June 16, 2003: Knowledge Fight dissects Alex Jones’s episode, exposing his fraudulent framing of St. Louis dentist Charles Sell—charged in 1997, ruled incompetent, and forcibly medicated after racial slurs at a judge—as a "Waco whistleblower," despite no evidence. Jones also misrepresents Jeff Sharlet’s research on the authoritarian-leaning Family group, founded by Norwegian immigrant Abraham Verghese in 1935, later financially tied to Lindell and Trump’s rise. His dismissive, conspiracy-laden style reveals a pattern of cherry-picking facts while mocking nuance, underscoring how his own extremist rhetoric aligns with the very hierarchies he critiques. [Automatically generated summary]
This first clip, I actually misheard the first time I was listening through the episode.
And I got pretty excited because I thought Alex was teasing a guest he was going to have on his show as opposed to a subject he was going to discuss.
Okay.
And then I got really disappointed when I realized, ah, this person's not going to be on the show because I thought it would have been very interesting.
Coming up, we'll be talking about Dr. Charles Sell, the St. Louis doctor, who had exposed government corruption, so they arrested him under Medicaid Medicare fraud.
The charge would give him two years in prison if he was convicted by a jury of his peers.
But they said that he was insane.
The medical doctor was insane, the government said.
Even before he got in this legal hot water, he'd shown signs of severe mental illness, with his own doctor ordering him into hospitalization after he revealed that he was concerned that communists had contaminated the fillings that he was putting into people.
He returned to practice, but ended up having more flare-ups, like when, quote, he told police a leopard was getting on a city bus and several in which he thought people in his community were out to kill him.
Sell got popped on 56 counts of mail fraud, six counts of Medicaid fraud, and a count of money laundering in 1997 on accusations of, quote, submitting false claims, including false documents and x-rays, to Medicaid and private insurers for dental services he did not provide.
Immediately, it became an issue for the courts about whether or not he was competent to stand trial.
Initially, he was said to be competent, but I imagine that it probably didn't help his case that at his first bond hearing in front of a federal magistrate, quote, Dr. Sell screamed at the magistrate using racial epithets.
When she tried to continue the hearing, he shouted and spat in her face.
In August 2000, another court ordered him medicated, and the appeal went to the Eighth Circuit Court, who decided not to rehear the case on a 5-4 vote.
Ultimately, in June 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court would weigh in and rule 6-3 in the case of Sell versus United States, affirming that, quote, forcibly drugging a defendant solely for trial competence is appropriate only in limited circumstances.
This would overturn the previous order for him to be medicated involuntarily.
And fascinatingly, guess what?
The Supreme Court ruling actually happened on June 16th, the exact day that this episode we're listening to was being recorded by Alex, where he's covering this subject.
Well, and one of the reasons that it's taken less seriously, like some of a lot of this conversation, the conspiracy to murder thing, is that a lot of the courts believe that that was a manifestation of the same reasons that made him unfit to conspire to murder somebody.
And so when the conversations about whether or not it's appropriate to forcibly medicate him, it was strictly along the conversations of the fraud charges.
Right.
And that's just fascinating.
So in the end, he accepted a plea deal where he pled no contest to all the charges, and he was sentenced to time served and six months in a halfway house and then three years parole.
There are aspects of this story, particularly ones about he had allegations of mistreatment while he was in prison.
These are very important things, and I don't mean to brush them aside at all, but for the time being, this case is a perfect example of what I was talking about back in episode one of our podcast, that I felt that there was an important role that someone who is what Alex pretends to be could play in society.
This case is fucking hard, because even assuming that Sell was guilty of Medicare fraud, which he definitely was, at what point does his individual liberty intersect with the public need to adjudicate this case?
Fraud charges are non-violent crimes, so does the public interest really demand that he be medicated so he can be competent to stand trial for that?
If not, what should you do?
He was defrauding people and the public health care system, so there can't be no consequences, but what do you do in that situation?
So these are the sort of hard questions that don't have clear-cut answers because they really do boil down to where you think the line is between the liberties of individuals and when that encroaches on the responsibilities we all have to each other.
Someone like Alex is obviously an extremist on the side of individual liberties, but this kind of case is the territory where you actually have an interesting case study to look at where you can say that the state has no right to demand medication, and I'm going to hear you out.
And you can say that the state has an obligation to demand medication, and I'll hear that out too.
It's honestly just a shame because even in 2003, you can see Alex completely fucking up, playing the role of somebody who just isn't to individual liberty.
He can't even report the details of this case accurately because he's not confident he can make the argument for this guy if he has to accept all the unsavory aspects of the case.
The details of the case get in the way of him being able to even talk about it.
Another thing, really quick: this has basically nothing to do with the legal questions that the case brings up, but I have a hunch that Charles Sell also happens to be a racist asshole.
It's easy to attribute his use of slurs in court as possibly like a manifestation of a mental break, but that becomes harder to argue when you realize that he was also prior to this a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens.
Dylan Roof, the guy who murdered nine black people because they were black at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, specifically mentions the Council of Conservative Citizens' website as being the thing that started him down his path to white nationalism in his manifesto.
But the point does still stand in his case that these issues that involve involuntary medicating, like that conversation is justified and it's something that's worth having that conversation.
And it's just a shame that Alex is such a shithead that he can't be the side of that conversation that he should be.
Right.
Someone who pretends to have the political beliefs as that he does, you know, that's someone who has a voice in this case.
It is kind of that question of like, and I could even, I could absolutely hear out the argument of somebody being like, no, this is a power that a government could use and could use well, but not ours.
I can see definitely a very difficult conversation to be had about, well, if you allow medicating just for the sake of him being able to stand trial against his will, the medicating, in the case of this Medicare fraud case, what is the line that it is appropriate?
Where do you set the line of who can you forcibly medicate?
What type of behavior is deemed deserving of that as a solution?
Then on the second hour, I've got Mr. Charlotte joining us from Harper's magazine to talk about the Brotherhood, this bizarre so-called Christian cult that loves Nietzsche and Hitler and believes that a world government must be constituted because that's how Jesus wants it to be.
And, well, the CIA is involved, and they control a lot of the big neocon Christian organizations, and it's an obvious government trunt from all the evidence.
Charlotte would go on to write a book about the group in 2008, largely about how this group of extreme fundamentalist Christians are deeply entrenched in conservative politics, which Alex would probably agree with and be all for in 2021.
So apparently, in 2003, Alex was running a website promoting a town in Utah called Virgin, which was, quote, a model community for small towns and big cities alike.
The Virgin City Council and citizenry have made Virgin a friendly place to live for those who support the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
In the present day, like in the last few years, Alex has pretty regularly been talking about how his extremist right-wing buddies need to get together and start their own self-ruled communities.
So at the time, that city had a population of about 400, and a 2010 census put the city at 91.8% white.
The entire reason that Alex is promoting this city as a place for liberty lovers is because in 2000, they passed an ordinance that every citizen had to own a gun.
Yes.
So, on their website, they discuss how this ordinance was based on a similar one from Kennesaw County, Georgia, although they did misspell Kennesaw.
There are unsupported claims about an 80% drop in, quote, every category of crime in the 15 years since Kennesaw passed the ordinance.
Also, I love this part.
Quote, one important point for any county or city thinking about passing this ordinance, Kennesaw County saw a population explosion from under 5,000 citizens to over 20,000 today.
That's over eight times the growth that the average community sees.
It seems good news travels fast.
Americans want safe communities where they can raise their children and the right to protect their families.
This is actually true, the population growth, but it's not really possible to attribute this gun ordinance for that growth in population.
Kennesaw was a growing community for decades, experiencing a 167.2% growth between 1950 and 1960, and then a 135% point four percent growth between 1960 and 1970.
The gun ordinance was passed in 1982, and the population actually only grew 75.4% between 1980 and 1990 before picking up to a 142.6% growth rate in the next decade.
If anything, you could argue that based on the growth rate the city seems to be normally experiencing, that was a slump period for the town.
One of the primary drivers of this population growth that people, including the Kennesaw city government's own website, attribute for the growth in population is that they're located right next to Kennesaw State University, which was founded in 1963.
They add, quote, the rapid growth of Kennesaw's population is also spurred by our favorable location with respect to transportation, including I-75 and U.S. Highway 41.
I was going to go with the explosion of public highways that happened just about everywhere in the 50s and 60s, leading to a massive amount of travel and combined would be brought to the area by the college.
Quote: Exempt from the effect of this section are those heads of households who suffer from physical or mental disability, which would prohibit them from using such a firearm.
Further exempt from this effect of this section are those heads of households who are paupers or who conscientiously oppose maintaining firearms as a result of beliefs or religious doctrine or persons convicted of a felony.
Yeah, this is all just for show and to excite people like Alex.
That's all this is.
An article in the New York Times quoted their mayor as saying that they've never prosecuted someone for not owning a gun and that the law was essentially unenforceable.
So I'll get into some of that news in a minute, but I'm going to go ahead and talk about this on air.
I'm going to talk about it once because I told one or two people this weekend, and already it was metastasizing into rumors.
I was out with a friend on their boat this weekend on Lake Travis.
And on Saturday, Saturday night, we were out there fishing.
We were going back to the dock, and we came across a pontoon boat that was dead in the water.
And there were about four-foot waves.
There had been some storms earlier in the day, and we couldn't tie up alongside of it.
The pontoon was in the middle of the lake.
And I jumped in to swim over and try to fix their boat.
No good deed goes unpunished.
And I, of course, the boat was turned off.
It was dead in the water.
I started climbing up on the side of the pontoon boat that has aluminum siding on it.
And I slipped once I got up on the boat.
I slipped.
My hand caught in between the railing, and it basically cut my finger off.
So I've had a really enjoyable weekend, and it feels real good because I'm not about to take painkillers and then impair my judgment.
And so as I sit here now, they did a good job basically reattaching my finger.
The best description of it, you ever seen Terminator 2 where Schwarzenegger, you know, is the robot, the android, and he cuts his flesh off and pulls the flesh off his arm, and there's the skeleton under it.
And we drove back in the 10 minutes back into the dock.
And then that was fun.
There was a big party going on at the dock.
You know, they have like a big restaurant and bands out there at night.
And I come pulling in.
There's a no-wake zone like a half mile out from the harbor.
And we come driving in and my friend Kevin was driving about, I don't know, 15 miles an hour in the no-wake zone, which it wasn't throwing much of a wake.
We had all these people mad at us yelling, and they all ran up to the dock as we pulled up.
And there's blood all over the place.
And they were all yelling and cussing at me, drunk, I guess.
And I just held my hand up and said, hey, almost cut my finger off.
They wanted him to come down to Waco to do the forensic work.
Here we go.
For dentures, so on and so forth, teeth, you know, to identify bodies.
Now, this is before the Branch Davidians decided to kill themselves, burn themselves, according to the mainstream press and all the findings of government panels that the Davidians actually committed suicide.
I can find no credible source that backs up the claim that Sell was called in to do forensic dentistry at Waco, nor that he was called in before the standoff even occurred.
This seems really bizarre to me because it seems like Alex and John are putting a hat on a hat here.
They have an issue that they can make a compelling case on, whether or not the state has the authority to forcibly medicate someone arrested for a nonviolent crime.
But instead of really just sticking to the issue where there's a chance of making a decent point, these dum-dums have to spin out and turn everything into a grand conspiracy that works into their larger worldview.
The actual relevant issue is either too boring or too difficult for these people to talk about.
So instead, they just jangle keys.
Like, what if we fight to get him to not have to take his meds?
unidentified
Then he'll finally break the whole Waco case wide open.
It made me feel like I gave Alex too much credit at the beginning of the episode when this case got brought up because I felt like this is an actual place where he could make an argument that I could engage with his principles and his politics on.
They also conveniently forget about the prior hospitalizations, the long history of delusions, and everything else that gives this case its context.
And there's a very clear reason why they're doing that.
They aren't really interested in this case for whether or not the state has the right to forcibly medicate people, but they want the credibility that comes with pretending to have that conversation.
They want to just present Sell as a political prisoner who's being held and forcibly drugged because he needs to be silenced about Waco.
That's their angle on this story.
The pretense of concern about Sell's rights, that's just window dressing.
The actual people concerned with the issues Alex pretends to be concerned about are folks like the lawyers at the ACLU.
So, yeah, they play this, and then here's a little bit of commentary.
unidentified
Regardless of whether you think the government has secretly acted to keep him off the street, or what you make of Dr. Sell's guilt or innocence, for a man who's already lost nearly six years of his life, his home, and his freedom, you can see why it's enough to make someone like Dr. Sell believe in conspiracies.
I may spend the rest of my life, probably right here in Springfield.
Like, there's, it comes at it from a number of angles.
Like, I don't, you know, obviously, I don't think any news program's perfect, but I think they did a fairly decent job based on my understanding of the details.
So John Stadtmiller, it seems like one of his primary roles is kind of like whitewashing stories that might be uncomfortable for folks in the extreme right.
Well, take these sitcoms and dramas, you know, like the agency, where they frame people, but they're doing it because they're bad guys and torture's good and framing's good.
You know, they got to play dirty to protect us, John.
So I think that they are also, John and Alex, they're misrepresenting and misreporting some details here.
So this case was about three members of the Georgia Republic militia who were arrested in 1996 and charged with conspiring to build pipe bombs.
These guys were worried about the need to prepare for a war against the U.S. government, who they thought were going to use U.N. troops against the public, much like Alex does and did.
An informant did alert the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms about some of the militia's activities and recorded some of their meetings.
But that's not the same thing as demonstrating that the government set these people up or any of that nonsense that Stadmiller's going on.
Also, if you go and read the articles about this case, you get quite a picture from the Associated Press.
Quote, neighbor Georgine Fesperman said she's seen a pickup truck full of men with shaved heads carrying rifles and dressed in camouflage and black berets drive into McCraney property.
Something's going on back there, she said.
There's always gunfire back there.
They've got vicious dogs back there.
You can hear them.
The article goes on, quote, an informant told agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms on April 5th that he had attended a meeting with McCraney, Starr, and others at which McCraney talked about blowing up a bomb on his property and said he had enough chemicals to make 40 bombs, according to the affidavit.
McCraney is not the government informant.
That's one of the men who was arrested.
And Alex and John Statmiller are turning into a martyr here.
Like, this is all nonsense.
It's all just part of the, what I would call the lone wolf social contract that Alex engages in.
You know, like, these things happen, people get caught, and we will do our best to make sure that these are presented as fake in order to make it easier for the next person not to get caught.
It does seem like the point is for Alex and his ilk and the Tucker Carlsons of the world to provide cover for the militias to refine and hone their methods in order to eventually succeed.
Bananas is that unfortunately they're providing a smokescreen for the dumbest, most cowardly people on the planet who have yet to refine a single method, period.
We just keep finding bombs everywhere that are poorly constructed.
A couple weeks ago, I read a Guerrilla News Network story, and of course, it all came out of a story out of Harper's, a highly respected magazine.
Jeffrey Charlotte, who's a religious writer, writes on religious organizations, wrote an amazing story about the Brotherhood.
And in the article, the articles, they talk about how Hitler was good, and Mao was good, and they liked Nietzsche and all of this, and the CIA is involved, and they got all these so-called Christian conservatives involved, and all these congressmen.
And I posted my comment that it sounds like Satanism to me.
And Jeffrey was emailing me back saying, well, no, they're just weird or whatever.
So that point that he was making at the beginning of Alex's intro there, it's a little complicated, but it's not so much that the people featured in Charlotte's article are saying that Hitler was good.
It's more that they use Hitler and his relationship with the Nazi leadership as an example of what they think is a good form of government.
Hitler and his top command had a complete unity of purpose, and there was a steadfast devotion to following Hitler.
And this is commented on in the article as a powerful form of covenant.
Another example that's used is the mafia.
They're basically describing being super into dictators.
The leader, Doug Coe, explains, quote, a covenant like the mafia.
Look at the strength of their bonds.
See, for them, it's honor.
For us, it's Jesus.
The article goes on, quote, Koe listed other men who had changed the world through the strength of the covenants they'd forged with their brothers.
Look, quote, look at Hitler, he said.
Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Bin Laden.
The family, of course, possessed a weapon those leaders lacked, the total Jesus of a brotherhood in Christ.
So that's whenever Hitler comes up in the article, it's basically talking about it in this context, which is still fucked up, but it's not what Alex, it's not the way Alex is understanding it or re-presenting it to the audience.
So some of the stuff that Alex is saying is fairly accurate, but I want to talk about a certain irony here, and that is that Alex is having this hypercritical coverage of the family back in 2003.
But the reality is that he might actually be broke right now if it wasn't for them.
As we know, Alex has said on air a bunch of his finances were looking shaky in the past few months.
And this year he would have been deep in the red if it weren't for Mike Lindell and his pillow money.
Well, what if I were to tell you that the family radicalized Mike Lindell?
Jonathan Larson recently wrote a piece in Salon that traces Mike Lindell's conversion to fundamentalist Christianity and hard-right politics to his attendance at the 2016 National Prayer Breakfast.
It's actually a four-day affair full of small group meetings that are probably familiar to anyone who's gone to an evangelical church, but also mix in that MLM vibe.
I'd recommend this article, but the short version is that Lindell went, ended up in one of these small rooms with someone praying, and he experienced a prophecy that he was going to change the course of the country.
Well, he was in this prayer room with Ben Carson, who's a big member of the group, and they got to talking politics.
An excerpt from Lindell's book that is featured in that salon article: quote: The dozen people in the room gathered in a circle and began talking about the critical importance of the 2016 election.
We agreed it was going to be a real spiritual turning point for the country.
One path could lead us toward national renewal.
The other could lead us down a dark path from which there may be no return, a path that had begun with the removal of God from the public square.
The religious group had successfully intertwined their religious vision and their political ambitions into Mike Lindell's head, and we all know where that's gone.
Lindell supported Ben Carson, and then Ben Carson got him into Trump after Carson dropped out of the race.
Anyway, it's a tangled and twisted web, but the family was deeply involved in not only supporting Trump's candidacy, but with directly scamming the shit out of Mike Lindell, which had a trickle-down effect of getting Alex out of financial hot water.
Please break it down for us what the brotherhood is or the family as they call it, how they operate, how it was founded, and all these shadowy connections.
Okay, the family started in 1935 in Washington State and it started the union bucketing group, small-scale Norwegian immigrant named Abraham Barady, whose biggest fear was communism.
He was a minister, but the main thing, he thought that God is calling him to fight communism and is giving him a special commission.
And everyone else, he thought Christianity had always ministered to the down and out, the poor and the weak.
And he said, well, what about the up and out, the powerful and the strong?
And he thought that's what Christ wanted him to do, was to go out and minister.
Alex, you're talking to somebody who's like, you're talking to somebody who is analogous to the person 40 years from then who's going to write an article on you.
You are talking to your interviewer in the future.
Now, it's obvious from your writings and then what I've dug up since I read your stories about this, and you were inside the group, of course, for a month and then investigated it for months before and after, that it's just an envelope, an envelope, a way for them to use Christians as a cover from the evidence I see.
They've done this in countless other organizations to put this, oh, this Christian mantle on covert activities and legitimize dictators and mass murderers.
I mean, you get into how they sit around at these dinner tables and talk about how Hitler was good.
That does not mean that they admire Hitler's policies, although they're unclear that there's not much of a distinction.
So you are not anti-Semitic, but they do say Hitler, they say, look, here's what this guy, he worked with a group of five of other brothers, friends, and look what he accomplished.
Imagine if we could put that model to work for Christ.
See, Alex keeps only going back to the point of like, they say Hitler's good to the point where Jeff Charlotte has to be like, I have to clarify this because I don't think it's fair the way you're characterizing it.
I think you can be fine saying something like that as a commentator, but someone who's presenting themselves as a serious reporter who backs up everything that he says with facts and research.
Yeah, I think that he has a greater responsibility to be clear on his point.
What I would like here, let me let me throw this at him.
Okay.
Let's go back in time.
Let me throw this at you.
I can only prove through the conversations that I have heard and been told about that they appreciate Hitler's business model.
Now, if I were a betting man, I would say if you spend a lot of time appreciating Hitler's business model, sooner or later you're going to get to, he had some other good ideas.
So fuck off if you think they don't love Hitler too.
And I think, you know, I think that from Charlotte's conversation, one of the things that you can take away is, you know, A delineation between from his experience and the documents that he had been able to get a hold of and the experience that he had living among these people.
Right.
There wasn't a racialized version of this or an ethnic.
There was a religiously based elite kind of thing.
And if you wanted to have that conversation about, you know, maybe Hitler's policies creeping in in terms of just related to Christians and non-Christians, maybe.
But in terms of master races and stuff like that, there is a breakdown between what you would normally have come to your mind when you envision Hitler and what they are interested in.
But also, also, you say, Jeffrey Charlotte, writer for Harper's Magazine, you also say in there that they, you know, an interview you did for Gorilla News Network, that Nietzsche, they talk a lot about Nietzsche.
There's a passive aggression that may actually be going in both directions because whether he understands it or not, Jeff Charlotte ends up saying some things that Alex would consider fighting words today.
Hey, look, if you're one of those lunatics, those absolute nutbags, those fucking crazy folk who believe that the book of Revelations is literally going to happen.
And maybe make some connections with other folks who aren't completely ignored as Alex is like hey, Jeff, could you get me the phone numbers of some of those important people in the family and see if they want to give me a lot of money?
So something that I think is really fascinating is the point that Charlotte makes, which is about his assessment of the people is they may not even recognize that what they're doing is essentially calling for a dictatorship.
I think that's it, and I think that's a common thread throughout is a certain number of people who really feel that a few elite men should be calling all the shots.
And that's the government model they admire.
And they don't even quite recognize sometimes that what they're advocating is dictatorship.
It's bizarre to me to see this conversation that's weirdly illuminating of what will happen in Alex's future.
So one point that Charlotte makes that makes me kind of think that he has at least maybe a baseline awareness of Alex is that he brings up that these aren't like your fundamentalists that you would normally think of who are, as he refers to it, provincial.
The one thing I would like to say that I think that your listeners are attuned to that one of the most compelling things about this group is that they're internationalist.
And I think liberals too often dismiss fundamentalists as stupid and as provincial and local.
And these guys are none of that.
They're very internationalist.
They're very sophisticated.
They're very savvy.
They're charming.
They're not Gary Falwell screaming at you on the TV.
These groups are, you know, they look just like everyone else, as they say.
And I think if we're going to really combat fundamentalism, we need to acknowledge that and give credit where credit is due.
So I think if you get rid of Alex's interjection that is kind of off track a little bit, what you have is a caller saying that a lot of these right-wing Christian types can conflate their interest in success and authority.
You can mix that up with an image of godliness.
And I think that Alex did an outrageous amount of that with Trump.
Yeah, that guy might as well have just been like, hey, you know, I bet the internet's going to come along and it's going to make celebrity go kind of out of control.
And then people are just going to wind up following celebrities and believing that they know what they're talking about, even if they have no fucking clue and just got their money for no reason whatsoever.
Or their dad gave it to them.
Those people are probably going to want him to become a fucking dictator.
I think what's really funny about that is we've got one more great irony, which is that Alex does not want to talk about child support and custody issues on his show.
So there is another hour of the show, but it is just Alex interviewing the mom from that story we talked about last time, the Waltham Massachusetts, where they didn't want to take a standardized test.
I really feel like this is only like the only thing I can think of in my head for this is some sort of celebrity deathmatch claymation thing where they get Alex Jones at 20 versus Alex Jones at 40.
Like that's just got to be that, I mean they just kill each other.