Knowledge Fight dissects Alex Jones’ baseless claims about the June 15, 2025, Minnesota shooting, where he falsely ties shooter Vance Bolter—a failed security contractor with no-Kings flyers—to Trump while ignoring key details: only John Hoffman voted against Minnesota Care, not Melissa Hortman. Jones alleges a "false flag" targeting him and allies like Tucker Carlson, repeating debunked conspiracy tropes (e.g., severed heads, suppressed evidence) despite Bolter’s arrest and wife’s pre-planned "bug out" gear. His performative outrage—predicting Bolter’s death, calling witnesses "crocodile tears"—mirrors past Sandy Hook misinformation, now unchecked by legal consequences. The hosts warn his rhetoric risks glorifying violence, exposing systemic failures in accountability for powerful figures peddling unverified narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
I mean, hey, listen, just not to reveal my business at all, but if I'm grocery shopping and I'm always going through the checkout and I'm not always paying for everything.
So thank you so much to Dane, pronounced like a large dog or failed comedian.
Would like Zach, redacted last name to protect the innocent, to reach out so we can talk about the up-to-this date completion of the Knowledge Fight Compendium.
We have the Minnesota Tim Walz appointee and No King's organizer, who they say is the suspect.
The police say they saw run out of the house and shoot at police.
And they go in, and there's the dead state senator and her husband, and he critically wounded, and the state rep and the spouse.
And then they caught the wife and a bunch of other people with guns and passports fleeing, but detained her, but then didn't arrest her.
And then he runs a security intelligence company.
He's wearing a plastic mask.
If you can believe it's him, this thing smells of some type of sophisticated operation.
I don't know exactly what's going on, but the first thing I did yesterday morning when the news broke is I said, let me see who these two Democrat lawmakers are that got shot.
Both of them were bucking the party.
Both of them were voting against illegal aliens getting health care and other goodies.
So this is a good illustration of Alex using one of his standard little tricks.
He technically said that he doesn't know what's going on with the case of this shooting.
So whatever shit he talks isn't something you can really hold him responsible for.
He's making very clear insinuations, and the storyline he wants the audience to follow is not ambiguous.
But all he wants to own up to is saying that this situation is suspicious, that it smells.
But that's not the point he's making.
The point he's making is that these two Minnesota lawmakers were unique in the fact that they were fighting against the Democratic Party line, particularly in terms of undocumented immigrants having access to Minnesota care benefits.
They were scared, and the alleged shooter has deep connections to Tim Walz.
The story is very clear that Tim Walz sent the guy to kill him for their refusal to join the team on these votes.
But Alex doesn't want to just come out and say that, probably because he knows how stupid it sounds when you spell it out in plain language.
When you keep things in the territory of suggestion and heavy insinuation, it's possible to lead people to conclusions that they would reject if you were more blunt about what you're saying.
I think a lot of people are surprised by people's actions, but I think in general, people do things because they work.
And they only know that they work because they've done them in the past.
You know?
So I would say that it would be surprising for Governor Tim Walz to intentionally assassinate lawmakers without also having a trail of intentional assassinations behind him.
So Alex is deep in insinuating that Tim Walz was behind the shooting.
And now I guess the idea is that the shooter might have been an agent of the Chinese government who's killing these people to stop them from releasing some information about Walls being employed by China.
That's really dumb.
And if it's true, then the Chinese government assassins are fucking sloppy.
One of the targets and his wife survived.
So whatever intel they were going to be killed to keep secret isn't going to stay secret now.
So mission not accomplished.
I like this kind of game, though, because Alex is operating off zero information and just throwing out fun what-if scenarios.
You know, it's easy for us to walk over because we are who we are and we live where we live in this present day.
But it cannot be understated how insane it is, right?
That a guy who was materially, partially, at the very least, responsible for these murders, who shouldn't have been on the air anyways, who could have very easily been off the air for a long time prior to this, who is being given a platform by any number of people currently.
There is definite disruptions that could have been made in this information economy and things like that.
But, like, if Alex had suffered the consequences that he should have, let's say from the Sandy Hook trial and he was no longer able to produce his show or maybe was in jail or something.
And I think that a larger understanding of how this misinformation economy and ecosystem works, I think if people more broadly and largely understood it, then it could help limit the number of people who are like this shooter who go down this path because of the information exploitation that people like Alex carry out.
No, I think he's just like, don't make me, well, don't make me feel stupid.
To be blunt, this is really dumb, but I think that it reveals an interesting little reality that Alex doesn't want to be seen as the conspiracy guy, even when he's engaging in embarrassing levels of conspiracy theories.
He wishes he was someone who people took seriously, but unfortunately, the only people who could ever take him seriously aren't serious people.
It's ironic that one of the wonks referenced Dane Cook because it's a vicious cycle.
Now, in theory, if the Chinese government knew that these two lawmakers had dirt on Walls, and so Walls was involved with getting this guy that he put on a board in order to kill them or maybe just use him as a patsy.
This is elaborate.
And I honestly think that you would have to suspect that the local police would be in on it.
And I'm not saying the local police department's in on it.
But they, within an hour of the shootout with the guy in the rubber mask, who they caught in the act, they went in, and then one of the victims, one was dead, one died as the ambulance got there.
I'm sure they have intel.
They haven't released it yet.
How they believe it's this guy who's on the run, and he's supposedly sending text messages to his friends and family that he did something like this.
And then we see videos by the groups reading the text and all of it.
And the wife caught fleeing with passports and guns with other people.
So I think Alex has to be suggesting that the local police are in on this plot.
I don't think there's any way this works otherwise.
So they had identified Vance Bolter as a suspect pretty quickly because of two things.
One, his roommate called the police after he got some texts that were a thinly veiled confession that he'd committed some serious crimes.
Two, Bolter abandoned an SUV at the scene of the Hortman's home where the police had intercepted him and he managed to escape on foot.
The plotting and carrying out of this attack was fairly intricate, but it wasn't really a whodunit after it was done and had been interrupted.
The clues were all there.
Pretty obvious.
Alex wants to make it suspicious that there was a suspect fairly quickly, but it doesn't really seem weird at all.
There were strong leads, and a person who just killed two people and attempted to kill two others at two separate locations was presumably armed and on the loose.
The police would get that information to the public fast because it's a matter of public safety that you find this person before he kills people.
So, the reason that she was in this situation is likely that she'd received a text from her husband saying, Words are not going to explain how sorry I am for this situation.
There's going to be some people coming to the house armed and trigger happy, and I don't want you guys around.
The couple were preppers and they had a bug out plan, so it seems like she might have been following that plan when her path intersected with the police.
Yeah, as it stands now, there's no indication that the wife was involved with the murders.
And all of these things that Alex is pointing out as suspicious, they're only suspicious if you want them to be.
Yeah, if you want to create suspicion around not looking at information, not looking at details.
This, this, you know, there are a lot of things we can take away from this, but I think the big thing for me is that bug out bags aren't as useful as I thought they were going to be.
I thought bug out bags were going to be more important, but it feels like if you can be intercepted that quickly, bug out bags aren't as big a deal.
Well, I think the indications that I would take away from this, or the like little bits of sort of context, seem to be that he was looking for a shooting war.
Yep.
And maybe she was less committed to the violent going out in a blaze of glory kind of thing.
So I don't know.
Because she did have two guns, which Alex shouldn't have a problem with.
Sure.
But those could be for when you get to the homestead or whatever.
How do they know a guy in a stolen police car they said it was looked like their police car, their police car, they're not been clear yet, but indistinguishable from their police car, who's the head of an intelligence company, intelligence security company, who's got all these big appointments in the state government and a no-Kings organizer.
How does he know it's him?
And then I said yesterday, oh, were they going to find his dead body somewhere?
And then, oh, there's a manhunt.
Oh, and he had a manifesto of 70 names he wanted to kill.
MAGA Maniac.
Click that.
Let's see what the Democratic Party drudge is saying.
So all of the details that Alex is adding to this story to make the official version not make sense are things that he's wrong about or intentionally misrepresenting.
The police never said that the shooter's car was a stolen police vehicle.
They said it was made to look like a real police vehicle by the addition of lights and stuff like that.
Alex has just decided that maybe it was a stolen cop car because that makes things look more suspicious.
Boulder doesn't have an intelligence and security company.
He had worked a bit in food service and traveled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo as a missionary, but he had a fantasy of running a security company.
He founded a company called Praetorian Guard Security Services, which failed to attract customers.
Alex is embellishing the status of that company in order to make it look like this guy had connections to the FBI, the CIA, the intelligence community.
Bolter didn't have, quote, all these big appointments in the state government.
He was appointed to the governor's workforce development board in 2016, an unpaid position that has approximately 60 members.
It's a single low-level position he held, which Alex is exaggerating out into a series of high-level posts because that makes this picture more suspicious.
He had a bunch of no-kings flyers in his car, but that doesn't really prove anything.
They could have been there because he came across them at a shop and he took them to try and limit the amount of other people who could take these flyers and in the process limit the promotional spread.
There's a number of possible explanations for why those flyers were in his car, but Alex has decided that he was a no-kings protest organizer because that's the option that makes it look the most suspicious.
This is a typical strategy that Alex employs when the reality of a story is threatening to him.
He just creates a fake story and then points out all the weird anomalies that don't make sense in his fake story.
If you go through his career, you see this behavior again and again, generally when he's worried about the real version of a story.
In this case, he's probably worried that it's going to come out that the shooter was a fan of his and that people are going to start asking questions about how Alex had openly declared a civil war had started on his show and how he said the next wave of the Patriot movement launched with the No Kings protest.
The quiet suburbs of Minneapolis were shattered early this morning by a cold, calculated act of political terror.
State Representative Melissa Hortman, a Democratic powerhouse and former House Speaker, along with her husband Mark, were gunned down in their Brooklyn Park home by a suspect posing as a police officer.
In a related attack, State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette were shot multiple times, both now clinging to life after surgery.
As the lone Democrat in the House to join Republicans, Hortman supported SSHF1, a bill stripping undocumented adults from eligibility for Minnesota care, the state's low-income health insurance program.
This 68 to 65 vote, with Hortman as the decisive crossover, marked a stunning departure from her party's progressive rhetoric.
The Democrats decried Hortman's vote as cruel and immoral, with Representative Maria Issa Perez Vega chanting, this ain't one Minnesota in protest.
Days before her murder, Hortman, physically shaking, defended her vote as a necessary compromise to secure a state budget in a tied 6767 House.
So if Hortman had abstained from voting, it would have been 67 to 65.
Or if she'd voted against it, it would have been 67 to 66.
It seems like whatever she did, the bill would have passed and that her vote was more of a symbolic act meant to ensure cooperation from the Republicans on other parts of the state budget.
Because where he cuts off her thing from the news report, saying that we wanted to find a way to do this without this in the budget, but the GOP will not.
They made it clear they weren't going to give an inch and that they were willing to shut down the government if they didn't get their way.
The Minnesota House is a complete mess, even before this shooting.
In the 2024 election, the House ended up being a 67-67 split between the GOP and the DFL or the Democratic Farmer Labor Party.
The GOP challenged the winner of the District 40B race, Curtis Johnson, and they were successful in stopping him from being seated by arguments that he didn't live in his district.
A special election was scheduled, but for the time being, the GOP had a majority of 67 to 66, with the 40B seat being vacant.
It was very clear that the DFL would win that seat and it would end up in a tie, but while they had a temporary advantage, the GOP tried to push through all of their agenda.
In response, the DFL members boycotted the House, refusing to show up so the GOP wouldn't have the required number of representatives present to make a quorum.
In February of this year, the two parties reached a power-sharing agreement, which sort of resolved things, but also clearly didn't.
Melissa Hortman was part of that negotiation for the power-sharing agreement, since she was the former Speaker of the Minnesota House and the leader of the DFL party.
When they came to this compromise, she was part of the negotiations to form a state budget, part of which was this unshakable GOP position that undocumented adults were to be stripped of eligibility for Minnesota care.
I'm not defending her choice in making that compromise, but I'm trying to illustrate that her vote is not as suspicious as Alex and John Bowd want to make it out to be.
The entire narrative of this vote being part of the motivation for the shooting falls apart when you add in the other victim, Senator John Hoffman.
He voted against the bill, which wasn't as close in the Senate and had 15 Democratic votes in favor of it.
So if there was a means of like killing these people to punish them for going against the Democrats, there's 15 senators In the Minnesota Senate, that should have been targets before Hoffman.
John Bound says that Hortman's pragmatic vote may have sealed her fate and that whispers of retribution are in the air, but he's the one who's doing the whispering.
They're creating this, like, oh, streets are talking.
No official motive has been confirmed, but the no kings flyers found in Bolter's vehicle tie him directly to the raucous anti-Trump rallies planned across Minnesota and the rest of the country.
My good friend and colleague, Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, were shot and killed early this morning in what appears to be a politically motivated assassination.
And as Trump's military parade marking the U.S. Army's 250th anniversary begins to roll out, the left's refusal to cancel these rallies reeks of hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance.
Preaching peace while aggressively rallying against kings exposes the fractured ideology that Hortman's vote and her death have laid bare.
If there's one thing that the United States is supposed to be like, one thing that's above the whole, like, oh, I'm on the left or I'm on the right or anything like that.
He is incapable of engaging with people trying to, in good faith or even in dicey faith, trying to explain to him why the things that he does are wrong and they hurt people.
Now, yesterday, I saw the roommate of the supposed shooter who we're all being told did it, Vance Bolter.
And now there's a manhunt, and people heard gunshots in the woods, and his vehicle's been found.
I think we'll find his dead body.
And somebody shows up in a mask, a rubber mask, but you're told it's him.
Then I saw the video of his obese roommate reading his text message to the news yesterday, and it came off as very theater kid.
And he's crying, saying, I can't tell you and implicate you, but I'm probably never going to come back.
I'm probably about to die.
He does all this fake crying.
And I thought, man, that's really suspicious.
But I didn't really say anything yesterday about it.
I just, I'm going to put that in my data bank.
Now he's told the news that his roommate, Vance Bolter, who we're told did this, but some guy in a rubber mask and a police car was there doing it, had a shootout with police and escaped.
That he is a huge Trump supporter.
Yeah, and there he is.
We'll play that next.
But first, I want to play the corporate media out front of his house.
And oh, he says that this appointee by Walls with all the no-Kings flyers in the car that the police found, the police car, he's a Trump supporter.
And he had 70 targets.
So were they planning to hit more people, whoever this group is, and then blame Trump?
This is the exact same behavior that Alex engaged in with Sandy Hook.
The parallels are pretty direct, which is why part of holding Alex accountable for what he did in that case involves not letting him be a public figure that can be taken seriously again.
He will just do this over and over because he doesn't care about the people that he might hurt in the process.
Someone connected to the shooting said something that's inconvenient for him politically.
So Alex has just decided to heavily suggest that he's an actor and he must be in on the whole thing, planted there to say that the Patsy was a Trump supporter.
That's really all Alex is responding to.
There's nothing bigger behind this than the fact that the roommate said that the shooter was a Trump supporter, and that's threatening to Alex.
So Alex has to invalidate it.
That's it.
If he'd said that the shooter was a big Harris fan, do you think that he would come off as such a theater kid to Alex?
Or would it conveniently, his vibes be a little bit different?
Alex cannot control himself because there's no reason to.
There are some strong indications that the shooter in this case was a fan of his content, which carries zero consequences in reality.
In order to deflect any potential association between the shooter and Trump, Alex is engaging in the same behaviors that led to his Sandy Hook lawsuit because he hasn't really faced that many consequences there.
He's still super rich, and the vilification that came from that suit has made people like Tucker Carlson think that he's some kind of countercultural figure that they should prop up.
You know, he's learned, in essence, there's nothing wrong with doing this.
I mean, it is one of those things where, to me, looking at the present, it feels like what we're living in is not the consequences of malicious behavior so much as the consequences of not punishing failure.
If you fail the way that the legal system has failed, the consequences are not on the legal system.
They're on us.
The consequences are then fed directly to us.
And all of the people who have failed get to go on about their day as though, hey, listen, win or lose, it's just a thing.
Well, it's the same thing with failing to regulate pollution makes us all pay for it.
Yep.
You know, instead of making the companies that are polluting pay for it.
But then not holding Alex responsible in a way that addresses the issue within the legal system makes all but certain other people are going to be subject to the same things.
Yep.
He's going to, when convenient, when profitable, when easy, he's going to do the same things in the same way that if allowed, companies are going to pollute.
And we all are going to bear the social burden of that.
You know, at what point does you start to get into criminal consequences for like the civil courts very clearly seem to have not provided the consequences that Alex would respond to, but maybe some sort of criminal court would.
It's probably a good thing that Alex doesn't really matter as much as he did in 2013, or else this could incite a really bad harassment campaign against the guy.
He may still be the subject of some dumb conspiracies and harassment, but Alex is an unnecessary part of that process in 2025.
He is just a Twitter recap show, so it would probably be a lot harder to argue that he was a critical part of spreading the theories about David Carlson, the roommate, compared to the past.
Absolutely.
But it's interesting how Alex is wrong about everything in that clip.
All of his predictions about how things are going to play out are wrong.
Bolter wasn't found dead.
He was arrested.
Alex is wrong in making shit up, but there's another aspect of this that's important.
He's saying that Bolter is going to be found dead, which is part of his argument that this has set up written all over it.
Alex doesn't realize it, and it's not important to anyone, but this is a conditional if-then statement.
If Bolter is found dead, then this has set up written all over it.
His final texts to Carlson and his wife can't be fraudulently pinned on him if he survives and says that he sent them.
The shootings can't be falsely ascribed to him if he lives and said that he did it.
All of this patsy crafting that Alex is doing relies on the assumption that he's going to be found dead, and then everyone will just say that he did it.
Because Bolter was taken alive, Alex should have to reassess a lot of this stuff, but he doesn't have to.
And part of the reason is that no one cares, including Alex.
This is all a game to him.
None of this is the conveying of sincere belief or information.
Alex is right 95% of the time, and yet so shockingly wrong on such a regular basis.
Makes you wonder how stats work.
So Alex says all this foreshadows them finding Bolter dead because he's treating all this like a dramatic story someone else is telling and he's trying to predict the plot based on the writer's clues.
The problem is that he doesn't actually think like that.
If he did, he would have killed a bunch of people by now and probably himself.
What he's exhibiting is a very distorted manner of viewing the world, but if he really saw things that way and acted upon it, he'd be unable to function.
He couldn't run a fake pill company.
He couldn't shift all of this stuff over from the Alex Jones store to the AlexJones.net network or whatever.
He wouldn't be able to do all that stuff if he truly was caught up in reading all the clues that the man is secretly giving him.
And this, I believe, is part of what makes him such an interesting figure is that he is kind of fucked up in this way.
There is some part of that that he's drawn by.
Right.
But part of it is also very fake.
And part of it is a performance that encourages that kind of thinking in the audience.
And that like, is this real?
Is this fake?
That Kayfabe or whatever, it's the most blurry with him than it is with anybody in his media bubble.
To me, anything higher than like your standard Dungeons and Dragons 6 stat kind of thing is awful high.
It feels like the amount of characteristics, the stat characteristics have to be tuned to such a very specific level at every single one of them to get Alex.
The issue that I have with this stat thing with Alex is that like there are certain things that, like, in a DD build, there are certain stats that preclude other stats.
With Alex, he's able to navigate bullshit the way that he does on his show.
And I think that you could believe that he is just as crazy as he presents himself to be.
Sure.
But he has really good handlers around him, like his dad.
Right.
Could see, like, once the cameras are off, he is a raving lunatic, and his dad has to stop him from doing all of the killing and shit that he would do on his own.
If I were Alex and I was just, you know, a gigantic piece of shit and I had been through what I had been through with the Sandy Hook cases, I would have PTSD around the idea of saying this about somebody else.
Absolutely.
I would not be able to do it because I would be like, well, at least on a muscle memory level, I remember that this is trouble.
We're going to follow this story because it stinks to high heaven like a rotten fish.
Or like a sewage line.
But Here's what we know.
You have a high-level appointee to the board of labor of Minnesota and a big reported no-king supporter, big Democrat uprising group.
He's got an intelligence security firm.
He's surrounded by Democrats.
He's a Democrat.
And then his best buddy reads messages crying for the news that it's him.
And here he is saying all this.
And then the best buddy says, oh, yeah, he's a huge Trump supporter.
And so the huge Trump supporter in a rubber mask with a stolen police car goes and attacks the state-senator state rep's house, kills two, critically wounds two others, kills the senator and her husband, critically wounds the state rep and their spouse.
And then we're told she's going to be found dead.
And now they're looking for the dead body.
They heard shots and there's a car found in the woods.
So the MAGA maniac wearing a rubber mask, we don't know who he is, but we know it's him.
The media told us it's him with no evidence.
Wanted to kill Democrats that were voting against Tim Wall's illegal alien free health care legislation things.
So when you're a big Trump supporter, you go kill the Democrats that are defecting from the party, which is their main fear, which is happening everywhere.
So I'm thrilled that he's going to keep on following the story.
And I think that Bolter's roommate could sue him.
I think the grounds are pretty clear there.
Everything Alex is saying in that clip that's meant to add to the suspiciousness of this story is false or wildly exaggerated.
The version that Alex is telling is very suspicious, but only because of the stuff that he's making up.
If he addressed this story based on the information that was available, it wouldn't be all that suspicious, but he can't do that because if he did, it would make him feel bad.
One thing that's particularly wrong here is that the people who the shooter targeted were Democrats who voted against extending Minnesota care to immigrants.
Melissa Hortman voted with the GOP on that, but John Hoffman didn't.
So this theory of a motive doesn't work.
A further complication is that Tim Walz was supportive of the compromise that the lawmakers reached in order to pass a state budget.
He was obviously opposed to this piece of it, but he was part of reaching the larger agreement.
He literally appeared with Hortman and the new Speaker of the House, GOP Representative Lisa Demuth, at a press conference announcing that compromise back in May.
Voting for this piece of the budget wasn't going against Tim Walz.
In fact, it could be argued that Hortman made a very difficult decision that was exactly what Walls needed her to do in order to get the rest of the budget passed.
Alex needs to lie and add shit to this story to make it suspicious because if he didn't, he wouldn't really be able to argue against the shooter's actions.
Democrats are fucking demonic child abusers who can't get enough human trafficking.
On what grounds could Alex actually stand against assassinating Democratic leaders?
If anything that he preaches is meant to be taken seriously, Bolter's actions should be reported on Infowars as noble and just, which is why this has to be a false flag and why he desperately has to go out of his way to create this dumb bullshit.
I would say no, but I've been so wrong about the tough to hold up here the track record.
Well, and I think that the way that He's made sort of tragic heroes out of people who, like cops who have killed black people, like a Derek Chauvin type figure.
So, in a sense, all right, if you think about it this way, all right.
If you know all of the things that are wrong, every single thing that is wrong, you, in a sense, also know what is right because that is defined as the only thing that is not.
I know that Alex is being facetious here about this being why he's a bad man, but he's actually spot on.
This is a huge part of why he's a horrible person.
Alex is saying the exact same things he did about Robbie Parker's press conference after the Sandy Hook shooting.
And Alex has every reason to know how much that hurt him.
Alex knows precisely what he's doing, and he does not care.
This couldn't be a clearer example that he hasn't learned anything from that entire lawsuit, and he's doing the exact same thing to another person because the truth is too difficult for him to spin.
If he actually dealt with reality on reality's term, it'd be tough.
So, David Carlson's a private citizen, and Alex is accusing him of being an actor, which would have to mean that he's part of an elaborate plan to kill Minnesota state lawmakers and a willing participant in a psychopath meant to overthrow Trump.
Yeah, until Alex faces real consequences that make him understand the gravity of the things that he does to people, this behavior isn't going to change.
And I don't know what those consequences are, but I think he probably there should probably be some way that he could go to jail.
It is like, it is like, I wonder how much of Alex's protection is really just cast off protection from the legal system's inability to hold any rich person accountable.
I think that the retreat and the mask of free speech is something that people, you know, you worry about, oh, what's the precedent something is going to set?
Or, you know, I think that, especially in the U.S., we're pretty bad with those kinds of issues.
We don't really deal with them in a way that's compatible with, you know, real life.
So also that story from the No Kings protest is misreporting.
North Carolina Representative Julie Von Heffen posted an image of a protester sign on social media, which Alex is reporting as her waving around a severed head at the protest.
He doesn't know what the actual story is, and Von Haffen immediately apologized.
Seems kind of stupid, though, to whine about how this is all going to lead to violence while simultaneously trying to run defense for a guy who just assassinated a state rep. But Alex is kind of stupid that way.
And the dissonance of this is not going to make the listeners think, like, wait, hold on a second.
People were just murdered.
People weren't murdered after the No Kings protests.
I wonder if there's some sort of like I wonder if there's some sort of way to go back and look because I feel like there is a down, there's a death spiral that begins when enough people are successfully convinced that competence is suspicious.
You know what I mean?
Like when somebody, like, oh my God, they did it.
They did it too well.
Like, Jesus Christ, be happy that somebody did their fucking job well for once.
So I am somewhat flabbergasted by this, and I wanted this episode to stand alone a little bit because I think it's such a clear illustration of Alex doing the Sandy Hook tricks again.
And I think that it's a mistake to think of them as Sandy Hook tricks.
They're his tricks.
They're the things that he does.
Yeah.
It's just that the most famous example that got him in the most trouble had to do with the Sandy Hook shooting.
To bring it full circle, as I was saying, this is a moment because you can go back and look at Alex's career before Sandy Hook and see him doing the same thing over and over and over again because it works.
And I think that the reason that it's interesting to see it deployed here is that for a long time, I don't think he's felt comfortable doing that because of the courts, because of the danger that some of this represents.
And there's a back on my bullshit kind of feel about him doing this to the shooter's roommate.
There were plenty of times that we've talked about in the intervening years, which is great to say those words, years, wherein he's like, you know what?
Maybe I'll hold back a little bit because of all of that stuff.
He's insinuated that he is holding back due to consequences.
But until a pattern of behavior is stopped, diverted, until the inertia of that is moved away, especially if it's monetarily rewarded, people are just going to keep doing it.
And I think that in the past we've seen, or intervening years, as you say, we've seen a lot of examples of him getting fairly close to doing stuff like this.
But I don't know how I don't feel like I've seen him go full on this guy is a fucking actor.
Where did he learn at a strip mall?
Like that kind of stuff.
Saying that his tears are fake, all this shit.
I don't think that I've seen that in a while.
It represents a shift.
I don't think it's a meaningful shift.
No.
Except for that, obviously he doesn't think that this can get him in trouble anymore.
And so with his words, if you like connect a bunch of clauses and put everything together, you can see he's saying the exact same thing about Sandy Hook that he was before.
He's just doing it in a different way.
Whereas now it feels like he's saying it exactly the same.