Dump Is The Right Word

January 12, 2023 10:46 AM

Exclusive: Alex Jones Phone Dump Reveals Text Convos With Tucker Carlson [Huffington Post] CW: what it says on the tin. Feel free to look away if you like, but it provides deep insight into the making of a sausage most foul
posted by chavenet (31 comments total)

MetaFilter: the making of a sausage most foul
posted by slogger at 11:47 AM on January 12, 2023 [10 favorites]

Quelle surprise.
posted by Doleful Creature at 12:26 PM on January 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

I got about a quarter of the way through the article before giving up. Does it continue to be gossipy non-news, or is there anything more substantial/smoking-gun in the rest of the article?
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:28 PM on January 12, 2023 [13 favorites]

I have yet to read this beyond the first paragraph or two, but I am reminded of this old piece on Tucker Carlson by Ben Smith in the NYT (not paywalled): “Tucker Carlson Calls Journalists ‘Animals.’ He’s Also Their Best Source.”
posted by Going To Maine at 12:36 PM on January 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

I guess for me the interesting thing, other than him being such buddies with Carlson which I did not know and also get nervous about, is how much time and energy Carlson spends fantasizing about performing gruesome violence on the people surrounding him in real life:

“I’m starting to think about having to eat my neighbors,” Jones said on Infowars days before telling Carlson he feared arrest. “You think I like sizing up my neighbor, how I’m going to haul him up by a chain and chop his ass up? I’ll do it.”

“But, I’m literally looking at my neighbors now and going: ‘I’m ready to hang them up and gut them and skin them and chop them up.’ You know what? I’m ready. My daughters aren’t going to starve to death. I’ll eat my neighbors. When my babies come into the equation, I will cook your ass up so fast and I’ll tell them: ‘Oh, I killed a cow out back, baby.’ Here it is because my babies ain’t gonna die for your crap, your failure. I will eat your leftist ass like corn on the cob, I’m ready. I’ll barbecue your ass flat. I will eat you. I’ll drink your blood. You understand that? I will hang your ass up and cut you into cutlets like a filet mignon and grill your ass before I watch my daughters starve to death. Let me tell you something right now. I swear to God, if it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to get my hands around your throat.”

I don't know if his neighbors are actually "leftists" or anything, though, or if that's just the smear of justification he can use to indulge in this fantasy of his, because I think he really does like thinking about it.
posted by foxfirefey at 12:49 PM on January 12, 2023 [20 favorites]

Yeah, he's really putting the resort into "resorting to cannibalism."
posted by mittens at 1:05 PM on January 12, 2023 [7 favorites]

I apologize, I did not RTFA (did not want to ruin my day just yet). But I was reminded of this recent John Green video:
"...there are some people I just struggle to abide" [YT short]
posted by Glinn at 1:11 PM on January 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

“I’m starting to think about having to eat my neighbors,” Jones said on Infowars days before telling Carlson he feared arrest.

Oh, hey, it's the bit this great song is based on.

posted by charred husk at 1:18 PM on January 12, 2023 [7 favorites]

This will definitely have an effect on Tucker's ongoing audition for RT. And by that I mean no effect.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:20 PM on January 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

Thinking of the tragedy of the Jones family starving to death post-apocalypse because all his neighbors are capable of a mild jog. As usual with these gross fantasies, I think we know who'd really get butchered up like a pig in this scenario.
posted by praemunire at 1:21 PM on January 12, 2023 [20 favorites]

0% chance he even knows how to butcher a store bought rotisserie chicken.

The kinda guy I wouldn't stand in front of at a metro stop.
posted by Slackermagee at 2:01 PM on January 12, 2023 [7 favorites]

0% chance he even knows how to butcher

I don't get the impression not knowing how would him from trying.
posted by pwnguin at 2:59 PM on January 12, 2023 [7 favorites]

Fun fact: Alex lives in a fabulous building downtown. His neighbors are Almost certainly wealthy, conservative folks w ties to oil, engineering, trust funds, and medicine.

Not a bunch of students or drum circle socialists. Just his dumb posturing, as usual.
posted by Freecola at 3:30 PM on January 12, 2023 [9 favorites]

If you haven't heard Alex Jones, I envy you, but there's something you have to understand. Reading his spoken words don't convey the delivery style. He's a performer. When he speechifies these dark fantasies he grunts and growls, slowly turning up the volume. Compression fills the spectrum as he crescendos, rising to a primal outburst of mad rage. Then he asks you to buy some vitamin supplements.
posted by adept256 at 3:36 PM on January 12, 2023 [26 favorites]

"Because Jacobinism “never truly manifested itself in the United States,” Cleves argues, “the oppositional rhetoric it generated, known as anti-Jacobinism, may appear to be a similarly foreign invention.” On the contrary: “American anti-Jacobinism was very genuine.” However much of it was fertilized by British anti-Jacobinism (and vice versa), it was home grown, and persistent. It was also graphic: “throughout the 1790s, accounts of mob cannibalism served as a generalized element of trans-Atlantic anti-Jacobin discourse.”

Among several examples of this bloodthirsty rhetoric, Cleves quotes prominent Federalist Theodore Dwight describing victims of the Terror “sacrificed to the infernal fury of cannibal fishwomen.” William Cobbett, the English pamphleteer who lived in the United States from 1792 to 1800, was so known for his fervid descriptions of supposed French cannibalism that rival Philadelphia papers even mocked him for it."


posted by clavdivs at 3:43 PM on January 12, 2023 [10 favorites]

William Cobbett was an agrarian populist and parliamentary reformer who is not a particularly good historical analog for Jones. He just hated the French.
posted by praemunire at 3:50 PM on January 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

Why, yes. If going for an analog I would have used Himmler.

For enemy eating political rhetoric:
"Donnez un verre de sang à ce cannibale : il en a soif!"

-Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud.

The antecedent is what I'm aiming for. As an analog for Jones' froth is hard to place, Pol Pot perhaps?
posted by clavdivs at 4:44 PM on January 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm really struck by the extent to which they seem to actually believe a lot of their own bullshit. They clearly understand that a lot of what they say on air is bullshit but they seem to actually believe "democrats" worked to get him arrested and there are "leftist plots" and all that nonsense.

What an absolutely exhausting way to live.
posted by VTX at 5:54 PM on January 12, 2023 [9 favorites]

Wailing against democracy is a side bar.
This Neighbor talk...

Notice

a resemblence.
posted by clavdivs at 6:45 PM on January 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

I have never watched either of these two entertainers, perform. I have never heard either of them utter a word; also, not Hannity, or Limbaugh, or Howard Stern, for that matter. I am choosy about what goes into my head, via any medium.
posted by Oyéah at 6:45 PM on January 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

I think Jones utterly believes whatever he is saying while he is saying it, then goes on to something else, which he also believes. Neither doubt nor truth darken his skies. No idea too stupid or vile for him to embrace.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:52 PM on January 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

Howard Stern?
posted by ryanrs at 8:21 PM on January 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

Alex Jones can barely butcher a soggy White Castle slider without having a stroke.

And honestly, if he wants to talk about eating people?

He should be very, very afraid of truly leftist weirdos that have spent their whole lives being poor and eating out of dumpsters and who are also often deeply pagan even before you get to their "eat the rich" sensibilities!
posted by loquacious at 10:20 PM on January 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

Look do not eat Alex Jones. I'm sure he contains cadmium or something.
posted by away for regrooving at 10:48 PM on January 12, 2023 [22 favorites]

Dibs on the leg!
posted by Meatbomb at 11:07 PM on January 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

The issue is not the content of the texts as much as it is that Carlson is still active in something that passes for mainstream media, while fully being in communion with the conspiracy theorist wing of the right. It shows (or should show) that whatever residual claims to respectability he might have are rubbish, but also that his channel's claims are rubbish too.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:23 PM on January 12, 2023 [11 favorites]

I was in a late night deli a few months ago where Tucker Carlson’s show was on, and he started angrily ranting about something, and his voice and expression dramatically changed. I thought immediately he was imitating Jones, whether 100% consciously or not.

I’d guess based on that and this article is that Carlson sees Jones as a bizarre but undeniably talented colleague, though not a close outside of work friend.
posted by smelendez at 12:43 AM on January 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

Long pig.
posted by aiq at 8:15 AM on January 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

For the optimal flavortown experience, Chef Fieri recommends a typical Alex Jones preparation of foot-in-mouth.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:23 PM on January 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

We're gonna need a bigger ketchup bottle...
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:06 PM on January 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

He is definitely full of colloidal silver.

But as per usual, it's not the famous hate-stokers themselves I worry about; they are generally loathe to dirty their own hands. It's the people who listen to them and decide to act out their fantasies.

That's power, isn't it? Speak your horrible ideas out loud over and over till someone acts on them, but never be held responsible for inciting the violence.
posted by emjaybee at 8:25 PM on January 13, 2023 [2 favorites]