January 26, 2004 episode dissects Alex Jones’ self-mythologizing—claiming 1,300+ radio interviews with only 1 in 20-30 dissenters, often hostile—and his debunked conspiracy about David Kelly’s death. Caller Davis Lurmann (later revealed as Nazi-linked Davis Lerman) pushes "scorched earth voting," echoing Jones’ past support for divisive figures like Ron Paul. The hosts mock absurd theories, like Laura Bush’s 2004 State of the Union "brainwashing" via Tom Brady, and contrast modern impunity (e.g., Carlson’s January 6th praise) with past accountability, exposing Jones’ pattern of amplifying fringe extremism without evidence or consequence. [Automatically generated summary]
You may have heard laughing over the theme song, and that was because I had forgotten to turn on the headphone amp, and so Jordan was mocking how I'd forgotten how to put it.
My bright spot today is actually the cause of that rustiness.
I'd like to thank you for filling in, doing a fun interview with Mike Rothschild.
Delight.
I mentioned, I think on Monday's episode, that I had a speaking engagement, which led to a little bit of, you know, tension, a little bit of push and pull with the schedule.
It's just because I have two things that I needed to do this month.
You know, basically.
So we had the live shows at the beginning of the month, and obviously that was a lot of prep and all that stuff.
And then my bright spot for today was I was invited to go to Florida Southern College in Lakeland, in lovely, lovely Lakeland and give a little talk there for the students.
Took me back in many ways to my college experience.
Yeah.
You know, being because, look, a number of the students were engaged and they had questions and it was great, but some of them were looking at me with dead eyes.
I remember that when someone was giving a talk and maybe you get extra credit to go and you just go and you're just waiting to maybe go get high later.
And we talked about it a little bit, I think even on the show, that when you come from stand-up, there's a muscle memory and like an expectation that your body has that people will laugh at the things you say when you're in front of a crowd.
And so most of the talk actually ended up just being a question and answer kind of thing back and forth with students, which I think is probably a lot more useful.
I know a ton about Alex Jones, and I could tell them all kinds of things about Alex Jones, but to what level is that useful to a freshman or a sophomore in college?
But it was like there was two, you can't express to a group of people, of students who are halfway apathetic at best, you know, like the vast breadth of knowledge you have about a single subject.
Oh, when we got out of the courthouse, we went to dinner or we went to lunch with my wife's moms, and we were not dressed particularly well.
You know, I was wearing my quote nice jeans.
That's what we got married in, that kind of stuff.
And it was the four of us eating together, and all of a sudden, from across the room, some group of women were all hanging out talking, and one of them just stood up and was like, Did you get married today?
It was like, if somebody could set their expectations low enough that they look at me wearing that and they're like, well, obviously that's the wedding day.
But then also, a lot of the stuff that I was watching on that Crowder interview before I decided I'd had enough was they're talking about Lindsey Graham a lot because Lindsey Graham had said some things about Ukraine.
Because he has discovered a year-old clip of Larry Silverstein, the guy who was leasing out the, or had the rights to lease the building for like, he ended up taking quite a hit on 9-11 and then sued for insurance claims on it.
But anyway, he was on a PBS documentary and Alex found it a year later, and that's the biggest thing in the world.
The weapons inspector who took his, who died from suicide, and Alex made a gigantic, disgraceful conspiracy out of that he was killed to silence him, but concerns about weapons of mass destruction.
Of course.
Just a bunch of nonsense, and we went over.
But it turns out there's another weapons inspector, also named David, that Alex has his concerns on.
So, first important thing to point out here is that Alex has fabricated a completely new story about David Kelly's death, which has no connection to reality and also seems fairly disconnected from his own past conspiracy narratives.
Alex is adding stuff like this to the story to make the idea of doubting that it was a murder seem silly to the audience because he'd rather mock the idea of believing something than have to argue against it.
And that's because if he had to operate just on the facts, his case would fall apart almost immediately.
As for David Kay, this is an interesting situation, but Alex is also full of shit.
Around this time in January 2004, David Kay, a weapons inspector and member of the Iraq Survey Group, was coming out publicly and saying he did not believe that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and that he did not believe they would be found.
He would go on to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee on January 28th and say, quote, I believe that it is time to begin with the fundamental analysis of how we got here, what led us here, and what we need to do in order to ensure that we are equipped with the best possible intelligence as we face these issues in the future.
Let me begin by saying we were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here.
Kay believed there was a fundamental intelligence failure, but not a direct effort to lie or exert specific political pressure.
You know, so whether or not you believe that there was a lie, that's a different conversation, and you may have a different point than what David Kay is coming at this from.
And I think it would be difficult to blend what conversation you or even I would want to bring into it with discussing where Alex is coming at it from because it's completely sort of separate.
So in the lead up to the war, Kay was a voice that said he didn't doubt Saddam would have aspirations for weapons of mass destruction, and he thought he probably did, but he was far from the biggest supporter in the media.
He did have like some things that he had, some assessments that he had made were used by people like Colin Powell and what have you.
So you can trace kind of an indirect direct line.
But in terms of being like the biggest cheerleader in the media, I'm not sure if that's a fair assessment.
One of the biggest exposures he had was likely after another former weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, returned from a trip to Iraq and declared that there, quote, is no hard evidence whatsoever that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
And that, quote, I'm not saying Iraq doesn't pose a threat.
I'm saying that it has not been demonstrated to pose a threat worthy of war.
So Scott Ritter came back from Iraq and he was roundly criticized for these comments that he made.
Anyway, David Kaye was not the person who was most instrumental in the weapons of mass destruction fraud, and he wasn't accusing anyone of lying at this point in 2004.
Alex just needs those two perceptions to be accepted by his audience so he can paint a narrative out of them that's easier than just doing the work that he's supposed to be working.
This is admitted in plain public view that Building 7 wasn't hit by an aircraft, that it caught fire later that afternoon and collapsed at 4.35 Eastern Time, and the owner of it, Silverstein, gets on PBS and says, we made the decision to blow it up.
The mass media that put out the propaganda has been swallowed by the American people since most of the American people who don't want to investigate at all, who don't want to be disturbed out of their comfort zone, don't want to do the investigative work or learn about the facts because it disturbs their comfort level if they have to think, put a thought process behind it, and understand what's going on.
And then they wouldn't know how to handle it to begin the ending.
Also, Silverstein didn't say that he decided to blow up the building.
Sure.
He said, quote, I remember getting a call from the fire department commander telling me that they were not sure they were going to be able to contain the fire.
And I said, you know, we've had such a terrible loss of life.
Maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.
And they made the decision to pull, and then we watched the building collapse.
His spokesperson has been very clear in statements that when Silverstein said pull, he was talking about pulling the firefighters out of the building and leaving it to burn.
He was deeply concerned for the safety of the firefighters in there.
And given that two other skyscrapers had collapsed that day and there was a whole lot of related chaos going on, his concerns were very understandable.
So Alex has taken this quote from PBS, which he didn't know about for like a year, then misrepresented it into being Silverstein saying that they decided to take the building down.
Now that this framework is established, Alex is further embellishing this to claim that Silverstein said that they were going to blow the building up.
Once that idea is firmly established in the audience's mind, Alex poses the question: when did they have time to plant the explosives after the attack?
This line of questioning is entirely built on eliciting an answer in the listener's mind that it would be impossible to plant the explosives after the attack, so they must have planted them previously.
If they planted them previously, then they must have had foreknowledge.
If they had foreknowledge, then the whole attack was probably an inside job.
You can see how this path is built by Alex for his audience to go down, where he lays out a bullshit narrative based on lies and misrepresentations of primary sources.
He's not capable of it at this point in the present day, but in 2004, it seems like he has the finesse to lay some of this stuff out suggestively.
Anyone can tell you that a conclusion that you reach on your own is more meaningful to you than one that someone just gives you, which is the foundation of a lot of teaching.
So I really think that Alex is trying to get the listeners to reach the conclusion he's decided for them, but they want them to get there on their own, or at least make it feel like they've worked out for themselves and be like, haha, this is my conclusion, not Alex's.
I don't see this kind of thing from him at all in the present day episodes.
And I think it's because he's lazy and he's spoiled by having a completely captured audience.
Yeah, I mean, it is a game of putting a bunch of questions like a moat around the one question you know the answer to and and just pretending that like as long as you can't cross the moat, whatever.
So you might have noticed a smug other voice in there talking about how all these people who don't believe they don't eat, they don't even want to do any analysis or research.
They don't want to go to Prison Planet and see these out-of-context videos and what have you.
He filed $49 million in damages against Larry Silverstein, the alleged owner of Runaway 69, a Queen's Dance Club.
WNBC TV, Channel 4, television station, the city of New York, Presidents Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, Ross Perot, John Vesey, and General Colin Powell.
As a big loss, the rivetament of Miller's complaint is that the name defendants committed or aided others in committing illegal acts, including assassinations, over a 25-year period, beginning amidst the Vietnam War, in furtherance of a conspiracy to distribute Laotian heroin.
He also asserted that the defendants are still engaged in heroin trafficking today.
Wouldn't we, okay, wouldn't we have seen a large production of Laotian heroin, a larger production of Laotian heroin in comparison to other heroin producers because they have the backing of this secret?
So I got excited because there's a dynamic in these 2004 episodes and in this timeframe that like he'll sometimes say that he has a guest coming on, but he doesn't say who.
I don't even know how to set this up because I didn't cut clips of the beginning of it when they were talking about it because I thought, oh, sure, they'll jump off this at some point.
It's very dumb.
Essentially, Davis Luhrman has a big complaint that Fox News shows like Laura Ingram and Hannity, they're playing clips of Bush's State of the Union address.
Folks, that's a big deal to have multiple national shows editing out Congress having a big round of applause when Bush says that the Patriot Act is set to repeal in 05.
By the way, it's not set to repeal in 05.
There's a bunch of provisions about, you know, loving your neighbor and happiness and loving Arabs.
I mean, it really, they really have provisions like that.
So Alex is interviewing this radio host who had him on the show previously, and he's having him on to craft this conspiracy that a bunch of hosts on Fox News edited out applause during a Bush speech when he said the key provisions of the Patriot Act were set to expire at the next year.
This was from a clip of Bush during the 2004 State of the Union.
So he was addressing Congress.
So the idea is that the government is even against the Patriot Act, but the folks at Fox are trying to cover that up because they're towing the line for Bush.
I didn't watch the Hannity or Laura Ingram episodes from that day, but I wouldn't be too surprised if they edited out that little bit of applause that the Dems had.
They're a propaganda news network, so that shouldn't be a shock to anybody.
The point more broadly is that the picture Alex is painting is just as misleading as the ones that they're accusing Fox of painting.
And Alex himself is guilty of way more egregious levels of editing clips and presenting things devoid of context.
Look what he's doing with Larry Silverstein.
It's really nuts that he spends like half an hour on this considering how mild his criticism is and how much he does this himself.
Yeah, I'm struggling to keep that thought in my mind of the actual thing that we have a problem with.
The thing we have a problem with is that Fox News shows edited out a small accidental bit of applause that wasn't even really supposed to be there and wouldn't have been there if Bush weren't such a terrible orator.
It's just as dishonest to pretend that that was the large part of the government being opposed to the Patriot Act and that Fox is trying to cover that up.
Right.
I could easily see it being more for the sake of cohesion of a clip because what I played for you is a little disjointed and a little strange.
And if you are a right-wing propaganda network, I could see how that clip would be preferable without the stutter step of applause in the middle.
Yeah, in fact, we can tell it's on her show because not only does she babble immediately following the president's statements, but in the middle of his statements, she adds a sound effect, what she calls a dramatic stinger.
I guess we can mock what it is people would find shocking about the president's statement.
One of those essential tools is the Patriot Act, which allows federal law enforcement to better share information, to track terrorists, to disrupt their sales, and to seize their assets.
For years, we have used similar provisions to catch embezzlers and drug traffickers.
If these methods are good for hunting criminals, they are even more important for hunting terrorists.
So what's interesting there is not that they can't get very basic tech stuff figured out, but it is kind of fun.
I enjoy that.
This clip is remarkable because Alex's guest is complaining about Laura Ingram playing some kind of a sound effect meant to mock something about Bush's speech or your potential response to it.
Alex chimes in, manufacturing consent.
But then what does Alex do as soon as that clip is playing?
He laughs boisterously and unconvincingly at something Bush says.
He's doing the exact same thing that he's calling Laura Ingram engaging in manufacturing consent.
That's fine, but turning it into some sort of a meta complaint about her and Hannity, it's really just a way of sidestepping, having to deal with anything of substance in whatever they're saying.
Like they're talking about different things, but they both seem to think they're talking about the same thing, and they have to feel their way through it like they're two people in a pitch black world.
The whole reason that this guy even brought up this movie that he was going to send to Alex is because Alex had been talking about wanting this film that had the Moloch worship in it.
That's a good, maybe he accidentally made a very good point, Davis, which is, I mean, you know, he didn't actually make it, but he revealed maybe something that is important, right?
When they say they're waking people up, right?
They believe they're only waking people up to what they believe.
But by virtue of their extreme response and their aggression into the real world, they are also waking up people to the idea of these people that need to be fucking stopped, right?
Don't think it is because I think the people who are calling in antagonistic towards them are not actually substantively criticizing what Alex is bringing to the table already there.
The first most glaring problem is that he absolutely is not keeping any records of the exact number of calls he takes and how many are for or against him.
He doesn't even know that number for his own show, let alone for these alleged 1,400 interviews he's done.
The numbers he's coming up with aren't based on anything except his memory and his mood, which makes them meaningless.
The second problem is that Alex doesn't have access to the actual number of callers.
It seems pretty clear to me that this Davis guy wasn't just not letting people on who swore on the air to the screener.
It's pretty likely that he didn't want to have negative calls coming on when this relative celebrity was a guest on his show.
I would suspect that a fair amount of the people who want to have Alex on as a guest are, to put it bluntly, bottom feeders who probably want to impress the much larger star who has made time for them because maybe then he'll have them on his show.
Alex assumes that the people who get on air are a representative sample of the total group of callers, but that's not a safe assumption to make.
The decision of who gets on air is not a randomized process, and there's a ton of variables at play there.
There's a side point to this problem, which is that Alex's selection of shows he's going on are not representative of the wider population.
The only invitations that are coming in are from weirdo patriot-leaning shows, and that's going to lean heavy in the bias of where the calls are coming from.
Usually, he's not going on C-SPAN's Washington Journal.
He's going on a show where the co-host may as well be a rifle in a wig.
The third problem is that it's impossible to definitively quantify what is a pro or anti-Alex call.
This is a subjective notion, so it's kind of meaningless.
The fourth problem is that Alex is an asshole.
It very well may be that his personality elicits a negative response in a caller who may otherwise entirely agree with him.
Alex is a sanctimonious braggart, and he's super judgmental.
So it's easy to imagine calls that he could see as being negative actually just being someone not liking him.
And that leads us to our fifth problem, which is that even if none of these problems existed and Alex was clearly tabulating all of his guest appearances and logging all of the pro and anti-callers and to find those things, and he was consulting with the board operators of these stations so he can get phone numbers to do follow-up calls with the people who didn't get through.
Even if he did all of that, all he could possibly get a sense of is how people feel about him.
I know that Alex thinks that he is synonymous with freedom, but he's not.
And the only real poll he's doing is whether or not it feels like the bulk of callers on shows who have loose enough booking standards to have him on like him.
It's a worthless, meaningless poll.
But I do enjoy the way he thinks there's something to it.
I was talking to a lady the other day and an older lady, and she said, Alex, I know what you're saying is true, but I'm older, and I just don't want to worry about it.
unidentified
I asked an older gentleman, Sunday, if he watched the speech of Mr. Bush the other day.
It does seem like if I was teaching a marketing class, I would wait.
I mean, I'm not saying it's Scientology, but I would wait until like third, fourth year before we're jumping into here's how you control human beings' behavior.
When Bush mentioned the Patriot Act, they showed an image of the Patriots quarterback who was there, Tom Brady, to remember that Tom Brady was Laura Bush's guest at the 2004 State Of The Union.
People on the right wing call themselves patriots.
Yes, the Patriot Act is against them.
Visual metaphor works perfectly right yeah I, I mean, I guess what it is is like drawing tenuous, meaningless connections yeah, and then accusing everybody who doesn't agree with you of being brainwashed.
Yes also, I found another conspiracy, uh-huh, when Bush was talking about making schools better, the camera panned to a really bored-looking kid in the audience.
So they were secretly totally telling us that improving schools is boring and it's cool not to fund schools.
Also, possibly larger conspiracy theory, I noticed.
This is really weird sure, every time they showed Bush speaking, there was a big old pedophile sitting behind him.
I'm not sure what the message they were trying to get across here, but it was glaring um so yeah I, just I. While I was watching, I was like oh, fucking Hastard, sitting up there he was.
He was uh, the speaker for a long time.
Yep yep, Alex and uh Davis have a really dumb conversation about uh, some ideas they have.
Well, that's Why you have to offer the big tent theory.
Just everyone who loves freedom, come on in.
And put the other petty differences aside, because if everyone who loves freedom is in fact united, what you have is a place that's free enough for people to express their religious differences without it coming to fist-to-cuffs, wars, manipulation, control, and the like.
I'm all for abstract ideas about freedom, and I think it's very clearly lucrative to yell vague platitudes about it on a radio show, but these guys and their conception of freedom is antithetical to a big tent.
They want the freedom to live in an area where they never see trans people.
They want the freedom to demand that movies not have gay characters in them.
Not just, I'm not going to see that movie.
You can't have a gay character in it.
They want the freedom to force people to carry unwanted pregnancies to term because that's what their religious beliefs tell them it's right, so it has to be imposed on everybody else.
For people like Alex, freedom means his freedom, and it comes at your expense.
For fuck's sake, Alex doesn't want to live in a world where Muslim women have the freedom to go to a pool supply shop.
Nope.
Go fuck off with this big tent nonsense.
When your ideology is based on restriction and exclusion, you cannot have a big tent.
The best you can do is have an incredibly small tent and yell outside of it how big it is, which is basically what Alex does with his above-the-left-right paradigm nonsense.
Also, small point: this conversation is happening because a caller was asking Alex a meandering question about how someone who works at the American Free Press was saying that the Jews did 9-11.
So Alex has to dance around not supporting that because it's anti-Semitic trash, but also not fully reject it because the people who sell that anti-Semitic trash at the American Free Press are some of his best friends and longtime sources like Big Jim Tucker.
One of the problems with complaining about academic ethics is that you really have to parse out what the writer is saying, which the media often isn't up to that task.
Practically speaking, Harris wasn't arguing for killing children after they're born.
What he was doing was conducting an ethical exploration of what differences there would be between a late-term abortion and killing a child after it's born to illuminate the implications that are buried in that distinction.
For instance, if your support of an abortion is based solely on whether or not the potential child would be a burden on the parent, then could that argument not be made about a child that was just born?
Surely you could say that that child could be a burden on some level, and therefore you have to explore the ethical reasons behind what makes them different.
In the real world, this is a line of argumentation that tends towards challenging the pro-choice position more than the anti-abortion one.
By comparing an abortion with something that is only pretty much everyone would call a murder, you're putting the burden on the abortion supporter to delineate what the ethical difference is between the two.
And so it's very strange that someone who's so staunchly anti-abortion like Alex would be the person who's so up in arms about this.
But he's dumb.
There's a lot of other elements to this conversation, like how it centers around some fairly eugenics-y ideas about disabilities, but this also wasn't a proposal.
It was an exercise in mental masturbation, which ultimately is what a lot of ethics writing and speaking ends up being.
It's the kind of stuff that's super easy to misrepresent.
So I can understand why Alex would choose it.
It's so easy to run with, oh, this is what you're saying.
Alex is saying that he's arguing for or saying that it is ethically or morally justified to kill children after they're born.
Yeah, because the sooner, it would be almost easier to take, as an individual, as an American, if Lady Liberty was simply decapitated in one fell swoop and we have to rush her to the OR, we could rebuild Rome brick by brick that much sooner.
Yeah, I mean, if you are saying it in jest, then that's a jest.
And if you are saying, yeah, and if you're saying it honestly, then you're essentially saying, let's burn the country down so we can build something up out of the ashes.
Okay, Alex, I wanted to know if you were aware that WLW in Cincinnati, where he's been a frequent guest on Bill Beaucher's program, is owned by Clear Channel.
It's strange how there were these little indications, like his bullshit Big Tent Freedom thing coming after there was a weird caller about the Jews doing 9-11.
Weird how he does that Nazi voice.
And then strangely, we get the spelling of his name and I find out that he was discussing the JQ on a bit shoot show.
Also, he was on another episode.
I couldn't get that episode to play.
Otherwise, I might have had some clips of it because I'm sure he said some fucking awful stuff.
So anyway, we come to the end of this episode, and it turns out we've accidentally been listening to Alex and a Nazi complain about Bush's State of the Union 2004.
None of these ideas or feelings are really hashed out, trying to put a brave face forward, much like Davis screening the calls that were negative against Alex because he knew it was better for his ability to use Alex as the next stepping stone for him or whatever.
These people obscure these horrible views that they have on horrible associations and horrible group memberships, even maybe.
Because otherwise it's more difficult for them to pass off their extreme right-wing bullshit.
You can't make it palatable to a normal audience if you know that you also think that maybe the Holocaust didn't happen.
Well, I mean, the concern ultimately, right, is every 30, 40 years, right, this pops, this pops up, and then it gets to the point where it boils over with your OKC bombing or your January fucking 6th, you know, and then with like in the past, they would go underground, you know, and they would start talking like this all the time.
They'd be like, hey, listen, we don't want to deal with all of that stuff until their bullshit forces society to a point where it accepts them openly, and then they blow up, and then we do it all over again.
It feels like we're not doing it all over again this time.
Well, yeah, and it does feel, I mean, here's what it felt like to me after the OKC bombing: is that all of no, I mean, when I watched it, you were four also.
And as that has such political utility for the 2024 candidacies, the whitewashing of the event, yeah, you're going to see more people incentivized to behave that way.