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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman take a DEEP dive into the career of Alex Jones, how he started in local access TV, grew into a social media titan, and how his latest endeavor might be the beginning of the end for our society.
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Hey everybody, welcome to the weekender edition of the Milk Break Podcast.
I'm Jerry D. H. Saxton.
I'm here with Nick Hausman.
Nick, how we doing, man?
I think I'm fine.
I think I've licked the cough and I can hear out of my ears again.
So I'm, you know, thank God for antibiotics.
What's wonderful about that is through the magic of podcasting, particularly leftist podcasting, I now have something.
Of course.
So we appreciate you listening and the good vibes that you are sending, which we'll get into more of that here in just a second.
There is so much going on in the world right now.
When we come back next week for our regular episode, we're going to be tackling the apparent demise of Roe v. Wade, which we're all just waiting around for right now.
So we're going to get more into depth next week on that.
In the meantime, we have a little bit of a special episode for you.
We wanted to get in depth on a really, a really special guy.
really important figure in modern history and that person is Alex Jones and we want to give you not just the history in the background of Jones but we want to explain the kind of role that people like this have played so we can learn from it we can understand what conspiracy theories do and what they don't do and why they're effective and also really really special folks Alex Jones
Is on to a new thing, which is, I think, really important and disturbing and dangerous.
And we'll get to that in just a little bit.
So if you're not a subscriber already, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
But before we get into the history... Nick, what is your experience with Alex Jones?
What's your... How has he been in your universe?
Well, we are fellow YouTubers together, so we are somehow brothers.
Like that!
Close.
Mother-mother.
So, you know, you gotta respect the hustle, I suppose, to some degree.
The guy who built a YouTube channel out of nothing.
But yeah, I mean, I don't know.
The thing that comes to mind first is him like on the street prowling around looking for people to troll with the camera crew following him, which is actually probably, you know, not the kind of content he normally does.
But there is one in particular where, you know, some guy is like, hey, you call them an asshole and he comes running over at him in this very strange movement pattern he has where he waddle runs to people.
And just looking, you know, to have some sort of argument.
That's basically what he does.
He's not a serious person at all.
He's a big, burly fella.
I'm glad you brought up the way that he moves.
He looks like a side character that helps Bluto on Popeye.
Yeah, that's good.
He looks like one of Bluto's, like, fellow ne'er-do-wells.
Down at the dock.
He would be the guy, so as the guy is sitting at the table, reaching up while they're throwing things back and forth, and he reaches up for the ketchup bottle, he's throwing the ketchup bottle, right?
He's one of those guys.
Is it Wimpy?
Wimpy is catching the ball, right?
Well, Wimpy is just in it for the free hamburgers.
Which, you know what?
Now that we're talking about it, Alex Jones is probably in it for the free hamburgers as well.
Well, Wimpy, that would be socialism, I guess, right?
That's what he represents.
Oh man, Alex would hate that we're having this conversation.
And again, I want to go ahead and tell people, this is going to be a retrospective talking about who he is, introducing him.
For me, I came across him years and years ago, and I was fascinated by him because I'm fascinated by conspiracy theorists, the stories that they tell, the lies that they weave.
And as things have moved forward, Alex Jones has become, unfortunately, one of the more influential people in modern American history.
That's not a good thing.
That's an absolutely terrible thing.
But I think it's really telling about where we are and where we're going.
But Alex Jones gave me incredible insight into the paranoid right-wing mind and also how it works within the right-wing ecosystem.
So we want to go into this a little bit.
And in order to do that, we have to go down to Austin, Texas, which of course is known as this sort of free spirited community.
Most people think of it as leftist, but I have to tell you, it has its fair share of paranoia.
Alex Jones has created an empire down in Austin, Texas.
Oh my goodness.
Originally, he was he was the kind of guy that you know, you'd come home late at night Maybe you'd be in the cups a little bit you'd turn on the TV.
You'd be flipping through you'd watch Who was the guy with the food dehydrator?
Oh My goodness.
Do you remember that?
I don't think I watched the same TV you did was it Ron Co.
Oh, I Oh, well, Ron Popeil, yeah.
He just died, actually.
That's sad.
My grandmother bought the dehydrator from Ron Popeil and I think used it once to make the worst beef jerky you have ever eaten in your entire life.
I think, actually not beef jerky, it was venison.
It was venison jerky.
But you'd be flipping through the TVs, thinking about going to sleep, Maybe the room's spinning a little bit.
And then you come across Austin, Texas, public access television.
And here is a young maniac, probably 23 years old, looking like he's going on 45, 48 years old, talking about conspiracy theories, talking about God knows what.
But in a way, kind of made for compelling TV.
It became sort of a thing where people in the area would see that this maniac was ranting and raving about all of this stuff, and sort of became a cult figure in the area.
Which, you know, if you think about it in the 1990s, those types of things happened, right?
You just had kooks, and you didn't think that they were going to, I don't know, help carry out the January 6th insurrection and coup attempt.
Well, that has to be at that time.
By the way, I also had a local access TV show in college.
Shut up.
Yeah, we had a comedy, a sketch comedy show, me and my friend Glenn.
If anybody in the world is listening who has tapes of Nick on public access TV, Please.
We have them.
I have them on VHST, I think, maybe, backed up.
Maybe I can convert them.
Actually, it's pretty funny.
Okay, it's Tom Green.
Remember Tom Green?
Oh, I absolutely remember.
There's probably a Tom Green-Alex Jones connection here, too, because Alex Jones had to have been more of a curiosity and entertainment value on a local access TV show in Texas, I would think, more than maybe, like, devout people following him, like a cult figure.
So, but that's how everything starts, right?
That's how... Jesus started as an... No, never mind.
Hey, do not give away the ending of this episode.
Okay, great.
I will not.
But certainly, entertainment is a great way to get in on the ground floor of people's minds.
Oh, and social media.
I mean, absolutely.
He was primed and ready for this thing to take over.
Sounds right in line with what we used to see, certainly back in the '90s with all that kind of stuff.
And by the way, Taylor made for the invention of the internet.
Oh, and social media.
I mean, absolutely.
Like, he was primed and ready for this thing to take over.
And if you watch the old clips of Jones doing his shtick, it's very much performance artist-y, right?
Like, he knows what he's doing, like, we all know at this point... And that whole thing is, like, this big put-on character that he has.
His shows, like, if you used to watch Public Access at all, those of us who are of age, you know, most of it's just somebody sitting very stiffly in front of a camera.
Jones would would like have props he would destroy things I mean he was very and and I think it's interesting you brought up Tom Green because Tom Green of course became a Phenomenon because of his public access shows I believe in Canada, right?
Yeah, and and with these big giant theatrics Alex Jones came came way before Tom Green And you have to imagine that there is some sort of a performance lineage from the people who would get on these platforms and build audiences simply from being outrageous, which I think is where Alex Jones sort of honed his shtick.
I think that he is sort of a product of a bygone era that has now been transported into this weird, bizarre, paranoid time.
Sure, and there's actually like a coolness factor to being into something that's so out there, right?
And so, you know, hey, only I can watch Local Access in this area, whatever.
Like, you know, it kind of becomes a thing where, unfortunately, because again, I don't want to make it seem like he was instantly on this earth and was like this prophet that people were like, you know, that he's filling a hole they needed.
The problem is he's doing that now, right?
Like the people that follow him now, Have been looking for this, right?
They're looking for some direction, looking for someone to give them meaning, and this is the guy, right?
But, you know, they all have to start somewhere.
And, you know, it's fascinating to see that.
I would love to actually see some of these Local Access episodes.
I wonder if they're available anywhere.
Some of them are, but, you know, we've got some fun clips coming up, by the way.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely disturbing, not at all fun.
But you know what's weird about it is one of the things that that Jones rages about constantly, and I think our listeners know this, is that in the last few years, he was booted off of social media.
He was taken off Twitter.
He was taken off Facebook.
He was taken off YouTube.
He was basically relegated over here.
And before that happened, he had billions of views.
Like literally, I mean billions with a B. Now it's really hard and we're going to talk a little bit about what Jones actually says that makes sense, which is how conspiracy theories stick and are effective.
And in a way he talks a lot about how it's dangerous for these corporations to have the power to alter reality to their own whims.
It's hard to find Clips of Jones other than ones discrediting him which is problematic for researchers like myself Right like I'm working on this current book and all I wanted to do was watch Jones's broadcast on September 11th 2001 and eventually I found it but I have to tell you Nick it took a Lot of searching to find it which is problematic again Not just for the public record
But for people who are trying to research this stuff and actually write about it and scrutinize it well Was it like on a torrent site?
Like how did you end up finding it?
You know the funny thing about it is when you look at like a place like YouTube And you know this I mean Nick Nick makes a gazillion dollars off of YouTube.
I mean, I'm not telling him anything He doesn't know but on YouTube.
There's sort of what I would call sort of like a three-step process So you start out by searching something and then the algorithm leads you Elsewhere, you know what?
I mean?
Yeah, and it sort of becomes it becomes hard to find materials to find Jones material.
And there's all kinds of other things.
I mean, there's William Cooper, who was an inspiration for Alex Jones.
Like, I need to research that for my stuff.
It's almost impossible to find that guy's stuff, but it's out there.
You know what I mean?
It's just sort of, it's sort of firewalled away from people.
Right, okay.
I mean yeah, it's funny because it's the same thing that happened to all the JFK conspiracy videos that I would watch every night for a year straight.
Not as easy to find them and I sensed that they weren't like deleted per se, but I think they got buried and I think that they don't come up as easily in a search.
And that's interesting because obviously YouTube wanted to make a push into tamping down the insanity in and around like January 6th and how that all came out.
But as a result, it probably makes the YouTube experience different and suboptimal too.
It does.
So I want to talk real fast about how Alex Jones became, as he started to blossom, as he started to become a phenomenon.
And he went from being a public access guy, and he was on the radio as well.
There were two events in the 1990s that really propelled him, that made him much more of a well-known name and an influencer.
And these were two tragedies one was the Ruby Ridge shooting of course in which a family was killed by federal agents Which was absolutely grotesque And then, of course, we have the fire in Waco, Texas, of the Branch Davidian compound, led, of course, by the cult leader David Koresh.
In both cases, federal agents overstepped their bounds, and it led to giant, giant tragedies.
Alex Jones, being the opportunist that he is, the shameless asshole that he is, jumped on both of these things, particularly the Waco situation.
He started inserting himself into public meetings.
He started ingratiating himself with families of the survivors.
He started raising a ton of money and creating a big public firestorm around rebuilding the compound.
And so what ended up happening was because of his proximity to this situation, He started making inroads with a lot of other conspiracy theorists.
And for those who don't know, before the advent of the Internet, before it became a household sort of connection, People were trading tapes.
They were sending VHS tapes to one another, cassette tapes to one another, they were making magazines, stuff like that.
Alex Jones was one of the quickest adopters of this, and used the tragedies of Waco and Ruby Ridge, and the burgeoning Patriot movement, which of course birthed us such luminaries as Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, believing that he was fighting the New World Order.
Yes.
I mean, you know, so again, you can't respect The Hustle because he's an asshole and he's exploiting these things.
But there is some notion of understanding how to do this, which is, you know, a through line between him and Trump, for instance.
By the way, was his voice back then as hard to listen to as it is now in terms of how gravelly and how scratchy he really is?
Do you remember if it was cleaner back in the day?
It was way cleaner.
And actually, I'm glad you say that because we have a clip of him here in a second.
Oh, okay.
Well, it's a little different.
Are you going to lay it on us?
Yeah, I will.
And I want to go ahead and preface this because what ends up happening with Alex Jones as Ruby Ridge and Waco happen?
This, of course, is where we start getting the New World Order conspiracy theory.
And to give people the background on this, and start to unravel the onion that we're dealing with, the New World Order conspiracy theory, do you want to break it down, what the conspiracy theory is?
Well, I mean, if you want me to weigh in on the whole Jewish cabal part of it, I suppose I can, but it's always, it tends to be, you know, Jews are controlling the media and Soros always comes up to as part of this whole thing.
And, you know, it's funny because there are some reasonable takes about, like, what the CIA was doing or what the government's doing that oversteps their bounds.
That, you know, kind of reflect a little bit of where, like, there's always a little kernel of something in there that can get people on board.
So, you know, I'll lead off with that.
But, you know, you're always much better at breaking down the New World Order and neoliberalism for everybody.
Yeah, and you're exactly right on that.
It's the kernel of truth at the heart of the New World Order conspiracy theory that makes it so seductive.
And the idea is that, well, at this point, they don't want to say Jews anymore.
So they start saying satanic forces, which is.
Sure.
Yeah, it's Jews.
And the entire idea is that as we as we go into NAFTA, as we start forming these trade organizations, we start moving towards free trade.
We start deindustrializing the United States of America.
People like my family have no idea why they're losing their jobs.
You know, they've worked in a factory, their parents worked in a factory.
Why would that go away?
It makes no sense.
And to try and explain neoliberalism, it's almost impossible to nail it down.
You know what I mean?
Unless you're an economist, unless you're in the middle of it.
It is much easier to tell people a story, they're doing it because they're evil, they're doing it because they're satanic, they're doing it to destroy you, they're betraying the country.
So Alex Jones benefits off of this and what he does is he offers a simplified version of what is happening economically that is based on supernatural forces.
And people are automatically susceptible to it because they're going to church, because they're being told by their pastors that these things are happening.
It's no coincidence that the New World Order, as a phrase, is uttered by George H.W. Bush, who helps design neoliberalism.
But then it starts being popularized by Pat Robertson of the 700 Club because he's talking about satanic elements.
But the entire idea is that there is this giant evil conspiracy as opposed to, I don't know, wealthy people wanting to pay less for goods and you and me having to pay less for things that we buy at Walmart.
Right, and remember the seductive or the gateway here is religion, right?
This is really where people are, and we've talked about this all the time so I hate to repeat myself, but the notion that, you know, people are primed, certain people are primed to already believe in these things because of how they were raised.
To be afraid of Satan and to hear the special keywords that trigger that emotional response that they're doing, that they want, It's a lot like what Tony Robbins does with his neuro-linguistic training, where you can elicit the response you want by slowly training in a very specific way.
That's hypnotism, if you will, or just Carnival Barker kind of thing.
But still, it's in the wrong hands, Jared, like in a bad movie.
It's quite dangerous.
Yeah.
Yeah, it is.
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