Western Standard - December 11, 2023


Piers Morgan says Alex Jones' return to X makes him "want to puke"


Episode Stats

Length

5 minutes

Words per Minute

168.9976

Word Count

1,011

Sentence Count

74

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

3


Summary

Alex Jones is a conspiracy theorist and shock jock in America who made hundreds of millions of dollars by peddling outrageous lies at the Sandy Hook school massacre, claiming it was a hoax. Alex Jones was ordered to pay record damages, more than a billion dollars in total, yet, of course, he declared himself bankrupt to avoid paying a penny.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Well, I'm a passionate defender of free speech.
00:00:03.280 There's a massive clue in the name of this show, Uncensored.
00:00:06.320 And I believe in it.
00:00:07.220 I believe that all honestly held opinions,
00:00:09.360 however offensive they are, belong in the open,
00:00:11.740 where they can be challenged, debated and exposed.
00:00:14.620 But there are limits on free speech.
00:00:16.560 There are laws and there is a line.
00:00:19.280 I've always said that Alex Jones is a perfect example
00:00:21.640 of where that line got crossed.
00:00:24.320 He's a conspiracy theorist and shock jock in America
00:00:27.120 who made hundreds of millions of dollars
00:00:29.620 by peddling outrageous lies
00:00:31.880 at the Sandy Hook school massacre shooting was a hoax.
00:00:36.180 For the uninitiated, this is him shouting at me
00:00:39.140 a week after that massacre on CNN.
00:00:41.680 The tyrants did it.
00:00:43.160 Hitler took the guns.
00:00:44.340 Stalin took the guns.
00:00:45.700 Mao took the guns.
00:00:46.800 Fidel Castro took the guns.
00:00:48.340 Hugo Chavez took the guns.
00:00:49.460 And I'm here to tell you, 1776 will commence again
00:00:53.260 if you try to take our firearms.
00:00:54.880 It doesn't matter how many lemmings you get out there on the street
00:00:57.500 begging for them to have their guns taken.
00:00:59.520 We will not relinquish them.
00:01:01.100 Do you understand?
00:01:02.860 He kind of won that debate, actually,
00:01:05.140 because the only response in America
00:01:07.540 to the Sandy Hook massacre was to do nothing.
00:01:10.400 In fact, they continued to sell a lot more guns.
00:01:13.480 A million new guns get sold in America every month.
00:01:16.620 And there are already over 400 million in circulation.
00:01:19.120 If you're wondering, if you're curious
00:01:20.780 why there are so many more mass shootings in America
00:01:23.420 than they used to be, that's why.
00:01:25.680 And if you're wondering what's going to happen
00:01:27.020 in the next few years
00:01:28.860 as a million new guns enter circulation
00:01:31.360 and nothing gets done to stop mass shootings,
00:01:34.880 my guess is there will be a lot more mass shootings.
00:01:37.660 I've covered a lot of them,
00:01:39.680 especially when I was at CNN in America.
00:01:42.080 Very few of them, in fact, none of them, actually,
00:01:45.200 were a soul-crushing Sandy Hook.
00:01:47.480 Twenty children, aged between six and seven,
00:01:50.760 were murdered by a mass killer
00:01:52.120 with a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle.
00:01:55.640 Alex Jones's reaction to this absolute appalling atrocity
00:01:59.080 was to tell his followers on his InfoWars show
00:02:02.280 it was all a government hoax
00:02:04.020 set up by the Obama administration,
00:02:06.260 a deep state plot to justify new gun laws
00:02:09.400 that would take away their guns.
00:02:11.340 He said the grieving families were all crisis actors.
00:02:15.020 Sandy Hook, it's got Inside Job written all over it.
00:02:20.460 Sandy Hook is a synthetic, completely fake,
00:02:24.880 with actors, in my view, manufactured.
00:02:27.940 I couldn't believe it at first.
00:02:29.620 People just instinctively know
00:02:31.660 that there's a lot of fraud going on.
00:02:34.900 But it took me about a year with Sandy Hook
00:02:37.060 to come to grips with the fact
00:02:38.740 that the whole thing was fake.
00:02:41.020 Well, as a direct result of his lies,
00:02:43.120 those grieving families were harassed
00:02:45.100 and threatened with death by his followers.
00:02:48.400 Erica Lafferty, daughter of the murder principal,
00:02:50.740 Dawn Hoxsprung, got death and rape threats
00:02:53.680 from people who said her mother was fictional.
00:02:56.100 Robbie Parker, who lost his daughter Emily,
00:02:58.400 was chased down the street by a Jones supporter,
00:03:00.280 asking him how much he'd earned
00:03:01.600 by lying about the death of his daughter.
00:03:04.780 Mark Barden, father of seven-year-old victim,
00:03:06.820 Daniel Barden, says that one of Jones' followers
00:03:09.400 urinated on his dead son's grave.
00:03:12.960 Some of these families have successfully sued him now
00:03:15.300 for defamation, which is explicitly not protected
00:03:18.160 by America's First Amendment.
00:03:20.400 Jones was ordered to pay record damages,
00:03:22.360 more than a billion dollars in total.
00:03:24.540 He's yet, of course, to pay a penny.
00:03:27.220 He actually declared himself bankrupt to avoid doing so.
00:03:30.360 Nevertheless, Elon Musk has inexplicably decided
00:03:33.540 it's time to restore Alex Jones to X, formerly Twitter.
00:03:37.700 I'm a big supporter, generally, of Elon Musk.
00:03:40.560 I think the work he's doing to eradicate bias
00:03:42.440 and protect free speech in the place
00:03:44.240 where so many debates now originate
00:03:46.160 is an important, very important one.
00:03:48.840 But this was a profoundly disappointing and wrong decision.
00:03:52.720 I'd like to remind Elon what he said
00:03:54.460 about reinstating Alex Jones when he first took over.
00:03:57.440 He said this.
00:03:58.920 He said he wouldn't restore him and said,
00:04:00.300 My first-born child died in my arms.
00:04:02.720 I felt his last heartbeat.
00:04:04.620 I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children
00:04:07.460 for gain, politics or fame.
00:04:10.440 Well, that is precisely what Alex Jones did.
00:04:13.560 He literally used dead children for gain, fame and politics.
00:04:19.920 So what's changed in a year, Elon?
00:04:22.400 Well, there's now a big movement
00:04:23.680 to rehabilitate Alex Jones online.
00:04:26.200 Many argue he's right more often than he's wrong,
00:04:28.500 when all the evidence points to the complete opposite.
00:04:31.840 And in the case of Sandy Hook,
00:04:33.740 it wasn't just one little mistake that he owned up to.
00:04:37.420 Andrew Tate tweeted,
00:04:38.500 Alex Jones is an effing hero.
00:04:40.920 Really?
00:04:42.060 He's not my kind of hero.
00:04:44.120 He's the opposite of a hero.
00:04:46.120 This is a man who repeatedly and deliberately lied
00:04:49.720 about the mass shooting of children at school
00:04:52.440 to enrich himself.
00:04:53.860 He called it all as phony as a $3 bill.
00:04:58.320 And yet that's what he is.
00:05:00.440 Yes, he's now apologised,
00:05:01.860 but he did that under legal duress
00:05:03.320 because his business was about to go to the wall.
00:05:06.200 This wasn't only something he blurted out once
00:05:07.960 and instantly regretted.
00:05:09.480 He did this for years.
00:05:11.700 And every time he lied about Sandy Hook,
00:05:14.100 he made more money.
00:05:15.100 Night after night, day after day, week after week,
00:05:19.960 month after month, year after year.
00:05:23.380 And he knew what was going on to these families
00:05:26.720 as a result of his harassment on air.
00:05:30.560 To see him back on X selling his book,
00:05:32.800 his merchandise, his website, his info wars,
00:05:36.260 frankly, makes me want to puke.
00:05:38.100 Every opinion should be heard,
00:05:41.180 but inciting harassment and violence
00:05:43.380 to profit from unspeakable grief,
00:05:46.460 to pour into the wounds of those families
00:05:50.080 yet more misery and pain.
00:05:52.640 That's not free speech.
00:05:55.060 It's deliberate hate speech.
00:05:57.860 And it's disgusting.
00:05:58.840 It's disgusting.