#1037: May 12, 2025 dissects Alex Jones’ contradictory claims—defending Trump’s Qatar jet as "not corrupt" while ignoring legal quid pro quo risks, misrepresenting U.S.-China tariffs as consumer wins despite net losses, and falsely framing a generic Google notification as FBI surveillance. His desperate pivot to FBI whistleblower Kyle Serafin (suspended for anti-vax stances) exposes a pattern of weaponizing conspiracies for profit, from supplement sales to fabricated persecution narratives. Jones’ shrinking relevance mirrors his network’s ideological extremes: sincere but cringe-worthy figures like Laura Loomer clash with opportunists like Jacob Wall, all undermining credibility while clinging to cult-like loyalty. The episode reveals how fringe rhetoric thrives on performative outrage, not substance. [Automatically generated summary]
That over time, if we were to really map out your behaviors, there would be a trend towards a riskier set of behaviors with pinky ring as opposed to without.
Yeah, I mean, depending on how we set the variables and everything, I think you would find that, but I bet it would be, like, a very incremental, tiny little bit of added risk.
That's what they just try to use to manipulate people.
China completely capitulated.
And the corporate media is, oh my God, Trump backed off his tariffs.
Trump totally surrendered.
No.
China did what Trump asked them to do eight years ago.
And tried to do.
And even the Democrats passed trade policy and continued Trump's trade policy, but the Chinese in Switzerland told the Treasury Secretary, and he's on record now, we have the clip coming up, they said, listen, we already did the deal and you didn't enforce it.
So now there's this 90 days to implement all the finer pieces of it, but it will go through because China is on the verge of total collapse.
You are not going to see the corporate media tell you that.
You would think Trump is the biggest moron on earth.
So there was a major breakthrough in the trade negotiations between the United States and China, but it's kind of silly to say that China capitulated.
In the past months, Trump has imposed and stalled and then imposed giant tariffs on Chinese imports into the United States.
In response, China has put retaliatory tariffs in place and then has had the effect of basically creating an unofficial embargo between these two giant trading partners.
It was very dumb and unnecessary.
And then in April, China had added export restrictions on rare earth minerals and they'd done a bunch of other adjustments to their relation to the United States, not necessarily just involving trade or tariffs.
This agreement that they struck involved dropping those pointless tariffs that Trump had initiated, and as part of the deal, China's going to drop all the other stuff that they were doing in response to those tariffs.
We're essentially back where we started, but also clearly worse off.
In terms of international relations, I think that this whole affair paints China as a much more reliable and trustworthy trading partner, and it also kind of reveals that they have a bit more leverage than Trump and Alex want to admit.
And I think that Trump and his administration have such a lack of credibility that, like, them coming out and saying, like, Oh, man, we worked out a great deal here.
So China has agreed to get rid of all of its non-monetary tariffs, all the little hidden ones.
And this is a huge victory.
And I explained Trump's policies.
He's explained them.
Kirk Elliott, a great economist, explained it six months ago, long before Trump even got back in, that he comes out with a moderate tariff if they don't agree.
Boom.
It gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
Which is weaponization, because they've been weaponized against us.
And then when they back off, he comes back to what he first said.
I mean, that's just simple art of the deal stuff, and he didn't invent that, by the way.
I mean, it's like your kids.
First time you tell them don't do that, next time you go, hey, I'm warning you.
Third time, I'm going to whip your ass.
And, you know, if you're 16 and keep not doing what they say, they just say, hey, get your ass out of the house.
So this is the guy who's like all about the sacredness of the family and how the left is trying to destroy the family unit, but he's also someone who believes that violent threats and kicking your kid out of the house in their sophomore year of high school is good parenting.
Sure.
Seems like an asshole.
What Alex is describing as the art of the deal and also parenting is just bullying.
This is a cornerstone of Alex and Trump's worldview, and it shows a little bit of the path of how you need to respond to it.
All right, let me get into this historic events that are happening all around you right now and the incredible victories humanity in America is having.
But I want to say something out of the gates because it's very instructive and informative and important.
I notice a massive continued talking point on X that I'm not even looking for.
I just see it because I love reading comments and love seeing clips and articles and memes that people post in response to what I post, what others post.
I just love it.
I'm addicted to it.
It's been hours a day on it.
I can't stand it.
I mean, I can't stand it to not be able to not constantly be looking at it.
So apparently talking about what random people are saying on Twitter is more important than getting to the news.
This dude has a serious problem with social media.
It's taking over his life.
I can understand how this criticism that is being waged against Alex kind of stings him a bit because it does.
So this is a natural part of the challenge that his type of career presents.
The relationship with power is always something that he needs to manage, or else he is going to become seduced by it.
Someone in his position isn't a watchdog about corruption or any of that other shit, but in order to play that role, he needs to have a healthy distance.
And unfortunately, that means never really being associated with the actual power structure.
It's important for him to champion idealistic losers like Ron Paul, who have no shot of actually getting elected, because maintaining that support is easy.
unidentified
If only Ron Paul had got elected, it wouldn't be in this mess.
That's a simple refrain that he can pull out any time a Democrat or Republican president does something bad.
Maintaining this connection to power always allows you to be playing forward-thinking and optimistic games.
You're striving for a state of affairs that will never come to pass, but man, if they did, things would be great.
When your guy fucks around and gets elected, you have to make excuses and justify why things aren't as good as they should be or you said they were gonna be.
You become someone playing a defensive and backward-thinking game, and that's not the natural position for a media figure like Alex Jones to be embodying.
The criticisms of Alex aren't about him being close to power, but it's a byproduct of how what he does doesn't work in this state of affairs.
He's made a career off talking about how the media just lie to prop up the globalist legalism.
The character is weak to this thing, and that thing is exactly what's happening now, which is having to tow the line and carry water for the power establishment.
When the corporate media would call me that in the ADL, so they probably lost Senator Democrats, I would say, I'm pro-constitutional government, limited government, the American system, and I'm anti-occupied globalist government.
And so...
I am pro-government when it's limited and constitutional.
In fact, I defend it because it's of the people.
It is our country.
And I am anti-illegitimate government and will fight it with every ounce of energy and every drop of blood, sweat and tears, clawing with my fingernails to the last...
Yeah, I understand what Alex is trying to say, but this just doesn't work with the rest of his career.
His career has been based on a very strong position of states' rights over everything that wasn't specified as a power that the federal government was given in the Constitution.
That's what so many of his positions have been theoretically based on over the years.
What he's saying in that clip is basically, I'm not opposed to all government.
I'm just opposed to government I don't like, which is a meaningless statement.
It's fine to believe this, and I don't actually have a problem with someone saying something like that because it's kind of a fine position.
You would be saying the government itself is value neutral, and when it's used for good, it's good, and when it's not, it's bad.
But that's not what Alex believes.
He's intellectualized his feelings about government, and he's got a longstanding position that the federal government has to be weakened as much as possible, and that states have all the powers that aren't given to the federal government, specifically in the Constitution.
He's always been a critic of executive power, and the issue people have is that he's completely abandoned this essential piece of his philosophy.
Anyone paying even a little bit of attention can tell that he's fundamentally altered his beliefs about civics, and it makes sense that he's sensitive about being called out about this.
He was part of the popularization of the idea of democide, like government murdering people.
I mean, I guess the question for him is, like, this is...
Frustrating for him because I do think that this is inaccurate criticism because the accurate criticism would be to say Alex has been lying to us this whole time, right?
Not like Alex has changed his beliefs about blank, but Alex was lying to us from the jump.
Because in a way, if you want to provide some depth to the idea of states' rights as an actual philosophy that you could say was real, then it would be...
Less states' rights and more, here are all of the tools that we have with the Constitution, propaganda-wise, reality-wise, courts-wise, all of this, to protect against a centralized form of government that I don't like.
And then, here are all the tools that the Constitution and propaganda and all this stuff has to enforce an executive government that I do like.
You know, like, I am willing to lie, cheat, or steal to get power, is the actual criticism that is Alex, you know?
It was just what was convenient for you at the time because you knew that there was no chance of executive power being something that would go in your direction.
Yeah, and I think that the criticism and the fact that it's happening on Twitter, where he is obsessively scrolling around looking for dopamine hits, I think the reason it's so...
Palpable for him is that it does start to chip away at that facade of the character that he is.
You know what's great about social media is that if you're somebody with a propensity for repetitive thoughts, you want to have those externalized and then shot at you through a gun.
That's the way you want social media to do things.
Colonel Travis wrote in his final letter to my ancestors in Gonzales with instructions to take care of his son.
And that's what this is, ladies and gentlemen.
This is about victory or this is about death.
And we're going to get plenty of death if these people continue on, as you've seen with the poison shots, the GMO, the chemtrails, the fentanyl, and all the autism and all this garbage.
Keep in mind, this is a guy who's just mad about some things people said on Twitter.
Like, he's God's appointed soldier to kill the devil, but he also has to spend long chunks of time on air whining about how people don't respect him enough.
Also, I was thinking about that, like, I'm not promising a utopia thing, and that's sometimes not true.
Alex does get into utopian visions periodically, but I'm gonna pretend that he doesn't.
One version of Utopia is the creation of an ideal state, but another is the avoidance of a totally evil one.
Alex doesn't promise a positive vision of a Utopia, but he does promise the audience that if he wins, they'll be spared from the dystopia that he spends so much time on air describing.
In effect, he's created a hell for them to fear, and offered a path to salvation from it.
This is really no different than promising someone a utopia if you follow them.
It's just playing on their fear instead of optimism for a better tomorrow.
It's like, great, yeah, you don't promise a utopia, you promise avoiding hell.
And the fact that Alex has worked himself into this situation where in order for this business model to continue working, he has to keep getting called a piece of shit by the TV.
So the reason that prescription drug prices are lower in other countries is because other countries have regulations in place that limit those prices.
Sure.
Places like England have nationalized healthcare that drives down the prices, and essentially those countries don't allow pharmaceutical companies to set their own prices and run the game however they want.
On the flip side, the U.S. doesn't have these types of protections for the consumers, and big pharma and insurance companies can fleece us for medications at huge markups.
Trump signed an executive order that said that they were going to ask drug companies to voluntarily drop the prices of drugs, but there's no mechanism for infirmation.
forcing anything, and this will do jack shit to solve the problem that Americans face with health care.
the U.S. trade representative and Department of Commerce to take action against unreasonable and discriminatory policies that lower drug prices abroad.
The reason that drug prices are lower abroad is because of government-subsidized healthcare systems that set prices that drug companies are allowed to charge.
It's pretty clear that Trump's goal here is to put pressure on these countries to raise their drug prices on the premise that if everyone else were paying more for these drugs, the Americans would pay less.
Just from a purely law-based standpoint, Trump did nothing with this executive order, but it's clearly signaling a direction that involves U.S. consumers paying the same amount for drugs.
But it's trying to do that by forcing Europeans to pay more, which doesn't help anybody except for the drug companies.
Well, yeah, I think the articles that I've read maybe have had something along those lines in headlines, but then once you get into the body of the articles, they're like, this has nothing, this does nothing.
And when you look at it, the tariffs President Trump announced against China on April 2nd are being cut by 24 percentage points for this temporary period while retaining the remaining.
Ad valorem rate of 10% from that announcement, according to a joint statement.
Chad agreed to the same stipulations, adding that we'll adopt all necessary administrative measures to suspend or remove the non-tariff countermeasures taken against the United States since April 2nd.
The announcement stated, under the deal, reciprocal trade for both countries would be reduced by 115%.
The U.S. will temporarily lower its tariffs on Chinese goods from $145 to $30, and China will reduce its levels on American products from $125 to $10.
This is a good representation of why people would say that Alex is just working for the government now.
He's dumbing this issue down to a point where it's meaningless in order to present it as a win for Trump, because everything is a win for Trump.
These numbers really don't tell the whole story.
For most of Biden's presidency, the U.S. had a 19% tariff on Chinese exports, and China had a 21% tariff on ours.
However, there was a disproportionate application of Trump's tariffs.
For example, almost 67% of Chinese exports were subjected to U.S. tariffs before, whereas only 58% of U.S. exports to China were tariffed.
What Trump has done is raise these tariffs to a ridiculously high rate and subject 100% of Chinese exports to that tariff.
In response, China raised their ratio of tariff exports from the US to 100% as well, so we were actually disproportionately affected by that retaliatory jump.
This also fails to take into account that we have a sizable trade imbalance between our countries.
We import way more stuff from China than China imports from us, so on a consumer level, the U.S. is going to feel these impacts way more than Chinese citizens do.
Alex is so invested in spinning everything as a positive for Trump that it ends up creating surface-level coverage that even some passive idiots in his audience, they're probably starting to sense that.
But if I'm working for the FBI and I'm not seeing anybody else take the obvious job position of former FBI guy who's spreading conspiracy theories, I'm thinking about it.
It's got to be one better than working for the FBI.
I genuinely think if I'm an FBI agent, I'm going to my boss like, I'm going to want to raise, otherwise I have this opportunity to lie about you for money.
He's like, well, you can't do that, but we'll do everything else you said.
Whereas he had all that other rhetoric before that Trump's a tyrant, the Americans want to steal our country.
Trump asked for way, way, way, way, way more than he knows he's going to get.
Show that when they do everything else he really wanted.
Well, they feel like they did okay.
That is a basic tactic of negotiation.
So we're going from not having any negotiations and being totally sold out by the globalist middleman to the complete opposite, an incredible negotiator with an incredible economic team.
You're gonna sell me some stuff for the price that I think is pretty ridiculous, but I suggested at first, which you balked at until I had this gun in your face.
Boeing can't even build in a decade a new Air Force One.
And so Trump gets given one, and they go, oh, it's a bribe.
No, it's a bribe if it's not declared.
And you could say, oh, well.
The point is, is that that, of course, Boeing can make a jumbo jet for somebody else, but when they know it's a government contract, just like these fighter jets, they keep milking it and scamming it.
And they've already, they're going to be like $8 billion for it, and Trump negotiated it six, seven years ago, down to $1.4 billion, and they can't even deliver one?
Alex's numbers are a little off, but this is really funny.
The idea that Alex Jones, the champion against corruption, is having to bend over backwards to justify Trump being personally given a jumbo jet worth $400 million by Qatar.
This is so comically corrupt that Alex should really just ignore it.
I don't believe that people talk about Illuminati humiliation rituals.
I don't believe in any of that stuff, but this has the feeling of a public humiliation ritual.
Alex having to go out on air and defend Trump getting a plane from Qatar.
So the thing is, as laid out by Politico, this isn't a gift to the U.S. government.
It's a luxury plane that's a gift to Trump and an expense to the taxpayers.
From their article, quote, A private contractor would have to rip it apart and turn the jet into a flying White House for the president with secure communications and classified upgrades, according to former Air Force officials and lawmakers.
An expensive and complicated prospect that could cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
Beyond any other conversation, which it is absolutely fucked up, but even then, he can't take it.
Because if I'm Cutter, and I'm giving you, personally, a $400 million jet, I am loading that jet with all kinds of spying-ass spy shit that's ever been spied on for spies.
It's like Elon Musk donating Starlink to the air traffic control systems when they go down, or donating them during the fires in the Palisades, or donating them during the hurricane.
So, Qatar did not offer to donate the plane to the U.S. government.
It's a gift to Trump, and he's explicitly said that he would donate the plane to his presidential library after his term ended.
This is a gift for a person, not the government, and Alex is directly lying about that to cover up Trump's praise and corruption.
Also, Elon isn't just donating Starlink terminals because he's a great person and he wants everyone to be online.
It's part of a business strategy where companies try to circumvent the government contractor competition by offering their product for free.
By insinuating yourself this way, you can provide a service that ends up becoming essential to the point where your ability to remove that service gives you outsized influence and the ability to demand a lot of money.
He's provided Starlink terminals in places that need them so it becomes more costly to try and go with another vendor than just continue working with him.
He's the proverbial drug dealer who gives you that first hit for free just out of the goodness of his heart.
It's crazy how all of the government computers were given Microsoft Windows early on for free, and now suddenly it costs a lot of money and they can't not use it.
And we saw this even play out with the war in Ukraine.
When the war broke out, Musk donated 20,000 Starlink units to the country to provide networking and communications that were based in satellites so they would still work, despite Russia taking out major pieces of Ukrainian infrastructure.
Then, in November 2022, Musk said that it was too expensive for him to continue offering these units, telling the Pentagon that they would need to pay for it, saying it would cost $120 million to finish out that year and $400 million for the next year.
Musk essentially put the government in a position where they would need to pay him a shitload of money to continue enjoying the gift he supposedly gave them, or they would need to come up with a replacement satellite communication system, or leave Ukraine in the dark.
Naturally, in 2023, the Pentagon announced that they had awarded Musk and SpaceX a contract to provide the Starlink service in Ukraine.
This isn't a gift or a donation.
It's a business model that is only a little bit different from extortion.
Yeah.
Musk is far from the only person who engages in these kinds of business practices like we discussed with Microsoft.
And when your personal job is going to end before the consequences of a deal like this are going to fully mature, what do you really care at the end of the day?
Not least of which, because at the end of your term, you'll probably get a job with the people who fleeced the people you were representing.
Let's get into what he did with the executive order on prescription drugs that they've been talking about for decades.
Why do we pay more?
Why do we pay more?
Because we have a political establishment, both Republican and Democrat.
That got together and screwed the people.
And then the drugs we get and that they push are always the newest, dangerous ones that are the highest cost because they make the most money off of it and it fits their agenda to kill us, to depopulate us.
But starting today, the United States will no longer subsidize the health care of foreign countries, which is what we were doing.
We're subsidizing others' health care.
The country is where they...
Paid a small fraction of what, for the same drug that what we pay many, many times more for, and will no longer tolerate profiteering and price gouging from Big Pharma, but again, it was really the countries that forced Big Pharma to do things that, frankly, I'm not sure they really felt comfortable doing, but they've gotten away with it, these countries.
To be clear, nothing that Trump is doing with that executive order will have any effect on US consumer prices for prescription drugs.
If you listen to what he's saying, he's complaining that other countries have set prices that drug companies can't charge more than, and that's what's unfair.
In the fantasy that he has, there's a set amount that these drug companies need to make.
Let's say $100 billion a year.
They need to make this amount in order to keep making new drugs and curing things, so it's really important that they make that much.
Europe has set a law in place that these companies can only make $20 billion from their countries, so in order to make the amount they need, they charge the U.S. consumers $80 billion.
In reality, Trump wants to pressure these other countries to drop their price controls so that drug companies can charge them more, which won't make a difference with U.S. consumer drug prices.
It's like, I've never not seen it be the case where somebody's gone on TV and been like, actually, this thing that's going to save you money, that's terrible for you!
You want us to have the profits, otherwise we'll steal your legs!
Yeah, I mean, if you asked somebody who was, like, I don't know, running a check cashing place or something like that, whether or not they provide a service, they'd probably say yes.
I think he is really deluded about where he is in terms of, like, if you are saying Trump is cool to have Qatar give him a plane, and that Drudge is Democratic Party corporate media because there's criticism of this flagrant corruption, you are so deep.
So on our last episode, Alex was bragging about how Laura Loomer was critical of Trump's choice for Surgeon General, which made Trump change his mind.
She was the shining example of constructive criticism, the part of the base that was holding Trump's feet to the fire.
But now she doesn't get it.
Alex's world has a loomer problem, because they've empowered her a little bit too much, and she isn't going to play ball.
She's a chaotic influence who isn't playing the same games as all of these people around her.
All these assholes pretend that they were like Jewish people in the lead-up to World War II and they got kicked off Twitter.
They whined about how they were being put into digital ghettos because that helped them inflame the feelings of persecution that animate the audience, which then helps them sell supplements.
Meanwhile, Laura Loomer put a Star of David on and handcuffed herself to the door of Twitter's headquarters.
It was embarrassing and she forgot to handcuff herself to both doors so people just walked around her, but I think that's representative of the different game that she's playing.
She sucks and is wrong about almost everything, but her actions also often have the subtext of, okay, what if we mean it?
Whereas all of these other figures in Alex's orbit, they know that what they're saying is bullshit and they don't take any of it too seriously.
So now you have things like Trump saying that he's going to accept an obviously illegal gift from the government of Qatar and Loomer is rightly responding, hey, isn't this the opposite of what we're supposed to pretend to support?
Alex's response is exactly right.
Sometimes she doesn't get it.
Sometimes she doesn't get that their media space is weaponized propaganda and you aren't supposed to criticize your side for not following the rules you demand the other side follow.
She and Nick Fuentes are good examples of people that the right-wing media should have done everything they could to sideline a long time ago.
They were too...
It's circumstantially profitable for the right-wing media to use, and they've gotten out of hand.
They have too much status and have built organic audiences of their own that aren't going to go away, and they're not going to play ball.
It is comforting when you're anti-conspiracy theory-ing to know that confidently no one in charge of anything Has a legitimate long-term plan for anything.
If you look back, it's like, you guys, it's fairly obvious that this was going to happen.
But you wanted it too bad.
Because there's so much of that Alex addiction of like, yeah, but he's useful now.
Yeah, and I was thinking over a lot of the things that Laura Loomer's done in her career, and a lot of it is the actions of someone taking seriously something everybody else knows not to take seriously.
We have one last clip here, and it's because Alex interviews that FBI whistleblower he's got, and I just decided to turn it off because he tells this story.
So I used to be on the other end of this, and that's what's, I guess, the weirdest part for me.
So I used to be able to serve process to people like Google or Meta or your cell phone companies and so on.
And if we wanted them to preserve data and then we wanted to serve either a subpoena or what's called a national security letter, and that's a secret subpoena, or a search warrant for content or information, then we would do so.
And then eventually...
I don't want Alex Jones to know that I'm in his emails.
So we would ask that to be under seal for a period of time.
At some point in time, either the case would conclude or we would bring out an indictment so you knew about it because you've been arrested.
Then we would go out and we would let this thing lapse and you would get this email notifying you.
So I'm just going to read it.
It says, this is from Google.
It's on their official letterhead.
It says, hello, Google received and responded to a legal process issued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, my ex-girlfriend, my former employer, compelling the release of information related to your Google account.
A court order previously prohibited, that's the thing I just mentioned, Google from notifying you of the legal process.
We're now permitted to disclose the receipt of legal process.
The agency reference number is as follows.
And there's a number there, which is a grand jury subpoena.
It says GJ, so that's what we assume for that one.
There's some kind of a subpoena.
I don't know exactly what that means, but the odds are that this was served in 2023.
Chaos that I feel when I look at this is that my former agency, and I made a note about what the Stasi was, so a lot of people probably are familiar with that term, but it gets thrown around and bandied around an awful lot.
They were the East German secret police, and they operated for 40 years, and they were responsible for three things in particular.
Domestic surveillance, that's what the FBI does.
Intelligence gathering, that's a post-9-11 FBI thing in a very big way.
And suppressing dissent, which has been basically a post-Obama era FBI mandate going after dissent.
So we saw this stuff with the...
We saw this stuff happening under Trump's first administration where he was removed from social media.
Suppressing dissent means we now decide whether or not you're allowed to have all the information you want, and we're going to go after people that have contrary viewpoints.
And your phone got caught up in the geolocation data that the police were running when they were trying to track the person's phone who committed this crime.
So generally, when you get an email like this...
It is indicative not of they've been spying on your email and everything that you've...
Whatever he's describing, like there's a grand jury targeting you.
No, it's that your phone got caught up in a dragnet.
So if this is the level of shit we're going with, then I think that this is a guy who, like you were describing, rightly saw an opportunity for a career change.
As opposed to, is someone I'm going to take seriously as an FBI whistleblower?
Well, the only problem is that Drudge and Loomer are being critical of it, so maybe that's forcing the issue in his head a little bit, but he still could ignore it.
unidentified
Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, you're fighting ghosts.