Oct 14, 2026 · 15 min · 16 segments
2016 was a pivotal year for Dan Friesen. It's the year he became fascinated with Alex Jones, and began watching the election of Donald J. Trump through the lens of Jones' show Info Wars. This…
For the past nine years, I've produced and co-hosted a podcast about Alex Jones and Infowars called Knowledge Fight.
But for the rest of y'all, let me take a moment to properly welcome you and get you up to speed.
In the lead up to the 2016 election, I noticed that the right-wing media was getting a little weird.
I'd grown up in Central Missouri, driving a car with no CD player before the days of iPods, so I listened to a ton of standard blowhard talkers like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and what I was seeing in 2016 felt insane.
The right-wing media machine always will galvanize around the Republican candidate, and it never surprised me for these guys to back whoever their team's horse happened to be.
The same pundits who supported George W. Bush could easily stump for Mitt Romney, and it wouldn't feel weird.
So for a lot of these idiots to be cheerleading for Donald Trump's candidacy, it wasn't that confusing.
I smoked a lot of weed in high school and college, so I watched plenty of Alex's content in my younger years.
I knew him as a conspiracy theorist, a small government guy, and one of the few very loud right-wing voices I remembered opposing the Iraq War.
I remembered him from his small role in Richard Linklater's film Waking Life, and I had a vague sense of him being a dude who I didn't agree with, but who had a list of principles that he stuck to.
I imagined him to be a sincere person, but I hadn't kept up with him over the years.
Now here he was, and I'm seeing him pop back up as a completely insane Trump supporter.
I was confused, so to learn more, I watched a few episodes of his show, and I only got more confused.
He was screaming about Trump being the best, how the world was gonna end if Hillary won, and he was much more religious than I remembered him being.
Over the course of the 2016 election campaign, instead of watching the debates on normal TV, I watched them on Infowars, mostly for the spectacle of it.
It seemed like dumb entertainment, but I was also curious to make sense of how this was the same guy from the Bohemian Grove video I watched back when I was really stoned in someone's garage That culminated in me watching the election night coverage on Infowars, which turned out to be a Spider-Verse style canon event in the way that it altered the trajectory of my life.
A lot of people had their political bearings shifted after the 2016 election directly as a result of Trump winning.
They couldn't believe that a clear con artist and self-centered liar could possibly get elected as president in our system.
The fact that it happened caused a shock that pushed people strongly in one direction or the other.
For the past nine years, I've produced and co-hosted a podcast about Alex Jones and Infowars called Knowledge Fight.
But for the rest of y'all, let me take a moment to properly welcome you and get you up to speed.
In the lead up to the 2016 election, I noticed that the right-wing media was getting a little weird.
I'd grown up in Central Missouri, driving a car with no CD player before the days of iPods, so I listened to a ton of standard blowhard talkers like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and what I was seeing in 2016 felt insane.
The right-wing media machine always will galvanize around the Republican candidate, and it never surprised me for these guys to back whoever their team's horse happened to be.
The same pundits who supported George W. Bush could easily stump for Mitt Romney, and it wouldn't feel weird.
So for a lot of these idiots to be cheerleading for Donald Trump's candidacy, it wasn't that confusing.
I smoked a lot of weed in high school and college, so I watched plenty of Alex's content in my younger years.
I knew him as a conspiracy theorist, a small government guy, and one of the few very loud right-wing voices I remembered opposing the Iraq War.
I remembered him from his small role in Richard Linklater's film Waking Life, and I had a vague sense of him being a dude who I didn't agree with, but who had a list of principles that he stuck to.
I imagined him to be a sincere person, but I hadn't kept up with him over the years.
Now here he was, and I'm seeing him pop back up as a completely insane Trump supporter.
I was confused, so to learn more, I watched a few episodes of his show, and I only got more confused.
He was screaming about Trump being the best, how the world was gonna end if Hillary won, and he was much more religious than I remembered him being.
Over the course of the 2016 election campaign, instead of watching the debates on normal TV, I watched them on Infowars, mostly for the spectacle of it.
It seemed like dumb entertainment, but I was also curious to make sense of how this was the same guy from the Bohemian Grove video I watched back when I was really stoned in someone's garage That culminated in me watching the election night coverage on Infowars, which turned out to be a Spider-Verse style canon event in the way that it altered the trajectory of my life.
A lot of people had their political bearings shifted after the 2016 election directly as a result of Trump winning.
They couldn't believe that a clear con artist and self-centered liar could possibly get elected as president in our system.
The fact that it happened caused a shock that pushed people strongly in one direction or the other.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.