Jordan is still out of town, so Dan takes the opportunity to sit down and chat with Jared Holt. The two chat about Alex Jones' youthful bigot friend Nick, and learn about how Twitter fights relate to opposition to voting rights.
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, everybody! | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| Boy, you do not recognize how long that theme song is until you're sitting across the room from someone who didn't know that it was probably going to play as we were starting the show. | ||
| So, hey, everybody, here's the thing. | ||
| Jordan is still on vacation until Monday. | ||
| He gets back on Monday, but we need to have an episode for Monday. | ||
| And so I was in a little bit of a pickle. | ||
| And thankfully, someone's in town visiting. | ||
| Friend of the show, I would say. | ||
| I think that's fair. | ||
| We've been on before, remotely, although this is the first time we've met in person on this trip. | ||
| Someone who's Brian Stelter's new best friend, just recently made a debut on Reliable Sources. | ||
| Jared Holt, welcome. | ||
| Dan, thanks so much. | ||
| Yeah, we've been in contact through the years, but here I am in the HQ. | ||
| Kat's here. | ||
| True. | ||
| The theme song has got me all pumped up in the headphones. | ||
| I'm ready to go. | ||
| I know that you're somebody who gets amped, and so I wanted to really try and bring that energy out of you with the theme song. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's... | ||
| Jared Holt, notorious hype guy. | ||
| Yeah, you're like the DJ Khaled of right-wing researchers. | ||
| Oh, yeah, I don't know about that, but... | ||
| That's not the right example. | ||
| I feel like he has gone from somebody who was known for being the guy who would yell on tracks to the guy who does not perform oral sex on women. | ||
| I feel like his whole reputation changed in that... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Anyway, we're off track. | |
| I thought this was a show about InfoWars. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It is somewhat. | ||
| It's always a little bit challenging to figure out exactly what the show is without one half of it. | ||
| Whenever I have a conversation with somebody else, it's like... | ||
| What do we do? | ||
| But I think this is going to be a little bit different. | ||
| I think you and I have fairly similar mentalities, at least similar worlds of focus. | ||
| We both look at a lot of the same kind of right-wing media landscape and do a lot of criticism about it. | ||
| I think that will provide a lot of interesting insight. | ||
| Yeah, I hope so. | ||
| I mean, you and I have kind of a similar approach where we're very clinical about it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's very easy to get upset or frustrated with this kind of stuff, but you and I both share the gift and curse of being completely dead inside. | ||
| So we're able to consume this and process it and hopefully help it make sense to other people. | ||
| I don't like that you put it that way, but you're probably right. | ||
| I think that there's a... | ||
| I like to... | ||
| Pretend. | ||
| Maybe this isn't totally accurate, but I like to pretend that it's academic detachment. | ||
| I can be pissed off at these things that I'm listening to and I'm hearing, but that's not going to help my ability to convey the information, and so I can detach that from the work or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, it helps to think that you're trying to do something about it. | ||
| It does. | ||
| It does. | ||
| That does make it less frustrating. | ||
| So, what I wanted to do, we should tell folks a little bit. | ||
| So, pre-pandemic, before COVID ever came to be a word we knew about, you and I had gone back and forth a little bit on Twitter, and we were talking about the phenomenon that we were noticing that was that Alex and Infowars were becoming buddy-buddy with Nick Fuentes, and how bizarre that was. | ||
| And we had wanted to get together and have a little conversation about our feelings about that and what we thought that meant. | ||
| And then a worldwide pandemic happened. | ||
| And it kind of knocked those plans off track. | ||
| And then it looked for a little bit like their friendship or their sort of working relationship wasn't going anywhere. | ||
| But now it's blossomed again. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, Nick is hosting some of his videos on the Infowars site now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I would consider that a pretty astounding development. | ||
| And, you know, Alex and Nick were both appearing at the same rallies, working together for Stop the Steal. | ||
| And, I mean, they were on tour together. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, they've really grown closer together. | ||
| And it's interesting, we were talking before we started recording, it's not really a perfect match. | ||
| Like, the whole Groyper, White Nationalist stuff, I mean, certainly... | ||
| Alex has broadcast elements of that movement or rhetoric on his show throughout the years in various capacities, but styling-wise and strategy-wise, it's kind of like two different extremist worlds coming together. | ||
| And it's really interesting to see where that is meshing and where it's not. | ||
| I think, interestingly, I think strategy... | ||
| That end of things, I think, is actually fairly compatible. | ||
| Because it is kind of attention-grabbing-based strategy. | ||
| At least in terms of on the ground. | ||
| Nick Fuentes and all of his followers would go and disrupt turning point events. | ||
| And it would get a lot of attention. | ||
| And Alex would go bullhorn people. | ||
| And that gets him tons of attention, too. | ||
| But I think what you mean is more like strategy behind social... | ||
| Yeah, and also just kind of how they see the vehicle into influence and power. | ||
| Somebody like Nick Fuentes, who's just unabashed white nationalist, unless he's getting criticism, then he's just kidding. | ||
| And a comedian. | ||
| It's a comedy show. | ||
| Complete coward, by the way. | ||
| Way more respect if you just own it, but, like, I'm not saying that's a lot of respect, but at least a smidge, maybe, in a very cynical way. | ||
| A loathsome respect. | ||
| Yeah, I guess that's a way to put it. | ||
| But Nick sees his strategy as, you know, they do these disruptive events. | ||
| They go to Turning Point USA conferences. | ||
| They were at CPAC a few weeks ago as we were recording this. | ||
| America Uncanceled! | ||
| Yeah, and they just kind of walk around and act like dicks and, like, Mm-hmm. | ||
| to become a type of stakeholder in the broader scene that demands, if not respect, at least some sort of catering or compromise. | ||
| Whereas Alex, I don't know that he's really seen anything His goal as mainlining into the GOP, or he hasn't particularly targeted young people the way that Nick has. | ||
| I think he would like to. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I'm sure he'd love to, but I don't know that I've seen so much of a coherent strategy for that. | ||
| No, that's true. | ||
| And I think that what you're getting at is something that I've always thought of as like... | ||
| Nick and Alex are very different inasmuch as I think that Nick has a political project he's working on, and Alex is just a con artist. | ||
| You know, like, he has, like, there's an ideology behind Alex, and, like, there's beliefs that he has, and there's things that he would like to see put in place in terms of, you know, I mean, some of it does overlap with Nick, like, anti-immigrant sentiment. | ||
| Certainly, they both share. | ||
| But Alex, yeah, definitely... | ||
| He doesn't have the same desire to really augment the GOP. | ||
| Alex wants the GOP to be weirder like him, whereas Nick wants to gain access to the means of power. | ||
| Yeah, because Nick... | ||
| I mean, I unfortunately have the experience of being one of the first people to really critically cover Nick in... | ||
| Reporting for Right Wing Watch at the time. | ||
| And all he's wanted the whole time is just to command some kind of respect in the Republican Party. | ||
| Because he was this young guy, based around here in Chicago. | ||
| Don't rub it in. | ||
| Went to school, was anti-Trump, then was pro-Trump, then got this shitty little gig at Right Side Broadcasting Network before it was anything. | ||
| For saying something along the lines of like, oh, CNN anchors should be hanged, you know, and just got bitter about it, you know, and well, and he's, you know, in his view, he's doing all this stuff to support the Trump cause in a way that... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I think on some level, if you take away how toxic of people they are, I get that. | ||
| Nick is better at this than Charlie Kirk. | ||
| But I think that the problem with that entitlement is not understanding what the requirements of the gig are. | ||
| The fact that Charlie Kirk is a bumbling doofus is the reason he fits into that hole. | ||
| And the fact that Nick has a... | ||
| Like, a sense of himself and feels entitled means he does not qualify for that role. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Because he would end up fucking up the game. | ||
| He would end up going off script. | ||
| He would end up advocating for some position that the people who are bankrolling everything don't want him to. | ||
| And then, well, this is a problem. | ||
| Yeah, that's how it goes. | ||
| And not to mention that around... | ||
| Geez, I don't know, 2016, 2017, 2018, and, I mean, for fuck's sake, the rest of the years afterward. | ||
| He's been toying with, you know, what was called the alt-right at that time, you know, mingling very close with just some really grisly, like, white supremacists and, you know, echoing themes of Holocaust denial, rambling on about anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. | ||
| And it doesn't matter what he does or what he changes at this point. | ||
| He has done enough damage to himself already that he is never going to be the Charlie Kirk unless there is some sort of insurgency-type movement within the younger GOP base. | ||
| Yeah, and I think you can see that that is what he would like to incite. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Almost out of self-preservation, interestingly. | ||
| And now that you put it that way, it almost seems like, well, this is the only shot I have at relevance is to foment extremism that I can ride the wave of. | ||
| Yeah, and Nick wants to ride it to power. | ||
| Alex wants to ride it to sell super male vitality and keep himself afloat. | ||
| Maybe younger in Alex's career, he had aspirations like that. | ||
| As obvious as Nick's are. | ||
| Yeah, I would say so. | ||
| From looking at other periods in Alex's career, I think he's closer, but certainly not to the degree that Nick is at, what, is he 22 now? | ||
| He has a very sharp focus at a young age. | ||
| You were bringing up high school. | ||
| Have you watched his videos from high school? | ||
| A handful here and there. | ||
| Just enough to kind of get the gist of what I was reporting out at the time, just to be like, who the fuck is this guy? | ||
| Because even years ago, I mean, this was probably three or four years ago at this point, when I first kind of caught wind of Nick and was watching his videos, I was like, this guy is young. | ||
| This guy is, for better or for worse, sharp. | ||
| He speaks extremely well. | ||
| And depending on what this guy does, it could be very potent. | ||
| And I think we're seeing sort of the side effects of that potency. | ||
| You're getting elected officials like Paul Gosar in Arizona, Michelle Malkin, a very prominent columnist for decades, throwing their weight behind this guy because they see him as the next generation of what they do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And somebody who has the ability to be a face of what they do. | ||
| He has the... | ||
| The ability to enter hostile spaces and come away with at least some modicum of, like, well, that didn't destroy me. | ||
| You know, you can argue with people who disagree with him. | ||
| He is very slick. | ||
| He is, yeah, I got the exact same sense from him the first time I came across him as well. | ||
| For a period, a friend of mine was really into, like, those online debates. | ||
| And like those where they want to just yell at each other. | ||
| They're like, welcome to the political debate. | ||
| We've gathered eight people to scream at each other. | ||
| None of whom have an undergrad degree. | ||
| And then they're like, alright, we go now to Based Night 34. And then Based Night 34 gets on there and it's just like... | ||
| I hate gay people. | ||
| And then everyone's like, that's terrible! | ||
| And that's the debate. | ||
| Hear him out! | ||
| Hear him out! | ||
| He gets two minutes like the rest of you. | ||
| I would watch some of these and I believe this friend of mine was really into Destiny. | ||
| And so I watched his debate with Nick Fuentes. | ||
| And that was, I think, where he first came into my scope of awareness. | ||
| And I thought, like, this guy is... | ||
| Fucking dangerous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He is really good at making bad points. | ||
| And he's really young, too. | ||
| So his potential shelf life is a long, long time. | ||
| Things have gotten much harder for him lately. | ||
| I don't know what fucking did it, right? | ||
| You know, what was left of his access to social media platforms finally pulled the trigger. | ||
| That was amazing it took that long. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He had a verified account on Twitter until like a couple weeks ago. | ||
| With like six-figure following. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And would speak like very explicitly. | ||
| The Southern Poverty Law Center put out a report that... | ||
| Took a big look at sort of the problems with Twitter and how it relates to extremism. | ||
| And in part of that report, they brought up Nick Fuentes. | ||
| And they pulled this quote that I think, like, illustrated sort of what was interesting here really well, where Nick was like, oh, yeah, you know, I got banned from YouTube or I get banned from DLive or whatever. | ||
| And then I just tweet the link and then everybody goes and follows me on the next one. | ||
| Like, that was kind of his... | ||
| Last really effective megaphone. | ||
| And now he's on Telegram, I guess. | ||
| And Gab, I think, is still active for him. | ||
| But he won't shut the fuck up about how much he hates Telegram. | ||
| And, like, he's not... | ||
| Well, they probably are terrible communication mediums. | ||
| Well, it's one way, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's like he sends a message, and it's not like his followers really, like... | ||
| It's not like Twitter where they get in the replies and they just, like... | ||
| Pop off or whatever. | ||
| People fight with each other. | ||
| There's no endorphin rush. | ||
| Yeah, it's one way. | ||
| I guess there's view counts on it. | ||
| If he opened up that Telegram channel where people could comment on it, it would just be insanity. | ||
| His phone would blow up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I saw that he's on Rumble. | |
| There's that video platform where people can just post shit. | ||
| And one of the things that I thought was really interesting is looking at... | ||
| How unactive that is. | ||
| Yeah, Rumble... | ||
| Donald Trump Jr. is on Rumble. | ||
| That's sort of the flagship. | ||
| I think Dinesh D'Souza, other great philosophical minds that use Rumble. | ||
| Some QAnon people used Rumble for a while. | ||
| I don't know if that's as prominent anymore, but they just don't get that much traffic. | ||
| No. | ||
| Previously, my only interaction with it was... | ||
| When Owen Schroyer did that caravan along the East Coast for Stopping the Steal, the person who was along with him was only posting stuff on Rumble. | ||
| So it was the only time I'd been there. | ||
| I had no real sense of the site. | ||
| When I was preparing this episode, I went to Nick's channel. | ||
| Very, very low counts. | ||
| And if I were him, I would actually see InfoWars as one of the more viable outlets that has actual people around, and that kind of scares the shit out of me. | ||
| Like, if I had gone to Rumble and seen good view counts, I would be like, well, at least he has his own thing off Alex's space. | ||
| Yeah, but, like, on Alex's platform, I was super skeptical of it when he launched it, but some of the videos on there... | ||
| Pulling in hundreds of thousands of views. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I haven't looked at the view counts for Nick's videos on there, but occasionally you get a viral banger on Alex's platform. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not super common. | ||
| The numbers aren't like what they used to be on a YouTube or whatever, but it's still more than nothing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Nick's views aren't huge, but they're better than on, let's say, a Rumble-type platform, which... | ||
| Which would be something that you would take into consideration if you're looking at a market. | ||
| And one of the things that you were saying, you were skeptical when Alex launched that. | ||
| I was skeptical when Nick came around. | ||
| Because I thought that there was no way that Alex was going to let him be explicit. | ||
| And I was wrong. | ||
| Well, a lot of the way Nick got into InfoWars was sort of through the C-list host. | ||
| You had Jake Floyd at the time. | ||
| Harrison Smith was having him on. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Owen and him hit it off pretty well. | ||
| Yeah, it's like he almost came in through the trapdoor of InfoWars. | ||
| And then Alex was like, look at this patriot. | ||
| This guy is amazing. | ||
| I always remember when I was younger, I was told that even if you didn't... | ||
| Graduate from high school, even if you never took the SAT or ACT, if you went to two summer school classes at the University of Missouri, you'd be automatically enrolled the next semester as a student. | ||
| And that's kind of what Nick did with InfoWars. | ||
| Yeah, kind of. | ||
| I remember, too, the first real indication that I had that something was trouble was the CPAC from last year, I believe. | ||
| And got too drunk and fell asleep before his speech. | ||
| And then Nick was kind of just taking over the room. | ||
| And you could see that he had a far more potent sway over the audience than... | ||
| Well, I mean, Alex was asleep. | ||
| But the rest of the people there didn't have any kind of connection that was close to what Nick was bringing. | ||
| That was a little bit bad. | ||
| He took over. | ||
| Alex's own event, more or less. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that was going to kind of happen anyway. | ||
| I've gone to CPAC several years. | ||
| I haven't gone since the pandemic, but that CPAC I did go to. | ||
| I did not go to the InfoWars event. | ||
| Wait, that was two years ago, right? | ||
| Yeah, it was two years ago. | ||
| Yeah, excuse me. | ||
| I didn't go to the InfoWars event because at that point, I mean, I'm a known enough quantity to these people that... | ||
| It's almost no point. | ||
| I can't do reporting if I go there because as soon as I show up, I just get, like, swarmed, right? | ||
| Yeah, you become the story. | ||
| Yeah, and that's not what my job is. | ||
| So I tend to just skip it or I was, like, watching it or whatever. | ||
| But CPAC generally as an event, like, certainly there's some donors that are around, some older activists, you know, passionate adults. | ||
| And it's like this for almost, you know, any major conference or event in D.C. They pack the numbers with college kids. | ||
| Like, what happens on the stage is for the cameras and there's media. | ||
| It's like a media circus. | ||
| And then there's also, like, the underbelly of all these conferences is bringing in young college kids and trying to rear up the next generation of the conservative movement. | ||
| Because the conservative movement has been so shitty the last couple decades, frankly, at pulling in younger generations to their cause. | ||
| Because Nick, the way he styles himself being young personally and also borrowing rhetoric and stylings from popular Twitch streamers or memes and jokes and stuff like that, he resonates more with the younger audience. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And I think at an event like CPAC, there's probably more people numbers-wise in the crowd that could be pulled to somebody like Fuentes than I don't know how many. | ||
| diehard InfoWars listeners are just roaming around CPAC. | ||
| In fact, most of the time when they go to CPAC, it's just to go be a thorn in the side until they get asked to leave. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I guess that makes sense. | ||
| I mean, I think that someone like Alex probably has a difficult time connecting with the youth because the youth don't care about the Red Scare. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The Tricoms. | ||
| There's a little bit of... | ||
| You're an old man. | ||
| And I think that even a lot of the insults that we see thrown around by Nick apply to Alex. | ||
| That's another thing that I think is really funny about this incompatibility is that on its face, these two dudes are like... | ||
| Most of what makes Nick's brand work is opposition to what Alex stands for. | ||
| Which is like, boomer 1776, taking America back, revolution. | ||
| Nick, on his own show... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't care what color you are if you bleed red blood. | |
| On Nick's show, he talks about people that use that kind of rhetoric. | ||
| I mean, I won't say what he calls them, but he speaks very lowly of them. | ||
| And then he goes on Infowars, and he's almost just like... | ||
| I almost feel like you can see it in his face sometimes. | ||
| He's like... | ||
| He knows that he kind of maybe for his career should be doing this, but isn't incredibly down. | ||
| I think he's just sort of happy to have access to a large audience. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I remember back when I did stand-up, there would be shows that I didn't want to do, but it was like, you just got to do it. | ||
| You just got to do it. | ||
| There's a crowd there. | ||
| You know, just whatever. | ||
| Yeah, you get that sense of just like... | ||
| Yeah, I'm checking this off the list. | ||
| I'm just doing this. | ||
| And the other thing, too, on this incompatibility note, is we were talking earlier about the Turning Point feud with Nick. | ||
| And one of the big things that they used as a wedge in those, whenever they would disrupt the Turning Point events, was Israel. | ||
| They would bring up Israel, and it would be like, why won't you denounce? | ||
| This exact strategy could be quite effectively used against Alex. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't understand how somebody like Alex could watch what Nick and his fanbase have done, exploiting Turning Point USA, and not realize, like, well... | ||
| Yeah, that's one of the few territories, Alex... | ||
| He tends to be a little hesitant to go. | ||
| He's gone there once or twice, but generally speaking, he kind of soft walks it there. | ||
| Very much. | ||
| Very much so, to the point where I actually don't fully know what his full position is. | ||
| No, I think that is probably on purpose. | ||
| Keep it ambiguous enough that the folks in the audience that believe in all kinds of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories don't... | ||
| Drop him, but not specific enough that he gets in trouble with the other part of the audience that is supportive of the state of Israel. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that that is probably a strategic move on his part, and probably wise for his brand. | ||
| But it's also the exact thing that someone like Nick would be like, no. | ||
| Have a position. | ||
| Why won't you have a position? | ||
| That's basically what he was yelling at Charlie Kirk at all those events. | ||
| And I just feel like Alex should know that that might be coming down the road from within your own organization now. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, we'll see. | ||
| With Nick not being on these platforms and losing access and being in a position where he has the potential to start circling the drain quite a bit. | ||
| We'll see if Alex can, how long he can hold on. | ||
| I am pretty curious, though. | ||
| You know, because there's almost two ways it could go, right? | ||
| On one hand, Alex is so cynical and, you know, is kind of half-consciously doing his show at this point that he's just like, yeah, whatever, we're getting the numbers in. | ||
| This is about censorship. | ||
| This isn't about what anybody is specifically saying. | ||
| And then there's the other part where he's just like, oh, maybe we can host the videos, but he doesn't come on the show anymore, that sort of thing. | ||
| It'll be interesting to see where those chips fall. | ||
| Well, I feel like it's, no matter what, gonna be bad. | ||
| I don't feel like you can have these influences in the same pot. | ||
| Turn on a little bit of heat, and it not turn into just utter chaos. | ||
| But we'll see. | ||
| I'm going to keep track of it. | ||
| And one of the things that I wanted to do was I wanted to just discuss a little video of Nick Fuentes' that he put on Infowars. | ||
| So again, this is something that now Alex has to deal with. | ||
| In preparation for this episode, I wanted to go and watch some of Nick's off-platform work. | ||
| And I was shocked how bad it is. | ||
| Not even, like, offensive. | ||
| Like, there's some offensive stuff. | ||
| But it's just also bad. | ||
| It's also just really doesn't seem like he's trying all that hard. | ||
| Yeah, he's really gotten in his own head lately. | ||
| And, like, I feel like half the show he just talks about... | ||
| He's almost pulling a Laura Loomer where every time she opens her mouth she's like, I'm so persecuted. | ||
| It's so terrible. | ||
| Blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And it just goes on and on for, like, 20 minutes. | ||
| And then at the end is like... | ||
| Let's check the super chats. | ||
| I oppose tech censorship, too. | ||
| That's important. | ||
| Google it. | ||
| I watched one, and he did a five-minute rant about how he wants to be a martyr, but not like Jesus. | ||
| He doesn't want to get crucified. | ||
| Because crucifixion would suck. | ||
| But he's fine being a martyr like he's on a no-fly list. | ||
| But even if he was crucified, he'd probably go to heaven, so that would be great. | ||
| I was like, I don't know what this is. | ||
| I listen to Alex Jones all the time. | ||
| I thought that was kind of uncompelling broadcasting, and I listen to this asshole. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, let's listen to some clips. | ||
| Alright, so this is a speech, this is from a speech that Nick gave that is on Infowars now, that is hosted on there, and it is about opposition to feminism. | ||
| That classic popular political position. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Anti-feminism is a galvanizing force within some of the proto-Trumpian communities. | ||
| It fueled a lot of the anti-SJW kind of outrage. | ||
| Now, I think that there's a difference between what you might call classical... | ||
| Anti-feminist ideas and what Nick is bringing to the table. | ||
| And we'll see that. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| We're going to give it a start. | ||
| Now they call me a sexist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that one is just true. | |
| Quite an applause break. | ||
| And I am a misogynist too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| That's just true. | ||
| And if you're a man, you almost have to be. | ||
| I don't really respect you if you're not. | ||
| But no, so they call you a sexist and why? | ||
| I even get called this by so-called right-wing women. | ||
| Like, for example, you know, Alex Clark? | ||
| Man! | ||
| She is on, please! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Eww, eww, eww, eww. | |
| Eww, eww, eww, eww. | ||
| So, I think this is one of the issues with dealing with someone his age and maybe humor maturity level and trying to mix the issues that he's trying to cover with she's ugly. | ||
| Yeah, it seems almost explicitly aimed at 14-year-old boys. | ||
| Who are angry. | ||
| Yeah, and that's particularly what is concerning to me about Fuentes as he goes through the years. | ||
| He aims young. | ||
| Like a Crowder type. | ||
| He's clearly somebody who is like, I know once you reach a certain age, you're probably not going to be interested in this bullshit. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| He's part stand-up comic, even though as I try to imagine that set in literally any comedy club, and he's like... | ||
| Alex Clark, right? | ||
| And the audience is like, who? | ||
| Who the fuck is that? | ||
| I pay attention to right-wing stuff, and even I had to look up who she was. | ||
| Yeah, she does an Instagram show for TPUSA. | ||
| Who gives a shit, dude? | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| Well, see, that's what's fascinating to me about this, is imagining it as a stand-up set, it's like, huh? | ||
| But then also, imagining it as a serious political thing is also like... | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| I got into a fight with this commentator for Turning Point USA. | ||
| This is the cornerstone of this lecture that I'm going to give. | ||
| It's absurd in both spaces. | ||
| Yeah, it's just... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just don't get it, really. | ||
| I mean, I get it. | ||
| I get what the point of it is. | ||
| But the way he's going about it, it's... | ||
| It kind of makes me sick a little bit to think, like, imagine if you and I were putting out this show, but we were putting on the, like, hello, it's, or what's the meme? | ||
| Like, howdy, my fellow kids, or whatever. | ||
| Oh, yeah, the Steve Buscemi meme? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, we open up the podcast, and I'm just like, epic dab, Dan. | ||
| That's so fucking sick. | ||
| Yeah, Alex Jones, he looks like he's got a zit for a head. | ||
| Damn! | ||
| Morning zoo sounds. | ||
| It would be something worth taking seriously, I think. | ||
| Well, the thing is, there's real political action to back it up, right? | ||
| So we kind of have to take it seriously. | ||
| That's the trap, and that's the problem. | ||
| And I think that understanding that trap, it's important to recognize that you have this... | ||
| Bad stand-up and bad political thing that is absurd, but it also veers into this. | ||
| He's complaining about Alex Clark, and this is one of his complaints that he brings up almost immediately upon bringing her up. | ||
| She's pretty rough looking. | ||
| And I see these pictures of her. | ||
| You ever see in a dating show? | ||
| She's in the jacuzzi. | ||
| With like a black guy. | ||
| Who the fuck is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoops. | |
| Hey. | ||
| That was based. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, shit. | |
| See, there we go. | ||
| You know, like, you have this joke that's not a joke. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And it's... | ||
| It's kind of clever because when throughout the years people like myself or places like the Southern Poverty Law Center or, you know, anti-extremism people have criticized Nick, he's kind of hidden under the, oh, it's an edgy joke. | ||
| It's a stand-up comedy. | ||
| You know, 20 years ago you'd go to a comedy club and hear this. | ||
| But I... | ||
| Don't think Nick is even old enough to know if that's true or not. | ||
| That's just like something someone told him one time. | ||
| Yeah, he might just say Lenny Bruce and then never know who he was. | ||
| But the thing is, if you want to take it from the perspective of a joke, the joke here is that Nick thinks it's gross that someone who's not black would be in a jacuzzi with a black man. | ||
| And I don't know what the joke is. | ||
| Yeah, it's not a joke. | ||
| There isn't a joke. | ||
| Hate. | ||
| Yeah, I guess the joke is, like, the only possible joke is him parodying being racist for the sake of being anti-racist. | ||
| And that's clearly not what he's doing. | ||
| Damn, this podcast is taking a turn. | ||
| I didn't think it would be Nick Fuentes' secret anti-fascist. | ||
| It's an inside job. | ||
| I remember I had a friend when I was younger who was pretty convinced that Ann Coulter was a performance artist. | ||
| And all of it was an elaborate parody of right-wing stuff. | ||
| And I thought that was fascinating back when I used to smoke a lot of weed. | ||
| And I was like, oh, what if? | ||
| Damn, bro. | ||
| I think that if I were younger, maybe someone would make that argument about Nick. | ||
| Like, secretly, this is all parody. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| It's just poorly thought out. | ||
| Bigotry that's being masked by a very thin sheet. | ||
| Yeah, very thin. | ||
| I don't know how it could... | ||
| It's like a Kleenex. | ||
| You can see right through it. | ||
| So in this next clip here, Nick begins to lay out what his problem with feminism is, and it relates back to Alex Clark a little bit. | ||
| But it actually doesn't. | ||
| It relates to a friend of Alex Clark's, which is really weird. | ||
| But here's the problem with feminism. | ||
| You see all these conservatives, and they've been beating this drum for years. | ||
| They'll say things like, well, there's no sexism. | ||
| There's no gender pay gap. | ||
| They've been doing that argument for like 10,000 years. | ||
| And they'll say things like, for example, third wave feminism is the problem. | ||
| We'll always have to stipulate. | ||
| Well, it's the third wave. | ||
| It's these new feminists. | ||
| Oh, feminism's fine. | ||
| You know, the first, second, every wave leading up to the third wave is wrong. | ||
| Or rather, everything leading up to the third wave is right. | ||
| The reason they call me a sexist or a woman hater, like Robert Barnes said, is because I actually believe in real traditional values. | ||
| And I'll tell you what I mean by that. | ||
| At CPAC, they're against abortion. | ||
| And if you're Christian, you have to be against abortion. | ||
| It really is your human being. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| And I'll say it's not even just Christians. | ||
| If you're a human being, if you see what they do to these babies, they go in there and they rip them out, rip them to pieces. | ||
| This is barbarism. | ||
| It's completely inhumane. | ||
| And over at CPAC, they're opposed to abortion, and I think that's a very standard conservative position, and it should be. | ||
| But abortion is kind of starting the story in the middle when it comes to an unplanned, so-called unplanned pregnancy. | ||
| So now here is where he gets into his problem. | ||
| When you have an opposition to abortion, that's starting the problem in the middle. | ||
| That's like you have a problem that you think is the problem and it's abortion, but there's actually a problem over here beforehand. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, beneath all the weird jokes that aren't jokes and the openers are almost like stand-up comedy or edgy Twitch streamers rhetoric, Nick's whole rhetorical strategy and Extremists do this all the time. | ||
| Is to present themselves as the truer version. | ||
| You've heard this. | ||
| You're nodding your head. | ||
| But let me tell you, this is a stopgap. | ||
| It does not fix the problem. | ||
| And I have the solution. | ||
| That is his whole presentation. | ||
| The truer conservative, it goes back to what I was saying. | ||
| He believes he deserves the place of somebody like Charlie Kirk because he thinks he is a truer iteration of Trumpism. | ||
| As somebody who didn't like Trump too much, I won't fight him on that. | ||
| You can take that mantle if you want. | ||
| Yeah, go for it. | ||
| You know what, dude? | ||
| Go for it. | ||
| I won't correct you, but yeah, it's interesting because this is what he's been doing for years. | ||
| Yeah, the rhetorical strategy that you're talking about is definitely there. | ||
| And I think the other thing that he's doing is he's taking this thing that everybody in the room agrees on, and that is that we're against abortion. | ||
| Because, obviously, you can hear from their response, this is an anti-choice crowd. | ||
| So he's taking that agreement, and then he's twisting it into, well, if you agree with this, you actually also agree with this other thing that you probably actually don't, and there's not really connective tissue to get you there logically. | ||
| And this is where Alex Clark's friend comes into play, because apparently Alex Clark was friends with somebody... | ||
| Who decided not to get an abortion, and this makes Nick mad, somehow. | ||
| You know, for example, there was a friend of Alex Clark, who we had a little bit of a fight with on Twitter earlier this year, and she went out on Twitter and she announced, hey everybody, I'm not aborting my baby! | ||
| And everybody was like, wow! | ||
| Wow, Queen! | ||
| Great job! | ||
| You didn't abort your baby! | ||
| I mean, all the groypers said is, the bar really happened. | ||
| I mean, if that's the bar to be a conservative or a conservative influencer, that you don't abort babies and now we're supposed to sing your praises, I say, that's not good enough. | ||
| And let's think about the story here. | ||
| A woman will have an unplanned pregnancy, so-called, and then, you know, maybe she'll choose life or maybe she'll choose abortion, but why are women having pregnancies that they don't want? | ||
| I mean, ask yourself that. | ||
| Why does that happen? | ||
| Why do abortions happen? | ||
| They're having babies they don't want because they're having sex outside of marriage. | ||
| That's why. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And there's a word for that. | |
| There's a word for that. | ||
| It's called adultery. | ||
| That's what that's called. | ||
| This is dumb. | ||
| Yeah, this is real dumb. | ||
| Yeah, so you've taken the opposition to abortion and now turned it into like, well, you actually have to be opposed to People having sex. | ||
| Because that's why unplanned pregnancies happen. | ||
| And I would say that a really easy rebuttal to this would just be like, well, are there other things that can stop unplanned pregnancies? | ||
| Like maybe universal access to reproductive health care, destigmatization by way of reproductive education. | ||
| These kinds of things have... | ||
| Clearly a track record that has shown that this does drastically reduce unwanted pregnancies. | ||
| So why do we have to just have everyone stop fucking? | ||
| Yeah, and this seems like a pretty hard sell to a room of teenage boys. | ||
| I'll just say that. | ||
| Remembering myself as a teenage boy and how the only thing I thought about was I wonder if and when I will have sex. | ||
| It was on my mind. | ||
| It would come up from time to time. | ||
| I grew up in a bit of a Christian environment. | ||
| Same. | ||
| I should tell you that I did get a promise ring, and there was a I'm-going-to-save-myself-for-marriage thing in my church. | ||
| I grew up in Arkansas, but I didn't go that far. | ||
| I wish that I had the restraint, because it was a bad period of time. | ||
| I feel a little embarrassed looking back, but I... | ||
| I found it really interesting listening to stuff like this because there's an anger behind what Nick is saying. | ||
| And there's an anger to that women shouldn't have sex before marriage. | ||
| Whereas, as much as I regret and I get kind of cringy feelings about myself looking back at my past, I don't think there was anger about premarital sex. | ||
| I think there was a choice that I felt I was making. | ||
| And I... | ||
| Didn't really care that much about what other people were doing, except my friends in the church community, if they had already made the same decision as I had. | ||
| Yeah, because the premise of a promise ring is kind of a personal one. | ||
| It is, the person that I end up marrying, I believe, deserves to have me completely. | ||
| That's the kind of rhetoric they use. | ||
| We're pre-committed to each other, or whatever. | ||
| Versus what Nick does is like, It's essentially just like, a woman must be clean for me. | ||
| It's like, it's one thing for people to be like, oh, I want to do this for my partner, I want to do whatever. | ||
| But it's another thing to be like, you owe me this. | ||
| Like, that is a little fucked up. | ||
| Yeah, I think also just like, even just like ballooning out a little bit, Umbrella, looking at it, the preoccupation with... | ||
| Virginity or purity or any of that stuff is a little bit unhealthy no matter what. | ||
| But the hostility and the anger really just bums me out. | ||
| Especially when there's just, like, if your problem is allegedly abortion and your solution to it is, you know, get rid of things that lead to unplanned pregnancies, there are other strategies. | ||
| You do not have to go with people can't have sex. | ||
| And ultimately, if you zoom out just a little bit, what Nick is doing is, like, some friend of Alex Clark was probably like, fuck you, Nick. | ||
| Rightfully so. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Probably disagree with her on everything else, but, like, there's some common ground there. | ||
| And he looked at that and said, like, oh, she said, fuck you, Nick. | ||
| Gross. | ||
| She had sex. | ||
| What a blah blah. | ||
| You know, I... | ||
| I really don't want to borrow the language he's using, but it's pretty gross. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think that there's also even, like, if we take all of this content out of it, you still have somebody who sees himself as, like, a political leader complaining about a fight he had on Twitter. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that is sad. | ||
| And his gripe? | ||
| They had sex. | ||
| Gross. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then something happened that was unexpected and they made the decision I would want them to make and I'm still mad about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it's still not good enough because they had sex. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| So Nick also appears to be against contraception as he lays out a little bit. | ||
| Why else do women have unplanned pregnancies? | ||
| Well, they use contraception, and it doesn't work sometimes. | ||
| And then they wind up with a pregnancy. | ||
| In short, the Bible and Christianity tells us about sexuality. | ||
| This is traditional, too. | ||
| That young men and young women are supposed to get married and then they're only supposed to do it with each other. | ||
| That's what the Bible tells us about marriage. | ||
| Conservatives seem to be okay with everything leading up to the unplanned pregnancy. | ||
| The contraception, the promiscuity, the sort of hook-up culture, casual sex, all of that. | ||
| And then when there's an unplanned pregnancy, then they draw the line and they say, no, no, but we're the real conservatives. | ||
| Go no further. | ||
| You've got to go all the way to the beginning of the story. | ||
| So, Nick is equating conservative values with theocratic Christian societal organization, basically. | ||
| And even then, I would encourage him to brush up on his Bible a little bit, because there are plenty of people in God's good graces that got around, I would say. | ||
| Jesus hung out with some folks who might have been looked down upon by someone like Nick. | ||
| He spoke out in their defense, in fact. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But yeah, like you were saying, the argument here is that the GOP should be the vehicle of the church. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Which a lot of Christian right folks would probably agree with, but it's something that our government is set up at least on paper in theory. | ||
| To not be. | ||
| I would hope. | ||
| Fingers crossed. | ||
| I mean, at the rate we're going now. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that there's a difference between wanting your religious beliefs to be respected and wanting them to be doctrine to everyone and expected of everyone to follow. | ||
| And that is clearly what Nick is advocating for. | ||
| Nick is clearly advocating for... | ||
| A society where his particular religious beliefs are codified into what everyone has to follow. | ||
| And that's not going to be great. | ||
| Yeah, and I think for Nick and also for people in the white nationalism that came generations before him, they saw the church, even if the church isn't in total agreement with their agenda, as kind of the fastest way to erase or to get... | ||
| To push a country away from the ideal of a multicultural democracy by instituting some sort of theocratic control or mandating the laws of the government based on a religious philosophy, you can get more people to nod along and also have... | ||
| Like an esoteric thing to point to. | ||
| It's not, you are not accountable, you are just following the rules in the good book, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You have sort of a thing you can fall back on that's like, wow, this is unquestionable. | ||
| Yeah, and I want to be totally clear, nothing against religion. | ||
| I'm not religious, but whatever. | ||
| It helps people, right? | ||
| But, you know, they do see this as a vehicle. | ||
| And, you know, I think for anybody who's listening to the show that's like a person of faith, it's something to be conscious of. | ||
| That people are out there that would seek to exploit your faith to turn you towards something really nasty. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, like, I think you see that a bit. | ||
| And that's one of the things that makes some of these conversations a little bit murky is, you know... | ||
| Trying to discuss that without coming off as anti-religious or anti-any kind of faith. | ||
| And I think it's very possible to walk that line, but people sometimes do a bad job of it. | ||
| And I think it doesn't help that a lot of people have negative past experiences of their own that they bring to the table with religious communities. | ||
| And, you know, that's just a challenge we all have. | ||
| Yeah, it's hard to talk about it in a way that's not personal. | ||
| Is my tan from my promise ring showing? | ||
| My permanent tan? | ||
| No, I don't know. | ||
| Well, it's funny because it's on a few fingers. | ||
| How many promises did you make, Dan? | ||
| I made a lot of promises. | ||
| They've all been broken. | ||
| I had a pinky ring. | ||
| I had a pinky. | ||
| Pinky and the boys. | ||
| I need to just jump out the window here. | ||
| There was another thing that I was thinking about here. | ||
| Oh yeah, that's what it was. | ||
| There's another aspect of this religious stuff that Nick is bringing to the table that I think really highlights a distinct difference between him and people like Alex and traditional Sort of anti-communist types. | ||
| And that is that there's religious zealotry and fervor on both sides, but Nick is a Catholic fascist. | ||
| Very specifically. | ||
| And Alex is more of a Protestant type. | ||
| And I think that Alex doesn't understand that. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know that he fully understands how those two... | ||
| Even historically speaking, perhaps, do not really get along. | ||
| Yeah, the extreme ends of Catholic extremism, let's say, and more... | ||
| I don't even know what you would call him. | ||
| I mean, just Christian identity, kind of, is the vein you would put Alex in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I think that's right, because he sees it as something that he is. | ||
| And I don't often hear Alex articulate a really coherent biblical argument for stuff. | ||
| Sometimes he talks about space in terms of God. | ||
| He's weird. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I think that most things that he brings up about the Bible are sort of out-of-context quotes about Jesus saying, get a sword and stuff like that. | ||
| And it's like, well, I'm not sure. | ||
| Not sure what a grasp you have here. | ||
| But the traditions of his community and his world in terms of religion are very different in terms of doctrine, in terms of goals, than Nick's. | ||
| And I don't think that he realizes that when they say God or whatever, they may have very distinct views in their mind. | ||
| And I think that's another thing that could... | ||
| Lead to a problem between the two of them. | ||
| Yeah, because Alex will undoubtedly fail a purity test if Nick decides he wants to apply it. | ||
| Yup. | ||
| Or Alex, I mean, potentially, I guess, could get uncomfortable by it? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Do things make him uncomfortable? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, until Nick does something that his lawyer thinks he needs to do something about, I don't know if Alex would be uncomfortable. | ||
| Because I don't think he knows. | ||
| Like, honestly, I don't think he knows what goes on his own site. | ||
| I can't imagine that, because I just... | ||
| He has to either not care or not know. | ||
| Yeah, and it's hard to know which one of those it is. | ||
| Yeah, because things like this would be very difficult to stand behind. | ||
| So you have Nick saying that abortion is wrong, and he's got the room on his side, and therefore you can't fuck. | ||
| Because that's bad. | ||
| You can only fuck in marriage. | ||
| But also, this extends much further. | ||
| It's not just about sexual morality. | ||
| It's not just about the family, but it's also about the composition of society. | ||
| When men and women get married, who's having the babies? | ||
| Does anybody know? | ||
| I mean, it's the women that are having the babies. | ||
| Yeah, that's how that works. | ||
| These days, it seems like people are okay with women in the workforce. | ||
| I mean, I go out there on my show and I say, I don't think women should be in the workforce. | ||
| Frankly, I don't know if they should be voting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| And people say that's so backwards. | ||
| How could you say that? | ||
| What is this, the 1950s? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The 1950s were a good time! | |
| They say, what is this, the 1950s? | ||
| No, but it should be. | ||
| We have to go back. | ||
| We have to go back. | ||
| Go ahead, sorry. | ||
| Just to be clear, for the listeners at home, we've been talking between some of these clips, but this is all from the same speech. | ||
| He has gone from a Twitter argument with Alex Clark to... | ||
| About her friend, who did the thing that I would want her to do. | ||
| Her friend got pregnant and then kept the baby. | ||
| But she shouldn't have gotten pregnant in the first place because she shouldn't have been having sex, which, by the way, even with contraceptions, fuck those things, women shouldn't vote. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| This is spiraled out into... | ||
| And also, this is speech. | ||
| I'm not... | ||
| Cutting out parts that make it make sense. | ||
| This is the train of thought that he's on. | ||
| These are the things that lead to abortion, which you need to be against if you're truly against abortion. | ||
| If you're truly against abortion, you need to be against fucking. | ||
| You need women not to be in the office, not in the workplace. | ||
| They probably shouldn't vote. | ||
| Like, okay. | ||
| We need to return to the 1950s, the era in time that was famously good to everybody. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wonderful time for everyone. | ||
| Everyone! | ||
| The thing is, if you look at that train of thought, what you really start to recognize is how much the abortion has nothing to do with what he actually is advocating. | ||
| He's hiding behind that mantle because it's something that people will obviously get on board with. | ||
| Trying to make the connection between Women voting, having the right to vote, and being opposed to abortion. | ||
| It's a long walk. | ||
| It's a long walk. | ||
| But he gets there in like, I mean, what is it, 60 seconds? | ||
| Give or take. | ||
| He's a fucking Olympian athlete. | ||
| Well, I mean, in a favorable room. | ||
| I think if he tried to make this make sense outside of his own America Uncancelled rally. | ||
| I don't know how well it would work, but yeah, I mean, this is what he's doing. | ||
| He's Trojan-horsing these other viewpoints onto the audience. | ||
| I would say that they're probably inclined to be angry and hostile towards women to begin with, but maybe they wouldn't have gone to a rally that was a women-shouldn't-vote rally, but they might show up for a pro-life rally. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's definitely fair, and it's, I mean, like I said, that's the whole strategy. | ||
| Oh, here's something you agree with. | ||
| Let me give you the real shit. | ||
| Like, and to a degree, with younger audiences, and apparently at the favor of at least one member of Congress, it's like resonating, which is... | ||
| Kind of terrifying. | ||
| Because if we just sit here and listen to it, it's fucking ridiculous, dude. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| No, and I think that we're of the age where we lived through the Tea Party happening. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I think that in a lot of ways, people didn't take that nearly seriously enough. | ||
| And I think, you know, you saw that... | ||
| The effect that it had on political discourse, on normalizing ideas that were prior, like, I don't know about this. | ||
| And I think that if we're not careful, this could be another thing that goes that direction. | ||
| Like, you're bringing up the Michelle Malkin support, the Gosar support. | ||
| It's not nothing. | ||
| Yeah, and these brigades from Nick and his fans who call themselves the Groypers and stuff, they have been able to kind of give TPUSA enough pressure for them to bend on some shit. | ||
| Which... | ||
| Is a mistake to fucking begin with. | ||
| Because once you put that, you know, you cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube after that. | ||
| It's like a bully, right? | ||
| You give in to the bully, you play the game, and guess who's back tomorrow? | ||
| It's the bully again. | ||
| Yeah, and that's what I feel about Alex having him on the network, even. | ||
| You know, like, what are you gonna do? | ||
| Are you gonna kick him off? | ||
| Good luck! | ||
| Yeah, I mean, jeez, I mean, we'll see. | ||
| It's a mess. | ||
| But here's where it gets a little bit racist, I think. | ||
| No, wait, this is more just about how women need to be just making babies all the time. | ||
| The reason why I'm against this, I never understood the argument myself. | ||
| I was a libertarian for years when I was in high school, and I never got it. | ||
| I don't think most people get it because nobody makes the argument. | ||
| Why, Nick? | ||
| Why can't women work in the workforce? | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Here's my favorite thing in the world, when someone is like, no one ever makes the argument, so now I will. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| It's like when Alex is like, I'm going to get down to it, I'm going to prove everything. | ||
| Nobody is talking about using your toaster in the bathtub, so I'm going to do it right now. | ||
| I'm going to lay it out. | ||
| I always love when someone sets the bar way too high for themselves, and that's what Nick has done right here. | ||
| Make the argument, my man. | ||
| Do you think they're incompetent? | ||
| Well, yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you think that they're not as intelligent as men? | |
| Yes. | ||
| But that's not entirely why. | ||
| That's not the only reason. | ||
| I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek, but it's actually serious. | ||
| If we're to have a traditional Christian view of sexual morality, then women should be getting married and having lots and lots of kids. | ||
| That's just the natural course of things if you're following God's Word, if you're a real Christian and a real conservative. | ||
| And so if you're having all these babies, Who is going to raise those babies other than their mother? | ||
| So yeah, no one makes the argument, so Nick's gonna do it. | ||
| He's gonna lay it out for you. | ||
| Damn, dude, I have never heard that one before. | ||
| Thank God Nick made this argument. | ||
| What a new idea. | ||
| Damn, dude. | ||
| Yes, yes, women are things. | ||
| I can't believe... | ||
| Women should have children? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| God, this guy is breaking new ground all over the place. | ||
| Did he go to church for the first time last week? | ||
| I find this fascinating, and I think you see it a lot with these types. | ||
| This making really, really old arguments that most people have left in the past as if they were new novel breakthroughs. | ||
| They're like, no one lays it out like me. | ||
| Oh, my religious beliefs dictate that women are essentially just biological machines that we use to create and take care of the next generation. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Groundbreaking. | ||
| Mind freak. | ||
| Well, it's just... | ||
| I mean, to go back to the joke I made earlier, I guess, it's like, imagine this in any other context, right? | ||
| Like, so, we used to put asbestos in buildings, and then people were getting sick, so we stopped. | ||
| We realized that was not how we wanted to go forward, so, you know, we moved on from it. | ||
| And I just imagine somebody like, this is the rhetorical equivalent of being like, I'm gonna let you in on a little secret. | ||
| There's something you can put in your walls. | ||
| I swear to God, no better insulation. | ||
| They'll call you an idiot. | ||
| They'll say that you're gonna go to the hospital when you're older if you do this. | ||
| But they're just trying to smear you. | ||
| Like, this is the same fucking thing. | ||
| My religion dictates that you must take the risk of going to the hospital. | ||
| Yeah, it's not convincing, I would say, for one. | ||
| And, of course, it does veer into racism, because this is Nick, after all, and of course it does. | ||
| We have a country now where people have babies, and what do they do? | ||
| They have one or two or three kids, and then they stop, and then they send the kids to daycare. | ||
| And the mom's working, and the dad's working, and they have two cars, and two car insurance, and all this, and they send the kids to daycare. | ||
| And the kids, from the time they wake up... | ||
| Until the time mommy and daddy get home from work, they're being raised by somebody other than their mother. | ||
| They're being raised in many cases by people that don't care about them. | ||
| Maybe people that hate them. | ||
| You're seeing people being brought up in daycare, and largely it's immigrants working these jobs. | ||
| We're going to have immigrants raise our babies because mothers are too busy doing what? | ||
| Making spreadsheets? | ||
| They're too busy making a schedule? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is insane. | |
| This is not a conservative community. | ||
| See, it always does have to come back to anti-immigrant sentiment and coding the our babies and, you know, it always has to come back to that. | ||
| Also, I think this is something that needs to be said, and that is that Nick is 22 years old, and we know what he's been doing since he was in high school. | ||
| I do not know if he's somebody that I would take very seriously about what it's like to have a career or a real job. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I'm listening to that. | ||
| Two cars, a couple kids. | ||
| I'm just like, damn, someone figured it out. | ||
| I don't know if I'll be able to do that with the income I've got. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They have two cars, two car insurances. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Damn! | |
| What does that mean? | ||
| They might just have one policy. | ||
| Big money right here is what I'm saying. | ||
| But, yeah, not exactly the authority on the good old days. | ||
| You know, I just imagine him flipping through, like, 1950s edition of, like, Highlights Magazine and being like, This is what they stole from us. | ||
| Which is like, you know. | ||
| But he has scrawled slurs in, like, word bubbles in every drawing in the Highlights magazine. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's ridiculous. | ||
| And also just this whole premise of, like, because somebody is an immigrant, that they would be inept at caring for a child or something. | ||
| And especially if they're in daycare, they're not in school yet, they're so young, they're not going to remember shit anyway. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Mild disdain is not probably going to stick around. | ||
| Yeah, just... | ||
| And people who gravitate towards childcare careers are often people who do not hate kids. | ||
| Yeah, the most selfless people in the world. | ||
| Typically. | ||
| Now, granted, obviously, there's gonna be bad people in any line of work, but I would think that of the people that I know who have gravitated towards that field, they love kids. | ||
| Yeah, you don't do it because you get rich or you get famous. | ||
| Do it because you care. | ||
| For the most part, there's going to be outliers in any profession. | ||
| And I think, too, that Nick doesn't know what it means to have a job. | ||
| He doesn't know what it means to have a career. | ||
| And therefore, he can be reductive and stupid about, like, oh, women are just making spreadsheets so they can't raise their babies. | ||
| Well, the thing is, his audience is so young, too. | ||
| It can kind of work. | ||
| Yeah, because they don't know either. | ||
| Yeah, like, if Nick got in a room full of, like... | ||
| I'm thinking the TPUSA donor dinner of like aging Q-tips all assembled in circles around tables eating basil chicken or whatever the fuck they do. | ||
| Sounds like it's on the menu. | ||
| They'd be like they just don't they've so they've got careers they've got families they've got whatever but blah blah and I just imagine that audience being like what's he talking about again? | ||
| I don't think it would resonate with the Older crowd. | ||
| No, no, because he'd essentially be looking at them and being like, all you do is make spreadsheets. | ||
| And everyone who's had a career or done work knows that there's much more to having a career, especially something that you love, something that you find fulfilling, something that is a part of your life. | ||
| the idea of depriving people of that because you and your religious beliefs dictate that they must have babies constantly is uh is bizarre it's unhinged it's uh offensive uh and uh it's supremacist is what it is it's true that my beliefs are so much more important than Mm-hmm. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| It's now something that Alex apparently is either tacitly or explicitly condoning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So we have one more clip here, but I'm going to skip past it because it's basically just him being like, well, if this is sexist, then I guess I am. | ||
| And yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I would agree. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Best point he's made the whole speech. | ||
| Yeah, so he accepts the mantle, kind of. | ||
| But of course, rhetorically, what he's trying to do is be like, this isn't sexist, this is just... | ||
| And it's not. | ||
| This is outrageous. | ||
| And I... | ||
| I've said this before, and I think it bears repeating. | ||
| I don't think that I would spend time covering Nick. | ||
| And I'm glad that people like you do. | ||
| Because I think that he's somebody that definitely people should pay attention to and deserves a critical eye. | ||
| But I don't know how much he fits into the scheme of what we cover on this show. | ||
| But... | ||
| He's on Alex's network doing this now. | ||
| This is so incompatible with the message that Alex tries to sell his brand on that I think it bears looking at and being like, really? | ||
| This is now Infowars. | ||
| This is their content. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's certainly interesting, but it's... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, I think they're kind of on two different tracks. | ||
| And there's some overlap there. | ||
| But when the rubber hits the road, I just... | ||
| Yeah, it is kind of hard to wrap your head around a bit. | ||
| I think that they are fortunate that the rubber has not hit the road. | ||
| And I imagine when it does, they will turn on each other incredibly aggressively. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| That would be... | ||
| As somebody who has had to spend countless hours of my life both paying attention to Alex and Nick, watching them eat each other alive would be immensely... | ||
| That's personally entertaining to me. | ||
| I think there would be some schadenfreude, for sure. | ||
| I would worry about how it could accelerate things for some of their followers. | ||
| Yeah, if one wins the other's audience, that's a bad thing. | ||
| But, yeah, it would be interesting to see them take pot shots. | ||
| Especially because a lot of the stuff that Nick uses as ammunition against people that he goes after... | ||
| Are all the criticisms that people in the right wing have had of Alex. | ||
| They've all constantly said that he's a shill for Israel. | ||
| They say that he works for Mossad. | ||
| All of this is a tradition that Nick could pull from and just go to town against Alex. | ||
| Well, it's something that Nick does for everybody else. | ||
| And it almost feels like he's pulling a punch with Alex. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, just take me for example. | ||
| Nick fucking hates me, right? | ||
| Because I was one of the first people that started writing about him. | ||
| And now when people have questions about Nick, people call me and I'm like, yeah, this guy's a piece of shit. | ||
| And hold on. | ||
| Let me just send you a Word document. | ||
| Off and on the record. | ||
| He sucks. | ||
| You check all this shit out and you tell me what you think of him. | ||
| Here's what I think. | ||
| It's pretty obvious what he's doing. | ||
| Like I said, it is veiled with a Kleenex. | ||
| You can see straight through it. | ||
| So, he doesn't like me. | ||
| So, when I was at Right Wing Watch, I was the Soros shill. | ||
| You know, I was working in Jewish interest in some... | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And now I work at TFR Lab, which is connected to the Atlantic Councils. | ||
| Now I work for NATO, and now I'm CIA. | ||
| And what is the CIA but an extension of Mossad? | ||
| And, like, it's just... | ||
| He always takes it back to, like, having some problem with Jews. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, it's a very constant refrain on his part. | ||
| And expect some of that in the future, Alex. | ||
| Well, Jared, thank you for joining. | ||
| I'm sorry to have subjected you to this. | ||
| This is not fun. | ||
| Listening to Nick Fuentes ever is really not a pleasant thing to do. | ||
| Not a great use of an afternoon, but I appreciate you joining. | ||
| Oh, it's been a pleasure. | ||
| It's nice to be in Knowledge Fight HQ. | ||
| HQ! | ||
| As you can see, I'm sending out buttons to the listeners, and that's the return address. | ||
| Knowledge Fight HQ. | ||
| Oh, nice. | ||
| KF HQ. | ||
| It's a treat. | ||
| Like I told you when we went out the other night and met up for the first time. | ||
| You're somebody who's been really supportive over the course of the time that we've done the show, and I really appreciate that, and thank you. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, what you guys have been doing here for so long is important, and you guys understand... | ||
| Like, a lot of media, especially national media, will maybe go to InfoWars or go to Alex and cover, like, an angle of it. | ||
| The tech deplatforming. | ||
| Or an angle of it of this particular crazy thing he said. | ||
| But there aren't a whole lot of people just really sitting with it. | ||
| And watching the show consistently. | ||
| And really getting a feel for the InfoWars cast of characters. | ||
| Sort of how the show works. | ||
| I can tell you why that is. | ||
| And I think you know why, because you used to do that a lot. | ||
| It sucks. | ||
| It sucks a lot. | ||
| It's a bad show. | ||
| It's not a fun job. | ||
| But it's unfortunately important. | ||
| In an ideal world, you know, maybe Knowledge Fight wouldn't have to exist, but for now, I'm really glad that it does. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| I appreciate that, and I'm glad that you're doing the work you're doing as well. | ||
| Where can people follow you and find some of your analysis and what have you? | ||
| I know you're just on Reliable Sources. | ||
| Oh, God, yeah. | ||
| You can follow me on Twitter. | ||
| Alex might talk about you. | ||
| Oh, I hope so. | ||
| He might do a segment on you. | ||
| He hates Stelter. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's always a pleasure to be in the company of such a widely revered potato, the most popular vegetable in the United States. | ||
| Brian's a good guy. | ||
| I don't want to roast him too bad. | ||
| You can keep up with me at jaredlholt on Twitter. | ||
| Don't follow me on anything else because I'm private on everything else. | ||
| I've got a podcast of my own called Shitpost. | ||
| With an exclamation point, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's SH exclamation point. | ||
| T-P-T-O-S-T. | ||
| Because people on iTunes won't let you swear. | ||
| Yeah, I typed it in originally, and I was like, oh no, I can't, what am I gonna do? | ||
| And then I put in the exclamation point, and now I have to spend 30 seconds explaining to people how to find the show. | ||
| I think in a description of an episode once, I put a swear word, and I saw that it automatically edited. | ||
| I was like, wow, this is... | ||
| Tech censorship, man! | ||
| No cussing. | ||
| Canceled. | ||
| Yeah, that's what we need to talk about. | ||
| Fuck Nick Fuentes getting kicked off, whatever. | ||
| This is America. | ||
| If I want to say, you know, asshole, in the description of my iTunes podcast, I should be able to do that. | ||
| I shouldn't have to use dollar signs. | ||
| Where are you, Ted Cruz? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| Where is Ted Cruz on Free the Nipple? | ||
| Anyway, we'll be back. | ||
| Jordan is going to be back from vacation, and so we will have an episode out on Wednesday where we'll check in with Alex. | ||
| But again, Jared, thank you so much for joining. | ||
| Oh, thanks. | ||
| I guess at the end of this, I'm supposed to say that I'm Neo. | ||
| I'm Leo. | ||
| I'm DZXClark. | ||
| I'm Daryl Rundis. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're on the air. | |
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your work. |