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Alex Jones - Episode 13
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Yeah, we could sell dick pills. You go, how do you feel about dick pills?
SPEAKER_03I I guess uh BBLs. BBLs, Proud Nation of Brazil. Okay, because we're framing it like, you know, towards our audience. So we would be like the thing that everybody is accusing Asmongold of really wanting nowadays. A BBL? Uh gender confirming surgery.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03So we would spin like very hypersexualized surgeries in like Mexico or some shit that we get like 30% of the profit as like gender-affirming surgeries uh for absolutely everyone, discounted with the reaction code 30% off BBLs, uh triple double D's.
SPEAKER_02When you show up at the shady clinic, like in the middle of fucking nowhere, like just just to spell out the code.
SPEAKER_03Exactly. But what would our version of dick pills be though? What what would our version of uh I mean it's gonna be the same shit.
SPEAKER_02It's it's like shit that opens your mind, like makes you focus, makes you apt, makes you like you know, able to confront the the bosses and the fascists of this world.
SPEAKER_03You yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Exactly, yeah. It's the exact same thing that Alex Jones does, just like from the left, I feel like. I wonder if is there anyone doing that? Like from the left, like selling like weird fucking like you know, bunk pills that don't do shit.
SPEAKER_03People sell merch, but the other stuff, no. Yeah, we can just we can corner the market.
SPEAKER_04I do think to put uh one of our old guests on blast, Samuel Cedar. I think he is an affiliate for certain products like uh CBDs. Oh wait, are we allowed to say that? Are we gonna get banned? And uh I think he has a co-op coffee blend. I'm jealous, honestly. I wish I had that. I want to sell that. I mean, that's a little bit different. Yeah, that's different.
SPEAKER_02Coffee is sick, yeah.
SPEAKER_03It's all ethical, by the way. Yeah, that's fine. That would be fine. Yeah, we just paint ours like all gay and shit. Yeah, we just paint all our shit like super gay and shit. The way like he makes everything look very masculine. Yeah, we make everything feel like oh my god, non confrontational. Yeah, and it sounds like fucking like a German accent. Yeah, yeah. Because all Deutsche and all my Deutsche sind homosexualisten, yeah, yeah. Uh if du bist ein Deutsche, du bist homosexualist oder fascist. There's no middle ground. All straight Germans are Nazis. Yeah, no, no, in between. Sorry, Mike, just European humor. We are. I'm laughing that's hard. Yep. Okay, to finish it off. Even as Jones is getting hammered in court today, with a judge ordering him to liquidate assets to pay those Sandy Hook judgments, writers note that InfoWars' underlying influence might actually outlive the business entity itself. You can shut down the company, but the conspiracist mode of thinking he helped normalize is now baked into an entire ecosystem, both MAGA and its influencers in everything that might come next. He wrote the book on manipulating the fringe elements of society and expanding that into a media empire. A book a lot of younger fascist influencers are sure as hell to read.
SPEAKER_01You ever seen that before? I don't remember. You're not sure if you've seen this before. No. Okay. You'll see up at the top it has a timestamp 1214-12. Yes. You know that's the date of Sandy Hook, right? I don't know. You don't know that. Starting into 2015, you learned that a Sandy Hook parent named Leonard Posner was behind a group called Honor Network. Correct? That was fighting online abuse of Sandy Hook victims. I did, I think. And when you learned that, and when Honor complained to YouTube in 2015, you told your viewers that Honor was run by Mr. Posner, you showed addresses being used by Mr. Posner, and you said he needed to be investigated in Florida. Didn't you say that? Objection as to form.
SPEAKER_00No. I mean the guy's running an anti-free speech foundation.
SPEAKER_01Let me make sure I have this really clear. You don't believe the official story of Sandy Hook. You think there was cover-up? You think there was manipulation? You think that there is some sinister thing going on?
SPEAKER_00I still yes, I still think children died. I believe many shootings happen. They said one in Brazil, a tragedy, and I believe it's a crisis. Um and I go back to the point of all the members being collectively blamed, then it it's dramatic, and and so people go and they find anomalies, and then I'm kind of retrospectively going back to the scene who did believe that stuff. Um and and then I go back to the minimal study of more actually the real anomalies, and then it's just the school system and government from the coverage rarely from from from from ability. Um and then and so there definitely has been a very I mean there's been a cover-up of the event. And I think there's a lot of evidence shown there could have been a second shooter. There is the helicopter footage, the man in the woods.
SPEAKER_04So far we've been having a lot of fun with Alex Jones, but now it's time to talk about the ways that his brand of conspiratorial propaganda has affected real people's lives. Sandy Hook is one of America's most notorious school shootings. And it began on December 14th, 2012, when 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut were ruthlessly murdered. Those twenty children were between the ages of six and seven years old. That morning, Adam Lanza murdered his mother, grabbed her AR-15 Bushmas rifle and two handguns from the home, and traveled to the elementary school in black military fatigues. When Lanza arrived at the school at 9 30 a.m., the doors were locked. Using his AR-15 and a spray of bullets, he broke into the school, where he was immediately confronted by Sandy Hook's principal and the school psychologist. Lanza saw and shot and killed both women. But that encounter and the sounds of gunfire were broadcast to individual classrooms via the school's PA system. Teachers attempted to safeguard their students by concealing them in closets and bathrooms or barricading doors with furniture and their own bodies. Lanza entered the classroom of teacher Lauren Rousseau and killed her and her fourteen students. Their tiny bodies were shredded by high-velocity rifle rounds. He then went to a second classroom where first grade teacher Victoria Soto had hidden her students in a closet. She attempted to misdirect Lanza by telling him that her class was in the school's auditorium on the other side of the building. Lanza killed Soto as well as six tiny first graders who attempted to flee from their hiding place. The police received the first emergency call from the school at around 9 35 a.m. And law enforcement personnel responded within two minutes. The first officers to enter the building caught a glimpse of an individual dressed in dark clothing, and after hearing a series of shots, they found Lanza next to the door to Soto's classroom, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot. Lonza had fired 154 rounds in less than five minutes, claiming 26 lives. The scope and scale of the killings were massive, and the nation was rocked with shame and fear. President Obama himself openly wept when he gave the media updates from the White House press room. There seemed to be a real national momentum around the idea of regulations of firearms at the federal level. Now, the gun that was used primarily in the shooting, the AR-15, had previously been banned in the form that Lanza took, and that ban had lapsed during the Bush administration. And so this was seen as a possible rallying cry for at least some minor regulations, especially towards people that have mental health crises or criminal records, or regulating the AR-15 and its bottles and various similar rifles from being so readily available for the consumer market. So there was a real crisis. Like this, the murdering of these children had caused a reckoning in a way America treated guns, thought about guns. And this is exactly where Alex Jones saw his opportunity. Because the ease and speed at which Lanza had slaughtered so many innocents using completely legal guns purchased by his own mother, that was creating a resounding call for regulations of those weapons. How many innocent children could be slaughtered with no major governmental response? And this caused many staunch advocates of gun rights to face the very real cost of easy access to weapons of war. Dozens of people could be slaughtered in moments, and the weapons to do it were very easy and cheap to obtain. And this, in my humble opinion, caused a resounding cognitive dissidence in the minds of millions of people. And they were desperate for any ego swaging out there that would help keep their worldview intact. And Alex Jones stepped in. He is a staunch opponent of gun control, and he almost immediately began casting doubts on the legitimacy of the attack. He repeatedly claimed that the massacre was staged. He described it as a false flag operation. As accounts and interviews were broadcast of mourning families, Jones called out individuals as crisis actors and sent his audience of millions to investigate every single victim's family. These claims were reiterated and broadcast consistently through his shows and through articles written on his website over a period of several years. The harassment described by Sandy Hook families went far beyond hostile comments online. Many parents and relatives received death threats accusing them of participating in a government conspiracy. Some individuals contacted the families directly to tell them that their children had never existed or that the victims were actors participating in a staged event. Parents reported being confronted in public by strangers who demanded proof that their children had died.
SPEAKER_03Fucking hell.
SPEAKER_04And fuck you. I mean, it's actually so evil. Can you imagine losing a seven-year-old? Yeah, getting like yeah. And then people giving you.
SPEAKER_02And then some like fucking piece of shit incel like like calls you up and is like, hey, uh, you know, none of that happened. Like, like, holy fuck. I would be in in some sort of rage. Like, I don't know.
SPEAKER_04I mean, I I can't believe that that there wasn't more retaliatory violence against Alex Jones's fans who would confront these people. And the thing is, like, what I'm I'm underselling how bad it is. They would send images of dead children to these people and be like, this is what real dead children look like. And stuff like that. Like the extreme emotional terrorism that these people suffered was in intense. And it was all directly traceable to the conspiracy theories that Alex Jones was spinning on his show. And he did not give a shit about the truth.
SPEAKER_02And I just again about like how fucking like uh filled with rage these families must be at like Alex Jones. When the lawsuits were filed, the judgment that was reached was way higher than what the families even were asking for. They were like were happy to settle for like $89 million or something of that sort. Like these families are like confronting all this horrible shit in like a very, very like, I guess like I don't know, like the word for it stoic. Like they're they're they're able to like deal with this shit in a way that I don't think I would be able to do.
SPEAKER_03Likewise, very, very likewise.
SPEAKER_04Well, you know, after years of harassment in 2018, families of the victims and an FBI agent who had responded to the shootings filed defamation and emotional distress lawsuits against Alex Jones and his company, InfoWars.
SPEAKER_02Well, actually, I want to say something real quick. Uh we haven't mentioned it at this point. InfoWars is actually a subsidiary of another company he owns called Free Speech Solutions, I think. Which is a fucking stupid name. I just wanted to put that out there. But anyways, go on.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I mean it it sounds power for the course and his company, Free Speech Solutions. Thank you, Fredda, for for updating, getting making sure I got that right. Because courts in Texas and Connecticut found him liable, including using a default judgment because Alex Jones blanket refused to respond to discovery orders and turn over requested evidence. And as a result, the juries in these cases were not deciding whether he had defame the families, they were merely deciding how much he should pay in damages.
SPEAKER_02I want to say something there also. That's like a pattern with him. He just doesn't actually like do what he's meant to do. Like, I don't know what it is, if it's like his like severe alcoholism or whatever that's like attested in several memoirs, or or if it's like the fact that I don't know, like he just doesn't actually do what he's meant to do. Like he you you he could have avoided so much of this. Like there isn't I don't know if I can uh think of any case where like someone has to pay upwards of like 1.5 billion dollars in lawsuits on something like this. And it's purely out of his own fucking like you know own goals. I do also want to say that I think uh Sandy Hook, uh uh the trial rather uh let me try that again. I do also want to say that I think the Sandy Hook trial might be the only time that a podcaster has been called as an expert witness in a court case. From 2017 to 2026, the comedians Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes covered Jones extensively in their podcast knowledge fight over the course of 1138 episodes. Which the lawyers going after Jones in the Sandy lawsuits actually avail themselves of for research. And one of the co-hosts, Dan Friesen, was called in as an expert witness to confront Alex Jones in court.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, the trials had a lot of really famous moments and all-time firsts. Specifically in one of the uh moments during the Texas trial, attorney Mark Bankston revealed that Jones' own lawyers had accidentally sent the plaintiffs a digital copy of years of text messages and other data from Jones' phone. That disclosure became a major news sensation because Jones had previously claimed that he could not locate messages related to Sandy Hook. Its own goals all the way down. Like he's so fucking stupid. Yeah, but that's also spoil his spoilation, right? Like, and the criminal way that him and his lawyers would operate is indicative of the bad faith, right? And the fact that they cannot be trusted, they don't act honorably, they don't act according to their legal obligations, moral obligations. This guy is a charlatan. And Bankston confronted him on the witness stand and informed that the plaintiffs possessed extensive records from his phone, and that exchange went mega viral and is one of the defining moments of the trial. I invest, I encourage everybody to go check it out because Alex Jones being caught and turning various shades of red is one of the most entertaining. Like, I didn't know a human skin could get that color on its own.
SPEAKER_02He yeah, he's he's got some like special tomato genes going on. Like, I don't know what's up there.
SPEAKER_01One of the things you talked about yesterday is you can fly with discovery, right? So that one on the witness stand? That's one of the things I talked about. Okay. One of the things that you were ordered to do in this lawsuit, you're ordered to turn over any text messages made you need standing code, right? Yes. And you didn't have it, right? Not that we could find. And and you in fact told me in your testimony, sworn testimony before coming to Discord room, you searched, right? I did. Okay. Mr. Jones, I'd like to show you what's been marked explained first. That's text messages between you and Paul Watson, isn't it? Yes. And they mention Sandy Hook, don't they? Yep.
SPEAKER_03Very uh niche uh what was the name? White people are children of what was it? Yakub.
SPEAKER_04Yakub, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Very, very specific niche Yacubian attributes that are unlocked only in special limited edition uh reaction cards.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I think he's got some red wealth genes in there, you know, Dragonkin.
SPEAKER_03Because you'll have like one main Alex Jones card, which will be very popular. Then you'll have variations. Yeah, you got like different evolutions of Alex Jones, like young Alex Jones, and then you have this pink Alex Jones.
SPEAKER_04Oh man, the before and after of his like dick pills or neutra brain pills full of lead is so fucking awesome.
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah, that's so fucking funny. Yeah, it was where he's like showing like how he got more jacked and thinner, and he just got more red.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah. You know, this is all fun in games, but the reality is that these families, even during these lawsuits, they continued to receive extremely vicious harassment. Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, who are two of the victim families, they were forced to hire security after confrontations that occurred outside the courthouse in Texas. Alex Jones's fans were so unhinged that even as he was facing, you know, trials for this defamation, his fans were there to confront and harass the families.
SPEAKER_02And like that is meant to come out of Alex Jones's pockets, ideally, over the course of this lawsuit. But I I do have to mention, like, they still haven't paid. InfoWars have not paid. It's been dragged out for years now.
SPEAKER_04I mean, they're doing everything to, you know, protect his assets, to hollow them out, to pretend like they don't have assets.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_04A psychiatrist even testified at trial that the volume and frequency of the death threats had led to post-traumatic stress and the overwhelming fear that one of Jones's followers would ultimately kill them. And that intensity of abuse has not abated. Other families have described equally disturbing incidents. Nicole and Ian Hockley, whose son Dylan was killed in the attack, testified that conspiracy theorists sent them graphic images of dead children and claimed that they were crisis actors who did not know what deceased children looked like. Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emily was among the victims, testified that online harassment became so relentless that he eventually shut down a memorial page dedicated to his daughter because it was overwhelmed by accusations and abuse. Family members also reported doxing attempts, organized online campaigns questioning their identities, and years of messages denying the reality of their loss. Neil Heslin, as we described earlier, whose son Jesse was killed in the shooting, testified that he endured years of abuse, anonymous phone calls, and threats against his life after Alex Jones questioned his account of the tragedy. He personally described it as a living hell and that the conspiracy theories were being spread worldwide, causing people to view him as a participant in a fraud rather than the reality of a grieving father who lost a young child. Scarlett Lewis, Jesse's mother, also testified that the persistent accusations compounded the trauma of losing her child. And as I said, mental health professionals testified during the trials, stated that several family members had PTSD. So imagine that. Yeah, he's he's a monster. He's a fucking freak. And he would go on to his show, like after testifying under oath, he would go on and say it was a show trial, and he would go on and try to discredit everything he said. Because during his testimony, he acknowledged that the Sandy Hook shooting was 100% real, and he admitted that promoting Hoax claims had been irresponsible. Like, and his own fans, even as Alex Jones was saying that under oath, his own fans kept harassing these families. Think about that. Think about how he just did not give a fuck and was. Was knowingly spreading this hate for profit. Other aspects of his behavior were generated additional headlines. He would criticize the case on InfoWars broadcasts. He described it as a politically motivated attack on free speech. He personally attacked the judge and opposing attorneys. And outside the courthouse, he said it was a show trial and argued that the judicial system was being weaponized against him. Which, you know, other far-right leaders, commentators have continually asserted, using Alex as a test case. But there is some good news because on October 12th, 2022, the Connecticut jury delivered one of the largest defamation verdicts in American history, awarding approximately 965 million dollars to the families and the plaintiffs. Family members embraced and cried in the courtroom as the verdict was read, and that award covered damages for emotional distress and defamation. Later, the judge awarded additional hundreds of millions of dollars in punitive damages and attorney fee awards, bringing the total Connecticut judgment to roughly 1.4 billion. And these judgments, record-setting as they are, are what are ultimately leading to the downfall of InfoWars. And that's where we turn to Freda, where we get to learn about an evil bastard, maybe finally getting some comeuppance.
SPEAKER_02Quoting from Josh Owens, The Madness of Believing, a memoir from Inside Alex Jones Conspiracy Machine. Cliff, an old high school friend of Jones's, was visiting the office that day, and I watched as he and Dalton removed two Barrett M eighty two sniper rifles from the safe. They lowered the bipod stands on each rifle, and began loading the high capacity magazines with fifty caliber rounds they pulled from heavy gauge steel ammunition boxes. Jones paced back and forth like a pseudo war general. He claimed to have spotted one of the men outside carrying a gun. Dalton and Cliff propped their rifles on a long table in the warehouse and aimed through the window at the strangers' heads. If any of them break the glass, Jones said, gulping down the rest of his Dixie Cup of vodka, shoot them. This wasn't the first time I feared someone might be gunned down at work. End quote. This was a confrontation between Jones and fellow podcaster Pete Santilli, who seems like one of your typical far-right nutjobs. His recent podcast episodes spore titles like Both Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens pushing communism and socialism right out in the open. Pete Santilli got on a megaphone and shouted, quote, You're a conspiracy theorist, end quote. Before accusing Alex Jones of accusing him of working for the FBI. He then said Jones' dad was a dentist who quote did specialty work for the CIA. That's how people went to work day in and day out at the InfoWars office in a hidden, but maybe not so hidden, location, with blacked out windows and fifty caliber antimaterial rifles on standby. By the way, those guys outside were not armed. They called the police, the police showed up, and you know, the guy outside called Alex Jones a pussy for calling the cops. Luckily, all of this has come crashing down after the Sandy Hook trial. Alex Jones was ordered to pay $1.4 billion to the aggrieved parties, which he appealed to the Supreme Court, which subsequently upheld the judgment. Without any comment, by the way. Mm-hmm. It's awesome. Like that and that's in like the most evil Supreme Court in a while, right? Oh yeah. InfoWars was up for bids and the Onion won the bidding. Which means they are set to take it over, and have promised to revamp the site and give profits of it to the families of the victims of the Sandy Oak shooting. On May 1st, Alex Jones did one final broadcast, sounding drunk as fuck, slurring his words. He promised the fight was not over. Listen to this.
SPEAKER_00And then we're gonna hear hours of all the Sandy Hook documentation by the CIA and the feds. And then we're not here anymore. Because they're turning the power off at midnight. Private detectives are coming in to close the doors, and they're gonna act like they've got their big ass victory. But notice the state court just blocked the little rat confessed Satanist from coming in to wear our skin for months while we launched a new operation. We're gonna assume for civil rights. We got whistleblowers, we've only begun to fight, but it's only because you buy the products at the augsthowstore.com.
SPEAKER_02What Jones was referring to there before the obligatory merch plug, the rat satanists, or whatever the fuck, is of course the onion, and the person who would be wearing his skin is Tim Heideker. And what he's saying is kind of true. The Onion's acquisition of Infowars was in legal limbo as Jones was fighting collection efforts. With a last-minute appeal, he managed to delay efforts until a hearing in June, the month that this podcast is releasing. And just now, zero exaggeration, as we are recording, according to the San Antonio Express, a state district court judge has said that he must post a $4.3 million bond to continue holding off paying the Sandyuk families. Which I believe would also pave the way for the purchase by the Onion. Since that's the only way Jones is going to get a hold of the money to pay the families. Attorneys for Alex Jones have testified that he has a net worth of negative $1.35 billion. But the judge said, quote, she has no faith in the veracity of evidence offered by free speech systems as to its own net worth. So who knows how much it's actually worth. This all once again has to go through appeals, so going forward, if you're listening to this podcast in the future, maybe, just maybe, the aggrieved families have gotten the $1.4 billion Alex Jones owes them. I think it'd be fitting to wrap this episode up with a conspiracy theory of our own. In late October 1958, a wealthy retired candy manufacturer invited seventeen friends to a completely off-the-record meeting in Indianapolis. That would start at 9 a.m. on Monday, December 8th, and end at 6 p.m. the next day. That's a long ass meeting. He advice that if anyone asked the participants why they had come to Indiana, they should simply say they were there on business. He instructed them to book their own hotels to reduce the chance that they would be seen together in public. The attendees in Indiana shared ideological tenets and professional interests, but also an interpretation of history. They believed that their conception of the real America, a nation defined by small government, maximum freedom, and a white Christian populace was receding into the past. They shared rage at what they considered a string of failures and deceptions that had brought the United States to its knees. This movement sat at the fringes of the American right, attempting to radicalize it over the course of decades, and eventually led the foundation for the transformation of the American right into what it is today. That wasn't actually a conspiracy theory. That scene, that sounds like the meeting of the turbo racists in one battle after another, actually happened. I was reading directly from and paraphrasing the introduction and chapter one. This podcast is 100% financed by you guys, the listeners, and we have to pay our editor. As such, you can find the rest of this episode over at patreon.com/slash the reaction podcast, or just use the link in the podcast description. We are incredibly grateful to all of our supporters. If you're already a patron and you're hearing this, you are on the wrong podcast feed. Thank you all so much for listening.
