Today, Explained - One Man vs. InfoWars

Episode Date: March 19, 2018

The white nationalist rally in Charlottesville sparked outrage when a driver barreled through the crowd, killing one woman and injuring more than 30. Brennan Gilmore filmed it, and everyone saw his video. Then came the conspiracies, backlash, and death threats. Now, Gilmore is fighting back. He’s taking InfoWars' Alex Jones to court. Can a victim of conspiracy theories take down the king of conspiracy theories? Sean Rameswaram speaks to Gilmore and Vox's Jane Coaston. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mack Weldon does not make mattresses or toothbrushes, but they make a lot of clothes for men or women who want to wear men's clothes. They're super into smart design, premium fabrics, and making shopping easy. You can see how easy buying stuff at Mack Weldon is at MackWeldon.com. You'll get 20% off using the promo code EXPLAINED. Remember those protests in Charlottesville last August? And the terrifying video of that car speeding into the crowd? Brennan Gilmore was the guy who filmed that video. I'm actually on leave from the State Department where I'm a Foreign Service officer.

Brennan lives just outside Charlottesville. And last August, when he found out that white supremacists were planning a rally there, he decided that he would go too. I was there as a counter-protester. You know, the counter-protesters came from kind of all walks of life and just unified in their, you know, horror about this expression of white supremacy in the streets of our community. So, you know, I didn't necessarily have an agenda. I wasn't part of an organized counter-protesting group. I just went down to be part of a show of numbers and to, you know, document what was going on. You know, we were just walking down the street and saw this crowd marching up. I was with two friends of mine and I stepped out in the street to sort of like center

up the shot, just like holding the camera to sort of like center up the shot just like holding the camera to where the car was and i was thinking well maybe it'll get his license plate and then it just you know all hell broke loose and this most sickening disgusting sound you know i even more than the image of the sound of him hitting those bodies like even as i'm talking to you it's like making me sick to my stomach. Then I just stepped back off the mall, what we call the mall in Charlottesville, where this attack occurred, and stepped into a storefront to look at my camera and see, you know. And it wasn't until then that I actually realized that it had been recording, and my immediate thought was, well, this shows exactly what happened, you know.

I need to get this to the police. Brennan showed his video to the cops and then he uploaded it and it became the definitive footage of an American tragedy. And for most of us, that's where the story sort of ends. But for Brennan, it was just the beginning. By Sunday evening, my sister had texted me. She's like, have you talked to mom and dad? And I said, no, why? You know, she's like, well, these Nazis have doxxed them and they put their addresses online and there's death threats against you.

So, because when I was in the Foreign Service, that was my home of record. I didn't have my own address. The address that these people had doxxed was my elderly parents, you know, in Lexington, Virginia. And that was, you know, day one of what has become this huge part of my life now, which is that I am the center of these conspiracy theories that I'm behind, like the attacks in Charlottesville. The most extreme of them are like these fake intercepted Russian intelligence reports that said I was in Africa, not to, you know, represent my

country in the Foreign Service, but to orchestrate genocide on behalf of the CIA against Muslims in Central Africa, or that I was this deep state actor. But the general outline of the conspiracy theory is that there is a deep state that is trying to overthrow Donald Trump, and I am an operative of it. Alex Jones, in his conspiracy theory, says I was paid $320,000 by George Soros to come to Charlottesville to orchestrate the event and then to get on mainstream media and lie about what happened, which would help undermine Trump's administration. They got State Department and high level CIA. One guy is paid $320,000 a year on the payroll of Soros. He doesn't just get money from Soros. He personally has played $320,000 a year,

and then he's their CIA State Department, and he's on the news. And then when people pointed out who he was, they took his name off the State Department website and stuff, but Google has all the shots of it. I mean, it's like, whoa, whoa. Within 36 hours, Alex Jones InfoWars had hour-long specials, comparing what I was doing in Charlottesville to other conspiracies around the world,

calling me a CIA asset and hack. Alex Jones, I mean, the combined viewership of the videos that are about conspiracy theories about me are probably in the millions, certainly the hundreds of thousands. But yeah, Alex Jones, Gateway Pundit, and within that entire week was just, I mean, that entire week started what became a deluge, just a deluge of hate mail and harassment and death threats and doxing. And, you know, people harassed me on the street in Charlottesville. I have, you know, people I grew up with that started listening to this stuff and believing it and, you know, not talking to me, like was just bewildering and dizzying in its intensity and scope and how it grew. And so, you know, by

five days after Charlottesville, you know, this went from an obscure alt-right website to Alex Jones to Gateway Pundit, you know, to quote-unquote media outlets that the White House has accredited who are pushing these conspiracies, these baseless, you know, defamatory conspiracy theories about me. And then by the end of the week, you have Louie Gohmert, this congressman from Texas, sitting on Fox Business News talking about how the Charlottesville events were staged by Democrats to make the 2018 midterms about race. How do you have instances of people with KKK shirts and Black Lives Matter getting off the same bus. I mean, there is a strategy to make race the number one issue in 2018. In 2020, they think it's their ticket back, but this is going to blow up in their face. We need an investigation as to what happened at Charlottesville,

who paid for the different groups to come in, who ordered the funneling of those groups together. I mean, it just went from where you know, where you're used to seeing these, you know, flat earth and fake moon landing conspiracy theories, sort of like the obscure reaches of the internet, to mainstream media and to Fox News. And it was just, you know, breathtaking and overwhelming. Brennan's name got dragged through the mud in a lot of dark corners of the internet. He became the story story but now he's

trying to hit back he filed the lawsuit against alex jones and his co-conspirators last week it's for defamation and for um intentional uh emotional infliction of emotional distress and we think that there's a very strong case to be made because, you know, what they did was libelous, was slander, was, you know, defamatory. Not to mention the emotional impact this has had on my family over the last six months to be constantly harassed. I mean, it's March 2018. This happened in August 2017, and I'm getting death threats now. You know, I mean, two weeks ago, somebody told me my body was going to be found at the bottom of the river that runs near my house, all because I happened to be on a street corner and had my phone running when somebody committed an attack.

We built this case and filed last Tuesday in federal court, but we hope it goes to trial because we want to, A, I want to defend my name and I want to expose what these outlets are doing and the incredibly insidious role that they're playing right now. This guy's on PBS, NPR, CNN, days after saying, I'm saying it's all fake and nobody died and all this stuff and all the rest of this stuff, or I made it up and I'm getting him harassed, when I didn't say any of that. So he's going to go on TV tomorrow and all over the media and be the victim and then call for the hurting and the bullying. My YouTube channel will be taken down, which they've been trying to do. And then it'll just kind of build the case and wave after wave that he's got to be silenced so they can then all misrepresent what I've said

and what I've done. You know, you were out there, Brennan, I think because you believed that you were on the right side of this issue. You've dedicated your life to serving your country. I wonder, has all this changed how you feel about being an American? No. I mean, I still believe in our country very much. I believe in its ideals. I believe in its institutions. I think we're in a difficult time. And I think we'll get through this and we'll come out better. And this lawsuit, in a very small way, I'm hoping to be part of that process by setting a new legal precedent that will give these outlets pause before they try and do the same thing next time.

Why would anyone believe a Foreign Service officer like Brennan would fake the Charlottesville attack? That's in just a beat. This is Today Explained. What can your data tell you? With Google Cloud Platform, you can use machine learning at scale to build better products. Google Cloud's AI provides modern machine learning services with pre-trained models and a service to generate your own tailored models. The platform is now available as a cloud service to bring unmatched scale and speed to your business applications.

It predicts so your business can thrive. Go to g.co slash getcloudai to learn more about Google Cloud Platform. This is Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. We've seen some pretty gnarly conspiracy theories in the past few years. There was the stuff about Brendan Gilmore in Charlottesville, but also the Las Vegas shooting. False flag. The idea that the whole thing was staged by the government in some extraordinary way. You know, 22,000 actors were hired to fake this. And Pizzagate.

Suggesting that Bill and Hillary Clinton were running a sex ring out of a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor. And maybe the hardest to swallow, the Sandy Hook truthers. A Sandy Hook truther has been arrested for terrorizing one of the victims of that tragic shooting. Believing, like Alex Jones, that the deaths at Sandy Hook were faked. How do people end up believing this bullshit? It's people trying to make sense out of something that does not make sense. Jane Koston covers politics at Vox. Like, you know, the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary, from an existential level, out of something that does not make sense. Jane Koston covers politics at Vox.

Like, you know, the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary, from an existential level, someone going in and shooting small children and then killing themselves does not make sense. That is a question for your rabbi or your priest or your imam to, like, go handle that. Like, why do bad things happen? That's kind of been, you know, the understated quest of human life has been trying to, why do bad things happen? That's kind of been, you know, the,

you know, the understated quest of human life has been trying to figure out why these things happen. But for conspiracy theorists, they're like, well, it can't have happened. And then it just becomes, it's easy to find an explanation to something when the, you know, it's either this explanation or admitting that life takes place without our control. What about when these things actually start to hurt people who are still with us? In the case of the Vegas shooting, saying there were multiple shooters is wrong and confusing and clearly not the case. But in the case of Charlottesville, where Alex Jones and tons of other alt-right trolls start calling Brennan Gilmore a government actor and saying that he staged the video, they're like ruining this guy's life potentially. What are they actually saying to justify that?

Well, I think that they would say that this person is actually the dangerous person, that they are the innocent victims of Brennan being the deep state actor behind all of this. And so you see that over and over again, that like, the idea is that this is all the alt-right is the innocent victim, and they're just trying to find the truth here. Do you think an Alex Jones type who has such an impact actually believes the things that he's saying? I don't think so, no. There was a court case last year in which it was, you know, it was a personal case to Alex Jones. It was between him and his ex-wife, and it had to do, I believe, with custody over their

children. And his ex-wife is saying, you know, this is Alex Jones. This person is clearly not mentally well, should probably not have custody of children. And Alex Jones's attorney's response was, no, this is performance art. He's an actor. This is all some part of a overall performance. None of this is real. And, you know, there's been some great writing, I think, at New York Magazine talking about

how a lot of what Alex Jones is trying to do is actually to sell supplements. Like dietary supplements? Yes, dietary supplements. We have some life-changing, really amazing products that you've got to try. There's a lot of hype out there, a lot of talk, but the revolutionary form of iodine we have, it's purple, blue crystal, truly pure, not from seaweed-based, not red, but blue, electric blue, the true gas form injected into an organic palm oil, X2 nation iodine, been life changing for myself and others. Truly amazing. It's a big deal. And it's actually, there was a hilarious story, I think last year, that showed that both InfoWars and Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's website,

sell the exact same supplements, just with like very different wording and terminology. Wow. Did Gwyneth Paltrow's website, sell the exact same supplements, just with very different wording and terminology. Wow. Did Gwyneth weigh in on that? She did not, as far as I know. Alex Jones's show relies really heavily on advertising revenue. And so he's got the website. He's got a YouTube channel.

He's got the display ads on that website. And all of those are to bring in money. And he does not believe that chemicals are turning frogs gay he does that one of them yes that is one of them what do you think tap water is it's a gay bomb baby i don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin frogs gay if you think about it that way he's basically kind of an ad man. And he just happens to be very good at it. It feels like once your life is inundated by a conspiracy or the sort of what feels like an ambush online, all you really have as recourse is a lawsuit, which is what we're seeing in the case of Charlottesville

and this guy Brennan Gilmore who filmed the video of the car driving through the crowd. Is there anything that says that that could work, suing an Alex Jones? I think so. Generally, defamation, especially in a civil lawsuit, is probably the best way to deal with this, especially because there's basically this kind of pattern that Alex Jones in court proceedings will settle, issue a one sentence retraction, and then keep going with whatever he's been saying. And I think Brendan Gilmore is saying like, okay, we're going to go to court and we're going to talk about this. Because I think that that's really the only way in to stop this.

Alex Jones's lawyers are caught in a really interesting predicament. Because Alex Jones perceives himself or wants to be perceived as someone who's telling the truth that no one else will tell. And if he is knowingly making a false statement, that's defamation. Or he's making this whole thing up. And his lawyers will have to say, he's a performance artist. All of this is made up. If people believe it, that's not his fault.

No one should believe Alex Jones. And so if you're Alex Jones, that's a really unfortunate position to have to be in, to either argue in court, I'm a big fat liar, or face defamation because everything he says is not true. Alex Jones likes to talk. This lawsuit was just filed a couple of days ago. Has he said anything about how he thinks it'll go? He has not. On InfoWars, they have pictures saying that the Pope Francis has sued InfoWars because Brennan Gilmore is working with the Georgetown University Law Clinic as his attorneys. Georgetown is a Catholic university. Ergo, if you go to InfoWars, they're like, the Catholic Church is suing InfoWars. It's a better headline.

They literally have a picture of Pope Francis, Georgetown, InfoWars. I was just like, okay, well, I guess that's where you're going with this. But Alex Jones has always portrayed himself very differently in court than how he does on his website, which is, I think, very amusing to me because he's always like, you know, I'm this like, I'm a man. I'm angry. And then in court, he's like, I'm an artist. Respect my art.

I think we've been talking a lot about white supremacist conspiracy theories and sort of far right conspiracy theories. But it's important to acknowledge that, you know, my uncle's a conspiracy theorist, and your grandmother's a conspiracy theorist, right? This isn't just people on the far fringes of our society. Exactly. You know, it's not uncommon. And my only conspiracy theorist leaning is that I think the Martin Luther King assassination, there's a lot more

to it than we know. Oh, so you're a conspiracy theorist too? Apparently. Okay. Because I think the Martin Luther King assassination, there's a lot more to it than we know. Oh, so you're a conspiracy theorist too? Apparently. Okay. Because I think that being a conspiracy theorist doesn't require you to be like wild and crazy or screaming at people on the street. It requires you to be someone who thinks that there's something you don't know or there's something you're being told that isn't true. And you think that there's more to it's something you're being told that isn't true and you think that there's more to it than what you're being told. You know, when people are like, well, we can just fact check conspiracy theorists. I'm like, no, you can't fact check people's feelings. People are like, ah, yes,

I took a look at all the available evidence that I've decided the moon landing did not happen. You know, if you kept providing people with evidence, people would still think the moon landing didn't really happen. And I think that's the most difficult thing of all about conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists. Mac Weldon makes all sorts of menswear, but their underwear has superpowers. They're antimicrobial, which means they eliminate odor for you while you wear them. If you don't like your first pair, you can keep them and they will still refund you.

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