Today, Dan and Jordan discuss the deposition of Infowars Managing Editor Kit Daniels in his lawsuit regarding his misidentifying of the Parkland shooter. Plus, plaintiff's attorney Bill Ogden joins the gents to discuss the act of deposing Info-Warriors
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledge Fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Knowledge Fight. | |
| I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys, saying we are the bad guys. | ||
| Knowledge Fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dan and George. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I need money. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your room. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Knowledge Fight. | |
| KnowledgeFight.com. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around, worship at the altar of Selene, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Oh, indeed we are, Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Dan! | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Quick question. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| What's your bright spot today? | ||
| My bright spot today is actually a continuation of the last bright spot. | ||
| Ah, we're musterding. | ||
| That is that people have responded quite well to the notion of a mustard year. | ||
| Of a year of a mustard? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Which is actually maybe not a bright spot. | ||
| Maybe it's the worst possible outcome. | ||
| But I do appreciate it. | ||
| Also, someone tweeted at us a picture of Hot Dan the Mustard Man. | ||
| Oh yeah, I saw that one. | ||
| That might be my moniker for the year of the mustard. | ||
| It'd be Hot Day on the Mustard Man. | ||
| I feel like I have to follow you to some sort of hidden pathway if you're Hot Day on the Mustard Man. | ||
| Right, you're going to have to choose your own condiment to celebrate a year of. | ||
| I feel like I'm going to be eaten with a condiment. | ||
| Are there any condiments that you would choose to sample varieties of for a year? | ||
| There's probably not enough ketchups in the world. | ||
| You know, I mean, here's what I would say. | ||
| Salad dressings? | ||
| What would I call them? | ||
| Spicy Asian sauces. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Like a sweet and sour kind of sauce combined with all of those varieties. | ||
| I don't know what I would call that as a category. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| But I would like all of them. | ||
| Okay, well that's your year. | ||
| That's my year. | ||
| We've got to find a way to make a name out of it. | ||
| We've got to find a way to hear that. | ||
| So, thank you all for enabling me. | ||
| Yes, I think that's kind of the problem here. | ||
| So what about you? | ||
| Well, I mean, my bright spot's not going to be like Will Smith and Chris Brock. | ||
| Some shit? | ||
| No, absolutely not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you want? | |
| It's mustard. | ||
| I didn't want anything. | ||
| I definitely don't want mustard. | ||
| My bright spot is somebody, very kindly, they didn't leave their name on the note, but they very kindly sent me some black bean coffee and chocolate. | ||
| Oh yeah, I tried some of that chocolate. | ||
| Oh, delicious. | ||
| Absolutely fantastic. | ||
| The coffee is fantastic. | ||
| You don't like anything other than Folgers. | ||
| We've established this. | ||
| No, I love coffee. | ||
| I just drink so much of it that I'm... | ||
| I might as well survive cheaply. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You drink a pot of coffee a day and Starbucks will catch up to you real quick. | ||
| It will, but also Folgers sucks. | ||
| Well, you drink a pot of it a day and you'll get used to it. | ||
| Anyways, it's very nice. | ||
| That chocolate was really good. | ||
| Thank you very much for the wedding present. | ||
| I only have one thing to say, which is stop it! | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But I appreciate it. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I wish I had that on hand. | ||
| It really would be valuable. | ||
| Well, that's great, yeah, and thank you to them for also, I mean, it rolled downhill and I got to eat some of that chocolate. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, well, naturally. | ||
| So, Jordan, today, we have a very, we have a holiday on the show. | ||
| People will be very excited to learn that today we have two depositions to go over. | ||
| Another formulaic objections episode for y 'all. | ||
| And there's a lot to get into, so I think we should not kill any more time here, and let's get down to business. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| We've got to say hi to some walks. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| I think we do. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's called for. | ||
| So first, A-up Nick into Yorkshire air! | ||
| Or something. | ||
| Uh, you are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you very much! | ||
| Next, more QAA and knowledge fight crossovers! | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much! | ||
| Next, Jordan is my favorite author. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much! | ||
| Next, my dog is a policy nonk. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much! | ||
| Next, Brett and Paul are besties. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much! | ||
| Correction. | ||
| Paul and Brett are besties. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| So Brett may not be as into it as Paul is. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| Yeah, it's possible. | ||
| Also, we got a technocrat in the mix, and I have news on the other side of this. | ||
| But, hello, my name is Eric, and I tried to get the daddy shark back. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a technocrat. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| I have risen above my enemies. | ||
| I might quit tomorrow, actually. | ||
| I'm just gonna take a little breaky now. | ||
| A little breaky for me. | ||
| And then we're going to come back, and I'm going to start the show over. | ||
| But I'm the devil! | ||
| I've got to be taken off the air! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck you! | |
| Fuck you! | ||
| I've got plenty of words for you, but at the end of the day, fuck you and your New World Order, and fuck the horse you rode in on, and all your shit! | ||
| Maybe today should be my last broadcast. | ||
| Maybe I'll just be gone a month, maybe five years. | ||
| Maybe I'll walk out of here tomorrow, and you never see me again. | ||
| That's really what I want to do. | ||
| I never want to come back here again. | ||
| I apologize to the crew and the listeners yesterday that I was legitimately having breakdowns on air. | ||
| I'll be better tomorrow. | ||
| We will not know if he's better tomorrow because today we will be hearing nothing from Alex. | ||
| Zero Alex info. | ||
| But the news is I've decided... | ||
| What's that? | ||
| I will be... | ||
| A benevolent podcaster. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And Eric is asking for Daddy Shark to come back. | ||
| Yes, of course. | ||
| I will honor this on the 666 episode. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So episode 666, Alex is coming back and we'll bring back Daddy Shark. | |
| Everything we do is so arbitrary. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's... | |
| I think that preparing this... | ||
| Podcast is a brutal endeavor that is not fun a lot of the time, and so I must amuse myself with years of mustard and dangling daddy shark drops. | ||
| So that is coming. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| So, Jordan, today we have two depositions to go over. | ||
| We're going to be talking about one with Kit Daniels, who is an editor and writer for Infowars, the website. | ||
| Not an on-air personality, although I definitely have seen him in some videos. | ||
| In the past, but not regularly. | ||
| Loose definition of writer. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that is an issue that is central to this. | ||
| So that is a deposition that is related to the Marcel Fontaine case, which is a case where Kit Daniels wrote an article and posted it on Infowars where he misidentified the Parkland shooter based on a picture that he found on 4chan. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this... | ||
| Is delved into in this deposition. | ||
| And then the second deposition is Owen Troyer's deposition in the Sandy Hook case in Texas. | ||
| And so these are the two that we're going to get into. | ||
| And interestingly, these are depositions that Mark Bankston didn't take. | ||
| No, he wasn't him. | ||
| He was not the lawyer who was giving these. | ||
| And actually, it's Bill Ogden, his co-attorney for the plaintiffs. | ||
| You know, in our past episodes, the last few at least, we have some deposition stuff to talk about. | ||
| It's sort of been our pattern to talk to the attorney who's holding the deposition. | ||
| Inexplicably, they want to talk to us. | ||
| It's very bizarre. | ||
| But that luck has got to have run out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, absolutely. | |
| There's no way that Bill would want to come and have a conversation with us. | ||
| Let's be honest, we're kind of uninteresting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hey, folks. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| We're here joined to start off this episode before we get into these depositions here that we have in front of us. | ||
| Another formulaic objections episode. | ||
| Everybody loves depositions. | ||
| They can't get enough of them. | ||
| What a weird world we live in where our fans are like, holy shit, a deposition? | ||
| Watch out! | ||
| It's like a big deal. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| I don't know why either. | ||
| But it's fantastic. | ||
| Yes, and speaking of fantastic, we are joined today to talk about this a little bit. | ||
| We've had the other counsel for the plaintiffs on Mark Bankston a couple of times talking about these here depositions. | ||
| But this time, we've had the other counsel in the case. | ||
| Bill Ogden joining us. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Bill, how are you today? | ||
| Hey, long-time listener, first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a big fan of what is now probably the most listened to legal podcast ever. | ||
| So, you know, thanks for having me, guys. | ||
| I think our pals at Opening Arguments might have a... | ||
| They might be pissed, yeah. | ||
| You have touched on a really good point, though, and that is that we screwed up by putting our podcast in the comedy and news sections of iTunes. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| We should have chosen something else that we could be, like, at the top of the charts. | ||
| We're the number one law. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You guys are a wandering vagabond of different genres of podcasting. | ||
| The most versatile. | ||
| We are not the best point guard, not the best center, but we're an all-around kind of six-man. | ||
| We're Bam Adebayo. | ||
| That's how we do it here. | ||
| Well, I don't know if I would go with the shrimp. | ||
| My only reference. | ||
| So, Bill, we're thrilled to talk to you a little bit before we get to this episode, because we're listening to two depositions that you actually were in charge of and were handling. | ||
| Presenting? | ||
| What would the word be? | ||
| Interrogating. | ||
| It turned out pretty much as an interrogation, but the lawyer will take a deposition, the witness will give a deposition. | ||
| So I took these two depots. | ||
| Did you ever? | ||
| You took them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I did. | |
| I did. | ||
| It's some of my better work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You took those depots from behind, my friend. | |
| I was thinking about this. | ||
| I went to Austin. | ||
| I met you and Mark and came along to the Alex and Daria depositions. | ||
| And both of those Mark was taking. | ||
| And I saw his style. | ||
| And, you know, he has kind of like a more, like a jocular kind of. | ||
| Style. | ||
| There's a little bit of a friendship thing and some playing around. | ||
| And I watched these depositions and I realized I would be so much more scared of being across the table from you. | ||
| I think Mark will mess you up too. | ||
| Oh no, absolutely. | ||
| But he will make you like it while he does. | ||
| There are questions that you asked Kit and Owen that I just see like, oh no, no, no. | ||
| No, definitely. | ||
| And I tell witnesses. | ||
| In these cases, I've told witnesses, especially ones that have been deposed by Mark and then are now being deposed by me. | ||
| Or if we have a witness go day one and I'm doing the day two depots, I'll tell the witness, like, I'm just letting you know now, Mr. Bankston wasn't very pleasant yesterday and he's the nice one of us. | ||
| Like, I will straight up just tell him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fucking training day style Denzel Washington shit. | |
| I just don't want them to be caught off guard when it happens. | ||
| It's coming. | ||
| If you've got to do something, you might want to hydrate. | ||
| We have these two depositions here today. | ||
| We have a Kit Daniels deposition and an Owen Schroer deposition. | ||
| The thing that's kind of weird about this is these are from two different cases. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So Owen's case, Owen's deposition was for the Hesslin case, where he went on air and said what he said about Neil's son and that kind of thing. | ||
| And then Kit was the person at Infowars that wrote the article that started all of this. | ||
| He wrote the article about Marcel Fontaine, who's an individual in Massachusetts, who they pinned his photo and said, this is the Florida Parkland High School shooter. | ||
| That just massacred a bunch of kids in Florida. | ||
| So that case, the Florida case, we filed first, and from the media attention that we had no idea was coming. | ||
| From all of that, we got contacted by the Sandy Hook appearance, and that's kind of where the chronological order of how this all came about. | ||
| That is kind of remarkable. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine being Kit Daniels and recognizing exactly what... | ||
| A dumb fuck-up you made that took down all of InfoWars. | ||
| And he's like, he's very critical, at least answering my questions, he was very critical of himself at this point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was like, one to ten rated, and he's like, two. | |
| And my response was, really? | ||
| What's a one? | ||
| I straight up, and it wasn't planned, and some would say it was a bit unprofessional, but hey, that's just... | ||
| But he said two, and I just was like, really? | ||
| What's a one? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is as bad as it gets. | |
| One would be like broken sentences. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the words actually lighting on fire as you write them. | ||
| Yeah, or he actually used white font on a white background, so it was just a blank piece of paper, I guess would be a one for him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They forgot to cut out the slurs. | |
| That's not going to trigger a litany of litigation against his company. | ||
| But hey, I guess that's... | ||
| Better than this. | ||
| That's so wild, though, to think about, like, this just kind of dominoing effect, you know, like, Kit Daniels wrote this article, and that led to Marcel Fontaine being defamed, and the starting of this trial, which leads to the Sandy, you guys representing the Sandy Hook folks, which leads to that. | ||
| But even think, like, the further back, because the Fontaine stuff was based on him reporting on, like, Troll shit from 4chan. | ||
| So whoever posted that actually is responsible for taking down Alex. | ||
| You can't just go back. | ||
| You got to keep going forward because then it triggered these lawsuits and here I am talking to you guys. | ||
| So here I am congratulating Jordan. | ||
| I believe you just got married. | ||
| Yes, I did. | ||
| We can thank Kit Daniels for that. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| Wait, you might not be married if it wasn't for Kit Daniels. | ||
| If it weren't for Kit Daniels, I think this all makes sense now. | ||
| I'm pretty sure that logic follows. | ||
| This is the problem with us just watching knowing. | ||
| Yeah, the determinism aspect of it is getting... | ||
| The only way this could be better is if it was Kit Daniels' first day. | ||
| That would be the greatest moment. | ||
| Like, the very first thing he wrote on his first day was this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, that'd be beautiful. | ||
| Unfortunately, he'd made many errors prior. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| One of the things that kind of shook me a little bit was when I was watching that deposition, Kit Daniel seems a little bit older than I expected. | ||
| I kind of pictured him like... | ||
| I think he's 37. He's older than I am, which I was kind of caught off guard by as well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wait, wait, I'm 37. But you also... | |
| Dan's older than you are? | ||
| I'm kind of caught off guard by that, to be honest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I am 34 years young. | |
| I have really fucked up my life. | ||
| Oh, I know. | ||
| Look at us both and work backwards. | ||
| But I think I'm better than Kit Daniels, at least, because I wasn't in that deposition room. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not keeping score here, but I don't think it's close. | |
| I don't think it's close here. | ||
| I'd always pictured him as kind of like a maybe mid to late 20s guy because he has sort of a youthful naivete to him in the times that I've seen him on video on Infowars before. | ||
| But then seeing him in that room, there was obviously a longer face and certainly... | ||
| Not having fun. | ||
| Maybe that ages you a little bit. | ||
| That would probably age you. | ||
| I will say this. | ||
| You can be a certain personality in life or in your professional career and whatnot, but when you walk into the deposition room and you ask, where do I sit? | ||
| And they point to the head chair. | ||
| It kind of kicks in. | ||
| And then when that court reporter tells you to raise your right hand, it's like, oh my God, what am I doing here? | ||
| And so life gets real, real fast. | ||
| And I'm just like, oh, this is another day in the office. | ||
| But everybody else is just like... | ||
| Because you're looking right at a giant camera lens that's just directly on you, and you've got lawyers just spit-firing questions, and somebody's asking an objection. | ||
| You don't know what's going on, but you know you don't want to answer that really hard question. | ||
| And you have lawyers who have probably poorly prepared you. | ||
| Certainly a number of past lawyers probably didn't tell people exactly. | ||
| Here's what it means to be under oath. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| Here's what a corporate representative does. | ||
| And that actually leads us to another interesting point, and this is very important, and that is that you, Bill, were the person who took Rob Dew's legendary deposition. | ||
| I did. | ||
| So my role at the firm, when I came in, I started looking, you know, they hired me right out of law school. | ||
| Well, actually, I worked there for a year and a half during law school, and then they offered me a job. | ||
| And so I started looking around to see what can I master that can bring value to the firm. | ||
| Crushing dorks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
To an extent, yes, that's actually what I do. | |
| So 30B6 is what we call it, which is a corporate representative depot. | ||
| And so I just kind of mastered meticulously going through topics and making the person just look really unprepared. | ||
| And with these topics, it wasn't hard because there's just no way. | ||
| There's so many false claims and just kind of bullshit being thrown around that no one could know and get a grip on all of it. | ||
| And even if they could, sincerely answering a lot of those questions would just kind of reveal more questions of the ineptitude and unpreparedness, probably. | ||
| Oh yeah, answering them is worse than not knowing. | ||
| At this point, if they knew the answer and had to say it out loud. | ||
| That would be worse than them not being prepared to be sanctioned to $100,000. | ||
| It's like Zook Spang in chess or whatever it is. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I learned one thing. | ||
| The word of the name. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| What kind of preparation did you, or I suppose, I mean, I assume that this type of deposition is a little bit different from the ones that maybe you're used to in a regular non-InfoWars setting. | ||
| Did you do, like, more preparation for this, or? | ||
| Oh, well, I'm pretty prepared on every case, but for this one specifically, when Mark came into the case, he came to me because I've been watching Alex Jones since college. | ||
| And not as necessarily as a fan, more as entertainment. | ||
| And so he and I had had conversations in the past about it. | ||
| He was like, hey, you want to do this with me? | ||
| I'm like, absolutely. | ||
| No questions asked. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| And so my first job, I made partner, I think, during this case like two years ago. | ||
| But I was an associate when I first came in. | ||
| And my first task was like, here's 200 hours worth of video. | ||
| I need you to watch it. | ||
| Kind of document everything that goes on. | ||
| And so like, I started going through it and I was probably like two or three or four days in and Mark came into my office and he was like, what are you looking at? | ||
| And I was like, hey, this Gulf of Tonkin thing. | ||
| And Mark was like, Mark could see in my face. | ||
| I was like drained. | ||
| But because the way it happens, he's just spit firing so much information from so many directions. | ||
| It really did kind of start messing with my head. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I had to stop. | |
| Mark was like, you got to stop. | ||
| You got to take a step away. | ||
| So I took like two days off and I went back into it. | ||
| I was like, oh, okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'm back. | |
| Jordan tried to get me to take a couple days off a while back. | ||
| Didn't stick. | ||
| Did not stick. | ||
| I gave it my best shot. | ||
| Yeah, it was definitely an experience. | ||
| And Mark was like kind of concerned. | ||
| Like, dude, did they get to you? | ||
| Like, you know, what happened? | ||
| You've been brain snatched. | ||
| It really is like the stylistic. | ||
| Approach that they use of just different topics completely that aren't related that are just getting thrown in your face. | ||
| It's like, you know, somebody tossing a bucket of hot dogs into your face and they're all just kind of hitting you in different areas and bouncing different directions. | ||
| And so you can't, to digest it, it's tough. | ||
| And so instead you just kind of keep absorbing. | ||
| Yeah, especially if it's like the topic is something scary. | ||
| It kind of overrides your ability to keep track of like, oh, you just jump from A to H. What is going on here? | ||
| And then H back to B, and then now we're at X. What's going on? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I did all that. | ||
| I documented it. | ||
| So from there, I had a pretty good grasp on the case. | ||
| And then Mark is, you know, just so we're clear, Mark's 100% the smart one of our group. | ||
| Like, he's the brains. | ||
| I'm, you know, I would, I guess I default to the looks, but, you know, I'm like a seven on the best eight. | ||
| Six if I'm in California. | ||
| You're aggressive, I think. | ||
| Yeah, I'm definitely the aggressive one. | ||
| And I don't like taking Zoom depots, which are like COVID made those a thing. | ||
| And a defense attorney asked me one time, he said, why don't you like taking Zoom? | ||
| And I was like, well, because I've never lied to your face. | ||
| And he just looked at me like... | ||
| Well, did you lie to me on the phone? | ||
| Did you lie to me on Zoom? | ||
| And I was like, I'm not saying anything else. | ||
| I'm just saying, I've never lied to you straight to your face. | ||
| So, yeah, I'm definitely the bully of the group, I guess. | ||
| Like, when somebody needs to, you know, when a bully needs to get, you know, humbled, I guess I'm the person that comes in. | ||
| And takes care of that. | ||
| Mark can do it. | ||
| And he does it in a very articulate way. | ||
| And he's smart enough to maneuver you into it. | ||
| You don't even know you're hurting your case by the time you're saying your answer. | ||
| Where I'm just asking it in a way that is impossible for you to answer. | ||
| And you're like, oh, please. | ||
| You're the cuck destroyer destroyer. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| I'm not the not-cut-destroyer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| And I think probably, too, that being in the room, being in person as opposed to over Zoom, there's so many of those other aspects. | ||
| Like what you mentioned, you're sitting at the head of this table, you have that camera in front of you, and other people are in the room. | ||
| I imagine that's just a completely different vibe. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| There's an intensity to it, to which I thrive in. | ||
| You know, I have no problem just staring someone down with eye contact dead silent. | ||
| It's awkward as shit. | ||
| I know it. | ||
| They know it. | ||
| They're like, what do I do? | ||
| And so then they'll try to, you know, make a noise to fill that void. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. | |
| Let's sit in this. | ||
| Let's enjoy this. | ||
| You're describing like the Errol Morris philosophy of like filmmaking, you know, just make people stare at a camera and eventually they'll say something that they shouldn't. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And so I use my techniques of kind of... | ||
| So Wes Ball and Kyle Farrah started our firm when they were like 31 or 32. And they rolled the dice. | ||
| They took all the risks. | ||
| They were fantastic lawyers. | ||
| I've wasted so many years. | ||
| So many years. | ||
| You're fine. | ||
| You're doing great. | ||
| Everybody's 10 years older than me. | ||
| Mark, Wes, Kyle, and David at the firm are older. | ||
| And so I came in and I had the benefit of one, riding their coattails. | ||
| They were already super successful. | ||
| I didn't have to sweat a line of credit in whether or not I could pay employees. | ||
| They did all the hard work. | ||
| And so I got the benefit of learning under them. | ||
| And so I just took certain aspects from each of the lawyers that I could. | ||
| He kind of molded it into my own little stylistic approach to it. | ||
| I feel like it's been pretty successful so far. | ||
| I guarantee Kit and Owen think so. | ||
| Which of those other partners taught you about snack preparation? | ||
| That's actually Wes Ball. | ||
| It's not necessarily snack. | ||
| He'd actually probably have been pissed. | ||
| If I was an associate and I pulled out a bag of gummy bears during a deposition, he'd be like, what the fuck are you doing? | ||
| Making people uncomfortable when you're asking uncomfortable questions makes them just want it to end. | ||
| So they give you whatever they know what you want. | ||
| And if they're uncomfortable, they're just going to give it rather than playing this line of things where they... | ||
| Ask your question again. | ||
| I don't understand what you're asking. | ||
| That kind of thing. | ||
| And so, yeah, Jordan, what you can't see on the depots is I stop at Bucky's, which is a very famous gas station. | ||
| It's the size of a Walmart in Texas. | ||
| And there's one right between Houston and Austin. | ||
| So I stop and I buy this giant bag of gummy worms. | ||
| And so during the depot, I just open them up while they're asking questions. | ||
| And I'll hold it up to the light. | ||
| I'll eat it. | ||
| And like, I use it as a, and then I'll look over at the witness and they're just staring at my hands. | ||
| They're, you know, looking at this gummy bear and I'm, you know, I'm just chowing down on them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It actually, the one thing that was bad was when- This is like Daniel Craig's southern accent in that movie. | |
| 100%. | ||
| So I actually stole that from, there's a real famous criminal defense lawyer in Texas, very famous, and he would take a paperclip. | ||
| While the other side was doing their opening statement, and he would slowly straighten it all the way out. | ||
| And this was back when you could smoke indoors. | ||
| You know, cigs inside. | ||
| I think that's what frat guys call it these days. | ||
| But he would take a straight paperclip, and then he would slide it down the cigarette, and he would light it. | ||
| And then he would smoke it, and the ash wouldn't fall. | ||
| And so the jury would just stare at that instead of paying attention. | ||
| To the other side's opening statement because they're waiting for this long cigarette ash to drop and it doesn't. | ||
| And he's just, you know, going at it. | ||
| And I heard that story one time and I was like, oh, that's kind of cool to do. | ||
| And so I kind of, that's where it started. | ||
| And then I incorporated the awkwardness into it. | ||
| See, I feel like that cigarette trick, that's like sleight of hand. | ||
| It's screwing with people's attention. | ||
| Whereas like the gummy bear is just aggressive. | ||
| Like that's just like. | ||
| It's menacing. | ||
| It's just to let you know, I'm so comfortable that I'm going to snap. | ||
| This is not uncomfortable for me. | ||
| You're dying inside. | ||
| It would be very threatening. | ||
| I mean, it's funny now, but if I was in a room with you while you were doing that, God, I would just call you a prick nonstop. | ||
| Like, I wouldn't be able to answer a question. | ||
| I'd just be like, can you get this prick to stop eating these fucking worms? | ||
| But imagine a scenario where you can't do that. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| You have to answer questions. | ||
| Well, then I'm in trouble. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Then you're just sitting there, dying inside, watching me snack. | ||
| And there's two things. | ||
| One, you're thinking how disrespectful. | ||
| Or two, God, I wish he'd give me one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so, either way, it's not good for you. | |
| Can you ask for a gummy worm, or is that against the law? | ||
| I think you'd probably be crossing the line. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| That would be best case scenario for me. | ||
| Because if they asked me for a gummy worm, I'd go, I only brought enough for one. | ||
| Knowing it's a massive bag. | ||
| Oh, for God's sakes. | ||
| You son of a bitch. | ||
| Most people avoid the awkwardness and I'm there to create it and live in it. | ||
| When someone gets awkward, you learn a lot about that person. | ||
| You can get a good read on somebody with how they react to something that's uncomfortable. | ||
| I try to make people uncomfortable very quickly in a depo. | ||
| Not in a bad way. | ||
| To put them on their toes, see how they react so that I can then kind of morph my questions into a more impactful way. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're like, what if Jigsaw was a lawyer instead? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, it's like, what if Jigsaw just didn't kill people? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It was just like an escape room. | ||
| Hey, he lets you hang yourself too. | ||
| I mean, it's the same basic principle. | ||
| You know, that's the idea. | ||
| The Owen deposition actually does start with, would you like to play a game? | ||
| So, Owen's, it's the, I've been watching Owen for a while because, you know, he's like, oh, watch me own these libs at this march or this protest. | ||
| And I'm thinking to myself, this guy's not that smart. | ||
| He's just going and finding, those are the best clips he's got from everybody he spoke to. | ||
| So, as soon as Hessling, the Hessling case came in, I called dibs on Owen from day one, three, four years ago. | ||
| And Mark was like, 100%, you can have it. | ||
| He was like, why? | ||
| And I was like, because we're roughly the same age. | ||
| And I want him to feel what other people feel like when he does it to them. | ||
| Sounds like the urge to bully the bully. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's like, let me show you how it's done when you meet your match here. | ||
| And the best part was, I'd found a video the night before of him at the Women's March in D.C. And he was wearing Trump garb. | ||
| And a lot of people were saying like, oh, how could you be out here wearing a Trump scarf? | ||
| You know, support and say you support women. | ||
| He's like, oh, I support all the women that were sexually trafficked at the Epstein Island, which I was like, OK, I can get behind that, you know, mutual ground. | ||
| And then they're like, yeah, but y 'all, you know, Infowars is bad. | ||
| And he's like, name one Trump accuser. | ||
| If Trump is so bad, name one woman's name that's an accuser. | ||
| And these people just couldn't. | ||
| And he's like, yeah, so you can't even name one name, so you're not even informed. | ||
| And so I heard that, and I was like, oh, God. | ||
| I was like, all right. | ||
| So during the depo, I straight up just asked him, I'm like, can you name, do you know the name of Mr. Heslin's son? | ||
| Do you know, can you name one child? | ||
| And I just started asking him, he's like, no, he's like, you can't. | ||
| I was like, let's watch this clip. | ||
| So I play the clip of him doing it to other people, and at the end, it was so unnecessary for me to do. | ||
| I was like. | ||
| You see kind of how I got my question in format there? | ||
| And he just looks at me on the record and goes, I tipped my hat to you on that one. | ||
| And I was just like, alright. | ||
|
unidentified
|
At least you understand what was happening. | |
| He knew. | ||
| I just got railed. | ||
| That's awareness inside the room. | ||
| You know, like him being able to get to that place. | ||
| I thought Owen was a bad guy. | ||
| Excuse me, sir. | ||
| I believe I have been hoisted upon my own baton. | ||
| Good night! | ||
| The fun thing, too, is imagining that these people that he's talking to in that video that you found, what if they hosted a show where they complained about Trump accusers and still couldn't name one? | ||
| That's the thing that's even more offensive. | ||
| And what makes your example even more egregious, I think. | ||
| Yeah, so he, I will say this, since we haven't got into some of the specifics, I walked into Owen's depot thinking he was a bad guy. | ||
| And I could see in his face, the more we talked about what happened and how we got to here and how wrong all the shit was that he said, he was having an epiphany of anger. | ||
| Not towards us or towards the plaintiffs, but towards his staff and towards the company. | ||
| And at the end, when I said, you know, if Mr. Hesslin or Ms. Lewis was in the room right now, what would you say? | ||
| And he was remorseful. | ||
| He was sorry. | ||
| He was the only one. | ||
| And he walked out of there and I was like, God damn it, I wanted to hate you more than I do right now. | ||
| And it's not fair, but I really do appreciate you doing what you did and saying what he did. | ||
| And so he walked away from that. | ||
| I get his position now. | ||
| He's stuck. | ||
| What's he supposed to do? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nobody else is going to hire him. | |
| A car wash would. | ||
| He doesn't deserve to be in media just because he has been. | ||
| I'm not sure a car wash in liberal Austin would hire him. | ||
| If he goes by John or whatever his real first name is and maybe, I don't know, talks a little differently. | ||
| He can reinvent his life somewhere in Nebraska. | ||
| That's a great place for him. | ||
| Omaha is nice during like... | ||
| Oh, I wouldn't let him in a city. | ||
| He's got to be very quiet and by himself. | ||
| Small town. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Population one. | ||
| Well, I mean, he's from my home state of Missouri. | ||
| And so like, you know, he's not... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that how y 'all say it? | |
| I've been butchering it this whole time. | ||
| Some people do. | ||
| It's Missouri. | ||
| But like... | ||
| Well, I'm saying people from there. | ||
| Like, that's funny you brought that up because I'm always like, hey, can I ask a question? | ||
| Why do we call it Germany when people from Germany call it Deutschland? | ||
| Anybody? | ||
| And everybody's like, shit, I didn't. | ||
| Well, it's because they're wrong. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| You don't know where you live. | ||
| Yeah, that's actually kind of a bone of contention of people in Missouri. | ||
| There's the Missouri people and then the Missouri people. | ||
| It's, I mean, Civil War kind of shit. | ||
| It is ironic, but yes, that was the state divided over the Civil War. | ||
| Yeah, those strains remain. | ||
| But yeah, either way, he walked out of there and he was the only witness that's walked out, besides maybe Kit, that was actually sorry. | ||
| And I don't know if they're sorry because of how the depo went, or that was the first time anybody had actually given them all the facts. | ||
| Because there was a lot of stuff both of them had no idea. | ||
| They're like, wait, what? | ||
| Well, I'm definitely more inclined to agree with that about Kit. | ||
| Watching his deposition, I do think there's a lot he didn't know. | ||
| Many things that we'll get into over the course of the episode, he shockingly doesn't know about. | ||
| Owen, I think, knows a bit more. | ||
| But the other problem, too, that I have is, like, yeah, he may not have another choice, but if Owen recognizes how bad this stuff is that he's involved in and continues to do it... | ||
| That's worse. | ||
| Like, if you watch his show now, he's doing the same stuff. | ||
| Right, he's just very safe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's just making sure nobody's names and I'm not identifying groups. | |
| He's safe. | ||
| With what he does. | ||
| And he is a true believer to an extent on that. | ||
| But when he talked about Sandy Hook once, and it just happened to be the one time within the statute of limitations that brought them in. | ||
| And he'd only been at the company a couple months when he did it. | ||
| I think somebody was just like, hey, new kids, say this. | ||
| And since then, he was on a bunch of other nonsense. | ||
| But yeah, at the time, I don't fault him necessarily for that. | ||
| And watching his show, I did not think he was going to be remorseful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just thought he was just, hey, that's the cost of doing business for what I do. | |
| Yeah, because he seems like he'd be more brash. | ||
| He did. | ||
| And on air, in his interviews and all these videos that he posts, he is very brash. | ||
| But when he gets into a serious moment, he's just a little kid. | ||
| Yeah, what you're describing about him and you wanted to hate him more at the end of the deposition was definitely kind of how I felt about Paul Joseph Watson's deposition. | ||
| I didn't hate Paul Joseph Watson at all. | ||
| Paul Joseph Watson, he saw the writing on the wall. | ||
| No, totally. | ||
| Stop doing this. | ||
| What the fuck are we doing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is bad. | |
| This looks horrible for all of us. | ||
| It's going to give us this reputation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you can see from that email. | ||
| He splits, and he starts doing his own thing, because he's not going down with that ship. | ||
| Well, I mean, he has his feet in both sort of boats, as it were. | ||
| He has his own thing, and as much as he's doing his own YouTube channel, it's kind of separate, but he's also still hosting Infowars sometimes, and he's still very closely connected. | ||
| He's still the main editor of the site, and what have you. | ||
| I will say this. | ||
| He does have some sort of moral compass, and he knows right and wrong, which not, and that's weird to say about, you know, adults, but this case has showed me, you know. | ||
| Well, I mean, you have to kind of be a psychopath to work at Infowars, so it does make sense that right and wrong would be a rare ability. | ||
| It's funny because, you know, as much as they're like, oh, we're not sheep, we don't just follow what, you know. | ||
| Dr. Fauci says. | ||
| But all the employees are just sheep of Alex. | ||
| I just said what Alex told me to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Yeah, like, hey, he told me to put that, he told me, like, Kit, Kit, oh, God. | ||
| Poor sweet Kit. | ||
| Poor sweet Kit. | ||
| He is in such shit right now at work. | ||
| I am sure. | ||
| Because he's, some of his answers were horrific for him, career-wise, because he was like, I'm like, why did you put this here? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he's like, Alex Jones just told me to put that, so I did. | |
| And I'm like, oh. | ||
| Wait, wait, the defamatory part? | ||
| Yeah, I'm like, oh, okay. | ||
| And I was like, and then I asked him, I was like, and what, you know, Alex is your boss. | ||
| Like, what he says, you know, you kind of got to go with it. | ||
| And he's like, oh, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm like, oh, no, kid, don't say that. | |
| If I recall, there's a couple of times you were like. | ||
| Alex is not going to like that answer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'll straight up, like, no take back seats. | |
| You said it. | ||
| You got to live by it, bud. | ||
| You swear to God, right hand up. | ||
| You swear to God. | ||
| Yeah, so I'll just say, like, ooh, he is not going to like that answer. | ||
| He said something way different than his. | ||
| And then you can see it in their face, like, no. | ||
| There's something so awful about, like, being in a room, being questioned by somebody who has, like, Sort of the freedom or whatever to just like, you know, the trap has been set. | ||
| You have stepped in it. | ||
| And then you were just like, whew, that was a trap. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I know, like, I knew the trap was there, right? | ||
| I'm setting it up. | ||
| They have no idea. | ||
| Then they say it. | ||
| And sometimes, like, Kit, he doesn't even know he stepped in. | ||
| Like, the trap's there. | ||
| He steps in it. | ||
| He's just dangling. | ||
| And I'm like, yeah. | ||
| This is a trap. | ||
| And he's like, oh, shit. | ||
| What a trap. | ||
| I'm amazed. | ||
| Whenever we've watched all these depositions, I am just shocked that these people aren't constantly going like, oh, shit, tricked again. | ||
| Like, it is over and over and over again, where afterwards they go, oh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, it's just a rake. | |
| They're stepping on the same rake over and over and over again. | ||
| Yeah, it's that gif of Sideshow Bob. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's definitely, one, regardless of who the lawyer is, tough to get some of these individuals prepped whatsoever. | ||
| I don't think prep is the problem. | ||
| I think it's something else. | ||
| Johnny Cochran couldn't help some of these Infowars people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's definitely a tall order to try and say, oh yeah, I'll prep these guys in a full day. | ||
| A full day of prep is a lot of prep. | ||
| They had the legendary Robert Barnes. | ||
| In their corner. | ||
| Bobby Bottle Service. | ||
| Work doesn't get much better. | ||
| Yeah, so I was the one that kind of broke him in the second, no, the first Rob Dudebo where he just goes off the handle and he's like, you know, Mr. Banks is laughing and all this stuff and you guys need to just cut all the unprofessionalism, you know. | ||
| What I'm asking for is not unreasonable. | ||
| He just blew his lid, and I knew he had a fuse. | ||
| I just wanted to see how far I needed to burn it. | ||
| And so once he did, I looked at him as calmly as I could, and I just said, I'm not even going to comment on the reasonableness of what you just said. | ||
| And I just left it there, and you could see him just, ooh. | ||
| And I knew that's when he was probably going to be exiting the case. | ||
| I might have poked back with like, hey, why don't you do an interview with Stefan Molyneux about that? | ||
| Why don't you go do that? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But yeah, the depots have definitely been fun. | ||
| And it kind of gave Mark and I... | ||
| It brought us back to our roots and showed us this is why we do this. | ||
| Because this case was taken on... | ||
| We call it a hobby case, but it's not like a hobby. | ||
| We brought it on because the money doesn't... | ||
| We don't care about the money. | ||
| We're successful in all sorts of... | ||
| I've got some civil rights cases and some... | ||
| Big industrial accidents and the auto defects. | ||
| We've made money. | ||
| So each lawyer brings on a case at any given time that they want to do for the right reasons. | ||
| And that's why we brought this one on. | ||
| And that's why I give all the credit to Wes and Kyle because they have never told us no and have never said, hey, watch your spending or anything. | ||
| They're just like, hey, go have at it. | ||
| If you guys need help, let us know. | ||
| I'd love to come in. | ||
| And so they've been great with that. | ||
| So when we brought this in, We started taking these depots and it was fun again. | ||
| It wasn't work. | ||
| I'm not prepping. | ||
| I'm thoroughly invested in being as prepared as I can because we just wanted to destroy this testimony. | ||
| I have to imagine that after you start doing these depositions, you start to see the level of sort of, you could call it unpreparedness or disrespect that's being shown by these Defendants. | ||
| And like, that's gotta kind of be invigorating in some ways, or at least freeing. | ||
| It is mainly because, so it happens all the time in all cases. | ||
| Not like this though, right? | ||
| Not like, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| This does not happen. | ||
| First of all, we've never, everybody always, you know, 30B6, it's not uncommon to do a motion for sanctions. | ||
| It's not uncommon to seek a default because this is so egregious. | ||
| But you know, deep down inside, no way are you ever getting a default until now. | ||
| And these cases have just, they literally have kind of, they kind of screwed me moving forward because no matter, I'm not going to be so hard on defense counsel anymore because I'm just in my head, I'm going to say... | ||
| Could have been worse. | ||
| I've seen way worse. | ||
| You're no Barnes. | ||
| You were wrong, but you're not that bad. | ||
| When I first started, I was the young guy, so I had a chip on my shoulder, and I was just like, let's go. | ||
| I'm about to start a bunch of forest fires. | ||
| Even if it's unnecessary, I'm here to start wars with the other side. | ||
| You were 2016 Owen Troyer. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| A little bit of this Owen Troyer still. | ||
| Some of us grow, some of us don't. | ||
| And then I got older and I started being a little bit, you know, hey, you don't have to be this aggressive and all that. | ||
| And then I got to this case and I was like, oh, here we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's do it. | |
| I forgot what this felt like. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Y 'all are hungry. | ||
| Back whenever I was a stand-up, if you had a run of really bad shows and you just weren't doing well, you just kept sucking, there were a couple of rooms that were notoriously easy to get really big laughs from. | ||
| And that's where you would go to like... | ||
| Reinvigorate yourself, you know? | ||
| Like, yeah, I am funny, that kind of thing. | ||
| I can make it. | ||
| It really does feel like this is where you're at, you know? | ||
| Like, oh, all these real cases are fucking hard, you know? | ||
| I gotta fight that. | ||
| And this, I just get to come in and fucking beat up on, I mean, what amounts to children. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Suing Alex Jones or being the plaintiff's attorney for Alex Jones is like going to the shithole. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| That's the name of him. | ||
| And you gotta think, like, if I get an... | ||
| I get an airbag defect case, right? | ||
| And I get 15 gigabytes of documents sent over to my office. | ||
| There's nothing exciting about it. | ||
| I get 15 gigs from Infowars. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm like, where do we start? | |
| I really hope there's no child porn in this. | ||
| Because that's happened. | ||
| There was child pornography in some of their discovery. | ||
| Not in our case. | ||
| I was in the Connecticut case. | ||
| But it was just the stuff, the documents they do have. | ||
| We only get about 15% of the craziness that is given to them or that they send to each other. | ||
| A lot of stuff doesn't come out. | ||
| And so when we get to see some of them, we're like, Jesus. | ||
| It is fascinating to see how the inner workings of something like this are. | ||
| Yeah, one of the things that really stuck out to me from the two depositions we went over last time was the Comprehensive background check on Leonard Posner that was just weirdly in their files. | ||
| We don't know where it came from. | ||
| It just, you know, fell out of your hair that way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that a hair doll? | |
| Like, no, it fell out of your hair that way. | ||
| Yeah, that was surreal. | ||
| That and them posting, you know, the Honor Network's P.O. box, that's the stuff that pisses us off. | ||
| And that's why we're like, okay, you know. | ||
| I'm not in any way going to even pretend to be nice in the beginning in some of this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so that was the initial motivation. | |
| And then once we started getting into it, it was just at this point, it's like, I'm going to enjoy what I'm about to do to you as a person. | ||
| And I'm actually a nice guy. | ||
| But now when I'm punching the time card, I'm like, time to be an asshole. | ||
| Clocking to work. | ||
| Probably cathartic in some ways. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's like going to a break room. | ||
| And Mark and I, you know, fully invested in this case, we would sometimes lose sight of, you know, because we're so focused on doing what we're doing and we are enjoying it. | ||
| And then we'd have to sit down together for a meeting and talk about what we're doing next. | ||
| And when we started talking about trial, we realized, like, Jesus, this is actually going to be a very emotional. | ||
| And it's going to be a very, you know, there's not going to be any humor in the trial, right? | ||
| And so we... | ||
| That's why I'm not invited. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| Because you, there will be moments where you're like, please let me talk, please let me say something. | ||
| Or just laugh. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| And so, you know, the clients have been fantastic. | ||
| They are some of the bravest people I've ever met. | ||
| And Mark is extremely close. | ||
| He's closer with all of them. | ||
| I'm, you know, I started off as kind of the workhorse, so I was behind the scenes doing all the stuff. | ||
| Watching all the garbage videos. | ||
| God, and it's so many. | ||
| It's so many more than you think. | ||
| Like, when I say 200 hours of video, it's 200 hours of what should be a thousand hours, right? | ||
| It's because everything's so scattered out and there's no real plan. | ||
| At least like a third of it is commercials. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And the commercials. | ||
| So Elizabeth Williamson is a writer at the New York Times. | ||
| And as soon as we filed this case, she was like, she contacted us and said, I want to, can I fly down and just follow y 'all around for a couple of days? | ||
| And we're like, sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| New York Times, you can do that. | ||
| But we didn't think, what we didn't know is we had zero media training. | ||
| And so step one was like, all right, lunchtime, let's go to El Tiempo, which is, you know, that's where we ate Mexican food in Houston. | ||
| And, oh, wait, I don't know if you actually got El Tiempo, but they're known for very strong margaritas. | ||
| And so we got hammered with a reporter, and we said all the stuff you're not supposed to say to the media. | ||
| And so I realized it about an hour in, and I'm like, ah, Ms. Williamson, if this is going to turn into a hit piece, I just want you to know. | ||
| You have full authority to lie and embellish. | ||
| Because if it's going to be bad, I want to be like Wolf of Wall Street bad. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So she just looked at me, she's like, no one has ever said that to me before. | ||
| I was like, I just want you to know, because I realized we've said a lot of stuff we should have done. | ||
| And no one said off the record at all, guys. | ||
| And I'm like, looking at the guys, everybody's like, everyone's having that epiphany. | ||
| And she's like, guys, like, no, you guys are fine. | ||
| Y 'all been great. | ||
| But she... | ||
| Bartenders should really do that for you. | ||
| Like, say this is off the record. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Every bartender should have a journalist credential that they have to check. | ||
| Yeah, they have to do the whole thing. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| I'm going to open a bar, call off the record. | ||
| But she just published a book a couple weeks ago. | ||
| It's a Sandy Hook book. | ||
| And in that, she interviewed me kind of right when I was really digging into the videos. | ||
| And she was like, what are you getting out of it? | ||
| And I had just watched one. | ||
| And I was like, honestly, I'm really involved. | ||
| I'm really into these combat wipes. | ||
| Because that was the commercial that I just heard. | ||
| And she looked at me. | ||
| She was like, what are they? | ||
| And I was like, I mean, if you break it down, it's just baby wipes for a bunch of middle-aged Caucasian men that are camping out in the woods with some friends calling themselves a militia. | ||
| And she put it in the book. | ||
| If you accidentally cut yourself with your friend's hunting knife, then these wipes are... | ||
| These are man wipes. | ||
| You know, keep yourself fresh down there when you're with all your militia. | ||
| That's in my intro of the book. | ||
| And I was just like, one, I'm wearing that as a badge of honor for the rest of my life. | ||
| And two, I could have been more professional in that interview. | ||
| But here we are. | ||
| With that, watching all those videos and having that, like, you said you watched Alex from when you were, like, in college, you know, as entertainment. | ||
| Yeah, back when it was 9-11 and JFK and, you know, our human hybrid amphibians, you know, real. | ||
| It was, you know, my generation, you know. | ||
| Facebook came to my college my freshman year. | ||
| You had to have a.edu email address to have Facebook. | ||
| Like it was the Facebook. | ||
| Yeah, the Facebook. | ||
| I will never forget. | ||
| We all promised we would never forget the the. | ||
| And so this technological era of news and information and all that was as I was coming of age. | ||
| Alex Jones, I would see different articles or videos and stuff. | ||
| And so we'd watch him and my friends would watch him and talk about him. | ||
| And so I knew exactly who he was a long time ago. | ||
| But it was entertainment. | ||
| And then the closer we got to 2016 election is when he decided, you know, Sandy Hook, he took an extreme story, probably the most egregious extreme story in my lifetime. | ||
| And then he made it even more extreme. | ||
| Right? | ||
| From there, the closer we got to 2016, he realized if he goes political, he can grow. | ||
| And he did. | ||
| When he went right, he exploded. | ||
| And I mean, for instance, InfoWars had White House press credentials at one point. | ||
| Kind of. | ||
| I mean, what I said wasn't not true. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In a strictly legal sense, that might be accurate. | |
| You've fallen into our trap, fool! | ||
| They got me again! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Give me my gummy worms! | |
| Yeah, I'll have one of those now. | ||
| He was political before, it was just that he loved Ron Paul, who was never going to win. | ||
| The doctor. | ||
| He's the most notorious OBGYN on the planet. | ||
| And the only OBGYN, I think, who tried to take over an island nation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, everybody has their version of events, right? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| But no, he was. | ||
| He was libertarian. | ||
| I mean, he was not a fan of George Bush. | ||
| No. | ||
| George Bush was too much of a liberal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which is funny because George Bush became governor by saying, yes, that person over there is conservative. | ||
| I'm more conservative. | ||
| And then Alex Jones is like, yeah, this crazy lib. | ||
| Yeah, this guy's a socialist. | ||
| But yeah, he exploded in 2016 and it kind of took its own wings from there. | ||
| Did that experience really feel different though? | ||
| Watching it and paying attention versus watching it for entertainment? | ||
| Oh, 100%. | ||
| Because I'm not really watching the content as much as I'm breaking down The style of how he's doing it, how he's going into these and planning them and how he transitions, you notice all of that now. | ||
| And you realize it's, I'm not going to say genius, but it was a way that no one had really mastered until him to rapid fire things at someone to where you can't ask questions because there's so much coming at you and there's so many questions to ask that you just don't have time. | ||
| Or you forget about something that he said five minutes ago because you're now talking about something else. | ||
| Yeah, there's a craft to it that I'm not even positive he's entirely conscious of what he's doing. | ||
| But there is something to that. | ||
| But I mean, it's really just kind of a debate tactic, like overwhelming the person that you're talking to with too much stuff and hoping they get flustered. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I mean, one of our clients was a fan of his. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Up until... | ||
| Sandy Hook. | ||
| He's an avid listener of his. | ||
| And then this happened and, you know, well, let's just say not so much a fan anymore. | ||
| It's got to make you reevaluate whether or not it's a good idea to believe Alex about Oklahoma City and stuff like that. | ||
| You would hope. | ||
| You're on the wrong end of his conspiracies. | ||
| Speaking of that, I thoroughly enjoyed asking Kit and Owen, like, tell me one story that y 'all have gotten right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then Owen was like, Gulf of Tonkin. | ||
| I was like, okay, anything in the last 20 years? | ||
| And they didn't cover that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They went back and that was all real fun. | ||
| Owen was on the ground at the Gulf of Tonkin. | ||
| He was negative 10 years old. | ||
| I will say this. | ||
| They called Epstein early. | ||
| No, they didn't. | ||
| Well, ish. | ||
| They didn't name him. | ||
| They just said that the globalists are sex trafficking. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, but the satanic panic happened in the 80s and 90s. | |
| They're just ripping that shit off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But they did call Jussie Smollett. | |
| But that's just racism. | ||
| You can't just... | ||
| Listen, if you're just a racist all the time, then yes, you're gonna call Jussie Smollett. | ||
| But that's not fair. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Putting racism aside. | |
| You can't! | ||
| Put racism aside! | ||
| The way I like to say it is even in a pitch black room and you're throwing darts at the wall, you hit the target every once in a while. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's what, it's literally what they do is they just, everything's a conspiracy or everything's not what it seems until one time. | ||
| And, you know. | ||
| Yeah, I'll give you that. | ||
| However they got there, those were things that they. | ||
| Didn't totally end up with something that was wrong in hindsight. | ||
| They didn't get sued. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's the bar. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But they could have. | |
| That's the bar. | ||
| Well, maybe not, because Jesse Smollett was a public figure. | ||
| Probably would have been clear. | ||
| When it becomes public figure, it becomes a lot more difficult. | ||
| These cases become more difficult because you have a platform to speak yourself. | ||
| Yeah, that moment with the Kid Daniels when it's just like, name something you didn't get wrong. | ||
| Just one. | ||
| And then it's just like, oh, wait. | ||
| And it just keeps going. | ||
| It's painful. | ||
| Painful stuff. | ||
| Yeah, Rob Dew, the first time it happened, Rob Dew was doing it. | ||
| I was like, you know, just name one. | ||
| And he's just sitting there, and I was like, this is getting uncomfortable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I just say it out loud to him, and he just looks at me like, you're right, man. | |
| Fuck. | ||
| This is horrible. | ||
| Well, I don't want to say under oath something we got right, just in case. | ||
| Because under oath, you know, Their whole motto and philosophy at the company is like, you know, if we get under oath, we'll tell you the truth. | ||
| We got the stories. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then they get under oath and they're like, please don't make me answer that. | |
| Please, for the love of God, please don't make me answer that question. | ||
| Well, Alex just the other day was saying that once it gets to the trial for the Sandy Hook case. | ||
| He's going to reveal and expose how all the people are making money on Sandy Hook and all this. | ||
| Yeah, he's very excited to get on the stand and really defend himself. | ||
| So I'm excited for a number of things. | ||
| First of all, when these got filed and all the media kind of started, I was immediately on his show was like, oh, Hillary Clinton and George Soros are funding this. | ||
| And the day that that was said, we were all at lunch and I looked at my phone and I saw it. | ||
| Somebody had sent me a screenshot. | ||
| And I was like, take a look at this. | ||
| And I looked at the table and I was like, all right, guys, which one of you fuckers has all the money and isn't sharing? | ||
| Because it's like, where's the Soros check? | ||
| Because I haven't gotten any. | ||
| I didn't get any either. | ||
| Everyone's phone's on the table. | ||
| Who has a text from Hillary? | ||
| Who's holding out? | ||
| It's also funny because Kyle Farah came to a hearing with us and He stood up in court at one point because something got played by the defense and that Soros accusation got thrown out and Kyle stood up and said, Judge, I have to stand up. | ||
| I'm a little offended here. | ||
| I just want for the record to be known I'm funding all of this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just want everyone to know this is my money. | |
| I picked up the check, not Soros. | ||
| So I don't want anyone getting credit for this except me. | ||
| I am funding this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So if there's any power behind us, it's mine. | |
| Well, I'm glad we were able to clear up the non-Soros connection. | ||
| Unless Mark's keistering a bunch of checks that he hadn't told anybody about. | ||
| We have not received a cent. | ||
| We did start receiving money and cards of support at the beginning. | ||
| And every once in a while, we'll still get one. | ||
| And people just started sending cash and stuff to us to say, hey, we want to help with the legal costs. | ||
| And Mark came in and said, what do we do with all this? | ||
| I'm like... | ||
| I was like, donate it. | ||
| He was like, where should we donate it to? | ||
| I was like, the Honor Network. | ||
| He's like, oh, that's perfect. | ||
| Anytime somebody emails us or says, and we're actually very responsive to people that reached out to us via email or call. | ||
| I'll just say like, hey, if you'd like to donate, I really appreciate it, but we don't need it. | ||
| If you want to donate, donate to the Honor Network because they're a network that targets internet misinformation. | ||
| That probably makes you look more like you're taking Soros money. | ||
| Hey, I will do anything in my power to look more suspicious to Alex. | ||
| See, here's the problem. | ||
| Just really freak him out. | ||
| When your optics are giving money away, clearly that means that Soros is giving you that money to give away, obviously. | ||
| Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to give that money away. | ||
| Makes perfect sense. | ||
| I want to buy one of those little earpieces with the little stretchy cord that, like, the Secret Service wear. | ||
| I want to wear one of those in trial and just look at him and then start talking into my cuff. | ||
| It'd be great. | ||
| Like, somebody's feeding me lines into that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, who is that? | |
| Who's he talking to? | ||
| It'd be great if in a deposition you had an earpiece, but it was connected to a gummy worm. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That would be great. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| Just had it right here and just kind of shoot it off. | ||
| And a lit cigarette. | ||
| Yeah, with a paperclip. | ||
| With a paperclip inside. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And then everybody's just looking at me like, hey, that's illegal now. | ||
| Can't smoke indoors. | ||
| Is this lawyer crazy? | ||
| So we should probably wrap this up before too long. | ||
| I think we're about an hour or so. | ||
| But I want to know if there's anything else that you wanted to cover about the depositions. | ||
| Anything that would be a good introductory note? | ||
| Because we're going to get into it after we talk here. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So I would say with the Owen Depot, I walked out of that thinking that was way better than I thought it was going to be. | ||
| And I had very high expectations for myself. | ||
| He knew the position he was in, and he was one of the few that didn't even try to fight. | ||
| At one point, kind of threw all the papers in the air and said, Jesus, just make this end. | ||
| Two. | ||
| Owen makes more money than I thought he did. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Their payroll is out of control based on the depositions that I've heard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then when you get to Kent, early on I realized I'm not dealing with the top brass here. | ||
| But he's the type of person that doesn't know better than to believe all of them. | ||
| A lot of this stuff. | ||
| And so I used that against him. | ||
| And he would say a sentence and I'd say, oh, you just used this word. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| And then he'd give me his definition of it. | ||
| I'm like, okay, perfect. | ||
| Let's now apply that to... | ||
| And I did it with Owen. | ||
| That's probably the highlight for me is when I said, Owen. | ||
| Is Infowars mainstream media? | ||
| He's like, absolutely not. | ||
| I'm like, okay, what is mainstream media? | ||
| And then he gives me like, you know, they have been around for a little while, have a reputation. | ||
| They have corporate advertising. | ||
| And he gives me like four points. | ||
| And I'm like, all right, well, what about Breitbart? | ||
| And he's like, no, I wouldn't say they're mainstream. | ||
| And I'm like, well, those four points. | ||
| And then I realized, as soon as I say that, I realized, holy shit, Infowars, before they were deplatformed, had all of these things. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| Let's get back to these four points. | ||
| And so I go, is Infowars? | ||
| And he's like, absolutely not. | ||
| We're not mainstream media. | ||
| And I'm like, well, what about this, this, and this? | ||
| And he's like, well, that's not just the whole list. | ||
| And I'm like, okay, well, what else is on the list? | ||
| And he's like, ugh. | ||
| And I'm like, all right. | ||
| You can kind of see what we're doing here. | ||
| And he's like, but we're not mainstream media. | ||
| I'm like, according to your definition, bro. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You might be. | |
| You just might be mainstream media. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The highlight for... | |
| And so then I... | ||
| At one point, I got him, at one point in the depo, I asked him, I'm like, so let's just agree. | ||
| You don't even know what mainstream media is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he's like, yeah, yeah, I don't know what it is. | |
| So I'm like, Jesus, this is best case scenario for me. | ||
| And Mark's sitting there and he's, when I'm going at it, like he and I work really well together. | ||
| So we're handing notes and making sure that we're on the same page. | ||
| But half the time, by the time one of us gets done with the note and hands it to the questioner, we've already verbatim said that. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So we can read each other's minds. | ||
| We've been doing this for a while. | ||
| And so Mark starts writing. | ||
| And then when that question comes out, I can hear him stop. | ||
| And I hear him go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he just kind of has a short gasp because he knows it's coming. | |
| And Owen says, yeah, I don't know. | ||
| And Mark just goes, God. | ||
| And then it was loud enough to where everyone in the room heard, but it didn't get caught on the record. | ||
| There's one other time that if you listen closely, you can hear it. | ||
| And it's during Owen's depot. | ||
| And Owen's like, yeah, I was live on air filling in for Alex. | ||
| Somebody who I don't remember handed me these documents and said, we already got the clips ready to go run the story from Zero Edge. | ||
| And I'm like, so you're just a puppet. | ||
| And he's like, I'm not a puppet. | ||
| And I'm like, well, a puppet is somebody who conveys a message, but someone else has control. | ||
| And I'm like, he's like, yeah. | ||
| And I'm like, you're live on air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's like, yeah. | |
| I'm like, somebody hands you a story. | ||
| You don't know what's in it. | ||
| He's like, right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I'm like, but they do. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So they have control of it. | ||
| He's like, right. | ||
| And then you convey the message. | ||
| He's like, exactly. | ||
| And I'm like, so you're a puppet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He was like, yeah, yeah, I am a puppet. | |
| And Mark just goes, to which, like, this testimony is not supposed to exist, right? | ||
| No one's ever supposed to say I'm a puppet. | ||
| But this Mark just goes, I'm Ron Burgundy. | ||
| Just right in my ear. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And if you listen, it didn't make the transcript, but if you listen, you can hear it. | |
| Because throughout all these depots, regardless of who's questioning, the other person is literally there just eating popcorn, watching and trying to hold it in. | ||
| And there's times where you can't. | ||
| But yeah, if you listen closely, you can hear the, I'm Ron Burgundy? | ||
| And he wasn't trying to be disruptive or anything. | ||
| It just had come to him. | ||
| And he said it very quietly in my ear. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I just look at him and I was like, shh. | |
| Wow, that's a little loud, buddy. | ||
| And he was like, what's it? | ||
| We're going to have to look for that. | ||
| This is definitely going to be very important to us from here on out. | ||
| Owen admits, doesn't know what mainstream media is. | ||
| And I am a puppet. | ||
| And yeah, Kit Daniels cries a lot. | ||
| And rightly so. | ||
| Hard to argue with that. | ||
| To sum up the six or seven hours, that's the high one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's the brief description. | |
| Yeah, that's a broad stroke. | ||
| And now we'll get into a couple hours breakdown of the six hours. | ||
| It's a little bit more specific. | ||
| Bill, thank you so much for joining us. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| As a policy wonk, I was honored to be asked to appear on the show and I love what you guys do. | ||
| That means a lot, and it was great to meet you down in Austin. | ||
| I may make the trip for the trial, so I hope to see you again next month. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Take care, guys. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And congratulations on getting you married. | |
| Congratulations to you and to Kit Daniels for causing them. | ||
| I feel like you've got to rewrite your vows on that one. | ||
| Wow, what fun. | ||
| Oh my god, he's so nice. | ||
| Yeah, what a delight. | ||
| Thank you, Bill, for coming in and having a little chat with us before we get going. | ||
| And now we will partake in a long, extended session of listening to him question idiots. | ||
| Yep, that's the plan. | ||
| So I decided that we're going to start with the Kit Daniels deposition, because I think... | ||
| I think we can all agree that if this is the lineup of two, Owen's the headliner. | ||
| And that is a sad state of affairs, but it's just the reality. | ||
| So this was a deposition that was taken on February 17th of this year. | ||
| And like I said, it has to do with the Parkland shooter misidentification that Kit put in an InfoWars article. | ||
| He misidentified the shooter as Marcel Fontaine, who is now suing in force. | ||
| I know that Owen's probably more famous of a figure and that the Sandy Hook litigation is probably more primary in people's minds, but I've been thinking about it and I think that this deposition is probably more revealing than many of the others that we've covered. | ||
| Maybe not more than Daria, but it's up there. | ||
| And most of what we revealed through Daria's was that she's a weirdo. | ||
| I mean, I heard the psycho music during Daria's deposition. | ||
| It was, yeah, it was diegetic to the scene, as they say. | ||
| Part of this, like, the revealing nature comes from, I'm sorry to say, Kit seems really dumb. | ||
| I worry that that sounds harsh now, but I assure you as we go through this, that assessment, I think, is going to seem very fair. | ||
| He doesn't seem to know or understand much, and because of that, he ends up getting himself into really bizarre places while being questioned under oath. | ||
| Sometimes this dumbness intersects with a level of naivete, and in those places, Kit doesn't seem like he realizes some of the stuff he's revealing about the inner workings of InfoWars, which is wild. | ||
| A lot of that stuff may not be legally problematic, but it's definitely damning in the context of our show and what we cover. | ||
| There's another aspect of this, too, and it's something that Bill kind of touched on, which is that you kind of want to end up liking Kit a little bit. | ||
| He doesn't seem like such a bad guy a lot of the time, and his clear lack of understanding about basic concepts, it triggers a certain amount of pity. | ||
| in the viewer, in the listener of this. | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Those feelings are fairly complicated, and Wade, along with a clear awareness that he's been an employee at Infowars for like a decade, and he doesn't deserve the benefit of any doubts, It really makes a bizarre mix of an experience. | |
| Right. | ||
| And I think that that's definitely something that I found more interesting than I expected it to be. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| For someone who is essentially... | ||
| Infowars has its Boo Radley, if you will. | ||
| Well, he's not a franchise. | ||
| He's a role player, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I get what you mean. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You feel complicated things about Boo Radley. | ||
| Exactly, yes. | ||
| Sure, yes. | ||
| And yeah, I think there's a lot to dig here. | ||
| So let's just jump right in. | ||
| And we learn, right at the beginning, there's obviously a lot of preliminary conversation in any deposition, talking about past employment, how long have you worked at it for us. | ||
| And we're going to jump in where we learn about Daniel's salary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So from May of 2013 to the summer of 2018, you were an associate editor? | ||
| Approximately that, yes. | ||
| And then after that, you were promoted to managing editor? | ||
| Something like that, yes. | ||
| When you say something like that, what do you mean? | ||
| We don't really have a culture at Infowars of job titles. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What is the culture at Infowars? | |
| Well, what I mean as far as like some companies you would have like, oh, here's your new job title. | ||
| Maybe it's in writing. | ||
| That hasn't necessarily been the case compared to my other positions at other companies. | ||
| When you became managing editor in the summer of 2018, did you receive a raise? | ||
| No. | ||
| How much do you currently make? | ||
| Anywhere from $75,000 to $90,000 a year. | ||
| It's based on the range. | ||
| I assume it's not a salary position. | ||
| It is a salary position. | ||
| I think $75,000 is my base salary. | ||
| It can go up to 90 based on performance bonuses. | ||
| 75,000 is high, but I think compared to the other salaries we've heard from people who work at InfoWars, it's closer to a range that I find acceptable. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Still bums me up. | ||
| Still bums me out. | ||
| But you know, it should bum me out as somebody who supports workers is that he got a raise or he didn't get a raise. | ||
| He didn't get a raise. | ||
| Just a new title. | ||
| I know. | ||
| More responsibilities, probably more work, no raise. | ||
| I've already sussed out one major issue that I almost like in the back of my mind know will come up almost constantly. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| Kit Daniels giving answers that he does not realize are begging questions. | ||
| You know that like... | ||
| That's not really the culture we have here at InfoWars. | ||
| Begs the question, well, what the fuck is the culture at InfoWars? | ||
| I feel like we're going to go down that pathway a lot. | ||
| At risk of sounding like Paul F. Tompkins, it raises the question. | ||
| You're using that expression wrong. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Yeah, I think you're right, though. | ||
| He does open doors with answers a bit. | ||
| And I think that's a dynamic that is kind of fun, because I think that Bill, as a person holding a deposition, is the... | ||
| The sort who's like, alright, let's walk through that door. | ||
| Yeah, let's go. | ||
| You opened it, man. | ||
| It's not even me. | ||
| So it leads to some pretty interesting exchanges. | ||
| But so Kip makes $75,000 a year, a possibility of $90,000. | ||
| Still scoffing. | ||
| Gets bonuses. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| For what he's lying about. | ||
| Well, sure, but I mean, we wouldn't put it that way. | ||
| Did you receive a bonus in 2020? | ||
| 2020. | ||
| That would have been last year, correct? | ||
| I don't know, two years ago. | ||
| Yes, I did. | ||
| Do you remember what that bonus was? | ||
| That was probably approximately, for the year, $12,000 to $13,000. | ||
| Seems like the company was doing... | ||
| The performance of the company was better in 2020 than 2021. | ||
| Something like that, I would assume. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| What about 2019? | ||
| Do you remember? | ||
| It was approximately the same as 2020. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And 2018? | ||
| It's been a while since I've looked at my W-2 for 2018. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| But if we wanted to find that information out, it would be in your W-2s? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Have you ever had a year where you did not receive a bonus? | ||
| I don't believe so. | ||
| Are you aware that Free Speech Systems, as they state in this lawsuit, is over $50 million in debt? | ||
| No, I wasn't aware of that. | ||
| Do you think people should be getting bonuses if that's an actual real debt? | ||
| I wouldn't be the person to make that judgment. | ||
| If you were running a company that was that indebted, would you be giving bonuses to people? | ||
| Possibly not. | ||
| So there's a jocularness to him. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| Possibly not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe I wouldn't be. | |
| So of all the people that I've heard deposed, Kit is the only person who I don't feel furious about when I hear him talk about his salary. | ||
| The rest of these people are outrageous hacks and make way too much. | ||
| And don't get me wrong, Kit is a hack too. | ||
| But he's making under six figures. | ||
| Right, that's better. | ||
| Which I don't know why that's a dividing line somehow. | ||
| For whatever reason. | ||
| I can see an argument for someone like him being worth a decent salary, because honestly, without the people who run the site and manage the articles that go up, there would be no way the show could exist. | ||
| Alex can't curate that shit himself, and if he were forced to report on articles without tailor-made headlines for him to yell about, his show would suffer from that. | ||
| The people who write the articles and who repost other outlets' articles with new headlines are really the backbone of what makes Alex's show function. | ||
| And with Paul Joseph Watson doing a lot less of that heavy lifting in the past few years, someone like Kit probably does have real value. | ||
| Compare what someone like him brings to the table to someone like Owen or Harrison, and I think you'd rather have Kit around just about any day. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you know, I don't like that he's paid as much as he is, but relatively speaking, I think he needs to unionize in order to get a better contract for himself, because there's no way that Harrison Smith should be making that much more than him, right? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I mean, I would pay Owen like $15 an hour, because that's a respectable wage. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| And even though I'm philosophically opposed to them, I would offer Harrison... | ||
| I wouldn't give him anything past an unpaid internship. | ||
| The thing that I find really interesting about this clip and so many other moments in this deposition is the clear information-based power imbalance between the lawyer and the person being deposed. | ||
| Kit has no idea that InfoWars is deeply in debt. | ||
| Later, Owen is going to talk about how he has no idea what archives or databases the company keeps, and no one told him that he received a court order for discovery in this case. | ||
| This is because InfoWars is a deeply compartmentalized workplace. | ||
| Alex keeps so much information from the people who work there, and you can see... | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But it seems pretty high. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alex sucks at business, so I could see him being really deep in the soup, but I don't know what the fuller picture of this is until more information comes out. | |
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, just a quibble with Bill is just like, you know, I think the employees should be treated regardless of whether or not the owners of the company have fucked up and gotten themselves $50 million in debt. | ||
| That's all I'm saying. | ||
| I think in an ideal world that would be the case, but I think that maybe a business can't function with $50 million in debt. | ||
| That may be true. | ||
| Especially something like Alex's business. | ||
| There is something of the real politic to it, yes. | ||
| Kit is asked about, like, this, the dynamics of how, like, an article gets published. | ||
| And so, like, you publish this yourself, right? | ||
| You were able to hit the button and publish it. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| Hand you exhibit one. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Do you recognize it? | ||
| Yes, I do. | ||
| Tell us what it is. | ||
| This is a rolling update article I wrote in February 14, 2018, regarding the breaking news. | ||
| On the Florida shooting. | ||
| When you say the Florida shooting, you mean the Parkland? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Florida high school shooting? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Who published the story? | ||
| I did. | ||
| Did anybody help you? | ||
| No. | ||
| When you write a story and publish it, you have the ability to upload it to the website on your own? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Who all has that capability? | ||
| The writers that I just mentioned, except Dan Lyman usually submits his stories for one of the staff writers to publish for him. | ||
| We don't trust Ian. | ||
| Do you, as the managing editor, have to put eyes on every story that goes up? | ||
| That is my practice. | ||
| Is that a requirement? | ||
| It's not necessarily a requirement, but that's something I do in practice. | ||
| Have you always done that? | ||
| No. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| It's just kind of something that after all these lawsuits and litigation, I kind of decided for myself that that was something I needed to do and take more responsibility. | ||
| I think most people would hear this and just move along, but I think it's nuts. | ||
| I think that is wild. | ||
| This clip is probably the only time in any of these depositions that I've heard someone express that in response to all of the lawsuits InfoWars is facing, that they decided they needed to do a better job. | ||
| It was, yeah, no, I was just, I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on. | ||
| Mind-blowing. | ||
| Are you saying that you saw a problem, took responsibility, and then changed your behavior? | ||
| That fucking blows my mind. | ||
| Yeah, that's a really basic thing for normal people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's a super low bar to clear, but for InfoWars employees, that deserves a standing ovation. | ||
| I know! | ||
| No, my jaw is on the floor! | ||
| Now, to be clear, since this point, Kit has not done a better job, and the articles that go up on the website are still totally full of bullshit, but he has the ability to recognize that he needs to do better. | ||
| I'm going to assume that he has a problem with follow-through, or maybe he has a boss that needs him to do a bad job to keep the company in business, but I applaud this impulse on a very basic level. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I think the evidence shows that it doesn't really make a difference at all, but impressive all the same, I think. | ||
| You know, it is about what you do and not about what you say, but doing something like saying this is so unreal for an InfoWars employee, that almost counts. | ||
| This is sort of touching on a little bit of that naivete that I mentioned, because in this setting, it doesn't... | ||
| Behoove you to say something like that. | ||
| No, no, absolutely. | ||
| It makes you look like a better, more rational human, but it doesn't help you with the deposition. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| And it's not good defense, let's say. | ||
| Yeah, no, your best defense at InfoWars is pretending you've never heard of InfoWars. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What is morals? | ||
| What are you saying words-wise? | ||
| So, there's a interesting... | ||
| Through line, I'll say, in this entire exchange, the entire four-hour deposition, it pops back up. | ||
| It rears its head. | ||
| And that is, are you a journalist? | ||
| What is a journalist? | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so Kit has called himself a journalist in the past, but he realizes that might have been a mistake. | ||
| And so he addresses that here. | ||
| When you publish an article, who does the... | ||
| Research for it. | ||
| If it's an article I'm doing, typically myself. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| What's your training in journalism? | ||
| I took some classes in... | ||
| Well, first off, I've used the word journalism maybe out of ignorance before. | ||
| I kind of see myself more as a social commentator. | ||
| Since when? | ||
| I think my whole career at Enforced has been more about social commentator. | ||
| When did you start? | ||
| Lawsuit. | ||
| Characterizing yourself as a social commentator. | ||
| I think I started reading some Glenn Greenwald articles the past couple of months and kind of made me realize the way he approaches things is a lot different than the way I approach things. | ||
| Ew. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I... | |
| No. | ||
| What? | ||
| What? | ||
| It's real cool that Kit's been reading Greenwald lately as opposed to the other points in his career. | ||
| I was going to say, that's not true! | ||
| I think that Kit probably learned about him from appearances on Tucker. | ||
| That's what I would assume. | ||
| That would make sense. | ||
| Another interesting thing to point out is that all of these people say that they don't consider themselves Yeah, no. | ||
| Social commentator is definitely a Barnes or Pattis conversation there. | ||
| It feels like something that is useful to appear. | ||
| I'm sure to have less responsibility, but I don't know if it helps. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| So the intersection of, like, are you a journalist, I may have said I was in the past kind of thing, it leads to what I would describe as a weird who's-on-first routine between Bill and Kit. | ||
| What is a journalist? | ||
| What are you? | ||
| That's the thing that I, when I first started Infowars, it is very confusing. | ||
| So I understand your frustration with it, too. | ||
| Thanks, Kit. | ||
| Let me ask you this. | ||
| Maybe this will be easier. | ||
| What's the difference between you and a journalist? | ||
| I don't go out and talk to sources one-on-one. | ||
| I'm not going to go get a news tip from somebody and talk to them on Signal. | ||
| Let me ask you this. | ||
| Did you go out to a Bernie Sanders protest and talk to people? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Those are sources. | ||
| True? | ||
| I don't know if I'd call them sources. | ||
| I would just kind of give them an opportunity to vent their frustrations with what was going on. | ||
| So you were there as a therapist? | ||
| No. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're interviewing people for information, correct? | ||
| What their opinions were about the matter. | ||
| And then you took what you gathered from those sources of information and then you wrote articles or made videos about it. | ||
| I don't remember writing articles. | ||
| Let's slow down. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Let me finish my question. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| I just... | ||
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, boy. | ||
| So you get information from people and then you report it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So here's where I feel like social commentator falls apart, is that they feel like it's more honest than journalist. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it's still hiding behind something. | ||
| Like, what they should just say is, like, I'm a professional asshole. | ||
| I am a dick to people, and their reaction is what we sell. | ||
| Have you ever heard that Dennis Leary song? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I'm an asshole. | ||
| That's what we do, man. | ||
| And then I feel like people would be like, well, that's probably about as accurate as you're going to get. | ||
| Yeah, I feel like it would be tougher for a lot of Alex's audience to... | ||
| Get excited about... | ||
| A professional asshole? | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I just follow a professional asshole. | ||
| I think that might tarnish their image a little bit. | ||
| This guy is a dick, and I pay him for it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So as this... | ||
| The journalism question will come back up, of course. | ||
| But the question that's on the table now is that if you're reporting a story, is it more important to be accurate or first? | ||
| Or, you know, quick to get the story out? | ||
| All right. | ||
| Before you ask this question, Kit. | ||
| Do not answer this question. | ||
| Or answer poorly. | ||
| I asked Mr. Schroyer the same question that I'm about to ask you, which is... | ||
| Foreshadowing? | ||
| Do you believe it's more important to get the news right or to be the first to report the news? | ||
| I think it's both. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You don't think that the veracity of a story is far more important than it being reported before anybody else? | ||
| No, what I believe is that you want to be as accurate as you can be, but at the same time, you want to be timely. | ||
| I mean, look, that's dumb. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You don't want to ever say that, you know, you can sacrifice your obligation to be correct or accurate about things. | ||
| If it's in the interest of getting things out fast. | ||
| No, the editor-in-chief at, like, WAPO or something would say, the most important thing to us is the truth, by far. | ||
| And then, you know, quietly they'd be like, well, obviously we've got to get it out timely. | ||
| There's a push-pull of economics here, but they wouldn't say it. | ||
| Well, but I think that the reality is... | ||
| Obviously, there's an incentive for things to be immediate when there are new stories. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| But that is in no way more important than accuracy. | ||
| No, always support that. | ||
| If you can't get an accurate story, you shouldn't run with it for the sake of speed. | ||
| Does not matter. | ||
| And I don't think that that is what Kit is describing. | ||
| No. | ||
| I think he's saying, like, it's half and half. | ||
| I would say you get it as right as you can get it so long as you get it out the door. | ||
| Oh, wait, no, that means that I put timeliness. | ||
| Way ahead of it. | ||
| No, okay, never mind. | ||
| That's trouble. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, in discussing this speed thing, Kit reveals some stuff about how he views his responsibility to the audience and vice versa that I find troubling. | ||
| When you wrote Exhibit 1, was there any rush to put this article out? | ||
| Yes, it was a breaking story. | ||
| Why does that make it a rush? | ||
| Because nobody... | ||
| This shooting just occurred within a couple hours, and it was in the public's interest to kind of figure out what the motivations for the shooting were. | ||
| Why do you think the public needed to know the motivations immediately? | ||
| That's how the news cycle works. | ||
| Unfortunately, people don't want to know things two, three, four days later. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| At InfoWars, since they're not journalists, there's no race, wouldn't they have plenty of time to make sure what they're... | ||
| Providing the people is true? | ||
| Well, unfortunately, our audience kind of dictates our time frame. | ||
| How so? | ||
| Well, they're just not going to be interested in a story that's four or five days old. | ||
| Why do you think that? | ||
| Because the public tends to, if they have their eyes set on a pretty particular story that happened at that moment in time, that's where their eyeballs are going to be at. | ||
| So Kit's revealing a couple of really important things here. | ||
| The first has to do with the relationship between the audience and the producers of the content. | ||
| Kit believes that he has to rush out stories, whether they're accurate or not, because the audience is fickle and they won't care tomorrow about what happened today. | ||
| But the reality is that he has this relationship backwards. | ||
| Infowars has cultivated and trained this response from their audience through the constant bombardment of flashy headlines and imminent predictions of terrorist nukes and FEMA camps. | ||
| Everything that's happening today is reported as cataclysmic because it needs to be to capture the maximum amount of attention. | ||
| And if you want a chance at retaining any eyeballs tomorrow, the headlines better be just as flashy. | ||
| And just as severe, and probably not about the same thing you were yelling about the day before. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's not gonna be as exciting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| Alex has trained this in his audience, partially because it's easier. | ||
| And partially because he can't operate any other way. | ||
| If InfoWars took the time to flesh out stories and do follow-up reporting, just about everything they cover would be revealed to be bullshit, and they'd spend all their time on air correcting the shit they said yesterday. | ||
| Which might be an interesting show. | ||
| I think it would be as a sketch. | ||
| Yeah, like a Mr. Show, the Colin last week sketch. | ||
| Right, the correcting yesterday show. | ||
| There isn't time to flesh out stories because you need to get right back to work distracting the audience as soon as the next news cycle hits, and you have a very strong incentive to not flesh out stories anyway because they don't hold up to scrutiny. | ||
| They did this to their audience, but the way Kit understands it, they're just responding to market pressure. | ||
| Yeah, no, I feel like one of the things that I'm running into here, and the reason that Bill specifically said he's a more sympathetic figure, is simply because it appears that he... | ||
| Has been told all of these things and then just believed them. | ||
| Yeah, there is the naivete. | ||
| It's a weird thing to run into because there is a sincerity to it that doesn't feel artificial. | ||
| And I can't imagine him being a good enough actor to pull that off convincingly. | ||
| No, because what it is is he's never asked himself a follow-up question. | ||
| Maybe never had to. | ||
| Yeah, he's never had to. | ||
| So Bill is asking him questions that he's sitting there thinking like, I've never even thought of this question before. | ||
| This is kind of interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the second thing that Kit is revealing is the internal way that Infowars kind of understands that metaphor that I refer to as the wet concrete thing. | ||
| Propaganda narratives really only stick if you're able to implant them early. | ||
| You need to have something happen and then provide the narrative for your audience to understand the event through. | ||
| If you can succeed at that, your audience will be more likely to evaluate any further things they hear about the event through the prism of your conspiracy narrative. | ||
| As opposed to looking at the details independently. | ||
| This is a critical aspect of getting narratives to stick, and I think that Kit is reflecting a basic understanding of this, but just from the producer's side. | ||
| He wouldn't want to think that that's what he's doing because it's inherently abusive to an audience and it's entirely dishonest, but this is that dynamic. | ||
| When he says that the audience wouldn't be interested in old news, what he's actually saying is that by the time a story is a few days old, the concrete's already dried, and whatever angle he's going to try and sell, it isn't going to stick. | ||
| The thing I find the most fascinating about this perspective is that I completely agree with just about everything that Kit is describing in terms of whether or not the audience would care about a couple days old news story, but we have a fundamental disconnect in terms of why. | ||
| I blame Infowars and Alex, whereas Kit seems to blame the audience for how they're fickle. | ||
| If they didn't want it, we wouldn't give it to them, man. | ||
| It's like, oh, just because I go into some community and give them a ton of heroin, people want heroin. | ||
| That has nothing to do with it, man. | ||
| People always want heroin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, there's something to that metaphor. | |
| Now we get to some of the details about the actual article that Kit wrote. | ||
| One of the pieces of information that he put into the article was about how Nicholas Cruz, the shooter in Parkland, was a Democrat. | ||
| And the way he figured this out was the voter records. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| Let's hear how this goes. | ||
| Ooh, man. | ||
| This first sentence is the first sentence of the story, correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it ends with, Voter records... | ||
| Voter records suggest 19-year-old Nicholas Cruz was a Democratic voter. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Where did you get voter records? | ||
| If I remember correctly, I did a search. | ||
| I think Florida has a... | ||
| I think voter records in Florida are public. | ||
| Okay, so for this story, you weren't reporting on what other people were saying. | ||
| You went out... | ||
| And found voter records on your own. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's journalism, true? | ||
| Ugh. | ||
| I can't really commentate on what's happening in the media if you're reporting something that nobody else has reported. | ||
| Unless this... | ||
| I'm sorry, I'm trying... | ||
| My memory's a little bit fuzzy. | ||
| Unless this is something I found somewhere else. | ||
| I do remember that... | ||
| I believe that Florida's... | ||
| My understanding was Florida's voter registration is public information. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Although this might have been a screenshot I found for somebody else. | ||
| Okay, so you don't even know where it came from. | ||
| Well, my understanding is it came from Florida. | ||
| I probably did go back and verify it to make sure this is not just something completely made out. | ||
| Okay, so you do go and verify things. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Isn't that journalism? | ||
| It's just something that's good practice. | ||
| For who? | ||
| Okay, so you go and verify things. | ||
| For the audience, yes. | ||
| To the best of my ability. | ||
| I was kind of getting to a point around here where it's like, this is getting a little annoying, actually. | ||
| This naivete is a little bit grating at a certain point. | ||
| I am starting to recognize why I was not invited to the depositions. | ||
| I feel like I wouldn't be able to keep quite a sane, solid face as you and Bill were. | ||
| Well, I wasn't here for this. | ||
| No, you weren't there for that one. | ||
| But, I mean, people who have been in these depositions. | ||
| Sure, there's an expectation of decorum. | ||
| Although I will say, spoiler alert, at one point there is an audible laugh. | ||
| To something that Kit says, which I enjoy and I will give you a heads up. | ||
| Excellent. | ||
| I'm very excited. | ||
| So, again, this question of, like, is this journalism? | ||
| Is what you're doing journalism is just unanswerable. | ||
| This is just such a murky hit. | ||
| Would you agree that journalists have a duty to be right? | ||
| Would you agree with that? | ||
| That's what journalists do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, if journalists... | ||
| Weren't reporting an Instagram account. | ||
| It'd be fair to say, since this was within hours of the shooting, they were verifying. | ||
| Well, unfortunately, that's what you and me would like to believe. | ||
| What? | ||
| And growing up, that's how I always thought of traditional media. | ||
| But unfortunately, I saw an article in Axios recently. | ||
| In my opinion, Axios is a little bit left-leaning. | ||
| They pointed out that trust in traditional media is like... | ||
| Plummeting. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| But let me ask you this. | ||
| How did that answer my question? | ||
| I do like that. | ||
| Let me ask you this. | ||
| Let me throw this out at you. | ||
| What does that have to do with Eddie? | ||
| So this is in relation to... | ||
| The notion that's given in Kit's article, the headline, the sub-headline, that the media is somehow covering something up about the Parkland shooter. | ||
| And this is a complaint, I guess, as best as Kit can explain, that no one else is covering the Instagram account. | ||
| And so Bill's conjecture is... | ||
| Maybe they're checking things. | ||
| And so Kit's rejoinder is that there's an Axios article that came out that people don't trust the media. | ||
| See? | ||
| And again, this is not related. | ||
| Problem solved. | ||
| Not related to the question at all. | ||
| You think that. | ||
| Unfortunately. | ||
| This leads to Kit getting some thoughts out about statistics. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no, no, Kit! | ||
| This leads to a brick wall. | ||
| I'm not in the newsrooms of some of these organizations. | ||
| Right, so you shouldn't really have an opinion one way or the other as to what they're doing. | ||
| Well, it's not my opinion when I say that Axios reported that public trust in the media is at all-time lows. | ||
| And that was a sample of the general public, correct? | ||
| I believe so. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You don't know who they sampled, correct? | ||
| No. | ||
| You don't know how many people? | ||
| Well, in my understanding, being an economics major, if it's over 30, it's maybe statistically important. | ||
| I mean, there's at least seven more variables that are absolutely necessary for it to be reliable, not just over 30. Geographical, age, gender, all of those go into it to make sure it's objective, correct? | ||
| That's what you're saying. | ||
| I don't know that. | ||
| Right, but you're citing statistics, and so I'm citing the statistical principles. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Do you know them? | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay, then let's not talk about statistics, okay? | ||
| That hurt. | ||
| Do you know anything about this topic? | ||
| No. | ||
| All right, let's not talk about it then. | ||
| Hey, how about this? | ||
| I'm going to give you a gift. | ||
| Don't hang yourself right now. | ||
| We got time. | ||
| This is exactly what you were talking about. | ||
| The doors that get open, Bill walks down that hallway, and then there's like, nope, this isn't going anywhere. | ||
| Buddy, buddy, come on now. | ||
| You gotta stop. | ||
| So, the article itself, some of the claims... | ||
| Over 30! | ||
| But see, here's the thing. | ||
| I can't tell because of the context. | ||
| I can't tell if he means over 30 people polled or if it's over 30% is relevant. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I could definitely see him saying over 30 people polled, but I can't believe it. | ||
| It seems like that's what he's saying based on context. | ||
| But if you're being overly generous, then it's like, well, if something is over 30%... | ||
| Then it's statistically relevant, but I would say that something in the 20s is still, it could be seen as relevant. | ||
| If what he's saying is that a poll is statistically relevant as long as you ask more than 30 people... | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| I do not believe in education anymore. | ||
| I don't think it can save us. | ||
| I don't think it can help us. | ||
| If something has to be over 30% to be statistically relevant, then... | ||
| I mean, on our last episode from 2003, Alex was reporting on a German poll where like 19% of people thought that 9-11 was an inside job. | ||
| So that's not statistically relevant. | ||
| Did he get that from Stat News? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That is not a statistics outlet. | ||
| So, the article itself, some of the main claims in it were that Kit was saying that the shooter dressed like a communist, also dressed like an ISIS fighter in Syria, and supported ISIS. | ||
| These were claims that were made based on Nicholas Cruz's Instagram page that he found, and the picture of Marcel Fontaine that was found on 4chan that... | ||
| Kit misidentified as the shooter. | ||
| And so we get into a little bit of this, the claims of the communist dressing, the supporting ISIS, and it's not good for Kit. | ||
| Would you agree with me that reported Florida shooter dressed as communist is false? | ||
| If the headline had to do with Fontaine's photo, then yes, I would agree with you. | ||
| Would you also agree with me that reported Florida shooter dressed as communist, comma, supported ISIS, that's also false? | ||
| I don't know, because if I remember correctly, his Instagram account said things like Allah Akbar. | ||
| And these photos in the Instagram account just looks like something I would expect an ISIS fighter in Iraq to dress like. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| He says ISIS fighter in Iraq, but it constantly goes back to Syria for some reason. | ||
|
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|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| And this is kind of an interesting notion. | ||
| Like, why do you think this looks like an ISIS fighter? | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| And this could not go more poorly for Kit. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| This. | ||
| Because I can already tell you what a Stone answer is right now. | ||
| I can just be like, hey, who knows what's in a man's heart? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And then he'd ask questions, you'd be like, ah, that's all I got for you. | ||
| That's Stone. | ||
| I think that... | ||
| Some level of don't answer this would have been appropriate. | ||
| The best way. | ||
| Instead, Kit just fumbles the ball multiple times. | ||
| It's embarrassing. | ||
| The article that you wrote says, additionally, the shooter's garb is very similar to the style worn by ISIS fighters in Syria. | ||
| I read that correctly? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| When we look at the image that you included in this article, there are... | ||
| One, two, three, four, five pictures of allegedly Nicholas Cruz, correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
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|
Okay. | |
| And is this the collage of photos that you drew the ISIS fighters in Syria comment from? | ||
| I believe so, yes. | ||
| Is it normal for ISIS fighters in Syria to wear United States Army hats? | ||
|
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|
Well, I was looking at... | |
| The mask that they're wearing. | ||
| And the kind of the knives, how he's holding the knives. | ||
| So... | ||
| And you say the United States Army. | ||
| I mean, I do remember that there was a big controversy. | ||
| Don't do it. | ||
| Where ISIS fighters, I believe it was in Syria, were using a pickup truck from a plumber in Houston. | ||
| That still had his logo on it. | ||
| So there's no telling. | ||
| I mean, yeah, possibly. | ||
| So it's... | ||
| Based on your analysis, it's fair that the videographer here is dressed as an ISIS member fighting in Syria. | ||
| No, he's actually dressed pretty well. | ||
| I know plumbers in Houston that dress like that. | ||
| Well, I was talking about the plumber's truck. | ||
| This is why you don't need to answer these kinds of questions. | ||
| In what world do you offer information at a deposition? | ||
| Well, I think probably there's poor preparation. | ||
| Well, there's definitely that. | ||
| And I think also these kinds of justifications for, like, why did you think that? | ||
| Those work in his normal life. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, totally. | ||
| You know, around Infowars, that's good enough. | ||
| Yeah, again, no follow-up questions. | ||
| Probably doesn't hang out with too many, like... | ||
| Critical people of his worldview. | ||
| And if he does, maybe it's at some place where he has a camera and it's hostile-based. | ||
| It's about yelling at each other. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| He doesn't have to actually question himself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so, why did you think this person looked like an ISIS fighter in Syria? | ||
| He was wearing a mask and has an American army hat, but also a plumber in Houston's truck was in Syria. | ||
| It's just convoluted. | ||
| Makes perfect sense. | ||
| And it gets worse. | ||
| It just gets worse. | ||
| Let's hear it. | ||
| So if the videographer here was wearing a U.S. Army hat, you could infer from that that he was dressed as a fighter in Syria. | ||
| Well, it wasn't the hat that I was looking at specifically. | ||
| It's just the whole collage of the image, the whole thing. | ||
| The fact that the guys are wearing a mask. | ||
| The Gestalt, if you will. | ||
| Which is definitely, I've seen lots of photos of ISIS fighters and they definitely like to wear masks for whatever reason. | ||
| Have you ever seen pictures of people wearing masks that weren't in ISIS? | ||
|
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|
Yes. | |
| Okay, so we can throw that one out as reliable. | ||
| Anything else you got in here that's reliable as far as somebody dressed like an ISIS fighter in Syria? | ||
| Well, the photos I have seen of ISIS fighters in Syria were definitely very similar to how he's dressed in his mannerism. | ||
| How many photos of ISIS fighters in Syria have you seen? | ||
| A lot. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And based on that, Nicholas Cruz right here is dressed like that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it could pass off as a Halloween costume. | ||
| It could also pass off as a bank robber in the United States. | ||
| Well, I've never seen him. | ||
| When I think of bank robber, I think of someone wearing a presidential mask. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Other than that very specific and extremely random comment, we'll go on to... | ||
| Have you ever seen photos of Taliban forces in Afghanistan? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Any of them wearing masks? | ||
| Possibly. | ||
| We didn't have that in the article. | ||
| Well, Taliban was... | ||
| I don't even think the Taliban was in the news at the time. | ||
| It was mainly ISIS. | ||
| You don't think or you don't know. | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| Okay, well then we can dismiss that comment and you can answer my question. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Why didn't you add Taliban forces in Afghanistan? | ||
| Because in the news cycle at the time, it was ISIS. | ||
| Is it extremely popular and sometimes often required for members of the Tamil Tigers to wear masks exactly like that? | ||
| The who? | ||
| Tamil Tigers? | ||
| I'm not familiar with that. | ||
| It's the second largest terrorist organization in the world. | ||
| No, I'm not. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's a bad look. | ||
| Don't know who the Tamil Tigers are for a conspiracy geopolitical website managing editor. | ||
| Not great. | ||
| Not a great look. | ||
| We need to redo the Oscars because that's best supporting actor level shit right there. | ||
| That was hilarious. | ||
| That is a funny man. | ||
| It's pretty dry delivery. | ||
| Oh my god, when I think of bank robbers, I think of people wearing presidential masks. | ||
| You know, like that movie Point Break. | ||
| Yes, of course Point Break. | ||
| Of course Point Break. | ||
| Not like the traditional striped... | ||
|
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|
Nope, nope, nope, definitely not. | |
| Do they have Tommy guns and they shoot their names into the wall? | ||
| So I would say that Kit does not do a good job of defending these assertions. | ||
| I mean, the idea of not giving a shit what it is, whether or not it's ISIS or Taliban or whomever, because what's in the news is ISIS, that's kind of an important reveal. | ||
| Yeah, and it also kind of dovetails with what he was saying about whatever, the audience's eyes aren't going to be beyond this unless it's something immediate. | ||
| And that makes your content suffer, I believe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So now we jump over to the notion that he had that the shooter supported ISIS and where they came from. | ||
| And just a heads up, there is an ethnic slur that is used in this as part of the explanation for his... | ||
| Of course, of course. | ||
| And here you did say the shooter's garb is very similar, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But when we look at page one, you say he supported ISIS. | ||
| Well, there was a, if I remember correctly, in his Instagram account, he said something about Ali Akbar. | ||
| Turn to page three. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Do you see the screenshot on page three of his, of Nicholas Cruz and the voter registration? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Do you see the caption on the Instagram post? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Can you read it? | ||
| I believe it says, well, at least we now know what it means when a Sandurka says Allah Akbar. | ||
| Does that sound like anyone in the world that would support ISIS? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| Do you know what a Sandurka is? | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay, then why on earth would you derive your headline from a sentence that you don't understand? | ||
| I don't believe I derived it from this. | ||
| I believe I've derived it from something Cruz said on his Instagram account. | ||
| This is his Instagram account. | ||
| Yeah, it might have been another comment he made on another post in an Instagram account. | ||
| Surely you would have included that in your article since your headline said he supported ISIS. | ||
| Possibly. | ||
| Possibly. | ||
| Hey, it could have happened. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| So yeah, he decided that just the fact that Allah Akbar is included within the body of this phrase that also includes a slur. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A very specific slur. | ||
| That means that he supports ISIS. | ||
| Yeah, I would go the other direction. | ||
| I would go the other direction. | ||
| Yeah, the context of it is quite clear. | ||
| And I think one of the things that you can really derive from this is the level of attention to detail that someone who's in a managerial role at InfoWars engages with his content with. | ||
| And that's scary, I guess. | ||
| It's troubling. | ||
| I'm just shocked at the... | ||
| Like, complete admission of more of just lack of curiosity. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wait. | |
| Wait. | ||
| It gets worse. | ||
| I can't believe that you would have no idea what that means and not be like, I better take a look at that. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Well, you just ignore entire parts of sentences. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| Because you're just like, I don't need to ask questions. | ||
| Well, the level of lack of curiosity and lack of... | ||
| Knowledge base, let's say. | ||
| It gets worse. | ||
| It's much worse. | ||
| I believe that. | ||
| But before we get to any of that, which is, I find, one of the more staggering admissions we'll get to in a second. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But before that, the conversation of, like, why did you need to report based on this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Why is the Instagram something that you felt was necessary? | ||
| Yeah, why would you do this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, based on his Instagram, at the time, the shooting just occurred. | ||
| And unfortunately, that's kind of all we had to go with to kind of try to figure out what this man's motivations were. | ||
| So maybe. | ||
| The suspect's motivations were. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Because information was so limited, maybe it should have slowed down, huh? | ||
| Well, it was a breaking news story. | ||
| For you. | ||
| No, it was for the audience. | ||
| So the audience said, tell us the motivation. | ||
| Yeah, it was all over the news at the time. | ||
| Who at Infowars got a call from the audience that said, we want to know right now? | ||
| Well, that's just standard practice. | ||
| If the news cycle was, if you see in every single news outlet and on social media, they're all talking about this mass shooting. | ||
| That's where the audience's eyeballs are at. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Where did it come from that the audience needed to know the motivation immediately to the point where you just start throwing darts in a dark room? | ||
| Well, it's kind of in the public's interest. | ||
| Well, that's what people are asking. | ||
| Sitting here today, looking back at the veracity of your article, do you really think this article was in the public's interest? | ||
| It was in the public's interest to try to determine what the motivations were behind a mass shooting. | ||
| You would agree with me that one thing that is never in the public's interest is somebody who is disseminating false information. | ||
| Well, I mean, with malice, maybe. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Kit! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Kit! | |
| Why did you offer up an answer to a question that only raises further questions? | ||
| Don't answer that question. | ||
| Don't do it, man. | ||
| You gotta learn when to shut up. | ||
| Unreal. | ||
| Yeah, that is a real problem through a fair amount of this deposition. | ||
| I do appreciate that Bill has very clearly got a point to this section of questioning, at least, which is that beginning of, like, what matters more, accuracy or timeliness? | ||
| And when he says both, Bill is very clearly going, I'm going to dismantle the concept that you give a fuck about veracity, and that it's all about timeliness. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I appreciate that. | ||
| That's very good. | ||
| And Kit is doing such a good job. | ||
| Unfortunately, against his interest of kind of explaining why that immediacy is so important, and that is that this is how the business model operates, basically. | ||
| Which is exactly what Bill wants to hear, because that's how you get the money part of the you profit off of lies. | ||
| And the hopeful recognition that what you're doing is clickbait. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| This is another thing that Bill... | ||
| I was like, can you recognize that what you're doing is clickbait? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this conversation, as it appears here, leads to what I would describe as the most staggering admission of ignorance that you're going to hear. | ||
| Frankly, I think it's a little weird, his photos. | ||
| I mean, why would your Instagram account just be nothing but photos of you wearing masks showing knives? | ||
| Well, I mean, I think you're trying... | ||
| Let me back that up. | ||
| Are you trying to make sense of an individual who brought guns to his high school and killed a bunch of people? | ||
| I wouldn't say sense, maybe like motivation. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Why did you have to do it right then and there? | ||
| Because that's where the audience was paying attention to at the time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So this is clickbait. | ||
| It's unreliable information about a story the audience wants to read about. | ||
| That's clickbait, right? | ||
| That's your opinion. | ||
| What's your opinion of clickbait? | ||
| When I use it, what do you think it means? | ||
| Well, I don't really engage in clickbait, so I don't really have an opinion on it, to be honest. | ||
| What's the term mean? | ||
| You just used the term clickbait. | ||
| What do you mean by it? | ||
| I think clickbait is something like, when you see an article on social media, it's like, click here to find five household products that will clean your house, pick and span. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's like, click here to find this out, and then you click on it, and there's no real information about that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So when this says, he supported ISIS, and somebody clicked on your story, where in here would they find that he supported ISIS? | ||
| Just based on what I saw on Instagram. | ||
| No, point in the story where your readers would find the information that he supported ISIS. | ||
| Just the Al-Akbar comment. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Which you have no idea what it even means. | |
| I mean, I know that's a phrase ISIS fighters use a lot. | ||
| It's also a phrase that every Muslim in the world uses. | ||
| Did you know that? | ||
| Not necessarily. | ||
| I'm not too familiar with. | ||
| You didn't know that Abu Akbar is a Muslim phrase that is used literally every day multiple times by every Muslim in the world. | ||
| I'm just not that familiar with the Muslim ideology. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's... | ||
| Just fucking wow. | ||
| I don't even know what you would say to that. | ||
| I mean, I guess it's easier to understand why... | ||
| What I would say is, it's a lot easier to understand why you're a white supremacist. | ||
| And don't think you are. | ||
| You clearly have no fucking clue what's going on. | ||
| And it's an irrational world. | ||
| Someone with this little information would not be anywhere near the levers of talking about these topics publicly. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
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|
You would not be able to opine about terrorism, any issues related to Islam. | |
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you didn't have some very basic pieces of information. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And we do not live in that sane world. | ||
| I feel like a fundamental issue we're running into here is Kit does not believe that words have a mutable meaning. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But I mean, it is like, when you ask me what a journalist is, it's a word that has a meaning. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You can just repeat that meaning back, because that's what a word means. | ||
| And he's like... | ||
| You know, it could be like when a bird flies and it drops information onto the ground, and that information is a seed, and the seed becomes a tree, and that's journalism. | ||
| Now imagine that bird is Glenn Greenwald's recent work. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And that seed is a bomb of bullshit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So this next clip could have been an out-of-context drop, but it's just Bill dealing with the fact that Kit did not know what Alaw Akbar means. | ||
| When you wrote this article, it was your belief that Alu Akbar was something that only people in ISIS say? | ||
| That was my belief at the time. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And since that time, you've been promoted? | ||
| Holy shit! | ||
| Holy shit! | ||
| Bill! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck me! | |
| It's tough to wrestle with. | ||
| That is damning. | ||
| I feel like I just got punched in the gut. | ||
| That's damning for Kit because of his clear ignorance, but it's also damning of Rob Dew, presumably his immediate supervisor, Alex Jones, the entire inner workings of InfoWars that he doesn't reach basic standards. | ||
| It would be one thing if you didn't know what Al-Akbar meant and you didn't cover... | ||
| The topics that Kit talks about, where he draws conclusions about things based on the words Allah Akbar appearing somewhere. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| If he talked about financial news strictly. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Maybe you could just be like, yeah, that's not a world I really understand much about. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Maybe then you could be promoted if you're a good financial analyst. | ||
| Like most White Sox beat writers, he has no idea what Allah Akbar means. | ||
| That's not the case. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Horrible. | |
| Amazing. | ||
| So. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| Well. | ||
| There are more incredible things. | ||
| As you recall, it was brought up that he reported that Nicholas Cruz was presumably a Democrat based on voter registration. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Bad news about that. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| You also included a screenshot of the Florida voter registration. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Did you even realize that the name isn't even spelled the same? | ||
| Not at the time, it did not. | ||
| It's not even the same person. | ||
| Yeah, well, I did... | ||
| Blurt it out for that contention. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| True. | ||
| Yeah, but the name doesn't even match up, and you overlooked that? | ||
| Now that I remember that, there was an instance where there was, if I remember correctly, there was two reported instances of his name in the media at the time. | ||
| And it wasn't until the next morning of the 15th where his correct spelling of his name was more prominent in the media. | ||
| So when you wrote this story, alleging that this person supported ISIS and was a communist, you weren't even sure how to spell his name. | ||
| Just because the media at the time was reporting, like, I think two different spellings of his name. | ||
| Why'd you pick the one that you picked in this story? | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| You just picked one and said, ah, we'll go with it. | ||
| I don't know if I did that. | ||
| I just don't remember. | ||
| Does that sound like good reporting? | ||
| I just don't remember. | ||
| Does it sound like good reporting is what I asked. | ||
| Well, unfortunately, when there's something in news that's breaking, the details tend to be a little muddy. | ||
| Right, and they're muddied by individuals trying to pull full stories out of details that are not yet developed, correct? | ||
| Well, I'll give you an example. | ||
| You sent me the question first. | ||
| Correct? | ||
| What was your question? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. | ||
| Ooh, no, oh, no. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Yeah, that's tough. | ||
| Alright, so when I describe my job, it sounds good, but then you describe it, and it sounds bad, and I don't understand your words, because I feel like my job's good. | ||
| No, it's bad. | ||
| There's another point that comes up later that Bill brings up, and that is that there may have been multiple spellings of Nicholas Cruz's name, but there was only one birth date that was released, and you could have cross-referenced that to figure out who it was in the voting record, and Kit seems surprised by this information. | ||
| Excuse me, sir, I do not understand what cross-reference means. | ||
| Describe that to me in greater detail, using words like I am a child. | ||
| So Kit has brought up that... | ||
| You know, in the immediacy of stories sometimes when there's breaking news, things get a little bit muddy. | ||
| And Bill has suggested that maybe things are muddy when people try to force stories. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He might as well have just been like, you realize that's you, right? | ||
| Yeah, that's basically what he does in this next clip. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The reason it's muddy is because all the news organizations are tracing after the story and the details haven't been flushed out enough yet to report the whole story. | ||
| So it gets muddy. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You realize you're part of the problem. | ||
| Do you realize that? | ||
| Maybe in this instance. | ||
| I'm just saying. | ||
| Well, you seem like you're sitting here today saying what you did in this story was okay. | ||
| Do you think it was okay to do? | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay, so you realize you were wrong. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay, and you realize you could have been way better. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| Okay, you realize nothing about any of these photos has anything to do with communism or supporting ISIS. | ||
| I understand that now, yes, definitely. | ||
| When did you start understanding that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just this moment. | |
| Just this moment. | ||
| How did you realize it? | ||
| When you asked me. | ||
| Well, what he told me gave me good insight as far as ISIS. | ||
| So, before I just instructed you on, one, anybody who actually supported ISIS would never... | ||
| Used the term Sandurka. | ||
| Yeah, I wasn't aware of that term. | ||
| You didn't even know what it meant? | ||
| You didn't Google any of this? | ||
| You just saw it and said, oh, I recognize two of those words. | ||
| Must be ISIS. | ||
| Well, it was a breaking news story at the time. | ||
| For you, I would assume so. | ||
| Woof. | ||
| I feel like a lot of my responses to these clips is oof. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Kit, you stepped in it this time. | ||
| Kit, buddy. | ||
| This is a boxing match of, I mean, just Mike Tyson versus a three-year-old. | ||
| I mean, it is bad. | ||
| It is bad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Although, at the same time, here's what I feel like. | ||
| I feel like listening to Kit now, Kit feels like he's in a much more... | ||
| Comfortable space just because he feels like he's getting dressed down. | ||
| Like, he's a man who's used to having people tell him he did a bad job. | ||
| And right now he's like, yeah. | ||
| You're right, man. | ||
| I did do a bad job. | ||
| Like, I feel comfortable here. | ||
| I'm not being questioned to think about things right now. | ||
| And possibly in other circumstances in his life, those dressing downs don't really lead to any consequences, and then he gets a bonus at some point. | ||
| Right, exactly! | ||
| So he just says, oh, I'm sorry, sir, and oh, yeah, you're right, I'll do better next time, sir. | ||
| There may be something to that, but whether that is the case or not relies on some assumptions. | ||
| And I think we can at least say... | ||
| There is something of value in him recognizing that what he did was wrong. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Again, low bar. | ||
| That forthrightness is not necessarily there in a lot of other Infowars personalities who are questioned about these things. | ||
| And so, you know, again, applaud tentatively. | ||
| So the question of commie comes up, the communist aspect. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I don't think that his support for this is much better, but it has to do with a text that Alex showed him. | ||
| Your other headline said that he was a communist. | ||
| You got that from the picture of my client, correct? | ||
| That was my understanding at the time. | ||
| There was no other information that you had leading anyone to believe that the Florida shooter supported communism. | ||
| Well, Jones, back during the Las Vegas shooting, he showed me a text from one of his sources that was somehow tied to the FBI hostage rescue team during that shooting. | ||
| That said that there was a bunch of Antifa paraphernalia all over the hotel room. | ||
| So that kind of got me into that line of thinking. | ||
| So now just anytime anyone fires a weapon off near you, you just immediately look for something that looks Antifa-like? | ||
| No, that was what the source said. | ||
| Okay, what does that have anything to do with this story? | ||
| That just kind of put me in the mindset. | ||
| So you were brainwashed by Mr. Jones? | ||
| I wouldn't say I was brainwashed. | ||
| It sounds like he showed you something from a source, and from there on out, you were in a mindset to assume and look for Antifa. | ||
| Well, I wasn't going to disclude it. | ||
| Oh, not disclude it. | ||
| We're going to run with it. | ||
| It's going to leave some of our assumptions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What am I going to say? | |
| What am I going to leave it out? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| The possibility, based on this text that Alex showed of an alleged source. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Alright, so a source said it was Antifa, and obviously I called him a commie. | ||
| What don't you understand? | ||
| Well, no, no, no. | ||
| The source said that there was Antifa literature at the Las Vegas shooter, which was prior to this and a different event. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And so other shootings, now we've got to just throw, because that is now an established talking point within the world of Infowars. | ||
| And so Alex would want him to include other things so you can make connections between things where there is no actual connection and build the grander conspiracy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Kit does not understand this clearly. | ||
| I don't think so, but I do think there is some subconscious understanding of it. | ||
| And that's the stuff that I think is being kind of revealed through this questioning. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And thank God he did just decide to answer questions he didn't need to. | ||
| My God. | ||
| So, this leads to the actual discussion of the Fontaine photo that Kit included in his article. | ||
| And in the picture, it's Marcel holding up his fist, and he's wearing a shirt that, if you don't pay attention to it, might look like a communist shirt. | ||
| But it is revealed in this next clip what the shirt actually is. | ||
| What does Antifa stand for? | ||
| Anti-fascist, I think. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Does everybody that's in Antifa support communism? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You didn't put anything about Antifa in your story, did you? | ||
| The photo of Mr. Fontaine, if I remember correctly, looked like a communist shirt. | ||
| Flip the page, it's in front of you. | ||
| It looks like a communist shirt. | ||
| If you look closely, do you recognize that shirt as a parody on the Communist Party? | ||
| Where certain communist individuals that are famous, Are having a party. | ||
| For instance, Lenin has a lampshade on his head and people are drinking. | ||
| Did you even realize that? | ||
| No, I did not. | ||
| You just saw a red shirt. | ||
| With the hammer and symbol. | ||
| And you said, gotta be communism. | ||
| That was my assumption at the time, especially considering his fist like that. | ||
| Is somebody raising their fist like this, has that been used for any other movements? | ||
| Possibly, but in this photo, that combined when I see a red shirt with a hammer and sickle. | ||
| Bam. | ||
| Gotta be communism in your eyes. | ||
| Well, that was my assumption that it looks like something like a communist. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| In the headline, it doesn't say, my assumption is that he might be communist. | ||
| Did you say that? | ||
| No. | ||
| Sure didn't. | ||
| So we kind of have these fundamental claims that Kit was leading with, like the dressed like an ISIS fighter in Syria, supported ISIS, was a commie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And all of this is shown to be based on the flimsiest, and the evidence is actually contradictory to the claims that it would lead you to the opposite conclusion. | ||
| Or at least the absence of a conclusion. | ||
| And I think that that's pretty clearly demonstrated. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And so Bill asks, how do you think you did on this one? | ||
| One out of ten. | ||
| Rate your performance on this article. | ||
| I'd say about a two or a three. | ||
| Really? | ||
| You got to two? | ||
| What part of it got you to two? | ||
| About kind of everything you said. | ||
| If I had this to do all over again, I wouldn't have done it this way. | ||
| Frankly, I think this is one of my worst performing articles I've ever done. | ||
| Yeah, I think so, probably. | ||
| But here's what's interesting about this, because I had to listen to that a couple times. | ||
| Bill's asking 1 to 10, how do you give yourself a ranking? | ||
| He says 2 or 3, and Bill is shocked. | ||
| How did you get to 2? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And Kit interprets that as, how did you get down to 2? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How did you get down to two, as opposed to what deserves a two? | ||
| Never occurred to him to think that, oh, he's looking for me to justify why it's better than a zero. | ||
| It should be a zero. | ||
| He's like, why isn't this a ten? | ||
| I wish I could listen to this episode with zero context for InfoWars or anything. | ||
| Just the idea of listening to somebody go like, oh, I called him a communist. | ||
| And he's like, you realize that the shirt... | ||
| Had Lennon wearing a lampshade on it, right? | ||
| Just that moment of like, this is really happening? | ||
| This is not fake? | ||
| It would be strange to see what kind of conclusions you would draw about InfoWars based on it. | ||
| Just sight unseen of all the other stuff we know. | ||
| I don't think it would come across positively. | ||
| Wouldn't go well. | ||
| So, Marcel's face is the only one that's visible in the pictures that Kit put into the article. | ||
| And that's a problem, because if you're looking at the article, you would maybe assume that it's the same face under those masks that are on the Instagram account. | ||
| You would have to. | ||
| And that is at play. | ||
| You would agree with me that in Exhibit 1, the only photograph of the alleged shooter, the only photograph with an unobscured face is Mr. Fontaine. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So when you started spreading photos of the shooter, the only one that anyone can see a face isn't even the right person. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| You know what a reverse image search is, right? | ||
| I'm familiar with it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Did you do one? | ||
| I remember typing in Nicholas Cruz on Google Images, and unfortunately the photos that were coming up were of Mr. Fontaine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I didn't ask that question. | ||
| I know, but that's just me clarifying. | ||
| I asked you whether or not you did a reverse image. | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| And the answer's no. | ||
| You did not. | ||
| Yeah, the answer is no. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, that's poor practice, probably. | ||
| One of the things, too, that sort of is a hallmark of this deposition is that there's a kind of non-linear aspect to the questions that are asked. | ||
| Some things, like, as you noticed with the voter registration, it came up at the beginning, and then came back up. | ||
| And here, the notion of journalism comes back up, and this Unfortunately, Kit has referred to himself as a video journalist. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| And now this introduces an entirely new wrinkle of, what does this mean? | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Your declaration in front of you. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| If we look at paragraph two, it says you're a video journalist, and you use the term journalist. | ||
| Video journalist. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Journalist, though, is used in the context of video journalism. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| What's the difference between regular journalism and video journalism? | ||
| I use the term video journalist because I really didn't know how to describe myself to the best of my ability as far as going out and shooting videos, interviewing people. | ||
| And then writing stories about those videos? | ||
| I didn't do that very often, if at all. | ||
| Okay, so you would just shoot videos and then give them to somebody else? | ||
| No, I'd shoot videos, upload them to the website. | ||
| Okay, and you wouldn't write anything at the bottom or a story with the video? | ||
| Typically not. | ||
| I generally never had time to. | ||
| I would just shoot a video and just upload it to YouTube, and then we'd embed it on InfoWars. | ||
| Yeah, so you'd be a news reporter. | ||
| I mean, normally in the company we use the phrase reporter for on-air talent. | ||
| Right, but you were taking videos, doing interviews, and uploading them to the public, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So when you see news cameras out, In the field, in their little vans, and they pull over and set up the camera and do an interview. | ||
| There's nothing different from that than what you were doing. | ||
| Well, they had a lot more equipment. | ||
| They had a van. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| You don't have a van or that equipment, but you got a camera and you have a mouth, correct? | ||
| Yeah, but unfortunately, there's a lot of interviews I couldn't do because it seems like when you have a small camera, people think you're small time, so they're not going to interview you. | ||
| Why are you telling them this? | ||
| What are you doing, Kit? | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| The splitting hairs about these definitions is so weird. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Kit, what are you doing? | ||
| Well, you know, I mean, sure, I do all the things, but am I? | ||
| Really? | ||
| I do everything that's exactly the same as people I would describe as journalists, except I don't have a van and I use an iPhone. | ||
| My camera's too small. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| My camera's too small for me to be a journalist, man. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Right. | ||
| InfoWars is $50 million in debt. | ||
| We can't afford impressive cameras in a van. | ||
| Alex spent all the budget on a tank. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Can't take that out. | ||
| So Kit justifies his use of the image of Marcel that he uses by claiming that, quote, the image was trending. | ||
| Ah, see? | ||
| It was trending. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that is also a problem when you look at reality. | ||
| Can you turn the page to page paragraph three? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It says, I published an image of a man that I had obtained from the popular image and web board entitled 4chan. | ||
| It says, I went to the 4chan website after I had seen the challenged image trending on social media. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| How does... | ||
| How does an image trend? | ||
| When you go on your Twitter newsfeed and you just see it all over the place, or even maybe your Facebook newsfeed. | ||
| It's just everywhere. | ||
| And under oath, right now, to this jury, you're telling them that you saw Mr. Fontaine's photo all over your newsfeed. | ||
| That's my understanding, if I recall correctly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Do you know how many times, at the time the article was published, do you know how many times that image had been posted on Twitter? | ||
| No. | ||
| Do you know how many times it had been posted on Facebook? | ||
| No. | ||
| Would it surprise you a lot to know that it was less than a dozen? | ||
| A little time frame? | ||
| Between the shooting and your article going live. | ||
| Big gulp of water right there. | ||
| Well, maybe I'm... | ||
| Maybe I just happened to see all of them. | ||
| Good save. | ||
| That I like. | ||
| I like that one. | ||
| That's a good one. | ||
| Maybe I happened to be following all of the accounts. | ||
| I caught them all, man. | ||
| Listen, maybe you just don't have as many cool friends as I do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's... | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| That's grim. | ||
| So the justification is, in Kit's statement, is that David that he's sworn... | ||
| It includes an image of somebody posting this picture of Marcel on Twitter prior to Kit putting out the article. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this also reveals... | ||
| This is going to have bad news. | ||
| It's going to be Kit, isn't it? | ||
| No, but it is what turns out to be a troll Twitter account. | ||
| And unfortunately, in the conversation of this, we learn another gap in Kit's information base that is truly staggering. | ||
| In paragraph three of your declaration, you also talk about Laguna Beach Antifa. | ||
| You see that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| You relied on Laguna Beach Antifa's tweet, correct? | ||
| No. | ||
| Would it surprise you to know that it was the only original source at the time that had posted it and all others that you would have seen would have been reposted? | ||
| That would surprise me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm sorry, did you say that would surprise me? | |
| Yes. | ||
| Now that we've established that... | ||
| Because that surprised me. | ||
| Your testimony in this affidavit is that the Laguna Beach Antifa Twitter post was at 2.37pm hours before I posted the challenged image on the Infowars website. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You see that? | |
| Yes. | ||
| 2.37pm what time zone? | ||
| I believe that would be central time. | ||
| Why would you think that? | ||
| Because that's the time zone I'm in. | ||
| Would it surprise you to know that if you go to the Laguna Beach page, that doesn't correlate. | ||
| It correlates with California time. | ||
| I was on the impression they were out of Florida. | ||
| Would it surprise you? | ||
| You think Laguna Beach is in Florida? | ||
| I thought that was where it was at. | ||
| I'm surprised you know it was in California. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Laguna Beach, Florida. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my God. | |
| It's in Luxembourg, France, Dad. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| These are unforced errors. | ||
| In trying to explain himself, he reveals these just remarkable misconceptions that he has. | ||
| Allah Akbar is something that only ISIS people say. | ||
| This slur isn't a slur. | ||
| Laguna Beach is in Florida. | ||
| It's... | ||
| This is sad. | ||
| It feels like if you are going to prepare Kit Daniels for this deposition, you have to be as honest as any human being has ever been and just start with, they know the true answers to the questions they're going to ask you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So your instinct is going to be wrong. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You do not know the true answers to what they're answering you. | ||
| You can't know. | ||
| You cannot. | ||
| So any answer you have is only bad for us. | ||
| There's a human impulse to explain yourself. | ||
| You want to be friends? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You want to explain? | ||
| No, listen. | ||
| Let me explain why I don't feel like what I did was bad. | ||
| Don't. | ||
| Just don't do that. | ||
| I guess a good way to prep him would just be like, watch every episode of Law& Order. | ||
| I mean, a good way to prep him is like a fucking mafia prep where he wakes up in a goddamn river. | ||
| Like, that's the type of prep you need to do for this shit. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| I don't know what you would do. | ||
| You'd have to deal with so many first concepts in order to be like, you can handle being cross-examined by somebody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sir, some things are, and some things aren't. | |
| Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. | ||
| Okay, all right, let's start from the beginning. | ||
| So this Antifa account apparently was pretty new. | ||
| By the way, that's the fake account. | ||
| It is a troll account. | ||
| Yeah, naturally. | ||
| But it might have been, this tweet might have been pretty fresh when Kit got his hands on it. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| What time did you post the article? | ||
| It was approximately 4 p.m. or after. | ||
| So about 23 minutes. | ||
| It had been up on Laguna Beach Antifa's page for 23 minutes. | ||
| How long had you been following Laguna Beach Antifa on Twitter? | ||
| I wasn't following them on Twitter. | ||
| How did you get to it? | ||
| I did not. | ||
| What's it doing in your affidavit? | ||
| So Kevin Brown went and found an example of Fontaine's photo on social media that predated when I put it up on InfoWars. | ||
| Why didn't you just go get the original? | ||
| I didn't remember. | ||
| I couldn't find the original, unfortunately. | ||
| How long did you look? | ||
| 30, 40 minutes. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| I mean, maybe longer. | ||
| Maybe or what? | ||
| Well, I couldn't find it. | ||
| I went back and looked before I screenshotted it from Fortune. | ||
| I could not find the thread. | ||
| I do remember looking for it on social media, and unfortunately a lot of people were deleting it by the time I was looking for it for the discovery process. | ||
| Why were they deleting it? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Because it was wrong? | ||
| Possibly, yes. | ||
| Or because there were a bunch of Twitter pages set up quickly that posted this image as troll pages to see if any news media outlets would pick it up and run the story. | ||
| That's a possibility. | ||
| Do you believe you're a victim of some internet trolls that just got the best of you because you weren't paying attention? | ||
| I think I was duped, definitely. | ||
| I think you were too. | ||
| I love that he instantly responded with what he thought was a solid amount of research time. | ||
| 30 minutes? | ||
| 30 to 40 minutes. | ||
| And when he was questioned on that, immediately he was like... | ||
| Maybe it was longer. | ||
| I didn't know it was supposed to be longer. | ||
| Was it supposed to be longer? | ||
| But, like, 30 minutes to try and find this, if you had found it, that would be a reasonable amount of time to have spent, because that seems like about how long it might take you to... | ||
| It should take you about that long to find it. | ||
| But since you failed to find it... | ||
| Then we're in trouble. | ||
| You gave up. | ||
| You quit. | ||
| Pretty easily. | ||
| Oh, well. | ||
| So now we re-explore this notion of Alex told him... | ||
| About the Antifa literature at the Las Vegas shooting. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So this Antifa idea is connected to this shooting somehow, which then has been translated into communism. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which makes sense. | ||
| To Kit. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And this is why. | ||
| The only thing he got from his photo was that he didn't even understand the t-shirt he was wearing. | ||
| What motivation did you add to the story with? | ||
| Well, it was hard to understand the t-shirt he was wearing. | ||
| Kind of looking at it. | ||
| I mean, it had a hammer and sickle. | ||
| It was red color. | ||
| At the time, I couldn't tell it was a parody shirt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| What... | ||
| What did his photo add to your story? | ||
| Well, like I said, I was told during a Las Vegas shooting that there was Antifa paraphernalia all over the shooter's room. | ||
| That got me in the mindset to consider that... | ||
| There might be some sort of communist Antifa link to some of these shootings going on. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| What did Mr. Fontaine's photo add to the article? | ||
| I thought it was a photo of Nicholas Cruz at the time. | ||
| And you believe that everyone in Antifa supports communism? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Then how'd you get to... | ||
| Oh, I saw Hammer and Sickle and it was red. | ||
| Because normally I... | ||
| When I see a hammer and sickle in a red shirt, I think of communism. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| How do you get to Antifa? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| How do you go from communism to Antifa? | ||
| Just from what I was told about the Las Vegas shooting. | ||
| So Alex Jones is the reason why you assumed everyone in Antifa supports communism? | ||
| I never said that. | ||
| You added the picture of Mr. Fontaine because he had a communism shirt on in your eyes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You added that. | ||
| Because Mr. Jones showed you some information that led you to believe there might be an Antifa-related ideology behind these shootings. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| How do you get from communism with Mr. Fontaine's shirt to him being Antifa? | ||
| It's in the same spectrum, politically. | ||
| Of what? | ||
| I mean, Antifa is typically left-leaning. | ||
| Communism is typically left-leaning. | ||
| That's how you got to the headline of your story. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Swing and a miss. | ||
| Man. | ||
| He feels they're both left-leaning. | ||
| I feel like Kit Daniels should really just be going like, dude, you are blowing my mind. | ||
| What are you saying? | ||
| I'm saying that Antifa and communism, uh, they're the same. | ||
| And you're like, have you thought about it? | ||
| And I'm realizing that I have not. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this leads to a line of questioning about like, ah. | ||
| Now, what about this? | ||
| Why didn't you blame Obama? | ||
| He is also left-leaning. | ||
| That's a troubling line of questioning for Kit to go down. | ||
| So we return to the issue of the reverse image search, because obviously this is leading to information that Bill already has at his disposal of what he would have found had he done a reverse image search. | ||
| When did you learn what a reverse image search was? | ||
| I don't remember, unfortunately. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Was it... | ||
| Just now. | ||
| Six months ago, six years ago? | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| Have you known about it for a while? | ||
| I'd say so. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And have you run one on this image? | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| Standing here today, have you run one ever? | ||
| I've done it in the past, yes. | ||
| On this image? | ||
| On the Fontaine image? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's not hard to do, right? | ||
| It depends. | ||
| How do you do a reverse image search? | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Sometimes I use 10i.com. | ||
| Sometimes I try to use Google. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Both of those, you just copy and paste the images, right? | ||
| Yeah, but Google tends to be kind of finicky. | ||
| Regardless, it's not hard to do. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And standing here today, did you know that if you do a reverse image search, you'll find Mr. Fontaine's photo, the exact one, with the exact same... | ||
| Commentary at the bottom posted four days before the shooting ever happened. | ||
| Did you know that? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's kind of an important fact, right? | ||
| Especially if you could have done a reverse image search before spreading his photograph all over the nation, alleging him to be a mass shooter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| Right? | ||
| You are blowing my mind, man. | ||
| What are you saying? | ||
| Reverse image search before I post? | ||
| Why? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that could have saved some trouble here. | |
| That is the first time it ever occurred to him to have done that before posting. | ||
| I don't know about that, based on our next clip. | ||
| But also, never has that noise been more appropriate. | ||
| So you're saying that he never thought about the idea of reverse image searching before. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Unfortunately, the plaintiff's attorneys have at their disposal Kit's previous work. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Have you seen this before? | ||
| I vaguely remember writing it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| In this article, you talk about... | ||
| How reckless it is for people to not run reverse image searches, don't you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Where does that say that at? | |
| Oh, look back up. | ||
| The article is dated November 5th, 2016. | ||
| Correct? | ||
| Oh, sorry. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that's over a year before you did, you published Mr. Fontaine's photograph in the world. | ||
| And the headline says, Law Enforcement Begs World. | ||
| Read Hillary's emails to find child rape evidence. | ||
| And then it says, Hillary linked to child sex ring, emails suggest. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We flip to page eight. | ||
| It says, the seller attached a picture of a Beanie Baby collection to the email, but using a reverse image search, the image appeared to be a publicly available photo that appeared on several blogs as far back. | ||
| It's October 2014, and perhaps even earlier. | ||
| The seller's email was dated June 2015. | ||
| I read that correctly. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So you knew what a reverse image search was. | ||
| At the time, yes. | ||
| You'd done it before you posted Mr. Fontaine's photo to the world. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Why didn't you do one? | ||
| I don't remember, but if I didn't do it for Fontaine's photo, I regret not doing it. | ||
| I bet. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I bet. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I would imagine so. | ||
| Satisfying, I guess, because he works for Infowars, about that. | ||
| Like, you didn't do a reverse image search, and you would have found that your story was complete bullshit if you had done one. | ||
| Also, here's an article where you're scolding people for not doing a reverse image search. | ||
| Do you know what it feels like? | ||
| It feels like a constant repetition of that jackass sketch. | ||
| Where they have the giant hand... | ||
| The pneumatic or the... | ||
| Yeah, and the guy's carrying the tray of drinks or whatever and he's just walking right into... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Boom! | |
| And it explodes in his face. | ||
| Every question, he's just like... | ||
| He knows that the thing he's answering after that is, you know you wrote this article, right? | ||
| But what's kind of remarkable about it, too, is that he doesn't seem to ever realize a hand's coming. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| No clue. | ||
| It's every single time he gets up. | ||
| It's a little troubling. | ||
| He walks towards that door with all those drinks, and he gets smashed by the hand again. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So because this reverse image search article that Kit has written about... | ||
| Something to do with the Podesta emails and Clinton has been brought up. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, Kit's Pizzagate coverage. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Defend this. | ||
| Well, he actually does. | ||
| And the way he does it is by throwing Alex the fuck under the bus. | ||
| Good call. | ||
| Just flip to the next page, page nine. | ||
| The second full paragraph. | ||
| It says, other strange emails sent to Podesta include cryptic references to pizza, hot dogs, pasta, and walnuts, which are fueling speculation they are code words for criminal activity, including child molestation. | ||
| I read that correctly, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| This is a bunch of Pizzagate nonsense, right? | ||
| I don't know if this was necessarily involved with Pizzagate. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| My understanding of Pizzagate had to do with the Comet Ping Pong Pizza. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And where did all of that start? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Podesta emails with cryptic references about pizza and child molestation. | ||
| You know that, right? | ||
| I wasn't involved with the comic peenball, as far as I remember. | ||
| Yeah, you wrote an article about linking Hillary Clinton to a child sex ring. | ||
| If I remember correctly, I think Alex Jones gave me the headline and the sub-headline for this article. | ||
| Who gave you the content in the article? | ||
| I think it was... | ||
| I think I worked with it with Jones. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But I don't remember, unfortunately. | ||
| One thing we do know is that here you are again writing about a story that turned out to not only not be true, but people acted on it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| What are you referring to? | ||
| A gentleman with an AR-15 walking into a pizzeria and firing his weapon because he was convinced there was a child sex ring being run out of it. | ||
| Did I say anything about a pizzeria in this article? | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| No, I'm saying you're reporting on the information that led to that pizzeria. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm... | |
| Are you sure about that? | ||
| Where do you think the name of that pizzeria came from? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| Like I said, I wasn't that involved with the Comet fiendfall stuff at all. | ||
| No, but you were involved with spreading the disinformation about... | ||
| These non-cryptic messages. | ||
| Well, it was Alex Jones that told me that pizza, hot dogs, pasta, walnuts were all code words. | ||
| And I believe that was also FBI symbolism. | ||
| You do believe that? | ||
| For child molestation. | ||
| Do you still believe that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I was just trying to vaguely remember. | ||
| This is from 2016, so my memory's a little bit fuzzy. | ||
| Why on earth would you believe that? | ||
| The FBI had code words like that for child molestation. | ||
| Well, because the FBI was... | ||
| Would point out, hey, if you ever hear these code words, this could be a signal for child molestation, so be on the lookout for it. | ||
| Where'd you learn that? | ||
| I believe it was in a bulletin, FBI bulletin. | ||
| Do ya? | ||
| You sure? | ||
| That's what I remember. | ||
| Let me back up. | ||
| Are you sure that what you're referring to is an actual real FBI document? | ||
| I vaguely remember seeing one. | ||
| Vaguely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Man. | |
| But, like, there's this, like, what is with this headline? | ||
| I think Alex gave me that headline. | ||
| Oh, Alex told me this stuff. | ||
| It's kind of becoming, you know, this is going to be a theme. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's just like, I got that from Alex. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's bad. | ||
| I can't believe he hasn't already... | ||
| How far into the deposition? | ||
| We're at least an hour into the deposition by this point, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I can't believe he hasn't already realized that if he gets the question, do you think that was a real document, he knows the answer to that already. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Like, he doesn't... | ||
| He just can't... | ||
| Process that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He thinks that anybody asking him a question is genuinely interested in his response to it. | ||
| Or there's a possibility that based on your answer, the information the other person has will be effective. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I mean, it's optimistic in some ways. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's a little Don Quixote. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It is. | ||
| More, yeah, panza. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Bill decides that a good approach to take here would be, what have you ever gotten right? | ||
| Good call, Bill. | ||
| Unfortunately, I've watched a lot of InfoWars programming. | ||
| I think I've read every word that you've ever written. | ||
| So when I'm asking you these stories, I kind of know what the answers are. | ||
| So what else have y 'all gotten right? | ||
| And I'll give you two. | ||
| I'll give you time. | ||
| Epstein and Jussie Smollett. | ||
| I'll give you those two guesses that y 'all ended up getting right. | ||
| What else? | ||
| We, uh... | ||
| I'm trying to think. | ||
| There's just so many of them. | ||
| So many! | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll wait. | |
| Just give me one. | ||
| And Gulf of Tonkin doesn't count. | ||
| Y 'all weren't in company when it happened. | ||
| I said the Gulf of Tonkin doesn't count. | ||
| They weren't a company when it happened. | ||
| I want that on the record, please. | ||
| We can sit in this awkward silence as long as you need to think of one time where y 'all were right. | ||
| Well, there's just so many, like, stories we've covered over the years. | ||
| It's a little bit hard for me to kind of... | ||
| Just pick one, then. | ||
| Well, that's kind of the problem. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's so many of them. | |
| It's kind of like on Spotify. | ||
| Let me stop you here. | ||
| You keep thinking, we'll wait in silence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Ooh. | ||
| That's not... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not... | |
| Not good. | ||
| Come on, come on. | ||
| Just let me get out of this one. | ||
| Just let me get out of this one. | ||
| There's so many. | ||
| We have nothing but time. | ||
| No, just let me get out of this one. | ||
| Listen, I'll answer all your questions, sir. | ||
| I'll get on my knees. | ||
| Just don't make me answer if anything I've ever written is true. | ||
| It's an embarrassment of correctness, and so I have too much to choose from. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think the reality of that is, obviously, you'd be very worried about saying anything definitively. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Because there will be a follow-up question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| And you can't really back up what you're going to say, probably. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| So, this is another moment of Kit being like a normal human, sort of. | ||
| And that is, the question is posed to him, do you believe that you and Infowars are responsible for the coverage that you put out that affected my client? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And Kit, like a normal human, accepts that responsibility. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Do you believe you and or Infowars share responsibility in... | ||
| What Mr. Fontaine has gone through. | ||
| I regret posting his photo and what he's gone through. | ||
| I didn't ask you how you felt. | ||
| I asked if you're going to hold yourself and the company responsible for doing what you did to them. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And that goes for both you and the company, correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Are you aware that the company testified day before yesterday and they said we don't have any responsibility? | ||
| No, I'm not aware of that. | ||
| You would disagree with that. | ||
| Not anymore! | ||
| I understand. | ||
| That's your job. | ||
| We know the answer. | ||
| I just asked it. | ||
| I'll strike the question. | ||
| I got your answer. | ||
| That's tough. | ||
| Listen, even Bill at this point is throwing him... | ||
| Listen, we already know the answer. | ||
| He's really trying to help him out. | ||
| He's not hitting as hard as he probably could. | ||
| I really do feel like Bill is giving him... | ||
| This, like, I don't know what to call it. | ||
| Just a sense of, like, man, I could really tear your ass into shreds. | ||
| You know that, right? | ||
| It comes back to the dynamic you were talking about at the beginning. | ||
| It's just this feeling of, you say things that you don't need to say in response to questions that you could dodge or not answer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| Instead, you offer more information. | ||
| Insane. | ||
| It's basically like, if it were a boxing metaphor, it would be like, You're leaving your midsection exposed constantly. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| You've got your hands over your head and you're saying, I'm gonna get ya! | ||
| I'm gonna get ya! | ||
| So this next clip is where sort of the main headline surrounding this deposition is that Kit started crying. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this is the clip where that happens. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And I'm going to give a little bit of just a warning in advance. | ||
| There's some language that's used regarding Fontaine that comes from 4chan posts that I think some would probably find offensive. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And just for the sake of, you know, it's on the record, here is that. | ||
| I'm going to go ahead and assume you've never seen this February 10th post from 4chan either. | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay, if you flip to page three. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What do we see? | ||
| A photo of Mr. Fontaine. | ||
| Okay, and that's four days before the shooting. | ||
| Ah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct? | |
| Yes. | ||
| So, this post is, if you go to the first page, is a subpage of 4chan called Politically Incorrect, right? | ||
| I believe so, yes. | ||
| And the caption of this thread is Antifa... | ||
| Aspie, lefty, communist, cringe thread. | ||
| That's what it says. | ||
| Show me your worst, unironic, lefty, dimwits, commies, etc. | ||
| you found while surfing the internet social media. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And you understand Mr. Fontaine was posted by someone to this thread. | ||
| It's what it appears to be, yes. | ||
| Are you aware that Mr. Fontaine suffers from any mental health diseases? | ||
| No. | ||
| Would that affect the way you feel about him if he did? | ||
| Yeah, I've felt the same way at times. | ||
| I'm going to represent to you that Mr. Fontaine has been clinically diagnosed with being on the autism spectrum. | ||
| And has been for a while. | ||
| He doesn't like, he's socially not very developed as you are today speaking of the jury. | ||
| And has dealt with mental health issues both before and continues. | ||
| Now, remember how you said you felt whenever you got death threats, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I want you to imagine... | ||
| And you do not have any sort of mental health diseases that you know of, correct? | ||
| No, I've suffered from depression. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Have you suffered from autism? | ||
| Social anxiety? | ||
| Do you have an inability to work in large groups of people and deal with a lot of people in person? | ||
| I do. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And you can sympathize a little bit more with Mr. Fontaine for what he went through. | ||
| And I understand you're upset. | ||
| And I'm not trying to... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not upset, just... | |
| Take your time. | ||
| I can understand the suffering he's been through. | ||
| Take your time. | ||
| I understand you're upset. | ||
| If you want to take a few seconds, let's take a break and get him some tissues. | ||
| We're going to go off the record, Madam Reporter. | ||
| The time is 12.30pm. | ||
| We're off the record. | ||
| So, they go to break. | ||
| Understandably, I think that's probably a human impulse. | ||
| He did do a plug for Super Veil Vitality when they went to break. | ||
| It's important. | ||
| I think that a lot of people have drawn attention to this, and I think it's interesting, obviously, that he started crying. | ||
| But I also think that it's probably the most... | ||
| I think that obviously he should have recognized the pain that he was causing through this sloppy-ass work prior to this. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You would hope that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I still find it very difficult to criticize that response. | ||
| I think this is a really good example of what we've talked about from the very beginning. | ||
| And with Alex, we've kind of come to a clearer idea, and it's less ambiguous, but that stupid v. | ||
| evil continuum. | ||
| You can be stupid... | ||
| And, you know, still do evil shit, but it's kind of clear here that Kit Daniels is not in the vindictive or malicious or even... | ||
| He's a kernel of evil, but mostly kind of dumb and unaware. | ||
| He's just kind of an idiot who... | ||
| I mean, unless he's a fucking Kaiser Soce-level mastermind right here, then he's kind of an idiot who has been lied to by Alex Jones and intimidated by everybody else. | ||
| I don't know what conclusion to draw, but I think that's certainly a fair reading that you can take. | ||
| I knew going in watching this that he started crying, and I still felt when it happened that it was shocking. | ||
| It still shocked me because, first of all, it kind of happens fairly quick. | ||
| It doesn't build very naturally to it, but what it felt like to me was somebody's... | ||
| Dissonance really being challenged. | ||
| The notion that this is what I do for a living, and this is what... | ||
| If I wasn't getting sued for this, I probably wouldn't even recognize that I had done something wrong. | ||
| And here I am, seeing parts of myself in the victim of what I've done. | ||
| These thoughts just sort of tearing in the brain. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| It's hard to look at. | ||
| It is, honestly, the thing that it reminds me of most is evangelical children and how they grow up. | ||
| And one of the things that will almost always wind up happening when an evangelical child leaves the faith... | ||
| For good is they will have a very big conversation and they will suddenly start crying and they don't entirely know why. | ||
| Based upon the questions and the conversations and the thought they're having. | ||
| And the reality is the reason it's happening is because they're going through this strange moment where everything they have ever believed comes into contact with an immovable force. | ||
| Your reality is being challenged. | ||
| Absolute. | ||
| Mind-crushing pressure from that. | ||
| And so you just always cry. | ||
| And it just happens. | ||
| Now, conversely... | ||
| It's like cult deprogramming as well. | ||
| But conversely, you have situations like the Daria deposition or Alex's deposition where they're being confronted with very incontrovertible instances of the harm and damage that came to the victims of these narratives and these things that they put out. | ||
| And they did not bat an eyelash. | ||
| Nope. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think... | |
| They had no... | ||
| Alex gave lip service to, for example, the emails that Wolfgang Halbig sent harassing the parents. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure, sure. | ||
| He gave lip service to, like, this is horrible. | ||
| That is wrong. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But there wasn't any kind of an emotional reaction. | ||
| It wasn't worse. | ||
| No. | ||
| And with Daria, it was even worse and colder. | ||
| She's ice cold. | ||
| But this... | ||
| This feels like there's some humanity there that's crying out. | ||
| It feels, yeah, but that's why I bring up evangelical, because it feels like the difference between a believer and somebody who was raised in the church. | ||
| You know, like somebody who was raised in the church has been surrounded by nothing but this type of information for such a long time that it's assumed to be true, right? | ||
| Believers, it doesn't matter what you do. | ||
| It does not matter what you do. | ||
| You cannot talk to them in a way that will cut through their belief system. | ||
| But if you're just somebody who was raised around it and has just absorbed it, then eventually you can go like, oh shit! | ||
| What the f***? | ||
| Fuck is around me! | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah, and I don't know. | ||
| Maybe there's an element, too, that it's kind of really shocking to see that we're making more out of it than really is there. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| It is possible. | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| It's really tough to interpret. | ||
| And one of the things that makes it even more difficult is that, like, to the best of my knowledge, Kit didn't immediately quit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, like, I don't know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, and furthermore, simply because of what we do, we're so unused to people having human moments on our show. | ||
| Well, and Alex Fick's crying all the time. | ||
| That's very clearly real. | ||
| Yeah, so it's like, I don't even know if anything's true when it comes to human emotions on this show. | ||
| Right, or what is actually underlying that human emotion, even if it is real. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it literally could be him crying because he realized that he's so fucked. | ||
| I feel like that's doubtful based on just the surrounding information that was being discussed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| Absolutely. | ||
| But there's also, like, I mean, if you wanted to get really cynical with it, there could just be a crying about his own pain. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| Not empathizing necessarily with... | ||
| Yeah, you're just reminding me that I get depressed. | ||
| Right, and those painful memories from my own existence are what's motivating this. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| I don't know if that's the case. | ||
| It doesn't... | ||
| Really feel like it. | ||
| It feels like there's an empathetic quality to it. | ||
| It does. | ||
| But again, I might just be seeing some things that I would prefer to see as opposed to... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| This is just a total selfish... | ||
| Oh no, totally. | ||
| I want to believe that he is... | ||
| You know, it's one of those things where I have that... | ||
| Absolute bias as well. | ||
| Like, I want to believe. | ||
| I want to believe that somebody can change. | ||
| Alright, Fox Mulder. | ||
| I want to do it. | ||
| I want to Knight's Tale this. | ||
| Well, because it's preferable to thinking that this is an organization that's all full of Darius. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So they take the break, and they come back, and one of the things that I think Bill is trying to do here is really force... | ||
| his information comes from. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So like this 4chan that he got his information from. | |
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So there's more offensive language here. | |
| So just a heads up on that. | ||
| If we look at page two, Okay. | ||
| a picture above Mr. Fontaine's right here. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right, that's Mr. Fontaine in the middle. | |
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Can you please read the comment that was posted with it? | ||
| I'd rather not, but I will because you asked me. | ||
| It says, Same Aspie Commie Faggot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Go down two. | ||
| Actually, go down one. | ||
| What does the next one say? | ||
| The nose. | ||
| The nose. | ||
| What's the next one say? | ||
| What is it with the they, them pronouns? | ||
| Aren't they plural pronouns? | ||
| Would you understand that to be a comment related to Mr. Fontaine being a non-binary identifying individual? | ||
| I guess, just because I'm not terribly familiar with the terminology. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| It means I'll represent to you that Mr. Fontaine does not identify as a male or a female. | ||
| Okay, I get you now. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay, I see. | ||
| My God. | ||
| That's what, if you go up one, that's what the they, them. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They're picking apart the public information they find on him and using that to make fun of him. | ||
| Then you see the photo of Mr. Fontaine. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Right under that, you see a picture that was posted, correct? | ||
| It looks like it was a screenshot of a video. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Can you tell me what the file name was? | ||
| Left Wing Death Squad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Go to the next one. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Can you read it for us? | ||
| I can guarantee that this loser works at the Palladium in Worchester, Massachusetts. | ||
| They play loads of metal shows far more than any other genre. | ||
| Do you know where Mr. Fontaine works? | ||
| No. | ||
| I want to represent to you that at the time he worked at the Palladium in Worchester, Massachusetts. | ||
| So, the demonstration here is of the intensely bigoted nature of the harassment that Kit continued, knowingly or unknowingly, or through negligence, and the doxing and all of this is the kernel from which his reporting bloomed. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| Or whatever, and it's... | ||
| It's a bummer. | ||
| Yeah, you see all these pieces of shit? | ||
| Yeah, you're one of them. | ||
| How do you feel about that? | ||
| Not only you're one of them, it's more you have taken their goals and achieved them for them. | ||
| You have spread this harassment to a much larger audience than would be available on this poll board. | ||
| And in some ways created a more mainstream-ish place where it's happening. | ||
| And, you know, I think if Kit is dealing with what's being shown to him, I think it should be a terrifying, like, oh, that should be a wake-up call. | ||
| Oh, I mean, yeah. | ||
| Yikes. | ||
| Yeah, the fact that he didn't quit immediately after this deposition says a lot. | ||
| Says a lot. | ||
| But then again, I don't know. | ||
| Can't really say that with certainty. | ||
| I don't know what his employment status is. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| I haven't gone to the website enough to know if he has bylines. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Necessarily, but I haven't heard anything. | ||
| I would say that if he didn't quit, that speaks volumes. | ||
| Yeah, yep. | ||
| But, oh well. | ||
| Anyway, he fell for a 4chan thing. | ||
| And unfortunately, a year prior, he'd written another article. | ||
| This is your article, correct? | ||
| I believe so, yes. | ||
| It's got your name on it? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Can you tell me what the headline is? | ||
| BBC Falls Victim to 4chan Trolling. | ||
| MSN Caught Sounding Like Idiots. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| It's kind of ironic, huh? | ||
| I would agree, yes. | ||
| And you wrote this article in August of 2017, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| About eight months before you wrote the article in question today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Now, The subheading catches my eye. | ||
| Can you read it for me, please? | ||
| BBC claims visiting 4chan constitutes investigative journalism. | ||
| And your subheading there is pointing out and making fun of BBC for falling victim and for thinking that 4chan's reliable, correct? | ||
| Something to that effect. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| You'd agree this one didn't really age well, huh? | ||
| I would agree so. | ||
| There's a ability for Kit to kind of laugh about this stuff after he's sort of purged himself. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's very weird. | ||
| Yeah, that's like flipping a weird switch. | ||
| I know! | ||
| What an idiot I look like now, right? | ||
| I gotta say. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Remember I was crying for destroying that guy's life? | ||
| Man, I feel like I've got egg on my face. | ||
| Falling for a 4chan troll prank a year after complaining that other people look like idiots because they fell for one. | ||
| Yeah, that kind of makes it appear that I was aware that that's something I should be looking out for. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Man, that did not age well. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Ha! | ||
| So, there's another aspect to the Parkland shooting that Kit covered, and that is that there were some... | ||
| Bags that cops were taking to a car. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And this is suspicious. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so Kit posted an article making some questions about this. | ||
| He's gotta ask questions. | ||
| And so this next clip is an attempt to get Kit to understand that this is not asking questions. | ||
| What you're doing is not asking questions. | ||
| Oh my god, is this a 45 minute long clip? | ||
| Three. | ||
| Are you contending here under oath that the investigating officers of this shooting were improper? | ||
| And what they did? | ||
| The way I wrote this article, I thought at the time of the video, it seemed a little odd. | ||
| I'm not saying that they did anything improper. | ||
| Sure, but let me do this. | ||
| If you and I go outside of this building and we're standing there, and a school bus of children drive by, and I say, I was really odd how you just looked at that little girl. | ||
| I'm implying something, but I can say I'm just asking questions. | ||
| But it's not really a question. | ||
| You get that, right? | ||
| I don't know if that's equivalent to this. | ||
| Well, sure it is. | ||
| I'm just asking questions. | ||
| No, I literally was. | ||
| I mean, to me, it did seem a little odd that they were carrying it at the time. | ||
| It was pointed out to me. | ||
| I believe it was the Jones and maybe one of the radio production crews brought me this video. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why do you keep looking at me like... | |
| You realize this is clickbait, but you don't want to admit it. | ||
| Because that's not my... | ||
| I'm just asking questions. | ||
| You're the one that keeps bringing up the word clickbait. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Look, in my opinion, they look like you're saying clickbait. | ||
| So my eyes are saying clickbait? | ||
| Right, I'm just asking questions. | ||
| You see how this works? | ||
| When someone has an opinion... | ||
| I'm sorry, you've lost me. | ||
| Alright, here, I'll break it down for you. | ||
| I don't need to be rude, but... | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| When someone has an opinion... | ||
| And then they inject that opinion into a loaded question with an agenda. | ||
| But they do it in a form of a question, and then they say, "Whoa, whoa, I'm just asking questions." That's not actually asking questions. | ||
| You don't care what the answers are. | ||
| That's what your opinion is. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| What are the answers? | ||
| You know it now. | ||
| Did you go look? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Did you go through the files of Parkland and look and see what bag was put in that truck? | ||
| No. | ||
| Did you go try to search and find out who these officers were? | ||
| Not after this. | ||
| No, because it's not important. | ||
| The important part is that you got body bag and responders acting suspicious the day after the shooting. | ||
| That's the important part. | ||
| Not the actual truth, right? | ||
| That's what you're implying, but... | ||
| What'd you do to find the truth? | ||
| What'd you do to answer these questions? | ||
| Let's put it this way. | ||
| Just answer my questions. | ||
| I will answer your question. | ||
| What'd you do? | ||
| If I were to go back and do FOIA requests to find any of this out weeks later, I'm sorry, the audience has already moved away from Parkland. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're writing stories to get your audience to read them now. | ||
| No. | ||
| I'm writing stories that the audience is already paying attention to. | ||
| How do you know what your audience is going to pay attention to in two weeks? | ||
| How do you know they won't still want to know, oh yeah, what are the answers? | ||
| Because, unfortunately, that's how the world works nowadays. | ||
| People have a short attention span. | ||
| Doesn't sound like these questions are very important, then, does it? | ||
| That's what you're... | ||
| I don't understand what you're saying. | ||
| Well, if you had all these important questions, right, but never even attempted to figure out the answers, they're not that important, are they? | ||
| I guess that's your opinion. | ||
| That is a tough thing to get around. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| The just-asking questions, but I also don't care about the answers. | ||
| That's a tough needle to thread. | ||
| I genuinely believe he does not understand what is being explained to him. | ||
| I do, too. | ||
| Especially the part where your eyes seem to be saying clickbait. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| He was like, I'm in a completely different world, sir. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Please. | ||
| Bill was even making clear, like, you see how this works? | ||
| I'm doing this to you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he did not... | ||
| Just can't get there. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| The idea of answering a question does seem anathema to Kit Daniels. | ||
| Well, he says possibly a lot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That does come up. | ||
| Bill tells him to stop it. | ||
| Hey, maybe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe not. | |
| He does say unfortunately a lot, too. | ||
| You know, looking back on it, I would have preferred to have done my job completely differently from the beginning. | ||
| Yep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| So, you know, obviously, question asking. | ||
| That itself isn't bad. | ||
| But this brings up the notion of you gotta ask the right questions. | ||
| Oh boy, this is gonna be a 45 minute long clip. | ||
| Just a minute. | ||
| In your opinion, are these questions important? | ||
| When we're trying to figure out what's going on with the mass shooting, it is important to ask questions. | ||
| The right questions. | ||
| Who decides what the right questions are? | ||
| Well, we know which ones are the wrong questions, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| No, I don't know where you're getting at. | ||
| Wrong questions are the questions that are put out there that nobody cares about and nobody actually goes and tries to answer. | ||
| Like your article. | ||
| Says who? | ||
| You yourself didn't even try to answer. | ||
| It can't be that important to you. | ||
| You don't even care what the answer is. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| You just said... | ||
| You did not go and do anything to get the answers. | ||
| FOIA requests would have taken too long. | ||
| My readers wouldn't have liked that. | ||
| So how important can they be? | ||
| Here's the problem. | ||
| I can't force readers to care about things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If I wrote about something three or four weeks after the fact, unfortunately people are just not going to care that much. | |
| So InfoWars audience only cares... | ||
| About the questions that are asked immediately and they don't care about the answers. | ||
| The news audience in general tends to only focus on the stories of the day and they're not necessarily focused too much on stories that would happen two, three, four weeks ago. | ||
| Okay, sure. | ||
| Where'd you get that info? | ||
| That's just common knowledge. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oops. | |
| Oops. | ||
| Kit, you're selling yourself short there, buddy. | ||
| Are you saying that people don't want to read your work based upon the merits of your work? | ||
| Nope, not if it's a couple days old. | ||
| Sure don't. | ||
| Hey, listen. | ||
| I have got nothing interesting to say unless you are already paying attention. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that things are a little contentious here. | ||
| Permission to treat the witness as stupid. | ||
| And so I think in cases like that, in situations like that, it's important to bring things back to the center and find some agreement, which they're able to do here. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I'll tell you this. | ||
| Jones has told me years ago that we were not investigative journalists. | ||
| I will agree with him on that. | ||
| Now, whether or not you made your audience believe you were... | ||
| Hold on, let me finish. | ||
| Okay, I'm sorry. | ||
| Now, whether or not you made your audience believe you were is a completely different question, but there is no doubt in my mind that nothing that you do is actually investigative journalism. | ||
| I would agree with that. | ||
| The problem I have is that Alex Jones' motto, and something he's repeated over and over and over again, is we are the truth in what? | ||
| Starts with a J and ends with an urnalism. | ||
| Still don't know. | ||
| Where did you see that at? | ||
| On his show. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Once or twice every three hours. | ||
| At least for the first 300 hours I spent listening to him. | ||
| Well, unfortunately I can't speak for Jones. | ||
| Okay, so if Mr. Jones, the owner of the company, says Infowars, we're the truth in journalism, he's lying in your opinion. | ||
| I didn't say that. | ||
| Well, you said you're not journalists. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Oh, God damn it. | ||
| These are the kind of things that you just have to assume that either... | ||
| No one at Infowars cares or led to horrible conversations. | ||
| I mean, just like, it could not be more a man walking through a fucking crowded street of carriages while two people are carrying a pane of glass and there's fucking watermelon carts everywhere. | ||
| Like, he is stepping into an absolute disaster every time he speaks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Just imagine him going to work and being like, hey boss. | ||
| So I blamed you for a bunch of things. | ||
| I told them that you aren't journalism, and if you say you are, you're lying. | ||
| And also, I said that InfoWars is responsible for the coverage. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I am starting to think I am not going to have a good day today. | |
| Yeah, I don't need to sit down. | ||
| I can just go back to my desk. | ||
| It's a good thing I'm well-practiced at apologizing for things I did wrong. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| But I think at this point, Kit really does want to get out of the line of questioning where it's like, hey, you didn't even look into any of this. | ||
| Sure, sure, yeah, I would imagine so. | ||
| And so it's someone else's fault. | ||
| Let me ask you something. | ||
| What was in this bag? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Was it weapons? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| How many shooters were involved here? | ||
| Was it just one or more? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Why did it take two trained professionals to carry this bag? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Is there SWAT gear in that bag? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Are these questions that you find important? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, they're not important enough for you to go and answer, right? | ||
| We know that. | ||
| Well, if I remember correctly, I wrote this article at the behest of somebody else. | ||
| Somebody told you to write it? | ||
| I believe so. | ||
| I think it was Jones or a radio producer, like I said. | ||
| And Jones said, here's some footage. | ||
| This is what I want you to write. | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| I just vaguely remember someone asked me to write this article. | ||
| Okay, so this article would have been about... | ||
| It's not necessarily your beliefs. | ||
| You just wrote something that somebody asked you to write. | ||
| Basically, yes. | ||
| It's my understanding of it. | ||
| Then you would agree with me. | ||
| These aren't... | ||
| You don't actually care what the answers are to these questions, right? | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Exasperated sigh is probably about the best you can do as a response to that. | ||
| Here's my answer to your question, sir. | ||
| I am very tired and you make me feel very bad about myself. | ||
| I would like to not do this anymore. | ||
| Can we do that? | ||
| It's Alex's fault. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Or some producer. | ||
| Somebody else told me to do this. | ||
| I frankly... | ||
| I mean, let's be honest. | ||
| Did you hear me try and read the things you asked me to read? | ||
| Do you think I'm good at reading or writing? | ||
| So there's still another matter to be... | ||
| It's still the question of not answering these questions because they're not important. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| This is still being driven. | ||
| We're really trying to get this home to Kit. | ||
| Because I think it is important. | ||
| It is. | ||
| If you thought these questions were important, you would have gone and looked for the answers at some point between... | ||
| February 2018, and today, February of 2022. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like I said, I don't consider myself an investigative journalist. | ||
| I consider myself more as a social commentator. | ||
| I don't even believe I've ever done a spoiler request, as far as I recall. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| So these answers easy to my question. | ||
| I'm not trying to trick you. | ||
| You don't care what the answers are to these questions, right? | ||
| You're just asking them. | ||
| I think I would have been interested if I could find the answers of it, like, Within a couple days of the shooting. | ||
| Are you saying you couldn't find those answers? | ||
| I mean, no. | ||
| You're not saying that. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| I'm saying I doubt I could have found the answers to these questions a couple days within the shooting. | ||
| Mr. Daniels, you didn't even try. | ||
| Well, yeah, because I didn't think I could. | ||
| Duh. | ||
| You never tried. | ||
| Because I'm not an investigative journalist. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So why do you find me on these questions? | ||
| Because maybe I just don't understand the questions. | ||
| I'm just trying to put it out there that sometimes Infowars has articles that go out, whether written in your perspective or on behalf of somebody else, that ask questions, quote-unquote, to stir up fear or stir up a conspiracy theorist. | ||
| Like, there was a body in the bag. | ||
| Or there was weapons in the bag. | ||
| Or that there was SWAT gear in the bag. | ||
| Or that it was a dead body. | ||
| Or that this was taken during the shooting. | ||
| All of these just questions, they're all there just to incite people to say, oh my gosh, something might be up. | ||
| And then where do they start going for information? | ||
| They start coming back to www.fillintheblank. | ||
| Infowars.com because that's where this all started. | ||
| It's tough for Kit to refute any of this because it is a pretty apt description of what he did. | ||
| This is just exciting questions to tickle the brains of people who are drawn towards conspiracies to imply that you have some kind of information that isn't accessible anywhere else and then get them into your revenue stream more or less. | ||
| And I get it. | ||
| He's trapped in a fucking Fox News right-wing propaganda brain where the idea is never... | ||
| I mean, the job of right-wing media is to remove curiosity by destroying the value of questions. | ||
| Like, oh, gay marriage? | ||
| What's next? | ||
| Are you going to marry your dog? | ||
| You don't actually want to know what's next. | ||
| What's next is more equality and everybody gets better. | ||
| You want to... | ||
| What's next is... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Couples getting married. | ||
| Yeah, questions don't mean anything. | ||
| Questions are just reasons to hate. | ||
| Yep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| So, there's a fundamental issue going on, and that is that the retraction of this story was not done correctly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| The one that involved the picture of Marcel Fontaine. | ||
| And so, Kit has an excuse about this that is troubling. | ||
| Do you know what date Mr. Fontaine filed a lawsuit? | ||
| Around that same time frame? | ||
| April 1st, 2018. | ||
| And he did that because the standard language that should have been in the original one, it's not just okay for you to take the photo out. | ||
| This is what's required. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And because he gave you over two weeks and nobody did anything about it, that's where this comes from. | ||
| Do you find the retraction, clarification, and correction a bit disingenuous considering it was in response to getting sued? | ||
| No, if he... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here's my problem. | |
| I've told my counsel this. | ||
| If this is an attorney-client conversation, it's privileged. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, well, I'm not going to say what I told you then. | |
| Well, you can say what you told her. | ||
| You're not supposed to tell me what legal advice she gave. | ||
| Okay, I understand that. | ||
| HIPAA. | ||
| My problem was, at the time, our counsel, Eric Taub, apparently he said on that letter that y 'all sent for a month. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Excuse me? | ||
| My understanding is, when we saw the letter in the lawsuit, we went and got other counsel to write the retraction letter. | ||
| Did you know that Mr. Tab actually represented you all the way up until about maybe two weeks ago? | ||
| For the last four years in this case? | ||
| Oh, excuse me. | ||
| He pulled out in end of November. | ||
| So, there's an allegation being made here that their lawyer ignored this demand for a retraction for a month, and then they got new counsel, but he was still the counsel until very recently before this deposition. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is troubling. | ||
| Yeah, if I was Kit Daniel's lawyer, I would have said, do not say any of that. | ||
| It introduces a lot more questions. | ||
| Excuse me, a lawyer sat on this for 30 days. | ||
| May I have more details about that information? | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, it's bad. | ||
| But also, even given all that, Kit's understanding about the rules... | ||
| About retraction. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Are not great. | ||
| And mic down for this because this is the clip where you can hear a laugh. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And it's your contention that he sat on the letter and he's the reason why the retraction wasn't done correctly or in the right time frame. | ||
| It was done under the right time frame. | ||
| What do you mean by that? | ||
| I mean, my understanding is we have, what, like 30 days to put the retraction up? | ||
| It's 10. What I saw in the Texas State Law, it said 30. And even if it was 30, you got my letter on February 18th. | ||
| You changed it on April 2nd. | ||
| I don't remember if I even saw the letter until a lawsuit, to be honest. | ||
| Sure, but I'm just saying, when you said you met the time frame, I don't know how many days you're counting, but that's more than 30. But we don't, we don't, my understanding is we don't practice law in Texas on the weekends. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ha! | |
| That's not, it's just... | ||
| Blatantly not true. | ||
| I practice law all the time. | ||
| Well, I mean... | ||
| Saturdays, I wake up, I practice. | ||
| Do you do depositions on Saturdays and Sundays? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yep. | ||
| That was where the laugh was. | ||
| My understanding is in Texas, you don't practice law on weekends. | ||
| Don't say that to a lawyer. | ||
| My understanding in Texas, and please stop me if you know any more about this than I do, perhaps. | ||
| Are you some sort of lawyer that practices in some sort of state? | ||
| Anyways, my understanding, despite you very clearly saying all the words that would suggest what I'm about to say is not true, I don't think you guys work on Saturday. | ||
| Well, something that's kind of even remarkable about this is that... | ||
| I know from first-hand experience being at a deposition in Texas that happened on the weekend. | ||
| On the weekend! | ||
| That happened before this deposition. | ||
| People at Infowars were deposed on weekends. | ||
| Kids should know that this is nonsense, but I think it is a fun little bit of, like... | ||
| Who told him that? | ||
| Who told him that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Where did he get that information? | ||
| He read it in one of those, like, bathroom books. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| That's one of those things where it's like, that's the type of shit where it's like, I genuinely want to know where it is you got that impression. | ||
| What's the chain of custody of this fact? | ||
| Totally, totally, totally. | ||
| So there's still more problems with this retraction, though. | ||
| And this also is another thing where Kit might get scolded by Alex for this. | ||
| I do have a question about Exhibit 2. Okay. | ||
| Here, on this webpage, on February 14th, 2018, we showed a photograph of a young man that we had received. | ||
| That's very puzzling, considering you said that you pulled it. | ||
| You never said anybody sent you that photo. | ||
| Yes, you're right. | ||
| So, whoever wrote that, that clarification also is inaccurate. | ||
| Only those words I did bring up to Alex Jones that I didn't like we had received. | ||
| What did he say? | ||
| He said, just let the lawyers handle it. | ||
| Don't say Alex's name in the deposition. | ||
| Don't do it. | ||
| You're only going to get Alex in trouble. | ||
| You could have said lawyers. | ||
| You could have said lawyers. | ||
| You didn't need to say... | ||
| Alex told me! | ||
| I brought up that exact complaint to Alex. | ||
| He told me to shut up. | ||
| How is it that he has not been able to remember so much, but this one time he's like, oh yeah, that one? | ||
| I definitely brought that up to Alex. | ||
| Probably a problem. | ||
| Could not have been more certain that he took that exact complaint to Alex. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| So, Kit wrote this article, and something happened the next day around Infowars. | ||
| Kind of funny. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The day after you posted your story, Paul Joseph Watson, who at the time I believe was, what was the role you gave him? | |
| Not chief editor, but editor at large. | ||
| That's how he referred to himself in his biography. | ||
| And he says, so the alt-right and the alt-left media crafted a fake news narrative that fulfilled both their objectives using made up 4chan posts less than 24 hours after the, A bloody massacre that killed 17 people. | ||
| Period. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Period. | ||
| You realize Mr. Watson's actually making fun of you right now. | ||
| He doesn't realize that you did this, but... | ||
| The Sandy Feinmester responds to him and says, That's rich coming from you. | ||
| Infowars published false information in the wrong photo in propaganda efforts to link the left and Antifa. | ||
| You're a huge part of the problem, period. | ||
| Complete hypocrisy, period. | ||
| He's not wrong there, is he? | ||
| No. | ||
| The sandy guy? | ||
| He does clarify that he didn't do it maliciously. | ||
| No, of course he didn't. | ||
| Because he doesn't even understand things. | ||
| I just find it tough. | ||
| How do you continue working there? | ||
| I don't know! | ||
| Having this thrown in your face that your own... | ||
| Senior editor or whatever was posting articles mocking the very work that you're getting sued over. | ||
| I legitimately don't know how this dude fucking brushes his teeth every morning. | ||
| I don't know if he speaks to his blender. | ||
| I don't know if he's given things fantastical names like I sleep in the dumper bed. | ||
| Like, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know how this dude functions. | ||
| It's pretty confusing. | ||
| It is bananas to me. | ||
| So he also wrote some stuff about the Las Vegas shooting based on some notions of Antifa literature and what have you. | ||
| Bill wants to establish that that was also clickbait. | ||
| I'm going to ask you one question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Your headline says Vegas shooter found with Antifa literature, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Point me where you get that from in this article. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ooh! | |
| I don't see an embed for it. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| Because the headline is clickbait. | ||
| That's your opinion? | ||
| Not the opinion. | ||
| Oh my god, what do words mean, Dan? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| That's what I thought. | ||
| So this article that Kit had written about the Las Vegas shooting is debatably clickbait. | ||
| Debatably. | ||
| But the information that he's running with in this Comes from dubious origins. | ||
| It's essentially just from Alex. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Now, this... | ||
| We're winding down this deposition here, and I think it ends with a scathing revelation about how InfoWars works. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I wrote the headline in the lead sentence on Beheads to Jones, if I remember correctly. | ||
| He showed me the text he got from his source. | ||
| That you don't know if is even real. | ||
| It could have been Dr. Jones with his burner phone. | ||
| I seriously doubt that. | ||
| You don't know who it was. | ||
| But I seriously doubt he would do something like that just for me working for him for so long. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, you idiot. | |
| He's got you writing multiple articles telling you to put stuff in that you can't back up. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that he, that nobody. | ||
| Maybe the in-bed for you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hold on, hold on. | |
| You'll need to talk one at a time. | ||
| Okay, I'm sorry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| That nobody can corroborate. | ||
| He's got you putting your name out there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| But you would agree with me, nothing about this article has anything to do with Antifa other than the headline Jones forced you to put on the top of this paper. | ||
| Well, it said Antifa literature. | ||
| There's a difference. | ||
| There's nothing in this article besides the headline that Mr. Jones forced you to put on here that has anything to do with Antifa literature. | ||
| Well, that was what the source told Jones. | ||
| Then where is it? | ||
| Where's the screenshot? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So here's the thing. | ||
| Why is that your headline if the article doesn't talk about it at all? | ||
| That's a question for Jones. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And just to kind of break it down, Jones just kind of said you're writing this and kind of forced you to write this. | ||
| This isn't something you wanted to write. | ||
| My understanding is this is something he asked me to write. | ||
| He gave me the information off his phone. | ||
| Did he ask you in a way where he would have been okay if you said no? | ||
| I doubt it. | ||
| Because when he asks something like this, you do it. | ||
| Yeah, he's my boss. | ||
| So this may not be as relevant in a legal setting, but this clip is super important for my interests. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| I have found that the methodology for how InfoWars works as a broadcast is that Alex will use InfoWars articles, specifically their headlines, to build his on-air narratives. | ||
| Oftentimes these headlines do not accurately reflect the body of the article, but are worded specifically in a way so that they can be useful to whatever conspiracy Alex is trying to prove or demonstrate on air. | ||
| In some cases, these are just fully in-house articles, and in other cases, they're articles from other outlets where the body of the article is copy-pasted onto the Infowars site, and a wholly new headline is attached to make it more useful for Alex. | ||
| The revelation that Alex is directly telling his managing editor what headlines to put on stories is basically the piece that completes the circle of Alex just making all this shit up. | ||
| He's on air pretending to cover news stories, but in reality, it's just him yelling about headlines that he's told his employees to put on stories so he can more easily yell about them. | ||
| This is a completely self-contained information space where everything is just basically Alex's whim. | ||
| It was pretty clear that this was what was going on, but it seemed like a much more reasonable assumption to think that the in-house culture was just that employees knew what Alex wanted and then they provided it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Maybe some subtle prodding happened, like if you didn't take the right angle, Rob Dew would scold you or you wouldn't get as big of a raise. | ||
| That's kind of what I assumed was happening. | ||
| That would make sense and it would be enough to get the message across and ultimately the people who did the right job would stick around and the people who didn't fit that company culture, they wouldn't last. | ||
| To me, it's an entirely different ballgame for Alex to be actively directing the production of the news he's covering and having an active role in the creation of the headlines, which are the only parts of the story he ever really covers. | ||
| Given this workflow, like, what story could Alex not manufacture? | ||
| All he needs is an Infowars article to justify anything he might say on air, and he can just tell one of his mopey underlings to create that for him. | ||
| And from Kit's telling of it, these underlings know better than to not give Alex what he wants. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That's fucked up. | ||
| It's like, we reverse engineered this just from watching the show. | ||
| And it's like, but even then you create a series of plausible sounding steps that would lead you to the result that you have. | ||
| To have somebody not only tell you that those steps were totally right, but to also be like, and guess what? | ||
| There are fewer steps than you thought. | ||
| It's just Alex. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's fucking insane. | ||
| Yeah, because you just have demonstrable, observable things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, Alex only really covers headlines ever. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Suspicious. | |
| The headlines don't match the body of the articles. | ||
| Hugely suspicious. | ||
| Oftentimes, there will be articles that match... | ||
| Where they were originally posted with totally new headlines. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| These are all factual, observable things that lead you to the conclusion that this is an intentional strategy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That creates ease for Alex to yell about things on air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| You wouldn't want to jump to the conclusion that Alex is telling people what to write because it makes it easier for him to yell about things on air. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Because that's an unearned leap. | ||
| And here we are. | ||
| And here we are. | ||
| We have just been given that leap, I guess. | ||
| And I would go so far as to say that the one thing you would not want your employee to tell is that very fact. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So we have one last clip in this deposition, and it's actually a demonstration of how this process works, with the headline being used to essentially create the broadcast. | ||
| Open that article up, go to the last page where the tweet is. | ||
| And read what Mr. Jones tweeted. | ||
| Which article is that? | ||
| That one right there. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| Last page. | ||
| Second to last page, sorry. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Never mind, we're still in sales. | ||
|
unidentified
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Keep going. | |
| Right. | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| Scavenger hunt. | ||
| Just right back to laughing again, huh? | ||
| Mr. Jones' tweet. | ||
| Read it. | ||
| Please? | ||
| Live, ISIS takes responsibility for Vegas shooting as left celebrates massacre. | ||
| Can you tell me why you put that in there? | ||
| I don't know if I did put it in there myself. | ||
| It might have been just, we might have had a script at the time. | ||
| Do you think anyone on the left was celebrating what happened in Las Vegas? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Personally? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| So, in your opinion, you have zero evidence that anyone from the left... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I didn't write this, to be honest with you. | ||
| It's in your article, correct? | ||
| But it's an embed for Twitter for Jones' radio program. | ||
| Okay, so that's just an advertisement that happens to be on the same subject matter as your article. | ||
| I mean, I don't know if advertisement is accurate, but I guess, for lack of a better term... | ||
| If there isn't a better term... | ||
| Maybe this was the... | ||
| When was this published? | ||
| It just might have been coincidence that he's talking about that on the same day of this article. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And it could be coincidence that he asked you to write that article in that way on that day, right? | ||
| I don't understand the question. | ||
| True. | ||
| I wouldn't if I were him either. | ||
| I would absolutely not understand that question. | ||
| Yes, you just have a pretty clear, linear, A to B demonstration of Alex asked you to write this headline, or told you to, and you knew you couldn't not do it, and there's an embedded headline of his show from that day that is covering this news story in the way he told you to cover it, using your article as the justification for it. | ||
| It's just, it's... | ||
| It's a damning indictment of them as... | ||
| I mean, I think this whole deposition is really just a horrific portrait of how they work internally. | ||
|
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Totally. | |
| That's mind-boggling to me. | ||
| That is absolutely mind-boggling to me. | ||
| How is it that you have been on these cases for so fucking long as one of InfoWars' lawyers? | ||
| But at no point in time did you think, man, we should really explain to Kit not to tell the truth. | ||
| Or not try to. | ||
| Yeah, or not try to give up everything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is it that, or do they really think that this is an acceptable way to act? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| They can't, right? | ||
| I think that Kit didn't know any better than to recognize... | ||
| He couldn't recognize the roads he was being walked down. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And I think that... | ||
| I think that comes back to that naivete. | ||
| And I think that the dumbness and the stupidity that he manifests comes out in a lot of ways with him not recognizing some of the stuff that he's reporting is completely batshit and nonsense. | ||
|
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Right, right, right. | |
| And then the naivete comes in with the, he doesn't realize... | ||
| Like, where these questions are leading him. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And that combines to be like, this is a weird, weird conversation they're having. | ||
| It does seem like this is very much a dude who has just operated purely on, like, reward-punishment scale his entire life, where it's just like... | ||
| If I don't ask these questions, I get a reward. | ||
| They give me a bonus. | ||
| I mean, he might as well get $15,000 a year to not ask questions about this. | ||
| I wouldn't be surprised if that is how it felt. | ||
| If that's how it felt. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| This is so fucking sad. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It is so sad. | ||
| It's a bummer all around, I think. | ||
| I think it's a bummer because this is obviously... | ||
| Far from the only example of stories that Kit has shanked this terribly. | ||
| It's just the one where someone thought to sue them. | ||
| And I think there's also a depressing aspect of it that is from the beginning of it, where this is the only person we've ever seen who has had any discernible sense that they need to do better in response to this negative feedback. | ||
| And it also doesn't matter. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| You know, there's a futility to it that comes out. | ||
| Yeah, and I think one of the weird, or not weird, I think one of the things that makes it easier to feel sympathy for Kit is just because... | ||
| Regardless of his, you know, whatever, relative intelligence or preparation or anything along those lines, he's just not equipped to handle a conversation like this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| With follow-up questions and what do you mean. | ||
| It's just not what he's got in his bag of abilities. | ||
| And so the problem here is that Bill could not be more equipped. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's very much a fucking knight on a horse with a lance against a dude holding his underwears over his head, you know? | ||
| And it's like, that's not fair. | ||
| Even if it was Hitler holding his underwear over his head, you'd be like, well, this isn't a fair fight. | ||
| I want Hitler to die, but I mean, this is just kind of excessive, right? | ||
| It feels that way, and I think that's the other difficult part, is the keeping in mind that... | ||
| It's Hitler! | ||
| Well, metaphorically. | ||
| Metaphorically, yes. | ||
| Yeah, it's like, how much sympathy do you really need to expend for someone? | ||
| Who is in a situation where he's way in over his head. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| But also is part of a toxic, horrible infrastructure at Infowars that has led to so many people being hurt. | ||
| And is ultimately, ultimately what we're watching is not a beatdown or anything like that. | ||
| It is a man simply receiving consequences for his actions. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Who has never had to before. | ||
|
unidentified
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Feedback. | |
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So, Jordan, I gotta be honest with you. | ||
| I'm gonna call an audible. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I think we should split this into two episodes. | ||
| I think so, too. | ||
| I think that you should join us Friday for the Owen Schroyer deposition. | ||
| I think that's the plan. | ||
| Because, quite frankly, we're at three and a half hours or so right now. | ||
| And if we add Owen on, I don't know what the fuck kind of time we're gonna be at. | ||
| It's going to be a while. | ||
| And I appreciate that our listeners do enjoy long episodes. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| But we have our limits, and I think the prospect of a six-hour episode is too much for anybody. | ||
| It's a little taxing. | ||
| So, sorry as a bait-and-switch, but I assure you, Friday we will pay off with the headliner. | ||
| So, yeah, I think it's weird. | ||
| I think you say just about everything you need to say about this deposition by playing it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then also saying oof. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think there's a bit of analysis pointing some stuff out, but I think it really speaks for itself in a lot of ways of just like, this is the level of care that is given when you're reporting something that has the potential to drastically impact people's lives. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Don't care until there's consequences. | ||
| They don't care until there's consequences. | ||
| I mean, it is just so much of like children. | ||
| They're just children. | ||
|
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Nobody ever explained like the hot... | |
| It hurts. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| When other people touch hot, it hurts. | ||
| So don't touch them with hot. | ||
| It just makes sense. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| So we will be back, Jordan. | ||
| Indeed we will. | ||
| For another little glimpse into the deposition world of Alex Jones and his cronies. | ||
| But until then, we have a website. | ||
| We do. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| We're also on Twitter. | ||
| We are on Twitter. | ||
| It's at knowledge underscore fight, and I go to bed Jordan. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| We'll be back. | ||
| But until then, I'm Neo. | ||
| I'm Leo. | ||
| I'm DZX Clark. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm... | |
| Mako Shark Rampage. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And now, here comes the sex robots. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |