Jordan Holmes and Dan Friesen dissect Alex Jones’ March 15, 2006 episode, where he falsely claims Slobodan Milosevic’s death was a globalist murder—ignoring drug traces and hypertension—while twisting Rupert Murdoch’s speech on MySpace into a supposed surrender to "truth-telling" bloggers. They expose Jones’ exploitative interview with Iraqi pharmacist Dr. Rashad Zaydan, who testified about war victims, as he hijacked her advocacy for narcissistic conspiracy rants, comparing American struggles to Iraq’s horrors. Code Pink founder Gail Murphy condemns his platforming of their message, calling it a "psychopathic" manipulation, while Jones pivots to framing Iraq as a "pretext" against U.S. children—revealing his disregard for real suffering in favor of sensationalism. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, every few years, I think it's three for whatever reason, a bunch of countries play baseball in a big tournament called the World Baseball Classic.
And it's funny because there are some countries who are really, really good at baseball.
And then there's like Great Britain who is like, we've never even really seen a baseball before.
I'm interested in rights and people being allowed and enabled to live the lives that they want to live.
I'm interested in how we can organize society better to maximize that.
And I'm interested in figures in the media space whose only real function is to lie to everyone to make it impossible for us to improve anything.
I'm interested in those things.
And I think for a while, I've had a belief that politics was the most disciplined and effective way to do the work of organizing society in a way that maximizes rights and people's freedoms to make choices themselves.
But watching that fucking State of the Union, I don't know if that feels accurate anymore.
Maybe it was never a useful avenue for that pursuit, or maybe things have gotten worse in the past 15 years.
I'm not sure, and I don't care.
But I know that watching that State of the Union made me certain that our structure of government does not have an effective answer for what Trump is doing.
Nasty, malevolent creeps have essentially seized the power of our government and are clearly indicating to anyone who's willing to listen that they don't care about checks on their power.
Like, this guy should have gone down in history as the single worst president who lied us into a war, who's a fucking monster, a serial killer, a murderer, a horrible fucking person.
Now everybody's going to be like, he wasn't that bad.
After watching it, I was like, well, we should probably talk about Alex's response to that, but I'm not quite ready to after having taken it in and sat with it.
Meanwhile, they've gotten rid of Slobod Milajevic because he was demanding a real trial and had been exposing how al-Qaeda works for the U.S. government and had attacked his country.
So he was unceremoniously murdered and the poison was even found in his bloodstream.
And the media admits it and claims he did it himself.
So this is a great example of Alex reporting pieces of disconnected information in order to promote a larger false narrative.
As we've discussed, Slobodan Milosevic's blood sample from two months prior to his death did have traces of a drug in it that could make his hypertension medications less effective.
In theory, if he died from a heart attack when this drug was in his system, you could speculate that the drug played a role in making that heart attack more likely.
Alex needs to present the image that Slobo was murdered for standing up to the globalists, so the conclusion comes before the evidence.
And all information needs to conform to propping up the story that will be told.
To make the charade work, Alex just pretends that the drug was found in Slobo's system when he died, not months prior.
He pretends that this was definitely the cause of death and not a possible non-sequitur because he's a lazy liar.
Alex relies on his audience not paying attention or knowing much about the stories he rambles about because if they focused and did their own research as he so often begs them to do, they would start to notice that he does this all the time.
Little pieces of accurate information are distorted and misused to make unfounded points and they become load-bearing pieces of propping up these outlandish theories.
And I think if you pay attention, you notice that over and over and over again.
As for that part about Saddam Hussein's trial, they didn't shut off his mic after he said that the U.S. is involved in bombings.
He was ranting about still being the president of Iraq and trying to rally the Iraqi people to unite against the American invaders.
So the Iraqi judge transferred the hearing into a private chamber where the press wasn't allowed in.
This was a common occurrence during Saddam's trial.
He was pretty regularly yelling at judges, giving long, angry speeches, and having his mic cut off.
When people are super guilty, they usually recognize that their only option at trial is to try to derail the proceedings and pretend that they're putting the system on trial, much like Alex did himself in the Sandy Hook case.
I mean, it is hard not to, like, okay, in this era of AJ's career, if you're an InfoWarrior, it makes more sense, I guess, period, to be an Info Warrior, but maybe not.
But in terms of like Slobodan Milosevic, evil guy should be, is connected to a bunch of evil other guys, some of whom are what you would consider in the regular world, right, of non-super evil kill guys.
So he should kind of know something about somebody who maybe should want to eliminate him.
Internet means end for media barons, says Rupert Murdoch, magnet hail, second great age of discovery.
Power moving from the old elite to the bloggers.
Rupert Murdoch last night sounded the death knell for the era of the media baron, comparing today's internet pioneers with explorers such as Christopher Columbus and John Cabot and hailing the arrival of a second great age of discovery.
I'm going to get into that.
And of course, we hailed this several years ago with articles we wrote.
I mean, when I can start a website in a few months, have it be bigger than, say, the Austin American Statesman, 100 and something-year-old newspapers website, when I can have websites that now rival the size of the Dallas Morning News, and I don't have near the biggest freedom websites, truth-telling websites, whatever you want to call them.
There are just hundreds and hundreds of gigantic ones bigger than most major newspapers.
And these illusional papers are all arrogant and they're aggressive, and they've got all these simpering writers who are on power trips, and they're a joke.
They're a joke.
I mean, an email we post gets conservatively five, ten times the readership of, say, a letter to the editor in the Dallas Morning News or a hundred times some pathetic letter to the editor in that joke rag, the Austin Chronicle, that nothing.
You know, people want reality.
They want to hear the truth.
They already know the truth in their guts.
It's terrorists run this government.
But let me tell you something.
We're not out of the woods yet.
And they're playing possum right now.
And all I'm going to break down internet too, what they're really planning.
And don't worry, they're not about to give up their power without a fight.
And if A-bombs need to be involved, they will be.
Oh, yes.
So we'll go over this a little bit, but we are kicking their teeth in.
So this is a great encapsulation of Alex's sense of what he's doing.
He's part of the truth-telling media, but that media is also super popular because it's telling you what you know in your gut.
The truth of what feels right, you know, what you think must be right, is far more true than someone reporting about an event that's actually happening.
They're trying to lie to you with facts and statistics, whereas Alex is telling you the truth through vibes.
The headline that Alex bases this little riff on is actually, it's a little confusing, but it was just Rupert Murdoch giving a speech at the annual livery lecture to the worshipful company of stationers and newspaper makers in London, mostly about how the internet was transforming media from a business that created a thing for consumers to a thing that catered to consumers' demands.
This is mostly discussed in terms of the pivot from newspapers that were primarily print to news outlets that focused a lot on online articles and apps.
It comes off as a reassuring speech meant to argue that high-quality content will always win the day and that the existing media companies should rise to the challenge that the internet presents.
With hindsight, I read this speech as a deludedly optimistic view.
The dynamic that Murdoch is talking about, where the power and influence in the media is held not by the reporters or editors, but by the whims of the consumer, is basically what we're living in now.
Media companies, both old and new, have made themselves slaves to the clicks and artificial traffic that social media appears to provide.
And in the process, they've allowed a small number of lunatic consumers to have outsized influence on what the rest of us has to live with as our prevailing culture.
I mean, you know, it's tough not to say that when the guy who buys the internet does something with it that's the opposite of what he was saying when he was talking about the internet, I think he kind of knew what was up.
You know, you wonder if it is just like, this is the end of profit chasing and we will have to, as a people, like decide not to chase the maximum profits.
Like we will have to decide to do that because it seems like this is a function of the system.
It's a weird word to just stumble across in a news story that you're reading, but Alex pretends to be like an expert on the British economic history that the globalists grew out of.
They've been caught taking billions in Pentagon and government money to put billions to put out lies, not liberal lies, not conservative lies, world government empire lies.
And they tried to give us fake left-right paradigms and get us, oh, Russia's real, or, oh, Al Franklin's real, or these Democrats will save us.
And they try to give you these two false choices owned by the same companies.
And it just hasn't worked.
People are very discerning.
The larger and larger minority, and it will become a majority soon, has developed taste buds, has developed a palate, has developed a nose, has developed an ear, has developed a touch, has developed a sense.
I don't even have to defend myself when big major publications attack me or when low-level Co-endelpro operators on the web attack me, because people know, they recognize it, they see it, you instinctively know.
Now it's very exciting.
And so they're trying to run around and, and they're trying to put a good face on it, they're trying to uh claim that they've had some victory through their defeat.
I mean, FOX has, you know, had quote the biggest ratings of cable tv.
A few million people at three million tops on their biggest show.
I mean old line talk radio makes that look puny.
Their media is all fractured.
They're Trying to supply all the different niches, all the different niches that are out there, and they can't do that.
They can't supply thousands of different viewpoints and niches.
And they have to constantly try to lie and cover up their whole lives.
And no matter how good-looking the info babes are, or no matter how they look at you with sexual desire for the television tube, I mean, how dumb are you, folks?
Some of you out there, you know, you like Fox News because the info babe sits there, Lori Dew, smiling at you and winking at you, you know, as if she's a real woman there five feet from you who really desires you.
Quote: The internet was crucial to that astonishing development, and I'm sure that the web will continue its rapid development as the prime media channel for information, entertainment, business, and social contact.
One of the reasons I say that is the success of a company we bought last year called MySpace.com.
This is a networking site in which millions of people, aged mainly between 16 and 34, talk online to each other about music, film, dating, travel, whatever interests them.
They share pictures, videos, and blogs, forming virtual communities.
Since launch last just two years ago, the site has acquired 60 million registered users, 35 million of whom are regular users.
This is a generation now popularly referred to as the MySpace generation, talking to itself in a world without frontiers.
It's just one example of how the media, with its ability to reach millions with information, entertainment, and education, can use the achievements of technology to create better and more interesting lives for a great many people.
The speech is really Murdoch discussing a new ownership model of the media in the internet age, where the Barons still own these hubs like MySpace, and it plays into a larger existing paradigm.
He says, Caxton's printing press marked a revolution that is with us 500 years later.
But the history of that revolution is not one in which the new wipes out the old.
Radio didn't destroy newspapers, television didn't destroy radio, and neither eliminated the printing of books.
And the headline might make you think that it's Murdoch saying that there's a new media that's going to replace media barons.
But it's really just about him trying to encourage the existing structure to embrace things like MySpace, own them, and use them as part of the larger model.
It's fascinating to me that Alex could be reading this article, and he's covering it not like that.
I'm not saying there isn't a lot of cool stuff on there and you guys don't have nice web pages and gee, it's a lot of fun to be part of this big community.
The point is they'll erase your blog if they don't like it.
The point is you don't own all the stuff you've put up there.
The point is, is that it's like Internet 2.
It has automatic censoring systems that go in and erase keywords.
The point is, is that they're trying to contain it.
And sure, it's big and it's fun, but it leads into stagnation and destruction.
I mean, I've been wrestling with the fact that people keep asking me to get a MySpace blog.
And sure, we can do that, but just so I can send Rupert Murdoch money and just so Rupert Murdoch can take it away from me anytime he wants, we'll be right back.
So in 2006, Alex doesn't want to get on MySpace because he understands that him having a page there would be making Rupert Murdoch money and he doesn't want to have to be bound by the terms of service of the website.
If Murdoch took down his blog, that wasn't an attack on free speech that the president needs to address.
That was just Alex not behaving in a way that was consistent with how the owner of the site required customers to act.
I have zero problem with giving up on the I would be making Murdoch money angle because even if we pretend that mattered, Alex would be perfectly fine with his Twitter account making Elon money now.
But him understanding that having your blog posted on a website isn't guaranteed by the First Amendment represents a very serious shift.
And I think I understand generally what's going on.
In 2006, Alex was still pretty heavily a radio guy.
He's never been on as many stations as he claims, but he was more widely syndicated at this point.
So he didn't have to rely on social media and desperate attention jacking to get an audience.
He had a job, and adding a blog would be a nice way to reach people and get the information out, but it wouldn't make or break his gold and water filter revenues.
Somewhere along the line, radio became a much less lucrative market to be in, and corporate consolidation started to limit the number of stations he could even be considered for.
So Alex over-relied on the internet.
That had some upsides, like how he created PrisonPlanet.tv, which was making live internet broadcasts a bit ahead of the curve, but it also had major downsides, like how clearly addicted he is to using social media to promote his bullshit.
He does not actually believe that the First Amendment guarantees you a right to have a Twitter account and say whatever you want on it.
That's just the position he's adopted.
So he doesn't have to admit that he's just personally and professionally desperate to not be kicked off again.
If all of the cancel culture bullshit we've dealt with in the past years, if all that came from a sincere place, then Alex wouldn't be so dismissive of the idea that Rupert Murdoch can just take down blogs that he doesn't like on MySpace.
That would be a violation of the Constitution, not just a choice that makes Alex not want to be on MySpace.
Yeah, man, that is, it's so tough to, it's so tough because in 2006, you know, you see like Murdoch is buying MySpace, but it doesn't have to be, it doesn't, that's not the whole internet, man.
Like, it didn't have to be like that.
It didn't have to be like what it became.
And it's, it feels like that's the echo of every new media.
What they're describing is the other side of it.
Every echo is these people made this space where they can't get us anymore.
You know, this free open space.
Like when podcasting started, it's this free open space where we're allowed to do everything.
And then slowly those rich fucks own it all.
They just, but if we had really buckled down, circled the wagons and been like, no, no, maybe we could have pulled it out.
So the argument Alex is trying to make can be diagrammed like this: Premise one: if I get more job applicants through using Craigslist than through the newspaper, then the media is a hoax.
The first premise in his argument is fundamentally flawed.
So although this argument can be valid, it can never be sound.
It's not possible for the first premise to be true because the number of job applicants you get from a certain source has no inherent connection to whether or not the media is a hoax.
When you hear an argument like this, it's a good idea to search for unspoken or implied premises.
Sometimes the person making the argument is trying to hide something about what they're arguing, but sometimes they're just lazy and bad at thinking, so they come up with dumb shit like this.
I highlighted this example because there's at least one very obvious hidden premise that Alex isn't saying that he needs for this argument to make sense.
He needs to have a premise included that illustrates how getting more job applicants makes something a hoax.
Ideally, a premise that defines what it even means for something to be a hoax.
Once you start to tease that question out, it begins to look like the hoax is that the media pretends more people are reading the newspaper, whereas more people actually respond to Craigslist ads.
So I think that when you're analyzing some of these arguments, it's important to fill in some of the blanks that are intentionally being left out because they oftentimes help you realize how kind of stupid this is.
I mean, it's generous to even go along with them to the point where you can parse that the hoax is the media trying to claim a larger readership.
Because when you just say the media is a hoax, that is, I mean, a blanket statement of like, you just can't trust anything they say simply because of job applicants.
And people all stoop and fetch and get so excited.
People send me stuff.
Oh, you were in the Washington Post, Alex.
Oh, you were in the New York Times.
Oh, you were in Vanity Fair.
Oh, don't you feel big?
And I'm like, no, I don't feel big.
Nobody reads that.
My website gets plugged in Vanity Fair three times.
And I get a few emails, and that's about it.
But I go on some little local Christian radio talk show in Florida or Alabama or Tennessee, and we get 50 video orders and tens of thousands of visitors to the website.
Because let me tell you something.
Mainstream media, people don't trust you, and they don't like you.
And I don't think you realize just how much we don't like you and just how much we don't trust you.
The fact that Alex's store gets more sales from him being on a Christian shortwave show than him being in Vanity Fair, that doesn't illustrate that the public hates outlets like Vanity Fair.
It tends to suggest that people who read things like Vanity Fair aren't interested in what Alex is selling, whereas Christian shortwave audiences are.
So if he goes on a Christian shortwave show and he gets 10 sales, but only gets two after being featured in Vanity Fair, the only explanation you can come up with is that Christian shortwave stations have five times the audience of Vanity Fair.
In reality, he might be getting a 50% conversion rate on the total 20 listeners on that Christian shortwave station, whereas Vanity Fair has a circulation of 1.2 million copies per issue back in 2006.
So his two sales would be about one thousandth of a percent conversion.
That is the question because it seems far too obvious to a guy who is really obsessed with internet traffic at this time, especially, to not understand the demographic difference of the audience being so important towards actually converting into sales.
So for this monologue to make sense, he would have to suddenly have forgotten all sales information that he has ever known, the most important thing to him in order to go on this rant.
Yeah.
Or he's lying about it and it seems easier than making sense.
Should we have one of my webmasters go build a site, get thousands of friends and members and promote it, and then just have them just take it?
Should I go sign a contract with Murdoch saying, sure.
I mean, you understand, folks, this is internet too, where you have, in the future, you'll have to go under them, have to sign a contract with them to be on the web, and then they'll shut you down.
We're setting out to prove that they are censors and they're going to just, like, you have to then keep upping the ante of disgusting shit to try to get yourself kicked off.
I mean, I think they're just going to try to get us so deep into a war with Iran in the future, or they're going to attack Iran and hope that Iran strikes back.
And then, oh, everybody will be shocked if they fight back.
And then we're going to be off for the races.
And I think they'll force us into a full war mobilization and bring in the draft and everything else.
Yeah, when I was listening to that, when Alex is like, you use the Hitler comparison, and Paul Craig Roberts said, well, I was like, that's the scariest well.
I want to tell you that I really appreciate the way that you handled all these issues non-ideologically, and also that you don't bait ethnic groups and that you don't bait religions.
A lot of people like to, you know, they stick their finger in it and they think because they got a feeling that that electricity going into them is good.
And they think because they're getting attention that it's good.
You know, like, maybe, maybe the question of awareness is actually the question that we should really be dealing with, but not in a way of like, is he aware of what does this mean or anything?
Like, maybe we actually have to get to the fundaments of what the concept of awareness is.
Because maybe he just does not have it.
You know, like, maybe, you know, like whenever you see a fucking fish go to where it was born, right?
You don't know why that happens.
Does the fish have an awareness of why it happens, but the fish does it.
We have spent nine years of our lives, a thousand episodes plus of like, look who's talking now, putting dialogue into a dog's head, of like trying to figure out why Alex is doing any of the shit he's doing.
I don't want to play a ton of her interview because from everything I can tell, what she is there to advocate for is just bringing attention to the victims of the Iraq war.
Tell us how you came to the United States, Dr. Zaydan.
unidentified
Global Peace for saying no to war, they invited us to sharing their activities, and we came here just to tell the American people what is happening really in Iraq.
We just want to tell them the truth, which they don't hear it from the media.
We have some pictures, we have some films about what's happening, and we hope we can reach every American people in order they know the truth because we believe that America is the center for truth and freedom, but the picture now is different.
After three years, we see everything is different.
There's no way that anybody deserves it, but she especially does not deserve it.
And then my next thought was, I don't know if you remember this, but a while back, probably a good while back now that we're old, there was a football coach who had this huge meltdown.
And at the end of it, he's screaming like, I'm a man.
I'm 40.
Because these media people were talking shit about kids.
You know, like they had forgotten that those were kids and they shouldn't be talking like that.
And he was expressing that it's like, no, come at me.
Can we, I like to go back to you, Dr. Zaydam, but can I speak to the founder of Code Pink, which is a women's peace activist group, Gail Murphy, here for a few minutes?
Can you break down some of the things you guys are doing and where you're going to be and what some of this horrific testimony these women have been giving is like?
unidentified
Well, it's been very emotional.
The women came more or less around the 5th of March and started in New York where we had a large public event.
And there's something so interesting about this dynamic, which is like, I don't begrudge Code Pink or this woman's advocacy for getting the voices out of people who are victims in Iraq.
I also don't think there's any way to deny that they're being used and that Alex needs these types of people at this stage in his career or else he looks like the Nazi that he is.
It is, it is to take another phrase from this time, Alex was an unknown unknown.
You know, like there was no way for these people to know fully the malicious level of what Alex was, because really, nobody had done this level of maliciousness before, in a way, you know?
Like, what media outlet could you have thought of in 2006 that would be actively like, oh, I'm going to launder my Nazism through pretending that I am a fair and balanced above-the-board show, you know?
Yeah, I mean, whatever ideological differences that you may have with somebody doing that, you know, like what you are, what you should be, what you should be forced to acknowledge is that they're doing the work, you know, like whether or not you agree that it's good work or bad work, or that in the long run, it's health or any number of things, right?
Alex should be saying, you're doing the work, and I'm talking on the radio.
So we're going to start from a position of I am beneath your level of fucking give a shit, right?
So to not come with a humbleness, to not come directly towards like, hey, man, you're amazing or disrespectful.
You know, and it just reinforces what we've been saying that, and it's, it's, I, I, you know, I don't know if it still means anything, but the so many times it's like, don't go on these shows.
Don't have these debates.
Don't have them on your show.
Don't legitimize any of that shit because even this person is going to be used.
Even this person, of course, you're going to be used.