Behind the Bastards - Part Three: The Fall of Alex Jones

Episode Date: September 20, 2018

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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. Hey everybody, welcome to Behind the Bastards. I'm Robert Evans and this is the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. I'm going to take a quick bite from a delightful Dorito and I'm going to introduce our guest for the day. Do you hear the sound of it biting back? It feels so good to hear that.

Oh my God, Benjamin, no co-hosts of Ridiculous History and stuff they don't want you to know. We're also a little punchy right now because we're on the East Coast and so it's eight o'clock right now and we've been here since about eight a.m. But it's fun. I'm like writing it out. I'm having a great time also. We can see each other on video. So every time that Robert eats a Dorito, we notice the pause. We get the whole gravitas of the performance. Yeah, and I take a shot of whiskey. And I'm personally very excited that we, you know, I want to welcome all the listeners to this episode that we've teased for a little bit because that last episode had some really heavy, emotionally powerful and despair worthy stuff. And I think we're finally setting ourselves up for some catharsis, right, Robert?

Yes, we are. So just in case you're tuning in for part three for some reason and haven't watched the first two, we're talking about Alex Jones. In part one, we talked about his rise and how he sort of invented a lot of the field that we're all currently employed in and figured out how to market stuff using the Internet and podcasts and the radio and really revolutionary ways. In part two, we talked about how he built an empire selling supplements, some of which contain six times the recommended daily dose of lead, and how his empire was heavily dependent on convincing people that the government was attacking them and that they were under threat and about to be destroyed. And that this sparked a number of mass shootings, or at least was a factor, potentially, in a number of mass shootings, because a whole lot of his fans have committed mass shootings. We ended by talking about the Sandy Hook conspiracy theory, which Alex Jones was one of the origin points for and which resulted in a massive lawsuit that is still ongoing. So as you talked about today is the Schadenfreude episode of Alex Jones, the fall of the House of Jones, where we talk about sort of the collapse or what appears to be the collapse of this empire that he has built. But before we get into all of the lawsuits, I'm going to go back in time a little bit to the 2016 election. It is possible that Alex Jones did not want Donald Trump to win the 2016 election. You remember back in 2012, there was some suspicion by people close to Alex that he actually voted for Barack Obama because he was afraid that he would make less money with a Republican in the White House.

And when on election night it started to look like Trump was going to win, one staffer who was with Jones on that night reported later, quote, he looked depressed. You could tell when he found out that Trump was going to win. You could see his mood change. This employee noted that, quote, his business is based on a fear of the left taking over a conservative way of life. He has to have that power of fear, that idea that they're going to take your guns. Trump winning, put it all in jeopardy. Now, I don't know how true that is. I suspect the employee who said that may have been Ashley Lynn Beckford, who filed an EEOC claim against Alex this year that we'll be talking about in a little bit. But maybe not. We don't know if that quote is true. We do know that on paper at least late 2016 was the apex of Alex Jones' influence. He claims to have had 18 million viewers watching the returns come in live on election night. Now, a few weeks later, in mid-December, Alex filmed one of the most incredible videos I've ever seen in my entire life.

I thoroughly suggest you listeners find this video on our website because it shows Alex Jones looking like an unhinged goddamn maniac and more so than he has ever looked before. In this video that we're about to play the audio from, he is shirtless wandering around the woods near his studio in the dead of winter. One of his cameramen says it's 25 degrees outside. I think he's on acid or something. He looks like it, man. I think he looks like he's about to change into a wolf. He's like mid-metamorphosis. Imagine Alex Jones about to burst into werewolfdom and you'll have a good idea of how he looks in this. Now, in the part of the video right before I play this, Jones claims that the media would freak out if they knew how connected he was to the new halls of power and to President Trump. And now we're going to play a good chunk of this video for y'all to experience. I do have right here only on my heart, but the point is is that this is what it's all about.

This is what it's like when you don't sit in front of video games all day and act like you're intellectual and act like you're tough. And I'm not criticizing if you play video games. The point is it's designed and it's meant to dehumanize you in every single way. It feels so good to break free from the matrix. It feels so good to be alive. It feels so good to be involved. And it feels so good to just feel my humanity rising as we resist the globalist and as the spirit of humanity re-enters the earth and the enemy just collapses. The looks on both of your faces right now are priceless. I wish this was a video podcast or whatever. Oh my God. That is the most bonkers thing I've ever seen in my life. No, there's no doubt. He's like on Hiawasca or some shit. I mean like that. I don't know what is going on with him.

What is forest bathing? Forest bathing? Yes. The video goes on for quite a while and he continues to wander around in the woods followed by a giggling camera crew. Joan suggests staying outside for hours. He repeatedly says how good he feels in the cold. He says at one point, quote, people jump into buckets of ice. That's what's cold. Which is not an untrue statement. That is cold. He tells an elaborate story about going hunting with his dad all in the same manic tone. He suggests marching down to Barton Creek and then he says, it's weird. Your body doesn't get cold if you wear gloves. What? He's wearing gloves and nothing else on his chest in that video.

Now, we have a lot. Atlanta, where our podcasts are based, beautiful city. We have a lot of very interesting people struggling with drug addiction. And that totally sounds like crackhead logic. I could see somebody assuring us that it's okay, they're not cold, or they can't get wet or something because they have gloves. He does definitely seem like he could be on crack. If you were to tell me this is a video of Alex Jones having just smoked a big rock of crack, I would say, yeah, that's maybe. We're going to play one more clip from that video. So right before this next clip, he starts talking about going bald and then he throws in an ad offering 50% off of colloidal silver. Even wandering around on drugs shirtless in the woods, Alex Jones knows how to plug his fucking products. All right. These are really badass stuff. People asked, I mean, I turned into a blob. I'm not in great shape now, but I lost almost 70 pounds, 65 pounds, gained a lot of muscle. And it is, I haven't taken any brain forces. I just didn't need it. I had coffee today and I just feel hired to kite with what's happened in the world. I mean, we're battling the globalist. We're affecting world change as a man. My body just goes, this is great. Here's more energy. Great job.

I almost want to play the whole video, but that would be too much for the people listening. But it's a remarkable thing. You should watch this video of Alex Jones shirtless wandering in the woods and screaming. He's going to feel like the gamut of human emotions here. He deserves an Emmy for that video. I don't know what Emmy, but just someone should give him one. This is right after the election. He certainly doesn't seem bummed about Trump winning in this video. So who knows what his actual feelings were. There's obviously been a lot of debate recently in over the last couple of years about how much influence Alex Jones now has in the White House. In 2017, BuzzFeed made a good case for how his ideas at least regularly spread to the president. In early March, in response to claims that the Trump administration was potentially colluding with Russia, an InfoWars editor tweeted an old photo of New York Senator Chuck Schumer looking chummy with Vladimir Putin. 12 hours later, the image was splashed atop the Drudge Report, and less than 12 hours after that, Trump's presidential account had tweeted it.

It wasn't the first time something like this had happened. In November 2016, InfoWars published a story citing an unverified claim from a former Texas Health and Human Services Commission deputy commissioner that 3 million non-citizens had voted illegally. The InfoWars story was leaked by the Drudge Report, and 13 days later, wound up the subject of a tweet from Trump's account. As Jones put it last summer to the journalist John Ronson, quote, I put out a video, a message to Trump, and then two days later, he lays out the case. It's like sending up the bat signal. Alex Jones is able to get information to Donald Trump, but it's possible and very likely in fact that the two have not communicated directly since that time Trump called him right after the election. In fact, it doesn't look like the direct line to President Trump that Alex was hoping for in that shirtless video ever came to pass. In March of 2017, in an interview on the Travis County Courthouse Steps, Alex Jones told a reporter, quote, We don't speak much since he became president.

It's unclear if Jones is happy with the influence he has or angry because he doesn't get to communicate directly and formally to the president. I really don't know. In any case, the first hundred days of the Trump administration were actually not a good time for Alex Jones. For one thing, that dude held up the Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria with an AR-15, believing child sex slaves were hidden in its basement. Jones wound up having to apologize for helping to spread the theory in order to avoid liability for his actions. Then he still wound up in court fighting a vicious custody battle. 2017 was the spark for a so far endless series of lawsuits for Mr. Jones. Now, during these episodes, I've repeatedly referenced a 2011 Rolling Stone article, Meet Alex Jones.

I told you that while it definitely took the stance that Jones was a crank, it presented a pretty fond picture of the guy, quotes like this. People think I'm depressive and angry, but it's the opposite. Jones tells me over Margaritas at his favorite Mexican joint, my life is a love letter to humanity, what the globalists do is a hate letter, a curse. The article describes Jones as a doting father, a devoted husband, and definitely not a racist. Quote, unlike many of his conspiracy-minded predecessors, Henry Ford, the Ku Klux Klan, the militia movement, Jones has no tolerance for racism or anti-Semitism. There's no globalist command center, and I never make it about certain groups, says Jones, whose wife is of Jewish descent and whose adopted sister, Marley, is Asian-American. So, Jones denies being racist, and Rolling Stone was willing to give him credit on that in 2011. Now, in 2018, we have some evidence that he may in fact be a little bit racist, and that's what we're going to get into right now.

We're about to read some excerpts from a complaint made by Ashley Lynn Beckford, a black former employee of Alex Jones and Infowars. She made this complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2018. The complaint does not portray a man with no tolerance for racism. Ashley, who I believe was the third-ever black employee at Infowars, filed this in February of 2018. You can find a link to the whole report on our site, but I'm going to read some quotes from it. To my knowledge, I was the only African-American woman ever to work at Free Speech Systems LLC. I was at the forefront of Infowars News Reports as a broadcast news analyst during the Trump election season and transition period. Both African-American men ever to work for the production team were fired within the same month, July 2017. I believe that certain actions, such as underpaying me, were taken against me because I am a black individual. I was repeatedly mocked for my skin tone, and I was denied promotions to match the salary of other coworkers who did less work in a similar job.

I have no trouble believing this story, although I am certain that Alex Jones and Infowars deny it. So again, this is the report of an employee with a grievance. She's not an objective reporter, but she paints a fascinating picture of working at Infowars. Here's how she describes the hostile work environment. I was intimidated by the constant open carry and display of guns by coworkers in the workplace. My supervisors and peer colleagues often brandished guns to scare away crazed fans, which made me feel uncomfortable and unsafe at work every day. So apparently people regularly show up to Infowars and have to be waved off by gun-wielding Infowars employees. That's insane. Yeah, it really paints a vivid picture of the working environment there.

She claims that she and other employees were ordered to work longer weekday and weekend hours without pay. She claims they were repeatedly called motherfuckers by Alex's cousin, Buckley Hammond. She says that she was once called a coon. She recalls having to stop a colleague from calling black people colored on the air. And she recalls a colleague showing her a pair of swastika-covered shoes that he received as a gift from a fan. So, certainly seems like a lot of racism going on in the Infowars office. Jesus Christ. And I guess the MO then would at that point be for Alex Jones to say, I don't tolerate that and I'm not aware of it, right?

Yeah, he would deny any sort of awareness of anything like that. And he does deny any sort of awareness of that. But the complaint is still there. So Ashley tells the story of an ugly interaction she had when she was ordered to question people outside of a pro-Hillary rally in 2016. My cameraman, Josh Owens, who had worked in Infowars for years compared to my less than three month tenure, consistently pressured me to engage with the Hillary Clinton supporters as a black Trump promoter. I was subsequently subject to multiple people hurling insults and racial slurs at me, including Uncle Tom by one of the gay white male attendees. Another Clinton supporter, a white lesbian woman, told me that she knew more about black issues than I did because she is married to a black woman who was also present.

I went back to the Infowars office in tears, incredulous at how I was being racially attacked because of my support for a political candidate. And Alex Jones, taking advantage of my fragility in that moment, forced me to share what had happened to me on the air for YouTube and other social media that same night, feigning his own tears of empathy. So... Wow. That's pretty gross. Yeah. I will say there's some reasons to be a little bit suspicious of this lady. Like, she claims that this video she feels like damaged her ability to be hired as a journalist in the future.

And I gotta say, lady, working for Infowars damaged her ability to be hired as a journalist in the future. That is not the thing you want on your resume if you're shooting for a job with the New York Times. Yeah. But I don't have any trouble believing that it's a hostile work environment. Ashley goes on to claim that during this obviously traumatic and pretty fucked up time, Alex Jones copped a feel. Quote, After the broadcast, I was with Alex Jones, Rob Dew, and several other members in Rob Dew's office. Alex Jones was still pretending to feel sympathy for my plight as a black female Trump supporter, and he put his arm around my shoulder to initiate a side hug.

After he pulled me to his side, instead of removing his arm from my shoulder, he allowed his arm to slide down my back and he grabbed my butt with his right hand. Simultaneously, he was commenting to those in the room, Who wouldn't want to have a black wife? To response to my comment. I felt embarrassed and nervous, but I knew that he had specifically touched my behind at that moment as a sly come on that other people may not notice. It was extremely ironic because it was the lesbian white woman with the black wife who had mentioned earlier that night on camera how Alex Jones is a womanizer who loves gray goose. I didn't know then that later on that same night he would be drunk enough to feel confident about fondling his female staffers. Parentheses.

Most of the staff was drinking alcohol that night in the office, as was the usual on late nights. Alex Jones was in possession of his trademark mugs and paper cups, which the staffers often alleged contained alcohol-infused beverages. So, Alex Jones. Wow, what fuckery, that's crazy. Yeah. Well, so the idea then is that the guy is, I guess, trying to act as though he is a champion. And maybe it sounds like he's trying to diffuse the situation with the wife joke. But surely there's some kind of HR thing there, or no?

I have a lot of trouble believing that InfoWars has a particularly dedicated HR team. I'm just going to guess that's not one of the things they do really well. My read on that is that he was sort of making that joke while he was groping her almost as like a distraction. But I don't know, I wasn't there. That seems to be what she's saying. Yeah. I'm fascinated by the picture this also paints of the office, because now we know everyone is always armed at InfoWars. People regularly wave guns around, and whenever they work late nights, which is often they're drunk.

So it's a compound near the woods in Austin filled with drunken armed people ranting about conspiracies. And I can't believe I hate them, and it sounds like a terrible place. Because drunken, heavily armed, commune in the woods, sounds like it could be a lot of fun if it wasn't Alex Jackson. It sounds like there's also some potential for these people waving their dicks around. Oh my God, that has to be, right? Yeah. Oh no, it seems like rife for misogyny and ass-grabbery. Or even just waving their dicks around at each other, literally.

Sure, just for fun. Yeah. Yeah, I do have trouble imagining someone working for Alex for a long time and not seeing his dick. Like. I mean, first of all, we don't see below the belt for most of these shirtless vids. That's true. I conjecture that it's possible that he's full nude. Yeah, it is.

Especially in that woods video. I mean, it's anything in that woods video. That guy hates clothes, unless they're gloves. Wandering around naked, except for a pair of gloves in the winter. That does a nice job of scrubbing the sexual harassment complaint out of my memory. Yeah. So, what happens to her? Well, we'll get into that.

Right now, it seems to be an appropriate time to sell some products and services. Gotta move that product. Gotta move the products and those services. So, we will talk more about Ashley's complaint and then the litany of other lawsuits that Alex is dealing with right now. But first, consumerism. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. 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 were like a lot of guns.

He's a shark. And on the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks. 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 in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of 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. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't

a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back. We were just talking about some potential names for Alex Jones' products that we think might sell really well, like we know he does DNA force and iodine shield. I don't know, vitamin B12 assaultant battery. Unicorn tears. Niacin trespass.

Potassium genocide. That's a good band name back there. That's the mic drop. Yeah, I think we just discovered my new favorite improv game. It's like a warm-up. So we were just talking about Ashley Lynn Beckford's pretty detailed complaint about sexual harassment and rampant racism at the InfoWars office. She also alleges that the term, quote, fat black bitch was repeatedly used both by

InfoWars writers and articles. And if you Google InfoWars and those words, you will find a number of articles where that term comes up, usually referring to Black Lives Matter activists. But she says that it was also used repeatedly in the office and used around her specifically, people trying to get a rise out of her and whatnot. Just to clarify, I'm sorry to interrupt. So this term was used by actual paid writers and staff, not by just people dropping in on the forum?

Yeah, a number of paid writers and staff. There were a number of articles. She lists them in the complaint where the term fat black bitch was used in InfoWars articles. Holy smokes. Yeah, it's pretty bad. She reported her coworkers for using this term in the office, but nothing was done. She says that guns were brandished on a daily basis when she complained. Her supervisor told her it was part of the company culture and advised her to, quote,

keep her head down, which is good advice when a bunch of drunken men are waving guns around. Yeah, keep your head down. Maybe buy some of that Alex Jones body armor. She was told not to complain about things that made her uncomfortable, and Alex Jones, of course, continued to hit on her. Here's another story of that. Alex Jones came to my desk on one occasion to find out what I like to do for fun outside of work. It's my opinion that it was his intention to see if he could groom me for sexual exploitation,

because he also mentioned that I, quote, had a good body that looked like I worked out a lot. I was concerned that these unwanted sexual advances would eventually result in a request for sexual favors in exchange for promotions. In the office, it was rumored that he may have had inappropriate relationships with other female production staff employees. In addition, Alex Jones himself has alluded to the fact that he loves to grab women's backsides and videos that he has made and uploaded to YouTube. Alex often spent time shirtless and endlessly leering with or without a shirt at female guests and employees while creating a disgusting, hostile environment

that openly encourages his staff to stare at and make inappropriate comments towards women. I definitely believe that he spent a lot of time shirtless in the office. I have no trouble whatsoever believing that Alex Jones was regularly shirtless. Shirtless and leering, the Alex Jones story. Yeah, shirtless and leering and probably carrying a gun. Alex Jones. The complaint is a pretty remarkable document. Again, I can't claim to know how accurate it all is, but she does claim on this official legal document that she has audio tapes of much of the harassment.

Former Infowars video editor Rob Jacobson, who is Jewish, and that will be relevant in a minute, claims that he was discriminated against during his 13 years working with Alex Jones. He says he was called the studio's, quote, resident Jew, quote, the Jewish individual, and Jacobson, which I don't know why that's an anti-Jewish thing. But anyway, you get the picture. That's weird. A lot of anti-Semitism at the Infowars office. Rob says this about Alex Jones, quote,

my employer also inserted my face onto a photo of a Hasidic Jewish man and circulated that picture around the office. Holy shit. The idea that he's coding the term globalists and uses it to mean Jewish people seems pretty plausible. Really, really does. I would say so. The least surprising thing in the world would be that Alex Jones believes in a Jewish conspiracy. Yeah, that would not shock me at all.

Although I would actually be a little bit shocked. I go back and forth on this because part of me thinks he has never, at least never that I've come up with, I've never run into him in a video making a very clear, direct sort of reference to anti-Semitism or a Jewish conspiracy. And part of me not wonders, does Alex Jones have the discipline, if he really believes in this conspiracy, to hide it that much? Maybe he like, is anti-Semitic enough to find some jokes about it funny, but really doesn't believe in a conspiracy?

Because if he did, I feel like it might have leaked out more. I don't know, I go back and forth on this one. You don't think he's disciplined enough to keep it under wraps? He would just poop out of his mouth and come out with some anti-Semitic garbage? I think that if Alex Jones has believed this whole time in a giant Jewish global conspiracy, the most impressive thing about him is that he's been so disciplined enough to never be direct about it. That would be kind of impressive to me. Does he use the other dog whistle words, does he say Zionist and stuff like that?

I haven't run into that. He's more pro-Israel now, because he's become a lot more conservative, especially since Trump died under the White House. He used to be very critical of Israel, but it was always critical of Israeli foreign policy. And of course, obviously, you don't have to be anti-Semitic to have criticisms of Israel. And when I've listened to those videos, I have not run into anything where it sounds like he's an anti-Semitic crank. Other than that, it certainly seems like you could replace globalists with Jewish people in a rant and you would have a Nazi rant. But I don't know if that's Alex's intent or not.

I really go back and forth on this, because if it is, he's hiding it well. Yeah, so here's another thing that could be possible. If the profile that we are painting of this dude is accurate to a high enough degree, then it's completely possible that he would be able to have a disciplined approach due to the bottom line. Because what we're really asking about here is the nature of belief. How much does he believe his own bullshit? And it may well be that he just performs the belief when he feels like it will help him in a situation. So maybe behind closed doors with employees, he's not quite straight out saying Jews,

but he says them and nods a little bit so you can hear the italics when he speaks. He also does hilarious Photoshop jobs with Jewish employees. There's no question. I have no problem believing that whatsoever. But no, I think to your point, he probably does a better job of holding that character when it suits him. But I do feel like in this part of the story, we're starting to see that unravel a little bit, and I think that's interesting and I want to see more of that. Yeah, and that is definitely the story of post-2016 Alex Jones is him unraveling and the things that he's clearly kept in check and hidden to a degree over the years starting to fall apart.

So yeah, this is actually the point where we get to the piece de resistance of this episode. Alex Jones's custody hearing. Oh, here we go. I was waiting for this one. Now, I never thought I would cover a custody hearing in one of my episodes. I'm a little bit even was hesitant to talk about this stuff just because everybody has a private life. Custody hearings are always ugly, but after everything I read about what happened in this hearing, you really can't get the whole story of Alex Jones without talking about this custody hearing. It is a critical moment in the study of Jonesology.

So we're going to talk about this custody hearing. In 2007, Kelly Rebecca Nichols married Alex Jones. So they got together when he was starting to be prominent, but before he was super rich. You know, that's like the year after he started the InfoWars store, but before he was starting InfoWars life, which is when he really started to make money. So they split up in 2013 and divorced in 2015, and they've been fighting over custody of their three children ever since. They had a big courtroom hearing in April of last year.

Charlie Warzel of BuzzFeed was there. Here's how he opened his article about the fateful day that that started. Quote, Alex Jones' cross-examination in his 10-day custody trial began today with an unusual question. You haven't had any chili this morning, have you, Mr. Jones? Is that a serious question? Jones shot back. Now, that may seem weird to you, but that was a reference to something that had happened during Alex's deposition in March of 2018. Alex Jones, an unofficial advisor to the president, self-declared revolutionary millionaire and 43-year-old man, claimed that he couldn't remember the names of his children's teachers because he'd eaten an enormous bowl of chili the night before. That was an argument in a courtroom for why he couldn't remember the teachers of his children.

He was gassy, you know? It does things to your brain. Chili being amnesia, you know? He was asked by the judge in a court of law if chili impacted his memory, and Alex Jones replied, Big ol' bowl of chili, sure does, yeah. When I read the transcript, I can hear it in his voice. Big ol' bowl of chili, yeah. That's true. I'm sticking to it. Really saps your memories. The globalists in the chili.

It off comes the shirt. Yeah. Well, we were about to talk about that. Oh, no. Oh, yeah. Although, I will say, one of the craziest things is that after 50 or 60 cumulative hours spent in Alex Jones' land, I don't know that he's lying about chili impacting his memory. He might be telling, like, that may just be the way Alex Jones works,

as he ate so much chili that he forgot the names of his children's teachers. I bet it was, like, fucking, like, elk chili or something, too. Something super gamey. I think if it was elk chili, it was an elk that he wrestled to the ground while hunting naked in the woods. And ripped its heart out and ate it, like Dothraki style. I mean, yeah. If I were wandering around in the woods of central Texas, and I saw a naked Alex Jones run past me chasing after a deer, I don't think I'd be surprised. I think I'd be like,

oh, okay, this is a piece of a puzzle. Thank you. So, it seems like over the course of this custody hearing, Alex and his wife have spent a combined at least $4 to $5 million on legal fees, maybe more like $10 million. His ex-wife also already gets something like $500,000 a year from him, so I don't believe that money is the thing at stake in this custody hearing. It really does seem that his wife is legitimately worried for the kids who Alex had primary custody of during the time when this custody hearing started. He got to pick where they lived full-time, and she spent $2.5 million to try to get them out of his house,

which I think is a sign of real concern on her part. She argued that Alex is an unstable monster trying to turn their children against her and inculcate them into being the heirs to his conspiracy empire. She claims also that Alex has been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. No. Yeah, that's not a long walk, you know. It's really not that surprising. I did learn that fact when I stumbled upon his wife's website.

Do you want to guess what his wife's website is? Oh my gosh, is it a pun on Infowars? It sure is, buddy. custodywars.com How is that not already taken? It's amazing, right? Genius. Yeah, so there are a ton of articles on custodywars.com.

I try not to use it as a major source for this episode just because she has a very clear bias being his ex-wife fighting him in a case, and I wanted to try to get as unbiased a source as I could for the life of Alex Jones. But I had to look around it a little bit, and I had to click on an article titled, Why did Kelly Moore marry Alex Jones? Because, my God, I wanted to know. I was expecting a wild and salacious rant when I clicked on the article, and I was expecting her to be essentially the female version of Alex Jones, just, you know, focused on hating Alex Jones rather than on hating the globalists. That's not what I found. It was a very reasonable article. She calls him a narcissist in it, but she also spends most of the article breaking down in a very rational way what narcissistic personality disorder is, and how it's easy for someone to trap you without you really realizing it first about it.

Actually, she doesn't seem crazy at all, having read some of her website. I'm going to read a quote from that article. Sadly, Alex has been professionally diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, and Alex, like most narcissists, is good at pulling wool over people's eyes. Narcissists use a variety of verbal and emotional abuse in their relationships, including gaslighting and manipulation. Their abuse is constant, and it wears you down to the point that you question things you think you know to be true and don't know which way is up. So it's like, this checks out because this is the way he treats his audience. Exactly. I was expecting, like, creating a website, custodywars.com, she was married to Alex Jones, I was waiting for her to be a crazy person.

She seems really reasonable. You can watch interviews with her that she's done for other journalists, and she's definitely media trained. She's very media savvy. She clearly has memorized a lot of different sort of speeches to go on, but she seems genuinely concerned for him and for their kids, and she definitely seems like the same person in the relationship. How long were they married? Like seven years. They split up in 2013, married in 2007, but divorced in 2015. Yeah, so he was already batshit Alex Jones by this point though, right?

That was like right around the pivot point, you know? She got with him right before the Obama election, which is really sort of... Oh, wow. Can you imagine learning that after you're married, watching that transformation? I just hear the curb your enthusiasm music playing in my head, you know? Well, but it was almost a little bit like the journey we've had in this podcast, because you remember when I played the first thing from him in the late 90s, you were like, he seems fun. I kind of want to see more of this guy. And now I'm just worn down, dude.

I mean, if you see me right now, I'm just like, the skin is hanging off my face right now. I'm so beat down by this guy. Yeah. I kind of want to write a letter to him, a strongly worded letter. Well, yeah. I like that we're all going on the Kelly Jones journey right now. We can empathize with her a little bit, because we started out at like, Alex Jones, this guy is fun. I'd like to have him at a party to like, oh my God. Anyway, Kelly alleges that Alex Jones has been surveilling her since the divorce, and ironically enough, leaving cameras on her property in order to spy on her.

She's found and documented at least one of these cameras. Now, Alex has a bodyguard who is a former Blackwater mercenary. Kelly alleges that Alex has had this mercenary essentially tracking her. This guy shows up with Alex in court. He's always, whenever Alex is in public, there's this big bearded looking fucking mercenary looking guy. He's got those, I don't know, if you've spent a lot of time around really scary fucking people. He's got scary fucking person eyes. Oh, he's got the Thousand Leagues stare.

He's got that I've destroyed people look in his eyes. The dead eyes, the dead eyes. He's a scary looking guy, and I don't have any trouble believing that Alex has used him to intimidate his ex-wife. That doesn't, yeah. Not a lot of a stretch, although again, this is all unconfirmed. Now, Alex claims that his ex-wife is unstable and emotionally unwell. He has brought some therapists into court who have described her that way. And you know, maybe she is, maybe she's got some stuff loose.

I don't know the woman. Maybe she alleges that he bribed those therapists, and I can't know what happened. His ex-wife says that there's a lot of corruption in the court system in Austin. I don't know. It may just be that she's paranoid after being married to Alex Jones for years and years, which is entirely possible. And that's a specific genre of gaslighting that narcissists use, where they will accuse people of having the issues or behaviors that they themselves exhibit, right? Yeah, to the point where it can make that person feel as if they do have those sort of problems,

which is part of why people stay with narcissistic abusers, is that they can convince you that you're the bad one and that you're the one doing fucked-up stuff. Not only that, only I can help you. Again, it's the same thing he does to his followers. It bonkers to me, the parallels here. Only not at all. It makes absolute sense. Yeah, he is, well, no, he's not even consistent, but he's consistent in the tactics he uses. That's for sure.

So, Alex bought the best Texas lawyers that Texas money can buy. One of his attorneys for this custody battle was a former Texas state Supreme Court justice. Another came from an old Texas law family, so old that there are streets in Austin around the courthouse named after this guy's family. So, he spent the big money on this shit. But even these men, these top dollar lawyers, were not able to restrain Alex Jones. Charlie Warsall from Buzzfeed, who watched the whole shit show, makes it sound like a pretty fun custody hearing. Even when he's spending millions of dollars on lawyers, he can't turn it off. It's remarkable.

So, when we come back, we're going to talk about how shirtlessness played a role in the Alex Jones custody hearing. Because you better bet shirtlessness played a role in his court battles. Because if there's one thing that we know for sure about Alex Jones, it's that the only thing he hates more than globalists is his own shirt. So, all that and more after we sell you some products and services. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. 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. And he's a shark. And on the good and bad-ass way. And nasty sharks. 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 in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of 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. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

On the second day of the trial, Jones in the entire courtroom watched a video of him wearing only his underwear, selling male vitality supplements. It's a pretty special video. They also played a video from 2016 with the title, Alex Jones Takes Off His Clothes for the FBI. And that's the title Alex Jones gave the video. This video includes several minutes of Alex Jones ranting about UN carbon taxes and Amazon end user license agreements. Then he talks about how your webcam is watching you, which, sure, maybe, probably sometimes. Alex rants about biometrics and the increasing dehumanization of modernity and claims, quote, Once they've got you cashless, they've got everything, and they're going to take your humanity down to the bone and blow it away.

Then, 10 minutes and 40 seconds into this shirtless video Alex Jones made for the FBI, he starts to strip. And we're gonna play that clip. Here we go, ladies and gentlemen. Should I get completely naked? No, there's a family audience. I'm just gonna, I'm just going to take my shirt off. Hey, you will notice I've lost even more weight. It's been a slow process in forexlife.com. We've got the great DNA force back in stock. We've got the great super male vitality back in stock.

I tell you, I know the same amount of exercises I ever did, but taking the great things that mother nature has created and concentrating on what super male vitality has really helped me lose my ton of weight. Whoa. As you can see right here, now again, I was not planning this tonight. Oh, gosh. I have lost a lot of weight if you compare this to past videos. So while we're here with government looking at our surf history, looking at what emails we send, Google reading your emails, suicide next to the Apple factories, murdering people, death, forced abortion, baby parts being sold.

Oh, but I'm so dehumanized, I'm in my underwear. Isn't it pathetic? I just have no doubt that he's on stimulants of some kind. Right? He has to be. I mean, he's, yeah, he's like, you know, poppin' benes at the very least, something. Good lord. I think there's a logic to it where he's narcissistic enough to be thinking, better take my shirt off because sex sells. You know, he might think people are attracted to it. I love that in this video that he has made for the FBI, he's selling supplements. That's such commitment.

I just think we're seeing a man in full tailspin. He's still incorporating some of his old tricks as he breaks down in the public eye. Like, he's like, he's so married to this idea of like, sell, sell, sell. And like, that's the only reason that any of this stuff exists because he doesn't really believe any of it. You know, that he just can't not do it. But yeah, he's having a breakdown on YouTube and still manages to throw to the fucking ad. He needs help. You know, maybe it's like a muscle memory at this point, you know, it's reflexive. And I really do wonder, because I've heard a lot of allegations that he's an alcoholic.

You will run into people around him. He definitely drinks and sometimes, because he's been drunk on his show and on videos he's posted a number of times. So it's possible that he's a problem drinker. It's possible he has another drug problem. And if that's the case, I do wonder how much of his degeneration is just the fact that he's been fucking taking a shitload of meth or whatever. I don't know what he, but like, you watch some of these videos and it's like, if he's sober during this, which he does claim to be sober in that shirtless wandering around in the winter video, if he's sober, there's something profound going on in him.

I mean, if there was a video of me behaving this way on the internet, like, I would not want that out in the world. That's all I'm saying. Oh, good God, no. Did I ever post that? No, thanks, man. I appreciate that. So in the courtroom, because they played that video for the court, it was one of the few videos the judge allowed to be played.

And I should note that after the point at which we stopped, he continues standing around in his underwear and ranting for five more minutes. Bobby Newman, a lawyer for Kelly Jones, stated to the court afterwards, he just takes his clothes off. And I'm going to guess that was the way that he expressed that. I only have it typed, but I'm going to guess it's, he just takes his clothes off. That's Alex Jones. That's what he did.

I just picture the people like staying up late into the night agonizing about how to justify this and like going through various pieces of jurisprudence and then just saying, you know what, we're going to have to lose this battle if we want to win this war. So psychologist, Alyssa Sherry, who was the case manager for the Jones divorce, confirmed in court that Alex Jones has been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. So this is not an allegation. She says that he has sought help for it. She also says that she has seen Alex remove his shirt in front of his children during a therapy session.

She, quote, didn't remember the context in which he stripped, but noted that it was, quote, a rare thing to happen in a therapy session, which I would say so. I would say so. That's reasonable thing to say. Maybe he's going crazy because we keep asking him to wear clothes. Like maybe there's some sort of naked overtime thing. He's trying to let the sanity into his pores and that's why he keeps stripping when the crazy hits artist.

Oh God. Yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe. So Jones's ex-wife's lawyers accused him of being as crazy off-camera as he is on camera. They also accused him of trying to turn his children against their mother and alleged that he, quote, intends to enmesh the children in his business. Jones, in return, testified that his 14-year-old son has, quote, done some great reports for us. So we're going to listen to one of those reports that his child has done. It's titled, Alex Jones's son challenges David a hog to a gun debate.

Clearly, Alex wanted to attack the Parkland kids and particularly David Hogg, but knew that 44-year-old shirtless Alex Jones ranting about children would not play well. So he had his own teenager do a video. We're going to play a small selection from that because it is pretty embarrassing. It is admitted they want to disarm the American people, just as they have done with so many corrupt regimes in the past. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, North Korea. Do you think those places, do you think those corrupt leaders allowed their citizens to have guns?

Do you think the Jews were able to protect themselves when Hitler put them in concentration camps? No, they were disarmed and that's why they were enslaved. Really? Okay, first of all, he's doing the Alex Jones voice already. Yeah, yeah. And he looks and he's got like, he's got this just staring into the void look on his face. This like indoctrinated look on his face. Yeah, it looks like a very chilling.

Looks like a fundamentalist kid who's been stuck at camp for too long. You know what I mean? There's a parroting quality. Yeah, and I have no reason to question his wife when she worries for her son, because I'm worried for that kid. A 14 year old should not be looking like that or talking like that or be put on a camera in front of millions of people saying those things. He's 14. It's just gross. It's really, really gross and scary.

So you might have expected Alex Jones to be on his best behavior during the epic court battle over his children's custody. You know, if someone's legal case rests entirely on the claim that they're just an actor playing a crazy guy and not really crazy themselves, maybe that person shouldn't do crazy unhinged things in the middle of their court case. That would make sense, right? Right. Good logic, solid strategy, right?

Alex Jones took a different tact. Midway through the trial, he published a video on Infowars Live titled, Alex Jones Responds to Sandy Hook Vampire. Sadly, this video appears to have been scrubbed from the Internet, so I'm going to read Rolling Stone's summary of what it included. Instead of ranting about unanswered questions around the mass shooting, he showed scenes from the 1973 American science fiction movie Soylent Green and talked about his teenage sex life.

What? There we go. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. So I have a question. They said that he might be a problem drinker and spend a lot of time on camera or in public, inebriated.

Yes. Was there anything, did you see anything about him possibly being drunk or inebriated during the trial or during the hearing, rather? I did not run into any evidence of that. Okay. It's entirely possible, but I don't know. Certainly I haven't read anyone alleging that he was drunk during the trial. They did play a video during the trial of a drunk Alex Jones talking about his desire

to piss on a tree. And I'll defend him on that. Absolutely. There's a strong pull there. Absolutely. I've spent a lot of my life drunk and peeing on trees, and it's a noble way to spend your time. Yeah. Just don't get caught.

Don't get caught? Or do it in the woods where it's fine to pee on everything. That's the joy of the woods, which is why I think Alex is drawn to the woods. It's the least crazy thing about him. Okay. So, at one point during the trial, Kelly Jones took the stand and laid out her accusations against her ex-husband. She claimed that Alex was a quote, angry, volatile, hateful person who regularly went on racist,

homophobic, and anti-women rants. She also said that their children had begun to parrot his beliefs. She said that she heard her 14-year-old son say, I hate women, and their 12-year-old daughter say women shouldn't be judges. Kelly warned, presumably, the entire world that, quote, they are morphing into him. Yes, but that is so evident in that clip you played. It looks like a little mini Alex Jones. It's bonkers.

Yeah. He's trained a second one, which means that our fucking grandkids will probably be dealing with a crazy person last named Jones shirtless on Info Wars screaming about the globalists. Or maybe not, depending on the rest of this podcast. We'll see. But yeah, that scares the hell out of me. The idea that this man is allowed to influence the lives of children is horrifying. It's just more apparent, though, with his own children, because he's able to legally

exert physical influence over there. But I think this leads to a larger question, which is difficult to answer how many other children are being influenced. It's not as if it's difficult for a 12-year-old to find him on YouTube. No. And in fact, when I was a young teenager, like 15, 14, or 15, I ran into Alex Jones stuff on the internet all the time. I thought it was funny, but I watched a bunch of his stuff as a kid.

And who knows? I mean, I do think that the globalists are poisoning our water and that the only way to get rid of the toxins that they put into our water is to buy the new Bastard's Pod iodine shield protection potion, which again, I will mail you if you PayPal me $43. It'll come in a brown envelope. It's just a pile of pills. You know what? I am sold.

Yes, I am. PayPal me money, and I will mail you pills in an envelope. Okay, let's get back to Alex Jones. Jones' ex-wife, Kelly, complained that the public and controversial nature of her husband's work put she and her children in danger. She brought up a tweeted death threat Alex received in April of 2017, which had threatened death to Alex, his children, and InfoWars staff. So, yeah, she basically claimed that because he's so prominent and so controversial and

involving their children that he's putting them in danger, which again, seems fair. In the end, the court seems to have sided with her. The couple remained joint managing conservators, so neither of them has full custody, but his wife gained the ability to designate the primary residence of the children, which is a big win. And this will continue to be re-litigated. I'm sure they will be back in court numerous times before their kids are 18. So, the last year and a half or so of Alex's life has, as you probably guessed by now, involved a lot of courtroom time.

Alex was actually sued in the middle of his custody hearing by Chobane Yogurt of all people, because on April 10th, while in the middle of his trial, Alex published a video titled Idaho Yogurt Maker Caught Importing Migrant Rapists. The video itself is pretty boring. It stars two of Jones' lackeys rather than Alex himself. The video basically connects Chobane to a rape committed by some refugees and then spirals into an incoherent rant. Jones doesn't show up until the end when he comes in to deliver a special report, which

rather than being about refugees is about iodine, which he sells. So, we're going to listen to a little bit of that. If you yourself and your family are favor and check out the importance of iodine for yourself, I think you're going to be blown away. And whatever you do, support the broadcast and get a bottle of Survival Shield Nacinon-9X2. Also, consult your physician, because if you've been deficient in it or have other issues, it can have some dramatic effects. As for me and most folks I talk to, it's been a game changer in the positive column.

But still, consult your physician, because iodine is no joke. It's a key building block of the body. And if you haven't had it for a long time and suddenly have it, some folks say they've experienced like a detoxing effect and things like that. You've got to have vitamin C. So, this is what he appends to the end of a video accusing Chobani of importing rapists to the United States. Chobani sued him.

And again, they sued him while he was in the middle of the custody hearing with his wife, his ex-wife. When you showed us this video, one thing that really sticks out to me is that from an editing perspective, it looks like a hastily arranged voiceover with just clips playing. I could flash the two shots of him at the news desk, I guess, at the war's news desk. But it's clearly from an earlier recording. So, did he really just record a VO for iodine? Yeah, I think he recorded it, because that's how he does it. They're doing this other report that's supposedly a news story about the dangerous refugees Chobani's

bringing into the United States. And then Alex makes it look like he's delivering breaking news, but instead he's just trying to sell you iodine. Oh, wow. Remarkable. So, after Chobani sued Alex, he immediately put out another video laughing at the company for daring to come after him. He claimed that he could back up all of the claims that he had made about rapes and TB being spread by Chobani's refugee workers. But then in May, he settled out of court with Chobani, paying them an undisclosed sum and releasing this sweet, sweet dose of Schadenfreude. And I'm overwhelmingly happy to present to all of you Alex Jones apologizing to Chobani yogurt.

On the M4Wars Twitter feed and YouTube channel regarding Chobani LLC. That I now understand to be wrong. The tweets and video have now been retracted and will not be reposted. On behalf of M4Wars, I regret that we mischaracterized Chobani, its employees and the people of Twin Falls, Idaho, the way we did. Wow. Look at that. He's got his shirt on. He's got his shirt on.

He's reading, copy, clearly. I wonder how much money they pulled out of his hide and how much money less he had to pay as a result of apologizing publicly. It was a very clearly legally mandated performance. Really? A legally mandated apology. And it sounds like his legal team probably also negotiated the language of the apology. That's why it had to be explicit. And I bet he fought them for a while on whether or not he was going to wear a shirt during that.

Oh, yeah. He's like, look, I'll do it, but I got to be greased up. I want to get real greasy in my underwear. Can I strip while I apologize? Can I sell iodine shield while I'm apologizing? I am shocked that there was no ad for Infowars Life in that apology to Chobani. You would expect, right? No, you absolutely would. I usually don't make these sorts of errors in my reporting, but I haven't been taking my supplements.

And it's making me crazy. I've just been eating chili. On April 17th, 2018, the families of several children who died in the Sandy Hook attack, including Lenny Posner and Veronica, his ex-wife, sued Alex Jones for more than a million dollars. Now, we've already talked about in our last podcast, Veronica and Lenny. Another parent, last name Heslin, was also part of this lawsuit because Infowars, Alex Jones, claimed that he was lying about seeing a bullet hole in his child's head. They actually did a whole special report where they attempted to prove that he couldn't have seen his child's dead body. So these people all joined together in a big ol' lawsuit against Infowars.

The suit, on behalf of the Sandy Hook families, came at the same time as another defamation suit. Marcel Fontaine sued Alex Jones for one million dollars because Alex had used his image on air and claimed that he was the Parkland shooter. He didn't even live in the state. I don't know if he'd ever even been to Florida. So two defamation suits drop at the same time, both for a million dollars. And in August, six more Sandy Hook families joined the lawsuit against August. I think there's nine families currently suing him for his role in perpetuating that particular conspiracy theory. In court, lawyers for the Sandy Hook families played an episode of Infowars

where Alex Jones broadcast maps to the Posner home causing audible gasps from the jury. So Alex actually doxxed people and like claimed that they had faked their child's murder and then told his viewers how to find their home. Alex's lawyer argued that this did not count as defamation. What does it count as? Well, here's Alex's lawyer. I'm on the edge of my seat here, man. Maybe it's fringe speech, maybe it's dangerous speech, but it's not defamation.

That is rhetoric hyperbole at its core. Oh, come the fuck on. I do imagine that is like the country liar. Maybe it's fringe speech, maybe it's dangerous speech, but defamation. I'm just a simple. I do declare this is rhetorical hyperbole at its core. Rhetorical hyperbole, sir. Yes.

Here's a video of Alex Jones talking about the Sandy Hook parents. Y'all tell me if you think this seems like defamation. Billy off and watched him go around the corner. And he never came back all because of the guns. Won't you just turn your guns in for my son? Why'd you do it to him, gun owners? Well, listen, I didn't kill your kids. The truth is they've had national polls where upwards of half of Americans don't believe Sandy Hook

because they don't believe a word the mainstream media says. We've sent reporters up there, man, and that place is like Children of the Corner or something. I mean, it is fricking weird. And then the weird videos of reported parents of kids laughing. And all of a sudden they do the hyperventilating to cry to go on TV. All I know is something's going on and you don't like us looking at it. You don't like us questioning you. The father sees it needs to clarify that NBC needs to clarify.

Clarify because the corner said no, the parents were allowed to touch the kids or see the kids. And maybe they're meaning at the school. I'm sure later maybe the parents saw their children. So Alex will claim and still claims that he never accused the families of faking their children's deaths. You can see where he has a legal leg to stand on there because he said studies show upwards of half Americans don't believe anything happened at Sandy Hook because they don't believe the mainstream media. But then he immediately goes into talking about well, we've sent reporters up there and it seems it's spooky. It seems like a ghost town.

I would say that that means my personal threshold for defamation of these families for damn sure. I don't know what the law is going to wind up saying, but that seems pretty defamatory to me. So this is still in motion. This is still being adjudicated. Yeah, this is still in motion. It is still going on. Jones's lawyers at one point asked the judge to throw out the case and tried to sue Ronnick and Lenny for $100,000 in court fees. Now, Alex did rescind that attempt to get them to pay his court fees and he, in an interview with a journalist,

was very angry that the news has not reported more on the fact that he decided not to countersue the families that he had defamed. His lawyer's request to have the case thrown out was denied in August. So we're still waiting to see where all of these cards are going to fall. I know of at least three defamation cases going on against Alex Jones right now, though. So he is concurrently involved in at least three defamation suits. It might be more like five, like a lot of people are suing him right now. And whatever these cases wind up costing him, if anything, you know, he might win. But that cost will be in addition to the millions of dollars he spent on custody battles with his wife.

I assume he's spending millions of dollars in all of these lawsuits. I don't know what he paid to Cibani or if he paid them. But I think it's fairly safe to say that Alex Jones is hemorrhaging cash right now as is his Info Wars operation. He's hired top dollar lawyers and he is involved. I think like seven or eight different lawsuits this year. That is enough to drain even a very rich man, which Alex is. All of which makes this a very bad time for him to suddenly get cut off from every single major social media platform. Over the course of August, he was banned by Facebook and YouTube and the iTunes App Store, among other platforms.

The bans caused an initial surge in traffic to Info Wars as people flocked there to see Jones's increasingly unhinged reactions to the banning. This caused him to celebrate and say, quote, the more I am persecuted, the stronger I get. It backfired. But that doesn't seem to be true. Here's what the New York Times wrote on September 4th, 2018. In the three weeks before the August 6th bans, Info Wars had an daily average of nearly 1.4 million visits to its website and views of videos posted by its main YouTube and Facebook pages. But, quote, in the three months afterward, its audience fell by roughly half to about 715,000 site visits and video views, according to the analysis. So, it's possible that his traffic is down by half, or more than half right now, because on September 5th, while lawmakers talked to Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter, Alex Jones, showed up in Washington DC. His cunning plan was to scream at everybody, including Jack Dorsey, the man who had by some accounts personally intervened to stop him from being banned by Twitter. Alex yelled at a lot of people during that trip, though, and one of those people was CNN's Oliver Darcy.

Now, Darcy had documented all of the ways Alex Jones and Info Wars had violated YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter's codes of conduct. He was a big part of the fact that Alex had been deplatformed by everyone but Twitter at this point. Info Wars calls Darcy, quote, the architect of deplatforming conservatives. Jones confronted Darcy during his DC trip and streamed the whole encounter on Periscope, which is owned by Twitter. Here is just a clip of that, so you can get an idea of what was going on here. Some of the things about the decisions that you made. Darcy, you don't even respond because we're just scum. You said that they're seeing it with no viewers, no followers, everyone can't stand you. And no matter, you can shut everyone down on Earth. No one will like you. You understand that?

You'll never have billions and billions of fans and followers. You'll never have people that love you. Do you have anything else you'd like to say, Alex? No, you are a dishonorable liar who would never even dare have me on your little tiny shows when you installed or called me a virus. You are a virus to America and freedom. You are authoritarianism. Just look in those eyes. The hunger to silence America. So, what I want to, I really want to throw some props Darcy's way. Because there are other videos you can find, even from DC, of him arguing with people on the street. A couple of women confront him at one point and they get into a screaming argument with him and they do the wrong thing, which is engage with him.

Because Alex's thing, whenever he's in person, he's going to throw out as many different, very specific accusations as possible. Because that's the way his mind works. Because then you're going to lose. If you try to address one thing, he's going to attack you for not addressing the other things. If you try to address everything, he's just going to keep throwing more stuff at you until you don't have a response, which makes it look like you've lost. Darcy just doesn't say anything until there's a break and then he will just say something like, do you have anything else to say, Alex? Always good to see you, Alex. He really understands this guy and how to defang him. And it turns out that that rant against Darcy was, well, it's debatable. Some people will say that the fact that he yelled at Jack Dorsey is why Dorsey pulled him from Twitter.

The official reason that Jones got pulled from Twitter is because what he did to Oliver Darcy on Periscope was abusive and bullying and in violation of Twitter's rules of conduct. Alex Jones was banned from Twitter the very next day. It is impossible to know where the future will take Alex Jones and Infowars, but I do think it's important for posterity's sake that we take a look at how he reacted to the fact that he has now been thoroughly deplatformed from polite digital society. Here's a clip from his first post-ban episode. He starts the clip wearing a donkey mask, which he rips off to reveal a reptilian mask underneath, so he's wearing two masks at the start of this video. That's just beautiful. It's a long clip, but my God, it's full of stars, and we just have to play it. But no one's going to see that broadcast, Alex Jones, today, because it's been deleted. And you see, you've learned, and you've learned very, very well, that only the internet matters, not UHF, not VHF, nothing. Only our control matters.

And so now you're being taught to submit. So let me tell you about Operation 666. What? Yes. Operation 666? He is a fake donkey head on the whole time. Operation Freedom! To destroy you! Forever!

I'm just a donkey. On the 6th of August, we banded for wars from 27 platforms. And now, on September 6th, we banned you from Twitter. And on October 6th, we will destroy your president and set fire to every major U.S. city, and have our communist forces launch their attack while Silicon Valley sits in their bunkers in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in New Zealand. Operation 666, the number of the beast, hell and fire, raiding free. Soon the West will fall. 1.8 billion Islamists trained in Satanism are ready to invade. The China system will expand.

The third world will collapse into Europe and America. And our domination will be complete. I was wrong. That's not the video where he rips off his donkey mask to reveal an alien mask. That is a different video where he wears a donkey mask. There's just so many. I love this, though, because first off, that's quality entertainment. That is quality entertainment. He's nothing if not a showman, that's for damn sure.

And the way he's moving around and being so arched with his statements really reminds me of villains from old cartoons like Cobra Commander, or what's that, Mumra? Yeah, exactly. There is a strong Cobra Commander vibe to Alex Jones in that video. He has gone off of the deep end and is digging his own swimming pool now. Yeah, for sure. Something else. I love that line. 1.3 billion Islamists trained in Satanism are on the border or something like that.

Because they were like, we need as many Islamists as we can get. But make sure they're trained in Satanism. Yeah, don't half-ass this one. Although that's almost woke for Alex Jones because he is claiming that they have to be trained in the Satanism, which for Alex Jones, that's progressive. So maybe he's turned a corner. No. So do we have any idea what's going to happen to this guy?

No idea. It's still too soon off to the bands to know what kind of financial impact there's going to really be for the fact that he's been deplatformed. So over the next couple of months, I'm sure a lot of people will be watching to see what happens to his traffic, what happens to the spread of his ideas. I did watch his most recent big broadcast and he makes a big point of like, there's a video out right now, The Daily Wire posted it first, but then Jones grabbed it of like, this rancher put up a camera on his land for like two and a half years and he filmed people crossing the border. And so like, Alex is turning like, an army is crossing the border yet.

But he makes polls to like, put this on your Twitter page. You know, we can't tweet this, but you can is what he says. And I suspect we're going to see a lot of that. It's him being like, I can't put this on Facebook, but you can. All to action. Yeah. He's going to keep trying, even if he has to go back to being the guy, you know, attacking Geraldo Rivera and screaming on a bullhorn while someone else broadcasts.

I don't think he's going to stop doing what he's done his entire adult life at this point. So, yeah. Was that DC trip the same trip wherein he accosted Marco Rubio? Sure was. It was a different trip. No, it was the same trip. He said he had a busy day. So, Alex Jones, that's it.

That's all I got for you guys. What did you have you learned? I'm exhausted, Robert. That was a wild ride you just took us on. First of all, this is the single most hours of podcasting I think either one of us have done in a single day. Me too. It was pretty close for me. Yeah.

But I got to get a donkey mask. Yeah. We all need donkey masks. I think that's fair. I feel that insane right now that I would totally wear a donkey mask for the rest of the night. Just like, you know, just out around the town. Yeah. But with a shirt on.

And would people ask what it's for? Just say, operation six, six, six, six. Run cackling. Then you can rip your shirt off and run cackling into the night and have a nice night bath. I need one of those Hulk Logan, like, careway shirts that's like made of rubber or something. I'm surprised he doesn't have one of those. You'd think he'd have a closet full of them by now. Man.

He's very restrained when he's stripping for the FBI, you know? That is the most restrained stripping for the FBI I've ever seen, for sure. I think he's trying to make it a little erotic. Well, Robert, thank you for breaking our brains and having us on your bonkers three-part series on Alex Jones. Yeah, thank you for letting us do this, man. Well, thank you both for enduring this with me. And thank you, listeners, for enduring this with us. Although you've taken these, I hope, three days apart from each other as opposed to all at once,

which is a lot of Alex Jones to take. Yeah, I need all the drinks, like now. I'm going to drink heavily and watch the opposite of Alex Jones after this, which is Mr. Rogers, maybe? Maybe. Bob Ross, perhaps? Yeah. Bob Ross. Maybe like the Great British Baking Show.

Just not Captain Kangaroo. That guy is a creep. No, no. Although if I watch Bob Ross in my current mind state, I'm sure I'm going to see gunmen behind the happy little trees. Maybe just go walk the streets of your neighborhood for a while and try to look at the stars or something. I don't know, man. You know what I think I'm going to do? I'm going to find a couple of cameramen.

I'm going to strip naked and I'm going to go bathe in the night. That does seem like a good idea. Get your gloves. You know, night bathing deserves a quiet night. Yeah, night bathing. Thank you for the REM reference. You're very welcome. Yeah.

And thank you all for listening. No, Benjamin, you guys want to plug your plug-ables before we cap this out? Sure. We'll do the quick and dirty version because God knows we need to. We've got stuff they don't want you to know. Conspiracy theories with critical thinking. It's the full package. You can turn back now or you can find every episode we've ever done on our website, stufftheydon'twantyouknow.com.

Or Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever your poison is. We also have a great show called Ridiculous History that Nolan and I host that covers all the strange, bizarre, unusual and sometimes hilarious people, places and events throughout the span of human civilization. It's true. And you can find that on all the places too at Ridiculous History. And God, Robert, this has been a blast slash an utter nightmare. And I want to thank you for putting me through this. I really feel like what does not kill you makes you stronger. I've never felt that more than I feel right now.

I thought you were going to say what does it kill you makes you bonkers. That's what I'm going to go with. And I'd like to make an Alex Jones. Maybe we should all make Alex Jones t-shirt ideas on our shows. I think that's a great idea. Yeah, yeah. So send us your suggestions. Yeah, I think I'm just going to write Alex Jones was murdered in Sharpie on a white t-shirt and walk around Hollywood Boulevard for a little while.

Just see what kind of reaction that gets, you know. I'm going to conjecture not much of one on Hollywood Boulevard. What if I write custodywars.com on the back? There you go. Now we're cooking with gas. Now we're working. All right. I'm Robert Evans.

This has been Behind the Bastards. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. You can find my fun book about experimenting with dangerous ancient drugs, A Brief History of Ice on Amazon. You can find this website, all of our sources, all of these terrible video clips on behindthebastards.com. You can find this podcast on Twitter and Instagram at atvastardspod. So I hope you all have enjoyed this little nightmare and buy our t-shirts on t-public. We don't have any Alex Jones shirts yet, but I'm sure we'll cook something up.

You know, send us a message on Twitter if you have a good t-shirt idea featuring America's craziest donkey-headed shirtless man. Bye for now. 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 were 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 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.