Knowledge Fight’s #404 dissects Alex Jones’ chaotic CPAC "Save the First Amendment" summit, where his 34-strong crowd (claimed 12 at start) mocked his drunken incoherence, like rambling about William Binney’s debunked tech claims or forcing Mike Flynn Jr. to defend his father’s "Russiagate" conspiracy. Nick Fuentes, a former Trump-critical libertarian turned alt-right grifter, dominated with polished hate rhetoric, exposing Jones’ performative outrage as hollow—especially when Jones abandoned the stage, unable to align with Fuentes’ hardline audience. The episode reveals how Jones’ malleability and fringe allies like Jerome Bell (a GOP candidate pushing anti-immigration extremism) risk radicalizing his followers further, as his vague stances fail under scrutiny from the right. [Automatically generated summary]
So, Jordan, like I said, Alex Jones and most of the Infowars family went to Washington, D.C. to try and whine and beg for attention by taking over CPAC.
So there were all sorts of highlights from the trip, like Gavin McGinnis getting kicked out of CPAC and Gavin McGinnis being told to leave the lobby outside CPAC in the middle of being interviewed by Alex's intern, Harrison Smith, about how he'd been kicked out of CPAC.
They threw some kind of gala party on Thursday night, but for a person like me who's about the substance, it was all about their emergency Save the First Amendment summit, which took place Wednesday evening.
This was an event that promised appearances from the likes of Millie Weaver, Gavin McGinnis, and the hastily booked Nick Fuentes, all booked to complain about how they're not allowed on social media.
National File had planned to hold an event at a smaller auditorium.
But when Alex heard about this, he insisted they rent out the Omni, a much larger venue befitting of a star of his caliber.
Alex has suggested that he paid as much as $20,000 to rent the bigger room because with a roster like Gavin, Alex, and Nick Fuentes, you're going to draw a crowd.
And if you look at the video at the end of the event where we get another wide shot, it doesn't look like many more people showed up over the course of the summit.
The most I was ever really able to count in any wide shot was about 34.
But granted, the shot itself doesn't show the entire room, but it does show the first 10 rows.
Any empty seat, let alone 40 or more of them in the front rows, that's a damning refutation of the image he presents of himself.
There may have been a few more people than the folks I'm able to count in the video, but I also heard from an inside source, according to a person who was there in the room, that there was never more than 100 people in the crowd.
I've performed at independent comedy shows that have been better attended.
And my friend, I was not a successful comic.
Me neither.
There's a lot going on in the world.
I'm pretty sure that Alex has some pretty horrible takes on the coronavirus developments and the situation in Syria and the Democratic primary.
But since he's been out of the studio, we have to wait to Wednesday to check up on any of that stuff.
Today, we're going to walk through this three-hour long emergency free speech summit that Alex put on, desperately trying to beg for Trump's attention.
I don't want to prejudice you or the audience, but I have to say that watching this was one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever had preparing for this show.
This summit was so poorly run that it caused me to yell, who's in charge here?
Way more than once.
As a person who used to produce live stand-up shows, there were just so many very basic mistakes that Alex and his friends made that just made it clear that no one was trying and no one knows what they're doing.
It's infuriating to watch, but I kept my wits about me and I'm glad I did because this summit has a pretty amazing narrative arc to it.
It has almost nothing to do with the free speech and First Amendment that's supposedly there for not fans of it, actually.
But there is a rich psychodrama going on that I think actually has pretty important implications for the Infowars universe.
The first thing that's important to point out here is that this is an emergency First Amendment summit where the whole point is that all these conservatives are being taken off social media.
And the first person to take the podium is literally Alex Jones' longest-running employee and news director, who decides to make it clear while stretching out before Alex shows up that he's actually still on Twitter.
It might be something you'd rather not call attention to because it raises the question in a listener's mind: what has Alex done that Rob Dew hasn't done?
The fact that Rob Dew is still on Twitter, as is Owen Schroer, should be compelling evidence that maybe people who've been kicked off were kicked off for a reason.
Also, that tweet Rob is reading is supposedly from Rod Blagojevich, which Rob Dew is using as a basis to argue that Blago was expecting a pardon from Obama, which he did not get.
So now he's taking to Twitter to tell the world that Obama's gay.
I hate to ruin Rob Dew's party, but this tweet is from an account called at GovBloggo, whose bio is literally, quote, not the real Bloggo parody account.
Like I said, though, this account is clearly also employing some parody that's a little bit subtler, like this tweet.
Quote, theory, the Chinese didn't like these tariffs.
So how do they get rid of them?
Get rid of Trump.
How do you get rid of Trump?
Create a virus that'll turn into a worldwide plague and cause the American economy to suffer.
You think the coronavirus is an accident?
Bloggo doesn't.
On one level, Rob Dew thinks this is actually Blagojevich's Twitter because he's an idiot and he never checks any information before accepting it and repeating it.
But on a deeper level, he automatically accepts the tweet as real because it conforms to what he wants to believe.
And I can't put it more simply than this.
A parody account is indistinguishable from what Rob Dew really thinks.
Consider for a moment that Rob Dew just told this crowd at a free speech rally that he's still on Twitter and that he got fooled by a Rod Blagojevich parody account that says, quote, parody account in its bio.
And he's worked for Alex for over a decade.
When you go to Infowars, you show up dumb and you certainly don't get sharper based on the experience.
So the fact that out of billions of people served in InfoWars, the fact that in the middle of a DC traffic jam and rainy streets and with two days announcing this, that one person or a hundred people or a thousand people show up is an act of defiance against the tyrants and is a beautiful thing.
Now, coming up in about two hours, when I give my 20-minute speech, I'm going to get into the smoking gun evidence of governmental funding of censorship of the American people and the blueprint, they believe, to have us not stand up for each other, where they pick off one person here, one person there, and by the time they get to you, there's nobody to stand up for you.
Now, that's really a common sense thing we know in history.
It happens, but it's happening again right now, and we have a real chance to say no to this.
That was a poem written by the Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoler in the form of a confession, expressing guilt for not doing more in the lead up to the Holocaust because he thought it wasn't his problem.
It's very clear that what Alex is doing is he's hoping to evoke that here.
But I'm very convinced he will never, ever, ever actually quote that poem.
And that's because the first line is, quote, first they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.
Alex wants to co-opt the ever-resonant themes of this poem, but he'll never talk about what the poem actually says because, well, he's kind of invested in the enterprise of coming for the socialists.
The next stanza is about coming for the trade unionists, which again, Alex would be on the side actively opposing the unions.
Well, what you don't understand is that the poem and the poet was dumb because Alex just summed up the whole poem with just like, you know, if you don't stand up for somebody, nobody's going to stand up for you.
So this might not be the best way to characterize your hero president.
Like, I don't think anyone should be supporting an elected official who is transactional, particularly when it comes to matters of public interest.
I have no idea how Alex can get in front of this thin crowd and tell them that Trump doesn't deal with you unless you have something to offer him and expect that to sound good.
It sounds insanely corrupt, like blatant corruption, to the point where even Alex is trying to make it sound good.
So I'll give him an A-minus report card because when it comes to standing up for free speech and standing up against big tech cartels combining forces to censor populists and patriots and gun groups and veteran groups and Christian organizations and pro-life groups, President Trump gets an F minus.
See that A plus total, it takes it down to an A minus because in that way, standing up for the First Amendment, President Trump has an F. I'm not sure how Alex is weighting grades here, but I didn't realize that he put so little priority on free speech stuff.
Like he literally yells about it all the time.
And so many of his completely manufactured complaints about the left have to do with fake free speech grievances, like the Purple Penguins affair.
So I would have really considered him to be a free speech absolutist.
Like his fucking company is called Free Speech Systems.
Based on every indication I get about what he pretends his positions are, if a president gets an F minus on free speech issues, it should be impossible for their whole grade to be A minus.
I think that this A- is just a strong indication that Alex realizes, like, I can't say even B-plus because Trump would take that as an insult and maybe it would hurt my chances of getting his attention.
President Trump signed on that metaphysical dotted line and said as candidate Trump months before the election, Julian Assange, if you have him, release him.
And Julian Assange wasn't a whim.
Julian Assange pulled the trigger and he released the criminal activities of the deep state wanting to cause race wars and bio-wars and collapses and pure evil.
And he did a hero's work.
And instead of being carried down Main Street in New York City in a ticker tape parade for delivering the shot down the Death Star reactor shaft, Julian Assange has spent years and years and years and years in solitary confinement where he's a gibbering person that can't even hardly talk at these hearings.
And President Trump sits there on the sidelines.
God has to President Trump because he's honorable and cares about America and has strength.
But in the final equation, if he doesn't get Julian Assange out of prison and continues along with this fake extradition, then President Trump has joined all those cowardly globalists in the swamp and makes me want to throw up.
Does that mean I'm going to support Hillary?
We know she's getting ready to broker convention.
Hell no.
But still, it takes a great record that President Trump's engaged in and absolutely tarnishes it.
But it's good when I've been wronged because it tells me that I'm on the right track.
That mentality is going to be ubiquitous throughout these speakers.
But here is one of the first points where I'm like, this is not going well.
I mean, when Alex gets up and just rants the way he does all the time, it's like, well, he says stupid things, but like, this is exactly what you expect.
I turn towards that attack and I put my head down and go into it because that is where the daggers of truth will go into their livers and their hearts and their kidneys and their spine.
It's in that place of their fear when they attack me that I know I've been given the guidance of where to strike.
And so instead of being cowards and slaves, I say we fight and we take action now today.
Let's go ahead and bring up Tom Pappert of National Files to put on this great event.
So I don't think that Tom Pappert knew exactly when Alex was going to be wrapping up this little ranty intro because Alex just, you know, he's in the middle of yelling about how he knows where to attack when he gets attacked.
And on a dime, he turns to introing Tom.
Then Alex just bails from the stage, not waiting for Tom to get up on.
Like, if you're introing someone, you wait on stage for them to come up, you shake their hand and ceremonially give them the stage.
This seems like a little thing, but it's an important gesture that the audience definitely subconsciously notices.
Alex, by virtue of being the biggest star in the building and most of the people there's boss, has a position of authority.
By leaving without greeting Tom on stage, he's sending a message of disrespect, kind of like, I've done my part.
Good luck, kid.
It's very rude, and it lends the whole show an air of disunity.
Like the speakers aren't really in this together.
If your goal is to have a successful performance, there are little things like this that you need to be mindful of.
And it's just wild to think that Alex has been in some form of show business or performance art for over 20 years and he doesn't seem to know those things.
Now, another thing that happens when you surprise introduce somebody, then just leave the stage, is that you completely sandbag them.
The audience is trained to applaud for ends of performances and introductions.
So when you wrap up and intro the next person, but they take a while to get on stage, the applause will be clapped out by the time they get to the podium.
Instead of being able to ride in on a wave of applause and support, you're now faced with dying enthusiasm as you begin your presentation, which puts you in an uphill battle.
Instead of just getting going, you're now kind of in a position where you have to win the crowd over, which we'll see.
Tom tries to do with the, he's, you know, here, let's go ahead and listen to that here.
And unless you follow it up with something like a humorous anecdote about Alex, it's only going to signal further weakness and prove to the audience that you're not in control of the situation.
Like you have like, you're giving a cop out for why I'm not going to be entertaining.
It is fascinating how much of our like creating those little moments that will turn just an event into a fucking show, into the illusion of an actual show.
Like those tiny little moments can change everything.
And simply put, Tom Papert is fucked before he even gets on stage.
And part of it is specifically because Alex is a selfish prick who doesn't understand those little things about presentation and how to be magnanimous, be sort of giving with the space.
It's unfortunate because, I mean, you could transform something from being like, well, good luck to whoever comes up next to being like, we're all in this.
There are people who have the talent and experience necessary to take that awful ending, sacrifice their set, turn into the host, and then make the show a much better show from there.
And you can see Alex reinforce this feeling that you'd have of trust for the capability of the person on stage when he yells shit out while Tom is trying to get through his speech.
This reporter for National File is coming out swinging with some of that hot adrenochrome humor.
The joke is a little muddy, though, because I think he's trying to poke fun at the idea that people like Hillary Clinton drink children's blood, but he's also speaking at an event put on by Alex Jones, who definitely thinks people like Hillary drink children's blood.
He's introduced as a writer for National File, but mysteriously absent from his intro is that he formerly worked at Breitbart and Daily Caller, and he founded the absurdly far-right blog Big League Politics, and is actually still the editor-in-chief of it.
In February 2018, the Daily Beast reported that big league politics had been bought by a company called Mustard Seed Media, which happens to be owned by a political consultant named Riley O'Neal, who had just finished up failing to get noted monster and alleged pedophile Roy Moore elected in Alabama.
Also, I should point out that this financial arrangement is really shady, considering the fact that the guy who owns Mustard Seed is still an active political consultant, and he's being paid by candidates and politicians who are covered on big league politics.
Riley O'Neill runs a consulting firm called Tidewater Strategies, along with another right-wing consultant, Noel Fritsch.
That Daily Beast article points out that multiple politicians who have paid O'Neill and Fritch who also get shockingly positive coverage of big league politics, like overt white nationalist Paul Nealon and former Virginia gubernatorial candidate Corey Stewart.
And this seems like a pattern with these guys.
I'll just read to you here from the end of this Daily Beast article.
Quote, big league politics isn't O'Neill's first foray into the political news business, and at least one other media property he controls has promoted his consulting firm's clients.
First in Freedom Daily, a North Carolina-centric conservative news site owned by Mustard Seed Media, has promoted political efforts by two of O'Neill's clients, North State Leadership Council and North Carolina Gun Rights.
Stories promoting both of those groups were written by Spencer Hardison, who works for Tidewater, the consulting group.
Hardison began contributing to big league politics this month.
This is all super shady shit.
And anyone interested at all in any kind of journalistic integrity would absolutely never have their right-wing propaganda blog be owned by active GOP political consultants.
It starts by talking about how Democrats and liberals are just dumb people who don't know the truth yet.
She knows this firsthand because she used to be one.
And then, as you heard, she gives Alex credit for waking her up, and now she's smart.
This is particularly funny because I'm old enough to remember when Millie Weaver tweeted out, quote, Dear libtards who think Facebook is a privately owned business, there's a thing called fact-checking.
Facebook is a public business that's publicly traded.
Using that argument to justify banning Alex Jones doesn't work.
It's so awesome when these dumb dumbs get so convinced that they're right about something that they shoot off some completely inaccurate thing while chastising people to fact-check.
Millie can say that Alex woke her up to reality all she wants, but I would propose that a different phenomenon is at work here.
And that is that Alex provided her with a lucrative outlet where she could be marginally famous and there was absolutely no hard work or accountability required.
That might feel like waking up to you, but it's not.
It's called copping out.
I steadfastly refuse to believe that to take anyone saying that Alex Jones woke them up seriously.
When it's just a normal everyday person saying it, I think it sounds a little more reasonable because Alex can be persuasive and the simplicity of his worldview is seductive.
You can experience that as waking up, but that's not really what it is.
It's more just being indoctrinated into a bad thinking pattern.
And one of the reasons is that that bad thinking pattern is satisfying.
It's very easy and it feels good, mostly because it allows you to imagine that all the other people in the world are blind to the obvious reality that you've woken up to.
For someone like Millie, however, when I hear her say that Alex woke her up, there's absolutely zero chance that she isn't full of shit.
I just refuse to believe that anyone could work at Infowars and be paying attention at all to what's said on the network without realizing that Alex is just making up most of it.
And basically, nothing is real.
The only way you can maintain respect for Alex working there is to have no principles or to basically just be sleepwalking through life and not paying attention to anything he says, which I would say is the opposite of being woken up.
unidentified
Yeah, that's like being put back to sleep, isn't it?
She was covering the Kentucky gubernatorial race, and she has a conspiracy about it that I've heard her bring up a couple times, and I don't find it compelling.
But it's interesting.
She says something while talking about this story in this speech that she should be deeply ashamed of.
unidentified
I went forward.
I pushed it.
I told everyone what was going on.
But some of that information we couldn't release.
Because in doing so, we would have been releasing information that could potentially put us in prison, just like Julian Assange.
And how many journalists out there are sitting on information that they would love to release, but they can't.
But those who were brave, like Julian Assange, those who were brave, I mean, even Chelsea Manning, I mean, Radley Manning, whatever you want to call him.
Those people that were brave, look what's happening to them.
Also, if you listen carefully, what Millie Weaver just did is say into a hot mic that she's a coward.
She's talking about some hot scoop that she had about how there was election meddling in the Kentucky gubernatorial race that saw incumbent Matt Bevan lose his bid for re-election.
There's no proof that this election was stolen, but here, Millie is saying that she has information that would prove that it was, but she can't release it because she's afraid of the consequences.
She's worried about what would happen to her personally if she reveals this information.
So she's keeping it to herself and allowing a fraudulent election to stand.
I don't believe her at all, but if what she was saying were true, she's a piece of shit.
What happened to the Infowars motto of being the tip of the spear?
What happened to the we're the ones who hit the barbed wire talk?
Where's that kamikaze mentality that Alex screams about all the time?
You dare call yourself an investigative journalist and then claim that you have proof that an election was stolen, but you're not telling anyone what that proof is because you don't want the headache of what could happen to you afterwards.
Even the dramatized, imaginary version of herself that Millie is presenting in this speech should be ashamed.
Sometimes investigative journalism means uncovering things that's a risk to your comfort.
It's kind of just part of the gig.
Like imagine Upton Sinclair discovering what he did about the U.S. meatpacking industry and then just deciding, well, this could lead to trouble.
Another one of the people Bevan pardoned was a 41-year-old man who'd been convicted of raping a nine-year-old.
He pardoned another guy who'd killed his parents.
And then there was the guy he pardoned who was, quote, convicted of beheading a female coworker and hiding her mutilated body in a barrel.
He also pardoned a woman who'd been convicted of attempting to hire a hitman to kill her child's father and his wife and to make it look like a murder-suicide.
Interestingly, that woman was a friend of Bevin's sister, who had testified in her defense during the trial.
Overall, he pardoned 428 people, and mysteriously, 95% of them were white.
Bevan's actions before leaving office were so shocking and offensive that even noted morally dubious character Mitch McConnell called it inappropriate.
Matt Bevin is a disgusting piece of shit, but he was the candidate that Trump was behind in that election.
So him losing must be proof of theft to an InfoWars employee.
Because I think a number of the people that he did let out were people who you and I, just independent of all other contexts, would be like, yeah, they shouldn't be in prison.
If I were producing a comedy show and the host said something like that about a female comic who was on the lineup, I would never book them.
out of here yeah i don't know if i would kick them off the show because yeah might be too that might be really bad for everyone involved yeah but i would be sure to never book them uh again in that capacity especially As a host.
I mean, it's just inappropriate behavior.
Yeah, that's it hasn't her attractiveness or unattractiveness has nothing to do with why you're here, what she's bringing to the table and her ostensible value as a person.
And to make it always constantly about attractiveness and sexiness is demeaning on a level.
Rob brings up another speaker, and he has an interesting complaint about the scammers on the right, the people like Ben Shapiro and Stephen Crowder and all of them.
All of our esteemed thinkers then go to college campuses, and this is my favorite charade that they do.
And during the Q ⁇ A at their events, people like Charlie Kirk will destroy the 19-year-old feminist lesbian hair and claim that as like this gigantic win for conservatism.
It's a sad and pathetic shtick that's been done over and over and over again by people who work in politics for a living against kids who are just developing political ideologies.
Now, I'm going to grant that people like Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, they have been way, way more successful at monetizing their game of dunking on people on the street and pretending they've demonstrated a point.
But it should be pointed out that this is what approximately 80% of InfoWars field pieces are.
Like, that number goes up to 90 if you're just talking about Owen Schroyer's work.
It's more yelling-based than Ben Shapiro's like fast-talking points and stuff.
So this guy's name is Pete DeBrasca.
He was trying to run for the U.S. House in North Carolina, but he didn't qualify for the GOP primary ballot.
The problem was that Pete registered to vote as a Republican at his address on December 3rd, but he filed as a candidate too quickly thereafter.
The North Carolina GOP has a rule that candidates are invalid if they file to run within 90 days of registering as a Republican, which as far as rules go, makes total sense to me.
You wouldn't want someone just showing up and swooping in.
This guy, Pete, is a dumb-dumb, but he's a dumb-dumb who wants to end all immigration and has a story about running for Congress that can be spun in a way as to make him look like a victim.
So anyway, like I mentioned, Pete, he's up there and he's complaining about these right-wing people going out and dunking on college kids and random people on the street, not recognizing that's an essential piece of the Infowars business model.
So the pitch he's in the middle of here is trying to demonstrate that the fundamental rights that Americans have are not valued by immigrants.
But what he's doing is actually misusing statistics.
There's no reason for him to cite statistics about Hispanic attitudes towards free speech and then apply that to immigrants.
He has absolutely no way of knowing what proportion of the Hispanic people in that study were born in the United States or citizens or immigrated here.
He's just conflating Hispanic with immigrant, which is kind of the point for people like him.
Also, this 62% number he's citing about Hispanics not respecting others' rights, this is an example of him not understanding the things he reads.
This comes from a 2017 study published by the Cato Institute.
But the question wasn't, do you respect others' rights?
The question as posed in the study was if, quote, people who don't respect others don't deserve the right of free speech.
That's not the same question.
I can understand how if you're already postured to hate Hispanic people and you're looking for ways to justify your feelings, you could get sloppy and choose this, but it doesn't work.
Also, 36% of white people answer the question the same way, so wrestle with that.
Pete can take this stat, misrepresent it, and use it to argue that if there are more Hispanic people in the country, then free speech will be gone.
But he seems to not want to report that in the same study, 77% of Hispanic people agreed that, quote, it would be difficult to ban hate speech since people can't agree on what hate speech is.
Seems to indicate a reticence to actually ban this stuff.
Also, I should point out that 47% of Republicans said that people who publicly criticize or disrespect the police should not be allowed to speak at college campuses.
So I guess you could draw the conclusion that from that study, Republicans prefer Holocaust denial to questioning the police.
The numbers in that study certainly reflect that.
But where does that get us, really?
It's cherry-picking numbers and connecting them where they may not be connected.
Man, that's a heartening level of response from Republicans, considering they don't even know how many Holocaust deniers that they support on a regular basis.
Well, this gets back to that 77% of people in the Hispanic community not wanting to ban free speech or, you know, hate speech because we can't decide what it is.
We love people from India, Mexico, Eastern Europe, wherever.
But they're being used as a tool to destroy our American Republic.
And so we have a right.
Water is a wonderful thing.
But if a dam breaks the flesh your town, it's a bad thing.
And so we love our fellow humans.
We want a promium future.
But he's right.
The globalists are using uncontrolled immigration as a weapon, as a giant sucking sound, like the late great patriot from Texas, Ross Perot, said to lower our wages.
It's almost like a political sideshow where the people who aren't even serious enough to be at CPAC are trying to pick up whatever scraps they can find.
And that's a real bummer to be on the sideshow when the main show involved Diamond and Silk, Carpe Donctum, and Rick from Pondstars.
So what I did in response to that bitch move of hers, excuse my language, but we're allowed to have free speech, is I flew a plane around San Francisco that said Pelosi for prison because we need to have her accountable for her crimes against America.
And it is, thank you, it's the most liberal district of America.
And people said, oh, no, don't fly a plane around that says Pelosi for prison.
So Deanna is asserting here that San Francisco is the most liberal district in the United States.
And first of all, San Francisco is not a district.
She's talking about California's 12th congressional district, which doesn't actually even contain all of San Francisco.
Some of Southern San Francisco is in the 14th district.
Also, California's 12th is not the most liberal district in the country.
This measurement is captured by the Cook Political Reports Partisan Voter Index, or the PVI.
Since it started in 1997, the PVI is considered one of the most solid tools in terms of understanding partisan leanings, broken down on a granular level in every congressional district.
California's 12th district has a Democrat plus 37 PVI, which is a strong-leaning Democrat district, for sure.
There's no arguing with that.
However, you don't have to look very far to find a stronger leaning district because California's 13th has a PVI of Democrat plus 40.
The District of Columbia has Democrat plus 43.
Illinois' 7th has Democrat plus 38.
New York's 5th is at plus 37.
The 7th is plus 38.
And the 13th is plus 43.
Pennsylvania's 2nd district is Democrat plus 40.
And actually, the most liberal district in the country is New York's 15th, coming in at plus 44.
And no, that is not where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got elected.
She's from the 14th district, which is only Democrat plus 29.
San Francisco isn't the most liberal district in the country, but it feels like it to these sort of hardcore conservatives because the city and the surrounding area played such an important role in the activism in the 60s in the civil rights movement.
This lingers to this day, and it makes San Francisco a cultural villain to conservatives.
So it feels like the most liberal district, but it's not.
And honestly, this feels more like Deanna giving herself excuses for why she's inevitably going to lose this election.
I would assume that people were advising her not to rent out a plane, not because the district's too liberal, but because her candidacy is a farce and it seems like a waste of money.
I'm going to tell you in advance, I don't believe this is real.
unidentified
Okay.
I'm just, I hope this is okay, but I'm going to play a little 20-second voicemail from someone that saw my Pelosi for Prison banner in the air in San Francisco.
Why is Deanna texting with a guy who's allegedly leaving a random voicemail after seeing her Pelosi plane?
That makes no sense.
Second, the idea that someone who doesn't like her Pelosi plane would call her and say that she's going to death camps because that's where we're going, that's absurd.
The first problem with this is that the whole death camps thing, that's primarily an obsession of the right.
People like Alex and Deanna.
Alex has been yelling about FEMA camps being right around the corner for over a decade, and in that time, I've never heard any of his enemies really suggest that they were interested in putting people in cash.
This event, for all its pretense of being a free speech summit, really just feels like a rally for xenophobic, extreme right-wing candidates who aren't even actually candidates yet.
And the more quixotic congressional candidates they have coming and giving speeches, the more it feels like people desperately trying to assert their relevance to a bunch of empty chairs.
I don't know how else to put it, but this is a bummer.
Not because the kind of evil that it pretends.
You know, like Trump's rallies are a bummer because they're scary.
Yeah, I feel like this is like Walmart moved in on the conspiracy grifter and pushed all these mom-and-pop conspiracy grifters into the Nazi territory.
So Enrique starts bragging about all the things that he's banned from, which seems to be a theme.
Like some of these people who are actually kicked off a bunch of stuff, it seems like they're really into talking about how many things they're banned from because that gives them some kind of a capital on this.
But Enrique isn't as poorly received as, let's say, that first guy with the bad comedy or Pete Diabrusco with his boring ass xenophobic policy papers.
Yeah.
Enrique is doing okay.
And that is one of those situations where Alex has now gotten to the point of drunk where he's trying to help from the audience as opposed to, like with Pappert, he was disrupting.
So, you know, Lee's giving his speech, and it's really just along the lines, like I said, he keeps getting the crowd to chant the whistleblower's name.
The judge in the Stone Show trial says don't say the names of the jurors, even though their federal laws must be public because she rigged them all and the Democratic Party operatives and they're panicking right now.
And we put out the names of the jurors and now she's burning in hell.
Understand that Alex is pretty drunk by this point and he's completely lost his ability to control himself.
But if I had no idea what was going on and had no access to context, I would think this was a man celebrating after murdering a Did they kill Amy Burman Jackson when we were looking?
People don't typically burn in hell while they're still alive.
So that seems like a strange thing to yell about somebody.
Also, Rob Dew is the saddest little boy here, scampering up to the mic to tell, you know, try to get the audience excited about how dangerous it is to say this whistleblower's name.
Like, this is the end result of Alex's horribly misguided philosophy that you know that you're right when you're getting attacked, which he even expressed at the beginning of his speech, like at the start.
If you internalize that belief, then you'll interpret attacks as being proof that you're right, which gives you the validation and a bit of a dopamine rush from like, yeah, we're doing it.
But what happens when you're not getting attacked and your very sad free speech summit is just happening and no one cares?
Well, then you might just need to interrupt Lee Stranahan to pretend that you just might get attacked at some point, which would then prove that you're right and give you the validation you so desperately crave.
Tying your value to how negatively people respond to you is a very sad game.
And it runs so consistently through these people.
From Rob's interjection here to Deanna's clearly fake voicemail.
From their about page, it's pretty clear that they're a Christian fundamentalist outlet pushing for what you might describe as either Christian-led nation or a theocracy, depending on your point of view.
I don't really care too much about this stuff because honestly, I looked at it and I think from some of the metrics, it's pretty clear that a lot of the members of her group are bots.
He's supposed to be the former technical head of the NSA and she runs a weird conservative Christian organization that posts obviously fake things on Facebook.
This is a person with legitimately no information.
And I honestly kind of wonder if she's even there at the request of William Binney.
Most of her speech is pushing the conspiracy that the Goosefer hack couldn't have been done remotely over the internet, which is a position that William Binney has definitely advanced, but he also recanted it in 2018 when Duncan Campbell demonstrated to him that the metadata that he'd used to arrive at that conclusion had been manipulated.
I honestly have no idea what's going on here, but I don't exclude the possibility that William Binney has nothing to do with her speech in the present day.
The only connection between Tommy and Benny that I can find online is from 2018, an interview that she did with him.
It was prior to the point where Benny walked back the Goose of her theories.
I have no idea what's going on here.
And like, this is booking that I would have avoided if I were InfoWars.
It raises more questions than answers that it provides, and it just looks amateurish.
So the reason that she's there and the reason that she got on stage, honestly, is that she promised information and an announcement that Bill Benny has been working on.
So they think they're going to break some big news.
Even I was caught a little bit off guard when this turned into a situation where Tommy is asking for money to make this super powerful technology that Bill has in his head that could have stopped 9-11.
In fact, he retired in October 2001, suspiciously, basically immediately after 9-11.
I can't imagine that a room full of like 60 people are going to raise funds to provide Benny with some kind of miracle technology he can use to stop future terrorist attacks, considering he was literally at the NSA in a position to use all of his genius at the time when the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil actually did happen.
I've felt that pain when a punchline just misses entirely.
Like, you know, granted, in those situations, I was just trying to get a laugh, not raise funds for an imaginary splinter high-tech intelligence operation in a half-filled room full of crypto fascists.
I can't imagine the feeling because there's a certain amount of, in my head, if I were there, it'd be like, if I say something wrong, are they going to eat me?
So Alex starts rambling about Bill Binney's technology.
And I think that this clip is actually like a really amazing little demonstration of Alex not knowing what he's about to say when he starts a sentence.
So you see what happened there is that Alex got caught up in rambling about how Bill Binney had this amazing technology he created that the globalists didn't want him to use.
It was 3D imaging and all that.
So sophisticated, you could detect crimes before they happened.
As Alex is talking, he realizes that he's describing something he categorically has to be opposed to.
As soon as he realizes that he needs to be against this minority report technology he's pretending Benny made, he knows that the globalists now have to be in favor of it.
So he proceeds as if he didn't say they were trying to stop Benny like 10 seconds prior.
There's a very interesting dynamic at play at this free speech summit.
One thing is that Owen isn't drinking, and he has a consistent motivation.
So he comes off as a level-headed dude by comparison to the painfully drunk Alex and the grab bag of losers who has spoken so far.
This might be my Somali pirates moment, but you kind of have to give it up to Owen for keeping his wits about him when he could have just got wasted and had a good time.
We've only talked about Nick Fuentes showing up on Alex's show in the past, but he's been a guest with Owen a couple times too.
I've mentioned this a number of times that the younger, more online radical types are more likely to show up on Owen's show, and Nick is a prime example of that.
Alex is a bit of an embarrassing old man for them.
They'd be happy to utilize his platform to disseminate their views, but privately, they're also probably doing impressions of him and mocking him about gay frogs and stuff.
You can hear from that much larger ovation that Owen got when he came to the stage that the mood in the room has shifted a little.
And that's because the Fuentes fans are there, and someone they like has taken the stage.
It's very strange to see high-status Schroyer, but I have to say that seeing him here showed me a whole new side of him.
It's entirely possible that I'm just being blinded by the staggering incompetence that surrounds him, but he's showing a confident in-charge presence, and that's pretty weird.
So, if you recall, Alex met Ivan Rakeland the last time he rented out the DC Press Club and did a big press event about how he wasn't on social media.
Ivan was there, said hi to Alex, and ended up giving a speech.
I suspect part of the reason they became fast friends is that Ivan is an associate of the Flynn family, and Alex wanted any kind of access he could get.
But when I was like a year in and Marty was headlining at some middle of the nowhere show in fucking like Bridgeport or whatever, not Bridgeport, Barrington.
And it's like he walked out of the room during my feature set and I was just like, oh, no.
Got this Ivan Raiklin falling for the same foolish perception that Tommy Collins had, where they think this is shark tank and they're going to fundraise from this beleaguered audience.
And then I think Alex sensed that this speech that Ivan was giving was going nowhere and that he's going into business for himself.
So all bets are off.
Ivan's already said no to Alex's request for Flynn to speak, but Ivan's being a dick.
So Alex forces the issue.
Ivan leaves stage and Alex begins doing some pump-up stuff.
America's back.
But unbeknownst to him, Mike Flynn Jr. has come on stage behind him.
Alex and Mike greet each other and Alex fumbles that, oh, we talked online before this becomes his big victory.
He's now got Mike Flynn Jr. giving the speech at his rally.
I can tell you that, you know, I kind of describe what's been going on with my family and everything else that's happened with all this Russia Gate shit.
I have a really difficult time with this situation because on the one hand, Mike Flynn Jr. is a dumb-dumb, and he's definitely a willful actor spreading conspiracy shit and misinformation online.
But on the other hand, I don't want to shit on him too hard when he's talking about how this, you know, the effect this investigation has had on his family because on some level, that still feels like it would be shitty.
Like his mother, as far as I know, wasn't involved in any of this.
It's sad for her, if only that.
However, however, you find some sort of empathy, it's important to hold on to some of it.
And they made that limit specifically because in 1982, Ray Mancini fought Duck Koo Kim in a match that went to the 15th round, which resulted in Kim collapsing into a coma immediately after the fight, getting emergency brain surgery and dying four days later.
Mike Flynn Jr. was like one year old when that happened.
So his whole life, boxing matches have been 12 rounds.
Talk about your father as a patriot and what you guys went through and the vindication now that the whole lie is coming down and Roger's telling everything.
Tell him what happened.
Tell him in five minutes what happened, what you guys went through as American patriots.
And, you know, that's a big deal after all the persecution you've gone through to come here and speak on these live feeds out here.
But let's get back to the beginning of the few minutes we have left.
I appreciate you coming here today and your courage to do it.
I know you've been, you and your family persecuted.
I've been persecuted.
We know what it's like.
We get persecuted because we support America.
We realize that persecution is actually a blessing.
And we don't see ourselves as victims.
How people listen to what this guy's saying because his dad, just like Roger Stone, and just like so many other people, they tried to put his father in prison.
They try to hold years in prison and bankrupting them to lie about President Trump and lie about the populist election we had.
So I hear a lot of talk.
I love you guys.
Just for respect, everybody just stop talking for one second.
Just one second.
One second.
Just one second in your lives.
His father wanted to serve America and try to defend our republic.
And because they targeted him because he wanted to put in the Trump administration patriots that would promote freedom worldwide.
They were scared of the army that George Washington founded 245 years ago, finally getting control of the government again from these communists and these globalists.
Now, where this stops being relatable is that part at the end there, where Alex almost starts crying about General Flynn.
It's not surprising for Alex to get emotional talking about America, but what I was shocked to hear is him saying that what he is that what the globalists were afraid of was that General Flynn was trying to get the military to be in charge of the government.
If I'm not mistaken, Alex's entire brand was warning about the coming martial law in militarized state.
It seems like everything he's stood for since at least 1995 has been strongly, emphatically opposed to the idea of the military being in control of the state.
But here he is crying on stage with Mike Flynn's son about how the globalists jammed up his dad because he was going to bring the military back in charge.
Was not enjoying speaking at this, was clearly not being paid attention to at this, and then was suddenly and loudly interrupted for this and then continually asked questions and interrupted by the very host that you are talking to, who has now kicked you off the microphone and is standing right next to you screaming about how he loves George Washington.
So Nick comes on stage, and like, I think you'll be able to tell immediately how much better he is at this than almost everybody else that's been there.
I know I sound like a broken record about these various small details of live performance, but it's really one of the things that interested me the most in my time doing stand-up.
There's little things that any performer can or cannot do that will have huge effects on how they're perceived by an audience.
One of the really common ones is a comic coming on stage, taking the microphone out of the stand, and casually moving the mic stand to the back of the stage.
It's a simple routine action that indicates that the performer is at ease and they're able to control their surroundings.
But if they fail to do this simple act, they end up with a mic stand between them and the audience, obstructing the view from the crowd, which creates distance.
The comic could leave the mic in the stand, and then that's a different thing.
That's a stylistic choice.
But if you see a performer take the mic out of the stand and leave the stand there, it sends a subconscious signal that this person isn't in control of their space.
The same message is sent by a comic who concedes too easily to a heckler.
If someone in the audience yells something out, you don't have to destroy them or anything, but ignoring the comment altogether or behaving in a way that allows the audience member to score a point over you decreases your status as the center of attention and tells the audience that they're not in good hands.
They can't trust the performer to get through whatever they're about to do.
Yeah, before I even started doing stand-up, my uncle worked at a comedy club and we went in Indianapolis at Crackers and we were hanging out with the headliner after the show and he was just talking and he was literally, I remember this to this day of him just saying, I can tell how long a stand-up has been doing it just by how they take the mic stand out.
I bring all this up because immediately when he got to the podium, Nick Fuentes carried himself like a guy who's in control of the situation.
He takes the stage and immediately expresses graciousness to the event, to organizers, and to Alex.
In the same way, a professional comic will make a point to draw the audience's attention to the host, the other comics on the lineup and the wait staff.
This sends an explicit message that endears you to the audience.
It's your time with the microphone, but you want to seed some of that time to give it up for the unsung people who have made this possible.
It's a very little thing, and you see it from pretty much every decent headliner at a comedy show, but Nick isn't the headliner of this event.
There's more speakers after him, and literally no one else has behaved like this throughout the entire time.
Nick Fuentes is a real piece of shit, but he's good at these things, which is really bad.
It's very troubling.
So, because I felt a sense that Nick Fuentes seems to be becoming a more ascendant figure in the world of Infowars, it might be the sort of thing that spells trouble.
We've seen in the past how easily co-optable Alex and Infowars are, from Roger Stone to Robert Barnes, from all the meme assholes to whatever intern told Alex about 4chan.
He was broadcasting a show by that name on YouTube until he was recently booted from the platform for repeated violations of hate speech rules.
He's become a very public shithead, and one of the things that makes him so particularly notable is that he's very young.
Nick is only 21 years old, and despite his youth and inexperience in life, he's managed to create a sizable following of disaffected, conservative, young white men who call themselves gripers, which is apparently a reference to Pepe the Frog.
This is a public school, but it's a school that has a particular character to it.
The student body is 73% white, as opposed to the statewide average of 49%.
More notably, probably, only 14% of the students at Lions were eligible for free lunch programs compared to the 46% average for Illinois schools.
The indicators around this school paint a picture of an environment that Nick came into adolescence in, and it's a predominantly white and affluent environment.
Lions Township is a school that has an offshoot television station called LTTV.
On November 5th, 2015, Nick Fuentes released the very first episode of the Nicholas J. Fuentes show on LTTV.
And just a quick look at this show makes it crystal clear that high school Nick was very similar to who he is today in some ways and very different in others.
One thing that jumps out at you is that Nick carries himself with an almost comical level of self-importance in this high school AV class project.
He's got a suit and tie on and is sitting at a wooden table doing a political roundtable show where he discusses the big issues of the day with two other 16-year-olds he has home room with.
It's the same kind of stiff upper lip thing that you can see today in his speech at Alex's event.
Any normal person would not be able to carry on the illusion that what they're doing has any meaning at all, but Nick soldiers forward.
He's committed to being taken seriously, so he'll take a dumb conversation about the 2016 Republican primary with his high school friends as seriously as he would if he were hosting the McNeil Lehrer hour.
And he's, you know, he'll pretend that he's glad to be speaking at a quarterful ballroom with a bunch of losers and Alex drunkenly interrupting everyone.
So you can see that he identifies as a libertarian.
Flash forward to the present day, and here's what he said along with Milo Yiannopoulos when he recently did an interview with him about libertarians.
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They're selfish, preposterous, self-interested cowards who have given up on trying to come up with a worthwhile solution to fix civilization and society.
I mean, I have nothing but contempt for libertarians, which is one of the points of ideological contact I think we have.
People grow up, though, and their ideologies can go from believing a thing, and then a little while later they agree with a sad, washed-up propagandist saying that people who believe that same thing are the worst.
So I watched these high school shows of his, and I have to say that they're pretty eye-opening.
His first episode was a breakdown of the candidates in the 2016 primaries.
He's in favor of Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, which makes sense for a weirdo conservative type, but all that's way less important than his stance on Donald Trump.
Sounds a whole lot like Alex Jones talking about Trump in the summer of 2015.
Alex phrased it more in terms of Trump being a corrupt mobster who's only out for himself, but Nick is pretty close to that theme with his pointing out that Trump is an opportunist who's only interested in power.
Scratch beneath the surface of the current-day fringe Trump supporters, and you'll often find them clearly expressing that Trump is a piece of shit you can't trust back in 2015.
Now, Donald Trump is doing so well because he appeals to the Republicans, not in fighting the Democrats, but in fighting the establishment.
We haven't fought the Democrats since 2012, since Mitt Romney ran against Barack Obama.
Since then, the Republicans have not been fighting the Democrats, but other Republicans, rhinos, Republicans in name only.
And Donald Trump has served a very important function in breaking the monopoly of John Boehner, of Paul Ryan, of Rentz Priebus, and having people of, by, and for the people they were intended to represent.
Now, having said that, Donald Trump has served his function.
His time is over.
It's time for serious candidates.
Let the adults talk, Donald.
We don't need the exclamatory phrases, the borderline racist remarks.
So interestingly, from that last clip about Trump, you can see that Nick has recognized the value of Trump sticking it to the Republican establishment, but that job is done at that point in November 2015.
He doesn't serve any further purpose, really, and he needs to step aside.
So, adult, real candidates like Ted Cruz can come front and center.
At this point, it really seems clear that he's not the same Nick Fuentes from an ideological perspective.
He's expressing a disapproval of Trump's racist language.
He recognizes him as a con man, and he resents that he's taking attention away from real conservative candidates that he wants to see win.
There are little flickers of anti-Jewish inclinations, you know, that you later fully embrace, but they're subtle.
And even honestly, they're debatable in this old clip.
Like this one weird aside he has when he's talking about Ben Carson's tax proposal.
I thought that this glimpse into Nick's roots was fascinating because although I definitely disagreed with most of the stuff he was saying in that video from a political perspective, it's a completely different person than the one we've seen as the leader of the America First Groypers.
It's a completely different person than the guy who would jokingly dabble in Holocaust denial while hiding behind calling murdered Jews cookies.
Something happened that changed Nick dramatically, and I can guarantee that it happened prior to April 2016.
On April 6th, 2016, Nick released episode 6 of the Nicholas J. Fuentes show, in which he debated a fellow high schooler about Donald Trump.
By this point, Nick had completely changed his position, and he was fully on board with the Trump candidacy, which seems weird.
In this clip, Nick explains that Trump would be a good president, because Trump demonstrates how we can't even have a debate about hot-button issues in this country anymore.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that his high school economics class wasn't even covering the wage gap because the complexity of that issue from an actual econ perspective is kind of outside the scope of public education in high school.
You look at any other discussion, even when Donald Trump brings up that in his announcement speech, he said that Mexico was sending their criminals, their rapists, their drugs, whatever.
And the first response was racist.
He's a racist.
Shut him down.
Never mind the discussion on illegal immigration.
Never mind the policy proposals.
If you break down what he actually said in the syntax of it, it wasn't racist.
And then there's the further point where Nick is saying that people just say Trump's comments are racist without addressing Trump's point about immigration.
But back in 2015, Nick himself addressed Trump's policies about immigration, saying, quote, his immigration policy resembles Patrick Starr's.
We're going to take the immigrants and push them somewhere else?
It's ridiculous.
Nick himself rejected the immigration talk that was supposedly behind the comments that were being called racist.
And he himself had deemed Trump's commentary to be borderline racist mere months earlier.
You can tell a couple of important things from that clip.
It sucks.
Well, put that on board as number one.
In the episode from November, Nick was against Trump because he wasn't being a serious candidate, like his first choice, Ted Cruz.
Now, in April, apparently the desire for seriousness is gone, and it's totally cool for Trump to tweet about how his wife is hotter than Ted Cruz's wife.
The qualification for a candidate needing to be serious has been abandoned.
The second thing you can see from that clip is Nick's quip, quote, that's not an argument, that's an ad hominem.
This sort of talk was very popular in the right-wing circles of the internet around this time when debating had taken on a bit of a pugilistic character.
It probably didn't start with him, but Stéphane Molyneux definitely had a big part in popularizing philosophy language being deployed by people who didn't really understand the terms.
And they would use it to deflect any criticism of their positions or what they're doing by calling it an ad hominem attack.
This is a little bit of a clue to me that Nick might have been spending some time in those types of online communities.
The third and most important thing here is that the other guy and Nick are friends.
That was established earlier in the debate.
So when he's saying that he wishes Nick could see him from his seat, he's expressing a feeling that this position Nick is taking is foreign.
This is a person who knows you saying, you've changed, and I wish you could see things from outside yourself.
A lot of this conversation surrounds the difference of opinion about how electing Trump would lead to the international community thinking we're a bunch of dumb-dumb idiots who would elect someone like Trump.
That's discussed in this next clip.
And I think it really reveals a ton of where Nick is coming from.
The UK and Europe have taken a course that is different from America's.
It's a course which America has not confronted the crossroads yet, or at least it might be too far gone, it might not be.
But Europe has decided to take the road of multiculturalism.
And they've decided to embrace Islam and other cultures.
And not even, I won't even say Islam because, again, I don't want to offend moderate Muslims.
But when you see what they're importing from the Middle East, from Yemen, from Somalia, and you see what happened in Cologne on New Year's, you see what happened in Brussels, what happened in Paris, you see the no-go zones across France, Germany, and Belgium.
You see that Sweden has become the number two country in rapes per capita because of refugees from Yemen and from Somalia and Eritrea.
And you understand that Europe is not America.
They have forsaken their culture, and that will be to their demise.
All that multicultural anxiety, the Muslims coming into Europe, all of that was absent from his consideration of candidates back in November, but now it's front and center.
Incidentally, those were exactly the red pill talking points that were making the rounds in the online fringe right-wing communities.
Most of them complete misrepresentations of statistics packaged in such a way so they could be useful to help young white men argue aggressively against multiculturalism.
To put it simply, Nick just sounds like a guy who read a bunch of 4chan and changed his whole vibe.
You think that if America, and this is a problem, and I hesitate to call you this, but I will define this culture from the establishment and from these moderate Republicans and from the conservatives, they are cuckservatives.
The cuck insult and cuckservative was really hot in specific communities around this time, particularly the cockservative form.
And Nick pulling it out in this conversation is a signifier of the places he's hanging out.
It's just a forensic fingerprint.
The same goes for the open and explicit rhetoric about the West being superior to other cultures.
That was a fundamental piece of the online far-right at this point in time.
And the more Nick talks, the more clear it is.
He's just rattling off lingo that he learned from his cool, new, edgy online friends.
I think at this point, it seems pretty hard for me to get away from the conclusion that between November 2015 and April 2016, Nick Filentes was hanging out in some real edgy right-wing communities online.
And as the kids say, he got red-pilled.
He's using all the new cool lingo.
He's repeating popular talking points from alt-right communities around this time.
His friend is indicating that he's changed.
Like, Nick is a complete asshole now.
So it's often easy to lose sight of the fact that he's 21.
I wonder why so many of these people constantly report losing friends and family whenever you see a wonderful young man calling his friend a conservative.
I can't imagine why they would lose friends and family.
As far as I can tell from these snapshots and an awareness of what was going on at the time, it's hard for me not to see Nick Fuentes as a conservative kid who bought into the extreme right propaganda.
He was being fed in the form of edgy memes when he was an impressionable 16-year-old who didn't have the emotional maturity to handle it.
The only thing that really distinguishes him in any way from any other angry kid who just harasses people online anonymously is that Nick is blessed with talent.
As much as he sucks on so many levels, it would be pointlessly dishonest for me to pretend that he doesn't have an almost startling level of competence, even back in those high school videos.
He's slick and he's quick on his feet.
He's able to bluff a decent argument out of nowhere or come up with a deflection to an argument that he doesn't want to have.
Nick is a piece of shit, and he's fully responsible for the positions that he puts into the world now.
And none of what I feel about him changes that.
But I'll never really be able to take him too seriously because at the end of the day, he's just a kid who got radicalized and just so happened to have the talent and skills required to transition into being a cult leader himself.
And honestly, it's more sad than anything else.
There was clearly something he desperately needed prior to April 2016, and that had nothing to do with misrepresented European crime stats.
He probably always had a little bit of that racist shithead vibe in him, but the way that the Trump campaign and the online world surrounding it changed the definitions of what was acceptable to advocate clearly did a number on him.
Nick is not the first of this sort, and he won't be the last.
The only really notable thing about him right now is that he's more talented than these idiots like Baked Alaska or Laura Loomer.
And because he's figured out this novel strategy, that's really what makes him notable.
He's figured out this strategy, and I think that it's maybe 100 times more effective than the things employed by Richard Spencer.
By attacking right-wing scammers from the right, he's essentially repeating the parts that made the Tea Party successful.
Just this time, he doesn't have to deal with Klein Beck crying all over the place about his nine principles and 11 rules or whatever.
So this strategy that he's employing of attacking things like Turning Point USA and Ben Shapiro from the right by presenting his group as the real conservatives.
Second, the people who would be opposed to you on the left or the mainstream media, for the most part, are going to leave you alone when you are attacking Charlie Kirk.
That's going to be the reaction that a lot of people have.
They'll think it's funny that there's this internecine fight between these fringe right-wing groups and never pay the attention that would be required in order to treat you like you deserve to be treated, which is a sad 16-year-old boy who went online and found some shit you shouldn't have.
But he doesn't have a ton of overhead necessarily to what he needs to do.
And so until he got kicked off YouTube, I'm pretty sure that based on the audience that he had, he wasn't demonetized until fairly soon before he got kicked off.
So he was probably making a pretty good amount of money from that.
And then whatever donations might be coming in, I could see him being fully self-sustainable without having to do too much grift.
So I wanted to get into that a little bit because I think it's interesting when you see the way that Nick has become, you know, he's come back on Alex's show.
Alex immediately was like, we need to get you to this rally.
The way the audience is largely Nick's fans and the way he's carrying himself in charge, he is so confident there that that's going to rub off a bit.
I felt it was worthwhile to take a little look at some of these earlier times things because the picture of him is incomplete if you don't recognize that most of this philosophy is born out of this online radicalization that he clearly was subject to and he was too young to handle it.
And like what you're saying, I think what you said was right on.
It's the mimicry aspect.
In 2015, you're mimicking the mainstream GOP, talking about like, hey, Ben Carson's the leader in the clubhouse and Rand Paul is great conservative, but I don't know if it's going anywhere.
Very, very much that.
And then when you get exposed to the online extreme stuff, you start mimicking that and then you become it.
I almost see him like a fucking, he's almost like an empty vessel now that I've, because like the more that I, the more that I go through listening to all of that shit, all I see is him just writing this, writing this, this, this rage, this like inexplicable rage.
But, but, like, I just, I, I really thought coming into this from so many of these interactions with Nick Fuentes' work that he was something more than what I see him as now, which is an empty, he's empty to me.
From a logistical perspective, I have no idea why they haven't.
But as an external observer, I would say that this entire show up till this point has been a pretty solid argument for why it hasn't happened.
Fringe weirdo congressional candidates trying to lock up the fringe weirdo vote, scammers trying to Trojan horse a fundraising scheme into a speech, Alex getting progressively more problematically drunk.
I think the argument for not doing this show is pretty well spelled out by doing the show.
You know, like even if Alex was a regular old middle-of-the-road moderate Republican, he's still going to get drunk and wander up on stage and try and do a show at you.
He gets on stage and thanks the people that are putting on the event.
He uses the name of the event.
In contrast to how everyone else has demonstrated a complete ignorance of or a disrespect for the normal etiquette of performance, Nick has nailed almost every little piece of it.
He's good at this, and that's how he's able to get away with a lot of the stuff that he does because he's overly competent in many of the subtle social signifiers, like pretending to be humble and being appreciative.
This was a lighthearted thing, and it came in the form of ribbing, but it's at least the second time in the first 20 minutes of that interview with Milo that a joke about Nick being controlled opposition because he's still on Twitter came up.
As of this recording, Nick is still verified on Twitter.
I don't know if I agree with some of the finer points of Nick's assessment here, but I want to leave all that aside and focus on this very important point.
And it's something that makes Nick super dangerous.
Nick is completely aware that the authoritarians of the past have used bullshit free speech whining to weasel their way into public spaces.
He knows that George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party, used debates about free speech as a tool to mainstream and normalize his bigoted ideology, as if pretty much every extreme right-wing fuck ever since.
I'm not sure he's right about the left using free speech to take over power after the 60s, considering that after 1969, there wasn't a Democrat in the presidency other than the very ineffectual one-term of Jimmy Carter until Bill Clinton took office in 1993.
From 1969 to 1993, Democrats were only in the presidency four out of the 24 years, which, if you're paying attention, means Republicans were in power 20 of the 24 years.
What's interesting is that Nick seems to be wanting to have his cake and eat it too in this clip.
On the one hand, he seems to be completely exposing the game and saying that everyone just pretends to be into free speech, but it's really just a means for them to get power.
On the other hand, he seems to be still insinuating that he, unlike the Democrats and Republicans, is the one who actually cares about free speech.
And if he were to rise to power, he would be the only one who wouldn't immediately forget about the issue.
This is an impressive level of cynicism, but I also think that it could be dangerously effective.
There are tons of disenchanted folks on the right who are sick of people like Steven Crowder and the entire flock of free speech profiteers, and it could be super appealing as a thing for them to hear, like on the right, to have someone on the right call out the scam for what it is.
Granted, people like Nick are pretty selective in their targeting.
Like he'll say people like Crowder or Ben Shapiro or Turning Point, they're scamming on free speech to gain power, but he doesn't have that same complaint about Milo Yiannopoulos or Alex Jones.
That's because he doesn't care about them being free speech con men.
He's just bitter that Crowder, Shapiro, and Turning Point don't want to validate him.
Whereas Alex and Milo are desperate enough that they're willing to see if they can get a boost out of it.
Because people like Nick are excluded from even being given access to the right-wing mainstream, they can free themselves up to lob some pretty fairly accurate critiques of the scams of the right-wing mainstream.
To be perfectly clear, a lot of the critiques he makes are not accurate and actually just bigotry.
But this one, that they're using free speech trolling as a means of gaining power, but they don't care about free speech, that's a salient point.
That is a fair point that he's making, and he's free to do it.
I mean, it's, but that's the way that we get into trouble with when the right wing starts criticizing like the FBI and shit like that, where you're like, yeah, the FBI's fucking evil, and it would be harder to believe conspiracy theories about them if they didn't do so much evil shit.
Yeah, the CIA is fucking evil.
They didn't do this, but I get why you believe that because like, how many, how many Fred Hamptons do we have to get murdered before it's like, I get it, the cops are fucking evil, you know?
You know, I was interviewed at Charlottesville as well by an Infowars reporter, Millie Weaver.
I think Millie Weaver, you know, she was very surprised by the Chad right.
She was very surprised by how authoritarian we were that day because she was interviewing us saying, well, don't you think everybody has the right to free speech?
And me and James Olsip were like, no, no, they don't.
So in true fascist fashion, Nick uses the language that appeals to people.
But what his political project is working on, it's working on something entirely different.
He can show up to a First Amendment rally while holding a position that people he disagrees with politically don't have free speech rights.
This is because Nick Fuentes, at his core, is interested in creating a state that runs on Catholic fascism.
Here is a clip of him from his show, America First, discussing how he would join Antifa if they were supporters of Mussolini or Francisco Franco.
I had to take this clip from his interview with Milo, so there's a little bit of laughing from Milo's friends in the background just so that doesn't distract you too much.
If Antifa were marching down the streets and they were waving the banner of Benito Mussolini or Francisco Franco, I'd be joining them.
Frankly.
If Antifo was waving the banner of phalangism, if they were waving the banner of and they were saying, you know, Catholic fascism now, I would join them.
So Nick has said that, you know, he doesn't, you know, he got interviewed at Charlottesville at the Unite the Right rally by Millie Weaver, and he was talking about how these people that he disagreed with don't have free speech rights.
I think the First Amendment protects that kind of ridicule.
If I want to say women are dumb, if I want to say, if I want to say something nasty about black people, if I want to say something nasty about Jews, and why would anybody want to do that?
So you can see that there's this conflict of I don't believe in free speech rights for people I disagree with, but free speech is an absolute necessity when it comes to me being able to say racist and hateful things.
The reason the state is cracking down on dissidents who want to say things like all women are dumb and racial slurs and all of that stuff is because what was I talking about again?
So you have this muddy view of what free speech means.
It's just a tool that Nick is using, while at the same time, being free to come to this speech and talk about how political forces use free speech as a weapon, basically.
But you also see that from these indications that he has, he's very interested in something else.
He's interested in cultivating an absolute kind of power, like this Catholic fascism idea that he's expressing.
It's legitimately an authoritarian, religiously based monarchy that he would like to see come into power.
So he's not particularly interested in the subtle free speech cons being run by people like Steven Crowder and Charlie Kirk.
Those guys aren't so much motivated in terms of bringing in an overt dictator as they are interested in marginalizing vulnerable people and making a profit off it.
Nick's political project is much broader in scope than that.
So he can afford to call out the trivial game that others on the right are playing.
It doesn't hurt him at all, and it'll trick a certain amount of people into thinking that he's actually the real one who's interested in free speech.
But of course he's not, which is why it's farcical that he's here speaking at Alex's First Amendment summit.
He doesn't believe in the First Amendment at all.
So Nick expounds on this point here that he has about free speech being in the interest of those in power, sorry, against the interest of those in power.
And as you were waiting for it, here comes Alex to interrupt.
All these right-wing people that say they're against censorship, they're in favor of free speech, that worked 10 years ago when they didn't have this institutional power.
But now that they've got the money and they've got the think tanks and they've got the NGOs and all that institutional power on their side, free speech is no longer convenient for them.
Now that they are in positions of power, they do not like the free speech that we are offering up as true conservatives.
Because that's all the left's got is to say somebody trying to promote freedom is a Nazi when the Nazis are a bunch of losers 70-something years ago got their ass kicks.
And so they just keep saying, though, you're a Nazi.
He's drunk, and at this point, he seems to think that he's doing his show as opposed to being at a summit of invited speakers.
He's not paying attention, and he just interrupts Nick to get his talking points in, which is embarrassing.
Nick is expressing a very interesting dynamic, which is that free speech is not in the interest of those controlling power, particularly when their primary reason to pursue power is to gain more power or hold on to that which they have.
It's one of the main reasons that the First Amendment is there and why we need this freedom to be considered sacrosanct in our culture.
Because if it wasn't, and true free speech rules were up to the whims of random elected politicians and officials, they'd probably have been gone long ago.
I don't think Alex even understands the point that Nick is making.
You can hear Nick say, here he comes in the background when Alex comes up on stage.
It has a real tone of judgment to it.
He's not excited that Alex is interrupting him, but you know what?
Nick is the only speaker other than Mike Flynn Jr. who doesn't end up responding to Alex interrupting them with the archetypal cop-out: it's impossible to follow Alex Jones.
It's not impossible for Nick because to him, Alex is an embarrassing fool who's just useful at this point.
But also, at this point, I'm starting to suspect that Alex's interruptions might sometimes be strategic.
If there's one thing he doesn't want a speaker condemning, it's the idea that you shouldn't spend all of your time regurgitating and re-litigating the Cold War.
This is not cool for Alex because his entire show is relitigating the Cold War.
All of his expert friends are Cold War hangers-on, like Joel Skousen and Steve Pieczenik, who see commies hiding in every bush and inside every government office.
Everything in Alex's world comes back to Cold War anti-communist fanaticism.
Think about it.
A gigantic part of his coronavirus conspiracy has to do with his belief that the globalists are in bed with China because they want them to take down the West, which is why David Rockefeller installed Mao into power in 1949.
Alex's beliefs are essentially indecipherable without the understanding that pretty much everything he's saying goes back to the ravings of some crypto fascist from the Cold War era.
Though not a direct attack on Alex, what Nick is saying is a bit of an indictment of Alex's primary worldview.
Mocking the idea that CPAC would be socialism versus the United America.
mean yeah yeah yeah there there is a certain level of uh of like once you've got any well actually you know what i totally i I am actually going to go complete 180 and agree with you wholeheartedly because now we're doing Alex's show.
Now the show instincts have kicked in.
And this is, hey, we're not talking about that right now.
Alex knows that Nick has the room's attention and he has a lot of fans in the crowd, so he wants to associate himself with Nick and try and see if he can get some of them to become his customers.
Unfortunately, this depressing ass event has driven him to drink to the point of near incoherence, and all he's doing is making a joke of himself in front of Nick's hip young audience.
Also, to the point that Nick isn't a racist, I would beg to differ.
Here's a clip of him from his interview with Milo expressing a viewpoint that I don't really know how a non-racist could have.
think they exist as scientific classifications and they did up until very recently and i you know i just wonder again uh i don't know where the rub is where a lot of people say and you've said we don't agree with diversity and you believe race is real but yet any kind of idea of benefit to diversity for some you know for its own sake But there is a benefit to diversity.
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Well, I think that what I would say is that the culture, mixing cultures deriving from different religions doesn't work.
I don't think that I would say that mixing races doesn't work.
As to the advertising point, in August 2019, researchers at the Qatar Computing Research Institute released a study where they investigated gender and racial diversity in approximately 86,000 ads that had been shared by, quote, 73 top international brands on Instagram and Facebook.
One of their questions was about just representation, generally speaking, but another was, quote, which pairs of demographic groups are preferred in advertising images for cross-sex interaction context.
As to the representation question, they found that white people appear in ads at a rate proportional to the most recent census data, but that black people are way less likely to appear in ads than you would expect based on demographic numbers.
And that the number looks even worse when you look specifically just at black women, the rate which the researchers called, quote, strikingly low.
As to the question of cross-sex interaction between members of different races, what do you know?
They found that there was a gigantic tendency towards white male, white female pairings in ads.
But that raised a new question for them, which was, is this just the result of there being way more white people represented in ads?
So they took into account the relative number of models of different races, and they found that, quote, the preference towards pairing of the same race in cross-sex interaction becomes apparent.
This is a classic example of people like Nick completely fabricating perception.
He's seen a few instances of interracial pairings in commercials, and each time the right-wing media has lost its mind, yelling about forced miscegenation and some shit.
So it feels like this is a consistent pattern.
Now, every time there's a mixed-race couple in an ad, it's further proof that the globalists are trying to push race mixing on the whites.
For every ad with a mixed-race pairing, I would dare say Nick would see 500 ads where the pairing are both white, but his mind doesn't register that.
He ignores the overwhelming prevalence of white, white couples and ads because he's a racist, and it bothers him when he sees mixed couples and ads.
In order to justify this anger without just admitting he's a racist, the easiest move is to pretend that every ad you see is black guys with white girls and how the man is trying to push it on the brave and noble whites.
It's a cowardly cop-out that reveals the bigotry underneath when you actually look at the statistical analyses of these ads.
People are going to fucking hear about The Bachelor.
No, I mean, it's so obvious, especially because I was forced to watch The Bachelorette last season, and there was a black dude who fucking killed who I wanted to be with, who, of course, didn't wind up with her because, surprise.
And then this year's Bachelor, who's usually chosen from that, should have been that fucking guy, but instead he's some dumb boring pilot.
Like, that's a good example of things that are just unexamined, things that Nick would never bring into it because they're kind of counterfactuals to the point that he's making.
The right wing gets all up in a tizzy whenever there's like one of these commercials with a mixed race couple and they're like, well, what message are you sending?
You're trying, you know, so you have that.
And that instills in your mind, if you're of this inclination, read racist.
Well, I mean, if you see one ad and assume that because of this one ad with an interracial couple, the entire fucking establishment is pushing miscegenation upon you.
Hey, why would it matter if you see 100 ads or 20 ads?
In the interview, Ali is discussing how everyone says they want integration, but after he won the gold medal at the Olympics, he still couldn't eat at segregated restaurants because he was black.
He's pointing to the inherent hypocrisy of the times, or the rhetoric is often pro-integration, but the lived experience is much different.
He talks about how marriage is a part of integration, and he tells the interviewer, quote, I'm sure no intelligent white person watching this show in his or her right white mind want black men and women marrying their white sons and daughters and in return introducing their grandchildren to half-brown kinky-haired black people.
The interviewer points out that the phenomenon he's talking about is a social problem and that educating people not to have these prejudices and bigotries will go a long way toward reducing the number of white people in 1971 who wouldn't want their grandchildren to be of multiple races.
To that, Ali responds, quote, but life is too short for me to be doing that, educating people.
I'd rather be reading to my own.
I have a beautiful daughter, beautiful wife.
They look like me.
We are all happy and don't have no trouble.
It would be dishonest for me to say that Muhammad Ali wasn't expressing in his view that the natural state in the world is races living separately.
That is true.
But his view is very influenced by the time and the circumstances of the early 70s in the United States.
1971 is only a few years removed from the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, as well as the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton, and Malcolm X.
This context informs his position and where he was coming from.
Also, in this interview, Ali seems preoccupied with his fear of flying.
And at one point, he seems to imply that he can predict plane crashes.
unidentified
The interview asks him, quote, God, he would have stopped 9-11.
It's been used by white supremacists and white nationalists for years to justify their own desire for a white ethno-state.
So it seems weird to imagine that Nick has some other reason to pull out that quote here.
I think it's possibly oversimplified, but even if you imagine the worst possible interpretation for something that Ali said in an interview 49 years ago, I still don't think that's a good defense for Nick's position against interracial marriage.
Because one person who gained fame and yet still did not overcome the institutionalized racism was expressing a worldview built around white people enslaving everybody he's ever known.
Then after that, fucking continuing a pattern of abuse for years on past the civil rights era, because he was expressing his opinion there, that totally makes it okay for a white person who did all of that shit to then co-opt his argument.
Well, even if you take that aside, like just the appeal to authority that's being done is not really an authority.
It's just some, it's a celebrity who was a smart person and had some interesting ideas about a lot of stuff, but that doesn't mean that this is a great point.
So anyway, the point of this, where it all started, is that Alex is wrong.
Nick Fuentes has given people ample reason to suspect he's a racist and a white nationalist.
Also, there are a few things more satisfying for me than when Alex tries to bring out that stuff about Elohim City and that the material, expecting it to blow people's minds and no one cares.
unidentified
You just hear when he's talking about like the SPLC runs it.
We, as conservatives who are in favor of America first, whatever our difference is, we will either hang together or we will most surely hang separately.
I think that Alex is really shaken by the fact that Nick Fuentes, you can't tell from just listening to this, but he got a standing ovation from the crowd after his speech.
While he was trying to bring up Gavin, like Alex is trying to introduce Gavin McGinnis, and the crowd is giving a standing ovation for Nick.
This is not good for Alex because this flips the dynamic he was hoping for.
Alex co-opts other people's shit because in the fringe weirdo conspiracy and crypto fascist right wing, he's always been the biggest game in town.
Other people may have some cottage industry things going, but traditionally, Alex has been able to associate with them and then use them to his advantage.
But this is the exact opposite.
Nick Fuentes does not need Alex.
And I think Alex realized it in that moment.
Any benefit from this is going directly to Nick.
Any person who Alex is exposing to Nick stands to possibly become a fan of Nick's.
It's not going to go the other way around.
It's not like Nick's fans are going to convert to InfoWarriors.
I strongly suspect that Alex realized that he's in a situation where the only outcomes available to him are losing prospects.
He could fully accept Nick and watch as his audience gets drawn away from him towards the shiny, nice, respectable, clean-cut, articulate, magnanimous young man who can handle himself way, way better than Alex.
Or conversely, he could try to distance himself from Nick now and run the risk of becoming his next target, the next example of an organization like Turning Point that isn't really America first, but pretends to be.
That QA session at the end is a huge danger.
The way that Nick and the Groypers have done the damage they have to Turning Point is by showing up in the audience of their QA sessions and asking them incredibly loaded questions about Israel and about restricting even legal immigration into the country.
It's a stunt strategy that's meant to make Turning Point look unable to answer these questions and to expose them as the non-conservative shills Nick says they are the conservatives.
It's honestly a really good media strategy, and it's helped by the fact, like I mentioned earlier, the mainstream media and most leftists hate Turning Point too, so they're not going to come to their defense when they're being attacked by a group of crypto-fascist Catholic monarchists.
Alex cannot be on the receiving end of that kind of treatment and survive.
He's too drunk at this point to navigate that QA session safely.
Just so you understand what just went on, Gavin had an intern come up to him from the crowd and bring him a beer and then some lines of Coke, presumably fake Coke, which he proceeds to snort on stage.
The goal of the bit is to have him pretend to be all nervous, but then like Popeye getting a can of spinach, he transforms into this strong, confident self, like his real self, after getting his booze and cocaine.
See, but the problem with the bit as Gavin is doing it is how it ends up working in practice is that Gavin doesn't really sell the post-cocaine boost of energy that you heard at the end there.
It's underwhelming, which is why there's a tepid response from the crowd.
And that undercuts the ability of this to work as a joke structure.
Also, nothing more conservative than a grumpy former gang leader who's slowly drifting deeper into his openly sad drinking in public phase, pretending to do cocaine as an emotional crutch at your show.
They were talking about Drag Queen Story Hour in some small town, and the teacher said, the teacher who organized this thing said, let's be honest, parents often don't know what's best for their kids.
The community should decide what's best for their kids.
So Gavin is talking about examples of like the Dems showing their cards.
And from everything I can tell, I don't know what kind of apocryphal story he's talking about here, but I think I tracked it down what the base of this is.
And I think he's misrepresenting this.
From what I can tell, this is about a state representative in Missouri proposing the creation of a parental library review board, which would be comprised of five adult community members.
The goal of the board would be to, quote, determine whether any sexual material provided to the public by the public library is age-appropriate.
According to most people who've spoken about this bill, from the director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom to various Drag Queen Story Hour participants, this is actually an attempt to curtail free speech in public libraries and impose potentially harsh fines and even jail time on librarians whose libraries host events that five community members decide is inappropriate, but is actually constitutionally protected.
And with free speech, the agenda is clearly, I want to control the story.
And when you see people being persecuted, in this day and age, it tends to be, and this might be the Coke talking because they're charming and funny and gorgeous.
I can't imagine the level of self-delusion that's required to think that the Proud Boys made supporting Trump look cool.
It's a group of dudes who wear matching shirts whose group is named after a song in the Aladdin musical who spent their time whining about how no one respects the West anymore.
How do we square that with the basic requirement for Proud Boy membership being they have to stop masturbating?
I can't think of anything that more screams of deep shame complexes than a weirdo failed comedian telling a street gang of disaffected young men that they have to stop jerking off to join him.
I know that when Gavin says not feeling shame, what he means is that privileged groups in society should feel free like we should be able to throw the C-word around with no trouble.
They should be free to feel like they deserve the social benefits that have come from generations of denying minorities access to the economy or any semblance of social power.
His point is that white people shouldn't have to feel bad about the racist history of our country, but I think the shame he really should be focusing on is him telling young dudes that if they want to be in his group, they can't beat off.
Psychologically, that's a way more interesting thing than his run-of-the-mill white identity leanings.
Gavin spends his time on stage rambling his way through a convoluted story about how his proud boys are actually the victims of all the street fights they've gotten into, how the courts are full of SJW judges, and how he hopes Antifa people get raped in prison.
It's horrible, and it's very difficult to follow as a speech.
It's punctuated by increasingly sad attempts at punchlines.
More so than anyone else who's come on stage so far.
Gavin really does think he's funny.
He's a failed stand-up comic, so I think he thinks he's got some of those skills still, but man, he doesn't.
I'm not going to play too many clips of his speech for a couple of reasons.
The first is that it's almost incomprehensible.
And the stuff that he's saying about his gang members are things that I couldn't possibly confirm or deny if I wanted to.
Things like jailhouse conversations a proud boy allegedly had with an Antifa member who said that they have a group of high-priced lawyers on Retainer.
I don't believe that, but also there's nothing I can do with it.
The other reason that Gavin, the other reason I don't want to talk about this all that much more is that Gavin is trying to be funny.
And his style of comedy is basically just saying offensive things and then basking in the orgasmic glow of having been edgy enough to say this bad word.
It's very lame and sad.
Like he thinks he's Lenny Bruce because he said the T-word in a room full of the most transphobic people you could ever gather together.
It's really the definition of someone doing an impression of what they think edgy looks like while doing the safest thing imaginable, which in many ways is an apt description of this entire summit.
He was definitely wasted, and I don't think it's impossible, but I see this as highly unlikely.
I've seen many episodes where Alex is three sheets to the wind, and it's bedtime, but he keeps going.
Alex gets drunk, but he has a lot of staying power.
He's the guy who won't leave your party at 4 a.m. when everyone else has already gone home, but he has a theory about gremlins being predictive programming that you have to listen to.
Someone at Infowars, probably Owen, since Rob Dew is completely fucked up too, told Alex that he needed to call it a night.
He was at a point where something he said or did could cause real damage.
And the fact that Mike Flynn Jr. had shown up, plus Nick Fuentes, that may have given the streams a bit more attention than they would have gotten otherwise.
I see this as kind of possible that someone would have stopped Alex from hurting himself by giving his headlining speech because it would have been a disaster.
But I also don't think that it's a sure thing because Alex, particularly drunk Alex, doesn't listen to other people.
He's very stubborn.
And I feel like he's the kind of guy who would fight a bartender who tried to cut him off.
Alex, listen, look, I think your speech is great, but you spent the first 15 minutes of it arguing why the hard R is the only problem with you saying the N-word.
So, most likely, Alex knew that he couldn't give a speech wasted in front of Nick Fuentes' fans.
The only possible outcome is trouble.
They're super conservative, and their ideas are largely based on a lot of the same anti-left conspiracy bullshit that's grown out of the remnants of the Cold War shit, but they also aren't into the same cartoonish idiocy that Alex is.
Nick Fuentes is involved in something that aspires to be a political movement, not just an entertainment empire where you can lie about headlines to sell dumb pills.
And his followers have a bit of the same seriousness to them, which is something Alex cannot engage with.
He can engage with just about any form of opposition from the left because he can just yell over them.
He can call them Satanists, and if all else fails, yell something about how Epstein didn't kill himself.
He cannot risk being attacked from the fringe right, because if he does, his whole act falls apart.
If these Groypers start asking him for his positions on issues they care most about, namely Israel and shutting down all immigration, Alex is going to look like not a real conservative.
And guess what?
When that happens, none of his tricks work.
He can't paint them as Satanists because they're America first conservatives.
He can't say they're secret globalists because Nick's been banned from YouTube and is a target of the media in theory.
He can't yell at them because that just makes him look weak in contrast to the smiling, poised Nick Fuentes.
He can't throw his Epstein didn't kill himself smoke bomb because they'll just be like, totally agree.
So why shouldn't we attack Israel?
Nick Fuentes and the Groypers are perhaps the biggest threat to Alex's credibility right now.
And I think rather than mixing it up with them in a live stream, he decided to go to bed.
It's the right decision because Alex doesn't need to be there.
He's made an ass out of himself trying to make the show entertaining and that was a failure.
But they don't need him dragging it out at the end with a dumb speech about his victimhood and crying about the military junta he seems to want to install.
He has Owen Schroyer there, seemingly sober, who the Groypers like, so he's not going to get the same kind of scrutiny that Alex might.
He has Rob Dew, completely drunk, to keep an eye on things.
He was right to go to bed, even if they said like 20 times he was going to be the headline speaker and then he just disappeared.
Kind of fucked up, but I think it's the right decision because strategically, he's only loses.
Anyway, Bell is a hardline anti-immigrant candidate.
He's received some support from the white nationalist circles, including Faith Goldie.
He's running on a platform of shutting down all immigration to the United States, which is a very dumb idea.
Apparently, based on this drop-in speech, he's also in favor of stopping all U.S. foreign aid, which is tantamount to calling for the deaths of millions of people around the world.
This Ron Paul ass endorsement of passive slaughter under the guise of why should we pay for it is the stuff of monsters hiding behind poorly constructed fiscal arguments.
I would bet everything I owned that he's going to lose that primary.
If you're keeping score, that's about zero for six on the congressional hopefuls that Alex has had on this absurd rally.
One of Nick's followers directly asking if accepting homosexuality does any good in terms of winning the culture war, that poses a real challenge to someone like Alex.
It's clear from the raucous response when Nick says that homosexuality is gross, that that was the correct answer, according to the Kroipers.
So if Alex had a non-committal political answer that maintains his wishy-washy stance on the issue, they would not find that acceptable.
If he said that accepting homosexuality was good, he'd clearly be walking into a trap where he would then have to defend how that is a conservative position.
If he answered that homosexuality was bad, and as Nick said, it has no place, he runs the risk of further alienating himself from the base that he has that desperately needs to cling to the idea that Alex is not a bigot himself.
No answer to that question serves Alex's interests.
I mean, but what's interesting to me is that it is essentially calling out the people who have been exploiting latent, if not explicit, bigotry and homophobia.
Fair enough.
For lying about supporting bigotry.
Yeah, yeah.
Like, no, I'm totally bigoted.
I know, I hate.
Well, I don't hate gay people.
You can't hate gay people.
No, I mean, no, I've been telling you that I hate gay people, but you can't.
All they're doing is just being people.
Oh, shit.
No, I've cultivated an audience of monsters, haven't I?
And introducing Nick Fuentes to the InfoWars audience.
Like, I don't know what Alex's audience even really is anymore, how big they are or what.
The only possible thing that can happen is Nick convincing them that Alex is too milquetoast and he doesn't actually have the principles that he pretends to have.
Absolutely.
It's fucked up.
And if it continues, like if it keeps going, which I think would be a huge mistake on Alex's part, but I don't think he, I think he's in a position where he can't not still support Nick because the implicit threat of his fans turning on him.
Yeah, yeah.
Alex has accidentally backed himself into like a really dangerous position for his own position and stake in the conservative world.
It is, it is really reminiscent of like, uh, of, I mean, again, it's, it's so reminiscent of Reagan, where it's all of these people are suddenly creating this insurgence based around a political class that has been exploiting their homophobia without making it explicit.
Always, always constantly just like, hey, you know, those people with the, with the HIV.
Do you have it?
You know, you know, those people, like that kind of thing, without ever explicitly saying it.
And now they're forcing people to actually come down on it.
And they're like, guys, we can't actually hate these people.
But it does have a lot of potential to disrupt a lot of things.
And it also has the potential to strengthen and reinforce a lot of the worst parts, which could have an effect.
But that doesn't, I don't know.
I'm not bought into the idea that he is the next rising star that's going to be here, the next William F. Buckley type, although he would probably be mad if I said that.
But I think that because we're in the present day and because, you know, we're people who follow Alex, I have to recognize that this is an existential threat to Alex.
And that's why you don't work with people like this.
This is why you have some kind of a standard of like, no, getting involved here is only going to be trouble.
You should not engage because when you engage, you open up the possibility for them to completely fuck you.
It's so funny because it is that, like, they're so hard right.
They're doing exactly the same thing the ALD, the Anti-Defamation League is doing, where it's like, Alex for so long is like, no, no, no, no, I'm not racist.
They're unfairly painting me as racist.
And then the guys on the right are like, oh, you're not racist?
And Alex, like, because of whatever desperation he has or whatever, he's brought it upon himself.
And I think it's interesting.
I really think that the psychodrama that I was describing at the beginning of this episode about this speech has a lot to do with the fact that it's depressing as hell at the beginning because there's no one there and these people are fucking ding-dongs and losers.
And then as it goes along, Nick Fluentes' fans show up and really change the character of what's going on.
Now, at the same time, because it was so depressing at the beginning, Alex is fucking wasted and he's in no position to deal with any of this stuff.
I don't even know if he could sober, but drunk, absolutely not.
And so, like the tip of the spear, like the king of the Americana movement, he goes to bed.
I still, I mean, Alex is resilient like a coga roach.
So I don't think that he's going to be destroyed by this, but it's going to make his job much harder.
Like, I think that Infowars is resilient enough that he's going to be able to navigate this in some form.
But I do think that it could, if things keep going the way they're going, it could force him into situations where he has to make positions that he's been wishy-washy and vague about in the past.
And that vagueness is very politically useful to him.
Yeah.
The disappearance of that vagueness creates a like, because one of the things that the Groypers are specifically aiming to do is nail people down on positions.
So for Alex to have to be nailed down on something like, we should get rid of all foreign aid to Israel.
What else does that imply?
How does that change the rest of your coverage?
What else comes from that?
Or even getting rid of all legal immigration?
What comes from that?
Where does, how does your, like, your coverage have to change?
It's a challenge he's not up to.
And it could cut down on his bottom line at a time when he really needs as much as he can.
So, I mean, we'll see.
I have no idea, but I had an interesting time and a weird psychological roller coaster watching this.
And I'm glad to be able to share some of it with you.
Not so much the failed congressional candidates and some of those bummers.