Spencer critiques Knowledge Fight’s Alex Jones dissection, proposing a standardized disinformation lexicon like "reality inversion" (fact-flipping gaslighting) and "proof by association" (tying unrelated events, e.g., Sandy Hook to declassified 1960s docs). He highlights Jones’ 2006 clip where controversy became self-validating, Rigney’s "explicit paradox" ("normal" church as a red flag), and Dew’s flawed logic. Standardizing terms could sharpen counter-disinformation efforts, positioning Spencer’s work as a toolkit for broader media analysis. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that is creating and interpreting the language of the disinformation age.
It's also a podcast that now officially does have theme music.
I'm Spencer, your host.
And today I have just me today.
No other person to talk to.
First of all, I just want to say if anyone has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns about anything they hear when they are listening to this podcast, the correct place to send that response is truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
You can also find me on Twitter at Spencer GWatson.
I'm there at least once a day.
So I have, I'm doing a new thing today.
We'll see if this lasts.
This is a thing that I do more than once.
So I listen to a lot of podcasts and many of those are related to conspiracies.
People debunking them, you know, skeptics weigh in.
And a trend has begun that I'm very happy with that started with this podcast that I'm going to talk about right now.
It's called Knowledge Fight.
And that trend is the use of a podcast to produce a stream of content that tracks a single disinformation merchant or source.
In the case of Knowledge Fight, that disinformation merchant is Alex Jones, the longtime host of InfoWars.
While I greatly appreciate the efforts of Dan and Jordan, who host that show, to produce two episodes a week for nine years now as a form of like what could be called like man-to-man information defense, I'm sometimes frustrated when I hear them have to stop and explain certain concepts.
I mean, they certainly understand the things they're explaining very, very well, and they explain them well.
And they do a great job.
This is one of the best podcasts around.
But it's my mission here with this podcast to make the explanations in this area easier to create, easier to communicate.
And it's part of my goal.
Creating and interpreting the language of the disinformation age.
And as such, I have attempted to create terms and lingo that are specific to descriptions of ideas that are required in the field of disinformation.
And when I've already created a term and then I hear someone have to stop to describe the meaning of the term that I have already created, I think to myself, what if they already knew about the term?
What if everyone knew about it and their conversations about Alex Jones could become easier, more efficient?
You know, like what would happen if we had to stop and describe what confirmation bias was all the time?
So much easier to have the term confirmation bias and everyone more or less understand what confirmation bias is.
Also, it helps that the term confirmation bias kind of describes what it actually is.
Helps you along.
It's?
Uh, it's that way almost on purpose, but I can already hear some people asking, whatever do you mean?
I heard those same episodes of Knowledge fight and I didn't hear anything.
Uh off, or that anything was missing.
Sure okay, but uh, in the last month or so that i've listened to Knowledge Fight, i've taken note of some of the times when they have had to explain something that I have already covered in much greater detail, and so today we're going to go through some of those um.
So, Knowledge Fight takes clips from Alex Jones's show.
Uh, they also take clips from uh other media that's related to Alex Jones, related media like uh Tucker Carlson, and also from uh depositions that have been made public during the many lawsuits that have included Alex Jones and his employees.
Knowledge Fight takes those clips and comments on them.
So I will be taking clips from Knowledge fight and commenting on them.
The meta of the meta is truly never reached.
One wonders if this will eventually be turtles all the way down.
So this is going to be the first example.
Uh, this is a.
This is going to be an example of reality inversion, the idea that uh, none of the facts need to change or be denied.
Uh, they just need to be reinterpreted to mean the opposite of what a reasonable person should expect them to mean.
This is technically a special case of gaslighting, but gaslighting itself is not a very instructive term, and that this happens so very, very often means it really should have its own name so that we can properly shame it.
So this clip is from the most recent episode of Knowledge Fight, that's episode 1120.
Uh, this moment is from approximately one hour 17 minutes into that episode.
It aired on february 27th uh, as I record this yesterday, uh 2026.
Uh, Dan and Jordan are reviewing an episode.
They're actually reviewing an episode from 2006, comparing uh Jones's rhetoric from 20 years ago to uh that of today.
So uh, here we go, Fred and Philly, you're on the air.
Go ahead, Fred hi.
Uh, I want to.
I want to uh tell you that I really appreciate the way that you handled uh all these issues non-ideologically, and also that you don't bait um ethnic groups and that you don't bait religions, and I think that's very commendable.
Well, those are all hot buttons.
A lot of people like to uh, 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.
But but overall, it's very, very disruptive and that's what the neocons do.
Yeah, and I think that uh, it took me several years to uh get into the uh into that, into into that uh mode of thinking, but it's very valuable.
I'm proud of this guy from Philly.
Yep um, what Alex is describing it almost sounds like someone who I don't know this is.
This is crazy.
Yeah, hear me out.
It almost sounds like someone who would say that you get the most flack when you're over the target.
Yeah, you know, like someone using that kind of like negative feedback as a way to prove that they're on to something.
Yep yep, yep.
It's very similar to how Alex is saying, like you press the button, you get a charge of electricity and you think you're doing something that does feel right.
Huh yeah, so you had it right there.
It's uh when you.
You get the most flack when you're over the target.
I actually use that same uh metaphor as a, as a, in the episode where I described that um, so uh.
I don't think that needs any more commentary.
It was pretty straightforward, uh.
Next next clip is about crowdsourced storytelling, which is the idea that the people who are creating the fictional narratives that become conspiracy beliefs, they're adding their own fictional pieces onto each other's stories in what amounts to like an extended exercise in improvisation.
Magicians On Stage00:09:43
Would-be influencers are adding in their own pieces and whether or not the conspiracy audience likes that particular piece is what will determine who gets to be an influencer in this space and who does not.
Who is the best bullshitter?
Who's the best at making up stuff to have people nod along in cynical agreement?
And what does it look like when two of them get together and carry out this task right in front of your eyes like a magician doing a card trick when the missing card is right there on the table the entire time?
Let's find out.
So this was from a recent episode, Knowledge Fight 1117 from roughly one hour, 17 minutes in.
This aired February 15th, 2026.
This is they're covering an interview with a man named Patrick Bett David, another right-wing disinformation influencer.
So here we go.
So Alex eventually just comes down to it and he doesn't have an answer for why I'm doing anything and I will let him do anything.
Listen to this amazing moment.
Why he's not firing.
Oh yeah, why he's not fired.
I mean, I don't know specifically.
That's I know pieces of it.
I mean, he replaced Walt.
Waltz went from, you know, one position to another position.
That's not a fire.
You're moving somebody, right?
You kind of safe face with media.
But there's a lot of people down the Trump 1.0 would have fired that he's not doing today.
Why?
I don't know the answer to that question.
What do you think?
Is it media?
Is it controlling contact?
You help me.
You help me.
He doesn't want to have the embarrassment until mid-fired.
He still legitimizes that there's a scandal.
Oh, my God.
That's wrong.
And so, yeah, that's his main reason.
I mean, you just answered your question for you.
Yes.
Trump doesn't.
He did answer his question for him.
He did.
He did exactly that because you fucked up.
Yep.
You dropped the ball, buddy.
This is a great example of how truth is created collaboratively with Alex.
Patrick is asking him why Trump hasn't fired people in his second term.
And Alex is very clear.
He doesn't know.
He doesn't have an answer.
We all know.
He ran away.
He doesn't want to talk about this.
We all know why.
I don't want to tell you why because that makes me feel bad.
So Patrick offers a possible answer, which is that Trump wants to save face with the media.
Oh, shit, that's a great answer.
That's probably the true answer.
Alex jumps on it.
And that is now his answer.
Alex doesn't just respond by saying that this sounds possible.
He now has heard that this is the case from important White House sources.
Totally.
Alex had no answer before, but now mere seconds later, he has sources.
This is all a game and none of it means anything.
And it's embarrassing for Patrick to pretend that this is a real conversation.
Yeah, that's sad.
So, yeah, you can hear it there.
It's crowdsourced storytelling.
What can I say?
I like the way you put that, though, collaborative effort, which it really is.
Really is a collaborative effort.
So, moving on, the next clip.
Technically, I didn't come up with the phrase, every accusation is confession.
But I did do an episode describing the psychological reasons why this is likely to keep happening in human interactions.
So I'm throwing this one in here.
Basically, people who feel really good about their own strategies for gaining power and influence will overvalue them and come to see the potential that someone else could try these same strategies as the greatest threat to themselves.
And as such, people who are narrow-minded or too focused on a simple set of ideas will tend to assume that other people are going to get advantage from the thing that they think is giving themselves an advantage.
In this way, accusations tend to overlap strongly with confessions.
Let's see what that looks like in situ.
So this is Knowledge Fight episode 1114.
It aired on February 5th of 2026.
This moment is roughly 29 minutes into the episode.
And Dan and Jordan are still looking back at 2006 in this clip.
That's going around.
This video about Iran and an EMP is basically just War of the World.
It's basically War of the World.
And then, holy shit, Bush, he misspoke.
Uh-oh.
And then now this, now this latest bit of propaganda.
By the way, Bush called it the Liberty Tower.
It's never been called the Liberty Tower.
It's not named the Liberty Tower.
No one's called it, but I guarantee you, Rove just said, listen, liberty has a better effect in people's brains.
You've heard his speeches.
Well, he'll say Liberty 35 times, tyranny 20 something times, liberty versus tyranny over and over again.
They liked it.
Liberty's being attacked.
It's symbolic.
It's subconscious.
It doesn't matter if it's not named that.
They're so dumb.
Our people at Fox are ready with the images.
You just call it Liberty Tower.
Doesn't matter if it's called Library Tower.
The news then began calling it Liberty Tower.
Okay.
The Emperor renames the building.
They didn't even question it.
This building is Liberty Tower.
Bush was kind of famous for fucking up words and speeches.
I don't know if this was a grand propaganda move that everybody had to workshop and Rove had to be behind.
Alex is saying that Bush called Library Tower Liberty Tower, and then everyone just fell in line and started calling it that.
But that's not true.
You can find tons of articles from the mainstream media about how he got the name of the building wrong in his State of the Union speech.
And the White House issued a correction almost immediately after he misspoke.
It's interesting, though, because Alex is imagining a media that's in total lockstep with Bush, where he misspeaks, and then they report the thing he got wrong as if it were actually correct.
That wasn't true, but it's true of Alex and his crew now.
Listening to this, it kind of feels like Alex is saying that the media is acting this way because it's what he thinks his role is.
The media exists to reinforce the message of the people in power.
And in 2006, he felt like he was nowhere near power and never would be.
Whereas in 2026, that's changed.
If Trump were to call Library Tower Liberty Tower, it would be Alex's job to convince people that was the right name, which is why he assumes that the mainstream media is doing that with Bush.
Yeah.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
If you, if you stop thinking about him as reacting to reality whatsoever and instead think about him as being one part of the same reality, right?
So instead of that whole concept of predictive programming or anything like that, Alex is telling you what the enemy is doing because that's what those people are supposed to be doing.
So if Alex is in that position, he's going to do what they're doing.
Yeah, I mean, that's what you're supposed to be doing.
I literally said that's what I would do if I were in there.
I would do, but it's, but it is like, well, you're, you're not thinking of it as a literal like, oh, no, he thinks that's what you're supposed to do in that position.
So it's, it's insane.
He's not predicting anything.
He's just revealing how he would have done it the whole time.
And then imagining other people are doing that and criticizing them for it.
And because of him normalizing that insanity, it allows you to actually do it.
Wild.
So they don't actually use the term every accusation is a confession when they went through that.
That was interesting.
But they did more or less have to trip through the much of the explanation for that.
Yeah, I mean, they're certainly sharp.
They're good at catching these things.
How much better could they be, though?
Really?
That's what I'm asking.
So the next clip.
The explicit paradox says that some properties or descriptors about oneself are best demonstrated through social interaction.
In our bustling internet world, many people feel like they don't have the kind of time it takes to demonstrate these sorts of things, but they still need people to know about these positive descriptions about themselves.
As such, people will sometimes will sometimes explicitly tell others about these things instead of just demonstrating them.
And this leads whoever's listening to think that the reality is the opposite of the thing that is explicitly being claimed.
So here's an example of that.
This is from Knowledge Fight episode 1113.
Normal Churches Claiming Otherwise00:03:24
This was roughly two hours and 27 minutes into the episode.
That was a very long episode they had that day.
This aired on February 1st, 2026.
And in this episode, they're talking about Tucker Carlson.
So here it is.
Joe Rigney is a pastor who came to some national attention for writing a book about how empathy can be a sin and also for getting the boot from the Bethlehem College and Seminary for his ties to Christian nationalists.
Sure.
After that, he moved to Idaho, where he now works with another pastor who Tucker has interviewed named Doug Wilson.
And they run what Politico has described as a, quote, theocratic regime in a small town there.
That's nice.
If this is the guy who founded the city's church in Minnesota, then it's very clear that that's a place that preaches Christian nationalism.
And that makes it much more of a political target for a protest than a regular congregation.
Yeah, I was willing to give all kinds of latitude and it is not earned.
Yeah, no, you put a swastika church.
That's on you.
Yeah.
It is no longer deserved.
Nope.
The care and concern that I was trying to give this story.
Or maybe I'm wrong.
You could be because this Joe guy.
Well, let's see what he has to say about it.
You know what he has to say about it?
What?
This is a normal church.
Oh, good.
So normal.
I bet it is.
And so you see the escalating violence on the left of normal Christian people.
And I just want to, I just think I want to underscore that piece of it.
These are not, these are not political activists.
This is not a political church.
These are normal Bible-believing evangelicals.
The mission of the church, the way that they talk since the beginning when we planted the church and they've continued this is real basic.
They have a number of very clear priorities, what they care about.
And if you asked any of them, they would say, we're here because we want to worship Jesus.
He's the most, he's real.
Jesus is real.
And he's the most important person in the universe.
He's the only hope of the world.
There's salvation in no one else.
They're going to want to tell you that.
And then they're going to say, we want to love each other as Christians.
And then they're going to say, and we're here to seek the good of these cities.
We've not given up on these cities.
And we're normal.
I hate that this is a situation wherein, because like I was more than willing to give the benefit of the doubt that this is kind of no good to protest in a way that disrupts a church service, but this guy's laying it on too thick for this not to be trolling.
Yeah.
One thing that normal churches don't usually say is we're totally a normal church.
That's usually the kind of thing you hear from big time weirdos and creeps who are hiding behind religion.
Yeah.
So normal.
So you can hear it there.
They pointed out the fact that the concept, the fact that if you have to tell people that you're a normal church, that's odd.
It stands out.
That's a red flag right there that you're not really what you're claiming to be.
Maybe something else is going on there.
And then you have to tell people that you're normal because of the other thing that's happening.
So this moving on to the last clip we're going to do.
Proof By Association00:07:52
Proof by association is the idea that every conspiracy event that someone claims is not what it really seems needs to be proven so based only on the evidence of what happened at the event itself.
This means that when the conspiratorial minded try to justify a belief in a mass shooting being fake because of a belief that a previous event was staged, this is a logical fallacy and needs to be called out as such.
Allowing someone to insinuate that the current event is staged because of its imagined association with other events is part of a gish gallop technique that attempts to put the onus on the responder to debunk every event simultaneously.
And this just isn't possible.
Proof by association doesn't work against every presentation of the gish gallop, but it does help and should be used whenever it's needed to bring a conspiracist back to the topic at hand.
Cut out the references to previous events that aren't the one in question and make their beliefs have to stand up to reality.
So this is from Knowledge Fight 771.
It's quite a bit earlier than the other episodes.
It's called Formulaic Objections Part 15.
So this was released three years ago, January 26, 2023.
And the part that I clipped out here is roughly 58 minutes into the show.
The formulaic objection episodes of Knowledge Fight are all about depositions from the lawsuits against Infowars.
In this particular deposition, a man named Rob Dew, who's worked at Infowars for many years as some kind of director, is being questioned by an attorney.
If you don't listen to the rest of Knowledge Fight, I still strongly suggest that everyone listen to all of the formulaic objection episodes.
These will be this is so important to understand the difference between the shouting man on the TV screen on the internet that people have seen in Alex Jones and the version that's seen in depositions.
But anyway, we're going to go on with this clip that shows proof by association.
So there needs to be a factual basis for his belief, or at least the question is, what's your factual basis?
Yeah, there doesn't need to be.
And it turns out it's Operation Northwoods.
Oh, God.
But Rob doesn't seem to even understand this.
The day of the Sandy Hook shooting, Mr. Jones went on his show and suggested that this was all staged by the government.
Correct?
You'd have to show me the video.
I'm asking you, what's the factual basis for Mr. Jones's theory the day of as it relates to number four listed in the piece of paper in front of you?
What was the factual basis for him saying the government staged this?
I think the factual basis goes back to a document that was declassified in the late 1990s.
And it was called Operation Northwoods.
And in that, it describes situations where the government would create events and stage one of which was bombing airlines.
Also staging mass shootings, they say in theaters.
I believe schools is also listed in that.
I haven't looked at that document in a while.
But that document declassified.
And it was signed by the heads of the military and given to President Kennedy.
Okay.
So because that document was declassified in the 90s, every single mass shooting, immediately Mr. Jones goes on infowars.com and on his radio show and suggests that this is staged.
I just want to make sure that I have my factual basis clear.
Well, we can say it live.
I think what we do is...
Not what you do, what you did.
but we did, we remind people.
I'm sorry?
We reminded people.
And I'm not even sure if he mentioned Northwoods that day or not.
But I'm sure that was in his mind, although I can't speak for him.
Okay.
So we remind people of this.
Wow.
Which is that is the how's that different?
That's bizarre.
Well, I say it this way, and it doesn't sound like I said it a different way.
It's such a good way that Bill put it.
Because of this document that was declassified in the 90s, every mass shooting is reported as possibly being fake or likely being fake.
Is that correct?
And then Rob Dude has to be like, well, yes, but I don't want to say it because when you say it like that, it sounds fucking stupid.
Yeah.
So what I'm saying is we reminded people of the document.
It sounds almost as if we have a very weak basis for the kind of reporting.
You know, I've never thought of it that way, but when you put it like that, I am going to shut down and stay silent for a while.
Yeah, shit.
Long pause.
Yeah.
So you could see it there.
You could see both the you could hear both the lawyer in question pointing out the exact logical scenario that's happening that he, the man Rob Dew, has to refer back to a previous event to justify a belief in a new event.
And then they go through it again.
Dan and Jordan afterward, after they showed their clip, that they go through it again.
But how much easier is it to have the term proof by association to just say, just show that's what's happening?
They're trying to prove that the one thing is true based on some kind of a association with a previous event that there's really no reason to think are linked.
So that's all I have for today.
I might do more of these types of episodes with other podcasts that I listen to.
And this shouldn't be taken as any kind of rebuke or like criticism of any of these podcasts.
More like a feedback into the system to call for updated vocabulary and try to demonstrate to people who listen to Knowledge Fight how what I do is relevant to what Knowledge Fight is doing.
And because, yeah, we all want to feel relevant if nothing else.