#1109: January 4, 2026—Alex Jones, in erratic fashion, pivots from attacking "Andy and Tandy" to defending Trump’s Venezuela intervention as a Monroe Doctrine revival, ignoring his past "gunboat diplomacy" critiques of corporate imperialism like BlackRock. He frames it as worker-friendly, citing Ford’s model, but Dan Friesen exposes the contradiction: $2.13 tipped-minimum wages and profit-driven motives. Meanwhile, Jones mocks liberal opposition while fixating on trivial online debates, revealing a desperate shift toward uncharacteristic loyalty over consistency. The episode underscores how even fringe rhetoric adapts to power, abandoning core principles for partisan convenience. [Automatically generated summary]
Then my vamp today is going to be about the traders.
Now, obviously, there's the main traders, the U.S. traders starring the great Alan Cummings, who's fucking killing it, of course.
But also, concurrently, there is the UK Traders with just regular ass people hosted by a woman who is famous in Britain for being a Raven or something.
And I was thinking about the difference between the two of them.
And the great part of the traders in the UK, the real people traders, is that they don't know what they're allowed to do.
You know, they don't understand that there's no real rules yet.
You know, like the people on the U.S. Traders, so many of them have their self-created personas.
That's why when Hank Seth came out and a reporter's like, this is like Iraq regime change, he says it's the opposite.
Because the previous regime change was about destabilizing the Middle East and balkanizing it.
The United States wants to go in and have free and fair elections and turn Venezuela of its own power back into the most wealthy country in Latin America.
But you have to know the history.
You have to know the Monroe Doctrine.
You have to know what gunboat diplomacy is.
You have to know the Barbary policy of Thomas Jefferson.
You have to understand all of that to understand this is a no-brainer.
So one thing that anyone listening to Alex's show could not help but notice is that in the past six months or so, he's been constantly making references to Thomas Jefferson and his Barbary Coast precedent.
This is a reference to the Barbary Wars of the early 1800s, where Jefferson sent Marines to fight against pirates in the waters near Tripoli.
The idea is supposed to be that these pirates posed a national security threat.
So Jefferson was within his right to attack and kill them at sea, which is then used as an argument that Trump has the right to do this with the Venezuelan boats.
It was part of the justification of Trump's militaristic action.
This idea is combined with references to the Monroe Doctrine, which is a bit convoluted.
The Monroe Doctrine essentially says that the U.S. has control over everything in the Western Hemisphere, so any hostile powers trying to take over countries on our half of the world can be seen as enemies.
This has nothing to do with Jefferson's actions during the Barbary Wars because that was centered around North African states, which are in the Eastern Hemisphere.
The point I'm making here is that Thomas Jefferson Barbary War stuff is a talking point, and I'm pretty convinced that he's been told to push this by someone else.
It's not a point that he ever brought up before 2020.
And even then, it was in the context of an interview with a historian talking about Jefferson's actions in the Barbary Wars.
Typically, when the Barbary Wars were mentioned on Infowars, it was because someone was trying to insist that white people weren't the only ones who ever engaged in slave trafficking.
That context changed on September 4th, 2025, after which point Alex began consistently repeating this new talking point about Jefferson's actions in the Barbary War as a justification for Trump sinking Venezuelan boats.
What I'm getting at here is I don't believe this is organic.
If Alex truly felt like Jefferson's attack on the Barbary pirates justified whatever military actions a president could argue were meant to protect the American people, then it would have come up in conversations about things like the invasion of Granada or Clinton's planned attack on Haiti.
I would bet that someone like Roger Stone or General Flynn advised Alex to start justifying the boat attacks using this language because the increase is just too much to be a coincidence.
And he didn't come up with this on his own.
The same thing is happening now more recently with the term gunboat diplomacy.
Alex is starting to use that expression more as a way to justify Trump's belligerent actions against other countries.
Peace through strength was an acceptable maxim to throw out until you had real military actions and overthrows that you needed to spin.
And it feels to me like this appealing to gunboat diplomacy is the way Alex is trying to escalate that.
The problem is that gunboat diplomacy means a number of different things to different people.
For political science types, it usually refers to a country replacing their diplomatic efforts with threats.
So the international agreements that they make aren't based on shared self-interest, but rather on one party knowing that the other will kill them if they violate the agreement.
Or even more to the point, it involves more powerful countries using displays of their superior maritime weaponry as a means of coercing less powerful countries to make those agreements in the first place.
Alex fully understands and opposes this practice, as he's made clear repeatedly about China's actions in the South China Sea.
He cannot actually support the principle of gunboat diplomacy without giving up any reason why he should care about the idea of like China invading Taiwan.
From my position of having listened to a ton of the show, I don't believe that Alex supports gunboat diplomacy as a concept.
But there's a larger issue.
On InfoWars, gunboat diplomacy is not a concept that involves a state intimidating another state using a show of strength.
On Alex's show, the term has a specific meaning, and it is about corporate imperialism.
Here's him explaining this to a caller from April 2004.
Don't you remember gunboat diplomacy over the last 150 years?
If a third world Latin American country didn't let our corporations basically own them, how the Marines would be landed and they'd burn whole cities down.
I briefly wanted to point this out that growing up, you know, you're taught in school and college that third worlders are a bunch of idiot savages, basically.
I mean, it's done with a velvet glove, but oh, those people, they just can't get themselves together.
And ha ha ha.
Well, that's not what's going on.
The colonial areas of Latin America, Africa, and Southern Asia and other areas have been overrun by the more advanced technological militaries of the West repeatedly in the last 300 years.
And systems of tyranny are put in.
And then the last hundred years, and this is mainline history if you research it.
This is not my opinion.
And major white papers were written by the British government.
The U.S. government deployed gunboat diplomacy where they would give a dictator or give a thug, say in Venezuela or Guatemala.
This goes back over 100 years, the U.S. They give them a $20 million loan.
And openly, it would come out and tell them, don't pay this back.
Leave in one year with the money to Switzerland or to New York.
That's why you have a lot of Mexican presidents actually move to New York after they steal a bunch of money.
Just a few decades ago, that happened or in the mid-90s.
So it's the same system, or they go to Switzerland.
That's kind of the place where they nest, and it's a free zone they allow.
And so, and then the public's told, well, with interest, it's been 10 years.
You don't owe us 20 million in 1905.
You owe us 300 million.
And the country says, you know, back then, that was before the inflation we have.
It was the equivalent of 300 billion or something.
They said, we don't even make that in 20 years.
We can't pay it.
Oh, that's fine.
From the shores of Montezuma, from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.
And the Marine Corps top general, two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner, Smedley Butler, finally quit and went public and said, look, it's all about money.
In Infowars language, gunboat diplomacy refers to the practice of the IMF and World Bank giving corrupt leaders in struggling countries huge debts that they know can never be repaid.
The leader plays ball and gets to be rich in Switzerland, but they've sold out their country, which goes broke because of their inability to pay the loan, at which point the globalists come in and buy up all their infrastructure.
If their leader doesn't play ball, we send in the Navy and the military.
This was the only context Alex ever used the term until December 2025.
After that point, he started using it to mean the more traditional definition of the expression, which is to use military and particularly naval intimidation to force American foreign policy objectives.
And he started presenting this as a positive thing that is good that Trump is getting back to.
If Alex thinks the U.S. should impose its will on the rest of the Western hemisphere through murder and threats of wars, then he should just say that.
He probably feels like he can't because he spent so much of his career pretending to love freedom and hate empires, but he needs to get over that hurdle.
This is just bullshit.
I understand that no villain ever really just comes out and says, hey, I'm the bad guy.
But if you pay any attention to Alex, notice the language that he's using, the way things are changing, he's sending the message pretty fucking clear.
If you pay attention to Alex, you cannot possibly believe that he believes anything.
Every single thing about his political ideology should strongly oppose Trump telling oil companies how to do business.
The idea that Trump could tell companies how to manage supply and demand so he can manipulate prices is a state-run economy, which is a critical piece of what he's supposed to hate about communist countries like China.
Trump telling oil companies to slash their prices and that they can make no profits is a horrible transgression of what Alex's worldview is supposed to be based on.
But he can pretend Trump is doing it and he reports that to the audience as a positive because he knows that even his audience kind of wants socialist-leaning policies, even if they don't know the words.
Everyone except people who profit from oil companies hate oil companies.
Everyone except people who profit from insurance companies hate insurance companies.
Everyone kind of gets that the game is rigged and the smug libertarian contrarianism of the late and mid-2000s, it isn't fun for teens anymore.
Yeah, you know, it is something that has become more and more clear in our present time that I misunderstood how the world works based on how words work, right?
Like, to me, a principle was only really confirmed when it sucked.
And I think that a lot of the people who are busy off changing their principles are a lot of the people who would rant and crow at you about how principles are only important when they're inconvenient.
Sure, I would love for kids to be safer in schools, but what about the guns?
Yeah, because it is something that I'm listening to him talk and it's like, I guess, I guess people will listen to the reasons, maybe, I guess, and think like, oh, this is a good reason to do this thing.
But in my head, it's like, oh, you can give me all the reasons you want, but you can't do the thing.
So because you did the thing, none of your reasons mean anything to me.
Yeah, there's probably some edge cases where somebody does something that you instinctively think and maybe know is wrong, and then you could be persuaded by reasons.
So, by Trump grabbing $18 trillion in oil that's now on the U.S. ballot sheet, and that's damn right what it is.
What do you think we did until the globalist era after World War II?
You think the U.S. didn't go around grabbing stuff before?
Think we didn't grab Cuba from Spain and then turn around and give it to them?
But as long as they let us have a military base there for God, I mean, the U.S. has been the partner to have that won't screw you over and let you run things just don't screw us until the end of World War II and then the CIA and we become globalists and then all the things that came out of it because we're working for globalist interest, British Empire interest, New World Order interest, not the people's interest.
But if you think in this world that we can have our country and just hide in it and can't be engaged or can't be involved, well, I got a bridge I'm happy to sell you.
And I want to be clear that I respect him saying it explicitly.
I wholeheartedly disagree with his position.
And I think it's delusional to pretend that this doesn't just benefit giant corporations and tyrants, but I think it's closer to what Alex sincerely supports.
In 2008, when he was trying to boost his career by latching onto Ron Paul supporters who were mostly mad about the war, do you think he would have said anything like that?
Not getting involved in foreign wars was a central piece of the messaging back then, so Alex pushed that.
Alex was positioned against the system, and regardless of whether Bush or Clinton or Obama was in office, they were representatives of the system and they were doing the wars.
It's super easy to be opposed to their wars and then convince your audience that you're principally opposed to all war and you're not.
Make no mistake about it.
Alex built his career on the illusion that he was opposed to things like colonialist adventure and regime change because of principles that he believed in about things like freedom, sovereignty, and non-interventionism.
He presented himself as the alternative to the hawks like Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News crowd.
And without that fiction, he never would have been able to sell himself to a larger audience.
People who weren't extreme right-wingers and racists were drawn to him because they were pissed the fuck off about the Iraq war, and he was giving them a message that they could get behind, and it seemed to transcend politics.
People like Tucker would get in their bow ties and argue on TV about how Bush was right to attack Iraq and Afghanistan, but Alex told the audience that you were more likely to get struck by lightning than ever meet a terrorist and that the war was being sold to you on false pretenses.
The people who were pissed off about the war agreed with that.
And because Alex was saying it, it made him look like he was more honest than his competitors.
But how many of the people who marched with no blood for oil signs would have gotten on board with Alex saying that the U.S. should take stuff and plunder freely, like how things were before the World War II international order?
How seriously could any of these people ever have taken him if his argument against the war wasn't that it was happening, but he didn't like the people benefiting from it?
The argument for why the globalists are bad is supposed to be that they do bad things, like carry out regime change wars in order to steal resources.
By accepting and celebrating Trump doing the exact same thing, Alex has in effect removed the whole reason to oppose them.
Because the guy who made millions of dollars as the anti-system guy now has to be a cheerleader for the system, he can no longer keep up the shredded that any of the stuff that he used to care about matters.
The principles he used to mask as his mask, they're all destroyed.
And what's left of it is the shit that was there all along and was the real motivating factor, which is white nationalism, Christian identity, protection of business interests over people, and colonialist exploitation of Uyghur countries' natural resources.
But maybe I, I mean, just going by everything that he's done, said how he's lived, all the things that I know about him, I would say it's not worth it.
But, you know, maybe somewhere in his head it was.
So anyway, Alex immediately, like yesterday on this show, he was like, Trump looks at this shit and he's like, I could build a lot of hotels down there.
I've also seen, I'll get to this because it's not about me, but it's an example of propaganda.
All these big Democrat talk show hosts taking a club out of context yesterday, like a 30-second club, where I'm saying Trump loves to see golf courses and Trump towers and everybody happy and a future for his kids.
And that got translated into Trump's doing this so he has Trump golf courses and towers and so his kids can make billions.
No, I explained how when he went and met with Kim Jong-un and showed him a video graphic of look how wealthy South Korea is.
You can be that way with all these factories and businesses and golf courses and hotels.
And Kim Jong-un reportedly cried and said, China won't let me.
So Alex did literally say that Trump looks at a country like Venezuela and just sees the potential to build Trump hotels and golf courses there.
He can pretend this was taken out of context all he wants, but he's fucking lying.
It was on our last episode.
Larger issue, though, the explanation of the context here that Alex is doing doesn't make it better.
Alex is just explaining that Trump likes to do whatever works best for corporate interests, and he demands on getting a cut himself.
Everything Alex brings up is an example of something that's meant to benefit the corporations, including the no tax on tips thing.
It's great for working people not to have to pay tax on tips, but that's also part of a larger negotiation that involves employers not having to pay tipped positions fair base wages.
It looks like a huge win for the workers when you only consider the no tax on tips part.
But when you look at the bigger picture, this is a perfect pressure release valve for the corporations to continue making more money.
They don't have to pay their tipped employees anything more than they did before, but the employee theoretically walks home with more money.
Collected tax revenue goes down, but the business makes the same amount.
Consider that the alternative to this would be raising the minimum wage for tipped employees, and you can see how no tax on tips is a program that's friendly to workers, but even more so to corporations.
Currently, the federal minimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13.
They're allowed to use $5.12 of any tips that they make as credit towards a $725 an hour minimum wage.
So in some ways, you could look at any shift as starting about $5 in the hole that you need to work off to your boss.
Only six states in Guam require tipped employees to be paid their state's normal minimum wage, while 15 use the federal minimum of $2.13.
No tax on tips is good for the workers in a direct sense, but the reason that someone like Trump or Alex can support it is because they understand that compared to the alternative, this is a very good option for big business.
Also, I'm not the person to get super into the weeds about this, but Trump shit can only apply to federal taxes, so tips can still be taxed at a state level, and companies can still apply payroll taxes to some forms of tips.
And there's a $25,000 cap.
So it's not as worker-friendly as this catchphrase name is meant to imply.
I mean, there's being a worm tongue and then there's being a straight-up toady.
You know, at least the worm tongue gets to whisper in, you know, King WhatsApp's face's ear and be like, ah, but man, if you're just like, it's okay if he steps on my nose.
Trump said, we're returning to the Monroe doctrine and the model used by William McKinley.
And if foreign powers are projecting their power into our hemisphere and setting up states and governments to manipulate our internal operations, we are going to smash your ass.
You know how many times we've gone into Latin America and to Mexico before World War II?
Hundreds of times.
Because of foreign powers coming in trying to manipulate and control.
We built the Panama Canal.
We had it for eternity in the deal.
Carter signed it away.
Obama finished it.
Trump came in with headset and told Panama, hey, the ChiComs are pushing in.
Like, Trump made a lot of noise last year about how Chinese companies ran ports around the Panama Canal and how that wasn't good for American national security.
This involved a Hong Kong-based company called C.K. Hutchinson Holdings, who owned controlling interest over these ports.
Trump demanded a shake-up, so C.K. Hutchinson ended up agreeing to sell their interest in these ports for $22.8 billion.
The group that ended up with buying that controlling interest is a consortium that's run by BlackRock.
That seems like it should be relevant to Alex because they're one of his big villains.
See, we kind of have to understand is Alex's framing of this relies on his understanding of gunboat diplomacy.
He fantasizes about this idea that Trump will have Maduro in custody and he'll be able to intimidate him into pointing the finger at his political enemies.
And if you agree to this deal, we will let you out of prison and you can be rich in Switzerland.
And I think the story of the Emperor Has No Clothes has been misunderstood for its actual power, right?
Now, you say, oh, the emperor has no clothes, and then the kid laughs at him.
But I say instead, the emperor walks around naked with his dick swinging around and then hires a bunch of people to scream at you that he's wearing clothes.
And then if you say anything about him not wearing clothes, he murders you.
Well, you know how, like, I think, you know, you watch movies from, like, the 90s and stuff, and it's like, well, this whole plot would be solved by a cell phone.
Like, if there just were cell phones, this is not an issue.
Like, I think that it's one thing to have, like, oh, yeah, there's a lot of people who are going along with the, you know, the fiction that the emperor has cool clothes.
For real, though, this is an insane level of bootlicking that almost can't be put on a chart.
The way that Alex is justifying Trump's geopolitical military actions relies on assuming a super corrupt but benevolent motivation from a business standpoint, and that alone should be a problem.
Yeah.
If Trump is kidnapping world leaders and seizing oil fields, that should be bad.
But he's doing it because he wants everyone to have a bunch of money.
So that should be good.
But he wants everyone to have money because he's a hospitality guy who only makes money if everyone has money to spend.
So that kind of makes his motives look suspicious again.
It's good to want people to have money and be able to afford things in life.
But if your reason for wanting that is so you can sell them things, then your ability to afford something is really a means to an end that this person is after, which is them selling you things.
It's great to give people more money so they can afford to buy, you know, raising wages.
What's even more effective than that is giving them company bucks and selling them all the things that they, that's super efficient.
I mean, this show, if like he talks about how God tells him what to do and how he's like the most important person in the world and has shaped the tides of history and stuff.
And like, great.
You should be doing something else with the time then.
You know, the show shouldn't be a meme recap show and you trying to puff your chest out at TikTok videos.