Jordan Holmes and Dan Friesen dissect Knowledge Fight’s analysis of Alex Jones’ exploitation of Kelly Rushing, a caller falsely framed as a victim of police tyranny after a 2004 incident involving anti-government tapes in Trooper Louis Dodd’s mailbox—charges later dismissed. Jones sensationalized the case (claiming "lasers," "acid-spitting threats") to push his Infowar narrative, ignoring Kelly’s admitted wrongdoing and legal advice missteps. The hosts expose how Jones weaponizes perceived persecution for profit, contrasting his performative liberty rhetoric with real-world consequences, revealing a pattern of manipulation over principle. [Automatically generated summary]
This is what I just thought of, based on what you said.
What we should do, if the future is going to be worth anything, figure out a way to get real current guest star funny people, famous people now, into old episodes of Columbo.
And there's a lot of people that are great, and there's a lot of people that I want to watch, and I hope some people win, and I hope other people don't win.
But it's just not seeing Rafa go for, you know, another ridiculous number.
And there's a certain amount of despair that it's easy to slip into because it often seems like we have a large segment of the country that doesn't see what's happening as a mess or even support it and are facilitating these things that are a mess.
There are a lot of issues that we could focus on that you're seeing manifest in the world.
But our show is about Alex Jones and the right-wing media.
So I think that one of the things that's important to discuss is liberty.
Okay.
In my lifetime, the most common reason why right-wing and libertarian types insist that we can't do anything to help people who are in need is because of concerns about liberty.
We can't provide free lunches for school children because that would need to be paid for by taxes.
and that's an imposition on the liberal Mm.
These sites shouldn't be allowed to ban your account for harassing people because your harassment is just free speech, and these sites shouldn't be messing with your liberty." To put things in very simple terms, a lot of people want to create a better world, but a small percentage don't.
A lot of these people are the super rich people whose profits rely on us not creating a better world.
You can make a lot more money as a business person if you pay your employees crumbs and avoid all OSHA regulations, for instance.
Or if those things didn't exist, it would help your profits.
Most of the population intuitively agrees with employers that they shouldn't exploit their employees.
And when they hurt them, those employees should have recourse to hold those employers accountable.
They have this intuitive understanding because far more people have the experience of being an employee and not an employer than have the experience of being an employer but never having been an employee.
Most people understand the inherent imbalance of power that exists within labor because they've been on the powerless side of it.
One of the ways that the right-wing media gets people to side with the positions that are opposite of their best interest is by making appeals to liberty.
Minimum wage laws aren't about making sure that employees get a living wage.
It's an attack on liberty.
Employers can't pay less than a certain amount, which is actually an encroachment of the workers' liberty.
You can't take a job for less than minimum wage.
Shouldn't you be free to do that?
Think about how the market would expand if you were just able to work for slave wages.
Appeals to liberty are very often a mask to make it harder for people to realize that certain right-wing positions directly harm them and common people at the expense of rich people and corporations.
And this works because liberty rules and people want to be free.
Protecting liberty is important, so if you pretend that it's the most important thing to you, it's very easy to make a lot of really shitty political positions more palatable to a broader audience.
Because this is the case, and it's such an effective mask, it's important to be mindful about people whose identities are based around this concept of liberty.
Right now, Alex Jones is supporting and running cover for a government that's detained a number of legal U.S. residents for things ranging from DWIs in the past to things that are definitely covered by free speech, like writing an op-ed in a college paper.
In order to be the person that Alex pretends to be, he needs to be super against the violations of liberty that are being carried out by the U.S. government right now.
The events that are happening require him to oppose Trump on principle and spend his entire show highlighting these incidents and how they're a danger to you and your liberty.
If the government can detain legal residents on student visas for their speech, Alex knows damn well that citizens aren't safe.
Fundamentally, this is the issue that a bulk of his career is based on.
For instance, how the Patriot Act sought to make all crimes terrorism, so the government could treat his dissenter friends as terrorists for just having different opinions.
Alex needs to have that position.
Because that's what his career would imply.
So I wanted to highlight how weird it is that Alex is still supporting Trump.
And I thought that the best way to do that was to take you on a little journey through 2004, when Alex championed a very important case that was a real threat to American liberties.
Well, you know, we've had thousands of listeners make thousands of copies of the videos and give them to police and deliver them to firefighters, and usually they get a positive response.
But you're telling me that you stuck it in the mailbox, and now they're trying to claim, what, that it's a federal offense to stick something in a mailbox?
This first introduction between these two is important, because as Kelly begins to tell his story, he literally says that he made a mistake by putting one of Alex's tapes in a cop's mailbox.
Getting arrested for it is possibly an overreaction, but that was in response to him doing something that he says was a mistake.
On December 15, 2003, Kelly Rushing was arrested by Trooper Louis Dodd.
Dodd would go on to testify that in early November, he had found anti-government videos placed in his mailbox, which were left there by Rushing.
Rushing admitted to all this.
From an article in the Herald-Ledger, quote, Dodd said that as a Kentucky state police trooper, he's part of the state government.
When I get a tape that's anti-government, I take offense to that.
A month later, Dodd saw Rushing leaning out of the window of his car and putting something in his mailbox again.
Dodd got dressed and went out, eventually finding rushing down the road on US 641, where he arrested him for menacing.
It's unquestionably illegal to put things into other people's mailboxes or to tamper with mailboxes.
You may disagree that this isn't how the law should be, but as things did in 2003, Sure.
There's a recording from Rushing's arrest where he says to Dodd, quote, Dodd asked in response to that, quote, Sounds like a threat to me.
From the standpoint of this officer, this shit was messed up.
He had five kids at home, and someone he didn't know had now dropped off multiple anti-government tapes in his mailbox, and when he arrested him, the guy told him his family wasn't safe.
Kelly made a mistake and he didn't do himself any favors when the consequences of that mistake came around.
He was given a trial and in April he was acquitted of all the charges which is a pretty great deal for him.
He ended up being accused of menacing and third degree terrorist threatening and it's probably fair to say that that is a bit of a stretch but he definitely put unwanted propaganda in a cop's mailbox and he could have easily been charged and convicted with that.
As it stands on February 16th, when he's calling into Alex's show here, rushing is between the arrest and the dropping of all charges on him.
So in effect, he is the human embodiment of that wet cement principle that I've talked about, where Alex can make an impact in something, but only before the cement dries.
Once it dries, he can't do shit.
So he's in that.
He is that.
Kelly exists as that.
He's simultaneously being sent to prison for life and a free man.
I guess, um, I would, I would say that if I project myself into the mind of a cop in a tiny town who has five kids, uh, So maybe they don't have a ton of experience within law enforcement.
Maybe they're scared.
Sure.
Scared for their family's safety.
You can call that a baby, but I think that if I were just a civilian, just a normal person, and I caught someone putting things that were somewhat inflammatory in my mailbox, and their response was, your family's not safe, I might react similarly to this guy.
I went by his house for probably about a month before I did this.
And on my way to work every morning, I thought, well, it'd be easy to try to inform him because I didn't think there was anything wrong.
We're trying to inform people of authority in your area.
So I put the tape in his mailbox, the first one.
Well, evidently, he didn't know where it'd come from or he didn't see me, right?
So I went ahead and went to work.
And then about two weeks later, I decided that I would put another one in his mailbox, which is another tape which confirmed your tape from other sources.
Actually, it came off the History Channel and C-SPAN and stuff like that.
So Kelly's telling his story, and it's very clear that he's in the wrong.
He made a mistake by his own description, and he did it multiple times.
Kelly says that he didn't think there was anything wrong with trying to inform people, and he's right.
There's not.
No one is mad that he was trying to inform anyone about anything.
it was a problem that he was putting shit in someone's mailbox, and that shit happened to offend that person, and that person had the power to arrest them.
Kelly is totally in the wrong, and it's crystal clear that even someone on his side should probably think so.
This isn't a KGB agent persecuting someone because they were spreading dissenting material, it's a cop arresting someone for repeatedly leaving harassing material in their home mailbox, with the source of that material being unknown.
It could be left there by a well-meaning libertarian info-warrior.
Or it could have been left there by someone who could escalate to hurting Dodd's family.
And the fact that Kelly said your family isn't safe when he was arrested does not play in his favor.
Alex doesn't have all of the information in this case at this point because it's the first time he's hearing any of it.
But just based on what Kelly has revealed so far, Alex shouldn't be egging him on by pretending that this is some kind of a free speech issue.
In the same way that you can write this off as like, oh, it's a baby cop or whatever, you should be able to write this off as a, you shouldn't put that fucking thing in his mailbox.
You know what I've always, you know what I always dreamt of?
And I mean, I know this is a little weird.
I wanted to get one of those kidnap letters with the pasted words.
In my head, I'd always had the like, how dramatic would it be to get a letter from somebody that's like pasted out from, because they don't want to know.
I need to get you in contact with some First Amendment organizations.
Number one, they're idiots.
I know they've charged people that put the coupons in mailboxes because you're not supposed to put it in a mailbox, but that's not really enforced.
They're so stupid they didn't charge you with that.
That's the one thing they could do.
I've told folks, don't put them in mailboxes.
Just hand deliver them But they have Look Get a jury trial Just go My goodness I just gave the guy A history channel show And some stuff I'm trying to inform people Right And So you can almost hear in that clip the second that Alex realized how great this was for him.
You literally cannot buy publicity like what Alex wants to create off of this.
The only problem is that Alex knows that it's illegal to put things in mailboxes, and he's explicitly told listeners not to do that because it's illegal.
He needs to downplay this aspect of the case, which is what he's starting to try to coach Kelly through immediately.
He makes a point of saying that Kelly needs to get a jury trial so he can pretend that all he did was try to inform this guy of uncontroversial things that are on the History Channel.
He needs Kelly to turn this into a PR stunt, so Alex can wet his beak off of that, but that only works if Kelly was in trouble for the content of his message, not the fact that he put things illegally in someone else's mailbox.
Alex says, they're so stupid they didn't charge you with that, because he knows that Kelly would be convicted of that, having just confessed to it on the radio.
Instead, these officials charged him with crimes that are dripping with persecution, and he probably isn't guilty of.
It is most likely the case that Rushing wasn't charged with the crime involving tampering with a mailbox because that's a federal crime, and the feds probably didn't want to get involved.
Ironically, the fact that the federal government didn't step in to press charges on Kelly kind of disproves Alex's narratives about how the feds are all trying to stop his patriot movement.
He was dead to rights on the federal charge involving mailboxes, but the only trouble Kelly got in was with the Kentucky State Police.
Kind of makes you think.
A little bit about how much the feds actually are after, Alex.
I'm just thinking of all the people I know who've been actually fucking stalked, and the level of give-a-fuck that the cops gave was astonishingly low.
He already told me that I was being locked up for terroristic threatening.
I was in the car and I told him, I said, well, you know, when a father sees something in the future that may be a threat to his children, then he should take a course to try to protect them.
Well, this jerk turned around and said that I had threatened his family and children.
So I feel like clips like this bring out how Alex acts from a place of bad faith.
Anyone who's interested in reality would hear this guy and say, look, it's illegal to put things in other people's mailboxes, so you got in trouble for that, and in the course of the cop talking to you, you said something that was easily misconstrued as a threat.
It would be easy to cry victim here, but this should be a learning experience.
Stay out of people's mailboxes, and don't explain that you put something in a cop's mailbox to save his children from some impromptu.
This is just, you know, hey, we all fucked up across the board.
I think it's interesting that this guy is, like, part of the reason that all of this is happening is because of the language that he is inundated with.
Like that form of communication through these tapes, through the way that all of these people talk, this hyper-dramatized, like everything is life or death kind of thing.
He's literally trying to be like...
But because the language that they're given is something along the lines of like, hey, if something happens to your kids, it ain't my fault.
Yeah, especially when the reality of the situation you find yourself in is that you have been putting material in this person's mailbox in a way that they feel...
is harassing to them.
It's not understanding the context of the interaction you're in.
So I think they should just be like, hey, you know, you win some, you lose some.
But Alex can tell when a story is worth exploiting.
And this one is perfect.
If they can wallpaper over some of the more obvious aspects of the case and grandstand about some cherry-picked details, this could play like a horror movie tale where every patriot is about to get arrested by the Gestapo just for expressing their opinions.
And Alex's tape is at the center of this imaginary story, so Alex is really the victim here.
Turning this story into an oppression narrative is a perfect way for Alex to claim all the potential benefits that come from it while making sure that Kelly will face all of the possible consequences.
And whether Kelly realizes it or not, the worse this turns out for him, the better it is for Alex.
And that's something that I wish folks in his position would think about.
So when Kelly was arrested, he had put something in Officer Dodd's mailbox on two separate occasions.
It's entirely understandable that a judge might require him to promise to leave Dodd alone as a condition of his release on his own recognizance.
Until all the facts of this case are squared away, there's no reason to not assume that Kelly might be stalking Dodd.
So everyone's reactions here make sense.
Alex is starting to get excited, but you can see that the things that he tries to project onto the story are falling flat.
Alex understands why the court would be interested in Kelly staying away from Dodd, so he's trying to insinuate that the form they made him sign admitted his life.
guilt because Alex needs this to be some kind of a story where there's railroading going on and Kelly doesn't seem to get the game.
He doesn't seem to understand exactly the way that Alex wants to use him.
Yeah.
And he's answering things too honestly like there is nothing else on the form.
And for him to not understand that that's what this is for, that this is the whole purpose of all that's going on right now is to set this ball on this tee.
No, I think Alex's reaction is surprising him a little.
Um, otherwise I feel like he probably would be more invested in rolling with, Yeah, no, it feels like this guy is going like, I'm telling you this story, which is like hanging his head like, you know, I kind of fucked up on this one.
No, I missed the N. So that said, Alex, he got off into the where are you line of questions because this is clearly a dead ball of the story.
He's got a lawyer who believes there's a First Amendment angle on the case, so there's not really anything else to do here.
This lawyer successfully argues to the court that the comments that seemed like threats were not threats, and a juror was quoted in the Herald-Ledger as saying, Never did say I threaten you, but I can see the officer's point of view.
This is a case where Kelly definitely committed a federal crime, which he's not being charged with, but he is being charged with state crimes that are a little bit of a gray area.
It's not insane that Dodd interpreted what Kelly said to him the way he did, but when the matter was all talked out in court, it was clear that he didn't mean this to be threatening.
Everything worked out probably as well as it could have, and it's clear from this first call that Kelly has a lawyer who's going to get him acquitted.
Because this case is basically a guy committing a federal offense, then getting charged with a misunderstanding.
So this situation is good for Alex, but it's better for him if Kelly doesn't agree to a plea.
If he goes to trial, Alex can potentially show up with a bullhorn, and regardless of the outcome, it works for propaganda purposes.
If Kelly loses, Alex can use that as proof that the government is coming after him.
If Kelly wins, Alex can use it as a story that proves that you can win against the man if you stand up for your rights.
Alex asked for the officer's name, and that's not really so crazy, but it is notable that Alex's actions would end up leading to a wave of harassment being directed towards Post 1, where Trooper Dodd was stationed.
After one of his interviews with Rushing, Public Affairs Officer Barry Meadows said that they had received over 50 calls, and that, quote, the calls tied up emergency dispatch personnel and phone lines that are used for regular police business.
Most of the calls were coming from people living in the Midwest and on the West Coast.
If you zoom out, you can see that Alex exists to make things worse for everyone in this story.
He's exacerbating Kelly's feelings of persecution and making it impossible for him to understand that he did something wrong and he should just apologize and everyone should move on.
He's directing more harassment towards a police officer who kicked all this off by not accepting Kelly's harassment.
And he's inciting all of these callers to waste Kentucky's public resources by selling them a fake version of the story to get mad about and call in to this place and to the paper.
All sorts of phone calls.
He's the one in all of this who comes out ahead, because the feelings that he creates off distorting this story are what he uses to sell those water filters.
And I think that that dynamic, I wish, had been more clear to people, like, at this time.
So Alex is already claiming this story as his own, and you can tell by the complete distortion of basic details.
Alex says that a judge told Kelly he was guilty of handing a police officer an anti-government, anti-police video.
That's nonsense.
No one ever alleged that Kelly handed anyone anything, and the judge didn't say that he was guilty.
Alex has zero documents about this case and just heard about it for the first time, but he knows when the skeleton of something is valuable, and this is perfect.
The basics are there, Alex just needs to fudge a few details in order to make it maximally profitable for him, and you can see him do that, almost as if by instinct.
It's as if there's a voice in his brain that says, man, it'd be really good for this story if Kelly was arrested for handing someone my tape, and then magically, his mouth says, Kelly was arrested for handing someone my tape.
His brain experiences a wish, and then his mouth utters it as fact.
So Alex, I think that once Kelly calls in and once he starts down this road and Alex recognizes the value that this story represents, Alex wants to take over.
Anyone who's done stand-up is familiar with the process of working out the beats of a joke.
When you go to an open mic, you often test out different wording or slightly different timing that you deliver your lines in to see what comes out smoothest and communicates your joke the best.
It's a process, and for a lot of artists, this is a process that's done in private.
Very few non-comics are at open mics, and only a select few people ever see an author's early drafts.
But because Alex is the type of artist that he is, a bullshit artist, you can watch him engage in this editing on air.
Now this story is that Kelly put one of Alex's videos in a cop's mailbox, which Alex knows is a crime.
But that part is just ignored.
The cop waited for Kelly and said that he'd threatened the cop's family.
In reality, Kelly had put things in Dodd's mailbox at least twice, and when he was pulled over by Dodd, he said, quote, your family is in danger, which Dodd perceived to be a threat.
So Kelly is totally cool with all this, until he gets taken before a judge who told him that he was guilty of giving an officer an anti-government tape.
The judge didn't tell him that, and that wasn't what Kelly was in trouble for.
Alex has a gift for punch-up, and he knows how to escalate and exaggerate little parts of the story in order to make it better fit his needs.
Kelly's life is essentially a premise that he's introduced to Alex, and Alex is going to work on turning it into a bit that he can do at the clubs, and you see it.
You see him hitting the dents out of the car muffler or whatever.
You kind of notice that Kelly doesn't really know all that much about his own case, and Alex is way more interested in the details than Kelly is.
This is because Alex knows how valuable Kelly's story is, whereas Kelly just thought he was calling into Alex's show with maybe a funny story about getting in trouble because he made the mistake of putting tapes into someone's mailbox.
Alex is gassing Kelly up, and at the end there, Kelly reveals a major component of why this story is so valuable to Alex.
If you change some of the details of Kelly's story and exaggerate a little bit, it can be made to look exactly like the kind of terrifying things that are in Alex's films.
Kelly serves as a hashtag Alex Jones was right meme of this time, where if Alex can lie just a little bit about the details, this case can be used to prove that Alex was right all along.
It's life mirroring art, but life itself is an artistic depiction of what happened to Kelly.
And all over the country, thousands and thousands of listeners have gotten the videos and made thousands of copies, in many cases, dozens in other cases, and gotten them out to people.
They've aired on national television.
They've been put on access TV stations around the country.
And a listener gives a cop, a state police officer in Kentucky, some of my videos, including a video of some C-SPAN and History Channel stuff, and he's arrested, and they say it's a threat.
He pulls him out of the car, says, you're threatening my family.
The guy says, what do you mean?
I gave you some videos.
And the guy says, you threatened my family, and now he's being charged.
And the judge says, in Fredonia, Kentucky, that, hey, boy, you're guilty of giving a police officer an anti-government, anti-police video.
And then they go ahead with charging him.
And don't think he won't go to jail.
Now, most police aren't like this, but in a lot of areas they are.
But certainly they've been under federal training.
So you can see Alex taking another swing at this story after Kelly is off the phone, and you can see how it shifts a little.
Now Alex doesn't even mention that he put tapes in the cop's home mailbox.
He just says that Kelly gave the cop some tapes.
Alex is blurring the timeline to make the content of the tapes the underlying threat that the officer charged Kelly with, as opposed to it being repeatedly putting things in his mailbox and then saying, your family is in danger when questioned about it.
The judge is prejudiced against Kelly, and he's going to end up getting a year in jail, and it's all because these cops have federal training, which Alex has just added to this story for no reason.
He knows nothing about these kinds of details, and ironically, the feds are giving Kelly pretty much a free pass on the federal crime that he definitely committed and has admitted to repeatedly on this radio show.
The feds are the enemy, and Alex is all states' rights at this point in time, so it makes sense that he'd throw that element into the story, but it's coming out of thin air.
And you can see, like, he almost feels a little freer now that Kelly's off the line.
Well, apparently Mr. Rushing left some videotapes in the mailbox of a Kentucky state trooper, and this state trooper arrested him and charged him with terrorism.
So the people of Kentucky need to be enlightened.
The best way I can think of would be for your listeners, No, I agree.
So this caller has only just heard about Kelly's case from listening to Alex's coverage of it on this show, and now Alex is having the caller recap it.
This is a really powerful rhetorical strategy because now the listeners are hearing this story coming from someone else, although all he's doing is repeating the narrative that Alex has laid out.
It looks like confirmation, but it's just repetition.
And it's not a coincidence that the answer to this problem is to spread Alex's content more.
The immediate concern isn't really making sure that Kelly doesn't go to jail.
It's making sure that county is flooded with Alex Jones tapes so Alex can get the rightful publicity out of this thing.
We're talking to Kelly Rushing, who lives in Lyons County, Kentucky.
We gave a video to a state police officer, and I have the state police officer's own police report.
He says that he was given this video, and he says that it was threatening.
And Mr. Rushing's brother, Tim Rushing, made the videos.
It was C-SPAN, History Channel, Discovery Channel stuff.
One of my videos, and by the way, one of my videos, stuff from my videos, is aired on national TV.
This is just documented stuff, just like this show, mainstream news stuff.
We just analyze it.
Nothing threatening to this guy.
So he goes and has him arrested.
And by the way, this just happened to a keep and bear arms writer who also writes for guns and ammo.
He had police come to his house because he wrote a letter to the San Francisco Police Department saying, you guys are violating the law handing out these marriage certificates.
That's all he said.
And they came out and said, you know, you're a gun writer.
You're not planning to use some guns, are you?
I mean, that's how, see, it's all these secret police need to talk to you because you might, you know, do something, but the border stays wide open.
So as the story gets repeated, the important elements of it become more crystallized.
Alex isn't even bringing up the mailbox aspect of the story now.
It's just that Kelly gave a cop the tape.
Kelly didn't say your family is in danger to the cop when he was pulled over.
It was just the tape's contents that made the cop feel threatened.
When you see the way that Alex is exaggerating and bluffing pieces of Kelly's story, alarm bells should be ringing that he's probably done the same thing to this keep-and-bear-arms writer from San Francisco.
There are almost certainly elements of that story that have been massaged so they fit Alex's purposes, which is to make these stories broadly appealing to folks who aren't in his extremist bubble so they can be used to get more people into that bubble.
A normal non-info warrior person would hear Alex's version of Kelly's story or this San Francisco writer's story and think, the police sure seem to overreact there.
Alex's version, it removes the inciting incidents and tries to gloss over why the officer would feel threatened, because his agenda relies on building up the overreaction part and making Kelly into the most blameless, persecuted victim possible.
With false versions of the story, it's easy to make this matter to people who haven't bought in fully to Alex's world, and you can see how this narrative itself is being used to blend subtle, extreme right-wing politics.
There are these examples of the secret police cracking down on patriots while the border is wide open.
Essentially, what I'm saying is that no one should be surprised that Alex isn't interested in the liberty and free speech of legal residents of the United States in 2025.
He doesn't think they deserve rights or to be here, and much of his career that looked like it was built on First Amendment principles, that was just the costume that he wore, so he didn't have to see himself as a white nationalist when he looked in the mirror.
And that's a large part of what I'm driving at with this discussion of Kelby.
Kelly, what happened to you, thought criminal that you are, when you went in now to the court this morning before Judge William G. McCaslin for your crime, as he said, of giving someone an anti-government videotape?
I did give a couple of the tapes to the prosecuting attorney, and he called me over and said that he enjoyed the tapes and told me that they wouldn't get his gun unless they prided out of his cold, dead hand.
So I think that Alex is kind of recognizing that Kelly's a bit of a boring dude, and this story is pretty boring.
It sounds like he went to his court date and nothing happened.
In a desperate attempt to make the story interesting, Alex starts throwing in wizards and dragons.
How this sounds to me is that the prosecution tried to make some common ground with Kelly.
Basically, they were saying that they agreed with him about the Second Amendment but that his actions were still inappropriate.
You can't put shit in other people's mailbox and when you're pulled over and questioned about it, you can't say cryptic nonsense that a cop might take as a threat to his family.
But Alex needs to keep it interesting, so instead, that was probably them trying to bait Kelly into making another threat so they can call in the SWAT team.
Already, it's become apparent that Alex has a minor conundrum on his hands.
Kelly's story as told by Alex is perfect for the Infowar, but Kelly himself and the reality of the story is kind of a dud.
The more he stays around, the more Alex is going to need to dramatize, whereas if Kelly would just go away, Alex could manage this whole thing himself.
It's a microcosm of what Alex has himself become in the present day.
The extreme right wing elevated Alex to a status of a prophet who has visions from God, which is perfect for them, except for the fact that Alex still exists and does his show.
In many ways, you can see Alex treating Kelly in the same way that the broader right wing media would like to treat him now.
So Alex is saying that these Soviet Kentucky troopers are operating off a system where they come arrest you for nothing, and they charge you with things that you do in response to being unfairly arrested.
They're being assholes, so you'll commit a crime that they can then arrest you for, like happened with Karl Klang.
Do you know that guy?
So, most people probably don't know who Karl Klang is, but he was a patriot country musician in the 90s and into the 2000s, and he had a bit of an anti-Semitic streak.
For instance, he had a song called The News Behind the News, which included the chorus, quote, It's the news behind the news and the methods you can use.
It's the blueprint and the plan you can rely on, and it's written in the protocols of the learned elders of Zion.
Leaving all of that aside, on December 4th, 2003, Klang was arrested for disorderly conduct and provoking a fight.
When he was booked into a holding cell, he destroyed his jail uniform, the mattress in the room, and the light fixtures in the cell.
From the Casper Star Tribune, he was sent for a mental health evaluation, quote, because Clang threatened to kill police officers and himself, and at one point requested suicide assist by cops, or by police.
Clang told the court that he was bipolar and had fallen off his meds about two months before his arrest.
In light of all this information, the judge in the case said that the situation was unfortunate and said, quote, I sympathize with you.
Alex is misrepresenting that quote just a little bit.
Given the circumstances, the authorities felt like they didn't need to pursue the initial charges, and he was just made to pay for the stuff that he broke in the holding cell, coming out with a fine of about $300.
This actually is a lot like Kelly's case in that it started because somebody did something illegal, which they ended up facing no consequences for.
After they did their crime, they acted self-destructively toward the cops and ended up getting themselves in more trouble, which ultimately they faced no real consequences for.
And they both used the situations to portray themselves as the victims of the globalists trying to persecute good Christian patriots.
They are very similar, and it's just not in the way that Alex wants them to be.
Well, I think what you do with it is recognize that maybe this cop was not a Soviet Kentucky trooper trying to jam up Patriots, and I think the fact that he found a gun and ignored it speaks to that.
You know, I talk to locals, and I call other members of your family, and I talk to the newspaper and other people, and supposedly your state police are pretty rampant around there.
If you look at them wrong, they're going to go ahead and take you on down.
And I think that there's something really grim about the way they're laughing about these police setting up bootlicking stations.
When you realize that Alex has been an important media figure in terms of ushering in what Trump is manifesting, which is an entire media space full of people licking boots.
And luckily, Mr. Dodd, everything's recorded here, so you can't tell any lies about us.
When I call up people in Kentucky, I had a recorder running, too.
You're not going to pull your scams on me.
I know how to record you people.
Very important to record people like you.
So you can't change the facts later.
But before we go to these calls, if you want to get 9-11 Road to Tyranny, Masters of Terror, Police State 3 Total Enslavement, Matrix of Evil, you need to go to Infowars.com or PrisonPlanet.com.
I mean, that's not America, Angel, and the reason I bring this up is I have confirmed it, and by the way, American Free Press wants to write an article about it, and I'm supposed to get them the information, but one of my listeners, Kelly Rushing, in Kentucky, Leon County, just gave a state police officer one of my videos and a C-SPAN video of Ron Paul.
The cop the next day pulled him over, arrested him, said this is terrorism, and they're trying to put him behind bars for a year for giving him a video.
And the judge said it's illegal to give police videos.
So from talking to Kelly's brother Tim, Alex learned that one of the things on one of those tapes was a C-SPAN recording of Ron Paul talking about neoconservatism.
So now the focus is going more towards that.
Alex knows that his name and brand of Infowars is toxic in some circles, even back in 2004, so some people might hear this story, see that it's about an Infowars tape, and tune out.
If Kelly is being persecuted for a Ron Paul tape, you have less risk that people are going to call bullshit immediately, and this still preserves the attention and publicity harvesting that Alex wants to do with the case.
You can see that other details are starting to take shape.
Kelly didn't put anything in a mailbox, he just gave an officer some tapes.
The next day he was pulled over, and the cops said that giving him the tape was terrorism, and Kelly's gonna get a year in jail for it.
The judge said that it's illegal to give police videos.
This story has lost connection to the real case that it's about because this never really was about the underlying case.
Alex knows that it's illegal to put things in mailboxes and he explicitly tells people not to do it because he knows this is the type of shit that could happen.
In their first interaction, Kelly understood that he'd made a mistake and Alex knew that what he'd done was a crime.
happened after that point is a collaborative fiction that's being created in order to push extreme right politics under the disguise of it being about free speech and liberty.
Because the free speech and liberty aspect of it is attractive to a broader base than who's actually drawn to the horrible politics you're actually espousing yeah I love that exchange that's such a great little exchange what can you believe that Yes!
So some time has passed, and Alex has kind of let things cool down a little.
I suspect that he's got what he's needed out of the story, and given how flimsy all of the details are, what's the point of overcommitting to this one?
It's a touch point that Alex can use and a perfect example of how the man is trying to stop you from buying his tapes.
But while the case is ongoing, Alex can only do so much.
He wants to use this for publicity and marketing.
But at this point in March, if he pushes too hard, he's going to accidentally do activism.
He's accidentally going to end up like what?
Get people to like occupy that courthouse or whatever.
It's about using a bullshit version of Kelly's story to advance Alex's interests, which are the shared interests of Nazis like Texe Marrs and the American Free Press.
Alex is trying to loop them in on the story because it has all of the appearances of being about liberty and free speech that they can use to hide their shit behind.
Alex seems to be giving Kelly explicit legal advice here, and I think that's pretty irresponsible, especially considering he's invested in perpetuating a fake version of Kelly's story for profit.
All in all, this is a cruel exploitation that Alex is engaged in here of this person who, you know, I think he can have differing shades of opinions, but he basically ended up in a misunderstanding.
And Alex is exploiting that.
I feel bad for Kelly, even though I don't like him, and I think he and I wouldn't agree about anything.
So they dropped these charges because they realized the reality of the situation and wanted to make a compromise that works for all parties.
Kelly did something wrong in that he put shit in someone's mailbox, and then he made a faux pas by bringing up the officer's family being in danger when he was questioned.
That's, like, it's not super serious to them, but it's also not nothing.
So the court seems to be trying to negotiate a slap on the wrist type punishment for Kelly to accept so everyone can move forward.
He could take a plea on the second-degree harassment, and he'd probably get a fine and just never have to go, like, promise to never go near that guy's house ever again, and stop putting things in people's mailboxes.
He doesn't want to take that deal, so they dropped most of the charges and just left the threatening one.
Alex is trying to get Kelly to be a martyr.
He wants Kelly to fully adopt Alex's version of the story, where this case is mostly about Alex because it was an InfoWars tape.
And he wants Kelly to put his needs in a secondary position to getting Alex press.
We have no idea if Kelly can afford his lawyers or if he can pay for a lengthy trial.
We have no idea what kind of health he's in or what his job status is to make any kind of assessment of what impact forcing him to go to jail might have.
Alex doesn't care about any of that stuff because he's not going to feel any of it.
Kelly will.
And all the while, Alex, the only thing he's going to feel is increased attention and water filter sales that are coming his way.
This is the dynamic that he's trying to massage Kelly into, where he takes all the risk and all of the reward is funneled to Alex.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting that there's two kind of reactions to this.
There's the Fed's reaction, which is to just say, eh, fuck it.
And then there's the state reaction, and you can see that Alex would far prefer it if the feds had got him for something real, because then he would have been convicted.
He would have had to do the whole thing.
We would have grandstanded about how he was just putting two tapes in a mailbox, done the whole thing.
It's a wise thing to say, eh, get the fuck out of here.
You know, what's funny is I've given these same two tapes to plenty of other people, and I never had any problems because I give them to a police officer.
And this is what he's done to so many people over the years.
This is one of the consequences of Alex's content and the way he operates.
In the background victimization that has happened to so many people in the course of his career that he's never had to pay any kind of responsibility for.
Prosecuting attorneys started talking about how the Second Amendment right was to be held up and that he felt that it was best that they drop the menacing charges.
So most likely, what Kelly was talking about is a conversation that the prosecutor had about how if Kelly were found guilty of the charges of menacing, he might lose his right to own a gun in Kentucky.
I would assume that this is part of the reason that these charges were dropped at this preliminary hearing, because taking away Kelly's guns would make this more than the slap on a wrist that the court was aiming at trying to impose.
Alex is trying to terrorize this man into making horrible decisions so Alex can profit off them.
He's trying to encourage Kelly to be paranoid about everyone around him and think that every part of a process that was treating him really well was secretly a trap.
Some people might want to think that this is because Alex is stupid, but it's key to understand that Alex knows that his interests are furthered by things going bad for Kelly.
The appearance of state oppression, the larger that appearance is, the easier it is for Alex to profit off it.
So if he can get Kelly to make some bad moves that turn the situation worse, Alex is going to do that.
So after this point, Alex again drops interest in the case because it's going on too long and it's actually pretty boring.
He says on air that he needs to check in with Kelly a few times, but it's really unimportant until around April 9th, which was the Friday before Kelly's court date on Monday, April 12th.
Alex grandstands a ton about the case, and he tries to get Kelly all fired up, and then Kelly was acquitted on Monday, and everything really fizzles out.
Alex wants him to sue everyone, but there's no case here, so Alex is just left to repeat his distorted narrative over and over again.
As the years went on, I suspect that Alex realized how much money he left on the table with this thing.
The elements of Kelly's story that could be exploited were so perfect for Alex, and he fumbled it.
I have no direct evidence to back this up, but based on the available information, I suspect that Kelly had some decent people around him who were able to get him to recognize that Alex wasn't looking out for his best interests.
He didn't want to sue the police, and he apologized to Trooper Dodd, which makes me suspect that he came to understand the impact of his actions, how his well-meaning comments appeared to be a threat, and how his appearances on Alex's show led to increased harassment towards Dodd and the police department as a whole.
I suspect he might have understood this dynamic in the end, because he doesn't come back.
But by September, Alex seemed to know that there was so much profit left to make off Kelly's story that then he was able to extract.
He didn't get all the meat off the bone, so he started trying to exploit Kelly rushing side characters.
We're going to go here in a second to Will in Kentucky, but not yet.
Will called me this weekend.
Will.
He's there in Lyon County, Kentucky.
And Kelly Rushing, remember that whole case?
He made it into some newspapers.
He was a listener of mine, no criminal record, upstanding member of the community.
I talked to a lot of the locals.
He gave a state police officer a copy of a Ron Paul speech, the neocon speech of last year.
gave the neocon speech, and he gave him a copy of Road to Tyranny, and the police...
Those are terrorists.
Criticizing the government's illegal.
And the judge publicly said it was illegal.
And they went ahead and had a jury trial and tried to convict him, put him in jail for two years.
The jury said, are you crazy?
No way.
So then they started getting pulled over and harassed after that.
And then there was Kelly Rushett saying, I don't want to sue him.
I just want to be nice.
You know, he even told the cop, I'm sorry all this trouble came of this.
I mean, just too nice, folks.
Well, then his friend, Will, who helped him out, was riding his horse.
It's out in the country.
And the cops pulled him over and said, you're drunk, took him to jail, wouldn't let him have the plea of not guilty, and the judge wouldn't allow any basic trial and just said, no jury.
And there's already been, I was the first one, but there's also been others kicked out for just possessing Alex Jones' videos.
And the military police are going around doing sweeps that anyone that possessed on their computer or have Alex Jones' videos are being sent to the psycho ward.
Don't they know that footage I've shot and videos I've made have aired on national TV?
We confirmed that in Lyon County, Kentucky, a year and a half ago.
Kelly Rushing, no criminal record, outstanding member of the community.
His family is old and respected in that community.
And it was in the newspaper.
He gave a state police officer a Ron Paul speech called Neocon, off C-SPAN, and my video wrote a tyranny.
And they arrested him and tried to put him in jail for seven years, saying the videos were terroristic and threatening the law enforcement, which just shows FEMA saying all Christians are terrorists.
I want to digress for a second here, Jack, and then I want to get into the history of the Magna Carta and the Common Law and the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence, all of what America is.
Because I know it, you know it, they're counting on us not to know it.
But, you know, Kelly Rushing, that was in the newspaper.
Two and a half years ago, one of my listeners gives a Ron Paul video in one of my films on the same video to a state policeman.
The cop says thank you, watches it, decides it's threatening, arrests Kelly Rushing, prominent member of the community.
And it was in the newspaper.
It said, forgiving a video.
He's facing three years in jail, a year and a half each count of terrific threats and harassment for each video.
And I called the judge, and he said, yeah, we're doing this.
And then they took a jury and tried to put him in jail.
How did that judge and those state cops, how did they sit there in Lyon County, Kentucky, and get off on trying to destroy a man's life, a family man's life, who just tried to say, hey, this is an important video for you, officer.
So you might notice some major changes to the telling of this story by 2006.
Now Kelly gives Trooper Dodd the tape and Dodd thanks him for it.
The mailbox aspect of the story is completely wiped from our memory, along with the fact that Kelly left things in the mailbox twice.
Now Dodd watches the tape and decides to arrest Kelly, and now the charges and potential jail time has been changed again.
There's no consistency in the story because the details of it really don't matter to Alex.
He knows that the story he's telling is bullshit, so demanding accuracy is ridiculous.
All that matters is the shape and form of the story.
It must conform to reinforcing the grievance narrative that he uses as a mask to obscure his true politics from being painfully obvious to anyone Because if what he truly believed in and what he was expressing was immediately visually apparent, He never would be able to make inroads past very extreme right-wing spheres.
He never would have been able to tap into some of the disaffected people at, like, Occupy Wall Street and shit.
His marketability relies on that mask.
And that mask often takes the shape of hiding behind appeals to liberty and shit.
People are convicted of things that are not illegal.
I have seen cases where people have been indicted, and it's gone to court.
And the judges instructed the jury that they have committed a crime and basically told the jury to convict them, which judges aren't supposed to do, in the case of Kelly Rushing, handing out a VHS tape.
This was eight years ago, back when VHS was still around.
A VHS tape with Ron Paul 45-minute speech called Neocond on the House floor and my film Road to Tyranny.
And he was charged with two counts of threatening law enforcement.
They said Ron Paul's speech was threatening.
This was in the newspapers in Kentucky with a straight face, like it was reasonable.
Not like, hey, this is the Soviet Union.
This is wrong.
No, the news was, thank goodness, that Kelly Rushing, no criminal record, upstanding family, business owner, would walk up to state police and give them the video and say, please watch this.
It's important for you and your family.
And they said that it was a threat to law enforcement and disrespectful.
So he was charged with being disrespectful.
I mean, that's what the judge said, but the actual charge was terroristic threats.
And when you listen to Kelly's appearances on the show and you understand what happened with the case, you can see the way that Alex is trying to manufacture a liberty and freedom and free speech kind of thing out of this, where it's really a misunderstanding.
That's a difficulty that I think a lot of us probably feel.
But when you're someone like Alex who yells about 1776 and how all the tyrants will bleed and patriots and all this stuff, you know, like when you're someone who that is your normal contextual framework, when shit gets real, you have a different responsibility than...
Yeah, I mean, there is something to be said about if you're talking about 1776 a lot, you have to remember that several thousands upon thousands of people died, all for not as much as you might want.
I've been thinking about this Kelly rushing thing for a number of years, because I came across it when I was going back through episodes, and then I noticed that it was a through line.
So we have covered some of the days that these episodes come from, but I intentionally sidestepped his whole through line, his whole narrative, because I wanted to look at it more holistically.
And it never felt like there is a time.
It never felt like...
And I think now is.
I think now is the time.
It felt like a time when this portrait is damning of Alex's behavior in the present in a way that nothing he says in the present can be.
And so that was why I thought it had some value to bring out.
I mean, because to a certain extent, Kelly wouldn't be where he was getting exploited the way he was getting exploited if he weren't already being exploited back and back and back and back and back.
You know, there's those signals are difficult whenever you're both the guy who's like, you can't trust anybody and you're in a war for everything all the time and you should do whatever it takes to win the war.
And then the guy's also like, don't put things in mailboxes because of federal law.