Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes dissect Alex Jones’ June 2, 2025 episode, where he pivots from blaming Trump’s briefings for Ukraine’s drone attack to defending Palantir’s surveillance despite prior opposition, calling critics "hysterical" while dismissing Hamas flag debates as free speech. They expose his shifting narratives—leftist bias, corporate jealousy, then populist betrayal—as opportunistic, questioning whether his embrace of mainstream right-wing Twitter signals a genuine ideological shift or financial ties. His selective defense of surveillance mirrors past false-choice tactics, undermining credibility. [Automatically generated summary]
So, the massive attacks Sunday night into Monday morning all over Russia, up to 4,000 miles away from the Ukrainian border in far eastern Russia, right by Japan, are completely designed to, the night before, derail the peace talks that just concluded this morning.
And, of course, everyone's waiting for the big response from Putin.
Well, I shouldn't say everyone.
You tune into leftist media.
You tune into so-called populist media.
All they're talking about is the crazy Muslim with the makeshift flamethrower, Malab Cocktails, trying to kill Jews in Boulder.
Or they're spending their time hysterically running around about Palantir.
Because that's what the liberals want you to talk about, so that's what we do.
And don't worry, I'll spend time on the rocky horror and on Palantir a little bit next hour, if you actually want to know what's going on in both cases.
So on June 1st, Ukraine carried out a very elaborate attack on Russia, where they managed to smuggle 117 drones into the country, launch them, and attack Russian air bases successfully.
It's tough to say exactly what the damage they were able to do is, but from what I can tell from news reports, this is entirely a matter of them attacking military targets.
On this episode, Alex calls this Russia's Pearl Harbor, which actually fails on two counts.
The first is that the U.S. hadn't previously invaded Japan, and the second is that Alex...
Alex is supposed to think that Pearl Harbor was a false flag.
The whole thing is a big deal, and there's obviously going to be retaliation.
But largely speaking...
Alex is at a very uncomfortable point at this June 2nd episode.
When Trump was running in 2024, I think that he overestimated his sway over Putin and believed that he could end the war in Ukraine just by buddying up with the strongman and joining him in bullying Zelensky.
As we've seen, that clearly hasn't worked, and towards the end of May, Trump said that Putin was, quote, absolutely crazy and condemned Russia's attacks on Ukrainian cities.
At this point, I think that Trump may be realizing that his normal tactics aren't going to do shit here.
And it seems like he's signaling that he's just going to be backing off from being too involved, let Russia do whatever the fuck they want.
That's a good strategy for Trump if he's just trying to distance himself from a situation where he has way less leverage than he thought.
But it's a huge problem for people like Alex in the extreme right-wing media.
They've seriously overcommitted to Putin and the righteousness of his cause.
They're tying it closely to these political and even spiritual identities that they've built up.
These folks in this media space are going to need to make some tough choices in the coming months as the team that they've chosen to root for falls apart.
On the one front, you have Trump and Putin, who are supposed to be the united front that's standing up to save white Christendom from the terrors of wokeness.
They should be on the same page, but they're clearly not, and that's a problem.
On another front, you have Trump and Elon Musk falling out a bit over Trump's big, beautiful bill, and Elon departing his role in the fake government efficiency office that they created.
Musk's been shitting on this bill and trying to whip up opposition to it, and it looks like the two of them may not be on the same page at all anymore.
This shit is coming apart at the seams, and Alex needs to make some choices.
As As for the choice that he's making on this show, it seems to indicate to me that he's possibly more committed to Putin than he is to Trump, since the attack on Russia is being covered as the real main news, whereas these other things like the Molotov cocktail attack and Palantir, these are side issues.
That you're being distracted from the main thing, which is this Russia stuff.
So yeah, I think that Alex is at this sort of crossroads, whether he understands it or not, that he's committed to a number of things that are about to be enemies with each other.
But you've got another big strain here that no one is pointing out.
Oh, Ukraine's massive drone attack deep inside Russia lays bare Putin's vulnerability.
Russia's borders are highly controlled compared to the United States that's been a wide-open sieve off and on for decades, particularly the last four years.
Hundreds of thousands of military-age men with affiliations to Hezbollah and the Chinese military and others have come in en masse with the same boots, same backpacks, same military builds.
We know they're here producing fentanyl, money laundering, running crime operations, sending the money back to Iran and back to China.
And if you think this lays bare the dangers and the vulnerabilities of asymmetrical warfare, let me give you a newsflash.
The Russians have smuggled nuclear weapons into the United States decades ago.
The Chinese have smuggled nuclear weapons in.
The United States has smuggled things even nastier than that into their countries.
So it's important to understand that kicking immigrants out of the United States is one of the only things that really matters to Alex.
And you can tell by how every story is actually about how scared you should be about the border.
This attack on Russia has nothing to do with Russia's immigration laws, but Alex doesn't miss an opportunity to demonize the people that he hates.
And I would say that if Alex believes any of this shit that he's saying, then there's basically no reason to try to solve any of the world's problems.
If all of these countries have smuggled arsenals into each other's borders, the mathematical odds of that not going wrong is basically zero.
Disarmament talks aren't really an option, because if you've got all these secret weapons in someone else's country, how could you ever expect them to trust you when you say you promise you've removed them all?
This is a Gordian knot of international diplomacy, and if any of it's true, then Trump enabled that status quo to remain in place for his entire first presidency, which seems pretty shitty, and I'd love to hear Alex explain that.
And that's why it's important to remember that Alex doesn't actually believe any of that stuff.
The fantasies about smuggled nukes and all this shit is just exciting detail that he's adding to this story to advocate for kicking immigrants out of the United States.
Furthermore, what's even the point of smuggling weapons if you can North Korea smuggle ballots and shit in and influence the government of the country?
There's so many ways everybody is trying to murder you, and it's so close that it's like, maybe you guys should focus on one way to murder me and get really, really good at it, you know?
It's like the Bruce Lee thousand punch thing, you know?
And as I told you when Trump came out eight days ago and said, I'm very upset with Putin.
I don't know what he's doing, attacking Ukraine.
We got a peace deal.
I'd ask both sides not to do this.
I knew before I even made phone calls that through his morning briefings that goes through a filter, and because it's not on the corporate media here in the United States until this big attack a day and a half ago, that Trump did not know.
About the massive Ukrainian escalation in the last month of drone attacks and missile attacks in Russia.
And sure enough, Marco Rubio's gone public.
Lavrov's gone public.
And it's CNN's reporting that the White House has said that Trump did not understand what Ukraine was doing the last five weeks.
And that Trump is upset about Trump.
But I saw the experts, the populists, the fake populists that actually haven't been studying this for decades, going, Jones just made it up.
Trump knew what he was doing.
This is a great way to put pressure on Putin to game the peace table.
He gets these briefings, he gets this information, and if it's not on Fox News, he occasionally watches my show and other people's shows, but he has some lag time, as Roger Stone has said many times, that when Trump gets the right information, he always makes the right decision.
Obviously what's going on here is that Alex needs to come up with a story to sell the audience that explains why Trump said that Putin had gone crazy, and the best way to do that is to pretend that he's a child and he can only be expected to know things that are on TV.
But I can't imagine how pathetic I would feel if there was a politician that I supported who went against a position that I thought was very important, and I tried to rationalize why that happened by saying they didn't see the story on TV.
This is such a weak angle for Alex to take.
It's such diminished expectations of what Trump is doing.
It suggests a possible situation where four people could directly limit and curate the amount of and what type of knowledge Trump receives, thereby creating their own agenda that Trump would enact, believing that he was enacting his own thoughts, when in fact...
And I realized, like, oh, Alex is just priming the talking points that Mike Flynn's going to come on and rant about.
Right.
Like, the whole setup, everything about, like, this attack on Russia, what it really illustrates is how vulnerable the United States is to terrorist insurgent attacks from within.
You know, like, it has that same kernel, except Steve was so detached from time, and he had such crazy claims of, like, arresting the Pope and all this other shit.
So if the A plot of this episode is General Flynn's talking points about the attack in Russia, then the B plot is how everyone should stop worrying so much about Palantir.
News had just broken that Palantir was in talks with the Trump administration to create a database of U.S. citizens, which is exactly the kind of thing that Alex has spent his entire career screaming about.
Representatives of the administration had claimed that they just want to eliminate data silos where different departments of the government have access to different information about you.
Information silos in terms of the government are a really good thing for the sake of protecting your privacy.
The government isn't supposed to collect information from you except when they really need to, like the IRS getting tax returns or Medicare getting medical documents.
An office like the IRS has no business with your medical records, so obviously disclosing that stuff to that office is a violation of your basic right to privacy.
This is really elementary liberty stuff.
So it's glaring to see Alex on the side of this issue that he is.
The other basic piece of this is that the government, if they merge all of that data together, it becomes a lot less secure in terms of hackers.
So Alex is in a really bad spot here because he's been promoting or minimizing Palantir lately because the Trump administration had been working with them to create a database of undocumented immigrants in order to help speed up deportations.
This is something that Alex should have opposed on principle, but as we've discovered in his recent career, those principles he pretended to have were just an act.
This was the Trump administration expanding the surveillance and police states.
Two things that are the bedrock of Alex's career.
But it was fine because Alex knew that it wasn't going to hurt people that are like him.
It's only going to hurt people he doesn't care about.
Now it's coming out that Trump wants to consolidate all this information that the government has about citizens, and Trump is getting some serious backlash from the right-wing base.
This is a bad move on Trump's part, and because it's getting this kind of heat, Alex feels the need to weigh in, and he's chosen the absolute worst angle he can have.
Alex has made multiple documentaries with the title Police State.
He can't just come out and say that Palantir is okay because they're not that big of a company.
They had revenues of almost $3 billion last year, so it sounds like this is some mom-and-pop outfit, and Alex needs to cut that shit right off.
I tried pretty hard to resist the sellout label in general, because a lot of times Alex's shifting positions can be explained in other ways.
But this is impossible.
I dare say that I've listened to more of this guy's show than most people on this planet, and there's no way that I believe that Alex Jones, who started Infowars, could possibly reach the point where he's defending a company like Palantir, creating a database of U.S. citizens without him having some motivation to reach that point.
I don't know if it's desperation or if he's given up, but there's no way that this position on this core issue changes like this organically.
Doing things like supporting Trump or getting on board with Elon, those were wrong decisions for him to make.
But they can be made sense of in Alex's world.
This cannot make sense without Alex abandoning a belief in the right to privacy.
And I think that's bullshit.
I don't think that there's any way that he can get there without core denials of what his thing is built on.
As fundamental as America, the idea is, the thing that we can all agree on, regardless of your specifics about government, is that we're not housing soldiers.
It's fascinating to me because I don't think it's possible to convince me that Palantir should exist.
Do you know what I mean?
I understand the argument for why it can't be like...
I understand that conversation, but there's no reason that you could give me that would be like, oh, well, obviously Palantir has a purpose in this world that isn't evil.
But the underlying product that it has created, someone else would create, most likely.
So this kind of stuff really gets under my skin because while Alex was often wrong about the stories he covered and was almost always making things up, his underlying concerns about surveillance and privacy are valid points that someone should be stressing.
Someone like Alex should exist for that kind of reason.
But when you see the things that he's willing to betray now, you realize that a large part of the reason that we never got a decent person like Alex is because Alex was squatting on that real estate in the alternative media at a critical time in the development of new technologies.
When I hear Alex hand-wave away concerns about Palantir, it bothers me because in those moments I can see what was possible and how Alex represents a generational failure of counterculture.
This is such an indictment.
Of the missed opportunity that Alex pretended to be.
Well, I think that would be the interesting parallel reality to switch those two out.
Would it be that the fundamental characteristics that made this person real in the way that we would want them to be also would keep them from becoming a media empire in the way that Alex did?
It is because Alex was willing to give up everything that he became the thing that it is.
I just, I think, you know, it's obviously, you'll never be able to prove a counterfactual kind of thing, but I think that you go back and you watch him in Waking Life, and You can't really tell the difference between that and a guy who doesn't mean it.
My point is, is that all this hype about Palantir comes out of the Young Turks and out of the New York Times, and I see almost everybody in patriot media spending half their time on Palantir.
And it's because you aren't informed.
You don't know all the pieces.
You're not real scholars.
Like, I should ask Flynn.
I know what he'd say.
And it's not because Alex Karp...
Know about Peter Thiel, all of that stuff.
Peter Thiel's been backing Trump massively.
The point is, is who else is Trump going to go to in Silicon Valley to try to surveil the government deep state and all the stolen money?
Pretty much every instance I can think of outside of the recent Nick Fuentes interview involves Alex using the word Palantir to refer to the thing in Lord of the Rings.
It's a crystal ball, so when he's used the word in the past, it's often hard to tell if he even knows what the company does.
His understanding of Peter Thiel seems to be shallow and confined to he likes Trump, so I sincerely don't know if Alex is playing dumb or is just that dumb.
I could possibly believe that Alex doesn't know what Palantir does, and he's just entirely checked out, and this is only the lazy spin that he can muster, but I have a problem with the Thiel thing.
Alex can't really think that Palantir is a small company if he knows that Teal is behind it, because he's been talking about Peter Teal since 2012.
In that election cycle, Thiel was a big Ron Paul donor in the primary, which was suspicious because Thiel had previously attended Bilderberg meetings.
When Ron Paul lost, Thiel became the bad guy, and Alex spent the next stretch of his time arguing that he was trying to co-opt the libertarian movement on behalf of the globalists.
He went on to even have this conversation in 2012 with a caller.
The only thing that I have to say is about the whole Ron Paul and Rand Paul thing.
My feeling is, and my husband's feeling is, imagine they did all this campaigning just to see who's on the opposition, basically, who is part of the resistance, and now they're planning in head, basically, to put us down.
Peter Thiel, the Bilderberg, has bragged that he supported Paul just to map with computers who everybody is to then understand how to target them politically.
And I, yeah, yeah.
Oh, my God.
If this was some 20-year mole operation, that has to be looked at now.
That's what I mean.
That's why I'm so sick about this.
We have to open up an entire research operation now.
Alex's conspiracies about Peter Thiel involved him running companies that wanted to harvest your data for nefarious purposes going back 13 years, to the point where he was ready to be like, uh-oh, maybe Ron Paul's a fucking mole.
Over time, Alex softened on Teal and began to cast him as the guy who went to Bilderberg, but he wanted to change things from the inside.
Apparently, someone had told Alex that Teal was a fan of the show, and his opinion began to change pretty quick, with Alex giving him an almost hands-off treatment when he became a major Trump donor.
I don't know this for sure, but I think it might have been Max Keiser who told Alex that Teal was a fan because they're both involved in Bitcoin and have an overlap from that.
Elon's not involved in this Golden Dome thing that they're trying to give the contract to Palantir, and the military-industrial complex is pissed because Palantir is the Johnny-come-lately.
And that doesn't mean that it's not a problem.
My God, all of it.
I mean, you look at Sentinel, the Pentagon's AI, you look at Google's AI, Microsoft's AI.
It feels like Alex knows that he's on such unstable ground on this subject that he's desperately looking for anything else to talk about, like how Rogan talked shit about Bono.
There's a lot of stuff that I believe he can plausibly just pretend, I don't know that.
You can't do that here.
Which is weird.
It makes the actions more suspicious.
And then I think another element that we've already seen a little bit of, and we get more of, that adds to that suspiciousness, is how hostile he is towards people who are like, hey, Palantir's bad news.
Incidentally, Palantir was awarded a government contract beginning in 2020 to build a platform called Tiberius, which, according to their own press release, was, quote, a software platform the HHS uses to track vaccine production, distribution, and administration across the United States.
It was a giant part of the vaccine rollout.
In 2022, the CDC partnered with Palantir and their Tiberius program, which they called, quote, the digital operating system for the U.S. public health response to the pandemic.
Later that year, Palantir received a five-year, $443 million contract to bring together the multiple existing platforms that they provided for the Department of Health and Human Services under one functional umbrella.
So when we were talking about, like, why do they need to exist, there's stuff like this.
Sure.
In terms of facilitating the vaccine rollout and shit like that, their platforms are useful in those contexts.
So there are these positive things.
I still don't think that they should exist as they exist.
So the Palantir scare came from reporting that the Trump administration was working with them to create a database of U.S. citizens, which tons of people from all political sides were not happy about.
It's just mind-blowing how truly illiterate people are.
I mean, do people even know what the Pentagon's AI is?
No.
Do you know about Sentinel?
It'll make Palantir look like a pop gun.
And that's why you hear about how it's the devil everywhere so that it can't get its nose in the trough.
And I'm not even saying have the troth, I'm saying know why you hear Palantir, Palantir, Palantir, Palantir, Palantir, Palantir, Palantir, Palantir, Palantir, Palantir, Palantir, Palantir.
Even if there was all the proof in the world, you know, that this was a truly stupid and I simply cannot believe it because practically speaking, Yeah, it's a lie or a prank.
It's a little bit like the fucking business representative.
I understand maybe you personally don't know, but you're Infowars.
So, we're seeing a lot of good out of the Trump administration, but also some of the state Republicans with Democrats in Florida and New York passing or close to passing laws that throw you in prison for anti-Israel speech that is un-American.
You should be able to have a Hamas flag if you want, if you're an American citizen.
Now, if you're here, some leftist being paid for with taxpayer money, ship their asses out.
Got too many foreigners here.
They've been brought in here and turned against the country.
It's nice that he thinks you should be allowed to have a Hamas flag, but he doesn't seem nearly as passionate about defending the First Amendment as he is about defending Palantir.
I understand what you think you're saying, but what you're actually saying is that everybody should come to you on an individual case-by-case basis as to whether or not they are sufficiently loyal enough to stay or leave based on your personal weird-ass metrics.
We have Victor Boot, very famous businessman and soldier from Russia to give the Russian perspective on the Russian Pearl Harbor that happened yesterday.
I mean, like, because here's, if you ask me, you know, somebody, like, just a regular guy, you know, like, hey, how do we get them to stop blowing up our planes?
and And it's been wanting to get big contracts, and Trump wants to use it to track illegal aliens and stuff, and the real ID that they're trying to bring in that's terrible.
That never got implemented because it's unconstitutional.
So I've been critical of all of that, and I obviously don't trust Palantir and the rest of the stuff it's doing.
But it is small compared to all the other big AI and the Pentagon, Sentinel, and all the rest of it.
The reason you're seeing the attacks on it everywhere is because it's trying to get contracts that other big tech companies already have, and because Palantir has been supportive of Trump.
And so, yeah, Trump is going to them because they've been supporters.
But all this hype about Palantir, all of these systems can be used for control.
All these systems are out of control.
All the AIs are woke.
So Palantir is being used to run AI drones, kill people in Gaza.
All of it's very concerning.
But why do people know about Palantir and nothing else?
Well, that's because it comes from the left, only focusing on Palantir, because it's seen as something being brought in to surveil the government itself and to try to find ways for it.
So in just that minute and a half clip, Alex proposes two seeming contradictions.
The first has to do with what Trump wants to use Palantir for.
Is it for tracking immigrants, or is it for some sort of globalist corruption hunt?
Alex can't figure out what to use to justify his plea for the conspiracy audience to ignore Palantir, mostly because every explanation he can come up with for what Trump wants to do with them is suspicious as hell, and it's pure conspiracy bait.
If this is about tracking immigrants, then Alex's audience should know that it's only a matter of time until that's used against citizens.
I mean, yeah.
The second contradiction is the shifting explanation for why people are mad about Palantir, which is an attempt to tell the audience that this whole thing's a sigh up, and they should refrain from making connections about this company.
At one point, the other AI companies are mad that Palantir is getting the contracts that they want, so they're attacking them.
That's all you're experiencing is these people being mad they're losing contracts.
At another point, it's because the left is demonizing them, because they're friendly to Trump.
This is just all about attacking Trump.
Alex is all over the place here because he's doing that thing where he's throwing a ton of spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.
He has a clear point that he's pushing toward, which is getting the audience to deprioritize making conspiracy theories about Palantir.
He's not too picky about what works in achieving that.
None of the particulars matter that much, because Infowars is a medium that's narrative-driven.
So long as the narrative that Palantir isn't a big deal gets through to the audience, that's all that's really important.
That's the part that really frustrates me, is that, like, Alex's show is about creating connections between things that aren't connected.
He's trained the audience, and the entire, like, exercise in media criticism and news coverage is to connect unconnected things to prop up narratives that are advantageous for him.
So, when he's actively discouraging the audience from making connections about something.
But I imagine if he was like Clockwork Oranged to Endgame, his own fucking movie, and just had to watch it from start to finish, and I know that's a long three and a half hours or whatever it is, infinity time.
And then to have me read an exact transcript of what he just said.
There's no way he could be like, ah, I'm on that guy's team.
This is the end of the path that you have decided to follow, where you chase clout, you chase profit, you chase all of this stuff in opposition to maintaining the principles that you pretended to base your career on.
This is the inevitable outcome of you being full of shit.
Trump admin tasked Palantir with expanding U.S. surveillance state.
And the New York Times and all of them are all over it.
Palantir's deepening government ties sparked fears of centralized surveillance.
And you've got the owner of it, the CEO of it, with all his statements about crushing the right wing in Europe and all the rest of it.
I got serious concerns.
It's just that endless hyping about it and only focusing on it is coming out of the left, and the populist anti-globalist movement has taken it absolutely hook, line, and sinker.
The basic idea you're supposed to get as a viewer is that Palantir may not be the best, and yeah, maybe the head of it said he wanted to crush the right wing in Europe, but they're not as bad as some of these other companies like Google.
It's an appeal to the lesser of two evils argument which seems to be increasingly the only way that Alex can justify anything.
The argument Alex is making is meant to obscure the fact that what he's proposing is a false choice.
It's not the case that we're choosing between Google or Palantir to create a centralized database of citizens that breaks down the information silos that serve to protect our privacy.
If it were an inevitable reality that this was something that was going to be made, then maybe we should quibble about what contractor the government uses.
But the point the other side is making is that this doesn't need to happen.
All of these companies can be good or bad.
It doesn't matter because this is a thing that we're not going to accept.
That's the position you'd expect someone like Alex to have.
And yet his main priority seems to be arguing against people who hold that position.
When Alex used to say that he was above the left-right paradigm, part of what he meant is that the media and government was presenting people with a false choice.
They were acting like a world government was inevitable, so it was just a matter of choosing between a left-wing appearance or a right-wing appearance and how that government looked.
Alex transcended this false choice by trying to wake you up out of the trance so you could see that the world government wasn't inevitable, and the globalists only wanted you to think that so you wouldn't realize the true choice you had, which was to reject world government and embrace liberty.
Or not.
Those were the choices you had.
You're given a false choice to make their conclusion inevitable.
It was a fun and compelling sales pitch, but ultimately it's a bunch of bullshit, and you can easily see Alex is using the same tactics against his audience that the imaginary enemies he has used to use against them.
He's presenting the expansion of the surveillance state as an inevitable thing that's going to happen.
Tyranny is inevitable, so let's make sure it's a friendly face that we have controlling that tyranny.
What I'm saying is that I don't believe it's possible that he doesn't understand what he's doing.
I don't want to get too deep in any conspiracy theory waters of my own, so I don't want to say he's getting paid off by Palantir or Peter Thiel, but this behavior is too much of an outlier.
It's not explainable by coincidence.
It's not explainable by mere stupidity or unawareness.