A unofficial subreddit dedicated to the podcast run by Dan and Jordan: Knowledge Fight. Coverage and discussion of each episode and the content therein as filtered through the episode. Please keep all content topical to Knowledge Fight podcast episodes. We cannot become a catch all for all things conspiracy as there are other subreddits for that.
If he wasnt such a narcissist dick... in an alternative universe alex would interview musicians. I loved how star struck he was, as would I. Like alex i grew up on nelson cash, Kristofferson and Jennings. Their music was the soundtrack to my adolescents.
It pained me to hear that nelson is a,bit of a weirdo but at anywhere between 60 and 600 years old one can be forgiven for being weird.
It was an interesting episode.
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it strikes me as so weird that Alex labels these guys his heroes but absorbed exactly zero of their outlook. Kris was outspoken about his feelings about Latin America. Johnny Cash may have straight up punched Alex in real life. I wonder how Alex confronts that, if he does at all.
this reminds me of all these people who seem to suddenly be realizing that Rage Against the Machine are "political".
There is probably nothing I want more than for that to have been a thing that actually happened.
Johnny Cash-me Outside
That's really weird to me because I loved them as a teenager specifically because they were political and now I think they're practically centrists which is kinda silly for an "alternative" band to be bragging about
Willie has always been a bit of a weirdo, but he's never been a bigot. I don't know if he really listened to Alex Jones or if that's just the sort of thing you say when you're doing promotional radio interviews. What I do know is that he's campaigned for a number of really good political candidates and causes over the decades, like just recently rereleasing a version of Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other with the extremely talented and also very weird Orville Peck, so I'm not going to write him off for having some dumb conspiracy theory ideas.
There were a lot of left wing conspiracy theorists especially in iraq war times, but "conspiracy theory" as a whole has extreme right wing roots. OG conspiracy theories were things like the Protocols. Father Coughlin was another OG, rabid antisemite. Birchers and None Dare Call It Conspiracy, everything was Jews and Communism. Things like JFK assassination theories, UFO coverup theories, and most of all Iraq War theories, were more bipartisan -- and there's definitely some affinity between the left's "the Capitalists control everything and manufacture consent" and conspiracy theory in general... but the far right weirdos got there first and they kind of own the territory. And they've very much dominated in the last few years.
yep and i would add election fraud stuff. Like the other things, there's a grain of truth, and left wingers would legitimately be interested, but the right wing conspiracy theorists exploited it in a dishonest way. Knowledge Fight recently covered an interview with Bev Harris, who after the 2004 election suckered a lot of left wingers about voting issues.
I love the term for left-wing conspiracy theorists: moonbats.
I generally have the position that anyone who lived through Kennedy and saw two dudes shot on live TV has a pretty good reason to be a mega weirdo and I have some sympathy for them.
There is nothing wrong with having weird ideas. Once upon a time you could be quirky and weird and have strange ideas. It seems only recently that somehow politics and ideology has been grafted into the conspiracy world.
Willie nelson doesn't want to exterminate people. I had to type that out just now.
That is his saving grace. He can have quirky weird ideas, but he wants us to live in peace and buy his records. Which is fine.
You said it better than my earlier attempt: I didn't hear any hatred, racism, or xenophobia from Willie. Just some weirdo ideas that seem harmless to me. It's the modern trend of conspiracy theories becoming mainstream political slogans pushed by social media that bothers me. Willie sounds like a gentle soul who is suspicious of government and wasn't ready to discount the Mayan calendar.
Politics have always been at the heart of the Conspiracy World. The change is that the surface of the Onion is now political.
Pick a random conspiracy theory from back in the day, and you can drill down to find how The Jews are responsible (and are sometimes lizards).
I was very disappointed when I found that out. Pretty much ruined exploring theories for fun. And the real conspiracies are just straight infuriating or scary
I'm not sure if it's about the political, so much as about power. Even if your complaint is why hot dogs come in packages of 10, but buns come in packages of 8, it's still about power. Once you've established that it's about power, the next move it to make it about politics. After you've established that it's about politics, someone is going to make it about the Jews.
"Why does big hot dog want you to make at least 40 hot dogs without creating waste? Are they in it with the hot dog vendors? You know a lot of hot dog vendors are Jews, right? Who do you think Hebrew National is selling to? Really makes you think, huh?"
Most people aren't going to jump all the way to those conclusions. They are just going to be annoyed that they have 2 extra wieners.
The first one I can remember hearing about was my dad talking about the Pogue carburetor --you know, the one where some guy made a carburetor that gets 100 MPG, but the gas companies bought the patent to suppress it. Never mind that it was from the 1930s and that patent would have expired a long time ago and they could just release it themselves and lower gas production to keep their profits up. Still, it's about power and what THEY will do with that power. Meanwhile, none of that has anything to do with Jewish people. It's just the little guy wondering why he can't have a cab that gets him 100 MPG, but there is going to be someone out there who is going to link it all to BlackRock's Jewish CEO.
I worked at my family's service station growing up in the 80s and can't count the number of times I heard the magic carburetor story or compressed air or the engine that runs on water. I gave up trying to have a rational argument about it because these shadetree mechanics couldn't resist the idea of one of their own inventing revolutionary technology but being silenced by big companies and government.
With Willie, the good far outweighs the bad. I wonder if Willie would come on a second time after all the nonsense of 2020. Willie was part of the Biden campaign, then. It's possible Alex might have moved on too.
I mean, he's a pretty terrible interviewer. I think he'd do okay as a disc-jockey who gets to ramble about his nerdy interests and do some shock-jock stuff. But just doing interviews would be a terrible move for him.
Willie has spent a good portion of his life high as a kite, of course he’s got some out there fuckin ideas. 🤣
It was hard not to feel that Bush might run for a 3rd term at the time. There were so many naked power grabs and abuses that it felt like any bad thing was possible.
Also worth nothing that Willie went on Art Bell.
https://archive.org/details/8eps-sheet1/Willie+Nelson+-+9+May+97+-+Art+Bell.mp3
Coast to coast am was the shit! Absolutely unhinged
Did the “promised” second interview ever happen? I’m betting not
Was it interesting? I stopped at the part where Jordan says it's so interesting that
Cash(lol, no) Willie formed a band with his gym teacher.From my perspective it was. I don't know anything really about willy nelson except for his music and the Marijuana activism.
I have a hard time imagining Willie Nelson as a high school football player. Maybe in the tradition of Todd Snider and the Smoke Pit or the guys in Dazed and Confused who wouldn't sign that stupid pledge. I bet he was a devastating downfield blocker, Coach Letterman style.
I hated it! Half his questions in every interview he lands are some variation of “what drives you to be so incredible and to do so much to save the human race against all odds?”
It reminded me of the Rogan interview, which I know Joe said in the moment felt “forced”.
At the time I honestly thought that was a clear extension of the weird psychodrama between them in which Alex clearly hates and resents Joe’s organic popularity/financial success but Joe seems to be desperately blowing on the embers of a single authentically fun night getting wasted and running around the national mall together.
It seemed to me then like Alex was asking him such fawning questions to sort of damn him with fake praise. But now, I’m actually beginning to think that’s the only way he knows how to interview someone - maybe because that’s the kind of questions he wished everyone who’d ever interviewed HIM had asked.