Knowing Is Half the Battle

In his younger days, Dan Friesen was fascinated by conspiracy theories, which inevitably led him to the controversial InfoWars host Alex Jones. However, Friesen noticed something different about Jones in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.

“His public persona was so different than what I remembered,” Friesen tells WW. “He was talking about how much he loved Trump, and it was very religious in some ways, and I remembered him as a 9/11 guy…so I started watching his show because I was curious and it really blew my mind. I felt like I had seen something that no one knew about.”

Friesen wanted to learn more about Jones’ particular brand of content, and so asked his friend and fellow standup comic Jordan Holmes to start a podcast exploring Jones’ history, his theories, and where he stood in the field of right-wing ideologues. Their podcast, Knowledge Fight, was launched in January 2017. Despite expectations of the hosts that it might last only a couple of months, the show has powered forward through eight years of Jones’ career and amassed an audience of “policy wonks” along the way. Knowledge Fight will host two live shows at the Aladdin Theater on Dec. 18 and 19 (the latter is already sold out).

After nearly a decade of covering InfoWars, one of Friesen’s biggest takeaways is that there’s not really any secret to Jones, and the audience’s first impressions of him are usually right.

“Most people think he’s a racist, and yeah, he is,” Friesen says. “Most people think that he’s a general bigot and a liar, and he is. Sometimes you can judge books by covers. It’s still not a good practice, you shouldn’t do that, but in this case it does kind of work. He is what he appears to be.”

Much as Jones tries to claim he’s for “Team Humanity,” his views and actions reveal a deep intolerance rooted in narcissism, white Christian nationalism, and the pervasive influence of John Birch Society propaganda. Friesen says Jones’ flippant dishonesty stuck out to him.

“Some people have a facility with lying that’s really scary,” he says. “Most people think you’d have shame or guilt about big lies that hurt people, but some people are totally fine [with lying]. They just don’t care.”

Perhaps Jones’ most infamous lie came in 2012 when he said the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was staged, a “false flag” operation by Second Amendment detractors in order to justify a crackdown on gun ownership. Although Jones now maintains he always believed the massacre was real, his influence led to harassment of the victims’ families by InfoWars employees and fans alike. The families sued Jones and his company for defamation, winning by default in 2021 when Jones refused to comply with court orders to provide witnesses and relevant materials (the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Jones’ last appeal in October).

Knowledge Fight had a front-row seat to Jones’s legal woes, not only watching and commenting on depositions and court proceedings as they happened, but with Friesen himself consulting with the prosecution as an expert witness on Jones and InfoWars.

“I think it’s a little overstated, the amount that I was involved,” he says. “I helped wherever I could, and when they had questions about various things he’d said over the years, I helped them find clips and find context, but by the time that I was ever involved with it, it was going the way it was going.”

Over the years, Friesen has seen how Jones’ positions have shifted and changed, particularly with his unconditional support of Trump and collaborations with former political adviser Roger Stone. “He used to be someone outside of power,” Friesen says, “and since then he has become a slave to power.”

Much of InfoWars’ coverage in November 2025 was devoted to rationalizing and excusing the president’s blatant cover-up of the Epstein files, which Friesen describes as “unthinkable compared to the character [Jones] used to present himself as.” Friesen further clarifies that there wasn’t some radical shift in Jones brought on by Trump, but rather the natural conclusion of a man who shares Jones’ beliefs coming into power.

“The last couple years especially, he’s a boot-licking weirdo for the state, and maybe he always would have been, but he never had the opportunity to be that before. He could suck up to Ron Paul, but Ron Paul was never going to win, so he never had an opportunity to be the leech on the president, and that’s the biggest change.”

Between Jones’ legal woes and waning influence, InfoWars seems on the verge of collapse. Knowledge Fight will survive and move on to covering other media figures—Friesen and Holmes are already commenting on the later career of Tucker Carlson, whose output has grown to resemble InfoWars-style conspiracism following his Fox News firing.

As for Jones, Friesen predicts: “The future is dark and depressing. I think he’ll be able to avoid having to ever pay the Sandy Hook judgments against him because he’s successfully created a number of fake businesses that he doesn’t own…I think he’ll be rich for the rest of his life, but there’s not much for him to do…There’s no going back being the voice of those who’ve had enough once you were a cheerleader for the things that were too much for them.”

SEE IT: Knowledge Fight at the Aladdin Theater, 3017 SE Milwaukie Ave., 503-234-9694, aladdin-theater.com. 8 pm Thursday, Dec. 18. $32.18.