Jordan Holmes and Dan Friesen dissect Alex Jones’ September 2, 2022 episode, where he weaponizes Biden’s speech—calling MAGA supporters a "bull" provoked by "Operation Matador"—while peddling baseless false flag theories: neutron bombs, fuel oil trucks, and Ukrainian "plantations." Jones cites unnamed Pentagon/CIA sources but ignores Desmet’s mass formation warnings about rhetoric fueling violence. Despite mocking Jones’ claims, they note his audience still justifies aggression, revealing fearmongering over substance. The episode underscores how conspiracy-driven media distorts reality to radicalize rather than mobilize. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, I'm not sure exactly how the ball is going to break at this point, but he gave a speech that was essentially like, hey, look, here's the situation.
Trump and the people who are following him, these MAGA folks, are a mess.
In my humble opinion, the only reason that a president should give a speech is as cover for somebody to arrest like a thousand people at the same time.
But yeah, I'm really, there's a part of me that is quite conflicted about how exciting to think the, like, you know, giving voice to a lot of this stuff is.
Well, I mean, you have to ask yourself, and I think that, no, I think the entire country is asking itself right now, does anybody even listen to the president anymore?
Like, all real talk, does anybody care what he says?
Yeah, it's a tough, it's a tough walk from the past of like, my fellow Americans, I come to you today to like Trump being like, they say I have a small dick.
And I think one of the reasons that this is really sticking in his craw, as it were, is we heard for years during Trump's time, Alex being like, you have the bully pulpit.
Do an evening speech.
Get out there and address the population in prime time and get your message across.
So here's what was said in between the clips that was cut out.
Quote, but there's no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that this is a threat to this country.
These are hard things, but I'm an American president, not the president of Red America or Blue America, but of all America.
And I believe it is my duty, my duty to level with you, to tell you the truth no matter how difficult, no matter how painful.
It may be a coincidence that this was cut out, but it also seems like a point Alex wouldn't be super comfortable with, particularly the part about the GOP being intimidated by Trump and his followers.
The impression about Trump and the MAGA folks is supposed to be that they're winning the battle of ideas and that they're just smarter and more patriotic than the rest of us, which is why they've taken over the GOP.
It's not a great idea to plant seeds in the audience's mind that maybe they're a part of something hostile that has gained power not by being ideologically better, but by being more willing to threaten and employ violence.
Alex also cuts out the part at the beginning where Biden says, quote, we must never forget, we the people are the true heirs of the American experiment that began more than two centuries ago.
We the people have burning inside each of us the flame of liberty that was lit here at Independence Hall, a flame that lit our way through abolition, the Civil War, suffrage, the Great Depression, world wars, civil rights.
That sacred flame still burns now in our time as we build an America that is more prosperous, free, and just.
That is the work of my presidency, a mission I believe in with my whole soul.
That's just good business on Alex's part cutting that out.
He has a vested interest in pretending that his political enemies hate the country and what it stands for.
So it's best not to allow someone like Biden to speak like this on InfoWars as someone who has a passionate love for the country's history.
They promote authoritarian leaders and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.
Here's what Biden said in the middle of that, right after where it cut.
Quote, they look at the mob that stormed the United States Capitol on January 6th, brutally attacking law enforcement, not as insurrectionists who placed a dagger to the throat of our democracy, but they look at them as patriots.
And they see their MAGA failure to stop a peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election as preparation for the 2022 and 2024 elections.
I think Alex knows well enough that most of his audience does see January 6th rioters as patriots, which is uncomfortable.
Yeah.
It's hard to rationalize if you really have to, if confronted on it.
This is holding up a mirror to his audience's beliefs in a way that could be threatening, whereas other parts of the speech that are left in, they really aren't.
For instance, he leaves in Biden saying, quote, they promote authoritarian leaders because the audience doesn't think they do that.
Trump, DeSantis, Bolsonaro, and Orban, they're the furthest things from authoritarian in the audience's eyes.
So hearing Biden say that is just absurd to them.
That's not something that's like, oh, I'm taken aback by this.
Another part that Alex leaves in is, quote, MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards, backward to an America where there's no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.
All that stuff, that stuff that his audience believes in and is totally fine with.
This is not threatening for Alex to show the audience because it gives the audience the feeling that Biden is declaring war on them for their political beliefs.
They identify with the people that Biden is describing as a threat to democracy, which is what Alex wants them to feel.
In the case of the January 6th thing, that's a little bit different.
That's a case where the audience will see their feelings mirrored by what Biden is saying, but it's not about political positions they can justify as rational.
Opposition to abortion or believing that marriage is just between a man and a woman are things that are common in many religious communities, so it wouldn't give you pause to look at yourself in that mirror.
The riots of January 6th were actions, and those actions are way harder for people who want to see themselves as respectable to justify.
That's a mirror it's best not to look into, partially because what Biden is saying makes sense.
Quote, but while the threat to American democracy is real, I want to say as clearly as we can, we are not powerless in the face of these threats.
We are not bystanders in this ongoing attack on democracy.
There are far more Americans, far more Americans from every background and belief who reject the extreme MAGA ideology than those who accept it.
After that line, there was a big cheer.
This could be useful to instill fear in the audience, but that doesn't play as well with the Infowars version of Biden and these ideas.
A huge part of the election conspiracy is that Biden was so unpopular and that no one would come to his rallies.
So you don't really want these large applause breaks and getting applause for the idea that there are more people who are sick of this stuff than Alex's goofy audience.
There's a bunch more that's cut out, and a lot of it is Biden saying things about uniting around defending our political process and then getting applause.
No need for stuff like that because it's bad optics.
You know, I was wondering, you know, part of why I think that calling the January 6th people Patriots is weird to me is because it was such a huge fuck-up, you know?
Like, I mean, they really, we all saw that it was just a bunch of fucking assholes just really being pieces of shit, you know?
And it's like, you can't mythologize that the same way you can the Boston Tea Party, you know?
Like, that was just a bunch of assholes going on a boat and like fucking shit up, you know?
Also, in this portion, Biden lists off a number of his accomplishments that he's helped make possible in the past two years, all of which are things that Alex is pretending aren't real.
So it's best not to confuse the audience with that.
This also Cut out the part where there's a protester yelling stuff to disrupt the speech.
And Biden says, Quote, notwithstanding those folks you hear on the other side there, they're entitled to be outrageous.
This is a democracy, but history and common sense, good manners is nothing they've suffered from.
That's a pretty far cry from all those times Trump interrupted his own speeches to demand protesters be kicked out or times he responded with glee to protesters being assaulted at his rallies.
I mean, the funniest part about it is like, you know, I suppose you could go with the bailout and like the ACA to portray Obama as a tyrant.
You know, at least there's that.
But with Biden, it really does feel like he's half-ass and, you know, like, is he a tyrant if he's willing to be like, hey, 10K in student loan forgiveness?
I'm not going to go after these hard right people and say we got to get 20.
Another thing that's weird here is that the part where this picks up after the cut where Biden says, quote, and now America must choose, that's actually from earlier in the speech.
This is edited out of order to create the impression that Alex is wanting to convey.
Right.
I promise I could make Alex's show look so much worse if I just gave up on the idea of linear time.
That's not fair because this is a very definition of taking things out of context, out of context in temporal space.
Yeah, might as well be a magazine cut out of a hostage letter.
Yep.
I understand that maybe for time reasons, Alex wouldn't want to play the whole speech, but the way this is being presented is irresponsible and it's intentionally deceptive.
Yeah, you shouldn't expect anything otherwise.
So this clip comes to an end or the part of the speech.
I'm sure there's some image he's trying to evoke that's not that.
But I strongly suspect that Alex has the tone that he has there because he knows that his followers are primed to hear something like this as the go-ahead to start shooting or carrying out violence against the government.
He desperately needs to create the preemptive narrative that anything that may happen is not real and will be a false flag.
This was almost certainly in response to Senator Lindsey Graham going on Fox News and saying that if Trump was charged for having all that classified shit at Mar-a-Lago, then there would be riots in the streets.
You know, like you think back to those conservative commentators like William F. Buckley Jr., and you think about him now saying, you know, what amounts to I'm rubber in your glue, Niener Niener, what bounces off me sticks to you.
Alex knows well enough he's plugged into no, like he's friends with all kinds of Oathkeeper types who have been begging to fight a fucking war forever.
Like he knows enough to see the optics of this, to see the way people are talking about it, and know someone is probably making a bomb as we speak.
Yeah.
So when that happens, if that happens, I don't want to be blamed for it, and I don't want this to be a setback to my business and to my ideology.
And when he was talking about false flags coming before this speech, I mean, it's the same thing.
It's just much more important now.
When there was those, you know, we touched on this before, but like, you know, the clips on social media going around of him saying, oh, false flags are coming before the midterms.
I think I would take the bet because the bet is if you arrest Trump and you do the law thing correctly, they attack or nothing happens and we get Trump.
I think I take the bet.
I think if we get Trump and they don't attack, the wind drops out of their sails completely.
But the yeah, I get where you're coming from, but also I think that's naive because I think that to assume an immediate backlash is the backlash might be short-sighted.
So like if Trump were arrested and nothing happens, that doesn't mean like six months of planning later, something wouldn't happen.
It's, it's a tough thing to think about, but I hope that decision-making isn't being guided by the potential for people to cause rampant and random political damage.
This is an emergency broadcast, ladies and gentlemen.
And I'll be up here tomorrow taping another emergency three-hour broadcast with some special guests who are going to be here today, but with the storms across the country, their plane is delayed until this evening.
I'll leave it at that.
Special guest studio tomorrow.
We've got big guests as well in studio today.
A psychological warfare expert, one of the leading ones in the world, will be talking to say about that at the bottom of the hour.
Or that's a tiger, or that's a giraffe, or that's a grizzly bear, or that's a penguin, or that's a boa constrictor.
When the leader of a country gets up and declares half the nation terrorist and says they're about to engage in terrorism, and they do it with troops behind them with a red background with a dark cross above it.
They see us as the bull, and they are shaking a red flag in our face.
And the Matador is the deep state with a long, skinny, razor-sharp sword so that when the bull lunges forward, the matador uses the force of its weight to drive it into the heart and step aside with his cape as the bull buries himself into the dust.
And then he has his own fucking analogy in order to explain the name that he bets they made up for it, thinking that they had the metaphorical wherewithal to make that up.
And the way you get a bull that outweighs the Matador 15 times and has big, giant, razor-sharp horns to finally run into the sword is they throw little spears.
That's what they've been doing with the open borders and the drag queen story time that he valued dollars and shutting off your power supplies and remote controlling all the devices in your house.
That was throwing the little spears, the barbs in our back.
But now the red cape's out with 67 days out from the midterms where they know they're set to lose big despite all the dead people they've got on the rolls, hoping they can steal it with mail-in ballots.
And so now the red cape is out, being flapped in our face, and right behind it is the FBI and the New World Order getting ready to stage terror attacks.
So if you follow this and understand Infor's language, then you know that most of the stuff Alex talks about is bullshit.
And a lot of these things he's listed as spears being poked to anger the audience are just buzzwords he throws around to prompt an emotional reaction from the audience.
This list is an airing of grievances.
And the complaint is basically that Alex doesn't like technological advancement and abhors a society that embraces immigrants and LGBTQ community folks.
He yells about free speech all day, but wants to live in a country where athletes aren't allowed to take a knee during the national anthem in protest of racial discrimination and policing.
These are things that Alex conceptualizes as the spears being used to poke the metaphorical bull.
And it really just sounds to me like Alex is expressing a profoundly white identity view of the country.
He doesn't believe that people who are not straight white Christians are entitled to rights or power in this country.
And on some level, anytime he hears a conversation about people who fit this description acting in a way that he doesn't like, his reaction is basically like, you should be glad us white folks even let you be here.
Yeah, I mean, it does seem like the more apt metaphorical Stand-in for Alex in this scenario is in fact the bull itself constantly being enraged by any number of different things.
Anyway, each time he sees these things, these things like people living, he experiences that as a spear being poked into his white Christian tolerance.
Colin Kaepernick taking a knee instead of just accepting police violence, that's a spear.
Drag queens reading at a library instead of being shamed into never living in public, that's a spear.
Immigrants being allowed into the country instead of having a hardened militarized border they're killed for crossing, that's a spear.
Here's the thing: when a bull charges after being poked by a bunch of spears, it's a natural reaction.
The matador waving that flag is something that the bull can't really be faulted for charging.
It's the expected result of all the poking.
If we understand Alex's metaphor, his Patriot buddies are the bull, and they would be well within their right to charge the matador, in this case, bomb things, because they've been poked so much.
The only problem is that the matador's cape has the FBI behind it.
That doesn't really make sense because in the metaphorical matador situation, this whole thing, there's really no way to make it a false flag.
You would need like a fake bull or some shit.
And I have no idea how this works inside this conception.
Yeah, yeah.
This isn't Alex warning about a false flag.
This is him warning his buddies about following their instincts.
He's trying to tell the bull not to charge because it's a trap.
Because Alex understands that his buddies want to charge that matador really badly.
They want to bomb shit.
And Alex is smart enough to recognize that the way that people are talking about Biden's speech is exactly the kind of thing that will lead that will be as much of a stimulus for that as a matador waving a cape.
This isn't a false flag situation he's talking about.
That unless we see massive Justice Department whistleblowers now, and unless we see people even in corporate media that know they're mercenaries and know what they're doing is wrong, and a lot of them do, unless we just see everybody start coming out and saying, I'm not with this, it's over.
And again, a lot of people say, well, we'll just have a war with these people and we'll show them.
And you don't want that really, because as much as some of that is galvanizing for his community, you know, denying Oklahoma City bombing is certainly something that they've made a lot of mileage on.
If you're somebody who just lives and like listens to Alex, believes this stuff, goes about your day, I don't know how you could not think like, well, maybe the building that I work in could be a target or something.
It's got to be cripplingly scary, whether it's a conscious fear or not.
Like there's got to be something that, it's awful.
In the last few days, I've talked to high-level current Pentagon and high-level current CIA and high-level Army Special Operations Command, and they concur with my analysis 100% and say it's their analysis and that America's never been in more trouble.
But obviously those people can't come on the show.
But I can tell you that people that have done this in third world countries and people that have run regime change agree there's an attempt by the leftist arm of the deep state to stage events and permanently bring America into martial law.
Now, I do think that it would make sense that these high-level people agree with Alex because we heard not too long ago that Alex is the fucking leader of the government.
So they are getting ready to stage something huge, ladies and gentlemen.
So the public will at least buy that, oh, because of the big terror attack or whatever, or terror attacks, or mass shootings, or mass poisonings, or power outages, or whatever it is they're gearing up to do, there's a plethora of things they can do within the false flag realm.
And so I'm just going to be every day on this until the election because they'll want a few weeks to maximize it.
I'd say we enter the prime zone October 1st and October after, and they may go ahead and just start stuff up now.
You better believe the mentally ill, schizophrenic mass shooters are being programmed and drugged up and are in government, CIA, New World Order, programming centers, MK Ultra operations right now.
There was at least a self-seriousness that Alex had in earlier times in his career where this would look embarrassing for him to be like going so far out of his way to create these elaborate conspiracy theories about something like a midterm election.
A guy dubiously associated with federal government programs, ostensibly not on speed right now, telling me that nuclear bombs without plutonium are going to hit people.
So this caller is a good example of why you can't really inject disagreement on Alex's own show, even if you have a valid point, like how none of the things Alex is saying about Biden's speech are accurate.
Alex can just hang up on you, talk over you, call you a seminar caller, and create fake reasons to not engage with any of your points.
He can list off weird, unrelated talking points to distract his listeners.
Like, what exactly does your thermostat have to do with whether or not the way Alex is discussing Biden's speech is accurate?
I believe he was actually speaking literally in that, because if you scan the sentence, then it's actually the stacks of articles themselves that are controlling our thermostats.
So that was just letting everybody know that the stacks of articles has taken over.
The amount of printing and wasting of paper and non-recycling that Alex does had an impact on climate change to the point where governments have had to control your thermostats.
He cannot play any of the clips and present his unwillingness to present his own evidence as an unwillingness to engage with your games that you're playing.
Calling and disagreeing with Alex is pointless.
And even though the prime directive of our show, you know, to not interfere with InfoWars is kind of destroyed because of our presence at the trial and my work with the plaintiffs, I still think that it's important to point out that this just isn't something that's going to go anywhere.
And I would not incentivize that behavior.
Although, and I do kind of wrestle with this because I think that person probably is a listener of our show because they use the edging.
Professor Matthias Desmond is in the studio with us for the next hour plus.
He is recognized as the world's leading expert on the theory of mass formation, psychology, and psychosis as it applies to the COVID-19 pandemic.
He's a professor of clinical psychology, Department of Psychology, the Educational Sciences at Ghent, as I said, University of Belgium, and a practicing psychologist he has worked in discussing widely in the media, and he's here with us.
Of course, he's well known for the Joe Rogan show as well.
He wanted to get right into Biden's speech, Professor, and just how archetypal it is with at nighttime with troops behind him with red light.
I mean, it's right out of Viva Vendetta.
It's right out of Nazi Germany.
It's right out of Stalinist Russia.
It's right out of North Korea.
And saying our enemies are going to be bad, and we've got to have a war with them.
Yes, well, this speech definitely puts us at risk of something.
And it is that it entices the people who are targeted, namely those people who are targeted, who are referred to by President Biden as a mega extremists, that it entices these people to act upon their aggression.
And that's what should be avoided at all times because it will be counterproductive and self-destructive if people act upon their aggression.
Because the system can perfectly control aggression.
I believe that it is of crucial importance that we stick to the principles of non-violent resistance and that we realize that the first and foremost enemy we have to watch is that part of the enemy that is in ourselves, namely this aggression that might entice us to act in a violent way.
He's saying that Biden's speech was possibly a bad idea because it'll be used as justification for people who want to do violent things when they do violent things.
Understood appropriately, this episode has basically been Alex tripping over himself to frame Biden's speech in a way that inflames that aggression in his audience, but pays lip service to not wanting any violence so he can evade any accusations that he's causing and calling for terrorist acts.
Put simply, I don't respect anybody who accepts a booking on InfoWars, but this guy is coming at the conversation of Biden's speech from a completely different perspective than Alex.
And I think that their views are actually at odds with each other.
I disagree with the professor's point, mostly because if taken to its logical conclusion, you end up in a place where criticizing any potentially violent segment of the population is bad because it will trigger their aggression.
But I do accept that his point is at least connected to reality, and it's something that can be debated.
Alex's position is more or less just rooted in his feelings, and it's not something you can refute at all.
The conversation is Alex saying, when the people that I've riled up do violence in the false flag, and his conversation is actually they shouldn't do violence because that is the thing.
But if you say that to Alex's listeners, then they won't do violence, and then there won't be a false flag because there won't actually be an actual attack.
So those two conversations are in direct opposition in terms of goals.
So if Alex is describing that as something that qualifies as a false flag, then I would say we have passed the point where anything has any definition.
And I think that one of the things you should take away from this is that regardless of whether Alex is talking incoherently with this metaphor and stuff, or if he really does believe that if you bomb something because you're mad at Biden's speech, that's a false flag.
Whatever the case, the term false flag is meaningless to him.
It is a signifier of something that is just like, ah, don't take this seriously.
For his audience to not accept any kind of idea that the information space that they live in and the stuff that Alex disseminates is part of the violence.
Ironically, to return to an earlier metaphor that Alex himself made, if you are taking your three-year-old daughter to the zoo and you're looking at an elephant and you go, that's not a fucking elephant.
That's some fake elephant, then that's more like what Alex is doing.
So this interview with this guy I found very boring.
It's I mean, he's talking about this idea of like mass formation, which is the idea that part of the population has been tricked into thinking COVID is real and that because of, or he's not saying COVID is fake.
Sure, sure, sure, sure.
That we need to do all this stuff in order to battle COVID.
And they're in a hypnotic state, more or less.
But I mean, if you listen to it, if you want to, go ahead.
But if you do, you'll notice that a lot of maybe all of the things that he's describing as being indicative of this sort of hypnotic state that people are in kind of describe people who support Trump.
Right.
And I just, I found it to be an uncompelling interview.
And he's this, you know, you can get his verbal patterns.