Knowledge Fight dissects Alex Jones’ February 2, 2023, broadcast, where he ignored the SPLC’s five-part report on his private texts—including unexamined claims like "you be bi"—while amplifying absurd conspiracy theories: COVID vaccines adding DNA strands, AI controlled by The X-Files, Elon Musk killed by robots, and Biden’s 2024 assassination via "false flag" psychic warnings. Jones’ blind affirmation of callers’ wild assertions, from quantum entanglement to "seventh strand of DNA," reveals a pattern of uncritical sensationalism over substance, despite his audience’s embrace of fringe narratives. The episode underscores how Jones’ output thrives on spectacle rather than accountability, even when credible critiques demand engagement. [Automatically generated summary]
Late, because we wanted to get this turned around, because we wanted to get a response from Alex to the new major report, a five-part series in the SPLC, about Alex's text messages.
And unfortunately or fortunately, Alex doesn't even mention them.
So, I think one of the big takeaways that people had from these texts that came out, because we've got to talk about this a little bit at least, is the idea that he asked for a sucky.
That is...
And I think that that would not be...
It's kind of gross.
I think a lot of people took that as gross.
Sure.
But...
It would not really matter, except for the breakies and stackies.
So, something that's an element of my current life that I could never have predicted a mere five years ago is that I'm frequently in a position where I know a lot more than I can reveal.
I feel privileged that I've achieved some kind of a place in this world, and I always go out of my way to respect privacy and non-disclosure.
For example, I flew to Austin to sit in on the Alex and Daria depositions in early December 2021, and no one other than a few private friends knew that happened until late.
January 2022 when we covered it on the depositions on the podcast once they were released.
For two months, we gave no indication that I'd taken a trip across the country and was in the same room as Alex himself.
At that time, I knew that Daria had said that spreading conspiracies that Sandy Hook victims were still alive might be a generous act and could provide the parents with some hope.
I say all this as an intro to explaining that I've known this SPLC article was gonna come out.
I'd wrestled with how I was gonna address this when it did come out, and I feel like the only way to navigate this is to be as transparent as I can be and give some sincere opinions.
I've also reviewed all the texts, and I have a lot of thoughts about them, which we can start to get into now a little bit.
When I first reviewed them, which I did as a part of my role as the consulting expert Lin-Louis case, it really hurt.
I approached the prospect of this level of access to inside information to be a goldmine, and I reveled at what I might learn about this con man that I've studied for years, and I would be lying if I said that there wasn't some level of giddiness in me as I look, oh my god.
As As I read through them, so much of it is pretty personal stuff, and it really fucking bummed me out.
For one, it validated a portrait of Alex that's pretty obvious if you listen to his show critically at all, and it was a little deflating to realize that he's basically as much of a mope as he seems to be.
But even beyond that, there's some real pathos and complicated feelings that come up when you peek into the inner workings of a monster's life, and that's the work for biographers, which I'm not at this point, not yet.
After reviewing the text, it became difficult for me to do my normal work for a bit.
I've always tried to make an exercise of practicing abstract empathy for Alex in as much as it's important to recognize his personhood.
However, there are things that I'm excited to be able to talk about because they do directly intersect with our work.
As a courtesy to everyone involved, I'm not going to talk about any of those things until the SPLC does or until their series is over because I do think that they're going to get to them in later installments.
Full disclosure, I was initially involved in that project as a third party along with Michael and Megan.
I was approached under the understanding that the project would not be about Alex's personal life and would focus on some of the more important, though admittedly less attention-grabbing aspects of information in the texts.
Over the course of my time working on the project, it didn't feel like this was the direction that things were going, and I decided to quit.
There are many aspects of this that I'm not going to discuss and will remain private, but I ultimately...
We didn't feel like this was something I cannot disclose in good conscience.
This is a gigantic story about Alex Jones, the person who I've studied and commented on for the past six years, so ignoring it doesn't feel like an option, and covering it while not revealing my involvement also feels like it would be lying to the audience, even if only by omission.
On a fundamental level, my disagreement with the piece was that it...
As it was planned, which is reflected in the form it's been released in, is the rumination on Alex's private life in ways that I don't feel are productive.
Or even at times are self-defeating.
I'd like to go through a couple of these dynamics in detail to explain my decision.
One of the topics that's covered in great detail in the article is the subject of Alex's marriage and the rockiness that the texts imply.
No matter what you do, you will never get an accurate picture of someone's personal relationship with someone they're in an intimate relationship with from an incomplete series of text messages.
And it's my feeling that you shouldn't try.
I'm not saying that the stuff in there should just be ignored, because there's clear indications that Alex seems to be engaging in really destructive behavior, like what appears to be stalking, and that's a serious matter.
I just don't know if it's a matter of primary importance to a piece about him.
It might be more relevant to law enforcement, quite frankly, than the reading audience.
There's another issue that dipping into this territory introduces, and that's a matter of completeness.
I can say that the picture that's painted in the article is fair in as much as it reflects the texts, but it also doesn't include a ton of other context from texts.
There's a selectiveness to what's being covered, which is always going to be an angle for possible criticism by someone like Alex when you're addressing his personal life.
Case in point, the SPLC article, it says that Alex's wife mentions that they should get divorced six times in the text, which is true.
But the texts also include Alex saying that multiple times himself.
When you introduce the notion that she wanted a divorce at times, It comes an omission to not also mention that he did.
They have a chaotic, rocky relationship.
That much is true, for sure, based on the picture you get.
But they also send each other sweet messages and have clearly inside jokes that none of us could possibly understand.
It was my personal opinion that it's possible to understand and recognize that Alex is most likely a very abusive asshole, and also think that it's really shitty to publish messages where the only news value is to demonstrate that a married couple are probably cheating on each other and have fights.
The second matter is the alcoholism.
This is an interesting question because it straddles the line between things that are already pretty public and things that are really sad and private.
Alex is already very obviously a person who struggles with drinking.
He's said as much on air.
He's been on air very drunk way more than once.
He's claimed that he was drunk on air when he defamed Sandy Hook families, and that video surveillance of him drinking at the office was leaked a few months back.
I think that this is a case where it does seem relevant that Alex is having people fetch him vodka during the time when he's on air, often before noon.
But here's the twist.
I checked the shows from the days in the text where he's requesting booze, and he seems totally normal.
Those aren't days where he was clearly drunk or having huge outbursts on air, and I thought that was pretty weird.
I thought, like, for sure, here's where we find a drunk episode.
He's probably drunk, but he's just maintaining, or whatever.
I feel like the conversation about his arrest for driving impaired and the way that alcohol intersects with what he puts out into the world is totally fine.
And some of the texts really do help illustrate that.
The problem is that this problem with alcohol extends into his personal life.
So if you're covering his personal life, it's pretty difficult to disaggregate that from the conversation.
I don't know how to do this, and I don't necessarily think the article does a terrible job, but at times, it's hard not to feel like you're wallowing in Alex's misery, and I don't know if that's necessary.
It made me feel uncomfortable.
The last thing I want to touch on is the pornography section, which was the reason I left the project.
It was an impasse that we couldn't get around, and I felt that I couldn't be involved.
Alex sending his wife porn links while being a public opponent of porn is pretty hypocritical, but there's also nothing wrong with sending your spouse links to porno that they're clearly fine with receiving.
The problem is the on-show message, and the illustration that the messenger doesn't live up to the prescription his message is sending doesn't help make that point.
The fomenting conspiracies about pornography and demonizing sex workers is the problem.
Sending porn privately is not.
By connecting these two things and making a critique that appears to hinge on that hypocrisy, it does seem to imply that if Alex didn't send his wife porn, he'd be in good standing to make the arguments that he does, and I don't buy into that.
I can understand critiques that this is newsworthy, and I disagree, but we can agree to disagree on this.
On the other hand, the rest of that section is unacceptable for me.
The final paragraph is a clear attempt to imply that Alex is bisexual or has bisexual leanings.
For anyone who hasn't read the article, I will just read you that paragraph.
Quote, The text Tatewatch reviewed further reinforced the likelihood that the Infowars host demonstrates different views on sexuality in his personal life than he professes on his notoriously bigoted show.
In addition to viewing pornographic material involving group sex, his wife sending Jones a picture of a black man's erection in the text, There are no women in the photo.
Jones and his wife also exchange messages expressing favorable views about bisexuality.
On February 1st, 2020, Erica Wolfe-Jones texts her husband, you be bi.
It was and is my opinion that the source material doesn't justify this coverage.
Viewing group sex-related porno doesn't implicate your sexuality at all, and the texts referenced about him and his wife could easily be inside jokes.
Sending a picture of a dick doesn't mean anything, and they fight so much that discerning the context is impossible.
And his wife does say you be bi, but who knows what that means, and it comes in response to Alex telling her you be ho.
The language and the UB construction makes me strongly suspect that this is an inside joke between married people.
As another point, his wife says, I'm a bisexual elf, followed by an emoji that looks like a superhero with a mask.
She's clearly not saying this sincerely, since she's responding to Alex texting an article from Daily Wire about Mark Ronson identifying as sapiosexual.
They're making fun of Mark Ronson's identity, and I wouldn't be too surprised if the UB-Bi has something similar to it.
But from the material that exists, you can't possibly know the context of any of this.
It's my belief that this kind of coverage is not just sloppy, it's also dangerous.
At best, you could say that the article is trying to plant a seed that while Alex is anti-LGBTQ on-air, he's bisexual off-air.
This again runs into the problem that I mentioned earlier, where being bisexual is completely fine, and his on-air positions aren't made any better or worse based on his attractions.
I don't know what Alex's sexuality is or what he's into, and to be perfectly honest, I don't care.
That's his business, and I don't think I understand it any better from having reviewed the texts.
I have a very strongly held belief that this doesn't need to be in the article, nor any piece that's meant to be critical of Alex.
If you're producing something that is critical of Alex, the best-case scenario that you could be hoping for is to inform people about him, and that new awareness diminishes their respect for him.
If you're going to get anyone who likes Alex to have second thoughts about him based on this, you're not actually helping.
You're getting them to direct their homogies, In addition to everyone else.
You're also not informing...
Non-Infowars supporting people because this argument is based on such flimsy evidence that it doesn't support its own weight.
You're liable to get people jumping to the assumption that Alex is secretly gay or bi, and you run the risk of feeding into the trope that homophobes are just secretly angry about themselves being gay.
In the process, you weaken the actual criticism of Alex's rhetoric, which doesn't need to touch on his personal life to demolish and to have a strong critique of.
People can have differing feelings about my perspective on that, but we do need to stress that the basis for this paragraph's inclusion in the article is not solid.
And I understand that the article didn't actually claim that Alex was bi, but I think everyone here is an adult and we recognize the clear implication.
And people on Twitter certainly did.
And in the comments section of articles about this, you can get the sense.
Here's just a couple you can find very easily on Mediaite's article about this.
The Frogs Turned Me Bi, Alex Jones.
Alex Jones being into black guys wasn't on my 2023 bingo card, and a ton of variations of that same joke.
When's Jones gonna elope with Santos?
People got the message.
This problem was never going to be manageable, because the second installment of this article includes Jacob Engels, who's a proud boy, who is an associate of Roger Stone's, and he's unnecessarily identified as a gay man three times in the article, presumably to justify this paragraph.
Quote, Engels addressed revelations about Alex Jones' personal life that appeared in part one of this series saying, quote, I don't think there's anything wrong with being a red-blooded American male.
That's what Alex is.
About how he navigates the far right as a gay man, Engels said, quote, I try to live my life very quietly when it comes to my sexuality.
I try to keep that to myself and not hoist that upon others.
They were able to reach Engels and get comment from him, and presumably one of the questions they asked him was about Alex's sexuality, which is a strong indication about the interest and the direction of that coverage.
Again, this question is being posed to Engels.
It's predicated on some porn links, a picture of a dick, and almost certainly a joke between Alex and his wife.
That was something that we did not see eye to eye on.
I still definitely don't think was appropriate.
Yeah.
I was not really involved in the second article.
Maybe a tiny bit.
I wasn't around when drafts of that were being...
So my involvement sort of ended with...
And I do have the utmost faith that they are going to cover more relevant things and more substantial things that aren't just his personal life in later installments.
But I wrestled and struggled with...
Do I take my name off the first one and then try to stay involved in the other ones?
What message does that send?
Can I still be involved and sort of extricate myself?
And I felt like I couldn't.
I felt like I couldn't get around that.
And I also felt like it would be something that would...
The audience, maybe quite rightly, would have concerns about.
Me being someone who has been fairly against covering Alex's personal life in the past, we do our best to avoid unnecessarily bringing up stuff that is kind of like, eh, that's not...
I felt like the audience might feel betrayed by that, and I think that would be fair of them to feel.
But I mean if you want to talk about that if you've ever texted your wife like I want to have sex and then you're judging for that then go fuck yourself.
Well, and the stuff that I think is definitely more relevant to our show and we'll have more conversation on the show.
We'll be in the later articles that they have.
Who cares?
We'll discuss those things as it relates then, but for now, there's not a whole lot related to his personal life that I feel is relevant, and I think a lot of the stuff in the second article is stuff we already have...
I don't know if the texts necessarily bring much to light on that.
Many Americans refuse to recognize the endless crimes against humanity being committed by our own government.
And so, by default, they blindly support it.
Even when the American government is caught funding bioweapons labs around the Russian border, many Americans turn a blind eye.
And so now the majority of the world stands with Russia and see America as the main threat against humanity.
A new video produced by Russia.
Russia's Wagner private military is now recruiting Americans to join them in their fight against the United States, pointing out how the United States has become a force of evil and is no longer what our forefathers intended it to be.
unidentified
You were a hero to your country, given your best years in the army.
You dreamed of defeating evil.
You dreamed of doing much to make America great again.
If Americans were as righteous as we think we are, then we would not stand for such a corrupt government wreaking havoc on the rest of the world in our name.
Instead, most of us are content fighting each other and turning a blind eye.
And maybe there is some ways that you can withdraw support.
Like, there are people who are conscientious objectors to war whenever there's a draft.
There are people who are principled tax protesters who, you know, make a point of refusing to pay taxes because it goes to funding the war machines and what have you.
There are people like that.
And he could, you know, express some of that sentiment.
I mean, what's odd about it is I kind of think that that would be, if you transcribed it, it wouldn't be too much different from a pamphlet for the Bolshevik Revolution.
Many of the people who formed the foreign battalion in Ukraine, you know, like the French Foreign Legion, if you will, back in the day, although not a fan of them.
I get that.
Because they feel like they are fighting for a cause worth dying for.
What I don't get is the idea that you would go join the Nazis because Greg Reese told you it was a good idea.
That's a little bit like, you know, hey, like if you're ordering food.
And the place you're ordering from has their own website, and you can order from there, and you order from there, they get like 40% more out of your order than if you order through Grubhub.
So do that if you can, right?
That makes perfect sense.
I'm with you.
Not because Grubhub are the globalists working with the devil.
If you're interested in trying to be self-sustainable, there are ways that you can explore that stuff and maybe it's uplifting to your life and what have you.
It reminds me greatly of when Ken Kesey got out of jail.
He moved back to Oregon, where he and his family and some of the other merry pranksters had put together a little compound of their own, if you will, where they tried to be self-sustainable, they had cattle, they grew their own food, all of that stuff.
And as a great writer, he was very blunt about it being not romantic at all.
It is incredibly hard, and it's extremely dangerous if you're inexperienced.
And if you do it, it doesn't make you a better person.
Yeah, but I think that there's one thing I noted about this caller.
And I think that anything based out of fear is kind of...
It's a dangerous motivation.
Yeah.
But I think that he's closer to a prepper who is based in wanting to help people than a prepper who wants to, I don't know, scavenge and hunt other preppers for their supplies.
He knew how to do a lot of stuff, but I just think about the men I knew that are almost all dead.
And they can literally do plumbing, do electricity, do roofing, incredible shots with a gun, great farmers.
And they can read you bedtime stories and take care of when you were sick.
And I think about those type of people, and I see what we got today, including myself, and I'm ashamed of what a stupid slob I've become and how I've let myself be positioned in this and how I raised my children in an evil city.
Now, that said, it's all in hindsight, and my children have done all right.
When you know you're wrong, and you know you've got to get out of here, I'm stuck here with the crew who I love, and this infrastructure is stuck here.
We've got to move to a town outside, Austin.
We've got to move to something leaner and meaner with the crew, but I've got to get out of here.
And, folks, you are insane if you stay in the cities.
I'm not saying pick up and just run the middle of nowhere either, but...
You've got to find those communities.
And if you're willing to work with those communities, they're willing to work with you.
And I'm telling you, this is the whole future.
And when a community knows they're under attack, and if you get people in the city council in those towns that know what's going on, we are unstoppable.
The new world order is not going to be able to come shut down our towns.
We will have our own hydroelectric.
We will have our own gas power.
We will have our own solar.
We will work together.
We're designed to do this and be self-sufficient, not be a bunch of damn jellyfish.
I think what he's describing is a plan that has not taken any shape, but I guess he's encouraging people to make a plan to go and red pill people in small towns and take over these towns and then don't secede or something?
The reality is he's not believing this because DeMontagne and Francis Boyle said this.
He's saying it because he wants to believe this.
And he's justifying it by saying that these people said it who have no idea what they're talking about.
But...
I would much prefer to have Alex's brain, where it's like some guy calls in and he's like, the COVID vaccine's adding a third strand to your DNA, and he's like, yes.
They've generated a new strand of DNA, and down to the tubulin dimer level, within the synapses of the brain, using quantum entanglement with their fancy quantum computers.
They can control our thought processes.
You know, we think that this idea of the metaverse, Zuckerberg has failed.
If they have controlled these individuals that have taken these shots down to that level of perception, then they just turn it on and the metaverse happens inside of them.
I marked that little short segment up because I wanted to play that whole song.
We played it for years.
I don't want to play most of the song here.
We're going to go to break, join some stations, and no matter how good your calls are, I've only gotten to four or five calls, I'm going to give each caller two minutes because I want to get to everybody holding.
I haven't seen the clip, and I tell you, when Joe first moved here, we were hanging out quite often, and Joe's very nice.
If I call him up, we can go get dinner or whatever.
And I just kind of, I talked to Joe on the phone some.
We talk on text every day.
But I just, you know, he did some good work exposing the shot, but then it's almost like I'm seeing backtracking from him and just a lot of weird stuff going on.
And I just, you know, I've got bigger fish to fry, like the New World Order and the Globalists, and so I'm not going to be the keeper.
I'm not my brother's keeper.
I'm not going to sit there and tell Joe what to do.
But also, I don't know what the connective tissue is between this guy living check to check and buying Alex's stuff and then Rogan not having Trump on.
I thought that he was going to say, we're not rich and we're supporting you.
Although, on the other hand, what went astray is that the robots became too altruistic, thereby saving the entire humor race and then scattering them across the galaxy.
I was thinking about this, and I don't really fully know how I would respond if I were a talk show host and someone called in and was like, Elon Musk and 29 Japanese scientists were killed by four robots.
we need to make robots illegal.
I don't know if I would feel like I have the time to explain that Elon Musk isn't dead.
Yeah.
Like I don't know how I'd respond.
I know I wouldn't say I agree with you Right, right, right, right.
And if you're in that situation, I don't know, maybe it's the next ten minutes are trying to help this person realize that robots didn't kill Elon Musk.
So Alex's mom apparently shook him and told him they're gonna kill Biden.
Now we know from listening to this show enough that they were gonna kill Trump before the election, and then he won, and then they were gonna kill him before the inauguration, and then they were trying to kill him the entire time that he was president, right?
I go to my parents' house probably every two weeks for dinner with my wife and my five-year-old child and my older children come over to visit usually at the same time.
And it was about two years ago.
Biden had only been a few months.
And I'm sitting there.
My mother goes, they're going to kill Biden.
They're going to kill Biden in the next couple of years.
And before he announces for 2024, he used that as a false flag.
You've got to tell people, and we've got to stop it.
And you've got to make sure people are nonviolent, and you've got to get out ahead of this and say that you don't support Biden being killed, which I do not.
It turns into a martyr.
And call it a sense, women's intuition.
We all know about it.
I mean, here's an example the other day, and this happens all the time.
I was really expecting there was going to be some kind of a discussion or mention of the articles about the text, because he took a fair amount of calls.
I just don't know how much penetration the SPLC has in the InfoWars audience.
Generally speaking, I feel like maybe they're actively hostile towards the SPLC and will regard anything that they write as bullshit no matter what it is.