#1041: The Legend of Kelly Rushing
In this installment, Dan and Jordan go back in time to discuss the genesis of one of Alex's great stories of persecution, the time a guy in Kentucky got arrested for distributing his VHS tapes.
May 26, 2025 - Knowledge Fight
02:05:51
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledge Fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys, saying we are the bad guys. | |
| Knowledge Fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dan and George. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| I need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Stop it. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your room. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Knowledgefight.com. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| I'm Jordan. | ||
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around, worship at the altar of Selene, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Oh, indeed we are, Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Quick question for you. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| What's your bright spot today, buddy? | ||
| My bright spot today is the second season of Poker Face. | ||
| Oh, that's right! | ||
| Part of it is out. | ||
| It's coming out. | ||
| I want to pay it the best compliment I can on a TV show. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I wish that it was on when TV existed. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| You would have liked to watch it once a week with people to talk to about it? | ||
| Well, and I think that under that model, it would be like a huge, huge show. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's so well done, has the right amount of quirk, has the right amount of funny, has the right amount of suspense. | ||
| It makes me sad for streaming. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, the future's not that great. | ||
| No. | ||
| I remember being told it was gonna be great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the, you know, first season was fantastic, and it makes you think, like, can they live up to it? | ||
| And it's great. | ||
| So far, it's great. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| It's been fantastic. | ||
| Isn't that by, that's Rian Johnson, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's just fucking good. | ||
| Natasha Lyonne wrote a couple of them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're just great. | ||
| She's got it, you know? | ||
| I mean, it's fun whenever somebody's just good. | ||
| You know, he's just very consistently good at writing things that you're enjoying. | ||
| Richard Kind is in an episode? | ||
| No shit! | ||
| That was always nice to see. | ||
| Always loved to see Richard Kind. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I think that the guest stars that they have are so well done, too. | ||
| Man, nails it. | ||
| I would like. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| and just film a whole new episode of Columbo. | ||
| Obviously, enslave him and force to do Columbo only. | ||
| He wakes up from the dead and you're like, one more thing. | ||
| One more thing. | ||
| You have to do this forever. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I think the technology's there. | ||
| Elon has told me some things. | ||
| We can do it. | ||
| I think it's time. | ||
| So what's your bright spot? | ||
| My bright spot is... | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| French Open, my man. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Roland Garros. | ||
| C 'est très bien. | ||
| Yeah, they've renamed it. | ||
| You're going French! | ||
| Yeah, they won't even say French Open. | ||
| Between Expedition 33 and the French Open, what is up with you, man? | ||
| I'm just hanging out in Paris these days. | ||
| Or Lumière, as the game would have it. | ||
| Just throwing around croissants. | ||
| Just throwing around croissants. | ||
| Who's your pick for this here tournament? | ||
| It seems like Algaraz is going to take over. | ||
| I don't think anybody but a Spanish person is going to win the French Open ever again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Essentially. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| They're right next door to each other. | ||
| Rafa won forever. | ||
| This is his first tournament where he's not even going to be there. | ||
| And then Alcaraz won, and he'll probably just keep winning forever and ever. | ||
| Is it something about the French air? | ||
| I don't... | ||
| I genuinely have no idea. | ||
| There is no comparison for 14 major... | ||
| There's none. | ||
| He's just won a lot. | ||
| He's won too many to make sense of. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| But it's gonna be a Spanish person. | ||
| Yeah, it could be that Spain produces people who win the French Open. | ||
| It's just possible. | ||
| Or it could be a conspiracy. | ||
| That's also possible. | ||
| It could be the type of show we're doing. | ||
| You need to keep these possibilities in your mind. | ||
| Who wins the French Open? | ||
| The Knights of Malta. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| That's right. | ||
| You have to be a descendant of a Knight of Malta. | ||
| It makes perfect sense. | ||
| It almost makes too much sense. | ||
| It makes too much sense. | ||
| It's a mystery, Babylon. | ||
| Well, I hope you enjoy that tennis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I will. | |
| I feel like you are less excited about this than other times you've brought up tennis. | ||
| I've got to be honest. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's hard because this is a grieving year. | ||
| Rafa's not there. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Like, at all. | ||
| Transitional period between the goat. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That storyline is gone. | ||
| It's gone. | ||
| It's over. | ||
| You're having to adjust to a new... | ||
| I understand why it's a four then. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Jordan, today we have an episode to go over. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And we're going to be doing something a little bit different. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| We are going to be talking about our primary ding dong. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Mr. Alex Jones. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| if you're nasty. | ||
| But, Good! | ||
| And so we'll get down to business on exactly what that is here in just a second. | ||
| But first, let's take a little moment to say hello to some new wonks. | ||
| Ooh, that's a great idea. | ||
| So first, nearest the policy nearest. | ||
| Thank you so much, you're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much! | ||
| Thank you! | ||
| Next, I'm a mother pheasant plucker. | ||
| I pluck mother pheasants. | ||
| I'm a pleasant mother pheasant plucker who plucks mother pheasants. | ||
| Thank you so much, you're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much! | ||
| Go fuck yourself. | ||
| Next, Brian. | ||
| Brian, it's me, Atticus. | ||
| Brian, stop cataloging books right now. | ||
| I'm stuck in an Alex Jones podcast, Brian. | ||
| The globalists finally got to me. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you! | ||
| And we got a technocrat in the mix, Jordan. | ||
| So thank you so much, too. | ||
| Nikki is enjoying a demon feast. | ||
| You guys are awesome. | ||
| Keep up the great work. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a technocrat. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Four stars. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go home to your mother and tell her you're brilliant. | |
| Someone sodomite sent me a bucket of poop. | ||
| Daddy Shark. | ||
| Jar Jar Binks has a Caribbean black accent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's a loser little titty baby. | |
| I don't want to hate black people. | ||
| I renounce Jesus Christ. | ||
| It's a demon feast. | ||
| It's a demon feast. | ||
| I hate to inform you folks, it's a demon feast. | ||
| So, Jordan, I think we can all agree that the world we are currently living in is a Sure. | ||
| It is a disaster on a lot of fronts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| 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. | ||
| Make sense. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| How do you feel? | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| So, on February 16th, 2004, Alex did a little interview with Mel Gibson's dad about how he was totally not a Nazi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
God damn it. | |
| But that's not important. | ||
| That's not the most important thing that happened on that show. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| He also received a call from a guy named Kelly Rushing, who would go on to be very important in Alex's career. | ||
| Let's talk to Kelly in Kentucky. | ||
| Kelly, go ahead. | ||
| How are you doing, Alex? | ||
| Good. | ||
| I don't know if I'd be telling people to pass out these tapes. | ||
| I have put police officers... | ||
| 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. | ||
| And Rushing replied, quote, It's not a threat. | ||
| I'm just trying to wake you up. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Depending on how Alex wants to tell this story. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's just fallen into his lap in an amazing way. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| This is a story of Alex's that lives on. | ||
| It's one of the prime examples he has of his own oppression. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| This guy got arrested for giving a cop one of my tapes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's something that's repeated. | ||
| It's part of the mythology. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And because of that, I wanted to discuss Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, I'm hearing there's a crybaby cop. | ||
| That's all I'm hearing. | ||
| Hey, I mean, look, that perspective is fine. | ||
| Like, let's take the fact that he's a cop out of it. | ||
| All you really remove is that the person wouldn't have been able to arrest him. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But he could have employed or implored someone else to arrest Kelly. | ||
| Sure, but they wouldn't have. | ||
| They might have. | ||
| In a small fucking town, they might have. | ||
| Doubtful. | ||
| That guy was abusing his bullshit powers. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| And we know that because he was acquitted. | ||
| So he's innocent of all charges. | ||
| That's how it works. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| I think that as we go through this, you might come to understand or realize that the state really just wanted to give a slap on the wrist for this. | ||
| Because this is bullshit! | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't understand what we're disagreeing on. | ||
| I'm just, I mean, I don't get what this whole... | ||
| I don't get the mythology of it. | ||
| like being like, this baby, this baby cop's crying. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| 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 don't think it's baby-ish. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I get that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But he was a fucking cop. | ||
| So fuck him. | ||
| What do you think he should do? | ||
| What do I think he should do? | ||
| Get over himself. | ||
| Get over it. | ||
| I would imagine. | ||
| I mean, honestly. | ||
| Tell the guy not to do it. | ||
| I would imagine that that was the point of stopping him in the first place. | ||
| And then it escalated because he said, your family is not safe. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It would never have escalated if he wasn't a cop. | ||
| It's because he's a cop. | ||
| It's because he's a cop. | ||
| Well, it wouldn't have escalated because the person wouldn't have the authority to do a traffic stop. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| That is the point. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| I guess my point is that the decision is rational, and your point is that even if rational, it's an abuse of power. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I will agree to disagree. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So Kelly describes his situation here. | ||
| And this is the first that Alex is hearing of any of this. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Let me try to explain it to you. | ||
| First, I had been going by this. | ||
| He was a state trooper. | ||
| 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 you're a real radical. | ||
| Well, yeah, I guess. | ||
| But anyway, I put that one in his mailbox about two or three weeks later, and he saw me put it in there. | ||
| So he evidently waited on the highway where he knew I would probably come back down. | ||
| He waited for me that evening after work, and when I came by, he pulled me over. | ||
| And basically, he acted out just like the tape said he would. | ||
| I think it kind of hurt his pride or something. | ||
| What did he do to you, this KGB officer that thinks that spreading information is un-American, so he needs to go ahead and arrest you? | ||
| What happened? | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's a mailbox issue, and Alex knows that. | ||
| He should just be like, oh man, that's rough. | ||
| Well, oh well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh yeah, don't put shit in people's mailboxes. | ||
| And communicate more clearly. | ||
| Don't say things like your family's in danger. | ||
| 100%, not complicated. | ||
| Yeah, these are the steps that got us where we are. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know, your handwriting. | ||
| How great would that be? | ||
| That would be awesome. | ||
| Does it have to be about a kidnapping? | ||
| Or could it just be like a, hi, how are you? | ||
| I mean, it's more dramatic if it's about a kidnapping. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I suppose it'd be fine if it's a, hi, how are you? | ||
| That's still pretty creepy. | ||
| How often do you check your mail? | ||
| Now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Never. | |
| I have not checked my mail. | ||
| You might have one in the mailbox and you just don't even know it. | ||
| How disappointing would it be if you find one a year later in your mailbox? | ||
| That's like, oh, I could have acted on this, but now my friend is dead. | ||
| Yeah, that would be a bummer. | ||
| That would be a bummer. | ||
| If you just find a bunch like, hey, I sent you a message last month. | ||
| Final notice! | ||
| That would suck. | ||
| Yeah, that would be a bummer. | ||
| So Alex is listening to this guy's story, and I think that he realizes, oh shit, I can use this. | ||
| This is gonna be good. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| Well, he pulled me over. | ||
| And came to my window, and I said, how you doing? | ||
| And he didn't say anything but get out of the truck, right? | ||
| So I got out of the truck, and the second thing he said was turn around. | ||
| And I asked him, I said, what am I being arrested for? | ||
| Because he started to put the cuffs on me. | ||
| And he said, you're being arrested for terroristic threatening. | ||
| So basically, I got locked up for terroristic threatening over your tape. | ||
| And have they charged you? | ||
| Yes, they have. | ||
| They charged me with terroristic threatening and two counts of menacing. | ||
| Okay, sir, Kelly, I need your phone number. | ||
| 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. | ||
| A guy got arrested for passing out his tapes. | ||
| 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 mean, it kind of makes me think the feds were thinking this guy was a baby cop. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| That's what I'm hearing. | ||
| Hey, you and the feds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm hearing them say that this guy needs to fucking grow the fuck up. | |
| Get over it. | ||
| So. | ||
| You got a couple tapes of your hand. | ||
| Like, tell the guy to stop. | ||
| I get where you're coming from. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I would argue that the traffic stop was the attempt at that. | ||
| The attempt at stop this. | ||
| And then it escalated because there were threats made. | ||
| Or things that were interpreted as threats. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Which I think you could still make the argument, hey, you're being a baby, if you think saying your family is not safe is a threat. | ||
| Sure! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure! | |
| 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. | ||
| So, sure. | ||
| But the answer to that isn't don't take anything seriously. | ||
| The answer to that is they should take those instances seriously as well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Okay. | ||
| So when the call happened or when he started talking to the cop, this is where some threats happen. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Like the your family isn't safe. | ||
| and that's where they locked me up there. | ||
| And what are they saying the threats are? | ||
| Well, I told him that after he had... | ||
| 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. | ||
| And he said because of the videos? | ||
| No, no, he said because he's trying to twist this around and say that I had threatened his children over that. | ||
| Oh, see, they come around. | ||
| Because I said, well, when a father sees something in the future. | ||
| Yes, there is. | ||
| Most state police wear a lapel microphone that's hooked into the recording system, so there should be audio of that. | ||
| This is what they do. | ||
| This is what they do. | ||
| They arrest a patriot. | ||
| Then, of course, they say you resist or you threaten them or you did something. | ||
| Then they try to charge you. | ||
| Once you got to the jail, did you say to folks, so it's now illegal in America to give people videos? | ||
| No, they didn't really let me talk to anyone. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Of course you're going to get fucked over. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That's not how you communicate with people. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No. | ||
| And I honestly think that if people were not trying to use this for some kind of a manipulative purpose... | ||
| These dudes should just be laughing about this. | ||
|
unidentified
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Absolutely. | |
| It's not like Kelly fucked up. | ||
| No, I mean, it's... | ||
| But it is like that capture into a culture that is implicitly in conflict. | ||
| Before we've even spoken, all of my words are... | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's just like, hello. | ||
| You know, of course you're gonna have trouble communicating with the rest of the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Watch this Alex Jones video or your children will die. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| That sounds like a threat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, if you die, that's great. | ||
| For Alex. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| If you go to jail for a long time, that's great for Alex. | ||
| It's the best thing that could happen, especially if you have phone privileges to call into his show. | ||
| That's, mwah! | ||
| That's number one. | ||
| Yeah, and he can choose to take or not take the call. | ||
| Yes, that is most important. | ||
| So, Kelly tells a little bit more of his story, and Alex just gets fucking pissed. | ||
| Basically, and let me tell you what happened after they released me from jail. | ||
| Okay, he um Sir, you don't have to sign any statements in America. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Over and over again, they tell people to sign this, sign that. | ||
| That was the only, that's the only way I could get out of here. | ||
| Okay, what did the, yeah, that's what they tell you. | ||
| What did the statement say, sir? | ||
| It just said that I wasn't... | ||
| Did it say anything else, like I agree that I harassed him? | ||
| Excuse me? | ||
| Did it say anything else? | ||
| No, just that. | ||
| And then a judge would release me if I didn't contact him first. | ||
| When is your court date? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's the... | |
| This could not be more on a tee. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's sad. | ||
| He believes it. | ||
| I think that he had probably an intention of he was going to call in and this is going to be a bit of a funny story or something. | ||
| It wasn't going to be Alex staking a crusade on this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
something. | |
| 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. | ||
| I really shouldn't have put that shit in me. | ||
| Like you might tell your friends at the bar. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It's an annoyance and I ended up with a small fine. | ||
| It is so funny. | ||
| What an arsonist can do with a spark. | ||
| Just like, God damn. | ||
| Yep, that's exactly right. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So Alex asks him about his lawyer. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Yeah, this is going to go well. | ||
| He should probably just not get involved in that. | ||
| And what is your lawyer saying? | ||
| Well, he seems to think that there's some constitutional issue here that, you know, the First Amendment. | ||
| But, I mean, you never... | ||
| Where are you located? | ||
| I'm located in Fredonia, Kentucky. | ||
| Fredonia? | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| How do you spell that? | ||
| It's a little town. | ||
| How do you spell that? | ||
| F-R-E-D-O-I-A. | ||
| Kentucky. | ||
| I don't want to be a dick, but he misspelled Fredonia. | ||
| I was going to say, that doesn't feel like enough letters. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And it all worked out. | ||
| Okay, sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Alex wants more information about this here case. | ||
| We've got the name of the city. | ||
| Let's talk about, uh, who was this cop? | ||
| Who did this? | ||
| And, uh, what's the officer's name? | ||
| It's an officer, Dobb. | ||
| E-O-D-D. | ||
| And did you ever talk to the people at the jail and go, this is crazy, I gave the guy a video? | ||
| Um, no, I haven't seen it. | ||
| And then he'll come back with, well, you said you were wanting somebody to protect their children. | ||
| Well, that's what everybody, that's a statement. | ||
| I know we need to protect our children's future. | ||
| I mean, look, they don't have... | ||
| They're going to go, this is how you get out of it. | ||
| Just go on probation. | ||
| And if you want to believe them and sign your rights away, go ahead. | ||
| But you need to get this thrown out and you need to sue them for official oppression. | ||
| I tell you what, don't hang up, Kelly. | ||
| I want your home phone number. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And I need to get you in touch with some people. | ||
| This is insane. | ||
| But it's what's in the video. | ||
| I mean, what do you expect from these people? | ||
| Hello folks, this is Alex Jones. | ||
| You know that Berkey water filters have become the standard of excellence by which all other water filtration systems are measured. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The way that everyone loses but him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, Alex goes to break, and he comes back with Kelly. | ||
| Kelly's still there. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| This is an exciting day for him. | ||
| He's going to be talking to Mel Gibson's dad, and he gets to do this. | ||
| What a perfect day. | ||
| So he comes back, and he's already spinning this story. | ||
| I was just talking to Kelly during the break. | ||
| This happened three, four weeks ago. | ||
| He thought they'd drop it. | ||
| Then he went before the judge for pretrial, and the judge said, you're guilty of handing a police officer an anti-government, anti-police video. | ||
| And so... | ||
| If his lawyer doesn't know that that is totally insane and has prejudiced the judge, then I don't know what does. | ||
| You've got to have witnesses to that. | ||
| You've got to get in touch with the different foundations that fight this type of stuff. | ||
| You've got to get in touch with a local newspaper reporter. | ||
| We need to give out your contact info for people. | ||
| I need to write a report on this. | ||
| I need you to fax me all the documents so I know this is a real story, though I believe you. | ||
| This is so scary. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's an interesting skill. | ||
| Nah. | ||
| He put a tape in a mailbox. | ||
| I guess if you want to say he handed somebody a tape, I'm fine with that. | ||
| No. | ||
| He put a tape in a mailbox. | ||
| That's not handing something to somebody. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| Fine! | ||
| It's very importantly different. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| There are federal laws. | ||
| I'm sure that federal laws are very important to everybody right now. | ||
| They are when you're talking about semantics. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Fine. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He wants to tell Kelly what his own story is. | ||
| And so you can see this beginning to take shape. | ||
| And we're talking to Kelly Rushing, who gave a police officer some videos, including C-SPAN and Discovery or History Channel. | ||
| And the judge said, you're guilty of giving a police officer an anti-government, anti-police video, which isn't. | ||
| I mean, my films I've made have aired on national TV. | ||
| Dark Secrets Inside Bohemian Grove on the Trio Network. | ||
| So, I mean, this is a free country, but they don't think so. | ||
| This is their mindset. | ||
| This is what we show in the video. | ||
| We're all terrorists. | ||
| We're bad if we talk about freedom. | ||
| Yeah, Alex, you know, after the judge told me that, I told him, I said, wait a minute, that was an anti-corruption tape. | ||
| But wait a minute. | ||
| You should have said to the judge, it doesn't matter what the video is. | ||
| It's a free country. | ||
| So how many, hold on, hold on, how many witnesses do you have to the judge saying that? | ||
| Well, it was a pre-trial. | ||
| How many witnesses? | ||
| I don't know that there was any witnesses in there that was on my side. | ||
| I mean, I went to the pre-trial, not realizing that they were actually going to pursue this thing. | ||
| But under oath, they may lie even under oath, but was your lawyer there? | ||
| No, sir. | ||
| I was a lawyer because I didn't think there was a lawyer. | ||
| Okay, okay, okay. | ||
| Was the court reporter typing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh? | |
| Was there a court reporter? | ||
| As far as I know, I know the prosecuting attorney was there. | ||
| You need to very quietly get a copy of that because that judge is in deep trouble saying you're guilty. | ||
| A judge saying you are guilty at a pretrial. | ||
| You are guilty, he's saying, and you're guilty of giving somebody a C-SPAN video. | ||
| This is anti-government. | ||
| I mean, oh my. | ||
| So Alex, I think, feels almost like, I wish this happened to me. | ||
| Like, I wish that I could be in this position. | ||
| Kelly, you can make a fucking scene out of this. | ||
| If I were in your position, I would be making note of everybody who's there and being able to... | ||
| Whereas Kelly doesn't know who is in the room. | ||
| He doesn't seem to know. | ||
| He doesn't have any details. | ||
| This feels exactly like a scam phone call with an older person. | ||
| You don't have this number? | ||
| You need to write this number down. | ||
| Now give me your social security number. | ||
| Once I get that, I'll be able to get you over to this. | ||
| It's so clearly like, oh, you're getting scammed, man. | ||
| Yeah, but the scam is like, hey... | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's not a great deal. | ||
| Not a great deal. | ||
| Although, there is a funny point later where Alex, he gives him his fax number because he only needs to fax some documents. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| And Alex is like, hey, listen up, everybody. | ||
| Don't fax me, shit. | ||
| I'm going to give out this number. | ||
| But all you motherfuckers, keep faxing me books. | ||
| If you're going to do that, you need to pay me for the ink cartridge. | ||
| Oh, they're faxing an entire book! | ||
| God, that's awful. | ||
| It's very funny to be in this period of technology where it is a thing where he's like, you could abuse this fax number, so just don't do that. | ||
| Please, everyone. | ||
| That's such a prank that they are doing with full... | ||
| They don't think it's a prank. | ||
| They don't think it's a prank, but you have ruined his fax machine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Alex wants more details about the judge who said he is guilty, which he didn't. | ||
| But let's see if we can get some details out of this guy. | ||
| So what did you say to the judge when he said this? | ||
| Well, I told him that it was anti-corruption. | ||
| And he says, well, you're rather outspoken, aren't you? | ||
| Oh! | ||
| So he said that was bad. | ||
| I was thinking to myself, well, thank God for men that were outspoken. | ||
| You wouldn't be sitting there enjoying the freedoms you've enjoyed all your life, sucker. | ||
| And by the way, you also mentioned that you're facing a year in jail. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, that's what he told me. | ||
| Isn't that, stay there, and more calls are coming up. | ||
| I'm about to vomit. | ||
| That's going to throw up about how upset he is about this news. | ||
| So make a note of that, that Kelly is facing a year in jail. | ||
| There's no chance he ever would have probably even gotten a day in jail, necessarily for this. | ||
| But that's the big fear. | ||
| That's the scary version of this outcome, is a year in jail. | ||
| Well, I mean, you know he's a hardened criminal because he says words like sucker. | ||
| That man's done his time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And I think that the judge saying, like, well, you're outspoken, I don't think that that's necessarily... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it just seems like a regular comment. | ||
| Maybe it's overly familiar for a judge. | ||
| That's the best I would give it. | ||
| I mean, you know, the stakes are real high in a courtroom. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Alex is like, alright, we're on to something here. | ||
| I almost threw up. | ||
| This has got to be a good story then. | ||
| So he starts trying to figure out, like, I'm going to get the beats on this thing. | ||
| Unexpected turn of events. | ||
| This is the first case of this I've heard of. | ||
| A listener in Kentucky, Kelly Rushing, who I believe, but I have to get all the documents on this, put in a police officer's mailbox. | ||
| One of my videos, a C-SPAN video, exposing the New World Order. | ||
| And so the cop waited for him, pulled him over, said, you threatened my family. | ||
| And he didn't take it serious. | ||
| Kelly couldn't imagine he'd done something wrong until the judge said, you're guilty of giving a police officer an anti-government, anti-police video. | ||
| So now that's a crime. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I don't know cars. | ||
| It's fascinating to see in action. | ||
| It is, it is, uh... | ||
| You're just watching a guy try to act. | ||
| Yeah, and instead of acting, it's like lying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Comes to some people naturally, both acting and lying. | ||
| Yeah, he is a savant. | ||
| So Alex has already sort of tried to give Kelly reason to not trust his lawyer. | ||
| And he continues down that road. | ||
| And what does your lawyer say? | ||
| Now, do you know your lawyer personally? | ||
| Because a lot of times you can't get a lawyer there locally that will really represent you. | ||
| No, sir, I don't know him personally. | ||
| I have some people that told me that every time they've used him that they've won their case. | ||
| Okay, good. | ||
| And he's in Fredonia, Kentucky. | ||
| Well, my lawyer's in Princeton. | ||
| I live in Fredonia. | ||
| Fredonia is a really small town. | ||
| Okay, and what type of judge is this that's going after you? | ||
| What type of judge? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, is he a county judge? | ||
| I really couldn't tell you, Alex. | ||
| You need to find all that out and get it to me today. | ||
| Today, and if I find out what you're saying is true and I can already... | ||
| Well, I'm kind of just a basic... | ||
| Now, you said during the break, to me, off air, that this is what the video says they do, and so, wow, they're really doing it. | ||
| Oh, yeah, he acted out just like the video said he would. | ||
| Well, this is America. | ||
| You give a police officer a video. | ||
| Yeah, well, it confirmed things, you know, to me. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's using the same tricks that he does to edit up old videos of himself, but with talking through Kelly's story. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| With the painting of Dorian Gray. | ||
| You can see it getting older in real time. | ||
| It's just interesting to see that this is a strategy that has been Pivotal to Alex for his whole career. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Distorting things in order to make himself look accurate. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, you know, the two of them, they have only so much time. | ||
| Kelly has got to go back to his life, so he hangs up. | ||
| And as soon as he is off the line, Alex starts doing some more punch-up work on this story, running through the beats. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can use you as a prop without you being able to respond that you don't know any details. | ||
| Yeah, there's a little bit of, like, turn-em-up kind of thing. | ||
| Like, you know, you get a low-level criminal, oh, this is like a low-level county offense. | ||
| We're trading that in for federal training. | ||
| That's what we're going for the top. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're always using this little thing to... | ||
| That's the way we do it. | ||
| So we have a little clip from this 16th episode that is completely unrelated. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Because I thought it was funny. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And it's also, I think, very illustrative of Alex's brain. | ||
| The other thing about that... | ||
| I'm not anti-gun. | ||
| Well, that's not true. | ||
| The entire Bible is about people defending themselves against tyranny. | ||
| The entire thing? | ||
| Jesus came. | ||
| That was in the Old Testament. | ||
| I've read the Bible more than... | ||
| No, the truth of the Scriptures is this. | ||
| Well, let me just tell you something. | ||
| I'm going to defend my family, and I can have 100 pastors on here to repeat what you're saying. | ||
| Look, you know, there's plenty of scriptures to refute it, to refute the fact that we are to not live like that. | ||
| It says, blessed are the peacemakers. | ||
| Well, if you'll let me explain, that verse in 22, 36 of Luke, that's not what it means. | ||
| It's been taken out of context. | ||
| It is in no wise meant for us to go arm, to fight. | ||
| I've read the whole thing, and that's not true, and thanks for the call. | ||
| Thanks for the call. | ||
| Hitler was for gun control. | ||
| The Bible's not for Hitler. | ||
| Okay, let's go ahead. | ||
| I mean, it boils down to stuff real simple like that. | ||
| I think that perfectly sums up Alex's relationship with religion. | ||
| He's not interested in it at all, except for the ways that it can be used as a prop to justify the beliefs that he already has. | ||
| That's classic talk radio bullshit. | ||
| That's beautiful. | ||
| I think other talk radio people would be a little smoother, maybe. | ||
| I think it's classic clunky talk radio. | ||
| Yeah, but I mean that exchange of the host getting eight words and then being like, Next thing you have to say. | ||
| And then another, but actually, nah, you're an idiot. | ||
| Get off the line. | ||
| I could get a hundred experts that say you're wrong. | ||
| What a great thing to say. | ||
| What a meaningless thing to say. | ||
| I could get a hundred priests to say you're wrong. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| Hey, Hitler was for gun control. | ||
| The Bible doesn't like Hitler. | ||
| Sometimes it's just as easy as that. | ||
| What is happening? | ||
| How does this help our conversation about Luke 22? | ||
| It doesn't. | ||
| No. | ||
| So, Alex has another caller. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think that he does something really important as it relates to the story of Kelly Rushing in this clip. | ||
| Let's go ahead and talk to Ron in Oklahoma. | ||
| Ron, go ahead. | ||
| Okay, Alex. | ||
| Two things quickly here. | ||
| One, the problem in Kentucky is caused by ignorance. | ||
| I think it's time for your listeners around the United States and around the world to... | ||
| And for those that just joined us, recap what has happened to Kelly Rushing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We need to flood that county with these videos, which the police seem to think are illegal. | ||
| The judge told him, according to... | ||
| I mean, folks, one of my videos is aired on national television. | ||
| I've been interviewed by national TV. | ||
| 2020, Good Morning America, hard copy, extra, C-SPAN. | ||
| The point here is that it's not illegal to make films and to write books, but these people think it is. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's a pure form Infowar right there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the having the caller tell the telephone story, like the beginning of it, is such a perfect... | ||
| Yeah, and let's see if any of them work for me. | ||
| Yeah, it's like the telemarketer. | ||
| Like, make the script your own, you know? | ||
| And then it'll be easier to sell. | ||
| See if it comes out a little better. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe it will, maybe it won't. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Sometimes blue sky thinking comes up with a good idea. | ||
| Yeah, and on top of that, there's the call and response nature to it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's like – it's like – And then you repeat. | ||
| I don't think it's meant to be psychologically super fucky, but it is. | ||
| I think it's like what we did for Handshakes. | ||
| It's really just like, you're my friend, I am your friend. | ||
| None of their words actually mean anything close to what they're trying to say. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I mean, like, Alex's having this caller repeat this stuff is an attack on all of the rest of the listeners. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It is meant to trick them into more solidifying the story that this guy is telling, which is just the story that he heard from Alex earlier. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But I don't think that it's that in, like, I don't. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's just instinct. | ||
| It's borderline, like, here's a goat, say it's a deer. | ||
| You know, it's borderline that level of, if you agree with this story, now you're part of the group, and if you don't, you're excommunicated. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's like that book, 1987. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| That was my birth year. | ||
| Hey, happy birthday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks. | |
| So, um... | ||
| So naturally, once that day comes around, this story is going to come back up a little bit. | ||
| So we jump to the 23rd, and Alex tells, he recaps the audience. | ||
| There is so much here today. | ||
| 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. | ||
| This is not real. | ||
| This is not a concern about free speech. | ||
| But it looks like it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's a show. | ||
| It's a production. | ||
| It's the illusion of what a real patriot would feel if they existed within this story. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That's the sales pitch. | ||
| If you were really in this simulation, this is how you should react with, like, the government's going to kill you and all that stuff. | ||
| If you were someone who Alex pretends to be, this should be your reaction. | ||
| And it's just convenient that it's also exactly what you would do if you were merely trying to exploit the situation for your own maximal gain. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And given his actions over the years, I think it becomes very clear that it's not some noble intention that he has. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's like... | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| So there's the court date that Kelly has. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And Alex wants to talk about that, but also realizes that it's fucking boring. | ||
| 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? | ||
| What happened was not a whole lot. | ||
| I think they're discontinuing it until March the 8th because the prosecuting attorney hasn't seen the arrest tape yet, from my understanding. | ||
| Now, through discovery before that tape disappears and the cop claims that you were, you know... | ||
| Before he claimed that you had lasers shooting out of your eyes and grew 19-inch fangs and spit acid on him. | ||
| Before he says that, you need to do discovery and get that video. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Because he'll claim you sprouted wings later. | ||
| But luckily we've got his police report. | ||
| He says the video is threatening and that's the crime. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| 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. | ||
| Well, see, this is the point, and I've gotten the same thing from the city and the county. | ||
| They don't want to go after you, but the state police are filing a complaint. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, I mean, so he enjoyed the videos, but he's still going to prosecute you. | ||
| Well, what did you say to him? | ||
| Well, I just basically said, well, we see eye to eye about the gun issue, but... | ||
| Oh, that's a threat! | ||
| That's a threat! | ||
| SWAT team! | ||
| I wouldn't even talk to these people. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's interesting, I think, that dynamic. | ||
| It's there. | ||
| The young eat the old. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And Alex used to be young. | ||
| I think Alex did say one true thing there, which is you probably shouldn't talk to these people. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| If that was our advice from the very beginning. | ||
| You probably shouldn't talk to these people. | ||
| We'd be better off. | ||
| I think that's usually a good piece of advice in legal situations. | ||
| But I think that Alex is including his own lawyer in that you shouldn't talk to these people. | ||
| I was going even further back. | ||
| You should not be giving out tapes. | ||
| Just don't talk to anybody. | ||
| Stay inside. | ||
| Don't talk to anybody. | ||
| Stay inside. | ||
| Never talk. | ||
| Watch The Net, starring Sandra Bullock. | ||
| I hear it's good. | ||
| It's a great movie. | ||
| So Alex compares Kelly's case to another Patriot. | ||
| Now, did they say they're going to drop this, or they're just going to hear it later? | ||
| No, they're going to review the arrest tape to see what kind of approach they're going to take. | ||
| The policeman said that there's some things that I said on the arrest tape that proves his point. | ||
| Yeah, I love this. | ||
| He arrests you for giving him a video and then tries to claim that you threatened him in the police car. | ||
| That's like... | ||
| The judge said, I don't know why you were held this long. | ||
| I apologize. | ||
| I have the Associated Press article. | ||
| But, yeah, oh no, the big charges came, which they, by the way, dropped, once he was in the jail cell. | ||
| See, they arrest you so you can commit the crimes in the jail cell or in the squad car. | ||
| I love this new Soviet system. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I'll just say, boy, it is good to be white in America. | ||
| That is the way you do it. | ||
| You don't know that Carl Klang is white? | ||
| I mean, hey, it's possible. | ||
| I'm proud of him for not taking the low-hanging fruit with rhyming news with Jews. | ||
| That's nice. | ||
| You don't know that he didn't. | ||
| I don't know that he didn't. | ||
| You haven't read all the lyrics? | ||
| I feel like you could have told us. | ||
| I can't confirm or deny. | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| I just copy and pasted the chorus. | ||
| I mean, that one is... | ||
| It is the rhyme for news right there. | ||
| So Kelly's brother, Tim, is the one who made the tape that got put in the mailbox. | ||
| And so on this February 23rd episode, he pops in. | ||
| So now the word family's a threat, see? | ||
| I mean, that's what we all say. | ||
| We're trying to protect our children, protect this country, our children's future. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I've just threatened everybody's children because I said the word children. | |
| Now, jury, you will convict that man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You will convict Kelly Rushing because he said the word family. | |
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Alex, if Kelly's such a threat to that officer, then why did that officer allow Kelly to leave with his firearm? | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| Kelly had a firearm in the vehicle, and then when he left jail, they gave it back to him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| No, they never took it out of the vehicle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They left it when they impounded the vehicle. | |
| Well, the lazy possums may not have looked. | ||
| No, he did. | ||
| He had Kelly remove it from the glove compartment, and he looked at it and put it back in the glove compartment. | ||
| Well, that just means that people still believe in the Second Amendment and aren't completely brainwashed. | ||
| No, he didn't have me remove it. | ||
| He opened the glove box, and I was sitting in the car and could see him opening the glove box, and at that time I told him it was legal. | ||
| And he closed it back then. | ||
| So basically it's gotten to the point where the prosecutor and the judge know that they can't get you on an Alex Jones and a C-SPAN video. | ||
| So they're going to try to find something on the tape, which you didn't do, and so you just show that tape to the jury. | ||
| Yeah, I think they're starting to backstep now. | ||
| So this is some tough information for Alex. | ||
| If the story here is supposed to be about crushing patriots and all that, why'd they ignore the gun? | ||
| This is a huge plot hole, which is why you see Alex trying to brush past it and move on to something else. | ||
| Because obviously, if this was all some kind of globalist thing, it's like, boom, we got a gun! | ||
| This is perfect! | ||
| Let's just shoot him in the car! | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That is legitimately crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And Alex doesn't really know what to do with it. | ||
| Neither do you. | ||
| What is there to do with that? | ||
| 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. | ||
| I always thought that the luxury of the Soviet stitch-em-up was that you didn't even have to worry about getting them to do anything. | ||
| You just said they did it. | ||
| It's much easier. | ||
| Very simple. | ||
| And in this case, you just ignore something. | ||
| I mean, that's crazy. | ||
| That's legitimately crazy. | ||
| So, the call ends here with stressing how prophetic Alex is. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's a big affirmative. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I guess they're kind of God around there. | ||
| Do they set up shoe sign stations where you've got to all park your cars and lick their boots so they're real shiny? | ||
| That's the next step, Alex. | ||
| Let's don't give them no ideas either. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, gentlemen, you've got my home phone number. | ||
| Stay in touch. | ||
| We appreciate all you do, Alex. | ||
| And, Tim, you told me you're going to keep giving the videos out, right? | ||
| Most definitely. | ||
| I've got the VCR working overtime now. | ||
| Kelly, what you saw in 9-11 actually happened to you, didn't it? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, it sure did. | ||
| All right, thanks for the call, guys. | ||
| We appreciate it, Alex. | ||
| 9-11 is a road to tyranny, Alex's film, just to be clear. | ||
| Yeah, so he lived the terrifying fantasy that Alex put into his film, and you can't buy that. | ||
| Like, you can't buy that kind of PR. | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| It must be weird not to be able to say the only thing that you have to be thinking at that moment, which is like, it didn't feel like it. | ||
| No. | ||
| Your movie sounded like it would feel very different. | ||
| Yeah, your movie was so scary. | ||
| This felt boring. | ||
| It sounds real boring. | ||
| This was municipal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| They, by working their VCRs over time and sending out more of Alex's tapes, ended up empowering... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's ironic. | ||
| I believe that is dramatic irony. | ||
| Yes, that is the definition of said term. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| So Alex is mad about this trooper as he continues on on the 23rd. | ||
| This state trooper Dodd is just... | ||
| 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. | ||
| They cannot plug. | ||
| You know. | ||
| I mean, this is a business. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What are we doing here? | ||
| Do you want to be the centerpiece of my next podcast? | ||
| Somebody has to pay for this. | ||
| Listen, other people take ads. | ||
| I do this. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| I have just spent quite a while talking to someone who is possibly going to go to jail for a year because of my tapes. | ||
| Would you like to buy some? | ||
| That sounds pretty cool, though. | ||
| That's how you do it. | ||
| It's an adventure. | ||
| Banning it only makes it sexier. | ||
| So the 23rd of February, that's where this episode was. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the next day... | ||
| But the reason I bring this on, I play this clip from the 24th, is you can just see Alex practicing the story. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What? | ||
| You are kidding me. | ||
| No, I'm not kidding. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| I mean, that shows how crazy. | ||
| It's all crazy. | ||
| 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! | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| And no, you shouldn't. | ||
| The end. | ||
| Angel Shamaya is almost coming in with a standpoint of like, that's not true. | ||
| That sounds like so much bullshit. | ||
| But fine. | ||
| A judge did not say that it's illegal to give a cop a tape. | ||
| That would be insane. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| But fine. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| The world's crazy, man. | ||
| So now we roll on till March 5th. | ||
| And Alex has Tex Mars on the show on that day. | ||
| And so he tells... | ||
| This is an important case. | ||
| You might want to write about it. | ||
| I can give you their numbers. | ||
| In fact, the American Free Press called me two weeks ago. | ||
| I never called them back. | ||
| I apologize. | ||
| And I should have told Kelly, Rushing, and others to call them. | ||
| But I called the newspaper. | ||
| I called around. | ||
| I just get so overwhelmed, text. | ||
| One of my listeners gave a police officer a C-SPAN video of Ron Paul's neocon speech. | ||
| He gave one of my videos. | ||
| He gave the state police officer this. | ||
| The state police officer came and arrested him after that on the road. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Took him to jail. | ||
| The judge said, you're guilty of giving us anti-government, anti-police videos. | ||
| And they're going ahead with the trial, trying to put him in jail for a year as a threat. | ||
| And they say giving him the video was a threat. | ||
| So that's pure Soviet Union, Tex. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, absolutely. | |
| And, you know, this is the thing. | ||
| These things must be going on. | ||
| We're getting these reports now across America. | ||
| And the press will, you're the only guy out there, Alex, one of the few that has the courage to report this kind of thing. | ||
| So brave. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like he doesn't want that necessarily. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| This isn't about standing up for Kelly rushing. | ||
| It's about using a bullshit version of Kelly's story to advance Alex's interests, which are the shared interests of Nazis like Tex Mars 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. | ||
| He's like, hey guys, we got a live thing here. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| It's a giant puppet of The Wizard of Oz, That's the whole thing. | ||
| And that's why these are the sorts of people that he's pitching the story to. | ||
| The American Free Press, Tex Mars, Angel Shemaya. | ||
| Like, they're the people who also need the kinds of cover that Alex uses to disguise his real agenda. | ||
| Economic dependence and credulity often sound very similar. | ||
| So, March 10th comes along, and Alex has Kelly back on the show, because there have been some developments. | ||
| Namely, that Kelly has rejected a plea deal. | ||
| Kelly rushing in Kentucky, and I got the news articles, I talked to the local officials. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| They're no longer public servants. | ||
| I talked to the officials, the authorities. | ||
| He gave a police officer a Ron Paul video from Congress, public video broadcast on television, sent out over cable, C-SPAN. | ||
| Very radical, evil stuff. | ||
| An elected congressman, Vietnam veteran, a doctor, very evil. | ||
| Very radical stuff, talking about the neocons in one of my videos to a police officer. | ||
| And he was then, the cop next day pulled him over, arrested him, and said, you shouldn't have given me that video, that's a threat. | ||
| And the judge said, you've given anti-government, anti-police videos, you're guilty. | ||
| Last time we heard that they were postponing the trial for a while, and now to give us a report, is Kelly rushing? | ||
| From Lyons County, Kentucky. | ||
| Good to talk to you, Kelly. | ||
| How are you doing, Alex? | ||
| Good. | ||
| What exactly has now happened to you? | ||
| Well, I went to court and they tried to plea bargain with me. | ||
| My lawyer told me that they wanted me to admit to a guilt of a charge of harassment. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So, do not do that. | ||
| No, no, I didn't. | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| I told you they do that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, this is taking advantage of a man who's... | ||
| But fuck it. | ||
| Incapable of fighting back. | ||
| There's at least a naivety that gets in the way. | ||
| Yeah, he does not have the tools necessary to defend himself against this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he's very unassuming of the negative intentions that Alex obviously is operating from. | ||
| Of course he doesn't have the tools. | ||
| Why would he have the tools, right? | ||
| He's just a trusting guy who's trusted people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, as this exploitation is happening, You can feel Alex egging him on. | ||
| He wants him to explode, basically. | ||
| And I can tell you that it didn't happen, and I'm pretty grateful for that. | ||
| You gave somebody a video, and I tried to say it was a threat, a terrific threat, for giving him a Ron Paul video. | ||
| Hey, tell him, let's go ahead and push it. | ||
| Tell him, go ahead and put you in jail, and we'll get all the foundations out there on your side, and we'll sue all of them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| okay? | ||
| Menacing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| And now they're strictly going after the terroristic threatening. | ||
| And again, they're going to try to get it. | ||
| If you demand a jury, which of course you should, they'll try to never let you bring that up. | ||
| They'll say, did you talk to the officer? | ||
| And the judge will say, you will convict him. | ||
| He talked to a god. | ||
| You need to bring up the videos. | ||
| You need to intermittent evidence. | ||
| Did your lawyer try to get you to plea bargain? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, not really, no. | |
| So tell us where it's going. | ||
| In America, giving them a Ron Paul and Alex Jones video. | ||
| And by the way, American Free Press wants to talk to you for three weeks, and I, for some reason, dropped the ball. | ||
| I'll get you that info. | ||
| 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. | ||
| If the feds had charged him, Alex probably would have shown up at the court date. | ||
| It would have been the best thing that ever happened. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just a little bit inconvenient. | ||
| Some of the details don't quite work, and that's why Alex needs to fiddle around a little, dance around a little. | ||
| I mean, I do like that he's acquitted. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Don't take the deal. | ||
| Don't ever take the deal. | ||
| Especially on something like this, it's a misunderstanding. | ||
| Yeah, get a jury trial if it's a misunderstanding. | ||
| But also sometimes deals are not necessarily in your interest. | ||
| Sometimes they are in your best interest. | ||
| So Alex makes a prediction for the court date that is upcoming for Kelly. | ||
| Kelly's got this court date in April, and here's the prediction. | ||
| You're going in what time at the Lyon County Courthouse? | ||
| At 1 o 'clock on April the 12th. | ||
| Okay, and they say this is for jury selection? | ||
| Yeah, this will be for jury selection. | ||
| Okay, let me make a prediction. | ||
| They're going to corner you. | ||
| And threaten to charge you with other things if you don't sign right now. | ||
| And at that point, you've got to say no. | ||
| You've got to keep going with the jury trial, and you've got to start – I've got to – I still have those. | ||
| Those are at my house. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Now, for some reason, I've got a problem. | ||
| Well, they're lunatics, sir. | ||
| I mean, they're on complete power trips. | ||
| It's like giving a Nazi in Nazi Germany a pamphlet about how, you know, arresting Jews is bad. | ||
| What do you think would happen to you even if you were German? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's not... | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I don't think it's good. | ||
| I do like that he's almost on to the lesson, though, which is don't fuck with the cops. | ||
| Just don't do it. | ||
| I think that there is... | ||
| That's a great lesson. | ||
| I'll take that lesson. | ||
| But here's the other lesson that's more important. | ||
| Don't randomly put things in people's mailboxes. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You don't know whose mailbox it is, necessarily. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| You don't know how they're going to respond to whatever it is you're putting in the mailbox. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That's the lesson. | ||
| If you're going to give out Alex's fucking tapes, do it face-to-face. | ||
| Or leave a pile of them somewhere. | ||
| There's definitely that. | ||
| Like a give a penny, take a penny. | ||
| Leave it on a counter where someone says it's okay to leave them there. | ||
| Don't put shit in people's mailboxes. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Secondary lesson. | ||
| Also, don't fuck with the police. | ||
| See, I like the first lesson, but then you get into, like, why is Discover still sending me junk mail? | ||
| You know? | ||
| Because they pay postage. | ||
| See, there we go. | ||
| Now it's about economics with you. | ||
| It's all about the money. | ||
| It is! | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's about the postal system. | |
| In my natural state, as a mammal, I don't care about mailboxes. | ||
| Wild. | ||
| The postal system is important. | ||
| Wild. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So we do live in that world, and therefore mailboxes are sacred. | ||
| Don't put shit in people's mailbox. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So Alex predicts that... | ||
| He's going to be rich. | ||
| They're in deep trouble, sir. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| Even if you're convicted, it's going to then be a national case, and you're going to have a lawsuit that's so big you're going to own... | ||
| Foster Rouse, it's already up at $500,000. | ||
| Oh, in that way, Alex. | ||
| You know, the officer has moved out of his house. | ||
| I couldn't believe that. | ||
| Well, you know, the Bible says the wicked fleeth when none pursueth. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I mean, they're guilty, man. | ||
| Man, it's like, you know, this is how they operate. | ||
| I mean, you've got to be. | ||
| I mean, folks, what type of wimp should police come to be able to? | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| So this guy got these things put in his mailbox and then tried to deal with it. | ||
| Alex has been covering the story for a month. | ||
| And it's a pretty easy assumption to make that he moved because he was receiving a lot of harassment. | ||
| Not complicated. | ||
| No. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| So when Alex says, the wicked flee when no one pursue, it's your listeners who are pursuing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You are doing this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| He doesn't have to take any accountability for the just tidal wave of discomfort he leaves. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Didn't happen then. | ||
| Never happens. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| And it's fascinating how the two of them, there's that pause when he says that the cop moved. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I think that pause is Alex recognizing, I know why. | ||
| That would be me. | ||
| That would be me. | ||
| And the two of them kind of having a silence of, oh, shit. | ||
| It kind of shows the consequences of the behavior we're engaging in. | ||
| Oh, well. | ||
| So Alex wants Kelly to fire his lawyer. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Alex doesn't know who his lawyer is. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| He knows nothing. | ||
| Nah. | ||
| He's like, you probably gotta fire that guy. | ||
| Get him out of here. | ||
| He's a globalist. | ||
| He might be a mason. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| So far, my lawyer hasn't said a whole lot. | ||
| Huh? | ||
| No, he didn't move for a motion to dismiss all of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He didn't. | |
| No. | ||
| Because he gets money out of continuing it. | ||
| You need to get rid of your lawyer, buddy. | ||
| I mean, is this some good old boy in the community everybody can trust? | ||
| Oh, well, I'm sure that, yeah, he's in the... | ||
| There seems to be a nest of them around here. | ||
| Well, there's a nest everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, but, I mean, there are really a lot of them around here. | ||
| We're going to show this boy how things are done, done like our new world order. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He doesn't know anything about this guy's lawyer. | ||
| He's possibly acting in ways that are disrupting Kelly's own best interests. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think this is deeply fucking irresponsible. | ||
| Yeah, I was trying to, I'm thinking maybe not. | ||
| Who does voices? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I feel like that's fairly good advice. | ||
| I mean, I bet there's some dude who's like, ah, I bought Bitcoin in 2000, and you're like, ah, well, fucking everybody gets one. | ||
| That's the exception. | ||
| Ah, that's bullshit. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| I think that other people who are around you may have more context for your life than Alex Ding Dong Jones. | ||
| At the very least, they're bigger fans of you. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| Alex hates you. | ||
| He hates you. | ||
| And he wants to just scare the shit out of you. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And what is this about the Second Amendment? | ||
| I'm confused. | ||
| Huh? | ||
| Kelly. | ||
| What is this about Second Amendment? | ||
| I'm confused. | ||
| Well, I don't know either. | ||
| I know the prosecuting attorney keeps talking about he's not giving up his guns, so I'm not really sure why he's even bringing that in. | ||
| They're trying to get you to say the word gun, and they're going to put you on medication. | ||
| You'll never be seen again. | ||
| Keep your mouth shut about stuff like that. | ||
| Get ready your lawyer, and we've got to get you in touch with Foundations right now. | ||
| You're in a lot of trouble. | ||
| Because these people are nuts, and if it continues, you could end up having a problem on a dark road at night. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're going to show him one way or another. | ||
| He ain't going to get away with us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We run things in this county, not you. | |
| We own you people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We've owned you for hundreds of years, and you're going to learn we run things. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Fire your fucking lawyer. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| It's not me. | ||
| I'm not going to go to jail. | ||
| It's so funny. | ||
| You can hear Alex having the same conversation that that guy had with a cop. | ||
| Alex was like, man, if you don't do this, if you don't get rid of him, you might find yourself alone in a dark alley, shot in the head. | ||
| That's how they talk to each other. | ||
| And then at the end of it, he like giggles. | ||
| Yeah, but Alex is rich. | ||
| Yeah, like it's nuts. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He said, you're guilty. | ||
| So six months later, Alex is now talking to a friend of his who was drunk on a horse. | ||
| I mean, when it's, uh, never look a drunk gift horse in the mouth, I think is what we're learning here. | ||
| Yeah, I feel like that clip is such a recognition of Alex realizing that he fucked up this game. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This was, like, such an opportunity for him, and he just didn't nail it down right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm willing to talk to the guy who was drunk on a horse, because it's associated with this story that is so good. | ||
| Gotta have something. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yep. | |
| Can't have nothing. | ||
| But also, I couldn't find any articles about this guy on the horse. | ||
| Couldn't? | ||
| No. | ||
| That's unsurprising. | ||
| That's not that surprising. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| I feel like that's prime newspaper, we gotta fill a column kind of thing. | ||
| Back in 2004? | ||
| No, there's drunk people on horses all day, every day around there. | ||
| But they don't get arrested on the horse. | ||
| You have to be pretty drunk. | ||
| That's because you're inundated. | ||
| Or the horse might have been drunk. | ||
| That's also possible. | ||
| What if the horse was also smoking weed? | ||
| Can horses do that? | ||
| I remember seeing a monkey smoke. | ||
| They can take edibles. | ||
| They can take edibles. | ||
| Anything can take edibles. | ||
| Well, I mean, you have to keep your hand flat. | ||
| That's traditional. | ||
| You gotta keep your hand flat whenever you give them the THC-infused apple. | ||
| Dip it in salt. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ah, well. | |
| So, we now jump to November 2005. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Kelly initially called in February 2004. | ||
| So, you know, we're later here. | ||
| And Alex is still telling this story. | ||
| And all the videos are banned at this base. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know, that's very, very newsworthy. | ||
| I mean, fought police on a military basis. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Well, that's exactly what they do at Fort Gordon. | ||
| They threaten you with sedition. | ||
| If you say, okay, I'm seditious, that's okay, but if you don't say, okay, I'm just crazy, then they send you up to the psycho world. | ||
| Yeah, so they, well, I mean, obviously, they're trying to turn us into the Soviet Union. | ||
| Yeah, this caller makes a lot of sense, seems to be telling a very coherent story. | ||
| But Alex seems to have adjusted some of the details of this story in the time. | ||
| Well, seven years is a much better number. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's more like evocative. | ||
| It's a little scarier. | ||
| Yep, absolutely. | ||
| But you see some of the main sort of polish points that he made in the story initially with the mailbox is out of it now, the tape is terrorism. | ||
| Ways that the story works better for Alex are now canon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we're able to just adjust, like, he was facing a year in jails, now seven. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| Details don't matter. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Seven years is better for the story. | ||
|
unidentified
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It is. | |
| It just rolls off the tongue better. | ||
| Yeah, it's great. | ||
| So now we go to February 2006, two years after Kelly had originally appeared on the show. | ||
| Alex is talking to Jack McLamb, and he tells him the story. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, how do they sleep at night? | ||
| Trying to send good people to prison. | ||
| Well, brother, they're operating under the philosophy that all of our governments, local, state, and federal are operating under. | ||
| The unjustifies the means. | ||
| That sounds familiar. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And it's all fake. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I love the update. | ||
| I think the three years, but... | ||
| That is better than seven years. | ||
| It sounds more legal. | ||
| Yeah, it sounds more official. | ||
| It sounds so more official. | ||
| And then he's saying he called the judge, so obviously he got that information. | ||
| Alex has claimed that he's called the judge on other instances. | ||
| I don't know if he did or didn't do that. | ||
| My guess is no. | ||
| I'm going to go with a no on that one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I do appreciate making up that part of the story. | ||
| How do these people get off on trying to ruin this man's life like I'm currently doing? | ||
| I don't want to ruin his life. | ||
| I just want to encourage more risky behaviors that I can profit off of. | ||
| I know that what ends at this is his life being ruined, but I'm not looking for that outcome. | ||
| I'm just doing the things that get there. | ||
| Yeah, in spite of that possible consequence. | ||
| I'm ignoring that. | ||
| I don't care about that as opposed to wanting it. | ||
| It's about the journey, not the destination. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Indeed. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And so let's... | ||
| So now we are six years after Kelly was on, and he's still just telling this story. | ||
| And I see this all the time. | ||
| 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. | ||
| This is far, like, these are far from the only clips of Alex talking about this case. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He talks about it a lot and has talked about it a lot over the years. | ||
| Still, even until much more recently than 2010. | ||
| I think that that's fascinating because it's bullshit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is bullshit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's really both sides of this. | ||
| You could make an argument. | ||
| Acted a little bit capriciously. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But it started with Kelly. | ||
| Kelly did the thing that incited the motion. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| In this case. | ||
| And Alex has spent years making a big deal out of this. | ||
| So when you have that as your sort of, that's your behavior, you would not think that you would just be hand-waving away. | ||
| Sincere and very legitimate encroachments upon people's freedom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| The way that Alex is able to accept what's going on now and able to be like, ah, fuck them, they're on student visas or something like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's bad. | |
| But when you reckon with it in juxtaposition with his past behaviors, and how... | ||
| That should be years of Alex's coverage. | ||
| This Kelly rushing situation was something that he talked about for years. | ||
| These things, these abuses that are being carried out right now should be Alex's, it should be incessant. | ||
| And instead, it's forgiven and ignored. | ||
| I mean, you know, to a certain extent, it being real is bad for business. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because if it's real, then we have to do all the things that we talk shit about doing. | ||
| Whenever it's fake, we can just talk shit. | ||
| It's a lot easier to just talk. | ||
| I called the judge. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Because it's fake, you can say you called the judge and there was no consequence. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Now that it's real, If I believed what I say, then I actually have to do a lot of shit. | ||
| Well, and I think that a lot of people have that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So, anyway. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| I think Kelly, I don't know where he's at. | ||
| I think he's probably dead. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Rest in peace, Larry Nichols. | ||
| I think that's what's important here. | ||
| We need to remind people about Larry Nichols. | ||
| The thing that I find so just rich about this is there is that comparison of the president and Alex's behavior and the way he operated in the past. | ||
| And at the same time, there is a real pathos. | ||
| To, like, Kelly is obviously someone who has beliefs that I don't agree with and I find bad. | ||
| At the same time, he's a human. | ||
| And you see him being used by Alex. | ||
| And there's a human element. | ||
| There's an academic and a human element. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| Victim and perpetrator are all too often the same. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't believe that people should be exploited, even Kelly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know? | ||
| At the same time, if he listened to Alex, when Alex said, don't put things in people's mailboxes. | ||
| There is that. | ||
| This problem would not have come about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| If he had just, like, run into Officer Dodd socially somewhere and given him the tape, none of this would have happened. | ||
| It's the mailbox. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That doesn't sound very warlike. | ||
| The postmaster general does not fuck around. | ||
| Yeah, that doesn't sound very cool at all. | ||
| He's a general. | ||
| So, we come to the end of this, and we'll see where we are next time! | ||
| But until then, we have a website. | ||
| Indeed we do. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| We'll be back. | ||
| But until then, I'm Neo. | ||
| I'm Leo. | ||
| I'm DZXClark. | ||
| I am the Mysterious Professor. | ||
| Woo! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| Woo! | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Woo! | ||
| And now, here comes the sex robot. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love your work. |
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