Today, Dan tells Jordan about one of the weirdest days ever on The Alex Jones Show. Alex begins the show really depressed about Satanists and finishes the show by barging out of the studio for one of the most childish reasons imaginable. The key is in what happens in between, like Alex thinking the show Gunsmoke is realistic.
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your work. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| I'm Jordan. | ||
| We're a couple dudes who like to sit around, drink novelty beverages, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Oh, indeed we are, Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Dan! | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| How was your first experience with pandemic? | ||
| Oh, we played a little board game the other night. | ||
| We did. | ||
| You just got a grill. | ||
| Recently. | ||
| And so I came over to your house. | ||
| We made some delightful burgers. | ||
| And we played the game Pandemic, which I believe was very widely recommended by our listeners in the wake of our talking about the Illuminati card game. | ||
| And everybody going crazy. | ||
| Everyone loves games. | ||
| And it was a lot of fun. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| I enjoyed it quite a bit. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| We lost. | ||
| Yes, we did. | ||
| It was pretty brutal. | ||
| I think that was part of the learning curve, though. | ||
| You know, just taking it out of the box, figuring out how to play, I think you're going to lose your first time. | ||
| You don't have to take that too self-consciously, although, you know, I was a little bummed out. | ||
| Yeah, it is a little bit weird to lose a cooperative strategy game and not feel like you're kind of dumb. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| You're like, I lost to a game? | ||
| That's not fair. | ||
| Well, we lost because of the timer, or like whatever. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| We ran out of cards. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And the built-in, like, we could have won if we had more time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| I think that's the... | ||
| That's how the world is going to... | ||
| Once climate change kills us all, well, we could have done it. | ||
| But it was a lot of fun. | ||
| Goddammit, if George W. Bush hadn't stolen the election, we might have survived this one. | ||
| But Pandemic was a lot of fun. | ||
| I look forward to playing it again at some point. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Indeed. | |
| I enjoyed it. | ||
| I enjoyed it as well, and this will be enjoyable on some level because it's a podcast where I know a lot about Alex Jones. | ||
| And I only know what you tell me about Alex Jones. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| We've got an episode to do today. | ||
| But before we get to that, I want to say a special thank you again to the dudes from QAnon Anonymous. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Had a great time with them, too. | ||
| I hope we get to play Pandemic together someday. | ||
| And more pointedly, perhaps, a thank you to everybody with all the positive feedback. | ||
| It was a massive departure from our format. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was very worried about the idea of how it was going to be received by the audience, who I thought might be confused. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And wall-to-wall, everybody, with very positive, nice things. | ||
| So, Jordan, today what we're going to be doing is we're going to the present day since Monday was that QAnon Anonymous crossover episode. | ||
| Oh, no, not the present. | ||
| Presence Day. | ||
| Wednesday has got to take that role this week. | ||
| And when I do these present day episodes, one of the things I strive to do is be as close to current as possible. | ||
| I want to cover things that are... | ||
| Too late, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And today, I wanted to do that, but I can't. | |
| Because I started covering Wednesday, May 8th. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I realized, you know, sure, it's a week old at this point, this episode, but there was too much going on on it that I felt I couldn't leave this uncovered. | ||
| So that's what we'll be going over today, Wednesday, May 8th. | ||
| Sounds good. | ||
| We'll get to that in just one second, but before we do, we've got to say thank you to some people who have signed up and are supporting the show. | ||
| First of all, David, thank you so much. | ||
| You are now PolicyWonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, David. | ||
| Thank you, David. | ||
| Next, Kevin. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Kevin. | ||
| Next, Andrew. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Andrew. | ||
| Next, Roop Groove. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Roop Groove. | ||
| Roop Groove. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Finally, I'd like to say thank you to somebody who donated at an elevated level. | ||
| We appreciate it very much. | ||
| So, Genevieve, thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a technocrat. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Four stars. | |
| Go home to your mother and tell her you're brilliant. | ||
| Someone, someone sodomite sent me a bucket of poop. | ||
| Daddy Shark. | ||
| Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. | ||
| Jar Jar Binks has a Caribbean black accent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's a loser little, little titty baby. | |
| I don't want to hate black people. | ||
| I renounce Jesus Christ! | ||
| Thank you so much, Genevieve. | ||
| Thank you very much, Genevieve. | ||
| Always like a Genevieve. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| If you're out there listening and you're thinking, hey, I like what these guys do, I'd like to support the show, you can do that by going to our website, knowledgefight.com, clicking the button that says support the show. | ||
| We would appreciate it. | ||
| It would be delightful. | ||
| So, Jordan, May 8th, 2019, Wednesday. | ||
| I don't know how else to build this up. | ||
| I mean, it's my birthday. | ||
| It is! | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| See, that's why I did it. | ||
| That's why you did it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I forgot which day last week was your birthday. | |
| Yeah, that's why we did it! | ||
| That's why we did it! | ||
| It was my birthday episode! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, of course! | |
| How inconsiderate of me. | ||
| So, for your birthday, maybe this is the best present you could possibly have. | ||
| Sure! | ||
| Almost the first... | ||
| Half hour, 40 minutes of the show. | ||
| Alex Jones appears to be very depressed. | ||
| Alright, that's nice. | ||
| Clinical depression level symptoms coming out of this man. | ||
| I'm liking this. | ||
| So here is just sort of a cross section of... | ||
| I think that this embodies the depressed vibe Alex has got. | ||
| Here's what's happening. | ||
| I don't even know if I continue on doing this show at this point. | ||
| I think I may just end the show right now. | ||
| Because things are so bad in this country, I think talking about it is almost a way of just making it a form of entertainment. | ||
| I mean, I really, really, really do. | ||
| We have to do some really, really drastic things. | ||
| If you see any of these tech executives in person, I wouldn't try to run them out of restaurants. | ||
| I wouldn't try to do what the Democrats have said do to us that are fighting back against the bullying. | ||
| But I would definitely let them know that you're aware of their criminal activity and that they will be brought to justice. | ||
| And if you live next door to them, you should let them know that. | ||
| If you run into them, you should. | ||
| If you can do anything to hurt their stocks, if you can do anything to let these criminals know, because they're consolidating power, and it's getting worse by the day. | ||
| So there's a fatalistic element to what he's talking about. | ||
| It seems like he kind of has resigned in some ways to, like, I'm not doing it. | ||
| Do I agree with him here? | ||
| I kind of think I do. | ||
| Well, it's kind of him showing his cards. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, coming around to the position of, like, whatever I'm doing isn't solving any problems. | ||
| I'm just making entertainment out of this. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Maybe I should stop this show. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| They'll get sued a lot. | ||
| Right now. | ||
| There's just this super weird vibe, and I don't think that clip fully embodies it, because there's parts where there's just, like, frequent four-second pauses, where he's just like, ugh. | ||
| You can just feel it in here. | ||
| This lethargy. | ||
| It's like, I don't know what... | ||
| It feels like the will to live has been sucked out of him. | ||
| And when I was listening to it, I was very puzzled. | ||
| I was like, what the fuck is going on here? | ||
| I don't even know what I hate anymore. | ||
| Do I want guns? | ||
| I had so many theories about what could possibly be going on. | ||
| And like Alex does all the time, you don't need to have theories. | ||
| He will just tell you. | ||
| He just watched the opening 20 minutes of Up. | ||
| That's what happened. | ||
| He did watch something. | ||
| Okay, alright. | ||
| You know, I got the vibe that he was really depressed and that something must be up. | ||
| You know, like a good friend, I sensed a difference in him. | ||
| Of course, of course. | ||
| And thankfully, about 40 minutes in, he lets us know exactly what's going on and what has caused him to lose his will to live. | ||
| We're dying. | ||
| We're dying. | ||
| And I went and saw a movie last night, and it was exactly what I thought it would be. | ||
| At this point, I thought it was Avengers Endgame. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I legitimately thought like, oh, he saw Avengers and... | ||
| It's the only thing that makes sense. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I thought that was for sure it. | ||
| It's a little more indie than that. | ||
| And worse. | ||
| So incredibly boring. | ||
| So incredibly predictive. | ||
| So pathetic. | ||
| I still at this point thought it was Endgame. | ||
| There's gotta be Endgame. | ||
| I do, and I have heard a clip of him, or not a clip, I heard it on some other episode where he was talking about how Endgame stole his title. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And so, like, I thought for sure it's like some sort of a, it is not Endgame. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| And we will see what it is. | ||
| The people so weak and so soulless, slaves. | ||
| And it's exactly what I thought it would be. | ||
| Damn it, what is it? | ||
| Exactly what I knew it was. | ||
| Following it in the real world. | ||
| And it was a giant PR rollout for Satanism. | ||
| And not for the fake atheistic Satanism where the atheists claim, oh, I'm really an atheist. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| As I was listening to this, I still felt like he's going to get around something about Loki or I have no fucking idea. | ||
| This is nuts. | ||
| Thor cut his head off. | ||
| Oh, sure you are. | ||
| Yes, of course you are. | ||
| These were actual devil worshippers. | ||
| And by that, they see themselves as the devil and you as their food. | ||
| It's a predatory thing. | ||
| Do as thou wilt is the whole law. | ||
| And just thank God I'm not with those people. | ||
| But being in the theater and looking at the weak chicken-neck people around me and watching their enjoyment was soul-sucking. | ||
| Like when you're in Los Angeles and feel the desperateness and the emptiness and the lostness. | ||
| The movie is Hail Satan. | ||
| I'm going to talk about it later in the broadcast. | ||
| Wait, it's just called Hail Satan? | ||
| It's a documentary. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's a documentary about the Satanic Temple. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Gotcha. | |
| It's sort of farcical a little bit. | ||
| There's a real humor to it. | ||
| He's going to get into it later in the episode, and so we'll talk about it. | ||
| But Alex went and saw this Hail Satan documentary, and it is completely destroyed the beginning of his broadcast. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why did he see this? | |
| That was my first question. | ||
| Why would you do that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What are you doing there? | |
| What are you going to gain from this sort of... | ||
| I wanted to give my children culture. | ||
| I don't think he allowed his kids to go. | ||
| I think he probably put on a false nose and glasses, a little fake mustache, went to the theater incognito. | ||
| Owen Schroyer's right next to him wearing a balaclava. | ||
| Also, he went to the Alamo Drafthouse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| He's seeing a movie. | ||
| He's probably drinking while he's there, too. | ||
| So maybe this depression that he's manifesting is just a hangover, because he saw a documentary where Satanists are put in a good light, and that is going to cause a bender. | ||
| Yeah, no, that's going to be trouble. | ||
| So any of these possibilities are there. | ||
| Like, he saw Satanists in a documentary, ergo, losing the will to live. | ||
| Of course, of course. | ||
| Or saw Satanists in a documentary, driven to drink, a little sloppy the next morning on there. | ||
| For sure! | ||
| Long pauses between words. | ||
| Both equally possible. | ||
| He's got a terrible headache. | ||
| So he sees this documentary and he goes on long jags about how these Satanists are low down, broke backed, soul sucked. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All this. | ||
| His normal Satanic imagery. | ||
| That's all the people in the audience. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And he specifically takes a lot of those ideas that he's putting onto the Satanists. | ||
| And you'll see very clearly in this next clip, what he does is he takes those characterizations and applies them to Democrats in order to conflate Satanists and Democrats. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Why not? | ||
| And I think that there is actually a specific reason that he's doing that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I can tell you, not just here, but in Europe and many other areas, the actual operating system. | ||
| Like a computer program, like Windows 2000. | ||
| What? | ||
| Of the Democratic Party is Satanism. | ||
| And again, I remember three-star Air Force generals telling me that 20-something years ago. | ||
| I didn't believe it. | ||
| I remember, even though I grew up, there was a lot of that going on in Dallas and wealthy areas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Which? | |
| These weren't. | ||
| White trash, Antifa, meth heads. | ||
| Wait a second. | ||
| These were rich people, and this was more Luciferian, but it was the real deal. | ||
| Wait a second. | ||
| I've got to pause there for a second, because Alex's whole thing is about anti-white racism, and now he's throwing around white trash? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That is not cool, man. | ||
| Nah, why not? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Most of your listeners are white trash. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not even fine with you throwing it around flippantly as a joke. | |
| The idea that he is... | ||
| His whole brand proposition is defense of attacks on white people. | ||
| And white trash is one of the terms that's used most derisively about poor white people. | ||
| It seems completely incongruous that someone with... | ||
| The market share that Alex does would be okay with throwing that around to insult some other white people. | ||
| Hey, you're depressed. | ||
| Your filters are way at their lowest. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Maybe he doesn't even mean it. | ||
| It's just his rage trying to get its way out in a sad direction. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fine, but he's still anti-white. | |
| Alex Jones has turned on the whites. | ||
| What do they have left? | ||
| About time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, boy. | |
| But even though I was around it, I still couldn't believe that it was this rampant. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| And that's what I'm going to be getting into at the bottom of the next hour. | ||
| I meant to write some notes last night when I got home or today of watching Hail Satan, this new movie. | ||
| And it was just like, that's the Democrats. | ||
| And the first five minutes in, I went, oh my gosh, it's the operating system. | ||
| They're going to say this is the new religion of America and the democratic operating system. | ||
| They're going to show all these Democrats that said, oh, I was an atheist, but now I'm a Satanist. | ||
| And it's a tongue-in-cheek thing, but it's real. | ||
| I have a very strong theory as to why he sees these Satanists in the documentary and he says, oh my god, it's the Democrats. | ||
| Have you seen the documentary? | ||
| I haven't. | ||
| So, I want to say that the depression that he was manifesting at the beginning of the episode kind of made me feel a little bit gross and sad until it was contextualized in like, I saw this documentary about Satanism and that's what's causing it. | ||
| You know, the previous night before this episode, he'd gone to the old cinema, and he'd seen the documentary Hail Satan, which, I mean, the first question you had is the first question anyone has, which is, why the fuck would he go and do that? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| It's the sort of thing, it's like, you know better. | ||
| You don't need to go see this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just watch a YouTube video about the 80s. | |
| Yeah, what are you going to get out of it? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| What are you going to get out of it that's gratifying in some way that you can't just get that same charge from reading a book by my uncle who wrote books about satanic ritual abuse? | ||
| Reading the title of a book by your uncle would be more than enough for him to get sad. | ||
| For those who haven't listened to all of our episodes, my uncle wrote a number of books about multiple personality disorder and how it's caused by satanic ritual abuse. | ||
| And the only cure is Jesus. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's not widely respected in the profession. | ||
| In the community? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He's a little bit pariah? | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| I don't know about pariah, but he's certainly not seen as a luminary. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| So I've not had a chance to see this movie, this documentary that Alex is talking about, but I watched the trailer and it looks really pretty interesting and I would be inclined to go see it. | ||
| But it's also really easy to sort out what the story of the movie is. | ||
| The documentary follows a group of people who advocate for marginalized groups and particularly against the oppression that comes disguised as Christian principle and protecting the separation of church and state. | ||
| And they formed this satanic temple in order to force the issue. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They're the ones who will be like, hey, if you're going to erect the Ten Commandments, we get to put a statue of the devil. | ||
| We'll get to that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the group the documentary follows is called the Satanic Temple, and it should be pointed out that they explicitly don't believe in a supernatural Satan. | ||
| Satan is just a metaphor that they use and a powerful symbol that they wield to get free press and demonstrate how much Christianity infringes on people's way of lives in ways that most people just accept as the default. | ||
| For instance, in 2013, they held a rally to support Florida Governor Rick Scott signing Senate Bill 98, which allowed children to pray at school in assemblies. | ||
| They rallied in support of the bill specifically to illustrate that the bill meant that if a student wanted to pray to Satan at the assembly, the school would have to let them. | ||
| They were using the tool of people's response to Satan as a way of highlighting that, you know, you're probably not cool with the idea of satanic prayer in school, and possibly maybe someone else might not be cool with any... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're describing a pendulum. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They've used the church to launch a number of purely social advocacies. | ||
| For instance, they started the Protect Children Project, where they allow parents to sign up on their website if their child goes to a school that uses corporal punishment or prolonged isolation as punishments for infractions. | ||
| After the parents register, the temple will contact the school and inform them that the punishments they're using are a violation of religious principles and post a challenge to the practice as a way of protecting these kids. | ||
| The religious principle here is that the satanic temple believes that your, quote, body is inviolable and subject only to one's own will, which is a tenet that they hope they can also use to provide religious exemptions to purely religiously based abortion laws. | ||
| So they use these things very strategically as a way to advocate. | ||
| Their works have ranged from things that are a little bit PR stunty, like when they married a gay and lesbian couple on top of Fred Phelps' mother's grave and then the satanic priest teabagged her tombstone. | ||
| Pretty funny. | ||
| A little bit stunty. | ||
| Look, tasteless? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe. | |
| Yeah, a little. | ||
| Hilarious? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It's on the more... | ||
| PR-focused end of it. | ||
| But also, the point is still... | ||
| You take away the teabagging, and maybe I'm more on board with the stunt. | ||
| How dare you take away the teabagging? | ||
| Some of them are a little bit more just directly confrontational. | ||
| On that side of things, the Satanic Temple were the ones, like you mentioned, who, after Oklahoma State Representative Mike Ritz planned to erect a monument to the Ten Commandments on state property, insisted that that meant they had the right to erect a statue of Baphomet. | ||
| They didn't want to erect this statue of Baphomet at the state capitol. | ||
| They only wanted to illustrate why they didn't want a monument to the Ten Commandments, and it worked. | ||
| The case Prescott v. | ||
| Oklahoma Capital Preservation Committee ended up getting rid of the Ten Commandments monument and then immediately the Satanic Temple dropped their plans to put up their statue. | ||
| When Arkansas planned to put up a Ten Commandments monument, the Satanists brought back out the statue and are currently in the process of challenging that one too. | ||
| The point they were driving at is very clear. | ||
| Yeah, the satanic panic, well, why not just lean into it? | ||
| Right, and use it liberal. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Which, I mean, I don't know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Members of the group don't even really have to be Satanists to join the church. | |
| As one of their New York members explains, quote, you don't even have to be a Satanist. | ||
| You could just be a strong ally who believes in the political and secular actions without being super stoked about all the aesthetic aspects. | ||
| I get what they're doing. | ||
| They're trying to fuck with right-wingers by using a lot of their tools against them. | ||
| Pretty much everything the Satanic Temple does is specifically about protecting the division of church and state and about supporting vulnerable communities, be it the LGBT community, immigrants, Planned Parenthood employees, or kids who get hit in schools. | ||
| I admittedly don't know everything about the group, but from everything I can tell, while my personal taste doesn't go for some of the theatricality, it seems like they're doing important work and are pretty effective. | ||
| Well, I mean, consider the almost certainly... | ||
| No, the unconstitutional Georgia abortion ban. | ||
| All of those things. | ||
| If you're going to have a religious exemption law for, you know... | ||
| A nurse refusing to treat a gay or lesbian patient. | ||
| If there's a religious exemption for that, then almost certainly you can argue in court that there would be a religious exemption for abortion if you were a Satanist. | ||
| Or the same logic tracks from the religious exemptions for vaccines. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| You could very easily... | ||
| My religion specifically dictates that I have control over my own body. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And this is in violation of that. | ||
| We're a federally recognized religion, tax-exempt status, all that. | ||
| So ironically, Georgia may have created a million Satanists. | ||
| Well, the devil's going to go down to Georgia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, exactly. | |
| So I see a lot of what they're doing, and again, I'm not going to bat whole cloth for the organization. | ||
| I don't know enough about their various chapters, and there could be... | ||
| I'm sure there's a bunch of assholes. | ||
| There could be some seedy shit somewhere. | ||
| I'm sure there's a bunch of assholes. | ||
| Or whatever. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| But in terms of the higher profile, bigger stuff that I'm able to find out about, it seems like stuff that I tip my hat to. | ||
| Just short of me becoming a Satanist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| I'm sure they got a turf or two right now. | ||
| But they seem to be doing some good stuff. | ||
| But Alex fucking hates them. | ||
| And he likes to pretend that he hates them because they're low-down, dirty fools, seduced into following a literal personified Lucifer. | ||
| It's pretty clear if you look into what this group does, and if you watch the trailer for this documentary, it's clear that it's mostly about their social activism. | ||
| The conclusion is pretty tough to escape that what Alex hates about them is their social conscience. | ||
| He hates that they're into providing pretty tough resistance to the merging of church and state, which Alex is pretty into. | ||
| He hates that they accept people of all sexual orientations, of all identities, of all races, and they don't think that anybody is weird. | ||
| He hates that they take the protections that his religion has exploited forever and turn them around on him, because he knows that the only argument he can really use against them is an argument that Also erodes his religion's hegemony. | ||
| They have got him trapped to a certain extent. | ||
| If he argues against whatever they're doing on a religious ground, he erodes his power. | ||
| Or he's advocating for an out-and-out theocracy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is going to crush all other religions. | |
| It's sort of forcing his hand. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so his only attack is that they're evil worshippers of a literal Satan, which is pretty lame and absolutely against their own stated... | ||
| Yeah, I have a struggle any time I recognize that people do believe in a literal Satan. | ||
| I'm always like, really? | ||
| Are we sure about a literal Satan? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I'm positive that there are some folk who do, but I've never met anybody who professes to be a Satanist who doesn't look at things as a metaphor. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| But you know what's interesting? | ||
| Those are Wiccans. | ||
| This is pretty fun. | ||
| In Hating the Satanic Temple, which is the group that the documentary is about, Alex Jones has an unlikely ally, and that is Anton LaVey's Church of Satan. | ||
| A representative of the Church of Satan has said that, quote, the Satanic Temple amounts to no more than a bunch of trolls giving Satanism a bad name and a bald quest for attention, and has called them not real Satanists. | ||
| They're giving Satanism a bad name. | ||
| My enemy is my friend. | ||
| Alex Jones and Anton LaFey are too big up against the socially progressive satanic temple. | ||
| Finally they can agree on something. | ||
| And what's weird is some of the criticisms that Alex has about them are really strangely in line with those of Peter Gilmore, the current high priest of the Church of Satan. | ||
| Alex feels that the Baphomet statue that they use as a prop in order to get rid of religious encroachment on state property... | ||
| Is a monument to pedophilia, since there are children on each side of Baphomet, the goat man. | ||
| Gilmore said the statue, quote, seems pedophilic. | ||
| Strange bedfellows, as they say. | ||
| Huh! | ||
| Alex Jones and the Church of Satan getting together. | ||
| You know, it's nice to see that they can put aside all of their myriad differences and agree to call a lot of shit pedophilic without any... | ||
| Information or care for the damage it might do. | ||
| You would think that the people who were at the Church of Satan would be more sensitive about things that lead to satanic panic. | ||
| You really do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| We should be prosecuting Satanists. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| The ones over there. | ||
| The poor ones. | ||
| I'm sure nobody else will mistake the two of us. | ||
| People don't react negatively to Satanists. | ||
| The poor ones who are trying to protect minorities. | ||
| Those are the ones who are prosecuting. | ||
| Yeah, get rid of that. | ||
| Seems to show true colors. | ||
| So I'm left with the very strong sense that Alex is triggered by watching this documentary less because they are literal Satanists, because they aren't worshipping a literal Satan. | ||
| He's more triggered by the idea that they make a very strong point of protecting the vulnerable in these populations that Alex sees as non-desirable. | ||
| Yeah, can you imagine how much pain Alex must have gone through listening to his arguments shot back at him whenever the cognitive dissonance in his brain exploded That's where we are right now. | ||
| Because he's like, shit, they're saying the same stuff I'm saying, but they're right too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck! | |
| No! | ||
| Goddammit! | ||
| My only move forward is to heavily demonize and basically manifest a satanic panic in my audience. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's the only way I'm going to spin out of this thing. | ||
| All he's got. | ||
| And that's what he does. | ||
| It's all about killing babies after they're born. | ||
| And they talk about how bad babies are and how we need to kill them and how they're scum and how we need to stop putting them up on a pedestal, how we need to trample babies. | ||
| And I was in this theater with all these Austin liberals, all these weak men, like squirming and drinking their beer and getting off of it. | ||
| And I looked at all the men and women. | ||
| They were all ugly. | ||
| The men were all super weak. | ||
| The weakest of the weak, the ugliest of the ugliest. | ||
| These are Satan's minions. | ||
| These are Satan's servants. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Knights in Satan's service. | |
| We have to bring God back into America. | ||
| We have to do it now. | ||
| So, I mean, you see right there, you have the desire to push a satanic panic narrative, and it ends with exactly what we've been talking about. | ||
| This desire to bring God into controlling the state. | ||
| It's definitely a good idea to have a theocracy right now. | ||
| Right now is the perfect time for the theocracy. | ||
| Especially when you're yelling about Islamic theocracies overseas. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| They're trying to put in Sharia law. | ||
| We just need the Ten Commandments to rule our country, right? | ||
| Completely different thing. | ||
| We need Sharia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shrikula. | |
| I don't know what that is, but it's something. | ||
| It's something. | ||
| There's something there. | ||
| I don't know what's there. | ||
| I just mentally transported to a mad TV writer's room. | ||
| We've got to crack this nut. | ||
| We're Patton Oswalt in the 90s. | ||
| There's a sketch here. | ||
| I'm going to do some more coke and we're going to figure this out. | ||
| We'll get to the bottom of it. | ||
| We won't. | ||
| Someone else will. | ||
| Somebody. | ||
| So you see that there, and Alex continues doing this throughout the episode, getting more extreme with these ideas that are really just manifestations of his inability to deal with this satanic temple as an actual intelligent... | ||
| Group that is intentionally doing these things for political reasons. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| And so he just turns it into even more ugly threats or fear. | ||
| They're not coming for your children. | ||
| They've already got your children in most cases. | ||
| So we're going to break it all down coming up today. | ||
| Very, very serious broadcast. | ||
| The enemy is highly funded. | ||
| We are not. | ||
| I try to make it easy to support us by having the best products you're going to find out there. | ||
| The Alexa Pure. | ||
| It's a great, great water filter. | ||
| Yeah, so I mean, like you see there, that's exactly this extreme. | ||
| They already have your kids. | ||
| I need some money. | ||
| I need some money because I wasted a bunch on booze at the Alamo Drafthouse last night because I got so fucking depressed by this movie. | ||
| I also bought a ticket to that movie for the Satanists and I need to recoup that. | ||
| So buy some fucking Secret 12 so I can make it up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's so annoying. | ||
| I hate that fucking, now they're killing babies after they're born. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Bullshit. | ||
| That's what Satanism's all about. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| It's such like the anti-abortion people have already used all of their other shitty lies. | ||
| So, because we're in the situation that we are where you can just say any untrue thing and everybody's going to buy it, or the people you like are going to buy it, you can just say, ah, they're killing babies. | ||
| Two years from now, they're going to be like, they're allowing abortion up to five years old! | ||
| And you're like, what are you talking about? | ||
| I wonder about how much that is, like, we've had progression of argument A, B, C, D, and now we're at, like, J. Yeah. | ||
| I wonder how much is that, and how much of it is, like, because the way you said that, I heard it as, like, they've retreated from these other arguments. | ||
| I wonder how much of it is just, like... | ||
| That's what I was saying. | ||
| This has always been the goal to get to. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's what I meant. | |
| And then next step, you know what else is killing babies? | ||
| Birth control. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| I need to get rid of all that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| That kills babies up to two years old. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because their moms had birth control when they were conceived or whatever. | ||
| I mean, it's crazy. | ||
| Like, a lot of these same things were... | ||
| Stupid ideas 20 years ago when I was listening to Loveline. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And they're still not fixed. | ||
| Did you know condoms cause cancer? | ||
| Great. | ||
| The triple C's. | ||
| These Satanists have your kids. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And you need to give Alex money in order to get your kids back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I guess. | |
| In most situations, Dan. | ||
| Makes you seem like a hostage. | ||
| Not everybody has their kids taken. | ||
| Alex is the only one who can get your kids back from these Satanists and globalists. | ||
| But you better fucking give him money or else he's not going to be able to do it. | ||
| That's a threat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's an implied threat. | |
| I never thought about it that way. | ||
| I believe he is very reminiscent of the movie Ransom. | ||
| He's like some sort of good guy who will only work for money, which makes him not a good guy. | ||
| No. | ||
| So in his next clip he talks about his enemies, these demons, these Satanists, and they want to be destroyed. | ||
| So that's good. | ||
| Oh, they secretly want to be destroyed. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay, gotcha. | ||
| But that's what these people do. | ||
| And they always want to make it uglier and uglier and uglier and uglier because they're ugly at a spiritual level and they want to project their hate of themselves onto you. | ||
| And they want to make their behavior more and more outrageous like serial killers do so they get caught, so you stop them. | ||
| They want you to stop them. | ||
| Alex. | ||
| And we are. | ||
| Listen to yourself. | ||
| Don't worry. | ||
| Because God's going to stop them. | ||
| He does ramble a little bit after this about some sort of godly retribution, but it doesn't make it better, because what he's tapping into there is, you can hurt them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They want to be hurt. | ||
| They're trying to get you to stop them. | ||
| Yeah, I think Alex is talking about himself here. | ||
| Well, you might be trying to rationalize beating up a Satanist. | ||
| Maybe he beat up a Satanist at that movie. | ||
| No, I mean, I think he's... | ||
| Oh, he wants to be stopped? | ||
| I think he's now wants to be... | ||
| He's in the stage of his career where he's like... | ||
| Facebook, just somebody actually stop me. | ||
| I'm losing so much money. | ||
| I need to be stopped because I can't do it myself. | ||
| Save me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe. | |
| Save me, someone. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I mean, that's an interesting reading of it. | ||
| I read it more as, like, justifying hurting people who you disagree with. | ||
| Yeah, that's always a safe bet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I think it's very possible that it's six of one, half a dozen of the other. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Because, you know... | ||
| There's a little flagellation going on right here. | ||
| You can... | ||
| Sort of embody a justification of hurting your political enemies and at the same time express, I am fucking out of control. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So, maybe. | ||
| So he gets off the Satanism topic and he says this next thing and this is wild. | ||
| I'm going to get into a bunch of other issues next hour on Trump and his tax returns and what's really behind that. | ||
| Trump's noble moment, waiving executive privilege on Mueller's report, something that no other president's ever done. | ||
| So first thing, he spends a long time on talking about Trump's taxes, and I don't really particularly care to talk about it, because I don't think he knows what he's talking about. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| And I don't think I fully know what he's talking about. | ||
| Because, you know, the idea of losing a lot of money when you're investing in things, I don't... | ||
| I don't know enough to talk coherently about it. | ||
| Oh yeah, no. | ||
| What are we, Jim Cramer over here? | ||
| All Alex is doing is talking about that report about how Trump lost a billion dollars. | ||
| And we could talk about that too. | ||
| I don't really think that's a good use of our time. | ||
| So I'm going to leave that alone. | ||
| Now, the part about executive privilege, Alex is directly lying. | ||
| He's saying that Trump waived executive privilege about the Mueller report, and that is 100% not true. | ||
| There was an article in The Hill from that morning, May 8th, quote, Trump declares executive privilege over Mueller report. | ||
| The issue is that Congress wants the unredacted report so they can investigate the ten instances that Mueller laid out about possible obstruction of justice. | ||
| Possible? | ||
| Interestingly, Attorney General and cover-up veteran William Barr has refused to provide them with the document, which has led the House Judiciary Committee to schedule a vote to hold Barr in contempt of Congress. | ||
| Trump's administration made it clear that they were going to assert executive privilege if they didn't cancel or delay the contempt vote, basically trying to get them not to hold Barr responsible by saying, quote, even if you do that, you're not going to get your report. | ||
| It honestly kind of feels like threatening to hurt a hostage to get your co-kidnapper out of a speeding ticket. | ||
| Not a great metaphor, but it's what came to me. | ||
| I'm going to stand by it. | ||
| This threat didn't work. | ||
| Barr was held in contempt of Congress, which for some things... | ||
| That sounds so serious really doesn't mean anything. | ||
| And Trump asserted his executive privilege, thereby debatably obstructing justice in the investigation into whether or not he previously obstructed justice. | ||
| Nothing matters anymore and the government is a circus. | ||
| Thank you! | ||
| Finally we got there. | ||
| The only point here that's important is that Alex is literally saying that Trump waived his right to executive privilege, something no president has ever done before. | ||
| Which is crazy. | ||
| When literally the opposite is true. | ||
| This is an overt, explicit example of him telling his audience that 2 plus 2 equals 5. The very same thing he accuses his opponents in the media of doing all the time. | ||
| Alex is directly lying to his audience. | ||
| And that's not something... | ||
| That's new, necessarily. | ||
| But it's often not so brazen and direct as this. | ||
| This is, like, something that is demonstrably, like, factually... | ||
| You can find out what the truth is about this, and Alex is asserting the exact opposite of that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't know on this one if he is, like, maliciously lying or wrong stupidly. | ||
| Because what he could be thinking is that... | ||
| The simple fact that we have the Mueller report at all means that Trump had to have waived his executive privilege because he could have used his executive privilege to suppress the entire report. | ||
| I think that's what he's trying to say. | ||
| It's possible that it is the result of a profoundly poor thinking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I would accept that on almost any other day, but the fact that on May 8th it was in the news, the discussion of the executive privilege vis-a-vis the Mueller report. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fair. | |
| It seems difficult for me just to think it was him dumbly misasserting something or misunderstanding the actual Mueller report's redacted release. | ||
| I kind of think it has to be... | ||
| I don't know why, though. | ||
| You know, like, that's the only thing that leads me back to your stupidity possibility. | ||
| Like, it doesn't... | ||
| Him asserting executive privilege over this isn't tough for Alex to spin. | ||
| He could do that. | ||
| He's supposed to assert executive. | ||
| Alex could just say that. | ||
| That's what presidents... | ||
| You know, Obama used to assert executive privilege all the time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yada, yada, yada. | |
| And fuck these globalists trying to jam him up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right, right. | |
| It's not a hard line to walk for him. | ||
| No collusion. | ||
| Blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| So the... | ||
| It seems to me very tough to figure out what the motive of lying directly and specifically about this is. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| Whatever the case is, he's telling his audience that reality isn't reality. | ||
| Par for the course. | ||
| Par for the course. | ||
| So, Alex has a big story. | ||
| Bigger than Satanism. | ||
| Eh, maybe not. | ||
| Satanism's pretty fucking big. | ||
| Satanism is worldwide. | ||
| I'm shocked that we got through all that Satanism stuff this quickly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I thought that was going to take maybe a week. | |
| But Alex has another story here that I honestly think is profoundly disgraceful. | ||
| And it's dehumanizing in a new way. | ||
| We already know what's going on internally. | ||
| Because... | ||
| At Facebook. | ||
| I happen to have some intel here that ties into intel we already had and why they're trying to race and why they're going as fast as they can to have AI do all the censoring, but humans still have to oversee it because AI can't understand memes. | ||
| Guess what I have here? | ||
| Memes that I printed out. | ||
| I always say I'm going to do something and I don't do it. | ||
| You guys remind me. | ||
| Star of the next hour, we'll have Dan Lyman on it. | ||
| 115. | ||
| When he said Dan Lyman was coming up, I was like, thank God. | ||
| Cakewalk. | ||
| I'm not going to have to do shit. | ||
| I have never been more wrong in my life. | ||
| That's foreshadowing for later. | ||
| That has nothing to do with this narrative. | ||
| I don't know why I paused this clip. | ||
| That's strange. | ||
| From EuropeWars.com, the amazing developments there. | ||
| I'm going to cover this. | ||
| At the start of the next hour. | ||
| And you're not going to believe it. | ||
| Well, you are going to believe it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| But do you know what's happening to the people that have to censor this show? | ||
| Can you imagine? | ||
| I was told this by executives and then I saw some news admitting it, but not saying my name. | ||
| And then this obviously breaks it down from PBS. | ||
| The SJWs that are made to watch my show, to monitor it and censor it, upwards of half of them are, quote, becoming programmed and brainwashed and then totally freaking out. | ||
| And then, quote, they are grabbing them in these facilities and taking them to mental institutions. | ||
| So, yes, big tech is an actual cult, folks. | ||
| So you heard him laughing about them being censored. | ||
| He's laughing about it? | ||
| So that's fun. | ||
| So this is a really good teachable moment. | ||
| I believe in our show. | ||
| Sometimes these things pop up and I think that they're worth demonstrating explicitly what's going on. | ||
| Alex is pretending that he has internal intelligence about what's going on at Facebook, but all he really has is something that he found on PBS. | ||
| That's all he ever has. | ||
| He has no inside information. | ||
| He has no high-level sources. | ||
| He has publicly published articles that he covers and pretends matches intelligence that he's already received. | ||
| Literally publicly funded public information. | ||
| I've seen this play out way more times than I can even count on this show, and we don't often stop to, you know, take a point of what he's doing. | ||
| So one of the other things that's important to point out is that he says that this matches intelligence that we already got. | ||
| I got this intelligence, this PBA. | ||
| Yes, yes, yes. | ||
| That the PBS article is just a transcript of an interview that they did with this guy named Casey Newton. | ||
| And it's just a conversation about an article Casey had written about content moderators back in February. | ||
| The information that Alex said it matched up with is the article that Casey wrote in The Verge in February, which is the previous intel that Alex had that this PBS article matches up with, because it's an interview with the writer of that article. | ||
| I hate him. | ||
| I hate him so much. | ||
| So that is just to explain the process of how he pretends there's sources and things match up with intel. | ||
| That is exactly what's going on here. | ||
| The PBS article, I'm sorry, it's just a transcript of this interview about the conversation about the article. | ||
| The article itself was published in The Verge, and it covers the trauma that social media moderators are experiencing on the job. | ||
| The article paints a horrifying picture of the working conditions at Cognizant, a company subcontracted by Facebook to moderate content. | ||
| It's not the same company, but Casey in the interview does make a good point, and I think it's pretty fair. | ||
| That is to say, for all intents and purposes, they are Facebook employees in everything but name. | ||
| And I think that that's a fine line to draw. | ||
| Probably legal distinctions. | ||
| Well, the government does that, like FBI does security contractors for so much work that work in the same exact office as FBI employees and that whole thing. | ||
| To say that they're Facebook employees is inaccurate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But it's... | ||
| Functionally, they have to take the orders that Facebook gives them, so... | ||
| It's a weird line. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Workers have to evaluate a constant stream of bullying content, racist content, graphic videos of murders, and all manner of other deeply disturbing things that people post on Facebook and Instagram. | ||
| The author of this piece talked to people who had experienced severe reactions from the work, from beginning to question the Holocaust to always carrying a gun even while sleeping due to threats from people whose content was being rejected. | ||
| Or at least fears of reprisals from people whose content had been censored. | ||
| The problem is compounded by Cognizant being run in a manner that sounds exactly like an abusive factory. | ||
| That doesn't surprise me. | ||
| It's a Korean animation factory. | ||
| Intense micromanagement of employees' time, what they can and can't do with their breaks, ineffectual counseling services being provided, and harsh productivity and accuracy expectations all add up to an incredibly hostile environment. | ||
| Capitalism's great. | ||
| Even if these people weren't being made to experience horrors as a part of their job. | ||
| Employees describe the experience of talking to a coworker as, quote, trauma bonding. | ||
| On bad days, employees would joke that it was time to, quote, go hang out on the roof, code for wanting to jump off it. | ||
| One employee describes how he always loved cooking, but now is afraid to be around knives, because every time he sees one, he's reminded of a video he had to moderate where a man is stabbed to death and cries out for his mother as he dies. | ||
| Holy fuck. | ||
| I'm fucked up, man. | ||
| I don't think it's possible to do the job and not come out of it with some acute stress disorder or PTSD. | ||
| This anecdote is the closest that anything in this article comes to what Alex is basing his almost gleeful reporting that, quote, basically half of the moderators are becoming brainwashed and freaking out and they're sending them to mental institutions. | ||
| They didn't send this guy to a mental institution. | ||
| He sought help because of the... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Awfulness that he had to experience. | ||
| They broadcast the Christchurch shooting for how long on Facebook Live? | ||
| Imagine if you had to watch that every day. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, maybe not. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| People reposting it every day. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Because people do. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Every single day. | ||
| Well, and to be fair, like a more nuanced interviews and things about this topic, they generally do make a point that The bulk of what they deal with is maybe a slur or bullying. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And that not the most of it is that sort of thing. | ||
| But I would respond, who cares? | ||
| Yeah, I would say enough of it is any of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can't imagine, like, I could never even come close to watching the Christchurch video. | ||
| No. | ||
| I could never even come close to it. | ||
| Seeing people die once affects you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| It doesn't matter how much of a snowflake Alex might call you for that response. | ||
| It's a response to your humanity. | ||
| The article is about the human toll that comes from running content moderation in the same way companies run customer support call centers. | ||
| It's a brutal job where people are expected to see awful things, or they're exposed to awful things that make an impact on them, no matter how sensitive they may be. | ||
| And the greatest indictment of this article is not on the people posting fucked up stuff. | ||
| It's of Facebook and it's subcontracting companies for not doing a better job of taking care of their employees. | ||
| They talk about how the idea that you can have these horrible reactions to the work that you're made to do, but because the work is really awful and the place is run poorly, most Yeah. | ||
| like eight months. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then you leave and the consequences linger. | |
| And a place where you worked for eight months isn't going to pay for you to go get help. | ||
| Nope. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So these are the issues that are coming up in this article that it's... | |
| Pretty much the middle finger at these companies and the way they're doing business. | ||
| Yeah, it has to be... | ||
| It's very... | ||
| Alex only exists in it... | ||
| Well, first of all, not at all specifically. | ||
| It's mostly about murder videos. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| Stuff like that. | ||
| And then he only exists as a phantom as a... | ||
| It's a byproduct of doing business. | ||
| They don't even give a shit about the idea of him as some sort of monster or anything like that. | ||
| It's about the companies. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| They're basically predators. | ||
| They grab people who need work and then they fucking throw them away. | ||
| That's basically, here's my job. | ||
| I wake up, I get tortured all day, and then I go home. | ||
| Maybe not all day, but most of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's what the article's about, and there's a real human piece to it that I think is an important conversation we need to have, and if Alex were willing to engage with that conversation, he'd be able to score points against Facebook if he was actually looking at what was being discussed, but he's not. | ||
| Because? | ||
| They're exhibiting weakness, which means he'd rather attack the people who are victims than the predators. | ||
| But I don't think he's even doing that. | ||
| I think he's a monster. | ||
| Because these are real people whose lives are being altered, not an opportunity for him to make everything about his perceived plight and score a cheap self-serving point for himself. | ||
| Because that's what I think he's doing. | ||
| He's trying to make this argument that... | ||
| And he's going to get into it more later. | ||
| He's using this story as kind of a rationale that he's right about things. | ||
| And that's the wrong way to look at this. | ||
| I would say. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The interview Casey Newton did on PBS literally had nothing to do with Alex Jones. | |
| Alex never came up. | ||
| The conversation was just a discussion of this investigative piece on the moderation factory. | ||
| So that's the only... | ||
| Alex is just making this about himself. | ||
| Alex is just one of the people deplatformed that they obliquely mentioned up top. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, in this next clip, I just want to play this for you to understand that this is what... | ||
| Like, we now kind of have an understanding of the article and the source material that he's talking about, and here is how he talks about it. | ||
| They're Baker acting people at Facebook and at Twitter and other places. | ||
| That when they tell them I'm a Nazi and then they go watch years of my show, these people can absolutely finally find their soul and go, oh my god, Alex Jones didn't do any of this stuff. | ||
| So that is the angle and the narrative that he's using. | ||
| These people who are suffering these horrible consequences of being exposed to things like videos of people being shot. | ||
| And in addition to that, some racist and hateful content in written form. | ||
| And a lot of people, there is a tendency towards, when you're not examining things that are being brought into your sphere, there is a tendency towards just automatic acceptance of them. | ||
| When you're exposed to conspiracy content on a bombarding basis, which this is set up to be, because there are quotas and you have an expectation of doing a ton of work, you will just be exposed to these ideas for a very brief... | ||
| You won't be able to critically analyze them because you've got to get on to your next piece of content that you have to moderate. | ||
| So there is something that overrides your critical thinking skills and your ability to look into a claim that's made. | ||
| So you'll just see Muslims want to kill everybody. | ||
| Muslims want to kill everybody. | ||
| And if you're not careful of your default, you could let your guard down and eventually buy into a lot of ideas that aren't true. | ||
| So Alex is using that Reality, as... | ||
| They're exposed to my content, and then they realize that I'm right about everything, and then they're getting baker-acted in sentimental institutions because shit isn't going the way that the SJW globalists wanted it to. | ||
| They want to label me as some sort of an evil force, but everybody who sees me, they know that they're wrong and I'm right. | ||
| Well, I'm living proof. | ||
| I've been listening to you every day for two and a half years, and I have not been baker-acted. | ||
| No. | ||
| I've not gone crazy, necessarily. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I've also... | |
| There have been moments. | ||
| You're doing alright. | ||
| There were some bad moments early on. | ||
| But because I have the time to look into his claims and I have the time to deal with what he is actually saying and look into historical context... | ||
| I listen to more of his show than anybody, probably, and I come away with it with no indication that he's right about anything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I'm living proof that that argument does not work. | ||
| Yeah, because you're not a droog living in clockwork orange every day. | ||
| I mean, if I had to do 300 of these episodes, that's insane. | ||
| No, that's impossible. | ||
| If I had the sort of time constraints of... | ||
| Someone who worked in a place like that Cognizant office. | ||
| I couldn't do this show the way that I do. | ||
| And I think I probably would have lost your mind. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Because imagine you didn't have any larger context and it was just... | ||
| Short little clips of him saying something very confidently that's untrue. | ||
| Just bombarding you constantly over and over and over again. | ||
| These short clips without context. | ||
| And you're just, eventually it's going to infect your brain. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Especially when it's slick. | ||
| There's money behind it. | ||
| The propaganda has craft to it. | ||
| It's very dangerous. | ||
| And we're starting to understand that. | ||
| I don't think that people really knew that that would be a byproduct of... | ||
| The attempts to moderate content online, but at the same time, without those people... | ||
| We'd have more people. | ||
| We would have unusable social media platforms, basically. | ||
| They would be destroyed by, well, videos of murders. | ||
| Yeah, imagine everywhere was 4chan. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's a post-apocalyptic wasteland. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's a fair assessment. | ||
| And so what actually this guy, Casey Newton, was arguing for is, or maybe not even arguing for, but suggesting one approach would be to treat these people who work in these... | ||
| centers the same way that you treat EMTs and give them more benefits give them higher pay Have an in-house counselor, for God's sake. | ||
| Well, they do, but apparently it's very ineffectual. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay. | ||
| And not available a lot of the time and whatever. | ||
| But yeah, absolutely. | ||
| That mental health resource would be very important. | ||
| Treat them like they're doing a service for society, because in many ways they are. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I don't think there's much room to argue against that. | ||
| No, I absolutely agree with you. | ||
| And I think that Alex gets a lot of mileage out of turning it into being about himself, as opposed to it being about beheading videos and, you know, shootings. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I mean, think every time you go on Facebook, it's because of a moderator that I'm maybe not seeing a murder right now. | ||
| Or crying. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Alex can make an argument when he makes it about himself, because that's safe. | ||
| You'd be like, they're doing all this to attack me, right or there. | ||
| But he knows on some level that the argument as it really stands, which is about horrors, he can't make that argument. | ||
| He needs to make that argument if he wants this to be compelling and successful, but he can't. | ||
| So he makes it about himself and... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he might as well come out and be like, I used to watch Faces of Death before I went to sleep every night. | ||
| I'm sure he did. | ||
| You know, for sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, in this next clip, I think Alex kind of realized that that was a dead end, and he didn't really want to get into it. | ||
| He does get back into it a little bit later, like towards the end of the episode. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Gotta get back into Satanists. | |
| Come on. | ||
| You bet. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| So, in this next clip, Alex talks about how the Satanists are correct about one thing, and that is that God wants blood. | ||
| Well, the bottom-feeding, lowest-of-low Satanist that worked with Hollywood and the real Satanist to produce Hail Satan... | ||
| Hail Satan. | ||
| ...got one thing right in their film, and that's when Abraham is going to kill his own son that God gave him to show total and complete loyalty, that it's God that does the killing. | ||
| And God that delivers the vengeance. | ||
| And God that demands blood. | ||
| We should get a different God. | ||
| I'm not a huge fan of his. | ||
| His God is weird. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There is a thing that he says a little bit later. | ||
| Sort of trying, I think maybe trying to wiggle out of how extreme that sounds. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| He wants blood of the good soldiers fighting the good fight. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure, Alex. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Whatever. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So in this next clip, Alex explains that he knows Satanism better than literal Satanists. | ||
| That seems odd. | ||
| These people would never get within a mile or never know about real Satanism or real Luciferianism. | ||
| I have seen it. | ||
| Now let's continue. | ||
| Let's. | ||
| What, did he just veer into a PowerPoint presentation? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, next slide. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that's weird, certainly. | ||
| Wait, he's talking about the Satanic Temple and comparing them to the actual Satanists, right? | ||
| So what he's saying is... | ||
| He wants his cake and to eat it, too. | ||
| Right, and he's saying that they're not real Luciferians. | ||
| Well, he's saying that the people in the documentary are at the behest of Satan, and they're working for literal Satan, and worship literal Satan, but they're also the sucked-dry minions of true Satanists who are rich people. | ||
| Goddammit, it takes a long time to get through his ideas. | ||
| It does. | ||
| I am tired. | ||
| Well, in this next clip, I think he gets to talking about what the version of real Satanism looks like. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it turns out it's basically just sexual honey traps. | ||
| To the old Satanism model, the sexy, beautiful, voluptuous woman to lure in businessmen and powerful people and to really, that's real Satanism. | ||
| Cults. | ||
| This is meant to be stunted. | ||
| Dead-eyed, super weak, and shown as powerful because they've already gotten the giant masses of leftists to be soulless and have no connection to God, and so they'll never know what hit them when the devil tells you at the start, we don't believe in the devil, we don't believe in God. | ||
| Get rid of that actor, I do believe in devil, I'm God. | ||
| I wrote in the title of this clip... | ||
| This doesn't make sense. | ||
| No, I really need to... | ||
| What did he say again? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It has to do with tricking atheists into becoming Satanists. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't fucking... | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| Who cares? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Who cares? | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| The real Satanism is sexual, busty women making honey traps for businessmen. | ||
| Because I, Jordan, I have seen the devil's advocate. | ||
| I have seen Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves and Charlize Theron and I know how the devil works. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's kind of exactly like the devil's advocate. | ||
| And this is basically the queen of the damned? | ||
| It's nonsense. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| So in this next clip, I think he expresses... | ||
| More, the idea that I was putting forth that what he is responding to in these people in this Hail Satan documentary, which by the way, I should point out, it's Hail Satan question mark. | ||
| Hail Satan! | ||
| Hail Satan! | ||
| Even in the title, there's a little bit of ambivalence. | ||
| But I believe that what he's responding to in them is a resentment and an opposition to them because of their interest in equality. | ||
| And I look at the people in this film and you can see they're gone. | ||
| There's no one left there. | ||
| Lowest of the low. | ||
| Lowest level. | ||
| And this is who they will march out against you in the public schools. | ||
| You think drag queen story time, remember the same people's bed? | ||
| They are having Satanism clubs with your children, with them sitting on their laps right now. | ||
| And that's what the Bathament statue with the children is all about. | ||
| Bathament destroying the next generation. | ||
| And it's a celebration of the death of children. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yikes. | |
| The music behind that makes me want now, now it's an instant, like, Patton's speech, the inspirational swelling music behind it, just overlay it with what Alex said right there. | ||
| See, I see it more, visually, what I see when I hear that is, like, good, bad, and the ugly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| I see Alex drawing, like having a duel with the devil. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Like a literal fucking boring Satan. | ||
| Two of them, 20 paces and turn. | ||
| That's what I see. | ||
| Now I want to do a Hail Satan with a period, and it's just about a cab driver named Satan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh! | |
| I think I'd love that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| That'd be wonderful. | ||
| He could drive all kinds of interesting people around. | ||
| I was trying to figure out a way to make that meat substitute. | ||
| It'd be an indie movie like My Dinner with Andre. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So what Alex is doing is really trying to drum up a satanic panic. | ||
| Like, that's really what he's doing. | ||
| It's pretty overt. | ||
| It's pretty gross. | ||
| It's really... | ||
| It's dumb. | ||
| It shouldn't be allowed. | ||
| It's 2019. | ||
| Maybe the Satanic Panic made more sense in the 70s when everybody was stupid. | ||
| And everybody was still coming off the high of the whole thing, so Satanist is probably fine. | ||
| But it's 2019, 50 years later. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| Jordan, I have bad news for you. | ||
| What? | ||
| First of all, you're stupid. | ||
| Fair. | ||
| The satanic panic was real. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I mean, it was real. | ||
| Not in the sense that we understand it to have been real. | ||
| It was actual demons and the devil. | ||
| Well, then where have they been for the past, what? | ||
| They've been hanging out. | ||
| But we didn't talk about them for like 35 years or whatever. | ||
| They were biding their time. | ||
| They were hibernating. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But here's the thing. | ||
| They're like cicadas. | ||
| Dude, the satanic panic was real. | ||
| Satan. | ||
| Demons really trying to get in the mix. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And Alex has one piece of evidence that he's going to present in this next clip of how real the satanic panic was. | ||
| And man, this is bad evidence. | ||
| Dungeons and Dragons. | ||
| Oh, there was the big freakout of the 1980s about the Satanism invasion. | ||
| And Geraldo Rivera and all of it. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, I was living during that period in one of the wealthiest areas of the country. | ||
| And wherever you get around wealth, you find Satanism. | ||
| And the Satanist I knew had private jets and helicopters. | ||
| And Mark Dice had it happen. | ||
| They were offering him a national TV show with a member of Motley Crue. | ||
| The Motley Crue guy wasn't like this. | ||
| He's actually a pretty good guy. | ||
| Which one? | ||
| And the major director got Mark Dice in a meeting room and said, You're a Christian, aren't you, Sol Dice? | ||
| It's his full name. | ||
| And he goes, yeah. | ||
| He goes, yeah, well, we're going to give you this national TV show and all this money, but we want you to... | ||
| Renounce Jesus Christ, and we want you to worship Lucifer. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| Mark says, is this a joke? | ||
| The guy said, no, I want you to pray with me right now. | ||
| And Mark said, are you just messing with me? | ||
| He goes, no, I'm serious. | ||
| I am 100% messing with you. | ||
| You understand that, folks? | ||
| That didn't happen. | ||
| If your story about... | ||
| Like, Satanism being real is that Mark Dice told you a story. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| Also, again, it must be so good to work for Alex when you can tell him stories like that and believe it. | ||
| Here's what really happened. | ||
| He didn't get the job. | ||
| But you can't do that. | ||
| You just gotta tell him it was Satanist. | ||
| That's why I didn't take the job. | ||
| A big part of your brand as a con man is not really having... | ||
| Losses in your background. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So every loss has to be recontextualized as a win. | ||
| And so, yeah, you don't get this job. | ||
| I mean, who knows? | ||
| Show business is really fucking tough. | ||
| You can be really talented and not get something. | ||
| It's not a shame to you personally, or it shouldn't be. | ||
| I mean, you should start worshipping Lucifer anyways. | ||
| Well, I mean, that's implied, I think. | ||
| That's the point of our show, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, Mark Dice has to turn that around because it's a sign of weakness that you weren't, you know, he feels it's a projection of I'm not good enough to have gotten this show. | ||
| So, in reality, it was a situation where this guy told me I needed to worship Satan in order to get this TV show, and I said no because I have principles. | ||
| Bullshit. | ||
| Mark, though, I mean, you don't want to do a show with a washed-up Motley Crue member. | ||
| Might not have been washed up. | ||
| You don't know what year this was? | ||
| Okay, that's possible. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What was it, 87? | ||
| The time frame would have to be really interesting, too, because Mark Dices had a lot of fucking scams in his life. | ||
| He used to run a memory scam, like improve your memory. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| He also used to be a pickup artist scam guy. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Yeah, before he really landed on the... | ||
| Getting on ancient aliens and talking about Illuminati. | ||
| Went by the codename John Connor online for a while. | ||
| He did not. | ||
| He did. | ||
| Don't even tell me that. | ||
| He is a pile of shit. | ||
| He is a nerd. | ||
| He's been all over the place in terms of these scams. | ||
| So I'd like to know when this happened in the chronology of it. | ||
| Because that would probably be worth noting. | ||
| That I imagine this story only exists in service of his... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Later career Christian defense. | |
| Yeah, somewhere in there. | ||
| So lest you think that Alex was just implying that the satanic panic was real, here you go. | ||
| So they tell you there wasn't a satanic invasion in the 80s, which there was, but now we are taking over and we're going to overturn Christianity for free speech when the left is all anti-free speech and this very satanic group is anti-Alex Jones and doesn't think I should be on the air. | ||
| They don't care. | ||
| A lot of people are mad that they might overturn Roe v. | ||
| Wade, but what we should really be scared of is if they overturn God v. | ||
| the devil. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Satanism is going to overturn Christianity. | |
| Such bullshit. | ||
| First of all, it was a demonic invasion. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, anybody who looks into it just a little bit knows the, like, oh my god, fingerprints of demons everywhere. | ||
| Haven't you seen the amazing Keanu Reeves movie, Constantine? | ||
| Haven't you seen the amazing Keanu Reeves movie, Devil's Advocate? | ||
| Haven't you seen the amazing... | ||
| Never mind. | ||
| We could do this all day. | ||
| A lot of movies about devils. | ||
| Haven't you seen anything with Gabriel Byrne? | ||
| So, you might wonder about the nature of the devil. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| In this next clip, I literally found this to be one of the more troubling clips I've ever heard Alex say. | ||
| This is part one of the things that I find really disturbing. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This is the first one, and then the next, later in the episode, there will be the one that I truly find disturbing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| This is more just insane. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That's where Silicon Valley came from. | ||
| It's where it all came from, just like God said. | ||
| The devil is a fallen, ancient entity imprisoned on this planet. | ||
| God did not say that. | ||
| And is testing us, and God allows that to happen, because we have free will. | ||
| And the devil knows about a lot of ancient technology that God has built before, remain in the image of God. | ||
| And so the devil doesn't even really know how to do it all. | ||
| The devil comes to us and tells us what's been done before. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| You're getting the big, deep stuff here, folks. | ||
| What? | ||
| This is the big, deep stuff, is that the devil is trapped on Earth by God, which God told us. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he knows a lot about the past, and there have been a lot of ancient civilizations that have been highly technologically advanced, I guess. | ||
| So he knows about those technologies, but he doesn't know how to build anything. | ||
| And so he can seduce people to create Silicon Valley with promises of this ancient technology that is actually futuristic to us. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But God says all this. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This is nuts. | ||
| I'm glad you cleared that up for me. | ||
| This is nuts. | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| I got it. | ||
| I realize that the ultimate plan of the universe makes perfect sense. | ||
| When Alex says you're getting the big, deep stuff here, that's really upsetting. | ||
| Because that means that on some level, he's presenting this as information that he believes, but has held back. | ||
| He doesn't want to give you all of it. | ||
| This is stuff you've got to work for. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's fucked up. | ||
| That's fucked up. | ||
| Well, I mean, look, you don't want to just... | ||
| Look, if you come out on a first date and say that you believe we're locked into a struggle of good and evil and that the devil is somewhere entrapped underneath the earth because God did it for whatever reason he has, we have free will, although that means he's not a Calvinist. | ||
| That we can rule out there. | ||
| I suppose so. | ||
| He's more of an Augustinian. | ||
| Then, you know, you're not going to get a second date. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You wait 20... | ||
| Four years into your marriage to really get that one out there. | ||
| Now, honey, I should tell you. | ||
| Do you know what I've been keeping in my backyard? | ||
| Honey, the devil's in a hole. | ||
| He gave me a calculator. | ||
| Now I must build. | ||
| All right. | ||
| This is fucking stupid. | ||
| So, Alex believes that there are a lot of Satanists at Democratic events, or more accurately, the people who are at Democratic events are Satanists. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It depends on how you want to track the inference entirely, but I think he's going to say something really stupid here, but I think if you really listen to it, there's a better way to understand what he's saying. | ||
| I'll talk about that on the other end. | ||
| But remember, if you go to a Democratic Party event, the people look... | ||
| They look scared. | ||
| They look soulless. | ||
| They look like they're lost. | ||
| And that's the high end. | ||
| Half of them, or the low side, are crazed and screaming and shaking with hatred. | ||
| And they believe that those of you who have the light of God in your eyes are the enemy, and if they could simply extinguish that light, then they could finally have power. | ||
| In their search for power, they have found the opposite of power. | ||
| They found the dead space. | ||
| The Phantom Zone. | ||
| And now their only wish is to take us with them. | ||
| I would posit that I think that that clip is perfectly understood if you look through what he's saying as a defense of white supremacy. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Because what he's talking about is people at liberal rallies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They are gone. | ||
| The devil has taken over them because they're on a quest for power. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So if you understand that, you know, people who are at, let's say, a Black Lives Matter rally that Alex seems to hate, or the Women's March. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The versions of power that they're trying to take are more liberations from societal oppression. | ||
| It's more about making things equitable than it is taking power over white, straight, male Christians. | ||
| The contextualization of these calls for equality as being trying to take power over us, it's purely a defense of a system wherein... | ||
| Straight, white, male Christians are seen as the de facto default thing that the society works for and where the power lies. | ||
| I thought he was just criticizing Danny's turn into burning down. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No fucking spoilers! | |
| No spoilers! | ||
| I've seen it, but I don't know what the audience has. | ||
| It's Daenerys? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, I think people can figure out from there. | ||
| Sorry if you were waiting. | ||
| I don't know why you would be, but just in case. | ||
| Well, Elizabeth Warren came out today against people who are mad about spoilers, so she once again is the best. | ||
| Me and Elizabeth Warren are at Loggerheads. | ||
| I'm not mad about spoilers, but I don't know who's listening. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| I don't think that my thought is too far off. | ||
| No, I agree. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| Outside of the facetious nature, I do agree with you. | ||
| Obviously that's not what Alex is saying, but underneath what he's saying, the effect of what he's trying to communicate to his audience, the people he's trying to get them to not like, and the reason he's trying to get them to not like them, it tracks, if you understand the code that he's using as being the defense of white defaultism. | ||
| Or whatever. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Straight, white, male, Christian, absolute... | ||
| Supremacy. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, there's room for, you know, semantic... | ||
| At the very least, he supports ethno-nationalism. | ||
| Yeah, there's room for semantic debate, but I'm going to leave it be. | ||
| So, he gets done talking about Satan for now. | ||
| I bet it comes back up. | ||
| But he's mad about Facebook and Instagram kicking him off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, of course. | |
| And I thought initially that that was what was really making him depressed at the beginning of the episode. | ||
| And it might have been. | ||
| It might have been a part of it. | ||
| Because he complains about how we need to break up Facebook and social media. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Just like Teddy Roosevelt broke up the railroads because there was a monopoly. | ||
| And I can't tell you how excited I am about how this clip goes. | ||
| Mic down. | ||
| You know, back in the days of Teddy Roosevelt was a pretty good president. | ||
| He said, bully! | ||
| The railroads won't let their competition pay to ship their own fruit or their own cattle when there's room? | ||
| That's a monopoly. | ||
| We're going to break that up. | ||
| He told... | ||
| Northern Pacific and all of them, you're going to ship people's products. | ||
| Or I'm going to have your ass arrested. | ||
| That's a private business. | ||
| They can do whatever they want. | ||
| The big railroads advertise. | ||
| They got open land. | ||
| They got all the exemptions. | ||
| They got liability protection to open up the West and have commerce. | ||
| And then once they had the railroads coast to coast, they started saying, there's even like a gun smoke on it I saw once that's based on true stories where they want to ship the peaches. | ||
| A thousand miles. | ||
| And the kids' dads died. | ||
| I'm going from memory. | ||
| The kids' dads died. | ||
| Was it a gun smoker or was it a bonanza? | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| I can't tell you how much I fucking love that. | ||
| One, I say, was it gun smoker bonanza? | ||
| All the time. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| So many references. | ||
| First thing I should probably tell you is just right off top that Gunsmoke and Bonanza are not documentaries. | ||
| The second thing that I should point out is that those are two of the most boring as shit. | ||
| We're just trying to figure out how to make TV shows in this era. | ||
| Racist as hell programs ever to air. | ||
| Gunsmoke ran for 20 seasons, but it ended its run when Alex was one year old. | ||
| Bonanza ran for 14 and was done before Alex was ever born. | ||
| Man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, on the other hand, somehow I can reference Gunsmoke and Bonanza all too often, and it ended long before I was born. | ||
| Well, I mean, sure, they ran in reruns that bored the shit out of you as a kid. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. | ||
| Gunsmoke was mostly a show about a lawman being forced to make hard choices. | ||
| Going over the list of episodes they put out, there's a curiously high incidence of plots of episodes surrounding white children who were raised by Native Americans. | ||
| Something that must have been a hot topic back in the 50s when this show was created. | ||
| As much as I'd love to talk about Bonanza a little, this was definitely a Gunsmoke episode that Alex is thinking of. | ||
| He's referencing episode 472, which is less about a railroad monopoly as it is about corporate eminent domain. | ||
| Nicholas is kind of mixing topics up a little. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| He's close enough for peaches, as they say. | ||
| That episode aired 51 years ago, so it's pretty relevant. | ||
| I'm going to be the first to openly admit here, you know, I like to be very open and clear, even when I have to admit that my research went astray. | ||
| And this is one of those cases. | ||
| Later in the episode, actually in the next clip we're going to hear, Alex is going to make clear that he's talking about that episode 472, but before he did, I started trying to solve the mystery of what episode he was talking about. | ||
| I came across an episode from season 4 called Monopoly, which had to do with a goods transporting business, so I figured it must be what he was talking about. | ||
| In the end, it wasn't the right episode, and I accept that. | ||
| However, I did watch an episode of Gunsmoke in preparation for this episode. | ||
| There's no way I'm not going to not tell you about it. | ||
| The episode was originally aired on October 4th, 1958. | ||
| It's called Monopoly, and truth be told, it has barely anything to do with a monopoly. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I think that this is important, even though this isn't the right episode, to walk you through how gun smoke plots aren't about what they're about. | ||
| If that makes sense, it will in a minute. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Sheriff Matt Dillon comes to work one day to find a lovable local character sleeping off a wicked drinking binge in the town holding cell. | ||
| The drunk wakes up, and as he's leaving, Dillon gives him his gun back, which is almost certainly what Alex was referencing when he recently claimed that back in the 50s, the cops would give you your guns back when you got out of prison. | ||
| Holy shit! | ||
| Small clarification, though. | ||
| This show was made in the 1950s, but it's set in Dodge City, Kansas, in the 1870s. | ||
| That does sound right. | ||
| So back in the 1870s, in the Old West, they gave you your gun. | ||
| But the show was made in the 50s, Alex. | ||
| So what kind of racism would they be if it's set in the 1870s? | ||
| What racism was there? | ||
| Lots. | ||
| All of them? | ||
| Seems to be a real hard swing at Asians. | ||
| Asian American immigrants. | ||
| There seems to be a lot of episodes where they're dealt with as particularly weird. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which makes me pretty uncomfortable. | ||
| Deadwood. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So this drunk has given his gun back, and he apologizes for being so drunk the night before, and says he only drank because he had just sold off his freighting business, and so had pretty much all the other mule and wagon cargo people in town. | ||
| The mysterious Mr. Ivy had come to town from St. Louis, as they insist on calling it every single time. | ||
| They call it St. Louis. | ||
| St. Louis. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| And he's buying up everyone's businesses. | ||
| So Dylan goes to meet with Ivy at his lodging, and he finds out that he's hired Cam Spiegel as his bodyguard. | ||
| Alright, I like me a good Cam Spiegel. | ||
| Dylan and Spiegel have a history, you see. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Spiegel had shot a man in the back years ago in Wichita. | ||
| No! | ||
| And he got away with it because Dylan just didn't have the evidence to convict him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| They cared about evidence in the 1860s in Wichita? | ||
| Apparently they fucking did. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So now Spiegel's come to Dodge City and he's working for Ivy. | ||
| This doesn't look good. | ||
| But Dylan doesn't really seem to care at all, except to say to Ivy, hey, hiring this guy's bad news, it's going to be trouble. | ||
| And then he leaves the hotel room. | ||
| Oh, and then they just move on? | ||
| Okay, cool. | ||
| Just basically gives him a warning of like, hey, by the time that he becomes a problem, it might be too late. | ||
| That's basically all he does. | ||
| So the last freight runner who hasn't sold out, a man by the name of Joe Trimble, he comes to Dylan because he's received a note from Ivy, but it turns out he's illiterate and needs Dylan to read it for him. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Plot twist. | ||
| Ivy wants to buy his company for $1,000, which even with inflation considered would only be a little bit less than $20,000 today. | ||
| It's a nice little chunk of change, but if you're running a business that sustains you, it's not like that's going to be some kind of luxurious all-be-set-for-life money. | ||
| Definitely not. | ||
| Probably because that's not that much money. | ||
| Trimble turns down the offer. | ||
| Ivy later tells him that he's going to double his rates and that Trimble needs to as well because if he doesn't, his lower rates will cause a flood of demand that he can't handle. | ||
| This doesn't make a lot of sense, but it doesn't matter because I have to stress, this is not a huge part of the episode. | ||
| It's only there to be window dressing for the feud between Sheriff Matt Dillon and Cam Spiegel. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Long story short, Cam Spiegel burns down Trimble's house, which kills Trimble's wife. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh boy! | |
| And he pays a saloon girl $300 to be his alibi. | ||
| Jesus! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It takes a harsh turn. | ||
| This is Roadhouse! | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| This is crazy! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What, is Patrick Swayze going to rip Spiegel's throat out? | ||
| I have to stress that even with this craziness, this is still super boring as a TV show. | ||
| So he pays this saloon girl $300. | ||
| I used to fuck Dylan in prison. | ||
| The saloon girl can't go for that shit because people around these parts love the Trimbles. | ||
| Although IMDB tells me that this character only appeared in this episode. | ||
| But that doesn't stop the actor who played him from appearing four more times as different characters on Gunsmoke. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Gunsmoke was the law and order of its day. | ||
| They wouldn't even allow five appearances by the same actor, I think. | ||
| Either way, the saloon girl tells Dylan about the bribe, and he's about to go confront Cam Spiegel about this when he gets news that Spiegel has shot Joe Trimble at the local saloon. | ||
| Again? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Jesus, he has taken the Trimbles out one by one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dylan goes to check things out and Spiegel claims self-defense saying that, you know, Trimble had come in and drew his gun on him. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And then Dylan says that Trimble had a good reason to draw on him since he had burned down his house and killed his wife. | ||
| Spiegel says he has an alibi. | ||
| Dylan tells him no. | ||
| He knows about the bribe. | ||
| Dylan tells him he's going to jail and he needs to lay his gun down and they'll let a court decide about the arson. | ||
| Spiegel starts to draw on Dylan, and Dylan shoots him dead. | ||
| The town doctor, Doc, who's there, he comments, quote, it's just as well he probably would have won in court, which is a fucked up response to watching a cop kill a guy. | ||
| Okay, oh boy. | ||
| So it's been there all along, Dan. | ||
| It's been there all along. | ||
| That was such a crazy response to see. | ||
| Well, probably would have been fine anyways. | ||
| Nope, he would have gotten away with it. | ||
| After all this drama, Ivy claims he knew nothing about Spiegel's actions, and Dylan tells him that he needs to get the fuck out of town. | ||
| The citizens of that town will kill him on sight because they love the Trimbles, who, I repeat, have not appeared in the previous 120 episodes of this show, nor in the 480 episodes of its 11-year run as a radio drama, which I stress is about a small town. | ||
| Ivy is terrified. | ||
| He runs out the back door with his tail between his legs, never to be seen again, explicitly leaving behind the companies that he had bought out. | ||
| Obviously, the first issue is that at no point in this episode does Matt Dillon care about Okay. | ||
| All he only cares about cam Spiegel and writing the wrongs of Wichita. | ||
| Okay Hmm. | ||
| It seems like they should have paid more. | ||
| Wait, so he's just... | ||
| He's missing the point of becoming a monopoly in the first place. | ||
| So he's calling the guy stupid when the guy's buying up all these businesses just to jack up the rates to make it more profitable. | ||
| God damn it! | ||
| I am frustrated. | ||
| I don't think these 1870s sheriffs were that smart. | ||
| No, that's somewhat implied by the subtext of the episode, but Matt Dillon doesn't give a fuck about that. | ||
| He doesn't care at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I like that. | |
| Now, the natural problem that the ending of this episode introduces is now that with Trimble dead and Ivy ran out of town, you go from an attempted monopoly to literally no one in the city having a transportation business. | ||
| The people who got bought out aren't given the chance to buy their shit back from Ivy Yeah, that sounds right. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Reality from. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And the way things should be. | ||
| That's not the episode that Alex was talking about. | ||
| But I didn't want my time to have been wasted. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| It was very entertaining. | ||
| And one of the other important things to point out is that Teddy Roosevelt and trust-busting is a thing. | ||
| It is real. | ||
| And yet, Roosevelt directed the Justice Department to sue the Northern Securities Company, which had become a railroad monopoly. | ||
| But it's an unhealthy thing to give him sole credit for busting the monopoly up, because Congress was involved as well. | ||
| It's inappropriate to look at the unitary executive ideas. | ||
| No, it's always a good idea to look at the executive as being the... | ||
| I'm the prime mover behind all positive or negative. | ||
| Well, I mean, Congress even said explicitly that the executive branch shouldn't be in the business of deciding what is or is not a monopoly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, whatever. | ||
| It's not under their purview. | ||
| Also, it's true that Roosevelt was involved in this trust-busting and shit, but it would be unfair to ignore that it wasn't his presidency that was the entirety of the progressive era, and that more trusts were busted up during Taft's tenure in office than during Roosevelt's. | ||
| So, he doesn't give much of that credit because he was too fat and got stuck in a bathtub. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's all people remember. | ||
| Yeah, there's no way that people are going to give Taft credit for that. | ||
| So in this next clip, Alex talks about the Gunsmoke episode that he was talking about. | ||
| But you read history books, that's all over the place. | ||
| And then you know where they, Louis L 'Amour and others, you've got those ideas that are in those Western books that are fiction. | ||
| None of that stuff's fiction. | ||
| They've just gone and rewritten old newspaper articles. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| They went and found the library. | ||
| What? | ||
| And want to ship your peaches. | ||
| That old western, I think his dad had died, his mom had died. | ||
| He wanted to keep the little farm, and the big local corrupt guy wanted to take it because it had water and holes on it or whatever, and then he goes to the railroad and makes a deal with them where they won't ship his peaches. | ||
| There are similarities. | ||
| A thousand miles so he can make the money to save his farm. | ||
| But in the end, he loads them up in a wagon, takes them a month or so to get there. | ||
| The guy sends bandits to stop him. | ||
| But they get stopped, and then when he gets there, he thinks all the peaches are dead and rotten, but under the first layer, all the peaches are alive. | ||
| Pretty good story. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| The peaches are still not bad. | ||
| They're still ripening. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Those are real stories, though. | ||
| That isn't just Gunsmoke or Bonanza that you're watching. | ||
| That isn't just Gunsmoke or Bonanza that you're sitting there looking at. | ||
| This is the real world, folks. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| I was not able to find that episode of Gunsmoke because I was going to try and, like, right the wrongs of my bad research into the other episode. | ||
| But it's not available online anywhere that I can find. | ||
| But I did read a review of it, and it's 100% about eminent domain. | ||
| So if Alex wanted to talk about it that way, I think it's fine. | ||
| But it doesn't really have to do with the monopolies and the idea of breaking up Facebook. | ||
| So anyway, he gets off that topic. | ||
| And I teased earlier, like I said, that first clip where Alex is talking about the devil being trapped on Earth with ancient technologies. | ||
| Yeah, God said that. | ||
| God told us that. | ||
| That was where I was like, this is insane. | ||
| This is troubling. | ||
| This next clip, I legitimately think, is one of the more disturbed things I've ever heard Alex say. | ||
| This clip is fucked up. | ||
| If you think people are dumb and evil and stupid now, you haven't seen anything yet. | ||
| If you think devil worshippers all over the news saying we're going to come to your school and talk to your kids whether you like it or not is bad and we're going to kill babies after they're born. | ||
| If you think that's bad in 2019, Bubba, you ain't seen nothing yet. | ||
| Because before the globalist can release the bioweapons, God has to remove his protection. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| The devil would nuke this planet in 10 seconds if God removed his protection. | ||
| And God is going to remove the protection. | ||
| But for one hour. | ||
| What? | ||
| One hour and we're going to be ready before... | ||
| Hunters, anglers, campers... | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is the funniest... | |
| That is the funniest time for it to be cut off. | ||
| The fact that he's a bad... | ||
| God's going to lift his protection for an hour. | ||
| I'm riveted. | ||
| I want to know what's going to happen next. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| Commercial shit! | ||
| And he doesn't get back to it. | ||
| That's upsetting. | ||
| That's deeply upsetting. | ||
| So the globalist devils, they're going to nuke the planet and release race-specific bioweapons. | ||
| They would have done that already. | ||
| They can't because of God's protection. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| But God, for some reason, is going to remove his protection for an hour. | ||
| He's got to take a shit. | ||
| For an hour. | ||
| Everybody, he's bigger than us. | ||
| Who does God give a shit about time? | ||
| All right, on the clock, 60. As someone who's omniscient and omnipotent, it sure seems like he would exist outside of time. | ||
| Why does it have to be an hour? | ||
| It could just be a minute. | ||
| If it's nuking the planet, the consequences of that are going to last way longer than an hour, and the act of doing it would take a second. | ||
| Why does it have to be an hour? | ||
| No, it's got to be an hour. | ||
| It takes a while. | ||
| What if you need to do it again? | ||
| What if the first one misses? | ||
| You just want to give yourself some wiggle room. | ||
| Deeply implied by that, right where he got cut off by commercial. | ||
| is that he knows when that's going to happen. | ||
| Yep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he's prepared. | |
| He is a psychic. | ||
| He's preparing for it. | ||
| Everybody's going to be ready for the hour. | ||
| God is going to remove protection for an hour. | ||
| Devil's attack. | ||
| Alex prepared. | ||
| totally cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's disturbed. | |
| That is a very fucked up way of thinking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If he believes that's true, I think we do need to call someone. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, it's, It's a level of untethered. | |
| You hear that, and you're like, ooh. | ||
| Yeah, we've heard him say a lot of crazy stuff before, but when you get to that level, it's like, we're talking different. | ||
| You've got to do something. | ||
| God's protection ideas, that line of thought definitely isn't foreign to us, but him coming out and saying, God will release the protection for an hour, and that's when we're going to get hit, that is pretty... | ||
| Pretty fucked up. | ||
| That's new and fucked up. | ||
| God's protection is the only thing keeping us from being nuked and hit by bioweapons. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Which implies that God can protect us. | ||
| But isn't going to for that hour. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And also doesn't for the rest of the horrible things that go on right now. | ||
| Oh, yeah, that is implied. | ||
| So God... | ||
| Could be protecting us from everything, but he's only choosing nuclear weapons and biorepons right now. | ||
| People that Alex may or may not support who gas their people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| So now, I foreshadowed earlier in the episode that Dan Lyman was going to be coming in. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You thought you could cakewalk through it. | ||
| Unfortunately, I can't, because his appearance has very harsh resonances to Alex Jones' narratives that he's pushing in the present day. | ||
| And he actually dips his toe into a story that I started looking into and I found very interesting, and it requires unpacking. | ||
| So here we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dan Lyman joins us. | |
| Investigative journalist. | ||
| Patriot. | ||
| Heads up. | ||
| EuropeWars.com. | ||
| And boy, there are a lot of articles at EuropeWars.com that are exclusively there. | ||
| Brussels buses suspend service to Nogo Station, citing malaria TB outbreak. | ||
| So, malaria, TB, that's really never been there, especially malaria, but now it's there, just like all the diseases pouring over in the United States. | ||
| In the Ellis Island days, they checked everybody for a few months at least. | ||
| Not now, Dan Lyman. | ||
| Thanks for joining us from Europe. | ||
| Oh no, immigrants bring disease again? | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| This is so fucking awful. | ||
| The window dressing is interesting because he's talking about this bus station, the Gare du Nord, the north station in Brussels that has been closed. | ||
| It hasn't been closed. | ||
| There's a bus line that has stopped serving that station and going to another bus stop because of... | ||
| A lot of immigrant population there. | ||
| Now, in order to understand this story that Alex is telling on the show, it's essential to understand the surrounding context of it. | ||
| I'm going to grant him that it is true. | ||
| There is a story he's covering in a Belgian news outlet, HLN, that does discuss the plan to not have buses stop at the north station, the Gare du Nord, quote, prompted by recent rumors that scabies, malaria, and tuberculosis had broken out at the station. | ||
| But, as is always the case with Alex, there's more to this story than he cares to understand or report. | ||
| There's a large population of itinerant immigrants, or as they're called, transmigrants, who are, for lack of a better word, stuck in Brussels. | ||
| Many of them fled from various countries in turmoil, ultimately arriving in Europe, landing in Italy. | ||
| They've then made their way north to Belgium. | ||
| Right. | ||
| For many of them, it's as simple of a problem as not having proper identification to make the trip, often because they left it behind when they fled their home country. | ||
| Because they fled. | ||
| They didn't just mosey on out of there. | ||
| Some others wish to stay in Belgium, but are afraid to apply for asylum after seeing many immigrants that they knew apply, only to have that put them on the government's radar for deportation. | ||
| Under EU rules, and specifically a rule called the Dublin Rule, a country is not supposed to deport asylum seekers back to their home countries. | ||
| But, under the right circumstances, they're allowed to send them back to the first EU country they arrived in. | ||
| For many of these immigrants in Belgium, that would be Italy. | ||
| And there's a reason they didn't just stay in Italy. | ||
| To quote a 25-year-old Sudanese man who spoke with the Financial Times, conditions in Italy are bad. | ||
| Quote, you stay in the camp and there is nothing. | ||
| They don't want to risk applying for asylum only to be sent back to Italy where they'll be put in a camp, and they can't make the trip across the English Channel, so they're left in a weird in-between state stuck in Brussels. | ||
| Human rights charities work with the people, and they've found that once they're able to establish with a refugee that they're exempt from the Dublin rule, because many are. | ||
| Many submit to the process and apply for asylum formally, which gives a positive indication about a direction forward there could be towards progress. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's nice. | ||
| But there are even greater risks in being sent to an Italian camp. | ||
| Because even though they're not supposed to do so generally, sometimes refugees are deported back to the countries they left. | ||
| And in 2017, that caused some real serious tensions to flare up after there were allegations that people who had been sent back to Sudan had been tortured when they returned. | ||
| These people were sent despite warnings from international human rights groups and leaked notes from the government that indicated that they were aware that some of the people who were sent back were from the regions of Darfur, the Blue Nile, and South Kordofan, which made them automatic recipients of a protected status. | ||
| The government's motivation seemed to be, quote, cleaning up public areas where stuck itinerant immigrants were congregating, places like Gardu Nord and Maximilian Park. | ||
| So it's probably unclear off the bat here why there would be large populations of itinerant immigrants coming to this Garda Nord. | ||
| If you had to assume, I would guess that you probably just think that it's where the train disembarks, so they get off the train and then just stay there. | ||
| But that's not true. | ||
| Immigrants come to Gare du Nord specifically because it's an established humanitarian hub. | ||
| Several non-governmental organizations have banded together to provide essential help to people trying to immigrate, many of them leaving war-torn areas and wanting a chance to start a new life. | ||
| Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam, the Red Cross, and some more local organizations have established this center within the Garda Nord as a place where immigrants can get help that no one else is providing. | ||
| This ranges from psychological services, basic medical care, legal assistance, food, clothing, Wi-Fi, and electrical outlets that they can use to charge their phones. | ||
| While all this help is definitely life-saving, the psychological services aspect of this is really crucial. | ||
| According to a psychologist who works at the humanitarian hub, he's seeing a trend of immigrants developing depression based on harsh disillusionment. | ||
| Quote, they imagine Europe as the continent of human rights, but when they arrive here, they're completely disillusioned. | ||
| They never imagined that they'd be sleeping outside in a state with a rule of law. | ||
| So that's a little bit of a bummer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's a bummer, but it's also part and parcel of a reality that there are these people who are providing this help. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And that's why there are large groups of immigrants that congregate. | ||
| They turned Gardinort into almost like a strip mall of life-saving. | ||
| I mean, I don't think it's the full station, but yeah, there is a part of it that is this... | ||
| This life-saving thing. | ||
| And then there are other good things to mention, positive things. | ||
| A volunteer organization called BXL Refugees launched a movement in September 2017 urging people to open their homes to refugees who found themselves in the impossible situation they're in. | ||
| When they began, they were only able to find 10 families willing to house a stranger in need. | ||
| But by 2018, the number had swelled to over 3,000 families opening up their spare rooms. | ||
| One family, the Gillises, have opened their home to two refugees in need. | ||
| One of them, speaking to Euronews, said, quote, There are many good-hearted people who are going out of their way to do something to help mitigate the problem, and that is a very inspiring sign. | ||
| But, as we've learned so well on this podcast, anytime there's something inspiring, there's something equally depressing hanging over us like a sword of Damocles, waiting to dash any kind of optimism we may have. | ||
| Yeah, go ahead and hit it. | ||
| Since 2010, as nationalism began to sound pretty good to people again, the political situation in Belgium has been moving pretty far to the right. | ||
| The Flemish Nationalist Party, the New Flemish Alliance, has made major strides, and in 2014 they became the largest party in the Chamber of Representatives and in the Senate. | ||
| The New Flemish Alliance sucks, and their leader, Bart de Weber, has been pretty clear in his harsh stance towards itinerant immigrants, proposing prosecuting them and seizing their cell phones to send the message that, quote, Belgium is not the place to be. | ||
| In a good news, bad news situation, the New Flemish Alliance lost a bit of power in 2018 when they left the ruling coalition that they were a part of, which included the prime ministership. | ||
| That's the good news. | ||
| The bad news is that they left the ruling alliance because Prime Minister Charles Michel refused the new Flemish alliance's demand that he rescind his plan to sign a non-binding UN migration agreement. | ||
| All UN member states other than the US have signed it. | ||
| And because Michel decided to sign, the NVA, which is their initials in Flemish, pulled out of his government. | ||
| This is a bad sign, because they're still the largest political party in the Senate and Chamber of Representatives. | ||
| So when they're leaving the ruling coalition in an effort to be more xenophobic and push further hard right, it's concerning. | ||
| And one of the reasons that they need to do this sort of thing is to hold on to their far-right base, which is starting to be eroded by an even more fucked-up Flemish nationalist party, Vlaams Belong. | ||
| Hard right Flemish nationalist parties are starting from an unfair disadvantage, I would say, and that is that their movement traces its roots to the post-World War I world, when a party representing their interests emerged called the Front Party. | ||
| While the party may have started with Flemish representation... | ||
| The Front Party? | ||
| Are we going to... | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| They may have started with an interest in Flemish representation as being their primary concern. | ||
| By the early 1930s, it had pushed pretty far right and had been absorbed by the Flemish National Union, an explicitly authoritarian party that were overt collaborators with the Nazis in World War II because Hitler had promised them greater Flemish rights. | ||
| It deserves mention that VNV, that's their initials, the Flemish National Union, VLV leader Stef de Klerk was collaborating with the Nazis before they invaded Belgium, with the hopes that they could help him come to power, which led directly to his party helping organize the deportation of Jews to the camps. | ||
| So you can see how that history gives people a little bit of hesitance about hard-right nationalist, Flemish nationalist parties. | ||
| After the liberation of Belgium by the Allied Powers, the VNV was outlawed as a political party for fairly obvious reasons. | ||
| This led to the rise of the Christian Flemish People's Union, which worked to make sure that they were nationalists, but also didn't put anyone in office who had collaborated with the Nazis. | ||
| That was nice of them. | ||
| That was nice of them, at least. | ||
| It's an interesting proposition. | ||
| Jesus Christ, do you know what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's... | |
| Wait, fucking the NRA hired Oliver North. | ||
| They're better than we are. | ||
| Oliver, they didn't hire him. | ||
| He's their leader. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that was an attempt that they made, but this led to the group being nationalist in nature, but also fairly moderate left in politics. | ||
| So a lot of folks jumped ship and created new radical options. | ||
| Oh, surprise. | ||
| Which would eventually be merged into the Vlaams bloc. | ||
| Vlaam's bloc was a very specifically anti-immigrant, far-hard-right nationalist party. | ||
| Their slogan in the 1987 election was, quote, own people first, which sounds really bad when translated, since it's easy to read the word own as a verb. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| We're going with our own people first. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| The translation is tough. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| The translation might actually be more accurate. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| The party found increased success with focusing on immigration issues as opposed to harping too hard on Flemish separatism. | ||
| In the same way that our right wing may profess an interest in small government, but riling people up about nativist resentment and populist bullshit is way more effective as an electoral strategy. | ||
| And it worked well for Valaam's bloc. | ||
| Growing from relative obscurity in the 80s to a very serious political party by the late And then the year 2000 happened. | ||
| A complaint was filed against the party claiming that they broke Belgium's anti-racism laws in their party's stated platform. | ||
| We hate everyone based on race. | ||
| An issue was that they had called for an entirely separate educational system for foreign children, new taxes for businesses that hired non-European foreigners, and restricting benefits for non-European foreigners. | ||
| The case bounced around courts until 2004 when the Belgian High Court, the Court of Cassation, ruled that their party platform was indeed racist and effectively disbanded the party by taking away their state funding I bet they took that well, put their tails between their legs, and just moved on, right? | ||
| No, they did. | ||
| They had to. | ||
| They had to. | ||
| They were dissolved. | ||
| They had no chance of any relevancy if they were banned from television, and the state funding of elections, if they don't have access to that money, they're fucked. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So they dissolved. | ||
| And then they reorganized. | ||
| That's what I was saying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Of course, yeah, they dissolved that party and then they were like, cool, now we're going to groundhog into some other fucking... | ||
| They reorganized in 2004 as Vlaams Belong, which is now the party that is challenging the new Flemish alliance from the right. | ||
| So you can kind of see how this all fits together a little bit better now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This situation that they find themselves in. | ||
| We want to cage immigrants! | ||
| Whoa, whoa. | ||
| You are not going far enough. | ||
| We want to kill them. | ||
| Hey! | ||
| That's an interesting conversation of ideas. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One of the members of the New Flemish Alliance that left the Michelle government was their migration minister, Theo Franken, who incidentally was the one responsible for sending protected refugees back to the Sudan to be tortured. | ||
| Now, before he left the Michelle government, Franken actually had a bit of a hand to play in making sure that the issue of Gardu Nord in Brussels was not taken care of. | ||
| His New Flemish alliance has a hard right position on immigration who wishes to punish or deport these people, not to help them. | ||
| And in the recent years, he's had groups like Vlam's Belong happy to be even further right and more shitty than him to make sure that he's not able to give an inch. | ||
| Because if he does, they start attacking him from the right. | ||
| It's a terrible situation. | ||
| The party with the most members in Brussels Parliament, the local government in Brussels, is the Socialist Party. | ||
| And a large majority of the members of that body are not hard-right nationalists. | ||
| Most of them are liberal. | ||
| Members of the Brussels Parliament have tried to do what they can to alleviate what is legitimately a humanitarian crisis for these trans migrants, but they've been pretty vocal that they can't solve any problems without federal government cooperation. | ||
| There's collaboration that needs to be done. | ||
| To that complaint and request... | ||
| New Flemish Alliance Migration Minister Theo Franken said they can, quote, count on zero euros. | ||
| I've always been against this migration hub that Brussels apparently wants to be. | ||
| If Brussels wants to be a kind of safe haven for illegal trans migrants, they should go ahead, but not at the expense of the federal government. | ||
| He doesn't give a shit. | ||
| Folks like this only care about humanitarian issues like this when they escalate to the point where they feel that they can rationalize dealing with their problem through violence. | ||
| And so the problem has been allowed to fester. | ||
| So, I know this has been long, but I think it's really important to understand the forces at play when we see a situation that's being lied about by right-wing propagandists in our country. | ||
| We live in a place where most of us are incredibly unaware about Belgian politics and the day-to-day of this sort of stuff, so it becomes something that's easy to manipulate people about. | ||
| Foreign events are often the most fertile soil for local propagandists because the disconnect involved and the almost guaranteed ignorance of the topic in your listener. | ||
| This is why Alex loves to trot out crime statistics from the UK and Sweden and lie about them, knowing that his audience won't look deep enough into them to understand the context behind the data. | ||
| And the same is true, the situation here at the Gardner Nord in Brussels that he's talking about. | ||
| So all this situation is, you can see kind of the forces at play and all that. | ||
| But at the same time, from what I've been able to sort out from the reporting I've read, I can't contest the fact that buses are saying that they are going to stop servicing the station. | ||
| That does appear to be factually accurate. | ||
| However, it should be pointed out that it's not the government that's behind stopping the bus services. | ||
| It's the trade union. | ||
| The union that represents transportation employees decided that they weren't going to be stopping at the underground bus terminal there, instead rerouting to nearby stops. | ||
| In an article in the Brussels Times, it makes it explicitly clear that the concerns about scabies and TB are rumors, and that there's literally no evidence of either disease. | ||
| And DeLine, the group that runs the buses, and the federal public health ministry have said that this amounts basically just to unfounded rumors. | ||
| The real issue comes down to complaints from customers about the smell, the litter, and being hit up by transmigrants for change. | ||
| There's a climate where people don't feel safe, and when unfounded disease rumors appeared, it was enough justification for the transportation trade unions to act. | ||
| Unfortunately, the place that they've re-roded the buses to, Rogier Square, is in the neighboring St. Joss, whose mayor, Amir Kier, is not happy about the mobility problems that the increased traffic has brought with it. | ||
| So he's seeking to stop the buses from stopping in his city, saying in a press release, quote, It is incomprehensible and unacceptable for the federal government to abandon a place as important as the Gardu Nord. | ||
| I call on all parties involved to find a sustainable and worthy solution for everyone. | ||
| So I'm not entirely sure exactly what's going on, but this seems kind of like a good strategy, and it might be effective in getting the federal government to act. | ||
| The idea of, like, we've re-rooted these buses here. | ||
| No, you're not. | ||
| Maybe that'll force their hand. | ||
| I'm not entirely sure, but time will tell. | ||
| The reality of the situation in Brussels is incredibly complicated, but could be helped immensely by a government that was willing to do what it needed to do to help people in a crisis. | ||
| A huge step forward would be removing the fear that many of these refugees have of applying for Belgian asylum. | ||
| If they knew that it wouldn't result in them being sent back to a country where they might face torture or death, or back to a camp in Italy, it could go a long way to getting them back on their feet. | ||
| Removal of that threat could be a big step forward. | ||
| It would be nice if the state could help with getting those who wanted to apply for asylum in the UK, helping them facilitate that. | ||
| For instance, a lot of them want to because they have family there. | ||
| But it seems unlikely that they would do that since it would be decried by anti-immigrant politicians there. | ||
| Yeah, I was going to say, the UK would lose their fucking mind. | ||
| It doesn't seem realistic. | ||
| They're already losing their mind. | ||
| It doesn't seem realistic that Belgium would help... | ||
| The immigrants get to their final destination in the UK, if only for that reason. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| So that was all a lot. | ||
| But you can see that this is a complex story. | ||
| Oh, sorry. | ||
| Also, I should point out, adding to the complexity, it's not just itinerant immigrants that are there at the station. | ||
| It's also homeless Belgian citizens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| So there's a larger issue here than just immigration, and Alex refuses to look at any of it. | ||
| So when you really look at what's going on, the hard-right nationalists are not the good guys in this story. | ||
| What? | ||
| And when you hear Alex's coverage of it, what does he say? | ||
| He says, you know, he hits the points that are convenient to his narratives. | ||
| He pulls out that there's a disease angle and an immigrant's angle. | ||
| Since he's been working to push the immigrants are causing the measles outbreak narrative in recent weeks. | ||
| And that's all he really cares about, is that this story seems to fit with his narratives. | ||
| He's a monster. | ||
| Pushing rhetoric that will serve to demonize a population. | ||
| And there's literally no excuse for behaving like this. | ||
| And there's even less of an excuse for someone to fucking think that people were routinely kept for months at Ellis Island. | ||
| Yeah, we already talked about that one. | ||
| We did. | ||
| But just because this bothers me, I want to talk a little bit more about Ellis Island. | ||
| I want to read to you a little bit about Ellis Island and their medical screenings. | ||
| We didn't get specifically into that too much. | ||
| This is from an article in the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics. | ||
| Quote, the diagnostic protocol emphasized the physician's gaze, demonstrating the conviction that disease was written on the body. | ||
| Dr. Albert Newt argued that, quote, Dr. Stupid. | ||
| So you understand, they basically relied almost entirely on looking at people. | ||
| Hey! | ||
| Hey! | ||
| Look over here! | ||
| You look good. | ||
| Get on in there, you scamp. | ||
| And then when they saw something that looked bad, they made a chalk mark. | ||
| And so, quote, officers immediately transferred those bearing chalk marks, typically 15 to 20 percent of the arrivals, to either the physical or mental examination rooms. | ||
| Of all the people who are found to be sick, this is not a quote, this is me talking here. | ||
| Of all the people who are found to be sick, which is just that small percentage, 15 to 20 percent, quote, some were confined, often for months and sometimes years, in the isolation units in the southernmost wing of Ellis Island. | ||
| So now... | ||
| For years? | ||
| Very few of them. | ||
| It was a very small amount. | ||
| Yeah, but that's crazy. | ||
| But a lot of it was under medical care. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| That's also for people with chronic or severe conditions. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's a very, very small number of people who came in. | ||
| But a number of people who had less severe conditions might be held for a week. | ||
| And it would pass. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| But they'd be held in these cells, and they wouldn't apply for hospital treatment because they knew that they would have to pay for it themselves. | ||
| And ultimately, most of the people who were treated for diseases at Ellis Island were deported not because they were sick, but because they couldn't pay for their own hospitalization. | ||
| So a lot of the people that Alex is referring to... | ||
| America! | ||
| The people that Alex is referring to, the very small number of people who were held for possibly months, were just poor. | ||
| Well, I mean, they ended up getting deported because they were poor, but they ended up getting deported because they applied for hospitalization and then couldn't pay for it once they were fine. | ||
| I find this passage particularly important to remember. | ||
| Of those who were denied entry, most were certified not with loathsome or dangerous contagious diseases, but with conditions that limited their capacity to perform unskilled labor. | ||
| Senility, old age, varicose veins, hernias, poor vision, and deformities of limbs or spine were among the primary causes for exclusion. | ||
| That so few of the more than 25 million arriving immigrants inspected by the PHS were excluded sets into bold relief the country's almost insatiable industrial demand for cheap labor. | ||
| Of course, even though this was the case at Ellis Island, where a vast majority of people arriving were European, it should be noted that, quote, non-Europeans faced more considerable medical obstacles to entry at the nation's Pacific coast and Mexican border during immigration stations. | ||
| At Texas border stations, PHS medical inspectors stripped, showered, disinfected, searched for lice, and physically examined large groups of immigrants. | ||
| All second- and third-class Asian immigrants arriving in San Francisco endured a physical exam similar to that conducted along the Mexican border in addition to routine laboratory testing for parasitic infection, which required detention on Angel Island for one or two days. | ||
| Disease, health officials argued, was not easily read in the inscrutable Asians, particularly the Chinese. | ||
| So you see a little bit of a... | ||
| It's always interesting when you go back to the old racism, like the real old shit. | ||
| Yeah, that's when you're like, damn, you guys were not... | ||
| Because they were racist. | ||
| They were awfully racist. | ||
| But in such a ridiculously ignorant way. | ||
| Just like... | ||
| They look different from me, and I have no idea what that looks like. | ||
| You're sick or you're fine? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| My magical medical vision can't read your Asian face. | ||
| Yeah, no kidding. | ||
| It's fucked up. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| So it wasn't until the Immigration Act of 1924 that things started to change. | ||
| We set up a visa system where American consular offices in other countries would grant visas to people before they embarked on their journey here. | ||
| This was specifically to cut off the flow of immigrants from, quote, undesirable southern and eastern European nations. | ||
| Weirdly, under the system, between 1926 and 1930, almost 5% of immigrants The rate had been around 1% turned away for medical reasons, approximately 2% turned away, period. | ||
| The immigration system has always been a backbone of racism and exploitative capitalism. | ||
| Medical rules have always been a tool of that exclusion. | ||
| Before 1924, of those who wouldn't be good cheap labor, and after 1924, of people of ethnicities we didn't want here. | ||
| To pretend Alex's position is based on some kind of concern for public health is ludicrous. | ||
| So that's my point about this. | ||
| It's so much like you think... | ||
| All of these hard right guys right now, if we didn't have a system of automation, would be like, hey, we need to get rid of their rights, but I mean, come on in. | ||
| Come on in. | ||
| We need you to do the factory stuff. | ||
| So get on in here. | ||
| Let's have a great time. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| It would be a whole different conversation. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Because they need it. | ||
| So you may have forgotten, but we're talking about a train station in Belgium. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Sure we are, Dan. | ||
| We're talking about so much more than one train station in Belgium. | ||
| I think we are. | ||
| Alex is specifically talking about that one train station in Belgium. | ||
| But he's also talking about more, I guess, because he's trying to apply it to his narratives about immigrants bringing measles here and causing outbreaks. | ||
| God, I hate him so much for helping to cause a measles outbreak and then blaming it. | ||
| And then blaming it on immigrants. | ||
| That's so fucking evil. | ||
| It's dirty. | ||
| It's so evil. | ||
| So, I agree. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| And I think you're kind of now getting the sense of why I could only cover the eighth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's these sorts of things that pop up. | ||
| You start the episode, Alex is depressed, and then he starts yelling about Satan. | ||
| It's like, well, I guess this might be a short one. | ||
| And then before you know it, I'm reading fucking pages and pages about Belgian political parties. | ||
| And here we are. | ||
| So Dan Lyman brings up a new story about this Gardu Nord, and he's misrepresenting things a little bit. | ||
| Would you believe it? | ||
| No! | ||
| It just comes out today, just after we published that story, that the cleaning staff that work at this train station are now going to be vaccinated for a variety of different diseases, including a variety of hepatitis strains. | ||
| And so they're also downplaying this one and saying, oh, you know, there's nobody that's been infected. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're just doing this as a precautionary measure. | |
| But I think that this ties into the larger situation. | ||
| We have this measles outbreak that's just exploding across the U.S. See, he's even making it explicit. | ||
| Can't you just believe that it is a precautionary measure? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Can't you just do that? | ||
| Can't you just do that one time? | ||
| Just be like, oh, are they vaccinating people before they get diseases? | ||
| That's very smart. | ||
| So the first thing that's super important here is that you see the intention of covering the story crystal clear. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| It's too obvious. | ||
| As Dan Lyman, he weaves from this Belgian bus station to U.S. measles at the end of that clip. | ||
| It's very clear that this is only in service of bolstering that argument. | ||
| Look, the Belgians are doing it. | ||
| We should get rid of them, too. | ||
| This is what the story is about to these people, like Alex and Dan Lyman. | ||
| Fuck the details. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| Second thing. | ||
| The article that he's using as a source for this is from the Brussels Times, and it doesn't involve local officials downplaying anything. | ||
| It involves news organizations quoting public health organizations that are on the ground and actually know the facts, saying, quote, It is what he is insinuating. | ||
| Why would you? | ||
| A combative mindset where the default position of anything that doesn't fit the narrative must secretly be a cover-up. | ||
| This mentality is incredibly dangerous, especially when it's being wielded to perpetuate these sorts of dehumanization narratives because it's based on nothing. | ||
| But idiots think that he has some reason to suggest this is downplaying. | ||
| Third thing. | ||
| Dan Lyman is completely misrepresenting his primary source. | ||
| This Brussels Times article. | ||
| If you read it, it clearly says, quote, around 10 workers are concerned and will be vaccinated against hepatitis A and B. Oh, it's not even like a policy. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| It's just a few of them got together and they were like, this would be smart. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| God, I hate everybody. | ||
| If you take the hyperlink that that is referencing, it takes you to an article in Le Dernier Huer, which is a French paper out of Belgium. | ||
| Where you learn that around 10 means 12 and that their primary concern isn't with the transmission of sicknesses that Alex and Lyman are trying to scare you about. | ||
| It's about fecal transmitted diseases like hepatitis that could be a risk to cleaning crews. | ||
| Also super important... | ||
| Oh my god, I hate everyone. | ||
| Also super important to point out that you immediately caught is that the whole staff isn't getting these vaccines. | ||
| It's done by 12 employees' request to themselves. | ||
| I hate everyone. | ||
| This is crucially important. | ||
| I am rooting for... | ||
| This is crucially important. | ||
| These people, Alex and Lyman. | ||
| These people like them, these propagandists. | ||
| They cherry-pick their information in an abusive fashion because they are not journalists. | ||
| They're cruel propagandists whose current primary objective is implanting and solidifying in their audience's mind that people who aren't from where you are from should be suspected of being transmitters of infectious diseases. | ||
| They're basically biological weapons being used by the Democrats who want them to get in specifically to get you sick. | ||
| This is repulsive stuff. | ||
| And the fact that they can engage in this... | ||
| This kind of talk, so flippantly, is legitimately terrifying to me. | ||
| Because how do they not understand that this is what they're doing? | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| It's so much like the creation of the border between India and Pakistan, where it's almost like this propaganda just built up, and then overnight, your neighbor now became your suspect. | ||
| The next day, you're like, uh-oh. | ||
| This dude might be a disease carrier. | ||
| Just not even realizing that you're one step away from fucking total eradication. | ||
| It would be like the Stanford Prison Experiment if that wasn't discredited. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So they talk some more about just trying to make you afraid of immigrants. | ||
| Because that's the game. | ||
| And Alex asks Dan Lyman to talk about no-go zones. | ||
| And immediately... | ||
| Dan Lyman kind of proves that they don't exist, accidentally. | ||
| Giant no-go zones everywhere? | ||
| What, just a few years ago, Dan, they denied the no-go zones. | ||
| Tell folks that don't know what a no-go zone is. | ||
| Yeah, I've been in them myself. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Well, they're no longer no-go zones. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| You've been inside a no-go zone? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Who would let you in? | ||
| Who? | ||
| So they talk a bit about the no-go zones, which I think that it's testament to that term meaning nothing, if you're saying I've been in there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| So here's a little bit of it. | ||
| But it was before it became a no-go zone. | ||
| It was a Denny's, actually. | ||
| Here's a little conversation about no-go zones, which is real fun. | ||
| Just to give people an idea, I mean, you go into these areas, yes, technically you can go into them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're not allowed to go into them. | |
| But you do risk anything from a robbery to your own life, depending on how bad the zone is and how fearful the police are of going in them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've been in them in Paris. | |
| I've been in them in Hamburg, Germany. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've been in them in Italy last year during one of our reports. | |
| And these areas are basically areas where the police won't go or they're afraid to go or they're just afraid to enforce. | ||
| I hate you for making me listen to a man say that. | ||
| I don't have the time to get into why that's so stupid. | ||
| The idea of Portland being run by Antifa. | ||
| If you look into the police situation there, just go do some reading. | ||
| Hey, no, the Pacific Northwest has a long and wonderful history of being accepted. | ||
| It's probably a topic that we will deal with in a future show, but it's too big for now. | ||
| But in terms of these no-go zone things, this is a fun game that these assholes get to play. | ||
| They get to come up with terms like no-go zone, and they never really define what it means. | ||
| You could hear when Lyman's talking there, he's talking about it in just vague enough of terms. | ||
| It's a place where police aren't really interested in going. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And nobody enforces the law there except for Antifa, which suggests that there is still a law and it is still being enforced. | ||
| So their audience hears them talk about it, a no-go zone. | ||
| Generally, this is one of the first times, maybe not the first times, but one of the first times on Alex's show. | ||
| Perhaps that the term has been applied to like an Antifa area. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| It's pretty much exclusively used to demonize Muslims. | ||
| But their audience gets the message that they're trying to get across. | ||
| Namely that there's areas in these cities where Muslims have completely taken over, they operate under Sharia law, non-Muslims aren't welcome to enter, and the cops are afraid to come in at all because the Muslim Sharia law is more powerful than their absurdly overpowered police power. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| In reality, what these fucking asshole right-wing piles of shit are describing is predominantly minority. | ||
| What? | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| It's a no-go zone, Dan. | ||
| They're telling me that I can't go there. | ||
| It's not that whenever I go there, I feel like I'm not the dominant person. | ||
| You'll notice that Dan Lyman is not being specific about these areas he's been to at all. | ||
| Just naming cities, or in one case, just saying it was in Italy. | ||
| This is very intentional, because the less specific you are, the more able you are to wiggle out of your lie when you're called on it. | ||
| If you take away, or if you add specificity, you're named. | ||
| You're fucking full of shit. | ||
| So, in terms of Paris, a woman named Holly Koch put together an interesting mini-documentary on YouTube that I found where she set out to do a two-week investigation, checking out all the alleged Muslim no-go zones in Paris, alone with her camera, specifically pointing out that she's a blonde woman alone, something that all the people who propagate the no-go zone ideas would say would make her a huge target. | ||
| Not to spoil the documentary, but no one harassed her, although she did say she was catcalled twice in the two weeks, which is bad. | ||
| Yeah, that's a man thing. | ||
| That's not a... | ||
| The neighborhood thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That's everywhere that men are. | ||
| Because they're garbage. | ||
| And she didn't find any evidence of Muslim-only neighborhoods or neighborhoods where Sharia law was in place at all. | ||
| Her video, full of actual footage of her all over Paris that pretty well documents and demonstrates that these ideas are ludicrous, has about 1,300 views on YouTube. | ||
| Paul Joseph Watson paid definitely not a Nazi but seems to hang out with Nazis quite a bit. | ||
| Tim Pool, $2,000 to go explore the alleged no-go zones in Malmo, Sweden. | ||
| And even he had to admit that he didn't find shit, even in the areas that everyone said was the worst. | ||
| That hasn't stopped his documentary as being used as evidence of no-go zones, and it has 2.1 million views on YouTube. | ||
| So you can kind of see... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The idea of no-go zones has been flying around for quite a while, but the talk of them has really ramped up since 2015 because that's when about a million refugees fled almost certain death, mostly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. | ||
| I can't be any more explicit than this. | ||
| These people who push these narratives are not doing it because they're concerned about an imagined increase in crime or whatever high-minded reason they profess. | ||
| Pure and simple, the idea of no-go zones exists as preemptive conditioning to desensitize people against the idea of violence against minority neighborhoods. | ||
| It's a rationalization for looking the other way if police crack down on Muslims. | ||
| Of course they had to send the National Guard in there, Dan. | ||
| It was a no-go zone. | ||
| The regular police just couldn't handle it. | ||
| That's 100%. | ||
| Well, and of course, you know what? | ||
| It turns out that, really, we just need to send in a few special ops people, just some crack military guys. | ||
| Maybe send a, you know... | ||
| 20, 30, 100. | ||
| This is the implication behind No Go Zone propaganda, that eventually we're going to have to suck it up and send the military in, or reclaim the neighborhoods ourselves. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| It's a deeply insidious narrative, meant only to further stigmatize immigrants and people who folks like Alex hate, and make sure that there is no chance of integration, and no chance of people living happily together. | ||
| And here's the thing. | ||
| In order to reinforce these narratives, these motherfuckers who push this stuff have to make shit up. | ||
| When Tim Pool went to Sweden, he didn't get any footage of anything. | ||
| But in order to make it look like his trip wasn't a total waste of time for right-wing narratives, he claimed that, quote, several men started masking up and following us. | ||
| Police told us to leave and had to escort us to our car. | ||
| This was when he was in Rickenby, which is just outside Stockholm. | ||
| He went on to later say, quote, They got in their car to escort us out, and we had to walk alongside their vehicle and followed us to our car. | ||
| As we were walking, there were people just following us, yelling things. | ||
| You suck, you racist piece of shit! | ||
| Fuck you! | ||
| See, it's a good story, and it's just enough to leave the taste in your mouth that these stories of no-go zones are true. | ||
| And maybe it's just a reality a little bit deeper beneath the surface than Tim Pool has the skills to dig. | ||
| It's precisely the sort of thing that someone who went to Sweden and found nothing to support the idea of no-go zones might be inclined to lie about in order to make sure that the documentary that he makes still work to reinforce no-go zone narratives. | ||
| It's important when performing any kind of scientific experiment or investigation. | ||
| To figure out what outcome you want to have first and then get yourself to that conclusion regardless of whatever reality is. | ||
| You don't want Paul Joseph Watson to ask for his two grand back? | ||
| No, absolutely not. | ||
| You don't want the Koch brothers to tell you that your climate study didn't work out the right direction. | ||
| So I'm suggesting that Tim Pool made this up in order to make it look like maybe there is something here. | ||
| You're suggesting that, but let me guess a question. | ||
| Do you know who else? | ||
| Might be suggesting that? | ||
| The Swedish police. | ||
| Is it the Swedish police? | ||
| There we go. | ||
| Because he did make that shit up. | ||
| When the local, a Swedish news outlet, contacted the police, quote, a press officer said that Poole did not receive an escort. | ||
| Frida Nordloff of the Swedish police said, quote, when Tim Pool took out a camera and started filming a group of young people, they pulled their hoods up and covered their faces and shouted at him to stop filming. | ||
| The officers then told Tim Pool that it wasn't wise to stay there in the middle of the square and keep filming. | ||
| So he's completely misrepresented this interaction as being followed and, you know, somehow... | ||
| It's a fucking bullshit. | ||
| Hey, Tim. | ||
| Could you quit being an asshole? | ||
| Alright, get back to your car. | ||
| I've seen literally no evidence of no-go zones that doesn't somehow intrinsically involve dishonest reporting, or things that could just be seen as the normal sort of thing, you know, where some parts of cities have higher crime than other parts of the city, and a lot of that could be explained really easily by economic realities that don't really have anything to do with Islam or immigration specifically. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But go ahead, guys. | ||
| Keep on pushing your narratives. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So this is the end of Dan Lyman. | ||
| Lion Dan Man. | ||
| In my life, this is the end of Dan Lyman. | ||
| And the end of his interview, because Alex lets him go, they've done what they need to do, and now Alex wants to talk about his personal aggrievement and how he is a victim, and then he compares himself. | ||
| This is an unfair comparison he makes. | ||
| Okay, this is the InfoWarm, Alex Jones. | ||
| So, they sit there and they demonize us. | ||
| They lie about us. | ||
| Thousands of articles a month. | ||
| Hundreds of TV shows a month. | ||
| That's conservative. | ||
| Just saying horrible things. | ||
| Never showing you a clip of me saying it. | ||
| They just do it. | ||
| They have no respect for you. | ||
| They just churn out these lies. | ||
| And then corporate America kicks you off your bank accounts. | ||
| You get kicked off social media. | ||
| You get treated like you're a Jew in Nazi Germany. | ||
| That's a good historical parallel to what's happening. | ||
| I hate you so much. | ||
| That's pretty crazy. | ||
| I hate you so much. | ||
| I hate him so much. | ||
| On days like this. | ||
| This is my birthday, Dan. | ||
| He said that on my birthday. | ||
| On days like this, it's really tough to hear that kind of comparison. | ||
| Like, it's real brash. | ||
| I guess I'd just sum that up by saying nope. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| You're more like an Israeli Jew that supports Netanyahu? | ||
| So, after his self-aggrievement, complaining, and very unfair comparison to Jews and the Holocaust, Alex gets to getting back to what he claimed was his main story, which is the Facebook censors who are coming down with trauma symptoms. | ||
| And he gets back to spinning it as just being like... | ||
| SJW snowflakes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then the globalists need to send them to mental institutions because if they watch his stuff, they start to agree with him. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And so years ago, I began to learn that one big reason they wanted to go to AI computers doing censorship, which more and more they're doing, is because humans that have to listen to shows like this at Facebook and Twitter and Google and places and YouTube and censor it, well, they get radicalized, you see. | ||
| They actually tune in. | ||
| And hear what we have to say versus what mainstream media is saying about us and what the corporate system is saying about us. | ||
| So you can see that this is just trying to reclaim the ship a little bit. | ||
| This is, hey, you know what? | ||
| People are starting to find that there are mental health problems with listening to you. | ||
| Well, the way I interpret that is listening to me makes people see the truth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's not healthy. | ||
| That's really fucked up. | ||
| Because if you read the actual article in The Verge, it's very hard to come away from that article without a decent amount of empathy and concern for the people who have to make social media spaces livable for us. | ||
| I'm sure he didn't read the article. | ||
| Oh, absolutely not. | ||
| But for him to have this take on it is so indecent. | ||
| It's so lacking and caring. | ||
| It's hard to hear. | ||
| And he's turning himself into the most powerful man you could ever see. | ||
| Because those moderators, they can watch Fox News all day on their own time, and it doesn't radicalize them. | ||
| But when they watch even a little clip of my show, they're radicalized because I am so powerful. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he's imagining that these people watch half-hour videos to moderate his content. | ||
| They have to go through like 300, 400... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're watching tiny snippets of stuff. | ||
| All they need to do is see one second of an InfoWars logo and they're like, boop, get it out of here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's probably more about seeing memes and stuff like that that, you know, convey a point much quicker. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And much more appealingly to simplistic thinking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But anyway, Alex claims that he has inside sources in Facebook moderation. | ||
| It doesn't seem to know that it's not Facebook that employs these people, which... | ||
| Seems weird. | ||
| I don't believe him, but also he just gets real gross and cruel at the end. | ||
| And so PBS put out a report a few days ago. | ||
| We're going to play some clips of it right now. | ||
| And notice the attack. | ||
| It's multifaceted here. | ||
| They talk about snuff films and child molestation. | ||
| That's all the stuff the Democrats are into. | ||
| And they talk about all the terrible stuff Facebook has to go through. | ||
| And you see the articles about Facebook employees that have to moderate while they get PTSD having to listen to the conspiracy theorists. | ||
| And then they talk about, oh, why we have to follow them around and watch what they're doing. | ||
| And I've talked to sources inside these groups. | ||
| They have PIs that watch them. | ||
| They spy on them. | ||
| And then sometimes, like Kanye West got sent to a mental institution for a week when he said he liked Trump, sometimes they grab him and Baker Act him. | ||
| Because, you know, if you decide, hey, we shouldn't be spying on everybody and then lying about it on the news. | ||
| Hey, we shouldn't be controlling what words they can say. | ||
| Hey, we're calling people things they aren't. | ||
| Well, then, that's their highest turnover. | ||
| That's the groups they've got to target. | ||
| That's the groups they've got to watch. | ||
| And so, really, this is your takeaway to this big segment. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| Is around half the people that work a year or longer in, quote, moderation. | ||
| That have even been Southern Poverty Law Center trained. | ||
| They were brainwashed for years in college. | ||
| They were then given a fake template about us. | ||
| And then they get into the moderation and they freak out. | ||
| That's why we get internal Google documents about how we're targeted last year. | ||
| So now he read an article. | ||
| So now he's saying that the moderators themselves have turned. | ||
| They've become patriots because of their experience and they leak him documents, which isn't true. | ||
| He's referencing an article from like a year ago. | ||
| I remember when he covered that. | ||
| Back then. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was just talking about publicly available information. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| He's turning this into some sort of a noble crusade that these people who are being affected by this content are engaged in, and it's not. | ||
| There are people who are hurting. | ||
| And so, I don't know. | ||
| The way he opened with just like, oh, they see... | ||
| Sexual child molestation. | ||
| Oh, that's what the Democrats are into. | ||
| And then later on he says that they're getting PTSD from watching his show. | ||
| And it's like, you already explained why they're... | ||
| So he's saying that they're brainwashed to think that the child molestation is totally fine. | ||
| It's only the... | ||
| Well, maybe in college they are. | ||
| Maybe that's what he's trying to imply. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I get the broader point that he's trying to make and the lie that he's presenting. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I don't really understand a lot of the finer details, nor do I care to, necessarily. | ||
| What kind of template do you think they get? | ||
| Batman. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| That's not hard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| So I only play some of that stuff because I don't really care. | ||
| I think we talked about it enough at the beginning of the episode. | ||
| But I only play that because it leads into what I think is actually maybe a good birthday present for you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And that is how this episode ends. | ||
| Lionel. | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Mike Adams hosts the fourth hour. | ||
| But before he ends up coming into studio, Alex loses it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And you know what he loses it about? | ||
| He's trying to cover this story. | ||
| And he wants on screen for the source of the article, like the article that he's referencing, he wants it to be an InfoWars article. | ||
| But it's a different site's article, and this pisses him off to no end. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And Mike Down, because he ends up storming off the set of it. | ||
| Facebook calls me dangerous. | ||
| Imagine my shot. | ||
| No, really? | ||
| And if you scroll down the article on InfoWars... | ||
| For some reason, they've got Human Events pulled up. | ||
| I'll just show you my site. | ||
| I'll just go to my site. | ||
| That's quicker and easier for me to do. | ||
| And I'll just go to theoldinfowars.com. | ||
| Hell, I'll just go off air. | ||
| That's what I'll do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can I move to Canada? | |
| So they start playing some video. | ||
| What? | ||
| What just happened? | ||
| I'll lay it all out for you. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| In the time that I've listened to his show, over the years in the past, I have never heard him... | ||
| I've heard him leave the studio. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, yeah. | |
| But I've never heard him leave so gruffly that I could hear footsteps. | ||
| Like, you could hear him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| I thought, no, if there wasn't video, I'd be like, that's totally photally work. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Like, there's no way that that's, because that was clear. | ||
| Like, what is he wearing fucking heels? | ||
| Like, what's going on? | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Also, there really should have been a lot more buildup for him to have just walked off the show. | ||
| That was like three sentences. | ||
| Yeah, it was. | ||
| Well, I mean, I can actually, I can explain. | ||
| My very strong theory about why he did. | ||
| All right. | ||
| But what happened is he's covering this Facebook story, and they have pulled up an article from Human Events, which his lawyer is involved in, running, and also some of his guests. | ||
| A national Nazi. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| So... | ||
| They have that article up there. | ||
| And Alex is like, fuck it, I'll pull it up on my phone. | ||
| I'll pull up our article on it so you can get an overhead cam on the article to cover the story. | ||
| Just pull up theoldinfowars.com? | ||
| And I think as he pulls out his phone, maybe he realizes, like, I forgot the code. | ||
| Or maybe it's like, ah, this is going to take longer, more dead air than I want there to be. | ||
| I'm going off air to find the article. | ||
| Or maybe he just doesn't know what the article is called, doesn't know how to search for it. | ||
| Maybe they didn't have one. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| So the reason that he storms off and the reason that the build-up is so short... | ||
| I believe is that Alex realizes that his only fucking chance is driving traffic aggressively to his website. | ||
| That is the only place that he has control over. | ||
| They aren't taking away his IP address. | ||
| They're not taking away his hosting. | ||
| Anything like that, he's safe. | ||
| Whereas all these other platforms clearly go away. | ||
| You know, YouTube's kicked him off. | ||
| Now Facebook and Instagram, he's gone. | ||
| The only thing that he can really control the flow to and what... | ||
| You do with the flow to monetizing the amount of traffic that comes to his site. | ||
| That is his site. | ||
| That's all he's got. | ||
| So when even a site like Human Events that he's ideologically aligned with, he has an interest in by virtue of his lawyer and guests being involved in it, he doesn't want to drive traffic to them because it's a zero-sum game. | ||
| That traffic that goes to that article isn't going to him. | ||
| They're covering the same story. | ||
| Really mad at his staff for doing that. | ||
| It should always be an InfoWars article. | ||
| That is all we've got. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think that's what facilitated his freakout and going off air. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| Everything I know about him, and especially his current situation, leads me to, like, that's the only conclusion, because it is abrupt, and it is weird. | ||
| Yeah, that is crazy. | ||
| Yeah, it's weird. | ||
| So now, we have one last clip. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And Alex has come. | ||
| He's already walked off the show. | ||
| But he comes back. | ||
| Oh, he comes back! | ||
| He comes back while they're playing the video of the PBS interview with the guy who wrote the article about the Facebook moderators. | ||
| This is literally how the show ends. | ||
| This is going to be another Mike Down clip because it is completely fucked up. | ||
| He is so mad about them using a different article. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| This is... | ||
| Happy birthday. | ||
| They're going to control how you live your lives. | ||
| That's how they do it. | ||
| And I shouldn't say visit Infowars.com or Newswars.com. | ||
| Who really cares? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Nobody really cares anymore. | ||
| Everybody's going to watch Netflix until the reactors start melting down and the new war starts. | ||
| And there's going to be a huge world war and billions are going to die because humans are weak, people are stupid, and they want to die. | ||
| Alex? | ||
| has officially turned heel on humanity. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's... | |
| That is what somebody is saying whenever they say I'm taking my ball and going home. | ||
| He's just walking out the door just like, everybody, they just don't appreciate me the way that they're supposed to. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| If you don't appreciate me, you can go fuck yourself. | ||
| And I don't like any of you. | ||
| And everybody can die. | ||
| There's going to be a world war. | ||
| There's going to be a world war and we're all going to die. | ||
| So I'm taking my ball and going home. | ||
| It's worse than that because so much of Alex, especially his early career, was predicated on this idea that humanity is so good and it's worth defending and humanity is... | ||
| We're powerful, and we can take power back from these globalists that have enslaved us. | ||
| And then now, just because the plug didn't work right, and his staff put the wrong article up, because clearly that's what he's complaining about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Why should I even try to plug it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Who cares? | |
| Oh, News Wars, Info Wars, who gives a shit? | ||
| Who fucking cares? | ||
| Let's plug somebody else in. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Go to the fucking CNN's website. | ||
| They probably got something on there. | ||
| I don't even give a fuck. | ||
| Because of the petty squabble there. | ||
| He's like, fuck it, humanity sucks. | ||
| They're stupid and they want to die. | ||
| I do like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's all it takes! | |
| Yeah, I know, that's what I was... | ||
| The pettiness... | ||
| Okay, the fact that it just escalates to the world exploding is my favorite part. | ||
| You could throw a tantrum. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can complain about stuff. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But your ultimate endgame for the website didn't show up properly shouldn't be, there's going to be a world war and billions are going to die. | ||
| That's your fault. | ||
| Hey, staff, put a news wars on there because people want to die. | ||
| Humanity wants it. | ||
| They want to die and they're fucking stupid. | ||
| So who cares about plugging my website? | ||
| God, that's almost a veiled threat to the employee who put the wrong one up there. | ||
| I wouldn't doubt that. | ||
| People want to die! | ||
| I'm guessing... | ||
| I'm looking at you, Terry! | ||
| I'm guessing they're fired already. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I have to assume. | ||
| Yeah, he threw a real big tantrum. | ||
| So I think that this episode blows my mind from a narrative arc situation, from him showing up super depressed because he watched a movie about Satanism yesterday. | ||
| To these weird roads that he goes down with the Belgian bus station and Gunsmoke being factually ripped from the headlines. | ||
| Literally ripped from the headlines. | ||
| What else was on the headlines today? | ||
| To this dehumanizing talk about Facebook moderators who don't even technically work for Facebook. | ||
| Just self-serving exploitation of their pain. | ||
| Just awful. | ||
| And then you reach the end, and just because he didn't get a plug for his own website on his own show, he throws a tantrum and says humanity wants to die. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think we closed the narrative circle there pretty well. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| There's episodes in the present day that are deeply, deeply painful to listen to. | ||
| And because of the farcical nature of so much of this, it really wasn't so bad, but it was a lot of stuff. | ||
| And it's like, I could handle this. | ||
| As much as I hate the present day, and I never look forward to listening to it, this I relished. | ||
| This was kind of like, you got a lot of meat on the bones. | ||
| There's a lot of stuff for me to learn about. | ||
| You're acting like a real fucking idiot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So... | ||
| He very much seemed like he went through one of my bipolar cycles in three hours. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Probably all the krill. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's been fucking tripping the whole time. | ||
| Might have taken five caps before the show. | ||
| Oh, seeing Santa Claus. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a real possibility. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Well, man, it's, you know... | ||
| That episode on Monday, doing that was a lot of fun, but I missed doing this. | ||
| I missed actually covering his stuff in our normal format, so it's nice to get back to it. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And I'm glad this went well, and we're technically still finishing on time for me to go to therapy. | ||
| Well, then we're perfect. | ||
| Yeah, so that's nice. | ||
| In the meantime, I think we have a website? | ||
| We do. | ||
| We have a website. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| Are we on Twitter? | ||
| We are. | ||
| Knowledge underscore fight. | ||
| And you're on Twitter. | ||
| I'm at GoToBedJordan. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We're on Facebook. | ||
| We are on Facebook. | ||
| Also, we're on iTunes. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| So many other places. | ||
| I might bite the bullet and get on Spotify. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I don't know why this has to be a month-long conversation. | ||
| That's basically how we start. | ||
| But, man, I don't know. | ||
| This is interesting. | ||
| I don't think we have a hero here. | ||
| Well, we have several heroes. | ||
| Well, we got Satan. | ||
| Satan's doing alright. | ||
| Satan's never killed anybody. | ||
| Satan does not exist. | ||
| That's an interesting one for this, but yeah, I'd stand by that. | ||
| I'd stand by it too. | ||
| Satan's never killed anybody. | ||
| Now, are we talking about the way people... | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And also not talking about fictional portrayals. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A literal Satan has never killed anybody. | |
| There we go. | ||
| But one guy who technically probably has is Alex Jones. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |