Noam Chomsky’s 2001 interview with Alex Jones reveals their shared skepticism of elite control—Chomsky citing structural propaganda (e.g., Madison Avenue’s "utility" model), Jones twisting it into vaccine-induced compliance. Jones misuses stats, like England’s 1997 gun laws (voluntary surrender, not confiscation) and Australia’s crime rates, to attack Chomsky’s claim that U.S. gun deaths are uniquely high. Chomsky calmly counters, exposing Jones’s cherry-picked narratives and personal insults ("propaganda state shill") as tactics to undermine credibility rather than engage in meaningful debate. Their clash highlights how conspiracy tropes distort systemic critiques, leaving audiences with fragmented truths instead of coherent analysis. [Automatically generated summary]
A big part of this is I've been meaning to take a trip back to my childhood home in Honolulu and see some of the sites like Ali Yalani Elementary School and go down to Waikiki Beach and kick around the old haunts.
So, Jordan, today we have an interesting situation to get into because as I mentioned, you know, we're going to be pre-recording some episodes, and that's going to make it more difficult to be in the present day keeping up with Alex.
So, of course, it had been my plan to, you know, stay in the past in 2003, probably, for those episodes.
Sure.
And so I didn't want to do a 2003 episode here today.
I mean, I feel like somehow we're thinking of this as a negative thing, but being a guest and being by far more prepared than anything that your host has ever done seems like a positive to me.
At what point he became aware that he was up against feels a bubb.
You know, I think early days in his career, a lot of it was based around like, you know, making big publicity stunts about trying to get the church of the Branch Davidians rebuilt.
Sure.
And so he had some notoriety on a sort of regional basis from that.
But if you look at the early parts of his career where he really, you know, sort of got the, he hit the NOS, as it were, in these furious terms, that's got to be all around 9-11 conspiracies before that.
Also, another thing that's really weird is that they agree about a lot of stuff.
And he's written books like Manufacturing Consent, an Excellent Video, also called titled Manufacturing Consent.
And it goes into how they stage things.
How they will have a supposed debate on television, but the people debating are actually on the same side.
They're just debating the exact implementation by just a few degrees, giving you the psychological illusion that there's really some type of difference, so that in your mind, you're going to fall in supposedly either phony camp being steered in the direction they wish.
Now, that's how I put it.
Chomsky does it in a little bit more sophisticated fashion, but they do this all the time.
Manufacturing consent is about the media, but it's not necessarily about staging events or false flags or that kind of stuff the way Alex is kind of leading it and presenting this.
The general thesis of Chomsky's book, largely co-written by Edward Herman, is that the media engages in self-censoring of ideas that are opposed to the interests of the elite corporations in such a way that encourages acceptance of the policies being put in place by the government, which support those interests, often to the detriment of what's in the interest of normal people.
It's more complicated than even what I'm presenting, but that's a large part of what Chomsky and Herman called the propaganda model.
It doesn't rely on coercion to operate.
Rather, it's a product of just market forces.
There's a structural conflict of interest in how the media is organized that creates a disconnect between conveying all of the information that's relevant to the interests of the upper upper classes and those of everyone else.
Right.
This is the general 30,000-foot view of manufacturing consent.
Yeah, if the media were capable of reporting correctly, they would be reporting every single day that we should do everything we can to destroy their billionaire owners.
I don't think I would be qualified to give a full breakdown of the ideas in that text, but I can tell you that I'm also certain that Alex has not read it.
The propaganda model includes five filters, which are theorized as being determinative about whether certain news is represented in the larger media.
The first four are ownership, funding, sources, and flack.
Alex could probably find agreement on those four, but he absolutely could not accept the fifth, which is anti-communism.
During the Cold War, the mass media wasn't going to give a serious chance to an outlet that went at odds with the prevailing narrative, which was to be afraid of the commies.
In more recent times, Chomsky has recontextualized this filter to update it to the Times, where the war on terror is more relevant as a media filter after 9-11 than anti-communism.
Alex could probably agree that large portions of the media have the same opinion on big issues like the war on terror, and that possibly it was meant to scare people into accepting policies they wouldn't maybe otherwise, but he absolutely could never accept that anti-communist fervor during the Cold War was in any way part of that.
Yes, I think that's kind of interesting because I think what happens is that Alex has a predetermined set of beliefs and he's just decided that Chomsky backs those up.
yes um so alex talks before getting into the actual interview of more about his this is 2001 so yeah this is This is where he's at in terms of the similarities between the left and the right.
So, yeah, I just, I come away from clips like that with a feeling that I don't know how in-depth any of this assessment of the similarities between left and right are.
Because I do think you can make a decent argument that there are similarities.
Obviously, there are entwined interests.
There are similar priorities in some ways, but there are also huge fucking differences.
But I think the only thing I would add as a kind of a footnote is that that marginalization of the public that you're describing is quite purposeful, unconscious, self-conscious.
So especially through the 20th century, actually it goes back to the founding of the country, but particularly in the 20th century, there has been a very self-conscious, explicit effort.
I mean, you can make it nothing speculative, but the leaders say so.
Business leaders, intellectuals, academic social scientists and others say that it is important to keep the public out of things.
It's important to ensure that the public remain what are called spectators, not participants.
They're supposed to be directed to other concerns and not to interfere with policy formation.
That is a major phenomenon developed in the more democratic countries, in the United States and England particularly, through the 20th century.
And the reason was very clear.
By the early 20th century, it was becoming very difficult to control people by other means.
The voting franchise was extending.
Labor unions were developing.
Women were demanding the vote.
I mean, the countries, especially England and the United States, were simply becoming more democratic.
And it was recognized early on that if you can't control people by force or poverty or some other means, you are going to have to control them by what was quite openly called propaganda at the time.
People don't like the term propaganda anymore, but that was used public relations industry grows out of these experiences and this understanding, and it is very explicit.
Professor Chomsky, they developed, put out their papers that I've read from the Carnegie Endowment and others that mind control, behavioral modification, is much cheaper and much more effective than tanks and guns.
No, I think that there is what Chomsky's bringing to the table is ideas about wanting to keep people disengaged from some public discourse and some decisions that could be detrimental to elite corporations' interests.
And I think that there is a real conversation that can be had.
And I think that I obviously wouldn't necessarily take this tack, but someone could say that if literally everybody was engaged in decision-making about every issue, it would be impossible for a society to function.
And maybe to a limit, there is an argument that can be made for, you know, people being disengaged is more productive, is actually a better organizational model.
Alex, on the other hand, his beliefs veer so much into the vaccines are meant to make us dumb, they poison us in our food and all this, that even this point of agreement is a point of departure for the two of them.
Yeah, I mean, it does sound like Noam Chomsky is describing the phenomena of the government Destroying the ability of the electorate to honestly engage with their actions.
And Alex responded, so obviously you're talking about mind control.
And I think that it, you know, I don't have a good enough glimpse of Alex of 2001, although based on, you know, the present day, I would guess that he means like someone putting a legitimate mind control.
You look into my spinning thing.
Yeah, I think so, but I think that the way someone like his guest would interact with that is taking that as metaphor.
If Alex was like, hey, so you're in agreement with me, they're putting computer chips inside everybody's brain to make them do what they tell them to, and Noam would have gone, that is not what I'm saying at all.
But I don't know if that's what Alex is saying back at this point.
That's one of the parts that is kind of challenging about this is you can hear that from Alex even as metaphor, as flourish of speaking, as opposed to it being like, I have you under my control.
So Alex talks about how Bush and Clinton, this is going to have to be, yeah, I guess it would be George W. Bush because he just got elected at this point.
Well, maybe I'm naive, but I have more faith in the public than that.
My feeling is that the general public is rather well aware of this, and I think it shows up in public opinion study in the United States, mainly because business wants to keep its finger on the public pulse.
They want to know what people are thinking.
So we have a pretty trustworthy and very extensive bully industry.
And what comes out of public attitudes, I think, is kind of revealing.
So for the last 20 years or so, about 80% of the population, when they're asked, what do you think the country, you know, who runs the government or what does it do?
The answer that they pick out of a set of choices is the government works for the few and the special interests, not the people.
And again, I think that really illustrates the sort of surface level and cherry-picked way in which Alex describes the similarity between the two.
absolutely um and i think i largely agree with chomsky's analysis that more this isn't like groundbreaking stuff yeah The idea that people have an alienation from power.
And Chomsky has brought up the idea of hopelessness and that hopelessness is a response that people can have to the idea that the government isn't necessarily serving their interests.
And so Alex is suggesting that this shift in propaganda from hiding the globalists to throwing it in your face is a way of facilitating this hopelessness.
Yeah, that's when the relations industry really exploded.
And it grew on the basis of the very sensible assumption that was pretty clearly articulated that we have to somehow make sure that the general public does not make use of the democratic opportunities that are available to them and leaves us to run the place as we've been doing.
And the way to do it was you read the business leaders are saying, look, we have to induce what's called a philosophy of utility.
They actually use the phrase, we have to just kind of direct people to superficial things like fashionable consumption.
We have to regiment something, anything that doesn't bother us.
Bread and circus, just anything like that.
And that's true of leading intellectuals.
I mean, take, say, Walter Lippmann, who was the leading figure in the U.S. elite media in the 20th century, major public intellectual.
He's the one who invented the phrase manufacturer of consent.
We borrowed it from him.
And he thought it was necessary.
It's necessary to manufacture consent in order to make sure that we, what he called the responsible men, can run the affairs of the world without being bothered.
And what he didn't say, but what is crucial is your point, that people, you become a responsible man if you're serving the interests of concentrated private power.
I feel like that's what I'm learning from all of this, is that somehow Alex fucking Jones gets to talk to Noam Chomsky, and he doesn't get to listen to me shit talk him while he's explaining the world to me.
So this is one of the things that makes this kind of difficult to really even engage with too deeply as content from my end is that, yeah, I think I can see what Chomsky's saying.
He's articulating positions clearly.
I think rebutting things would, you know, there's some stuff that I maybe don't entirely agree with, but, you know, it would be a matter of teasing out points to really get to the bottom of like, okay, well, you know, yes, there is an interest in media in having people consumed with superficial things.
Sure, of course.
How much of that is intentional strategy driven by people who want people to be distracted from larger issues, and how much of that is actively, that is what people want.
Yeah, I mean, it would be hard to argue that the best example of that very thing would be Trump's tweets.
By constantly covering Trump's tweets, they almost ensured he would at least have a shot at becoming president.
At the same time, if the public weren't so consumed and so interested with discovering more and more about his dumb fuck tweets, then they wouldn't be covering it, you know?
And to this question, particularly about what he's bringing up about the media and what Alex yells bread and circuses with, is there is a supply component and there's a demand component.
And to ignore either, I think, is not the full picture.
And I don't think that Chomsky's ignoring the demand picture.
See, now, the problem, Alex, is he had a perfect opportunity to cut into Noam Chomsky and be like, actually, I think it goes further back than that to roam with bread and circuses, Mr. Chomsky.
Or you're not smart enough to figure out the echo on your phone now, are you?
But he brings up the difference of opinion between the sort of elite corporations and the normal person who has a job perhaps in terms of free trade agreements.
One of the major issues for the public, look at polls, and it's understandable, are these international economic agreements, the things that are called free trade agreements.
So that's not what they are.
Those are very big issues for the public.
People are very much worried about the trade deficit because they know that affects their job.
But the point I'm trying to make is this: these are very big issues for the population.
They're also big issues for the business world.
But the population and the business world happens to be on opposite sides.
Therefore, the issues do not arise in political campaigns.
So, like, for example, the free trade area of the Americas, which is an enormous agreement with a lot of consequences, that has yet to be discussed in the media.
It's been negotiated for three years.
It finally broke through at the Summit of the Americas meeting in Quebec.
There was such a fur over it, had to be mentioned.
But it's been under negotiation for a couple of years by corporate managers, by trade ministers of governments who are basically corporate representatives.
The media know all about it, but they don't want the public to know.
It did not come up in the political campaign.
The nature of these arrangements has yet to be made public.
I mean, you can sort of figure it out if you do a research project.
But these things are not made available to the public, and that's for a very clear reason.
Now, maybe Alex would view this as the consequence of an elaborate, shady conspiracy to put this trade deal in in order to enslave white men or something.
You know, those filters that are brought up in the propaganda model, things like ownership of conglomerates, the sources of news, the advertising revenues.
Things like that create a market environment where it's not in the best interest of the people who may profit from one of these arrangements to cover it too much.
One thing I am absolutely seeing that is mitigating what I would think is so much disagreement is that Chomsky is elucidating the conspiracies that are real that we all know about.
You know, like we all know that billionaires and the government work together to fuck us over.
That's a normal conspiracy.
That's what they do.
And it's not even like, it's not even like their fault.
They're just creations of the system that is propping them up and then they continue to, you know, they do that whole thing.
But since he's framing it in that conspiratorial, like these business interests and the government are all working together to fuck us over, that can be viewed by Alex in the same way that the metaphor could be viewed by Noam Chomsky.
Yeah, there's enough leeway to this that Alex can still find it useful and the audience can still read into it what they want to read into it that fits the sort of InfoWars narrative structure.
Right.
Whereas it does not necessarily, and it's a lot more boring than the way that Alex would put it.
Like in 2001, that level of like because the government is so fucking corrupt and because Alex isn't outright saying he's fighting the devil, you can go on an Infowars show and say the government's fucking corrupt.
And Alex is being like, yeah, the government's fucking corrupt.
And everybody goes, yeah, the government's fucking corrupt.
And then 20 years later, you're like, let's overthrow the government.
And this exists in that space before that where there's a lot of fertile ground for Alex to take advantage of in political disillusionment.
Yeah.
And so I think that Noam, you know, unfortunately, but I don't know, I don't think he knows too much about Alex and just thinks that he is kind of like an alternative news guy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And he says things like, you know, outlets like yours are important to.
I mean, to Chomsky's earlier point, like, if you recall the media immediately following that stolen election, like, they quickly were like, hey, you know what?
We need to unite around our president and we need the country to come together.
At no point in time were they like, hey, we can't have a stolen election.
Well, these are unelected, unaccountable international boards controlled by the top 20 corporations and banks telling us they're going to run our lives.
I mean, that's a horrible idea, but most Americans don't know that.
Yeah, and if you watch, I mean, I sometimes watch this television with my grandchildren.
What they are subjected to is criminal.
I mean, they're barraged by propaganda, teaching them from infancy that the only thing in life is getting those tennis shoes or those Pokemon cards or whatever it may be.
And that's really a way to control people in a very ugly fashion.
The only way that this is productive as a conversation is addressing it as an individualistic pursuit of recognizing when those kind of advertising tricks are being used.
So I think that the path away from helplessness that I'm hearing is self-motivated, self-driven.
And ways that intellectuals and public speakers can be of help is helping people recognize that it is a path out of this conundrum as opposed to, and sure, there's institutional things you can do, like perhaps break up large media entities.
Certainly there's organization and things you can do on that front.
But the idea of getting rid of the influence that is this negative consumerism is not likely.
Take, say, these trade agreements are coming along.
One crucial part of them is to take what are called services and hand them over to private power.
Well, services are just about anything that people would care about.
Health, education, water, anything that would be in the public arena where people would want to make decisions.
That has to be taken out of the public arena, put into private hands, unaccountable private hands, and then what's left for the public is which kind of shoes I buy.
I mean, the distinction between republic and democracy that you're describing was not really what concerned the founding fathers.
What they were concerned about, you read, say, James Madison, the main framer, what he was concerned about, but he wanted to have a system in which power would lie in the hands of what he called the wealth of the nation, the more capable class of men.
And the reason was because the goal of government, this phrase, is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.
So the system was designed to try to ensure that the wealth of the nation would essentially be in control and that the general public would be fragmented and marginalized and so on.
I think, look, over the centuries, there have been a lot of struggles against this elitist concept, and the options for public participation did increase substantially.
I think people, again, like I say, maybe I'm naive, but I think people more or less understand it.
And what they feel is helpless.
And they have to be able to overcome that feeling of helplessness.
And there are ways of doing it.
In the past, people have organized.
They have struggled.
They've achieved rights.
We have all kinds of rights and freedoms that didn't exist not long ago.
And that's because of because people were not willing to just sit back and take it, but to organize, learn, act, educate, you know, do things to change the world so that it fits their concerns and needs.
We have the opportunities to do that.
I mean, we're very privileged.
We live in a society where people are not controlled by force.
Well, Mr. Chomsky, I have to be honest with you, and I really appreciate you coming on.
I want to tell folks about some of your publications and let you get back to work.
But right there, it seemed like a groupthink herding mechanism when you talked about the guns and you said, well, I think America, the U.S., is off from the main line of the rest of the world as if, oh, we're a little backwards that we still have guns.
So Alex is trying to express this notion that you're trying to shame America about guns based on the notion that the rest of the world is more civilized because they don't have guns.
And this is just anathema to Alex.
He has decided that if you present that kind of a position on his show, you're fucking chill.
No, I mean, the moment Noam said we live in a country where you can't control people by force, all I saw in my head was Alex pulling a gun and saying, you take that back.
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And it's like, well, look, guns are not about force.
No, and he's framing the conversation where he believes it's more important, which is deaths, gun deaths, which is out of pace with other industrialized countries.
I think that there's a really not bizarre at all, very foreign to Infowars situation going on where he's talking to a person who is staying on the one thing that they were talking about, which is deaths by guns.
Yeah, I think I would have said something along the lines of if England and Australia are one and two in gun deaths, I will eat a bowl of my own shit, you idiot.
So Alex, what he's doing is he's talking about the Firearms Amendment Acts of 1997 in England, which were passed in response to the Dunblane massacre, where a man in his 40s carried out a mass shooting at a primary school.
The strategy that they employed was not to confiscate guns, but to ban future ownership of most guns and let the valid licenses that were active lapse and not be renewed.
In response, a ton of people voluntarily turned in their guns, and Alex is pretending that's a confiscation.
And it did make more guns illegal to own, but there's been some pretty strict rules about guns in England predating this.
Noam Chomsky's not far off.
No.
Alex could get him on a technicality if he was saying that all guns have always been illegal or whatever.
One big part of controlling the thought process and the debate where the rat thinks it has a choice.
It can go forward, left, right, or back, but it's still in their system, is having people out there talking about this propaganda state in Madison Avenue and only pointing out certain parts of it and misdirecting people back into the big government paradigm.
And frankly, sir, you need to get the information on the guns, on the land grabbing, on all of it, because I have it right here.
And I respect your work, but at the same time, just here talking to you, I think some of it isn't as honest as it could be.
I'm going to agree with you for about an hour, but it turns out that you disagree with me on guns, so you work for David Rockefeller, you lying piece of shit.
I mean, how many, I mean, you've seen the video that's been on nationwide of them cutting the guns in half over there, confiscating the handguns, the rifles.
Three years ago, we've read the reports, The Economist, WorldNet, Daily.
Yeah, so I mean, just speak freely once he's gone.
I've read his books.
Now I know for sure.
So it was the idea to get him in there and then find something to disagree with and then declare him a shill?
I think it has to have been because he has to have, like, if what Alex is saying is true and he's read Chomsky's books and suspected that he was an NWO shill.
I would have suggested that when he was talking about one of the books that you supposedly read would be the time to say that, hey, I think after having read your book, you're a shill.
I mean, it kind of feels like if I were running it, here would be my kind of game plan there, which is if you and Noam Chomsky have an awesome interview, then you get to say Noam Chomsky is a fan of yours.
I do think that the extreme right elements of Alex's audience, which is certainly more of the keystone of it than anything, would not like the idea of being friends with Noam Chomsky.
Totally, totally.
I honestly, I've listened to this interview a couple times, and I don't really know exactly what happened.
I'm not sure.
It makes no sense to me.
And maybe there's a decent chance that what we saw there with him being like, sir, you know, I believe that this is a group think, and, you know, I think that you're not being as honest as maybe that's 2001 Angry Alex.
Like having a conversation with Alex that it steps on a number of commonalities between where sort of critical historical study overlaps with, you know, pseudo-conspiracy.