Knowledge Fight dissects Alex Jones’ muted 2024 election coverage, contrasting his 2016 vitriol with this year’s restrained tone, exposing a movement-dependent identity. They debunk Texas fraud claims, mock MKUltra ties to Kamala Harris, and critique his "deep state purge" rhetoric as hollow. The episode reveals Jones’ reliance on conspiracy theatrics—like pairing Flynn with a pizza CEO—over accountability or solutions, while hosts joke about their own personas and promote knowledgefight.com, underscoring how Jones thrives on blame rather than substance. [Automatically generated summary]
It's a very strange sensation to watch the coverage on there again, because, as we've talked about in the past...
A lot of my curiosity and the interest in doing the show grew out of watching the debates on Infowars culminating in the 2016 election coverage where Alex raised his champagne glass and mocked the people at the Clinton campaign.
People aren't really talking about what he covers.
I don't know what his show is like.
What is the real shit here?
And so to eight years later be, like, in a...
Fairly similar situation.
Watching an election happen where Alex is celebrating Trump winning and also going out of his way to play footage of Harris rallies and going out of his way to try and laugh at these people.
And I think we all know how important we're all going to be for each other in the future, how crucial things are as things get bad.
You know, I don't know.
I'm not the best source of inspirational speech or insight on this.
But, you know, I think everybody who listens to this show probably understands, like, there's a lot of work ahead, and, you know, that's just a reality.
I don't think that it was a giant surprise that Trump won.
It was disappointing for sure, but at the beginning of the night, I felt like it could go either way.
The sense that I got was that reality could go either direction, but that the media that we end up covering a ton treated Trump's win as a foregone conclusion, and they were planning a ton of groundwork for the possibility of him losing.
There was just all, it's gonna be stolen, oh my god, there's people in Philadelphia who've been caught stealing.
I'll admit, though, I did think that there was a slight edge that Harris was holding, because Trump's a complete lunatic.
I thought things like Tucker talking about being attacked by a demon would be a splash of cold water in the face for people that would wake them up about the direction that that side of things was going.
But I think the main message that I've had from the election coverage on Infowars was that Alex is bored.
And I don't have any qualms about that even now that Trump won.
I still think Alex was intensely bored with the actual election, needing to distract himself from the real world with any momentarily exciting headline or fantasy prediction.
And from watching his coverage of the 2024 election, I still feel that way.
I still feel that he was bored, and he was just a bored guy with things going his way.
There's this kind of celebratory mood, but during the night, he played some footage of him and Roger celebrating 2016, and there's such a noticeable difference.
Yeah, no, that's the way that they made you feel in the lead-up to the election, and now that it's happened, everybody's gonna make you feel like, actually, things will be pretty much the same.
So I was trying to put my finger on what this difference that I felt between 2016 and 2024 Alex was.
And the thing that I kept coming back to is that Alex is no longer a free person.
In 2016, he'd agreed to shill for Trump, a guy who he'd previously shit on and reported was connected to the mob, but he was doing a gig.
In many ways, supporting Trump furthered his enterprise, and it opened up a ton of conspiracy possibilities.
Trump winning wasn't ideal, but it was an interesting development, and they might be able to work with it.
But Alex made a giant mistake by centering his identity on the power that he felt after this win.
He embellished stories and made shit up to make himself look closer to this power.
He abandoned old guests who didn't go along with Trump and brought in a new crew of idiots who were riding the same adjacency to power scam that Alex was.
Instead of being Alex Jones in a new world where Trump happened to be in power, Alex branded himself as the guy who Trump listens to and takes the lead from.
Alex was talking to all the Trump advisors, and Alex is actually the spiritual driver behind the whole Trump movement.
His essence became entwined with this in a way that wasn't freeing, but in fact shackled him.
And now Alex lives in a constricted world of being Alex Jones.
He's still Alex Jones, but he's tied down.
Let's imagine a scenario where Trump uses the military against Palestinian rights protesters or climate change protesters.
This would be as clear a breach of posse comitatus as you could imagine, and it couldn't be more of a red line for someone in Alex's political tradition.
Deploying FEMA after natural disasters is supposed to be a violation of posse comitatus to him, so how can he exist in this conspiracy space?
He would need to then be like, oh no, Trump is a villain.
Metaphorically, what he needs to do is go away to a space where people forget about him, and then he can come back and be the rampaging, returning hero.
The Bush gives you a, I'm outside the box legitimacy, and then the tail end Obama is like, and this is where I truly stepped into the role of anti-Obama guy.
So, like, this is just really bad for Alex, I think, the way that he's tied down.
And there's a ton of examples, like Trump using the military against protesters, where the archetype of Alex Jones should be yelling about how this powerful person is abusing their power.
The fake version of Alex that exists in people's minds needs to be opposed to Trump, because, you know, It's obvious.
But Alex has associated himself so much with the power that comes with being associated to Trump, he has to walk around pretending not to see very obvious shit that's in front of him.
And it's embarrassing.
He can only really sniff out one type of conspiracy at this point, which is the conspiracy against Trump.
Even when he's mad at Trump about things like the vaccine, which is a bioweapon against the American people, Alex will yell about how everyone tricked Trump and he's only guilty of being a proud man.
Yeah, the money-making conspiracy that's going to be...
What's going to do it for you in the coming years is going to be anti-billionaire stuff.
And if you're the biggest Elon Musk cheerleader there's ever been, you can't be like, oh, I hate billionaires, but the richest man in the world is totally cool.
He has the instinctual talent to do more than this, and in order to fit the role that he's in now, he needs to play to lower than his actual abilities, but I'm sure he knows that there isn't a real choice for him anymore.
The audience he's cultivated doesn't want what he used to pretend to be.
Everyone kind of knew the game, and one of the important things that happens in the whole night of Alex's election coverage...
Is this admission that he makes while he's bragging to his co-host for the night?
I'm really curious how much the Joe Rogan endorsement made a dent in a lot of these states that we're all concerned about, like the battleground states.
Early on in the podcast, we did an episode about Stefan Molyneux going to Poland and finally just accepting that he was a white nationalist.
Even though Molyneux was a side character on our show at best, I thought it merited an episode because what he experienced and expressed was such a crystallization of all of these assholes.
They express views that are clearly indicating their beliefs, like in Molyneux's case, that he was a white nationalist.
In response, people accurately describe his beliefs and tell him that he's a piece of shit because of his white nationalism.
People try to get mainstream platforms like YouTube to not host this very obviously white nationalist content.
Stefan, on some level, understands fully well that he's a white nationalist.
But he also knows that if he's too clear about it, no one except white nationalists are going to support him.
In order to trick non-white nationalists into defending his white nationalist content, it has to be about free speech or some other abstraction.
He's a defender of these abstract ideals, and the man is so worried about him that they've branded him unfairly as a white nationalist.
Can you believe that?
This is the way that they always do it.
They just try and call everything racist.
But then Trump wins, and Stefan goes to a white nationalist rally in Poland, where he feels the power of the thing that he's been pretending not to be, and the facade is no longer necessary.
In that moment, he just admits he's a white nationalist, and in essence, all of his critics have been right all along.
The same is true about a lot of these folks, and Alex is literally saying that it's true of Rogan.
Rogan may or may not actually be an overt white nationalist or anything, but he's a very extreme right-wing social media poisoned shithead.
For a long time, he's pretended to have a neutral, unbiased position, and his whole thing was about having these interesting conversations with interesting people.
But all the critics, folks like us, and many other people have been saying, this dude is super right-wing.
He is an idiot, and he is pushing this ideology.
And of course the response to that criticism is to pretend to be offended.
How dare you call me right-wing?
I just completely and mindlessly parrot social media right-wing grievance narratives and interview complete idiots from the right-wing media as if they were cool normal people.
Have you met my leftist friends Jimmy Dore and Dave Rubin?
The point of people criticizing Stefan Molyneux about being a white nationalist was to help the people who might watch his content understand what they were seeing.
It seems like this was a show about philosophy or current events, but he was pushing racist and sexist ideology masquerading as free speech and common sense.
He lied about what his agenda was in order to be more palatable to a wider audience, and then once he felt like he didn't need to hide anymore, he just accepted that the people criticizing him were right.
He viewed it as too late to matter, and the association with power that he felt from that rally was stronger than his need to lie.
The point of criticizing Rogan as a right-wing extremist promoting idiot was never to hurt his feelings or to ruin him.
It was to help people who might watch his show understand what they were getting into.
He wasn't being straight up about what he was advocating for, and that was pretty apparent if you paid attention.
Now the election's happened, and there's no need to pretend anymore.
He had Trump, Vance, and Elon Musk all on the show in the run-up to the election, which Alex is calling a victory lap.
It's honestly fine if he's a right-wing fanatic shithead.
If Rogan believes all that stuff, that's his business, and it's his right to express himself however he wants.
The problem is the idea that he was lying, and as Alex put it, quote, pretending to be nonpartisan this whole time, because the reason he would do that is to trick the audience into not realizing what they're signing up for.
I don't know if what Alex is saying is true, that Rogan has told them that, but I think this is a situation where Rogan should have to respond to this.
I need him to either accept that, yeah.
I've been lying to y 'all this whole time in order to trick you into associating cool things about me with voting for Trump, or I need him to deal with the fact that one of his quote-unquote best friends came on his show and said, my guy Joe's been lying to you for years in order to try and hurt Democrats.
So, I mean, he should have to face the music on this one way or the other.
Like, the Democrats, and Harris in particular, a lot of their messaging was around Project 2025, being like, this is what Trump's probably going to do.
These are staffing decisions and advocacy stuff that is likely...
That's a bunch of the most brainwashed idiots ever.
They don't know anything.
And it's not going to lie to us.
Real intelligence is observation in the universe of what's happening.
They've spent so much time in Texas.
Harris has spent so much time.
They've been snickering they're going to win.
They've been pumping us full of illegals.
They've been putting their people, they've got control of all the major cities.
They're openly engaged in fraud.
They just caught stealing a bunch of votes down in Houston.
And they have been salivating where we're all focused on the other battlegrounds and they flip Texas.
The only other person I've heard really warning of this is Marjorie Taylor Greene with me.
In the last two weeks, she's been on twice.
Now, this happened last time because they have so many baked-in fraudulent votes that it looks like they almost stole Florida four years ago that as it builds up, they run out of the votes in the Zuckerberg database, and then you see Cruz and others win.
But it was very close last time, and now they've been doubling down, so I'm literally...
Sick at my stomach, because if they ever steal Texas, they're never going to let it go back again with this fraud.
So I am just totally disgusted.
And let's just pray.
We've got to work harder and get these machines out, folks.
Yeah, based on the way she was sounding, I was thinking she was about to ask if they needed an ID to get alcohol in Texas, because that's how young she is sounding.
And it's really funny, too, because if you're watching this, Alex is staring off at the camera, and she's looking at him, and that really perfectly depicts this vibe that's going on.
She's having a conversation, or thinks she is, and Alex is yelling something.
So all that shit Alex is saying is bullshit, but she doesn't really have much of a choice but to nod along whenever he gives an answer to one of her questions.
Or else she has to be like, what are you talking about?
And then I guess my question with Texas is, do you think that the reason why it was showing blue earlier on is because we had this huge influx of people from California?
And then it seemed like the government here was trying to almost make it really unfriendly for them and made it really, really conservative to the point where now they're kind of rebelling.
Like, still be Republican, still be conservative, but instead of trying to push them out by making it unfriendly, you maybe actually go a little bit more towards the middle?
So this is the sort of moment that gives me a little bit of pause about Candace.
This is an actual question, which is super rare on Alex's show.
People are moving from California to Texas, and to punish them, Texas has gone super conservative to the point where it's kind of unpleasant to live there for most humans.
This seems antithetical to the supposed goal of creating a better state for people to live in.
If the state insists on being hyper-conservative as a reaction to more liberal people moving to the state, then it stands to reason that this is just going to create a backlash where Texas goes blue eventually.
So isn't it actually in the GOP's best interest to compromise a little bit and create a center-right power structure that's more durable than an extreme fringe one that they're trying to install that's really easy to fall apart?
This question implies an ability to think and engage with an idea, which Alex doesn't do all that well with.
Most of the people that he has on the show are more experienced with the game, and they wouldn't even ask a question like this, so Alex's only way to shut it down is to rattle off some buzzwords about how compromise isn't possible, his enemies aren't really even people, and then quickly jump to another subject.
She really genuinely would like to know, which is the last thing you can do in this space.
Like, it is literally, like, you understand that we're playing a game, answers like the ones you're looking for shouldn't exist, and we definitely don't want regular people knowing them.
You know, I may be pretty, pretty, I mean, at this point, among our listeners at the very least, I'm known for being angry about things from time to time.
I don't know why, but General Flynn and Papa John together on election night, no.
No, I demand we all stand up and say no.
Finally, it is time to no longer be another brick in the wall, Dan.
I mean, I would say that if there was a President and Bozo the Clown standing next to each other, I would feel similarly, and I would ask Bozo so many questions.
This is whenever there would just be pool parties, and MTV would just wander around the pool and be like, hey, what do you think about this to some random stranger?
And they would give as insightful an answer as, maybe I should give you free pizza!
Alex's mind goes to that because he wants the Empire to rise, and seeing Trump's favorable results, it excites him in a way that reminds him of Darth Vader crushing the Rebels in Star Wars.
I mean, even Harrison is probably like, man, you understand that the theme of that exact scene is that by indulging in the murder, he is sealing his own fate.
I mean, she engages with it the way that you're supposed to engage with a superior legend, where she's like, oh, wow, that's information you've told me.
You know, that's the way you're supposed to engage with somebody who is supposedly above you in the pecking order.
No, and I think that's really exciting, too, because it's really hard, even if you have someone that you want to win that gets the presidential election, if he has everyone working against him, it's like, how much change can he actually be effective with?
So he's giving a shallow answer to a question that she's asking that reveals a complete non-awareness of the reality of the election beyond the superficial optics and the social media bullshit that probably is a large part of her information base.
So we'll get back for Monday with a little bit of regrouping and seeing how the chips have fallen with Alex.
Sure.
Yeah, I think this was kind of uninspired on Alex's part, and I hope that between this and the coming auction, he's able to get to a point where there's a point.
I think one thing that I think people need to understand most about the media and the politicians in this particular circumstance is that the fun is in not winning.