Today, Dan and Jordan check in on what's going on in the present day with the Alex Jones Show. Turns out the show's not going so well, as Alex spends most of his show rambling about how great a new right-wing meme is, before coming up with about seven clunky nicknames for Beto O'Rourke.
So today we've got an interesting episode to go over, but before we get there, I'd like to say thank you to a couple of new folks who have joined up in supporting the show.
If you yourself out there are listening and you'd like to support the show, you can do so by going to our website, knowledgefight.com, clicking that support the show button up at the top, and you can become a policy wonk yourself.
Jordan, today, what I wanted to do is, earlier in the week I said that I was working on the 2009 stuff, and by the end of the week the cake would probably be baked.
Cake is not baked.
It is not settled.
I've got to put a pin in 2009 until next week, probably.
And Mitch McConnell fulfilling the prophecy that I gave six months ago when I said that these fucking tax cuts are a way for them to actually attack Social Security and Medicare.
And who do you know?
unidentified
Guess what?
Mitch McConnell comes out and it says, I have no problem with the deficit!
20 days, and the tidal wave of total censorship has gone into insane overdrive.
Unbelievable information coming up.
Facebook, Twitter, you name it, are banning tens of thousands of pages of anyone that promotes the MPC memes, which simply takes a gray face and puts it over the face of conformist, authoritarian, leftist thinkers.
This is a new right-wing meme thing where they're putting these gray faces on, like, oftentimes it'll be someone's actual Twitter avatar, and they'll create, like, a false version of them.
And then also there's other ones that are just NPC1735, ba-da-da-da, and they all are basically doing an impression of people on the left trying to parody the idea that there's groupthink and everybody's saying the exact same things.
Like they're non-playable characters in a video game who just repeat dialogue when you walk up to them.
And then the other side of it, too, that should be horribly apparent to anybody who travels in or listens to any of the diverse voices on the left, what you know is that basically you just have a bunch of people in places like Reddit, 4chan, these sorts of places, where they just are their own echo chambers, where they've created this image in their head of what social justice warriors are.
So they've created that image, and then they're...
Pretending that that's what everybody sounds like, and now they're creating a parody of this false version of the other side that they've created in their head.
So, look, I don't have a lot of feelings about this here NPC meme.
I really don't.
I don't care about it.
I understand one of the reasons that Twitter is cracking down and getting rid of some of these accounts is that they are targeted harassment to a certain extent.
If you put this gray thing over someone's face and you're pretending that you're them, sure, I think on one level that constitutes parody, but I also could see a way that it could be targeted harassment.
So I see both sides of this.
I think this is up to Twitter to make the decision and live with it.
Choose whatever stake you want to make in it.
We'll see how the chips fall.
I don't advocate them banning all of them, but I also don't think it's wrong of them to.
And then he ends up getting to the above ground and realizes there's birds up there and he's been lied to the whole time, much like the allegory of the cave.
This is all just very...
It's very derivative work, much like a lot of George Lucas' work.
While we're talking about this movie, really quick, just because Alex brought it up and I think it was fun and I looked into it a little bit.
If you take out some of the more purely aesthetic, stylistic touches, which are the things that Alex really gets caught up on, like the idea that everyone's bald, everyone shaves their head.
That sort of stuff.
If you really get rid of some of those things, the movie really contains two central ideas about state control.
One is forced drugging of people and instilling the mentality that the economy and money are more important than people's humanity.
Since Donald Trump, Alex's favorite politician has been in office.
There have been many reports of ICE agents and independent contractors forcibly medicating immigrant children that have been separated from their families in order to make them more pliable and manageable.
In the last week, responding to the grisly murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a non-citizen resident of the United States and journalist for the Washington Post that appears to have been carried out by Saudi Arabia, Alex's favorite politician, Donald Trump, said, quote, they're spending $110 billion on military equipment and on things that create jobs for this country.
I don't like the concept of stopping an investment of $110 billion into the United States because you know they're going to go, they're going to take that money and spend it in Russia or China or someplace else.
That is almost the literal definition of putting money in the supposed economy over someone's humanity.
Now just to be petty, it should be pointed out that Trump's excuse about jobs and the economy is a lie.
From Vox, quote, But private sector defense workers make up less than 0.5% of the total U.S. labor force.
And that includes every person whose job depends directly on the sale or production of airplanes, tanks, bombs, and services for the entire U.S. military.
It's unlikely that many of them, if any, depend directly on weapon sales to Saudi Arabia.
And it's also unlikely that these jobs would vanish if Saudi money disappeared.
This is also probably a coincidence, but from The Hill.
Quote, Also, at a campaign rally in 2015,
he told the crowd, quote, In January 2018, he said on Fox News, quote, I would want to protect Saudi Arabia, but Saudi Arabia is going to have to help us economically.
And it's really cool to see things like Pat Robertson come out on the 700 Club, a supposed Christian dude, telling his audience that, hey, you know what?
Why would we jeopardize this weapons deal?
It's great.
It's great that we now live in a world where I'm sure Jim Baker is saying similar shit, that we've got these dickhole, these pastors out there who are actively rallying people around the idea of selling billions of dollars of weapons because that somehow helps their regressive domestic agenda.
He bridges that with THX 1138, which, as we described, he's missing most of the thematic points of, which, if he did understand the points of, would really point the finger at the actions of Donald Trump, one of which is this inhumane response, inhuman response, to the apparent...
Looking like assassination by the state of Saudi Arabia of a journalist who is critical of the regime.
As we said last Friday and Sunday, evidence because of there being no motive, and because the media, the corporate media, jumped on it, looks like it could be a rogue group false flag to derail the peace plans that Trump has, and as he prepares to put the clamps on...
Iran, that this is deep state operatives like John Kerry and Obama, who are running their own rogue shadow State Department, admittedly, to try to derail what's happening using networks under the crown prince, but not under his control.
Just like Trump isn't in control of most of the FBI, or most of the Justice Department, or most of the CIA.
There are loyal people there, but there are large swaths that do whatever they want, or under the command of...
Like I'm saying, just because Alex doesn't recognize that there's a motive or he's not willing to accept it or whatever, doesn't mean that there isn't.
There's a very concrete, real-world, clear-cut...
That Khashoggi would have been a target of the Saudi Arabian state.
Especially in the lead up to their 2030 enticement of foreign business, the infrastructure planning that they're doing, this big push.
And so, you better believe one guy dies, they're acting like 10 million died, and I'm not saying it's a good thing, whatever really happened to him, but the fact that it's all recorded, it's all surveilled, looks like a setup on both ends.
He's straight-up pro-Iran, and he hates the idea that these neocons are demonizing the Iranian government.
So, like, I don't know.
I don't know.
I know that times change, but it seems very difficult for me to believe that he's changed so much that he's now for some sort of an intervention in order to prompt regime change.
That seems so far outside of Alex Jones' vocabulary.
It seems so far outside of his principles that, I mean, this is just, you're a gun for hire.
Well, now, it's interesting that you say that, because in this next clip, Alex explains where he's getting his information about the situation in Saudi Arabia from.
And it might surprise you that it's not research, it's his gut.
When I see CNN, MSNBC, day one saying Saudi Arabia did it and this ends our peace deal with them and everything's over and Trump's an idiot and it's his fault.
I'm like, these are known lying scumbags that I don't believe a damn word they say.
If there's one thing I know about the scientific method, it's start with the result that you want and then ignore anything else that doesn't support that.
He does these voices that are meant to characterize the people he's lampooning.
He'll generally use tweets from people that he doesn't like and then does an insulting voice similar to that, although not as robotic usually, but that's trying to get the idea of, like, all these people are saying the same things.
The least exciting and technically proficient shot in any movie is some sort of long one take.
Everybody hates those.
Rope!
Remember in Birdman, whenever there was that interminable long take where they're walking and it's filled with drama with the drums playing behind it, which only increases the tension, and then the tension exploded?
Boring!
Give me 18 million cuts between every single fucking step.
A study undertaken by researchers at University College London found that the most effective memes largely originated in two places, the Donald subreddit and 4chan.
A vice write-up of the study acknowledges that the most, quote, effectively spread memes originated on the Donald and Paul.
No, we can't pass on this because it's very demonstrative of something super important.
Paul Joseph Watson is misusing this study from the University College of London because of course he is.
He didn't click the link in the BBC article that he's summarizing or in the vice write-up that he is saying characterizes the study.
So he really has no idea what he even says past the characterization that Paul and the Donald are effective meme distribution hubs.
That's the only message that he's gotten out of this because he didn't fucking read the study.
If he had read it, he would have found some information that doesn't really help his arguments very much at all.
First, from the study, quote, our work focuses on four web communities, Twitter, Reddit, Gab, and 4chan's politically incorrect board.
They even later say, quote, note that we exclude mainstream communities like the rest of Reddit.
Other than the Donald subreddit.
And Twitter, as our main goal is to obtain clusters of memes from the fringe web communities.
They only looked at four places in the study, so when the conclusion they come away with is that the Donald board on Reddit and Poll are effective meme platforms, really the conclusion more accurately stated is Gab is a ghost town, and Twitter mostly exists as a second-hand store or a thrift shop of memes.
That's really the conclusion that you should take away from this, since there's only four things being studied.
Now, second, if Paul Joseph Watson had read this study, he would have found that one of the main takeaways from the study was...
Quote, communities within 4chan, Reddit, and Gab use memes to share hateful and racist content.
For instance, among the most popular clusters of memes, we find variants of the anti-Semitic happy merchant meme.
They say in the study that memes of these communities are used to express racist sentiment.
Quote, evident from the popularity of the anti-Semitic happy merchant meme, which depicts a greedy and manipulative stereotypical caricature of a Jew.
By contrast, mainstream communities like the rest of Reddit and Twitter primarily share harmless neutral memes, which are rarely used in hateful contexts.
One of the big takeaways, again, from the study was, quote, There are several takeaways from our measurements of influence.
We show that poll is, generally speaking, the most influential disseminator of memes in terms of raw influence.
In particular, it's more influential in spreading racist memes than non-racist ones.
Relatedly, poll has generally more influence in terms of spreading political memes than other communities.
What the study ultimately found is that Poll is the most influential meme source in the realm of their study, but that they were woefully inefficient, which is to say that they post tons of memes there, and a lot of them don't catch on, but the ones that do are really popular.
In contrast, the Donald subreddit has a way higher than expected efficiency rate, which is honestly what you should expect.
That subreddit is largely just, it's little more than a means of weaponizing information and misinformation in a coordinated way.
So that's exactly what would make sense to find.
A low number of unique memes, but each one pushed in a unique, unified, focused way.
If Paul Joseph Watson wants to use this study to assert the things that he's asserting, namely that it demonstrates why liberals are afraid of memes because his side is better at them, he needs to accept that this entire study, he has to accept the entire study, not just the pieces that feel good to him.
I know that it would be inconvenient in the middle of this snarky rant to have to just stop and point out that a large part of the study that he's citing involves the dissemination of racist memes and how the very places he's claiming as being on his side are full to the gills.
So I empathize with him a little bit.
Because that would be very difficult to put in with your fake voices and his weird tweets that he likes to quote.
Now, I've explained to you what that study really says and why it's not really any evidence that liberals are afraid of memes.
Again, just studied four fringe places.
You can just throw away Gab, by the way.
That's a zero.
And that study very clearly demonstrates ain't nobody on Gab, but the people there?
Yeah.
But...
Paul Joseph Watson is coming in, you know, with this like, hey, I read an article on Vice that said this one sentence about this study, so I'm going to act like I know everything about it.
Just a minute later in his special report, Paul Joseph Watson owns himself.
It takes a modicum of research and a small step beyond superficial thinking to understand that no, not everyone who doesn't have hashtag FBPE or a blue wave in their profile is an alt-right neo-Nazi.
That's not invigorating and you don't get much out of it.
Good work.
With political opinions, just a modicum of research will help you get where you need to go, says me, the guy who read one sentence in a Vice article and then decided to conclude things that you shouldn't conclude about it.
I feel invigorated by, like, oh, I did read that study, and it says slightly different things than what Paul Joseph Watson's trying to present.
I just hate it.
I hate it that in the same breath he's sassing about, like, I do all this stuff.
Like, the reason that I have such robust, smart political beliefs is that I do research into this stuff in the same sentence when he's manifesting not doing research.
And then he ends with a false characterization of people on the left being like, if you don't have a blue wave on your Twitter thing, you're a Nazi.
Like, that's playground stuff.
I'm not triggered by this.
I just think it's pathetic.
You know, I mean, I think generally speaking it's best not to talk about him because it's the game that he wants.
Bit of silence, or pause, proves far more effective, or perhaps, at the very least, more interesting than constant jump cuts so there is literally no space between the end of any sentence fragment and the next sentence.
And then also, it's much harder to edit his stuff into, like, those, like, Vic Berger would have a much harder time using Paul Joseph Watson's footage.
Because you'd have to, like, really make precise chops in order to get the clips that you would want of, like, here's what he's saying, because he's talking a mile a minute.
His real sterling achievement is that he can take the attacks, turn them back on the enemy, withstand all the peer pressure, the $2 billion he's lost of his fortune, from all the lawsuits and attacks and golf course deals he lost and tournaments he lost and everything else.
I don't know that to be true or not, but I do know other things that are true, such as him not paying his contractors really consistently.
And I would say that that kind of behavior doesn't match.
Like, if you have somebody who's such a, like, generous, giving person that they would buy an employee a house because they're having a bad time or something like that, that person will probably also pay their contractors.
The New York Times found stories and reports of his dad in the 30s when there were communist riots in New York and police reports about his dad beating up four or five of them.
I can't find any evidence that Fred Trump ever beat up a bunch of communists in New York during a skirmish.
However, on Memorial Day 1927 in New York City, there was a brawl between the Ku Klux Klan and Italian fascist sympathizers, which led to the deaths of two of the Italian fascists.
Later, in Queens, at least 1,000 Klan members marched on this Memorial Day, which of course pissed off a bunch of folks.
Another brawl started.
In the aftermath, seven people were arrested.
One of these men was Fred Trump, Donald Trump's dad.
It's unclear, based on all public records, exactly what he was up to, but the brawl which he was in was between the Klan representing Protestant nativist outrage and the Catholics representing the group that the Protestants felt they were being oppressed by, namely the Catholic police.
And Trump's family are not Catholics.
The other six men who were arrested were all Klan guys, which makes you think that Fred probably was, too.
The argument has been made that the other six men were charged, whereas Fred was released, and thus he must be innocent.
Might be the case, but it's equally likely that he was the only one of the seven to be rich and was able to bribe the notoriously corrupt 1920s New York judicial system.
Maybe he wasn't the billionaire that he would end up being, or multi-multi-millionaire, but he was plenty loaded to bribe the notoriously corrupt New York judicial system in the 20s.
We have Honduras and Guatemala, after being funded by the U.N., openly launching massive invasion forces and opening up migration routes into the United States to countermand the fact that Trump last year pulled out You mean a humanitarian mission?
To help refugees?
Within hours, Honduras and Guatemala responded to stop migrant caravan after Trump threats.
That is the Associated Press.
So we're talking diplomatically, politically instant response to Trump putting his foot down and saying, I notice you've got borders.
So, this is a story that Alex is trying to pitch that Trump threatened to stop all foreign aid to Honduras and Guatemala if they didn't stop sending caravans.
So, Alex is presenting this story as being cut and dry.
Real simple.
A bunch of immigrants are trying to come up from Honduras.
Trump threatened to cut foreign aid to the country, and their president shook in his boots to kowtow to Trump's bold America First machismo.
The first problem here is that Honduras didn't really bend to the will of Trump.
Mexico has threatened to detain or deport the refugees in the Honduran caravan should they end up reaching their border.
The most that Honduras has done is that the foreign ministry warned that there may be people in, quote, political sectors making false promises to the refugees that they'll be able to seek asylum in the United States and that they should not let themselves be used by a, quote, movement that is obviously political and is meant to upset governability, stability, and peace.
Alex doesn't know because he didn't read the rest of this Associated Press article.
But if he had read the article that he's citing, he would see, quote, Fernando André, leader of the governing national party, claimed opponents of Honduras'politics.
president were behind the migrant exodus.
Quote, it's a strategy planned and financed by the opposition, he said.
So you basically have a Central American, maybe not so popular president, who has gotten into power, and the Association of American States has been like, hey, there's a lot of irregularities with your election, and now he's trying to demonize the people who want to get out of the country.
So, the second issue here is that the threat of cutting off foreign aid was not necessarily what got anyone to do anything.
It was Trump threatening to literally close the southern U.S. border and send in the military.
Quote, Can he do that?
I must, in the strongest terms, ask Mexico to stop this onslaught.
And if possible to do so, I will call up the U.S. military and all caps, close our southern border.
He refers to refugees trying to save their lives by coming to America and onslaught.
That's not great.
It should go without saying, but according to Alex's belief about what the president can and cannot do with the army vis-a-vis operating domestically, Alex should be livid about that tweet.
Unless he considers this not a domestic action, in which case Alex would legitimately need to be advocating war with Mexico, and I guess Honduras.
Basically, you have to say that these troops are going to be used non-domestically, and then that would be war.
The third problem is that when Trump was talking about foreign aid, he said he was, quote, "stopping all payments to these countries which seem to have almost no control over their population." The thing that Alex Jones yells about the most, the biggest fear that he's ever had, is the idea of a government having control over their population.
Any innocuous comment from a politician he doesn't like is magically transformed into proof that the government is trying to control him.
Whether it be by taking his precious guns, or just by making him feel bad that In reality...
This is largely a replaying out of the tension that happened back in April, when a group of about 1,100 people walked up from Central America to the border in a combination of an annual symbolic protest, as well as an attempt for many of them to reach the border, intentionally turn themselves in and plead for asylum.
Trump saw a report about this on Fox& Friends and immediately tweeted out that this was an invasion and threatened to send in the National Guard.
According to The Guardian, he threatened to cut off all foreign aid to Honduras then.
It's familiar.
Both threats were ultimately empty.
But in April, Mexico did not stop the refugees from reaching the border.
Quote, they didn't act the way Trump wanted, Iranio Mujica said.
When Trump started tweeting, we were afraid, but the Mexican government responded humanely and sensibly.
We didn't expect that.
We thought they would cave to Trump, but they didn't.
One of the members of the April Caravan was Chanel Smith, the 27-year-old trans woman from Honduras.
Quote, Another was Jocelyn Amador, 22, who operated a small business selling mobile phone accessories in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, but also had to flee after being unable to pay a pair of $125 extortion payments.
Another was Isabel Niero Rodriguez, 52 years old, who also fled after extortion demands.
She tried to open a bakery in El Salvador, but a gang demanded $300 as a fee for starting operations and threatened to kill her grandson if she didn't pay.
The Mexican government responded humanely and allowed these refugees to reach their destination rather than detaining them and sending them back to a very likely death.
In June 2018, the Department of Homeland Security reported that from April 19th to May 31st, at least 1,995 children were separated from their families at the border.
Since then, allegations have come out about rampant physical and sexual abuse of detainees, as well as the thing that Alex seemed to be very concerned about, which is forced medication of children.
Though the Trump administration had been considering implementing the family separation policy since his literal inauguration day, the timeline strongly suggests that he put the policy in action almost as a way of punishing the Mexican government for not stopping the refugee caravan in the spring of 2018.
This isn't just me making a loose conjecture.
The Guardian even makes the connection very clearly.
Quote, the Mexican government allowed hundreds of migrants, mainly Hondurans, to reach the U.S. border, infuriating Trump, who initiated the family separation policy soon after.
Beyond the human tragedy that has been witnessed since this policy was implemented, studies have also shown that it has had little to no deterrent effect on refugees and immigrants trying to reach the United States.
Further, analyses of the data have shown that the cost of housing people who were detained under Trump's separation plan averages out to about $775 per person per day, as opposed to $256 per person per day under the previous system.
In order to compensate for this increased cost of being cruel to an almost inhuman level, the Trump administration announced that it planned to shift more than $260 million that was supposed to go to HIV and cancer research into covering the costs of separating families.
If I had to guess, I would say that this is not because Trump is an idiot who doesn't care about other people but himself, but because he knows that the holographic med beds that cure all diseases are right around the corner and spending any money trying to cure cancer is just wasting money.
So...
I mean, so fuck all that noise.
I don't know how to put a button on anything, but, you know, this is all bad.
You know, it's tough to listen to Alex be a complete monster about very predictable things and things that we've seen play out already, even in the last six months.
I am as viscerally affected by it as anybody else, but at the same time, I deaden that, like...
That immediate reaction button or whatever.
I'm not saying that you're succumbing to this at all.
Please don't think that this is a judgment.
When you have people who outwardly talk and relish in the idea of bullying and trying to make people angry for fun and sport, whenever you spend...
12, 14 hours a day studying them and digging into the methods of their propaganda, it gets to a point where, for me especially, I realize that that's part of their game, and I'm so averse to them getting what they want out of me.
We're going to bring internet freedom back, ladies and gentlemen.
And we'll just have Memes Central.
And the best ones will be on the front page.
And we're going to have daily prizes for memes.
Because it's memes that threaten them the most.
In fact, I'm going to announce a super fast contest that I will determine and that I will announce next Monday $10,000 for the best InfoWars themed MPC meme.
That really sounds like he's like, I'm going to get them to ban me, which is intentionally getting yourself kicked off stuff, because I'm saying things that I earlier would have stopped myself from saying...
I don't know.
It's not making a lot of sense.
His dad does sound like he's probably giving him good advice, which is cool out.
Because there's a lot of this stuff, you know, we've gone down these roads of, like, complete and utter bullshit that's masking, like, just inhuman nonsense.
And say, you know, it's good for this to happen to kids.
They have a right for men to come pick your daughter or son up.
And so all I'm saying is, central casting, folks, central casting, these guys look like slimy pieces of crap that you wouldn't let get anywhere near your children.
Of course, they want to abort your children before they're born.
They want to kill your children, if they could, before they're born.
And they want to feed them GMO and give them deadly vaccines.
I know that my life as it is is kind of like, maybe, a lot of people would think possibly I'm throwing a lot of my time away and like, Maybe I'm fishing in a dry well by really trying to understand Alex Jones.
And I take that criticism.
I understand.
But even I, as fully committed as I am to this, hear shit like this, and I'm like...
I got better things to do.
I don't know why this guy is even doing a show anymore.
But, like, I just, like, I want him to do better, and I'm not getting anything out of it.
And I'm just hearing him be like, Beto O 'Rourke, Beto O 'Rourke.
I'm just like, this is pathetic.
This is...
On the same show that Paul Joseph Watson is basically saying, like, we just do playground insults and when you respond poorly to it, we keep doing it because that's what bullies do.