Behind the Bastards - Part One: Alex Jones: The Godfather of Fake News

Episode Date: September 18, 2018

Alex Jones has been banned from Facebook, Twitter, the App Store and pretty much every other mainstream app that is capable of somehow spreading information. In Episode 22, Robert is joined by Noel Brown and Benjamin Bowlin (Ridiculous History and Stuff They Don't Want You To Know) and they discuss how Alex Jones became an architect of modern conservative media. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now you probably know Alex Jones is a ridiculous hobgoblin of a man who spouts conspiracies at the same rate of fire as a Vulcan chain gun. He's been banned from Facebook, Twitter, the App Store, and pretty much every other mainstream app that is capable of somehow spreading information. Up until very recently, Alex Jones was considered nothing but a far-fringed loon, hardly an important voice in our national discourse. But the sad, weird, almost funny if you can hold back the tears truth is that Alexander Jones is one of the most influential Americans of the 21st century.

He is an architect of modern conservative media and a pioneer in a field that employs everyone on the podcast today. Speaking of everyone on the podcast today, my guests today are Ben Bowlin and Noel Brown from Ridiculous History. Hey, thanks for having us on the show, Robert. Thanks for being on. We're so excited to talk about this despicable pustule of a man. And especially because this is the second time that the three of us have hung out. You recently appeared on an episode of our show. Yes, I did, talking about California's first governor and one of the most famous racists in Oregon history.

That was fun. That's true. It was a feel-good moment for everyone. Well, today we will be talking about more racism, but not from a Californian or an Oregonian, actually, from a Texan. So that's fun. You guys excited? Oh, man. Thrilled.

Let's do it. All right. Let's roll into this. Alexander M. Rick Jones was born in Dallas, Texas in 1974. A 2011 Rolling Stone profile describes him as the descendant of two lines of Texas frontiersmen. I think this article is one of the first, if not the very first, major publications that devoted a substantial feature to the subject of Mr. Jones's life. It takes a bemused, slightly mocking, but ultimately quite fond stance towards the infamous loon. Quote, he describes a childhood that will disappoint those searching for the Freudian roots of his crusade.

His parents, a dentist and a homemaker, raised him with love in the manicured suburb of Rockwall. I was an all-American kid with a great family, he says. I read time-life books, played football, was friends with everybody. So that's what Alex says his background was. Yeah. Yeah. So that seems so far pretty normal, right? Pretty normal so far.

I mean, it's hard not to read him talking anytime he's quoted in like a gruffin. Alex Jones been eating cigarettes. You can read the phone book. You can read the phone book in that voice. There's a lot of fun. You say Rockwall? We grew up in Rockwall. Rockwall, yeah.

That sounds very down home. That sounds like a very comforting place to have grown up. It is. I actually grew up about 25 minutes away from Alex Jones. No way. Yeah, in a place called Plano. So Rockwall is a suburb of Dallas and it's a pretty affluent place. The suburbs on that side of Dallas are generally quite well off, upper middle class for sure.

And Rockwall is one of the nicer suburbs in that whole area. It is a nice, quiet and pretty boring place. Mike Judge's King of the Hill is set in that same area. And it's actually a pretty accurate depiction of how it was when I lived there at least. I think that's why I said it was comforting. King of the Hill is like video comfort food for me. Yeah. I put it on like to just, it lulls me into a state of utter bliss.

So, man, okay. So when did things go wrong? Well, that's kind of something we're all going to have to piece together here during the story. I've read everything I can about his background, every different article I found that goes into his childhood. So I'm going to give you everything. There's some conflicting stuff here. Oh, awesome. Here we go.

And also just, hey, man, on a personal note, thanks for doing that and saving us from it. I hope you're okay. It wasn't. It's finding all the clips that was really emotionally damaging because I had to listen to a lot of Info Wars. But you are going to put us through that part. Oh, yeah. No. You won't mean nothing.

Okay. All right. I'm ready. I'm a monster. Okay. According to Alex, his parents raised him to be a political quote, almost as an experiment to see what I'd turn into. The closest thing to a childhood political training was some neighbors who were members of the John Birch Society. They'd come over for dinner and I'd be exposed to those ideas starting at around age two.

So this is the first place where I have questions with that Rolling Stone article because no one in 1984 just had friends that came over to talk about the John Birch Society. Do you guys know what that is? No. Break it down for us. Okay. So the John Birch Society is like the prototype for all future right-wing conspiracy organizations. Fred Koch, the patriarch of the Koch Brothers, was one of the founding members. To give you an idea of these people's intellectual tin there, they believed Dwight D. Eisenhower was a secret communist.

Oh, wait. Yeah. I am familiar with these people because they're still like, they're staunchly anti-communist. That's one of their big platforms, right? Yeah, they're staunchly anti-communist and they believe that like a gigantic communist conspiracy controls most of the world. Even during like the height of the Cold War when like, you know, like I said, they think Eisenhower was a lefty. So that should give you an idea of how far to the right these guys are. Oh, wow.

So having friends who just, I don't buy that he just had friends who came over to talk about the John Birch Society. And other articles I've read say that Alex Jones' father himself was a member of the John Birch Society, which makes a lot of sense. Whatever the truth is, Alex Jones was probably born into a mix of middle-class luxury and far-right conspiracy theories. Every single deep dive on the man I've read will mention that while young, he found a book called None Dare Call It Conspiracy on his father's bookshelf. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So another quote from Rolling Stone, according to None Dare, the federal income tax is nothing but a plot by a cabal of mega-rich insiders who work to suck the middle class dry and transfer its wealth to the Ford and Rockefeller foundations.

As a teenager, Jones read the book twice. It's still the easiest to read primary to the New World Order, he says. So this is like the book that's his, I don't know, what's another influential book? The Bible? This is his Bible. Sure, sure. It's like his, the fountain. It's his catcher in the rye.

There you go. But he always makes a point, maybe this is coming later, I'm sure it is, that he's playing a character and he doesn't even really believe any of this. But based on what you're saying so far, it sounds like he has a pretty strong history of fucking believing in this. Oh, and he just recently started saying that it was a character. Yeah, and that's for a custody hearing. And speaking of that custody hearing, the 2018 custody hearing, which we will be talking about more in the last episode of this three-parter podcast, but during that custody hearing, he does talk about his childhood some. So I'd actually like to play you a clip from that where Alex talks about his life at age 16. So this will give us all some idea of what Alex Jones was doing as a teenager.

When I was 16, I didn't want to party anymore. I didn't want to play games anymore. I grew up, I'd already been in the fights, all the big rituals. I'd already had probably a, I hate to brag, so I'm not bragging, it's actually shameful, probably 150 women or more. That's conservative. Jesus. I had over 150 women. I'd already been in fights with full grown men.

I was already dating college girls by the time I was 15 years old. I was already a man. Oh, man. So that's the heart that pulled blood. 150. I got hairy balls. 150 and he's being conservative. Dude.

No, he is myth-building at this point. I mean, come on. He's always myth-building. No, that's all lies, clearly. It's funny. I feel, yeah. That's 44-year-old Alex Jones talking about it. I say 140 tops.

Robert, I say 140 tops. I'll believe 140. That's a reasonable number for a 15-year-old. So, yeah, oddly enough, if you want some context for that video, the first part of it is him talking about a New World Order plan to stop people from breeding because we're all supposed to have kids by age 16. Yeah, so anyway, I don't want to be just taking Alex out of context because whenever the media attacks him, yeah.

Here's a question. If that's his beef, this is this conspiracy to cut off procreation or whatever, and he's had 150 women by the age of 15, where all his bastard children is progeny. Well, he's admitted to, I think, 10 abortions. Having had partners of his have 10 abortions over the years and stuff, and it's usually something he brings up when he's talking about his shameful past or whatever. For whatever reason, that's important to him.

So, he regrets him. Yeah. So, none of that is true, you're saying. Absolutely none of it. I know he's had sex with people because he has kids, but I really doubt he had sex with 150 people by the time he was 15. But was he really fighting? Full-brown male.

Well, I don't know, but we're going to be talking about a fight we know Alex Jones had, and we've got different perspectives on that fight, including the police report that Alex filed. So, that's coming up in a little bit. Maybe you guys will reserve our judgment until then. Okay. So, anyway, during his John Hughes movie Worth Adolescence, Alex Jones stumbled onto his first conspiracy.

While he was out at parties on the weekend, he would watch his off-duty cop sold pot, ecstasy, and coke to other teens. Jones said to Rolling Stone, quote, a truck would appear sometimes with a guy still in uniform inside. Then on Monday, they'd have dare and drug test us for football. I was like, you want to drug test me when I know you're selling the stuff? I call them the mafia to their face. At the time, I didn't know anything about the CIA drug dealing.

So, Alex was a varsity lineman at this point in high school, so it's entirely possible he went to a lot of parties, and it's also possible that Rockwell cops sold drugs to teenagers. That whole chunk of suburban Dallas Fort Worth has horrific and had horrific drug problems. When I was a kid there in the mid-1990s, there was an article that, on a, like, seven or eight kids died in a night from heroin overdoses. It was called the Great Heroin Massacre, and it turned out that Plano was like the heroin capital of the United States.

And in, like, 2001, a bunch of Dallas cops got busted for planting hundreds of pounds of fake drugs on people. So, there's a lot of police corruption in that part of Texas. It is entirely possible that young Alex Jones stumbled upon a real drug conspiracy. He says that this conspiracy is why he wound up leaving the Dallas area. He got arrested for driving without a license and having a six-pack of beer in the car. And when the police brought him to jail, he says the police threatened to frame him and send him away if he didn't stop, you know, talking about the things that they were doing wrong. Maybe that's true. Maybe Alex started his career as a conspiracy theorist with a real conspiracy.

It is possible. Cops in that part of Dallas have done some shady things. And that was certainly wet your appetite. You know, if, like, the first one is legit, then, you know, everything you see from then on has, like, got that tone to it. It does sound a little self-aggrandizing, though, that the cops were so concerned. You know what I mean? If they're that bad, why didn't they just get rid of him? Well, and that's, that's a fair point. And it's almost, even if there was something wrong, because apparently the Rockwell Sheriff was indicted on criminal charges for, like, organized crime conspiracy and stuff after he and his family left Austin.

He says they left that his parents moved to Austin because he was a threat from the police. I don't know if that's true. I don't know if they were afraid of him, but it's entirely possible. He saw some evidence of an actual shady thing going on and that that's what sort of jump-started him. I gotta say, I appreciate that you're, you're being very fair, Robert. I've noticed that this is, I think, my spider-sense tells me this is about to get really weird. I mean, it's Alex Jones, of course, it's gonna be really, really weird. But yeah, he does, at this point, he hasn't done anything that's, that's inherently terrible, and he may be stumbled upon a real, a real conspiracy.

Luckily, Hammond, Alex's cousin and a current Infowars employee, considers this whole Rockwell police thing to be a major moment for Alex. Quote, the Rockwell cops were lowbrow thugs and Alex was a hellraiser. The conflict with the cops started Alex down the road of his current pursuit. So yeah, that seems plausible. Once he and his family moved to Austin, Alex quit football, which is probably good. He's not a man who needs head injuries added on to whatever else is going on in his head. There you go. There's a nice dig.

He also quit smoking pot because he says it made him paranoid, and we wouldn't want paranoid Alex Jones. Decades later, during that magical 2018 custody hearing, Alex Jones admitted that he still does smoke marijuana once a year, quote, to monitor its strength like law enforcement does. You mean just to make sure nobody's putting anything in the fucking weed? He believes that George Soros is making marijuana more potent. That was what he stated in court, and so he's keeping tabs on it.

I mean, I don't even know if I might ask. To stop people from breeding. To stop people from breeding and bring in the New World Order with better pot. Have you seen the video of him where he's talking on a YouTube clip and in the background he's got all this EDM DJ equipment and there's this conspiracy about Alex Jones that he is a secret EDM DJ? He definitely plays a lot of EDM on Infowars. Yeah, but in the background there's a TR-808 and these CDJ decks

and all of this stuff that only a super hardcore synth nerd would have and it's clearly like a room in his house. I can tell you, I know at least close to a dozen men over 40 in Austin who are electronic music DJs. I'm 35 and I live in Atlanta and I've got a bunch of synth stuff in mind. Me and Alex Jones have that in common. It just kind of made me feel closer to him. I just wanted to bring that up early on.

Maybe it's just a Texas thing. Well, yeah. It's popular in Austin, it's entirely possible that that's a hobby of his and if so, I encourage him to do that and not everything else he's been doing. I consider EDM a more or less positive thing for the world. So it's similar, I guess, this testing marijuana potency. It reminds me of that old story about Gandhi where he said that he would have young female relatives of his sleeping bed with him to test his...

His resolve? His discipline and his resolve, yeah. Well, good on Gandhi, good on Alex Jones. Good on Alex Jones, real bulwark. You know what? It's weird, but anytime someone talks about doing something to test themselves, it's almost always a little shady. I don't know.

Maybe normal people don't test themselves, they just indulge sometimes. Whatever. I'm getting on a moral point here. Anyway, Jones claims that near the end of his time in high school, he started reading big, fancy history books including William Shires, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which is a really good book, as well as works of Roman history. He began to see a pattern in history of government staged terror attacks,

and this apparently was sort of the start of his formation of the ideology that would take him through into adulthood. So, in 1993, Alex Jones graduated high school. He wound up gravitating toward the Austin Community Access Cable Station and took on basically whatever work he could volunteer for. In 1995, when the Oklahoma City Federal Building was blown up by Timothy McFay, Jones got on the air and accused the federal government of planning the attack. Other conspiracy nuts started mailing him tips and information.

Soon, Jones became a local Austin celebrity. Brian Blake, the Austin Public Access Station producer, recalled that back in those days, the station was, quote, wild and unmoderated, like the YouTube of its time. Yeah, that was gonna be my question. Like, he just had, like, a bully pulpit? Like, he could just do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted at this time? Yeah, yeah, he could just get on public access TV.

He had, like, a slot, and he also guested on a lot of people's shows, and he would just say whatever he wanted to. Did you ever end up seeing some of this stuff, Robert? Oh, yeah, we're about to play a clip to it. So I have found a clip from the show in this era, and it's pretty remarkable. When you see Jones today, you wouldn't look at Alex Jones in a modern Info Wars broadcast and be like, that man is polished. But I think this video makes it clear that he is.

He's just, that's the polish he's picked, because the early video shows him before he's developed his full shtick. So for some context, this video starts when one of his fans calls in to complain about a wildlife preserve in the area, and Jones starts mocking him in, like, how dare you doubt the wisdom of the globalist elite sort of way. So he's being satirical, he's not really mocking the guy, but he's talking to him the way he thinks that a globalist elite would talk to this guy.

It's kind of weird. The guy doesn't seem to get the joke and is really uncomfortable with the fact that Alex is yelling at him, and at one point the poor fucker call, like, thanks Alex for the call and says he has to go and is clearly put off, and Alex screams at him, no submit! And then this happens. Alright Alex, talk to you soon.

No, I, submit, for the kids! Of course I'm illustrating him starting by being a surgeon. Hello, we're on the air. Another government training center dupe. They've taught you how to be cool, the cool person goes, never thinks, and the guy that you call the girls is the fool, you know, who wears the cool clothes, and he doesn't care about politics or none of that,

ooh baby, let's party, yeah! I don't care about my future, my kids future, or the world's future, I'm a caring person, I like Bill Clinton a lot. I like this Alex Jones. Yeah, this Alex Jones is fun. He's whimsical as fuck man, this is great. He's dapper? Yeah, he's enjoyable.

You wanna watch this Alex Jones. He looks like he hasn't fully drunk his own Kool-Aid at this point, you know? He also doesn't look like he's emotionally and financially invested in destroying the world. Right, that's true. He looks like this is a bit for him, like who could do a SNL weekend update or something. I can see why people would have found him enjoyable

and even comforting to like turn on at night, smoke a little bit, Well it was also a different time, it was a different time. It sure was. It was not as heavy and weird as it is now. I mean, come on. This feels like an intentional comedy show. Still with a bent, but with an intent on making people laugh

more than scaring them into buying Tuesday prep supplies or whatever. And he sounds like a normal human being, not as we'll get to in later clips. Like he's been gargling cigarettes and razor blades for the last 30 years. Well it's like what happened to Gullum, you know? Like over time you just shrivel and degrade into this totally new creature. This is like him when he was Smeagol.

Yeah, this is Smeagol Jones and not Gullum Jones. I like that, I like that. So at this point he's definitely, he rants a lot about socialists and he's already ranting about the globalists. But his conspiracy theory is more like an ex-files type of conspiracy. The military and the police and the CIA are untrustworthy and spying on people. They're all engaged in a grand chess game for your mind.

He's not partisan. The Republican and the Democratic parties are all fake to this Alex Jones. He's not left or on the right. He's just everyone that's in power at all is in the same conspiracy. That's Alex Jones at this point. Fingers on the same hand, right? Yeah, exactly. So this particular take that he developed

secured Jones a comfortable niche in Austin's then thriving community of weirdos. He became a minor local celebrity and is in fact one of the people like that slogan, you know, keep Austin weird, that developed in this time in the late 90s in Austin. And Alex Jones is one of the people who was the most prominent folks in that sort of era of

kooky quirky Austin. So in 1996 he got his first radio job, a show called the Final Edition on KJFK FM. The chief conceit of the Final Edition is that every episode might be the last because even then the globalists were perpetually a few days away from cracking down on Alex Jones. At least that's the version of reality that Jones

portrayed to Rolling Stone. Subsequent reporting over the years has revealed a different side to how he got his show. I found this quote from a 2017 Business Insider article. While his big break came from public access TV, Jones' first real job in media was with a local talk radio show. He got the job with some help from his father, a dentist who recommended his son to a patient

who managed the station. After his father made the connection, Jones was invited for an interview. BuzzFeed also published a great article in Alex in 2017 called Alex Jones Just Can't Help Himself. It provides even more detail on how Alex's dad basically got him his first real radio job. He said,

My son's got some out there ideas, but I think he'd be perfect. Daryl O'Neill, the KJFK manager who brokered the deal explained, the next week he brought Alex in for a meeting. To secure Jones' spot on the station, Jones' father became his son's first on-air advertiser. So, there we go. Dad's money is what got Alex Jones' career started. And his dad is a fairly well-off doctor,

definitely upper middle class. It is interesting, if you're a regular listener to the show, to how many of the terrible figures in America that we've talked about, the Koch brothers, Paul Manafort, Eric Prince, got their big break from their dad's money. Just kind of weird how that works. Anyway, speaking of money that doesn't come from fathers,

or doesn't come from Alex Jones, it's time for ads. This was my way of segueing into the ads. That was well done. Perfect. Thank you. I'm a professional. Sophie, can we just play that? During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI

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In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're talking about Alex Jones, and yeah, we just got into the fact that his dad got him his first radio job, which is fun, perfectly fine if you're not the kind of person who always brags about how you're a self-made man.

Anyway, whatever. So yeah, dad's money aside, Alex Jones is apparently a natural at radio. Ryan Shu, KJFK's radio engineer, later recalled Jones' first day. He just walked into the booth, sat down, and started in on a rant cold. He never saw anything like that.

According to Buzzfeed, quote, other early co-workers said that Jones was famous and often disorienting theatrics have been there from the start. Burke described a moment when a caller attacked Jones on air as a soft button-up media type. Jones, according to Burke, erupted into tears, yelling, my name is Alexander Jones and I played football man and my parents are still married and I'm a damned American.

The caller was stunned. A co-worker recalled, we went to break right after that and he put his head in his hands and is rubbing his eyes all sheepish. He turned to me and said, was I crying too much? I just turn it on sometimes and I don't know how to stop. So. Wow. So he's really in touch with his emotions, huh?

Pretty stable guy. Well, that's always been a hallmark of him. He gets super worked up and like, you know, that's sort of him saying, look, I'm just like you. I feel things. I feel deeply. It's an interesting point. Because he said, sometimes I just turn it on,

but I can't turn it off. So there's an interesting, like, I guess conflict there, like how performative is it? Does he start performative? I think he's just method. I think he just taps into it like, you know, method acting style. I don't know. I think that may have been it at first.

I think he probably started out having enough discretion and self-control to tap into it when he knew it was appropriate for making the show more compelling and drawing viewers or listeners in. And I suspect maybe over time he's kind of lost his filter and lost his ability to filter like a sane person would. OK, gone completely bonkers. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's my theory. So you guys asked earlier about Alex Jones and what he's like in a fight, and it just so happens we have some data on that. So in 1997, another local Austin celebrity known as Space Hitler punched Alex Jones right in his face several times. Space Hitler, real name Clayton Counts,

but I'm going to keep going from Space Hitler. Please. Yeah. Space Hitler had a habit of calling into Alex Jones's public access show and making fun of him. His nickname of choice was Jarhead Jones, which for some reason Alex Jones hated. Here's how Jones described him in the police report that he filed.

Quote, He has called my home and told me graphically that he wants to kill me. I have made a complaint when this has happened informally a number of times and we have contacted the FBI. He has harassed many people over the past years. His voice is very easy to remember. It is, I would say, a Houston type accent. He is very strange looking.

He has eyes that look like a goats. Wait. So is Space Hitler just a famous local troll or did he have his own show too? It's just like the battle of the shock jocks. He was just a famous local kind of like personality. Accentric? Accentric.

And I don't think it's true that he threatened to murder Jones at his home. I think that's the top ringing in the FBI is classic Alex Jones. I think he's exaggerating it. What's up with the goat eyes though? I have no idea. I've never heard anyone describe someone's eyes as being like a goat. Does that mean they're really close together or really far apart?

They're like octopus eyes. Your guess is as good as mine. I've seen a lot of goats and I have no idea what he means. Yeah. So from what I can gather from other people's accounts Space Hitler was definitely harassing Alex Jones. Although again, I don't think he was calling his home and threatening to disembowel him.

There are a number of versions of what happened in the fight between Space Hitler and Alex Jones. They pretty much all start when Space Hitler and some friends came by the studio where Alex was like working at the Public Access Television Studio and were harassing Jones. And Jones asked them to step outside and then pretended to get a gun from his car. One of Space Hitler's friends mocked him for this

and then punched Alex Jones in the face. Now Charlie Satello, who was an employee at the station says that he came out right after Alex got punched and Alex was in a frenzy and going crazy. Satello tried to calm Jones down and he and Jones got into an argument and then Jones started throwing punches at him. Satello says, quote, Alex tried to fight back

but was throwing wild punches with no form. The guy is no fighter. So Charlie Satello claims that the fight only stopped because Alex's dad arrived and gave Satello $100 because Alex had bled on his shirt. So that's one side of the story. That's Space Hitler and Charlie Satello's side of the story. They're making fun of Alex.

He calls them outside and pretends to get a gun to scare them and somebody punches him and he starts swinging wildly at people and someone tries to calm him down and he starts swinging wildly at that guy too. And then his dad comes over and bribes everyone to leave. So that's one version of the story. Now there's another side of the story

and it's Alex Jones' side. And we have the full account of that side because we have the police report that Alex Jones wrote after the altercation. I will be putting a link to this police report up on our website behindthebastroods.com. I recommend reading it because it is a work of art and belongs in a museum.

But I'm going to quote liberally from it here. So in the police report, Jones identifies himself as an employee of Castle Dental, which I think means he was working for his dad at this time. Jones claims that Space Hitler and his friends rolled up in a mix of suits and jogging suits. Quote, I said, why do you call me at home and on the air and say you want to kill me?

The leader said, yeah, Jarhead, it is me. I'm not a dumbass like you. I don't put myself out in front. I'm hidden. No one knows who I am. I can do what I want and get away with it. 22-year-old Alex Jones then claims that a man who was quote, a large Latin Anglo mix type hit him with no warning. Quote, I did nothing

because I saw that to his left, the ringleader with the strange eyes had a double edged terry type killing knife. What? Alex claims he, yeah. Are you all on board so far? Oh my God, I'm more than a million percent. Alex claims that he tried to run away towards the studio,

but that the big Latin Anglo mix type man followed him. He hit Alex once more and our hero, Alex, was mournfully forced to defend himself. Quote. Where's the killing knife in all of this? I'm sorry. The ringleader has the killing knife. The man with the goat eyes has the knife. Of course. The man with the goat eyes has the military type

killing knife. Yeah. Okay. So the big Latin Anglo guy runs after Alex and hits him once and Alex turns around and defends himself. Quote. I hit him in the face. He came forward to hit me again and I hit him one more time, I believe. He fell to his knees. This is when Alex claims that that guy Charlie came out and got into a fight with him.

Now, Alex leaves out anything about his dad over to stop the fight and it's very unclear what actually happened. The Austin Chronicle says that the security footage has long been deleted, but the cops apparently saw it and they didn't see anything serious enough to take further action. My guess is that this was more of a sad schoolyard fist fight type situation

than the action scene Alex Jones recounts. I mean, I guess he didn't knock anyone to their knees. It gives some insight into Alex's head and how I think he interprets the world. So, yeah. He had to mournfully defend himself. That's great. I bet at some point he yelled,

do you know who my dad is? He's dentist. He may have just killed dad. Yeah, maybe. Oh, man, this is very enlightening, Robert. This is juice. Wow. So, several days after that fight, Alex Jones, because that fight happened in winter of 1997

and within between a couple of days and a couple of weeks after that point, Alex Jones did a Halloween special guest spot on someone else's public access television show. So, we're going to watch a video of Alex, and for you listeners who aren't seeing the video, the link will be up on the site, but Alex is in like a Halloween

decorated set. There's a fake severed head and a bucket next to him, and he has a fairly small butcher knife that he is jabbing a pumpkin with as if he's trying to murder it. And he's taking calls. His first caller seems to be making fun of him for being on public access TV,

which is unpaid work, and he asks Alex what Alex does for a living. So, we're going to play the clip now. All right, come on public access and hang out. I'm on 24 hours a day, they say. Yeah, pretty close. Well, I can assure you, I don't make any money off public access.

I can guarantee you that. Well, you guys have a good one. Hey, appreciate that call. Hello, caller, you on the air? Yes, Alex, how you doing? Pretty good. I was just kind of curious. It's true that the police can

have beams if you want to call it and they can project those into your house. Just look at him carving up that pumpkin. Yeah, the Austin Police Department, last time I heard, has 20 units within parade. Oh, wow. And he still looks for everybody listening.

He still looks pretty good. Yeah, he looks like a normal human being. He's clearly got a shtick going on, but it's fun and you want to watch. So, Alex's radio show at KJFK gradually started to pick up steam. His co-workers back then describe a man who was incapable of turning himself off

when they would all hang out at bars. Alex would come over with a thick pile of papers and start ranting about globalists or fluoride. Matthew Hobley, who worked at KJFK, told BuzzFeed later, quote, he'd come over and go into his spiel and we'd tell him to be cool and he'd yell, this is serious stuff.

We'd be like, damn, Alex, it's our day off, but he'd go on and on and by the time he was finished there were papers everywhere. Was he pounding shots, though? I think he's always been a drinker. I don't know. It seems like some of this stuff comes from the drink. It comes from the place of drink.

It seems like there's a big need for attention as well, you know? He doesn't seem like the kind of person who's comfortable when he's not the topic of the conversation or the person speaking. Yeah, and that seems to gel with what he did on public access because one of the things he was famous for

was being the guy you could count on to do guest spots on your thing if you were away for a week or whatever. He really seemed to just always want to be on the air. Like, that's been a gulf with Alex since he was a teenager, really. Interesting.

He might like the sound of his own voice. Hard to say. So, yeah, tragically, Alex's radio show was not long for this world. The final edition had its final edition in 1999 when the station got bought and the new management fired Alex for his, quote, inside terror job stuff.

The bad situation and started his own website, infowars.com. He found 10 stations that were willing to buy his new show and he started broadcasting it from home while running his website. He made a documentary called America, Destroyed by Design, about a world bank takeover of public land that Jones assured

everyone was imminent. This earned him his first celebrity fan, Richard Linkletter, who cast him as a crazy street prophet in several of his movies, including A Scanner Darkly. So, you want to see more young Alex Jones, A Scanner Darkly. I just remember Waking Life, and that was the first time

I ever even heard of Alex Jones. He was like the crazy red-faced dude in the cab that's just like going off. Yeah, I think he is Alex Jones in all of the Linkletter movies he appears in. Yeah, as Alex's fame grew, so did his popularity, he made a deal with Midas Resources, a syndication outfit that existed

to sell gold to crazy people. Or sanity disinclined people. Jones started making money of his own and by July of 2001, his show was on nearly 100 local affiliate stations across the country. On July 25th, Alex Jones made his most

successful prediction. Please call Congress, tell them we know the government is planning terrorism. He referenced the 1993 World Trade Center attack and identified Osama bin Laden as quote, the boogeyman they need in this Orwellian phony system. So basically, Alex Jones on July 25th,

2001, predicted that there would be an attack very likely on the World Trade Center, possibly involving planes, and he identified Osama bin Laden as the person who would be blamed for it. Now, I do want to point out right now that his prediction was not entirely accurate, and we're going to play a section of that prediction

that you will not find familiar. We've seen the news stories that you've wanted to blow things up, that you have blown things up, and that you're saying that 4 million of us are going to die and we need martial law and the Associated Press. Yeah, so he wasn't right about everything, but you got to give a guy credit

calling in July an attack like that. It's close enough that he was able to make a career off of the fact that he predicted the 9-11 attacks. Well, surely that, like, he was able to translate that into listeners and zealots that would like follow him to the ends of the earth, right?

Yeah, and there's also some confirmation bias there, I think, because if if people want to believe that he's making accurate predictions, it's very easy to ignore all the inaccurate predictions he made before that one. Well, it's like the Nostradamus effect.

I mean, Nostradamus predicted 9-11. Yeah, exactly. Like, if you predict doom and gloom every single day for years, sometimes those predictions will line up with a real attack. And the 1993 World Trade Center attack was a really prominent terror attack.

Osama bin Laden was a prominent terrorist. It's not out of nowhere. Yeah, so that's my question here, Robert. Did he claim to have any insider information or was he privy to something? Yeah, I mean, he claimed to have sources and he claimed to have because he was talking about how, like,

we know that the press is going to support martial law and stuff. Like, he was basing all of this. He always says that he's got, like, white papers and sources and stuff that he reads all this from, but he claimed to have had inside information that this attack was coming.

From an anonymous source. From a bunch of anonymous sources and stuff. This has been verified. This has been proven. We have the sources and then he doesn't give them. But credit where it's due, he called a terror attack that sounded like 9-11 wound up being

a couple of months before 9-11. Here's Alex Jones speaking later about this time. So, Jones got in trouble at first because obviously right after 9-11 he declared it to have been a government attack and he was probably the first prominent person in the country to declare the 9-11 attacks

a government conspiracy. This is like 9-11 was an inside job. That was sort of the big buzz phrase that was flying around at the time. And he is the guy who started, like, he's not obviously, I'm going to guess, that when that happened thousands of conspiracy theorists around the world had similar ideas.

But Jones was the first prominent conspiracy theorist to really hammer home his belief that 9-11 was an inside job. And gain traction with it too, right? Whether positive or negative, he was the first, he became the face of that. And he would replay that clip of him predicting it

and stuff and that got him tens of thousands of followers, probably millions by the time the real height of that conspiracy theory. And I'm not the man to deny anyone their crowning achievement. Alex is, if nothing else, probably the luckiest conspiracy theorist in history. But like you said, he makes a lot of

predictions and I want to make sure that we provide some context here. Because Alex Jones has predicted one disaster a day for roughly 20 straight years and through, yeah, yeah. So just so no one thinks he's psychic, I would like to zoom forward real quick to 2010 and the release of the Robert Rodriguez

and Danny Trejo film, Machete. Now, Alex was terrified of this movie because it showed Mexicans with Machetes attacking mostly white bad guys. So here's a prediction he made about the movie Machete, just so we don't think that maybe he is magic or whatever. And this is an Austin thing too.

Rodriguez is an Austin guy, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Rodriguez and Jones know each other. I don't think well, but I'm not sure I've seen that. Whether he knows it or not, Robert Rodriguez, I would say it's a 90% chance right now, is going to trigger

racial riots and racial killings in the United States with the September release of his film, Machete. First of all, it's like the most minor Robert Rodriguez film ever. I don't know if anybody saw that movie.

I certainly have. And you know what, to Jones' credit here, at least he wasn't trying to say Machete or something like that. That's fair, that's fair. And also, I want to note, our super producer, Casey, is outside the booth with us and he is laughing so hard at some of these

that we can hear him in here. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Well played, sir. Well, I mean, you guys remember the machete race riots, right? That was a dark time for this country. It really was. Real turning point. I didn't think we were going to come back from that. We were going to buy them in stores.

I do just want to say that Ben and I also do another show called Stuff They Don't Want You To Know that's like, we're not a conspiracy theorist. We call ourselves conspiracy realists, but the idea is like critical thinking applied to conspiracy theories. So it's like, we look at them. It's like, why are people talking about this? What are people saying on the Internet?

Why is this interesting? Why is this a fascinating thought experiment? And we get so many crazy emails in our email box. And most, a lot of them are like these group emails that are sent to dozens and dozens of addresses. Some are just predicting a disaster a day. So he set the tone for this. I mean, this is a thing.

Yeah, and it's a smart thing to do if you want to be in the business of making conspiracies. You want to make as many prophecies as you can because it moves. It's the same thing that like an evangelical doom and gloom preacher would do. You know, you make so many predictions about the end of the world or whatever.

And it doesn't matter that each of them is fake because what's important is people, some people want to always be that amped up. They want to feel like the stakes are always that high. It's about the journey. Yeah, it's about the journey to the end of the world. Not whether or not the world

ends. So, Jones treated his luck as prophecy and his show began to spread like wildfire. At first, he was mostly popular in the moist, weird underground of Internet nerds in the early 2000s, which I'm going to guess everyone on this podcast was a member of one way or the other.

I just cringed at your use of the word moist, but that's a personal thing for me. I thought it was a vocative and appropriate, but disturbing. Yeah. Well, we passed Alex Jones around like a joint. He was Bill Hicks without the humor. He was Robert Anton Wilson without the humanity. He was a

strange and unique little nut screaming into the abyss when we went on strung out red eyed drives across the Southwestern, wherever you happen to be driving late at night. But as the Internet spread, so did Alex Jones. And he would not stay small forever, but

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We're back and we're talking about Alex Jones, who has just started to really drive home the fact that he predicted 9-11 along with a bunch of shit that never happened. Anyway, he's making a lot of hay out of that and his first big break came courtesy of a man you may know,

Charlie Sheen. In 2006, Jones interviewed Sheen on Infowars about his belief in 9-11 conspiracy theories, most of which had of course been spread via Infowars. This video, because Charlie Sheen is a prominent guy, went really, really viral and that same year, Alex Jones published

the 9-11 conspiracy film Loose Change. He was a producer on Loose Change, which is why a lot of people will still make the joke that jet fuel can't melt steel beams. That's where that comes from. So, Alex Jones Loose Change really ignites the 9-11 conspiracy

movement. And for the first time in his life, Alex Jones became more than just a local Austin celebrity or a nut beloved by truck drivers. He launched the Infowars store in 2006 and he started selling diet supplements in 2013, using his shows as free advertising for

his own products. Alex Jones was the first person to really grasp how much money could be made by being famous and trusted in selling people bogus healthcare products on the internet. Nowadays, Ben Shapiro, Gwyneth Paltrow, dozens and dozens of different public figures sell various health products using

their sort of websites and podcasts and media networks as a way to drive sales. But Alex Jones was the guy who invented that. You guys don't have behind the bastards branded life straws? I think you're missing out on that niche. You know, for just $99.95

you can get a bottle of 12 behind the bastards iodine tablets guaranteed to make sure you have enough iodine to listen to this show. I personally endorse those, by the way. I think you get a price break if you order in bulk. What about cyanide tablets? That's what I want. We also sell cyanide

tablets. Yeah, those are cheaper. We're trying to really drive the cyanide. But anyway, yeah, so I just feel it's important to recognize that Alex Jones was kind of like the Steve Jobs of sleazily selling people expensive supplements on the internet.

What a way to put that. Huh? Yeah, I mean, he blazed that trail. He was the first guy. I had no idea seriously that he was the pioneer there. I thought he was just you know what it is? It's because it's so ubiquitous

in like alarmist conspiratorial shows to, you know, you hear the ads about how the economy's going to collapse and then it goes to another ad about how you should buy gold. You know what I mean? But he got to start with buying gold. Wasn't that like his first big thing? Yeah, but I didn't

know he was the first. And like in 2014 when Glenn Beck was everywhere on the air, he was always selling like gold stuff and that he was that was very much descendant from Alex Jones because he was the first guy to realize that like there's a whole constellation of expensive things that people who are scared about the end

of the world always want to buy and if you can keep them convinced that the world is always ending and get them to trust you and then tell them that your ridiculous safety supplies or supplements or whatever will protect them that you can make a shitload of money. And that's actually what our second

episode's going to be, but I just wanted to make the point that years before Gwyneth Paltrow made Goop, Alex Jones was selling people silver to put up their butts. Now Infowars grew into a major production. No longer was Alex recording a show from his house and filming video in a spare room. Now he had a studio

semi-professional production values and a whole staff. One of his producers from this early period was impressed by Alex's ability to talk for an hour about stories he hadn't read more than the titles of. Another employee recalled the Buzzfeed quote sometimes he'll say he has sources and he's been told a piece of news that has been

confirmed, but we wouldn't have that information. Later we'd find out it was because a week earlier we had a caller on air who theorized about something and Alex repeated it as fact. So you mentioned earlier having doing your conspiracy show and getting emails from nuts.

I suspect a lot of Alex's sources are emails like that. Like cause he's think of the lists Alex Jones must be on. Oh yeah. We have it confirmed now from the email. And he shakes it too.

I'm shaking a bunch of paper right now. Verified. It does feel good. We should be filming this so people can watch me shake at a camera and get all red faced. Anyway. So in September of 2007 Alex Jones

interrupted Geraldo Rivera's life on Fox News. Rivera was doing what I'm sure was a tasteful and informative report on the secret world of restroom gay sex. But then Alex showed up to get in the middle of it shouting 9-11 was an inside job through a megaphone until he was

removed by the NYPD. Which is like almost a singularity of classlessness. Geraldo Rivera talking about gay restroom sex while Alex Jones rants about 9-11 conspiracies on the same frame of a television show. It's amazing. Tell me we have a clip of this.

There's got to be a clip. Are we just going to have to use our imaginations? You're going to have to use your imaginations for that. I didn't pull that one up because there was other clips. That's fair. We can just reenact it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who wants to be Geraldo? I'll take one for the team.

I say we put the kibosh on this and move on. On March 18th 2008 Alex Jones became an invited guest of Fox News. Judge Andrew Napolitano had him on as quote the great Alex Jones. They talked about the fact that Alex in Info Wars had suddenly become a substantial influence

on other conservative media personalities like Glenn Beck. Alex said I've never seen an awakening this big. I'm seeing Glenn Beck talk about the New World Order on Fox. I'm seeing you talk about it. We're seeing Lou Dobbs talk about it. We're seeing mainline hosts. Limbaugh is even talking about world government.

Michael Savage is talking about how Obama may stage crises to bring in martial law. So all the things that I was talking about in the wilderness 10 plus years ago are now hitting mainstream and it's great. So that's... Okay, I'm sorry. Hold on. Point of order Robert. Michael

Savage as mainstream? That guy is loony tunes. You know, I hate to argue with you on this, but I grew up in Texas with a very conservative family and I heard Michael Savage three or four times a week and my parents aren't conspiracy theorists. They're just very conservative.

He's not that far out. If you're right wing, he was not in that period of time far out of the mainstream. You know what it was then? I bet it's because I started listening to him later in life, maybe later in his career. And when I heard him, he was like

based in California and talked about how much he hated the commies in California, but he still lived there. Oh boy. And I don't know what he's doing now or if he's gone further to the fringes now, but when I was a kid at least, I heard him a lot. He's definitely like

like Glenn Beck, one of those voices who was just regularly a part of our lives. So the first broadcast of the Alex Jones live show was in April of 2008. I found a copy of at least a lot of that broadcast. The link will be up on our site, but the first

minute and a half is just the AC-DC song, Balls to the Wall. Then Alex Classic. He's got great taste in music. He puts up a lot of obscure like industrial metal from the 80s.

Something that's always interested me is Alex Jones's musical tastes. Which is why it's interesting that you say he might be a secret DJ. I would kind of love to hear his music. Yeah. Anyway, AC-DC's song Balls to the Wall plays for a minute and a half and then Alex Jones begins ranting about

how all of the world religions are controlled by the same group of people. Eventually the footage cuts to Alex Jones wearing a Ron Paul 2008 t-shirt. He's talking with an Irish guest about Margaret Thatcher. Alex allows his guest to speak for a while, occasionally cutting in to move things along when the show starts to drag.

He talks about the Illuminati and they eventually wind up on the subject of Senator Joseph McCarthy who Alex loves. He goes on a rant about how the Soviet Union was funded by the U.S. Army. So, we're going to play a clip from that. That the Army and then our government was funding the Soviets, he was totally destroyed instantly

because that was about to expose their communism was just a fake front. Just like we knew from books that were written and inside people that Mao was put into power in 1949, now it's admitted on the History Channel and they have the old CIA section chiefs who are now dead but videos of them admitting that they

put Mao into power. Alan, what? So, we're at normal Alex, like today Alex Jones by 2008 or so. His politics are a little bit different but you hear the voice, right? He's gone all gravelly and dark. So, he's definitely there. He's still kind of

bipartisan because he's definitely saying that like the whole government is engaged in a conspiracy to make people believe communism is real when it's just a front for the U.S. Army. So, he's not a partisan hack yet but he's definitely evolved from beginning Alex Jones.

Yeah. The election of Barack Obama as president of the United States was probably the best thing that ever happened to Alex. It seems to have taken him by surprise as does the surge of far-right sentiment that immediately followed President Obama's election. The podcast Knowledge Fight is currently going over every

post-election episode of Alex Jones' show to kind of document Alex's transition from a total political outsider to a dedicated prophet of the far-right but they've shown that he didn't see the Tea Party coming. The first episode of his show, when the Tea Party got brought up by a caller, he clearly had no idea what it was. Eventually though

he got on board and realized that this represented a group of people that he could sell stuff to. Alex Jones and Info Wars were responsible for spreading that viral poster of Obama as the Joker if you glanced at a Tea Party protest in 2009 you would have seen that. In March of 2009, Alex Jones released

the documentary The Obama Deception, a two-hour movie about how Barack Obama was a grave threat to quote the hope of free humanity. Jones made the case that President Obama was going to take away America's freedom, a thing that totally happened. You all remember that, right? One former employee

later described the mood in Info Wars at the time as quote we were getting more and more calls from people who seemed unwell claiming that the FBI was watching their house. We kept saying we're the underdogs, that was our mantra but slowly it started to feel more like we were becoming the majority.

Yeah. So what spurred this change in him? He was just so freaked out by Obama in particular? I don't know. That's a good question because it makes sense why he because he obviously hated on Bush a ton.

He believes Bush murdered thousands of Americans to start a war using whatever the hell I don't want to get into 9-11 conspiracy theories but he hated Bush but Obama didn't even do anything for him to hate him. That's what I'm saying. It was just hope. It was just like let's turn the tide.

Let's just do some different stuff and be good people. I think there's a lot of implicit racism in there. You mentioned that at the top of the show. There's a lot of implicit racism in the surge of far-right sentiment that sprang up after Obama's election. With Jones, I'm not sure.

I'm sure some of it's racism. I think a lot of it though might just be simple economic sense. Knowing if I can scare the shit like Bush is out of the White House so I can't scare the left anymore into buying my shit, right? Because their guy's in office and they think

that this war stuff's going to get reduced. So now I have to scare people on the right. Well, how do I scare people on the right? I make Barack Obama look like a demon trying to take their freedom. And he wasted no time doing that. Immediately, yeah. And that's something that's pretty easy

for him to do, but I appreciate your point. You can't be a showman without a show. You know what I mean? Exactly. So do you think that it was I know we're speculating here, but do you think it was a matter of that cognizant level of

calculation or do you think he was just going with the flow? I think it's probably a mix of both. We'll get into that a little bit more later, but I see some calculation at the start of it because Obama hadn't done anything yet to justify a freak out,

and he engineered the freak out. With Bush, obviously, something like 9-11 happened, something as crazy as planes flying into a tower, people will make conspiracies about it, and he jumped onto that, and maybe that was legitimate. He moved every conspiracy he spread about 9-11.

I do think Obama marks the point where he's just trying to make money. Okay. But that's my theory. So they made a lot of money in early 2009, the early Obama years. On good days, Alex would run around yelling, you get a bonus. We had a huge sale day.

Another former employee recalled a time when Alex took everyone out to the Infowars warehouse and shot at boxes of DVDs with a bow and arrow. Apparently in celebration, this was recalled as a fun time. Like all great artists, Alex Stoll, in particular, he stole from Rush Limbaugh. Several former employees

claimed he nursed an intense jealousy for the right-wing radio icon. Jones' signature Smokes 30 Packs a Day voice is apparently an imitation of Rush Limbaugh's voice. Again, we listened to his earlier stuff. He's clearly putting on a voice because he doesn't always talk like that.

One employee later claimed, quote, we'd spend weeks getting everything just right in the studio, then he'd go for a drive and hear Rush again and say, I need my voice to sound something like that. And so we'd completely re-engineer the sound to make him gruffer. So, that's interesting. A key moment in Alex's evolution

happened in 2011 because that's the year he got really good at Google bombing. According to that Rolling Stone profile, quote, asking his audience to stage a mass online search of the phrase Revolt Against the TSA, a tactic known as Google bombing, Jones instantly manipulated the term to the top of Google's search index.

As intended, the maneuver caught the sensitive traffic antennae of Matt Drudge, who put the TSA story on the national news agenda. Our show was the detonator on the cap of the TSA story, and Drudge was the barrel of the gun, says Jones. So this is like early fake news. Like this is like, yes.

He's also the fucking Steve Jobs of fake news because he really figured out, he's not just putting out fake news stories. He recognizes how to get his listeners to manipulate the algorithms of social media and search engines in order to make it that popular.

He's trying to tip the scales to freak people out and to start some kind of firestorm of paranoia that's in his favor to help him sell bullshit. Exactly. Question, was it phrased as when he was telling his audience to do this, was it phrased as you can go search

now to learn more about this or was he telling them make this the top search term? He was telling them to make this a search term. Okay. That was the explicit goal. And he says the goal was to get this story to Matt Drudge. I'm going to guess

a lot of our listeners don't read the Drudge Report regularly, but it is currently number 119 on Alexa. The 119th most popular website on the entire internet. There are very few websites in existence larger

than the Drudge Report. It is one of the most influential you could call it journalism outlets on the planet. And Drudge and Jones have a mutually parasitic relationship. When Alex was banned from Twitter, that was the top story on the Drudge Report a few minutes later.

Drudge regularly will scan info wars and will put, like, basically comb the crazy out of his stories and then put them up on his site. That's been going on for years and it started at least as early as 2011. Alex Jones speaks positively of Matt Drudge and regularly

cites his website as well. He feels differently about Glenn Beck. So here's that Rolling Stone profile. People inside his company tell me Beck follows what we do closely, says Jones. It's frustrating that I've never sold out yet I'm being gobbled up by this giant Pac-Man who puts my work through his corporate media assembly line. He

takes information from me about secret combines and elites and then spins it against big government. But he ignores big business. He says George Soros is at the top of the New World Order power pyramid. Give me a break. I have no love for Soros but I don't trust Beck. 98% of my audience hates him. New listeners tell me I'm a Beck wannabe.

I'm like, no, it's the other way around. So we have Alex Jones to thank for a lot of Glenn Beck. Easily wounded. This ego, you know? He is and it's fun that he talks about he says George Soros was in a big deal back in 2011 or so

because he does not shut up about George Soros today. George Soros is making marijuana stronger. He's behind everything bad now. It's just interesting how he switched over time. But Obama's first term is a great time for Alex Jones. It goes so well in fact that

people who were close to him at the time speculate that he voted for Barack Obama in 2012. One employee recalled, quote, he just kept saying, oh my god, if Obama loses we're out of business. One of the guys in there asked, you didn't vote for Obama, did you? And Alex said nothing. Just a

grimace. I don't know what it meant. Whoa. There's a conspiracy for us to start about Alex Jones. I know at least three employees told Buzzfeed stories about how a number of people at Info Wars at the time suspected Jones had voted for Obama.

This remains my favorite Alex Jones conspiracy. I bet that drives him insane. I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. If he's cynical enough to do it, then I don't know.

If he did it, that's proof that this is, I mean, maybe he wasn't lying in his custody hearing and this is all an act. I don't think it's all an act, but I wouldn't be surprised if he voted for Barack Obama because he wanted millions of dollars and because he wanted to continue being relevant and he

attached his relevance to being able to stir up hate against, you know, the system, the president. So Obama won in 2012 obviously and for a little while things remained good for Jonesland. He made millions of dollars selling supplements, rifle parts, and survival supplies like seeds and body armor.

It's possible that during the Obama years Jones took home like 20 or 30 million dollars himself, maybe more. In 2013, at an event for the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists, Alex Jones met Roger Stone. This was the beginning of what I like to call the likeliest friendship

in history. Former Paul Manafort partner and sure to be frequent bastard podside character Roger Stone told Washington Post this, we kind of hit it off. He's fearless, a showman. He likes a drink, a cigar, bounty stories, hunting and fishing. He's a man's man. Roger Stone. Self-proclaimed

man's man. A full grown man's man. And Roger Stone now hosts a show on Infowars. Where just last week he defended himself against the surely looming indictment that's coming from the Mueller investigation. That's fine.

It is good fun. In Roger Stone, no one has ever been more ready to be an Infowars guest than Roger Stone. He is, was made for that show. It's like they poured him into a mold. Ah, what a guy. Anyway, other people around Jones at this time

say that as Obama's second term drew to a close, Alex started to change. One ex-employee said, quote, it became less about affecting change and more about being sensational and making money. It didn't start out that way. He was a lovely person to hang around for a long time, but soon that evaporated. Four employees

described Alex Jones to Buzzfeed as, quote, a tyrant. One person called him Blackbeard meets Hitler. One minute just on a high and swashbuckling and calling us to action, the next punching out walls. So when Donald Trump first appeared on the scene, Jones didn't pay him very much mind. He kind of

dismissed him as a plant by the globalist or a fake at first. But then Roger Stone got involved in the Trump campaign and introduced Alex to Donald Trump. In December of 2015, Trump appeared on Infowars for a 30-minute conversation with Alex Jones. In 15 years, Alex had gone

from running a website out of his spare room to talking with the soon-to-be president for an audience that numbered in the tens of millions. But Alex Jones never lost the common touch. To prove that, here's a video he filmed when Caitlyn Jenner transitioned in 2015. Just so you know, listener, in this video, he

is shirtless. This is the first of many shirtless Alex Jones videos, and he's wearing what he admits are his own dirty gym socks on his ears. So... Trans-zoological, I believe is the term. I may as well be trans-abled and shot my arms and legs off and I'd be known as a biscuit

and live in a box. I'm taking care of it. If you don't accept it, you're hateful. In fact, if you don't adopt my lifestyle and wear dirty brown socks on your ears after you work out, you're a racist, you're a homophobe, you're an anti-zoological phobe, you're a piece of filth. So now, I

become my new self. Oh, my God. Yeah, he's pretending to be a dog in that. Yeah, and just to point out, he had a lower third on the screen that said Rough Rough Jones. Yes, Rough Rough Jones. Yeah. Now, is this the first shirtless Alex

Jones video? Oh, good God, no. I don't think this is the first one. It's the earliest I found, maybe, but he's... I have... Up on the site we'll have, I think it's like a 16 minute supercut of a... I don't even think they're all of the shirtless scenes. We will be talking about that.

But I think at this point, his degeneration into modern Jones is finished. Like, it's kind of like watching Danny DeVito's character in Always Sunny from the second season, where he's a businessman to like, where he's eating garbage. Alex Jones has gone from a charming man in a suit who talks like a normal person

to wearing his filthy gym socks on his ears, insulting a random woman for no good reason. Like, he's completely degenerated now. Anyway. Full Golem Jones at this point. Yeah, he has... Schmigel has died long ago.

Yeah. So, 2016 went the way we all know it did. Donald Trump gradually defeated his Republican rivals, and eventually Hillary Clinton. Alex Jones watched his reach and influence grow throughout the campaign. Thanks to the algorithms on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, he had a direct highway into the

brains of tens of millions of people. In 2011, his YouTube channel had some 80 million views. In 2018, that number was more than 1.2 billion. Now, Donald Trump called Jones after his election victory to thank Jones' viewers for their support, and Alex

Jones for, quote, standing up for what's right. According to Alex Jones, this is what the president-elect said. I just talked to kings and queens of the world, world leaders, you name it, but it doesn't matter. I want to talk to you, to thank your audience, and I'll be on in the next few weeks to thank them. So, that didn't

happen. He didn't show up on Info Wars again. I think the adults around Donald Trump were like, you can't keep showing up on Info Wars. The same people who rip up his paperwork? Hit him on the nose with a newspaper. No.

Not go on Alex Jones. That time is gone for you. Maybe they played a super cut of shirtless Alex Jones for him, and we're just like, we can't let you do this. He's like, but Putin doesn't wear a shirt. He's probably so pissed that he has to wear shirts right now. Mm-hmm. Oh, God.

Thank God for that. I will legitimately say whoever's keeping a shirt on the president is a hero, if that's a difficult thing to do. Anyway. On November 9th, Alex Jones in tears cheered Donald Trump's plan to, quote, build a better world. He toasted

champagne glasses with Roger Stone. Frank Sinatra's My Way played. Oh, no. Yeah. Wait, I'm sorry. So, he turned it on, but he couldn't turn it off again? The tears? Yeah, I mean, he can't turn it off anymore. I think he's passed that point in his life now. He's

always on. He's like when your bomb told you not to make that face. You know, if you stay a racist conspiracy theorist long enough, it'll stick that way. So, Alex Jones was, after Trump's election, on the surface at least on top of the world. But like the conspiracies he loved,

there were more twists and turns in his journey than were visible on the surface. On Thursday's episode, we're going to talk about Alex's vicious multi-year, multi-million-dollar divorce, his frankly shocking custody battle, and the moment when, Icarus-like, he flew too close to the sun and got banned from all mainstream social media.

Tomorrow, though, we're going to talk about Alex Jones' supplement empire, and all the people he may have gotten killed along the way. So, that's what's coming up. I'd like to thank both of you, Noel Benjamin, for being on my show, for talking with me about Alex Jones. How are you feeling after part one of this epic

three-part thing? A little bit dead inside, a little broken, a little on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but also, you know, kind of chipper and ready to see what comes next. Personally, I'm thrilled. I'm learning a lot, and when it started, stuff they don't want

you to know, I figured we'd run into Alex Jones, but this deep dive is a real eye-opener, man. The Steve Jobs stuff alone. Yeah, I really think that's a fair way to bill him, because whatever else he is, and this is something people, you talk about, like, to people who

would, like, study broadcast, radio history, and, like, podcasting, and how it sort of evolved. He's a seminal figure in that. He's an important figure in the industry that we're all involved in. He is an innovator. He's also the shirtless guy that we saw wearing his own

filthy gym socks on his ears, for no real good reason. He contains multitudes, Alex Jones. Yeah, I did also like your Rudyard Kipling reference there earlier, with the common touch. Yeah. I have a question. Just no spoilers, Robert, but

in the next episode, are we going to learn whether or not Alex Jones sells branded tinfoil? I mean, I actually haven't run across Jones selling tinfoil, but we are going to talk about the lead-based supplements that he sold to people.

I'm in. No, Benjamin, you guys want to plug your plugables before we close out this episode? Absolutely. Noel and I are the co-host of a show called Ridiculous History, which examines the strange, bizarre, unusual

people, places, events, and things throughout the span of human civilization. It's a little shallower dive, but it's a lot of fun. And the episodes are like, you know, 30, 45 minutes, and pretty easy to get through and binge. Nice, snackable podcast episodes. We do those, and we also

do a show called Stuff That I Want You To Know, which applies critical thinking to conspiracy theories. And I think we did one on Alex Jones turning the frogs gay pretty recently, and that was a lot of fun. But I've learned a lot more than I ever wanted to know, and God, it sounds like we're going to learn a lot more still.

This is just the beginning of the journey. In the meantime, while you're waiting for the next part of this three-part series on Behind the Bastards, you can check out every podcast we've ever done for either show on our websites, RidiculousHistoryShow.com or StuffTheyDon'tWantYouToKnow.com. Beautiful. You can find me

on Twitter at IWriteOK. I have a book on Amazon, a brief history of vice where I experiment on myself with dangerous ancient drugs, so you can pick that up too if you want. You can find this podcast on the internet at BehindTheBastards.com, where we'll have all of the sources and video clips for this

ridiculous three-part episode. And you can find us on social media, Instagram, Twitter, at at BastardsPod. So, we'll be back tomorrow and Thursday with more shit about Alex Jones. Until then, maybe try buying a t-shirt off of our T-Public store

Behind the Bastards. You can get NachosNotNazis, DoritosNotDictators, DJ Stahl, and we got all that stuff, so buy it and tune in for the next episode. And remember, I love about 40% of you. Alphabet Boys

is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside this hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents

catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you want to be. Alphabet Boys

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest,

I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.