Knowledge Fight - #197: Jared Holt from the Sh!tpost Podcast

Episode Date: August 23, 2018

Today, Dan and Jordan bring you a little bonus episode where they sit down and have a little chat with Jared Holt from the Sh!tpost Podcast. Jared is a compatriot in the realm of studying right wing propaganda, and it was a real treat having the chance to compare some notes.

Andy and Kansas, you're on the air. Thanks for holding. So, Alex, I'm a first-time caller. I'm a huge fan. I love your work. I love you. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. I'm Dan, no Jordan, in the studio right now. He has gone home for the evening. He has fulfilled his eight-hour shift here at the podcast, and he has clocked out, put his little time card into the machine, went to chunk, and he locked up when he left. He mopped the floors, and we appreciate his service. I have no idea. I am here, though, to do a little introduction for a bonus episode

that we got for you here. Today, we have the privilege and the luxury, sure, why not, the pleasure of sitting down with Jared Holt from the Shit Post podcast, which you can find all over, wherever podcasts are found, but be forewarned that it is shit, but with the I is an exclamation point. So, that is something to consider when you're trying to find this, and I believe that at the end of this episode, when we're doing plugs, I may have talked over him while he was saying his plug. I apologize, so now we're doing it up top. It was a really great time, a real thrill, a treat to sit down with somebody, have a little conversation, somebody especially who spends as much time looking at and focusing on and digging into the world of Alex Jones as I do, and he

also has far more scope to the things he looks into with monitoring and looking at right-wing propaganda. So, it was a real nice time to sit down with him, and I thank him very much for his time. Please do check out his podcast, and yeah, I don't know. I was going to go to the mailbag and listen to some voicemails, but as I sort of thought about it, I realized that that feels a little bit weird without Jordan here. So, we'll get back to, you know, some policy wonks, shoutouts, and some voicemails from the good people out there when he is back in studio. But for now, please enjoy this very special bonus episode of the podcast with Jared Holt. Check out his podcast, Shitpost podcast, and do follow him on Twitter at Jared L. Holt. Guys, thanks for listening,

and we'll be back with a regular episode real soon. I'm a policy wonk. Hello. Yeah, it's great to be doing a show with somebody who watches as much Alex Jones as I do. I don't come across that very often. Me too. It's a rare thing in this world, in this day and age to read it. No. Pass, pass. You don't want me to do the Family Matters theme song about this? All right, fine. Yeah, I find it very difficult, generally, to have a lot of conversations with people, because I end up knowing too much about various worlds that are unsavory to most people. Yeah, it can be kind of tough, right? It's like, this is almost like an alternate reality in itself, and I feel like once you get that in your brain, it's hard to understand how other people wouldn't

know it. Yeah, you guys, there's all this, it's like you have a friend who takes mushrooms for the first time, and they tell you about everything that you're missing out on, and it's all just sort of illusions. I've made the point that the only person who Dan could actually speak to is Alex Jones, and they would try and kill each other. They would cancel each other out like anti-matter and matter. Oh, why is that? Oh, because Dan spends as much time listening to Alex Jones talk as Alex Jones listens to himself talk. That may actually be fair. I basically study him full time now and have been for the better part of two years. So, you know, really digging into his narratives, really trying to unpack where they come from, and really just

doing research into what's the source of this. It's something I don't think a lot of people care to pay too much attention to. So, have you read The Book Them by Ron Johnson? Oh, John Ronson's book, yeah. I haven't read all of them, but I've read a lot of excerpts, and listened to tons of interviews of him talking about Alex, and the perspective that he has is it scares me a lot because I think that he could do a lot to take Alex out, quite frankly, or at least ruin his image in front of his audience. I don't know if he does enough. Yeah, like if there's one guy that I want to go on Info Wars, I think it's him. He's been on a bunch of times. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. He comes on almost as a

amused observer of Alex. I guess probably because he has that sort of documentarians distance. He never is too pointed about, like, Alex, you know you're making this stuff up to his face, but yeah, I don't understand why he would go on, but he has a bunch. Like Ron Johnson has that sort of documentary approach, how did you get into this originally? Well, I made the mistake of watching Info Wars coverage of the election in 2016, and through a bit of a coincidence, I just saw the ugliness that was behind it. I was trying to amuse myself because I thought, like, for the most part, political pageantry is a little bit boring, and so why not spice it up with Alex Jones screaming about stuff? I thought

that would be a lot of fun, but then you look too closely at it a little bit. I think you see what it's really about, and what I saw was just an organization that was dedicated to reinforcing whiteness and maleness against the supposed other of equality, and it really bummed me out. So I just started trying to dig into it, and at the time, me and Jordan were hanging out a lot and drinking a bunch and screaming at each other at bars, and so we just decided to do that because I kept talking to Alex Jones. No, at the time it was actually the complete opposite, because what was going on is Dan and I had this weird, intense friendship that would last one night, and then we wouldn't see each

other for six months, like we would get together and we would talk for like seven hours, and they'd be like, okay, cool, goodbye. So this was, for me, like a lot of an excuse just to hang out. Yeah, so those sort of things merged a little bit. Our desire to hang out with each other, it helped create the show, and then my working theory from about two years ago that Alex was operating a sort of chauvinist white supremacist organization, media corporation. So that was sort of the jumping off point for my research, and nothing has disproven that. Yeah, it's only been reinforced greatly. So if I get what you're saying, you watch info wars for the friendship. Yeah. Yeah. I don't I don't watch info wars that like the original conceit for the show is I don't

know anything about Alex Jones, like what Dan told me was my entire, you know, entrance into the world. And it has, I would go so far as to say ruined my life in a very positive way. Yeah, that's the that's sort of the the slogan of our show. That go to bed somehow. Yeah, I think go to bed turned into our unofficial catchphrase. Yeah, it's it's it's interesting. I mean, it has brought a lot of joy and wonder meant to my life. But at the same time, I'm sure you can relate to I'm sure you have probably a similar experience with all the research that you do on your end, about how becoming aware of these, these, these worlds makes you realize how much more there is even beyond this that you don't even know about.

Right. It's it's like, so I have sort of a similar background where it was probably two or two and a half years ago, I first hopped aboard the info wars train popped my brain force plus and sat down to just consume the Alex Jones show in almost its entirety like every day. And then on Mondays, I would like watch the weekend stuff. My secret to it is playing it at like one and a half speed. That's smart. That's smart. Dan has not figured that out yet. I have actually recently had someone tell me that's what I should do. And I'm, I think I'm going to have to. But yeah, I play it fast. And then I skip the commercials and you can

like crank through an episode of the Alex Jones show if you're dedicated and like an hour and a half. But some of the stuff I've picked up is really similar to the stuff you've picked up. I've, you know, it's hard not to see these like white nationalist tropes. Oh, yeah. And also, like you said, this sort of chauvinist mentality exhibited on air, both through like the, the character of Alex Jones and also through some of the guest selection and some of the recurring themes that show up every week on the show. And it's like most recently, they've paired with the proud boys, which is Gavin McKinnis's group. Oh, my friend, they have been on the proud boys tip for a long time. Yeah. I mean, last year, early last year,

Gavin McKinnis was on. And the only thing I really remember about that appearance was he was trying to make the argument that most blackface was reverent. And it was actually a very respectful thing to African Americans. What I remember about that episode was screaming a lot at you for making me aware of the fucking proud boys. Yeah, that was a tough, tough. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then like, and now recently, he's been just having like random proud boy members on. Oh, like, like Rufio Stickman? Or yeah, like, like, like Rufio, who was in Portland. Rufio! Rufio! Oh, sorry. Hook. Can't get away from it. Yeah. I mean, he's having people on that have, you know, gotten into violent altercations with

counter protesters and stuff and like, is sort of glorifying that and rewarding that with what, you know, became over the years a national platform. I will tell you this, the biggest mistake that you have made is not listening to the commercials because they might be my favorite part. If you skip through the commercials, you miss some, some gold here and there, less, less nowadays. But back in the past, you used to have a lot of really fun commercials. Diamond Gusset Jeans is my favorite thing that has ever existed. He had an advertiser called Diamond Gusset Jeans that we did some research into and found that all of their customer reviews were, I ordered a large, but this is a medium. They just said like, every one of them is just like, I got a random pants size. And then

whenever I sent it back, the shipping was like 30 bucks and they didn't send me any other pants. Like it's fantastic. And then back in like 2009 or so to, he was one of his sponsors was the most high family ministry, which is like a legitimate cult that was running a real elaborate scam operation. And he took them on as a sponsor. Like those sorts of things are pretty fun. But I generally I agree with you, you should skip the commercials nowadays, like with the brain force. There's not much, not much juice in those berries. But the ad pivots, when he goes into a screaming rant about how everyone's coming to kill you, and they're going to take your children and they're going to take them into the basement and they're going to do horrible things to them. And it's everybody's

going to die and everybody's going to be destroyed. By the way, we have Easter specials still on free shipping. Yeah, free shipping. It's really good. You can get brain force. You have no idea. The globalists will destroy you if you don't give me money. Supermail vitality is about making your dick hard all the time. My favorite person who does the ad pivots is Roger Stone. Whenever he's guest hosting, those are beautiful. Have you seen those? He's a smooth, smooth daddy of Roger Stone. I hate Roger Stone. And yet in the same way, I kind of view him reverently as a trickster god just dancing around the earth. So discord wherever he goes. He has the nature of like sort of a gentleman grifter absentee father. Yeah, that's true. I can see that. There's a little bit of a

feel. Oh, God, did you just psychoanalyze me in a way that I don't feel comfortable with? I apologize. He's good. I think that that's a lot of his just inborn slickness that Roger has. And then also he's very chameleon-esque. So he's taken on a lot of those affectations that Alex already had with those smooth, smooth transitions to an ad. It's interesting to see that sort of like infowars virus infect people like Owen Schreuer. We can watch him right now sort of starting to learn how to do the pivot. Not doing not doing great. No, but it's still it's coming in there. He's he shows a little bit of potential. Yeah, I still maintain that the only person who is going to make it through this whole thing somehow unscathed is Roger Stone. Like he's going to be a cockroach at the end,

like even if the nuclear bomb hit Austin, he'd just like slink away fine. Yeah, he just like crawl out of the sewer and be like, we've got some excellent specials in the infowars story. Yeah, pretty much. Undoubtedly. So yeah, I don't know. It's kind of interesting because as we go through, I try and approach Alex and this whole like studying that that we're undertaking with as much of an open mind as I can an open heart. I try not to condemn him too quickly without cause. And and so it it's weird because every episode or so, you know, every few episodes definitely we end up learning things that are sort of transformative in terms of our understanding of Alex like we we learned not too long ago that he's had at least 10 abortions in his life.

Not him personally, he's paid for at least 10 abortions, not like he's some kind of Mr. Mom like our Schwarzenegger now like that kind of thing. And more troublingly, he did say on air that some of the women who got these abortions didn't want to did not want it. And so there's things like that that you learn and it sort of reframes how you look at Alex Jones, the character and the man. And I bring this up because I don't know if you were listening to his show on Monday of this week on on what would that have been? Oh, sorry, Tuesday on the 21st. Did you did you listen to that show by chance? I'm thinking I've been a little bit busy with other stuff and I have to go back. But I'm trying to remember if I got to that one. I'd like to I'd like to see if

I can play a clip for you because we have a goddamn doozy. This is something that I think everyone needs to know about. Let me see if this this will play for you. Google would Google would love to have me arrested and killed guaranteed. See, I've never killed anybody. Technically, one guy technically I didn't. Did that come through? They didn't come through. Oh, God, damn it. Our tech issues are terrible. Spark and spark notes it for me. I'll send it over to you. Suffice it to say Alex Jones confessed on air that he might have killed somebody in his life. To give you a rundown of the clip. It's him going like I guarantee Google would kill me. Guarantee. And I've never killed a guy except that one guy. I mean, technically, I didn't kill

him, but he had some health issues and he didn't later. But technically, I didn't. And you're like, what? Yeah, it always amazes me like the weird personal details that Alex lets out because like if you remember back to, you know, his custody trial, when was that like? Good year ago or so. Yeah, I would say about a year ago. Yeah, whenever his lawyers like gave this deposition that Alex Jones is a character, you know, played by Alex Jones, he's like playing himself or something. Yeah. You know, it's it's very easy to see what Info Wars is doing as sort of stage art in a way. But every once in a while, like, yeah, these weird details come out

that don't seem like it's acting and they're a little startling. I think that I've reached my Malcolm Gladwell tipping point of time listening to him. I think I've gotten to a point where I can pretty well suss out when there's like when he's saying something he thinks he shouldn't say or when he's lying. And I generally find that when he's lying about something, he adds a bunch of extraneous details and fleshes out the story really well. And when he's telling the truth, it's something like that where he's like, I never I never killed a guy. Well, there's one guy. Anyway, I technically didn't. Anyways, the Chinese are destroying all of us, but I didn't kill a guy. That's the sort of thing that leads me towards

like, this is this is not an act. This is somebody struggling. It just brings me back to that claim that Alex Jones made that he like slept with 200 women by the time he was like 16. Oh, yeah. Y'all remember that? I kind of oh, we remember that. I kind of believe that with a little bit of embellishment on his end, you know, it's probably more like maybe 40 or 50 or something like that, which is still too many. Right. Too many. But one of the reasons that I believe that is because he's described a childhood that was full of trauma. You know, in terms of when he was a young boy, he talked about one time he got stuck under a house and they were fumigating the house. He was just stuck. He was like trapped under a house with

the extermination chemicals. And he got hit in the head when he was really young. With a giant rock. Yeah. And then it was like a cinder block. Yeah. And he talks about how his mom when he was six kicked kicked him off her knee and said, you don't get my favorite because she wanted him to be a man. And let's talk about goddamn knock. He also may have killed his dog. He had a dog named knock. And he very graphically described killing him on one episode. It was weird. Yeah. So when he talks about having sex with tons of women, pre, you know, younger than, you know, most people would consider normal. I think that you take into account a sort of very chaotic childhood and it doesn't

it doesn't seem that far out of like what the consequence or the, you know, the result that you might expect from someone like that. And let's face it, he was hot. He was when he was super hot. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah, I can see where you're coming from. And then even further, like he talked about for like, not just in that conversation, we was talking about how many women he'd slept with before he was 16. He also, when he had Mike Rotondo on the guy who was 30 years old and his parents sued him to get him out of the house. Alex was trying to give him a pep talk. And he said that by the time he was 12, he'd already become a man saying that he had had sex at 11. And whether or not, you know, you want

to, you know, it's probably thought it was a good idea. But even so, you know, sexual activity at that young of age could be very traumatic. No, he's, he's lionized his own sexual abuse. Like he was truly sexually abused. And he's playing it off as like a, his words as truth. Like what he's describing is a child being victimized. Right. Absolutely. So that, that sort of thing is always like, you know, he says he had sex with 150 women. Maybe he has. Yeah. What are you going to do? It's awful that he considers that a brag. Yeah. But I don't know. So I'd be interested to hear like you seem to, you know, you have the perspective that like Alex Jones has experienced seemingly major trauma in his life. Absolutely. You know, and it's, it is sort of fascinating

to see that play out in the form of a daily broadcast. You know, I, how do you see that play out like during Info Wars segments? I think that one of the ways is that he manifests like really childish thinking, like the way he creates artificial cause and effect all the time, that sort of thing, his leaps of logic and his just inability to under like, he always refers to primary sources and stuff like that, but he never actually understands the context that those sources come from. And it's very adolescent. And so I would say that to some extent, the entirety of his show is a manifestation of frozen in time. Yeah. Kind of intellectual arrested development where he's just not able to wrestle with nuance. He's very angry. He feels like he's lost something and he's

mad at some nebulous entity out in the world. Yeah. He feels has deprived him of that. He really does like if you, if you read so much about serial killer, like backstories, he has so similar a childhood that you're like, well, at least you didn't kill like 15 people. There's just one in theory. Yeah, practically, technically, technically, just one. Allegedly, alleged by Alex. No, no, it's a confessed by Alex. Yes, I don't know. It's tough to say because you have these sorts of things and these trends and you kind of want to give somebody a bit of pity. But at the same time, it's very difficult when you actually listen to what he puts out into the world and how he's affected a lot of people.

So I'm actually interested. How did you start doing this? Was this like work or did you just become fascinated by this? Alex? It was a little bit of both. I used to work at this place called Media Matters for America in Zoros. Yeah. Nazi collaborator Zoros. Oh my God. I went to an Alex Jones press conference when he was in DC one week and it was like recently. Yeah, it was earlier this year. Lucky duck. Oh, dude, that was that was an experience. Yeah. And once he figured out who I was, he just went off. On you specifically? Yeah, he like singled me out in the crowd and he's like, that guy works for a Nazi collaborator. I think I saw this in the live feed. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah, that was me. Congratulations. Yeah, I know. We're very excited for you.

Yeah, it's that was a hell of a day. But yeah, so I started doing stuff with Media Matters and you know, there's like a weekly sort of mix of stuff I had to listen to like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Alex Jones, and I just thought the info or stuff was more interesting. Yeah. Or at the very least, more entertaining. Oh, yeah. It was like watching a daily train wreck. So I sort of step on that. And now that, you know, I do work at a place called Right Wing Watch, which for the money or for the record does not get Zoros money. That's good. Good to know. I don't think Alex cares, but no, no, no, absolutely not. And I just sort of stuck with it, I guess, and I thought about like different ways I could approach

it. Anytime he's in the area or an event that I think I might go to, I try to work that angle into it and try to figure out how it fits into the broader info wars universe or or zeitgeist. Yeah, and something that's like become really fascinating to me. I'm interested to hear your thoughts. It's just sort of, you know, this trauma inspired train wreck that happens on air every day, like the sorts of people that it attracts because Alex Jones has mega fans and he has a lot of them that will travel to like go see him or other info wars host at different events. And it's always the most curious bunch of people. How so? Well, it's a lot of live streamers. First off, that was like that's something I've noticed at a bunch of events is people with their own sort of spin off live

stream, right wing conspiracy theory style shows that, you know, are there to hopefully interview Alex Jones or meet Alex Jones or try to get a job with Alex Jones. One thing I think that that sort of triggers in my mind is like that really makes sense because most of Alex's employees came from contests that he ran, like Leanne McAdoo and David Knight were both people that came into the fold through contests. And Owen Schreuer came aboard because he was making like antagonistic YouTube videos and he got in touch with Alex, Millie Weavers, I believe, fairly similar. So a lot of his actual employees feed the myth that like if you just go find him and you're doing something, he'll bring you aboard. And then even beyond that, back in the day,

most of his callers, like nowadays, they'll call in and be like, Alex, I want to tell you that Alpha Brain is the best. And now here's my question. Whereas back in the day, you'd get callers and they'd all be like, Hey, Alex, I'm putting together an info wars rap album. Can I plug it? That was fun. Everybody would call in with their own thing and plug it. So Alex was kind of like a distribution center. Like his web, his radio show was like this place that you could get your thing out. And I think he really encouraged that ethos in his audience. So I am not too surprised to hear that now the YouTube streaming stuff has become so much more prevalent that that's still the case. What's more interesting, not to not to one up you like a douchebag, what I find more

interesting is how much he openly disdains his listeners. He hates them. He hates his listeners. Like anytime somebody calls in, there's a certain expectation of like, you're going to say some dumb shit, and I'm going to have to pretend that it's okay. And he'll just often just cut people off and and act like his own narrative is what you were talking about. And it'll just be like, Hey, did you know that space is owned by dogs who live in their own home? Well, yeah, of course, I did. And that's why the Chinese are running everything now. And you're like, that's you didn't engage with that. Yeah, he does that a lot. He does that even to his own guests sometimes. Oh, yeah. There are probably only like five or six guests that I've seen that he always

gives deference to and always gives respect. There's like the Rogers of the world. There's this guy named Steve Quayle who's like this weird religious prophet of some sort. Alex never cuts him off treats him like a king. Well, he's a prophet. How can you cut off a profit? Yeah, you don't cut off the profit. That's just rude. Like, did you think Elijah was cut off all the time? Hell no, you listen to what Elijah has to say. I don't even know if he died. No, no, probably not. By the way, did you guys book that profit for this? We have a we have a we have a profit law statement. All right. All right, I'm going to move on. Yeah, something told me that like mine was going to be here. But I don't know, man, I guess,

I guess I was wrong. Profits are notoriously flaky. That's what I found. The the guest that I would say is my favorite, I think, just because of the weirdness. I don't know how much you have wrestled with Steve Pachanik. Are you are you aware of Steve Pachanik? I am. I'm sorry to hear that. Most people aren't. And they should be. You know, like Alex Jones, he's on everybody's lips. Everybody's writing big write ups about him and all this and no one really knows the nature of like one of the big sources of his narratives. Now, admittedly, the most interesting that Steve Pachanik ever did was get a call from Alex in the middle of a hurricane and bitch out at him. Like for the first time, Steve Pachanik was just like,

great, Alex. Yeah, sure. We're going to talk about your narratives right now. I'm in a goddamn hurricane. There was a was it during it was that Florida hurricane. Yeah. Not too long ago. Alex called him to do an interview on the show. And as soon as they started talking, Steve was like, Alex, I thought you were calling to ask how I'm doing. It was personally offended by it is fantastic. Yeah, but Steve Pachanik uses his like former like State Department status to lend Info Wars credibility, which if you don't know who he is and like how far out he is that that could, if you're gullible, I guess, or susceptible or new to who this guy is, that could be a little concerning. Yeah. And like even as recently as

like, I don't know, six months ago or so, he was on David Knight's show, Real News, and was talking about how Sandy Hook is fake, which is kind of running counter to Alex's efforts to like, let's not talk about this ever. Oh, yeah. So yeah, Steve Pachanik is a wild man. The only thing that saved Alex there is David Knight show is too boring to listen to ever. Yeah. Yeah, I skip it most of the time. It's the wise decision. Guys are human quail. Yeah, I don't think we talk about anybody but all of his co hosts and all of his like guest hosts, we all just like, nah, hard pass. You're not crazy enough. They don't have it. No. And but that's also part of Alex's hiring strategy is he's always going to hire people

who he feels like aren't a threat to his supremacy. Like the closest one is what's his dumb face? No, no, no, the British prison Paul Paul, Paul Joseph Watson. Yeah. Yeah. Who's who should be lit on fire and then just peed on forever. And it's even that guy is is too much of a pence to ever really compare to Alex's intense toxic max masculinity. But I do have to admire Paul's dedication to the brand whenever he like made this video about soy boys or whatever. And someone pointed out that the info wars brain force thing that he's always selling contains soy. And he just doubled all the way the fuck down. He's unflappable. You got to respect it. Oh, yeah, absolutely. He has the he has that kind of smugness that you

can't punch out of somebody. You know, like it's just he has he has that face that just drives people crazy and he knows it. And that's his weapon. It's it's really, it's great. It really works with his like really fast edited videos that he puts up, you know, it really is good for like trying to piss off people and, and, you know, sort of invigorate the base that likes to piss off other people. Yeah, but put him in front of the camera for like five minutes without fast cuts. And he's he's kind of hopeless. Yeah, not really very good without his editor. That's that's his real talent is like understanding the the attention span necessity. Like he is willing to cut and and almost by himself go at 1.5 times speed, you know, like you can he can say something

really boring, but he says it so quick that you you skip over the stuff. And you're like, oh, he's he's saying something racist here. Yeah. So I, you know, Paul has like, you know, mastered the art of creating outrage and Alex Jones, I think attracts people like just because he's so eccentric. But, you know, sort of circling back to this question of like, who watches info wars? I, you know, you sort of had that, you know, you called it like a Malcolm Gladwell analysis of Alex Jones. I'm curious what you think, you know, the history and mannerisms of Alex Jones might be able to tell us about his viewership, at least in the most general sense. Oh, I can tell you Dan has the serious answer to this one.

Well, I think that it's, it's changed over time, certainly. I think that probably, you know, in the probably late 90s, it was a lot of really hardcore militia folk who were listening. And then as you got into the early 2000s, I think you probably could make a case that there were a lot of died in the wool libertarians. And there were, there were a lot of people who were dissatisfied with George W. Bush. So he even probably had some weird left leaning libertarians in the mix. And then as soon as Obama got in, I think you, you saw white, you saw a real shift in terms of that. But I still think you maintain a lot of the libertarian folk. I don't know exactly when things changed, because I haven't, I haven't listened to all the episodes

that he's ever done. But I know from looking at online communities now and hearing comments about him now, there are tons of people who think that he's sold out and is a shill, particularly for Israel, people make that argument a lot. So I don't know, I, the true believers in terms of like his fan base of the, of the like, the libertarianism that he embodied years ago, I think a lot of those people have left him. I don't really know what his fan base is like outside of sort of scammy opportunists like those YouTube streamers you were mentioning, and people who are full of hate. I don't, I'm not sure exactly. I think he's most emblematic of the Republican party as it is now. Like his brand is overtaken by

the Fox News and all of that stuff. Because prior to Trump's ascent into global monstrosity, his brand was cruelty. His brand was whatever it is we can do to hurt the weakest members of our society is what we need to do. And they've overtaken that. So now he's kind of left with this, this weird conglomeration of sovereign citizens, white nationalists, people who want to say they're not anti-Semitic yet at the same time are so anti-Semitic. And then of course, artificially inflated Russian bot views. Like one of the, my biggest theory is that nobody but us actually kind of listens to him. Like I think, I think it might be you and Dan who are the only people who listen to what he has to say,

and everybody else kind of puts him on or doesn't as background music. Like what we found out is he's, now that he's off YouTube and Facebook and all of that stuff, he's on like 30 radio stations to give or take in large to medium markets. Who's to say how many like 200 population towns he might be on like a little transistor or something, but that's a medium market. No, I'm saying that he might have a ton of little tiny towns around the country where he's broadcast. But I did an analysis of major and medium markets and found he's, his radio reach is much smaller than he pretends. Yeah. And something I've been watching as, you know, since Alex Jones has been pulled off of all these platforms, you know, there was like a relative spike in interest and,

you know, as a result, traffic to the info war site, like right after that happened. Now it's starting to fall back down sort of closer to the normal range. And I'm wondering if it'll stay at that normal range or if we'll see that start to dwindle. Well, it's like, it's like when Breitbart, when the, the artificial, when they had to remove the. There's an article about how the, there was a suspicious pattern in Breitbart's traffic where they went up almost at a vertical line in their traffic. And then stayed around that level. And then like, I don't know, I think it was like nine months later, they had a, another vertical line downward in their traffic that clearly indicates artificial inflation of traffic. And I don't,

I don't know. I don't know what to expect from Alex. I know that whatever interest he got, like with him bragging about being the number one app and stuff like that, that was even overblown. He was the number one in the trending apps because everyone was running to it, like rats trying to get off a sinking ship. They needed something to hold on to. But I think, I think candy crush is still number one or whatever it is. I think back to normal is probably where you're going to be for a bit, especially because the midterms are coming up. I think that he has a built-in narrative about that. I think people are still invested in trying to see him through on whatever story, like whatever the storyline of this season of the show is with his, I'm a free speech martyr

and that stuff. Yeah, I think that was season five of Mad Men. Yeah. People want to see the conclusion of it. And then I think you'll probably see diminishing returns either way, whether the Republicans win in the midterms or they lose control of the House and Senate. I think either way, Alex kind of loses a lot of momentum and a lot of natural interest. So info is being pulled off. Some of these bigger platforms, a little bit of a disclaimer, I had sort of what ended up being a little bit of an accidental role in that. You were the Spotify guy. What? Yeah, that was the one who got Spotify. No shit! And then that just snowballed and I had no idea it was going to turn into what it turned into,

but here we are today. I'm curious to get someone else who understands the Infowars universe's take on what now or how does this affect the brand? Hmm. My, simply as somebody who doesn't study it and is only there to react on it and create my own nonsense theories, I think he's actually done. Like, I don't think he's, because right now he's the cause for so many of these people. And as we know from any cause, Twitter and all of that stuff is going to let it go after a couple of weeks. And once he stops being the cause, the cause celeb as it was, he is just going to disappear. And it's just going to be people, even the ones who are hardcore listeners, are going to wind up getting bored. Because as we've

listened to over the recent episodes, he's really kind of putting out the same nonsense and it's not as much fun. Before he got taken off, I feel like what you did, and I believe it was inadvertent and everything. I don't think that you were gunning or anything like that. I believe you're a hero, but anyways. I think that what you in essence did was kind of forced the narrative forward, because he was in a bit of a holding pattern. And by him getting kicked off stuff, he's able to progress to the next logical step, which is I'm a victim, I am the first target in terms of free speech, X, Y, and Z. And when that started to happen, one of my firm convictions, I believe, at the time, and I still believe this would be the case, was that he needed to use that

as a jumping off point to do something else. That he needed not like turn on Trump or anything like that, but he needed to respond to that change in the status quo by now really going full Lenny Bruce, like getting down to the brass tacks, sitting on his show as boring as it may be, reading over regulations, reading over terms of service agreements, or something like that, you know, trying to like make it make himself a respectable, legitimate argument, because he never does that. And when we started to listen to the episodes after he got kicked off of like Facebook and YouTube, you just saw him doing the exact same things. And like, it's just yelling about the chai comms, screaming about how Soros is evil, just doing the same, like I got to sell

my fish oil, all that stuff. And when I saw that, I just, I got the sense that like, he's either waving a white flag of surrender, or he doesn't realize that he's already dead in the water. There's there's nowhere to go past the end of this narrative. If that makes sense. The most exciting moment, I think for us with Alex in present day, was whenever he said that Trump shoved ISIS up his dirty asshole. That was the night that Trump bombed Syria. Yeah, because we were we were both watching him in this transformation from crazy guy who screams about chimeras and shit in and then becoming just the guy who's a partisan hack, who's just like, Hey, the Republicans are great and all this stuff and all the leftists are trying to kill you,

kill you. And on that night, we we could have seen the real turning point for him. He could have changed his narrative and become something so much better than what he is right now. It wouldn't have been better. Well, more, more interesting, more entertaining, I suppose. No, because that less repetitive that night when he was crying drunk on air screaming about Trump, as we say, shoves ISIS up our dirty assholes. The option that he would have then is to turn on Trump and be like, I'm going to fix this. I'm going to be the hero that's needed. And in reality, what you need him to do is shut up. Yeah, you did you helped make this mess that we're in. We don't need you to clean it up. He's like a baby who knocks over a bottle, and then doesn't know how to clean,

but he's trying like, Oh, let me help. Let me help. You just be like, baby, go sit in the corner. I'll take care of this. So adults need to step in. You know, I'm not mad at you. Yeah, no, because like, if I am remembering that same night, which I assume that I am, it's that he didn't use that to turn on Trump or really defy him in a major way and said it was like, Trump, we love you, we elected you for a reason, but but this wasn't good. No, no, by the end of the night, he was very much like, we got it, we're on our own now, that kind of thing. He was he was putting out granted he was pretty drunk and needed Owen Schreuer to sit there by his side to keep things going and moving forward.

You could you could see Owen Schreuer's look of surprise after every sentence he said of just like, what? No, we should have had a production meeting. I believe at one point, Owen was like, hey, Alex, we should probably get off air. Oh, wait, wait, I remember this. Yes. Okay. Another hour. He played me that clip and I was like, oh, it's certainly going. Thank God some or not. Thank God. Like, like, oh, it's a good thing that some reasonable person is getting Alex off the air. Alex is like, no, no, I got more shit to say. And yeah, so by the end of that, he was in full turn on flip on Trump mode. And then the next day he got on his show and said, you know, hey, everything's cool. We still support Trump,

but this is stupid that that sort of thing. Dan's theory is that Roger Stone texted him furiously or called him all night, trying to convince him otherwise. That's that's part of my theory. I have some other theories about that. But believe that isn't me. Oh, I think I found this is this when he's like, uh, Donald Trump shit his fucking pants at the fucking moment and shit all over everybody is that moment, right? So good. Yeah, there's some. So he did some strong work that night. That was a real not fucking cold for Donald Trump. That was that was a good night. Okay, yeah, I remember this. That was like one of the last most recent times that I've been like, that's Alex, baby.

Yeah, exactly. That's my boy. Because we did we did invest not we Dan investigated 2015. Um, and we did this whole long series because 22 episode series. Yeah. Yeah, because we're we really streamline things. You know, when we put out three hour episodes, we're really trying to condense it down probably a 55 hour long presentation. But I wanted to go back to 2015 to find the exact day that Trump announced his candidacy and see where, uh, Alex jumped on board to see like, because I thought the most interesting thing that the media wasn't telling me at all, even though everyone was saying that Alex Jones is the voice of Trump or whatever. And clearly Alex was on board with Trump. No one had any idea

why. And I wanted to try and figure that out. So I spent countless hours at my then day job, just going over listening to all the episodes, taking notes. Now, one of the things that I found that was the most surprising was that when Trump announced his candidacy, Alex hated him. He was very clear about how Donald Trump was a part of the mob. He said that Trump was a front man for consortiums on the East Coast, that he was a bad, bad guy. He knows from deep, deep sources said deep sources and say like, quote, if you have a name like Corleone, you get arrested. If you have a name like Trump, you don't. And so he was just very clearly coming out with like, I know that this guy is involved with illegal financial operations and stuff like that. And

then over the course of months, we saw him go from that position to Jesus, this guy is mean. He hates immigrants. I like that. But I still love Rand Paul. Yeah. He never wavered on that point at all for, for months and months. And then it happened in a week. Well, it didn't actually. And this is one of the misconceptions that a lot of people have. Well, no, a lot of people. No, I'm just kidding. A lot of people have this misconception. And I think it's a really easy mistake to make. And that is that once Roger Stone came, Alex flipped. And that's not true at all. Roger Stone showed up on November 9, 2015, was his first appearance on the show. And he did some good work in terms of trying to get Alex to love Trump by saying like, Trump loves guns,

you'd like him, he carries a gun everywhere, that sort of thing. But Alex still didn't endorse Trump until the middle of December. Or he didn't, he didn't get on board with him and say, this is our guy, Rand Paul is not good enough in December. So his path was much more complicated than I expected, or I expected to find. And yeah, I don't know. It was, it was really, it was really kind of, I like, it was a slow transition, I admit. I do think that the rhetoric happened, though, very quickly, like even near the end of his, his eventual love of Trump, the evolution that took a while, it was still like, well, you know, Rand Paul's my guy, but I'm starting to like this Trump fella, he hates non white people, and I hate non white

people. So maybe we're doing good. And then all of a sudden, it went from Trump is still mobbed up to Trump is a secret sleeper patriot. He has been, he has been working undercover for 30 years, in order to turn himself finally into the patriot that we all need to save us. He is the Messiah. No, you're, you're wrong, though. That's, I apologize. God, I love you. That's not correct. You're my favorite. You are. What you're recounting is like a central plot line. Have you guys read Jerome Corsi's book? Wait, is the book about QAnon? The Killing the Deep State? Yeah. Oh, I would never read a Jerome Corsi book that I have, I admit, I spend a lot of time listening to little warriors. But I don't have time. I don't have time to read a Jerome

Corsi. It's, it's some excellent fan fiction, probably some of the most creative I've read in a while. Well, actually, interestingly, Jerome Corsi was one of the people who was telling Alex in like July of 2015, that Trump was full of shit and that he, he didn't mean to run for president. So his whole like, writing a book about the deep state, as you're saying, and all this fan fiction is kind of like exactly the opposite of what he was saying in 2015. Interesting. Yeah. The reality though, Jordan, is that this is, this is essentially our podcast wherein I say something and Dan explains why I'm wrong. He didn't switch to Trump as our savior until a bit later. He got on board with Trump largely

because of that narrative that you did mention with the, he's working behind the scenes. There's a deal between Assad, Putin, and our rogue military that, that the counter coup narrative is, as we refer to it, that was being told to him by Roger Stone and Steve Pocenic behind the scenes, who are working together in a group that they have on air referred to as the 45 group. So I, I'm convinced that the two of them were working in concert to try and flip Alex Jones because they knew of his propaganda potential. And that happened towards the end of 2015, probably more towards December, when Trump appeared on Info Wars himself. Yeah, I'm curious, you know, especially as we go into the midterms now, when we're

recording this, you know, we've had sitting Congress people and, you know, congressional candidates and that sort of thing appear on Info Wars, I think just for the sake of the size of the audience that I guess it once had, I haven't seen any like real numbers recently. And it's just sort of that idea that, you know, it is a propaganda tool. And I'm really curious to see, you know, now that Info Wars has been pulled from so many platforms, if we're going to see the same type of high profile, you know, figures holding power, who are trying to wield Info Wars in the same way, or if it's going to sort of go the way that Breitbart did, where, you know, Breitbart can still get some guests and like, you know, high profile guests, but it's not this,

it's not thought of as the same like wieldy attack dog sort of outlet that it once was. Yeah. I think that, I mean, Matt Gates was the last sort of sitting politician, I think, who's going on. Yeah. And he went on there and complained about getting called a conspiracy theorist, which was just beautiful. And then apologized for going on is like, I shouldn't have done that. Which fair enough. But I think his, I think his reach even within his own sort of crew of guests is going to diminish, like let alone the people who like might go on just to pander to an audience like Matt Gates clearly was doing. I think that even some of those other people who are just essentially running cons will realize that this is not a profitable

place for us to go on anymore. And so I think I think even a lot of his like roster of guests will diminish. And that's one of the big things that we or at least I have learned from all of the analysis that Dan has put together of Alex's cast of characters is that these are all conmen trying to run their own game kind of hanging on like you were saying the guys who are hangers on trying to get their own YouTube show with Alex's cache involved in that. We see so many different people who go from Alex Jones to a fucking, what is it, Kerry Cassidy, Project Camelot, and then we've got the same people going on Jim Baker's show. And all of this stuff we find is people running a con and then the other con men kind of propping them up. None of these people.

There's an ecosystem of confidence games that really is most of the right wing media sphere at this point. That's my yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you if you look at like who's a regular guest on Alex Jones, it's people like Mike Cernovich, it's people like Roger Stone, it's people, you know, con man. Yeah, they're people that, you know, they have their own, whether it's like some bullshit book or, you know, like some of these guys have their own their own supplement line, you know, or whatever they're selling, you know, I, I grew that I think, you know, you look at, you know, the info wars guest rotation, and it's a relatively small pool of people. And they all have their own shit that they're trying to do. And I almost wonder if that's

like another indicative sign of sort of like the stage of info wars and its growth where people are coming on info wars to be on info wars, not because like anything substantial or, you know, majorly con consequential is happening on the platform or that they expect to wield like real influence anymore. I think that I think that some people definitely did before, but I think what they got out of it was money, quite frankly, because I know recently we we sometimes cover Project Camelot and Jim Baker episodes too, because they do the same sort of con maneuvers. And on an episode of Jim Baker's show recently, he was talking about how when he sells a guest's book, he buys a ton of their books, and then he sells them. So there's a financial incentive

for the guests to come on because they automatically sell this large chunk of books. And when you look at Alex Jones's business model with the info wars store, most of the time when these guests come on, he's selling their books on his store. So there is probably I can't confirm this necessarily, but it only stands to reason that a lot of these guests who are coming on end up selling 5000 books to Alex for the appearance that they're on. Yeah, there's essentially a sort of an in kind version of pay to play that's going on with like a consignment deal with absolutely. And I think that a lot of people as we move forward with his diminished reach won't see that as an investment that's worthwhile anymore. And he'll probably end up having to

go way down the batting order. Well, but see, that's one of the things that I don't like about his, as you were saying, he's got a smaller rotating cast of characters. Like when we go back in time with Alex, one of my favorites was a, what's his name, General Stubblebine or whatever. He's dead. Yeah, but when he went on the show, his wife was essentially selling a $25 postcard with a magic sentence that would get you out of any crime. No, no, no, it gets you out of getting vaccinated. Yeah. That's right. There was just even better. Yeah. She just she just she was selling a laminated card that said, don't stick me. Yeah, exactly. It was, it was like, oh, you're the kind of guest that I want. I don't want a Cernovich being a bitch on your show.

There's kind of like a fun crazy less existent nowadays. Oh, man. Yeah. I as long as we keep health ranger Mike, I think we'll be good. Yeah, health ranger Mike. Did you read his report that apparently got to the president? No, I didn't. You didn't read the Adams report? It was, I believe it was. It was really long. Was it Wesley Adams who did it or or okay. It was a a lengthy treatise that Mike Adams had written about the the state of conservative shadow banning that the president needed to see. I regret it is our 51st state actually. Yes. I knew that he was sending that, but I didn't realize it was health ranger Mike doing it. Oh,

yeah, it is. Oh, yeah. What the f***? What kind of world do we live in where a guy named health ranger Mike is allowed to do any of this shit? The the proprietor of naturalnews.com full of all kinds of your medical woo. Whatever you want to not believe, he'll help you not believe it. Yeah. And the thing like he he'll have health ranger Mike on every once in a while just to be like we've tested the supplements. They're fantastic. Also, you don't need vaccines. Yep. Fuck those vaccines will kill you. Hey, come on. Ginkgo biloba. You just need iodine. Deep earth iodine, Dan. Yeah. Don't could don't sell it short. There's something really interesting too. Like if you go and look at like, I mean, all those supplements that he sells all the

super male vitalities and everything, they're all brought to you by Dr. Group, who is his fake doctor. He's a chiropractor, but he runs this place called the global healing center. And if you go and look at his website, he has all the exact same products for sale just with different names that kind of sound like medicines. And it's a really interesting dynamic that the two of them have where they sell the same stuff. But Dr. Groups sounds like medicine. Alex sounds like it's combat gear, because they know their audiences. Yeah. And I mean, it's the same thing. It's another version of the same con. Yeah, it's like they have their own. It's like they all have their own private label, you know, like they all buy it from the same retailer. And then they just put

their own name on it. And they're like, this is completely different. More likely Dr. Group buys all of it, puts it all together. And then Alex does the same thing that he does with people's books in theory. And he's selling Dr. Groups stuff on private label. I like the image of Dr. Group putting it all together himself like he has a workshop like that. Exactly. It'd be fun. It would be fun. Well, I think we should go ahead and start to wrap this now that we have have finally discovered once and for all that, you know, the Info Wars products really are as as good as they say. Oh, yeah, we fixed it. If they are. I guess I can't get out of bed in the morning unless I have my bone broth. I'll tell you the only thing my my big takeaway,

I think the big thing that we discovered this evening is that, you know, with with fewer people going on the Alex Jones show, I think the Jim Baker show is about to get way more popping off. Man, I'll tell you, it's already been popping off. Those those buckets are not to be believed. Jim Baker show had on what what the the lady who Paula White Kane, Paula White Kane, who is the single greatest con artist I think we've had, or at least your position, at least like in Larry Nichols is much better. Larry Nichols call Larry Nichols. If you die, definitely make sure to pin a note to your chest that says call Larry Nichols. But she is running such a con in a way that somehow she gave a benediction for Trump or whatever. Well, she's his sort of personal

preacher. Right. And she there's nobody who could be less aligned with any kind of Christian theology that you could imagine. Come on, man, she's married to the keyboardist from Journey. That's true. That's great. That's true. That's enough for me. inexplicably true. I would I would say it's interesting that you're putting it that way. You think Jim Baker is about to pop off. I think he's already reached his is sort of zenith as it were. He's he's he's plateaued. He's gonna stay about where he is. I say keep your eyes on something like Project Camelot. That's, I think, I think that's much more likely to get really popular, because that's really fringe. That's really weird. They just talk about the secret space program all the time

and have like weird liars on. And the biggest guess they have is a murderer from 1993 or whatever it is, the Penn Dragon case. Mark Richards. Yeah. By the way, just so you know, just so you know, anytime you try and wrap up a show, we're going to wind up talking for 85 more minutes. So please just be as insistent as possible. Well, to wrap up the show. Perfect. Should I just answer everything with that? No, just end the phone call. Jared, it was a lot of fun to talk to you. I apologize. This was kind of all over the place, but it's nice to speak to somebody who focuses on this stuff as well. It's a rare treat in my personal life, at least. Yeah, it was a real pleasure. Wonderful. So for this is my podcast,

where can they check out Knowledge Fight? KnowledgeFight.com is our website that's got all the information that folks need, perhaps. The best thing to do to find us is to go to our Facebook group inexplicably enough. It's called Go Home and Tell Your Mother You're Brilliant, which is based on that clip that I was talking about with Steve Pachanic earlier where he bitched out on Alex for a while. He just ends with saying like, great, you did a good job. Go Home and Tell Your Mother You're Brilliant, five stars, whatever. It's bananas. Cool. Well, if you're looking for my podcast, you can find it on iTunes and all over the place. It's called the Shitpost. It's an exclamation point, right?

Yeah, that is an exclamation point. Yeah. Oh, by the way, are we allowed to say all of the yelling swear words that I did on your podcast? It's called Shitpost. Okay, fair enough. Well, then fuck this noise. But Shitpost is with the eye like it's pink, you know, the singer pink. All right, I got it. The eye was an exclamation point for it. Yeah, I tried to type the word shit into iTunes and they weren't having it, so. Those motherfucking pieces of shit. I believe, Jared, I believe that you are a victim of, you know, tyranny, online censorship, run amok. Undoubtedly, your free speech is being squashed because you can't put shit onto iTunes. Also, just so you know, I originally tried to email

Shitpost podcast at gmail.com and instead I found out that that is owned by a Mexican podcast that just started and they were not having it. Wait, what? Yeah, yeah, I emailed it and the guy was like, yeah, so we just started like a couple of weeks ago, we're in Mexico. Anyways, you don't want to talk to us. Oh man, that's hilarious. Well, cool guys. It's great Chad. Yeah, thank you so much. We had a great time. Cool, take care. All the best.