Today, Dan and Jordan head to the past to continue exploring the question of whether or not Alex Jones thought he was fighting the literal devil in 2003. In this installment, Alex talks to at least two people who think they're fighting the literal devil, commits to possibly seeing the second Matrix movie, and continues to be aggressively anti-Putin.
I mean, I suppose you could probably try and make the argument that it's hypocritical for him to be God-blasting all day, every day, and then be at a strip club.
Well, I hate Alex Jones, and I will say that if someone was taking a picture of him in the bathroom, I think that is a violation of someone's rights of privacy.
Especially to me for donating to our show, just to make sure everybody knows that I might have a stand-up video on YouTube still, and I'm not sure if I do, but it's okay.
And Alex is still covering the bombing in Riyadh that had happened recently.
If you recall, it was a residential complex compound kind of area where a lot of Westerners were known to live.
In the intervening time since then, some more information has come out about the particular Westerners that were living in these compounds that appeared to be the target of that.
And so this is the direction the story is going to.
So the company in question that were apparently the targets of this 2003 bombing in Riyadh was the Vinel Corporation.
It's a construction business that was founded in 1931 and has a deep history of international contracts for U.S. interests.
For instance, during the Vietnam War, Vinel was tasked with maintaining power plant systems over there, overseas.
They're actually pretty well known for this because in 1967, approximately 2,000 Korean workers at a vinyl plant in Cam 'ron Bay were dissatisfied enough with their conditions that they rioted.
From Shelby Stanton's book, The Rise and Fall of an American Army, U.S. Ground Forces in Vietnam, 1965 to 1973, quote, A Vinal Corporation civilian took out his gun and
shot three Koreans.
He was then mobbed and severely injured, and a Korean shot another American.
What's really most notable about this company, however, is that in 1975, they landed a very lucrative contract to train the Saudi Arabian National Guard.
I think that the people who would be trying to attack the Saudi Arabian government, you know, maybe some rebel types or terrorists, would know enough to be like, well, let's not just attack the government.
So here's the connection between Vennel and Carlisle Group.
In 1992, Vinyl Corporation was bought by BDM International Incorporated, which in turn was owned by the Carlyle Group.
However, in 1997, BDM was purchased by TRW Incorporated, which represented the end of their association with the Carlyle Group.
According to an article in the Washington Post from 1997 about the deal, Carlyle had agreed to sell its entire stake and shares in the company to TRW in the acquisition, so there isn't even some minority ownership remaining, the way Alex is pretending.
Then, in 2002, TRW was bought by Northrop Grumman.
So at the time Alex was recording this episode, and he wants to talk about this company in the context of the military-industrial complex, this would be the angle to take.
By pointing fingers at the Carlyle Group, Alex is making this piece of information fit his pre-written narratives about Bush, but he's depriving the audience of access to any real context for the subject that he's covering.
At the point Alex is on air here, the Carlyle Group was six years removed from selling Vanell's parent company, and even if they were owners of Vanell's parent company, still, it wouldn't prove anything.
One of the things that I've learned to be very careful about when dealing with speculative information is claims that people or groups are fronts.
This is an accusation that's really difficult to work with because generally speaking it's a claim that's made constantly without proof and people who make the claim often seem to think that the burden of proof is on you to show that some group isn't a front, which is a trap.
If you read any John Birch Society text or book from the anti-communist crusaders that Alex loves, one of the first things you'll notice is that every single thing is asserted to be a communist front, and none of it is ever substantiated.
Gary Allen's book, Communist Revolution in the Streets, accuses literally every civil rights organization, every student activism group, and most bookstores of being communist fronts.
And not in the sense that, like, some communists might gravitate to these things.
Like, he's claiming that these exist explicitly as...
So anyway, my point is that it's one of the rhetorical tricks that I have the least interest in, is like an unsupported allegation that something or someone is a front.
So, in the case of Vennel, there is an article in the London Times about how they were formerly owned by the Carlyle Group and that the Carlyle Group had a history of contracting with intelligence organizations.
That's almost a certainty, considering their long-standing contract to train the Saudi National Guard.
And allegations have been made.
From a 2003 article in the LA Times, It's definitely conceivable to imagine that at times people who work for the CIA have used fake employment at Vanell as cover.
But that alone doesn't demonstrate that the entire company itself is a front operation.
I'm going out of my way to provide explanations for why Alex could be right, and I still don't think his argument stands up to scrutiny.
Initially, after the bombing, it was suspected that the attacks were on a housing area known to be used by Westerners living in Riyadh.
As more details came out, it became more clear that this was likely a targeted attack aimed at Vinal.
What makes a lot of sense is that, like, from the standpoint of people who might attack the Saudi government, like we were talking about, like, they're assisting and training the National Guard of Saudi Arabia, and you might see that as a high-profile target.
The CIA could outright run Vanell, or they could just be a company that had close ties to the government and allowed CIA agents to use their business's name as part of the cover.
Either way, I'm not sure it really matters, because the thing they're doing sucks.
There's a much larger problem here with this entire state of private armies and war contractors.
But instead of dealing with those things realistically, Alex just wants to jingle around keys like the CIA and Carlyle Group, because distracting is easier than wrestling with difficult information and looking at the reality.
But then again, to a certain extent, it's hard not to look back in the context of, like, when he has Trump, he's fine with so much of this shit, you know?
So he's saying that 50 of the 70 employees at Venno were gone on a training mission, but what he's doing is he's trying to create the false impression in the listener's head.
Whenever there's an attack, you'll always hear claims that some select group was warned not to be there or had been removed from the area beforehand because claims like this...
Seem to be really strong indications of foreknowledge, and probably it's a false flag.
Alex wants you to think that 50 of the seven employees there weren't at work that day, which is suspicious, but that's not the situation.
The buildings that were bombed were a residential compound where 70 American employees lived.
I'm not sure where Alex is getting the 50 number from, but nine employees died and 15 were hospitalized, not counting many who were merely treated for minor injuries.
Also, if people who worked at Vino weren't at home, they almost by definition would be on a training mission, since the reason they're in Saudi Arabia is a training mission.
The words Alex is saying actually mean nothing, but they're meant to create a denser air of suspicion around the bombing, which is unearned by the information that he's actually presenting.
No, he's trying to sell it like if the Pentagon got exploded tomorrow, but all the top generals escaped miraculously the day before, you're like, well, that's suspicious as shit.
We know a lot of World of Daily writers listen when you admitted that.
I've got news for you, friends.
Fascism and communism are ideological kissing cousins.
Boy, you said it.
I would place fascism and socialism just a few degrees to the right of communism.
No fair, it's not left-right.
Fascism, communism, socialism, all on the command and control, tyranny, serfdom, feudalism, and republics, constitutional republics, are on the other end of that spectrum.
And he thinks that this op-ed that Joseph Farrow wrote is...
Like an indication that they're coming around or something, and so he's excited.
I'm less interested in that op-ed than I am in Alex's discussion about some more of the specifics about his belief that the right-left paradigm is an illusion.
Listening to mostly more current episodes of Alex's show from the past five or six years, you get the sense that...
That idea had something to do with political parties.
Even at the end of the clip, he's making reference to the left and the right having something to do with giving you the illusion of having a choice, which feels like he's talking about voting and political parties.
However, listening to these 2003 episodes, the concept has sort of taken a different shape.
Since Alex talks a little bit more about what he actually means back then, and I have to say that I think it's actually way stupider than I thought it was, it actually seems like a political philosophy that's tailor-made to be defined by opposition.
Which goes a long way toward helping make sense of how the show seemed nonsensical in the Trump era and now.
When Alex is discussing the illusion of the left-right paradigm I believe you have to just completely get ideas of liberal or conservative politics out of your head.
I think Alex is operating on a completely different axis, which is essentially just government is bad.
It's a pretty childish thing to express as your fundamental political belief, especially if you don't have the courage to just come out and be a full-on anarchist.
If you're against big government, then I'd like to remind you that small government is fucking huge compared to no government.
Leaving that aside, I want to discuss for a second why Alex's conception of this being the only relevant access in politics is woefully dumb and not the way to look at the world.
The sole factor Alex considers in terms of ideology is whether or not something is a system that includes government control of the public.
The command and control aspect.
On the one side of the spectrum, he puts communism, socialism, and fascism as systems with high government control.
And at the other end, he has this idealized version of a constitutional republic, which I guess is supposed to have minimal government control.
I don't know.
If that's the only factor that matters, then there should be no difference to Alex between anarcho-capitalism and libertarian socialism.
Both advocate for the elimination of the centralized state, which would result in a system with even less governmental control over the public than exists in a republic.
Both are conceived around people existing in a stateless world characterized by voluntarily constructed groups.
But, obviously, these two ideologies have stark differences.
private property.
Anarcho-capitalists believe the right to private property is essentially the bedrock of society, whereas libertarian socialists would view the accumulation of private property to be an instance of the same oppression one might face from the state, just being carried out by a private corporation.
It's very obvious if you look at these two systems that Alex isn't really being honest about his political preferences.
If there's two schools of thought which both eschew centralized governmental control, there Alex has that are on the left-right spectrum.
Private property is a matter of the left-right spectrum.
While it's true that most center-left and center-right people tend to agree that private property ownership is good, that's not true when you go to the further ends.
of the spectrum.
Further left ideologies tend to favor communal ownership of private property or democratized workplaces.
Conversely, further right ideologies tend to believe that private property rights are inalienable human rights and they have no problem with exploitative workplaces because employment is a voluntary relationship.
Sure.
unidentified
Alex presents himself as being above the left right paradigm because he wants you to think that he's talking about Democrat, Republican, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I just think when you hear stuff like this, it really...
What it does is it helps me understand a little bit more about these sort of elements of Alex's costume that he wears to try and trick people into thinking he's sensible.
And that, like, being above the left-right paradigm looks sensible.
Because, you know, you could say, you know, Republicans and Democrats are all the same.
They're beholden to corporate interests and special interest groups.
And, you know, like, you can say that.
And I think you can get a lot of people to be like, yeah, you know what?
Yeah, I mean, you can call yourself above the left-right paradigm fairly easily because a winning strategy for both Republicans and Democrats is to say, listen, the Republicans and the Democrats fucking suck.
Elect me to be one of those Republicans or Democrats.
If your goal is to enlighten an audience or help them better understand the world around them and the political conversations that they're hearing, this is exactly the opposite of what you should do.
Communism and fascism do definitely mean something.
They are just words that describe imperial strongmen wearing different colored hats, and convincing audiences that that's the case makes them entirely unprepared to deal with challenging political issues.
Also, if you take Alex at his word, then the hallmarks of the sort of government that he hates, and he does not want to exist, is one that's run by a strongman or thug, which is an empire.
I know hypocrisy means nothing, but by these standards, Donald Trump is precisely the candidate 2003 Alex Jones would strongly oppose.
In 2015, Alex knew Trump was connected to the mob and presented an image of a strong man as a facade.
Yeah, it's such a bummer that these concepts like communism and fascism and all of that stuff, things that really do take a book or multiple books or many, many books to understand clearly, let alone try and implement, And then you've got people who are just like, communism is this, in a short sentence.
On shows like Alex's, you'll hear coverage like this a lot, because it serves a couple of important emotional purposes for the audience.
The first is that a straw man is created of the heartless people who could just exercise while a person next to them was dead.
The listener gets to imagine how horrible these people are and feel morally superior to these imaginary people.
The second is to demoralize the audience about the state of the world and erode their belief in their fellow persons.
The goal is to present a situation where the audience hears this headline and they imagine that these people in the gym continue to be a good person.
continued to work out fully aware that this person was dead because that's shitty of them.
If they didn't know the person was dead and thought possibly he was just resting then you can't really paint this as a story that highlights the moral degradation of the broader culture.
It's really more just a situation where people are minding their own business at the gym and Yeah.
Yeah, it's sad and it's unfortunate, but it's not like...
This is not a news story that illustrates how bad people are.
Yeah, it is unfortunate that that's like that combination of when...
Commerce and capital met psychology and turned it into advertising, and they're like, we can get more stuff if we emotionally manipulate people than if we provide them a rational argument, so we're going to emotionally manipulate them.
Well, Alex, I tell you what, I'm on a business trip, and I've got to be somewhere in about 15 minutes, but if I can, I'd like to give a little special out here.
He thinks 9-11 was an inside job and what have you.
And so Alex is playing him up as like the biggest deal.
Like a huge Canadian journalist.
One of the most important in the world.
And so here's Barry's introduction to the proceedings.
unidentified
Listen, it's a real pleasure, Alex.
I encountered your face for the first time at the end of that new video called Aftermath, you know?
Questions, unanswered questions from 9-11?
I saw that video in San Francisco last month, and I really liked what they had you as the last guy punching out a real call for people to wake up, and I really admired that.
He decided that the mainstream media story about the attack wasn't real, but he did have a bit of a different angle on it than Alex.
According to what he told reporter Terry Glavin in a 2006 interview, the end goal of the attack, carried out by the White House, was to create a war against Islam.
In 2004, he would go on to make his own 9-11 film titled The Great Conspiracy, the 9-11 news special you never saw.
It's just as good and just as bad as every other 9-11 documentary and has a title that bears all the hallmarks of the early days of internet clickbait before people really got good at it.
Over the years, he's continued to be a 9-11 truther and generally the sort of person you can count on to call just about anything a false flag.
I found a recent interview he did with the Global Research News Hour where he was discussing how the storming of the Capitol on January 6th was a false flag.
It's tough for me to say, but listening to that interview, it kind of feels like Zwicker is like an Alex Jones, but with opposite politics.
He's making wildly unfounded assertions and claims that don't make sense, but he's also staunchly opposed to Trump and recognizes that systemic racism exists.
They felt like they were in agreement as far as 9-11 conspiracies were concerned, but they actually didn't agree on anything because they're dreadfully far apart on the left-right paradigm.
The left-right paradigm is fairly important in reality.
According to Infowars lore, Bertrand Russell's writing outright admits that the globalists plan to drug, sterilize, and kill off most of the population.
Russell is one of the old-school globalists, according to Alex, who is instrumental in coming up with and publicizing their evil plans.
I can understand wanting to have a polite interview, and I do think there are times just to agree to disagree about things.
For instance, if Barry thought that the 9-11 planes were remote-controlled and Alex felt they were piloted by the hijackers, they could go ahead and agree to disagree without having a gigantic problem sitting on the table.
They may have a disagreement, but not a fundamental contradiction.
Barry isn't just saying that he kind of likes Bertrand Russell.
He says Russell is his hero.
Barry is a guy who's worked for major papers and he's taught college courses, so it stands to reason that if he says that Bertrand Russell is his hero, he's probably read as much or more of his writing than Alex has.
This is why, to me, this cannot be an agree-to-disagree moment.
In order for Alex to maintain all the narratives he has in play, he has to be agreeing to disagree about his guest hero-worshipping a guy who he has read, discussing the plans to kill off most of the human population.
There's no other reasonable conclusion to come to with the information provided, other than that Barry is an enthusiastic fan of globalist conspiracies.
Alex also knows that if he presses the issue, he risks revealing that his shit about Russell's made up.
But he also knows that he can't just let a statement like that stand.
And thus, you end up with this middle ground, this spineless agreeing to disagree about one of the top thinkers of the gigantic demonic conspiracy that Alex has made his entire career about fighting happening.
Yeah, yeah, because if you're saying that you're above the left-right paradigm, you should be more unhappy with the plan instead of being like, well, there's globalists on the left, there's globalists on the right.
And that is that I think that Alex's branding at this point is so dependent on him being able to pretend this left-right paradigm thing as an illusion.
Yeah.
unidentified
So for him to have someone who's ostensibly a 9-11 conspiracy theorist who's on the left or has left tendencies and left politics.
Well, I mean, because Alex is taking advantage of...
So, the enemy of my enemy is not my friend, and you can prove that because Alex is taking advantage of people thinking that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Okay, for those that don't know, you're a national television host.
You did this on your own, and you write for newspapers, and you just put together this video, and believe me, it'll be a lot more than 500 of you get the word out.
There are now mainstream news articles reporting on what we've been saying for years.
The evidence of mind control triggers in the Matrix films, and here it is.
We've been saying this for about three years, and here it is in the mainstream news.
Did you know that Malvo, the supposed sniper who looks like a mind control victim, is out there now saying that that is certainly involved?
I wonder how we knew about this three years ago.
Well, there's just a lot of key indicators, and of course Harris and the others involved there in the Columbine situation were obsessed with the Matrix, and we'll be discussing it a little bit later.
It could be a coincidence, but somehow I doubt it.
And look, I would say that probably The Matrix has some ideas that are explored, maybe not as eloquently as they could have been, and maybe that confuses some people.
Further, it has an aesthetic that a lot of people adopt, and maybe you could trace those things to some of these shooters.
I don't know.
I also think that, generally speaking, when you have somebody, Like, there are a couple stories that Alex brings up, and it's people who shot somebody and then said they were trying to flee the Matrix in order to get an insanity plea.
So then eventually he wakes up and blah, blah, blah.
They meet in the Matrix.
They come out.
And what's-her-face?
Trinity.
They both go on a suicide mission into the evil place, right?
They fly up over into the sky, and they're like, ah!
In the meantime, at Zion, the final attack is going on, and all the fucking, oh, no, and there's all these blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and that goes on for a while.
Yeah, there's a guy, and he's like, and they got these weird mech suits, and then there's some heroic action, because it's a war, and it's a movie, and you gotta do that.
Neo and Trinity, they make it through.
Neo and the AI are both like, hey man, this Agent Smith dude is fucking out of control, right?
So the AI plugs the Neo into the AI and they're like, you better solve this fucking problem, right?
So he winds up being absorbed by Agent Orange Smith after a massive, useless, pointless fight.
And then the AI is like blowing them all up and they start over and everybody finally breaks the cycle and everything's cool for a while at least.
In 99, attacking his own soft targets, that is, apartment buildings.
Three buildings were blown up.
They said the Chechnyans did it.
The Chechnyans screamed, why would we do that and bring on an attack?
No, the Russian government's doing it.
And then Moscow police, not knowing what the other hand was doing, the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing, caught members of the FSB, the modern KGB, that Putin was setting up for Boris Yeltsin.
caught them in the building planting hexagon explosives.
They got the explosives, arrested them, and then they were raided by, the police station was raided in Moscow by paramilitary forces from the KGB slash FSBGRU.
Yeah, you know, it would be ironic if what seems to be one of the main pillars of his everything is a false flag thing, because these are documented events where you're like, Putin did that shit, you know?
So his main evidence that you can follow up on is now...
Not at all mentioned and wiped away, despite the fact that he still claims that everything is a false flag.
It would be ironic if you weren't aware that he's just a psycho, that none of this matters, and he's going to use whatever he feels like using however he feels like using it.
I want to learn more about this, but I don't really know much more than Alex will not stop talking about Putin blowing up the apartment buildings in 2003.
So he's on for the rest of the show, and it's just rambling about.
Basic-ass New World Order conspiracy talking points.
It's a lot of the same stuff we covered in the Endgame documentary, and it bored the hell out of me.
That said, it's a far cry from the content that Alex produces these days.
This is, at very least, a show that's striving to be about an alleged conspiracy.
It goes off track pretty regularly, it provides horrible information, and it ignores stories in favor of headlines, but huge chunks of time are devoted to talking about a vague, unsourced accusation about the Bilderberg Group and Bohemian Grove.
They used facilitators through various Delphi techniques to do this, and Edward Bernays, who was hired by William Paley in 1928 as his chief advisor with CBS, wrote a book called Propaganda, and in that book he said, we're like an invisible government, we know how to manipulate you, and at the end he says, it was sort of like Ross Perot, he says, We need a businessman-politician type to say, I must lead the people.
Am I not their servant?
Here's what you say you want, and it's really facilitated.
So I find it very curious that Alex takes this tone when this caller brings up Bob Chapman.
For those who haven't heard the episodes covering other periods of time, Bob Chapman is one of Alex's most regular guests for a stretch of years, leading up to his death in 2012.
He's an alleged precious metals expert who Alex used as a scene partner when doing extended commercials for Midas Resources, the gold sales company that syndicated Alex's show.
Also, Bob claims to have been invited to a screening of a film of Ronald Reagan getting pegged.
For years, Bob was on Alex's show every Friday.
Outside of people who host the fourth hour, it's tough for me to think of anyone else who had what amounts to basically a standing engagement on Alex's schedule.
To hear Alex saying he doesn't know what's up with him and sounding like he doesn't want to talk about it in 2003 is really weird.
Things get even weirder when you consult issues of his newsletter.
The International Forecaster from back in 2003.
They're not all available online, but there are two that I could find from 2003, January 2003.
And even back then, Bob clearly had a working relationship with Midas Resources.
Quote, special offer.
You may also order it, and it's in reference to the book The Beast from Jekyll Island.
By calling Midas Resources Incorporated.
Midas Resources will give you a silver dollar from the early 1900s, a $12 value, just for purchasing the book at its normal price of $19.95.
It seems clear to me that this business relationship with Midas is intact at this point, even prior to this episode that we're listening to now.
So whatever weird energy Alex is giving off, it seems like it's probably personal.
I read over Bob's newsletters to see if I could find any reasons that Alex might not want to associate with him at this point.
I'm not sure if I see anything.
In one of his January issues, he predicts an imminent return of the gold standard in the What a surprise that he would want or predict that.
Yeah.
The war is going to put pressure on economies, you know?
That's fairly standard kind of stuff, you know?
You can see Alex not disagreeing with that.
He does say, quote, the Muslims believe they can destroy capitalism by forcing gold to the forefront, and we agree that this could and probably will be successful.
Which is a little weird, but it does not seem like it's outside of Alex's wheelhouse.
Some of the next issues that I could find were from July 2003, and honestly it just kind of sounds like a transcript of something Alex might say at some point in his life.
Quote, All we can say is buy gold and silver coins and shares as fast as possible.
The ship is sinking and there's no sense in drowning with the rest of the idiots.
Incidentally, exercise your constitutional rights and legally arm yourself and your families to the teeth.
The only thing I can find in there that I can see Alex being pissed off about is that Bob advises his readers to buy gold and silver, but if they have to invest in currency that they are gonna hide, they should favor I could see Alex thinking this was bad-mouthing the dollar like the Treasury Secretary was.
He calls people who don't take his financial advice idiots, and he's basically just fucking with his readers.
Quote, Don't forget, as interest rates go back up to, say, 7% or 8%, you will lose money on the value of bonds unless you buy at par and hold to maturity.
Most of you may be dead by then.
We don't have all the answers, but this is the way we see it.
We've been making these kinds of decisions for 43 years, so we guess this qualifies us to voice our opinion.
It's outrageous stuff.
Considering this is, like, it's supposed to be a financial advice newsletter, not a, you're all gonna die.
So I know that there is some sort of a coming back together, and I'm going to guarantee that at no point do they discuss what their differences were on there.
Like, if another caller calls in and brings up specifics or something, I'm going to keep my eye open on this one.
So, one of the other things that I'm tracking very closely, trying to understand, is whether or not Alex Jones believes he's fighting the literal devil in 2003.
Well, even taking that one step further in terms of just biblical end times, you know Revelation 18 and what happens there, and it has to be a port sitting, and everybody says New York, and everybody says, well, that was the World Trade Center.
I don't think so, because when you get around verse 22, remember it says, And a candle would be seen no more, and that would be symbolic of the Statue of Liberty.
Matrix firms, films blamed for series of murders by obsessed fans.
There are films that use triggers to go out there, but the government doesn't even have to brainwash you now in person.
Certain susceptible minds through programming through the culture of your big TV heads can be activated.
I'm not saying the Matrix does that.
We know they have these technologies.
We know there's key indicators in it.
We know that some of the things that Chief Moose said, you know, the duck is in the noose or whatever is a known trigger, and then Malvo and the other guy show up, Mohammed show up.
It goes on and on, but I don't like to speculate, but I'll tell you once up soon if I get a chance to see it tonight.
And I should say that we are now past the point where the policy of debathification has been openly announced, and there are people who are coming out and speaking about getting rid of all party members within government and such.
Well, it's like, I don't know, you're playing a sequel to a video game or a prequel, and, like, the main character's the same, but maybe they're in a different...
And so you have a different NPC character.
It's like the cube.
I'm wondering where the old friends are and who these new people are.
Do you mean you're enjoying learning and discovering new things like you always have?
And now that you're in the present where we are rarely learning anything and often discovering the same things daily, this is new and exciting for you?
There's at least interesting context and things to discuss, whereas I think in the present day, most episodes I do end up could just be like, He didn't read this.
I'm going to guess that if you were to find Noah Shackman today and ask what he thinks about having been a guest on Alex's show, you might not get an answer.
Because at this point in 2003, Shackman worked at Wired.
But now, in 2021, he's currently the editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast, an outlet that Alex screams about quite often for their very cruel coverage of the stupid things he says and does.
He's on the show because he wrote an article in Wired about early possible plans from DARPA to create a project called Lifelong, which would seek to compile all available data on individuals to be able to tell the story of their lives.
It was outrageously fucked up as an idea, and it did not end up coming to pass for a number of reasons.
One was probably public backlash, but another was probably the unfeasibility of creating a system that would be able to do this in any meaningful, usable way.
The primary sourcing on the program was a solicitation from DARPA for people to make proposals on how to create this program that they had the name for and an idea of what they wanted it to do, but not much else.
This is to say that there wasn't a program they were testing.
They were requesting people to put in bids to create a program to do some...
Pretty overly ambitious and overly fucked up things.
As I understand it from the way Noah describes it, the way they were hoping to start some of this research was to have researchers themselves do mock trips places and see if this program that they had created could log their physical movements, their transactions, and stuff like that.
The point is, government surveillance is a real issue that is taken seriously by serious people, and it appears that Noah is one of them.
I suspect that he accepted this booking because in 2003, no one really knew how not serious Alex is, and how Alex will take any opportunity to use Noah's credibility to advance nonsense exaggerations of his underlying reporting.
Yeah, radio frequency identifiers have been in for six years, and Federal Reserve says if you don't keep your money in the bank, they're going to devalue it off those tags.
So what I'm telling you is this is maybe a lot further along than you knew, sir.
And, yeah, the article that Noah wrote, Noah Shagman wrote in Wired, is a discussion of this, a discussion of the moral implications, people, even within the sort of technological community, being worried about this.
And now what's happened is our credibility has exploded because over the years, people heard us warn them about all this.
Now they've seen it happening.
So our credibility has skyrocketed.
Absolutely.
unidentified
You know, when I was in college, you know, a lot of people thought I was the nut.
Several generations later or decades later, I meet one or two of my friends from college, and they say, exactly what you've just said, Rick, I apologize.
I thought you were the nut.
I was the nut.
I didn't believe because I didn't want to believe, but everything you said was going to happen did, in fact, happen.
However, what is interesting is that mentality that they're expressing.
And it's kind of like a mantra for propagandists and conspiracy theorists.
I've heard Alex say exactly this same sort of thing in the present day.
I've heard him say it five years ago.
He says this all the time.
This, like, our credibility is through the roof because everything we've said has come true.
The reason this rhetoric is used is because it's not about credibility or track records or predictions.
None of these concepts are even real in the game that's being played on these shows.
The goal is to tap into the audience's feelings and provide them with psychological comfort.
They all have memory of someone thinking that they were crazy for their conspiracy beliefs.
And it makes people feel better to have their supposed expert hero give voice to those feelings, but, importantly, to put them in the past.
You were right to believe me all along.
We're on the other side of it now.
This supposed story about Rick's friends from college apologizing for doubting him, that didn't happen.
That story is constructed to give the audience hope that if they hold strong to their fringe-ass nonsense, eventually they, too, will have everyone in their lives apologizing to them for being too afraid to accept the truth.
You see this really consistently in these sorts of communities.
It's rampant in QAnon conversations that you see of fantasizing about the day that everyone will admit that they were right all along.
It's weird.
And it can't possibly be...
Everyone thought we were wrong, but we keep being right, and so our credibility is through the roof.
I mean, it seems like he's creating a, like, sine wave of credibility that just goes up and down depending on the year or the day or whatever, you know?
Like, today our credibility's through the roof, and then tomorrow our credibility's way, way down, you know?
Something is going on, but it frustrates me because that sounds like I'm making a conspiracy theory about something going on, but something has to be going on.
I could sue them, but then I wouldn't have time to be on the radio six, seven hours a day.
Right Like tonight I'm going to be on Jeff Rents Okay, but I can fight for a while I'll be filling in for somebody for two hours today here locally So fucking funny.
This is one of Alex's biggest early publicity stunts, and you could argue that it's the closing segment, the big piece in his documentary, America Destroyed by Design.
Alex brings in a bunch of cameras when he goes to the Austin DMV to go get a new driver's license, knowing that the process requires a fingerprint.
He brings along eight forms of identification and insists he shouldn't have to provide a fingerprint to which the people at the DMV say, uh, you do.
Alex starts yelling about how Bill Clinton wants his blood and urine next and asking if the DMV workers are going to stick a needle in him.
It's a petulant display and it's a real sign of the sort of publicity stunts that would come to characterize his career moving forward.
It's so hilarious that at the end of this story, he just went back without the cameras and gave the fingerprint to get his driver's license.
I will go and I will take this stand and yell while there's cameras running and get attention and incite people into a frenzy about these supposed political beliefs and these, like, I am standing up for all the people, you know, and then...
So this manager is bringing up that at her place of work, They are now talking about bringing in a scanner, like a fingerprint scanner, for the time clock.
Tell them that you've been a good employee, always clocked in, not had a problem.
Tell them that you're not going to be part of this, and if they give you problems, I think you're going to have a civil rights lawsuit on religious reasons.
And you had a perfect situation where you had a lot of people supporting you.
They had your back.
You could have been the one to do this lawsuit in order to make sure that all of us could get our waivers and not have to give fingerprints to get a DMV, get our licenses.
I can't believe how jaded we are that that completely is, like, almost passe to a certain, you know, like, oh, yeah, yeah, of course he believes this then and doesn't believe that now.
Like, that's just boring at this point, but that's nuts.