Fake Quotes — Knowledge Fight

Alex Jones has a very bad habit of using fake quotes to make his arguments. While this behavior definitely manifests in his spoken word, the place where it is most offensively used is in his “documentaries,” particularly Endgame and The Obama Deception

Endgame

A mere 16 seconds into his documentary, Alex has already used a quote dishonestly. You can find the full text of H.G. Wells book here, and if you go to page 111, you can see the full quote, without the words that Alex chose to omit. The words he cut out completely change the meaning of the quote.

The full quote is: “Countless people, from maharajas to millionaires and from pukkha sahibs to pretty ladies, will hate the new world order, be rendered unhappy by frustration of their passions and ambitions through its advent and will die protesting against it.”

In its proper context, this is a quote about how the ruling classes will fight to the death against any movement toward greater social equality that takes away their privileged positions and frustrates their passions. Alex is trying to present the quote as expressing that there is going to be a New World Order and people like Alex, “The Patriots,” are going to die fighting nobly against it. These are exact opposite meanings.

This is not a real quote. No one can find any place where it is recorded that Hitler said this or wrote it. It doesn’t appear in any official transcripts or any verified sources. It is essentially rumor, and Alex provides no evidence in his bibliography for the film to defend his assertion that Hitler did say this:

That is not good enough.

You can find the full transcript of Warburg’s address here, and if you do, you will find that Alex has changed the quote in a small but very important way.

The actual quote is: “We shall have world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government will be achieved by consent or by conquest.”

This is a crucial change in language. In the actual quote, James Warburg is expressing the feeling that a world government is likely an inevitability and that we had a decision as to whether that eventual state is reached by war or collaboration. Alex has changed the language so it appears to be a threat, that there will be world government whether or not you like it. Alex absolutely edited this quote on purpose.

Kissinger is an easy target because he is a monster, but this is a fake quote. No sources exist to verify that he has ever said or written this, and Alex provides no evidence or citation for it in his bibliography:

This most likely comes from a misquoting of Kissinger by Louis Farrakhan, but there is no evidence that Kissinger ever said such a thing.

The Obama Deception

In his follow up “documentary,” Alex Jones made two very smart changes to his process. First, he put less of the fake quotes he was using up on screen, which makes it harder for people like me to present how wrong he is visually. Second, he just didn’t even release a bibliography, so people like me can’t point out that just saying “insert source later” doesn’t count as citing a source.

But he still uses a bunch of fake quotes.

The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace, and it conspires against it in times of adversity. It’s more despotic than monarchy. It’s more insolent than autocracy. It’s more selfish than bureaucracy. . . . Corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the republic is destroyed. -Abraham Lincoln

Around the 10:30 mark of the film, Gerald Celente reads this quote, and says that he believes that Lincoln was assassinated because he said these words. The problem is that Lincoln never said those words, so it seems unlikely that it was the reason he was assassinated.

On it’s face, this quote is absurd. Before entering politics, Lincoln was a corporate attorney, representing large interests like the Illinois Central Railroad. He was not anti-corporations in any sense of the term. This quote is from a fraudulent letter that was included in the 1950 “Lincoln Encyclopedia,” thanks to some sloppy editing. By the time Alex made this film, it was very public information that this quote was not real.

In Evians, France, in 1991, standing before the Bilderberg Group, the apex of the World Government power structure, David Rockefeller defined the New World Order as “a system of world government serving the international banking elite.” -Alex Jones

This comes at approximately the 17:10 point of the film. This supposed quote is absurd, for a number of reasons.

First, Alex has no citation for it, and couldn’t possibly have one since it supposedly was said at a secret meeting. His assumed source on this is his “Bilderberg expert” Daniel Estulin, who is not a credible source.

Second, there’s no reason why David Rockefeller would ever say this, even in the privacy of a secret meeting. If Bilderberg is evil and all that, then everyone there would already know what the definition of the New World Order was; they are a part of it. Is Alex trying to pretend that this quote was taken from Rockefeller giving a speech at a Bilderberg Freshman Initiation meeting? It’s just nonsense.

Third, the Bilderberg meeting wasn’t in Evians in 1991. T hey were in Baden-Baden, Germany that year and in Evians in 1992, which really seems like someone who has all the secret information about their internal workings should know.

This is a fake quote that did not appear anywhere in print until 1948, though Jefferson died in 1826.

The part where Jefferson says "I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies" is close to a real quote, but not quite. It also wasn’t in a letter to Albert Gallatin from 1802, it was from a letter to John Taylor from 1816. The reason people like to claim this quote is from 1802 is that Jefferson was President in 1802, but hadn’t been in office for seven years at the time he actually wrote that letter to Taylor.

Further, the point that Jefferson is supposed to be making here is not one he could have. Etymologists have traced the use of the word “deflation” as describing a monetary process, and found that the word did not have that meaning until 1920, almost 100 years after Jefferson died.

Jefferson was not a fan of paper money, but using this quote to make that argument is super dishonest, particularly because it adds in all the stuff about “children waking up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered,” which exists only to appeal to nativist fears of losing social standing. Beyond that, using this fake quote is also super lazy.

This is by no means a complete list of the fake quotes that Alex Jones passes off as real, but I feel like these examples should demonstrate a very important trend, and that is that, best case scenario, Alex Jones has no idea what he’s talking about. The best possibility is that he is just super lazy and an unprincipled ideologue who wants to make his side’s argument as easily as possible so he never fact checks anything because that takes too much time.

Worst case (and more likely) scenario, Alex Jones knows exactly what he’s doing, and knows he’s misleading his audience with fake quotes and completely made up stories because doing so pays better.