#539: March 10, 2021 dissects Infowars’ descent into conspiracy-fueled chaos—Harrison Smith’s return claims COVID-19 is a "hoax" and falsely ties George Floyd’s death to fentanyl, ignoring $50M lawsuits and expert rebuttals. His show endorses Marjorie Taylor Greene’s anti-gun-control stances while peddling pseudoscience like "5G-proof" Kava pills. Callers unleash Nazi tropes ("Zionist-occupied government," "Jew World Order"), yet Smith deflects, framing "globalist" as neutral while dismissing ADL/SPLC as "hate groups." Stuart Rhodes’ interview reveals coordinated Oath Keepers violence on January 6th, contradicting claims of peaceful protest. Infowars’ propaganda machine falters under scrutiny, exposing its hosts as either complicit or incapable of countering extremism—proving conspiracy media’s self-serving collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
And the reason that I got it mixed up was because when they went on this tour, they had intended to speak in New Zealand, and New Zealand said, fuck no.
As it turns out, Alex has taken off for another workcation this time heading up to Florida to cover what he calls a mask rebellion that's taking place at a grocery store in the city of Naples.
So, the situation with this grocery store is actually kind of funny.
It's actually not in the city of Naples, technically.
And if it were, it would not have a mask mandate because the Naples City Council decided against imposing one, preferring instead to just make it a thing they strongly recommend.
However, this store is in North Naples, which is about five miles north of city limits, and is subject to the jurisdiction of the county, in this case, Collier County, who do have a mask mandate in place.
As such, the store's owner, Alfie Oakes, has been waging a protracted campaign against masks since he feels like this COVID-19 stuff is a hoax.
That led to the Lees County school district severing their contract with him, which prompted Oakes to sue the school district for $50 million, claiming, as all bigots do, that their free speech had been violated.
I don't know what his contract with the school district said, but if they had a clause in there about being able to terminate the contract for cause, I don't think this is a free speech issue.
In fact, I would assume that since he's a staunch conservative, Alfie should be in favor of the school district being able to practice free association.
Anyway, I don't particularly care about Alfie Oakes, nor do I care too much about Alex's very transparent attempt to vampirically feast on the attention Oakes is getting at the moment.
If Alex had done like a whole show from the grocery store, then you might be dealing with an excited dam.
But as it stands, this is just too little to get worked up about.
It's really funny to imagine, though, going into a Whole Foods or a jewel and just trying to get some produce and you hear a guy yelling about the UN trying to kill the children while you're shopping.
There was a moment in the interview that Alex did a while back with Logan Paul where one of Logan's friends commented to Alex that he had a, quote, heavy pour when he was getting another glass of booze.
The tone wasn't like, hey, cool pour, man.
It had a touch of concern in it, like telling Alex to slow down.
This interview has the opposite vibe, where the hosts are laughing their asses off and just celebrating how basically incoherent Alex is becoming.
Alex lies to the host's face about things like Sandy Hook and his position on reparations, illustrating that these hosts do absolutely no show prep before interviewing propagandists.
At the end of the thing, one of the hosts has a list of questions for Alex, like, was 9-11 a part-time job?
You're watching American Journal Infowars.com banned.video.
What a day full of news I have for you today.
And at the end of this program at around 10.30 Central Standard Time, Alex Jones will be taking over the broadcast from his outpost in the state of Florida.
In today's program, I'll be laying out what I think is a rather convincing argument for the fact that we are rapidly racing towards a conflict that I would call World War III.
Connection lines are being drawn, and we're seeing a lot of posturing that portends great devastation in our future.
It has to do with China, Iran, and the Western powers aligning themselves against those bad countries.
According to his anti-communist buddies, like Alex, World War III already happened.
The Cold War was World War III, and some even think that the Iraq War has turned into World War IV.
So if there's another one coming, Harrison should be calling it World War V. I thought we were still fighting World War II since Nazis still seem to be the bad guys.
In this case, I think that him using World War III sounds a lot more exciting.
So I merely understand why Harrison would just go ahead and stick with that branding with a scaremongering.
So not only does Alfie Oakes think that George Floyd was a criminal and blah, blah, blah.
There aren't revelations coming out about the case at this point because the trial was still in the jury selection phase.
The coroner's report and autopsy information that the public has access to is the exact same information we've had for like six months, and it doesn't show what Harrison is claiming.
He's pretending that there's a new piece of information that's come out that verifies his pre-existing talking points because he knows that no one in the audience demands better, and they already believe that George Floyd's death is no big deal.
The Washington Post had an article about the upcoming trial on March 10th, and here's what they had to say.
Quote, when Chauvin's trial for his alleged role in Floyd's tragic death begins, much of the argument will center instead on the autopsy details.
Most specifically, whether fentanyl and underlying health conditions, not the police officers' actions, stopped Floyd's heart and lungs.
Seven experts in toxicology, cardiology, and illegal drug use consulted by the Washington Post largely disagreed with that idea, most of them strenuously.
All but one said the autopsy findings and other court documents coupled with the well-known chain of events that evening made death by fentanyl overdose unlikely to impossible.
Experts who have weighed in on the matter are pretty clear that what happened to Floyd doesn't resemble what happens in cases of opiate overdose, which is why no one on the scene administered naloxone when they did have it.
They had the drug that would be used in the case of an opiate.
Yeah, it's what they did in the case of the Rodney King beating when it was alleged that King was on PCP and that made him such a threat that it justified the police's actions.
Totally.
This is just something that they do.
And this is Harrison Smith essentially just, you know, taking defense arguments uncritically and then also towing the line for just sort of like exactly what cops say all the time.
And it appears that even if there were some sort of a like, I'm not saying this is the case, but if there, like this argument that is being made by Harrison were even true, then you still have negligent homicide on the part of these cops who would have had a responsibility to address the medical condition that was supposedly happening.
To make matters worse, ABC News reported in September 2019 that not only had Trump not done these press conferences, but it had been, quote, six months since a White House press secretary last came to the podium in a briefing room to field questions from reporters.
I do think that Biden should face criticism for not having press conferences enough or yet, since I think it would, you know, it's a helpful piece of moving forward.
And I directed the same criticism at Trump when he was doing the same thing because I think the transparency and availability to the public is a good thing to encourage in our leadership.
Harrison and Infowars don't really have any underlying beliefs.
They just attack their predetermined enemies and glorify whoever they like at the moment, regardless if they're doing the same things.
They'll pretend that their hero didn't actually do what the villain is now doing, but worse, not long ago, because if they did acknowledge that, they'd have to explain why it wasn't a big deal for them when Trump did the same thing that they're so upset Biden is doing now, and that would unravel the game.
Anyway, HR 8 is about expanding background checks for people purchasing guns.
The other bill that they're talking about is meant to close what's known as the Charleston loophole, named after the 2015 shooting because it was how Dylan Roof was able to purchase the guns that he used to kill nine people at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
He shouldn't have been able to pass a gun background check, but he did because of this loophole.
See, when you go to buy a gun, your name is run through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which should provide a yes or no result within minutes.
However, in some cases, the automated system runs into complications and can't make a determination.
In these cases, the FBI, who run the system, have three days to provide a yes or no to the gun seller.
And if they fail to give a determination in that time, the seller gets to decide if they sell the guns or not.
And you better believe they almost always do because they're selling guns.
This bill that Harrison's complaining about would change that window from three days to 10 days to hopefully provide more oversight that would stop things like future Dylan Roofs having easy access to guns.
Consider this stat from a report put out by the Center for American Progress.
Quote, in 2018, 4,240 background checks were denied nationwide after the three-day investigation period elapsed.
In at least 3,960 of those cases, a gun was sold to the prohibited buyer at the discretion of the dealer, requiring officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and Explosives to attempt to retrieve these guns from individuals with a potentially dangerous criminal history.
This loophole results in tons of people who shouldn't be allowed to have guns getting guns, which poses a bit of a threat and also creates a ton of work and expense for the ATF to try and correct the mistakes caused by a clearly too short window of time being given for these background check systems to provide an answer.
I think that both of these bills are completely sensible.
So it's great to see Harrison try to attack them by not discussing the bills in detail at all and relying on a video of a QAnon weirdo in Congress to make his argument for him.
So, in case you want to learn something, or Harrison, if you're listening, Easter and Passover are both religious observances that don't involve specific dates on our calendars.
Christmas, for instance, like that's always observed on December 25th because it's tied to our calendar.
Easter and Passover, however, are both observed based on the lunar calendar, which results in the holidays lining up with different dates every year according to our Gregorian calendar.
Easter is always the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring, unless you're following the Eastern Orthodox tradition, which is an issue that's too complicated to get into because Harrison and this caller aren't even touching on that aspect of things.
The more important aspect of this caller, I think, is how much he's internalized the underlying message of a lot of Alex's rhetoric.
There are demons out there, sure.
But the curses that are plaguing everyone are the result of God letting this stuff happen because you aren't good enough for him to protect.
This is the messaging of cults, and it's very present in Alex's content with his regular outbursts about how the world deserves to burn for things like allowing abortions.
You should have overthrown the teacher, brutally deposed her, and murdered her, and then God would have showered you with all the gum in the world, Dan.
Steve Pieczenik arrested the Pope like a year ago.
But I guess the fake Pope, somebody pretending to be the Pope recently, I guess in an interview had said that climate change is possibly going to cause another flood.
Now, we'll get into this here in a second, but something I think is really interesting is that Harrison starts thinking about the flood, starts thinking about the flood story, and he gets a little bit weird with.
So I decided I would go back and refresh my memory about the lead up to the flood and see if it happened because people weren't fucking the way that God wanted them.
In Genesis 6, God gets a little bit tired of people and decides they shouldn't be living so long.
In addition to that, he sees that, quote, sons of God were marrying, quote, daughters of humans, which I guess is supposed to mean that angels were breeding with humans.
Strange that there aren't any lady angels wooing human dudes, but I'll get off my SJW story.
Quote, the Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.
The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.
So the Lord said, I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created, and with them the animals and the birds and the creatures that move along the ground, for I regret that I have made them.
But I am going to say that I was reading over this, and it struck me how weird this is that, like, you know, it's a big decision to create a race of the.
God liked Noah because he was unlike the rest of the people.
From Genesis 6, 11, quote, now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence.
God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways.
So God said to Noah, I'm going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them.
Twice in three verses, the complaint of violence is raised in relation to God's decision to kill everyone off with the flood, and weirdly, sexual impropriety isn't brought up at all.
After Noah builds the ark and saves all the animals, the flood comes and they have to live on that boat that's comically oversized for about a year.
Noah is 600 years old at that point.
When the flood ends, Noah gets off the boat and makes an altar to God, which pleases God.
In appreciation, God says, quote, never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood.
And never again will I destroy all living creatures as I have done.
This story is fucked up, but the promise that God makes at the end of it doesn't preclude God from causing the kind of flooding that we would see arise from climate change.
People aren't suggesting that we're going to end up in water world or some shit, just that there are a lot of places that'll become uninhabitable, and this will lead to mass displacement and likely a lot of death.
That's completely compatible with God's promise to never again destroy all living creatures.
Anyway, Harrison Smith is a dumb fuck religious zealot who's trying to repurpose religious stories to suit his extremist agenda.
In this case, his opposition to LGBTQ rights and access to reproductive health care.
It's a pathetic display, and honestly, it's important to recognize that this is not a news show.
They aren't even really conspiracy theory shows at this point.
Nope.
They're extremist religious programming that's masquerading as something political or about conspiracy in order to make them more interesting and attractive to an audience that would reject them instantly if they were aware that the message they were being delivered and was being pushed to them was religious in nature.
These guys on this, like uh, this podcast where they're all drunk, if they realized what was behind Alex's rhetoric and like his messaging and how it was really largely a religious message, I don't think they would think this was as funny.
Hey, hey, guys, I know we've had a lot of fun, but uh, just to remind you, the earth is only 10,000 years old and uh, your sinfulness is gonna get you sent to hell forever.
Uh, hey, uh, I know I'm three-quarters of the way through this bottle of Jameson, but I should tell you my conception of angels and demons and how very serious it is, and I can see them demons.
So I think that Harrison believes on some level that the motivation behind the flood on God's part was something to the effect of something related to LGBTQ rights.
And of course, you look at the, you know, in Christian mythology, I guess you could call it the rainbow was the sign from God as a promise that he would never flood the earth again.
So just think about this: that you have God flooding the earth because of sexual immorality, and then you have the symbol of this, the symbol of his promise to never do it again, has been co-opted by alternative sexual lifestyles.
So this next caller, Jordan, I had got into this episode and I'd started listening to it because I thought that this was the episode where Harrison interviews Stuart Rhodes.
Yes, good morning, Mr. Smith, and congratulations on your child.
You're a dad, and that's an awesome responsibility.
You know, I'd like to say this.
Stuart Rhodes is a hero.
He's a hero and a patriot, leader of the Oath Keepers.
I pray for him and his family that this evil government does not incarcerate him.
You know, you should have a panel, if you can, do a show.
I don't know if you can do this, where you could get the leaders of the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Boys, the Three Percenters.
My favorite group, the John Birch Society.
I haven't heard from the John Birch Society.
If ever there was a group to get involved with being a takeover of communism, the United States is a John Birch Society, Sovereign Citizens, Westboro Baptist Church.
January 6th, 2021 is going to go in in American history.
It's the beginning of the second American Revolution.
It's going to be the pinnacle of it, the beginning of it, because this is not over, Mr. Smith.
The American people are being persecuted and they're being persecuted by a Zionist-occupied government.
And let me relate what that means.
When you've got an FBI that interrogates, threatens people, like you were saying yesterday, because they don't like their opinions.
They don't like their thought processes.
This smacks of a Zionist-occupied government.
What I mean by that, I want to be vague.
I'm talking specifically about a government that is controlled by APAC, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a Federal Reserve that is the Rothschild Bank.
You just mentioned a moment ago, Linda Rothschild.
That doesn't surprise me talking about a new capitalist world order.
International Jewry is at stake here, is involved here.
And I would argue, buddy, just, I mean, and look, I'm going to go out on a limb here and I'm going to say that he's very mad at the FBI for choosing to prosecute, go after people who don't share his opinions now.
I get the feeling that he was a big fan of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.
You know, I think he was probably a fan of the FBI murdering people who would say things like Black Lives Matter and the like.
It's strange because it does indicate that, I mean, this guy isn't the only person in the audience who has a cognizant sort of self-awareness that that's what he thinks Alex is talking about.
Okay, yeah, let me just say, you know, it's interesting that you bring it up with Stuart Rhodes because actually one of the things I was going to mention yesterday that I didn't get to with Stuart Rhodes is the fact that the organizations who are actually advising the FBI on what to do, I mean, you know, essentially you have the FBI and you would think that they would be answerable only to politicians.
They would be taking directives from civilian oversight.
But in reality, what you see, and there's stories going back all the way to 2017, is that it's organizations like the ADL and the SPLC that are actually directing the FBI.
I'm not calling the ADL and SPLC Jewish organizations.
They're calling themselves that, right?
So you have an organization that is of, you know, of a certain ideology that is not claiming to, you know, be for everybody.
It's the anti-defamation league.
It's a Jewish organization.
And yet they're the ones who are directing the FBI.
Now, there is a weird sort of disconnect in the American psyche where it's like, how do we not see that that's weird and wrong?
That it's a private organization that I consider a hate group that has articles about me calling me an anti-Semite, calling me a homophobe, calling me a racist, calling me all sorts of horrible things that are completely untrue and totally baseless.
When you have a caller who's insinuating that international Jewry is a cabal that's trying to push the Jew world order, and if anybody in the audience is afraid, they should just read the protocols of the Elders of Zion.
And then if you then respond with, hey, you know, the SPLC and ADL are Jewish organizations and they run our FBI and they're a hate group that runs our hey, buddy, you are signing off on what this guy is saying.
Yeah, You are not disagreeing with him.
This isn't a debate.
This isn't an airing of alternative ideas that you have.
It is interesting the difference in reaction between, because I feel like now that they're all just letting it out, just like, hey, we're Nazis as fuck.
How are you guys doing?
Well, I'm a Nazi, you're a Nazi.
Let's have a grand old conversation about Nazi shit.
Like, I can feel my guard being lowered a little bit because I'm not like, I'm not like, what is this supposed to mean?
You know, what, in what way are they trying to hide?
You didn't wait to see if somebody called in and said the Holocaust didn't happen and that Jews are also responsible for all the problems in the world?
Again, you have to begrudgingly admire the ability of the mainstream media and the corrupt establishment, their ability to manipulate the minds of the American people, especially when it comes to an event like January 6th, 2021.
It was, of course, as more information's coming out, we know, essentially an inside job.
Same way that 9-11 was an inside job, 1-6 was an inside job.
Well, it's been like something out of Borwell's 1984.
You know, it's thought crime and face crime and all the things that we've seen in the past that's been done to others is now being done, not just to me, but anybody else who's in DC.
It's ridiculous.
As you were saying earlier, there were no weapons.
No one brought guns.
What kind of an insurrection is that?
You know, frankly, it's an insult to the competence of the people.
So Stuart Rhodes is coming on the show to try to get out in front of some pretty damning information that's just been released.
It's related to the U.S.'s case against Thomas Caldwell, an oathkeeper who was arrested related to the storming of the Capitol.
Caldwell had made a motion to reconsider his detention, and this document that was filed in the evening of March 8th was a response to that motion.
There's some interesting bits in here.
The first thing that's important to remember is that the charge this guy is facing is conspiracy to, quote, stop, delay, and hinder Congress's certification of the Electoral College vote.
That's key, because the conspiracy wasn't to storm the building.
The storming of the building was, quote, an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy, regardless of when they formed the intent to take these actions.
The prosecution isn't claiming that anyone conspired to storm the Capitol, just that they conspired to make it so Congress couldn't carry out its work.
This should scare the shit out of someone like Stuart Rhodes.
The reason it should scare him is that this filing also reveals that the government is in possession of logs from a signal chat titled, quote, DC Op January 6th, 21, which was previously undisclosed.
Caldwell himself has not been proven to have been in that chat, but Jessica Watkins, as well as another unnamed person who were both oath keepers who were arrested with Caldwell, were in there.
As were multiple, quote, regional oath keeper leaders from multiple states across the country and Stuart Rhodes.
Who would have guessed that the people who believe that the government is surveilling them at all times, trying to constantly implant them with computer chips to track them, would have absolutely no idea that the government could actually read these fucking conversations.
These chat logs clearly show that Stuart Rhodes was in contact with multiple people associated with the Oathkeepers who stormed the Capitol and also establishes fairly well that they were all involved in a plan to mess with the certification of the Electoral College votes.
Based on the publicly available evidence, it looks like Stuart could get rolled up in this conspiracy charge should the government want to pursue that.
The full extent of the chats aren't disclosed, but Stewart did tell the group, quote, we have several well-equipped quick reaction forces outside D.C. There are many, many others from other groups who will be watching and waiting on the outside in case of worst case scenarios.
Maybe his people didn't have weapons because they had a plan that involved heavily armed backup teams.
Yeah, they didn't have weapons in the Capitol because we were keeping them outside of the cavalry to use on people who tried to escape the Capitol, dummies.
On January 3rd, Thomas Caldwell sent a message to a three-personer group asking, quote, how many people either in the militia or not who are still supportive of our efforts to save the Republic have a boat on a trailer that could handle a Potomac crossing?
If we had someone standing by at a dock ramp, we could have our quick response team with the heavy weapons standing by quickly load them and ferry them across the river to our waiting arms.
He then sent maps to people alleged to have been part of his response team.
I wonder, and to be clear, I am just spitballing here.
I'm not being sarcastic or facetious at all.
I'm just curious, and I wonder if this dude got the idea to use the Potomac from listening to Alex's show.
On the December 31st episode of Alex's show, just days before Caldwell tried to get this boat planned together, Alex had a caller on his show who suggested this.
unidentified
Just wanted to touch bases with you with the March on D.C. or the occupation of D.C.
I think that you, I'm going to talk to all the Cajun Navy and all these people that did boat parades for the past three to four months.
We need to have every single one of those people plug up the Potomac because you know that's a good idea.
Well, we need to see the Cajun Navy come in and then get on the ground with us, but I totally agree.
We need to see.
unidentified
Well, because I'm looking at it, if they tie up those boats, even if they try to shut down those bridges, and that's a free, you can get into the, I mean, that's a public area.
Tie up those boats.
If they try to shut down those bridges, just imagine the InfoWar army crossing.
This caller is talking about clogging the river with the boats, whereas Caldwell wanted to use them to ferry weapons.
But there are some similarities in terms of what's being suggested.
Clearly, this caller doesn't mean that the entire river should be clogged up, but that these boats should tie together and block the area off so Infowars types could cross the river in the event that the bridges were closed.
There's thematic similarities to what Caldwell was trying to achieve, but it's probably not connected in any way.
The only thing they've got is a message from me posted on our operational chat on Signal saying anybody who's not on a PSD, come to the northeast corner of the Capitol.
That's where I was standing.
Rendezvous there.
And my intent was to make sure that our guys stayed out of trouble.
Sadly, our North Carolina chapter had already gone rogue and it declared on a chat that I wasn't even on.
They declared to other guys in North Carolina that in D.C. on January the 6th, they were not going to have anything to do with national or take part in anything the national was doing.
They're trying to say that because we said the election was stolen, this is what's very dangerous about this.
Anyone who said the election was stolen and then encouraged people to go to D.C. And then, like we did, encourage Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act.
And we said, if he does, we're willing to serve as the militia if he calls us into service, which is a perfectly constitutional and legal act by the president.
If he declares an insurrection and calls us up under federal law as the militia and calls into service, he has every right and authority to do so.
So it turns out that because of what's happening and the prosecution of these people for storming the Capitol and all this, turns out there's no more Constitution.
Today, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Congresswoman, rose to speak against H.R. 8, which is a national gun registration, and H.R. 1446, which is a permanent firearm waiting list.
So the Democrats are coming after our constitutionally guaranteed rights one after the other, and there's no sense of them slowing down, only increasing their speed.
No, and if you're going to say post-constitutional America, then essentially what you're saying is if we want the Constitution back, we're going to have to overthrow the fucking United States government.
It's disgusting to watch all these so-called Republican leaders throw everyone at the Capitol under the bus, condemn them all, and agree with the Democrats.
This was an insurrection and all this nonsense.
We have got to purge the Republican Party, and it has to start at the bottom up.
You got to purge out all the rhinos, all the cowards or traitors that dominate the GOP.
I want you to tell us, Stuart, what, like, somebody who's listening right now, they see what's going on, and they're thinking, what do I do as soon as this program's over?
We come to the end of this, and one of the things that I really am pretty insistent on in my own head is I'm going to be paying more attention to Harrison.
I think that this is actually an incredibly bad strategy on their part.
I think that this is bad for InfoWars, and as such, it appears to be a head poking up, and I'm going to play whack-a-mole with it.
Yep.
I'm going to pay more attention to him because I think it's a soft, exposed underbelly and a fucking idiot who doesn't know how to play the game that Alex and Owen Shroyer clearly play better, where they can shut this stuff down.
They can give the appearance of signaling to these white nationalists and anti-Semitic people.