#1004: January 23, 2025 dissects Alex Jones’ hyperbole—from framing The Challenge All Stars as a "maturity test" to his violent rhetoric about Trump’s Davos speech, dismissed by Dan Friesen as delusional. Ezra Levant’s illegal Swiss confrontation with Larry Fink is mocked, while Jones’ bug-protein panic ignores explicit labeling. His support for Trump’s birthright citizenship order and cartel terrorism claims reveal selective outrage, yet contradictions emerge: past anti-military intervention stances clash with his own escalationist framing. JFK files hype collides with debunked 1971 conspiracy clips, exposing Jones’ reliance on recycled theories over substance. The episode underscores how fringe narratives thrive on misdirection and performative outrage, even as facts dismantle them. [Automatically generated summary]
Maybe we've been spoiled because they haven't been put to the crucible of actually being mature in a situation with the person who makes them most immature.
If they just put somebody on there and were like, this person's been on the challenge and we're just really strong about it, I think I would believe them, even if they weren't.
Still dirty kind of songs that were sexy, but in like a, oh, this is a Coke-filled, like, this is the bad night where you've had too much Coke and you woke up and you're like, ah, this is no good.
That's the advantage of having the relationship with music that I do, is that I've heard everything in a Target or something, but I have no idea who sings it.
I don't like to hype things, but people are designed to hype.
I am going to paint once a week on air, and I'm going to let callers call in.
We'll also take emails and request what you want to see me paint.
One, two, three, Matt Damon!
Matt Damon!
There you go.
Party time.
I'm going to get in your guts.
And the Nazis, in my view, were thugs that shook people down to a lot of really bad things.
But they did good things, too.
We're going to stop dissing the Nazis all the time.
Okay.
I'm thinking about doing some shows, too, where I run the whole thing myself, just hit record, and sit in the dark with just a few candles and candlelight and talk about the nature of the world universe.
I mean, you know, a big old juicy ribeye, folks, is as good as, you know, sex with your wife.
I don't know how much Alex watched, but I sat through the full 45 minutes, including the question and answer segment, and I didn't come away with the impression that he was telling them that their new world order system was dead.
If anything, I think the tone was collegial and it involved Trump discussing how they're all going to do a lot of business in the coming years.
In Alex's head and the version of Trump he's built up for the audience to worship, this is a guy who would storm into Davos and tell them all to get lost.
He would upend the whole thing because it was a corrupt system and he was the redeemer.
But that didn't happen.
He gave a speech about his policy ideas, was very polite to the rich elites he's friends with, and then took questions for half an hour.
The problem is that Alex still needs to maintain the image he's built up for the audience, so despite this being a fairly boring speech Trump gave at the central power hub of the globalists, and the fact that Klaus Schwab literally introduced Trump on stage, Alex has to tell the story as Trump going in there loaded for bear, but it's all just an illusion.
Have you ever seen the, like, directors for an NFL broadcast?
They'll do those things where they go behind the scenes and there's somebody who's got, like, 15 different shots Like, hey, can we go to camera three during...
I don't know if you remember this, but the young man who shot President Trump in the ear one inch away from murdering him bizarrely appeared in a BlackRock corporate video.
And I forgot about that in the heat of the moment.
He stops and he takes out his personal cell phone, aims it right at my face, snap, does the same to Avi Yamini, snap, does it to our cameraman.
And I'm thinking...
I mean, we...
Is he gonna share this with who?
Is he gonna send this to some attack dog?
Is he gonna...
And it was only later that I remembered that that corporate video he made contained, bizarrely...
The guy who, almost like I was stumbling into some, maybe BlackRock is so big and dark and nefarious that they have sort of a team of wet work experts.
See, that's an interesting construction, and I would love to see some kind of proof for this conspiracy that Ezra's promoting.
According to him, BlackRock comes in and invests in a company, and then they demand that the company be woke, or else they'll lose the investment that BlackRock put in.
Here's what I need for him to present for me to even begin to take this seriously.
I would need to see internal demands from BlackRock to these companies that they go woke, and Ezra repeating DEI and ESG over and over again, that's not going to be enough.
I need something that demonstrates that the investment and, quote, going woke are connected.
To make that piece of the argument stronger, I would need to see examples of companies who were not necessarily woke, who took in BlackRock money and then went woke.
It shouldn't be too difficult to make a timeline if what Ezra is saying is true, so I would welcome him to present that and show it.
When looking at this argument, you want to try and find a counterexample that might challenge the faulty premises that Ezra is working with.
According to his thinking, companies that get BlackRock investment have these demands made of them, so they become woke.
A good counterexample would be a company that he definitely doesn't think is woke at all who has BlackRock investment.
These guys all love Elon Musk so much, so just take a look at Tesla.
It turns out BlackRock manages just under 200 million shares of their stock, and if you add that amount to the amounts held by State Street and Vanguard, the total comes up to over 500 million shares.
This tends to indicate that it's possible to have BlackRock investment in a company and it not be some kind of a woke shakedown.
Without that premise in place, Ezra's argument kind of falls apart, and it's shown to mean nothing.
If they quote-unquote abandoned Woke and BlackRock still is investing in them, then it means the ideology never really meant anything and you were all just fighting ghosts.
You know, sometimes it's like, I know when you're lying about something because you want to convince people of some bullshit, but sometimes that stuff's so crazy.
It's just him and his buddy asking Larry Fink mean questions and him not responding.
Also, it makes total sense for Fink to take their picture, because what Ezra is doing is very much illegal in Switzerland.
Perhaps Ezra and Alex don't care about things like national sovereignty, but Switzerland has a very different understanding of freedom of speech and press than we do.
Specifically, in Switzerland, as a member of the public, you have a right to not be photographed without your consent.
You own the right to your own image, so a person taking your picture has to get permission in order to use it.
According to Swiss law, Ezra is brazenly harassing Larry Fink, and now he's illegally publishing his image without consent.
Like, there are even stipulations in Swiss law about, like, if you take a crowd shot, that's okay, but if someone sticks out in that crowd, you have to get that permission.
If you want to use it, especially in, like, a commercial setting.
You know, and it feels like an evolution of the dashboard videos where they're like, I'm about to go through this checkpoint and we're going to see if they're going to respect my Fourth Amendment rights or whatever.
And then they're just yelling at the guy and he's like...
By the way, Elon, that's key again, Elon, that's why I love interviewing you, Elon has said for decades, but all the time, he tells his managers and crew...
I want you to tell me bad news.
I want you to disagree with me when you think I'm wrong.
I want to be challenged because that's the opposite of being stagnant.
But he talks about all these other corporations and government.
They only want yes-men around them and how dangerous that is.
But I think it's crazy so tactically, because the criticism of billionaires is probably pretty accurate, but they love Elon Musk, so they have to make him immune from that criticism.
It's comical, this level of trying to police someone's reaction.
Or, what it is, is he's an instigator.
You know, as a little man to somebody who goes out and he agitates, and you want to create compelling content through that.
You want to go out and get into a fight with Larry Fink.
But guess what?
He's not responding to your stupid ass.
So you get nothing.
This video is nothing except you and your friend looking like idiots.
So you have to find something to complain about, and all you've got is the bodyguard said something kind of glib when one of your cameramen slipped on ice.
The conspiracy isn't supposed to be that there are some products that use insect-derived protein.
It's that the globalists want to force you to only eat the bugs by banning the sale of things like beef and chicken.
Proving that there are insect-derived energy bars being sold by companies in Europe does zero towards establishing this conspiracy.
So the company that Ezra is talking about is called Pumba, and in big letters on each bar, it says, quote, If Ezra cared at all, he would know that this is a term used to describe taking things that would often otherwise be waste and making them into nutritious foods.
That should have been his first tip-off.
The second thing he should have noticed is that in the ingredients section, things are in Swiss and French, because this is a Swiss company.
It says on the ingredients list, in bold letters, Alphatobus dipernis, followed by Insectamel, in parentheses, which translates to Insect Meal.
His complaint is that it doesn't say that there are bugs in this thing, but it's in the ingredients list, and the bar is labeled Upcycled Food.
On their website, they say, quote, Pumba's mission is to bring the best insect-based foods to people around the globe, promoting both personal well-being and environmental stewardship.
This isn't something they're hiding.
What the fuck are you doing?
This is a really good encapsulation of how pathetic this conspiracy ecosystem is.
Ezra is on to complain about how Larry Fink didn't answer his questions, and he drops this bombshell that a company in Switzerland uses alternative protein sources for its energy bar.
So, if you go strictly by the, if it looks good, I'm supposed to eat it rule, I don't know why anyone would eat lobsters, mushrooms, mollusks, or all sort of things that are perfectly acceptable foods.
However, he pulls up a headline that says, quote, bugs and food, a recipe for cancer.
And the first thing I would point out is this ends in a question mark.
This is not a statement, it is a query.
This is an article published in the journal Cell Metabolism in 2014 and based on how Alex is talking about it you would think that this is about how having a diet that includes bugs will lead to an increase in your risk of cancer.
However, if you read the article, it's about something else altogether.
The paper involves cancer risk in mice and questions some conventional understandings about obesity and cancer.
Specifically, the understanding at the time that was being examined was that when mice have a high fat diet, they develop obesity and inflammation, which then leads to cancer.
However, the analysis these researchers came to was that the development of cancer actually preceded the obesity and inflammation in the mice that were fed a high fat diet.
So there must be another contributing factor.
They posit that this other factor is microbial makeup inside the mouse's guts.
These bacteria and microbes are the.
Right, right, right, right, right.
Alex has no idea what information he's presenting to the audience, and he doesn't care.
That headline appears to make the point that he's trying to make, so it's presented fraudulently in order to make that point.
No, I remember eight years ago, I remember reading something specifically about this whole concept and just being like, oh, what we found is that none of that happens, but there are fucking, like, ten Russian people who've done it in the past hundred years, and you're like...
As I recall from looking into it, it is something that happens, but it happens on such a small level to be, like, what you're really doing is hurting people.
You gain much more kind of by just being like, alright, some people are going to exploit whatever, who cares?
And I want to raise this now without saying any names because I've seen a bunch of people doing it without even looking.
It's all over the place.
Attacking Tom Homan, the new border czar, and attacking Trump when Tom Homan goes on TV and says, we're going to target the worst people first.
And then taking that, meaning they're not going to get everybody.
You better get the worst people first.
I mean, if you're in a small town and there's six, seven cops on duty at midnight and a bunch of calls come in, somebody is shooting up the local country dance bar and another call comes in of a domestic dispute.
And another call comes in about a car wreck.
And then what do the cops do?
The police station, whoever's on duty and charge, calls out and says, respond to that first.
Earlier today, NBC crews filmed multiple federal agents.
Rounding people up from apartments in Boston, and we already showed some of that.
And they've got it in Los Angeles.
They've got it in Houston.
Trump deportation plan begins to take shape as immigrant communities face fear and uncertainty.
Oh, really?
Look at this photo.
At the U.S.-Mexico border, migrants experience the reality of Trump's first few days, and they're crying, and it's a woman.
Yeah.
Amos International says 80-plus percent of the women and girls that come across that border have been raped on the other side, not here, by the smugglers.
It's all, oh, look, she got told to come up here, and now she just can't waltz in and have her baby and have it all paid for, be a Democrat, live on welfare, and fly her foreign flag.
No.
What about this guy?
Oh, look, she's crying.
Poor thing.
What about Border Patrol agent was killed in Vermont and he worked at the Pentagon during 9-11 AP?
U.S. Border Patrol agent was killed in Vermont during a traffic stop near the Canadian border, was a military veteran who worked security duty at the Pentagon during 7-11.
Notice, the article's not about how an illegal alien with prior violent convictions that had been ordered deported but wasn't deported by the Biden system because they would just bureaucratically block it.
They don't even get into his...
Name or any of it until you dig deeper because they want to make it all about he just got killed.
I mean, how long do I got to read here until I find out this guy did this?
So you see here Alex trying to make the audience not feel bad for a person being caught up in an ICE raid by distracting them with a story about how this Border Patrol agent was shot in Vermont.
Alex knows nothing about that story, and he's just adding in some details in order to make it fit its narrative, like the whole storyline about how this person who shot the Border Patrol agent was an undocumented immigrant with a prior violent conviction that was supposed to be deported, but that was stopped by Biden.
All of that is from Alex's imagination.
As it stands now, they've not said who actually shot that agent, which brings up the kind of sad possibility that he might have been shot by friendly fire during the standoff.
What we do know is that it's pretty unlikely that the man who's from Germany, Felix Backholt, was the one who shot him, because he was in the process of pulling a weapon when he was shot and killed.
The police and Theresa Youngblood, the woman from Washington, were the ones who got off shots.
As far as I can tell, Bockholt doesn't have a history of violent convictions and wasn't ordered deported.
He came from Germany to Canada to attend university in 2015 and then came to the United States and overstayed a visa.
This story is unfolding in a very crazy way, but I don't think it works in any way that Alex needs it to.
At this point, the details are kind of sketchy, but it looks like it's possible that this killing of this Border Patrol agent could be connected to some other murders.
There's also some insinuations that the people who carried out the shooting might have been trans and vegan, so I would expect this to pivot from being an immigration narrative into being an anti-LGBTQ one, if Alex continues with it at all.
It has all the makings of a completely insane story, but Alex knows nothing about any of the details and doesn't care.
It's a border patrol agent who was shot, so I can use that to distract from your feelings of genuine empathy that you should have for seeing these people mistreated.
What we need to do is make it mandatory to always be wearing hockey gloves.
All right?
So now we're all wearing hockey gloves, and that means that whenever Alex says something like that, I can just drop my hockey gloves, and we are in a fight.
You know what I'm saying?
We're in a hockey-style fight.
Everybody knows what the signals are.
We've got a social kind of thing going on.
And because you're wearing the hockey gloves, can't mess with a gun.
When I first saw this headline, it was just a screenshot on X. I said, is that fake?
And I went and clicked, and no, it wasn't, of course.
Almost as silly as the headline in 1906, it'll take a million years for men to fly, and a week later the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk documented it.
It happened before.
How labeling cartels terrorists could hurt the U.S. economy.
And I'm like, is that real?
Yeah, here it is.
How labeling cartels terrorists, I mean, if anybody's terrorist, it's them, could hurt the U.S. economy.
And have you seen the carnage, the death, the fentanyl, the stuff they do?
And you read it, and it's like a joke.
And then they give their excuses.
It doesn't even...
It's like humanizes the cartels.
And now the Mexican pesos dropping and all the rest of it because he runs that country.
Trump-designated cartels, terror groups, could hurt the U.S. economy, New York Times warns.
Mexico-based New York Times reporter argues Trump order could have a major impact on U.S.-Mexico given their deep economic interdependence to their admitting Mexico runs off dry.
So I'm not interested in supporting or defending drug cartels, but I do think that Alex's position is entirely inconsistent with his previously stated beliefs, and pretending that people oppose Trump labeling cartels as international terror groups because they want to defend the cartels is a cowardly dodge for him to make.
There are a number of issues here and a compelling reason why no other president has ever made a move like this.
The first is that the mainstream economy of Mexico is deeply penetrated by the cartels, in a way that a lot of normal businesses are used as fronts to launder money.
Because this is the case, most analysts believe that it would be almost impossible to discern which businesses are cartel-connected and which are not, so when you label these cartels as international terrorist groups, it could now be considered materially supporting a terrorist group if you invest in the wrong company in Mexico.
You introduce a lot of legal issues, and one of the downstream results is that people just stop taking the risk of investing in any businesses in Mexico in fear that they might unknowingly be supporting terrorism.
The second is that the United States has a terrible track record of dealing with terrorist groups.
The last 20 years has been marked by us calling something a terrorist group and then using that as a justification to bomb people.
Labeling the cartels as international terrorist groups creates a fear that this is going to lead to more of that.
Trump could demand that they be addressed militarily, and if Mexico's response isn't satisfactory, it's easy to imagine him accusing them of harboring terrorists and we need to go in and take care of it ourselves.
This could easily be seen, uh, you can see how...
Turn into justification for needing to send boots on the ground to fight the terrorists.
Alex should know this.
He's been around the whole Iraq war period.
He knows this shit.
It's impossible he doesn't understand that.
This move is counterproductive, which is what people oppose in it.
That's when they say they oppose this kind of declaration.
That's what they mean.
Alex is just incapable of conversations about news that go any deeper than a headline.
Yeah, I'm getting the feeling like maybe we should do a moratorium on those headlines and just replace it with being near United States geographically alarms Mexico.
He didn't just pull 52 of the neocon and globalist leftist that worked against him and didn't just block the Hunter Biden stuff, but they ran a crossfire hurricane, all of it, and a lot of them are neocons.
A lot of the top ones are.
So John Bolton lost his security clearance.
And now Pompeo.
Oh, that guy's a snake in the grass.
Reuters.
Trump revoked security protection.
Yeah, they're also pulling their security.
You don't get that.
Like, Fauci needs to have his pulled.
He was getting it illegally.
15 agents, 24 hours a day.
I think it was like, it was some giant number.
It was like in the tens of millions they spend on Fauci alone.
Trump revokes security protection for Pompeo and a former aide.
Good.
Pure gold.
John Brennan bellyaching about his security clearance being pulled over laptop intel letter.
So John Brennan's security clearance was revoked in 2018.
Alex adding that in with these headlines is a little bit confusing.
I imagine he just forgot that that happened in Trump's first term.
Alex is also mixing up his stories.
John Bolton had his security clearance revoked, but Mike Pompeo had his security detail pulled.
This is a concern because there have been rumblings for years that Iran very much wants to assassinate Mike Pompeo because he played a role in the killing of Qasem Soleimani.
So without that security detail, that task would be a lot easier.
So Alex hasn't gotten deep into any of the new subjects that he's touched on on the show, but if you pay attention to what he's saying, this makes total sense.
He's not going to take calls because he needs to spend more time on the show covering subjects that his staff can then cut into clips that they can use as clickbait on Twitter.
That's moving the needle as much as he sees big...
this is a smart thing for him to maximize.
He has more fun and would rather take calls, maybe, but the way he believes he can make the most money is to make clickbait bullshit that flies around on Twitter.
It's a terrible strategy, and I'm therefore glad that Alex thinks it's a good strategy.
Well, and I think that there's something really sad to think about that is Alex's metrics for his own, like...
His brilliance and his own relevance and all of this is just tied to Twitter views.
If something should happen and Elon decides you're not in my good graces anymore and bans Alex from Twitter, he's spent so much time building up the hundreds of millions of views that they're getting on there.
Okay, so when you give a single person, usually megalomaniacal, an absurd amount of power over you, then whenever they whimsically change their mind, as they are known to do, there are lots of protections.
So nothing says tip of the spear quite like openly and constantly acknowledging that you don't even really give a shit about the first six minutes of every hour because it doesn't go out on the tiny number of radio stations that air your show.
John Ratcliffe is a terrible choice for the CIA, seeing as he was a Bush-era anti-terrorism chief in the Department of Justice and ran a law firm with John Ashcroft.
Since then, he's shown a lot of loyalty to Trump, so Alex is cool with it.
Who cares?
Incidentally, Alex can laugh all he wants here, but Trump's actions in California were almost a huge disaster.
He sent the Army Corps of Engineers to open up dams to increase the flow of water, which local authorities said would have caused severe flooding.
A Politico article says, quote, Local officials had to talk the Army Corps of Engineers down.
Victor Hernandez, a water manager in the area, said he'd not seen anything like it in 25 years on the job and that it was, quote, The release of that much water that quickly would have the risk of damaging the channels, of causing flooding of farmland and communities nearby, and creating shortages of water meant for irrigation later.
This will have no effect on firefighting ability, has potentially disastrous consequences, and is at best kind of a waste.
The point of doing something like this is the exercise of power.
Just don't bring up Mario if you don't know the power-ups and then bring up one that is in active opposition to then the reference to the Wizard of Oz that you...
He's misunderstood 18 different references in the same sentence.
Also get the clip ready of Trump on Hannity talking about, isn't it interesting, Biden pardoned everybody that was doing stuff for him for his crimes but didn't pardon himself.
Obviously talking about going after him because he's no longer the president and doesn't have immunity.
He just signed the executive order ordering all of the remaining JFK files to be released.
Previously, they slow-rolled it.
Trump is ordering them released today.
If they aren't, he'll send in the federal marshals.
Trump orders the release of the final JFK assassination documents.
And just...
A week and a half ago, we aired the exclusive audio from 1971 of the former head of the DNC and LBJ's business manager and Billy Saul Estes talking about LBJ ordering the murder of JFK.
Talk about smoking gun.
That interview got over 100 million viewers and listeners on Real Alex Jones.
Someone claiming to be his grandson released a tape of him talking about it, but that doesn't really add to the conversation about the theory that LBJ killed JFK.
As for the declassifying of JFK files, that's a real dud.
Trump probably should do it, because until someone does, it'll hang over everyone's head as some kind of weird conspiracy MacGuffin, but it's super unlikely that there's anything left to declassify that means anything.
Most stuff has already been declassified, and people who study this subject will generally tell you that the remaining classified material is mostly only still classified because it contains sensitive personal information.
This is an action Trump can take to really excite the base, but they'll quickly lose focus from the fact that the declassified documents don't really reveal anything they hope they will, and they'll move along and just be like, Trump told us all the truth about JFK.
Yeah, but here's what would be fun, because this is the way he made it sound.
If we don't do this, I'm going to send in the federal marshals.
So, in this scenario, they decide not to do it.
And then federal marshals have to go.
Like, does that mean that there's some sort of Knights Templar group within this classification who's like, we have to protect the JFK documents with our lives, man.