STRATFOR: ORIGINS, FUNDING, JONES CONNECTION
Stratfor was founded in 1996 by George Friedman and other ex US intelligentsia— the same year Jones launched his radio career and GCN was created, all in Austin, Texas. It physically sits at 700 Lavaca Street, Suite 900 — inside the Travis County Government Administration Building. WikiLeaks's 2012 dump of five million internal emails confirmed what critics suspected: clients included DHS, the Marines, and the DIA; informants were paid through Swiss bank accounts; and a secret Goldman Sachs-backed hedge fund called StratCap was using Stratfor's intelligence to trade government bonds. Goldman's Shea Morenz invested $4M+ and joined Stratfor's board. By 2020, Teakwood Capital had sold Stratfor to RANE Network — founded by David Lawrence, ex-Goldman Business Intelligence Group chief — with MDC Partners (itself Goldman-backed) also invested in RANE. The Jones connection runs directly through Molly Maroney, who interned at Stratfor for 11 months in 2009-2010 and was then hired as editor of InfoWars Magazine.
ALEX JONES Family
Jones's uncle William "Biff" Hamman was a Vietnam-era Army helicopter pilot with a PhD in Latin American History who lived in Guatemala during the CIA dirty war period. The Guatemalan government seized his HAM radio equipment, accusing him of CIA covert communications — confirmed by his son Buckley on InfoWars in 2014. Biff died January 2014.
Buckley Hamman co-founded InfoWars in 1995 — Jones said so on air — and served as Director of Operations per EEOC filings, running all broadcast, satellite, IT, and e-commerce infrastructure without a public title. He later transitioned to managing social media influencers and Fortune 500 marketing clients.
Verna Grayce Chao (Biff's daughter) was Director of Global Security Solutions at Dell — the government-facing cybersecurity division — while Dell simultaneously employed Snowden on the CIA account and later owned NSA-backdoored RSA Security. She is currently EVP at City National Bank, a Royal Bank of Canada subsidiary.
David Jones (father) bought Alex his first show by purchasing ad time through his Castle Dental practice — an affiliate of a PE-backed dental chain. InfoWars.com was originally registered at David's dental office address: 3001 S Lamar Blvd, Suite 100.
His LinkedIn is live at linkedin.com/in/buckley-hamman-5929766 — describing him as an "Experienced Operations Manager" working in IT development, media production, marketing and advertising, with the tagline "Achieve Your Potential With Ingenious Software Solutions." It hasn't been meaningfully updated since around 2018.
Beyond that, his current activities are genuinely hard to pin down. He appears to have maintained the same low-profile operating style he had at InfoWars — substantive operational role, no public title, minimal digital footprint. Knowledge Fight noted as recently as 2018 that even professional journalists couldn't nail down what he actually did at InfoWars.
JAY DYER: BACKGROUND, JONES CONNECTION, CHOQ TIMELINE
Father was in military and he lived in San Diego? Red flag much? He attended Murray State University where his graduate work focused — his own words in every published bio — on "psychological warfare, espionage, and film," with a thesis on Ian Fleming's real WWII covert operations. He completed all MA requirements except submitting the thesis. The formal written record of his research on psychological warfare was never made public.
His Twitter goes back to March 2009 and JaysAnalysis.com to 2013. By 2015 his bios already reference InfoWars appearances. By 2020 he was hosting full show hours.
CHOQ AND SEATON CAESAR COLLARD
Collard was running supplement ventures and consciousness groups in Austin at age 21 in 2012 — documented on Austin community radio KOOP. He worked in the music department of Richard Linklater's Boyhood in 2014. Jones appeared in two Linklater films. Both have documented professional relationships with the same filmmaker — a connection not noted anywhere before this research.
In June 2018, as Jones's deplatforming crisis began, Collard incorporated Sjern LLC at his Bastrop home address. No business activity, no products, no documentation. It dissolved in 2021.
Choq LLC was incorporated April 5, 2019 — months after Jones's final deplatforming wave — at 700 Lavaca Street, Suite 1401, Austin: the same building as Stratfor at Suite 900, inside the Travis County Government Administration Building. It uses a privacy registered agent service that keeps real owner addresses off public record. Choq claimed 100,000+ bottles sold in year one.
Choq is a direct sponsor of Jay Dyer, capitalizing on the sort of fear mongering that Bill Cooper derided Alex Jones for.
But we don't have Bill Cooper anymore, we got Jones. Also lost Dave McGowan but instead we get repackaged incendiary antagonist Jay Dyer doing lite version of the same stuff people already do.
