transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:00] Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.
Speaker 2:
[00:06] Oh, we're getting shut down.
Speaker 3:
[00:08] We've beat so many attacks, and, but finally, we're shutting down with Willow next month.
Speaker 1:
[00:14] Right after this ad.
Speaker 4:
[00:22] I'm really proud of you, what you've done. I'm not kidding, it's really hard to do what you've done here.
Speaker 1:
[00:27] Thank you, dude.
Speaker 4:
[00:28] It's hard to do journalism at all, and you bet on yourself, and you hit the f***ing back button, so I'm really proud of you.
Speaker 1:
[00:34] I think both of us have probably felt this, where it's like, man, the bar's real low.
Speaker 4:
[00:37] It sure is. There's nobody, nobody's picking up the phone anymore to do any kind of journalism, it's crazy.
Speaker 1:
[00:45] It's a market opportunity, as well as the problem.
Speaker 4:
[00:48] The actual reporters left are the kids who are currently in journalism school, because they're being told old-fashioned tricks on how to do stuff. They realize that's actually the thing that's going to get me a journalism job. It's scoops. It's affirmation. It's freaking f***ing news.
Speaker 5:
[01:01] Yes, yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1:
[01:03] What an accurate, descriptive summary of the thing we're here to talk about. And by the way, the exclusive, big announcement you're here to make with us here today. Thank you, Ben Collins, for doing that. For those who are not familiar with your current job, what is the title that you have?
Speaker 4:
[01:19] I'm the CEO of Global Tetrahedron. It's primarily a puppy mill. That's how we make most of our money, a clandestine puppy mill. We also print a newspaper called The Onion, which you may have heard of. Good newspaper.
Speaker 1:
[01:31] It's so good, I dare say, that you've become the foremost antagonist of the one and only Alex Jones.
Speaker 3:
[01:41] When you realize how fake it all is, the football, the basketball, the Lady Gaga, the Justin Bieber. Now, the globalists are pouring on all the heat they can, pushing their hive-mind, Borg collectivist, zombie public system. I don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin frogs gay!
Speaker 2:
[02:04] Do you understand that?
Speaker 6:
[02:07] Serious crap!
Speaker 7:
[02:08] Liberal. Liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal, happy fun, la, la, la, human smuggling, fentanyl deaths, forced government, euthanasia.
Speaker 8:
[02:19] Patriot.
Speaker 3:
[02:20] Patriot.
Speaker 8:
[02:21] Patriot.
Speaker 3:
[02:22] Vampire. Nationalist. Mental retard. Eugenicist. A scared man. Really retard.
Speaker 7:
[02:29] Retard. Traitor.
Speaker 3:
[02:31] Vampire. Vampire. Next level.
Speaker 7:
[02:33] Moses.
Speaker 1:
[02:36] I don't know if I've given enough consideration to vampire as a really key feature of his work.
Speaker 4:
[02:42] Yeah, 50% of people are vampires, by the way, according to that clip.
Speaker 1:
[02:45] Apparently. Apparently. By the way, the visuals on where he's saying a bunch of that stuff from, there is a very familiar microphone that has kind of been an archetype for all podcasters, let's be honest, since then. It's from inside of this bunker at this apparently undisclosed location in the woods of Austin, Texas. And that is where the headquarters of Infowars are located.
Speaker 4:
[03:10] Yeah. Guess how much rent is there, by the way?
Speaker 1:
[03:12] What's rent run, Alex Jones?
Speaker 4:
[03:14] $75,000 a month. I swear to God.
Speaker 1:
[03:18] We're going to get into the finances, the finer economic data points around this. But Infowars is the foremost conspiracy newsroom. Scare quotes around the word news, obviously. The scariest quotes around the word news. It's been described by one of Alex Jones' former employees who has written since a book about his experiences as quote-unquote cult-like. And Alex Jones himself chooses a different term to describe it. In a tweet from 2016, he says, and you've certainly seen this photo before, there's a war on for your mind at infowars.com as the 21st century cavalry! And beneath which is a photo of what?
Speaker 4:
[03:57] That's a Putin-esque Alex Jones shirtless atop a horse. I would call him, a barrel chest is a really nice way of putting it, right? A bowling ball chest is probably another way of putting it as well.
Speaker 1:
[04:08] Yes, and he's wearing jeans.
Speaker 4:
[04:10] He is wearing jeans, yes.
Speaker 1:
[04:10] Before RFK Jr. was wearing jeans and exercising, Alex Jones was the Venn diagram of all of these conspiratorial scammer characters. And his website, by the way, like the headlines over there, I mean, there are some classics like Lady Gaga, Half Time Show, A Satanic Ritual, Bombshell, Barack Obama conclusively outed a CIA creation, NWO, New World Order obviously opening thousands of portals to ancient demons, Top Insider confirms Hillary's odor problem, actual demon question mark. When did you first encounter Alex Jones?
Speaker 4:
[04:44] This is not going to be a fun story quickly. I'm just going to be, I'm going to go back into time and it's going to be sad and then I'll come back to the fun part. Okay. So I was working at the Daily Beast. I was a news editor and one day I woke up and my friend's girlfriend was shot and killed on live TV. This was in Roanoke, Virginia. Her name is Alice Parker and my friend Chris Hurst, we had a, like what we call a podcast or something together in college. He was an anchor at this new station in Roanoke and his girlfriend was out in the field and a disgruntled ex-employee put a GoPro on his head. I think it was the first ever live streamed murder of anybody.
Speaker 1:
[05:25] I remember this, I had no idea that you had a relationship.
Speaker 4:
[05:28] Yeah, I freaked out and I just like left the newsroom. My editor was like, get out of here, you're too close to this. And I was like, you're right. But over the next few days, I started to look up all of these people who were calling it a false flag. Because if you, at that point in time, if you Googled his name, the very top things would be like he is a CIA plant, she never existed, this is a false flag gun control thing. These are all notes that stank heavily of Alex Jones, right? So over the next few weeks, I did a story where I just called everybody who made those claims. And remember one guy, I would let them talk for half an hour at the end, and I would just say, I'm just letting you know, I hear you, but I know Chris Hurst, if he's a CIA agent, he sucks, he's a terrible fantasy baseball player, he's garbage at this, he's a real man. And they would just say, well, that's just what I believe. I just believe this. And really at the end of the day, it comes from the culture that Alex created. Right.
Speaker 1:
[06:27] The idea that there was in fact video.
Speaker 4:
[06:30] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[06:30] And despite that, you could deny what seemed to be, when we were growing up, the most undisputable way to convey reality.
Speaker 4:
[06:40] Well, so my previous job, I used to cover conspiracy theories. And so I saw that Alex Jones had a guy on his show that said they're doing child sex trafficking on Mars. Like they're bringing children up there to Mars. And I did some quick math and I was like, by the time they get up there though, they're like 25 at least. Like they're like, you know, I don't know what number you're getting at here, but like they're fully adults by the time they're up at Mars. So my editor was like, you should call NASA.
Speaker 1:
[07:09] What was NASA's response when you fact-checked the math?
Speaker 4:
[07:12] They thought I was just an idiot calling them and they're trying to be nice to me. And then they got so mad. Like once the story came out, they were like, I didn't know I was on the record. All this stuff was terrible. And I did feel bad for them. But the headline was basically like NASA colon. There is no child sex trafficking on Mars or something. Had Alex Jones stuck to this kind of s***, there's no problems. This is great. Amazing content.
Speaker 1:
[07:37] The thing that he ends up doing though, is not just do 9-11 conspiracy theories and pizza gate. It gets to the subject that is at the heart of this entire saga that you've been immersed in.
Speaker 3:
[07:49] Yeah.
Speaker 9:
[07:50] It's a Sunday of sorrow for Newtown, Connecticut and for the nation. This afternoon, hundreds of residents walked the road to Sandy Hook Elementary School where, on Friday, 26 people were murdered.
Speaker 10:
[08:02] The majority of those who died today were children. Beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old.
Speaker 3:
[08:13] Sandy Hook is a synthetic, completely fake, with actors, in my view, manufacturer. There's a cover up, there's actors, they're manipulating, they've been caught lying. What do you do when they've got the kids going in circles, in and out of the building with their hands up? I've watched the footage and it looks like a drill.
Speaker 1:
[08:30] How do you describe what we just heard there in terms of where it fits into his sort of oeuvre?
Speaker 4:
[08:36] It's a harassment campaign against private citizens who've gone through the worst thing that you can ever imagine. I've come to call it the double whammy of American life. Really only happens here where one day you drop them off at school and then they no longer exist as human beings anymore. Then for the next few years of your life, there is an economy around trying to make it clear that your child never existed at all. By the way, you deserve harassment because you're in on it.
Speaker 1:
[09:05] You're a crisis actor.
Speaker 4:
[09:06] You're a crisis actor. You're part of it. And a big part of this to me was always, when I say the double whammy of American life, it's that Alex was part of that ecosystem and really kind of drove it. And what he did at that time was he told people to call the families, call the parents. There was a guy who went, who was an Alex Jones fan, who ripped up the memorials and then called the families and were like, why did you do this? For years, this is what happened to them after. All these people had to move just to stay away from this harassment. And more importantly, he made so much goddamn money, dude. He made so much money.
Speaker 1:
[09:43] No, the business of being a Sandy Hook truth-er was one of the most telling chapters in human civilization. The thing that was least acceptable became one of the most monetizable. And there were no guardrails around this. And it reminds me, of course, in the bigger picture sense, of one of the greatest onion headlines of all time, the recurring headline, which I'm sure you know by memory.
Speaker 4:
[10:08] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[10:09] Which is...
Speaker 4:
[10:10] No way to prevent this, says OnlyNation, where this regularly happens.
Speaker 1:
[10:14] And it's hard to come up with a better capsule summary than that. But this is where, like, The Onion being the antagonist to Infowars, to Alex Jones, is perfect in this sort of, I don't know, like the fake news spectrum, the moral valence of what it is to do satire and the abuse of satire. I mean, I grew up reading the paper which you have revived. Like, I'm holding the new Onion in my hands and I'm seeing at the very top, this is the March-April edition, tearful Trump claims he was sex trafficked by Epstein. I was one of his victims. It's the stuff that made me laugh consistently.
Speaker 4:
[10:56] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[10:57] 1998, drugs win drug war. 2011, judge rules white girl will be tried as black adult.
Speaker 11:
[11:05] Once the trial begins next week, all courtroom images of Hannah will depict her as a 300-pound muscular black man, and jury members will be instructed to imagine her as such.
Speaker 4:
[11:15] Great video, by the way.
Speaker 1:
[11:16] So good. Leading us to 2014, Ohio replaces lethal injection with humane new head-ripping-off machine.
Speaker 12:
[11:24] The new device is designed to be as humane as possible, emitting soothing white noise and putting prisoners on a cushioned seat before its metallic talons dig into their necks and painlessly wrench their heads off.
Speaker 1:
[11:35] And so the whole point in all of these things, not to be pedantic about satire, but in the humor, in the sacred topic that you seem to be defiling, you're actually revealing something fundamentally interesting and useful about us, in which the person being made fun of is not one of the most traumatized victims you can imagine.
Speaker 4:
[11:57] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[11:58] But it's often incredibly powerful people in institutions.
Speaker 4:
[12:03] To me, it's the financialization of it. Anybody can believe stupid s***. But if you say, believe my stupid s***, and the only way to stop that stupid s*** is this boner pill I'm selling you on the internet, and then suddenly you're a millionaire.
Speaker 3:
[12:15] My friends, we have done it. With Dr. Group's help, we have developed the ultimate male vitality supplement with eight concentrated super herbs. This is the answer to the globalist war on male vitality.
Speaker 4:
[12:27] Like a multi-multi-millionaire. You have a recurring revenue of people buying your boner pills every month. That is not a speech issue. That is like an FTC issue. That's an issue of, do we want an economy that incentivizes that behavior? Right. And I just don't want to live in a world like that. I just simply don't want to live in a world like that.
Speaker 1:
[12:48] And so the story we're here to tell, it's basically been in the works for more than a year at this point.
Speaker 4:
[12:54] 18 months.
Speaker 1:
[12:55] Okay. Well, I think we should probably catch people up with the date November 14th, 2024.
Speaker 13:
[13:02] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[13:02] This is nine days after Trump's re-election. And actually good things seems to have happened.
Speaker 13:
[13:11] CNN breaking news.
Speaker 10:
[13:14] This morning, the satirical news site, The Onion, has just won an auction to acquire the media outlet Infowars.
Speaker 6:
[13:20] That is right. The Onion buys Alex Jones' Infowars in a bankruptcy auction. It sounded like a headline you would read in the satirical newspaper. But this is no joke.
Speaker 5:
[13:30] The Onion plans to turn Infowars into a parody, mocking the kind of disinformation that Alex Jones amplified.
Speaker 14:
[13:36] The Onion buying Infowars is like if Mad Magazine bought Mein Kampf.
Speaker 1:
[13:46] It's hard to imagine something more perfect than you guys trolling the world's greatest troll by using legal mechanisms available to you that I did not know were even possible.
Speaker 4:
[13:57] We do big swings as a company. And this was clearly our biggest one yet. Also, it was a 50-50 ball until we found out. So in terms of a swing, it was a home run swing and we connected.
Speaker 1:
[14:13] Well, this is the thing. So this news breaks and it's an enormous deal. Everyone's covering it. And then it doesn't happen.
Speaker 4:
[14:23] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[14:24] So the answer I'm here to find out is like, what the f*** did happen? And also in the process of that, what happened to you?
Speaker 4:
[14:32] Uh, medicine. Anti-depressants. That's what happened to me. Yeah, look, it was a, it's been a real test of my medal as a human being. And I think like our medal is a country in the last 18 months. And those two stories sort of dovetailed pretty nicely.
Speaker 1:
[15:16] So I just got to recap here, because summer of 2022, Alex Jones and the parent company of Infowars, which is conveniently named Free Speech Systems, they had already been found liable for damages, like significant damages because of three defamation lawsuits led by Sandy Hook parents. And just to set the scene here, there are lawsuits in Connecticut, there are lawsuits in Texas where Alex Jones is based, and so these two sets of Sandy Hook families at these two different trial venues, they're bringing litigation stemming from, again, the mass killing of 20 students between six and seven years old, plus six of their educators, plus the shooter himself. This was all 13 and a half years ago in Newtown, Connecticut, Sandy Hook Elementary. But legally speaking, Alex Jones lost those cases.
Speaker 4:
[16:02] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[16:02] Why?
Speaker 4:
[16:04] Because he didn't participate in the cases. He thought he was above it.
Speaker 1:
[16:07] And you were covering the trial for NBC News.
Speaker 4:
[16:09] Yes, I was. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[16:10] We love discovery. We love documentation on this show. How forthcoming is he with the documents that the court is demanding?
Speaker 4:
[16:18] Oh, he doesn't provide anything. Like, literally does not provide anything. But that also backfires, which I'm sure you're going to talk about. There is like this one moment that is... It would be like, if it happened on Law and Order, you'd be like, shut the f*** up.
Speaker 1:
[16:30] One of my favorite moments in the history of jurisprudence. We have Alex Jones on the witness stand. The judge in her black robe is over his shoulder. And he's on trial in Texas. And a lawyer for the Texas families is going to reveal something that is objectively amazing.
Speaker 15:
[16:48] Is that your phone number?
Speaker 16:
[16:50] Yes. So you did get my text messages.
Speaker 7:
[16:55] And it said you did.
Speaker 16:
[16:56] Nice trick.
Speaker 15:
[16:59] Yes, Mr. Jones.
Speaker 17:
[17:01] Indeed. You didn't give this text message to me. You don't know where this came from. Do you know where I got this?
Speaker 3:
[17:07] No.
Speaker 17:
[17:09] Mr. Jones, did you know that 12 days ago, 12 days ago, your attorneys messed up and sent me an entire digital copy of your entire cell phone with every text message you've sent for the past two years and when informed, did not take any steps to identify it as privileged or protect it in any way. And as of two days ago, it fell free and clear into my possession. And that is how I know you lied to me when you said you didn't have to text messages about saying, well, did you know that?
Speaker 3:
[17:42] I told you the truth.
Speaker 2:
[17:43] This is your Perry Mason moment.
Speaker 15:
[17:45] I gave them my phone and then Mr. Jones, you need to answer the question.
Speaker 3:
[17:51] No, I don't know this happens, but I mean, I told you, I gave them the phone over.
Speaker 1:
[17:56] I just want to take a second to applaud the camera panning down to the back of his lawyer's head.
Speaker 4:
[18:02] Everybody, everybody involved cooks.
Speaker 1:
[18:06] It's, I don't even know how that's possible.
Speaker 4:
[18:11] Yeah, I don't either.
Speaker 1:
[18:12] Like I accidentally gave you the opposite of what I should have done. Whoops.
Speaker 4:
[18:18] He has gone through many legal trials and tribulations and no one sought through to just embarrassing him at scale.
Speaker 1:
[18:27] It also just has sort of like the vibe of like a kid who's finally been hauled in front of a principal. Yeah, and in this case, the principal is Texas District Court Judge, Maya Gamble, who treats him like he is misbehaving in class.
Speaker 15:
[18:41] Spit your gum out, Mr. Jones. It's not gum. What is it? Because you're not allowed food or gum of any kind in the courtroom.
Speaker 3:
[18:49] I had my tooth pulled a week and a half ago, and I had some gauze in there earlier, and it's been causing me to have some pain.
Speaker 15:
[18:57] So you're chewing on your gauze?
Speaker 3:
[18:59] Would you like me to show you?
Speaker 15:
[19:00] No, I just want you to answer my question.
Speaker 3:
[19:02] No, I was massaging the hole of my mouth with my tongue.
Speaker 15:
[19:06] I'm here, right here. I don't want to see the inside of your mouth. No, no, don't go. Hole.
Speaker 14:
[19:13] Sit down.
Speaker 4:
[19:15] It's incredible. It's great.
Speaker 1:
[19:18] Ultimately, on the stand in Texas, Alex Jones goes on to admit the thing that he has been seemingly loathed to admit finally, which is that, oh yeah, the whole Sandy Hook shooting, it was, quote, 100 percent real.
Speaker 16:
[19:34] Do you understand now that it was absolutely irresponsible of you to do that?
Speaker 3:
[19:38] It was, especially since I met the parents. And it's 100 percent real, as I said on the radio yesterday, and as I said here yesterday, it's 100 percent real. And the media still ran with lies that I was saying it wasn't real on there yesterday. It's incredible. They won't let me take it back.
Speaker 16:
[19:58] They just want to keep me in the position of being the Sandy Hook man.
Speaker 1:
[20:03] I mean, just the experience of watching him try and save his reputation.
Speaker 4:
[20:08] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[20:09] As a reporter covering the trial at the time, what did it tell you about Alex Jones' capacity to actually handle the truth?
Speaker 4:
[20:15] Well, you have to like bring him to the limit, right, of him realizing like this might actually be it, that he might actually face consequences here. The issue is, though, every mass shooting since then, he has called a false flag. Almost every single one, you know, El Paso, Buffalo. His default statement is, these people who died in this horrific thing are not real, or they are real, but it's being done on behalf of like a government or something like that. And to say that this isn't a big deal, it's not a problem that we have in this country with Gun miles.
Speaker 1:
[20:46] So this Jerry Awards the families $50 million, and that's not even like the big damages trial.
Speaker 4:
[20:53] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[20:53] Fall 2022, in the state of Connecticut, you have the jury form in there. This is the other trial we've been talking about. And he's reading off the damages to plaintiffs.
Speaker 8:
[21:03] Total fair, just and reasonable damages to plaintiff Robert Parker and against Alex Jones and FreeSkip Systems, and Line A and Line B, total of $120 million.
Speaker 1:
[21:16] $120 million, $25 million, $55 million, and on and on and on. And yeah, Alex Jones on his show is like, he's basically saying, yeah, they had me doing the Oprah thing.
Speaker 3:
[21:31] You get a million, you get a hundred million, you get a 50 million.
Speaker 1:
[21:34] But the total damages, it all adds up to about how much, Ben?
Speaker 4:
[21:39] 1.4 billion dollars.
Speaker 1:
[21:41] Which as a historical matter, how do we even begin to contextualize what that is?
Speaker 4:
[21:48] It's far and away the most in any defamation suit of all time. I wanna make it clear, I do remember covering it that day. And he was, you know, almost elated. He literally said, oh, I'm never gonna pay this. It's like, I'm just, you know, I'm never gonna pay this out. This is a guy who's settled everything else he's ever done. He once was sued by Chobani, the yogurt company, for alleging that they brought tuberculosis into the United States through immigrants. They settled. Another guy who he falsely accused of doing the Charlottesville attack, settled. People generally just take, you know, the admission of guilt, the admission that he's making stuff up, the on-air apology in a paltry sum of money and walk away.
Speaker 1:
[22:29] At the time that it was ruled that he owed these families $1.4 billion, how much was Alex Jones worth, allegedly?
Speaker 4:
[22:36] He was worth like, I believe, tens of millions of dollars, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars. But he, you know, he had this recurring stream of income. Like that, the thing, and it has not shut off, it's actually probably gotten bigger over time because he sells people the solution to all of these conspiracy theories, right? Iodized salt from a specific rock in a place is actually the thing that will save you from all of the radiation coming from 5G or whatever. Like there's, he provides you something to be extremely afraid of and an answer.
Speaker 1:
[23:05] And also just like merch is legal response to this is an ancient American response because he does what?
Speaker 4:
[23:15] He files for bankruptcy. Yeah, because he has to, right? He has a lot of money. Like this guy is rich by any definition, but he's not $1.4 billion rich, right? So he has to file for bankruptcy. And what gets fully into that bankruptcy is this thing called free speech systems, which encompasses Infowars and Infowars Life, which is the supplement company. And several thousand domain names including, which we learned after the fact when looking through bank accounts.
Speaker 1:
[23:40] Thousands of domain names?
Speaker 4:
[23:41] Yeah, including one called goblinlove.net.
Speaker 1:
[23:44] I'm just going to go over goblinlove.net right now and see what's happening on goblinlove.net. I'm getting the whole thing of like this site is not a secure connection. And okay, very good. It's probably for the best.
Speaker 4:
[23:54] Yeah. I'm sure he had grand designs for goblinlove.net.
Speaker 1:
[23:59] I should say for the record here that we at Pablo Torre Finds Out are reaching out to attorneys for Alex Jones as well as for the parent company of Infowars. And while they may not immediately respond to our request for comment, we will post an update in the show notes and on social if they do. And in terms of like bankruptcy strategy, the legal sort of dimension of that, I should be very clear that neither of us are bankruptcy lawyers.
Speaker 4:
[24:21] No.
Speaker 1:
[24:22] And so while other sports podcasts have been talking about the Final Four, we ended up speaking to a guy named Chris Maddy.
Speaker 13:
[24:29] Yeah. My name is Chris Maddy. I'm a lawyer in Connecticut. I was lead counsel for the Sandy Hook families who brought a case against Alex Jones and Infowars. Here in Connecticut, lifelong Husky fan, go Huskies.
Speaker 1:
[24:40] And Chris Maddy said that Alex Jones mocking the verdict struck him as just another theatrical performance of sorts, as opposed to, again, something true.
Speaker 13:
[24:51] What it struck me as was a guy who was play acting that he was strong and unbothered by this verdict when inside, I think he was terrified of what this would mean for him and his business. And my biggest hope was that the verdict might puncture this aura that he has around him with many of his followers, where some people who had been misled for so long might have watched the trial, seen all the evidence, and then seen this jury's verdict and thought to themselves, this was bullsh-t all along.
Speaker 1:
[25:27] In basketball, there is the concept of a heat check.
Speaker 4:
[25:29] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[25:30] And it just felt like the Sandy Hook families finally exposed Alex Jones as the thing that he never wanted to be regarded as to his audience, which was just a bullsh-t.
Speaker 4:
[25:41] Yeah. I mean, that sort of felt like in the moment.
Speaker 1:
[25:43] I mean, what this lawyer, what this UConn Huskies' apologist also told us, which is that...
Speaker 4:
[25:50] First of all, disgusting behavior.
Speaker 1:
[25:51] I mean, that's gross. That's gross. But the degree of public confidence that Alex Jones was sort of theatrically performing, according to Chris Maddy, it was far from the only thing that he saw Alex Jones misrepresenting in this case.
Speaker 13:
[26:06] Throughout the case, we knew that Alex Jones was lying about his assets. I mean, that's one of the reasons that he ultimately was defaulted is because he had his people fabricate financial documents and he was concealing crucial information about the way his business worked, which was obviously corrupt, like lie and you get clicks. That was the basic profit model. So we expected to run into some malfeasance post verdict. He sought bankruptcy in a very friendly venue in Texas, and we were assigned to a court that basically allowed him to drag things out, continue to operate his business while benefiting from it. The problem was that our families did not care about money. They've never cared about money. They rejected a deal with Alex Jones that would have paid them a lot of money, and instead wanted to make sure that this verdict was used to basically defang him. And so, the whole bank...
Speaker 1:
[27:07] Again, the vampire thing keeps on coming back.
Speaker 4:
[27:09] Yeah, I mean, he shouldn't have used that word. What is he doing?
Speaker 1:
[27:14] I mean, dare I say that the whole onion thing has been on the nose now.
Speaker 4:
[27:17] Pablo, that's garlic.
Speaker 1:
[27:20] Hold on. Yeah, I'm getting in my ear that it's garlic.
Speaker 4:
[27:24] do not edit that out. Do not let him have that.
Speaker 1:
[27:28] Furiously Googling vampire onion sh**. We gotta fast forward, though, to June 2024, because the families and the lawyer, Chris Maddy, represents them. They agreed to let the court supervise the liquidation of Alex Jones Inc., all of his assets. And the biggest asset in what is now like Storage Wars is, of course, what?
Speaker 4:
[27:53] Oh, it's Infowars.
Speaker 1:
[27:54] So when did you and The Onion come up with the idea to make a bid on it?
Speaker 4:
[27:58] Yeah, so I saw it was for sale. Like they have to market these things. They have to, in bankruptcy court, they have to go market it. And they appeared in like the equivalent of a classified ad somewhere in some awesome newspaper. And that was uploaded, I think, to like Blue Sky or Twitter or something. I was like, this would be funny. The first thing I wanted to do is make sure the families would be okay with us doing a bit on this. Because like, you don't want to go in there and do a bit about stuff like this without people's, you know, permission, like express permission. The other thing that, the big thing that played into our calculus is the money goes to the families. Like if we buy this, it goes to the Sandywick families. And I was like, I'm not sure anybody else is going to bid on it. He might just get it back with money he's laundered through like Roger Stone or something. Which would be unacceptable to most people. And it certainly looked like it was headed that way. So we were like, well, it's either us or nobody.
Speaker 1:
[28:53] But when you say that you took to the families and their reaction was like, huh.
Speaker 4:
[28:58] Yeah, I think it took them a minute. I think they were at first they were like, that thing.
Speaker 1:
[29:04] It's worth characterizing, by the way, the reaction of Chris Maddie, the lawyer for the families, because it was understandable.
Speaker 13:
[29:13] I think the families would have been very happy for somebody to come in and just shudder this thing. On the other hand, they also recognize that there's kind of real value in using a brand and a property that has been for so long used for terrible purposes, and to kind of turn it around a little bit.
Speaker 4:
[29:37] I think a lot of people characterize victims of tragedies like this as like, that's all they are. They are, that's the dad of this dead child or something. They are human beings who like to laugh at stuff and have lives, and this allows them to reclaim their identity in a way that is very nice, right? And also, if you live in America, you almost certainly know someone who has been a victim of gun violence, and that's not all they are. Now, the issue is, nine days before the auction, we are going to have to wait for this thing.
Speaker 18:
[30:12] It is now official. CNN projects that Donald Trump has been elected president, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris, and making a political comeback unlike any.
Speaker 1:
[30:22] Oh, right.
Speaker 4:
[30:23] Remember that?
Speaker 1:
[30:24] November, 2024, to put it in the grand timeline.
Speaker 4:
[30:29] So he wins, and then there's this like eight day window where we're like, okay, we are walking into a burning building when we bid, but we have, and what we have is $1.75 million, in part because our business is doing well, and in part because we have a sponsorship for a launch of it with Everytown, which is the gun safety group. And then we have the backing of the families. Families have helped out by basically, so the Connecticut families don't really care about money very much, the Texas families care about it slightly. They have basically a deferred payment from the Connecticut families to the Texas families built into the claims waiver kind of thing. What that allows that to do is like push the value of our bid up much higher. The federal receiver in charge of the estate for Infowars, he has a fiduciary duty to maximize value. Cash is king. And by maximizing value, we have the highest bid.
Speaker 1:
[31:37] Well, Alex Jones, his shell company, First United American Companies, they had bid $3.5 million and lost because you guys had bid the $1.75 plus what I can only translate into sort of like non-lawyer speak is like this sweetener where the families agreed to forego some of the proceeds to benefit other creditors, which brought the sweetener to a value of like around $7 million.
Speaker 4:
[32:02] Correct.
Speaker 1:
[32:04] But of course, the response from Alex Jones as Infowars is going offline. And again, he can't even broadcast from his famous studio.
Speaker 4:
[32:16] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[32:17] You would describe how.
Speaker 4:
[32:19] He lost his mind.
Speaker 3:
[32:22] Ladies and gentlemen, it is 7.50 right now.
Speaker 2:
[32:25] I'm about to upload this to X.
Speaker 3:
[32:27] I just got word 15 minutes ago that my lawyers and folks met with the US trustee over our bankruptcy this morning. And they said they're shutting us down, even without a court order. This morning, the Connecticut Democrats with The Onion newspaper bought us. They asked, did they outbid? They said, well, it was competitive. So they changed all the bidding rules, made it secret two days ago. I had a bad feeling. I told you that.
Speaker 4:
[32:51] One of the very first things he does is he calls Steve Bannon on the air. And Steve Bannon picks up the phone and goes, what the f*** is happening?
Speaker 19:
[33:00] The Onion is the front group that bought it with backing from other sources. But The Onion is going to turn it into a parody site thinking they can mock us. They're going to make fake news and the vitamin supplements that you sell, Alex and other people sell. They think they're going to be really funny. Let's show how funny it is. Walk in the control room, put the freaking camera up in their face and let's get a name ranking serial number. Imperial troops are going to come in there and think they're going to jackboot what's going on. Let's see the jackboot. Let's see the polish on the jackboot. Let's see the heel of the jackboot. This is nothing but Gestapo.
Speaker 4:
[33:36] Then the receiver goes in and starts like turning stuff off in the studio, which was also weird and we didn't really fully understand the extent of how that was going to take place.
Speaker 3:
[33:46] They're turning off the Internet, they're turning everything off here, and so that's in process right now. Infowars has turned off, Bandot Video has turned off. And so there is a very good chance that we will be back here in the next few days as soon as the judge has an emergency hearing. And this will, this is what I believe is injustice and wrong will be upended.
Speaker 4:
[34:11] A thing that I didn't fully understand until midway through the day is that he had never heard of The Onion until it bought Infowars. He just never didn't even like the concept of it was completely foreign to him. So we that was a fun thing to deal with. And then over the course of the day, like, you know, the local like the Fox News started a trip because like it was so out of the field, the news didn't really know how to handle it. Fox News said we had 4.3 trillion daily readers, which is on our website somewhere, but I don't even know where it's not even on the about section. I don't know where they found that. We had done a hostile takeover of the news for a day and it was great, except this really, really made Alex very, very upset. So we realized that he was simply not going to give up on this thing.
Speaker 1:
[35:00] Yeah, and spoiler alert, less than a month later, a judge rejects your winning bid, rejects the entire auction that took place. And Alex Jones takes to his microphone again.
Speaker 3:
[35:13] This is a fight all the way to the end. And I've told Trump and I've told his advisors, they're the bad guys. And so I like our odds. Just taking the gloves off.
Speaker 1:
[35:40] Can you describe what it's like to face Alex Jones with the gloves off?
Speaker 4:
[35:45] Oh, it sucks, brother. It's not good. They had made a bunch of threats toward me and like The Onion in general over that month, that they were gonna come after us for, you know, thought crime, whatever. I don't know exactly what the charges were.
Speaker 1:
[36:02] For silencing him. For taking his free speech.
Speaker 4:
[36:05] Yes, for taking his free speech. For basically enacting a judgment, several judgments against him by bidding on the company. And a lot of people ask me like, you know, the judge, for example, is like, why wouldn't this sell for more? Why wouldn't this go for more?
Speaker 1:
[36:20] Yeah, I gotta admit, like, that's a pretty good price.
Speaker 4:
[36:22] Yeah, right? And it's because you're not buying Infowars. You're buying Alex Jones' personal harassment campaign for the rest of your life. You are inheriting this thing. You're taking on all of this bullsh** forever. Like, we were just talking about strength and how he views strength.
Speaker 1:
[36:40] Yeah, shirtless on a horse.
Speaker 4:
[36:42] And what I've realized over the last 18 months is strength is actually sticking through to what you believe and what is the right thing to do for people who would otherwise just abandon it. It's not about showing up on a horse and taking big pills until your voice sounds like there's no more here. That's not what it is. Or bombing the out of countries and yelling at people about it. Or, you know, sending your mass goons into cities and beating the out of women and shooting them in the face. That's not strength. That's actually like the opposite. That's insecurity. Strength is knowing that you're going to walk into a bunch of people saying insane about you and keep walking. I just think, Pablo, there is a moment in your life where you see a bunch of evil sh** happening and you have a chance to stop something that is particularly egregious. And if you walk away from it, I just don't know why you're alive. You know? And I decided, with the help of everybody in my life and family, that I just wasn't going to drop this. And I just didn't want to make it. So our most grievous sin as a country, which is mass shootings of kids in school, where financializing that and getting away with it is fine. If we can't draw a line there, then there is no line anymore. You can just do whatever you want. Whatever evil sh** you want and make as much money you want. Friends of mine were like, wasn't it cool that time you like, you know, you hip jacked Alex Jones and like, and I was like, no dude, we're still going for it. And they were like, yeah, that's cute, Ben. It's nice that you're doing that. Everyone had just given up on the premise. And I wasn't going to give up on these families. I just didn't want to do it.
Speaker 1:
[38:48] Except the problem was that bankruptcy court doesn't exactly make doing the right thing easy. And I will spare you the full TikTok of what happened here. But all you really got to know is that shutting up Alex Jones for good, because of Sandy Hook, ultimately hinged on a legal character known as the court-appointed receiver. And the court-appointed receiver's job was to sell, at auction, a whole bunch of stuff belonging to a bankrupt Alex Jones. Kinda like, you know, Storage Wars. He has the actual passwords to infowars.com. He's also the guy, relatedly, who sued Alex Jones in June of 2025 for things which included, allegedly, selling part of his ranch to his dad for $10, gifting his dad three luxury cars, and then apparently forgetting which cars they even were. Also making up a prenuptial agreement payment to his wife, and other, quote, sham transactions concocted to frustrate the collection efforts, end quote. And this is the dude, who, in so many words, seemed like he was all good with The Onion and your bid. Yeah. And then what happened?
Speaker 4:
[40:00] I think he got spooked.
Speaker 1:
[40:03] As did the gum-hating judge that we mentioned before, who rejected The Onion's winning bid back in late 2024, only to have something of a change of heart in August of last year.
Speaker 3:
[40:15] I guess it's hit the news. The Hill judge clears the way for The Onion to revive the bid for Alex Jones' Infowars. So here we go again.
Speaker 1:
[40:24] But more than anything else, Ben Collins needed the court-appointed receiver to rule in his favor, or at least allow The Onion to lease the keys to Infowars for that $75,000 a month. And what that receiver realized, apparently, is that he did not want Alex Jones to do to him what he had done to all of his targets, including the Sandy Hook families who are still struggling to collect those $1.4 billion in damages. He realized that Alex Jones was going to talk about him all the time on Infowars and make his life hell. In fact, Alex Jones was so committed to information warfare and to fighting that $1.4 billion judgment that he tried to take his case all the way to the Supreme Court, filing an 84-page application, which ultimately failed.
Speaker 4:
[41:24] First of all, he called The Onion his ideological enemy and that we shouldn't be allowed to take over because of that, which I don't think is how courts work, but I just, you know, that's just me.
Speaker 1:
[41:36] But around that same time, last September, something remarkable happened. Donald Trump's Department of Justice entered the fray. The director of Trump's weaponization working group, a guy named Eagle Ed Martin, who is also the Associate Deputy Attorney General and the United States Pardon Attorney, as previously discussed on this show, sent a threatening letter to Chris Maddie, the UConn fan and attorney for the Sandy Hook families. And in that letter, Martin questions the credibility and financial motives of one of the first responders at the shooting, an FBI agent. And he says, quote, as you may know, there are criminal laws protecting the citizens from actions by government employees who may be acting for personal benefit. I encourage you to review those, end quote.
Speaker 4:
[42:31] Yeah, it's like active sandio of truth orism coming from the letterhead of the United States government.
Speaker 1:
[42:37] Alex Jones, naturally, obtained and then published this letter on infowars.com, and he tweeted it out alongside a photo of himself standing next to a smiling Ed Martin.
Speaker 3:
[42:50] So yesterday, I talked to Ed Martin, the head strike force lawyer with billions of dollars under him and thousands of people at his disposal. And we talked about 45 minutes, and most of what he told me, he said was to be on the record. Only a few things weren't. And a lot of this was exclusive information because I've known Ed for really 24, 25 years. I don't know about his background, he's been like hardcore anti-globalist for 40 years. I mean, so he's been doing it longer than I have.
Speaker 1:
[43:24] But what this whole multimedia effort told the recipient, Chris Maddie, was something else about Alex Jones?
Speaker 13:
[43:34] He was getting very, very worried that he was getting to the end. He was trying to come up with some way to throw off the process that is going to result in the closure of Infowars. And he tells Ed Martin, hey, and by the way, I don't have first-hand knowledge of this, but it's pretty easy to read these tea leaves, that one thing we might be able to do here is to suggest that this whole litigation is somehow under investigation by the Justice Department. Thankfully, somebody at the Justice Department, I believe Todd Blanch, shut it down. But one thing that it made me think about is how many people have gotten letters like this, who don't have counsel, who haven't done anything wrong, and with the Justice Department just being used as a form of Bush League intimidation, which is what this kind of was.
Speaker 1:
[44:29] Todd Blanch, by the way, the new Acting Attorney General, seemed to have at the very least the political wherewithal to think to himself, maybe we shouldn't want to be head to head against this Hindihook families by accusing the FBI agent who was trying to help them.
Speaker 4:
[44:45] And this is the Glane Maxwell guy, by the way.
Speaker 1:
[44:48] But again, it's like, where is the line? Is the story of our time? What's going to be the point beyond which you cannot return? They looked right over into that canyon and then drew themselves back at the last second.
Speaker 4:
[45:02] Yeah. And I think part of why I've been living with this feeling like I'm falling out of an airplane for 18 months is I am with them at the canyon. And this was the last line of defense. We had to do it because literally no one else was going to do it. The good news is two things happened. One, the newspaper went bananas in this time frame. So we relaunched it in August of 2024. Since then, we've become, I believe we are the fifth largest newspaper in the United States right now, which is insane. We have over 70,000 subscribers. So that was just cooking as this was happening. So that was really helpful. And also, it gave us some time to figure out what to do with this asset, right? Because initially, we were going to put some of our favorite old Onion writers in charge of it and just do a bunch of scams. Like, send us $100 and we'll send you your grandson $20. That was the kind of thing that we were going to put on the front page, which I think we still might do, by the way. And then we were like, well, is that really doing this justice? Could we do something much bigger and better? So the good news is over the last 18 months, and the bad news for Alex and everybody else involved in the other side is it gave us a lot of time to think about what this could be and make some phone calls. And then a couple weeks ago, Alex Jones shows up on Tim Pool's show and they say that he smells like alcohol. And he says, they're shutting down Infowars next month.
Speaker 3:
[46:33] I'm ready, but don't follow me. We're all shows on X, infowars.com. We're getting, we're getting shut down. We've, we beat so many attacks. And, but finally we're shutting down with the middle of next month.
Speaker 18:
[46:46] Wow.
Speaker 3:
[46:46] It's going to be the same what happens people can, you know.
Speaker 18:
[46:49] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[46:50] The fake receiverships, the fake auctions, all of it is happening right now.
Speaker 4:
[46:53] The picture of sobriety.
Speaker 1:
[46:54] I was going to say, I don't have blood tests, but I can smell him from here.
Speaker 4:
[47:02] Yeah. So I called my lawyer or bankruptcy lawyer who we've had this whole time. And I was like, I know he says this like once a month, but again, he says that they're shutting down Infowars next month. So what's the deal? So he called the receiver and he was like, yeah, we're shutting it down. Like the receiver said, we don't have enough money to pay rent on this $75,000. Right. Exactly. Let alone pay for utilities and internet and the staff. So we can't keep the asset moving. And we were like, well, this receiver has two responsibilities, right? Do what the families want with this asset. That's one, which currently they want to sell it to hopefully us. I'm hoping. But like, they want to sell it for value to someone they entrust is not in Alex Jones' orbit. And in order to do that, they have to keep the value of the asset up. That is the receiver's job is to keep the value of the asset going. That's why he's still in the air.
Speaker 1:
[47:57] The rub is, yeah, you can you can sell this to Alex Jones' ideological enemy, but they got to figure out a way to make money with it.
Speaker 4:
[48:06] Yeah, exactly. So we called the receiver and said, well, it has considerably less value to us as a dead property. We'll pay to take it over. And I could almost guarantee you with the plans that we have, like it will increase its value over, you know, the boner company that it currently runs. And by the way, and you know, this is not part of the deal, but the whole time, we're giving a cut of merch sales to the families. We want them to be able to get paid for real at some point with actual human dollars as part of this process. So we've come to an agreement with the receiver that we get to take over this asset pretty much immediately in a couple of days.
Speaker 1:
[48:53] Wow.
Speaker 4:
[48:53] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[48:54] Wait, so just to be clear then, the actual big exclusive announcement here is that The Onion has finally acquired Infowars.
Speaker 4:
[49:03] Yes. Yes, we have. We've taken over the Infowars studio and the IP and the website and all that stuff, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[49:12] You guys hiring?
Speaker 4:
[49:14] Yeah. So part of the thing we did in the background is like, we were like, no matter if we get this thing or not, we need to go after this kind of like, you know, ecosystem of like, slopfluencers. So we started hiring in the background. And the very first person we hired is a guy who reached out maybe like 20 minutes after the first announcement. And that's Tim Heidecker from Tim and Eric and Adult Swim Days and Office Hours. And he's currently on tour.
Speaker 1:
[49:42] That's incredible.
Speaker 4:
[49:43] Yeah, he's an incredible fit. And we didn't know this until one phone call, but he does a great Alex Jones impression.
Speaker 2:
[49:48] I set up a website and you can look at it right now because I've got a liquidate and I've got a lot of DVDs. And these are items that I've had for 20 years. These are great DVDs. Tire of Monty Python's Flying Circus. OK, now that's seven DVDs. And you can get that for $99 right now. And that's going to help pay for our legal bills. We're going to be able to keep the doors open.
Speaker 4:
[50:07] A big part of what we've seen over the last couple of years is all of the good comedians that you and I know and love, all of the good pipelines for good comedy writers kind of got killed by a series of things, like the writer strike, the fires, the pandemic. And by the time they all came back, all their jobs were replaced by shows about oil with like, they have like five racial slurs in them for some reason. And they're like, shit, where is the apex mountain for what a comedy job is?
Speaker 1:
[50:41] Are you saying you're not hiring Jerry Jones to do it again?
Speaker 4:
[50:45] He is involved, but sometimes as you know, Wyatt doesn't get great Wi-Fi, so that's kind of the issue.
Speaker 1:
[50:51] But I just love, hold on, but what you're saying is that you have made a series of bets on print newspapers and now comedy at the time at which both of these industries have of course been otherwise deeply, deeply destroyed.
Speaker 4:
[51:08] Yeah, I like a zag. We also had this woman named Mia Di Pasquale who was in charge at, you know, Nathan For You. She was in charge of duping all those companies into participating in that show. And all of them have deep Rolodexes. My favorite thing about Tim is that he just loves bringing up younger comics and giving them more space to do stuff. And we're gonna give them space and we're gonna give them the ability to grow into a much bigger thing. In what better way, right? Like build on the rubble of all this awful stuff. We're all gonna have to do this, brother. Like we have, like there is just rubble now. And for example, what you've built is, like you've built this mansion on top of this rubble because you correctly identified it as rubble. We're trying to do the same. And the people we've hired for this, I could not possibly be more confident it's gonna be a big deal.
Speaker 1:
[51:57] Which is all to say that at some point, you, Ben Collins, head of The Onion, CEO of Global Tetrahedron, is going to get the keys to that studio. And you're gonna get to walk in to Alex Jones' headquarters and do whatever you want with it.
Speaker 4:
[52:17] Yeah. And these families, too. You know, I'm hoping we get access to the actual facility, and it's not like booby-trapped or whatever. But like, they can go in there whenever they want. And, you know, put their feet up if they want. And that is important to me. And hopefully to them, that they get to be able to do that and feel like, you know, what happened to them won't happen to anybody else.
Speaker 1:
[52:41] Ben Collins, thank you for coming on the show. And if I find that there is a Filipino-looking sports podcaster on your new podcast network, I will sue your ass.
Speaker 4:
[52:55] Well, look, first of all, even our fake version of you will understand that vampires don't like garlic and not f***ing onions.
Speaker 9:
[53:04] Right.
Speaker 4:
[53:06] I swear to God, if you guys f***ing got that thing.
Speaker 1:
[53:07] We're gonna cut every part of it. This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.