#569: June 23, 2021 dissects Alex Jones’ erratic behavior—shouting "Knowledgefight.com" mid-interruption, promoting his own banned.video platform after John McAfee’s death, and making transphobic jokes on Flagrant 2 while exposing himself. His baseless claims about McAfee’s murder mirror past debunked theories like Breitbart’s death or Cormier’s poisoning, revealing a pattern of exploiting tragedy for fearmongering. The episode exposes how Jones’ opportunism and inconsistent messaging—from apocalyptic globalist rhetoric to crass humor—undermine credibility while normalizing extremism for his audience. [Automatically generated summary]
If you send an address to that, there's going to be a little bit of time, you know, obviously.
Sure.
We've got to make these up, so there could be a little bit of a delay, but we will get this in the works, get some envelopes with your addresses on them, and get these buttons sent out to you.
I'm very excited.
I know that last time we did this, one of the things that I discovered was I was really, really enjoying the process of making.
It's not a super bright spot, but after a year of writing nothing but mean things to Taylor Swift and stories about wizards, I've started a new project.
Is that he's probably going to deal with some sort of a legal issue with the Attorney General of New York, Letitia James, who he has threatened on air multiple times.
And, of course, he had the cease and desist for some of the products that he was selling.
And I think that there is a possibility that that's the case.
You know, like he suspiciously went to Connecticut.
I've listened to a number of episodes of it because it was a morbid curiosity on my part.
And like back, you know, a ways back, not just recently, but you know, the show is basically you have got you got Tony, you got his producer, Brian Redband, and then you got a guest, a celebrity comedian, guest, and they just act like hot shit.
Yeah, and then the guests and the hosts will fuck around and act cool and generally be overly encouraging of some things and overly mean to anybody who doesn't fit into their like their box.
Yeah, I kind of feel like maybe listening and criticizing a podcast that's about listening and criticizing comedians is open mic comedians is just a waste of everyone's time.
Yeah, no, whenever you leave a wake of misery and destruction, what you should do with that is like make it a funny little bit that you can pun off of.
So we have a couple things that I'm going to talk about towards the end of the episode from the Flagrant podcast because I think there were even, you know, like as much as it's just like, ah, these guys are just bullshitting and having fun and whatever.
John McAfee did not kill himself in public statements and on his own Twitter.
As early as just last week, he said, I will never commit suicide if I die in prison.
I have been murdered by the U.S. government.
I'm going to listen to a man I knew and respected, not the lying corporate media, that before his body's even cold, expected it's a suicide with no coroner or no inquest.
This thing sneaks to high heaven, just like Jeffrey Epstein.
So even if we take as absolute gospel fact that McAfee said he would never kill himself, he was the definition of an unhinged, drugged-out lunatic who said complete bullshit, essentially for a living.
A couple of my favorite things that he said that were complete nonsense were, you know, like when he said that he had nothing to do with his neighbor in Belize's murder.
Or that time that he said that if Bitcoin wasn't trading at $500,000 within three years from July 17th, 2017, he would, quote, eat his own dick on national television.
Some of his more recent work includes that time that he tried to create a publicity stunt hoax where he pretended to have been arrested for refusing to wear a mask, wearing a lace thong on his face instead.
McAfee and his wife publicly claimed he'd been arrested in Norway, but the pictures that they posted as evidence of this were from the Augsburg airport, which is in Germany.
The Augsburg police told the media, quote, there has never been an arrest, explaining that McAfee tried to enter Germany but decided not to when he was told that he would have to quarantine.
Then he just created a bunch of bullshit on social media.
And who could forget the ridiculous runs for the Libertarian nomination for the presidential race or the very overt and transparent history of involvement in pump and dump cryptocurrency scams?
In fact, that was one of the cases that McAfee was facing, along with tax evasion, which is what the U.S. was looking to extradite him back from Spain in order to prosecute him for.
Soon before he was found dead, a court ruled that he could be extradited to the United States, and this actually really matters.
McAfee was 75 years old, and he was facing essentially the rest of his life in prison for his fraud and tax crimes, which he absolutely would be convicted for.
I can't say with certainty that McAfee died from suicide, but if that does end up being the determination that experts end up making, I'm not going to be surprised.
I wanted to get a sense of how the media was covering this death.
So I sampled some of the largest outlets that were covering the story.
The headline in CNN was, quote, John McAfee found dead in Spanish prison after his extradition to the United States was approved.
The article doesn't say that there's a known cause of death at all.
Quote, McAfee was found dead in his cell in a prison near Barcelona on Wednesday around 1 p.m. Eastern, and a medical examiner is on the scene.
A spokeswoman for the Superior Court of Catalonia told CNN.
She said the cause of death is under investigation.
A statement from the Catalonia Regional Government Justice Department, which manages prisons there, said that prison medical personnel and guards attempted to perform life-saving procedures after finding McAfee, but were unsuccessful.
The statement said, quote, everything indicates, unquote, that McAfee could have died by suicide.
That article is eminently responsible and doesn't jump to any conclusions.
The New York Times story has a headline, quote, John McAfee, software pioneer turned fugitive, dies in Spanish prison.
They mentioned the primary source statement: quote, the Justice Department for the Catalan region in Spain said that pending an investigation, it was treating his death as a probable suicide.
The NPR story doesn't even talk about the Catalonia Justice Department combat, instead, just reporting, quote, authorities are investigating the cause of death.
This article even goes out of its way to soften McAfee's image and turn him into some kind of a prankster-type outlaw.
Quote, McAfee took pride in outwitting authorities.
He once boasted about eluding police by dressing as a German tourist in a speedo, and another time as an angry homeless man.
It's like the NPR version of this is really like, I mean, these things are true.
McAfee did do it.
He did enjoy creating this outlaw on the run image of himself outsmarting the police.
Yeah, I would have included more of his bombastic psychotic criminal acts, but I suppose if you want to paint him as a modern-day world-traveling catch-me-if-you-can type con artist, fine.
Reuters had this headline: quote, larger-than-life software mogul, John McAfee dies in Spain by suicide, lawyer says.
This is because this story isn't about the actual death.
It's about McAfee's lawyer making a statement that McAfee died by suicide.
Quote, McAfee's lawyer, Javier Villelba, said the antivirus software pioneer died by hanging as his nine months in prison brought him to despair.
Even so, even though this article is saying this, the article does not say that this in fact was the cause of death, only that McAfee's lawyer had said that it was.
None of these outlets are reporting anything definitive, and the information that they have to go on is directly from primary source statements, one from the Catalonia Justice Department and one from McAfee's own lawyer.
This is responsible reporting of the facts.
I can't find examples of these folks rushing and jumping the gun to call this a suicide.
But here's why this looking at the coverage is important.
Alex is trying to rush and jump the gun on the conclusion that his death was not a suicide.
And in order to do that, he needs to make the circumstances around the coverage seem as suspicious as possible.
Alex is reporting a fiction, which is that the media is immediately and without cause declaring McAfee's death a suicide because they're trying to cover something up.
Because that kernel of suspicion is necessary for Alex to use this story for his own purposes.
Alex is an opportunist by nature, and he needs to use everything he can for his largest benefit.
Just last week, Alex was covering that reporter, Christopher Sein's death, as a definitive professional execution, and his big prediction was the globalists are going to start killing people like himself and Tucker.
This situation with McAfee isn't a perfect fit, but it's good enough for Alex to use to claim that he was right.
So this absolutely cannot be a suicide in InfoWars world.
There's a real danger to this kind of behavior, and it's in how Alex's rhetoric has been shaped over the course of the past year and even further back, honestly.
The COVID pandemic has been declared the globalists' big move and something that they can't undo.
This is the end game coming into reality, which means that there's no going back.
Alex has said that over and over in so many different constructions.
Victory or death, no going back.
They've crossed the Rubicon over and over and over again in different ways, saying there's no going home again.
The rhetoric surrounding how this is like the end game and, you know, this is the big move, that's dangerous enough on its own.
And if Alex is now going to start reporting stuff like people like McAfee dying as the globalists killing off brave patriot leaders, what's the logical leap he's expecting his audience to make?
He constantly talks about how everyone needs to keep lists of globalists in their town and be ready to take them out when things jump off.
How is killing off patriot leaders not the most explicit evidence that things have jumped off that you could imagine?
Whether he means to do this or not is kind of irrelevant.
It's just part of the message that his audience is going to take from that.
As far as I can tell, all we can really do is hope that the people who get that message aren't the type of listeners that he has who like to take action.
And talking about like Epstein as a murder, a Hillary murder or whatever, is a little bit different even because that's like, all right, they're trying to cover up their tracks.
But second, I don't think that at this point Alex is aware that McAfee's Instagram posted a big Q right after he died, which is going to complicate the data.
I got a chance to get to know McAfee back in 2012, right after his escape from Belize into Guatemala, and found to be a larger-than-life type character.
Then a few years later, he came and visited us several times in Austin, Texas.
I had a chance to go to dinner with him, had a chance to go out shooting with him, and he was even more larger-than-life in person.
The guy was definitely an American success story.
He made billions of dollars with his McAfee antivirus software.
He was an outrageous drunk, and he declared martial law twice in a two-year span because of fears of a French invasion, which it should be pointed out, he was accused of collaborating with the French.
That's the first instance that I heard in this report of Alex having.
I don't know why he's saying this is the second time.
I think it's probably an editing screw-up.
I'm not sure.
So this tweet is probably the strongest evidence that Alex has that McAfee didn't kill himself, since he said he wouldn't do that in October.
I accept this as something that makes sense on its face, but I also don't think it proves anything.
John McAfee was one of the most unhinged, unstable people in the public eye, and it isn't necessarily wise to take most of the things he says without a giant grain of salt.
I can believe that in October, he may have felt that he would never commit suicide.
But that was also eight months ago.
And a lot can change to a person's mental state over the course of eight months, particularly if they're in a foreign prison and maybe without the drugs that they generally do.
McAfee has had a long history of being arrested in foreign countries or being wanted in foreign countries and getting away and going on the run.
When he was a person of interest in his neighbor's murder in Belize, he fled the country and he got away with it.
More notably, in 2019, he was arrested and released when he docked his boat in the Dominican Republic.
He was on the run from the United States for that old tax thing, and he'd taken to living on his yacht, I guess, in international waters like some goddamn Andy Daly character.
To kill time on the boat, McAfee posted some pictures of himself with a bunch of big old guns.
This drew the attention of the Dominican Republic authorities when he tried to dock, so he was arrested and held for four days, and then he was released.
John McAfee has a history of getting in trouble, and then the consequences just disappear.
So in October, just after he'd been arrested in Spain, if you're him, there's no way you think you're going to be in jail for the next eight months, let alone end up extradited to the United States.
There's a lot of questions that do remain to be answered, but making this a hit team murder, I think, is going to be a really uphill battle for Alex, especially if the thing he's leading with is a tweet from eight months ago.
Those tweets are real, but also John McAfee was a delusional paranoid drug addict who promised to eat his own dick on TV as a way to promote cryptocurrency, probably as part of a pump and dump activity.
This isn't compelling evidence of anything.
Like these tweets and him getting a tattoo that says dollar sign whacked.
It's not evidence to me of anything other than McAfee was unwell.
The outlets that Alex thinks are in on this conspiracy did not report that it was a suicide within minutes.
There was dry, matter-of-fact coverage of the Catalonian statement, and then eventually Reuters reported the statement that was made by McAfee's lawyer.
I strongly suspect that Alex's claim that within minutes it was called a suicide is based on random tweets he saw.
We did a whole episode about the day after Andrew Breitbart died, and nothing Alex is saying is real about that case either.
The media didn't immediately call it a heart attack, and the initial reporting that it was suspected to be a heart attack, the place that came from and the direct line that everyone was quoting was a press release put out by Breitbart's own website.
There's no conspiracy there.
As for the coroner thing, that was just a conspiracy narrative that's based on nothing.
This was about the death of Michael Cormier, a person who worked at the coroner's office.
The problem is that he had nothing to do with Breitbart's autopsy, and the amount of arsenic he had in his system was so large that one of the detectives on the case said it would be impossible to poison someone with that much arsenic without them noticing.
And he can't prove that Breitbart didn't die from a heart attack.
All he can do is pull at strings, real or imagined, in order to create a sensational storyline that fits his purposes.
One of the most important aspects of this is the narrative that the media immediately calls these deaths suicides, or in Breitbart's case, a heart attack, because that implies that there's a cover-up.
And if there's a cover-up, that means that there's something to cover up, and that means that it's a murder.
In Breitbart's case, Alex was just making up that the media immediately called it a heart attack.
And in this case, he's doing the same thing with McAfee's death.
It's a pattern of behavior that exists not because he's responding to real reporting, but because he's operating from a pre-existing script.
Regardless of what any media outlet published about McAfee's death, as soon as Alex heard that he was dead, he knew the angle was that the media immediately called it a suicide.
As tragic as that is, and as much as I don't want to minimize people who are struggling with suicidal ideas and figuring there's no way out or anything like that, it is imaginable to put yourself in McAfee's position and be like, the indignity of the trial, the damage that the trial would do to the things that he has made the most important parts of his life, like cryptocurrency.
I'll let the information guide me to whatever conclusion is there.
But based on the statement from the Catalonian Justice Department, based on the statement from his lawyer that they are saying this is an apparent suicide.
Yeah, that that I I get what you're saying and i'm not super interested in the case itself as much as I am the behavior and what it illustrates.
Totally, I think that the important thing to take away from this is really understanding that Alex put out this report that night, because what we talk about, that concrete idea, the idea that when concrete is wet, A leaf that falls on it could leave a permanent impression.
And when a story, when the details aren't out, when there isn't solidified information surrounding stuff, you can make an indentation in that concrete.
And with this, Alex is trying to put into his audience's mind before there's any solid information that the media immediately reported that it was a suicide and that's suspicious because McAfee tweeted some crazy shit.
That's and that, you know, it's a consistent behavior.
It's it's one of the most kind of worrying and disgusting things is that the conservative media has so insulated their listeners and viewers and the like that they can make claims about any other media because they know you're not going to go check.
You didn't listen.
You don't read the papers.
What person who is reading InfoWars articles is then going to be like, and now I'll switch over to the Reuters article.
That's not happening.
So you can just make any fucking claim that you want about what the media said because they'll believe anything you say about what the media said.
You own the mainstream media if you are in the conservative space.
And even if you are like an Alex Jones listener and you go check the Reuters story, you'll see the headline, larger than life software mogul, John McAfee dies in Spain by suicide, lawyer says.
A lot of our interviews with him over the years were on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.
Dozens of them got banned and knocked off.
We never re-uploaded them to banned.video.
This reminded us to.
So we're going to create a John McAfee archive page, and we'll post all the interviews we've done with him and any other interviews that are out there that have been censored.
And so we're going to put a few of the interviews on the tail end of this right now.
We'll went shooting with him, my first interview with him in 2012, and then we'll endeavor to post some of the other archives in a John McAfee section again at banned.video.
Now, just when in closing, I want to say to listeners, we've been getting a lot of threats, a lot of attacks by the globalists as well.
They are making their move worldwide.
They are killing so many reporters, so many journalists.
So it'll be 1,000%, a trillion percent clear to infinity.
I will never commit suicide.
I will never kill myself.
And if I'm found dead in a jail cell or if I'm found dead in a hotel room with a needle in my arm or anything like that, it is the deep state that did it and I want them held accountable.
If anything happens to me, look at Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, the deep state of the new world order.
They are the enemies of America, the enemies of humanity, and they're the ones that have long histories of serious criminal activity and ever being held accountable.
So if anything happens to me, the thunderbolt should strike.
I would prefer if every time he was like, if they find me with a needle in my arm, if he just got really specific into what kind of drugs and alcohol he's doing, if they find me in a hotel surrounded by three empty bottles of Jack Daniels, you know they killed me.
So this is the only actual content and analysis that Alex put out.
It's as boilerplate as you can get.
There's more information that's yet to come out.
And Alex knows that once that information is available, his job of rewriting this narrative is going to be next to impossible.
The only time to act is immediately.
So you get this, a rushed, formulaic, meaningless insistence that McAfee didn't kill himself based on a couple of years-old tweets.
It just doesn't matter.
And this episode, I think, is still salient.
And I think it's important to do because it's important to recognize these tricks.
This is a key trick that Alex uses.
And one thing that I find fucking exciting, and I haven't, you know, we're recording this during the day on Thursday, so we haven't had time to listen to the end of the week shows of his.
I want to know how he incorporates that cue on Instagram.
So it's moments like this that just really highlight to me how much of a duplicitous game everyone is playing.
Like, Alex is there to try to launder his extremist beliefs to a gullible audience, and he's also trying to bring more customers into his revenue stream.
I mean, it's so much like I immediately get flashbacks to like early on doing stand-up, working with a established, clean comic headliner, and it's me and a young female comic.
She and I are at about the same level of talent.
And then we're at the bar afterwards, and he starts telling creepy ass fucking jokes right to her face that is so fucked up and inappropriate.
And you're like, this is not okay.
That is what I'm hearing Alex do right now, that creepy ass shit where he presents himself one place as being a pious, God-fearing man.
And then when there's a social situation where he can fucking take advantage of his goddamn position in the hierarchy to fuck around with people, and I hate it.
When you're so stressed out, you need an outlet, and that outlet is telling two weird bros while they mock you to your face that you've got a weird penis.
I guess if people want to look at him as I don't know.
The thing that I kept flashing to was these people like these hosts of Flagrant.
And I would say even Rogan probably is this way.
Or Tony Hinchcliffe.
They have an image of Alex as this.
The drunk guy who talks about his dick or yells about aliens or tells them some weird subsection they've never heard of and is like, I'm going to blow your mind.
I'm going to blow your mind.
Let me tell you.
Let me tell you, I talked to the weather weapon guy.
And when Alex comes on these types of shows, he's not crying about fighting the devil.
He's not like yelling all his racist shit.
He's not doing what he does on his show.
If these people actually listened to Alex's show, they would either be bored out of their mind or they'd be like, wait a second, this is what Alex does?
mean here's what i could see this i could see them all in their mind because they are all the i mean what what the names of the people that we're dealing with are all traffickers in toxic masculinity by trade So I could definitely see them being like, oh, you know, we just play it up on our show.
Alex just plays it up on his show.
And in real life, he's this guy.
So it's okay for us to be cool with him, despite not realizing all of the fucking destruction that his show does.
Just because he's a character on the show means it's okay for them to be like, ah, you know what?
We'll have him on our show where he's the real guy.
Because if the argument is that it's a character and this is the real Alex that we're hanging out with, bro and down with about our dicks, like, okay, then that person that you're broing down with is a psychopath.
No, I would say it's a self-serving and delusional argument that helps you go to sleep at night because what you're actually doing is exposing people to a fucking monster.
And you're helping make it easier for people to accept the bad arguments and the awful things that Alex does believe by presenting him in a way that's positive, that's sociable, that is like, hey, we're having fun.
And allowing him to perpetuate things that just explicitly aren't true.
This is entirely about Jimmy Kimmel discussing on air how he'd spoken with Chuck Schumer about the Affordable Care Act, which you might recall was a super important thing to Jimmy because his son lives with a congenital heart defect.
So he was discussing on air this piece that he did about how the coverage of pre-existing conditions really matters in a very concrete way.
Kimmel was taking issue with the Graham Cassidy bill, which sought to get rid of some of the provisions of the ACA.
And in preparation, he got some assistance from Chuck Schumer's office about the bill's details.
Alex has taken that kernel from 2017 and embellished it now to the point where he's telling these dudes that Schumer is basically the booker and head writer for all late night shows.
This isn't joking around, and it's not even in the territory of embellishment for effect.
This is just a lie that Alex is specifically deploying to convince these people's audience that all non-crazy entertainment is just secret globalist programming.
And the hosts of this show, the two dudes who are the main hosts of it, one of them used to be on MTV's Guy Code, and the other one was on Wild and Out.
If you've been on the Guy Code or Wild and Out or that kind of stuff, there's no way you haven't interacted with people who literally work at SNL or Colbert or the like.
I think that happens a lot, and it's a part of the shallowness of the nature of corporations.
We treat corporations like people, and all of a sudden they have a brand and a persona to cultivate.
And part of that is trite social media gestures.
And I think a lot of people see through that.
By framing Alex's opposition to things like black people and rainbow flags this way, Alex is trying to hook the audience by appealing to something that they could easily believe.
This could possibly be the belief that Alex has that everyone says is racist.
You know, all those times Alex gets called a racist?
It's got to be because people are misrepresenting his stance against corporate use of Black Lives Matter and rainbow flags.
That's got to be it.
He's not actually a racist.
That's what Alex wants the audience to think because the reality is that Alex is a gigantic racist.
And if the audience knows that going in, they won't ever make it to the Infowars store.
Trust me.
The difference in how Alex responds to a murder when the victim is black or when the victim is white has nothing to do with corporate signaling.
That's the feedback loop of conspiracy theorists and shitty politicians is that when the system is so corrupt and so transparent bullshit, it is easy for you to take a pot shot like this and get people towards more conspiratory-laden bullshit.
Because obviously, Nancy Pelosi is fucking lying to you.
And then corrupt and shallow assholes use that conspiracy theory to get elected when they corrupt the government and make it less functional than it was before.
Then your conspiracy theories get even stronger because the government is so obviously corrupt and it creates that feedback loop of destruction.
If it were possible, I mean, I've said this so many times, but the greatest weapon that the Democrats have against the Republican Party is just governing effectively, and they cannot do that.
I don't think people are, you know, should be banned.
I don't know.
I mean, it's the platform's choice.
They can do whatever the fuck they want.
Sure.
I don't think that, you know, I don't think they should be arrested or anything for this, but I wish people would consider a little bit more what they're doing.
I wish that, like, if these guys want to have Alex Jones on their show, I would like them to ask about the devil.
I would like them to ask about valid criticisms about him, as opposed to allowing him to present his very, very clear racism as opposition to corporate signaling.
Right.
I would like it if they allow, you know, this is a rare opportunity where you have Alex there and you could ask him digging questions and instead just allow him to poach your audience.
Yeah, I think we have probably a very unique perspective.
And I don't mean unique in necessarily an overly positive way, but a perspective that other people don't have because we focus so much on Alex Jones.
And that is that I think that we have enough of an awareness of what this dude does and what he's up to, his history, the way he lies, the positions that he actually has, that people who would choose to associate with him, it's your right to.
I mean, again, if it weren't so reasonable to assume that they are corrupt, lying pieces of shit, I think it would be harder to launder your racism behind.