conscience. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So this is incredibly complicated for me to make sense of because I can't escape the fact that a March 13, 1977 article in the Eugene Register Guard does seem to confirm that Steve was involved in the response to the standoff, saying he was, quote, in the picture and, quote, working side by side with police chief Maurice Cullinane. | ||
| At the same time, Jeffrey David Simon's book doesn't mention Steve at all, but it does say, quote, also joining the negotiations were U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Earl Silbert and Deputy Attorney General Designee Peter Flaherty. | ||
| The book even quotes Police Chief Maurice Cullinane, and there's no mention of Steve. | ||
| He mentions the head of the FBI and Attorney General being at the command post, but everything we can learn about Steve's involvement comes from his own mouth, either through his telling of the story or quotes he's provided to newspapers. | ||
| Which, I don't know, I mean, he was there, right? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But if you've got Deputy Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General. | ||
| I'm not sure where the plan goes there. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And then you've got the head of the FBI, and then you've got all these other guys. | ||
| Even if he's any one of 06 medical doctor or international relations PhD, he's still not top billed. | ||
| I think if Steve were running the show and he was the one using the Koran to... | ||
| I think everybody would be talking about it. | ||
| I think history would reflect that. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| But I don't necessarily see it. | ||
| I'm not entirely sure. | ||
| I don't want to discount and take away from the fact that he was there and involved, but I don't know. | ||
| Either that or he specifically told all of these people to not mention him. | ||
| Yeah, don't snitch. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think what it looks like to me is perhaps an exaggeration of his involvement. | ||
| Perhaps? | ||
| It feels like it might be. | ||
| I would go with high likelihood of exaggeration. | ||
| So Steve resigned from the State Department on November 7th, 1979, because he was upset with the handling of the Iranian hostage crisis. | ||
| Yeah, go home and tell your mothers you're brilliant. | ||
| I'm out of here. | ||
| Apparently he wasn't happy that he wasn't called in to resolve the situation. | ||
| Telling reporter Georgie Ann Geyer, quote, I had to walk into the operations center on my own after 72 hours. | ||
| This is a little confusing to me. | ||
| Because here we have a guy who's revolutionized the entire world of hostage negotiation, who's called in whenever there's a big crisis unfolding, who's considered a genius in high-pressure situations, and no one calls him when the big game is starting here with this Iranian hostage situation. | ||
| That just doesn't track. | ||
| If the people in the State Department knew that they had the king of hostage negotiators at their disposal, there's literally no reason they wouldn't use him when a potentially explosive hostage situation breaks out. | ||
| I'm guessing Alex might want to write this off as the State Department secretly not wanting the crisis to be diffused, so they keep Steve away from it, knowing that he would easily be able to set things straight. | ||
| A more real-world explanation may be that they didn't trust Steve, and that maybe that has something to do... | ||
| With his most recent, at that point, high-profile job. | ||
| One of the few things we absolutely know Steve was involved in, and that is the botched negotiations to free the kidnapped Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro. | ||
| This is one of the more documented pieces of Steve's history, and it's crazy. | ||
| It's legitimately insane. | ||
| I can't wait. | ||
| In 1976, Aldo Moro and the Italian Communist Party had joined together in what's now known as the Historic Compromise, where they began developing a political alliance where they would share governmental power. | ||
| They were going to call it the Three-Fifths Compromise because it made sense in that... | ||
| But then they heard about ours and they were like, no, no, no, no, no, historic. | ||
| It was revolutionary stuff. | ||
| Like, it was one of the first times that communist parties would be involved in a coalition government. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Up until that point. | ||
| So, perhaps not coincidentally, the day Morrow was kidnapped, he was on his way to parliament to attend the historic first joint voting of the Christian Democrats and the Communist Party. | ||
| The kidnapping severely hurt the communists and put this attempt at cooperation completely on ice. | ||
| Morrow had been kidnapped by terrorists on March 16, 1978. | ||
| He was ultimately held for 55 days, during which time the Red Brigades gave him a criminal trial. | ||
| Apparently he was found guilty, because on May 9, his body was found in the trunk of a car. | ||
| And everybody that I can find specifically points out that the car that he was found in was equidistant from the Communist Party and Christian Democrat headquarters. | ||
|
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Oh, man. | |
| As if it's a message of, you know... | ||
|
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|
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| But I see that written all over the place. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| And I don't know if it's true, but I don't know why. | ||
| Could be apocryphal, but goddamn if it does... | ||
| If it's apocryphal, it shows up in every single report. | ||
| Print the legend, Dan. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, for three weeks during this period, Steve Pachenik was secretly working and meeting with the Italian authorities and intelligence, helping craft a strategy to negotiate the release of Aldo Moro. | ||
| What if we said no? | ||
| However, in April, Steve left Italy and gave up, having decided that Moro was the victim of a setup and that there wasn't anything and anyone in the government that he could really even trust. | ||
| Quote, given the deployment of paramilitary forces, I found it increasingly difficult to believe that they could not find him, that they had no clues to follow. | ||
| I realized that the whole situation was compromised. | ||
| What I suspected, and that was why I left early, was that they didn't really care to pull Morrow out alive. | ||
| This is one version of the story that he's told, that he was just a good guy trying to get the job done, but everyone else, they were a bunch of snakes. | ||
| I'm gonna go with he got fired. | ||
| That's not the case. | ||
| Oh, no? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Because he still worked at the State Department after this. | ||
| No, I mean from the negotiations. | ||
| There's no indication that I have that either. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I just think maybe things didn't go as planned. | ||
| Steve's story about his involvement in the Moro affair has changed a bit over the years. | ||
| In 2008, a documentary was released called The Last Days of Aldo Moro. | ||
| In the film, Steve admits that the decision was made to let Moro die, and that baiting the kidnappers into killing him was the only solution available. | ||
| Quote, the decision was made in the fourth week of the kidnapping, when Morrow's letters became more desperate, and he was about to reveal state secrets. | ||
|
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Hey! | |
| Hey, assholes! | ||
| For real! | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That's the position that he was putting forth, is like, Morrow was allowed to write letters back to the government, and what have you, and they were getting the tone, they're like, he's gonna start telling the Red Brigades a bunch of shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, Steve, and this is not backed up by anything. | ||
| Correct? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Steve saying that the Italian government was literally like, let's let him die? | ||
|
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I don't know. | |
| You're looking at me with very pregnant eyes. | ||
| Well, many people don't believe Steve, which I think is a pretty healthy instinct. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good start. | ||
| However, some people do. | ||
| In 2014, the International Business Times reported that, quote, prosecutors in Rome said there's serious evidence suggesting Steve Pachenik, a former State Department international crisis manager, participated in the murder that shocked Italy. | ||
| admit as much on tape six years prior. | ||
| I don't think that's too shocking of a report. | ||
| Yeah, that sounds right. | ||
| Both Steve and Italian Interior Minister Francesco Cosiga have admitted that they released a false statement attributed to the kidnappers, known as Communication No. | ||
| 7, which announced that Moro was dead, though he was still alive in captivity. | ||
| Steve admitted that they did this to gauge the public's reaction to news of Moro's death, as well as to send a message to the Red Brigades that they didn't care whether Moro lived or died, that they considered him dead already. | ||
| That's fucked up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That is really... | ||
| No, you can't do that. | ||
| We don't have people who do that, right? | ||
| We got one guy. | ||
| That's not a thing that you can do. | ||
|
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So he literally just... | |
| Sent this message of just like, we're going to be out in front of this story. | ||
| We're saying he's dead. | ||
| So you have the option of killing him or making him the fucking Jesus. | ||
| Those are your options. | ||
| More or less. | ||
| And Steve, this was Steve's idea. | ||
| Well, we don't know if it's Steve's idea, but he participated in it. | ||
| It could have been the Interior Minister who came up with this, but Steve seems to relish in it as a good idea. | ||
| And this was not known for quite a while. | ||
| When I mentioned that that article, a lot of his bio comes from, it involves the Aldo Moro kidnapping. | ||
| This stuff is not public at this point. | ||
| He's presenting a different version of the events that happened. | ||
| So other people are like, ah, this guy, ah, he doesn't know what he's talking about. | ||
| And then the International Business Times is like, oh, that dude murdered a dude. | ||
| Later this information came out and both of them have admitted that they sent this fake communication, which was part of trying to manipulate the kidnappers, which probably led them to not believe that they had... | ||
| bargaining chip. | ||
| Yeah, obviously. | ||
| So to quote Steve speaking about the Red Brigades, quote, I drew them into a trap where the only thing they could do eventually was kill Aldo Moro. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| I trapped you! | ||
| Steve literally says that he did this through a psychological operation, a PSYOP. | ||
| Steve's goal was not to free Aldo Moro. | ||
| His goal was to protect the established power structure, and once it got to a point where it was decided that Moro was a threat, he worked to get Moro killed. | ||
| Freeing him wouldn't be advantageous, since Morrow's letters indicated a feeling of being betrayed by his associate, and they worried that if he made it out alive, he would use their inaction to save him against them politically. | ||
| Simultaneously, they couldn't take the risk of the Red Brigade's not killing Morrow, because if they kept him alive long enough and treated him well, his animosity toward the people who were not rescuing him could grow to the point where he might leak information to the Red Brigade to hurt them politically, because he'd get, like, the Stockholm Syndrome kind of thing. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| All I hear is them saying, okay, we're the bad guys here, so let's kill him. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know how to describe it, but I don't know if that's far off. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In order to maintain the status quo, to paraphrase Steve Pchenik, Aldo Moro had to be sacrificed. | ||
| In that documentary, The Last Days of Aldo Moro, the filmmakers talked to a couple of former members of the Red Brigades. | ||
| Here's an excerpt of that documentary where they discuss the interrogations of Moro, which they were present for. | ||
| The first voice you'll hear is a woman named Adriana Ferranda, and the second is a guy named Valerio Morucci, both active members of the Red Brigade. | ||
| Still, or just back then? | ||
|
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And meanwhile, held in his cell in the Via Montalcini, the hostage is interrogated every day by his Red Brigade kidnappers. | |
| Convinced that the country is politically and economically enslaved, they attempt to make him confess to links that exist between the Italian state and multinational companies. | ||
| Secondo me c'era un problema di inadeguatezza. | ||
| The comrades who interrogated Moro were expecting him to confirm what they had imagined about the Italian state, to confirm that there existed an imperialist multinational state. | ||
| and that the United States were the brains behind this vast globalized restructuring. | ||
| The United States was the brain of this world's restructuring. | ||
| In fact, Morrow talked about a reality that was much more complex and not so easy to decipher. | ||
| ... | ||
| And the convoys quickly felt they were being duped. | ||
| And so the brothers who were referring to what he was saying was obviously They said that Moro was deliberately not answering their questions, but trying to waste their time, or rather, trying to gain some time. | ||
| Our leader, Moretti, couldn't get Moro to give way. | ||
| According to him, Moro's answers were partly true, but only partially. | ||
| The reality was much more complex, but for a brigade member it was incomprehensible. | ||
| For us, reality was much more simple. | ||
| There were causes and effects, that's all. | ||
| The complexity, the intrigues, the overlapping, the contradictions. | ||
| We couldn't understand all that. | ||
| After a few days, the interrogations stopped and Moro began to write for himself. | ||
| He didn't seek to convince us because he understood that in no way did we want to kill him. | ||
| He knew that his negotiating partner was now the state and no longer the Red Brigades. | ||
| Who do these Red Brigade people sound like? | ||
| Militant anti-government rebels who believe in a one-world government who refuse to accept any kind of complexity? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Does it sound like a guy we do a podcast about? | ||
| I can't think of anything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was just hearing that just thinking like, oh, isn't that such the way of it? | ||
| Do not try and explain complex situations to people who are like, tell us everything we want to hear. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do not tell us the truth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Please. | ||
| Confirm. | ||
| Please don't tell us the truth. | ||
| Confirm for us all of our paranoid fantasies about how the world works that are based on oversimplifications and black and white thinking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not like that. | ||
| You've got to understand. | ||
| X, Y, Z. Right. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Can't compute. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now we're held hostage by an entire country run by that thought process. | ||
| So, in an interview Steve did with the St. Petersburg Times from April 21st, 1978, he's pretty clear that he thinks the Morrow situation worked out well. | ||
| I killed Morrow myself. | ||
| Because the government didn't have to resort to extreme actions, which he felt would threaten the credibility and viability of the state. | ||
| Of course, like I said, in 1978, when he's talking to this newspaper, he was pretending that he and Kasinga hadn't sent out fake communication number seven. | ||
| Man, that's fucked up. | ||
| That shit's not supposed to happen in real life. | ||
| Like, that's a Bourne Identity movie plot right there. | ||
| Like, that's stupid. | ||
| So this went bad from a larger perspective. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Aldo Morrow probably wasn't... | ||
| If you're a hostage negotiator and you're sent in by the State Department at Jimmy Carter's behest to go and try and resolve a situation where a head of state of an allied country has been kidnapped by rebels, you don't necessarily want to come out of that with a dead prime minister in the trunk of a car. | ||
| It's not a great thing. | ||
| So my feeling on it is possibly that Steve Pachanek punted on this, just screwed up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then wasn't involved in the Iranian hostage crisis because he had just been coming off this terrible outing where the fucking prime minister got assassinated. | ||
| Yeah, that one. | ||
| So here's how I think that would go. | ||
| Jimmy Carter is like, hey, let's go save. | ||
| Let's send some people to help save the prime minister's life. | ||
| And Steve Pachanek is like, OK, I'm going to kill him. | ||
| And Jimmy Carter is like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| You don't understand. | ||
| We want to go save his life. | ||
| And Steve Bajanek's like, I'm going to wink really loudly right now. | ||
| Did I say that out loud? | ||
| Anyways, I'm going to kill him. | ||
| Steve has a lot of quotes also from his past about being a rogue and stuff like that. | ||
| And so the idea that he might have just been like... | ||
| I got a fucking crazy idea here. | ||
| Let's see if this works. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| He's like a punk hostage negotiator, you know? | ||
| What's more cool and underground than negotiating the opposite of what you're supposed to do? | ||
| Man, it's 78. Punk is hot at that point. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| He's talking to them. | ||
| He's like, what if we asked you to kill him more? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the other big piece of Steve's resume that always comes up is the Camp David Accords. | ||
| He is always cited as being involved in the Camp David Accords, which took place in September 1978. | ||
| Jimmy Carter brought Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Camp David to have a peace summit. | ||
| Carter! | ||
| Carter! | ||
| What if we killed him? | ||
| Without exception, whenever Steve's bio is repeated, it will say that he was, quote, instrumental in getting the Accords signed. | ||
| And that, to me, is very interesting. | ||
| It seems entirely likely that Steve could have been at the staff that was there at the time. | ||
| It's in between the Moro affair and his resignation in 1979, so it's believable that he would be there as a State Department attache. | ||
| The problem comes in when you try to define what the word instrumental means. | ||
| Because no source I can find that doesn't trace directly back to Steve credits him with being instrumental in the Accords. | ||
| Well, he locked the door behind him when he left the room, and the doors are locked from the outside. | ||
| So they wouldn't even have been able to leave without the Accords. | ||
| He is instrumental in that. | ||
| I will say that a lot of the sources on the Camp David Accords do say the primary goal is not letting them leave without. | ||
| So if he did lock the doors... | ||
| You could make the argument that he was instrumental. | ||
| I'm not saying that he wasn't there. | ||
| I'm perfectly willing to believe that he was. | ||
| But I don't know if I trust his depiction of it. | ||
| Every other source I can find seems to put far more emphasis on Zbigniew Brzezinski's involvement. | ||
| He seems to be a major player in the negotiations. | ||
| Even down to that famous picture of him playing chess against Menachem Begin. | ||
| Yeah, one of those people is a historical figure. | ||
| And then the other one is Zbigniew Brzezinski. | ||
| Like, who even knows who that fucking guy is? | ||
|
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Sure. | |
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| We got Stevie Pease in there! | ||
| Right. | ||
| It seems strange that Steve did all this stuff when everybody else agrees that it was someone else. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know, though. | ||
| It could be a grand conspiracy to malign Steve Pachanik and make sure that his brand of roguish hostage negotiation never takes over. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, so here's the only thing that I could say, is that obviously the guy at the, you know, if you're an aide or a secretary or something along those lines, sure, generally speaking, they do all the legwork and the face gets all the accolades, you know? | ||
| But in this type of situation... | ||
| Usually, those guys are not listening to Steve Pachenik, deputy assistant to the Secretary of State. | ||
| He is a deputy assistant. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| There are a lot of deputy assistant secretaries of state under the various assistant secretaries of state. | ||
| There are a lot of those. | ||
| And so, like, yeah, it is a cool position to be in, and I'd never knock somebody for reaching that level of achievement. | ||
| But it's also easy to say that you're doing a lot more than you are, possibly. | ||
| Now, one of the things I find incredibly difficult is that Steve Pchenik definitely was in that position from 1974, when he was a consultant, to 1976, when he became a deputy assistant secretary of state, to 1979, when he quit over the Iran hostage situation. | ||
| I know that to be true. | ||
| From contemporary reports, from definitive things you can trace down, he was in that role. | ||
| According to Steve, when he's on Alex's show, according to his bio, he took a little time off and then returned and served under Reagan and Bush Sr. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| Where he orchestrated 9-11, presumably. | ||
| His bio consistently says that he worked under four or five administrations. | ||
|
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What? | |
| They don't really get the story straight. | ||
| His bio says four or five. | ||
| No. | ||
| His multiple bios. | ||
| It depends on which bio you're reading. | ||
| Okay, that's an issue. | ||
| There's an inconsistency of whether it's four or five administrations. | ||
| Maybe they're just not taking into account Ford. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I have no idea what the situation is, but there's a lack of clarity there. | ||
| So we get into the early 80s here. | ||
| After the Iranian hostage crisis and Steve's resignation from the State Department, he starts showing up on places like CBS and ABC, talking to a number of newspapers also. | ||
| He's offering his expert opinion on how things are going. | ||
| I think too many are surviving these days. | ||
|
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Oh, boy. | |
| In all of these appearances, all of these times he's in the newspapers, he's credited as a psychiatrist and former member of the State Department. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| On February 17, 1981, Steve formally accuses the State Department of sanctioning the attack that killed U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolf Dobbs. | ||
| Dobbs had been kidnapped by militants, and as the story goes, the U.S. urged patience and negotiation, whereas the Afghanistan government took a more rash approach and attacked the militants, which led to the ambassador's death. | ||
| There was tremendous fallout from this incident as the U.S. began to change its stance towards Afghanistan and drastically cut back foreign aid. | ||
| Steve claimed he was in the room when permission was given for the Afghan forces to attack, but no evidence has ever been produced to back those claims up. | ||
| He said he knows the name of the official who gave permission, but, quote, doesn't want to identify the official because he doesn't want the case to become an indictment of just one person, but to focus the attention on the U.S. anti-terrorist policy. | ||
| This is shockingly similar to what he told Alex Jones about 9-11 saying he knows the names of generals who are involved in the false flag but wouldn't reveal them. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| This seems like a pattern. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I would also point you to my doctoral supervisor at MIT, but unfortunately they died. | ||
| I'm sorry you can't talk to them. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| My bad. | ||
| Such a weird thing. | ||
| According to the United Press International, an article in that, quote, State Department spokesman William Dice said officials involved in the Dubs kidnapping had been consulted and communications logs reviewed. | ||
| And then he said, the allegations by Pachenik are incorrect. | ||
| All concerned stress the need for restraint as well as avoiding a precipitous assault. | ||
| It strains credulity for me to imagine that Steve Pachenik could be involved in the bungled Moro negotiations, quit over not being involved in the Iranian hostage crisis, then take to the media to accuse the State Department of being complicit in the murder of an ambassador, then get his job back at the State Department. | ||
| It feels like this kind of an act of making public accusations like this would probably disqualify someone from getting a sensitive job back. | ||
| Ah, but it would qualify for you getting a secret State Department job, Dan. | ||
| I think it would be even more disqualifying. | ||
| You've shown that you can't keep your goddamn mouth shut. | ||
| No, what you've shown is how to run disinformation campaigns on your own. | ||
| I guess that would be... | ||
| That's taking initiative. | ||
| That would be an interesting way to freelance resume it. | ||
| Like, look what I did on my own. | ||
| I accused you of murder. | ||
| Yeah, it's like when the government goes after people who play video games well and hires them to run all of their spaceship programs. | ||
| Like in The Last Starfighter? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's Steve Bajanek's Last Starfighter to his way to the Secret State Department. | ||
| I don't know about that. | ||
| I mean, I don't know about that. | ||
| In articles in the New York Times from 1982, 1985, and 1991, Steve is consistently credited as a former member of the State Department who is now in private practice. | ||
| And all this is during the time that he supposedly was back in the State Department under Reagan and Bush Sr. | ||
| There's no indication from contemporary sources that he ever worked in the government in an official capacity past his resignation in 1979. | ||
| And that would make total sense based on his behavior and his actions. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If I were anybody who was involved in vetting for, like, State Department stuff, and, you know, I don't give a good goddamn how good Steve is at his job. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| If he comes out publicly in newspapers and media, accuses us of planning the murder of an ambassador... | ||
| He's not getting credentials again. | ||
| He's not getting clearance. | ||
| Yeah, because he would... | ||
| I mean, if he was still in the union, maybe, but I don't think so. | ||
| He is a tremendous risk to your insulation of information if he's shown himself willing to... | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Like, if this is true, this is disqualifying. | ||
| If it's fake, it's more disqualifying. | ||
| Well, not just that, but I'm sure that in real life he was a fucking joke at the State Department. | ||
| And if they did give his resume, they'd be like, is this the guy that killed Morrow? | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Get out of here. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| I have not been able to find any resources on whether or not he was a joke at the State Department. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| Quick question. | ||
| Why are so many people quoting him in articles? | ||
| Is it just because he's available? | ||
| Now, it's interesting that you ask that. | ||
| Ah, because he's a shameless self-promoter? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| And a lot of them are written by the same people. | ||
| He seems to have a tendency to have someone who's this go-to person. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| It was that Robert C. Toth for a minute. | ||
| There was a couple articles that he printed about Steve. | ||
| And then that Georgie Ann Geyer, she seems to be someone who Steve went to over and over and over again. | ||
| She wrote stuff about how he's a brilliant mind and considered one of the best. | ||
| I don't know if there's anything suspicious about him, but I think people like Steve like to have a reliable place where they can funnel information. | ||
| And get positive. | ||
| And so a number of these stories are... | ||
| In other instances, there's every reason to go to him for comment. | ||
| In the late 70s especially, there's every reason to treat him like somebody who... | ||
| He's a rising star in the State Department. | ||
| He's involved in the Hanafi standoff. | ||
| You could paint that as a big success. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Oh, that's fair. | ||
| So I see the press as being like... | ||
| Obviously, there would be an interest in him. | ||
| But as time goes on, I think there's much less of it. | ||
| Useful idiots in a certain sense. | ||
| Until Alex comes along. | ||
| The most idiot useful of all. | ||
| Yeah, Alex does seem to fit the pattern that he has of a couple of these journalists that he goes back to the well with. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And Alex seems to be the ultimate in that because he's on the radio. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He's stupid. | ||
| That helps. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| So I have no idea what the reality is of him trying to go back to the State Department or whatever. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| And honestly, it would be impossible for me to ever really get to the bottom of it. | ||
| These are secretive and clandestine waters, after all. | ||
| So how easily would it be to rebut everything I can bring to the table by saying, like, Steve was working for the government secretly. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| In an unofficial capacity. | ||
| Fucking I did that. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I can't really address anything like that, in the same way that I can't disprove the existence of space raptors. | ||
| But I can tell you from all the sources that are available from the late 70s through early 90s, there is a consistent thread. | ||
| Until 1979, Steve is credited in articles as a current deputy. | ||
| Man, that would be such a weird thing to go from negotiating the murder of a prime minister. | ||
| To your own private psychiatric practice? | ||
| Wouldn't that be so weird? | ||
| That's a difference in status or stature. | ||
| Really, really big. | ||
| Really, really big. | ||
| Psychiatrists are still pretty well respected in our culture. | ||
| They're very well respected, but most of them have never killed a prime minister. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| And, you know, hey, just be clear, he didn't kill the Prime Minister. | ||
| He got the Prime Minister killed. | ||
| Even that's not entirely clear. | ||
|
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|
Right. | |
| But the situation was 100% not handled in a way that was appropriate. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So, we get to 2002, and Steve Pachenik makes his first appearance on The Alex Jones Show on April 24th, 2002. | ||
| And while I can't find audio of that first interview, I did find a transcript, and it's a fantastic, fascinating document. | ||
| From the very beginning... | ||
| Steve was playing to Alex's narcissism. | ||
| Listen to this exchange that comes just after Steve lays out some of his credentials. | ||
| Alex, quote, We're talking to Dr. Steve Pachenik, and he's worked at the highest levels of psychological operations for four administrations. | ||
| You're talking about controlling paradigms, paradigm management. | ||
| Steve, quote, Well, that's interesting. | ||
| I've never used that word, paradigm. | ||
| But you clearly, you must be a professor, Alex. | ||
| Jesus Christ! | ||
| That's flattery. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's a lie. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In a March 12, 1977 article in the St. Petersburg Times discussing the B 'nai B 'rith-Hanafi standoff, Steve said, quote, This was a paradigm of unusual cooperation between different agencies and countries. | ||
|
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|
Stop it! | |
| Stop it. | ||
| I never use the word paradigm. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| You must be a professor, Alex. | ||
| That is petty. | ||
| That is petty, Dan. | ||
| That's receipts. | ||
| We already saw that he was lying his fucking teeth off. | ||
| But, I mean, it's good to see it demonstrated in 1977. | ||
| That is fun. | ||
| That is fun. | ||
| Maybe it's instinct, or maybe Steve did his homework in advance, but looking at this exchange, he seems to know exactly how to ingratiate himself to Alex. | ||
| Alex brings up that Steve is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations in a really skeptical way. | ||
| And Steve reassures him that the CFR is basically a rotary club. | ||
| He hasn't been to a meeting in years, and he's also a member of the NRA. | ||
| So what do you think about that? | ||
| I'm a member of that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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|
Minutes into the interview, Alex is saying shit like, quote, we're talking to Dr. Steve Pachenik, and he's one of the info warriors in four administrations, crafting much of I'm so honored to have you on the show tonight. | |
| He is so fucking stupid. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Flips. | |
| I hate him so much. | ||
| Based on everything I know about Alex Jones, he should be almost entirely against the policies we've seen in the previous 20 to 30 years. | ||
| And yet he is, here he is, praising the man he's crediting with crafting those policies. | ||
| It makes no sense. | ||
| I think after hearing about the previous journalist's writing and looking to Steve for blurbs, it makes way more sense that he would be as polished and good as he is in 2002 to now. | ||
| He's already honed his bullshit for almost 20 years. | ||
| Not nearly at as high a level. | ||
| No, no, absolutely not. | ||
| But that's what I'm saying. | ||
| He's been working out at open mics. | ||
| He's been working out at those road gigs, doing one-nighters, getting that in. | ||
| And then when Alex comes along, he's at the height of his fucking power. | ||
| And it's like an easy room, too. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Especially for someone who has the appearance of these super elevated credentials like he does. | ||
| Yeah, he was doing comedy on State Department. | ||
| That's a reference for almost nobody. | ||
| As Steve continued making appearances on Alex's show, particularly in the 2011-2012 time frame, he took particular aim at President Obama. | ||
| He called him a sociopath and unfit to be in office. | ||
| And in fairness to Steve, he'd also said some pretty horrible things about George H.W. Bush while Bush was still in office. | ||
| He'd called him, quote, clinically depressed and obviously in the midst of a serious identity crisis. | ||
| In even further fairness to Steve, in 1978, he complained to the LA Times about how people were lazy in psychoanalyzing President Carter, saying, quote, I personally feel it's unethical to write psychohistory about a president while he's still in office. | ||
| These studies do not take adequately into account the many constraints, the checks and balances, the many hats which the president wears. | ||
| I guess he changed his mind on that. | ||
| Well, he was still working. | ||
| At the time, and I imagine that H.W. and Obama neither were very open to his resume anymore. | ||
| That is possible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I found some interesting things, and that is that Steve Pchenik has been published in respectable journals. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Let's say. | ||
| In his capacity as a psychiatrist. | ||
| And sort of international affair kind of things, like intelligence. | ||
| He's published two articles that are very short in the American Intelligence Journal. | ||
| One of them is called... | ||
| Kill them! | ||
| Kill them all! | ||
| One of them is called Putin KGB forever, which is really funny because he's pretty pro-Putin in 2015 when he's talking to Alex. | ||
| But he wrote another article in volume 22 of the American Intelligence Journal. | ||
| It's called A Mandate for Intelligence, in which he argues that the national security infrastructure in America was woefully underutilizing resources that could be gained by gathering human intelligence. | ||
| He describes a bit of the complaints that he has like this. | ||
| Quote, Unfortunately, effective integration of civilian military intelligence, counterintelligence, and psyops has been absent from the government for well over a decade. | ||
| This has led to a serious inability to predict human behavior and prevent evolving crises. | ||
| This is a strange position for Steve to have when compared to the positions he takes on Alex's show. | ||
| In one of his appearances on the show, Steve literally tells Alex, quote, it has to do with the famous technique in warfare that we call the stand-down, false flag, deception, and denial. | ||
| It was done during Pearl Harbor. | ||
| Uh-oh, it was a false flag. | ||
| It was a false flag. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| There it is! | ||
| Alex explained it to you yesterday. | ||
| It was done by Hitler. | ||
| It was done by LBJ during the war in Vietnam where we had the Gulf of Tonkin and he claimed we had a false flag operation and we had to shoot the Vietnamese because they shot at us. | ||
| That was wrong. | ||
| Many men died for that. | ||
| Many men went to war. | ||
| He seems very against false flags, deception, psyops, counterintelligence when he's talking to Alex. | ||
| When he's writing in the American Intelligence Journal, he seems to be pro those things and say that they've been gone for well over a decade in the United States. | ||
| Ah, boy. | ||
| He sounds like a liar, Dan. | ||
| It seems a bit... | ||
| Contradictory. | ||
| He doesn't sound like he's being honest with, I don't know, fucking... | ||
| Anybody? | ||
| Could be. | ||
| One of Steve's suggestions for how to resolve the problem of limited use of human intelligence is to, quote, develop open source predictive intelligence, which is to say that he was interested in taking already public information and using it for intelligence gathering purposes. | ||
| Quote, what is needed is an up and down change in the culture of intelligence community, where 90% of what's required for operations already exists in open source venues such as newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, and most importantly, the internet. | ||
| As usual, American entrepreneurs have anticipated this intelligence conundrum and accordingly have developed extremely capable software for data mining, cataloging, managing restricted content, and predicting behavior. | ||
| Greater cooperation between the business community and the intelligence community is imperative. | ||
|
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|
Did he create fucking Cambridge Analytica? | |
| What the fuck is wrong with this guy? | ||
| God! | ||
| Goddammit! | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| That's very much against what Alex believes. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| So he's the one... | ||
| Kudos! | ||
| He's literally like, I am angling and hopeful for a massive surveillance state. | ||
| Fucking utilizing already public information to control and manipulate the population. | ||
| And by the way, Alex, I'm against the globalists who are absolutely... | ||
| Did you say that they were doing exactly that? | ||
| Well, kudos to everybody else doing that and fuck the globalists. | ||
| And this wasn't a stray idea that Steve had in this 2004 article. | ||
| In 2001, he was the CEO of a consulting firm called Strategic Intelligence Associates. | ||
| And in his capacity, he was profiled in a November 30, 2001 post in the National Defense magazine, arguing that the intelligence gathering should be outsourced to the private sector. | ||
| It seems very strange for me that in all the times I've heard Steve on Alex's show, I've never heard it come up that Steve was the head of a consulting firm that was advocating for the creation of private spy businesses. | ||
|
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|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, going back 18 years, Steve had been advocating for that sort of thing. | ||
| I mean, now, if I were, I suppose, looking at it from his perspective in that kind of field, that would be something that you say to a higher-up in the spy world, and they'd be like, genius. | ||
| So that's a good idea from his world, I would say. | ||
| That's an interesting perspective on it. | ||
| Yeah, like I could see him being praised for that as a position. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| In certain circles. | ||
| Not by us. | ||
| Or by Alex. | ||
| And to be clear, this is a big point where I don't know what the fuck is going on. | ||
| And for me to try and pitch a theory about it would be irresponsible and out of line for me. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I can't tell you why what he's saying in this journal doesn't seem to match at all with what Alex believes or what he leads Alex to believe. | ||
| Because if he was like... | ||
| Talking with Alex, and he's like, oh, also, I run an intelligence consulting business that is super into creating private spy companies. | ||
| I don't imagine Alex going along with that back in 2002. | ||
| No. | ||
| I don't see that being... | ||
| No, but as part of his consulting for creating private spy agencies, I'm going on your show, Alex, in order to fucking monitor that. | ||
| Holy shit, this dude. | ||
| Now, I also don't know how successful his consulting business was. | ||
| Probably not great. | ||
| And I don't think it was much more than just him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't have any reason to believe that it was a massive outlet or anything. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It was a tax dodge. | ||
| Could be. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| So, one of the other huge pieces of Steve's resume is that he has an association with Tom Clancy. | ||
| Yes, of course. | ||
| In his bio, Steve's writing career is generally encapsulated as saying that he ghostwrote books for Tom Clancy. | ||
| Huh, great. | ||
| Who hasn't? | ||
| In interviews with Alex Jones, the story has gone so far as to be that Steve himself is the inspiration for Jack Ryan, which, based on everything I can tell, doesn't seem true. | ||
| What? | ||
| Steve is just, he's Harrison Ford, man. | ||
| What? | ||
| And I promise you, this is not buzz marketing for that new Amazon series with John Krasinski. | ||
| No. | ||
| Now available. | ||
| Get Amazon Prime. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| This is not buzz marketing. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| So he's told Alex, or Alex has said multiple times, and Steve's never corrected him, that he is the inspiration. | ||
| You watch Patriot Games? | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| You watch A Hunt for Red October? | ||
| That's Steve Pachenik in that movie. | ||
| He's both Sean Connery and... | ||
| Never mind. | ||
| Did I get one wrong there? | ||
| I don't like those movies. | ||
| The Hunt for Red October was Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin. | ||
| Oh, was it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, my bad. | ||
| I just assumed that... | ||
| One of the great Russian accents coming from Sean Connery. | ||
| I haven't seen those movies in a very long time. | ||
| I don't care about them at all. | ||
| And I just assumed John Krasinski had always played the role. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Works for me. | ||
| Amazon Prime. | ||
| What's great is that's my attempt at a fake version of buzz marketing. | ||
| I just yell Amazon Prime. | ||
| So Clancy himself told the Washington Post in 1995 about Steve, quote, I don't know if he's a model for Jack Ryan, but we're buddies. | ||
| It's that simple. | ||
| So that seems to contradict the idea that he is the inspiration. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it does probably lead one to assume that much like other writers that Steve has been in the orbit of, he... | ||
| Insinuated himself into Tom Clancy's circle by being very flattering. | ||
| And I bet that Steve is fucking interesting as hell. | ||
| I bet if you were hanging out with him, he would tell amazing stories. | ||
| Probably not real. | ||
| No. | ||
| Maybe based on a kernel of reality, but probably deeply embellished. | ||
| Slightly more real than three globalists in a hot tub. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| So, it's literally impossible, actually. | ||
| I've been kind of coy about this. | ||
| You've been cagey. | ||
| Yeah, it's literally impossible for Jack Ryan to be based on Steve, even by Steve's own words. | ||
| In 1995, Steve and Clancy co-produced a TV miniseries that starred the great Harry Hamlin and Wilford Brimley. | ||
| In a puff piece about it in the Washington Post, Steve explains how he met Tom Clancy. | ||
| Quote, "A decade ago," he recalled, "he was browsing a book fair and happened by a Naval Institute press kiosk. | ||
| Quote, "I picked up this book with a submarine on the cover and paged through it. | ||
| Based on his experience as a negotiator, Pachanik thought the author displayed great insight on the Soviets, and the submarine stuff was fantastic. | ||
| He pointed out the book and its author to his agent. | ||
| The book was The Hunt for Red October." Steve had no idea who Tom Clancy was when he was a scientist. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| The books that Steve was involved in with Tom Clancy were the books in the Op Center and Net Force series. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Are you aware of those? | ||
| No. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| Not even close. | ||
| Op Center began in 1995 and Net Force in 1999, whereas the character of Jack Ryan debuted in 1984's Hunt for Red October and had been the focus of six books by the time either of these spinoff series began. | ||
| It was less of a creative partnership that these two men had. | ||
| It was more of a business venture. | ||
| Steve and Tom were the creators of the series, but they didn't write any of the books in the Op Center or NetForce series. | ||
| A man named Jeff Roven wrote most of the Op Center books, and Steve Perry, not the guy from Journey, wrote the NetForce ones. | ||
| They called the books Tom Clancy's Op Center and Tom Clancy's Net Force, knowing that most people would just assume that meant Clancy had written them, as opposed to just signifying they exist in what I'm going to call the extended Clancyverse. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not to be terrible, but I mean, God, I've never made it through half of one of his books. | ||
| I can't imagine people being like... | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I've tried. | ||
| Ah, man. | ||
| They make millions of dollars. | ||
| Yeah, oh no, of course. | ||
| With these spinoff series. | ||
| No, they're brilliant. | ||
| Huge paperback. | ||
| You know, everybody's got to get something at an airport. | ||
| Yeah, no, that's fine. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| Unfortunately, Jordan, all good things have to come to an end. | ||
| And the same is true for Steve and Tom's friendship and their business partnership. | ||
| In 1999, Tom Clancy got a divorce. | ||
| And in the 2005 settlement, his ex-wife, Wanda King, got control over Jack Ryan Limited Partnership, the entity that was used to publish the books written by other people with Tom's name on them. | ||
| Jack Ryan Limited Partnership was in a joint venture with S&R Literary Incorporated, an entity owned by Steve Pachenik. | ||
| With Clancy's ex-wife taking control of Jack Ryan Limited, Steve was now in business with Tom's ex-wife, or Steve was out of business. | ||
| In January 2004, Tom had declared his decision that he no longer wanted his name to be on these books that he didn't write. | ||
| that this was a breach of his fiduciary duty since it would severely impact the value of this asset. | ||
| Right, of course. | ||
| The court sided with Wanda King, as did the appeals court, that he couldn't take his name off these books, which seems nightmarish. | ||
| That is, God, that's what? | ||
| John Denver being sued for copyright violations on his own songs or whatever it was? | ||
| Yeah, it's like, I think their reasoning was basically like, in good faith, you... | ||
| Made it totally fine for someone else to write books with your name on them. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| You can't change it now. | ||
| This is just punitive in order to be a dick to your ex-wife. | ||
| Also, in the divorce, it came out that the reason for the separation was that Wanda had discovered that Clancy had cheated on her with a woman nicknamed Ping Pong who he had met on the internet. | ||
| I did not know that. | ||
|
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|
Yep. | |
| I was waiting for another classic Steve Pachenik insert into sentence. | ||
| Very strange, though. | ||
| She divorced him when she found out that his friend Steve Pachenik killed Morrow. | ||
| I know. | ||
| That was not it. | ||
| It was a, quote, woman named Ping Pong. | ||
| Hey, you know what? | ||
| Everybody got to go back and forth. | ||
| I feel like there's an offensive story behind that that I'm just not going to dig into. | ||
| I have to assume. | ||
| Nope, I don't want to do it. | ||
| When the chips were down and Clancy was trying to take his name off these books that he no longer had any control over because his wife was in charge of Jack Ryan Limited, Steve sided with King and testified against Clancy, alleging that his motivation to take his name off the books was to hurt King financially. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| From everything I can tell, there's no reason to give Steve any elevated status with Tom Clancy, as if Steve was responsible for his success or anything like that. | ||
|
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|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| He's not Jack Ryan. | ||
| No. | ||
| For God's sakes. | ||
| I'm pretty sure Steve spun some great yarns that led to him being a collaborator with Tom. | ||
| But gun to your head, do you know anything about the Op Center or NetForce books? | ||
| One of them, I assume, has something to do with the internet. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| And the other one is like, we're in the middle of this place! | ||
| We gotta get stuff done! | ||
| You would be dead. | ||
| NetForce is about illegal fisheries. | ||
| Really? | ||
| No. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| God, that'd be great! | ||
| I know the names of four Tom Clancy books, and they have nothing to do with Steve at all. | ||
| None of the books that you know. | ||
| Have anything to do with Steve. | ||
| I think I might actually read an international spy book about fishery violations. | ||
| I think that might actually be interesting. | ||
| Could be. | ||
| But it might interest you to know that Steve has a non-Tom Clancy related writing career as well. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| In 1985, he released a book called The Mind Palace. | ||
| Then in 1989, he came out with Blood Heat. | ||
| Maximum Vigilance was published in 1992, then Pax Pacifica in 1995. | ||
| These books have been reviewed as, quote, bad and, quote, having no literary value. | ||
| But these are just the reviews of random people online, so maybe they're great books. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have no idea. | |
| Sure, sure, could be. | ||
| Now, something I find interesting is how closely some of these books seem to match up with Alex Jones' narratives. | ||
| There it is! | ||
| Some of them, Alex might have been inspired to believe, based on Steve. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For instance, Blood Heat is about an evil cabal working in a conspiracy to create a mutated bioweapon which could make the bubonic plague even more transmittable. | ||
|
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|
Ooh, that is scary! | |
| Virus. | ||
| Bioweapons. | ||
| Controlled release. | ||
| The Mind Palace has to do with psychiatry being used nefariously. | ||
| Pax Pacifica involves conspiracies and power struggles in China that ripple over into the United States. | ||
| All these vaguely intersect with major Alex Jones narratives. | ||
| But Steve's 1992 book, Maximum Vigilance, is perhaps the best example of his literature having strange parallels with the things that he's told Alex. | ||
| The central conflict in that book is about how a fictionalized version of President Bush was crazy and needed to be removed from office using the 25th Amendment. | ||
| Interestingly, around the time of the book's release, Steve went around to all the media places that would talk to him, and he was out there just accusing George H.W. Bush of being crazy. | ||
| I have zero doubt that if Alex's show existed at that point, he would have used it as a platform to spread the Bush is crazy idea. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Steve's comments got him in some trouble, and he was reprimanded by the American Medical Association, which ultimately led to him leaving the American Medical Association. | ||
| Yeah, that'll do it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He said that Bush was, quote, clinically depressed and obviously in the midst of a serious identity crisis. | ||
| No one else was putting forth these sorts of accusations or gossip, and it's super relevant to point out that there was a little bit more than a passing similarity between the book he was selling at the time and the portrait of reality he was presenting. | ||
| Unsurprisingly, the hero of maximum vigilance is, quote, DZX Clark. | ||
| I want to spell that name for you. | ||
| D-E-S-A-I-X. | ||
| DZX. | ||
| It's probably an anagram for something. | ||
| This guy is a, quote, psychiatrist and State Department crisis manager with a taste for kinky sex who works his way through layers of deceit, betrayal, torture, and assassination to uncover the multiple conspiracies afoot. | ||
| I don't know why anyone would say that a book like that, with that description, has no literary value. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| Steve seems to have written himself into his work, and he wants you to know he's into some kinky shit. | ||
| I think he might be into some kinky shit. | ||
| Good for him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, here's where things get interesting. | ||
| In the book, Clark, clearly a fictionalized version of Steve, discovers that the president, who's clearly a stand-in for President Bush, has Marfan syndrome. | ||
| That's the condition that he has that makes DZX Clark need to get him out of office. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That book came out in 1992. | ||
| When Steve started coming on Alex Jones' show, one of the ways he impressed Alex was arguing that Osama bin Laden had died back in 2001 and he had died of Marfan syndrome. | ||
| Marfan syndrome is something that would have been almost a death sentence in the period of time that Steve was coming up in the world. | ||
| In the 50s and 60s, the prognosis for someone with Marfan would not be good. | ||
| Death from cardiovascular complications often would happen by the time the patient was in their 20s. | ||
| However, modern medical science has made big breakthroughs. | ||
| And for the most part, it's a relatively manageable condition now, with predicted lifespans of people with Marfan syndrome being comparable to the general population. | ||
| So I don't necessarily... | ||
| I mean, the thing that I think is that Steve knows of this thing... | ||
| That most people don't know anything about. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's a great thing to throw in as a creative device. | ||
| Especially to certain people. | ||
| He clearly did it in his book, Maximum Vigilance, as a plot device. | ||
| And now he's clearly repurposed it as a plot device to help convince Alex that Osama bin Laden was dead long ago. | ||
| He didn't do 9-11. | ||
| Obama didn't kill him. | ||
| And that's exactly what you would want. | ||
| To tell Alex is some disease that he has never heard of that's so rare that he's... | ||
| Nobody listening to the show is going to follow up on, and Alex is going to pretend like he already knew all about. | ||
| I'm an expert in Marfan. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You give that... | ||
| Call it supercalifragilistic disease, and Alex will be like, Ah, they created that one in the 70s! | ||
| And you're like, Ah, you're fucking stupid. | ||
| It seems interesting to me that this fairly obscure condition is used as a plot device in both his book... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Twice. | |
| ...and in telling Alex about Osama bin Laden. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Now, there's a chance that that's just a coincidence. | ||
| I don't... | ||
| I don't... | ||
| Pretend to mean that it definitively means anything. | ||
| But it also seems like maybe a pattern. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, like who Roger Stone blames when he needs to get out of some trouble. | ||
| It's the same guys over and over and over again. | ||
| It's always Randy Credico. | ||
| It's always Randy Credico. | ||
| So there still is a little bit of a question that I have after all of this. | ||
| After looking at all the available evidence of like... | ||
| it doesn't look like Steve worked at the State Department past 1979. | ||
| It seems like that story, based on the information that you can find, makes total sense. | ||
| Like his track through the State Department. | ||
| He came in, he's sort of fucked up, he got mad that he wasn't involved in the Iranian hostage crisis, he quit, and then created a self-mythology around himself that some people in the media bought into that really certainly helped his path go forward. | ||
| Then he hooks up with Tom Clancy after And Ping Pong. | ||
| No, that was Tom. | ||
| You don't know. | ||
| He's into some kinky shit. | ||
| He starts writing thrillers, and they're not getting much traction. | ||
| He meets up with Tom Clancy, starts working with him on this, and then that sort of falls apart. | ||
| And I don't know what his fucking game is with Alex. | ||
| Like, I don't know. | ||
| Some people think that he's running a PSYOP on him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And that he, you know, he was infiltrating the Patriot community in order to bring them down or something like that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And I find that argument to be completely uncredible. | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| Because in order for that to be true, who is he working for? | ||
| Somebody that he hasn't worked... | ||
| Sacred State Department. | ||
| Sure, okay. | ||
| Solid State Department. | ||
| Show me any evidence that he's worked there. | ||
| Since 1979, and then we can talk. | ||
| Now, the point is, you can't show me evidence that he hasn't, which suggests... | ||
| It's not upon me to do that. | ||
| Actually, if there was any evidence, then you would know that it wasn't happening. | ||
| That's how you would know that because there is an evidence is why you know he is. | ||
| Because if there was evidence that he was, that would be a psyop. | ||
| Keep going. | ||
|
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|
All right. | |
| All right. | ||
| How much further can this go? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I really don't believe that. | ||
| And I also don't believe that he's just crazy. | ||
| But I also, I just don't get it. | ||
| Like, what is he doing? | ||
| Honestly, I swear to you, this is the number one, this is the thing that I think most. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's bored. | ||
| I think there's a chance. | ||
| He's bored. | ||
| He lived in an exciting, again. | ||
| He killed the Prime Minister, and then he had to go right back to just being a practicing psychiatrist? | ||
| Now he's written all these books, and he's had his taste of fame? | ||
| He's had his taste of the goddamn creative life? | ||
| I worked with Harry Hamlin. | ||
| Yeah, and nothing is going on, and now maybe he's still practicing or whatever, but he doesn't have the taste. | ||
| He's got the taste for a conspiracy, Dan. | ||
| He wants to live a conspiracy. | ||
| I think that there is some viability to that theory. | ||
| I can't prove it, obviously. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
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|
But one of the questions that comes up to support the argument that he is legit is the fact that he knows a lot about the intelligence community. | |
| He knows a lot of names. | ||
| He knows a lot of dates. | ||
| He talks like an expert. | ||
| I believe that some of this could be explained by a piece of his reading diet that was In 2012, WikiLeaks released a ton of information from the intelligence group Stratfor. | ||
| Included in that dump of documents was an email chain from 2011 where Steve Pachanek was complaining to customer service, quote, I bought several Stratfor books several weeks ago but have not received them. | ||
| Could someone inform me as to what happened? | ||
| From this, we learn that Steve is a customer of Stratfor, who produces intelligence assessments. | ||
| And we also learn Steve's phone number, and the fact that he uses an AOL email address, which you wouldn't think someone in his position would do, particularly when emailing with an intelligence contracting company. | ||
| Seems weird. | ||
| Oh, man, this is a guy who cannot turn his phone off and on again. | ||
| Steve Pachanek at sbcglobal.net. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| Where are my intelligence books? | ||
| All the books Steve ordered were the works of George Friedman, the founder of Stratford. | ||
| In his exchange with customer service, Steve implies that Stratford has his visa number on file, which seems to indicate that he might be a regular customer and consumer of their products. | ||
| This impression is strengthened by another email from 2009, where Steve is responding to a bulk email, like a mass email that got sent out by Stratford. | ||
| It got sent to all their subscribers, and he's responding very snippily. | ||
| It appears from his response that an auto-mailing that he doesn't like, it appears that he does not like getting spam. | ||
|
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|
Of course. | |
| Also, he would like to know why there are so many toolbars on his browser, Dan. | ||
| Another email from 2007 includes Steve on a list of, quote, premium users of Stratfor. | ||
| One email has him listed as the holder of a lifetime membership. | ||
| In 2005, Steve sent Stratford the following email, quote, Happy Holidays! | ||
| Continue the great job! | ||
| soon we will not need our expensive ineffective bloated government agencies I would venture to guess that someone who reads the premium content including their daily intelligence reports produced by and released by Stratford pretty he reads them pretty regularly to the point where he interacts with them to wish them a happy holiday and wish for the downfall of government agencies that's probably a person who would be able to sound really well versed in geopolitics and intelligence stuff the That's just a theory. | ||
| But it would... | ||
| Kind of tend to explain how Steve is able to sound like an expert in this field when he probably hasn't been involved in decades. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He just reads a lot of Stratford publications who put out intelligence assessments professionally. | ||
| That does explain how he sounds like he does. | ||
| I did not realize that that is something that you could just get. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| You can just get intelligence assessments? | ||
|
unidentified
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Mm-hmm. | |
| You just email a guy? | ||
| And you say, I want some intelligence assessments. | ||
| Why would you ever think for one second that anything in them is true? | ||
| Well, because they're produced by professionals. | ||
| So? | ||
| I don't think that Steve operates off them necessarily, because I don't think they're saying that Sandy Hook was a false flag. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I'm saying why would anyone get them anyway? | ||
| Yeah, never mind. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So I found these revelations pretty interesting. | ||
| It could go a long way as to explaining Steve's ability to present himself the way he does. | ||
| So I decided to see if Steve is mentioned in any other WikiLeaks releases. | ||
| It's not like the only documents they've ever released were the Stratfor files. | ||
| There are quite a few documents they released that involve Steve. | ||
| Mostly classified cables about State Department business. | ||
| He's mentioned as an attendee at that ambassador who got killed in Afghanistan. | ||
| His funeral, for instance. | ||
| He's listed there. | ||
| Everybody was pissed he showed up. | ||
| No, they were pretty... | ||
| They were all right with it, I think. | ||
| Now, what's interesting... | ||
| Because he hadn't said they caused it yet. | ||
| Oh, okay, never mind. | ||
| All right, I gotcha. | ||
| I was gonna say, that would make them... | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That was after he quit. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| He came out with that. | ||
| Gotcha, gotcha. | ||
| Now, what's interesting about this is that literally every single classified document that's been released that mentions Steve comes from the period of 1976 to 1979. | ||
| There's nothing that's been released that would tend to indicate his continued involvement in government past the point where he quit because of the Iran hostage crisis. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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Which kind of tracks with every other piece of information that I can find that doesn't trace directly back to Steve. | |
| Right. | ||
|
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So even the WikiLeaks. | |
| Even their releases. | ||
| They have a ton of stuff they've put out. | ||
| Steve Pchenik's name only exists in the time frame you would expect it to, and in emails he's sent to Stratford as a paying customer of their materials. | ||
| That's fucking interesting. | ||
| That's very interesting. | ||
| Very. | ||
| Interesting is true, but I would say telling? | ||
| Perhaps. | ||
| Insurmountable evidence? | ||
| It doesn't prove anything still, but it does, like, if our working thesis is, well, based on all available information that doesn't trace back to Steve, or an article in the paper where Steve is the primary source of information, he left the State Department in 1979 and has not worked officially in the government ever since. | ||
| If that's our working theory, I keep finding things that... | ||
| Reinforce that. | ||
| The fact that every newspaper article after 1979 refers to him as a former State Department official. | ||
| The fact that these WikiLeaks consistently go straight through with him being mentioned as a State Department, only during that time frame. | ||
| It's hard for me to overcome that. | ||
| But, like I said, if there's proof, I'll change my tune. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| I just can't find any. | ||
| So, there's another email in the Stratfor WikiLeaks collection that involves Steve. | ||
| I don't understand my TV hookup! | ||
| It used to be a tube thing, now it's flat, and now I don't know. | ||
| Anyways. | ||
| It's a 2008 email from a guy named Dr. John Neustad, who's writing to inquire about a membership. | ||
| In his email, he mentions that his partner is Steve Pachenik, and that Steve pays over $700 a year for his Stratfor membership. | ||
| Dr. Newstead wasn't Steve's romantic partner or anything. | ||
| They ran a health supplement company together called Nutritional Biochemistry Incorporated. | ||
| It's definitely not as wacky an outfit as Alex's supplement line, but there are overlaps. | ||
| There's iron supplements, sleep aids, stimulant-free energy supplements, and the like. | ||
| all the stuff you normally see. | ||
| Steve was definitely involved with this company and was Dr. Newstead's partner in it at the time and co-founded the business with him in Yeah. | ||
| National Biochemistry Incorporated's website doesn't mention Steve and their about page, which I think is curious. | ||
| Either way, this probably is nothing super nefarious. | ||
| Probably not even that weird. | ||
| It's just a regular old scam nutrient company. | ||
| It might not even be as much of a scam as some others. | ||
| Well, they're all scams. | ||
| It's just further confirmation that if you scratch the surface a little bit, you always find a pill business with these weirdos. | ||
| Every single one of them has some sort of supplement business cooking somewhere. | ||
| I assume it's because it's the easiest to get into. | ||
| Get out of and scam people on because you can make up whatever it is you want to say about it in your confirmation or your... | ||
| Placebo effect is going to give you just enough to get by on. | ||
| There's no regulation of the market whatsoever. | ||
| And you're basically private labeling everybody else's manufactured pills. | ||
| So you get a storefront, you get a thing, and if you don't like it, you just close it all down and burn it up for insurance money. | ||
| It makes perfect sense. | ||
| It works. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I've about reached the end of where things I've looked into. | ||
| I intentionally didn't want to explore too much the idea that Steve's counter-coup narrative and all that stuff kind of is very similar to QAnon. | ||
| We already have gone greatly in-depth on our podcast about Steve's involvement in convincing Alex to support Trump. | ||
| And so I felt like that would be rehashing too much territory. | ||
| But outside of this, I think the image that I come away from this with is like... | ||
| We're seeing a pretty strong indication that Steve Pachenik is involved with Alex Jones turning around on Sandy Hook. | ||
| We have seen his involvement in convincing Alex to support Trump. | ||
| These are two major decisions that Alex made that have negatively affected his career to a point that is almost unexpressible. | ||
| Oh no, they've destroyed his career. | ||
| And it has been done based on, as it appears, based on the advice and guidance. | ||
| of somebody who, when I look at it, all the chips are down, I would never think is a credible person to talk to. | ||
| Even if I didn't know any of the stuff that I've looked into for this episode, if you told me a psych warfare guy wants to talk to me and promises not to do psych warfare on me, You know, like, I can't be hypnotized. | ||
| Like, I'm... | ||
| I'm one of those people who just, you know, it doesn't happen. | ||
| Jordan says on year three of doing this podcast. | ||
| Oh, shit! | ||
| Oh, no! | ||
| Oh, no! | ||
| It turns out those were the words that wake me up. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| I've seen a lot of stuff and I've read a bunch of stuff for this and looked at a lot of indications. | ||
| And to me, it seems like... | ||
| There's a clear picture of what's most likely, but the alternative is also possible. | ||
| It just seems incredibly unlikely. | ||
| And all the information that is definitive that I can find tends towards the likely explanation. | ||
| Now, I'm just a dick who records a podcast in his apartment. | ||
| I am not involved in the halls of government or the high-level spy intelligence consulting business. | ||
| I don't read Stratford stuff. | ||
| So I have no idea how any of this stuff works. | ||
| Is it possible there's a world that is completely obscured and all kinds of secrecy is involved and Steve actually was working with Reagan and Bush? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Possible. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| I can't tell you it's not, but I don't think it is. | ||
| I don't think it's true. | ||
| Well, there is one thing. | ||
| Obviously, you haven't worked in the halls of government, so you can't view Steve's story through that lens. | ||
|
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However... | |
| You are, as am I, somebody who works from home. | ||
| And we spend a lot of time writing and staring at computer screens and empty pages. | ||
| And you get bored. | ||
| You get bored. | ||
| So, you and I, we do this, you know, we don't do this podcast because we're bored, but this is an outlet to keep us from losing our minds all too often. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And Steve, I'm sure, is just like, fuck! | ||
| What do I do to get out some of this stress to get back to my computer and start typing? | ||
|
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I'll go fuck with Alex. | |
| I know I'll go fuck with Alex for about an hour or so. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Not a lot of work. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Get it done. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He's bored. | ||
| So after all this examination and reflection, I've sat with a lot of this for a bit, and I really don't know what to make of Steve Pachanek. | ||
| I don't know how much of his story is true, but I can definitely say that it's not entirely false. | ||
| There's some truth to some of the things he's saying. | ||
| Which is the best lie. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I come away from this with the sense that Steve is, first of all, incredibly smart and seems to have a singular talent for persuasion. | ||
| Seems to be able to convince people of things. | ||
| Let's say. | ||
| Couldn't get his job back. | ||
| He appears to have exactly the right amount of credentials one would need to be able to convince people who are inclined to believe him that he had been everywhere and he has done everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Ultimately, when I look at all this available evidence about Steve Pachenik, what comes to mind is a line from his 1985 novel, Blood Heat. | ||
| Quote, every life is exciting, depending on how you paint it. | ||
| I think Steve... | ||
| Edit that out. | ||
| Good God! | ||
| I don't want that on this podcast. | ||
| I don't want his shitty writing on this podcast. | ||
| I think Steve has painted an incredible life for himself. | ||
| And it's very interesting. | ||
| And he may have accidentally or intentionally or just capriciously torpedoed Alex Jones' life in the process. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And created a fucking monster. | ||
| Yeah, that is... | ||
| It is kind of almost one of those, like, Hitler did do something good in his life. | ||
| He killed Hitler. | ||
| You know, like, Steve Pachanek did do something good in his life. | ||
| He killed Alex Jones' career. | ||
| But also facilitated it. | ||
| Yeah, he made it incredibly worse for the rest of the world, but at least it's going to end. | ||
| At least we know it's going to end. | ||
| Well, so is this episode. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fair! | |
| I want your reflections, though, Jordan. | ||
| I've hit you with a lot of information, and I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what case I've proven. | ||
| I don't know if I've even proven a case. | ||
| But what are your thoughts? | ||
| I'm always amazed by those guys who can just fuck around their way up. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| This is a guy who is not good at just about anything. | ||
| I don't know if that's true. | ||
| He's very, very good at flattery. | ||
| Maybe that's his only skill. | ||
| Maybe he's really, really bad at everything but flattery. | ||
| And he has parlayed that skill into a weird and interesting and wonderful career. | ||
| But based on the single line you just read to me from his book, he's not a good writer. | ||
| A bunch of anonymous people online tend to agree. | ||
| None of the books that he... | ||
| None of the shit that he helped co-create with Tom Clancy is any good. | ||
| He was his major... | ||
| Don't tell Harry Hamlin that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're not going to stick up for Brimley? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| He's fine. | ||
| He's got that natural money. | ||
| He's golden. | ||
| He's... | ||
| The biggest thing in his entire State Department career was an international disaster. | ||
| Of the death of a prime minister. | ||
| Everything else, everybody agrees that he wasn't really involved with. | ||
| He quit because people didn't want him around. | ||
| Most likely. | ||
| So every indication is that he is shitty at anything he tries to do, but he can shit talk his way into money. | ||
| But he might be really great with psychology, which is the... | ||
| You're right. | ||
| We would have to get a... | ||
| Which I'm not doing. | ||
| No. | ||
| I'm definitely not going to go for a session. | ||
| But he might be really, really talented in that field. | ||
| He might be very gifted in understanding how people's brains work, which is what allows him to be able to spin the yarns he does Yeah. | ||
| But again, like I said, I want to be totally clear. | ||
| There is an incredibly small possibility that a lot of his resume is true, and there's just no evidence of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That being said... | |
| The stuff he tells Alex is still bullshit. | ||
| That's 100% true. | ||
| Even if his resume is totally true, there's no way the Las Vegas shooting didn't happen. | ||
| No. | ||
| He's a fucking asshole. | ||
| That's the other reflection I have. | ||
| What a giant fucking asshole. | ||
| And it's not like Roger Stone where he does it with a twinkle in his eye as he burns the world on fire. | ||
| Burns the world to the ground. | ||
| It's almost surly and annoyed. | ||
| He's annoyed that he has to destroy the world. | ||
| Which is fun when you consider his arguments with Alex about manners or how he was mad when Alex was supporting Neil Gorsuch being on the Supreme Court. | ||
| Steve got really mad at him about how he can't have a neocon on the court. | ||
| Yeah, it's fun when he's cranky at Alex, but it is... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| So, I don't know if we have a definitive conclusion, but that's the end of the episode. | ||
| Make your own conclusions what you will about this whole matter. | ||
| I just thought it was important to, as we're in the 2013 period where Steve has appeared, I think it is essential for us to have a better understanding of when he comes on and is like, I am a complete expert in all of these things. | ||
| What is true about that? | ||
| We couldn't do that within the span of an episode. | ||
| That wasn't fully dedicated to this. | ||
| No, this is great. | ||
| I'm really glad to learn more about this guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's a mess. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that's... | |
| This dude's fucked up. | ||
| What is his deal? | ||
| Steve, if you're listening, what is your deal? | ||
| DZX Clark. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| So... | ||
| Mako Shark Rampant of Tom Clancy novels. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, we'll be back on Monday. | ||
| But until then, we have a website. | ||
| And we do. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| We're also on Twitter. | ||
| It's at go-to-bed Jordan and at knowledge underscore fights. | ||
| You can find us on Facebook. | ||
| You can't... | ||
| Find us on Facebook, and if you would like to download and listen to the show, you can go to iTunes. | ||
| You could leave a review. | ||
| The other thing you could do, in the back-to-school aisle at Target, hidden underneath the small three-star notebooks. | ||
| Do you remember the small ones? | ||
| Like the little notebooks about six inches wide? | ||
| If you open it up... | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Dan just demonstrated one of those. | ||
| I have one right here. | ||
| If you open it up to exactly the 38th page, scribble a little demon star around there with the circle around it. | ||
| Don't give it all the way. | ||
| I won't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I won't. | |
| But an episode of our podcast will emerge from... | ||
| Actually, a hand will emerge from the summoning circle, and it will give you an episode of our podcast. | ||
| That's the best way to get it. | ||
| On a flash drive. | ||
| It's always on a flash drive. | ||
| How else are you going to transfer the audio? | ||
| You can't just plug a demon hand into your computer. | ||
| That's not going to work. | ||
| So you can do that. | ||
| You can with a monkey spot, though. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| So we'll be back. | ||
| But until then, I'm Neo. | ||
| I'm Leo. | ||
| I'm DZX Clark. | ||
| I am the Jesus Lizard. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |
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