In Knowledge Fight’s #811 episode, Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes dissect Alex Jones’ February 24, 2004 segment, debunking his false claims about Texas Independence Day parade cancellations (blaming racial suppression while ignoring Celebrate Texas’ $5K→$11.8K fee hike) and West Virginia’s SB 439 vaccine bill (exaggerating it as 35 forced shots with mercury-linked autism, despite only adding mumps, hepatitis B, and chickenpox). They expose his pattern of cherry-picking discredited sources like WorldNetDaily to stoke "police state" paranoia, from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s alleged presidential law changes to New Mexico’s breathalyzer laws. Jones’ selective praise of Teddy Roosevelt (ignoring FDR’s WPA) and calls for vigilante doxxing (like tarandfeather.net) reveal deeper ideological grievances—framing perceived slights as systemic oppression while dismissing legitimate concerns. Ultimately, his rhetoric thrives on manufactured outrage, not real issues, reinforcing a cycle of fear and division. [Automatically generated summary]
There is nothing better than you finally caving to the pressure of, you know what, maybe we'll just buckle down and we'll focus on the present day, only to have the present day kick you in the teeth in response.
We start our adventure here on the 24th, and Alex, one thing, I think I've mentioned this before, I do appreciate in the past that he will often announce his guests at the top of the show, whereas now it's kind of, you know, catch as catch can.
But I can turn on the show and I'm like, oh, this person's coming up.
And then sometimes I hear a name and I'm like, I have no fucking idea who this person is.
So one thing you'll notice in that clip is that there's this far greater emphasis on opposition to marriage equality at this point in time, because that was the battle the conservatives were trying to fight.
Most of society was making progress on that front, and the forces that seek to oppose the tide of equality and regress back to more restrictive times, they just couldn't handle that.
It's a very similar impetus that we see in terms of the right wing's obsessive and grotesque behavior surrounding trans people today, and I would guess that if present-day Alex were back on air in 2004, he'd be yelling about gay marriage being all about satanic pedophilia or whatever.
Also in this clip, we get to be introduced to a new name, Angel Shamaya.
This isn't someone who's come up on our radar before, so I'm going to give you a little bit of a rundown on this person.
Shamaya ran a popular gun rights website called Keep and Bear Arms, which he would eventually go on to sell to some conservative lobbying groups.
Prior to that, though, he was a fairly big figure in the scene for folks like Alex.
His site would have gun news that catered to the worldview of gun absolutists.
It had like an aggregator kind of news headlines about gun stuff.
In 2006, Angel was arrested, and if you only consulted the Gun Absolutist blogs and message boards, well, you'd come away with the impression that he'd been completely screwed.
The police just showed up at his house one day for no reason and found a couple handguns that he hadn't properly registered and decided to jam him up.
In reality, Shamaya, birth name Scott Craig McReynolds, got a visit from the police because his ex-girlfriend had called them after he threatened to kill her.
When the police arrived at his home, they found 10 long guns, 15 unregistered handguns, and over 17,000 rounds of ammo.
Naturally, the gun weirdo community minimized his ridiculous cache of weapons and pretended that he hadn't made domestic violence threats so they could keep propping him up as a hero and raise money for his legal fees.
After all, it's important to understand that if someone who happens to be a gun weirdo gets in trouble for threatening to kill his ex-girlfriend, next thing you know, the Second Amendment is gone.
I think, look, I'm not the best expert on this, but I think that having a large amount of rounds of ammunition isn't that weird if you're someone who shoots recreationally fairly often.
Sure.
I don't think you need 25 guns, and I think 17,000 rounds is more than that threshold.
So this may not be the most extreme example we've encountered, but it's pretty clear that if you pay attention, that almost all of these people who are in Alex's orbit, they're abusive monsters.
This isn't a coincidence.
These people are almost always abusive monsters because their political ideology is organized around using power to abuse people.
And so that's why you kind of see these trends almost universally.
Of course people who believe that if your name is in capital letters, the government owns you, or at least a facsimile of yourself, would change their name, I say.
He has a bit of a cold or something, and so their interview is cut short and there's really nothing going on with it, so we're not actually even going to hear any of it.
But Alex has a number of headlines on this episode that are all trash.
Here in Austin, Texas, we have had Texas Independence Day marches, rallies for over 100 years, and it's a family event.
The city of Austin doesn't want to be a part of that.
It won't allow a parade.
They won't provide security so you can't have a parade.
The city of Austin sponsors Cinco de Mayo.
Mexican independence in Austin, Texas.
Over 10 years ago, I guess about 12 years ago, University of Texas banned Texas Independence Day from the school sponsoring it or any department sponsoring it, but they do sponsor Cinco de Mayo and Quonset and everything else.
And so I have the Associated Press article here, Texas Independence Parade canceled because of cost.
That is, they say you can't have a parade because we don't want to pay for it.
The city can't spare the police.
But they can for tens of thousands of screaming people waving Mexican flags on Cinco de Mayo.
The city of Austin cancels Texas Independence Day parade, but sponsors Cinco de Mayo and everything else as long as it's not Texan.
The University of Texas canceled Texas Independence Day over 10 years ago, but banned any university department from supporting it.
Now the city of Austin is saying they can't allow the parade because they can't supply police for it, but every year for Cinco de Mayo, Austin, downtown is shut down as thousands of screaming people violently wave Mexican flags.
Once again, Alex doesn't really know what he's talking about here, but he's close to a general point.
In 2002, the City Council of Austin passed Resolution 20021003-040, part of which had to do with which events were granted an automatic waiver of fees.
Most of these events are ones that are co-sponsored with the city, and there's five of them in number.
There's Fiesta de Independencia, which is not Cinco de Mayo, the Veterans Day Parade, the Juneteenth Parade, which is not Kwanzaa, Adiós.
Martin Luther King Day Parade, and a commemorative event for September 11th.
Those are the five that the 2002 resolution granted automatic waivers to.
Outside of these events, which are specifically co-sponsored by the city and thus have their fees waived, you can apply to have those fees that you would accrue waived as well.
It requires the support of three council members, and the council needs to, quote, find that the program or project serves a public purpose.
In theory, all of the other events that make Alex so mad are ones that went through those proper channels and applied for fee waivers, or may have actually accepted the burden of paying those fees themselves.
The Texas Independence Day Parade in Austin is run by a non-profit called Celebrate Texas, and in the previous year, they'd paid all the fees themselves, which totaled approximately $5,000.
This year, the fees they would need to offset were $11,800, which they said they couldn't afford.
The city wasn't keen to co-sponsor the parade since there had been a ton of requests for fee waivers, and they couldn't afford to just rubber stamp all of them.
One thing that I think it's important to recognize is that this isn't a super long-standing tradition.
Celebrate Texas only started doing their parades in 2000, and even without the parade, they still held a large celebration at the Capitol, and fun was had by all.
Very family event.
Also, they were able to make a huge stink out of not getting their fees waived, and they were able to use the political clout that they had to get future sponsorship of their parade into an emergency agenda for the city council.
On January 29, 2004, which was prior to the episode of Alex's show we're listening to now by about a month, the motion to authorize the waiver for Celebrate Texas's parade and their fun run was approved.
So because they claim that they didn't have time to make the 2004...
And then on February 26th, a couple days after this episode that we're listening to now, the City Council passed a resolution adding the Celebrate Texas parade and run to the list of city co-sponsored events, assuring that they would get an automatic waiver for the city fees every year from...
It's the type of shit that you see in elementary school and everybody goes, why are you giving everything that fucking crying kid, why are you giving everything they want to him?
So ultimately, this is a case where a non-profit was used to paying the fees themselves, and then they couldn't afford the increased cost.
They weren't one of the events that the city co-sponsored, so they weren't entitled to a waiver, and because of shoddy planning, their year's parade was canceled.
In response to public backlash from folks who definitely aren't mad about holidays celebrated, Celebrated predominantly by non-white people, they were able to almost immediately get reimbursed for fees paid and get their event added to a short list of city co-sponsored events.
It all worked out exactly how Alex would have wanted, except that there wasn't a parade this year, which is really no one's fault but the organizers, so he shouldn't really be complaining about...
If he wants to complain about anybody, he should be complaining about Celebrate Texas.
One thing that's notable, if you look at the specific revisions that the bill was seeking to make, none of it made anything involving vaccine refusal any more or less illegal.
Mostly, the illegality comes down to people who falsify immunization records, which is already illegal.
The hepatitis B vaccine wasn't around until the late 60s, reliable mumps vaccination didn't come around until the early 60s, and the chickenpox vaccine wasn't approved for U.S. use until 1995.
This bill is really all just updates, and it doesn't even relate to homeschooled children at all, as this coverage is trying to make it...
West Virginia was just saying that these vaccines were required to go to public school, and if you tried to create fraudulent proof of vaccination, you'd be fined, which was already the case.
So this bill ended up passing the Senate, but it died in the House Health and Human Resources Committee, and so it wasn't ever actually enacted.
But consider the headline of the article that Alex is reading about this from WorldNetDaily.
Well, I think the issue is that you have an argument being made that I should not...
I have to do this to go to this public school.
And people's response is just like, nope.
And then there's nowhere else to go.
And so you create a lot of elaborate masks that you put on arguments and stuff.
So it's important to understand what the objective and action being taken here is.
The guy who wrote this article at World Night Daily doesn't care about this bill.
Alex doesn't care about this bill.
And the homeschool organizations protesting this bill don't care about it either.
They aren't homeschool organizations.
They're anti-vax groups.
And they don't like that West Virginia has vaccine requirements for public schools.
They know full well that this bill is nothing more than a slight updating of some terms and has nothing to do with homeschooled children being forcefully vaccinated.
But pretending that that is the case is the only way to use this as an opportunity to push the anti-vax agenda.
This World Night Daily article starts, quote, West Virginia homeschooling families and others were scheduled to stage two rallies today to protest a bill.
But a little bit later, you find out that the rallies were organized by a group called West Virginians for Vaccine Exemption.
The other group that's behind the rallies is a group called Human Life International, a Catholic anti-abortion organization.
Seems weird.
This is the little sleight of hand that's going on here.
The bill itself doesn't make choosing not to be vaccinated any more or less difficult.
West Virginia required proof of vaccination to go to public school before this, and this bill wouldn't change that.
It's a non-issue for homeschoolers, but if it's presented as if it is, there's a better chance of using it to inflame people.
If you present this as like an anti-vax issue, or if you're up front that...
Weirdly, it's an anti-abortion group that's spearheading this outrage.
You make it kind of easy for people to write you off immediately.
If you hide your real cards behind the image of homeschoolers, you give cover to what you really are up to, and you create an argument that...
You're not actually making what people think you're making, and so they engage with the wrong point, and you can kind of get people on their back foot.
So there's two types of lies that are happening here.
The first is the sort that are actually in the World Net Daily article, which Alex is reading and passing along to the audience.
The idea that this bill somehow eliminated parents' ability to plead medical exemptions is completely false.
There was previous language that allowed students to enroll in public school if they had a, quote, certificate from a reputable physician showing that immunization for any or all is impossible or improper or sufficient reason why.
any or all immunizations should not be done.
In the updated version, that language is stricken because it's redundant to the part where it says that children have to be immunized or be, quote, exempted from immunization.
It was unnecessary language, and if it weren't stricken out, don't pretend that Alex wouldn't do an hour on what the state would consider a reputable physician.
Here's what I feel like should be a very simple argument, and it seems self-evident, but if your argument is that vaccines are killing people, and we have had mandatory vaccines on the books for longer than all of us have been alive for, Wouldn't that mean that we're fine?
Alex has no idea if there are any co-sponsors of this bill.
He has no idea what the status is in the legislature.
He can't even be bothered to accurately convey the fraudulent information in this WorldNet Daily article.
He's just making all this up because it fits his anti-vax extremism and helps perpetuate the feeling in the audience that they're under attack because they don't want to take vaccines or be homeschoolers.
Also, it seems super inappropriate for Alex to be telling his audience to call the West Virginia legislature and harass them from out of state.
Doesn't he believe in states' rights and states' business?
Why should somebody in Texas or any other state have the ability to petition the West Virginia legislature about issues that don't involve them at all?
It gets really weird.
It makes sense to have feelings about a state's bills and laws, but unless you really feel like the country is one full community as opposed to 50 completely sovereign states, it doesn't make any sense to think you have any right to get involved.
You're essentially saying, I am so concerned about a slippery slope of you, one state, mandating these vaccines and having it turn into a wildfire of mandated vaccines everywhere that I am willing to berate you into stopping.
Now, granted, I don't know if I would call and harass other states' legislatures, but it makes more sense for someone with the political set that you or I have to be interested in various laws in other states and be concerned about the implications of them.
Texas declared independence in 1836 after a brief revolution that, it is fair to say, was fought by a coalition of white colonists from the United States and Tejanos.
The term Tejano just means Hispanic people who live in Texas prior to Texas becoming a state, and then the term is used to describe people who are descended from such families.
Sure.
A whole lot of the Constitution of the Republic of Texas Texas is just taken from the U.S. Constitution and its primary author was a man named George Campbell Childress who was from Tennessee and was very much not somebody who would qualify as Tejano.
He went to Mexican territory, then returned to Tennessee to recruit people to fight for Texas independence.
When he returned, he wrote the Constitution, and then he failed repeatedly to open law offices in Texas.
Five years after writing the Texas Constitution, he took his own life by slashing his abdomen with a Bowie knife.
So that's a tragic end to Childress, the author of the Texas independence constitution.
In earnest, the Republic of Texas only existed for a handful of years.
It was less than ten years between the Declaration of Independence for Mexico and the absorption into the United States, so it's not like there was a really rich history here.
In all likelihood, they never really would have even declared independence if the United States had supported the revolution in the first place, and the alliance of U.S. colonists and the part of the Tejano population that supported them would have been happy to just become a state in 1835.
There were four presidents of Texas, with Sam Houston serving two non-consecutive terms, and they were all white dudes.
He was also only vice president for a few months before he was replaced by the son of a plantation owner from Georgia named Mirabu Lamar, whose biggest claim to fame was how aggressively he tried to rid Texas of Native Americans.
He took particular aim at the Cherokee people, who he used as a scapegoat in his campaign to ethnically cleanse Texas.
I'm not a Santa Ana apologist or anything, but Alex's version of this history is complete bullshit.
The movement for Texan independence did involve some Tejano individuals, but it was predominantly a project undertaken by white colonial settlers from the United States who wanted to claim the territory for themselves.
From the president, to the vice president, to the secretaries in various departments, to the postmaster's general.
Every member of the second elected government of the Republic of Texas was a white dude from the United States.
There may have been some lesser positions that I can't find record of, but I was unable to find a single person who was in an executive position or in a leadership position in the Congress or in the courts that was not a white man from the United States.
It is fair to say that Lorenzo...
Lorenzo de Zavala was the interim vice president, and it is possible that he would have had a larger role in the government moving forward if he hadn't died of pneumonia later in 1836, but those are what-if questions.
And the fact of the universal white American man government of the Republic of Texas that it actually had, I think it speaks volumes.
Also, I'm about 100% sure, give or take, probably about 100%, give or take zero, so I'm 100% sure.
Well, I mean, you go anywhere and you start a revolution and whoever's there, there's plenty of people who don't like that government, whatever government it is.
At the same time, I don't think that people wanting to celebrate Texas Independence Day in the present day are necessarily all motivated from a place of white...
And one of the things that's also fairly interesting is you look at these folks who played major roles in the government of the Republic of Texas, and you kind of assume that a lot of it is people who are like from the South.
Yeah.
Who are heading over.
And that's not universal.
There were a number of folks from even New England-y areas that came down and were involved in the Republic of Texas.
Alex is working backwards, because the conclusion he has in mind is already established, and it's his job to find material that he can use to prop up that conclusion.
The end goal is the conclusion that we're all becoming criminals by the state, police state, blah, blah, blah.
So in order to push that forward, push towards that, the headlines and how they're discussed must serve that purpose.
He can't cover reality in real-world terms, which isn't to say that he would want to anyway, but he literally can't without his messaging becoming completely incoherent.
Let's take this Texas Independence Day parade story as a great example.
The city of Austin didn't say that they couldn't have a...
It was just an issue where the fees weren't automatically waived and the non-profit who runs the parade couldn't afford to cover that bill, so the parade was cancelled.
If Alex covered this story in line with reality, there's a problem that exists, which is that this bill needs to be paid.
He loves Texas Independence Day and he wants that parade so he could possibly pay that bill himself.
But at this point in his career, he may not be able to throw around that kind of cash, so let's go the other way with it.
He has a big audience, and the challenge of raising like $11,000 for this very important event would be super easy.
If he wanted to solve the problem he claims to be so upset about, it would be easy.
But he doesn't do this because the parade not existing isn't really the problem.
That's the mask that he has put on the problem.
The real thing Alex is complaining about is that he feels like white people are treated meanly by the city government, but Hispanic community members aren't.
That's the real story that he's covering.
The shit about the parade is just window dressing.
That's why he can't even mention the parade being cancelled without saying that the city sponsors the Cinco de Mayo parade, which isn't even true.
It's because he needs both of these elements to be present for the story that he wants to tell, which is about a white victimhood narrative.
That's why he can't just cover the real details of this story and why he has no interest in using his platform to propose a productive solution.
Paying for the fees so this group can have their parade solves the problem of the parade being cancelled.
Because if you actually look at somebody in the eye and say, I want you to give preferential treatment to white people all the time, they will just say...
To a certain point, though, we have to accept that it's on us for letting them do this shit forever and not just getting down to the bottom of it and saying all you want is preferential treatment for white people all the time.
And I think that that's probably a part of why it's...
What's so frustrating for you hearing that story is that the city council of Austin having this emergency session, inserting that into the agenda is giving deference to a tantrum.
By the way, every time I tune into a neocon now, they're talking about how great Roosevelt was.
What's this new trend of hearing people talk about how great Roosevelt was?
unidentified
From what I'm getting out of this book, he was basically the start of all this.
He pushed government beyond unbelievable what he did.
I mean, he ran his platform trying to get elected on...
Hoover was spending way too much money.
The first thing he does, he gets in the office and he starts, you know, what, 50 different organizations for this and organizations for that, basically just taking control, the federal government just took control of our whole nation ever since.
Like, oh, FDR gets into office and the first thing he does is start making all these organizations to get people back to work because there was something going on.
So this book, The Roosevelt Myth, was written by a man named John T. Flynn.
Flynn was a weird dude.
He was a big-time anti-interventionist, going so far as to being a major figure in the early creation of the America First Committee, which was organized primarily to keep the U.S. out of World War II.
That group had some serious problems with anti-Semites and Nazi sympathizers in its ranks, but I don't have any reason to think that Flynn was one such person.
He seemed to be primarily motivated by opposition to U.S. intervention in all foreign wars.
However, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, However, Flynn entirely abandoned his beliefs and fully supported the war effort.
And then so you come up with conspiracy theories in order to deflect from the fact that you went against your own beliefs due to the rising tide of public opinion after this giant traumatic event.
It would be like someone who was really against war, 9-11 happens, then they support the invasion of Iraq, and then come up with conspiracy theories to explain why they were tricked into supporting war or something.
It has that feeling, and I don't know if Flynn is that...
That's a very consistent kind of trait for a lot of people, is that once you experience that cognitive dissonance that overwhelms you, you kind of have to spend the rest of your life dealing with cognitive dissonance.
So we get some calls, though, and we get back to this West Virginia story.
Big stuff.
unidentified
The reason why I called is I wanted to make a short comment on West Virginia and what's going on there.
When they come, Poke my children, which are two and four right now.
My daughter's four, my son's two.
When they come to poke my children, because I know the agenda always goes on, regardless if it starts in West Virginia or if it starts in any other state, it's going to be pushed.
When they come to poke my children, I will not let them.
Guarantee you I will lay down my life before they poke my children or before they draft my children.
If you're the type of person who is often finding fictional scenarios wherein you would be willing to kill or lay down your life in protection of others, I have great news for you.
I think that we ought to have a website called Tar and Feather.
Tarandfeather.com is taken, but it looks like a small potato guy, and it's ready to expire in April.
But tarandfeather.net is still available, and if we put up all these new world cronies information, anybody anywhere that lives close by them could go talk to them.
You know what I mean?
Tarandfeather.com or.net.
It's just an idea.
You know, I try to find a lot of information on a lot of people just because I'd like to know where they are.
Well, I mean, yeah, it's good to have websites that expose corrupt politicians and corrupt government pimps and minions.
The problem is there's hundreds of thousands of high-level bureaucrats, millions total, hundreds of state and county and city agencies in every state, if not thousands.
And, I mean, it would be encyclopedic.
What we need is lots of regional websites that are making and being promoted to the grassroots.
But I do believe that he probably gets it quite a bit.
And that is because the mentality that Alex perpetuates, the coverage, the editorial positions of his show, would lead somebody who doesn't know that much about computers, maybe isn't that tech savvy, they would see that and be like, oh my god.