Dave Hodges is an Alex Jones-wannabe conspiracy theorist who hosts The Common Sense Show, a radio talk show dedicated to bringing you information about what’s really going on in the world that They don’t want you to know about. His bio lists him as a “psychology, sociology, statistics and research professor” though is, perhaps not very surprisingly, sparse on details about affiliations and actual credentials; we’re sure Hodges feels very strongly that he is competent at analyzing current events, though. Currently, Hodges’s show seems to be a rather prominent one among a plethora of insane wingnut clown shows (Sheila Zilinsky, Jim Garrow, Rick Wiles and so on) whose hosts tend to interview each other and other wingnut influencers, and who occasionally has managed to pull in politicians and others with genuine power into their orgy of hateful insanity. He is apparently also spokesperson for something called The American Coalition to Protect Personal Property Rights, a group dedicated to “combat the growing erosion of personal property rights across America”.
Most recently, Hodges’s show has been particularly focused on spreading conspiracy theories about the murder of Charlie Kirk (“THE CIA IS BEHIND EVERY PRESIDENTIAL DEMISE AND ACTIVISTS LIKE CHARLIE KIRK”), and he seems very unhappy about the direction Turning Point USA has been taking (it is apparently currently a puppet organization for Israel and the Zionist agenda), but Hodges has covered a remarkable range of idiotic conspiracy theories on his show over the years – he’s impressively productive, which is easier to be when you apply Hodges’s standards for evidence and fact checking – and has been instrumental in promulgating most of the various paranoia-driven conspiracy theories that have gone viral in wingnut circles the last decade or so. In particular, it seems that batshit insane conspiracy theories surrounding the Jade Helm military exercise in 2015 was something of a milestone in Hodges’s rise to prominence in paranoid wingnut circles – Hodges outlined a conspiracy theory involving FEMA camps, foreign troops, and false flags, and – in a conversation with Jason Van Tatenhove, then National Media Director for the Oath Keepers and co-host of something called The Liberty Brothers – putative government plans to use NSA threat-matrix scores to determine whether American citizens were to be executed by government death squads (the military itself was also being bamboozled here, and the government would ultimately rely on the aforementioned foreign troops to finish the job).
At the time of Jade Helm, however, Hodges had already established himself as a purveyor of nonsense. Did you know, for instance, that in 2013, then-President Obama was preparing an executive order to give away 8 states to Mexico to form the nation of Aztlan? Apparently, Obama did so after trying (and failing) to pass the resolution through Senate Bill 744, the text of which is here (Hodges was presumably ‘reading between the lines’). And in 2016, the government, with the use of “Nazi occupation storm troopers”, had “taken over Eastern Oregon” – Hodges was apparently referring to checkpoints set up for anyone trying to get into the Malheur wildlife refuge where there was an ongoing standoff with Ammon Bundy and his gang who had taken over federal property (a topic Hodges covered extensively). In general, Hodges recommended taking up arms against Obama and taking him down through guerrilla warfare: Obama “is definitely an imposter, he’s a traitor. He needs to be in jail […] But my fear is that our military, because we’re so dispersed all over the world, we’re not strong enough domestically to stand up to the Russians and Chinese that are here or will be here soon, and then their Canadian allies as well, as well as anybody else that might wear the blue helmet of the UN. So I think we don’t have any choice but to really engage in guerrilla warfare, long-term guerrilla warfare.”
And of course, nefarious Deep State plots just kicked it up a notch under Trump. By 2018, for instance, Obama was forming a private army that would work with the gang MS-13 to assassinate government officials in order to force the United Nations to impose martial law on America and reinstall him as leader – for this information, Hodges cited “sources” (but come on: the primary evidence is of course that “Democrats are the dirtiest organization to ever exist in this country, they're on a level with ISIS”, and if you wondered whether it is correct to say that the Democrats are on a level with ISIS, Hodges would of course cite things like Obama’s attempt to form a private army with MS-13 to assassinate government leaders, and so on, in an airtight epistemic loop). By then, Hodges was of course deeply mired in QAnon-related conspiracy nonsense (like this one or this one). Meanwhile, we’ll let headlines like “The Use of Manchurian Mind-Controlled Subjects to Disrupt Trump’s Political Events” speak for themselves.
Importantly, such nefarious plots didn’t all originate with people officially associated with the Democratic Party either: there are agents of darkness all of over the place – Brett Kavanaugh, for instance: Hodges stated that the confirmation of Kavanaugh would signal the start of a Chinese/Russian EMP attack on America, launched from Puerto Rico. (No, he doesn’t use the success rate of previous predictions to inform what credence he – or his listeners – should place in new ones; that’s not the kind of evidence that registers with Dave Hodges.)
Diagnosis: Yes, batshit crazy, of course. Dave Hodges is deeply paranoid and has a wild imagination unfettered by the constraints of reason, rationality or evidence. And his show seems to be something of a go-to source for similar-minded people, of which there are, apparently, very, very many.
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