On April 19, 2013, Alex Jones falsely claimed the Boston Marathon bombing was a "false flag" to justify martial law, conflating shelter-in-place orders with "martial law" and misrepresenting police actions. He pivoted from blaming a white gunman to Muslims or Navy SEALs without evidence, mocked credible sources like Oath Keepers leader Stuart Rhodes, and bullied Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo with baseless accusations. Jones exploited grief by promoting conspiracy theories while deflecting criticism, like his edited Family Guy clip and 9 p.m. bedtime excuse for the 10:30 p.m. shootout. His shifting narratives reveal a pattern of prioritizing attention over accountability, undermining trust during crises. [Automatically generated summary]
I don't know about gospel songs, but like when you bring that up, it makes me think of like the Christian music that I used to listen to back when I was.
I don't know if it bangs, but some of it is still pretty good.
It's listenable at least.
I know everyone out there is rolling their damn eyes at me, but I think some of it is still like there's a couple Five Iron Frenzy songs that I think hold up even if you like that you can listen to them almost outside of it being religious.
As we discussed on our last episode, which was April 18th, that was the day that the FBI released the images of the suspects who we now know as Tamerlin and Johar Zarnev.
So that was on the 18th.
And then overnight, shit just blows up.
And then the 19th is completely, it's absolute chaos.
Not absolute chaos, really.
But it's when the city is, everyone is, there's a shelter-in-place request.
People are staying indoors.
There's the manhunt going on.
So that's the day that we're covering today.
I think this is one of the weirder episodes of Alex's show that I've heard in a very long time.
So on our last episode covering this coverage that Alex has of the Boston bombing, we heard him utterly convinced that the pictures he'd found on 4chan had cracked this case wide open and that the media and the globalists were in a mad scramble to keep their false flag operation together.
His certainty was naturally based on nothing other than his own imagination, but the effect was clear.
He was blowing up in popularity and he loved it.
His ratings were through the roof.
Traffic was coming into the website like crazy.
He'd send his reporter Dan Badandi out to disrupt Boston officials' press conferences, and he was successfully able to yell about false flags and say infowars.com at multiple internationally televised events, including the one on the 18th, where the FBI released the photographs of the two suspects who were still at that point unidentified.
While Badandi's yelling had the effect that it was going for, which was driving tons of traffic to Alex's site, that press conference had another important effect that was ultimately far more relevant to the real world.
April 18th was the day that everything broke wide open.
For days since the bombing, the perpetrators had every reason to think that they'd gotten away with the attack.
They'd returned to their normal lives, and if I were them and I'd just seen the internet, I'd probably think I was in the clear, too.
That changed at 5:20 p.m. on the 18th when the FBI released their photos.
The illusion of safety was gone, and they knew it was only a matter of time before someone called a tip line and said they recognized them.
And then the jig was up.
And thus began 24 hours of complete chaos.
At 10:31 p.m., MIT police officer Sean Collier is murdered sitting in his car, which investigators determined was an attempt on these guys to get another gun.
This murder happened very close to an armed robbery that happened at a convenience store.
So early reports got the two of them mixed up, and people thought they were connected, but they weren't.
That was another thing that is sort of part of the conspiracy canon, but Alex doesn't even actually.
Though they didn't steal anything from that convenience store, the bombers did hijack a guy's SUV less than an hour later at 11:20 p.m., holding the driver hostage with them.
They would go to a gas station where the younger bomber is caught on security cameras shopping for a bunch of snacks.
He would later tell detectives that their plan was to drive to New York and set off another bomb there.
This plan would be derailed by the SUV's owner escaping the car and running to a different nearby convenience store where he would call the police.
You can easily find security camera footage of the driver running into that store, terrified, hiding behind the counter and calling the police, telling them that he'd been carjacked by men claiming to be the bombers and that his car had a GPS system that they could track.
You can also easily find footage from the same time of the older bomber coming into the gas station to tell the younger brother that the driver had escaped and it was time to go.
The younger guy drops all his snacks and they run out back to the car to leave.
Later in this episode, Alex and a caller will discuss how the bombers were in a Mercedes and how that's really suspicious.
Like they're trying to speculate about how did they get this money?
The police track that SUV to an address in Watertown, and units are dispatched.
The first responding officer spots the vehicle but is told not to engage until his supervisor arrives.
He follows the SUV, then around 12:41 AM, the driver of the SUV gets out, approaches his car, and starts shooting.
The shootout lasts approximately eight minutes, with both sides exchanging gunfire and one of the bombers throwing IEDs at the police, which Alex will later misidentify as grenades.
There were grenades.
He does that in order to say, like, how would they get their hands on grenades?
At 12:49 AM, the older brother is tackled by police after he appears to have run out of bullets.
The officers attempted to get him subdued and in custody, but while they were getting him handcuffed, the other bomber drives right at them.
The officers manage to jump out of the way, but the older bomber is run over as his partner escapes.
So just before 1 a.m., the shootout in Watertown had come to an end.
The older bomber is taken to the hospital where he's pronounced dead.
They run his fingerprints and learn that his name is Tamerlin Tsarnev, and with this information, they're able to identify his partner, his younger brother, Johar.
Neutralizing one suspect is probably a good thing, all things considered, but it would be hard to consider this night's events a good result.
One officer had been severely injured, and another had sustained injuries that would end up killing him approximately a year later.
Though one suspect was down, police were unsuccessful in giving chase to Johar, who appeared who disappeared into the night on foot after abandoning his vehicle about half a mile from the site of the shootout.
Police went to work immediately, attempting to establish a perimeter.
All points bulletins were sent out, and bomb squads were called in to neutralize the unexploded IEDs that the brothers had left at the scene in Watertown.
News of the flare-up broke real quick, and almost immediately the Watertown Police Department is inundated with tons of reports of suspicious individuals, all of whom they look into and find unrelated to the search for Johar.
In this 24-hour span, the department receives over 500 calls to 911, as opposed to their normal daily average of 30.
These people were dealing with an overwhelming situation where a community that had been on edge for days was now looking to them to protect them from a rogue individual on the loose.
And it's easy to look at the situation and say that this was just one young man on the loose.
What's the need for such a panic?
Why do you need such a massive police response as we're going to end up seeing?
And I can see why someone would have that knee-jerk reaction, but the reality is not so simple.
At the time, it was very unclear if this was just one kid on his own that they were after.
For one thing, this was a kid who had bombed the Boston Marathon who had been involved in the murder of a police officer.
And when confronted by additional cops, he responded by throwing IEDs at them.
Yeah, or he could be, you know, if you see a big thing like the Boston bombing, there's no way that you're going to think, oh, it's just two lone people.
There has to be some sort of connection to some sort of network.
How did they get all this information?
All that shit.
You can't rule that out until you have any information on it.
So at 1:57 a.m., the Watertown PD sends out an emergency message to the residents of the town asking them to stay inside their homes and report anything that might be helpful in their manhut.
This obviously is a very scary development, but honestly, given the circumstances, I'm not sure there was a good option.
And an important distinction needs to be made.
At this point, the message to stay indoors was not a mandatory order, and it was very localized to the area directly surrounding the morning shootout.
People could go outside if they wanted to, but they also ran a very high likelihood of a neighbor seeing them and they're wandering around at 2 a.m.
By 2:30 a.m., a unified command center is set up outside Arsenal Mall, an outlet shopping center in Watertown.
The center serves as a hub for coordination between Watertown PD, neighboring area police departments who have come in to help, as well as the FBI and the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency.
Over a thousand individual law enforcement officers are on hand to deal with the crisis.
And by the end of the day, more than 2,500 officers will have been involved in some capacity in the situation.
At 4:15 a.m., the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency and Governor Duval Patrick authorized the Massachusetts National Guard to deploy armed military police into Watertown.
This is another important distinction here because the authorization didn't come from FEMA or the federal government.
This was a state-level decision, which really punches holes in any kind of states' rights anti-government angle to this response because that's well within the governor's mandate.
They can call out National Guard for emergency situations.
The discussion of whether or not it's the right decision or the most efficient decision is not really my interest.
The point is, it was a state decision, which all the arguments about this being the federal government coming in, it's absolutely not true.
As the morning comes, 120 military police officers are sent out to assist local authorities in house-to-house searches, which have been authorized, again, by the proper channels.
At 5:15 a.m., the governor of Massachusetts and the mayor of Boston have a conference call with the Unified Command Center and decide they need to suspend mass transit services temporarily and put out a shelter-in-place request, effectively putting the area into lockdown.
This is the closest thing to martial law as we've seen in the United States for a long time.
And it would be easy to see this as the fulfillment of Alex's prophecies, you know?
WBUR did a survey a year later in April 2014 and found that 83% of respondents believed that the police putting out a shelter-in-place request was the right decision.
If you read the after-action report that the authorities all collaborated on and put out, there is a lot of very valid criticism, particularly about weapon discipline.
For sure.
Particularly in the case of the Watertown shootout when they were trying to stop Johar's car leaving.
So, like I mentioned, 911 operators got a ton of tips during this time.
And one of the more relevant ones had to do with a suspicious person carrying a package who got into a taxi.
The police end up finding out that this taxi driver is on the terrorist watch list.
And this immediately becomes a huge deal.
The taxi was en route to the South Station, which is a hub for both Massachusetts Mass Transit and Amtrak.
So taxi service is suspended in the city by 9 a.m.
Right.
It's suspended earlier, but by 9 a.m., it's determined that the taxi driver in question, they'd misspelled his name, and it wasn't the person on the terrorist watch.
This will not be the only time in this story that appropriate data entry skills would have saved people a lot of time, which leads me to my next point, which is that data entry workers need to be respected and paid better.
The day goes on, and the police keep coming up empty.
And that's where things stand as Alex gets on air.
The previous night had been a completely chaotic nightmare with a murder of a police officer, a shootout in a residential neighborhood, and the request for a metropolitan area to stay indoors while police and National Guard carry out their search.
It's almost like a ball being set up on a tee for Alex.
He's spent his entire career talking about how fake terrorist attacks are being used to bring in martial law, and now he's determined that a terrorist attack was a false flag, and the response has been to enact something that he would call martial law, though it's not even close to the actual thing if you get down to all the details.
I just talked to our reporter, Dan Badondi, that is at Lexington Green.
We're oath keepers.
We're trying to get through to Stuart Rhodes right now.
We're oath keepers.
Go ahead and get Dan Badondi on if we can't get a hold of Stuart Rhodes.
Where they're being told the police have revoked the permit for them to have an oath-taking ceremony to defend the Bill of Rights and Constitution because that is the enemy now that the occupiers hate.
And of course, they revoked their permit to demonstrate, but the anti-gun group that got their permit revoked, they are allowed to take Lexington Green and make all sorts of red coat Bloombergian announcements.
That's happening while Boston and surrounding cities in Massachusetts into Connecticut have martial law declared.
When a group plans to use public space to hold a rally or a protest, they do need to apply for a permit because they're the ones who wish to use the public space for their own purposes.
If the counter-demonstrators wanted to hold a competing rally of their own in a park near Lexington Green, for example, then they would need a permit for that.
This was the case with the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where countergroups planned to hold a rally for, quote, racial justice, harmony, and the end of white supremacy at Justice and McGuffey Parks, which are near the park where the right-wing groups planned their rally.
The people counter-demonstrating the oath keepers don't need permits because their event is really just a natural extension of the oath keepers event, not an event in its own right.
So they tracked that train to Norwalk, Connecticut, which was the next stop that they were able to stop the train at and search it.
So they stopped this train in Norwalk, and the Metro Police and Norwalk Police Department searched it.
There was no extension of checkpoints or martial law to Connecticut.
It was just this stop where the police were able to intercept the train that they had a tip that the person might have been on.
It was all resolved by 9 a.m. and Alex has no reason to take that kernel of information and use it to pretend that this shelter-in-place request the police put out extended past the Boston suburbs.
It's a real unfortunate situation because they really had an opportunity to have a fight on top of a moving train, and it just turned out it wasn't the guy.
And I mean, there is a 1% chance, maybe a 3% chance, maybe even a 5% chance that there are real organic Muslim terrorists who kind of pick up on the hype of all of this war on terror and go out and basically copycat.
So that is a factor.
This could be a real terror attack, as I've said from day one.
It's a very low probability.
But then why do you have the big drill with guys with backpacks everywhere right around where it happened, staring?
And then you had another Patsy they said they arrested and it was going to be the redneck.
And then they had to abandon that and go with plan B.
And you've got meeting with the Saudi ambassador, their foreign minister.
If you go back to Monday afternoon when I went into Overdrive on air to break down what I thought was going to end up happening at the Boston Marathon, you'll find that, as usual, we were on target with a spectrum of analysis because I've seen this over and over again.
I said, if there was a drill and if there's a bunch of federal agents around where the bombing happens, he goes on from there and just trails off.
We know, because we listened to the episode from that Monday, that Alex was not right on target when he was in Overdrive.
It was mostly him just yelling with Richard Belzer about how he thinks this was a false flag and trying to find any little piece of information to justify that belief.
One of his interns told him it was Patriots Day, so he ran with that.
Rob Dew said his brother left the marathon from dehydration, so Alex ran with and embellished that.
He was not right on target.
He was constructing a narrative, and he was doing it very sloppily.
In that clip we just heard, Alex says, quote, if there was a drill, if there were military all around, and then he trails off and goes off to another topic without laying out what the then part is of this if-then statement.
And every single person listening to Alex's show knows that without Alex saying it.
It's an axiom of InfoWars.
And this is where deception is kind of built.
Because Alex knows that his audience has internalized this if-then relationship.
He knows that a shortcut to proving that something was a false flag, proving in heavy quotes, all he has to do is just create the perception there was a drill going on at the same time.
Understanding this dynamic goes a long way toward understanding why Alex is so prone to accept complete bullshit when it helps him get where he needs to go.
He has absolutely no ability to prove that the bombing was a false flag.
It's just not possible.
But his audience has accepted the implied relationship between a drill and a false flag.
So all he has to do is prove that, that there was a drill, which I would argue he still has failed to do.
This kind of puts into context why he accepts all this completely flimsy evidence of a drill and then extrapolates that stuff out far past what's reasonable to.
He's done this with a school safety drill in a completely different city to assert that Sandy Hook was a false flag.
He's done this with a corporate training lecture he's pretending was a drill to assert that the 7-7 bombing in London was a false flag.
He does this all the time because he knows that the appearance of a drill is enough to convince most of his audience.
Yeah, I'm guessing that after his long career in the TV industry, Bells is a little bit annoyed that he didn't get a story credit on the whole false flag theory there because I'm telling you, he collaborated, man.
Then they had all the Democratic operatives on Wednesday come out on MSNBC, CNN, you name it, and they said, ladies and gentlemen, it is the right-wingers.
We're not Liberty City exactly yet, but yes, it's a right-wing, probably a soldier.
I watched CNN and MSNBC last night before I went on air live on the nightly news at 7, and I saw CNN with three different hosts and guests all say it's going to be a veteran, it's going to be a Navy SEAL.
There were people creating fake profiles for the Saarnev brothers on social media, attempting to inject their own details into the conspiracy theories about the attack.
Another thing that was happening at the time was that botnets were using fake articles about the bombing to spread spam and malware, hoping to capitalize on the public's hunger for information about what had happened.
Cisco put out a warning that this was happening and warned that one of the attempts was related to an email that appeared to be from CNN.
Some apparent censorship of conspiracy content around this time was related to protecting users from these botnets that were trying to hijack their computers.
In a crisis like this, people who are up to no good go to work.
The public really wants to know what's going on, and when they're not getting that information, they're way more likely to fall for bullshit or fall victim to cyber attacks.
So you exploit that hunger for information and get people to click on things they probably wouldn't otherwise.
I'm not sure exactly the bigger picture of what Alex is talking about.
And there were definitely plenty of horrible things that Facebook did nothing to block or censor in the days after the bombing.
For instance, there was a 22-year-old Brown University student named Sunil Tripathi, who had been missing since March.
And he's someone who the internet decided to turn into a suspect in the bombing.
Sunil's family had set up a Facebook page, hoping he'd see it and be encouraged that he could come home or reach out.
In the days after the bombing, that page got bombarded with tons of hateful posts from people who decided that Sunel had been involved in the bombing of the marathon.
And then on April 23rd, Sunil's body was found in the Providence River, with a subsequent autopsy ruling that the cause of death was suicide.
I'm not aware of any evidence that the witch hunt was related to his death, and he'd been missing since before the bombing.
But the witch hunt did traumatize these terrified family who wanted to find their son.
Facebook did not take down these posts that were harassing his family.
And eventually the family just ended up taking down that page themselves.
I think Alex, you know, he's talking about the backpack thing, these articles about the backpacks.
But I think he's also referencing this because Facebook had blocked links to an article that he had about the manipulatively edited Family Guy episode, which I think is pretty easy to understand.
I'm sure that Seth McFarlane had made a copyright claim, and they were completely distorting his intellectual property in ways that I don't think are covered by fair use.
You can use copyrighted material in a transformative way, but I'm not sure that you can then use that recreated thing to claim that that distorted material is representative of what the original was.
Yeah, he briefly mentioned that the city is under martial law, which it's not, and he's not really giving any updates, nor does he even seem that interested that this is a lead story.
This episode so far has mostly been about him rambling about how he was right about Drill.
And truth be told, he feels more focused on the Oath Keepers getting to have their rally than he is on the outbreak of literal martial law, according to him.
And that seems weird.
The behavior you would expect from Alex Jones when the appearance of martial law comes is to get on air and call all patriots to Boston.
He should be talking about how good it is that the oath keepers are in Boston so they can make the first offense to liberate the people of the city from tyranny.
Alex's entire career has been built about warning that the police state is coming, and now here is as close as he's seen in the United States, and he seems to want to avoid the story.
The options that I see are the first is that he realizes that what's going on is a legitimate police operation.
It's completely legal, and they do need to find this terrorist who's on the loose.
He knows that if he does anything that might impede the carrying out of the investigation, then God forbid, like this guy blows up another building, then Alex is going to have a lot of blood on his hands.
So the other possibility is what you touched on, and that is, I would describe as Alex is scared.
This is a point, this is the point he's been yelling about forever because he was betting that it would never come.
Like, he would never have to pay up.
This is Alex's chickens coming home to roost.
He's made millions of dollars rambling about how if the government ever got out of line, him and his Patriot buddies would shoot them and restore the Republic.
He was safe to do this because I'm sure he never imagined something like this would happen.
But now it is, or at least the appearance of it is.
And heavily armed police are searching houses door to door, and people are being asked to stay indoors.
In order for Alex to stay in any way consistent to what he yells about all the time, he has to call for armed resistance.
I suspect, but cannot prove, that Alex has already gotten everything he needs out of this tragedy.
He found his narrative that this was a false flag.
He's gotten an insane amount of internet exposure, and he's driven tons of traffic to his sites.
So while the appearance of police tyranny descending on the city does play into his narratives, it's also too much.
It would be very difficult for him to engage with the story how he normally would without it being to the point where the line in the sand has been crossed.
And that's something he just can't afford to do as a business.
Alex is like the way his narratives work is that the globalists cannot ever actually start taking people to FEMA camps.
It has to always be about to happen.
The globalists have to always be making their move.
They can't actually be doing the martial law shit that Alex says they plan to do.
That in-between state is where the money is.
Because if the story is that martial law is in place, then all of Alex's rhetoric should tell any listener who's paying attention that it's time to start shooting.
And that cuts into profits.
So I think Alex wants to foster this image, but at the same time, stay the fuck away from it.
The only explanation rationally to me are those possibilities because someone who presents themself like Alex does in every context that I've heard would be screaming about this.
Obviously, everyone listening to our show at this point realizes that everything Alex is saying is just based on his fantasies that he's constructed after seeing some pictures he found on 4chan.
None of this is real.
None of it's based on anything other than his feelings.
However, there's one thing here I think that merits pointing out.
Alex has no idea if any of the people in the pictures he saw were actually Muslims.
All he knows is that they're non-white people, possibly of Middle Eastern descent.
But past that, he has no reason to believe the people in these images from 4chan are followers of Islam.
He sees brown people in the pictures, and their skin proves to him what group they're a part of, which to me is a bad sign.
So much of his narrative is based on characteristics that he's imagined about people in these pictures.
He sees brown people, they must be Muslims.
He sees a white guy, he must be a redneck idiot who's been brought in to be the Patsy.
He sees guys in uniforms, they must be Navy SEALs or mercenary groups.
Not one single thing about these people in these photos is actually substantiated.
It's just taken as true because Alex has asserted these things to be true.
When we talk about Alex not knowing the difference between reality and fiction, it's usually in the context of him thinking that movies he's seen are real.
That's definitely the place where the tendency is most pronounced.
But it's important to remember that this exists in other contexts.
Here he's written a complete fiction about some pictures he saw that he found on 4chan, and he experiences that as reality.
It's almost like an author falling in love with a character in a novel that they're writing.
He either knows he's doing this and that he's willfully misleading his audience into accepting his fiction as reality for his own profit, which would make him a psychopath, or he has no idea he's doing that to people, which means he needs serious help.
Regardless of the explanation, someone should have intervened in Alex's life long ago.
It's real bummer to see these signs, these warning signs so clear.
And like, I wasn't paying attention to Alex in 2013, although I hope that that would have been my response to hearing this.
I mean, I can't imagine if you're anything other than a very dedicated, active listener, then you could, you know, rationalize away all of this shit.
If you didn't have an active, like, consistent point of view regarding everything he said and tracking it over time, you'd just be like coming in and out, and he'd say nonsense like a movie, and he'd be like, oh, it was like a movie.
And then he'd go back to screaming and you'd be like, oh, I get it.
I don't think that most people who would have any interest in critically looking at what he's doing have the stomach to actually listen to his show, particularly back then.
That's the first reference to the shootout from the night before.
And he's only referencing it vaguely.
And he's only doing it to try and say, like, they're going to take our guns, which is wild.
I can find no evidence that an AP reporter was threatened by the police during the hunt for Johar Sarnev.
I'm not saying that it definitely didn't happen, but I'm saying that I can't find any trace of this story on the AP's website nor on Infowars, not even in archived versions of the sites from the time.
I don't know what the reality is here, but I have every reason to believe Alex is just kind of riffing or just embellishing.
Later, someone attempts to correct Alex that what happened was that the police were warning reporters who had been out on the night before at the shootout in Watertown, but there was an active shooting going on, and if they weren't careful, they'd get shot.
This is very different than police threatening to shoot reporters, but it definitely sounds like the sort of thing Alex would misreport as police threatening to shoot reporters.
Now, if Trump was talking and he said, hey, you might get shot if you stick around out here, then we're talking about somebody threatening to shoot reporters.
In this circumstance, if Trump was the police commissioner or whatever who was on the scene, I would still not think it was a threat because it is a legitimate warning.
There's an eight-minute live shooting where the guys are throwing fucking IEDs at police.
That might be what's going on, like this misunderstanding or misrepresentation of police warnings.
That might be what Alex is talking about, but I'm not certain.
There might have been a dust-up between a cop and a reporter that I just can't find a record of.
I have no idea.
However, that clip is a really good encapsulation of how Alex is dealing with the supposed martial law in Boston.
He touches on it for a second, but only to use it as a way to amplify the other things he wants to talk about, like how the oath keepers can't have a permit for their rally or how the globalists want your guns.
Those are safe topics for him to stay on because they don't involve him getting backed into a corner by his own rhetoric.
The oath keepers are obviously still having a rally and no one's going to stop them.
And no one is taking anyone's guns.
So it's totally fine to agitate about those topics.
You're only creating hypothetical extremists.
If Alex were to really spend any time on the fact that, according to his own worldview, martial law is here and he's pretty consistently advocated fighting martial law, he would very quickly end up advocating violence against the police.
It's a real sign of cowardice what he's doing and a clear indication that his words are just talk.
If he believed half the shit he yells about on his show, this would be a put-up or shut-up moment.
And he's instead just decided to change the subject.
There were some people who brought up stuff related to the shootout from the night before or the shelter-in-place request, but it's not dealt with in any meaningful way.
Because I would have, I mean, I would think that some of his crazier wackos would have called in and been like, if you're saying there's martial law and all this stuff, and give him a detailed list and then be like, you've said it's time to start swinging.
So Alex is doing this to he brings up the shootout from the night before, but only as a way to weave into his own narratives, the gun stuff, and as a way to bring in Stuart Rhodes.
So he has Stuart Rhodes, the head of the Oath Keepers, on the show, to talk about the situation in Lexington Green with their permit.
If he thinks that random armed civilians wandering around in posse would have a preference, that would be a preferable solution to what happened in Boston.
It didn't happen, so we can only guess.
But you have to imagine that a whole bunch of people would have been shot who had nothing to do with the bombing.
And that's one thing to think about, but a much more concrete version is that there were tons of false suspects who got floated by the internet, which led to tons of targeted harassment.
Would have to kind of assume that if groups of armed people felt emboldened to take the law into their own hands, one of those people might have been killed.
It's almost a miracle that no civilians were killed, as is, in the manhunt and everything.
The police after action report makes very strong points of saying that one of the main things that needed improvement, I've mentioned this already, was the weapons discipline.
In the late-night shootout in Watertown, like I said, there was that crossfire situation that got created.
After Johar got away, an erroneous report of a stolen truck was called in, which led to police shooting at said truck when they spotted it.
No one was hurt, and it turned out the people in the truck were off-duty police who took the whole thing in stride.
Bottom line of what I'm getting at, I want nothing less in life than for Stuart Rhodes-style posse to be empowered to enforce the law, particularly up to the point of using lethal force.
That's legitimately the stuff of nightmares.
Now, as to Alex's contention that if this was happening in Texas, they would have found and killed this guy already.
I beg to differ.
In March 2018, 23-year-old Mark Condit carried out a string of bombings, ultimately killing two people and injuring six.
His first bombing was on March 2nd, and his serial bombings would not end until March 21st.
His reign of terror did not end because some oath keeper rounded up the boys and went hunting.
It was because police did a thorough investigation and tracked Condit down and tried to arrest him.
They were unsuccessful as he detonated a bomb he had in his car when they tried to pull him over, killing himself and injuring a cop.
Vigilante activity did literally nothing to help in the case of this serial bomber who was on the loose in Texas.
Nor did Alex's lunatic ravings about it all being a false flag on his show.
So I guess that kind of disproves Alex's we would have taken care of him in Texas bravado bullshit.
So keep in mind in this next clip that the city of Boston is going through some real serious stuff and the surrounding towns as well.
They're in a pretty messed up situation.
Everybody's struggling.
But Stuart Rhodes is also having a tough time.
unidentified
We said this warning.
We're going to go and do this.
We're going to go on Lexington Green.
I went there preparing to be arrested, as did a bunch of other veterans.
My message to the police was: look, you can either let us take five minutes and do our own ceremony on the green, or you can process or mess and process all of these veterans retired costs.
Stuart Rhodes, what do you say about the false flag angle of this?
Because they don't want us to look at these Navy SEALs and what looks like special forces of other branches crawling all over right before the bomb happened.
What do you say from your research?
unidentified
Well, I mean, I can't, like I said the other day when I was talking to you, I can't tell by someone's clothing who they are.
You're literally advocating going around and shooting brown people for fun, and you're the one who's going to be like, look, you know your neighborhood.
Jokar Zarnev is supposedly the young skinny man that we all nationwide why not put the whole country under martial law?
Why not put 315 million people in prison because of this?
They are all over Boston surrounding suburbs into Connecticut at checkpoints, pointing their M4s at men and women and their cars jerking people out going in houses.
They're about to have a press conference I was just watching it out there with just incredible off-the-chart, Unbelievable grandstanding, grandstanding going on.
Yeah, he is just tossing off the idea that an entire city is under martial law, where he spent his entire career saying that if a city goes under martial law, that's the signal that they're going to take over the country and kill us all and disarm us and so on and so forth.
Not just like, oh, yeah, yeah, Boston's under martial law.
It may seem like a little minor slip-up that Alex tries to refute that LA Times story with the Washington Times headline that he tries to pass off as a Washington Post headline.
But if you know what these papers are, that looks less like a mistake and more like sleight of hand.
The Washington Post is a mainstream media paper.
So, if they're publishing an article speculating about how there may have been these craft international agents at the marathon, it lends things a bit more credibility, which is exactly what Alex is trying to achieve by citing this story.
For the story to make it to the WAPO, it would need to pass layers of editors.
So, it carries a bit more weight.
Conversely, the Washington Times is a completely untrustworthy pseudo-news outlet founded by the cult leader Reverend Sun Young Moon.
Moon said, I founded the Washington Times as an expression of my love for America and to fulfill the will of God who seeks to establish America in his providence.
Yeah, it's also pretty brilliant reacting in the moment to be like, there's also a blurb in the Post, because that makes it seem like, oh, the mistake is just, I don't have time now to pull up the Post article.
I've already got the Times article in front of me.
There's a blurb about it in the Post, but I'm just going to reference the one that I have in front of me.
I'm not going to, I mean, he doesn't quantify it, so I don't know the number exactly, but here's where he's at: Joe Carr is the one living, and Czar Nab is the last name, and Tamerlin is the supposed larger boxer brother who's dead.
You acted guilty as sin when drills and stand downs were brought up at those three press conferences.
I mean, ladies and gentlemen, when we plugged Infowars.com, whenever Dan Badondi, our reporter, in the third press conference, after they canceled the others, and by the way, the police and FBI came over and said, you and Infowars are going to be good now, right?
You're not going to cause a problem.
And why didn't they arrest him or throw him out?
They didn't want to make a scene in front of all the reporters.
With the exception of the reporters who have won contests.
I think some of the behind-the-scenes people are probably pretty competent who've been around for a bit.
So I think that you have an ease compared to what he's dealing with right now.
But unfortunately, because of this thinned-out staff, like I said, Jacobson, California, Aaron Dykes, and Melissa Melton have just left to start their own offshoot, their own operation.
And everybody else has just run ragged.
Paul Joseph Watson's been working for days straight.
I don't have any clips of it because in order to sort of demonstrate my point, we'd have to listen to the whole thing, and it's like four minutes long.
It's not worth that.
But anyway, I was shocked.
It's very strange because, you know, the day before, on the 18th, she was the one who came up with the different color backpacks theory.
His narrative is like an amorphous blob that is just like certain parts just expand at one moment and then they come back in and then another part expands and it just keeps rolling around and rolling around.
Whenever you are a journalistic enterprise and you do reach out to somebody, there is formality to like they say no comment or they don't return calls.
But it would be easy to hear that and hear him say, I don't agree with that, as indicative of being like they were going to blame the blacks and the gays.
That is not what he's disagreeing with.
He's disagreeing with the fundamental assumption here.
And this is part of the pivoting of the narrative.
They must have had those conversations because I did hear them say Navy SEAL four times, which means, obviously, if you reverse engineer it, that means six months ago they said we were going to blame a Navy SEAL.
What is brilliant, and I think it's probably accidental, but what is brilliant is putting it on his audience to put those clips together instead of having to do it himself.
Had a click happen last hour, then I'm going to your calls, that is so horrible that it gave me the beginnings of a migraine headache, which I only get about once or twice a year, which is setting in right now.
It made me so physically sick when it all clicked that since Tuesday, I have seen CNN, MSNBC, and CNBC, and newspapers, and I need all you to pull this up and help us.
I just mentioned 6:15, 6.30, something like that last night.
CNN, what's her name, Erin something?
What's her name?
The former CNBC host is on there with her expert, Aaron Burnett.
Thank you.
Saying it might be Navy SEALs, and this is the expert on there.
I will say that I can neither confirm nor deny that Aaron Burnett or her expert guest said such a thing on her show last night from when Alex was recording.
But I can give you some reasons why I don't think they did.
What we're listening to right now is Alex's show from the 19th.
The night before would have been the 18th.
And if her show was taking place after 6 p.m., as Alex said, then it would have had to have been after the FBI press conference where the suspect photos were released.
It seems very unlikely that a TV show host or her expert guest would be discussing the possibility that these people who did the bombing were disgruntled veterans after the photos of them had been released, and they're clearly both pretty young.
The one thing that actually stands out, the guy in the blue jacket with the red shirt, the poor, poor-looking guy that the bag actually matches his straps that he's got over his arms.
Let's imagine that no bombing took place at the Boston Marathon.
Do you think for a single second that Alex and this caller would even take a second look at a picture of a man carrying a backpack in front of himself?
Do you think that that rises to any level of suspicion?
Under the circumstances where there wasn't a bombing, your mind would see that picture and realize that the photograph takes one split second into consideration and doesn't tell you anything about what happened just before or just after.
If there hadn't been a bombing, you would just see that, and any number of innocuous explanations would make sense.
Maybe his back was tired.
Maybe he'd just taken something out of the bag.
Maybe he was preparing to take something out of the bag.
Maybe he was going to give it to a friend to carry for a while.
But so now we're prioritizing the idea that they wanted to blame the Marines.
And the idea that the city is under lockdown, they're on the shelter-in-place order.
There's a new wrinkle that's going to start developing.
unidentified
These guys, they're on pictures everywhere.
So for them to come out and say, you know, maybe a Navy SEAL did it, they're saying that just in case pictures get credibility and somebody somewhere in a position to make a difference actually speaks out and says, look at all these Navy SEALs everywhere.
You know, I mean, they're just, that's another way for, you know, mainstream media to cover their butt.
I just love the spirit that they apply to this of just escalating it from we've got a few pictures to, God, I can't even believe how many Patsies are out there.
So in 2019, on our Friday episode, we had Alex's lawyer, Robert Barnes, come on the show and say that we're at war with Islam.
And, you know, that's awful, and it sucks to hear.
It sucks that people act that way.
You go back to 2013, you hear, like, these are the same ideas that have been underlying a lot of the guests and the people in Alex's orbit for a very long time.
The body language of the SEALs to me is they were just told to be there for a drill and didn't know.
And because, I mean, I've looked at now, there's a ton of these photos and videos.
They look just, you know, and I see some other guys that look, you know, like older special ops, like back, look totally freaked out.
You know, like, whoa, what just happened minutes after the blast?
My issue is it started clicking last night.
I've seen them four times since Tuesday say, maybe it's a former military, like a Navy SEAL, when they have these creepy FBI and Southern Barbie Law Center type guys on.
And so are they looking at framing the SEALs or what is that?
So Release the Kraken is, of course, a reference to the movie Clash of the Titans.
It's a common catchphrase that people use, and the way they use it is always in the context of sending in an offensive.
It's a weapon release.
What Alex is revealing here with his joke is twofold.
The first thing is actually pretty important because it may seem obvious to the point where you ignore it, and that Alex sends Dan Badanti to cover the things he covers.
In his deposition about his Sandy Hook case, Alex has tried hard, as hard as he can, to distance himself in any official way from Badandi's antics.
But this clip really seems to suggest that Badandi is an instrument of InfoWars.
They have a target, and they send him out to do what he does.
The second thing this reveals is that Alex sees Badandi sending Badanti somewhere.
It's tantamount to releasing a destructive weapon.
Badandi is not a reporter going out to ask questions.
He's a mythical beast who's completely uncontrollable that Alex is letting loose on people, namely the citizens of Boston and Sandy Hook.
And Alex relishes that.
He's not fake laughing there.
That's actual giddiness he has to tell this caller about calling Badandi the Kraken.
He loves that he can throw a grenade at these people and watch it explode from a safe distance.
This illustrates a cruel and sadistic streak in Alex, but it also kind of shows that Alex really doesn't give a shit about Dan Badanti.
He's a thing to Alex, a beast to release on people, but not somebody who he really values that much outside of his destructive capacity.
I really hate Dan Badanti, and I hope he's really ashamed of himself for what he's done.
But you kind of can't help but feel a little bit bad for him here, and as much as Alex is clearly using him, I don't feel that bad.
What I choose to do in a case like this is instinctually, I feel a little bit of pity for Dan Badanti.
But because he's clearly willingly acting in such an awful way towards vulnerable, grieving people, I choose to transmute that pity into disgust towards Alex.
Then, Jordan, what if there are two criminals on the loose and they've split up?
Can you then broaden the area that's on lockdown?
If one suspect being traced justifies one block being locked down, and the police telling people in that block to stay indoors and walking around with guns, then two suspects justifies an additional lockdown, right?
And now, what if this suspect is someone who set off bombs at a marathon, then killed police?
And what if you're not sure if they're working with other people, possibly even a network?
Surely that qualifies them to be considered a target that justifies using the most extreme measures allowable to catch them.
My point here is that Alex has made a form of martial law okay.
And from that point, he's completely lost any kind of ground he can stand on.
If he were against the police acting this way under any circumstances, there's not a whole lot I could do to argue against him.
I could disagree with him and say that I believe that there are occasions where the public should possibly do things that are uncomfortable to themselves personally to help the greater public interest, but I couldn't say, like, hey, you are fucked up.
You've made a mistake.
But since Alex says locking down one block because you think a suspect is there, he's completely failed.
Now he needs to answer so many questions he absolutely can't answer.
Like why one block is okay but a greater area isn't.
What's the difference?
That's a pretty big fuck-up on his part.
Like listening to him, I often find things he says that are lies, things that are stupid, but it's rare to find such an unforced error like that.
No one's asking him to make his message less extreme or to moderate.
No one is saying, hey, Alex, be reasonable about this.
What if it's a block?
For whatever reason, he's just decided to moderate this anti-police lockdown stance.
I just don't think he understands his own positions.
I don't think he understands what he believes or what he should be saying if he believed the things he believes.
I think it's just a glaring indication that he's making this shit up as he goes along, and it's all based on feelings and whatever he just thinks in the moment.
It'd be very much like actually getting down to who he cares about living or dying at that point of just like sooner or later he's going to say, look, I care.
Nobody, you know, everybody has a heart, man.
Like that kind of thing.
And it's like, well, there you go.
You are arbitrarily creating these rules and you don't believe any of this nonsense.
I would welcome to make that argument, but I do not see him making that argument, and he needs to, if one is okay and the other isn't, because otherwise it is arbitrary.
Well, and the basic idea behind that argument is I would be more comfortable understanding that these people have a target, that it's not just a wide sweep, and that they are narrowing it down in a very specific way.
And by having it only be a block, I feel far safer.
You know, like, he needs to make sure that that appearance is minimized, lest other listeners think, like, huh, this show might really appeal to people who have some processing problems.
This caller also wants to compliment Dan Badandi and this is something that they, like the other caller, said too that he has a sack of steel.
I think it's a meme that's going around that Dan Badandi's got a sack of steel and I got to tell you Mr. Badondi has got a sack of steel without a doubt.
Well, you know what he had, them kind of intimidating him and threatening him and stuff, all three times before and after and he but still they were afraid to, I guess, arrest him for because they didn't want him to be the newscast.
But when he got Infowars.com out and all over the world they were carrying that news feed live.
Get normally we get about a million visitors a day.
InfoWars, half a million to Prison Planet, big days maybe two million.
Max, guess how many visitors we had per minute for several hours after that happened.
All of it is about the publicity from the stunt that he did.
He sent Dan Badondi out there to cause a scene.
Yellinfowars.com got a ton of traffic.
Same thing he ends up doing in the 2016 election with the Bill Clinton's a rapist contest.
Yeah, this is his MO.
This is what he does.
And when there's serious issues going on that other people are trying to deal with, he's trying to get attention.
So, cool.
Good stuff.
So Alex takes another caller, and here's where it goes from the suggestion that the lockdown is about cleaning up Patsy's to it being seriously suggested.
It's not like it was strictly enforced, stay in your homes or we'll shoot you.
That's nonsense.
And that cop threatening the reporter, I do believe, is still what we talked about earlier: the warning that there's an active shooting going on.
Now, this controlled explosion thing that Alex is talking about has to do with the police finding what they believe to be another device in a home that they were searching where the Sarnev brothers had stayed.
Also, the media wasn't threatened and told not to follow them or anything like that.
There's actually tons of pictures you can find of the police at that home.
Like, there's a place called Hutton Photography.
If you just Google the Boston Marathon Week, they have tons of pictures of the police at that home.
So, there was no crackdown.
This is a zero.
Anyway, I mostly just played that clip to illustrate how now it seems like Alex has fully embraced the - they're just trying to clean up Patsy's narrative, which I need to point out.
And I know I sound like a broken record.
That's based on literally nothing but his imagination.
Everything in this coverage is stuff Alex is imagining.
You care so much and you believe in truth and reality, and you should have known that the answer Alex was really going to give you from the beginning is: it doesn't matter, Art.
I understand that Alex has this sort of confrontational strategy where he tries to get people to be lured into his net by like, hey, why don't you come in?
But I also think if you understand that Art and his family did flee Cuba to the United States, like telling him to go back to Cuba, there is a connotation to that.
It's mostly Alex trying to bring up his gun talking points and Art being like, I think that background checks are a very reasonable thing for citizens to submit to.
It's not a huge deal.
There will not be any confiscation.
I would never go along with that.
I have not heard anybody suggest that seriously in any way.
It's just pointless.
And along the way, Alex keeps asking him to go shooting with him.
And what's interesting about this, like, we're in overdrive, and Alex is still taking calls.
unidentified
And here's what one of his callers says: The reason I'm calling is I was up all night listening to the police scanner and watching the news and seeing how things were unfolding over at MIC.
So instead of really dealing with any of this shit, Alex goes on to, he's really excited to interview Dan Badanti because by so he has Badondi call in.
It's all just stupid about how it's scary out there in Boston.
I've done stuff like he's doing now, but I've never done anything that big myself.
I mean, I've crashed some big press conferences and exposed Janet Reno for murder at Waco, and I've confronted presidents and been arrested.
And I've been, you know, I mean, I've done something, but nothing where it's a press conference that's on every TV in North America and most of the ones in Europe.
I mean, listen, 100,000 visitors a minute for hours to Infowars.com.
So instead of dealing with the real issues going on in the city of Boston and surrounding this bombing, Alex decides to spend a good amount of this fourth hour complaining about Bill O'Reilly talking about it.
Bill did not say that this episode didn't happen and it didn't air.
He's saying that people didn't see that clip on TV because it's edited because it's doctored.
Alex is not engaging with criticism.
The part of this that people take issue with is taking the part of the bombs and attaching it to the part about the marathon is a distortion of what this episode was.
When Alex says he blows up the marathon, then blows up other stuff, that's not true.
The blowing up was other stuff.
And, you know, I hate to say it, but Bill O'Reilly is, you know, he's on the right side of this one.
That is a clip that could literally come from any month of any year of Alex's show.
It's a constant refrain that he uses to convince his audience to accept outlandish conclusions like this bombing was a big setup by the government.
One of the reasons that line he's selling is about this being a giant conspiracy, why it's hard to accept for people is because of the why.
Most of Alex's conspiracies are presented as being really simple, but on a closer analysis, they would involve a staggering amount of participants.
So the question does seem to ask itself: why would these people all agree to something like this?
Whenever Alex needs to justify something and he's running out of options, his default is to say that the globalists know that they've committed tons of crimes, and whatever conspiracy he's selling that day is their only shot of keeping themselves out of prison.
We've seen it over and over and over.
In the present day, this is his explanation for why the deep state is trying to get Trump impeached.
If they don't, they're all going to prison, which is how he explains how wide-ranging this conspiracy would have to be.
This narrative crutch also serves a second purpose, which is to make every single conspiracy that Alex is selling his audience a matter of immediate life or death.
If the globalists need to pull this off in order to make sure they don't go to prison for their many crimes, then it stands to reason that if Alex and his intrepid team could just bring the truth out on this one, they might just bring down the globalists once and for all.
Every half-cooked theory, every fantasy about a picture he finds on 4chan, they're all elevated to nearly absurd importance when they're framed like this.
And what's so crazy is that it's so consistent in his career.
Like, I really thought some of this stuff that you, because we hear this a lot in more recent days, I kind of thought that was a part of his increasing desperation in the post-2016 era.
But here it is in Rosier Times in 2013.
He's just constantly fucking with his audience, trying to make them think like this is our shot every single time.
Yeah, it does appear like his imaginary world is like unaffected by reality, but it absorbs it.
You know, like, no matter what's going on in the real world, like, there could literally be a coup going on in the real world, but it wouldn't affect his imaginary version of what that coup is.
And that's what I was referencing earlier when he said, like, why are these people feel so intensely in on this?
And part of the reason is because Alex is selling it in such a way that they're led to believe that, like, if we can just pull this off, if we can pull this off, we might finally be rid of those globalists.
So Alex, as we get towards the end of this episode, he's going to hand it off to Jakari and David Knight to do a couple more hours so you can keep that traffic coming in.
And if this is proven to not be a false flag, which I think has gone from 1% chance to maybe 5% chance, I will eat my hat and apologize and be very pleased.
I mean, I would do cartwheels and probably go on vacation for a week and run around popping champagne bottles.
Because I really want to believe that the government is not this evil.
After I took care of a sick child at about 4 a.m., I get on the computer, headache from hell, and I see people on YouTube going, why isn't Alex covering the shootout?
Well, I went to bed at 9.
The shootout started at 10.30.
I got to sleep, folks.
I don't have a 24-hour crew.
We're trying to hire more journalist writers to work overnight and have a night shift.
I am somebody who listens to loads of this bullshit.
And I'll say that this episode felt very different than the 18th.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There is a shift in it.
And I have to, I mean, the only real difference between what happened on the 18th and what happened on the 19th is up until the end of Alex's show on the 18th, the FBI hadn't released the suspect photos, and the situation was abstract.
There wasn't concrete information.
And on the 19th, there is an official story, and it's an unfolding situation where there's real serious actions being taken.
That's the only difference that I see in between the two.
And Alex's behavior is completely different.
Now, granted, he's still lying and making up narratives, but he's more looking back to his narratives that he's already established and then pivoting some into it being about the SEALs and they're cleaning up people.
It's just different.
I don't know exactly how to put my finger on it, but it's fucking different.
It's like you write a play with a specific actor in mind, and they do the run for a good year, and then the play keeps going, but the actor wants to move.
It's not going to be the same play.
You're putting different characters, or you're putting a different actor into a play written for this specific actor.
So you're taking this, they're coming for our guns play, and you're throwing in Navy SEALs, and it's just not the same thing.
From the 15th to the 19th has been a wild ride on Alex's show.
He's been so irresponsible.
He's done about as bad a job as he could while insisting he should have a parade and everyone should be so thrilled that he has broken the case wide open.
Yeah, and I mean, like, the stuff that he's doing with these pictures and all this stuff is behavior that a lot of the internet was engaged in, but you expect that from the internet.
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