#1110: January 7, 2026 dissects Alex Jones’ erratic claims—from framing Trump’s imperialism as necessary to prevent U.S. decline (despite $34T debt) to falsely linking a Minneapolis ICE shooting to Soros-backed "leftist provocation," ignoring contradictory footage. Jones pivots from accusing protesters of justifying violence to defending state actions without evidence, while Dan and Jordan expose his reliance on Twitter clips (e.g., Gunther Fehlinger’s non-NATO statements) and narrative manipulation. His hypocrisy—dismissing moral scrutiny yet weaponizing it—reveals a pattern of preemptive storytelling over truth, underscoring how conspiracy-driven rhetoric distorts reality to justify power. [Automatically generated summary]
Here's the last line in the Wikipedia plot synopsis of Patch Adams.
At graduation, Adams receives his doctor of medicine degree and bowing to the professors and audience reveals himself to be naked underneath his capacity.
So, first, hey, Dan, my policy wonk status was formally announced a few hundred episodes ago when you were super fucking depressed.
I've re-listened many times over at reduced speeds, and I have to know, while you were in your dark place, did you kind of laugh when you read my policy wonk name?
The old globalist New World Order system fell apart a long time ago.
And people just figured that out.
So there is the EU, there is Russia.
There is China.
There is the United States.
And the United States still has more power projection than all of those groups together.
But because of internal issues in the United States and because of our debt, the United States, at many levels, is in a great position, but also in a very bad position.
So, so, so here's what's going on.
You notice everything's accelerating faster and faster.
But there's no doubt that the reason Trump's doing what he's doing is that if he doesn't do this, the United States will not come out on top in this power reshuffle.
So this seems totally out of step with the entire storyline of Alex's career and also notably out of step with how he's been trying to sell Trump's overthrowing of Venezuela so far.
If someone had been listening to the show for a long time, hearing him say, like, the globalist order has been destroyed long ago, but people are just realizing it now.
What the fuck were you crying about six months ago then?
The United States needs the 18 trillion of oil and trillion of gold or more on the balance sheet so the whole world sees us winning and that we're not in the same debt as China and the EU.
And then the way the world works is they then say, oh, we're winning.
Then they all rush to us to invest with us.
And then we come out on top, and then we don't go into a total, prolonged depression, and you hear Social Security and the rest of it.
People would say, well, that's empire, and that's wrong.
And okay, fine.
Then just be ready for what's going to happen.
Now, the empire building we've been doing for 40 years, really since World War II, 75, 80 years, but intensely for the globals for 40 years, has been at our expense and in our name and our treasure, demonizing us worldwide against our own interest.
With Trump, you're getting strongman empire that is 100% for the general public because he understands you got to stabilize the base for his own wealth.
So they're trying to threaten Russia, holding a gun to everybody's head with war to keep themselves central players.
And to hold together the British Empire, Bilderberg, Western Europe model, and use that to control U.S. foreign policy to be the backstop for their plan.
And like, we talked years and years ago about how like he just needs to get right with the fact that he just wants colonialism back and that's kind of where we are.
He just believes that certain countries have their spheres, their superpowers, and they should fight over affiliates where they can pillage and plunder all the resources and fuck the people who are there.
And the royal families just said they weren't in charge anymore in Europe and the UK.
No, they are.
Canada is still under the royal family's control.
The governor general can dissolve parliament.
They don't like the votes in Canada.
Same thing in Australia.
You think the British Empire doesn't exist anymore because it went into stealth mode.
And so Marco Rubio is going over there, and Greenland's like, absolutely.
We'll take tens of millions of investment.
We'll become a U.S. protectorate.
It's key to the resources in the Arctic.
China moving in, Russia moving in with all their icebreakers, all of it.
It's critical for refueling.
It's the move we saw with the U.S. expanding during Manifest Destiny in its first 175 years or so and buying Alaska from the Russians and the Spanish-American War in 1898.
So all that went on before the neocons showed up, before Trotsky fled Russia when Stalin was trying to kill him and came over here and set up the neocons and national review and took over.
That's them.
That old system's bye-bye.
And that doesn't say I endorse this.
I'm simply saying Trump is obsessed with the 18th and 19th century.
He follows it.
His planners are.
And they are trying to reboot the country with the Teddy Roosevelt model.
Because bigger than the Monroe, it was President Roosevelt, Teddy, not Franklin, who really implemented the Monroe Doctrine.
You were supposed to tell us about fucking where the red fern grows, and instead you're telling me that Trump is obsessed with the 18th and 19th century.
It's just embarrassingly oversimplified to the point where anybody who had actually, you know, maybe studied or maybe who has a history background, you'd hear this and you'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about?
Yeah, what a shocking bit of news that Alex has somehow figured out through back channels that Russia and China are thrilled with this discord among the Western countries.
So I know it's going to be tough, and I don't know how it gets pulled off, but there needs to be a nationwide, probably worldwide, let's just face it, like a social media recall.
You know, like we fucked up.
We know we fucked up, but we still got to have it.
So we're going to take a couple weeks off, retool things, and then bring it back in a better way.
I think when a product is defective in a meaningful way, you're able, like if a toaster causes fires, people are able to say, hey, this is not safe for consumers.
These are the few areas Trump can get something done because the Justice Department's so corrupt, he can't really act as much as he wants to domestically, but he can militarily.
DHS is a newer agency.
He's got better people in there.
2,000 hit Minneapolis-St. Paul alone.
Reportedly, 500 arrests just last day.
I mean, the left's going crazy right now.
So anywhere Trump can get his agenda through, he's doing it with flying colors.
Man, I remember growing up and hearing so much bullshit from like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity about how what they want is a government that couldn't do anything.
Crash the economic system, crash the capitalist system with corruption and overload, then offer communism and redistribution of wealth and seizing the means of production and seizing private property.
And the leftist globalist control systems are the same from Australia to Germany to the UK to the U.S. Anytime they need to, any charity they're carrying out, they just say oh it's for the brown people.
Then they can activate the leadership of the brown people who are NGO globalist, who communist, to burn everything down anytime we got align.
So to be clear, what Alex is saying here is just classic white supremacist talking points.
In its early stages, white supremacists and Nazis had very clear and open affinity for anti-communist extremists for some fairly obvious reasons.
Communists and Nazis have historically been at odds with each other, so that alliance makes sense.
But the connection for white supremacists isn't as direct.
Anti-communist propaganda has historically presented every attempt by the oppressed and often non-white people to escape their oppressors as being a plot the communists are using to disrupt the natural order of things.
Communist parties and organizations are often on the side of groups that opposed systems like South African apartheid.
So it was easy for anti-communist propagandists to conflate the two and create the impression that no one would be complaining about apartheid if it weren't for those pesky communists making black South Africans feel like they should attack the white people.
Over time, this connection became a central pillar of the anti-communist worldview and a way for people on the extreme right wing to express white supremacist views without feeling like they were being super racist.
They could pretend that they would be in favor of civil rights, but they couldn't possibly endorse them in the 60s because all of that was just communist agitation.
If only there were some call for equal rights that wasn't communist agitation, they would totally get behind it.
Mamdani didn't say that he was going to seize white people's property, and all that other stuff Alex is saying is just bullshit.
His tenant director, Sia Weaver, posted a tweet in 2019 that said, quote, private property, including and kind of especially homeownership, is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as wealth-building public policy.
Sure.
Alex doesn't know who Weaver is, and he has no idea what she actually tweeted.
He's just responding to people getting all worked up about libs of TikTok posting about her tweet.
And now there is a power vacuum with the major powers of the world trying to flood in to grab all the different resources and different things to establish the new political landscape.
And I would use the analogy of The Hobbit, where at the end of the book, they've killed Smog.
He's got the biggest treasure trove in the world that he'd stolen from the dwarves.
And so the five different races of Middle-earth care about it, and they all go rushing towards the Lonely Mountain to try to get control of the giant treasure horde.
And that's where we are right now.
And so China's running around grabbing stuff from the Philippines and Vietnam and moving into Africa and Latin America and trying to get the Panama Canal.
And Russia just wants to secure its borders and not be attacked by Europe that openly says their business model is to take over Russia, which is totally insane.
And quote, break it in five pieces.
So we're going back to what was always done before.
And under the globalists, they were doing it corporately going around taking over the world and proliferating weapons.
So we are now entering the battle of five armies.
But instead of five armies, it's the Chikoms, the Russians.
It's interesting that the America first Trump people are a separate group in Alex's mind from the Christians who are doing the right thing and praying.
What's going on right now is that Alex is trying to shed the baggage of the globalists and pivot his content into a new world order era, but he doesn't have any other real tricks than this battle of good and evil stuff.
But I do know from just being kind of like a light movie guy who has awareness, I know that the Peter Jackson's, like, he only meant to make two of The Hobbit, and then he had to make three.
And in order to do that, he had to expand the Battle of the Five Armies into like something that was much bigger than it was in the original text.
If you take it, we take every single base of the Americans from Aviano to Ramstein, from Romania to all the other military bases will be confiscated and you will lose it.
And the whole position of American power since World War II, if you take Greenland, you have to live.
It's very simple, Mrs. Miller.
This is the leverage we have.
You need the spaces for global power protection.
You won't have it.
And we can defend ourselves very well.
And we will do that without the U.S. nuclear shield, without the U.S. troops in Europe, without the American bases.
We will simply run these bases ourselves and we run your boys home into Chicago and Ohio.
The bases without our weapons and satellite control, the weapons, are worthless.
85% of Europeans and major polls are going to run and aren't going to be conscripted to fight.
They want us to get into a direct war with Russia.
We miss you're already in one.
And so, oh, if you go make a deal with Greenland that you claim was independent, oh, now we're going to go to war with you and now we're going to kick all your military out.
Please get us out of NATO.
Please.
And then all these wars with Russia will shut down just like that.
And Europe's got its nukes, so Russia's not going to attack you.
It's been the EU expanding up to the borders of Russia.
And we know that.
So these guys hold none of the cards, but there they are holding us hostage.
We got to get these clips to Trump.
I can't wait till he reads all these EU officials and NATO officials running their mouths.
More importantly, though, really think about the mentality that Alex is expressing at the end there.
He's excited about the idea of Trump being informed about a geopolitical threat that NATO is supposedly making by Alex showing him the clip.
In Alex's conception, Trump doesn't know about something like this already, which to me sounds like holding comically low expectations for a leader.
If some pundit on MSNBC was playing a clip of a foreign leader making a threat against the U.S. during the Obama years and the host said, I can't wait until Obama sees that on our show, it would come off like a real dumb child.
I don't want to bring this up to highlight any hypocrisy or play some what about games.
I just really want to stress what Alex's behaviors would look like in other contexts.
Now, I've been telling you, the left can't debate us on policy.
They can't debate us on economics.
They can't debate us on culture.
So all they need to do is create racial division.
And they've been hyping a new civil war in America and having violent groups attack ICE and Border Patrol and openly saying, we need somebody to get killed.
So we have a new George Floyd.
So we have a pretext to burn the country down, say Trump's a dictator, implement the martial law Podesta plan.
Well, now we may have a candidate of that.
I'm surprised this hadn't happened earlier with all the shooting at ICE and shooting them and killing them and ramming them and throwing rocks at them and all the rest of it.
Witnesses report ICE agent shooting woman in Minneapolis Hepburn's car crash incident.
So this is the first mention Alex has of the ICE shooting, and you can see how his default is to make the story fit his narrative regardless of what the truth in the case may be.
He's not interested at all in the details.
He's not reporting on a breaking story.
He's taking a horrible traumatic event that just happened and demanding the audience view it solely through his lens.
I get that everyone is insane now, but personally, I'm not going to dignify this situation as something worth arguing over.
It's very clearly an inappropriate shooting carried out by an ICE agent against a U.S. citizen, and it should be treated as a possible homicide.
I understand heat of the moment type defenses and all that sort of thing should be litigated by a court and a jury.
Anybody who sees the details of the shooting and say that it's acceptable, that's not a sincere actor.
You are not coming at this from a sincere place.
You are a tool of state power, and it's fairly obvious.
With Alex at this point in his show, I think his behavior is actually less nefarious than it could be.
And that's only because in this moment, he doesn't know anything.
He has no information.
This is all just a knee-jerk reaction to breaking news that ICE killed someone.
In the Infowars conspiracy narrative, anti-Trump agitators have been trying to get someone killed so they can use them as a martyr.
So it makes total sense for Alex to slot this in as the fulfillment of that prophecy.
He's an idiot, and this is inhumanly cynical.
But I really think that you can only grasp the depths of Alex's intentional depravity by seeing his reaction to this case once he has more information.
It makes total sense and is boring evil the way he responds in the moment.
And you have the countless videos of them saying, get after him, attack him, and viciously attacking ICE.
And already Walls is out demonizing.
Before you even know the facts, federal law enforcement shoots civilian in Minneapolis.
City officials say acting like federal law enforcement's military.
See how they spin that?
Like, oh, a civilian.
And here's the video breaking tear gas and pepper spray.
Oh, turns out we're getting footage now.
They were running around screaming, attacking, going after people.
And who knows if ICE even shot this lady?
Again, you never know when they're going to pull a false flag.
And they've said one death and they're going to burn down the country.
And again, a bunch of middle-aged and elderly women, as usual, white women virtue signaling, running up, screaming, pushing, attacking, ramming cars, all of it.
And the left always cuts after they ram the car or after they attack somebody when they get slammed to the ground.
So you can see in that clip, Alex beginning to weave visual details he's picking up from early videos into the story.
They're white women virtue signaling.
He's blending his standard talking points and predictive narrative structure with the first little details that he's been able to take in about this shooting.
This clip also includes an interesting condemnation that I'm going to pretend I don't quite understand, which is Alex complaining about Tim Walz coming out and talking about the shooting.
He says that Walls is out demonizing ICE about it when we don't even know the details, but Alex himself is out defending ICE about it when he definitely knows less about this than Walls.
If what Walls is doing is wrong and manipulative, then what Alex is doing is too, by default.
If you believe that he's doing so, it would be okay to criticize Waltz for jumping to conclusions.
Like if you believe that about Walls.
But if that's the problem, then Alex shouldn't be doing the exact same thing too.
He can't live in both spaces without pointing the finger at himself.
All that matters is that you're not, you're talking about this case before anyone knows the details.
That's a valid criticism that non-insane people can accept about public officials.
So, Alex uses it to attack what he perceives as them building a narrative.
The point I'm trying to make is that it looks like hypocrisy for Alex to be making up his mind about a story while criticizing Walls for hardy having made up his mind about the story, but it's not relevant to see this as hypocrisy.
It's a rhetorical trick that he uses so he doesn't have to full-throatedly argue his real point.
It's far easier for him to say that Walls is too eager to blame ICE for the shooting compared to what Alex really needs to do, which is justify ICE shooting a citizen.
Yeah, it is that form of hypocrisy that is misleading, like, you know, just Mitch McConnell's existence.
You know, it's you think they're supposed to be doing one thing, but if you pull back, what's happening is they're trying to cut down a tree, and they don't give a shit what tool they have to use to do it.
There's no such thing as hypocrisy.
There's just the tree is up or it's down.
So I'll lie.
I'll say this.
I'll say the same thing you say.
It doesn't, nothing means anything except for the tree falling.
If you are able to then grow from the point where you understand that this is hypocrisy and it does not matter, the hypocrisy is a rhetorical trick that is being weaponized against you.
So Alex is playing a video that shows the aftermath of the shooting where there's a bloody airbag deployed in the car.
That was because the victim was shot while driving away and her car then rammed into another car because she was dead behind the wheel.
Alex knows nothing about this situation.
He's just making stuff up about the little snippets of video he's cold watching on the show and then trying to use whatever details he sees as proof of his predetermined narrative.
There's a bloody airbag because this person rammed an ICE vehicle before getting shot.
That's a possibility that Alex sees as maybe working to justify the shooting.
So he's throwing it out there.
That's probably what happened because that works for me.
Yeah, it's like, I mean, these people should just have a board.
You know, they should have a writer's room and they should have a board that just is like, what are all the possible reasons people might accept where it's okay to shoot somebody?
And then just pull them out at random whenever you need them.
It's fucked because the point of it is like for most people who, like, if you wanted ICE gone, you didn't need this to happen to push you over the edge.
It's fascinating to hear Alex mumble this kind of stuff over these videos because his career is based on way tamer videos than this one.
And his insistence that they were all the police state.
He spent years of his career whining about a video where troops were doing a crowd control drill and some teen improvised a line about how they can't do this to him because he's a citizen.
The optics of that were so scandalous that Alex basically declared war.
All that shit seems so quaint and dumb now.
This woman was killed by federal agents on the streets in the United States.
It's not a hypothetical.
It's not some kid role-playing at some National Guard training exercise.
This is real.
And you can see where Alex's loyalties lie by his immediate response to this.
So, Alex, I think one of the things that he wants to do is to make sure that all the people who didn't get shot at the protest, they all look as bad as possible.
It has to be something because I just genuinely don't know how you can be so fucking political brain rotted that you can look at this and think that there is a right or a left.
Because if there were enough people, right, who are like, hey, I think we should openly say that the state should be a terrorist-run organization that murders people we don't like, right?
Then we could just fight them.
But because there's not enough, they have to lie about it.
And that's terrible because people get tricked so easily.
And I think that a pretty decent argument could be made that the reason that they're doing this in Minneapolis is because they couldn't do it in L.A. or New York or Chicago.
people would fucking fight them yeah no there'd be no yeah there There is enough like the large enough cities they could not pull this kind of shit off on.
Is great lawyer, constitutional expert, real historian Robert Barnes, on the global political realignment happening, the seizure of this Russian tanker, the militias rising up in Venezuela against U.S. regime change, the U.S. saying they're about to take Greenland, Denmark saying that'll be an act of war, that they will go to war with us.
They'll shoot first, ask questions later, close quote.
But first, we just talked to Nick Sordor, the incredible on-the-ground reporter, also Infowars reporter.
Host his Sunday show with us.
Nick Sordor is on the ground embedded with DHS.
They have confirmed to him that a woman, just in the last hour and a half, tried to ram their vehicle in one of these neighborhoods where this rapid reaction force of 2000 went in to arrest illegal aliens with long rap sheets.
And DHS has said that she tried to ram the vehicle.
Last hour, I looked at raw footage and you see what looks like a bunch of ram vehicles in her car and the bloody airbag.
So it looked pretty obvious to me that you've got vehicles rammed and then you've got a DHS vehicle there and you see the bloody airbag.
She has now reportedly been pronounced dead according to DHS sources.
So Nick Sordor is not embedded with the DHS as a journalist.
He's there as a mouthpiece of the state.
He's there to spin events in a way that state media surrogates like Alex can then report to their audience in ways that defend the narrative that maintains state power.
This narrative that the victim was trying to ram vehicles is the first attempt to make something stick that exonerates the ICE agent, but it ends up not working.
They later pivot to accusing her of trying to run over an agent once more videos released.
But if that hadn't happened, it's likely that this would have sufficed for most of Trump's audience and allowed them to move on, which is the role that Nick plays.
He has been so seduced by proximity to power and the Trump administration treating him like he has something valid to offer in terms of media or journalism that he's compromised.
He's been captured by the state and they can freely just lie to him and he will report the lie on Twitter and it will travel around to folks like Alex.
And you've got all these versions signaling white people out here so pissed at murderers and rapists and criminals and frogsters are being, I mean, they got federal orders from courts, folks.
They're busting drug houses and fentanyl houses and human traveling houses.
Telltale they've got umbrellas to block their faces.
That's an anti-vomote.
So they're trying to leave.
They're blocking the road, attacking them.
This is the provocation they want.
This is what they're looking for.
And then if Trump doesn't execute federal law, start deporting the illegal aliens, he's capitulated to them.
Then they control the blue cities.
Because you're really expeditionary forces into areas captured by the left in America.
Look, in 1917, the Russians took him a couple years to get control of all of Russia.
Anybody who has sacrificed for what they thought Infowars was about, people who've been alienated from their families because they wouldn't shut the fuck up about Ron Paul or some dumb Bilderberg shit.
People who have died because of this or lost loved ones to like this.
They should be furious at Alex.
He's telling them that this doesn't matter.
The mentality Alex is expressing here is one that you can't really allow to exist because engaging with it ends up becoming a trap.
If your political enemies are actually enemy combatants, then politics is useless.
If we accept that framing, then we become incompatible with each other.
And I reject that.
I don't think that people who have different political views like in rural America, in deep red areas, should be invaded by the government in order to stop them from being racist even.
Well, I mean, it's the one battle after another script.
I mean, the main movie that Hollywood is promoting to win the actually best film for Oscars, even though, you know, by most real critics, it's not a very particularly cinematically effective film.
It's a particularly well-known director, nor was it popular at the box office itself, despite having some big-name actors like DiCaprio and others as part of the cast.
Sean Penn, you know, Benedicto del Toro, you name it.
But the core of the film is to celebrate Antifa-type violence targeting ICE facilities and ICE individuals.
These fucking clowns are so embarrassing, rattling off this bullshit when they clearly haven't seen the movie they're talking about.
One battle after another doesn't glorify Antifa-style violence against ICE facilities, but you might think that if you only saw the trailer and saw a bunch of right-wing dipshits complaining about the trailer on social media, the actual movie is fairly indicting of how that kind of violence is frequently carried out by people who are superficially interested in revolution, but what they're really motivated by is the money that they make from bank robberies or the excitement they get out of creating their own criminal branding.
The real revolutionary action in that movie is love and family.
Leonardo DiCaprio loving and caring for his daughter creates a better future, not the bonds that he made when he was younger.
Benicio Del Toro is able to create meaningful resistance not by committing acts of terrorism, but by creating networks that protect children and vulnerable people.
Also, is fucking Barnes saying that Paul Thomas Anderson is a no-name director?
The guy who did Boogie Knights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood?
But we know Hakeem Jeffries and all of them a year ago said, we're going to dox you, we're going to harass you, we're going to come after you.
I'm surprised they get a lot to get shot at and bricks thrown at when they're just serving court orders.
And I'm not all for paramilitary masks, but that's when you do it is you wear a mask when you're being hunted.
It's one thing if you wear a mask to be secret police, but if you wear a mask because you're following a court order and they're hunting you, I guess they're just supposed to go out and say, by the way, here's my home address.
That's what I was curious, your thoughts, because they're just finding in the polling data that it's resonating negatively, and the Democrats are getting their net plus out of the fact that, as you know, they have to be dressed the way they are to protect their own safety personally and so that they're not doxed, so that they're not harassed, so that all these things are happening anyway, but that it doesn't follow them home.
And so very understandable and acceptable concern on their side, but it's playing into the Democratic narrative, the Democratic narrative that they're going to re-script in all of this because you know they're going to, as you point out, they're going to retell this story.
This story is going to be nice, innocent, sweet middle America protester summarily executed by Trump's military force.
Now, this is part of why I'm concerned about the Venezuelan other things, is that certain things make that perception easier for the media to get away with.
No, to the left, if you go out and surround people and start ramming them and bashing their cars and throwing water bottles and rocks at them and screaming and all the rest of it, and then you got vehicles driving around.
Except when you play the types of games that someone like Alex does, someone like Barnes does, you do have to play those games because you don't have another choice.
The alternative is to like tell the audience the truth.
I will, as you can see right now, I will defend the government to all my InfoWars listeners, just to be clear.
If you are murdered by a nice person, because you might reasonably, having listened to Infowars for your entire life, decided that the government murdering people is wrong, and then they murder you, I will say they were right to do it.
Even though it's because of you listening to me that they did it.
And I think that there's something that goes through a lot of Alex's content that is this, I'm going to say the first part of the conditional statement, but I'm not going to say the second part.
Right.
Because your mind fills it in for you.
He never has to say the then part.
He only has to say the premise.
And your brain makes the conclusion for you.
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And then he doesn't have to take responsibility for it.
I mean, and they're going to keep building to this.
And that's where, I mean, the, I mean, we have to enforce the laws, and we can't, as you note, allow them to just hijack cities by threats of violence.
On the flip side, politically, you know, how Trump handles it in perception is going to matter too, because it's unfortunately the reality of it.
This is a narrative war as much as it is a digital war and an online war.
Once he learns more, depending on what the facts are, he's just saying, very sad they attack everybody.
Very sad, it's bedlam and insane.
So terrible they shot up all these ice facilities and shot up the vans and killed these agents over here and did all this and just show a reel of their violence for like five minutes and say this is and show MSNBC headlines.
We need blood.
We need to get in their faces till they kill one of us.
Then we have a pretext.
What's crazy is they admit the podesta plan that, and they admit in all these shows, this is what they want.
It's so crazy.
So I just think Trump points out they're the ones that wanted this.
These guys are very clearly struggling with having just watched this video live on air and needing to make it fit the narrative that they're required to sell.
On its face, this video is a murder.
You can't watch it and come away with the impression that it was probably cool and justified.
You need motivated reasoning to reach that conclusion.
The narrative game that Alex had chosen to play was totally fine until that video came out.
But now the story runs counter to what you would instinctually feel from watching that tape.
And Alex just played it live on the show.
You could hear it so clearly in Barnes.
He knows what his job demands of him, but he's viscerally uncomfortable with having to show a video and tell the audience that their eyes are lying to them.
The Infowars narrative had already been set, and then the video plays, and it's not as clear as Barnes thought, which is fucking uncomfortable.
But keep in mind, this is all just rhetorical narrative games, and Barnes knows that.
He and Alex both thought that they could take this one head on and try to sell the story that this was an unhinged Antifa protester who got killed because she was ramming her car into ICE vehicles.
But once that video was seen, they knew they couldn't do that and they needed to retreat to narrative.
Now it really doesn't matter what happened in this specific instance.
Trump needs to play videos of unrelated instances of ICE being attacked.
They don't want to argue about the specific details of the shooting and how it unfolded because they just watched the video and they're pretty sure it's going to be bad.
So now the shooting can really only be understood as part of a long line of events.
Sure, maybe the shooting was bad, but it happened because the left and Antifa forced ICE to act like this.
Maybe the shooting wasn't self-defense, but if you look at the big picture, it totally was.
This is the information war, and Barnes and Alex both fully understand their part in it.
In the moment when they've been forced to watch a woman be killed in the street and they then have to turn around and defend it, you can see how eager Alex is to do his job.
Barnes is mildly uncomfortable and he sounds kind of like, I don't want to do this.
But Alex is a fucking monster and he jumps in without looking both feet down.
Well, I mean, if there's any way to exile somebody or to shun them with as much visceral hatred as I can possibly give, those two people, after having seen that clip, get it.