#SeditionHunters - is this the downfall of Alex Jones, the “king of conspiracy” (CNN), the most famous figure at the Capitol attack? He’d tormented the Sandy Hook parents for years; last week lost by default their multi-$M lawsuit. Will the law come for him for Jan 6 too? 1/
Alex’s reel shows how central he is on Jan 6: VIP section at the rally, marched w/ entourage to the Capitol (trailed by shouts: “Alex Jones!”), speechifed from the E. steps..& then decamped to a rented rooftop overlooking the besieged Capitol. He KNEW. 2/ rumble.com/vndge8-alex-jo…
Alex films himself so much we had to edit to keep the reel to 17 mins - but he must hate our reel since it keeps getting banned from YouTube. It's on Rumble now; hope to repost on the ‘Hunting Insurrectionists’ YT channel (itself shadowbanned -use link) 3/ youtube.com/channel/UCboWX…
Alex’s Jan 6 reel must be interesting if someone doesn’t want it seen! Alex & wife Erika stayed at the Willard with elites like Roger Stone, were driven to the Ellipse rally where they sat with InfoWars’ Owen Shroyer (arrested) & rally organizer Cindy Chafian (subpoenaed). 4/
Alex’s InfoWars footage often seems staged, self-serving & misleading. At 1:32 PM: “They just breached the Capitol” (40 mins after the walkway breaches, 40 mins before the break-in). Alex blames provocateurs, but then heads there. Ali Alexander says “the s-- of your dreams”. 5/
Alex’s shell game is dizzying. He arrives at the W. Capitol as the scaffolds are breached, uses a bullhorn to urge people to move from West to East...his words are “We are peaceful”, but the motion is just what is strategically needed to pad out the thin East side crowds. 6/
On the East side Alex and entourage go up the Capitol steps at 2:17 PM, the crowd cheering. He gives a speech, again saying “be peaceful”, but also “1776!” and “We will never give in!” Four minutes after he descends the steps, the mob breaks open the E. Capitol doors. 7/
Alex travels all afternoon with Ali Alexander, architect of ‘Stop the Steal’. #SeditionVIP’s Michael Coudrey and Jason Jones, both connected with Ali, arrived separately and pre-positioned on the north balcony, then followed Alex down the stairs and joined up with his group. 8/
An hour later, Owen & Alex emerged on the roof of 101 Constitution Ave, pre-rented for his InfoWars broadcast with the battered Capitol as backdrop, the giant flag perfectly framed. It’s hard to believe they didn’t know what they would be getting. 9/
Alex’s Jan 6 show is fascinating - watch as they slowly realize the attack is failing. Host Harrison Smith had gushed about the “onrush of patriots”, now is shocked, disbelieving: “so President Trump is sending the National Guard now” (laughs) “he never sent it for Antifa.” 10/
While Alex Jones deflects blame (“95% of this is provocateurs”), Ali Alexander seems shamelessly unrepentant. He released his own video to make it clear: “I do not disavow this”. (Tweeted out by Michael Coudrey, who then fled the U.S. for South Africa.) 11/
Alex’s bodyguards, many ex-Blackwater, wrap up the day with a rooftop photograph. We marked Tim Enlow - he's a public figure as the first TX policeman ever fired for racial profiling. Ex-Army, + 8 years as a “security contractor” in Iraq & Afghanistan. 12/ austinchronicle.com/news/2001-12-2…
Enlow has a long paper trail, not just the Austin firing. He left Blackwater (now Academi) shortly after being named in a federal lawsuit by whistleblowers fired for reporting that Enlow was falsifying firearms training test results. See Wired article. 13/ wired.com/2012/07/blackw…
Alex’s men are proud to show their Blackwater connection. Here they are on Jan 5th in the Willard Hotel posing with ex-Blackwater guard Paul Slough, convicted for killing Iraqi civilians, then pardoned by Trump on Dec. 22, just 2 weeks before. 14/
The just-pardoned Slough was a kind of celebrity in DC that weekend. On Jan 5th eveninge hung out in the VIP tent at the Freedom Plaza rally, near Roger Stone, who had gotten his own pardon the day after Slough's. 15/
Alex Jones helped fund the pre-attack rallies, may have connected organizers Cindy Chafian and Caroline Wren. It’s hard to sort since all are now spinning. Chafian now claims to have met Alex in December “by complete happenstance” at the Willard Hotel. 16/ propublica.org/article/trump-…
Jones and Cindy Chafian are tight enough that on Jan 6, Alex’s wife Erika traveled with Cindy’s group all the way to the Capitol where they watched the violent tunnel attack. Erika did depart a bit earlier, & alone - Alex says in his broadcast she “just got back” at 3:57 PM. 17/
Alex has been promoting bizarre conspiracy theories for 25 years, now to 2M listeners (satanist cults! plans to breed a master race!). SPLC called him “the most prolific conspiracy theorist” of our era; Rolling Stone “the most paranoid man in America". 18/ rollingstone.com/culture/cultur…
After 20 children (& their teachers) were killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, Jones called it a hoax and relentlessly harassed the grieving parents. They sued; a TX judge just ruled him in default & liable for all damages. His reign may be ending. 19/ washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/10…
Alex Jones is no military mastermind of the Capitol attack...but seems he knew what was coming, & he had a role in the ecosystem of insurrection: inciting the crowd, drawing them there. Coudrey's pre-attack Tweet says "If we give the order, DO NOT LEAVE DC." Who is "we"? 20/
More broadly, Alex’s toxicity helped make the attack possible. The people lured to the Capitol were prepped with the kind of propaganda that Alex pioneered; he was ahead of his time: "There's a war for your mind", his site says. The U.S. is fighting that war now, all of us. 21/
Update: the @January6thCmte just issued a subpoena for Ali Alexander. The target is the Jan 6 permit for Lot 8, just across E. Plaza & likely where Alex Jones' group met up. Letter specifically mentions Ali's "Victory or death" chant the night before. 23/ january6th.house.gov/sites/democrat…
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Sean Casten just learned that Mike Johnson was Dean of a planned law school named after pedophile Southern Baptist leader Judge Paul Pressler, who preyed on young boys. Wait til he learns that Ted Cruz was on its board. Pressler also gave Cruz one of his first endorsements. 1/
Johnson's failed Paul Pressler School of Law was a major play by the religious right. Its board, formed in 2010, was full of the biggest luminaries in the fundamentalist Evangelical universe. Then in 2011, the obscure Ted Cruz was added. Ask him why. 2/ web.archive.org/web/2012012200…
The Paul Pressler School of Law was an intensely political project, meant to train lawyers to overturn US law, build a Christian-focused government. That's why its board were key names - and then Cruz. Many of these people have Jan 6 connections. They're still power players. 3/
As Fox revisits Hilary's email server, let's do a comparative politics test. Question: why did the Jan 6 Committee have to subpoena phone records of Trump officials? Answer: because they were ALL using private emails and phones for government business. Yet no media covered it. 1/
Do you want to learn how Trump aide Vince Haley managed the 1776 Commission, worked on the Jan 6 speech, or negotiated Mike Flynn's pardon? It was on his @ newt. org email from when he worked for Newt Gingrich. Not submitted to the National Archives. 2/ govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GP…
Just look at the J6C's material: only a tiny portion is from the National Archives. Most of it is personal devices and personal emails, used by Trump officials for government business. Wildly insecure and also illegal. But sure, talk about Hillary. 3/ govinfo.gov/collection/jan…
People missed the likely explanation for Trump's bizarre ramble yesterday, when he falsely said his uncle taught the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. Trump is under huge stress right now about the Jeffrey Epstein files. And it's Epstein who claimed that he studied with the Unabomber. 1/
That detail came out in 2019. After Epstein's address book got released, reporter Leland Nally called the numbers in it, and got a wild interview with Stuart Pivar, who said he was a close friend of Epstein's: "Jeffrey once told me that he studied math with the Unambomber." 2/
Epstein's story is a lie: Kaczynski quit teaching in 1969, when Epstein was in high school. But the interview reminds us again how odd it is that in 1974, after Epstein dropped out of college, he was immediately hired to teach math & physics at Dalton, a prep school. How? 3/
A part of the Epstein nothing-to-see-here fiasco no one's talking about: what happened to the "army of FBI agents" pulled off their cases in March to work on the Epstein files? Pam Bondi made people move to DC, pull all-nighters redacting the files. Did they just.. go home? 1/
Bloomberg: Pam Bondi demanded all the FBI's Epstein files, then ordered "hundreds" of agents to work on them (bizarrely via their personal phones). They were "holed up in offices at the bureau’s sprawling Central Records Complex". Are they still there? 2/ bloomberg.com/news/newslette…
The public should know what happened to Bondi's redaction effort, when and why (and if) the decision was made to send FBI agents home. And if she won't answer maybe one of those hundreds of agents is mad enough to leak. Keep your eye on who is next laid off at the FBI, too. 3/
As Hungary's Viktor Orban sucks up to Putin and accuses Ukraine of "choos[ing] war", a reminder, again, that Orban, Netanyahu, and Trump all owe their careers to the same US political operative - Arthur Finkelstein. Arguably the man most responsible for our dystopian times. 1/
Arthur Finkelstein was the dark master of the negative campaign, orchestrating facts-free and values-free assaults on political opponents. A gay, Jewish man who specialized in electing anti-gay homophobes. 2/
No one's explained yet if Finkelstein had a direct tie to Russia, but Finkelstein created Putin's bootlicker Orban, and Finkelstein is the one who brought Paul Manafort to Trump out of Ukraine where he was busy installing pro-Russia politicians. 3/
Yes, the NYT is shameful for sourcing an anti-Mamdani article from notorious white supremacist Jordan Lasker. But it's worse. Lasker, who they call an "academic", is a student whose only paper of note is INFAMOUS for unethical data use that got his tenured co-author fired. 1/
Who is the NYT's "academic" source? Lasker is or was a PhD student at Texas Tech, but his only paper of note is earlier, from 2019: "Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability", whose misuse of data triggered a major investigation and got Cleveland State Prof. Bryan Pesta fired. 2/
The Chronicle of Higher Ed wrote about the scandal. It wasn't just that the article was "racist pseudoscience". It was that the authors misused data from the NIH and lied on their data application - filed by Bryan Pesta. A flagrant ethics violation. 3/ archive.is/KwbGy