#602: Sandy Hook Response
Today, Dan and Jordan discuss Alex Jones' response to the news that he lost multiple court cases. Also, the gents chat with Mark Bankston, lead counsel for the Sandy Hook family members who sued Alex.
Oct. 4, 2021 - Knowledge Fight
01:59:59
Participants
| 
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dan and Jordan, knowledge fight. | |
| I need, I need money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I need money. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
| In Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your room. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Knowledge Fight. | |
| KnowledgeFight.com. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| I'm Jordan. | ||
| Workable dudes like to sit around, worship at the altar of Selene, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Oh, indeed. | ||
| My voice sounded weird there. | ||
| That's why I was kind of lost for a second. | ||
| No, I get you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're doing great. | |
| You didn't sound weird to me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Hey, come on. | ||
| Keep it going. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| How's it going? | ||
| How you doing, Dan? | ||
| I'm alright. | ||
| Hey! | ||
| What is your bright spot today, Dan? | ||
| My bright spot today, Jordan, with a resounding capital letter, is magic cards. | ||
| I got some. | ||
| Capital letters for Bright Spot. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Magic. | ||
| The Gathering. | ||
| Card. | ||
| Capitals all across the board. | ||
| I opened the gate with trying out the Magic Arena online. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| I like the art style of a lot of these cards. | ||
| I like the gameplay. | ||
| I enjoy that. | ||
| But it wasn't really exactly what I was looking for. | ||
| And so I got on eBay and just got a big box. | ||
| Of random cards and that was what I was looking for. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There's a tactile sensation to it and a looking at... | ||
| As I was telling you before we started recording... | ||
| There's almost like an implied story in all of it. | ||
| It's gripping and atmospheric and calming. | ||
| I really, really, really enjoy it, and I wish that I'd been able to mess around with these things when I was 13. Yeah, I understand. | ||
| It's that same feeling that you would never go to a bookstore that's just filled with e-books. | ||
| You go to a used bookstore with stacks of books that are unorganized, and you can smell the paper, and you can touch it with your fingers. | ||
| We're getting dangerously close to talking about the warmth of vinyl. | ||
| Things! | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're old. | |
| We are old. | ||
| But so I was considering checking some of these cards out, and actually what pushed me over the edge, and made me like, yeah, definitely, for sure, was that Jason sent us something to the mailbox. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And that was two individually crafted magic cards. | ||
| Insane. | ||
| Based on Alex Jones. | ||
| We'll put up a picture of them. | ||
| But one is Sudden Plug, and the other is Over Prepare. | ||
| They're so good. | ||
| They're so awesome. | ||
| They're amazing. | ||
| And these are just sort of one-of-a-kind things. | ||
| And I was like, well, why not build a collection around this? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| So I'm starting down that road. | ||
| I'm going to not go too crazy. | ||
| But Jason, in his note that he sent along with it also, he requested that we give a shout-out to his Uncle Kurt. | ||
| And I say, fuck that. | ||
| No. | ||
| I'm going to give a shout-out to both of you. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Shout-out to Jason. | ||
| Shout out to Uncle Kurt. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm feeling a lot of aggressive energy coming from all directions. | ||
| He's telling me I have to do something. | ||
| You're telling me that I have to do something different. | ||
| I'm just going to say... | ||
| You can sit out of this one. | ||
| I'm giving both of them a shout out. | ||
| I'm taking both shout outs away. | ||
| We're going to even this out. | ||
| We're going to equal it out. | ||
| I'm giving them two shout outs each. | ||
| Now we're in an evolutionary arms race. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's no way around this. | |
| Also, piggybacking on some of this stuff, too, I want to give a special shout-out to Dylan K., who got in touch with me, and I was way too delayed in sending an email back about an idea for a card game. | ||
| Sort of along these lines. | ||
| And Lucas H. Thank you so much. | ||
| Put that battle-hardened goblin card on Twitter that started a little bit of a thread of Infowars personalities as magic cards. | ||
| Yes, fantastic. | ||
| There's a Larry Nichols, there's a Steve Pachanek, I believe a Don de Grand Prix. | ||
| Oh, so good. | ||
| So good. | ||
| That really brightened the spirits. | ||
| Yes, indeed. | ||
| So what's your bright spot? | ||
| My bright spot, Dan, is in the before times. | ||
| Before COVID or Alex? | ||
| Yes, before COVID. | ||
| My partner and I were going to see a magic show. | ||
| Oh, at that place down on Clark? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| We were going to see that magic show and a week before everything shut down. | ||
| So, this Friday... | ||
| Finally, we will be going to that very same magic show, my friend. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nice! | |
| It is happening. | ||
| It's coming full circle. | ||
| We're getting out of the pandemic. | ||
| This is a symbol. | ||
| This is a meaningful thing to do. | ||
| You're going to get lost in the laundry room. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It's going to be a nightmare. | ||
| You're never going to make it. | ||
| It's a magic club. | ||
| They don't have a sign saying magic. | ||
| They're like, okay, there's a door. | ||
| You have to secretly find it. | ||
| And you're like, this isn't the magic part! | ||
| But, yeah. | ||
| I'm going to get lost. | ||
| Yeah, you're never going to make it in the door. | ||
| Never going to find that place. | ||
| Yeah, I really, really love that idea of this poorly advertised magic theater. | ||
| It has Steppenwolfian vibes. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| And I really, of course, love that book. | ||
| So yeah, that place has always called to me. | ||
| Yeah, I'm excited. | ||
| I'm excited to go. | ||
| I hope you have a great time. | ||
| I'd love to hear all about it. | ||
| You will. | ||
| So also, Jordan, before we get into too much business here, I want to give a shout out to Bobo D. Bear! | ||
| Who adopted a raptor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ooh! | |
| A great horned owl that is now joining the family of Selene. | ||
| Not a dinosaur. | ||
| I'm just saying that they are traveling with Jurassic World. | ||
| Oh, true. | ||
| They're available. | ||
| They're not touring with Jurassic World. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| What was it called? | ||
| Dinosaur? | ||
| Not the mama? | ||
| At the park. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So, Jordan, today we have a bit of an interesting situation on our hands. | ||
| We have... | ||
| Alex has just lost some suits. | ||
| He has! | ||
| He's lost... | ||
| Now, at this point, I believe it's three Sandy Hook-related lawsuits in the Texas courts. | ||
| And today we have a little bit of his response to go over. | ||
| Happily. | ||
| But before we do that, Jordan, let's say hello to some new wonks. | ||
| Oh, that's a great idea. | ||
| So first, Mr. Pickles, the dapper dachshund. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Mr. Pickles! | ||
| Next, Horse Pants. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Horse Pants. | ||
| Next, Ruth Persephone. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Ruth. | ||
| Next, Mike. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Mike. | ||
| Next, Ben. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Ben. | ||
| And we got a technocrat in the mix. | ||
| Shout out to started at Scathing Atheist, and now we're here. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a technocrat. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Crikey, mate. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| Have yourself a brew. | ||
| How's your 401k doing, bro? | ||
| All right, we got to go full tilt boogie on this, Watson, all right? | ||
| Let's just get down to business. | ||
| We ain't making that money off that heroin. | ||
| Why are you pimps so good? | ||
| My neck is freakishly large. | ||
| I declare Infowar on you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Started escaping anything since now we're here. | ||
| Yes, thank you very much. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| So, look. | ||
| I mean, we all know what went down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We were there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We saw it all happen. | ||
| Alex was completely vindicated. | ||
| Everybody has changed their tunes. | ||
| Everybody realizes now the horrible mistakes they've made, and they've treated him unfairly. | ||
| Much like Don DeGrandpre, I have some bad news for you. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Alex lost some of these cases. | ||
| Yes, with prejudice. | ||
| News came out at the end of last week that Alex had lost two Sandy Hook trials in Texas court, with the judge in the case giving the parents a default judgment. | ||
| These two cases initially were the ones brought by Leonard Posner and Veronique De La Rosa and the one that was brought by Scarlett Lewis. | ||
| It took a little bit longer for the news to break on it, but there's also a third case that Alex lost that day, which was brought by Neil Heslin. | ||
| I wanted to get deeply into the weeds on this development, but you know how I am with these technical issues. | ||
| I sometimes drop the ball, so I just kind of embarrass myself sometimes. | ||
| I get emails from people who are like... | ||
| You don't know this term. | ||
| I believe in our first deposition episode, I called the guy a prosecutor. | ||
| Yeah, so I embarrass myself sometimes. | ||
| Ah, come on. | ||
| So you know what I think would be great? | ||
| What? | ||
| What if? | ||
| What if? | ||
| What if we could get the Sandy Hook Parents lead counsel, Mark Bankston, to come on our show and help explain it? | ||
| Well, yeah, but I mean, there's no chance of that happening. | ||
| Never. | ||
| That would never happen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Weedly, weedly, weedly. | |
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome to this segment. | ||
| We're going to do something a little bit very out of the norm. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| We're thrilled to be joined by lead counsel for the Sandy Hook families opposing Alex Jones in court. | ||
| Yeah, no, you're telling the truth. | ||
| That's the weird part. | ||
| See, when you announce something like that on this show, we're supposed to be... | ||
| Being ridiculous. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's supposed to be a friend doing a character. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| But no, Mark Bankston is here. | ||
| Now we're going to throw it to him. | ||
| Welcome. | ||
| Thank you for joining us. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me. | ||
| I'm glad to be here. | ||
| I appreciate you taking the time. | ||
| I know that I imagine there's some press requests at this point. | ||
| Right, but they're boring. | ||
| They're absolutely boring. | ||
| Who wants to talk to, you know, Anderson Cooper? | ||
| That's not fun. | ||
| Yeah, he's CIA. | ||
| Fuck Anderson Cooper! | ||
| Who gives a shit about that asshole? | ||
| But if you did go on Anderson Cooper and talk to him, you could talk about his nose disappearing. | ||
| Well, it's funny. | ||
| The reason I mentioned that is my partner, Kyle Farrow, was on Anderson Cooper Friday night talking about the disappearing nose and that whole insane proposition that for those who aren't regular followers of this case, Mr. Jones contends that one of my clients, Veronique De La Rosa, performed a fake interview on a blue screen in a CNN soundstage rather than actually being at Sandy Hook. | ||
| Because his nose disappeared. | ||
| Right, because, you know, just a little nose disappearing. | ||
| I would love it if your fellow lawyer who was on Anderson Cooper did the I got your nose trick. | ||
| That would have been awesome. | ||
| That is great. | ||
| So I think the place I'd like to start with this, I guess, if that's what we're doing, is... | ||
| What happened? | ||
| Can you explain the ruling that happened? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure, sure. | |
| I'm not a legal scholar. | ||
| So, and before I say anything, let me also just say this. | ||
| There's some ground rules that we're going to be expected to follow today. | ||
| The ethical rules regarding pretrial publicity make me not be able to say a couple things. | ||
| For instance, I can't talk to you about things like the credibility of certain witnesses or my belief on the guilt or innocence of certain people, all these kinds of things. | ||
| But there also becomes a sort of loophole when your opposing party... | ||
| Completely abuses pre-trial publicity and says the most insane things publicly. | ||
| That sort of frees you up to get to talk. | ||
| And so that's part of why I'm here today is that I'm a little bit freer than I would normally be because my opponent has made an absolute mockery. | ||
| This is the pot kettle statue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| There you go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You can call them black all we want because this is a pot kettle situation. | |
| Well, let me just say in relation to that, if there's any point where anything feels uncomfortable or Past what you can talk about, just let me know. | ||
| I'll respect that entirely. | ||
| Dan, I'll lodge an objection and we'll get it ruled on. | ||
| Jordan's the judge. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll just Bobby Barnes it up in here and just objection form. | |
| Objection form, objection form. | ||
| Good work, Barnes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good work, Barnes. | |
| A little call back to the deposition episode for the Knowledge Fight fans. | ||
| Let me tell you a little bit about what just happened. | ||
| It has never happened to me. | ||
| It has never happened to anybody I know outside of the most insane situation. | ||
| All right, well, then I can cross one of my questions off the list, which was, have you ever had a case like this before? | ||
| Never! | ||
| The answer is never. | ||
| No one has ever had a case like this. | ||
| What has happened? | ||
| Is for the past three years, we have been in a situation where Jones has had discovery obligations. | ||
| That means the court will enter order saying he has to produce certain documents, produce certain people for deposition, that sort of thing. | ||
| Daft Punk albums. | ||
| Right. | ||
| For three years, it has been an absolute mess. | ||
| So not only is he not producing the documents he's supposed to produce, not answering the questions. | ||
| And I mean, when we're talking about questions, there's stuff like... | ||
| Name all the employees who worked on these videos and name the videos themselves. | ||
| Never met any of them. | ||
| Yeah, like factual based questions. | ||
| Very, very simple fact stuff. | ||
| Yeah, they are not answering in any way, shape or form. | ||
| And then you have the documents they won't produce. | ||
| And then you have the documents they do produce. | ||
| And when they end up giving us a bunch of documents and turn over them in electronic format, one of the consultants up in Connecticut found that they had given us child pornography in those documents. | ||
| Yeah, that was a massive affair. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Threatening the bounty on Mehdi and all. | |
| Yeah, that one's great. | ||
| Well, it's again, it's one of those situations where just nobody has ever seen anything like it. | ||
| So, you know, we had, and I think a credit to our judge in Texas who just recently retired. | ||
| We had Judge Scott Jenkins presiding over this, and he's an old scholarly judge who does things right by the book. | ||
| And he was giving Infowars and Jones every chance they had to get in compliance, to treat this correctly. | ||
| I mean, a lot of other parties, they would have been done well before Jones. | ||
| But you don't want to give Jones the ability to say, oh, I'm being railroad here. | ||
| Folks, there's a railroad job. | ||
| They got me all set up. | ||
| That's not what you want to do. | ||
| And so we gave him every chance that he had. | ||
| But after three years, now we show up into our last hearing. | ||
| And they basically just pretend like we have no idea what we're supposed to do. | ||
| You know, his lawyers are brand new. | ||
| He's on lawyer number seven. | ||
| What is law? | ||
| As far as pretending goes, with Alex's lawyers, I don't know how law works is a legitimate thing for a lawyer that works for Alex to say. | ||
| Honestly, that's their best defense at this point. | ||
| We don't know what we're doing. | ||
| A little while back, Norm Pattis was saying he was going to get into stand-up on Alex's show. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| You notice that there has been a cavalcade of lawyers who have seen Jones as an opportunity to get themselves I probably would, too. | ||
| I mean, I think that's a really rational thing to do. | ||
| Yeah, why not? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, old Bobby Barnes got it turned into a show on Infowars for a while. | ||
| Not the career-changing opportunity that he was hoping for, but... | ||
| I guess not. | ||
| Well, who knows, right? | ||
| Maybe it was exactly the career opportunity he was hoping for. | ||
| I'll tell you this, when you're representing these cases, you never think you're going to get so lucky as to have your opposing counsel be an actual Infowars commentator. | ||
| You don't get that. | ||
| That is something that, for us, we've known it so long. | ||
| We've known it for years, but then you say it. | ||
| An actual person, a real lawyer, meaning it's in the real world and not just on our show. | ||
| That's ridiculous! | ||
| It is completely ridiculous. | ||
| It is unbelievable. | ||
| An amazing perspective on this, or, like, sense of humor about it. | ||
| Watching the depositions that we did, it seems like it would be infuriating. | ||
| You'd just be banging your head against a wall. | ||
| I think most people would probably look at that and be like, I'm miserable. | ||
| You seem to find some amusement in it, which I think is probably healthy. | ||
| I told people when I first got on this case, I had to watch about 150 hours of InfoWars programming. | ||
| As you guys know, that messes with your brain. | ||
| It doesn't do good things to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And so after a while, though, you kind of have to take a perspective on it that you embrace the absurdity of it all. | ||
| And I'll tell you this. | ||
| It's particularly easy to find a good sense of humor about it all when at the same time these things are happening, you are also just beating them up and down the courtroom. | ||
| And in this case, when I'm sitting in that Jones deposition and he is saying the most absurd stuff. | ||
| Yeah, on some level, it's infuriating to watch him not take that process seriously. | ||
| On the other hand, it's intensely rewarding when he says stuff like, oh, we ourselves, we never even investigated Sandy Hook. | ||
| And thank you, Mr. Jones. | ||
| Thank you for telling me that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that sort of stuff was really good. | |
| But to circle back, because I haven't really answered your question, is they're done now. | ||
| So this is over for all intents and purposes. | ||
| The judge has said... | ||
| These people have disobeyed the rules with such intensity and with such consistency that there's no way that my judicial rulings are ever going to have any impact on them. | ||
| So what she's done then is just declared judgment, which basically says, I'm going to instruct the jury that what he did was illegal, unlawful, and caused damage to these plaintiffs. | ||
| And their only job is to figure out how much money that's worth. | ||
| Yeah, so that's the next step, right? | ||
| That's where the case goes from here into figuring out like, What's the price tag? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And another one of those where nobody has any idea because nobody has ever seen anything like this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, one of the things that I know from Alex's response to the news of these default judgments was that he said he produced all of his bank records from his entire life. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| Not to you, but to the Connecticut court. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| So there's two lawsuits going on, just for your viewers. | ||
| There's lawsuits in Texas, and there's also a lawsuit in Connecticut. | ||
| And he did have to produce some financial information in Connecticut. | ||
| I haven't personally viewed it, but I know what was requested and what had to be produced. | ||
| And he did actually produce that. | ||
| It was not a... | ||
| A broad-spanning financial inquiry into Alex Jones' life. | ||
| There were certain records produced from free speech systems, mainly because what you have to understand, and different lawyers have different ways they approach cases, obviously. | ||
| And in Connecticut, one of the big things that they're talking about, it's an interesting idea, is that... | ||
| Part of why Jones did this so often and so much is because he ultimately found it profitable. | ||
| Is that if you can look at the records and see that sales for brain force and male vitality were higher on the days that Sandy Hook was being discussed, then you can show a motive that he had to do it. | ||
| Personally, I also believe you can look at this and see that his motive is genuinely that he started to hate these parents. | ||
| That these parents became genuine financial threats to him. | ||
| Because if they got strikes with YouTube every time he put up a picture of their kids saying that they were fake, then pretty soon, just as we saw, he'd lose his livelihood in terms of YouTube. | ||
| And he started to hate these parents. | ||
| And for us, that really was his motive, is that I think there's a part of Alex Jones that knew. | ||
| It was trouble to keep talking about Sandy Hook this way, and he just couldn't help himself because he hated these people so much. | ||
| Yeah, that fits about right. | ||
| That's an interesting perspective. | ||
| I think there may be something to that, and there may just be like he's never really had any meaningful consequences ever in the past. | ||
| That's also true. | ||
| Why would he change his behavior if he keeps Dukes of hazarding himself out of trouble? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I mean, look, the guy's never been in a situation where the answers to the questions that people are asking him have any consequence or that he would be held to account for any of the answers. | ||
| And for him, being in a deposition was a completely new experience, one he did not like at all. | ||
| It seemed like he loved it. | ||
| It's funny, guys, you know, I came up in, you know, my firm mainly had done Corporate negligence, products liability, civil rights, these kind of big plaintiffs' cases. | ||
| And, you know, we have done big work in the past. | ||
| I've gone after 3M for medical devices. | ||
| We've had large tread separation cases. | ||
| We've had civil rights cases that were pretty egregious. | ||
| Nobody ever in the history has done a podcast analyzing my deposition. | ||
| That has never happened. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ever. | |
| I've had some media coverage in the past, but I've got to tell you guys, sitting down and listening to y 'all talk about that deposition, that is an interesting thing as a lawyer to go through. | ||
| One of the reasons that I'm on this show right at this moment is I want y 'all to go back at some point and listen to those episodes and viewers, y 'all go back and listen to those as well. | ||
| I want you to know that every single time that these guys... | ||
| Say, all right, what's going on here? | ||
| Let's offer our guess as to what this means or what is going on here or what the strategy is. | ||
| 100% of the time, y 'all are correct. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| I want to go over some of them and just laugh about some of them because y 'all were absolutely dead on target. | ||
| I love particularly talking about the Paul Joseph Watson deposition. | ||
| That one was the one that was kind of... | ||
| The least funny, but very interesting to me. | ||
| Very interesting, because like you pointed out, Watson is very aware of how bad this is, and he doesn't want to be connected to it. | ||
| And so in a lot of ways... | ||
| It's strange. | ||
| You would have never thought Paul Joseph Watson comes out being the good guy. | ||
| You know, I mean, though, it's interesting. | ||
| Was he really worried about it because he was worried about the morality or because he was worried about the money of it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like there's that that I felt like he came off like Stringer Bell, you know, like he was he was above this fray and he saw his friend going to jail for, you know, eight years. | ||
| And he's like, I had nothing to do with this. | ||
| I'm just over here on the other side. | ||
| You know, you mentioned Stringer Bell, though. | ||
| You gotta remember, though, there's that email from Watson where he says, Jones, this Sandy Hook stuff's killing us. | ||
| These people are batshit crazy. | ||
| And that kind of reminds me of Stringer Bell's warning of, like, you are writing down a criminal conspiracy? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It is wild. | ||
| But I remember in that... | ||
| It almost feels like... | ||
| Oh, sorry. | ||
| Jordan had said in that podcast, when you're done with Watson, you're sort of tempted to just go lightning round with him. | ||
| And just, you know, climate change. | ||
| And let's talk about every and believe me, I had a list of every story of Paul Watson's that I wanted to talk to him about. | ||
| But you get to that point towards the end of that deposition, you realize this guy's my star witness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What the heck? | |
| It's a really interesting thing that so many of the people inside InfoWars, clearly the public record shows of these depositions that they don't know what's going on. | ||
| They don't understand the hot water they're in. | ||
| Paul Watson did. | ||
| And as opposed to Rob Dew and Alex Jones, it's a very, very different situation. | ||
| And what's remarkable is that those emails that Paul had show that he knew that then, too. | ||
| And that he tried to make others aware of it at the time. | ||
| And so they have every reason to know that this is something that could be quite warm water. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And what a contrast that is from what we saw from Rob Dew. | ||
| My favorite thing. | ||
| That's a big part. | ||
| Rob Dew has a lot on his shoulders in terms of why we're at where we are at today. | ||
| As the corporate representative, I'm supposed to know what? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That was, and again, for y 'all's viewers who haven't, what happened in Rob Dew's deposition, Rob Dew, unlike the other witnesses, wasn't there testifying as himself. | ||
| He was there testifying as Free Speech Systems, which is Jones' subsidiary company that runs all this stuff. | ||
| He was the assigned corporate representative. | ||
| When you're assigned that, you're given homework. | ||
| You're given a list of topics. | ||
| And the corporation has a reasonable duty to prepare you to testify about those topics and speak with the corporation's voice, give the answers for the corporation. | ||
|
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Rob Dew had no idea he was supposed to do that. | |
| And the funny thing, Y 'all remember, that's the first deposition. | ||
| The first corporate representative deposition. | ||
| Rob Dew shows up. | ||
| He has no idea what he's supposed to do. | ||
| He has no idea. | ||
| He says, I don't know to everything. | ||
| And then you kept having to ask back, like, do you not know or does free speech systems not know? | ||
| That's my favorite. | ||
| That was my favorite. | ||
| Actually, so I have to give a shout out on this one because that was my other partner, Bill Ogden, did that deposition. | ||
| And that one was, in the midst of it, one of the most offensive and The amount of disrespect being shown for the process was infuriating. | ||
| But the moment you get the transcript and listen to it, it becomes the most hilarious thing you've ever seen. | ||
| Because you simply are incapable of understanding how a party could disrespect the process this much. | ||
| But you can see it in his eyes that Rob didn't know. | ||
| I think if you watch that tape of the deposition, it's kind of coming over him how unprepared he is as it's going along. | ||
| I think he thought he could come in in Stonewall or whatever. | ||
| Well, you know, the one thing I don't think that comes across in your podcast about it, because you did excerpt a lot of answers, in order to get the full spirit of it, you would have to include about 20 to 30 minutes of total silence during that proposition. | ||
| It was unreal. | ||
| There were periods where you ask a question and you're staring at him for a solid two minutes and he hasn't opened his mouth. | ||
| And in front of a jury, that stuff doesn't look good. | ||
| No. | ||
| And they have to know that. | ||
| So that's after the first time we did Rob Du. | ||
| You've got to understand that six months later, they got called to do Discovery again, and they designated him again as the corporate representative. | ||
| No, they did not! | ||
| They did. | ||
| This worked out last time. | ||
| Let's try it again. | ||
|
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Hey, throw them bones. | |
| He shows up and, okay, here's topic number one. | ||
| You're supposed to talk about the sourcing and research behind these episodes of Emperor Wars on these dates. | ||
| Have you done anything to prepare for that? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Didn't even know I'd have to do that. | ||
| And it was so offensive that the judge at the next hearing is just scratching their heads of, like, I wrote an order saying that this was really, really bad and then you just did it again. | ||
| And at that point, even at that point, where we had gone through three cases with no discovery, child pornography had been produced. | ||
| They had shown up to deposition twice and just totally ignored it. | ||
| Nothing is going on. | ||
| They still got another chance. | ||
| They got to go on appeal. | ||
| They could have completely won the case and dismissed all of these cases and still won on a legal argument, which they didn't. | ||
| But they got to do an entire other appeal, come back, and then get another chance to answer discovery. | ||
| And it was only after they didn't do that. | ||
| That they were defaulted. | ||
| So when I see Jones, for instance, getting on his show recently after this happened and saying about how unfairly he's been treated or what a travesty it is, I've got to impress upon people. | ||
| This does not happen and judges don't want to do it. | ||
| And it took three years of this for it to happen in this case. | ||
| You have been given literally... | ||
| Every available benefit of the doubt, to the point now where the judgment used to be 100 pages long, and this is just one page of an ASCII middle finger just saying, you owe money. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think anybody who listens to our show probably is aware of how very clear, from an outsider's perspective, it is that his strategy has been kick the can down the road, basically to make sure this doesn't go to trial. | ||
| And partially, One of his legal strategies we've seen in the past has been, if we protract this case, it'll cost the other people too much money and they'll want to settle. | ||
| And that seems to happen a bit. | ||
| And I think he was banking on that happening here. | ||
| It's tough to know what he was banking on. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| Because I think there was at that time, and maybe he's still convinced of it, that... | ||
| He, no matter what happens, he's going to be a Larry Flint hero who goes up to the U.S. Supreme Court and everybody, you know, it's all going to be saved and they're going to make a movie about what a hero he is, right? | ||
| I think he might genuinely, on some level, have thought that. | ||
| The problem now, though, is that in order to appeal and go up to the U.S. Supreme Court and vindicate yourself on the First Amendment rights, you have actually had to have made a First Amendment argument and had a lawsuit with trial that actually happened. | ||
| Here, you've had, no, you screwed around with discovery, you're done. | ||
| So you don't get to appeal saying that your rights weren't. | ||
| We never had an exhibition of your rights. | ||
| We don't even know what the hell they are right now. | ||
| So right now all we have is you have massively disobeyed a court and that's the only thing you'll ever be able to appeal. | ||
| He's going to Lenny Bruce that. | ||
| He's going to do it. | ||
| This is what happens when you have seven lawyers, right? | ||
| Like a series of seven lawyers. | ||
| You don't have a coherent legal strategy. | ||
| You never had a coherent legal strategy. | ||
| It was always about delay. | ||
| It was always about just not facing this. | ||
| And at some point, you have to face it. | ||
| And that's what we're looking at now. | ||
| We're set now for March 28th for us to go pull some jurors and basically put on... | ||
| Psychological evidence of what happened to our plaintiffs put on evidence of how far this spread. | ||
| You know, we're going to have to go up to a jury of 12 people who, unlike us, don't have a real firm understanding of what Infowars cultural footprint is. | ||
| Don't understand exactly how big this was. | ||
| So we got to talk to a jury about that. | ||
| But in terms of them being able to say what we did, we were justified in doing it. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| That's gone now. | ||
| Yeah, that chapter of this is over. | ||
| Yeah, this is such Owen's fucking community service all over again. | ||
| It's like all you had to do was 30 hours of community. | ||
| That is not a lot. | ||
| All you needed to do was show up with the documents. | ||
|
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And then you could have pushed it probably another year down the road. | |
| You know, right? | ||
| Totally! | ||
| That implies, though, that there's a reason he wouldn't want to do that. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I mean, everybody has to be considered rational actors, and they're doing what they do for a reason. | ||
| You can speculate about it, but it's a challenge. | ||
| Yeah, it really is. | ||
| And that's the whole problem. | ||
| So many times in this case, you want to try to predict what's about to happen, or by using a rational actor sort of... | ||
| Scheme, and it never works. | ||
| Never once works. | ||
| What you think is going to happen is not whatever happens. | ||
| And so we basically, the easiest way to have some predictive control over this case is to, at any juncture, say, all right, if I'm Jones and I'm his attorneys, what would I do rationally? | ||
| And then you can go ahead and cross at least that one off the list, because that's not going to happen. | ||
| Expect chaos. | ||
| Yeah, now you're throwing darts at your chaos board and figuring out which one it hits. | ||
| Because this is really how it's been. | ||
| There's no control or rhyme or reason over any of this. | ||
| So, again, that's how you get to the point where you go stir-crazy like me and you just laugh at everything. | ||
| Yeah, well, I think that at least partially that response is the right response. | ||
| You know, there has to be a little laugh in there somewhere. | ||
| There is a part of it. | ||
| If there's a time to take a break and reflect and look at this and go, wow, hasn't this been absurd? | ||
| It's right now. | ||
| Next few months, we're going to be gearing up to do the very serious lifting of telling the jury a very serious story about some people whose lives you just can't understand how they are. | ||
| Honestly, there's where the anger comes from me a little bit, is that in the middle of this absolute circus of absurdity that Jones needs to be put through, that tends to distract in some way. | ||
| comes time to put this on for a trial and this is obviously you know they're going to be media is going to be recording this trial people are going to be talking about it this trial is going to be deadly serious about something that has been distracted for way too long yeah and to me it is fantastic that this trial is not going to be about alex jones Yeah. | ||
| And what this Charles is going to be about is about these families. | ||
| There could be no better poetic justice than that. | ||
| The moment that he thought was going to be his circus that he could use for himself, he doesn't even get that anymore. | ||
| That is kind of gratifying as something. | ||
| And I do think that there is too much. | ||
| That gets lost, and Alex will blame the gun grabbers and stuff for coming at him. | ||
| It's just a way, I feel, of deflecting from exactly what you're talking about. | ||
| The reality that at the core of this is these people that have gone through something unimaginable. | ||
| And I think you have to do that if you're someone in his position, because how do you look in the mirror if you don't? | ||
| How do you deal with their... | ||
| Real grief and your part in it. | ||
| It's very challenging. | ||
| The thing he wants most is attention and that is the thing that is going to be denied him is delightful. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| He'll find a way. | ||
| Of course he'll find a way, but he's not on YouTube or Facebook. | ||
| As long as none of the major media outlets go to InfoWars and are like, we're going to put you on TV, then it will be fine. | ||
| Until then... | ||
| What we always knew, too, it would be... | ||
| It would be a spectacle without any content, of course. | ||
| It was going to be something that was just... | ||
| Because it brings me back, actually, something to Dan you said about these depositions and why they're kind of surprising, is that if Infowars is what it is, and it is what they claim to be, then these depositions should have been the most exciting moment for them, because it was their chance to put up what they had. | ||
| They're saying they're right. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| Put up or shut up. | ||
| Here's the time. | ||
| You really get to throw down. | ||
| With, you know, some commie attorney like me. | ||
| You get to, like, tell him in his place, yeah, you're just wrong. | ||
| Look at all the stuff we have. | ||
| And instead, Jones and Doe even were like, I don't remember any of that. | ||
| I don't know what you're talking about. | ||
| We did no... | ||
| I mean, remember the time Jones said in that deposition, I did no preparation for this. | ||
| It gives me a headache. | ||
| I don't even want to do this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| I've never heard of globalism. | ||
|
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I have no idea what you're talking about. | |
| Who the hell is Rob do? | ||
| You know, and here's the other thing I'm sure you'll realize is I got ready for these depositions. | ||
| I became a expert such that it is in the Sandy Hook hopes mythology. | ||
| And I can go toe to toe with anybody who believes this bullshit, like a Wolfgang Halbig or a Jim Fetzer. | ||
| And I was actually looking forward to going toe to toe with somebody who thought that they were confident about this stuff and destroying them. | ||
| And it didn't happen. | ||
| I mean, instead, what we got from Jones was, you know. | ||
| Jones, you've said this before, didn't you? | ||
| No, I never said that. | ||
| Here's a video clip of you saying that. | ||
| That's edited. | ||
| It's out of context. | ||
| Media Matters edited clips, so what can I say to that? | ||
| You can't get anywhere. | ||
| There was this idea, too, I think that was really observant of you both, that there's some things you can accomplish, basically, in that situation in terms of testimony. | ||
| There are some admissions you can get very quickly, but that's done in 15, 20 minutes, really. | ||
| There's not a lot of legal significance that can come out of that deposition. | ||
| It happens very quick. | ||
| But culturally, I think there is a lot of significance to that deposition. | ||
| And I think you're going to see that at this trial, too. | ||
| In other words, I don't want to say that the show is over. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| There is a reckoning for Jones that's going to happen. | ||
| And it's going to be personal. | ||
| It's not just going to be totally focused on my clients. | ||
| So there's still some more to come. | ||
| Wow. | ||
|
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That's... | |
| Interesting. | ||
| I don't know how to respond to that. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| It's heartening. | ||
| It's heartening, yeah. | ||
| And I think that it's such a testament to the families that they've been able to have the wherewithal to continue in the face of the difficulty of living through the last three years of this case. | ||
| I wouldn't fault somebody for saying, this is enough. | ||
| I'm out. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| And it is really, on some level, for people who can't stand up to a bully, you know, it's pretty heartening that they have. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you know, I'll tell you, there are definitely families out there who are involved in all of this, who don't want anything to do with this, you know, who aren't in lawsuit and all of that. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And I completely respect that decision because, gosh, why would you want to get into any of this in a lot of ways? | ||
| But it's really interesting that my clients down in Texas, you know, where you have Lenny and Veronique and Neil and Scarlett, those are two families who we're really heavily focused on. | ||
| They put up the Posner's address to where they go pick up their mail. | ||
| They said they were starting an anti-First Amendment terrorist organization that was coming after Infowars viewers. | ||
| They said that Neil Hessen was lying about holding his son with a bullet hole in the head. | ||
| It's this really personal crap. | ||
| And so these clients have really stood up because they were these personal targets to be able to make this fight on behalf of everybody. | ||
| And it's really been a brave struggle, particularly if Lenny has been in this since the beginning. | ||
| Within a couple weeks of the shooting, he wrote to Infowars and said, knock this off. | ||
| Why are you doing this? | ||
| Lenny is up front about the fact that probably driving, once he dropped Noah off that morning, he was driving away. | ||
| He might have been listening to Infowars. | ||
| He was actually kind of into that stuff just because it was interesting to him. | ||
| And to have these people stick, because people don't, what they sometimes don't realize is that we're talking about five years of straight harassment. | ||
| Followed by three years of them making a mockery of their lawsuits. | ||
| So it's been almost a decade they've been having to deal with this crap. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the thing that Alex always plays games with is that idea of like five years of harassment. | ||
| He's like, I didn't say that stuff for five years on air. | ||
| It's like, well, it's not that every day you were saying this stuff on air. | ||
| It's that they have been subjected to this harassment that was facilitated. | ||
| For five years. | ||
| I think some people who aren't really up to speed like we are on Jones understand that he said things about Sandy Hook, but probably think it was a handful of occasions over a couple of years, that kind of thing. | ||
| I was questioning. | ||
| So that's the other big one I have to address as well. | ||
| But you'll notice that if you watched his statement in reaction to these default judgments, one of the things he said is, you know, I only mentioned this a couple of times, only a few times that I ever talk about Sandy Hook. | ||
| And we don't... | ||
| Your audience may not realize, but because of we bringing the suit and then there shortly thereafter, YouTube and Facebook deleting all their profiles, Infowars has lost irreparably a lot of its videos and content. | ||
| It can't tell us everything. | ||
| So we've kind of had to play Sherlock Holmes using the public record to try to figure out what videos were made and when. | ||
| And right now, our best estimate is that they made 100 episodes about Sandy Hook. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| We know that they made about 350 pages of Infowars articles about Sandy Hook. | ||
| We're averaging about two shows a month over the entire span. | ||
| Now, there are some times when he hits it, like 2015 and 2017, he is really hitting it hard. | ||
| So those have more times. | ||
| But generally, five years of this straight harassment that people just don't know unless you're a real... | ||
| I mean, everybody's seen the Media Matters clips, right? | ||
| God, when you really dig in there, I'm telling you, you have to sit there and you have to watch an hour and a half of an unscripted conversation between Jones and Wolfgang Halbig. | ||
| That will fry you. | ||
| That will scramble your circuit. | ||
| You're one of the most prestigious policemen who's ever lived. | ||
|
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Exactly. | |
| Manning on CNN all the time, school safety experts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They talk to you about Columbine. | ||
| Yeah, all of that. | ||
| And you hear it. | ||
| One of the things I mentioned to Jones, because Jones was telling me about how credible he initially thought Halbig was, and I was like, sir, you've done Skype calls with Halbig. | ||
| You've seen Halbig's home. | ||
| You've seen how he lives. | ||
| You've seen who he is. | ||
| You know who this man is, right? | ||
| At one point, I even used, I mean, look, I would never normally say in a deposition, look, you got 4,000 emails from him, and reading them, you would agree with me, this man is a raving lunatic. | ||
| I normally wouldn't use that kind of language, but Wolfgang Halbig, and look, I think that that statement is a matter of my opinion. | ||
| It's not a statement of fact. | ||
| But if Wolfgang Halbig is upset about that, please, please sue me, Wolfgang, because you are a raving lunatic, and you have caused enormous pain to these families. | ||
| And Jones knew that, because that's my other problem. | ||
| The number one question I get on these cases is, does Jones believe the things that he said? | ||
| And all I can do is point you to the public record. | ||
| That's all I can do is point you to the public record and to the deposition transcripts. | ||
| And I think it becomes very clear that no, he never for a second thought these things were fake. | ||
| You know, Jones talks a lot about, one of the observations you made that was very observant was the idea of the media jumping on with both feet of this idea that he said it was a psychosis that caused anything. | ||
| And that's not really what he said. | ||
| He was making a metaphor and it kind of was still pretty crazy and it was a dumb thing to say. | ||
| But there are people out there. | ||
| There are people out there who... | ||
| Popular institutions and the powers that be and just the shitty deal you get in life in America has made them distrust basically all official sources of authority. | ||
| There's no question that that's a real thing that happens to people. | ||
| That did not happen to Alex Jones. | ||
| No, he's done that to other people. | ||
|
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Exactly. | |
| He is profiting off of that. | ||
| He understands that phenomenon and wants to inflame and exploit it and be able to profit from it. | ||
| And he can point to that as a justification, but he is not one of those people. | ||
| He does not have that psychosis. | ||
| It all was malicious. | ||
| Every bit of it was malicious. | ||
| I think that he could still be a slight victim of that mentality in as much as he was getting caught up in it as he was producing that content and it was becoming more successful. | ||
| If he just wasn't aware of what was going on and he wasn't aware, he's not in touch with himself. | ||
| You could easily find yourself snowballing a little bit. | ||
| Well, I do think that you're just radicalizing yourself at that point. | ||
| There's some moments where Jones is is. | ||
| He detaches from reality and just sort of free spins. | ||
| And in that way, he may be sort of just theorizing in ways that aren't totally grounded. | ||
| Like when he'll talk about an interdimensional shadow government or some shit, you know, like that. | ||
| That's out there. | ||
| And then there are other times where I think he has somewhat convinced himself of his own BS. | ||
| You know, some very basic world events. | ||
| Oh, the Syrian chemical attack was faked or something like that, right? | ||
| And he'll convince him of that. | ||
| But when it comes to something like Sandy Hook was not an operating school. | ||
| I don't believe Jones ever believed that. | ||
| Or that there were kids who were recruited to play the parts of different dead children and they were shot. | ||
| He didn't believe any of that. | ||
| You know, the scarier thought that I have is I don't think he ever cared about the truth or falsity of it. | ||
| Yeah, he never cared enough. | ||
| Like the expedience and the usefulness of this claim is more important than whether or not it's true. | ||
| Yeah, that's really interesting. | ||
| And just the level of conspiracy theory is such that I have no doubt that To a certain extent, he was just on autopilot. | ||
| He wasn't even paying attention to the fake shit he was saying because it's the same stuff he said the last time. | ||
| That's something our expert has really harped on, is that you can look at every single mass tragedy and it follows the same script. | ||
| You can't really pick one. | ||
| It's interesting, when Watson was in deposition, I asked him, can you name me a mass casualty event he didn't say was a false flag? | ||
| And he goes, well... | ||
| I think maybe more of the recent ones, like the El Paso shooting, and then on the podcast I hear Jordan go, nope, nope, nope, wrongo. | ||
| We've heard him do it over and over again. | ||
| And it is. | ||
| It's in the law views it as. | ||
| When you have a person who is engaging in a course of conduct that shows a consistent form of behavior to advance their business, you can assume that they made the same justifications for this latest thing as consistent with everything else they've ever done. | ||
| So the fact that he is within hours is going to call one of these events a mass tragedy shows you that it's a reckless disregard for the truth. | ||
| That's not what's really important. | ||
| Yeah, and to circle back to something that we touched on a minute ago, it's not questioning things. | ||
| Like, there's such a distinction that he abuses when he says, like, I was just questioning events. | ||
| And it's like, no, you're coming to conclusions. | ||
| You're advancing a conclusion in the guise of pretending you're questioning. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| When you say there were men arrested in SWAT gear. | ||
| That's an assertion of fact. | ||
| If that didn't happen, you're a liar. | ||
| It's not just you have a bad opinion, right? | ||
| Or another one that he'll try to do a trick on you is he will put it in a question, but it will be a why do you still beat your wife question. | ||
| And it's that sort of thing. | ||
| Why were there no paramedics allowed in the school? | ||
| Well, I'm just questioning things. | ||
| Yeah, but your question is based upon a lie that there were no paramedics in the school, right? | ||
| So it's never a matter of questioning. | ||
| These guys, they don't question. | ||
| That's not what they do. | ||
| They state false facts. | ||
| And there's that classic clip of him saying that he didn't believe it was fake at first, but then he looked into it deeply and it was all fake, all actors. | ||
| And that's not questioning. | ||
|
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No. | |
| No, no, it is not. | ||
| I mean, there is some where it's so unbelievably unequivocal of, at first I thought they killed real kids, but now I know it's completely staged and this is all totally synthetic and fake and a hoax. | ||
| And then he'll tell me, in deposition, yeah, I mean, I questioned some things, but I never questioned it in totality of saying whether it was staged. | ||
| And you could just play the clip right afterwards. | ||
| It's just out of context. | ||
| Yeah, and it's unbelievable that he can do it. | ||
| And for me, I think what it came down to for Jones, Okay, so this is the scary part about Chokes. | ||
| The scariest part about him to me. | ||
| His neck? | ||
| It's freakishly large. | ||
| He is a very large man, and he takes a lot of supplements which could make him strong and fearsome in a fight. | ||
| But the thing that really scares me about him is that I think that he deduced, perhaps correctly, that there are things more potent, more powerful, more useful in our current political dialogue than truth or verified facts. | ||
| That there are magical narratives. | ||
| That can represent what we want and what we hope to achieve in our political agendas that are way more effective or useful than anything we could ever report truthfully. | ||
| And so when the info war... | ||
| Now, there are six Supreme Court justices who would say it's all about fairness and earning your way. | ||
| I'm sure that it's about truth and honesty. | ||
| I guarantee it. | ||
| If the hiding part of the land is filled with truthful, honest people... | ||
| Anyways. | ||
| But that is the scary part to me is that, you know... | ||
| Look, I think you could probably imagine you get involved in these cases as an attorney a couple years ago, and I started to get really enthusiastic about maybe some of the changes that could result from here. | ||
| Not only am I going to do something for these families, but maybe there is a cultural change into how we talk about information. | ||
| And then over the past three years... | ||
| What have I seen? | ||
| You know, I've seen a man who has been able to use his own frivolous disrespect to delay this process for three years, so there's no accountability. | ||
| And over that same course of time, all of his more industry-established contemporaries begin copying his formula. | ||
|
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Are you talking about Mitch McConnell? | |
| You know, the one that springs to mind most potently to me is Tucker Carlson. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, of course. | ||
| Carlson looks more like Infowars now than he did three years ago, and that's scary to me. | ||
| He looks more like Infowars than Glenn Beck did in 2009. | ||
| Yep, that's the truth, right? | ||
| At least Beck had this sort of pseudo-stage production of he's writing on chalkboards and it's just all kind of silly. | ||
| Carlson's is terrifying, and that's the same. | ||
| There's so much overlap that Alex will just play long segments of Tucker's show on his show. | ||
| It's right at home there. | ||
| Somebody used to tell me, one of my colleagues, Genevieve Zimmerman, was involved with the lawsuits against Jim Fetzer in Michigan, where Lenny Posner was able to win a defamation suit against Jim Fetzer. | ||
| Interestingly enough, by result of default judgment, when Jim Fetzer refused to participate with court proceedings. | ||
| Sort of birds of a feather flock together situation there. | ||
| But Jen, when she was helping out with closing arguments, had come up with the line for Jake Zimmerman to use, which was calling what Jones did an alt-right opium. | ||
| And I always really resonated with that phrase. | ||
| But then over the past three years, I told her that phrase no longer works because it's not alt-right opium anymore. | ||
| It's just right opium. | ||
| There is no alt anymore. | ||
| That what Jones did and what his flavor for how to manipulate facts and stuff is now just lingua franqua for the entire conservative movement. | ||
| And that's terrifying. | ||
| It does feel like that. | ||
| And I also think just from my sense of things, just from my looking at everything, I don't think that he may even be aware of that. | ||
| That he discovered something more powerful than truth. | ||
| I don't think he discovered it, necessarily. | ||
| I don't think he knows what he's doing. | ||
| Ultimately, we have the same problem that you had in the depositions, which is this. | ||
| They know. | ||
| You know they're lying. | ||
| You know they know they're lying. | ||
| So all there is, the only question is, are you going to tell me that you were lying or not? | ||
| So Alex is going to not say that he's lying and he'll accept any default judgment, anything, because then he doesn't have to say what everyone knows and why he's in the courtroom. | ||
| I'm lying to you. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| You know, y 'all did a discussion of perjury in civil versus criminal cases that was dead on point, that if I was a criminal lawyer, I could roast these people. | ||
| I could have them against the wall in no time. | ||
| But here in civil law, it's different. | ||
| So the best thing that I can do... | ||
| Is to hopefully make sure the jury understands that they also know that they're lying. | ||
| Unless you see what the reactions are. | ||
| Because the reaction is the important part. | ||
| And that's what we're trying to do. | ||
| And I think you could probably fully demonstrate quite a bit of that to a jury based on those depositions. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| No, it's going to be really interesting seeing them react to it. | ||
| I'm excited for that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So one thing we touched on that we haven't gotten to yet that I was really hoping to get your perspective on was how you felt the coverage of the case was. | ||
| Do you feel like the media at large focused on the right points? | ||
| Do you feel like... | ||
| I think that's one of the things that's definitely become very interesting to me over the course of the time that we've done this podcast. | ||
| Is seeing how people cover Alex and seeing the ways in which, you know, there's sometimes unforced errors and then sometimes people, you know, are like, this is, they got the right point there. | ||
| To answer the first part, do I think the media has typically gotten this right? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, I do not. | ||
| And that's a shame. | ||
| A lot of the media that's involved around Alex Jones is very clickbait media. | ||
| Editors know that if they have a story about Alex Jones and the Sandy Hook lawsuit, it's going to get clicks. | ||
| Psychosis. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Same deal. | ||
| And the big problem for mine, look, I'm not. | ||
| A lot of people would say, all right, well, if you're getting my coverage wrong, you're usually almost always getting it wrong in a way that's critical to Alex Jones. | ||
| So maybe that'd be good. | ||
| But no, no, it's not. | ||
| And the problem is, is that Jones knows very acutely that his ability to identify. | ||
| Mistakes made by the mainstream media is one of his best defenses. | ||
| If you overshoot the target on Jones, he uses it as a way to martyr himself. | ||
| In fact, I was just talking about the Jim Fetzer verdict up in Michigan where one of his sources was helpful. | ||
| A lot of newspapers ran a story that that was Alex Jones who got that. | ||
| And Jones got on the show and made... | ||
| Mainstream media looks stupid. | ||
| He said he was going to sue the Associated Press. | ||
| Yeah, that never happened. | ||
| You know, there's been a lot of threats of lawsuits all over the place that never materialized, but it always gives him a good sounding board to say, for not being accurate, when these people aren't being accurate about me. | ||
| And that's a good point. | ||
| But what Jones never understood about me, personally, is that I'm not, those media, that's not, I'm not. | ||
| Aligned with them. | ||
| You give me a CNN story defaming one of my clients, I'm suing CNN in a heartbeat because I guarantee it's way easier than suing this guy. | ||
| CNN's got insurance policies and lawyers who don't mess around, they're going to pay. | ||
| They might help with discovery. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I'll give you another example. | ||
| You remember Boston bombing when the two Egyptian young men were identified on the front page of the New York Post, which is not a paper that has a great reputation in terms of things like that, in terms of reliability. | ||
| But they've got a big insurance policy. | ||
| They've got lawyers. | ||
| They've got a lot to lose. | ||
| They took care of those young men without even filing suit. | ||
| And we've got the exact same situation in this case. | ||
| I'm not sure if y 'all are aware of the other suit that I'm handling right now. | ||
| It was actually the first one was Marcel Fontaine as a young man in Boston who was falsely identified as being the Parkland shooter. | ||
| Same deal as... | ||
| I mean, worse than what happened to these Egyptian kids because they were just like, they're people of interest. | ||
| They put a picture of Marcel and said, here's the guy. | ||
| He was wearing a communist-themed t-shirt. | ||
| Yeah, there it was. | ||
| That was the one that had its roots in 4chan, right? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, they took a post off of 4chan and reported it with no cooperation, which is stunning. | ||
| They do that a bit. | ||
| We've stumbled on a number of instances of that kind of... | ||
| Journalistic integrity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's, they are even, you know, it was even one point Jones was trying to define what a source was in deposition. | ||
|
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Source, source could be, you know, she started on the bathroom wall. | |
| You see some green on the bathroom wall? | ||
| That could be a source. | ||
| Hey, I had a dream. | ||
| That's basically 4chan. | ||
| That's what you're saying. | ||
| You know. | ||
| The bathroom wall of the internet. | ||
| Think about the idea that they want to say that journalism should be protected to the extent that if I see Jane, for a good time, call Jane Smith on a bathroom wall, I can go in a paper and report Jane Smith as a prostitute, and I'm okay. | ||
| This is in the public interest. | ||
|
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You're just asking questions about what's going on with Jane. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| The people are talking about it, right? | ||
| I'm just talking about what the people are talking about. | ||
| Someone's passionate enough to write on a bathroom wall. | ||
| Who am I to silence this voice on the bathroom wall? | ||
| We have got one of the most important whistleblowers in the world. | ||
| Their information is so powerful they couldn't put it anywhere but a bathroom stall. | ||
| It's funny that in Neil Heslund's case, They had cited a blog post from a blog called Zero Hedge. | ||
| Zero Hedge is an anonymously run libertarian financial freakout blog. | ||
| I beg your pardon. | ||
| All of the articles are written by Tyler Durden. | ||
|
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Okay, yes. | |
| So Tyler Durden. | ||
| God. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Yep. | ||
|
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So. | |
| Zero head. | ||
| Had a blog post saying that Neil Hassen didn't hold his kid. | ||
| And that blog post itself cited Jim Fetzer. | ||
| So it's just garbage in garbage to garbage, right? | ||
| But that was their blog post. | ||
| And then Owen Schroer gets on and puts that on air and says, hey, I'm just reporting on what Zero Hedge is saying. | ||
| When he puts up the Zero Hedge blog post, you can see the page. | ||
| It has three shares at that moment, right? | ||
| Like nobody in the world has seen this. | ||
| This is obviously Infowars and Zero Hedge are hand in glove and like doing this sort of thing. | ||
| But to say that you're... | ||
| Just reporting on what other people are saying. | ||
| So I'm just going to bring on old Dr. Steve P and just let him go nuts. | ||
| Just wind him up. | ||
| Just let him go. | ||
| And you know what you're doing. | ||
| We have the emails that are in this case that have been filed with the court that show that before they put Dr. Steve P on, they knew exactly what he was going to say and encouraged him to say it. | ||
| You've got to get him in a deposition. | ||
| Oh, God, I want it so bad. | ||
| I would love that. | ||
| We would do a whole series of episodes about that. | ||
| There's so many names that you can't get to. | ||
| Johnny Bravo would be just a wonderful guy to have on the show at some point. | ||
| You know, this whole thing. | ||
| But yeah, Dr. Steve P is a great character. | ||
| If you could ever get Alex back under oath, I'd like you to ask him if he believes he's fighting the literal devil. | ||
| I think that might be unprofessional of you to do, but it's something I'm very curious how he would answer. | ||
| No, I think that speaks to his state of mind, don't you? | ||
| He's led me to believe through listening to the show that he definitely believes he's fighting the literal Christian devil. | ||
| Yeah, the literal one. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And that's what I kind of want to know is in the deposition, from his standpoint, do I smell like sulfur? | ||
| Can you get it from across there? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| I'll tell you this, though. | ||
| You're assuming That we don't see massive contempt of court in the next couple weeks. | ||
| Your wish will be granted because he is currently set to be deposed again on October 22nd. | ||
| Oh, I can't wait. | ||
| I hope that video ends up on YouTube as well. | ||
| Look, here's the other thing you have to remember is that when I deposed Paul Joseph Lawson, you saw that I had emails. | ||
| I had internal documents. | ||
| I had some things to talk to him about. | ||
| When I deposed Jones, I did not. | ||
| At that point in the proceedings, they had not yet produced anything. | ||
| I was flying completely blind in that Jones deposition. | ||
| It was based on my own research, nothing that came from the company. | ||
| Now, we're in a very different situation. | ||
| Now we have things. | ||
| So, you know, a lot of the song and dance that a lot of people saw was Jones's hemming and hawing about who Dan Badandi was and whether that was an employee. | ||
| Whether he sent the Kraken to go harass the people of Newtown. | ||
| Independent contractor, never met him before in my life. | ||
| Spoiler alert, he hired him and he calls him the Kraken. | ||
| Nope, no clue what he's talking about. | ||
| It shows my frustration with how Jones talks about this case publicly and how it comes out in the depositions and all of this. | ||
| When you don't have the documents, he'll say, yeah, we got rid of Dan Bedondi. | ||
| We didn't like what he was doing up there in Newtown. | ||
| That just really bothered us. | ||
| We had to get rid of him. | ||
| And then six weeks later, you get the emails and it shows, no, they were still paying him through 2016. | ||
| They fired him because he embarrassed them at a Trump rally. | ||
| Apparently he was... | ||
| Making some inappropriate comments to a female conservative journalist at a Trump rally. | ||
| And they were like, you can't have that anymore because we've got to preserve our relationship with these conservative media outlets. | ||
| And we've got to make sure we can still get into Trump rallies. | ||
| So they didn't care that Dan Badani chased a bunch of people around Newtown. | ||
| They didn't care they hung out with Wolfgang Halbig. | ||
| Well, you've got Halbig showing up in a white unmarked van taking video of children at the Catholic private school. | ||
| None of that do they care about. | ||
| He was a made man after the Boston bombing press conference. | ||
| After he disrupted that and got so much traffic to Infowars. | ||
| Yeah, that one he dined out on for years. | ||
| Literally, yeah. | ||
| Well, you realize Owen Sawyer tried to make the same mark. | ||
| He basically tried to do the same thing by disrupting proceedings. | ||
| Yeah, with the impeachment. | ||
| Exactly, right? | ||
| And that's why, you know, one of the things that we brought up at our last hearing is we were granted in 2018, we were granted an order saying that we were supposed to have Owen's deposition along with several other people, and we never got them. | ||
| They refused to produce them. | ||
| And now I'm in a position of who I really want Owen Troyer's deposition, and I'm not sure I'm going to get it because there's a very good chance he could be in federal custody by the time I want it. | ||
| And because right now he's in a situation where he's facing These charges for breach of basically federal trespassing. | ||
| And it wouldn't normally be that serious, except he did it a year ago and didn't show up for community service. | ||
|
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Yep. | |
| That's the irony. | ||
| We told the judge, too, look, we're concerned not only about that deposition, but that's why we want this deposition of Jones in October, is because we're a little worried. | ||
| If you look in Schroyer's arrest affidavit, with all the pictures of Owen Schroyer being places he's not supposed to be, Jones is standing right next to him. | ||
| Yeah, but we're... | ||
| We're expecting an arrest fairly soon. | ||
| I wouldn't expect anything from Alex because the reason that Owen got in trouble was because he had a restraining order that because he didn't do the community service, he was barred from being in all of those places. | ||
| Alex being there with him, I don't think it matters as much because he didn't have that sort of... | ||
| Yeah, he wasn't trespassing. | ||
| That's the theory anyway. | ||
| I mean, look, people say a lot of stuff, and I don't know what's happening in the federal investigation, but people say whatever they could get Jones off of those pictures is such a minor crime as to not even be worth the trouble. | ||
| And as you can tell more than anyone else, it would be trouble. | ||
| But I think we've all seen enough mafia movies to know why the federal authorities might go arrest somebody like Owen Troyer. | ||
| I think we know what they're thinking about what Owen Schreier could give to them. | ||
|
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A could lead to C. Exactly. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| You follow the crazy. | ||
| We want that eye-patched Oath Keeper and this is where we start. | ||
| We're going to get Owen and then we're going to get that fucker and then it's going to be over! | ||
| Bring me all over. | ||
| I mean, the thing about it is it's a distraction to my case. | ||
| It's not great to have this criminal stuff going on. | ||
| Alongside of it. | ||
| Because it is a distraction. | ||
| And I want this over. | ||
| I want this to be done as soon as possible. | ||
| Because it is for these families. | ||
| They're ready. | ||
| Boy, are they ready just to have it done. | ||
| You know, it was interesting. | ||
| A couple of years ago, we got him to admit under oath that Sandy Hook happened. | ||
| That was sort of like a big step for the family. | ||
| It's just, they were like, okay, that's one step, but we got to get to the end here. | ||
| And to see it finally maybe happening, I don't know. | ||
| I was getting real pessimistic. | ||
| I'm going to be honest with you guys. | ||
| Really pessimistic. | ||
| Not about our case, because I knew I would pursue Jones to the end of the earth and grind him in dust. | ||
| That was never a question to me. | ||
| But was it actually going to make a difference to anybody anywhere? | ||
| I mean, first, could I make a difference for my own clients? | ||
| Could we even collect from him? | ||
| All those sorts of things. | ||
| But then I started seeing, gosh, when I started seeing coronavirus hit and I started seeing just the absolute insanity of the false facts being put out there. | ||
| When I saw January 6th go down, the big lie around the election, I'm like, are we too far gone? | ||
| Did these lawsuits need to be brought several years ago or is this too late? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| But I'll tell you, the last couple of weeks, I'm feeling a little more optimistic. | ||
| I think we're taking notice of this. | ||
| I bet that there's a real feeling of exhaling, you know, at least on some level. | ||
| It feels like you're on the way up, at least, instead of on the way down to even lower wherever it can go. | ||
| Because you're at the mercy of somebody who's dragging their heels as long as they're allowed to drag their heels. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It really is that way. | ||
| And once the, you know... | ||
| The judge orders no heel dragging. | ||
| Then everything starts moving a lot quicker. | ||
| One of these things, too, that occurs to me about it is three years later and finally they are the cause of their own demise. | ||
| I feel pretty good about how I've handled this case. | ||
| I feel like I've done some really good work in it, but the truth of the matter is they are the cause of their own demise. | ||
| I think anybody who spends a bit of time listening to Infowars or knows it semi-critically would... | ||
| Never expect anything other. | ||
| I do feel like they would always be the root of their own destruction. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's true. | ||
| When Jones was really mad after our deposition, he got on and talked about me for a couple hours. | ||
| One of the things he was saying is, you know, they're all calling this lawyer the new Perry Mason. | ||
|
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And I'm like, that's cool. | |
| I'm glad you're saying that. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Honestly, most credit goes to you, man. | ||
| I wish I could take more of the credit than I am, but it really is a man who is self-destructing in almost an epic Greek tragedy sort of way. | ||
| I'm just here as a conductor on the train. | ||
| I'm just driving it to the station. | ||
| At this point, there's no turns to be made. | ||
| It's just a track going to one place. | ||
| Going down the track. | ||
| When we go back to the 2003 episodes, there is a certain feel of, like, you're looking at the man who is inexorably going to wind up where we are right now. | ||
| You know, like, his behavior then will eventually lead to where we are now. | ||
| That's fascinating. | ||
| That's just going to happen. | ||
| I saw that y 'all were looking at some of those earlier episodes, and I haven't, I mean, that takes me back to my college days, you know, like, when I was in UT around, like, 99, 2000, that's when Jones started to become kind of huge. | ||
| Moving from public access to what he is today. | ||
| And I really want to now go back and listen to some of those episodes from 2003 because to see the sort of embryonic chaos agent start to take form. | ||
| They're bizarre. | ||
| One of the recent ones we went over, he interviewed a guy who had gone to heaven. | ||
| And it was silly. | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| It was fantastic. | ||
| There's a waiting room in heaven. | ||
| Your best friend is your imaginary friend, and he's also the guy who's snitching on you to God. | ||
| He's your guardian angel. | ||
| He's your childhood imaginary friend. | ||
| Okay, so there's a transition, though, that occurs with Jones that I know that y 'all seen it through the history. | ||
| I mean, look, one of the things that becomes obvious to me when I'm watching these videos is you watch a video in 2013 versus 2015 versus 2017, the sets are different. | ||
| And you can see the evolution of the show through its sets. | ||
| And now it's this big, gaudy, CNN-looking set. | ||
| And it's funny to me how... | ||
| There are so many things that I know, from what I think of Jones, from when I came up with him in the 2000s, is not who he is today. | ||
| Because to me, Jones is the guy who's about to be in tears over the alien fish hybrids. | ||
|
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They're in the tanks and they're moving their flippers and oh my gosh, I've never seen that. | |
| Sad human eyes. | ||
| Sad human eyes. | ||
| Right, and it's so silly. | ||
| It's so, and people, for so many years, people made viral video clips and stuff that were just making fun of these silly things Alex Jones would say. | ||
| And then somewhere along the line, and it happened almost... | ||
| I mean, John is faced on Sandy Hook, looking both directions. | ||
| It's from Sandy Hook forward, it's a completely... | ||
| He's starting to edge into a completely different thing. | ||
| He's not just so... | ||
| He's not a lizard person, silly, Jeff Rents-style absurdity. | ||
| Now there's something more sinister because it's being... | ||
| Portrayed as hard news, right? | ||
| Like, I'm not going to be showing my jury a lot of videos from him in the 2000s talking about the gay frogs or the fish hybrids or that kind of crap, because what they need to see is that ever since then in the last few years, he's trying to sell himself off as legit news. | ||
| How many times a day Infowars says? | ||
| You're getting the real truth here at Infowars. | ||
| The mainstream media is fake news. | ||
| Tomorrow's news today. | ||
|
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Oh, wow. | |
| Yeah, exactly, right? | ||
| News of the future. | ||
| Now, admittedly, he shares a lot of news from six months ago, but it is tomorrow's news today. | ||
| Often blog posts from six months ago. | ||
| There's something almost Orwellian about tomorrow's news today, right? | ||
| Like this idea that he's creating it himself. | ||
| Oh, man, that's wild. | ||
| I had one question that I definitely needed to ask you. | ||
| I want to jam this in. | ||
| What's your favorite Sunday? | ||
| That was it. | ||
| In Alex's defense, after these default judgments came out, he said that in this case... | ||
| The opposing counsel was demanding that he produce something he referred to as Sandy Hook marketing material. | ||
|
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Can you talk a little bit about what he could have been referring to? | |
| Alright, so he's mostly talking about the Lafferty case in Connecticut. | ||
| He's mostly talking about that Connecticut case. | ||
| So it's not even with the stuff that happened? | ||
| Not even with what just happened, exactly. | ||
| In other words, the discovery requests that were at issue in Texas that made him default the case, none of this has anything to do with that. | ||
| So just to make that clear right off the bat. | ||
| But in Connecticut, they had asked him, it wasn't really Sandy Hook marketing materials. | ||
| Basically what it was is they wanted any, for any episode that Sandy Hook was discussed about, they wanted Infowars internal analytics, right? | ||
| They wanted to know what did they get off of Google Ads? | ||
| What did they get? | ||
| How many hits did they get? | ||
| These sorts of things. | ||
| And then... | ||
| Infowars also uses things like an internal Google Analytics program. | ||
| It has some other metrics that it uses there. | ||
| And they wanted to request all of that, which I think is a pretty fair request. | ||
| You got to know, particularly the amount of views, right? | ||
| Because if you want to establish how these people were damaged, you have to know how many people saw it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like, so ultimately the total audience of Infowars is important. | ||
| They asked for also, I think if they had, if there were any emails that referred to special marketing initiatives for Sandy Hook. | ||
| And by that, I mean, like, we're going to make a special promotional page or we're going to, hey, can you make sure on this video, can you promote some Sandy Hook videos? | ||
| Because they've been really popular. | ||
| If there's an email like that, obviously we want to see it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But in terms of like, you have to remember that despite Despite Infowars' revenue and its sets and everything, ultimately, at core, it's not a very sophisticated business. | ||
| Doesn't seem like it. | ||
| Yeah, we're not like, hey, can you produce us your marketing director? | ||
| You don't have one of those. | ||
| It's going to be Rob Du again. | ||
| It's just going to keep being Rob Du. | ||
| Can you produce anything for me? | ||
| It's going to keep being Rob Du. | ||
| He's just going to show up. | ||
| Rob Du in a silly hat. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| Yeah, because the way Alex makes it seem is like they're demanding that I bring like to them like these flyers that we printed up with Sandy Hook sale going on. | ||
| And that doesn't exist. | ||
| How can I produce that? | ||
| No, I mean, there's obviously a lot of when you're a digital web business who publishes on the web, you're going to have some statistics about what happened to your videos. | ||
| And those are things they want. | ||
| But what's mind-blowing about it is that in my case, we aren't even there yet. | ||
| We have just recently started to broach some of those issues. | ||
| But in my case, it's like, okay, here would be a sample request that they're not answering, is identify every video in which Infowars discussed the Sandy Hook tragedy. | ||
| That has never been answered. | ||
| These are very, very simple things. | ||
| And that was what I think was most shocking to our judge, is that you have these... | ||
| Requests that were supposed to be answered in 2018, like at the very beginning of the case, so you can even start feeling your way around in the dark. | ||
| This is so basic. | ||
| And so for Jones to go on there and pretend like he has been unjustly had his right to a jury taken away, this is flatly absurd. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| That's one of the sticking points. | ||
| Now it makes me think. | ||
| That there's something out there that he doesn't want to give us in terms of that, because he really is focused on this whole Sandy Hook marketing thing, and I don't understand why he's so hung up on it. | ||
| It might just be that he doesn't understand what he's being asked. | ||
| Have you guys ever run a Sandy Hook 50% off sale? | ||
| It's probably a question he doesn't know the answer to, and definitely doesn't want to find out the answer to. | ||
| We could have done that, so I just don't want to find out. | ||
| I do love the judge being surprised when you ask that question. | ||
| Give me all the videos where you have said something about Sandy Hook and the judge is surprised they didn't do it. | ||
| Immediately, my thought was just like, oh, they said that sounds really hard and just didn't do it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That was instantly. | ||
| How could you guys be surprised by that? | ||
| I know these people. | ||
| They said, that's hard. | ||
| I won't do it. | ||
| And then maybe you'll go away. | ||
| Well, it's half of that. | ||
| It's half of it's hard. | ||
| It's half of we've been so insanely negligent ever since being sued that we have caused massive amounts of evidence to be destroyed and can never produce it to you. | ||
| And if they ever have to really fully just be up front and admit that, that also has some pretty severe consequences. | ||
| Yeah, that's not good. | ||
| At this point, you know, that's honestly the challenge is going to be, as for those of people who I know your audience is, for those who watch these proceedings, the challenge going forward is if there's any more shenanigans, How exactly do you punish them? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like, there's not much more you can do at this point. | ||
| Yeah, that was a question I had in my head, too. | ||
| Like, you know, because you still have the process that you have to go through in terms of getting to the jury deciding the damages. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And he does have some ability to drag his heels on that still. | ||
| Absolutely, he does. | ||
| And in order to cause other crazy problems, you've got to remember, my plaintiffs are going to be asked to give testimony soon. | ||
| And some of the things they're going to be testifying about are confidential private health information, that sort of stuff. | ||
| And they've already made a mockery of that stuff up in Connecticut. | ||
| I don't know if y 'all followed this one. | ||
| This one was fascinating to me, of just how detached from reality their strategy has become, is they were in the middle of deposing a plaintiff, Sandy Hook Parent. | ||
| And the deposition itself is designated confidential, attorney's eyes only, at the start of the deposition. | ||
| Which means this doesn't get released to the public. | ||
| And in the middle of that deposition, Norm Pattis, their lawyer, starts live streaming. | ||
| Basically. | ||
| I mean, basically that's what he did. | ||
| He did not start doing that. | ||
| I mean, he didn't live stream it. | ||
| What he did was he started writing down the things that the plaintiff was saying, the confidential testimony, inserted that into a motion. | ||
| And then filed that motion publicly with the court on the court's docket where everybody can get a copy of it. | ||
| And, okay, so now the part of this that's going to make you just your jaw drop at this is not only is that insane, the motion that he was filing was a motion to request that the court compel the deposition of Hillary Clinton. | ||
| Yes, because apparently, according to Jones, these lawsuits, the only reason they happened is because Hillary Clinton was mad. | ||
| And then for some reason, like about two years after she lost the election, she decided to go recruit some attorneys in the Sandy Hook families to pursue a vendetta against Alex Jones. | ||
| And that apparently I'm under Clinton payroll and all this kind of stuff. | ||
| That does not sound like something a malignant narcissist would invent at all. | ||
| That sounds crazy. | ||
| I think he thinks that Hillary said he had a black heart. | ||
| Or something like that. | ||
| And that was the sign that she's coming after him. | ||
| Well, you know, in Jones's own feverish sort of construction of all of this, Hillary Clinton is a big reason why he said some of the things he said about Sandy Hook, particularly after 2016. | ||
| Because when she used him as a prop to attack Trump and to say, Trump's associated with this guy and this guy's a mess, right? | ||
| And this guy said... | ||
| Sandy Hook didn't happen. | ||
| And everything she said about him was 100% true, but she was using him very clearly as a campaign prop to try to score some points. | ||
| And I got no problem with that, whatever. | ||
| But once he did that, that enraged Jones. | ||
| That was it. | ||
| Because Jones at that point was on this trajectory to become very mainstream. | ||
| He had had Trump on his show. | ||
| He was being credited at that time with Trump's victory. | ||
| And so that's why just after the election. | ||
| In November, right after the election, he did a broadcast called Alex Jones' Final Statement about Sandy Hook. | ||
| And basically, he couldn't stop talking about it because Hillary talked about him, so he had to respond back. | ||
| So his genius idea was to get on there and go, well, look, here's all the reasons I thought it was fake. | ||
| And honestly, if it hadn't been for that, some of this case would have never happened. | ||
| If the parents, they were of the position that if Jones had stopped after 2016, they probably wouldn't have pursued this. | ||
| But it was this vendetta that kept up, is that not only did he do it then, but then just a couple months later in the new year, in 2017, he did a video called Sandy Hook Vampires Exposed. | ||
| That's the one that accuses my clients of faking a blue screen. | ||
| So here we are in 2017 and he just can't stop because he's so pissed at these parents. | ||
| He's so pissed at Hillary Clinton. | ||
| Also, rough name. | ||
| I would fire whoever named these videos. | ||
| Sandy Hook of Vampires Exposed. | ||
| Doesn't look good, just as a title. | ||
| Not great. | ||
| I can understand him being mad at Hillary. | ||
| She's been his villain for... | ||
| 20 years. | ||
| Also, she lost and ruined everybody's life. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I'm sure he's mad at her about that, too. | ||
| Well, I don't know if there's any other points you want to get to, but I feel like... | ||
| Is there anything that the media has not said at all that you want to, that you feel like there's some information that nobody has really touched on? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm really surprised that nobody in the media reported. | |
| That in his 20, his November 27, I'm sorry, his November 2019 deposition, his second deposition, that he ended that deposition by saying Epstein didn't kill himself. | ||
| And that to me is hilarious. | ||
| It's like you have made this, you understand what a mockery you've made of this, that you're willing to do that at the end of that deposition. | ||
| This is just promotional. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| As I think y 'all remember, during that deposition, he was so eager to talk about Epstein. | ||
| He really, really wanted to talk about Epstein. | ||
| And then I kept telling him during the deposition, no, we're going to get to Epstein. | ||
| Don't worry, we're going to get to Epstein. | ||
| I believe there was a point where you're like, I promise we'll get back to that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I promise you I've been wanting to do this. | |
| I promise you. | ||
| And I'll tell you, there were several points in there where his eyes glaze over because he doesn't know what's happening because he's like, oh my God, I'm agreeing with a lot of this thing this guy's saying right now. | ||
| I don't know what to do because I'm sitting there telling him, I think you and I agree. | ||
| Most of the people who run this world, who are in the ruling class of this country and the world, are mainly psychopaths and criminals. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he was like, yeah, I do agree with that. | |
| Yeah, it's very strange. | ||
| Because, of course, he still wants to cast me as something that I'm not. | ||
| He's really, really interested in making it seem that I'm a democratic operative or something like that. | ||
| We were talking a little bit about his motion to depose Hillary Clinton and his sort of obsession with this idea that these lawsuits were entirely motivated by Hillary Clinton's vendetta against him. | ||
| Yeah, persecution complex. | ||
| It's weird because it's like, do you think there's really that shortage of many people who'd love to do these lawsuits? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Only Hillary could hate me. | |
| There's no one else in the world who could want to bring me down, right? | ||
| It's funny because, okay, so just some inside baseball on this, is that as a plaintiff's lawyer, what I do is when people come to me for help, they don't pay me any money. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like, I'm sort of, think of it like a pirate, right? | ||
| Like, somebody comes to a pirate and says, these Spaniards took all my gold, and I want you to go get it back. | ||
| And I'm like, okay, I'll outfit a fast ship with a lot of guns. | ||
| I'll try to go get your gold. | ||
| I'm keeping a third of it, and I'll front any expenses. | ||
| And if I don't get the gold, you don't owe me anything. | ||
| I'll eat that expense. | ||
| That's basically how I play it. | ||
| You're working on spec, as they say in the industry. | ||
| The way plaintiff's lawyers say it is, you know, you talk to these lawyers who bill by hours and you say, that's not me. | ||
| I'm a plaintiff's lawyer. | ||
| I eat what I kill. | ||
| And that's basically how it works. | ||
| And so for most of my cases, I'm going to say if I'm involved in a medical device case or if I've got a product case, I've got to pay experts. | ||
| You know, my firm, we're putting in $200,250 into a case before we see a dime on it and trying to make that happen. | ||
| Alex, this case hasn't cost as much. | ||
| And honestly, it's just different than a lot of cases that we do. | ||
| And Jones is convinced of this idea that it must be funded by Hillary Clinton or something. | ||
| And we've been really upfront about it since the beginning. | ||
| My firm, Farrah and Ball, has fronted every expense on this. | ||
| We're happy to do it. | ||
| We're excited to do it. | ||
| There's not many law firms who do what I do who wouldn't love to do this. | ||
| I mean, it is. | ||
| Have you produced the Hillary Clinton marketing materials? | ||
| I have not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what else? | |
| I'm waiting for a request for production on all my George Soros emails. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| But yeah, what they never figured out... | ||
| Look, it's interesting. | ||
| You look at the law firm up there in Connecticut who's doing that Connecticut case, the Costco firm. | ||
| And they're a very button-up, very normal kind of law firm, very respectable, have their ties on really nice. | ||
| I'm the guy on a... | ||
| Profane podcast about Alex Jones right now. | ||
| Slightly different approaches. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'm a little bit of a different lawyer. | ||
| And what I don't think they realize is I came into their lives representing a young communist out of Massachusetts and not Sandy Hook. | ||
| Sandy Hook parents came to me because I brought a suit on behalf of this young communist. | ||
| And I am not a Hillary Clinton operative. | ||
| There's no way, shape, or form. | ||
| But they never get this. | ||
| The entire Infowars organization is convinced that this is all about a political vendetta against them. | ||
| When, really, they just opened themselves up to this. | ||
| It could have been anybody who did this to them. | ||
| It's a terrifying combination of just, like, narcissism and black and white thinking. | ||
| You know, like, just absolutes and everyone is against me. | ||
| Because I'm the greatest. | ||
| It is funny. | ||
| He talks about international global politics all the time, thinking that he's a big-time show, but really, he only knows like 10 people. | ||
| Rogan? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Okay, so who's bringing this lawsuit? | ||
| I don't know any of these people, so it's got to be one of the 10 people I know. | ||
| It's got to be Hillary. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, when you have that simple of a worldview, you cram everything into it. | ||
| I've run out of characters. | ||
| Yeah, he has a really small world. | ||
| It's just a really small place in his head. | ||
| It's like a sitcom with a low budget. | ||
| Not a lot of locations, not a lot of characters. | ||
| Mainly mockumentary style. | ||
| My other kind of final thoughts, and this is addressed to the State Bar of Texas when they finally review this and listen to me talk on this, is, listen, guys, I know we've been a little loose and wild today and a little profane here. | ||
| I know that I did my imitations, Alex Jones. | ||
| I know I did a couple of those. | ||
| Just want it for the record, he imitated me first. | ||
| He got on his show and imitated me first. | ||
| So I think it's fair. | ||
| He compared me to Gollum and said that I was a great... | ||
| He even said he was going to make a little goblin Bankston doll, and that hasn't happened yet because I am number one who's going to buy one. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Can you imagine? | ||
| He started it, okay? | ||
| So I want that to be fair for the State Bar. | ||
| He started it, and in all seriousness, it has been a situation where his public statements have been absurd. | ||
| For somebody, look. | ||
| I have the opportunity to be on national television whenever I want. | ||
| If somebody wants to talk to a Sandy Hook lawyer, it's going to happen. | ||
| And I haven't done that. | ||
| I've done it fairly infrequently. | ||
| When we first started, I went on the Today Show the very first time. | ||
| I've done a PBS frontline appearance about this issue to talk about it. | ||
| But other than that, that's not where we're fighting this. | ||
| And I wanted to come talk about it with y 'all's audience. | ||
| Because one, your audience is never going to be on the jury. | ||
| If there's anybody who watches Knowledge Fight, they're getting taken off the jury. | ||
| Trust me, they're not going to make it. | ||
| That level of interest or strong feelings in Alex Jones, you will not be on this jury. | ||
| So I'm not worried about influencing the jury pool or anything. | ||
| But I did want to come talk about it with y 'all because I feel like this suit has been really interesting to the wider culture. | ||
| And not enough really hard analysis is being done on it. | ||
| Not enough real attention is being paid to it. | ||
| And I know y 'all guys come out and like to have fun with it. | ||
| But y 'all are doing a really big service. | ||
| A lot of people have learned a lot more about what this show really is from Knowledge Fight, and I just wanted to thank y 'all for that. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| I'm overwhelmed to hear that, and thank you. | ||
| We reject your thanks completely. | ||
| Your positive statements have no place here. | ||
| Get thee from me, Satan! | ||
| I was talking to a friend last night about how we were going to do this interview, and I was like, man, I hope he doesn't compliment us. | ||
| That's the thing I'm most anxious about. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Two shitheads in Chicago. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Goodbye. | ||
| I was telling somebody last night, I'm going to go on a show. | ||
| You can count on one hand the number of people in the world who know more about Alex Jones than I do. | ||
| And I'm currently talking to two of them. | ||
| You're talking to one of them. | ||
| I don't know, Jordan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I think you could do some callbacks that I probably couldn't do. | ||
| I bet you know more about Alex Jones than most, but you're probably not in the top five. | ||
| I've got a lot somewhere in my head. | ||
| I don't have action. | ||
| I don't have the ability to call it whenever I want, but it's been up there. | ||
| Now I'm being a petty narcissist about this. | ||
| No, I'm fair. | ||
| I'll take it. | ||
| Well, thank you so much for joining us, Mark. | ||
| I hope at some point we can reconnect and maybe check in another time. | ||
| Well, I'm sure, look, if Alex comes on and says some more crazy stuff between now and trial, I'd love to come back and talk to you all about that. | ||
| We can play the video and talk all about it. | ||
| But otherwise... | ||
| Let's try to plan on me having a verdict sometime near the end of April, and we'll come back and talk about what that means. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| Maybe right in time for my birthday. | ||
| I'm all about it. | ||
| I'm all about it. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| Well, thank you again, Mark. | ||
| It's been an absolute delight to talk to you, and I wish you and everyone on your side of the case all the best. | ||
| We're going to keep doing what we can do. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks, guys. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| That was illuminating. | ||
| What are the odds? | ||
| Oh, who would have guessed? | ||
| That was a lot of fun. | ||
| Thank you so much to Mark for joining us and having that little chat. | ||
| And for all the work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Spectacular. | ||
| Just spectacular job. | ||
| And congratulations, too, I think. | ||
| Huge congratulations. | ||
| I'm not sure if we articulated that enough in our conversation, but it's got to just feel great for at least that chapter to have come to a close. | ||
| And just sheer, and just talking to him, you know, like... | ||
| He pulled it off like he hadn't spent the last four years in hell, you know? | ||
| Like, he pulled it off like this wasn't a crushing, miserable thing to do on a daily basis filled with abuse, bullshit, and it looking like it might never end, you know? | ||
| And he fucking did it! | ||
| Hell yeah! | ||
| Maybe a little bit of that humor armor can help a little bit. | ||
| But, Jordan, we are not just here to have an interview with Mark Bankston. | ||
| We are also here to discuss Alex's immediate response that he put out the night that these summary judgments, that's not it, default judgments came around. | ||
| And so he put out a little piece, and it's not good. | ||
| It's not a very compelling... | ||
| Piece of business. | ||
| Any bounties? | ||
| Any threats? | ||
| I think he learned his lesson on that one. | ||
| Also, Norm isn't there watching Alex just drunkenly spiral. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| That's a good idea. | ||
| So let's start at the beginning. | ||
| Here is where we're at. | ||
| It's the left. | ||
| The left in this country has completely weaponized the legal system and the judiciary. | ||
| There are so many examples of it. | ||
| Just the last few days, a decorated lieutenant colonel who came out and criticized the hasty, horribly organized withdrawal of Afghanistan is sitting in a military stockade, in a brig, in a prison, without even being charged with a crime yet, and he's already been there five days. | ||
| This is about Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller, who had criticized the Biden administration's handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan in a video that he posted on Facebook. | ||
| He was relieved of command and put in the brig at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina awaiting trial. | ||
| This is pretty messed up, and I can see how this would worry anybody, but it has nothing to do with the left or the judiciary. | ||
| This has to do with how there are different rules of conduct when you agree to enlist in the armed services. | ||
| There are military rules, and they apply to you and not to non-enlisted persons, and when you break them, you get in a different sort of trouble. | ||
| These are martial laws. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| You can't even really say no to them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because he violated a gag order after being relieved of command by posting the videos he put on Facebook, Scheller is accused of, quote, showing contempt towards officials, willfully disobeying a superior officer, failing to obey lawful orders, and committing conduct unbecoming of an officer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can agree that it might be a productive conversation to discuss how weird it is that the military has these own rules that it has for its members to be subjected to. | ||
| But in terms of Alex's response to, you know, like, he's getting on air to talk about losing these multiple Sandy Hook cases. | ||
| This has nothing to do with anything. | ||
| I was about to say, if I was directing this, I would have been like, Alex, quick cut, alright? | ||
| We're going to start over. | ||
| Okay, we're going to take this again. | ||
| Just real quick, we're talking about your Sandy Hook lawsuit. | ||
| Off track, a little. | ||
| You've already left the station. | ||
| If this is the way he's deciding to start discussing this, I don't have a lot of faith that this is going to keep going or reach anywhere. | ||
| Listen, I know everybody's read the news, but what they are not talking about is that it is still Fat Bear Week. | ||
| And the week of Fat Bear should be held sacred. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| If I could be clear about this, I think Alex's show would be more productive and less dangerous if he did just cover Fat Bear Week. | ||
| Everybody would have a much better time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So yeah, this was not good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I thought like, well, we're not going to get a whole lot here. | ||
| But what we do get right off the bat is a little bit of a confused timeline of events. | ||
| Unsurprising. | ||
| Now, if you go back almost 10 years ago. | ||
| We saw the tragic shootings at Sandy Hook. | ||
| And it was hard for Americans to believe that someone would go in and execute a bunch of elementary school students. | ||
| And the internet quickly had questions and talked about anomalies. | ||
| It was something that I only covered a few times on air. | ||
| But years later, evidence came out that some of those anomalies were not accurate. | ||
| And I said, I believe Sandy Hook actually happened. | ||
| It was the minute that I said I thought it happened that the mainstream media said, oh, you said it didn't happen for attention. | ||
| When in truth, I almost had employees quit over it. | ||
| A lot of people disagree with me, including some of my family, and it was not a popular view on my family. | ||
| I can speak as someone who listened back to the entire period after the shooting, and with absolute confidence, I can say that that's bullshit. | ||
| It's a good spin for Alex, because most people won't actually go back and check, and idiots like Joe Rogan fall for this kind of line, but that is definitely false. | ||
| But even leaving that aside, that clip makes no sense. | ||
| Alex is trying to make two claims simultaneously, and it's really hard for both of them to be true. | ||
| The first is that he barely ever talked about Sandy Hook, maybe just a few times, and he was just covering what the internet was saying. | ||
| And then the second thing he's trying to claim is that the coverage of Sandy Hook was so unpopular that some of Alex's family disagreed with him and staff almost quit because of it. | ||
| That seems convoluted. | ||
| I don't know how both of those can actually be his accurate retelling of events. | ||
| Well, I mean, he did it two or three times and then there was such an uproar over it that he never talked about it again until several years later whenever he finally said that he believes it happened and then everybody was like, ha ha. | ||
| Ah, now it's time to take you to the cleaners. | ||
| Well, what about those years in between where you're... | ||
| I mean, he mentioned it maybe 70, 100, 200 times. | ||
| Me? | ||
| I mean, yeah, but I mean... | ||
| But other than those. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Other than those, there's only a few times. | ||
| I feel like you're the one being up to us here. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| I should probably get off my damn high horse. | ||
| I should probably stop thinking like, hey... | ||
| Alex is just questioning things, man. | ||
| Why am I so uptight about this stuff? | ||
| Everybody hates the questioners, but they're the ones who lead us forward. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the idea that I questioned Sandy Hook because it was some master plan of minding it famous was completely asinine. | ||
| I questioned WMDs in Iraq. | ||
| I was right about that. | ||
| I questioned babies in the incubators being thrown out by Saddam. | ||
| That wasn't true either. | ||
| I questioned Jesse Smollett, and that was a fraud. | ||
| I questioned Bubba Wallace. | ||
| I questioned hundreds of other events out there that have turned out to be staged, like the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 that got us into Vietnam. | ||
| First of all, no one's claiming that Alex had a grand design to get rich and famous by way of lying about Sandy Hook, or at least that's not a matter for the courts immediately. | ||
| Alex is trying to implant that idea in his audience's head because it's a more defensible straw man than dealing with reality. | ||
| Alex's list of things he's questioned is a little bizarre, though. | ||
| For one, I don't think he was the one who questioned the Gulf of Tonkin incident, if only because it happened 10 years before he was born. | ||
| Yeah, but he was the first person to really look into it. | ||
| Second, the cases of Jesse Smollett and Bubba Wallace are the only two recent examples he comes up with, and those are both times that he just had a knee-jerk denial about allegations of racially motivated crimes. | ||
| If you listen to our show, you'll find way more examples of times when Alex was very wrong about denying racist violence. | ||
| He doesn't bring those times up. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| You're always batting 1,000, so long as you pretend that all the times that you struck out didn't happen. | ||
| And that's what his audience allegedly said. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's not fair. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Now we're old. | ||
| That one's definitely we're old. | ||
| Shit. | ||
| That's the one large issue of his comment. | ||
| But then there's another one, and that is that Alex is not questioning things. | ||
| He comes to conclusions. | ||
| It would be one thing if Alex's coverage was what he imagines it was. | ||
| It would still be dumb and dangerous, but if he was dryly reporting that online conspiracy communities had questions about alleged irregularities in the Sandy Hook case, that could be argued to just be questioning. | ||
| which is different than questioning. | ||
| Questioning seeks truth through asking sometimes unpopular questions. | ||
| Persuading has a conclusion that the audience is supposed to be drawn to. | ||
| And oftentimes you can ask loaded questions as a tool that you can use in the path of your persuasion. | ||
| And that's what Alex does. | ||
| And it's nonsense. | ||
| You're not questioning shit. | ||
| Yeah, that's why in court you can't do that. | ||
| It's called a leading question. | ||
| You're not allowed to do it the way... | ||
| If Alex wasn't guilty of stuff, then he would be able to do the same stuff he does in the courtroom. | ||
| The fact that he can't do any of the things he does the moment he steps into a place where it means something should tell you all you need to know! | ||
| And it seems to happen over and over and over again with all these people. | ||
| So, look, man, Sandy Hook wasn't that big part of Alex's career. | ||
| It's no big deal. | ||
| Look, man, please. | ||
| It's not a big deal. | ||
| Nah, no big deal. | ||
| Sandy Hook is... | ||
| A blip on the radar screen in the different stories, the tens of thousands I've covered. | ||
| But it's not a blip on the radar screen for the lobbies that are anti-gun, the big corporate institutions that seek to disarm the American people. | ||
| They have successfully been able to use the deaths of those children to sue Remington into bankruptcy and to demonize the idea of self-defense itself. | ||
| and to try to basically destroy and steal the birthright of self-defense from all Americans. | ||
| That's just so fucking callous and just insulting. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| He's saying that his actions are just like a blip in his career, but it wasn't a blip to the evil gun grabbers that he's against, and they're around every corner. | ||
| Your response is exactly the same thing that I was experiencing when I was listening to that. | ||
| Yeah, you know who else it wasn't a blip for? | ||
| People who lost their loved ones, you asshole. | ||
| No, I mean, it's... | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| But what he's literally doing in that sentence is denying that there were victims at Sandy Hook. | ||
| Well... | ||
| He's at least ignoring it. | ||
| And then another thing he's doing is he's taking away their agency. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| They're being used as pawns in the game the gun grabbers are trying to play. | ||
| Again, they're not real. | ||
| They're fake. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| They could be real. | ||
| They're literally real, yes. | ||
| But their intentions are fake. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Again. | ||
| Their concerns are being weaponized by the gun grabbers in a way that... | ||
| Would lead one to believe, if you believe, Alex, that their concerns aren't real. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| And that is fucking disgusting. | ||
| It is him doubling the fuck down. | ||
| If you meant any of what you said about any of what you're saying right now, you'd say, I'm sorry to the victims. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Also, this is like how supervillains talk. | ||
| Like, this is like, it was just a blip in my career. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, totally. | |
| Isn't that like from Street Fighter, the day Bison visited your village? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was a day you'll never forget, but for Bison it was a Tuesday. | |
| It was nothing to me. | ||
| Yeah, that sucks, man. | ||
| This guy's a piece of shit. | ||
| He's a real piece of shit. | ||
| Unreal. | ||
| Unreal. | ||
| Fuck me. | ||
| Yeah, that clip was where I was like, well, we're off the rails. | ||
| That's going in the money. | ||
| That's going in the money here. | ||
| Play that shit right there. | ||
| See, even after he fucking lost, he's pretending they're not real! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Yeah, it's wild. | ||
| Wild. | ||
| But Alex is really the victim here. | ||
| I can't see any possible way that's true, but I will give him a shot. | ||
| story that I'll show you in a moment. | ||
| Even their top legal expert says that these death penalty sanctions are basically a myth because you're guaranteed to be able to try the facts of the case. | ||
| So this is a legal theory they're trying to get through to get rid of due process using the straw man of the demonized villain, Alex Jones. | ||
| This endangers everybody's due process. | ||
| process everybody's free speech and the system is hoping that they can have the alex jones law that's what they call it to get rid of people's free speech selectively while protecting the corporate media's free speech that's not how history works everybody is going to get burned by this this is nonsense uh if anything alex has been given excessive due process and given every opportunity to cooperate with the case and he's shown himself to be unwilling at every turn this isn't the court depriving alex of his rights it's him shooting himself in the foot yeah | ||
|
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|
in the court order for default judgment they specifically say that they have gotten no response and discovery And it's pretty funny, too. | |
| The order makes it clear that this is not a lawyer problem. | ||
| It's Alex. | ||
| It is clear to the court that discovery misconduct is properly attributable to the client and not the attorney, especially since defendants have been represented by seven attorneys over the course of the suit. | ||
| Regardless of the attorney, defendant's discovery abuse remained consistent. | ||
| Also, the Huffington Post article that Alex is talking about, it wasn't quoting their top legal expert. | ||
| They were quoting Bill Ogden, who's a lawyer at Farrar& Bell, which is the law firm that Mark Bankston works at. | ||
| Bill Ogden's the guy who he referenced was doing the Rob Due deposition. | ||
| So their pictures are even right next to each other on the law firm's website. | ||
| This isn't a lawyer saying that this is just a legal theory. | ||
| He's saying that it's taught that way in law school because it almost never happens. | ||
| Yeah, it's like if... | ||
| Let's say, okay, how about this? | ||
| Okay, so I murdered somebody, and then I took the knife home with me, and they arrested me, and they were like, okay. | ||
| You just got to bring that knife and then we'll get this all done with. | ||
| And every time I didn't bring the knife and I was like, nah, I'm just not going to go. | ||
| And they were like, okay, well, we have to do something. | ||
| So I guess there's a fine or maybe just bring the fucking knife. | ||
| Bring the knife. | ||
| And then I was like, no, no, no. | ||
| How about instead I go stand outside your courthouse and waggle my dick in your face and then go, ah, while holding the knife above my head and then throwing it around and then spinning. | ||
| And then whenever you grab me. | ||
| And arrest me and put me in jail? | ||
| Please pretend. | ||
| You have denied my due process, sir. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| While we're on the topic of due process, let's talk Rob due process. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Alright. | ||
| That was my one pun for the day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There you go. | |
| That's the one. | ||
| So Alex wants to set the record straight. | ||
| He's given everybody everything. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| He's been the king of discovery. | ||
| A judge issued default judgments, a rarity in the legal world against Jones and Infowars, after the conspiracy theorists failed to produce discovery records. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, first let me set the record straight. | ||
| My lawyers told me in Connecticut, they said, you shouldn't even produce what they're asking for. | ||
| No one's ever done this. | ||
| And I said, I'm going to do it. | ||
| They want to default me. | ||
| I released all of my company bank records going back to Sandy Hook and up until now. | ||
| No one has ever done that. | ||
| So that sounds like Trump at the end there. | ||
| No one's ever done anything like this. | ||
| This is the best lawsuit anyone's ever had. | ||
| So we talked to Mark a little bit about this, and who cares? | ||
| It has nothing to do with the cases he lost. | ||
| That's in the Connecticut case. | ||
| Yeah, so this is just sort of like, again, throwing... | ||
| Confetti in there. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| This is a distraction. | ||
| It is a shotgun blast of bullshit at any wall that might stick. | ||
| So Alex thinks that the case is really about trying to prove that he's paid by the NRA or the Mercers or somebody. | ||
| I don't recall that. | ||
| Which again is just another side deflection. | ||
| They have this weird, crazy theory that I'm secretly being paid off by the NRA or something to do this. | ||
| Let them see it all. | ||
| Let them see there's no money from the Mercers or the NRA or the Republicans or anybody. | ||
| And so we did that because the judge in Connecticut demanded it. | ||
| Right here in Texas, this is all coordinated. | ||
| They asked for less, but it was still substantive. | ||
| Tens of thousands of emails, thousands of records. | ||
| It went on and on. | ||
| But they kept demanding the Sandy Hook marketing records. | ||
| I don't do marketing around news we cover. | ||
| I have products and sponsors that I promote and market for, and we gave them in Connecticut and Texas that basic information. | ||
| Yeah, so that one flummoxed me, which is why I had to bring it up with Mark, because I didn't know what the fuck he could possibly be referring to. | ||
| What is he talking about? | ||
| Yeah, and I think that there's just a fundamental misunderstanding that he thinks that it's about the source of the funding as opposed to tracking whether or not your analytics show that you... | ||
| Yeah, okay, so the day after we did the first Sandy Hook story, we had a huge increase in traffic, and then the more we did Sandy Hook stories, the more we saw an increase in traffic versus when we weren't doing Sandy Hook stories. | ||
| It's a very clear way to establish a pattern of malicious behavior for money. | ||
| It doesn't even take, it's not even hard. | ||
| And it's kind of tough to imagine, you know, the image we have of Alex, that he would spend any time poring over that data. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| He has employees. | ||
| Somebody did. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Somebody did. | ||
| Otherwise, how are we here? | ||
| Is any of this real? | ||
| If nobody has handled his traffic, then fucking I quit. | ||
| It's just coincidence. | ||
| This is bullshit. | ||
| This is all lies. | ||
| This is everything. | ||
| So look, man. | ||
| Part of the problem is that this judge in Texas, right? | ||
|
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|
The judge won't let Alex have his lawyer that he wants. | |
| They say I've covered up. | ||
| They say I haven't given him any information. | ||
| And so, this judge... | ||
| And the judge previous, because when I'm retired in Travis County, will never let me have the lawyers I want that are well-known, famous First Amendment lawyers like Mark Randazza and others. | ||
| A what? | ||
| And so we have local lawyers, most of which are brand new. | ||
| They'll take the case and they go in and they get yelled at and they roll over and say, I'm sorry, we'll do better, we'll give you more. | ||
| When the judge and the opposing side say, we know you've got the information. | ||
| This is like asking somebody for a confession that doesn't exist. | ||
| And that's what's completely crazy about this whole thing. | ||
|
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|
Wow. | |
| That's an interesting spin. | ||
| I mean, you know, that's a question that I guess they just didn't ask in the depositions. | ||
| It's just like, legitimately, you and me, man to man, tell me why you're here. | ||
| That would be interesting. | ||
| Just keep going. | ||
| What is your perception of what's happening? | ||
| Yeah, what is happening? | ||
| I want to know, before we go anywhere, what do you think is going on right now? | ||
| And are there spinny lights around me? | ||
| Do I have horns? | ||
| Something that I remember learning in some philosophy class in college was that the beginning of any kind of discussion that you can have with someone is agreeing on the definitions of terms. | ||
| And you do really kind of have to establish... | ||
| First principles about reality. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is this a chair? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You say this is a chair. | ||
| We agree this is a chair. | ||
| We can move from there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good. | |
| Now, next word. | ||
| We're going to go through the dictionary. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All these lawyers were just like little worms. | ||
| They were afraid of the judge. | ||
| So funny. | ||
| So funny. | ||
| They're brand new lawyers because that's all we could get to take this case. | ||
| A good lawyer would be like, no, we'll never do this. | ||
| So then they're like, maybe we can figure something out. | ||
| A lawyer takes on the case, gets involved. | ||
| Realizes Alex is going to maybe get them disbarred. | ||
| They skedaddle and someone else comes in. | ||
| Your Honor, I'm representing Alex Jones. | ||
| Can I stop? | ||
| Yeah, the court says fine. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Reasonable thing to do. | ||
| But look, man, one of the other problems besides Alex's lawyers, he doesn't get to choose the lawyer that he wants because they're maybe not... | ||
| Where's Cochran at? | ||
| Well, isn't he dead? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But other people are... | ||
| Where's the ghost of Cochran at? | ||
| We're at the court of heaven. | ||
| That's where it's being tried by Johnny Cochran. | ||
| Some people are not qualified to practice in Texas or not allowed to. | ||
| They haven't passed the bar in Texas or whatever. | ||
| And that's a problem. | ||
| But the other problem, I think, is probably even more serious. | ||
| And if Alex is to be believed, this judge does not know the law. | ||
| The judge also, who is known as a bomb thrower, who's known by the Democrats that I've talked to as well, is just unbelievably ill-informed about the law. | ||
| They even quote it here in the Huffington Post, of all places, who's attacking me, that it's unheard of. | ||
| Lawyer Bill Ogden, with far ball, told Huffington Post that Gamble's default, that's the judgment ruling, is a bit of a myth. | ||
| In the legal world, but not if they can make it real with me, where a judge just decides, wow. | ||
| Bad sign that Alex didn't recognize the name of the law firm, Farrar and Bell. | ||
| Yeah, that's not good. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| That was weird. | ||
| Are you alive? | ||
| I recognize that name, and I'm not being sued by them. | ||
| You are not being sued by them for what could be a ridiculous number of monies. | ||
| Yeah, and for a long time. | ||
| It seems like if you're in a protracted case, And the law firm, you'd know the name of the law firm against you. | ||
| To a certain point, they have been in this case so long, you would halfway expect them to have developed an almost collegial relationship. | ||
| Like, we'll go out and eat lunch together. | ||
| We've just spent every day together for four years or whatever. | ||
| Nope, still doesn't know their name. | ||
| Doesn't seem to. | ||
| So Alex is being sued for defamation for things he didn't do. | ||
| And it's simple. | ||
| They don't want me to have a jury trial. | ||
| Did you know that in the Texas cases... | ||
| You don't want you to have a jury trial. | ||
| I'm being sued by people, and they say in the court case that I've never said their names. | ||
| Texas law says you can't sue somebody if you didn't say their name for defamation. | ||
| But it's right there. | ||
| Did you hear me? | ||
| So this is sort of true, but Alex is still lying. | ||
| So the cases that were brought by Neil Heslin and Posner and De La Rosa, those are defamation cases because Infowars and Alex did say their names specifically on air. | ||
| Conversely, the case that's being brought by Charlotte Lewis isn't for defamation because her name was never said, but her child was invoked. | ||
| And thus she accused Alex of intentional infliction of emotional distress. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Which is a different charge. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Because the defamation statute probably would not apply. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Alex is playing fast and loose with these details, knowing that his audience will never look into it or try to figure out the difference or why. | ||
| It's like, I never said her name. | ||
| I'm being charged with defamation. | ||
| Well, not in that case. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In any situation like this, if you're a listener of Alex, just based on all we've had to do to like... | ||
| Narrow down what's actually happening. | ||
| And how many different complicated things are happening simultaneously. | ||
| Alex is giving you a very simple answer. | ||
| They've never heard of the law! | ||
| This judge... | ||
| There's a bomb thrower who's ill-informed on laws. | ||
| Yeah, so, okay, that's a simple explanation. | ||
| I think I'm gonna go with the simple one. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Keep it simple, stupid. | ||
| That's the philosophy. | ||
| I think you probably self-select for an audience that is really into easy answers. | ||
| Very easy answers. | ||
| So, congrats. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Anyway, Alex is insisting that he's never gonna get a fair trial. | ||
| Oh, woe is me. | ||
| So they're not going to give us a fair trial. | ||
| Just like they're not going to give America a fair trial because tyranny has taken this country over. | ||
| Especially in blue cities and blue states. | ||
| The Republicans have their own problems, warmongering, surveillance, police state stuff. | ||
| But with the left, all of that and more is fused together with their righteousness that they're in control of society and that they rule the world. | ||
| Alex has had every opportunity to have a fair trial. | ||
| This is nonsense. | ||
| Also, it seems really weird that Alex seems to be brushing aside the problems he has with Republicans when those problems are, quote, warmongering, surveillance, police state stuff. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| Okay, so the... | ||
| The Republicans want to take over the world, watch us at all times, and control our behaviors. | ||
| Hey, buddy, how many documentaries have you made called Police State? | ||
| Yada, yada, yada. | ||
| Sure, there's some problems there, but it's the left. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because they're sanctimonious or something. | ||
| Oh, they just want us to have food. | ||
| All of us! | ||
| They want a police state and they're snooty. | ||
| Oh, oh, okay, okay. | ||
| So no one's gonna starve in the streets. | ||
| Really? | ||
| No one? | ||
| Well, then what's the fucking point of living? | ||
| Ridiculous. | ||
| Ridiculous. | ||
| I find this defense to be laughable. | ||
| It's a really dismal display, but it gets a little bit sadder. | ||
| And again, it's been years since I've even talked about this, so I'm venting a little bit. | ||
| But in a way, it's like the movie Idiocracy. | ||
| It's so insane, it's almost comical. | ||
| So we're going to play a clip of the court scene from Idiocracy at the end, and that's how I stay sane. | ||
| But first, let me read you a statement from Norm Pattis. | ||
| I actually got my hands on this statement from Norm Pattis. | ||
| Knock, knock. | ||
| Who's there? | ||
| No, seriously, knock, knock. | ||
| Who's there? | ||
| Orange. | ||
| Orange who? | ||
| Orange, you glad you bought woke insurance. | ||
| Man, it's hard to be white. | ||
| Good joke. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, boy. | |
| Okay, so you got one pun. | ||
| You got a knock-knock joke in. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Under the guise of it being written by Norm Pattis. | ||
| Yes, I know. | ||
| I know. | ||
| This has been a good day for you. | ||
| I got a call back to woke insurance in the mix, too. | ||
| This is fantastic. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| You get five points. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| So, we have one last clip here, and it's the end of Norm's quote. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Which is not the knock-knock joke. | ||
| It's exactly what you would expect from Alex's lawyer. | ||
| And then, man, it feels like Alex is about to go to an ad, and he doesn't really, but kind of soft does an ad. | ||
| It is not an overstatement to say that the First Amendment was crucified today. | ||
| He fought King George back in 1776, and today we fight judicial tyranny. | ||
| There are still some good judges, there's still some good FBI, there's still some good Justice Department in this country. | ||
| And we're not going to fight these people with violence or with muskets like we saw 240-something years ago. | ||
| We're going to fight them with the truth and justice in educating the public and taking our country back through elections and through other legal and lawful processes. | ||
| I appreciate the listeners keeping us on air. | ||
| I haven't made a big deal about this the last few years. | ||
| We've been incredibly persecuted by these people. | ||
| I've hired some of the top lawyers in the country. | ||
| They've never seen anything like this in their lives. | ||
| And so I just trust in God, and I trust in you to support us, and I appreciate you all. | ||
| So that's a soft ad. | ||
| And he goes out with the idiocracy clip and just yelling about how he's going to fight the New World Order. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I found this response to be... | ||
| I would be underwhelmed by this if I was a fan of his. | ||
| I would find this to be... | ||
| You would need to more directly rebut the allegations against you. | ||
| I would feel like this was a little weak. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| And he's not even really theatrical. | ||
| He's not full of bombast. | ||
| Just kind of a... | ||
| Just a wet noodle. | ||
| He's fucked. | ||
| I think that's what we're hearing. | ||
| We're hearing a guy who's just like... | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| I mean, the moment he said, my lawyers have never seen anything like this, I was like, every single lawyer on the planet has never seen anything like you, Alex. | ||
| No one has seen anything like this, asshole. | ||
| No one has seen anything like you. | ||
| You have ruined the legal system for lawyers. | ||
| And they love that shit. | ||
| It's just a perfect storm of narcissism enabling and... | ||
| The political situation we're in. | ||
| Well, and Kraft. | ||
| Like, he has, you know, some... | ||
| Whether it's in a loathsome area of expertise, it's still talent. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| He's fucked. | ||
| I'm just saying that over and over again, thinking, yeah, he's fucked. | ||
| There's no getting around this. | ||
| We've thought that so many times in the past. | ||
| I know, but there's no way! | ||
| God, I can't even say it. | ||
| If I say there's no way, then I can't do it. | ||
| We live in a world where you can't say there's no way this happens. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I have two thoughts about this, kind of. | ||
| And one is that Alex kind of won in as much as he didn't have to reveal a lot of information that I bet he would not want to be public. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, totally. | ||
| The inner workings of how... | ||
| made their news, let's say, could be a lot more damaging to him than any financial penalty. | ||
| So I do feel like there is that angle of this, but at the same time, that might be me being too pessimistic, because he still has the Connecticut case that's still going. | ||
| Further, as you get into figuring out the damages in the jury trials in Texas, if he does not cooperate, They may levy a penalty that is huge. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, beyond anybody's capability of paying. | ||
| Yeah, there is a decent chance you could end up seeing this bankrupt him. | ||
| I don't know that that's the case, but he has a financial incentive to cooperate. | ||
| In this phase of the trial. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because if he doesn't, he's leaving it up to chance, kind of, what they believe is a fitting punishment and what he's worth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think that he kind of gives off the air of somebody who's pretty fucking rich. | ||
| Seems like it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I mean, the first thing I thought was, I was like, throw out $250 million. | ||
| Just say it. | ||
| Just say it. | ||
| Fucking do it. | ||
| Because that's what I would do. | ||
| That's what happened with, what was that, Miles Kwok when he sued Roger Stone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| He was like $100 million, and Roger's like, man, I'm so sorry. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I did not mean that shit. | ||
| Whoa, I never said anything, and I apologize for all of it. | ||
| Yeah, I think that that's probably going to be one of the more interesting things to follow. | ||
| Does his tune change in terms of cooperation when it comes down to, like, now this is going to hit your bottom line a little bit. | ||
| You have an interest in this. | ||
| It's not just obfuscating, because eventually a decision... | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I mean, it just seems like it's too much. | ||
| It's too much happening all at the same time for them not to come back with something that is massively punitive. | ||
| Because we're dealing with somebody who's... | ||
| Everybody is saying that this has never fucking happened. | ||
| This is something taught in schools because it doesn't actually happen. | ||
| So you've got that already. | ||
| So your default judgment money should be upped double just for that. | ||
| Just for the extra three years it took or whatever, you know? | ||
| On top of that, you've got this guy who is essentially... | ||
| Created the blueprint by which democracy has been demolished. | ||
| But you can't punish him for that in this case. | ||
| You have to keep it... | ||
| But what you can do is make an example out of somebody who behaves the way he does. | ||
| I mean, I don't want vengeance to come into it, but I do think... | ||
| Absolutely not vengeance. | ||
| I mean, straight up, like, this should be a simple, like, hey... | ||
| Fuck around, and you're going to look at a $250 million judgment. | ||
| I don't think $250 million is unfair. | ||
| I don't think so either. | ||
| I think it's actually kind of low, honestly. | ||
| Man. | ||
| Yeah, well, I just... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm fascinated to see where this all goes. | ||
| And I was going to get into his actual show. | ||
| From after the period. | ||
| But because we had this conversation with Mark Bankston, I didn't want to overburden the episode and make it too long. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And so for our next episode, we will get into some of the actual show response. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But for now, I'm just like, I could see a number of directions this could go. | ||
| I know that he'll obviously try and use it to raise money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Probably have another money bomb at some point. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And maybe Mike Lindell will swoop in. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There could be all kinds of stuff. | ||
| By the way, Mike Lindell was just on a telethon on Jim Baker's show. | ||
| He was just a guest on Jim Baker's telethon. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| What is it about? | ||
| That's very close. | ||
| They're all the same. | ||
| Very close to covering that. | ||
| It's the same shit. | ||
| They're all the same shit. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Doesn't matter where you go. | ||
| The far right is the same shit. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So, we'll be back, Jordan. | ||
| But until next time, we have a website. | ||
| We do have a website. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| We are also on Twitter. | ||
| We are on Twitter. | ||
| It's at knowledge underscore fight. | ||
| Nat, go to bed, Jordan. | ||
| Yes, we'll be back. | ||
| But again, thank you so much to Mark Bankston for joining us. | ||
| A very rare guest appearance. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Yep. | ||
| Worthy. | ||
| Worthy guest. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But until next time, I'm Neo. | ||
| I'm Leo. | ||
| I'm DZXClark. | ||
| I'm Daryl Rundis. | ||
| And now, here comes the sex robots. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |
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