Knowledge Fight dissects Alex Jones’ March 2, 2021, rant against Donald Trump and Roger Stone, framing it as opportunistic betrayal amid his long history of attacking Trump while still profiting from him. The episode traces Kalen Robertson’s role in editing propaganda like Farmlands—a racist film falsely linking South African violence to Muslims—while critiquing his 2019 documentary You Can’t Watch This for weaponizing free speech rhetoric to defend bigotry. Robertson’s alleged ideological shift, from anti-Islamism to selective "redemption," is exposed as performative, revealing how fringe media exploits personal narratives to sustain credibility. Ultimately, the analysis underscores how such tactics perpetuate radicalization rather than challenge it. [Automatically generated summary]
No, that's great, because I've always had that same experience that even if you classify it as a complete leisure activity, you should be doing better leisure activities.
Oh, you're playing a video game as a leisure activity.
What you should be doing is going out to a park and throwing the ball around.
Because unlike previous things I'd done that were game-changing, those were just time-space continuum reflections of the third big change I was going to be involved in.
And that was bringing Donald John Trump into Austin.
I'm just going to say it again.
I said, Austin, into office.
Because this is, you guys are asking really good questions.
This is going to be a really good thing, but I'm going to say it again in a minute.
It's the truth, and I'm just going to say it, that I wish I never would have fucking met Trump.
I wish it never would have happened.
And it's not the attacks that I've been through.
It's I'm so sick of fucking Donald Trump, man.
God, I'm fucking sick of him.
And I'm not doing this because it's like I'm kissing his fucking ass, you know?
To people unfamiliar with Alex Jones or the right-wing media sphere, this probably sounds like a huge, huge deal.
Here's Alex on film, saying that he's sick of Trump and wishes he'd never met Trump or Roger Stone.
To anyone who's listened to our show regularly, this probably was less shocking.
Though Alex has created a personality cult around Trump that he's inexorably tied to, he also frequently lashes out at Trump and the people in Trump's orbit when things don't go his way.
There was the classic case of his breakdown after Trump bombed Syria in April 2018.
So that stream included Alex accusing Trump of betraying his family and talking about how ashamed he was of Trump and of supporting him.
Things got so out of hand, Owen Schroer had to try to stop the show because Alex was swearing so much and they were out of delay, so they couldn't bleep things.
We did a whole episode about that night, so if you want to hear about that in greater detail, it's episode 150.
But the thing is, that night is not at all an isolated incident.
Alex very regularly blows up at Trump, and the reason is pretty obvious.
Trump doesn't actually care about what Alex thinks, but Alex's business model has relied on him claiming that Trump does.
When Trump's public actions contradict the version of reality that Alex has painted on his show, the only response Alex can have is to portray it as betrayal.
The alternative is to admit that you were either conned, or that you were aware that Trump was full of shit and you were helping him con your audience, Neither of which are acceptable for Alex's brand.
The same thing happened during Alex's March 2019 Ask Me Anything stream that he did, which happened after Facebook had purged more accounts that Alex and Infowars ran, and just after Rogan did an episode with Jack Dorsey where Alex's Twitter ban was discussed.
Alex was really raw about how Trump wasn't helping him get it back on social media, and he expressed that inaction on Trump's part has made him...
Trump has all the power in his hands, and he's done a lot of good things, but the fact that he doesn't do these other decentralizations shows that, at the end of the day, he's an establishment-type person, and so he should be abandoned.
And I'm not happy about that because I've been persecuted for supporting Trump, but, you know, my gut is, like, ready to pull away, but then there's, like, the left.
And they are.
I don't want to abandon Trump because of them.
They didn't run me off Trump.
They didn't make me turn against Trump.
Trump made me turn against Trump.
And so it doesn't matter if Trump is this great thing.
It's that if he's going against that, we have to turn against him.
And, you know, they haven't been seen by multitudes of people, so it could be argued that Alex said these things in unseen areas of the internet where only weirdos like me look on.
True.
Unfortunately, Alex has literally also said that he hates Trump more than Hillary when he was a guest on Joe Rogan's show.
I've got all these employees and all this crew, and I've got all my lawsuits I'm fighting that are way more money than Roger's paying.
It's not some competition here, but I'm kind of fighting a two-front war with Roger because Infowars has become a platform to sit there and promote fundraising for his issues when I gave Roger a job here, which is great, and he's paid, and then it also becomes this split where we may not get the funds to fund Infowars.
Because the 24-7 Roger Stone fundraising is people then split it and say, well, we'll just give him a donation instead of InfoWars.
I've got to have a talk with him about that because we can win the battle, lose the war here because of that.
So I hope people do support Roger.
But InfoWars has a bill, let's not exaggerate, at least 10 times what Roger Stone's is, okay?
And he's bringing in as much money as we're bringing in right now.
And that's great.
That's all fine and dandy.
I have 100 employees.
I have all the bandwidth bills and all the equipment, and I sent security up with Roger and reporters up there, and that costs money.
And so I'm not bitching or complaining.
I'm going to have to make some decisions around here on a bunch of fronts about layoffs, laying Paul Watson off, laying Roger Stone off, people that are paid more around here.
Alex is definitely more demonstrative and more out...
Gregarious, I guess, when he's fucked up, but he'll still venture into many outbursts against Trump, like he did here in this segment he was doing on his, he did a big marathon in May 2017, and he said this.
They're not even about the people associated with Trump, that Alex has gone back and forth on heroes to villains over and over again.
The point I'm seeking to make here is that if you follow Alex, you know that him saying that he wishes he'd never met Trump while drunk in a controlled setting where editing is possible.
It's not a bombshell.
It's a good headline, and it seems to have driven some traffic if my mentions are any gauge of that, but I'm not sure it's helpful.
And the reason for this is three-pronged.
The first is the fact that this is not a comment that's necessarily groundbreaking.
Alex has said a lot of shit about Trump on his own show.
The second piece is that literally nobody who listens to Alex Jones would care about a 90-second clip being reported on by the Southern Poverty Law Center's hate watch.
I can personally respect the work that the SPLC does and acknowledge that they are an important entity, while at the same time saying with absolute certainty that no one who believes right-wing propaganda will...
Respect or accept a report from the SPLC.
A very basic piece of right-wing ideology is that the SPLC is a communist globalist front organization meant to launder money and demonize patriots who threaten the globalist establishment.
Any report coming from that source is going to be seen basically like how normal people see a headline that comes from Glenn Beck.
Presumably the people that this clip and things like it would be helpful for are people who suspect that Alex may be a valid source of information, and in terms of those people, they will not be reached by this reporting at all.
That's not to say that the SBLC shouldn't do reporting like this, but the fact that only they have access to the underlying material, which we'll get into in a minute, makes this a little bit difficult to believe will help anybody that it could help.
The people that this hate watch article appeals to are people who already think or know that Alex is full of shit.
The third prong is that this basically just plays the same game that we've done so many times with Alex in the past.
The response is predictable, and honestly, it's one that Alex comes out winning.
When this article on Hate Watch was released, Alex appeared on the War Room to discuss things, and it was honestly so formulaic that I probably could have written his response before listening to this episode.
So here at the beginning of this is Owen introducing this headline and asking Alex about it.
You can see there, calling it the Southern Poverty Hate Center, preemptively minimizing and deriding the headline and the source, that this isn't a big deal to Alex or Owen.
The thing about Stern there was that apparently a Daily Mail article attributed words that an Alex impersonator said to being from Alex himself.
It's difficult to tell, though, because what's apparently parody is indistinguishable from things Alex would say himself.
From the article, quote, This is normalized mass extermination, a bio-attack on humanity, before the day of our Lord's birth, in the name of the satanic pedophile globalist New World Order.
They want forced inoculation of the Gates vaccine, which has the HIV delivery system gene coding.
Anyway, Alex is fixated on this detail for two reasons.
First, it gives him a chance to try and wage a publicity campaign where he's able to see if he can get some cheap attention by yelling about a more popular broadcaster, in this case Howard Stern.
We're mere days away from Stern getting the sneaky snake treatment.
Second, it distracts from the main point of that Daily Mail article, which was about how Alex had buzzed his ex-wife's house in a helicopter, which had terrorized their daughter.
From the article, quote, In the video exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com, the couple's 12-year-old daughter is briefly seen waving before rushing over to her mother and screaming, It's scary, Mom.
It's scary.
We try to stay out of Alex's personal life, but this incident seems like Alex being a real piece of shit.
And he's focusing on this detail about the Stern character.
It seems like a way to make the audience not even care to look Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, here, you see the reason why this minute or so clip is not really threatening to Alex, at least in the eyes of his listeners.
It was taken out of context, which is the standard excuse that everyone in the right-wing media knows damn well they can use to get out of almost any situation.
It happens all the time, because it's something that the audience has been trained to accept, particularly when the clip that's said to be out of context comes from a source that's been fully maligned, like the SPLC.
If you listen to the clip that's included in the final product of the documentary, it's not really saying anything too different from what Alex is saying in the newly released clip.
They're both expressing a frustration with Trump, particularly around how the identity that Alex enjoyed prior to being associated with Trump has been swallowed up by this new image of him.
Make no mistake, though, he did create that image and he profits off it.
I'm really frustrated because that does seem something like a very clear-eyed evaluation of how things have gone, which makes me think he's been listening to our show too much.
So the thing that I find fascinating here is that the clip that's in the documentary is actually a clearer articulation of Alex's feelings, whereas the clip released by Hatewatch is interesting only because it appears to show a secret revelation and an emotional outburst.
You can see emotional outbursts on Alex's show every day.
And what Alex says there is far from a secret revelation.
And ultimately, here's one of the things that I'm really struggling with.
As far as I can tell, as someone who watched the documentary and has watched Alex's show around the time that this documentary was being filmed, I do think that the clip is taking Alex out of context.
Alex was struggling with his identity at the time.
According to Hatewatch, this documentary was filming in January 2019, which is exactly when Alex was spending a lot of time on air discussing his desire to get back to his roots and not be so singularly associated with Trump.
Here is a clip from the January 28th, 2019 episode of his show where Alex discusses how he doesn't just want to talk about Trump and Roger anymore and how the audience wants him to go back to his roots.
This was part of a larger period in time where Alex was really fucking tired of Roger's legal fund siphoning donations.
But it's definitely this phase that he was in.
That legal fees and this disillusionment with Trump and wanting to be who he used to be was going on in January 2019.
And if you pay attention to Alex and you were listening to it, you would know that this stemmed from Alex being mad at Trump for not declaring a national emergency to close our southern border.
This was deep in the caravan propaganda cycle of 2019, so in Infowars world, Trump not declaring an emergency and seizing complete power was essentially him allowing all Americans to be murdered by MS-13, which is hard to rationalize.
So Alex turned on Trump for a little while.
That was a really rough situation for Alex, because he had all but guaranteed that Trump was about to declare an emergency, as we can be heard here.
Here in January 2019, the migrant caravan fears were the biggest story in the right-wing media, and Alex had essentially gone all-in in Trump declaring a national emergency, to the point where he did a special evening stream to celebrate the declaration that didn't end up happening.
That's fucking embarrassing.
And Alex was understandably a little bit raw about it after the fact.
Now, I was going to come back in this segment, and I was going to get to this later, but everybody knows my habit of mentioning something coming up and getting right into it, but when we come back...
Constitutional lawyer, really smart cookie, founder of Oath Keepers.
So this is one of the things that makes a clip like this really, it's incredibly difficult to understand without a nuanced understanding of Alex's propaganda and the context that the things are said in.
Alex saying that he's sick of Trump is attention-grabbing, but it's completely in line with what he was saying on air around this time.
Alex was sick of his identity being associated solely with Trump, which he expresses more coherently in the take that they actually use in the documentary.
Alex has said way worse things about Trump on his show.
Like before deciding to support him for president back in 2015, Alex would regularly talk about how Trump was a front man for the mob.
I do believe that it captures a sincere moment of frustration where Alex is pissed off about how pigeonholed he's become as a Trump cheerleader.
But I don't think that the moment means anything outside of exciting people who already don't like Trump or Alex.
For me, this falls into about the same heading as that Bon Iver parody song that was made about Alex.
It feels like an attack, but in reality it just plays directly into his hands.
Consider this.
I hate Alex Jones.
I've done a podcast about how full of shit he is for over four years, and when I heard him respond to this clip by saying that it's out of context, I don't think he's totally wrong.
The Hatewatch article doesn't discuss the other version of this clip that appears in the documentary, nor does it address what was going on in the world around the time that the documentary was filmed that could have contributed to what their readers were seeing.
From my perspective, these are important aspects to understanding that clip, because without knowing what was going on, it's really easy to see that clip and make up your own story in your mind about what Alex, you know, when he says, I'm so fucking sick of Trump, or he wished he'd never met him, you can come up with your own explanation of what that means.
And it's not...
It's pretty clear, if you know what was going on, what he means by that.
And that's why this episode is going to be a little bit different, is because the frustration of, like, Everybody wants us to cover these things that go viral.
Now, what's interesting, though, too, is that this is a little bit different than those other instances, because this is a case where I do believe that it's in context in as much as it is a video, that it doesn't have a bunch of quick cuts.
It is Alex saying, I'm fucking sick and tired of Trump.
It is that.
It is also devoid of the surrounding context that could be accessed, I mean, just by listening to his show.
It's hard to pay as much attention to it as we do.
And that's something that we constantly have to check ourselves on in terms of being like, how can you possibly not be aware of this completely sensible thing to not be aware of?
So this is where we get to why we didn't have an episode on Friday.
When I was exploring some of these ideas and listening to this clip and what have you, I realized that covering Alex's response to it would be unsatisfying.
I didn't want to do an episode where we look at this and then just say that Alex said that the clip that was released was out of context and the best I can say is kind of.
I felt like that feels way too close to defending Alex from my taste and I'm not into it.
I felt like the best thing I could do is try something I've never tried before and that was make some inquiries.
I sent emails, made a bunch of phone calls, and tried everything I could think of other than starting a social media pressure campaign, because I'm opposed to those.
But I was trying to get access to the raw footage of this clip that Hatewatch had released, trying to see where it came from, see what the surrounding discussion was around that.
What happened after Alex walked off camera, as he does at the end of that clip?
Did he immediately clarify himself, or did he sit down and say stuff that made it clear that what he meant is that he fucking personally hates Donald Trump as a human, and that he's connected to the mob?
I felt unable to wrestle with this clip fully without the surrounding context, because to me, this was a headline being presented without a body of text.
So, I did see, however, that the producer of the documentary that the clip is from, who gave the footage to Hatewatch, had replied to a tweet from one of our listeners that indicated that he would be willing to come on our show.
Typically, when things like this happen, I ignore them.
I don't have a lot of interest in doing an interview with someone who comes from the worlds that we cover since I have a default position of distrust and skepticism towards them.
And I'm not particularly drawn toward making a show like where me and a propagandist yell at each other incoherently.
So I figured a middle ground would be to reach out to him and see if he was open to letting us review the larger context of the clip that was released.
I made guarantees to everyone that I spoke to that I would respect the right of hate watches reporting, and I wouldn't scoop them by releasing clips.
They may or may not be worth it.
Of course.
The documentarian, Kalen Robertson, said that he gave the footage to Hatewatch, but would come on the show to discuss what it was like to work with Alex.
It's entirely possible that he saw me as someone just out to get the footage to create clickbait and undermine whatever plans there may or may not be for releasing things.
As Wednesday became Thursday, I realized that we needed to record an episode, that a lot of the audience expected that we would be covering that clip that Hatewatch released, and that without the larger footage, I didn't have much to bring to the table past saying, there's a larger context, Alex is still an asshole who lies about everything, but there's nuance here that might have been missed.
As I watched through that lens, a ton of questions came to mind, particularly about the state of mind one is in Clearly full of shit propaganda documentaries that feature only the opinions of extreme lunatics like Alex Jones, Tommy Robinson, Laura Loomer, and Gavin McGinnis.
I got into this idea, so early on Friday I sent Kalen another message explaining the reasoning for my wanting the raw footage to better understand the context.
I also said that if that wasn't possible, I still might want to chat and that if he was interested, I could email over some questions, he could decide whether or not he wanted to participate.
I had absolutely no interest in blindsiding anybody and I felt like he could see the questions, get the tone of what I was looking for, and decide whether or not he wanted to participate.
I did not send him the questions, though, to be fair.
It dawned on me that I knew very little about this guy, Kalen Robertson.
I pay attention to the right-wing media, but he's a behind-the-scenes guy, and his only direct association with Alex was in this film You Can't Watch This, which didn't impress me much and didn't cause a big splash when it came out.
The Hatewatch piece says that Robertson has disavowed the far-right and told Hatewatch he's working to undo the damage he did while producing propaganda for extremists such as Jones.
That's good, but words like, quote, producing propaganda for extremists like Jones are the kind of words that make me curious.
What other sorts of extremists are we talking about here?
I started poking around and this dude's fingerprints are on so many of the side characters we've discussed on this show.
He used to work at Rebel Media.
He did extensive work with Tommy Robinson.
He directed two flagrantly racist and intentionally manipulative documentaries with Lawrence Southern.
And perhaps most interestingly, he was the uncredited, but at very least, cameraman and probably editor or director of Stefan Molyneux's film, The Hundred Year March, A Philosopher in Poland.
We covered that entire documentary, and you can find it, it's episode 285 of our podcast.
But not only does Robertson boast this impressive list of right-wing shithead credentials, he also went along on that trip that Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux took to New Zealand in 2018 and even spoke prior to their talks after screening his very racist film Farmlands, which argues that black South Africans are trying to kill all the white farmers there.
It's important because I want to sort of make a philosophical argument, of course, about two cultures.
Obviously, there's the European Western culture, the white culture, and then there's the aborigine culture and there was a collision.
One, one.
Collision is a good way of whitewashing it.
And then, like, in general, cultures that lose, they either vanish or they turn into guilt-tripping manipulators to extract any giant red vending machine called white guilt.
Quick reminder that this is in New Zealand, and also that the Christchurch shooter donated money to Stefan Molyneux and was a big fan of Lauren Southern.
And named his manifesto The Great Replacement, which is the conspiracy about white genocide that Lauren Southern's movies are based on, which were directed by Kalen Robertson.
He said in that speech in New Zealand that he was covering this very sensitive topic about the South African farmers, so it was crucial to tell their stories properly.
Well, about that...
In a very interesting review of Lauren Southern's other film, Borderless, the YouTube commentator Jose brought up a very interesting problem about how farmland told the stories of these farmers.
Here's a little clip from Jose's video titled The Many Lies of Borderless.
unidentified
Towards the end of the video, I highlighted one of Lauren's major works, and that's the movie Farmlands.
A movie that advanced the racist conspiracy theory that black South Africans were out to kill white farmers, fueled by some sort of racial animosity that's ginned up by South African politicians.
In that movie, a woman named Janine Eichenfeldt had the gruesome details of her father's murder used to advance said racist conspiracy theory.
I mentioned that I didn't believe Janine was a willing participant in this, evidenced by the selective editing of her interview.
In an interview of May 2019, Eichenfelt told Ariel Levy, writing for The New Yorker, that she had been interviewed under a false premise.
Here's a quote.
I felt exploited.
Another farmer phoned me to say he's got this Canadian chickie doing a documentary about the drought.
Can you bring her to me?
Hence, I was in my farm boots and my shorts to go and show them the effect of the drought on the farm, and Lauren sat down and said, Tell me about your dad.
This is a shocking revelation, because it's not something that can possibly happen by accident.
It's the result of a conscious decision to mislead interview subjects and exploit what they tell you by taking it out of context to further the conclusion you want your propaganda to arrive at.
As it turns out, this is not the only way in which Farmlands, the documentary directed by Kaylin Robertson, failed to tell the woman's story properly.
In reality, her father was killed, and that is a tragedy, but the film fails to explain the details of the crime because they want to use it as a prop to make the argument that white farmers are being targeted for genocide by black South Africans.
...
farm.
Five days prior, this man had stabbed his girlfriend, who was a person of color, to death, and was chased by police, but not apprehended.
He went to this woman's father's farm, killed him, and robbed his house, and was subsequently arrested and is now serving a 30-year sentence in jail.
This is a case of a double murder, and it's sad and an awful crime, but it's not an act of racial hate towards white farmers, which is what Kalen's film portrays it as.
This isn't telling the story.
properly.
It's creating a fake version of a South African woman's pain to exploit to further a racist narrative.
And then it's further gaslighting an audience in New Zealand while doing audience warm-up for a guy who decided to be a white supremacist because less of them booed his dumbass.
The more I watched of his work, the more I didn't like him at all.
But the more I watched his interviews, the more I kind of liked him.
He's an immensely charming person, and that charisma probably played no small part in his ability to rise to such a position of prominence among these right-wing grifters, for whom appearance is so critical.
I mean, you know, like, Louis Theroux is an incredibly charming person, and that's part of why his documentaries end up with people saying stuff that maybe they wouldn't in other contexts.
Here we are in the present day, and Robertson has disavowed the errors of his ways from a few years ago, and he's trying to undo the damage he's done, and I do commend that.
I do.
I want to be very clear about that.
I was curious about the stories of his path to redemption, so I decided to dig a little bit deeper and watch some of the more recent interviews that were available out there to try and get a sense of this.
You know, like, one of the things that I loved the most about our podcast that unfortunately...
Maybe tainted now.
There's that episode about Jessica Schaub, the crystal child who...
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Someone informed me that she might not be as much of a wonderful success story as...
No, and I think that's a great example because I've thought about that one a lot.
You know, my exuberance towards her escape was...
Undeniable.
But, like, the more I've thought about that, the more I've just been like, you cannot take people at their word when they just say that they are disavowing stuff.
And the reason that we do, the reason that we always do, is because we want to believe that so hard.
I want to believe this guy.
Like, the reason that I'm so...
Against believing that this guy is disavowed.
It's because I know I want to.
Because I know that provides hope for me for my fucking family.
That provides hope for me for so many other people.
I'm struggling with the idea that it feels like we might be attacking him or something because I don't want to attack the idea that it's possible for your family or for people around you.
And, you know, the way that I talk, of course, everything I say sounds like an attack, but what I'm trying to express in my dumb way is that he has earned where he is.
He's earned where he got to.
And if you want to go somewhere else, you have to earn it.
And those, maybe they don't have to be equal.
But I'll tell you that given a few clips to the SPLC is not earning your way out of being the shitbag that you were.
And I was not convinced of that until I was watching this.
And as I was looking at this story of the upliftingness, I was like, this doesn't make sense.
There's something that doesn't match up.
So the first thing that stuck out to me was an interview that Robertson did with a Muslim activist in the UK named Ali Dawah.
Ali and Tommy's crew had a really high-profile run-in in the past, back in May of 2018, surrounding a rally that Tommy was throwing called Freedom Day.
The event was supposed to be a free speech rally, so Ali requested to speak at the rally, since why wouldn't a free speech rally want to have everybody have speech?
Initially, Allie was told he could speak, but ultimately he wasn't allowed to, and he was harassed, threatened, and attacked by Tommy's fans at the event.
This interaction between Allie and Kalen in September 2019 is actually really fascinating for a number of reasons.
The first is just the simple fact that these two people who were on opposite sides of things a little over a year prior were now able to have a polite conversation.
The other reason is that halfway through, their interview gets interrupted by an old British Islamophobe who spouts a bunch of anti-Muslim talking points at Ali for no other reason than because he looks like a Muslim.
The interview gets sidetracked and derailed by the consequences of Kalen's prior actions.
It's almost as if this interview is metaphorically expressing that the damage that Kalen did in his past lives on, no matter what he does.
And beyond that...
It even gets in the way of and will be a constant problem even when he's trying to do good, as he presumably is by having this chat with Ali.
It's remarkable how this turn of events captures a reality and a meta-reality, and both involve the person embodied by Ali patiently trying to deal with the aftermath of what this white nationalist propaganda has done to people.
The reason I find this interview the most interesting, however, is because of one detail that Kalen gives while discussing that Freedom Day march.
And it wasn't until you arrived that the head of the DFLA or the FLA or this, like, far-right group, you know, pretended they were about football, texted Tommy and said, if you let him on stage, we'll storm the stage, you'll, you know, you'll be attacked or whatever.
And Tommy was like...
This is fucking about freedom of speech.
This is the purpose of the event.
It's about freedom of expression and freedom of speech.
That's literally what it's about.
Nothing else.
And he was like, I can't do it, I can't do it.
Like, it's going to fucking piss everyone off.
I can't do it.
And then Lucy came on, super, super, super heated.
She said, everyone knows about this.
Everyone already knows he's invited.
He said he doesn't care if you can spin it up.
And she said, just admit it, it's because he's fucking Muslim, isn't it?
I have no idea what was said when Kalen's mic cut out there, but the gist of that story is that when Tommy was okay with the idea of Ali being disinvited to speak at this free speech event because he was Muslim, it made Kalen wake up and realize that Tommy didn't care about free speech at all.
The conversation goes on to be about how Tommy uses free speech rhetoric as a mask to hide his real agenda, which is racism generally and anti-Islam agitation.
But the claim that he's making, I actually kind of believe, and the reason I do, is that in July 2020, Kaylin released a video through the Byline Times, which captures Tommy Rod We should do a free speech march.
The point here, whether or not this tape was from before or after the Freedom Day event, that day in 2018 is supposed to be the day that Kalen realized that Tommy Robinson used the facade of free speech as a way to cover his racism and trick people into getting involved with it.
That rally took place on May 6th, 2018, so it's safe to assume that anything that took place after that point was done with the full awareness that the whole free speech argument from the right-wing media figures is nonsense.
Well, for one, in his documentary, You Can't Watch This, which you can watch, Kalen interviews Alex Jones about how he was kicked off all those social media entities, which happened in early August 2018, after the Freedom Day rally.
This interview is being recorded in January 2019, even later than that.
Plenty of time to reflect on how maybe Tommy Robinson isn't the only person who uses free speech complaints to mask their bigotry.
To make matters worse, Tommy Robinson himself is one of the subjects of this documentary, and the entire point of it, if you couldn't tell from the title, is that these people who have just alternative points of view are having their free speech violated and they're wrongly being called racists.
The entire concept of this documentary In January 2019, at the same time he was making this documentary, Kalen was interviewed by Sky News.
In this interview, he tells a story about a short film he made about Muslim extremists while in college.
This film that he made didn't end up making the class's screening.
And if you listen carefully to this interview, you might notice Kalen using free speech arguments to justify people's racism.
Well, I made a, like, I think it was like a nine-minute film just about a...
It wasn't Anjum Charity, but there was a bunch of Muslim extremists who were walking up and down Whitechapel, and I was just interviewing a few of them, not that they would really want to talk very much, but going up to the cameras.
And then I showed it to one of my lecturers, and they were like, oh, this is interesting, but we're not going to put it in the screening of the official...
Like, of the official screening of all the short films at the end of the year.
And I was like, oh, that's really strange.
I didn't really think much of it.
But then when I started Googling about universities not, like, deplatforming things or maybe not showing all different ideas...
I think they were just trying to be polite to a lot of the other students and they didn't want to upset a lot of different people and bring that kind of argument into the classroom.
Yeah, well, this is why I say that the left created Tommy.
Like, the left created this situation as well.
Like, if you would only show something, maybe we have some difficult conversations and actually not silence freedom of speech or not silence content, then people might not start questioning this too much.
People might not start dedicating their lives to it or getting involved in activism to try and fight it.
Like, that wouldn't be the case because there wouldn't be a silence around it.
This is an appeal to the idea that the left being censorious and limiting free speech of people like Tommy Robinson.
read racists is what causes people to become racist.
These people aren't actually even racists.
They're just made to look that way because normal society won't let them have the difficult conversations that they want to have.
You know, those difficult conversations like the ones his buddy Stefan Molyneux wants to have, but for an Nothing I love more than oppressing people for hundreds of years and then blaming them for making me feel bad.
It was in January 2019.
And then in May 2019, Kalen appeared as a guest on RT to promote his documentary, The You Can't Watch This.
And he discussed what the film covers.
Once again, after he should have realized this was no good, he relies on whitewashing his subject's behaviors by appealing to free speech.
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The project looks into how social media is being used as a tool to exclude certain voices.
It focuses on the online war with prominent conservatives and the implications this removal of content has for the freedom of speech.
The director says he hoped the film would uncover how serious and widespread it's become and the danger it poses to our culture.
Now, the film follows five controversial figures who have been victims of social media purges.
One is British activist Tommy Robinson, who founded the far-right English Defense League.
Facebook accused Robinson of promoting hate against the Muslim community.
Also featured is Alex Jones, director of the Infowars website.
Permanently banned from Twitter, Jones is said to have promoted discriminatory behavior and spread disinformation.
Now, to discuss the documentary and the issue it touches upon, we're joined now by Kaylin Robertson, an executive producer of the documentary, You Can't Watch This, and Masoud Sajure, chair of the Islamic Human Rights Commission.
You're both very welcome to the program.
Now, Kaylin, if we could start with you, social media platforms are public forums.
Do you not think it's a fair argument to respect the diversity of users and not to actively provoke or offend them?
Well, yeah, well, what this documentary explores is the increasing powers that social media have in changing the Overton window, in influencing what people can and can't watch online as consumers, in changing elections.
And this is why it's so important.
And a lot of people argue, oh, well, you know, they're private companies, they can do what they want.
Well, they're actually acting like publishers and they actually have a duty to actually hold free speech as one of their core values, especially given how important social media is in our society.
It seems like even though he had known for at least a year that this was specifically a tactic that one of his subjects, Tommy Robinson, used to subtly promote racist ideas to an unsuspecting population, Kalen was still willing to employ the same tactic to subtly promote his film full of bigots to an unsuspecting population, which is strange.
So I was sitting with this, and I was really, like, just reflecting, and I was wondering why I was even doing this.
And I want to jump back here real quick, because I think there's something interesting that I noticed in that interview that he did in January 2019 with Sky News.
And it's illuminating to me, because here he is discussing, I know you're going to think this is going to be worse than it is, but here's...
Here's Kalen saying some things that he thought about the civil rights era.
I loved what the left did in the 60s, 70s, and 80s with the civil rights movement, with the rights for women, with the rights for gays.
It's groundbreaking.
It's what made us as Westerners...
Great.
I always thought the left was fabulous when I started at university.
I was like, of course I'd be of the left, of course.
Everyone told me that, and I assumed they were the ones who were progressive, caring.
That was the best thing.
But it wasn't until I actually saw what was going on until I actually started seeing the homophobia from the people that they were already friends with, the anti-Semitism that the left are willing to put up with.
But I thought, ooh, it's losing their touch a little bit.
It never used to be like that as well.
They're losing their touch completely, and we need to stamp that out.
But that clip is actually a really critical point to distinguish Kalen from the rest of the extreme right wing that he was hanging around with.
His right-wing existence is not philosophical.
It's not rooted in the same traditions as his extreme right-wing peers who are deeply anti-communist, and they would view the left of the 60s and 70s as one of the greatest existential threats that the West has ever seen.
If Kalen was rooted in the more entrenched school of the right wing, he would view things like integration, voting rights, and LGBTQ protections as things that were pushed by communists in order to divide and conquer society.
It doesn't seem to me, from looking through the available information that I can find, that there's a lot of depth to Kalen's right wing views.
In many ways, it seems aesthetic, almost.
It seems almost performed.
Work that he did back when he was on The Rebel is often about dumb, pointless culture war-type complaints.
Like this clip from July 2017, where he was oh so mad that there was a new emoji that got released.
The original idea, according to their website, was to have an emoji with a dark purple headscarf.
But fearing that was a little bit too crazy, they decided on a more neutral, font-color one.
Which I think is a lot more appropriate, to be honest.
In the Change.org petition, the group asked how they were going to make progress if they don't include everyone in their path for peace and acceptance.
And oh boy, are they right!
I mean, how on earth are we supposed to achieve world peace without the right emojis?
It's just not going to happen.
And I don't know about you, but I'm so proud to see the tech industry making such giant leaps for humanity.
And then, you know, he unconvincingly argues that the British are at war with Islam after the suicide bombing in Manchester in 2017, which, just again, this doesn't feel convincing.
And once again it proves that we are currently right now at this very place in time on the 23rd of May 2017 at war.
And the left seem to think that they still dominate the narrative of this entire perspective.
We had Katy Perry only hours ago saying that we need to ignore what's going on and keep the borders open and stop.
We've had hundreds of political figures on pretty much every side of the political spectrum, up and down the country, explain to all of us and lecture us about how we must come together, how we must unite, and how we must not hate anybody.
Well, the fact is that we are coming together.
But we're coming together as British people.
And Islamists are coming together as themselves, and we are becoming even more of a target.
And it's a total waste of time, and we are lying to ourselves if we think that having some sort of vigil, posting notes all over city centres saying that we will not be cowed and lighting candles will make any difference.
Now, the only differences between World War II, the last time this country looked as at war as we are now, was that at least then we could name the enemy, and at least then we actually fought back.
And now we don't do even slightly something like that.
No, like, my career was always in marketing and politics and, well, sort of PR and things like that at university.
And after I graduated, you know, my partner was at the BBC and I was working in marketing and PR firms.
And that's where everything was really, really focused.
And that's obviously how I transitioned from sort of traditional establishment sectors into what we're doing now, sort of taking all of the textbook stuff and applying it to kind of more sort of fringe alternative subjects, which is interesting.
This isn't a person who's motivated by the same ideologies that many of the people we talk about are.
The InfoWars universe, particularly in the pre-Trump era, but still to this day, is based on the bedrock of ideas disseminated by the John Birch Society and their associated figures.
It's almost entirely a merging of Cold War anti-communism run amok and extreme white identity-tinged religious beliefs.
That's what you find behind many of Alex's guests and in his own intellectual tradition.
This is the same intellectual tradition that popularized conspiracies about the globalists, which have morphed into the deep state conspiracies in the past few years.
The pool that Kalen is swimming in was filled by anti-communist conspiracy theories, but I don't get the sense that he knows how the plumbing works.
So covering the stories that a lot of traditional media and establishment media don't want to talk about or are too worried to talk about.
Sort of covering the other side of a lot of the conversations that aren't being discussed, even in day-to-day life.
I'm bringing production value to that as well and legitimizing those arguments so that they're not like fringe sort of things on the corners of the internet and bringing that to the mainstream.
In 2019, while on Sky News, prior to being on RT to promote his free speech documentary full of racists, Caitlin fully expresses an awareness that his role is to take fringe things and make them look presentable so that people might get tricked into thinking that they're mainstream.
Yeah, or if your ideology was simplistic and not really based in the same things that are motivating this wide swath of right-wing ideology that is back to the militia movement.
Well, the thing that I run into that I think is really difficult is that, like, I do believe he probably ended up in a position that was different than where he wanted to be.
But from everything I can tell, it's not the story of somebody who got sucked into YouTube algorithms and got into right wing ideology or something like that.
It's somebody who sought out working with Tommy Robinson and rebel media in order to produce racist content that looked better than what was being created.
No, I mean, we talked about this, and part of why I was so vehemently against interviewing is, and I don't know if I'll bore you with this one more time, but whenever my family left the cult, before they could be accepted back in...
Yeah, before they could be accepted back into their family, and it took a while.
It took a while.
They had to send...
Actual letters of apology, single-spaced, that actually enumerated, we understand where we went wrong, and here is what we are going to do about that to improve things.
This is a genuine apology because it's about knowing how to correct the mistake instead of just saying, I'm sorry for the bad things that happened.
Because I'm not interested in Kalen's personal life.
I'm not interested in anything about that.
I'm very willing to believe that he is a good person and that he's had a change of heart.
I'm concerned about the product.
I'm concerned about the effects and the work.
The path to making things right for somebody who had his hands in and produced slash directed documentaries for Lauren Southern, Alex Jones, and fucking Stefan Molyneux, within the last few years, it's a path.
It's tough.
The public has been hurt by this.
A lot.
I do think that things that you can see online, things that he said, they do give the indication and suggestion, and I don't have any reason to necessarily distrust it, that he wants to make that path, and I hope he does.
I would say that the questions that I've been raised with through this is, okay, so he's...
Part of his redemption campaign is gotcha clips, half of which were already in the fucking documentary, that show Alex Jones represents himself differently in public than he does in private.
And what you have just played for me is a clip of this guy representing himself differently in public.
In the interview where he says, here's what I believe and this is the moment it happened to me.
And then a clip from a year later talking about his fucking documentary.
Ultimately, also, I think it's important to remember that in the big picture, it doesn't matter whether or not we believe him.
This dude doesn't owe me or you anything.
Any apologies that he needs to make are probably to other people, and they could have already happened, and we don't know.
And that's totally cool, and that's their business.
I'm not interested in it.
This show is largely created by me taking in Alex Jones's content and finding things that stick out as interesting and seeing where curiosity takes me.
In this case, there was a high profile viral video of Alex and the exploration of the context of it and where it came from led me to learn a bunch of stuff about a guy who's apparently turned over a new leaf.
I respect and I'll defend people's right to change, but I think there needs to be really serious examination of the professional careers of people who are claiming to have changed, because to not do so is dangerous, professionally.
Recent history is full of people who tried to make dishonest rebrands.
I'm sure Samantha Bee isn't happy she played along with Glenn Beck's bullshit about how he was sorry about all that stuff, and then he went back on it.
In May 2019, the Daily Dot published an article about how noted white national...
This article quotes him as saying, Flash forward to the present, and the last we heard of him was when he was arrested for being part of the January 6th storming of the U.S. Capitol.
My kind of gist on how I'm, because I've thought about it a lot since we've been talking about this whole thing, and part, I think, part of the simple thing that I kind of want is like, okay, you don't get to be in public.
One thing that I've noticed so often is that I'm just going to change jobs.
Well, and the thing that really I struggle with, again, too, is that, like...
When you have stories of people who have been sucked down rabbit holes of information, like YouTube radicalization and what have you, I feel like their stories are valuable.
And I don't think Kalen's story is unvaluable.
But I think that their stories are really useful because people in their position can hear them and relate to things that they're talking about.
So, the rest of the reporting in that Hatewatch article that this clip was released in this initial clip...
It's not stuff from the video.
It's just things like Kalen telling him, you know, like that Alex brags about selling dick pills, and his audience was gullible, and then he paid Paul Joseph Watson $16,000 a month.
I think that the problem with stuff like that, and it's definitely something that I've realized over the course of doing this show, is that that is something that everybody who...
Well, I mean, you'd have to change your entire worldview because some guy who you know is connected to the SPLC told you that Alex thought buying dick pills made you a joke.
You know?
And it's like, one, these are dick pills.
I'm not even going to admit that I buy these.
And two, I am not going to believe that I've been conned out of having good boners.
So, at the end of this, what we come to is, you know, we have...
A situation where it's essentially another instance of the media bungling how you report on Alex.
And honestly, I think that maybe you could look at this and think it was a slam dunk, but if you just had a little bit of context to what was going on in Alex's life at that time, you'd look at that clip entirely differently than how it's supposed to be presented.
And then after that, I just don't know, man.
I don't know how I feel.
We've finished recording, we're at the end of this, and I don't know how I feel.
I don't know if I feel shitty about looking at these things.
I don't know if it is worth anyone's time to be like, hey, here is somebody who's embarking on a redemption arc, and I think that's cool.
I think it's possible.
But I also think we need to wrestle with the fact...
That this isn't somebody who just came off the YouTube.
It's somebody who went to New Zealand with fucking Stefan Molyneux.
I play it to illustrate that as far as I can tell, everything that I look at and I can see, it's the mark of a willing and excited participant in this stuff.