In Knowledge Fight #756, Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes dissect Alex Jones’ December 5, 2003, episode, exposing his false claims—Putin’s alleged 2003 Russian train bombing false flag (later abandoned), military-caused California wildfires, and Robert Maupin’s debunked Texas-Mexico abduction story. They mock his self-proclaimed martyrdom, JFK conspiracy ramblings, and vague "global policy reports" from groups like the CFR or PENAC, noting how his fearmongering evolved into radicalized extremism while ignoring past contradictions. His 2003 paranoia foreshadowed later patterns of unverified narratives and opportunistic financial ventures, revealing a consistent reliance on sensationalism over substance. [Automatically generated summary]
There's this one scene with stop motion animation where there's this floating balloon, this slightly floating balloon, the type that you know where the string is just barely touching and it's a little bit above that.
So, yeah, it's a little bit like that, but with Guillermo del Toro monsters, so it seems a lot darker than it really is just because his monster design is so, you know, if it was Miyazaki monsters, you'd be like, oh, this is a fun kid story with a lot of dark elements.
But I think you run the risk of if we only talk about that stuff, it gives an overwhelming perception of maybe how uniform it is.
You know what I mean?
If our show is all that, I worry about the listeners taking in too much of that and giving the sense that we think that everything all around is white supremacist and Nazis jumping off.
No, I mean, what's interesting about the past is that when you can look at something and then see what consequences did occur, there's a lot more interesting stuff to be learned from that because you have actual evidence of what will happen if you do this thing in this circumstance.
Whereas if you stay in the present all too often, I mean, it does feel like we're constantly within the same framework and minor details are changing.
Nick Fuentes hasn't said something new we haven't heard about white supremacy before.
Alex, you know, when we're in the past, one of the things that Alex does is he has like the roundup of the stories and then a load of bullshit for about two and a half hours.
Also, when I saw this Toronto Star article headline, Girl Six Locked in Dryer for Weeks at a Time, I knew automatically it would be CPS.
The way the headline was written, I knew that they would call it the mother and then bury in the article that it was CPS because about 90% of the time when I hear about someone being tortured or killed in their parents' custody, at the bottom of the article, they will say that it was a foster parent or CPS.
I spent quite a bit of time trying to track this story down, but I was unable to find the actual news story that was covering this case.
But right off the bat, it can't be the CPS because this is a story that happened in Canada where the U.S. Child Protective Service doesn't have any jurisdiction.
The Toronto Star article itself isn't online anymore, and the Wayback Machine doesn't have a snapshot of it.
But cruising around, I was able to find some other cases that Alex might want to consider.
In late October 2003, a 23-year-old mother in Somerville, Georgia was arrested for throwing her eight-month-old into a dryer.
Or in November 2000, a woman in Niles, Michigan, was arrested for shutting her six-year-old son in a running dryer to punish him for playing hide and seek during which time he had hid in the dryer.
One of the things that I sadly learned while prepping this episode is that apparently people put babies in dryers more than you'd think, which is horrible.
Even if you grant that all the details of the story Alex is telling are true, it's still not a valid point.
There are definitely valid critiques of the CPS and foster care system to be made, and anything that can be done to protect the children in that world is a moral imperative to pursue.
But abuse like this happens in all different contexts.
The image that Alex is trying to present is that it never happens between a parent and a child.
And whenever there's a headline that reads like that's the case, it's secretly a situation where the CPS is abusing children and trying to blame it on parents because the globalists hate families.
In hindsight, it really shouldn't come as a huge surprise that Alex got caught up in shit like Pizzagate, the Wayfair stuff, and pretty much every other child abuse satanic panic we've seen over the last years.
He's never really taken the issue seriously.
So what he's doing now is more or less the natural progression of what you see even back in 2003.
It's a cartoonishness around a fairly serious issue.
I mean, that is one of those things where I can definitely understand the desire to think that it only would be an evil organization that could do that.
You know, like that is that is one of those things where you want to retreat from the idea that a parent, no matter what the circumstances, could even do that, you know?
That's one example of a few, actually, I think that you're going to see on this episode of places where conspiracy theories serve to make things feel more like you think they should be.
Right, right, right, right.
And that's maybe an underappreciated dynamic of some of the narratives that people put out.
And I read the article, and of course, as always, it was exactly as it normally is.
So I know what's in these articles before I read them.
That's how out of control the globalists are.
That's how it looks.
I guess the next line, I do that every day.
You know, if it's some article poo-pooing the Kennedy assassination with the government involved, or if it's some article saying there's no world government, or there's some article saying surveillance is good.
This is such a perfect encapsulation of Alex's methods, except he's lying about following up by reading the stories.
He just sees a headline and decides he knows what the article is about, then doesn't change his mind when presented with evidence that his manufactured narrative is based on nothing.
I think, in my mind, what happens is this, all right?
He reads a headline and then starts thinking of what he wants it to be.
And as he starts reading the words, all of a sudden they swirl together in a magic paper and then rearrange themselves the way that he wants them to go.
A few months ago, out in L.A. and San Diego, I have the TV news and radio news reports, as well as a local news report that admitted that most of the fires in between San Diego and L.A., where they originally started four at one time, were set during Marine Corps and Army joint training.
Just accidentally, four separate areas.
Dozens of miles from each other.
Just magically, these fires accidentally started.
And then I remember the fires last year in Arizona.
Marines in the hills doing a training.
I just, I mean, how do I even express how out of control all this is?
So the fall of 2003 was a horrific season for fires in California, which would eventually come to include 14 different fires.
The Cedar fire being remembered as the most severe of the bunch.
The first one on October 21st was called the Roblar II fire.
And this one was accidentally started at the Marine Corps base, Camp Pendleton, on the firing range.
This was a particularly complicated fire response because it was on federal land.
And beyond that, just consider all the things that could explode at a Marine base, and you can get some sense of how delicately fire teams needed to tread.
I mean, and I'm just going to say, like, I feel like I've lit minor fires just existing in my own place, and there are far fewer flammable things about.
You know, like, there's a lot of people in a large amount of flammable things.
So many of the other fires were smaller in nature, but they contributed to an environment where firefighting resources were spread thin, made worse by a dry season and the arrival of some bad Santa Ana winds that made fires spread much more easily.
The Cedar fire, which the San Diego government describes as, quote, the largest wildland fire in California history, was started, quote, when a hunter became lost and lit a small fire to signal for help.
One of the other large fires called the Old Fire was started by an arsonist named Ricky Lee Fowler who burned a house down after he was kicked out of it.
The fire ended up killing five people and in 2013 he was found guilty of those murders and sentenced to death.
Another of the large fires was the Grand Prix fire, which was suspicious, but was called an accident by investigators in 2004, likely the result of an exhaust spark or cigarette butt.
I'm not sure what evidence Alex is basing his claims on, and he doesn't cite a single source other than his memories of unnamed news things he claimed to have seen.
So it seems like maybe he's just talking shit.
If I had to guess, I would say that he's taking the fact that the Roblar 2 fire began at Camp Pendleton and then pretending that some of these other fires, like the old or Grand Prix, also had military involvement in their ignition.
But what exactly was the nefarious evil part that was like he's saying that all of these fires got started at military bases and not all military bases, but all military like that?
So Alex isn't specific about what fire he's talking about in Arizona, but I believe the one he's talking about, the big one that fits around the timeframe that he's mentioning, is known as the Aspen Fire.
This fire burned for just short of a month and ended up covering over 84,000 acres of land.
And it was also in the woods, which fits Alex's description.
Initially, folks thought that it was possibly caused by a lightning strike, but investigators fairly quickly ruled that out as none of the telltale signs were there.
It's believed that it was human-caused.
And while the definite origin isn't known, there was a man who ended up being charged with and convicted of lying to investigators about whether or not he was smoking on the trail that day, exactly where the fire was known to have started.
The issue here is that these kinds of giant, devastating events can be easily caused by mundane and seemingly inconsequential things, and that doesn't feel right.
It's an everyday action for so many people to just toss their cigarette butts on the ground.
So it doesn't seem possible that doing that could lead to tens of thousands of acres being burned and hundreds of homes being destroyed.
The fact that it doesn't feel right that something so insignificant could have such severe effects can have the result of causing people to seek for explanations that do feel right.
Something as huge as a month-long fire requires a commensurate cause, like a shadowy world government plot.
It's debatable whether Alex is a person who suffers from this need to come up with emotionally satisfying stories to explain world events, or if he knows that the audience does and he exploits that to profit from them.
I'm not sure, but either way, it's really best not to take information from him.
Yeah, I mean the cedar fire one, too, is really a bummer because, you know, in some ways, if you're a hunter and you're lost and like you have a potential that you might die out in the woods.
Yeah, no, it puts all of the reality survival contest shows that I've ever seen in such a weird, like, whenever you stop and think about, like, oh, we're fucking up a section of the earth for my entertainment, you know, it messes with your head.
But the idea that it's entirely possible that one of those shows, obviously it hasn't happened, but in the future it could.
So this is a wild Newsmax story where a guy named Robert Maupin claimed that he and his family had been kidnapped by as many as eight Mexican soldiers who had crossed the border to capture him.
Mysteriously, they were let go, and this wasn't an international incident that was sparked over him.
Crossing over borders to detain people, even when they're wanted fugitives, is a messy business, as Dog the Bounty Hunter learned firsthand.
So it seems wild to imagine that this story happened as Maupin describes.
He claims that he had reported a meth lab on his land to the DEA, who then told the Mexican authorities.
So there was an article in the Times from May 1997 that includes this little tidbit.
Quote, Bob Maupin, who maintains that he was arrested on his own land by Mexican soldiers protecting a meth lab, says smugglers have tried to run him down in their trucks.
That article also explains how Maupin had started his own vigilante group that wanders the border and makes citizens' arrest with the blessing of the deputy sheriff Robert Novak, who calls them Bob's boys.
So this guy created a militia that terrorizes immigrants for fun, and he's claimed on more than one occasion that he's been kidnapped by Mexican soldiers crossing the border because he snitched on a meth lab.
Seems like that story isn't true, and maybe it's a rationalization for why Maupin does this horrible shit so he doesn't have to feel like a monster.
Instead, they say that he, quote, isn't shy about letting Mexican migrants and smugglers know that they aren't welcome to pass through his sprawling property in the tiny town of Bolvard.
If you can read this, you're in range, one sign says on his property.
Apparently, he told a friend of his who worked in narcotics enforcement that he smelled ether on his property and that there was a building about half a mile from the border that was usually empty, but he would periodically see it occupied.
He would know it was occupied because plainclothes men with weapons would be patrolling and they would hoist a Mexican flag.
He and his daughter were out shooting and were confronted by Mexican troops carrying NATO weapons.
It should be noted that this situation is about the same setup as the story being told in 2003, where his whole family was out shooting and they got confronted by the Mexicans.
These troops said that they were looking for illegal guns and drugs, which they have no jurisdiction to investigate in U.S. soil, so this is ridiculous.
Yeah, they also said that they were looking for Senor Maupin, which Robert said, quote, made it pretty clear to me that I had made somebody in the Mexican government angry by sticking my nose into their drug business.
This story is a convoluted mess, and I don't believe a word of it.
This part is particularly unbelievable.
Quote, Robert Moppin was planning to pursue legal remedies, but federal officials told him he would have to be in court for three to four months straight.
Instead of spending those months in court, I guess Maupin decided to recycle this story on a couple more occasions to justify his disgusting vigilante actions and, in the process, create new cycles that incite fear and hatred of Mexican immigrants.
Anyway, this is part of the story that Alex doesn't cover because he doesn't care.
Yeah, he would be compelled to testify under subpoena, making him more likely to be jailed by the United States government than the Mexican government, in all honesty.
And the little town south of there, Belton, well, it's not a little town, it's like 50,000 people.
And what do I have?
I mean, robots rolling around with shotguns, army troops walking up and asking what we're doing, two cars exploding in downtown, fire and black smoke shooting up, guys running around throwing hand grenades into cars.
The mayor gets up and goes, we've been attacked by terrorists.
And the headline in the newspaper said, Belton, it's in the film, attacked by terrorists.
And I said to the mayor at the end of it, I said, sir, this has all been a drill.
And he goes, of course it's been a drill.
But again, that was at the bottom of a two-page article that it was a drill.
But you're reading it, having the emotional response.
You see, this is what happens to an unconscious mass of people.
It creates the perception.
Your subconscious considers that there are all these terrorist attacks.
This definitely isn't the reason that Alex says that there are training and scenario exercises now.
This is a completely different conspiracy narrative that he's expressing in the past.
In this conception, he thinks that there are all these exercises because your unconscious mind will experience them as if they're real attacks, and you'll emotionally think that there are more attacks than there actually are.
Because of your heightened state of subconscious fear, the globalists will be able to exploit you into supporting things that are sold to you in the name of protecting you from these attacks.
In more present times, these exercises exist to give cover to real false flag attacks.
For instance, the Operation Lockstep shit existed so that the globalists could plan the COVID-19 release, and if anyone was caught, they could say it was part of the exercise.
Leaving aside how stupid that theory is, it's worlds apart from this 2003 understanding of these exercises.
And that's because at this point in 2003, Alex doesn't seem to have recognized the value of fully denying reality and calling everything false flags.
His business model is still kind of in its infancy and hasn't matured to this present-day level that we see now where it's like, fuck it, everything.
Also, if Alex thinks these exercises exist to give people a subconscious sense that things are worse than they are, I would suggest he consider how he covers news and how the lies and exaggerations he reports give his audience the impression that things are worse than they are, specifically around certain themes like immigration and white identity fears.
Are you saying that he is like whenever he says that the government is trying to subconsciously make people more afraid of terrorism by creating these things?
Are you saying that he is then taking something like the story of an absolute lunatic and then bolstering it with his bullshit to make it look like everybody is being invaded by a different country all the time?
And also, like, I wasn't able to find this article that he was talking about, but like, I bet that article is just somebody at a newspaper having a little bit of a flourish.
You know, you've read those articles that are like, bombs are exploding everywhere.
What Alex is expressing with this drill talk appears to go like this.
A training drill happens, which no one is claiming is a real event.
Alex pretends that people are saying it is a real event and takes on the role of a guy insisting these are fake drills.
Eventually, a news outlet covers the drill, and Alex takes that as an admission that it was fake all along and that his yelling forced them to end their cover-up.
His role in the whole thing is a charade and entirely meaningless.
Unfortunately, this is exactly the kind of thinking that left unexamined for too long and enabled by a further radicalized conspiracy environment leads to a person losing a billion dollars.
All that stuff about Columbine does sound remarkably similar to the stuff Alex says about Sandy Hook.
Not necessarily in terms of the specifics of the claim, but the way that there's a collection of claims that he almost certainly got from completely disreputable sources, which aren't accurate, but he throws out anyway to defend his contention that it was a big theatrical event.
It's the same way that he has all of these talking points that he'd be like, well, kids are walking around the schools, the port of potties, you know, they didn't let paramedics in, you know, like all of these things.
That's exactly what you heard with his description of Columbine.
Harris and Klebold were not in the trench coat mafia.
That's a group that existed at the school who were wrongly associated with the shooting because the shooters wore dusters.
Most of the people in that actual crew had graduated the year prior, but in the panic of the immediate aftermath, people got them confused, and the media did a poor job of covering this, leading to misconceptions that linger to this day, much like the narrative that Harris and Klebold were bullied, which also is not the full accurate description of what led to that.
It's a bit of a mind fuck, you know, when you start looking at things from a teleological perspective and then you see, I mean, an exact like nucleus of the future.
I think that in terms of, you know, giant events, mass casualty type events, I would imagine that, you know, if you want to use this language, there are more fake events than real ones, in as much as there are training exercises that happen.
The source said the Mexican unit may have been prompted to cross the U.S. because the family of father, mother, and three minors were shooting rabbits on their property.
Well, yeah, the Marines will kill you if you're out shooting at rabbits.
Sounds right to me.
Along the border in Procedo County.
By the way, we've confirmed the report in North Carolina.
A man on his own property hunting in a deer stand had British troops threatened to arrest him, and an FBI type guy in a suit arrived and said, get out of that deer.
You're breaking our Third Amendment rights.
Get off your property and don't come back.
This was all done at Machine Gun Point, by the way.
But it's probably based on a fraudulent telling of a real fact, which is that there is a tiny piece of land, approximately 0.052 acres in North Carolina that is actually British soil.
I'm saying that Alex was made aware of that, and then he wrote a story in his head about a North Carolina man getting accosted by British troops at Machine Gun Point who told him to get off the land.
Obviously, as he said, that particular news item should be mainstream headlines across the board.
And of course, we had Bush carrying on the Clinton policy of refusing to arm the border guards down there, even though they're getting shot up every week by the Mexicans.
Yeah, that's and also, again, I mean, again, that's the, it seems like the stakes are raised, but because they're raised so ridiculously high, no one's going to war with Mexico.
Anti-Semitic, white identity obsessed, and paranoid.
I think it illustrates something important to note that Alex pushes back on the part where white people and Arabs are being pitted against each other to say that the globalists pit all groups against each other, but he doesn't really push back at all on the guy's claim that there's a Judeo-New World Order.
That's probably somewhat strategic, the way he pushes back on some things and then leaves other things kind of like that is a way of introducing yourself.
I think in some ways, Alex, I mean, we talked about this even like hundreds of episodes back.
I think like there is a certain sense that Alex has outlived his usefulness in terms of the conspiracy community, and he continues on as this weird thing that the next generation is trying to navigate how they use.
And we also have to remember that part of this stage, that economic collapse, is to eventually completely obliterate the dollar to be merged into this world currency, which, of course, is basically halfway completed with the Euro.
So that's another agenda that's going to create this Pan-American Union currency.
And in September 99, and basically the month following that, a series of explosions took place in Russian apartment buildings, which gave Putin the pretext to launch a war on the Chechens and create a police state at home.
And it turned out that the FSB, the former KGB, were actually caught substituting the dummy explosives for real explosives, Hexagen, and they were caught but allowed to leave the country by Moscow police caught them.
It's, you know, examples of the Hegelian dialectic.
So there's a bunch of articles in that section as well.
And then anyone that tries to blow the whistle on this, like Berezovsky, I mean, they're trying to deport him every week because he's back in London now.
Any journalist that reports on this in Russia is strangely gunned down on the street in the weeks following.
So we know that there's a massive cover-up going on there.
I think David Knight's actually a pretty good ghost of Christmas present, you know, because he's almost the same thing in the present that Alex is in the past.
He could just show up and be like, bet you wish you didn't fire me, you dumb-dumb.
It's about getting past the rhetoric and getting down to the actions of the politicos and then looking at the sources of power that surround us both historically and in a contemporary fashion.
Well, to be fair, if you're doing the show, you don't want to come in from break and be like, if you're joining us for the first time, I make up bullshit based on skimming headlines and try and make white people scared.
I think there's a fairly funny movie to be made where all of the conspiracies are true and everybody shows up in Texas on the same day, kind of like having an awkward mixer.
And in this clip, I think we get some insight into what the left-right paradigm means to Alex.
And it's not what you think.
unidentified
I get the distinct impression that whenever I have a criticism or a complaint about Bush, like you said, then I automatically become like in league with the liberals or something.
You've got to explain to them the things I hit on earlier in the hour, all the bullet points of how the rhetoric's different, but the actions are the same.
Explain the good cop-bad cop to system to them.
They're so busy, though, associating their personal power with Bush like he's a sports hero or something that they can't get past that.
I believe that this is a really illuminating clip to help us understand what Alex means when he says he's above the left-right paradigm.
Just based on the words and what they mean, one would be inclined to think he means that his politics exist outside of the spectrum that defines things as left-leaning or right-leaning.
This is the way he wants people to see him because it helps make you more appealing to folks who fancy themselves also to be above politics.
When Alex says he's above the left-right paradigm, what he's essentially saying is that he wants to make people aware that you can attack the GOP from the right.
Based on his use of the term and his clear ignorance about pretty basic stuff in terms of politics and civics, I kind of think he doesn't understand that this is what he means.
It seems like he actually thinks that attacking the GOP from the right is an evolved political position that places him outside of the left-right binary, but it doesn't.
I mean, what he's really saying is, I defy political party.
I think both political parties are bullshit, which is fine, but that doesn't mean, like, I'm, I think both political parties are bullshit, but I'm on the left.
Okay, the Council on Foreign Relations has about five different types of reports.
The CFR founded in 1922 to overthrow America publicly.
The Council on Foreign Relations puts out their foreign affairs brief every two months.
It's in all major bookstores.
It's called Foreign Affairs.
That's their outward propaganda for the general public.
But on their website and in interdepartmental reports and reports of the president or Congress or to other private think tanks, they say what they're going to do.
You've got PENAC, Project for New American Century.
You've got the reports of the Carnegie Foundation.
Going back to the 30s, we have these.
You've got the Ford Foundation battle plans.
You've got Rand Corporation.
Then when you know who the members of these groups are, you see them then writing news articles for major magazines and newspapers and on the Sunday news shows, and you can see the different grades of propaganda they're putting out for different audiences.
It's very sophisticated.
And those are the type of global policy reports that I was talking about.
unidentified
Well, I do appreciate that information.
That's definitely going to send me in a different direction.
If you pay attention to that, Alex didn't really answer the question that was posed.
And the reason for that is that he doesn't base his conspiracy bullshit on any actual sources.
He skims headlines and makes up stories that are complementary to his extreme right-wing white identity ideology and points to a vague, unspecific mass of official documents to give his narratives an unearned weight.
I've tracked Alex's answer, and here is what he says in response to a very straightforward question about where these reports are that he's talking about.
First, he brings up the CFR, who have about five different kinds of reports.
This seems to imply that all of these kinds of reports spring forth from the CFR, maybe?
So they put out the foreign affairs, but foreign affairs is a public-facing propaganda outlet, so that's not actually what we're talking about.
It might still be one of the types of reports, but it's still coded.
So then you have the completely unspecific reference to all sorts of other reports that the CFR puts out to the president or internally or interdepartmental briefs, whatever the fuck that means in between departments of what?
These things are just name-dropped, but hearing these names doesn't help anyone find the sources Alex is talking about.
If the Carnegie Foundation has reports going back to the 1930s, how does he expect anyone to know where to look?
And is it just one type of report that they have?
I imagine the Carnegie Foundation has so many different types of reports.
Then you start to learn the names of the people in these groups and you see them writing articles.
This is, again, outward-facing propaganda, but I guess you can use this to check your work against these internal documents to illustrate that they're putting out propaganda to the masses and speaking openly in secret, but these documents show that they're working towards a similar goal.
This is all completely useless as an answer to this caller because you have nowhere to go with what you've been told.
The caller is obviously looking for more information, and you would think that someone in Alex's position would be eager to give that person specifics about how they could find the hard evidence that shows that Alex is right about the nonsense that he spouts.
But in reality, the last thing Alex wants is for actually curious members of his audience checking in on any of this shit.
The game he's playing only works if sourcing is left vague and unexamined.
So when he's asked a question like this, he does the equivalent of like gesturing wildly and acting like a kid who's trying to bluff a book report.
It's just weird to me that Newsmax would, even with the question mark, put out this story without doing a little legwork and finding these claims from the past that he's made.