Having listened to 800+ episodes, my impression of Alex Jones is that he’s equal parts reactionary right winger and moneymaking huckster. He generally skims headlines and makes up a take that’s compatible with his “the globalists are out to get us” stuff, most of which is based in white grievance identity politics.

Take this for what it’s worth. I’m a socialist. But it’s worth listening to an episode or two of the podcast to get a glimpse of Alex’s typical stuff. Most people who have an impression of Alex as a truth teller haven’t spent a lot of time with his show.

Listen to Knowledge Fight. It will disabuse you of a lot of the image that Alex Jones has as a “truth teller.”

Wish my wife had felt this way.

Yeah dude the grind to try and get a tenure track job is soul-crushing. I put out over 1000 applications over the course of four years. I had about 15 interviews, 2 second round interviews, and at the end, no job. I can get adjunct work fairly easily, but it comes with no health insurance or stability, and it’s paid pretty badly. The adjunctification of higher ed has meant that a lot of otherwise good people have no future in academia, me being one of them. It sucks because I worked for fifteen years studying, teaching, and publishing on very some absolutely esoteric shit, and ended up with less job security and benefits than a Walmart employee. It took a lot of therapy, because this is the one thing I wanted to do with my life. But I know now that it’s time to move on, and that I can do good somewhere else if I get the right skills.

I’m an endlessly adjuncting philosophy professor. Going back to law school in the fall at age 38.

Here in Seattle the cops don’t fly an American flag outside their union headquarters, only the “thin blue line” flag. In their salary negotiations they sacrificed a week of back pay so their back pay could start on 1/6/2021 (the date of the Capitol insurrection) instead of the end of their last contract. Dozens of our police here in Washington participated in the insurrection. They were under a consent decree for civil rights violations for a decade. When a cop recently ran over a college student while going 74 mph in a 25, the vice president of the police union was caught on camera laughing with the police union president and saying “she was 26 anyway, she had limited value.” Police here have a dismal crime clearance rate, often don’t respond at all to property crimes, or take forever. During the protests in 2020, they were absolutely savage with protestors.

I have no empathy for the police, here in America at least. They are an occupying, militarized force that has zero accountability to the people. Maybe if they started treating citizens like human beings, and holding themselves to a higher standard, I would.

Bobby, if these kids could understand volcanic geology, they’d be very upset right now.

This has never happened to me because my opinions are 100% conventional.

I was in a fourth floor walk up. It was fine until in one year I broke my foot and my dog’s back was paralyzed. Going up four flights of stairs on crutches sure sucked, as did carrying a 50lb dog up and down three times a day.

Sounds like you’re making money by working hard, which is a silly way to try to make a lot of money in a capitalist system. The hint is in the name, my friend: it’s not called “workism”.

If only we lived in an economy where your hard work was proportional to your income!

The states that rely on sales taxes for most of their income are the most likely to tax the poor the most, since the poor spend more of their income.

Always felt like an increasing rush of wind to me. Like falling faster and faster.

I dunno, lil onion, we’re not off to a great start.