#787: January 23, 2004 dissects Alex Jones’ First Amendment rhetoric around Operation Rescue West’s "truth truck," led by Troy Newman, falsely claiming 72% of youth were pro-life (Gallup showed 43%) and 24.5M U.S. abortions yearly (CDC: ~850K). Callers like Mary from Maryland, who regretted not having an abortion due to abuse, were ignored while Jones framed opposition as "hateful." Dan and Jordan expose his radicalization tactics—portraying clinics as "death camps"—and note his shift to viral, clippable content, though they dismiss his past work as sloppy and ineffective. His unchanging extremism, now weaponized for attention, reveals a pattern of demonizing dissent while exploiting legal loopholes to incite violence. [Automatically generated summary]
Okay, I was worried that Skinwalker was like a normal, like it's a show about a regular ranch and it just so happened to be named Skinwalker as opposed to being a Skinwalker, you know, exactly.
We're going to be talking about more noise and other disturbances by the Mighty Way Boss Tones.
We're going to be talking about Ska Cor, the Devil, and more.
All right, okay.
No, we're going to be talking about an episode from 2004.
Yay!
Because I've been, you know, I have speaking engagement this week, and so preparing for that has been, you know, I've been juggling a little bit of that.
And I was listening to some present-day stuff, and it's just a slog.
So, Jordan, like I said, there's not a lot going on.
We get into like a real dead zone of content.
Sure.
Alex preoccupies himself quite a bit with Building 7 stuff about 9-11, but it's not stuff that we haven't heard before, and it's all pretty bland shit.
But he's very, very excited about it.
Of course.
And so that takes up a lot of his time over the course of multiple days.
And it took a while to get to anything that I really thought merited our attention.
The first is that I think that if someone was driving around in a van with pictures of victims of the Holocaust on the side of it, that might also not be super appropriate.
I don't think that the reality of human atrocity should be watered down or ignored, but there's a place for that kind of thing.
Second, there's a difference between all of those things that Alex is listing off versus abortion.
All of those other things are murders, whereas an abortion is not.
He's welcome to his very strongly held belief that it is, but that's not going to impact how most of the rest of the country feels.
So, this story has to do with an anti-abortion group called Operation Rescue West, who were charged with a misdemeanor for what they call their truth truck.
The issue wasn't that they had pictures of dead babies on it, it was that in Bel Air, Kansas, there's an ordinance that prohibits cars with portable signs on them, essentially banning moving billboards.
The charges were dropped in March, most likely because it wasn't that big of a deal, and the city realized that the group thrived off being persecuted, so it maybe wasn't even worth the trouble.
Yeah, Operation Rescue West was led by a man named Troy Newman, who's going to be the guest that comes on here later.
And a large amount of his specific activism was against a reproductive care doctor in Kansas named George Tiller.
In fact, the misdemeanor charge happened when he was driving his truck near the home of one of Tiller's nurses in a very clear attempt to harass and intimidate her.
For years, they went after Tiller to the extent of planning a mock trial accusing him of mass murder.
Incidentally, Tiller was murdered himself in May 2009.
Tiller's murderer, Scott Roeder, was a frequent donor to Operation Rescue West, and when he was arrested, the phone number for Operation Rescue West's senior policy advisor, Cheryl Sullinger, was found in his car.
Sullinger, when pressed on it, had to admit that she had spoken with Roeder in the past and had specifically given him information about Tiller's whereabouts in the past, like court appearances and the like.
Also, Sellinger served two years in jail, quote, after pleading guilty to conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic in California in 1988.
Alex is going to have this guy from Operation Rescue West on the show to complain about this misdemeanor charge that's going to be dropped in a few months, but it's critical to understand that what is happening is that Alex is interviewing someone who is a stochastic terrorist, quite frankly.
This is an attempt to play up this false sense of victimhood and aggrievement, which is a large part of the fuel that these groups use to inspire the domestic terrorism against people who support or provide reproductive health access.
This is who Alex has always been.
When we go back to the past, we see constant appearances by thinly disguised Nazis and white supremacists.
We see promotion of groups that inspire domestic terrorism.
I mean, I think that so much of the criticism of Alex that existed on message boards, even pretty close to up to like our starting of the show, had to do with him being a tool of Israel.
Now, granted, their senior policy advisor is in contact with people who may eventually murder and herself plan to bomb an abortion clinic and went to prison for it.
I haven't looked into enough of the, let's say, anti-abortion pro-life groups, but I would assume that there's some who are very disconnected from folks who would bomb an abortion clinic.
It makes sense to me because he doesn't actually care about the movement, you know.
Like, and I understand that he cares about abortion, but he doesn't care about like, oh, well, I need to make contacts in this place or this place or this place.
I need to be aware of who's doing what everywhere.
At this point in time, he's just trying to do a radio show, you know?
So this discussion of statistics is just not real.
Gallup has polled pro-life versus pro-choice self-description, at least going back to 1996.
And in 2004, approximately 43% of respondents called themselves pro-life, compared to about 49% who were pro-choice.
The highest they've ever polled pro-life identification was in 2009 at 51%, which I think, you know, if you consider what was going on around then, you could consider it a conservative resurgence that was going on due to the election of Obama.
I think you can understand why there would be a little bump there.
Also, in our present day, pro-life sentiment is polling almost as poorly as it ever has, about 39%, trailed only by 1996 when it was around 33.
These folks use fraudulent statistics to create the impression that their extreme views and extreme actions are actually mainstream and supported by the vast majority of the population.
This is meant to help radicalize the listeners of the show while simultaneously pacifying them from any fears about whether or not what they're supporting is in fact extremism.
He has the biggest death camp in the U.S. Exactly it, and he's got a huge full-size crematorium there that the smoke billows out with the smoke of dead babies, and his office manager resides in Bel Air.
Well, I mean, not just that, but because of the issue that we're dealing with of abortion, the laws to protect those people have been specifically watered down as much as possible.
The laws to protect Tiller were almost as, I mean, at that time, he was being harassed for years.
And the extent to which you want to make arguments against access to abortion, I guess you could make the argument that a lot of that is, you know, very much, it should be protected free speech.
But some of this other stuff, I don't know how appropriate it is.
You know, when you have a powder keg type issue like this, saying that this person is running a death camp, saying that kind of stuff, articulating it as like a murder factory or comparing it to Holocaust stuff, and he's a mass murderer.
We're going to put him on trial for mass murder.
These kinds of things, you have to understand that what you're doing is trying to incite violence against him.
Yeah, and consider the headspace that you're putting people in largely that may be a little bit unwell, unhealthy mentally, who also believe the things that you do.
You're telling them that this person is a mass murderer.
Well, I mean, if we actually knew that across the street there was a death camp, it would be my moral responsibility to go over there and stop it if I could.
And they actually draw their power on it, and that's why they feel that you're threatening their power base, and they're going to the extremes to protect it.
Now they've got it basically on a mass scale.
And I would venture to say that your guests would agree on this, but I'd like his input on it also.
The Moabites were the first people recorded in the scripture sacrificing their own children.
All of Baal and Asherah worship were sexual immorality and child killing.
1 Corinthians, it says those things that the pagans sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons.
Here at George Tiller's abortion clinic, we regularly see notorious witches going in and out of there, particularly when that big incinerator lights up.
So, yeah, so what we have now is Alex is allowing this guy to put on a presentation that not only is George Tiller a mass murderer, he's complicit with witches in doing a blood sacrifice with these dead babies or these aborted babies in order to gain satanic power of some sort.
So now we're adding a spiritual responsibility and dimension to this.
This is so fucked up.
Knowing that just a few years after this, the guy gets murdered is insane.
But what you're saying does, you know, there is something to it.
You know, you think that you are the noble person who's going in to save everybody.
Absolutely.
And you have these people like Alex and like Troy on these large platforms essentially convincing you that you are the good guy should you behave in the way that you do.
You know, it makes you think of the guy who went with a gun to comet ping pong.
You know, like that person didn't think he was hurting people.
He thought he was going to save children.
Yep.
And I think that that is one of the ways that you can get people to do awful things is by convincing them in some perverse way that their awful action is actually morally obligatory or morally commendable.
Henry, in Oregon, you say you disagree with our guest on some issue.
Go ahead.
unidentified
I indeed do.
I just want to know where these people get off thinking they can tell an individual free sovereign citizen of the Republic what they can put in or take out of their individual body.
I'm telling you that I'm tired of you people trying to stick your Bible in my face, man.
I'm telling you that, you know, you stick to your own beliefs and leave the other individual sovereigns in this country alone because you're making more enemies than you are friends anymore, buddy.
We know from listening to Alex for years that he has an intense burning guilt over how he's paid for at least 10 abortions.
He's never really processed any of his feelings about that, and it manifests pretty regularly in outbursts surrounding reproductive rights.
At this point, it's not clear if Alex is being honest with the audience about his past abortions, but what we can tell from this clip is that he's very committed to projecting his own guilt onto everyone else.
In his own mind, he sees supporting access to abortion as being a way that he could alleviate his own guilt.
If it's not wrong to have an abortion, then he doesn't need to feel bad about his past in that area.
But Alex is also a religious zealot, and he cannot be pro-choice and continue to be at all appealing to the audience that he's fostered.
Alex personally is trapped, but he recognizes that being pro-choice would be the surest and easiest path for him to unburden himself from that weight that he needlessly carries around.
And thus, he assumes that's the case for everyone who supports access to abortion.
They don't actually believe in the right to bodily autonomy, they don't have any principled reason for their position.
They must just be looking for an easy way to alleviate their own guilt.
Alex is mad because he's talking about himself.
He can't deal with this caller as an individual because the conversation is barely even about abortion.
The caller and probably Troy think that it's about abortion, but they don't realize that the host of the show is kind of playing out a psychodrama and using them as props.
Right, Alex, I want to, first of all, tell you that I'm very conservative.
I was a congressional candidate here in the state of Rhode Island.
But basically, this abortion issue, I've looked at it right down the line, and unfortunately, there's a worse crime than abortion, and that's being born and being unloved.
I grew up with all those kids over here in the Rhode Island area that had no reason, you know, their parents didn't care about them or anything.
So, this caller is articulating his argument for abortion access poorly.
But you can see how Alex has taken his point and completely distorted it in order to create a straw man that it's easier for him to fight with.
The idea of having access to abortion for people who end up in situations where they have an unwanted pregnancy, it's not like China's one-child policy.
It's not forced abortions.
This is a ridiculous leap that Alex is making because he never actually wants to argue real points.
He wants to score optical points about like, oh, you're disgusting.
You think that people should just be, why do we find people who aren't loved and kill them?
And it's unfortunate, too, because even people that you would sort of on the surface agree with or broadly agree with in as much as like people should have access to reproductive health care.
They're still Alex's listeners and they're not going to be able to make these arguments in any way that's like, you know, they're going to fall into rhetorical traps.
The problem is to be pro-choice is a very straight line.
Right.
But to be pro-choice and also a conservative or also somebody who's listening to Alex Jones, all of that stuff, you are going to inevitably have to take a twisty path around all of those giant obstacles to going straight to abortion.
So that means that when you're having a conversation with somebody else who's a conservative, they go, well, why did you go around this obstacle?
So it's pretty easy to see how Alex could imagine that the opposition to his position is not very well considered, given the callers that disagree.
But he doesn't take into account that he's self-selected his own opposition.
People who have strong, well-reasoned pro-reproductive health arguments aren't going to be listening to Alex's show and they aren't going to call in.
The opposition he has to worry about contending with are people who listen to his show that disagree with a central pillar of his worldview, which are going to be generally confused folks who are easy to dismiss.
On the off chance that he gets someone with a good point calling in, it's the easiest thing to just restate their argument in a dishonest way to create a straw man to attack or put them on hold and the job is done.
My point is that if Alex had to argue with people who weren't Infowars listeners, he'd be fucked.
Also, this lady's call is a real severe bummer and I feel for her.
And she says that and she goes on to talk about abuse that she had as a child and her mother having complications from her birth.
It's a real heavy thing.
And Alex just is a real shithead to her.
He's a real dick.
And I don't think it brings much to our show to dwell on that.
What I would expect if we were going to have a conversation about this particular topic, at the very least, what should be represented are the parties directly involved with it.
Well, I think there can be sort of points that are illuminated by talking to people who are maybe unrelated to the doctor-patient dynamic of an abortion.
I think some people can have worthwhile things to add to the conversation, but generally it's not going to be a guy who's a shithead radio host, guy whose career is harassing an abortion doctor.
Right.
You know, those aren't the sort of people.
It is just going to be like at worst and at best, some sort of like an explosion of quote-unquote entertainment.
An earlier caller was asking you, I believe, Allison in California about this particular abortionist there in Kansas who, quote, was doing some rituals.
So a lot of that stuff that he's describing as snuff film production or like weird, bizarre rituals, I think it's an underappreciated aspect, certainly among people like Alex and these folk, that it's not always a very easy choice that people make to terminate a pregnancy.
And sometimes things like having some kind of cremation or something.
It can help have closure for the parents.
And I think that there's something that they're attacking this as something evil, but it's actually one of the most probably caring services that a person in Tiller's position could offer.
Sure.
These are things that allow someone who had to choose something that is very painful, allows them to have a closure about it, allows them to honor this fetus.
There's something that could be very helpful and meaningful to that, and it's pretty shitty for Alex and him to be going on like this.
And pretending that these things that are offered as means of helping the parents process and grieve, it's some sort of a perverse thing that Tiller's doing for himself.
Right.
And that's just, I mean, it's disgusting.
But these are the ways you would characterize someone if you wanted them to be hurt.
CDC numbers for this timeframe around 2003, 2004 were about 850,000.
And the trend has consistently been heading downward ever since.
And even at that point, it was heading downward.
Alex is exaggerating the number of abortions done each year by about five times and not recognizing that number of procedures is decreasing as education improves and there's greater access to birth control and emergency contraception.
Alex is a liar, painting a fraudulent picture for the audience to help justify his extremist views and make them more likely to support a group like Operation Rescue West, whose senior policy advisor went to jail for planning to bomb a clinic and who very clearly inspired the murder of George Tiller.
There's not even a reason to lie here.
His audience doesn't understand numbers or scale.
So if he said 850,000 abortions were done each year, they'd be just as scandalized by it.
This guy would still say yikes.
But on some level, Alex cannot resist the impulse to exaggerate and sensationalize everything he touches, regardless of how, I don't know, serious an issue it is.
That to me is even more cowardly than what you're describing in that youth pastor, because at least that youth pastor, you'd be able to dismiss what he's saying a little bit more because it's like, oh, you're dealing with something.
It should be recognized too that George Tiller was a large name in the reproductive health scene, let's say.
He was somebody who was the lot of people around the country even pointed the finger at him.
And they were like, this guy sucks.
He's the worst.
That is true.
But this guy, Troy Newman, and his group were there.
They were agitating there.
Absolutely.
That is a little bit more relevant or I think it's more impactful.
His involvement was on the ground there inciting, harassing them, as opposed to, let's say, an anti-abortion group on the West Coast who is still mad at Tiller, let's say, but maybe wrote a letter or something.
And I mean, from a performance aspect, yes, that's definitely true.
He's become far worse a broadcaster.
He's sloppy and unhinged in ways that are meant to farm attention.
Yeah.
Because that's more of the economy at that point.
But, you know, it's important to recognize and understand that you go back as far back in his career as you can and you see behavior that is just as detestable and just as dangerous as stuff that he does regularly presently.
Yeah, I think what happens is if you only pop in and out, you know, over your life, you know, I only see these clips every maybe I only saw a video last year and then one again.
You can mistake decaying for change.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, I don't think Alex changed.
He just decayed.
It just got worse and worse and worse, but not different.
I mean, in as much as I think a lot of people changed strategies when social media became more relevant, you know, the ways that you can hack people's attention, you know, I think that that could attribute a lot to what you're describing as decay.
You know, it's one of the things in trying to prepare for this episode, I was also trying to look at other people we could talk about.
You know, like I texted you about like Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles are two dudes who are like, you know, they're both Daily Wire guys who are like very on the vanguard of pretty dangerous transphobic ideology rhetoric.
And so I thought like, yeah, maybe it would be a good idea.
I see clips of them flying around all the time on Twitter.
And I thought like, let me sit down and check out an episode of their show.
And it became intensely clear to me that there is a bit that's for attention and then an unwatchable show.
We've received emails from like companies who do exactly that for you where they say, well, what they do is they say, we're going to help you make TikTok clips out of your large content to grow your audience.
So then all of a sudden, you are not concerned with the large content.
You are concerned with making the TikTok clips go around.
Yeah, you don't have to worry so much about the coherence and the quality of your larger product.
You have to have like, well, it's good enough what I'm doing, but there has to be something that is at least clippable enough that people will get angry or people will keep reposting this.
And I think that those strategies are absent in Alex in the past, too.
And that's maybe a large part of why I think that it's more interesting as a product.
Yeah, that's fair.
Because I find that to be a really dumb, boring.
I think it's, I think that, like, I don't know, operating that way.