"NUREMBERG 2.0": ALEX JONES TALKS ABOUT IT, BUT IT'S A GLOBAL CONSPIRACY THEORY

NBC News recently recently published a piece by Sarah Mullens about her mother, who's been an Alex Jones fan since Jones's public-access broadcasts in the 1990s. Mullens writes:

... my mother has found purpose and intellectual stimulation through her fervent following of Jones. Even as he backpedaled on the witness stand during his defamation trial in Texas and a jury ordered him to pay $50 million to the parents of a Sandy Hook victim for the lies he spread about the massacre, even as Jones faces another defamation case in Connecticut, she calls for a Nuremberg 2.0 to try the forces behind Covid-19 vaccines, which Jones’ site claims are a weapon of genocide.

The reference to "Nurenberg 2.0" got my attention because I've run across the idea recently -- but not in connection to Jones. Steve Deace, a former Iowa talk radio host who became an operative on Ted Cruz's 2016 presidential campaign and later went to work as a host on Glenn Beck's network, The Blaze, has a book coming out in 2023 titled Rise of the Fourth Reich: Confronting COVID Fascism with a New Nuremberg Trial, So This Never Happens Again. The book will be published by Post Hill Press and distributed by Simon & Schuster; the S&S website tells us:

COVID-19 was used to launch the worst tyranny in American history, which we’re still facing even now. It was also the worst oppression in global history since the Third Reich. Just as that evil required a reckoning at Nuremberg, this one does as well. In this Nuremberg 2.0, we call witnesses that our elected representatives and law enforcement agents need to hear from in order to know the full extent of the evil, and who is responsible for it—so that this never happens again.

Based on advance orders -- yes, possibly bulk buys -- the book reached #28 on the Amazon bestseller list last week.

But the "Nuremberg 2.0" idea didn't originate in America. It appears to have started in Germany. Last year, Jessica Bateman of Vice News wrote about Reiner Fuellmich, a German lawyer who spread the idea:

Fuellmich isn’t a familiar name to most people. But for many of those sucked into conspiracy theories around COVID-19, he has become one of the most influential figures in the world. Thousands of people worldwide are clinging to the fantasy that he will soon be leading a major prosecution of world leaders, scientists and journalists, placing them on trial for “crimes against humanity” for their role in supposedly engineering a false pandemic.

His followers believe these trials will carry global historical significance, so much so that they’ve become known as “Nuremberg 2.0” in reference to the trials of Nazi leaders that took place after World War 2....

This push for a “Nuremberg 2.0” is gaining traction within the increasingly-interconnected global anti-lockdown scene.... mentions of the term in German Telegram groups jumped from virtually zero to over 1,000 a day in April. The term trended on Twitter in the UK this summer, and in August, a man interrupted a police press conference in Sydney, Australia, shouting “Nuremberg 2.0”.

A Facebook group, in which Fuellmich’s supporters encourage people to contact their local police about the claims made in his videos, gained more than 17,000 members before being removed by Facebook as a result of inquiries by VICE World News.

Facebook may have removed that site, but here's an Italian "Nuremberg 2.0" Facebook group that appears to be active. Big Tech seems quite tolerant of the "Nuremberg 2.0" idea. Here are many videos on YouTube. Here's Audible (Amazon) hosting a radio broadcast with Bret Barker, who's a member of the COVID conspiracy group America's Frontline Doctors and who is described as "CEO Nuremberg 2.0 Ltd." Here's a Dutch Instagram site with the tagline "Nuremberg 2.0." Here's a podcast called "Nuremberg 2.0" at Apple Podcasts. Many mainstream sites even host a song called "Crimes Against Humanity," on which Fuellmich's words are heard over a techno-jazz dance beat.

So yes, you can find a 2021 broadcast in which Alex Jones interviewed Francis Boyle, a law professor who believes the coronavirus is a bioweapon, on "the next steps of Nuremberg 2.0 and Fauci's arrest." You can find "Nuremberg 2.0" invoked in a March 2022 Jones interview with Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, whose proposal for treating COVID with hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and zinc impressed Rudy Giuliani and others in Trumpworld in the early days of the pandemic. (Zelenko died of lung cancer at the age of 48 a few months after the interview.) But Jones is only one of the people pushing this idea.

There are some people worldwide who believed last year that the Nuremberg 2.0 trial was already underway. A couple of Facebook users from the Republic of Georgia were among those spreading the rumor that the trial was happening. So this is an idea that's global. It would continue to spread even if Alex Jones went silent tomorrow.