#538: March 2, 2021
Today, Dan and Jordan discuss the viral clip that came out last week of Alex Jones saying he wished he'd never met Trump, and the conflicted path that led Dan down.
March 8, 2021 - Knowledge Fight
01:40:02
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I'm sweating. | ||
| Knowledgefight.com. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
| I have great respect for knowledge fight. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Dan and George. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Knowledge fight. | |
| I need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Andy in Kansas. | |
| Stop it. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for holding us. | |
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Knowledge Fight. | |
| KnowledgeFight.com. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| I'm Jordan. | ||
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around, drink novelty beverages, and talk just a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Oh, indeed we are, Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Dan! | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Blackjack! | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Then I have a quick question for you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's your bright spot today? | ||
| Blackjack. | ||
| I've been playing a lot of online blackjack lately. | ||
| Oh, well, that works. | ||
| That makes things much easier. | ||
| I guess it's kind of related to that, but that was a joke. | ||
| I guess one of my bright spots, I think, is kind of like I'm starting to forgive myself for enjoying video games. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| We talk about some games we're playing every now and again in these bright spots. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I've started to recognize some of these unexamined biases I have towards myself for liking video games. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Growing up, my parents were very against... | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| You play half an hour a day and then I'm going to throw that thing out the window. | ||
| Totally, totally. | ||
| And it's always been something that you could be doing something better than that. | ||
| And I think I have a little bit of self-appointed stigma about it. | ||
| And I'm starting to feel a little bit less that way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think part of that is just like I'm recognizing there are a lot of really good video games that are a lot of fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Taking away a little bit of that shame is good. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And it's like, I get that. | ||
| Sometimes I do. | ||
| I got a video game for you. | ||
| It's called The Museum. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Get over there. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| There's a lot of that. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think it's good to retain a little bit of it lest I descend into only playing games. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| You can go too far with anything. | ||
| I'm finding a balance. | ||
| Anyway, what about you? | ||
| I like it. | ||
| Dan? | ||
| There's a new Mogwai album out, Dan, and that is important to me. | ||
| Don't feed that album after midnight. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Okay, Dan. | ||
| No, it's really interesting to me that there's a new album all the way in 2021 because I think the first time I saw them live was in 2001. | ||
| And they've been putting out music since the late 80s. | ||
| But it's Mogwai, so it's not like the Rolling Stones are those old bands of 70-year-olds who are still touring. | ||
| It's weird post-rock. | ||
| So everybody who goes is like, I want to hear your new shit! | ||
| Post-rock all sounds basically the same. | ||
| I have an interesting confession to make. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| I know nothing about Mogwai. | ||
| You don't know anything about Mogwai? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| Mogwai is one of the most important, first off, Scottish bands there's ever been. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| And second, Mogwai helped create the entire genre of post-rock as we know it. | ||
| Yeah, this is a big blind spot for me, clearly, because you could have told me they were metal or folk, and I wouldn't have believed either. | ||
| Well, now let me tell you something about post-rock, Dan. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| There are elements of metal and... | ||
| Landfolk that have been applied. | ||
| Goddammit. | ||
| And they have wound up influencing other... | ||
| It's only fair that I sit through this music lecture because I got a lot to get through in terms of Professor Dan today. | ||
| Jordan, today we have an interesting episode to go over. | ||
| I think there's a lot of ins and outs, a lot of twists. | ||
| Hoo boy. | ||
| But before we get down to business on that, let's take a little moment to say thank you to some folks who signed up and are supporting the show. | ||
| Oh, I think that's a great idea. | ||
| So first, Nick, and this is spelled N-I-K. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Nick! | ||
| Thank you! | ||
| Next, Keeley. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Keeley! | ||
| Next, Spunglodorf Enemy. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| However, you are also my enemy, for I am Spungalodorf. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Next, thank you to Eviscerated by a Reptoid over Cadbury Eggs. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much, Vision of All of Our Fates. | ||
| Next, Dante H. Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Dante! | ||
| Thank you! | ||
| And finally, I'd like to say thank you to a technocrat out there. | ||
| Actually, it's two people splitting a technocrat, so maybe they're both... | ||
| Ah, who knows? | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| Anyway, Matt and Ben, thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a technocrat. | ||
| Or technocrats, you decide. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Crikey, mate, that's fantastic. | ||
| Have yourself a brew. | ||
| How's your 401k doing, bro? | ||
| Alright, we gotta go full tilt boogie on this, Watson, alright? | ||
| Let's just get down to business. | ||
| We ain't making that money off that heroin. | ||
| Why are you pimps so good? | ||
| My neck is freakishly large. | ||
| I declare Infowar on you. | ||
| Thank you so much, Matt and Ben! | ||
| Yes, thank you very much to the both of you. | ||
| And, Jordan, we got a little bit of a special occasion to celebrate today. | ||
| Do we? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| It's Mogwai's birthday. | ||
| Oh, no! | ||
| Oh, shit! | ||
| Somebody fed him after midnight. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| No, we've got a special birthday shout-out going out to Easter. | ||
| Happy birthday out there. | ||
| The holiday of Easter? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| A person by the name of Easter. | ||
| Oh, Estarte. | ||
| The Sumerian god of... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ooh. | |
| Maybe. | ||
| No, but I am excited that Easter candy is starting to show up. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| At the Walgreens and what have you. | ||
| I do appreciate that. | ||
| Very pumped. | ||
| Reese's peanut butter eggs are put out there February 5th. | ||
| 15th, baby! | ||
| I like those eggs, the hard-shelled eggs, the mini eggs. | ||
| Those are the best. | ||
| Those are fantastic. | ||
| Holy shit, they're so good. | ||
| So anyway, happy birthday, Easter. | ||
| I hope you enjoy some Easter candy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, please. | |
| And everybody's doing well. | ||
| Yeah, the thing that I... | ||
| It's terrible, but my partner is allergic to peanuts. | ||
| And so... | ||
| I have to hoard Reese's peanut butter eggs and eat them like a squirrel before I get home. | ||
| And then like mouthwash and brush my teeth. | ||
| But Dan, they're worth it. | ||
| I'm going to get you some Reese's almond butter eggs. | ||
| How dare you, sir! | ||
| Not quite the same. | ||
| No. | ||
| So Jordan, we didn't have an episode on Friday. | ||
| And in the interest of full transparency, I want to discuss what happened. | ||
| Essentially, that video of Alex saying that he wished he'd never met Trump threw me into a complete tailspin. | ||
| Oh, of course. | ||
| Part of me. | ||
| The selfish part. | ||
| Wishes I'd never met Donald Trump. | ||
| Wishes that I'd never met Roger Stone. | ||
| 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? | ||
| It's like I'm sick of it. | ||
| We'll do it in a minute. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, you know, like Trump said, Hillary and Obama created ISIS. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, but Trump, it's Barack Trump. | |
| Trump uses it like a prophylactic. | ||
| He just shoves ISIS up his big, dirty asshole. | ||
| I apologize to TV stations. | ||
| Yeah, and then, you know, he said even more. | ||
| And, of course, the whole part where Alex yelled fuck Trump a bunch that day before he realized he was streaming live. | ||
| Well, there's that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck Trump and fuck these fucking people. | |
| At a certain point, man, I'm sick of all you fucking liberals and mainlanders. | ||
| You're a bunch of cowardly fucks. | ||
| You're not Americans. | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Okay, should we shut these fees down and delete those? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just shut those fees down or restart them, okay? | |
| Yeah, no one will ever know about this. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I see that. | ||
| I see that. | ||
| They were on TV. | ||
| I see that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I have been swearing too much. | ||
| It's been made clear. | ||
| It's so fucking clear right now, Owen. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was a tough, drunk night for Alex. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, they don't come off in a positive light no matter how you try and spin them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So now, some of these clips might be a little obscure. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| 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 don't dislike Donald Trump. | ||
| And I think he's done some good things on trying to do peace and trying to get jobs back to America. | ||
|
unidentified
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But I hate Donald Trump. | |
| Because I got behind him because I knew Hillary was bad. | ||
| And then he became my identity. | ||
| He's not a bad guy. | ||
| But the truth is, I hate him more than Hillary Clinton. | ||
| Because he's who I am now. | ||
| And whatever he does is who I am. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I am not with Donald Trump. | |
| I'm with America and freedom and everything else. | ||
| And I'm not throwing him under the bus to get George Soros on my back. | ||
| Though they're already after me for the reasons I'm not with them. | ||
| I'm not against even Trump. | ||
| But I get in a fight like this that's so dumbed down. | ||
| That then, no matter what I do, they take my radicalness, my weirdness to hurt Trump. | ||
| But then all it does is radioactively attack me. | ||
| I don't know how to describe it, but it's like Trump is breaking my legs every day. | ||
| And it's not like I'm not willing to go through the pain, except a lot of what he says I don't agree with, and he's not my identity. | ||
| Sandy Hook's not my identity. | ||
| Donald Trump's not my identity. | ||
| You're talking from your own personal perspective, and I appreciate that. | ||
| I don't know how many people actually think that he's your identity. | ||
| Me! | ||
| You might notice that in these clips I've played, there are instances that Alex is... | ||
| Clearly intoxicated on air. | ||
| I was about to say, Dan, there are very similar speech patterns and, uh, yeah. | ||
| That's something of a theme, and it's something that seems also to be related to the clip that was released by Hatewatch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The clip of Alex saying that he's sick of Trump that we played at the beginning. | ||
| Yeah, and you can argue in vino veritas if you would like, but... | ||
| I'm not gonna even get into any of that. | ||
| Alex definitely seems drunk in that clip, and that makes sense. | ||
| But the thing is, this is not a behavior that's exclusive to when he's clearly fucked up. | ||
| In late January 2019, Alex was getting deeply frustrated with being associated with Trump, at least partially because fundraising... | ||
| 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. | ||
| And so the truth is, Trump is the Johnson holster for the warmongering neocons and Democrats. | ||
| Trump is the Johnson holster of the military-industrial complex. | ||
| And these are just clips about, like, Trump. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| They always check the SPLC to see whether or not they should trust people. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's going to be ignored. | ||
| I was going to say, it's like RT being like, Russia's not doing anything evil today. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| On the evening of March 2nd... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Alex, I just might as well bring this up to you because it's kind of funny. | ||
| Is this the Daily Mail article where they say a Howard Stern puppet to me is real? | ||
| No, no, that's a different one. | ||
| This one just came out from the Southern Poverty Law Center. | ||
| This is so ridiculous, especially when I work here and I know the true story and then to just read their lies. | ||
| Alex Jones on leaked video. | ||
| I wish I never met Trump. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It has HIV in it. | ||
| That's what happens when you defeat parody. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you've finally won over, like, SNL can't fucking... | ||
| No, I mean, that might have been said by a person doing an impression, but Alex has said all of those things. | ||
| Yeah, no, no, that's word for word. | ||
| He literally said all those things. | ||
| He could have been reading off of any episode transcript. | ||
| Yeah, it could have been. | ||
| No, no, no, not hard. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's also another thing that's beyond parody. | ||
| No good or reasonable human being would fucking fly by their own child with a helicopter. | ||
| You've won. | ||
| You've defeated me. | ||
| That's ridiculous and evil. | ||
| So we now get to the formulaic defense. | ||
| Exactly what you would expect. | ||
| Alex... | ||
| So they're saying that it's a leaked footage from a documentary filmmaker that you paid on his film. | ||
| Even though that's not even accurate. | ||
| We didn't pay him to make that. | ||
| He did that on his own. | ||
| Well, no, let me explain. | ||
| Turns out those guys worked for Hope Not Hate and said they probably lost their ADL, you know, that whole group. | ||
| Ah, there we go. | ||
| They came to me and they said, we're making this documentary with Paul Watts and all these people that were here one day. | ||
| They did the interview and they said, what's your feelings on Trump? | ||
| And I said, well, it's devil's advocate. | ||
| It's in the film. | ||
| I said, part of me hates him. | ||
| It destroyed my life. | ||
| You know, it's terrible. | ||
| I wish I would have met him, but I'm still glad I did it because overall, even though it's been painful, I always do that. | ||
| You know, they always get me on that. | ||
| So that's in a DVD we sell. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I've never heard that before. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The audience requires an answer for that clip because people are posting it around, which is delivered by Alex saying that it's out of context. | ||
| That's enough. | ||
| The audience does not then become curious about what the larger context is. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| Alex is standing on slightly sturdier ground here than he normally is when he makes that claim. | ||
| I went and I rewatched the full documentary called You Can't Watch This, and the part that that clip is in, part of it is in the movie. | ||
| Here is that. | ||
| It's not just me who's at risk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
*music* | |
| Part of me, the selfish part, wishes I'd never met Donald Trump. | ||
| Fantastic business. | ||
| I don't know if you can see that thing right up there. | ||
| We can. | ||
| But it's doing great business. | ||
| I hope your audience goes out and buys it as Christmas gifts and everything else. | ||
| And I just want to finish by saying your reputation's amazing. | ||
| I will not let you down. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You will be very, very impressed, I hope. | |
| And I think we'll be speaking a lot. | ||
| Being sucked into that. | ||
| The whole vortex, it was like selling your soul. | ||
| Everything I did, everything I was, and everything I was trying to do, at that point, it didn't matter how diverse it was. | ||
| It didn't matter how it was multifaceted. | ||
| It all became that at that point. | ||
| So Trump came to get my populist audience, and then he did that. | ||
| The Democrats saw it as a threat. | ||
| They attacked it and said that I was Donald Trump, thinking that would hurt him. | ||
| It made Trump stronger. | ||
| It made him win the election. | ||
| And so they understand that Donald Trump is Infowars, and that I'm Donald Trump now. | ||
| And it's like a ring of doom. | ||
| We've been merged together into this thing, and they're obsessed with it. | ||
| If I'd had a target on my back before... | ||
| When I signed on to promote America's resurgence, to promote Donald Trump, all the attacks I'd been through before were like boot camp. | ||
| This was the real battle. | ||
| And that's when it got crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The future definitely worries me. | |
| I left the beginning and end just to show that that's where... | ||
| It's unedited. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| I understand. | ||
| This introduces some really murky issues for me. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I didn't know that that was in there, and now I'm real not happy about this. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No, I know. | ||
| Don't feel too bad for him. | ||
| No, I don't feel bad at all. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, but that clip that's in the documentary is thematically the same. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The only difference is that Alex seems to be a little more mad, and he's having a little bit of an outburst. | ||
| I just don't give a shit. | ||
| Once you say someone shoved ISIS up their dirty asshole, I don't care! | ||
| You've already said enough! | ||
| It's tough to top that. | ||
| Dan, if I told you you shoved fucking the base up your dirty asshole... | ||
| I don't think we would be going beyond that. | ||
| We'd be like, we got it. | ||
| If you're on stage and you say that, I'm giving you the light. | ||
| Yeah, we got it, guys. | ||
| It's what's been said needed to be said, and it's over. | ||
| It's about time. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I don't want to just cover Trump. | ||
| Or Roger Stone. | ||
| And I like Roger. | ||
| But it's taken all the oxygen out of the room of all the incredible stuff going on around the world. | ||
| Iran on the edge of war with Israel, what's happening in Venezuela, what Soros saying, get ready for China to collapse, which I agree with. | ||
| But that's like Soros is jumping on the bandwagon. | ||
| A lot of listeners love the show, but they also say, Alex, we want you to get back to... | ||
| Secret society some, and the globalist, and the esoteric, and weather modification. | ||
| Because the last three years, it's been all Trump all the time. | ||
| And that's because we've been in an epic civil war with the globalists. | ||
| And there'll still be a lot of Trump here. | ||
| It's just that I don't want to cover every facet of everything Trump does. | ||
| Alex was feeling like his identity had been subsumed by the Trump. | ||
| Rightly. | ||
| He was feeling right. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| He was correctly feeling that. | ||
| And he was feeling some kind of backlash from the audience over this. | ||
| They were expressing that they weren't... | ||
| There was some... | ||
| Whatever it was. | ||
| Maybe it's somebody who works at InfoWars. | ||
| Maybe it was an outpouring of feedback from the audience. | ||
| Like, we missed back when you were fun. | ||
| This is boring in one note. | ||
| No, I know. | ||
| And I feel like this is such a nothing simply because it seems impossible to believe. | ||
| It's impossible for me to believe that any right-thinking person would look at the grifters and not think they all actually hate Donald Trump. | ||
| Like in the campaign in the primary. | ||
| They all hate him. | ||
| They all hate him. | ||
| But it's just part of the game. | ||
| He won the game and now they have to lick his boots. | ||
| Any reasonable person would be like, yeah, of course Alex hates Donald Trump. | ||
| Yeah, I think anybody except the most ambitious grifter would have seen that like, okay, the money is following this. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And the most ambitious grifter would have probably, the bet might have paid off. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe. | |
| It'd be a long bet. | ||
| I don't know if anybody who's boosting Rand Paul is making a lot of money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't think so. | |
| Anybody who's stuck with Rand. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| So... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Quite a time to be alive, my friends. | ||
| Trump's going to declare a national emergency tonight. | ||
| It's already been declared privately. | ||
| Oh, I remember that one. | ||
| I like private declarations. | ||
| It's as if they're being let up before a firing squad. | ||
| Or how about this clip? | ||
| Mike Adams, incredible job. | ||
| NaturalNews.com will join us tonight, 7 o 'clock Central, for coverage of Trump's epic declaration of emergency. | ||
| As he says, we're in an emergency. | ||
| I may declare an emergency. | ||
| Oh, he's going to declare it. | ||
| Mike, thank you. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| Stay with us. | ||
| Or this one. | ||
| Mike Adams, God bless you. | ||
| Great job to join us tonight, 7 o 'clock, Central, 8 p.m. Eastern, 4. The coverage of Trump declaring a national emergency. | ||
| I don't know how all this is going to end, but if the globalists want to fight, they better believe they've got one! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ha ha ha! | |
| Yeah! | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oath Cookies. | |
| He's going to be joining us. | ||
| I would eat Oath Cookies. | ||
| But here's the bottom line. | ||
| You can't eat any other cookies. | ||
| Yale for his writings and of course worked for Ron Paul. | ||
| Smart guy. | ||
| He concurs with what I've said. | ||
| Trump essentially is no longer the president. | ||
| He has advocated his responsibility. | ||
| He's signing it away. | ||
| He's letting a group of people around him tell him that he can't fire the head of the Federal Reserve. | ||
| What you can do in the code. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And we were talking about back then. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You go and you show at the university four or five palace-sized houses, 40 million, 13 million, you name it. | ||
| And you say, is this Donald Trump's? | ||
| Everybody thinks he's the richest guy. | ||
| The guy's literally nothing. | ||
| Kind of just a front man. | ||
| For some consortiums on the East Coast, I'll leave it at that. | ||
| Oh yeah, Trump's a piece of work, folks. | ||
| And they go in there. | ||
| It's just mind-blowing. | ||
| I don't even know what to say anymore. | ||
| And like, he did this a lot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Donald Trump owns a bunch of casinos. | ||
| Donald Trump's involved in a bunch of stuff. | ||
| He's basically a front man for some very hardcore people. | ||
| And he gives tons of money to the Democratic Party, more to Democrats than Republicans in the last 30 years. | ||
| So you can bet this is all his phonies, a $3 bill. | ||
| And Donald Trump, I have it from high-level sources, is... | ||
| Well, let's just say, with a name like Trump, they don't come after you. | ||
| With a name like Carleone, they do. | ||
| Don Trump will be back. | ||
| Stay with us. | ||
| I'm Alex Jones. | ||
| You want the truth? | ||
| Can you handle it? | ||
| You're gonna get it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ha ha. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So this is the reality of a clip like the one released by Hatewatch. | ||
| It's Schrodinger's clip. | ||
| It's simultaneously in and out of context. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| No, I tweeted out immediately, because I got all those. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I got all those, too. | |
| I tweeted out immediately. | ||
| I was like, this is just an ad for Alex and the filmmaker. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| It's just because, goddammit, Dan, how many times are we going to do this? | ||
| I understand. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We did! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure! | |
| Three years ago! | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean, there's a certain part of me that finds it. | ||
| It's defensible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just because, look. | ||
| I mean, it's not you shouldn't be paying attention to that world, but I'm not going to say that it's bad that you don't. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And there's absolutely value in taking something that otherwise people wouldn't know and bringing it out to them. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| There are tons of people who don't pay attention to Alex and just know of him. | ||
| I'm sure it's a very valuable thing for them to know. | ||
| Also, he's full of shit on this. | ||
| And if they didn't know that and now they do, that's a net positive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We don't need that at all. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, Dan, we don't, in our world... | ||
| Headlines being their own story is not good. | ||
| That's what Alex does. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| No one at the SPLC or Hatewatch returned my calls or emails and my press request went unanswered. | ||
| It's hard to believe that they wouldn't suddenly drop everything for a podcast. | ||
| Look, dude, I understand people are busy and not everyone's aware of us, so I don't take it personally or anything. | ||
| I completely understand and I'm not shitting on anybody. | ||
| I just am saying this to say I tried. | ||
| To get access to this, and I failed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I take it a little personally. | ||
| Well, you can, because that's your role. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I take it a little bit personally. | ||
| I just find it a little bit frustrating that if you're reporting on Alex Jones, you can't find the only podcast about him. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It seems easy to find. | ||
| What's great is that I put in all the effort, and then you get to be mad that it didn't work out. | ||
| What? | ||
| Okay, are you going to play the victim for being a better person than me? | ||
| No, I just think it's fine. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And I don't think I can interview him because I'm famous for saying cut his dick off to Roger Stone. | ||
| True. | ||
| That would make things a little bit adversarial. | ||
| So I wasn't convinced that I should interview him and you were strongly opposed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| 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. | ||
| point he stopped responding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, odd. | |
| 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. | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He doesn't know me at all, and I can't begrudge someone being careful about who they would trust online, so this didn't seem too strange to me. | |
| I think I moderated my tone, but honestly, I might have come off as a little thirsty for the footage. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| It's really hard to tell how your tone works. | ||
| I mean, you are a little thirsty for the footage. | ||
| I was interested, sure. | ||
| I mean, if it's there, I want to see it. | ||
| Well, yeah, I understand. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I didn't know what to do, but at that point, I still thought there was a chance that someone would get back to me. | ||
| COVID is a total pain in the ass, so I could understand the bureaucracy at the SPLC and Hatewatch being slowed down a little bit. | ||
| So maybe I'd hear back on Thursday or Friday, and thus I decided to punt to Monday to make the best episode we could. | ||
| That was the plan. | ||
| But here we are on Sunday, and no one's responding. | ||
| And there's not much to say other than that the SPLC is bad now, Dan. | ||
| Since I didn't have the raw footage, I felt like I was at a dead end. | ||
| That said, I'd already thought a lot about this clip, and I had some things I wanted to say about it, so we have to do this episode. | ||
| I decided to re-watch You Can't Watch This and jot down some questions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa, whoa, whoa. | |
| How? | ||
| I could watch it. | ||
| It turns out. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| As well as, I believe, Wile E. Coyote. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I get you. | ||
| I'm just saying that might sound a little bit thirsty, you know? | ||
| If you're on a dating app and you don't get a response for a day and then you come back with, I might answer questions. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| There is definitely a reason I didn't send another message after this one. | ||
| I'm also not interested in harassing somebody, and I felt like another unanswered message in this chain would look a way that I'd have to... | ||
| It might be your trouble. | ||
| I have to look in the mirror, and I don't think I can handle being the guy who keeps sending messages. | ||
| Yeah, that could be trouble. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah, you know, I read that line and my immediate thought was, tell me exactly how he is disavowing and improving from there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Give me line by line. | ||
| Do not tell me that he told you he was disavowing the far right and you... | ||
| Took him at face value. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Famous for his declaration of, I am a white nationalist. | ||
| Empirically. | ||
| Empirically, I am a white nationalist. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Here's a little clip of him giving a speech. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| My name is Kaelin Robertson and I co-produced Far Lands with my colleague George L. John and, of course, Lauren Southern. | ||
| Obviously, this was an incredibly challenging process to put together. | ||
| It was highly emotional as a subject and obviously very, very intensely serious as a subject, which meant that it had to be told in the right way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The stories of these people are so powerful that it had to be told properly. | |
| It had to be told properly. | ||
| Now, we'll get back to that in a second, but in case you're interested, here's what Stefan was talking about that evening. | ||
| Let's hear it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is your house. | |
| I'm a guest, and I appreciate being here, so I wanted to talk about things that would be of interest to you. | ||
| So, you know, like any good researcher, we sort of sit down and we start at the beginning. | ||
| Now, the beginning is the Aboriginal culture. | ||
| So I thought, all right, I've heard about the noble savage. | ||
| I really agree with it, but, you know, I'm open with data. | ||
| You know, let's find out. | ||
| So, we started researching into average culture. | ||
| Sir, this plane is going down! | ||
| This plane is going down, sir! | ||
| It's... | ||
|
unidentified
|
well, you'll see. | |
| But it's important. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
| Wow, cool stuff. | ||
| Cool stuff. | ||
| Boy, I want him to get collision. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Huh! | ||
| So, real quick, back to that clip I played of Kalen's speech. | ||
| Well, it's a good thing he told people that he disavowed that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Completely caught me off guard. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The behavior precludes good faith. | ||
| There's just no way around that. | ||
| No, it's not possible. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
|
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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. | ||
| No, Dan, it's great. | ||
| Look, I get it, but he told the SPLC that he disavowed that, and he gave them some footage of Alex that everybody's already seen before. | ||
| So he's repented. | ||
| I'm struggling. | ||
| I'm really struggling. | ||
| Over the course of the weekend, I watched and read everything that was available to be found and created about or created by Kalen Robertson. | ||
| Because this picture was just giving me trouble. | ||
| I was confused. | ||
| It was accidental going down this road, but I was interested, and I was confused. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Look, this is by no means retaliation. | ||
| I know because we've talked about this every step of the way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, should have given us that fucking footage, dude. | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, I understand. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| I think it's funny you saying that. | ||
| No, we've talked about this extensively. | ||
| Believe me, that is not your motivation whatsoever. | ||
| 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. | ||
| As well as getting them to say stuff. | ||
| Perhaps. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I feel like he seems fun. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| He's the type of guy that the New Yorker would have written a glowing profile about. | ||
| New Nazis, they dress different. | ||
| Yeah, I would say so. | ||
| And I mean, I'm not even immune to it, like watching these interviews. | ||
| Sure, no, you listen to it. | ||
| A charming guy is a charming guy. | ||
| There's not much you can do with that. | ||
| And that's part of what made it so intriguing. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| What's going on here? | ||
| This is fucked up. | ||
| 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... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Someone informed me that she might not be as much of a wonderful success story as... | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| But I'm always looking for something like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| I'm always looking for something uplifting because it's so much better than Alex's dumb ass. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Look, you can come back. | ||
| And so I am not going to trust anybody. | ||
| Yeah, and that also is what makes... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I'm just curious, and I want to deal with reality on reality's terms. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A couple of important points. | |
| One, that's not for us to determine. | ||
| And you can have your feeling and you're entitled to your feeling. | ||
| But we are not the judges of this person. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| Second, we cannot possibly know what he has done privately. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| He doesn't owe anybody, like us, an apology. | ||
| And maybe he has made amends with folks behind the scenes privately, and I think that may be even more appropriate than anybody knowing. | ||
| That's exactly what he should be doing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And we can't judge whether or not that's the case. | ||
|
unidentified
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Nope. | |
| And I'm not sitting here saying he hasn't. | ||
| I'm saying I'm struggling with this because... | ||
| I believe wholeheartedly in redemption. | ||
| I believe wholeheartedly that people can make it out. | ||
| And oftentimes their stories on the other end can be very uplifting and helpful for people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I also don't. | |
| think it's appropriate to pretend that this history isn't what it is. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like you... | |
| The redemption needs to take stock of the professional career that beget the redemption. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Of course! | ||
| 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. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was all about free speech. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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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? | ||
|
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And he said, yeah, it is. | |
| That's it. | ||
| And that's when we realised, like at that moment, that he didn't even fuck about freedom of speech. | ||
| No, but we were quite convinced. | ||
| Like, I... | ||
| Fuck you! | ||
| Like, we were genuinely like, this is... | ||
| We are like a cool counter-cultural... | ||
| There's a lot of far-right idiots that we don't want, but we genuinely believed in that. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Fuck you. | ||
| That was the moment? | ||
| That was the moment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's no way for him to have known before that point that the far right did that. | ||
| It's not possible. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| A free speech march. | ||
| That's the gayest thing I've ever heard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All we're going to do is shout. | |
| No, the difference is... | ||
| Do you know why Thingy's so easy to get numbers? | ||
| Would be so easy to get numbers. | ||
| is you're not asking people to come out and protest against Islam. | ||
| You're not asking people to protest against anything. | ||
| You're asking people to come and show their face in support of free speech. | ||
| Everyone can do that. | ||
| It doesn't matter about your job. | ||
| It doesn't matter about your career. | ||
| You're not going to lose your job. | ||
| No one's going to look down upon you. | ||
| Your friends aren't going to hate you. | ||
| I'm pro-free speech. | ||
| They still love. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's interesting, because that clip is from 2018, and it seems to be Tommy discussing the idea of doing a free speech rally. | ||
| Which would be really just to trick large numbers of people to come out who wouldn't show up if you were honest about your anti-Muslim intentions. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| That Freedom Day event in May was Tommy's biggest allegedly free speech event that year, and he did spend some of 2018 in jail. | ||
| So it seems to me it's pretty likely that this clip of Tommy explaining that free speech is a mask... | ||
| That might have come from before the Freedom Day event. | ||
| I would probably say. | ||
| I have a hunch. | ||
| Could be that. | ||
| Either way, I find it super hard to believe that anyone working with these people wouldn't understand that dynamic. | ||
| And I think it's super embarrassing that Tommy got caught on tape explaining the most obvious game he and his friends play. | ||
| Very sad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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 was his Saul of Tarsus moment. | ||
| 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, then I assume he quit. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No, no, he's an aberration. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, you think so? | ||
| 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... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, what was the rationale given to you? | |
| Right, OK, this is interesting work, but... | ||
| Do you know what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're not going to have it in the end of the year. | |
| They said... | ||
| I remember them using the word inflammatory, that it could be perceived as inflammatory. | ||
| I think they... | ||
| Oh, hate speech? | ||
| It wasn't from a super insidious way. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, you mean hate speech? | ||
| So I wasn't really that bothered about it at the time until I started researching other universities between things like that. | ||
| But yeah, that was sort of the first time I recognised that that was going on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, is it fair for me to then join the dots between that incident, that film, and then... | |
| Your later work with Tommy Robinson, formerly of the EDL. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There wouldn't be these issues. | ||
| Sounds like he disavowed it to me. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
| No, he did do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
| Looks like someone's using free speech arguments in order to elevate the complaints of Laura Loomer, Gavin McGinnis, Alex Jones, and Tommy Robinson. | ||
| Those people all have something else in common besides... | ||
| Censorship. | ||
| But this is like a year after the Freedom Day rally when he ostensibly... | ||
| Yeah, but you can hear... | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| You can hear in his voice that he recognizes that what he's doing is wrong. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| It's killing him on the inside. | ||
| This is a man crying out for help, Dan. | ||
| Please, someone stop me from doing this. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Honestly. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| At a certain point. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, good. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, fair enough. | ||
| Everybody could be a little bit better. | ||
| Losing their touch, Dan. | ||
| The left, we just don't got it anymore. | ||
| I mean, the left can do better, but I think that if you want to compare... | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No, let's not pretend that there aren't shitheads. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, for God's sake. | ||
| Where someone's wearing a hijab. | ||
| 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 I tell you, I can't wait for the FGM emojis. | ||
| Oh! | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Wow, wow, wow. | ||
| He's like a shittier Paul Watson out there. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It just seems like an act. | ||
| There's a video of him complaining about people cutting loose at Pride. | ||
| There's a video of him complaining about Starbucks changing their logo in Saudi Arabia. | ||
| Doesn't feel like it has anything going on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, it feels like a PR person doing a right-wing piece of propaganda. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because that's what it is. | ||
| Kalen discussed the beginnings of his career in that Sky News interview from 2019. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He knows marketing. | ||
| That was his job, and he's good at it. | ||
| I would say I'm like an alternative producer. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What this raises is the question of like... | ||
| What does it mean to disavow right-wing ideology if you never fucking believed in it in the first place? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And in that case, then what is he disavowing? | ||
| Is he disavowing fucking opportunistic bullshit? | ||
| Is he disavowing fucking deceptive editing? | ||
| Is he disavowing surprise interviews? | ||
| Like, I want to know what this is. | ||
| I think that that's one of the things that I'm kind of confused by and I'm interested in. | ||
| And these are the sorts of questions that were coming up as I was taking in a lot of this content. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's confusing to me. | ||
| I don't... | ||
| Because I guess it's racism. | ||
| I guess it's hate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| You're a merc for Nazis. | ||
| You're not a Nazi yourself. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think I care about the distinction between those two all too much. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| It's not necessarily a disavowing of right-wing ideas, although there are certainly a lot of racist problems on the right. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| I don't get the sense that there was anything other than... | ||
| Profiting off bigotry. | ||
| Yeah, it was a gig. | ||
| I answered an ad and I got a job and they were like, make these PR puff pieces. | ||
| And I was like, I'm good at that. | ||
| And then six years later, it turns out being a Nazi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is wrong. | |
| It turns out there is a wall. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't think I'm going to be able to work at CNN as a line producer if I've got this on my baggage. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| I do believe that there is entirely a possibility that, like, some of that radicalization did happen. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, he saw a market inefficiency. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is also incredibly fucked up. | ||
| But again, that's not Beyond Redemption 2. No, no, no. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| It's different. | ||
| It feels different than the story that we're being told. | ||
| It feels different than the story that you get from reading that Hatewatch article. | ||
| But it's not the person who's beyond... | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| It's not somebody who's beyond respect. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's just that, like, I'm gonna look a little bit differently. | ||
| No, I mean, a PR person for an oil company, sure, can redeem themselves. | ||
| That's, you know, the oil company's destroying the world. | ||
| You're working for an essentially evil organization. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| But, I mean, that's different. | ||
| It's different. | ||
| It really is different from being part and parcel of people who are there to inspire violence. | ||
| Because that's ultimately the reality of it. | ||
| I get that maybe he wasn't a believer in the deepest deep end, but he is still producing content that is only designed to drum up violence. | ||
| And he knew that. | ||
| At least hate. | ||
| And here's what else he knew. | ||
| He knew that Allie would get murdered. | ||
| Could, yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So he knows that violence is absolutely on the table. | ||
| And he probably knows, or he should, or he would have to be incredibly stupid not to know. | ||
| That that is the fucking, the result of what they do is that group of people texting Tommy Robinson saying, we'll kill that guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the result. | ||
| Yeah, and it's part of it. | ||
| It's the base. | ||
| Yeah, it's the idea. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, the production of this documentary about free speech being infringed for these four people who are complete bigots. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Like, that was going on after... | ||
| He had the Freedom Day experience. | ||
| We all have our relapses, Dan. | ||
| It's just tough. | ||
| It's just tough for me to swallow. | ||
| I'm not trying to be unempathic, and I'm not trying to shit on the guy, and I hope... | ||
| I just don't know, man. | ||
| I just don't know. | ||
| 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... | ||
| I think this is an important perspective. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's what I don't hear. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think that there's a little bit of a delineation that needs to be made because that's about personal life. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| I'm staying entirely in terms of professional life. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| 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. | ||
| More or less. | ||
| So to me, while those are different, they are not the same. | ||
| No. | ||
| They also don't point me towards believing that a guy who's very good at marketing is not rebranding and is instead contrite. | ||
| And changing things. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| And it's tough. | ||
| Because I don't want to live in that place of suspicion. | ||
| That doesn't make me feel good. | ||
| I'm not like, hey, you know what is great? | ||
| Thinking the worst of people. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| But at the same time, we can't live in this space. | ||
| Otherwise, it's going to happen again and again and again. | ||
| Like it always does. | ||
| This is where we get to why I told you this. | ||
| Off air, and I will say it again, I think that this was one of the most difficult and complicated episodes I've had to prepare. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| For two main reasons. | ||
| The first is that I had to constantly check in on myself and make sure that I was not doing this motivated out of spite. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I don't feel bitter about people not replying to my messages, but you never know how much might be below the surface. | ||
| There was this emotionally interesting ride that I was on as the whole thing, you know, trying to branch out. | ||
| requesting raw video from somebody. | ||
| And that blew up in my face. | ||
| There was a lot of processing going on. | ||
| It's kind of funny to be around you with that emotional rollercoaster because we don't talk like... | ||
| The entire way through. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I'm getting little chunks of like, oh, you're on the down wave. | ||
| I can definitely get this. | ||
| Text is definitely not a go. | ||
| And then the text where he's like, this is the most exciting thing I've ever done. | ||
| It's like, I'm available to snapshots. | ||
| You're filtering this through your own interpretation of these snapshots. | ||
| No, no, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| I'm just getting snapshots. | ||
| So the second reason why this was so difficult, I think, is more important. | ||
| I hope Kalen is sincere in that he's changed. | ||
| He's co-founded a new organization that's, quote, designed to show people radicalized into far-right movements that there is a path out. | ||
| That is an important goal, and people knowing that there's life after whatever thing they've fallen into is critical. | ||
| I'm personally evidence of that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Absolutely. | ||
| If this is for real, then I don't want to be a part of impeding Kalen from being able to live a good, healthy life. | ||
| That can be an example to others that they can do that too. | ||
| I'm not interested in being a dick about someone who's trying to make their way out of being in the right wing. | ||
| That does not benefit me at all, and it's not interesting to me. | ||
| I don't like the idea of people shitting on somebody by default. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I don't like that. | ||
| The point that I think about is, regardless of whether or not he specifically is on the right path, and just like you, I hope he is. | ||
| This story is still instructive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because, sure, he's on the path. | ||
| There are still plenty of people who have taken advantage of this exact type of situation. | ||
| Sure, we'll get into that in a second. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Just saying. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The way I went through this was largely... | ||
| What I would do if this was a Leo Zagami clip. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Except, I will admit, I pulled a few punches because some of it is like, well, this is probably shitty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And also, he didn't claim to be Jesus. | ||
| No! | ||
| And I'm not here to... | ||
| I'm here to ask him to. | ||
| Leo Zagami did claim to be Jesus. | ||
| He did claim to be Jesus. | ||
| And he did 9-11. | ||
| I'm saying, Kalen, if you want to get back in my good graces, buddy, there's a very simple way. | ||
| I believe in redemption wholeheartedly. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, what a surprise. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, but that was outside of a cult. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| People like Mike Cernovich have made more pivots than I can count, and there's many more people like this. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's not like I'm going to do anything different. | ||
| I'm just going to get a different gig. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I don't appreciate that. | ||
| Yeah, it is just a shifting over of like... | ||
| I'm going to now do stuff that isn't hateful. | ||
| I'll make slick content to make sure people know that they can not like stuff that I used to do. | ||
| They don't need to go to a judge to say, give me 100 hours of community service. | ||
| News organizations should say, we're not going to put you on TV until you do 100 hours. | ||
| You know, like, something along those lines of, like, get your fucking hands dirty. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, for sure, yeah. | ||
| Kalen's experience is pretty fucking unique, and I'm not sure his testimony is going to be persuasive to other right-wing propagandists. | ||
| Like him saying, you can get out. | ||
| You can follow my lead and get out. | ||
| They're going to look at him the same way Alex's audience looks at the Southern Poverty Law Center. | ||
| It's not going to be persuasive to other folks who are creating and disseminating this propaganda. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It is going to benefit rehabbing his image. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It will. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And again, I hate coming off the way that I sound, because I do sound like I'm beating the shit out of a dead horse right now. | ||
| I'm just, you know, we're just not far away from the storming of the fucking Capitol. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's true. | |
| And I'm supposed to be like, oh, he's disavowed the right and I care? | ||
| I'm supposed to care? | ||
| Great. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's all I'm saying. | ||
| No, I know. | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's complicated. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And, I mean, I don't think that rehabbing your image is wrong if you're, you know, if you're rehabbing. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| I think that people deserve chances. | ||
| And I just, like, he's doing this organization that's supposed to help people get out of right-wing stuff. | ||
| If the idea is to appeal to people who are... | ||
| Sucked into these webs and these right-wing information spaces. | ||
| I don't think that he is going to be a very easy... | ||
| Sorry, I don't think he's going to be a very hard target for the right-wing propagandists to attack. | ||
| Oh, you can smear him in two seconds. | ||
| Yeah, like Alex did, saying he works or hope not. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Fucking... | ||
| Again, you can play clips of him doing the thing that he's... | ||
| You know, blaming or he's exploiting Alex for doing. | ||
| Because that's also what he's doing. | ||
| He's exploiting Alex and the SPLC at the same time. | ||
| And they're obviously exploiting his bullshit. | ||
| And the only people who benefit from this are the three parties involved. | ||
| Because none of us get shit from it. | ||
| Well, the issue that I have is, I guess you could describe it as exploiting. | ||
| But I don't know if it's intentional. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I could see a scenario wherein he thinks that this is going to make a difference, this video of Alex. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And the SPLC thinks, hey, this'll show Alex is full of shit. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And both of them just have no idea. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I could see that being possible. | ||
| I see it as being fairly unlikely. | ||
| Super unlikely. | ||
| And... | ||
| Would demonstrate an uncharacteristic naivete on both of their parts. | ||
| Perhaps something so... | ||
| But it is possible. | ||
| It is possible. | ||
| 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. | ||
| All these things are interesting, but... | ||
| We already know how much Jerome Corsi got paid per month, and it was about... | ||
| What, $15,000 a month or something? | ||
| I don't remember exactly, but it was a lot. | ||
| It was some absurd number. | ||
| But the problem is that I can't accept the unsubstantiated word of someone like this just because they're telling me something I want to hear. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| That's not fair. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Also something that you should deduce. | ||
| It is far more likely that he is making fun of people for buying dick pills behind their backs than otherwise. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I mean... | |
| Right? | ||
| I feel like the entire supplement industry is laughing at us behind their backs. | ||
| I feel like a lot of them are. | ||
| They have to. | ||
| 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... | ||
| isn't on the inside assumes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And everybody who's inside won't be convinced that that's the case. | |
| No chance. | ||
| Particularly based on the hearsay of somebody being quoted by the Southern population. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Not happening! | ||
| Never! | ||
| 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. | ||
| He went to Poland with Stefan Molyneux. | ||
| It's a serious... | ||
| This is somebody who... | ||
| He captured the shot of Stefan Molyneux proudly declaring himself a white nationalist. | ||
| And when he clicked cut, he was like, that was great stuff, man. | ||
| Now let me edit it. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I'm going to watch hours of him saying that he's a white nationalist. | ||
| Let me edit this together in a way that makes him look smart and presentable. | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so kids or youths who click on this video will see it and think like, oh, you know what? | ||
| He does make a great case for why Poland is a great country, and maybe it's because everyone's white. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And to me, the reason that I... | ||
| Like, play any of the clips that I played or any of the stuff is not to beat up on this guy because I really don't want to. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's, I think that there's a victimhood that inherently comes along with right-wing spheres. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that a lot of the time they abuse each other in... | |
| in ways that are sometimes subtle and sometimes pretty overt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I do think that there's probably a fair amount of that. | |
| And I feel bad that he had to be involved in any of that stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I don't think that anybody is not a victim to some extent that gets in these machines. | |
| In the same way that we talk about, like, Alex... | ||
| Alex fires Millie Weaver for Shadowgate. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| You think you're important? | ||
| No, you're not. | ||
| No, you're not. | ||
| You're dispendable. | ||
| That is an inherent abusiveness. | ||
| You got into a fight with Stevie Peas, so you're gone. | ||
| Bye, David Knight. | ||
| You're gone. | ||
| You've worked here for a decade and you're fucking gone. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| And that was a huge mistake and I'm not looking back. | ||
| Yeah, that is... | ||
| Like, an inherent piece of this information world. | ||
| And it is an intrinsically abusive place to be in. | ||
| And so I'm not minimizing that. | ||
| And I'm not saying, like, he doesn't have a fair point that, like, there's probably some mistreatment along the way, and that sucks. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| That said, from the second he is involved in right-wing media at Rebel, then with Tommy Robinson, it's not somebody who's not, like... | ||
| Driving his own train. | ||
| He's not on message boards. | ||
| He's filming their fucking documentaries. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, that's... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't have any place to judge. | ||
| By no means. | ||
| But one thing I did think when I read that article was like, Oh, man. | ||
| I thought the SPLC would be better than this. | ||
| I really did. | ||
| If I saw that in like... | ||
| The Times or something like that. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| You guys are all shitheads. | ||
| But it's the SPLC Hate Watch! | ||
| They're good at this! | ||
| Man, I was like, God damn, you guys are... | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I thought that the left had lost its touch a little bit. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Anyway, let's end this. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Apologies if anybody thought this episode was pointless. | ||
| It's half pointless. | ||
| I doubt they did. | ||
| But we'll be back, Jordan. | ||
| But until then, we have a website. | ||
| Indeed we do. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Yeah, we're also on Twitter. | ||
| We are on Twitter. | ||
| It's at knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Now go to bed, Jordan. | ||
| We're also... | ||
| What? | ||
| Wait, we're on Facebook? | ||
| Oh, did I say? | ||
| No, you said we're on Twitter. | ||
| Yeah, we're on Facebook. | ||
| Yeah, now we're on Facebook. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We are on Facebook, Dan. | ||
| I'm absent-minded. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| If you could, please find a local charity. | ||
| We'll be back, but until then, I'm Neo, I'm Leo, I'm DZX Clark, I'm Daryl Rundis, I'm absent-minded. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |
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