#902: February 21, 2024 dissects Alex Jones’ bankruptcy hearings in March, where assets like his $45K studio desk and Infowars.com may be sold, while he falsely ties Letitia James’ Trump asset seizure to a "globalist conspiracy." The episode critiques Jones’ fearmongering—from framing Amos Miller’s raw milk case as persecution (ignoring 2016 listeriosis deaths) to amplifying debunked claims about Hunter Biden informant Alexander Smirnov. Jones pivots to transphobic and xenophobic attacks, like Kelly Wong’s legal residency, while promoting collapse narratives, though Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes expose his rhetoric as opportunistic brand maintenance rather than substantive analysis. [Automatically generated summary]
My bright spot today, Jordan, is man, you know, there's instances where you record an episode and you say something, and then it's immediately like, oh, I think you were right.
And we recorded that our last episode.
I said that Alex must be selling off his shit because if he was at a gym, there's no reason for that.
Narratively speaking, because I'm not trying to influence anybody's behavior, it's none of my business, right?
But narratively speaking, if the Sandy Hook families are in control over what can be sold, you know, have some influence over what can be given to whom and sold and for what, you know, giving us as like a symbolic $1 Infowars.com thing would be the fucking narrative move.
No, they put a little bit of the melody to the song, but the problem is Mako was so good and so clear and so perfect as the character that you just can't ever make the show without him.
And so that usually adds a different layer to Alex's presentation, knowing that there's a public awareness of, like, oh, you're going to have to sell all of your shit.
Yeah, it does seem like it should be a lot harder to say, hey, please give me your money whenever you know you're a going out of business sale, essentially.
I appreciate now the idea that sooner or later the possibility will arise that Chase and Harrison Smith will wear an Alex Jones costume that they both fit inside.
You know, like those horse costumes.
Yeah, but they'll each get one arm.
You know, they'll be side by side.
And then the combined neck thickness will make sense.
So Alex is obviously off air dealing with the bankruptcy stuff.
He's not able to get to the show.
And so he comes in in the second hour.
And he comes in and he, because he's covering Trump's bankruptcy stuff, while he's in the middle of a bankruptcy, he feels like what he's doing is gonzo journalism.
There is a certain uncanniness to the twin stories that we've watched since we started, you know, like in 2017 when we started, the parallels are kind of really freaky.
I wasn't here a couple days last week, and the first hour today is that I'm in intense legal meetings with all of the bankruptcy of free speech systems and my personal bankruptcy all coming to a head here and decide the future of this operation.
And we got Letitia James announcing that she's going to go ahead and just seize all of Trump's assets before the appeal and sell it all off.
They've put a former Bill Clinton operative in as the receiver to oversee all this and run the Trump companies.
Fear and loathing in the failed attempt at scamming the bankruptcy court.
There'd be a bad Hunter S. Thompson book.
I can say that for sure.
So this isn't Alex being in the middle of stories.
It's that he and Trump are both facing legal consequences for the crimes they committed or harms they caused.
These are unrelated cases, but because they're both so plainly in the wrong and so deserving of the consequences they're being given, it's really important to hand-wave the cases away and delegitimize them as a whole so your audience doesn't even begin to engage with what they're about.
A very efficient path to this is just to say that they're both some part of a bigger plan against the Patriots, which is what Alex is doing.
It's wrong and it's manipulative towards the audience, but it's probably the best shot he's got.
This is not gonzo journalism.
That would be like if Alex went to embed himself with the Trump team as they go through the case, thereby injecting himself into the story, maybe doing a bunch of drugs and stuff, and then making everything up.
What Alex is actually doing here is trying to make the Trump story about himself because that helps calm the audience into thinking he's the victim in this whole thing and that ain't Gonzo.
Their cities are already destroyed, but they just keep doubling down, doubling down, Robert Barnes.
How long has the legal system been this corrupt?
And am I wrong to say that as soon as Trump got elected now seven years ago that the establishment went totally crazy and said, okay, the left controls most of the courts and most of the judiciary and most lawyers are Democrats.
So we're just going to go full Soros model.
We know he has seminars training people how to do this to weaponize it and militarize it.
And now they've done it, but it's totally blowing up in their face.
When I was being given show trials, there was some concern.
People were starting to wake up, but now it's epidemic for people waking up.
I mean, I go out on the street.
Again, I'm famous.
The average listener's not.
That's great.
You're private people.
Sorry.
So a lot of negatives come with being well-known.
But the good thing that comes with being well-known is I'm a gauge on how much hate I'm getting.
It's almost like a sports talk show when they throw to the guy who yells about one specific thing for like five minutes and then it's back to the regular old asshole hosts or whatever, you know?
And while all of this is going on in terms of President Trump, in terms of Julian Assange, in terms of political freedom in America, we have the case like Amos Miller in Pennsylvania that next Friday, I'm going to be in a hearing in Lancaster County where they are trying to completely shut down this Amish farmer to issue an injunction that would prohibit him from get this from feeding his own pigs, his own food from his own farm.
If you hear Barnes tell the story, this is just an utter case of injustice.
How can he possibly this be happening?
You know what?
A man's not allowed to feed his pigs as easy as fit.
In the real world, Miller was selling products like raw milk across state lines and not following food safety guidelines, which led to his products being tied to multiple cases of E. coli.
He doesn't have a license to sell these goods across state lines.
Miller's been on the state radar since 2016 when listeria was found in the milk that he sold.
And they did a biological analysis and found that it was likely that it caused at least two cases of listeriosis, one of which was fatal.
Sure.
In 2023, Miller and the state reached an agreement, which he then went on to ignore.
So Pennsylvania sued him to halt the sales of raw milk and all that in January 2024.
This isn't an instance of state oppression.
It's a serious food safety issue and one that the state tried to bend over backwards to accommodate this guy on.
There were so many warnings and non-punishments, even after his milk likely killed someone.
He's been steadfast in his unwillingness to follow safety guidelines, but his willingness to pretend like he will in order to get out of trouble.
And Bobby Barnes is his lawyer.
So I wouldn't expect this to be any kind of success in court.
But if you just want someone to yell on your behalf, maybe getting a little bit of juice on Infowars, having some people get mad about this, maybe the guy will use some alliteration.
They're busy indicting their own informants who, because those informants ratted out Joe Biden by claiming that it's another Russia gate, another Russian conspiracy.
That any allegation against Joe Biden must just be from Russia.
That, you know, the Russian nukes in space and then Navalny wasn't working to get that $68 billion to the deep state money laundering machine known as Zelensky in Ukraine.
And so now they're resorting to even more desperate measures and desperate attempts.
And that's the great risk that we face is we have an incompetent deep state.
But unfortunately, the person responsible for providing that information, you know, those claims are based on, got arrested by the FBI for making it all up.
And to make matters worse, this guy, Alexander Smirnov, has admitted since being arrested that, quote, officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing along that story.
Because Republicans in Congress ran with this information, and there's an open question if they knew it was faulty, at what point they knew it was faulty.
But from a Barnes and InfoWars standpoint, this news presents a different challenge.
How do you use the basic details of what happened to reinforce the existing narratives that you've built on this fraudulent information?
Maintaining those narratives is still important, even if the foundation they're built on is very suspect.
So you need to zoom the conspiracy out a little bit.
You can see how Barnes achieves this by pretending that Smirnov was arrested because he said bad things about Biden, as opposed to the reality that he got caught making up demonstrably false things about the Biden family.
By using this one little twist of make-believe, Barnes is able to hold on to the precious narratives that mean so much to him.
Like at the end, I was able to call Ukraine a money laundering operation for Biden.
You still retain that, and you're not threatened by the reality coming out.
This is often how conspiracy works.
When the narrative that isn't that, like, it's not that important, if you have a narrative that's just not all that important, it's not central.
If that is debunked or becomes difficult to maintain, it's just ignored.
And then you pretend it was never important to begin with.
Maybe you didn't even say it.
We've seen countless examples of this in our time doing the show, and you're able to do this because the audience is always willing to be distracted by the seemingly important big new bombshell you got.
That's why every episode of Alex's show is called Big Breaking Emergency Broadcast Report Bombshells.
So you can do all that stuff and distract away, like, and just be like, hey, we didn't do that.
That wasn't part of our worldview or whatever when the narrative isn't important.
But when the narrative is actually important, something structural in your storytelling, when it's debunked, you need to broaden the conspiracy out.
The fact that your information is wrong is proof that you're actually right.
They're all saying that this guy was arrested for making up shit to the FBI, but that's just a cover for why he was really arrested, which is because he was blowing the whistle on Biden and threatening the money laundering operation.
This is the sort of taking it back another level.
And it's because certain things are critically important to the infrastructure of the InfoWars narrative environment.
You have like the need to make Biden the most corrupt person ever.
You have to invalidate the Ukraine war and support Putin's side of it.
So these things are necessary.
And even when the legs are cut out from under it, you need to still like, okay, let's just broaden the conspiracy.
Just like the truckers are not going to deliver to New York, just like the businesses are pulling out of New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, California, Washington, Oregon, Illinois.
There's still a lot of good people in those states, folks, but they're run by absolute crazed demons.
I was supposed to start on Monday and it would show New York for daring to prosecute Trump, but then nothing happened.
Even the Twitter user who started the whole thing, a guy named Chicago Ray, who's ironically from Wisconsin, made some posts trying to backtrack and disassociate himself.
I'm like, I didn't do this.
I wasn't trying to get a trucker strike code.
You know, there are some issues with some truckers not wanting to go to New York, but it's not because of Trump.
What I find interesting about that is if truckers were as a single group capable of cutting off service to one state or one city, they would be almost unstoppable, right?
Like, there is no fucking with them.
I mean, if they proved that they could not, if they proved they could just not deliver stuff to New York City, that would be the end of America.
And the final equation, everything coming out of Hollywood, everything coming out of the corporate media, everything coming out of D.C., it's going to destroy you and your family.
So it's real simple.
You can study this 24-7 like I do and find it all the time and be a super expert at it.
Or you can just realize everything you've ever been told is a lie by these people and they're out to get you.
And whatever they say, don't believe a damn word of it.
I got one more article I want to hit here, and then I'm going to your calls.
I beat a dead horse on this.
But if you want to know if your government's out to get you, all you got to know is this, okay?
Biden killed the Keystone pipeline that would have cut gas prices 50 cents on average, would have created hundreds of thousands of jobs after it was built.
He banned all new oil exploration, gas.
He cut off thousands of permits to repair pipelines around the country.
This story about the sale of coal mines may result in some increase of mining output, but that doesn't change the fact that India is on the path towards clean energy, having announced plans to reach zero emissions by 2070 and half of that goal by 2030.
Now, while they're doing that, they have said that they're not going to abandon coal as things build up.
Sure, sure.
And certainly there are complaints to be made about the energy situation in India, but they did say last year, five-year pause on any new coal power plants being built.
So the left, who's in bed with the globalists and has all the factories, they forcibly move everything overseas where there's no environmental controls, kill all our clean stuff, and then say it's for the earth.
It's just if people had a basic understanding of energy, they would know this wasn't true.
New Delhi.
India's received a total of 40 bids for some of the 32 commercial coal mines that were available for auctioning in December.
The government has a statement on Monday adding the bids would be open February 20th.
They're the world's largest or second largest coal user after China.
And they're boosting it and building more coal power plants.
You can hear here Alex trying to cold read this article, but it doesn't match the rant that he's just gone on.
He gets bored while reading it because the words are actually about auctioning off existing coal mines, not creating new ones.
And as he's reading it, he just decides to bail.
If he'd gotten a little bit further, he would have found this article says something that he could use, and that is, quote, output from mines auctioned to private companies is expected to boost production of coal by over 40%.
Ooh.
So he could use that.
That would be useful.
But nowhere in the article does it say they're building more coal power plants.
Alex is making that up because he needs this article to say that.
This is the whole reason he was drawn to the headline in the first place, because the Infowars narrative is that other countries are making tons of new coal plants, but the globalists won't let the U.S. do that because they want us to have no energy.
Alex is reading along and then pauses because he realizes this article doesn't work for that very specific purpose.
He immediately starts injecting his own narrative saying, quote, they're boosting it and building more coal power plants.
He's making that up, but this article has enough of the appearance on the topic.
It looks like it's right so he can get away with it.
This is one of Alex's big tricks.
And if you pay attention and consult his sources, you'll see that he does this all the time to distort reality so it comports with the narrative reality that is more important.
If I was in control of, you know, like basic understanding of energy, I would say we should focus on alchemy.
I think we should return back to alchemy.
Okay.
And honestly, I think knowing what I do know about physics now, we're more likely to get the ability to transform one element into another via the manipulation of protons than we are to get clean coal.
And I'm going to stay on there as long as I can, and God bless you.
But if they kill me or put me in prison or shut me down, there's a big body of our work out there, and it's evergreen because what I talked about 10 years ago is now here.
I talked about 20 years ago is now here.
What I talked about today will be happening in two years.
So this body of work, this testament, this information is there.
And I'm not saying they're going to shut us down, but it's all in God's plan.
Just remember, the body of work and our guest and our crew is there.
Save it to hard drives, keep it there, because as things get worse and worse, this information will become more and more powerful as people realize how dead on it was.
But what he's expressing is fundamentally what I wish to not come to pass: is that people ignore the reality of what his work actually is and create this image that his legacy is some kind of body of, oh, he was a prophet.
He was so right about everything.
No, no, absolutely not.
This is nonsense.
And he's telling this distraught grandma this kind of like my legacy will live on.
And this will save your grandchildren when you show them.
They'll be like, oh my God, Alex was so right about this in advance.
I often ruminate about this because it's such a fascinating thought experiment.
And that is take something from the past and imagine asking Alex, what did you say about this?
And I guarantee nine times out of ten, he has no idea what he said about various events that happened over history because it was what was useful in the moment, what was needed in the moment.
It's not, it's, you know, obviously he's going to say everything was fucking globalist related.
I think what I find so interesting about that and the type of person that Alex is is that even in that conversation, the quest is just to make it over the bar of what you'll accept.
You know what I mean?
Like, I am as consistent as what it'll take for you to move on from this conversation.
What did you think about that guy?
Well, whatever is enough to get past this.
You know, there's no like, oh, here's where I am.
It's only here's the bar that I am trying to clear in this moment.
I think that's what I'm so interested by in a lot of these stories about the next generation is something that I don't understand, which is that a lot of them seem to believe that adults and authority is on their side, which is a brand new concept to me.
Like when I was growing up, I remember being like, okay, whether or not I like or dislike has nothing to do with it.
These people are the enemy because they are trying to keep me from doing the things that I want to do, right?
And you have like this response to it that's like, how can that possibly be?
And I think you can sit with that for a little while and recognize that's not that weird.
That doesn't preclude you from being in that position.
The only reason you would do that is if you're just overwhelmed by some combination of racism and xenophobia, and you assume because she's from Hong Kong that she must be a spy.
Yeah, I like the idea that people see that contradiction of like, oh, she can't vote and she's on the elections board and not think there's something wrong with the system as opposed to like, well, clearly we've made a mistake with her.
You know, instead of being like, well, what whoever wrote that system clearly had no idea that we could wind up in a situation like this and it doesn't make sense.
Well, I mean, if you're talking about America and voting, it's always important to remember that voting has only been available for most people for the past 50 years or so.
The interesting thing there is this tossing out of the transphobic jabs.
You know, like, Alex seems to think that he's making a point saying like being trans is unconstitutional or something, which is strange, but I think it is what he believes.
Quote: Wong pushed back against the xenophobic and anti-immigrant narratives that conservatives have placed on her.
Chinese for affirmative action also confirmed that the organization has been receiving many anti-Chinese and racist attacks in the wake of Wong's appointment.
And that's what Alex wants.
He knows that California voted and decided they wouldn't bar immigrants from these positions and that he lost.
You lost that conversation.
The recourse that he has left is attempting to incite intimidation towards her in the hopes that people just withdraw from public life and stop trying to make a difference.
Right.
That's the aim of doing coverage like this: inciting harassment towards her in order to, you know, subvert the channels that you failed on.
California voted.
There's nothing barring her from being in that position.
Where is the but I mean, if you have if you have this kind of a mentality and you're willing to go this far, then like you're basically fine if Trump does steal the election somehow.
Well, because you would just blame it on the other people.
I mean, there's just no possible outcome where Trump doesn't win in their mind.
And that's that's fantastic, and I'm glad there's elaborate theories about how any kind of empirical evidence can be distracted from and made to look like a false flag voter fraud.
And these names are, Trump's name's on the ballot to begin with, and they're false flagging it, making it look like a giant landslide in order to invalidate the election.
Well, I think that this is one of the things, too, that kind of gives you the sense that the elections being stolen is more important to them than Trump winning.
I think what the Tucker Putin interview should teach us, which is really interesting, is this idea of like the strongman is no longer important, is no longer necessary.
You are, for whatever reason, telling me a history lesson.
I'm using you, right?
That idea, that idea of these people are not voting for Trump because Trump has a governing policy or anything along those lines.
They're voting for Trump because Trump is going to hurt bad people.
think what it is and why people don't understand what trump's actual holding power is is that trump is the one most likely to say he's going to hurt bad people and then do it you know like every other hillary no but but you know of course not because none of them are ever gonna do any of that stuff But it feels like he's the one who's going to do it.
If you vote for Jeb Bush, Jeb Bush can say, I'm going to lock up my political enemies.
But you're like, hey, listen, when you get into office, you're going to be like George Bush.
But I mean, also, part of why they want Trump a second go-around is because, you know, he failed to lock up Hillary, and he seems pretty pissed off about it.
That's real weird because the guy actually asks the question, which is, all right, all of these, you know, there's this elaborate power structure that's in place that we can't get around.
They control all of this shit.
What do we do?
How do we counter this?
And that is the critical important question that Alex can't really wrestle with.
And so when he's asked it, he pivots over into a transphobic headline that he's covering.
There's this comfort that is in that territory, palling around with this guy around the groups that they want to hurt.
Yeah, I wonder what it would be like, what the feeling would be like to live through the fall of Rome versus the fall of the Mongol Empire.
An empire that falls over 200 years versus an empire that falls over 20.
Like that is such a fascinating idea because Alex, you know, you could be saying at any point in time at like 25 AD, we're in the middle of the collapse right now, right?
But the collapse is still going to take another 200 years or whatever it is you want to talk about.
So we reached the end of this, and, you know, this was not necessarily the outburst that maybe you thought would come given the breaking news, but certainly there is the ominousness of being off air for the first hour and then trying to meld Trump's situation with his own in terms of creating a brand of this bankruptcy.
It does feel like there are steps that are happening behind the scenes that are going to, they're going to lead to that explosion at some point.
You know, one of the things that makes this a little different is there are external forces that are being applied through the courts and stuff that aren't necessarily things as nebulous as my ad revenue is down or I got kicked off Twitter or whatever.