I interviewed Alex Jones' lawyer, and it was wild...
The road to hell is paved with good intentions...
This article was originally published on 12/18/2020 for my informal email list. I’m re-posting some of my earlier newsletters here as a gradual process to shift to Substack.
I wasn’t messing around when I wrote a few weeks ago that we have to go beyond our ideological bubbles and seek out ideas that make our existing knowledge framework uncomfortable. Yesterday my interview with Robert Barnes was released. He’s the lawyer for Alex Jones, the Covington kids, Ralph Nader… and he was recently invited by President Trump to help challenge the election results. Yes, Barnes is part of Trump’s core legal team crafting strategies and was just in Georgia negotiating with its Sec. of State about ballot audits.
Please don’t be turned off by words like “Alex Jones” or “election frauds.” The interview has no pandering; every question was posed to challenge him to explain more. Our team and I did extensive preparation to make sure we’ve collected enough facts about the election lawsuits to ask him about. You may disagree with what Barnes says, but I do think this might be one of the most eye-opening and wildest interviews I’ve ever done. The dude showed up with a cigar in his mouth and drank beer; we said the interview was gonna be 1 hour but ended up talking for 2.5 hours straight...
I always resist recommending people to listen to my podcasts in full, but I think this 2.5 hours is worth it. If you don’t have the time, here are some highlights with timestamps that you can jump to:
Alex Jones made some good predictions? (~28:00)
How do you justify Alex Jones denying Sandy Hook and talking about Hillary running a pedophile ring? Barnes’s response is:
Jones also got a lot of stuff right – like the absence of weapons of mass destruction, US going to wars without proper reasoning, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Bohemian Grove, Biden’s cognitive decline, Russiagate… So he in fact adds a lot of good information.
Authorities and legacy media have screwed up a lot as well – most recently on Covid and before on WMD along with other issues – but nobody’s questioning that CNN should be de-platformed.
The public square should make the decision; not some government big brother or big tech, because then the line gets blurry.
He explains the legal details of Section 230, and why incorporating First Amendment into tech companies’ terms & services will do away 90% of the debates we have today.
How can you prove they came after Alex Jones? (~58:00)
Barnes says that “the institutions” came after Jones. What does that mean? How can one actually prove there are systematically organized and coordinated forces that have ulterior motives?! For instance, sure I may agree that NYTimes is in their own bubble and they may be narrative-driven journalism (as explained by our interview with Axios CEO Jim VandeHei), but I don’t see solid evidence of how they’re secretly plotting how to destroy political discourse in this country or intentionally bringing down Alex Jones.
Barnes responded that there doesn’t have to be a centrally planned plot or core group of actors for collective action to happen. No, Soros didn’t get into the same room with Zuckerberg to decide that Jones has to go down. However, the current culture environment has subconsciously shaped those who work at these big institutions (NYTimes, FB, CNN, Goldman Sachs, etc.) in such a profound way, such that they all share the same worldview that Jones is a threat to society that needs to be weeded out.
In other words, even low-level employees at these organizations can collectively suppress certain ideas with good intentions after bathing in their bubbles and being disconnected from the rest of America for so long.
Famous podcast host Eric Weinstein devised this term “GIN” (Gated Institution Narratives) to describe how institutions control and suppress ideas. I’ve followed Weinstein’s podcast for a long time but never quite understood what this term means. Barnes’s explanation in the podcast is much more nuanced, and I highly recommend you to listen to this part in particular.
Cognitive upper- and under-class (~71:00)
I think Barnes brought up a profound point here. America is so polarized between two classes of people: one is the college-educated, rational, well-mannered class of elites who work in big media, business, and political institutions; vs. the vast majority of Americans who are seen by the elites as not progressive enough, as backwards, as the deplorable, who happen to consider Jones (or Rush Limbaugh, Trump, or even Bernie for the disenfranchised Leftists) as their true representatives.
This is not just a socio-economic division, but also a cognitive one, where one sees the other group as so morally corrupt or fundamentally ignorant that any engagement is meaningless.This is perhaps epitomized by the cultural discourse during the recent BLM movement, for example, or on matters like climate change.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” says Barnes. You may truly believe that what you’re doing is morally just and that the other side is wrong, and because a large group of people all share such beliefs with you (since you've had similar education backgrounds, information sources, social circles), you can collectively, inadvertently suppress ideas and cause injustices.
We all really believe that Alex Jones is morally corrupt and we all believe we’re doing the morally just thing by de-platforming him. But are we doing the right thing?
The tide is turning, and we need to wake the f*ck up
People around me have always unanimously hated Alex Jones, until recently. The tide seems to be turning. More are talking about how Alex Jones did get some stuff right and we need a voice like him in the social discourse, likely because people’s faith in authorities has been utterly eroded over the past year with Covid, BLM, Epstein, the elections, and more.
This past week, Trump tweeted that Fox News is fake news after the network no longer seems to fully support his election lawsuits. Fox News’ ratings subsequently plummeted. How crazy will the media landscape be, when millions of Americans tune into One America News (OAN) and Newsmax and believe that Fox News is “liberal fake news”?!
The point of me presenting you all this is not at all trying to convince you that Barnes is right. You don’t have to believe in his ideas. I do, however, think it’s worth knowing that tens of millions of Americans do share his views. The point of Policy Punchline, at the core, is to try to show you that the lived experiences and values for these tens of millions of Americans should not be debased below ours. That seems to be the direction we’ve been headed for a while, and we really should treat this urgent problem seriously.
The tide is turning, and I don’t feel good about any of this…
(The interview is so dense; there’s more on election lawsuits that I’ll write about later).