#709: 2 Dan's 2 War
Today, Dan and Jordan wrap up their coverage of Alex's documentary by discussing the Q&A that Glenn Greenwald hosted after the film's premier. It's not good.
July 31, 2022 - Knowledge Fight
01:48:03
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledge fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dan and Jordan, I am sweating. | |
| Knowledgefight.com. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have great respect for knowledge fight. | |
| 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 Jordan. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| I need, I need money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Andy in Kansas. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Andy in Kansas. | |
| It's time to pray. | ||
| Andy and Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your room. | ||
|
unidentified
|
KnowledgeFight. | |
| KnowledgeFight.com. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to KnowledgeFight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| I'm Jordan. | ||
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around, worship at the altar of Celine from afar in this hotel room. | ||
| Oh, indeed. | ||
| And talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Oh, indeed we are. | ||
| Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Dan! | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Quick question for you. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| What's your bright spot today, buddy? | ||
| My bright spot, Jordan, is that I went to the 7-Eleven. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I was looking for some candy. | ||
| The end. | ||
| Walking down the candy aisle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| Always been a big fan of Swedish fish. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, I like Swedish. | ||
| They disgust me. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, I think it's probably something to do with my dad, like, growing up. | ||
| Fair. | ||
| Some of the things that he really liked stuck. | ||
| Here's a fish. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he was Swedish. | ||
| I like Swedish fish. | ||
| My dad likes Swedish fish, but also he was a big fan of, like, marzipan, and that one didn't carry over. | ||
| I don't like marzipan. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| But Swedish fish are fine. | ||
| Anyway, my bright spot is that I saw a bag of Swedish fish and friends, and I was excited to make friends! | ||
| The fish has made friends! | ||
| We've been awake too long. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There are new flavors. | ||
| Actually, there are new flavors? | ||
| They're not good. | ||
| Oh, well, that makes sense. | ||
| There's a strawberry dolphin and a watermelon turtle. | ||
| Honestly, the original is better. | ||
| What nationalities are they? | ||
| Oh, that's a great question. | ||
| I think they're all Swedish. | ||
| That's kind of offensive to me, really. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Swedish turtle? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Swedish dolphin? | ||
| It's a rainbow world now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fine. | |
| Norwegian turtle. | ||
| Happy? | ||
| Yes, I am. | ||
| What's your bright spot? | ||
| My bright spot is that, boy, it's Saturday. | ||
| I don't have to live-tweet a trial today. | ||
| That is my bright spot. | ||
| Yeah, that is true. | ||
| You got the day off from your new gig. | ||
| No, stop it! | ||
|
unidentified
|
You said it! | |
| It's not my... | ||
| No, it's just... | ||
| I type a lot. | ||
| It's really hard. | ||
| It hurts your fingers. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know how you do it. | ||
| It's a lot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wrote, I think, 20,000 words yesterday. | ||
| That's a book. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| That's fucked up. | ||
| That is fucked up. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| It is nice. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| To free up those fingers. | ||
| I haven't felt... | ||
| They're just soft and gentle all day. | ||
| You gotta play piano. | ||
| Put lotion on them? | ||
| Oh, I'm trying. | ||
| I'm trying. | ||
| I'm gonna learn. | ||
| Well... | ||
| I'm happy for you, Jordan. | ||
| And you'll have to be back on that all night. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| You know what you gotta do? | ||
| Finger push-ups. | ||
| Get ready for Monday. | ||
| Yeah, the Bruce Lee two-finger push-ups. | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| I gotta step up my game. | ||
| So, Jordan! | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We are doing the thing that we have to do, and that is the follow-up to Alex's War, our coverage of that. | ||
| After the premiere of that film, they did a little Q&A where Glenn Greenwald interviewed Alex Jones and Alex Lee Moyer, the documentarian who directed this film. | ||
| They did not have their mics really working and the sound was really terrible for the portion where Moyer was interviewed. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So we're not going to talk about any of that. | ||
| I wonder if she's mad at the crew. | ||
| I would be. | ||
| Maybe not, actually. | ||
| Maybe it's best to not know exactly how that interview went. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So we've just got Alex's chunk. | ||
| And honestly, it's like 40-something minutes of an interview. | ||
| And, I mean, it sucks. | ||
| But it's going to take more than 40 minutes to talk about it. | ||
| Unsurprising. | ||
| I'm fairly certain. | ||
| So, what are your feelings going into this? | ||
| What are your expectations? | ||
| My feeling is that it's going to be Glenn Greenwald doing the softballiest of interviews. | ||
| Like, not even softball questions, not t-ball questions. | ||
| Like, he's swinging the bat for Alex to try and get that ball across the fucking plate. | ||
| That's what I feel like. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| We'll see if that lives up to your expectations. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, before we get into the actual interview, I have a few things I want to say. | ||
| I have some comments. | ||
| Jordan, you're getting very excited. | ||
| So I've been tracking some reactions to this new documentary about Alex, and I have to say that I've just been seeing more and more shit takes. | ||
| It's sincerely unbelievable to me that anyone could watch this film and come away accepting the argument that the producers and director just showed Alex as he is. | ||
| That's such an offensive and gaslighting farce that I feel the need to address this again and really sharpen the point that I'm making. | ||
| On the day before the film was released, Matt Taibbi published a fawning interview with director Alex Lee Moyer on his substack. | ||
| In his introduction to the interview, Taibbi says, quote, she takes characters reduced in panicked media treatments to two-dimensional monsters and renders a non-judgmental, tautly edited Herzogian treatment of who they are and how they came to be that way. | ||
| This is absolute nonsense, and if I were Herzog, I would not take kindly to this kind of a suggestion. | ||
| But I want to ask, what exactly is meant by non-judgmental here? | ||
| That seems like a really important concept to nail down, because it seems like this is something Moyer and the film's defenders are really proud of being. | ||
| I would guess that from the other things I've read, non-judgmental to these folks means that they don't include critical voices in their film to provide any other input, and then they pat themselves on the back a whole bunch for having the courage to let the audience decide what to think about the subject of the film. | ||
| I guess it's fine to not include critical voices in a film, but I really don't think that you're going to be able to say that you even tried to portray your subject as they are. | ||
| You're just portraying your subject how they want you to see them. | ||
| For example, Alex lies constantly and contradicts himself about biographical information in this film, but you aren't introduced to somebody expressing that point in the film, so you have no reason to suspect that Alex is being anything but honest. | ||
| The audience is being allowed to make up their own mind, I guess, but their options are believing Alex or choosing not to, which they'd have no reason to do based on the film they're watching. | ||
| Another important point is that you're editing the film according to the whim of your subject, which makes it nearly impossible for an uninformed viewer to make up their mind for themselves. | ||
| If you're watching this film, nothing about it would give you any reason to distrust Alex's assertion that the only reason anyone was mad at him about Sandy Hook was because he liked Trump and they needed something to smear him with. | ||
| There's no reason at all, from the material in this film, to not conclude that the Sandy Hook parents, like Neil Heslin or Scarlett Lewis, who we've been in the courtroom with this week, are just tools of an overzealous democratic machine that wanted desperately to punish Alex for supporting Trump. | ||
| That assertion, that narrative that Alex tells, is not presented as just what this guy is saying. | ||
| The film is structured around defending that narrative. | ||
| The only outcome of accepting Moyer's claim that this is just nonjudgmental and presenting Alex how he is would be to conclude that she either believes Alex's version of this story or she edited her film in a way to strengthen the story fully aware that it was full of shit and is now bragging about how great she is for not indicating that the audience maybe shouldn't trust this claim at all. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Odd. | ||
| We've done this fucking stupid dance all over, like over and over again with idiots like Rogan who want to have their cake and eat it too, but then they also want pie. | ||
| They want to talk to and platform dangerous lunatics and whitewash their images, but they don't want to be criticized for it. | ||
| And not only that, they want to be treated like the real heroes for having the courage to do what they do. | ||
| And much like with Rogan, I don't buy that shit from Moyer. | ||
| If you're doing a documentary about a liar or a conman and you don't include any content critical of that liar or conman in your film, you aren't doing a documentary. | ||
| The conman is using you as a medium to spread their message to an audience they wouldn't have access to otherwise. | ||
| You do have a responsibility in that circumstance, whether you choose to accept it or not. | ||
| To be totally clear, here is Moyer in her own words on how she approaches her filmmaking. | ||
| This is from that interview with Taibbi. | ||
| Quote, This is what I'm going to do with all of the documentaries that I make, by the way, including the one I just made about Alex Jones. | ||
| It's not meant to confirm your biases. | ||
| It's meant to actually show you what these people are actually like and then you can make an informed decision based off watching the film. | ||
| It used to be called journalism. | ||
| This was said in response to her telling a story about how she had investors not want to support her first film because she wouldn't include the voices of people who had been harmed by misogynists and school shooters, which is meant to connect to her choice to not have critical voices of Alex in this film. | ||
| In a very real sense, she's kind of engaging in censorship here, because guess what, ding dong? | ||
| A huge part of who Alex actually is and what he's actually like is that he knows that he's caused people an enormous amount of pain, and he doesn't give a shit. | ||
| By not giving voice to that and not exploring that side of him, you're kind of covering up that aspect of his psyche, because it's inconvenient and probably too difficult of a subject for you to pull off in this softball-ass documentary. | ||
| Now, let me focus in on my point about Moyer's approach by applying it to a different situation. | ||
| Now, let's imagine that Alex's war actually could be called a fair portrait and that it provided the audience with enough information to make an informed decision. | ||
| I totally don't believe that, but that's going to be the standard that will apply to another situation and see how it feels. | ||
| Boy, they're really going to wish they hadn't said that. | ||
| I'm going to throw that out at you right now. | ||
| I don't think it's going to go well for them. | ||
| I just don't think they're going to stand up to it. | ||
| That's just me. | ||
| So what would Moyer say about someone who made a documentary like hers about Jim Jones in, like, I don't know, 1974, right when he was forming Jonestown in Guyana? | ||
| What if that person just let Jim Jones tell his own story, lying the whole time, with no pushback from the director or anyone in the film at all? | ||
| You'd think that Jim Jones would be able to spin a pretty good yarn and be able to make the idea of heading to his compound and his commune sound like a pretty decent idea. | ||
| People were having a great time, and he was spreading a real message of love and unity. | ||
| The word of God is coming through. | ||
| Now let's imagine further that this hypothetical documentarian knew that there were former members of the People's Temple who had left and alleged that Jim Jones had abused them both physically and sexually. | ||
| That people had come forward and alleged that Jim Jones would punish dissenters by starving them and ostracizing them from socializing with the rest of the community. | ||
| This documentarian knew those things but decided not to include any of them in the film because of a commitment to just showing Jim Jones as he really is. | ||
| And everybody knows that when that happened, all of those people who left, they were just hired by Carter to smear Jim Jones. | ||
| Everybody knew that. | ||
| Now, let's imagine that this hypothetical filmmaker edited together their documentary in such a way that swelling music played over hero shots of Jim Jones, and almost religious soundscapes served as the background for him talking about his religious awakening. | ||
| Now, let's imagine that this hypothetical filmmaker allowed Jim Jones' framing of his life to inform the structure of their documentary and how the story was told. | ||
| So, like you were touching on, in this documentary, they do end up mentioning the allegations of abuse of his followers, but it's not brought up as a negative thing about him. | ||
| Instead, it's only mentioned as something that Jim brushes off to the side as an attack from the power structure who were afraid of the religious revolution that he was involved in and his commune in Guyana and the possibilities. | ||
| I should have made a more extreme joke. | ||
| That was too obviously just what would have happened. | ||
| Well, that's the parallel to this documentary. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, of course. | ||
| The mass murder that ended Jonestown hadn't happened yet, so maybe some edgy assholes of the day would say that this documentary filmmaker was just giving a non-judgmental view of this public figure who's somewhat polarizing. | ||
| And if I were somebody who studied Jim Jones back then, as I am somebody who studies Alex Jones right now, I would say that's completely Yeah. | ||
| Dan. | ||
| I want to run through a brick wall for you right now. | ||
| I want to bounce my fucking head against the... | ||
| Like, let's stop recording shit! | ||
| Let's go fight Jim Jones! | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't even know what's happening right now! | |
| I'm sure that the rebuttal to this would be that Alex Jones is no Jim Jones. | ||
| And sure, he doesn't have a Jonestown, but you're delusional if you think that Alex doesn't pose as much potential danger as Jim Jones did. | ||
| By adopting Moyer's approach, you're essentially legitimizing the figure you're covering and making people more likely to follow them. | ||
| And as we've seen over the course of doing this show, He's told his audience that it might be time to consider if you could kill your family members if they support vaccination. | ||
| He extols the message that psych meds are mind control weapons, which could have the effect of making people not seek mental health care, or even worse, just stop taking medications that they're prescribed. | ||
| Ask the people of Boston if Alex's actions have real-world consequences. | ||
| Ask the people, the Sandy Hook victims, family members. | ||
| Ask the families of Igor Soldo, Alan Beck, and Joseph Wilcox, the three people who were murdered by Jared and Amanda Miller in 2014, murders that were inspired by their anti-government views and which Jared had discussed beforehand on the Infowars forums. | ||
| Ask the family of tragically deceased Marcel Fontaine. | ||
| These are stories that we know, and they're just the tip of the iceberg of the lives that have been changed permanently by Alex's behaviors, and Alex doesn't give a shit. | ||
| He continues acting in the exact same ways that he did that led to these people's grief because it's profitable. | ||
| And these voices are ignored and disrespected in this documentary because actually covering Alex as he really is would be way too hard. | ||
| It would have resulted in 710 episodes of some sort of... | ||
| I think that might be what would have happened. | ||
| It definitely wouldn't have resulted in the sort of movie that she was looking for, considering that at least two of the producers of this film were also producers of the Trump propaganda nonsense film The Plot Against the President. | ||
| Alex Lee Moyer made a stupid and inaccurate film, one that willfully omits information that calls into question the subject's self-delivered image of himself. | ||
| It's a bad movie, and it will hurt people, but it's her right to make it. | ||
| I hope the money that you made doing it is worth it, but please spare me the sanctimonious bullshit about how people can't handle that you do journalism. | ||
| You're a cut-rate editor producing semi-slick character studies, not of Alex Jones, but of the person Alex Jones wants you to think he is. | ||
| Basically, you're the mark if you think what this documentary shows is Alex as he really is. | ||
| Also, before we get into this Q&A, I need to make one more point crystal clear, which is that the framing that Moyer has about her own work, that isn't even real. | ||
| She isn't interested in seeing these subjects as they are, and there's some sort of purity to it, and the most obvious tell is that she interviews Owen Schroyer, Rob Dew, and Mike Hansen in the documentary. | ||
| They don't provide a glimpse into Alex as he really is. | ||
| Interviewing them doesn't just show Alex as he is and lets the audience decide for themselves. | ||
| They're included because they're sycophantic voices that'll echo the self-aggrandizing narrative that Alex is telling about himself, which is the story that Moyer wants to tell. | ||
| Including interviews with people who glorify Alex is counter to her pretend ethos and kind of makes a joke of her insistence of not interviewing critical voices in the name of some pretense of journalistic purity. | ||
| That's a condescending mask she's wearing so she can elevate her puff piece brand rehabilitation project into some kind of act of reporting that's so brave that we can't even understand it. | ||
| I reject that shit entirely, and it's really sad to see people with actual media careers falling for this kind of an act. | ||
| And I can't stress this enough. | ||
| Even if Moyer thinks that she's some kind of an uncritical observer just dispassionately relaying the story of Alex, she's deluded. | ||
| she's a creator and she's creating some of her input and biases are impossible not to have an impact Oh, yeah? | ||
| What might that be? | ||
| Quote, she watched the X-Files, researched serial killers and conspiracies, and generally respected murderers. | ||
| Quote, Liberal outlets, she thinks, have unwittingly lent credibility to figures like Jones thanks to their credulousness about official narratives. | ||
| Quote, The things they're calling conspiracy theories are just going to be news items six months from now, she says. | ||
| There were WMDs. | ||
| COVID came from a bat. | ||
| This is just her saying Alex's catchphrase in a less succinct manner. | ||
| InfoWars. | ||
| tomorrow's news today last bit of business glenn greenwald has a penchant for run-on sentences so in order to present this q a in as fair of a light as possible i God damn it. | ||
| I would rather risk annoying you than being censorious. | ||
| Listen, just because I am not a very important person doesn't mean that I shouldn't be okay with you treating me like this. | ||
| Ugh. | ||
| So anyway, I have some thoughts. | ||
| How are you feeling? | ||
| I mean, it's just sad. | ||
| It's so sad. | ||
| She sucks. | ||
| Like, just on a level of, like... | ||
| Quality. | ||
| Like, she just sucks. | ||
| She played shitty music. | ||
| Like, it's not like she had good choices. | ||
| She didn't have Radiohead or anything on there. | ||
| That might have boosted up the documentary for somebody. | ||
| That might have got a copyright strike. | ||
| And she would have had trouble with that one. | ||
| I get clearing that might have been an issue. | ||
| Yeah, definitely. | ||
| But, like, just having Owen Schroyer on there, a man who's literally a puppet. | ||
| A self-admitted pun. | ||
| Self-describe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Of the subject of the documentary, what are you going to get? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wait a second. | |
| Wait a second. | ||
| Like, what is Jeff Dunham's hand up a puppet's ass going to say in a documentary about him? | ||
| He's like, oh, Jeff Dunham's... | ||
| Well, I mean, he would say mean things, but that's not the point of what I'm trying to say! | ||
| Yeah, I'm not sure he was going to say anything meaningful in the documentary. | ||
| It's like, well, I am essentially unemployable in any other media situation. | ||
| I'm stuck here. | ||
| I'm saddled with this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| So I'm going to say shitty things about my boss. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Yeah, while Alex's hand is right all the way up my ass, controlling my mouth, I'm gonna be like, I think he might go too far sometimes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like, what are you doing? | ||
| This nonsense idea of that, like, I'm just showing him as he is, it's so torpedoed by the fact that you sought out Mike Hansen. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alex, like, his current employees, or at the time, current employees, also a dubious move. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But Mike Hansen's inclusion in there is, like, Get off your fucking high horse. | ||
| Pretending that, like, what input is Mike Hansen giving that shows Alex as he actually is? | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nothing. | |
| No. | ||
| It's giving Mike Hansen's impression of Alex. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which is a positive one. | ||
| You exclude all negative impressions of Alex because you're not up to the task of telling that fucking story. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think what it is tying together with what I'm learning during this whole fucking experience down here is that All of these people are fucking cowards who are afraid of anybody challenging them. | ||
| And because they have a rabid fan base that will attack... | ||
| People who do challenge them, a lot of people don't discover that they're cowards. | ||
| They have this little group of people who protect them and keep them from ever having to realize that they're a bunch of fucking cowardly babies who have no competence or quality at anything. | ||
| You mean like Alex's 90 bodyguards? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| His 90 bodyguards for nobody showing up to court at all? | ||
| You missed it. | ||
| You missed the best one. | ||
| Whenever I left court... | ||
| The other day, he went out, he went across the street to go get a hero or something, right? | ||
| And his ten bodyguards were surrounding him, and they were doing the funniest, like, Mission Impossible-ass maneuvers. | ||
| Like, people are checking the corner, and like, I got your six! | ||
| Like, it was hilarious. | ||
| There is no one there. | ||
| They're doing these Mission Impossible-ass organizational moves. | ||
| It is fucking sad. | ||
| They have, like, really long meetings before they go out in public about, like, alright, we gotta keep an eye out for Miller. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Can't let Alex get milkshaked. | ||
| And no offense at all, but one of his bodyguards is 5 '3". | ||
| I'm not joking. | ||
| Did you see the guy who may or may not have a false mustache? | ||
| Yes, I did see the guy. | ||
| Still up in the air whether or not. | ||
| You'll never know. | ||
| You'll never know. | ||
| Kind of looks like somebody from that Beastie Boys video. | ||
| He grew a mustache the size of Mike Dicka's forehead is what I would like to describe it as. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So without further ado, Jordan, let's jump in on this Q&A. | ||
| All right. | ||
| This is not going to not be frustrating for you. | ||
| Anyway, it starts with some compliments. | ||
| Well, it's already frustrating for me. | ||
| Alex is not yet on stage, so this is just Greenwald and Moyer. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This week I had to spend time explaining what I thought. | ||
| Was never necessary to explain, which is you can, if you're a journalist, for example, go and speak to someone without making clear whether you love that person or hate that person, but simply to try and understand them is kind of fundamental to what journalists are supposed to do. | ||
| And I think that's the same for filmmakers and artists and documentarians. | ||
| And the fact that you even have to explain yourself, the fact that it's unusual to watch a film without constantly being bombarded with the filmmaker's moral perspective, I think is a testament. | ||
| And I really want to congratulate you for resisting that and for kind of restoring what I think is the purpose of art and journalism and film and documentaries, which is to show the public information that they ought to have and let them decide what they think about it as opposed to shoving that conclusion down their face. | ||
| and life is a lot easier for you, as I said, if you had chosen a different route, but I think it takes a lot of courage for you to do that, and I think it's important, so I want to congratulate you for that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, Glenn. | |
| Go! | ||
| I feel like one of the defining characteristics of people you really shouldn't listen to are people who have a mindless need to be in opposition. | ||
| For instance, I think you're delusional if you don't think Glenn's belief that this documentary shows a fair portrait of Alex is in some way informed by the fact that all of the media voices he doesn't like are saying it's not. | ||
| I think if you've watched this film and you see that this is Glenn's take, he's just a loser. | ||
| This film isn't providing the information that people need to make an informed decision. | ||
| It's not just a dispassionate exercise in journalism that people are just mad at because it doesn't include the requisite performance of outrage. | ||
| That's the line these ding-dongs tell themselves so they can feel morally superior to everyone else while they trot out their exploitative vanity projects. | ||
| I would argue that in order to make an informed decision, you need to have all the relevant information about a subject. | ||
| For instance, it would be inappropriate for a pill to market itself by exclusively talking about the positive things it can do while completely neglecting the potential side effects it can have. | ||
| Similarly, it wouldn't serve a person at all if the coverage of a pill focused entirely on the potential side effects and ignored the thing that it's effective in treating. | ||
| Either of these would give the person a lot of information about the pill in question, but neither would give them what they needed to make an informed choice. | ||
| It might give them the feeling that they had that informed choice, but that feeling is an illusion. | ||
| This documentary does not give the viewers the information they need to make any kind of an informed decision about Alex. | ||
| In order for this film to actually be something that the viewer can watch and make up their own mind about, the viewer would need to already enter the film knowing that Alex is a liar and nothing he says can really be taken as sincere. | ||
| You already need to know that there's a reason not to trust him before you watch, and that's an absurd expectation to have for most viewers who are randomly coming into this film. | ||
| I talk to people periodically, and they're like, what do you do? | ||
| I do a podcast about Alex Jones. | ||
| Who's that? | ||
| And, you know, he's not somebody who everyone knows about. | ||
| There's a lot of people who have an unformed opinion about him. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you go into this documentary, and all the information that it provides is incomplete. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Let's say. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Glenn thinks he knows who Alex is, and he's been told that this documentary provides a fair portrait, and people he doesn't like don't like the movie, so he's gung-ho about patting himself on the back and congratulating Moyer on her act of enlightened filmmaking. | ||
| They're just basking in their own... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's disgusting. | ||
| I can't imagine what her next film, Mussolini, A Profile in Courage, is going to be about. | ||
| But I think I've heard that it shows a balanced view of Mussolini right up until 1941. | ||
| You know, just that he's a great guy. | ||
| Misunderstood! | ||
| I think she'll need to overcorrect and do some film about something that'll make the right wing angry or something. | ||
| If she overcorrected, she would jump off a bridge. | ||
| That's the wrong kind of overcorrecting. | ||
| That's maybe a little too overcorrecting. | ||
| Artistically overcorrecting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a smart one. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| A puff piece about an eco-terrorist or something like that. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Bill Ayers, isn't he the best? | ||
| Well, that would be an interesting film. | ||
| That would be an interesting film. | ||
| Anyway, Alex comes out, and here we are. | ||
| All right, so do you want to end the weirdness of talking about Alex Jones right in front of him if he's not here and bring him up on stage? | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Get up here, AJ. | |
| Come on, Alex. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Does he have a mic? | |
| Yeah, he should have a mic. | ||
| We can share. | ||
| We can share. | ||
| No, I mean... | ||
| I haven't asked anything, Alex. | ||
| Do you want to talk? | ||
| Cylon Raiders attack. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| No, I mean, listen. | ||
| I got into this on AXS TV when I was 21 years old. | ||
| Days. | ||
| But I meant everything in purity. | ||
| I made a lot of mistakes. | ||
| I've done a lot of bad stuff, but it wasn't on purpose. | ||
| So it's great to be here with Gwyneth Greenwald. | ||
| It's great to be here with Alex Moyer. | ||
| And the thing is, I didn't lie on purpose. | ||
| I made a lot of mistakes. | ||
| But I'm not some person getting orders and lying to people. | ||
| And we're probably like 90% accurate, 10% wrong. | ||
| And I want to get better. | ||
| And so that's just where I'm at. | ||
| And it's great to be here. | ||
| and I'm glad you made a film that just kind of shows what we've done, because I look at it, it's kind of horrifying how obnoxious I am, and then parts of it are good, but, I mean, I did this from a pure place, and that's, at the end of the day, like, I did not lie to people on purpose. | ||
| I did make mistakes on purpose, and I'm just glad you guys made this film. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| So Alex, let me actually begin by asking you a little bit about that in terms of your intentions. | ||
| So this is a good indication of how stilted this Q&A is. | ||
| Any decent interviewer might hear that opening statement that Alex made and first say, are you okay? | ||
| And after clearing that up, you'd probably point out that unprompted, Alex just said that he didn't ever intentionally lie three times in about a minute. | ||
| That kind of feels like somebody who lies intentionally really trying to stress that they don't do that. | ||
| And if your instinct isn't to follow up on that, I guess you're just a better journalist than I can ever imagine being. | ||
| Also weird not to latch onto that weird 90% accurate claim. | ||
| Seems like that's something that could stand to be explored. | ||
| Like, how do you quantify that? | ||
| Does that actually mean anything? | ||
| Or is that just an evasive catchphrase that you use to try to dodge responsibility for the horrible things you say and do all the fucking time? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I mean, you're forgetting Shakespeare's immortal line, you know, me thinks you can't possibly protest too much. | ||
| Me thinks you doth can't protest at all. | ||
| Why would you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fair. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You're too right all the time. | ||
| Me thinks. | ||
| What is protesting? | ||
| Are you on the stand? | ||
| So, Glenn started into a question there, and here's where he goes. | ||
| And if you're expecting it to be like, hey, let me ask you about that. | ||
| You say you don't lie. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| That's not it. | ||
| So, Alex, let me actually begin by asking you a little bit about that in terms of your intentions and the like, because I... | ||
| I remember when I watched the film it was just so striking this early footage of you and I remember when the internet first discovered some of the early pictures of you from your public access days in Austin I remember liberals being almost horrified with this cognitive dissonance, like we're supposed to look at him as a screaming, spitting monster, and yet these pictures are disturbingly handsome in this very mainstream, normal way. | ||
| What turned you into the disturbing, screaming monster you are now? | ||
| That's the question, right? | ||
| You obviously, from the beginning, had a kind of charisma, a natural charisma. | ||
| You were so handsome, and now you're ugly. | ||
| Even said from the first time they saw you, and so when you combined these attributes that you had when you were young, I think you clearly, had you been somebody who was willing to affirm rather than question establishment pieties, Could have ended up as like a meteorologist on like Good Morning America or like some Anderson Cooper type. | ||
| And I'm wondering if you were aware of that potential and purposely chose to reject it for a different path, this kind of path. | ||
| That's your question? | ||
| It's an outcast that we're surrounded by delightfully. | ||
| And it's still going? | ||
| Or whether it was just so natural to your personality that you never even considered trying to pursue that kind of mainstream acceptability. | ||
| What? | ||
| I was thinking about driving her today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, that's where Glenn goes. | |
| That's his first question. | ||
| After Alex says three times in a minute that he doesn't lie on purpose and that he's right 90% of the time, Glenn decides to open with a question predicated on how Alex was a handsome young man. | ||
| This is just pathetic, because track this question. | ||
| It's basically asking, did you make a conscious decision to not be as rich and famous as your talents would make you deserving of being because you were too invested in questioning the power structure, or is it just your instinctual nature to be a rebel who questions the power structure? | ||
| So the decision to not be super rich and famous wasn't even a decision. | ||
| It's basically like, are you so awesome by choice or by nature? | ||
| I mean, you almost went too long for me. | ||
| I would have gone with, why is your dick so big? | ||
| How did it get so big? | ||
| That is the biggest dick I've ever seen! | ||
| That's another reading of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This shit is embarrassing. | ||
| Partially because it's basically answered in the film, but also because it kind of ignores the reality that if Alex had ever tried to get a job where he'd have a boss or advertisers that weren't a Yeah. | ||
| extreme oppositional defiance because he's got the goods. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's No. | |
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| This question is predicated on a false construct of what Alex could and could not have done as a younger man. | ||
| Yes, he was handsome. | ||
| Yes, he was talented. | ||
| He was also Alex Jones that whole time. | ||
| If you take his story and the documentary at all seriously, you shouldn't have to ask this question. | ||
| Alex talks about how he got fired from a radio station because he wouldn't stop talking about Waco. | ||
| Alex took the path he did because it was the only path available to him that allowed him to satisfy his need for attention and for nobody to ever be able to tell him what to do. | ||
| It's quite something, really. | ||
| This Q&A was never going to be hard hitting, but... | ||
| I didn't predict it would open this flaccid. | ||
| I mean, yeah, that one's tough. | ||
| Here's a good... | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Here, if you want to do that Beatles, like, hey, listen, man, you had that moment where there were two paths, becoming a rock god or working at a grocery store, you know? | ||
| What was it that really turned that? | ||
| And I would have been like, hey, Alex, you could have been a father of at least ten. | ||
| Why didn't you become that? | ||
| Alex, you could have been in jail for murder. | ||
| Why did you become an InfoWars host? | ||
| Hey, excuse me! | ||
| Have you ever heard your own story about your childhood? | ||
| Why didn't you put it in this fucking movie? | ||
| I'm gonna guess that Glenn's awareness of Alex starts and ends with things that are in this documentary and the fact that everybody doesn't like him. | ||
| Yeah, and then he gets more money for it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What a piece of shit. | ||
| And maybe a few of the really broad things that people know, like he was against the Iraq War. | ||
| Blah, blah, blah. | ||
| He hates the establishment. | ||
| Which Glenn Greenwald should be against him for. | ||
| Glenn was for the Iraq War. | ||
| So was his buddy Tucker. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Weird. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anyway, here's Alex's answer to that question of, well, essentially how big that dick. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or whether it was just so natural to your personality that you never even considered trying to pursue that kind of mainstream acceptability. | ||
| Glenn, I was thinking about driving her today. | ||
| What I wanted to say, and I forgot it. | ||
| Thank God you brought that up. | ||
| No, no, no, seriously. | ||
| No, it's really intuitive. | ||
| My enemies say I'm this Lex Luthor mastermind, and I'm about to say that. | ||
| You're a moron. | ||
| None of that. | ||
| I had no... | ||
| I could study the news and politics and read books by Zbigniew Brzezinski, and these were scary things. | ||
| But I had no training, no idea, no plan. | ||
| And this idea that, like, I'm this mastermind is the opposite. | ||
| I mean, I can't balance my check. | ||
| And I'm not trying to put myself down. | ||
| It's just like they literally think I'm like this evil mastermind and I literally can't balance my checkbook. | ||
| And they're just like attacking me constantly. | ||
| Like, where's the secret? | ||
| Where's the Russians? | ||
| Who's giving the mercers? | ||
| Who's giving the orders? | ||
| And I'm like, I was just covering the news. | ||
| I was just giving my opinion on something. | ||
| And so, no, I had no idea what I was doing. | ||
| I just was pro-America and like... | ||
| Kind of a libertarian and like didn't like Republicans, didn't like Democrats. | ||
| And I was just watching all this happen. | ||
| I said, God, I can go on Access TV. | ||
| So I tried to go to college and try to get an RTF job. | ||
| And they're like, I'll take you five years to even do anything on radio. | ||
| And I was like, well, I'll do Access TV. | ||
| So it was basically, I had my own political beliefs that were just pro-freedom. | ||
| And then I got involved and was immediately successful. | ||
| And then I was like trying to like figure out as I went. | ||
| I'm trying to be truthful. | ||
| Made a lot of mistakes along the way. | ||
| But none of it was with malice. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| None of it was with hurt anybody. | ||
| Yeah, we're going to talk about the mistakes for sure in a few minutes. | ||
| Oh, I'm sure. | ||
| Because it wouldn't be a complete discussion without that. | ||
| But before we get to that, I just... | ||
| Why? | ||
| Why wouldn't it be a complete discussion? | ||
| Anyway, this isn't really an answer to Glenn's question, but Glenn doesn't give a shit. | ||
| In fairness, I guess it's like a half answer with an answer to a completely different question mixed in. | ||
| Also, you might notice that Alex ended that ramble by again saying that he never meant to lie, and if you're Greenwald, it's a conscious choice to ignore that happening so much. | ||
| A neutral observer would look at that behavior and say, hmm. | ||
| This person really seems to be going out of his way to say that he doesn't lie on purpose, and yet no one here has accused him of that at all. | ||
| That seems like something he's being super defensive about, and maybe if I want to have a full discussion, I should check in on that glaring dynamic that's playing out right in front of me. | ||
| I guess you could just ignore it and power through to your next softball question, though. | ||
| That's certainly another option. | ||
| I mean, I'm so fucking furious at Glenn already, you know? | ||
| Like, it's... | ||
| It's like, this is a dude who will go out of his way to try and destroy a young journalist's career. | ||
| Who will fucking sick his sycophantic bullshit people on other people to destroy their lives. | ||
| Then he'll go and fucking say, Alex, you've got the biggest dick in the world. | ||
| How do you walk with a dick this big? | ||
| It's so huge. | ||
| But he won't even fucking talk to me. | ||
| He won't even block me on Twitter. | ||
| Do you know why? | ||
| Because I don't have any fucking restraints. | ||
| That young journalist, she could lose her job if she called him a giant shitball. | ||
| Oh, yeah, we are untethered from the establishment. | ||
| You can't, what are you, who's gonna get mad at me? | ||
| He doesn't have anything to gain. | ||
| It is interesting, and I do think there's a really funny thing in that you're mad that he won't block you. | ||
| I want him to, because this means that he knows, and he's just a coward. | ||
| He doesn't even have the guts to acknowledge it. | ||
| If you block me, then at least you acknowledge it. | ||
| I didn't see this, but you told me that somebody who tweeted at him, who had under 10 followers... | ||
| Immediately blocked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They said that he should listen to our show. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So believe me, you know you know. | ||
| That's a little... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, Glenn, here is his next question here. | ||
| And I think that there's a little kernel of something in here, actually. | ||
| Yeah, we're going to talk about the mistakes, for sure, in a few minutes, because it wouldn't be a complete discussion without that. | ||
| But before we get to that, the question of your politics, I think, is so interesting. | ||
| And this is what was striking me watching the film is... | ||
| There's this idea, you know, if you ask somebody with what political faction or ideology is Alex Jones associated, they would instantly say, oh, the far right. | ||
| And I'm watching you well before most people thought about doing it. | ||
| You're spreading huge amounts of skepticism and doubt about the CIA, the U.S. security state. | ||
| You're confronting the FBI well before Trump began spreading that kind of skepticism in Republican circles. | ||
| It seems like you're answering that question before Alex even gets the chance to. | ||
| You even are talking about the NSA before 9 /11. | ||
| You're warning about the dangers of exaggerating the threats of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda in order to kind of bring it into a sort of authoritarian imbalance. | ||
| Does he have giant note cards? | ||
| Lots of things that people very associated with the left have been saying for a long time. | ||
| I'm kind of opposing these institutions of authoritarianism, warning about how they exploit people's perceptions to put the population in fear. | ||
| How have you seen yourself ideologically and politically along the years? | ||
| So that's a dumb question, but there's a little bit of truth in it. | ||
| Alex was skeptical of all these organizations like the FBI and the CIA early on, but there's also a context that's missing from all of this, and it's not something you're going to get from Glenn or from Alex himself, and certainly not from this film. | ||
| Alex hated these groups not because of some kind of a principled opposition to things like spying, the way Glenn is framing the question. | ||
| Alex hated these groups because of Waco, Ruby Ridge, and the Oklahoma City bombing. | ||
| He distrusted them because after OKC, the issue of right-wing militia violence was a high priority for law enforcement and it put a serious halt to the momentum that the extreme right was seeing in terms of organizing. | ||
| It wasn't in opposition to the idea of spying or the FBI. | ||
| it was that Alex felt that they were focused on people who were too much like himself. | ||
| Similarly, his opposition to overhyping the threat of bin Laden was also really just about his fears about the government cracking down on far-right militias. | ||
| He didn't oppose spying on, like, suspected Muslim terrorists for its own sake. | ||
| He just thought it was a smokescreen to eventually spy on Christian nationalistic socialists. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, here's a better way of framing that question. | ||
| Uh, Alex, you opposed the FBI because they're not solely out to get non-white people. | ||
| How long has that been going on for? | ||
| But Glenn would have no way to know any of that stuff, because he didn't prepare for this interview at all. | ||
| I really feel like... | ||
| He doesn't know anything except for, like... | ||
| I am tired of hearing that! | ||
| That is an excuse! | ||
| It's not an excuse. | ||
| It makes it worse. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| Yeah, it's a willful ignorance of the subject you're covering, or you do know some things and you're just pretending not to know them because it would be inconvenient for the interview. | ||
| It would be a terrible idea to know those things. | ||
| Yeah, it's fine to give it up to Alex that on paper a lot of his positions about things like the NSA are good, but to pretend that they're based in some kind of a principled belief is a little bit much. | ||
| Taking Alec seriously on this issue is honestly kind of funny because he's the last person I would accuse of being a serious opponent of authoritarian leadership. | ||
| For one thing, he made cartoonish accusations about how, like, Obama was going to become a tyrant, like he was going to dissolve the government so he could turn the country into part of a one-world caliphate that he ruled. | ||
| The caliphate, yeah. | ||
| Engaging with the notion of tyranny like this indicates a lack of seriousness about the subject and not somebody who you should ask their thoughts on because they're not going to... | ||
| There's not going to be a point. | ||
| Or you could look at how he behaved with Trump. | ||
| He was cheering on Trump's authoritarian leanings at every turn and yelling that Trump needed to go further. | ||
| He wanted Trump to imprison his political enemies, take over the media, militarize the border, and outlaw the Democratic Party. | ||
| If this is someone you're taking at all seriously on the subject of authoritarianism, the joke is on you. | ||
| Also, Alex's politics are really simple. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I mean, it's just... | ||
| But he's not going to tell you that. | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| It's like, I just don't know, Glenn. | ||
| Glenn, you don't have a place in Alex's world, just in case you were wondering. | ||
| At the end of the day, Glenn, good luck to you. | ||
| You want to fawn over the guy who wants you dead. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Hey, no, no, no. | ||
| He's only going after trans people right now. | ||
| I'm sure whenever he's done with that, he's gonna stop. | ||
| That's how it works, right? | ||
| Once you go after LGBTQ, you stop after one of the letters. | ||
| You don't go after all of them. | ||
| Yeah, makes sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Glenn may learn a hard lesson that Dave Rubin is learning currently at some point. | ||
| Yeah, which I don't enjoy. | ||
| There's no schadenfreude in that. | ||
| It's fucked up. | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| It's tragic. | ||
| And why? | ||
| Yeah, it's fucked! | ||
| Anyway, Alex responds to this question that you very readily pointed out. | ||
| Glenn was basically answering in the delivery of the question. | ||
| And because I think, maybe partially because of that, Alex just, I don't know what the fuck even this answer is. | ||
| How have you seen yourself ideologically and politically along the years? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Starting out in like 95, 96, first articles were like, communist Alex Jones is anti-American. | ||
| Because I was against wars and surveillance. | ||
| Because that just seemed like, well, Bill of Rights says you don't do this. | ||
| Real quick. | ||
| 94 and 95, Alex Jones is a communist? | ||
| No way. | ||
| How old was he? | ||
| Well, first of all, right when he's beginning his career, no one really gave a shit. | ||
| And he was opposed to Bill Clinton at the time. | ||
| He was attacking from the right. | ||
| He's trying to pretend that he was called a communist because he opposed Bush. | ||
| And that's not accurate at all. | ||
| It's better for his mythology to have that in his background than to be a right-wing shitbag from the start. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| So this is bad. | ||
| And I would just follow the Constitution really ham-fistedly. | ||
| And I was like, well, I see all this news about the Constitution. | ||
| And so I wasn't even being right-wing or left-wing. | ||
| I was simply thinking, well, I want to promote freedom. | ||
| That's a fun thing to do. | ||
| And so that's really where it came from. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then that's why, like, Martin Sheen. | |
| 18 years ago or so, said, "We want to fly you out here to California, and we want you to, you know, Milo Estevez's son, we really love what you're doing." So I get their house, and it's like I'm sitting there, and they're putting movies on, like, "So you're really a good liberal, right? | ||
| You're against these wars, and you're against George Bush?" I'm like, "Yeah, I'm against George Bush." And they didn't care that I was pro-gun or any of this stuff. | ||
| It was like, I'm sitting there like, oh, Anthony Hopkins is coming for dinner. | ||
| Let's have dinner right now. | ||
| We're talking like 18 years ago. | ||
| I'm sitting with Anthony Hopkins eating roast beef at like Martin Sheen's house in Malibu. | ||
| And I'm like, what's this place? | ||
| Because I had no idea. | ||
| Like a private jet land slides back to California. | ||
| They're like, you're a very important young filmmaker. | ||
| You're exposing the evil right-wingers. | ||
| I'm like, I just don't want to have a war. | ||
| I don't want to support what these people are doing. | ||
| And so there was that, and then as soon as Obama got in... | ||
| This is astonishing. | ||
| They're like, boy, this is Obama. | ||
| Obama's continuing the same stuff. | ||
| So to me, I literally just went on AXS TV at like 21 years old, got a local radio show at 22, got syndicated at 23, totally self-taught, made a ton of mistakes, but I did it from a place of truth. | ||
| What mistakes? | ||
| And I experienced like Hollywood and what it does and the writing. | ||
| Talk about Hollywood. | ||
| I've had this great experience over 28 years on air. | ||
| Of seeing all the weird underbellies of all this stuff, because I didn't come into it from the establishment. | ||
| I literally came out of AXS TV in Austin, Texas, and so because I wasn't part of any of the power structures, I got to see stuff nobody else has seen. | ||
| So let me ask you a similar question to the one I asked Alex, which is... | ||
| I don't think that was an answer to Glenn's question, but whatever. | ||
| There's no reason to ask a follow-up to the original question because Glenn didn't really care that much about it to begin with. | ||
| It was really just a launching pad for Alex to go off on some rambling diatribe that's eventually going to include him saying that he doesn't lie on purpose at some point. | ||
| He's very defensive about that. | ||
| It does seem like that. | ||
| Almost like he's about to go on trial. | ||
| Sure, but he's not on trial here, and he's super defensive. | ||
| You know what I find really interesting, though? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| Alex has all these stories with these left-wing folks like Martin Sheen mistakenly thinking that he's on the left because he hated Bush, but you never really hear any stories about right-wingers who invited Alex in, only to realize that he isn't right-wing after all. | ||
| Sure, you had like that time when Ann Coulter was on his show and she laughed at him for being so far right that he sounded like Lyndon LaRouche, but I don't think anyone on the right would talk to Alex and come away disappointed, thinking like, oh, he's not on our side. | ||
| Man, he's a rhino. | ||
| That's what Alex is. | ||
| He's a rhino, buddy! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anyway, Glenn has another question for Alex that is really just like hype man shit. | ||
| Let me ask you a similar question to the one I asked Alex, which is, you know, it is so striking when I began writing about politics in 2005. | ||
| Let me ask you this. | ||
| How does Anthony Hopkins like his roast beef? | ||
| That is a good question. | ||
| Liberals hated more than anybody George Bush, the architects of the Iraq War. | ||
| I began writing in opposition to rendition and the torture regime in Guantanamo and due process free imprisonment. | ||
| And it's just so striking that all the people back then who were implementing it, were advocating it, are completely acceptable, in fact, beloved. | ||
| In mainstream liberal circles, liberals watch media outlets and consume media outlets that employ those people. | ||
| As I was saying, I could interview all of them and I would be applauded by liberals. | ||
| And yet you, who back in 2004 were saying, don't trust George W. Bush. | ||
| His father was the CIA director. | ||
| The Iraq war is based on lies. | ||
| All things that ought to appeal to that sensibility of liberals. | ||
| You are uniquely castigated and kind of... | ||
| Cast out of good company to the point where you're one of the very few people that even journalists are told they can't speak to. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Why have you been identified as such a threat in a way that other people who actually have blood on their hands and wars on their legacy aren't even remotely cast as? | ||
| Well, I mean, that's a great question, and I, again, only learned this, Glenn, through organic experience of it, but... | ||
| I think Glenn should take up his concern with himself and his good buddy Tucker, who was a huge supporter of the war back in his bowtie days. | ||
| Hey, you'd think. | ||
| This is an interesting point, although one that Alex has nothing interesting to say on the subject. | ||
| There have been some attempts to rehabilitate the images of people like George W. Bush, and that's been a distasteful thing to see. | ||
| That said, I don't think it's been a... | ||
| I don't know how many fawning pieces we're seeing about Dick Cheney or Karl Rove these days. | ||
| To his larger point, though, all of the mainstream media outlets have Trump people on their rosters of talking heads. | ||
| Kellyanne Conway was just on CBS today, and she was the person that Trump hired to lie to the media for him. | ||
| It does suck, but media outlets do feature some shitty people, but they're people who fall within a certain spectrum of shittiness. | ||
| And most right-thinking people understand that Alex is outside that range. | ||
| It does feel like all networks have a worm farm somewhere. | ||
| I suspect that a giant part of Alex's not being allowed in is... | ||
| I think it's less about what Alex believes or would say and more about how he would act. | ||
| He's already shown himself through countless appearances to be unable to stop himself from just yelling and self-promoting instead of actually doing an interview, like with Piers Morgan, Andrew Neal in the UK, or the... | ||
| that he was on The View. | ||
| If I were a TV booker, I'd be pretty aware that Alex isn't going to be a guest that participates in any discussion he might be trying to have, but he's just going to steamroll everything and yell Infowars.com. | ||
| He's a shitty guest, as further evidenced by his appearances on the podcasts like Flagrant 2 and Rogan. | ||
| He just gets wasted, yells nonsense, and the only reason you'd want him around is if you're looking for a spectacle. | ||
| Most TV shows wouldn't consider the spectacle to be worth the hassle of having Alex on, but the matter is, Path is different for desperate people and charlatans, so thus, here we are. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That explains the situation. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Glenn's questions so far are living more than up to my standard. | ||
| In fact, I did not expect that he would be asking Alex something along the lines of, Alex, your virtues are so great. | ||
| We are knighting you a paladin of truth tomorrow. | ||
| Tell me more about how you came by them. | ||
| This question in particular, I think I would translate as like, why won't anyone let you come on their show? | ||
| Is it because you're too right about things? | ||
| Also, isn't it really awesome that I'm not scared to interview you like all those other media outlets? | ||
| I'm pretty awesome, too. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's nice that we... | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| It's nice that two of the biggest dicked people in the world get to share a stage together for one moment, you know? | ||
| It's just rare to see this happen. | ||
| So here's Alex's answer to whatever question that was. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I mean, that's a great question, and again, I only learned this through organic experience of it, but... | ||
| If I lied about WMDs, if I killed millions of people, I'm part of the establishment. | ||
| But they're not scared of Alex Jones. | ||
| They're scared of populist movements. | ||
| And the fact that I wasn't left-wing or right-wing, the fact that I was just pro-America and pro-freedom, it really wasn't me. | ||
| They just saw me as like the American people. | ||
| Okay, this is what the American people produced. | ||
| This is organic, because they went and checked out who I was, knew I wasn't controlled. | ||
| They're like, well, this guy just came out of the dirt. | ||
| And so this is the enemy. | ||
| And so it's their hatred of the general public, their hatred of the organic, grassroots. | ||
| It's not me. | ||
| It's their hatred of just good, decent, classical, liberal Americans that want peace and want justice and want unity and want justice and want everybody to live in peace. | ||
| We don't want to hurt anybody. | ||
| We're not judging anybody. | ||
| We just want our freedom. | ||
| And so that's what freaked them out. | ||
| Like, well, this guy could get this popular. | ||
| And he's just some idiot on AXS TV. | ||
| What are we going to do? | ||
| So I'm a symbol of their insecurity. | ||
| I'm not that strong. | ||
| They're weak. | ||
| And that's what they're scared of. | ||
| So, you know, it is interesting that the thing they hate most are people who develop influence and a significant audience without being captive to their structures and their influence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Talk to me, Glenn. | ||
| Hey, listen. | ||
| Look at what's happening now. | ||
| I'm developing an influence independent of all this bullshit. | ||
| How about that, Glenn? | ||
| It seems like Glenn's not into that either. | ||
| It seems weird. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Huh. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Also, I mean, it's all good and well to talk about Alex not being beholden to CNN or News Corp, but he got $8 million in Bitcoin from somebody. | ||
| It's so crazy! | ||
| He's so unbeholden! | ||
| Yeah, and he spent most of his career hawking gold for a weirdo. | ||
| Oh, so unbeholden to constantly doing the Earth is going to fall apart so you better buy gold ads. | ||
| Yeah, weirdly, in the documentary and this interview, Ted Anderson doesn't come up once. | ||
| That's so crazy! | ||
| So strange. | ||
| And so how about... | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're mad. | |
| I think you're madder. | ||
| I was madder when I was writing my intro. | ||
| Your anger is pushed into the document. | ||
| Now you're free. | ||
| I'm still reliving it for the first time. | ||
| So here is the next question. | ||
| And I actually think that this is Glenn's best question. | ||
| Is it shorter? | ||
| It doesn't go anywhere and I might be misinterpreting it. | ||
| It is interesting that the thing they hate most are people who develop influence and a significant audience without being captive to their structures and their influence. | ||
| And that is something that defines what you've done, I think, more than anything. | ||
| You came out of public access TV, which was tolerated because it's supposed to be a joke that no one watches, and yet you develop this gigantic audience. | ||
| And clearly part of why is because you have a kind of... | ||
| Showman charisma, kind of, you know, entertainment component to you that made people want to watch. | ||
| And one of the things that struck me was, you know, you were talking early on in this funny episode about how when you were 12, you would see these preachers with Rolls Royces and gigantic houses doing coke off Hooker's breasts and whatever. | ||
| And now you do that, and have those. | ||
| They had this similar kind of showmanship. | ||
| They were able to get people to watch. | ||
| And by the end of the film, we're watching you talking about... | ||
| Praying for President Bush and satanic influences in a way that seems... | ||
| I'm just wondering... | ||
| No, let's be honest. | ||
| I became the abyss. | ||
| Okay, but was there a... | ||
| Do you notice that kind of similarity? | ||
| No, when you nailed it, I became what I saw. | ||
| But for a good cause, but it wasn't on purpose. | ||
| Only at 48 can I now see it. | ||
| No, I was like, damn, that's a hot slut that preacher's banging on his back porch. | ||
| That Rolls Royce looks pretty damn nice. | ||
| What the fuck just happened? | ||
| No, I mean, I wasn't doing that consciously, but yeah, there's definitely, I mean, I'm not going to lie. | ||
| Yeah, it's true. | ||
| I'm a preacher. | ||
| And so only now at like 48 last years, I'm like, whoa, what have I been doing? | ||
| I've kind of like, you know, the things, you get old, you go, damn, what'd I just do? | ||
| You're like, damn, I did all that? | ||
| Like, God, I'm a freaking horrible person. | ||
| But then I didn't do it consciously. | ||
| The establishment is lying according to formulas. | ||
| I didn't ever do stuff on purpose. | ||
| So this could actually be interpreted as a pretty scathing question, which may be why Alex dodged the real meaning behind it by turning on that charisma and talking about titties. | ||
| The point of the preachers thing that Alex saw as a kid, it wasn't that they were preachers. | ||
| They were hypocrites. | ||
| They were pious as an act to make money, and then in their real lives they did coke off sex workers on boats. | ||
| If taken as it appears to be asked, Glenn's question would seem to be asking about a possible dynamic where Alex has become the same kind of hypocrite, ranting about the devil on air to make money, but living a discordant life. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not sure if that's what Glenn was getting at, but that's the most generous interpretation I can come up with. | |
| So I'm going to... | ||
| Do your best. | ||
| In response, Alex puts on this little show and pretends to wrestle with the idea that he's a preacher and that he's done bad stuff in the past or whatever. | ||
| Not that he's a preacher on air and a millionaire off air. | ||
| If nothing else, Alex does have good instincts on when to distract from dangerous points. | ||
| Also, he brought back up that whole I don't lie on purpose thing again which is really starting to become more and more suspicious that Glenn is not calling it out. | ||
| I mean, the number of times that he is essentially saying, Because I didn't do bad on purpose, do not hold me accountable for doing bad. | ||
| As though the only crime in the world is first-degree murder. | ||
| All other crimes are legal. | ||
| As long as it's not premeditated murder, you're golden, baby! | ||
| Right. | ||
| Just apologize, say you're sorry, and then cash another check! | ||
| It's like the reverse of the John Stuart Mill. | ||
| The only thing that is truly good is a good will, and the only thing that's bad is a bad will. | ||
| That is why John Stuart Mill was an idiot. | ||
| I think Alex would agree with you until you explain. | ||
| Anyway, so this next clip, they're talking about January 6th, and Alex says some stuff that I think is really fucking stupid. | ||
| And if Glenn had any awareness of Alex's career and what he does on air, he would be able to recognize that he was being lied to. | ||
| If I had it all to do again, I would have just stepped back and said, Biden, just sink the ship and see what happens. | ||
| Because, man, I'm not a revolutionary leader in, like, war. | ||
| I'm not trying to lead troops. | ||
| I don't have some weird thing in my head like I need to be a military G.I. Joe guy. | ||
| But when you get a million people in D.C., it doesn't matter, even if they're being manipulated. | ||
| You steal your responsibility. | ||
| So I have a lot of guilt over January 6th because it could have gone really bad. | ||
| If the federal provocateurs had their way, if they would have, the Q people would have actually kidnapped Mike Pence and Pelosi and put them in handcuffs, we'd be in martial law right now. | ||
| That would have been nice. | ||
| Because that wouldn't have been us capturing the Capitol. | ||
| That would have been the country going down the tube. | ||
| So we came in. | ||
| January 6th in closing was a dud. | ||
| It was meant to provocateur us into a violent event that was meant to get out of control. | ||
| Thank God it failed. | ||
| And so I feel like I've been brought to the edge of death. | ||
| And so January 6th to me is very serious. | ||
| Let me ask you about the underlying cause of January 6th. | ||
| So this is such bullshit. | ||
| Like, it was taken as gospel fact on Infowars that if Biden got into office, the literal Christian devil would take his place as the head of the country, aligned with communist China, and it would be all over for the patriots. | ||
| As soon as Biden got into office, folks like Alex would be rounded up and sent to camps as the orderly depopulation of the planet took off. | ||
| Now, in hindsight, since that didn't happen, it's so fun for Alex to say, if I could do it all over, I'd just let Biden get into office and fail, because to take responsibility for the rhetoric he was using before the election would just be embarrassing now. | ||
| And Glenn doesn't know or doesn't care about what Alex says on his show. | ||
| All he knows is what he saw in this... | ||
| Dumb documentary, so he's going to let this bullshit stand unquestioned. | ||
| I would call that the mark of an unprepared interviewer. | ||
| This is not good. | ||
| When you have something like this, there is a very clear next follow-up question. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That is, okay, you're saying that if you could do this all over again, you would just let Biden get into office, and then we see whatever we're seeing now. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Are you lying to me now, or were you lying to your audience about the devil ascending to the throne and aligning with Communist China and everything being over the day Biden comes into office? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Were you lying to your audience or lying to me? | ||
| I am lying to both of you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So Glenn got into there at the end of Alex's talk the idea that there was an underlying cause. | ||
| Of January 6th. | ||
| And that, of course, is the election fraud storyline. | ||
| I assume Glenn doesn't follow up with like... | ||
| Okay, so you think it was, if it had gone wrong, you know, you think it had gone wrong, and if it had gone right, it would have been bad. | ||
| Why do you think it would have been bad if it had gone right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| Wouldn't you be the fucking White House press correspondent? | ||
| Also, didn't your employee who was hosting your show for you say the Capitol has fallen and the Patriots are now in charge? | ||
| Doesn't he think that the Patriots being in charge is a good thing? | ||
| Certainly one of your employees was celebrating it as it was happening. | ||
| Seems odd. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| Anyways. | ||
| Anyway, what about that election fraud stuff? | ||
| How about it? | ||
| In this case where you were saying there was widespread fraud, did you actually conduct what you feel like is kind of a meticulous, a forensic analysis of the voting patterns and conclude that there was fraud in these states sufficient to have swung the election? | ||
| Or was this kind of an ethos, like a way of saying... | ||
| The establishment was so against Trump from the beginning in illegitimate ways that I'm going to kind of endorse this cause, not because it's necessarily true in its particulars, but more as kind of a thematic way of protesting. | ||
| No, I mean, I'll be honest, which the establishment doesn't do, I'll be honest. | ||
| It was a pre-baked deal that obviously Biden got more votes than Trump, and we saw all the weird... | ||
| You know, anomalies and, like, Democrats blocking the windows and people, like, feeding machines full of things. | ||
| And so we saw some evidence, but we were expecting it. | ||
| And so you can say it's kind of a foregone conclusion, and we all look through rose-colored darklies, but I think it's kind of 50-50. | ||
| And then now in hindsight with 2,000 mules and all the stuff that's come out, I mean, I think that obviously, I don't think Biden got more votes than Trump. | ||
| But in a sick way, it's better that Biden's in, so we now get to see what the establishment's really about. | ||
| But yeah, I... | ||
| I mean, we expect election fraud right away. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| And so kind of when you're a hammer, everything's a nail. | ||
| I mean, I think we distorted our views, obviously. | ||
| And they'll say, Jones admits he distorted views. | ||
| Now, there was evidence of the fraud, and it got covered up and got suppressed. | ||
| But I'm not going to lie and say I didn't distort my views in hindsight to what was happening. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you know, I think one of the things I think about a lot is... | |
| Great follow-up, Glenn. | ||
| The established media, its function is to spread disinformation. | ||
| They lie constantly in ways far worse than what you just kind of... | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I admit I'm what you just said. | ||
| I don't want to be a liar like Tim on purpose. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So once again, really driving home that point that Alex insists he doesn't lie on purpose, which kind of should make anyone listening... | ||
| You know, suspicious that he feels guilty about how much he lies on purpose. | ||
| I mean, it is a fucking lot, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He is saying that a lot. | ||
| Too much. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Also, listening to this, Glenn should really be picking up on what Alex is saying. | ||
| Alex is essentially saying that his entire coverage of the question of election fraud in the 2020 election was a pre- Yep. | ||
| He decided he'd report on before the election, before anything ever happened. | ||
| Yep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alex insists there was evidence of fraud, but any half-decent interviewer might want to point out that this evidence that Alex is bringing up, like the 2000 mules thing... | |
| It's all bullshit. | ||
| And what Alex is describing is confirmation bias. | ||
| He'd made up his mind and then anything he saw could be used to justify the conclusion he already had in mind. | ||
| It was already, you know, like anything that affirmed that was automatically considered bombshell proof of election fraud because he desperately needed to justify the narrative he was going to sell his audience no matter what. | ||
| This seems to fly directly in the face of the hundred times Alex says that he doesn't lie on purpose, and the only way to really square this circle is to suggest that maybe Alex doesn't even really know the difference between lying and telling the truth. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, if you're saying that I've never lied on purpose, you don't understand what a lie is. | ||
| A lie is purposeful. | ||
| You can't lie not on purpose. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| You can be wrong. | ||
| You can't lie unless you know the answer that you are obfuscating. | ||
| That's not how it works! | ||
| Now, the other thing that a competent interviewer could tease out of this, if they understood what Alex was saying and knew anything about his career, is that you could take this glaring, shocking admission on Alex's part that they decided that they were going to just say election fraud no matter what. | ||
| There wasn't any evidence. | ||
| It was a pre-gone conclusion. | ||
| I feel like me screaming what... | ||
| Every second made perfect sense. | ||
| And any reasonable interviewer would be like, stop at some point. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then what you could do from there is bring up how that's all he does. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| When you have the situation with his coverage of the Uvalde shooting. | ||
| He was doing that. | ||
| He had a foregone conclusion that he wanted to bring up, and so pieces of evidence that were bullshit, were unchecked, unconfirmed in any way, were treated as gospel if they upheld the narrative he wanted to tell. | ||
| Same thing with the Boston bombing. | ||
| Same thing with Sandy Hook. | ||
| Same thing with every single thing in his career. | ||
| He... | ||
| Comes up with a conclusion, and then the evidence is stuff he's figured out out of confirmation bias to justify the conclusion he was always going to reach. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| And Glenn doesn't even take a step towards that when it's right there in front of him. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It is a choice not to... | ||
| It's astonishing. | ||
| It is astonishing that a man... | ||
| It is crazy because Glenn is trying to do a softball interview. | ||
| And Alex is trying to force him to do a hardball interview by being so admitting to crimes. | ||
| Like, it's crazy. | ||
| Glenn is doing this softball interview and Alex is almost like, too soft. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's really that. | ||
| It really is that. | ||
| Alex is trying to give him shit. | ||
| Hey, buddy, this is too soft. | ||
| Let's mix it up a little bit. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| Hey, Glenn, you're going to lose the audience. | ||
| Glenn, please, in some way challenge something. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Yeah, pathetic. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| Glenn, you're weak even for Alex. | ||
| That's bad. | ||
| Hey, Glenn, I just teed you up to ask if I intentionally lied about stuff in order to overthrow the government. | ||
| You want to take a swing at this? | ||
| Hey, Glenn, did you realize that Joe Rogan's a better journalist than you now? | ||
| You want to take a bite off that apple? | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Instead, do you want to just talk about how bad the other media is and how I'm not as bad as them? | ||
| Man, your sub stack's great. | ||
| Let's keep going. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| This world is sad now. | ||
| Hey Glenn, the check's not going to clear. | ||
| Bitcoin dropped dramatically. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So that is now $4 million in Bitcoin, my friend. | |
| So here's Glenn's next question. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you are somebody who's standing against kind of establishment authority and establishment institutions, you know that one of the things they're going to do is seize on any mistake that you make. | ||
| And this is what I kind of try and counsel people all the time who are trying to be dissidents, which is you need to be a thousand times more careful because they can lie all the time and no one's going to call them out on it because they're on the side of the people with the more powerful megaphones. | ||
| Do you feel like you, on some occasions, have paid insufficient attention to the need not to hand your enemies really easy and cheap weapons for them to take and bash you over the head with? | ||
| 100%, Glenn. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's just an amazing spin that Glenn is giving Alex. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Almost like something, like you said, a ball on a tee to make it easier for Alex to hit. | ||
| Alex defamed grieving parents. | ||
| He intentionally lied about election fraud in a way that led to an attempted overthrow of our government. | ||
| He's undoubtedly killed vast numbers of his fans through his vaccine bullshit. | ||
| These aren't instances of Alex just not being careful enough and giving his opponents easy wins. | ||
| Wins that they only need because he's an anti-establishment dissident voice that must be destroyed. | ||
| The framing of these questions is pathetic. | ||
| Do you realize that you said Alex defamed grieving families? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You did not say Alex allegedly defamed because Alex is guilty of defaming them legally. | ||
| You don't even get to say he kind of defamed them or he a little defamed them or he made a mistake. | ||
| He committed a fucking crime! | ||
| And as to that... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Here is Glenn's question about Sandy Hook. | ||
| Sure, let's hear how great and insightful this fucking question's gonna fucking be. | ||
| Mic down for this. | ||
| Yeah, good call. | ||
| So, you know, I mentioned before, I want to ask you a little bit about Sandy Hook. | ||
| I know the expectation is I'm supposed to come here and bash you over the head about Sandy Hook. | ||
| Go ahead, I deserve it. | ||
| I know I have no interest in doing that. | ||
| I don't give a shit what the expectations are. | ||
| It would bore me if I tried. | ||
| You've talked about it extensively for people who are interested in it. | ||
| You've been deposed about it. | ||
| You've talked for hours about it. | ||
| People interested in the particulars can go watch that if they want. | ||
| I'm not going to jump through hoops in order to appease people's anger that I'm here. | ||
| I do, though, want to ask you about a question that I'm actually interested in myself, which is... | ||
| You know, you have just said that you have made mistakes. | ||
| Obviously, one of those is the stuff you said about Sandy Hook. | ||
| We watched you in the film come very clean about the fact that you made statements that turned out to be untrue. | ||
| You've obviously spent a lot of kind of reflective time. | ||
| It's like the soulful Alex Jones we got to see in the last part of the film. | ||
| What is it that you think... | ||
| What caused you to do that? | ||
| I mean, you referenced some things, and I just identify with it myself, that when people who lie for a living are telling you that you're a liar, when people whose job it is to spread disinformation are accusing you of doing that, you kind of want to dig in a little bit and not give an inch to people who you know aren't criticizing you in good faith. | ||
| But what is it about how social media works, about how... | ||
| Groups function? | ||
| Have you thought about some of the psychological and cultural dynamics that led you to make some of those mistakes in Sandy Hook? | ||
| Well, sure. | ||
| Think of this like a thousand-page book. | ||
| So Glenn is essentially starting this question off by apologizing for asking it and saying that everyone expects him to ask about Sandy Hook. | ||
| It's almost like a meta conversation that Glenn is having with himself about how aggrieved he is, about how people view him for agreeing to do this documentary Q&A. | ||
| It's legitimately insane. | ||
| Yeah, this is nutbaggery of the highest caliber. | ||
| Yeah, but then this question is trash. | ||
| First off, Glenn says that if people want to know the particulars, they can watch Alex talk about Sandy Hook, they can watch the depositions, etc. | ||
| That's all good and well, but I'm fairly certain that Glenn hasn't done any of that himself. | ||
| He's not interested in the reality of what Alex did about Sandy Hook. | ||
| He just assumes, based on what this shallow-ass documentary has presented, that Alex got some things wrong and then he apologized for it. | ||
| Now everyone's just using these errors against him because he's a dissonant voice that needed to be destroyed because he supported Trump. | ||
| That's the foundation of this bad question. | ||
| And to make the question worse, Glenn builds an excuse into the question as he's asking it. | ||
| Do you think the media was so unfairly mean to you that you had to defame grieving parents? | ||
| It totally makes sense that you'd say that people's dead kids weren't real because the media's so bad, and sometimes you just get too caught up in your noble fight against them, right? | ||
| Fuck off. | ||
| I mean, this is, this is a fucked up thing to, I'm... | ||
| Very struggling. | ||
| I'm struggling with this one. | ||
| I started making all kinds of weird movements. | ||
| Yeah, you did. | ||
| This is not good. | ||
| You've been doing breathing exercises periodically. | ||
| I have. | ||
| I have. | ||
| Your pits are sweating. | ||
| My intense extreme fury sweat is going crazy right now. | ||
| This is not good. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| So here's Alex's answer to that question. | ||
| Let's hear this. | ||
| It goes about as you'd expect. | ||
| I don't care about the Sandy Hook families. | ||
| Alex, please continue to cause problems for them in front of me right now. | ||
| Well, Alex has an interesting take on it that I think won't surprise anybody who listens to our show at all. | ||
| Well, sure. | ||
| Think of this like a thousand-page book, and Sandy Hook in my life is like a quarter page. | ||
| And not putting down the kids that died or any of that stuff. | ||
| It's just like... | ||
| Yeah, you wouldn't want to put them down. | ||
| I used to... | ||
| You don't want to call them overweight. | ||
| Go with... | ||
| I would take calls. | ||
| It should be a call different show. | ||
| It still is, but like 10 years ago, it was like almost all calls. | ||
| It's like four hours a day. | ||
| So the callers all call and say, we don't believe this. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| It's like, well, let's look at this. | ||
| Let's look at that. | ||
| They kind of take pieces of that out of context. | ||
| And so here's a way to describe it. | ||
| Fast forward to Jesse Smolin. | ||
| I do a Sunday show, and I guess it was a Saturday night or whatever it was. | ||
| Maybe it was a Monday show, I forget, but they say he's at 2:30 in the morning, and guys dump bleach on him and put a noose over his head and say it's MAGA country, and I'd already been sued for Sandy Hook, and I said, "I don't care if I get sued, this doesn't sound real." And of course it wasn't real. | ||
| That NASCAR driver, Bubba whatever, Bubba Wallace, they had nooses hanging in my thing. | ||
| It's like, you just know that's BS. | ||
| So a lot of it's just, I'm a talk show host. | ||
| So I don't go, I'm journalistic, and I have the witnesses, and I have the proof, and you know, Jussie Smollett's full of crap. | ||
| But I still went on air. | ||
| And I said, the day after it happened, I said, Jesse Smollett's full of crap. | ||
| There's not dudes at 23 below zero running around at 2.30 in the morning dumping bleach on black people. | ||
| Get your ass kicked. | ||
| I mean, like, you go attack black people, Bill, you're going to die. | ||
| I mean, like, run around 2.30 in the morning? | ||
| That ain't going on. | ||
| Get my city's name out of your mouth. | ||
| The internet doesn't buy anything it's told anymore because they've been lied to so much. | ||
| I mean, take you vaulting. | ||
| I didn't say anything about it. | ||
| It's not Uvalde. | ||
| The head of state police said, everything we've been told to lie, we don't know what happened. | ||
| I mean, project what you want on lies and incompetence in the 77-minute stand-down. | ||
| The police are putting hand sanitizers. | ||
| Glenn, I'm sorry it's a long answer. | ||
| Is it an answer? | ||
| He's forgotten what the question was. | ||
| But, like, he did say a ton of shit about Uvalde. | ||
| It's just that no one really remembers. | ||
| He gets to pretend he didn't. | ||
| So even with all this softball features that are built into this question, and with Glenn doing everything he can to make Alex seem justified and heroic, Alex can't handle answering this question directly without getting lost in his talking points about how everything is fake. | ||
| Also, it might be a good idea... | ||
| For Glenn to ask a follow-up about how it's suspicious that the only two examples that Alex can come up with from modern history of times he's called things fake and he feels confident about still saying that are times when he denied an alleged hate crime. | ||
| With Smollett, fair enough. | ||
| Alex was right on that, but he was right for the wrong reasons. | ||
| With Bubba Wallace, Alex doesn't even understand the basic facts of that situation, and I would dare to say that essentially no one in that audience even remembers that case. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| This is pretty grim stuff, and if I were Glenn, and I hadn't already, this is about the time where I would realize that I'm interviewing a deceitful idiot, and he's not even keeping track of what question he's answering. | ||
| No, I mean, either Glenn is like, Playing a fucking cartoon in his head while Alex talks. | ||
| I mean, yeah, it has to be. | ||
| Because if you are legitimately listening to this human being speak, if the next words you say are the ones Glenn Green has said the whole time, you're an insane person. | ||
| Yeah, the way that it's just like, question, answer. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Next question. | ||
| Just not even a conception of a response that acknowledges the answer. | ||
| None. | ||
| Almost none. | ||
| No, Glenn is asking a question, answering the question the way Alex should answer it, and then allowing Alex to say a bunch of stuff, and then pretending that Alex didn't say anything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This is a frustrating experience for me. | ||
| It's not pleasant. | ||
| And here is Glenn refocusing the question, re-asking the question. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Another bite at the apple, as it were, doesn't do a good job. | ||
| I'm sorry it's a long answer. | ||
| What was the question? | ||
| What do you think led you into these kind of errors that you've been describing? | ||
| Great question. | ||
| It was just being on air four or five hours a day. | ||
| You're very cavalier. | ||
| And so you're not putting a journalistic filter on things. | ||
| When I write an article, I would do that. | ||
| I don't know if I make a film. | ||
| I was, like, getting every piece together. | ||
| Those were pretty good films. | ||
| No, you wouldn't. | ||
| No, you wouldn't. | ||
| For 20 years ago, they're pretty accurate. | ||
| No, they weren't. | ||
| They were cavaliering, like, drinking vodka and smoking cigarettes and, like, you know, doing whatever. | ||
| That's unacceptable! | ||
| And you're like, yeah, I hear it's a bunch of fake BS, man. | ||
| And, like, you're sued for it. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| So, so... | ||
| Wait, wait, wait, wait. | ||
| So your excuse is you were drunk. | ||
| I was drunk! | ||
|
unidentified
|
It doesn't count! | |
| I stole the car, but I was drunk! | ||
| Look, man, I was just free-associated. | ||
| I was just drunk as shit on air, and so maybe I said that these kids didn't actually exist. | ||
| Okay, so this motorcyclist is now part of that tree over there, but in my defense, I was drunk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Duh! | |
| I love the way that Alex will be on air, and it'll be like, I spent 20 hours a day studying this stuff. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| I eat, breathe, and sleep the globalists. | ||
| I know nothing but their plans backwards and forwards. | ||
| I dream about them even when I'm not working. | ||
| Right, and then here being active to explain himself, he's like, you're on air, you're just free-balling, you're just smoking a cigarette, drinking vodka. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, fuck you, man. | |
| Listen, why don't people understand that the defense's excellent and unimpeachable defense is because we have to fill time, it's okay for us to defame parents and make money. | ||
| Well, if you're going to make an omelet, sometimes you're going to defame some shells. | ||
| Sometimes you're going to defame parents. | ||
| That's how it happens. | ||
| Unreal. | ||
| Unreal! | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So, Alex complains about this trial. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| I'm probably going to boycott the trial or something because that's not a trial where if I was a guy caught again with 20 dead bodies in my basement, I could get up. | ||
| They're like, Mr. Jones, we have the dead bodies and we have them in your basement. | ||
| I'm still innocent, Your Honor. | ||
| A judge has never said you can't say you're innocent. | ||
| That is in a court. | ||
| Order starting next Wednesday that I cannot say I'm innocent. | ||
| So I'm not even feeling sorry for myself. | ||
| I'm like, whoa, this is the end of the country. | ||
| And so whatever things I did weren't on purpose. | ||
| And I had 10 points to make on your question. | ||
| It was a really big question. | ||
| No, I mean, I think, you know, it's interesting. | ||
| And I've identified this with myself and I think. | ||
| Yeah, no shit you identified as with yourself. | ||
| No fucking shit, you fucking coward. | ||
| Pretty remarkable to allow Alex to say these kinds of things about his case and not ask clarifying questions like, oh, why can't you say you're innocent? | ||
| Is it because that's not a relevant question of the phase that we're in of this case? | ||
| He's making it seem like it's a case to determine his innocence or guilt. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And it's not. | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| Such bullshit. | ||
| Listen. | ||
| This is how you know that Glenn Greenwald knows full well what he's doing. | ||
| Because if you're going to say that out loud to what is supposedly a journalist, they have to then ask, well, if you are guilty before this happened, why? | ||
| Why are you not allowed to say you're innocent? | ||
| Tell me why. | ||
| Explain to the judge's reasoning why. | ||
| Because if what you're saying is true, then the entire justice system has fallen apart. | ||
| This is the biggest news in the world that Glenn Greenwald is the first person to discover that Alex Jones has had his free rights, his forced amendment rights to say that he is innocent taken away from him, and this is a constitutional fight. | ||
| He knows that the person he's talking to is full of shit because he just moves on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It's embarrassing. | ||
| If that was true... | ||
| I mean, honestly, if Alex truly, on his first try to go to trial for this crime, was instantly disallowed from saying he's innocent, you and I would be talking about it. | ||
| Yeah, I think that would be a problem. | ||
| We would be furious. | ||
| You do not get to at least have a trial. | ||
| The reason we didn't have a trial is because of all this shit! | ||
| Yeah, if Alex had cooperated with the discovery process and everything, and it had gotten to the point where it was going to trial, actually on the merits, the original... | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And he was not allowed to say he was innocent. | ||
| We would be like, that's unacceptable. | ||
| That's unacceptable. | ||
| And it never would happen. | ||
| No. | ||
| So, you know, Glenn identifies with Alex, like he said there at the end. | ||
| And here's a little more on that. | ||
| I hope he will when he's broke. | ||
| Interesting, and I've identified this with myself, is I think if you start off as kind of this outsider, you start off as like on AXS TV, you start growing a little bit in influence, growing a little bit in influence, and suddenly you become, I think, one of the most influential people in the country with one of the largest audiences. | ||
| It's hard, I think, sometimes to remind yourself I'm not that guy on AXS TV in Austin anymore because it wasn't all that long ago when you weren't getting so much scrutiny, and then suddenly you're subjected to more scrutiny than anybody. | ||
| And I think it's hard. | ||
| It's hard to try and, you know, kind of adapt with that because it's kind of a slow and incremental. | ||
| That's why you're a great writer at Rape Journal. | ||
| That's exactly what I meant to say. | ||
| Because they go back. | ||
| They go back. | ||
| And they go back ten years, five years, and you're like, I didn't drink a bottle of vodka that day. | ||
| Jesus, I said that? | ||
| You know, I mean, I'm going to be honest about it. | ||
| I'm not going to lie to people. | ||
| You know, so it's, yeah, exactly. | ||
| So let me ask you this because I, you know, obviously do a lot of work on internet censorship. | ||
| Hey, here's my, on alcoholism? | ||
| Grow the fuck up. | ||
| Like, I do think that it's a gradual process to adjust to rising levels of notoriety, and that as your influence rises, you have a greater responsibility with your messaging. | ||
| It's also the case that you're responsible for understanding that, and to not understand it is you neglecting your responsibility. | ||
| It isn't an acceptable excuse to say that Alex Jones in 2013 or onward wasn't aware of his reach and his responsibility. | ||
| He wasn't some guy on public access. | ||
| He had multiple employees and reporters working under him. | ||
| He would brag on air all the time about how many viewers he got on the website. | ||
| If he didn't understand what responsibility he had to the audience about delivering information, that was a conscious choice that he was making to ignore that responsibility because it would make his job harder and less fun. | ||
| For example, he wouldn't be able to drink that bottle of vodka and get on air, make up a bunch of shit that gets people hurt, and then do it again the next day. | ||
| He would know that he was responsible to not do that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What a load of shit. | ||
| And to hear Glenn lap this up and not ask any follow-up questions, it's really disappointing. | ||
| But honestly, it makes total sense. | ||
| He needs access to Alex in order to interview Alex. | ||
| And if he doesn't do exactly what he is doing, and if he treats Alex with any critical focus, he knows that he's gonna lose that access. | ||
| Conversely, I think Glenn probably fully understands that the most likely result of pushing back on Alex at all is that this interview is going to become a fight. | ||
| It's happened in pretty much all of Alex's other high-profile interviews and that's not what Glenn wants. | ||
| This is supposed to be a promotional event for this image-rehabilitating documentary so it would be counterproductive for the end result of this Q&A to be everyone walking away thinking... | ||
| Yeah, maybe you can't really interview Alex. | ||
| Maybe there's a reason he doesn't give many invitations, because he's an asshole and they just end up in fights. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's essential to Glenn and Alex Lee Moyer's grift for Alex to be treated seriously and not like a cartoon, and in order for that to be able to happen, you need to treat him with kid gloves, and it's pathetic. | ||
| I mean, and it's not even, it doesn't even work. | ||
| Alex is a cartoon. | ||
| They're just acting like he's not. | ||
| It is gaslighting of the highest order for you to talk to what is the words coming out of his mouth to respond with what Glenn is saying is gaslighting. | ||
| Can you imagine what kind of restraint you would need to employ to not ask a follow-up question if Alex said, I was drunk. | ||
| I drank a bottle of vodka when I defamed families who had people die that they loved on Sandy Hook. | ||
| It meant... | ||
| So little to me that I was just drunk on air. | ||
| I was just shit-faced. | ||
| Just threw it away. | ||
| Why are you mad at me? | ||
| I made a mistake when I was drunk. | ||
| That's his argument. | ||
| That's what he's allowed to say to Glenn fucking Greenwald about a fucking propaganda movie about how great Hitler is. | ||
| No curiosity on Glenn's part. | ||
| None. | ||
| None. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| He's a great journalist and a great writer, though. | ||
| Yeah, but you know what he's not good at? | ||
| What? | ||
| Because apparently they had trouble finding a venue. | ||
| Oh, no! | ||
| When I got picked up at the airport, I was told that there was some difficulty for a while getting a venue here in Austin to do this event that when they found out that you were involved, they said, you know what, on second thought, we're not really interested in your money. | ||
| And I thought about it for a minute, and at first I said, okay, yeah, of course that's the case. | ||
| And then I realized... | ||
| That shouldn't be so comforting like normal to hear. | ||
| That should be chilling and alarming. | ||
| I should be, what do you mean we're in the United States? | ||
| Why is it difficult to get a venue to show a film about somebody who has a lot? | ||
| And we've been so conditioned. | ||
| We're getting too comfortable. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think there's a kind of repression that has emerged that we've been trained for so long to think takes place in other places that we have a very hard time recognizing that we're actually subject to that level of repression here. | ||
| Have you had problems with the film, like this film, getting distribution and other kind of publicity for it that you didn't have with the first film? | ||
| Have you noticed greater difficulty? | ||
| There's a bear shit in the woods. | ||
| That wasn't a question for Alex, that was for Moyer. | ||
| But, like, okay... | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| Like, they're basically just trying to say cancel culture without saying cancel culture. | ||
| Dan, as a tireless advocate for free speech, as someone who demands that everyone be given the choices to do what they desire, when a venue refuses money based on some sort of political opinion, how dare they? | ||
| How dare they stand up for that not a First Amendment right they have to deny me giving whatever I want? | ||
| Does he think? | ||
| Do you think that if you paid for it, a theater should be forced to let you screen Song of the South or Triumph of the Will? | ||
| Clearly. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Well, because they didn't let him do it. | ||
| That's cancel culture. | ||
| I'm a whiny baby, is what he said. | ||
| And also, isn't free association like one of the main pillars of Alex's ideology? | ||
| This question and Alex's reaction to it in essence reveal that Alex's libertarian leanings and those bedrock ideas are just lip service. | ||
| He fully supports the right of a business to not serve someone because they're black or because they're gay, but he'll cry bloody murder if a theater doesn't want to air his stupid documentary. | ||
| Also, again, this question is basically just teeing Alex or Alex up to complain about how everyone's been so mean to them because they were brave enough to make this film. | ||
| And that, Jordan, is good Jordan. | ||
| I'm going to tell you this right now. | ||
| I'm going to tell you this right now. | ||
| People have not been anywhere near mean enough to them. | ||
| I'm doing my best and I'm not being mean enough to them. | ||
| We're fighting so hard to be mean to these people. | ||
| They don't know what mean is, man. | ||
| And it's not meanness born out of bad faith or ill will or some kind of a hostility towards them. | ||
| It's righteous fury. | ||
| Well, it's a... | ||
| This is unjust! | ||
| It's a reaction to the thing that they made or did. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| On the merits. | ||
| They should be treated way harsher based on how bad the shit they're doing is. | ||
| Disgusting. | ||
| So anyway, Moyer comes in to answer this question about finding a venue. | ||
| Have you had problems with the film, like this film, getting distribution and other kind of publicity for it that you didn't have with the first film? | ||
| Have you noticed greater difficulty? | ||
| There's a bear shit in the woods? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, sort of. | |
| But also, we read the tea leaves after... | ||
| What happened with our last film and we took matters into our own hands and things to play nice. | ||
| Hi! | ||
| We, you know, we started basically talking to people outside of Hollywood and I'm not, I mean, I don't... | ||
| I'm a free agent. | ||
| I'm not Play Nice, but we're a team on this movie for sure, and there are people that are interested in seeing authentic content, you know, and 1AMDC and Amanda Milius can vouch for that too. | ||
| So Play Nice is the company that distributed the film, and it's run by that guy who used to be in charge of CineFamily until he got forced out because of rampant sexual harassment complaints against him, and then the theater went out of business. | ||
| Incidentally, Play Nice was founded partially with investment from Peter Thiel. | ||
| I'm sure that's a totally benign thing and not at all suspicious. | ||
| You know what's crazy? | ||
| Alex's next film is about how he's not guilty of any of those sexual assaults that he committed. | ||
| Do you know why? | ||
| He was drunk, Dan. | ||
| Also, I'm not sure how much stock I'd put into Amanda Milius vouching for Moyer's free agency, considering that Milius produced and directed The Plot Against the President, the Trump propaganda film that two of the producers of that film are producers of Alex's. | ||
| war. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Unbeholden. | |
| It was smart of Melius to shorten the title of that movie from the title of the book that it's based on, which is quote, The Plot Against the President, The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History. | ||
| That title probably wouldn't have aged quite as well as the shortened version. | ||
| It could have really hurt. | ||
| Could have really hurt later on. | ||
| The plot against the president. | ||
| The true story of how Congressman Devin Nunes tried to sue a Twitter account. | ||
| The Capitol has fallen and that's a good thing. | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Where should we head? | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| So here's what is essentially the last question of this interview. | ||
| Do you mean the first? | ||
| You seem to be somebody who, from the very beginning, you know, were... | ||
| Saying things that in your community and in your politics and in the media were things that were going to cause you to be cast aside as a crazy person or as a conspiracy theorist, going back to the 90s with Waco and the FBI and those sorts of things. | ||
| Why did that happen? | ||
| Why did you end up on this path that caused you to just constantly be so skeptical of what you're told by authority? | ||
| I was a heroic helicopter pilot in Vietnam, and then he worked in Iran-Contra. | ||
| And he wouldn't tell me all the secret stuff, but he said, when I was like a teenager, I was like, I like Rush Limbaugh. | ||
| And he goes, the Republicans are controlled, the Democrats are controlled. | ||
| And I was down there visiting him for like two weeks in San Antonio. | ||
| And he said, let me just take you back around the back porch and let's sit down and eat a sandwich and talk about this. | ||
| And he told me about a lot of the stuff he saw in Vietnam and how he did these things he was told to do. | ||
| He got worse and worse and worse to the moment he said no. | ||
| And it was narcotics trafficking in Vietnam, and then it was everything, you know, with the Iran-Contra. | ||
| It met a point where... | ||
| They were smuggling kids out of orphanages, you know, where they were going. | ||
| And he said at that point he was done. | ||
| And so he told me about all that. | ||
| And then I had other family, you know, that were involved in black operations back when it was all human intelligence. | ||
| And, like, the Russians were actually here and they were actually in wars. | ||
| So my dad's cousin was involved in a bunch of stuff. | ||
| And so I grew up kind of, like, sitting around. | ||
| Dinner table. | ||
| I hear these people talk about this stuff. | ||
| And so I kind of knew what was going on, what other people didn't. | ||
| I was just growing up around that. | ||
| And so I kind of heard that. | ||
| And then my dad was heavily involved in geopolitics and research and all these books around the house. | ||
| And so I kind of grew up around that. | ||
| And these were like pro-American people, but they were saying the government's bad. | ||
| The government did a lot of bad stuff. | ||
| There was a bad group taking over. | ||
| But they weren't telling me this. | ||
| You know, there's a bumper sticker. | ||
| If you want your children to listen, whisper. | ||
| They weren't telling me the stuff. | ||
| This was me hiding around the corner, like, listening to what they were talking about. | ||
| And so that's why I had a leg up on it all, was because of a bunch of family stuff. | ||
| Well, I wonder if Glenn would ask a follow-up, if Alex was clear about what he's talking about, and it's all the John Birch Society shit. | ||
| Like, I wonder if Glenn would debase himself enough to be like, yeah, the JBS, they were onto something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe. | |
| Listen, listen. | ||
| One, I get all of my greatest wisdom from bumper stickers. | ||
| And two, my parents didn't tell me a lot about the John Birch Society. | ||
| They just told me that black people were part of a communist plot to take over America and that we need to fight against the Russians as well as civil rights with everything that we've ever got. | ||
| They didn't tell me that. | ||
| They just yelled about it to their friends all the time and had a house full of books about the topic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Picture books. | ||
| It's the only things I could read. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So also, this question that Glenn is asking is framed on a lie. | ||
| Like, he's, like, pretending that what Alex did was bold. | ||
| Like... | ||
| His shit wasn't unpopular in the community he was in and the politics that he had. | ||
| In conspiracy theory, anti-government militia, anti-communist worlds, everything Alex was saying was popular and basically the standard doctrine. | ||
| It was pandering. | ||
| Yes, Glenn's acting like Alex had a job at CNN hosting a nightly show and then he did what he did, like he took a brave stand. | ||
| It wasn't brave to be a conspiracy theorist in a community of conspiracy theorists. | ||
| Maybe it would be if you were expected to not be insane, but that was never the expectation for Alex. | ||
| He was in an insane world. | ||
| The person they're really talking about here is David Icke. | ||
| That guy sucks and is wrong about everything, but what he did took a lot of nerve. | ||
| He was already a big mainstream celebrity, and he essentially threw that all away to go down a crazy conspiracy path. | ||
| Alex was just born on that path and followed along doing the things that got him positive reinforcement until we're... | ||
| We're here. | ||
| Until he wound up saying that David Icke was right all along. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The turd in the punch bowl. | ||
| The turd in the punch bowl is a delicious turd. | ||
| But like, yeah, they're pretending that Alex did that. | ||
| Like... | ||
| David Icke went on TV and said that he's Jesus. | ||
| I'm just so mad. | ||
| I'm tired of people being allowed to gaslight me this bad. | ||
| It's pretty rough. | ||
| Just be like, hey man, I think that McDonald's nuggets are good. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| You're gaslighting me, but that's fine. | ||
| McDonald's nuggets are fine. | ||
| See, I'm sick of you gaslighting me. | ||
| They're not good, but they're fine. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| So Greenwald starts talking about what life would be if you'd made a different choice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| And mic down for this. | ||
| Because there's a slip of the tongue, and I want to make sure you catch it. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So before I came here, I was thinking about where I would be instead of here if I had made different choices to pursue the kind of mainstream acceptability that I was interested in wondering why you had rejected. | ||
| That's... | ||
| Meaningful. | ||
| There were two paths. | ||
| There were accountability and acceptability. | ||
| That is a really good point. | ||
| Accountability is really what he's rejecting. | ||
| Like, you want to pretend that you're a rebel shunning acceptability, but that's a farce. | ||
| You just don't want to be held accountable for the things you do, and Alex is basically the avatar of that shit. | ||
| I have lost so much accessibility with my 1.8 million followers. | ||
| What I have is accountability with my ability to harass people with less of an audience than I do and receive no consequences. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whoops. | ||
| Oh, no! | ||
| Fun slip of the tongue. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, anyway, here we go. | ||
| This is the last clip we have. | ||
| This is just sort of a wrap-up. | ||
| And, you know, after this, there's not really anything. | ||
| Just Glenn saying goodbye to the audience. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure, sure, sure. | |
| So I was, before I came here, I was thinking about where I would be instead of here if I had made different choices to pursue the kind of mainstream accountability, acceptability that I was interested in, in wondering why you had rejected. | ||
| And I was thinking I'd probably be in, like, the CNN building with Wolf Blitzer and Chris Hayes and, like, Amy Klobuchar and Nancy Pelosi wanting to kill myself out of boredom and disgust. | ||
| And, you know, I refer to this crowd as, like, a kind of crowd of misfits and outcasts, and it is, and I'm so... | ||
| So much happier to be around people like this who place themselves on the outside and decide that they're not going to pay that price of embracing things they don't believe for whatever rewards they offer. | ||
| And you've been doing this for decades and taking all kinds of slings and arrows. | ||
| And you yourself recognize you made a lot of mistakes. | ||
| But I'm really glad you've been doing what you're doing. | ||
| Well, Lynn, I appreciate you coming. | ||
| I appreciate Alex's whole thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, Glenn. | |
| Absolutely. | ||
| Just to close on that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, Alex. | |
| Thanks, Alex. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| You want to say something? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I was just thanking you. | ||
| No, no, but thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For being in the movie and, you know, I never really thanked you for being in the movie. | |
| Well, you guys are being too nice, but the difference is I didn't make mistakes on purpose. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| We all get better and we all fix them. | ||
| But the larger issue is we have a lot of... | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| I was gonna ask you, did you make mistakes on purpose or did you do them intentionally? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So you knew! | |
| You know what? | ||
| I said it five times, yeah, you're right. | ||
| See, it's funny. | ||
| Hilarious! | ||
| The crowd laughs and claps at Glenn finally acknowledging that Alex keeps saying that, you know, that he doesn't lie on purpose. | ||
| It's cathartic. | ||
| It's a tension breaker because the joke is that they all know that Alex absolutely lies on purpose and has been for the past 40 minutes or whatever he's been on stage. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's the price of admission. | ||
| You want the attention and outsider credibility that you can gain from associating with Alex? | ||
| Then you better stick to kayfabe and present Alex how he wants to be seen. | ||
| Glenn understands that, which is why he didn't acknowledge the constant insistences that Alex doesn't lie on purpose. | ||
| To do so would be to call out that very notion and call it into question, whereas it needs just to be taken as a given. | ||
| It's just a fundamental fact. | ||
| The audience laughs because they're in on the joke. | ||
| They know that Alex lies on purpose, but their ability to use him as an avatar of their hatred of the mainstream press and the establishment requires that they maintain the same kayfabe that Glenn is bound by. | ||
| There's nothing challenging or brave about this content, and the congratulations these idiots give themselves for engaging in it is hollow and meaningless. | ||
| What would actually be challenging? | ||
| It's putting Alex in an uncomfortable position where he has to wrestle with the idea that his evasions and lies and self-contradictions aren't gonna fly and see how he reacts. | ||
| There's nothing challenging about filming a liar lie and then interviewing about his lies as if they're truth. | ||
| But you don't act like this, because you know Alex doesn't actually need you. | ||
| He wants the press of the movie, but he's fine without you. | ||
| You need him. | ||
| And... | ||
| If you don't make yourself a good little soldier in Alex's imaginary war, he's not going to play ball, and you don't get him. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So, fuck you. | ||
| I mean, here's the, you know, we were, our last episode, which we recorded so long ago, about stand-up comedy, reminds me of something important for this. | ||
| When I was coming up, there was one joke that I told that really worked well. | ||
| And then, as I kept telling it, I realized that I didn't know, I didn't understand why it worked. | ||
| I didn't understand what the people were laughing at. | ||
| I didn't know what I was really saying that made them release that tension, which is what the laughter really is. | ||
| And it was a fucked up thing to say. | ||
| I thought I was being very satirical and smart and doing all that, but the reason that they were laughing is because they were thinking I was saying it literally. | ||
| That can happen. | ||
| You know, and then I stopped doing the joke because if you understand why people are laughing, then you understand what it is you are actually saying and what it is they are understanding you to say. | ||
| That laugh came because that unacknowledgment had been in the air the entire fucking show. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it came as a laugh because when he released the tension, what the tension release was, was it's fine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| It's fine to imagine that it doesn't matter that Alex lies intentionally. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| That's what the joke is. | ||
| The joke is we don't even have to bother. | ||
| And the joke is... | ||
| I'm just imagining Glenn ever even asking that question to begin with. | ||
| 100, because this is silly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everybody has participated in a farce, and then Glenn Greenwald gets to pop the balloon at the end because it's over and everybody gets to go home and pretend that they weren't part of this farce in the fucking first place. | ||
| Well, honestly, he has to pop the balloon because the audience laughed when Alex said it the last time. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| He has to address the fact that they laughed, so he has to just break the tension and whatever and make the very idea Of asking that question, the joke itself. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, it's nonsense. | ||
| It's awareness and it's bullshit. | ||
| It's fucking bullshit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It is pathetic, and that is a sad, sad, sad, sad, sad man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, if you're sucking the boot of Alex Jones and really trying to get the whole thing in your mouth, as much of that boot as you can, you're not doing good. | ||
| That paycheck better have been huge. | ||
| It better be big, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Woof. | |
| Woof. | ||
| Woo, Nelly! | ||
| I can't believe that. | ||
| So, I think this was one of the... | ||
| I mean, it was way worse than I think I expected it to be. | ||
| I really am blindsided, truly and honestly. | ||
| And your expectations were low. | ||
| My expectations were so low! | ||
| I mean, I'm fine with Glenn asking insanely long questions, because that's just how the moron talks, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But this is bad. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| This is bad. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's almost... | ||
| I think those questions could have been asked by a broom. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| More concisely and better. | ||
| They weren't thoughtful. | ||
| There weren't follow-ups. | ||
| Anyway, I find all of this just so annoying. | ||
| Distasteful. | ||
| So, I mean, this brings us to the end of our arc, I guess, with Alex's war. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And that documentary is bad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's dangerous. | ||
| Because it lends itself towards mainstreaming Alex. | ||
| It foists Alex upon an unsuspecting population. | ||
| If you go into that documentary without an awareness of who he is, which many people probably will, just be like, I've heard this name. | ||
| Let's see this documentary about him or something. | ||
| Or they know him as just the gay frogs guy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You could stand to very seriously... | ||
| Well, what you're saying to the people who know him as the gay frog guy or don't know him at all is, yes, look at this man. | ||
| He's the gay frog guy, but he's more than that. | ||
| He's a human who makes mistakes, and he's a man with principled political stances. | ||
| And it's fucking bullshit. | ||
| It's all a lie. | ||
| It's all bullshit. | ||
| And she sucks. | ||
| I think humanizing Alex is totally fine, and I do think that one or two dimensional caricatures of him are counterproductive. | ||
| I 100% agree with that. | ||
| I just don't think that that's what this is. | ||
| No. | ||
| I think that this is an attempt to humanize the version of Alex that he wants people to see, and that is not what a documentary is. | ||
| You're not showing the accurate picture. | ||
| You're showing the mask that Alex wears and not really giving any indication that it's a mask. | ||
| You're not giving... | ||
| It's just... | ||
| You're fucking over your audience if you do this. | ||
| And Glenn is too. | ||
| And it's... | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You have every right to do it, but any kind of pretense of this is somehow a challenging piece of work that we're doing... | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| You're playing the recorder and pretending it's a tuba. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or whatever. | ||
| You've created a golem of Alex Jones in order to allow the real Alex Jones to avoid consequences for his behavior. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And let us not forget, quite sincerely, this Q&A and this premiere of this documentary was set to happen just before the trial was to begin. | ||
| Glenn Greenwald came to Austin to engage in a promotional event with Alex doing these softball bullshit questions after this puff-piece-ass shallow documentary in the context of... | ||
| same city right around the same time that alex is trying to avoid responsibility for his actions vis-a-vis sandy hook yep and glenn is essentially a media outlet cheerleader for him in those efforts yep willingly unwittingly wittingly It doesn't matter if you lie on purpose or not! | ||
| I guess that's really what it comes down to. | ||
| That's what it comes down to. | ||
| Glenn is saying to Alex, it's a good thing that you keep saying you don't lie on purpose, so I don't have to say I don't lie on purpose. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| So, anyway. | ||
| We deserve each other. | ||
| We'll be back. | ||
| But until then, we have a website. | ||
| We do have a website. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| We're also on Twitter. | ||
| We are on Twitter. | ||
| It's at knowledge underscore fight. | ||
| Go to Ben Jordan. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| We'll be back. | ||
| But until then, I'm Neo. | ||
| I'm Leo. | ||
| I'm DZX Clark. | ||
| I'm Alex's empty bottle of vodka before he got on air. | ||
| And now here comes the sex robots. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |
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