Today, Dan and Jordan go back to the past to explore how Alex Jones covered the days after the shooting at Sandy Hook. In this installment, everything goes crazy with completely absurd interviews. Alex interviews an insane sheriff. PJW interviews a Sandy Hook truther (poorly). Mike Adams interviews anti-vax charlatan Andrew Wakefield. It's a wild couple of days.
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm Jordan. | |
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around, drink novelty beverages, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Oh, indeed we are, Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Dan? | ||
| Jordan? | ||
| What's the best meal you've ever cooked for yourself? | ||
| I mean, I've made some stir-fries that were pretty good. | ||
| I think that's about it. | ||
| Not a home cook? | ||
| I'm not really. | ||
| I'm not very good at it. | ||
| I burn things. | ||
| I also am not very broad in my like of foods. | ||
| Well, that's true. | ||
| As somebody who's cooked for you in the past, yes, that is definitely true. | ||
| You made some nice burgers the other night? | ||
| I famously have said many times that if it were an option, I would just take food pills. | ||
| I probably would rather just not eat. | ||
| I like some dishes and all that, and I get the pleasure of eating, but it's not a big deal for me. | ||
| I would take food replacement in a fucking heartbeat. | ||
| That's disappointing. | ||
| You don't like a good crunch? | ||
| I don't mind it. | ||
| But you don't have a visceral enjoyment of it. | ||
| I eat to live. | ||
| I don't live to eat, as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson once said. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Benjamin Franklin Thomas Jefferson was his full name. | |
| Absolutely. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I would like to cook more, but I'm not good at it. | ||
| Well, when you get those peppers up and running, you're going to have to cook with them, right? | ||
| Maybe, or just eat them. | ||
| Or you're just going to eat them? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Anyway, this is a show where I promise I'll maybe learn how to cook in the future. | ||
| Don't judge me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not judging you. | |
| Where did you get judgment from? | ||
| And I know a lot about Alex Jones. | ||
| And I only know what you tell me. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| And this is going to be a fun episode, I think. | ||
| We will see. | ||
| There's a lot of meat here on this table. | ||
| Got a lot to go over today. | ||
| This is going to be pretty intense. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| We're going to be going over. | ||
| We're in the past. | ||
| We're going to be going over January 17th and 18th. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| And I would say that this is a watershed day. | ||
| A couple of days. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| On the Alex Jones program in 2013. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| For reasons you may expect and reasons you have no idea about. | ||
| The only way it could be a watershed one is if there are reasons that I could never possibly comprehend or predict. | ||
| Well, the reasons you would expect are because, you know, we're going back to look over his coverage in the aftermath of Sandy Hook. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so you would expect, well, there's some sort of big event in that narrative. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There is. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| Well, that's good. | ||
| But then there's something else. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, man. | |
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| And we'll get to that in a moment. | ||
| But before we do, we've got to give a shout-out to a couple people who have signed up and are supporting the show. | ||
| That sounds wonderful. | ||
| And make this kind of exploration possible. | ||
| So first, Catherine, thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Catherine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, Catherine. | |
| Next, Daniel, thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Daniel. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Daniel. | |
| Great name. | ||
| Next, Tian, thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Tian. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Next, I'd like to say thank you to somebody who donated and bumped it up to a little bit of an elevated level. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| We appreciate that, though, so very much. | ||
| So, Laura, 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 sodomite sent me a bucket of poop. | ||
| Daddy Sharp. | ||
| Jar Jar Binks has a Caribbean black accent. | ||
| He's a loser little titty baby. | ||
| I don't want to hate black people. | ||
| I renounce Jesus Christ! | ||
| Thank you so much, Laura. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| That would be hilarious if it was Laura Loomer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It would be. | |
| She listened to our coverage of her freak out and she was like, God, this show is great. | ||
| I can assure you, not Loomer. | ||
| Not her? | ||
| No, but if you like the show and you like to sign up and support what we're doing, you can go to our website, knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Click the button that says support the show. | ||
| We would appreciate it. | ||
| Please do. | ||
| And one more shout out. | ||
| Very special shout out. | ||
| Going out to Joseph. | ||
| He got in touch with us after we talked about the Illuminati card game, and he had some decks of the Illuminati New World Order set from 1994. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| And we got those in the mail. | ||
| I've been looking through these. | ||
| They're the coolest fucking thing in the world. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| I took a look at them, and I want to own them in my private space. | ||
| The art style is amazing. | ||
| They look fantastic. | ||
| They feel good in your hands. | ||
| They have a good mouthfeel as well. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| They do spark joy. | ||
| And so, Joseph, thank you so much. | ||
| We really appreciate it. | ||
| And I can think of no other way to formally repay you and express our gratitude other than to declare you, sir, a raptor princess. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Four stars. | |
| Go home to your mother and tell her you're brilliant. | ||
| Someone sodomite sent me a bucket of poop. | ||
| Daddy shark! | ||
| Jar Jar Binks has a Caribbean black accent. | ||
| He's a loser little titty baby. | ||
| I don't want to hate black people. | ||
| I renounce Jesus Christ! | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know how to read. | |
| I am out of control. | ||
| I've never really seen a lot of white racism in my life. | ||
| I really haven't. | ||
| I bet you money there are few living black people that have been abused by white people as much as I have been abused by black people. | ||
| Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, both those guys were complete badasses. | ||
| Complete studs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Welcome to McDonald's. | |
| May I help you? | ||
| I'm Benny Sanders. | ||
| Thank you so much, Joseph. | ||
| We really appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you very much, Joseph. | ||
| I always forget that our highest honor is also our saddest drop. | ||
| It's a little too long. | ||
| No, I just mean the ending is so brutal. | ||
| I might need to do some tweaks. | ||
| I am very seriously considering and have put minimal effort, but some effort, into a couple attempts to make new sound bites for the drops. | ||
| And that will happen eventually. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Once one of these little... | ||
| Catches fire. | ||
| Yeah, moves forward the way I intended to. | ||
| All right, so let's get down to business today. | ||
| We are going to jump in. | ||
| Here is an out-of-context drop from one of these here shows. | ||
| Barack Obama is not my father. | ||
| I'm my father. | ||
| What? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| He's his own father. | ||
| Dreams of my father, me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So let's jump into the actual episode. | ||
| We will start here on the 17th, January 17th, 2013. | ||
| Here is where Alex's head is at. | ||
| He's covering a little bit of a news story that he finds very exciting. | ||
| This is also up at Infowars.com. | ||
| Mayor predicts Waco-style standoff in response to Obama gun confiscation. | ||
| Expressing his opinion to the New York Safe Act, Gloversville Mayor Dayton King has just sensationally warned that any federal gun confiscation program could lead to Waco-style standoff in rural areas of America. | ||
| And we're going to be going over that, and I want to get that mayor on, ASAP. | ||
| Sue, how are you feeling? | ||
| So, a mayor is warning everyone that there will be... | ||
| Mass Waco standoffs all across the rural United States when the gun grab that isn't coming comes. | ||
| That might be what your perception is based on what Alex is saying, but I'm not sure if that's what he's actually saying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| So Dayton King was the mayor of Gloversville, New York. | ||
| It's a town kind of in the middle of the state, which was once a hub in the glove-making industry, hence its name. | ||
| From the 1880s to the 1950s, 90% of gloves that were sold in the country came through the leather and tanning industries in Gloversville. | ||
| There were over 100 leather and glove companies in the town at its peak. | ||
| In the 1960s and 70s, the town was devastated, as foreign suppliers became ascendant in the glove business, and the New York State Pure Water Program and the Federal Clean Water Act made it much more expensive for leather tanneries to do their business. | ||
| Tanneries are a super-polluting business, as the chemical runoff from the tanning process has a bad tendency to contaminate water supplies, if not disposed of properly, which is something that adds tons of expense to a business. | ||
| From 1950 to 2010, Gloversville lost a full third of its population, going from about 23,600 residents to about 15,600. | ||
| All in all, it's a tragic example of a city built on a single industry, which we discovered too late was killing the planet and people due to the industry's byproducts. | ||
| Yeah, that's actually a Douglas Adams bit. | ||
| About Gloversville? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Whenever a single town becomes too dependent on any one industry, people start paying for things with shoes. | ||
| It's a whole thing. | ||
| It was a Douglas Adam bit. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It was good. | ||
| Anyway, what I was talking about has nothing to do with Dayton King, but sometimes I like to take a little walk and give folks a little context about the smaller towns we end up discussing. | ||
| Yeah, I thought that was going to be just... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I had nothing to do with anything. | |
| I thought that was going to come to some kind of fruition, but now that was just a fun fact. | ||
| That's what Gloversville is. | ||
| Fun fact. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dayton King was mayor of Gloversville from 2010 to 2018. | ||
| The end of King's time as mayor is a completely fucked up story, which I will tell you now. | ||
| King was elected for the first time to a four-year term in 2010, then re-elected in 2014. | ||
| He decided to run again in 2018, and when the votes came in, it was announced that he'd lost to a local firefighter named William Bill Roback Jr. | ||
| The vote was really close, though, and after a recount, it was found that there were miscounts in a couple districts, and they were enough to give King the win by a margin of 28 votes. | ||
| Roback took the news gracefully and congratulated King on his win. | ||
| Everybody move forward. | ||
| Great. | ||
| End of story. | ||
| End of story. | ||
| There's nothing further to report here. | ||
| We're just going to move on. | ||
| Gloversville is a wonderful city. | ||
| You don't notice the weirdness that his term ended in 2018 when he won that election? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I did notice that. | |
| I did notice that. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| It's an interesting situation. | ||
| Well, it turns out King was forced to resign as mayor on January 9th, 2019, after he was arrested. | ||
| What was he arrested for, you ask? | ||
| Well, he got caught sneaking into government property after hours and stealing postage from the city for personal use, and then falsified records to cover his tracks. | ||
| It was stamps? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| It was stamps that took him out. | ||
| Well, electronic stamps, probably. | ||
| But yeah. | ||
| He was charged with a felony, but in a plea deal, he was allowed just to step down as mayor and pay back the $473 he stole in stamps. | ||
| $473 in stamps? | ||
| That was it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's it. | |
| That was it? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Even, I will admit, that's a little bit lame. | ||
| Who doesn't steal office supplies, you know? | ||
| Maybe $473 in postage is a little, you know, getting someone... | ||
| It's a little much. | ||
| It's a lot of postage. | ||
| Where's he sending it to? | ||
| Is he Larry Nichols making $437 worth of calls to Nicaragua? | ||
| I mean, who knows? | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| But, you know, it's a lot of postage to steal. | ||
| And maybe it's unbecoming for a mayor to falsify records to cover up his theft of office supplies. | ||
| But if this was really the only thing about Dayton King that was sketchy, I might say, eh. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| Yeah, all in all, it's lame. | ||
| Yeah, a little bit. | ||
| However, this is not the first time that Mayor King has been arrested while in office. | ||
| For postage. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| He's a serial postage thief. | ||
| If only. | ||
| Wait, he's been arrested before in office? | ||
| You bet. | ||
| Why did you say that? | ||
| Fairly recently. | ||
| Why did you say that part? | ||
| Well, because it was fairly recently, and this guy is a dick. | ||
| The previous time happened during the 2018 mayoral race, and it had to do with him committing official misconduct, the result of him reviewing the personnel file of his opponent in the race, William Roback Jr., from his time as a firefighter, and releasing that information on air during a debate. | ||
| Kind of makes it mind-blowing that Roback gracefully accepted losing by 28 votes after that kind of shit was pulled during the election. | ||
| So King ended up pleading guilty to second-degree harassment. | ||
| It was made to, quote, write a letter of apology to Roback and the Gloversville Firefighters Union for violating a state civil rights law. | ||
| He was out there violating people's civil rights. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Don't you not get to be mayor if you do that? | ||
| If you violate civil rights, we have a rule that's like, can't be mayor anymore, right? | ||
| No, you can't violate civil rights and then just be like, okay, cool, great win. | ||
| It was stamps. | ||
| It was stamps that took him down. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| That is America in all. | ||
| God, that's a microcosm of everything that America stands for. | ||
| Kind of seems like a real piece of shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The kind of guy who would violate his opponent's civil rights in order to win a fucking mayoral race. | ||
| So anyway, back in 2013, he was interviewed on the local news, and there's like an eight-second clip where he says that most people will turn in their guns and go along with buybacks, but there's some people who won't and predict a Waco situation that won't end well. | ||
| It's not even really clear that he's voicing opposition to gun laws in the clip, just that he sees some possible negative consequences. | ||
| Oh, so he's just like, hey man, there's some crazies. | ||
| I'm not sure if he's even speaking of them negatively. | ||
| The clip's too short. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I don't know what he's saying, and neither do they. | ||
| Paul Joseph Watson wrote an article on Infowars that claimed that the clip was a strong voice of opposition to gun bills, and a whole lot of the right-wing media picked up on that as the spin, which is what Alex is doing here. | ||
| Alex doesn't know what he's talking about, and as per usual, the guy he's building up as a good guy in government, standing up for your guns, is actually a stamp-stealing local election Nixon. | ||
| Naturally. | ||
| Good times. | ||
| Why are they always together? | ||
| They're always together. | ||
| All the con men stick together. | ||
| But I don't know if this guy ever actually even shows up. | ||
| I know that Alex wants to get him on. | ||
| But it's just because he said something about guns. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| God, I hate people. | ||
| I'm not doing great with the people at the moment. | ||
| With the people. | ||
| With the people. | ||
| I'm having some struggles. | ||
| People struggles. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's something normal to have in 2019, I think. | ||
| I feel like, yeah. | ||
| So speaking of people you might struggle with, Alex has a guest here on the 17th. | ||
| It's going to be interesting to learn a little bit more about this guy. | ||
| He is a sheriff. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| I'm already out. | ||
| Pass. | ||
| Move on to the lightning round. | ||
| He is interested in saying that, no, we will not follow gun laws. | ||
| Surprise. | ||
| Surprise. | ||
| When they come for the guns, it's going to kick off a war. | ||
| And they're going to call us terrorists. | ||
| You are. | ||
| Now, me, I'm not here saying I'm offensively going to do anything. | ||
| I'm a radio talk show host. | ||
| I'm not trying to be macho. | ||
| I don't want a war. | ||
| But I'm telling you something. | ||
| They're going to start it, and we're going to finish it. | ||
| That's where this is going. | ||
| And I want to take you now to Jackson County Sheriff Denny Payman. | ||
| He was the first sheriff. | ||
| Now it is dozens of them. | ||
| Rand Paul vows to torpedo Obama executive orders, so we're going to fight peacefully. | ||
| They know we're going to beat them peacefully. | ||
| Okay, so Denny Payman is this guy. | ||
| So at this point in 2013, Danny Payment is the sheriff of Jackson County in Kentucky. | ||
| But as is so often the case when we go back... | ||
| When does he get fired? | ||
| For what dishonorable action? | ||
| What do you know? | ||
| It's another fun story. | ||
| You know, so often when we go back to look at these people that Alex has on as like pillars and exemplary figures... | ||
| They're in jail now or should be. | ||
| I don't think this guy's in jail, but man, he was close. | ||
| So... | ||
| At 2013, though, he had little over a year left as sheriff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And four years before he was right on the cusp of being sent to prison for a long time. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| For years as sheriff, Denny Payman had received warnings that he was running the finances of Jackson County Sheriff's Department. | ||
| The way he was doing it amounted to mismanagement. | ||
| These were generally soft, like, hey, be careful about this kind of warnings as opposed to threats. | ||
| The audit of the department, dated December 17, 2012, conducted by county treasurer Beth Salley and signed by Judge William O. Smith, concluded that Payman was not keeping appropriate receipts. | ||
| He was not tracking expenses correctly, and he had, quote, exceeded his salary limits, according to the county's approved budget. | ||
| Doing what? | ||
| They found that he was running a deficit in his department of over $112,000. | ||
| Annually? | ||
| Well, yeah, in that year. | ||
| And that the fiscal court had already loaned his department $277,000 to pay salaries, which he had not reimbursed. | ||
| These numbers are completely insane, particularly when you learn that according to Kentucky.gov, the Jackson County, Kentucky Sheriff's Department currently employs exactly seven officers. | ||
| And back when Payman was sheriff, that number may have been two. | ||
| So it was a very small department. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| So he's an embezzler. | ||
| It's unclear. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I wouldn't make that allegation against him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| He may be just bad at finances. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whatever it is, it could be some mismanagement action. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| That is a possibility. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| So anyway, Judge William O. Smith said at the time that it, quote, was the worst audit I've ever seen of a county office. | ||
| In the audit report, there's a section where Payman can respond, and he acknowledged all of the identified problems as being real, but says things like they're being taken care of and that he didn't know where these were happening or that these things were problems. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Flash forward about a year, and he's not taking care of the Sheriff's Department fiscal problems, so again, there are concerns raised, and controls of the department's finances get taken away and given to the fiscal court, and they also start another police department. | ||
| Really think that should have been the situation the first time you talk? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe. | |
| Give them a chance to fix the problem. | ||
| Once you hear $114,000 is missing, that's not good. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| Or whatever the number was. | ||
| Twelve. | ||
| But I say give people a shot. | ||
| Anyway. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| The sheriff's department was losing a ton of money, and the county couldn't afford to allow it to continue down that road. | ||
| But still, Denny Payman was not being charged with a crime, and he was just having control of the department's finances put in more responsible hands. | ||
| Well, Denny Payman didn't take kindly to that. | ||
| On January 2014, he showed up to a meeting of the county fiscal court and arrested Beth Sally and Judge William O. Smith, who happened to be in the middle of conducting a meeting. | ||
| Naturally, this led to the meeting having to be adjourned with some interesting responses from meeting attendees, which I'm taking from an article in the Lexington Herald-Leader. | ||
| County Attorney George Hayes said, quote, Judge Smith's probably got him a good federal lawsuit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Quote, we had to adjourn because there's no one running the meeting, County Clerk Donald Duckmore said with a laugh. | ||
| I know it's... | ||
| Right, because he's still in the Blues Brothers? | ||
| That's a different duck. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| I know it's not funny, but still... | ||
| And then dot, dot, dot. | ||
| Guy trails off. | ||
| A number of people at the meeting were pretty concerned that they just witnessed an overt example of abuse of authority. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, quote, Payman insisted his only motivation is to clean up local government. | ||
| There's nothing political about doing what's right, he said. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh. | |
| Payment charged Sally and Smith with tampering with public records, second-degree forgery, criminal facilitation, abuse of public trust, and engaging in organized crime through extortion or coercion. | ||
| Many of these are very serious felonies. | ||
| It should be pointed out, however, that he charged them without seeking an indictment or even getting a warrant signed by a judicial officer. | ||
| I was going to say, you can't do all that, right? | ||
| This is a one-man arrest job. | ||
| You started writing in, you started saying he charged them and I was like, okay, so he's gone through the district. | ||
| No, it's just him. | ||
| It's just him. | ||
| Did he write everything out with a pencil? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Payman felt that he had the authority to unilaterally arrest a judge and a county treasurer because he was the sheriff, and he is a part of the constitutional sheriff movement, who hold that the sheriff is the highest law on the land and not subject to anyone else's authority. | ||
| You can't be a sheriff and be part of the constitutional sheriff movement. | ||
| It seems self-serving. | ||
| That's a bad idea. | ||
| Well, Denny Payman would soon learn that these constitutional sheriff beliefs do not hold up in reality. | ||
| Odd, odd, odd. | ||
| Because what he did was flagrantly against the law, and charges against Sally and Smith were dropped on February 6, 2014. | ||
| But that didn't stop the fallout from Payman's wildly stupid behavior. | ||
| Judge Smith sued Payman in federal court and eventually reached a settlement awarding him $62,500. | ||
| See, I think we're right back in the whole commit a bunch of crimes thing and then get zero punishment for it that fits it. | ||
| $437 worth of stamp doesn't trump civil rights. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't care what settlement you get. | ||
| Arresting a judge? | ||
| He just arrested people for no reason because he's crazy and he thinks that the sheriff is the highest law officer in the land. | ||
| No, that's immediate, like, goodbye. | ||
| Goodbye! | ||
| Now, you know what's fucked up? | ||
| Judge Smith was clean. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, oh no, she's actually guilty of shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
County Treasurer Beth Sally absolutely was corrupt. | |
| She was absolutely stealing from the county. | ||
| Goddammit, it was a 50-50 job. | ||
| But what she ended up getting indicted for in 2015 doesn't match with what he tried to arrest her for a year prior. | ||
| It's one of those weird situations where the cops try to frame someone who also happens to be guilty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Payman was acting in retaliation, and his charges were complete shit. | ||
| But it turns out that one of the people he lashed out with was actually guilty of a mess. | ||
| And so she's in big trouble. | ||
| But it's so crazy. | ||
| And she's gonna go to jail! | ||
| I don't understand why he isn't in jail! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| God, White Manning is great. | ||
| So, about this arrest of a judge, he didn't face criminal charges for that. | ||
| But he wasn't so lucky in 2017 when he was arrested and charged with drug trafficking. | ||
| Oh, well, that's simple. | ||
| After leaving law enforcement, Payman had set up a hemp farm that he had the permission to grow hemp on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, that's nice. | |
| Naturally, he decided to start growing straight up weed and was involved in trafficking of said weed. | ||
| Well, naturally, I think weed should be legal, and I don't think that even someone as clearly an asshole as payment should be punished for selling it. | ||
| I do think that there are some extenuating circumstances here that I could bring up to judge him for. | ||
| The first is that when police showed up, they didn't just find weed. | ||
| They also found eight vials of steroids, which he didn't have a legal reason to have, which is an amount that law enforcement considers indicative of trafficking. | ||
| They also found three loaded guns, which were, quote, strategically placed in the house to defend Payman's marijuana-growing operation. | ||
| That sounds right. | ||
| He did read How to Hide Your Guns, didn't he? | ||
| He might have. | ||
| It appears that he was up to a bit more than just some cool weed growing. | ||
| Second, it strains my principles to give someone a pass for drug-related crimes when they were the head of an organization that profited off locking people up for drug-related crimes. | ||
| According to the 2016 data from Kentucky.gov, of the 207 arrests made by the Jackson County Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Fuck him. | ||
| Poetic justice in this situation is still just kind of annoying. | ||
| I still think that those charges were dropped against him, too. | ||
| I don't think that he ended up getting... | ||
|
unidentified
|
God, these guys get away with everything. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| They just get away with everything. | ||
| It does seem that way. | ||
| I can't understand why we haven't realized that if we just started locking up white men who do weird shit like this, we're going to be way better off. | ||
| Also, I should tell you this, Jordan. | ||
| Sheriff Payman was present at the Bundy Ranch standoff. | ||
| See what I'm saying? | ||
| You should have gone to jail then! | ||
| And in 2013, he was awarded the High Noon Award. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| Which was personally given to him at a ceremony presided over by Larry Pratt of Gun Owners America. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are these guys children? | |
| It's called the High Noon Award? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are they literally playing cowboys and Indians right now? | |
| Somewhat, yes. | ||
| This is disgusting. | ||
| So he got the award from Larry Pratt of Gun Owners for America, one of Alex's earliest sponsors. | ||
| The award is given to those who, quote, stand for truth when others run, tell the truth, even though politically incorrect. | ||
| Can't help but think that getting that award might have emboldened payment to feel like he could just unilaterally arrest. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Oh, great. | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| Right. | ||
| What are we doing here, guys? | ||
| Kind of weird. | ||
| What does it take to get you to a place where you believe that the sheriff is the highest office in the land? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What has to happen? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's pretty strange. | ||
| But, you know, that's the view of this guy, what kind of sheriff he was. | ||
| I mean, because I can't... | ||
| Look, I get flat earthers. | ||
| You can't see the whole thing. | ||
| It's tough to comprehend. | ||
| Maybe you don't get it. | ||
| Civic systems are complicated too, man. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I mean, just looking at a guy wearing that uniform and you're like, come on, you're not the highest authority in the land because we're not nine. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It does seem strange. | ||
| So anyway, I think that he's kind of a bad sheriff. | ||
| Yeah, I would say so too. | ||
| But here's what Alex thinks. | ||
| Well, God bless you, Sheriff. | ||
| One more segment with you. | ||
| Jackson County Sheriff Denny Payman. | ||
| This is the kind of sheriff we need in every county in this country. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| Yep, there you go. | ||
| So in this next clip, Alex talks about how Obama took everything from him. | ||
| Everything from the good... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, you ain't seen shit yet, Alex. | |
| He has a lot of personal aggrievement complaints here. | ||
| And then Denny Payman has... | ||
| A really fucked up take on things. | ||
| Unsurprising. | ||
| Everything's been taken from us. | ||
| Obama said it five years ago in a secret meeting with his million dollar donors. | ||
| He said they're bitter clingers, but don't worry, I'll get them in the second term. | ||
| They call us bitter clingers. | ||
| They hate us because we love God. | ||
| They hate us, and they've taken everything from us. | ||
| All we've got is our guns left and our Bibles, and now they're taking our churches, saying the Catholic Church and others are going to have to pay for abortions. | ||
| These people are crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, they are. | |
| There's not the same blood that runs through them as it runs through the rest of the core of America. | ||
| It's not the same blood. | ||
| They'll find out what the color of that blood is. | ||
| They've showed it before. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I don't like that at all. | ||
| I don't like anything about that. | ||
| Even Alex was taken aback for a second, just like, God! | ||
| Damn, man. | ||
| Yeah, that's a weird thing to say, man. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Let's move the fuck on. | ||
| Yeah, so that's unsettling to some extent. | ||
| But not nearly as unsettling just from a discernment perspective than hearing Sheriff Denny Payman describe the Tea Party like this. | ||
| This is weird. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, what I'm finding in these little Tea Party groups, liberal groups, you know, patriot groups, what I'm finding... | |
| He thinks that the Tea Party are liberal groups. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Well, to him, maybe they are. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, maybe that is... | ||
| They are not submitting to his authority, which means that they're obviously commie liberals. | ||
| That's one way of looking at it. | ||
| So after this, Denny Payman leaves, and Alex has Lou Rockwell as a guest, who's a libertarian luminary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| I don't give a shit. | ||
| Those aren't words that can... | ||
| That's an oxymoron. | ||
| It's a really, really boring interview, and I don't care. | ||
| It's mostly just demonizing Obama. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Based on where we're going, we don't have time for goddamn Lou Rockwell. | ||
| We'll get to him another day. | ||
| Sounds good. | ||
| He will come back and say something interesting, and we'll get to him then. | ||
| Because Alex says this, and it got me... | ||
| The point is, and they've got some big breaking news tomorrow, everybody's demanding we look at false flag at Newtown. | ||
| And it's Sandy. | ||
| Look, it's got all the signs of it. | ||
| It looks really bad, okay? | ||
| And I've just stayed out of it because I know they can crucify people with the information if it's not 100% nailed down. | ||
| It's got all the earmarks. | ||
| We're going to hear... | ||
| From some of the people that are saying this. | ||
| And it doesn't mean I agree with all of it. | ||
| There's a lot of signs. | ||
| I mean, we know they put him on the drugs. | ||
| We know he got the gun illegally. | ||
| We know they're blaming us for stuff we couldn't control. | ||
| We know they made him victim-disarmament zone. | ||
| But some of the other stuff, were the whole thing a hoax? | ||
| No, they killed some real people there. | ||
| It does have the signs. | ||
| So we got a really interesting position that Alex is expressing, which is... | ||
| Again, really wanting to call it a false flag. | ||
| But at the same time, showing a little bit of restraint and kind of an awareness that if I go down this road, someone's going to hit me for it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| That kind of idea. | ||
| The fact that he's resisting it all is confusing in the present day. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Where you're like, why do you... | ||
| Because it seems that he's aware that it's a line that you can't... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Come back from. | |
| Right, and I think he understands the consequences of it a little bit better in this time frame. | ||
| And so he's saying that we're going to get into it tomorrow, and I'm like, I'm listening to this episode, and I'm like, there's no way we're not covering both of these episodes, so I knew I had my work ahead of me, which is why Lou Rockwell can get bent. | ||
| Fuck off, Lou. | ||
| So then Alex says this about Paul Joseph Watson and his feelings about Sandy Hook conspiracy theories. | ||
| I don't know about Sandy Hook. | ||
| They're going to look at that some tomorrow. | ||
| Watson is somewhat of a skeptic, but we're going to look at it because you're beating our doors down to do it. | ||
| That's all we've been doing is looking at it. | ||
| Believe me, that's all people are doing. | ||
| It looks real bad. | ||
| So I think what you can take away from that is that Alex is responding to audience demand, something that he denies in the present day. | ||
| The idea that the audience made a lot of requests that he covers Sandy Hook. | ||
| He's like, I just go where truth is. | ||
| No, I think it's very clear that there's market pressure for him to get into this business. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, absolutely. | |
| Because as we've seen, he's been pretty resistant to cover it up until this point. | ||
| Yeah, and even PJ Dubs is giving him some... | ||
| Allegedly. | ||
| Yeah, well, fair. | ||
| Giving him some pushback. | ||
| Fair. | ||
| But I think that that's an important piece of this, because he has to respond to what the audience wants him to do. | ||
| You can see it clearly there. | ||
| The audience have been banging down our door. | ||
| In terms of the lawsuit, it sure seems like that means he is profiting off of... | ||
| Or at least seeking profit. | ||
| Seeking to profit off of this. | ||
| Whether or not it came is a strong indication that's like, well, this seems to be where people want us to go. | ||
| I don't know how much that's illegal. | ||
| I think it's a little shady. | ||
| But whatever. | ||
| So towards the end of this episode, Alex gets a call from a guy who has some news about another gun grab. | ||
| Oh, great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I just hope an article gets written up on this because it's pretty important. | |
| It shows how the IRS is going to be used at least to kind of reimburse people for weapons that are taken, whether they're voluntarily or not. | ||
| Yeah, wasn't that introduced like two years ago and again last year? | ||
| I mean, I'd forgotten about that, but I remember seeing that like a year ago, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know, but it was introduced this Monday. | |
| It's HR 226. | ||
| HR, oh, I didn't know that. | ||
| 226 and IRS for confiscated guns. | ||
| Holy Toledo. | ||
| I mean, you know what's amazing about why I should take more calls? | ||
| You guys always remind me of stuff I forgot about. | ||
| Or things that I didn't know about. | ||
| So I get information from my callers that I accept as real. | ||
| And I just repeat it to you. | ||
| And it's news now. | ||
| So H.R. 226 was a House resolution that was designed to alter the IRS code to allow $2,000 of a tax credit to people who elected to surrender their assault weapons to the federal, state, or local government. | ||
| It was completely voluntary and specifies that it was about creating an incentive for people to get the number of weapons laying around down. | ||
| It's super pointless to debate the fine points of this bill because as it literally always is the case when Alex brings up a gun bill This was already dead in committee by the time the caller is telling Alex it exists Of course three days before this episode the bill was sent to the house ways and means committee and literally no action was ever Taken on it and there it died great Alex didn't know about its existence until this caller called in he doesn't keep up with the news He doesn't keep up with his premier talk All he's about is gun rights. | ||
| There is a fucking bill in the house that's so nefarious and evil. | ||
| Three days go by, and if this caller hadn't called in, he'd never know about it. | ||
| Yeah, of course not. | ||
| This is pathetic. | ||
| Well, it wasn't being covered in the mainstream media, so he doesn't need to respond to it. | ||
| It's not covered in drudge. | ||
| He's a purely reactionary creature. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, at the end of the day. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So this is where we say farewell to the 17th. | ||
| Goodbye, Lou. | ||
| And in the process, we say goodbye to Alex Jones for now. | ||
| Because wisely, Alex took off on the 18th. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Wait, so we're covering a day when Alex is not there. | ||
| This is fucking unprecedented. | ||
| Generally, we would never do that. | ||
| But this is too important for us to skip. | ||
| 300 plus episodes and here we are. | ||
| Oh, I think we've talked about a couple David Knights here and there in our earlier days. | ||
| Paul Joseph Watson hosts on the 18th. | ||
| And I honestly think that it was a strategic decision on Alex's part, less a vacation that he actually wanted to take. | ||
| I don't think that Alex wanted to be anywhere near this, just in case. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because Paul Joseph Watson has a little bit of a guest. | ||
| Comes straight out the gate with... | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| You're getting a little too excited. | ||
| It's nothing that overt. | ||
| But he has a guest that Alex doesn't want to be directly tied to. | ||
| And coming up shortly, CNN can't get him, but we can. | ||
| It's the controversial Florida professor who's basically been savaged by the mainstream media for questioning the official narrative behind the Sandy Hook shooting. | ||
| It's Professor James Tracy, and he'll be live via Skype to take your calls. | ||
| So James Tracy, the professor from Florida Atlantic University. | ||
| Is Paul Joseph Watson's guest on the show. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| At this point in time, Tracy was already pitching crisis actor conspiracies. | ||
| It's the sort of thing where if you're going to have him on, you are responsible for pushing back on these things. | ||
| And let's see how he does. | ||
| Especially for someone who the day before Alex said Paul Joseph Watson is critical of these theories. | ||
| He doesn't go in for it, so you would expect him to come loaded for bear to protect the conspiracy world that he is involved in from someone who's saying dangerous ideas that taint the purity of the turf. | ||
| I thought when he said that even PJW was giving him some pushback, it was the same way that his listeners were saying... | ||
| You should go and do more about Sandy Hook. | ||
| Opposite. | ||
| Paul Joseph Watson is a voice of reason in Alex's conception of things. | ||
| The way he's presenting it, Paul Joseph Watson's like, Alex, don't do this. | ||
| That idea. | ||
| And Paul's going to try and pay lip service to that position as he interviews Professor James Tracy. | ||
| But the broader picture that I think you walk away from this interview with is that he's trying to mainstream... | ||
| Tracy, as a questioner, as a legitimate media critic or something. | ||
| And I think that the feeling that I had that this wasn't going to be a great interview started almost immediately. | ||
| He's been absolutely pillared by the mainstream media. | ||
| He was on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 last Friday, I believe it was. | ||
| And for 25 minutes, Anderson Cooper attacked him, put his picture up on screen. | ||
| Basically, it was a surprise that there wasn't a wanted sign next to his name. | ||
| That's an exaggeration, for sure. | ||
| Don't they put up your picture just about every time you call into a CNN show? | ||
| Paul's misspeaking. | ||
| I thought this was really crazy, because in the clip right before this, literally a minute before this... | ||
| He'd said, CNN can't get him, but we can. | ||
| I know, that was weird. | ||
| Yeah, and now he's saying he was on CNN, and it's not. | ||
| Anderson Cooper was talking about him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| He wasn't on CNN. | ||
| Okay, that makes sense. | ||
| Paul's just speaking very unclearly. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Goddamn Brits. | |
| But even if you're talking about somebody, you would put their picture up. | ||
| You would put their picture up. | ||
| Television news style. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| As Alex does with everybody. | ||
| Everyone. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How dare they? | ||
| But you're getting the victim characterization here. | ||
| He's being pilloried by the media for asking questions and defying the mainstream narrative. | ||
| Everybody wants to believe the same thing, but we've got to have those thinkers out there asking the hard questions. | ||
| So in this clip, Paul expresses and sets forth his position, and that is that he doesn't believe these theories. | ||
| And so in fairness to him, I will... | ||
| I don't actually believe in all these theories that are circulating about Sandy Hook, but we're going to talk to the professor before the bottom of the hour. | ||
| We're going to go over some of the questions that he and others have raised about the Sandy Hook massacre. | ||
| I think that there's an appropriate way to do this for Paul to live in that space where, hey, I don't believe any of this stuff, but I'm willing to talk to you. | ||
| But it requires pushback. | ||
| It requires knowing and presenting accurately what this guy is saying, not misrepresenting what he's saying to paint him as a victim of the mainstream media's bullying. | ||
| I think that that's important. | ||
| And I think we already know he's not going to do that. | ||
| No, absolutely not. | ||
| This is going to be a mess. | ||
| You think he's playing a game on us? | ||
| You think Paul Joseph is running out here ostensibly saying that he doesn't believe anything, but actually does believe it, and is acting as the resident skeptic who's going to be won over at the end, and everybody goes, look at how great that was! | ||
| I don't think it's the second one. | ||
| I think it's that Paul's pretty smart, and he understands that this is a sticky wicket. | ||
| This is a trap. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If I get involved with this guy too overtly, then I will be in league with whatever the consequences are. | ||
| I think he's smart enough to be aware of that, at least at this point. | ||
| That's the sense that I get from the way he's carrying himself. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| But at the same time, he is such a dyed-in-the-wool instinctual propagandist that he knows that people with extreme opinions, it's good for business to allow them... | ||
| I get what you're saying. | ||
| The theories are very popular. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| As referenced the last day, Alex on the 17th was saying that people are knocking down their door to talk about how there were actors at Sandy Hook, how all this shit's fake, all that stuff. | ||
| So Paul kind of knows that it's good for business to not be like, fuck you, Professor Tracy. | ||
| What you're doing is shameful. | ||
| I don't believe it. | ||
| You have no evidence of this. | ||
| Because then you're going to alienate all the people who've been knocking down your door and demanding you have this conversation. | ||
| I was going to say, and not just alienate. | ||
| Alienate would be fine. | ||
| Turn them on you. | ||
| Our listeners could alienate us. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| That would be a whole different thing than his listeners who would fucking attack his home. | ||
| Or not that, but just like constant vitriol and bile being thrown at you. | ||
| You would make enemies of your audience. | ||
| And I think that Paul is smart enough and has done this long enough to be aware of that dynamic. | ||
| And he's smart enough to understand there is no proof of this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so he's trying to walk that line, but I think he errs on the side of what's good for business. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And... | ||
| Con men tend to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Alex is gone, but that doesn't stop him from calling into the fucking show and holding court for like 10 minutes. | ||
| He calls into the show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| God, I hate him so much. | ||
| And here's a little bit of that. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Now we're joined on the line by Alex Jones with an emergency alert. | ||
| Oh my God, what a gift. | ||
| Alex, welcome to the show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| I've taken a day off. | ||
| I took my son camping, and I got up this morning and began reading the articles at Infowars.com, and I had to call in here to point out that even Infowars.com and even myself and my great researchers, we tend to under or downplay the full magnitude of this. | ||
| What's happening is so tyrannical and so sensational. | ||
| I don't even care anymore. | ||
| This is so ridiculous. | ||
| So we're listening to three people on the phone. | ||
| Well, Tracy isn't there yet. | ||
| This is still pre-interview. | ||
| Okay, so fine. | ||
| Paul Joseph Watson's on the phone from London. | ||
| Alex is on the phone from camping. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And Tracy's going to be on the phone from Florida. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This is... | ||
| Thrilling content. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is. | |
| By the way, this is visually unstoppable. | ||
| But as an audio thing, it's kind of interesting because what's going on is Alex has taken the day off ostensibly to go camping with his son. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And in the middle of the day, he's like, fuck it, I got to check in with Paul. | ||
| Somebody needs to know that there's tyranny going on somewhere. | ||
| And it's way worse. | ||
| It's way worse than you ever would have expected. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But if you really... | |
| Dig between the lines of what he's calling in to say. | ||
| He's like, my own website, we are inaccurate. | ||
| It's worse than we say. | ||
| It's kind of like an anti-plug for his own coverage in a weird way. | ||
| So they get to talking about guns, because of course, and Alex has this to say about Janet Napolitano and the Department of Homeland Security. | ||
| They put out some training videos, and some of the terrorists in the video are not Arabs. | ||
| They're not Middle Eastern. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa, whoa, whoa. | |
| Then what is a terrorist, Dan? | ||
| If they're not Middle Eastern, if they're not exclusively Middle Eastern, what is a terrorist, Dan? | ||
| That seems to be what Alex's complaint is. | ||
| That's kind of what I think it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Folks, it's happening. | |
| She's announcing that we're the terrorists. | ||
| In the training videos, every single person is white. | ||
| I mean, folks, it is on. | ||
| All you guys that said give our liberties up because of al-Qaeda, you have been fooled. | ||
| So, I mean, I think you can get a sense of... | ||
| I think he has a strong take. | ||
| I think he has a strong take on white people can't be terrorists. | ||
| I would say, your son wants to go fishing. | ||
| Get off the fucking phone, you idiot. | ||
| Nothing like camping. | ||
| You know, you remember camping as a kid. | ||
| You'd go out into the middle of the forest to build your fire and you'd call into your syndicated radio show. | ||
| Your own show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Lame. | ||
| Fucking take a day off. | ||
| You're not saying anything you don't say. | ||
| It's not like this is breaking news with Napolitano. | ||
| Like, why? | ||
| How rejected must your kid feel in that moment? | ||
| If I were his son, I would feel real not great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Also, I don't believe he's camping. | |
| What kind of leaf is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, it's the magic of life. | |
| Hold on, I gotta call into my radio show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's an emergency! | |
| We're all taking our guns! | ||
| Paul, baby. | ||
| Do a good job with this interview with a crazy dude, all right? | ||
| Be careful. | ||
| So we get to it. | ||
| Here, Paul gives James Tracy what I would describe as a very friendly introduction to their interview. | ||
| Well, I'm delighted to be joined now by Professor James Tracy, Ph.D. from Florida Atlantic University. | ||
| He's a tenured communications professor, and he also teaches a class entitled Culture of Conspiracy. | ||
| He's also involved with Project Censored. | ||
| And his website is memoryholeblog.com. | ||
| Professor, welcome to the show. | ||
| It's great to be here, Paul. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So I don't believe that when you're having an interview with someone like this, you necessarily need to introduce the interview by being like, first of all, I'd like to say you can fuck off. | ||
| It's okay to have some pleasantries. | ||
| I don't think there's anything... | ||
| There's nothing I would condemn yet. | ||
| But to be fair, all they've done is say hello to each other. | ||
| I might even go with, you can only call him professor and list no other credits. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Because, and even then. | ||
| Not if you're interviewing him now, in 2019. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| In any facet, all of that stuff is there to burnish him as a credulous subject. | ||
| Somebody who has information. | ||
| He's a professor. | ||
| He's well-read. | ||
| He's well-educated. | ||
| He runs his own blog. | ||
| He even does classes on conspiracy. | ||
| So of course he knows what he's talking about. | ||
| And what they don't point out is that he is in Florida, has never been there, and should shut the fuck up about it. | ||
| That seems like the thing I would put in there just first. | ||
| The way what you're describing, like him presenting him in this certain fashion, goes a little bit even further in this. | ||
| This is sort of an attempt Paul is making to lay out a question for him, but I don't actually think that they get to a real question. | ||
| Is your dick too big? | ||
| It's not far off in terms of conspiracy, like self-victimhood aggrandizement. | ||
| Because the way that Paul lays out this question, pay close attention to it. | ||
| All this is to do is to... | ||
| This is the first question, by the way. | ||
| This is the first question. | ||
| It is to establish immediately in the interview that this man is the victim of a harsh assault by the mainstream media. | ||
| So if you hear something from the mainstream media that's super negative about James Tracy... | ||
| Well, you can't trust him. | ||
| They're assaulting him. | ||
| They're bullies. | ||
| He's a victim of their attacks. | ||
| And he's definitely not a snowflake. | ||
| They are. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, before we get into Sandy Hook, obviously we're going to go in detail on that. | ||
| I want to talk about basically the onslaught you've received over the past week by the mainstream media, and particularly CNN. | ||
| As I mentioned earlier, Anderson Cooper literally devoted half of his show last week to attacking Professor Tracy, and then he had another ten-minute segment just a couple of days ago doing the same thing. | ||
| Basically, as far as I saw, he was trying to get Professor Tracy fired from his position there at the university. | ||
| Professor, I mean, CNN could have easily just ignored all this. | ||
| Why do you think they've attacked you so vigorously for asking questions about Sandy Hook? | ||
| So you see there in the framing, the point comes out in the question. | ||
| You wouldn't phrase a question like that unless you were wanting to paint this person as the unfair target of some sort of... | ||
| Vitriol from the mainstream establishment who's scared of the questions he's asking. | ||
| It's like when they write up poll questions. | ||
| If you wrote that question on a poll, you're not going to get an accurate reading. | ||
| That's a biased question right off the bat. | ||
| It's a volleyball setup for a spike. | ||
| James Tracy knows how to fucking answer a question about his own oppression. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| Your intentions show through when you ask a question like that, regardless of how many times you say you don't believe the things he's saying, which Paul does in this next clip. | ||
| And in this clip, I believe it lays out pretty clearly what I was describing as what I believe his motivations are. | ||
| The desire to personally be above it while at the same time doing what's best for business because everyone wants them to cover this. | ||
| There's a video on YouTube which came to my attention about a week ago. | ||
| It's only been posted for about... | ||
| 10, 11 days. | ||
| It's called the Sandy Hook shooting fully exposed. | ||
| 10.6 million plus people have watched this video in the space of the last 10, 11 days alone. | ||
| That shows you how voracious the interest is in this whole Sandy Hook issue. | ||
| And, I mean, I'm coming at it from a perspective of there are lots of unanswered questions. | ||
| I don't buy into the notion that this never happened or that the parents, the... | ||
| Family members involved were actors in some sense, which some people have claimed. | ||
| I think it was a real tragedy. | ||
| It really happened. | ||
| But there are plenty of unanswered questions that go along with it that suggest more people than the accused shooter Adam Lanza may have been involved. | ||
| So we're going to get into that now with Professor James Tracy. | ||
| So there's 10.6 million people or whatever who watch this video in 10 days. | ||
| That's an incredibly huge market. | ||
| that we hope to siphon some off of by interviewing you and satisfying the demands of the people who are knocking down our door but at the same time I can't be personally attached to this. | ||
| I think that dynamic is so perfectly clear here. | ||
| It's also an appeal to the herd in some senses of, like, if you're listening to this, well, this guy has a video that has over 10.6 million views. | ||
| I don't think it's his video. | ||
| You've got something to listen to. | ||
| I don't think it's his video, but it's a video that's adjacent to the idea that he's putting out. | ||
| No, that's what he's, you know. | ||
| It also raises the question of, like, how uninformed is Paul about who he's interviewing here? | ||
| because if he knew the things that Tracy was saying, he wouldn't be able to walk this line. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
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He would have to present it at... | |
| If you are a person who believes that this was a real tragedy and that you don't believe the people who are putting out things that are disrespectful to the people who lost loved ones or died there, why would you put up with and help? | ||
| the person who's making those theories by asking questions that are designed to play right into the things that they're doing. | ||
| Now, with a well-run show, I would say that it is... | ||
| Unbelievable that you would not know who is coming on your show. | ||
| On InfoWars, I can totally believe he did zero preparation and he's just having a grand old time because he's an idiot. | ||
| I can believe that, but if so, it is weird that he keeps saying, I don't believe this stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because he must know what he doesn't believe. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just think there's a lot of nefarious intent here. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| No, I agree with that. | ||
| And I think you can see that here in this next question. | ||
| That he asks him. | ||
| Because if you follow the framing of the question, it is again an incredibly manipulative setup that's trying to lead James Tracy where he needs to go in order to push his theories. | ||
| So, Professor, you know, the Obama administration has built its entire gun control move on the notion that Adam Lanza shot these children with an AR-15 assault rifle. | ||
| They're trying to ban the assault rifles now. | ||
| Given that, wouldn't it be the perfect poster child to actually have even a still image from a surveillance camera of Adam Lanza with this AR-15 assault rifle, when in reality we've seen nothing, no surveillance footage, no still images of the shooter? | ||
| When in past mass shootings, school shootings, images of the shooter, thinking about Columbine, Virginia Tech, have emerged within days? | ||
| But of Adam Lanza, we've seen absolutely nothing. | ||
| Is that one of the questions that you've been talking about? | ||
| That's a fucking awful question. | ||
| That is giving a theory and then being like, you want to talk about that? | ||
| That is not... | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| So the way Paul is setting up that question is intrinsically dishonest. | ||
| The framing implies it's proven that Obama is trying to take away people's guns and that he's manipulatively using Sandy Hook to do that because of an AR-15. | ||
| The entire premise of the question leans heavily on that biased position that is unproven but asserted and deemed fag... | ||
| Secondly, he's using a trick that classic conspiracy theory bullshit artists do, and we've seen it play out over and over again. | ||
| They set the standard of what they would deem as acceptable proof of something, then when they get that proof, they move the goalposts or insist that the proof provided is of itself fake, is actually a proof of the conspiracy that they were pitching in the first place. | ||
| So the idea of, like, why haven't we seen any of the surveillance footage? | ||
| Give us the surveillance footage. | ||
| That's why we all have questions. | ||
| It's all just bullshit. | ||
| Long form birth certificate. | ||
| Shut the fuck up, guys. | ||
| Shut the fuck up. | ||
| That's exactly the best example of this. | ||
| Nothing Obama could have ever released or provided would have satisfied the people who were invested in making the argument that he wasn't a U.S. citizen. | ||
| Holy shit! | ||
| You wrote that down. | ||
| I grabbed your notes before. | ||
| I can see your goddamn brain working. | ||
| It's a bad faith position to argue from, and tactics like this belie true intentions, once again. | ||
| In the case of Paul Joseph Watson's specific question, there's a number of serious problems. | ||
| One is that he has no idea if Sandy Hook had video surveillance. | ||
| Different school districts have different budgets and different policies, so listing off other schools where shootings happen doesn't really stand up to scrutiny as a good argument as to what evidence should exist in the case of this shooting. | ||
| Point of order, also. | ||
| The fact that you are referencing school shootings that you think are real... | ||
| Wow. | ||
| We're going to get to that in a second. | ||
| They don't. | ||
| So basically... | ||
| Oh, they don't. | ||
| No. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| So even though they get the standard of evidence that they're... | ||
| But that's exactly what we're talking about. | ||
| Right. | ||
| God, I hate these people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I hate them so much. | ||
| Mixed in with this problem is that all those other examples that he's listing, like Columbine and Virginia Tech, are a high school and a college, respectively, so they'd obviously have different security protocols than an elementary school. | ||
| So, again, it's not a worthwhile comparison for him to be making, as, like, we had pictures and videos there, why not here? | ||
| The most important point here is that even if the police or FBI released footage or images of Adam Lanza committing the shooting, it wouldn't be accepted as proof. | ||
| It would become the new grist for the mill of conspiracy. | ||
| Well, if you look at that picture that they released, you can see that his eye has turned the wrong direction, so either he's got a lazy eye, or... | ||
| Somebody airbrushed this photo and they made a mistake. | ||
| Let's zoom in on it and see if the photo's fake. | ||
| It's exactly what they would do. | ||
| They would look for any irregularity that could possibly be there and that would be the new proof of conspiracy and blah blah blah. | ||
| This question is a horrible way to lead off the interview. | ||
| Unless the intention is to portray Professor James Tracy as a completely reasonable person who's just asking questions as opposed to someone who's actively making slanderous claims about the family members of murdered children. | ||
| So I think that's what he's doing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Paul asks about the security system, and here's part of Tracy's response. | ||
| The Sandy Hook School District installed a new security system in September. | ||
| Now, this is a very affluent community, and they would not have cut corners in terms of video surveillance. | ||
| How do you know that? | ||
| So there's a glaring problem here with regard to what is actually going on. | ||
| Where is that video footage? | ||
| I think we can safely conclude that there was video footage captured. | ||
|
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Why? | |
| But where is it now? | ||
| I think we can safely conclude is nonsense. | ||
| How can you say that's not evidence of a... | ||
| You're totally right. | ||
| I think we can safely conclude? | ||
|
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What? | |
| Totally right. | ||
| What are you fucking talking about? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It is true that Sandy Hook put in a new security system. | ||
| There were articles about that that were available. | ||
| But all the information that's publicly available says and leads you to the conclusion that this system isn't some kind of high-tech surveillance system for the whole school. | ||
| And in fact, the word system here seems to mean something closer to strategy. | ||
| There was a letter that was sent to parents informing them that the doors of the school would be locked after 9.30 a.m., and that in order to get in, one would need to hit the buzzer and be recognized by someone in the office who could see them through a security monitor. | ||
| That's the only definite camera at the school at the door. | ||
| As Adam Lanza shot in a window to get into the school, bypassing the buzzer, there's no reason to even be certain that that camera would have caught images of him coming in there. | ||
| There may actually be no footage of him. | ||
| Well, I think we can safely conclude that... | ||
| There were cameras in every single one of those windows. | ||
| Obviously, they didn't skimp on the budget for their new security system. | ||
| So, let's start from the position of there are cameras everywhere in this school. | ||
| Right, absolutely. | ||
| They may be asking for something that doesn't exist and insisting that... | ||
| It not being released is proof of... | ||
| Also, furthermore, we're living in this dystopian society already where schools have to have fucking security cameras literally everywhere? | ||
| Well, maybe we didn't in 2012. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| So this is a hallmark of Sandy Hook conspiracy theories, exaggerating the scale of the new security system that the school had put in a few months prior. | ||
| James Tracy is allowed on this show to just guess as to what the systems were based on his estimations of the money people in town had and his assumption that their wealth must mean that they had the best everything available. | ||
| This is based on nothing but speculation, and Paul does nothing. | ||
| Nothing to push back at all. | ||
| And if he didn't want him speculating and just saying bullshit, then he would have pushed back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he doesn't. | ||
| And furthermore, it doesn't matter how affluent your community is, maybe it even works against you, but yeah, it's a publicly funded building. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| Designed to cut corners. | ||
| Everybody in the low... | ||
| Do you think that everybody's property taxes are... | ||
| They're really stoked about them going to schools? | ||
| No! | ||
| They want their property taxes going to making black people go to prison. | ||
| So, in this next clip, Tracy explains that if only there was evidence of this surveillance footage, we would put things to rest. | ||
| Because if they want to put a lot of our queries to rest, they could release that. | ||
| We could see Lanza committing the crimes, and that would be the end of it. | ||
| So, James Tracy is acting from a dishonest position. | ||
| He knows fully well that releasing the footage would not put anyone's queries to rest, and here's how I know that. | ||
| In Paul Joseph Watson's framing of the original question, he uses Columbine as an example of a school shooting where the surveillance footage has been released. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| I've heard Alex call that a false flag a hundred times. | ||
| All the releasing of footage does is take away the argument that it never happened. | ||
| It's so easy for the conspiracy to survive by pivoting into talking about a different angle. | ||
| And any professor who's claimed to have studied conspiracies knows damn well this is how the game is played. | ||
| On some level, conspiracy theorists know that the kindling that they need to keep their fires alive naturally depletes. | ||
| One kernel of suspicion kind of grows old after a while, so to keep their audiences engaged, they need to continue to feed the fire fresh new novelties. | ||
| This strategy of saying, if only we got X, then our questions would be answered and we'd stop this shit, is a two-pronged strategy to provide that new novelty. | ||
| On the one hand, it's a foolishly grandiose attempt to get people to release the thing that you want them to, so you can comb through it for new novelties you're after. | ||
| That generally doesn't work since the police don't make their decisions based on whether or not something shuts up a conspiracy theorist. | ||
| But it doesn't matter, because that's really more of a Hail Mary, and they're not really expecting that to happen to begin with. | ||
| Yeah, of course not. | ||
| In a more definite way, this strategy automatically provides the new novelty, because it allows people like James Tracy to make the argument that, hey, we've made it clear that we would shut up if they just released this thing. | ||
| We have our question, and they won't provide the one piece of evidence that would make it all go away, and that that becomes itself the novelty that they need to keep the fire alive. | ||
| It's a manipulative strategy and is loads of bullshit. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And you can't see these sorts of techniques being used in this context without being like, come on, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what you're doing. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So here we get into the next piece of Sandy Hook conspiracy that James Tracy is going to pitch, unquestioning. | ||
| Paul doesn't push back really at all, just allows him to say this shit on air. | ||
| But, of course, as you know, there's also the CBS footage of a bystander who remarks that this individual was paraded by them and said to them, the onlookers, that I didn't do it. | ||
| And then they took the individual and put them in the front seat of the patrol car. | ||
| I'm very skeptical of accepting the Newtown Bee as a valid source for information after the really contradictory reports initially from December 14th, first of all quoting the principal, Don Hawksprung, and then retracting that and never saying who it actually was that they spoke to. | ||
| So I'm really very suspicious of that particular medium. | ||
| So he's saying that he doesn't trust the Newtown Bee. | ||
| Newtown B, in terms of the explanations for who the people in the woods were, because that's all been cleared up by this point. | ||
| Is that their local newspaper? | ||
|
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|
Oh, okay. | |
| Gotcha. | ||
| But at the end, they're saying he doesn't trust them because of a retraction they made, which indicates that their coverage is bad. | ||
| If any news outlet ever makes any retraction, you know you can never trust them. | ||
|
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Ever. | |
| That's how it works, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So on the day of the shooting, the Bee ran a story which quoted the school's principal, Don Hopsprung, commenting what happened in the school. | ||
| But they couldn't have gotten a quote from her because she was one of the people killed at the school. | ||
| The Bee retracted the quote and apologized, saying, quote, an early online report from the scene of the December 14th shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School quoted a woman who identified herself to our reporter as the principal of the school. | ||
| That woman is not the school's principal, Don Hawksprung, who was killed in the Friday morning attack. | ||
| They went on to apologize for any pain the confusion may have caused. | ||
| This is a pretty bad fuck-up, but I don't think it's proof of anything nefarious. | ||
| The simplest explanation is that this could easily be a case of severely rushed work with journalists trying to get stories out before anything could be fact-checked or proofed. | ||
| Or, if you need a bad person to blame, maybe it was a bystander who was in shock who misrepresented herself to be involved in the story. | ||
| That's possible. | ||
| It seems pretty unlikely, but still more likely than this grand conspiracy that's being sold. | ||
| I would even accept that it's entirely possible that it was another administrator at the school, and there was some sort of a miscommunication, and the reporter assumed it was the principal, and retracting the whole cloth is a simpler way to deal with it than bringing someone else into it, who then could become a target of people's conspiracies. | ||
| For the conspiracy theory, guys. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You might not want to bring someone else into this. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, an easier way of just like, fuck it. | ||
| Retraction. | ||
| It's a big fuck-up, man. | ||
| It's entirely possible that the person writing the story was thinking about her while thinking about the clip and just wrote it down, mixing up their notes or something. | ||
| There's a hundred possibilities. | ||
| There's any number of reasons. | ||
| Especially under the immediacy and the time crunch and the stress. | ||
| And it was a fucking tragedy! | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Ultimately, it's very weird. | ||
| I think it's a very weird thing that happened, but it doesn't rise to the level of even kind of suspicious to me. | ||
| It has the vibe of a mistake made under intense circumstances. | ||
| And James Tracy isn't saying he distrusts them as a source because he demands consistency and thorough fact-checking from the media he trusts. | ||
| I know that because he's on fucking Infowars. | ||
|
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|
No shit. | |
| He says that because this retraction is one of the big early pieces of evidence the conspiracy theorists use to bolster their claims that no one died there. | ||
| So, that's what he's doing. | ||
| This is a piece of that narrative. | ||
| Because they got a quote from somebody who was ostensibly dead. | ||
| Nobody actually... | ||
| God, you guys are stupid. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, here's another piece of his stupid suspicions. | ||
| I would say that you just shouldn't even say something like this. | ||
| If you want to be taken seriously as someone who's, like, critical, this is dumb. | ||
| There are also questions with regard to the alleged photograph of the evacuation of the 15 or 16 students that were being evacuated that really did make the national and international news. | ||
| That was supposedly taken by one of the Newtown B associate editors as she came onto the scene. | ||
| In the back of the first responders, and she said that she was taking photographs left and right, and yet only two photographs emerged from that series of photos. | ||
| Is this the best you've got? | ||
| Like, you're on a national platform, and this is what you've got? | ||
| Like, do you not understand that maybe she didn't get clearance to publish pictures of people? | ||
| Like, there are explanations that are simple. | ||
| Or, she just thought these were the best of the bunch? | ||
| That's kind of... | ||
| There's so many fucking easy... | ||
| Let me give you a quick example. | ||
| If you get headshots... | ||
| They take a lot more than two pictures. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| But they only give you two pictures. | ||
| Well, that's a conspiracy. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| What are they doing with all those other pictures in my head, Dan? | ||
| I should probably say I think that there may be, like, my first rebuttal might be a little bit weak because there are, you know, I think, I don't know, it might vary by state, but you could take pictures of people in public, I think, and you don't have to get their permission. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think, I do believe that that's the case in most states, but at the same time, the argument of... | ||
| She chose to release a couple? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Who gives a fuck? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You gotta do better than that. | ||
| That's not suspicious at all. | ||
| She took a bunch of pictures, and we only got a few of them. | ||
| Maybe she was saving the rest for a photo essay later. | ||
| Maybe she was saving the rest for a coffee table book. | ||
| That would be deeply disturbing. | ||
| Maybe the Newtown Bee only wanted to print a couple of them. | ||
| Any of these things are possible. | ||
| Maybe she just has them on a hard drive somewhere. | ||
| Maybe they only had room for two in the copy. | ||
|
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|
It's not unlimited space in newspapers. | |
| Maybe her memory card was full. | ||
| This was 2012. | ||
| This was before Squarespace, man. | ||
| You didn't have drag-and-drop websites. | ||
| Oh, yeah, that's disappointing. | ||
| Yeah, you had to use, like, photo buckets. | ||
| Times were so tough back then. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So in this next clip, he brings up a completely absurd conspiracy about Sandy Hook and then says something. | ||
| That broke this case wide open to me in a way that I think Alex is in deep trouble. | ||
| I love constitutional sheriffs. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| And also, there were these bizarre reports of people dressed as nuns fleeing the scene in a purple van, and then we've got this photograph of these black veils being found near the scene on the ground. | ||
| Did you hear about that report? | ||
| Well, yeah, I believe, in fact, that it was someone who was calling the Alex Jones show on the morning of the incident that reported this initially, and that's the first time that it emerged really on the news. | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| Really? | ||
| At the end of that clip, you heard Tracy explicitly say that the fleeing nuns narrative was something that he heard for the first time on the Alex Jones show. | ||
| I might not have perfect recall, but I do not remember Alex covering fleeing nuns on his show. | ||
| No idea what he was talking about there. | ||
| But... | ||
| Oh, that just has to do with there were a couple nuns who were comforting survivors and people on the scene, and they were wearing shoes that people online didn't think looked right for nuns. | ||
| They were too comfortable for nuns. | ||
| People don't know anything about nuns. | ||
| A bunch of people started posting pictures and claiming they were, like, police tactical shoes. | ||
| They were police tactical shoes? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's a lot of bullshit. | ||
| All right, all right. | ||
| That is not important. | ||
| But it is interesting that the two of them are interested in that narrative. | ||
| Nontown, Connecticut, back in the habit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What's more important is that he said that he first heard this on the Alex Jones show, and because I decided to look around a little bit, I found a really strange, overlooked piece of James Tracy's coverage of Sandy Hook. | ||
| One thing that I find particularly interesting is that the first time that Tracy covered Sandy Hook on his blog was December 20, 2012, six days after the shooting. | ||
| Allow me to read to you from the section where he's discussing contradictions in the official report of the story. | ||
| Quote, In that same post, he includes a quote about how journalists dictate how people experience the tragedy. | ||
| They set the stage. | ||
| They convey to the public the meaning and atmosphere and essence of the whole event. | ||
| And having done that, there's simply no room for anything that would intrude on this sepulchral mood. | ||
| That's a quote from John Rappaport, frequent InfoWars guest and fourth hour host. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Every single citation that isn't straight coverage from the AP or CBS, ABC or Fox in the notes section of this post, the first time that he covered Sandy Hook on his blog is a direct link to an InfoWars contributor. | ||
| Rob Dew, John Rappaport and Mike Adams are listed as sources that James Tracy's first article cites when he started questioning Sandy Hook. | ||
| First off, I hate you, you beautiful mind. | ||
| This is fucked up stuff. | ||
| That you found that at all is an inspired piece of research. | ||
| Well, there's more. | ||
| I am in awe of you. | ||
| There's more. | ||
| And also, the information that you have found makes me angry on such a deep level that I... | ||
| Going to go home and just, like, press myself in between two walls to make sure that I'm okay. | ||
| I think it starts to explain why Rob Dew's in that lawsuit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Which would seem to be an open question before. | ||
| So, there's a little bit more here, though. | ||
| On December 24th, Tracy was back at it on his blog. | ||
| Back on his bullshit! | ||
| This was the post that included the suggestion that, quote, one is left to inquire whether Sandy Hook, the shooting, even took place. | ||
| That's one of the big quotes of James Tracy's that gets thrown around. | ||
| Also, somehow, just to take us back real quick a second, anybody who uses the word sepulchral can fuck off. | ||
| Fuck off, John Rappaport. | ||
| Fuck off, John Rappaport. | ||
| Go fuck yourself. | ||
| So this December 24th post is where that originates, this idea of one is left to inquire whether it happened. | ||
| Now would be a good time to point out that he prefaced that statement by saying that, quote, with the exception of an unusual and apparently contrived appearance by Emily Parker's alleged father, victims' family members have been most wholly absent from public scrutiny. | ||
| Because, of course, that's what someone whose child was just murdered about a week ago needs, a bunch of public scrutiny. | ||
| That, my friend, is a healthy impulse. | ||
| robbie parker on james tracy's blog but alex had suggested that he seems like an actor and needs to be investigated on his own show on december 19th days prior to tracy ever bringing him up interestingly this post tracy made again uses rob do as a reference along with citizen journalists in quotes radio man 9 11 tv and idaho picker who are just people who have youtube channels okay All right. | ||
| By January 4th, Tracy was explicitly discussing crisis actors, saying, quote, A possible reason is that they're trained actors working under the direction of state and federal authorities and in coordination with cable and broadcast network talent to provide tailor-made crisis acting that realistically drives home the event's tragic features. | ||
| In the post, Tracy goes on to ask, That is where he would fall back on the defense of, I was just asking questions, when you put forth an idea like this. | ||
| But this is also where that argument gets blown to shit. | ||
| If you're just asking the question, then immediately following it up with a justification for why the answer to that question is, yes, they did use actors. | ||
| You know, because he starts that with, is it possible that such actors were utilized in Newtown to control the event's depiction? | ||
|
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Blah, blah, blah. | |
| That's not a leading question at all. | ||
| Well, but you ask that question and then immediately defend the affirmative of it, you know? | ||
| And at no point do you provide a counterpoint that balances out why it's possible that the answer to the question is, no, they didn't. | ||
| Then your question is just a rhetorical... | ||
| Tracy doesn't provide the side that maybe they weren't actors, but he does go on to say of a child who survived the shooting, quote, In case I'm not being clear enough that James Tracy 100% was not interested in just asking questions in this January 4th post, | ||
| here is his conclusion in the post. | ||
| Quote, to declare that the shooting never took place is cause for intense opprobrium in most polite circles, where, in familiar Orwellian fashion, the media-induced trance and dehistoricized will believe mainly... | ||
| Ooh, this is terrible writing on his part. | ||
|
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|
This is... | |
| I'm so furious at all of the sentences and words people are using in these quotes, Dan. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Who writes like this? | ||
| The media-induced trance will maintain its hold. | ||
| God, you self-fucking... | ||
| oh similarly an individual who contends that timothy mcveigh was an accessory to a much larger operation in oklahoma city osama bin laden was not responsible for the events of 9-11 and the world trade center towers were brought down by controlled demolition is vigorously condemned for thought crimes against the state such are the immense dimensions of mass manipulations where fact and tragedy must be routinely revised and reinforced to fit the motives and designs towards a much larger apparatus of social Okay, that is like... | ||
| That's a rant. | ||
| Let me describe that to you as best I can. | ||
| What you just read was a used sock that was just masturbated into. | ||
| That was tremendously disgusting. | ||
| I hated it. | ||
| Well, I mean, what he's doing is he's expressing derision towards people who would balk at the idea that Sandy Hook didn't happen. | ||
| He's accusing people who think it happened of being under Orwellian mind control. | ||
| He's not just asking questions about inconsistencies. | ||
| And that blog post was posted two weeks before this interview with Paul Joseph Watson. | ||
| This is the sort of thing that he's putting out into the world that Paul Joseph Watson is not pushing back on. | ||
| So, fuck him. | ||
| So, not only that, but based on your timeline, his very first article references InfoWars correspondence repeatedly. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Then he is used as a source on InfoWars. | ||
| He continues to quote InfoWars extensively. | ||
| Maybe not as extensively as at the beginning. | ||
| The beginning was mostly InfoWars content that seemed to be informing the beginning. | ||
| As it goes along, I think more people pick up on it. | ||
| He has more links to Veterans Today and Global Research, those sorts of organizations. | ||
| But yeah, it's heavy InfoWars at the beginning. | ||
| But what we're seeing there is InfoWars putting out a narrative. | ||
| One of their listeners... | ||
| Running as far and as fast as they can with that narrative. | ||
| Then Infowars graciously pulling them back into the fold to show them, look, we've run as far with you. | ||
| Yeah, and to also allow them to be the shield for criticism. | ||
| So by February, James Tracy was starting to get some heat. | ||
| Publicity was starting to be paid to him since his status as a tenured professor lent him a ton of credibility with these dumb theories that he was helping propagate. | ||
| As he began to be derided, Jim Fetzer wrote in Tracy's defense, which should surprise no one, since Fetzer is a literal Holocaust denier and would go on to write the book No One Died at Sandy Hook. | ||
| I wonder where he falls on the issue. | ||
| By December 2013, James Tracy had gone fully off the deep end and was posting articles about how many of the children killed at the shooting were in the choir that sang with Jennifer Hudson at Super Bowl. | ||
| I can't remember what the number is because I have XLVII and I don't know how to read Roman numerals quickly. | ||
| XLVII? | ||
| 47. Good. | ||
| And I'll tell you this, he didn't get saner from there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not a great use of my time to read every little thing Tracy has ever written on his blog, so I'm going to go ahead and leave it there in terms of the timeline of his bullshit. | ||
| However, it's interesting to note that his earliest coverage of the tragedy used Infowars, Rob Dew, and Mike Adams as sources explicitly. | ||
| When Alex is getting sued for his coverage in the present day, his stock defense is that he was just reporting on what Wolfgang Halbig and Professor Tracy were covering. | ||
| Wolfgang Halbig isn't even in play yet. | ||
| And if you look at the facts, you see clearly that what Tracy was covering was widely inspired by what Alex was doing. | ||
| Alex, by pointing the finger at Tracy, is in many ways actually pointing the finger at himself. | ||
| At himself. | ||
| But most people don't realize that. | ||
| So... | ||
| No. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| It's an interesting wrinkle to this story that I think is probably ignored, or not ignored, but not realized by people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what? | |
| I think what's going to happen is you're going to put out a video of this, and we're going to get 10.6 million views on that, right? | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| That's how it works. | ||
| When you debunk things like this, you get 10.6 million views. | ||
| And when you make these crazy conspiracy theorists, you only get a few people who listen, right? | ||
| Isn't that right? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So, I think you can... | ||
| You can see a really weird dynamic to the idea of even doing this interview to begin with. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it does open up a whole lot of doors and windows in terms of like, oh man, Alex, you're a mess. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that question, or that last clip, before... | ||
| Tracy made it clear by saying, oh, I heard that on InfoWars, which they should have hit the cough button on that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Just for posterity's sake. | ||
| We don't want this to be on a recording. | ||
| Before they got to that, they were talking about... | ||
| Let's Nixon turn these tapes off for a little bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So before that, they were talking about the nun conspiracy. | ||
| And Paul gets back to it in this next clip in a fucking hilarious way. | ||
| In fact, I believe there was a photograph taken of these individuals, and they're wearing footwear similar to what police officers would wear. | ||
| Shoes! | ||
| Yeah, I actually saw that photo earlier today. | ||
| It's definitely bizarre. | ||
| But, I mean, the problem we've got is, you know, amidst all these legitimate questions about the narrative, you know, what happened, who was involved. | ||
| There's a plethora of claims that are obviously either completely baseless or are, you know, woefully reductionist. | ||
| So you see the dichotomy that he's trying to make. | ||
| These legitimate questions like we have about nuns' shoes. | ||
| All of the questions that you have been presenting, those are 100% rational questions that we should consider, and I'm grateful that we're talking about nuns' shoes right now. | ||
| Let's talk about some of the wilder theories. | ||
| There are some people out there. | ||
| There are some people out there making weird claims. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Normal shoes! | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the thing that you have to recognize is that when this interview is happening, the expectation of the audience is they know who James Tracy is. | ||
| They know what he's been putting out into the world. | ||
| And so there's no real way to do this interview without bringing up the idea of crisis actors. | ||
| And that is why Paul keeps saying, I don't believe in these theories. | ||
| He's trying to preemptively inoculate himself from any blowback. | ||
| But what he does in this next clip, the way he sets up... | ||
| The question that he's going to introduce crisis actors into the conversation. | ||
| He introduces the question in such a strawmanning fashion that I don't believe you would do this unless you were trying to get people to think that he was much more rational than he is. | ||
| And by he, I mean James Tracy. | ||
| I've seen some really just crazy things like You know, Robbie Parker, one of the parents, is actually Tony Hawk, the skateboard guy. | ||
| So there's a lot of people poisoning the well with bizarre craziness, and it's really not helping us understand what actually happened, is it? | ||
| Well, I've seen a lot of activity on my blog as well, the comments and things of the like, and I think that there is definitely a program to sow misinformation. | ||
| In the stream of information in order to muddy the waters. | ||
| And in the process, discredit the research that independent researchers and the like are putting together in alternative media. | ||
| Because if you can discredit it or muddy the waters to a limited degree in one area, you can paint with a fairly broad brush. | ||
| In that clip, the way Paul Joseph Watson's setting up that question is a perfect way to allow someone to misrepresent their position. | ||
| He doesn't want to directly ask him at this point if he believes that some of the victims were actors because that would require a follow-up he doesn't want to ask. | ||
| Specifically, what the fuck are you talking about? | ||
| He would either have to allow that point to stand on the show unchallenged and then he would look like a fucking asshole or he'd have to dig deeper and ask questions like, what victims are actors? | ||
| What makes you think that? | ||
| What evidence do you have to say something like that? | ||
| The way Paul sets up the question is a straw man. | ||
| Some people are saying that Robbie Parker is actually Tony Hawk. | ||
| That allows the perfect middle ground. | ||
| It's his way of mainstreaming Professor Tracy's completely insane arguments into a form that's way more acceptable to the broader Infowars audience. | ||
| It really seems to me like a strong indication that Paul wants the audience to see him as a credible, reasonable source of information. | ||
| If you're not following what I mean, this is what it is. | ||
| He doesn't ask Tracy about the beliefs that he has espoused. | ||
| He asks him about the even crazier things that people on YouTube are saying about how Robbie Parker is Tony Hawk, for example. | ||
| Because he frames the question by asking about what other even crazier people are saying, it allows Tracy to condemn this muddying of the water of legitimate research in quotes. | ||
| By asking the question in this way, that provides Tracy with something to condemn. | ||
| Paul Joseph Watson allows Tracy to set himself apart from those people who aren't serious online. | ||
| I have a hard time believing that this is an accident, particularly coming from someone who, like Paul, has stressed that he doesn't believe in the crisis sector theories, which Tracy has explicitly been pushing at this point. | ||
| Do you know what this reminds me of more than anything else right now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dave Rubin. | |
| This is not our normal InfoWars. | ||
| This is 100% a Swery Carey interview. | ||
| I think Paul's trying. | ||
| A little. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A little. | |
| How dare you? | ||
| Well, he's at least saying... | ||
| Swery Carey is trying so hard, Dan. | ||
| It's harder for her. | ||
| There is a part of it that I do believe that it comes from personal preservation to an extent. | ||
| But Paul doesn't have to repeatedly say, I don't believe this. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That is at least to his credit. | ||
| Yeah, but that's like a Swear to Carrie episode where she's talking about what's-his-dumb-fuck who she doesn't like anymore. | ||
| Eddie Page. | ||
| Yeah, Eddie Page. | ||
| See, his information is crazy, and he's discrediting all of us out here who are trying to explain to you that raptors will kill you for chocolate. | ||
| It's Eddie Page who's ruining things for us. | ||
| There are similarities, I would say, to this. | ||
| I think it's more... | ||
| I don't know, the dynamics are super fucked up, because for the company, Paul is doing this. | ||
| And for himself, too, because he profits from it. | ||
| But it feels like an interview that would go differently if it was being done sincerely. | ||
| The position that Paul expresses, which is, I don't believe this, I think that these people actually are victims of this, it's awful. | ||
| I don't think that a sincere conversation with the person who's saying the things Tracy is posting on his blog, I don't think it would go like this. | ||
| I don't think that Paul Joseph Watson, if he was operating from a sincere place, would be like, now there's a lot of people who say that he's Tony Hawk, now isn't that crazy? | ||
| Yes, absolutely, it is crazy, and it muddies the waters and ruins real journalism and research like I do. | ||
| Because it allows him to present himself as above it. | ||
| Again, the intent comes out in these questions. | ||
| It's fucked up. | ||
| A lot of real journalists will base their conclusions on, well, it seems like the average... | ||
| Income in this county is pretty high, so the security system must be top of the line. | ||
| Well, we can reasonably conclude that. | ||
| A lot of journalists don't even bother with citing sources. | ||
| They just really like to reasonably conclude with a safe assumption. | ||
| Yeah, so in this next clip, I would say that I would admire what Paul Joseph Watson is saying were he not talking to the person that he's talking to. | ||
| I believe that this was a horrible tragedy for all the parents involved, and I believe that some of the people who are asking questions about this, not the professor, but a lot of people on YouTube, have handled it in a rather insensitive way. | ||
| Of course, we've had reports about them harassing some of the people who were involved, and basically it doesn't do us any favors. | ||
| So we need to treat it, obviously, with extreme caution because it's a very traumatic event. | ||
| I agree with that, but unfortunately, while he's decrying harassment of these families at Sandy Hook, he's on the phone with a guy who's literally personally harassed Sandy Hook victims' families. | ||
| Now, granted, at this point, Tracy hasn't reached the point that he would eventually get to, where he was literally suggesting that Lenny Posner's son wasn't his son, employing the exact same strategy we discussed with the surveillance footage. | ||
| His angle was, just do a DNA test to prove he's your son. | ||
| No way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have questions. | |
| You can clear them up, but I'm just, you know. | ||
| I'm going to use the fact that you won't give me a crazy person like I am a DNA test to prove he's your son. | ||
| I'm going to use the fact that you won't give that to me to suggest that I'm right and he isn't your son. | ||
| Tracy wouldn't reach that level of crazy and abusive for a little while. | ||
| But that doesn't mean that he wasn't doing some real damage to victims' families at the point he's a guest here talking to Paul Joseph Watson. | ||
| Yeah, we're talking about Melania trying to end online bullying. | ||
| Be best. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Really, Melania? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| You're fucking with us now. | ||
| You know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just a few months after this appearance, he was reprimanded by Florida Atlantic University for not sufficiently disassociating his personal blog from the university. | ||
| One of the reasons for his eventual firing. | ||
| Heather Koltman, the Dean of Arts and Sciences, told him, quote, you may, of course, blog on your personal time. | ||
| You must stop dragging Florida Atlantic University into your personal endeavors. | ||
| You can see clearly he's using his position as a credit in this Infowars interview, which is exactly the sort of thing that the school wasn't interested in, because, as Koltman explains, quote, your actions continue to adversely affect legitimate interests of the university and constitute misconduct. | ||
| He was so deeply on the this shit is fake thing from early on, like he definitely was. | ||
| In December 2012, he wrote, quote, while it sounds like an outrageous claim, one is left to inquire whether the Sandy Hook shooting ever took place, dash, dash, at least in the way law enforcement authorities and the nation's news media have described, as I referenced earlier. | ||
| That's the slimiest fucking way possible to play this game. | ||
| First, he couches the point in the language of suggestion. | ||
| One is left to inquire is such bullshit. | ||
| That's a shitty way to start this sentence. | ||
| It's the equivalent of that dumb joke, I'm asking for a friend. | ||
| Or how I'll sometimes preface a question by saying, inquiring minds want to know. | ||
| I'm doing it as a joke. | ||
| He's doing it as a dodge. | ||
| It's a way of saying something inflammatory without having to own the consequences of it. | ||
| The second thing in what he wrote there with that quote... | ||
| That is a mess is the placement of the double dashes. | ||
| He knows that his readers will disregard what comes after, the part where he adds the qualifier to that never took place. | ||
| They're just going to run with the primary assertion he's driving people towards, which is this shit never happened. | ||
| He's saying that one is left to inquire whether or not the Sandy Hook shooting ever took place. | ||
| Is one! | ||
| If he's saying that in the weeks after the tragedy, how easy is it to jump from there to one is left to inquire if the people who claim to have been affected by this all are liars? | ||
| It's a super easy pivot for a conspiracy theorist to make, and a whole lot of his listeners and followers did exactly that. | ||
| Oh, and so did he. | ||
| As we talked about before, he began directly harassing victims' families, and he didn't stop. | ||
| He wrote an article on his website on October 15, 2016, titled, quote, Sandy Hook fraudster Lenny Posner targets MHB. | ||
| MHB is memory hole blog, his website. | ||
| Of course, this was after Tracy had aggressively targeted Mr. Posner, who wrote a December 10, 2015 op-ed in the Orlando Sun Sentinel, saying, quote, Tracy is among those who have personally sought to cause our family pain and anguish. | ||
| By publicly demonizing our attempts to keep our cherished photos of our slain son from falling into the hands of conspiracy theorists. | ||
| Tracy even sent us a certified letter demanding proof that Noah once lived, that we were his parents, and that we were the rightful owner of these photographic images. | ||
| We found this so outrageous and unsettling that we filed a police report for harassment. | ||
| Once Tracy realized we would not respond, he subjected us to ridicule and contempt on his blog, boasting to his readers that the unfulfilled request was noteworthy because we had used a copyright claim to thwart continued research into the Sandy Hook massacre event. | ||
| It means nothing for Paul Joseph Watson to pretend to take the high ground to be against people harassing the victims' families when he's offering a largely friendly and non-confrontational platform to someone who has already sown the seeds that inspired many of his followers to harass victims' families and would go on to be one of the most disgraceful harassers himself. | ||
| This is intellectual cowardice on full display. | ||
| From PJ Dubs? | ||
| Who would have seen that coming? | ||
| Cowardice? | ||
| Cowardice. | ||
| From these fucking... | ||
| Pillars of righteousness and courage and never-ending desire to fight back against the powers that be. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cowardice. | ||
| I mean, if you hear their bumpers coming in and out of commercial, then you'd know that they stand up for truth. | ||
| For truth, Dan! | ||
| I can't imagine that they would shrink behind... | ||
| Legalese. | ||
| So earlier, Paul asked a question about crisis actors, but he couched it with that straw man version of the question. | ||
| Because I sincerely believe it's because he didn't want to have any follow-ups, and he didn't know what he was going to do. | ||
| Now, a little bit later in the interview, he directly does ask about crisis actors and Tracy's beliefs about that, and I think I can explain why he decided to do it this time. | ||
| And I think one of the aspects of this... | ||
| Which a lot of people have claimed, Professor, is this whole idea that there were, quote, crisis actors who were working with the media to create a fake narrative surrounding this event. | ||
| And this is where we probably differ, but just give us your take on the whole crisis actors angle. | ||
| Explain what that is. | ||
| The Crisis Actors is a group based out of Denver, Colorado, I believe. | ||
| And they work in association with the Department of Homeland Security on active shooter drills. | ||
| So they are involved in playing the roles of bystanders. | ||
| Perhaps the shooter himself, the victims in some cases, the individuals involved in posting things to social media. | ||
| In other words, they are... | ||
| They are all-encompassing in creating an environment for a lifelike drill. | ||
| Now, there was a drill that took place, by the way, along these lines. | ||
| Now, I don't know if crisis actors were involved, but this was in a school for disabled children in Harlem. | ||
| And the children were absolutely, absolutely terrified. | ||
| So in some cases, it's not known whether or not an event is actually taking place, but it's made more lifelike by the crisis actors. | ||
| Again, I don't know if they were involved in that particular drill. | ||
| And that's an incident that's sort of foamed beyond the mainstream media radar. | ||
| So his example that he's using there is something that he had to qualify twice. | ||
| He has no idea if these crisis actors from this organization in Colorado had anything to do with. | ||
| He's saying nothing. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| Crisis actors exist, right? | ||
| Ergo. | ||
| Ergo, a crisis happened. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| Actors were there. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ta-da! | |
| So he goes on to explain what made him think that there were actors there. | ||
| And I gotta say, I think that this is, like... | ||
| I think this shit is so weak. | ||
| I'm going to go with the slam dunk. | ||
| I bet this is going to be slam dunk evidence. | ||
| It's so insane to hear people, even in a friendly environment, try and explain what made them think these things. | ||
| Because if you just listen to it, it's always so much more disappointing than you kind of hope it is. | ||
| You hope it's a better story than this. | ||
| Again, they embellish the particular event. | ||
| So if this were a drill that somehow went live, as we know that, for example, 9-11 and the 7-705 bombings were, then it would have involved actors along these lines, and they would not even know whether or not the drill itself went live. | ||
| One of the things that... | ||
| That made me question in this regard. | ||
| By the way, right there, it probably sounded like there was a cut, like the way he was speaking. | ||
| That's just his vocal patterns. | ||
| I didn't cut anything. | ||
| That's just how he talks. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, he was talking in a drill and then it went live. | ||
| As well as the photographic evidence emerging from the scene. | ||
| And as you had alluded to earlier, there were just, you know, there were few bystanders and the like. | ||
| There were very few people actually being interviewed when you would think there would be a great many people on the scene. | ||
| Now, maybe what you say is correct. | ||
| Maybe the media got there late and there was no photographic or video evidence along those lines. | ||
| A few people that they could actually interview. | ||
| But that's one of the reasons that I actually put that forward. | ||
| The possibility of there being crisis actors. | ||
| And I think it's probably been the most controversial. | ||
| Okay, we'll be back after the break. | ||
| Stay there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Your calls for Professor. | |
| That's a super lame explanation for why he believes there were crisis actors. | ||
| He's like, I saw pictures and there weren't many people around. | ||
| Like, fuck you, man. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what you're starting with as your explanation for your theory? | ||
| There was supposed to be more people. | ||
| You would think there would be more people. | ||
| I mean, whenever I look at pictures and I'm always like, oh man, if this was a crisis, there would be more people there. | ||
| So this must be a false thing. | ||
| I'm convinced. | ||
| Sounds reasonable. | ||
| Lame, but convincing. | ||
| So you see here that Paul Joseph Watson did end up asking him about the crisis actors thing. | ||
| And I think that my point from earlier still stands about how he doesn't want follow-up questions. | ||
| What Paul doesn't want is to have to deal with that aftermath of the question, but he knows that his audience will be furious if the topic doesn't come up, so he uses the best strategy available. | ||
| He asks Tracy about the crisis actors idea, but he does so when there's only about a minute and a half, two minutes left before a hard out to a commercial break. | ||
| Knowing that Tracy's answer is going to be at least long enough to get to the commercial break. | ||
| So when he's done or in the middle of the answer, Paul can pop in and say that they needed to go to break. | ||
| No need for a difficult follow up. | ||
| He buys himself minutes of time during the commercial break to come up with a way to respond that preserves the possibility of crisis actors being used. | ||
| While also preserving the aloof distance between himself and someone who would say something like that. | ||
| What a prick. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I believe that this plays out, because when they come back from commercial, Paul has realized a way to swing this and gives Tracy an out. | ||
| But what sprung to my mind before the break is, Professor, straight after the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9-11, we had people... | ||
| On the ground, who seem to know bizarrely intricate details of how that collapsed happened, which just happened to then morph almost immediately into the official story. | ||
| So I guess that's what you're talking about when you're talking about actors being involved. | ||
| You're not saying there were no victims. | ||
| You're just saying that people may have been there to massage the narrative. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| Yes, that's correct, Paul. | ||
| I am simply posing questions, and I never said anything declarative in any of my articles about this happened. | ||
| I was saying, could this be a possibility? | ||
| And yet the media took that and ran with it. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I took my assertion as an allegation when it was merely a question, and that, unfortunately, is how this has been framed and how I think that it is. | ||
| It's been offensive, especially to the people that lost their loved ones up there in Newtown. | ||
| I hate you so much. | ||
| I never actually intended that. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| All I did was use a question as a thesis. | ||
| That's all I did. | ||
| You know, tons of people fucking write that shit. | ||
| Tons of people jerk off onto a typewriter because they're just asking questions. | ||
| It's definitely not because they already know what it is they want to say. | ||
| And they're so excited to say that it's a question. | ||
| I mean, where have we heard that defense before? | ||
| It's Alex's defense. | ||
| Just asking questions. | ||
| I'm asking hard questions, and that's why they're coming after me. | ||
| Well, I guess so was the fucking guy who you're pointing the finger at now. | ||
| No, he was asking mean questions. | ||
| I was asking hard questions. | ||
| I'm not trying to hurt anybody's feelings here, and that's why I'm sending letters demanding DNA. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So a lot of the rest of the interview is pretty boring stuff, and it's a lot of the stuff that we've covered already, so it would be kind of laborious to go through it. | ||
| Like, he talks about how the story changed when they had that press conference. | ||
| And it's like, oh, did it change, or were there inaccurate early reports from immediate information like there is in any of these situations? | ||
| He says that he doesn't trust the medical examiner because he had a bad press conference. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And that's why he started to doubt Sandy Hook was real. | ||
| Look, we've all had a bad set, but it didn't mean that a tragedy didn't happen. | ||
| I know, but all this is so weak. | ||
| It's just such bullshit. | ||
| So I was just sitting there, and I'm like, I can't believe that this person is this luminary of the crisis actor world and everything, and he's just doing a shit job here. | ||
| But Paul's doing the best he can in order to make him not look like a crazy person, and I think it's successful. | ||
| He rehabbed the ideas that... | ||
| Of the crisis actors that Tracy's pitching. | ||
| You're not saying that people didn't die. | ||
| You're saying that they were there to massage the narrative. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| As opposed to what he's actually doing, which is accusing people whose fucking children died of being actors. | ||
| Yeah, it seemed like Paul did do a good job. | ||
| Well, if that's the goal. | ||
| If that was his goal, then he did a good job, and that has made my mood very sepulchral. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| So here's the jovial... | ||
| Go fuck yourself, John Rappaport. | ||
| Here's the jovial end to their interview. | ||
| Okay, we really appreciate your time. | ||
| Fascinating questions raised once again, and we hope to talk to you again soon. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thanks, Paul. | ||
| There goes Professor James Tracy raising questions about the Sandy Hook massacre. | ||
| And again, this has gone completely viral. | ||
| It even surprised me how crazy, insane the interest in this is. | ||
| 10.6 million views on one video alone on YouTube. | ||
| That was created just 10, 11 days ago, and in fact we're probably going to try and get the creators behind that video on the show. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| Tons of videos, tons of questions, while still trying to maintain respect and dignity for the realization that this was a very real tragedy, but we'll continue to ask questions about it. | ||
| So you see that he's trying to walk this line, and I think that that's why Alex didn't want to be there. | ||
| Because he's not going to be able to walk that line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He couldn't do it. | |
| I think Paul did a much better job. | ||
| If you look at a propagandist performance, I think Paul did as good as you can. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is actually the worst thing possible. | ||
| It could not have gone worse. | ||
| If Alex was doing that interview, he'd be like, yeah, they're all fake, aren't they? | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Let's all be crazy. | ||
| Well, present day Alex, certainly. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| Back then, Alex would probably just want to talk all about guns. | ||
| Yeah, that's also true. | ||
| So, Paul Joseph Watson hosts the first two hours of the show. | ||
| Maybe first hour and a half. | ||
| He hosts the first half of the show. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Then... | |
| Mike Adams takes over the second half of the show. | ||
| Health Ranger Mike Adams. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| And I think the reason is because he also had a big guest. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Welcome back to The Alex Jones Show. | ||
| This is Mike Adams, the editor of naturalnews.com, filling in for Alex today. | ||
| And in studio, joining me now for the rest of this hour is none other than Dr. Andrew Wakefield with some breaking news. | ||
| On the U.S. vaccine court and its recent decision tying vaccines to autism. | ||
| No. | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| No. | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| How fucking dare you? | ||
| I told you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| I told you. | ||
| What? | ||
| I told you. | ||
| No, you're a dick. | ||
| I told you this was terrible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is your fault. | |
| It is. | ||
| This is your fault. | ||
| You spliced the... | ||
| These are two completely... | ||
| These are years apart episodes that you spliced together because you have that power over all of us. | ||
| How can you possibly be more poignant? | ||
| This is so bizarre. | ||
| You son of a bitch! | ||
| This is so bizarre to me because I'm looking through these for Sandy Hook stuff and, you know, like for that story. | ||
| And as we're going through it, you know, we get to the 17th and Alex is just doing, like, interviews with the sheriffs and weirdos. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it's like, what the fuck is going on? | ||
| In the middle of it, he says, tomorrow we're going to get into Sandy Hook. | ||
| I tune in the next day. | ||
| Paul Joseph Watson's hosting. | ||
| But he does interview that James Tracy. | ||
| And like, well, this is pretty fucked up. | ||
| This is a whole episode here. | ||
| But then as it goes on, fucking Mike Adams shows up. | ||
| I'm like, we can't not talk about this. | ||
| That can't be real. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| Infowars is the world now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is really problematic. | ||
| It's pretty weird. | ||
| Do you remember when we started this show and we were like, ha ha ha, we're talking about a crazy person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I barely remember that. | |
| And now the world is us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So some people might not know about Andrew Wakefield, so here's a little bit of an introduction to who this pile of shit is. | ||
| The fucking worst pile of shit. | ||
| Garbage motherfucker. | ||
| Andrew Wakefield is not somebody that should be interviewed as an expert on anything, with the possible exception of him being an excellent subject if you're making a documentary about the subjective experience of having your sloppy and dishonest work lead to a lunatic medical conspiracy movement and countless deaths. | ||
| In February 1998, Wakefield wrote a research paper that was published in the medical journal Lancet. | ||
| The basic idea of the study was that he'd studied the cases of 12 anonymous children who were admitted to a London hospital between July 19... | ||
| Let's remember, the sample size is... | ||
| Twelve. | ||
| Twelve! | ||
| His paper alleged that two-thirds of the children experienced, quote, regressive autism, which is to say, for example, language skills that were there before were actually lost in the child. | ||
| His paper asserted that many of these symptoms were seen within 14 days of getting the measles, mumps, and rubella shot, with the average being 6.3 days after the shot. | ||
| The study caused a severe immediate backlash against the vaccines, and the damage that the paper did is almost impossible to put into words. | ||
| Public trust was eroded, the anti-vaccination movement, previously just a completely fringe phenomenon, became more mainstream and emboldened, and safeguards of public health were jeopardized. | ||
| His claims began to take hold in the UK, where he was based, but after he made a tour of the United States in the year 2000 and appeared on 60 Minutes explicitly linking the MMR vaccine with an alleged, quote, epidemic of autism, the anti-vax crowd in the United States started to make some serious moves. | ||
| It would be one thing if this study was a real study, and he'd actually found evidence that linked the MMR vaccine with this bowel condition and, quote, regressive autism, but... | ||
| As it would soon come out, his work was not above board. | ||
| For one, his study only involved 12 children, which is an absurdly small sample size to make this sort of claim using. | ||
| Subsequent attempts to reproduce the results of his study have all failed to arrive at the same conclusion he did. | ||
| As more and more information about the study and how it was conducted began to come to the surface, Lancet began retracting it. | ||
| At first retracting the interpretation of the study, then in 2010 completely retracting the study and citing Wakefield and his co-authors with ethical violations as well as scientific. | ||
| Misinterpretation. | ||
| So, it was all done in 2010. | ||
| He definitely never got back on his bullshit. | ||
| Three years later on Infowars. | ||
| Oh, he did! | ||
| Right. | ||
| Oh, so he then leaned into it once it became a very popular theory that he got to fucking... | ||
|
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We'll get to that. | |
| I hate him so much. | ||
| I hate him so much! | ||
| He's so much worse than people think. | ||
| Do you remember the guy who implanted a cloned human embryo? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| Not cloned. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Off the top of my head. | ||
| Genetically altered embryo. | ||
| The Chinese man. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| The scientist. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Who the Chinese government was like, cool, cool, cool. | ||
| Goodbye. | ||
| That kind of thing. | ||
| Like, I'm not... | ||
| I don't want to applaud the Chinese government or say that we should act like them in any way. | ||
| No, I mean, he should be in prison. | ||
| He should be in prison. | ||
| He should be in prison. | ||
| He shouldn't be disappeared. | ||
| No, he shouldn't be disappeared. | ||
| There should be fucking consequences. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He should be... | |
| Yeah, no. | ||
| And if you think this is extreme, hold on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, boy. | |
| According to an investigation done by British journalist Brian Deere, reported in the British Journal of Medicine, Andrew Wakefield failed to disclose certain financial conflicts of interest when he embarked on this study. | ||
| Two years prior, he'd been, quote, confidentially put on the payroll of a solicitor named Richard Barr, who would go on to pay Wakefield 435,643 pounds plus expenses. | ||
| But why? | ||
| Why would a trial lawyer be paying Wakefield half a million pounds? | ||
| According to Deere, it was part of a scheme whereby Richard Barr would be able to begin a massively profitable class-action lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers. | ||
| But in order to do that, he would need a study to illustrate that there was a causal connection between the onset of this condition and receiving the vaccine. | ||
| A close examination of the medical records of the children included in the study turned up some really, really damning stuff. | ||
| Perhaps the biggest red flag was regarding Child 11, whose father spoke with Brian Deere. | ||
| In the study, Child 11 is listed as one of the children whose symptoms happened after getting the MMR shot, but according to his actual medical records and his father, that is not true. | ||
| The symptoms preceded the shot by at least a month, and Wakefield lied about this information in his study to make the results fit his predetermined conclusion. | ||
| Child 11's father said, quote, Please let me know if Andrew Wakefield has his doctor's license revoked. | ||
| His misinterpretation of my son in his research paper is inexcusable. | ||
| You should probably go to jail. | ||
| Another child, Child 2, is said to have developed symptoms two weeks after getting the vaccine, but his mother has gone on record and said it was six months. | ||
| In the case of Child 8, her general practitioner wrote this in a note to Wakefield, which he seems to have just ignored and included this girl in the study anyway. | ||
| Quote, I would simply reiterate that both the hospital and members of the primary care team involved with Child 8 had significant concerns about her development some months before she had her MMR shot. | ||
| As the study was scrutinized, more problems just kept coming up. | ||
| Like the fact that one of the children's mothers was a member of a group that campaigned against the MMR vaccine, and the parents of two of the other children in the study were people that she knew. | ||
| Or that another of the parents was looking for answers about her child, which led to her meeting someone who connected her with Barr and Wakefield and resulted in her child's inclusion in the study. | ||
| The sample of 12 children was highly selective, as opposed to being in any way a scientific sample. | ||
| The problems with this Lancet study are numerous, and we don't possibly have the time to get into all of them here, but if you'd like to, there's a whole shitload of research you can find that lays out how almost every element of this study has the appearance of either being the most incompetent piece of work ever or outright deceit. | ||
| Well, that's good that we've got that cleared up. | ||
| This is going to get 10.6 million views, I assume. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And we're going to get rid of all of this anti-vax nonsense. | ||
| We solved everything! | ||
| We did it! | ||
| Wakefield would have his medical license stripped, and his study was completely discredited upon closer analysis. | ||
| Subsequent studies which have actually followed... | ||
| Upon any analysis! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Upon the use of analysis! | ||
| It was... | ||
| When you said, look, it should have been discredited the moment he was like, well, I have 12 people. | ||
| You're like, okay, well then shut the fuck up. | ||
| Get a thousand, or whatever. | ||
| Get a representative. | ||
| Yeah, it would be helpful. | ||
| Subsequent studies, which have actually followed the protocols of science, have consistently shown there's no causal... | ||
| The protocols of the elders of science. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's no causal relationship between vaccines and autism spectrum disorders. | ||
| But it doesn't matter. | ||
| The damage has already been done. | ||
| And there's no convincing most of the people who believe this stuff that Wakefield is a fraud. | ||
| His study has an unimaginable ripple effects that have been experienced. | ||
| And it's amazing that in 2013, he's on Infowars instead of in a prison cell. | ||
| But here he is, presented as a credible voice, three years after his study had been denounced and retracted fully, years after the questions about his undisclosed funding were completely public, well after the assessments of the methodology and practices that he used have made it clear that he is bad at science. | ||
| Probably the only thing that makes this even more of a farce is that Alex isn't there, and he's being interviewed by the fucking health ranger, Mike Adams. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| This is just embarrassing stuff. | ||
| God, I want to shove a flagpole so far up his ass he can taste freedom. | ||
| Christ. | ||
| Put a Gadsden flag on that pole. | ||
| So in this next clip, they get to talking, and obviously there's preemptive damage control that Mike Adams needs to do, because some people do know that Wakefield's a fraud, and so you've got to kind of push back on that before you get too far into this. | ||
| Dr. Wakefield, welcome to the Alice Jones Show. | ||
| It's good to have you in studio again. | ||
| It's great to be back. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, a lot has been happening since the last time we spoke right here in the same spot. | ||
| You've got the British Medical Journal still has not retracted their slanderous statements about you and your research. | ||
| Is there any update on that front? | ||
| Go ahead and sue them. | ||
| Yes, Brian Deere and the editor of the British Medical Journal and the BMJ themselves are being sued here in the state of Texas. | ||
| We're going through a jurisdictional battle at the moment. | ||
| They're saying you don't have the right. | ||
| To sue us here in Texas. | ||
| This is a British journal. | ||
| This is a British journalist. | ||
| But we do. | ||
| There's a long-arm statute, and they sell their wares and make a profit out of Texas. | ||
| So on the technical aspects of this, we're confident in winning and getting Brian Deere here before a Texas jury, and that is the key. | ||
| How did that go? | ||
| It didn't go. | ||
| So six months prior to this episode, in August 2012, Travis County District Judge Amy Clark Meacham had thrown Andrew Wakefield's libel action against the British Medical Journal and Brian Deere straight out of court. | ||
| This case was thrown out because, of course, the Texas court doesn't have the jurisdiction for this case. | ||
| But if you want to know the truth, that's exactly why Andrew Wakefield chose to put this case in a Texas court, because he knew it would get rejected on a technicality so he could argue if they would just hear the case, he would prove that these monsters... | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| And you know how I fucking know that's the case? | ||
| Because he said it. | ||
| Well, no, because in 2005 he tried to sue Brian Deere in the High Court of London but withdrew that lawsuit voluntarily. | ||
| He probably did that because Judge Justice Eadie was kind of on to his ruse, saying, quote, I'm quite satisfied that the claimant wished to extract whatever advantage he could from the existence of these proceedings while not wishing to progress them or to give the defendants an opportunity of meeting the claims. | ||
| Boy, she really did know her shit. | ||
| Good on her! | ||
| Wakefield agreed to pay Deere's legal fees when discontinuing the action against him, probably to avoid getting countersued. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So he already tried to do this in a London court. | ||
| Where he did have jurisdiction. | ||
| What a fucking asshole. | ||
| Wakefield would go on to appeal the jurisdiction ruling from the Texas Court to the Texas Court of Appeals, who would also reject his claims. | ||
| He then threatened to take it to the Texas Supreme Court, but that was just blustery bullshit. | ||
| These aren't real lawsuits. | ||
| They're PR stunts meant to create the appearance that he's fighting to clear his name, but once things look like they're heading towards his actual study having to be reviewed in court, he's quick to retreat. | ||
| His unethical medical behavior is only rivaled by his cowardice. | ||
| And this is a load of bullshit that Mike Adams is helping him pitch. | ||
| Laura Loomer needs your money so she can file a lawsuit. | ||
| It's for the litigation, Dan. | ||
| It's becoming much more popular of a hustle. | ||
| It's very manipulative. | ||
| It seems like it's fairly cheap to file a lawsuit and really expensive to actually go through with one. | ||
| And it's also really costly to lose a frivolous one, which all of these people are doing. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Super losing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So in this next clip, Andrew Wakefield explains that he's just being attacked because he's brave. | ||
| As you probably know, there is an increasing level of attack on scientists and physicians who are acting in the best interests. | ||
| of their patients and not in the best interests of the government or the pharmaceutical industry. | ||
| And there is a relentless assault on the few, perhaps five, ten scientists in the world who are prepared to work on the possible association between vaccines and childhood developmental disorders like autism. | ||
| And if we do not protect those scientists and doctors, then you're going to find nobody who's prepared to stand up in vaccine court to protect these children because that's the end of their career. | ||
| You're going to find no scientist who's prepared to do the valid safety science on vaccines because it'll be the end of their career. | ||
| They'll lose their grants. | ||
| They'll lose everything, just as I did. | ||
| And so we have got to stand up. | ||
| For me. | ||
| Now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Wakefield's claim that this is an attack on science is complete bullshit. | ||
| Yeah, that one is one of the more infuriating things that he could possibly say, considering he's a walking attack on science. | ||
| Like, every moment he draws breath as an attack on the concept of science. | ||
| Well, I mean, this idea that, like, if you don't defend me, you know, everyone will be afraid to do controversial research because they'll lose everything. | ||
| Tons of people were willing to do work on the connection between autism and vaccination. | ||
|
unidentified
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And they have. | |
| That you're wrong and we're lying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All of their work proved that you're wrong and lying. | ||
| Yeah, as long as they follow the scientific design and the controls for experiments, no one cares. | ||
| That's why peer review is a thing. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, in 2019, a study was published out of Denmark that followed 657,461 children to gauge whether or not there was an increased autism risk among children who received the MMR vaccine. | ||
| I'm sorry, I thought I heard you say 12. No, it was a few more than that. | ||
| How many more? | ||
| A few hundred thousand? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Give or take. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| What was the conclusion of that study? | ||
| Quote, the study strongly supports that MMR vaccination does not increase the risk for autism, does not trigger autism in susceptible children, and is not associated with clustering of autism cases after vaccination. | ||
| Also, that study mirrored another Danish study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2002, which followed 537,303 children and concluded, quote, this study provides strong evidence against the hypothesis that MMR vaccination causes autism. | ||
| Or, if you prefer American studies, there was a 2015 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association where researchers followed 95,727 children, including 15,000 unvaccinated children, and, quote, observed, Observed no association between MMR vaccination and increased ASD risk, even among children who had siblings with ASD. | ||
| It's a whole different thing, though, because William Barr came out after that and said that vaccines did cause. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| The study said that vaccine causes measles. | ||
| So we know, you know. | ||
| Barr. | ||
| Again. | ||
| Again. | ||
| The third time! | ||
| I could go on and on, but this is the point. | ||
| There are a ton of studies that reach that conclusion, which leads one to believe that these studies have repeatability, an important feature of the scientific method. | ||
| Wakefield's results have never been repeated, and in fact, every peer-reviewed study I can find explicitly reached contradictory results to his. | ||
| He's not a brave scientist under attack. | ||
| He's a fraud who got caught, and he realized his only chance for a future career is pivoting hard into the medical conspiracy theorist and con man worlds, completely unconcerned with the tons of people he's hurting along the way. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he can't... | ||
| Practice anymore. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Might as well go hang out with the fucking health ranger. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| So they've been talking a bit about vaccine court. | ||
| Vaccine court. | ||
| In this next clip, they just lie about how the vaccine courts have actually said that vaccines do cause autism. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Well, let's talk about the U.S. vaccine court now. | ||
| Also, there's been significant breaking news that you brought to my attention. | ||
| An article published at HuffPost, vaccine court awards millions to two children with autism. | ||
| The court has made the determination that there is a causal link between vaccinations and the development of autism in those children. | ||
| And they were given an award. | ||
| Give us a breakdown of that story. | ||
| Well, this is fascinating. | ||
| It's huge. | ||
| It's a game changer. | ||
| And it comes on the back of an Italian decision in the Rimini court, which made an identical decision. | ||
| Here we have a child who was developing perfectly normally in Italy. | ||
| There we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Proven. | |
| The sample size there, again, overwhelming. | ||
| One. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So the first thing that's important to point out about that clip is that that HuffPost article that they're talking about and citing with the headline, quote, Vaccination Court Awards Millions to Two Children with Autism, was not published by the Huffington Post. | ||
| It was published as a part of their contributor platform, where they would let whoever applied, they would allow them to, quote, control their own work and post freely on our site. | ||
| It was a blog post that didn't go through the regular vetting that normal posts do. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That was a great idea. | ||
| The Huffington Post website. | ||
| Odd that they closed that one. | ||
| Second, the headline is misleading. | ||
| The vaccine courts did award money to children who also had autism spectrum disorders, but that's not why they awarded them the money. | ||
| The court has been consistent in its position that there's no causal link between ASD and vaccines, and in their autism omnibus case, it was decided that they can't award people money who claim damages from vaccines causing ASD. | ||
| However, that doesn't mean that a child Second, the Italian case that Wakefield is talking about is a bit of a sticky wicket, as they might say in his home country, and I've used that expression twice on this episode. | ||
| I know, I've seen it. | ||
| Well, because Paul's British, too. | ||
| In July 2012, a provincial court in Rimini, Italy, ruled in favor of a child whose parents claimed that he got a vaccine and it caused ASD. | ||
| This case has been held up as one of the prime examples that anti-vax people point to when they want to validate their claims. | ||
| The argument held up in an Italian court, and it would hold up in an American court if they were brave enough to hear the case, they say. | ||
| As it turns out, the only evidence presented by the family's lawyers at that trial were Andrew Wakefield's discredited Lancet study and the testimony of an expert witness who himself was relying on the Lancet study for his testimony. | ||
| While the family did win that case in 2012, the Court of Appeals in Bologna overturned the decision in February 2015, specifically because the evidence introduced was fraudulent. | ||
| Also, really shitty for him to point out that the Italian case made it so people didn't have to get the MMR vaccine in Italy, because part of that appeal in 2015 noted that after the case, vaccination rates dropped locally around Rimini. | ||
| In 2015, they had an approximate... | ||
| 85% vaccination rate, down from 90% two years earlier. | ||
| This is a real-world consequence for things like this bullshit that Mike and Wakefield are doing. | ||
| This is dangerous stuff that they're playing with, and they don't care. | ||
| They don't care about the consequences. | ||
| Because there is a point at which, like, if you drop down a vaccination rate too far, you risk... | ||
| You risk herd immunity, and then you're fucked. | ||
| It can be a real problem. | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| I can't imagine the psychopathic nature you would have to have to... | ||
| Totally. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| And as you can see... | ||
| And he's still lying. | ||
| He's purposefully lying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| We know that he's lying lying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| We know that he is... | ||
| Purposefully. | ||
| Why isn't he... | ||
| Can't we sue him for something? | ||
| Let's do a thing! | ||
| Well, and it's demonstrably, like, it's not true. | ||
| Now, granted, this is in 2013, and the case doesn't get overturned until 2015. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But Andrew Wakefield knows he fucked up his own study. | ||
| And he knows that this Italian case is based entirely on his discredited study. | ||
| So he knows that, like, that was a fraudulent court case, basically. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And all this stuff is so easy to parse through. | ||
| Now, it takes a little bit of time to disentangle certain pieces from each other, but it's not really all that hard to see where the manipulation is. | ||
| It's ludicrous. | ||
| It's real bad. | ||
| So in this next clip, he cites a study, and I have some questions about it. | ||
| Well, they are losing confidence in vaccines. | ||
| No, Mike, they've lost it. | ||
| They've lost it. | ||
| 89% of American parents in a recent study from University of Michigan said that vaccine safety science was their number one medical research priority. | ||
| 89% of parents. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So the majority of parents have major concerns. | ||
| They do not believe the CDC. | ||
| They do not believe what their pediatrician is telling them they're saying in there. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| does exist. | ||
| But if it does, I would bet anything that he's misinterpreting what parental concern means. | ||
| Like the idea that parents are concerned about vaccines. | ||
| I would believe that's true, but not the interpretation he's giving it. | ||
| Regardless, I was able to find a University of Michigan study from 2011, so it's just a bit before this episode happened, that involves trust and vaccines, so it's kind of close in resembling to what he's talking about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| The problem is that this study doesn't even come close to reaching the conclusion that he does. | ||
| Isn't that weird? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The study that I found was the result of 2,521 online surveys of parents looking to determine who they deemed credible as information providers about vaccines. | ||
| They found that 76% expressed a high level of trust for their child's doctor, 26% for other doctors, 15% said family and friends, and a very troubling 2% said they had a high level of trust for celebrities. | ||
| Only 2% reported not trusting a physician at all. | ||
| According to the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, another 2009 study of 21,420 households carried out by the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases found that, quote, 86.5% of respondents reported that they usually followed their clinician's advice and 84% reported that they trusted it. | ||
| I'm not sure where Wakefield is getting his data from, but I can definitely find data that seems to contradict him. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what this University of Michigan study was, but I'm just going to, as a default, just not believe it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| God damn it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I hate people. | ||
| So, in an interesting shade of things to come, Mike Adams relies on an interesting source here to make a vaccine argument. | ||
| And it's obvious that they damage children. | ||
| I mean, I remember even Donald Trump said on the air a couple of months ago that his employees had perfectly healthy children, took them in to the pediatrician, they got vaccinated, the next morning, lights are out, the child's autistic. | ||
| That's gross. | ||
| But also, you know what's fun? | ||
| Mike Adams is part of that 2% who believes celebrities as a reliable vaccine. | ||
| He's part of that 2%. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| Yeah, it's a mess. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| I would rather he be in the trust no one situation. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Why are you trusting? | ||
|
unidentified
|
God, I... | |
| It's wild. | ||
| And this is in 2013. | ||
| Trump has been ruining our lives for longer than we can even comprehend. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know what? | ||
| I don't even like Home Alone 2 anymore. | ||
| That movie's out! | ||
| I didn't like it to begin with. | ||
| Fair. | ||
| So they start taking some calls now, him and Wakefield. | ||
| And they're mostly not all that good. | ||
| But he gets one call that brought up an... | ||
| Interesting organization as being the victim of oppressive health regulation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| NRA? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| I wanted to look into it a little more, so I included this clip just because I... | ||
| Just because you needed to satisfy your intellectual curiosity? | ||
| A tiny bit, and I also just thought, like, maybe this will be interesting. | ||
| I think it's a little interesting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And the FTC went after them. | ||
| It was called Daniel Chapter 1. Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, they attacked their First Amendment rights, and if they were to say anything about this anymore... | ||
| They're basically going to put them in prison. | ||
| So they ended their radio program. | ||
| We need the support of the people. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| They're killing the messenger. | ||
| They're going after the messenger. | ||
| I mean, the Federal Trade Commission is who went after them, not the CDC. | ||
| I'm very familiar with that case. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| Daniel Chapter 1 was actually a ministry, and they sold some cancer therapies, herbal. | ||
| And they dared to go on the air and to say that some of these herbs are mentioned in the Bible and they can actually help you heal from cancer. | ||
| And yeah, the FTC came after them. | ||
| They should have. | ||
| The FTC, absolutely, that's their business. | ||
| So the way they're presenting this is really interesting. | ||
| The guy said that they took away their radio show. | ||
| That's not true at all. | ||
| They just said they couldn't advertise things misleadingly, and that was how they were funding their radio show. | ||
| They didn't take away their radio show. | ||
| They just took away their fraud. | ||
| So in 2009, the courts found against a group known as Daniel Chapter 1. And yes, the FTC was involved because they had specifically broken the Federal Trade Commission Act. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| An issue was the fact that they were marketing health products by making demonstrably false claims about them and making a real nice profit doing so. | ||
| Their line of products, including biomix... | ||
| Wait, but they're of the cloth. | ||
| They're of the Lord. | ||
| They're of the tribe. | ||
| True. | ||
| They would never do that. | ||
| They're professed Christians. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So they sold products like Biomix. | ||
| Yeah, that sounds right. | ||
| The seven herb formula. | ||
| A $45 coin that touches God. | ||
| And my favorite product they sold, Bioshark. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bioshark. | |
| Bioshark. | ||
| I was a bigger fan of Bioshark, too. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That was the one that really... | ||
| I prefer Bioshark Rampant. | ||
| Reference for nobody. | ||
| So these products were marketed as specifically able to inhibit tumor growth. | ||
| And in the case of one of their products called GDU, they said it would eliminate tumors altogether. | ||
| The prosecution addressed the complaint that Daniel chapter 1 made that their healing process is biblical and thus protected by their religious right to promote it. | ||
| By saying, fuck off. | ||
| That argument fell apart completely when their advertisements were introduced into court as evidence, which leaned far more towards the scam healthcare supplement vibe than a religious one. | ||
| The courts determined that nothing about the case infringed on their religious freedom, but their actions absolutely violated consumer protection statutes regarding making false medical claims about the things they're selling. | ||
| Ultimately, Daniel Chapter 1 was forced to pay millions of dollars in restitution to customers they'd defrauded and a bunch of fines. | ||
| You can read the court documents about the case. | ||
| There's a lot of discussion about their First Amendment concerns, about previous court precedents, and every concern you might have, and it's all pretty well laid out in the court documents. | ||
| This is a case about a medical scam. | ||
| And honestly, of course it's the sort of thing Mike Adams and Andrew Wakefield should be concerned about, and they should turn it into a cause celeb, because they're just as guilty of peddling bullshit science as Daniel Chapter 1. They're just more careful about not making medically unsubstantiated claims about the things they sell, because they know that's illegal. | ||
| They know what Daniel chapter one did is illegal. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| They have to muddy the water because it's getting a little close to home. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So. | |
| Ugh. | ||
| Goddamn them. | ||
| This has been such an infuriating... | ||
| I'm so angry at everybody here. | ||
| The only possible way this could be worse is if you're like, and surprise, they did two hours of overdrive with Mark Moreno. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| And now we're going to bitch about how climate change deniers exist. | ||
| I know it was a shock to your system to hear Andrew Wakefield show up out of nowhere, but I promise you there's no more surprises. | ||
| Just a couple of weird callers to end the episode. | ||
| This first caller is describing his experience dealing with therapists. | ||
| And I think he's presenting it as indications that he's not mentally ill. | ||
| But I would describe the story he's telling as being pretty indicative that his behavior is evidence of a mental illness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
My parents made me go see a therapist, and I basically started making things up. | |
| Based on what I was reading, you know, his diagnosis for certain things, I actually read Michael Crichton's Terminal Man and basically just started telling him I was having all the symptoms that the main character in that book had. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And they completely took my word for it. | |
| What? | ||
| That tone of voice. | ||
| So what were you diagnosed with? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Psychiatrist who then gave me some medication and then inevitably I started telling him I was hearing voices even though I wasn't. | |
| Because, you know, it was a game. | ||
| It was fun for me. | ||
| I was 13. So they admitted me. | ||
| And by the time it was all said and done, I was on Lebutrin when it first came out, Depakote, Navane, and they would give me Thorazine whenever I acted up. | ||
| So, and also probably those records could then be used against you now to deny you access to purchasing a firearm also. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, yes, please. | |
| And interestingly enough, I was still allowed to join the military at 17, so you figured that out. | ||
| What? | ||
| So, you can hear there, Mike Adams just wants to talk about guns, and he's like, I actually have a minor, all those records aren't, you know, those are all sealed. | ||
| So even Mike Adams' attempt to turn this into, like, of course, my biggest health concern is guns. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| It doesn't work, and he's like, nah, I also joined the Army, no one really cares. | ||
| Which is an issue? | ||
| I don't know, maybe it is, but, I mean, what he's describing is, like, a pathology. | ||
| Like, lying to doctors. | ||
| Yeah, he described, I don't know, what, Munchausen's? | ||
| I don't know, because... | ||
| Because he described it as a game. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| I'm not the sort of person who is going to say, you lie to a doctor and that automatically means something. | ||
| You're fucked up. | ||
| But the stakes to which he was doing it... | ||
| Seem to be indicative of, this isn't just fun and games for you. | ||
| You ended up in a hospital because of your lies. | ||
| And also, what are these doctors supposed to do? | ||
| You're reporting symptoms of your subjective experience of your own mental states. | ||
| It would be completely negligent of them not to put you in a hospital, perhaps, if you were describing hearing voices that you were disturbed by. | ||
| Like, I don't know how he characterized the voices to these doctors, but that seems like a really... | ||
| Sane response? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| On the doctor's part? | ||
| What he just described was a lot of situations where the doctors acted appropriately and he was the one who was being inappropriate. | ||
| It seems like that. | ||
| From the limited information we have, it does seem like what you're describing is... | ||
| Well, in his story. | ||
| Yeah, you are the one who's messed up. | ||
| You're the asshole here, yeah. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Like, sure, maybe you didn't have depression or X, Y, or Z condition that you were describing to the doctor. | ||
| But your actions belie that you had something going on that led you to behave that way. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I was playing this fun game with this long succession of doctors, and then I wound up committed. | ||
| And it was like, well, this was a great game. | ||
| I nailed it. | ||
| I think I won. | ||
| I think I did it. | ||
| So I'm going to cut off the last clip because it's really just Andrew Wakefield and Mike Adams saying goodbye, and who cares? | ||
| So this will be our last clip, and it's a caller calling in, expressing some credentials. | ||
| And it's interesting that no one calls him on this. | ||
| No one asks for an explanation. | ||
| They just accept these absurd credentials from a caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dr. Wakefield, I just want to say it's really a pleasure, sir, to be talking to you. | |
| I myself actually am one of America's few remaining pioneer research scientists, and it's such a good coincidence that you happen to be on. | ||
| He's a pioneer research scientist? | ||
| He's one of the last remaining American pioneer research scientists. | ||
| He's one of the last remaining American pioneer research scientists. | ||
| There's no, like, what does that mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What does that mean? | |
| There's no, like, who are you? | ||
| Like, please prove that you are what you're saying. | ||
| They just treat him like he's some sort of a... | ||
| Like a grand doctor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, he believes the same vaccine shit that Wakefield's spitting. | ||
| So they're just like, oh my god, isn't this great to have confirmation from a fucking pioneer researcher? | ||
| We really are. | ||
| It's something that we're not talking about enough. | ||
| You know, everybody talked about how the bees are dying and the climate is changing. | ||
| But what we're missing is the real human cost of so few remaining pioneer scientists. | ||
| It is a big blow. | ||
| Also, is that just... | ||
| Just the few remaining American pioneer scientists? | ||
| Does that mean that there's a booming pioneer scientist industry in Switzerland? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Lots of pioneer. | ||
| Of what? | ||
| Pioneer of what? | ||
| Is he also, I imagine... | ||
| Is his research pioneering? | ||
| Is he researching pioneers? | ||
| I imagine that he was on an episode of Gunsmoke and he played a... | ||
| Pioneer research scientist. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I imagine. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, it's just so indicative, though, of, like, Alex the day before got a call from this guy who's talking about this gun bill, the HR-226. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, like, he treats this caller as if he is an expert in policy and, like, he knows about civic structure and where the bill is and what it means. | ||
| He treats him like an expert, then he recycles that information as his narratives. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Mike Adams does the exact same thing with this pioneer fucking research scientist that you're not like, hey, man, what are you talking about? | ||
| There is just such a consistent thread. | ||
| If there is a consistent thread through all of these two episodes that were completely fucked up and so wide-ranging that I can't believe we've gotten through it in just over two hours. | ||
| It's nuts to me. | ||
| I thought this would take like four. | ||
| But the consistent thread is just an inability or more likely an unwillingness. | ||
| To call anyone out on their shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like you have this Denny Payman who is a corrupt fucking asshole sheriff and Alex, because he likes the gun stuff he's saying, refuses to deal with him in any kind of realistic way that like, oh my god, you're a megalomaniac. | ||
| You're a nut. | ||
| You have this James Tracy come in. | ||
| Paul Joseph Watson won't push back on him because it's good for business. | ||
| This viral video siphoning off some of that audience is more important to him than actually standing up for his professed principle, which is, I don't believe this shit. | ||
| You have Mike Adams come in, and Andrew Wakefield is just allowed to run roughshod and say, I'm suing these people. | ||
| They're all lying about me. | ||
| And because he is also a medical weirdo, and he makes a ton of money off medical woo and all this bullshit, he allows that to happen. | ||
| And then they take this call, and he's a fucking pioneer scientist. | ||
| It's just a consistent, like, whatever you say you are is what you are. | ||
| Yeah, no, they're children. | ||
| The children are purer. | ||
| Yeah, we're not paying them for it. | ||
| Except for the crisis actors, of course. | ||
| And it's not necessarily paying them for it, but as long as you're bringing me what I need, You define yourself, and I am on board. | ||
| That's sad. | ||
| Sad. | ||
| Do you think they get together after these? | ||
| Do you think they ever have meetups where they're all just like, man, this is a good scam? | ||
| Or do you think they all just eye each other? | ||
| I think they know better than to talk about it. | ||
| I think it's almost more like gunslingers, if we're going to continue this metaphor, where they're just going into, and they've all got their hands on their weapons every time they see each other, just like... | ||
| I know what you'd do. | ||
| I know what you'd do. | ||
| I'd do it too. | ||
| Just keep your distance. | ||
| I think it would probably be pretty gauche to talk about it. | ||
| I don't think that they would... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I think it would be embarrassing. | ||
| I imagine that, though. | ||
| Like, Paul Joseph Watson... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah! | |
| I forgot! | ||
| They would have to then admit to themselves that they're scammers. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that would be embarrassing. | ||
| Because I imagine, like, Harrison Smith going through, like, orientation at InfoWars, watching sensitivity training videos. | ||
| Or whatever. | ||
| And they're like, okay, now we are all running a scam and here's how... | ||
| I don't see it. | ||
| I don't see it. | ||
| I think it's something that you instinctually know what to do. | ||
| And that's why a lot of these people aren't good at it. | ||
| That's why a lot of his employees suck. | ||
| There's no training. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can't train people to do this. | ||
| Otherwise, you risk them knowing about this, and if they leave, then they can fucking take you down. | ||
| Yeah, but people have left, and they've called it a scam, and that didn't bother anybody. | ||
| Right. | ||
| People leave Scientology all the time. | ||
| It's not changing anything there. | ||
| I don't know if the people who have left in Fort Wars have said, Alex has said this is a scam. | ||
| Oh, yeah, that's a good point. | ||
| You know, they just know it is from lived experience. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| It would be different if, like, I have an audio recording of Alex saying this is a scam. | ||
| Yeah, but you... | ||
| Again, we can... | ||
| Evidence means nothing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Evidence means nothing. | ||
| Especially these days. | ||
| Yeah, no kidding. | ||
| It's only getting worse. | ||
| God, it's such a... | ||
| We moved from any notion of objective reality into purely subjective reality. | ||
| Yeah, it's terrifying. | ||
| It is horrific. | ||
| So, this episode is horrific, I suppose, in many ways, but I'm glad that we got through it all because I was... | ||
| I knew that James Tracy was coming up, eventually. | ||
| And I knew that that would probably be, at least in some ways, a big moment in the Sandy Hook investigation. | ||
| And I'm glad that we're on the other side of it. | ||
| Because now, I have a strong suspicion that this is where Alex is going to change. | ||
| Because... | ||
| Paul Joseph Watson and Alex, when they were on the show, Alex on the 17th and Paul on the 18th, both expressed that they didn't know that this video was as popular as it was. | ||
| This 10 million view video about Sandy Hook and crisis actors and the false flag. | ||
| I think that that's going to heavily inform things moving forward, which is very interesting because had we not spent the time and gone through all of this, we wouldn't know that he didn't care that much. | ||
| Up to this point, he hasn't cared that much. | ||
| So if he does start caring a bunch and covering it a ton more, it makes a lot of sense to assume that one of his motivations might be recognizing the market that's there. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So if we see, moving forward, an intense pivot towards covering Sandy Hook and talking about Sandy Hook, you know damn well that's why. | ||
| That's probably unfair to say with certainty, but it looks like that's probably why. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that's interesting. | ||
| Unlike other people, we cannot safely conclude that. | ||
| However, it sure does look like all the evidence is pointing towards a conclusion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm interested in that, and I'm also interested in the possibility that he doesn't start talking about Sandy Hook, because then the question even becomes more bizarre. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Which is what's fun about going through this. | ||
| We get a much more robust and fuller understanding of what Alex did, as opposed to just saying he said that they were actors. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Which we know is the conclusion. | ||
| But this path, this path is so weird. | ||
| It's always weird. | ||
| And then we learn along the way about, you know, we learned about glove making. | ||
| In the early 1900s. | ||
| I do love your glove making. | ||
| You're a very soft and gentle glove maker. | ||
| We learned about Andrew Wakefield, which I know we'd gotten requests to talk about. | ||
| And so I'm glad that he organically came up within the investigation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not. | |
| I know. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Many ways I'm not either. | ||
| I hate that guy so much. | ||
| He's the worst. | ||
| So we come to the end of this, and we will be back on Monday. | ||
| And we will see you then. | ||
| But until then, we have a website. | ||
| We do have a website. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Yes, we also have a Twitter. | ||
| It's knowledge underscore fight. | ||
| And I'm at gotobedjordan. | ||
| And we're on Facebook. | ||
| We are on Facebook. | ||
| And you could also get us as a podcast in podcast form. | ||
| Many places. | ||
| Through the use of any podcast apps. | ||
| Except for Stitcher, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fuck Stitcher. | ||
| Or maybe we'll get on Stitcher. | ||
| I'm not against anybody except for that one that got pilloried recently. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Luminary. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Luminosity. | ||
| Luminosity is the brain training scam. | ||
| That's not the one. | ||
| They're all fucking scams. | ||
| So we come to the end of this, and I'll say that, I mean, I don't know. | ||
| Mayor Dayton King. | ||
| He infringed on a guy who was running against him for mayor's civil rights, but he didn't fucking kill anybody. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| He stole stamps. | ||
| He stole stamps. | ||
| We can prove it in a court of law! | ||
| He didn't kill anybody, though, which is fine. | ||
| But one guy who technically probably did is that boy, Alex Jones. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |