In Knowledge Fight’s #344 (April 9–10, 2013), Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes dissect Alex Jones’ baseless claims: his 49% crime drop statistic (debunked by Stanford’s 2017 findings), mockery of Sandy Hook victims’ families, and conspiracy theories about Obama’s "Nazi" gun confiscation schemes—all tied to InfoWarsStore.com sales. Jones falsely portrays Joshua Haken as a victim, ignoring domestic violence charges, and misquotes John Parker’s 1775 rally as fabricated "info war" lore. The episode reveals Jones’ rhetoric spiraling into profit-driven extremism, weaponizing grief and history while dismissing evidence, leaving listeners with a chilling pattern of manipulation and detachment from reality. [Automatically generated summary]
And if you're out there listening and you like what we do and you'd like to support the show, you can go to our website, knowledgefight.com, click the button that says support the show.
So, Jordan, I had hoped to do a Wacky Wednesday episode for today, but I regret to inform you that Carrie Cassidy over at Project Camelot has not gone back to Vacaville Prison to talk to Mark Richards yet.
She's teased that it's going to happen, but it hasn't happened.
And then the rest of the episodes are like, I just can't do it.
She interviewed the former guitarist of the Steve Miller band about how he liked it.
Meanwhile, it was in the middle of real, very serious non-proliferation talks where it looked like North Korea was intending to withdraw from the non-proliferation treaty.
And we had some reason to believe that they already had better reactors.
Yeah.
And ABB was allowed to sell these light water reactors because they're much harder to make weapons-grade plutonium with.
What a spectacle, Obama using those dead kids and rolling out the parents saying, America, it's your fault this happened.
Restrict your guns.
No, parents, you took your children to a government training center, advertised as a mass shooting facility, and you're the ones, globalists and supporters of it, that are supporting all the mentally ill people on the psychotropics.
Whatever it is, it's like, even if he believes there or is presenting the belief that there's dead kids, or if it's fake, whatever message he's sending, it's targeting these parents.
It's victimizing them all over again one way or another.
Some of that's possible, but if you want to look at it in the crassest way possible, like just like the most cynical approach, it's like this is market testing.
Like if you're looking at it from a marketing perspective, that could easily explain this sort of disjointed behavior where everything's fake and then also it's real, but it's the government and it's the parents' fault for bringing kids to school.
I don't know what he's doing, but if it's accidental, it's still manipulative as hell.
If you want to escape the incredible tyranny of the United States, you've got to flee to Cuba.
They've got surveillance footage from the dock in Tampa, Florida, where they believe Michael Hagen and his wife with their two children that they kidnapped.
Why he's supposedly the Air Force veteran, engineer, his wife and engineer, no criminal record, got caught with a bowl of marijuana in Louisiana, so they took his kids.
And a year later, he was tired of it, so he went and got them back.
And I was just watching CNN.
They're all breathless.
He ran to Cuba with the kidnapped children, and they're all got real serious faces.
There's nothing worse than a family.
Now, if your drones strike a whole village to kill one guy, that's peace prize.
But I'm telling you, a dad and a mother standing up to the state with their kids, I mean, there is nothing worse.
So what's going on here at this stretch of time, like I said, on Alex's show is that he's really into the idea that the globalists want to take your kids.
He needs to push that.
So he's trying to latch onto any story that comes close to these sorts of elements.
And thus he ends up making heroes out of this Florida couple who kidnapped their own two children and tried to flee to Cuba.
They're white, so Alex views this as the state cracking down on them, but I don't make such quick snap judgments.
Apparently, for a short amount of time after the state had taken away his parental rights, they were in a foster home, and he showed up at that foster home to try and remove them from custody at gunpoint.
Just showing up to somebody's house with a gun to try and get anything means you should have your kids taken away, even if it's trying to get back your kittens.
Quote, Slidell police were called to the holiday inn where the Hakans were staying on the afternoon of June 17th, 2012, after receiving calls about a woman running down a hallway and knocking on doors.
They found Sharon Haken, 34 years old, with, quote, multiple bruises on her body and bumps on her head, where it looked like she was beaten.
In interviews with interviews with authorities, the children said that they'd seen him hit their mother in their presence.
He may have got arrested for marijuana possession initially, but the reason the situation escalated to the point it did where he lost custody was because of very serious domestic problems that were uncovered as a result of their initial call to the hotel room, which didn't have to do with weed.
They got there and found drugs, a battered woman, and crying children.
It would have been completely negligent for them to just be like, eh, it seems fine.
Also, according to this Tampa Bay Times article, the police found a large knife in the hotel room, which Josh asked them not to take because, quote, I need it to complete the ultimate objective of my journey.
If you need a large knife to complete the ultimate objective, you better either be going through the jungle or fucking returning that knife to the fucking princess so she can survive her coronation.
In discussions with the authorities, Joshua laid out his completely insane theories about how he was subjected to attacks by microwave weapons by the government and how he was a victim of MKUltra.
He was convinced of literally every anti-government conspiracy theory you can think of and was ultimately deemed legally insane by multiple mental health professionals.
I honestly think also, if we're looking at this from what's best standpoint, I kind of agree with his defense attorney that is like going to prison is not going to help him at all.
If he were talking to Alex, he would be like, yeah, if somebody took my kids away, I'd go wherever they were with my gun, and I'd be willing to kill anybody who got in the way of me and my kids and that kind of thing.
Now that you know that, listen to this and see how, like, in the middle of a sentence, Alex stops reading because he's scanned ahead and be like, uh-oh, that interferes with the narrative.
Or he lacks bigger picture context skills in terms of reading.
He has a fucked up version of literacy.
Just the actual words he can make out.
But also, it demonstrates there's no preparation.
Like, he doesn't know this story at all before he starts reporting it because he would have known that, like, this paragraph gets into the fact that this dude tied up a grandma.
So we get back to a little bit of Sandy Hook talk here.
And Alex is pretty much like spinning his wheels, trying to find ways to attack the mainstream media's story about Sandy Hook without going too far with it.
And he finds something that he thinks is indicative of a connection between so many of these school shootings that lends itself, I don't know, the appearance of maybe it's all staged event.
The earliest reporting that I can find on this is dated December 15th, 2012, just after the shooting.
There's no link to the FSB report that I can find, and there's no substantiation for this outside of it just being asserted on a website called whatdozitmean.com.
In order to gauge that site's editorial standards, I decided to check out their front page and see what news they're reporting.
But if you look through the content that's posted on that site, it really feels like almost all of the stories are overtly pro-Russia and seem to start by citing unseen reports allegedly circulating in the Kremlin.
And this is suspicious.
Now, in the ensuing days, after this report was published on December 15th, 2012, the information made its way onto message boards and eventually to websites like SuperSoulier Talk and sites with seemingly non-insane names, but are insane, like EUTimes.net.
There's absolutely zero doubt that Alex either got the information he's repeating from this site or someone reposting this site's content.
It's absolutely the root of the theory from which all of the branches grow.
Now, I don't believe the author of this site is relying on real Russian intelligence reports to make their site.
It seems more like the site is run by a real weirdo conspiracy theorist who relies on claiming FSB reports that you know no one can confirm or deny or anything like that in order to create the validity and the credibility of whatever bullshit you're putting out.
For one reason, I think that they would do a much better job with the site, which looks like a GeoCities nightmare.
It's just a disaster.
That aspect of this isn't really important to me, though.
But what is that Alex is accepting this information is true.
And legitimately, the only place that it could be coming from is this website.
We can see it when we look at this April 2013 period.
Alex is in the process of changing his mind and his coverage about Sandy Hook.
And one of the things he's decided is credible is information being put out by the 73rd Sorcha Fall.
This is nuts.
No one is convincing him of this.
No one has come on the show and told him this piece of information.
Alex is introducing it to the show himself, presenting it as something credible.
And that's really fucked up.
The only two possibilities here that I think, I think this covers all possible realities.
One is he got the information directly or secondhand from the site himself and thought it was cool.
Or two, someone told him that Lance's mom worked for DARPA and he did literally no work in trying to substantiate it before repeating it on air.
This shit is embarrassing.
But this lack of any kind of standard for disseminating very serious information is also really dangerous.
And we're seeing it right here.
We're seeing this, like, this lack of editorial standard in any way.
Just really, like, he's, because he wants to say the globalists want to take your kids, he's defending this completely insane, domestic, violent weirdo who has an InfoWars sticker on his mailbox.
And then because he wants to cast suspicion about Sandy Hook and claim that Adam Lance's mom worked for DARPA, he's taking information that's been laundered from a fake Russian intelligence report on a completely insane website.
It almost seems like having a thing that you want to be true and then just searching the internet, scouring for any possible proof of that might lead you to say wrong, evil, dumb things.
It's just that situation of if you are doing anything and you have already decided what the end game is and you will ignore literally anything else along the way in order to get to that end game, you're just, that's pointless.
Like any study, any study that's paid for by the fucking Koch brothers where they're like, ah, see, we actually found a small ice age in ba-da-da-da-da is all built around the idea that we saw this little weird bit of data, so recontextualize it so we can lie about it.
That's all we want to do.
We don't want to find out anything that we don't want to be true.
There's an ice age in for a few years, so that means that the entire fucking government and science establishment is trying to lie to us in order to get fucking carbon taxes.
So Obama quotes some university poll, government-funded poll, that no other polls show that 90% of people support, quote, background checks that are really registration for confiscation.
Criminals go out and get their guns regardless.
Mentally ill people are just going to steal them like Adam Lanza did if you even believe he's not a total patsy.
So in that clip, you get a really interesting glimpse into how Alex twists things on multiple levels, multiple axes, if you will.
The first move is saying that the stats Obama cited are from a government poll.
He then further impugns the numbers by saying that they're out of line with every other poll.
Then he recontextualizes the poll itself by saying that the background checks are actually just registration for confiscation.
These are all things he's doing without providing any evidence or support, nothing.
He's just attacking the statistic without doing any work he needs to do in order to refute it.
As for calling the poll a government poll, that's a meaningless attack.
The polls that Obama were using were Gallup polls.
And if Alex is saying that Gallup is just controlled by the government, then what he's doing is just trying to wage a full-scale war on any semblance of a shared reality that's measured by statistical analysis.
And that's what they did, and they found overwhelming support for all of it.
That's very hard for Alex to deal with.
So he just says it's a government poll, and now he doesn't have to deal with the fact that he himself is an extreme outlier.
As to the question of whether or not this result is in line with other poll results, I don't know what he's talking about.
Polling has been very consistent in showing huge support for these sorts of measures.
A couple of things to discuss.
Gallup track of historical trends.
And one question they've asked in polls since 1990 is: quote, in general, do you feel that laws covering the sale of firearms should be made more strict, less strict, or kept as they are now?
In the entire history of asking that question, the percent of saying that say less strict has never been more than 14% and is regularly less than 10%.
The side saying more strict has only been under 50% seven times in the entire history of polling that question, and it's never been lower than 43%.
Their polls have shown massive support for background checks universally over a long span of time.
Yes, if it was just put to a raw vote of the public, yes, absolutely, these things would be taken care of.
Easily.
And when you compare those results that Gallup has historically to other polls, you see that it's not an outlier at all.
Quinnipay's June 2017 study found 94% approval for background checks.
Washington University's July 2016 found 84%.
There's literally nothing I can find to support the idea that Alex is advancing, namely that there's credible polls showing lower support for background checks for gun purchasing, which is why he needs the last element, the reframing of background checks just to be about regulation for confiscation.
And honestly, I can't do anything with that kind of paranoia.
You can just run wild with that shit if you want to.
Like, you shouldn't have to do a background check when I apply for a job.
That's just letting the government know where I work so they can get me fired.
You shouldn't do a background check when I try to rent an apartment.
That's just telling the government where I live so they can send a drone at me for being a patriot.
In life, there are times when submitting to a background check are pretty understandable and necessary.
If your real problem is that you think that this is some kind of registration, then you should be politically moving to help shape the system that the background checks take place in.
You should be pushing for background checks that are not kept on file.
You should be advocating for the background checks to be as anonymized as possible with no data retention.
What you shouldn't do, if you're a sane person, is pretend that background checks are the same thing as confiscation.
Because ultimately, what you're doing then is actively supporting people who can't pass background checks getting guns.
If that's what you're all about, cool.
But don't try to act like you're in favor of responsible gun ownership then, because you're not.
There are less than 10% of the rest of the country that agrees with you.
You have to lie about your position and pretend that you're in the majority in order to trick enough of those idiots into following along with your dumb bullshit that they don't agree with.
So on this episode, I think we've seen a good bit of Alex kind of just being full of shit about various things, trying to lead his audience to believe that Joshua Haken is a hero, particularly, you know, lying about things, passing along the idea that Nancy worked for DARPA based on this dumb blog.
You see, you've got the globalists that know they've got a public.
You've got two different publics.
You've got a public that's awake and aware, and then you've got the public that literally are as dumb as the day is long, the most gullible, soft, stupid, pathetic on the government dole.
It's one I've heard him scream about pretty consistently in any time period of the show that I've listened to.
That idea that there's a 49% drop in violent crime that was caused by people having more guns.
This, again, is an instance of Alex being completely illiterate when it comes to how statistics work.
The part of this that's true is that during the time span of 1993 to 2013, private gun ownership numbers went up and the violent crime rate went down.
Both of these are correct.
But what Alex has failed to do in any way is demonstrate causation.
There's no reason to believe that just because two things happened around the same time as each other or even at the same time as each other that they're somehow related.
There's a whole website dedicated to really weird, correlated phenomena that aren't causally linked in any way.
It was created by a guy named Tyler Vidgin, and he's tracked these really bizarre connections and found things like there's a 99.26% correlation between 2000 and 2009 in the divorce rate in Maine and the per capita consumption of margarine.
There's also a 95% correlation from 1999 to 2010, the marriage rate in Kentucky and the number of people who drowned after falling out of a fishing boat.
Anyway, he wrote a book about this called Spurious Correlations, which, if nothing else, is demonstrative of how just because two numbers run similar paths or appearingly correlated paths, that doesn't mean they have anything to do with each other.
People who have studied it point the gun violence drop and the gun ownership.
The violent crime drop and gun ownership increase.
They point to other variables that explain the drop as being possible post-1993, which was a high point.
One major factor is that the post-World War II baby boom generation had just passed the age brackets that are most statistically likely to be high crime ages.
So what Alex has failed to do in any way is take these other factors into account, preferring instead to just take this statistic that crime dropped 49% in a period of time that gun ownership has risen, and he's decided that guns were the reason that the rate dropped.
This isn't how serious people approach stats.
If serious people, they have looked at the issue, and they found the exact opposite conclusion from what Alex has come up with.
Most notably in that 2017 Stanford study that showed that states that pass right to carry laws experience a 13 to 15 percent increase in violent crime.
So I don't, I just, the essential piece of this is when you look at what Alex is doing, he's taking a correlation and implying causation, and he does no work in any way to establish that.
He doesn't have any study to show, like, oh, it is true that more guns equals less crime.
People who have looked at it from that viewpoint, the relationship between more guns and less crime, they look at it from a standpoint of rising crime makes people buy more guns.
They look at it from almost like their analysis of the statistics shows almost the opposite of what Alex is saying, is that crime motivates people to buy guns as opposed to gun buying leads people to do less crime.
Right.
So all I'm saying is Alex is just being fast and loose, dodging around, being shifty.
It just flies in the face of the one truth that I don't see ever changing, which is that the more, like, if you make the means by which to do something more prevalent, it makes it more likely that something will happen.
If you give people more guns, it makes it more likely that gun violence is going to happen.
That's been true forever.
That is human reality.
And to argue the opposite of that goes against something that's fundamental and basic in humans, and I will never trust any argument otherwise.
So, Alex, I've singled out this because I know that it's probably pretty difficult.
And I don't know if I could actually even convey this in clips.
Like, even if I played you 100 clips, I'm not sure that I could fully express to you the ramping up of extremeness that's going on in this April time period, maybe even a little bit into the end of March.
But it's very specifically happening right here in the timeframe that we're talking about.
It is very easy to hear a clip like the last one we played where, like, they have to take our guns because we're rising.
We're the best.
Obama is not my president.
He's a Vichy collaborator.
You could hear that and be like, it's kind of similar to stuff Alex says through a lot.
And I accept that.
But I have to stress, if you listen to these episodes in their entirety, you do notice that this is getting much more extreme.
There is an amplification.
And Alex is even explicit about the fact that he is getting more extreme.
He talks about it.
And in this next clip, one of the things that I think is really important is that Alex ties that growing extremeness.
I need to come up with another word for it, but that growing radical edge that he has on his show with sales, which is one of the contentions that the people in the Sandy Hook lawsuits are making is that he profited off of this sort of coverage.
And if you listen to this next clip, you get some indications that they may have a point.
He's also said at other times that he is going more, like he's getting more intense and things are, you know, he's saying that you got to pay me.
You've got to buy my shit because that fuels my ability to go 110% in this no-holds-barred shit.
I think there's – and it's interesting to me because the extremeness that he's presenting, as we discussed on our last episode, it doesn't just apply to Sandy Hook issues.
That's the one – That's the one area that has led to legal action now.
But if there were VA doctors or ministers who were harassed by Alex Jones' fans, I could see them suing him for what he did at this period just as easily.
That's one thing that I've thought about with the lawsuit pretty because when we're talking about that kind of situation, that's where we get into that correlation causation issue.
I don't know how you can prove that specifically the Sandy Hook stuff increased his profits.
Other than to take it as a totality, in which case, I suppose that means that not only do doctors and VA officials who were harassed have standing, but it's morally imperative for them to join the lawsuits.
Well, the problem there is that, like, from what I understand about the lawsuits, is the only reason that this sort of extends the statute of limitations is that Alex re-brought up some of these things.
As non-legally literate people, I think it would be tough for us to know what constitutes that.
But it's, yeah, I think the more important point is that, like, you look at this, and it's very clear that on a level, he is trying to benefit from the behavior that led to the treatment that the Sandy Hook people.
And again, we have this continuation of now it's okay for him to make fun of this grieving father as opposed to defending him when a caller calls in and suggests he's an actor.
Saying these people are coached is right.
That's putting your toe into the water of the actor shit.
And that's why I have the White House Science Czar.
I'll show it to you during the next segment if you're a TV viewer, radio listener, EcoScience, where they said we're going to use diet injections injunctions to dumb you down.
We're going to put stuff in your water.
Now they've got hundreds of shots they want to give kids.
Shots, This is a good demonstration of how little Alex cares about his own bullshit.
He's claiming that John P. Holdren's book, EcoScience, discusses diet injections and injunctions to control the public.
And I really honestly think this is a result of him never reading the things he rants about reading all the time.
When he's talking about isn't a reference to eco-science, the textbook that John P. Holdren wrote.
That's a line that Alex always misuses from Bertrand Russell in his book, The Impact of Science on Society.
We've talked about this a bunch of times.
Alex is just taking that line entirely out of context.
Russell was talking about the really bad stuff that could come up if, for instance, the Nazis had been more scientifically advanced as a dictatorship.
He's not advocating for these things, but because he's discussing them, Alex has decided he's secretly actually saying that the globalists are doing these things, which is fucking stupid.
And guess what?
I didn't have to look any of this up to remember it.
I heard him talk about eco-science and the diet injections injunctions.
I'm like, oh, you mismatched references, buddy.
My big point here is that Alex doesn't even care about getting his fake things right.
And amazingly, it seems like a bunch of his audience doesn't care either.
Fuck it.
John P. Holdren, Bertrand Russell, who gives a shit?
It's crazy.
If you have this really revolutionary, world-shaking information that you've uncovered, but a plan to depopulate the planet and kill off everybody, seems like you'd know what you're talking about and keep your ducks in a row.
And he doesn't.
That seems to me an indication that this isn't real.
Well, I think, I mean, it's easier to get away with that shit because his listeners generally are looking for emotional validation.
They have no interest in the intellectual side of it.
They just want to understand and have their anger and fear and paranoia mirrored back to them in an acceptable way, as opposed to being like, I need to think about what this guy's saying.
No, I just need to get the general vibe of how he's angry.
That's what I really want.
I don't need, I'm not going to do homework for InfoWars.
So about an hour of this episode is dedicated to Alex doing an interview with anthrax guitarist Dan Spitz and his wife Candy about the evils of vaccination.
So there's a couple points where he brings up something, and then there's just silence on the other end of the phone, where they're like, I don't know.
Especially from Candy, the wife.
Also, I don't want to bring this up because I looked into them a little bit, and they're a mess.
And from the mass shootings they stage and set up by making them gun-free zones, victim disarmament, mass killer zones to teach the kids to crouch over in a good ball so the killer can get the maximum number of dead so they can hopefully get our guns next time.
Well, guess what?
We're on to you.
This is boomerang back on you.
By the way, I want to announce the Infowars.com, InfoWarsHealth.com health challenge.
I'm challenging listeners to get healthy in the face of the new world order in the month of April.
And let's put InfoWars Health up there on screen for folks.
Again, I'm challenging listeners to go to InfoWarsHealth.com and sign up and try the great products like Beyond Tangy Tangerine, the Alex Pack, the Healthy Start Pack, Polymburst, Polymburst Plus.
Yeah, normally, like, the ad pivots are always bad, but to go from like, well, victim disarmament zones and they turn your kids into a ball and then maximum damage.
Anyway, their basic point isn't one, like I said, that I'm too interested in or I disagree with too much.
They're basically just saying that Bitcoin may be a good thing, and they support decentralized currencies, but they're skeptical.
In the clip there, you can hear Alex speculating that the central banks and the Federal Reserve, they're in the pump stage of a pump and dump with Bitcoin.
Alex let him have his fun with that theory.
What I think is important is his reason for his theory.
He has literally no evidence to support his conjecture that the Fed is artificially inflating Bitcoin to bring about an eventual crash.
But he feels like that's the case because he's decided what the enemy is, how they think, how they operate.
And he's decided that that's what he would do if he was them.
When you take into account that his enemies are imaginary and all of his primary sources don't say what he thinks they do, you really have to consider that Alex comes up with his ideas about the globalists and what they're up to through sheer imagination.
He's imagined a villain and he just says, what would I do if I were them?
I really felt like this was what he was doing for a long time, but I've never heard him so clearly express that mentality as in that last clip.
Like the globalists don't want to depopulate the planet, but Alex would, if he were them.
The globalists don't play an elaborate false flag shooting hoaxes to take guns away, but Alex would, if he were them, all this shit is Alex projecting.
Well, and but that's we've talked about that a few times in the past of like how revealing it is when they say what the enemy is doing.
Because like how many times do right-wing people are like, oh, the Democrats are stealing votes and they're shipping in illegals in order to steal elections and all that shit.
And we see none of that actually happening on the Democratic side.
But every voter suppression effort, every attempt to rig an election, just Chris Kobach's continued existence, like all of that shit, you see, oh, well, they are ascribing it to us in order to justify why they do it themselves.
So we get to the 10th, and there's not much going on here because I'll be honest with you, about an, oh, let's say two hours of this show is David Knight and Jakari Jackson coming in as guests, like to co-host with Alex, because they had been out to a gun control rally.
And Councilman Mike Martinez of Austin got on the mic and said, hey, to that guy who's trying to get himself a bunch of attention, there is no gun confiscation going on.
But once we make some moves, keep that sign because you're going to need it later.
He can handle the nightly news and shit, but being on Alex's show itself, where there's clearly way more listeners, both of them seem to be a little bit like, this is the big leagues.
It's hundreds of thousands in every state who are sitting back watching what's happening and everything's being confirmed for them and they are locked and they are loaded.
And I want to tell the Federal Reserve and the New World Order something.
You are not going to get away with this.
You may be able to kill Ron Paul or kill Alex Jones and wipe out the leadership.
And the reason you haven't done that yet is because you know what that'll do.
That'll energize us 110%.
Okay?
We're powering up against your revolution against our republic.
It's hard because, again, you could fall back behind.
I've never heard Alex defend his position by saying like, well, there were probably victim family members who were better actors, and that's what I was trying to say.
I've never heard him use that defense.
unidentified
If he used it, I'd be like, I don't know if I believe you.
But that is an interpretation that could be made of this.
And that, yeah, the court of law is the worst part because you can't be like, Your Honor, I submit to you six to seven hundred hours of Alex Jones content from multiple eras so you can have a full context on what exactly this means, as opposed to what it is that you may think it means in a legal definition.
There is tone, there's context around the time period, there's his bullshit.
unidentified
And he'd be like, I'm not going to listen to any of that shit.
And again, please, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to go to break, come back into another segment with your calls for Sean and Ron and Paul and Alex and everybody with our guest host here.
There's no actual solid historical basis for the quote, which is to say that no reliable source who was there put it down into writing until a lot later.
The quote was spread initially by Parker's grandson Theodore, who was not present at the time of being said.
So, yeah, like I said, he's not present, but in 1822, at a reenactment of the Battle of Lexington, Theodore claimed that Minuteman Sergeant William Monroe had told him back when he was a kid of his grandfather's great quote, but weirdly seems to have not told anyone else.
Then, some 40 years later, Theodore has remembered it, and it becomes a part of American lore.
There was a man named Ebenezer Monroe who said, quote, Captain Parker ordered his men to stand their ground and not molest the regulars unless they meddled with us.
But the differences are all the credible accounts don't include the part that's saying if they want war, we'll have one.
The bravado is gone.
The veneer of masculinity and heroic restraint reaching its last nerve.
Those differences are the only thing that Alex is interested in about this quote.
And odds are they're total bullshit made up by a kid trying to glorify his grandfather.
So it looks like once again, Alex is firmly on the side of lore over history here.
And he doesn't really believe anything about the founding of the country unless it matches up with whatever he's feeling at the time or whatever he wants to push.
But Alex used two quotes in that stretch.
You might have recognized at the end there, he used a Patrick Henry quote.
Now, Alex is close enough on that for me to give it to him.
The quote is actually, quote, the war is actually begun.
But Alex's take on it is probably a very accurate assessment of the point Patrick Henry was trying to make in his March 23rd, 1975 speech to the Second Virginia Convention.
Honestly, that speech would be a great thing for Alex to actually quote.
It really closely matches a ton of the vibe he's been throwing out lately, but I think there's a problem with him actually quoting the speech instead of paraphrasing it, and that is that Patrick Henry is legitimately calling for war, not an info war.
In fact, Patrick Henry's speech is very opposed to an info war.
Quote, and what have we to oppose them?
Shall we try argument?
Sir, we've been trying that for the last ten years.
Have we anything new to offer upon the subject?
Nothing.
We have held the subject up in every light of which it is capable, but it has all been in vain.
Shall we resort to entreaty and humble supplication?
What terms shall we find which we have not already exhausted?
Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves any longer.
Anyway, that's a real quote.
But also, based on the speech that it comes from that Alex is paraphrasing here, if Alex believed that war had truly already started, Patrick Henry would think he's a coward in helping the enemy with his info war bullshit.
There's just a sense of like listening to this April, the beginning of April.
Like, I mean, part of it is knowing the Boston bombing is coming.
Like, that is definitely a part of this.
Yeah.
But even not knowing that, there's still like you just see these elements that are intersecting, and you see, like, there has to be something going on that's not on the show.
Like, the way that Alex's rhetoric is escalating so severely, the way his tactics are kind of shifting towards directly targeting these folks.
Like, there is something going on that is unclear.
But there's that moment where he's down in the basement and he's playing with his trains, and the entire Adams family is up and they're all listening intently, and they're going, oh, no, it's running around Dead Man's Curve.
Oh, no, it's hitting this thing.
Like, they all know that this is going to result in this massive, destructive act.
He knows it.
They know it.
Everybody's involved in watching this happen.
And it's still so inevitable.
You know, everybody, anybody, anybody included, could have stopped it.
Not to go too overboard in complimentary behavior, but obviously we cannot listen to all of these episodes in full because none of us want to, and it's a horrific nightmare.
So the only evidence that most people listening to this show have that this rhetoric is rising and this behavior is so much more troubling as we go through this is what you tell us.
But also, you really have presented it to the point where I feel it.
I really do feel like, even though I haven't listened to this shit, I really do feel like I can hear it.
If we're going to talk about the Bells, let's bring in the story of what's the name, John Parker's grandson, and telling that whole quote and everything.
That is 100% Christopher Walken in pulp fiction, like showing up to him as a kid and being like, your grandfather, you know, that whole thing.
And Christopher Walken and the Bells were both on Infowars.