Today, both Jordan and Alex Jones return from their respective vacations. In this installment, the gents discuss the day Alex got back in the studio and decided to spend most of his time making an absurd argument for why Trump is great for wanting to buy Greenland.
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
I love you. | |
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| I'm Jordan. | ||
| We're a couple dudes who like to sit around, drink novelty beverages, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Indeed we are, Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Dan! | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| What is the weirdest... | ||
| Candy you have ever had. | ||
| I know you appreciate candies from across the world. | ||
| And you have received many different treats from many different places. | ||
| Terrible candies do not stick out in my mind. | ||
| I erase them. | ||
| I pretend they never exist. | ||
| That's a good way of viewing it. | ||
| I don't want to deal with it. | ||
| The worst one that sticks out, obviously, is those weird orange and black wrapper taffies that you would get on Halloween. | ||
| Those ones that are weird peanut something or other. | ||
| Disgusting. | ||
| Terrible. | ||
| But the ones that stick out the most for me are the positives. | ||
| And so those are the Wonka Bar. | ||
| I think the Wonka Bar is one of the best. | ||
| It's fantastic. | ||
| Got the graham crackers in there. | ||
| Good texture. | ||
| Great chocolate. | ||
| Fantastic work, Willie. | ||
| And then the other one is the Honeycomb. | ||
| The honeycomb ones. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not sure what you're talking about. | ||
| Crunch bar, I think, is the name of it. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Crunch is the Nestle Crunch. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Crunchy, maybe? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure, sure. | ||
| It's like a honeycomb and then just chocolate on it. | ||
| It's so good. | ||
| I do not think I've ever heard of that nor absolutely never had it. | ||
| I believe I ran into it initially when my dad would go to conferences. | ||
| The Society of Biblical Literature would have conferences in various countries. | ||
| They would have honeycomb-based treats there. | ||
| Well, I mean, you'd go to different countries. | ||
| They always bring back candies. | ||
| And I think I encountered one of these honeycomb candies from some foreign market. | ||
| That's what we were all looking for. | ||
| We were looking for your foreign candies, Dan. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| I like an arrow. | ||
| The sort of aerated chocolate has a really nice texture to it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Those are pretty good. | ||
| But yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I know that you're doing this as a transition because you have just returned from your trip to South Africa. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And you have brought back with you. | ||
| What looks like probably the most disgusting thing ever. | ||
| It is amazing. | ||
| It is a Jelly Tots candy bar. | ||
| Jelly Tots. | ||
| And here's the description of it. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| White chocolate with original Jelly Tots. | ||
| Original. | ||
| Original Jelly Tots. | ||
| All right, I'm going to give this a shot. | ||
| So this is basically gummy bears inside a white chocolate coating. | ||
| I have no idea how it's going to go. | ||
| Dan, your first bite. | ||
| Oh, chewy. | ||
| Good opening review? | ||
|
unidentified
|
If I can... | |
| Okay. | ||
| The jelly tots have a very unappealing texture. | ||
| That's not a surprise. | ||
|
unidentified
|
First review, too much white chocolate. | |
| Not enough jelly tot. | ||
| If you're going to make a white chocolate thing, I think it's, you know, you're behooved to make it a little bit less white chocolate as a very overpowering flavor. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm not into it. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| That's my review. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| It's not as bad as I thought it was going to be based on the jelly thing and white chocolate combination. | ||
| Oh, you look like you're going to spit this out. | ||
| Bro, I just can't chew it. | ||
| Yeah, it's a bad texture. | ||
| That's what I was saying. | ||
| Oh boy, that's difficult. | ||
| It's like if you were eating white chocolate and then a raisin attacked you. | ||
| It's not a treat. | ||
| No, it is a fight. | ||
| But I imagine your trip was welcome back. | ||
| I hope you had a great time over there and you didn't think too much about the song. | ||
| Africa by Toto. | ||
| Again, I only thought of it one time, and that was because of your text. | ||
| I had successfully expunged all remembrance of Toto's Africa until you texted me on Wednesday. | ||
| Yeah, we were texting, and I told you multiple times, whatever you do, don't... | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| Hoping that you would be out enjoying... | ||
| Oh, there's a rhinoceros. | ||
| Hey, hey, while you're in the shower, don't worry, I'm not reading your diary. | ||
| Wait, wait, are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| No, it was... | ||
| It was an incredible trip. | ||
| We weren't staying in a city or anything. | ||
| We were actually staying in a game preserve. | ||
| Even better. | ||
| Which was truly, truly incredible. | ||
| But even that was tainted because we went out on a drive guided by one of the park rangers at night. | ||
| And as we're cresting and on the way back to the camp, he literally turns around and he's like... | ||
| You know, we're not really being taken care of here anymore. | ||
| I've been here for 23 years, and they're going to make me retire, and there's no replacement for me. | ||
| And so he's going on on this whole thing, and I'm once again getting... | ||
| You're like, I'm going to step in. | ||
| I mean, it's awful. | ||
| It's really awful. | ||
| Unlike so many places where, you know, Bolsonaro's selling off the Amazon rainforest to loggers and shit like that, but the South African government is just... | ||
| Starving this place of fun, so I assume it'll go out of business and then they'll be able to sell off all of the fucking land. | ||
| It's nightmarish. | ||
| That sounds like a great vacation you're describing so far. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| It was incredible! | ||
| Did you see a lot of great wildlife? | ||
| Oh yeah, I was unexpectedly 25 feet away from an elephant. | ||
| You usually like encounters with elephants to be expected. | ||
| You should absolutely like those to be expected. | ||
| It's tough to prepare for a startling elephant. | ||
| It was not good. | ||
| It was not good. | ||
| We couldn't see it. | ||
| It was 25 feet off the main road. | ||
| And then later on the next day, we heard that the elephant had figured out that nobody was in the camp eating all of the food there. | ||
| So, the elephant started going into the camp during the middle of the day. | ||
| Elephants are sneaky. | ||
| It was right by the swimming pool on the last day. | ||
| It was 25 feet away from the swimming pool. | ||
| I'm just picturing this elephant tiptoeing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's bananas. | ||
| Grabbing a sandwich with its big old nose. | ||
| Pretty much. | ||
| Well, I'm glad you had a great time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And welcome back. | ||
| Thank you to everybody who has been clamoring for... | ||
| Just to get back to work. | ||
| Yeah, don't worry. | ||
| I'd also like to say an apology and a thank you to our friend, friend of the show, Matt Drufke, who came in. | ||
| We recorded an episode on Monday, or to put out for Monday, and I had some tech difficulties in terms of editing it and getting it out, and hopefully we'll be able to release it at some point down the line, but in order to keep moving forward with the process. | ||
| of releasing episodes and keeping up with the show. | ||
| It's very difficult to add that to the moving forward workload, but I do hope that we'll be able to do that. | ||
| And I apologize for the inconvenience and not having an episode on Monday. | ||
| And thank Matt Drafke for being so kind as to... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that sucks. | |
| I was looking forward to listening to that. | ||
| Many were. | ||
| Many were. | ||
| But the being up until 4 a.m. | ||
| with a glitchy computer kind of Makes it impossible to get it out on Monday. | ||
| It's very difficult. | ||
| I shouldn't complain. | ||
| Yes, you should! | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, Jordan, today we are back. | ||
| We are back in business, and we'll be going over the August 16th, 2019 episode of The Alex Jones Show. | ||
| As you may know... | ||
| Alex Jones went on vacation at the same time you went on vacation. | ||
| Yeah, that was strange. | ||
| Your vacation was announced. | ||
| We mentioned it ahead of time. | ||
| That was very strange. | ||
| Alex's was not. | ||
| That is very strange. | ||
| So he was gone with his family on vacation for all of last week and returned on Friday. | ||
| In the meantime, he had been putting in little video reports and popping in while other people were hosting the show. | ||
| And he'd ride shotgun with them, as he is known to say. | ||
| But he didn't do a lot of his own show until Friday, when he was actually back in studio. | ||
| And so we'll be picking up the thread there. | ||
| And it'll be interesting. | ||
| I don't think it's anything like what anybody would have expected the show to be. | ||
| Which is now what we should expect the show to be. | ||
| Expect the unexpected. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| There are some very, very weird things that Alex says in this episode. | ||
| And I'm excited to break down these things with you. | ||
| But before we get to that, we've got to give a shout-out to some people who have signed up and are supporting the show. | ||
| Yay! | ||
| So first, this guy. | ||
| What a great name. | ||
| Daniel, thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Daniel. | ||
| Next, Laura. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Laura. | ||
| Next, Eric with a K. Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Eric with a K. Next, Deadeye Nick. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Deadeye Nick. | ||
| It's a nice name, a little bit of an aggressive moniker. | ||
| Well, you remember that band, Deadeye Dick? | ||
| No, I do not. | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| I can confidently say. | ||
| Don't like the meat, but you sure like the bone. | ||
| I'm really fine with that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You don't remember that song? | |
| Of course not. | ||
| I can't remember what the name of that song was. | ||
| It was a terrible song. | ||
| Much like you and terrible foreign candies. | ||
| Terrible foreign 90s bands. | ||
| Wash it off. | ||
| No issue. | ||
| So, before we go any further, let's give a shout out to some people who are donated on an elevated level. | ||
| We appreciate it very much. | ||
| So, David, thank you so much. | ||
| Lottie, thank you so much. | ||
| And a very special thank you to D-Dubs. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are all now wonderful technocrats. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Crikey, mate, that's fantastic. | ||
| Have yourself a brew. | ||
| How's your 401k doing, bro? | ||
| All right, we got to go full tilt boogie on this, Watson, all right? | ||
| Let's just get down to business. | ||
| We ain't making that money off that heroin. | ||
| Why are you pimp so good? | ||
| My neck is freakishly large. | ||
| I declare. | ||
| Infowar on you. | ||
| Thank you, David. | ||
| Thank you, Lottie. | ||
| And thank you, D-Dubs. | ||
| Yes, thank you, all three of you. | ||
| If you out there are enjoying the show and you'd like to support what we do, you can do that by going to our website, knowledgefight.com, clicking the button that says support the show. | ||
| We would appreciate it. | ||
| It would be very nice. | ||
| So, Jordan, like I said, August 16th. | ||
| A lot of people are probably clamoring to find out what Alex's take on the death of Jeffrey Epstein is. | ||
| And I knew going in that it was probably... | ||
| He's not going to have a good take on it. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| And I listened to a bit of his stuff from The Week. | ||
| And it's exactly what you'd expect it to be. | ||
| He urged restraint on everybody. | ||
| He said that this rampant speculation about some sort of conspiratorial murder doesn't actually make any sense. | ||
| And it's reasonable to assume that this suicide actually isn't even going to really affect the outcome overall of anything. | ||
| Except we don't get to see him tarred and feathered and walk through the streets. | ||
| That's not his approach to it. | ||
| That's not? | ||
| No. | ||
| His take on it was that a number of documents had been released before his death. | ||
| Jeffrey Epstein said. | ||
| And these documents exonerated Trump of any kind of involvement with him. | ||
| Boy, that doesn't sound right. | ||
| Therefore, Jeffrey Epstein was no longer useful to the cabal, and so they killed him. | ||
| That's basically Alex's position on this. | ||
| It's a situation where I don't have the patience to get into it, quite frankly. | ||
| And it's a very not large part of when he comes back to studio on the 16th. | ||
| It is a minor. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's just, it's not particularly compelling to me, his take on it. | ||
| And I honestly don't think there's a ton of value in us going over it. | ||
| Which is why I'm not going to go over his little guest appearances on his own show while he was on vacation. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I think getting into the weeds on it is kind of stupid. | ||
| And kind of, I don't know, a waste of time? | ||
| If he's not drunk, he has to be in studio. | ||
| Those are our rules, right? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And, you know, if he gets back around to it and there's more information that can actually be looked into down the road, I am willing to re-explore this topic. | ||
| But for now, the episode we're covering is the 16th, and it's barely an issue for Alex on the 16th. | ||
| Which seems like it should be if it's a big deal to him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's not. | ||
| Jangling keys. | ||
| If you look at Epstein too long, you might notice there's a connection to Trump, and the less you talk about Epstein, the less you talk about Trump being connected to Epstein. | ||
| Jangly keys, jangly keys, jangly keys. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| So he starts the day by complaining about how no one does journalism anymore, which is... | ||
| Rich? | ||
| Yeah, a little bit. | ||
| In fact, there's so much big news happening. | ||
| Back when the New York Times still did some journalism, and the Washington Post still did some journalism, a journalist would spend a month working on one of the things we work on. | ||
| So we've got to move fast, and it means we make mistakes sometimes, but we've proven that nine times out of ten, we're dead on. | ||
| And here's the difference. | ||
| We're trying to tell the truth. | ||
| We're not trying to deceive like a lot of the corporate media out there. | ||
| Norm Pattis joins us at the bottom of the hour. | ||
| Oh, good. | ||
| Oh, great. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| I fucking love that. | ||
| Just insulting the media, and then my lawyer is going to be a guest on my show again coming up. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Like, we try and tell all the truth, and I'm going to say that this guy I'm paying to defend me in court is going to give his opinions probably on my court case. | ||
| The guy who has a monetary interest in backing up literally everything I say. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That's fun. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| I like that complaint while at the same time... | ||
| Literally saying why you shouldn't do what we are doing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And sure, we get things wrong all the time because we work too fast. | ||
| Like when journalism used to happen, people used to spend their time on stuff. | ||
| Oh man, that is really what he's saying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that like, look, normal places would spend a long time on this. | ||
| We don't really care. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So we're just going to speed through a lot of this shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We could do a good job, but we won't. | |
| Because he's not really saying that they do a month's worth of work in a day or whatever. | ||
| No. | ||
| He's just saying we breeze through this shit. | ||
| He's saying we don't work that hard or that long. | ||
| So Norm is coming in, and it's actually not really to talk about Alex's case. | ||
| It's about another case that Norm might be representing. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And it's bad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here we go. | |
| It's bad. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| He was actually contacted by the ICE officer this morning. | ||
| And he may end up representing him, but regardless, he's seen the videos of what happened in Rhode Island, the supposed ICE officer running a crowd over. | ||
| No, he pulls up around the corner, doesn't see him, stops. | ||
| They get around him, and he just simply bumps him at a quarter mile an hour, putting his car in gear. | ||
| They're calling it murder. | ||
| They're looking to charge him in Rhode Island, he's been told. | ||
| So exclusive info on that, we'll play the video. | ||
| And they just start celebrating. | ||
| They go, oh, the truck, ICE murdered us! | ||
| And they go, I mean attempted murder! | ||
| So just the foaming at the mouth. | ||
| It's foaming at the mouth. | ||
| Can you fucking imagine how freaking screaming Alex would be if a truck almost ran over a Second Amendment protester? | ||
| Can you fucking imagine? | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| We're not doing that. | ||
| We're not putting his bullshit in context. | ||
| No, I mean, it's insane. | ||
| The idea that Alex Jones, champion of freedom, champion against tyranny, would side with a state employee. | ||
| In any way driving a car through a line of protesters who are expressing their First Amendment right to free speech, free congregation, free airing of grievances. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| This is tyranny shit. | ||
| If at Charlottesville one of the cops had like... | ||
| Accidentally moved the rearview window out and accidentally touched one of the Second Amendment people, everybody would have exploded. | ||
| Alex would have lost his shit. | ||
| That gives you free reign to shoot on cops. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| If they hit you with their rearview mirror while adjusting it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| I mean, it's just so indicative of this slide that he's on. | ||
| It pretends bad things for the future and the present. | ||
| And that his lawyer is going to... | ||
| I mean, that ICE agent, as much of a piece of shit as it appears he may be, he still deserves a day in court, still deserves a lawyer. | ||
| It's not wrong for Norm to represent him. | ||
| It's kind of wrong for him to, whether or not he's representing him, come on Alex's show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| And say, this guy is great. | ||
| Incredibly unethical. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| What is he, Rudy Giuliani? | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| The only real reason that I think he can have any kind of wiggle room is that he hasn't officially taken on the case according to Alex and Norm's presentation of it. | ||
| So it's still sort of a Schrodinger's lawyer situation. | ||
| I'd be interested to know if he was qualified to both work criminal defense and civil. | ||
| Issues, right? | ||
| I think he is. | ||
| Because he's representing that guy who may or may not have murdered his wife. | ||
| Fair. | ||
| He does do some criminal cases as well. | ||
| Probably for the good guys always. | ||
| Always. | ||
| Always. | ||
| Not that everybody's a bad guy if they're in there. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Don't ever talk to the cops, kids. | ||
| That's all I'm trying to say. | ||
| Again, this is an indication that I might have been a little bit too quick with my judgment that Norm isn't a piece of shit. | ||
| Just because he tried to calm Alex down when he was screaming, that doesn't mean that he has good sense. | ||
| So, in this next clip, Jordan, we get into what I would describe as the main theme of this episode, this August 16th episode. | ||
| And it's not really what you might expect it to be. | ||
| It's not about any major world news, really. | ||
| It's about Vivaldi's The Rites of Spring? | ||
| I would be interested in hearing Alex's take on that. | ||
| It is not. | ||
| It is actually one of the weirdest defending Trump positions I've ever heard Alex make. | ||
| The American people are seeing the propaganda. | ||
| Well, the latest laughing stock, ladies and gentlemen, is that Trump wants to purchase, or look into purchasing, the biggest island in the world with an estimated $10 trillion of oil and gas on it. | ||
| Oh, you'd never want to buy that for a few billion bucks. | ||
| Greenland. | ||
| Its population is only a few hundred thousand, max. | ||
| Almost no one lives there. | ||
| The Inuit population started moving there in the last 800 years. | ||
| That's the Eskimo folks from North America. | ||
| If you're a TV viewer, you can see Greenland there on the screen. | ||
| Why Danish politicians scoff at Trump's reported wish to buy Greenland. | ||
| It must be April Fool's Day. | ||
| But you see, Greenland is autonomous. | ||
| Yes, the Vikings had some small settlements there. | ||
| Where are we going? | ||
| What is this? | ||
| The people of Greenland could vote like Texas voted to become part of the union. | ||
| And it could become the 51st state. | ||
| You know, like Alaska, that other terrible... | ||
| Horrible purchase. | ||
| What the fuck is happening? | ||
| I have not heard this angle. | ||
| I'm happy. | ||
| Almost this whole episode is him trying to rationalize Trump wanting to buy Greenland. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I'm fine with that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's live in wacky world. | ||
| I'm golden. | ||
| So there's a couple things here in what Alex is saying that are completely batshit insane. | ||
| Oh, are they? | ||
| The first is that Alex is okay with the idea of a president suggesting that they might want to buy another country. | ||
| That is completely insane. | ||
| Can you imagine if Bill Clinton or Obama or even George W. Bush had suggested, hey, maybe it would be a good idea for us to buy Ireland? | ||
| Do you think Alex would be like, hey, that's a good idea. | ||
| They have a lot of natural resources there we could take. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, EU, EU, what do I got to do to get Portugal? | |
| What do I got to pay you to get Portugal? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Second, the population isn't in the hundreds of thousands. | ||
| It's actually closer to 56,000. | ||
| Greenland is very sparsely populated because a lot of the land in the country is uninhabitable, partially because the Greenland ice sheet covers approximately 81% of the island. | ||
| So it's a good investment to get it now. | ||
| Alex might make that point later. | ||
| Approximately 40% of Greenland is protected land, the Northeast Greenland National Park, which is the largest national park in the world. | ||
| And the area around the coasts are the only place that they can have permanent human residencies. | ||
| It's outside of the coverage of the ice sheet, and that explains why there's such a low population, is because you can only really inhabit the coast. | ||
| But it's important to remember that just because there's a small number of total people there, it doesn't make their connection to the land any less legitimate or any less of a factor when considering whether or not the place should be just strip-mined for resources. | ||
| Dan, I'm pretty sure we've read the history books on colonialism, and it works out great. | ||
| Appealing to a low number of people affected by this sort of decision is really no different than just saying that their feelings don't matter, or that it's for their own good. | ||
| All the other justifications... | ||
| for colonialism that have existed over history. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| About 90% of the population of Greenland are Inuit people. | ||
| While the island is technically part of the Kingdom of Denmark, they have their own parliamentary government and there have been moves made towards complete independence from Denmark for years, but they aren't autonomous in the way that Alex is suggesting. | ||
| And I would bet just about everything that I own that if it were put to a vote, the people of Greenland would not be in favor of jumping from Denmark to the United States for in Enrichment of the United States. | ||
| Yeah, I'm going to go with that one would win by a Stalin-esque 97%. | ||
| Also, what the fuck does he think he's saying by trying to minimize the Inuit population by saying they moved there 800 years ago? | ||
| They only moved there 800 years ago. | ||
| That's over three times the period that the U.S. has been around. | ||
| No, stop it. | ||
| Don't even put that into anyone's brains. | ||
| Don't you even put that we have a right to this land, Dan. | ||
| We've been here for 300 years. | ||
| They don't have any rights to their lands. | ||
| They've only been there 800 years. | ||
| We've only been here for a fraction of the time that the Inuit have been in Greenland. | ||
| Yeah, Alex won't stop screaming every day about how immigrants are coming and it's a threat to his culture. | ||
| Does he not think that a full-scale strip mining operation in Greenland wouldn't bring in masses of immigrants? | ||
| Does he not care about how drastically something like that might change the culture in Greenland? | ||
| I'm sure he doesn't care at all. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Because when you get really down to it, I need to make this point. | ||
| It's hard to hear what Alex is saying and not think that he's advocating for a return to colonialism. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Which seems completely counter to pretty much every single thing he's built his career on or pretended to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know if he... | ||
| So, based on what he was saying there, he thinks that if we somehow just buy Greenland... | ||
| Well, they're autonomous. | ||
| ...from Greenlandians... | ||
| Right. | ||
| ...is what he thinks. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So they'll just take a parliamentary vote on whether to sell. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's like a housing administration all getting together and being like, well, we'll get this condo. | ||
| I don't know how housing administrations work, but yes. | ||
| I would assume that's what he's picturing in his head. | ||
| Then we own Greenland, and then Greenland citizens will then be allowed to vote again on whether or not to become the 51st state, as though that is in their control. | ||
| Yes, I assume so. | ||
| But along the way... | ||
| Does he know what Puerto Rico is? | ||
| I don't know if he does. | ||
| Or Guam or... | ||
| Yeah, any number of the American territories. | ||
| We're going to learn a lot about, not those ones specifically, but the examples Alex uses. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Because he uses some really bad examples to try and make this argument. | ||
| Because when you really get down to it, what his argument is, is this... | ||
| Because he even appealed to it a little bit there by bringing up Alaska. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| The idea that we're going to buy a bunch of land. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Seward's Folly in the whole... | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And that was a great investment. | ||
| Yeah, it turns out great. | ||
| So, let's talk a little bit about this purchase of Alaska. | ||
| When the United States purchased Alaska in 1867, they didn't put it to a vote of the people in Alaska. | ||
| Alaska wasn't an autonomous state that just wanted to join the Union. | ||
| It was a piece of the Russian Empire, and we bought it from them, at least partially because they didn't want it anymore, since it was way too hard to defend from their position. | ||
| So even if great natural resources were discovered, it was so vulnerable to capture that it wasn't worth the effort it would take to protect it. | ||
| Plus, they'd completely wiped out the otter populations they were killing for fur, so maintaining colonies there just wasn't profitable for them in any way. | ||
| We paid the Russian Empire, and then, without any consent of the people who lived in Alaska, it was then part of the United States. | ||
| Even when the Russian Empire arrived in Alaska, there were approximately 100,000 native peoples living there who had no say in what happened and their own futures. | ||
| Though the U.S. bought Alaska, the native peoples there were not allowed citizenship until 1924, meaning that they had no right to go. | ||
| Now, let me ask you a question, Dan. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Would that count as something along the lines of being taxed without being represented? | ||
| Yeah, it's a second-class citizenship for sure. | ||
| Yeah, it sure does seem like that. | ||
| And that's what America is based on, right? | ||
| We're against it. | ||
| We the people, in order to form a more... | ||
| Anyways. | ||
| The US didn't even make Alaska a state until 1959, and some progress had been made in terms of ceding land back to native populations, but absolutely it was not a primary concern when we bought Alaska. | ||
| My point here is that Alex Jones is a fucking monster. | ||
| If he were alive in Belgium in the late 1800s, I have zero doubt that he would have been going around yelling at everybody about how it was a great idea what King Leopold wants to do in the Congo. | ||
| Like, it's insane. | ||
| What he's saying is crazy. | ||
| No, it's Manifest Destiny. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| Well, I mean, it's a little bit tapered because he has this fucking nonsensical idea about paying people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is still like... | ||
| If you put it in a slightly different context, he would scream that they're just being bribed. | ||
| It's ludicrous. | ||
| Well, I mean, if they were in a different context and it served as a narrative in a different way, he'd say we were trying to steal the land from Denmark. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which he gets into in this next clip. | ||
| Okay, of course. | ||
| Well, we're going to go ahead and break down all these other stupid, horrible purchases for TV and radio viewers right now. | ||
| Because it is autonomous. | ||
| We could pay each person 15, 20 million dollars. | ||
| And buy it and have a multi-thousand percent increase in profit and all the resources, the tourism, the development, which everything is going to be in the Arctic in the future. | ||
| Oh, is it? | ||
| So, the first thing first there, if, you know, if climate change isn't real, then why is it? | ||
| It's not real, don't worry about it. | ||
| No, don't, definitely don't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-uh. | |
| No, no, no, he didn't give up anything. | ||
| Seems like he tipped his hand a little. | ||
| Yeah, a little bit. | ||
| So first, I love the idea that he's like, okay, we're going to get into these fucking purchases, because Alex can never use specifics correctly, and that's great. | ||
| He's going to get his ass kicked. | ||
| It's going to be very bad for him. | ||
| Now, beyond that, his plan to pay off the people of Greenland is fucking stupid. | ||
| He's suggesting that the U.S. government should pay each person in Greenland 15 to 20 million dollars and then still turn a gigantic profit, and that's fucking deranged. | ||
| I'm going to leave aside the fact that he thinks that the population is in the hundreds of thousands, and I'm going to use his lowball number of 15 million per person. | ||
| If we gave that amount to each person in Greenland, that would be 840 billion dollars. | ||
| That is an insane amount of money. | ||
| Someone advocating for an $840 billion expenditure to buy fucking Greenland is not a fiscal conservative, I would argue, by any stretch of the imagination. | ||
| They fought tooth and nail to avoid giving Americans $850 billion in fucking stimulus bullshit. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no, but this is an island. | ||
| These people are insane. | ||
| Where does Alex think that money's coming from, I might ask? | ||
| Does he realize that something like that would require insane tax hikes? | ||
| I can't stress this enough. | ||
| This is completely unhinged and a batshit idea for him to justify this kind of shit. | ||
| And it fully contradicts the positions he's pretended to support for the entirety of his career. | ||
| Can you imagine Ron Paul advocating for paying $840 billion to buy Greenland? | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Guys, look, I know this sounds like a lunatic idea, but what if we just spent 40% of our GDP and bought Greenland? | ||
| I know you're going to... | ||
| Now, hold on. | ||
| I have three proposals. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| One, eliminate all foreign aid. | ||
| Two, get rid of OSHA. | ||
| Three, buy Greenland. | ||
| Buy Greenland, yeah. | ||
| Sir, you just got yourself a standing ovation. | ||
| Now, there's a second matter to consider, and that is that he thinks there will be thousands of percent profit. | ||
| Now, in order for that to be the case, you'd need to see about a tenfold return. | ||
| So now we're talking about bringing in, like, $8 trillion in tourism and resources mined from Greenland? | ||
| Day one. | ||
| First hundred days of owning Greenland, Dan. | ||
| We will bring in $8 trillion. | ||
| That's bad news about his plan. | ||
| Currently, the GDP of Greenland is $2.7 billion. | ||
| If the United States were to just steal all of that, it would still take us about 3,000 years to make thousands of percent profit on the purchase Alex is suggesting, and that's not even factoring in any costs that we would need to incur. | ||
| Making this kind of a purchase profitable would require an almost unimaginable length of time or an almost unimaginable level of destruction of nature in pursuit of these resources. | ||
| It would be a horrible thing to do, and there's no reason to think that even if you destroyed every piece of... | ||
| It is the... | ||
| Colonialist equivalent of John Wall's NBA contract. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I don't know John Wall's. | ||
| Washington Wizards. | ||
| It's the worst contract in the entire league by a wide margin. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's pretty fantastic. | ||
| What's he pulling in? | ||
| $840 billion? | ||
| Actually, pretty close. | ||
| That's why it's troublesome. | ||
| So, like I said, I love the idea that Alex is going to try and use specifics. | ||
| Because I need to make this clear. | ||
| He's talking about the idea of purchasing Greenland. | ||
| And he's saying that everyone is saying Trump is stupid for wanting to buy Greenland. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So now his argument is going to be, look at all these other times presidents have bought land or whatever, and it was so stupid. | ||
| The argument hinges on the idea that these people bought the land. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's important. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| His first example is okay. | ||
| The Louisiana purchase? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| That's number one, and then it's going to go down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Remember when we bought the land with the guns? | |
| So let's let him get into the Louisiana Purchase, and then we'll see how this all plays out. | ||
| So let's go through the history here. | ||
| Well, after we took from the King of England the original 13 colonies by force, by conquest, by ideas, well, then there was the Louisiana Purchase for $15 million. | ||
| The equivalent of about 200 plus million today. | ||
| And as you know, the Louisiana Purchase is worth hundreds of trillions of dollars. | ||
| What a horrible purchase. | ||
| What a horrible thing that President did back then. | ||
| Those were really bad people. | ||
| Do you think it's strange that Alex can't come up with the name of who was the president during the Louisiana Purchase? | ||
| Do you think that's strange? | ||
| Do you think it's weird? | ||
| It does not. | ||
| Because do you know who did it, Dan? | ||
| I do. | ||
| I know who we have a ton of quotes from. | ||
| I'll tell you that right now. | ||
| I know we've got so many quotes from this guy, but I can't think of his name right now. | ||
| Is it someone who Alex considers a hero? | ||
| And maybe the foundation of a ton of his ideas are based on, like you said, fake quotes from him? | ||
| It's so surprising that he can't remember his name. | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| It's surprising that the one time it's referencing something he actually did do. | ||
| Whoever was president back then. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| What is wrong with this guy? | ||
| Oh man, do you remember that famous quote of his? | ||
| Liberty can't be grown without the burning of fire on the seed of Louisiana's purchase. | ||
| Thomas Jefferson. | ||
| From a purely financial standpoint, that did turn out to be a great purchase. | ||
| But other factors make it a bit more of a complicated situation. | ||
| Again, we were not buying the land from the people who actually lived there. | ||
| No, we were buying it from the people who actually lived there, right? | ||
| We weren't buying autonomous areas and saying, "Hey folks, we sure would like it if you join up with our awesome country, and how about we pay you and you do this." No, the French were born there, Dan. | ||
| Everybody knows this. | ||
| The area that was bought in the Louisiana Purchase, ladies and gentlemen, was colonized by the French and we bought it from them. | ||
| There was no consent of the natives who lived in the area. | ||
| There was no vote about it. | ||
| It was just a negotiation between two colonizing powers who didn't give a fuck about the interests of the people who lived in the areas they did. | ||
| That just doesn't sound like us, Dan. | ||
| It doesn't ring true. | ||
| It just doesn't sound like us. | ||
| Seems like fake news. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's impossible to argue that the purchase wasn't a really good investment for the U.S. on a monetary basis. | ||
| But it also set into place a lot of really long-lasting problems that still resonate to this day. | ||
| There was the disruption, destabilization, and displacement of Native peoples that we enacted. | ||
| There was the ensuing War of 1812 that was caused by a ton of factors. | ||
| And this isn't obviously the entirety of it, but one of the factors was the international response to American expansionism as well as the British support of Native American tribes. | ||
| who are fighting with the United States because the United States was disrupting, destabilizing and displacing them. | ||
| So those were factors that came into, that were a direct result of our expansionism. | ||
| Which is not to say that the British were supporting the native tribes because they were great. | ||
| Are good guys. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Definitely not. | ||
| There was also the fact that states could be made out of this Louisiana Purchase that would have to either be free or slave states, which would disrupt the balance between the two. | ||
| And so they had to compromise and create... | ||
| The Missouri Compromise of 1820. | ||
| That compromise likely postponed the outbreak of the Civil War, but it also gave an air of legitimacy to slavery in the South, and also made official that anti-slavery progress was not going to extend past that barrier. | ||
| You know, it reminds me of something where it's like you can't compromise on certain issues, you know, you can either be, you know, so if you're compromising with certain stuff, then you're really just enabling evil things to occur. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Yeah, you allow it to exist in a place. | ||
| You can't apply that to current day whatsoever. | ||
| There are a lot of very serious factors that go into looking at the history of the Louisiana Purchase that don't involve whether or not we've made a lot of money off of it. | ||
| Using that kind of simplistic logic, would Alex be alright with pretty much any kind of oppression in the name of a good return on investment? | ||
| Let's imagine a super-rich communist wanted to buy Texas, and the United States sold it to them. | ||
| Shouldn't he have to be okay with that? | ||
| If the super-rich communist paid people so they would vote to sell him Texas? | ||
| Alex would never stop screaming about how it was a rigged vote and bribery, but that's exactly what he wants done in Greenland. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This guy is an idiot and a monster. | |
| What he's advocating is a monstrous thing. | ||
| The clip itself, listening to him talk, I just got this vision of both of us in a bar. | ||
| Him saying that and me being like, I don't want this conversation. | ||
| Bye. | ||
| Bye. | ||
| Goodbye. | ||
| No thanks. | ||
| So, you know, at least Louisiana Purchase, though, was a purchase. | ||
| So Alex has got that going for him. | ||
| His next example... | ||
| When we purchased Texas from the Mexicans. | ||
| No, we've got a little while until we get to that. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| His next example is not as good of an example of a purchase. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| There was, of course, the Red River Valley Purchase. | ||
| Again, just absolutely got it for nothing. | ||
| The Red River Valley Purchase is not something that exists. | ||
| We didn't buy the Red River Valley or the Red River Basin. | ||
| The boundaries were negotiated in the Treaty of 1818 at the end of the War of 1812, and actually the treaty involved us ceding a bunch of land from the Louisiana Purchase that is now Canada to Britain, since the treaty established the northern border in that area for the United States. | ||
| Alex is kind of just making shit up here, or reading off a hastily compiled list of territorial expansions in United States history that probably one of his... | ||
| Yeah, we bought the concession of land to the British. | ||
| Don't you know that? | ||
| We fought the War of 1812, and at the end of it, we had a treaty that negotiated this borderline, and we lost a bunch of land. | ||
| Robert E. Lee bought losing the Civil War. | ||
| Everybody knows this. | ||
| So now we get to another one that Alex is bringing up, which, I mean, again, this is going to become very repetitive, but he's wrong about everything. | ||
| Then there was the Florida purchase for $5 million. | ||
| Oh my gosh, Florida for $5 million. | ||
| What another stupid, laughingstock, idiot president. | ||
| You know, who was president in 1819? | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| You tell me. | ||
| Because that person was a really horrible person. | ||
| Wait, he actually doesn't know? | ||
| I don't think he does. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| We'll get to that in a minute. | ||
| It was Thomas Jefferson! | ||
| It wasn't. | ||
| It was James Monroe. | ||
| The Florida Purchase only... | ||
| I hear his doctrine was pretty dope. | ||
| Well, it doesn't make him a great guy. | ||
| No. | ||
| The Florida Purchase only happened because Spain didn't want to spend so much maintaining the colony and wanted to make a deal with the United States, which led to the Adams-Ones Treaty of 1819. | ||
| People often misleadingly say that the U.S. paid $5 million to Spain for Florida, as Alex thinks, but in reality that $5 million was part of the Adams-Ones Treaty, wherein the U.S. agreed to pay for the legal claims of U.S. citizens against Spain up to the amount of $5 million. | ||
| So it was more an issue of accepting bureaucratic responsibility You realize this is so insanely like how professional sports works today. | ||
| It is negotiations like that. | ||
| It is really very similar to it. | ||
| It's kind of creeping me out. | ||
| There was no actual payment for Florida. | ||
| It was a negotiation and the resulting agreement was one that was not kept. | ||
| Fun fact, and one of the reasons that Alex should absolutely not be cool with what he's talking about in the Florida Purchase, Article 3 of the treaty explicitly made the U.S. relinquish all claims it had on most of Texas, saying that the U.S. had to, quote, cede to his Catholic majesty, that's the ruler of Spain, and renounce forever all their rights, claims, and pretensions to Texas, among other areas that would end up becoming part of the United States somehow. | ||
| I'm not entirely sure. | ||
| We didn't buy Florida, and the agreement that brought Florida into the United States involved language that forbade the U.S. to lay claim on Alex's home state. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Again, his team is very, very sloppy, and he has zero idea what he's talking about. | ||
| His only reason to exist in the present day is to justify whatever dumb shit Trump does and agitate towards an authoritarian white nationalist state. | ||
| And this is a piece of that. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Also, like we mentioned, James Monroe was president in 1919, and all things considered, he wasn't a great guy. | ||
| It's also just fucking hilarious that this noted student of history, knower of all things and reader of a thousand books... | ||
| Whatever president was the live... | ||
| He literally has no idea who was president when these great expansions of the country he loves so much happened. | ||
| This is embarrassing. | ||
| He's read too many books about World War II. | ||
| He still says he's read a lot about American history. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| He's not equipped to have the conversation he's trying to have. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| And he would be if he just spent any time actually learning about any of this stuff. | ||
| Well, no. | ||
| In a lot of ways, the entire American education system is built around making sure no one knows how... | ||
| Utterly and completely complex American history is. | ||
| Period. | ||
| And it's to create this American myth that makes sense out of all of this. | ||
| Instead of a constant push and pull between stupid and ridiculous and evil. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a huge thing. | ||
| So, Florida. | ||
| Purchased. | ||
| Check it off the list. | ||
| That helps us make sense and rationalize. | ||
| Huge return on investment. | ||
| We have the Louisiana Purchase. | ||
| We have the non-existent Red River Valley Purchase. | ||
| We bought the Florida Purchase. | ||
| So these are the things that Alex is using to defend the idea of buying Greenland. | ||
| So far, he is not doing a great job. | ||
| Here he goes now with some more examples. | ||
| Oh my gosh, then there was the 1845 Texas annexation. | ||
| You don't want Texas and all that oil and all that land and all that... | ||
| I mean, that is just a horrible deal right there. | ||
| Absolutely horrible deal. | ||
| How much did we spend? | ||
| And they got that for nothing. | ||
| Another terrible, horrible decision. | ||
| I mean, Trump is a frickin' kook, man. | ||
| Kook. | ||
| So, at this point, I'm not sure Alex is sure what he's even arguing anymore. | ||
| I really have no idea what he's talking about. | ||
| The Louisiana Purchase involved the U.S. buying territory from another colonialist force, but these other examples have literally nothing to do with the point he started with. | ||
| The Red River Valley Purchase isn't a thing, the Florida Purchase wasn't a purchase, and the Texas annexation was, again, not us buying Texas. | ||
| The territory that's now Texas was colonized by Spain. | ||
| In 1821, Steve Austin's father Moses Austin was granted permission to create a settlement with a population of 300 in Spanish territory. | ||
| After Moses died, Steve kept up his work, but the number of American immigrants into Texas did not stop at 300. | ||
| This led to the Americans thinking that they were in charge, which quickly gave way to them declaring Texas its own country, and even though it was Spanish territory and they were explicitly only there because they had permission from the Spanish. | ||
| Anyway, a war broke out, and then in 1845, with all the treasuries wearing seriously thin and finding themselves unable to defend themselves, Texas asked to join the United States and U.S. said, cool. | ||
| Mexico, by now an independent country from Spain, made clear that if the U.S. annexed Texas, that would mean war. | ||
| The U.S. said, let's do this thing, and thus the history books now get to include a little chapter about the Mexican-American War. | ||
| So that cost us, like, six million? | ||
| Like, what are we talking here? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, if you want to talk lives, there are a few. | ||
| Texas joining the United States did not involve us buying it from someone. | ||
| It involved an insurrection from within Spanish territory, and then a war that cost thousands of lives. | ||
| If this is what Alex is using as an example of what to expect from trying to get our hands on Greenland, I think he's making a terrible argument. | ||
| And also, by the way, we have plenty of options for a 51st state already. | ||
| Like what? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Like who? | ||
| I know Trump supposedly said something about Greenland and everyone's making fun of him, so Alex just needs, he feels this need to go on the defensive, but before we start trying to grab up parts of Denmark, maybe we should get our own house in order and recognize the statehood of some of these territories we've got that we've been neglecting. | ||
| Dan, then they would have rights. | ||
| That is a problem. | ||
| Yeah, that's a huge issue for a lot of people. | ||
| And they probably wouldn't vote for his nonsense. | ||
| It would be a surprise if they did. | ||
| I would be shocked. | ||
| Man, I was really pissed off that I couldn't squeeze in a that's the bottom line reference there. | ||
| It was going to be something like there's a 300 maximum amount and that's not the bottom line. | ||
| I was going to go there. | ||
| So, in this next clip, Alex gets back to talking about Alaska. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| This is really interesting. | ||
| Because in this clip... | ||
| Does he call it the Louisiana Purchase again? | ||
| He doesn't. | ||
| In this clip, he actually uses the word colonize when he's talking about Greenland. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But what he says about Alaska is fucking insane. | ||
| Alright, let's hear this. | ||
| The average citizen gets a yearly paycheck from the government off the resources in Alaska. | ||
| And Trump's even proposing that for any U.S. citizens that would move out of the inside baseball to Greenland. | ||
| We would then colonize it once it became a U.S. territory, and then later it would become a state. | ||
| Oh, but who wants to even offer those folks that? | ||
| Because nobody else seems to be doing it. | ||
| Well, no one seems to be doing it because they seem to be pretty satisfied with the position that they're in currently. | ||
| And holy shit, Jordan, Alex Jones is the stupidest motherfucker in the planet. | ||
| His entire current brand is built on being opposed to socialism and any form of welfare. | ||
| He hates the idea of a universal basic income because it makes you dependent on the state. | ||
| Well, guess what, shithead? | ||
| That's exactly what the Alaska Permanent Fund is. | ||
| The Alaska Permanent Fund is a state-owned fund that takes oil revenues and redistributes it to the citizens of Alaska. | ||
| In a very basic sense, it is recognizing that all residents of the state are part owners of the natural resources that are taken from the land that they live in, and they recognize that and pay people for it. | ||
| Everyone gets a check, and just by virtue of that, the state is able to raise tons of people out of abject poverty, which is the exact goal of all the social welfare programs that Alex is so vehemently against. | ||
| Children can be enrolled as soon as they're born, and their dividend checks are placed into an account, so by the time they're 18, they could easily have, like... | ||
| $20,000 to put towards college or trade school or whatever they want. | ||
| The oil companies still make insane profits, but some of that has to go back to the people. | ||
| It's a very sane model. | ||
| So sane that Alex doesn't even seem to be against it. | ||
| Weird! | ||
| What a dumb motherfucker. | ||
| Dan, you know, the more you listen to these kinds of folk talk, the more you think, I don't think they actually believe in anything they're saying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| I think they're just... | ||
| Making bad faith arguments in order to convince enough people to vote against their own interests. | ||
| And it's almost like the things that they actually complain about aren't what they care about. | ||
| It seems like there's something behind it that's actually like maybe a white thing. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I don't think they really care as much about the things they purport to care about. | ||
| In Alaska, this is a state-run and owned program. | ||
| Right! | ||
| And to Alex, this should be socialism run amok. | ||
| States' rights! | ||
| It should be something that he sees as intrinsically evil and exactly opposite to everything he stands for. | ||
| And yet here he is seemingly endorsing it. | ||
| Which is, I guess, to say Alex doesn't really hate socialism as much as he thinks he does. | ||
| And here's the real kicker. | ||
| Studies have shown that the dividend checks have had almost a non-existent effect on employment, which is to say that people being given a free check hasn't made them just decide to stop working and live off the state. | ||
| There's some indications that it's increased part-time employment, but a lot of that is thought to be a result of people having the freedom to work less hours and not starve, which societally speaking is a good thing. | ||
| You remember in the 1940s and 50s whenever they had all those, like, what the future is going to be like for people? | ||
| I mean, I don't remember it subjectively, but I've heard of it. | ||
| Yeah, well, they have all those things, and you can keep going back, and every one of those, like, what the future is going to be like scenarios, everybody is always like, well... | ||
| We won't have to work as much. | ||
| We won't have to have the five-day work week. | ||
| We'll be able to work two or three days and still be able to explore our interests in a greater way. | ||
| And now people have taken that in the complete opposite direction. | ||
| It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. | ||
| You want the future to be you working less, you lazy piece of shit? | ||
| Believing that the only incentive to do anything is financial or something along those lines is stupid. | ||
| What it is is indicating that you don't really believe in people as much as you think you do. | ||
| Alex always talks about, I believe in the human spirit. | ||
| If you did, then everyone getting paid a basic survival income shouldn't change how vigorous and inflamed the human spirit would be. | ||
| People would create so many amazing things. | ||
| No, they wouldn't. | ||
| So because this program is based on Alaska's natural resources and most states don't share that kind of abundance, it's been seen as a difficult challenge to try and replicate this sort of program nationally. | ||
| But I think that's kind of dumb. | ||
| There are countless ways the success of this very not-not-socialist program could be enacted through Texas. | ||
| And it would make everyone's life substantially better. | ||
| I would love to see something along these lines be explored. | ||
| Maybe not just, you know, let's throw it up and see what happens. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But explore these sorts of ideas. | ||
| See what kind of system we could put in place. | ||
| And it's exciting to hear that Alex is on board. | ||
| Yeah, no kidding. | ||
| So I look forward to him advocating for universal basic income initiatives in the future. | ||
| It'll be great. | ||
| Thank you, Alex. | ||
| As long as they're given to Greenland, Dan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not to the, you know, not to the 50. What a stupid, stupid douche. | |
| They're all stupid. | ||
| They're all incredibly stupid unless they're smart. | ||
| In which case they're evil. | ||
| I think socialism is of the devil, but I'm thrilled with this program that's in Alaska and also Trump is going to bring it to Greenland. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| Yeah, but not to the 48, Dad. | ||
| Look, the contiguous 48, we just can't be trusted with that kind of shit right there. | ||
| You can only give it to Alaska, Greenland, and I suppose Hawaii, because it's also not connected to the mainland. | ||
| Alex is the worst. | ||
| So now he gets back to his examples of dumb purchases. | ||
| Are we still doing this? | ||
| This goes on a long time. | ||
| How long? | ||
| Most of the episode? | ||
| None of it was purchases! | ||
| Nope. | ||
| We killed people! | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| This one isn't either. | ||
| Then there's the Oregon Treaty. | ||
| The Oregon Treaty established the boundary between Canada and the United States and the 49th parallel. | ||
| And again, that was for nothing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It was a treaty. | ||
| Then there was the Vietnam Treaty, where we took some of Vietnam, I guess. | ||
| He does get kind of close to that. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I'm trying to be... | ||
| You can't. | ||
| I'm trying to go too far. | ||
| You can't exaggerate. | ||
| So the Oregon country was established as a dual-occupied area where the United States and British settlers could freely set up shop. | ||
| The settlers were mostly there for the fur trade, and inevitably when the local species became more scarce from overhunting, the industry took a downturn. | ||
| In that situation in the 1840s, the British weren't really all that interested in maintaining their occupation of the Oregon Territory, especially considering that the U.S. was super interested in it and there were way more Americans there than British. | ||
| By this point, the ripples of the Missouri Compromise were being felt in all of the expansionist territories of the United States. | ||
| Every new area that was coming under our sway was subject to the new slave state versus free state debate, and the Oregon Territory was no different. | ||
| It always has to be one and one, too. | ||
| You can't have one state going to the Union. | ||
| It's got to be even. | ||
| When negotiating for the precise boundaries of what the U.S. would eventually own, in terms of the northern boundary with Britain's claim on Canada, anti-slavery people wanted more territory because it was in the north, and if there was more territory, it may become more states, which would then be non-slave states. | ||
| The south didn't really want to fight with the British over expanding the northern boundary of the United States because they were aware of that exact same dynamic. | ||
| Unless territory actually worked in their interests of preserving the power that slave states held. | ||
| Again, this is not an instance of the United States purchasing land to expand its territory. | ||
| This, as best as I can tell, has literally nothing to do with the point Alex is trying to make about Greenland. | ||
| Unless the only point he's trying to make is that he's into colonialism and existing populations should just be made to submit to and assimilate to the culture you're bringing in with your colonization. | ||
| This is really disgusting stuff to hear coming from the same guy who spends all his time yelling about Muslims and South American refugees coming to take away his culture. | ||
| Here he is so ready to celebrate the prospect of doing exactly that to someone else because he thinks it's a good investment. | ||
| Like, this dude's a monster. | ||
| And his argument about colonizing Greenland makes clear he's stupid. | ||
| These examples are not analogous in any way except in adding more territory to the United States. | ||
| That's the only similarity that they have. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
His only argument he could be making with all of these examples is, hey, look at all these other times we've added territory. | |
| We should add more territory. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's it. | |
| There is a – It doesn't – sorry. | ||
| Here is my main point. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It doesn't justify the idea that people are making fun of Trump for. | |
| No, yeah! | ||
| We're so far away from that being. | ||
| That's what Alex is defending. | ||
| That's what people are mocking Trump for. | ||
| That's why he's being defensive. | ||
| And the argument he's making has nothing to do with that. | ||
| He's lost the thread entirely. | ||
| It is a... | ||
| I don't know if it's unique, but it is very strong, this overriding manifest destiny belief in America that so many, let's go with, incredibly white people have of just like, I would... | ||
| Die! | ||
| I would kill everyone that I've ever met before I allow someone to take an inch of my land. | ||
| And I will absolutely have zero understanding of how similar that it would be if I was on the other side. | ||
| I'm going to take your land with no consequences and no interest in you. | ||
| And your reactions whatsoever. | ||
| But if you even come for an inch of mine, I'll go ape shit on you. | ||
| That is just how so many of these guys think without ever understanding the similarities there. | ||
| Yeah, it does appear that to be the case. | ||
| But Alex has more examples. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| How? | ||
| And then there's Mexican cessation where we got massive amounts of stuff, including California. | ||
| Who wants that? | ||
| Utah, Arizona, all of that. | ||
| And that was taken. | ||
| Again, by force because Mexico couldn't even hold it. | ||
| So we purchased it, right? | ||
| We can just continue here. | ||
| All these other horrible... | ||
| Horrible purchases. | ||
| These aren't purchases. | ||
| He just said that it wasn't a purchase, that it was taken by force. | ||
| You can't buy something taken by force. | ||
| That's a burglary. | ||
| It's also not the Mexican cessation. | ||
| It's the Mexican cession. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they ceded land to the United States. | ||
| So this isn't a part of a purchase or a shrewd investment we made. | ||
| It was the result of a treaty that ended the Mexican-American War. | ||
| As a result of the war, the U.S. absorbed a lot of the territory that is now the West and the Southwest. | ||
| As part of the treaty, Mexicans who decided to stay were granted citizenship and allowed to keep their property. | ||
| Except we didn't stick to that. | ||
| The U.S. almost immediately began snatching up land that was already owned by Mexicans, who would now be Americans. | ||
| Estimates put it at around 20 million acres of land that should be rightful property of Mexican-Americans that was just taken from them, which absolutely had a massive ripple effect through history in terms of capital, property, and generational wealth. | ||
| But Alex isn't interested in that. | ||
| It was a great purchase. | ||
| It was a great purchase. | ||
| He shouldn't want California. | ||
| He hates California. | ||
| Yeah, but it's ours. | ||
| It's ours. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| He thinks it's one of the biggest problems in America. | ||
| Yeah, but just because liberals took it over doesn't mean it's not. | ||
| Not ours? | ||
| Ridiculous. | ||
| Man, he really... | ||
| In a way, though, it actually makes sense because he was totally all about the annexation of Crimea. | ||
| So it's very similar. | ||
| There are similarities. | ||
| The annexation of Crime Mexico. | ||
| So most of these do seem to be like treaties that ended wars or just treaties that were negotiations less than they were purchases. | ||
| And none of them took into account the people. | ||
| Who are living there already. | ||
| No, imperialism is an awful, terrible thing. | ||
| Except when we do it! | ||
| So now, interestingly, Alex gets to another actual purchase in this next split. | ||
| The 1853 Gadsden purchase from Mexico, $10 million. | ||
| And again, that gave U.S. possession of the valley south of the Gila River and the land in which the United States and Arizona and New Mexico now reside. | ||
| So again... | ||
| Horrible getting large parts of Arizona and New Mexico. | ||
| What a horrible deal for $10 million. | ||
| What a terrible deal with stupid, bad American presidents. | ||
| These American presidents absolutely just have to be stopped. | ||
| Again, he doesn't know who the president was. | ||
| No clue. | ||
| For the record, Franklin Pierce was president when the Gadsden Purchase happened. | ||
| I know, I know, he was a one-term guy and he was only president when the Nebraska-Kansas Act was passed that really exacerbated relations between slave and free states and was in office during the bleeding Kansas border wars between Kansas and Missouri. | ||
| All that stuff's really easy to not know much about, especially when you've read dozens of books about the Civil War. | ||
| It's a good thing Alex doesn't claim to have read dozens of books about the Civil War, or else you should know a lot of this stuff that he seems to be kind of unaware of. | ||
| You would think. | ||
| I doubt his books about the Civil War really go into the larger socioeconomic and political factors. | ||
| It might be written by Confederate sympathizers. | ||
| Yeah, that started like 40 years before the Civil War even came close to beginning. | ||
| They might just be about how... | ||
| The South was great. | ||
| Yeah, Jefferson Davis is cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So finally, though, we have the Gadsden Purchase. | ||
| We have an actual purchase in this laundry list of non-purchases Alex is trying to use to justify the stupid idea of buying Greenland. | ||
| First things first, this has nothing to do with the Gadsden flag. | ||
| That was designed by a guy named Christopher Gadsden back in the late 1700s, whereas this purchase is named after the chief negotiator of it, James Gadsden. | ||
| J.K., James Gadsden, is Christopher Gadsden's grandson. | ||
| Oh, okay, great. | ||
| So it kind of does. | ||
| Okay, I gotcha. | ||
| So James Gadsden was a real piece of shit. | ||
| Oh, no! | ||
| What? | ||
| Come on! | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| What? | ||
| I know you're shocked. | ||
| He was the president of the South Carolina Railroad Company, and in 1850 he advocated for South Carolina to secede from the Union because they admitted California as a free state. | ||
| You see, he had said that slavery was, quote, a social blessing. | ||
| But of course, as we know, the choice to secede had nothing to do with wanting to keep enslaving people. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| They definitely didn't put it in that big, like, why we are going to secede kind of thing. | ||
| So California went too far south geographically for his tastes because it should have been a slave state since it went down into that. | ||
| So that was his problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Imaginary lines. | ||
| So his plan when Carolina didn't end up go ahead and secede back then, he decided his new plan was going to be to try to... | ||
| Break up California into two states and make the southern part of it a giant slave colony, which also didn't succeed. | ||
| One of his plans for the California slave colony was to use slave labor to build a railroad. | ||
| After all, that was the business he was in. | ||
| In 1853, Franklin Pierce sent Gadsden to Mexico to negotiate for more land along the border, and the reason he was sent was because we wanted that land in order to build a southern transcontinental railroad. | ||
| Gadsden was successful in his negotiation trip, and now the land in the Gadsden Purchase is one of the largest rail hubs in the country. | ||
| Now, I would also be remiss if I didn't tell you that James Gadsden was also pretty deeply involved in the negotiation of those treaties the U.S. made to remove native tribes from their land. | ||
| This, of course, was during the time of Andrew Jackson... | ||
| Yeah, that's something that... | ||
| That only he and like half of our presidents can share, really. | ||
| That being said, this is an example of the U.S. paying another country for a plot of land. | ||
| However, it does kind of fall into the exact same problem as any of the other purchases, and that the move was never the will of the people who lived in the land that it was purchased, like the land that was in question. | ||
| Also, that $10 million went to Santa Ana, who Alex knows as the villain of the story of the Alamo, so he probably shouldn't be so thrilled that we gave $10 million to one of his greatest historical arch-villains. | ||
| His heroes, Alex's heroes, didn't negotiate with a tyrant like Santa Ana. | ||
| They stood up and bravely held their ground. | ||
| They didn't give him $10 million for the Alamo. | ||
| He literally knows nothing about what he's talking about. | ||
| If you think too hard or read too much about American history, you'll hurt yourself, Dan. | ||
| Just believe what you want to believe about it. | ||
| That's the best way to go through life. | ||
| Yeah, I guess so. | ||
| I bet in Alex's mind, he's almost thinking that he's developed a progressive colonialism wherein we actually pay the people who live there. | ||
| Yeah, he probably feels insecure about how, like, this is pretty forward-thinking. | ||
| He's probably like, look at me. | ||
| I am a classical liberal. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Hey. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I am a good guy. | ||
| I think I am. | ||
| Pat myself on the back. | ||
| I'm getting soft, to be honest. | ||
| Dick. | ||
| So in this next clip, Alex just directly is advocating for colonizing. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Great. | ||
| And we could go in there and have a referendum and buy it from them for nothing. | ||
| And then they would get major investment and then major amounts of people moving there. | ||
| And then everybody will be trying to move to... | ||
| Greenland, 50 years after we buy it. | ||
| Guaranteed. | ||
| There'll be flotillas of people trying to break into the country. | ||
| There'll be huge migrant caravan ships. | ||
| We'll have to put fences up around Greenland once there's shopping malls and movie theaters and all sorts of giant greenhouse facilities growing food. | ||
| And then once we develop it and there's all these incredible mountain ski resorts and hot springs, I mean, Greenland is incredible. | ||
| Greenland is magic. | ||
| Maybe we can show that in the New York Times. | ||
| Photo of Greenland. | ||
| It looks like where Santa Claus lives or something. | ||
| Or something. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is stupid. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| And it bums me out to hear a grown-up talking like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's dumb. | ||
| Although, on the other hand, I bet Pompeo is talking to Boris Johnson about something very similar. | ||
| Whenever Scotland and Northern Ireland leave... | ||
| Pompeo would be like, hey, Boris, what if we just bought England, buddy? | ||
| We used to be your colony, now you get full circle, man. | ||
| Narrative circles. | ||
| I mean, it is... | ||
| I don't know if that would necessarily be in the realm of realistic, but that's in line with the sort of conversation Alex is opening up. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| It becomes this really fucked up box that he's opening that I don't think is good. | ||
| No, and it kind of suggests that he thinks any country... | ||
| Could just vote to become a state. | ||
| And if we paid them to. | ||
| I do think he thinks that. | ||
| I think he thinks that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It kind of sounds like if, you know, and it can't be one of the Middle Eastern states because he'll be very angry about it. | ||
| But like, if Laos just was like, you know what, we want to become a United States state, so we had a vote. | ||
| Give us, I don't know, two million each. | ||
| We're a real bargain country. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Two million each. | ||
| And then we'll just be 51st state. | ||
| Now you're suggesting that other states could, or other countries could initiate this process. | ||
| Of course, yeah. | ||
| And make us making states. | ||
| They're going to make an offer. | ||
| Yeah, they're making us an offer. | ||
| Eventually, we used car salesmen our way into owning the world. | ||
| I mean, really, that is, like... | ||
| On a very basic level, what he's dipping his toe into is expansionism. | ||
| It is empire. | ||
| It's not good. | ||
| When you have a guy who's deeply, deeply white supremacist, white identity to his core, and then you add in expansionist, interested in empire. | ||
| I really don't see any corollary or historical parallel at all. | ||
| I'm not saying that he's advocating for taking over the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I'm saying that this is not language you'll like to see out of that kind of guy. | ||
| Well, the next sentence out of his mouth is, have we considered invading Poland? | ||
| I think it might be a good way to go. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Step one, krieg that blitz. | ||
| Well, we'll kind of get into how this rhetoric is very easily molded once it's established, which I think is important, but we have to wait for him to play out his thoughts first. | ||
| In this next clip, Alexer says some more stupid shit. | ||
| There's a whole bunch of other pages of horrible, stupid, evil purchases by other dirty Americans that believe in manifest destiny and to expand with our renaissance and our superior ideas and to build an amazing place everyone would want to come to, which we did. | ||
| But now folks want to conquer us. | ||
| They want to take us over. | ||
| So here you have it, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| There you have it. | ||
| What? | ||
| They're superior. | ||
| The ideas were superior, and that's why we ended up taking over all of this stuff. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, like, so, I mean, I think you get all you need from that. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| They just can't go that next step of being like, well, if our ideas were superior then, so we get to conquer them, does that mean, should someone have ideas superior to ours now, they get to conquer us? | ||
| Well, I mean, then Alex would probably need to do a lot more work in trying to refute the arguments and ideas of the UN. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because he feels like they're trying to conquer him. | ||
| Yeah, it seems like they have superior ideas, though. | ||
| To him, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so then I guess they should be allowed to take over whatever they want. | ||
| I mean, Alex's ideas are dirt bad. | ||
| See, there we go. | ||
| He has no choice but to acquiesce to UN control by his own arguments. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So, in this next clip, Alex talks horribly. | ||
| About the people of Greenland. | ||
| And we could go in there and buy it from the indigenous population that's autonomous from Denmark. | ||
| Even under a bidding war. | ||
| What? | ||
| $200 billion would be chicken feed. | ||
| All that's on it now is a bunch of shacks. | ||
| A couple hundred thousand people. | ||
| And that's seasonal. | ||
| So, you know, man, if Greenland is just a bunch of shacks, it's wildly impressive that their GDP is $2.7 billion. | ||
| Their capital city, Nook, has a population of about 19,000. | ||
| That's a ton of shacks. | ||
| The country has 14 airports in it, or as I like to call them, flying shacks. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| You're so proud of yourself. | ||
| All bullshit aside, this rhetoric is fucking insane. | ||
| This is the language of colonialism. | ||
| And because it's coming out of Alex's mouth and it's being used to describe the Inuit peoples that he wants to pillage resources from, this is the language of white supremacist colonialism. | ||
| There's no difference between the sentiment that holds up what Alex is saying and the notions that the people of Africa were savages who needed the Europeans to come in and civilize things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is empire shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| This is exactly what Alex stands against. | ||
| No, he is also the chief propagandist for the East India Oil Company. | ||
| I know he thinks he's framing this as some kind of a, like, we'll go in and pay them so they vote to let us take all their shit and turn their country into something they don't recognize anymore. | ||
| But the reality is that at no point has Greenland ever been interested in being bought. | ||
| Both the Prime Minister of Greenland and Denmark have both said that the idea is absurd and they're not interested in selling the fucking country. | ||
| Because of course they're not. | ||
| The Sydney Morning Herald interviewed residents of Tazlik who were uniformly just laughing at Trump. | ||
| One said, quote, I think it's a ridiculous idea. | ||
| I think it sounds stupid. | ||
| It wasn't just the Democrats or Trump's political enemies who were laughing at him. | ||
| It was the people that he wanted to buy and fuck over. | ||
| And here's why this conversation is happening. | ||
| This is a means to warm up to the idea of future adventures in colonialism. | ||
| I have zero idea what Trump is thinking or what his intentions are, or if this is just him talking shit, but I get the very strong sense that Alex wants it to be a sincere suggestion. | ||
| He wouldn't be spending so much time on his show defending the idea if he weren't interested in it being something that's actually pursued. | ||
| He is absolutely unequivocally using the language of colonialism to describe the state of affairs he wishes to see in the world, namely that the United States becomes expansionist. | ||
| He's using dehumanizing and delegitimizing descriptions and imagery to describe the people who would be affected by the colonization, to make listeners care less about them. | ||
| He's describing the wonderful outcomes that would be the result of colonization. | ||
| He's implying that expanding your country and gaining wealth is absolutely the thing that freedom does. | ||
| This is a profoundly dangerous development in Alex's rhetoric. | ||
| Up to this point in listening to Alex, I've never heard anything like this. | ||
| And granted, that's probably because we've never had a president stupid enough to want to buy Greenland. | ||
| But the point is still important. | ||
| Either Alex has been waiting forever for a president to seemingly endorse American expansion, or he's been so warped by the Trump rise to power that he no longer realizes that his primary brand for his entire career has been explicitly opposed to foreign intervention, regime change, meddling in affairs, all that other shit. | ||
| This is so essentially opposed to what he's supposed to stand for that it really worries me. | ||
| And to be clear, I get that he's not saying we should go in and invade them right now in Greenland. | ||
| But what if the situation is slightly changed? | ||
| What if we need a strategic resource that they have and they don't want to sell? | ||
| Once you've introduced the idea that it's totally great and a positive thing to buy countries to pillage their resources, how easy is it to escalate that rhetoric to conquest? | ||
| It's very easy. | ||
| You can even use the preliminary rhetoric that you've already done to build your case. | ||
| We tried to buy this very important thing that we need from them, but they want us to go without it, which, if you really think about it, amounts to an act of war against us. | ||
| We basically have to invade them now. | ||
| It's a very dangerous road to walk down, and I really, really don't like what it implies about what Alex is now capable of accepting. | ||
| Because it seems like a departure. | ||
| Well, let's say... | ||
| Oh, I don't know. | ||
| Let's say Greenland has this resource that we really, really need. | ||
| And just a couple of years prior to this, there was some sort of big attack on the United States. | ||
| And we just... | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| I found out that the Greenland government... | ||
| They have all of this shit that they're hiding from us. | ||
| All of these weapons and we just gotta go in there and we gotta save the people freely. | ||
| They're already United States citizens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In a way. | |
| They're gonna greet us. | ||
| In a way, yeah. | ||
| They're gonna greet us as their liberators. | ||
| It's really not far from preparatory... | ||
| But it's worse. | ||
| It's worse. | ||
| But he made the anti-colonialist arguments... | ||
| During the Iraq, the lead-up to Iraq War. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| All of that stuff was the same shit, but we weren't buying it. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| The problem with regime change over colonialism is that sometimes it goes your way, and then sometimes it goes the other direction back at you. | ||
| Like, with Iran, we were like, ha-ha, we did it! | ||
| And then it all went to shit real quick. | ||
| It pretty much always goes against you. | ||
| Of course it does. | ||
| So Alex is fucking stupid, and I think, like, a lot of those other things that we've found that invalidate... | ||
| Yeah, especially when you're talking about the most... | ||
| Ridiculous military might that the earth has ever seen. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, that's no good. | ||
| We don't want an imperialist country in 2019. | ||
| But it's, you know, whatever. | ||
| Are the Nazis really coming back that strong? | ||
| That's too strong. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's too strong. | ||
| But, like, look. | ||
| I mean, Trump just wants to buy Greenland. | ||
| And Alex has more examples of purchases. | ||
| Really? | ||
| He does. | ||
| He's got receipts? | ||
| He has more purchases. | ||
| How could there be more? | ||
| You've made your not a point. | ||
| And Trump's an idiot. | ||
| Trump's a terrorist. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Kind of like that purchase of Alaska for $7.2 million in 1867. | ||
| Terrible idea. | ||
| It's worth tens of trillions now. | ||
| Midway Islands, got that for free. | ||
| Terrible idea. | ||
| So we already talked about Alaska. | ||
| Midway Airport? | ||
| What the fuck is Alex doing? | ||
| The Midway Islands? | ||
| What does he think he's doing? | ||
| Midway Island has literally, I mean this. | ||
| Literally no one living on it when it was discovered in 1859. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It was discovered by a captain who was trying to mine guano, or bird shit, and claim the island for the United States, which was an acceptable thing to do because it was unclaimed and completely uninhabited. | ||
| And before anyone gets the wrong idea about this, Midway Island currently has a population of about 40, and no economy or government to speak of. | ||
| It was initially used by the Commercial Pacific Cable Company as a stop in a project to lay transatlantic cable lines in the early 1900s. | ||
| After that point, it was a strategic location for the Navy to set up radio towers, and of course, as World War II was getting going, it was a crucially important refueling station, since it was halfway between the United States and Japan, hence the name Midway. | ||
| In the 60s and 70s, there were a couple thousand people stationed there, what with the Vietnam War going on. | ||
| But outside of that, there's never been a relevant population permanently living on the island. | ||
| And nowadays, it's a bird refuge. | ||
| Well, that sounds nice. | ||
| So if you're keeping score, this one was an... | ||
| I would like Midway Islands to be a 51st state then. | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A lot of birds. | |
| We'll give that one the eye out. | ||
| "This was an uninhabited island that was claimed by the United States and no native populations were hurt or exploited in the process. | ||
| This wasn't a purchase and no one has ever really lived on the island. | ||
| There's no culture that's distinct to this island." This has literally nothing in common with Alex's fantasies of Trump colonizing Greenland. | ||
| Sincerely, Alex is the stupidest asshole in the world, and he's so terrible at making an argument. | ||
| This is almost embarrassing to listen to this. | ||
| And I absolutely wouldn't care at all, except for the points that I've been trying to make throughout this of he is advocating for the return of colonialism. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And that is very bad. | ||
| Yeah, that's very bad. | ||
| So you have to, when these are the pieces that he's using to reinforce that shift towards that mentality, it's important to understand why these are terrible examples. | ||
| Fucking Midway Island. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| Do you know, here's, so... | ||
| Being without the constant content mill for the past 10 days has been very nice. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It really has. | ||
| But it gave me this perspective while all this Trump is going to buy Greenland shit is going on that I didn't expect to receive, which is, of course he's not going to buy Greenland. | ||
| And even talking about this is pretty fucking stupid. | ||
| It's just shit for the content mill. | ||
| But what fascinates me about that is that if we hadn't brought this subject up, Alex would never have suddenly started talking about how colonialism is okay. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| And now he's on that side. | ||
| Like, this is a thought that he never would have needed to confront were it not for a bullshit... | ||
| Content grist. | ||
| Yeah, and he never would have had a reason for it to be something he needs to do because he needs to defend Trump. | ||
| And the only way to do it, in his mind, is to like, oh yeah, I mean, fucking let's do this. | ||
| So the more Trump does dumb shit, the more they reveal exactly what's underneath. | ||
| That has been there the whole time. | ||
| Yeah, and I guess that's something that's interesting about focusing on what we focus on, is that it's less interesting that Trump said X. It's more interesting how Alex responds to X. And how it makes... | ||
| The people who love Trump respond to X. Yeah. | ||
| It's fascinating because you're like, I would never have even expected people to really think colonialism was still okay. | ||
| But it turns out a lot of people are like, why did Manifest Destiny stop? | ||
| Yeah, it's troubling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So here's another example. | ||
| Hawaiian Islands. | ||
| That was the worst. | ||
| Oh, that was not a purchase. | ||
| Dumb American. | ||
| Dumb American. | ||
| That was not a purchase. | ||
| As someone who spent some years of his childhood growing up in Hawaii, I can tell you firsthand there are still some not great feelings about the process in which the island nation was brought into the United States. | ||
| I have a lot of fond memories of my dad taking me out of school early so we could go to the courthouse for the big King Kamehameha Day celebration. | ||
| Legitimately, some of my best memories are things like that from my time living on the island of Oahu, taking part in celebration of a culture that was not my own, but I was welcomed into the celebration all the same. | ||
| That was not the full experience of growing up white in Hawaii. | ||
| There was definitely a good amount of racism thrown my way just because I was white. | ||
| And that's never great. | ||
| But as an adult, I kind of understand it in a little bit of a larger context. | ||
| The early history of the Hawaiian Islands is difficult to get into, basically, because all the islands have their own stories. | ||
| They weren't completely, like, a united thing through a lot of history, and even had conflicts between each other from time to time. | ||
| Because getting into that is endlessly complicated, though there are some amazing tales that exist in that canon, I'm going to choose to start our story today in 1922, because that's when James Dole, the owner of the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, which would become Dole, bought the island of Lanai. | ||
| Lanai became almost entirely a pineapple plantation, and I remember in my youth being told that normal people like me were not allowed to go to Lanai, because it was wholly owned by Dole. | ||
| I imagine showing up on Lanai would be something not unlike that scene in the Leonardo DiCaprio movie The Beach, where Leo accidentally stumbles into a giant marijuana farm on an island, but this would be with pineapples. | ||
| The island isn't closed off to people anymore, but it might have been when I was there, because the pineapple plantations were still operational until the time I lived in Honolulu. | ||
| Yeah, it was more like Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained than The Beach. | ||
| It may have been. | ||
| By then, the Lanai plantation was a smaller operation, though, and it was run by Del Monte because Dole had fled Hawaii in search of cheaper labor. | ||
| The pineapple business in Hawaii was very big, and Lanai boasted the largest such plantation in the world, which understandably gave James Dole a very powerful position in the islands. | ||
| Flashback to 1795. | ||
| King Kamehameha has united the islands into a single kingdom. | ||
| His descendants rule until 1872, the line ending with the death of the childless King Kamehameha V. With no heir, chaos descended on the process of determining the next ruler. | ||
| When things got a little bit out of hand, Western forces stepped in to quell the violence, ultimately leading to the ascension of King Kalakua. | ||
| Although initially on friendly terms with Western interests, in time Kalakua began entertaining ideas of creating a federation of Polynesian states, each independent and sovereign, but cooperative in their interests. | ||
| This was not something that the Western business interests wanted to see happen. | ||
| Things were all right for their business interests as it was, but if Polynesian states got together, they could ultimately jeopardize their corporate power through exports and trade. | ||
| Labor unionizing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, on July 6th, 1887, King Kalakua was literally forced at gunpoint to sign a new constitution for Hawaii that was written by the white business owners and was designed to disenfranchise the native population and make it easier for their businesses to run roughshod over nature and the native peoples. | ||
| It's remembered by its appropriate name, the Bayonet Constitution. | ||
| The men who made Kalakua sign the Constitution were members of a group called the Hawaiian League, which was comprised of sugar and pineapple business owners, missionaries, and lawyers. | ||
| This was legitimately a white secret society aimed at overthrowing the Kingdom of Hawaii and getting the U.S. to annex the islands. | ||
| They exerted their control by joining up with a local white militia called the Honolulu Rifles, who were literally the ones pointing the guns during the signing of the Bayonet Constitution. | ||
| The new constitution took much of the power away from the monarch and gave that power to the legislature. | ||
| Generally, democratization, when it's not forced at gunpoint, is a good thing. | ||
| But this constitution also specified and put in place new requirements for voting rights that would disenfranchise most of the native population of the island, leaving only the white settlers and business owners as the ones who could elect the members of the legislature. | ||
| To get elected, even, one had to, quote, own real estate within the kingdom of clear value. | ||
| Kalakua's cabinet was dismissed, some fleeing the country under feelings that they were going to be killed. | ||
| Wise feelings. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Possibly. | |
| Wise feelings. | ||
| And the cabinet was then replaced by members of the Hawaiian League. | ||
| This was not democratization. | ||
| This was a coup. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Just like Georgia. | ||
| Kalakua died. | ||
| Not the country. | ||
| Brian Kemp. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Kalakua died in 1891 and was succeeded by his sister, Queen Liliokalani, who is recognized as the last monarch of Hawaii. | ||
| When Liliokalani rose to the throne, she made it clear that it was her intention to restore power to the monarchy, specifically targeting the business interests that had been behind the original coup. | ||
| That scared the shit out of the business owners and members of the Hawaiian League, who had by now changed their name to the Committee of Safety. | ||
| The goal of the actions of the white settlers up to this point had always been aimed at the annexation of Hawaii. | ||
| They really wanted the United States to take over Hawaii. | ||
| It's a lot easier to suppress people whenever you've got the whole United States behind you. | ||
| Most of the momentum was coming from Americans who wanted to take the islands, but they also used the fear that if we didn't do it, the British or the Japanese would to rally politicians to their side. | ||
| Nationalism being used in a negative... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| All that really stood in the way of their ability to achieve their goals was the monarchy. | ||
| Lilial Kalani was clear in her position that she stood against annexation, and thus the members of the Committee for Safety knew that they had to actually overthrow the Queen, which is what they paved the way to do in order to help pave the way for the United States to have no reason to not annex. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| On January 14, 1893, Queen Liliokalani gave a speech indicating her intention to invalidate the Bayonet Constitution. | ||
| She made clear she would not seek to, quote, deprive one white man of any legitimate right, but she quite accurately also pointed out that, quote, any newly arrived white man without interests or intention of residence is placed as a voter above the heads of thousands of my subjects to whom God had given these islands and no other home. | ||
| She presented cabinet ministers with the new constitution that she wanted to enact, which they refused to sign, before fleeing the government building, afraid of the crowds of Hawaiians who had gathered to support the Queen. | ||
| The Committee of Safety held a meeting on January 16th. | ||
| where they decided to frame their coming actions as purely a means to protect the lives and property of white citizens. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pretending there was a noble reason for their clear incitement and conspiracy. | |
| The reasons for framing the situation like this was because they knew that the U.S. military would not openly support their efforts to overthrow the Queen, but they would intervene to protect U.S. citizens. | ||
| If the illusion was created that that's what they were needed for, you could get the military into play. | ||
| Charles Burnett Wilson, the Marshal of the Kingdom, caught wind of the overthrow plot and attempted to get arrest warrants for the members of the committee who were agitating against the government. | ||
| But because they were all well-placed business people with connections in the legislature, the requests were denied. | ||
| His quote at the time was, I don't think they're really interested in safety at all, guys. | ||
| I think this whole name thing, I think they're fucking with us. | ||
| Knowing that there was trouble brewing, Wilson started gathering a posse to try and protect the Queen, but it was pointless. | ||
| The committee had used their narrative to bring the U.S. military into the city, and the defenders of the throne were no match for the forces behind the coup. | ||
| Lilio Kalani surrendered, and the committee conspirators took over the government, installing, you guessed it, Stanford Dole as the president. | ||
| Who is the cousin. | ||
| Of James Dole, the plantation of Lanai owner. | ||
| Okay, so you're saying that there is this whole intertwined political business kind of circumstance going on. | ||
| It's a good thing that America grew out of all that. | ||
| Now we're the champions of democracy abroad. | ||
| Right, Dan? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Freedom. | ||
| Sanford Dole was leading these groups, or at least was a big agitator in these groups. | ||
| And his brother, or not brother, I'm sorry, his cousin owned... | ||
| Lanai, and was the plantation impresario. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So their plan seemed like it worked out perfectly, and now it was time with Dole in charge. | ||
| It was time for the U.S. to come and annex Hawaii. | ||
| Unfortunately, Grover Cleveland was president at the time, and he wasn't into this kind of imperialist shit. | ||
| Cleveland actually advocated for Lilial Kalani to be restored as queen, so he was of no help to these plotters. | ||
| Hey, guys, real quick, I'm gonna try and do the whole America believes the bullshit that we say about ourselves thing real quick, so business owners, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna get your back on this one. | ||
| Please make sure that my terms are consecutive. | ||
| All their coup work seemed to be for nothing. | ||
| Not one to be discouraged, Dole declared Hawaii an independent republic, waited a few years until McKinley came to office, who agreed to annex the island. | ||
| And that, Jordan, is how Hawaii came to be a part of the United States. | ||
| It was a sneaky, brutal series of plots carried out by white settlers and business interests for the express purpose of disenfranchising the native populations so their business could prosper. | ||
| A gorgeous and rich history and culture subjugated to the interests of higher profits and increased sugar exports. | ||
| And that's why we sing God Bless America before every baseball game. | ||
| It's pretty much exactly what Alex wants for the Inuit people of Greenland. | ||
| On the one hand, I didn't enjoy the kids at my elementary school would call me Howley when I lived in Hawaii. | ||
| But when you understand the history a little bit better, it kind of makes sense. | ||
| So on behalf of King Kamehameha and Queen Liliokalani, I take this opportunity to say, Alex Jones, you're a goddamn Howley. | ||
| You fucking asshole. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go swim with the humuhumunukunukuapua 'a. | |
| And I wish you a mele kalikimaka. | ||
| I really don't want you to say those words where he might come close to trying to pronounce them. | ||
| It's a state fish. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, is it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I did not know that. | |
| Mele kalikimaka means Merry Christmas. | ||
| Yes, that one I do know. | ||
| In Hawaiian. | ||
| Because they're songs. | ||
| Those are about all the Hawaiian words I remember. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I knew a bunch more at a certain point. | ||
| But, yeah, that one's a little bit... | ||
| More of a terrible example for Alex to be using, just because of how explicit it is and how known the history is. | ||
| It's a legit conspiracy that was carried out to overthrow the monarchy of Hawaii for the explicit purpose of helping with these sugar plantations, the pineapple plantations, the missionaries. | ||
| It was a coup. | ||
| It's something that Alex should not be in favor of. | ||
| Yet he's using it as a great example of American expansion. | ||
| There's a coup. | ||
| The coup already occurred in our fucking 2016 election. | ||
| Why did Brian Kemp win? | ||
| It's because of voter suppression. | ||
| It's because he had control over who was allowed to vote. | ||
| Why did Trump win? | ||
| Because of voter suppression. | ||
| Because we work under this electoral college system that is fucking stupid. | ||
| They steal elections. | ||
| Why did George fucking W. Bush win? | ||
| They steal elections, Dan! | ||
| There's no way there's going to be a free and fair election in 2020. | ||
| Anyways, what are we talking about? | ||
| Okay, good, good. | ||
| Philippine Islands, terrible idea. | ||
| Purchase a bunch of that from Spain. | ||
| Wait, did he just say that the Philippines Islands was a terrible idea? | ||
| Well, getting them was a terrible idea because we bought them from Spain, which is not true at all. | ||
| Right, but aren't we supposed to be mentioning good purchases? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| He's saying it facetiously. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Terrible idea. | ||
| The Philippines are not a part of the United States. | ||
| We didn't buy them from Spain. | ||
| We seized the islands in 1898 after the Spanish-American War and installed a military government on the island, fearing that if we didn't, the Japanese would come in and take over. | ||
| This naturally led to a three-year-long Philippine-American war where Filipino nationalists continued their fight for independence just against us this time because we were the one colonizing them. | ||
| Dan, you're really not telling positive stories about American history. | ||
| Certainly not. | ||
| Dan, I really would like to hear more positive things about white people. | ||
| I would if Alex brought up examples for me to talk about that, but he's trying to glorify all these examples of horrible times. | ||
| Tens of thousands of Filipino soldiers as well as civilians were killed in that conflict. | ||
| The list of war crimes committed by U.S. forces in that war is a very long one. | ||
| And I don't want to get into it, but it definitely did not include killing entire villages of people. | ||
| Whatever the case, the war resolved and the US put in a transitional government that would give way to the Philippines being an independent country, which was achieved in 1935. | ||
| This lasted a few years until they were occupied by Japan in World War II and the government was sent into exile. | ||
| After that, the country went on to become independent again and joined the UN. | ||
| Then, of course, came the rise of the brutal dictator Ferdinand Marcos. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| I meant to say brutal U.S.-backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| I meant to say brutal U.S.-backed dictator and Roger Stone client Ferdinand Marcos. | ||
| Marcos ruled the country for 21 years and terrorized his people and stole a shitload of money. | ||
| Alex's citing the Philippines and citing it as some kind of an example of positive U.S. involvement is an indication that he legitimately has zero idea what he's talking about. | ||
| Or he's super into people like Ferdinand Marcos. | ||
| And honestly, these days... | ||
| Yeah, no, absolutely. | ||
| I'm not sure what it is. | ||
| Of course he is. | ||
| I don't know what... | ||
| If he likes Duterte now, why wouldn't you love Ferdinand then? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's it for the examples. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that brings us to the end of this list. | ||
| And I mean, I don't think he's made any cogent argument here in terms of why it's not dumb to suggest to buy Greenland. | ||
| Most of these aren't purchases. | ||
| Most of them were brutal exploitations of Native people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But not white people, so it's fine. | ||
| And they were profitable. | ||
| I don't disagree with that angle on it, but if that's the only vector you're using to determine whether or not this was a good thing that happened, you are going to justify anything. | ||
| Let's not even get into for whom were they profitable. | ||
| Say, okay, so you say the Louisiana Purchase was profitable. | ||
| Definitely wasn't profitable for the people who were already living there. | ||
| And frankly, it's not even that profitable for the people who move there, but it sure as fuck is profitable for the giant business owners who fucking make a shit ton of money explaining all the people. | ||
| So when I started out to do this episode, I was hoping to cover Friday, Sunday, Monday even, do a big stretch of present day stuff. | ||
| Welcome back! | ||
| But that was like... | ||
| It was so crazy that I was like, well, I don't think I can get past the 16th. | ||
| That's a legitimately insane thing that Alex is trying to argue just because his hero said something stupid. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Just to defend that, he has to go all the way to advocating for colonialism to return for the United States in a terrifying fashion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So now he jumps off that and we get to just some dumb defending Trump about other stuff. | ||
| Shit. | ||
| This is really stupid. | ||
| Yep, Trump's an idiot. | ||
| He's a bad guy. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Well, you just heard the former deputy director of the FBI. | ||
| He said the Trump supporters are like terrorists. | ||
| Last week he said Trump lowered the flags to half-staff to Heil Hitler. | ||
| Because he knows leftists will actually believe that. | ||
| Yes, he ordered them lowered on a certain date and... | ||
| Brought back up another to salute Hitler because it was 8-8. | ||
| You know, not many people know that a very small group of prisoners like the number 88 because it's the number of the alphabet. | ||
| It kind of becomes a schizophrenic thing. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Is 8. And so H-H-8-8. | ||
| Right, a small group of prisoners believe that? | ||
| Oh man, that's me thinks he does protest too much on that one. | ||
| Just a small group of prisoners, Alex. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I could get into the numerous times that frequent past Alex Jones guest Jack Posobiec has tweeted out weird things about 1488. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But let's leave that alone for now. | ||
| It was a good year, Dan. | ||
| It was a good year. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So Alex is referencing an appearance made by Frank Figliuzzi on the 11th Hour, that show on MSNBC. | ||
| This dude's a former counterintelligence guy for the FBI, and he spent a ton of time researching and studying extremist groups. | ||
| When he was appearing on the show, he pointed out that lowering the flags, it's not lowering the flags, it's re-raising the flags on 8-8 is probably a bad publicity move that would be interpreted as hailing of Hitler by people who wanted to see it as that. | ||
| He was very clear that he wasn't saying that Trump did it deliberately, but was saying that the state of the extremist community on the right currently is such that something like this will likely be seen as some indication of tacit support. | ||
| The lowering was meant to be about the El Paso and Dayton shootings, which were on August 3rd and 4th, respectively. | ||
| So the argument essentially was that it would have been a wiser or safer PR move. | ||
| If the flags would have been chosen to be re-raised on any other day. | ||
| Since it wasn't a timely thing. | ||
| It wasn't a speed thing. | ||
| It wasn't like, we gotta raise it as soon as possible. | ||
| You can raise it on the 9th if you wanted. | ||
| It would have been just as easy. | ||
| So what he was saying is that the White House, if they understood the white supremacist movement in the country that they were dealing with, someone would have advised him against doing it on 8-8. | ||
| Really, the main criticism seems to be that Trump and his people seem unaware of the reality of the extremist movements in the country. | ||
| It doesn't seem to be a criticism that Trump is racist or a Nazi or anything like that, just that he's not getting good advice that could possibly avoid sending the wrong message. | ||
| From that, Alex gets that a former deputy director of the FBI is on TV calling Trump and his supporters Nazis. | ||
| I feel like you wouldn't make that kind of misleading leap, generally, unless there was a part of you that was worried about people rightly calling you a Nazi. | ||
| I think this is a doth protest too much. | ||
| Defensive too fast. | ||
| That's when you know what you're actually afraid of revealing. | ||
| You're trying to create the idea that any criticism of you is saying that you're a racist or a Nazi because you know eventually valid criticisms of you being a racist or a Nazi are going to come up and you want to preemptively be like, oh, all criticisms, but they just say I'm a racist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But by doing it too preemptively, you reveal that you're just too open with it. | ||
| And that's kind of a big part of Alex's career. | ||
| Well, he's the weakest link. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Alex has, this is a little bit of an ad piece that he has, and you'll see how he's trying to raise money now. | ||
| But first, let me just remind folks of this. | ||
| We're only here because of you. | ||
| And in the last two weeks, the Democratic Party has filed two more lawsuits on me for Sandy Hook. | ||
| Because they believe that the Court of Appeals is going to throw their lawsuits out coming up in September. | ||
| The Democratic Party hasn't done that. | ||
| Sandy Hook parents have. | ||
| No, it was the DNC. | ||
| It's parents. | ||
| And I would suggest that actually more lawsuits is a very bad sign for Alex. | ||
| Because these parents wouldn't be filing these lawsuits if it looked like the other ones were going to fail. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The only reason that they would add more lawsuits is like, oh my god, this is actually going to work. | ||
| We're actually going to have our voice heard. | ||
| I think that this is a terrible sign for Alex. | ||
| And of course that's what he would use to try and fundraise. | ||
| Like, I've got more legal fees, guys. | ||
| I've got more fucking fights. | ||
| And that's why we've got Norm Pattison to actually directly ask you for the money that I'm going to pay him. | ||
| Actually, I think Norm is... | ||
| I want to let people know that I'm not as interested in your cases, and I want to help defend this ice guy who tried to drive over people. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| Yay. | ||
| So Alex has some guests on the show. | ||
| Can he... | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Norm was on earlier, but his was so boring, I just don't care. | ||
| So we have this guy coming up. | ||
| Which guy? | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, we are back live broadcasting worldwide. | ||
| Thank you so much for joining us. | ||
| Greg Coppola is a senior software engineer at Google currently who has been placed on administrative leave 24 hours after publicly suggesting the company is politically biased. | ||
| The man said the sky is blue, grass is green. | ||
| We're going to play about two minutes of here in a moment, where he exposed Google's dishonest methods and practices, among which are political bias, boosting and de-boosting of search results for specific websites, perjury of Google CEO Sundar Pachai to Congress, and other questionable practices. | ||
| I want to play... | ||
| So we got this guy, Greg Coppola, who's featured in a Project Veritas video. | ||
| I heard Alex announce that he was going to have this dude come on and talk about how Google is trying to crush conservatives. | ||
| I just let out an exasperated sigh. | ||
| I'm so tired of these clunky-ass attempts at journalism from James O 'Keefe. | ||
| I just can't stand them. | ||
| They're all equally bad and misleading, but they're exhausting. | ||
| They're exhausting to get into. | ||
| Yeah, that's what he's doing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The more time you have to spend reacting is the less time you spend doing something valuable. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's the name of the game. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I decided that instead of even caring about Alex's interview with this guy, I was going to watch the Project Veritas video to see if I should even give a shit about what this guy is claiming to be a whistleblower about. | ||
| Namely, that Google is trying to election metal by silencing conservatives. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I legitimately had to turn off the video long before it was done because this guy is saying fucking nothing. | ||
| He says that the way Google is censoring conservatives is that they only aggregate a small number of sources for their news category, you know, like Google's search and the news results, and that those news sources are, quote, vitriolically against President Trump, which I consider to be interference in the American election. | ||
| I decided to put this to the test by just Googling Donald Trump, clicking on the News tab, and seeing what comes up. | ||
| The second result was from Fox News. | ||
| The third result was from USA Today with a scathing headline, quote, Barron Trump is taller than his mom, even in her heels, and he's sporting a new haircut. | ||
| A little further down the results... | ||
| Just so you know, I am rooting now for climate change to get rid of humanity, in case you were wondering. | ||
| A little further down the results, you get an article from the National Review, the outlet founded by notorious leftist William F. Buckley. | ||
| There's another article from Fox News, quote, Heather McDonald, Trump is not the one dividing us by race. | ||
| His rivals are obsessed with, quote, white privilege. | ||
| And another one, there's another Fox News article, quote, John Voight declares Trump is greatest president of the century. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Here are some of the clearly leftist-leaning publications that are included in Google's news search. | ||
| Footwear news, sporting news, WebMD, Wine Spectator, Men's Health, and of course, Fish Stripes. | ||
| The only podcast you need to know about if you're a fan of the Miami Marlins. | ||
| All of these sites and tons of others show up in Google's news feed. | ||
| So I kind of suspect that this guy just might be talking shit and people like James O 'Keefe really want to listen whether or not what he's saying is in any way accurate. | ||
| I'm really not comfortable with this pro-Marlins propaganda that you're throwing on our show now. | ||
| Fish stripes! | ||
| I'm not comfortable with that endorsement. | ||
| Nope, I do not endorse this. | ||
| The Miami Marlins are an evil organization. | ||
| It may be, but their podcast shows up in the news section of Google. | ||
| Great. | ||
| The second thing that this dude says is that 20% of all searches for Donald Trump go to an article from CNN. | ||
| Jordan, how many CNN results do you think I found in the first page of Google News by searching for Donald Trump? | ||
| First page, that's like, what, 15 results? | ||
| Seven. | ||
| Seven results? | ||
| Oh, zero. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| There were zero. | ||
| There were two results from Fox News on the first page, though. | ||
| So out of two stories displayed, I don't know if you know this, two out of seven is more than 20%. | ||
| It does seem like that. | ||
| Two out of the ten stories on the second page were about Trump from CNN, so that would be 20% if it weren't for the first page, because now we're up to two out of 17, both for CNN and Fox. | ||
| After that point, there were about two stories per page from CNN, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything nefarious. | ||
| CNN puts out a whole lot of content, and looking through the search results... | ||
| And where they seem to come from, the places that put out a lot of material and aren't named Infowars seem to pop up most frequently. | ||
| Fox News, Politico, Washington Post, CNN, the AP, Reuters, The Hill, Guardian, USA Today. | ||
| Then you have some of the other folks sprinkled in. | ||
| A Rolling Stone article here, National Review article here. | ||
| I don't really see much that seems fishy here. | ||
| Quite honestly, without what I would call proof, I think it's a perfectly reasonable assessment for why there's a whole lot more content that appears to be negative about Trump, is that he's doing a lot of negative things. | ||
| No one would write a story about him being an idiot for wanting to buy Greenland if he hadn't said he wanted to buy Greenland. | ||
| There wouldn't be stories about him getting into a petty fight with the mooch if he hadn't gotten into a petty fight with the mooch. | ||
| Asking for the media to cover negative things that Trump does in a positive way, or decrying that they don't, Is essentially saying that you're mad that the press isn't a controlled arm of the state. | ||
| And I don't really have a lot of time for that position. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you for finally saying it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If you're demanding positive coverage of things that are pretty negative, I don't... | ||
| Like, what do you want? | ||
| CNN to write an article about... | ||
| Isn't it awesome that Trump and Mooch are fighting? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Why aren't you doing this? | ||
| Isn't it great that our fearless leader president is willing to confront his critics head on? | ||
| Man to man. | ||
| See? | ||
| I wrote your CNN article. | ||
| Next! | ||
| Give me another headline. | ||
| I'll rewrite it pro-Trump! | ||
| I really didn't see anything worthwhile in this guy's comments. | ||
| And he kept couching all of his answers to questions when he was asked. | ||
| Instead of saying that there was bias, he'd say he believes there is. | ||
| He seems actually resistant to saying anything that's something that people could nail down and demand evidence of. | ||
| There's also one point where he says that he doesn't actually know what Google is doing, but he says, but what they do do, and then he smirks at the camera, almost cracking himself up because he said do-do. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Which is suspicious. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| This is not something I'm going to take too seriously. | ||
| And he helped me not take him too seriously when he told James O 'Keefe, quote, I don't have a smoking gun. | ||
| That's putting it way too strongly. | ||
| He doesn't have anything except notions. | ||
| O 'Keefe basically got a guy who works at Google to say I have nothing to back anything up other than my own thoughts but I think all of your anti-media propaganda is totally right. | ||
| It's possible that this guy is pranking O 'Keefe. | ||
| He seems really squirrely and constantly doing looks to the camera and smiling like he's Jimmy Fallon, trying to keep it together in an SNL sketch. | ||
| Is he zacking from Saved by the Bell? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There's a weird vibe he's giving off, but that just could be social awkwardness or something. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But I do extend the possibility that this is a prank. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| It's probably not, but it's possible. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| The other possibility, which is way more likely... | ||
| is that this guy is just a right-wing weirdo who believes all the propaganda narratives put out by the extreme right-wing media like Alex, Project Veritas, and Tucker Carlson, which are weirdly the three places I've seen him pop up for interviews. | ||
| Some of my reasoning for this. | ||
| When he talked about CNN showing up in the news feed, he seems to think they shouldn't because Trump has called it, quote, very fake news. | ||
| He also suggests that all it would take to skew the news results at Google would be a few people working in a secret project, but he doesn't in any way indicate that he's aware that such a project exists, so he's kind of just speculating and talking shit in the same way that Alex does and all this other right-wing media does. | ||
| He says, quote, I think the way that Google works, the way the Democrats work, the way their allies work in the media... | ||
| They don't really want a lot of questioning of anything. | ||
| They just want to call people names and get them to toe a certain kind of line. | ||
| Man, it sounds like I've heard almost that word for word from other places where you might have heard that from. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The way that Google works. | ||
| The way that Democrats work. | ||
| Bundling that all up. | ||
| And he says that immediately after saying that at work at Google on a day-to-day basis that everyone knew that he liked Trump and no one cared. | ||
| So I don't know what he's responding to. | ||
| This interview is shit. | ||
| The guy isn't saying anything, and the best way to sum it up is that this is yet another Project Veritas video. | ||
| These tech companies absolutely do need to be addressed. | ||
| There are serious problems that need to be taken care of. | ||
| But I know these guys well enough to know that I cannot find common cause with them. | ||
| There's superficial agreement with the position I would have. | ||
| The agreement is about what the problem is, or describing the problem. | ||
| That covers up a massive disagreement underneath about why we think something is a problem. | ||
| So fuck all this. | ||
| Like, it bothers me because either they know exactly how cartoonish they're being, because literally what they're doing is saying, okay, we need content that says what we want it to say, but we can't get that content, so we'll make some content and just say it says what we wanted it to say. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's cartoonishly evil. | ||
| That's cartoonish! | ||
| But the manipulation seems to work. | ||
| It works, but you can't be that stupid about it and get people to believe you, but apparently you can. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're living in a Captain Planet episode, and somehow people are not realizing that the bad guy is the guy who looks like a giant rat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're like, that guy seems like he's got some good ideas about the environment. | ||
| Yeah, it's weird. | ||
| It is weird when you take a step back and look at it through a wider prism. | ||
| So I decided that I wasn't going to cover at all this guy's interview with Alex because I really felt like the chances are this is like this guy just has a bunch of paranoid notions about elaborate conspiracies and he probably got them from Alex to begin with. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it seems like it would be pointless to hear him repeat those back to Alex so Alex can say I was right all along. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's the feedback machine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I kind of was like, oh, fuck this. | ||
| I don't even care about his interview. | ||
| I watched the Project Veritas video. | ||
| Who gives a shit? | ||
| But it actually goes a little bit off the rails. | ||
| Because he's a fan of the Miami Marlins? | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But it turned into like, well, I guess we'll cover it. | ||
| So in this first clip, Alex is talking to this Coppola guy, and the two of them seem to think that Twitter is suppressing them because they don't have enough followers. | ||
|
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|
I mean, it's interesting on the Twitter thing. | |
| I mean, I got 9,000 followers in the first two hours, and I haven't had any more. | ||
| Even after I went on Tucker Carlson, even after the President Trump retweeted me. | ||
| So I think they're getting maybe cute. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But I think that's one of the problems is we don't have transparency. | ||
| So it's kind of just like he said. | ||
| Oh, my son went on Twitter a month ago. | ||
| He got 10,000 in, like you said, two hours, and then it stopped there. | ||
| Even though he's had videos with a half million views and everybody's saying they're trying to follow him, they're just not able to. | ||
| I don't believe that for a second. | ||
| Maybe those 9,000, 10,000 are about the market that is interested in following you on Twitter. | ||
| Maybe there's a lot of older people who watch Fox News that watch Tucker Carlson that aren't on Twitter. | ||
| Maybe the people who are, you know, there's plenty of, maybe the bot networks that over-inflate a lot of people's viewer counts and follower counts, maybe they haven't picked up on you yet. | ||
| So, I mean, there's plenty of reasons why, like, yeah, 9,000 followers for you appearing in a Project Veritas video that has, like, maybe 2,000 likes, the Project Veritas tweet about it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, so your video got 2,000 likes from the main... | ||
| Account that put it out. | ||
| You ended up with 9,000 followers from that? | ||
| That seems like normal metrics. | ||
| I don't see anything suspicious about this, but they're turning it into proof that they're being blocked. | ||
| I do like that ability to blame any amount of success or lack thereof on secret conspiracies. | ||
| It is really, really comforting. | ||
| Like, I wish I could just say of my comedy career, the reason that I'm not on TV is because a large group of people have been oppressing me. | ||
|
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|
Well, I mean, you do hear that from a lot of comics. | |
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| You do hear a lot of... | ||
| That is true. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| People are fucking stupid. | ||
| That's easy. | ||
| It's very appealing. | ||
| It's an appealing mindset to have. | ||
| And I'm glad that in the long period of time where no one was listening to our show, we didn't succumb to that sort of rationale for why no one was listening. | ||
| Honestly, I think we're succumbing to the opposite now. | ||
| Is there a conspiracy of people trying to make us feel better about ourselves for a little bit? | ||
| Is this a make-a-wish situation that we're living in right now? | ||
| Is there a trap? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Are we about to get eaten by some sort of weird alien race? | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| They're fattening us up? | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| So, in this next clip, Coppola makes an absurd statement. | ||
|
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|
I mean, honestly, being able to go viral is almost like a human right in the 21st century, so I think we really need transparency around why certain things can trend and why certain things can't. | |
| I am amazed by that level of human rights argument on a show that argues against a lot of really basic human rights. | ||
| The idea that, first of all, having a social media account even is a human right is crazy. | ||
| And then the idea that you have the right to go viral is insane. | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's astonishing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That is a batshit level of entitlement. | ||
| I can't even process. | ||
| Right, and this is from this Google whistleblower. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Well, if everybody has a human right to go viral, then we're going to be really inundated with a ton of terrible content. | ||
| That is the definition of delusions of grandeur. | ||
| It doesn't get more grandiose than, like, if the only possible reason the world does not... | ||
| Instantly all kowtow to my whim after my whistleblowing video is because somebody is suppressing it and they're destroying my human rights. | ||
| To go viral. | ||
| To go viral. | ||
|
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|
Wolf. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Whoa, boy. | ||
| So Alex complains about his stake in the social media game by bragging about his appearance on Rogan. | ||
| Take Joe Rogan's podcast. | ||
| He admits that they even shadow banned it. | ||
| But it's had something like 50 million views on all the platforms. | ||
| It's bigger than his Elon Musk by over 10 million. | ||
| What about Bernie? | ||
| It's the biggest podcast he's ever done. | ||
| But because it's the biggest thing he ever did, it's too dangerous to ever basically probably have me on again. | ||
| So again, being most popular now and being what humans agree with, that's now verboten. | ||
| Alex seems to be forgetting that he did go back on Rogan. | ||
| Yes, he did. | ||
| Like, I don't... | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| We should be allowed to outlaw clearly fake words invented for bullshit. | ||
| Shadow banned. | ||
| If you say shadow banned... | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| But it is a real thing. | ||
|
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|
I understand. | |
| Just not in the sense that they're using it. | ||
| None of these people are using it the way it's intended. | ||
| It sounds fucking spacey and like it's in the movies of hackers. | ||
| It's like, yeah, shadow bans. | ||
| So up to this point, this interview is largely what you'd expect. | ||
| Sort of retreading of the Project Veritas video. | ||
| And it is exactly what I didn't care to cover. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| It's not interesting. | ||
| It's what you'd expect. | ||
| Alex trying to validate his victimhood through this guy who doesn't seem to have any real information, just senses of things. | ||
| And so that's not good. | ||
| And this next clip is why it ended up becoming something that I needed to talk about. | ||
| And that's because Alex brings in another guy from Google. | ||
| So Zach Voorhees... | ||
| I thought made history yesterday. | ||
| It was totally blacked out, except for DredgeReport.com and viewers and listeners of this show, which is millions of people. | ||
| But we're talking to Greg Coppola, who is a senior engineer, highly respected, put on leave when he went public a month ago on Project Veritapis, and he's saying he thinks that Zach Voorhees is the Ed Snowden whistleblower so far. | ||
| I certainly thought it with the documents he put out that are incredibly damning that we'll put on screen for TV viewers. | ||
| Alex hasn't read those documents. | ||
| Nah. | ||
| So, Zach Voorhees, not to be confused with Alex's source, Zach, is another Google whistleblower who Project Veritas is promoting. | ||
| He was interviewed by James O 'Keefe, and almost immediately, journalists ran into some problematic information. | ||
| No! | ||
| God, somebody put him back in... | ||
| James O 'Keefe should be in jail! | ||
| Looking through the Zach guy's Twitter account, people found him saying, quote, the narrative of QAnon has been more accurate than any news outlet. | ||
| Which might not be disqualifying on its own, but it's certainly a bad indicator in terms of a person's judgment and discernment. | ||
| The problem goes deeper, though, when you look at more of his social media and you find that he's argued that vaccines cause autism, he was a big Pizzagate guy, and has made numerous accusations that the media and government are controlled by Zionists. | ||
| Right, so he has an unimpeachable track record. | ||
| He's even gone so far as to say that Zionists killed Andrew Breitbart. | ||
| Oh boy! | ||
| Quote, it's very simple, either you go along with the Zionists or you end up like Andrew Breitbart. | ||
| He accuses, quote, Israel and the Zionist cabal for doing 9-11, which is insane since we all know it was Leo Zagami. | ||
| It was his fault. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He also uses the term ZOG, which stands for Zionist Occupied Government, multiple times, and that is a huge problem. | ||
| ZOG is not a term that casual folks use. | ||
| It has a distinct place in the fringe worlds of anti-Semitism and white supremacy. | ||
| His use of that term is a very strong indication that he himself is an outright white supremacist, or he takes in information from white supremacist sources so regularly that he's adopted that term. | ||
| And either of those is not good. | ||
| It is occasionally heartening to look at these awful people, because, you know, a lot of people, when you perceive a Google employee, you think, somebody who's this brilliant, top of their field, just... | ||
| Super genius level talent. | ||
| And then you see this guy and you're like, oh, it could be any old asshole. | ||
| When Trump became president, you had to admit... | ||
| Fucking, it doesn't matter if you know what you're talking about. | ||
| Any idiot could become president. | ||
| But at the same time, with this, I don't doubt that Voorhees is probably very good at whatever tech stuff he does. | ||
| For sure, for sure. | ||
| It's just that that can also occupy the same brain that believes there's a Zog. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, actually. | ||
| It's also probably, you know, I'm putting this down to a dichotomy of him being an anti-Semite or taking in... | ||
| White supremacist anti-Semite content so much that he just absorbs it. | ||
| I think it's probably more the case that he's an anti-Semite based on his use of sarcastic parentheses around words that he wants to denote Jewishness. | ||
| Like when he put them around, quote, the globalist media in a tweet. | ||
| I think that the case for him being a big old piece of shit is pretty strong. | ||
| When these parts of Voorhees' belief system started to come up, Project Veritas accused sites like the Daily Beast of attacking the messenger instead of the message. | ||
| They were engaging in ad hominem attacks because they were scared of what Voorhees brought to the table. | ||
| That's what Project Veritas was saying. | ||
| You know, his beliefs had nothing to do with the message. | ||
| Also, interestingly, as documented by Will Sommer, Voorhees immediately went back and started scrubbing his social media to erase all this anti-Semitic shit. | ||
| Yeah, naturally. | ||
| Because of course he did. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not true or fair to argue that bringing up this stuff is just attacking the messenger. | ||
| It's very relevant. | ||
| The documents he is releasing to a known publicity stunt fraud operation purport to show that there's a grand conspiracy against conservatives in the media. | ||
| Criminal fraud organization! | ||
| It's very relevant that this guy also believes that the Jews control the media and the government. | ||
| So when he tells O 'Keefe that they're tampering with elections to overthrow the government, it's important to realize he believes that it's the Jews doing that. | ||
| The message being put out on Project Veritas is overtly anti-Semitic because of this guy's beliefs that we have prior context to understand what he believes. | ||
| But because O 'Keefe doesn't mention that aspect of his source, he's able to slightly obscure that reality and just present the information as unbiased and coming from a credible source when he might as well just be reading from a new high-tech version of the protocols of the Elders of Zion. | ||
| This isn't some extraneous piece of trivia about the guy. | ||
| It gives content and shows why he might be trying to go out of his way to prove his theory and why he would stoop to being used by Project Veritas to do so. | ||
| Like, if his documents purported what they claimed they did, he would absolutely get a platform to release them on The Intercept or any number of places, other media outlets that would be interested in this kind of story. | ||
| You only go to Project Veritas if what you have isn't great, but you want to make a splash in the right-wing media. | ||
| And also if it is a human right for you to go viral. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, that is why you go to Project Veritas. | ||
| So I looked over the documents that Voorhees released to Project Veritas. | ||
| In a dream! | ||
| One of the main pieces of evidence that he brought to the table is a list of blacklisted sites that weren't to be included in news search results. | ||
| These included things like Google Drives. | ||
| Their own Google. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Of course that wouldn't show up in. | ||
| Yeah, no, that would be ridiculous. | ||
| eBay results were excluded, which makes some sense too. | ||
| Which partially because they have their own, you know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then there's a bunch of torrent sites, which might be a legal issue. | ||
| The only other site that isn't one of those types of sites that's in their blacklisted list is the Daily Stormer. | ||
| Then there's another section of the list, which is, quote, sites with high user block rates. | ||
| User block rates, which is to say users of Google blocked these sites themselves, and they're noting, oh, there's a really high, way above average incidence. | ||
| Okay, so they're not suppressing the search results. | ||
| The people are choosing not to see these results in their... | ||
| And possibly they're on a list because of that. | ||
| This is a list of sites that consumers have not wanted to see pop up in results. | ||
| And a whole lot of those are things like angrypatriotmovement.com and girlsjustwanttohaveguns.com. | ||
| Admittedly, this list is largely conservative. | ||
| But a whole lot of it is overtly anti-Semitic. | ||
| And white nationalist sites, too. | ||
| It's not just all conservative things. | ||
| And it also includes sites like liberalamerica.org or modernliberals.com. | ||
| They're probably spam organizations that have a liberal bend to them. | ||
| Oh, it also includes Media Matters, Occupy Democrats, Wonkette, and that horrible conspiracy message board Above Top Secret. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Which are obvious just trolling attempts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| From this document, I don't see any indication that there's some kind of an internal censorship happening. | ||
| What I see is an internal decision to block torrents and the Daily Stormer, and then a giant list of sites that users have blocked at above-average rates, with no indication that those sites are at all blacklisted, too. | ||
| I mean, I know for a fact that Above Top Secret shows up in search results, since I regularly run into the site when I'm looking into Project Camelot stuff. | ||
| So that piece of information doesn't seem good. | ||
| If that's... | ||
| One of the big pieces of evidence? | ||
| I say no. | ||
| Yeah, well, the thing that they believe is that the free market means they'll be allowed to win because they're obviously the most popular. | ||
| So, if the free market is saying they don't want us, that means that Google is manipulating those people into that blockchain. | ||
| They must. | ||
| Because the only explanation is that they're... | ||
| Supposed to win the free market of ideas. | ||
| They have to. | ||
| And somebody is suppressing them. | ||
| So that idea of user block versus internal block doesn't mean anything to them. | ||
| Nor should it. | ||
| Because obviously users wouldn't block them. | ||
| No, they're great. | ||
| Users love them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So another piece of evidence he's provided is a screenshot of a program to classify YouTube channels depending on how fringe their coverage is. | ||
| What immediately jumped out to me from this screenshot is that it clearly says, quote, work in progress. | ||
| So who knows if it was even implemented or even followed through on. | ||
| It could have just been an idea. | ||
| The other thing that jumps out is that there's a list of example ratings that the screenshot contains. | ||
| The Wall Street Journal tops the list at 8.53 for their rating, indicating a low level of fringeness. | ||
| Then you got Alex Jones down at a negative 1.56. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Which makes sense, too. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Young Turks and the Huffington Post have... | |
| substantially lower rates than Breitbart and Fox News, indicating that their coverage is seen as more fringe. | ||
| This document, if anything, demonstrates a lack of political bias against conservatives. | ||
| Yeah, I would say that it demonstrates the status quo heavily skews towards old white people. | ||
| Perhaps. | ||
| Strange. | ||
| There are apparently thousands of documents that Voorhees released, but I'm absolutely not gonna read all of them. | ||
| He is clearly an anti-Semite who believes the Jews control the media and government are in the process of installing a Zog. | ||
| In an effort to promote the idea that there's a giant conspiracy about controlling the media and the government, he reached out to Project Veritas, who chose to highlight those two documents that I have just pointed out. | ||
| Those are the ones that they are pushing to the forefront. | ||
| And they show absolutely nothing close to what's being touted as what they're showing. | ||
| All in all, this is exactly what I've come to expect from Project Veritas. | ||
| And if there's some, oh, smoking gun in this pile of thousands of documents, then at best what they've done is a terrible job of presenting it. | ||
| Because the ones that they did point out are bullshit. | ||
| So anyway, Voorhees sucks. | ||
| Occam's razor at this point dictates that if there is a smoking gun, or if there is any evidence at all that Google, Facebook, and all these people are going out of their way to suppress conservative voices, It would come through someplace. | ||
| Even, you know, some piece that has a high margin of respect, like The Intercept. | ||
| The Intercept would totally put it out. | ||
| Glenn Greenwald would jerk off to the notion if he could prove that they were doing it. | ||
| And he's not the only one. | ||
| There's tons of outlets. | ||
| Tons of people. | ||
| Not necessarily your CNN or whatever. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| I'm not going to hear about it from a guy who's a Zog, who believes in a Zog. | ||
| I'm going to hear about it from The Intercept. | ||
| So until The Intercept or somebody like that comes through with this, I'm going to let the Zog guy go based purely on his Zogginess. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't need it. | |
| But it's important. | ||
| I know I already made this point, but it's important to recognize that those beliefs that he has clearly demonstrated by his social media presence and things that he's put out into the world is disqualifying for him to make arguments about, I don't know, someone trying to control the government and media. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Because we already know what he believes about that. | ||
| It's a big problem. | ||
| Yeah, you're out immediately. | ||
| I don't need to read any of your documents if you're also the guy who's like, and the Zionists run the media. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So at this point, Alex decides that he's going to let these two have a bull session and let them take over the show. | ||
| I'm going to stop there for the hour. | ||
| I think we should have Greg Coppola here with... | ||
| Our next guest who's joining us, Zach Voorhees at Perpetual Maniac on Twitter. | ||
| You guys have a discussion here, meeting each other, talking to each other. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| What? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, Zach, what's up? | |
| Hey, Greg, how you doing? | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think, I mean, Alex does constantly butt in after this, but I think his idea was like, I want to eat lunch. | ||
| Yeah, that has to be it, right? | ||
| Let these two guys talk. | ||
| I'm going to eat lunch. | ||
| Yeah, but he keeps butting in. | ||
| Because he thinks that this is some kind of world-changing summit that he's brokered on the show, and he says as much in this next clip. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I had the crew all run through during the break, and people came over from the other side of the office. | |
| They said, this is history. | ||
| We've got two Google engineers that have the courage to go public. | ||
| The first one and the second one. | ||
| Others have just leaked stuff. | ||
| And they're there together interfacing for the first time live on an alternative system that Google and Facebook and Twitter and Apple didn't want to exist. | ||
| They knew it would threaten them in the future if it was here to challenge their information domicile. | ||
| This is like Stalin, Churchill, and FDR. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| This is crazy. | ||
| This is a meeting. | ||
| This is a... | ||
| Lincoln-Douglas debates is what's going on. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| History. | ||
| History is being made by this. | ||
| This appearance on Alex Jones' fucking stupid show that he spent most of defending the idea of buying Greenland. | ||
| Frost Nixon is coming up. | ||
| I got these two heavy hitters. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So in this next clip, Greg Coppola, he's talking about like, man, everybody hates social media, so why aren't other ones successful? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was going to say half of America is really being kind of antagonized by tech parts. | |
| They're not happy. | ||
| It's the same thing in every country. | ||
| So shouldn't somebody be able to get rich off of this, of just catering to these other people if there really was a free market? | ||
| Well, that's what's been said. | ||
| What if Trump or others got together and promoted a new startup? | ||
| Everyone would leave immediately. | ||
| That's the Achilles heel. | ||
| There's no bloody revolution. | ||
| There's no lawsuits. | ||
| There's no antitrust. | ||
| Just, okay, Google. | ||
| Okay, Apple. | ||
| F you. | ||
| See, I can actually tell you why this hasn't worked. | ||
| It's because the people who don't like these social media networks and do still want social media networks. | ||
| There's a lot of people who don't like them. | ||
| They're just like, I'm going to get off this and go live my life. | ||
| They don't bother with this stuff. | ||
| But the ones who leave and have to leave generally are Nazis and white supremacists. | ||
| And when they create their own spaces that are free from the censorship of Facebook, they generally turn into violent, awful... | ||
| Shit holes full of people saying some of the most vile shit in the world. | ||
| Like, you see it very easily. | ||
| That's why this doesn't work. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Which, if you are one of those white nationalists, you should kind of look at that as a microcosm of the nation that you would create. | ||
| Would you have your way? | ||
| It seems like you should take... | ||
| Should you have your white nation, it will look like when you have a white nationalist Twitter. | ||
| It looks like Gab. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's not good. | ||
| It looks like a place that's going to tear itself apart because the only people within your white nation are the people who want to tear everyone apart. | ||
| It does seem like it'll go that direction. | ||
| So now Alex is just loving having these two guys on. | ||
| And there's not a ton of clips that I've cut of that because I don't really think their conversation was that interesting. | ||
| But I do think it's interesting that Alex pulled one of his trademark moves in the middle of the conversation. | ||
| Well, let me be the first to offer you gentlemen together... | ||
| Once a week, whenever you want, a two-hour show to say whatever the hell you want with no strings attached. | ||
| I mean, the listeners love this. | ||
| They love a real discussion. | ||
| Alex just loves giving people shows. | ||
| This is not a good way to run your organization. | ||
| He offers everyone a show. | ||
| Everyone gets a show. | ||
| He offered Barnes a show. | ||
| He's offering these two guys a show. | ||
| He offered Mike Rotondo a show. | ||
| I need content. | ||
|
unidentified
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I need it. | |
| He's offered callers shows. | ||
| It's just insane. | ||
| Where's the old man house phone? | ||
| Did he ever get his show? | ||
| He might be dead. | ||
| We miss him. | ||
| R.I.P. | ||
| Old Man Houseboat. | ||
| In this next clip, I admit that I only kept this in because I'm petty. | ||
| No, it's like Monty Python when the knight that goes knit has had all his arms and heads cut off. | ||
| It's like, it's done. | ||
| No more getting obsessed with, like, target fixation. | ||
| Alex is wrong on two counts. | ||
| I was going to say, you can't be wrong on both. | ||
| Pick one. | ||
| That's the Black Knight. | ||
| The knights who say knee or the Black Knight. | ||
| You can't say the knights who say knit are the Black Knight. | ||
| God damn it! | ||
| The knights who say knit. | ||
| I love that it's so consistent, too. | ||
| He says that all the time. | ||
| He needs to go re-watch Monty Python. | ||
| You know who wrote that sketch? | ||
| Thomas Jefferson. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So, in this next clip, Zach Voorhees talks about how he was part of Occupy. | ||
| This is interesting, because I think he says something that can't possibly be true. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, you know, I was attacked by Antifa. | |
| Because I disrupted one of their events when they tried to take over Occupy Wall Street. | ||
| And, you know, they gave me death threats. | ||
| And it's really funny because I've done more against fascism than all of them combined. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I'm confused. | ||
| You believe in a zog. | ||
| When did... | ||
| The group that the conservatives consider to be Antifa build their own fucking time machine and go back to Occupy Wall Street. | ||
| There were groups that you could describe as anti-fascists that have existed for a long time in the United States. | ||
| Yeah, but you know exactly what he's talking about. | ||
| Yeah, it's absurd. | ||
| It is absurd. | ||
| The current preoccupation with Antifa does not extend back to Occupy Wall Street. | ||
| No, it does not. | ||
| He is conflating things for the sake of right-wing propaganda. | ||
| Which is not a good sign. | ||
| And again, he believes in a zog. | ||
| So anyway, this interview wraps up and Alex gets kind of... | ||
| Towards the end of it, he starts to get into the spirit. | ||
| Do you feel the spirit, guys? | ||
| He wants them to talk about how back when they worked at Google and YouTube, they felt downtrodden and like, oh, ugly, everything is bad. | ||
| But once they started speaking out, the spirit changed. | ||
| He wants to introduce a spiritual aspect of the fight that they're in. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And that leads to a long esoteric ramble about how if you just get into God, everything is great. | ||
| Which, again, I think highlights this thing that Alex has expressed himself, that his show is primarily evangelical. | ||
| And he's using a lot of these right-wing things in order to get people in that direction of accepting Jesus, or his version of Jesus. | ||
| His version of Jesus, yeah. | ||
| And so here's a little piece of that esoteric ramble that ends... | ||
| There's nothing wrong with yachts. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with beautiful women. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with a 900-horsepower car. | ||
| But let me tell you, it doesn't come close to promoting real human destiny and promoting a human future. | ||
| It's so rewarding to stand up against this force. | ||
| And so many people seem so enslaved. | ||
| They have never tasted, they have never imagined communing with God, the higher level. | ||
| And if you just once ever touch it, you'll never want anything else again. | ||
| It's not like Christians, you talk about real Christians, not fake ones about, you know, I'm here alive, but I can't wait to be with the Lord. | ||
| I can't wait to give, they don't want to die. | ||
| In fact, most of them are the longest lived people over 100 years old. | ||
| A lot of Christians are the longest lived people because they're willing to give up. | ||
|
unidentified
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Why? | |
| Why even throw it in? | ||
| Hangs on because they're already touching heaven. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| And I'm telling you, folks, there's a whole new universe waiting for you. | ||
| And something's happening here. | ||
| The enemy knew it was coming. | ||
| But we didn't believe their lies. | ||
| We held the course. | ||
| You held the course. | ||
| Leo Zagami's been holding for 39 minutes. | ||
| I apologize. | ||
| He's an amazing author, researcher. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, God. | |
| I think probably... | ||
| I want to hear that so much! | ||
| Leo Zagami has been waiting. | ||
| I want that number to increase every time Leo Zagami is introduced. | ||
| Leo Zagami has been waiting for 28 hours now. | ||
| We're going to have him on in just a second. | ||
| There is true comedy. | ||
| I assume the people listening were like, why is Dan playing this kind of standard Alex talking about religion thing? | ||
| Rambling forever and then being like, I've made Leo Zagami hold this whole time. | ||
| I've been rambling. | ||
| Now let's get to him. | ||
| He's Neo. | ||
| He's Leo. | ||
| And he's been on hold. | ||
| He's got it all. | ||
| He did 9-11. | ||
| Let's keep it going. | ||
| So Leo Zagami's on and I don't care. | ||
| No. | ||
| But I just want to play this one clip that he has where he expresses something that again is fucked up. | ||
| It's the power of prayer, Alex, that is putting together all of us info-warriors against a clearly demonic force. | ||
| So it's this egregore that we are creating to oppose their own egregore, which means fourth form. | ||
| So we are definitely fighting an epic battle. | ||
| Is brought together by prayer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And they're creating an egregore. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Shout out to Robert Evans. | ||
| Let's create this demonic egregore. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which we already know from the last time we talked about this is very clearly traced back to anti-Semitic ideas about the... | ||
| The Jews creating a demonic entity called the Egregore that inspires them and is running communism or some shit. | ||
| You know, that really makes me rethink that Jimmy James line in News Radio. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| When I zig? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When they think I'm going to zig, I zag. | ||
| That's what I zag. | ||
| When they think I'm going to zag, that's what I zag. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Unfortunately, a great joke is tainted by white supremacists. | ||
| Once again, white supremacists ruin shit. | ||
| So the two of them just have a conversation about the Vatican. | ||
| I don't really care. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And so that brings us to the end of the episode. | ||
| We get Neo-Leo. | ||
| And this episode was crazy. | ||
| I really wanted to cover more time. | ||
| But I couldn't. | ||
| I couldn't. | ||
| He's outright justifying trying to buy Greenland by appealing to a ton of horrible things from the past and acting like they were purchases that we made in some form. | ||
| And it's absolutely ludicrous. | ||
| And then also this Google shit is a little bit whack, and it's worth at least pointing that stuff out. | ||
| But there's really not a ton of Epstein talk. | ||
| Yeah, there is a little bit of like, we need to overhaul our education system, and I'll tell you who did a great job of doing that, Chairman Mao. | ||
| He really overturned the whole educational system there. | ||
| It was a win for everybody. | ||
| It does have shades of that. | ||
| It's ludicrous. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And so I don't know. | ||
| I think because of this being so weird and all that, I think we'll probably stay in the present for Friday. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just to try and get a little closer up to speed. | ||
| See if he's talking about some of the other issues in the world on other days. | ||
| Maybe he just was really into this Greenland riff on this day. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So we'll see. | ||
| And we'll be back on Friday. | ||
| And we will see you then. | ||
| But it's great to be back. | ||
| It is great to be back. | ||
| Missed you, Jordan. | ||
| Missed doing this. | ||
| I missed you too, buddy. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But until we get back, people can check out... | ||
| We have a website. | ||
| We do. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And we also are on Twitter. | ||
| We are at knowledge underscore fight and at go to bed Jordan. | ||
| And we're on Facebook. | ||
| We are on Facebook. | ||
| If you would like to download and listen to an episode of our show, Dan, you could go to iTunes. | ||
| Oh, you could also go to our homepage at knowledgefight.com. | ||
| I changed it from the most recent episode. | ||
| That's no longer on the homepage. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Because I felt like... | ||
| We have so many episodes. | ||
| It's very hard for people to know where to start. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so I put up on there the episode where he interviews Bob Chapman about Reagan. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, okay. | |
| I'd heard from a number of people that that's a good intro. | ||
| That's the best. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's a good bottle episode. | ||
| Reagan got pegged. | ||
| No, you've spoiled it. | ||
| But if people are looking for... | ||
| Because I do hear from people, like, I want to recommend the show, but I don't know what episode to suggest. | ||
| Some people have said that that's a good entry point, and so I put that up on the homepage. | ||
| So instead of just saying, like, go to the iTunes, there's so many episodes, maybe that's a good place to direct people. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| That's a great idea. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So let's do that. | ||
| Go to knowledgefight.com and listen to an episode with a shocking twist in the middle. | ||
| And there's a bunch of talk about his weird commercials, too. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| That episode was a lot of fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But also, until next time, I've been the Jesus Lizard. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |