Dan and Jordan dissect the chaotic, leaderless state of InfoWars following Alex Jones' absence, focusing on Owen Schroyer's hypocritical rebranding as a "policy wonk" after a decade of Trump propaganda. They critique Rex Jones and Tim Tompkins for passively attacking their father while benefiting from the toxic culture, noting how Schroyer mirrors right-wing figures like Nick Fuentes despite claiming to oppose them. The hosts condemn the use of anti-Semitic slurs and the "reaping and sowing" meme, arguing that this family's disingenuousness proves they are incapable of distinguishing truth from the very deception they claim to expose. Ultimately, the episode reveals that InfoWars remains a vessel for hate speech, where personal gain overrides any genuine commitment to truth or neutrality. [Automatically generated summary]
It's going to be a good week to spend together, which is interesting because last week she was out late every night, so we barely got to see each other.
This week, we're going to spend as much time as we can together, or at least as long as she can stand to be around me.
Like, for better or worse, I think you guys go on vacations to cool places that are nice, and you might go to like swim with the turtles or go on a zipline.
But the state of affairs on air has been particularly grim.
This past week, Alex has barely appeared on his own show, with Harrison Smith generally kicking off the broadcast, which is then hosted by a rotating cast of racists and weirdos.
You have a lot of familiar faces like Stuart Rhodes, Gavin McGuinness, Mike Adams, and the like.
But what's different about the present situation is that it doesn't feel like anyone in particular is the anchor.
In the world of independent stand-up, you generally run into two kinds of shows.
The first has a host who welcomes the crowd and gets things going and then returns in between acts to reset the audience and give things a sense of continuity.
The other type is a shotgun show where the performer on stage introduces the next performer and it just keeps rolling like that.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I've never been a part of or seen a shotgun style show that felt good.
You don't need a stern hand out of a host, but you really do need someone to bring a bit of order to the chaos or else the show kind of feels like it's out of control.
And that's what InfoWars feels like.
It's like a boat with no captain.
And Alex, I think he has appeared a couple times doing a little video that he sent in.
And there's something very telling about the fact that he's decided to stop impersonating his dad and doing a show based on one of his dad's catchphrases and start impersonating another media figure whose brand seems a little bit more viable right now.
Well, I mean, there's definitely probably something where I bet, and I'm just going to go out on a limb and say that his relationship with his father is probably not the healthiest one.
I'm just going to go reach for the stars on my guesses.
An easy answer to Owen's question is that it's definitely as bad as it's ever been and that he wasn't betrayed.
It's as bad as it's ever been, not because things are actually as bad as they've ever been.
Like other periods of history have been demonstrably worse, but none of them are happening right now.
Things are as bad as they've ever been because we don't know how this plays out, but we do know that things are bad and they're heading in a bad direction.
The past has already happened and we can see the effects of past bad times and do our best to learn from them.
But our present is uniquely dangerous because we don't know what's going to happen and we don't know what the consequences of today's actions are going to be.
And Owen wasn't betrayed except by himself.
No one who treated Trump realistically is at all surprised by what he's doing.
It might be a little more brazen than some people expected, but everything is in line with who he was from day one.
Owen was a fine sports broadcaster who dreamed of something bigger.
And in 2015, he saw the easiest shortcut to those dreams in the form of bullying people at protests.
It was so easy.
And he got a job at Infowars that paid him way more than he'd be getting at a local station doing sports, which realistically is probably what he'd end up doing.
He has some skills, so maybe he could have gotten on ESPN or some other big name in sports broadcasting, but it's also a competitive field.
In working for InfoWars and going along with everything he promoted for years, Owen made a deal with the devil.
He got to be way richer than he had any business being, and he got to have a career in what felt like media.
What was asked in return was that he promote the party line, which was Trump fanaticism.
The disappointment Owen feels with Trump now isn't real disappointment with Trump.
It's a disappointment that the fake version of Trump he made a career off selling doesn't exist.
It's a disappointment that the game is kind of over because it was a fun, easy game for them to play for the last decade.
That's something that I think is so critical and why these kind of people can't be trusted ever again.
They weren't just wrong to be optimistic about Trump.
If that were the case, then you could easily say, ah, man, we all get things wrong sometimes.
It's not a crime to have hope.
Come on, let's go, yeah.
But they weren't optimistic.
They lied.
They were optimistic that they'd get away with lying and that it wouldn't blow up in their faces.
But they straight up lied to their audience for years in order to make the audience feel optimistic about Trump.
Until there's some accounting of how they lied to sell Trump in the past, you can't possibly think that anything Owen is saying now isn't just another lie that's meant to sell what he thinks is his best shot at a new marketable brand.
I mean, it's just absurd on its face because for all of these people who are somehow like, ah, I feel betrayed.
Have I been?
If you go back in time to 2016 and you just say, like, let's make a deal, right?
I'll support Trump.
But if he ever violates the Constitution to the point where you have to say he violated the Constitution, then he's done.
He's out.
He's dead to you.
He's dead to all of us, right?
They would, of course, made that deal because no matter what, even if he had violated the Constitution, they would have been like, I can lie my way through it, right?
They would never have guessed that they would get to the point where they would say, that motherfucker's violating the Constitution.
And because they are here and because they never thought they would be here, they're way willing to go as far as, you know, like, is it as bad as it's ever been?
What are you fucking talking about?
That you're asking that question is the answer to that question.
And I don't know if you saw this, but Trump put out a video, or I guess it was after the Massey rally, and he's in Cincinnati, or the anti-Massey rally.
I mean, Trump is straight up doing North Korean-level propaganda now.
Owen's criticism of Trump is fine and he's not wrong.
It all just rings hollow because Trump was always doing that shit.
Owen was at January 6th.
He did the caravan of the Stop the Steel rallies.
He only owns a house now because he was willing to sell the dictator level of propaganda that Trump was putting out then.
It's great that he feels upset and he doesn't want to do that job anymore, but I'm not sure he realizes how making this criticism just kind of indicts his whole career.
He had no problem parroting Trump's absurd self-serving lies in the past.
So all of a sudden, being able to accurately assess that this is dictator levels of propaganda just tells you that he knew what he was selling in the past.
You can't, or you have to have, you have to have some sort of massive come to Jesus moment where you explain to everybody how you could be so fucking stupid not to realize that you were the fucking government propaganda to begin with.
So, I would ask MAGA this, because I don't take anything in politics personally.
I think feeling feeling a little heartbreak or betrayal is natural after everything we went through to get here.
But I don't take anything in politics personally.
So, getting betrayed by a politician, getting lied to by a politician, like, okay, whatever.
The sun comes up.
What is really, I think, worse is watching what MAGA has turned into.
And, you know, Rex, you were there with us at the grassroots level of this.
We've been in the streets together.
I was one of the first people in the media to come out in support of Trump when he came down the elevator.
And so it's like we've got to this point.
And now all of these people that are basically living off the movement that we created, it's like they're wearing our movement as like a skin suit, as like an avatar.
And all it is to them is a business model.
All it is to them is a grift.
All it is to them is like a popularity contest in high school where they've never sat at the cool kids' table.
And now they feel like, oh, we're running the cool kids' table.
And you're like, what are you doing here?
This was our movement.
You guys are just, you guys have just completely destroyed it.
That makes me want to strangle him, not least of which, because even if that was true, even if he didn't take things personally, what you believe is that I should put children in cages.
Your boss, the guy you worked for for a decade, cries on air about how he and Trump have a psychic mind-meld connection and can finish each other's sentences.
There are a couple of red lines, depending on the person, but they're all practical calculations.
Some people's red line is if they really need a rebrand because they got fired from a shitty job where they worked for a raving alcoholic who seems like he's dying.
They will be willing to ditch Trump when they're convinced that there's more money to be made on the other side of the shit talking economy.
Far more people will have a red line that is they will be willing to treat Trump as the piece of shit they know him to be once there's a viable alternative who they think will be racist and pro-business enough.
That group includes people like Alex, and it really does make sense if you think about it.
Making the jump from Ron Paul to Trump is a serious blow to your principles, but it's an upgrade in terms of power.
You went from your hero being a guy in Congress who most people were tired of to a president who controlled a cult of personality.
The option is there to make that jump again, but there's no upward jumps to be made.
Massey is probably the best choice for them to get behind, but that would be basically going back to Ron Paul.
If you never left Ron Paul, that's a smooth transition.
But because of the choices the extreme right has made in the past decade, that looks like them going from varsity to junior varsity.
I wish there was some sort of religion, some huge, like maybe one of the most popular ones ever that had something that was like, it's really like maybe that humility and being humbled is like the path to like becoming a better person or to improving things.
Like it would be so cool if there was like a big focus on humility in this popular religion.
And that's why people like Nick Fuenez are kind of turning into this accelerationist mindset or just burn it to the ground mindset because this happens every time.
Republican politics get unpopular.
Populism and nationalism takes over the body politic of the right, of the GOP.
It gives us election victories.
We get into power.
And then the establishment steals everything from us.
And then the establishment takes our movement, turns it into neocons, turns it into warmongers, the same crap we've been dealing with.
They just did it with Trump.
And so now we're sitting here and we're saying, not again.
Not again.
The entire right Republican GOP establishment has to be completely removed from the picture altogether.
Otherwise, we're going to win these victories.
And then when we actually get in power, nothing happens that we want to happen.
I have a slightly different explanation that I would like him to consider.
Right-wing politics are always unpopular.
They suck shit.
And they're disproportionately meant to hurt the vast majority of the population to benefit the rich.
That's what their ideology is based around.
That's all the John Birch society kind of Cold War post-shit was all about.
It's not that populism makes conservative ideas popular and then gets people elected who are then corrupted by neocons.
It's that populism is a lie and a manipulative strategy that's often used by people who want to uphold the existing system by appealing to those people who feel disaffected by it.
Trump is and always was a billionaire elite who wanted to use the government to enrich himself and his associates.
He just tricked Owen and all the other MAGA people into thinking that he was a populist in order to accrue that power.
I think what they've realized, like the establishment people in the GOP, Trump, whatever, his handlers, whatever, I think they've realized is that they can marry the crazy evangelical Christians and crazy Christian Zionists that truly do believe in the message, the mission, the lighting the signal fire to bring Jesus back in World War III, the apocalypse in the Middle East.
And they can unite the grifters, the people trying to make the money, the people in the game, people, you know, making that AdSense cash.
They can connect those groups together where you have a group that truly believes in it too much and then a group that doesn't believe in anything at all.
And bing, bang, boom, that's your new base.
And as long, I think as long as they can extract money out of people, they don't even care about the midterms.
Rex knows that his dad pretends that God talks to him and gives him special missions, which would qualify as true belief, or at least the portrayal of it.
I think that Rex is kind of right that the current right wing is a union between very serious ideologues and conmen, but it's silly to hear that coming from him.
No one would even know who he was, except for the fact that his dad presided over the ceremony where those two things got married.
If so, then, yeah, if it was addressed, if he was wrestling with that part of why anyone would ever listen to his show, then yeah, I guess maybe it's interesting.
Man, I just had the thought that you're like, for whatever legacy people ever have, one that would be truly perfect for you would be somebody listening to one of these dumb-dumb right-wing people's podcasts and have them at some point say, yeah, Dan probably stopped listening to this one by now.
I often talk about this a lot with Tim or just solo by myself.
What does the post-Trump era of politics look like in America?
Because for more than a decade, people have been obsessed with this guy, following this guy.
Love or hate him, no one's indifferent about Trump, right, to this very day.
But you look at someone like a Vance or someone like a Rubio that's associated with this toxic, evil betrayal administration, and they're supposed to run in a primary and everyone's be like, I'm behind Rubio.
So right now, Owen can say this, and there's no real stakes.
He can tell Trump's circling the drain and he's trying to save himself.
In 2026, it's very easy for him to say that he won't vote for someone in the administration.
But as 2028 gets closer, we'll see if he doesn't end up terrified of the Democratic candidate and start playing Lesser of Two Evils games.
Also, I can't help but think that Rex is kind of doing an impression of his dad.
He knows that Alex is trying to soft-launch supporting Vance, so it feels like he's making fun of the old man there doing that voice.
And also, it can't help but feel like there's a desperation of a fantasy that someone will come along and save them like Trump did with the, you know, taking out Jeb Bush.
I mean, listen, I guess I am the only person in this world who's fucking crazy.
But if I'm doing math, right, I'm saying this is a person who already was fine with overthrowing the country and maybe pulled it off and instead of going to jail became president again, right?
And now that he's president again, he has committed a bunch of actual literal fucking crimes, super crimes, crimes that crimers are like, that's too crimy.
If I have committed super crimes that people might want to hold me accountable for, and I've already been fine overthrowing a country's government, I doubt I'm going to be interested in a Democratic election where I might lose.
I don't think that, you know, we're necessarily destined or that's inevitable, like the path the church are going to go down.
But yeah, you know, just based on the psychology of the individual, as Jeeves would say, it's tough to imagine bequeathing power knowing you're probably going to go to jail for the rest of your life.
I can't just say wrong is wrong anymore and that, you know, when the Democrats, the Democrats were doing this.
And if you were to criticize the vaccine, they would call you a commie, you know, Republican and conservative, you know, all these different names that they had.
And I'm just, I'm feeling disingenuous at this point.
I mean, it is wild that I accepted that he misspoke because the only reason I would accept that is that it makes too much sense to say the appropriate word in that situation.
Because there's no, the only way to even engage with this is if these people first take a picture of them in 2016 and go like, this is me calling me a Libtard in 2026.
Like, that's what has to, you have to connect those two.
Otherwise, you can go fuck yourself.
Otherwise, you're just another liar who's going to lie again.
But the thing that's tough is that, like, as feeling people, like, obviously you have an empathetic response to somebody saying, like, hey, I can't do this without the political online space turning against me.
And, like, yeah, it sucks to deal with that.
I just, yeah, it's, it's, instead of the reaction that you have to someone just calling the names, which is, fuck you.
So honestly, I don't believe that Owen is capable of knowing what is and is not propaganda.
And if he is, that's actually worse for him.
If he has the instincts to know when something's a fake narrative that's being pushed for propaganda purposes, then he worked at Infowars and participated in that knowingly and willingly for like a decade.
I think that what Owen is calling his instinct about propaganda is actually an instinct for marketing.
His whole career at Infowars was based on contrarianism, like marketing yourself as the opposition to the power structure.
Obama was in office and they were against that.
Trump got into office and they pretended that Obama was still in power.
Biden got in and they were against that and pretended that Trump secretly won.
Now Trump is back in office and there's really no way to sell the audience that he isn't in absolute power.
He's appointed a third of the Supreme Court and the GOP controls all of Congress.
He uses the Department of Justice to protect himself and target enemies.
There's no choice for someone who needs to be a contrarian except to be against Trump now.
And Owen understands that.
He likes to pretend that he's got a gift for calling out propaganda, but it's really just that he's good at whining and presenting himself as the one who's against the power as opposed to having an actual stance.
Also, Rex is really shitting on his dad's friends there.
God, I just, I wish these people weren't allowed to use words.
Like, I under, because if they were allowed to express what they truly mean, which is like grunting noises at each other and then like a sad sound, like grunt, grunt, grunt.
Like, you know, I've been betrayed by my dad.
Like, that's what I feel like they're actually saying.
And, you know, it makes you wonder if like he's talking to Owen and they're like, Nick Sortor is doing Trump Kim Jong-un style North Korean propaganda.
We got a big problem with that on the show because they've done so many great things for us, like get us into this war and whatnot.
That's a thing that I want to ask you about.
They tell us, you just listed this horrible situation that we're in and the arrogance, the hubris of thinking that we can quickly get out of it somehow, even if we declare victory and walk away.
Because the foreign policy is so macabre and so insane and so grotesque that we look at it and like you said, like, hey, I'm just taking a break from doing the show today to recalibrate because it's all too much.
The thing about a term like that, a slang term like that, is that in order for it to arrive, in order for it to congeal from the ether of this bullshit, right?
It probably takes hundreds of hundreds of hundreds of conversations where you're being anti-Semitic till eventually you get something that's slightly cleverer, and that's what you wind up with.
It's not that you didn't just like, oh, hey, I was just thinking about words and combining them together the other day, and I came up with this really funny one.
Alex could have avoided this and still been his son's hero instead of someone his son is clearly making fun of on his show while idolizing the baby Nazi that Alex really shouldn't have associated with to begin with.
I'm going to go watch 50 episodes of his dumbass talk to this other friend of his who doesn't seem that great.
I don't know.
I think that there was a time when I definitely would have shied away from an episode like this because there's clearly familial and psychosocial dynamics that are played out on you.
And they're not talking about it, but it's there.
It's haunting this.
And I think it's inappropriate, but now I'm at the point where I think it's kind of funny.
We've had plenty of conversations, very kind ones with the wonks who have been like, you guys being open and talking honestly about your mental struggles and illnesses and all of that stuff has been inspiring and has helped us to do the same for ourselves, right?
I can't imagine doing the opposite and having people be like, man, you guys being in denial about very obvious things has allowed me to divorce my wife.
Well, me divorce her is a strong way of describing her leaving me with the kids.