Rogan vs. Jones: The Ultimate Analysis

Part 1

Alex Jones was interviewed for the third time by Joe Rogan and as usual it was a big event. 15 million people have watched it on YouTube. Maybe double that heard it on the podcast. Perhaps over 30 million people checked this interview out. The previous interview with Jones got 25 million views on YouTube alone, second only to Rogan’s interview with a rutting elk.

Not only are lots of people interested in these interviews, a lot of people were persuaded. 

Many people were impressed with Rogan fact checking Jones. They thought Alex Jones performed well when pushed and that he was right an impressive amount of the time. Tim Dillon, the other corporeal entity in this interview, said this.

And this is the final takeaway Rogan himself leaves us with at the end of the episode.

There was of course lots of pushback as well, including from some Spotify employees.[[1]](#_ftn1) Spotify is now the exclusive carrier of the Joe Rogan Experience. Rogan later doubled down in his support of Jones with this statement and a link to a Bill Gates interview that appeared to corroborate something Jones said about the COVID vaccine.

So. Joe Rogan, who actually is decently skeptical although he is Alex Jones’ friend so he’s biased, Rogan thought there was good information here and lots of other people thought the same.

However. This interview is actually a complete fucking shit show, a catastrophic dumpster fire disaster, where almost nothing of relevance is correct. So the dust has settled, some time has passed, let’s take an objective look at what happened here. We’re going to revisit this interview and analyze it. Consider this an autopsy of JRE 1555. I’m gonna slice into this episode, pull it open, and explain the purpose of all those yucky innards.

And by the time I’m done, I think you’ll be able to see this interview for what is: it’s an illusion. It’s the illusion of an actual argument, it’s the illusion of actual information. When we’re done you’ll be better able to recognize similar kinds of bullshit.

This will a multi-part series, maybe three videos. At the end of the series I’m gonna merge these parts into a single video and if I’ve made any mistakes along the way, I will correct them and incorporate them into that full edit. The resulting video should be a compilation of eternal truths roughly equivalent to the ten commandments.

Here’s what’s happening behind the illusion of Joe Rogan Experience 1555.

This is Jones. This is Rogan. This is Jones. This is Rogan. Jones. Rogan. Jones. Rogan. Yeah, that’s Rogan.

Joe Rogan is getting merced in this interview. And he often helps Alex Jones do it.

Alex Jones practices InfoWar and he sees InfoWar everywhere. He’s been doing it for decades and he’s fucking good at it. This guy has a PHD in bullshit. People underestimate his skills because he’s a lunatic and an idiot. Granted. But you can be both those things and still have skills. He has skills.

For Alex Jones, this is a fight. He knows it, Rogan doesn’t. I think Rogan thinks this is a conversation where both people are constrained by some standard of honesty and decency and good faith. But these constraints are not honored by Alex Jones. For him, this is war, this is a fight, and anything goes.

I’m gonna get into Jones tactics next, his tricks of the trade, the stuff that makes all this work. But first we need to know where this guy is coming from. Who is Alex Jones and what is Alex Jones?

Alex Jones is a kind of American performer slash salesman slash grifter that’s been around for a couple centuries. Alex Jones is a confidence man, he traffics in confidence tricks. Confidence tricks are what they sound like: you place your confidence in someone, your trust, and they trick you, they use that trust against you. Confidence tricks exploit your naïveté, your vanity, your irresponsibility, your laziness, your greed.

But the key that unlocks everything is your belief. That’s the main thing they target because once they have your belief, they can exploit you.

Snake oil salesman, faith healers, quacks, Ponzi schemers, forgers, sleazy salesmen, fraudsters – these are all confidence men. We say conmen now.

Illusionists are like domesticated conmen. We trust them to lie to us within certain boundaries. The illusion can’t be you paid for the show and I’m not doing the show. Fooled ya!

Alex Jones is like an illusionist of information. He’s does a bunch of sleight of hand tricks that make you think the illusion is real, that his narrative is real.

A favorite word in our culture lately is grifter. A grifter spouts bullshit to make money. Alex Jones is a grifter if ever there was a grifter. He’s an OG internet grifter. All us smarty pantses must concede that it’s impressive what this guy’s done with this racket.

It’s important to remember that a conman or a grifter doesn’t just exploit what’s bad about you, they exploit what’s good about you too—your honor, your trust, your humanity. They use your social instincts, the stuff that helps us all get along, to fuckin’ jiu-jitsu you and armbar your brain.

Alex Jones manipulates trust and he's good at it. He wins people’s belief. That’s the InfoWar victory he’s gunning for. And then that’s a platform from which he can sell you his useless fuckin’ boner pills.

Now I’m not saying Alex Jones knows he’s manipulating people, though plenty of the time he does.  And I’m not saying he doesn't believe what he says. I think he often does. But you can still be a conman even when you don't know you're doing it and you mean what you're saying. Because Alex Jones will never fool anyone as completely as he has fooled himself. This guy has locked himself into a cell thrown away the key. He is trapped in a consciousness that must be torturous to exist in. So… sympathy for the devil. I can’t imagine how miserable it is being this guy constantly.

So what is this con, what is the InfoWar illusion? Alex Jones actually has tactics, he has strategies that make his grift run. These are the tactics of InfoWar.

TACTICS OF INFOWAR
1 PUSH THE PACE

The top thing Alex Jones wants to do is say a lot fast, talk a blue streak. Like it’s the end of Scarface, just strafe the room with your bullshit. You fuckin cockroaches, believe my bullshit!

Jones makes an incredible number of claims in this interview. He talks about climate change, he talks about COVID, he talks about vaccines, he makes hundreds upon hundreds, if not over a thousand, distinct claims here. He just throws an incredible amount of stuff at you.

Pushing a fast pace is effective for a bunch of reasons. 

We’re often persuaded by quantity. That guy had a lot of points, so he must be right. You can even find yourself doing this. Like if you're interviewing for a job you're not qualified for, you might start just jabbering on in a desperate bid to win them over.

This part is very simple: a lot of people can be persuaded if they just think they’re hearing a lot of information, then they think it must be at least kinda right.

But there’s more levels at work here. As Jones would say…

Let’s go further

Alex Jones wants to overwhelm you. He wants to overwhelm you because he doesn’t want you scrutinizing.

Think of this. A Potemkin Village is a fake, pretty town that looks real enough if you’re not paying attention but it’s actually just a bunch of prop houses. It's sorta like an Old West town set for a movie. That’s what InfoWars is -- it’s a facade. Alex Jones doesn’t want you going into the house, cuz there is no house. It’s just a front. He doesn’t want you pondering and contemplating because none of this makes sense.

Joe Rogan clearly doesn't get this about Alex Jones, which you can see in this suggestion.

This is charmingly well intentioned and utterly delusional. Alex Jones doesn’t want someone undermining his bullshit the entire time. He’ll never finish a sentence if he has a fact checker.

When Rogan slows things down, digs into claims, Jones often gets uncomfortable and impatient and grouchy and also seems remarkably uncurious.

He doesn’t really wanna know if he’s right because being right isn’t the point. The point is to create a big pile of bullshit. And you don’t throw out perfectly good bullshit because it’s incorrect. You heap it on the fucking pile of bullshit. It’s bullshit that’s what it’s for! It’s for piling.

Jones wants so many balls in the air that nobody can catch ‘em all. It’s like a batter standing there knocking one ball after another into the outfield and Rogan is out there by himself trying to catch ‘em all. It’s impossible for anybody. Rogan counters some stuff but there’s still minutes on end where Jones is spouting unchallenged bullshit. There’s long sections about climate change, COVID and vaccines that are pretty much nothing but wrong.

This is a massive advantage that bullshit artists have over the rest of us: it’s fucking easier. It’s easier to make a gigantic mess than to clean it up. It’s easier to talk out your ass than to be constrained by facts and reason. It’s easier to just vilify them than to try to reconcile contradictory perspectives.

The rest of us have this self-critical app running all the time, and it takes up a bunch of battery power and processing power and it eliminates all sorts of ploys you could otherwise use. Jones doesn’t run that app. He can move faster and more freely because he doesn’t give a fuck.

2 CREATE URGENCY

This one isn’t in this Rogan interview much but it’s so central to Jones’ schtick and InfoWars’ schtick I needed to include it. Creating urgency is a classic move of extremists. There's always some imminent catastrophe coming, whether it’s Armageddon or an invasion or a coup or whatever. And they just live on this edge. The great event never comes and it never goes. It’s just locked there on the horizon. I talk about this more in my video The Return of Magic.

Urgency makes us wanna do something now, it makes us impulsive. Salespeople create urgency in order to get you to sign on the dotted line right now. They’re trying to head off contemplation because when we think things over, there’s a good chance we’ll arrive at no thanks.

Jones creates urgency because he wants you to stop thinking about this crap and just fucking believe it. He doesn’t want you roaming around the Potemkin Village and looking in the windows and trying the doors. Stop pondering because they’re coming to kill you.

Some of you might be thinking, does this apply to something like climate change? Are they trying to mislead us by creating urgency and making us panic?

No because urgency exists. Some matters are urgent. That one seems plenty urgent to me. And just doing one of the things I’ll describe here doesn’t mean much. Like some people talk fast because they really know what they’re talking about. It’s when you spot a bunch of these tactics that you should get skeptical. 

Alex Jones creates urgency, because he’s trying to get something from you: your belief. That’s always the victory he’s after. And he can later transmute that into cash money through his useless fuckin’ potions and powders.

3 LOOK SMART

Alex Jones is always putting on this sort of performance of intelligence, he’s trying to look smart. It’s like a Las Vegas showtime version of learnedness. It’s sorta like watching a poor person imitate a rich person, or a rich person imitate a poor person. They don’t know or understand these people so they do this kinda caricature, this exaggerated stereotypical imitation. And if you haven’t been exposed to many smart people, this act can fool you.

The fast pace is part of this. Like look at how much I know. He’s always bragging about his memory but he fucks shit up constantly. He gets a date wrong here and tries to bullshit his way of it because he just can’t stop doing this act.

Wrong. No. There wasn’t. Why not just say, oh okay. Because it’s pathological.

His facts are generally mangled or they don’t relate but most of the time he’s just talkin’ out his ass. Much more on this later.

Even how Jones describes his memory is bullshit. He keeps repeating this.

“Photographic memory” is not a thing. It’s an urban myth, it’s pseudoscience.[[2]](#_ftn2)

Sometimes Jones even does straight up tricks, deliberately deceptive performed bits. In the first interview he does this:

And Rogan and Eddie Bravo, the guest in other two interviews, they completely fall for it.

This is a con and he knows it’s a con. I’ve heard him do it before. And it was that citation, it wasn’t even a different one. And I won’t get into it but he doesn’t understand this citation anyway. He’s memorized one bit of text to cite something he doesn’t actually understand. That’s what’s happening here. And Rogan and Bravo are going holy shit, David Copperfield just made the Statue of Liberty disappear! It’s gone, call the police!

Jones also sprinkles around lots of lingo and mumbo jumbo that seems like stuff someone knowledgeable would use. He loves to say intel and ChiComs and psyops. Like listen to this bit about climate change.

That’s just rapid fire climate denial talking points you can find anywhere. They’re trash and they’ve been trash for years, if not decades. This entire section about climate, all twenty-some minutes of it, is constantly wrong.

Jones also sometimes uses fancy words like gestalt.

Just don’t ever say gestalt. Unless you’re German then maybe it’s okay I don’t know.

I want to close with two points about truly smart people and how to identity them in the wild.

Point number one. Truly smart people often sound boring. That’s their Achilles heel. They’re not entertaining. It’s hard enough to be smart without being entertaining on top of that. Yes, smart people should do better at communicating but the rest of us should also all grow up a bit and stop expecting reality to be so fucking entertaining and dramatic.

And point number two. Anytime anybody is trying to convince you they have a vast and exhaustive range of deep knowledge, that is suspicious. You can know a little about a lot or a lot about a little but you can’t know a lot about a lot. It doesn’t fit in a brain. Nobody’s that smart, especially Alex Jones. He pretends to know a lot about a lot. History, economics, foreign policy, climate science, virology, epidemiology, technology, media - - he’s got ’em all figured out and guess what, all these brainiacs in these fields are wrong and he’s right.

People who do this act are either deluded or dumb or deceptive. Whatever it is, it starts with a D. For sure.

I’m not saying I’m a brilliant person but I’m smart. And I have very limited understanding of almost all the topics in this video. I’m sure I will make some mistakes. And when people spot them, I’ll just incorporate them, I won’t wriggle off the goddamn hook. But above all, I’m 100% certain that I’m more right than Alex Jones. Bank on it.

4 EXPRESS CERTAINTY

Alex Jones projects certainty and uses a bunch of tricks that convince us someone is right. He has the affect of certainty, the appearance of certainty. And when we pick up these cues, often we’ll go, oh okay, well good enough, he seems certain, I guess he’s right. When we perceive these cues, we trust.

Straight out the gate in this interview, first exchange, Jones does this.

Nods. Certain. It’s Gizlane.

Nobody is saying her name this way. They’re saying ghee-lane, which is the French pronunciation, her mom is French, so it’s ghee-lane and that’s that. And it seems like it’s been Anglicized to guh-lane. English speaking people are also saying that. Nobody’s saying giz-lane.

Why say anything here? So much of what this guy is is right here in these first seconds of the interview. Steps into the fray. Confident. Like a squished Clint Eastwood. It’s giz-lane.

From the jump, just weirdly wrong and for no reason.

Alex Jones, if you’re watching, please tell me why I’m mistaken. I’ve been respectful here. I said you have a PhD! Pull that up, me.

But it’s this next trick that Jones loves the mostest.

They admitted it. Oh okay, I mean if they admitted it. This is just something you can throw in there that makes something sound done. They admitted it. 

Look at how much admitting is going on.

They never admitted it. Never. They said something, it went through the meat grinder of Alex Jones’ fevered ego and it was transformed into an admission.

There’s a bunch of variations on they admitted it. Like they said it or I’ve seen the documents or it’s public or go look for yourself. They’re so evil and powerful and contemptuous, they put their evil plots of world dominion out there in well-designed PDFs anybody can download.

But my personal favorite is this…

White papers! That sounds very egghead… and sinister… if you want it to be sinister. White papers.

Clip I see White papers.

Folks, he has not read the white papers. He doesn’t even know what white papers are. Which brings us to…

5 BRAG ABOUT SOURCES 

Jones is endless declaring that he has the proof. I have it I have it I have it. Go look at yourself. He knows almost nobody will bother. And for those that do, he’s prepped them to expect something evil, so that they’ll squint at the document like a Rorschach blot and go yeah, I guess I do see George Soros sodomizing a nun.

Anytime you look into these sources and follow the breadcrumbs, they go nowhere. If you can tell what in the fuck he’s talking about, which is a big if, and you go find the mystery box and you open it up -- guess what’s in there? Cobwebs. Maybe a lone dopey moth flutters away, clonks into a light bulb. That’s me chasing this shit down.

This happens a bunch of times in this interview.

He says Xi Jinping (chee jhin-ping) said all this outrageous stuff right onstage.

Nope, turns out he said none of that.[[3]](#_ftn3) No idea what he’s talking about here.

Jones claims Gavin Newsom will not allow the economy to re-open until Trump is no longer president.

Then oh it’s not Newsom, it’s Gretchen Whitmer, another Democrat so who cares, then turns out she didn’t actually say that. It’s just a politician from one party blamed a politician from the other party for a big problem. That’s what happened.

Jones say this:

Ooo leaked it. Who leaked it?

A comedian. A comedian leaked it. On his HBO show.

Jones is always saying he has the documents. He never has the documents. He printed off a bunch of web pages. And what are these sources? AP, CBS News, LA Times, NY Times, even the dreaded CNN. Anytime Jones gets something right, he just got it from the news. Maybe just read those?

He doesn’t do this one in the interview because he knows it’s bullshit, but on InfoWars, half the time he’s citing… InfoWars. He’s citing himself.

This one’s a really cool trick—here he’s citing the actual broadcast he’s in right now!

He could rupture the space-time continuum if he keeps this up. He could create a recursive fractal vortex wormhole of bullshit and suck the whole universe into it, like it’s Alex Jones’ head disappearing up Donald Trump’s puckered orange butthole!

The documents never matter anyway because Alex Jones does not read things. He skims, looking for fearful bits that he can plug into his magazine so he can fuckin annihilate us cockroaches.

This next sequence thoroughly demonstrates how little Jones knows about the things he cites. Here he’s referring to a PDF that in conspiracy-land gets called Operation Lockstep. And he think he doesn’t have it.

I don’t have it in front of me.

But he does have it. He was waving it around earlier and calling it The Great Reset, which is not this, it’s something else.

Then they pull up the thing he’s referring to, he stares at it and doesn’t know that’s not it.

Again, the so-called Operation Lockstep document is here. On the table in front of him.

Then they pull up the real document and Jones stares at it and doesn’t know that that is it. Then he says it’s thousands of pages long. It’s 50 fucking pages. With pictures.

But even more importantly, Alex Jones doesn’t understand this document anyway. He doesn’t get what it is. They’re doing something called scenario planning here. In scenario planning you’re imagining future scenarios, not just so you can support the good ones but so you can avoid bad ones. [[KF1]](#_msocom_1) One of these scenarios is something called Lockstep. And it’s an authoritarian dystopia scenario that it seems pretty clear to me we should try to avoid. It’s not the plan – it's a scenario. This stuff is kinda like technical, dry science fiction writing.

This sequence is an epic faceplant. You cannot trust people who do this sort of thing. It’s disqualifying.

Rogan has good rebuttals in this section but he does not grasp how completely clueless and delusional Jones is here. There is no there there. This is nothing.

But Jones knows that almost nobody, except for underachievers like me, are gonna wanna see the documents. This dangling of documents is often like a dare. He knows this will be tedious and people mostly aren’t going to want to do that.

6 BE RIGHT EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE THEN BRAG ABOUT IT ENDLESSLY

To really sell this stuff you gotta be right every once in a while. Not very often, but if you just add a dash of facts, it really brings the dish together. Jones is right sometimes in this interview. But this smattering of wins never adds up to anything, they don’t support his overall claims. Even when he’s right it’s just part of the greater mission of being wrong.

Lots of Jones’ facts are just trivial. Like here he is being surprisingly and amusingly correct that humans evolved from a shrew-like creature.

Score one for Shrek here. People are surprising. Don’t underestimate people, even this guy.

One of Jones big wins in the interview is this bit about AT&T.

Then he brags about this endlessly. He keeps referring back to it to establish credibility.

So this does seem to be correct but it doesn’t support his larger argument of globalist bullshit. This is an example of corruption within the Trump administration and Jones is hardcore Trump toady yes man bootlicker. By the way, this for me is the saddest thing about the story of Alex Jones, that’s he’s become a goddamn sycophant.

Then Jones comes out with this fuckin’ doozy.

So Jones is making the point that the polio vaccine is causing polio. And the larger, dangerous argument that he’s always hammering is that vaccines will kill you.

Rogan pulls it’s up, there’s a story, we’re left thinking this is correct. But as Jones would say:

So there was an outbreak of about a dozen polio cases in Sudan and they were caused by the oral vaccine, which in rare cases can cause polio, this is a known effect.

This is real. This outbreak is a problem. It’s tragic for these people. It’s a bad situation. I’m not making light of it but there’s a much much much larger context here. This sad event exists within an immense, historic triumph for humankind.

Americans, who do you know who has had polio and is under the age of 40? Nobody. I guarantee it. Because polio was eradicated here in 1979. In 1952 almost 60,000 people were paralyzed from polio. FDR had polio which is why he such an awful hurdler.[[4]](#_ftn4)

Where did all the polio go? Here’s a hint, the answer starts with V. Polio is very nearly globally eradicated and that is because of Vaccines. There are millions of people the world over who are now walking because of the polio vaccine. That is an epic triumph. That is heroic stuff.

What happened in Sudan is sad but it’s a blip compared to how immense the spread of polio would be without a vaccine. Jones is using this small tragedy to stoke fears about vaccination in general – and these fears could lead to people refusing the polio vaccine which can lead us back here.

Vaccines and science have been so successful some people have gotten spoiled. They think not getting these awful diseases is natural and it’s not. It was earned. Our predecessors did it for us. And that people wanna piss away these gifts because they’re into health and wellness makes me angry. There’s nothing healthy or well about getting measles. It can kill your kids. Don’t let them get it for Christ’s sakes.

Africa is the final frontier for eradicating polio. And that is science in your face. Any retort by anybody to what I just said is hot fucking air. It’s nothing compared to this real real real humanitarian triumph.

And scene! You’ll call me, great.

Jones is aiming to stoke vaccination fears with this story, when the polio vaccines are in fact a towering monument to the effectiveness of medical science.

Then Jones tosses more bullshit in cuz he always turns up the volume:

Nobody died. He’s just tossing in fiction because who fuckin’ cares right? What do you shovel onto bullshit? More bullshit.

Then Joe Rogan does this weird thing. He marvels at the horror of this here photo.

This is a file photo from seven years ago. This kid’s probably got pubes by now. And this photo’s not even related to this polio outbreak except that’s it’s a vaccination.

Folks, when I was a kid I used to scream like I was being boiled in oil when my mom washed my hair. Because we didn’t have a showerhead and she used a pot and just dumped water over my head. Kids meltdown over nuthin’. Plus, does this kid really look that terrorized? I think 11 seconds later he was a-okay again. And without polio to boot.

This bit ends with Rogan all shook up over, get this…  polio!

Which nobody in this country has had since disco! Rogan buys Jones’ bullshit which means many listeners will buy it and now they’ve got lodged in their heads doubt about the fuckin’ polio vaccine which has virtually rid the entire planet of one of history’s most feared diseases. Congrats on that free speech argument we keep getting lectured about.

Jones’ point here is shit, and Rogan is totally wrong in accepting this nonsense, despite this event being true. The point is to make you doubt Vaccines in general and he’s using perhaps the most effective vaccine in human history to make it. Even when Jones is right, he manages to be completely wrong.

7 THEY NEVER DENIED IT

Here’s how this one works. You say whatever stupid bullshit you want about someone and then add “they never denied it!” This is a fantastic trick. It’s just 360 degrees of win. “They never denied it!”

So they apparently have to keep tabs on your incoherent bullshit. And if they do deny your claim, they’re lying so who cares? And by denying it they draw attention to your bullshit, which is excellent. And isn’t their denial suspicious? Must be over the target right?

Alex Jones has never denied that he devoured a freshly born litter of chihuahua puppies. He’s never denied it! Ate them like in this clip I am contractually obligated to use in every video I make.

They never denied it! Excellent trick. Use it, abuse it, get out there and do your part to make the world a bit worse.

8 HAVE A WINGMAN

Alex Jones can thank Joe Rogan for this one: he always has a wingman in these interviews.  Someone to toss chum to the intellectual sharknado.

Here he has Tim Dillon. I don’t know anything about Tim Dillon and he seems like a smart and nice person but he’s done something really weird to his brain and because of this, I think the only logical conclusion one can have about him is that he’s as crazy as a shithouse rat.

Tim Dillon instead of going to sleep listening to, like, Kate Winslet…

He went to sleep listening to InfoWars.

He’s gonna have to read a lot of Foreign Affairs to recover from this.

Tim Dillon is an Alex Jones fan so here he’s assumed the role of trusty wingman. When Jones is drawing too much fire and things are looking a dodgy for our hero, Dillon zooms in and draws fire. In the climate change fuckfest of idiocy, Jones is just flailing around from one topic to the next and nothing is adding up so Tim Dillon to the rescue!

So Dillon asks about motives and once somebody is talking about motives, we’re imagining what's in the heads of other people. This is totally meaningless conjecture.

To be more charitable to Tim, he’s being a good performing collaborator here, he’s setting up his partner so he can look good. He’s setting up Jones to play some of his greatest shits.

The wingman role is surprisingly influential. This role is typically played by martial artist, Eddie Bravo. Eddie Bravo is lovable and totally crazy and never comin’ back. He’s as gone as gone gets. Eddie Bravo has left the building. And having someone as crazy as Jones actually made this whole strange exercise more defensible. Eddie Bravo made this stuff clearly not serious. I mean they’re talking about deals with interdimensional aliens at one point.

Tim Dillon seems not nuts so he makes Jones seem more credible. He helps launder the lunacy and stupidity. When Jones is about to be swallowed up by his own bullshit, Dillon tosses him a vine. He chips in with he’s right about that or it’s not that far off. He translates Jones into sane-speak.

I think what Patrick is trying to say is here is he’s got intense drives and hey, aren’t we all a bit crazy?!

But it’s Joe Rogan who deserves the brunt of the criticism here because he taken on this gross mission to rehabilitate Jones’ deservedly awful reputation. He keeps telling us Alex Jones is alright and everybody ease up on this guy. Alex Jones had it comin’. I’ll talk a lot more about this later.

9 SAY YOU'RE NOT DOING THE THING YOU’RE DEFINITELY DOING

Deceptive people will often straight-up tell you what they want you to think. They want you to think, they’re not doing what they’re doing. There’s no artistry to this–they just say it. Jones is always saying that he’s not doing the thing he’s definitely doing.

He says things like I don’t think everything’s a conspiracy then he hosts a whole daily show and talk about nothing but conspiracies day after day for a few decades.

He says he doesn’t know everything then says he’s right almost 100% of the time.

He’s says he’s not kissin’ Trump’s ass then just plunges his tongue right up the ol’ Mar a Lago and gives him the works.

And finally, here’s a particularly telling one from when Joe Rogan appeared on InfoWars.

I’m not using you he says. Who says this? If someone in conversation says, I’m not using you, they are wiping their ass with your soul. With your animal spirit.

Whenever Alex Jones says “I’m not” whatever…. he most assuredly is.

10 JUST MAKE SHIT UP

Last and most obviously: just make shit up. You’re right even if your facts aren’t right. So just fucking let it rip, who cares?

The gestalt of it is correct.

Jones will often give us specific bullshit. We find specifics convincing. When he says this:

After hearing that you might think, well something like that must be in this book– nope! This book is about population growth not climate change. None of that shit is in there.

Specifics heIp sell bullshit. It’s like this classic scene in Reservoir Dogs.

Specificity feels like truth. And Jones sprinkles around plenty of specifics and when they’re right they’re irrelevant, but most of the time they’re nonsense or figments of his imagination.

Alex Jones MO is to grind up media into sausage and poop it out into InfoWars brand wieners. Everything that enters Jones’ consciousness gets mangled and torn apart then remolded into this narrative of a global cabal that’s doing everything. In reality, the stuff he’s talking about emerges from a variety of sources and they’re not coordinated. They emerge from various technologies, from various companies, from various countries, from various governments, from various levels of government, from various departments of government, and from culture—meaning large groups of regular people. These forces are interconnected but they’re not an organization, they’re not a hierarchy, they’re not a they. Just like the stock market isn’t a they. Just like the internet isn’t a they. Just like the economy isn’t a they. There’s no men with cigars running it all.

Jones interprets all of this stuff in a paranoid way and he makes a single entity responsible: the globalists who are in cahoots with china and have deals with interdimensional aliens and everybody’s blackmailing each other and they’re all eating kids or something. Who cares?

Everything that is scary, including a bunch of stuff he just imagined, is all done by them, it’s a plan to kill you, and they are evil.

This vilifying story makes everything simple and when you buy this story, you get to be totally righteous and blameless. You don’t have to do anything other than hate them. Despising a group of people becomes your north star. See the potential issues here?

Alright, that is it for Part One. If I made any mistakes, let me know. If there you spotted more than what I did, let me know. In the next episode, we will pull back the curtain and reveal what these tactics are concealing. Yeah, it’s bullshit.

PART 2: JOE ROGAN IS A LOST CAUSE

This is a video series about Joe Rogan and Alex Jones, with a focus on The Joe Rogan Experience episode from October 2020.

Everyone, I want to warn you up front, there’s disgusting, graphic, disturbing and offensive content ahead. I felt it was important to include this stuff because this type of conversation in my view is often too abstract. I felt it was important to see this stuff and to feel it. The Alex Jones we see on the Joe Rogan Experience is a sanitized, PG version. I want to show you the real thing. I’ll tell you when that stuff is coming so you can skip ahead if you want to.

Okay.

Joe Rogan has known Alex Jones for a couple decades. Despite this, I do not think Joe Rogan actually knows much about Alex Jones and I certainly don’t think he understands him. Unfortunately, he’s really really thinks he does.

Rogan has a very limited number of things he says about Jones, it’s pretty monotonous, and much of what he talks about is from twenty years ago. He pretty clearly doesn’t know much about what Alex Jones gets up to anymore and yet he’s weirdly overconfident. This video, along with the first one, is gonna demonstrate this with total clarity.

To be clear, Rogan does some good work in his conversation with Alex Jones. He has plenty of good rebuttals. He drills down on some of Jones’ claims and shows that they don’t go anywhere. I’m not just being a hater, there’s some good stuff here.

But all the good stuff is just a blip. It’s a bit of chocolate in the poop sundae.

Rogan has put himself in a losing situation. When you have a very public conversation with someone who spouts rapid-fire lies and lunacy, most of it is going to get through and that’s going to make you look foolish. For instance, Jones says this moments into the interview about Giz-lane Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein.

So stop the presses: there’s some sort of sex ring that is blackmailing scientists, the government and industry. I guess Giz-lane really wants a carbon tax. It’s ludicrous, he has no evidence, he doesn’t support it and the show just happily marches on from there. This happens incessantly. Jones says something bonkers and we just keep truckin’.

This is the primary problem with this whole undertaking. Jones is a bullshit machine. And by having him on as a guest, Rogan is turning his show into a bullshit machine for a few hours.

When it comes to Alex Jones, Joe Rogan is a lost cause. He does not seem capable of seeing this person for who he is. He can’t see how biased Jones is, how unreliable he is, how disturbed he is, how malicious he is or most importantly, how bad he is at what he does. He sucks at the info part of InfoWar. Pretty good at the war part though.

And Rogan isn’t just letting Jones spout bullshit, he’s also generating his own bullshit. He’s not fundamentally dishonest the way Jones is but he is repeatedly making statements about Alex Jones that are very obviously wrong. There are four points in particular that Rogan keeps saying about Alex Jones and they are very revealing.

# 1.  Alex Jones is right about a lot.

Here’s Rogan summing up their last conversation on the Joe Rogan Experience.

And here’s Rogan saying this again in February.

No. No no. He’s definitely not. He’s wrong about a lot. He’s wrong almost all the time. My initial intent in this video was to go through all the major claims in the video and talk about what’s wrong and what’s right and score it. And I couldn’t do it. I got pissed off in the midst of it. Like why am I cleaning up this asshole’s fucking mess? He’s too ridiculous to merit that kind of treatment.

So I intended to really rigorously break everything down, I couldn’t do it and it seemed excessive.

But I did tally a quick score. In this single interview I counted 80 incorrect claims from Alex Jones and 10 correct ones. 80 wrong, 10 right. So he was right 11% of the time. 11%.

And lots of times when he is right, those claims are embedded within larger arguments that are wrong. For instance, he says there’s a global greening happening, this is correct, but this point is in service of a totally screwball incoherent climate denial straw-man mess. That 11% is a generous assessment.

Let’s do a quick survey of the wrongness because that’s all you need. We don’t need to look at them all because it’s torture. Let’s start with some small examples because they’re easy to explain and they demonstrate how flagrant this stuff is and how bad faith it is.

He says Sweden has the lowest death rate in Europe. Nope. They’re 29th. Close though. This is so easy to know and yet here he is saying it. If he can’t get something simple like this right, what can he get right? That answer is… pretty much nothing.

Jones says this. This is clickbait bullshit. This is a microscopic event of zero significance. This was put on a menu in a London bar by whoever’s bar it was. I don’t know if it was a joke or what it was – who cares? It’s nothing. Alex Jones will see a meme and report it as a fact.

Jones thinks Charles Kushner’s dad, who went to jail for illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering, was over-prosecuted. Extend Clip Charles Kushner set-up his brother-in-law with a prostitute and videotaped it because he was cooperating with prosecutors. Kushner then sent the tape to his brother-in-law’s wife, his sister. Just normal stuff. Charles Kushner pled guilty to this. He admitted it… like in reality. Legally. Then went to prison. Jones think this is a divorce case. Jones has no clue what this is even about. By the way, Charles Kushner was pardoned by Trump, the father-in-law of his son. Flagrant corruption. Jones doesn’t care because Trump’s his guy. That Rogan thinks Jones cares about corruption is preposterous.

Now let’s look at a just a couple of the bigger claims here to see what a tangled mess of bullshit these are.

The climate change section of this video, which is over twenty minutes long, is never right in any meaningful way.

He thinks people confuse carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. I’ve never heard anyone say this but him.

He says there was a global cooling mania, which never panned out, so then they switched it to global warming. “Global cooling” was a brief and minor conjecture among scientists from the seventies, nowhere even remotely near the scale or the level of acceptance of global warming. Jones’ claim is wrong, it’s old, it’s boring.

Jones has been saying for a decade or two that scientists think carbon is bad. He goes on and on about how there's carbon everywhere! Clip

Carbon is not bad and there is no scientist, not a one, who thinks this. Just like none of them think hydrogen is bad. There’s just too much carbon in the air relative to human history. Humans have never had this much carbon in the air. It doesn’t matter if dinosaurs did, which Jones also goes on about. There weren’t 7.6 billion of them and they didn’t farm and live around coastlines that might get flooded. We are headed into uncharted territory and that should be highly concerning.

Oh yes, and Jones also says that scientists are being blackmailed over sextapes with children. No evidence, just y’know Bilderbergs, Epstein, stuff.

The other big thing I wanna unpack is this goddamn Bill Gates bit.

Everything started with this clip.

This then goes through the meatgrinder of Alex Jones’ imagination and comes out like this in the interview.

Dr. Dan Wilson does a great breakdown of this and I’m citing him a lot here.

Rogan not only accepts this in the interview, he has stuck with it ever since. He posted the Bill Gates interview and says this: “I knew people were going to criticize the content of the podcast without even listening and I was right. That’s why I fact checked every single crazy thing he said, and all of them were verified.”

Right, they’re the sloppy ones. Well, I listened to this many times, much to the detriment of my well-being. And I definitely did more work than Rogan on researching what actually happened here. This claim is trash.

I think Bill Gates got caught flat-flooted and he doesn’t clearly refute what’s said.[[4]](#_ftn4)

But this doesn’t matter. Bill Gates is not the point. What’s important is what happened. What’s important is reality. I think we can all agree on that.

What actually happened was detailed in this study by Moderna, the makers of this vaccine. This study says firstly: “Adverse events (AEs) were generally transient and mild to moderate in severity.” So there’s the quick takeaway. But the part that inspired this mess is this: “The most notable adverse events were seen at the 250 µg dose level, with three of those 14 participants (21%) reporting one or more severe events.”

They did not proceed with this dosage. Problem, solution. The severe side effects were at this discontinued dosage level and they happened 21% of the time. The 80% is for mild side effects. CBS News also doesn’t understand what this study says.

This 80% of people needing to “go to the hospital” is fucking crap from Jones’ muddled brain, as are the “two studies.” Again, when we hear detail like this, we find it persuasive. You cannot trust Alex Jones’ details.

The lower doses were tolerated extremely well, they seemed to work well, and yes, there were and there are side effects. Then you get to be immune from COVID. That’s the trade. I fuckin’ love it.

So what this study says is there were severe side effects 21% of the time at a higher dosage level that they stopped developing. Do we expect clinical trials to never have anything bad happen? Do we want innovation without failure? Well you can’t have it. They are bound together. Innovation requires failure.

Alarmingly shitty analysis from Rogan. And lazy. Lazy. No due diligence. No explanation, just declaration. He needs to go beyond looking at a two minute interview clip. When you have a fool on your show and treat them like they’re not a fool and tell the rest of us they’re not a fool, well, you’re the fool at that point.

Okay. Enough. If I have a longer fuse, I could spend hours on all this. But between this video and the last one, I hope the point is clear by now. Alex Jones is wrong about almost everything.

And this statement from Rogan is alternative reality. “….I fact checked every single crazy thing he said, and all of them were verified.” He did not fact check “every single thing,” he fact checked, meaning Googled and skimmed articles, a small handful of things. And what did he verify? That Trump’s lawyer took bribes on his behalf? Okay. And actually it was CNN that proved that. What else did he prove right? This fucking polio bullshit? There’s a deep dive about this suicidal stupidity in the first video. They fact-checked “Operation Lockstep” and they came to the right conclusion. That it wasn’t a conspiracy to enslave humanity. That’s in my first video too. There’s over twenty minutes of stuff about climate change. Does Rogan believe this stuff? No, he clearly doesn’t. And yet he tells us he checked everything and it’s all good. Rogan actually proves Jones wrong a number of times in this interview and yet this is the takeaway he leaves us with.

Again, I counted 80 incorrect claims from Jones and 10 correct ones.

11% is what I counted. It was a quick count, but it’s the right ballpark. That is not “a solid percentage”. If someone is right 11% of the time, it’s fair to just round down and say they’re wrong all the time.

# 2. Alex Jones has broken some important stories.

Rogan repeatedly tells us that Jones has broken news before it’s gone mainstream. In this interview, I’m calling out two things in particular.

He’s saying Alex Jones knew about two major news stories of the past few years before anybody else: Jeffrey Epstein and the NVIVM sex cult. To both of these I say: bullshit. If these claims are true, there is footage out there of Jones saying these things. So that means something about Epstein from before 2006 and something about NXIVM from before 2017.

If these things are true, somebody prove it to me. Show me the footage. Show me up somebody. And if I’m wrong, fuck it. But I like my chances.

What news has Alex Jones ever broken? Bohemian Grove? The Billderberg meetings? that shit is weak. I am not impressed – and it was 20 fucking years ago. What has he done in the last, let’s say, decade.

Anybody who talks as much as Jones and is this unconcerned about consistency is going to end up being right sometimes. A stopped clock is right twice a day. So he’s gonna get some hits because he’s a mouth that never stops moving.

Alex Jones also make lots of bad predictions.

And folks the lines are gonna be brutal. So I say do it now and beat the rush. And I’m not not joking.

Mark that one on your calendar. He’s been saying that for twenty years now but I’m sure he’s right this time.

And the vague predictions Jones seemingly gets right every once in a while are easy. Watch. I’ll do it right now, three times in a row. Take these to the bank. The stock market is going to crash. There is going to be a terrorist attack. And there is going to be another pandemic.

Of course all these things will happen at some point and then I can claim I predicted them.

# 3.  Alex Jones is not far right.

Rogan says this again and again and it’s just wrong.

That’s because George W. Bush was not right-wing enough. Alex Jones is far-right. Anti-communism is his background. His influences are people like Barry Goldwater, Cleon Skousen, Gary Allen, Bill Cooper, The John Birch Society. The character General Jack D. Ripper in Dr Strangelove was a parody of the John Birch Society and anti-communists.

Does that paranoid energy feel familiar?

The militia movement of the nineties is the culture Alex Jones came of age within. Waco and Ruby Ridge are major events in his world view. He thinks Timothy McVeigh, who blew up a government building in Oklahoma City, is innocent or was mind-controlled or whatever. McVeigh murdered 168 people, including 19 children, a number of them babies. Jones says McVeigh, who was as guilty as guilty gets, is not responsible. Why? Because McVeigh is from his tribe. He was a hard-right militia guy. This is why this matters. Alex Jones’ positions are determined primarily by tribalism, just like every other partisan windbag.

Jones has had members of far-right groups like The Proud Boys and The Oathkeepers and The Boogaloo Boys on his show and guess what: they don’t disagree about much.

Sure, Alex Jones’ views are not wholly consistent because he’s not coherent. He doesn’t deserve credit for that.  

Rogan really misses the point of Alex Jones here. Jones is the opposite of nonpartisan. He’s hyper-partisan. He’s just another far right pundit. Alex Jones is far right, hard right, whatever you want to call it. He’s the farthest right figure who people have heard of. Who’s more far right? Tell me. If you go one step farther right than InfoWars, you’re in Nazi turf.

He's really against corruption more than he's against any particular party

This is absurd and it shows how little Rogan even knows about this guy.

Alex Jones politics are this. He is fundamentally anti-government. Unless that government will harm his enemies, then he’s a full-on fascist. He wants a puny, weak, libertarian-style government for himself, and a totalitarian dictatorship for his enemies.

# 4.  Alex Jones is alright.

Joe Rogan thinks Alex Jones is alright. He clearly likes him and would like to see him be more accepted. Rogan has a clear agenda to improve the reputation of Alex Jones. Alex Jones is not alright. He is not morally okay. To use his Christian concepts, this is an evil man. This is a hateful man.

Quick shout-out here to the superb podcast Knowledge Fight which is where I got lots of these upcoming examples.

Everybody, this is where things are going to get unpleasant. Skip ahead to the next section if you don’t want to hear this.

This Rogan interview is Alex Jones on the leash. It’s the soft stuff. InfoWars, his outlet, is the hard stuff. The point of being on the Joe Rogan Experience is to bring people to InfoWars where he can rile them up and sell them garbage.

InfoWars is an extremist, fringe outlet. The primary agenda of InfoWars is a single thing and that is the dehumanization of the left and liberals in general. That is the mission. He repeatedly tells his audience with mind-numbing repetitiveness that they are the most reprehensible and vicious things in human history.

They’re murderers, they’re cannibals, they’re Satanic, they’re demons, they’ve even goblins, whatever that means. I mean this guy’s consciousness is a fever dream. He is living a terrifying acid trip.

Jones, like so many other right-wing conspiracy people, really into pedophilia. He falsely accuses Hunter Biden of being a pedophile in this interview and on InfoWars he calls Joe Biden a pedophile.

Why does it always have to be pedophilia? This obsession with pedophilia makes we wonder what's up with these people? Is this guy at war with inner demons? Is that what this preoccupation is about? I’m not saying Alex Jones is a pedophile. But he’s never denied it.

This stuff is so graphic and it’s him imagining it.

And when it’s convenient to him, he plays actual child abuse for laughs. This is an especially awful clip I’m sorry. This one got him a strike on YouTube. How does one defend this?

InfoWars is gross. It’s R-rated or worse. It’s not suitable for a general audience. This is Reason #1 why its reach should be limited. This guy goes on and on and on about God and then spouts this filth.

The InfoWars rhetoric is the most bloody minded you’ll hear. He’s got this gory imagination. He’s really into blood and torture and mutilation and rape. He is clearly sadistic. Look at how long this bit goes on.

I’m not sure Rogan comprehends what Jones thinks about vaccines. Vaccine denial is putting it mildly. He thinks vaccines will kill you. He thinks they’re intended to sterilize you. And he vilifies nurses and doctors, he thinks they’re in on it. He vilifies people who save lives, people who are the heroes of this pandemic.

And of course he’s homophobic.

Pillow biter is an old term for gay men.

And here’s another example of say you’re not doing the thing you’re definitely doing.

The endless message of InfoWars, pounded into your head day after day, is THEY ARE SCUM. THEY ARE SCUM. THEY ARE SCUM.

He then taunts his audience. They are weak and pathetic to accept the humiliation that is heaped upon you. And they need to do something about it. What are you going to do?  What are you going to do? You need to do something.

And if somebody from his tribe, ultra-conservative angry white dudes, does do something horrible, rest assured that Alex Jones will defend you. He is a dedicated apologist and gaslighter for right-wing terrorism.

He thinks the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping attempt was the FBI. Provocateured. Good ol’ provocateurs, the ultimate escape hatch.

Storming of the capital, of course, that was provocateured by just some random guy in a crowd. Good luck verbally manipulating a mob.

Timothy McVeigh, of course. Innocent. Brainwashed. Or the government did it. He’s said both. He doesn’t care. The point is – it wasn’t his guy.

If Ted Bundy had murdered Democrats, Alex Jones would think Bundy’s innocent too.

Jones repeatedly puts it out that there won’t somebody murder certain well known figures. I’m gonna bleep these names.

As disgusting as all this, the bottom of the barrel is, of course, Sandy Hook. Alex Jones spent years saying that murdered children weren’t murdered and their parents are actors.

Again, repeatedly saying that murdered children weren’t murdered and their parents are actors.

Jones supporters always try to get Sandy Hook off the table as quickly as possible. Okay, that was bad, we all make mistakes. Who among us has not said for a few years that murdered children aren’t dead and their parents are actors? We can all relate.

This is not an ordinary mistake. Alex Jones has pushed people who have suffered inconceivably deeper into darkness. He has heaped outrageous accusations upon vulnerable people who needed our greatest sympathy and support. Fuck him. Permanently. Some shit you can’t come back from… unless you truly change. Alex Jones not only hasn’t changed, he’s worse. He’s more extreme and more inflammatory than he used to be.

To use a Christian concept again, Alex Jones has sinned greatly in this world. He is the biggest perpetuator of blind hatred and bigotry in popular culture. If there’s worse, tell me. I’m honestly curious.

This is who Joe Rogan is palling around with for some reason.  I guarantee he doesn’t know about almost any of what I’ve shown here. Rogan vouches for someone whose work he does not truly know. And then he’s arrogant about it. He’s overconfident.

These things that Rogan keep repeating about Alex Jones – that he’s right about a lot, that he’s broken stories, that he’s not far right, that he’s alright – he says these repeatedly. He has a very limited arsenal on this topic. Because they’re all he knows. That material he keeps running is all he’s got. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Which is fine. The problem is he thinks he does.

In the past, I have seen Joe Rogan admit mistakes, change and grow. He used to believe every conspiracy theory. So he’s come a long way. But I don’t think he’s coming back from this Alex Jones thing. He’s through the looking glass with this one. And if you’re a regular listener of his show, I would be wondering what else he’s entirely delusional about. If this mess is getting past him so easily, there’s way more where this came from.

I am not saying Joe Rogan is without merit. I am saying his position on Alex Jones is without merit. If he had some strong points, I would concede them. They’re not there.

Where Rogan has his best points is on the topic of free speech, but that stuff isn’t really about Alex Jones. It’s about the issue of censorship. I disagree with him here too but I don’t think his views are hopeless like they are on Alex Jones. So that’s where we’re headed next, that’s what the final video is about.

Thanks for sticking it out through this one. I know a lot of that was gross and dark. That’s the worst part of this journey. The final video won’t be anywhere so ugly. Tell me what you think down below, like, subscribe, and all that. Remember that life is good and people are mostly good. See you next time.

PART 3: FREE SPEECH, CENSORSHIP, AND SLIPPERY SLOPES

Aright let’s talk about free speech, let’s talk about censorship, let’s talk about slippery slopes.  And as a central reference, let’s use a stupid conversation from five months ago. I think I’ve laid the groundwork for great success.

This is the third and final video in a series about Joe Rogan and Alex Jones. If you haven’t seen the others, do watch em but you can watch them after this and in any order you want.

Alright. Take a breath. Let’s all try to set aside our ideologies for a bit. After this, as you were. But for now try to just set that down. No? Fine.

One of the major reasons Joe Rogan has Alex Jones on his show is because of the issue of free speech. This is one of the primary, load-bearing pillars of this whole rickety structure. In the previous videos I detail how there is no merit to anything Joe Rogan says about Alex Jones’ facts and arguments. There is no there there. Here, there is a there. There’s a there there here. Here is where the there is. Simple.

The power of massive monopolies to control speech is a problem. And we are in a mob-like cultural climate. I’m not saying status quo is fine. We’ve got problems.

Rogan has valid points on the topic of freedom of expression and yet I disagree with him in big ways and what he’s saying sure as hell doesn’t justify having this ding dong on your show.

Alex Jones and his outlet InfoWars have been banned from YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Spotify, Google Play Store, Apple App store, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, PayPal, Roku, Mailchimp, LinkedIn, and to add insult to injury, Pinterest. Which is just kickin’ a fella when he’s down. Fun fact: one of the last remaining: Amazon.

Alex Jones is persona non grata of pop culture, he is he who must be named. Except that he appears regularly on the biggest podcast on the planet, along with a bunch of other huge shows.

Joe Rogan is not okay with all this deplatforming. This is a free speech guy – I am too. I’m part of this tribe as well, just a different, less hardline wing of it.

Here’s how Rogan puts his free speech argument.

He says this a lot. He says it over and over. And frankly, I think it’s not good enough. He needs something more. He needs something better.

We keep getting lectured about how correct speech beats wrong speech and the demonstration Rogan provides is… a barrage of wrong speech. 11% is what I counted Jones getting right in their conversation and I went easy on him. See the last video for more on that.

So… what is he demonstrating exactly? What’s the lesson here?

I’m a middle aged liberal, same era as Rogan, and I came of age within this free speech paradigm, this is a liberal ideal. It’s a great ideal. I like it. I get why others like it. I think this is a good North star to guide us all.

But it’s an ideal everybody. It’s a generalization. It’s not science, it’s not a law of nature. It’s highly imperfect and there are exceptions. And we make this idea look ridiculous and repulsive when we reflexively back every amoral aggro asshole who gets deplatformed.

Young folks, here’s the way things used to work. There was always dark stuff out there that you could go explore. I remember being freaked out by ads for Black Flag albums that ran in the backs of music magazines. And that’s just dark art. There was also truly dangerous stuff out there, equivalent to InfoWars or even worse. Extreme stuff. Radical stuff. You could get it, but it wasn’t readily accessible. It wasn’t on TV, it didn’t come in the morning newspaper, you had to go find it. You had to go to the shitty part of town. You had to go into some dump that smells like cat piss and see all the weirdos millin’ about, and they’re all dudes and you’re never gonna meet a girl here, and then you took your purchase up to the sad, mute fucker workin’ the cash, and you bought… whatever. And you walked outta there feeling… some appropriate shame.

Wait, was I buying radical literature or porn? Whatever, it’s all stuff that we don’t want to just be everywhere.

So in this previous system, the old media era, the radical stuff wasn’t just on a brightly lit shelf at a nice store where there’s families and cute girls and cute boys and cool people hangin’ around. You were with the weirdos. And not weird in a cool, interesting way. Weird like The Unabomber.

In this old media era, you got some context about where you were.  You were on the fringes and when you went there, you knew it.

In my opinion, that’s where InfoWars belongs: in the shitty part of town, in the dump that smells like cat piss. Not in your local shopping mall beside the Cinnabon.

That world that I grew up in – 80s and 90s -- was far less diverse and far less free than the one we live in now, even with these global mega corporations that can disappear you whenever they want. The reality is you can now say pretty much whatever you want and lots of people can hear it. Expression is more free now than it was then, and not by a bit, not by 30%, it’s 100 times, 500 times, I dunno, it’s immense. And if you disagree me, leave a comment below where everybody in the world can potentially read it. Then hop in your time machine and try that in 1990.

We are vastly more free now than we were then. That is a goddamn fact. I’m middle-aged, I lived in that world, I know. So anybody saying we’ve lost our freedom of speech, spare me. Calm down.

There isn’t just legal speech and illegal. There is also legal speech that we–us, society, not the government–reduce the visibility of. There are certain exceptional types of speech that we marginalize. You can still have it, but you have to seek it. We have never had a system where the full range of free speech, including all the violent, pornographic and psychotic stuff, is readily accessible to everyone. That world never existed. There are places like that now. They suck and nobody but the weirdos wanna hang out there.

There is a whole universe of hideous, vile expression that is free speech, that is legal, and almost none of us want it around. You are free to deny that the holocaust ever happened, you can share images of people who’ve committed suicide, you can share weirdly photographed images of little kids – stuff you can’t imagine. That’s all free speech to show. If you think your line is just if it’s legal, it’s fine to be anywhere, I think if you investigate this position  further, you would discover that that is actually not what you think. You think there’s a line and that line is not just is it legal or not. There is legal speech you don’t want everywhere.

For the people who want some sort of absolutist free speech system, no censorship, everything that is legal is fair game and that stuff should be available everywhere, that is a deeply radical and unproven idea. That is not our history. And I wish we could just flip a switch and try that out for 24 hours so everyone could get a load of it. I think if we actually tried this idea for a day, it would be dead, buried and forgotten. Nobody actually wants this because it is disgusting and hateful.

Free speech taken to an extreme is nihilism. Nothing matters. If you push any belief far enough, it will corrupt. I believe in peace but sometimes there has to be war. You can’t talk Hitler out of conquering Europe and murdering the entire Jewish population. War is the moral choice in that particular and extraordinary case.

I believe in free speech, and there are particular and extraordinary cases where censorship is the right answer. There are outliers who shouldn’t get treated the same way as everybody else.

And the solution Rogan proposes is dystopian shit.

For starters, this would have required Donald Trump understanding what congress is. So non-starter.

Furthermore, folks, whenever you’ve got a problem, there’s a zillion ways to make that problem worse. We have a problem with the power that these platforms have over speech. But this idea of Rogan’s is worse. It’s a more extreme form of power than what we have now because it’s held by the state, it’s backed by legally sanctioned violence. You might not like Facebook but they can’t arrest you. The government could arrest you because you platformed some holocaust denier.

A constitutional amendment, for the likes of freaks like Alex Jones, is nuts. It’s forcing every platform to treat the worst content imaginable just like everything else and if you don’t, you get arrested. How would this even work? It’s ludicrous.

Joe Rogan talks a lot about slippery slopes. This is a big component of his free speech position.

Again, there’s a decent point in here. People are looking for smaller and smaller infractions with which to punish people. People are being outraged by smaller and smaller things. Some people are getting caught in the cross fire probably. But the solution here isn’t to say, okay, there’s no slope. It’s just this. Free speech, not free speech. Whatever is legal to say, you can say everywhere.

There is a slope. The slope exists. There is a gradient between acceptable speech and unacceptable speech and there is going to be dispute and contention about the boundary between them. We have to contend with the reality of there being a slope.

Just like the rest of us, Joe Rogan navigates them. I’m sure he has chosen a point on the slope which he will not go past for who his guests are. He hasn’t had David Duke on, an actual KKKer. He hasn’t spoken to anyone from ISIS. He hasn’t had on Louis Farrakhan, who’s compared Jewish people to insects[[1]](#_ftn1). They’ve been deplatformed. Would he talk to them? I think no. That’s too far. He has limits.

Slippery slopes are real. They are part of life. I deal with them, you deal them, Rogan deals with them, and platforms are going to have to deal with them. We can’t eliminate them.

We shouldn’t just have two categories of legal speech and illegal speech. There is also a third category that is between them. This stuff is violent, it’s sexually explicit, it’s extremist, whatever. And the reach of this stuff should be limited.

I believe InfoWars is legal speech, with some slander, which is actually illegal. It’s mostly legal speech but I don’t think it has the right to be everywhere. And forcing companies to host this stuff is nuts. They don’t have to host this shit, just like radio stations didn’t have to play your shitty song or newspapers didn’t have to run your insane  letter to the editor.

And in a strict sense, Infowars has not been censored. It’s still right there. Anybody can go get it. It’s just not on Main St. Primarily because it’s disgusting. That is the main reason. It’s because it’s gross. If you don’t know what I’m referring to here, watch the second video in this series. After which, you will need a shower.

I don’t feel amazing about this position I’m taking. I don’t love it. Because I think censorship is mostly a bad solution. I don’t enjoy deplatforming Alex Jones or the likes of QAnon. But leaving them alone seemed worse. Are we better off in some way with things like InfoWars and QAnon on these platforms? If so, how does this happen? And when does it happen? Cuz it wasn’t happening. It was just getting worse. Do we wait until Alex Jones starts vilifying some other innocent person about the Boulder shooting or whatever? How many times does he get to do this? How does this work?

The core focus of Alex Jones, of InfoWars, is not information. It’s not news. It’s vilification. It’s hating them. It’s scapegoating. Scapegoating has a catastrophic and horrifying history. There is nothing with a worse history. This is how wars happen, this is how murders happen, this is how genocides happen.

InfoWars’ content should be marginalized because it is dedicated to hating a group of people, meaning liberals, me and plenty of you. InfoWars is a hate outlet. Anybody who says otherwise, either isn’t paying attention or likes that it hates the same people as them.

Alex Jones made his bed. There were countless opportunities along the way for him along to just compromise a bit. Like we all do in society. We don’t just escalate, escalate, escalate. Alex Jones could still be on all these platforms if he would just moderate his worst impulses a bit. The violence, the homophobia, the detailed imaginings of rape and cannibalism and pedophilia and poop eating. If he just laid off the truly vile stuff, he could be making the same political points. But the points aren’t the point. Right? The points aren’t the point. Vilifying your enemies using the most extreme rhetoric possible is the point.

This guy can never compromise, he can never concede. He has to fight always. And you pay a price for that in life.

We, meaning civilization, society, groups of people who cooperate, ostracize people who sow discord for no good reason, people who create needless conflict. We marginalize them. We exclude them. That is what we’ve always done. This wasn’t invented by a bunch of millennials on Twitter. It’s ancient. We exclude. Exclusion is necessary. Not everything is fine. We all know this.

I personally think the bar for exclusion should be high. You should have to be an epic fuck-up. Infowars is cleanly over that bar. Alex Jones deserves exclusion for Sandy Hook alone. But Sandy Hook is just the beginning with this guy. If you took away Sandy Hook, InfoWars is still over the bar.

By having Jones on his show, Rogan is amplifying misinformation, hate and plain ol’ stupidity. In case I haven’t been blunt enough, this shit is fucking stupid. And younger people who are unencumbered by this free speech paradigm that I grew up in and Rogan grew up in, I think they are just seeing this for what it is. It’s mega publicity for someone who has vilified the parents of murdered children and that’s just the start of the loathsome shit this guy’s been up to for decades. They’re doing what Joe Rogan seems incapable of. They’re seeing Jones for what he is: awful, wrong, ridiculous, a fool.

Joe Rogan is allying himself with Alex Jones and this is a risky bet. I mean, here’s how Jones is using Rogan on his site now. There will be plenty more of this. It will not stop. Alex Jones will milk this cow until it stops breathing.

Associating with Alex Jones is potentially humiliating or worse. Alex Jones could get someone hurt or worse. A major reason platforms don’t want Jones around is because they don’t want to be blamed when something awful happens. That is a very rational position.

Alex Jones is the most vicious and violent-minded public figure I can think of. The only thing that dilutes how toxic he is, is how stupid and ridiculous he is. Most people just think he’s a joke.

Joe Rogan repeats his free speech theory a lot.

If this theory is so good, give it a stress test. Talk to the people who are getting the sharp end of it.

Talk to Chrissie Teigen, who was terrorized by QAnon followers after having a miscarriage. She’s done nothing other than be really liberal.

Talk to Marina Abramovic. She’s been getting death threats from Pizzagaters and Anons since 2016. She’s done nothing other than be super weird.

Talk to the people who do the actual work of fighting child trafficking and see what happened to their world after QAnon came to town.

Talk to Sandy Hook parents. Lenny Pozner has to appear in make-up now because he keeps getting death threats. He’s moved seven times. Clip Get a taste of the entirely undeserved misery that Alex Jones doles out for entertainment and to sell boner pills.

If Rogan is going to be as confident as he is in this theory, then look the consequences straight in the eye. Which he has not done.

Like Rogan, I am pro free speech, I don't like censorship, but there are exceptions. There are always exceptions. Free speech is not my religion.

I get where people are coming from with this, I acknowledge there are big problems here, and it is not my intent to be disrespectful. But if you’re one these people who are hard-line on this issue, I would consider the case I’ve made here. Because if nothing else, you need rebuttals to this stuff.

When you look at old clips of Alex Jones, he’s a different guy, and more of a recognizable human being. He’s still totally full of shit, but the things he says aren’t so starkly crazy.

The Alex Jones of 2021 is way way way crazier than the Alex Jones of 2005, who was already bonkers. The old Alex Jones used to ridicule people who believed in UFOs, now he’s talking about portals to other dimensions and globalist deals with interdimensional aliens.

Jones used to not be so obsessed with murder and rape and torture and pedophilia and incest and cannibalism. There wasn’t so much Satan and demons and witches. There was a façade of journalism to it.

Jones is basically doing the same act he was doing twenty years ago except it’s just way worse, way more careless and way more desperate. He’s like a TV show that was bad from the start and now it’s in its 25th season and he’s exhausted and desperate for ratings. The crazier he’s acted over the years, the more attention he’s gotten, so he’s just cranked that dial to 11.

But there’s something more going on here.

Alex Jones is disintegrating. He’s a midde-aged man who is a shell of what he once was, which wasn’t much to begin with. And I think there is a teachable moment here for the rest of us.

Why is Alex Jones disintegrating?

Alex Jones is disintegrating because growth is about being wrong, not being right. It’s when we make mistakes and acknowledge them that we grow. Alex Jones is so certain, he is so rigid, he is so unwilling to admit fault, he is so threatened by contrary perspectives that he won’t let himself sympathize with them at all. He only accepts information that suits what he already believes. If it feels bad he rejects it.

In this life, if you're not growing, you’re shrinking. And Alex Jones is shrinking.

This scapegoating just makes everything too goddamn easy. You don’t have to do shit but judge and hate. That you should perhaps learn and grow and change is not of concern. You get to blame them for everything and never be reflective, never acknowledge mistakes.

This is why conspiracy thinking is so seductive. It flatters us. It’s tells you you’re right on about everything. The only real problem is them. And the horrible bargain that you enter into when you buy this stuff is that you wither away. 

The saddest thing about living in conspiracy world is that you stop developing. And you even get dumber than you were going in – this stuff is like anti-knowledge. Because it’s so sloppy and illogical, and then you start mirroring that. We copy the media we consume, its evidence, its tactics, its reasoning. Everything is a remix people.

What I see when I look at Alex Jones isn’t what he’s so intent on projecting, which is strength and confidence and rage. What I see is fear. This is a person dominated by fear. And all the machismo is there to hide that from everyone, including himself. Just like an aggressive dog is a dog that’s afraid, the most aggressive people are often afraid.

I believe fear is the most disfiguring of all emotions. It’s at the core of why we think horrible things and commit horrible acts. We do it when we’re afraid.

Alex Jones has dedicated his time here with us in this world to fear and spreading fear. And if you let this fear into your heart, in time it will make you cruel. And you’ll unleash this cruelty not necessarily in political violence, and not necessarily even in violence, but in hostility and anger towards your community, your friends or your family. Your life will be infected by malice, and people will exclude you. And you’ll become more and more isolated. It’s a sad, lonely, angry life to have.

To use Christian concepts again, Alex Jones is one of God’s creatures. I don’t hate him. I don’t know him. At my best, I can feel some sympathy for him. He didn’t choose to be this guy. It’s the hand he was dealt. He seems deeply tortured and unhappy and unwell. And something is probably wrong with him. He’s got a personality disorder. Or three.

Anyway, we need to deal with his presence. I don’t recommend feeling anger towards Alex Jones. I think at this point what Alex Jones deserves above all is indifference. He deserves obscurity. He’s earned it. Don’t watch. Don’t ridicule. Don’t react. Don’t share memes. If you want to hate-listen to Infowars, just listen to the podcast Knowledge Fight instead.

I for one do not intend to ever talk about this guy again. That’s a wrap.

For Joe Rogan, the case is more complicated. Having Alex Jones on your podcast is just polluting your audience’s mind with dangerous nonsense. But Rogan has had plenty of great guests too. Maybe someday he’ll have a woman on the show, it could happen.

These interviews with Alex Jones are amazingly bad work, really really low quality, total garbage. The chasm between The Joe Rogan Experience at its best and at its worst is the most immense I’ve seen in pop culture. For Rogan and his team, that seems like a problem to me. Rogan complains about mainstream media a lot, this is much worse media.

If Rogan were doing this Alex Jones’ thing privately, I could support it. But Joe Rogan is a media empire at this point. He’s bigger than mainstream media. This is a giant stage he’s welcoming this malicious goofball onto.

Rogan is just really weak on the topic of politics and I’m not sure he knows how bad he is. He was naïve and uninformed to ever have considered Alex Jones credible. That’s bad discernment. Fine, we all do that. But he won’t dismiss this guy and move on. He bought this shitcoin and he’s gonna hold it.

I also think Rogan needs to raise his game on the topic of free speech. I think his arguments are platitudes, and he’s way too sympathetic to the people who say crazy shit rather than the people who have crazy shit said about them. These people are actual victims, not fake victims. Unlike Alex Jones, they didn’t deserve what they got.

I can see why people would listen to Rogan sometimes, he does some good stuff. I would not listen to further Alex Jones interview certainly. And I would make note that Rogan has a serious gullible streak, I mean it’s a real character flaw, and when he doesn’t wanna learn something, he’ll bury his head in the sand and just stay there. He’s done that with Jones for twenty years now.

Alex Jones’ popularity is a symptom of an illness within American culture. That people want to hear this guy should concern us. People are anxious and afraid and confused and stuff like this is providing them answers. I think the rest of us should all be thinking about how can we help improve the conditions that are creating these needs and how can we provide better answers than the ones people like Alex Jones are coming up with.

So over to you guys now. Take it from here. Fix society please.

That’s the end of this journey for me. What do you think? Where the line? Is there a line? Let me know what you think in the comments below. I’m coming back next time with something totally different. I’m done with dark stuff for a while or forever. I want to create things that are fun and joyous and positive. So that’s what’s coming next. I’ll see you then!