155: January 7-9, 2009

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Today, Dan tells Jordan about how different a man Alex Jones was in 2009. To be fair, there were a lot of similarities, but this dude is not 2018 Alex. Enjoy Jordan going on a damn roller coaster.

Tidbits

• Alex is against cops killing black people
• Oscar Grant killing
• 2009 Alex is anti-cop
• Alex Jones Karaoke: Silver Stallion by the Highwaymen
• Alex is pro-protesting
• Alex's True Story: High School Alex stands up to dirty cops
• January 2009: Gazprom cuts off gas to Ukraine, Alex blames Ukraine
• Alex auctions off broken bullhorn, Tyranny Crusher 1
• All bullhorn, all day
• Alex has Charlie Sheen's jacket from Red Dawn, does not sell it
• Red Dawn clip, Alex announces he's on RT
• Gold Sales with Ted Anderson
• Alex is not a fan of Andrew Jackson
• Government agency put in a $5 million bid on bullhorn
• Your problem is that your mother didn't breastfeed you, that's how Satan got hold of you
• Guest: Russell Means, First People's Rights advocate
• Alex is critical of Israel
• Guest: Bob Chapman, gold shill
• Alex's True Story: Black people apologize to Alex at a mall
• Alex doesn't like the culture of malls
• Bob and Ted run a 2 man gold sales game
• Name of show should have been "They're All Conmen"

Notable Bits

• Alex Jones Karaoke
• Alex's True Story

Detailed Show Notes

This portion was reproduced from the official Knowledge Fight website.

Guests

• Eric Plumley: Plumley is a lawyer who has experience in litigating surveillance-related cases. Alex seems to intend to have him on to talk about the legality or illegality of the government monitoring people, but Plumley's specialty seems to be in cases of a spouse spying on their partner in order to dig up incriminating information about them. The interview is interesting, but it is clear that it is a much smaller focus than what Alex intended.
• Ray McGovern: McGovern was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990, and was involved in creating Presidential Daily Briefings, particularly in the Reagan White House. Since then, he's been an activist, voicing strong opinions against torture and the Iraq War. McGovern seems like a complicated figure. On the one hand, he has legitimate career credentials and has a track record against horrible things (like torture). On the other hand, he also has a history of going on Russian and Turkish media to support Russian talking points. He also has written for Russia Insider since 2015, including such articles as "How The West Provoked The New Cold War," and "Swamp Psychopath (John) Brennan Running Scared." Not as damning as the writings of Paul Craig Roberts, but still showing a very specific bias.

Narratives

Alex Jones spends a very large portion of this show complaining about a cop who recently shot and killed an unarmed man named Oscar Grant, in Oakland, CA. Grant may have gotten into a fight on a BART train at around 2 AM on New Years Day, 2009. Cops responded to the scene, where witnesses confirmed that Grant was "peaceful" when the officers arrived and that the officers were the aggressors. They ended up having Grant on his stomach on the ground, trying to handcuff him, when officer Johannes Mehserle shot him in the back, which led to his death hours later at a hospital.

This is a horrible story that we've seen play out so many times, but what sticks out in this case is that Alex Jones' take on the entire thing is 100% against the police. At this point in his career, he hadn't made the pivot toward pandering to military and police yet, so his perspective is entirely about how this is a horrifying example of police brutality. Most likely, he's just against the police because, at this point, he views them as extensions of President Obama, but whatever the case is, it is a tremendous difference from where he will end up being a few years later.

The rest of most of the show is spent with Alex talking about the Trans-Texas Corridor, the super highway that Alex is convinced is a Globalist takeover of the Americas, and will lead to the North American Union. None of these things came to pass, and the Trans-Texas Corridor did not end up getting built.

His topic on the TTC today is that "they" are saying that the plans for the road fell through, but in reality, "they" were just changing the name. This is inaccurate. The TTC never got made, and the North American Union remains a non-existent entity that really has no political traction and no one is really pushing for.

This portion was reproduced from the official Knowledge Fight website.

Guests

• Steve Quayle: Steve Quayle is an unhinged lunatic, and someone who Alex Jones looks to as a very seriously credible source. He has written books about how there used to be literal giants walking the Earth, how the Nazis didn't lose WWII and actually have a base under Antarctica, how most natural disasters are really weather weapons, among many other insane topics. Alex made clear on another episode that Steve is the source for most of his "chimera narratives," which is really sad.
• Paul Craig Roberts: Roberts was the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under President Reagan in 1981, and after that became an editor for the Wall Street Journal and a Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute. Since at least 2014, he's been a columnist for Russian Insider and Russian state-owned outlet Sputnik, writing articles with titles like "America Has No Unifying Moral Culture-It Will Lose A War Against Russia," "Will Putin Realize That Russia Holds All The Cards?" and "Privatization Is The Atlanticist Strategy To Attack Russia."
• David Icke: Where to begin? David Icke was a sports broadcaster in the UK, until he went on Terry Wogan's talk show in 1991 and declared that he is the son of God. From there, he went on to be laughed at for a while, but he came out the other side of it with a pretty respectable career giving lectures about the "Reptilian bloodlines" that control the world and have for generations. He believes the Protocols of Zion are real (they are not), and he has signed off on almost every conspiracy theory out there. Also, since this appearance, he's had a falling out with Alex Jones and believes him to be a disinformation agent.

Narratives

Alex Jones makes a very damning statement on today's show that reveals that his affinity for Russia dates back even to 2009.

On January 7, 2009 (the day prior to this episode), Russia cut off the oil that was transported through Ukraine, en route to many other countries in Europe, leaving 17 countries almost entirely without the oil that they needed to heat homes in the dead of winter. This was the end result of a breakdown in a financial deal between the two countries, and as it relates to how things ended up getting to the seriously dangerous point they reached, both Russia and Ukraine have blame to share.

However, one thing that no one in their right mind would have said in the immediate aftermath, or years later even, is what Alex Jones says on his show:

Alex does not only say that it is Ukraine's fault that oil shipments were shut down; he says that Ukraine shut off the oil. He is implying that Russia did not even have a part in the situation, that shutting down oil deliveries was not literally and entirely a decision that Russia made.

You can read an in-depth assessment of the 2009 oil dispute from the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies, and you can get a sense of the underlying negligence and sloppy communication that led Europe to this brink, but what you cannot in any way justify is the idea that Ukraine shut off the oil. That is a narrative that, quite literally, only someone who willingly disseminates Russian propaganda, or someone who naively believes said propaganda and repeats it as fact, could possibly think. Suffice it to say that Alex Jones had been loving and covering for Russia long before Donald Trump came into the picture.

To drive that point home, here is a clip of Alex announcing his upcoming appearance on RT, while we watches and yells over a little snippet of Red Dawn:

In case you were wondering, the appearance he's plugging is on the day of Barack Obama's presidential inauguration. Spoiler alert: On January 20th, Alex Jones leaves his own show for half an hour to do an interview on RT about how bad Obama is. His priorities should be pretty clear from that: on what should be one of the biggest days of his own career, Alex leaves his own post to appear on a hostile foreign power's state-owned media network. All about a week and a half after he said that Ukraine shut off the oil to Europe, and then moved on, never covering the story again. This does not seem coincidental.

Anyway, most of the rest of the show involves Alex further covering the San Francisco police shooting he covered on yesterday's show. He has now decided that the cop is a lunatic, and he's gotta go to jail for his actions, something he would never, ever say a few years after this episode.

The other most notable thing about this episode is the fundraising aspects of the show. He does one thing that is hilarious, and one thing that borders on illegal (but he does all the time), while trying to raise funds on this episode.

The hilarious thing is that he is trying to sell a broken bullhorn that he used to yell into, and he's reporting some very serious bids coming in on it.

Alex spends a shockingly high amount of time on this episode being very defensive about the idea that he's selling a broken bullhorn, as if his audience would not understand the idea of "memorabilia" having value outside of functional use. If I recall correctly, he's getting bids in the range of $50,000 toward the end of this episode, or at least he thinks he is.

The other fund-raising initiative that is in play today is that Alex finishes up the show with a visit from Ted Anderson, owner of the Genesis Communications Network (GCN) and owner of gold/silver sales firm Midas Resources. Ted started GCN to use as a promotional wing for Midas Resources, so it's always been about selling gold for him, but looking back at 2009, it's pretty mind-blowing to see how deeply involved Alex was in trying to push business to Midas.

Almost every day, he finishes up the show with a visit from Ted, if he doesn't talk to him in the middle of the show, often coincidentally right after he concludes an interview with one of his guests who likes to predict imminent financial collapse (see: Gerald Celente, Bob Chapman, Paul Craig Roberts, Peter Schiff, almost anyone who comes on Alex's show honestly).

It's almost like Alex understands that it is his job to get his listeners into a suggestible state by scaring them with interviews with lunatics masquerading as experts telling them that soon their dollars will be worthless, at which point he brings in Ted with the solution to all those problems: gold!

I would say that these guys are the bigoted and paranoid version of the Home Shopping Network, if the con-men on the Home Shopping Network had designs to reshape society into a white-supremacist Christian chauvinist feudal state.

This portion was reproduced from the official Knowledge Fight website.

Guests

• Russell Means: Russell Means is an interesting guest for InfoWars. On the one hand, he has a decades long history of activism, engaging in occupations and protests against the mistreatment of Native Peoples in America. On the other hand, he is probably also a crazy person. For instance, he was ready to sign up as Vice President to campaign with Larry Flynt in 1983. For another, he was arrested for assault and battery of his 80 year-old father (who had one false arm), and in 1999 the American Indian Movement (AIM) put out a press release repudiating him and saying that, though he may represent himself as involved with AIM, he was not. As is so often the case on this show, it appears we are dealing with a con-man.
• Bob Chapman: Bob Chapman is an absolute mystery, and all I can tell you for certain about him is that there is something very sinister afoot in his life. For one thing, he claims that he was "probably the largest gold and silver stockbroker in the world" from 1970-1988, a claim that if true would have to make Bob at very least a multi-billionaire, which raises the question of why he would appear on InfoWars to shill gold at age 73 if he was a billionaire. It doesn't add up. But then, you peel back the next layer, and you learn that until 1976 he focused his gold business almost entirely on South African (apartheid era South African) gold, in fact he spent the years 1970-1973 living in apartheid era South Africa and the short-lived literal white nationalist state Rhodesia. He helped Gary Allen finance the printing of his book None Dare Call It Conspiracy (the book that "woke Alex Jones up") with money he was making from stealing South African resources and while he was living in apartheid countries in Africa. Also, one time, he claimed he saw a video of Ronald Reagan getting butt-fucked.
• Alan Watt: Alan Watt is not Alan Watts. Those are different guys, don't get them confused. Alan Watt is an idiot who mostly rambles about the NWO and Illuminati, spinning yarns about vague theories of their nefarious doings throughout history. It's all bullshit, and he's real boring.

Narratives

There are a couple of very, very important things that come up on today's show, but before getting to them, Alex does give an update about how he is selling his broken bullhorn, lovingly nicknamed TyrannyCrusher One:

It turns out that Alex's eBay auction for his broken bullhorn fell prey to some troll bidding, and now he may not be able to sell it after all, what with the time it will take to go through the bids and see if any of them are real.

That seems like a job for eBay, and really shouldn't represent any time commitment on Alex's part, but whatever. The part I'm far more interested in is the part where Alex is convinced that anything negative that happens to him must be the government coming after him. The reality is that people on the internet like to fuck around and 2009 was basically the wild west for this sort of thing.

What Alex is doing is really smart though, painting a run of the mill internet prank as targeted harassment from government shills does make it appear that his work is far more dangerous and based in reality than it actually is. Propaganda truly is about the management of appearances, so it's important for even minor things like this to be presented as sinister attacks against "the republic," or some shit.

It is really stupid, but it does lead to this incredibly stupid attack on Alex's critics:

Regardless, on to the more important things on this episode. These are very important, so I will need to deal with them as bullet points:

1) Alex Jones Criticizes Israel For Shooting Palestinians

This is pretty huge, and is diametrically opposed to Alex's position in 2018. When Israeli snipers shot and killed over 50 Palestinians in May of 2018, most of them completely unarmed and peacefully demonstrating, Alex's response was to affirm his support of Israel, and to play rhetorical "what about this?" type games about how bad he thinks Muslims are, lying about "hourly suicide bombings" that the media doesn't report:

We can see here a major pivot in his position. This is something that demands an explanation, and I do not trust the one that Alex would offer up, namely that he "didn't realize how evil Islam was in 2009." Alex's rhetoric about the "Globalists" wanting to flood "Western" (he means "white") countries with immigrants in order to destroy their economies, is alive and well in 2009. This is one of the things he claims is his biggest issues with Islam, and it's a complaint he is making in 2009, so I reject that as what has changed for him.

It is hard to say without having all the evidence at our disposal, but this is going to be something that we watch very closely as 2009 progresses. As it stands, this is one of the most glaring examples of something that needs explaining that we've found in the past so far.

[Note: we in no way believe that this is an indication that Alex works for Israel or Mossad. The people who put forth those sorts of theories generally seem to hold to a particular belief system that we do not think is a coincidence. I don't rule out any possibility, but all "evidence" I've seen has been very weak, and there are many other possible explanations for why Alex changed his position on Israel]

2) Alex Is In Very Deep As A Gold Con-Man

For a long time, it's been perfectly clear that Alex is running a gold-sales scam at the behest of Ted Anderson, owner of the Genesis Communications Network and the gold/silver outlet Midas Resources.

How I imagined it, Alex is kind of crazy and paranoid to begin with, but he's in enough control of it to be able to use it to sell things. He probably does believe that the "Globalists" are putting things in the water, but he also knows that if he yells about it more and exaggerates the danger, he will sell more units for his water filtration sponsors. He probably is a Doomsday Prepper-type at heart, but if he amps up how passionate he seems about fearing that the end is coming, that translates to more sales for his survival food sponsor. I made the fairly generous assumption that the relationship between Alex's content and his sponsors was incidental or possibly benign.

After experiencing a bit of 2009 episodes, I no longer think InfoWars is a case of benign or incidental sales. I am becoming more and more convinced that we are not looking at a radio show where the host has positions, and conveniently he has sponsors related to the things he talks about. I am becoming concerned that the advertisements on InfoWars dictate the content.

On this episode, Alex Jones welcomes Bob Chapman to the show, and they very predictably have a conversation about how the economy and the dollar are about to collapse. They spread a ton of real over the top financial fear, before Bob reaches the natural conclusion of their conversation, telling the audience that the only safe option in the world is gold:

At this point, Bob Chapman straight up just tells Alex's audience that what they need to do is call Midas Resources. Keep in mind that Bob Chapman is appearing on the show, ostensibly, as a financial expert, not as a booster for Midas Resources, which again, is the company that owns GCN, the company that syndicates Alex's show (and is responsible for most of his ad revenue).

Leave aside for a second that Bob Chapman buys ads on GCN programming to promote his newsletter, The International Forecaster. Forget that Midas Resources offers a free issue of The International Forecaster along with gold/silver purchases. Actually, scratch that, there is no way to ignore these absurdly intertwined, overlapping, and undisclosed business relationships between these guys. This is absolutely the definition of immoral advertising.

This kind of thing should be a huge red flag for anyone listening, and it should be completely clear what is going on as soon as Alex gets Ted Anderson himself on the line to chat with Bob Chapman about how important it is to buy gold and how good the Midas deals are if you want to buy gold NOW!

These men are running a very basic con where Alex has someone on as an expert who is actually a shill for Midas Resources. The two of them get the audience ready to hear a gold salespitch, usually by peddling fear based on misrepresentations of news stories or history, and when the audience is good and primed, they bring in the closer, Ted Anderson to give you the deals, deals that you would be so stupid to pass up.

It doesn't get ore see-through than this as a con, and if they would be willing to stoop to this level, it really has to call into question all the rest of InfoWars operation. Very likely, the entire thing is probably not above board.