#1076: September 10, 2025 dissects Alex Jones’s exploitative coverage of Charlie Kirk’s murder—initially dismissed as a "false flag," then sensationalized with graphic footage and baseless leftist conspiracy claims. Jones ties Kirk’s death to his own warnings about "parking garage attacks" and globalist wars, while Stuart Rhodes declares a civil war against the left. Friesen and Holmes expose Jones’s lack of evidence, mocking his decade-long pattern of profiting from tragedies, and warn his rhetoric risks escalating violence or conspiracy theories, revealing a media ecosystem that thrives on misdirected outrage rather than truth. [Automatically generated summary]
I think that when Culver's came, people were like pretty excited about the I have never seen a quality difference that would suggest excitement would be valuable whatsoever.
Next, sorry, Jordan, as the unappointed voice of asexuals, I'm here to report that we don't all watch porn from Special K. Thank you so much, Jernhow, Paul's Wonk.
So obviously, there was some big news in the world of right-wing media and propaganda this week as the head of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, was shot and killed at an event he was holding on the campus of Utah Valley University on Wednesday.
An incident like this can be really difficult to address, and this case in particular is even more messy than some other kind of similar events that have happened in the past.
As soon as news broke of the shooting, tons of politicians from both parties came out with statements denouncing political violence and offering condolences.
Simultaneously, lots of people with large social media accounts released some pretty inflammatory responses, with many people mocking Charlie Kirk and others saying that his shooting was pretext for literal war against the left.
In the broken media space that we all currently live in, all of this messaging blends together and everything becomes a confusing stew of shit.
In most online spaces, anonymous shit posters have as much or more reach than PhD holding journalists.
So who can keep track of who's saying what?
It's all just being bombarded at you.
Personally, I think everyone who listens to this show knows exactly what I would say about Charlie Kirk as a media figure the day before he was shot.
And his getting shot doesn't change anything about how I feel about the toxic bullshit he disseminated.
However, as much as I may have hated everything he stands for, I wouldn't have wished death upon him.
At the same time, now that it has happened, I'm not particularly interested in caring that much about it or scolding anyone for responding however they feel they need to respond.
As of the point of we're recording this episode, we don't know who did the shooting or why.
So deconstructing what led us to this point is a little premature.
And I think that we can deal with more of that as we learn more.
It's possible that the shooter will end up being someone with left-leaning politics, but it's also just as likely that someone from the far right.
As much as someone like me may have not liked Kirk, the people who were further to the right hated him even more.
Nick Fuentes and the Groypers infiltrated Kirk's organization, and they've tried to unseat him for years, largely because he's not anti-Semitic enough for their tastes.
That particular branch of the right wing really hates Kirk, and the idea that someone with those beliefs would kill him, that's not impossible.
On top of that, Kirk has been a huge media figure that's gone against other ends of the far right in recent months, notably being one of the big influencers who said that he was going to trust his friends in the Trump administration when they told everyone to move on from the Epstein stuff.
He also wasn't opposed to Trump attacking Iran and has been a solid supporter of Israel throughout the genocide in Gaza, which naturally has made him an enemy of people on the left and right who oppose that.
Ultimately, I can't answer the question of who did it or why they did it, so I don't want to take a ton of time speculating about that here on the show.
I heard about the shooting pretty soon after it happened, and I saw on Twitter that there was a video that was taken from pretty far away, a pretty far away vantage point.
I watched it, and it looked like Kirk might have just been hit, and it looked like it might have been survivable.
Then, before I knew it, there was another video from much closer, and I really wish I hadn't seen it.
The first thing I thought when I saw the closer video was that dude is gone.
It was a horrible thing to see, and just buh.
I think that seeing death and killing in particular causes a certain amount of emotional trauma to a viewer, and it really struck me how huge of a psychologically resonant event this has to have been.
I may think Kirk sucks, but he had a ton of fans and people who look up to him within turning point, and they were seeing that person that they admired die in front of a crowd.
Sure, maybe they shouldn't have looked up to him, maybe that was dumb of them, or they chose a bad person to admire, but they did.
And the sight of him being killed has to have hurt so many people in a way that's going to be really hard to process and predict, predict what the outcome of that's going to be.
I feel for those people, and the people who didn't like him who may have also accidentally watched something they really shouldn't have on Twitter and are feeling something about it.
When I say something like that, I can imagine some people saying, getting the impression that all this, the death and horrible sights, they should be censored from social media.
Like, that's my perspective.
Sure.
And that my position would mean banning documenting atrocities that are carried out in Gaza or in other parts of the world.
But I want to make a distinction clear.
When people see documentation of human rights violations and war crimes somewhere like Gaza, they're going to have a certain amount of emotional trauma that comes from that.
However, in that case, they can take that trauma and make it something productive.
They can find like-minded people, and through community with these people, it's possible to funnel those feelings of trauma into advocacy and action that's meant to stop these atrocities and ideally limit them in the future.
That isn't possible with videos like the one of Kirk being shot.
The trauma that this type of video inflicts on you can't be redirected towards something good.
There isn't a real advocacy that can be fueled by the awareness that this trauma brings.
It leads just to pain, and then that pain can be misdirected pretty easily against whoever someone wants to target.
I wrestled with whether or not we should do an episode about this today because there's just so little information available, but we can still cover Alex's response to this breaking news without knowing a bunch of the underlying details of what happened.
But what they are is very cheap sort of distraction drones.
It's a cheap long-range drone, which Ukraine intelligence says is made of materials like plywood and foam and assembled at Russia's vast Yellow Booga facility.
Yellow Booga.
It can be used as a decoy, drawing the attention of air defenses away from much pricier Shaheda.
See, this is which often carry powerful warheads.
However, analysts say that since its introduction, other versions of the Gerbera with light warheads or reconnaissance equipment have emerged.
So for the most part, these are just sort of huge model airplanes, like balsa wood airplanes that they send out in a first wave or send out along with the actual armed, expensive, fancy attack drones as a way to confuse air defenses because they can shoot these sort of useless drones out of the sky and it doesn't cost them anything.
And it allows the actual payloads to be delivered.
Poland has asked NATO to invoke Article 4.
Officially at this point, Warsaw wants consultations with block members.
After an alleged violation of its airspace by drones, it identified as Russian.
And like I said, there's entirely, like, you could come away from the wide-angle version of this, you know, this other clip as like he might have survived.
You know, here's the fun thing, and it's not fun, but just from like a let's step back and remember where and what we are and what we're doing, you shouldn't be, there's no possible way you could ever have evolved to be fine with seeing something like that.
The species has only been around for 300,000 years and none of them has been able to deal with that shit.
There's no reason to think that you'd just be instinctively fine with it.
I think what's human about that is that it reminds us that all of the other reactions to it are reactions of thought, are reactions of second consequence.
Your first instinct is the same as every other fucking person, except for, I guess, psychopaths or whatever, because I've read about them.
It doesn't, all of the shit you've talked up until that point, whether or not you believed it at the time or not, in that moment, you are reacting like a human being.
I mean, it's ironic, but like a well-thought-out reaction from a good, right-thinking person hours later is identical to Harrison Smith's well-thought-out, horrifying reaction.
What's also identical is that your good person and Harrison's horrible person reaction in the moment is fucking shit.
Did you know that there was a time whenever something like this would happen and they would go like, we're just going to turn the TV off for a few minutes while we figure out what the fuck is going on?
Yeah, and if you're too unsure in your footing and you're not really, you know, really, you're not really selling it, you run the risk of Alex barging in.
When I said earlier that Harrison sounded unsure in his footing, I meant that he had the opposite of that energy.
Alex storms onto the set, slamming the door behind him and immediately asserts a couple kinds of authority.
He's far more assertive about accusing the left and trans people of the shooting.
And I wouldn't be too shocked if part of Alex's instinct to come in so quick was because Harrison wasn't pouncing on blaming people fast enough.
Alex directs the coverage to treat the shooting video as a bit more of a spectacle.
And in the process, he's dehumanizing Charlie Kirk a little bit.
He's amazed at the accuracy of the shot, which seems more interesting to him than the fact that his supposed friend is dying in front of him.
The second major thing Alex does here is put his stamp on the story by making sure to point out that the shooter was probably in a garage and that Alex predicted that.
It's good for InfoWars if the story is that a high-profile conservative figure was killed, but it's great for InfoWars if the headline is that Alex predicted it.
He's marveling at a video of his comrade being killed.
And one of Alex's first thoughts is to make it about himself, which is what you'd expect.
And that's the only reason that Harrison's response is in any way notable to me at all.
It's the lowest of bars, but because Alex immediately fails it, it's.
Everybody, let's say a prayer right now for Charlie.
By the way, everybody says censorship when I come into the show.
Everybody knows I get harder.
I run there when breaking news.
You guys are supposed to be on my show, too.
Our Heavenly Father, Charlie Kirk, has done such an incredible job getting hundreds of thousands, if not millions of young people to register to vote for Republicans.
He is a game changer and puts himself out there every day as a warrior on the field, as a man in the arena.
And we pray, Father, that you send your angels of protection and miraculously heal him.
And we pray that you raise him up and it's in your will that he live.
If it is in your will, that he die.
He will then be a martyr for the truth and justice.
We pray for Charlie Kirk right now in the name of your son, our Savior, Jesus Christ.
Amen.
All of us together, we pray for Charlie Kirk in the name of Jesus Christ.
Again, Alex is trying to make this all about himself.
He's insistent on bringing up the parking garages thing because it's validating his own sense of importance.
Charlie's death proves Alex right again, which is the important thing to Alex.
Even more disgustingly, when Alex is getting ready to pray for Charlie, he has to take a minute to get defensive about how he barged into Harrison's show because that's something he's getting a lot of criticism for with Owen leaving.
No one's mad that Alex stormed in now, and it actually would be strange if he didn't.
This is a massive breaking news, and Harrison's filling in for him on his show.
So the fact that this is something that's in the front of his mind is weird.
That's fucked up.
This is an awful way to cover this news.
Alex has reinserted himself into the show, made someone else's death about himself, got defensive about stuff his former employee said, did a very performative prayer, and then started whining about how Trump is good.
In the minutes after the shooting, countless Democratic politicians, ostensibly Charlie's great rivals, posted messages of condolences to his family and denunciations of political violence.
News companies went out of their way to be pandering in their coverage to the point that MSNBC fired one of their political analysts, Matthew Dowd, after he commented on air that Kirk was a divisive figure who promoted a ton of hate in his career, and that, quote, I always go back to hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.
That got him fired.
And I think that speaks to the tame or even muzzled response you saw from institutions in the wake of this shooting.
Kirk's old nemesis, Nick Fuentes, posted on Twitter, quote, this feels like a nightmare, one of the most horrific things I've ever seen.
I feel absolutely gutted and devastated.
Pray for Charlie Kirk's soul, his young family, and our country.
The violence and hatred has to stop.
Our country needs Christ now more than ever.
A few hours later, he posted, quote, Given the gravity of today's events, I will not be doing a show tonight.
Instead, let us all say a prayer for the repose of Charlie Kirk's soul and for his grieving family.
How we choose to respond to this watershed moment is profoundly important, and we should all sleep on it.
All of this really illustrates how Alex has become a man entirely ruled by his impulses and his addiction to chasing attention to the point where, you know, this guy, Nick, who hated Charlie, can see what he should do in this situation.
You know, sometimes in moments like this, I wish that I was still a Christian because I would be grateful for Alex as being like a perfect test of true faith.
If you believe there is a God who gives a shit and that man's still alive, it takes faith to get there.
I mean, the left is absolutely becoming radicalized to an insane degree.
This is not.
Honestly, I hate to say it's not even unexpected.
I mean, they have Antifa members, like one month ago or two months ago, setting an ambush outside of an ICE facility, lighting the building on fire so they come out and then snipers positioned shooting at them.
Luckily, you know, they failed in that attempt, but I mean, they are on a war footing and they are out for blood.
And they keep telling us that and we keep not taking them seriously.
At this point, they know literally nothing about this incident.
They've just decided that it was a leftist who did it because that satisfies the storyline in their heads.
So that's just become fact.
These kinds of details don't matter because when there are details that come out, they'll just ignore them.
If it turns out the shooter was a left-leaning person, they'll just continue with that storyline.
And if it turns out that they weren't, then it'll be a false flag or a Patsy or a mind control wind-up toy of the deep state.
It doesn't matter.
Also, this talk about leftist violence is great, but do you think that Harrison can remember the names of the Minnesota lawmakers who were shot in June?
I wonder if we're entering like a weird subset of the dead internet theory where eventually all violence is carried out by like 50 guys to each other.
Because I feel like no matter what everybody's talking about with left or right or anything like that, I don't feel like people are shooting from a couple hundred yards away unless they're already on their own kind of situation.
You can't have a fun horse race politics idea of how things should work while at the same time being like, and you should shoot the horses before they finish the race.
No, I mean, at the very least, you got to finish the race.
And what have we been talking about for the last couple of days?
The fostering of extremism, the encouraging of the most radical and violent elements of the Democratic Party, constantly telling this swath of mentally ill people that they're under attack, that fascism is coming, that they have to stand up and fight and arm yourselves.
That's what you say!
Inevitable outcome, and that's what you say!
I pray Charlie Kirk is okay.
This is going to change a lot of the calculus moving forward, I think.
Again, we're going to bring anything to we get as soon as we get it, but we're not going to run with any rumors.
We're only going to go with the confirmed statements.
Harrison's pretending that he's not going to report rumors and he's just going to stick to the facts, but the entire premise of his coverage is based on his feelings.
He's just decided that the shooting was connected to the stories that he likes to tell about radical Democrats being violent.
And based on nothing more than that, this is how the news is being covered.
The foundation that this coverage is based on his opinion and emotion, not any kind of factual reporting.
And I don't think that he's even aware of or understands that.
But also, Harrison should be super careful about what he's saying here.
InfoWars is not supposed to believe that stochastic terrorism is real.
It's a very important tenet of Alex's ideology that violent words don't cause violent action, because if they did, he would be in big trouble.
What's Alex's business model built on other than telling mentally ill people that they're under attack?
He rants about the globalists and commies instead of fascism, but what Harrison's whining about the Democrats doing is exactly what pays his bills.
Harrison doesn't seem to understand that the only reason that what he and Alex do is socially acceptable at all is because Alex says politically after he graphically describes murdering someone and then we all pretend that matters.
If we all accept that violent rhetoric leads to violent action, then Alex should be in prison, which is why Infowars is not supposed to understand this.
Harrison should leave this angle alone, brings up too many questions.
You know, the irony of everything that they are and everything that they do, right?
Is that If I'm talking about somebody who's in the, you know, not on the left or in the center or anything like that, if I'm talking about somebody who's just a rational, clear-eyed talker about what we're talking about, and I say something like, oh, it's a false flag.
The response isn't like those never happen.
The response is, those are usually a bad idea.
Like, those don't work.
Those are bad ideas.
Right?
Only these people think that not only do false flags happen all the time, almost every day, but that they are a good idea in order to accomplish what you want.
So the irony of this situation is that, and I'm not saying that this is or is not a false flag, but in terms of a situation like this, based upon the target that we're dealing with, there is a far more likelihood of this being somebody that likes him than not likes him in order to try and achieve the goals that he set out because of what they believe.
This is the inevitable consequence of the radicalization of the left in this country and the demonization of right-wingers, even people like Charlie Kirk, who are totally respectable, totally Christian, totally informed by American ethos, and yet they have a target on his back.
There's no justification for Alex playing this footage.
It's disgustingly graphic, and you don't learn anything from it that wasn't already known.
It's exploitative, and it's an act of harm he's perpetrating on the audience.
I honestly wouldn't have even included the audio of that, except that Alex can be heard making an aside to Harrison that I think he thought was off-mic.
He said, quote, they don't want this scene when they kill people, which feels like Alex making an excuse for playing this video.
It feels like saying that is an indication that Alex knows that he needs a reason to be airing a snuff film and even telling the crew to loop it.
So as usual, InfoWars is reporting ruber and speculation, passing it off as official information from legit sources, the exact thing that Harrison said they're not going to do.
You know, albeit fairly brief time that they were covering this on the episode was that Harrison has a slightly human response and Alex does not care at all.
They have zero information about who did this shooting or why they did it.
But now we have Stuart Rhodes coming in to whine about how this is part of the left's war on the country, which is already a civil war.
I often have moments where it feels like Infowars is a full-on parody of itself.
And this is a great example of that.
Charlie Kirk was just murdered at an event.
And less than an hour later, the head of a paramilitary group that tried to overthrow the country four years ago is guest hosting, complaining about the left.
Even if you just leave out all of the January 6th stuff, leave that to the side.
His history with the Oath Keepers is plagued with violence pretending to be politics.
Stuart being the host on this particular day, it just feels like proof of a simulation.
By this point, Alex has zero new information, but he's very confidently yelling about how the Democrats killed Charlie Kirk.
Getting things right doesn't matter to Alex.
All that matters is feelings.
It's important to understand that Alex is acting this way because he knows that emotions are super high in this moment and that he needs to strike while the iron's hot.
A leading figure in their media space was just publicly killed, so people are naturally pissed off and a bit scared.
If Alex were to get on air and say, hey, let's keep our cool and wait till we have some information before we jump to conclusions, he wouldn't be able to exploit those angry and scared feelings that the listeners have.
When someone is angry and scared, if you try to calm them down, you're looking out for their best interests, but you're going to be less able to manipulate them.
On the other hand, if you tap into that fear and anger, you're going to make the situation they're in worse, but the energy that those emotions create can be redirected and pointed where you want to aim it.
This is a major trick that Alex has used throughout his career, where he exploits the audience's feelings of fear and anger, often around public tragedies, and then redirects their feelings towards things that bring him profit.
When you think about Alex's career, what do you think about?
Is it making shit up about horrible tragedies, or is it actually getting to the bottom of crimes and corruption?
Without the crutch of taking advantage of public trauma, we wouldn't know Alex's name.
Everything that's big in his career, 9-11, Sandy Hook, Waco.
Like all of it is exploitation of the pain that tragedy causes.
Also, I'm not going to dwell on this too much, but when Alex says that Democrats are over, that they're all celebrating Charlie's death, the only thing he points to is a couple of random people on TikTok.
It would be totally fine if he wanted to say that these people are acting distastefully and that he doesn't like it, but if he's going to say that Democrats are all out here celebrating, he should add a little note about how literally every mainstream Democratic politician posted a condolence and denunciation message on Twitter.
It feels like him not saying that and just posting like a few TikToks, that's him lying by omission.
I mean, functionally, while I understand the impetus behind what everybody's doing, right?
All of those messages from Democratic politicians and the like are all reasonable things that they are saying to other Democrats.
You are not being heard by anybody on the right.
Yeah.
So if you're making that statement or firing whatever his fuck is in the hopes of being like, this will send a message to the right that we're above this.
But the reason it's a shot heard around the world is he came out a few days ago with the murder of the Ukrainian 23-year-old refugee and the left trying to cover up that was racially motivated.
This was one of the coldest, most senseless murders I've ever seen.
She had no interaction with this guy whatsoever.
She was sitting minding her own business, and he just takes out a knife and just decides to stab her.
I do say this with some form of just heaviness.
I don't like politicizing situations like this, but it just necessitates it because there are so many dynamics at play here.
Based on the information evidence we have, the attacker did say, I got that white girl.
The attacker racialized it in his own telling of the situation.
And we all know this.
Any honest observer of your program knows this, including Van Jones even knows this deep down, which is that, of course, if a random white person on a subway took out a knife and stabbed a black girl senselessly to death, there would be massive media coverage.
There would be policy changes.
There'd be people having to apologize for this.
We saw this in George Floyd.
And yet, for whatever reason, this situation has not garnered even a fraction of that kind of outrage or backlash.
So what happened in this case in North Carolina is a horrible tragedy, but I don't think that this very clearly mentally unwell person muttering something that sounded like, I got that white girl after stabbing a random person, is enough to establish that this was a racially motivated crime.
I don't think that Charlie's claim that the killer, quote, racialized the crime is even defensible because generally speaking, for a crime to be racialized, race has to be a part of a motivation for a crime, not something that was just said descriptively afterwards.
Further, the point that Charlie is making about how if it were a black woman stabbed by a white guy on the train, there would be tons of media coverage of it and there would be policy changes.
But I would also just point out that there's tons of media coverage of the case he's talking about, and the president is using it to try to justify sending federal troops into states to squash crime.
This whole if the races were swapped game is just that.
It's a game designed to bait racists.
Charlie also says that this isn't getting the same attention as George Floyd.
And I think part of the reason for that is that Floyd was killed by a cop who had him subdued.
The current story doesn't involve police brutality, which was a very central issue as to why people were protesting a lot about the previous case.
The reason that Charlie got blowback from this behavior that he was engaged in is because it was a little obvious how desperately he was trying to stoke racism with his coverage of the story.
I feel like him saying even Van Jones would have to admit is a little over the top because he's just using Van Jones as a stand-in for a black guy.
I know it's not important, but this story has another deep irony to it, which is that the victim of this crime is someone that folks like Alex and Charlie do not like.
She was a refugee, which they don't want here.
Further, she was from Ukraine, a country that they both are cheering on Putin invading.
If she hadn't been killed, they would be happy to demand that she be deported back to Ukraine, and they wouldn't care if she was killed as a result of that.
But because it happened here and how it did, they accept her as one of their own because she was white.
And they can use this story to exacerbate their audience's feelings of racial victimhood.
The people who say that Charlie wasn't hardcore enough are the avant-garde Nazis that Alex likes a lot these days.
And not hardcore enough is just a fun euphemism that Alex is trying to hide behind.
He needs to stop playing dumb games and just accept that his Nazi friends hated Kirk because it wasn't Nazi enough for them.
Also, I think it's really sad for Alex to be venerating some guy who was wishy-washy on the issues just because they were an effective partisan voter registration guy.
If you're supposed to be above the left-ray paradigm, this seems like a weird person to make a hero out of, but that paradigm wasn't real to begin with.
The Podesta plan from August 2020 said if Trump could win and they couldn't steal it, it's public, they'd have blue states secede to blue cities, create racial uprisings, and burn the country down and drive Trump from power.
Then they produced a few years later the film Civil War that was released in the election year last year, fantasizing about the states coming together, marching on D.C. and killing Trump, who's only protected by the Secret Service, a Trumpian figure.
So they've said they're going ahead with this plan.
Alex is making up all this shit about this supposed Podesta plan.
And the only way he could say this stuff about that Civil War movie is if he hasn't seen it or he's betting that everyone listening to the show hasn't.
Yeah, and it really sucks because, you know, we're coming off a time that was a little bit back to having some fun with Owen leaving and all that stuff.
Yeah.
And now this is like real, it's a real splash of cold water on your face reminding you that this guy is one of the most fucked up people who's been allowed in front of a camera.
It's a very good chance that off of the murder of Charlie Kirk, they've got some white supremacist, drugged out MK Ultra people ready to truck bomb the illegal alien administration or shoot up a black college or something in their future.
And then they're going to try to create the collash and conflagration out of that.
And that's why they're pushing this violence.
And so that's why this is so incredibly important right now that you understand this is a bellwethered event.
This is another important piece of Alex's agenda, which is giving a preemptive storyline to any racist acts of violence that may come in the near future.
Charlie had an audience that included a ton of racists and other brands of bigots.
And the fact that their leader was just killed could incite some kind of a response up to and including other acts of violence.
Alex and everyone in this media space understands that the odds of that have gone up because of this shooting.
So if that happens, it's important to have reminded the audience in advance not to believe anything like that could be real.
They need to create the chaos and have the mass uprising like we're Nepal or something and manipulate the youth to burn down the country so there's a smokescreen to remove Trump and bring in their tyranny.
Trump has deployed military in a few cities because of the Soros stand down, defunding the police and the Soros DAs.
It's not a police state.
In an emergency, you do that and crime has already plunged 90% in D.C. That is a protective measure ahead of what they know is coming.
Even if we accept everything about what Alex is saying, if we accept and stipulate that it's true, is this an acceptable justification for a police state?
There's going to be a lot of crime in the future, so Trump has to move towards martial law.
That doesn't sound very convincing coming from a guy like Alex.
If this is all that it takes to justify using the military or National Guard for domestic policing, most of the work he's done in his entire career falls apart immediately.
I mean, the irony of that is that it is actually disrespectful to Charlie Kirk's memory and what he believed in.
Like, there's a subtle problem with people pointing out his quote of the Second Amendment thing is because they're subtly saying, well, he didn't actually believe that.
Because if you wanted to say, like, this man actually believes that, then part of this is respecting that this is what happens.
He believed that this is what happens.
To take him honestly and seriously is to say this man is a result of what he believes in.
For Alex to then take that and use it as justification for, let's say, overriding the Second Amendment and allowing the National Guard to come into people's houses and grab their guns.
In 2019, Alex was joining with Nick in attacking Turning Point and Charlie Kirk and even got into an argument with his then employee Millie Weaver about his use of Nick's branding of the term conservative Inc.
Then in 2020, Owen got kicked out of CPAC and that led to them feuding a bit with Kirk and Turning Point because they were seen as the anointed conservative media who are gatekeeping and keeping Infowars out.
So all through that time, he definitely was joining in.
Over time, it is fair to say that Alex softened it on Kirk, but it's shameful for him to pretend that he never got into the mud.
I mean, you know, when you see somebody like exploiting the death of just like a regular coworker in a way that's really uncomfortable, where you're like, oh, I knew him so well, we knew each other pretty well.
I talked to Charlie just a few weeks ago and about a week ago before that.
We talked about our children.
We talked about our families.
Talked about the voting drive he was doing.
Talked about how Trump's doing.
Talked about how Trump was handling Epstein wrong.
We talked about how it didn't matter because we were creating a new generation of leaders for local, state, and federal government.
And that was the secret that long after Trump's gone, we were creating the new generation of populist Christians who will restore and empower this republic.
I don't tell that story to run Trump down.
That was just their conversations about, yeah, we're telling Trump.
Charlie's like, man, he called me, we talked every month or so, but he called me a few times about a month and a half ago.
He was just like, man, good job.
Keep it up.
People at the White House totally agree with you.
He's got to stop saying it's a hoax.
We know he means what they put in the files that they left behind is, he's the guy who blew the whistle, but my God, it's a disaster.
Yeah, you know, keep it up.
We totally agree with you.
Great.
Keep it up.
They were just encouraging me.
And I was like, hey, come on the show.
Yeah, I'll get you on the show.
We both got busy.
It didn't happen.
And he called me back about other stuff, but he's dead now.
I mean, I maybe believe that they have communicated in the past, but I don't believe that they were talking once a month and he was saying, hey, Alex, love what you're doing.
How could you, you know, like, you know, those people who don't have pain, who don't experience pain for whatever reason, they have some sort of thing.
And you're like, oh, I bet that would be, but it's a horrible existence where if they get cut, they might bleed out without even knowing about it.
And Charlie also, he kind of feels like, I don't know what his personal relationships were like, but he seems like the kind of guy who knows, like, all right, I'm going to keep Alex at a distance.
It's like they've just, things have funneled so tightly into a space where you're like, I don't even feel like I'm represented by what you hate anymore.
I feel like the number one reason that I have now for proving that ghosts aren't real is because conservatives would be haunting the shit out of each other left and right.
I'm thinking that that's why we don't think that conservatives haunt other conservatives because we don't realize that once you're dead, you have the distance to be able to look back and go like, oh, that guy was actually the fucking problem the whole time.
I kind of hope he does do this or get like through the planning stages and put a lot of money into it and then the family sues the shit out of him or something.
When you, okay, so if you're watching like Naked and Afraid or something like that, you know, and they see they show you a carcass and it's being eaten by the wild.
You know, there's bacteria, there's bugs, there's scavengers, there's little things, there's all of this stuff going on, right?
What if instead it was just one giant, hideous, mucus-covered fungus that just landed on top of it and sucked everything of value out of it and then bounded off to do it again to somebody else.
I mean, it's just a disgusting display of a person.
Like, I never super comfortable with, you know, especially in the immediate aftermath of something like this happening because it's so out of hand.
It's so out of control.
And the pieces of it are moving in such a way that whatever information was available when we started recording might be different than what is when we're done.
Absolutely.
And so it's really easy to make assumptions and get out ahead of yourself.
Yeah, no, I do think that there was a boring period and it might have maybe we just needed a reminder of like what an exploitative piece of shit this dude is.
And that's another element of this that makes me like slightly uncomfortable because at a certain point, this episode kind of does feel like me just being like, hey, look at this awful person.
And, you know, playing clips.
And it could have the feeling of being like, I'm better than this guy.
And I don't want to wallow in that or dwell on that.
But like, to some degree, you can just play this and look at it and be like, well, it speaks for itself how awful this is.